What I learned in a writing class

I took this writing class once when I was a young man. I thought maybe I could learn something about how to write literature. Everybody in the class submitted a short story, and then the professor critiqued them in front of the whole class.

I wrote this story about when I was a 19 year old homeless bum in San Francisco in 1976 and hanging out in the Tenderloin district. The story starts out with me  waiting outside of St. Anthony’s dining hall, lined up on the sidewalk with all the other bums waiting to get a free lunch. When these two winos got into a conflict. They’re jawing back and forth, cursing and shouting and threatening each other. Finally one of the bums reaches into the garbage can on the corner and starts pulling out all the empty wine bottles (Thunderbird) and throwing them at the other bum. One after another.  There’s no shortage of that kind of ammunition in the Tenderloin, I can tell you that much. So wine bottles are exploding all across the sidewalk like hand grenades. And the other bum is dancing back and forth trying to dodge the in-coming artillery.  Then the bum smashed one of the wine bottles on the ground so it had a jagged edge and chased after the other bum, waving the jagged bottle in the air. And as they turned the corner and disappeared behind a building, it looked like the one bum was on the verge of catching the other bum and slicing him up. The End.

This object is a metaphor for a container in which people discard unwanted refuse.

After reading my story to the class the professor said: “What an apt metaphor. That the very wine bottles that the winos had consumed in the hopes of attaining satisfaction were now being utilized as agents of their own self-destruction. Its a symbolic statement of the ironic nature of their existential dilemma.”

I had never thought about that before. The empty wine bottles being apt metaphors and all that. I was just trying to describe something that I had seen and experienced. And hopefully it made sense and wasn’t boring.  And that’s pretty much all I hope for with my writing. And with this piece of writing, too.

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