Does It Answer Something Inside of You
In Colorado, you wake up one morning and realize that fall has staked its claim. The nighttime breeze rifling through your muslin bedroom curtains encourages you to slide on slippers before you let the cat outside.
If it’s about to be fall, then Michael and I are at the far end of our first season here together. I keep announcing how excited I am for the leaves to change color; he kept wondering if the annual phenomenon will live up to the hype. The backyard that was lush and fecund when we moved into our house has faded in the sun, like denim left too long on the line. Instead of jungle green, the hill behind our house glows a scorched, Rapunzel’s-hair yellow.
This summer has been a whirlwind. The encroaching twilight makes the preceding summer feel like a blur, a blitz of visitors and new routines. Mid-August, we snuck in a weekend trip to Las Vegas with Michael’s mom. We passed two days sipping “free” cocktails at the Blackjack tables, pushing around plastic tokens, blowing on dice, waving our fingers in obscure, camera-recorded gestures. Vegas was all about the gestures: the hand signals at the craps table, chips tossed down at just the right moment to guarantee a return or result in their being unceremoniously scraped away by the dealer’s crook, taps on the felted tables to request one more card to make a poker hand.
I read Denis Johnson while we were in Vegas: blistered short stories about desolation and hope in the wasted basement bars of middle America. He describes the things of the city “turn[ing] in the windows like the images in a slot machine.” The rest of his collection of short stories, Jesus’ Son, I devoured in ten-minute increments in the break room of my job at the liquor store. That seemed like the perfect place for it, slouching over a greasy high-top alongside the lockers, squirreling away as many seconds as I could before I had to trot back to my register and play nice with the retirees buying thirty bottles of wine, the tourists who refused to make a membership but wanted the discount anyway, the college kids wheeling carts loaded down with Keystone Light. I mentally wobbled between the fluorescent-lit floor of Hazel’s Beverage World and Johnson’s blighted Iowa: “Most of the farmers didn’t even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.”
I love being in grad school. I love working with an advisor who recommends books I would never pick out on my own (see above paragraph for Exhibit A). This past week, my advisor gathered us together online—his other advisees this semester and me—so we could read and critique each other’s work. In between line edits and generalized remarks, we offered one another much-needed camaraderie. Writing can be a lonely and bizarre pursuit. I’ve rarely heard it better summarized than in the introduction to Fantastic Man’s recent cover profile of poet Ocean Vuong. The introduction notes, “He’s just finished a new book, another collection of poetry, and he loves it. It’s the first time he’s ever been happy with his work and he thinks he might never write anything ever again.” I laughed out loud when I read that. And then I thought, yup. Sounds about right.
It’s a terrible pastime, writing about your own life, but no one is making you do it. It’s an unanswerable but unrelenting call, a phone that keeps ringing but with no voice on the other end.
During last week’s mid-semester workshop, Roy, the one first semester student, had the vulnerability to ask us if he should keep bothering with this.
“I’m 74, I don’t have many years left,” he said. “Is this what I should be spending them on? I mean, does it have any value for anyone besides myself?”
Mike, our fearless leader—whom we adore—unmuted himself. “You can’t ask that, man. Because the answer is go fuck yourself. Nobody else cares!” Mike laughed. “If you’re doing this, you have to be doing it because it answers something inside of you.”
Back in Houston, I had a tango teacher who had been involved in the scene for a decade. I asked him once if he’d ever thought about quitting.
“When I first started,” he said, “I told myself I was only going to do this as long as it was fun. And it’s never stopped being fun.”
