Chicago
Our novel starts and ends with Chicago, Vincente Bonaventura's dream destination, where he finally gets to work indoors. To set the scene ---- one must visualize the differences between the Fifties and the Millenium ---- these are vast. Even though the novel starts at the final destination, you can see how difficult it was to get there. This book trailer puts all destinations in their correct sequential order. Vince and Julie get to Chicago only after hiding out in Mexico and fighting for justice in Atlantic City. Flashing back and flashing forward many times brings the reader closer to our characters and story. So here is the beginning of Jitterbug -----
"Evenings in suburban Chicago were dusky like only the late 1950‘s could produce. There were very few nuclear plants, only one or two experimental ones here and there. Instead, the brilliant pinks and yellows streaking across the mid-west horizon at sunset were from the nearby coal burning electric plants. In rural Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, a thick, sulfuric, rotting smell rolled across the cornfields before the sky turned to indigo in the evenings.
Toyota did not exist as a compact car manufacturer. Rambler did. There were not very many compact cars in America. Gasoline was about fifteen cents a gallon. Most cars were V-8’s, vinyl-upholstered and the size of a small pickup truck. The heater coil was usually broken on used vehicles -- giving passengers the stark, icy thrill of a freezer unit on the coldest days of winter. The plastic bench-style, non-bucket seats were like sitting on a frosty, crackling, plastic mattress that time of year -- waiting to sear your bare legs raw in the heat of the summer. Moving around in the summer on one of those plastic bench seats in a pair of shorts was a lot like ripping a large piece of duct tape off the back of your bare thighs.
* * *
Vincente Bonaventura took the Chicago commuter train on the Burlington Northern line to work. He rode from the station near his new home in the suburbs to Union Station on Canal Street in downtown Chicago. Then he hopped a city bus from there to his job at the Sears building in Hyde Park, near Chicago’s South Side. His job was to paste up parts of the Sears Roebuck mail order catalog and type copy. All of his business machines were manual. He worked in a hospital green partition with a frosted glass top and sat at a huge gray metal desk.
With his white shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows (and in one of his satin vests), under the ubiquitous green glass glow of his desk lamp, he could type on his manual Royal upright as fast and as accurately as any female secretary.
* * *
Eight years before that Vincente and Julietta Bonaventura began their journey to the north alone with a small dog, but without their twenty-some family members surrounding them, protecting them and interpreting the world for them. They were running. Running away from the love that Vince once knew with Emma, Julie’s mother, his wife. Running from the memories.
Running to? A bright, new future. A different kind of chance for his baby daughter?
A curtain opened slowly, revealing a beckoning, deep light as they drove towards Charlottesville. What will be? Will it be good -- or will it just lead them back to Louisiana?
Que sera sera…"
"Evenings in suburban Chicago were dusky like only the late 1950‘s could produce. There were very few nuclear plants, only one or two experimental ones here and there. Instead, the brilliant pinks and yellows streaking across the mid-west horizon at sunset were from the nearby coal burning electric plants. In rural Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, a thick, sulfuric, rotting smell rolled across the cornfields before the sky turned to indigo in the evenings.
Toyota did not exist as a compact car manufacturer. Rambler did. There were not very many compact cars in America. Gasoline was about fifteen cents a gallon. Most cars were V-8’s, vinyl-upholstered and the size of a small pickup truck. The heater coil was usually broken on used vehicles -- giving passengers the stark, icy thrill of a freezer unit on the coldest days of winter. The plastic bench-style, non-bucket seats were like sitting on a frosty, crackling, plastic mattress that time of year -- waiting to sear your bare legs raw in the heat of the summer. Moving around in the summer on one of those plastic bench seats in a pair of shorts was a lot like ripping a large piece of duct tape off the back of your bare thighs.
* * *
Vincente Bonaventura took the Chicago commuter train on the Burlington Northern line to work. He rode from the station near his new home in the suburbs to Union Station on Canal Street in downtown Chicago. Then he hopped a city bus from there to his job at the Sears building in Hyde Park, near Chicago’s South Side. His job was to paste up parts of the Sears Roebuck mail order catalog and type copy. All of his business machines were manual. He worked in a hospital green partition with a frosted glass top and sat at a huge gray metal desk.
With his white shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows (and in one of his satin vests), under the ubiquitous green glass glow of his desk lamp, he could type on his manual Royal upright as fast and as accurately as any female secretary.
* * *
Eight years before that Vincente and Julietta Bonaventura began their journey to the north alone with a small dog, but without their twenty-some family members surrounding them, protecting them and interpreting the world for them. They were running. Running away from the love that Vince once knew with Emma, Julie’s mother, his wife. Running from the memories.
Running to? A bright, new future. A different kind of chance for his baby daughter?
A curtain opened slowly, revealing a beckoning, deep light as they drove towards Charlottesville. What will be? Will it be good -- or will it just lead them back to Louisiana?
Que sera sera…"