Category Archives: Motivations

I know where your hands have been

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* This article was first published in Blank Canvas Magazine, Fall 2009. 

The Schube: I know who masterminded the JFK assassination.

He butted in front of me at the 12-items-or-less checkout line at the Fresh & Easy. He had three items too many, but the kid behind the counter didn’t mention it. Maybe the kid had him pegged too.

I know who murdered Jon Benet Ramsey.

She boarded the bus right after me and stared straight ahead in a trance all the way to downtown Phoenix. A Daewoo darted out in the carpool lane and everyone else braced for it as the brakes burned, but she never tensed up. Just faced forward and kept on fiddling with the hairs in the mole on her neck. That’s when I knew the unspeakable things she’s done.

I ran into a guy who knows exactly where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.

I wasn’t brave enough to ask him. I didn’t like the way his pockmarked face glared at me outside the Chicken Man in New Orleans as he picked through an ashtray for something with enough tobacco left to smoke. I kept my head down and walked on by. Went in and bought a bag of mesquite BBQ corn nuts from a guy behind the counter whose story would undoubtedly scar you for life.

It’s amazing what you can figure out about people. It took me a little while to get the hang of it, and now I can’t stop.

I think it all started about two years ago on a flight from Orlando to Baltimore. My wife and I were bored and started noticing the little quirks of people on the plane. About once an hour, a guy in his mid-80s a few seats away would pull out an envelope and carefully unfold a handwritten letter. He’d read it and wipe a tear from his right eye, then put the note back in his breast pocket.

I’m still haunted by what that note might have said. The reporter in me was dying to know. I wanted to reach over and tap him on the forearm and ask if everything was OK, if he wanted to talk about it. Because maybe then he’d tell me.

But instead, I let my imagination drift. I made up a whole back story about the guy in my mind, and it really seemed to fit him perfectly. This was a long flight, so I had plenty of time to add all sorts of details, to the point where the he just became that character to me.

In my mind, the letter was from his granddaughter. They’d had a falling out nearly a decade ago when she found out that he’d lied to her for years about being a CEO of a knife manufacturing company. She’d stumbled across the secret no one else in the family knew: He was actually a hired killer.

She loved him enough to never tell anyone, but cast him out of her life. It nearly destroyed him because she was all he had.

Then two days ago, her letter arrived like a brick through a window. I need help, grandpa. His fingers trembled as he read on. There was nowhere else to turn. She’d married a police commander and everything had been great until he started beating her. Twice he’d put her in the hospital. Last week, he’d threatened to kill her if she tried to leave. The cops didn’t believe her. He had too much influence.

Please, grandpa. I know I shut you out but I couldn’t bear to know you’d done those things. Now you might be the only person who can help.

The old man had retired nearly 25 years ago, and his body was failing him. He was tired, so tired. His hands shook with arthritis. But they steadied a little more each time he read her letter. Her words filled him with bittersweet hope that he could make things right between them this time. He knew what needed to be done. When the plane touched down in Maryland, he was going to take her husband’s life.

Now, every day, I find myself coming up with these stories about random strangers. Sometimes it feels like a blessing, and it’s often very funny to see what your imagination comes up with. (The traffic lady directs an underground freak show every Wednesday night that’s a riot!)

Other times, it’s a little intense. I mean, this morning I met the Zodiac Killer in the bargain books section of Barnes & Noble. The guy behind me at the Chick-fil-A drive-through once filled in for Josef Mengele when the mad Nazi doctor was out for a few days with a cold.

You see?

Oh, and I know about you, too. I know what wanders through your mind, where your hands have been. I know what you’ve been up to.

You know about me, too. Or you will. Because now that I’ve told you about this, about making up stories about strangers, you’ll start doing it too. Just wait and see.

One day you’ll pull up beside me at a red light and you’ll glance my way. Your mind will start to wander. You won’t be sure about who I really am, but in your mind, you’ll know.

You’ll know.

The Boogeyman won’t leave… He’s waving outside my window

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The Schube: I’m staring at a hand wrapped in gauze. Unblinking eyes stare back at me from fingers on the hand. I’m in the second grade, and my mind has just officially been blown.

The cover art on this dog-eared paperback book fascinates me. I recognize the title phrase – “Night Shift” – because my mom’s a nurse and works overnights. I wonder if she’s ever treated a patient whose hand has eyes peering out of it. I’d ask her, but she’s busy chatting with my godmother who’s chain-smoking cigarettes in the kitchen.

I open the book among a fog of nicotine and try to read the words as my eyes burn from the smoke.

I can make out many of the words, but I don’t really understand what they’re saying because of the way they’re strung together.

This isn’t like any of the books I’ve read in school. This is a grown-up book, far too complex for me. I’m probably not supposed to be reading it, which makes me yearn to comprehend it even more.

The book has several stories, many with titles that set my imagination on fire. The Mangler. The Boogeyman. Sometimes They Come Back. (They do? Oh lordy, who are “they?” And what kind of bad business do they do when they return?)

Children of the Corn.

This last one is especially enticing, even haunting. Because outside the nearby window (its glass grown beige with a sticky film of nicotine) is what seems like the world’s tallest cornfield.

Wait, there are kids walking among those crops? Do they have eyes in their hands?

I know a few things in this instant. One, I can try to read these stories all day and they’re not going to make sense to me. Not yet. But one day they will, and I absolutely cannot wait for that day. I’d give up candy for a month, maybe a year to be able to understand them right now. For now, all I can do is stare at that cover, and the table of contents, imagining what kind of wild ideas must exist in those stories.

One thing I don’t know yet, and won’t know until at least a few years later: This is the moment I became a writer. Those stories I was coming up with in my mind to fill the void of not being able to read…they weren’t great, but they weren’t bad either. They kept me entertained, even gave me bad dreams. And when my mom left for the night shift that night, I didn’t ask her about the hand with the eyes.

I was pretty sure she’d laugh and tell me that stuff never happened.

That was just fine. I already liked my version better.

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And so what about you, ya maniac? What was the moment that inspired you to become who you are today? (Bonus points if it turned you into someone who taps a keyboard for a living, of course. Heh heh…)  Hit us up in the comments section on the blog. Don’t be shy. After all, your hand is staring at that mouse, unblinking, and it’s itching to click… 

Waiting for the Sun

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The Schube: Someone recently asked me how I find the energy to get up at 4:30 a.m. to write my own stuff nearly every day, before heading to work for 8 hours — where I also write all day.

It’s easy: I’m a writer.

I believe in the power of words and stories. Even when I’m exhausted, my fingers still itch for the keyboard. David Copperfield and David Blaine fascinate me, but they’ve got nothing on the magic of a few words woven together well.

Words can sell the worst product. They can bring together cultures. They can save a life. They saved mine.

I believe in the importance of learning all the rules of good form, grammar, narrative and style.

And then knowing when to break them.

I believe writing is a combination of painting with letters and photographing a moment with a lens wide enough to capture every supernova, each star across the myriad of galaxies, yet sharp enough to focus on the depth of the black hole in the iris of a sparrow.

Sometimes it takes a poetic line to get the job done. Other times that’s too much. A few simple words are often more than enough to give people hope, or drive them mad. Consider:

I love you.

God.

Life in prison.

He’s dead.

The power of a story can come when you least expect it, a gift so sincere and bittersweet that it strikes you as if fired from a gun with roses for bullets.

Hemingway wrote a story only six words long: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Words and stories can also be elusive. On the worst days for a writer, a blank page is a mirror that reflects the world’s most embarrassing face. But on the best days, filling that page is like creating a mask of yourself that thousands of people will want to wear.

So it’s vital to stick it out, to seek out the story. To keep getting the words down, one letter a time.

Without myths, metaphors, similes, themes and morals, life is chaos with no theory. It’s proportion without divinity. A golden mean worth less than copper.

I’m a writer. The stories I tell aren’t always true, but they’re always honest.

And yes, 4:30 a.m. often comes all too early. But sometimes the muse runs late. I want to make sure I’m ready when it arrives.