Me and Writing

This was the summer that I think I became a writer. I was thirteen years old. I wore steel-rimmed glasses and I was a very 1)solemn boy. Not that I was sad, but I simply was paying attention. I'd been given a typewriter by my Uncle George, when he got an electric. He gave me his old Underwood typewriter and I set it up in the 2)basement. I had a secret place under the stairs behind a 3)stack of sheet rock. I sat in there and wrote where my parents could not see me because they were worried, you know, that I didn't go outside. And they believed in the 4)illusion of a balanced life, you know, you do a little bit of this, you do a little bit of that. I just wanted to do one thing. I just wanted to find things to write about.


I liked to write about 5)tornadoes: Tornadoes, which come out of a peaceful summer day in the Midwest. And the sky's blue and then suddenly it's dark as night and this great snake-like cloud comes slithering across the 6)landscape, 7)smashing houses at random, destroying this one, leaving this standing. I liked that idea.

I wrote a story, a sort of 8)autobiographical story, about a family from New York, a microbiologist and his actress wife, and their son, who looked, and walked, and talked, and thought, and felt exactly like me. I sat in the 9)backseat and they were driving across the Midwest, and they forgot me... at a gas station. We stopped for a rest stop... and they forgot me, and they drove away. I walked up the road that they had driven and suddenly the sky turned dark and... a tornado came up and it picked me up and it carried me and dropped me, uninjured, in the yard of a 10)sanctified 11)Brethren family. I knocked on the door and a woman in a white 12)satin gown holding a flaming 13)torch came out and asked me what I wanted. And I was going to tell them that I had to leave to look for my parents and then the dog spoke to me. The dog said, "Stay." So, I stayed. But still, I missed the life of 14)glamour that I had known on New York's 15)exclusive Upper West Side. I love to write stories like that.

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