I’m adding a short story today, THE PRESENT. This is my first published short story and I wrote it when I was 19. It appeared in 1969 in COTTONWOOD, the literary journal of the University of Kansas.
It’s obviously influence by Steinbeck, who I had emersed myself in for years, reading everything he wrote. There is a passage in GRAPES OF WRATH that I particularly admired as a young writer, the brilliant, meticulous description of s turtle crossing a road. My short story clearly reflects my admiration for this passage.
I was writing a lot then, in the late 1960s. My world was convulsing with drugs, especially acid, sex and revolt. I was an active rebel at the University of Kansas, in long hair, beard and beads. I did mild civil disobedience, some mass protests, a bit of vandalism. At the time I was working for the university’s Behavioral Science Lab with such antipathy to what it represented–what I still see as dubious ‘science’ that can become sinister when used by the powerful against the weak–that I was covering the walls with quota from a cherished book, REVOLT OF THE MASSES by Jose Ortega y Gasset.
My distaste for Behavioral Science was such that in protest to it I often masturbated at work, I did the graveyard shift alone giving electrical shocks to pigeons and rats. I’d ejaculate with warrior like contempt directly onto the lab’s floor.
This is backdrop to THE PRESENT, written in the zealot anger of a young student prince against the tablets of norms, the consensual that holds us all locked in place. Against the laws and power of our elders.
Rereading it I’m uncertain of its quality or originality. But I am still stirred by what it reflects of turbulence and revolution. Of anger. So many now are outraged by Trump. I think they miss that while he is a jerk, he is unimportant, he is a mediocre Mussolini mugging his way along. We should be raising hell instead against the system that he and others are part of and that skewer the Afro American, women, gays, and most especially the American poor. Ah yes, the American poor.
Who gives a shit for them. Rather, we so proudly hail greed and bigotry.