Gen X: I Did What I Loved, the Money Did Not Follow

The MFAs

Kibbins published a book the second year of the program.  That fall, every few weeks, he'd have  his lover Susie Samuelson teach his courses while he read at bookstores in Boston, New York and Washington DC. The effect it had on the rest of us was poisonous. Suddenly, we were failures before we’d all graduated. Fueling this feeling of failure was the pernicious idea that a good novel could be produced quickly. There was Hemmingway writing Old Man and the Sea in six weeks, and now Kibbins had a novel about training for the Olympic track team with a dying brother in a small Illinois town, written in nine months. In the fall, Kibbins talked about the finishing the first half, by spring break a draft was done and sent off to an agent—who importantly sent it back with edits so that Kibbins always referring to weekend and evening plans of finishing something for the agent while the rest of us had only papers to grade or a trip to the grocery store. His book was sold by final exam week. So here it was proven; of course it was doable to write a book and sell it in a year; the rest of us had failed to do it.

Ryder, the most detached and given to glib, druggy pronouncements about writing, stopped his saying, as he used to, that his novel would take years to write.  Now, with the same ring of delivering plain truth, he said the exact opposite. “You just have to get the work out."  He said he was going to mail the first four chapters of his novel to an agent. Easley, who was always an emotionally sweet soul, Rhyme and Reason in one, declared that she was “on fire” with a new project and the gods were speaking the story to her for six straight hours a day; in three months she was done, which was somatically punctuated with her throwing up in the bushes on her way to teach. Many started transcribing their diaries, which is what Kibbins claimed he was doing. Susie Samuelson enjoyed consorting with the elect and positioned herself as Kibbins’ intellectual helpmeet and spoke of their collaborative process. Everyone accelerated their projected finish dates and then at least like me, privately despaired that how hours of sitting and forcing words led to days where I woke and had nothing to say. Schacht started typing out passages of Faulkner novels, as if the mechanics of this and physically following the words would keep him that much closer to coming up with a good book himself.

It all came to nothing, of course. We did not discover a better way to write fiction. We merely lived out our jealousy while the embarrassments mounted: Ryder said the agent “misunderstood” Ryder’s chapters, or more likely didn’t know why he was being sent an unfinished manuscript from an unknown writer; Easley let it slip that her committee chair had asked her to please not send her “on fire” manuscript out and mention the writing program. (To expedite the writing, Easley had “let go” of creating characters). Everyone discovered their diaries told stories that were boring, as generally writers lead boring lives. I went back to sleeping adequately and writing a paragraph a day; Schacht switched to masturbation.

The Job Afterward

It was 7 pm in the evening and the A train moved and then halted and then moved and then halted, obeying the tunnel signal lights flashing downwards from green to yellow to red, staying red; indifferent to the passengers inside it. The prospect of a relaxing evening at home juddering to nothing by red lights, red lights, red lights.

It was hard for K. to reason herself out of the notion the train behaved like this because she was poor. It was easy to believe that the city elders would deliver worse service to people with small incomes, bad apartments.

But also, she knew this wasn't possible: before this train got to those outer places, it was moving through rich neighborhoods in Manhattan and their denizens were being simultaneously inconvenienced, if this train wasn’t moving, somewhere in prime real estate land, this must mean that they couldn’t move too. Right?

She, K., began her day before these people rose. Her day started and ended in utter blackness. K. had, between dropping her bag down on the kitchen counter next to the door and putting her head down on her pillow, about one hour—60 minutes—of useable leisure. She’d wake up when the cold night wasn’t over and try to write something, wilting over her computer. She’d go to work and come home at night, hopeful for some reality she was not currently occupying, in which she was awake and okay.

Photographing the rats in the courtyard for a harangue to the building owner, complaining about the side door that was always left open to frigid air and drug dealers—these were closer things she wanted to get to at three in the afternoon when she looked from her desk at 3 pm—a time of day when she had a strong vision of humming productivity that would visit her in the evening to do what really mattered. It never happened.

K. looked up at the people around her on the train. Overweight. When she was a dancer, a teacher at the school took a moment out of class to talk about professionalism and along whatever the teacher said about manners and dress, the teacher also held a pink hand to his chest and proclaimed, "and I've never seen so many overweight girls in my life!"

Funny, the things that stay with you. The federal offense of trying to make art without asking more of yourself.

Her stop was coming. Her heart felt like a meager thing. She remembered at some point earlier, she did a visualizing exercise: she would come home, need less, put her life a centimeter ahead of where it lay unmoved day after day when she put the key in lock on the door. But no: she’d sit in a chair for 20 minutes, eat for 15 minutes, make her lunch in 15 minutes, shower and, put her clothes in a hamper and iron a shirt and choose an outfit for tomorrow in 20 minutes. She fell asleep composing sentences.

And then at 4:00 am, a time that would ruin her day, her life, she’d wake up in a coffin of blackness and ask the same question: why, what did I do wrong—

A Weekend of a Novelist

Friday

 I am riding the train and it is not even five; I feel hopeful.

I get home, a clucking of a fire alarm in the hallway that has been going on for a year and my complaining about it to the managing agent has done nothing.

I make coffee and unfreeze bread and then toast it. I garbage it up with a pile of magazines—I don’t like this time, when my mind is too weakened to do anything other than passively absorb empty calories of gossip.

 The coffee has kicked in, I’ve exchanged enough texts and now I start ruminating—

Riding the subway…writing on the subway. Why haven’t I ever made more of that? Twice, I’ve seen the novelist Nathan Englander writing on the subway. Ankle resting on one knee and scrawling away. He peered at me a couple of times, maybe because I’d gone to a reading he did at the Strand and asked a question. He teaches in my home state, Wisconsin. Maybe this is a good moment to reveal to you my secret super power. My secret super power is that I could live just about anywhere. I am from a flyover state, I went to college in a flyover state and I never saw the problem with living in one. Unless being black there is a problem. I’m not visibly black but I am black and I’ve heard enough about what white people really think of black people when no black people are around—wait a minute. I’m on the subway. In New York City. Where I moved so I’d never be the only person of color wherever I was again. Nathan Englander still lives part of the year in Brooklyn and Ella’s Deli in Madison must be his idea of Hell on Earth, but if I had the chance to get out of New York with a good job and salary my writerly feelings would not be hurt.

Saturday

Saturday and Sunday morning, I actually get down to it: the writing itself.It’s a little bit like sex starts; how you don’t plan it, but you think about it over and over, until it is in the air and expands until there’s nothing else to do. This is how I would describe writing: visiting the Arch of St. Louis. Going inside it, riding up in a claustrophobic tube through a small black in what feels like a Rube Goldberg invention—chains rattling, the contraption we were in shimmying. And then getting up to the walkway which has this tilted sheer glass where a rail should be so you can lean into it and instead of looking down and seeing my feet, I see a sheer drop 700 feet down, and the west spreading out beyond me. I let go, and I fly.

That is what writing feels like.

And then it’s over.

Monday

I stand on the train platform, stunned that I am in a suit again. My eyes are flattened disks.