A Lesson for the Sub

During my mid-twenties, I hit what you might call a bottom. Since college, I'd partaken too liberally in wine and song, although in this case the wine was cheap beer and street drugs and the song was my self-sabotaging punk band.

-  SAM LIPSYTE

When the band broke apart, I cleaned up and moved back in with my mother. I got a job as a substitute teacher. One period I might be covering a history class, the next running a chemistry lab. I was grateful to the student who said, "Mr. Lipsyte, I really think you should wear protective goggles during this experiment." I was not as grateful to the one who said, "My dad told me all subs are losers."

Not all subs, I thought, but quite possibly me. I was eager, in fact, for a quiet, unambitious existence, a long, boring, soul-mending sojourn. I didn't foresee that two events would infuse this period with an intensity I haven't quite known since.

First came a phone call from Gordon Lish, the famous fiction editor. I'd received encouraging rejections from his magazine in college, but I'd lost my drive and nerve for writing fiction. Now I began to rediscover it, and after I sent in a new story he offered me a spot in a private seminar that some considered a cult. I had already attended twelve-step meetings and they'd helped me, so I figured there were good cults and bad cults. My mother, a journalist and a novelist, had reservations about the class, but also seemed happy that somebody had taken an interest in her no-longer-so-promising son.