Bubblegum and Kipling. Tom Mayer
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on the street and the weed field on the other side, and I lay on my bed in the room I shared with my younger brother, and I opened Bubble Gum and Kipling to its title story and began to read.
The first time was in the eighth grade, before Jerry Gordon turned fourteen. It was with a girl named Rita Gomez, and she was thrown out of school later in the year because she was caught doing it with someone else in the weeds behind the backstop.
I did not know this then, but I, too, would do it just before turning fourteen. And it would be with a girl who would also move on from me as quickly as Rita Gomez had moved on from Jerry Gordon, the protagonist of this story and all the other stories in this spare yet beautifully evocative book. What I did know is that somehow this writer, Tom Mayer, had written sentences that forced me to forget they were sentences; instead, in just a few paragraphs, he made me become this boy, Jerry Gordon, sitting in the back row of Mrs. Kline’s English class trying not to get caught with the comic book that big-breasted, bubble–gum-chewing Rita Gomez has just passed to him.
I read through the afternoon and into the early evening, and while I am quite certain that the wonderful stories in Bubble Gum and Kipling were not written for a readership of twelve-year-old boys, it was one of the first books I ever read that showed me what literary art could do: reach out its hand and pull me in and show me that I was not alone.
Forty years later, I find I’ve become a writer of books myself. I have also read hundreds and hundreds of them since that rainy summer afternoon in 1971 and, like my late father, the short story master Andre Dubus, I’ve seen far too many fall out of print and end up on some remainder table out on the street. Maybe some deserve this fate, yet Bubble Gum and Kipling clearly does not; these fine stories, most of them set in the American southwest, still have that same quality I could not have articulated when I first read them; they nearly crackle with an understated and contained dramatic tension, the kind Ernest Hemingway first pioneered, for so much of what happens in these stories—including most of Jerry’s larger thoughts and deeper emotions—lie beneath the surface.
Instead of stating an emotion directly, Tom Mayer—who was only 21 at the time—takes a more artful route. Using either the first person or a close third, he relies upon the physical action itself to render the moment at hand, whether it’s Jerry Gordon training his younger brother for a boxing match, or Jerry making love for the first time, or roping calves, or hearing of the death of his grandmother while he’s away at boarding school, or meeting the train that carries his father’s body and coffin, we experience the thing itself, something Mayer achieves with lean, declarative sentences and a keen eye on the landscape, as in this opening to one of this book’s finest stories, “Homecoming”:
We came up the long rise to the top of the Galisteo shelf at about sixty, which was all the car would do, and then we could see the whole northern end of the Estancia Valley. The steel of the railroad tracks below glinted in the afternoon sun, and we could see the steeple of the church at Lamy behind the rolls in the plain. I could tell there wasn’t much wind, which was unusual, because there weren’t any twisters. Sometimes you can see seven or eight twisters from the top of the shelf.
Mayer goes on here to describe Jerry’s mother sitting in the front seat beside him, “her eyes inflamed and pinkish from a week of crying.” And here, as in all of these compelling and accomplished stories, we begin in the middle, in this case with the Gordon family driving to the train station to retrieve Jerry’s father’s body; Mayer trusts us to catch up and to bring our own losses to Jerry Gordon’s, a boy and young man who, in just eight short stories, comes of age the way young men and women do, slowly and then all at once.
And so it is a cause for true celebration that Pharos Editions has resurrected this subtle and moving collection, allowing new readers to lie back in a room somewhere, maybe with a summer rain falling out in the streets, and step into Tom Mayer’s remarkable, and lasting, Bubble Gum and Kipling.
— ANDRE DUBUS III
FOREWORD BY
TOM MAYER
When Pharos Editions asked me if I was interested in reissuing Bubble Gum and Kipling, my first reaction was amazement. I had not read or thought about any of the stories for twenty-five or thirty years. I did not think anyone else had either. I could not remember the titles of several of them. My second reaction was, Probably better to leave sleeping dogs lie.
Finally, I did reread the stories. It was a strange experience. I had no sense of authorship. Much of the material was still fascinating to me, but time, long and frank conversations with my mother as she was dying, and the gyrations of my own life had so changed my perspectives that the stories seemed as if they had been written by someone else.
I liked some of them, but they all were from a world that had turned several times since they were written. I had no desire to revise—changing them would be like messing with an ancient, ancestral sand painting. I doubted if many other people would read them, or like them if they did, but why not find out? I did cut one story from the original book. I thought it was awful, and remembered that the young man who had been me had not liked it himself, and had regretted publishing it all those years ago.
The excision left a very skinny volume. It would have scored on the moron edge of the bell curve of what John O’Hara used to call The Heft Test. To avert accusations of anorexia, Pharos allowed me to include two other, later stories.
I remembered them fine and fondly. “A Cold Wind” seemed like a pretty good glimpse of how as a kid I had reacted to death manifest, and it was my private laboratory for musing on Hemingway’s notion about fiction being like an iceberg. My grandfather did not smoke Bull Durham or carry me about on horseback when I was a child. He was a Chicago lawyer, who traveled by chauffeured Packard. He carried a watch in his vest pocket. It made various noises that were supposed to entrance his grandchildren. Several years before I was born, my father did discover the genuine Alexander in approximately the circumstances I used in the story, but, while bringing the frozen corpse to headquarters, Dad saw a coyote, and, as was his custom, took off cross country in hot pursuit. The coyote escaped. Dad proceeded to the headquarters house, where he told Mother Mr. Alexander had died, that he had the remains in the truck, did she wish to accompany him while he took them to the funeral home. (The one he had in mind was owned by a man whose synthetic dignity made you think he might be a W. C. Fields impersonator. Dad considered any meeting with him free entertainment, greeted him by asking, “How’s business? I hear you’re getting a lotta new customers.”)
Mother, glancing in the bed before climbing in the pick up: “Where’s Mr. Alexander?”
Dad: “In back. I told you.”
Mother: “You might want to look again. Are you sure he was dead? I don’t believe in resurrection.”
Dad: “He must have bounced out while I was after the coyote.”
After an extensive search, Dad rediscovered the corpse, camouflaged by partial burial in a snowdrift, and reloaded it.
Mother: “How could you? You completely forget that poor gentle old man, while you go charging off and have a wonderful time chasing a coyote. Only you.”
Dad: “Jesus Christ, Peach. There was no place he had to be, and he didn’t feel a goddamned thing.”
A rancher my parents liked did buy his dentures by mail order, and did shape them himself. To give you an idea how far Hemingway’s theory may reach, in case there’s any validity to it, the man’s son was Llewellyn Thompson, one of the great American diplomats, the guy the histories say prevented World War III by telling Kennedy what to say to Khrushchev.
I still haven’t decided if the Cuban Missile Crisis, trick pocket watches, or what Dad and Mother said to each other after Dad lost the corpse while trying to get a shot at a coyote are subsurface structural essentials, but the proposition is one I enjoy contemplating for a half