Do you ever wonder how many people you have inside of you? Not separate people—more like aspects of self, personas, those “moods” or behaviors that make you say later, “I just wasn’t feeling like myself.” I’m guessing that most of you who are reading this aren’t old enough to remember the TV show called “The Naked City,” but you may have heard their tag line, a voice-over that came at the end of each episode: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” Well, I don’t know that I have eight million other people inside of me, but a good many more than I’m comfortable admitting to, and they all have stories.
One of the handy things about being a writer is that I get to play out some of these personalities in the characters I create, and it isn’t like I do it deliberately—sometimes a character turns up when I’m writing, and I wonder where the heck she came from, certainly not from me: I am not like that at all!
Or am I?
Tonight I went to a workshop that is part of an ongoing training I’ve been in for more than two years. I’m learning how to be conscious, how to breathe, how to pay attention to what my body knows. (We knew these things when we were babies, but the older we are, the more we’ve forgotten, so it’s not as easy as it sounds.) Tonight it took me a long time to land in my body and to be present, and I realized that I was caught up in that San Francisco character I posted about yesterday. Only she was moodier, darker, and then I recognized her as a woman I once wrote about who is traveling through Nevada. I don't know who she is, but she is very familiar.
Here's a theory I just made up: What if, to write fiction, the writer must be open to her own darkness (and we all have darkness). It doesn't mean she's a serial killer or an alcoholic or a slut or an SOB. It just means that when she picks up a pen, she doesn't know what will emerge, but she's willing.
At the Truck Stop—Wells, Nevada
“Coffee?”
The waitress wore a brown-and-white-checked uniform with a white apron, frills at the edges, ketchup stain in the middle, and a little fan of a hankie pinned to her meager chest with a name plate that read “Dot.” The woman in the sunglasses pushed her cup across the counter with one knuckle and Dot splashed the thin brown liquid into it as she pulled a stub of pencil from behind one ear. Dot held the pencil over the scratch pad and looked at her own reflection in the sunglasses. Was this woman going to order breakfast or just sit here drinking coffee and tapping her foot like there weren’t six truckers waiting by the bowl of mints for a stool and a Trucker’s Special: three eggs, six flapjacks, six strips of bacon, hash browns, toast, and all the coffee you could drink.
The woman at the counter took a long drag on her cigarette and blew a long stream of smoke in the direction of the kitchen where a dark-eyed man with a devil tattoo looked up, his eyes intense, his spatula held still in one long-fingered hand. Behind her a slot machine clanked out silver dollars in a long clatter and a woman in powder-blue polyester with a large JCPenney’s shopping bag at her feet clapped and laughed and coughed into her sleeve. The woman at the counter didn’t turn around. She gazed across the tables and out the window where a man with “Pete” stitched on the front of his green work shirt was bouncing a tire past the gas pumps and into the garage where a blue and white 1957 Chevy Bel Air was up on the racks.
Sunlight glittered off the windshields of 20 trucks parked in a long diagonal row, and the woman looked away from the glare, lit a cigarette from the butt of the one she had smoked down to a nub before stubbing it out in the overflowing ashtray. She waved the match, leaving a trail of smoke as the flame went out, dropped it in the ashtray, and reached inside the low neck of her black sweater and tugged on a bra strap. Two truckers at table 12 watched her, and one nudged the other with his elbow, smirked, and then looked down at the menu when Dot came to take their orders. When they left half an hour later, the woman in the sunglasses was still sitting at the counter where Dot splashed coffee into her cup in 15-minute intervals, and a thin man in black cowboy boots touched the woman for luck before he leaned far over the crap table and rolled the dice.