I was taking the bus from Ames, Iowa, to Chadron, Nebraska, where a one-bedroom bungalow and a short-order cooking job awaited me. It was the spring of 1994, and my seatmate was a jowly man with a low, heavily creased forehead and shifty eyes like President Richard Nixon. Dick was reading a book called Winning Game Plans. He told me he’d lost everything in an oil-drilling scheme and was going to Kansas to live with his brother. Dick claimed to have made millions but “pissed it all away.”
Wanting to share a “pissed it all away” confession of my own, I confided that I was almost forty and still working futilely at becoming a writer. I had spent most of my twenties and thirties wandering the country, living in transient motels and small rooms down by the railroad tracks, picking up work in kitchens, warehouses, and factories, and laboring over stories and novels after my shift was over. When that had failed to bring me fame and fortune, or a book contract, or even twelve dollars, I’d gone back to college, at Iowa State (not the Iowa college with the famous writing program), but my aversion to the cattle chutes of the institution had led me to drop out after two and a half semesters. Now I was five thousand dollars in debt and convinced I would spend the rest of my days like a Benedictine nun among the poor.
