K. Jeffery

I decided I wanted to be an author at an early age. Of course, I also harbored dreams of becoming an astronaut, so maybe that doesn't really say that much about how it was all fated to be.

My term paper for sophomore English at Clear Creek High was about the development of the modern American novel. I studied everything I could about it, conducting exhaustive research more out of a fascination with the subject than for a grade. Since my paper was on the cutting edge rather than being about a time-tested topic like documenting autobiographical sources in Dickens, I used magazines like Time and Newsweek rather than encyclopedias or literary biographies as my main tool for research. This gave me a perspective that was different than the usual academic dogma.

I was also influenced by Norman Mailer�s �Advertisements for Myself,� in which the pugnacious original chronicled his own journey in the literary world, an experience which he characterized as courting the b***h goddess Fame. It got me to thinking about how Mailer got experiences to use as material for his first novel by going directly to where the defining experience of his generation was to be had. Not only did he enlist in the Army, but he also went to great lengths to make sure his Harvard education didn�t prevent his serving in a combat brigade. I thought about that a lot over the next years, and decided to go where I needed to for the sake of my art.

No, I didn't serve in Nam. I headed out to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. Though a lot of people seem to want to forget, taking psychedelics was the defining experience of the baby boomers.

I almost did enlist once, but the Marine recruiter tried to con me into signing up for three years, with promises I could go to helicopter school and wouldn't have to do my tour "in the mud." I only went to the Marines because you could enlist for two years rather than four. His greed and lies were obvious to me, so I decided to wait for the Army to draft me. Then the lottery came along, and I drew a number in the 200s, and was forever safe.

Freed, I spent the years until 1976 drifting around the country and working various jobs, the way a young man could back then. I thumbed rides and hopped freight trains, mostly west of the Mississippi. By 1974 it seemed the only place to keep from starving was the oil patch - Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. Over the next year even that seemed to get played out, the country going through what seemed like hard times, though nothing like what my father's generation knew. So I went looking to settle down, finally fixing on Seattle, one of my favorite cities.

It was there that I rediscovered my literary ambitions, which had been misplaced somewhere during the incredible rush of events during the previous years. Eventually I put together a story I called "The Highway is for Gamblers," a coming-of-age novel about a young man drifting through the backwash of the sixties. But when I met Carla, the love of my life, I worried that some of the autobiographical incidents might be difficult to explain. I think all young men sow their wild oats, but it doesn't pay to have all those youthful indiscretions thoroughly documented. I panicked, and burned every word I had ever written.

We married and it was happily ever after as far as I was concerned, except for one small fact. Carla died tragically young, when she was thirty-three. It's been twenty years, but I still have trouble dealing with it. People say there's always a good woman behind every successful man, and she was certainly my inspiration. She saw to it that I studied computer electronics and start living like a solid citizen. It was quite a change from my rebellious youth.

So now I'm fifty-eight, self-satisfied and with time on my hands, and I find I have a lot I want to write about. He may have meant it differently, but the lyrics Pete Townshend wrote for "White City Fighting" seem to make the point I wish to elaborate: "For no one remembers, not that I can see / That we were defenders, we were the free." The story of the sixties still hasn't been properly told, and I just want to be a part of a group that tries to set that right.