Writing gives us a little hope for connecting with the outside world.

When I was a ninth-grader growing up in Encanto, I used to struggle with poems that just wouldn’t work out. After a whole day of fussing and revising, I’d still end up with something like a centipede running on wooden legs. Every line wobbled and I never knew how to fix it. But at least there was somewhere I could go before that centipede ate me alive.

You may have heard that Encanto was built on eleven hills. Well, I’d claimed one of those hills as my own. Encanto was still largely undeveloped in those days. The steep hillsides were emerald green or tawny gold, their colors shifting imperceptibly with the seasons. From my chosen perch on a small cliff, I could see the violet silhouette of Point Loma against the sparkling Pacific. Using a pair of binoculars, I could identify familiar buildings in downtown San Diego. I loved that hilltop. It was my only escape, not just from my frustrating poetry-writing, but from my parents, too.

Daddy was always yelling. “Get that bike off the lawn before I make scrap metal out of it! Who ate my cashews? Those aren’t peanuts, you know. They’re expensive. Stay out of my private stock!” Although he no longer yanked off his belt to administer chastisement, my brother and I still took a swift backhand on the head from time to time. Mama hated all the tension, so she consoled herself with frequent nips from strategically placed bottles and she slept so much that I sometimes wondered if she hadn’t died behind that closed door.

My younger brother Mark had figured out that he wasn’t “normal.” When he finally told me what that meant, I was more interested than shocked. “It’s not such a big deal,” I said. “Tchaikovsky wasn’t nuts about girls either, you know. I read that in a book. Maybe you’re a genius, too.”

“I’m not a genius,” Mark said glumly. “And Tchaikovsky didn’t have to live with our dad.”

Above all else, Daddy insisted that everybody in the family be normal, conventional, and well-behaved. Or at least we all had to pass as such. That must have been a tall order for Mama, yet she somehow made it to church every Sunday with the rest of us.

By age 15, I was writing stories, stories about high school girls with issues. One threw herself under a train that was carrying her dad away on a business trip. Another starved herself half to death while secretly craving her mother’s affection. A third had a habit of squeezing shards of glass into her palms. Miss Shields, my favorite teacher at Morse High, advised me to keep at my writing. “Desire is everything!” she rhapsodized. “Never give up!” Spurred on by her intensity, I sent a manuscript to Redbook magazine. It was promptly returned with my first rejection slip—a politely worded little note, obviously not intended to shatter a beginner’s aspirations.

Mind you, I didn’t do any of those things. These gruesome vignettes were probably just bids for parental attention, and failed bids at that. Neither of my folks gave them more than a shrug. They just wished that I’d quit writing and start taking the future more seriously. Before my eighteenth birthday, I was supporting myself and living alone in downtown San Diego.

My parents were divorced by then. Daddy remarried right after the split, taking up residence in Poway. His new wife was not only a domestic wonder, but an exemplary Christian as well. She picked up all of my father’s sanctimonious platitudes, repeating them daily like a chatty parrot in a cage. Daddy was blessed. And Mama? After settling into a little North Park cottage, she became an active bar-hopper, forever on the hunt for men who had that in common with her. My brother had dropped out of school and moved up to Washington with a friend. They both got jobs in a potato processing plant.

My first job was at the Armed Forces YMCA near the foot of Broadway. I worked the morning shift in the coffee shop, and I had to be there at five to get everything set up. The other waitresses arrived at six when we opened. I walked the seventeen blocks between my apartment and the Y at a fast clip. It was dark and chilly at that hour, but once I hit Broadway, everything was warmly lit up. It gave me a surge of excitement to whiz past the old penny arcade. All those bleeps and bells, along with the clatter of pinballs, were music to my ears. Freedom was so intoxicating! Plus, Broadway smelled so good just before the crack of dawn. You caught whiffs of popcorn, hotdogs, onions, French fries, waffles and syrup — everything delicious! Sometimes you even picked up the briny smell of the harbor where the ferry boats docked.

I enjoyed waiting on our customers and making them happy. They could seat themselves at any of our three horseshoe counters, or at one of the booths along the west-facing windows. Flocks of uniformed sailors came in for breakfast, as well as a few retired old salts who lived permanently at the Y. I discovered that teamwork was bliss — a fact which amazed me! I’d been such a loner and a loser in high school. I also loved my vintage apartment with its built-in dresser and springy Murphy bed. I covered the old couch and overstuffed chairs with cheerfully patterned bedspreads. Then, as a final touch, I taped travel posters to the living room walls.

Not long after settling in, I signed up for a UCSD Extension course in fiction techniques. It was being offered in the evening at Roosevelt Junior High. An outspoken student in that class —now a well-known author and his own biggest fan — deflowered me on the Murphy bed. I fell into a pit of despair shortly afterwards. It wasn’t that I missed my virginity so much; but I couldn’t stop wondering what that conquistador had gone and done with it. He’d vanished so abruptly, never even coming back to class.

I began making plans to move up to San Francisco. Somehow, that just seemed like the perfect place to write one’s first novel. Naturally, my dad was totally against the idea.

“You don’t belong up there,” he said, while visiting me at my apartment. “That city is packed with creeps and weirdos! It’s no place for a chaste young woman. You lie down with the dogs, you’ll get up with fleas. Haven’t I always told you that?”

“Lots of times, Daddy.”

“Well, here’s what I think you should do next.” As usual, he squared his shoulders and cleared his throat before proceeding. “There’s no future for you in waitressing or writing. You see, neither of those things pay. You should train to be a court reporter. That’s a lucrative—“

“Oh, I would hate that,” I broke in.

“Why? It’s not much different from typing. You’re always typing up your stories for people who don’t like them. Why not apply your skill to some real purpose?” After he left, I continued packing.

Halloween at Mirella’s with Karl, a Marine.

During my sojourn in San Francisco, I switched jobs and apartments several times. Both were easy to find. On Market Street, I could get restaurant or counter work just by walking in the door. The places I could afford to rent were shabby, but never depressing. In fact, I thought they were charming with their bay windows and high ceilings. Any touch of anti-quity has always delighted me. I wrote an entire novel in a long, narrow room with a defunct fireplace in a very old building on Hayes Street. The manager loaned me a little electric heater to plug in near the bed.

Since my room was on the second floor, I had a great view from the fire escape. In the evening, I used to sit out there and watch fancily dressed people walk from their parked cars to the opera. But the dome of City Hall loomed larger than anything else on the horizon. It comforted me to know that the public library was also in that vicinity. I went there practically every day that it was open.

Just below the fire escape, a dingy little café met flush with the sidewalk. I never went inside the place, but everything was visible through the front window. I took daily notice of the cluttered counter, the unshaven cook scratching his head while flipping burgers, the row of somber customers masticating their grub like farm animals at a trough. The scene reminded me of something out of a Steinbeck novel. The Wayward Bus, perhaps? I inserted the café into my novel. Then I threw in my own digs, adding extra space for two tenants — a surly old man and his seventeen-year-old daughter. They ran the dismal eatery together — Dad scratching himself at the grill while Elsie diligently tended the counter. Elsie’s drunken mother, having bailed out of the situation a long time ago, rarely contacted her.

When this project was finished, I thought I’d written something almost as good as The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. But I had no idea what to do with it. I packed it in my suitcase and returned to San Diego. Before long, I was working in a cafeteria on Fifth Avenue and wondering if San Francisco hadn’t been some kind of a dream.

Months later, a notice on a library bulletin board caught my attention. There was going to be a writers’ conference at the University of Colorado. Important authors would be lecturing on campus every day and even critiquing the work of beginners. And if you sent in a sample of your writing, you could possibly win a fellowship which would cover your room, board, and tuition. Right away, I mailed my book to the university with a note explaining that I was a cafeteria worker/cashier who could sure use a fellowship.

The reply was somewhat disappointing. The board of directors wouldn’t give me a fellowship. But they were willing to pay my tuition through a scholarship, leaving the other costs up to me. There was enough money in my checking account for room and board, plus a round-trip Greyhound ticket. My boss agreed to hold my job for two weeks, and I set off for Boulder in high spirits. It was a long, exhilarating bus ride through territory I’d never seen. I scarcely slept. Upon checking into the designated dorm on campus, I met my roommates — two mature women from New England who had won fellowships and who seemed to me like a pair of sweet maiden aunts. They tolerated my starry-eyed giddiness and constant babbling. The truth was, I could barely handle the euphoria, not to mention the stark terror, of being around so many brilliant people all at once.

One afternoon, my roommates and I attended a poetry reading in the auditorium. The giant standing before us was James Dickey. He read a narrative poem called “Falling” which he’d based on a real event: due to some mishap with a door, an airline stewardess had gotten sucked out of a plane. While plummeting through the atmosphere, she managed to strip off all of her clothing in time to meet the earth, her death, and her maker in the nude. What did this poem mean? I had no idea. I only knew that I’d lived every second of it. That powerful wind hitting my body had been glacial.

Later in the evening, a bunch of us were invited over to the guest house where James Dickey was staying. At one point, while sitting right next to the man himself, I began shaking like a cold puppy. He finally glanced my way and asked where I was from.

“I’m from San Diego, Mr. Dickey.” Smiling nervously, I added, “I came here on the Greyhound.”

“Oh, I see.” The poet looked away. That was it for me. No matter. Mr. Dickey may have been sitting next to a conversational dry well, but his bar was anything but dry. Launching into a full-scale imitation of my mother, I guzzled everything I could lay my hands on. Before the party was even over, my genteel “maiden aunts” had to lug me to the dorm like a sack of potatoes. But the worst was yet to come. I still had to face the critique of my novel. The best-selling author who handled it spoke softly and almost soothingly as she advised me to try doing something else with my life. She sounded just like my parents.

“Writing just isn’t working for you, dear,” she elaborated. “You could go on this way for a long, long time, but it wouldn’t get you anywhere. I feel obligated to tell you that.”

“Well, I’m still young enough to learn!” My voice cracked with agony. “Why did they give me a scholarship if I’m as hopeless as you say?”

My critic smiled indulgently. “Obviously, you’ve put a lot of time and effort into your novel. But you see, it really isn’t a novel at all. It’s unstructured. It just meanders. And your protagonist, I’m sorry to say, leaves the reader completely cold. I don’t believe those things are going to change.” I grabbed my book and ran for the dorm. Leaving the conference the next day, I resolved to give up writing forever. But that resolution didn’t stick.

What is it that pushes us to keep writing, even after such toxic mega-doses of discouragement? Some of us, as kids, feel like a blob — all gooey whites and yolks. Formless. To gain any sense of self-definition, we need to secrete a shell. Writing is that shell. Writing gives us a little hope for connecting with the outside world. With luck, the egg gets to roll around on the tabletop for a while. Without luck, something or someone comes along and cracks the shell. My parents shouldn’t have told me to quit writing. That woman at the conference shouldn’t have told me to quit writing. Oh, she was right about my book. It didn’t stand a chance. But I stood a chance — if I kept writing.

Returning to my job at the cafeteria, I tried to pull myself together. It wasn’t easy, because something else was plaguing me besides the experience in Boulder: my mother. She was always phoning in the middle of the night, soused out of her mind. Sometimes she would even show up at my apartment, bringing a man with her—some guy she’d met in a bar. When I mentioned that to my dad, he said, “You should change your address and phone number and never let her know where you are.” I hated to think it had come to that, but maybe Daddy was right. Still, when I finally told him that I’d be moving to New York City, he was none too pleased.

“That’s just another Sodom or Gomorrah,” he groaned.

My mother’s reaction was nothing short of hostile. She felt abandoned. She sneered, “Well, I just hope the Big Apple teaches you how gifted you’re not!”

“Oh, come on, Mama,” I fired back. “I heard you say meaner things than that when I was a two-year-old.” Later, we said a more amicable goodbye.

Once I got to New York, I wondered if I hadn’t bitten off more Big Apple than I could chew. Plenty of restaurant work was available, but even dumpy rooms were beyond my means. To stay in Manhattan, I had to take a series of live-in nanny jobs. My employers, mostly single or divorced mothers, lived in dreary brownstones or high-rise buildings on the West Side. They all offered me a private room along with meals and a stipend for my personal needs. And, of course, I had adequate time off on weekends to explore the museums or go to the library. Sometimes I even splurged on concerts and off-Broadway plays.

One of my employers loved pulp magazines like True Story, True Confessions, True Romance, etc. She left them scattered all over the apartment so she could read them on the fly. One day I picked up a copy of True Experience and gave it a long hard look. Then I examined True Love and all the rest of them, and I found myself thinking, “Hey. I could write these.” They weren’t bad stories —not even half-bad — and contrary to what I’d always imagined, they weren’t totally formulaic. But they were told in the first person, and I never wrote that way except in my journal.

Anyway, I gave it a try. It came back with a rejection slip. So I tried again. And again. After twelve tries, I finally sold one. Other sales followed. I didn’t have to imagine my characters anymore because I already knew them. They were the women I’d been working with ever since my first job at the YMCA. They didn’t have college degrees; they didn’t shop at Macy’s; and sometimes they even lacked the sense to come in out of the rain. They learned, though. Like me, these women were challenged emotionally and economically. No character in a confession story ever lived a stress-free life. But they all made the discovery that love was the bottom line. If you could find the right man — and I don’t mean a sugar daddy, but the right man — you could pull through anything. Or, if you could just rekindle the flame with that hunk o’ love you already had at home — same result. Happy trails!

It gave me chills to write these tear-jerkers. I cried over my endings. I was proud of my work. Those magazines paid a photographer to capture the most dramatic moment in each story. Models were hired to portray the characters. Oh, the delicious sense of anticipation when a new issue came out! I couldn’t wait to open it and find out what my own latest heroine looked like.

Of course, nobody in my family had any interest in this pulp stuff. Whenever I sent my folks a magazine containing a story I’d written, I would hear little or nothing about it. I didn’t bother sending any issues to my brother. He was going through a very hard time with a church that he’d decided to join. The people in the congregation had convinced him that he should be celibate. Although he was trying, he felt lonely and miserable. I knew that my romantic narratives would mean nothing to him.

Although I sold quite a few stories in New York, I couldn’t begin to survive on the five cents a word they brought in. By the time I returned to San Diego four years later, my mother had quit drinking. (Among countless other catastrophes, she’d crash-landed on a barroom floor and broken her hip.) I needed flexibility on the employment front so I could keep up with my writing, and I ended up working at Mirella’s, a busy massage parlor in downtown Oceanside. The masseuses could request as few or as many hours as they wanted, and they could choose their shifts. I asked for the night shift so I could write in the daytime.

The parlor’s décor made it resemble a bordello in an old Hollywood movie. As you entered the lobby, the first thing you saw was a huge “velvet” painting of a nude woman. You could almost hear her whispering, “Come and get me!” And the masseuses? They weren’t exactly trying to pass as therapists in their spark-ly nightclub dresses and high heels. But nothing illegal went on. As our pretty auburn-haired manager Mitzi liked to explain it, “Nobody wants to be accused of corrupting the Marines from Camp Pendleton. Besides, the cops come in here for coffee all the time.”

We gave our customers a standard Swedish massage, which we’d been trained to do in a classroom setting. The course covered anatomy in general with a special focus on the muscles. We studied everything from the biceps and the triceps to the mighty gluteus maximus. Because of our textbook knowledge, we were prepared to deal with disgruntled patrons who said things like “Hey, hold on, baby, you forgot this muscle here” by replying, “That’s not a muscle, sir. That’s erectile tissue. Please put your drape back on if you want the rest of your massage.”

Rules were strictly enforced. No pawing at your masseuse. No touching yourself except to scratch an itch. No foul language. No drinking or smoking. We welcomed tips, of course, but not for anything extra. Prospective customers were informed of these restrictions before any money crossed the reception desk. We could hardly feel sorry for the dumb ones who refused to believe us. Legitimacy was the big factor that kept the parlor open. No one appreciated that more than Brigid, a former prostitute from Los Angeles. She didn’t want to end up on the street again, where her life had been controlled by a scumbag pimp. “I feel safe here,” she told me once. “It’s nice to be in the company of men without having to do the dirty.”

I could imagine. Doing the dirty must get old. It must take a great toll on a woman’s body and spirit. Like Brigid, I enjoyed the company of nice men enormously. Even our youngest Marines had harrowing stories to tell about boot camp. And some of our older guys — truck drivers, construction workers, etc. — definitely knew how to give us a laugh, the kind of guffaw that cuts off your oxygen supply and turns your nose red. The night shift could be a real party when the right crowd showed up.

We weren’t supposed to date our clientele, but that rule was frequently broken. Brigid met her future husband at the parlor. As soon as he got out of the Marine Corps, she ran off to Idaho with him. I missed her a lot, but I was glad for her. If anyone deserved stability and marital happiness, it was my beautiful friend Brigid.

One night, I flipped out over a handsome bearded biker who’d parked his Harley right in front of our window. It turned out that he was an associate dean at a law school in San Diego. He’d even picked up a degree in international law at Cambridge. His shiny, elegant chopper told me at least one thing about him: this was a man who lived two lives. After I’d given him a massage, he asked me out.

Our affair lasted for about a year. But when Mirella’s closed to make way for the developers, I immediately got a job at another parlor a few blocks away. My aristocratic boyfriend felt let down, because I hadn’t looked for a more respectable position. A golden opportunity for change had presented itself, and I’d just hot-footed it over to another tawdry massage parlor in the sleaziest part of town.

Sometimes all I could do about an emotional crisis was to write it out in my journal. Without that reliable vent, I would get all clogged up inside, like a drain full of grease and coffee grounds. So I scribbled away in my voluminous log, meanwhile making friends with my new co-workers, who happened to be just great. Within a few months, I’d grown to love them like the sisters I never had, or like the close friends I never met in high school. I loved them, period. After a while, the sky turned blue again and I started seeing things in a different light. My self-image improved, maybe just because I gave it full permission to do so. That process started in a massage parlor.

Hoping to broaden my creative horizons, I went up to Santa Monica for a conference on children’s literature. Once again, my work was criticized by a successful author, and once again, I got raked over the coals. It appeared that my writing style was “precious.”

“How well do you know children, Ms. Hotchkiss?” the smooth-talking gentleman asked me. “Got any of your own?”

“No. Do you?”

“As it happens, I don’t. But that’s beside the point. As a female writer, you’re missing some very basic instruction about the audience you’re trying to reach.” Pressing his fingertips together like a teepee, he added, “I’m talking about the biological transition that changes a woman into a mother.”

“Well, Louisa May Alcott didn’t go through that biological transition,” I pointed out.

“You’re right, she didn’t. And too bad for her! Apart from Little Women, all of Alcott’s writing is extremely precious…“

The next market I tried was women’s erotica. Just one tale about a shy housewife’s appointment with a gigolo was worth three confession stories. But the editor insisted on detailed descriptions, and not just of the steamy encounter. My gigolo couldn’t invite his ladies into a typical bachelor pad, he needed a brightly painted gypsy wagon parked in a sandy cove, the candlelit interior decorated with Turkish carpets, tasseled cushions, and vases of peacock feathers.

My friends at the parlor loved these sizzlers. One girl, a soft-spoken southerner named Bessie, was more impressed than she should have been. “My lord, Georgeanne,” she gasped. “Did you really do all these things?”

Barely able to keep a straight face, I answered, “Land sakes no, Bessie! I only did about half of them.”

“Well, I sure wish I coulda met that cop who tore up your speeding ticket.”

Then one day, a phone call from my dad turned the world into a wasteland. My brother had killed himself. Alcohol, sleeping pills, and carbon monoxide. His church had “disfellowshipped” him; they shunned him like some atrocious monster. I tried consoling Mark by saying that he was lucky to be done with those small-minded hicks. He pretended to agree, but the whole thing was more than he could bear.

During the next few months, I kept my regular hours at the parlor. That was the only stitching holding me together. I didn’t care a bit about writing anymore. A little later, I took a leave of absence and went to Europe. I made up my own itinerary and did everything on the cheap. But even though I saw a profusion of beautiful things, I also saw my brother at every turn. In Madrid, he was walking briskly down a cobblestone street. In Venice, he was sitting meditatively by a canal.

For the next five years or so, I only did three things—work, read, and get older. The new girls who were being hired at the parlor could have been my daughters. They liked me, and I liked them; but the situation wasn’t dovetailing with reality anymore. Fortunately, I liked seniors. I got my CNA training at Mira Costa College and followed it with all kinds of caregiving jobs. I longed to write for magazines again, but there was never any time. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, “We are buried alive in this close world and want more room.” Happily, my journal opened up to me again, and I found that room in its pages. Oh, and I also managed to write the story you’ve just read — my own.