“There’s no puppy fat on these slight short stories whose author, now 21, is not much older (or probably very different from) the Jerry Gordon who figures in all of them. They have had partial magazine appearance and . . . “Just Fine,” one of the best, was chosen by Story magazine for an award as the best college work of short fiction. Mayer’s touch is nice and natural.”
—KIRKUS
“I consider it a remarkable collection. The stories are frank and direct, enlivened by the spirit of a ‘Western’ sensibility that never becomes mannered. I like too their lack of quaintness in the sense that while they record what is timeless in a young man’s experience, the experience is distinctly responsive to contemporary circumstance. In short they’re alive, show a good ear, and demonstrate a . . . respect for the names and shape of things.”
—WILLIAM WIEGAND
“I find Mayer’s writing remarkable . . . strong . . . straightforward . . . precise . . . honest. After reading Bubble Gum and Kipling, I think you’ll agree.”
—OAKLAND TRIBUNE
“Ernest Hemingway spoke a truth about fiction. He said a writer’s task is to tell what happens and what he feels about it. Tom Mayer has heard Hemingway. (His stories) become experience. Mayer writes like himself, not Hemingway. But he writes under the Hemingway injunction.”
—LIFE MAGAZINE
“One of the first significant voices of a brand-new generation.”
–PAUL HORGAN
“Keep your eye on Tom Mayer . . . he can write.”
—ALBUQUERQUE TRIBUNE
“Very impressive.”
—HOUSTON NEWS
Text copyright © 1963, 1964, 1966, 1974 by Tom Mayer
Introduction copyright © 2016 by Andre Dubus III
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First edition by The Viking Press 1964
First Pharos Editions printing 2016
“Homecoming” and “A Minute Forty-seven of the Second” first appeared in Harper’s Magazine; “To Match Her Eyes” first appeared in The New Yorker as “The Phone Call”; “A Cold Wind” first appeared in New Mexico Quarterly, Summer 1966; “The Top of the World” first appeared in Playboy magazine, December, 1974; “Just Fine” copyright 1963 by Story Magazine, Inc. and used here by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication is available.
Cover and interior design by Faceout Studio
Pharos Editions, an imprint of Counterpoint
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
e-book ISBN 978-1-94043-616-6
INTRODUCTION BY
ANDRE DUBUS III
I first opened this lovely book in 1971 when I was twelve years old. My parents had divorced only a year or so earlier, and we four kids were living with our newly single mother in a semi-abandoned shipbuilding town on a river just south of the New Hampshire border. Downtown was one empty mill after another, rotted sheets of plywood nailed across their windows and doorways, weeds growing up through cracks in the sidewalk in front of the only businesses that seemed to be still running— a newsstand, a luncheonette, and a dim barroom in front of which were often parked Harley Davidsons, a jukebox inside playing Tom Jones or The Allman Brothers.
My mother had rented a half-house across from a field of weeds where drunks lived all summer long, and on the other side of the house lived another single mother whose TV was never turned off, her young kids running inside and out. It was also a neighborhood of tough and angry kids I tried to keep away from, so for a while I kept close to our new rented half-house, its paint flaking off the clapboards onto the strip of yard between it and the hot sidewalk.
On Sundays our father would pick us up and drive us four kids to church. He was thirty-five years old then and always kept his brown beard neatly trimmed. A few years earlier he had published his first book, a novel called The Lieutenant, and I knew he was a teacher in a college town a few miles up the river, though I rarely thought about him in this way; he was my father, and I missed him, and I was sure somewhere deep inside me that I and my brother and sisters had done something terrible that had made him leave.
One of these Sundays he drove us to a church in Boston forty miles south. He heard its priests preached against the Vietnam War, so we went there, and after Mass, the five of us went walking through Harvard Square. I had never been there before, and I liked how crowded it was with people carrying books or backpacks full of books or guitars slung over their shoulders. Most of the men had long hair and beards, and the women wore tight bellbottom jeans, their hair long and shiny, and in the air were the smells of car exhaust and cigarette and pot smoke and coffee from some cafe. So many of the stores and shops had their doors propped open, and there were long tables set up on the sidewalks and on them were rows of jewelry, handmade leather pocketbooks and wallets, hundreds of albums wedged into cardboard boxes. In front of a big newsstand in the center of the square were five or six tables weighed down with hundreds of books, and this is where our father stopped and began to browse, and so we stopped and began to look through them, too.
I hadn’t read a book since I was nine or ten. It was something I used to enjoy, but with the family breaking up and our mother having to move us from one place to another, reading had fallen away, and now my brother and sisters and I spent a lot of time in front of our black-and-white TV, watching silly game shows and half-hour comedies of laughing, happy people. But my father read books
