He was sitting on a bench outside Mary’s Kitchen Sunday, maybe an hour or so ahead of his appointed time at Diesel, A Bookstore. Dressed in khakis, a crisp red shirt and navy blazer, Al Martinez might have been a tourist, just watching the natives pass by in their shorts and flips.
My friend Richard and I, recognizing the shock of white hair and mustache, stopped to reassure him he would not be facing rows of empty white plastic chairs, with no live bodies to read to or books to sign. He appeared relieved.
In the midst of what he calls a modest book tour promoting “Barkley: A Dog’s Journey,” he must have considered the possibility of sitting for an hour before more empty chairs, like the ones at the Sundance Bookstore in Reno last month. After that, he wrote in his L.A. Times column about profiling Irving Wallace at a time when his books were the No. 1 bestsellers in the world. Still, at a large bookstore on Market Street in San Francisco, Wallace faced 50 chairs that remained unoccupied for the entire hour and a stack of 50 books requiring no signatures. Wallace’s notoriously sturdy ego was undiminished.
But Martinez wrote, “There’s a quality of melancholy to sitting alone at a little table with your ego and a year’s work piled in front of you and no one paying a lot of attention.”
He admits he’s not a born book hustler.
In his affable and relaxed manner (the blazer came off within minutes), he spoke and read to a friendly group, patiently answering many questions and afterward personalizing messages in many books with more than the required signature.
This extra attention to his fans is characteristic of the man who knew from early childhood that writing was for him. In response to the inevitable question: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? He tells this story. He recalls a teacher who required students to give speeches in class.
“You know the kind, what I did on my summer vacation.”
But Martinez had a troublesome stutter and stumbled through his first public speaking effort to the hoots of his classmates. He told his teacher he would never, ever get up to speak again. She said that was okay, but for every speech he refused to make, he would have to write two essays. That was fine with him.
After his first few essays, she must have recognized the budding talent and gave him an exercise that took quite awhile to master. Sitting alone, she told him to envision a scene, without trying to describe it. Just see the colors, smell the trees or flowers, hear the birds or whatever.
“I couldn’t do it at first, it was hard,” he said. “But finally one day I got it, the sights, the sounds, the smells.”
When he told his teacher, she said this was what would make him a great writer. Though most of his long career has been in journalism, his descriptions and the feelings they evoke in the reader are extraordinary. Absolutely poetic.
A gentleman asked him Sunday, which was his favorite column. He didn’t seem to have one favorite but I could think of at least four right off the bat, not counting his Memorial Day piece a few weeks ago. I’m no fan of war, but he writes about it from the heart, involving all the senses and the feelings one can only evoke from having lived through it. In response to my friend’s e-mail on the piece, he replied, “It is sad. We fight a war, we bleed, we die and nothing changes. The devil’s dance goes on.”
We became e-mail friends after I wrote a column about his being bumped as Metro columnist around the time the Chicago Tribune took over the Times. I was livid. The new suits said he should be newsier.
“I was more about whimsy,” he said. “I like and respect Steve Lopez, but I just don’t want to do those stories any more.”
His column now appears in Calendar, “With the movie reviews, where they allow a little whimsy.”
True to form, “Barkley,” which begins and ends with, “Once upon a time…,” has its share of philosophy as he describes the last journey with his dog, the “big bye-bye.” It also has plenty of humor and, yes, even its share of whimsy. Even so, for those of us who have loved and outlived dear dog friends, tears will come.
In memory of a particularly sweet Doberman who lost her life to cancer, I will cherish Martinez’ book, now resting on the shelf alongside “The Last City Room,” his first novel, and “Reflections,” the most recent collection of his columns.
During a short conversation while Martinez signed his book, novelist Paul Mantee said he occasionally does a column for The Malibu Times just to keep his hand in.
Martinez told him, “If I weren’t writing for the L.A. Times, I’d be doing columns for the Topanga Messenger or any place else, just to keep writing.”
Let’s all hope he does.