Schulz drew his iconic and lucrative cartoons from a dark, well-worn office built in a grove of redwoods near a dirty creek. I’m sure when he moved here, the creek wasn’t the dirty, homeless haven that it has become, but times change. During his lifetime he and his wife bought the a rundown ice arena near his studio, paying to have it completely refurbished, and renaming it the Redwood Ice Arena. He also had a hockey court with blue cement floors and white walls put in, as well as an outdoor tennis court. After Schulz died in 2000, the grounds around his playground became the site of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.

This modern, glassy building is right down the street from my house, and I’ve been walking my dog in the fields near the hockey rink for the past four years, almost every day, and while I have enjoyed seeing the happy tourists congregating for photographs next to a ceramic Snoopy’s doghouse statue, I’ve never actually ventured into the museum proper. The reality being that I couldn’t bear to part with a single dollar to see old Peanuts comics on view and modern art tributes by people like Christo to the “Peanuts gang.” I mean, I loved my Snoopy lunchbox, snow cone machine, and t-shirts when I was eight, but like I said, times change.

But when my husband suggested we go check out the museum on a free night—the occasion for the free entry being the museum’s eighth anniversary, I said yes without hesitation. I was finally going to enter the building that I’d peered into, mused about, and walked past for so many years. Plus, they were serving free ice cream cake. It took us two minutes to walk over, and once we stepped into the actual building, the exhibits were pretty much what I expected, but still entertaining. I especially liked the random collection of pop culture artifacts that supposedly served as Schulz’s inspiration—a macramé owl, a silver lame vest, a Davy Crockett hat, and a pristine long board pushed up against a wall. Hmmm, okay.

But the most interesting moment of the night came when we were approached by a museum volunteer as we stood before the “Wrapped Snoopy.” A gift from Christo to Schulz, a thank you for the cartoonist’s support of the artist’s “Running Fence” project, erected in Sonoma County in the mid-1970’s. The artistic integrity of a Snoopy doghouse sloppily wrapped in what looks like bedsheets was lost on me. The woman asked us how we liked the museum and we got into conversation. It turns how that she had just moved from Brooklyn, New York and had only lived in our little city for ten months. She was rhapsodic about living here, talking about how much friendlier people were than in New York, and how much she loved the weather. She told us about her walks through the Fountain Grove area where she had moved with her husband.

So this is where I actually get to the book I want to talk about this month. In 2006, Chronicle Books published this amazing collection of photos and essays titled The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. Written by the trippy California-phile Erik Davis, the essays offer fascinating information about the “restless, heretical edge of the Anglo American experience as it probes the inside and outside of religious institutions.” In the essay “Divine Winery,” Davis tells the story of Thomas Lake Harris, a mystic who moved his Brotherhood of the New Life Colony—a theo-socialist commune—to California (specifically the town where I live) in 1875. He called it the “Eden of the West.” Harris and his friends lived in a richly-decorated, two-story manor where Harris taught his acolytes about Divine Respiration, and the hermaphrodite God that he called the “Twain-One.” At the same time, the group established a winery on the grounds that would one day be Fountain Grove, where they built a thriving wine export business. Eventually, Harris was “shamed” (the man did think that fairies lived in the bosoms of women) into stepping down as leader, and after years of being successfully run by Kanaye Nagasawa, the winery fell into disrepair. But you can still walk the creepy grounds of the ruins, where ancient wine barrels covered in graffiti loom under a progressively deteriorating roof.

We excitedly shared all of this information with the woman from Brooklyn, as she peered at us through her hip New York glasses. She seemed interested, but a little put off by our obsession with the Divine Winery. It seemed so far away from the sparkling, proper museum filled with the important but so commercialized-that-it-has-almost-lost-all-meaning Peanuts images that surrounded us. Two versions of the California dream, one that ended in riches, and one that ended in ghosts and decay. I’m thinking ceramic Snoopy statue in front of the divine winery, holding strange fairies and 19^thcentury wine goblet in paw, but alas, never the twain shall meet.

Until now. Until I met standup comedy.

I started taking standup comedy classes at the San Francisco Comedy College ostensibly to research my latest novel-in-progress, the protagonist of which is a standup. I’ve been a comedy nerd-lite for awhile now. Greg Giraldo, David Cross, and Dave Attell are like sports heroes to me. I admire their work, wish I could do what they do, and can’t begin to fathom how. Two drafts into the novel, I realized that I only superficially understood a comedian’s life. Obviously, most successful comedians spend most of their careers on the road, going from one shitty club to another. Yes, many of them find that they need drugs or alcohol to prop their spirits while they’re stranded in cheap hotels in small towns waiting for the sun to set, the bars to open, and the audience to buy their two-drink minimums. But I was looking for the experiential details beyond the standard storylines of the lonely, but ultimately redemptive and gratifying life of a comedian that one can find easily in movies like Comedian starring Jerry Seinfeld, memoirs like Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, and podcasts like The Nerdist or WTF with Marc Maron. I figured that the best way to get into the head of a standup was to try to become one.

Even the teachers at the Comedy College admit that the concept of teaching comedy is a dubious one at best. “You are the material,” and “There are no rules,” are the closest things to tenets you’ll learn. Most importantly, the college gives amateur comics almost unlimited access to stage time, the best and fastest way to find out if you can be funny under the bright lights, alone, on a stage, in front of an audience who more or less expects to sit politely while you bomb.

Like many writers, I’m an introverted fellow, an invisible man at parties. I wake every morning and silently trudge to my laptop and translate images, scenes and anecdotes to a blank and unresponsive page. Sometimes the process is exciting, and sometimes, it’s a wonky tedium of shuffling words, deleting them, and Googling the arcane and slowly dying rules of grammar involving em dashes and serial commas. Writing is not an extemporaneous art form. Books are meant to be consumed in silence, in bed, on planes, and at beaches. The microphone and the stage are not a writer’s natural ally. I most certainly do not consider the spotlight a close friend.

Consequently, I planned to leave the gift of stage-time wrapped for as long as possible. After a couple of classes, though, more than half the class had begun to perform open-mics at least once a week and being an Asian-American (Type A all the way!), I wasn’t about to be left behind. So I took the leap. Two hours before my open-mic, I crafted (liberally speaking) three minutes about breaking my toenail while standup paddling as a result of my reluctance to trim my toenails and the resulting hijinx and neuroses that ensued. Larry David’s job is safe. As I walked up on stage, I kept telling myself I didn’t give a fuck whether these strangers laughed or not.

It wasn’t art, but to my surprise, I got laughs. In those instances, I felt a rush, not unlike the lighting of the bulb between me and fiction writing. And in those instances, I wanted to chase that feeling again—the rush you get from an audience’s laugh—as soon as possible.

Since that first open mic, I’ve performed a few more times. Each time, I’ve sat in the audience, worrying over my material so intensely that I often forget to enjoy and laugh at the previous comics like I should. Comic karma is a bitch! You have to support your own! Each time, before I get on stage, I lie to myself that I don’t give a fuck whether these strangers laugh or not. Of course, you care whether they laugh or not! Laughter’s your sole measure of success.

Yes, I’ve bombed, but one good bit seems to make you forget ten bad ones. Besides, when I bomb, I try to blame the audience as quickly as possible, and then move on to the next bit (just kidding, I save the bit for the next unlucky audience; I’m supposedly “working on material” but really, I’m just being prideful and misanthropic). When I write a failed novel, I throw half-decades of my life in the paper shredder. When a bit bombs, it’s just a few bad minutes I can quickly redeem.

Almost every aspect about being a standup is the polar opposite to that of a writer. Most writers require a quiet environment. A standup works on material with audiences. Most writers need a stable home to do their best work. A successful standup spends most of their time on the road. Fiction writing is a game where a select few win big, but smaller wins, like publishing a short story in a journal, are few and far between. Standup comedy is a game where a select few win big, but there are hundreds of potential micro-wins every night. Every joke wins or loses. For a writer, not only does every sentence not win or lose, every sentence can be an eternal pain in the ass.

If fiction writing is the long-married wife, standup is the farm fresh mistress, never questioning my failures and always feeding the ego with an effortless grace. But what will I do when I wake in the morning? Won’t I need to silently trudge to my laptop? Won’t I miss the wonky process of working and re-working sentences? Won’t I miss the inherent joys of working on my office-ass at home? Well, let’s just say that before I started doing standup, I never had to ask.

What do the hair depilation scene in The 40-Year Old Virgin, Todd Haynes’ Superstar, and Sarah Manguso’s stunning, lyrical memoir The Two Kinds of Decayhave in common? According to David Shields, author of the book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, these seemingly disparate art objects all share a commonality in that, while they are works of the imagination, they also toe the line between “reality”(a word that Nabokov claimed should always be in quotation marks) and fiction in a wholly new way. “Art is theft,” begins the book, with a quote from Picasso—one of the only quotes out of hundreds actually attributed, in the text, to the original speaker, and Shields spends the next 205 pages making just that argument.

Taking a clue from hip hop–particularly sampling–Shields “borrows” from other sources as a way to build a new kind of collage.  Each chapter of Reality Hunger contains short numbered vignettes, entire passages taken from other sources, without citing (on the page) the original source. Curious readers can flip back and forth between the body of the book and the appendix–which publisher Random House insisted be included to avoid legal ramifications—but Shields suggests that the reader instead grab a sharp pair of scissors and remove the pages by “cutting along the dotted line.”

While I didn’t heed Shield’s advice to cut out the appendix (it was a damn library book for god’s sake!), I did control my urge to flip back and forth between the appendix and the vignettes, an act that took a shocking amount of self-control on my part. In this action, I felt like I was actually interacting with the book in an intriguing way, one that got me thinking the assumed lines between attribution and originality, between myth, memory, and truth. Soon, the reading felt liberating. I have been struggling to finish a series of short stories for the past three years, trying to finesse them into something that resembles what I think they should look like, something so wholly fiction that the seams are hidden, like a fine couture dress. Shields book helped me to think about the “reality” that often times, I am more drawn to writing in which the seams are ragged and transparent, than those stories that are polished to perfection; while I do enjoy sinking into a nice work of fiction, the older I get, the more I enjoy books that challenge genre without adhering slavishly to the guidelines monitoring fiction.  Examples include the Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstrom, and Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

“This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature,” writes  Shields (see, I can’t help but give the guy credit) just before he suggests cutting out the appendix with a box cutter.

Why all this trouble to “steal” from other sources, to muddle the reader’s expectations of truth and fiction? Well, Shields is writing a manifesto, one that forefronts the argument that an artistic movement is forming, one that shares certain key components.

1. A deliberate unartiness; “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, unensored, and unprofessional. Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity,; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity; self-ethnography; anthropological autobiography; a blurring ( to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction; the lure and blur of the real.

In short, Shields declares that the novel is dead, or in the process of dying a slow and painful death. The time of the seamless Tolstoyan dream has ended, to be replaced by a mixed, hybrid form. In fact, he argues that this is not so much a replacement, as a return to original form. And while I find these ideas intriguing and freeing, as a so-called “fiction” writer, I am even more intrigued by the interaction between art and “reality.”

I started thinking about this while listening to the new Charlotte Gainsbourg album. I find Gainsbourg to be endlessly fascinating, ever since seeing her in a 1996 movie production of Jane Eyre—a book that I have read five times, thank you very much. The actress plays the patron saint of homely and disenfranchised girls with a confused, bemused energy, her lopsided mouth a perfect representation of the Jane Eyre’s homeliness. Gainsbourg is also a singer and her latest album is titled  IRM, the French acronym for an MRI scanner. In interviews, she has talked becoming intimately familiar with the IRM machine after a water-skiing accident led to a brain hemorrhage in 2007. The title track captures the experience of being in a hospital, undergoing tests, wondering if you are going to die. As I listen, I’m not sure if it is the actual song that I am drawn to, or if I am so fascinated with the history behind the song that I’m filling in the meaning, making it into an experience outside of the art object itself. Many albums are autobiographical, but this one in particular has got me thinking about the increasingly blurred lines (reality television has something to do with this) between what is made up and what is “reality,” and the importance of what both the artist and the reader (or listener) bring to the table. “Urgency attaches itself now more to the tale taken directly from life than one fashioned by the imagination out of life,” writes Shields –or not Shields. This not only explains the popularity of the Real Housewives franchise, it also gives liberty to writers and artists to pull unabashedly from their own experience, to break genre, to wallow in the freedom of being able to be both the “I” and not the “I” all at the same time.

​Of course, years later, I learned that many boys and a good handful of girls during the Great Depression sought shelter and refuge on Chicago rooftops. While on wandering walks in the city, or on an occasional skate, I keep my head up and I often try to imagine them – stealthy orphans stealing up stairs, fire escapes, and ladders to find solace and to get a better view of their catastrophic and shimmering city. (It’s no wonder that the rooftops of Gotham City were originally based on Chicago’s.) Today, our city’s rooftop bombers, taggers, and artists chase the ghosts of these orphans and seek the same thing that they once did – refuge from the formulaic and often brutish world below. We could learn a thing or two from them.

For all of its efficiency and necessity, a rooftop is a place to go when you feel the need to escape or when you need a different perspective of the city – inexhaustible towers, a cerise sunrise, the unfading blue of our great lake – but it’s also a place to consider and reflect on high. A place to go alone and wander the labyrinth of your thoughts. A place to bellow an Odyssean verse. A place to cavort with modern history. A place to abandon memory. A place to slow dance to Sam Cooke (or, R. Kelly, depending on your skool!) with someone you love, or at least, someone you love at the moment. Of course, the best rooftops are the ones where you can get epically drunk, commune with the ridiculous universe, and party with your friends like rooftop deities. So, yes, for all their efficiency and necessity, rooftops end up attracting orphans and artists and lovers and partygoers and would-be-gods. Essentially, in the city of Chicago, a rooftop is a Dionysian institution of refuge.

One particular night, some years back, a few good friends of mine and I needed a little refuge. We had just spent the previous two days and two nights on a non-stop hyper writing drive in order to submit to Bravo’s Project Greenlight, a tour de force competition in which thousands of young men and women across our Hollywood blitzed nation produce and/or write a television show over the course of two days and two nights, which is to say that thousands of young men and women quietly suffer those two days and two nights away under the illusion of a generous and grandiose Hollywood. Ah! But this is America. We have deities wearing crowns of sitcom scripts and wielding swords sharpened by Tom Cruise’s very own chin! To only be them. So very worth it! Our sitcom was entitled Settling Up. Basically, it was about on-going divorce proceedings between an awesomely hilarious, weight lifting, Camaro driving slacker and his equally awesomely hilarious once-bra-burning, fight-the-power wife turned corporate leviathan. The pilot episode starts when their runaway son returns to Chicago from Taiwan with a beautiful, fish-out-of-water Taiwanese pop star only to discover that his parents are getting divorced! It was, uh, a commentary, or something, on Baby Boomers and love. Ok! I know. I know. Absurd. BUT. We had spent 48 hours writing the damn thing and we loved the damn thing. Trancelike Hollywood was clearly awaiting us…That is until one of us, in a sitcom-y inspired moment, accidentally erased our only copy. So, with the click of a mouse button and a resounding if not entirely despondent and un-ironic booooooooo, our great masterpiece disappeared into the digital netherworld. Devastated and exhausted, we did what fallen Chicago writers do best – we absconded to a rooftop party. And ended up ruining it. While a moderately pleasant and mostly hip crowd attempted to quietly watch a very hip foreign film on a gorgeous rooftop off of Division, we drank a good portion of their alcohol and yelled at wonderfully drunk and attractive people on the street, who were not on their way to a rooftop party, who were, in fact, concrete dwellers. We felt sorry for them. We invited them up, much to the chagrin and angst of our hosts. We danced with them. We told bad jokes. Really bad jokes. From the sitcom we had just written and lost. We mourned our loss. We yelled and high-fived and made impossible promises of stardom. We threw bottles at the flaxen half-moon and listened as they crashed somewhere off in the distance. Dionysus of the Rooftop had clearly seduced us with hallucinations of Hollywood and ruckus.

​We got kicked out. And the moderately pleasant and mostly hip crowd stopped inviting us to parties.

A few years later, I found myself with a friend of the host of that rooftop party. We were celebrating and, in part, grieving, the last evening of the infamous and jazzy, deep red music club the HotHouse. Sometime during the coral stained sunrise in a few hours, the doors off Balbo Drive would close, and like so many other things neglected by the constant metamorphosis of our city, the club would disappear into a maze of memory. To further our disremembering, we danced and drank up the last of the club’s offerings. And sometime during the night, a small crowd of us retired to the rooftop to enjoy the silvery breeze coming off the Lake and to talk. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I’m sure it was mostly about myth and family and politics, Chicago’s triumvirate, and the friend of the host of the Division rooftop party wondered aloud if I would ruin the good conversation by throwing bottles at skyscrapers. I smiled and told her that I would not. I told her that I had abandoned sitcom writing and was now focusing on bigger and better things – a stage sketch show featuring PBS’s Star Gazer Jack Horkheimer and a rabbi that pitched bad sitcom ideas to Hollywood executives. I also told her that with age I had found reservation and maybe even a little maturity. Something like that. She smiled sweetly; though, I don’t think she believed me. We quietly sipped our drinks and watched the city lights and from the street below we heard laughter, debonair laughter or the midnight laughter of the soon-to-be damned. Before long, someone pulled out a camera and was taking photos of Balbo Drive, and I thought offhandedly, or I am thinking offhandedly now (rooftops have an ethereal affect on me) about how Balbo Drive was named after Italo Balbo, the fascist Italian aviator who flew from Rome to Chicago for the 1933 World’s Fair, proving once again, as the Swedish born, Chicago sculptor Claes Oldenburg once stated, that Chicago has a metaphysical elegance of death about it. We watched the photographer and I promised for a third time that I would behave. I wanted to behave. The night was elegant and self-possessed and I couldn’t think of a better place to be in the world. I turned my attention to the sky and the lights of the stars were somehow fused with the lights of the skyscrapers, a primrose fusion like that from a Van Gogh painting, and the skyscrapers themselves, ones I had known my entire life, seemed poised to puncture the night in what could only be considered defiance of a mortal life.

Photo by interpunct on Flickr.

Photo by Joe Lencioni at shiftingpixel.com

I was never much for dolls when I was a kid—not baby dolls or Barbie dolls. I was more likely to dress up my cat than a doll. My indifference to dolls followed me throughout life. I used to go to a hair salon that was decorated in dolls. The owner collected dolls and had them displayed on shelf molding throughout the salon. There were dolls with ornate hairstyles—braids and curled bangs and beehives—and even more ornate costumes of silk and satin and velvet. The dolls were positioned so when I was trapped under a purple cape processing, they seemed to be looking down at me, judging me with their unblinking eyes and perfect baby doll mouths. I turned my chair away but I could still see the dolls behind me in the mirror. All their perfect blank faces looking at me at my most vulnerable, my most secret self, without my coiffed day to day shield—righteous bitches.

“The trick is to intensify and to overlay; to compress the patterns; to reduce them to simple expressions; to make every inch count double.”

–from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Not long ago a visit to the Glessner House on Prairie Avenue made me think of dolls in another way. In the context of the ornate and decorative mansions on Prairie Avenue during the late 19^th century, the Glessner House, although grand in its own right, was somewhat of a palate cleanser. Unpopular with its luxury row neighbors when it was built in 1886, after visiting the new house during construction, Frances Glessner noted in her journal on October 24, 1886: “We walked across the street to take a distant look and two ladies passed by us—one said to the other ‘there isn’t a single pretty thing about it.’” The house built by architect Henry Hobson Richardson came to be recognized as innovative in design and is considered a landmark in residential architecture.

The Glessners lived in the house for fifty years and many of the furnishings and objects in the house are original and representative of the Glessner’s preferences and taste, which focused predominately on Arts and Crafts. The house reflects the dreams and desires of its inhabitants. That the Glessners commissioned such a radical departure in design for their primary residence and the thoughtfulness and intelligence exhibited in their selection of home furnishings, led me to expect that the residents of the Glessner House were at least as thoughtful and intelligent as their taste in home decor, at least as innovative in their thinking as their home design would suggest. In this context, I was interested to hear from the tour docent that years after she left the family home, the Glessner daughter, Fanny, constructed a series of dollhouse dioramas depicting violent crime scenes.

In her middle age, during the 1940s, after marriage and raising three kids, Frances Glessner Lee created eighteen miniature scenes based on actual homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths—The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. The Nutshells were used to train law enforcement officers in the instruction of forensic techniques of observation.

Contemporary photographer Corinne May Botz produced a series of images of the dioramas that were displayed in an exhibition and appear in a book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Monacelli Press, 2004). The Nutshells reveal not only crime scenes but also a degree of detail and precision that is perhaps as revealing about the nature of their creator as it is about the methods of murder. An unlatched door, blood splatters on pink wallpaper above a baby’s crib, pink slippers knit with straight pins neatly lying on a pink-fringed throw rug, an overflowing ashtray, a framed painting of a buck that is no bigger than a postage stamp. The scale is exact and looking at the photographs of the dioramas is disorienting. The dollhouse dioramas impose a narrative. What happened in these domestic scenes in kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms? What is the story that must be imagined? Is there more than one story? Reduction suggests diminishment, less than, but in the case of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, miniaturization intensifies and enlarges the effect. A drowning in a bathtub is reduced to a series of “simple expression[s]”: soap in a soap dish, a drain plug on a chain, a woman’s fully clothed body hanging over the tub, the water splashing in her face. Was she forced under the running water and drowned? Did she slip while filling the tub, knocking herself unconscious? Was she killed someplace else and her body placed in the tub?

“Children take up the suggestive qualities of space…”

–from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

From miniaturization to multitudes. I am the childless friend of women with daughters and granddaughters. Sometimes I am invited into this particular world, sometimes I spy. Recently I was a guest at the mother lode of the mother and girl child reunion—the American Girl Place on Michigan Avenue. A friend had traveled from St. Louis to Chicago with her seven-year-old granddaughter, Natalie, to visit the American Girl Place.

American Girl® encourages girls “to enjoy girlhood through fun and enchanting play.” That’s play with one or all of the American Girl characters, Just Like You® dolls, or Itty Baby® dolls. The American Girl store is a theme park devoted to dolls and their stuff—lots of stuff. Clothes and furniture and pets and gear for the pets like raincoats and grooming tubs, and a campfire with fake marshmallows on sticks, and a wooden ice cream churn, and two versions of tap dance outfits. The store is red and pink and black. The trademark shopping bags that girls are carrying in a six-block radius around the store are red. Like one of George Saunder’s short stories about the guy in the caveman real-action diorama or the CivilWarLand theme park, the American Girl Place is an exaggerated form of American consumerism. It’s fiction larger than life and gutted of imagination. In this space, the story is readymade, available for purchase.

Frances Glessner Lee’s dollhouse dioramas and American Girl doll nation: something big—murder, suicide, accidental death–made small and open to interpretation versus something small—a doll’s story, doll-sized black patent leather tap shoes—made larger than life and deathly static. Reverse gestures, yet both perverse, both violent acts of imagination.

First stop at the American Girl Place was the doll beauty salon. Josephina, one of the historical American Girl characters, had been promised a redo. Poor Josephina looked like she had been rode hard and put away wet. Natalie picked out a hairstyle for her doll—the tucked two braids with the turquoise ribbons—and the uniformed stylist tied a purple cape around Josephina’s neck. So there we were: Josephina trapped in a doll chair, hair on the loose, the three of us looking on, awaiting her transformation back into the only self that was possible for her.

Photo by Joe Lencioni at Shifting Pixel

That was eight years ago, and I’ve gotten a bit more realistic. College textbooks are expensive; there’s no way we’d rip them up, and my students don’t listen to opera, they listen to emo or trip-hop and I can’t save anybody. I teach creative writing—voice, structure, point of view, imagery… none of that’s going to help Rachel who’s pregnant or Kyle with the anti-depressants or Dennis who’s waaay more interested in pot than he is in class and I have these days sometimes where it’s like, what the hell am I doing here? This past semester was especially rough and on the last day, as I was packing my things for winter break, I thought: I could walk away.

What if I walked away?

On the way out, I grabbed my mail—memos, a stack of student work, and a book. I checked the cover—some lit journal from a community college—and was all set to toss it when I noticed a page was marked with a Post-it note. I opened it to a short story, saw the name of author and stopped. Okay, in order to explain what happened to next, I need you all to imagine that I’m a character on Grey’s Anatomy. I’m thinking specifically of the episode where Izzie gives up being a doctor—she’s got eight million dollars from her dead fiancé and she goes to say goodbye to Doctor Burke who first taught her how to do a running whip stitch and she tells him, “I’m sorry,” ’cause it’s her fault he got shot and has a tremor in his hand and maybe can’t be surgeon anymore and he says, “Don’t you be sorry because of me. You have two good hands and you’renot using them, be sorry for that!” At this point, some pop song by a new up-and-coming band will start playing—Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol, perhaps, or a Regina Spektor tune—and Izzie’s face jerks as though she’s been slapped. She stands there, confused and frozen in Burke’s office until slowly, slowly, she looks down at her hands, holding them in front of her like she’s about to play the piano. She studies every finger, every wrinkle, and turns them so the palms face upwards. We stare at those hands, all of us, imaging the thousands of lives they might save and the camera pans back to Izzie’s face, her lovely blue eyes wide and determined. My God, what am I doing? she thinks. How can I give up becoming a surgeon? And then, the song crescendos or maybe changes chord in some significant way and—she smiles. It all becomes clear then: she’s not going to quit. She’s going to stay and be a great doctor and here, here is the important part: It might never have happened if it hadn’t been for Burke.

Just like that lit journal in my mailbox means nothing unless I tell you about Andrew.

It was my second year of teaching. I was twenty-three and still naive enough to think we could all recite Whitman standing on our desks—except we don’t have desks in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College, we sit in semi-circles so you can look everyone in the eye. It was the first day of class and I was calling out attendance.

“Elizabeth?”

“Here!”

“Spencer?”

“Here!

“Andrew?—”

“Andrew?—”

I looked up. “Andrew?—” And I will never forget this, he said, “I’m fuckin’ here already.” This guy was nineteen, South Side Irish Catholic complete with the accent, very baggy jeans belted just below his crotch and these giant headphones that he would not turn off unless you told him to, like “Andrew, we’re starting class, can you lose the Eminem please?”

“Whatever,” he’d say, which was pretty much all he ever said—not because he was shy, but because he just didn’t give a fuck. I’m sure if you ask some educational psychologist, they’d tell you his defiance was a façade meant to mask his insecurities, but I wasn’t asking a psychologist. I was asking Andrew.

“I don’t give a fuck,” he said, when I told him he was failing. It was the fifth week of classes and he’d missed three already. When he did show it was an hour late, headphones blaring, sitting in the back of the room a good ten feet away from the rest of us in our semi-circle and it’s very, very difficult to continue reading Faulkner under those circumstances, for one: Faulkner and Eminem do not go well together and two: everyone is more interested in seeing how the teacher will handle such an interruption than they are in The Sound and the Fury so all the concentration that you’ve just spent an hour building is shot to hell. Had I been the teacher I am now, I would’ve told Andrew he could join us after the break, but then? I wanted to save everybody, remember?

“So if you don’t give a fuck,” I asked—Michelle Pfeiffer said the word fuck in the movie Dangerous Minds and after that all her students totally respected her—”Why are you still coming to class?”

Andrew’s hair hung past his nose—I wanted to tell him to move it so I could look him in the eye. “My mom’ll freak out if I don’t,” he said.

“This is college,” I said. “Your mother doesn’t—”

“Look, I fucking paid for the class,” he said. “I’m fucking gonna come to it.” In that moment I was afraid of Andrew—not that I thought he’d hurt me physically, but that maybe he could tell I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

“Fine,” I said. “But you have to write. We’re a third of the way through the semester and you haven’t given me any writing and it’s a writing class, Andrew, you have to—”

While I was talking, he stood up and opened his backpack, taking out a couple typed pages and dropping them in my lap. Then he turned and walked out, leaving me mid-sentence and trying to remember if this had ever happened to Michelle Pfeiffer.

His writing was really, really good, except it was about a guy who wanted to kill himself. Now, lots of my students have written about suicide, but this felt different. It didn’t feel like fiction. Usually, in such situations, you’ve got three options:

1. Ignore it, which really isn’t an option so far as I’m concerned so—
2. Contact somebody who knows what they’re doing. I called the college’s counseling hotline—and, for the record, I felt like a total asshole, like I was ratting out this guy’s creative work but me being an asshole seemed better than him being dead. Turns out, there are all sorts of legal implications to this stuff. This is college. Andrew is an adult—he has to choose to seek out counseling. I could suggest it but not enforce it, which brings me to—
3. Talk to Andrew directly.

Halfway through the semester, we do one-on-one conferences with every student—an hour-long sit-down to go over the strongest elements in their work. These are held in closet-sized cubicles in a hallway off the Fiction office, which is good because of the privacy but also a little unnerving, like picture you and a semi-stranger locked up in a bathroom for an hour. Now picture Andrew and me during his conference, the two of us in this tiny, cramped space and I’m making suggestions for his writing, like, “Could you maybe slow down the scene? Right here, when the character is taking all those pills and drinking all the vodka…” because that’s my job, right? To focus on his work? And then say something very subtle that’ll inspire him to seek help on his own but it is not, not, not that simple because sometimes those perfect words get all stuck in your throat and you end up saying the absolute worst thing possible, like: “Sooo. How’re you doing?”

“Fine,” he said.

“Fine?” I said. “Like, really fine?”

I couldn’t see his eyes through the hair, but I knew he was looking at me like I was nuts. “Okay,” I said. “Look. Do you need to… talk to somebody? I mean, there’s people here who—” Just like last time, he was on his feet and packing up. “Andrew!” I said. I wanted to reach out and grab his arm but figured that touching him would be as far from appropriate as I could get. “I’m just trying to help!”

He turned and faced me then. “It’s fiction,” he said. “Isn’t that what this class is? A fiction class?” And then he was gone.

I sat there in the cubicle for a really long time. I don’t remember my exact train of thought, but it went something like: Why can’t I get through to him, how do I reach him, how do I save him. I didn’t know then what I do now: it is so much fucking bigger than my little one class a week. Everybody think back for a second to when you were a freshman in college. What were you the most focused on? Me: my folks were splitting up, my boyfriend back in Michigan was seeing somebody else and I shared a twelve-by-twelve foot dorm room with a girl looped on ecstasy four nights out of the week. I will tell you what, teachers were the laaaast thing on my mind.

My job is to help their writing, not save their lives.

Right?

I gave Andrew an F, and on the last day of class I asked him to stay after. “You failed to fulfill the standards and policies of this class,” I told him. “It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good writer.”

“What the fuck ever,” he said. “I’m done with this school bullshit anyhow—” And then, like always, he was gone, out the door with zero fanfare.

At the end of every semester, teachers turn in grades and all copies of students’ work to the fiction office, at which time we’re given our student evaluations. I flipped through the stack and found one that hadn’t been filled out except for a single line in Andrew’s handwriting. It said: I can’t smoke pot before this class. This teacher talks too damn fast.

I thumbtacked that evaluation to my wall and looked at it for a while. Then, I put it in a box under my bed. Shake it off, I told myself. New students, new chapter. The first day of the spring semester I walked into class, called out attendance.

“Kelly?”

“Here!”

“LaTasha?”

“Here!”

“Brian?—”

“Brian?—”

“Brian?—” I looked up and it was total déjà vu. The same baggy pants, same headphones, same fucking accent even! Except this wasn’t Andrew. It wasn’t Andrew. It was Brian, slouching in his seat and looking at me like All right sweetheart. What are you gonna do for me?

He didn’t show up the second week of class.

He didn’t show up the third week

On the fourth week he rolled in an hour late and sat down in the back of the room. That’s when I sort of lost my mind. “All right, out in hall,” I told him. “Everybody else—read something… or something.” As I left the classroom, I tried to calm down. This is not Andrew, I told myself.Don’t put Andrew on this guy.

“I’m sorry,” he said, moving the hair out of his face. He had blue eyes. “The past couple of weeks have been pretty fucked up.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But that doesn’t excuse—”

“My friend killed himself,” he said. “That’s not your problem, I know, I just told you so you don’t think I’m slacking off.”

I exhaled, wondered briefly what the world was coming to and said I’d help him catch up after class.

“Cool,” he said. “But actually, my friend? He was a student here. And I know they’ve got some of his work in the office and I was wondering if you could get it for me. ‘Cause I know he wouldn’t want his parents to see it.”

I’m telling this story now and it’s so easy to see what’s coming next, but in that moment I just didn’t get it. I said something about the legality of the situation, how I’d have to ask the chair of my department and did he know the name of his friend’s teacher so I could speak to them directly?

And he said— “It was you. You were Andrew’s teacher.”

In class I tell my students there are words for every emotion and it’s our challenge as writers to find them. I have tried over and over to explain how I felt in that moment and every time I fail. I can tell about the guilt, about how part of me, the idealistic part, died right then and there; I can tell you how horrible it was but I won’t even come close. “Excuse me,” I said to Brian. Then I went into the office and down the hall, locked myself into a conference cubicle and cried. It was the first time I’d ever done that, and it certainly hasn’t been the last.

The full-time faculty in my department were really wonderful, and I might not have gotten through it without their support and advice. “Do the best you can,” they told me. “Turn your attention to the students you have now.”

For me, that meant Brian.

He came to class sporadically, but when he did he was really involved and even, I think, had a good time. He told stories about growing up on the South Side, specifically a series of instances about the Catholic school he and Andrew attended when they were kids. I don’t know if it was therapeutic for him to write about Andrew, but it sure was for me to read it.

In the end, I gave him a C, and on the last day of class I asked him to stay after. “You got a C ’cause you weren’t here half the time,” I told him. “It doesn’t mean you’re not a good writer.”

He smiled, sliding those giant headphones over his ears. “School’s never been my thing,” he said. “And this place costs too fucking much anyway.” He made it halfway through the door before he turned back around. “You know, Andrew told me to take your class,” he said.

I waited. What I wanted to hear was: He said you really helped him, or He said you were inspiring, or He said you almost saved him. What I heard instead was:

“He said you were… interesting.”

That was eight years ago. Sixteen semesters ago—twenty-seven if you count summer school—multiply that times three classes at two schools equals eighty-one classes times approximately twelve students per class at a grand total of nine hundred and seventy-two students and through all of it, all the names and faces and page upon page of writing I have never once forgotten Brian.

So picture it: I’m standing in front of my faculty mailbox, getting ready to walk out the door for winter break or maybe a hell of a lot longer, and I find this book, some lit magazine from a community college, and when I open it, there’s Brian’s name on the top of the page. I stare at it for a while, remembering him and Andrew and how I once thought I could Save the World, and some John Mayer song kicks in—maybe Imogen Heap. The story is about Brian getting kicked out of Catholic school for calling his teacher a whore. “What are you going to do with your life?” his mother asks as they walk to the car. “What are you going to do?” I remember when Brian first told the story, eight years ago in my class the week after his best friend’s funeral—and then, right after the chord change, I get it: my job is not just story structure and point of view and imagery. It’s about Brian putting that book in my mailbox. It’s Chris calling me the night before he shipped out to Iraq. It’s Rudy writing from prison and Kate getting a Fulbright to write overseas and Byron’s thank you card when he started his own business and all those people who’ve sat in my semi-circle over the years and let me learn from them. I imagine a camera closing in on my face then; my eyes are wide and determined. My God, what am I doing? I think. How can I give up being a teacher? It all becomes clear then: I’m not going to quit.

I can’t say whether or not I’ll be a great teacher, but it’s worth my time to try. At the very least, I’ll always be interesting.

This piece originally appeared in the Toasted Cheese Literary Journal.