~a letter to a close-reading commentator; why the fuck not?

Word limits on a platform designed to showcase one's words are silly. Word limits on a platform designed to showcase one's words are silly.Word limits on a platform designed to showcase one's words ar

To wit:

…you fucking whore’s asshole. no, not YOU, Mr. Dehaes. [looks up at the red highlighted portion]. we’re all just bopping along now.

well, here goes.

this is a letter to a gentleman [Mr. Jelle Dehaes] that was supposed to be a comment response to my previous posted work [“the order of the arrow [or the fifth of july]. lchristopher [that’s me]] but Substack’s writing platform apparently does not take into account what happens when you just…fall in. This is the hole in the page I will refer to at least once in the telephone book of a response queued below for Mr. Jelle Dehaes, e.g., et. al., pat. pending.

Mr. Dehaes:

First, thank you for the detailed close reading and for some of the questions posed on your own corner of this stodgy, word-limited platform - I wanted to make sure I could make a hole in my evening to address your thoughtful commentary.

It's funny. Someone opening a dialogue with apologies for not being a native speaker of American English immediately tells me that they are far, far better educated than I [at languages and in general]. I'm an American. Our mandatory 12 years of public schooling is beyond abysmal [it was abysmal when I went through it - largely in secondary level correctional institutions [reformatories; long story]; the last ten years it seems that you can earn your high school diploma without a) going to school b) doing the requisite schoolwork c) doing the requisite homework/studies d) passing the quizzes, examinations and tests put before you d) achieving a high enough score on the final exam allowing you to exit the institution and earn your degree. These are not even taking into consideration the "college courses" [prerequisites which must be completed to pursue a baccalaureate/bachelor's degree].

Me, I was just trying not to get stabbed over the doughnuts in the dayroom until I had earned enough "good time" [two years] to be allowed to be inserted into the matrix of "resource room" schooling in an affluent neighborhood which was thirty miles from my home. I got up every day for six years at 4AM to board what is colloquially referred to in America as the "short bus" for "SPED" students [a portmanteau of the two words: "SPecial EDucation"] so that we would arrive at the school by 8:02AM, for "first bell/homeroom/roll call". The bus went to each special education student's home over a gamut that covered at least fifty miles. For those two hours the bigger youths would beat the everliving shit out of the smaller youths until the smaller youths became bigger youths and the process repeated itself. Darwinian logic at its finest.

To continue:

After Columbine happened, Chris Rock - who lays all of the bare truth of our nation down quite well in his catalog of work, if you would like to learn more about the "real" America. Bigger and Blacker is his absolute best comedy sermon/special performance. Without it I never would have learned why our schedules were skewed shorter than the "regular" students. Mr. Rock espouses that it was not a Marilyn Manson album, it was not the movie Natural Born Killers by American auteur and Vietnam Veteran Oliver Stone - some people are just CRAZY, and parenting has a lot to do with that. He goes on to say that when HE was in high school: 1) the crazy kids went to school in a "little ass bus" [we did], 2) they performed the majority of their studies in a classroom at the far end of the school away from the "normal students" [we did] and that 3) the crazy kids got let out at 230PM [the agreed upon base model American public high school day ends at 3PM - nationwide] - so just in case said “…crazy kids, I dunno, went CRAZY - they would only hurt OTHER CRAZY KIDS”. [We did - I did not know this until many years later.

I spent the majority of my time in secondary education writing books [and got notably pink-slipped [a "deficiency" notice or demerit for bad conduct/behavior that normatively had to be signed by one's parents and returned to the ticket-writing teacher]. One i wish I had kept read as follows: - "Christopher is NOT doing the requisite amount of schoolwork. He has become preoccupied with a book he is writing at home." I couldn’t argue [and my parents didn’t give two shits, my baby sister was the golden child; I was the experiment, if that makes any fucking sense [and I hope for your sake, it does not, my new Belgian friend]. I mean, it was true! My manuscript topped out wat 424 pages typed double-spaced Courier 12pt font, with justified margins [the width escapes my recall at this time, but that was the century-old standard for professional publication and those scribblers seeking agency representation]. I finished that first book when I was 16 years old - writing 24-32 pages a night near the end, which comes at a fever pitch, when you find what [more] established authors than myself refer to as "the hole in the page." That is very important. It is when the world around you disappears and you fall through the paper/screen directly into the story itself. The real world is very far away.

As I am about as intelligent as a doorstop when it comes to a standard curriculum [this continued throughout my baccalaureate years and well into my graduate studies, both of which, you understand, *never would have happened* if I hadn't A) taught myself to read at age 2 1/2 [it is one of the few accolades my aged parents have both conceded over the years to me, I could read anything set in front of me [I was reading Stephen King novels in the 3rd grade and had skipped a grade [went into school a year early] with and spent the rest of my life to present voraciously reading anything and everything I could get my hands on. B) In the fifth grade two smart girls I liked began "writing a book" [this would also become a habit - if a girl or girls i liked (always pretty and smart) chose to jump off a bridge, I would be right fucking after them - it is how I ended up going to college - all of the prettiest, smartest girls were going there!] so I said, I could do that, and the rest is history.

To make the long story short -- too late -- I have no magic formula for establishing one's self in the writing world. I am about as attuned to social cues as a Floridian armadillo and historically have managed to tank every opportunity ever placed before me. I somehow wangled a residency at The New Yorker Magazine [did you know that once upon a time, on the door of the TNY Fiction Department - cue sound of angels - had a sign in 72pt font block letter small capitals reading: PLEASE DO NOT USE THE FICTION DEPARTMENT AS A SHORTCUT TO FAME AND RICHES? I didn't.] from a fellow editor at a college newspaper so blue and off-color we had our office of thirty years taken away and turned into a commuter lounge while I was still working there. You would think I would recognize such a sterling opportunity. Did I, you ask? NAY. I finished my residency of four months and was receiving calls to return to work in the Art Department for a very reasonable stipend but found it more engaging to go to work 35 miles away in what was at the time really only an extremely large village 11pm-7am each night. As a clerk at an all night newspaper stand.

This port of souls also happened to be the only 24 hour establishment allowed to operate within said village limits - a tobacconist, newspaper stand, and a short order grill stand adjacent to the train station taking you to New York City. You can only imagine the kind of shit that went on when you are the only source of cigarettes, cigars, greasy food and fresh coffee in a city of a 100,000 people abutting a university of 40,000 available from 230AM [when the bars closed] until 7AM. The police basically lived in my store between gunfights and nightstickings. They used to drive me home at the end of my shift. All of the other students thought I was out of my fucking mind - dropped off door-to-door by the city police [who were operating a brothel as an open secret in the center of town at the time - no, I never partook, didn’t see the need for supply to overcut demand] - not university police - every morning.

The City Police were supposed to receive "the police discount”. I never knew what the proper percentage of the total was supposed to be because I gave them anything and everything away for free. Gallons of piping hot black coffee for their Thermoses. Cartons of cigarettes. One time I grilled forty cheeseburgers for the felony squad after a raid. I lived out of that refrigerator - an Italian woman - the owner, J. - stocked it every three days with fresh meats, cheeses, dairy, eggs, all top end sausages, fresh bakery deliveries at 410AM every morning; pay yourself out of the register in cash every night, drop the night’s take [all cash, of course] in a brown paper bag with the receipt roll enclosed and the count of bills stacked neatly and rubberbanded together; dump the drop safe and spin the heavy steel tumbler twice to make sure it clearly connected and fell through, all of our stock came from hijackings and fencing operations - there were never any tax stamps on anything, and the city curfew was midnight for storefronts, 23Opm for bars/liquor stores with a token "bar" installed for safety's sake - somebody in the town hall was getting paid.

This was normal to me. I grew up in North Jersey [if you've ever seen the opening credits of The Sopranos - right until the protagonist, Tony Soprano [James Gandolfini, who also was a Jersey native and studied in the same large village as the Newsstand many years my senior] pulls into his posh driveway, anyway - that was where I grew up, and my parents parent's had grown up generations before. If you had Italian blood and worked in the trades - and I have my share of time in both, you knew.

What the fuck was I talking about? Oh, right. I could never pay attention long enough to do anything ever except writing. You sir, mention on another of the notes associated with your substack [one hopes - I have confused things before] about writing and how much you put into it or what qualifies you or what perimeter is drawn around the craft like the chalk around a corpse detectives would lay down before the advent of CSI, touch residue, surgical gloves, and DNA evidence. The very first thing you must understand is that I don't know anything. I am and have always been the dumbest kid in the smart row. I can make things work but I don't know how. I don't know what a gerund is. I didn't know what an adjective was until I got my first big magazine rejection letter scrawled like the word of God [TOO MANY ADJECTIVES] and then I had to look it up. I have never read a grammar book. That explanation that Matt Damon gives to Ben Affleck in that movie about the genius in South Boston far too many women had screened for me as a cautionary tale [to not end up working at construction site or a motor pool doing blue collar work my whole life like my father and to get the fuck out of whichever one-horse town we were currently fucking within the city limits of]? It lends itself to a comparison.

I have never passed a marking period/semester [until graduate school, which doesn't count] without completely tanking one of my courses. I have a partial photographic memory but it doesn't lend itself to anything useful [I can quote the liner notes from every Iron Maiden album ever pressed verbatim up to and including the "thanks to" pages, but a standardized test for grad school: GRE, LSAT, MCAT was out of the motherfucking question [didn't take one, applied anyway, got in on the strength of my written letter[s] and writing sample alone, somehow convinced them to pay for it because I sure as shit wasn't going to]. My polaroid mind was ditto when it came to the three biggies in these States United: Business, Law and Medicine. My skill is like that of an idiot savant [heavy on the idiot; hold the savant], and I can only repeat what the protagonist of that Matt Damon film tells his girlfriend just prior to the denouement: He's not a polymath by any means. He's not an athlete. He looks at a piano and sees "a bunch of keys, three pedals and a box of wood" because it isn't something he could understand [or bend to his will - which is largely what talent in its rarest, most pure form is, I feel and most relate to, a combination of talent and charisma smelted together to form a shared clairvoyance; of intelligent light. Or in the words of the immortal T.S. Eliot closing out the exit music to his film The Waste Lands - “Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.”- the peace which passeth understanding] - but when it came to quantum mathematics at its highest possible point - "he could always just play." I was never taught how to read. I just knew how. I was never taught how to write. I just knew how. I went to graduate school because I wanted to make sure the woman I loved could never look down at me for not being educated enough. I wrote 57 drafts of my entrance letter. Why? Because it wasn't done yet. It didn't feel right. I looked at the page and I knew. I looked at the words and I knew. It is all I have ever known how to do. I could always just play. Through playing, I have created a corner of the world where I am safe. That is it. That is all.

If you have reasonably strong work ethic (and what . There is an absolutely beautiful woman I know - we'll call her Sarah - who has a more than a good amount of talent but a work ethic that would put the heads of a Japanese corporation to commit seppuku/harakiri in their boardrooms for want of honor lost upon learning such a person as she existed. She will succeed no matter what, because that is what hardworking, beautiful people do. Talent is good, but its not enough. "Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter," as Stephen King, himself a low borne, blue collar, self-made author with an indescribable, incalculable work ethic, has said on more than one occasion. His book, On Writing, touches upon many of the points I myself am making here. Does he have a work ethic? You be the judge. His concordance is legion. His output and collective work speaks for itself.

I have connections, have lost more connections*, have had agents [i still may have one - i ought to follow up on that], have written a dozen finished works, have had deals and lost them. If you can still find them at this point in time, I would be surprised. Put your ass in the chair and place your desk against a wall and stay there until you are done. Don't quit. [a broken genius, Charles Bukowski himself crowned his headstone with the two-word-two syllable epitaph "Don't Try," but he's the man and we'll just have to come to terms with that]. It's the same logic that got earned me a slot in the US Army SOF when I was a far cry from their seventeen year old standard test of ability. You just don't quit. Keep reading. Keep writing. Turn off the fucking television. Enjoy the silence that comes with reading alone four hours a day and writing for at least that amount of time more [early morning when i first get up has always worked best for me. Meet a partner that understands both of these things and is willing to understand them forever. No matter what happens, you can write. My apartment burned down one year and I was without a computer, without a typewriter - all I had was a leather attache case with my longform current projects inside and an AMPAD 8/11/1/2 Gold Fibre doubleweight paper bond writing pad [you'll know when you know] and a handful of uniballs. My home was gone. But it didn't matter, you see - because all I had to do tomorrow to write was *think*. **I was going to do that anyway.**

Thanks for calling.

-LChristopher/NYC/8-22-2025 9:10PM EST

*for an example of how [not] well I network when called up to do so - true story - and how easily i obliterate acquisitions editors and agents used to working with anyone not living outside the seventh circle of hell in Manhattan; so far north that when you open the door, you're practically staring at Canada - give this piece below a look-see [like a meet-cute, except - not at all. hrm. allegorical comparisons can be a ugly bitch sometimes]. xx.