Hemingway Lives: the Super-Secret, Never-Before-Published Blogs of Ernest Hemingway

PART I

WINNER TAKE NOTHING

So you found your way to my blog. I knew you would because blogging is like death and any man's story if told well enough eventually ends up in his blog whether you like it or not. In that way blogs are much like death but the Hemingway Blog is live. And it is here and so are you and there is nothing we can do about that but carry on.

Across the Suburbs & Into the Express Lane at Vons

Iwas deep in the rear advance of the long line at the Express Lane at the Vons in the low brown hills on the outskirts of town. You couldn't say it was in town because it was a suburb, but we didn't know that when we lease-optioned the condo and it felt like a town to me. Maybe that's what a suburb did.

I had driven my hunter green Sports Utility Vehicle there to hunt for some milk of the lower fat variety, some swordfish, and a stuffed dog. I knew it would be dangerous during the running of the commuters, but I had been a member of the elite Vons Club for some time so I had lost the fear. I had tried to find it at the lost and found but all they had there was a generation. Someone said it was perdue but maybe he was just chicken. It was tough to know and maybe I was not tender enough to understand.

As the front lines advanced I executed a simple veronica and just missed the charge of a soccer mom and her troops. When I saw the National Enquirer I knew my time was near. The Enquirer was like death. You tried not to think about it but it was always there waiting for you right above the Spearmint Tic-Tacs and the Chapsticks of various flavors and there was not a thing you could do about it. You might find out that Elvis was seen at La Rotonde or even that they had discovered Hemingway's Things To Do Lists and would publish them in the spring. That's how it was in the Express Lane in suburbia, only we did not know it was any different than anywhere else. Maybe suburbia was what we had instead of God.

I finished off a fiasco of Valpolicella and reached into the J. Crew safari coat I wore on Fridays of the casual sort and retrieved my Vons Club Card. It was red but a lesser red than that of the Communists. It was a bit like the color of blood but without the politics. Once you had spilled blood and seen it spent on the ground of fascism, you found out that blood was all the same and all men had some right up until they didn't and then it was too late to even think about politics, no matter what card you carried with you in your safari coat.

I counted my items again. There were three and it made me think of the number of serial ports on my Toshiba laptop. I had heard some men had three but that was probably in the city. In those times you couldn't get into the city anyway because the Nationalists were occupying it. In the suburbs you really only needed two, or at least that's what we told ourselves then.

I tried not to notice the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition until I remembered that my wife was at Pilates. The model was blonde. The Swedes were very popular in those days. Beside her picture was a story about Robert Cohn fighting for the over-45 middleweight championship at the Y. I was not much impressed by that as a title but from the look on his face you could tell it was important to him. I was wondering if I had seen the girl of the cover on Real Housewives of Orange County or maybe during happy hour at Harry's Bar & American Grill. It could have been the Kardashians but I had not kept up.

When my turn came I was all alone on a small rise at the front facing the cold, hard stare of the young checkout girl in a uniform of the same color as the Italians. It was light grey on dark grey on medium-dark-grey that was almost black. The colors in that uniform were like life, all resting with unhappiness between black and white so that there was not a thing in that picture that a man could be certain of. About fifty different shades of grey stared back at me and like the bondage of life it hurt, but in a way that was good and also true, so there was the possibility that maybe I was a masochist and had asked for it without knowing. Anyway, whatever uniform the Italians wore, when they took them off they were damned fine chaps, but I was not sure if it was politically correct to say so anymore, not there beneath that clear and hard fluorescent light in August.

I placed the milk of the lower fat variety, all two-and-a-half pounds of free-range fresh-caught Gulf Stream swordfish, and also the stuffed dog on the swift moving blackness of the conveyor belt that would have reminded me of the trout streams of the Irati if my wife had not decided to take the kids to Disney World instead of Spain last year. Disney World was like Le Select, it was swell and good, but not Spain. Most places weren't. The senorita of the checkout had to call for a price check on the stuffed dog and it was something like the road to hell.

Is that all? she said, in that manner some checkout girls with the rank of Assistant Manager will use. It was a kind of dialect but I understood.

Isn't it pretty to think so, my little rabbit?

I was pleased not to have left the stuffed dog unbought. It could mean the world to you.

Paper or plastic?

It was a question I hated because I never knew how you were supposed to answer. My wife always knew, but her cell phone would be turned off for the quiet fight of the tense muscles in Pilates. For a moment I felt the weight of the whole environment on my shoulders and it was maybe the toughest thing I ever did.

"Nada. Nada y nada y pues nada," I said, as I pulled my debit card through the machine and walked out the automatic sliding doors into the warm suburban air without even waiting for my receipt. I felt some remorse about leaving the receipt with its redeemable coupons behind, but it was a casualty of the battle that you had to pay to win the war.

I knew that there would be other purchases and other opportunities to wrestle with weighty environmental value decisions, but that day I was sure that I was a man who knew how to shop.

There is never any end to suburbia and the memory of each person who lives there differs from that of any other. Or it is just the same. If you have never lived in suburbia, it was a thing you could not understand. I would ask my wife after the Pilates. She would know. Maybe I could text her.

At Noon the Bell Tolls

The Fourth Grade is Very Hard But So is Tetherball

In the spring of that year, Mrs. Pilar’s Social Studies class was still going on. We did not much like to attend it, but sometimes Social Studies is like war and attendance is mandatory whether you like it or not.

I was sitting in the back row near the large window so that I could see everything and also protect the rear flanks. It is not an easy thing to sit in the back row of a Social Studies class where you can look out the window and see the wind stirring the leaves of the trees and the tall green grasses of the playground, but still someone has to do it. From where I sat I could also see the hard gray steel of the monkey-bars and the brown wood of the teeter-totter. I had heard that in some places they called it a seesaw but one could not be sure about that.

I did not care much for the class as a thing in itself, but I knew that I was fortunate that the seating assignments were no longer alphabetical and I could sit near the window and think about these other pleasant and good things outside in the playground. I had mastered the alphabet some years before and now I did not have to follow all of its rules any longer. That was one of the very good things about the fourth grade.

Outside I could see the tetherball stirring in the breeze, lightly banging against the hard silver-colored pole. Like me, it had nowhere else to go. The tetherball, I thought, was much like myself in Social Studies class. It did not wish to be there, but it was attached and could not escape. All of us were tied to something whether we wished for it to be that way or not. There was not much that you could do about it in the long year of the fourth grade, not that I could see, anyway.

Sometimes when you are young that is the way of things. I imagined that it might also be like that when you are not young, but in the fourth grade I did not know yet.

There were still quite a few things I did not know then but not too many.

I had a B+ in clear red marker at the top of my last pop quiz to prove it to anyone who did not believe. If you are lucky enough to get a B+ when you are young man, that is something that stays with you forever.

Robert Cohn sat in front of me in Social Studies. He had once been the tetherball champion of Oak Park Elementary’s grade three, but that had been a very long time ago. Do not think I am much impressed by that as a title, but it meant a lot to Cohn who cared very much about such things. But his glory, like his youth, was but a memory.

Cohn, tetherball challenge at recess, I said, "mano-a-mano." It was a theme of mine. He did not answer. Perhaps he had the fear, like a bullfighter past his prime.

While I stared at the quiet back of his head, all I could hear was Mrs. Pilar in the front of the class talking about politics and the Spanish Civil War. If you sit in a Social Studies class long enough you learn that everything is politics. The fourth grade is very young to learn such a lesson, but you find out soon enough that it is a true lesson whether you like it or not.

It was hard to look out the window at the playground when recess was so very far away, so I looked at the bulletin board where there were pictures of zebras and wildebeest that made you think about Africa. The problem was that Africa was like lunchtime and recess. It was very far away and there was not a thing you could do about it no matter how hard you tried. I had a great hunger for recess because I was a fourth-grader of much appetite. I often believed that my appetites were as great as those of a sixth-grader.

That’s when I heard a loud grumble that sounded something like I imagined artillery fire would sound. It was my stomach. I hoped you could not hear it up at the front.

I had gotten up very early that morning to work on a composition and had missed morning chow. I had hunted in the cupboard for the tiger that graced the box of Frosted Flakes, but he was nowhere to be