Rivers & Prayers

I self-published Rivers & Prayers in 1999.

General Background

First Impressions at looking at the book sixteen years on

The book is prescient

Corny

What I would change

Am I happy with the book?

General Background

I wrote the book in the five years I spent in Jubail, Saudi Arabia (1992 - 1998).  I was on a DOD contract run for the Saudi Navy.  This particular contract was like a hot potato as no American company wanted any part of the Saudi Navy.  They were often coerced by the Saudis into taking the contract or lose a more lucrative contract with the Saudi Air Force.  I seem to remember that one contractor (McDonnell Douglas) lasted barely three months.  One company that stuck for a bit was a combination or two companies:  United Nuclear and Lear Siegler.  They were known as UnclearSiegler, and deserved the name.

Most of the men – no women, of course, this was Saudi Arabia – were US Navy enlisted.  Few had much college.  Some were great guys.  Unfortunately, I lived in a small trailer with a full blown sociopath, a young man who drank sid every night and literally torn the trailer apart while yelling curses.  Sid is a vile white-lightning concoction made by enterprising Filipinos.  I know of two other alcoholics in Saudi who died from drinking the stuff.  As a result, I locked my door every night.  One night he took several staggering steps trying to break the door in and I think he knocked himself out. I needed this job so badly - my kids depended on it - that I did not complain.

I wrote curriculum for the Saudi Naval technical schools.  I doubt any of the twenty odd courses I worked ever were really ever taught, but I did my best to keep them accurate.  The courses were never taught because the Saudi Navy is a social feeding troth.  Most of the Saudi students were literally grabbed off the streets and had trouble with speaking Arabic let alone English in which all courses were supposedly taught.  In the mornings, before going to work, I worked on the Rivers & Prayers.

There was no Internet in Jubail in 1993 and international phone calls were prohibitively expensive, in the order of $10 for a few minutes. Some guys ran up phone bills larger than their monthly salaries.  These were pretty desperate years for me; working on the book was one of the few things that got me through.

A few years later we moved to another compound.  The compound was right next to the Jubail refineries which are some of the biggest in the world. The man I rode to work with, another alcoholic who came from Houston and had some experience with the oil industry, took one look at the proximity of the refineries and said “well within the blast zone.”

We had no real security at the first compound and this was only months after the first Gulf War.  But in our new compound, we got security after the bombing of KhobarTowers.  We got an additional check point of Saudi Marines.   For the first two weeks they dutifully checked every car coming out of the compound while waving in every car coming in.  Our contract administrator complained, but nothing happened for two weeks.  After that, the Marines didn’t do much of anything.

I finished the book and sent it to an agent advertising for new material.  After sitting in the agent’s office for seven months, I asked for it back.  It came back still unopened.  I left Saudi for the first time, spent a month or so in Thailand and another in the Philippines.  When I got back to the US I had no place to live, and no job, so I moved in with my sister in Laramie.  Sharon Dean, whom I had as a teacher at Rivier College, had read the book and convinced me in so many words to get it published.  I was not going to let it sit in another agent’s office, so I self-published it.  I found an editor on the Internet, who I think did a good job.  Editors don’t just pick up typos and grammatical errors – the book had a good number of these – but their real worth in finding other slip ups.  For instance, early on I describe Corny as having bifocals, but my editor found me saying that he had trifocals a hundred pages on.  If the world of the novel is real, editors help make it so.

This is pretty much a truth:  Once you work in Saudi Arabia, you’re pretty much doomed to go back again.  I went back teaching in Jeddah for two years at a teachers college.  You are doomed to go back because you no longer have a track history in the US.  You have become untouchable much like the long-term unemployed are today.

I finished the final edits – now just mine - and had it published.  The books arrived in Laramie and my sister got them stored at the ranch.

After two years I left the college.  My living conditions were poor and without a contract administrator, I was under the whim of the college deans.  These guys weren’t bad, but they weren’t spectacularly good either.  The kicker was that the school made me show up month early for school and do nothing. I said don’t pay me but let me stay in the US a month longer.  They said no, so I left.  I did meet some Saudis I liked a lot at this time and I still am in touch with them from time to time.

Back at my sister’s, I set up a website and hoped to sell the book on-line.  This was before Face Book and at a time e-Bay was just starting up.  I wanted to put the book on Amazon, but because I printed the cost of the book on the cover, I wouldn’t have made any money.  I don’t remember the exact details of this, but I do remember trying to figure out a way around this catch 22.  Running out of money again, I went back to my first job with the Navy in Jubail.

This turned out to be a very bad year.  The curriculum department now had only Saudi writers.  Flat out corruption by members of the Saudi military played a big part in this change.  It became sort of a retirement perk.  The “writers” might as well have been monkeys.   School books were published with every other page missing, with hundreds of pages missing, and with text upside down.  The Lieutenant in charge was rarely there, but he had a son going to a business college in Bahrain just across the causeway who needed a short paper done on a company then widely touted as the next big thing.  I did some reading and came to the conclusion that if Enron had a business plan it probably was illegal.  I said as much so in the paper.  The arrogant Saudi boy never read the paper of course and when he received a C with some stinging comments about criticizing this innovative American company, he told his father and I got fired.

The sad part was in what happened next.  If I could find a job on base, the contract would keep me on.  I knew many of the guys and the best fit was as a teacher at the navy yard.  Now there is a security check point to get on the base, and another to enter the navy yard.  I was a fit, but one of the other instructors (there were only three or four) had a brother who was a copier repairman in the US.  As luck would have it, the Saudis had several broken copiers in the school so they hired the brother who had no experience in eduction, hoping that they could get their copies fixed.  The contract then shipped me to Jeddah and the job there was a disaster, too.  A month after I landed in Jeddah, the copier repairman showed up in Jubail and within a week or so was shot dead, in his classroom, by one of the students.  The assassin, who of course got away, was the son of a big Saudi Captain on base who detested Americans.  This dislike with America ran very deep with young Saudis, probably still does.  I know that job should have been mine, but . . .

I was held under house arrest for a couple of weeks in Jeddah.  I felt the Saudis had broken the contract by sending me to Jeddah (they had) and they refuse to buy me a ticket home. I even went to see a Saudi judge about my problem.  He said that I was right, but that I would have to go back to Jubail (the other side of the peninsula) to file a complaint.  That was a non-starter so I just waited.  The Saudis finally got me a ticket and I ended back up in Laramie with my sister.

Back in Laramie again, I had no real idea of how to promote the book.  Brad Carr agreed to help do that even though I had no money to pay him.  He did yeoman work but without a marketing push ($$) few books ever get readers.  I sent the book out to reviewers, but no one was interested.  One reviewer wrote back that they only review books with New England color.  What the heh?  I sent a query to E. Annie Proulx who lived in Centennial (just outside Laramie).  She actually called me and was a fun person to talk to, but getting her to read it was a no go.  I was flat broke and still trying to make child support payments.  I ran a rake during one haying season out at the ranch.  I’m sure I did a half-assed job, but then I have hay fever and sneezed and coughed a lot.  As long as I stayed in the enclosed cabin of the tractor which provided a positive atmosphere (all air went out), I got by.  All the time I spent raking, I never actually looked to see what shed my books were in.  They were pretty much a dream gone bad by then.  I actually enjoyed driving the tractor, but I needed a job and so signed up with Raytheon to teach in Jeddah.  This was a lucrative job, but it took Raytheon four months after I was hired to get me there.  I was definitely broke. 

Last Sunday while talking to my sister (she has never called me but does send me money to call her) she exploded with rage about the books.  It wasn’t that the books had to be moved in a couple of weeks; it was that it had to be done today!  The depth of her rage worries me and I think something is wrong.  Being 12 thousand miles away in Thailand is difficult.

First Impressions at looking at the book sixteen years on

The back cover of the book reads as if it were a polemic on misogyny.   The book is anything but that, even though  the bullets still sound true to me.  I am sure I was aiming the book at men experiencing the same problems as I was having, but there were no direct links to misogyny in the book.  If the book had been a straight out polemic as many feminist writers were selling about the evils of a male dominated society, it might have caught fire.  Robert Bly seemed to be doing OK in praising men which I think this book tries to do.  Dunno.  But I’d write a different back cover today.

The book is prescient

Not only does Noah Winslow, the black FBI guy, tell Morris that the piss-ant wars around the world are coming to the US (this was before 911) but also that the bomb he was searching for was home grown.  I worked for the prime contractor of the MX missile for a time in Massachusetts  and thought that a disgruntled, Edward Snowden-type employee was more likely to walk off with a nuclear device than a bomb coming from North Korea.

Corny

I love Corny.  If you read the book you may, too.  A veteran of the Korean Conflict, Corny seems to be an American character that has crumbled away in recent years.  He became so real to me that when it came time for his retirement speech to his congregation – a scene I had been planning from day one – he wouldn’t do it.  It was as if he took me aside, and while cleaning his glasses, sadly shook his head no.  I love Corny.

What I would change

From the beginning, when my drunken roommate was cursing and trying to break down my locked bedroom door, I wanted a name that rhymed with Forrest because the theme of the book is autobiographical .  Morris is just a name I pulled out of the air and I regret it deeply.  Dick Backus name his kid Caleb, I think, and I would rename Morris character Caleb now.  It’s the Yankee in me.  The book is autobiographical in that Morris ends up on his way to Saudi Arabia, although he does it with more flair than I did.

There are a few typos I would change: remolded to remodeled but not much else.

I would revisit Chapter Two of the book which seems a drag.

Am I happy with the book?

I know it is readable.  I know in its search for meaning it is the best tradition of literature.  It is not a genre book.  It is a difficult read for those who aren’t willing even to countenance critical thoughts about America.  As America is coming apart at the seams today, the book still seems valid to me.

What makes me unhappy with the book?

That more people didn’t meet Corny; that my sister has had such problems in disposing of something as non-toxic as printed material.

I have pretty much given up writing narrative.  I only write poetry which is an odd blend of narrative and verse.  I post the site when I have a new poem, but normally only get ten or so hits.   No matter.  Getting the poems on Blogger is a way of archiving them.  Writing is still a searching and seeing for me, of trying to find some sort of meaning.  www.Forrestgreenwood.blogspot.com

Well, I have written a novella called Pi Lok the Specter which you can see on Smashbooks.com and other sites.  I’ve sold very few of these, too.

I appreciate Gail and others efforts.  When someone tells me they have read the book, my response is to say, “God bless you.”

FG  5/8/2015