FUTURES MARKET
By Duncan Murrell
Lather Weekly
January 16, 2003
LAST SUMMER I QUIT a good job to write a book. The banality of that does not escape me. Part of my job had been to dissuade people from making that very same decision, and perhaps it was the arguing that weakened my own convictions. I began to ask myself, What the hell am I saying? What the hell do I know?
In the end I didn't think it was a good job, but I understand why some people thought otherwise. The job had all the characteristics of something rare: mystery, occasional celebrity sightings, smart and creative colleagues, and daily contact (but only contact) with something I loved. People can live on those sorts of things for years, sometimes lifetimes. But what happens when you can't leave your own longings aside and you become Miss Haversham, taunted by the things that surround you?
I quit to follow my own path and to avoid spending my life clearing the paths of other writers. I loved myself for that selfishness. I'm giving it up for art! I certainly wasn't a saint, but I felt pure.
The first thing I did after getting some money to write the book was to ask my friends for a job tending their golf range off Yonkers Road. I had forgotten that writing rarely pays enough, but it was all right because the range job would let me pay my dues, and that would make me even more pure. Every ball I picked off the range, every golfer who left a mess for me to clean up, every row of grass I cut down ¯ these were the agents of a humility I could brag about someday. Someday, of course, I would no longer work at the golf range.
When the yardwork was done, I spent long hours in the pro shop reading novels or standing out on the back stoop smoking cigarettes and planning my future. I watched two mockingbirds harass a red-tailed hawk every day at sundown. An old man who came in almost every day complaining of his pains looked me in the eye and said, I could be dead right now. I kept it all in my head to use in something, something brilliant I was sure. On that stoop I imagined greatness; on that stoop I was the greatest writer I would ever be.
I began to enjoy the work. Writing the book was hard and lonely, but turning precise rows with the greens mower satisfied me greatly. I became a connoisseur of grass, memorizing the characteristics of the five types living on the range. I watched foxes and black snakes and killdeer go about their business. I imagined myself an oysterman back home in Maryland as I sprayed and sorted the dirty balls on the rack before sending them down into the washer. I learned to love two-cycle engines.
After a few months I thought I could stay there forever. I wondered if my friends who were waiters and bartenders and clerks ever felt the same way. Some of them had been at it a long time, paying their dues and plotting their futures.
I quit that job last month.
Copyright © 2003 Duncan Murrell
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