WHEN THE WORDS BECOME BREATH
or A FIRST NOVEL, WRITTEN IN DARKNESS
My last quarter of high school – when everyone else was enjoying their college laurels or goofing off – I got hit by a depression of the deep dark kind. Not my first midnight or my last, but definitely one of the worst. On the outside I appeared somewhat functional – I was still going to my job, something that never stopped no matter what (the immigrant in me the last thing to die) – but on the inside, hell reined in ways I still have trouble communicating. But who, having endured such extremity, ever really figures out how to speak of it?
Some might. Just not me.
What matters here: for half a year that abyss had me. A radiant despair that devoured all light, all joy, all possibility. I stopped going to school, stopped reading, stopped listening to music, stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons, stopped talking beyond the necessary. Just lay in bed in my basement and drifted in the dark sea of my dark thoughts. Not a lot the people around me could do. My campesina mother had her own worries (plenty of them actually) and what did she know about mental health? Nothing at all, really. My friends were busy finishing high school and then leaving for college, and no one at my job seemed to notice how unhinged I was becoming – it wasn’t that kind of job. As long I showed up on time and could lift the pool tables, no one cared about anything else.
Some weeks time slowed to a crawl. Some weeks time did not exist at all. I kept ending up in my mother’s bedroom where she stored the firearms my father had left behind. Took it upon myself to keep them cleaned. Just in case.
And then, incredibly, it was September and I was still alive. And because I was still alive, I found myself facing some choices. I could start taking night classes at the only school that had accepted me (Kean College) or I could stay in the basement and complete my descent into the abyss. All my friends had already left for basic training or Rutgers, where I hadn’t gotten in despite wanting it badly, and now the only way I was going to get Rutgers was to kick ass at Kean for a year.
Maybe it was the long-held dream of Rutgers, or maybe the depression had let up a notch, but whatever the reason I found myself barely pulling my shit together for classes. Everything was late paperwork-wise but Kean let me start anyway. Simpler days. I didn’t think I was going to make it to my first class, but I did. And the next one and the next one. Maybe it was enough like work. Maybe I wanted it. Hard to know amidst all that gloom. Hell still had dominion and I had to fight myself tooth and claw to make it to classes, to resist craziness. Which should have been enough for anyone, but clearly not for me.
About two weeks into the semester and in the middle of that no-holds-barred psychic lucha libre, I decided to write a novel.
Why was that something I felt compelled to do with my dwindling energies? In all honesty: no fucking idea. I mean I loved reading with all my heart, sure, but I had never written more than long letters to my military friends and my brother during his hospital stays. Maybe a way to fill the loneliness, to keep all my hours from turning to midnight. Maybe it was my obsession with Stephen King, whose books I kept turning over in my head throughout the dark depression.
Best guess is that I needed something to hang onto, something less abstract, more personally serious than school or work. I must have been afraid that if I didn’t do something serious that 9mm under my mother’s bed would become less a lure and more a mandate.
Whatever it was sparked me. I started writing a novel – in the Kean library before class. In the parking lot after work. In my basement late into the night. A total Stephen King pastiche titled Gloria. Gloria was set in Australia (read: the Dominican Republic) and dealt with a group of loser kids fighting an ancient possessing spirit that has taken over one of their stepmoms, the eponymous Gloria. Sounds a little like IT, my one Army buddy wrote me in a letter.
A lot like IT, actually.
I wrote, even though I didn’t know jack shit about writing short stories, much less writing novels. I’d had exactly one creative writing class in high school and was so busy obsessing on Frank Miller and Alan Moore that I didn’t learn much. And this was the late 80s, before everything had been professionalized, before National Write a Novel in a Month, before MFAs were everywhere. There were no online resources. Shit, there was no online. I did what I could with what I had. I was like the alien Talosians in that original Star Trek episode who, having no concept of human anatomy, pieced the damaged human Vina back together the best they could. At least what the Talosians produced was unlovely but alive – which was more than I could say for what I was writing.
I spent close to eight months on that book, and man o man was it bad. No surprise, really. I wasn’t Christopher Paolini or Zadie Smith – had zero literary precocity and for some reason the reading I had done all my life – and it was a lot of reading – wasn’t translating into good writing.
Looking back on it now, it was a fascinating struggle – one of those hope against negativity type things. These days diversity is a commodity and immigrant writers of color are lauded before they even publish a book – not in 1988. No one thought that my Dominican ass writing a novel was a good idea. Dique writing a book, my family snickered. They thought it a hoot.
It seemed a lost cause. But so did my life. And because I had nothing else to cling to, I kept at it. I wrote, and when I was stuck I read. A lot of Stephen King and a lot of Margaret Mahy who I discovered at the Kean library. I wasn’t exactly alive but I wasn’t dead either.
I wrote every day for seven months and then the letter arrived in the mail announcing that I’d been accepted to Rutgers. Somewhere in that furor scribendi I had found time to apply for a transfer – nowhere else, only Rutgers. You would have thought I’d won a Nobel or gotten into MIT. It was the first time I’d been happy in years. That letter was enough to finish what the writing started. Pulled me from the brink of midnight, from the shore of oblivion.
Funny thing about the novel. I put it down. Didn’t try to write anything that ambitious until years later. Stuffed the manuscript in a box, which I thought I lost during my many moves, and then a few year ago my friend Brian found some shit I’d stored at his house that we’d both forgotten.
Inside was the first chapter of Gloria. All in longhand.
They say even when a piece of writing fails, you learn from it. That writing bad helps you to write well. That even a failed project will teach you perseverance and the rhythm of the work. When I reflect on that first attempt at a novel, caught up as it was in so much despair, in so much numbness, I’m not sure I learned anything at all from the process. In fact, the failure and some of the habits I picked up hit me at a very vulnerable moment, seemed to teach me a lot of wrong lessons that I’m still trying to unlearn today.
But you know what – that’s alright, really. Everything you write doesn’t have to be additive or instrumental, fuel for an eventual phoenix event. Sometimes what we write teaches us nothing or close to nothing, budges the needle of our talent not at all. Sometimes we write just because it helps us to stay alive, the words becoming breath.
This so resonates with me. In a dark and hostile medical school environment I wrote a bad novel, all in long hand. Someone who to this day remains a friend, forty-plus years later, read it and told me that it was the foundation for something yet to come. I burned it. And things, albeit small, have indeed come since.
This is such a beautiful and inspiring piece. For me, it's about the power and alchemy of creating and how when we focus our energy on what we truly love (which is not necessarily the same as being easy or even at times enjoyable) magic happens.