Free Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou by Clay Reynolds Page B

biggest worry is whether I can tell all the stories I want to tell in the time I have left.
    Of course, none of us really knows how much time he has left. Preston Jones was a writer, and a very good one in my opinion, but he didn’t find out that he was a writer until he was only a couple of beers shy of the ulcer that killed him. It’s fun to speculate on what he might have done had he relocated from a beer joint to a fern bar and switched from Bud to Perrier. I suspect, though, that he wouldn’t have been a writer anymore. Writers are notoriously self-destructive, and it’s their habit to find their inspiration in the very elements that threaten them. I think it’s part of their mystique.
    Some writers discover or at least decide that they are writers early in life. In fact, their careers actually start before they have written or published anything. The world is full of writers who have never published. When I was in graduate school, I met a man named Ben. He handed me his business card. It had his name, and beneath the name, it said “Writer.”
    “Oh,” I said, embarrassed that I had never heard of him (English graduate students are supposed to know about writers.) “What have you written?”
    “Nothing yet,” he smiled at me. “I’m working on a couple of novels, though.”
    A couple of novels. It’s like someone saying, “I’m not six-foot-five yet, but I’m working on a couple of inches.” I decided right then that I would never call myself a writer until I had written—and published—something. I recognize that publication doesn’t necessarily make a person a writer, but it’s the only real validation I can understand. Without it, I am merely playing at writing, practicing well and hard, perhaps, but not yet in the game.
    Then there are the writers who have instant—and young—success. That is, they have published their work. I don’t like these writers very much. They tend to be cocky, overconfident, arrogant. They often write a lot about other writers, usually men, who are middle-aged and frightened of growing older. What do they know? They haven’t faced impotence or a shortness of breath from a moderately high staircase. They don’t have to watch what they eat or worry about the distance from their office to the john. They haven’t looked into the mirror one morning and discovered that their hair is thinning as rapidly as their hips are making rain-gutters for their waists. They haven’t found the value of comfortable shoes or that sleep is more fun than watching late-night TV. They are ignorant of ordered priorities that put nightclubs and skiing vacations beneath a trip to the dentist or socking money away for retirement. They haven’t come to terms with the notion that no matter how successful they are, they will never own a Porsche convertible, because such a car is impractical and silly for people their age.
    Why don’t they write about what they know? Why don’t they write about buying their first legal drink? Their first sexual encounter? Their first vote? I know one young writer I met right after his book came out. He was wearing a jeans jacket and dusty boots. He wrote a book about an artist—not a writer—who was middle-aged and frightened of growing older. I tried to like him even so, and I bought his book, had him sign it. We had a couple of beers together. He drank his slowly, and I determined that he didn’t much like beer. He was very young, I thought. He worked out and had clear skin and a full head of curly hair. His teeth were white and he didn’t smoke, and he switched from beer to white wine on the second round. He drove a Porsche convertible. He lived with a twenty-two-year-old symphony orchestra cellist, who had legs that went from her well-shaped calves all the way up to her long, thin neck. Her mouth was gorgeous, and she had long, graceful fingers. She was without a doubt the sexiest woman I’d ever seen. And she was in awe of him and of his role as a