Nowhere But Here

Where do you belong?

I live in two incompatible and separate worlds and belong to neither of them.

I grew up in an urban, ethnic, working class, Catholic neighborhood in Chicago where, if you got a higher education, you moved somewhere else and did something else. Otherwise it was bowling leagues and a time clock in your future. Be honest now. An education and moving out may provide you with the opportunity for some measure of aesthetics in your life, but the Joneses are always lurking. While the neighborhood has its joys, it usually places you in the domain of the intellectually incurious. No judgement. That’s just how it is in the world.

My trajectory (“Some college/No degree” on my job applications), placed me somewhere in between.

As I was degree-less I was destined to work for years on the overnight shift in print shops and warehouses in the dark corners of Chicago’s industrial parks that were somehow always stinking of diesel fuel and fast food fries like some midnight carnival, surrounded by my fellow urban, ethnic, working class bindery rats, pressmen, bus drivers, tool and die guys, forklift operators, shipping clerks and so on with all their good intentions but solid prejudices and sometimes unimaginable misconceptions about any number of subjects.

I wanted college but it was a matter of money. I originally intended on going to theGoodman School but, like Lou Gehrig’s parents, that was seen as impractical. To continue to educate myself I had to use my own private motivation, quietly, and alone, and walk away from most conversations. Any friendships that developed there centered around sports and nothing else. In such a world a person can easily fall under the hypnosis of sports and beer and the usual obligations and wake up one day to discover years have gone and you are what you are for better or worse. And sometimes the dreams of thy youth are dead as any stone.

On the other hand somewhere along the way I developed a ridiculous affinity for books, which led to an extension of something I did ever since I was a little boy - making up stories and writing them down (It may have taken 65 years to publish my first book, but I was in training since the age of 10).

The real separation began when the reading and the writing took the place of the commonly experienced cultural event. You know what I mean. The world is watching the Televised Event, and I’m too obtuse to remember it was on.

At work people like to talk about the latest tribal phenomenon and I had nothing to contribute. My affinities were/are different. My habits were/are different. Face facts - I was boring. Outside of sports there is a certain cultural separation between myself and the people I came from. I make no judgement. Neither way is better than the other. And I know I was judged more harshly than I presumed to judge others. But this is the reason for the deep isolation I sometimes feel, and still feel, the silence I sometimes find myself in when among them.

While traveling in the work day world (my first job ever was as a stock boy at a Montgomery Ward in the Yorktown Mall) I did what I could to keep up with my secret interest. After saving up enough money for a semester of writing classes at Columbia Chicago in the early 70s and an unproductive semester at a local community college, still in my twenties, I signed into Marjorie Peters’ Southside Creative Writers’ Workshop where the mantra was “write what you like to read.” So I did that, even though that particular workshop ending up being a bit too conventional for me because what I liked to read was often “difficult” if not outright strange.

Lucky for me Ms. Peters was an active author’s agent (Gwendolyn Brooks, Harry Mark Petrakis and a regular feeder of talent to Scribner’s) with long experience in the business and knew every pathway. She told me to keep going, and that if I wanted to stay on this course and developed my “voice” she had no doubts I would eventually find an audience. But she also said, in the meantime, “don’t quit your day job.” My work has never been, nor will it ever be “commercial.” I count her as my chief mentor even if the other denizens in the workshop didn’t quite “get” me. To be fair, in my twenties, I had no idea what I was doing either.

At some point in the 1980s, finally feeling “ready,” I began to submit work to all kinds of magazines trying to find that voice and that audience.

Early on the rejects filled a manilla envelope. These were, like everyone else in the same mode, the bones I was making. And that kept happening - until I found the right venues. In the meantime I kept punching clocks and cashing paychecks, with a small break of a half year doing acting work (a wild drunken 6 months fit for another story), it was all factories and parking lots for me. Then in 1989 a poem called “Kissing The Hermit Buddha” appeared in Nico Vassilakis’ Sub Rosa.

Something finally hit.

I found the tribe, as it were. My stuff began appearing in what was then known as the “altzine” world. Small, independent, mailart-type publications with no financial backing, sometimes surrealist-adjacent, street-bred, Fluxus, alternative, printed on Xerox machines or small run offset. I didn’t care where it hit. My philosophy was simple, like that lyric, it was a matter of “any world that I’m welcomed to.”

So who were these people? I was curious and decided to seek out the people who were accepting my work. To look for the other writers my stuff was appearing with and read up on them. That’s how I first saw Lorri Jackson do a reading. That’s how I ended up in late night jazz clubs in the city.

But hold on. Working class boys raising a family in the suburbs don’t mesh well with the hardcore writers and poets who are living in the proverbial garret, strung out on the habit that will eventually kill them young. I had kids in Girl Scouts. They had Hepatitis or something. In the first place there is a break with reality and in the second place they could be as judgmental to a worker bee from the burbs as a clock puncher at the mill would be judgmental about them. Who are you kidding? Though I was born and raised in the city, and didn’t move out until I was truly a city kid, it seems I brought the stink of the burbs with me wherever I went.

I went about my work to pay the bills and feed everybody while engaging in my mystery achievement (I still can’t get anybody in my extended family to actually read my stuff) until in 2018 I published Edju, my first novel.

My problems happen when I bring the kid from the neighborhood to the table. Writer “meet-ups” are a mistake for me. I have little to talk about and usually drink too much if the conversation gets too rarefied, silently and unengaged with nothing much to say. To this day I can count on one finger the number of “writer meet-ups” that didn’t end badly. I’ve been banished by a clique of Surrealists over a definition of a word. I’ve had a minor-celebrity writer-type walk out on an entire party because I said something - I still don’t know what - that bothered her… somehow. I did not come from a renowned writing program. And since we’ve halted putting out Thrice Fiction Magazine and I am no longer an editor who can get your stuff into print, half the writers I got to know seem to have completely disappeared from my feed, my texts, and my life. I don’t talk writing theory and have no artistic manifesto.

So you tell me what world I belong in.

Nobody liked anybody else in my life. War talk from both sides into my ears against each other, and on and on. I shouldn’t smoke cigars. I shouldn’t play the horses. I shouldn’t have joined the IWW. I shouldn’t dabble with military miniatures. I shouldn’t follow baseball. I shouldn’t be so “woke.” I should write stuff that will sell. I should but I shouldn’t. Nobody ever happy with what I do.

And it’s me and my books. My Kafka. My Levertov. My Garcia-Marquez. My Walser. My Vian. My Carrington. My Gogol. My Potocki. Belonging nowhere, writing away in obscurity yet always managing to get stuff into print, as mysterious as that may be to some people. Just like all those overnight shifts for years and years living a backward lifestyle on the edges of the real world dodging the night rats feeding at the garbage cans, where my ideas came from in the first place.

Don’t read this wrong - I’m not whining about anything. The truth is I’m satisfied. When I look at the two cultures I seem to sit between there are times I am actually glad I find myself in neither. I can create freely without having to conform to the latest interpretation of the form, inoculated against and far from high hat “isms” and the latest anti-pre-post-faux-modern-ish whatever going on at the moment. And, being retired, I only have to deal with the sad worker bees only when I have to. In the meantime the clock means nothing, and I am master of my time.

I’m also not alone in this. There are many writers and artists in the same boat. So let this insignificant reflection be a solace to all my like fellow travelers.

And may you have a successful New Year. The rest of them can do as they will. We made it this far without them, and their absence proves they added no value to our lives in the first place.

Artwork: Fernand Khnopff, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, 1891