Courtesy of the artist and Durham Press. I was born in Kentucky in I lived and worked there for twenty-seven years before moving to Boston. My immediate forebears were a mechanic, a schoolteacher, a butcher, a factory hand, a tenant farmer, and a seamstress. In Kentucky, I was an exterminator. I was a janitor. I parked cars. Now I write handbooks for the molecular biology department at Harvard.
But after seeing some of your inventions, it was well worth it! Muhammad Ali was born in Kentucky, too—in Louisville, my hometown. His real name was Cassius Clay, the wino said. Ali is a symbol. Myth is truer than fact. I moved to Boston to attend a writing program. I spent most of my time getting drunk and getting divorced. I had—several, with real books from real publishers. The bars are full of thwarted talents large and small, mostly small. Where I was from, poetry was books nobody checked out of the library and schizoid bums yowling about their aluminum-foil hats.
How about those other writers in the program? San Francisco. New Jersey. Salt Lake City. South Africa. New York City. In Boston, my wife was crying, thwarted, cheated—but the man behind the bar was always glad to see me and my big dumb wallet. We sat at a long table in the corner. Undergraduates and junior faculty alike took turns hitting on the few women among us. There was a dartboard near the single bathroom.
Soon came the dreaded thrill of shop talk. By now he was skipping whole assignments. It struck him as the most difficult, painful thing in the world. People at universities are always finding things like that.
Or being struck by them. No, I said, telling the necessary lie: maybe it would come true. It was hard work, I said, but I loved it, and I was glad to be some kind of writer in the big city. He sneered. He was a great sneerer, that one. A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people, he said.
