The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

Imagine if in the deserts all around you,
the lost lands
where you knew you would never ever go,
you went, and there discovered a world unimagined yet lived.
The world entwining yourself: jobs, hopes, dreams, ignorances
and just plain dumb bad luck,
has found you,
then you went.
You went because you saw someone else chasing a dream like a butterfly,
that man was retarded
and bleeding,
and you wanted to help.
But to help meant walking to Sunrise Mountain.
At night.
Till the marshes anyway.

Babybirds is my third book (60,000 words).
i also have a compilation of short stories – The World is Alright Today.
I have written a screenplay for one of my novels, Thy Soul’s Immensity. My first novel was written in 1994
and had to do with the race riots in Los Angeles
concerning the beating down of Rodney King.
I wrote for The Dudley Review and Alchemy on Sunday.
I attended Pacifica Graduate Institute (97) in California
and The University of Nevada, Reno (90)
with a year spent at State University of New York at Stony Brook
where I studied under historical Irish novelist and Joycean expert Thomas Flanagan
and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Louis Simpson.

It was an accidental jaunt away from societal norms, if just for a little while, for Evan, a just fired Casino executive.
By befriending “the Man,” Bernard Sandler, a severely retarded man on a mission to rescue “babybirds” on the “mountain,” (Bernard’s only two words), Evan discovers a world he frankly didn’t even know was there.
It is the world of the people of the marshes and the realm of sheer utter faith that better will come. It’s got to. It’s just got to. Or so they believe as they go.

From Babybirds
Copyright Library of Congress
2010
Fargo Kantrowitz

His mother had been gone for ten years now and Bernard had adjusted, but his memory of her remained. It has been said that when a parent dies they are not gone, but they move in with you. Bernard survived the loss of his mother through the absorption of her spirit, the unconscious memory of the musicality of her words and the green valleys that were her eyes. She had been storing good thoughts in his head in preparation for the time that he would need them and in Bernard’s case it seemed to have worked. Instead of dreaming of a lost and departed mother he dreamed of the beautiful things that his mother had introduced him to: animals and music and the lyrical quality of the spoken word which seemed to promise more and more beauty and goodness. In this way he lived a peaceful existence and was only rarely attacked by the demons that could seemingly destroy him, the demons that he tried to force out of his head through dizziness and that were sparked by the slightest thought that nobody but Bernard could ever know.

Thank you

Fargo Kantrowitz

I breathed out again and laughed quietly to myself. “Here, put this under your head and lie down.” I grabbed the box of Twinkies and gently guided this simple giant to the ground by placing my hand upon his shoulder. Just as he lay down I quickly put the box under his head and was relieved when he stayed there. He was really quite manageable except for when it came to the baby birds and the mountain. He looked up at me sideways as I went back to my spot up against the side of the rock. “Yeah, life’s not fair. You work and work and work and work and then they pull the rug out from under you because you believe in love. Love! Hah! If you believe in love in this world you’re dumped to the bottom of the pile, stepped on, flushed. That’s me, flushed. I mean look at me, I’m 29 years old, college educated, I’m even handsome. Look at this mug! This mug is meant to go places and I was, I was, until my line went just this side of the box and wham! Boom! You’re gone. You’re history. Go count change, Evan. That’s all you’re good for. Make sure the quarters don’t fall on the floor. Make sure the bags are tied up all tight and if you’re good we’ll let you stay here until you’re an old man then we’ll put you in a bag and tie it up with a tie and take you away too. It’s everything you could ever want and you’ve only got Thaddeus L. DuBuque Tooo to thank, bless the man. God bless his holy highness!”
The Man had lifted his head up when I went Boom! But I calmed him down with my hand and he lowered his head back down. He was obviously very tired and would be asleep soon, but I wasn’t sleepy at all. I shook my head. I could feel another wave coming on. “I’m a good person. I’m one of those people who can believe in doing good and work hard for a corporation. You know, it seems like anybody who cares anymore is suspect. If you don’t become a goddamned machine for these people you’re a squeaky wheel. They want your complete soul. Everything. It’s like you’re a coloring book picture.” I felt crazy. “That’s what you’re like, but the white parts of the thing, the part that hasn’t been colored in yet is the real thing and the part that you let be colored is what they want you to be. They’re doing the coloring. You’re not. You just sit there and let them color you in. If you think they’re good at coloring, if it seems it will be worth it, you just sit there and let them do it, yet you know that you’re still the outline, that even though they color you in, make you what they want you to be for the sake of their business, you are not really those colors. You know that you have already been colored in, completely different colors, already colored in by yourself and your parents and your surroundings and everything, what you believe, what you love, but for the sake of the team you let them color you the way they want and when you step out the door of the office you automatically revert to who you really are. I mixed these two things together. Do you see? I showed my true colors to the current colorer and look what became of me. I’m sitting in the desert looking for baby birds, geez, I must be crazy.”
The man suddenly sat up.
“Babybirds,” he said.
For the first time he truly smiled and it was a smile that disarmed me. It was huge and awkward and real and unless I was mistaken actually sympathetic. For the first time I let it get through that there really was more to life than the Arabian. I just didn’t know what it was yet.
“Yeah, baby birds. Now go to sleep. Go on.” This time he placed himself down and I, for the life of me, couldn’t remember what it was that I had been thinking about.

“I said, “I would give up everything, the entire Arabian, for love, if it came down to it.”
“You didn’t say that.”
“The Arabian is a great hotel, a majestic place, a worthwhile endeavor all around, but is just a speck of sand in comparison to the majesty of real love.”
“What did my dad say?
“Nothing. He just stared at me for a minute and I stared back and smiled. It was like I didn’t even know what I had said. I was just thinking about Maria. I love Maria that much and it just came out. Then he smiled back at me and didn’t say a word. He just went back to his veal and ate. We all just returned to our plates and ate.”
“You pulled a Jed Jones on him. You stood up for something that was true and cut his legs out from under him. My dad is not capable of love. He hates your guts now, because you have something he could never have. He’s not capable. You didn’t know that. Goddammit. It’s like you hit him in the head with a brick, Jesus.”
Me and Tad just stared at each other, each lost in his own personal hell. The end of the dream had arrived just when I thought it was about to truly begin.
“Do you wanna count change? He doesn’t want you up here.”
After a moment I heard words break through the cloud of doom that had covered my entire being.
“Yeah, I guess so.”

His mother had been gone for ten years now and Bernard had adjusted, but his memory of her remained. It has been said that when a parent dies they are not gone, but they move in with you. Bernard survived the loss of his mother through the absorption of her spirit, the unconscious memory of the musicality of her words and the green valleys that were her eyes. She had been storing good thoughts in his head in preparation for the time that he would need them and in Bernard’s case it seemed to have worked. Instead of dreaming of a lost and departed mother he dreamed of the beautiful things that his mother had introduced him to: animals and music and the lyrical quality of the spoken word which seemed to promise more and more beauty and goodness. In this way he lived a peaceful existence and was only rarely attacked by the demons that could seemingly destroy him, the demons that he tried to force out of his head through dizziness and that were sparked by the slightest thought that nobody but Bernard could ever know.

But beneath the rough exterior there was a world that nobody knew about and it was Bernard’s dream world. Bernard had the ability to dream in such a manner that had technology existed to view them people would perhaps even envy him for his mind. His dreams were in Technicolor. Everything seen was alive, breathing almost. Aura’s surrounded plants and trees and animals, which is mostly what he dreamed about; silver clouds, brown mountains, green trees, all were palpable and mysterious connections to the truest world, that of the spirit. In a way Bernard was in direct contact with God through wordless viewings into the inner realms of the outer world. Most of his dreams were kind things, simple roamings over landscapes of infinite beauty and mystery. He rarely dreamed of people and their intrigues for this was not a world that he was a part of much anymore

and i looked upon the mountain and saw it was fair. none there were to be lost. although its host deviled me with her dry eye, dared me, to die…buy the novel now at lulu.com. go to “search” and type in “babybirds.”