Caveat Emptor

PictureThe first book I ever read twice in a row without stopping.
I read Vonnegut, Heller, and Hemingway. Their works consumed me. I became enraged that Caveat Emptor Used Books didn’t keep regular business hours. The sign read, “Open at 11 a.m. or as the spirit moves me.” I missed my Foundations of Clinical Psychology and Hebrew Literature classes, waiting for the screwball owner to open. I scrawled over his sign, “MOVE YOUR LAZY ASS SPIRIT OUT OF BED!” I needed more Vonnegut, I was almost out of Heller, and unless Hemingway could dictate via Ouija board, there was nothing left to read from the "Papa" of modern American literature.

As a writer, Vonnegut showed me how to mix reality, fantasy, and fiction. Heller artfully coined a term that explained the world around me. Hemingway showed me how to write one true sentence.

​There were many others along the way, but the life experiences of this group of writers shaped me as a person, as well. They all witnessed war up close. Vonnegut was a POW and survived the bombing of Dresden. Heller lived the Catch-22 experience in World War II. Hemingway drove a military ambulance in World War I and was there for the landing at Normandy.

Escaping the Corn Fields of Indiana

PictureFt. Huachuca was an old Army cavalry outpost.
After college, I joined the Army’s Intel Corp. I needed to escape the cornfields of the Midwest, and I thought a stint in the service would give me the experiences I needed to become a writer. I probably should have sought the advice of an academic counselor.  

The Army's Intelligence School was nestled in Arizona's Huachuca Mountains. A young Captain Michael Flynn was my company commander and lead instructor. Yes, that Michael Flynn. We learned about spying and catching spies, and then we were released into the world to do just that.
PictureNear work and my apartment in Seoul's Itaewon district.
My first assignment was in Seoul, South Korea.  I wrote intel reports from a basement in Itaewon’s shopping district. I sent the reports over something called “the internet” to clandestine agencies back home. Another Indiana University grad hooked me up with a job teaching English to adults in a classroom at a Christian radio station.  
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The Army had its own writing style guide. Many of my reports were just, “a kid threw a rock at a guy,” but others were detailed narratives, connecting the raw intel that came in from Army spies throughout the Korean Peninsula. It was not the kind of writing that I aspired to, but I saw the demand for a tight narrative and the true sentence. Note that when I say "spies," I mean people we paid to spy for us. Most of the cloak-and-dagger spy work is done with cash and a receipt book, and nothing is more closely guarded than the receipt book. We had contingency plans on how to destroy that book in case the building was ever overrun. No real plans on what we were to do with ourselves after that.

I got a new assignment to Ft. Bragg. Heller would have admired how dysfunctional my new intel unit was. On my first day, one of the analysts went AWOL and the second in command was relieved of his duties because of improper conduct with an enlisted soldier. The entire unit was on lockdown until this fugazi was figured out.

Then war broke out.
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Our commanding officer knew when to get out of Dodge. He loaded our unit on the first plane to Saudi Arabia to escape further wrath back at Bragg. The Army’s Central Command didn’t know what to do with us when we arrived. Literally, they didn’t know what to do with us. We left Bragg without orders. One does not simply join the war. No, you must be invited with signed orders. Our commander was relieved of his duties and sent home. The rest of us remained for the duration of the war.
PictureI'm visiting my friend Rocky (L) at his tent back at 18th Airborne Command. Leaving our desert outpost, we knew to turn left at the dead camel to find HQ.
Our unit had extensive language training in Thai, Tagalog, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. We were prepared to deploy to anywhere in the Pacific in a moment’s notice. We weren’t in the Pacific. We didn’t even have a commanding officer. We couldn’t move into “Tent City” because we didn’t have orders. Central Command not only didn’t know what to do with us, they soon forgot about us. The Air Force loaned us some tents, and we set up camp near the end of the runway. Sleep was intermittent.
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We soon found our groove. Nearly all the workers in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were from Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. We spoke their language. We started making connections and inroads with the local workers. Central Command gave us access to a government checkbook and a pile of cash. Our orders were to spend as much money on the local population as possible. Cultivate eyes and ears on the ground.  A Saudi Air Force colonel let us stay in one of his unoccupied mansions on the Persian Gulf, and life was good. For awhile. I ran along the beach, ate Thai food every day, and observed the Army machine that kept moving forward even as parts flew off it.

We got a new commander, and suddenly, we were back in the war. Central Command loaned our services to the French forces, and with the Foreign Legion, we pushed our way north toward Baghdad once the ground war began. I saw a decimated Iraqi military, torn apart by depleted uranium bullets from our low-flying Warthogs and endless sorties from the 82nd Airborne's rocket launchers.  We drove through ancient Iraqi villages that hadn’t changed much in the past six hundred years. I dodged my own demise a number of times, all at the hands of my own stupidity or the ineptitude of those around me. I interviewed bedouins, nomads, drifters, farmers, villagers, and Iraqi Republican Guard deserters for new intel reports. We built psychological profiles on the local population, and I developed my first character sketches.

Headed Back to Class

PictureWe went for the mountains and stayed for the hurricane.
I separated from the Army on Vonnegut’s birthday with no plan on what to do next. A Yiddish proverb says “a bad peace is better than a good war,” and I was ready to move on, hoping I would be the last in a long line of Renfros to go off to war.

My wife and I hiked the Costa Rican rainforest and cloudforest. I was still trying to process the war. An unexpected hurricane turned the hike into more of an adventure than we were looking for. We sheltered at a family lodge outside of Santa Maria that overlooked the Rio Naranjo, which swelled during the storm to twice its normal size.
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During this time, I had been reading a lot of John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck. Another hiker left behind the Paul Bowles novel Let It Come Down. Bowles was part of Gertrude Stein’s group of ex-pats who never returned after WWII, writing from Tangiers for the rest of his life. He wrote about Americans living abroad, unprepared to live in hostile environments without the familiar protections of home. That resonated with me, and his stories captured my imagination.
I returned to North Carolina and began teaching literature to high schoolers at a city school near Ft. Bragg. My experience teaching English in Korea did not prepare me for this at all. In Korea, students revered their teachers and treated them with great respect. Adult students would take me out for lunch or dinner after class, treating me to saki, rice cakes, bulgogi, bibimbap, and OB beer. Students outside of Bragg were a little rougher and somewhat less refined. Most saw teachers as an obstacle, not a sage. Lunch was never included.

Many of the teachers there were Army vets who were looking for a new beginning after their own war experiences. Our school sent graduates to Harvard, Georgetown, and Duke, but I also had students who lived in poverty and had stretches where their families were homeless. These students knew what it was like having to choose between either having heat or cable TV or a phone in the winter. Almost all of them had a relative deployed to a combat zone. I couldn’t rely on “The Literary Canon” to reveal the joys and importance of literature to this group. A duchess losing her handbag at the opera was not a conflict that impressed them.

The first novel I taught was Great Expectations. My students immediately hated it. Dickens’ language was inaccessible to them, and 19th-century English culture was unrelatable. I stopped teaching it that day. I didn’t want to ruin Charles Dickens for them. They would be ready for Dickens one year, but it wasn’t that year. The Army taught us how to adapt, improvise, and overcome. I abandoned the school district’s curriculum and scoured bookstores for literature that would appeal to my students. We read Stephen King’s “Survivor Type” and Richard Preston’s Hot Zone. Each semester I had at least one student faint as we read these works. I’m being literal here. Invariably, someone would turn ghostly pale and collapse to the floor as I read out loud about a shipwrecked survivor eating his own foot to stay alive or an old man stricken with the Ebola virus regurgitating the vomito negro, with specks landing in the doctor’s mouth. Students begged me to read it again. They stole copies from the library. I knew I had discovered gold.

We gradually moved more toward the Canon. I introduced students to the inexplicable narratives and madness of Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, but I still scoured for more modern, relatable fiction. Together, we read short plays that depicted the realities of urban life. They couldn’t get enough. I also found flash fiction, urban fiction, and poetry slams. All were new to me. My students discovered the power of words and became active readers. I discovered new literature and found my voice as a writer.

It was during this time that I found my new gods. John Fante, Charles Bukowski, Mary Gaitskill, Gil Scott Heron, Kathy Acker, Jerzy Kosinski, Tama Janowitz. Then I picked up Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, and everything changed. He mastered the rules and then abandoned them all. He created a sub-poetry of slang and obscenity that made his oddball, nutter characters so real. I read the entire book at the bookshelf in the bookstore. I still purchased it, first to pay proper homage to the god-author and then to reread it and mark up every page with annotations that attempted to explain what was going on.

Paid to Write (Again)

The classroom was not my final destination. I was a writer who needed to produce more content. I returned to the internet. In the early days of blogging, I connected with my eventual writing mentor and Hollywood guru, Chris Soth. We collaborated on a screenplay together in one of his master classes, and it changed how I approached storytelling. I soon began blogging professionally for Getting Smart. Then, I had paid writing gigs all over the internet. I picked up a group of writers who I mentored. Smashwords published my how-to book on character development, and my novel Far From Okay is due out this spring or as the spirit moves me.