A paperback called Citrus Girl - By N.L. Belardes
It’s not everyday that you take a novel you wrote, an autobiographical one at that, and decide to share it with the guy who is portrayed as the bad guy in the book. I did just that about two weeks ago in a bold move. I took my novel The Citrus Girl, an unpublished work of about 400 pages of true-to-life fiction based around the years 1996-1997, and gave a copy to an old friend of mine I once had a falling out with. I wondered what he would think being the big bad guy of the novel: a grumbling philosopher of sorts named Steve Delani.
We had a meeting yesterday. I asked if he read the novel. He did. The room got quiet. He weighed each word carefully. He was looking into a distant past the way he sat there in his office, his hands behind his head, almost looking up at the ceiling, as if the past were there etched on the ceiling. He drifted into thinking not about his character in a novel, not him, but of another put on a pedestal of sorts in this work of romantic prose: the character of Tommy. He wondered why she had been uplifted to such lofty heights.
"Oh any one of us could have been the bad guy of that book," I said.
I reminded him I told the story I wanted to tell: The disgruntled jealous narrator, the bad guy from the Dead Generation, and the adventurous girl who infected everyone around with a vitriolic passion, not so different from the sweetness and acidity of a citrus fruit. "The novel is what it is," I added. Who can change such a work of art?
He and I hadn't spoke much in years.
But now here we both were, peering into the past because of this novel.
In the end he said he agreed with about 85% of my portrayal of him as the character, Steve Delani... we parted ways down near the entrance of the Haberfelde in a strange passing moment in the literary world.
From The Citrus Girl Chapter Nine:
Malcolm Cowley, one of the ‘lost’ and there he was, back in America and in the early 1930s, writing of ‘mansions in the air’ and ‘blue juniata’, and contemplating future generations. Because back in America he realized an entire lost generation would eventually come back home to the cities, hillsides, countrysides to where innocence escaped them, to where in America, “somewhere the turn of a dirt road or the unexpected crest of a hill reveals your own childhood.” Oh the literary enclaves—the lost generation—the beat generation—any generation, generations inspiring non-writers and non-literary-minded to become just as lost, or just as beat. After a while someone probably said regarding beats: “You don’t have to be a beat writer or bop musician, or to have known any of the famous beats to be one” —and soon a generation having already took root, expanded, appeared in pop culture, subculture, counterculture, mainstream culture until all they had to do was just look like a beatnik, act like what they thought was a beatnik—to be the beat generation.
And now today’s dead generation—lost, but never forever lost and never completely forgotten—where are their slacker rebel origins? In Generation X literature? Do they create? I think: Where were their childhoods? They were everywhere. Who writes about them? They aren’t so exciting. Where’ve the dead gone? —nowhere—yet somewhere, here in the cosmos; they creep out from behind their dark walls, don’t they? Like weeds as they reappear, return from where they’ve gone—to college, to travel, to their computers, to odd jobs, or no jobs, to corn-like cobs of rock bands, or just hidden deep within the city itself: isolationists. Find me—I say—reincarnated—enlightened—non-business-like—poets, writers and literary-minded young fools—where are you? Still gone? No. Rexroth once wrote: our murdered youth? Murdered: doing nothing and yet, they’re poor and exhausted—that’s their crime. I see them leaning or squatting against walls and smoking their dry cigarettes and contemplating themselves in reality and non-reality. I see them like me, in solitude—I am no Fresno poet—I scream from Southern Central California alone—I have yet to meet any poet. I am dead and alone in my valley… And I am part of it, and part of my generation—they come back you know, the intellectuals, the non-intellectuals and crawl back out of the big blue holes of life they’ve fallen into; even if they are gone, were gone, in all of their imperfectness, their wonderful imperfections of dress and crude sex, computers, drugs and malaise, to someplace I call, here, in the downtown city.
It could be any city…
And Cowley, he wrote that maybe the young writers of his age weren’t young or foolish enough. He wrote that they would “settle down too safely to earning a sensible living.” And how I agree with him—prophetic him—and live a life of poverty and deadness years later. He was a critic and a prophet. And Steve Delani—dead generation case study for the 1990’s who wrote, but never enough, and never anything that left the confines of his smelly bedroom into the world, until he wrote his most devastating song, who’d picked up and motivated himself after years of living in trash heaps of homes and survived a wrecked marriage to finally go back to college, to become one of the intellectuals in my group of friends that had intellectuals, nothings, and pseudo-nothings in it; and after a year of law school in Malibu, said: “All I know now, is that after I get outta here I better be making shitloads of money…” And Steve Delani—not really a writer—never would be as he hung out with other dead generation guys, and those girls: slacks hanging from their hips in bar-haze glee and tattoos marking them Christ-like down to their feet. The dead are pretentious, and sit around and listen to music to music to music—and are intelligent and corny, and only go for the ones who don’t really want them—oh so romantic and American, why? —because that’s what we often do—and most often are poor and crude, and eventually, hopefully wallow up through the mud of life bursting with all the anxiety and push of a maelstrom to self-murderously throw ourselves into the world. Where are the dead? Cowley was talking about ex-patriates, the writers, and then the next generation of literary laborers; and Steve, he was never a writer though he was and is like me, a part of something and nothing, with no one to tell him that he is among the dead generation who should have stood around and said: “Look how dead we are. We don’t do a damn thing.” We should have united and had a vision of our dead selves but never could because of our lazy nature.
In the first half of the 1990s, Steve was in a constant state of: “I’ve gotta divorce my crack-smoking wife.” She was one of the ‘nothings,’ the white and trashy kind people around here that some stereotype as “north of the river,” “north of the tracks,” or, “Dalians,” —any of the uncouth, un-intellectuals, the brash and overly dramatic; out of style and unkempt; violent and screaming about money, their husbands and everyone else they don’t like; those Dalians who could never find the spiritual, meaningful, or intellectual in anything literary. He was married to her while I studied history and toiled away in those same 1990s at something peculiarly American in my mind.
He finished divorcing his wife a year after he met Cholera at a downtown bar, a similar meeting to how he met his soon-to-be former wife at one of the constant parties raging at a house party somewhere in Bakersfield. “So, you want to go do it, or what?” he’d said. She did and two kids later—he had two girls nearly the same age as my two boys—he found himself living with her noose around his neck, and her smoking crack, then hooked on pot, and both of them getting fat off biscuits and gravy and greasy burgers and each filling out at a whopping three-hundred pounds; and him wearing the same tie-dyed shirt and cut-off sweats everyday, even when he started school, and even when transferring out to the University many here call, “Dartmouth of the Dust.”
While married he was bored. While separated he was a depressed dead soul. He played guitar in his bedroom, spent countless hours programming his synthesizer, making songs so complex you couldn’t make them even five years before, let alone in a tiny bedroom in Bakersfield without having had lots and lots of cash—and here was Steve doing nothing with them. We had gone to watch the increasingly popular band, Stalk, at the local Casa Royale, an old Basque restaurant dive on Union Avenue—that hardened artery of now dead motels and restaurants of old 99, where Frank Sinatra, the Three Stooges, and anyone who was anyone in the 1950’s came to gorge on the food of old Basque sheepherders, or to sing and play to a Bakersfield crowd. Casa Royale had a banquet room where high schools had proms and bands came to play. There were two bars, a big floor, and a balcony; it was a good venue, and the stage had been set high off the floor for everyone to see. On it, an effigy of a cop hung broken and bent in the darkness under the brightening stage lights; it was the BPD, the notorious Bakersfield Police who never let a bank robber come to town without escorting such a low life back out of city limits in a long narrow box. The police effigy hung while bagpipes played to a moshing crowd that seethed as if about to digest the effigy. The crowd moved in rhythm and flung themselves at one another.
We wandered to the balcony listening to a voice from the stage scream, “Fuck this! Fuck you!” and walked to where friends of the band hung out. They hung over the railings and drank beer and watched and drank more beer. I could see others down below—people who all wanted to know that something in Bakersfield was going somewhere, that some part of it was being exported rather than imported like that old Okie migration; people wanted to know that something went out to the world from here other than fruits and vegetables, cotton and oil. Here was the dark side of Bakersfield-influenced music, moving outward, having just toured Europe, having radiated somewhere distant, with funky hard-driving beats that now pounded into Steve that he might go somewhere too, that he was a part of something expanding from his own backyard. Steve lost himself in the crowd, while Pedro, wearing his usual backpack, came wandering over and smiled. Drumsticks poked from his backpack. “We were going to open for them. But it just didn’t work out. I need a beer!” Pedro yelled. I didn’t know if he was lying to me or not. Like Steve, Pedro always wanted to be a rock star.
The music poured into the large room. Women and men, girls and boys all moved against each other in the crowd beneath the stage. Voiced ripped and fragmented the air in angry, seething moments, musical moments, despairing rises of rhythm bass jams that pulled stalking drum beats into line, and then cast them off over the crowd like a net, pulling them together, making them more maniacal, desperate, and frenzied as everyone in the room began to feel their little city rupture and spill into popular music myth.
In Steve’s spare time he practiced some basketball. During our Friday night games at the park we all stood amazed when he contorted his huge pot-bellied frame into performing his amazing ‘spinorama finger-roll lay-up.’ We played every week for several years until he wrenched one of his knees one rainy basketball evening. That ended his park-B-ball stardom. He was a basketball addict, and ravenously ate up Lakers games and drove to LA—whenever he had a car—so he could watch Magic Johnson “Do his thing!” He wouldn’t work much. A job here or there popped his way: He worked at the local prison, then sold real estate for a few months, got money from his work-a-holic mother; moved from apartment to apartment, even once into a house just off Oleander Street: one of the mid-city streets with big houses, gas lamps on street corners, tall trees, and a big park where summer concerts attracted families who would go and sprawl blankets and sip sparkling cider, sodas, wine and cold tea as they listened to the sweating orchestras of the hundred degree Bakersfield summers.
We had a meeting yesterday. I asked if he read the novel. He did. The room got quiet. He weighed each word carefully. He was looking into a distant past the way he sat there in his office, his hands behind his head, almost looking up at the ceiling, as if the past were there etched on the ceiling. He drifted into thinking not about his character in a novel, not him, but of another put on a pedestal of sorts in this work of romantic prose: the character of Tommy. He wondered why she had been uplifted to such lofty heights.
"Oh any one of us could have been the bad guy of that book," I said.
I reminded him I told the story I wanted to tell: The disgruntled jealous narrator, the bad guy from the Dead Generation, and the adventurous girl who infected everyone around with a vitriolic passion, not so different from the sweetness and acidity of a citrus fruit. "The novel is what it is," I added. Who can change such a work of art?
He and I hadn't spoke much in years.
But now here we both were, peering into the past because of this novel.
In the end he said he agreed with about 85% of my portrayal of him as the character, Steve Delani... we parted ways down near the entrance of the Haberfelde in a strange passing moment in the literary world.
From The Citrus Girl Chapter Nine:
Malcolm Cowley, one of the ‘lost’ and there he was, back in America and in the early 1930s, writing of ‘mansions in the air’ and ‘blue juniata’, and contemplating future generations. Because back in America he realized an entire lost generation would eventually come back home to the cities, hillsides, countrysides to where innocence escaped them, to where in America, “somewhere the turn of a dirt road or the unexpected crest of a hill reveals your own childhood.” Oh the literary enclaves—the lost generation—the beat generation—any generation, generations inspiring non-writers and non-literary-minded to become just as lost, or just as beat. After a while someone probably said regarding beats: “You don’t have to be a beat writer or bop musician, or to have known any of the famous beats to be one” —and soon a generation having already took root, expanded, appeared in pop culture, subculture, counterculture, mainstream culture until all they had to do was just look like a beatnik, act like what they thought was a beatnik—to be the beat generation.
And now today’s dead generation—lost, but never forever lost and never completely forgotten—where are their slacker rebel origins? In Generation X literature? Do they create? I think: Where were their childhoods? They were everywhere. Who writes about them? They aren’t so exciting. Where’ve the dead gone? —nowhere—yet somewhere, here in the cosmos; they creep out from behind their dark walls, don’t they? Like weeds as they reappear, return from where they’ve gone—to college, to travel, to their computers, to odd jobs, or no jobs, to corn-like cobs of rock bands, or just hidden deep within the city itself: isolationists. Find me—I say—reincarnated—enlightened—non-business-like—poets, writers and literary-minded young fools—where are you? Still gone? No. Rexroth once wrote: our murdered youth? Murdered: doing nothing and yet, they’re poor and exhausted—that’s their crime. I see them leaning or squatting against walls and smoking their dry cigarettes and contemplating themselves in reality and non-reality. I see them like me, in solitude—I am no Fresno poet—I scream from Southern Central California alone—I have yet to meet any poet. I am dead and alone in my valley… And I am part of it, and part of my generation—they come back you know, the intellectuals, the non-intellectuals and crawl back out of the big blue holes of life they’ve fallen into; even if they are gone, were gone, in all of their imperfectness, their wonderful imperfections of dress and crude sex, computers, drugs and malaise, to someplace I call, here, in the downtown city.
It could be any city…
And Cowley, he wrote that maybe the young writers of his age weren’t young or foolish enough. He wrote that they would “settle down too safely to earning a sensible living.” And how I agree with him—prophetic him—and live a life of poverty and deadness years later. He was a critic and a prophet. And Steve Delani—dead generation case study for the 1990’s who wrote, but never enough, and never anything that left the confines of his smelly bedroom into the world, until he wrote his most devastating song, who’d picked up and motivated himself after years of living in trash heaps of homes and survived a wrecked marriage to finally go back to college, to become one of the intellectuals in my group of friends that had intellectuals, nothings, and pseudo-nothings in it; and after a year of law school in Malibu, said: “All I know now, is that after I get outta here I better be making shitloads of money…” And Steve Delani—not really a writer—never would be as he hung out with other dead generation guys, and those girls: slacks hanging from their hips in bar-haze glee and tattoos marking them Christ-like down to their feet. The dead are pretentious, and sit around and listen to music to music to music—and are intelligent and corny, and only go for the ones who don’t really want them—oh so romantic and American, why? —because that’s what we often do—and most often are poor and crude, and eventually, hopefully wallow up through the mud of life bursting with all the anxiety and push of a maelstrom to self-murderously throw ourselves into the world. Where are the dead? Cowley was talking about ex-patriates, the writers, and then the next generation of literary laborers; and Steve, he was never a writer though he was and is like me, a part of something and nothing, with no one to tell him that he is among the dead generation who should have stood around and said: “Look how dead we are. We don’t do a damn thing.” We should have united and had a vision of our dead selves but never could because of our lazy nature.
In the first half of the 1990s, Steve was in a constant state of: “I’ve gotta divorce my crack-smoking wife.” She was one of the ‘nothings,’ the white and trashy kind people around here that some stereotype as “north of the river,” “north of the tracks,” or, “Dalians,” —any of the uncouth, un-intellectuals, the brash and overly dramatic; out of style and unkempt; violent and screaming about money, their husbands and everyone else they don’t like; those Dalians who could never find the spiritual, meaningful, or intellectual in anything literary. He was married to her while I studied history and toiled away in those same 1990s at something peculiarly American in my mind.
He finished divorcing his wife a year after he met Cholera at a downtown bar, a similar meeting to how he met his soon-to-be former wife at one of the constant parties raging at a house party somewhere in Bakersfield. “So, you want to go do it, or what?” he’d said. She did and two kids later—he had two girls nearly the same age as my two boys—he found himself living with her noose around his neck, and her smoking crack, then hooked on pot, and both of them getting fat off biscuits and gravy and greasy burgers and each filling out at a whopping three-hundred pounds; and him wearing the same tie-dyed shirt and cut-off sweats everyday, even when he started school, and even when transferring out to the University many here call, “Dartmouth of the Dust.”
While married he was bored. While separated he was a depressed dead soul. He played guitar in his bedroom, spent countless hours programming his synthesizer, making songs so complex you couldn’t make them even five years before, let alone in a tiny bedroom in Bakersfield without having had lots and lots of cash—and here was Steve doing nothing with them. We had gone to watch the increasingly popular band, Stalk, at the local Casa Royale, an old Basque restaurant dive on Union Avenue—that hardened artery of now dead motels and restaurants of old 99, where Frank Sinatra, the Three Stooges, and anyone who was anyone in the 1950’s came to gorge on the food of old Basque sheepherders, or to sing and play to a Bakersfield crowd. Casa Royale had a banquet room where high schools had proms and bands came to play. There were two bars, a big floor, and a balcony; it was a good venue, and the stage had been set high off the floor for everyone to see. On it, an effigy of a cop hung broken and bent in the darkness under the brightening stage lights; it was the BPD, the notorious Bakersfield Police who never let a bank robber come to town without escorting such a low life back out of city limits in a long narrow box. The police effigy hung while bagpipes played to a moshing crowd that seethed as if about to digest the effigy. The crowd moved in rhythm and flung themselves at one another.
We wandered to the balcony listening to a voice from the stage scream, “Fuck this! Fuck you!” and walked to where friends of the band hung out. They hung over the railings and drank beer and watched and drank more beer. I could see others down below—people who all wanted to know that something in Bakersfield was going somewhere, that some part of it was being exported rather than imported like that old Okie migration; people wanted to know that something went out to the world from here other than fruits and vegetables, cotton and oil. Here was the dark side of Bakersfield-influenced music, moving outward, having just toured Europe, having radiated somewhere distant, with funky hard-driving beats that now pounded into Steve that he might go somewhere too, that he was a part of something expanding from his own backyard. Steve lost himself in the crowd, while Pedro, wearing his usual backpack, came wandering over and smiled. Drumsticks poked from his backpack. “We were going to open for them. But it just didn’t work out. I need a beer!” Pedro yelled. I didn’t know if he was lying to me or not. Like Steve, Pedro always wanted to be a rock star.
The music poured into the large room. Women and men, girls and boys all moved against each other in the crowd beneath the stage. Voiced ripped and fragmented the air in angry, seething moments, musical moments, despairing rises of rhythm bass jams that pulled stalking drum beats into line, and then cast them off over the crowd like a net, pulling them together, making them more maniacal, desperate, and frenzied as everyone in the room began to feel their little city rupture and spill into popular music myth.
In Steve’s spare time he practiced some basketball. During our Friday night games at the park we all stood amazed when he contorted his huge pot-bellied frame into performing his amazing ‘spinorama finger-roll lay-up.’ We played every week for several years until he wrenched one of his knees one rainy basketball evening. That ended his park-B-ball stardom. He was a basketball addict, and ravenously ate up Lakers games and drove to LA—whenever he had a car—so he could watch Magic Johnson “Do his thing!” He wouldn’t work much. A job here or there popped his way: He worked at the local prison, then sold real estate for a few months, got money from his work-a-holic mother; moved from apartment to apartment, even once into a house just off Oleander Street: one of the mid-city streets with big houses, gas lamps on street corners, tall trees, and a big park where summer concerts attracted families who would go and sprawl blankets and sip sparkling cider, sodas, wine and cold tea as they listened to the sweating orchestras of the hundred degree Bakersfield summers.
This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on
Saturday, February 04, 2006.
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WoW!
It was one of the strangest of meetings. Sitting there talking about a book with a person, not the characterized fictitious version, but the real guy, and wondering, "Is he going to shoot me now?" And then looking ten years prior into a world much different than my world today and wondering if I could ever really get that world straight in my memory of it...
I love the Citrus Girl! Such a romanticised journey of discovery... Steve Delani's character is portrayed really well and he makes a good villian! How brave to let him read the book and discuss his opinion of it with him...
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