What Do You Think He Saw Copyright © 2018 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Published in Black Static #65, Sep-Oct 2018

I was taught by nuns. Entering the classroom in black robes, tall stiff white bandeau across their wrinkled foreheads, above their small blue eyes, white coifs around their throats, white guimpe like a stiff half-length bib covering their breasts. My family was Catholic. I went to a Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school. In high school, a priest new to the parish, Father I Forget His Name, intense face, gave his first speech to all of us assembled in the school's gym, for the purpose of meeting him, by reenacting Christ's crucifixion, him playing the role of Christ, screaming in pain as his right hand mimed hammering an imaginary spike into his left palm, pinning the palm to the side arm of a large wooden imaginary cross, lifting his by now sweating face, mouth drooping open in agony. "My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me?" He disappeared a month later, amid rumors he had had a nervous breakdown. Like I said, intense.

In our sophomore year, all the boys were put on a bus, transported west across Connecticut, then north towards upper New York state, for a retreat. In Catholicism, a retreat means people brought to a place away from their daily routines, where they listen to talks (usually by priests), and spend time alone in prayer and introspection. Of course, boys being boys, the whispers soon spread through our ranks that all the food we were being served was spiked with saltpeter, so we wouldn't be able to get erections, and hence couldn't masturbate in our dormitory beds each night after our lectures in spirituality.

To get to the location of our retreat meant spending hours and hours on this bus. Teenage boys on a bus get impatient, so the priests used the same tactics all adult monitors do when kids have to endure long bus rides, whether it's to transport kids to a summer camp or a Broadway musical. They had us sing popular long bus ride songs, such as '99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall'.

I learned the patience of making a Louisiana roux in Maine. In Louisiana, a roux is made with oil rather than butter, and that oil and flour mixture is stirred in a circle for a half hour or longer, until the mixture in the skillet is the color of mud, with a rich, nutty flavor. It's hard to do. You stir it until it smells like popcorn, then lift the skillet from the flame long enough to prevent it from burning, slap it back down on the heat and stir some more. It becomes so hot it's referred to as 'Cajun napalm. Get a drop of it on you while you're stirring, and that combination of hot oil and sticky dark flour will burn an angry pink hole in your forearm deep as a recluse spider's bite. But it tastes so good, it's worth the risk.

A few months after we were established in Maine, I started writing again. And getting rejection letters again. So I decided to do something I had never tried before. I decided to tailor my writings for specific markets, rather than write what I really wanted to write.

Women's confessional magazines were really big back then. So I bought a handful of those magazines at the supermarket and dropped them in our shopping cart with our artichokes and Campbell's chicken broth and Maine shrimp, and when I got home to our apartment read them cover-to-cover, then wrote two stories I thought would fit in with what they published.

I saw David Bowie's stage performances four times during his life. Once at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, once in Connecticut, twice in California. I remember the Radio City Music Hall performance the most. After listening to his music on my turntable for so many years, at first in my parents' home, and later in my own apartment, it was a thrill to be in the same room with him. Luther Vandross was the opening act. As Vandross finished his performance, I could see, because of my-far left seat in the audience, Bowie behind the right side curtain, warming up, jumping up and down like a June bug, dancing frantically to himself, probably exorcizing whatever stage fright he felt, gearing himself up, waiting for his booming introduction over the venue's loudspeakers.

At one point during his performance that night, Bowie fell off the front edge of the stage. We all sat up in our seats. It was a bad ten-foot drop. To his credit, he immediately scrabbled back up on stage, wiping the mascara on his eyes to swipe away the tears of pain he must have felt falling that far.

The Young Americans tour did not do well. And the album did not do well. Robert Christgau, in the Village Voice, called it "an almost total failure".

I ended up writing two stories for women's confessional magazines. The first was, 'My Husband Is Forcing Me to Sleep with Another Man'. I don't remember what the second story was called. Mailed them both in to major women's magazines. Both were rejected. After I unbent the tiny brass clasp of the return manila envelope for the second story, pulled apart the glued top flap from the big beige rectangular body of the envelope and read the small white generic card inside rejecting the story, Mary shot me a wife's look across the small circular table in our kitchen. "If everything you write is going to be rejected, you might as well get rejected for stories you really care about, rather than stories that mean nothing to you personally that you're just writing to please a specific market." And that was the best writing advice I ever got in my life. Don't fail for something you don't care about. Fail for something that means the world to you.

Failure can be a problem, but success can be an even bigger problem.

We all tend to write a variety of stories. Different subject matters, different tones, genres, levels of intensity. If you're only praised, for example, for your humorous stories, and those are the only ones that sell, that may be all you wind up writing, in order to please editors and critics. And that's not true to who you are as an artist. A person. If everyone loves everything you do, you're not taking enough risks.

I can tell, when I write a story, if it'll be widely regarded, or dismissed as nonsense. But it still has to be written. I still need to fall off the stage, with my fingertips wipe my mascara away, get back up on the keyboard.

Because otherwise, I'm just writing the same story over and over again, to please, and when we do that, it means our art, what we have to contribute, is no longer startling. It's predictable. And who the fuck wants to be predictable? When you write, you have to have patience, you have to risk a recluse spider's bite.

'99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall' was a great bus song, but it wasn't the favorite song we Catholic sophomores sang on that long bus journey across different highways.

Our favorite song was, 'The Bear Went Over the Mountain'.

"The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain,
And what do you think he saw?

"He saw another mountain,
He saw another mountain,
He saw another mountain,
And what do you think he did?

"The bear went over the mountain…"

As a writer, when you go over the mountain, don't see another mountain. See something new. Unexpected. A car accident. Faked orgasm. Painful lump under the jaw.