I Shall Forever Remain an Amateur

A few readers have requested I post some more of my entry for National Novel Writing Month.  I definitely won’t be sharing the whole thing on here, but since there’s interest, I don’t see the harm in putting up a little more.

A caveat: I’m roughly 7,000 words (25 pages) into the novel, and I’m still not confident that it’s worth much of anything.  This isn’t false modesty.  I’m still figuring it out as I go, and whatever you read on here is, in every way, first draft material, scratched out in fits and starts over a couple hours each evening.  So keep that in mind as you read.  The first few pages can be found here, and this excerpt picks up straightaway.  Hope you enjoy.

*****

The street was as he remembered it, huge oaks on either side whose branches, in the summer, would meet overhead, causing the sun to tessellate on the pavement below, a shifting checkerboard of burnished light.  Even though Russell had never been to France, it reminded him for some reason of a Parisian boulevard.  In high school – to cultivate a sense of sophistication he thought was missing from the neighborhood – he took to lounging around outside his house in a beret, sipping Dr. Pepper from an espresso cup he’d stolen from K-Mart, and biting huge chunks off the end of a baguette.  His dad tolerated this with the resigned air of a parent much used to disappointment.  Cassie, his mom bought the baguettes.

Now, though, the bare branches reached toward one another, their spindly ends stretching and failing to make contact.  As Russell turned the corner at his parents’ – scratch that, parent’s – house, he noticed that the grass was long dead – killed off by the first frost that had surely struck weeks ago – but it was also long.  Like it hadn’t been mown at the end of summer.  It was a yearly tradition, that final mowing in late September or early October, a certain sign that the seasons were changing, the calendar ticking over from summer to fall.  It hadn’t happened this year.  The grass – brittle and brown – stood nearly knee-high.  Russell could picture it blowing in the late summer breeze, forgotten and supplanted by what was happening inside the house.

He turned into the driveway, feeling that old, familiar thud as the tires whacked up and then down over the uneven seam that separated driveway from sidewalk.  He had no sooner thrown the vehicle into park than his sister bounded out the back door.  Russell supposed it was possible that she had coincidentally been doing dishes at the kitchen sink and gazing out the window, but it was more likely that she had been waiting for him to arrive.  Sarah had always been the anxious one of the siblings.  Even as kids, she was the homework-doer, the checklist-maker, the one who insisted on being at band practice fifteen minutes early rather than run the risk of getting there two minutes late.  It was as though watching all of Russell’s mistakes growing up had granted his sister an unusual degree of paranoia.  She never smoked pot as a teen because she was confident it would cause her head to implode like a dying star.

But here she was, smiling at him as she shuffle-skipped toward the pickup, trying to constrain her excitement but only partially succeeding.  In the years that Russell had been in California Sarah had put on weight.  Where she had been too thin as a teen – neurotic about her weight and appearance like most teenage girls are, only amplified in Sarah’s hyper-sensitive case – she now looked, Russell observed, normal.  There was no other word for it.  She looked healthy, looked well-adjusted, looked like he’d hoped she would. [more here] And he could only imagine how he looked in her eyes.  He felt the same as when he’d left home at 26, but he could only imagine how he might look to her.  A little paunchy, a little gray, a little tired.  He wore glasses now, had grown out his beard, and, especially in the last year that he’d been without work, had taken an unhealthy liking to Gardetto’s snack food and beer.  He still felt 26 but imagined he looked like every one of his 34 years.

He swept all that away, though, as Sarah seized him in a hug.

“Assface!” she muttered into his shoulder.

“Hey, Dipshit,” he replied into the top of her head, the old pet name coming to him easily.

She broke the embrace but held onto him by the elbows, appraising him, soaking in the years of absence, the years of silence.

“What took you so long?” she asked, and of course there were multiple layers of meaning to that single question.

Russell didn’t know which layer to excavate first – the seven years in California with only a handful of phone calls, the missed birthdays, the fact that Mom had been sort of sick for three years and then really sick for one year and Russell still hadn’t visited – so he went with the easiest.

“Fucking Indiana cops,” he growled.  “2,500 hundred miles and I get a ticket a hundred from home.”

Sarah held his eyes for a moment longer, deciding whether or not to accept the boundary implied by his answer.  Then, a nod and another smile:

“Pigs,” she swore. “N.W.A. had it right.”

Russell broke away and turned to the bed of his truck, grabbing a navy blue duffel bag by the handle.  His breath plumed in the November air as he hoisted it.

“No no no no,” Sarah said, grabbing his wrist. “Trust me when I say you’re not ready for what’s inside.”

“What’s inside?” Russell asked.

Sarah moved around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door. “Just … let’s go.”

 **

 “She’s gone.”

“Dad … what?”

“She’s gone, Russ.  She’s gone.”

Brain wheeling, trying to get the synapses to fire.

“Who, Dad?”

“Your mom, Russ.  Who do you think?”

Connection made.

“What do I … what do you need me to do?”

“Come home, Russ.  Now.”

           **

In the late 90’s the town had been taken over by sports bars.  They were in strip malls next to Fashion Bug or TJ Maxx or Payless Shoes. They all bore single-word, two-syllable names like Hummer’s and Joker’s and Cheater’s, and these names were illuminated in neon along with a “clever” logo: a bumblebee for Hummer’s; a harlequin dressed in motley for Joker’s; and – apparently displaying a faulty understanding of the English language – a cheetah for Cheater’s.   But the name on the outside didn’t matter, not really.  Inside, the bars were relentlessly anonymous in their uniformity: wall-mounted TV’s and sports memorabilia and waitresses dressed like referees.  Perhaps not coincidentally, these interchangeable drinking holes became hugely popular with Midwestern sports fans, and the bars’ similarity to each other was comfortable in the same way it’s comfortable that every Wal-Mart is set up on an identical floorplan.

Despite the town’s preference for homogenization, there was still room for the Brass Rail.  Nestled snugly between a jeweler’s and a men’s clothing store on the main drag, the bar was an Edgewood mainstay, and it was here that Sarah directed Russell.  It was, improbably for a small Midwestern town, tastefully decorated: dim lighting, dark wood, photos of pub scenes hanging on the walls.  Even though smoking had been banned in Ohio bars since 2006, the air still smelled strongly of tobacco, as though it had embedded itself in the grain of the mahogany bar that spanned the length of the main room.

Russell had spent many nights here in his early 20’s, drinking alone most of the time.  He would tuck himself away in a corner and try to write, putting away beer after beer until his pen seemed loaded with lead shot and the words on the page shimmered as though in a heat haze.  Sarah, who went away to college at 18 and never really returned, was less familiar with the Rail, but she still knew it was the only decent place in town to grab a drink.  Anyway, it beat trying to talk at Hummer’s while the next table noisily slurped their nuclear-orange buffalo wings and some drunken toolbox slurred his way through a karaoke version of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

It wasn’t quite 5:00 when Russell and Sarah arrived, and the bar was nearly empty.  They grabbed drinks and settled in at a table away from the action, if any action were eventually to transpire.  Russell took a sip of his Newcastle and cleared his throat.

“So, what’s –“

And Sarah’s face began to melt.  It started with a twitch of the lips, a moistness in the eyes, and suddenly it was as though her features were caught in a landslide, collapsing inward and downward, picked up and carried along in a wave of anguish.  Her shoulders rocked with sobs, but she made no sound.  Sarah had always been the considerate one, too, careful not to make anyone else feel uncomfortable.  Russell pulled his chair around to her side of the table, wincing as it squealed on the floorboards.  He put his arm around her quivering shoulders, unsure what to say.  Comforting people wasn’t his specialty.

“Hey,” he began, awkwardly patting at her shoulder with the palm of his hands.

“Russell, where have you been?” Sarah moaned.  She pulled away from his arm and turned to him, her face blotchy even in the dim light of the bar. “Do you have any idea what it’s been like?”

“I know.  I know I fucked up,” Russell stammered.

“That’s not even it, Russ.”  Sarah leaned in, her voice suddenly intense, grief vanished with the snap of a finger to be replaced by simmering anger. “It goes beyond fucking up.  Fucking up is forgetting Mom’s birthday or dropping your pants in the middle of a job interview.  You’re the older brother and you just walked away.”

“I had a job, Sair,” Russell protested, fighting the urge to put his hands up in defense. “I had to go, and once I was there it was hell to get away.  I wanted to come, especially –“ He faltered, dropping his voice. “Especially when she got sick.”

“So where were you in the last year? You lost your job months ago.  Why didn’t you come sooner?  Why did you leave it up to Dad?”

“How is he?” Russell asked quietly – concerned, but also anxious to change the topic.

“Oh, Russ,” Sarah said, and Russell was mildly concerned to see yet another mood shift: grief to anger to despair. “It’s terrible.  I’ve been helping to coordinate all the funeral arrangements, and he just watches TV.  Court shows, mostly.  I ask him a question and he just tells me I know best.  Like he can’t be bothered.”

Russell took a pull of his beer, digesting the information.  Jerry, their father, had never been a sentimental man.  He had always been involved in his children’s lives, but he was never a hugger, and Russell could scarcely recall any instances when his father had expressed love for him.  As Russell got older and his interests gradually moved toward art and music and film and other pastimes that didn’t involve balls or tackling people, he always had the sense that Jerry wished he could call a mulligan on his oldest son.  He never voiced it out loud, but it was this general feeling of dissatisfaction that had partially driven Russell from Ohio in the first place.  Jerry was the kind to suffer in silence, grimacing instead of shouting, so to hear that his mourning was taking place from a sedentary position was, frankly, not surprising.

“He’s grieving, Sarah,” Russell said.  “It takes different forms.  It’s the, you know, the whatsit.  The stages of loss.”

“Kubler-Ross,” Sarah finished for him, and shook her head.  “I know grieving, Russ.  But this is different.  It’s like he’s just running out the clock.  He sleeps in the chair, and sometimes he forgets to eat.”

“Does he talk about her?  Ever?”

“Mom?  No.  At least not that I’ve heard.  Dan and Spencer – you remember them?  From the office? – they drop by sometimes, so maybe he talks about her with them.  But not with me.  And you know the worst part?”

Russell shook his head, afraid of what would come next.

“I haven’t seen him cry.  Not once.  He just sits there in front of that fucking TV, and it’s like it’s all slipping away from him.”

Russell watched as Sarah slid her rum and Coke across the tabletop, hand to hand to hand to hand.  It left a trail of moisture on the polished wood surface, and Russell suddenly remembered how his mom had always made him use a coaster.  The strength of the memory was a punch to the gut and he swallowed hard.

“So … what?” he asked.  “What can I do?”

Sarah smiled ruefully. “I don’t know, brother.  It’s not like –“ She bit off her words and quickly looked up at Russell through squinted eyes.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said.  “It’s cool.  It’s not like he and I were ever really on speaking terms.”

“Shit,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s cool,” Russell repeated.  Then: “When’s the funeral?”

“Day after tomorrow.  Viewing’s tomorrow night.”

“So what do we do in the next 24 hours?  Shake him from his stupor?  Stage an intervention?  Let him work it out on his own?”

Sarah knocked back the rest of her drink, ice knocking against her teeth.  She looked at Russell evenly. “How much help can I expect?”

“Jesus, Sarah – “

“It’s a fair question, Russ.” The anger was simmering again, just below the surface.  Sarah was stronger than Russell remembered her. “You split seven years ago.  Mom’s been – was – sick for most of that time.  Who do you think helped Dad take care of her in that time?  It sure as shit wasn’t you, big brother.  When Dad was at work I took her to chemo.  I fixed her meals when she was too weak to do it herself.  I was there at the end.  And you –“ She jabbed Russell in the chest with a finger, “weren’t.”

“Okay, okay,” Russell said, and this time he did raise his hands to ward off Sarah’s vitriol. “I’ll make up for lost time.  I will.” A pause.  “I’ll try.”

 **

“Come home, Russ.  Now.”

Fumble the handset back to the table.

Try to sleep, stare at the ceiling instead. A restless, rest-less, night.

Russell up at 6:00. No alarm, no need.

Coffee, toast, juice.  Drawers ransacked, closet raided, clothes haphazardly tossed in a duffel bag.  Time for folding later.

Armloads of CD’s swept into a larger duffel bag.

Downstairs to the pickup.  Palm trees nearly invisible against the mountains.  A faint band of pink just tingeing the black velvet scrim of the sky.

Clothes duffel in truck bed, CD duffel on the seat beside him.

Gun the engine, hit the road.

The 101, south to L.A.  Leg 1.

*****

Current listening:

The Go! Team – Rolling Blackouts (2011)

Far Side of Nowhere

Blogging is, I suppose, sort of a solipsistic enterprise.  Especially the kind of blog I keep, where I choose to write about what currently interests, perplexes, delights, or infuriates me. But even though I’m writing about me, I try not to have it really be about me, if you follow. Aside from the posts about my mom’s death, I’m not really interested in using this as a journal. There’s an implied audience to much of what I write, where even a trip to the gym turns into a sort of half-assed meditation on Southern racism.  This all sounds terribly pompous (I’m writing for the greater good!), but the alternative isn’t much better, where each of my posts is a recounting of what I’ve done each day, as though that’s of interest to anyone.

Anyway.  I’m aware that keeping this thing is sort of a tightrope – keeping it personal while making it interesting to people near and far.  Doing too much of the former turns this into a discussion of what I eat for lunch each day, while too much of the latter means I’ll eventually have to write about Justin Bieber.  I have to occupy the middle ground, which is more difficult than it sounds.

But tonight it’s solipsism all the way.  Because I’m stuck.

Tomorrow begins National Novel Writing Month (wherein its participants attempt to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November).

As usual, I’m planning on giving it a shot.

As usual, I don’t have the slightest idea what to write about.

It’s not for lack of trying.  I teach on Monday and Wednesday, and the first 15 minutes of each class is devoted to silent, individual writing, National Writing Project-style.  I write with my students, and each day this writing sounds stupidly similar.  Here’s an excerpt of what I wrote on Sept. 28:

This year I’d like to take a run at NaNoWriMo.  But the problem, as it usually is, comes down to inspiration.  At least I’m thinking about it early this time.  I’ve got a month to sketch out some basics, if I decide it’s worth shooting for.  The issue, though, is that I don’t even really have the germ of an idea.  I suppose I could go back to the Garrett stories, but after four years it may be time to concede that that ship has sailed.  I’ve taken stabs at it before and nothing has really stuck, even the time I wrote one more complete chapter to it.

Beyond that, though, I’m totally bereft of ideas.  And forget something substantial – I don’t even have a shallow, superficial idea. But maybe the trick is just to come up with the basic idea. NaNo is supposed to be down and dirty and probably not the place for a completely polished product. First draft material. So maybe I spend the next month searching for that idea – something that can last me for 30 days.

Tabula rasa comes to mind.  No good ideas, no real inspiration.  I tried using the writing time to do the sketching I promised myself, with little success.  Here’s Oct. 10, after I tried writing an opening paragraph based on the barest scrap of an idea:

It’s coming to terms with a parent’s death, with a Midwest upbringing, with growing older – but who really gives a shit if I can’t tell that story in a way it hasn’t been told before?  I talk all the time about the importance of having a ‘so what,’ but I don’t have one yet except that it’s some thirtysomething guy (like me) coming to terms with death (like me) and his roots (like me).  I mean, yawn.

The biggest issue is that it’s just as tiresome writing about my inability to write as it is writing about something I don’t care about.  Maybe (not maybe – definitely) what I need to do is give myself over to this more completely. I have this habit of just saying, ‘Well, I don’t know what to write about, so I quit,’ instead of actively thinking about it.  So – more thought.  At home, in the office, in the car, and then put pen to paper and just try it out.  It won’t be any more a waste of time than spinning my wheels like I’m doing now.

And so I did think about it.  I did some mental tinkering in the shower, as I drifted off to sleep each night, as a way of taking a break from grading papers.  Nothing.  I wrote sample paragraphs at the beginning of class and tried summarizing what I thought this novel would be about.  Nothing, and still more nothing.  Here’s what I wrote in class today, October 31:

So NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, and I still have no firm idea of what I’ll be writing about.  The question is: will I actually do it? … I’m still floating around in the void, and I’m doubtful that anything good will magically come of that.

It’s frustrating, to be completely honest.  I have a tendency to laugh things off, but this persistent inability of mine to come up with anything worth writing about is a constant irritant.  I think I do quite well for myself once I latch onto something that has legs, but it’s the latching that’s the problem.  And I do a bang-up job of finding excuses.  The ellipses in that final quote just above masks the way I tried to use this blog as a reason not to do NaNoWriMo.  The argument went something like this: How do I write 2,000 words a day for NaNoWriMo and maintain my newfound fidelity to this blog?  The implied moral being, Blog first, novel if I get around to it.  Which of course is no way to approach writing.

I forget where I heard it, but it strikes me as true that a great writer needs both talent and discipline.  You can maybe squeak by with one or the other, but it’s the marriage of the two that allows greatness to happen.  In my own case, discipline is constantly a problem, and I think some (including myself) would argue that my talent isn’t exactly a forgone conclusion, either.  NaNoWriMo is a chance for me to test my mettle in both regards, but as is usually the case in such instances, I’d rather talk myself out of it.

So I now have less than 24 hours to decide what – if anything – I’m going to write.  This does not fill me with warm feelings.  If any of you have a great novel idea that’s just languishing in a desk drawer or currently looking for a good home, send it my way.  It’s certainly better than anything I currently have.

*****

Current listening:

The Divine Comedy – Casanova (1996)

Comfortable Home (A True Story)

Ridiculous.  That’s the only word I can think of to describe the bravado with which I entered my latest blogging enterprise.  Here’s the problem, and it’s threefold: 1) I like the idea of blogging more than I actually like doing it, 2) I saw a vast majority of my free time get hoovered up by my role as co-director of the Summer Institute of a National Writing Project site, and 3) I am intractably lazy.

That third reason is actually the biggest problem.  I love it when people say something like, “If I won the lottery I’d still have to work because I’d get too bored.”  I have no such problem.  I love what I do and I’m passionate about teaching, but if I won the lottery I’d leave my job and never look back.  I would have no trouble filling my time.  I’d watch more movies and read more books, I’d play video games, I’d travel with Fiancée of Monty, I’d go to all the concerts I currently can’t afford to attend, I’d learn to cook something other than Top Ramen, I’d refine my oenophilic tendencies, I might even write that book I’ve been meaning to write; in short, I’d do all the things I want to do now but can’t because earning a paycheck gets in the way. So in some ways the third reason relates to the first because the thought of daily blog posting seems like an obligation, and there’s no quicker way to kill my interest in something than to make me feel like I have to do it.  I love reading, but I stay the hell away from book clubs for a very good reason: I don’t want homework.

So this post is partially an apologia for not posting with more regularity, but it’s primarily a way for me to relate my experience with Reason #2 above.  I spent the last twenty days running the Summer Institute (SI) of a National Writing Project site, and it was one of the most exhausting and rewarding experiences of my life.

A primer, for the uninitiated.  The National Writing Project has affiliate sites all over the country which provide professional development for teachers of all subjects and grade levels.  Teachers apply and, if accepted, attend the SI for a period of several weeks, Monday through Friday.  The purpose is to innovate in the field of writing instruction, and this is accomplished by 1) writing, writing, writing – in multiple genres for multiple purposes, and to get feedback on that writing by a community of peers, and 2) following the credo, “Teachers teaching teachers,” which means each of the summer’s participants conducts an hour-long workshop on something that’s working for them (or which has the potential to work for them) in their own classroom.  It’s a break from traditional professional development, where some mouth-breathing know-nothing bought and paid for by the district office comes in with a packaged program to sell and proceeds to talk at the teachers for a couple hours while they struggle to stay awake and/or grade papers and/or stifle their murderous thoughts.

Under my virtuoso instruction (because I’m clearly hot shit), the SI started each day with thirty minutes of uninterrupted free writing.  Some worked on older projects (the novel or short story that had been languishing in a desk drawer for a decade), some journaled about the previous day’s activities, some worked on ongoing writing projects that originated from the SI’s other activities.  After that, we moved into other writing workshops (I led some, dealing with things like writing for social justice and exploring logic and argument), which led into the previously mentioned teacher demonstrations, writing groups (where they’d workshop a piece they were working on), or reading groups (where they’d discuss some professional reading).  We had some outside speakers (including my former advisor/mentor/spiritual guru/life coach/all around good guy Sheridan Blau), a delicious breakfast each morning, intermittent bouts of grousing about current ed reform initiatives, and a hell of a lot of laughter.

I know, I know.  In this hastily sketched-out description it sounds kind of blech.  Writing groups.  Wahoo.  But you’ll just have to take my word that being immersed in this setting for roughly eight hours a day was invigorating and inspirational.  Because here’s the other thing about the National Writing Project: it tends to attract really great teachers.  The burnout you had for 10th grade English who treated you with thinly veiled contempt before he retreated behind his desk with the newspaper?  That’s not the teacher who attends the SI.  I had the privilege – and I mean that; I was the lucky one in this enterprise – of working with seventeen teachers who were (and are; I shouldn’t talk about them like they’re dead) passionate about teaching and dedicated to the idea of helping their students.  I don’t know how we lucked into such an amazing group, but any success we had this summer is due to what they brought with them each day.

And so, as I look back on the last few weeks, it’s really, really weird for me to feel content with my role.  I’ll be the first to tell you that I feel tangential to the SI’s success this year.  Even as co-director, my main job was coordinating the calendar and getting things rolling each day.  Yeah, I led a few activities, but I’m no Sheridan, who legitimately and routinely changes people’s lives.  I’m a decent facilitator, an above-average listener, and someone who mainly wants to ensure that no one feels their time was wasted.  So even though I wasn’t the source of the inspiration so many of the fellows said they felt, I guess my capacity for scheduling allowed the inspiration to happen.  Which, now that I look at those words, makes me a really gifted secretary.  But that’s okay.  The end result is the same, and I’m not going to deny how good it felt to show up at school each day, or how gratifying it was to hear the fellows testify to the way their SI experience will transform their teaching for the better.

And here’s the cool thing: this transformation isn’t a one-way street.  Last September I called Sheridan when I was first asked to co-direct the 2011 SI.  He said it would be one of the most fulfilling experiences of my teaching career.  He was right.  Now that I’m working primarily in a university setting, it did me a world of good to touch base with K-12 teachers who, after all, are my people, my tribe.  Much of the time I feel supremely out of place among my post-secondary colleagues, and I immediately felt at home talking shop with the high school English teachers.  But it also felt right to be among teachers sharing their passion for the job.  I picked up things I plan on taking back to my college classes in the fall, and I met people – both in Georgia and from our international cohort in Ecuador and Costa Rica – whom I want to stay in touch with as a source of professional and personal inspiration.  I said it earlier, but it bears repeating: I’m a lucky guy.

I had lots of reasons for not posting at this site for over a month, but only one of them is a good one.  And while I spent an inordinate amount of time, money, and frustration earning my Ph.D., June 2011 made it all worthwhile.

*****

Current listening:

Ty Segall – Goodbye Bread (2011)

Current reading:

Irvine Welsh – Crime (2008)

Last movie seen:

Super 8 (2011; J.J. Abrams, dir.)