A new novel

I started a new novel last Monday, June 1. Today I completed the eleventh chapter and am about 9000 words in.

This is the first time I have tried to write without an outline, but I felt I was ready. After seven novels, seven novellas, and sixteen screenplays, I think I have the basic moves of plot in my soul.

My approach is to present physical experiences and thoughts, but to leave it to the reader, to the greatest extent I can, to interpret the story.

An encouraging thing I have met in each chapter is having a little idea of what should happen in the chapter, and then the whole things just unfolds as I write.

The novel is set in my California home town, Redwood City, in 1970.

Here is chapter one.

i

Outside, the air was cool against his face and arms, the coastal overcast that lasted till mid-morning. The olive-green canvas Army surplus pack with its canvas straps and metal tips held the heavy texts he hoped to sell back.

In the garage, he turned the combination dial left past zero to 27—he usually prepped the dial with only the final number to go, unless someone was watching—and helped the shackle pop open. He pulled on the blue plastic-covered chain so it freed the front wheel from the frame and then pulled the chain through frame and the spokes of the rear wheel of his white Gitane. He wrapped the chain tight around the seat post, and locked it. Then he dialed the first two numbers of the combination so he could unlock it quickly, if necessary. You never know when you will have to get away quickly. You could always cup your hand around the lock, as if you were just holding it that way, not hiding the dial. But if some people saw you did it that way, they could tell you were afraid.

Courage was a virtue, Sr. Joseph said. It was funny how some sisters took men’s names. When he asked her her real name in second grade, she said her real name was Joseph now.

He mounted the front wheel to the front fork, seated it, rotated the quick-release paddle back half a revolution, then pressed closed the paddle with his thumb. He lifted the front of the ten speed a few inches off the ground and spun the wheel to see if it rotated true. It did. He squeezed the front brake lever, and the center-pull brakes instantly arrested the wheel.

Then he walked the bike through the garage side door, across the little cracked concrete patio, testing the rear brake once, creating a tiny skid, then up the driveway to the Beech Street. sidewalk.

He slid his left Converse into the toe clip, pushed off with his right leg, and then swung his right leg over the frame.

He had left the Gitane Interclub on the large front chain ring and the middle back cog. It took three revolutions, the first one a hard pump, to make it to the corner, where he turned toward downtown. He got on Hilton from the sidewalk down the next-door neighbor’s driveway. Three blocks of easy pedaling to Maple, then three to Middlefield Road, then right on Middlefield, passing the City Hall and Public Library on the right (he’d maybe go there after to look at Yosemite) and the fire station and police station on the left. Then with the green, west on Jefferson, after waiting for the south-bound commuter train to pass and crossing the bumpy railroad tracks and waiting for the green light on El Camino Real.

Jefferson ran pretty straight and flat toward the mountains past the Salvation Army, John Gill School (kids called it John Hill), and Community Park. There was public pool there where teenage girls swam in swimsuits and bikinis on summer afternoons. Some guy passed him with his side windows open and yelled something. Lenny didn’t know what but figured it was queer or faggot. Serious racers wore tight black shorts, but he was wearing long Levi cords, the right cuff clipped with a clothes pin so he wouldn’t get grease on them or worse get the cuff caught in the chain.

After a mile and a half he waited at the light at Alameda do las Pulgas. To the left the Alameda ascended—Nancy Close lived up there—he knew which house because he had looked up the address and ridden by it and had the house number and phone number memorized but had not called her.

Whenever he had to stop—when there was too much traffic to run a red, or if a cop might be nearby—he shifted gears back to what he thought of as neutral (large front chain ring/large rear cog). He held himself usually by his right foot on the ground. The 60 cm. frame was really too large for him—the guy at Menlo Cyclery even said so—but that’s what Greg Close, a just-graduated senior rode, and the pack was the kind of pack Greg wore, and he wore it the way Greg did with the straps fully extended. He knew Greg first and then discovered Nancy from him. She would be a junior next year. They said you were in the next grade as soon as you passed the last one but you weren’t, not till the first day. You might as well say he was a college freshmen, but he was sixteen, taking two junior college classes for high school credit so he could graduate high school in only three years. A guy had told Lenny this—all you had to do was talk to your counselor to set it up. Everything at Sequoia was bullshit (everything everywhere was), so why not get out as soon as possible?

The hard riding began a few blocks after the Alameda —the six-hundred-foot elevation gain: Jefferson then Farm Hill—almost all uphill with few level breaks.

Starting again, he moved the right down-tube shifter lever down and heard the chain clicking and the pedaling get easier, and then moved the left-side shifter down to reach the smaller, inner chain ring. As the incline began, he could only go a few blocks pedaling normally, then slower and slower until he had to stand on the pedals and pump, weight shifting side to side.

The breeze cooled the sweat on his face, but his back began to feel clammy under the pack.

Then the last and toughest. After a somewhat level stretch, the long, steep curving pitch rose forever—as steep as any hill in San Francisco—and you had to keep going because people couldn’t see you walking a bike up a hill like a wimp. Finally, his heart pounding and breath gasping, he crested the saddle at the entrance to Cañada, where the riding was suddenly easy for about ten seconds, then the whole ordeal again up the even steeper one-way loop to the toppest point, then an easy, cooling coast down to where the drive intersected the two halves of the campus. His pounding heart slowed, breathing getting easier.

He steered right and dismounted, walked the bike past the music building. Now the mountain range was so close. You could make out the individual redwood trees on Skyline.

He reached where his U.S. Government class met. Straight guys and hippy-types, button down shirts and peace signs, a woman in a mini-skirt and cowboy boots, Styrofoam cups and the faint drift of dope.

He locked up his bike around a light post, after removing the front wheel, and went into the classroom—it had an outside door—to take the final.