My writing education began modestly, at Manatee Community College   in Florida, but my writing life—you might say my sentencing—started at an institution of slightly lesser distinction: the Sarasota County Jail. In 1995, at age eighteen, I was arrested and charged with “Drugs Possession—controlled substance without prescription; Trespass on Property Other Than Structure or Conveyance; Marijuana Possession—not more than 20 grams; Larceny—petit first offense.” Friends and I were on benzodiazepine, a drug used as a hypnotic, a sedative, an anticonvulsant, and a skeletal muscle relaxant. When the little round pills were mixed with alcohol, the high had amnesiac properties, and one unlisted side effect was temporary kleptomania. We’d shoplifted trinkets from a blown-glass shop downtown and, afterward, smoked a joint on a building rooftop. Cops caught us climbing off the rooftop into a parking garage, our pot smoke wafting skunkily after us. I was charged with a felony for each of the six pills in my pocket, and misdemeanor theft for a blown-glass egg.

I spent the night in jail, part of it sitting precariously in the drunk tank. The benches were the first punishment, wide enough to perch on but not to comfortably sit. Warm and yeasty, the tank was sickening. It smelled like an unleavened loaf of sourdough sprayed by a territorial tomcat. Men were moaning. Withdrawing. One was crying, shaking. The stainless steel, seatless toilet against a wall was a dare no one dared take. I spent a couple of endless hours sobering up, fighting off an existential crisis. I looked around at the trapped, anxious men in close quarters—coming down off cheap highs that cost them everything, hung-over from regret, some homeless—and I saw my future.

In the morning I was released on my own recognizance with an order to appear for arraignment in a month. I had no idea what recognizance was, my own or anyone else’s, but I was glad for it. My family couldn’t afford a lawyer. Uncounseled, I spent thirty fretful days anticipating my trial and sentencing. I waited tables at a fondue restaurant, went to class, got high, and hung out. I tried to stay out of trouble. I did some searching and found that a recognizance is a conditional obligation undertaken by a person before a court. It is an obligation of record, entered into before a judge, whereby the bound party acknowledges—recognizes—that he owes a personal debt to the state.

Growing up I had an abusive stepfather, a maniacal martial artist who once took me to visit the farm of a gentleman we called Karate Kurt and, there, when my back was to my stepfather, he fired a .38 revolver at my feet. I last saw my biological father twenty-five years ago at a child-support hearing. The man responsible for my life and the lives of my two younger brothers showed up at court looking homeless to convince the presiding judge to reduce his monthly child-support payments. It worked.

My family was poor—sometimes on welfare, sometimes off. My mom is a hardworking single mother who had a difficult time raising three difficult boys. She’s clerked at a 7-Eleven in Sarasota since 1987. Thanks to her and her insistence, I got an education and managed to work my way up and into the ivory-collar world of academia, where I’ve found safety and constancy, thanks in part to the publication of my first book, Deadbeat, but where I’ve also learned a grim calculus.

Children raised without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime. Nine times more likely to drop out of school. Twenty times more likely to end up in prison. Fatherless children are at dramatically greater risk of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and teen pregnancy, and are more susceptible to sexual abuse. Boys who grow up in homes without fathers have increased trouble establishing stable sex roles and gender identity.

My two younger brothers and I can go through the above list and check all that apply to our downtrodden upbringing. Arrests for nonviolent offenses. Molestation at the hands of a babysitter. Flunking out of high school. Bankruptcy. Addiction to, and experimentation with, a slew of hard drugs and psychedelics. Anxiety attacks. Dyslexia. Food stamps. Our mother, working night shifts so she could spend her days with us, was beaten and raped by a soldier in uniform while delivering pizza to the now-defunct military base in Monmouth County, New Jersey, where we lived until she moved us to Florida when I was ten.

Despite the long odds, I’ve so far managed to skirt the hard life determined by these sad numbers, but only because I got more than my fair share of last chances—from my mom, from local and federal government agencies, from academic institutions—and only because surrogate fathers, all of them writing teachers, took me in, taught me a craft, and showed me how to live a productive life as a writer, a generous life as a teacher, an engaged life as a husband and father.

Maybe my father will read my book of poems. Maybe he already has. The poems follow a central character called Deadbeat, a hapless fellow, a ne’er-do-well, something of an effigy for an America in recession. He’s the embodiment of many modern-day misdemeanors of the sort that I’ve been charged with. This is to say the poems are more about me, the young man I was, the grown man I might have been, than they are about my father. Calling upon other well-known figures as fathers in absentia—far-flung Odysseus and God, to name two—I was working to exorcise the ghost of my missing father through the effort of empathy, trying to get to know a man I’m incapable of knowing. In so doing, in the act of imaginative reconciliation, I was hoping to recognize and thus avoid repeating my father’s failures, because the drain, the sucking spiral of fatherlessness—deadbeat dads producing irresponsible sons—has both drawn and threatened to damn me all my life.

A month after my arrest in 1995,  I attended my arraignment in a leg cast. I’d suffered a grade-three ankle sprain playing pickup basketball while stoned. The courthouse was crowded—too many cases on the docket—and the judge sent me home after a postponement, with an order to reappear the following month. The feeling was Kafkaesque, a word I’d learned in my second-semester English class as it was coming to a close.

The day before my English final, I dropped a tab of LSD, its blotter paper printed with one of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. I took only one dose; I had a test in the morning. Coming down off my half-day trip, I attended the final not having slept in thirty-six hours. The exam was a screening of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, after which we were to write a timed in-class essay. I watched what I took to be the formation of life on earth, feeling as if I were the first drip of archetypal precipitation to form and fall and vaporize on antediluvian oceans of lava, and I was all the time-lapse and slo-mo people sorting mail, sewing jeans, manufacturing televisions.

I was a hot dog on a conveyor and then I was a pedestrian conveyed up an escalator. That was me, the Saturn V rocket lifting off, and there I was again, the burning Atlas-Centaur rocket engine falling after its failure, pirouetting to the blown harmonies of Philip Glass. The universe was conspiring either for or against me. If life was out of balance, my life was in the balance.

The movie ended, and we were to write about what we’d watched. I set to work and after a half hour looked down at my page. Coleridge describing his opium vision of Xanadu in “Kubla Khan” it was not:

                      Then all the charm
Is broken—all that phantom-world
     so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets
     spread,
And each mis-shape the other. Stay
     awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar’st lift
     up thine eyes—

I couldn’t, for the life of me, complete a sentence. I had some four or five words and I wasn’t sure what they were, but they might well have been the four best words I’d ever written. As my time expired, I knew nothing more would come. When the professor was distracted, I turned in my journal due that day, and I submitted a few blank pages for my final.

The following week, at my end-of-semester conference, where we were to retrieve our journals, instead of embarrassedly taking the zero, I outrageously asked how I’d done on my final.

The professor, Ray Wonder, was an overworked, middle-aged poet teaching six classes a semester and advising the campus literary magazine, Pentangle. He spent most of his in-class energy gently, futilely trying to break us of using like in our speech as if it were the only mark of punctuation. Wonder didn’t publish much. He had a PhD in creative writing from Florida State, was divorced and had a daughter my age, and he lived alone on a small sailboat moored at the Regatta Pointe Marina in Palmetto.

After I asked about my final, Wonder looked at me like I’d untied his moorings and said, “You didn’t turn one in.”

I feigned surprise and stared into his bloodshot eyes. “I did too.”

“Well, I didn’t get it.” He flipped through a stack of pages.

“Maybe someone took it.”

“Who would do that?”

“Someone who doesn’t like me.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me what you wrote about.”

“Like life on earth and like how the movie presented a microcosmos of the last however-many eons. Like the failed rocket launch and the fall from like grace. Nuclear annihilation, hot dogs, and my recent arrest.”

“Your recent arrest.” He looked around his office, taking inventory. “Drugs?”

I shrugged.

He held up my spiral notebook. “How about I make you a deal.”

The sight of it, its gathered incriminations and confessions, made me more anxious than lying straight into his tired eyes. “This like plea bargaining?”

“It’s not like plea bargaining. It is plea bargaining. You promise to keep writing in your journal, every day, it doesn’t have to be much, just a jotting, but every single goddamn day—understand?—then I’ll give you a no-grade on your final.” He tossed me my journal. It seemed swollen with more than the high Florida humidity, like he’d dropped it in the harbor or the john and dried it in the sun. “Your other grades are good enough; you’ll have a high B.”

“High B, huh?” I riffled the pages of the half-full journal. “Deal.”

He held out his hand, we shook on it, and he didn’t let go. I pulled, he held firm. He dipped his head to catch my averted eye—I worried he was making a pass—and he asked, “Did you just lie to me about your final?”

I wanted to admit I had—I was a liar and, I thought, a good one—but I couldn’t breathe so I said the least I could. “No.”

“I’m trying to believe you, Nicorvo. You’re a smart kid but you’re feckless. You know what this means, feckless?”

I shook my head, more to clear it than to draw out a definition of what I was.

“Means you’re unable or unwilling to do anything useful.” With his free hand, he tapped the stack of graded finals. “I don’t think you’re unable.” He pointed at my notebook. “You’ve got some entries in that journal there that are very moving, heartbreaking really, about your mom, your brothers, your babysitter, your father. You had me welling up in a few places. You should keep working these things out, in words, because you have a way with them, even if you can’t spell them.” He gave my sweaty hand a good, hard squeeze and let go. “What I’m saying is simple, and it’s also like one of the hardest things there is. Keep writing.”

Days later, my deliverance arrived in an envelope from the county clerk of the court. I was being placed in its pretrial intervention program. If I successfully completed PTI, the history of the arrest would still exist, but all charges would be dismissed. I was given eighteen months of probation, drug counseling, monthly drug tests, fines and fees, and asked to complete a hundred hours of community service. I volunteered at the Pelican Man’s Bird Sanctuary. There I gossiped with the talking crow raised in captivity, Angie. Cleaned the pens of the vicious geese. They’d plucked the runt gander featherless, went after me, and I fended them off with a push broom. I washed tons of shitty towels that lined the cages of the baby birds in the nursery, then force-fed them gruel, kindly gagging them with a glass eyedropper. When I made rounds with the fish bucket, tossing dead mackerel to the one-winged osprey and the one-footed red-tailed hawk, I was followed everywhere by the applause of the wild brown pelicans that loitered at the sanctuary, waddling after me, clapping their beaks for a handout.

Terrified I’d violate the conditions of the intervention program and wind up back in jail, I promised myself I would never again cheat or steal. Overnight, I turned straight edge, swearing off drugs and alcohol. I refused to tell so much as a white lie. Instead of confessing to Professor Wonder, I kept my promise to him. I wrote in my journal every day, and I was brutal on those pages with a know-thyself honesty. Also, I read. I went to books looking for the guidance I never got from a father. I spent marathon summer days holed up in my bedroom, reading to discover how to live a decent life.

One of the first books I bought for pleasure was Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks. In Kafka I found familiarity. Here was the labyrinthine legal system, where damnation or salvation could be postponed or delivered by incomprehensible letter. After my days spent reading, I ate dinner with my mom, did the dishes, and drove to the library at the University of South Florida Sarasota–Manatee, reading off the stacks until midnight. I read dictionaries. I read the Propædia and studied its “Outline of Knowledge” in the Encyclopædia Britannica and got as far as volume three (“Ceara” to “Deluc”) of the Micropædia before conceding that the tomes were best treated as reference books and not to be read A to Z.

I read the King James Bible as if it were a modernist novel. The Harvard Classics were my atlas. I was the Vespucci of my own ignorance—cartographer, explorer—mapping out my lack of knowledge like a new coastline, and each instance of my ignorance was a river mouth I entered into before drifting out to continue up the unmapped coast.

I turned as far back as I could. I read the Epic of Gilgamesh. I read the Bhagavad Gita, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Sappho and Plato and Aristotle. I read Murasaki Shikibu. The Aeneid. Shakespeare’s tragedies; the comedies seemed silly. The Divine Comedy did not. I began to live by a line in Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parliament of England: “For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” Wistfully—and ignorant of the slow, nearly certain death by a thousand rejections—I thought I might one day publish a book. Gradually, I worked my uncertain way toward more contemporary writers, looking all the while for insight into myself, the rascal, the hoodlum, the drug addict, the thief, and the liar.

I found parts here and there. In The Brothers Karamazov, I was Dmitri (or Mitya or Mitka or Mitenka). I was Raskolnikov morphed with Gregor Samsa, the young Stephen Dedalus and Meursault. I went unnamed in Invisible Man. I wanted to be Dean in On the Road, but I was Sal. I was John in Go Tell It on the Mountain, Raoul Duke in the Fear and Loathing books, and Fuckhead in Jesus’ Son.

Starting with trade anthologies after exhausting my textbooks, I read as much poetry as prose. I read Six American Poets, picking my way through Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Williams, Frost, Hughes. I leapt from there to Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.

In my bedroom reading chair, a wicker swivel rocker, I opened the Norton anthology and read the first rice-paper pages: Paul Hoover’s introduction; the biographical sketch of the first poet, Charles Olson; and the first poem, “In Cold Hell, in Thicket.” As I finished part two of the poem, the last stanza, I began to feel wholly overwhelmed, the opposite of the crushing claustrophobia I’d known in that drunk tank. Moved in a way I’d never been while sober, I was euphoric. Had I lived a hundred years earlier, this would have been my spiritual conversion, and I would have strode straight to the nearest monastery. Black Mountain Charles Olson was my whispering angel, and what I heard in his garbled language was a bastardized, poor boy’s mistranslation of what Gabriel told Muhammad in the cave of Hira:

And archings traced and picked
     enough to hold
to stay, as she does, as he, the
     brother, when,
here where the mud is, he is frozen,
     not daring
where the grass grows, to move his
     feet from fear
he’ll trespass on his own dissolving
     bones, here
where there is altogether too much
     remembrance?

My conversion wasn’t rational, and when I try to reason it out, I can’t. I have little idea what in those lines so strongly determined the course of my life, but they did undoubtedly. The stanza clubbed me with the certain knowledge that I wanted, needed, to write—that I should, must, spend my time giving expression to lived and imagined experience. That stanza commanded me: Put into written words your understanding, and misunderstandings, of the world.

By the time I finished community college, Ray Wonder had become a friend, a father figure. He was the first of more than my fair share of writer mentors, men who deserve more than passing mention. Ray was followed by Sterling Watson at Eckerd College and John Skoyles at Emerson College. Sterling and John kept me writing, but Ray is the one who got me started, who first encouraged me despite my faults, my felonies and misdemeanors, and in the face of the lie I’d told him that I was never able to acknowledge, until now.

I’m not sure what it was about me that inspired these men to take me in and nurture me. I’m not sure how such men, imperfect strangers, could find it in themselves to tend to me when my own father couldn’t. Maybe I was a charity case, one who claimed his single mother working at 7-Eleven as his writerly role model, a woman willing to give most of her waking life in desperate support of the half-wild things she brought into the world.

I’ve had other writing-teacher mentors along the way, to whom I owe debts I can never repay: Michael Buonanno, Scott Ward, Peter Meinke, Burton Hersh, Frederick Reiken, David Daniel. Each one prodded me further along, gave me reason not to give up even though it’s taken me longer than some, given that after I decided to be a writer, I first had to learn to write a sentence. Here I am, some eighteen years after that night in jail, eighteen years after my first reading of “In Cold Hell, in Thicket,” and I’ve published a book. I married my best friend, who also happens to be one of the best, most generous—and most beautiful—writers I’ve met. And we made a son.

Now that I’m a father, I have a better idea of how to go about fatherhood—I’m still befuddled most of the time—thanks to my writer-father figures. Here I am, a first-time author, in a position to give back some of the good fortune, some of the love, my mentors gave me. My hope is that my son and my students will know me as a man worthy not of my father but of these other, more responsible men, men who showed me how to contribute to American culture rather than drain it.

It occurs to me that while reading “In Cold Hell, in Thicket” all those years ago, as in my meeting with Ray Wonder, I was moved to undertake a conditional obligation, entered into before a judge, whereby I, the bound party, recognized I owed a debt: to a culture that nurtured me the best it could, to a poet who never knew me, to a teacher fighting to reach me, to a father, my father, who couldn’t find it in himself to care for me, but who allowed me my life nonetheless. I’ve finally produced a record of my conditional obligations, my first book, and after I’m gone, my son will be able to pick up Deadbeat and read through its pages. In them, some lout might even find an honest calling and make himself useful.

Jay Baron Nicorvo is the author of the poetry collection Deadbeat, published by Four Way Books in 2012. He teaches at Western Michigan University, where he is the faculty advisor to Third Coast. He lives on an old farm outside Battle Creek with his wife, novelist Thisbe Nissen, and their son. His website is www.nicorvo.net [3].