Praise for White Asparagus
“...like eating a salad prepared by a four-star chef. The words are clean, crisp, crunchy and seasoned with observation, wit and empathy. I can read the poetry again and again, like chewing gum that keeps its flavor.”
— Dan Cuddy
Poet and editor of The Loch Raven Review
“What a pleasure to watch D. R. Belz pursue his thoughts through these wide-reaching, insightful, often funny essays, stories, and poems. He seems to have an eye on everything—from suburban witches to cigarette addiction. The result is a literary safari through what makes and moves our world.
D. R. Belz is great company and a charming, sure-handed guide.”
— Ron Tanner
Author of Kiss Me, Stranger
“An excellent book. I was charmed and amused...just floored by the list of ingredients that go into the blend of prose here—innocence, cynicism, tenderness, cruelty, gallows humor, loneliness, hurt, hope...A beautiful collection of work.”
— Aaron Henkin
Producer, WYPR
whiteasparagus
Collected Works
by D.R. Belz
with an introduction by
Rafael Alvarez
Copyright © 2010 by D. R. Belz
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Belz, D. R. (David Richard), 1956-
White asparagus : collected work / by D.R. Belz ; with an introduction by Rafael Alvarez. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-934074-53-4 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3602.E4635W48 2010
818’.6--dc22
2010018551
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition, revised
Cover concept and photo by Doyle Partners, New York.
Author’s photo by Jim Burger.
Photo location courtesy of The Howard Rawlings Conservatory.
Book design and typesetting by Sheila Watko.
Typeset with Champagne & Limousines and Baskerville.
ISBN: 978-1-934074-58-9 (hardcover) / ISBN: 978-1-934074-53-4 (paperback)
“And Little Lambs Eat Ivy” from “Mairzy Doats,” words and music by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman, Jerry Livingston. Miller Music Corp., NYC, 1943.
Published by Apprentice House
Apprentice House
Loyola University Maryland
4501 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210
410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)
www.ApprenticeHouse.com
For Muz.
“‘And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’”
— Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend
Foreword
The Real & Imagined Worlds of D.R. Belz
“When I was a boy, the moon was a pearl, the sun a yellow gold. But when I was a man, the wind blew cold, the hills were upside down ...”
— Tom Waits
That good old world over which Waits is crooning in a melancholy waltz was glimpsed by a boy through a chain link fence behind Northbourne Road in Baltimore’s Northwood.
Nose through a wire diamond, fingers hooked through the holes, the kid glimpsed the last of the old world pass by before it vanished in a 1960s blur of avocado green Frigidaires, Tupperware parties, and bell bottoms.
“When I was six or seven, this old guy would come through the neighborhood every so often ringing a school bell, and it sounded ominous. He looked like a seedy St. Nick. He could have been Father Time, for all I knew,” remembers David Belz.
“He wore a shabby leather coat and pants. He had a white beard, like Shirley Temple’s grandfather in Heidi, and he carried a big brown wooden box on his back.”
He was, Belz would learn later, the knife grinder.
“The wheel was in the wooden box on his back, and I only saw one woman on our block come out to give him knives to sharpen.
“I would crawl under the junipers along the fence to catch a glimpse as he walked by. He probably never even knew I was there.”
A hyper-literate, wise-ass Catholic kid (he began writing science fiction in the third grade and counts Mad Magazine, Monty Python, and the Society of Jesus as influences), he learned one, simple truth:
“‘Someone is always crazy, but when two are, it’s worse.’”
And so, from up and down that alley and the world he discovered beyond comes this collection of satiric essays, poetry, and short stories.
A D.R. Belz Reader, some 30 years in the making...
And if the knife grinder didn’t notice him, no matter. For a mere ten years or so later, the noir novelist and screenwriter James M. Cain [1892-1977] did.
“I was 16 years old and had written a long short story inspired by a bunch of Orwell I’d been reading. (Richard M.) Dick Prodey, one of my mentors at Loyola High School, entered it in a statewide literary contest,” said Belz. “It won.
“So I went to College Park that summer and lived in the dorms with the other young literary aspirants. At the time, I had no idea who one of our teachers, James M. Cain, was. He was eighty years old then, and when we came in the afternoons we’d find him asleep on the couch in a rumpled business suit with his legs tucked under him.
“He said things like: ‘Good writing is writing done for money’ —because that was how you knew it was worth something. And: ‘Girls shouldn’t hitchhike.’ This was 1973, remember. One girl jumped up and called him a sexist, but Cain just looked at her and didn’t say a thing. Of course, he was right.”
And time, it seems, has proven Cain right about Belz as well.
The old man left a message for Belz on the flyleaf of Cain x 3, Cain’s 1969 collection of the novels: Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice.
It reads: “To David Belz, who gave me a glimpse of the future that frightened me —in the hope he enjoys it . . .”
That future is one that perhaps only one of Belz’s heroes—Swift, Poe, Twain, Thurber, and Mencken among them—would recognize.
That one is Kurt Vonnegut.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut feared a future “according to General Motors.” Today Belz labors to make sense of one