LETTERS FROM HOME: SHELL GAMES AND RARELY SEEN WILD ANIMALS

June 20, 1996

Dear Patty,

Received a surprise package at work this week. The return address was only "Martien" and a P.O. box number. Inside the carton was a book, "Shell Game: A True Account of Beads and Money in North America." By Jerry Martien. Foreword by Gary Snyder.

The book cover informs readers that Jerry Martien received his Ph.D in English from Rutgers and works as a carpenter in Arcata, Calif., and that Gary Snyder's poetry book "Turtle Island" won the Pulitzer Prize. Of course, that's hardly the half of it.

Jerry's a carpenter sort of like Jesus was a carpenter. Other callings come to mind.

Jerry's poems are magical incantations propelled by their own internal rhythms, words that stand for grander intention, and my initial peek into the book suggests his prose is only less syncopated, more flowing.

Example: "Sometimes it seems like the only economy is the enormous carrying charges of our wandering affections."

This book, you may surmise, is about more than the roots of wampum and money. He's after the shell game of the heart.

When I ran into Jerry a few years ago, at the Jambalaya of course, he gave no inkling that he was at work on a book examining the American social contract through his own negotiations for love and money.

He said he was building things, living cheaply in Manila, just off the dunes, within sight of the pulp mill plume.

I told him I'd finally gotten married and that I'd written something about Morry Herman, the Jamabalaya bartender/poet who was killed by a car one night while crossing the street.

Jerry asked me to send him the piece. That request went into "the molasses file," as he says. Many months passed and I lost his address, so simply aimed his letter toward "Jerry Martien, Manila, Calif.," hoping his letter carrier might also be a poet. It coulda happened.

But the letter came back undeliverable, so I re-sent it care of the Jambalaya. That was nearly a year ago.

Now "Shell Game" arrives. Inside was a neatly typed note informing me that my letter did arrive, that the drunks at the Jambalaya still idolize Morry, author of the poem "Dirge for the Bar Crowd," that his own book had been favorably reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle, and that since his publisher has as little money as he does he is happy just to have copies of the book to send old friends.

I've always wanted to amend that story about Morry, wished I'd included the fact that 20 years ago he told me his favorite book was Peter Matthiessen's "The Snow Leopard." For some reason that choice lodged in my brain, maybe because it seemed odd that a gruff, besotted bartender, poet or not, would love a book about a search for a rarely seen wild animal.

I didn't understand what he was telling me about himself.

Many years later my hand fell upon "The Snow Leopard" in a library. As I began reading I realized that the book is all about the quest of the soul to understand itself. That quest occurs paths in the Himalayas and in poems written on a napkin.

"Shell Game" is the story of Jerry's own search, a life of rolling your own cigarettes, reading your own poetry, persistently empty pockets and falling in with extraordinary women.

Maybe that's our connection.

Example: "She knew I knew almost as little about money as I did about love. That I had this problem with home economics. And except for the occasional accident of a poem, hardly knew even my own heart."

When I run into him again at the Jambalaya I'll tell him I've found one who drives her car down the Grapevine Trail in such a way as to dodge butterflies.

"To Sam," Jerry's inscription reads, "with high hopes for those late-maturing bonds."

Love, Sam

Sam blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.