BookSpin is proud to present a guest post by Christopher Meeks and an excerpt from his book THE CHORDS OF WAR:
THE CREATIVE IMPERATIVE
By Christopher Meeks
Years ago, I started a nonfiction book called The Creative Imperative, which was simple. I started interviewing well-known artists in different fields—fine art, music, dance, film, theater, and writing. At the time, I was writing and teaching at CalArts, where all those fields had schools, and many of the people I interviewed were visiting artists or people I met when writing freelance.
I got the idea from the playwright Robert E. Lee (Inherit the Wind), who had become a friend after I had interviewed him for a magazine article, and we were mulling over where artists of all sorts found their ideas and what drove them. Lee was constantly fascinated by people and by what some of them did to make society better despite hurdles.
When I interviewed Pulitzer-Prize-winning music composer Mel Powell, he told me, for instance, “Every serious artist is, to some degree, an outsider, because there is no possible way for serious work to invoke expectations of financial success. Once that's clear, a very strategic decision, a life decision, is made. Does one continue along such line in a society, which, as you pointed out, rewards success by money? For some people, money is not only the summit, but maybe the only value that can be relied upon.”
Along those lines, playwright Robert Lee told me in an interview, “I suppose Montessori was at the root of it. You follow the child within yourself. You follow your own inspiration. You follow that which is bugging you, as a certain teacher you worked with said. That which troubles you. Every movement is rebellion. Be a rebel. To be a rebel is not to make a dollar, not to be motivated by money.”
I put that book aside to follow my own imperative to write plays and fiction. I didn’t expect to get rich at it, and I haven’t—but writing has been the core thing that drives my life. The several interviews I had done had inspired me so much, I moved onto create other things.
What drove me specifically into this new book were a few things. First was the coincidental lunch I had with my former Art Center College student Sam Gonzalez just after he had a meeting at MGM, the film studio. He’d been set to direct a feature film for them, a remake of a sci-fi film. However, the sci-fi film Elysium with Matt Damon had done poorly, so MGM pulled the plug on Sam’s movie. Sam, a positive guy, saw this as a new opportunity and instantly pitched a film based on his war experiences in Iraq. They loved it.
Sam had created a punk rock band after high school, and becoming popular, the band was part of the Vans Warped Tour. On tour, his band kicked him out. He joined the Army as something different to do with his life, and in 2007, he found himself on the front lines during the surge in Iraq. When he witnessed his best friend die in a burning Humvee, he created a band to play at his base as a memorial tribute. The soldiers and brass loved it, and a colonel had them play at other bases.
His producer optioned his life rights but Sam’s lawyers retained the novel rights. Sam asked me, “Would you like to write a novel on this?” I might, I said.
The second factor for me was I’d just finished my last book, a crime novel, A Death in Vegas. I didn’t know what my next book would be. Sam’s story seemed interesting. I wondered why the producer didn’t get all rights including novel rights? I had my lawyer look into it, and, sure enough, Sam still retained the novel rights. This was my chance to explore perhaps the worst thing a human being could get caught up in: war.
Last, I wasn’t sure HOW a novel could be made exactly from Sam’s life, but as I told him, “This will be a novel, not a memoir. I’d be making some things up to get at what the whole experience was like for you. Through drama, we get to truth.”
He was fine with that. He was a filmmaker, after all, and learning screenwriting. “Showing” lets a reader participate and have an experience versus “telling.” I could say, “Sam was sad,” or I could show it in a scene through his actions and realizations.
For me, too, writing is an organic thing. While I will outline a novel and then play with the outline, imagining new scenes and deleting other ones, the act of writing brings up new moments I didn’t anticipate.
Also, I never set out to preach anything. Themes should emerge on their own just through what the protagonist and others learn along the way. I’m learning along the way, too.
Sometime after the first draft, I ask myself, “What does this all mean? What is my subconscious mind seeing that I’m not?” I’m a firm believer in the power of the brain—that things swirl in the gray matter with much more sureness and ferocity than we may be consciously aware of. Once I see the truths to my story, I go back in and make sure each scene has the central truth quietly humming there.
Try out The Chords of War. See for yourself.
The Chords of War
CHRISTOPHER MEEKS
SAMUEL GONZALEZ, JR.
Inspired by a True Story of
Adolescence, War, and Rock’n’Roll
White Whisker Books
Los Angeles
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017913704
Copyright © 2017 by Christopher Meeks
First edition
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under copyright law, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.
To request permission to reprint any portion of the book, email info@whitewhiskerbooks.com and in the subject heading, put the name of the book.
Associate Editor: Carol Fuchs
Book and cover design: Deborah Daly
Cover image: Jeff Joseph
To the men and women who have served their country and haven’t been heard. May this book be your music.
Prologue
Music filled his mind. Specifically, seventeen-year-old Max Rivera dreamed of his last great gig with the Mad Suburbans. They played at a sleazy little bar in Orlando’s Milk District where dollar beers flowed, the lighting came from strings of white Christmas lights, and cigarette smoke filled the place as if a mosquito fogger had plowed through. Nonetheless, Max glowed, his fingers ripping the chords on his white Fender Stratocaster. He had the greatest job in the world, just like J.R.’s ice cream truck when Max was a kid. They both gave out treats.
In the tightly packed lounge, men tried to hit on the women rather than focus on the band, the band’s crazy hair, their ripped clothes, but Max nonetheless got people dancing with his songs “Now Comes Tomorrow” and “Ruby-Throated Sparrow.” Max yelled into his mike, laughing, feeling the electricity beneath his fingers travel all the way into his amp. The crowd blasted with a cheer. Max, of course, didn’t attach any meaning to this, meaning to life. He didn’t know anything about philosophy—didn’t know that it was a thing to know. Didn’t know most people didn’t. Didn’t know whether he had choice or not. Did he have choice to dream this dream? Did that relate to his purpose? Was he like Galvani’s frog leg—a dead leg that would move if electricity tickled it? Were we all just frog legs?
The dream was ruined only when his girlfriend, Lynette, in her dumpy Disneyland sweatshirt, glared at him, glared as if to remind him he was nothing.
A hammering started. No, it was the phone. Phone? Everyone in the bar stopped to look at him.
Max struggled awake to find the phone ringing. His head pounded. He rolled over in bed, and his hand and arm whacked around the nightstand. He finally touched the phone, an old-fashioned kind, one with a handset and a cord. Where was he?
“Hello?” he mumbled, and a happy up-and-down computer voice said, “Good morning, Mr. Rivera. This is your wake-up call. You wanted me to remind you, too, of the duck march at nine a.m.”
“Fuckin’ duck march?” he blurted and hung up the phone.
He jammed an extra pillow under his head and opened his eyes, trying to remember where he was. The throb in his head could be a metronome. He seemed to be in a hotel room with a high view. Duck march?
Now he remembered. When he’d checked in, the young woman at the front desk had explained that every morning at nine, five mallard ducks came down a special elevator from the roof, and a duck master led them down the carpet to the fountain. People lined up on either side to watch.
“That’s what rich people call fun?” he had said.
“It’s a tradition. And, yeah, kind of fun,” replied the young woman, a clerk only a few years older than he.
“Sounds interesting,” he said about the ducks, but he had meant it as “like needles in the eye.”
And now he remembered why he’d come. Florida was for dead people, and he’d decided to join them. He booked a room at the elegant Peabody Hotel, which was the second tallest building in Orlando. The tallest was an exclusive office building, but there was no way he could get in there.
His plan would have worked, too, if his friend Claire hadn’t called, having heard about his breakup with Lynette, and she weaseled out of him that he was at the Peabody. She assumed he was partying and asked if she could join him. Hot, red-headed Claire. She’d told her parents she would be studying with a girlfriend, but she got naked with him instead.
He turned his head to the side. Claire wasn’t there. She had left the bed. “Claire?” he said as loudly as his weak voice would allow. No answer. He reached for what looked to be a note on her pillow.
It read, “Fuck you, Max. You said mean things.”
Mean things? They were just true things.
“We’re not losers—at least I’m not. You’re a doosh.”
He was a better speller than that. It was “douche.”
“P.S. I took your money for a cab.”
He held his poor, aching head. He saw all the empty mini-bottles and beer cans on the floor. He wondered if he’d be charged beyond the one hundred dollars he left as deposit.
The TV was on, but the sound was off. It showed a single tall building with smoke coming out of it.
He vaguely remembered turning on the TV at night, but he didn’t remember watching it. He’d been too tired to do anything, including killing himself. Maybe now he could do it.
He lumbered to the dresser to grab a cigarette. Maybe it’d stop the headache. He lit a match, which made his eyes blink and water. Christ. The lit cigarette slipped from his fingers, and the cherry popped off and burrowed into the Berber. Smoke rose, and he hammered it out with his bare heel, then yelped at the pain. He was doing nothing right.
First his girlfriend, then the band, now Claire. Everything he touched turned to shit. He looked down again, thirty stories. All he had to do was fly, and it’d be over. He needed to be brave and fly. He smashed his fist against the window, but it just boomed and didn’t break. How to get through? It was time to fly.
A voice on the TV said, “We have word in that perhaps a small plane had gone off course.” The sound was on, after all.
Max moved closer and could see it was a boxy skyscraper against a cobalt blue sky. There was no context, but clearly it wasn’t Florida. The building was on fire. Why?
A wide shot from another angle had the Empire State Building in close, and in the distance, the building on fire had a matching tower, both far taller than the many buildings nearby. Beyond that gleamed a bay. The screen went back to a closer view of just the one tower burning. Max rubbed his lightly tattooed arms, suddenly cold, and he just stared. The same smooth male voice said, “We’re told a number of firefighting companies have been called in. There are no ladders that can go that high. This is the north tower. We’re trying to get an FDNY spokesperson to tell us how this fire will be fought. Buildings like this, I understand, are designed with automatic sprinklers as well as fire hose couplings on every floor. All should be well.”
As Max stared, something came from the right side of the screen—a jet? It flew behind the tower on fire, and a huge orange smoky blast burst from either side of the building. “Oh, my God,” he said in chorus with a man and woman’s voice on TV. The announcer said, “I think a second plane has just hit the second tower.”
“I didn’t see a plane go in,” said another male voice. “The building just exploded.”
“We saw a plane come in from the side, from the right,” said the woman.
Max felt as if he were hallucinating. Did a jet just crash into a building? Or was this just a strange movie? He turned the channel. The next channel, though, showed the same thing from a different angle where both towers were shown. Both were on fire. Max was about to shout for Claire, but he remembered she was gone. Maybe the front desk had answers. Maybe that woman at the front desk knew what’s going on now.
When the doors opened to the lobby, no one stood behind the long check-in counter. As he walked through the vast space, his black Chuck Taylors squeaked on the white marble floor and the occasional black inlay. Because of how quiet the place was, it was as if he were in church—or the depths of outer space. He looked for the staff past the modern art, the areas with cushy chairs, the impressive pillars and curvy white walls. He found them around the corner at the mirrored bar. At least twenty people, half of them wearing Peabody Hotel uniforms, quietly watched the TV above the bar. Max joined them, and as the TV gave a slow-motion replay of the plane going in and exploding, everyone there gasped at the fireball. “Definitely a large jetliner,” said a different announcer on the TV. “We may look back on this eleventh day in September as a turning point.”
“I think it’s terrorists,” an old man in tennis whites next to Max said. “It’s going to mean war.” Max didn’t think about who would fight it or where. He didn’t think whether this would change his life. He didn’t think if he could find choice or meaning.
The TV showed the plane yet again, and Max’s headache reasserted itself. He really should get some aspirin or something for it. A bottle of Jack Daniels caught his eye, that would work, but he’d never be served. An older woman on his other side, silver-haired, a bit chunky, madly pressed numbers on her cell phone. She wore baggy beige shorts and a stiff blouse as if she were lost on a safari. Anxiety cut across her face. Apparently no one answered.
She looked at Max, worried. “Do you know someone there?” she asked, touching his shoulder as if expecting a yes. He said nothing.
She frantically punched in another phone number. He realized he’d been ready to kill himself today, and now in these two buildings on TV, people who surely wanted to live had been crushed and incinerated. They had families, hopes, goals, but some sick fucks decided to kill innocent people.
“My God,” the woman gasped, and her shoulders shook. She stood, isolated, apart from the others, and closed her small Ericsson cell phone, a model Max had thought about getting because it was so small and had something new called Blue Tooth. He didn’t know what to do for her.
“I take it you know someone there,” Max said.
“My son works high up in one of those buildings,” she said between sobs. “He won’t answer his phone. I can’t reach him.”
He nodded.
“Why would two planes crash into those buildings?” she asked him. “What does this get anyone?”
He shook his head. “It’s a strange world.” He didn’t know then, but his world in a few years would become stranger, the way heat could feel like ice, the way blood could look like sweet Hershey’s syrup in the right fire light and sand. He would look back on today and think, “Yes, it started there.”
She looked right in his eyes as if he might have more answers.
He said, “My girlfriend, the first girl I loved, slept with everyone in the band just to get back at me. The world doesn’t make sense.”
The woman shook her head, taking his hand. “You’re a good boy.”
He shook his head, not believing it.
Her phone rang. She looked hopeful. “Charles?” she said into her phone, and then she beamed and spoke quickly, stepping away.
Some ducks quacked. Max looked over to the red carpet. Apparently no one had told the duck master about the burning towers, and the red-jacketed man guided his five ducks down the empty red runway. The man looked around, confused, and then peered at Max as if Max had the answer to why everyone was at the bar instead of the duck march. No matter. The man guided his charges forward. Each duck faithfully followed the one in front. As if they now knew it was a solemn time, they did not quack. They just marched.
1
Kuwait and Iraq, November 2006
As we cleaned our barracks for the final time in Fort Lewis before our deployment, I felt excited. I swept around my bunk, tightened my duffle, and smiled in anticipation. God knows, I’m no thinker, but it occurred to me that few people loved where they were in life, and I did. Physically, I’d never been better. My small paunch had hardened into washboard abs. My arms could be Popeye’s, my legs, more powerful than a locomotive. Mentally, too, I felt confident, and my parents were proud. Add to that, I was headed off with my two best friends, Hitch and Styles. I had purpose, helping my country. What more could a person want?
Sure, somewhere inside I knew Iraq wouldn’t be easy, yet after all the training, I felt ready. Everyone in the platoon, men and women, watched my back, and I covered theirs. To be a part of something—that’s special. Add to that, I’d be leaving the country for my first time ever. Ah, to travel! I’d see things beyond my dreams. I hadn’t felt this eager since Christmas as a kid.
A hundred Army soldiers and I headed to Kuwait City in a C-17 military aircraft. We would be deployed to Iraq after extra training. The seats were arranged lengthwise against the plane’s sidewalls with conventional rows in the middle.
With its vast space and fluorescent lighting, the C-17 felt like a moving Greyhound bus station. Two car-sized shipping containers, lashed down in the middle, did not add any elegance. With little to do, I fell asleep.
As if someone had shoved me, I awoke to a falling sensation and a huge creaking sound. Screams erupted. My right hand pressed against my chest. My uniformed comrades around me look startled, and one guy yelled “Shit!” Then we leveled off. The plane became steady. I laughed as I had on Disney World’s Space Mountain.
I stood and moved to one of few windows on the plane. The clouds below me looked like the top of a brain, and the flashes of light going off in the ridges could be nerve endings sparking out electricity. Synapse. I remembered the term from high school biology. I’d never made it beyond a single semester of community college. I’d played in a few punk rock bands instead.
Soon, the plane started shaking. We must have been entering a storm, which was what probably had awakened me. I focused on the beauty of those flashes. “Wow,” I blurted without thinking. A soldier near me seated on the sidewall stood to look out the same window, and then the captain sitting on the other side of the cavernous tube stepped over to see. Trying to make a good impression on the captain, I said, “Isn’t nature amazing?”
After looking at my name on my uniform, then staring out the window at the clouds several seconds, he said, “Yes, Private Rivera, but that’s not lightning. Those are bombs going off. We’re over Baghdad—over hell.” He sat down, grinning.
The short soldier next to me gasped, and only then did I realize the soldier was a woman—stocky, sturdy, but a feminine face. After other young faces jammed into the window, my skinny friend Hitch pushed on his tiptoes to look and said, “Shit. We’re the mole in Whack-a-Mole.” Whispers and groans erupted as fast as lit gasoline. The plane shook harder, and while it was probably from simple turbulence, we all surely assumed anti-aircraft missiles. The fasten seatbelt sign blinked on. I sat and clutched my seat as if we were already careening in a ball of flame. All the motivational films we’d witnessed in recruitment centers and in training—the “Be All You Can Be” and “Army Strong” stuff—did not prepare us for this moment.
Forty-five minutes later, we landed safely in Kuwait City. When I stepped out the rear into the sauna air, the hot tarmac nonetheless felt wonderfully solid. Adrenaline rushed through me as the words of our LT came back: “Every minute in Iraq can be filled with danger—snipers, car bombs, suicide bombers, IEDs, or an ambush. You’ll have a lot of boredom, punctuated by terror. It’s okay to be afraid. We all need a healthy dose of fright.”
Heat waves made the green trees that edged the field and the brown mountains in the distance waver. It reminded me of when a film got stuck in a projector, and the single projected image would melt.
This would be home for ten days. After desert training and acclimatization, we would drive into Iraq. Our superiors wanted to see that we could perform in the heat and hoped to boost our confidence in our skills and equipment. We drove different vehicles and were reminded again and again of the rules of engagement. Near the end, we practiced fighting in a training village of two-story buildings, abandoned cars, and dirt roads with real IEDs. The bombs weren’t powerful or filled with nails, but strong enough to show that, in a real situation, we could be dead.
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The Chords of War
by
Christopher Meeks & Samuel Gonzalez, Jr.
White Whisker Books
 |
| Christopher Meeks & Samuel Gonzalez, Jr. |
Hardcover
