My grandfather dealt in oil, a VP of Standard Oil of Indiana, or some such concern. His daughter, my mother, married a deservedly famous and internationally renowned throat surgeon. In our family, unvoiced expectations included college and a career making lots of money. Fame and power were optional.
My parents’ push toward my upward mobility started in the near north side Chicago Latin School, where I excelled until eighth grade. In fact, my most fulfilling academic moment occurred in fourth or fifth grade when I was allowed to read my stories, penciled the night before on wide loose-leaf paper, out loud to the class. Given the freedom to write about anything, I did. Something about pirates, perhaps, or subjects and characters equally perverse and action-filled.
By eighth grade, the curriculum had steamrolled any enthusiasm I had for school. My first quarter report card announced a C in Latin, and an F in French. Teachers and parents alike discovered that I didn’t have what my three older brothers had displayed—an impressive I.Q. and a knack for good study habits. My mother called the school, and second quarter saw me drop Latin and enroll in Dummy French.
My parents subsequently decided to send me to an Eastern boarding school a thousand miles away. I begged, I cried, I sulked, but my mother held firm, telling me, “We’re doing this for you. It’s an expensive school, and we expect you to do well.”
The only East Coast secondary school that would take me, Marvelwood, made it a condition that I go to Maine’s Winter Harbor Reading Camp, a kind of boot camp for reading skills and study methods. My mother must have waited to see if I graduated from Reading School before making my train reservation, because the only thing left was coach. I sat up on the overnight trip across the Midwest late in the summer of 1963. At Grand Central Station, a school van met and drove me the two hours to Cornwall, Connecticut, home of the cathedral pine, Mohawk Mountain, and ninety students with buried potential who were encouraged to unearth it with a strictly structured daily schedule. In 24 hours, I’d gone from color TV, thick steaks and carpeting to creaky, cold wooden floors, jail-thin mattress, required sports attendance, and proctored nightly study halls. Homesick, I threw up with bulimic regularity. Only the academics came easily compared to the rigors of Latin School, and with mandatory study halls, I made honor roll.
My first roommate, Bob, a short, stocky kid who later could have doubled for Perry Smith, one of the two murderers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, influenced me more than I would know for years. Together we wrote a fake news report for the annual variety show, delivered using lame impressions of Huntley and Brinkley. He also shamed me into reading a book not assigned for class. Although I had loved hearing my mother read to my brothers and me when young, I hated reading. In seventh grade, I picked the book Nautilus 90 North from a list to read within a designated period. When not finishing it on time, I had to bring a note to school signed by a parent so they’d be apprised of my misdemeanor. At breakfast, my father was waiting in his dark suit before going to the hospital. “I hear you didn’t get your book read on time.”
Who knows what I said? Probably something like, “Right,” or “I guess.”
“Damn it!” he yelled, timing his outburst with a fist crashing onto the table top, eviscerating my ego. He continued with shame-inducing language encouraging me to get my ass in gear, his response making me cry and hate books with even more conviction.
So when Bob pushed movie director Elia Kazan’s novel The Arrangement on me, I started reading it mostly to get him off my back. It turned me into a reader for life. The day I reached the end, my downward mobility took root. Not only had I been sucked into the black hole of reading, but I’d acquired a new hostility to conformity.
After four years, I left Marvelwood armed with good study skills, but what to study in college confounded me. At Hartwick College (in Oneonta, New York, 17 miles from Cooperstown), for three and a half years I sleepwalked through traditional liberal arts classes.
My major epiphany arrived one cold February night on Oneonta’s empty hockey rink that
bull’s-eyed the city’s dark, deserted, snow-packed public park. For half an hour I skated in figure eights, reviewing what I saw as my life choices. I dismissed business and sales. I didn’t want to wear a tie, and didn’t like talking to people about things I had no interest in.
I also dismissed soldiering. I’d lucked out with a high draft lottery number, 180—or thereabouts, a relatively safe number in 1971. And I dismissed graduate school, having sat half-somnambulant
at a desk for eighteen years while teachers and professors told me what to think.
My choice, writing, won the night. My god, how good this feels, I thought, wanting to scream my joy as the idea sank in that I could actually do what I wanted. Something heavy lifted and left me. I had rediscovered the ecstasy felt a decade earlier when reading the story
out loud to my fifth grade audience. Who knew if I’d earn a living turning out manuscripts?
All I knew was that I’d given myself permission to try.
The summer before this breakout moment, Bob, my novel-pushing former Marvelwood roommate, called to ask if I wanted to join him on a camping trip to Alaska. We’d drive his Bronco up the 1,200 miles of gravel Alaskan-Canadian highway. The June night we crossed the Yukon/Alaskan border, we fished under midnight’s blue dusk. We naively had planned on fighting forest fires like Norman McLean terrifyingly describes in his memoir Young Men and Fire but, fortunately, a wet summer saved us the embarrassment of being laughed out of a smoke jumper’s office.
Hearing about possible cannery work, we ferried to Kodiak Island, only to find angry indigenous Alaskans had shot and killed two bearded lower-forty-eight college kids horning in on the few high-paying cannery jobs available. We went three weeks half-heartedly waiting in lines to sign on, but luckily for us, failing, or the Kodiak Mirror may have covered our murders as well. Relying on the hospitality of strangers, we holed up nights in a church basement offered by a sympathetic protestant pastor. As we walked the streets of Kodiak, we experienced firsthand the New Wild West, where the law was loose and we constantly looked back over our shoulders to see if we were being followed.
The Alaska adventure did nothing to improve my literary style — not that I had one –
but living as an “other” prepared me for life as a writer. Relegated to life as an outsider reminded me of one particular dinner party my father threw for visiting doctors. When introduced to yet another world-famous throat surgeon, I stammered my bravado answer to
his question, “And what do you do?” with “I’m a writer.”
“No,” he responded almost pitiably, “I mean, what do you DO?”
After graduation, I stuck with the decision to write, which meant rejecting the thick, rich insulation afforded by my parents’ luxury apartment. Not that I really suffered, of course, not in the jungle missionary or mountain mystic sense. I looked to New Haven in Connectuct, where my older brother Bill lived with his new wife, and I started writing short fiction. In fact, if not for Bill, I’d probably be driving across Western Kansas today with a van full of multi-colored-covered high school English textbooks to sell to non-digitalized classrooms.
To support my pipe-smoking, caffeine-addicted first attempts to write the Great American Short Story, I applied for one of the only jobs my major in sociology prepared me for, a security guard. Earning minimum wage five nights a week — or more if they called and pleaded — I protected a New Haven 24-hour Stop and Shop grocery cold storage warehouse from
4 p.m. to midnight — or later if the next shift failed to show.
On my first night there, I met the relatively well-paid factory workers who unloaded sidetracked refrigerator boxcars, loaded and unloaded 20-foot shelves, and loaded trucks backed up to vertical bay doors. Throughout my shift they rolled up one by one in their knit caps, overalls, and gloves, their forklifts coughing blue exhaust, to let me know why my predecessor left.
“You know, de guard here before you leff after he write up a worker. Co-in-ci-den-tally, nex night a case a oranges ass-identally fall off the top shelf and come so close to landin’ on his head, it damn near kill the man.”
From that night forward, I spent most of the nine months working in that Arctic McCormick Place avoiding workers I was supposed to be protecting the warehouse and its food products from. Finding a stack of pallets in a corner on the relatively warm freight car platform, I marveled through Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, each new thinker my new hero. I jotted down unfamiliar words on the inside of the paperback’s back cover, and looked them up at home.
When my boss, a Guardsmark “lieutenant,” sent a memo telling us guards to expand our reports, writing more than just “Checked the warehouse, and all was secure,” I began employing my gargantuan, linguistic nomenclature, journalistically rendering my perambulation and circumnavigation of the premises in said document.
A week later the lieutenant summoned me to his office.
A short, officious company man, his uniform ironed and spotless, he paged through my reports.
“Did you write these?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“These are very impressive,” he said, raising his eyes to look at me. “How would you like to be made a lieutenant?
“Pays a dollar more an hour,” he added.
“What’ll I have to do?”
“You’d be stationed at the entrance to the main warehouse, checking people in and out, and calling in replacements if a guard called in sick.”
“I like being a guard, sir.”
The lieutenant told me to think about it.
The experience taught me a valuable lesson: words count—as well as the way you use them. They moved people in real, practical, life-changing ways.
Meanwhile, I wrote and mailed off my first story to Esquire, titled “The Observer.” A few months later, a tiny rejection slip arrived. Under the formal “Thank you for sending, but it doesn’t fit our present needs,” an editor had scrawled, “I love the story, but the telling leaves me cold.”
At this point, I began to imagine life as a college professor. My big break came when a former grad school friend recommended me when leaving his position at a small, two-year Kansas college where he’d replaced a teacher on sabbatical. So, in 1975, armed with a Masters in English, I blew into Winfield’s St. John’s College run by the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church.
Initially mocking the idea of living in Kansas, I grew to love Winfield. When flying out for my interview the June before starting, I sat next to a woman who told me I was coming to Kansas at the perfect time.
“The wheat is turning from green to gold,” she said, thoroughly impressed with her revelation.
I smirked at her low bar for beauty, but that was before falling in love with the slow, laid-back Mayberry lifestyle. After living among New Haven and St. Louis’s dirty buildings whose windows stared only at other dirty buildings, Winfield offered a rented house with unlocked doors, and sixty-something colleagues who invited me over for popcorn and Lawrence Welk.
Not willing — or able — to coach basketball, I was let go after a year, so I collected unemployment. The checks allowed me to stay nestled in my rented Winfield home for another year, diving ever deeper into the abyss of downward mobility. I wrote bad, but heartfelt, short stories in the morning, read mostly novels on the porch swing until cocktail time, and partied with coeds and dorm counselors at night. We baked cookies, explored deserted farmhouses, and cruised all-night grocery stores. Who said there wasn’t anything to do in small Kansas towns?
When the unemployment checks ran out, I fled Winfield, planting myself on our family weekend hideout in Plano, Illinois, an hour southwest of Chicago. In 1935, my oil executive grandfather had bought a retired private luxury Pullman train car built at the turn of the century. After removing the undercarriage, he moved the car from the Burlington tracks half a mile away on two trailer trucks to a bluff overlooking Rock Creek’s wooded floodplain and surrounded by oak and maple-shaded ravines cut by runoff creeks from nearby cornfields.
He tacked on a couple of additions and built a garage with an apartment overhead
Convincing my parents on the notion they needed a caretaker, I tested and balanced the pool water, rode a motorized lawn mower, and clipped recalcitrant hedges. Steeping myself in Charles Bukowski and Gary Snyder, I figured if they could write about their indigent lives as casually as entering thoughts in a journal, so could I. My first poems sounded a lot like notes for an autobiography, but I’d given myself permission to write poetry, so, in my mind, that made me a poet.
For six months I rationalized living by myself was good for my soul. This stint in perceived Paradise ended the day my father sat me down for a chat.
“Isn’t it about time you got a job?” he asked.
“I have a job,” I replied. In fact, I elaborated, I had two jobs, caretaker and writer. Or rather, artist.
“Your mother and I think you should get your teaching certificate so you can teach high school. We’re not going to keep supporting you.”
My Walden Pond was about to be drained.
That fall I moved to DeKalb to take classes at Northern Illinois University, where two good things emerged from that cornfield college besides a teaching certificate. One of my poems was published in a magazine. The second positive development growing out of that cornfield campus sat next to me on the first day of course called “Statistical Analysis and Other Testy Stuff” — or something like that. A beautiful woman with long wavy hair and a lovely blue dress — out of which slender runner’s legs emerged — struck up a conversation. Our courtship began that evening when I walked her to the bus stop, and ended when Tia and I married a year and a half later.
We both eventually landed college prep school jobs. For several years I attended local writing workshops, and in my early forties commuted to the University of Illinois at Chicago for three years, leaving with a Ph.D. in Creative Writing. I applied to local colleges (Tia wanted to stay in the Fox Valley, her family living nearby), but was tagged as a high school teacher.
Now, for more than thirty years I’ve taught a junior-year American lit survey class. Annually students tell me nothing much depends on a red wheelbarrow and titter about Gertrude Stein’s sexual preference. For the first eighteen years, I taught a creative writing elective, but bailed after told once too often by the author he should get an A “Because I honestly felt what I wrote.”
Today I’m happy. Those I’ve taught have taught me how to be a good teacher, not a great one, but I’ll settle for that. My own children showed me what’s most important to teach — not so much the subject as the passion for the subject. Year-end student evaluations tend to be more positive than negative, and some downright glow. Occasionally an alumnus will write or tell me he or she became a writer or English teacher because of my class, and I have to reevaluate my father, who mostly ignored me growing up, but did kick my ass into going back to school to get my teaching certificate.
When I began this educational gig, I was terrified to enter a classroom. Now I look forward to stepping into that first period class when the 8 a.m. bell rings. I know what I’m doing, and I think I’m doing it well.
My house sits in a Chicago suburb whose downtown the Chamber of Commerce declares “quaint.” I live in a generic subdivision two-story on a pleasant block. My wife and I are not fixer-upper people, don’t like to paint cedar shingles, and don’t do storm windows. We bought our home in a quiet neighborhood where our kids would have plenty of kids to play with nearby.
So I’ve gone from a palatial Chicago high-rise apartment to a pre-fab little-box house I share with a wife, two children, and a couple of older sedans. What I have is the joy of knowing when going to sleep at nine o’clock that when waking at four in the morning, for the next two hours I’ll transcend my body and enter the page I’m working on. I’ll enter the door to that most glorious home any writer, painter, sculptor, composer, musician, singer, or actor ever lived in, that of the imagination, of creativity, of art.