The Next Great American Novel

Part II
The Next Great American Novel  

Dad once said to me, “Stay in school, Jim. Learn as much as you can. Figure out what small ways you can make this world a better place and how to be happy with that. You’ll never be rich or famous. Most grownups hate their jobs - that’s why they call it ‘work.’ If you can find something you like doing every day and you can make a living doing it, you’ll be ok. Maybe you’ll get lucky, but most of us can only dream of that. You’ve already got it pretty good. Learn to be happy with what you have.”   

Other parents just told you things like, “You can be anything you want to be if you put your mind to it and work hard. Go to college, get a degree, and you’ll succeed.”

Nobody had other ambitions beyond the typical American dream. Graduate high-school, go to college, get a job, make money, get married, have kids and a house in the suburbs and two cars. Go on a vacation once a year and work until retirement age. Then hope you die in your sleep before you lose your mind or can’t wipe your own ass anymore and you get put into a nursing home.

Adults used to just repeat to us kids over and over again that if we worked hard we’d get ahead. We could be anything we wanted with enough hard work. It sounded simple enough, because, as it turns out, it was absolute bullshit. They must have known that, right?

If hard work really got you everything you wanted in life, most of the people living in poverty would be millionaires, and most of the millionaires would probably starve to death. As it would turn out later, all college meant for a lot of people in my generation was about 20 years of student loan payments, and, with a bit of luck, a job in a cubicle somewhere that allowed you to just barely stay current on your monthly bills.

Most people these days job hopped and wouldn’t stay with the same employer for even 5 years. Gone were the days of everyone working at the same place every day for 30 years, but management still loved to tell everyone how much we were like family. I assumed they all came from broken homes.

My old man knew better, but he also knew that even the over-looked little guys could make some difference. He wasn’t interested in just going through the motions. He didn’t want end up working some boring job, living paycheck to paycheck, doing the normal and expected things, and tuning out the rest of world because his own problems were already enough to worry about.

He just never figured out how to escape the cycle himself. He wasn’t interested in college and instead had gone straight off to work in a factory. He thought he could work hard and eventually buy his way to happiness, but as the years went on, he became bitter and unfulfilled. The 1980’s had been rough. He’d been in and out of several jobs after being downsized twice.

My mother was about as opposite of that as possible. Outwardly she was always a very cheerful, happy woman. She told us, “Since I was a little girl, I never wanted anything other than to be a mother, staying at home, cooking and cleaning the house, taking care of my family.” She didn’t agree with feminism and women going out and getting careers. She was a 1950’s housewife decades too late. There were times where it might have been a big help if she had a job and brought in additional income, but to her, her place was at home.

My brother and I assumed this was how most women were. Our friend’s moms in the neighborhood mostly didn’t work either and were at home watching their kids after school, cooking dinners, doing the laundry, waiting on their husbands like servants. Waiting on their children like an overworked cleaning, food, and taxi service.

Scott and I were wholly unprepared for independent living as young adults, or for the reality that most women we would meet wanted to be nothing like our mother. When I first moved out, I realized very quickly that all I knew how to cook was scrambled eggs, grilled cheese, Spaghetti O’s, boxed Mac and Cheese, and Ramen Noodles. If I had a gas grill I could cook a hamburger or a hot dog or a steak.

Mom did my laundry until I was 19 and I started renting my first apartment with a couple buddies near campus. I think she did my brother’s laundry until he was damn near 30. Even after he finally moved out he’d bring over baskets of dirty clothes for my mother to wash and fold for him.

A man with no motivation won’t ever do anything for himself until he’s got no other options. Or at least a man like my brother.

Our Dad was a lot different in that respect. He had motivation to spare. He could never sit still, but he was also plenty happy to have a traditional wife who felt like being Suzy homemaker. He went from living with his mother to living with a woman who cooked and cleaned and took care of the kids and the “woman” stuff. It allowed him to build things or work on “man” projects and complain about having to do all the heavy lifting on his own. He was never challenged on gender roles and never seemed to give that much thought.

Mom was always there - sometimes annoyingly so. Dad? Occasionally we wouldn’t see him for days, because of shift work. Then he’d be home and he’d either lay back in his chair watching reruns on TV and falling asleep or he’d be off in the garage or basement, sawing, hammering, painting a motorcycle for side cash - whatever the latest project was.

My Mother would often tell us boys to go help Dad work on one of his projects. He wasn’t good at taking time to explain what he was doing or why. He mostly barked orders to us or told us to get out of his way. My brother took it better than I did - I could tell when I wasn’t wanted, and would head off to play with my toys or read. Because of this, I was never really taught how to be handy or work with tools. I had to learn that all later on as an adult, and I still prefer to hire out work when I can afford it rather than bother with it myself.

Dad seemed to know he wasn’t the most attentive father and so from time to time he would try to make up for it. He’d get down on the carpet to play with me or ask me about how school was going. We’d go out in the yard and throw a ball around. Sometimes we’d even play 3 man baseball games with my brother - Dad would be the permanent pitcher. He also seemed to like Legos. Maybe because it was all about building things.

He had a hard time expressing it, but he loved us and wanted good for us. He wanted us to have a better, happier life. To keep moving up the economic ladder and to go places and do things that he’d never get to do himself.

My Dad seemed to envy anyone who found a career or job that they genuinely enjoyed and even more so if they felt that through their work they were making some sort of difference. Helping other people or pushing the world towards a better future somehow. The idea of public service was something he could appreciate. It probably made getting out of bed on Monday mornings seem a little more worth it.

Dad would drop hints at me all the time about becoming a teacher some day. “Summers off doesn’t sound so bad, huh? Not a bad retirement plan either.” I never liked bureaucracy or rules enough to believe I could do it. I was pretty sure I’d end up getting fired. If nothing else I feared slipping up and swearing in class.

When I’d argue with my parents, Dad would suggest I consider law school. I knew lawyers were generally detested by our society and I hated liars. I suppose I might have liked being one of those lawyers who works pro-bono and takes up good causes, but I couldn’t picture myself hanging around courtrooms and wearing a suit all the time either.

Dad used to bitch about engineers incessantly. He was convinced that engineers went to college to get dumber. He hated over complication and what he said was a lack of common sense. They could think it up but they’d never have to work on it themselves, so why try to make it easier for anyone to repair things? I had always done well in Math classes and got to be friends with a few guys who were planning to go to college for mechanical engineering. I thought maybe I could make a little difference and be a better engineer - one people like my old man would approve of.

I got interested in manufacturing and automation and ended up in the engineering department of a large machine shop with a side ambition to be a writer. I wrote a few unfinished short stories inspired by things that happened at work. Quite a few of the machinists and maintenance guys served as great inspiration for characters I’d come up with, and I was fairly certain even if I ever got published they’d never read my stuff and figure out who was really who.

I’d taken an interest in writing fairly early on in my life. I tried to write a few stories but I usually never finished them. In high-school I got into poetry, but my poems weren’t very good. I liked novelists better anyway, and I thought I might like to be one some day.

Anyone’s life could make a good story if you told it right. I’d thought once if I could somehow fit all of my life exactly as it was into a story, maybe I could write out the next great American novel. I never had much luck. The concept sounded great when I was 16, but as I got older and life got crazier I wasn’t sure anybody could ever sum it all up into one book, or even a thousand books.

My parents weren’t real supportive of the whole writing idea and had insisted I go to college for a real job that could actually make me some money. I still wonder sometimes how many creative people were steered away from their true callings by people in their life with good intentions who were simply trying to save them from a life of heartbreak and poverty. Musicians, artists, actors, writers - all dreamers in increasingly difficult careers to make a living at.   

So, I wrote in my free time, mostly to escape into my own little made up worlds. Even if the fictional world was awfully close to my own reality, I had far more power to change things in the fictional world. It was the same kind of escape into fantasy that I had reading or playing and using my imagination as a kid. Sometimes writing was kind of like therapy for me. It was sure cheaper.

I was also too afraid of rejections to send my writing to any publishers. Whatever the reasons, I enjoyed writing, and felt no reason to let anyone else ruin it for me by telling me I wasn’t any good at it. I wrote for myself, because I couldn’t seem to go long without writing at least something. Occasionally I’d let some friends read a little of it, but I hadn’t had any constructive feedback since I took a creative writing elective back in college.

Sometimes I posted rants on social media and I got some decent response from those. Some friends would tell me I should try being a real writer. (They meant one who got paid for writing.) If they thought I could hack it, that was good enough for me. It was safe. It allowed me to believe I could be a writer if I wanted to be. Maybe I already was, just as much as someone who paints with oils on a canvas as a hobby is still an artist.

On a bad day at work, I’d think about how I could have been writing and trying to make a name for myself instead of screwing around with problems I didn’t really care about anymore and playing around with CAD. If I never even tried to get published, I could never fail, and then I could blame all the time spent in my engineering job and the burn out from that on why I’d never seriously pursued writing.

I did manage to make a very respectable living as an engineer. I always had nice cars and a nice house and all the material possessions I wanted within reason. I got to travel and take my wife and kids on some really great vacations. Money can’t buy you happiness, but it sure as hell doesn’t hurt.

Still, there was always something missing. Something that drove me to sit at the keyboard for hours in my free time, banging out pages and pages I wasn’t even sure I’d ever show another living soul. I didn’t care as much about success or trying to write the next great American novel anymore. I didn’t even think about writing a great email at work. Most people didn’t read them all the way through anyway.

I didn’t really like my career most of the time, but I was good at it and I wasn’t sure what else to do. I’d already spent two decades of my life in engineering, paying off my student loans and trying to be happy with what I had. The easy path was to stick things out until I could afford to retire. I was caught in the cycle, just like my old man, and countless other working stiffs.

My story became like my Dad’s story and just like millions of other people’s stories. There is really nothing unique or great about it, which is why it somehow seems worth telling. Forget fame and the next great American novel. One day I’d just like to finish a halfway decent story.