From Alaska to San Fransisco, skinny jeans & words of inspiration
They say if you’re going through hell, keep going. That life begins at the end of your comfort zone, and the only ones for me are the mad ones. That it’s not about waiting for storm to pass, but learning to dance in the rain. And, of course – how can we forget Mr. Wilde? – life is too important to be taken seriously.
Well it’s been sixteen years of that shit, and I’m ready for a breather. Ever since I left school, dragged my duffel aboard the Greyhound at 10th & Filbert, and headed west to Alaska to work in the salmon hatchery, it’s been go go go. Some desperate crusade to invent rites of initiation – scooping guts on the slime-line, weeks asea fishing, crabbing, sea cucumbers – a moving company in San Diego, timber-framing in New Hampshire, cleaning out basements in Michigan, the carpenter’s union in Alaska, Greensaw, all of it bookended by a 220-ton WWII tugboat. Ten years straight, from age nineteen to twenty-nine without being anywhere for longer than six months. And now, sixteen years later, I consider myself just about the luckiest sonofabitch on the face of this fine planet. To have been called by the head of the Stanford Creative Writing Department on a Friday evening some five months ago, a few beers deep on a Friday night, and offered this – are you kidding me? I’ll repeat Churchill once more: If you’re going through hell, keep going.
The migration south for Dog and I has not been seamless. The adventure began at 4 am on a rainy morning, hours after saying goodbye to a couple of the boys on the work float, Lucy and Cal giving a quick lick of the chops then pretending they could care less about one another. If only we could all be as nonchalant as dogs! Anyways 4 am – I arrived at the Sitka airport with my doggy carrier, only to be told by a snappy, caffeine-addled agent – folks at Alaska Airlines are usually so pleasant! – that the case supplied to me ever so kindly and for free by Dr. Burgess had clips that made it against regulations to use.
Well well.
“I’m sorry. Can you ship your dog later one?”
I reminded her that it was also regulations that owners fly with their dogs.
“Oh. Of course.”
It was a bit of a standoff. Finally, she said she’d call in the back to see if they had any carriers for purchase. I got passed onto another agent. They dug up a carrier, and carted it out. Colorado looked on balefully.
“Hmm,” the agent said, frowning. This one much more pleasant, but also, understandably, slow in the morning. “You know, he’s got to be able to stand up without his back touching the roof of the carrier. Can you get him to hop in?”
In Mr. Colorado went. I coaxed him to standing, praying for a little slouch at just the right moment. His haunches all but brushed the roof of the carrier.
“Oooooh. I’m sorry. I think it’s just a bit too small.”
Second standoff of the morning. I wasn’t used to doing Philly in Alaska.
Back the guy went, searching for another carrier. A few minutes later he trotted out the next size, and, a hundred extra dollars later, we were airborne. Each time I switched planes, I was given a ticket that said, “Hi! _____ is on board!” Still, it was painful, thinking about the little guy, there in the hold, even if they did call it “FurClass.”
And then, eight hours later, we arrived in San Francisco. And there was Colorado, calm as a cucumber, gingerly stepping out of the carrier. I swear, he must have meditated the entire journey.Still, he was as all eyes and ears when it came to mention of “treat.”
And there to pick us up, dog and six bags, was Ms. Jenny Pritchett, driving her golden Toyota Corolla with the driver’s door you need to roll down the window to open. Glowing like a golden chariot, the scratched bumpers emitting an aura of nostos. How nice to have someone meet you at the airport, especially when you’re moving!
She whisked us direct to her friend Lindsey’s, in East Oakland. Lindsey was, and is, and continues to be, kind enough to look after Mr. Colorado, as Jenny’s roommate has Mr. Rusty, a sweet older cat who nein tolerates der hund.
On we went to Jenny’s apartment, off Piedmont Avenue, a blessedly sane and beautiful part of Oakland. The apartment even came with instructions on writing a book, helpful for all emerging writers, posted there on the wall. “Making a book. You need: white lined writing paper. Pencil and eraser. Construction paper (any color except white.)[At this young age, she even had the period in the correct place!!!!]
You do: Choose a title. Draw a cover on construction paper. Write a story.” The last part, of course, the easiest.
The next day, Saturday, was a story written on construction paper in dream-font, beginning at the Lake Merritt farmer’s market. God how we slave in Sitka to grow a freakin radish! The abundance, the cornucopia, the colors, the various states of undress, ragged tank-tops and baby-doll dresses and straw hats – food, glorious food! Humanity, glorious humanity! I recounted to Jenny the competitions in Sitka to grow a tomato, a single tomato, how someone is hailed as a master gardener if they manage to get a single red fruit. Take a look at this! Sunflowers, limes, avocados! Happy Boy Farms indeed!
The outlook in the Bay Area, like the weather, was sunny. But alas then I started looking for permanent housing. I figured out, after hosting an Alaska wild foods event for the first-year Stegner Fellows at Jenny’s place, that I was the only one without housing. And most folks were in the Lake Merritt area.
Thus began a crash-course in Bay Area rental. The dog was the main issue. The first place I visited was indeed beautiful, with a view of the lake, sun-splashed. Jenny was aghast when I gave the super an accurate description of Colorado’s weight and breed. How silly, how naive! Three weeks later I was rolling around with a copy of bank statements, pictures of the dog, credit report, letters of acceptance from Stanford, stipend details, and a cover letter that one property agent called an “essay.” Over the course of these three weeks Colorado made a miraculous transformation from a 62-pound husky shepherd into a 33-pound corgy-mix rescue therapy dog who once dug ten skiers out of an avalanche. And that, friends and neighbors, is what finally got us the green light on a place in a funky Vietnamese neighborhood a stone’s throw from the lake, around the block from Baggy’s, a splendid watering hole that was summed up by Rosie, a fellow Stegner fellow, as “an old grizzler-populated dive bar where the bartender is a real Englishman who authentically says things like “another pint then, love?” and can’t go back to London or else he faces ’15 in the pen’ due to this family feud he’s part of.” Said bartender has knuckle tats that say “hard work.” What’s not to love?
Meanwhile I made a good fool of myself flapping around a sports bar in Oakland, dressed in my stained Andre Waters jersey, singing the Philadelphia Eagles fight song when Chip Kelly and the birds destroyed the Redskins in the opener – 53 plays in the first half! Really! I’m getting too old for this silliness, and don’t think I don’t know it. But oh I love watching those buttoned-up Redskin fans writhe.
The next week we had two more Stegners drinking beer and bloody mary’s with us at 9 in the morning, watching a painful loss to the Chargers. I’ll corrupt them all, I say, one at a time. There are two Brenda/ens in the program, and I’ve already been nicknamed EB, for ‘Evil Brendan.’
Apartmentless still, I purchased a matte black beater Nissan pickup from Raymond L–, a Chinese man in Los Altos who is a dead ringer for a chainsmoking chipmunk, with funds resulting from the sale of faithful Mathilda (cue tears).
As Rilke tells us there are no beginners lessons in life, so off the as-yet-unnamed pickup and I went for an impromptu trip Los Angeles to coordinate with an NYC friend who has written a book that is now being made into a movie. I do love that city, with its irascible dawns, parking meters with slots for quarters and credit cards, Croatian parking attendants, the orange shroud over the Santa Monica mountains, the unapologetic absurdism of Venice Beach. Missed my friend Sarah, which sucked – but got to see Felix, at Sony Studios, and witness just how small the wheel on The Price is Right really is.
Coming back along Interstate 5 drove through the dung-veil of ‘Cow-shwitz,’ as folks darkly call it – a cow finishing farm that is just about the most awful thing I’ve seen or smelled. Enough to make you an animal-rights activist – at least until the next Sunday BBQ.
And a few days later was the orientation at Stanford. I carpooled down with a few of the other folks. As we drove onto the 8,000 acre campus – second in the world only to Moscow University, a university boasting as many olympians as the ninth winning country – that I had really landed, as the Jews say, in a pot of schmaltz, or melted chicken fat.And so I had – at least the afternoon light reflecting off the Spanish Mission buildings appeared coated in schmaltz, and I felt like a starving boy pulled up to the table, about to enjoy a long, wonderful schmaltz-soaked meal.The second-year Stegs pulled up chairs to the round table, and gave us newbies detailed insight into the program.
“It’s probably the best thing that will everhappen to you.”
They called Tobias Wolff “Toby,” referred to Eavan Boland as “Eavan,” Adam Johnson as “Adam.” I guess what I’m trying to say here is that these people, of which I was now one, were on, well, a FIRST-NAME BASIS with extraordinary writers. Got that?
Afterward we found our way to a cafe in Palo Alto and suddenly the wine and beer and grappa and steaks and crab began flowing, names of books, descriptions of novel excerpts, gossip on this writer throwing up after a bottle of ouzo. At one point the other Brenden looked over at me, and we both blinked a couple times, as if to clear the sleep from our eyes, trying to wake from what was surely some twisted wet writer-dream.
And that about sums it up things up. The dream continues, and I still have not woken. I did find a place, and Mr. Colorado and I get to move in around October 7. I haven’t seen it – kind of absurd, I know – but I think it will be just fine. Meanwhile Dog and I continue to depend on and appreciate the generosity and kindness of Lindsey and Jenny. Colorado has reluctantly adopted the city attitude of embracing haters. Me, I’m sure skinny jeans, a white V-neck and fixed bike are somewhere in my future, but for the moment I’m holding out. There happens to be one of the best Brazilian jiu-jitsu centers in the country here in Oakland, with teacher Eduard Rocha, and that has been a saving grace – although he didn’t like my black gi, or how it was covered in dog hair. And salmon caviar goes for 17.99 in the supermarket around here – stuff we were producing on the Adak by the bucketful. I swear someone needs to get on top of that.
Me, I have the novel due to Houghton January 15th, and am going to be somewhat off the radar until that happens. I emailed my editor, tentatively floating the idea of re-writing 75% of the manuscript, in hopes that she would say “NO! Don’t cut THAT much!” Instead she emailed back, seconds later, saying, “I think that’s a fantastic idea! I love where you’re going!”
On Wednesday I submit my first piece of writing to the workshop, alongside a woman who has a book shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. Um, kind of intimidating. And I’m the first fiction writer to have a reading, on October 23rd at Stanford – come if you’re around!
As my mother always said, do your very best, and things will work out fine. For the past sixteen years, I’ve been doing my best to live up to that, attacking each job as if it meant the world. And it’s nice to feel that it has led me here, to this worn couch in San Francisco’s Mission, in a coffee shop, empty spicy hot chocolate mug in front of me, half a glass of water, and good work, hard work, of a very different sort, waiting to be done.
