Instance Recall

Write what you know. Well, what do I know?

I can remember an episode on the first day in Mrs. Heald’s first grade class, when my friend Lenny wet his flannel-lined blue jeans. Lenny was always a tough guy, but that day he was bawling. I can remember when my sister Susan, nine years my junior, found me smoking in the field behind our house. She remembers it, too. She ratted me out thirty years after the fact.

I suspect life’s most embarrassing moments are more deeply etched in our recall. Those are the ones we’d most like to forget.

In sixth grade, I was supposed to keep a journal through the school year. Did I do it? Of course not. When the time came to turn the journal in for grading, I had nothing to deliver, so I started skipping school. Things went swimmingly until a day when it rained. I had to hole up in the crawlspace. Again, one of my sisters ratted me out. That was an inauspicious start to my writing career. 

While I was off to college, Susan ran into my sixth grade teacher. “How’s Richard doing?” Mr. Troy asked?”

Susan replied, “Oh, he’s in an institution in Michigan (General Motors Institute, now Kettering University).”

Mr. Troy could only nod sagely, as if his predictions had proven only too true.

I remember an agonizing twenty four hour Greyhound bus trip from Massachusetts to Michigan. We seemed to stop in every one-horse crossroads in five states. What didn’t happen was a ride through riot-torn Detroit. Despite that detail, the episode formed the basis for the first chapter of my book, Red Crush. The bus memory was vivid enough, and I’ve spent enough time in post-riot Detroit to fill in the blanks.

Writing from memories in fiction isn’t about transcription of actual events. It is more about shaping memories into a story worth telling. In my case, the process was about fitting memories and events into a morality play about race, human nature and amoral corporate culture.

For example, my fraternity did pledge their first black member while I was there. I recall a very heated discussion that left me disenchanted about the ideals of that organization. Did we actually blackball the man? I don’t remember. Was I pissed? I certainly was. I transformed that single discussion into several chapters of fiction about fraternity life, the moral contradictions we live with, and a bit of foreshadowing.

The plot in that book is built around a series of questionable industrial “accidents” in a stamping plant. I worked on and off for four years in a plant like the one I describe. During that time, numerous accidents like the ones I report did occur. Men were crushed inside presses. Men were caught between rail cars. I never witnessed any of these accidents, but my imagination and actual memories were sufficient to construct a facsimile.

Other events inside the plant have been faithfully recorded. I did spend a day on top of a press mucking around in die lubricant, helping change a giant fried electric motor. I did change the cutters inside a bailer, all the while waiting to be crushed. I did get castigated for pushing the line rate while working small press production. And I did more than my share of sweeping. Such is the life of a co-op student.

Some of my more memorable moments involve Lelli’s restaurant in Detroit. I only ate there a few times, but that porterhouse steak still sticks in my memory. Another time, I tried to order fettuccini in clam sauce in a bid to avoid their dreaded spaghetti Bolognaise. I eventually got it, but only after everyone else had finished their lunches.

How can I possibly remember a lunch eaten thirty years ago? I don’t know. Maybe that’s why I’m a writer. I have to do something to purge these recollections from my brain.