From Poets to Protagonists: Short Stories

From Poets to Protagonists

Fiction from the Hudson Valley Poetry Scene

Featuring the Poets as Main Characters

By

Harvey Havel

Copyright © 2009 by Harvey Havel

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

License Notes. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Books by Harvey Havel:

Noble McCloud (1999)

The Imam (2000)

Freedom of Association (2006)

From Poets to Protagonists (2009)

Harvey Havel's Blog, Essays (2011)

Stories from the Fall of the Empire (2011)

Two Tickets to Memphis (2012)

Mother, A Memoir (2013)

Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt (2014)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book One (2016)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book Two (2016)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book Three (2016)

An Adjunct Down (2016)

The Thruway Killers (2017)

PREFACE

Writing about the very people you know and love has never been easy for any writer, let alone this humble one who has had the high honor and privilege of being a part of The Hudson Valley Poetry Scene for the past several years. This work, I admit, will not do any of the poets featured herein their due justice when we take their incredible gifts and incredible talents into consideration. And stumbling upon this fine community of poets was certainly not easy, as in my early years as a writer, when I was both bruised and battered by my many attempts to make it in the New York City area as a big-time fiction writer, did I find the most fascinating group of artists just across the Jersey border to the north—in the rapidly developing suburbs of Orange County, New York.

The timing of meeting and getting to know these poets in the summer of 2005 couldn’t have come at a more desperate time in my life. I had failed as a young man in ways that I never even thought were remotely possible. I was so filled and consumed by such a loneliness and desperation from an intense urban isolation and longing in Manhattan that I thought my life would be a short and tragic one. Neither finding an audience for my work nor any writers who believed in me as an artist was only the starting point to what became a continuous downward spiral. I thought I had lost it all as I continued to roam the streets of Manhattan in search, not only for the fame and glory of being a writer, but quite simply for a connection with anyone who would even like me as a person or would talk to me as any human being would.

I wound up in Hackensack, New Jersey, as I was unable to afford the fast-paced lifestyle and all-around exclusivity that New York City demanded of its artists, and it was there, through a part-time job serving as an assistant to a disabled man, did I meet George Nitti. Through knowing George—a very talented writer, poet, and screen actor in his own right—I landed my first legitimate job as a composition instructor at Bergen Community College in Paramus, and after we both learned that we had a lot in common as writers, George took me on as a roommate at his spacious home in Chester, New York.

I remember well my first time meeting with a group of young, extremely talented poets whom George had invited for dinner and drinks one night on his wide, stone-flagged patio behind his home. I would learn to follow these poets for the next several years, and what’s more, these poets— Robert Milby, Bonnie Law, Christopher Wheeling, Marina Mati, and Ken Van Rennselaer among them—practically welcomed me at the gates, accepted me with open arms, took me in, and turned my entire life upside down by allowing this sole fiction writer among them to feature his prose at almost every blasted coffee house, library, and cultural center up and down the Hudson Valley.

Since that time, I have moved on to a more sobering teaching position up here in Albany, and being in Albany is like being in another world. I miss these poets terribly, as I don’t get to see them as much anymore, as I do live close by but not nearly as close enough. But my love for them still overflows with gratitude for what they did for me, whether they are conscious of the many gifts they imparted or not. Yes, as poets they do tend to struggle more so than any group of people I have ever met. They are constantly being beaten down by bills they can never pay, broken cars they can never fix, marriages they can never keep, lovers and soul-mates they can never rightfully have, books they can’t for the life of them publish, and places that they’d love to escape to but simply can’t afford. But I realize now, in my casual reflection of those threadbare times we shared together, that these poets don’t need these finer things in life. They seem to have each other and their own artistic merits and endeavors to guide them clear through to those celestial destinations that only poets of such high talent and caliber can intimately know.

The work herein does not represent an accurate depiction of what these poets are like. This collection was never meant to do that. But rather these stories try to place some singular quality of their multi-faceted characters within the context and action of short, fallible narratives that serve more to accentuate the stories themselves and not to emphasize any shortcomings that may be misconstrued as being a part of their personalities, personal histories, or qualities as people. Above all, this is a work of fiction, and what’s printed here, even though it involves these poets, is only fiction and far from fact.

Again, it is not so easy to write about the people a now-humbled writer has come to know and love, but my hope is that they forgive me for anything I have written that might cast them in any light that does not flatter them— because I may not be so flattering from time to time for the sake of these stories—not because these Hudson Valley poets aren’t some of the best people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.

WILLAM SEATON

PATRICIA SEATON

GEORGE NITTI

Dusk had befallen the village of Goshen. The moans of a saxophone and the brushing of a cymbal spilled from twin speakers from within Bill and Patricia Seaton’s living room onto an otherwise silent side-street like soft, undulating waves. Their oversized Victorian home, tucked away within a row of tall hedges and a couple of knotted elms, hid the laughter and the din of conversation that flourished on their porch outside. Bill looked upon his porch proudly, as it had been the latest addition to a home that he and his wife had spent many years rebuilding. They had both worked very hard in their later years to restore the home’s siding, which had chipped and peeled, and the wide deck that wrapped around it became a testament to the comfortable niche they had made after many years of tumult and uncertainty as fierce intellectuals and dedicated artisans. The floodlights hovering above them lent considerable shadow to the nooks and quiet corners of the porch where their artist-friends mingled and sipped at their wine. Their faces were hidden from the full gaze a daytime party would have revealed, as this was, after all, a special occasion. Bill Seaton was finally retiring from his position as visiting teacher at the state correctional facility the next town over. He could now settle more deeply into his work as a poet, his daughters college-bound and the mortgage on their large ornamented home recently paid-off in full.

And the guests there that celebrated his many years as a civil servant were an odd assortment of old-guard lefties from his days on the San Francisco poetry scene, local artists who spent their sober evenings at coffee houses, and proprietors from local grassroots businesses who had just entered the world of dollars and cents. Even a few family members had made the long trek to Goshen from as far away as Illinois and Florida. With Patricia by his side, he stood chomping on celery sticks beneath the glow of the lights.

He discussed prison life with George Nitti, who had recently bought a stake in the Baby Grand Bookstore in nearby Warwick. Bill wore a pair of tan, thick-whaled corduroys and a buttoned Oxford shirt, starched white. The curls of his whitening hair frizzed along his scalp with a gravity all their own, and his white beard hung upon the lower half of his face like a lush throwback to the calm, ancient evenings he spent hiking the upstate hinterlands, his wire-rimmed spectacles hinting at a royalty that had somehow interrupted his tenure as the radical reformer for whom he was so well known for many years.

In fact, his interest in social justice began in the farmlands of rural Illinois as he traveled southwest, hitch-hiking the entire way to San Francisco. Once there, he met Patricia for the first time. Luckily they had had enough foresight to flee from the ever-repopulating city by the bay before the world’s camera focused its full attentions on the dharma bums, sages, and mystics that wandered lazily through its hippified streets like decorated juggernauts. He saw all of these faces in front of him now returned to life, their dignities restored, as though every one of them had straightened the wrinkles and creases of their older age and dyed their hair their natural colors again. A return to youth, perhaps, but this time they did it more responsibly.

He remembered how several of his close friends fell to the excesses that soon followed this explosion of counter-culture, and many of them never quite returned from their forays into alternative living and the ever-expanding mind. Bill was much too genuine to have been sucked up by the rampant commercialism that replaced this wholesome drift into utopia, but when the ideas seemed to fade and the logic of their dogma succumbed to the raw, narrowing eyes of the money-making machine, they hit the road and took their thoughts and beliefs elsewhere.

Yet the streets and alleyways of San Francisco had taught their swollen hearts to imagine, and both Bill and Patricia held onto this cultural currency that would have otherwise rendered their lives barren.

Before the influx of acid tabs and electric guitars and the Rolling Stones, there had been a commitment to equality and an old roll-up-your-sleeves and turning-swords-into-ploughshares motif whose time had finally re-emerged. It all seemed a bit fantastic and somewhat naïve to think that