Changes

By Charles Oliver

Slip was just drifting through life, but that was until he met Ria. Now he struggles to find out who he will be, and the direction he should take. Soon they will both have to face difficult choices in the face of tragedy.

Warning: This book contains occasional profanity and some sexual situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Oliver
• Release date: Jul 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465946430

Book preview

CHARLES A. OLIVER

CHANGES

A Novel

The lyrics on the page following are from When I Write the Book, lyrics and music by Nick Lowe, as recorded by Rockpile on their album Seconds of Pleasure.

The lyrics in chapter twelve are from Changes, lyrics and music by Phil Ochs, as recorded on the Elektra album Phil Ochs in Concert (1966); copyright © 1965 (renewed 1993) Barricade Music, Inc. (ASCAP); rights administered by Almo Music Corp. for the world.

Copyright © 2011 by Charles A. Oliver

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage-and-retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper or electronically transmitted on radio or television.

Smashwords Edition

first published, July 2011

License Notes:

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All persons, places and organizations in this book — except those clearly in the public domain — are fictitious; and any resemblance to actual persons, places and organizations living, dead or defunct is purely coincidental.

Well, I can remember, like it was only yesterday

Love was young and foolish, like a little child at play;

But, oh! How love has changed, I never dreamed how easily,

For now I’m just a shadow of the boy I used to be.

And when I write the book about my love

It’ll be a heart-breaking story of bad luck in love.

When I lay down on the pages all I felt,

It will make the hardest-hearted of critics’ hearts melt.

When I write the book...

When I write the book about my love.

— Rockpile (Nick Lowe)

This one is for Linda Stewart,

who walks through life with both eyes open,

and whose humble student

it is my honor and privilege to have been.

CHANGES

INTRODUCTION

It’s probably a good idea to skip this section, and go directly to the story itself, unless you are the sort of person who enjoys seeing writers go on at great length about the writing process. For those who enjoy a little background, here it is:

While the time-span involved in the writing of this book was in excess of two decades, the majority of it was written in two one-month periods which just happened to be separated by twenty years.

I first attempted to tackle this project in early 1980, then scrapped the thing and started over. Both times, I broke down in the second chapter. I found myself getting bored with the minutiæ of background writing which some refer to as adding color, but I find impossible to think of as anything but padding. Since all of my writing to that point had been short stories, I tended toward economy in writing style. I became impatient with anything which did not contribute to moving the story along or developing characters in what I considered necessary directions.

Shortly after I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1984, I pulled out that pitiful bit of manuscript with the thought of taking it up once more. Once again, I got bogged down in the detail. It was at this point that Ted Reynolds, a published author (The Tides of God) and a member of the nominally science-fiction/fantasy writers’ group to which I then belonged, suggested that I toss sequence to the wind and write whatever seemed interesting to me at the time. I soon found myself with the first two chapters (easy, since they were largely completed already), most of the third, a chapter from somewhere in the middle, and the last two chapters. At this point, having once again exhausted all the story which was of interest to me — especially since I now knew how it ended, for crying out loud — I boxed it back up and stuck it in that fabled trunk all writers must lug about like Jacob Marley’s chains…

A couple of the people who had read the book up to that point were mightily upset that I had given up on it, one of them trying to convince me that what I was writing here was better and more important than that old standard of teen angst, Catcher in the Rye. Since I had the typical ego of many who consider themselves the world’s greatest undiscovered writer, this was music to my ears, but failed to motivate me to further work on it.

Then, in late 2000 and early 2001, while I was living in Kenai, Alaska, I tried reorganizing my unfinished manuscripts, partly with an eye toward seeing what might be salvaged. It had been thirteen years since I had written any fiction, and the only work I had done in the interim was a self-published volume of genealogy on my maternal grandmother’s family and a still-unfinished young-adult novel with fantasy overtones that I hoped (and still hope) would spawn a series of kids’ books built around the central premise and thereby make me one of the idle rich. Since I was actively working on that novel, the only things I wanted percolating on the back burner were shorter works to use as temporary diversions when the ideas for the juvenile novel (which was also written non-sequentially) began to peter out.

Still, Changes (then known simply as that god-damned coming-of-age thing) managed to attract attention. While doing genealogical research, I had fallen in with a group of like-minded people on the internet. Two of them nigh on demanded seeing just about everything I had written and punched into the computer to that point. One of them, Sandy Myers of Republic, Missouri, became the thing I had been lacking for the last dozen years or so: an audience to whom I could directly address my writing. Sandy goaded me into writing my 330-plus page genealogical book during an insane six-week period while I was living in Columbus, Ohio, after I had all but given up on it in the wake of the ending of my marriage. I also self-published a collection of my shorter works for Sandy, began the kids’ novel and did a fairly large amount of research for a historical novel chronicling the founding and settling of Deerfield, Massachusetts. That novel — or, what small bit of it actually got written, lies secreted on a damaged computer hard drive which has now disappeared. I tell myself that after six years, there is little chance I’d ever take it up again, but then there is this book, which lay in silence for nearly two decades. Following Sandy’s death, I pretty much cocooned up and stopped writing again.

The other friend, and the one who is perhaps most responsible for my taking up this particular story again after so long is Tom Robertson of New Albany, Mississippi. Tom is the reason I settled in New Albany when I moved from Alaska, and after Oklahoma didn’t work out (which is a whole ’nother story). Tom became a fan of Changes in those early days of friendship, and he had nagged me politely ever since.

When I pulled it out once more in New Albany, I found I had some new ideas, and finally wrote the last half of the penultimate chapter between my duties as graveyard-shift clerk at a convenience store. I was very much concerned that the seams would show — that it was impossible for a man of forty-three to tap into the experience of being eighteen. By this I do not mean the inability to remember what it was like to be eighteen, or how it felt at that age, but to actually empathize and feel things the same way now. Tom assured me that it hung together; and, now, two decades in, Changes has finally been completed. Tom died unexpectedly in June 2010, and his loss is deeply felt among his friends.

As far as nuts-and-bolts reality goes, I realize that the two main characters in this book are not typical teenagers. Since I have spent time around such folks, and remember all too well my own adolescence when I was far more like Slip (save for his popularity) than the slack-jawed Denny types who seemed to be in the majority, I felt that to concentrate on the ordinary would be to make one more meaningless excursion into territory already covered in Catcher in the Rye and others.

Although it may be a bit disconcerting, I tried to write in the current voice of my narrator. The first chapter begins in fairly decent English, then slides into more slangy and vernacular (and, at times, downright ungrammatical) delivery which would have been more typical of him as we flash back to the beginning of the story; as the book progresses, his voice gradually returns to the more educated tone. The Slip of the opening paragraphs would never have used a phrase like joie de vivre (and I am less than certain it should have remained near the end), but as he becomes more literate, it becomes a less jarring possibility.

I have also tried to work many of my characters and character-pairs in the sort of doubles or mirror-images/complement pairs used by Dostoevsky (i.e., the good Slip and Ria are mirrored by the bad Kenny and Diane; the ripe Kenny is mirrored in the incipient walking disaster Denny, and so on), and have embedded at least two hidden messages. I hope none of my tinkering with literary Lincoln Logs interferes with the story, but it was one of the games I got into playing to get past the boredom of some sections. The name of the main female character, as well as the cover art for this volume are also sort of in-joke references. I cringe to think that this little book should ever become subject to dissection by college students. When you get down to the bottom line, story is the most important thing anyway. Everything else is icing on the cake. This was a costly but important lesson I learned through an immersion in Twain which was far too late in coming.

While many of the incidents are rooted in reality, and several of the characters were somewhat inspired by people I met in a house similar to the one described in the novel, I have twisted things to my own purposes and felt free to lie outrageously when it suited me. I also gave my ex-wife to Kenny as partial explanation for his misogyny, and this childish bit of venting my own residual bitterness over the situation cheered me more than a little. The possibility that she will see this in print and gnash her teeth over it cheers me even more.

After several attempts to interest publishers in this slim volume, I have decided to go the electronic publishing route. Publishers, for obvious reasons, are reluctant to publish and promote books which are unlikely to sell. I realize that brevity may be something of an issue, what with the bloating which has occurred in novels in recent years, but this was always envisioned as a relatively short work, insofar as I have said all I had to say when I began it, and then some. In many ways, it is a throw-back to the type of young-adult novel of the sort written by Paul Zindel.

Here, then, is Changes. It may seem a bit self-aggrandizing, but I believe it is a decent bit of writing. I am not sure today’s audiences are ready for what is, after all, mostly heavy chunks of morality embedded in an episodic book with precious little action and a lot of odd-ball characters making speeches at one another. This is probably the price that is paid by a writer whose first major influence was Rod Serling via Twilight Zone, and the sternly moralistic world of fantasy/horror fiction.

The tone of the book is largely feminist, which some of my friends find amusingly incongruous with my tendency toward right-leaning politics; however,