Tap The Well
I first tried to write— I mean, tried to write as if I were a sage, someone outside myself —when I heard Jim Morrison’s “End of the Night.” I was twelve years old. This was a catalytic event for me because hearing Jim’s voice and hearing him use words that I had never heard before or in ways and combinations I had never encountered before meant that I too could go into places I didn’t know existed. Dark places. Places my parents and teachers wouldn’t think to go and wouldn’t want me to go.
Why was this important to me? I don’t know. Anymore than I know why it was so important to me to start growing my hair long. Part of it, I suppose, was to identify with the hippies, the rebels of our culture. In a way, I imagine I wanted to “get back at” those who had made fun of me or snubbed me. It was my way of saying, “you can’t hurt me, but I can hurt you.” Not physically, necessarily, but scare you.
What wound up happening, though, was that the words began to take on a life of their own. New meanings, new power. New places. I discovered that I could take myself anywhere I wanted to go, with anyone I wanted to go with. I didn’t need to use words to defend myself or attack others; I just used them to make myself happy. If I wanted to travel, I wrote about places I wanted to be, or wished I could be, sometimes where I had already been. If I wanted a girl to love me, or if I yearned for a romantic adventure in a faraway land or in some exotic location, I simply wrote the words down and it happened. I was there.
What happened after that was kind of a blur. I remember one of the very first stories I ever wrote— I think it was in Mrs. Joyce’s ninth grade Creative Writing class —called “The Egg That Ate the Earth.” I don’t recall too many details about the story other than it had something to do with a laboratory and me developing, or someone developing, a formula of some kind that when poured over an object, would cause it to rapidly grow, exponentially. I also recall that one of the lab workers was having breakfast in the lab and, I think, either left his plate of sunny-side-up eggs unattended near this concoction, or accidentally spilled some on his plate. In any case, the end result was that the plate of sunny-side-up eggs instantly began to grow and expand until they took over the entire room, then the building, then the town, then the countryside, and eventually, began to consume great swaths of land in all directions. I don’t remember anything else about the story after that— I either have a visual in my mind or I actually tried to draw a scene from it on a sheet of notebook paper —but I’m no artist. Still, the image is as fresh in my mind now as it was fifty years ago.
The story, of course, was a silly one— the goofy musings of a high school freshman —but it bothers me nonetheless that somewhere in the years that passed, I lost it. I can imagine being embarrassed enough by it, though, that I might have thrown it away, but I hope not.
It’s these moments, such glimpses into the past, that keep me going; they are what propel me around each corner, just curious enough, stubborn enough, to dare to take a look at what’s coming next. They define, in small ways, who and what I am. It was a silly, immature story for sure, but it was my story. It may have been my final attempt to tap into that underground aquifer that is my imagination. I’m not always sure the water is potable, but is always flowing.
May your well, too, never run dry.
