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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 delivered each day by media conglomerates across the country that continue to make writing for a living harder and harder.

This is a present-tense future in which outlets for the written word —never more devalued by Cain’s yardstick than in the first decades of the 21st century —are at once infinite and scarce.

Many of the prose pieces in White Asparagus originally appeared in newspapers, on which the plug will soon no doubt be pulled; and literary magazines, most of which no longer bother to send even form rejection slips.

Like Hollywood, you simply hear nothing.

Nothing at all.

“There’s very little room in newspapers for news anymore much less the stuff that I do,” said Belz. “But if you see me out in the yard walking the dog, it’s because I’m trying not to write.”

Here’s a moment of gratitude that he didn’t try too hard.

­— Rafael Alvarez

Macon Street, Baltimore

Thanksgiving, 2009