The Last Bongo Writers Workshop: What I Don't Know Standing Here

I once wanted to write a novel about a failed marriage that had run clean off the tracks.

My own.

In 1995, while working in Los Angeles as a full-time reporter, I enrolled in an evening writing workshop at the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program. I had just been through a divorce from my first wife, Betty Jean — a brassy, lovable tomboy-turned siren from rural Virginia and I wanted to write about the raw emotions our parting left behind.

And, oh man, did I have a story to tell.

We were both free spirits, me and Betty Jean. The very first time we met in the Norfolk State University cafeteria in the spring of 1981, I was attracted to her Southern drawl, painted-on jeans, ruby-red lipstick and sense of danger: At the time, she was in the throes of a torrid affair with a member of the Gambino crime family.

Betty Jean was a rebel, a breathy, trash-talking Marilyn Monroe. When it comes to women, I have always fallen fast and hard and after meeting Betty Jean, I could think no one and nothing else.

We fought, laughed, made love, and fought again.

One friend called us The Lockhorns.

Years later, before we got married in a little rural chapel in Baja, California, we'd sought the blessing of a Catholic priest, who asked Betty Jean why she wanted to marry me, in essence, why she loved me.

The question stopped her.

“He makes me laugh,” she said finally.

“That’s not enough,” he said.

On the ride home, we laughed derisively about what a priest knew about the emotions that fueled married life.

But he was right.

I had dragged my heels for years. By the time we walked out of that chapel in Mexico, we’d been dating more than a decade, with me always believing I was “too cool to be married.”

And fatherhood?

"One foot in the grave,” I said.

Betty Jean wanted babies, though she rarely, if ever, said as much. Maybe she did. Maybe she screamed it loud and often and I just wasn’t listening, or didn’t want to hear.

So when she got pregnant, after we were married, I talked her out of having it.

That’s when she fell out of love with me.

She traveled to Mexico with a friend to study Spanish, met a young Mexican teacher there, got pregnant, and that was that.

At first, she hadn’t yet told the teacher. I said she and I could raise the baby together, as ours, as a way to make up for the one we didn’t have.

But it was too late.

Months later, on that first night at the writing seminar, I brought along a few pages of a novel about divorce, and saying things you didn't mean, about a self-interested character who comes to regret an opportunity lost.

I called it Last Exit to Splitsville. 

But how to bring my character’s arrogance and pain to the page?

I hoped Les Plesko would show me.

He was older than me, just slightly, by three years.

Short in stature, with wild receding hair and a wandering right eye, Plesko was a bohemian fiction writer who’d just published an acclaimed first novel about a heroin addict’s self-loathing, marginal beachside life in the 1970s.

It was called The Last Bongo Sunset.

One critic called it “stylistically gorgeous.”

But there’s the thing: Les didn’t like me.

You have a sense of these things. Maybe as a journalist you become a quick study on people. I was the eldest in a class dominated by women; most a decade younger.

Maybe I spoiled the dynamic. Maybe Les saw an arrogance I didn’t realize I projected.

The class was called Life Becomes Fiction, perfect for what I was trying to do. And I figured: you didn’t have to like somebody to teach them something.

There were moments that stood out.

Les was enthusiastic about what he liked, knew the push young writers often needed. We soon came to recognize various Pleskoisms — nuggets of writing wisdom from our instructor’s subconscious mind.

Like “If you like the scene, it really happened.”

Or “Characters don’t realize they’re in novels.”

Or “Like a cobbler, fix as you go.”

On that first night, he gave us several pages of what he called writing prompts, a way to jump-start your creativity — bold, evocative sentences such as “I’m 10 years old and this is what I know.”

Looking for a writing sample to bring to class, I chose a prompt that I felt captured the wistful voice of an older man looking back on a major life trauma.

It read, “What I don’t know standing here is …” And I knew right where I was was going, what I wanted to say.

I remember reading the words aloud in class. I’ve forgotten them mostly, but idea went something like this: 

“What I don’t  know standing here is … what my babies would have looked like had I allowed them to enter this world. Would they have been boys or girls? Little brunettes who reached for your hand and made you do stupid things, shed all the self-respect you thought you had, just to hear them laugh?”

I can’t speak for the writing, but I felt as though I had touched upon something equaling real human sorrow.

I wanted Les to like it. I wanted his approval. Even the slightest encouragement.

When I was done, the room was silent.

Les said nothing.

“What did you think of that?” he finally asked someone.

Afterwards, a classmate asked if she could have a copy of my piece. She said she liked how the character had been so honest and so bruised.

Well, I had reached someone after all, I thought.

Not Les, but somebody. One of my peers.

Over the summer, I took a second writing seminar with Les in Venice Beach.

Still wanting to get that first novel out of my system. Still seeking Les' approval.

One Saturday, I read a scene in which my main character, a thinly-veiled version of myself named Jay, was pumping gas, cleaning the car windshield, making clownish faces at Betty Jean, who sat in the front passenger seat.

For some reason, I still can’t say, the episode ended with a stranger pouring gasoline on herself and self-immolating, before the characters' eyes.

I finished. Again more silence.

Les turned to the man sitting next to me.

“What do you think, Bill?” he said. “You used to write like this.”

I don’t remember what else was said. I left during the break and never went back.

For years, I couldn’t place my anger.

Was it just me being thin-skinned? Or was it a valuable lesson in choosing one’s mentors?

Maybe I learned something about professional rejection, which I would later learn to endure, but not then.

I hadn’t thought of Les for twenty years, until I was relating a story to a writer-friend who’d just joined a fiction workshop.

That’s when I realized that I was still wounded by the memory.

I looked Les up online and winced at what I found.

In 2013, Les had taken his own life, jumped from the roof of his apartment building in Venice Beach, landing face-up on the sidewalk, as a friend said, “looking like Jesus.”

He’d written another novel before he died.

And his last, No Stopping Train, was published shortly after his death. He’d also been named one of the best writing instructors at the UCLA Extension Writing Program.

I later published a few chapters of my novel project on a friend's 'ezine called Ellavon, under the title, "The Ruins of an Autobiographical Novel."

But as I watched a video of Les’ memorial service, hearing friends and former students paint a portrait of a quirky, funny man I’d never gotten to know, I felt like that character in my own work, an aging man learning another lesson too late in life, this one about not stopping to consider someone else's pain.

“What I don’t know standing here is …”