There’s a direction to growing up, a sense of being conveyed toward something. That was the pressure I felt consistently from a young age: I had to do something to avoid that thing.
At nine years old, I was doing 100 swings in a row every night in the basement, with a donut weight on my bat. The weight bench moved in not long after.
Pressure winds up looking like ambition. Ambition looks like something else.
When I was 16, I stapled together manuscripts and sent them to publishers. I mailed poems off to The New Yorker and The Paris Review. When rejected, I sent new ones, under pseudonyms. A cleverer friend of mine cooked up some New Yorker stationary and wrote me a rejection letter in the voice of Tina Brown, explaining that while my poems were very nice, the magazine had decided to run a seafood recipe instead.
Hiring?
When I was 17, I was on the second floor of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, flipping through poetry books, when I bumped into Lawrence Ferlinghetti as he came out of an office. I was wearing cutoff sweatpants and very possibly a long-sleeve pajama top.
I approached this august man of letters, parts of whose Coney Island of the Mind I could recite off the top of my head, and asked if he was indeed the Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to which he responded, with a jaunty charm shading into unease, “sometimes.”
City Lights was a pilgrimage site to me. It looked like the Vatican with a FOR HIRE sign hanging on the throne. That afternoon, poor Lawrence may have been the first person I talked to in a day-plus. I’d come up to San Francisco from Redlands on an ill-advised, all-night combination of buses and trains. So while I like to think I introduced myself in a civil manner and shared my admiration for all that he’d done as a poet, publisher and stalwart champion of the literary arts for a half century, I may not have been quite so deferential and charming.
Once he’d copped to being the great man himself, I think I just dove in and demanded to know the status of a manuscript I’d sent in a few months earlier. Now Lawrence was on his heels. He said he didn’t know. I repeated the name of the manuscript and my own full name, and said I’d wait if he wanted to go back into his office and check. I forget the words with which he used to refuse to do that. But he was gracious, and wished me good luck.
Let me in
Where did I get off? Where was I coming from? I wouldn’t have called it fear, but it was. I didn’t love what I’d seen of the lives available to adults in Massachusetts. That’s one reason I was in California at 17.
Adulthood was pressing down. Time was ticking, and I couldn’t accept adulthood on its terms. I saw grownups - the supposedly successful - golfing and drinking light beers and doing stuff with mulch. I didn’t want what had happened to them happening to me. And maybe, just maybe, writing could save me, like how baseball saved those Major League ballplayers who never had to grow up.
The Beats loomed large in my teenage years. Jack Kerouac had mythologized a similarly discarded New England mill town an hour to the north of us. The Beats seemed to have won both an escape from society and its embrace. When I saw Ferlinghetti, all I could think to say was please let me in!
The pantheon
In what? There’s a tradition in the written word, a sense of continuity, a canon, even. There’s social proof in the form of reviews, blurbs, allegiances and cliques. And Ferlinghetti was only the first heavyweight I’d hit up for admission.
Flash forward nine years. I’d done my college, and was working indoors. I published a book or two of poems with my buddies. I wrote a novel or two. I went through a pair of agents - one who let me go after trying and failing to sell the first book, and another who seemingly vanished. I later found out he died a few weeks after signing on to represent my second novel, I’ll See You in Heck, or as I finally titled it, The Last Bad Job.
It’s 2006, and everything is stalled. I’m working with a graphic-designer friend on a graphic novel, and losing steam. I’m looking down the deader deadline of turning thirty. So I printed up a few copies of The Last Bad Job and mailed them to some well-known living writers. My buddy Pete had the early-internet voodoo to get me their home addresses. I was hoping for an introduction to an agent and a publisher, or at least an invitation to a party.
This time, I was more tactful, complimenting their work, quoting passages of it back to them, and asking clever, probing questions. I sent the letters on some Windows on the World stationary I’d grabbed at a work event a few months before 9/11.
Paydirt and proper excerpting
Two writers got back to me. Right off, Denis Johnson rumbled my trickery, and said he wouldn’t read or comment on the book, following on with very thoughtful answers to the questions with which I’d hoped to inveigle him. Fair play.
Norman Mailer, however, read the whole book. And he sent me a tightly spaced page and a half overflowing with insightful, rather severe criticisms of the book, and some kind words peppered in.
This felt like a big deal. I’d like to say that I was high-minded about the letter and took a breath to appreciate the time end effort spent by one of the best-known American novelists of the 21st century to offer me direction and instruction. But there was another part, fast on its heels, scanning the typewritten pages for a precious blurb. And there it was! Near the end, between a page-plus listing all the times he wanted to quit reading the book and a long paragraph about how and why I’d likely never fulfill my potential as a writer:
a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.
I used it, immediately, maybe that same day, to pitch the book. I used it in my bio for a long time. I’ll never know if it did me any good. The last time I did a reading where they read my bio aloud, the host - a university English major - mispronounced Mailer.
Norman died about 17 months after that first letter. We went back and forth with a few times. I sent him my next manuscript, hoping for something. But it was too late.
The mall and the margarita
Reaching out to someone whose work you admire is a difficult conversation to initiate. It’s unnatural. There’s an asymmetry of information, so it makes sense to over-share to try to even the scales. But there’s another asymmetry when you reach out to someone you admire - you want something.
This asymmetry feels almost natural if you’re taking it on the chin on a daily basis, which is how I felt when I reached out to David Berman.
It’s 2014, I’d rewritten and self-published The Last Bad Job. But personally, I was in the retreat - broke and stuck an actual and persistent bad job with few prospects literary or otherwise. One bright spot was that I was two years into an 8-year stretch where my poems, stories and essays would appear in more than 300 publications. But on a daily basis, I was commuting and keeping quiet. I felt like I was floundering.
So I contacted David, the single most successful poet I admired. My pal Pete had his email address. They had a few things in common. I used Pete’s name in the subject line of my first email. In my first missive, I shared my enthusiasm for the Silver Jews and his poems in Actual Air, then segued into my own struggles. And David came back at me with the tale of his own utter defeat, a defeat too profound to be voiced. But in his response was another small nugget.
These are very good poems. For moments I could even feel the old feelings when i read them.
I used that too. Heaven only knows what it got me. We corresponded a few more times over the years. He went on a lot of email sabbaticals. And then in February 2019, he emailed me out of the blue to say that he never meant for me to use his words as a blurb. I felt rightfully ashamed. He’d called me out on the grimy little hustle my grandiose aspirations had ground down to. I apologized, and scrubbed his kind words where I could. He said thanks.
Six months later, Dave killed himself. He’s the type of artist where you feel like you know him. The day I found out, I sequestered myself in an empty office. The place was downsizing relentlessly, so there was always an office to be had. I played Margaritas at the Mall, from his latest, on repeat. One woman in my office, also a Silver Jews fan, sought me out. We sat and talked for a while about him and his music.
The shark
The question I asked David Berman in 2014. - to draw him out, and because I was at an honest loss in my own life - was how should writer or an artist interact with the world? After all, he’d tried a few approaches, and made a splash. So what did he want from an audience, even if money is off the table, as it is in poetry?
At the time, David said he’d given up asking, given up wanting, “I try not to contaminate others. After all, this dead end is mine and I really do hope others will find ways to continue to work and find value or even just pleasure in the pursuit.”
By 2019, I had my own answer: Publishing was one small appendage on the larger animal, which was writing and rewriting, like the fin of the shark, the nub visible from the shore. On a shark, it seems almost insignificant, like a stylish embellishment. But when unscrupulous fishermen hack off the fin for soup and throw the animal back in the water, it spins, flails and drowns.
This is what I was afraid of
I am so fucking tired as I write this. My little girl threw up at two in the morning, and I never got back to sleep. The office coffee gave me acid reflux and my fast-fashion button-down shirt is too tight.
When I was a younger man, I feared the growing up that I have since done. Today I know about interest rates, collar stents, the consumer price index and a whole bunch of stuff I’d rather not have learned. More than growing up, I feared a time when I had so little time and energy to meet the demands on my resources that I would no longer be able to write. This fear came with a sensation of drowning, of slipping under the surface of the water one too many times and never coming back up.
Of course it’s complicated. Love, a love I never imagined - for my wife and children - makes the money scarce and the time hard to find.
Passing through defeat
The answer is a kind of courage. It’s the courage to patiently number, polish and minutely detail each of the labor-laden days. It’s not a courage I’d coveted or prayed for until now. After faith, this courage remains, I hope.
My pal Pete’s Substack
Dave Berman’s Menthol Mountains
Dave Berman’s Actual Air
Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s The Coney Island of the Mind
My poems
I reread this twice. Your life step’s held me fascinated for your big break. Finding love and courage is just your beginning. 🦕