Day Fourteen

360 Cumberland, Winnipeg

Crowbar Hotel

Time again to try school. As crazy as I am, I’ve tried again to go back to University. I spent 3 weeks preparing my portfolios for the selected courses. When August 1st came, I emailed them to the respective instructors. I thought about the range I showed through poems and short stories that I either selected or wrote specifically for the classes. I thought I actually stood a chance… A real bonafide chance.

Whoops! There goes gravity… Back to the lab again. I was flatly refused and told I wasn’t using appropriate language and needed to grow up. I admit I used the word Nigger a few times in a poem entitled Wild Niggers, but I wrote it from the viewpoint of a slaver capturing Negroes in Africa. I didn’t even swear, although I alluded to masturbation in another piece called The Seamen of Life Giving Greatness.

To top it all off, I have memories of the loops the instructors put me through… Ouch doesn’t even sum it up. They caught me going for smokes in the alley behind the apartment and repeatedly ran me over saying, “Though shalt not steal!”. When that apparently wasn’t enough to cop a confession, they beat me with baseball bats and a crowbar. The crowbar was used to bash in my teeth because I wouldn’t lose them for my brother. The baseball bats, used because I claimed to enact Babe Ruth, crushed my limbs causing 496 fractures. I was awful mad, but just moved on…

I entered short story contests about this time hoping to get some extra money and a little credit. I was happy yet again that I could still follow my new dream of writing maybe I should have already known the outcome.