National Story Project
With Paul Auster

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August 2000 -- This month's installment of the National Story Project comes to you from the Gotham Book Mart & Gallery in New York City. The bookstore recently celebrated its 80th anniversary. This time around, Paul reads stories by Jack Marmorstein, Simonette Jackson, Gordon Lee Stelter, Bill Calm, Tim Gibson, and Catherine Austin Alexander.

Jack Marmorstein
Jack Marmorstein of Harrisonburg, Virginia has changed the name of his friend, but he says that she swears the story is true. "Christine," he writes, "adopted a one-eyed dog named Dalton at the pound in New York City. They told her that the dog had belonged to a one-eyed homeless man who had recently died. When Christine finished her Ph.D. dissertation in history, she wanted to dedicate it to her dog, but her advisor wouldn't let her. So she dedicated it instead to a famous historian with the last name of Dalton. When she met this historian, she told him the story about her dog. He said that his father had been a homeless man in New York who had died a few years earlier. She didn't think to ask if he'd had one eye."

Simonette Jackson
Simonette Jackson of Canoga Park, California grew up in the Philippines. The tradition there was to begin the rites of Holy Communion in the second grade. "Every Saturday," she tells us, "we had to go to school to rehearse how to walk, how to carry the candle, where to sit, how to kneel, and how to stick out your tongue to accept the Body of Christ. One Saturday, my mother and uncle picked me up from practice in a yellow Volkswagon Beetle. As I slid into the back seat, my uncle attempted to start the car. It gave several dry coughs, and then the engine stopped turning over. My uncle sat in silent frustration, and my mother turned around and asked me what we should do. I was eight years old, and without hesitation I told her that we had to wait for a yellow butterfly to touch the car before it would work again. I don't know whether my mother believed me or not. She only smiled, and then she turned back to my uncle to discuss what to do next. He got out of the car and told her that he was going to the nearest gas station for help. I fell in and out of sleep, but I was awake when my uncle returned from the gas station. I remember him carrying a container of gas, filling up the car, the car not starting and him tinkering some more, and still the car wouldn't start. My mother then got out of the car and hailed a cab. A yellow cab stopped. Instead of taking us home, the driver looked at our predicament and suggested that my uncle squirt some gas on the engine. This seemed to do the trick, and after thanking this good Samaritan, my uncle turned the ignition and the car started right away. I began falling back to sleep. Half a block later, my mother woke me up. She was all excited, and her voice was full of wonder. When I opened my eyes, I turned to where she was pointing. Fluttering around the rear-view mirror was a tiny yellow butterfly."

Gordon Lee Stelter
Gordon Lee Stelter of Bogart, Georgia also imagined the impossible - and soon discovered that everything is possible. "In 1978," he writes, "after working hard to develop a reputation as a player-piano restorer, I found myself overwhelmed with work and losing the affection of my beautiful, long-devoted girlfriend. Besides a considerable backlog of work for customers, I was distracted by a huge pile of unrestored instruments that I had bought and was not giving her the attention she deserved. In a last-ditch attempt to show my fiancee that she meant more to me than the pianos, I put them up for sale by taking out an ad in a newsletter for collectors. I sold them all to the first person who called - a man who lived on the opposite coast. It didn't work. My companion defected, and at the buyer's suggestion I moved to Tacoma to help him restore the pianos. I didn't like the West Coast. It differed too much from the East, and I was without a loved one for the first time. I quit working with the buyer. Then my truck developed problems, and I ran out of money. Desperate to leave, I barely got the truck running, drove to the airport, abandoned it, and went to the ticket counter. My brother was living in Chicago. I asked how much it would cost to fly there, and then I reached into my pocket and pulled out all of my remaining cash. It was, to the penny, the exact price of the ticket. After failed attempts to reconcile with my fiancee and a couple of years exploring the country by rail and thumb, staying in monastaries and so on, I again found myself on the West Coast. And once again I was broke. Then Mount St. Helens exploded. I was in the University of Washington library at the time, and we all ran to the front steps to watch the eruption on the horizon. It was very ominous and made many people quite nervous. The next day, one exceptionally nervous man was driving near the Pike Street Market and plowed through a crowded crosswalk, killing four people. I saw the whole thing happen, with the four bloodied and motionless bodies spread out across the pavement. That evening, while standing alone at that same intersection, I cried to the heavens with outstretched arms: God, I hate the West Coast! I said. If I had a unicycle, I'd ride all the way back to Connecticut on it! I walked away then and crawled into my sleeping bag down by the harbor. The next morning, at that same intersection - but across the street and lying on the sidewalk - there was a unicycle. I don't usually steal, but under the circumstances I felt I had better show some gratitude. So I got on it, pointed it down the hill, said 'Thanks,' and took off. I got about 300 feet before my ankles became so bloodied from banging on the crank that I had to stop. I was also starting to get worried about taking it, so I put it back. It lay there for three days, at one of the busiest intersections in town, before it finally vanished. I hopped a train out instead."

Part II of the audio for National story project picks up here.

Bill Calm
"Hi Paul Auster," begins the next one, sent in by a man with the wonderful name of Bill Calm. "This happened during my life as a radio gypsy," Mr. Calm writes. "In March 1974, I'd taken a job as a news guy on WOW in Omaha and was in my VW bug pulling away from the curb in front off my parents' house in a suburb of Denver when I had to jam on the brakes because a tire came rolling down a hill and rolled right in front of me. Poetic omen, I thought, and I hit the road. Two months later, the job I really wanted at KGW in Portland opened up, and while I was thinking about whether to quit the one in Omaha so soon, I looked out the window of my apartment to see a tire rolling along in the parking lot. The tire has spoken, I thought, and I went for the Portland job. A year passes and Portland's going well - so well that a promotion to the flagship station KING in Seattle is offered. But not before I'm driving my bug at 13th and West Burnside late at night, and a tire appears out of the fog and rolls down the street. But it doesn't end there. Another year - it's now 1976 - and the company wants to send me back to Portland, to KGW, as news director and morning news anchor. And this time the rolling wheel - actually only a tire rim - appeared heading south on the Alaskan Way Viaduct. I was in the left lane. Late '77. I'm on the road again, to KYA in San Francisco. My old VW is packed with my stereo and my cat and all my stuff, and I'm about to get on the freeway. I hadn't seen any rolling tires, but then I hear a grinding noise from the back of the car, and I feel like I'm skidding and the car doesn't steer. Scary. I put on the brakes - in time to see my own back right wheel, which had come loose, shooting down the road and coming to rest in a ditch. A mechanic had forgotten to put in a cotter pin. The rolling tire was my own damn wheel! And there ended the chain of rolling tires. Or so I thought - until 1984. I was back in Seattle, a big radio executive now, but still a gypsy of the business, and I accepted a job for lots more money in Houston, Texas. Every instinct spoke against it: the city, the vibes, the fact that I had two little kids now and really wanted to raise them in the Pacific Northwest. But the contract and the money clouded my judgment. I flew down there to begin the job, and my wife followed by car. She was driving on Interstate Five, coming through North Portland, when CRUNCH: the hood of her Volvo took the impact if something that had come down from a road that ran above the freeway. It bounced off her car, hit two other cars, and was stopped by the median. Shaken but not hurt, she looked and saw what it was: a big, huge truck tire. We did Houston, but it was terrible, and gratefully came back to Portland to raise our family. No more itchy feet, no more radio gypsy, and no more damn rolling tires."

Tim Gibson
This one - in a completely different register - was sent in by Tim Gibson. He says that he has kept it to himself for almost forty years. "In the early Sixties, when I was fourteen years old and living in a small town in southern Indiana, my father died. While my mother and I were out of town visiting relatives, an unexpected and very sudden heart attack took him. We returned home to find that he was gone. No chance to say 'I love you' or even 'Goodbye.' He was just gone, forever. With my older sister going away to college, our home went from a bustling, happy family of four to a house where two stunned people lived in quiet grief. I struggled terribly with the pain and loneliness of my loss, but I was also very worried about my mother. I feared that if she saw me crying for my father, her pain would be even more intense. And, as the new 'man' of the house, I felt a responsibility to protect her from greater hurt. So, I devised a plan that would allow me to grieve without causing more pain for my mother. In our town, people took the trash from their houses out to large barrels near the alleys behind their backyards. There, it would be burned or picked up by the trashmen once a week. Every evening after dinner, I would volunteer to take out the trash. I would rush a bag of paper or whatever I could collect around the house out to the alley and put it in the trash barrel. Then I'd hide in the shadows of the dark bushes, and that's where I would stay until I had cried myself out. After recovering enough to be certain my mother couldn't tell what I'd been doing, I would return to the house and get ready for bed. This subterfuge went on for weeks. One evening after dinner, when it was time for chores, I collected the trash and went out to my usual hiding place in the bushes. I didn't stay very long. When I returned to the house, I went to find my mother to ask if she needed me to do anything else. After searching through the entire house, I finally found her. She was in the darkened basement, behind the washer and dryer, crying by herself. She was hiding her pain, to protect me. I'm not sure which is greater: the pain you suffer openly, or the pain you endure alone to protect someone you love. I do know that on that night, in the basement, we held each other and poured out the misery that had driven us both to our separate, lonely, crying places. And we never felt the need to cry alone again."

Catherine Austin Alexander
We're in the middle of summer now - the dog days in all their steaming glory - and I wanted to end with this little gem about a New York summer scene written by Catherine Austin Alexander, who now lives in Seattle, Washington. It's called: Dancing on Seventy-Fourth Street - Manhattan, August 1962. It's not really a story so much as a word picture, but to my mind it captures the essence of what summer in New York City is all about. "A hot afternoon, my third day here," Mrs. Alexander writes. "The studio apartment is scorching. With a hammer and screwdriver, I chisel paint from the only window. Then with one great shove, I push the jamb to the top and turn my head towards the unbroken line of brownstones. Next door, neighbors are fanning out to the stoops where a brown-skinned infant curls its lip and arches its back before mama offers her nipple. In turquoise pants and clear plastic pumps, she sits cross-legged, dangling her shoe from her toes, a newspaper between her and the cracking cement. While the newborn draws its milk, mama alternates between a thin cigar and a bottle of cerveza. Papa in his undershirt swaggers out with a radio in one hand and a toddler, dragging a broom, in the other. The tot begins sweeping the stoop but changes its mind and strums the bristles instead. Kitchen chairs are being carried out, along with six-packs of Tab, Fresca, and Corona. I'm getting a whiff of black beans and saffron rice steaming from the hibachi under the stairs. Mama ties back her brash red hair, plops the baby in a box from Gristedes Market and slowly begins to twirl, her hands on her waist. She stops, slinks over to her man and, with her knee, nudges his thigh. Grinding to the sounds of the Caribbean, the pair dodge, plunge, twist, and swerve. The child accompanies with a wooden bowl and spoon; his father smiles in approval - flashing a gold incisor. Bongo players expand along the pavement while the new one sleeps in a cardboard box. And I, a girl of 20, a year out of Nebraska, watch transfixed. Suddenly, papa with the flashing incisor looks up from the pandemonium to my window. 'Hey, muchacha!' he yells to me. 'You got a smoke?'"

The National Story Project can be heard the first Saturday of every month on Weekend All Things Considered.