A Forsley Feuilleton: I Gave Up The Roadwork Of The Fight-Game For The Drinking Of The Lit-Game – Act Two

Those poets, the young happy rich people dressed like old sad poor people, spoke the truth:  after I moved from Phoenix to San Francisco and gave up the roadwork of the fight-game for the drinking of the lit-game, the only laws I had to abide by were those of unproductivity and degeneracy.  I joined a literary colony. . . I mean a literatty colony, and its members – those scavengers crawling through San Francisco’s dark alleys in search of nourishing sins and sonnets – not only disregarded but actually applauded my pale malnourished body covered in tattoos, varicose veins, and bleeding moles.  And I prospered because San Francisco is a giant dumpster filled with every rotting delicacy a scavenging rat-bastard desires – and so it inspires.

It didn’t inspire me to write.  It inspired me to drink every night in a different bar and scribble a different illegible line on a different napkin.  Then, at the end of every week, I’d pick one of the napkins – the most legible – and take it to San Francisco’s best open-mic.  The best open-mic in this city isn’t the run-away borstal boy with a talent for revealing his homosexual desires that the Catholic Church of his homeland once suppressed. No, no, no – the best open-mic in San Francisco is on the corner of 16^th and Mission where, every Thursday night, us literatty members of the literati take turns celebrating our degeneracy and uproductivity by ranting into the dense layer of fog that surrounds and protects us from the more noble rodents of the world – the destructive squirrels and gluttonous hamsters, but also the brain-washed rats that ignore their scavenger instincts and instead race other brain-washed rats through a maze for a single piece of cheese that, by the time one of them gets it, is moldy.

One night, after ranting at 16^th and Mission like a Schizophrenic with a revoked library card, I went to a bar to further celebrate my degeneracy and unproductivity. At first it was just me, a Mexican named Jose, and a Tennessean named Jack.  We stayed up late discussing our novel ideas that weren’t novel and praising the Beats that weren’t praiseworthy, because the jukebox didn’t have any Wu-Tang.  Then a Captain Morgan joined us with his first-mate, a Royal Beefeater.  And by the time a pickled Russian whose named I couldn’t pronounce came along, a Wild Turkey and a Grey Goose were flying into my head, over and over, warning me to get out.

So, with my head pounding like the praiseworthylessness of the Beats, I got out of that bar and found a nice corner of public property to piss on – a San Francisco tradition up there with eating crabs for Thanksgiving and trading crabs for crack – and I bled instead of pissed. My damaged kidney and I went to the Emergency Room without insurance and left the Emergency Room without ignorance: I realized I was an amateur, financially but also physically and intellectually.  I was drinking too much and writing too little.  If I had been playing the fight-game instead of the lit-game, I would have been fighting with headgear on in three-round unpaid and unpublicized fights. . . which would have been fine, for everyone has to start at the bottom, if I wasn’t already halfway through my twenties.  Mike Tyson knocked Trevor Berbick out and became a World Champion at nineteen.   Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise and became a best-selling author at twenty-three.  I was doing something wrong.

And I knew what I was doing wrong: I was acting irregular and disordered in my life, like a good fuckup, so that I could be passive and unoriginal in my work. . . when I should have been doing what Gustave Flaubert told me to do:  “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”  Every good writer understands this, as does every good boxer.  If I wanted to dance on the page like Muhammad Ali danced in the ring, I had to start training and living like ‘The Greatest’. . . because writing, like boxing, is a craft, a labor.  It’s not an inspirational moment that strikes like lighting.  A writer can’t sit in a metal chair on top of the tallest apple tree in the wettest orchard his whole life, even if he does have an unlimited supply of cider.

A writer, like a prize-fighter, needs to have disciple: he has to stay in shape, always ready to write, just as a boxer is always ready to fight.  I’m not saying a writer has to do roadwork like a Catholic in Ireland running from British Soldiers looking for something to smoke, or like a Mexican in Arizona running from Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his stagecoach full of pink underwear.  But I am saying that there’s a physical quality to writing that can’t be ignored.  I guess if you’re a poet you can ignore it just like you ignore your kidney’s pleas of mercy, the persuasive calls of Capitalism, the rules of grammar, and The Girlfriend’s requests of hygiene – but you can’t ignore that physical quality to writing if you want to accomplish anything besides pissing out blood, living off a burrito a day, writing run-on sentences, and giving The Girlfriend bladder infections.  Writing is like fighting, and to get intellectual, you have to get physical. . .