After ten years of teaching English <br />at Spinoza HS I couldn’t take it anymore <br />and decided to devote myself <br />to writing full time. <br />Unfortunately <br />when I received <br />my 47th consecutive rejection slip <br />ten months later <br />I had a nervous breakdown. <br />“I’m finished, ” I said <br />to my best buddy Sam Zellermayer. <br />“No cash left...gotta go back to work in September.” <br />“Bernstein, get a grip on yourself, ” he said, <br />“do you wanna wind up a mental case like Tom DeWitt? ” <br />“He never wore shoes <br />that don’t make him crazy.” <br />“In Brooklyn it does <br />with all that dog shit in the street.” <br />“Didn’t want anything <br />coming between him and Mother Earth <br />wrote a poem about him and his feet.” <br />“Get it published? ” <br />“They only want happy poems <br />or abstruse stuff <br />you gotta read fifty times <br />and still makes no sense.” <br />Zellermayer stared me <br />saw the desperation, my need to create <br />we’d known each other for two decades. <br />“I’ll help as much as I can, ” he finally said. <br />“You owe $38,000 on fourteen credit cards.” <br />“I wipe my ass with them paltry bills <br />and <br />so you know <br />it’s $52,000 on eighteen credit cards <br />and more in the mail <br />every day <br />this is America, Bernstein.” <br />He paused, then said, <br />“I don’t worry <br />and you shouldn’t worry <br />that’s what really destroys a man.” <br />Then he marched to an ATM machine <br />lodged in a small bodega on the corner <br />whistling a merry tune <br />one I had never heard.<br /><br />Charles Chaim Wax<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-man-of-true-worth-extends-his-protection-to-al/
