During the school year, I’m a crossing guard — an hour in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon — and twice every weekday I walk to and from my corner, which adds up to five miles, more when I swung by Coyote Coffee to sit outside and schmooze with the regulars.
Now it’s summer and I’m off, along with the students and teachers, and I also have this nerve pain in my left leg — sciatica, I think — so I’m cutting back on my walking, and instead I’m bicycling to libraries or coffee shops with my laptop. I’m retired, but busy — I have a couple of paid gigs, like designing a book about “dying gladly” by a man who’s dying. And I’m writing, in fits and starts, the last two chapters of my comic novel about the houseboat wars in Sausalito, tentatively titled Showdown in Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery True Story.
(The novel is based on a play I wrote and directed this past spring for our local community theater troupe — Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, which you can see here. Or scroll to the bottom of this post.)
Which brings me to “Ted Lasso” and the two audiobooks I’ve recently listened to — Grapes of Wrath and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The paid gigs, the novel I’m struggling to finish, the shows I’m watching, and the books I’m listening to — these things have converged by accident, not by design.
The theme of June so far seems to be “the end.” End of the school year. End of life. End of a TV series. End of books.
I know I’m late to unpack the final season of “Ted Lasso,” which, if you’ve recently crawled out of hibernation, is a popular streaming TV series about an American college football coach hired to coach a professional soccer team in England, even though he has no soccer experience. The team owner, Rebecca Walton, hires him because she hopes to sabotage the team, which used to be owned by her ex-husband, but Ted, who is goofy and cheesy and overly optimistic, turns out to be a successful coach.
The third and allegedly last season recently ended, and I was in tears during the final few episodes. In a good way. It was schmaltzy, to be sure, and the writers trotted out plenty of well-worn tropes, but it was also laugh-out-loud funny and touching in a way that didn’t feel manipulative.
What I appreciated about the “Ted Lasso” ending was how, over the last several episodes, we see the end of a journey for so many of the characters, even minor ones. Like Nate, the underdog former kit man turned boy genius coach turned villain. He quits his high-profile West Ham coaching gig because it turns out he has principles after all.
There were some touches I very much liked in the series, like the “Diamond Dogs,” an impromptu men’s group that Ted and several others convene in their office as necessary to discuss intimate issues like relationships. In the last episode, the sneering, always-swearing, tough-guy coach, Roy Kent, who has previously left the room whenever the Diamond Dogs gathered, says he wants in.
The last episode follows the usual sports story formula, with the team winning a pivotal game, but “Ted Lasso” manages to scratch that itch, without buying into the idea that winning it all is the only honorable end.
The mania that a team can stir up is real and it was fun to watch the watchers of that last game, like Sharon, the former team therapist, jumping up and down on her bed, and Ted’s son and ex-wife, watching from their couch in Kansas City, lumps in their throats.
Which brings me to Grapes of Wrath, which I read fifty years ago and barely remember. But I remember the ending, which was shocking then and still shocking now.
Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family as they leave their drought-stricken, dust-bowl, bank-repossessed farm in Oklahoma, during the Depression, and head to California, where they hear there’s plenty of work and you can pick oranges to eat right off the trees. Of course, when they arrive, there are more workers than jobs, the wages are low, and the farm bosses are cruel. The migrants set up camps along creek beds in little Hoovervilles, and struggle to make enough to feed their families.
As the book draws to a close, Tom Joad, the prodigal son who starts the book returning to his family’s abandoned farm after a stint in jail for killing a man, has gotten himself into trouble again and is hiding from the police. The rest of the family has worked a few days here and there and now there’s no more work and winter’s coming and the rain falls for days and the camp is flooding. Meanwhile Tom’s younger sister, Rose of Sharon, who is pregnant, whose husband has recently abandoned her, delivers a stillborn baby in the migrant camp. The floodwaters keep rising and Ma Joad is determined to get the weak Rose of Sharon to higher ground. They find a barn that’s dry, and inside meet a young man and his starving father. The father has been giving what little food he has to his son and now he’s dying. At Ma Joad’s urging, Rose of Sharon feeds the dying man her breast milk. That’s how it ends. She pulls his head to her breast and smiles.
But there’s no resolution to the rest of the story. None of the main characters’ journeys are tied up. We don’t know how the family will eat or find work or what they salvage from the flooding, or what will happen to Tom, who is on the lam from the law.
Amidst this bleakness, however, there is this glimmer of hope, in Rose of Sharon’s act of kindness, saving the man’s life with her milk. It’s an affirmation of the human spirit.
I’d forgotten how strident and outspoken John Steinbeck was about the oppressors and the oppressed, the evil capitalists and humble and virtuous Okies like the Joad family. Some say he oversimplifies and paints the world in black and white, and maybe so, but there’s plenty of truth in his words and he tells a memorable and almost mythological story. Highly recommended.
I listened to Grapes of Wrath in two spurts, because my library audiobook loan period ended when I was three-quarters of the way through and I couldn’t renew it because another patron had it on hold.
Looking for another audiobook, I stumbled on On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, an achingly poignant 2019 autobiographical novel by Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong. It could not be more different than Grapes of Wrath, except that, coincidentally, the protagonist, “Little Dog,” was briefly a migrant farm worker — picking tobacco as a teenager in Connecticut.
The novel is a letter from Little Dog to his illiterate mother, who left Vietnam when he was a baby, with her mother, who had survived as a prostitute during the Vietnam War. It’s poetic and nonlinear, occasionally difficult to follow, but brutally honest, emotionally powerful, and dazzlingly written. Little Dog recounts how he is treated abusively by his traumatized mother, who works in a nail salon, and discovers he is gay as a teenager when he works on the tobacco farm and meets a young white man, Trevor, whose grandfather is the owner.
Vuong jumps back and forth from the nail salon to the tobacco barn to the apartment in Hartford where he lives with his mother and grandmother, to the bar in Vietnam where his grandmother meets an American soldier. Often, because I was listening instead of reading, I lost track of where we were.
This book also does not end as much as stops, after Little Dog’s grandmother Lan dies and he accompanies his mother back to Vietnam to bury Lan’s ashes. That night, Little Dog wakes and goes outside to see music and dancing in the streets, and remembers a conversation with his mother, and how she laughs, but he doesn’t remember why.
Like Grapes of Wrath, there’s plenty of tragedy, and the book doesn’t ends with a plot climax, but more of an emotional epiphany.
Listening to these books, mostly while walking, created an immersiveness that was almost more intimate than reading. Ocean Vuong narrates his own book, and does a admirable job, though not like the virtuoso narration of Grapes of Wrath, by Dylan Baker, who delineates the many characters’ voices masterfully.
(By the way, I still read books, print and digital, but lately, the only books I’m reading are about writing. About endings, in particular.)
This brings me, finally, to my own unfinished novel and since I’ve written more than 1,500 words here already, I’ll keep it brief.
Here’s my synopsis of the story: Hippie squatter houseboaters resist greedy developers. Then someone gets stabbed. The story is made up, but based on true events from the late 1970s, a few miles from where I now live.
I’m struggling with my ending now, and while I’m aiming for the “Ted Lasso” wrap-up, I can’t stop longing for an ending like Grapes of Wrath, something readers might remember fifty years later, like I did.
There are only so many kinds of endings, though endless variations. There’s the happily-ever-after ending common to romances, where everything is resolved. There are the unresolved or ambiguous endings, where the reader can only speculate about what happens next. Like Grapes of Wrath. There are the unexpected endings, the gut-punches, which often rely on a plot twist, and I love those, especially when they surprise me and at the same time seem inevitable. But it’s daunting to come up with a twist that’s new and fresh.
There are also endings that circle back to the beginning. Like when the last line is something like, “so I wrote it all down so everyone would know.” I enjoy those too, but as with the twists, it’s hard to avoid sounding stale. In On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Little Dog circles back to the beginning. With memories, laughter, and celebration.
Most mysteries end with the identification of the killer, but I’ve made my life more difficult by telling two overlapping stories — the showdown over the shantytown houseboats and the murder that comes out of that fight. I could end once the police chief baits and traps the murderer, but there are other stories I want to resolve.
Then there are epilogues, which show the reader where the character(s) end up, months later, even years later. It might be a brief scene, or, like in some movies, there’s a list of characters and where they ended up, who they married, when they died.
My three previous novels ended with epilogues, which were several pages and jumped months ahead and tied up a few loose ends. I’m happy with them, and that was my leaning with this work-in-progress. But because I have nine characters narrating chapters from their points of view and I’d like a satisfying ending for as many of them as possible, and I want some twists, I have ended up three epilogues, which are too long and have too much action to be epilogues. They are more like “false summits” — that’s when you approach the top of the mountain peak only to find that it’s not the peak, that, oh no, there’s more steep climbing ahead. That’s not what I want readers to feel at the end.
Of course, when I do write the ending, I won’t be finished. I have to go back to the beginning and edit and rewrite the whole manuscript at least one more time before it’s ready. Which gives me plenty more time to percolate on the ending.
Here are two videos, one inspired by Grapes of Wrath — The Ghost of Tom Joad, by Bruce Springsteen — and the other the play I wrote and directed earlier this year — “Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery.”
Here are some highlights — in case you don’t have time to watch the whole thing. 🙂
Scene 3 (The Greedy Developer and the Liberal Police Chief) 7:24
Scene 4 (The Vengeful Ex-Wife Confronts the Mistress) 12:28
Scene 6 (Eviction Raid) 24:20 (includes sword fight)
Finally getting around to posting the video of Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, the play I wrote and directed earlier this spring. Watching it on the screen can’t match the energy of being there in person, but it’s still fun. Replete with a pretend pirate, a greedy developer with a maniacal laugh, his vengeful ex-wife and his hiccuping henchman, not to mention Sausalypso’s first ever woman police chief.
Here are some highlights — in case you don’t have time to watch the whole thing. 🙂
Scene 3 (The Greedy Developer and the Liberal Police Chief) 7:24
Scene 4 (The Vengeful Ex-Wife Confronts the Mistress) 12:28
Scene 6 (Eviction Raid) 24:20 (includes sword fight)
While directing my play, “Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery,” I was reading Save the Cat Writes a Novel, in which author Jessica Brody lays out the various “beats” in a novel, one of which is “All is Lost.”
Three days before Opening Night, when three cast and crew members got covid, that was how I felt. All is lost.
Every evening, I do pushups and back exercises, and on this particular evening, as I gritted my way through my routine, I sobbed quietly. How could we possibly open our show in three days with two cast members and our stage manager out? We couldn’t.
Oh, and all four shows were sold out. Which was great, except a full house without a full cast is not great.
We were going to have to cancel a show I’d been working on day and night for months, years if you count writing and rewriting the script.
I was, as I said in an email to the cast the next day, ready to impale myself on the Toys-R-Us sword from our play.
In Save the Cat, “All is Lost” is followed by “The Dark Night of the Soul,” but then, “Gathering the Team,” “Dig Down Deep,” and “Executing the Plan.”
After a brief, but necessary wallow in despair, I shifted into problem solving mode and after several calls that evening with Jeff, our technical director, and Camilla, the producer/events coordinator for the Tamalpais Community Services District, we came up with a plan to push Opening Night from March 3 to March 10, which would have been our closing weekend, and add two shows the following weekend. This created problems with the tickets, but there was no other option.
The next day, three more cast members notified me they had covid and on Saturday came our seventh. By then we had switched the show dates, canceled our in-person rehearsals, and were practicing on zoom. Crossing our fingers that enough of us would be healthy to mount the show on our new Opening Night.
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This story begins nine years ago, when I suggested to my wife that we attend the murder mystery dinner theater at our local community center in Tam Valley. In 2013, I got married and moved from Berkeley to Tam Valley, where my wife has lived for thirty years. She’d been to many events at the community center, but never the murder mystery.
We sat at one of ten round tables that seat ten and ate dinner before the show. During a break in the play, each table is asked to name a table captain and identify the suspect they believe committed the murder, and why. Later they get a chance to stand up and make their accusations.
We sat at a table with the wife of one of the actors and I talked about how I wrote and performed in a theater troupe back in the 1980s. She suggested I try out, and the rest, as they say, is history. Since then, I’ve acted in seven murder mysteries with the Tam Valley Players, and wrote and directed one six years ago.
When the pandemic began, we had just finished “Death of a Hot Sauce Salesman,” and I pitched my idea for a play set during the houseboat wars in Sausalito. I got the green light and started writing the play, not realizing how profoundly the pandemic would change our lives and how long it would be before live theater came back. The upside of the delay was that I rewrote the script many times, and kept tightening it, making it better.
The play features a greedy developer with the maniacal laugh, his vengeful ex-wife, defiant daughter, pregnant ex-mistress, and hiccupping henchman, not to mention a pretend pirate, peacemaking woman police chief, and hippie comedian. Of course, there’s a sword fight. Because, you know, pirates. Here are some photos from the rehearsals and the show. (And please note the fabulous set painting by Melodi Zaret, an artist I met playing pickleball.)
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Though the play is a farce, all made up, it is based on real events in the 1970s, when city leaders tried on multiple occasions to evict houseboaters, citing public health reasons. (You can see a compilation of news reports below — what happened in real life and what didn’t on the TCSD website.)
There were other challenges mounting the play, though they pale next to our covid crisis. When we started auditions, I feared we would not have enough people to fill the roles, but a bunch of people showed up at the last minute to try out. Once we cast the show, one actor had to drop out and I had to ask someone who had auditioned but not been cast if she would take the role.
When I got discouraged, I reminded myself, “I chose this.” No one forced this on me. Of course, I didn’t choose covid.
The cast was wonderful, not only because of their performances, but because of their positive attitude and good humor in the face of our challenges.
Over the course of the rehearsals, I wrote a lot of emails with acting notes and schedule reminders, but as we dealt with our covid issues, I started a text thread of fourteen people, and the actors had fun with it. I was concerned about how we might manage if we were not all healthy enough to perform, and because of my familiarity with the play, I was the logical understudy. Here’s one text exchange.
Our performances were not perfect, but the energy was high, there were a lot of laughs, and the audiences were loud and raucous. It was so much fun. And even more gratifying after overcoming our covid challenges.
Plus one wrinkle to our schedule change was that one of the twelve actors could not make it on the second weekend, so I had to play the part. And that was fun too.
Community theater is for the community, but it also builds community — not only the cast and crew, who are all volunteers, but the dozens of other volunteers who served dinner, painted sets, built props, and more.
Now for my next challenge — adapting the play into a novel, which is far harder than I anticipated. I started writing this novel, my fourth, after I finished the play, when the realization that it might be a long time before performing it would be possible. Progress has been slow — at one time, I had this delusion that the book would be finished and available by the time we performed the show. Not even close.
I’m not ready to jump back into writing and directing another play, but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it. What if the murder mystery were set within a theater troupe, maybe during a performance? Hmmm.
As some of you know, I’m directing a murder mystery play this winter at my local community theater — Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery. We completed auditions and casting in November and last week, we had our first table read-through with the actors. (Which was thrilling.) As I prepared the script to be printed and collated in binders, I realized I needed a cover sheet for the binders, so I whipped one together that turned out better than I expected. Since I’m also writing a novel, I thought I ‘d see how the same idea might work for my book cover.
Here it is. I continue to vacillate over the book title, though I decided, after so many suggestions/criticisms that I couldn’t ignore them, to use “Sausalito,” the real name of the city, in the title, instead of my fictionalized “Sausalypso,” but I’m still brainstorming about the subtitle. I have many months of writing and rewriting ahead, but I feel like I’m leaning in the right direction with the cover image, which is like a triple exposure, a composite of two photos of houseboats and one of the sunrise over Richardson Bay.
I would love to hear what you think — about the image as well as the title.
In June, I hiked and hung out with my brother-in-law at his family’s off-the-grid cabin at Echo Lake, and one evening, impatient with the library book I was reading on my tablet, I scrolled through what other books I had downloaded and there was my first novel, which I finished writing nine years ago — Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher.
I started reading it and could not stop.
It was a thrilling experience, to enjoy my own book, enjoy it immensely, as if I were a reader, and not the writer.
I like to say that I write the kinds of books I enjoy reading, so I have to acknowledge that I am the target audience of my book. Which means there are plenty of readers for whom it may not sing. But that’s true of all books.
(Reminds me of what I wrote long ago in an online dating profile — ”I’m not for everyone, but if you’re looking for someone like me, I’m perfect.”)
I remembered a lot of Bones in the Wash, but there were many complications and details and snippets of dialog that I did not remember, and I found myself rooting for both of the main characters, who were working against each other.
For the billions of you who have not read it, here’s a brief synopsis: Bones in the Wash is one-half political thriller, one-half family soap, and one-half murder mystery — that’s right, a book and a half. It’s a “page-turner with a conscience” set during the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico. Ambitious Albuquerque Mayor Tomas Zamara is charged with doing “whatever it takes” to deliver the state’s five electoral votes for John McCain, which includes shutting down voter registration drives and accusing the Democrats of stealing the election, charges he knows are not true. Challenging him every step of the way is fierce, young Sierra León of the Democracy Project, who calls on him to listen to his better self and reject his party’s dirty tricks. Both protagonists, knee-deep in politics, face as many or more crises with their families and relationships.
What I was especially pleased with as I read the book was the way it weaved together Tomas’ and Sierra’s stories. How their plots collided. For example, in one chapter, we see Tomas shut down a voter registration drive in Bernalillo, creating a new obstacle for Sierra, even though, at that point in the story, he doesn’t even know who she is.
The context in which I was reading Bones is important — I’m rewriting my fourth novel, a mystery/comedy tentatively titled Showdown in Sausalito: The Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery True Story, which sounds like a Borat movie and maybe that’s the point. I am happy with the first ten chapters or so and with the overall story, but I’m struggling through the muddy middle. I’m on Chapter 21 and I wish I could just tighten and polish my first draft, but instead I have to rethink it.
There were two threads going on in my head as I raced through Bones. One was that it was damn entertaining. It was tight and well-written. So many chapters ended with a cliffhanger that made me want to keep reading, even when it was time to sleep or eat. I cared about the characters as they faced one obstacle after another and I wanted to find out how they overcame them. Or didn’t.
The second thread was that the book I’m writing now is not as strong. Aren’t we supposed to get better with experience?
But then I reminded myself that Bones had, at many points during the writing and editing process, been flabby and unfocused, and I kept making it better and most important of all, cutting what wasn’t necessary.
Another interesting, albeit depressing part of reading the book was seeing how, in 2008, the Republicans used allegations of “voter fraud” to shut down voter registration drives and challenge legitimate voters. In light of Trump’s big lie about the 2022 election being stolen and the January 6 attack on the Capitol, what happened in Bones in the Wash was on a small scale and seemed comparatively innocent. But the seeds were there.
I remember talking with one reader, from Canada, who said he loved the book, but that the voter suppression tactics and dirty tricks didn’t seem realistic. I assured him that, though they were fictionalized, all the tactics and tricks in the novel were based on real and recent events, though not necessarily in New Mexico. If he read the book today, he would not consider it unrealistic.
While writing Bones in the Wash, I had this delusion that as allegations of voter fraud were exposed as frauds themselves, as empty excuses to push new voter suppression measures, that this false narrative would die away. Instead it has grown. Even when politicians say the silent part out loud.
I underestimated the power of the big lie. (But I’m not going down that rabbit hole now.)
One more thing I was impressed by was how all the main characters, and even many minor ones, had their own journeys. They were not static one-dimensional stock characters serving only as foils. While writing, I often remind myself of Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the Tom Stoppard play about two minor characters in Hamlet, who are, in this play, the protagonists in their own life stories, as they should be. And as are the secondary characters in Bones in the Wash.
If all goes according to plan, early next year I will finish Showdown in Sausalito and then, five or ten years from now, I’ll pick it up and reread it and be as impressed and entertained as I was with Bones in the Wash. Hopefully, other readers will enjoy it as much as I do.
On January 1, the first day of the year, I wrote the words “the end” to Sausalypso, the novel I’ve been working on during the pandemic. That doesn’t mean I’m finished, but I made it to the end of the first draft and now I go back and rewrite, reorganize, and make it better.
I just recently reworked my prologue. Which is a short and sweet introduction and history of Sausalypso.
Prologue: A Short History of Sausalypso
My name is Tin Alley and if you’ve heard of me, keep in mind that I don’t consider myself a hero and I didn’t solve the murder by myself.
I was not in Sausalypso when the houseboat story started, during World War II, when Bechtel Corporation built a massive shipyard called Marinship on the shores of Rich Bay. At its peak, Marinship employed 20,000 workers, who built 93 cargo ships and oil tankers for the war in three years.
I lived in the City then, as a newly orphaned sixteen-year-old, laundering sheets and scrubbing toilets for Sally Cal, who ran a brothel on Nob Hill.
I am forever grateful to Sally for taking me in when I ran away from my foster home at fifteen, and putting me to work changing sheets and washing dishes and cleaning toilets and never once pressuring me to become a working girl. She knew better than I did that wasn’t something I would be good at. And when she instructed me, once I had graduated to greater responsibilities, to pass out envelopes of cash, I followed orders.
This was long before I became police chief in Sausalypso, the first woman police chief in California. You can look it up. Long before the houseboat wars, the murder at City Hall, and my brief brush with fame.
Workers came from all over to work at Marinship, and there wasn’t enough housing for them. The county housing authority and the feds teamed up to establish Marin City on what had been a dairy farm, and build housing for 6,000 workers. Still wasn’t enough. Many workers lived on old boats or built them from whatever materials they could scrounge.
When the war ended, Bechtel abandoned the shipyard, and a boatbuilder named Donlon Arquez bought 20-plus acres of waterfront, full of shipbuilding debris. The land was considered worthless at the time. But that changed.
Arquez dragged old boats, like decommissioned ferries, onto the mudflats and rented them to free-spirited artists and soldiers returning from the war. People built their homes on barges and rafts. Out of packing crates, railroad cars, motor homes. These floating homes — most were not true houseboats as they were not navigable — connected to land with ramshackle wooden walkways or floating docks made from plywood sitting on styrofoam.
Arques charged little or no rent, and his landlord style could be generously described as “benign neglect.” Others called it anarchy. The waterfront became home to junk collectors, artists and craftsmen, boat builders and carpenters. Then, after the Summer of Love turned dark across the bay in Haight-Ashbury, hippies and squatters arrived, seeking free love and free living. Many homes had electricity, the wires strung along posts on the piers, but not sewage hookups.
This waterfront property, known as the “Gates,” became the epicenter of Sausalypso’s development battles of the 1970s. Local officials tried to clean up the houseboat scene, and Arques was forced to sell as complaints mounted. Then the evictions started.
You might remember news anchors like Dennis Richmond or Johnny Dash reporting from the Sausalypso waterfront about the eviction raid standoff, when the houseboaters in their dinghies pushed away our police boats with long oars. Or you read about the murder at City Hall in the newspaper.
But you can’t believe everything you see on your television screen or read in your paper. I was there.
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Our performances were not perfect, but the energy was high, there were a lot of laughs, and the audiences were loud and raucous. It was so much fun. And even more gratifying after overcoming our covid challenges. 
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