The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [74]
Enter the Mingo, stage left.
Andy Mingo in a shitty ass Isuzu Trooper. After my head-on collision, an M FA thesis student of mine at San Diego State University walked into my life like a movie star, offering to loan me one of his cars. By the time I met him in San Diego, I was a woman who had to crash her car.
The first time I really saw Andy was at my SDSU job interview. He very nearly fucked my shit up - sitting there looking a little like Marlon Brando. I’m up there trying like crazy to sound cogent and smart, jawing it around postmodernism like someone a university should hire and he’s zinging me with puffy lips and intense stares and is that a flattened spot just above his nose like in On the Waterfront? I swear to god the line “I coulda been a contendah” crept into my frontal lobe. I distinctly remember thinking, whoa. That guy is trouble.
When it came time for the question answer portion of the presentation, Andy Mingo raised his hand and asked, “What is your teaching philosophy with regard to what graduate students in creative writing should be reading?” All the grad students leaned forward at me.
I said, “Everything. They should read everything they can get their hands on. What they love, what they hate, all of it. You wouldn’t jump into an empty pool, would you? Literature is the medium. You have to swim in it.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. He glared at me. Pissed. It was not the answer he was apparently hoping for.
What I thought was, fuck you, Mingo. How many books have you written, big sexy looking guy? You’ve got a problem with reading? You can kiss my ass.
Miraculously, I got the job.
Every day I saw him in the graduate writing workshop Andy stared so hard at me I thought my skull might fracture. Or something in me, anyway.
After that eventful phone call from Paris that led to my carefully calculated drunk on and drive episode, Andy sauntered into my office and brought me a novel manuscript. A good one. And he offered to let me borrow one of his cars. Mine, was totaled. Like my life.
I borrowed the car.
When I drove his car around I could smell him and feel him. In the seat and on the steering wheel. In the holder thing between seats where I found cassette tapes he listened to. Bob Dylan and The Cure and Sublime. In the glove compartment where I found a lighter and rolling papers. On the car floor he’d so obviously worked hard to vacuum. The engine ran hot.
The kind of teacher I was, I’d meet the grad students to go over their writing anyplace but my office. I’ve never believed in institutional authority. So I’d let the grad student choose where we’d meet - let them name a place where they felt like themselves - and I would go there to talk with them about writing. With Andy, it was a Mediterranean coffee shop off the beaten track with an outdoor area where we sat under bougainvillea and orange blossoms and spoke of writing.
That sentence cracked me up. Immediately it was not about writing. Man-lust fucks a girl up.
We both wore sunglasses. Since neither of us took them off, I took it as a draw. We both threw out a few mock barbs. Neither flinched. We both executed a couple of low-level sexual innuendos. Dead even. And when I asked him about the references to Italy in his novel, he began to narrate his lifestory - so I came back at him with a bit of mine.
Andy grew up in Reno. And what was coming out of his mouth, well, it was a worthy backstory.
“My mother was a single mother. She taught math. I’ve always hated math. I grew up with a series of father stand-ins… guys with names like ‘Pidge.’ ”
I countered with “My mother was an alcoholic pathological liar. On the other hand, she was a great storyteller.”
“I was once a bouncer at Paul Revere’s ‘Kicks’ nightclub when I was 19.”
“Paul Revere and the Raiders?” I asked, thinking about how when I was 19 I was in Monte’s basement.