First Words

 Assuming I actually finish it and figure out how to publish it, my last memoir will be around 80,000 words, with 400 or so photo images. It will be big and heavy, like Kramer’s coffee table book that has legs and is a coffee table. I dunno about the built in doilies, though. (Hah. Joking.) 

Except for the formatting (a major deal) and a bit more text about photography, I’m done, or close to it. I’ve written some 40,000 words and have an equal number as excepts from my other three books… 

The last thing you usually write in a nonfiction book are the first words the reader will come across, no matter what you call it (Introduction, Foreword, Preface, whatever). I guess you’re supposed to have perspective or something by then, about the book and what it means, since you’re finally done with the fucking thing. 

I wrote this yesterday. See if it makes sense.

 

                                                             First Words

I hope as you read these words I’m gone. Deceased. Dead. The longer dead the better, actually. 

     Sounds nuts, does it?

     In order to explain let’s do a thought experiment involving time travel: I’m 75 years old as I write, okay? Let’s say I live five more years (my parents both passed at about eighty). On my 80th birthday, poof, I’m gone. This is a given.

     Also, I’m able right now to randomly pick one reader/viewer out of all those who will ever read/view this book. Remember, it’s a random pick, made in the distant future. 

    Can you see why I would want to have passed away before a random person reads these words? Think about it…

     Still don’t get it? 

     Okay, let’s think. Let’s say I get to pick ten random readers/viewers and as it turns out I’ve croaked before all of them read these words. Ten out of ten. I’m not just happy, I’m ecstatic!

     Surely you get it now.

     Good.

     Slightly different subject. I don’t have a great memory of my early childhood — I was a reasonably happy kid but the specifics are hazy — although I do vividly recall an incident that I think may at least indirectly pertain to what’s going on with this book.

     I recall I was in kindergarten so that would have made me five, possibly six years old. I was in my school library with the rest of my class and found myself thumbing through an old book of photographs. I turned a page and looked down at an  image, a black & white, two-pager, across the gutter. It was a crowded beach on a summer day. Really crowded, hundreds of people, maybe thousands, in their ridiculous full-length bathing suits. It was a wide angle shot; you could see forever up the beach, where the people were barely more than little black dots. I don’t recall the caption exactly but it was something about ‘Coney Island’ and ‘a summer day’ and the date was 1898. I remember this because I asked my teacher, Missus Gasparino, where the picture was taken and she pointed out the caption and read it to me.   

     ‘Are all those people dead now?’ I asked her. This was what I really wanted to know.

     I don’t recall what Missus Gasparino said or how it went after that, but I got this question stuck in my mind to the point where to this day I will often consciously ask it upon seeing certain photographs, especially — but by no means always — old ones. Lately, this has started to happen with my own photographs, most often the older ones, some of which were made going on half a century ago. 

     Another thing I hope for: When someone looks at one of my self-portraits in this book they will assume I’m deceased but in some cases not be sure of it. 

     Right. What I’m talking about here is producing something that lives on and continues to affect people far into the future. 

     This is what I’m trying to do with this book.