Sorting out the crazies

Teaching creative writing is one of the most personally revealing classes students can take and teachers can teach. I spent a chunk of my life teaching fiction writing to community-college students. One lesson teachers try to teach those who would write fiction is how to blur the line between what is real and what is made up. Spending time reading the words of people who may already be a bit unclear on that concept can be troubling.

Call it a miracle, but no one died violently in the colleges where I spent my 35-year teaching career. A few students I faced over those years were surely pathological, and a few more were probably marginal, but most of my students were just ordinary kids.

Like the creative-writing teacher at Virginia Tech who grew concerned about the fevered writings of her student, Seung-Hui Cho, I occasionally turned up indications of pathology in stories written in my creative-writing classes, incidents that stood out even in a field of Quentin Tarantino wannabes drawing upon a blood-soaked popular culture. If I assigned a story exercise to a class of 20 students, I could expect at least a dozen fictional murders, mostly gruesome.

When my teaching career began, back in the 1970s, malevolent weirdness was especially hard to spot. Students in my English classes were, as often as not, variously stoned on an array of street pharma. Some were on uppers, some were on downers, some were on psychedelics, and some were even straight. We were all a bit nuts in that decade, making it hard to detect the dyed-in-the-wool loons from those who were just flirting with madness, or competing to see who among us could be the most fashionably far out.

That zeitgeist is the only explanation I have for the folly of picking up hitchhikers on mountain roads that led to the little town in the Sierras where I lived and taught. Looking back, I’m appalled at my irresponsibility—a young father with two daughters at home—taking such risks based on the perceived solidarity I found in hair length and hippie drag. All I remember of that recklessness now is that I could not pass a hitchhiker on those lightly traveled roads—a “brother” or “sister” perhaps 20 miles from town—in a county that included rednecks with hunting rifles capable of doing harm to kids with long hair.

So it was not unusual when, on a late summer’s day, I picked up a guy on Highway 70, between Blairsden and Quincy, though the guy I picked up was unusual, even by the standards of that time. He wore a loin cloth, and nothing else. His hair was long, down to his butt, and matted with various bits of forest crud.

I tried to make small talk, but he said little, and I was glad when the 20-minute ride into town ended. I let him out on Main Street, well rid of him.

Or so I thought. A few weeks later, when the fall semester began, there he was in one of my classes, the loin cloth replaced with an ill-fitting suit provided by the Salvation Army.

Other students gave him a wide berth, and that space between them and him grew even wider after he spoke up in class one day—a rare event. A girl had written a story about her experience as a rape victim. It was a powerful story, exceptionally well told, and everyone in the class was moved, including the man in the bad suit. He, however, was moved in an entirely different direction. He spoke about the beneficial aspects of rape, stunning everyone into silence. Rape, he thought, was how shy people spread their seed, the way misfits kept their DNA in the gene pool. He also thought women enjoyed rape.

I made an attempt at being the adult in that company, saying that the imposition of one’s self on another by force was never justified, that women must be respected, etc. No one heard me. Everyone was too busy trying to look at this man, and to avoid making eye contact with him at the same time.

This tale has no graceful narrative arc, no dramatic payoff. To my knowledge, this strange man never did anyone harm, though his mind surely was a place from whence harm might have come. Someone sent me a clipping a few years ago, an obit that marked his passing.

There were a handful of such potentially dangerous minds in classes I taught, guys who might have been set off by triggers known only to the demons that ruled them. The community colleges prided themselves on an “open door” policy. Anyone could enroll.

Privacy laws and confidentiality conventions kept teachers from being informed about potentially dangerous people in their midst. It was assumed that knowing about psychologically troubled students might prejudice teachers against them.

As a result, classes are conducted at the crossroads where liberal insanity and conservative insanity intersect. Liberal insanity makes confidentiality and the individual student right to privacy sacrosanct. Conservative insanity makes gun rights sacrosanct, even for people who are crazy. At that crossroads, America teaches its young, willing to accept the deaths that occur where those two social pathologies meet, head on.