The scene I love most in The Tender Bar is when the uncle, the Ben Affleck character, opens a closet stacked with books from floor-to-ceiling and advises his fatherless nephew, an aspiring writer: “Start by reading all these.”
I met Drago when we were in the eighth grade. I remember the first time I visited his house. Like me he was the oldest of seven siblings. He took me down into the basement of his family’s house on Morley Street. Flush with the concrete wall was a sealed wooden door. The door had a small square opening about four inches square hinged into its center. Drago opened this tiny door and inserted his, hand, arm, all the way to the shoulder releasing an interior latch and opening the door as if by secret code. He pulled a string and the room was illuminated. The sight took my breath away. I was looking at a small room, a cell really, of about 8 by 10 feet. A cot, Drago’s bed, occupied almost all the floor space, each wall was bookshelf from ceiling to floor overstuffed with books, mostly paperback science fiction. We would read these for the next five or six years. We read the classics, Asimov and Bradbury, Frank Herbert and Philip K Dick. From Vonnegut we would later segue into “literature.” But what I remember reading most were the work of John Brunner and Alfred Bester. It was like they were our own private authors.
Bester’s The Stars My Destination may have stuck in my memory all these years because of the quatrain spoken by the main character that appears twice in the book:
Gully Foyle is my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
Death’s my destination.
The second time it appears the last line reads “The stars my destination.”
After we read this, for a few months we never used the word “home.” We would always say, “Are we going to your dwelling place now?” Or, “My parents require me at our dwelling place.”
If I remember accurately (questionable) Joyce has Stephen Daedalus do something like this in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: Stephen Daedalus, Dublin, Ireland. . . . etc. I remember making just such a list as a grade school kid at St. Michaels, as if to ask how many coordinates does it take to locate myself:
David Stevenson
Hathaway Street
Livonia
Wayne County
Michigan
USA
North America
Earth
The Solar System
Apparently this kind of quatrain was popular in the 18th century with “heaven” always being the destination. Very aspirational.
When we moved into the house we now live in there was a shed off the back door. It was primitive, cement floor, no interior walls, or finish of any kind, a storage shed. It housed, paradoxically, all kinds of garden toxins and rodents and spiders, as well as ancient, nonfunctioning and abandoned tools. I emptied all this out and a wizardly contractor/writer friend finished it for me with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. It is about eight feet by ten with an advantage of being about twelve feet high. I keep a ladder in there to reach the highest shelves. I am there right now. It didn’t occur to me until writing this that I was recreating Drago’s little cellar bedroom, floor-to-ceiling with books. I wish he were here to see this, but he’s been gone over a year now. I like to think there’s a glimmer of his consciousness out there among the stars, aware that he lives in the whorls of my memory, forever the skinny-armed eighth grader unlatching his secret door and opening for me that world of books.
We were selling some furniture on craigslist and a young couple came over with a child about ten years old. I happened to not be at home. The couple was long in deliberation and pleasantly chatty, but the kid was bored to death. My wife said to him, “Want to see something?” He did. She took him out the back door and opened the door to my study. The door opens to three steps downward, so there is very much a cave-like feeling to the place. She reported that the kid walked down the three steps, and looked around at the walls of books extending skyward and turned back to her. “It’s like a Harry Potter room,” he gasped, “magic.”
