prologue

i've been working on several scripts for what seems like an eternity. i had a laptop meltdown several years ago that took the steam out of the process when all my work went down with the dell.

a friend recently posed an interesting challenge. she thought it might be cool if i wrote the screenplay as a prose piece. i have the outline, know the story i want to tell, so how hard could it be? quite hard! but i've convinced myself that the difficulty is what makes it worth doing. after all, if it were easy, wouldn't everyone be doing it? (yikes. i just googled "screenplay." apparently everyone is doing it.)

anyway, here's a small bit of what i've written so far -- just the prologue. it's a very, very rough first draft. this is based on a true story and i'll tell you more about it later, so stay tuned...

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Prologue

I dream in black and white and shades of gray, like patchwork pieces sewn together in a quilt. Examined closely, the pieces mean nothing; but together, when viewed as a whole from a distance, pattern and purpose become apparent.

It's only now, almost thirty years later, that I realize sirens didn't waken me -- it was the distant, muted murmuring of voices. Somewhere in my sleepy subconscious I recognized my dad. It took me awhile to place the other voice. Uncle John -- it was Uncle John. Most people knew him as Chief Lawson, of the borough police department. He and Dad were lifelong friends so it wasn't unusual to hear them talking.

I rolled over and checked the time. It was 3 am. Why was Uncle John here this time of night? My muddled mind tried to make sense of it.

Then I heard my mother crying. A wave of panic swept over me as I leaped out of bed, suddenly wide-awake, and hurried to the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs.

The look on her face told me something unimaginable had happened.

"What's wrong?" I asked, dreading the answer I already knew. "Is it Angie?"

My sister Angie and I worked on the assembly line at the Volkswagen plant in Scottsdale, thirty minutes away. Although she was nineteen and I was twenty and we had jobs that paid well, we still lived at home. Most of our friends did, too. It wasn't so much a matter of economics as it was an immigrant newcomer's mentality that kept us close. Our parents (or grandparents) traveled to America in the early 20th century. They worked hard in the coal mines and steel mills and banded together with other nationalities to form labor unions to survive against the harsh treatment they received at their jobs. But outside of work, everything else remained separate. Although most in the community were Catholic, there were several churches and each catered to a particular ethnic group. Each group had its own social club, store, and restaurant. And even though these various cultures eventually commingled and coalesced, their early experiences filtered down to us and we became clannish and protective of one another.

That's how it was in California, Pennsylvania, a former coal-mining town in the Mid-Monongahela River valley that had long since seen its best days. Renamed after the 1849 gold rush in an effort to attract westward bound settlers, it's an expansive community located 35 miles south of Pittsburgh. In the late 1970s it might as well have been a thousand miles away. Separated by winding roads, rolling hills, and a blue-collar culture, we were the rural counterparts of Brooklynites who never cross the bridge into Manhattan.

I don't know if it was fear, pride, or ignorance that fostered such distrust of anything having to do with "the city." There was an unspoken understanding that bad things could happen to you there, which of course was true to an extent and true of all cities in general -- and, as far as we knew, nothing bad ever happened in a small town like ours.