The unofficial memoir of Stewart J. Kunderman

In order to alleviate this feeling that you have Stewart, you must, in a way, start from the beginning—the baseline of who you were before you started feeling this way. To let all the little failures thus far plague you to the point where you are awake at half five in the morning, letting these unresolved issues come out of the filing cabinet in your head, and flip through the file, even opening a specific one over and over again, staring at the raw data present, this isn’t going to fill one with the necessary sense of efficacy needed to handle this particular position in life.

“To put it simply, the profession you’ve chose doesn’t take to kindly to weakness on a personal level, it was never meant to. To become an English teacher and a writer concurrently is not only difficult, it’s impossible. You couldn’t join the army and become a sergeant at the same time could you? Of course not. You’ll need to make a tough decision, one will suffer, that has always been the case.”

I thought about a lot of things on the way home from Professor Gladney’s office that afternoon, one of which was the main catalyst for the pounding in my brain that resounded failure clear across the chest cavity.

I internalize things, always have. When I lost my virginity, I threw up stale Meister Brau beer all over the interior of a Caprice Classic. When I was first accepted into the teaching program, I collapsed after experiencing a sensation not unlike having your chest stepped upon by a crazed, jack-booted fascist.

So dropping out of Graduate School so far, had compounded in my stomach, and it needed a way to get out. This could get disgusting. Failure is rife with bodily fluids.

I had been up until five this morning, banging away on a new draft of my continuously morphing first novel. Self-Doubt had plagued this particular round to the point where it spent most of the time tucked away in a secluded cedar drawer, in the upstairs of the shabbily rented apartment above the international building. Time shifted, and for a moment I felt twenty again. For a moment I inhabited the body I lived in when I was twenty, and it came with all of the wheezing, the rattling cage of a brain I possessed along with an adroit sense of word choice.

Thinking on that for awhile still standing outside of Professor Gladney’s office, I stared at a poster for a study abroad opportunity lacquered to one of the reoccurring posts that dotted campus like mini police boxes, like the Tardis.

Dr. Who references had a way of sneaking up on me, as removed as it was from the situation, it gave me time to take in the information he presented to me as a realistic challenge, one that Gladney may have never dealt with. He might have just gone through life mastering challenge after challenge, never halting due to resentment on his own, albeit more driven, educated self.

Olympic athletes train hard, rising at five am to a colon-cleansing breakfast of soy powder and raw drive. Failed graduate students wake up at five the following morning, sip coffee and stare at the black and white checkerboard flooring in the kitchen wondering where it all went wrong.

My little upstairs apartment felt the weight on what happened yesterday. Making my way back last night was riddled with catatonic stops, at the bridge I sat watching the sun come down, and at the groups of undergraduates creeping across campus. Walking closely together, their energy seemed to coalesce at a certain physical point, and I felt a desire to go back and do it all over again, angry at myself for the time I had wasted.

But I was nothing if not of a survivor, so I went into the campus bookstore and was hired on immediately as a buyer, the proprietor impressed with my fetching combination of education and experience. So my inevitable breakdown would not be visiting then.

Walking back from this surprise success, I took the scenic route, and periodically stopped at reminisced about my first time on campus. I’ve been here for twelve years here, between pick up degrees and temporary assignments working in every sordid nook and cranny here. I’d sold rancid pizza as a freshman, pushed mountains of paperwork for the registrar my sophomore year, took a year abroad working in an Irish Pub my Junior year (another day I’ll tell, too many leather clad motorcycle jackets, pork pies, heart-stealing redheads and sadness) and went on a spiritual journey my senior year. Thinking that I’d never return to university, I signed up for a campus marketing career which had me visit every University Campus within a three state radius. It was my job to pump the students full of enthusiasm, so they’d have enough of it left when they signed on the dotted line, got the tshirt, gaudy pink coffee mug, delicate bear that fell apart two days later, or any number of throw away sacrifices to the altar of undergraduate first-time credit card reception.

My deal with the devil now clearly accomplished, I returned for graduate work and hid out in the library, working as a shelver and clerk for the remaining two years of graduate school. When the time came to return to graduate school, this time as an educator, I held out on employment, spending most of my days as a student teacher outside of the University system.

James Monroe High School lies on a two hundred mile peninsula just south of Oxnard, CA. It’s somehow strangely inner-city, as students from far away as Los Angeles are bussed in due to a slick combination of budget shortfalls and No Child Left Behind.

It’s some would say eclectic mix of students meant that I dealt with severe behavioral issues almost every day. What was even stranger was how closely their behavioral issues mirrored mine, albeit in a more violently reactionary way.

I loved these kids for the way they expressed themselves, the way they would just come out and say whatever was on their mind. As a stark contrast to the Academic world, where professors offered semester-long courses disguised as answers to how much your work resembled that of a petulant child and that you really shouldn’t think about becoming a writer.

These guys shouted out answers. If they felt like shit they’d say it, using the same nomenclature. For the first three months, I wrote referrals daily, and felt the burning heat of a thousand suns each time I taught a lesson.

At the same time, I had started work on my first novel. “The Graber Tapes” It was about a radio DJ in the 1970’s, living in Big Sur. I took too many liberties in borrowing from Play Misty for Me and it showed. What it lacked in originality it made up for in the ridiculous, as plot structures would come from the most contrived sources: Midnight callers would end up driving off of cliffs in cars manufactured by the father of the DJ, Michael Graber,-- a character’s name that could have only been formed out of the fires of 1970s police detective shows, like Banna or Mannix—which led to a high stakes lawsuit, after which Michael Graber would be forced to track down his father, a retired soap-opera star hiding out in the hills of Laguna Beach, CA. What made things worse than the lack of actual hills in Laguna Beach, CA was the way in which these plot structures would come, immediate. At the end of it all it read like a bad headache. And while I was still certain that there was something left of the scrap heap of “The Graber Tapes”, my teaching career was suffering.

When one is ensnarled in the business of writing a bad, yet engrossing novel, or writing any sort of novel, everything else suffers. I awoke forcefully most mornings, ripped from dreams of literary grandeur to the glaring reality that I had just completed two and a half drunken half-awake hours of sleep and I had my University Supervisor visiting my classroom that day, expecting detailed lesson plans, expectations, and a post class interview that always left me feeling hollow.

So, as stories like this often go, I was forced to make a decision. And being the sort of slight maniac who systematically makes the wrong choices, I chose the novel. With subplots worthy of One Life To Live, I spent the rest of the school year on the Graber Tapes and watched from a luxurious distance the slow, submerging death of my teaching career.

Standing in front of thirty students throwing paper airplanes and realizing that you just came to after falling asleep in the middle of a lecture is one the way to go down in the hallowed halls of history of educational fuck ups.

Groggy after my rude awakening, I eyed the furrowed brow and enraged pupils of my principal who, after a series of dramatic lines that had to have been scripted previously, promptly called my cooperating teacher into the room, and after a few rapid-fire one liners I couldn’t help but inject for dignity’s sake, I was on my way out of the building.