The Deerhunters: True Tales of Creative Writing Class

The associate instructor who led the workshop wore a bow tie and round wire-rims, a sinister look for a guy in his late 20s. He was a slight, red-haired man with a voice pitched high and effeminate, nasal but with a pinched, disturbed-sounding articulateness. As an undergraduate some years before at Louisiana State he had written and published an historical novel that took place in his hometown of New Orleans; he’d come to Indiana to pursue his MFA at IU’s distinguished creative writing program. Seated at one end of the long oval table, he presided with a velvety voice, glassy eyes and the demeanor of a man floating in a warm Dilaudid bubble bath.

Recently I came across the original typewritten, onionskin pages of the first short story I’d submitted to the workshop, the second semester of my freshman year. I winced as I reread it and recalled that class. There were about a dozen of us, all ready to start churning out prose dripping with unrestrained passion, sentimentality, adverbs, unreliable narration, melodramatic dialogue, obscure classical music references, subject-verb disagreement and other grammar horrors, unabashed confessions, unmotivated action and airy, meaningless abstractions. Each of us, with the possible exception of the fratboy with the backwards-turned baseball cap and Greek pendant hanging over his Señor Frog’s T-shirt, exhibited self-cultivated, precocious personas of delicate, if idiotic, genius. There were no geniuses in this group. Colleges should charge psychotherapists admission to sit in on creative writing workshops and take notes. They’d have a blast. We were a rogue’s gallery of pathology, bravura and white guilt. Whoever said that you should write what you know never met this gang.

There was a squirrelly, fey little guy with a tight black perm whose first story was a "novella-in-progress" called "Little Boy Lost," an embarrassing, sordid tale in the first person about a boy who is molested by his middle-school shop teacher.

"Maddie Blue" was the name of a story turned in by a 62-year-old widow, the oldest of our group, who wore a lot of purple, preferably in a smart pantsuit and kerchief. Maddie Blue, the protagonist of her story, is due at the parole hearing of a mentally retarded black man she falsely accused of raping her white virgin body 30 years before. The reader is set up for the anguish of moral choice–but not before, in the first paragraph, sixtysomething-year-old Maddie Blue sits on the toilet and "releases the morning contents of her bowels." Ummm.

A girl who often wore monogrammed sweaters and long pleated skirts turned in a well-meaning but patently offensive, thinly veiled autobiographical story about a teenage girl who goes to the soup kitchen with her parents on Thanksgiving to feed "the lost-looking African-American men," and the life-changing lessons she learns from her ordeal.

A recovering homecoming-queen type who wore psychedelic hair weaves, Birkenstocks and Little House on the Prairie dresses wrote a story called "Nature Boy," a thinly veiled autobiographical story about a girl who has an affair with a guy she picks up hitchhiking.

A cartoonishly handsome European with dark skin and greasy Rico Suave hair turned in a thinly veiled autobiographical story called "Wind Dancer," a Jim Morrison-inspired tale about a "superbly handsome yet naive" European guy who comes to America to discover that he was a Native American tribal elder in a previous life.

I had titled my own thinly veiled autobiographical first story "The Deerhunters," an unintentional nod (since I’d never seen the De Niro movie) to The Deer Hunter. It was based on an experience I’d had between semesters when I went home to northern Indiana for Christmas break. The actual story was great. Fictionalized, it didn’t work. At the time, of course, I thought it was a work of painful–and delicate–genius.

But it sucked, just like everyone else’s.

Here’s the story, as it happened, unfictionalized: ------

One night my friend Steve and I were playing guitars and drinking rum and RC cola in his bedroom in the back of the trailer Steve lived in with his older brother Ron, Ron’s wife Sam and their kid. A booming argument started in the living room. Ron had been coming into Steve’s bedroom all night to sneak belts of Ronrico and bumps of coke behind Sam’s back. We stopped noodling over our fretboards. As the unintelligible, paranoid Ron ranted on the other side of Steve’s door, Steve quietly painted some of the uglier scenes from his brother’s marriage. He told me that one time Ron had kicked Sam in the belly when she was pregnant with her and Ron’s son.

The trailer’s aluminum door opened and slammed to, and we could hear Ron crunching through the hard January snow toward the Buick he had bought the week before for a quarter-pound of pot. Ron was on permanent disability for a "back injury"; truth is, Ron was a lazy stoner who had reluctantly entered adulthood–a dumb, spoiled baby who’d got too big. Ron’s kid–I forget his name; let’s call him Joey–was a fat little man who is now probably the biggest brute in his junior high. We could hear him bawling in the living room and pounding across the carpet in his diaper.

Ron and Sam fought a lot. They made up a lot. For their anniversary one year, Ron took Sam to a truckstop down the road and won her a stuffed pair of giant red lips from a crane game. They didn’t get out much. The truckstop was their Disneyland. I remember seeing them the next day. Sam proudly showed off the prize Ron had won her. Her excitement embarrassed me. They’d taken Polaroids of each other at the truckstop, and Sam showed them to me. Here was Sam in front of a Donkey Kong Jr. machine with a Capri cigarette between her teeth. Here was ponytailed Ron gingerly moving those metal jaws toward the puckered lips.

This was the first time in weeks that Ron had been drunk. He had spent some time in the pokey for an alcohol-related offense. Stupidity and emotional baggage made Ron bad; booze made him badder. He readily admitted to his problem with alky-hol. Now he stuck mostly to pot, and this was the first time I’d ever seen him with cocaine. Once he got into a wrestling match with a friend of ours, which suddenly went from fun to serious, as things often do with mean-hearted drunks. Ron bodyslammed our friend, who stopped breathing. Someone gave him mouth-to-mouth. Ron turned into a weeping, blubbering mess before our eyes. It was touching, really, seeing that big dumb redneck reduced to mush.

Steve and I heard Ron trying to turn over the Buick’s engine. The car was parked on the lawn, right behind Steve’s bedroom window. Steve lifted the curtain. It was below zero outside. The layer of sandpapery ice that covered the window turned the Buick’s taillights into cigarette-cherry blotches after Ron got the car started.

"Shit," said Steve. "He’s going to put his car in a ditch. Fucking asshole."

We put our coats on. We walked into the living room, and I was relieved that Sam had gone into her bedroom with Joey and closed the door. I heard her in there sniffling.

I stood behind Steve as he knocked on the driver-side window of the Buick. The frozen manual window came down in hard jerks, and there was Ron’s big round head looking bemused but strangely serene. They debated a while, then I heard Ron saying, "You’re in or you’re out. What’s it going to be?" I knew better, but I’d been drinking heavily. A joyride in the country? Sheets of ice covering the roads? The driver blasted out of his mind? Sure, why not? Steve sat up front, and I climbed into the backseat.

We’d been cruising through the icy blackness on a gravel road when, out of nowhere, a huge doe leapt at our windshield. Ron made no attempt to avoid it, didn’t have time to; he just plowed right into it, cut it in half. The collision swung the tail end of the car around so we were facing the opposite direction. Our headlights illuminated a tan mound awash in blood.

"Mother of Jesus," said Steve.

"Fuck me," said Ron.

Ron put the Buick in park and we got out to inspect the damage. The Buick was fine. The doe was not.

"Like venison?" said Ron.

He had the bright idea of loading the carcass into the trunk and taking it home with us. Of course that was highly illegal. But were we not men? he argued. Did we not rightfully deserve the flesh of that which we had killed? Steve agreed with his brother. In the middle of a vast nowhere under a sliver of ice-cold moon, I helped drag the dead thing to the back of the car. Ron stuck his key into the trunk’s lock and turned, but it was either frozen solid or jammed shut.

"Fuck it," said Ron. He had a backup plan. "We put it in the backseat."

All I could do was go along with it. I pushed my coatsleeves up my arms and helped wrap the deer in a ratty old blanket from the car. We dragged it into the backseat. When we were done our hands were covered in blood, and red fingerprints spotted our faces.

It was a solemn ride home. If I’d known all along that my life was on a divergent path from Ron and Steve’s, that fact was especially clear now. I probably wouldn’t be coming home again.

------

Class reaction to "The Deerhunters" ranged from confusion to abject horror. "Interesting," said the associate instructor, to begin the workshopping process.

Little Boy Lost found it overly dramatic, self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing.

Maddie Blue didn’t like that the three guys never make it back to the trailer, that the central conflict between Ron and his wife and baby is never resolved.

Soup Kitchen thought it was a very nice story but that the characters were too ugly and negative.

Homecoming Queen said I should seek therapy.

Rico Suave couldn’t get past the fact that people would go on a date to a truckstop.

Fratboy thought it was "fucking cool." He said he’d "been there, bro."

When I reread it recently, the story still sucked, but I thought the last paragraph was nice, and couldn’t remember having written it:

"We rode in silence back to the trailer park, covered in blood which was now congealing, now crusting over, now turning black in the crevices around our fingernails. The copperlike smell of death filled the Buick. Our nostrils ballooned around it and expelled it in staccato bursts of steam that rose and converged over our heads."