Uncle Freddy's Writers' Boot Camp

I saw an advertisement in the U.C. Davis college news bulletin as I was sitting on a bench near Bixby Hall across from the Dining Concessions.

Join Uncle Teddy’s Writers’ Boot Camp

Program starts on June 10th

Be there or be square

June 10th happened to be the start of summer break. I was supposed to be on my way home to Tracy, California. I would have to break the news to my mother Tammy Wiggins that I did not pass my philosophy class and might have to take it next semester in August. I could just about hear her harping on about not putting my best foot forward and all that parental crap that goes with it. I was not looking forward to that since my sister had gotten a scholarship to Stanford and was on the Dean’s List. Again.

I watched some of the students tossing a frisbee around on the weed free green lawn. I would join them, but I had to concentrate on philosophy because Professor Gates was giving me a rare second chance. But as I scan the textbook, I can feel my eyelids getting much too heavy in the warm late morning sun. Let’s face it Kant can’t and neither can I.

What is with this boot camp? Be there or be square? What kind of shit is that?

Rawley, my best friend, could not handle another four years of school, so he enlisted in the Marines. His boot camp lasted thirteen weeks and he emailed me that it was pure Hell. I am not likely to voluntarily go to a boot camp, especially with some guy named Uncle Teddy.

“Duane! Duane wake up.” Marline shook me until I woke up. “You asked me for some help with your philosophy.”

She sat next to me and rescued my textbook from falling to the ground from my hands.

“Can I ask you a question?” I wiped the drool from the corners of my mouth with the back of my hand.

“You just did.” She smiled. I really liked her smile, but I was too chicken to tell her that. “So, what do you want to know?”

“Have you heard of this?” I pointed to the advertisement in the paper.

She took the paper from me and scanned the strange advertisement. Finally, she said, “I don’t think I would respond to this. Something seems a bit out of kilter.”

“Yeah, but aren’t you curious?” I asked.

“Sure, it does seem to grab your attention.” She handed me the paper. “Shall we get started?”

“Should we go inside Bixby?”

“No, I’d rather sit out here.” She shook her head, “It’s a really nice day.”

“Alright.” I shrugged.

Marline Doubette was a junior and a straight A student who had been on the Dean’s List every semester. I really liked studying with her, because she never got frustrated with me as I stumbled over material I should have known when I took the final. She had a sweet scent that mimicked the flowers in a very pleasing way. Her auburn hair cascaded down to her shoulders like a shiny reddish-brown river. When she smiled, which she did often, I had trouble concentrating on the dull and boring material.

“Duane, are you paying attention to what I’m saying?” She turned to me, raising an eyebrow.

“I just don’t think I can.” I said honestly.

She stood up and shook her head, “If you don’t start paying attention, I am wasting my time here.”

Oh, I was paying attention alright, but not to the textbook. Completely discouraged with me, I watched her walk away which I would compare to a summer’s day.

After bombing my second chance with philosophy, Professor Gates called me to his office which was no bigger than a broom closet. I could tell by reading his body language that the results were not adequate.

“Duane, you did better the first time.” He put my paper on his desk. There sure were a lot of red marks.

“Philosophy is not my deal.” I shrugged.

“Why did you take this course?” He asked as he still seemed sympathetic to my crash and burn failure.

“It was on the list for my major.” I tried to avoid eye contact, winding up looking down at my shoes.

“I could check and see if you could satisfy the requirement by taking another comparable course.” He folded his arms over his chest and tilted his head a bit.

“Sure, sure.” I agreed. I like Professor Gates, because he seemed to understand my predicament.

“We let out next week for summer break. I will have a solution before then.” He concluded.

“Yeah, that would be great.”

He found a solution. U.C. Davis had summer courses, but they were limited since a lot of the instructors needed a summer break as bad as the students. Those who decided to improve their income would teach a class using worksheets. And then there was Uncle Teddy who most of us suspected had escaped from a looney bin.

“Well, I have a course that should keep you on track for graduation next year.” Professor Gates reported as promised. “You will be going to Uncle Teddy’s Writers’ Boot Camp.”

He seemed quite pleased with the solution, but me, not so much.

When the class started, we were crammed into the Segundo Service Center two weeks later. As we sat waiting the class to start, a man with scraggly long hair and thick Coke bottle glasses into the room. He wore a t-shirt with one bold word scrolled across his white shirt in bold black letters, “Question.”

“Please find a seat.” His voice was not strong enough to quell the commotion caused by nearly a hundred of us trying to find an empty seat which reminded me of trying to find an empty spot in the parking lot during morning classes. “Please quiet down so we can get started.”

This took about twenty minutes. His angular square face turned bright red as he waited for us to be quiet enough for him to continue.

“Most of you are here to meet the requirements of graduation because you flunked one of your courses.” He looked around the room, “I do not care what course you were unable to achieve a passing grade, but in this class, you will do as you’re told. I am Professor Hyde or better known around the campus as Uncle Teddy. You may call me Uncle Teddy only when you complete whatever it is I have told you to do.”

There was a general rustling of students who did not care to be talked to as if they were in junior high.

“Settle down.” He waited a couple minutes. “My first instruction to you is to form up on the La Rue Road.”

Hand shot up into the air.

“Yes?” Uncle Teddy responded.

“Why are we gonna go there?” The unnamed student stood up. He was rather large, and he asked his question with a certain degree of defiance.

“We are going to run.”

“The hell you say.” The large student snapped.

“If you do not do as I say, you will fail this boot camp.” Uncle Teddy had a glint in his blue eyes. “We will meet on La Rue and we will run or jog around Aldred and Thompson where you will continue onto California Avenue and back along the path through student housing.”

“You’re joking right?” The student named Mike complained.

No, this was no joke. There we were in the hot sun jogging around the campus. Uncle Teddy took time to yell at some of the stragglers.

“Writing is hard work!” He’d yell near their ear, “You need to get a move on!”

It took us about an hour to get our breath back after our two-mile jaunt. As he stood there in the front of the room, he appearing to have barely broken a sweat. He ran with the rest of us wearing gym shorts and a muscle shirt that did not display a single muscle in his arm anywhere.

“Uncle Teddy, can we take a break?” Mike gasped.

“You can only call me Uncle Teddy when you have done something. So far you have not done squat.” He shook his head as Mike sank into his chair. Once everyone had stopped the heavy breathing, he spoke, “Get out your journals for this class.”

Everyone removed the spiral notebooks from their backpacks.

“I want you to write two pages on the following prompt.” He walked up the aisle to make sure everyone had done as he said, “Your prompt is my first memory.”

“What if we ain’t got one?” A student named Earl asked.

“No hand up and poor use of the language you speak.” He rolled his eyes. “We are human. We are a memory machine.”

“A what?” Mike’s face was now flushed. He was sitting next to Earl and was about the same size as Earl.

“Writers write from their memories about things they have experienced.” He slapped an empty desk with his open hand startling the class. “I expect you have memories of your childhood.”

“My first memory is when my dad hit me in the mouth with his fist.” Mike snarled.

“That’s a start.” He pointed at Mike and nodded.

“I don’t want to write about that.” Mike growled.

“Not everything you write will have a happy ending.” Uncle Teddy had his back turned to Mike as he spoke, “But you must overcome your own feelings in order to express the nature of your convictions. Even if they are not pleasant. Vonnegut wrote about the brutal bombing of Dresden where he was being held as a P.O.W.”

He turned to face Mike, “Now, you must be able to express your feelings about what happened.”

“I. Hated. It.” Mike said each word as if it was a separate sentence pausing in between each word.

“Good. Now you are getting it.” He nodded as Mike glared at him, “Get busy.”

We all looked at each other, totally awestruck at the audacity of Uncle Teddy.

After the better part of the hour, Uncle Teddy told every to assemble in the empty parking lot where we did calisthenics, jumping jacks, push-ups, sit ups, and a couple of exercises I had never done before. Everyone was groaning as we walked back into Segundo Service Center.

“Write two pages in your journals about where you see yourself in five years. You got thirty minutes.” He instructed.

The entire class let out a gasp.

“If given thirty minutes, you should be able to write something worth reading.” He shook head with a sinister smirk on his face.

For the next thirty minutes, everyone wrote furiously in their journals. I tried to imagine myself as the CEO of a large corporation, but when the bell went off, I had only written a page and a half.

“Mr. Wiggins, you are a half page short of the assignment. In order to make up for that, you can drop and give me ten push-ups.” He pointed to the ground next to my chair. “C’mon, hit it!”

I glanced at his face; his eyes told me that he was as serious as a heart attack. I fell to the floor and began to do push-ups.

“You need to do twenty.” He snorted.

I had never done twenty push-ups in my life, but I knew if I failed, he would not give me credit for what I had written. I was not the only one who had to hit the floor as there were others, almost half the class pushed in cadence with me.

“You must understand writing is physical as well as cognitive.” He put his hands behind his back and paced the room as he spoke, “Many accomplished writers believed that keeping physical fit was part of the process.”

One by one we returned to our seats, sweat pouring down our foreheads as we panted. Then he made us read what we had written.

“It is important for a writer to read aloud what he or she has written.” He continued to pace. “One more write left.”

“My hand hurts.” Mike complained.

“Awww.” His satirical sympathy was more than Mike could stand.

“I quit.” He stood up.

“So says the writer you will never be.” Uncle Teddy admonished him.

“I never said I wanted to be a writer.” He stood up towering over Uncle Teddy. “I just needed an extra credit so I could graduate out of this lousy prison school.”

“Lousy prison school? This place is far from a prison.” Uncle Teddy tilted his head at an odd angle, “The trouble with you is you don’t know the meaning of hard work.”

“I had to work hard most of my life.” Mike looks away from Uncle Teddy.

“When are you going to work hard for yourself?” Uncle Teddy asks. “Maybe life has been hard for you, but you can’t quit until you get what you came for. I have no intention of turning you into a best-selling writer, but I will enforce the discipline for you to know what it takes to be successful. Are you willing to do what it takes to be successful when you walk out that door?”

Mike’s eyes follow Uncle Teddy’s arm as he points to the door.

“Sit down, believe in what you got to say and then say it.” Uncle Teddy turns and walks back to the front of the room. “Now who wants to be the first to read what they wrote?”

“Mom, Uncle Freddy is crazy.” I told my mom over the phone. “He has us doing all kinds of things.”

“I am so happy to hear that, because ever since your father walked out, I’ve been worried about you.” She sounded as if she was crying.

“I can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow.” I closed my eyes.

The memory was still solid in my mind. I was only five years old when dad walked out the door claiming that he couldn’t take it anymore. I remember running after him, but he was already on his way down the road by the time I got there. I must have cried for the rest of the day. Not long after that my juvenile brain blamed my mother for his leaving. The whole memory leaked out of my eyes as I grabbed my journal and began to write. It was after one in the morning when I finished writing.

“Uncle Teddy, would you read this for me when you get a chance?” I asked as we all left Segundo Center to start class with our two-mile run.

“You have to accomplish-” He stopped as he leafed through my journal. “Did you write this?”

I nodded as I began to run down La Rue Road.

He was still reading when we finished our morning run.

“Mr. Wiggins, you may call me Uncle Teddy from now on.” He wiped a tear from his eye, “When your writing evokes such deep emotion, you have reached the pinnacle. Do you wish to become a writer, by the way?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged.

“You definitely have the talent.” He smiled, “It would just be a matter of how you wish to refine that talent.”

The eight weeks in Uncle Teddy’s Writers’ Boot Camp, I learned the some of the finer points of written expression and some of the expert writers who had come before me such as Steinbeck, Hemingway, Vonnegut, Twain, Fenimore Cooper, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austin, F. Scott Fitzgerald and so on. While most of my fellow students never really expressed an interest in becoming a writer, Uncle Teddy made sure to cover all the main points of good writing. From conflict to plot to characterizations, to theme, to descriptive and figurative language, to all the other devices writers used to communicate a message to their readers.

“Duane, I think you should publish that story.” He told me on the last day of class. Mike and Earl made sure to be the first out the door as I lagged behind for one final conversation with Uncle Teddy.

“I don’t know.” I shook my head.

“There are a lot of kids out there who would be glad to read your story.” He nodded.

“But it’s so sad.” I bowed my head. “Who would want to read something like that?”

“You’d be surprised.” He leaned his head on his fist.

“Like who?” I asked.

“Like me for instance.” He nodded, “My dad went to Vietnam before I was born. He never came home. I never even met him.”

“I am sorry.” I felt tears stinging my eyes.

“It’s okay. But when I read your story, my memory came back to me like an old friend. There was a time I hated God for taking him from me, but as I got older, I realized that this is sometimes part of life. When I read your story, I was reminded of that. Your prose was constructed with the emotion you had watching him leave and reminded me of when I felt the same thing as you did. Writing is magic, because it gives us hope for the future. Thank you so much, Duane.”

“You’re welcome, sir.”

“Ahem.”

“Uncle Freddy.” I smiled.

“I made this class hard, because life is hard. I hope you remember some of what I talked about.” He sighed.

“Thank you for everything, sir…I mean Uncle Freddy.”

“You are welcome.” He said as I walked out of the room.

I would catch a bus to my home in Tracy where I’d spend the next four weeks with my mother before taking the bus back here for my senior year. I couldn’t wait to tell her all about Uncle Teddy’s Writers’ Boot Camp.