Tuesday, March 2, 2004

I suppose you want me to spin a story, gentle reader, and play the bard to your inebriated audience. You want to know how I arrived at a land of opportunity with nothing more than a song in my heart and a lecture marinating in my mind. You want to hear a tale narrated in a vague foreign accent like so: “I came to Amaireeka in 1934 as a stowawee on a shipping bairge. My home was boot a dream, my bedfellows were boot rats.” And so on and so on.

What really happened was much simpler. In the place of a shipping barge were three yachts and a crone. That’s how things started, at least. One early morning, as the mist slowly engulfed the moors, I met an old woman during my daily constitutional. She approached noiselessly and fished around her satchel for a moment before handing me something.

“Here,” she croaked in a voice made barely audible by the din of ambient moor noises.

I looked at the spiral notebook in my hand.

“Shit,” she said, “wrong book. Those things always fall apart. Let me try again.”

Back into the satchel she went, grunting and fussing like a pig in a pile of truffles.

“Ah!” she exclaimed. “Here’s what I was looking for.”

She handed me a bound leather book with frayed edges and weather-stained pages. I thumbed through the book and found that all the pages were blank.

“The book only looks weather-stained because I dropped it a few hundred times on my way over,” she explained with a twinkle in her eye.

“So why are you here?”

“Because the people must know,” she said cryptically, “but first you must find your Muse. Only then can you fill this book.”

She turned heel and clambered over a nearby hill with a pace befitting someone a third of her age.

The next day, I made my way over to the family dock and found three yachts floating peacefully in the quiet. One of them seethed with an envious green, another glowed with a showy gold, and yet another smoldered with a passionate red. I boarded the green yacht and set sail for this mystical Isle of Muses–“Mu Zealand,” one publisher would quip in later years–and my journey quickly met with disaster. Within a few hours, my vessel collided ferociously with a bigger, better vessel and sunk, forcing me to swim back to shore.

The following morning, I packed some supplies and boarded the gold yacht. By noontime, I was nearly blinded by the reflected sunlight and quickly turned back to shore.

On the third day, however, my luck changed. I cast off in my little red yacht as the morning sun scattered brightly over the sea, and the water surrounding my ship was bathed incarnadine. I gave the leather tome a reassuring pat, which dislodged a small compass that curiously pointed northwest. Using the compass, I arrived at my destination in days, a small island with a gigantic high-rise filled with condominiums in the upper $300s. The building took up the entire island, actually, so much so that any remaining land simply served as a scenic beachfront. I entered the lobby and beheld a truly breathtaking spectacle.

“Hi,” I stuttered, “I’m–“

“I know who you are,” she answered, flashing me an angry look.

Irate as she looked, she was stunningly attractive, and I knew this was the Muse I needed.

“Are you mad at me?” I asked. “I really don’t want to start off like this.”

For a moment I thought her features softened, but it turned out I was wrong.

“Save it. You sure took your sweet time getting here,” she said with an imperious toss of her hair.

“Yeah,” I replied, “I’m sorry. The commute–“

“–was killer,” she finished. “Oh, don’t look surprised. I just wish you chose the red one first.”

I figured I’d lighten the atmosphere with a pithy compliment.

“You know, your attire is simply breathtaking. I–“

She cut me short again.

“I don’t do harlequin romance, you know, so you can skip it,” she said with a hint of a smile. “And are you complimenting my clothes or me?”

“You,” I admitted, “and now it’s my turn to do the asking. First question: past employers?”

“Virgil, Homer, Twain,” she listed succinctly. “Even did a little freelancing for Dickens.”

“Wow, that’s pretty impressive!” I exclaimed. “Now do you think–“

“For the love of classical antiquity, don’t even try to invoke me. I mean, we just met.”

She had a point.

“My mistake, I really apologize. I’m kind of new to this Muse thing,” I confessed.

“That’s okay,” she said. “Homer? When we first met, he had to toss back a few 90-proof “libations” before he wrote a word. But over time, the words came more easily. It’s almost like they–“

“Flowed?” I ventured.

“Nice try,” she said, breaking into a smile. “Shall we go?”

“Absolutely,” I replied.

That’s how I found my Muse. She might tell you a different story–this is how I remember it. Sure, a few details might be missing here and there, but what can you expect after tossing back a whole case of Perrier?