Slagg Ditch was raised in McGill next to a notorious waterway. He’s also a WPHS graduate.
I was raised in a small community in the eastern part of our state. Our high school graduated many successful people. There were also those who were not so successful, but who strove to better mankind. Three of the latter pursued the fine arts: an aspiring symphonic clarinetist, a poet, and an author.
The clarinetist, who was the third assistant student conductor of our school band, excelled as the lead second clarinetist. He listened to classical music almost as much as country western. The iconic first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—‘Ta-ta-ta-ta’—flooded his mind even as he began to take an interest in a pretty freshman third clarinetist who sat behind him. He was overjoyed when she asked him to show her the fingering for high D. That she would notice his proficiency on the instrument led him to ask her to write something in his year book. Standing with her four-year football letterman boy-friend, she politely declined.
Unabashed, he sought out the red-headed first saxophonist, who had won the award as our school’s finest practitioner of the Palmer Method. In perfect handwriting she wrote: “It’s been a long four years. I hope things get better for you. Maybe you will be a first clarinetist someday.”
He auditioned for the role of substitute third clarinet in the orchestra in a city across the state. He told the auditioner that if he didn’t get the part, he would return to our town to take a job with good benefits as a janitor. After a few measures on the clarinet, the auditioner said “I’m sure you’ll be a fine janitor.”
Back home he opened a bar downtown where he occasionally played rhythm guitar in the band in the bar’s Saturday Night Cowboy Fest. He fell in love with the one-time freshman clarinetist, now divorced, and moved in with her and her four children. He died in a mental institution in 1983 with his head resting on a Benny Goodman LP.
Our poet-to-be was always lost in thought. From first-year civics class to the tribulations of trigonometry, he pondered the wonders of nature and the plight of man in a hostile universe. He struggled to understand God and the meaning of godliness. Finding no answers, he turned to the spiritual teachings of the guru Mohandus Salamandikatchaturian, who usually wore a diaper but eschewed clothing entirely when he sang the verses of the ancient vedas in his chirpy mezzo-soprano voice.
However, being pale, short, and skinny, our young poet kept his clothes on even though he was a senior. There were no banyan trees for him to meditate under, so at lunch he reclined under a white pine on a hill behind school and contemplated the cosmos between bites of his mother’s tuna and lettuce sandwich. Eventually he came to doubt the precepts of Salamandikatchurianism and its indecipherable poetry.
His grades got him admitted to a community college in a neighboring state. He enrolled in a creative writing class that emphasized poetry. But, fortuitously, his first class was symbolic logic. The instructor posited: “If a = b and b = c, does a = c.?“ And: “If a = c and b = d, does b = c?” The questions became ever more difficult. He was hooked; this was true poetry, pure magic. He soon realized that his scholastic days were behind him. It was time to impart his knowledge to others.
For the next two years he sold tickets in a movie theater and spent his days in the library where he wrote, on yellow legal paper, his first book of poetry and commentary: “Musing the Logic of Poetry.” It was self-published. He donated ten copies to the school bookstore, four of which sold. He returned to our town to work in the mines. He carries with him a dog-eared copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, where he finds inspiration for his next poetic work.
As to our budding author, his father was a pastor who abandoned him and his mother in pursuit of the affections of a soprano in the church choir. He would never trust God or indulge in the foibles of religion again. Instead, he would write of life’s dire straits in hard-edged novels. Our senior English teacher suggested he be guided by the tragedies of Shakespeare, but he preferred dark authors like Poe. In his first essay in college, he quoted the rigid admonition of Dostoevsky: “Don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself comes to the point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.”
Stark, gruesome reality, and unflinching truth, would be the underlying themes of his writing. His first book, a novelette, told the story of a beautiful young woman who married an older man. Unfortunately, her weight tripled and her husband abused her by not allowing ice cream in the home. She divorced him, became a lacto-vegetarian, fasted four days a week, and gained fame and fortune as the lead in the reality television hit, “How to Avoid Exercise and Lose 250 Pounds.” The tragedy is she ended up paying alimony to the ex-husband, and worse, he got custody of the family dachshund.
He wrote a memoir about growing up in our little community. The theme was the cruelty of civilization. One of the countless humiliations he suffered came in the first grade. He was caught chewing gum and was forced by his cruel teacher to put the gum on his nose and stand with it pressed to the blackboard. [The teacher was the inspiration for the axe murderer in a later unpublished novel.] In the third grade he was teased unmercifully when the kids noticed his unzipped fly.
Those incidents were in his nightmares into adulthood and contributed to the dark rage of his next book, which told of the paralyzing anguish of the citizens of Brooklyn when the Giants came from 14 games down in the last month to beat the Dodgers on a miracle home run in the play-off game to go to the World Series. For posterity, he chronicled the tragedies of many Brooklynites who jumped in front of street cars or into the East River.
The latter work was seen by the principal of our high school, a Giants fan, and led to an invitation to our novelist to speak at graduation. He concluded his uplifting words to the graduates by paraphrasing a great philosopher: “As you face life, when you come to a fork in the road, take it. Life is full of opportunities, but it can also hold pitfalls. The trick is to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and still get home by midnight.”
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