Dave's Anatomy #118: My History as a Writer: “The Girl Who Was Like Ruby Tuesday."

The song “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones always intrigued me. The Rolling Stones were known for high-energy bluesy songs. “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” were signature hits, but “Ruby Tuesday,” a song about an enigmatic girl with a unique philosophy of life, was slow and lyrical. You heard piano, bowed bass, and odd, haunting recorder that almost sounded like a human voice (played by Brian Jones). Those instruments, along with Charlie Watts’ drumming and Mick Jagger’s vocal, made the song as mysterious as the focus of the song, the woman with the odd name.

Many years later, when I was teaching about social commentary in popular music, one of the songs we examined in class was “Ruby Tuesday.” We talked about the personality of the main character of the song and her philosophy of life. This got me to thinking about what the projected character represented. What would such a woman, if one met her in real life, be like. 

Various stories exist about the composition of the song. Keith Richards claims to have written the music and lyrics (usually Jagger wrote the lyrics). Marianne Faithful, however, said that Brian Jones came up with the original tune and lyrics and Richards helped him complete the song. The inspiration for the number was said to be Linda Keith, a groupie girl Richards knew. I decide to take the idea into the realm of fiction.

The story takes place in 1969. Belinda Palmer and Clinton Pierce meet at a pot party which is busted by the police. They flee. Belinda helps Clinton get away. After the danger of arrest has passed, they talk. She says she lives in a small apartment and is a musician. Clinton is house-sitting for an uncle who owns a lake-side condo that has a piano. He asks Belinda to come to his place. She agrees. She ends up living with him there. 

She is enigmatic. This dialogue, early in the story, expresses as much:

“ … Do you work?”

“Sort of. I live with guys. They pay me.”

“You’re a hooker?” this came out of his mouth before he could stop it. He blushed. She did not look offended, though he hoped she would smile to assure him of as much.

“I guess I could be. I don’t like working regular jobs. Living with guys gives me time to do what I liked to do.”

“Which is?”

“Music. I love to play music.” 

Over the summer, their relationship develops. Belinda’s behavior, her reading habits, her philosophy on how to live, her tastes in music, the pronouncements she makes puzzle and delight Clinton. She challenges the things he has been taught about responsibility, goals, and vision.  

Clinton works at a country club as a golf caddie. When he invites Belinda eat with him at the restaurant, they encounter a man he knows just slightly, Raymond Miller, who begins to berate Belinda. Their argument escalates. He slaps her. He and Clinton get into a scuffle, though the staff at the country club and diners at the café break it up quickly. 

Miller is wealthy and a longstanding member of the country club. The owner tells Clinton he needs to take a few days off. Belinda, though, gets a lawyer and files a lawsuit against Miller, who caught Belinda and his daughter smoking a joint once and, like the father of the boy who commits suicide in Dead Poets Society, tries to assuage his guilt for his failure to relate to his daughter by blaming Belinda for the heavy drug use she engages in. Soon he learns he is out of job. Miller continues to use his influence to harass Clinton. Not wanting the bad publicly, he settles out of court with Belinda, paying her considerable amount of money. Clinton, though is out of a job. He works as a waiter in a local restaurant. Even there, Miller uses his clout in the city make Clinton’s life miserable. 

Clinton’s old girlfriend, Betsy, asks him how much he knows about Belinda. When he says he doesn’t know a great deal, she chimes in: “She’s a drop-out. Did you know that? I mean, she graduated from high school but she ran track in school and was in the dance troupe; music too and she was good—sang in the choir and played piano for us sometimes. Then she just quit all that and started doing weird stuff.” 

He remains loyal and begins to fall in love. But Belinda decides to use the money she received in the settlement to go on and follow her dreams. Clinton tries to dissuade her, but nothing works. Though she says she loves him, she goes her way. 

He later hears the song by the Rolling Stones and wonders if she too heard it and tried to live like the girl mentioned in the lyrics. He does not hear from her again. When the internet comes on the scene, he tries to find her with a net search, but to avail. Clinton marries Betsy, goes into business, accrues wealth, has a family. Yet he still thinks of Belinda—especially when he hears

                                                Good-bye. Ruby Tuesday.

                                                Who could hang a name on you,

                                                When you change with every new day?

                                                Still, I’m gonna miss you. 

“The Girl Who Was Like Ruby Tuesday” appeared in Wild Violet. You can read it here.

I am excited about the release of my newest novella, In the Court of the Sovereign King. Vaguely based on the mythic construction in the old King Crimson song, “The Court of the Crimson King,” it is a story of intrigue, struggle for power, and the eventual triumph of virtue and of ethical discipline over rapacious power.  Get a copy here.

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, and happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #49: "Judy in Disguise"

 I am a musician. I play guitar and perform locally, doing blues and Celtic. I am also a writer who writes stories about music. But there are often misconceptions and misunderstandings of songs. Urban legends build up about them. Most everyone has heard that Peter, Paul and Mary's hit song, "Puff, the Magic Dragon," is about smoking marijuana. I mean, after all, the Dragon's name is Puff, and the little boy in the song is "Jackie Paper." I remember a friend telling me the group was "stoned on marijuana," when they wrote it. Turns out, they did not write the lyrics at all. They were written by a Cornell University student named Leonard Lipton and based on a poem by Ogden Nash titled "Custard the Dragon." It had nothing to do with marijuana.

The number that inspired my story "Judy in Disguise" had a similar history of misinterpretation. I had read that it was a song about college students being recruited by the FBI to spy on radical campus organizations. The lyrics seemed to suggest as much:

Judy in disguise, well, that's what you are
                                                Lemonade pie with a brand new car
                                                Cantaloupe eyes, come to me tonight
                                                Judy in disguise with glasses

The girl in the song is "in disguise," she has a brand new car. She is working for the FBI and they are paying her so she's bought a new car. The only trouble, this is not what the song is about. It was written as a sort of non-sense song. John Fred, the main author, said he was in the shower, heard the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," and thought it was "Judy in disguise with diamonds." When he learned the right lyrics, he wrote a song based on his misinterpretation. It was a hit—but, alas, what are called "novelty songs" usually make groups into one-hit wonders (e.g., "What the Fox Said") and so it was with John Fred and the Playboy Band, which was too bad because they were good musicians. But the bogus interpretation persisted and led me to write a story about the song.

Samuel Blachoviac, the main character, has been on the run ever since he became involved in radical politics during his student days in the 1960s. In the course of his adventures, he comes across Julissa Mason. In their students days they had dated, done drugs together, practiced "free love," and argued politics. She was conservative and did not buy his radical mindset; from a poor home, she did not romanticise the poor or poverty and wanted to get free of it by graduating to a high-paying job. She did not believe in revolution.

When Fiona, one of Samuel's radical friends, tells Julissa of their plot to burn down the ROTC building, she tells the police. Fiona, Tom (another radical friend) and Samuel move the date up and are able to burn the building, but Samuel's two friends are apprehended and he becomes a fugitive. When two cops corner him in Texas, he throws a hand grenade an SDS radical gave him to scare them away and ends up killing them both.

Julissa

He spends the next forty years of his life running and hiding, moving from place to place and from job to job. When he lands a job in Indiana, he sees a picture of Julissa in the newspaper. She runs a business in a near-by city. He resolves to kill her for ruining his life and the lives of Fiona and Tom, both of whom had come to bad ends and died young as a result of being arrested and imprisoned. 

He locates Julissa, tells her why he is going to kill her, and points a gun at her but never gets to fire it. With a lightning move, she knocks him out. He wakes up handcuffed. The police are present to take him away. It turns out Julissa liked working for the FBI so much she eventually became an agent. Finding him had been a lifelong project and, after all these years, she had got a tip on him, set up the business as a trap to make him come after her, and finally got her man. In the last scene, he is hauled off in a police car. The radio is not playing "Judy in Disguise," but he knows that soon, somewhere, he will eventually hear it.

The story was published in Issue #2 of Bête Noire, a journal which is still being published. An editor from another journal who rejected it said it was too predictable. Obviously, not everyone thought so, but I would agree it is not one of my very best stories. Still, it appealed enough to get in print. You can read it and decide on its quality for yourself. It is only available in print, no online copies, but you can still buy the journal for some excellent reading, "Judy in Disguise"

Songs, even if they are misinterpreted, and sometimes because they are, make for great narrative tales.

I would love to hear your comments and receive your feedback. Have you ever misinterpreted a song and gone for years and years thinking the lyrics said this when actually they said that? I had a friend who thought "Strawberry Fields Forever" was "Strawberry Beatles Florescent." 

This month I am promoting my novella Le Cafe de la Mort. Coffee to Die for served up by the Angel of Death. But even Angels get in trouble. When they do, who will rescue them? It will take an Orpheus to get one out of hell, but if you love her enough, you're willing to undertake the journey.

Happy Reading!

Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer, #8: The Ghost of Christmas Present, or Taking Ideas from Famous Stories

After I published five stories in a row about my ongoing character, musician Sossity Chandler, I decided I needed to do something else. Ongoing characters are common. W. Somerset Maugham wrote several stories about Ashendon, a British spy. Not many people know that Mark Twain wrote two novels about Tom Sawyer after the publication of the initial book on him. Other authors have done the same, but I thought maybe I ought to branch out a little bit lest I get caught in a rut.

The Christmas holidays were approaching. Christmas is many things, but to those who read a lot it is also Dickens' famous novella, A Christmas Carol. Soon I had an idea for a new story.

Doing a spin-off story was nothing new for me. I said in an earlier blog that the first story I published, "The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake," was modeled on a Henry James story, "The Aspern Papers." But this would be a little different. It would reference a well-known piece of literature. It would continue the creative "conversation" on the piece. I had seen some spins on the story. The made-for-TV movie An American Christmas Carol set the story in the USA during the Great Depression. Everyone from Mickey Mouse to Mr. Magoo to the Muppets had been included in versions of the story. This story, however, would employ elements from the Dickens ghost tale and go off in a different direction from the original.

Doing this sort of thing is an old tradition. I often 

hear people talking about how Shakespeare "stole" all his plot lines from other authors. I once heard a poet tell about how William Wordsworth "stole" the idea for the poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" from his sister, Dorothy.  But the idea that every story must be original is a relatively new development. In the past, authors took elements from other stories, used plots, tropes, characters, and ideas freely. And even modern writers do. My favorite story, W. Somerset Maugham's "Mr. Know-All," borrows plot from "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant. Examples could be multiplied. But if you're going to communicate with an existing 

work of literature (I like this term better than "steal"), 

you'd better do it with a little bit of skill.

The story, "The Ghost of Christmas Present," appeared in a British magazine called Neonbeam (no longer published). It is about a lonely, down-and-out guy, Jerry, who receives a visitor on Christmas night. The young lady says she has no place to go. He assumes she is homeless. She is dressed retro (1960s) and doesn't know what a computer or bottled water is. Finally, she confesses that she is a ghost.

He looks up her story and finds out she was murdered after a rock concert some time back. Once it is established she is a ghosts, she quips, "I guess I could be the Ghost of Christmas Present."  He remembers how as a child he had thought this meant "present" as in "gift" and that the ghost brought people Christmas presents. Jerry goes to bed that night thinking he can't even score with a ghost girl and this Christmas will be like the others in his adult life:  lonely and disappointing. In the middle of the night, however, the girl materializes in his bed. She informs him that from midnight to about 3 a.m., ghosts have bodies and the two of them make love. She also tells him why she is a ghost. Pretty and sought-after in life, she led many young men on. One ended up committing suicide after she dumped him and, when she is later murdered, she can't go to her rest. Being with Jerry makes her realize that to "go on" she will have to do good. The good is showing him love, giving of herself, and then being willing to face the consequences (whatever they are) when she goes on to her reward.

Shakespeare also informs the story. She haunted the theater where the concert after which she was murdered was held. But when a church rented the place for a Christmas celebration, she was driven out and had to flee. At the beginning of Hamlet, when Horatio and his friends are speculating on whether or not they've really seen a ghost, one comments,

                                       Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
                                    Wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated,
                                    The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
                                    And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
                                    The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
                                    No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
                                    So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

Something about Christmas and ghosts doesn't jive. So the girl, whose name is Bari, is driven away and has to seek refuge in Jerry's house. Here is another instance of "stealing." But for writers, using other texts is par for the course.

Bari is able to go on—though she's not sure 

what awaits her later in the afterlife—because 

she has done good and shown love to someone. In the morning, Jerry gets a call from the only girl he ever dated inviting him to spend Christmas day with her. The Ghost of Christmas Present has indeed brought him a gift—the gift he wanted most of all.

Stories that reference familiar works of literature are risky. The author has to walk a fine line, not borrowing too much from the story, not crassly appropriating another author's content, but making, in a sense, a commentary on the possibilities an existing story opens up. "All books speaks of other books, and every author tells a story that has already been told," novelist and critic Umberto Eco once wrote. Stories have already been told, but they lead to innumerable tales that can proceed from the original. "The Ghost of Christmas Present" was like this. There have been other "takes" in my writing career. Appropriating ideas from well-known literary works, revising them, and recasting them is a great exercise for any writer to do.

Take a look at my newest book, Mother Hulda, a science fiction story based on a tale by the Brothers Grimm. 

Check out my Writer's Page for more titles. 

Comments are always welcome!