just once a fortune paperslip - by Buck F. Trumpet

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Just once the fortune paperslip I remove from a crisp cookie come true

play the game for fun some

but for me it is the oracle,[1] prescient messages that lay out my life

noodles rice black tea[2] and dessert prognostications

Belief fills my breast, a faith[3] in the wish during birthday candles blowing

an eyelash successfully leaves the finger

my brother my brother my mother and our thanksgiving[4] wishbone

a common giving and acceptance, like true love and happily ever after

the tooth fairy little house on the prairie once upon a time

tomorrow is a brighter day the sun will come out bet your bottom dollar[5]

there is a miracle in the stars and sacred ocean waves[6]

we will solve our global problems and our individual desires attain

so says faith and truth and belief[7] and you and your mother during the pain

I figure there is employment among the crew[8] who

write such fortunes on thin slips and cookie folded

“Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.”[9]

Yes, but when? A Long and Happy Life.[10] Money is on your horizon (we can smell it)

love and peace and great wealth

“Your mind is sharp and your friends like you.”[11]

Your promise is about to be fulfilled.[12]

“If you are not yet married, you will be soon; if you are married,

you will be so forever.”[13]

My noodles in oyster sauce[14] some are tired of the grease[15] in egg rolls

but I love it, black tea[16] steamed rice cookies unfolding

A specific one came to me. Share with those at your table. I thirst

for the positive stroke,[17] even the fabricated one (blasphemy!); “Something

incredible will happen at work next week.”[18]

Now, pinpointed. I watched in diligence and[19] apprehension,

lived the week fully, and out of the ordinary came by me nothing.



[1] This reminds us, of course, of Milton’s On Christ’s Nativity: Hymn XIX, in Poems 9, where he writes “The Oracles are dumm,” written in 1645. Shakespeare did not shy away from use of the word, and in Winter’s Tale, we have “”Please, your Highnesse, Posts From those you sent to th’ Oracle, are come An houre since,” penned in 1616. Trumpet, however, seems to employ the word from the Sun-Sentinel, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he in 1999 was convalescing from his third heroin overdose. We know he was staying in a Motel 6 for those few winter months, after escaping Providence, R.I., where he had been teaching an English Literature class to graduate students on Wordsworth’s “Michael,” a poem which formed the structure of his great novel The Evening Star. We also know that he was attempting to drive to Key West, where he dreamed of researching his Hemingway-based novel about a man who constructs a makeshift raft and attempts to emigrate to Cuba. This poem, “just once the fortune paperslip” was written in the Motel 6, and was published posthumously in Poetry. Trumpet, we know, never made it to Key West.

[2] When Trumpet was recovering from his binges, he subsisted on a diet of Chinese noodles. His drug of choice, of course, was black tea. “I must always work in an altered state,” he’d say, “Even if it be merely sleep deprivation.” Of course we know the wordplay here, for which he was famous: noodle being the verb to search for opals, on the one hand, and the reference to I.L. Idriess’s Lightning Ridge, in which he wrote “Send the dirt up in the bucket where his mate... would carefully noodle it, seeking tell-tale potch and colour,” p. 79. His first novel, Noodle, was published by Viking, in ’86, the year he graduated from high school.

[3] Trumpet was a known atheist. Therefore, this of course refers to his curious brand of temporal paganism, from which he refused to be swayed. “I’ll f--- your God from behind,” he wrote in Noodle.

[4] Trumpet’s usual neuroses are here vividly evidenced. These lines are drawn directly from his short story “Faith, Anti-Faith,” published in the New Yorker, Jan. 4, 1993, the year he was hit from behind by the drunk driver Walter Weever, Jr., and left to die in the cornfields near his home in the Berkshires. He was diagnosed obsessive compulsive, and every slight superstition, if broken, would send him into conniptions, and ultimately to bed. In his story he writes about a fellow who tries to (unsuccessfully) blow out his birthday candles. The character (we can see Trumpet as a boy) looks up despondently, and announces, “We are all going to die” (p. 13).

[5] He saw Annie both on Broadway and in London, as a boy, with his parents (who died soon thereafter on the Lockerbie jet), and announced to his classmates “I wish to be a playwright,” and they laughed and laughed. He was known for fighting.

[6] Here’s his earthly paganism again. He once said, “No, no, it’s Palagianism, man, come on.” He then took a sip from his Scotch (single malt).

[7] Those words again! From this heathen of drink and licentiousness!

[8] Here it is obvious that he again plays with words: the past tense of “crow,” or, to utter the loud cry of the cock. Again, the reference to his own anatomy (always screaming, always “up” and shouting about) should not be a surprise. However, the play does not stop here: he had recently read Irving’s Alhambra, which he quoted and placed on an index card the following line, “As gaunt and ragged as a crew of gypsies” (p. 188). Trumpet rowed crew at Harvard (Class of ’90), and was an avid yachtsman; see Grote’s Greece, 1862, “The Egyptians...had captured five Grecian ships with their entire crews.” Trumpet sailed around the world twice, once with his then-wife Annie Bills and their dog Wooff (Virginia, Tom and Thomas, he said “with a lisp”), and once solo.

[9] The allusion here is amazing. This is both a fortune cookie line from a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn, circa 1999, and a line from his third novel Shut Up!, A Scream. Like Calvino, he once wanted to write a novel based entirely on fortunes found in Chinese cookies (which aren’t Chinese at all: they were invented by a entrepreneurial chap in Edinburgh, 1912).

[10] Wordsworth poem and 1960s American television show.

[11] From Noodles, p. 173.

[12] Buck Trumpet always complained that he had never found true fulfillment. “And I live and die in obscurity,” he said. After his friendship with Paul Newman dissolved (over the ingredients in the latter’s lemonade) – car racing, a few acting stints, engaged to his daughter – he wrote the novel Damn, I Stubbed My Toe, and dedicated it to Newman, as follows “An Ode to Paul.”

[13] A line from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, and, finally, a Grateful Dead song, supplied in the original by Trumpet’s grandfather, River Trumpet.

[14] Trumpet was often drunk. See also, Hawthorne’s Twice-told Tale, (1851), “A slice of the densest cloud within his reach, sauced with moonshine” (p. 182). Trumpet was also fond of verbal rebukes, therefore, we recall his avid reading of Dickens – “Don’t sauce me in the vicious pride of your youth” – and his dismissal of Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, which he loathed – “He sauced her with his eyes; sitting up broad, soiled, pink-cheeked; very sure of himself” (p. 274).

[15] Trumpet loved John Travolta, before Scientology, and taught himself to dance “like a black man” (from Fly Honky, 1997, p. 54).

[16] Yet another drug reference.

[17] Just as Jim Morrison, of The Doors, we know that Trumpet masturbated seven, eight times a day. He told us so in his Memoir in Verse. This line, though set in a different context, is pulled directly from his memoir, p. 778, but there the imagery is much more graphic, dealing with an evening in the walk-in cooler at a restaurant and some girl on her knees (there were other men involved).

[18] From his own Fly Honky and Pynchon’s V.

[19] This obviously refers to Chaucer’s Troylus, “With al my wit and al my deligence” (p. 135). Trumpet believed that Samuel Johnson was “the canonical critic,” and here is a double allusion, of course: this from Johnson’s Rambler No. 85, first paragraph: “Many writers...have laid out their diligence upon the consideration of those distempers.” It was published in 1751. A great reader of history (he also had a Ph.D. in History from Brown), Trumpet may have been alluding to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, each long volume of which he read seven times: “His rival...fled before him with the diligence of fear” (Vol. III, p. 41). The idea of “diligence of fear” Trumpet used in each of his works, short or lengthy, most notably in his novella Desperate Panic, where the cartoon condom swims for its life from an attacking “godzillan army” of sperm.