WRITING IN THE RIPPLES

 

Smiley’s Dice Adventures in Livingness

 By: Louellen  Smiley

 

The throw of the dice this week falls on chapter one of the memoir.   Like any creative endeavor, the work is organic and has a life of its own.   A garden doesn’t always grow with your plans; there are seeds that fall outside of the planter. There are disasters that drift though our arrangements and cause chaos. I am beginning to believe nothing ends how we visualize it will.   A beautiful day is hijacked by a tornado, a child is murdered while taking a walk with a girlfriend, and a chapter runs away from the author.     

The desk where I sit and write is engulfed with books, files, index cards, note pads, FBI files, and outlines. Period photographs are scattered through-out the room to further sedate any intrusion of the present. I live in a cubicle of my parent’s and famous gangsters. 

I was writing a lengthy portrayal of Ben Siegel one day, and it occurred to me that he had become a major character in my life.  He played a role that someone else should have; a noted author,  journalist, or poet.  Ben Siegel changed my history because I had to learn to love him.  Learning to love him meant erasing everything I had read or heard.    It is said he was a ruthless killer, a savage, violent, and that he loved to kill.    I turned my head to look at a photograph of my mother.  I was told that she loved Ben too. 

Where once I believed my mother was naïve and uninformed about Ben; now I know this wasn’t the case. She knew from the beginning. I‘ve read the news articles of the day, the columns, and I’ve spoken to people who were there.  The volumes of truth surfaced because of a club of researchers that have rallied around my book. These people, who gain insightful and intimate details of your life, form a friendship that is unlike any other.     Alice Syman, who has dug into the archives of every newspaper in the country found some disturbing articles. She wrote to me beforehand, and asked if I wanted to read the slanderous headlines.    RJ has an alert button built into his computer. Every time someone writes about my family, his button goes off. This week he sent me sent me a column he’d found in the Los Angeles Times about my father’s fracas with Tommy Dorsey.   Kristin Baggelaar, who authored , “Images of America, The Copacabana,” introduced me to women who knew my mother.   

What I’ve learned and accepted, is that she knew who Ben Siegel was and what he did.  My mother fit into this strangely singular and controversial group of criminally engaged people.  An Irish Catholic, convent raised,  John Robert Powers Model, with a future on stage and in film, was very close friends with my father’s associates.   I see her in the full frame of who she was; and not the puritan I had imagined.   I like her this way because it blends with the outrageousness of my former years. 

While writing about my father I questioned my prolonged interest in his choices, his behavior, and his secrecy. I asked Uncle Myron who shares the same history as my father.   Myron reaffirmed that my father was a true to the code gangster. No one ever got him to talk about what he knew or had seen. He assured me that descendants of men like my father suffer a similar disassociation with society, and share the same struggles to fit in as I have.    

Why I continue to seek answers and probe into their lives is  because they never told me anything. Children feel the repression of truth as clearly as they do the pain of bruise.  The more you hide the more they seek.  I more so than my sister,  because at my root is the inclination to question the world around me, and to mend the breaks in our lives. 

Along the way of writing the first chapter, I discovered that people like to know how I work in a state of solitude and selfishness.  It seems unnatural until you pick up a book you love and read.  While a story is moving through the author, they– or at least I — refrain from answering the phone, checking email, or listening to the voices downstairs. A story or any work of art lives inside the artist. It sounds sort of portentous but that is how it feels to me.  So when intrusions come, the disturbances are exaggerated into surrealistic proportions.  

A  knock on the door followed by a question unrelated resembles the feeling of being flung out of my chair and into mid-air.   Grating truck noise, loading and unloading of hotel uniforms and supplies is part of the landscape of my writing stage;   as is the occasional worker singing Mexican love songs.   I could easily write about the life of the hotel across the street; the many characters that take care of the guests and the grounds.  It would be an easy writing assignment because I am not related to the hotel.  Writing about your parent’s, the people who introduced you to the world,  is like grinding down your memories into sand,  and sifting through the grains for meaning. 

I write through the day starting at noon and finish around six.  Not all that time is writing; a great portion is lifting one pile of notes, to find another pile, indexing, reading, and just stretching out on the sofa and listening to the voices.  When I feel the prick of defeat rising from the page, I take a break outdoors, and watch my bird family dipping in the fountain or munching in the bird feeder.  I dream of diving into the Mediterranean, and take an imaginary plunge into the clear water where facts and fiction merge together.

 At the end of the day, as other lives intersect with mine, I see people engaged in human activity, the stimulation of common interest from living people and their needs. In writing you interact with your head.   The narrative is like water; it can run smooth like a river over all the rocks and debris, or it can break into a million bubbles and lose everything.    When it breaks apart like a wave on the beach, you begin again, and the erosion of impatience allows you to continue.  

It is what we all face collectively, the strength to return to a flawed or broken piece of our lives ,and make it work for us.  Any dice to throw email: folliesls@aol.com

If you interested in writing and are looking for an editor or a researcher. I have two recommendations:

David Bowman
Precise Edit 
PH:  505-603-3411 (cell)
PH:  888-474-4393 (toll-free)
FX:  505-474-4393
dbowman@PreciseEdit.com
http://www.PreciseEdit.com 

 Expert research: Genealogy, Newspaper archives, Internet articles

Alice Syman

P.O. Box 5495

St. Augustine, FL 32085

904-810-5596

Email: asyman@earthlink.net

 

 

LIFE ON THE OTHER SIDE

DiceAdventures in Livingness

 By: Louellen  Smiley

 

 

The throw of the dice this week lands  on adventures in living on the other side.  Just when I put my finger on truth, the truth comes back modified.  

The growing up with gangsters columns were like that, sometimes I’d superimpose a bit of falseness to minimize the harshness. I was writing for a community newspaper, and exposing my family history for the first time.  The truth came back; it squeezed in there between readings, or after I’d sent the column for publication. The confrontation of my own judgment; I didn’t approve of what I had written.  I hadn’t told the truth

I received letters of encouragement from friends, and once in awhile someone from the wrinkled pages of the past would respond.  The garage doorman where I lived with my father in Hollywood discovered my column in a search for Allen Smiley. He wrote me several stories, and confided his genuine respect toward my father, who treated him very cordially.  He also said word got around the Doheny Towers to do what Smiley says, or else.   

 The gangster columns always surprised me after they were written.  You don’t know what you remember until you begin writing.  Entire conversations replayed so effortlessly from so many years ago.  

Without readers, that wrote back they wanted more, I wouldn’t have continued.   Had I stopped writing about that subject, then I wouldn’t have had all that practice. It took a lot of practice; like playing an instrument, or learning to dance. Writing about a subject I was forbidden to even think about, was liberating, and it freed up a part of me that was caught in self deception.  Sharing the history with a community newspaper is different than sending it into the world.   If the subject wasn’t so forbidden and complex; there would be a lot more memoirs by descendants of organized crime figures.  Imagine reading the memoir of Benjamin Siegel’s daughter.  You never will.  Nor anyone related to him.  

None of my articles were published nationally until a few months ago.  I had been in a feverish temperament to get published and submitted something almost every morning the moment I woke up.  I felt empowered hitting up the major newspapers, and  magazines.   Sipping coffee and streaming in absolute absorption of getting published; it was a very satisfying feeling.    It’s like going into the dressing room in a department store, and allowing those three way mirrors to reflect every inch of you.  Once you get used to it, it’s not so bad, and besides, no one looks good in a three way mirror except nature and children.  I was up to about forty submissions, when I decided to send a note to a friend who worked at the New York Post.   I was trained not to ask for favors, because you know in the world my father lived in, ‘a favor can kill you faster than a bullet’ (that line is from Carlito’s Way, but it really applies to the whole thing).  I sent a note in defiance of this training, and asked if he thought this might work for the Post.  Joe replied that he’d run it upstairs to an editor he knew. 

Several days later, I received a note from the editor; she’d like to run a story in the Sunday edition, and would I write something up about growing up with gangsters. My swivel desk chair spun around, you know, and I did a double jump, a few more sporadic yelps and  then I had to get busy.  It was Thursday, and she wanted it by Friday.  All the material was on the hard drive, and even more accessible it was in my head, memorized from so many submissions and queries.  We worked on the piece together; she was really terrific to work with and she shaped it up beautifully.

 On Sunday I went looking for the Post; and there wasn’t a book shelf in the city that carried it.  Then my New York pal Joey called up, “I got the paper—yea—it’s great, like the whole page.”  The whole page I thought to myself. “There’s a few photographs of your mother and father,  the photo of you is a thumbprint.”  The irony is that the Times used to write about my parents, Winchell and another columnist, things like,  “Smiley and Casey are imaging,”  I couldn’t figure that out—at first. 

 Viewing the Post online isn’t the same as in print,  but I sat back and enjoyed the feeling of finality.  For me that was it, it was over, unless they wanted more columns, I was basking in the election of a column in a national publication with over one million readers. 

That wasn’t the end of it.  The Post became pre-occupied with Elliott Spitzer, and then the elections, and so my submissions are on hold.  What I hadn’t anticipated was a call from a literary agent asking to read what I’d written.  I mentioned I was working on a memoir in the byline.  It caught me off guard, like all the great surprises and disappointments, they just never happen when you expect them.   I told this agent I’d send a chapter and overview.   I had to catch my breath; I was caught.   The memoir was in the trunk, the trunk I closed because it deluded my thinking, my eating, and my living.  I hadn’t worked on it since 2005.

I pulled together a sample chapter and sent it off to New York.  I’d waited up to three months for a reply in the past, only to receive a scribbled note written in a moment of haste, ‘not for me, or I’ll pass.’ The agent called me personally, and I took the cell phone outside, and while he talked, I looked at the sky and tried to sound calm. He was enthusiastic; and he had represented mob related stories for twenty years. Though the writing was not acceptable, he’d have his editor make comments, and returned to me along with a contract.

 I was standing outside, looking right through to that other side, the one I’d dreamt about for twenty years.   The sky fell in my lap.  Unbelieving, in the same manner that follows news of a death you hadn’t expected, for days– even weeks I couldn’t grasp it.  What made the whole episode more intense was that this same agent had read some of my work, in novel form, twenty years ago, and passed on it. 

That is why the columns are arriving later and with less frequency; because I am writing the memoir in earnest.  I’m on the other side of the dream, and there is no more room for hiding, shading the truth, or giving up.

I’m still throwing the dice and the columns will continue throughout this process. Thank you reader for keeping me in practice!

Any dice to  throw email: folliesls@aol.com

Life on the Other Side

Dice Adventures in Livingness

 By: Louellen  Smiley

 

 

The throw of the dice this week lands  on adventures in living on the other side.  Just when I put my finger on truth, the truth comes back modified.  

The growing up with gangsters columns were like that, sometimes I’d superimpose a bit of falseness to minimize the harshness. I was writing for a community newspaper, and exposing my family history for the first time.  The truth came back; it squeezed in there between readings, or after I’d sent the column for publication. The confrontation of my own judgment; I didn’t approve of what I had written.  I hadn’t told the truth

I received letters of encouragement from friends, and once in awhile someone from the wrinkled pages of the past would respond.  The garage doorman where I lived with my father in Hollywood discovered my column in a search for Allen Smiley. He wrote me several stories, and confided his genuine respect toward my father, who treated him very cordially.  He also said word got around the Doheny Towers to do what Smiley says, or else.   

 The gangster columns always surprised me after they were written.  You don’t know what you remember until you begin writing.  Entire conversations replayed so effortlessly from so many years ago.  

Without readers, that wrote back they wanted more, I wouldn’t have continued.   Had I stopped writing about that subject, then I wouldn’t have had all that practice. It took a lot of practice; like playing an instrument, or learning to dance. Writing about a subject I was forbidden to even think about, was liberating, and it freed up a part of me that was caught in self deception.  Sharing the history with a community newspaper is different than sending it into the world.   If the subject wasn’t so forbidden and complex; there would be a lot more memoirs by descendants of organized crime figures.  Imagine reading the memoir of Benjamin Siegel’s daughter.  You never will.  Nor anyone related to him.  

None of my articles were published nationally until a few months ago.  I had been in a feverish temperament to get published and submitted something almost every morning the moment I woke up.  I felt empowered hitting up the major newspapers, and  magazines.   Sipping coffee and streaming in absolute absorption of getting published; it was a very satisfying feeling.    It’s like going into the dressing room in a department store, and allowing those three way mirrors to reflect every inch of you.  Once you get used to it, it’s not so bad, and besides, no one looks good in a three way mirror except nature and children.  I was up to about forty submissions, when I decided to send a note to a friend who worked at the New York Post.   I was trained not to ask for favors, because you know in the world my father lived in, ‘a favor can kill you faster than a bullet’ (that line is from Carlito’s Way, but it really applies to the whole thing).  I sent a note in defiance of this training, and asked if he thought this might work for the Post.  Joe replied that he’d run it upstairs to an editor he knew. 

Several days later, I received a note from the editor; she’d like to run a story in the Sunday edition, and would I write something up about growing up with gangsters. My swivel desk chair spun around, you know, and I did a double jump, a few more sporadic yelps and  then I had to get busy.  It was Thursday, and she wanted it by Friday.  All the material was on the hard drive, and even more accessible it was in my head, memorized from so many submissions and queries.  We worked on the piece together; she was really terrific to work with and she shaped it up beautifully.

 On Sunday I went looking for the Post; and there wasn’t a book shelf in the city that carried it.  Then my New York pal Joey called up, “I got the paper—yea—it’s great, like the whole page.”  The whole page I thought to myself. “There’s a few photographs of your mother and father,  the photo of you is a thumbprint.”  The irony is that the Times used to write about my parents, Winchell and another columnist, things like,  “Smiley and Casey are imaging,”  I couldn’t figure that out—at first. 

 Viewing the Post online isn’t the same as in print,  but I sat back and enjoyed the feeling of finality.  For me that was it, it was over, unless they wanted more columns, I was basking in the election of a column in a national publication with over one million readers. 

That wasn’t the end of it.  The Post became pre-occupied with Elliott Spitzer, and then the elections, and so my submissions are on hold.  What I hadn’t anticipated was a call from a literary agent asking to read what I’d written.  I mentioned I was working on a memoir in the byline.  It caught me off guard, like all the great surprises and disappointments, they just never happen when you expect them.   I told this agent I’d send a chapter and overview.   I had to catch my breath; I was caught.   The memoir was in the trunk, the trunk I closed because it deluded my thinking, my eating, and my living.  I hadn’t worked on it since 2005.

I pulled together a sample chapter and sent it off to New York.  I’d waited up to three months for a reply in the past, only to receive a scribbled note written in a moment of haste, ‘not for me, or I’ll pass.’ The agent called me personally, and I took the cell phone outside, and while he talked, I looked at the sky and tried to sound calm. He was enthusiastic; and he had represented mob related stories for twenty years. Though the writing was not acceptable, he’d have his editor make comments, and returned to me along with a contract.

 I was standing outside, looking right through to that other side, the one I’d dreamt about for twenty years.   The sky fell in my lap.  Unbelieving, in the same manner that follows news of a death you hadn’t expected, for days– even weeks I couldn’t grasp it.  What made the whole episode more intense was that this same agent had read some of my work, in novel form, twenty years ago, and passed on it. 

That is why the columns are arriving later and with less frequency; because I am writing the memoir in earnest.  I’m on the other side of the dream, and there is no more room for hiding, shading the truth, or giving up.

I’m still throwing the dice and the columns will continue throughout this process. Thank you reader for keeping me in practice!

Any dice to  throw email: folliesls@aol.com