The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 57. El Paso/Juarez: A Prelude

The apartment building in El Paso
where I became a writer.

Although I haven't had anything published since something like 2002, I am a writer.  I have been well-trained by master writers; I usually get up at 5:00 a.m. to practice my art; and most importantly, sometimes along the way I discover I have something to say and manage to express it somewhat well. That defines a writer:  yearning, training, persistence, something said well.  The rest is all the side-business of the craft, which admittedly I have failed royally at.  One can't get published if one doesn't send work to publishers.

Yet, from the standpoint of the text, I have been true to my art.  I have a fairly solid record of my interior life recorded through words put to paper.  I have discovered who I am and who I want to become through my writing.  Here's an example:

The Question

I think normal people just go to sleep,
which isn't a bad idea, and I used to.
Nine o'clock always as a kid, and looking forward to it,
that cold blue room in the lean-to add-on.
I plugged in the electric blanket and cuddled up
after a good firm talk with God
about how if I did this, he'd do that,
and I'd grow up happy, successful and loyal,
with a wife, five kids,
an architectural firm and a house,
a great space of light and body
headed by me, Patriarch,
like God headed the Church,
the building, the body, the light.

But, then I don't know, something happened.
Oh, I know it happens to all of us,
and few of us really sleep,
with houses balanced on loans,
beds suspended over arguments with elastic smiles,
marriages held together with kids as tape,
marriages not held together,
kids torn like tape, a piece on each flap,
flapping in the wind,
the guilt of having torn such a little body.
But how do you live in a house so small,
and with her?
And how does she stand you,
both of you growing,
swallowing space?
All healthy things get bigger,
more complex,
cells and histories of cells,
whole cities wiped out within
with new information and cable TV.
The cage can only make you rabid,
the things she says ticking off in your head.

Okay, so I don't have it so bad;
I have none of this.
I have one single question
that keeps me up at night:
How do I make it mine?

I wrote that poem one night sitting at my desk in my fifth floor apartment looking over Mesa Street and downtown El Paso.  At the time I was a creative writing major at UTEP; I worked for the publisher Cinco Puntos Press; and I'd started a literary magazine with my friend George Shimshock called Sell-Outs Literary Magazine, which we'd designed to be a flashy, high-quality magazine that poked fun of the literary community for taking itself too seriously.  It seemed like I was on track to be part of that world.  Yet, my writing knew before I did that I wanted something different.  I ended up in the same town in which I grew up, talking once again to the same God I talked to regularly as a child, only now less demanding.  I didn't end up with five kids, but I do have four.  Marci and I have a great marriage, and so the kids never had to be used as tape to keep it all together, and thankfully the marriage never came apart, kids flapping helplessly in the wind.  Yet, even if that had been the case, I believe I would have still deemed it all worth it.  I have the life my poem knew I wanted before I did.

I did not have that same drive to make it as a writer.  Perhaps I still don't.  I will always choose doing the dishes or watching an episode of NCIS with Marci over completing that next thought in whatever I'm writing because I know just how good I've got it, and I don't want to screw things up.  Yet writing is still a part of me.  It is part of my daily practice.  And because what we do daily becomes who we are, I am a writer.  I learned my craft in El Paso, and because of that, El Paso and Juarez are forever linked to my soul.  There is no me without that great city spread across three states and two nations, divided by a narrow, concrete-channeled river constantly dying of thirst but never quite fully evaporating under that intense sun.  I am every bit as much a product of El Paso as my hometown, where I write this now.