How to Write, Part 1

For Will Blythe--

The best way to make money from writing is to write about how to make money from writing and charge for it.

Over the years, friends and passers-by have asked me for advice on writing. I have my own narrow views, informed by years in formal classes, story conferences with other writers, and burying my head in the standard how-to texts when I should have been writing. (Henry James, by way of example, can tell you precisely how to structure your prose if you want to write like Henry James. I'd rather write like Barry Hannah, but have no chance of writing like either of them.) Popular emerging literary criticism from the time I studied in graduate school particularly cherished the word "informed", so I honor it here.

One school would analyze the writer's prose aggregate of grains of sand sparkling on the upright cusp of a woman's arched bottie as she rises from the nude beach on the Riviera to chill in the mouth of the sea. Another would say that the one doing the counting is the author of the text, since there are no original ideas, let alone original grains of sand.

There's no magic pill--only snake oil--for cobbling together a string of descriptors to circumscribe the sputtering belch of a four-barrel Holley 4150 carburetor as it chokes down cool morning air on a summer's day in Augusta, the Dodge still mounted on bricks in a driveway strewn with the detritus of broken screws, oily rags, the tattered head of a stuffed giraffe, trampled wisteria blossoms and frenzied army ants, a pair of oily, frayed bluejean legs splayed out from beneath the gray bondo and rusted frame, one cuff tucked into a Vietnam jungle boot while the other simply ripped to the calf, exposing....

This is the thing, not the idea of the thing. It's about taking action against the desire to think about the action. There are two shot glasses on the nightstand filled with amber liquid. One is labeled "Heaven" and the other, "Instructions for Heaven". From which would you drink?

And with each day's march across the page, you pile up things in the order in which they appear across the screen of the mind, set to the cadence of the heart and, after a while, you have a nasty jumble of stuff, just like the tangle of cord from the stowed earphones of a portable music player in a packing box already bursting with co-polymer fishing line, red shoelaces for your white basketball Jordans, a corded telephone handset (for the moment the cordless batteries expire without warning), the knotted ball of rubber bands you knew you'd need in a pinch, and the pink and mauve thread you've saved to append stray buttons to the double-knit, scotch-plaid leisure suit which someday may rise from the ashes toward your statement of retro chic.

Most people who ask for advice lack the salt to spend the days and years it may take to cultivate their own voice--if ever. You have to write like everyone else that wants to be a writer until you're sick of it and the voices you hear from television or the crappy novels you've read finally percolate away. You have to be willing to end up being just an average writer. There just aren't enough average writers these days anyway.

After college (after one of the colleges) I worked as a cub reporter in Newark, California-- home to Morton Salt. At the bottom of the watery curve of San Francisco Bay there are wide flats of mud and foam. The seawater flushed in with every tide and the flats were caked with with heavy salts. Morton simply reigned it in. At the end of the harvest cycle, the water had evaporated into the California sun and through endless summer days the rust-hued machines crisscrossed the basin, piling up crystalline mountains of salt, blinding-white grains blowing across the road in the trailing breeze. Nature takes time.

Reading widely can help. One summer I bored through several dozen Harlequin romances, charting the structure, noting when the wealthy stud with the fencing scar finally admits his undying love to the hapless trucking company secretary. (It's around page 168).

"There is no rule on how to write," Hemingway said. "Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."

A writer's job is to endure, Faulkner said. That means staying in the chair until the blasting and evaporating -- the erosion of the poorly wrought sentence down to bedrock -- does its thing.

My first and kindest writing mentor told me that everything I wrote could be cut by 75 percent. (You won't see barely enough of it here.) He didn't mean that I had become Thomas Wolfe incarnate, piling up huge constructions and plotlines of rectilinear animal motion. He did not mean that I wrote too much; he meant that I said too little. I wrote the way most high school students speak--and continue to speak well into their mid-lives (or at least until they have to work for a living). Like, you know, what I mean to say is that the sentence, to tell the truth, was, like, doing this and I was, like, thinking that and you know, it was fucked up.

Hemingway also once said the best advice he could give to an aspiring writer was to "go out and hang yourself", and repeat as necessary until you have some notion of the human condition. This advice is not applicable if you wish to become a technical writer, where suffering and writing constitute the same act.

"Life, friends, is boring, we must not say so," wrote John Berryman--expert writing advice from a brilliant poet with severe mental illness who leaped to his death from a bridge. It is not necessary to be mad or a drunk to write brilliantly, however many brilliant writers are both. Not all great authors stick their heads in ovens or walk with purpose out to the salty sea. Madness and suffering may fire the imagination, or help release the weasels in the brain, but it doesn't always equate to getting it down on paper. Under the Volcano is a uniquely fine example of a punitive alcoholic mind organizing the universe alcoholically--an exquisite novel of a lifetime, penned by a drunk who died choking on his vomit.

Hemingway, to follow the thread, is said to have shot himself because of creeping alcoholism. Please. The fellow suffered at least four major concussions following recurrent car/jeep/airplane crashes and you can't chalk it all up to two-fisted rivers of whiskey. Ray Carver's mean-edged, alcohol-tinged prose transcended into billowing clouds of winged grace in his last ten sober years on earth. Read and re-read "Where I'm Calling From" or "Cathedral".

'Nuff said on that subject.

I over-write all the do-dah day. The road of excess, Blake reminds us, leads to the palace of wisdom. You can't get to less until you've slathered the crap out of that prose turkey, basting with genuine butterfat. See? I wrote this piece in three hours and loose change. And I cut a third and re-wrote half the sentences before calling it quits. It would become something else entirely if I devoted (the perfect word) more time to it.

Whether you and I will accomplish a grain of victory in this writing life is another matter. There's alchemy, luck, and too many things we'll never control. I'm shooting for small, lovely moments. An email kiss from a stranger. The delight in dropping a period at the end of a sigh.

Maps to success, overarching plans, guarantees for commercial fanfare are best left to the publishing self-help mavens who routinely hear the cascading laughter of coins tumbling into the cash drawer. They know what it takes to sell books.

But getting out of bed, settling down to pen or keyboard, turning up the music, turning off the music, working at dawn or through the quiet hours of night, doing it with any consistency during a life that bears little evidence of progress when mapped by our critical mind-and hitting the "save" button with regularity-will foster progress and, quite possibly, character.

Writer's Block

Where it is hot and dry, the ants begin to move at night.

In the July morning of this year in my life they have found something cool and refreshing in the metal case of my laptop computer, marching with purpose up the legs of the wooden table, across the unfinished birch grain and up, up, onto the black metal case, marching across the control key, the caps lock, the A and Q keys, strumming their own stories by the dozens.

I know how they feel. Last week I drove to the coast near Fort Bragg to escape the relentless, pounding three-digit heat, lazing in the 60-degree ocean breeze, stumbling quite by accident into a sleepy tribe of sea lionesses and their cubs who blended gray and mottled across the rocks and seaweed. Driving home again on roads choked by July Fourth traffic, the temperature gauge in the car rocking upward again into the 90s, I bit my tongue against declarations of rage against the sun, society, so many oversized and gluttonous trucks and campers trailing their appended smaller cars, migrating into volleys of shimmering air. And today, hot and parched, the ants are writing their own story.

To say they have nothing to share is nonsense. My first and best writing mentor, James Hall, would have us pack up our notebooks and drive off the campus in the hills of Santa Cruz into town to find stories. He told me to take a basket of dirty clothes to the laundromat on Mission Street. The assignment: watch someone schlepping their dirties in and out of the machines and create a line of dialogue that told their story. Then, we had to return home and write a short fiction that deserved the nugget of dialogue. The only rule: we were not to mention the laundromat.

There are few gems in the hundreds of books on writing, but they are precious and include John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, Henry James' The Art of the Novel, Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, Rust Hill's Writing in General and The Short Story in Particular, and Leon Surmelian's Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness. Of the last, I have James Hall's personal copy, bequeathed to me when I graduated the writing program.

None of these tells you what to do when you experience writer's block because, if you're a writer, there is no such thing. There are days when the prose comes easily. And there are the others when it feels like hell to lay down a poorly made phrase. Writing takes a lot of writing, and writers are self-limiting by a lack of imagination, by sloth, by immersion in crippling pop culture and the deluge of distractions and poor taste. Mostly sloth.

Here's the only trick that has worked every time I feel disconnected from the page: I read. I read it all and it tickles the crevice in the brain dedicated to calling out rhythms of language. James Hall had us read across the genres. We'd read a pop novel like Hotel, or a crime piece from Elmore Leonard, a Zane Grey western--all along with the customary Joyce, Melville, and Crane.

When I taught fiction at the University of Illinois, my upscale Chicagoan students resented having to read outside of contemporary short stories. Some hated reading entirely, which was surprising for a classroom of students who elected to enroll in fiction writing classes. Some saw the class as a pottery workshop or some other "quick-A" experience they could complete without compromising their frat parties, akin to a classroom version of the window of a bank or credit union where you'd drive through, swipe a credit card, and drove off with cash--or caché.

And in this first week of July, having taken a month off from my daily writing, it felt like begging for my life to lay out a few lines of prose. So I picked up Willa Cather's My Antonia last night and fell into the comfort of honest language.

The ants, you know, produce music as they walk--an effect created by rubbing of thorax parts to their rhythm of march. It's called stridulation.

One of my teachers, novelist Wright Morris once wrote:

"In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98th Meridian–where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn’t–towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place–now that it is dead–has come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied."

And so, like those tireless ants, I have begun again to march across the keys if only to breathe life into my life, to open out the broken windows and sing my dreams.

Openers

I was in a bar once--oh, in fact many times--but once I was sitting at the Esquire Lounge, making notes for a new short story on a napkin when a woman I did not know put her head on my shoulder. I noticed her sitting beside me and had shuffled my stool to avoid her cigarette. I had yet to develop an allergy to liquor, but as I had a bad case of asthma I was determined not to suffer her smoke.

So, this woman, as tall-tale openers usually go, just leaned over, put her head on my shoulder, and began reading aloud my plot line. "Hanamoto," the notes began, "works in a flower shop in the suburbs of Osaka and is troubled by the sounds of heavy screwing coming through his apartment walls late at night. In fact, the sounds blast through his wall by-day too, almost all the time, and are made by a red-headed American woman and her Japanese boyfriend. The florist, in his 70s, has survived the war, watched as the Yanks occupied his country, and now resents this girl and her profligate ways."

The notes sounded a little off-key read by this stranger in the bar in the middle of the Illinois winter, a February so cold that you had to pour scalding water on the door of your car to get the locks moving in the morning. And this woman, reading boozily aloud made the story sound more of a cheap comedy than the serious fiction I was planning. Maybe it was a comedy.

I asked if she could put out her cigarette. The ash had grown to almost an inch on the end and it tumbled off into my beer.

"Where do you get your ideas?" she asked.

* * *

In the summer in a very humid June in Virginia, I waited outside the baseball stadium to buy a ticket for the Triple-A class team of the New York Mets, the Tidewater Tides. The sun grilled you like a flatfish and the stadium, located adjacent to the zoo and airport, was built on recovered swamp-land, swarming at mid-day with gnats and mosquitoes.

I had come to watch the rehabilitation assignment of pitcher Doc Gooden, an amazing fireballer who had suffered tendinitis and had been sent from New York to Norfolk to work his way back into shape. The word got out in the Norfolk papers that Gooden would make a start, so the line began forming around the stadium at eight, and I had been out there from the start to snag a good seat. I had my yellow legal pad, a few ballpoint pens tucked into my shirt pocket, a sandwich from home, and a copy of Graham Green's Another Mexico in my backpack for inspiration.

The previous winter I had traveled to the Yucatan with Dr. Z, my zesty companion from graduate school, and we had celebrated Christmas in the homes of friends in Merida. It was an amazing eve, wandering the neighborhoods where Mexicans had opened their doors, set out meals of puc-chuc, turkey in black mole, egg tacos with pumpkin seeds, and cochinita pibil. In some instances, the family was out visiting neighbors, so you helped yourself and ate with whomever else had come inside, then wandered the streets, house-to-house, paying respects and dining into the night.

I wanted to write a short story about an American couple, lost in the jungle outside Piste, near the Mayan ruins of Chitchen Itza. I sat cross-legged on the concrete, outside the stadium in a precious square of shade, writing a few words about the village of Piste where in the cooling dusk families sat around smoking coils of mosquito repellent and cooked tortillas over an open fire.

Every few moments a jet roared into the pale Virginia sky and broke my concentration. I was writing about mosquito coils and swatting the real ones that were lighting on me. Sweat beaded up on my forearms and trickled down to the yellow pad, spotting light blue where I had been writing.

The American couple was truly lost. The husband sat in the jungle wondering if his wife was having more than the one affair he suspected. She had been writing postcards all morning at their hotel before they took the bus to the ruins. And now they had been separated in the jungle and he couldn't help but think she had wandered away deliberately.

I could hear the whirring gnats and the afterblast of a jet that had landed behind me, and then the ticket window opened with a whack and I got my ticket to watch Gooden toss four innings in the blistering Norfolk sun, giving up three hits and fanning two. No walks. I never finished the story about the couple in Mexico.

* * *

I was renting a cottage in the woods outside Colfax, on a meadow at 2,000 feet with a brook and tall pines. We were so far from town that you couldn't get internet service, save by a satellite hookup that was spotty at best. But my desk looked out a sliding glass window on a broad field, with a narrow bridge over the creek, and a single Japanese maple that had blushed brilliant red in the snap of fall weather.

In the pane of the software window I was typing a story about the pony express. I had always wanted to try my hand at a Western, and the road leading to our property spun under the heavy forest, down into a dirt track that snaked its way to the north fork of the American River. Called Yankee Jim's Road, it dropped suddenly over 2,000 feet to the river, where a rusted forest service bridge spanned the whirlpools and flowing current. At the north side of the crossing, you could still walk into the small cave that had been carved into the cliff face to provide shelter for the pony express and, later, the Wells Fargo stagecoach that crossed the American en-route to Folsom and, further down in the valley, Sacramento.

I spent the morning working on a description of the chenille brocade dress with detachable sleeves worn by a woman that worked in the Auburn cafe. Panners were coming in for late breakfast, some with bound sacks of gold dust they had taken from the Bear River.

Then my friend Derek came over from Forest Hill, driving the stage route in his white Japanese pickup truck to sit on my porch and yak about recovery. I had to save the story in the software and get up to greet him. And he was barely in the place, when another knock came at the door.

It was my neighbor's daughter, weeping, barely able to tell me that a local kid came speeding around Yankee Jim's and hit a fawn. I went out to the drive and neighbor Grace had the baby wrapped in a bloody blanket. The fawn struggled to get free, but both its rear legs had been snapped in the impact. The kid had shrugged, looked at the deer where it lay in the road, and drove off elsewhere.

I nested the deer in my arms and sat on the edge of the drive, trying to keep it from struggling while Grace called the sheriff. The deer cried out. I had no notion that deer made any sound at all. The family--two does and six fawns--were always in the meadow in the dusk, grazing on the wildflowers and grass. I had come to recognize the twins, including the spotted fawn that now rolled its eyes and moaned, its head covered with ticks.

Grace came down the steps in tears. The sheriff, she said, couldn't come for an hour. But there was a vet in Colfax and the office was still open.

I put a wet washcloth to the fawn's mouth, praying, assuring it that her misery would soon be over. And we drove to town along Yankee Jim's in the Toyota, crammed into the front seat, the doe squirming on my lap in its blanket.

We had only been there a few minutes when the vet came back into the waiting room to say she had put down the fawn. Its legs could not be repaired and it would have been easy prey on the side of the road. The vet had been crying.

"Most people just leave them lying there," she said.

We drove home in silence, and then I went into the cabin, washed up, and sat down to talk recovery with Derek. I had forgotten about the woman in the Victorian dress and the apron she was wrapping tightly about her pinched waist as she eyed the gruffy sourdoughs that had trod their muddy boots into her fine cafe.

Lucky Life

Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors and there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the blows. -- Gerald Stern

On days when I have nothing, I hold the yellow pad in my lap and look out the window and remember days up the upstairs classroom in Morgan Hall with Bad Gerry. We called him that behind his back because, in the mid 1980s, the word "bad" meant great, and because he made you feel that poetry, while written by devoted madmen channeling God through quirky filters of discipline and learning, was accessible to all of us.

And Stern tempered his rage at Reaganism and its echoes of McCarthy with a heart that bled like a great viola. In the late afternoon in Tuscaloosa, Stern--bad sciatica and all--would lie on the classroom floor and read Howl aloud. He wore glasses with soda bottle lenses and with his thick lips was often mistaken for Allen Ginsberg. When I later met Ginsberg, I saw there was no true resemblance. For Ginsberg's was the syncopated flurry of Coltrane, a cool hipster rap sung in crowded bookstore reading rooms thick with tobacco smoke and a counterpoint of cheap Mexican weed. Bad Gerry was sung to Vivaldi played on a sturdy hi-fi set as you gazed out a dormer window across the Monongahela River where black sparrows alit like a puff of factory smoke in a tree laid nude by winter.

Big-Head Tom, Devens, Chilly Willy and Dr. Z (of the spider-wife-nerve disorder) would fill our overcoats with cans of Dixie Beer and walk across the quad to appease the writing faculty whenever poets came to town. You went through the darkened first floor of the natural science building, past fossils and dioramas of nocturnal riverbank critters, up the marbled stairway to the room reserved for the reading.

If you sat in the back of the hall, you could sneak sips off the beer between poems. Poets would often spend more time weaving a listless tale about the poem (Life, friends, is boring, we must not say so!) than it ever took to read it. Or you'd get the personal poet who used their finger to trace the meter of the poem as they read aloud, assuming you either lacked auric acuity or that you had a secret love of mimes.

One night Phil Levine raised his water glass in homage to the tire plant that spread its stink across the Black Warrior River. "Good year," he proclaimed after taking a sip.

Afterward, we'd retire to a student's apartment or faculty house where the reception coursed on the heavy tide of whiskey as we watched the visiting writer finesse a student to bed. If we made fun of the poet on Friday nights, the sing-song rendition, the absolute fawning over a well-honed article, we drew ourselves up with genuine glee when Bad Gerry's class reconvened the following week.

Stern was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Poland and studied in Paris in the early 50s. If there were honors in the craft--the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lamont Prize--he certainly snagged them. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. But in our upstairs room, he was simply Bad Gerry, ranting about "that bastard Reagan" who chose Alabama for his only campus visit during his re-election campaign.

I'd stop by Stern's office every time I walked through the English building, just to see his face, to share a complaint about throwback idiocy and racism after a cross was burned on campus to protest a Black sorority petition to have a house on frat row, to talk about the Beats, to sit where I was never judged or unliked for my threadbare poetic bandwidth.

Years afterwords, I'd read Lucky Life or Paradise Poems, or Lovesick to my students, showing them that poems entered the soul through the ear, not the brain. That everyone could have poetry. That on the most droll days of our lives a beam of crepuscular light could part the clouds and raise us from the shit of mediocrity.

And on days when I have nothing, nothing to say, and the yellow pad looks like an impossible list of demands from my kidnappers, I can turn to Bad Gerry and think how nice it is to think of you, kind father, tears running as polliwogs down your face, my favorite cardinal hopping in the Tuscaloosa dirt, the red dust rising like an arpeggio where the pain had been.

-30-

I recently received a very kind letter from my Aunt Naomi. She had been divorced from my Uncle Mort when I was in my early teens and I had not had any communication with her since. In her note, he remarked that she heard that I had become a writer, that I had always been a writer and had wanted to be one when she and my uncle gave me a thesaurus when I graduated junior high school.

At Porter Junior High we celebrated career dress-up day once a year. You'd come to school wearing the clothes that best reflected your highest aspirations. Mine had been to become Edward R. Murrow. I found a fedora, wrote the word "press" on a small index card, and wedged it into the hatband. I imagined myself trooping up the steps to the CBS studios on Manhattan, notepad in-hand, hurrying to beat the competition with my latest scoop.

By the end of my first year of college, I had already amassed a considerable portfolio of stories, culled from interviews with Katharine Ross, Ray Bradbury, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I had a press pass that let me into the great venues of Los Angeles, the Hollywood Bowl, the Cinerama Theatre (where I attended the opening of the film Woodstock), the Pantages, the Greek Theatre, the Ice House in Pasadena (where I'd brush elbows with emerging bands and comics), and the Shrine Auditorium. I had been to the opening of Hair, a concert of little-known Loggins and Messina, and covered anti-war marches along the Sunset Strip. By my senior year, I had transferred to San Jose State, where I amassed clips of anti-war riots, marches for Civil Rights, and the burial of a brand new Ford Pinto to wage an environmental protest. I was ready for great things.

Hardly a week following graduation I took a job with a small-town daily in Davis, a college community just west of Sacramento. We had an afternoon deadline, which meant I drove to work around 5:30 am, wrote six or seven news stories, then drove to Woodland, where a competitor paper was printed in the morning. I'd buy a copy, race back to my newsroom along Route 113, and re-write any stories that we might have missed.

My editor at The Enterprise was young, energetic, and a great mentor. But our publisher believed that the role of the paper was to echo the concerns of business and advertisers, which meant that everything I wrote passed through his heavy filter. He would re-write quotes or facts that cast the slightest aspersions on local businesses and their push for economic growth. Not an unusual role for a paper, but in a town exceptionally devoted to preserving the environment and stemming growth in the mid-1970s, it was the kiss of death. The mayor, Bob Black, had been arrested for laying his body across the railroad tracks in town through which munitions trains carried weapons westward to the Vietnam War. Now he led an effort to stem town expansion and spur the development of open space and parks.

I would cover a meeting where the council voted to stem growth, write the quotes accurately only to have them corrupted by my publisher. After a fashion, it was difficult to get anyone over at city hall to talk to me. But on the morning of September 15, 1975, I finally had my coup.

I drove to Sacramento to witness the arrival of President Gerald Ford at the state capitol. I wore my press pass in my coat pocket and carried a large format camera. Shortly after Ford arrived, I took positions with the press corps, and followed him and his secret service agents across the capitol grounds. Just outside the east entry, we passed a woman dressed in a hooded red robe.

It was Lynnette "Squeaky" Fromme, former member of the Mansion Family, who muttered something about the country going to pieces, pulled out a .45 Colt pistol and took aim. Two secret servicemen tackled her while the rest formed a wedge and spirited the President into the Capitol. I ran to a telephone and phoned in my story. We were an hour ahead of deadline and it would make the afternoon edition.

But my publisher, unsure of my ability to get facts strait, or with the right slant, decided to hold the story, awaiting confirmation of the assassination attempt by the wire services. He held it beyond deadline, and my account ran a day late.

Seventeen days later, I took my notebook with me to San Francisco. Ford was speaking at the St. Francis Hotel and I hoped to run into Megan Marshack, a college friend who was now covering the White House for AP Radio. As we waited for Ford outside the hotel we watched the secret service prepare Ford's limo. The moment the President emerged, Sarah Jane Moore was barely 40 feet away when she fired at shot at him. She was carrying a .45 automatic, 113 rounds of ammo, but the secret service got to her before she could fire a second shot. Again, my paper held my account until they could get a wire story. I had been an eyewitness to two assassination attempts and lost two scoops.

The summer of '76 I went to the Ford White House, courtesy of a press pass from Megan. As I sat in the press office, I saw a bunch of hard-drinking, bloated correspondents who awaited for "official" documents to come from the Press Secretary before heading to their typewriters and telephones. At that moment I knew that even at the apex of my career, I would be a fetch-it scribe for the interests of people in power.

It soured me. And four months later I walked into my office at my new daily paper in the Bay Area and pasted up a huge poster of Nelson Rockefeller. Under the portrait was a refrain from Daniel Webster about preserving the health of the union by breaking up large, corrupt interest groups. My editor, pissed, took it down. There was a clear rectangle now on a wall, a spot surrounded by bumper stickers, posters, press releases, and sports photos.

In the place where the poster had been, I pasted my resignation letter.

Men's Men

Bob Shacochis. He's a man's man, a teller of tall tales, noodler of great sentences set in the broth of political intrigue, a straight-talking lover of language with a delightful intolerance of hacks and pretenders. I had swapped letters with him long before we ever met, but when I first saw him, he was barbecuing leeks and asparagus that he had marinated in balsamic vinegar, a half-cigarette's worth of ash dangling from his lips, and what looked like a nasty case of windburn.

I had gone to Frisco in North Carolina's Outer Banks to visit him and his partner, Miss Fish. After dinner and oh so many cocktails, Bob drove me out to the dunes in his four-wheel truck, spinning us up the shore to where the waves swept across the black, moonlit sands and the cyclops eye of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse spun at you through the fog.

Months before, Bob sent the kindest rejection letter I had received during a four-year stretch of opening the most vile of commentaries. He was editing The Missouri Review and encouraged me to stay in the saddle, contending that the sorry world we lived in needed writers that could take out your eye with angular prose. He had come into the land of letters through journalism, using the same back door as I had done, as Hemingway had done. We were in fine company.

Shake, as some people called him, also waded ashore into travel writing because he had been mad about surfing. The waves carried him from his childhood home in Virginia to Hawaii, later to South America and, eventually, into the Peace Corps where he discovered the Caribbean. The string of islands opened up a trove of untapped stories that Bob mined for years, studying island life. Eventually, he penned two collections of literary short stories and a novel set in the land of heavy drink, heady women, and brutal politics. He wrote exclusively about the coup in Haiti. An avid outdoorsman, he wrote a cooking column for GQ while crafting journalistic gems for Harpers and Outside, along the way reeling in the Rome Prize for Literature, a National Book Award, and other noteworthy trophies. His writing about the Third World belongs on the shelf beside Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and Joseph Conrad. When I knew him, he was the book-blurb king, his nougats of praise appearing routinely on the jackets of short story collections and novels of his peers.

The last time we gathered, I had invited him to Fairbanks as a visiting author at the Midnight Sun Writer's Conference. He was a hit, carving off chunks of wry commentary on stories submitted by participating writers and holding forth on craft without waterboarding the audience with theory.

Toward the end of the conclave, I spirited him out of bed before dawn in my subcompact, and drove the 120 miles west to see Denali. The peak, better known as Mt. McKinley, had been spotted over the past few days and viewing--they said on the news--was optimal. Denali makes her own weather, so you can't trust conditions outside of the park to witness a rare appearance. But when she comes out, she is spectacular, rising 20,000 feet over an expanse that defies the human sense of scale. We had also packed some fishing gear, a couple of sandwiches, and a bottle of vodka, which somehow ended up open by 9 am, passing between us along the highway.

The park has six million acres of wilderness, so there are hours of driving just to get from the front gate to open views of the mountain. It's a track populated with grizzly bears, caribou, wolves, Dall sheep and moose--which of course we were there to see.

We had been motoring at a decent clip along Polychrome Pass when Bob brought out his field glasses. He had a feeling he said, and sure enough he shouted for me to pull over a moment later. We hopped out of the little car and stood along the road, steam rising off of our heads and shoulders.

"Up there!" Bob said, pointing to an overhang. His intuition was right. Seated on a boulder about 50 yards from us was a mature grizzly, his coat brown and red-ocher in the morning sun. If the bear saw us, we were of no significance. But I was impressed. The pass was long, pocked with crags and boulders, and Bob picked the bear out of an impossible backdrop of yellowing tundra.

Not long afterwards, we were finishing off the vodka, driving along the road to Wonder Lake, when Bob had another moment. He shouted for us to pull over and we hurried to a high point where we could look out on the massive valley carved eons ago by glaciers. The backdrop was equally confounded with jigsawed colors and shapes, yet Bob was sure. He pointed to a deadfall of spruce between the rocks and handed me the glasses.

His intuition was uncannily sharp as ever, but he had mistaken the beast's genus entirely. Sure, the chipmunk wore the same fall colors as the bear, and its shape, rising up on it haunches with its furry head certainly suggested a genetic relationship. It was as if I had turned the glasses backwards while looking at a ferocious grizzly, shrinking the image to manageable size for viewing by boys, wimps, or other undesirables who would never makes the rugged pages of Outside.

"Look out!" I shouted. And I shouted it again afterwords, after Bob caught an amazing creel of fish, and I would shout it out on the way home, and certainly a few times the following days until I had surely worn it out. I swear to God, Bob, I'm sorry. Mostly.

"Look out, Bob," I'd shout, "he's getting ready to charge!"

Moniker Business

My birth name is Gary, as only my family and friends from the past know. It was a common name among 1950s boys, just as Kyle or Evan are white-bread names today. There were always four or five Garys in my classes. There were lots of Garys moving into lookalike suburban homes of families escaping the cold, crowded boroughs of New York to warmer climes in Florida and Southern California.

In Jewish tradition, I was named to honor my maternal grandfather, Harry, a Russian man I never knew. My middle name, Marc, pays homage to my father's father, Max. I never knew Max, either. When the Rabbi gave me my Hebrew names--to reflect my place in the order of things--I was called Getzel Mendel ben Gedalya, the last name being that of my father's first Hebrew name. I am Getzel Mendel, son of Gedalya.

In Hebrew school, they called me Getzel the Pretzel (see french fry post below). In high school, some of the more witty fellahs called me Buster (as in Buster Hyman), or Gary Cherry. Is sarcasm the misshapen expression of love? (Rilke says, "The child bent becomes the bender, inflicts on others what he once went through.")

I came by the nickname Gabby after living the better part of a year in Israel. I worked on a kibbutz (a socialist labor colony) on the Sea of Galilee. At the time, you went to an office in Tel Aviv and selected the flavor of kibbutz where you hoped to volunteer. The offices organized the available colonies by religious and political orientation. You could choose an orthodox kibbutz with a right-wing, Zionist stance, a middle of the road kibbutz with a liberal stance--or any number of combinations. There was even a kibbutz comprised entirely of American emigres, but who wanted to go abroad only to live with the people you were trying to escape?

I had landed in Tel Aviv and spent December with my distant cousin Ronit (changed from Robin) who had settled in Israel years before. She had married an Israeli--a tough, no nonsense kind of fellow--and was completing an internship as a nurse in the downtown Tel Aviv hospital. Her roommate was a Moroccan Jew with black skin and kinky hair. When they completed their training, she was sent to the town of Kiryat Shmona on the Lebanese border. The town is the site of many a rocket attack and a horrific massacre led by the PLO. It was considered a "sponge town" in that it was to absorb the hatred and violence that rained down from the Lebanese mountains above while maintaining an Israeli presence. It seemed like blatant racism to me that Morrocans were assigned there, while my cousin and other Ashkenazim (European Jews) enjoyed cosmopolitan life in central Israel.

I had seen Kiryat Shmona on a bus trip north of the Galilee. The apartment houses had "safe rooms"--cinder block vaults where the families could run and lock the doors behind them should terrorists invade their building.

I was awestruck by the Galilee, with its dry brown hills and plush, irrigated fields beside the sparkling blue sea. Minarets in Tiberias and Safed were whited gems along the shore. After I had returned to Tel Aviv, Ronit said it was time to go; she advised me to check out the kibbutz office on Frishman Street.

I found an opening at Ginosar, a large kibbutz north of Tiberias, set on the shore of the Galilee just steps from where Christ had lived. Busloads of Christians emptied out nearby and people were baptised. Ginosar had hundreds of families settled on it, had a diverse economy based on crops (cotton, bananas, grapefruit), fishing (harvesting tons of St. Peter's Fish from the Galilee), a dairy, an electronics assembly plant, and a tourist hotel. Its most famous resident, Yigal Allon, was a Zionist pioneer and former Prime Minister, settling there in the early 1940s. I loved the idea of being on the sea which stretched out from the safety of the shore to the looming Golan Heights. I paid the small fee for health insurance, signed a few forms, and went directly to the Eged station to catch a northbound bus for Tiberias. Soldiers stacked their rifles in the aisle as we passed through the coastal plains and the foothills east of Haifa.

The bus dropped me off on the highway, right at the kibbutz. The farm was surrounded by barbed wire and a guarded gate and, after seeing bombings in the city and taking cover in shelters during terrorist threats, I came to feel comfortable when I returned from traveling and that gate slammed down behind me.

When you first arrived at Ginosar, you were assigned to a hut on the shore of the sea, given a roommate, a work assignment, and ushered to the laundry room where you were issued work clothes, bedding, and towels. You could put your name on your clothes, if you liked the fit and wanted them returned after cleaning. But you had to write an your name on the laundry tag. The Sabra who worked the counter looked at my tag. "Gary?" she said, "What kind of name is that?" She was right. In Japan, my name, phonetically, meant "diarrhea". "Your name in Israel," the clerk said, "Will be Gabi." (She prouncounced it "gah-bee").

It was odd having friends (among Israelis and kibbutz volunteers) with names that suggested they had stepped from pages of the Old Testament. There was Solomon and Samson, and Ester and Ruth. You could pick a name that used your original initial, so I became Gabby. In this country, Gabby is a woman's name, and I constantly receive junk mail addressed to "Ms." Or, I am miscalled "Gabe", which is rankling.

In the third month of my stay on the kibbutz, I went to work after a sleepless night and buried a machete in my knee. I was in the field, chopping down banana trees. Once the fruit is harvested, you chop the tree down to a foot or less and it regrows, producing its precious fruit. The plant is like bamboo, largely a conduit for fresh water from the Galilee and, once chopped, it sends new shoots toward the sun. My knee, on the other hand, did no such thing.

The stoic kibbutz nurse tried to stem the bleeding and told me to put a bandage on it and get back to work. This is no nation for slackers and whiners. But I needed stitches, so she backtracked, handed me bus fare to an American hospital in Tiberias. That afternoon, I came home on crutches.

For several weeks I could barely walk at all. A friend returned from a day trip to Tel Aviv with an armload of classical literature. It seemed like the first time in my life that fiction made sense to me. I thrilled in Graham Green's novels and Doris Lessing's stories. I wept at Chekhov, of all things. The sentences in Hemingway's narratives of the two-hearted river wrapped themselves around me.

After I was able to walk again, the kibbutz assigned me to a seat in the electronics factory, where I pressed two red buttons simultaneously to spot-weld switches. The machine buttons were separated so as to require two hands to initiate the weld. Apparently workers fried their free hands using the previous model. It was a far cry from the banana fields and fresh air and mud fights with my fellows. But, more than anything else--more than the evening dance parties at the field-house, the sunny days bobbing in the fishing boats on that brilliant sea, or the endless dininghall arguments over world politics with my fellow volunteers--I thought of digging out another book from the collection my benefactor had brought back from Tel Aviv.

In the spring, I left on a ship bound for the Isle of Rhodes. Less than a year after that, I enrolled in the creative writing program at Santa Cruz. I kept my floppy green kibbutz hat (click picture for detail), which I wore until it deteriorated, my memories, the scar on my left knee, and my kibbutz name. It's my writer's name. It's the name on the label of my birthday suit. It's the name that fits the shape that will remain after all the stars have died.

Aside from the folks at the department of motor vehicles, the IRS, and members of my family, no one gets to call me Gary.

My Life as a Beatle

“There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine” -- Logan Pearsall Smith.

My hairline began receding in my senior year of high school. It must have begun then, because I remember the morning Martha Louise reached up her hand and brushed back the locks I had combed forward. I was annoyed, which is sad, because today I fully understand her gesture.

That summer I had a near-fatal bout with myocarditis, a viral infection of the heart lining, after which the recession resumed in earnest. By the time I entered San Jose State, I had a partial comb-over that was so shameful, I slept with my head under the pillow.

My utter sense of despair grew proportionally to the pace of departing strands in the dormitory sink. So did a flagging sense of sexual prowess. Today, shaving your head--even if you have a full shock of hair--is commonplace and considered sexy; but in my adolescence only Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas had acceptable crowns, and they were distinctly odd and exotic men. I was whiter than white. (Oh, and there was the bald Genie on the soap bottle, too.)

The last of the comb-over supply was progressively knotted and, by my senior year, it was a matted clump held in place by thinning strands. It rattled in the wind. Following the lead of another young man who confided his secret to me, I went shopping for a wig. At that time, the since-defunct May Company store offered a wide selection of apparel and accessories. In their wig department you could find a brilliant array of styles and colors--for women! There was a single model for guys and it resembled the late-era Beatles mop-top. I took one home, along with a Styrofoam head (which my friends called "Spike") where it would rest all night on the dressing table.

The wig had a tight mesh lining that left a angry red pattern on my scalp when I took it off at night. It was hot, which was fine in cold weather, but unpleasant in the summer. It made my skin crawl. And it did little to allay my fear. It might be the end of a luscious evening over candles and Chardonnay when my date would run her fingers through my nylon, dislodging the entire facade. Surely that time would come, so I avoided women altogether.

After graduation, I went to work for a daily newspaper in a small college town near Sacramento. Each morning I would pull on my loud, double-knit sports coat and tie, brush my mop-top into shape, and drive off for the newsroom in my Buick convertible, the wig stirring in the breeze. I walked about town, gathering stories from my sources, sure that I looked suave and confident. I was probably the only person who thought I had hair.

When spring rolled around, I volunteered to coach football for the local Pop Warner team, the Cowboys, with a head coach who had played defensive back in college and hit you like a falling piano. In those days, everyone wore knee-high white athletic socks and hippie-generation headbands while playing sports. So I bought a bandanna and tied it around the wig. I looked studly.

Toward the middle of practice the coach and I were showing the boys how to pounce on a fumble. I beat him to the ball, but he slammed into me and the wig went flying. It flew about ten yards, then rolled--still held in shape by the headband--down a grassy hill, our young charges gazing in horror at what must have appeared as a clean beheading.

Then there was a twitter, and another, and then came cascades of laughter that I could hear all the way to my car.

A few months later I landed a job at a newspaper in the Bay Area and decided to make a clean break of things, vis a vis Spike and company. Besides, I had scorched the front of the mop-top attempting to light marijuana at a party and the wig remained crispy and smelled of disaster. The wig ended up in a dumpster, and I grew out the sides of my hair, glad to have it all out in the open. I could date again.

In 1975, I got brave and shaved it all off in the shower. I liked the look, complemented by my thick, black Rasputin beard. I was a trailblazer.

For a short time, I had a job writing advertising copy for a company that made pharmaceuticals said to grow hair. No way I would try them. The side effects include a dramatic loss of libido. Why stiffen your self esteem to loose tensile strength elsewhere? It seems a perfect metaphor for our culture.

There is nothing worse, I think, than male-pattern blandness. I'd rather leave it to nature to decide what grows--and where. Meanwhile, I can shave without cream, without a mirror--even wield a double-bladed razor in the dark. I know the tucks and curves of my head with profound intimacy. And despite the insane prejudice against baldness in our society, I find that many women -- at least the kind that interest me -- will still need me, will still feed me, when I'm sixty-four.

Us He Devours

A few months ago I received an email from a former student who had been in my fiction writing class at the University of Illinois. It began, "You may not remember me, for I was an unremarkable writer." When kindness drops into your laptop after years have passed, it's a remarkable gift. I only taught for a few years and probably had no more than 1,2o0 students. Not many. And I left the profession feeling that I was not good enough, that I had not published much, and while I had been a good lecturer, I was something of a fraud. The email wiped the last notion clear, and I cried with gratitude.

At the beginning, up on the hill in Santa Cruz, I studied writing with James B. Hall. He preferred to be called JB. Born in Midland, Ohio, he served in the Africa campaign during WW2. A wry, inventive writer and brilliant scholar, Hall was one of the first to attend the legendary Iowa Writers Workshops in the late 40s, and spoke of his classmate Flannery O'Connor. He authored a half dozen novels, five books of short fiction, a book on craft, and several books of poetry before passing this year in his home in Portland.

He had started the writing programs in Oregon (where he mentored Ken Kesey), at Irvine, and Santa Cruz. He gave Ray Carver a faculty spot for a semester when Carver was struggling with alcohol and beginning to publish his tales of mean suburbia in The New Yorker. Hall liked me from the start, possibly because I was older than most students, returning to school for a second bachelor's in my 30s, or because I had a newspaperman's experience, which had served many fledgling authors. I was insecure among the youngsters, and more insecure trying to speak the rarefied language of literary studies. So, I hid out in JB's office, where he never minded when I showed up or how long I stayed.

Once, when a young freshman came to visit, he nodded for me to remain seated. The visitor told JB she wanted to study writing, that she loved writing. I could see the twinkle in his eye. He asked her about her favorite authors. She told him that she loved James Joyce most of all.

"Can you tell me the opening lines of Portrait of the Artist?" JB asked. She could not. He looked over at me.

I said, "Once upon a time, and a very good time it was..."

Hall smiled. Then waved his hand dismissively. Visit over.

He could be brutal. He uttered outrageously bizarre or unnecessary things. He called my Japanese lover "baby doll". We were riding in his Volvo wagon on a way to a reading once, an open bottle of wine on the seat, when he spun an illegal U-Turn. "Hall's Law," he said.

Once he was in your corner, he was there for keeps. I had never read literature with a discerning eye before and had two years to learn as much as the four-year students. Hall would look over my short stories, pen in hand, and announce: "I can make this bleed anywhere." Or, he might say, "It's good, except for the whole thing."

I found one of his novels in a college office and stole it. It was out of print. When I took it to him for signature, he asked where the hell I had found it. Stupidly I said I discovered it at a local garage sale. He had that look in his eye, but wrote in it: "For Gabby, who has drive, initiative, and that other thing going for him."

At the end, I was to sit for an oral exam with three professors who would grill me on the 20 books of prose, poetry, and drama on my list. The idea was that you'd answer most of the questions. As the hour ended, one of the professors asked me the origin of Faulkner's title for The Sound and the Fury, and I said, "Macbeth, Act Five, Scene Five." With that, it was done.

I was to wait out in the hall while they deliberated, but it wasn't long. When I came in, I saw tears in JB's eyes. He informed me that I had earned high honors.

In February of 1991, I was living in the woods in Washington State. I had been to rehab, was trudging through a rough patch of things, and from the blue came a letter from JB. He had moved to Oregon after retiring from Santa Cruz, for there was better healthcare in Portland to assist his ailing wife. I wrote back, explaining my departure from academe, my struggles, my hopes.

A week later an envelope arrived from JB with money inside.

We wrote occasionally over the ensuing years, but our letters eventually tailed off. My mistake. After receiving the email from my former student, I was searching for JB's address when I came upon his obituary.

I have found that kindness begets kindness--but I had to have my teachers. And I need frequent reminding, for I often default into selfishness. What I know for sure is that my unremarkable writing student grew to become a remarkable woman. And perhaps JB thought the same of me, the lost orphaned lamb redeemed.

Hence, this message out of the blue is for you, JB--even though it bleeds everywhere. I hope you get it.