Let me say this about getting published. The day the padded envelope from Greenwillow Books, containing the first copy of your first book, appears in your mailbox, you’re almost afraid to open it and burst the bubble, but when you do, it’s about three times as good as catching a Mystery Motorist and discovering zits aren’t caused by hormonal indiscretion on the same day.
Though I had read many books of fiction by the time I finally put pen to paper, I had no idea about genre, and certainly no idea about the rules of the genre into which I was entering. That’s good, because rules get into my head like table manners and make me spill my milk thinking about them, so I tend to let them ride.
At the time I began writing Running Loose, I had very recently spent ten years with kids from the streets of Oakland. Apart from that, I grew up in a lumber town where you found your weekend entertainment going downtown to see if some logger was going to get oiled up in the Chief or the Valley Club and try to kick some cowboy’s butt, so harsh language came rather naturally. When Susan Hirschman began working on the manuscript with me, she told me Greenwillow was willing to publish my story in whatever form I chose, but I had used a certain two words in such excess that it might affect sales, given that librarians and teachers would be the first people to make the decision to buy it or not.
In its original form Running Loose was a three-hundred-page epic. I removed two words and it became a two-hundred-page coming-of-age novel. During that editing time, when one of my mother’s friends asked her how I was doing, my mom told her she hadn’t heard from me for two weeks, that she thought I was holed up at my typewriter unfucking my book.
Even with that, Running Loose brought me to the place where I would have to consider what I would write about and what language I would write it in.
When I was in fourth grade I overheard a high-school kid named Alan Donovan, who worked for my dad, telling a bunch of his buddies who were at the station working on their cars that he had taken Alicia Franklin to the movie down in Boise, and while she went to the restroom, he ripped a hole in the bottom of his popcorn bag and put his “thing” up through it. “At first she was surprised, and then really pissed,” he said, “but when she got a sense of the pure heft of it, well, she got excited and wouldn’t let go.” At nine years old I had no idea what was supposed to have happened inside that popcorn bag, but I spent several anxious hours in the principal’s office after my teacher discovered why the rest of the boys in fourth grade were gathered around me at recess as if I’d discovered an endless free source of baseball cards. For years I believed the story was true and could barely pass Alicia Franklin on the street without bursting out laughing. But then I heard it from two or three other, unconnected sources and figured out that, as brilliant as were most high-school male minds, it was unlikely that more than one would come up with that particular ploy and decided it must be an urban legend.
Under the guise of “local color” the main antagonist in Running Loose, Boomer Cowans, tells that same story. Louie Banks, the narrator of the tale, calls game on it the moment he hears it, and it serves to show that Boomer isn’t exactly headed to England for his higher education. Many censors did not agree with the necessity of teaching that somewhat edgy lesson through the wonders of literature, and it led to my placement on a list in USA Today several summers ago as a top-ten banned author. It was the first and only time my name was being mentioned in the same sentence with Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain: heady stuff.
But it put me in the position of having to decide whether to keep the censors in my head as I grew and defined myself as a writer. I was already struggling with an idea some adults had about young adult literature: that its purpose should be to set examples rather than to reflect the truth as the author sees it. I was pretty sure I knew where I stood, given my perpetual state of arrested adolescence, but a four-year-old, mixed-race, neglected and abused girl gave me my answer in spades.
In my early years as a child and family therapist at the Spokane Mental Health Center, a job I began shortly after writing my first novel, I worked in an abuse and neglect project that included families with children under the age of five who had been treated so badly they’d been removed to foster care. Those families had to be minimally successful in our project in order to get the children back home.
Allie’s mother had had a one-time sexual encounter with a black serviceman from the air force base, then engaged in a more permanent relationship with a racist short-haul truck driver. The first time I saw Allie, she was standing over the sink trying to wash the brown off her arms so she could be allowed to sit at the dinner table with her all-white half-brothers or play with toys they hadn’t yet discarded.
Allie’s life had been a nightmare by my standards, yet she presented as one of the most attractive children in the project. She was all muscle and sinew, could scale the walls like Spider-Man, but with a smile so wide and infectious that when she stood before you, arms outstretched, you had to pick her up. On that first day I did exactly that, and when I raised her to eye level, she smiled even wider, looked right at me, and said, “Fuckerbitch.” I was astonished enough to have no response other than to laugh. She said it again. I laughed again, and she laughed with me, and off we went to play.
At a break I caught the play therapist for a moment and said, “What’s with ‘fuckerbitch’?” She laughed, too. Funny stuff. “She uses it to see if you’re safe,” she said, and before she could explain that, some kid whacked another kid across the shoulder blades and she was off doing her job. For the second part of each day, I ran a group therapy session for the parents, and when Allie’s parents began working on their issues, it was clear that their biggest was the existence of Allie, who was proof of the fact that her mother had had sexual relations with a black man, an unforgivable sin in the eyes of her stepfather. When things heated to the blowup point, you can guess which two words tumbled out of their mouths. Allie had merely combined them for convenience.
“When Allie hears those words,” the play therapist said to me at our debriefing, “she knows the fight will end on her. She is living proof that her mother committed an unpardonable sin. So when she wants to discover whether or not an adult is safe, she simply runs those words up the flagpole and gauges the response. Give her a negative reaction, she writes you out of her universe. If not, she gives you a chance.”
Genius, if you think about it from the four-year-old perspective. Allie was key in shaping me as a writer. If I took those words away from her, she would have no way to test the waters, and though it’s a pretty astonishing thing to hear roll off the tongue of a four-year-old, it would be nothing short of disrespectful to take away the language she needed to express her world. If I am to make characters real, I have to treat them with that same respect, and I have to be willing to tell stories about the ruggedness of their lives. Anything less is far more disrespectful than the use of those really meaningless words in print; disrespectful to the character, to the reader, and to the author. So anytime I get a character just right, find that spot where language and circumstance and character merge to tell some tough truth, I thank Allie. And because of her, I never back off the truth as I see it, or the language required to tell it.
From Chip Hilton to Michael Jordan and Beyond
14
A CHARACTER IN ONE OF MY BOOKS SAYS, “There is no act of heroism that doesn’t include standing up for yourself.” As a writer I’m always on the lookout for heroes. As a child and family therapist, that is also true. As a writer I need them to people my stories, to stand up against the bad guys, to grow from the first page of the first chapter to the last page of the last and know more about themselves at the end than they did at the beginning. I need them to supply hope in situations where others of us might shrink away. As a therapist I need them to do exactly the same things: to stand up in the face of shame, to find some piece within themselves that will help preserve them and their families from being torn apart by a system that can’t accommodate them and
a history that gives them little room to breathe.
Back before I entered junior high school, when it became so clear to me that books poison the mind (why else would they be offered up by the enemy?), I was enthralled, enraptured, mesmerized by Chip Hilton, creation of legendary basketball guru and sports fiction author Clair Bee. Chip was a made-to-order hero for me. I lived, as I’ve said, in a tiny lumber town of under a thousand people, situated in a high mountain valley in central Idaho, so isolated that the town’s social schedule was set by the high-school football and basketball schedules. To a great degree the station of adults in the community fluctuated with the athletic ability of their male offspring. (I know my parents’ status took a nasty dive with John’s graduation.)
Chip Hilton was good. The unchallenged star of his football, basketball, and baseball teams throughout high school and college, he topped the academic honor role, worked late hours and weekends at the Sugar Bowl to help support his widowed mother, and was so morally upright that the bad guys at the outset of each book turned good by the last chapter and often led off as reformed bad guys in the first chapters of the next. I wanted to be Chip Hilton. He was tall, blond, and muscular, moved through his world on cat’s paws. I was medium height with a cottage-cheese torso and a bad haircut my mother made me renew every two weeks just as it had grown out enough to darken my side-walls sufficiently to rescue me from total dorkdom.
In sixth grade I discovered that with parental consent you could legally change your name. Since mine was a name my friends continually reminded me rhymed with a bathroom function, why wouldn’t my parents allow me to change it to Chip Hilton? My dad said it might seem unusual, our last name being Crutcher and all. John (who I constantly reminded was named after a bathroom fixture) encouraged them to go ahead but to require that I change my middle name to Beef. The name change, of course, was not to be, but Chip Hilton remained my prepubescent hero, his friends Soapy Smith, Biggie Cohen, and Speed Morris, the gang I wanted to hang with.
But some funny things happened on my wildly circuitous route to and through adulthood. Through watching Cassius Clay renounce his “slave name” only to be stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and threatened with jail for refusing to go to war against a people who had “never called me nigger” to seeing Tommy Smith and John Carlos atop the 1968 Olympic podium, heads bowed, black gloved fists raised in rigid salute; to watching a young burn victim at the city pool where I lifeguarded stand, horribly scarred, in his swimming suit, face and torso unrecognizable through the scars, patiently enduring the questions and taunts of his peers; to seeing a beautiful four-year-old stand before the sink day after day in play therapy, trying to wash the black off so her racist stepfather would allow her to touch the food and play with the toys and sit at the table with her all-white siblings, I realized that Chip Hilton wasn’t brave.
Chip Hilton never had to prove he had a life worth living. Though his father was dead, his only memories were of the tall, smart, handsome man’s love, his only job to carry on their good name.
Chip Hilton’s life didn’t include a father stopping by the tavern on his way home from a dead-end job, guzzling a six-pack, then taking his wife and kid to task when he arrived at home because the house wasn’t cleaned to his specifications or dinner wasn’t on the table.
Chip Hilton was never assaulted with gentle treachery in the after-midnight dark of his room, worried that the shadows in his imagination weren’t in his imagination at all.
Chip Hilton didn’t have to agonize over whether the girl of his dreams wouldn’t go out with him because her parents couldn’t accommodate the color of his skin or the shape of his facial features, or just because the girl had inherited that bigotry and made it her own.
Chip Hilton was like Superboy, and Superboy doesn’t have to be brave because he’s bulletproof. By the time I’d seen enough life to be able to write stories, I knew too many real heroes to allow myself to put Chip Hilton into them.
Don’t get me wrong. There is certainly a place in literature for Chip and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Tom Swift. They tickle the imagination with possibilities: what could be, if only. They empower and excite. But as much as he represents something to aspire to, Chip also represents what can never be. A truth about humans is that we are a trial-and-error species; we learn from our mistakes, not just our physical mistakes but our emotional and spiritual mistakes as well. I think heroes aren’t defined so much by what they do “right,” as by how they respond to what they do “wrong.”
If I have any complaints about my youth, and if you’ve read this far you know I have many, one is that so many well-meaning adults lied to me. Not spiteful lies with malicious intent but lies designed to prevent emotional and psychological pain, lies told by the people who cared about me most: my parents, teachers, relatives. They were lies designed to prevent disappointment, lies about the virtues of love, hard work, and any number of terms around which cliches blossom like desert flowers after a flash flood. They were meant to pave my way to Chip Hiltonhood. And I believed them, and became disillusioned when life turned out to operate by a different set of rules. Love brought as many problems as it solved. It didn’t “conquer all” it challenged, it tested. Honesty was the best policy, unless you didn’t want someone to know the truth.
In 1964 I was a freshman in college, swimming distance for the Eastern Washington State College swim team (and wondering how I could ever exist in academia without my brother’s homework, which had propelled me through high school). The varsity locker room at Eastern was a sprawling, semiopen space accommodating all the in-season athletes. I sat before my locker one day, psyching myself up for the grueling workout ahead, listening to the basketball players at the lockers behind me spinning their prepractice yarns.
There was in the state of Washington at the time a small-high-school basketball coach legendary for his number of postseason victories. One of the players on Eastern’s freshman squad had played for this coach and was telling how he believed they had won the state championship the previous year. According to the player, their “team of destiny” was about to be knocked off track early in the season because a “ringer” had been brought onto a competing team in their league. The player was black. The coach pulled the doors closed on a team meeting and told his players that he had played with them in college and the only way to stop them was to hurt them. He wanted the kid out of the game by halftime.
To make a long story short, he got his wish and the team fulfilled its destiny and the coach continued free on his march to athletic sainthood. I truly expected at least one of the Eastern players on the other side of those lockers to kick the storyteller’s butt or at least voice an opinion on what a monumental jerk he was. I heard only laughter—laughter and agreement. I’m ashamed to this day that I didn’t go around there and voice an opinion myself. But I was afraid to get hurt and even more afraid to get embarrassed.
Seventeen years later when I sat down to write my first novel, fueled by heroes of literature such as Atticus Finch and Boo Radley and Holden Caulfield and Billy Pilgrim, I created Louie Banks, the flawed hero of Running Loose, who took at least three runs at integrity before finally willing himself to do what I lacked the courage for back in that locker room in 1964. There was no Chip Hilton in that story, but Louie Banks was able to find the edges of some truths that had eluded Chris Crutcher.
Since then I have searched for my heroes among the small-t truths. I always find them among people learning the art of acceptance: not acceptance of defeat or acceptance of some inability to influence their own futures, but rather acceptance of life on the planet, acceptance of the grays rather than the black-and-whites, acceptance of the astonishing range of human emotion and human behavior.
Before his death from AIDS, tennis great Arthur Ashe did an ESPN interview with Roy Firestone. After plumbing the depths of the certain and awful realities ahead, Roy asked Arthur if he ever asked, “Why me?” Arthur looked directly into his eyes, and in that
soft, powerful tone that became the very meaning of dignity before his death, he said, “Why not me?” Arthur Ashe told us a simple truth about the world. Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving. Open an avenue for them and they go down it. AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive. Living, I believe Arthur was telling us, is risky. If one of my protagonists discovers the truth as Arthur Ashe tells it, he or she attains the status of hero.
A common point of argument these days is whether or not we should hold sports figures up as role models or heroes. Charles Barkley stated on repeated occasions during his playing days that “role model” was not his job; he was a basketball player. Barkley has always been one to openly admit his failings, which in my mind makes him a good role model; he tells the truth about who he believes he is.
An even tighter focus in that regard was—and still is—put on Michael Jordan. Is Michael a role model? A hero of our time? Let me tell you why I believe he is. Michael’s heroism, in my mind, has little to do with his ability to find that air step three-quarters of the way to the hoop that allows him to stay in the air a split second longer than all other members of his species, or his ability to score more than forty points when his body is racked with flu, or even his ability to take a year off from the NBA and return better than when he left. Those are simply attributes of Superman.
Here’s one thing that makes Michael a hero to me: During the O. J. Simpson trial, Fred Goldman, father of slain Ron Goldman, showed up in court every day, expressed his rage to the press on a regular basis, and declared he would be there every day in search of justice for his slain son. When justice was not found, in his view, he was more outraged than ever and he let us know it. His idea of righteousness was to not rest until his son’s death was avenged.