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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONThe Great Bewilderment: Reading "Captin JJC The Feirce"
The complete text of this selection is available in our print edition.
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Oliver Cooney-Martin’s “Captin JJC The Feirce” was composed in a single sitting of approximately an hour on a Sunday morning in December 2008.1 The 14-page, 587-word story was written with a No. 2 pencil in the kitchen of his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.2 The story is reprinted here in its entirety.
Captin JJC The Feirce3
by Oliver Cooney-Martin
Chapter 1: A Plan
Wars where feirce at hand.4 In crimenal v.s. soldier a young boy that hade a dream lived in these pereyod. hes dream that filed his heart is to work with a famous crimenal. He could do well and impress the bandit. The Bandits name was captin JJC the fieirce. The young boy was an orfen.5 he hade a plan.
Hes Plan was he was going to escape.6
7
He crept out of Bed. a rattle came frome the Door. the washer man was coming.8 What should he do. he swiflt slid down the loandry shoot two shoes. Bonk! Bonk!9 He slide Down the shoot. Womp! he nocked over the basket. he ran from the room. suddenly the princable came running in the room. he said “Wairs Jimy.” that was the kids name. Jimy ran around the corner. Without Being seen he tride to get out the Door But he couldn’t. then Jimy Jumped out the window!
the window was on the third floor. he fliped and Dived into the street. luckuly a car came by holding a mattress. oof! a soft landing. on the side was a For weeler.10 lucky me Jimy thought. he unstraped the weeler.
he slide off the truck. he turned around and Jetted forward. a car came By. he went on the side of Jimy. Jimy shoved the car off the road. smash!11 Jimy road into the ally way. some figures came out from a dump.
“looks like you got some trouble on your hands” said one of them.12 “you can Join if you want” said another. “Do you work for JJC”? said Jimy. “in fact we do” said the talest.13 “Well o.k.” said Jimy Becuse he dident have any Body to take cair of him.14 so he follode them into the sour!15
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1. Full disclosure: Oliver is my son. He was seven and a half at the time he created JJC. Oliver writes at all hours of the day and harbors no delusions about ideal work times or conditions. He usually begins first thing in the morning. After climbing down the ladder from his top bunk and visiting the bathroom, he goes straight to the kitchen table. He doesn’t require coffee.
2. The manuscript itself, like all of Oliver’s work from this period, is printed on the backside of a novel I abandoned after it had been rejected by more editors in New York City than there are students in Oliver’s second-grade classroom.
3. Oliver blithely dismisses conventional spelling and grammar. Reading Oliver is not unlike reading Gertrude Stein: one becomes more fluent with practice.
4. Violence is central to Oliver’s aesthetic. He is enthralled by battles, weapons, and armies. His stories take keen interest in characters who (a) employ deadly force for good cause and/or (b) operate outside the law yet remain noble.
Oliver’s mother struggles with this thematic obsession. An uncompromising pacifist, she maintains that the Nazi concentration camps could have been liberated by nonviolent action. When Oliver’s class was doing a unit on the Underground Railroad, his mother proclaimed, “That’s a perfect example of nonviolence in action.”
Oliver replied, “Harriet Tubman always carried a gun.”
“She did?” his mother asked.
Oliver looked at me and shook his head.
5. Orphans do not have little brothers running naked in and out of the room, singing at pitches painful to dogs, banging on drums, and destroying their concentration.
6. Oliver withholds our hero’s name, age, and physical description. There is no tedious back story about whom he is escaping from and why. Starting in medias res, Oliver bypasses several phases of the classic orphan-on-a-quest story, including the woe-I-am-abandoned phase, the woe-I-am- powerless phase, and the woe-I-am-not-worthy phase. As the popular author Elmore Leonard said, “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”
7. Line breaks represent page breaks in the original manuscript.
8. Our setting is an orphanage. The washer man is surely a janitor.
9. Oliver employs the exclamation mark. In his writing on aesthetics, the philosopher Nelson Goodman cites “repleteness” — exploiting all the properties of the medium — as one sign of artistic intention.
10. The hero’s aerial acrobatics and landing on a car with a mattress on its roof and an attached four-wheeler demonstrate the storyteller’s embrace of improbability.
11. Is the car that Jimy shoves off the road driven by a pursuer, sent by the orphanage to retrieve him? Or does it contain a family of four on their way to a picnic? Did the passengers die? Were they injured? Horribly disfigured? We don’t find out. What is clear, and unsettling, is Jimy’s existential calm in the face of possible fatality. One is reminded of The Stranger, by Albert Camus. How much compassion should we expect of a seven-year-old author for his imaginary minor characters?
12. Dramatic dialogue skips introductory formalities. The hard-boiled diction can be traced to Oliver’s fondness for Snoopy’s adventures as the World War I flying ace in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts corpus.
13. In his first physical description, Oliver gives the reader a bandit’s relative height. Ford Madox Ford said, “If you’re going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he’d better be real enough that you can smell his breath.”
14. Jimy’s/Oliver’s deepest existential concern.
15. A sewer, the bandit underworld.
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