In the eighth grade, Mrs. Borden (“Mrs. Boredom” as we called her behind her back), my English teacher, gave us an assignment: to write a short story. She told us she would read the five best to the class. We had a month to complete it.
I remember being excited to start it, which was extraordinarily odd, because to that point I had never been excited about doing a homework assignment, as in ever, going all the way back to my earliest memories as a student.
I worked hard on it. I wrote it longhand (which was how things were done back then, and honestly should be done now)—a story about a starship zooming off to fight some alien threat, as I recall. I was a die-hard Star Trek fan at the time, and daily closed the door to my bedroom after school and on weekends, where I would play with any number of spaceships I had collected, imagining traveling to the stars, flying faster than light and saving civilizations, General Order 24 be damned.
Somehow my mother discovered the assignment. I don’t recall how. She took her old typewriter out and typed it up for me, sitting at the kitchen table, stapling it in a very professional manner and putting it in a manila folder to present to Mrs. Boredom when the assignment came due. I don’t recall its title; I just recall how pleased Mom was with it.
Mrs. Borden wasn’t one of my favorite teachers. She was bossy and stern, and she heavily favored the girls in class, who loved her, while actively disdaining us boys who, despite deserving of it or not, were in constant trouble with her. It was with this reality in mind that I meekly handed her the folder a month later. I had nothing to worry about as far as her reading my story to the class; all five winners were going to be girls. I remember the other boys saying the same thing.
You can guess what happened.
She read her favorite stories, starting with her fifth favorite (yes, all girls), working up to number one—mine.
She read it with great flourish and dramatic flair while I did everything humanly possible to disappear from existence. I recall my face burning so hot with embarrassment that it physically stung. I remember sweating profusely and losing all sense of place while trying not to lose the ham and eggs I’d eaten for breakfast.
Of course, no one in that classroom, Mrs. Borden included, remembered the story five minutes after the bell rang and class was dismissed. Of course, I did. It and that lesson became a profound memory for me, still vital and vivid today, fifty years later.
It came to me when I was writing it what I wanted to do with my life, answering the question so popular with teachers, counselors, and adults, the same teachers, counselors, and adults who probably couldn’t answer it for themselves, but somehow expecting a child to know.
Which, in my case, I did. It was a very gentle realization, as I recall, nothing dramatic, nothing overwhelming. Just ... this. Do this, it told me.
Which became a problem almost immediately, one that persisted well into adulthood.
“You can’t make a living as an artist or writer,” I have heard countless times since. “It isn’t practical.”
After a while, I grew to hate that word.
A steady high-school girlfriend, upon angrily exiting my truck after a date a year or so after graduation, yelled before slamming the door, “If money isn’t coming in through the door, love flies out the window!”
I’d told her I was going to be a writer.
She wanted me to be practical and become a highly paid engineer, like her father.
I pursued a (not practical) mathematics degree in college, not an English major. Why math? If you want the truth, it comes down to a high-school counselor telling me I was too stupid to pursue a “difficult” degree and that I should “do something easy” like become a phys-ed teacher.
(If you're a phys-ed teacher, I apologize on behalf of her. I've known many phys-ed teachers. That isn't an easy job, no matter how "easy" it is to get a teaching certificate as one. One of my all-time favorite teachers taught phys-ed. Rest in peace, Mr. Kinard.)
That’s not totally complete, though. I had always been fascinated by mathematics (I still am), learning how it works, how the beautiful, complex symbology works, how—somehow--the universe’s language seems written onto the fabric of reality itself so that we can understand it. I find that utterly fascinating.
While putting myself through college, I worked weekends at a gas station, sitting in a tiny booth in a desolate industrial section of Fort Collins, Colorado, taking payments from customers. I’d do my math homework, then open a spiral notebook covered in the scribblings of my very first novel.
I never completed it, though I had several hundred pages written. Two reasons: one, I was stupid enough to read magazines like Writers Digest, whose own writers told me I was a worthless piece of scum for even trying to write anything let alone publish a novel; and two, far more important and damaging, my mother died.
My world was devastated, though I soldiered on like nothing was the matter. That was a critical error that would cost me dearly multiple times the following decades. I put up the fiction writing and the metric ton of poems found in another binder (there were cracks in my soldiering on; that’s where the poetry leaked through) and instead got a teaching certificate and tried to beat the clock like my peers were doing with everything they had, convinced I could do it, I could, I just needed to try harder, just try harder, just shut that voice down, that voice, that pesky, insistent voice. And the dreams. And the anguish. And the heartbreak.
In 2001 a graduate advisor sexually assaulted me after feeding me roofies at a dinner he served at his home while his wife, a nurse, worked the graveyard shift at the hospital down the street. A few months later I attempted suicide; a few months after that I was homeless. On my literal last legs, I contacted my incredibly hateful natural mother (I was adopted) and begged her to help (to give you an idea of how nasty she was, I initially chose homelessness over contacting her). Very grudgingly, she wired me cash, enough to get to San Diego where she lived.
She was one of those “If money isn’t coming in through the door, love flies out the window!” type of people, and saw her rejected son as an abject failure, letting me know on a near-daily basis while I looked everywhere for a job while living under her roof. I stayed only as long as needed; soon after I was employed by Job Corps in Imperial Beach as their lead math teacher for their high school. I left “mother” behind once and for all after paying her back for her bitter hospitality.
I’m a good teacher. I know how to connect with kids. I took the high school from second to last in the nation (of 108 total) to second best within eight months. My team and I were interviewed by a local news station. I was debt-free and steadily employed, and popular with the kids, some of the toughest gangbangers, paroled drug dealers, and abandoned street kids in Southern California.
But I was miserable in a way that the definition of the word doesn’t quite cover.
Like I said, I’m a good teacher. But I can’t stand it—at least the classroom version of it. The profession as it stood then, and even more so today, is a cruel, heartless, immoral joke. The American educational system is broken and the vast majority of kids, bless them, are broken, and the teachers, bless them too, are broken. Just as the powers-that-be want it. A dentist, taking my blood pressure during a routine cleaning, gawked at the reading, then said after asking after me, “You’ve got a choice to make. Because this is ridiculous. You’re only 41 years old. At this rate you’ll be lucky to make it to 50.”
In August of 2003, with almost no savings, almost nothing to show for those grueling fifty-hour weeks, I finally listened to that once-gentle internal voice born twenty-seven years earlier. I quit teaching (not quite true, as you’ll see), quit trying to be someone I wasn’t, quit trying to be a cog, quit trying to beat the clock, quit trying to like khaki slacks, and opened a blank Word 2003 document that eventually became The Candle.
I went through my savings in less than six months. In that time I had a vision of sorts after repeatedly walking to the Imperial Beach Pier a few miles from my apartment. There was a story there, a great one; and on my birthday, 2004, I began the prologue to Melody and the Pier to Forever. To pay my way forward, I opened a tutoring service, working one-on-one with middle-school, high-school, and college students. Carless, I became an expert rider on San Diego’s public transport, its buses and trolleys. I saw San Diego up close. I fell in love with the city. Truthfully, it isn’t the friendliest metropolis (at least it wasn't then), but that really didn’t matter to me. I watched people; I listened to them, their conversations; I observed how they sat or where they were looking, how they were dressed. Watching their faces, I tried to imagine what their internal thoughts were, what they were thinking. When I wasn't doing any of that stuff, I gazed out the windows and took notes and wrote chapters and poetry as the city bumped and blurred by. Most of Book One of Melody was written longhand on San Diego’s buses and trolleys and transcribed later to my desktop after I got home.
I have no idea what happened to my blood pressure, if it went down, stayed the same, or went up. I struggled like mad each month to make rent. Some clients ripped me off. Others dropped me for no reason. I’d get a new plum client just to lose another the next day. I scrambled day-to-day to get the scratch necessary to live. Warnings to evict began piling up on my kitchen counter. I ate ramen and cans of beans and picked up nickels when I saw them. About a year later I started waking in the middle of the night with a new problem: terrifying panic attacks, several of which landed me in the emergency room. I thought I was having a heart attack. I hadn’t processed the rape or my mother's death at all, soldiering on just as I had when Mom died; rent was due in a few days and I was very short; I had no friends or family to fall back on; holy shit I’m fucked six ways to Sunday. My beat-the-clock peers from high school were doing just fine, raising families, white picket fences, starched white underwear, New Year’s resolutions and the comfortable numbness of suburbia and cable TV.
Still, there were highlights. I was totally in love with Melody. There was a great bookstore in downtown San Diego where I’d go on weekends, buy a coffee I couldn’t afford, and head upstairs to sit and read for a couple of hours. Walks on the Pier and the beach. The Tijuana Estuary. A U2 concert which a client bought me a ticket to, and the incredible misadventure that took place when I tried to get home from it, not realizing that buses and trolleys stop operating past a certain time at night, a dark quest that provided me with a life highlight that I will take to my grave. An amazing radio show called Big Sonic Chill, which ran 10 to 2 weeknights. Watching a few of my kids really start succeeding. Helping them get into college. Helping an Iraq vet prepare for a critical math test that would determine if he could go to a prestigious architecture school, and celebrating with him when he passed it and got in. Setting my own hours. Being my own boss.
I was reborn in Imperial Beach, which is why it, not Fort Collins, Colorado, where I was raised, is my stated hometown.
In 2011, I published Melody. She went to number three on Amazon for several days while free, with more than ten thousand downloads in that time. In 2012 I moved to Smith River, California, going from the southwesternmost point in California to its northernmost town. I wept when I moved, but I don’t regret doing it. Rent had more than doubled by that point and the reality was, I simply couldn’t afford to live there anymore. In 2014, I moved to Gold Beach, Oregon, about fifty miles north.
I kept writing. And I began the impossibly difficult and painful process of stopping soldiering on. My past traumas were beginning to exact a greater and greater toll on my being, and with greater and greater frequency. They came to a head in 2022, having just turned 60, when I decided once and for all to live, stumbling away from a noose I’d hung from a hidden tree over a creek near where I lived. A friend, concerned for my well-being, had called the sheriff. I arrived home (I live in an old motorhome) to find two of them there. A state-funded psychotherapist showed up soon after. I was ordered to go to therapy. It was February of that year.
I call that month “Dawn” now, because it truly felt like dawn in my spirit. The darkness, by dint of that (very difficult) decision to live, suddenly and quite surprisingly started to abate. Slowly, agonizingly, haltingly, yes. But abate nonetheless, this time for good. I’d passed some sort of critical threshold, some sort of benchmark or mile marker. Insights regarding my past, my family and friends of my childhood and young adulthood, were descending on me almost daily like sudden, fierce lightning bolts, often stopping me cold or forcing me to pull over on the side of the road to take it in, trying to understand, my heart beating like mad, my lungs straining for air. Understanding my utterly toxic choices in girlfriends. I mean the lot of them, beginning to end, no exceptions, no excuses. Understanding what I was trying to fix in myself by dating them or sleeping with them or, worst of all, living with them.
I legally changed my name to one of my spiritual fathers and personal heroes. And I kept writing.
I’m still writing.
Somehow I’m still here. I’m still at it. I get by the best I can, and I write. It’s really that simple. There is no Grand Plan, no outline, no roadmap, no Final Goal. I’m writing, I’m living, I’m breathing, I’m waking each morning increasingly awed by and at this existence. I have never married, never had children, never bought a home. I have traveled almost nowhere. I don’t fly. I watch the ocean; I sleep with my beautiful rescue feline friend Cheez-it stretched out on top of me; I take prescription meds for high blood pressure and anxiety; and I try not to take myself too seriously. I’m poorer than a church mouse, but richer than Elon fucking Musk. Despite the massive, grinding challenges, some of which are still with me, I’d make the same choice again and again and again if given it.
Because I can feel that fourteen-year-old me smiling inside each day. And that feeling … it’s worth everything.
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