My Life As A Dumbfuck

It’s been confirmed: I’m a dumbfuck. I’ve long suspected that to be the case, but now I know for sure.

Here’s what happened: in an email exchange with a fellow poet, I groused about how a lifelong addiction to poetry was somehow responsible for what has been a very sketchy employment history. I confessed that “if I had pursued another career that paid the rent and medical bills, etc., and wrote poetry on the side simply as a pleasure, then yes, I’d be fulfilled with that. But I didn’t. I gave everything to poetry. When you go that route, validation for that choice becomes important. Recognition for your accomplishments is critical.”

To which he replied: “working at other jobs for a living doesn't mean one hasn't given one's all for poetry.”

Which is a pretty sensible answer. I mean, what was I thinking? I seemed to be claiming some kind of martyrdom that wasn’t really necessary. Why would it be? Who can’t come home from a job and pour a glass of wine and relax a little and then do a little writing in a lyrical vein. Putting words together isn’t that taxing. It’s not like trying to work another shift as a security guard or clerk in a car rental agency in order to pay the rent and have something left over for food, which is what a lot of people have to do nowadays.

But I wasn’t having it. I felt compelled to make an argument in favor of martyrdom. There’s a Charlton Heston in all of us and if I was going to come down from the mountain after talking to a deity in the form of a burning bush I had to make a pretty compelling case to support the clay tablets of my commitment to the high calling of poetry. So I said:

This is true – Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams being the two most famous (& irritating) examples – but what I’m talking about is a concentration on literature to the exclusion of all things else. If poetry became your end all and be all and you couldn’t hold down a job and got fired a lot because all you could think about was doing poetry reading it and writing it and the jobs you did manage to do for a while were all horrible shit jobs that paid a pittance and so you never became financially independent and now your social security checks are dinky and if you didn’t have an understanding partner you’d be out there living in a tent among the homeless. Whereas had I pursued a real career such as law or carpentry I wouldn’t be in this situation.

To which he replied (a few minutes and several stiff martinis later): “Well you dumb fuck didn't your mother advise you to go to Med School! Of course you should have pursued a real career! what was your thinking, or non-thinking, or mid-directed 'concentration’?”

I had to think about that. What, indeed, had I been thinking?

My mother was pretty eager to see me go out in the world and get a decent job and become an autonomous, fully functioning, responsible adult. No mention was made of med school, but she did make an effort to get me out the door and integrated into the work force.

I graduated high school in 1965 and went to visit her in San José, California. After lazing about the apartment for several weeks and showing no indication of a plan to become duly employed or advance myself in the labor market she drove me to the local navy recruitment center hoping I’d join up. I had absolutely no intention of joining the military, but partly out of a spirit of appeasement, and partly out of curiosity, I went along with the charade. The U.S. Navy appeared to her as a safer choice than the army or marines since the country was engaged in a war with Vietnam. Nothing could’ve been more foreign to me then, or now, to hold a rifle, take aim, and shoot someone. Murder them. I had little idea at the time as to what Vietnam was about, but I suspected – quite rightly – that there was something very hideous and evil about it. I wanted no part of it. So that was that. I pretended to be giving it thought, but when several days went by and I was not yet filling out the forms or signing papers to put my ass in the navy for four years, her next choice was decidedly less thrilling. She drove me to a car wash and told me to get out and apply for a job.

Which I did. And I got the job. Which lasted four days, before I quit literally threw in the towel. Every minute I spent wiping down cars was torture. I hated it. I saw very little room for progress in the sudsy sphere of the car wash.

I returned to Seattle and resumed living with my dad and stepmother. They were less patient. They weren’t patient at all. I was home less than a week before I had another job at a car wash.

What is it with car washes? Car washes will pretty much hire anybody. The car wash led to a dead-end job with a funeral home, washing limousines and driving a truck loaded with all the used flowers from the funeral ceremony to the landfill every Friday. That was my favorite job. I got to smoke cigarettes and listen to rock on the radio. I also had a peculiar enjoyment in the landfill. The smell of it was so unique and powerful, and the mountains of trash were fascinating; how long did it take for things to decay? Not long at all, it would seem. I found that strangely comforting. The rabid appetites of the seagulls circling the mayhem of trucks and trash awakened a certain literary perversity in me. It was a place of desolation, but also a place of remnant and remediation, a place where density and form came undone to become something else. I was at the edge of the institutional. I was at the shore of oblivion. I could feel my mind float out of my head and take wing with the seagulls.

I began reading books during my break. The Iliad, Moby Dick, Les Fleurs de Mal.  

I liked books. I felt at home in books. Books seemed to be my true environment, the place where I felt most deeply engaged, but I had not yet consciously decided that I would be a writer. Nothing whatever had congealed in my brain with regard to work. I knew I hated work. My hatred of routine and boredom gave me a foundation, a fertile bed in which to drop some seeds of rebellion. An inchoate idea of the life of the artist began to take root in the lush topsoil of my discontent.

Dirt. I had a short career in dirt. The realtor who sold my parents their house wanted to hire me to spread dirt for a new lawn. So I spent a couple of days plunging a shovel into a big pile of rich black dirt and began spreading it as evenly as I could. I seemed to be doing ok at it, and one day the realtor invited me in to listen to a recording of Adolf Hitler. To this day I don’t know what that was about. Was I supposed to be reacting to how evil it was? The speech was in German. I had no idea what Hitler was going on about. Maybe he was describing the most efficient way to spread dirt. I didn’t know what my reaction was supposed to be, but the man called my parents the next day and told them I was fired. Fired from a job that was only going to last four days, tops, to begin with. It was weird. Some years after, the realtor drove into the Cascade mountains and shot himself. His wife – who had gone missing – was found buried in the lawn. Probably under the same dirt that I had so carefully spread.

Fast forward a few more years and I go looking for employment again after acquiring a bachelor’s degree in English. The degree didn’t work its magic on anyone. People urged me to leave that information out. Nobody was going to hire some guy with an English degree. Too bookish, too dreamy. What I needed to do was go on to get a master’s degree. But I balked at that because it would’ve required loans for a profession - teaching - that was reportedly over-saturated. I didn’t want to be in debt and looking for job. So I decided to try and find a job that I could stick with without wanting to kill myself in the morning. The best I could do was eventually find myself working part time for a mailing service, running letters through a Pitney Bowes machine. I did that for nineteen years.

At no point did I ever think of making a career as a poet. That would’ve been ludicrous. I wanted to be a writer. There were plentiful indications in 1965 that free lance writing could provide a livable income. Hemmingway had only been dead not quite four years. He was still an iconic figure. Being a writer was a respectable profession. People would laugh, or look aside embarrassedly if you announced yourself as a poet. You just didn’t go to social gatherings and say to one and all “hi, I’m a poet.” But you could say “I’m a writer.” That was the equivalent of saying “I’m a doctor.”

But that didn’t pan out either. It took many more years to develop my skill as a writer. And by the time that occurred writing was no longer a viable way to make a living. To become the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling was tantamount to winning the lottery. I would’ve been happy to be the next Richard Brautigan or Tom Robbins or Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski, but those slots eluded me as well.

And so I became a dumbfuck. A guy who publishes books of poetry, writes the occasional review, deposits jeremiads like this on the Internet, and grouses about how tiny my social security check is.

It’s not entirely a matter of income. When I say dumbfuck, I mean it in a literal sense. I’m stupid. It’s why I learned and developed a huge vocabulary: to disguise my essential slowness. If I’m in a room of forty some people all being given a simple set of instructions, I’m the guy that will be looking around in a panic for some clue as to what I’m supposed to be doing while all the others are absorbed in completing their tasks.

Idiot savant, maybe. I’m good at writing, it is a calling, it truly is something I love to do. But I also have a strong memory of my father and I sitting on the kitchen floor (why the kitchen floor I don’t know), my father nearly in tears because I was the only kid in my third grade class who still couldn’t tell time. My father was intent on teaching me. And he got the job done. I finally figured out how to read a clock. And later in life, when I got those shit jobs, looking up at the clock became an obsession. I learned that an hour at a desk writing goes by in a minute, and a minute in a room running letters through a Pitney Bowes machine feels like an eternity.