The piece I submitted to the Raymond Carver contest was rejected. Which is fabulous. I mean it. Because rejection is proof that I write. Proof that I take risks. Proof that I enabled a portion of my mind to flow out of my fingers, through a pen, onto a piece of paper, and into the purview of people whose professional lives are devoted to the craft of writing.
Rejection is as much a part of the writing process as is sharpening a pencil or forming an outline. And since I was rejected, it means that I can now share the work with you (a requirement of most writing contests is that the work submitted can’t be published). So here’s the piece I wrote. A story inspired by friends, wolves, and chocolate.
On April 23, 1961, Judy Garland performed at Carnegie Hall in what some consider to be the greatest night in show business history, leading to a Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year, making her the first woman to earn this honor. This album is also synonymous with the gay community, for a multitude of reasons. The dialogue presented here includes quotes from this legendary performance.
Lucas, Judy, and Me.
by Callie Neylan, Spring 2021
He picked me up at my Airbnb near Berkeley, the one I chose specifically for its outdoor shower.
"How was your strip tease, Callie? Any peeping toms watch you shower this morning?"
I smirked, then threw my stuff in the back.
He turned left around a dusty park in the bright sun, which, after four days in California, my eyes still weren't used to. We passed pea patches and abandoned Oakland warehouses, parking on the street in front of one of them.
“I hope you don’t mind, but…Judy Garland is the soundtrack for today. All day. Because that’s what gay boys listen to.”
"When you're smiling, when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you." Judy sang.
The sidewalks dazzled, reflecting light like a snow field, their margins flanked by meager trees that someone forgot to water.
"Is it here?" The door was locked. But the sign said Taza. We walked around the building and tried a few more doors, then gave up. We were in the Bay Area to taste chocolate.
Lucas was our first hire. A coffee professional from Chicago who also loved chocolate. He was one of those people who, no matter how much time you spent with him, five minutes or several days, made you laugh. Hearty. Genuine. Guttural. He laughed, too. With you, around you, beside you, over you, under you. Because that's how his laughs carried. Like a Great Lakes wind.
We took separate flights from Seattle to San Francisco, sharing an apartment near Daly City for the first few days while we attended our cacao grading class in an abandoned warehouse that also housed an art gallery and a terraced garden with herbs in clay pots scattered around. I remember him like this:
Lucas, sliding down a metal slide at a needle-strewn playground in the Mission, then back up again in an infinite loop because it's not my memory, it's a Boomerang.
Lucas telling the cacao grader participants to please be quiet with exasperated eye rolls because he simply could not focus on the flavors with all our mindless chit chat.
Lucas, his black curls and frequent, midwestern chortle paired with a Mister Rogers green wool sweater, crisp jeans, and hand-crafted boots.
Lucas appraising whatever he put in his mouth with his critical wit – the food or coffee or cocktail – just like he assessed the roaming gay men as we walked through the Castro.
“Oh, hello. I’d like to take you home as dessert with my port.” he’d say as we passed a handsome man.
We got back into the Honda and he turned up the volume, taking us back to the greatest night in show biz history. On April 23, 1961, Judy Garland performed live at Carnegie Hall.
“I…uh…”, Judy laughed a breathy laugh. “I am so excited, my goodness!”
“I’m excited, too, Judy!” Lucas laughed, turning up the volume even more. Then we turned west past the Berkeley Bowl, north onto I-80 toward wine country for lunch.
Like most major American thoroughfares, the road to Napa Valley is littered with bland strip malls, squat, unconsidered buildings, and cars. Ugly, boxy, metal cars all over the fucking place. But it is also lit by California sunshine, glittered by its gold, ushered by its beautiful trees. Blue gum eucalyptus, Monterey cypress, bay figs, coastal corals, Brazilian peppers, and the quintessential palm.
“I just got back, well not actually just got back, I got back about three months ago from…Europe.” Judy said. Gay men everywhere loved her: she was persecuted. She knew suffering.
“Speaking of travel,” I turned to Lucas. “Tell me more about your trip to Africa!”
“Oh my god. It was the worst.” he rolled his eyes. “Well, it wasn’t really the worst. I’m lucky I got to go. But my friend who was supposed to make tour arrangements and accompany me bailed. When I got to Ethiopia, I was alone. Alone, Callie. I was so upset, not even Judy could have comforted me.”
“Are you serious? What a jerk!”
“I drove two days to the coffee plantation, spent two hours, then drove two days back. It was awful.”
He turned the volume down this time.
We passed Richmond and San Pablo. El Sobrante, Pinole, Hercules and Rodeo, passing over the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge, a smaller, grayer version of the Golden Gate. The hills were scrubby, plump, and brown, each like a teddy bear’s belly with the fur loved off. Did you know that California is named after a Black queen who ruled an island full of female warriors decked in gold, commanding an army of 500 griffins trained to kill men?
“Other places only make me love you best,” Judy swooned as scrub oaks and dairy cows blurred past. “Tell me you’re the one in all the golden west.”
The golden west morphed from strip malls into more hills and longer expanses of trees and salty marshes as we entered the grape Mecca. Napa Valley is one of the world’s smallest wine-growing regions, an area of only 5 miles wide by 35 miles long, but nevertheless, one of the most significant. Sheltered from California’s Central Valley heat by the Vaca Range to the east, the Mayacamas Mountains on the west provide a buffer from Sonoma County’s cool marine layer. Rich volcanic soils and a Mediterranean climate of hot, dry days followed by cool, dry nights provide a grape’s ideal womb.
Now cradled in the famed valley, we could see charred hills, black signatures of past wildfires written on mountain sides. But still, the valley itself was green and lush. It was easy to forget about wildfires and their destruction, looking at the purple and gold bunches of grapes. I remembered the first time I saw vineyards after I’d moved to the Pacific Northwest in the early 90s. That was in Washington’s Yakima Valley traveling west on I-90 from Kennewick to Seattle. I was fascinated by their squat yet sprawling stature, beautiful leaves and curled tendrils wrapped around a trellis like a baby’s curl around a mother’s finger.
We drove through the town of Napa, then started scanning the winery signs in earnest. It was time for lunch. But January in Napa is off-season and not many cellars were open. We lucked out, though, pulling into a winery called Honig Cellars, a lovely spot with a vine-covered veranda that provided dappled shade. January in Napa may be off-season, but the weather was still perfect.
“You go to my head and you linger like a haunting refrain,” Judy faded as we walked under the vines. “And I find you spinning ‘round my brain like the bubbles in a glass of champagne.”
“But we’re not in France, Judy.” Lucas said. “We’re in Cabernet Sauvignon country.” He glanced at me and rolled his eyes.
We sat down at a rough wooden table with iron chairs on gravel pebbles. The logo on the menu was a botanical illustration of a bumble bee as the cross bar of a capital H. We talked, laughed, and sipped our wine with cheese, crackers, and olives. Then we followed a vintner down rows of dry, brown vines, twisted and pruned, dormant this time of year. It smelled like dirt. We listened as the winemaker told us about their sustainable practices, for which this winery was renowned. How they use dogs to sniff out mealybugs, in lieu of toxic pesticides. How they place nests for bluebirds and owls throughout the vines to keep bugs in check. How their “enherbement” – the practice of planting grasses and flowers between the vines – enriches and protects the soil. And how all these practices together foster the proliferation of bees, the winery’s namesake.
We took a ride on the back of a tractor to the warehouses where they fermented the wine in 20’ steel tanks then stored it in rows of oak barrels. The storage rooms were cold and metallic, the smell of fermented grapes rich and musky. At their gift shop, we bought some books and dessert wine to go, then got back in the Honda, driving south down 29 but this time turning west toward Sausalito on our way back to San Francisco.
The sky was inky blue by the time we turned off Highway 101 toward the Marin Headlands, the last stop on our wine country loop. The Headlands, just northwest of San Francisco, are a geological treasure, providing spectacular views of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge from coastal prairies covered in scrub and grassland. They are also home to a diverse population of animals, including, as we discovered up close later, coyotes. Our headlights lit up the trees near the road like actors on a side stage. Judy was in the middle of telling us another story.
“I’ve got to tell you about another, another thing that happened to me when I went, uh, abroad.”
“Whoa, what was that?” I cranked my neck as human silhouettes suddenly appeared around a curve.
Judy kept talking. “I went to, uh, to London first and they’re uh, they’re terribly sweet they’re wonderful and they were very sweet to me, but if you know anything about the English press, they’re…uh…they’re odd.”
A cyclist in tight lycra lay crashed on the shoulder, an ambulance tilted off the roadway. We slowed down, then drove on. Through a retired military compound, hospital green barracks with shiplap siding glowed as our headlights flooded the signs to Kirby Cove. The road ended at a dirt parking lot. The gravel crunched under our tires as black as the sky was dark.
Judy said, “There was one young girl, though, and she was kinda cute, she was, uh, next to me all the way through this, this party and she kept saying you look marvelous! I’ve never seen you look as well…you look so relaxed!”
We parked and got out of the car. The wind was blowing and it smelled like the sea: a coastal perfume of kelp, salt, sand, and marsh. Lucas ran toward the water, his black curls bouncing, round shadows against the fog and mist, glowing orange from the lights of San Francisco across the Bay. Poking through the marine layer were the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge.
He screamed and hollered, still intoxicated from the wine we had at lunch. I ran after him, trying to keep up, taking my shoes off and cuffing my jeans as I went.
“Lucas, wait! Wait!!”
The sand poured between my toes and flicked on my ankles until it gave way under waves. It was cold and damp but the kind of cold and damp that makes you alive. Invigorated. I reached him as he was running from the surf, back toward the car.
“What is that?” he screamed.
I looked across the field to see multiple pairs of yellow dots gliding through the tall grasses on the edge of the sand. The blades parted over shadows of bodies, slender and lithe. We screamed and jumped, dashing back to the parking lot, waves crashing behind us, moonlight reflected on the white foam. I hyperventilated like a panting dog, hair in my mouth, my stomach left behind. I couldn’t see Lucas anymore and the yellow eyes – they must have been eyes – were darting in front of me. Behind me. Beside me. He reached the car before I did and started the engine.
“Get in!” He yelled over the wind and the motor. “Get in! Let’s get the hell out of here!”
Our seats sandy and our eyes wide, we drove off, leaving the coyotes and the waves and the perfumed grasslands behind with Judy, right on cue:
There's Brooklyn Bridge, London Bridge,
And the Bridge of San Louis Rey
But the only bridge, that's a real gone bridge,
Is the bridge accross the bay
San Francisco, I'm coming home again,
Never to roam again, by gum
San Francisco, I don't mean Frisco
San Francisco, here I come!
If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before.
Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we’ll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, ”created of warm blood and nerves” as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.
– Raymond Carver
Things That Nourished My Writing: July 16 - 31.
FOOD
Blackberries are in season. And Seattle has a special relationship with them.
Fennel’s in season, too. So we made fennel-infused chocolate milk.
FILM
I’m rewatching the original Sex and the City.
LITERARY
Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers
Becoming by Michelle Obama
MUSIC
We’re All Alone In This Together
PLACES
Beautiful Eastern Washington, a place of incredible agricultural bounty, is sadly on fire this summer.