The 505 - Joan Didion

ENL 505 Stylistics

Joan Didion Assignment

The Morlans ate “chip chop” on Wonder Bread seven days a week but mixed peanut butter with ice cream every night. The Gordons believed in jesus after Dickie died young and so went to the church near Mud Run creek, twice a week to find meaning after the meaningless. The Potts family had industrial-strength antennae on their roof to speak with truckers via CB every night -to the dismay of any family nearby trying to watch one of the three television channels. The Kings tried to run an inchoate flooring business from their house but they would have had just as much failure running any kind of business from their house, what with umpteen kids in various stages of diaper, Zeppelin concert t-shirt, and tube top littering their front steps. The Scott kids, all six of them stuffed like human sardines into a two bedroom home, played Pee Wee football for the Hazelwood Bears, Little League baseball for the Athletics or Tigers, slung sauerkraut covered “bratwurst” at Der Dog Haus in Rolling Acres Mall, while their parents turned up the Mamas & The Papas, Creedence, and Jackson Browne 8-track tapes and drank Kessler whiskey stowed under the leaky kitchen sink.
            All those families lived in nondescript houses situated no less than fifty yards from a Central Avenue bridge that carried Oldsmobile Cutlass Supremes, Chevy Novas, Pontiac Thunderbirds, and every other octane nourished animal that roared East/West on four lanes of Interstate 76 across Northeast Ohio. Those living near the bridge had trouble sleeping when they spent the night elsewhere because of the profound lack of a voluminous static whir from three thousand revolutions per minute, along with the melatonin inducing murmur of 18-wheelers pulling low gear to make the inclined on-ramp from nearby State Street. The underside of the bridge blasted hazing-style graffiti to join the perpetual wind and perpetually reverberated drone of Firestone and Goodyear tires traversing cement and tar beneath tons and tons of steel, minute after minute.
            Still, in summer they barbecued Acme hot dogs and burgers on cheap grills from K-Mart as they drank Busch beer or Pepsi cola on makeshift patios of mismatched bricks in backyards that featured forlorn bathtubs and fishponds. Still, the kids played Red Rover or Kick-The-Can, caught lightning bugs and put them in green-blue tinted Ball-Mason jars, and built forts atop the Scott’s hill. In winter, they still shoveled their walks and the kids had snowball fights and went sled riding as the vehicular hum poured over all of it, season after season, like noisy smog. Still, they all got along with the business of living by the bridge.

Not everything got on with the business of living by the bridge. The decisions and thought processes that land a family fifty yards from an interstate bridge are the same kind of decisions and thought processes that land puppies in houses fifty yards from an interstate bridge; even though the cost of a spay or neuter ensures that “Poochie” and “McGregor” and “Laverne” and “Woody” will become susceptible to estrus and all it entails. The decisions and thought processes that land a family fifty yards from an interstate bridge means that “dogs shouldn’t be leashed” and need to “run free” and “be dogs.” So those cute little pups were loved and adored and grew up as “street smart” as canines can be, for they tagged along in a time when kids walked the earth -to Lawson’s for a game of Pac-Man or the 98 Drive-Thru for mom’s Pall Mall cigarettes. Estrus and all it entails however, doesn’t care for street smarts; it is blind to stop signs or crosswalks or “right of way.” So those doggies followed their heat even when it took them directly onto vertiginous I-76 from under the fenceless Central Avenue Bridge. The hounds had unfettered access - sixty feet from Central Avenue to the highway median grass - to vehicles roaring by at 80 miles an hour.
So did the kids.

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Word Count: 663

Write: For this assignment, take a brief piece (500-750) you have written and revise/ write in the style of the featured author. In other words, revise so as to mimic the style

of the featured author. You can, as well, compose a brand new piece in this style.

Featured author: Joan Didion (specifically The White Album, more specifically the use of “inchoate” and “vertiginous”)