This is the least disgusting roach image I could find on Wikimedia Commons. It is credited to Nickfox14.
Tomorrow, a short story I wrote will be part of Texas Bound, an event put on by the Arts & Letters Live series at the Dallas Museum of Art. The story is a tiny part of a big evening, but it’s my first published (in a way) fiction since my novel, and I am savoring the moment.
That moment was about four decades in the making. When Clickety-Clack the Christmas Cockroach skitters onto the stage, it will cap a backstory full of ambition, jealousy and failure. It has death and despair. It offers lessons in the blind faith and mercy from the gods that writers rely on. And Fluff, the Fire-Breathing Kitten.
Allow me to explain.
Back in the latter quarter of the previous century, when I was 11th grade, I had a spectacular teacher for creative writing. One thing that made her spectacular was her willingness to adapt her plans to her students, something I suspect would be impossible in today’s test-driven climate, but I digress. She was great. She had a bunch of clowns in her class, so she set out to let us learn writing by doing comedy.
Around Christmas, she made the observation that all great holiday tales had similar elements. Namely, an innocent main character with some kind of deformity. (We would use a gentler word that celebrates our differences now.) Examples would be Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, or Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey, which was a real thing.
Our task was to collaborate on our own Christmas story, and perform it as a play or radio drama.
Now, when I say that our class had a bunch of clowns, what I mean is – it had some insanely talented, wickedly funny people. One was star of a couple of school plays and would go on to appear in a popular reality TV show, among other successes. Another became a cult figure writing for and performing on local TV. Others were clever and mischievous in ways that would lead them to careers in the law and cryptocurrency, I believe.
These were my friends, and also my rivals. Sometimes more rivals than friends, because we were teenage boys. But we had successfully worked together before, and I loved it, because nobody has ever made me laugh harder.
So when it came time to team up, it was assumed I’d be part of that group, again. Until I threw my lot in with another group of friends who, as I recall, all were girls.
I had a couple of reasons for this. First: They all were girls. So of course it would have been preferable to hang with them instead of a bunch of attention-seeking teenage boys.
Second, they were brilliant. If I am remembering our team correctly, it consisted of a future university professor, a future investment expert and maybe a future test pilot. My role in this team would not be as The Smart One. Which was fine. I could bring my impish sense of humor. And I knew we would be great.
This was important. I really, really wanted to prove to myself that I could be funny away from those other guys. Because if you put me up against the stars of that group, I would have been way down in the billing, somewhere above “gaffer” but below “best boy, and far from funniest.” I also was far from humble. And figured it would be a good chance to shine away from their light for a bit.
My teammates and I got along well, because we were careful and diligent people. We worked hard and went on to produce an entirely serviceable story about a mouse. I forget his flaw – maybe he didn’t like cheese? Anyhow, when we read it aloud, the class smiled and nodded, and we got our grade. It turns out, being careful and diligent are terrific skills for future professors, pilots and newspaper editors. But maybe not for comedy writers.
The other team – possibly at a wildy fun party I did not attend and probably at the last second – produced “Fluff the Fire-Breathing Kitten.” They recorded it with full sound effects, as I recall, and, in a word, it killed. It was clever, original and better than most of what you could have seen on TV that year. The people who did not fall on the floor laughing were probably just staying upright so they could wipe tears from their eyes.
I laughed and laughed and laughed, was happy to know people who were that clever, and also thought maybe I would like to try again at this assignment.
I am unaware of any actual roaches in my own Christmas tree, but I have one of these, which some would consider to be similar.
Time marches on. I became a newspaper editor, lost track of everyone, then met them again on Facebook.
In late 2018, my mom died. I think it is safe to say – back me up, armchair psychologists – that I learned to be funny in an effort to impress her. She laughed a lot, and sometimes my stupidest jokes got the best laughs.
A few weeks later after her death, my newspaper career came to an abrupt end. I spent the early part of 2019 scrambling for employment. Which, luckily, worked out within a few months. In fact, my new job had much saner hours than my newspaper gig. Which left me in a challenging situation, as a writer: For the first time in my adult life, I actually had time to write. (My novel had been written mostly at night, when the rest of the house was a sleep, and on stolen moments on the weekend, and sometimes early in the morning before I raced to work.)
There was a problem.
Because for the first time in my life, I also found myself utterly incapable of putting words on a page.
My new day job involved learning about health matters, and although it was challenging, that kind of writing was not a problem. But creatively, I had nothing. I spent hours staring at my computer screen. I had no words, no ideas, no jokes, no observations worth sharing. The white screen became a black hole – my desperate gaze went in, and nothing came out.
At the time, I told everyone I was doing fine. And this was what I told myself, too. Except – I think that to cope with the loss of my mom and the end of a career that, even on its many, many sucky days I liked and was proud of, I shut down emotionally. That is, I walled my feelings off to keep from crying or raging or ... well, I don’t know what exactly, because I walled it off.
For the sake of the people around me, this was a good thing. For the sake of my writing, it was terrible. Because I now realize that to write well, one has to be able to tap into anger, grief and ugliness, because they are stored in the same place as your joy, laughter and beauty. If you make yourself numb to one, you risk making yourself numb to all.
I did not know this at the time. So I tried different things to see if I could spark ideas. One of them was to look in a very old folder on my computer that was labeled, “Ideas.”
And in that folder was a document named “Xmasroach.”
It was so old my computer struggled to open it and so deeply buried I cannot even find it now. But it contained two lines:
The Story of the Christmas Cockroach
(Copyright 2008)
I have no memory of creating that file. But I understood it. On what was roughly the 25th anniversary of my creative writing class assignment, I’d apparently hit on an idea that had potential to work.
And a decade after that, I was going to try it. Because it was the spark I needed.
Clickety-Clack crawled onto the page slowly, in choppy, awkward sentences and under a different name. But one sentence did lead to another, and then another. And after a few weeks, “The Memorable Christmas of the Bold Little Cockroach: A Very Special Holiday Story” was my first successful fiction project in years.
I showed my wife. She laughed. I showed my book’s editor. She was encouraging.
But there is not a great market for roach-related Christmas stories. There is not a great market for weird Christmas stories in general. I know this because after Clickety-Clack, I wrote a bunch of them. They are unlikely to ever see the light of day. I have the rejection letters to prove it.
But because I had been able to write Clickety-Clack, I felt able to attempt them. And because I was able to attempt them, I am able to keep on writing. Maybe something will come of that again, someday. (Feel free to ask me about “The Trashy Little Christmas Tree” and his friends.)
In 2021, thanks to a former intern, I saw that Arts & Letters Live was soliciting short stories, I felt ready to let him crawl out into the spotlight. Which will shine on him tomorrow night.
He’s no Fluff the Fire-Breathing Kitten. He’s just a little roach who kept on trying.
May the roaches in your own life be so helpful.
