The Promise of the Wrecking Ball
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Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2011 The rP omise of the Wrecking Ball Scott Ricketts Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Ricketts, cS ott, "The rP omise of the Wrecking Ball" (2011). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 12166. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/12166 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The promise of the wrecking ball by Scott Jackson Ricketts A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Major: Creative Writing & Environment Program of Study Committee: Dean Bakopoulos, Major Professor David Zimmerman Kimberly Elman Zarecor Marwan Ghandour Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2011 Copyright © Scott Jackson Ricketts, 2011. All rights reserved. 1 CHAPTER ONE On the day my father died, I sat, for the first time, in his big leather chair behind the oversized desk in his study. I’d spent countless hours in this room with my dad, doing homework, reading books, but I had never sat behind this desk. The chair climbed up past my head as I collapsed into the soft, light brown leather. I spread my arms wide, searching for the armrests before finding them, the chair seemingly spacious enough for at least two people to comfortably sit in it. When I leaned against its back, my feet just barely touched the ground. The desk, likewise, seemed enormous from my new perspective. Made of oak, it seemed as permanent as the house itself, a shelter under which to hide from a spring thunderstorm. Matching bookshelves, the same color as the desk, lined an entire side of the room. They overflowed with a mix of three ring binders for his work as an insurance salesman and tattered, dog-eared paperbacks of the classics – Dickens, Twain, some anthologies of the Romantic poets. The shelves were so full that I thought pulling out even one of the books or binders might cause the rest to come spilling out like a dam cracking under the weight of its water. On the far wall by the door were more shelves holding a small stereo that was always tuned to NPR or the local opera station, depending on his mood that night. Pictures of my family stared back at me from distant locales –a mountain in Colorado, a golf course in Arizona, a beach in Hawai’i. The deep red color on the walls made the room feel closed-off from the world, a sanctuary for a father and his son. I looked to the far left corner of the desk, the spot I occupied as a kid when my dad and I worked together in the office. We didn’t speak much during those evenings. He would clack away at his typewriter, occasionally grumbling to himself or reading aloud 2 what he had just written, provided the evening’s soundtrack. I sat silently at my corner, reading or coloring, nearly every night for most of my childhood. I can’t remember anything he read out loud to me, and now that he was gone, I wish I had paid better attention, had kept any of his discarded pages on whose backs I drew the dinosaurs and trucks that flicker through a young boy’s imagination. From his chair, I could picture myself there at the corner of his desk, in his sightline: the pictures on his desk were still parted and the desk lamp still stood awkwardly in the middle of the desk toward the edge so that we could see each other, so that he could give me the occasional wink, so that I could make faces back at him, trying to get him to laugh. No mementos from my childhood, no coloring books or paper airplanes sat on that corner the day he died. Dark spots, from where a permanent maker bled through the paper and a few scratches from an X-acto knife used to cut the forms for a balsawood glider served as the only testament to my position at his desk. The area in front of his spot behind the desk was likewise empty. My dad’s typewriter, an Olivetti 32 portable he bought at a garage sale, was shrouded in a navy blue vinyl cover and had rested on the large credenza behind his chair for the last few years of his life. I couldn’t help but notice the layer of dust on it. My mom called to me from another room, her voice bringing me back to the reality of that day. We needed to meet with the mortician to confirm the funeral plans, and she was ready to leave. I wasn’t ready, but I knew arguing with my mom on this day, of all days, would be disastrous for the both of us. But before I could go, I needed something, an object, a memento of some sort, that would connect my dad and me. 3 Something tangible that I could hold on to. Some object from the study that, in the years to come, I could look at and touch, and find him in. The problem was that this was his office, not mine, and no matter how much time we spent together in here, these were his things. Aside from my small corner of the desk, I wasn’t allowed to touch anything. Not his typewriter. Not the pictures. Not even the radio dials on the shelf system stereo. As a kid, I always thought these rules were a little harsh, and when my parents were out of the house, I would sometimes sneak in and turn the radio to the local Top 10 station, always careful to turn the volume down and the station back when I was done. One time, I didn’t hear my parents come in, and had to run out of the study, able only to turn the stereo off. It wasn’t more that twenty minutes later that my dad called me in to his office. He sat behind his desk like a boss firing and employee—but he didn’t yell at me. He just explained that I was being let in to his special place where we could spend time together, and, to keep that privilege, I couldn’t touch certain things in his office ever again. To my eight-year-old mind, it made sense, and up to the day he died, I never touched the stereo again. My mom called for me again, and I heard her walking toward the study. She appeared in the doorway, but stopped short of coming in. “Come on, Jay. I don’t want to do this either, but we have an appointment.” She looked at me across the room, her face puffy and red. “If you had the typewriter out in front of you, you would look just like him, sitting there behind the desk.” Without waiting for a response, she turned and walked back down the hall. I had only a moment. What I remembered most about spending my childhood in his study was watching my father write, was how watching him made me decide to 4 become a writer, so whatever I took from the study would have to reflect that fact. I didn’t dare take the typewriter – it was his and always would be. Besides, I thought, a memento should be a little more portable, like a class ring or a favorite pen, not a typewriter that would sit like a paperweight on another desk, then maybe move to the back of a closet, before eventually finding its way to Goodwill. I tried opening one of the desk’s side drawers, hoping to find one of his manuscripts, but the drawer was locked. I slid open the middle drawer looking to locate a key that would unlock the others. Inside, the contents of the drawer were obscured by a writing pad that I took out and set on the desk. I fumbled around, moving pens, paperclips, and spare change, but couldn’t locate the key. Mom called again from another room. “Jay, we’re going to be late.” I shoved the drawer closed and leaned back in his chair, feeling tears well up in my eyes. I scanned the room again, an uneasy feeling boiling inside me. It couldn’t possibly be this difficult. One single thing, an object, anything, to carry with me. My dad was gone and I couldn’t even find one fucking thing to remember him by. I sat forward in the chair and noticed the pad of paper in front of me. There on the page, in my dad’s handwriting, were four numbered sentences: 1. a dimly-lit hallway 2. testing of outcomes 3. running for your life 4. the promise of the wrecking ball They were really more sentence fragments than complete thoughts. Ideas jotted down for later. Perhaps even plot points for some story or book he was working on. I didn’t know 5 what they meant, but there they were, written in his all-caps handwriting, precise and straight lines moving across the page. And around these four things, he had drawn a double-lined rectangle to give the list its proper emphasis, as if to say, “This stuff is really important.