WRITING
Crazy Cat LadySANTA CRUZ, CA 28 March 2007 |
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I once took a class with Kurt Vonnegut, who told me I’d never make a living as a writer. He told me I’d always be poor, all writers are poor.
He also told me that a character in one of my stories needed to fall in love with her doctor. He compared the doctor/patient relationship to the relationships among soldiers in foxholes on the frontlines of battle. He said he fell in love with his fellow soldiers.
I didn’t take his advice. That character didn’t fall in love with her doctor. I suspect Kurt Vonnegut was drunk.
But it’s true that few writers make a living as writers. They have day jobs, or sometimes night jobs, in the case of writers who work as bartenders.
I teach.
On one hand, teaching gives me time to write, but it isn’t one of those jobs you can leave back at the office. My students get under my skin. Sometimes they keep me up at night.
A few weeks ago I held conferences with the students in my composition class. The following Monday, a student approached me at the end of class. I always tell my students that they are all writers, but this one really can write; in his work arroyos swell and rivers bleed.
He also calls me ma’am, which makes me feel old.
So, that Monday he came up to me after class and said, “Ma’am, I’ve been trying to figure out what this means,” and he handed me his essay, the one we went over in our conference together.
On it was scrawled: CRUSTY PUNKS ARE PROOF THAT HIPPIES FUCK DOGS.
I said, “Who wrote this?”
He said, “You did.”
“I did not.” But some small part of me wondered, Or did I?
“Yes, you did,” he said. “Ma’am.”
Did I have a momentary meltdown, did I go into some fugue state wherein crusty punks were proof that hippies fuck dogs? It didn’t look like my handwriting. But if this student of mine was so sure I had written that, how could I be sure I hadn’t? This scared me. Was he insane, or was I?
I read a book recently, in which the narrator, who might or might not be possessed by a demon, might or might not have written something terrible about her boss. She doesn’t remember. Soon there are more things she doesn’t remember, things that are much worse. The book was called Come Closer. Had I had a Come Closer moment?
All day, that awful sentence I might or might not have written played in my head: Crusty punks are proof that hippies fuck dogs, crusty punks are proof that hippies fuck dogs.
Sometimes I wonder how close I am to becoming the strange lady with all the cats that the neighborhood kids are afraid of.
When I was a kid, I passed a haunted house every day on my way to school. The lawn was all dirt and weeds and the awnings hung in tatters. There was a rusting letter B on the chimney, which in my mind stood for beware, and sometimes a bony hand would appear in the window to part the curtains when I walked by.
I wonder how close I am to becoming that bony hand.
I like solitude and silence, I like dreaming up stories, but sometimes writing fiction feels more crazy than not.
Given the choice, I wouldn’t teach, I’d just write. But teaching ensures that I will get out of my pajamas and out of the house at least a few days a week. It keeps me from becoming the crazy cat lady.
I don’t even have a cat, but you know what I mean.
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: "This is a story: ? ! ."
This story, the one I just told you, moves very quickly from question mark (“Who wrote this?”) to exclamation point (“You did.”).
The question mark could also be how to make a living as a writer.
What about the period?
The next time I saw that student, I asked him if he ever figured out who wrote CRUSTY PUNKS ARE PROOF THAT HIPPIES FUCK DOGS on his paper.
“I think it was someone in my dorm,” he said. “Probably just someone messing with me, ma’am.”
“Yes,” I said. “Probably.”
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