Elements - Excerpt

It was a little college town I lived in, went to school in, cowboys and gunracks gunning down the street, a few cholos, a few Chicanos, lots of mojados working the outskirts of townI met a few vaqueros, real vaqueros, who had dignidad, worked on the ranches in the great Central Valley and had dignidad: I hope their kids don't' grow up stupid...Once, and in a town the size of my fist it opened up to explode a brown flower dripping sunlight like butter oozing over the digits...

I learned to be a writer.

My room was a dump, smallish and cramped, with a couch and a bed and a desk and a can of pencils and always a loose-leaf folder on the desk, me never knowing when it was going to happen. When I was going to work. When I was going to fill this damn thing up with something worth rereading and reshaping and showing to Gary Thompson, my friend and mentor at Chico State.

My teacher, and a good one...

I made him laugh once in his office with a draft of a story, really laugh, not fake laugh, and that was something. I walked out feeling good that I was a writer at some level.