The Autodidact.

The Autodidact

by james bezerra

I used to press my ear to the telephone pole out in front of the house and listen to the hum inside the wood. Sometimes I thought that I could hear – hidden down there below the hum – the voices that were sizzling by on the wires up above.  

The wood of the pole was dark with age and sometimes a little splintery, so I had to place my ear carefully and gently if I wanted to listen in.

I wasn’t six years old though.

It would be a perfectly charming story had I been six years old. I was actually twenty-four and the telephone pole was planted in the concrete of the sidewalk in front of the weird little duplex where six of us were living in two small bedrooms and a tiny living room. People still refer to it as “the Half House” because of the way it had been poorly and illogically split straight down the middle to make two separate apartments. It was on a short, dark street in the shadow of the second largest mozzarella cheese production plant on the planet. The smell was terrible. On 105 degree summer days - with just a swamp cooler - that curd smell permeated everything: pillows and carpet and clothes and skin. We smoked in that house. Everyone was a smoker back then. It was a very small town and on a late Saturday night – or more likely, an early Sunday morning – I’d often stagger somewhat drunkenly out of the smoke and the noise of the Half House and stand on the sidewalk and lean against the telephone pole and press my ear against it and I would listen to the voices in there. Sometimes those voices made me very sad. Sometimes they weren’t even voices – and they never actually sounded like voices anyway – sometimes I thought that they were all the thoughts I’d never thought. Sometimes I thought they were just ghosts of all the stories I hadn’t written, or the soft and distant echoes of the life I hadn’t lived. Sometimes those voices bothered me as they shot by overhead. I could look up and imagine them zipping past like flashes of light along the wires. I imagined them passing me by, because I felt like everything was passing me by. I can see me there, drunk and smelling of smoke and cheese and looking up at those wires. I was fat back then, with big round glasses and a full beard and ratty curly hair. I looked a bit like a woodchuck. And so now when I close my eyes I look down and see that big round face looking up with big blurry eyes under big circles of curved eye glass and imagining that he can see up in the air a life he had chosen not to have. That fat little roly-poly woodchuck man was wondering if he’d made a mistake.

The thing about decision-making is that it always feels like closing a door. Because that’s exactly what it is. Sometimes we hear noises from the other side of those closed doors. Quite often it sounds like the lives happening on the other side of those doors are a lot more exciting.

I didn’t go to college after high school. It was both a conscious decision and also an oddly zen-like path-of-least-resistance kind of anti-decision; like water taking the shape of the bowl it is poured into, I had glided into my own life because it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I’d been one of those high school kids who was always busy; up at 5am to make it to rehearsal by 6am. Then a full day and then editing the school newspaper until 5 or 6 at night. Before I’d graduated I was already taking junior college classes, I’d won a playwriting award six hours away in San Diego, and I was already writing for the local newspaper. I was the kid who should have gone to college. I even applied to one – I didn’t tell anyone about it – because it was the only college I’d ever heard of that had a writing program. I didn’t know then that virtually every college has a writing program. I thought that there was only the one.  I didn’t know there was such a thing as an MFAs program and I didn’t know that students who were poor could take out Federal Education loans to go to college. I had met with a high school guidance counselor precisely once to talk about college and she showed me how the University of California at Santa Cruz website had a live feed from a webcam in the middle of campus. That’s all we had talked about in her cramped little office. I cannot emphasize it enough: I am from a very small town.

Around that same time, I was working on my car in the street in front of the Half House.  The battery had gone bad and I couldn’t afford to have it towed and I couldn’t afford to pay someone to replace it. I could just about afford a new battery. The car was a gray Ford Escort that didn’t look like anything. It looked like a car. It was shaped like a car. When children draw the shape of a car they draw a horizontal oblong with a bulge in the middle where the people sit, that was my car. And I couldn’t get the last bolt off of the casing that held the battery in place. It was down below a thick black pipe and I couldn’t get the ratchet down there.  I’d nearly stripped the bolt head though because I’d tried to ratchet it out at an angle, which hadn’t worked even a little.

I was hot and sweaty and fat and frustrated and broke and all of that pissed me off.  I sat down on the curb with my friend Luke. He was a burly giant of a guy. His baggy carpenter’s jeans were cut open on the right leg because he had a long metal bar running the length of his shin. It went down through the skin and was bolted to the bone. He’d given himself a compound fracture by tumbling backward off a second floor balcony. We all drank too much back then, but Luke was full blown and. He would show up with a twenty-four pack of Keystone and drink all of it.

I told him that everything in life seemed bad right then, “Life fucking sucks man,” I said.

I told him that sometimes I thought I should have gone to college. If I’d gone to college I wouldn’t be sitting here in a shit town, working a shit call-center job, and sweating my ass off trying to get a shit battery out of my shit car.

“Fuck college man,” he said, “you’re a smart guy. You don’t need college.”

Life is a feedback loop. You get out what you put in.

I don’t regret the decision not to go to college. After all, I was going to community college, mostly just to placate my parents. I had evolved into a terrible student by then. I had realized it didn’t matter. I’d started taking fewer classes, I’d started trying less. Eventually I wasn’t taking any classes or trying at all. I didn’t see what I was getting out of it, so I didn’t get anything out of it. Life is a loop.

I was always writing though. That’s why I don’t regret the decision. I found myself in the writing. I found who I was in the writing. I found who I am in the writing. I found my own voice and it wouldn’t have been the same if I’d found it in a workshop, it wouldn’t be the same if had found it in a theory class. I’m a better writer because writing was harder for me because I was doing it in the wild. I was doing it completely alone. It was never homework for me, it was never assigned. I wrote because I needed to.

        That decision not to go did not make life easy, but it has made it interesting.

        The thing is, when I was 18 I was in love. She was a year older and she hadn’t gone to college. She’d passed on a slot at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. She’d passed on it because she hadn’t wanted to go. She passed on it because she was a Navy brat and she didn’t want that life for herself, even if it was as an officer. But she also passed on it for me. I think. We never exactly talked about it. And we never exactly talked about my not going. We started taking community college classes together. She got a good job, or what passed for one in a small town. I think that we were happy there – for a while – in that beat up little smoke-filled half of a house.

        But still, there were the nights when I would stand outside. When I would put my ear against that pole and I would hear the distant sounds of a life I didn’t have.

        By the time I was twenty-seven I’d lost the weight. I’d finally enrolled in a real university and I learned the word autodidact. I am an autodidact, but I had to go to college to learn the word. I’ve since enrolled in a Masters program so that I can learn more words.

        The one thing the Half House had going for it was that it had a giant backyard. The grass was dead, but we made the most of it. One summer evening the power went out in town. Someone showed up with an inflatable kiddie pool (people were always just showing up with things, I ran that kind of house). We filled the pool and while no one else in town had power, we still had an old radio that ran on batteries. Luke duct tapped its broken antenna and six or seven of us sat around in the yard drinking beer and alternating dips in the kiddie pool. That had been a good day. I wouldn’t give that memory up. That memory crystallizes that moment and that time and that place and those people and it wouldn’t exist if I had lived my life in a straight line.

        Not all mistakes are mistakes; some of them just look like mistakes on paper.

        There are a million beautiful and awful and sweet and strange experiences and moments of actual life I wouldn’t have had if I had made all of the right decisions. Over the course of this life I know that I’ve become an odd little man, uneven and restless and far too old for a grad program, but sometimes I walk outside of my apartment at the corner of Zelzah Avenue and Devonshire in the San Fernando Valley and I put my hand on the telephone pole there by the mouth of the alley behind the 7-11, and I think about that poor little fat woodchuck kid back home and I want to whisper to him that things will work out. They may not work out for the best, and they certainly won’t work out the way he expects. But they will work out nonetheless.

        Sometimes I like to imagine that he can hear me.

       

       

.

.

.