Every neighborhood has ‘The Crazy Guy’ (in fact, I think Los Angeles has 1.5 million of them). My neighborhood’s ‘Crazy Guy’ is a late-night loiterer at the convenience store where I buy my cigarettes. He’s six feet tall, beer-and-cigarettes skinny, has a beard that would make ZZ Top weep with envy and a cowboy hat bigger than Texas. I see him three or four nights a week, and we’ve got that odd kind of camaraderie that comes about whenever two people frequent the same establishment: we see each other, we nod, we say hello, and then we go our separate ways. It’s a ritual, a constant; I know he’ll be there whenever I go to pick up cigarettes in the middle of the night, just like I know the late-night clerk will have a pack waiting on the counter for me before I even step foot inside the door. We’re all denziens of the same little 1200 square foot, midnight sphere of existence.
Tonight, as I was standing in line behind him and waiting for him to pay for his beer (Budweiser in a can, and he always asks for a plastic bag instead of the standard-issue brown paper), the clerk mentioned to him that I’m a writer. It struck me as odd that he’d even remember that about me until I got outside and Crazy Guy (C.G. for short) approached me and said, “I’m a writer too.”
As open-minded as I try to be, my first instinct was to give a little internal snort of disbelief. But I was feeling charitable and uncharacteristically talkative, so I humored him and asked him what genre he writes. According to C.G., he cut his teeth on the likes of Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, with a side order of Ginsberg and, more recently, Chuck Palahniuk. Color me intrigued.
Whether C.G.’s story is true or not is really anyone’s guess. For all I know, I might go there tomorrow night and he might tell me he was once a fighter pilot, or a secret service agent, or a bank teller. Either way, something about him made me want to listen to what he had to say, so I sat down on the hood of my car and said, “Yeah?”
And the song goes like this: C.G. was an only child with divorced parents. Mommy was a nurse and Daddy was a mechanic. Somewhere between teenage angst and twenty-two with a mid-life crisis, he stumbled across beat poetry and marijuana. After two summers of helping his dad restore a ‘57 Chevy and sneaking cigarette-and-poetry breaks behind the garage, C.G. developed, “…a little bit of craziness and an obsession with being a writer.” Unfortunately, he never got any of his original work published. After having two novels rejected by publishers, he got into ghost writing for not-so-notable people (”B-list actors, washed-up politicians, you know– you should see the shit they write, then give me and want me to clean up the mess.”) Between that and the mechanic work he does on the side, he can afford to pay the bills, keep his kitchen stocked with beer and cigarettes, and spend every night hunched over the old typewriter in his bedroom.
I listened to the story, and the whole time, I was looking at him– dirty hair, dirty clothes, beer in one hand and cigarette in the other, both making arcs through the air while he talked– and I was thinking oh fuck, this could be me. In twenty years, I could be The Crazy Lady. And that’s when I realized something: C.G. is happy. He doesn’t care that his pants have grease stains on them or that his cowboy hat is lopsided, and he doesn’t care that people think he’s crazy because “…life is a lot more fun when people think you’re nuts.” None of that matters because he’s happy.
Then C.G. asked what I write, and I told him. I write sci-fi, I write erotica, I write horror, I write fan fiction– I just write. I write, and I write, and I think about people like Nabokov and Alan Moore, who weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, to push the red button, to cross the line and then saunter away from the mess they made, laughing and flipping the bird. And I think yeah, that’s what I want to do, that’s what I want to be. No Dickens or Hemmingway here, man. (”Fuck Dickens and Hemmingway,” C.G. said. “Hunter S. Thompson and Alan Ginsberg, now they were visionaries.”)
And by the time we were finished, and I got back into my car to drive away, I’d learned more in the span of a fifteen-minute conversation than I would have if I’d spent hours studying the subject of life:
1) Always carry a miniature tape recorder, because you never know when you’ll stumble across a midnight messiah in tattered jeans and a lopsided cowboy hat.
2) Writing isn’t about how many books you’ve published or how many zeroes there are on your royalty checks. It’s part of you; it’s under your skin, throbbing hard and furious in your veins, dancing behind your eyelids whenever you close your eyes.
3) If I’m looking at my future whenever I look at C.G., then I think maybe, just maybe, I’m okay with that.
