Hollywood via Orchard Street by Wayne Clark - Book Tour + Giveaway
Hollywood via Orchard Street
by Wayne Clark
Genre:
Historical Fiction
Historical Fiction
Deciding that the hopelessness he sees around him on New York’s squalid
Lower East Side during the Great Depression isn’t for him, a young
man invents an alter ego with the chutzpah he hopes will make a name
for himself. In the process he accidentally ignites a war between the
Irish mob and a Chinese tong, learns to drink and finds love for the
first time. Will he and his alter ego ever reunite? They will have to
if he doesn’t want to lose the love of a beautiful Broadway actress.
Lower East Side during the Great Depression isn’t for him, a young
man invents an alter ego with the chutzpah he hopes will make a name
for himself. In the process he accidentally ignites a war between the
Irish mob and a Chinese tong, learns to drink and finds love for the
first time. Will he and his alter ego ever reunite? They will have to
if he doesn’t want to lose the love of a beautiful Broadway actress.
**Only 99 cents!!**
“THE goal,” young Charles
Czerny scribbled in pencil, “was to become someone else. I am nothing,” he
wrote. “i must contort myself.” He had once seen the word “contortionist”
on a circus poster and looked it up. As euphoria invaded, he changed the “i” to a capital “I”.
“Nobody I know is
anybody. And I mean anybody, up and down Orchard Street, and everywhere else.” Wielding
with his new verb, he continued:
“They need to learn about
contorting themselves, or they’ll always be kind of sad in life. They would
probably like to tell someone that they’re always kind of sad, but they don’t
have the words to say it, so to speak. But I do. For example, ergo... I learned
that word in school. What I want to say is, ‘Ergo, you must contort your life
if you want to die reasonably satisfied.’ You can’t ask for it all, can you.
You have to send your mind up in a balloon and take a look around at the
possibilities. When you see one that twinkles like a penny firecracker, adopt
it. Say, ‘That’s me 10 years from now or whatever.’ Rewrite your life. I mean
your future. You are what you are right now, you are what your whiney aunt says
you are, but tomorrow, and all the tomorrows to come, well, that’s up to you.
Make up a story, then live it.
He was pleased with his
thoughts. There were a lot of them there. Those were the kind of thoughts he
was sure writers have.
The next day he did not
pick up his pencil. The new centerpiece of the salon that had always doubled as
his bedroom on Orchard Street was, as of that morning, the most magical thing
he’d ever possessed, an Underwood typewriter, an Underwood Model 2, which he
had found hours before in the rubble of a fire on Mangin Street, above
Delancey, near the river. The tiny street, Mangin, already had meaning for him
because he vaguely remembered that his parents, or maybe just his father, had
once lived there. His mind harbored echoes of someone saying “In the Mangin
days.” He decided to contort that memory by telling himself it was fact that
they both, mother and father, actually had lived in the place whose charred
ruins he’d just scavenged. It didn’t matter that he could not remember his
father. He must have lived with his mother at some point near the time of his
birth. His mother never spoke of him.
When he got home to Orchard
Street that afternoon with the typewriter, he fetched a cloth from his room and
returned to the stoop to rub away the soot. It took a long time, and many
neighbors stopped to observe him. Some would wish him good afternoon but mostly
they remained silent. No one seemed familiar enough with the machine to admire
it or ask how it worked or why he wanted it.
A sudden summer shower
chased Charles back up the four flights of stairs to his room. When he was sure
the Underwood Model 2 was dry—he always added “Model
2” in his
mind because it made it sound like he had the latest, best writing machine in
the country, guaranteed to bring results—he sat down at the table before it.
Though he had nothing much he felt ready to state in black in white, he liked
the fact that the typewriter was open-framed so he could see its inner
workings. He saw an analogy with the inner workings of his own heart and mind,
which, as a writer, he knew he would be required to explore. Yes, a good
parallel, he thought, reaching for the dictionary, a relic from his school
days. He made a mental note that “analogy” was spelled with only two a’s, not
three.
Charles left school, PS
62 on Grand Street, in the middle of the seventh grade. There, as far as he
remembered, he was good at poetry, mainly the required memorizing of stanzas
but also at writing. Though the school-days memory was a candidate for future
contortion, he believed deeply that he was good at it, the writing part. What
he wrote was profoundly emulative of the works he doggedly memorized, all by
19-century guys from England. He knew that they were important works because no
one he had ever met in his neighborhood, even all of New York, spoke like the
poets did, words that were big and deserving of five or six definitions in his
dictionary, or small but so obscure they were not even represented in the word
bible. Perhaps the poets made them up. Yes, contortion, thought Charles. There
was no shame in it. It wasn’t lying.
Certain that the writing
machine would make him a writer, Charles decided to regard his current job as a
temporary circumstance. Most people, especially since the Depression descended,
were happy to have a job no matter how hard it was, and their greatest hope was
that they would always have that job. Not Charles.
Nobody had ever asked
Charles what his plans were. People in his neighborhood were too poor to have
plans. Scraping by ate up the clock. Besides, he wasn’t an idiot. He knew he
couldn’t say he was a writer until he’d written something and someone had put
it in the paper.
Charles knew about
papers. Delivering them to newsboys paid his rent of $14 a month. The smell of
newsprint intoxicated Charles, who, at 24 years of age, had neither tasted
alcohol nor a woman. As he wrote in his notebook more than once, this meant he
had lots to do in addition to becoming a writer.
Award-winning author Wayne Clark was born in 1946 in Ottawa, Ont., but has called
Montreal home since 1968. Woven through that time frame in no
particular order have been interludes in Halifax, Toronto, Vancouver,
Germany, Holland and Mexico.
Montreal home since 1968. Woven through that time frame in no
particular order have been interludes in Halifax, Toronto, Vancouver,
Germany, Holland and Mexico.
By far the biggest slice in a pie chart of his career would be labelled
journalism, including newspapers and magazines, as a reporter, editor
and freelance writer. The other, smaller slices of the pie would also
represent words in one form or another, in advertising as a
copywriter and as a freelance translator. However, unquantifiable in
a pie chart would be the slivers and shreds of time stolen over the
years to write fiction.
journalism, including newspapers and magazines, as a reporter, editor
and freelance writer. The other, smaller slices of the pie would also
represent words in one form or another, in advertising as a
copywriter and as a freelance translator. However, unquantifiable in
a pie chart would be the slivers and shreds of time stolen over the
years to write fiction.
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