RUDIMENTS, pt. 85
Making Cars
I started out the previous chapter with
a complete other idea in mind, but never
got there. Basically, that just usually means
it wasn't worth much anyway. However,
the manner in which I write has everything
meaning something, so I go where it takes
me. I am, by the way, and have always been
the writing-workshop's worst nightmare.
And boy do I hate those things - workshops,
not nightmares. Quintessentially feminine,
usually even the guys, in that vein, nothing is
ever questioned except as it gets questioned
for its propriety, correctness, and right-attitude.
Which ain't writing at all; that's polemic, that's
ideology. So, I never knew what that crap was
all about, and usually told them, which most
generally - in those pre-laptop days - got
me a pencil in the eye. More than once. So,
you see, they blinded me. But I told them 'I
can see better blind, so shut up now and let
me write.' One of the writer-matrons in
charge, once - whom I tried desperately
to bed but who constantly resisted because,
she said 'I've always felt 'coitus' to be a
terribly unattractive word.' I said, 'Well
whatever, we'll be quick and I hope no
one walks in on us, because then it would
be 'caught us, interrupt us.' She didn't laugh
a twitter. And then I told her I had recently
read (and this is true) that the word 'pregnant'
was voted the ugliest word in the English
language, and 'cellar door' the prettiest-sounding.
What I didn't tell her was that the cellar-door
thing was actually Poe's favorite phrase too,
and way back then. He called it the loveliest
of English-language words. I was always
suspicious of that because he was continually
locking someone up in cellars in his stories.
I didn't tell her, as I've noted. But maybe you
see what I mean. That entire thing I just wrote,
this opening, would have gotten lacerated, cut
to ribbons, criticized and maimed in any
workshop group. My God, they'd be gagging
over it - and then there would a fourteen
minute argument over whether I should have
here said gagging 'over it', or 'on it.' See.
-
One time, in a workshop, all these gleeful
people were group-writing, reviewing, sharing
(man, I hate that), what they'd written. We were
supposed to be writing of an episode in our past
that stayed vivid to us still, and portray it for
others in a way that would bring that same
'vividness' to the fore for them. Ok, thought I,
that could work. Now, I've got like 14,000
things from my past I could easily write about.
And so I did. In a vivid way too. Whoah! It
blew the place apart, got me crucified, and
represented the last time I ever set foot in
a 'writer's workshop' ever. College level or the
freaking Chautauqua Institution Writers Center.
-
What I wrote about turned their hair green. It
related (which is why it's so comfortable to use
it here) back to my days in the woody-wilds of
rural Pennsylvania, when, while driving a
school-bus, I occasionally did something pretty
nasty. No one much cared, as I've written, up
there about anything short of maybe murder,
or mooching a cow (I said 'mooching', not
'smooching' a cow. That happened often).
Parents, whatever there was of them, were
pretty rare. It was usually hands-off for kids
to grow themselves up, after age 14 or so.
One parent was always missing, among the
poor, mountain people, living on dirt-edges
and in broken-down trailers. Desperate
situations, desperate people. This one girl,
a prime, ripe, really almost beautiful,
high-school senior (she later just became
a check-out girl at the local Super-Duper,
the grocery store over in Troy), she'd get
on the bus in the mornings, not everyday,
don't get me wrong, but, hey, often enough,
and stay on the bus, not getting off it. No
one ever said anything - her friends and
the others her age (I never knew how she
managed their silence; no one squealing,
or on me, for that matter), but one day she
had a discussion with me and presented her
situation - poverty, dire straits, sick Mama.
Whatever, I didn't balk; as far as I was
concerned she could do whatever the heck
she wanted once she got off my bus. So,
she'd skip the high-school thing and go
right to the Troy Hotel, and become a
'working girl' for the day. That's really
all I knew and all I ever cared to know.
Well, to be told, this little story I related
violated about every principle these people
held, including 'too many adjectives.' You'd
have thought I wrote the Satanic Bible the
way they carried on about everything but
my point : which was a re-telling of a vivid
episode in my past. Or so I thought anyway.
To them it was more like I was to be writing
a Gallup Poll, using only all the 'right' leads
and references to get people to say what I
wanted them to say. no thanks. It was funny.
The fact that I had this girl being led astray,
going through her motions, without correcting
her and stepping in, without judgmentalizing
what went on, and - in their eyes - misleading
the reader into the expectation that there had
been something going on between her and me
ON the bus, was 'false expectation without
explanation.' Whew. Huh?
-
And it was curious to me too how little grasp
of reality these hard-core writer people
actually had. They were cocooned. Mostly
NYC or university and 'Writer's Academy'
sorts. Pretty useless, and who'd gladly pay
good money to stay in the woods somewhere
to 'learn' how to write, by work-shopping.
What a dumb idea. My time in Pennsylvania
had been full of bloodletting - and so had my
time in NYC - and if they were going to get
any of it it was going to have to be hot, steaming
blood, of me and by me. I never understood
proprieties, nor did I ever understand having
to watch out for the other person while being
a writer. It was hot-stove, solitary stuff. So
just kindly step out of my way. In this (and
I never shared this) it reminded me of, back
on the farm, the old Grandad who used to
hang around Warren's barn with me sometimes.
He was the father of Warren's wife, kind of a
cracker, but cool - he'd tell me about his days
thereabouts with the WPA, when the government
put all those out-of-work Depression farmers
to work, so they could at least eat and buy
food for their families. They all were put to
the task of tarring the roads around the area.
He'd tell how they trailed behind the
drag-truck, slowly, walking along while
the truck scraped and dragged over the
ground and then they'd come up behind,
all the men with tar buckets, spreading the
stuff, as best they could, over the dirt, from
the pails with giant, hard brooms. Primitive
form of paving, I guess. What stayed in my
mind, and like this writing too, was how he
was always complaining about the TV being on,
in their house, and how expensive it was. He'd
say, 'Didja ever stand behind a TV and feel the
heat it throws. Anything that generates heat,
that's gonna be expensive as get-out to run.'
Like writing, I used to think, like writing,
throwing heat and being costly for it.
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