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Loser School
By
Dustin Wells
I had no desire to go to a Writers’ Conference. Paying to learn the secrets of how to get published seemed like a scam targeted at amateurs. I considered myself a professional even though I never had anything published aside from overwrought poems in my college literary magazine, of which I was the editor who decided to showcase my brilliant work. I considered myself a professional, because I worked on a novel every day, which was a hundred percent more than the majority of people I met who called themselves writers. I didn’t believe in creative writing degrees or workshops or writing groups. I believed in sitting in a room and fighting it out alone. I believed in wrestling with words the way Jacob wrestled the angel.
My wife Claire insisted that I go to the conference, because I was becoming increasingly frustrated at not being published. When I completed a novel, I mailed the first chapter to a hundred random agents I found in the
Guide to Literary Agents. A couple of times, agents asked to see an entire manuscript, but mostly I got six years of rejection slips. I took to writing genre fiction to break into publishing – one horror book and one gritty crime story. Both involved the grotesque killing of teenagers. My wife always believed in me, but my last two novels were of such a repellent nature that something needed to be done. I was not only spinning my wheels with the whole writing thing, I was descending into the depths of some weirdo insanity.
I told Claire that I’d go to the Writing Conference if we didn’t have to pay the six hundred bucks for the four day workshop. Claire slaved away as a nurse. I worked at an animal shelter cleaning up dog shit. I didn’t want to pay good money to sit in a room with a bunch of hacks who couldn’t get published. I couldn’t really see the point. It seemed like going to loser school.
I printed off the first chapter of my latest endeavor and mailed it. A month before, I bought a rusty pickup truck and immediately drove home and wrote about a guy who loves his truck and his dog, and how he loves riding around with his dog in his truck. I got the scholarship with the note that the reading staff was rolling in the aisles. I didn’t see what was so funny about my truck love story, but I accepted the free ride to attend the Reno Writers Jamboree.
The first morning of the conference it snowed four feet. Claire was working all day, so I threw my dogs in the back of the truck and drove to the casino where the conference was being held. When I walked in, the guy who gave me the scholarship made fun of me. “Ah, you’re the one who sent in
Cappuccino Cowboy,” he laughed. What the hell, I thought. It was snowing like a mother fucker, and he was making fun of my boots, black cowboy hat, and farm-hand coat. I guessed that writers were supposed to be wimpy lil’ guys with quirky glasses and dress shoes, exactly like those who were running this conference, sitting in the back handing out name tags.
I have to admit I was into method writing then. Like, you had to live a story to get it down right. If I was writing about a cowboy, goddamnit, I’d become a cowboy. Apparently, Mr. Scoft thought this funny. I gritted my teeth and scowled at him.
After the conference ran its course, bad omens surrounded me like horror movie clichés. Technically it was spring, but the sky outside looked a little past Armageddon. Crows squawked in the barren trees of our yard. When my wife came home from work on that blustery afternoon, I met her at the door. “I want to go to grad school and get my masters in writing,” I proclaimed.
Her work exhausted her, especially in the Reno E.R. where people beat their kids until they have to be rushed to Sacramento by chopper; where people use the emergency room for the sniffles; where snowboarders from Tahoe line the halls with broken backs. Claire worked twelve-hour shifts which usually parlayed into sixteen-hour shifts. After all that craziness, she didn’t like any crap. She didn’t even respond when I told her my news.
I can make a fantastic story out of anything, so on that cold afternoon I launched into how I absolutely needed to get an M.F.A. “This famous novelist said I should move to either New York or San Francisco and become part of the literary community and get to know publishers. He said I only need a little polish and that I could make it as a writer if I . . .”
Good writers never admit to being manipulators, but that’s exactly what they are -- hustlers with word skills. The famous novelist did say all those things, but I omitted that he was a senile old coot, a holdover from the sixties, whose mind was fried with so many drugs and senility that he spent most of our workshop talking about boxing. He ran around the room without his shirt, punching the air while going,
Ftttttt, with his lips. I also left out that the Reno Writers Jamboree was mainly composed of wackos.
One fledgling writer was an old guy who moved into the forest and then decided that cougars and bears were evil. He wrote lines like:
I prayed to God to steady my aim as I lined up the savage beast in my
sights. In the story, he thanks the angels for helping him kill animals. It was like something out of a Mormon diary from a hundred years ago, well, or any Mormon diary from anytime.
Some fat guy with a leather jacket and acne like a Halloween mask forked over the six hundred bucks. He kept muttering about how his book was going to be banned. I couldn’t imagine anything being banned on content anymore. Even chain bookstores hawked graphic fetish photography as coffee table books. I liked lurid literature and wanted to see some. From under his stack of Hunter S. Thompson books he gave me a glimpse. Apparently, his book was going to be banned because of its avant-garde use of capital letters and punctuation and his creative lack of any kind of coherence. I wanted to explain that being banned and not being published were probably not the same thing. Well, maybe not.
The banned book guy had a twin brother who wrote sci-fi where femme-robots gave a guy like him blow jobs all the time. Maybe I don’t know a lot about literature, but that was a good story. Even the senile old boxer stopped going fttttt! and sat down during that one.
A forty year-old yahoo dressed liked a teenage skateboarder blew in from Silicon Valley. He bragged about how he was going to trump his severance package from the recent dot.com bust into becoming a thriller writer. In his story, some bad dudes were stealing the new micro chip that was gonna revolutionize everything once again. He had a fancy laptop that unfolded into something as big as a drive-in movie theatre. His characters had so many e-gadgets I was surprised they could walk.
The most inspiring thing about the conference was that our senile workshop leader had a young woman companion, and he reached over periodically and grabbed her very big tits. She was also the one who read our work and wrote comments on it. The quack also kept alluding to his estate in Berkeley. That was inspiring enough right there. Novelists got to act like fools, treat people badly, grab women’s tits, and live on estates. Sign me up.
What I said to Claire was, “All these writers said I was the best writer there.” She rolled her eyes. Six months before, Claire toyed with the idea of returning to school to acquire her Masters of Nursing. That idea fell flat, because we had no idea how we could pay our mortgage with me being a failed novelist with no marketable skills. Every literary character needs a fatal flaw, a tick that does them in. Claire’s flaw – she loved me. She wearily asked me to look into schools in San Francisco.
What I didn’t know was that a lot of universities awarded fellowships, which meant graduate students got a stipend to teach, plus the school picked up part of their tuition. I was a pretty good writer and probably could have gotten one if I had tried. I didn’t check into any of that. My fatal flaw was that I was a complete fucking idiot. It was late-March and I wanted to start right away, in September. I typed in
MFA and San Francisco into the search engine. The first thing that popped up was
Sun College and a program called Writing Towards Enlightenment. I skipped right over that. In my mind, I was a top-notch writer and there was no way I was going to a rinky-dink school. Then I checked out San Francisco State, San Francisco University, and University of California, and found out that prospective students had to apply in the fall and were accepted in April. I couldn’t wait a year, so I surfed back to Sun College. Their web page had a big
Still Accepting Applications banner. Well, I gave that school another look, an on-line look. Their web pictures of their buildings looked pretty good, so I hit the
Writing Towards Enlightenment page and their philosophy popped up:
Our program encourages the student to intensely investigate gender identity, ethnic origin, and political oppression, in the belief that writing is a vital force to altering our culture. The program welcomes the writer to explore the underlying levels of social and political oppression, and to join the revolution, in which the writer is a catalyst for dynamic social change and spiritual enlightenment. We operate with the knowledge that writers are powerful Shamans with the ability to change reality . . .
Their whole spiel sounded completely bogus to me, because I didn’t believe that writers were enlightened. I thought writers were maladjusted outcasts with delusions of grandeur. Nevertheless, the prospect of moving to San Francisco ignited my imagination like a fuse. And writing was writing. I whipped off an admission essay and sent the first fifty pages of
Cappuccino Cowboy to them with a check for a hundred bucks.
I yelled out to Claire from my closet-like office about this great school.
“Sun College?” she asked incredulously.
I showed her their website about eco-this and eco-that and creating a Just, Sacred, and Sustainable World
blah blah blah.
Claire rolled her eyes. My last book was titled The Victory Tattoo, a crime novel about child prostitution, which I wrote to break into the publishing world, because that was what a How-To-Get-Published book told me to do.
Write a murder mystery. Mysteries sell. My book before that was called
The Moonshine Church Tradition in which I wrote about how my great-grandfather was a voodoo practitioner; his former slaves in Virginia taught him how to make zombies. In that book, a character based entirely on me tried to murder a character based entirely on my wife as they ran about Salt Lake City, where we used to live. In that book, I also murdered this teenager I had a crush on after I fucked her in some brutal ritual after turning her into a zombie. My book before that was about hustlers in New Orleans and how I was a much better thief than any of them, because I got away with ripping off the bar where I worked for at least a hundred bucks per night, because I have a disarming smile and come off as a little stupid. To say the least, I wasn’t
Writing Towards any kind of Enlightenment. Sun College’s Just, Sacred, and Sustainable World theory didn’t interest me too much. I was interested in a
Just, Sacred, and Sustainable big ol’ book deal for me. I was a greedy bastard and I always wanted to be a famous novelist and write big thick books so I could browbeat the world with them. Claire was the exact opposite of my baser instincts. She cared nothing for fame or even recognition, and she did important things, like help people heal or die. I wanted to wear platform shoes and rhinestone shirts and fire off books like I was banging out rock and roll. I often got the feeling Claire didn’t like me very much, but there was no doubt she loved me. She provided me with what good parents should have: financial security, dental insurance, unconditional love, and she forced me to get speech therapy, which helped me tremendously, even though it was from a third-rate college for speech pathologists whose students needed a practice dummy. Most of my base motives arose from the fact that I stuttered throughout my entire childhood so badly that I was unable to talk. Being denied the most basic form of communication made me insecure and spiteful well into my adult life. I sought revenge upon the world at the same time I wanted the world to love me. I was destined to become either a killer or a writer.
A few years ago, an FBI agent wrote a book documenting how serial killers shared basic traits. I had all the traits except for torturing animals, unless you consider sisters to be sentient beings. Within the profile of every killer was one thing that set them apart from the general milieu: crippling shyness, a learning disability, etc. Speech impediments run high among the killing crew, as does wetting the bed, which I did until I was thirteen. Burgeoning serial killers usually take up arson as a hobby. I burned my college dormitory, not down to the ground, but enough to make me a card-carrying arsonist. Then I took to writing, because I didn’t want to risk more jail time. Is there a school for that type of writer? The greedy, maladjusted, vengeful, sadistic, borderline-criminal, pornography-obsessed school of writing? Chuck Palahniuk could teach there. And Elmore Leonard. Oh, the guy that wrote the
Black Dahilia, James Elroy, he could be our dean. I’d invite the guy who wrote
Permanent Midnight, but he just annoys me for some reason. Irvine Welsh -what a great fuck up he is. We’d study Jim Thompson books, like
Hell of a Woman and The Grifters. I wanted to go to the Fucked Up School of Writing where we didn’t pretend to be valuable members of society.
Writers who didn’t admit having the greedy ego thing made me suspicious, because I felt they were just better at hiding it. To me, writers were the rejects, the insecure, the last ones picked for kickball, not the sages of the world. I didn’t see fiction writing as a noble endeavour, I saw it as a last resort. When all else failed, you became a writer and sought your revenge from the safety of a dark room. Besides, what could you say of someone who wanted to write fiction that would enlighten the world? Besides, they usually picked easy topics like racism-is-bad. No shit. I had no interest in stories where a character meets a black man --usually a caddy, servant, a guitar player, or even worse, a child-- and was suddenly not racist anymore. In my experience, life never happened like that.
Nothing happened when I sent the Sun College application in. In the meantime, I got this flyer in the mail for the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Conference, arguably the most prestigious one in the United States. Are Writers Conferences an American phenomenon? Something tells me they might be. I got on the Squaw Valley mailing list, because I went to the Reno Writing Jamboree. Anything that’s swapping mailing lists is in it for the money, if you ask me. I didn’t want to apply to Squaw because I was planning on upsetting our lives to go to San Francisco if Sun College accepted me. Squaw Valley was a week long ordeal in August, and I wanted to work as much as I could before throwing myself into unemployment. Claire knew I needed as much help as I could get so she badgered me into applying. Even she recognized some of the names on the list of speakers. Michael Chabon. Alice Sebold. Big time, folks, big time. I applied, sending in the first twenty pages of
Cappuccino Cowboy with a note that said I had no money and that I’d come if they’d foot the $1,000 bill. Their website said they only gave out a few scholarships per year. I had no hope of getting it. It was one thing to get the scholarship to a community college’s writing seminar in Reno and quiet another to get another to the number one conference in the land. I mailed it in on the last day they were allowed to be mailed.
I got the scholarship.
After not hearing back from the hippy dippy Sun College for months, I called and asked them to reject me formally so I could apply to some decent schools. Meanwhile I kept writing away at my truck love novel every day before work. Along side my clunky computer, I set the laptop to a porn video streaming site. I jerked off a lot while I wrote about how much I loved driving around with my dog in my pickup truck. Oh, I wrote about how I loved to fuck girls too. Talk about Enlightenment. Within my two hour writing sessions every morning, I’d cum three or four times while watching girls get gangbanged. After I was done writing and when my dick was sore from whacking off so much, I’d watch some more porn to relax.
Three months after sending my application, I still hadn’t heard from Sun College. Fucking hippies probably used my application to roll themselves some weed they bought with my hundred dollar application fee. I called. I emailed. I mail mailed. Finally the director of the program emailed me to meet him in late July. He apologized for being remiss about my application because he was on a book tour in Mexico. I was giddy with excitement.
Even driving to San Francisco by myself was a supreme victory. I wasn't very good at life and things one did in life, like drive. A month before my ride to San Francisco, I turned a corner and ran our Volkswagen onto a sidewalk and popped a tire. I tried to play it off like I had bad night vision, but truthfully, I confused the break and the gas for no apparent reason. Claire made me get driving glasses. The optometrist at the discount chain store who didn’t speak any English gave me nearly clear lenses in quirky green frames. I felt like Morissey. That was another story, but, then again, maybe it wasn’t.
Even before I started writing, I fell in love with the idea of looking like a writer, which I took to be a Left-Bank expatriate, whose image I took from postcards of hipsters drinking coffee at an outdoor café in Paris, which were sold in a bookstore in Philadelphia. In hindsight, that image looked like a Gap ad. I can see the ad campaign now.
Everybody Write Novels. Remember when GAP used Jack Kerouac? You can’t write unless you have a pair of ex-pat khakis.
I had many writer looks over the years. Emo punk poet. Southern nerd. Morissey. Who was I kidding? It was really all the same look.
My latest scheme to stand out was to become a rock-a-billy writer with gambling and cowboy shit all over me. Bolo tie. Flashy western shirts. Lucky dice belt buckle. I drew the line at the cowboy boots, because I have bad feet, so I wore running shoes. Looking like some weirdo cowboy, I not only drove all the way to San Francisco, I parked there too. I considered every parallel parking job a supreme victory. I arrived three hours early for my appointment. Sun College was located in the heart of the Mission District. The two building campus was located between Mission Street, where Asian-owned stores sold crap to Latino immigrants, and Valencia Street, where model-like people strutted hipster fashions, i.e. 80’s clothing.
To kill time, I bought a notebook and set out to start my urban literary career. I drank coffee in a grimy café called Muddy’s. Anyone could surely have pegged me as right off the bus, because I was clean and smiley and happy and bouncing around the city like a super-ball. Residents of the bohemian parts of town looked dirty and hungry, kind of like the coyotes looked in Nevada. I couldn’t think of anything to write, so I copied the graffiti in the bathroom, which I thought was brilliant.
Shut the fuck up and do something! And, $500--no questions
asked. I found it all profoundly obscene in a Zen way. Then the super-strong coffee got me too wired to even think. Coffee at Muddy’s came in pint glasses and looked like coal dust mixed with water.
The Sun College receptionist giggled when I told her I was there to meet Horace Jimenez the famous writer who just got off a real live Book Tour. “He wears all black,” she chuckled as she pointed me towards his office. I said I was in town only for one night, which was in fact my pickup line in case the urban darling wanted to inflict any notorious free love on me. She didn’t.
His office door creaked open when I knocked. Shadows fell across a man in a black suit like a classic film noir shot. His slicked-back hair caught the light. His pock-marked face and stomach were paunchy in an ominous way, like a well-fed cannibal.
The Writer. He leaned back in his chair while muttering softly to a female student who refused to look around as if she were in a private detective’s office and they were discussing lurid and tragic details. He frowned unpleasantly at his watch. He ordered me to go to a coffee shop three blocks away. He reached into his black suit jacket –on a hot July day, mind you– and pulled out a roll of bills like a gangster and handed me a dollar.
“Wwwhat about the c-campus c-coffee sh-sh-shop?” I stuttered.
“Der coffee,” he condemned, “iz sheet.” That’s my rendition of a Mexican accent. Maybe he said, “Their café is shet.” Definitely not shit. I say shit, just like it’s spelled.
I found the coffee shop and thought about the Sun College receptionist. I was girl-crazy then. Almost all women were pretty to me and I wanted to kiss most of them. I was conscious not to be a letch. I didn’t make secret meetings or have emotional email relationships. I didn’t touch inappropriately. I got crushes, but I didn’t act on them. I didn’t think this was too bad, because I had been completely faithful to my wife for the past five years. One time, before we were married, a drunk girl kissed me on the dance floor on New Years Eve, and it felt so good. My wife didn’t like the way I kissed so we didn’t do it much. We didn’t have very much sex either. I was fine with this, even though I seemed to have a tremendously high sex drive which I satisfied by jerking off a lot. I was an insomniac and I spent a lot of restless nights imagining screwing women. I was always looking for someone new to fantasize about. I rather liked my fantasy life. No fuss, no muss, no hassles, no betrayals, and I was still faithful, five years and running. When Claire worked nights, I’d line up magazines beside me in bed and wank away looking at pretty girls. Claire was fine with this. Sometimes she bought the magazines.
On my previous birthday, my thirty-first, we went to a Reno strip club where one of the strippers invited us out to Peyton Place, a swingers’ club. I wasn’t sure how it happened, but after a few drinks, I had this stripper’s back against the jukebox and was making out with her. Talk about a birthday. My wife knew I needed a little action. Then Claire either got jealous or wanted in on the action, and she started making out with the stripper, and then they went into the back room to have sex –without me. I didn’t feel angry. After five years of monogamy, a kiss felt like a big deal.
In my fiction, I exaggerated the sexual prowess of any character based on me. Maybe this was why I wrote. In reality, however, I was never any good with the ladies, because I stuttered horribly. Whenever I talked, my face screwed up and I snorted like a rutting bull who was choking to death. I also stamped my feet to get the words out. I waited an hour in the coffee shop looking at the hooker ads in the back of the weeklies until Horace came in, ordered two coffees, turned to me as if I was bothering him, handed me one, then escorted me like a lost dog back to campus.
“The college coffee is shit,” he reiterated. I’ll let you supply the Mexican accent.
“I ordered your book,” I blabbered. He was the first published author I had met. I had never equated books with actual people before. I considered being published to be another realm of existence, a domain I was not yet allowed access. It was exciting for me to be in a shoebox of an office with an author who had just returned from South America where he had been promoting his ominously titled book,
The Indelible Color of Our Messy Blood.
“Jes. Translation into English just coming out.” He invited me to the release party at City Lights bookstore. Yes, That City Lights --where Kerouac ran up and down the aisles begging for money to buy cheap wine while Ginsberg read “Howl.”
He swivelled his chair towards a window that opened onto a brick wall a few feet away. He waved his hand over my writing sample as if shooing flies. “Do you intend to write this shit in the program?” When I nodded, he hung his head in his hands as if about to break some bad news to me. “Your country does not understand bullfighting.” He pulled a cigarette from his suit jacket and lit it. “I don’t care what makes you get into the ring.” He studied me through the smoke. “I don’t care what makes you write.” Smoke filled the tiny office as if it were a portal to hell. “But if you want to come here, you must not just want to be published.” He pointed at a sparsely populated bookshelf behind me. “You must want to be the best published writer there is.” The cigarette crackled as he took a long drag. “You must have the hunger.”
I had the hunger. I especially wanted the lil’ bullfighter outfits those guys wore and decided to change my image immediately.
“If you can do this, then you may come to my school.”
Yes, I nodded. Yes! Yes!
“We may not write this Crappuccino. We will start something else, something better.”
I didn’t tell him that little piece got me a full scholarship to the Reno Writers Jamboree and Squaw Valley. But what did I know? Maybe it wasn’t any good.
The sun at my back, I screamed rock-and-roll songs as I zoomed my beat-up truck over the Sierra-Nevada Mountains. At home, I loaded my dogs into the back of my truck and took off into the desert. Shirtless, happy, drinking beer, I had simple dreams of being the greatest fucking matador writer that had come around in a few years. I never wanted to go up against Faulkner or Joyce or Capote, but those fuckers were dead, and they never make matadors fight dead bulls. I was certainly going to give living writers a run for their money. I liked a few contemporary writers, but I hated a whole lot more of them. I didn’t hate them per se, I just always expected more of them. In the night sky, Orion the Hunter rose bright on the horizon with his star dog at his heels. Like a gambling addict, I was going to wager everything on writing. I was betting it all on myself to win.
Copyright © 2005 Dustin Wells
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