I was on a yearlong sabbatical. My most recent—and, I thought, my best—book had almost broken me.
Longing for that old feeling of lazy pleasure in the hand moving across the page, not sure what would come up, that old sweet experience of discovery, I talked two of my best writing friends into coming along to a writing workshop on the Oregon coast for six days. I wanted to be a young student again and set aside being the one in charge.
On the first evening we were told to go back to where we were staying and produce two typed pages of risky, naked writing, with seventeen copies to pass around. The next day we held our breath as the work of half the class was analyzed, one by one, by two teachers. On Tuesday the other half would go under the microscope. The teachers had been students of Tom Spanbauer. Spanbauer, the author I actually came to study with, wasn’t in sight after our initial meeting the first night.
It is widely acknowledged that writing cannot be taught as a chronological step-by-step method and that this workshopping process, which we were doing in class, is the way writing is transmitted in America. Many great writers have been initiated this way. But I grew impatient. I have assiduously avoided workshopping for the whole of my writing career.
I repeatedly wriggled in my seat like a kindergartener. Where was Spanbauer? How did I get into this, anyway?
But I knew the truth—I was seduced by attention. Tom Spanbauer, whom I admired, had written me a long letter, telling me how he loved my books. It was a lovely letter. Why didn’t I leave it at that? Instead of simply writing back, “Thank you; I like your work too,” I had to study with him.
But in all honesty I did need help. I was tired of my writing subjects: my mother, my father, a sprinkle of my grandparents; my childhood in Farmingdale, New York; my old Zen teacher; Taos, New Mexico; Minnesota. A nice list, but thirty years of scraping around in it was enough. Of course, you should be able to write endlessly about a single topic, but I was sick of the particulars of my life.
This writer in Oregon had heart and a wild sexual narrative. Originally from Idaho, Spanbauer had lived in a tent at the foot of Kilimanjaro in his twenties. His first question to me on the phone: Do you speak Swahili?
This author’s second question—when our class met that first evening in the small elementary school used for summer adult art programs—was Has Zen taught you anything about dying?
He’d gone around the room in a wool jacket with a white T-shirt underneath, shaking hands, greeting us. Here he was. I had traveled a long way. Maybe it was his nervousness in finally meeting—there’d been calls and e-mails for almost nine months—that produced the raw question blurted out so quickly, which resounded as the true inquiry, the real introduction.
Squished into a third grader’s wooden desk, I stammered. Thirty years of ass-breaking meditation practice, and all I could say was, “I’ve seen some things.” Mysterious, very Zen-like, but what the hell did it mean? The author, who had AIDS, nodded.
Exactly what things have you seen? I asked myself, walking back to my hotel that night, feeling outrageously foolish. What did I know about death? Often I walked a tightrope between the void and a desire for a good hamburger.
No, Tom, I don’t know shit about dying. Can I get you a glass of water? Sit by your bed when you’re sick and keep you company? Give me your hand. Shall I tell you how your work moved me?
At first I thought Tom’s novel The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon was pure porn. I put it down. But men and women in the dot-com world in Palo Alto, where I was living for six months, talked about it constantly. I picked it up again months later while visiting my ninety-one-year-old mother in Florida. At midnight I climbed over the railing to the outdoor whirlpool of the senior center and took off my clothes. Normal hours were from eight in the morning till ten at night. My mother paid the fees all year-round and never went. I thought I’d use up a little of her time. I read Tom’s book by moonlight. On page 128 I looked up at the still palms standing tall around me, the milky black sky, and exclaimed aloud to the fat frogs, the square lit swimming pool and its ripply little waves, “I have never read anything like this.” On that night I swore I’d meet the man who wrote it.
That was spring. Tom’s phone was unlisted. I could not reach him.
The following fall I was on a book tour and read in Portland at one of the bastions of the word: Powell’s. It was a good audience. In the back stood an old student of mine, whom I was happy to see. When his turn came for me to sign his book and we’d caught up on a few life details, I leaned close and asked, “Do you know Tom Spanbauer? He lives around here.”
I still remember the look of surprise on Steve’s face. His glasses fell lower on his nose.
“I teach with him,” he said.
When I arrived home, I shuffled through a pile of bills and advertisements. I’d been on the road for a month and I was tired. A blue-inked envelope caught my attention. Above the return address: Tom Spanbauer.
I sat down in my living room and ripped it open. Seven pages, handwritten, torn from a spiral notebook. I didn’t trust anyone after this tour. My fans didn’t want to go where I was going with this new book. I read Tom’s words quickly, nervously.
I glanced through my living room’s back window. The Russian olives had dropped all of their leaves. Here was an author I admired who admired me. Believing in ourselves is such a fragile thing. I started his letter again:
Dainin Katagiri Roshi.
You are so blessed to have loved so well.
He was a beautiful man.
Even more beautiful now that I have finished The Great Failure. In fact, I probably would not have loved your teacher at all had he not failed so predictably.
Why hadn’t I just visited him in Portland, gone to a café and hung out? What was I looking for? I had to go to Cannon Beach and drag my friends Rob and Eddie along?
Rob called me in Santa Fe before we went to Oregon. “Let’s stay a week extra and do our own writing retreat, hammer out eight or nine hours a day.” Eddie wasn’t enthusiastic about the second week. Too much work. He likes good times, and I assured him we’d have tons of fun. Rob found the hotel and registered us in the class.
The ocean in Oregon was freezing. Rob vowed to dive into it at 5:00 P.M. every day.
On the first day of the class, Eddie and I trailed after, wearing our suits, slinging our towels around our necks, but only going up to our ankles. We decided we’d come as lifeguards.
Eddie turned to me. “Listen. If Rob is drowning, we’ll do rock, paper, scissors to see who goes in to save him. If we don’t like the results, we can do best out of five.”
That sent me over the edge. We couldn’t stop laughing, our bodies heaving up and down.
Rob appeared, sopping wet and shivering. “It was even colder than I thought.”
“Don’t worry. If anything had happened, we were right here,” Eddie said, and we started that insane laughter again.
My problem in the class was that they didn’t say, “This is good”; “This is bad.” Each piece had to have a diagnosis. Sometimes it took more than three-quarters of an hour for us to go over two pages of writing.
I glanced up at the alphabet lining the top of the blackboard. Small s; capital S. Small h; capital H. I found the i and the t. Shit. I was hoping to come to Oregon to become a race car driver, a fisherwoman out to sea, to catch a big one, to find a whole new perspective. Not diddle around with everyone’s writing.
The teachers did say something terrific that initial morning: “Don’t write about what you know, write about what you don’t know.”
By the end of the first day, Eddie hadn’t said one word or offered one thought in class. If someone didn’t know him, he would look like he had zoned out. But that’s his cover. He watches closely. I challenged him Monday night. “From now on, you have to offer no fewer than five insights in every class.”
“No more than five, either,” he said, smiling.
On the second day, Eddie said to the writer of a piece we were looking at, “While you know what the story is about, at the same time you may not know everything. Some parts may be in you but not in your consciousness. So your grip on the story has to be loose. Sure, but loose.” I flashed him one finger.
He flashed back four—how many more he had to go.
During the break, the writer came up to him. “Did your hand signals with Natalie mean anything about my story?”
More than our writing was laid out on the elementary school desks. Our whole self-worth was being examined. Writers were an earnest lot. It was painful to watch, painful to experience.
That afternoon, Rob madly wrote notes to himself, then to me, shoving the pages across the desktop. “I didn’t sleep well last night until about four. Weird dream about school and me teaching the kids who were out of control. I hardly ever have those dreams anymore. Must be these desks we’re in and having to pee in the kids’ bathroom.”
“Let’s have Cheerios tomorrow for breakfast,” I wrote back.
By the end of the second long, eight-hour day, a creeping loneliness enveloped me as I tried to listen to the endless discussions of each person’s work. Restlessness, the struggle against what hurts, raged inside as I sat squished in that small chair attached to my desk. I didn’t belong in this class. A thought was slowly dawning on me: I wasn’t going to make it through the week.
One student, sitting in the rear of the room, wore a black T-shirt, had dyed black hair, a lip ring, a nose ring, and a pale flat face. He was twenty-three. He never spoke except to say “I’m always wrong” and “I hate myself.” The two workshop leaders didn’t blink an eye. They probably knew him and it was his usual shtick.
During a break, he leaned outside against the pole that held the basketball net. Grass grew through cracks on the court. I walked over. “You don’t really hate yourself?”
He was startled. He thought an instant. “I guess I do.”
“I don’t believe it. You drive every day two hours from Portland to come here and two hours home. It means you want something.”
In late afternoon the group went to a bar and shared a pitcher of beer. I nursed a sparkling water and positioned myself in the booth next to the depressed young man. “What do you do in the city?”
“I go to college.” He paused. “A small, private Christian school.”
I almost spit out my drink. “You feel comfortable there?”
“They all hate me.” He reached out for a napkin with his right arm. The inside had a tattoo that said VOMIT. DEATH was another, written in Sanskrit. “It’s a long story,” he said, with the smallest curve up at the corner of his lips.
The piece he’d read in class that morning was about a mother’s death. The son mixed her ashes in Evening in Paris perfume, then rubbed them into her sexy dresses and gave them away to the Salvation Army.
That evening Eddie and I charged into the freezing ocean over our heads. Rob panicked; what if we had heart attacks? I made a face at him, but he was serious.
As we were toweling off, I told him and Eddie what had been building in me all day. “I’m quitting,” I said. “I’m not going back. I can’t stand it. I don’t belong. I’m done. I came to study with Spanbauer and he’s not showing.”
Rob and Eddie were stunned, and then agreed. “You’re doing the right thing.” They envied me, but they couldn’t abandon the other students. We agreed that we would hang out at lunch breaks and in the evenings.
But back at the hotel the next morning while my friends were in class, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt displaced, out of sorts in this resort town. I was on my own now to burn in hell.
The night before, I’d dreamed about my old Zen teacher. He’d been dead for fifteen years, and suddenly he came back in full force, beautiful with his bald head. He would not look directly at me, still mad from what I had written about him in my last book.
Then, in the dream, Carol Reisen, my old college pal, called to tell me our English teacher Mr. Crane had just come back from the dead too. He was the most boring teacher I’d ever had.
The last night, Tom had a party for the group. I went along with Rob and Eddie. Tom came alive at that party. He and I did the Lindy Hop together. He twirled me around double time. After the first dance, he took off his sweatshirt and I peeled off my cardigan. We meant business. The Rolling Stones came on. We screamed the words for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Eddie leaped up, howling and stomping. He’d made it through his five-comments-a-day requirement. Now everything he saw and felt could be expressed through his body.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Tom yelled and ran over to a trunk. He pulled out spike-heeled pink satin slippers trimmed with feathers, flung off his shoes and slipped them on. He danced, kicking up his legs. He bent down and pulled up his jeans to where they stopped below the knees. Eddie followed, showing his hairy legs and brown oxfords.
Tom’s boyfriend, Sage, changed the tape to Motown. Sweat poured off Tom’s forehead. We fell to the couch after that second cut.
The next morning I finally had time alone with Tom. We were face-to-face early Saturday across a small square table. He wore a white T-shirt with an unbuttoned white tailored long-sleeve shirt over it. A thick gray moustache, curly gray hair, and a big nose. He was handsome, compelling. He wanted three eggs over easy and a side of ham. The waitress told him they didn’t make over easy eggs here. He settled for scrambled.
What was it I wanted from Tom? He’d written his books; I’d written mine. We’d both been hippies. Almost sixty now, he told me that six years ago he’d broken up an eleven-year relationship, come down with full-blown AIDS, and lay alone in a hospital bed, where he almost died.
As a kid, close to open fields and distant mountains, isolated in a Mormon town right next to the Cheyenne/Shoshone reservation, he watched the unrelenting drinking of his family. “I’ve said that it was contracting HIV that saved me. I had to clean up my act, sleep at night, stop smoking. No more chugging beer. Otherwise, I would have gone the way of my people—stone-cold forever drunk—and soon dead.”
Tom looked at me as he talked, his hands on the edge of the table. At one point he took off his long-sleeved shirt, revealing lean, knotted arm muscles built over years of baling hay at the farm. His strength was limited now. The disease had eaten away at him.
Leaning forward, I suddenly blurted out, “Tom, how come you never showed in class?”
He looked down and then up at me. “Can I tell you the truth?”
I nodded.
“My longtime students and I were having a hard time. And the fact that you were coming—a well-known writer—made things even worse. We thought of this plan—my students would teach the class and I would give individual conferences. Then we wouldn’t have to teach together.”
Tom went back to his cabin to get one of my books for me to sign. As I waited for him, a newcomer joined a group of people at the next table. “How’s Ellen?” they greeted him.
“She’s walking with the Word.”
This is a friendly born-again place, I thought. I’m walking with the word too. I’ve filled notebooks with it.
Tom returned and handed me a book. I couldn’t think of anything to write. A pleasure to meet you came to mind. That’s all I can think of? I jotted down the platitude and signed my name.
We hugged good-bye in the street outside the café.
Eddie left early the next morning on the airport shuttle.
The following week, Rob and I wrote each day at the café across from our hotel. One morning at 7:00 he was right in front of me in line. He ordered coffee. The young girl behind the counter handed Rob a brown paper cup and he filled it with dark roast from a close-by thermos. I ordered a hot chocolate. This took longer. They steamed milk and ladled out cocoa. She asked my name to call it out when it was ready. I said, “Jane.”
Rob’s head swung around, but he took the leap and understood that a one-syllable name was easier than three. He nodded his head.
I went to a square table by the window, and he retreated to his by the wall. I immediately became absorbed, my hand moving fast. I had already filled three pages when the hot chocolate was shoved onto the table.
“It’s okay, Jane, to use an alias. Only remember it when they call it out—over and over.” Rob was standing above me, his hand on the cup.
“Oh, yeah, good idea.” We allowed ourselves one moment of laughter—then back to our notebooks.
Later I called out to him across the crowded café, “Give me another word for ‘response.’”
Hardly looking up from his page, he yelled out, “Retort, rebuttal, reply.” Rob was my very own Synonym Finder.
At noon I crossed the street. I’d put in four and a half hours. That was plenty. I thought of the phrase “the loneliness of the long-distance runner.”
I drove to Oswald West State Park and parked. I planned to hike up Neahkahnie, but it was not clear from the directions a friend had written down whether it was a two-and-a-half-mile trek till I got to the actual mountain, or if I was even in the right place to begin. But I didn’t worry too much because I saw a trail and my legs were hungry to move.
I entered the dark woods, the soft path piled with russet needles, old-growth spruce looming above. Ferns filled the ground; moss grew on rocks and hung from trees. The earth was not bare and dirt was not visible anywhere. So different from my home state.
I came to a swinging bridge over a fast stream and did not hesitate. I felt like Tarzan—no, like Jane. Remember: Jane. I moved fast.
Why hadn’t anyone told me about the Oregon coast? Easily as beautiful as Big Sur but so much less inhabited. No one was on the trail. After living at seven thousand feet for the last thirty years, sea level was a breeze for my robust lungs. Even a steep incline was easy.
The woods opened into a tangled trail rolling among abundant vines of near-ripe blackberries and pale raspberries. Over to the west was the Pacific, flat out between two cliffs. I was delighted in being half lost and half wandering.
I had written intensely all that morning, leaning over the notebook, deep in relation with my mind. A run to the bathroom was the only interruption to my concentration. This state of mind carried me out into the woods.
At first I turned my attention to the cool damp feeling of my skin, the sensation of my eyes adjusting to dark shadows, the blistering blue of the sky when I leaned my head far back to look beyond the stabbing spruce heights. Then, out of the corner of my right eye, almost like glimpsing a butterfly, something beckons. Once, twice, I let go.
I don’t know how to say this—I give way to no thought at all, none arising and none passing away, to no perception, no smell or feeling, not even sound. I disappear. Sure, I continue with one foot in front of the other, but no coagulation of attributes named Natalie exists. If someone walked by, the person would see this woman in black cotton pants, white sneakers, a black V-neck T-shirt with the arms of a red sweatshirt tied around her waist. But inside there is no one. The reign of myself simply stops existing, dropping away.
I go on up the mountain and I come down the mountain and I walk to the sea. When I sit on a bench, sound enters me again. I hear the crash of waves. Filled with a knowledge that I will not last forever, a great impersonal sadness rolls through me.
I don’t want to die. This is what I should have told Tom. But death will find me even if I don’t have AIDS. Then this single thought: Give everything while you can.