If I could give the wheel another spin I’d teleport back to 1987 or so and tell my asshole former self to go ahead set aside your paranoid scanner darkly antiwar notions. Stop watching full metal jacket on a loop. Shut the fuck up about Oliver North and the contras. Join the army. Maybe use those ten weeks of basic combat training to get your head right rather than opting for six weeks in county lockup. Or for fuck sake go be a war zone journalist. Join the peace corps. Do something useful boy.
Or don’t. Take the knife edge route. Dip into the meth slinging underworld as a getaway driver for a time. Walk into a few windowless back rooms full of nameless gangsters and nothing but weapons drugs and cash on the table. Serve your six weeks at county like a man. Keep your mouth shut study the prison yard dynamic and yeah watch out for your cornhole kid. Try coming out of a blackout at three in the morning at a deserted greyhound station outside Waco then go hitchhike across the west Texas badlands for the pure yeah might get murdered fuck of it. Drop acid by yourself and go wander the Tenderloin. Take the train down to LA and do the same along skid row.
Now that you’re sorted go work three years at the homeless shelter. Break up drunk hobo knife fights in the snow. Take the oddball gig delivering porn videos to freaks and creeps and lonely pervy assholes. Drive a yellow cab without cell phone or handgun into the most fucked up godforsaken trailer parks housing projects shit storms and active crime scenes you can find. Go do the lord’s work work in needle exchange, on suicide hotlines, at schizophrenic group homes. Defintely say yes to the job collecting dead bodies in the middle of the night and while you’re at it go work a decade of your life aka ten percent if your luck holds on the most wretched psych ward you can imagine. And for sure take a couple jobs where you’re holding a shovel or changing adult diapers or washing dishes in the server industry. Trust me it does you good. Along the way I also worked as migrant adjunct faculty at three institutions of American higher learning.
Anyone who has sweated the migrant track will tell you the same thing. Nobody is more openly abused, taken for granted, chewed and spit out by academia than the poor adjunct asshole teaching intro to whatever the fuck required class you didn’t want to take anyway.
I was up for a tenure track gig once after Kiss Me Judas came out and by all known metrics would have should have landed that job. Or might have done in an alt universe where the cards fell differently but was told in a hushed tone by one of the senior faculty in that particular English Dept they just couldn’t take the hit for another straight white man hire. Fair enough. Mind you this was roughly 2001. I’d just done my time on the grad student hamster wheel and was not blind. The old white dude situation was visibly festering and starting to stink at every school in the western sphere and there was nothing I could personally do about it, and besides I wasn’t even sure I was cut out for the job security nor the pressure and responsibility that came with such a position. I rather preferred the visiting prof gigs where I did a semester or two then bounced before anybody noticed me or looked too close at what the hell is mister Baer teaching those kids. I had a reputation for giving unorthodox assignments.
My last adjunct job was at the Memphis College of Art. Roughly 2009-11 in the slipstream. This was my favorite teaching gig ever mainly because none of the students were asshole English majors. I was an English major and professional asshole and I know what I’m talking about. These kids were artists. They already processed the world visually. My jam was writing prose that forced the brain to mainline visual viscera and sensory overload and provoke vertigo in the reader so these were my sort of kids. I taught creative writing and American noir and freshman composition. By the third semester though, when a brand new freshman girl walked into class on day one and asked when do we get to do the stalker assignment, I had a feeling my days were numbered.
At this exact point in time I was working the psych unit on weekends and teaching two days a week while collecting the after hours dead from crime scenes and coroners to then deliver to either the med school for research purposes or a funeral home for cremation or burial. I was also periodically locking myself into the shadiest motel 6 in West Memphis hanging out with the local lot lizards, dope boys, and strippers off the clock trying to either get myself shot or bloodily extract the mutant novel Godspeed from the underside of my own skin. Whichever came first. I was sober that year but manic and my ethics, judgment and general state of mind were perhaps questionable.
Side note. I may also have personally invented catfishing by accident before the internet became a real thing. One assignment I used to throw at my kids was go to craigslist or backpage or any indy weekly rag and find the weird sad personals. The missed connection ads where some lonely sweetheart posts a message like last Saturday night Texaco on Hwy 64 you drove a black jeep I wore pink sunglasses we both got Marlboro lights we made eye contact at the cash register. This was prime hunting ground for story material. The core assignment was to enter the scene at the Texaco and go inside one of the characters to find the story. But I did offer up the notion too that one might solve their writer’s block by just assuming an alt ego not their own. Go method. Become the dude in black jeep or the chick in pink sunglasses and respond to the ad. See what happens. Or spin up your own ad describing a fictional encounter at a gas station that doesn’t exist in this world. Stuff your narrator’s message into a bottle, seal it with a kiss and chuck it into the ether. Then wait to see what comes back.
Now fast forward a few years into working the psych ward and I notice how every fall and spring we intake a couple dozen college freshmen and sophomores surfing their first psychotic break. I realize how potentially dangerous these assignments may have been. Regardless of the fact that I did warn my students not to do anything illegal. Not to trespass or transgress or otherwise violate the basic social contract of do unto others. Because such advice tends to bring on the opposite of desired result with psych patients.
Back to the stalker assignment. Seek a public place such as a pedestrian mall, dog park, supermarket or DMV. Pick your poison. Find a park bench or folding chair with a decent vantage. Choose a mark. Study him or her. Follow them. Watch every little thing they do and how they do it. How they hold their coffee cup or cigarette. How they interact with others. Do they use their hands when they talk. How loud are they. Do they have a phony laugh. Do they make eye contact with the barista. Do they say bless you when someone sneezes. Do they follow small inconsequential rules like don’t walk or do they say fuck it and cross against the red. Memorize every tiny detail about their manners, their clothing, their hygiene. Hair and body language. Visible scars or tattoos. What sort of jewelry do they wear. Do they walk with a limp. What are they hiding from the world. What do they think they’re getting away with. Now become that character in a fictional alt universe and write from their point of view. Or alternately become a private detective or FBI profiler hunting a suspect who looks like your mark. Or failing that become the stalker, the scorned lover obsessed with him or her. Just don’t break any laws or do anything dangerous. Adjuncts don’t make a hell of a lot and I couldn’t promise to bail them out of jail if the assignment went sideways.
The kids loved it and luck smiled on me as I never had any future Dahmer or Bundy types in my classes. Or if I did they chose not to show themselves. Either way the students produced some fantastic stuff. Because the thing rookie writers struggle with most and don’t even realize it is point of view. Seems simple enough yeah, point of view. Everyone thinks they understand it but they don’t. There are professional writers out there with actual books published who know fuck all about the true mechanics of pov. The crucial differences between first and second. The narrative blind spots and deficiencies of first. The world building reqs of omniscient. The dizzy chasm between close third and distant third. How to maintain and control the chosen point of view. How to slip and slide from one character to another. I will revisit this struggle in a coming post. Until then.
peace.
Hah. I certainly remember the stalker assignment!
Looking forward to that lecture.