Eric and Me

Chapter 2

In the mornings I drank coffee at the old downtown cafe where Stella, a waitress with heavy legs and a pretty face, handed out Bible tracts with the check.

I did my best work there.

It didn’t take long before the morning “regulars” – mostly old timers retired from the area’s iron mines and logging outfits – began to nod my way when I came in through the front door. They all sat together at a big round table beneath a sputtering neon sign in the front window. I sat by myself in a booth in the back. They noticed that I was always writing stuff down in the spiral-bound notebook I always had with me. Maybe one day I would write about them.

One day a guy walks in that nobody had ever seen before. He looked to be about my age, maybe a little older, late 20s, early 30s. He settled himself into a booth across from me. I felt his eyes, glancing my way.

After he got comfortable and had had a short, friendly chat with Stella, he looked over at me, writing in my notebook, and asked in a matter-of-fact way: “Are you a writer?”

I said: “I want to be.”

And that was the truth. I had wanted to be a writer ever since I first heard the Beatle’s “Paperback Writer” in high school. As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be something other than what I was. In Little League, I wanted to be a professional baseball player like Stan Musial, bringing cheering crowds to their feet. Later on, I wanted to be an astronaut like Neil Armstrong, focus of the world. But I never developed a big league arm and I was afraid of heights, so by my later high school years I was desperate to find another way to be something other than what I was – a small town teenager growing up at the edge of the woods.

Father worked in a factory.

Mother was always home.

It was the 60s, we were going to the moon. The phrase “postindustrial society” had not yet made its way into the vernacular. I could have gotten a job right out of high school with the power company or with any of the unions – plumbers, pipefitters, carpenters. My family had been in the area for generations. We had connections. I could easily have made enough to buy a house and support a family with just my paycheck alone.

Instead, I went to college to learn how to be a writer. My father was not happy about it. My mother was confused.

The main thing I learned from my professors in college was that learning how to be a writer was not as simple and straightforward as remembering enough mathematical formulas to become a structural engineer.

First, you had to take off. At some point in their lives, in one way or another, all the writers we were required to read in college had taken off -- Jack London to Asia on a rusty ocean freighter; Hemingway to war; Steinbeck to the hobo towns of the 30s; Kerouac into the world of speed and jazz and drugs.

My wife, the professor, Culley Jane, points out that all the writers I was required to read in college were men. Her favorite writer is Jane Austin… she took off, too, but in a different way.

I also learned that lots of famous writers started out as newspaper reporters. So, after college, that’s what I did. And I was good at it and I won awards and was on my way up and there was talk in the office about sending me to the Washington bureau. But I wanted to be a writer, so I took off.

I didn’t tell anybody about it. Just one day I didn’t show up for work in the newsroom. I was gone.

I hitchhiked back and forth across the country, sleeping out, up and down, like a ball in a pinball machine at the pool hall. I slept on strangers’ couches, in the back of pickup trucks, under bridges, two nights in a Georgia jail for pissing alongside a deserted county road. I was young and strong. I’d been a halfback in high school. I knew my way around in the woods. I’d been a Boy Scout.  From Southern swamps to the foothills of the Bitterroots, I cooked pinto beans and Indian fry bread over open campfires next to my tent. I met hippy chicks in communes.

After a year or so of that I figured I had gathered enough experiences to fill a book. All I needed was a room with a table and a typewriter.

Had I not taken off, I might have spent my life in an office dreaming about it; dreaming about walking away from the concerns and ties of home and family to become a famous writer and getting on the Johnny Carson Show. My parents would be proud of me. Kids I grew up with would tell their kids about how they’d once played baseball with a famous writer.

(to be continued…)