How to Look and Act Normal

There was a time, before the car accident, before my huge mistake of a marriage and  wildly dysfunctional divorce, long before Professor Charles Bivona, when all I wanted to be was a yogi. It made sense at the time.

It was 1998 and I was home from a failed attempt at grad school on the west coast. The plan was to take the few thousand dollars I’d saved, audit some courses, and ease my way into a program. I couldn’t do it any other way. My deep insecurities would only allow an application as a formality. As in:

“The faculty loves you, Charles. You do excellent work. You’re already in the program! Of course you are! How could you not be? But we do need you to fill out an application, and write an essay, just to have it on file.”

It was only under those circumstances that I could muster the will to formally apply to grad school.

Incidentally, that’s almost the exact speech the head of the English MA program at Rutgers-Newark gave me a few years later.

“What is it you want to do, Charles?” She leaned back in her chair, and looked me in the eyes. “Be honest with yourself, and me.” She sat patiently, watching me struggle with my thoughts.

After all, I was the son of a carpenter father who barely made it through high school, and a beautician mother forced to drop out, get a GED, and go to work. How could I become an English Professor? The thought of it felt absurd.

But that, too, is another part of the story—much further along in the memoir. So, to the beginning.

I think it all started when I was working as an Assistant Manager in a mall bookstore, a cliché beginning, but there it is.

In 1996, I was twenty-four years old. I had $3,000 in the bank, a few sets of clothes, 2,000 used books, and a very old car. I was depressively in love with my girlfriend—call her Joy. My mind was already in California—fleeing my father’s specter—but that didn’t stop me from anxiously asking Joy to marry me. And it was very un-poetic. What I mean is, I just blurted out my nervous proposal in the food court of a New Jersey mall.

Read Part 2

Joy called it our writing experiment. 

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memoirs in fragments
By Charles Bivona

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