April 8, 2024
First rehearsal of A God in the Waters at a power company in Hendersonville, owned by the dad of one of my actors. Perfect, though odd, venue. The cast is the most immediately adept I’ve ever had.
Solid cloud cover concealed the eclipse, though I did manage to see a bit of the moon shadow crossing the sun late in the show, with the glasses I’d got at Ace Hardware for the purpose. Sat in my garden in the weird twilight, which must be like the blaze of noon on Mars.
April 6, 2024
Squalid dreams that gradually became graceful dreams, like riled water clearing.
Finally opened my Kirkus review, which arrived Monday:
THE FALLS OF THE WYONA
David Brendan Hopes
Red Hen Press (203 pp.)
$10.61 paperback, $10.08 e-book
ISBN: 9781597098939 May 23, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The love between two teenage boys is threatened by the homophobia of a football-mad town in this plangent romance.
Hopes’ tale follows four friends growing up in an unnamed small town in the North Carolina mountains in the 1940s: gifted athlete Vince Silvano; oddball Tilden Roundtree; everykid narrator Arden Summers; and Glen Copland, a “sissified” St. Louis transplant who stargazes and collects local flora and fauna. The boys roam the sylvan landscape surrounding a 100-foot waterfall on the Wyona River, a gorgeous but treacherous watercourse that is said to kill one every generation. Vince and Glen covertly fall in love as they start Eddie Rickenbacker High School, where Vince becomes the football team’s star quarterback. Unfortunately, the domineering football coach, who likes to toss around homophobic slurs, is Vince’s dad, and when Coach Silvano discovers the relationship, he quashes it by administering a beatdown to Vince. Tensions come to a head when Glen appears at homecoming dance and kisses Vince on the lips. Hopes’ yarn vividly portrays the fervent bond between young boys—camping out, bantering, double-daring each other into crazy stunts by the Falls—with its occasional erotic undertow, and the way it fractures under the pressure of stereotypes and bigotry. His young characters are full of vigor but also experience poignant, tongue-tied confusion over their warring impulses. Hopes’ prose is intense and evocative, infusing nightmarish scenes with a mordant lyricism: “Something that was less like water than everything else was bobbing on the near side of the river, snagged on the roots of a clump of willow…The way the Wyona was treating her, it almost looked like she was alive, lifted up by the waters, then settled gently down.”) The result is a gripping read with an undercurrent of elegiac yearning.
A darkly vibrant coming-of-age novel, richly textured and full of passion.
*
A fair day for gardening. By no means too hot. Bought plants to put in tomorrow, pulled strangling vines out of the hibiscus beds. The wind in the bamboo behind me was especially ghostly. I kept turning around to see who was there.
Fatboi is back, looking so comical when he tries to conceal his immense self under the tool shed.
DJ motored down in the chair to vew the garden. It was modest, assuming he’d come back when it was in full glory.
April 5, 2024
Quite cold, a look back into winter. Clouds out my upstairs window: it was brilliant at the beach. I’m home now, and not liking it. The vacation was brief but glorious, a renewal, a deep breath, and being back is not setting well– returned to my shoes stuck in the same pool of mud, me tugging away. Drive uneventful except, again, for long traffic jams. Standing on the pier last night I realized there is no particular reason (except for the bother of getting there) why I can’t live at the beach.
Maud did not patter out to greet, and then scold me for going away. Grief.
Phone call to my old UNCA number from people who want to feature A Childhood in the Milky Way at a book fair in Los Angeles. What sounded a delightful surprise turned out to be, of course, a scam to get me to pay them money. The voice on the phone wavered when I told them the book is thirty years old. They didn’t do much research. Five calls after I hung up on them. I wonder why nice things can’t actually be nice once in a while.
The radio program that bored me on the journey is now playing downstairs. All the PBS station must buy from the same list.
April 4, 2024
Chilly, brilliant day. Spent most of it walking around in my red Boy Scout jacket in the most spotless joy. Sitting and writing, moving to the next spot. I was happy. Am at this hour happy. I was morose yesterday (the storm?) but Tuesday and today have been the kind of days I would like to pile one upon the other till the end. The sea is a rich brown dotted by the swift shadows of clouds. Began a play in various benches overlooking the waves. Ambrosial beans and rice at Jack of Cups. The most vacation-y vacation in remembrance.
"Alfie and Greta" has been short-listed for the summer festival in Cork. If it’s chosen, I’ll go.
My cleaning lady is from Mongolia. I welcomed her to America and she smiled and bowed.
April 3, 2024
Waking: harsh rain over the ocean.
Family with young boys in the next room. They keep dropping something, sounds like marbles, if kids still play with marbles.
Instead of retiring last night when I felt I should, I toddled into the little town and attended an open mic at Planet Follywood. For starters, pretty good vodka tonics were $5. It was red-neck paradise, with local boys hollering blues and zydeco into the little room. Those I heard were quite good, and emotive, clearly feeling comfortable among their peers. I walked home on practically empty streets, panes of light falling from windows where the waiters were mopping floors and setting up for the morning. This could be a decent hometown.
Seated at breakfast opposite a high school baseball team from Virginia, here for a tournament. Perfect hair, round boy muscles, gestures and mannerisms hardening into personality. Courtly, as if they’d just learned manners and were trying them out. Two of the boys played catch in the hotel pool with the storm raging around them.
Evening. The storm, which was terrifying for a while, goes out to sea where it may terrify the fishes. The water drained from my toilet. The sink thundered. I don’t know what causes that. The bartender says there’s a pond in the hotel storage area. Couldn’t leave the hotel until about now. Soon I shall. I feel that I’ve had a bout of anger, but I can’t remember why. Maybe reading email from my ordinary life, which I ought not to do. W calls certain music we tried to consider “boring.” The word “boring” loses meaning when he uses it. The Resurrection would bore him unless Christ wore a sequined gown and twirled flaming batons.
The bartender noticed me writing out on the terrace in the sea wind. He too lived in Baltimore for a while.
April 2, 2024
Peach colored dawn over the pier. Early walkers and beachcombers already out. Oddly restless night last night, considering how exhausted I must have been. Couldn’t get comfortable in bed.
Spent a happy morning writing on the hotel terrace, blown by the sea wind, chattered at by grackles and laughing gulls. Bloody Mary at Drop In (new to me, and a new floor of sleaze) and lunch practically on the sidewalk at the Bounty Bar, where the passers-by were, in a striking proportion, nubile young girls with their parents. Boys with their shirts off, enough.
Found a little art gallery upstairs on a side street. Awful stuff. I’d be the Raphael of that place. I thought about asking if I could exhibit my beach paintings– I’d even buy in– but the elaboration that lay ahead daunted me. They must pay the rent with the sale of megaladon teeth.
Climbing the steps to the pier I suddenly was reminded of the decades when I would engage the gaze of every male I passed on the street, checking to see if he desired me, or would allow himself to be desired. It was exciting. It swelled the time with expectation. It came to something more often than modest relation would allow. For a while, that and “poet” were my definition of myself. I can’t remember when it stopped. Over time? In one night? When did I stop missing it? I was picking up men on the streets of Dublin into my middle sixties. I thought many inroads into the realm of Venus would find me a true lover for all of my life, as I thought that dedicating myself to writing would get me a life as a writer. I was misled on both accounts by poetry.
Huge afternoon nap made up for last night’s restlessness. The sound of the sea is unfamiliar to me, and every now and then I’d almost wake and wonder what turbulence was out on the street.
My balcony is directly above the hotel pool, so pissing or hurling things from the window is out of the question.
April 1, 2024
Woke to the chuckling of my turkey hen, stretching out her neck, as though calling to the rest of her flock. She gave up and ran around the perimeter of the garden until she found a way out.
Folly Beach, ninth floor of The Tides hotel. Buddy’s and my drive here was long but uneventful. Stopped dead four time in I-26, and jammed up in a long line trying to get onto Folly, but still adding only forty minutes to my ETA. My assumption that the week after Easter would be sparse on the beach proved inaccurate. The little town is packed, mostly with young people– me a tottering von Aschenbach with a whole range of Tadzius to choose from. Dropped an unopened bottle of vodka first thing. The maid who came to clean it up did a hilarious and accurate pantomime of how I must have looked when a full bottle of liquor broke on the floor. Coming home after supper and first stroll to the end of the pier, I had to vidit Buddy in the parking lot, to assure him I was nearby and all was well. The dominant group on the beach now is the laughing gull. I hadn’t remembered seeing so many of them (or any of them) here before.
