The Man Who Compelled Me To Write

I was fortunate enough in my freshman year at St. Louis University to take English 1, Composition and Rhetoric, from a nattily dressed (then) bachelor professor from Memphis named Dr. Albert J. Montesi, or “Crazy Al” as we affectionately came to call him. He spent most of the class session talking about whatever national or international horror that had most spooked him for the day; after about five different Cold War calamities, he told us to write an essay on one of them. For some reason he liked my writing and invited me to join the Writers’ Institute, a substitute for English 2.

The Writers’ Institute consisted of little instruction but much practice—we had to produce a story every week! Talk about writer’s block! Of course, many of the twelve of us fell way behind, but I never did. For every good story, I wrote three or four awful ones, just to keep up. “That’s okay, son,” Crazy Al would reassure me, “we all have to get bad stuff out of our systems.” Class sessions consisted of student stories being read aloud and then critiqued. This was all done anonymously. At the end of the semester, we were asked to vote on the best writer. Since we did not know who had written what, the vote was a tie since we all voted for ourselves.

The thing about Al was he compelled you to write—the written word oozed out of his pores and was supposed to ooze out of yours. If you had a killer calculus exam one week and saw Al coming toward you, you crossed the street to avoid his inevitable question: “What are you writing this week?” He kept track of you through all four years and hoped you would not disappoint him. In my freshman year, his star senior writer was John Coyne, a standard that you felt you had to attain! John has gone on to write more books than I have, drawing regularly on his experiences in the Peace Corps. His most recent book, 4.5 stars on Amazon’s 5-star scale, is The Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan, published by St. Martin’s and due out in paperback this month. Tough row to hoe!

All of us who studied under Al never forgot him nor did he forget us. We were often invited to his home in a gentrified section of St. Louis. In 1987 he invited me to give the “Montesi Lecture,” an endowed engagement. I was proud to be chosen—but I had forgotten one thing over the years. He was a horrible driver, his mind always on writing. The following day he “drove” me to see the Remington traveling exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum in Forest Park. He was a small man who viewed the road through the space under the top of the steering wheel and the dashboard. He always bought used cars, the biggest boats from the past. Lane lines on the roadway were as meaningless as Morse Code to Al. He swam all over them. Kingshighway Blvd., the major north-south artery at midtown, had four lanes in each direction. Al haphazardly used all four and, at times, parts of a fifth. Serenading horns were in continual concert—you felt you were an American in Paris (or at least in St. Louis). Al would roll down his window, stick his arm out, and gesture obscenely at anyone who leaned on his or hers too long for his taste. All the while he was talking to his terrified passengers about writing. From Memphis, Al had little tolerance for the honking of minority drivers. They received shouted epithets as well as obscene gestures. Al’s passengers ducked down below the windows. Al was no racist for he treated minority students the same as he did the rest of us. Streets just were something Al owned. Even white kids, pedaling in the bike lane, were cursed if Al felt he needed to be in it for some reason.

The worst were turns. He would make left turns out of the center lane and wind up in the oncoming traffic lane of the street he was aiming to enter. None of this interrupted his chatter about writing. Al lived and breathed writing. Driving was simply an annoyance that he was compelled by Fate to have to endure. Twenty years of not seeing Al had darkened my memory of this fact.

But not of Crazy Al Montesi. Every time I write, his spirit crosses mind. One day he introduced me to the work of a “fine new writer,” William Styron, upon whom I much later wrote an award-winning book. On November 2, 2006, Styron died at the age of 81. On the very same day, Al Montesi passed away. I cannot tell you how old he was; nobody ever seemed to know. I could not write that day or for several days after.