J. Adams Oaks

There were muggings and auto accidents and venereal diseases. There were Christmas Eve shopping emergencies and cheating lovers and dead bodies. All challenges in a day’s work. I’d just completed my graduate work and immediately begun work for AXA Assistance, a French insurance company that included emergency travel assistance as an add-on. It was standard for most insurance companies outside of the States; you have a phone number on the back of a card that you call when you run into trouble while traveling. The office maintained over forty languages and had sister offices across the globe. It was heart-racingly exciting and stressful and exhausting, and while I worked there, I never wrote a single word.

As a writer, that’s a problem. I was supposedly a writer with an unfinished novel that doubled as my thesis for graduate school. I’d completed all my class work at Columbia College Chicago and immediately started working full-time. Ten-hour days. Get home at eight. Eat a nasty microwave dinner in front of the TV. Weekends were for laundry, house cleaning and the few social obligations I had left. I didn’t even go into my writing room. I could see my computer through the window and it had gotten dusty. But there were so many distractions at work…

We had a man who’d got a mannequin arm stuck inside him. We had a sixteen-year-old Brazilian exchange student in Hawaii calling for birth control. We had an Orthodox Jew from Argentina die in a rural Chinese village where the only vehicle available to transport the body was the mayor’s station wagon which we paid him to fill with ice, load the unembalmed body, and drive with the deceased’s wife for ten hours to Hong Kong so that we could fly him to Israel for burial before sunset and before he decayed. I watched in awe as one of our employees translated between the Cantonese-speaking mayor and Spanish-speaking widow. We had such delicious scandal and drama and I should have been writing it all down.

After a year had passed, I was lamenting my lack of creative energy to my childhood friend, Claire Fallon. She and her husband lived in Colorado, between Boulder and Denver. She said, “Well, quit then.” A jolt of electricity shot through my chest—you don’t just quit. I’m not a quitter. But hadn’t I already quit my novel? “You could come live with me and Steve. We have a huge house and an extra bedroom.” Is that what it took to be a writer again? Starting over? Sacrificing security and benefits and an income to get to my craft? “You can live with us for free,” Claire said, “as long as you write everyday.” And that was the deal. I would quit, break my lease, sell everything I had, shave my head so I didn’t have to pay for haircuts, and go.

While researching material for my second novel, I recently found a journal from my year living with Claire and Steve. It said: “$50,000 in debt, no job, and all I can think about is how to heighten the tension in a scene and what moments are missing from the book…” I do cringe just a little bit, though I don’t regret it at all. I remember how, the day I gave notice at AXA, the CEO called me into his office for the first and last time and he offered me $6,000 for a six month stay on top of my salary to complete the project I was working on. But I knew that if I took it, just like the little devil on one shoulder was telling me to do, I’d never return to writing and I’d become one of those people who, thirty years later, would still claim to be working on thesis.

So I listened to the little white angel on the other shoulder who whispered sweet-creative-encouragement in my ear. I had no idea what I was in for. I didn’t get what it meant to make the choice. It was like cliff diving. For me, once I decided to live a writer’s life, there was no turning back. I thought I was living the writerly life when I was a Junior in college studying abroad in Madrid, Spain and I rented a huge clunky typewriter for five bucks a month to write some awkward poetry, painful stories, and let them sit in my suitcase waiting to return to the States. And I thought I was living the writerly life when, after graduation, I interned at publications and submitted to magazines and received a pile of rejection letters. I even thought I was living the writerly life during graduate school while I sat in cafes and smoked and journalled about my loneliness. I hadn’t yet realized what sacrifice meant.

My dad would say that he saw the change in me when I could finally just sit and stay put. That was a real hurdle. It takes willpower to keep your ass in the chair. And return to the chair the next day to sit in it again. And again. I promised myself four hours a day. That was what made me feel like I earned the free home Claire and Steve gave me. But sometimes that four hours meant me staring out the window at the neighbors’ giant trampoline, their row of Harleys, and pasture of lean horses. It meant sitting there and thinking. It meant sitting there and practicing not hating every word I put on the page. It meant not listening to all of the other ghost-critics that leaned over my shoulder to reaffirm how much the work sucked and plod on, no matter what.

A year later, I had a completed manuscript, graduated and I could sit for so long in that old wooden desk chair that Claire bought me a cushion for it. I’d never been poorer or more unsure of what to do with myself. I couldn’t go back to a corporate job. I needed to keep up the momentum. What job would work? My best writing time was late morning and early afternoon. What jobs had I worked that I liked? I loved working at Dunn Brothers Coffee in college, but that wasn’t enough money. I wanted to work at night, write all morning. While watching a rerun of ‘Jerry Springer’ and folding my laundry, a commercial came on for Bartending School. That was it! I’d become the next step up from barista: bartender! I went to the school, which shared a parking lot with a truck stop, and signed up immediately for a week-long class that after you passed your test—7 randomly-chosen drinks made successfully in 12 minutes—they would help you find a job! We practiced the old standards: ‘Pink Cadillacs’ and ‘Rusty Nails’ and ‘Long Island Iced Teas’ from liquor bottles filled with thinned out paint. We learned flourishes, like tossing the bottle in the air without spilling. We learned the liquor laws.

It worked out great. I wrote during the day then drove along the foothills to the Rockies to make drinks at a huge Brazilian restaurant near Columbine High School. I started editing my novel and writing some short stories. I collected stories from all the crazy customers and the whacky Brazilians. Drunk people love to talk. And this time I hid a Moleskin journal under the bar and kept careful notes. I still do this today, keep a journal with me for notes on-the-fly.

Things have changed a lot: I’ve returned to Chicago, my novel has been published, and I own a home. I still bartend. It’s how my writing process has worked best for over a decade. The drunk people still need to talk. Just last night we had our fifth heart attack at the restaurant, the ambulance comes, whisks them away and we never know if they survive. We had a stabbing out front a couple weeks ago, two drunk festival-goers from down the street. I have watched wedding proposals, break-ups, blind dates, hired escorts and their clients. I even had a woman tell me on her birthday that she was leaving her husband and two teenaged brats the next day, just packing up and moving on. I wrote an essay about that one, you know, about what it takes to just get up and go.

I think about that now and again. How long can I bartend? How long can I stand around for ten-hour shifts and smile and tend to others’ problems? What will it take to move on? What will my writing life demand? It’s not an inert thing, even if your routine is regular or your rituals stay the same. I continue learning and changing and improving every day, both as a writer and a human-being. Life changes. And the thing I’ve been reminding myself of most recently is: just keep your butt in the seat.