After my binge with the Bacons I settled down. I was drinking
less and reading moreâand writing more, too, but with little luck. I needed help. I could write stuff down all day, but I could never seem to organize it into anything worth reading. My high school offered a creative writing course, but in order to get in you had to have straight A's in eleventh-grade English. I guess you had to show you were smart before being allowed to take an “arty” course. I was still concerned the principal would figure out I had never finished eleventh grade, so I didn't put up a fight. I was glad I didn't when I found out more about how the course was run. A friend who was in the class said the teacher was just a wild-haired disorganized person masquerading as a wild-haired creative person. Every day the teacher arrived and told her students to put a blank piece of paper on their desks. Then she reached into her large carryall purse, fumbled around and pulled out some odd object, steadied it on the wooden podium, and instructed the students
to “describe the object and remember to write with
flair.
” So far they had described an artichoke, a butterfly press, a sneaker, a ring of keys, a potted hibiscus, a carved Christmas angel, and a sandwich. When I heard this, I knew I was doing better writing by myself no matter how skeptical I was of the results.
So I tried to be organized on my own. Ever since I'd been in elementary school I had kept diariesâbut they were filled with the odds and ends of writing like a box full of jigsaw puzzle pieces, and there was no telling if they'd ever fit together. This time I arranged my journal in a series of sections. The first and most obvious was my daily entry section, which I filled with a wild stream of thoughts in a conscious effort to capture my honest feelings, true motivations, and crazed activities of each day. The writing was kind of a blinding kaleidoscopic view of my life.
The next section was my favorite. Each time I read a book, I cataloged the parts that struck me dumb with envy and admiration for their beauty and power and truth. I spent hours copying entire pages, word for word, in my small, cramped handwriting. After I read Richard Yates's novel
Revolutionary Road
, I copied out this passage:
I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere. People who made their lives work out the way they wanted without
even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time.
The third section was plain and simple vocabulary building, where I'd write words and definitions I wanted to learn and use. Words like: viscous, impunity, paroxysm, unctuous, nefarious, onanistic, perfidious, lugubrious.
The fourth section was devoted to the moments of inspiration when book ideas came to me in full-color flashes, like bits of a film remembered, or a forgotten conversation suddenly pulsing to life. These were the great notions of sprawling novels that jolted me awake in the middle of the night or sneaked up on me as I drove my car so that I'd scrawl them on the white vinyl of the front seat next to my leg. Day and night I wrote down these ideas in my frantic, spastic penmanship. But that is all they ever amounted toâideas. After recording them in my journal I'd flip through these pages, reading them to myself, pondering each idea, and rejecting them. All of them. But they weren't all lousy. I just didn't have the confidence and determination to sit still and nurture them properly. I couldn't seem to concentrate long enough to weigh the worth of each thought, isolate its potential, allow it to grow. Instead, my mistakes, self-doubt, insecurity, and wandering mind left me high and dry. It was never too long before I lowered my pen and set down my journal. It's the life of the mind that matters, I told
myself as I picked up
The Catcher in the Rye
off my bedside stack. I figured my body would catch up later and write it all down. Of course, the body never did.
I decided my biggest writing problem was that I didn't have anything worthwhile to write about. Nothing interesting happened to me. Sure, living in a welfare motel for my senior year in high school was unusual, but it was not
extraordinary.
Or so I thought. But I had to keep practicing, and when the day came when something interesting did happen to me, I'd be ready. That's the best I could do, so I did it.
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My school building had been a former prison. The city built a new prison, moved the inmates into their new quarters, then rehabbed the old prison and turned it into a high school. Members of the school board said the city was growing so fast they had no choice but to take advantage of existing structures. They removed the razor wire but kept the twelve-foot fence. The concrete guard towers were turned into headquarters for service clubs like Interact and Junior Achievement. There was a gate out front where the buses pulled up, and the principal could throw a switch in his office and the gate would automatically open and close. He seemed to enjoy that, and at the end of each day would announce on the intercom that we were “free to go.” And we fled. The school cleared out in minutes, just as any prison would have if the warden opened the gate.
At Sunrise there were no prisoners left behind, but evidence of their trapped lives was everywhere. Even though the bars were removed I could still see the jagged edges above and below the windows where they had been unevenly cut with an acetylene torch. And in the right light no amount of fresh paint covered up what had been gouged into the concrete-block walls. Curse words, lovers' names, crude drawings of sex organs, sex objects, and sex acts. One wall was entirely worked into a life-size portrait of a naked woman reclining. I'd sit in a desk next to her and slowly trace the curves with my fingertips. It was sexy to imagine myself in prison. I'd let my mind drift and soon it was me behind bars as the snotty kid in
Jail Bait
saying, “I never thought that carrying a gun would lead to this!” I used to love watching those sleazy crime dramas on Saturday afternoon TV. My favorite was
The Violent Years,
about a gang of teenage girls dressed in black leather who robbed and molested guys like me. One of the girls said, “I shot a cop ⦠so what!” I never knew girls like that and wondered what they might do to me if I was lucky enough to be captured by them.
I thought having my own place would automatically attract girls to me. I was mistaken. I was the spider who could not coax any flies into his web. I wanted girls to find me interesting. But maybe it was my whiny Holden Caulfield imitation
of a boy in need of carnal therapy that got me nowhere. Or perhaps my sitting in the library with an intensely cheerless, poetic look on my face only scared girls away.
My big romance of the year was a crush on my psychology teacher, Miss Hall. It was her first year of teaching. She was fresh out of Ohio State. I'd sit in front of her desk and make troubled-brow faces which I thought illustrated the deep level of neurosis I represented. I figured she was watching me as closely as if I were a patient. It was only a matter of time, I figured, before she'd want to cure me, and I liked the idea that using a couch was part of the cure. I made straight A's for the first twelve weeks. Finally I got up the nerve to write her a letter about becoming a psychology and literature major. I didn't dare attempt a love letterâbesides, I didn't have to. Any psychology teacher would know that a soul-baring letter from her most devoted student had hidden meaning.
After she received it she caught me in the hallway and whispered, “I need to speak with you tomorrow in my office.” I could only imagine why she wanted me all alone. I figured I might start out talking about some personal observations inspired by Kesey's
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest,
then move on to a sensitive appreciation of Plath's
The Bell Jar
and its story of a woman's journey into madness. Then we could get more comfortable discussing
Love Story.
But our talk had no room for literary seduction. She had already been seduced.
“I'm quitting,” she revealed in confidence. “I'm pregnant. I just wanted you to know that I've enjoyed your attention this semester and hope you keep up the good work.”
That ended that. She was gone in a week. We had substitutes for the rest of the year. We read the textbook chapter by chapter and took moronic mimeographed tests. My grades dropped to barely passing. I was bored.
I only saw Miss Hall once more. It was unfortunate timing, as I was in a spot of trouble. A kid from school, Tony Gorda, had sold me a new car stereo. It was still in the package. I paid him and then found out it wouldn't work with my car. He told me to return it to the store for another model. When I did, the sales person called security on me and two big guys swooped down and grabbed my arms. It turned out Tony had shoplifted the stereo. The two big guys hoisted me up and carried me across the parking lot toward my car. They wanted to check my trunk and see if I had any more “loot.” As they carried me with my toes just barely ticking the asphalt, Miss Hall pulled up in her car.
“Is anything wrong, Jack?” she asked, eyeballing the two gorillas on either side of me.
“No, ma'am,” I replied, trying to act casual as I smiled down at her, and her extended belly.
“Then have a good day,” she said, and drove away.
For a psychology teacher, she didn't have much of an eye for spotting trouble when it poked her in the nose. No wonder she was in a family way.
After the gorillas found no loot in my trunk, they dragged me back into their cramped security office, where I signed a release allowing the store to keep the stereo. Then I was free to goâwhich I did, very quickly.
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One afternoon the principal called the entire school down to the auditorium to meet some “special alumni.” A traveling foursome of lifers from Raford State Prison had come to address us regarding the perils of criminal behavior. Earlier in their prison lives they had spent some time incarcerated where we were now going to school.
We filed down the dark halls and entered the former prison cafeteria. Once we took our seats the convicts parted the red velvet stage curtain and sat down on folding chairs. They wore broad-striped black-and-white uniforms and looked like they might launch into a rendition of “Jailhouse Rock” until a club-wielding guard joined them and announced, “These men you see here will never be released from prison. They regret their crimes, but it is too late for regret. Their lives are ruined, but they have volunteered to speak with you all today about the perils of a criminal life. Please listen carefully. Someday
you will graduate, but you will not want to go to your class reunion dressed like these guys.”
What could they say that would possibly change my life? I was enjoying my life just fine. I wasn't going to become a criminal. I was going to be a writer. And if not a writer, I wasn't sure what I might do, but I certainly had no interest in becoming a criminal.
The first prisoner stood up and strutted back and forth like a bowlegged bulldog. “I,” he said dramatically as he punched himself hard in the chest, “have an anger problem.” He told how bullies beat him up every day. He used to like reading, but the bullies ripped his books to shreds. At that moment he picked up a Yellow Pages from the stage and, to illustrate what the bullies did to him
and
his anger problem, ripped the book clean in half, tossing the two pieces over his shoulders. Kids laughed out loud. We couldn't help ourselves. The show seemed so ridiculously fake.
We kept laughing until the principal snapped his fingers at us. The prisoner went on to declare that he stopped reading and started fighting back, and kept on fighting back until he killed a man with his bare hands. Suddenly he thrust his fists toward us, and when he opened his hands they were glistening with stage blood. He was now serving a life sentence, and advised us to control our temper.
The next guy was little and nervous as a dragonfly. He
wore big round glasses and buzzed on about drugs in a whiny insect voice. First he'd smoked marijuana, then he took pills, then he started “mainlining heroinâChina whiteâIranian tarâMexican brown.” He went on to impress us with his knowledge of the opium-growing regions of the world. The more he talked about how good it had made him feelâ“with the skinny needle in my arm and the blood blooming in the syringe”âthe higher his voice rose. By the time he started using words like “rapture” and “sexiness,” he was swooping around as if he were having a seizure. Finally, the guard cut him off.
“What he means to tell you,” the guard summarized in case we missed the message, “is that once you start with drugs, you end up like himâa dope fiend who can only spend the rest of his days behind bars, dreaming of the past.” He escorted the dragonfly back to his seat. I watched as he slumped forward in a memory high.
The third guy had been a mail thief as a kid. “I started out small,” he announced. He went on to tell us about how he stole cash from birthday cards. Then checks. Then he robbed a string of banks and by misfortune he happened to shoot a bank guard and now was doing life. He advised us to work honestly for our money, and live within our means. Nobody seemed impressed with his reasonable advice, given where he was now spending all his time.
The last man was in for sex crimes. As he spoke, he never
raised his eyes above his shoes. When he was a boy he didn't have any friends to play with. He spent a lot of time alone. He didn't have much to do. He discovered masturbation. He wished he had exercised self-control and gone into the seminary. He never meant to hurt those women. In prison he said he had embraced the teachings of Jesus Christ and was a better man for it. He wanted us to forgive him. A halfhearted murmur of forgiveness broke out in pockets. I wasn't buying it. It seemed to me that no amount of forgiveness would ever wash away his need to be forgiven every day. He reminded me of the Flannery O'Connor story I loved, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” where the Misfit shoots the hugely annoying grandmother to death and then says she would of been a good woman, if somebody had been there to shoot her every minute of her life.