I didn't want to get arrested or get in fights or hurt anybody or ruin my life, but I wanted to do what I wanted to do instead of always doing what everybody expected me to do. I didn't want to keep working toward a degree because I had no idea what I wanted a degree in. I didn't want to keep working toward a future in a field just because that's what was expected. Call me crazy, but I really wanted to be happy in whatever my chosen field was to be.
My whole life, all the way up to and through graduation from Magnet, when anyone asked me what I wanted to do, my answer was the same from the first grade when I was first asked all the way up until real life hit me over the head: I want to graduate from high school, move to New York, get a job in a bookstore. And, of course, I wanted to write.
When Cory and I got back to Lafayette, I skipped my classes that Monday. I had a little weed buried in one of my drawers, but I wasn't great at rolling joints. So, I called two people who ended up becoming two of my closest friends ever, Rene and David (the same two I alluded to befriending earlier when I mentioned the changes in friends and associates). I told them that I'd get high with them (probably saying, "I'll smoke you guys out...") if they'd come over and teach me to roll a joint. They came and laughed and made me leave my weed put away because they liked getting high with me, and they taught me to roll a joint with some of the stuff they'd brought. I told them about the experience that I'd had, the fact that I'd had all these new and interesting and inspiring people come into my life, that I'd just seen the movie American Beauty (a film I saw four times in the theatre, a film that totally changed my perspective on everything that was anything and laid the foundation for the decision I was on the verge of making), and that I wanted to give the writing thing a real shot, that if I didn't do it right then, I'd probably never do it, and I'd never be happy (despite the fact that we've never had an extremely close relationship, I'd always looked up to my older brother, and he was an example of why I wanted to do something different as soon as possible; he'd graduated high school at seventeen, gone straight into the Army and served the full four years, gotten out and gone to work for the Caddo Parish School Board in the English-as-a-Second-Language department, gotten his degree in accounting in four years of night school, went to work for one of the most prestigious accounting firms in the world, and then realized that he might really like to go back to school to study the culinary arts).
The only obstacle I foresaw in the possibility of having my life take this new trajectory was my father. My dad was an immensely pragmatic man. He believed in me and my talent (mostly because of the awards I'd won and the stuff I produced on CMTV in high school), but he always told me that I had to have something to fall back on. Dad always reminded me to be realistic and to acknowledge the possibility (read: probability) that I'd never be successful as a novelist. So, I enrolled in school at LSUS (in lieu of the New York, work as a book store sales clerk, and try to get published plan) because that's what he wanted me to do.
I don't think I hit him up with the idea right away, but when I decided to bring it up, I went all out with it all at once. When I called him, I explained that I wanted to try something I'd never thought about really being able to try before, and he was quiet. He didn't argue and he didn't judge. He just let out a long sigh, paused, and then asked if I really thought I had a book in me. I told him that I had no doubt that I did. And then he said something I'll never forget: "One year."
"You got one year to try this out, and then you have to swear to me that, no matter what," - unless I signed some multi-million dollar deal and was set for the rest of my life - I had to promise I'd return to school and get my bachelors, even if it was only in English (a degree plan that my father -rightfully so-considered about as useful as a class in bagging groceries at Brookshire's). Well, I never dropped my classes (which, in hindsight, ended up okay.. or would have been okay had my life not taken the trajectory it did; later that semester, when I finally got around to dropping the courses, I had the ultimate reason for having everything excused).
I called another close friend, a free spirit named Alyson, with whom I waited tables. She'd become like an older sister to me, the voice of reason, and she loved the fact that I loved to write. She took me to a new age-y type store where I got copies of Annie Lamont's Bird By Bird, Julia Cameron's The Artists' Way and the accompanying workbook and journal, some incense, candles, and a copy of this little booklet called "It Works," which is about forty pages that tell you exactly what you have to do in order to succeed at anything in life. The truth is, if I really were to have applied that book and its contents to my life, it would have worked. In fact, it would still work today.
But I digress...
In addition to the spending spree, which was also my first chance to expose myself to the wonderful world of credit, Alyson and I grabbed grilled chicken Caesar salads and shared a bottle of Shiraz-Cabernet. Then I went to a Drug Emporium, got some stuff for a facial and other stuff to treat myself a little (a little self-invoked spa treatment can do the soul a world of good). I also bought a pack of pencils and a medium-sized royal blue three subject notebook, and I had a couple nights off from the restaurant. I put all my school stuff in a corner, downloaded some music from Napster, then wrote the first chapter (appropriately titled "Grilled Chicken Caesar Salads") in a book I subsequently came to call Oak Haven. The next day, I went to Barnes & Noble and got copies of the Literary media guides for agents and publishing (Writers' Market and the Novel and Short Story Writers' Market), came home and began learning everything I needed to know about the business end of the craft. With my father's permission, time to do it, and the mindset that I was gonna get it all out on paper, I was set.
I wrote like I'd never written before. In high school, I'd developed this way of writing in which I took real people in my life, used the first letters of their first and last names to rename them in stories, and developed my fictional characters around the realistic details I noted. I used mostly their physical characteristics and their mental/spiritual/moral aspects as composites to create characters, and put them in the stories I wrote, which were... totally different from what my classmates were writing at the time.
I used the same principal in the creation of Oak Haven, a picture perfect small town in Louisiana that resembled a combination of Shreveport and Lafayette (although both Shreveport and Lafayette appeared as locations in the course of the story I was writing). Oak Haven took place over the course of one unseasonably warm weekend in February in a series of intertwining vignettes. There were four main characters, one of which was a twenty-one-year-old blond guy with blue eyes who loved to write and who served as the glue at the center of the other characters (I know, kinda cliche, but I really wanted to adopt the practice of writing what I knew, and the practice requires that one put some aspects of himself somewhere in his work if he really wants to get it right). The events were all based on things I was really seeing, hearing about, and experiencing myself, but it was all smashed into one action-packed, fateful weekend of drunken debauchery with the young men and women depicted all testing their wings on the winds of life while chasing designer drugs with overpriced alcohol, weaving in and out of classes and lunches and bedrooms and hospital rooms and night clubs and after hours' parties, etc. In other words, it was very much what my life was soon to become.
While I was writing, I was also reading. It was during this time that I was introduced to Bret Easton Ellis and and the Literary Brat Pack of Bennington College graduates that included Jay McInerney and Donna Tartt. Ellis was recommended by several friends, and I remember reading all the books with a pencil nearby, filling the margins up with notes and insights. In addition to reading, I started really watching movies for the first time, also introduced to the critique of and appreciation for cinema as a fine art. I fell in love with Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Blue Velvet and Goodfellas, Martin Scorcese and David Lynch. Simultaneously, I discovered Sex and the City and I was really coming into my own, identifying with these women who trusted each other so much that they could tell each other everything. It was a new slant on a new movement called "post modernism," and I totally drank its Kool-Aid.
My twenty-first birthday, the day that led to me make all these sudden, drastic, and very positive changes was February 13th.
Starting then, I wrote every day, all day, and in whatever spare time I had to make in which to do more. I still went out a bit, partied some, but I was really writing (and using my late night excursions as possible write-offs as they were clearly research-oriented, and therefore, work-related; after all, Millicent and Julia and Tristan and Bryan and the others were all based very much on people I knew, and they were experiencing things I had as well or heard about from someone).
I came home briefly in March, just under a month from the moment my father had granted his permission for me to take a year off from school to write. My entire family was amazed that Dad gave me permission to do what I was doing, but everyone was obviously excited because they'd seen me win the awards and get the recognition in high school, and they wanted to see what I was gonna do, what stories I would create, and whether or not I would really be successful in my endeavor. Following my visit, I went back to Lafayette, continued to write. I was finding myself, hitting my stride, and I was developing my voice in the combination of personal journals, short stories, poetry, and the novel I was creating.
On the morning of April the 12th (or was it the 10th? I think it was a Wednesday) of 2000, just shy of two months into this blissful endeavor, my phone rang at about five o'clock in the morning. My brother was on the other end of the line. I still remember that I couldn't tell whether or not I was dreaming because it was five am and he was calling me. I remember that I was very confused. Had I overslept and it was the next night? I hadn't done anything the night before that would elicit such behavior? Shaun? Wait - am I talking to my brother? Is he in Lafayette? What the...?
He asked me how long I'd been in bed. He asked me if I'd gone out the night before. He wanted to know how much sleep I'd gotten. Slowly, reality was closing in as I was slowly waking up and slowly realizing that I was on the phone with my brother, that he had called me, and that something was not right about this, but I couldn't quite figure out what right away. It took some time to register what he was getting at and why: Dad was in the hospital, Shaun said. They didn't know what was going on, but I needed to come home immediately.
In a sudden frenzy, I told him I'd be right there, and he made me promise not to leave until I was fully awake. I called a friend to come watch my apartment (to prove how little sense my thoughts make when I first wake up, let me write that this "apartment" was a single room with a refrigerator in the room and an adjoining bathroom about half the size of the rest of the space. In fact, it looked just like a hotel room with a fridge and a hot plate...and here I was, calling my friend Abby to come over and watch it while I was gone; interesting as I had no animals or plants or anything that anyone would really even want to steal), threw some stuff into a bag, and hit I49 before seven o'clock. I remember listening to the radio on the way and the guys on one of the morning talk radio programs were discussing Whitney Houston and Dionne Warwick and their respective, secret drug problems. One of the two celebrities had gotten busted on a plane with some weed (one of the reasons I remember that is because it was the first time I'd made the connection that the two singers are related), and although I remember that, I don't remember much else about the drive other than knowing somewhere down in my stomach that Dad was going to die. Very strange considering I didn't even know what had happened. Shaun hadn't even told me a single symptom, but for some reason, I knew.
Another aspect of my trip home that I remember is the fact that the last conversation I'd had with Dad really stood out in my head. He had called two days before, and he was just wanting to shoot the breeze, to see how I was doing and how my writing was coming. I remember being frustrated because I wasn't in the mood to really talk. I think I was in a hurry to get out the door to go get a drink or smoke a joint or go hook up with someone I barely knew, but Dad was understanding. He knew I had other things I'd rather be doing, but he still managed to put in a few things that seem oddly prescient looking back. He made me, once again, promise that I wouldn't allow my social life and "fun life" get in the way of my future. He made me promise that I would go back to school next spring, and the last thing he said was that "ya might think I'm full of shit, but one of these days, you're gonna find out that the old man was right about a few things." That phone call was the last time I ever heard my father's voice.
I remember getting to Shreveport and the sky was overcast, like it'd been raining for a couple days and more storms were probably on their way. When I got to the house, nobody was there, but a neighbor had seen me pull up and she came outside to meet me and tell me that an ambulance had taken my dad to WK Pierremont, so i went. When I got there, I took a wrong turn at some point, and I remember that I walked in through the back/employee/hospital side of the ICU. In other words, I came in from behind instead of through a waiting area, and I remember I had on a black polo and a pair of jeans that i later lost somewhere along the lines. I remember that my shirt was tucked in, and I had a thick black belt to match the pair of black mules from Banana Republic, and I had my backpack on because I'd developed the habit of having my notebook, a dictionary, pencils, magazines, some CD's, cigarettes, and whatever books I was reading on me at all times.
One of the nurses saw me and I told him that I thought my dad was there, but I wasn't sure. I told him that I'd just arrived from Lafayette, and he recognized my name, and he brought me to a small room, just large enough for the bed and equipment.
And my dad. My dad, this big wall of heavy duty hard core intellect and pragmatism. The giant behemoth of knowledge, the man with all the answers. Here he was with tubes everywhere. They were going in. They were coming out. They were breathing for him, monitoring his heart's beats, his blood pressure, the oxygen saturation. There were bags hanging above his head and multiple IVs in his hands and arms and wrists. I don't know how long I stood just outside the room looking in, but I know that I suddenly became aware of the nurse, still standing beside me when I quietly, hopefully just-more-than-whispered, "Dad?"
The nurse told me that my father was unresponsive, that he'd had an aneurysm in his brain stem, which controls everything: self regulating body temp, heart rate, respiration, etc. Dad never woke up.
I'd started my journey on February 13th and my brother called the morning of April 10 (or was it the 12th) and my dad died ten days after he was admitted to the hospital. I held his hand when they turned everything off. Nobody else did. I guess we all figured it would happen quickly, but you don't die right when they turn things off. You keep breathing on your own because it's all automatic, even if not self regulated. In fact, you stay alive for quite a while, and the nurses just give you massive amounts of liquid morphine to help you drift away from things slowly. Very slowly.
My dad's death changed everything. Every dynamic in my family was completely and totally altered, and we -as a family- have (and will never) recovered from the loss; however, the point of including so many wild and divergent and personal details from my past is that the first days of April, 2000 is the last time I remember doing anything that I wanted to do, the last time I followed my dream instead of working to achieve the goals that others suggest: nursing, health care, doing anything that's not creative, anything that's not writing, everything that's not honing my personal wants and needs and desires... I did have a pretty good run for those two short months, and I know that I really created some stuff that would have made my father proud to read.
So, to better answer the question from Stacy, when I write that I want to seek redemption, I often treat the topic in such a way as that I'm trying to redeem myself in others' eyes, but that is a total fallacy, completely dishonest. The truth is that I want to redeem myself for myself in my own eyes, and I want to do what i can to get back to where i was from February 13th to the second week of April in 2000.
Finally... after 46 days of intermittent activity and unproductive uncertainty and no plan and very little follow-through ...after a debilitating surgery and near constant pain that I'm now being told may be both chronic and permanent ....after shaving the point of keeping a blog in the first place, I'm doing it. Eleven years after the fact, I'm back on the road to redemption. At least, that's how I see myself because that's how I feel. And when it really comes down to it - in the end - the way I feel and the way I feel about myself and the way I see myself are the only things that truly matter.
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