“God Help Me! Married Seven Years and Still a Virgin”

I was young. I was poor. I was desperate.

If you think you know how the story goes, no I didn’t resort to turning tricks to support myself and my infant son. Worse than that: I became a writer. Why didn’t she just get a JOB? you might wonder. As in one with a weekly paycheck. What can I say? I was young and foolish, barely out of my teens when I married. Two years later, I was a single mom, divorced and on welfare. A college dropout, I had no job experience outside the summer jobs I’d worked while I was in high school. But in school I’d always excelled in creative writing, so I thought Why not make a living at it?

     *Pause here for laughter*

Okay, but did I mention I was young and foolish? Also, in my defense, this was in the days before Google. Before the Internet, even. Had I done a Google search I would’ve discovered the odds weren’t in my favor, to put it mildly, and decided to become the dental hygienist my dad always wanted me to be rather than embark on what was undoubtedly a fool’s mission. Instead I leapt into the unknown.

But first, I needed a typewriter.

I was living with my sister Patty at the time in the upstairs apartment of a two-family house in Santa Cruz, California. From my sister’s bedroom window, you could see into the study of the university professor who lived next door. We called him Clock Man because the only parts of him that moved as he sat at his desk typing in the evenings were his hands. The way he abused his typewriter, I figured he must have spare. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I went over and knocked on his door.

He seemed startled by my request. He didn’t know me either except as a figure he occasionally glimpsed through his window (my sister was a slob and I’m a neatnik, so I didn’t go in her room unless it was to collect the half-eaten plates of food she habitually left lying around so they wouldn’t attract mice). Caught off guard, he agreed to loan me his spare typewriter, an old Royal manual.

I lugged the Royal back took my apartment and plunked it down in the middle of the living room—on the floor, since I didn’t have a desk. I’d compiled a list of publications that accepted unsolicited submissions, using the copy of The Writer’s Digest that was in the reference section of our public library. I was ready to roll! I had my sights set on the Confession magazine market to begin with, which paid by the word (I pictured those nickels and dimes piling up in my mental piggy bank). I hadn’t lived long enough to rack up a ton of life experiences, seamy or otherwise, but I have an active imagination. Plus, I’d done my homework. I’d plowed through a stack of Modern Romance and True Confessions magazines with their “true” stories that were as lurid as they were fake. Like the one about the bride who’s shocked to discover on her wedding night her “groom” is in fact a woman, which would elicit yawns from fans of today’s reality TV, but which seemed racy back then.

Six weeks and a sore back later, I’d written half a dozen stories, which I eagerly submitted, using the postage stamps I’d scrimped and saved to afford. Each came back in its self-addressed stamped envelope with a form rejection letter clipped to it. But I kept at it. I’d come to the sobering realization that writing was by no means a Get Rich Quick scheme, but I saw it as a challenge. I was determined to make it. I would beat the odds! I would be the one-in-a-million wannabe who broke out!

Week after week, I toiled away, bent over that old Royal like a jumbo shrimp. Finally, after amassing enough rejection slips to fill a shipping container, I sold my first story. It was titled “God Help Me! Married Seven Years and Still A Virgin.” Which was 100 % fabricated (obviously, since I had a baby to show for my short-lived marriage), and for which I was to be paid the princely sum of twenty cents a word.

I was over the moon. I was a soon-to-be published writer!

I never saw a dime of that money. The magazine folded before I got my check.

But you know what? I got something even better: validation. I was, if only in my own eyes, a writer. I’d proved I could do it. And if someone thought I was good enough, others would think so too.

It would be another six months, many reams of paper and several typewriter ribbons, before I got my second acceptance letter and my first check, from The National Star for an article titled “An Egg in Your Car Will Save You Money,” about how to save on gas by driving with an invisible egg between your foot and the gas pedal. The irony was I didn’t even own a car back then. I was too poor!

The check was for $20 but it meant the world to me. I would have framed it, but I needed the money for groceries, so I framed a Xerox copy instead. I still have it, and it still makes me smile, thinking about how far I’ve come since then. It keeps me humble, too. It’s a reminder that a hard-earned twenty bucks can mean more than a million-dollar lottery win, and that dreams do indeed come true if we do our part. Sometimes all it takes is a wing and a prayer and a borrowed typewriter.