Well that leaves me. This may be a bit more difficult; it's always harder being objective about oneself. My first impression is that I'm halfway between John and Howard, but as I reflect more, I think I have more in common with John than with Howard.
My upbringing in Fargo, North Dakota, was mostly worry free and fun. My father was a successful lawyer and later an executive, and we had a big white house, a swimming pool, and an embarrassment of belongings––a regular turnstile of new games, books, records, and clothes, nice cars, a motor home, a Triumph Spitfire (for the kids), and we ate steak, it seemed, every night.
My mother was a loving, creative, and intelligent woman who knew how to enjoy life. She held court in our neighborhood; not only all the kids but also their parents ended up in our house. My mother's friends, and later my high-school friends, would sit for hours in our kitchen laughing or baring their souls to her. My father was almost always working, and my mother, although death on feminism, did exactly what she wanted, which included sleeping until noon, spending freely, and living on coffee, cigarettes, and donuts.
The down side of my upbringing was the lack of discipline in our house. My two brothers and I spent most of our childhood running through the neighborhoods, watching TV, gobbling Snickers bars and guzzling sodas, and fighting with each other—both verbally and physically.
I nevertheless managed to stay out of trouble until I got to college. Neither my high school nor my family life had prepared me for the academic rigor I encountered there, and I was flabbergasted to learn that the average student spent 40 – 50 hours a week studying. I couldn't make the switch, and even though I had good grades in high school, now it was all I could do to keep my head above water. Feeling disconnected from both the academic and the social mix at the school (there really wasn't much of the latter), I found my home in the rugby club and threw myself into it heart and soul. By my junior year, I was captain on the field and head clown off, which meant I was drinking heavily, behaving badly, and visiting the dean's office on a regular basis trying to account for our team's outrageous behavior. There was something about the conservative, religious nature of the school that brought out the hellion in me, but of course my behavior was mostly hurting myself, and before long it put me in a downward spiral.
By winter of my junior year, I had worked myself into a deep depression. The pain of that experience surpassed anything I had ever known. I spent a month wandering around campus not knowing what was wrong with me. Late at night I walked over bridges and stared down at the ice, wondering if I would crash through it or merely bounce on the surface and break my bones, or how long it would take me to drown. Eventually I left school and was put on medications. It took me about a year to work my way back to normal, although in the process I had a semester-long relapse of near-insane behavior (think of Fight Club when Bard Pitt lets go of the steering wheel). Like John, I really didn't care whether I lived or died, and to this day, I'm not sure how I got through it all without killing myself or anyone else.
The positive side of the experience was that it forced me to rethink what was most important to me and what I wanted to do with my life. And I concluded that if life held such monsters lurking around its corners, a person would be a fool not to do the one thing he wanted most in life, and in my case, that was writing and telling stories.
Back at school my senior year I met Howard, who at the time was also planning to be a writer. Howard sparked in me a desire to learn where my professors had failed. He seemed to know everything, and he made it all interesting—ironic, entertaining, and relevant rather than sterile and pointless—and he freely interwove philosophy with science, history with art, and literature with psychology. More than anyone else I've known, I owe my lifelong interest in learning to Howard. That spring we both published stories in the school's literary magazine, and over the next summer I started my first novel.
The next ten years I spent writing three novels and working as a room-service waiter at L'hotel Sofitel in Minneapolis. I read everything I could get my hands on and even went back to school to get a master's degree in fiction writing (getting As this time), but in spite of all the hard work and single-minded focus, I couldn't publish a thing. In retrospect, I think I was trying to take on big, earth-shaking themes when didn't have the maturity to pull them off. I would have been much better off writing romances or fantasies, which at the time I thought were beneath me. And then just when I was finally pulling it all together, I gave it up.
I was thirty-two, married, and a new homeowner. Nancy and I wanted children, and I had worked my tail off for ten years with nothing to show for it, not even a resume to help me get a regular job. In the meantime all my buddies had become doctors, lawyers, teachers, or successful businessmen. I came to see the last decade of my life as a waste––the folly of a spoiled young man, and one day in a fit of disgust I burned everything I'd ever written.
That was my second painful transition in life, but it too worked out fine in the end. Eventually I got a job as a marketing-communications writer for a manufacturing company. I was surprised to find the work and the people interesting; it felt good to have a regular paycheck and lose the nagging bitterness of the artist manqué. Nancy and I raised two beautiful girls, and I found I loved being a father more than anything else I had done. I became a dedicated family man, performing my job and household duties to the utmost of my abilities. There isn't much more to tell about this decade of my life; as Tolstoy says, all happy families are alike, and the same is largely true, I think, for individuals.
Then in 1999, two years after I became a middle manager in a stress-ridden corporation, I decided the dual wage-earning model was a bad one for raising a family, so I left my corporate job and started a freelance writing business.
Being a freelancer allowed me to spend more time with my family, but it also had the unintended consequence of allowing me to write fiction once again. Before long I began to play around with the novel that eventually became The Islander, and as time went by, I devoted more and more hours to it each week. Six years later when I finally published it, my freelance business was suffering, and I was tired of the isolation and the never-ending quest for new clients, so I gave it up for another corporate job. But this time I'm not giving up on my own writing. I intend to keep at it, in whatever form possible, until the day I die, and so at 52 I find myself still working toward the same goal I dreamed about at 22 and hoping for that first big break on a novel.
So after writing down this personal history, I have to place my path in life closer to John's than to Howard's, but still somewhere between the two. The shape of the waves our three lives have cast is quite distinct: John's wave is vertical, with soaring peaks and plunging valleys; Howard's is more steady or undulating; and my own has included both peaks and valleys as well as the pleasant stability of Howard's. It's been an interesting run for all three of us, and when we met in Northfield last fall, we could have just as well been 21 again, sitting around in T-shirts, drinking beer, making confessions, and telling stories. For me anyway, life doesn't get any better than that. We all agreed to do it again next year, but this time we're going to ditch the corn dogs and relax full time, either going out to Howard's in Pennsylvania or hitting the streets of New York.
I can hardly wait.
Adventures in corn-dog land
