Life Lessons for a Young Writer

By Jervey TervalonMarch 19, 2022

Life Lessons for a Young Writer
I wanted to write a memoir but the connective tissue of the memoir didn't interest me. I wanted to render memories that would pop up like mushrooms and quickly vanish. I owe much to where I was raised, in a black neighborhood where people talked to each other and spent time on the porch and on the corner, as did my brothers and their friends as they smoked weed, drank Mickey Big Mouths and Heinekens, and talked all the time about the insanity of Vietnam, nuclear war, and H.P. Lovecraft, and from there they'd segue into the adventures of the many memorable characters in the neighborhood. I tried to do that here. A new installment will appear here every Saturday.

¤


Everything I needed to know to be a writer was there on Second Avenue beneath the big elm tree on the corner. I learned how to tell a story because my brothers and their friends didn’t mind me standing there listening to them because I didn’t exist. The fellas were a loose group of black men, including my brothers, who smoked weed and drank and talked about everything of interest in the known world. I wasn’t worthy of acknowledgment unless my brothers noticed me there and told me to leave, but I’d work my way back to them sooner than later. 

I was drawn to the corner conversations and the bagging and bragging. I was mesmerized by their ability to weave tales. Having something of interest to say was the coin of the realm on that corner. If you didn’t have anything of interest to say, you really needed to shut the fuck up. There was no tolerance for half-assed story telling. You needed to know your place and shut up and listen. I was almost ten years younger than my brothers and I wasn’t supposed to be there. They’d usually chase me away if they weren’t too mellow from drinking Heinekens and smoking only the best weed. But I didn’t care and I’d leave for a few minutes and reappear. Luckily, they were so blunted they never noticed my return.

I needed to hear talk about the skullduggery going on in the neighborhood, or the horrors of Vietnam, and how good the new Stevie Wonder album was and how good a horror story writer HP Lovecraft was, and how fucking racist he was way before his hate of black folk became a common topic. Through sheer determination, I mastered being invisible; otherwise I wouldn’t have heard about the guy up the street who wore dresses when he was home and who had really good weed and who would invite guys over to get high, and some of them would spend the night, or sometimes they’d say a few words about the muscular and kind of crazy girl with the veracious appetite for sex and who would terrify us virgin boys. I didn’t know what exactly to think about all those things, but I was glad to know them. It helped me see the world for what it was — complex and mysterious — and I wanted to know more about all the complexity and weirdness because I was weird and complex. The fellas talked about it all while drinking Heineken and smoking weed, before the dark times of rock cocaine that set fire to the land until only wreck and ruin was left.

Even when the fellas caught on to all my tricks and sent me away, I realized nobody minded me if I walked our husky over to them; they just wanted to pet the dog and blow their weed smoke into his nose. Our husky liked to get high, and they liked getting high with him, so I’d get to hear these black men who were master storytellers. They seemed to understand all aspects of human weakness and the comedy of life. It was my true education. Those stories were priceless, and the only reasonable thing was to tell them while they were still fresh.

There, I learned what I needed to know to get along in the world. I learned about how not to drive listening to the stories of legendary Leon, who possibly was the worst or highest driver in Los Angeles. Seemingly he had unlimited access to cars he could get running and then drive into a wall or into another car to disastrous results. Or sometimes he’d run into a telephone pole and we all wondered how he had not been killed. The conjecture was that since he was so high he was totally relaxed and just went with the physics of an automobile accident. He’d destroy the car but soon enough he’d be back behind the wheel of another hooptie. He got the reputation for being indestructible until he ran into a brick wall somewhere on Crenshaw and we didn’t see him after that. Then there was the motorcycle club up the street. They didn’t talk much and there was a lot of them, muscular black men who didn’t always wear shirts and who were always working on their bikes. The word was that they were a motorcycle gang, whatever that meant. Seemingly, if two black men stood together talking, they were a gang. All I remember is that they never messed with anybody. Supposedly some Crips new to the neighborhood made the mistake of disrespecting them and a shoot-out commenced in the alley, and those Crips were never seen in the neighborhood again.


¤


Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles, and got his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine. He is the author of six books, including Understanding This, for which he won the Quality Paper Book Club’s New Voices Award. Currently he is the Executive Director of “Literature for Life,” an educational advocacy organization, and Creative Director of The Pasadena LitFest. His latest novel is Monster’s Chef.

LARB Contributor

Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles, and got his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine. He is the author of six books including Understanding This, for which he won the Quality Paper Book Club’s New Voices Award. Currently he is the Executive Director of “Literature for Life,” an educational advocacy organization, and Creative Director of The Pasadena LitFest. His latest novel is Monster’s Chef.

Share

Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?


LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!