On August 6, 1976 I bought a paperback book by RodMcKuen. I still have it. It has been in my garage for years, by the trashcan. I have tried to throw it away but always pull it back. I wrote my name and the date on the inside, as if it were important that both be recorded. I was 19, almost 20. I sacked groceries in a small town in southern Missouri and lived in a trailer. It was the summer before my junior year in college.
I am probably one of the few people on the planet who can lay claim to having lived a life influenced by the poetry of this man. But there was a brief time when I wanted to be a younger version of him. The contemplative loner, hanging out in a cafe in Paris, composing a letter from a LandRover in Bangkok, walking the beach at sunset in Malibu, meeting a friend for tea in St. John's Wood, writing ballads about sunsets and hitchhiking.
I look at the lines I underlined and realize I plagiarized so many of them in letters to long forgotten girlfriends, perhaps even to my wife of 43 years. If any of you are reading this I must confess that these lines were not originally from me...
"I've drawn your face on tablecloths across the country"
"I was drifting while waiting for your eyes to find me"
"I have yet to see a sky or world quite good enough for you"
And this is just a sampling. This book is dog-eared, underlined, highlighted. I sat on a rock by my driveway and re-read all my favorites. Some seem corny and schmaltzy but others still speak to me as they did 50 years ago.
There truly was a time when my hair was thick and long and my bellbottoms were size 28 or 30, that this book slipped perfectly into my back pocket. If girls were not impressed with my charm, or my grades, or future prospects, there is always Rod. When doing my lonesome walk to class, or through a park, or being pseudo-contemplative, he was there, narrating the scene. Meanwhile, I loped and moped and hoped she would ask the question... "whatcha readin?".
I read this today, which once spoke to a life I could but imagine, and now have, in a way.
Freedom
"Free I am.
I have no bills to pay.
My debts are squared,
the edges smoothed out perfectly.
My ducks are in a row
and I can sail.
There are borders
in this final life
that were not here at nineteen
or at twenty-three."
(It deteriorates from there but you get the point)
I bought this book at a time when I was human play-dough, being molded by chance and circumstance and places. I'm sure it made its way to the small chapel on campus, an aging tennis court, that park I fled to so often, the trunk of my 1969 Ford Fairlane. So now, almost fifty years later I am drawn back to this little book, at obscure times. I can go years without thinking one thing about this guy, until a trigger reminds me a of a time when he was a much bigger influence on me than he should have been. He was a man who accoumplished some things but not a good man that other men should want to be like.
Now the jeans are size 34 or so and the bottoms have no bells. I would be embarrassed to have this book in my back pocket so it rests on a shelf in the garage. But still there are lines that gnaw at me as I thumb through the pages once more. I see that I wrote my name in it twice that August 6 of 1976, on different pages. Something was going on that day and I think I know what it was.
