Dawson Steeber

An Old T-shirt

I have an old T-shirt—coming apart at the neck, stained around the belly—on which is a black and white photograph of Charles “Hank” Bukowski. He looks to be in his fifties, but is more likely in his thirties, and is leaning against a streetlight, one arm wrapped around it like an old friend. His forearm rests on a pamphlet box. The sign on the box reads: JESUS CHRIST SAVES FROM ALL SIN. PRAY TO JESUS NOW. OBEY THE BIBLE. WARNING: DEATH, JUDGMENT, ETERNITY, HEAVEN or HELL. There is also a small note telling passersby to TAKE ONE PAPER FREE. The box is empty. Several people have asked who the preacher is on my shirt, and expressed more than a little surprise that I am religious. I generally laugh and explain that the preacher is a poet and that the shirt, to me, suggests that the Word of God is empty, and Hank is the one to listen to.

I realize this sounds a bit hyperbolic, and too many young braggadocios love to invoke him and his lifestyle, but Bukowski really did have a strong, nearly spiritual effect on me. I was never one for reading. No papers. No glossies. Nothing. Then I serendipitously came across Love is a Dog From Hell when I was around twenty years old. And ever since reading that book from cover to cover over a couple of hours, and repeat readings each day for three days after, I have been addicted to reading his words. In fact, reading Bukowksi was a sort of ironic “moment of clarity”, an epiphanic moment. I read him with the attention an ascetic would poring over the Bible. I read through his oeuvre with a catechismal rigor. I went from simply lying back on the floor of my apartment letting the words rush over me, to actually reading Bukowski’s words.

With his gritty, poignant brevity, with a blunt street vernacular, a frank looseness of tone with seemingly arbitrary line-breaks, the language of the layman—a language that one might use in conversation with a friend over a drink—Bukowski showed me at the heart of the American Dream lies profound ambivalence and empty morality. His first person narratives reflect parts of American society that I had long ignored—the working American, issues of social stratification, a harsh critique of the American Dream, and a critical analysis of work. Bukowski wasn’t the sort of poet that had driven me away from reading poetry; the type that had me disenchanted by literature’s alienating austerity and antiseptic content, though in high school I simply thought it corny and boring.

He was neither elitist, bohemian, nor overtly political, but simply working-class. It was his unique brand of beer-soaked irreverence and comic misadventure, tempered with scathing social commentary, and his blatant challenge to the efficacy of the American Dream; an unwavering assault on numbing, routinized work deadening the majority of Americans and a strong anti-consumerist belief—essentially, to hell with consumption for the sake of consumption—that spoke to me like scripture. I was embracing the sins of man, and Bukowski seemed to be showing me that I had, we have, no other choice. In fact, Bukowski told author Ben Pleasants that all of his, Bukowski’s, work dealt with an America that was “mentally fucked up and unhappy, not knowing what to do, how to get out of bed, how to get a job, how not to get a job, how to get through another day...” Oh, Yes! Tell ‘em, Brother Hank! Brutal truth teller!

I drank in his words and read that my refusal was a positive one, in that it implicitly demanded something more than material affluence. His work, ferociously bleak in its portrayal of life, his depiction of drunks, drug addicts, criminals, prostitutes and outcasts of all shapes and sizes was the world I was living in, those were the people I talked to, worked and drank and rode the bus with everyday.

It was this aliterary style with its characteristic themes of desolation among society’s misfits, outcasts just getting by, managing somehow to cope with the absurdity of life and work, that moved Ezra Pound to recognize Bukowski’s writing as “new” and “slapping the face of the status quo of writing.”

For me, Bukowski’s work will always be one of a kind in its range, its detail, and in its perspective from which readers are able to make value judgments regarding notions of work and its influence on the individual and all of us.

For a long time I carried around copies of Bukowski’s poetry clenched tightly in one hand and, like a bus stop or barstool preacher, I slurred catechisms to anyone who would listen.

Now, a husband and a father, I don’t preach so much, but there is a four shelf altar in my basement to old Hank to which I direct any visitors wanting to read good lines about the bad life.

Eric Wasserman

A Lifelong Treasure

There is a wonderful line I identify with near the beginning of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in which the narrator says, “Being the third son of the family, and not bred to any trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts.” As the third of four children in an enormous family I didn’t exactly feel special as a little boy. Also, I was a child who struggled in school from dyslexia and was placed in special education classes until the middle of the seventh grade. Reading was definitely no pleasure back then. What I did have going for me was an imagination.

The reader in our family was my oldest brother, Todd. I recall a family vacation to Lake Chelan and seeing Todd reading Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I was not a reader at the time. I was a boy obsessed with going to the movies and reenacting the plots I loved. My father was one of the first people in our neighborhood to buy a VCR and often recorded movies for us that played on television. One that I loved was the 1950 Walt Disney version of Treasure Island. I remember breaking one of my mother’s brooms in half and attempting to fasten it to my knee with duct tape to play the part of Long John Silver in my playtime fantasies. Treasure Island is one of the first books I read by choice. I read it for two reasons; I knew I liked the story from the movie and I wanted to be like my oldest brother who excelled in school and did not have dyslexia.

Coming from a big family, I had built in playmates, but the truth is that I spent a lot of time by myself imagining stories and acting them out. One of the places I would do that was Highland Forest. Had my mother known I was riding my bicycle into the forest and setting off to play out adventures she would have grounded me until puberty. In that special place I believed I really was Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. And when the adventures Stevenson put to the page ran out, I created my own because I didn’t want them to end. Alone there in Highland Forest, lost within my own imagination and the world of stories, I found a way to feel special. I would run about the trees singing “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest— / Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum!” having no idea what rum was at that age, but Coca Cola would do just fine to play the part. I was a suburban boy dreaming inside boy’s adventures. Like so many places of my childhood, Highland Forest is no longer there. But my imagination is still there among the vanished trees, believing I am living within a story.

When I went on my honeymoon to Scotland I took a copy of Stevenson’s Kidnapped. As I read it on the plane I simply could not imagine a fictional David Balfour. As I read, “I” was David Balfour and Highland Forest was Scotland. I was once again a little boy finding a way to feel special through reading. The Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh has a special Robert Louis Stevenson exhibit. In one of the security protected glass cases is a copy of the first printing of Treasure Island. While there, I stood and looked at it and thought of being that little boy who didn’t feel special who read a book and slipped into the world of the imagination. A book had opened a new door to my life and as a newly married man I was opening another. The once little boy with dyslexia found his life in the special gift of reading was staring at one of the seeds.

Emily Dressler

The Day I Met an Author

When I was ten, I was obsessed with one author. Her name was Lurlene McDaniel and she wrote books about girls with cancer. They usually died. Every girl was beautiful, even in the throes of sickness. Often, they had gorgeous boyfriends. I devoured these books. I could finish one in a day. They were supposed to make you cry, I think, but I never did.

McDaniel was coming to a bookstore in Fairlawn and I forced my dad to take me. I was nervous about meeting her. I had never met an author before and I didn’t know if you were supposed to meet the people whose books you practically ate. I had been too privy to her private thoughts, and I wondered if it would be awkward to see her.

My dad agreed to take me there on the condition that I stop reading her books. He said I was getting to old for them. Everyone died in the books, I had told him, and I added how grown up that made them. I knew he was right, though. I could tell the books weren’t all that great. It was a guilty pleasure and I was ten. Before we left the bookstore, he bought me Sirens of Titan and Of Mice and Men. Talk about growing up fast.

Meeting her was actually a nightmare. My dad was the only dad there. This was before Borders had a coffeeshop, so he couldn’t even go there and wait. He had to sit there with me. He wasn’t going to, but all the moms were with their daughters, so he stayed with me. I don’t remember what she talked about. I remember that I was the only one wearing basketball sneakers. During the Q & A, my dad nudged me. He knew I had a question. I had asked him my question on the car ride there and he hadn’t been able to answer it.

I asked her why all the sick girls were pretty. I had a big gap in my front teeth, my left eye was lazy, my shoes were never tied, and my hair was an unruly mess of frizzy curls. I asked her if it made the sickness worse, made their death sadder, if they were beautiful. She said no, but her books said otherwise.

On the drive home, I told my dad I didn’t want to read her books anymore. She wrote about people living and dying (mostly dying), and she didn’t talk at all about the magic in anything.

Tobin Terry

Reading Cat's Cradle at the End of the World

It was the summer of 2007 and I was working for an auto salvage yard in Akron, OH. My job was to be the first person who took inventory of a wrecked or totaled vehicle as it came in. I was required to get into the vehicle to collect information and certain parts or belongings. From time to time, I'd come across a vehicle soaked in human blood. Each vehicle had a story: A suicide car, a broken baby seat, palm crosses on the mirror, a tooth stuck in the dashboard, bullet holes and brain matter. It was depressing to say the least, an occupational pool-pah, if you will.

When Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle was assigned in one of my summer courses, I took it with me to read on my lunch break. I worked ten and twelve hour shifts practically unsupervised, so when I became so engrossed by the book, I took it with me into the yard. I found a wrecked Oldsmobile eighty-eight, maroon inside and out, with broken windows, cleared a spot in the driver's seat, leaned it back and read the book on company time. The novel's sarcastic tone provided nervous laughter where humor didn't seem to exist. I found myself whispering, "busy, busy, busy" and laughing at tragic car wrecks. No, it's not that I was laughing at them, I was laughing at the horrifying seriousness of them. Cat's Cradle was a lesson that it is okay, sometimes necessary even, to do that.

The reading experience was a spiritual one, and I'll never forget reading it, "lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who."

John Skarl

Pigman


I spent most of my adolescence pretending that I was someone else. A need to transcend the mundane manifested itself through the years I spent sitting around a table role-playing with character sheets and dice. Sometimes role-playing was war in the back of the allotment. In these fictional landscapes, the possibility of death lurked like a dark bird on a highwire.

Dungeons and Dragons experienced a rebirth during the nineties. It had been admonished as a game that further disconnected people from reality, inspired violent behavior, and in some cases, caused lasting mental harm. All three of these side effects could be true for all I know, though I have firm suspicions they are not. I thank God no one forbid our role-playing. Sometimes I wonder if Dungeons and Dragons could have vented Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s psychotic behavior into a harmless, hot steam. Our misfit group certainly had violent tendencies, and our discussions, had they been broadcasted or written down, could nowadays be considered grounds for expulsion.

We played other war games. I recall the dank dirt, clingy leaves, army surplus flashlight on one hip, canteen on the other. We had plastic guns—in some cases they were metal—they were all fake, but looked dangerously real. If there happened to be any sissy orange plastic, we pried those parts off or spray-painted them black. We humped the entire woods that spanned for five or six miles behind the allotment—these same woods later became the place we learned to drink or smoke—an irreverent place.

In sixth grade, a man came in to speak to us about the Vietnam War. James Crumb was the father of one of the girls in my class. He talked about how he was drafted. He spoke of his dread but also his sense of duty. He told us his weapon was the M-60 machine gun. That was the gun Rambo held with one arm. He had my attention. He gave us real answers to our questions: “Were you scared?” “Often.” “Did you kill anyone?” “Yes.”

He brought a cardboard box full of books telling his experiences in the war. I was a sixth grader with five dollars lunch money. I decided I could afford to go hungry. Those days I remember thumbing through military equipment guides, marveling over the pictures of guns, tanks and missiles in our library. Here was a living, breathing story. Crumb carried an M-60 machine gun, which could fire 160 rounds per minute. He called it the pig because of its weight, and the pig was called on often.

I still have Pigman. Its cover is a map of Vietnam highlighting the areas Crumb fought in or traveled through. I believe the memoir was self-published because the typeset looks like Courier and there are misspellings. None of these things mattered to me. Here was a true account—truth that wasn't filtered through the news or a history book.

At one point, he described diving into a foxhole to avoid mortar fire. Many others had the same idea, and soon he was buried under soldiers seeking refuge. When the shell hit, these bodies saved his life. He described finding a mass of slaughtered Viet Cong that had been exposed to the sun for weeks and he described their efforts to clean up the bodies on the side of a jungle mountain, how their sun-rotten skin stuck to his hands, the ravenblack smoke clouds, the barrel-rolling artillery planes, how, during the tour, his own reflection grew more and more unrecognizable. It was one book I never forgot.

Robert Pope

The Golden Slave

When I was very young I read quite a bit but never really noticed it. I read all kinds of things, including Hardy Boys and a series of blue biographies in early years at school. I read indiscriminately. We had a nice illustrated hard-bound copy of John Steinbeck's The Red Pony at home which I read repeatedly. We also had The Winter of Our Discontent, My Chinese Wife, The Good Earth, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Mister Roberts, The Human Comedy, and quite a few others I also read because they were available. I remember a book by Jim Kjelgaard called Fire Hunter, published in 1951, which excited me more than most books. I checked it out of my school library. I spent some time wandering through the public library reading science fiction books while sitting in the aisles of the stacks. One of my favorite was Martians, Go Home! by Frederic Brown. I hadn't really entered the world of great literature yet, or even the popular favorites of the day. I just read whatever caught my eye or my imagination.

One day I went into the basement of the house we lived in that year--we moved so many times I only remember it by the boxes still sitting around. Even though I recall this as happening when I turned twelve, I must have been fourteen, because the book came out in 1960. Even though I recall this as happening in the house in Virginia, it must have been Frankfurt, Germany because that's where I lived at the time. I pulled a paperback out of a box, The Golden Slave, and started reading--though it might have been a hardback. I saw the paperback years later, so I might have replaced the hardback with paper--if there was a hardback. Within the first few pages--as I recall--the Romans, I think it was, invaded and a mother dashed her infant's brains out against a rock rather than have him taken into slavery. If I am not mistaken, the golden slave went around the world he knew as the world searching for his wife, from whom he had been separated, and performing feats and tasks for kings who rewarded him, at least once--this sticks in my mind--with the lovely woman for his bed pictured on the cover.

I had never read anything like this, and it changed my notion of what a book could do. My eyes were opened. It was a book by Poul Anderson, and once I had read it the world was not the same. It was better and more awesome than it had been before, and the promise of books had grown in the afternoon it took to read it, sitting alone in our basement, on the wooden steps, among the boxes that had not been unpacked. This, I knew, was my father's book, a book he never would have told me about, and I wondered if this didn't indicate the life he lived as a military officer traveling about the world, sometimes with a family, sometimes not. The world promised more than it had ever promised. Literature opened to me as a world with at least as many dangers as the one in which I lived, and far greater rewards. I went after it more actively after this experience.

The Closet

http://www.valuablesandcuriosities.blogspot.com/

John Skarl teaches at a vocational high school, and I can't think of any better place to be teaching the kind of class on writing fiction that you can read about in his blog (address above). In his blog called The Closet, John has listed and commented on five writers who came to his class and read something they wrote and talked about writing with the students. If writing's not a vocation, John, I don't know what it is. Your students are lucky to have you and this class. Other teachers and schools ought to take notice.