I was never a big picture guy. The future was never something I planned for, or even really thought much about. What mattered was what I could see. If things stayed the same, so be it; if something changed, I’d deal with it. It wasn’t some cognoscente carpe diem ethos; I was lazy, sort of like The Dude from The Big Lebowski minus the robe and slippers. I wasn’t happy with my situation but I accepted it; at the very least it was something, and for me something was good enough. When Liz came into my life I started to feel different. I didn’t change much of anything in terms of my daily routine, but she made it easier to smile. If work went bad, oh well; if another day went by where I didn’t write a single sentence, who cared; at the end of the day she’d be there, she’d laugh, and nothing else would matter. I thought so much about her that I forgot about myself.
One day after work I was checking my email and I saw one from a friend. He and I had been talking a bit in the preceding weeks about the upcoming fantasy baseball season but this email was different. “We finished the book,” the email said, “and it’s on sale now!” I was speechless. Three years prior I knew that he and my former supervisor had started work on a Stephen King/Peter Straub-esque, each person writing alternating chapters thing, but I’d never heard much about it once I moved to Pennsylvania. I had always assumed it was something they were just doing for fun. But now they were finished. And it was for sale. And anyone, including myself, could see it online, and buy it, and like any of the other books that were sitting on my bookshelf, read it, and quote it, and love it. I felt like crap. When Liz came over that night and saw that I was in a mood she asked me what was wrong. I showed her the email. “That’s awesome,” she said. And I agreed; it was awesome, I was proud, and I was happy for them, which I said in my email response to him. But looking at the website where I could order the book, it made me at first uneasy, and then outright mad at myself. That night I couldn’t sleep; I stared off into the ceiling and thought about how big of a failure I was. It had been seven months since I graduated, and in that time I hadn’t penned anything of substance; save for a few late-night sprawls I hadn’t written anything at all. And now here were two of my friends, professionals in other fields, and they’d completed a novel. A freaking novel!
A couple of days later and still feeling dejected I got a page over the intercom at work, “Please pick up a call on line 2.” Wondering why they hadn’t just transferred the call to the department I was working in I picked up the phone and said hello. “I need you to send me some writing samples ASAP! Two or three fiction pieces under a total of five-thousand words would be great. And I need them by the end of the week.” All of that without even saying hello meant it could only be one person, a former teacher of mine who, for some reason, saw enough promise in me that almost a year after graduating, she was calling me at work to tell me about writing opportunities for me on campus. I asked what she needed them for. “Chuck Palahniuk is coming back to Edinboro for another conference and this time he’s been gracious enough to do a small two-day writing workshop for a few students. Of course I’ve included you in this.” I was speechless. And scared. I had exactly nothing to offer that I felt confident in. But she isn’t the sort of person you can say no to without feeling like you’ve just bludgeoned the family dog to death, and the fact that she was seeking me out showed the synopsis of her character; she is a helper pure and simple; a teacher in the true definition of the word. “Sure,” I said. “And thank you.” I hung up the phone and every inch of my body was covered in sweat.
All of a sudden I didn’t have time to wallow in my own self-pity about not having anything on par with a novel’s worth of material to show the world. Now I had to worry about finding a couple of worthy short samples to show to a best-selling author whose work I very much admired. Fiction was still pretty much uncharted territory for me; outside of some stuff that I had to write for a Fiction Workshop class all I had were notebooks of bad poetry. But even most of that stuff from the Fiction Workshop was either unfinished, or nothing more than exercises to get the brain working. Almost by default the first thing I chose was a short story I’d written that revolved around four people’s journey to get to Woodstock ’99. I didn’t think it was great, but it showed enough promise to earn an A, and that, coupled with the fact that it fit the criteria was good enough for me. I used the next couple of days at work to struggle over what else I could include. I thought about writing another story that revolved around music, and during my shifts I’d sift through the CDs looking for any inspiration. One of the new releases that week was Sing the Sorrow by AFI, a band I always sort of admired from a distance. The price of the CD was $5.99 so I bought it in hopes that it would give me that something I was looking for. For the following couple of nights, when I’d get out of work I’d sit at my computer, Sing The Sorrow playing on my CD player, and I’d write. I’d get a couple hundred words in and then I’d highlight everything and delete it. I loved the CD but it wasn’t translating itself into anything of substance.
Saturday of that week Liz had to go to Jamestown, NY to attend a defensive driving class as per part of the deal she cut to lower her speeding ticket to a moving violation. Not having to work, and not wanting to spend another day sitting by myself, staring at a computer screen, thinking about what I didn’t have to send off in a day’s time, I decided to go along for the ride. We listened to Sing the Sorrow on the otherwise boring ride through the bowels that are the towns along the New York/Pennsylvania border. The album was a departure from the AFI that I was used to, far less hardcore/scream-with-me anthem driven than it was a bunch of really polished songs that cohesively sounded, well, cohesive. Sing the Sorrow was an album that beckoned to be listened to all the way through, and we listened to it on repeat. Though not quite a concept album it sort of sounded that way; the transitions were seamless, the progression felt so natural that the songs were like puzzle pieces. Davey Havok broods in the miserable macabre just about better than anyone this side of Robert Smith, and on that car ride, in the days following that phone call leading up to that car ride, I could find solace in a song like “Death of Seasons” with lyrics such as:
“It won’t be all right despite what they say
Just watch the stars tonight as they, as they disappear, disintegrate”
Through my scholastic career I always worked better under pressure. If I was given an assignment a month in advance I’d try to stay ahead of the game and get it done long before the deadline. But I could never stay focused long enough to actually do it. Inevitably, the night before it was due, I’d find myself in a panicked frenzy, alternating between the book I didn’t read, and the page I couldn’t put words down on fast enough. It probably didn’t help that whatever I ended up turning in received a good grade; it was like giving a drunk just enough to keep them buzzed, and therefore they’d never think they had a problem. I always escaped unscathed, and though I’d tell myself that next times things would be different, that I wouldn’t wait until the last minute, that I would prepare myself better, as I had done with the previous Chuck Palahniuk conference two years prior, that never seemed to happen. But this time around I could see the writing on the wall; opportunities such as this didn’t grow on trees, especially now that technically I wasn’t a student anymore, and the only reason I was given this chance in the first place was that somehow, on some day, I got in the good graces of a wonderful woman who wouldn’t give up on me the same way I so easily gave up on myself; I couldn’t keep saying, “Next time” this time I had to do it. In “The Great Disappointment” Havok sings, “While I waited I was wasting away.” I was tired of waiting, but I was so inundated, so used to it all just naturally working out in the end that I didn’t know how to break the cycle.
I dropped Liz off at her defensive driving class and had about six hours to kill in Jamestown, NY. To anyone who has been through there you know that six hours is about five and-a-half hours too much. But I did my best, driving up and down just about every street within the town limits, parking downtown, walking past the ghosts of years gone by, seeing nothing but the dilapidated storefronts of businesses long since given up on. When I was out of viable options I remembered that there was a community college in Jamestown. Years before I had gone there with my sister to watch her play volleyball , and though I knew it wasn’t much, I figured at least there would be living, breathing people walking around. But there wasn’t; that week happened to be spring break and the campus, like the town, was a virtual ghost town. But it was a nice day, unseasonably warm, so I figured I’d walk around anyway. I grabbed my notebook, a pen, my copy of Palahniuk’s Choke that I’d begun re-reading after my teacher told me about the forthcoming conference, and I headed out. I walked the entire campus in about ten minutes, but I wasn’t ready to go back yet. I found the library door unlocked, so I walked upstairs, found an empty classroom, and read. As is often the case when I read I started to doze off. However long later when I came to, drool-smeared and dazed, I closed Choke, picked up my pen, opened my notebook, looked around the otherwise empty room, and started writing. As my right hand worked its way back and forth across the page I didn’t think much about what I was writing, whether or not it was good, I didn’t stop myself to re-read the previous sentence or think about where I was going with the next one; I just wrote. And then, like Forrest Gump when he says, “I didn’t want to run no more,” just as naturally as I started, I stopped. I closed my notebook and made my way for the exit. Just as I was about to head down the stairs I saw an adjacent room with the door slightly ajar. There was a bright neon pink sign that read, Theft Anonymous, taped to it and I could hear people talking. Outside the door there was a big comfy looking chair that I took a seat on. For a while, I don’t even know how long, I listened to the people on the other side of the door tell their stories of how they stole things: televisions, their mother’s pearls, their first girlfriend’s virginity, the sort of things you’d never think about anyone ever stealing, and I listened until I saw that it was time to go pick Liz up. When she got in her truck I had it on the tip of my tongue to tell her about the stories that I just heard, but I didn’t. We rolled through another full listen of Sing the Sorrow before she finally asked me what I did with my time. I remembered the thing I wrote, and I handed her the notebook. I kept glancing over at her to see if I could tell how far along she was in reading it. “This is really good,” she finally said as she closed the notebook. “You should send this to him.” So I did.
When the first day of the workshop finally arrived I had worried so much about coming up with some topic to do a presentation on—something my former teacher threw at me just days before—that I had forgotten altogether about the works I’d sent off to be critiqued. I didn’t even think much about what I wrote as Palahniuk started off by going through a bunch of techniques that worked for him, which ended up taking up the majority of that first day. It wasn’t until the start of the second day when he said that he was going to have one-on-one meetings with everyone to talk about their works they’d submitted to him that I got really nervous. When it was my turn with him I felt like I was heading off to be judged for the most heinous sins against humanity; there wasn’t going to be a trial or anything, I was going straight to the firing squad. When he handed me the stapled papers with my name at the top of it I could see there was something handwritten in the top right corner. Immediately I thought of A Christmas Story when Ralphie receives the paper which he thought would warrant a costumed parade of accolades, but instead had, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” as bold as the sky is blue written across the top of it. Not that I thought what I handed in would warrant any applause; in fact I thought just the opposite, that if anything, since I once again waited until the last minute, I would get what I deserve, a lifetime-in-the-making mark of “You’ve now shot both your eyes out. Congratulations!” But it didn’t say that at all, and Palahniuk didn’t have anything but praise and some suggestions of using what we’d learned in class to make things “tighter” to say about my writing. “You’ve got a lot of talent,” he said, “and that you can’t teach. Everything else you can work on if you’re dedicated enough.” I thanked him and moved on. I wasn’t exactly on the proverbial Cloud Nine but I was somewhere in the galaxy; it was one thing for girlfriends, and friends, and parents, and teachers, and even colleagues to say that your writing is good, but it was something completely different for someone who wrote a book, Choke, that I’d loved so much, to say those things. People use the word inspiring all of the time to describe a lot of varying emotions, but the feeling I had walking back to my seat felt to be at the root of the very word. This was the sort of kick in the ass that I needed to finally say, “This time things are going to be different” and actually mean it.
For the four days that followed (chronicled with a master’s touch in the documentary Postcards From The Future by The Cult fan site founder Dennis Widmyer) the entire experience was one big inspiration. Groups of strangers were there to talk about their love of Palahniuk’s work, and that happened, but more than that, including the duration of what was supposed to be my presentation, people talked about what made them tick: traveling, photography, tattoos, orgies, writing, late-night benders, whatever you can imagine. One day, as I was driving Palahniuk to one of the events, we got to talking about some of these stories, and the people behind the stories—because Edinboro is so small, and each reading so intimate, before the end of the week, it was easy to say, “that guy with the tattoo sleeves” and even if you didn’t know his name was Chris, everyone, including Chuck, would know exactly who you meant—and I sort of turned the talk back to the workshop. I was talking about a friend of mine from the Fiction Workshop class who was also there during the first day of Palahniuk’s workshop but couldn’t make it the second day, and I was saying how he and I had talked the previous night about putting a workshop together. “Don’t talk about it,” he said, “just do it. Even if it’s just the two of you, do it.” He’d gone on a lot during the first two days about the importance of the process within a writing workshop, but it didn’t really hit home until that car ride. “We plan on it,” I told him, “a few of us from the workshop are really going to do it,” and that was the truth; a few days after the festivities, a bunch of us met up at the local coffee house and laid out a plan for a weekly, blog-based workshop. That first week, four of us each posted something we maybe wanted to see if it would be worth fleshing out. I chose to post that same story that I wrote in that Jamestown Community College classroom, the same one that I’d turned into Palahniuk. In our one-on-one talk he said, “You could have something here.” I liked the sound of that. I had no idea what that something could be, but there was a certain confidence that came with the unknown, especially considering there were going to be a few friends who were on the same journey with me. I had Sing the Sorrow for a soundtrack, a coffee cup full of pens at my disposal, and I planned on using them for what they worth. It wasn’t a matter of my own self worth anymore; if I wanted to find value in that I had to earn it. And now was my chance.
