Something about writing a book without a plan is I have no clue where it is going and how it might end up. Yet, isn't that how life works? For sure, the 22-year-old who entered the University of Alabama School of Law in September 1965 would have freaked out if he knew what lay ahead of him while he was in law school, and if he had known what lay past that, well, he might have taken vows and joined a monastery.
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I majored in Economics and minored in Business Administration at Vanderbilt, because those arenas were related to my father's line of work and I didn't have a clue what else I might want to get involved in after I graduated from college. However, I took several English courses, and by the time I reached my senior year, I had completed most of my required major courses and I filled in my first semester curriculum with a course in the English novel, and in the second semester a course in the American novel. By the time I graduated, I nearly had enough credits for a major in English, and I had a romantic notion of wanting to be a writer. Emphasis on romantic, since there was no way in heaven or hell the Golden Flake heir apparent was going to be another Ernest Hemingway, for example.
Now some students of English writing might say there is a run-on sentence in the previous paragraph, but I might ask them if they ever read William Faulkner's novels, in which some of his sentences run a page or longer? Hemingway would not have been caught dead writing like Faulkner. But then, why should they write alike, when they were two entirely different men from two entirely different backgrounds? Faulkner, from Mississippi; Hemingway, from Illinois. Between Faulkner and Hemingway, I preferred the latter's novels, because I liked reading war stories, and I loved fishing and hunting, which were Hemingway's passions.
When I was a boy, my mother gave me the serial installments of The Old Man and the Sea, which I think were published in Life Magazine? I didn't know anything about Hemingway, had never heard of him, when my mother gave me those installments to read. She didn't know why I loved to fish, but she knew that if I didn't get to fish, that would be really bad for me. I did not yet know the lakes and streams where I fished were churches, and the fish were God, and when the fish had taught me how to fish, they would send me forth to fish for souls.
I reread The Old Man and the Sea during the American novels course at Vanderbilt. I took copius notes to feed back to the professor on the final exam, but I didn't need any notes to remember he said that you know who the bad guy is in a Hemingway novel, because he does not drink. I drank a bit back then. All my friends drank a bit. Sometimes we drank too much, but it didn't take us over like it took over Hemingway.
My senior year in law school, I volunteered to acquire the booze and ice and cups for the traditional 8 a.m. homecoming party in the law school rotunda, with a rock and roll band. All but one law student were male, and the tradition was we all wore morning suits and our wives or girlfriends wore evening gowns.
I drank maybe a half gallon of Bloody Mary's before the party ended and we adjourned to hop onto flatbed trailers pulled by over the road trucks. At the head of the lead trailer sat the law school's sexton before his pump organ, playing what all he knew how to play, That was the law school's contribution to the homecoming parade. That, and the law school's traditional cheers.
"1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 ...10!"
And, "Hidja, hidjja! How'd ya like to bite my ... ass?!"
Hidja had gotten banned the year before by the university administration. However, being clever lawyers to be, we simply chanted "Hidja" up to the last word, which we silently mouthed.
We Hdjaed real good Alabama's governor George Wallace that day. I was on the ground, walking with a couple of other really drunk male law students in morning suits, strutting about and leading cheers, until -
A huge paw grabbed my right shoulder and I turned around and looked up at a giant Alabama State Trooper, who said, "Son, do you want to see that football game today?" I said, "Yes, Sir." I didn't dare not say, "Sir." He said, "Then, get on that trailer!"
I climbed up on the trailer with the other drunk future lawyers of Alabama and their ladies, and all of a sudden the tractors revved their engines, left the parade, and led by a state trooper car with red lights flashing and siren wailing, we were escorted about 50 mph back to the law school, hanging onto each other and the floorboard of the trailer for dear life- there were no side rails, nor anything else to grab.
As if God desired more sport to banish care, the trucks stopped across from a grassy quadrangle where the visiting Mississippi State Bulldogs marching band and majorettes were warming up. Well, what a wonderful opportunity! A few of us really drunk future lawyers of Alabama wandered ourselves right into the midst of those pretty majorettes and were prancing ourselves with them to their band's music. Until -
From across the street came what looked like the entire Alabama Crimson Tide marching band, tubas and saxophones swinging back and forth, to protect the honor of the visiting band and its majorettes from the obnoxiously drunk and presumed highly dangerous future lawyers of Alabama, who immediately turned tail and fled with our ladies to the nearby football stadium.
Now it was long the custom for the law school students to sit on the 50 yard-line in the student section, starting at ground level and going upward. Except, when we arrived at our hallowed reserved seats, there were signs saying, "Reserved for band." Our longstanding legal easement had been stolen without due process. So, what did we do? Possession being 9/10ths of the law, we sat down in our purloined seats and - fine point of law, Hidja had only been banned from the parade. We started chanting Hidja really loud, and we did not omit to say "ass" at the end, which we very definitely wanted the school administration to bite, and we were certain beyond any reasonable doubt that we were really funny and cute.
Then, through the ground entrance of the stadium marched the Alabama band with its tubas and saxes waving back and forth. They marched right to where now about 100 drunk law students and their ladies sat, and in solidarity we law students crossed our arms and did not budge, and that went on a while, and then more drunk law students and their ladies showed up, and we took over the entire reserved band section, and the band about faced and marched toward the end zone and up into empty seats there.
By halftime, I was barely able to sit up straight and my wife drove me home. The next day was not a good day. Then followed several days of my stomach muscles cramping because of drinking way too much tomato juice. I wasn't much of a Bloody Mary fan after that.
The only other time I got that drunk in law school was after a last final exam. I prepared for finals by reading my class notes through three times. The night before a final exam, my wife and I went out for dinner and a couple of beers. I got up the next morning and went to the law school and took that day's exam and came home and started studying again.
There was a bar in Tuscaloosa called The Tide. Some of the Alabama football team star players liked to hang out there, drink beer, play the pinball machines. Such as, Kenny Stabler, who would go on to become a star professional football quarterback After the last final exam, me and a law school buddy, who was an Auburn graduate, liked to sit in the Tide and drink beer and talk with the star football players. Until we were smozzeled. Then, our wives came and got us and took us home.
Perhaps if I had drunk more beer and whiskey at Vanderbilt and in law school at Alabama, I would have been a lot more successful lawyer, and later as a writer? I wonder, because later in my lawyer life, I attended a few Birmingham Bar Association parties and saw some of that city's finest lawyers drinking as if there was no tomorrow, and I went on some so-called continuing legal education ski junkets out west, and I saw plenty of booze flowing, but by then my gut was ailing so bad, I was only a shadow of my former law school booze guzzling self.
While in law school, I read Carlos Baker's book about Ernest Hemingway. That's how I learned Hemingway had ended up blowing out his brains with his favorite double-barreled shotgun, to save himself from being locked up on a psych ward and dying of brain cancer there. All things considered, I thought Hemingway took the noble way out.
Baker came out with a second book, which contained a collection of Hemingway's handwritten letters. One letter to Hemingway's editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner & Sons, remains with me to this day. Hemingway was not happy that William Faulkner was getting so much attention. Another letter that remains with me to this day, was Hemingway was adamant that his latest manuscript was perfect. Every word, every comma, every period, was perfect. It should ot be changed in anyway. Several other letters caused me to tell my Vanderbilt sweetheart that Hemingway was an asshole. I lost interest in him. It never occurred to me that he and I might be somewhat alike.
During the latter stages of writing THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A New Approach to Legal Problems, I hired a book editor in Birmingham, who also was a published author. She helped me organize the book somewhat better and also write better. She told me about an upcoming writer's conference at Birmingham Southern College, which had a stellar arts and sciences reputation. She asked if I would like to be one of the presenters, since I already had three books published? HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the Slaughter?; SELLING YOUR HOME $WEET HOME; and KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? A Client's Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers?. Editors certainly had helped me improve those books. I said, yes, even though I didn't have a clue what I might present at the conference. I had attended a short story fiction writing course in Birmingham before writing the three books, which some people tried to pretend were fiction.
I was living in Boulder, Colorado then. In my living room one day, I wondered out loud to myself what I had signed myself up for? What would I talk about at the writers conference? Out of the blue, Writing as a mystical experience came into my thoughts. Neat, I thought. That's right up the new book's alley. The new book still being written and refined with the editor's help. But, I wondered out loud, what would I actually talk about? Then, as if a light switch was thrown, I was looking at The Old Man and the Sea in a very different way.
The old man was Hemingway far along in years. The boy was the young Hemingway, who had not spent much time with his father, and did not get invited to go out fishing with the old man that day in Cuba. The great blue marlin the old man hooked into with a dead fish for bait using a handline supported by a windlass mounted in the boat was the manhood Hemingway still was trying to prove to himself, thus to his father. The sharks that came to the old man's boat and started chomping away at the great fish lashed to the side of the old man's boat were his rejected feminine, his yin, getting her revenge by leaving uneaten only the head and the tail of the fish, and its skeleton. The last novel Hemingway completed, The Old Man and the Sea was his unconscious suicide note.
The first day of the writer's conference I was assigned a classroom and about 10 people showed up. They seemed to have no interest in my presentation outlined above. Nor in my suggesting that what an author writes about, first is about the author, whether the author believes it or not. The next day, I was assigned the main auditorium and had all the participants in the workshop in front of me. Again, there seemed to be no interest in my topic and The Old Man and the Sea analogy. I was stumped. Then, someone in the audience asked me what I did about writer's block? I said I didn't get writer's block. When I had something to write, I had to write it. When I didn't have something to write, I did something else. Maybe I could have heard a pin drop. I asked if they had read books about writing, in which they were told to sit in front of their typewriter so many hours a day, no matter if they wrote nothing? Some nodded, yes.
A fellow up in the back of the auditorium, with whom I had gone to high school, who did well in an English literature course and was a Golden Gloves champion and later became a lawyer, gave me a thumbs up. When I moved back to Birmingham in 1995, after the Boulder adventure played out and left me a bit disheveled, I reconnected with that fellow. We had a few visits. He had remarried and was still pushing himself hard. I gave him a copy of THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD, which led to some discussions. I finally suggested he try to go more with the flow and less with trying to make things happen. I didn't see or hear of him for a long while.
My life changed dramatically, because I ran out of money, which might, or might not, be another story to tell in this book. The novel, HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale fell out of me in about six weeks' time, after I had a dream in Key West of a street performer I had met there, which suggested I was going to be doing some kind of street performance. A few days later, I met that street performer again, in Helen, Georgia, where he lived and worked during the warm months. Upon learning I had written books, he asked if I had ever written a novel? I said I had written three novels. He said he had long had a great idea for a novel, did I want to hear it? I said, yes. He told me his idea and asked if I could write that novel? I said, sure, I had lived half of the story the year before. But I had no computer. He said the Helen Library had computers.
We went to the library and I was given permission to write the novel on one of their computers. A story about a very good Birmingham trial lawyer fate dealt a really bad hand, and he got so drunk on tequila that he became catatonic and ended up on a psych ward, and then God, or Something, came along and turned that lawyer (and some other people) upside down and inside out and every which a way but loose in ways I doubt Mississippi lawyer/novelist John Grisham could ever imagine before or after he was born again.
Around the time I finished writing HEAVY WAIT, I met a man living in Helen, who turned out to be an old friend of my brother Major, who also went to law school and later tried his hand at practicing law. I told my new acquaintance about the novel, which I felt God wrote and I went along for the ride. My new acquaintance said he wanted to read the manuscript. I gave him a disk holding the manuscript and he copied the disk and printed out the manuscript and read it and said he really liked the story.
He made more copies and sent one to a Jewish fellow in Birmingham, with whom I went to grammar school. He and other boys in my class had teased and sometimes hazed me. Much later, he became an evangelical Christian. He told Major's old friend to tell me that he really regretted being so mean to me, and I told Major's old friend to tell him that I said he would have to apologize to Jesus about that, after he died and went to heaven😎.
Major's old friend found me one day and said the Jewish evangelical couldn't relate to the novel and gave the manuscript to a lawyer friend, who happened to be my old high school friend, who became a lawyer and gave me a thumbs up at the Birmingham Southern writers conference. Major's old friend said my old high school friend was boxing at a gym in Birmingham and his much younger sparring partner hit him hard in his heart. His doctor told him to take it easy and let his heart heal, but he went to the YMCA and got on the running track and had a heart attack and died and left his new wife and their new baby behind. I asked Major's old friend if maybe I should not share HEAVY WAIT with anyone else? He seemed a bit spooked. Hell, I was spooked.
What was it Jesus said in the Gospels about lawyers?
Luke 11:52“Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered.
I wonder right now if booze was God's back up plan for killing all the lawyers Jesus could not heal?
As for the writer's haven Key West, when I lived there, I wrote a lot on blogs and had some truly exciting poetry fall out of me, but I never wrote a book there. I grew totally intolerant to booze there. One glass of red wine over dinner made my liver howl the next day and my gut behaved like it hated me. So, my drinking days ended in a city where boozing is the national pastime.
An annual celebration in Key West, called Hemingway Days, consists of lots of old white men with white Hemingway-ish beards, wearing fancy fishing outfits, drinking a whole lot of booze, hoping to win the Hemingway look-alike contest. Sometimes people told me I should enter the contest, I might win. I said that wasn't going to happen. Because, I did not drink, and I knew how to fish and write, and the Hemingway wannabes did not.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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