After my binge with the Bacons I settled down. I was drinking less and reading more—and 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 diaries—but 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 to—ideas. 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.
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 letter—besides, 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 go—which I did, very quickly.
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 heroin—China white—Iranian tar—Mexican 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 feel—“with the skinny needle in my arm and the blood blooming in the syringe”—the 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 him—a 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.
Wouldn’t we all.
As I watched the prisoners being marched away I knew there was nothing we had in common. I wasn’t angry. I didn’t use drugs. I didn’t steal. I wasn’t a rapist. But something was wrong. I felt adrift inside, as if I had a compulsion not to be myself. I especially had that feeling when I read books. I seemed to become the main character, as if I had abandoned myself and allowed some other person to step right in and take me over. It was a great ride becoming a fictional character for a
day or a week, but when the temporary visitor left I felt as empty as a bottle, and when I regained my own voice it was always strangely scarred from the experience, as though something in me had been torn open and then healed over. But that didn’t mean I’d end up in prison.
My friend Glen Martin’s dad was a sales rep for Van Heusen shirts. He sold them to stores throughout south Florida. His garage was filled with shelves stacked with samples, and after each new season Glen’s dad let him sell the samples to his friends. I was a good customer.
One afternoon I was in his garage sorting through new styles when he asked, “You ever smoke weed?”
“Ahh, no,” I replied, sounding very uncool to myself.
“Want to try some?” he asked.
“Not now,” I said. “I have to go to work.”
“Tonight?” he asked. “Come over to my new friend James’s apartment in the Lauderhill Lakes complex. Apartment 311. We’re having a weed party there.”
“Okay,” I said. “Yeah.” I was trying to sound enthusiastic, but it wasn’t working. I bought a shirt and left.
All through my shift at the grocery store I was absentminded. I had read lots of books where people smoked weed. Some seemed to really enjoy it and got happy and hungry and
silly and had deep insights into themselves and the world. I had a sneaky suspicion I was going to be the other kind of smoker—the kind I had also read about who go off the deep end and let life drift way out of control, and become dependent on dope and other users to help them out, and are abused and broken down and the only deep insight they gain from the experience is that they have totally ruined their lives—and I’d end up like that girl from Go Ask Alice who went nuts on LSD and was locked in a closet after she imagined a million bugs were on her skin and to kill them she clawed off all her flesh and nearly bled to death.
By the time I finished restocking the entire canned vegetable section at work I was convinced I would be a vegetable if I smoked. Yet I went to the apartment. Why? For the same deadhead reason people climb mountains—it was there and I wanted to try it. Plus, there was the slim possibility it would make me a better writer. I got that impression from reading William Burroughs.
I knocked on the door. James answered. He was at least ten years older than the rest of us.
“Come in,” he whispered, and as I entered the room I turned and saw him peek out the doorway as if I might have been followed by the police. He was so paranoid he scared me.
Inside, the apartment was filled with smoke that smelled like an acrid palmetto brushfire. I coughed. On the living room
floor Glen and four other guys were sitting cross-legged around a tall brass-and-glass hookah. Jefferson Airplane was on the stereo. Glen grinned up at me.
“We’re trying to get high but it’s not working,” he said, disappointed. “We’re just down to stems and seeds. Want a toke?”
He gave me the spitty plastic end of the hookah hose. I drew in some smoke and instantly hacked it out of my lungs.
“I know what you mean,” he remarked. “We even filled the hookah with wine but it can’t take the burn out of this stuff.”
I nodded my head in agreement as I gritted my teeth from trying to suppress more coughing. After it was determined the stems and seeds were a bust, I spent the rest of my time wondering just how long I had to hang around before politely leaving. I drank two beers, then said so long to Glen and James and the other guys I never met. They had stared at the floor the entire evening as if it were interesting. It just looked filthy to me.
All the way to my car I expected cops to grab me by the shoulder just as they had when I was exchanging the hot stereo. I didn’t want to be busted and thrown in jail so that someday I could tell my sad tale to others, just as the prisoners had told their woeful tales to me.
When I made it home I closed and double locked my door and pulled the curtains.
“I don’t have to do that again,” I said to myself. But I must not have been listening.
I lived in the King’s Court for the whole school year. Davy baked and left cookies on my bed, and she always monitored my health and mothered me with homemade soup when I was sick. Her motel catered to a patchwork of local folks who were down on their luck. Florida was still pretty segregated, so the cultural mix was unique and mostly peaceful—blacks, whites, Hispanics, and some Seminoles. Every now and again the Seminoles would get drunk and claim that Florida was their territory and everyone else had better pack up and move out. Parents made sure the kids were inside and the doors locked during these tirades. Davy let them shout and parade around in their native costume as they called on the spirit of Chief Osceola to help them regain their homeland. She only pulled out Ole Betsy and called them a bunch of “alligator wrestlers” when they walked onto Broward Boulevard to scare cars, or when they busted up furniture and threw bottles of Ripple and Boone’s Farm through the jalousie windows. She never called the cops on anyone. Her frontier policy was to work it out among ourselves. Besides, she felt for the Seminoles.
“They got every right to be pissed,” she said. “It wasn’t so long ago the government paid two hundred dollars bounty for every Indian killed by settlers.”
When I told my school friends where I lived they thought I was joking. For most of them I might as well have been living in the Black Hole of Calcutta. When my drinking buddy, Will, came to visit, he was always nervous his new Camaro would get broken into or stolen. And when any of the motel kids knocked on my door for a treat (I always kept bags of candy from the store in my room), my friends reeled back in horror as if the kids had lice, ringworm, or rabies. But after meeting my neighbors they’d relax and realize that people on the other side of the tracks were warm-blooded, could tell good stories, and were as curious about white high school kids as we were about them. I named my room the “Bad Attitude Clearing House.”
Things were not going well for my dad’s business. The family had moved from Puerto Rico to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands with the hope that my dad could start a small construction company and make big money. He started the company, but there was not much money and my mom was worried. I had stopped asking for a monthly allowance. I just wanted to be one less thing to fret about. That was my goal. My letters home were lame, but they did not add to the general gloom and doom around the house. Even when I changed my mind and decided not to go to college, it didn’t bother them.
At first I was going to go. I had taken all the tests that counted—the SAT and the Florida Placement Exam in order to
determine state college eligibility. There was only one kid out of our 700-student graduating class who was going to Harvard, and that was not me.
After I was accepted to the University of Florida in Gainesville, the only school I applied to, I was required to attend an interview with the admissions office. Before I went up to Gainesville I looked over the course offerings. The school was strong in literature but just seemed so-so in creative writing. That bothered me, but not too much because I was accustomed to not getting everything I wanted.
On a Wednesday I took off work time, packed a bag, and drove up the turnpike to I-75. I had changed the oil in my car, and had the brake pads replaced and the engine tuned. The car drove beautifully. I loved my car. I felt even more comfortable in it than I did in my room. They were about the same size and had about the same amount of furniture and closet space.
I arrived on campus early. I drove around the dorms, the library, the classroom buildings, and the administration offices. It was 1971 and the campus was dozing. Across the country students were rioting over civil rights, Vietnam, social justice, and government cover-ups involving tapping phones and secret wars. While in high school I accepted that I was living in a void, but now that I was heading for college I needed some fresh air and fresh thinking. Granted, my mind was pretty
blank to begin with, and I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted or what I needed, but I was totally certain what I didn’t want. And I didn’t want the University of Florida. It looked just like a big, sprawling high school. It was everything I feared, and it gave me the creeps. As I drove around I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to go. I wasn’t going to just bump along to grade thirteen and not go to a real school where I’d be roughed up and challenged. By the time I parked my car and entered the admissions officer’s cubby, I was determined. The lady who met with me was very nice. She shook my hand and welcomed me to the college. She gave me a little booster bag full of university items: a mini orange football with a Gator logo, a Gator car decal, a Gator hat, a Gator hand towel, a Gator mug, and a rubber Gator for the top of my car antenna.
I thanked her for the items and set them down by my feet. I was trying to come up with a way to tell her why I decided against attending the school. I suddenly wanted to blame it all on the Gator mascot, but knew I needed more than that, and more than just a gut feeling that the place was all wrong for me. Then she sealed the deal while pointing out a few freshman rules.
“ … and you have to dorm on campus for the first two years, and during that time you cannot have a car.”
I stared at her. I debated silently if I should tell her I loved
my car—needed my car—and that I had been living on my own long enough to never want a roommate. But I kept my thoughts to myself. I smiled. We chitchatted a bit and I left, and on the way home I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. All the way down to my toes I knew I had made the right decision. But I didn’t know entirely why. I guessed I would find out later. It was a good guess.