I wasn't any good at sports so I tried other things to fit in. I joined the school band and the cub-scouts. I remember the band teacher, a pink-faced, potato-shaped man named Mister Fergiss. I would sit there pretending to play the saxophone, watching him closely and wondering: Can he tell I'm not playing? He looked like he knew.
In cub-scouts it was all about working your way through these books of tasks. Each page had an illustrated task--like help an old lady across the street, or teach a younger kid to tie his shoes--and a place at the bottom for you and your parents to sign once you'd done it. Every ten tasks or so they gave you a badge. I got a few of the badges, then lost interest. It was just more homework, like band. I got kicked out of there for not learning to play the recorder and quit the cubs soon after.
When I was six or seven, right after we moved to Corrales, I got an orange tabby for a birthday present and named him Westmoreland--after Claude "the Cat" Westmoreland, a player on the Albuquerque Dukes. Westy was already pretty big but he was still a kitten. The day I got him I put him up on the kitchen counter to sniff and walk around. I had this idea that maybe being a kitten he wouldn't know the difference between the sink full of dirty dishwater and the surface of the counter, that he would walk right in himself, and when he didn't, I pushed him in. Then I wrapped him up in a towel to dry and took him back to my room and tucked him in under the bed-sheets with just his little damp head sticking out flat-eared.
My parents were in the living room. "Westy was walking around on the kitchen counter," I announced, " and the sink was full of water . . . and he just walked in like he couldn't tell the difference . . !" They ignored me or believed me.
I went back to my room at the other end of the house and Westy was still under there all wrapped up. He looked up at me patiently thinking the whole procedure normal somehow, and not expecting further treachery. I realized he trusted me completely. He was my first great friend of a cat and later he was killed on the big state road that ran past our house. I was leaving for school when Dad told me. I refused to believe at first it and ran out into the backyard. "Westy! Kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty! Here, West-y!" There was a very clear light, and the noise of a cat calling back, but it came from way up in the trees. I started crying.
When I got home my dad showed me where the grave was, in the little dead garden beside the low adobe wall next to the garage. I made a cross from the hollow steel legs of a volleyball net and put one of my mother's dishtowels over the small hump of earth like a blanket for the funeral.
I had a couple of friends, and we made wooden swords and acted out my stories in the backyard or beside the ditches or off in the "bosky," the wasteland of tall trees and thickets beside the Rio Grande. It was fun. One day we turned up an old junked car with spent cartridges inside, and pretended we were gangsters on the run, hiding out in our car after a big crime-spree and shootout. I started writing a lot, whole novels in pencil, complete with cartoon illustrations. My English teacher Emily took me aside and told me I had a gift for writing and made me promise I'd never forsake it.
Some kids from school came over for my eighth birthday. Bill Harlow gave me a slingshot and I loaded it and aimed it at him, jokingly threatening ha ha got you in my sights, when a rock flew out and broke one of his fingers. It was like with my cat and the sink, it just happened, like it had to for some reason. I didn't mean to do it. Over the years the cross lost its arms and was just a bent rod sticking up. My mom let the dishtowel stay and by the time we moved out of that house the earth had grown half over it.
AUTHOR'S NOTE The above is excerpted from the creative portion of my culminating thesis on my development as a writer for the Vermont College undergraduate program, which I completed in 2004. Vermont College of Fine Arts offers academic credit for self-designed study programs, provided students demonstrate due dedication to their chosen lines of inquiry. VCFA has been the springboard for writers like Wally Lamb, Amy Greene, and myself. Will you be next? They will be represented, with numerous envoys of the literary, publishing and academic scenes, at the upcoming AWP conference in Denver April 7th to 11th.
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