Appaloosa Radio offers
Unfamiliarity
An original audio story
“With light wings, I did o’er-perch these walls, for stony limits cannot hold me out.”
When I was in high school during the 1960s, I believed that I wanted to write. During my sophomore year, I took a Creative Writing course as my elective.
Three weeks into the course, we shared our first stories. Mine did not go well. Or at least that is what I thought then.
I had attempted to write a horror story based on a visit to a restaurant that I had made the summer before with my slightly older cousin. I remember being shocked that my cousin went behind the lunch counter to cook her own meal. I also remember that the place was run-down, greasy, and downright filthy. A regular pigsty! I remember saying to my cousin that I would never go there again.
In my story, I described the “deplorable, rancid, and greasy” ambiance of the place.
As the class critiqued my story, Mrs. Cornaby, our instructor asked me some really hard questions that I could not answer. Why was I bothered that Dina had gone behind the lunch counter to cook her own hamburger? Did her familiarity with the restaurant bother me? Why? Had I been in the kitchens of other restaurants? Did I know whether this restaurant was dirtier than other ones? What made me think this restaurant was filthy? Give specifics. Provide details. Weave the specifics into your story line. Use them to enhance the story’s narration.
As a sophomore in high school, I was deeply offended by Mrs. Cornaby’s intense questions. So offended that I dopped the course and opted for Advanced Biology instead.
~~~
Now retired, I recently saw an article in Time magazine that has stayed with me. It was an article about Detroit, more specifically about the cement block wall built in the early 1940s to divide the east and the west sections of the city. That’s correct. A cement block wall erected to divide the city. The wall was funded by some of the city’s largest real estate developers. It was designed to separate the city into a “black half” and a “white half.”
Researchers have studied the impacts of the Detroit wall and have concluded that its impacts were enormous.
On over 200 dimensions, the “white” side of the wall was significantly higher (more positive) than the “black” side.
As I said, the study of the impacts of the Detroit wall remained with me for weeks. Then, I realized that my five cousins (although neither African American nor Hispanic) lived on one side of a comparable “wall” and my brothers and I lived on another.
~~~
I re-read the story that I had written in my sophomore class. I remembered again the comments that Mrs. Cornaby had made. I was writing about something, some place, and some people I was not familiar with. I only knew life from my side of the wall.
For that reason, the story did not seem authentic. It seemed contrived, invented, one dimensional.
I spent one afternoon trying to imagine my cousin Dina’s experience, especially when she took me to her place of pride, the restaurant that she was managing. Try as hard as I could, I could only visualize brief snippets. The organizing gestalt was missing. I just couldn't get the pieces to fit.
Maybe it was from frustration. Maybe it was from curiosity. Maybe it was from long-held guilt. I don’t know.
Nonetheless, I decided to fly down to Southern California and go to the restaurant, the one where Dina had worked. I used the excuse that I was looking for background for a new story, but that was not true. I really did not know why I was going.
All I knew was that I wanted to go to the other side of the wall.
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Incidental music: Pink Floyd, “The Wall”
