Free If Rock and Roll Were a Machine by Terry Davis Page A

more, but he’d come to the end of the alley and it was time to head for home.
    *  *  *
    Bert lay in bed knowing it had been a lucky day and that he was a lucky guy. If he’d made the football team, he wouldn’t have a job at Shepard’s Classic and Custom, and he’d rather work there than be a third-string quarterback.
    He wondered how they could have doubted Camille would make the team. The kid was as big as his dad. A guy would have a lot better chance of being somebody, Bert thought, if he evolved out of the Shepard gene pool.
    Bert hated it that he wanted so much and that he envied what other people had. He knew he was more fortunate than most of the people in the world. He had his own room in a nice house, a sound system, a TV, his own phone, he was healthy, and he owned not one but two motor vehicles. Bert knew he was a lucky guy.

Chapter 14
“Though Much Is Taken, Much Abides”
    Thompson High’s first pep convocation of the year is in its initial phase of combustion. The auditorium is packed with clapping, chanting students. There’s a football game tonight and volleyball tomorrow night. The football boys sit on folding chairs on one side of the stage, and the volleyball girls sit on the other. Bert Bowden, who is not burning with the flame of school spirit, sits in the darkness in the last row of the upper level. Up here he doesn’t feel the urge to stand when everybody stands, clap when everybody claps, yell when everybody yells.
    Bert likes the pep cons. He finds them fascinating, and high in the darkness he can be fascinated in peace. There’s always a trade-off, of course. In this case Bert is trading the inspiration he feels at watching kids root for other kids who are trying to be somebody against the desperation he feels at being nobody. At being worse than nobody, really. At being too small-hearted to stand up and cheer with the rest of the crowd for people who have earned the acclaim and deserve the boost.
    Bert wishes he were up on the stage with the varsityfootball team now. But he’s not and he knows he doesn’t deserve to be. He does, however, yearn for a seat on some stage sometime somewhere.
    Coach Christman has risen to introduce the football team. Bert would rather listen to something else, so he pulls from his back pocket the essay Tanneran returned this morning, squints into the darkness, and reads the man’s comments one more time.
    Bert,
    You’re a good writer. Your prose doesn’t sound like writing, or like someone straining to sound like a writer. The voice is of a thoughtful person talking, and that’s exactly what it needs to be.
    One of your strongest qualities as a writer, it seems to me, is your ability first to see, and then to remember and use the sensory details that focus your readers’ attention in a scene.
    You say, for example, “Ours was an old school with wooden floors, and some of the boards had warped at the edges and were no longer level with the others. I felt the metal legs of the desk-chair catch on these raised boards and rip through them. The room was silent except for the squeal of the metal legs of my desk sliding overthe floor and the intermittent splintering of the board edges.”
    This is good narrative writing, Bert. It does one of the things all good narrative does: It forces the reader to experience what’s happening. You take us to that room with you and make us hear your chair go squealing across the floor. You create images in our heads not just of the chair ripping wood, but of the sight of the splintered boards. You don’t have to show us those boards specifically because you’ve already switched on our imaginations, and in our imaginations we see (and hear and smell and touch) the experience ourselves.
    You also force us to experience the damage a lousy teacher—maybe good-intentioned, but nevertheless lousy—can do to a kid. This guy took a lot away