Yet Another FAQ (Plus a Few Words about Revision)

            I tell my students that writing is all about revision. All writers’ drafts are crap at the outset, and it’s only through careful, astute revision that strong writing emerges. But what is revision? One thing it’s not is proofreading; correcting spelling and grammar mistakes, changing a word here and there, maybe adding a sentence are all final steps in the writing process, and jumping directly there from drafting is to leave out the part that involves the real work. That work—revision—is like radical surgery, the kind involving amputations, resections, grafts, and reconstructions. And when you’re performing such procedures on something you love…well, it can be difficult.

Difficult but necessary. And the best way to approach the task is without emotion. Yes, you may have worked hard to write that particular scene, but that doesn’t change the fact that it might not help the story and therefore needs to go. The same might apply to a character you happen to like. Or the narrative point of view. Every great novel has its phantom limbs, which are felt most keenly by the person who did the messy business of removal—the author. My own approach to revision is best summed up by a line from my favorite movie: “it’s not personal…it’s strictly business” (if I have to name the movie, then I don’t even know what to say to you), and I’ve been repeating this line to myself ad nauseum over my winter break, which I’ve spent cutting and slashing material from my book, trying to get it down to a reasonable fighting weight of about 100,000 words. It’s slow going, but not because of the emotion; revision is hard work even without that.

So with all this said, I’m presenting another installment of my “Frequently Asked Questions.” One caveat, though. These short pieces might not be the “sneak previews” as originally billed; they may very well end up being deleted scenes.

Without further delay, here is today’s question:

“What Did You Eat?”

            Lots and lots of crap.

When I told people that I was going to bike cross country, alone, they pictured vast expanses of nothingness where I’d have to dig for water and forage for meals. I have to admit that I’d pictured a little of this myself. Chopping wood for a fire, clambering down rocks to get water from a reservoir, cooking up a nutritious gruel made with whatever roots and berries I could scavenge.

But I never cooked a thing while on tour.

The vast majority of my food came from gas stations or grocery stores with names like “Piggly Wiggly,” “Ingels,” “Loaf ‘n’ Jug,” “Shnucks,” and “Harris Teeter” (I thought that this last one, when I first saw it, was an upscale furniture store).

Also, I didn’t carry a lot of food with me.

In the morning I would eat and drink leftovers from the night before. A bottle of Vitamin Water, a banana, maybe half a bagel. Throughout the day at various stops, I would load up on the same and indulge every now and then.

I went through a Milky Way phase in Kansas and switched to Three Musketeers in Tennessee. About 90% of my gas station stops resulted in the purchase of a cherry pie. The Hostess version had better icing, but the Little Debbie ones were cheaper and came in a box that kept them from being crushed in my overstuffed handlebar bag.

In Arizona I discovered the single greatest beverage in the history of beverages: The Vanilla Rockin’ Refuel from Shamrock Farms. Sweet nectar from the heavens. In addition to taste, it had everything I could hope for in a road drink: calcium, vitamins, fat, sugar, and a shitload of calories.

And then there were Clif Bars. I always had one or two of these tucked away somewhere on my bike. Unlike so many other protein or meal replacement bars, Clif Bars don’t pretend to be candy bars, so there’s no chocolaty coating to degrade into a gooey mess after sitting in my handlebar bag for more than twenty seconds. I ate so many Clif Bars that I can no longer eat Clif Bars. Just typing the name makes me a little queasy.

I didn’t carry food, but I met a few bikers who did. One was a young guy heading from Orlando to San Francisco. Stashed in various places on his bike were two family-size cans of vegetarian baked beans, cups of instant mac ‘n’ cheese, cans of soup, a couple of boxes of rice and beans, a loaf of bread, and a huge jar of peanut butter. On top of this, he had a small cookset and stove. He was obsessed with caloric intake and kept to a schedule where he ate five meals a day, making sure that each one packed at least two thousand calories.

I met another biker who always had a bag of bagels with him. We bunked together one night, and I watched him work his way through half of it. He washed it down with a half gallon of orange juice. "Eating for tomorrow," he said, juice running down his face.

Food was sustenance, and I’d shovel it in like coal to a raging furnace. But once in a while it seemed to be something more. A bag of pretzels from a guy named Pete at a gas station just over the Kansas-Missouri border. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich from a mom at a scenic overlook in Tennessee. A bottle of water from a guy named Sam at another gas station, this one in North Carolina. Whenever strangers stopped what they were doing and gave me something to drink or eat, I’d feel a little less alone.

I met Alan in the Ozarks. He was in his late fifties, worked for the forest service in New Zealand, and was on his way from Astoria, Oregon to Yorktown, Virginia. Our paths crossed for two nights running. On the first night, I learned about how his wife had died of cancer, how he’d felt lost after that, and how he found his way back on his bike. On the second night, I dragged him through rain-soaked streets to a $4.99 all-you-can-eat pizza buffet. I was in the mood for some serious eating, and it turned out that Alan was, too. We very nearly cleaned them out. Between the nine different kinds of pizza, the pasta (with a choice of marinara or alfredo), a loaded salad bar, and stacks of crunchy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside brownies, we racked up over a dozen plates of food. By the time we were done, our table looked like the wreckage from a little league team after its end-of-season party. We shared some of the stories from the road and our lives in that brightly lit booth, and in the morning we would part ways, Alan heading north to St. Louis and me due west to Chester, Illinois. We never saw each other again—I knew we wouldn’t—but when I remember our brief friendship, I can still see those steaming platters of pepperoni pizza, the heaps of salad and toppings, those plates overflowing with sugar-dusted brownies.

Stuff I Saw

As I continue to work on the final revisions to That Hidden Road, I'm also thinking about how I'm going to assemble the different narrative pieces. Most of the book consists of long chapters that "cross cut" between my experiences on the road and various memories, but there are also shorter chapters that will pop up from time to time, like the "FAQ" writings that I've posted here.

And then there are the comics. My plan is to sprinkle throughout the book several different comics--a couple of multi-page stories as well as some one-pagers. One group of these one-pagers is a short series called "Stuff I Saw," which I intend to appear a little rough, as if from a sketchbook. I did all of the layout, lettering, and art myself. Most of the images are based on pictures I took, and observant readers may notice two of them that already appear on this blog. Anyway, here's a preview of four of the "Stuff I Saw" comics:

A little gruesome, maybe, but I had to pay some kind of tribute to all of the dead animals that I saw. By the way, coming across roadkill while biking is about a hundred times worse than while driving. First of all, there's the smell. Second, there's the fact that I was moving slowly, so I had plenty of time to take a good, long look. Third, there's not much you can do to avoid it. I tried to move around a dead possum in Missouri and almost got hit by a pickup truck.

I love roadside kitsch, and to my mind, there's none better than big statues of fake people. My two favorites are on the bottom row, both found in the tiny Illinois town of Metropolis. The best part was that "Big John" is about ten feet taller than Superman.

Comics are good at amplifying the quiet moments of life, and I tried to keep that in mind when I sketched these landscapes from various parts of the trip. I'm the least happy with the "Tennessee" panel; all of that dark stuff is supposed to be kudzu, which grows crazy-fast and has taken over thousands and thousands of acreage in the South.

Not every dog was my enemy. I made some canine friends along the way, too, and I wanted to get them into the book in a unique way. 

I'm planning to post more of the comics if there's any reader interest, so let me know!

#soccerdad

As far as entertainment goes, it’s tough to beat people watching. It’s free, easy, and you can do it just about anywhere. Sure, some places are more rewarding than others—the airport, Las Vegas, Black Friday sales—because you can always count on the fact that at any moment someone will do something completely devoid of common sense, self-consciousness, or even a rudimentary understanding of basic civil conduct. For my money, though, there's somewhere that tops them all.

The sidelines of any kids’ sporting event.

I’m not sure how many of my kids’ games I’ve attended or coached, but the number is pretty high. And in terms of parental behavior, the sports can differ quite a bit.

At one end of the spectrum is cross-country. The courses are often hilly, twisty, and extend way beyond the bounds of any field of play involving a ball. So, it’s incredibly difficult for parents to observe the entire thing; the best that the most ambitious of us can manage is to jog around to different points in the course so that we can get a quick look at our kids zipping by. This has two main advantages (from our kids' point of view, no doubt). First, parents like me are usually too winded from running from place to place to do much more than clap and offer a “Woo-hoo, [insert son or daughter’s name here]!” And second, there’s something about the sport that invites shouts of encouragement only. When your child is only doing one thing—in this case, running—you don’t really have much to offer in the way of detailed advice. Plus, they’re not listening anyway.

On the other side of things is baseball, where I’ve seen some of the worst parental behavior on display. One reason, no doubt, to the length of the games. After sitting out in the heat by a dusty field for a couple of hours, even the meekest of souls might be stirred to take someone’s life—or at the very least, to do some serious maiming. Also, baseball is a “narrative-rich” game. There are all kinds of little stories going on, and these stories provide way too many opportunities for parents to insert themselves. Consider an at-bat: all those pitches, and with every pitch, the story (and, of course, the shouts of advice) changes. Then there’s the story of a hit ball, the story of a fielded (or not fielded) ball, the story of a steal. For each of these stories, there are multiple characters and perspectives—the team at bat, the team in the field, the various players who become involved in any given play, and naturally, the parents of all these kids. Sometimes after coaching a game, I’d have no voice left because I’d spent most of the time trying to make myself heard over the shouts coming from the stands.

When you study something long enough, certain patterns emerge, so without further adieu, I’d like to present a few characters—all dads—that I’ve encountered over the years. There are more, but these are my favorite. And by “favorite,” I mean “least favorite.”

The Analyst

Anyone with a child on a sports team knows that parents are required to show up at least sixty minutes before game time. Sometimes more, depending on the sport. While the kids warm up, the parents look for something to do. For me, that usually means setting up my folding chair and grading papers. For others, it means chatting over the tops of Starbucks cups. For the Analyst, it means checking out the conditions of the field, listening in on the coach’s pre-game advice, and studying the other team as they run through their drills.

A couple of Saturday mornings ago before my younger son’s soccer game, I was trying to in vain to find something resembling a thesis in one of my students’ papers when one of these dads saw me. I was hunched over, pen in hand, brow furrowed in concentration. So of course he assumed that I wanted to talk. Or rather, to listen.

“This is gonna come down to our midfielders,” he said, nodding.

“Whuzzat?”

“Last time we played these guys, they killed us in time of possession. They got some big guys. Big, but not fast.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Field’s pretty sloppy in the center.” He paused here to point out some dark spots on the grass. “There, there, and there. If our guys are quick to the ball, they can use their guys’ size against them. Didn’t hear Coach mention that though.”

“You should say something,” I said. And let me get back to grading.

“Yeah…yeah, I think I will,” he said, nodding, as he trudged across the sub-par field, pausing to more closely study the spots that would figure in to his unbeatable strategy.

The Macho Man

For some odd reason, this dad has linked his own sense of self and masculinity to his son’s performance on the field. Sadly, this psychodrama usually plays itself out publicly and almost always involves tears. The son’s, of course.

I’d see it all the time in baseball, usually when a kid got plunked at the plate, or caught a grounder with his chin, or was hit in the back as a base runner by an errant throw. When you think about it, baseball with young kids is insanely dangerous; they’re unskilled, usually hopped up on some post-school sugary snack, and wielding aluminum clubs and rock-hard orbs.

Once, one of my players was at bat, turned toward a high, inside pitch, and took it square on his left cheek. Now I’ve been hit with a baseball before. It hurts. And this kid started howling. Another coach and I ran over to him with our league-issued ice pack, and before we got to him, his dad was at the backstop fence, fingers locked into the chain link. He had sunglasses on, and I assumed that behind them was a look of concern. I was wrong.

“Suck it up and get back in there!” he shouted to his son. “Be a man!”

We iced his face, calmed him down, and got him back at the plate. He was terrified of the ball (and who wouldn’t be?), but I think he was more scared of his dad.

Mr. Advice, aka “Captain Obvious” (this nickname courtesy of my son Tony)

This is the dad who knows exactly which kid should be doing what and how. He’s not the coach, mind you—No time with work and all, out of town a lot, you know how it is—but that doesn’t stop him from liberally dispensing pointers at the top of his lungs.

During an 8am basketball game one Saturday morning, in a gym that was so cold it might as well have not had a roof, I was sitting next to a Mr. Advice. While most of us were trying not to succumb to hypothermic shock, this guy was on his feet for nearly the entire game. I couldn’t really gauge the breadth of his basketball knowledge because he was concerned with only one thing: how often the kids would pick up their dribble, get swarmed by the defense, and turn over the ball.

Now, this was rec ball and these kids were pretty young, so the scene described above pretty much sums up every game. Most parents accepted this, but Mr. Advice was dead set on helping out.

“DON’T PICK UP YOUR DRIBBLE!” he’d yell from in front of me. Then he’d catch my eye.

“Why do they pick up their dribble?” he’d ask. I’d shrug. He’d turn back to the game.

“WHY?!”

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to cop to being a Mr. Advice in my past. With soccer, no less, the sport about which I know the least. I had all kinds of tips for the kids, and I didn’t hesitate to share them during game time. Then one season, my son Nick’s coach had a fun idea for a practice: kids versus parents. I jogged out on the field, confident in my ability to carry out the very obvious instructions I’d been shouting every Saturday morning (Get there! Kick the ball! Stay with him!). Ten minutes and two handball calls against me later, I’d fallen to the ground twice (once while trying to Kick the ball!), been completely unable to keep up with kids a third my size, and suffered a simultaneous attack of vertigo and hyperventilation that I was convinced was a mild stroke.

From that point to precisely the present, my sideline comments have been nothing but enthusiastic support.

It should be noted, however, that people might not share your conception of “support.”   For example, I discovered the hard way that shouting “RELEASE THE KRAKKEN!” is not universally seen as a rallying cry.

One last comment. There are plenty of different types of moms on those sidelines, too, but they frighten me too much and I’m not about to tick any of them off.

FAQ Check, Part Deux: Godfather Time

Here's another question that I've been asked about my cross-country bike ride: "Did You Get Bored out There?"

And here's my answer:

Sometimes.

Biking for six, seven, even eight or nine hours a day—often on seldom-traveled roads in wide-open landscapes—I had to invent ways to keep myself entertained and distracted.

For instance, I’d make up little stories about the things I saw on the side of the road.

A water bottle filled with cloudy yellow liquid became a trucker’s emergency bathroom, filled while driving and then tossed out the window. He’d been breaking the speed limit all night long ever since he’d checked his phone in Phoenix, saw that his daughter had left a message, and heard only part of a garbled sentence—You’d better get back here fast—then nothing else.

A plastic triceratops was a teenage boy’s revenge on his younger brother, who was getting all the attention on the family vacation and generally making the car trip miserable. I could almost see the younger brother napping, the older brother snatching the dinosaur and then dropping it out the window of the moving car.

A broken syringe was cast off from a young couple—rail-thin and heroin-addicted—on their way south, following the road by day and wrapping themselves in an old blanket at night.

During a five-mile stretch near Jacumba, California, I spotted a red onion or two about every hundred feet. The reality was that they had probably squirted loose from some truck’s cargo, but reality can be boring. I preferred this: a husband and wife are on their way home from the market, where they’ve stocked up on red onions for pickling. The basket sits between them in the front seat. The wife looks out her window while her husband divides his attention between the road and the back of her head. He’s losing her, he knows. In fact, he’s pretty sure she’s already gone, thinking of someone else. He reaches a dirt-caked hand into the basket and pulls out an onion, feeling its heft. He squeezes it and asks a question. When she answers with what he suspects is a lie, he tosses the onion out of the window and grabs another. Onion after onion out the window. I was just getting to the part when that basket is empty, but then the road dipped precipitously and I suddenly had other things to worry about.

These were games, and I’ve always loved playing games—especially with my older brother, Vince. “Ker Plunk,” “Sure Shot Hockey," or "Life.” Home Run Derby with a wiffle ball and bat. Nerf football outside with some of the neighborhood kids. Vince, being several years older and wiser than the rest of us, was always head coach and quarterback. We’d invent games back then, too. Once we found an egg-shaped superball. It was as hard as a little rock and bounced in violent, unpredictable ways. So naturally, the game we came up with involved throwing it at each other. I stood at the top of the stairs, Vince stood at the bottom, and we whipped it back and forth for either a direct or ricocheted hit. We called the game “Acid Egg,” and if a guy got hit, he had to writhe around on the ground for a few seconds as if his flesh was burning.

There were no acid eggs on the trip, but there were awful winds, and during one brutal stretch in Kansas, I decided that the thing to do was sing every television theme song that I could remember as loudly as possible. The trick was not to swallow any bugs. I started in on the easy ones first, shows that Vince and I had spent hours watching together, sprawled across the gold shag carpeting of our living room. Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres. Next was a Norman Lear medley. All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, Good Times. After that, random songs that I knew most of the words to. WKRP in Cincinnati, Welcome Back Kotter, Laverne and Shirley, The Love Boat. When the words escaped me, I’d make something up. My brother has always had a gift for getting all the words to a song the first time he heard it. Naturally, he hated when I improvised. Pedaling into the wind, cornfields on both sides of me, trying to remember exactly why Chico shouldn’t be so discouraged by the Man, I could hear Vince’s voice cut through the whistling in my ears.

If you can’t sing it right, then don’t sing it.

But my favorite game, which I invented on my fourth day out while riding from Glamis to Blythe through southeastern California, was called “Godfather Time.”

About seven miles into the ride that morning, I was already tired, fighting the strongest headwinds that I’d ever experienced. I had a long way to go that day, and as I stopped to catch my breath, I took note of the time: 7:00 on the head. Later that morning and still far from my destination, I stopped again at the ominously-named Three Slashes Road. I checked my clock again: 9:55. I’d gone a little over twenty miles in two hours and fifty-five minutes.

The exact running time, coincidentally, of my favorite movie, The Godfather.

I could have watched the entire Godfather in the time it took me to bike those twenty miles in that desert wind tunnel.

From then on, when I needed to distract myself from some pretty miserable biking, I’d measure out the ride in Godfather units.

Less than a week later I was headed to Tuba City, Arizona, through desert terrain in high-90 degree temperatures, approaching the end of my first eighty-mile day. I saw a billboard for a Tuba City McDonald’s proclaiming that it was JUST 15 MINUTES AWAY.

In a car, schmuck!

I looked down at my speedometer. On an uphill grade, as loaded down as I was, as tired as I was, my top speed would barely reach above four miles per hour. Just fast enough so that I wouldn’t tip over into the ditch. I was looking at about another hour, assuming the grade didn’t get any steeper—an assumption, I’d learned, that it was neither safe nor smart to make.

In Godfather time, an hour would stretch from the film’s opening line—I believe in America, delivered in blackness—to roughly when the crooked cop McCluskey breaks Michael Corleone’s jaw.

In other words, a long god(father)damn time.

In the time it took to climb to Wolf Creek Pass and reach the Continental Divide in Colorado, I could have watched from the opening line to just past Sonny’s brutal death on the causeway. One hour, fifty-seven minutes.

In the time it took a biker I’d met to explain his philosophy of nutrition to me one endless evening in Missouri, I could have watched up to the scene where movie producer Jack Woltz finds his beloved horse’s head in his bed. After thirty minutes of this guy prattling on about sugars this and breads that, I was picturing his head—and not the horse’s—lying on top of Woltz’s bloodied silk sheets.

In the time it took me to bike on the I-40 in Arizona from Ash Fork to Williams, on a grade so steep that I passed two semi-trucks catching their breath on the shoulder, I could have watched up to the scene where Don Corleone calls in his favor with the undertaker, Bonasera, showing him Sonny’s bullet-riddled corpse. Look at how they massacred my boy...

And in the time that I spent climbing on the Cherohala Skyway, a punishing ride through the Appalachian Mountains that twisted and turned through what seemed like eight hundred false peaks, I could have watched The Godfather twice. Twice. The whole time climbing.

Anything five minutes or so—pedaling from one end of Dodge, Kansas, to the other on a quiet Sunday morning; getting from the Longbranch Coffeehouse to the Bicycle Surgeon in Carbondale, Illinois; taking a bathroom and sunblock-reapplication break near White House, Tennessee—was a “Baptism of Fire.” To the uninitiated, that’s the five-minute bravura sequence near the end of the movie that crosscuts between Michael in church, standing as godfather to his sister’s newborn son, and a series of violent gangland executions that he has ordered.

I saw this scene for the first time at some point in the 70s, when The Godfather made its network television premiere. The piece that struck me the hardest was when Moe Green, naked on a massage table, gets shot in the eye. One lens of his glasses spiderwebs, blood flows from beneath it, and his head slumps forward. I’d never seen anything like it, and for a second I kind of believed that they’d actually murdered a guy on camera.

“What happened?” I asked Vince, who was watching with me.

“Easy,” he said, shrugging. “Blood pellets.”

It wasn’t much of an explanation, but I felt lucky to get a verbal response at all. Most of our conversations at the time went like this: I’d ask a question and he’d make a face. College was on the horizon for him, and I was still in grade school, so while I’d be looking up to him, he was looking somewhere else—probably at a future that didn’t include an annoying little brother.

Despite its impact on me, the “Baptism of Fire” sequence is not my favorite part of The Godfather. Neither are any of the film’s other famous scenes. No, my favorite part is one that most people don’t notice, and the scene itself doesn’t even last long enough to serve as any kind of useful measure in my little game. It doesn’t, in fact, really mean anything the first time you watch the movie; it’s only when you watch it a second time do you become aware of the loss that it registers.

About halfway through the film, Sonny and Michael are going over the final details of their plan to kill Sollozzo, the drug dealer who put out a hit on their father. In a few minutes, Michael will be picked up by Sollozzo and his bodyguard for a sit-down where the two of them are supposed to negotiate a truce. But a gun has been hidden for Michael at the restaurant where the meeting takes place, and he’s going to use it to kill the two men. Right after, Michael will be whisked off to Sicily to hide out until everything blows over. Before Michael leaves for the meeting, he says goodbye to everyone, saving Sonny—his older brother—for last. Sonny agrees to “smooth things over” with both their mother and Michael’s girlfriend. The two brothers look at each other and then embrace.

As they hug, Sonny and Michael think that they have all the time in the world, that somewhere down the line, they’ll get together again.

But they don’t; a few scenes later, while Michael is in Sicily, Sonny is gunned down, and that embrace of theirs turns out to be the last time that they see each other. Whenever I watch that scene, I tighten up.

For me, it’s not as much about death as it is about drifting. When we’re young, the world sometimes seems like an endless series of games. Everything makes sense and problems can be solved by checking the rules on the inside of the box top. That security is a sham, of course, but it’s easy to fool our younger selves with tidy explanations. Easy. Blood pellets.

But things change when we get older. We have to work harder to explain the things that confound us. We gather obligations. Our lives become messier. Through all of this, brothers can drift apart. I think about this with me and Vince. I think about this with my sons, Nick and Tony. Like me, like Vince, the two of them have only one brother.

So is there any other way I can watch that scene in The Godfather? Sonny and Michael hug all too quickly, and I want to say to them, to those two brothers, “Pay attention, guys. It might not ever be like this again.”

Sorry…what was the original question?

On a Positive Note...

I feel like I need to offer a little bit of balance to some earlier posts—including the last one—about the state of today’s college students. Yes, it’s fun to focus on problems (like not bringing books, paper, or even a pencil to class), and yes, it’s much easier to entertain with these little anecdotes than with the feel-good stuff, but it’s also important to give credit where it’s due, and the truth is that I have encountered some incredibly motivated and talented students over the last fifteen years.

Before I get to my woefully incomplete list of these students, though, I have to say a few words about teaching.

To put it bluntly, I love my job.

In fact, I’m so grateful doing what I do that I try not to talk about how great it is; at best, it would seem like gloating, and at worst, I might jinx it. But the truth is that I get to talk to students about ideas, enrich their lives through reading and writing, and help them define and reach their goals.

And I get to do this at a community college—the most truly democratic institution in our educational landscape in that it has a 100% acceptance rate, affordable tuition, and outstanding instruction. If one believes, as I do, that a broadly educated populace makes for a healthy society, then it’s the community college that will help get us there.

But back to my students. Below is just a fraction of recent students who are doing amazing things since passing through my classroom:

One is working on her teaching credential and is currently doing classroom observations at a local middle school. She’s one of many of my former students who have chosen to go into teaching.

Another just transferred to UC Riverside, where he’s already been accepted as one of a handful of fiction editors on their literary journal.

Another, also interested in writing, transferred to UC Berkeley to study creative writing. Next semester, he’ll be one of thirteen students who was accepted into a workshop that will be taught by Joyce Carol Oates.

UC Berkeley was the destination of another former student. While at Palomar, he started our English Majors Club. After graduating from Berkeley, he worked at Google for a while and is now heading to law school.

Yet another one of my former creative writing students (who was also an editor on our literary journal) is currently in a master’s program at Portland State University.

It’s not all about books and writing and literary stuff; one recent student, a navy veteran, is currently enrolled in business school at UC San Diego.

Another one just started a Ph.D. program in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Cornell (after finishing a Master’s degree program at Columbia). She’s already published one article with a second one on the way. When she was at San Francisco State, she put together a collection of creative and personal writing by women that she had worked with in the community.

Okay, so we’re back to writing.  Here are two more:

One woman entered my creative writing class several years ago as a returning student. She’s been working as a tutor in our writing center for the last few years, but she’s also been working on her own projects. She recently published this book, and is hard at work on her second.

And another student took a couple of composition classes from me as a sixteen-year-old. She transferred into the USC film school (no easy feat), received her degree, and recently published her first novel with Simon & Schuster. Her second novel is coming out in the spring, and both are the first installments in two separate middle grade/young adult fantasy series.

My apologies to the many other former students of mine that I haven't listed here but who have nevertheless worked hard to achieve their goals. I’d love to hear stories from others about your positive experiences as either student or teacher and how your hard work (on either end) has paid off.

Power

A few weeks ago in one of my classes, we were discussing what is perhaps the greatest piece of argumentation ever written, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Our focus on appeals, structure, and imagery eventually gave way to a conversation about larger issues of inequalities in our society, the nature of protest, and empowerment.

Teaching at a community college, I see these issues—especially the last one—as central to my students’ lives. For the most part, my students find their way to my classroom for two obvious reasons: they can’t afford four-year school or they couldn’t get into a four-year school. There’s another reason, too; they believe, as I do, that education is empowering.

The problem is that a lot of students define “empowerment” in purely economic terms. That is, an education equals a job, and a job equals better pay and financial security.

There’s no denying that people with a college degree have greater earning power than those who don’t, but that’s not the only way that the educated are empowered. A well-rounded education fosters an attitude of active engagement with the ideas and issues that shape our world. Provided, of course, that students are willing to become engaged.

Some of my students are still working on this, as I found out last week.

As a rule, I avoid discussing election specifics, but this year there’s a ballot measure in California regarding educational funding that directly impacts my students. If Proposition 30 fails, the public K-12 and higher education school system is going to face massive, mission-altering cuts. The number of courses alone—coupled with the inevitable spikes in student tuition and fees—will derail most of my students’ educational plans. Some will be derailed permanently.

So when I asked who was eligible to vote, almost every hand went up. And then, when I asked who was actually registered to vote, about half came down.

For a few seconds I was speechless. Then I let them have it.

I told them that a big reason why education has dropped so far on the funding priority list is that people their age don’t vote, and lawmakers know it. As long as young people choose to remain uninformed about the political issues that affect them and refuse to make their voices heard at the ballot box, then there will be little incentive in the halls of power to change things. Public education—the “great equalizer,” in Horace Mann’s words—will continue to get strangled out of funds, test scores will continue to drop, teachers will continue to be blamed, and education will become more and more expensive until access will be limited to the wealthy.

Their responses were predictable. I don’t know who to vote for. They’re all crooks. My vote doesn’t matter.

These were just examples of lazy thinking, and I told them so.

If people try to silence your voice, that’s one thing. King and his fellow civil rights activists knew how to respond to that.

Silencing yourself, though, is something else entirely, and if today’s students hope to be truly empowered, then they need to realize that education is about more than a piece of paper, and it’s about more than collecting a bigger paycheck. It’s about finding out what’s going on and taking part.

One way to do that is to be an informed voter. It’s not just our right; it’s our obligation.

No Easy Rider

A vivid memory from my cross-country bike ride (yes, it's an excerpt from the book):

It was getting late on my fourth day out, and I’d stopped at a gas station called “Wheelie’s 76” in Palo Verde, California.  I’d just inhaled a S’mores-flavored energy bar, a Milky Way, a banana nut muffin the size of my fist, a pint of chocolate milk, and a one-liter bottle of fruit punch Gatorade.  I didn’t know it yet, but some version of this obscene caloric intake was going to become a typical midday meal for me, and even though an hour after consuming it I’d be hungry again, those first few post-snack minutes always left me sated and, sometimes, a little woozy.  That I was standing in the heat and the wind didn’t help.  As I walked to the bathroom behind the building, I could hear the liquid sloshing around in my stomach, and I could picture little chunks of muffin floating in a sea of brownish-red fluid—or whatever color chocolate milk and red Gatorade make when mixed. 

This soupy mixture lurched as the stench from the bathroom hit me.  The best I can say about that space was that it was almost big enough to accommodate the pile of sanitary pads and dirty diapers on the floor by the garbage can, the half-eaten burrito by the sink, and the used clumps of toilet paper that fell a little to the right of the toilet itself.  I breathed through my mouth as I swiped a fresh coating of Chamois Glide over my saddle sores and reapplied sunscreen over the exposed parts of my legs, arms, and face.  I got out of there as fast as I could and was just about to roll back onto the road when my phone chirped.  It was a five-word text message from my buddy Jerry in Chicago: Dude, Dennis Hopper just died.

Flashback to me as a kid, circa 1979.  I was in the sixth grade, and every day after school I’d be spread out on the gold shag carpet in our living room, the television tuned to Channel 7 for The3:30 Movie.  There was a different theme each week, but I only remember two:  “Animals Amok!” (Frogs, Night of the Lepus, Food of the Gods) and “Jack Nicholson.”  On the last day of Nicholson week, they showed Easy Rider, and even though it was edited for television—ridiculously edited, I’d find out years later—I was immediately caught up in the story of Billy the Kid and Captain America and their idea to just drop out and hit the open road. 

It was beyond me then to pick up on any cautionary messages about the hazards of that open road or the complexities of freedom; I didn’t dwell too long on the image of both men dead alongside their burning motorcycles, and I’d completely missed Peter Fonda’s line, “We blew it.”  At that point in my life and for many years after, I absorbed road stories through a filter that blocked out everything except that thrill of doing your own thing and to hell with what anyone else thought.  I watched the scene where Hopper, Fonda, and Nicholson get harassed by the anti-hippie guys in the restaurant, and I let myself believe it was a reflection of my own life, where I saw The Man hard at work bringing me down at school, at church, and at home.  Spelling tests and phonics workbooks.  Report cards and parent-teacher conferences.  Dressing up on Sundays.  Chores.  The monotony of my parents’ lives and jobs.  Dad to work at seven.  Dad home at five.  Dinner at six.  Hey, what’s your dad do, anyway?  I dunno.  Goes to an office.  Weekend chores.  Two weeks’ summer vacation spent on another driving trip to New York to see the same relatives and friends.  Rinse and repeat.

All those rules and all that regularity weren’t for me.  On the road was where things were happening.  As long as I stayed out of the South and away from guys with shotguns in pickup trucks, I’d be fine.

So I began hitting that open road.  Of course, it wasn’t on a motorcycle; it was on the banana seat of my metallic orange AMF Roadmaster Renegade.  And by “road” I mean sidewalk, and by “open” I mean carefully bordered by trim lawns and little fences made of white plastic posts connected by white plastic chains.  I would have liked a helmet with the stars and stripes on it like in the movie—it seemed wrong even though I couldn’t say why—but they weren’t for sale in my suburb.  The best I could do was my plastic Chicago Bears helmet.  Back then kids didn’t wear helmets at all, so after a few taunts from some older kids on the other side of our townhouse development, I tossed it back in the basement.  None of that dampened my enthusiasm or the guitar riffs of “Born to Be Wild” that I felt in my chest. 

I brought the road inside, too.  In one of my comic books, there was an ad for posters.  Farrah Fawcett in that orange swimsuit, John Travolta in his white disco finery, Bruce Lee and his bare chest.  They were the big sellers, and they sat atop a few columns of tiny typeface.  And there, hiding in that small print, were the words  Easy Rider.  I talked my mom into writing a check for me, and six-to-eight weeks later I was standing on my bed and thumbtacking into the wall a full-color image of Fonda and Hopper tooling down the road.  If my parents had known a little more about movies, or about 1960s drug culture, or about my growing restlessness with the predictability of our normal lives, they would have been upset about much more than the holes in the unblemished tan wall, which is what my dad yelled about when he got home from work.

I’d lie on my bed and stare at those two on their bikes and imagine myself on that highway.  Only maybe not on a motorcycle.  Maybe in an old car.  Or hitchhiking.  And maybe not even a highway, exactly, but something like it, where the whole point would be to roam the great unknown and have adventures and not have to deal with ordinary, everyday bullshit.  Thumbtack holes?  Gimme a break.

In the Wheelie’s 76 parking lot, the wind blew hot across my face, pulling me out of my memory.  As I read Jerry’s message again and tried to come up with some suitable response, my right knee grew stiff bracing myself against the dry gusts that had been pummeling me all day.  The sugar I had ingested was starting to congeal in my gut, and I took a long drink of water to wash the stickiness from my mouth.  I put my phone away.  Palo Verde didn’t amount to much, but its geometric fields were green and lush and a welcome change from the white desert that I’d just pedaled through.  I had a little bit further to go to get to Blythe, a bigger town on the Colorado River, which I would cross the next morning.  I hoped that I’d have the energy to get where I was headed.  

I knew I should get back on the road, but I couldn’t move.

What was I doing out here?  Why wasn’t I back home with my sons, relaxing in front of the TV or taking a walk or doing any of the things that normal people do?  I was a forty-two-year-old man on his bicycle.  This wasn’t Easy Rider.  How the hell did I get here?

The answer wasn’t simple.  Before I left, ten different friends would ask me why I was going, and I’d have ten different answers.  The one that had the most traction was direct and simple:  I want to see if I can do it.  Many of these friends knew me for being politically active at school, which meant fighting with the administration.  They’d also seen me through chemotherapy.  Locking onto a challenge like a cross-country bike ride must have seemed to them like a natural extension of my personality.  But in my head I was a lot less sure.  Part of me was doing it because cancer had made me feel weak, and I wanted to do something big that would make me feel strong again.  Part of me wanted that big adventure that I’d dreamed about when I was younger.  Yet another part of me was starting to really understand the truth that our most precious resource—time—is irreplaceable and constantly being spent, and once I got the idea of a cross-country bike ride in my head, it was joined by a vivid and frightening image:  me, as an older man who’d passed on the ride, thinking, I should’ve done it. 

And then part of me felt like I’d had some solid ideas about who I was, but they turned out to be not as solid as I thought, and what I needed was to find a new way to see myself, where I was, and how I’d gotten there.

I held my phone and waited for something to come, but those five words seemed to say it all.  Dude, Dennis Hopper just died...