By Lewis Buzbee

I still have my first copy of The Grapes of Wrath, a cracked, taped–together thing I stole from Mrs. Jouthas’s American Lit class because I couldn’t bear to part with it, and because of my crush on Mrs. Jouthas. I did, however, out of guilt and a sense of the book’s value, pay for a replacement copy.

Today, one sniff of that book’s cheap pulpy paper takes me back to that class: an entire year of wishing that Cheri Miller would finally see how cool I was, a year of trading snide remarks with Diana Tucker, who would work with me at Upstart Crow some years later and is someone I still trade snide remarks with today. I can see the posters above Mrs. Jouthas’s blackboard —Onomatopoeia, “the bells, bells, bells”; and Metonymy, “football is king” — and see her immaculate handwriting in blue, green, and yellow chalks. That was more than thirty years ago.

My most powerful reading memory is the opening chapter of The Grapes of Wrath. Night again, a different bedspread, olive green with traffic signs, Beatles posters on the wall, Cream on the record player. I had come to the book in a roundabout way, through my cousin Chuck, fourteen years older, who was living with us while attending graduate school in business. He’d suggested The Grapes of Wrath, saying I must read it or forever be doomed to a life of long hair and Dr Pepper, and because he seemed so wise, I took it up, though with some pain. It seemed very long. But it was time to get started on the book report, and lying on my bed in the privacy of that teenage night, I cracked open the first pages, completely unprepared: "To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth."

When I typed these lines from memory, I was surprised at how well I did; I spelled "gray" with an "e," and omitted "part of" and one comma.

By the time I finished the first chapter, I was determined that I, too, would be a writer someday, and that I would read everything else by Mr. Steinbeck, who I discovered, to my chagrin, had died six years earlier. I interrupted my reading long enough to write the first pages of my first short story, then went back to Steinbeck, and read until dawn.

I believe every compulsive reader has an ideal reading spot; mine is the orange Naugahyde recliner in my childhood living room. My latchkey afternoons became devoted to hours of reading in that chair, the close autumn sun pouring richly over the white paperback, its black spine, and dyed yellow edges. When I finished with The Grapes of Wrath, I stayed in that chair, and started in on Cannery Row, and every two or three days, I’d bicycle across the flat suburbia of the Santa Clara Valley to a tiny B. Dalton store to purchase another Steinbeck with the money I made washing dishes at a card club. Then it was back to the big chair.

As a typically lonely American teenager, who preferred my noises and company on the loud side, these afternoons were a revelation to me: the joy of solitude, the pleasure of it. I remember these newly consuming afternoons and the books I held there as much as what I read, but I remember the afternoons because of what I read. Steinbeck’s words, and those of the writers who followed, took me out of my San Jose self and transported me to new worlds. In the course of one week, ensconced in the big chair, I might travel to Kenya or Peru, enjoy the decadence of an English manor, or get shipped to the Gulag; I could be man or woman, child or ghost.

•••

It isn’t only the surprise of the exotic that first draws us into books, it’s also the recognition we feel. My friend Liz Szabla was fourteen when she discovered Ernest Hemingway and cut school one day to stay home and finish A Farewell to Arms, which she’d started the night before, another fortuitous book report. There’s a lot of vermouth in A Farewell to Arms, and Liz was so captured by the book that she raided her mother’s liquor cabinet: lo and behold, vermouth. She poured herself a milk tumbler’s worth, settled into the big chair in her family room, and spent the day sipping and reading, slightly tipsy, and occasionally pounding the arm of the chair, yelling to the empty house, "Yes, yes, that’s the way it is, yes, yes, yes, he knows everything, exactly, I love this book." Liz lost track of the time and did not hear her mother’s key in the door. Her mother wasn’t so much angry with Liz as surprised that anyone had the perseverance to drink that much "dry" vermouth. Hemingway’s characters, of course, were drinking "sweet" vermouth, slightly more palatable.

Reading alone in her chair, Liz felt the first great stir of connecting with a world beyond her own: she drank vermouth and felt deeply in tune with Lieutenant Henry and Miss Barkley in the streets of Milan, the war booming in the nearby mountains. Not only was there a big world out there, Liz knew she belonged in it and knew in her bones that there were others like her.

The strangeness and the recognition of reading are almost always mingled, and I first encountered their confluence in a visceral way. While much of the setting for The Grapes of Wrath, California’s central valley, was only a few hours from San Jose, it might as well have been the moon to me; I had come from Okie stock on my father’s side, but the plight of the Joads was yet science fiction. After The Grapes of Wrath, I read Steinbeck’s other California fiction — East of Eden, Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat, The Long Valley and others — all set in the Salinas Valley and on the Monterey coast an hour’s drive from San Jose. The landscape that Steinbeck described with loving power, the soft steep coastal hills, "shaded and dusky," and the live oak and manzanita forests, was a landscape I knew, but through his prose, I came to see this world, my only world then, as if for the first time, and I would ride my bike into the hills to see them for myself but with Steinbeck’s words still tumbling in me. Finally, it seemed to me, I knew the names of the world, names that had always been just out of reach like late–summer apricots on the highest branches.

When I turned sixteen, and finally got my driver’s license, I would get in the car, cutting school, and drive down to Steinbeck country to roam and wonder. My favorite spot on these trips was Cannery Row, at that time a tacky strip of art galleries and abandoned sardine canneries that still spoke of Steinbeck’s world: rotted–out boilers, run–down "paisano" shacks, vacant lots carpeted with lime green sweetgrass. I’d nose around the salt-worn laboratory of Doc Ricketts, Steinbeck’s closest friend, through whose cracked windows I spied specimen jars of squid, anemone, and frogs, which perhaps Steinbeck himself had helped catch and prepare. Across the street was Wing Fat’s, the Chinese grocer where the locals once bought pints of "old Tennis Shoes," and just up the hill, Flora’s, the local brothel, now, to my disappointment, a cheap spaghetti restaurant. I’d perch on a piling above the tide pools and stare at the ocean for hours, here in a very real place where vivid, yet imaginary characters wandered.

I’d been to Cannery Row before I discovered Steinbeck, but had only seen it as a place with a nice view of the ocean. Now, through Steinbeck’s musings on Robert Louis Stevenson, one of his favorite boyhood writers, I knew that I was standing at the edge of the Western world, at the end of history, looking west into the east, toward the future. The world was bigger because of Steinbeck, but also within my grasp.