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Northern Michigan University NMU Commons All NMU Master's Theses Student Works 2009 On Cortez Road My Search for One Homeless Man Brian Robert McMillan Northern Michigan University Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.nmu.edu/theses Recommended Citation McMillan, Brian Robert, "On Cortez Road My Search for One Homeless Man" (2009). All NMU Master's Theses. 456. https://commons.nmu.edu/theses/456 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Works at NMU Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in All NMU Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of NMU Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected],[email protected]. ON CORTEZ ROAD My Search for One Homeless Man By Brian Robert McMillan THESIS Submitted to Northern Michigan University In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Graduate Studies Office 2009 SIGNATURE APPROVAL FORM This thesis by Brian McMillan is recommended for approval by the student’s Thesis Committee and Department Head in the Department of English and by the Associate Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies. ____________________________________________________________ Committee Chair: Dr. Paul Lehmberg Date ____________________________________________________________ First Reader: Dr. Stephen Burn Date ____________________________________________________________ Second Reader: Dr. Diane Sautter Cole Date ____________________________________________________________ Department Head: Dr. Raymond J. Ventre Date ____________________________________________________________ Associate Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies: Date Dr. Cynthia Prosen OLSON LIBRARY NORTHERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY THESIS DATA FORM In order to catalog your thesis properly and enter a record in the OCLC international bibliographic data base, Olson Library must have the following requested information to distinguish you from others with the same or similar names and to provide appropriate subject access for other researchers. NAME: McMillan Brian Robert (Last) (First) (Middle) DATE OF BIRTH January 10 1980 (Month) (Day) (Year) ABSTRACT ON CORTEZ ROAD My Search for One Homeless Man By Brian Robert McMillan This book tells the story of my search, both physical and historical, for one homeless man, Lee Sandspur, on Cortez Road, in Bradenton, Florida. I met Lee when he was in the process of joining the same church I was attending with my family. When I learned how open he was about his homelessness, I proposed a writing project to him: I would write his life story, and we would split any money that might come from it. He agreed, and we began a long series of interviews that would stretch over a period of four years. One of my motives for the project was that I would be able to fellowship Lee as he made big changes in his life, from joining the church to finding a job and a more permanent place to live. Not long after we did our first interview, though, Lee returned to his alcohol and quit his job. I persisted with the project by interviewing people who knew him well, including family members, and learned that the life story he had been telling me was much more complicated. In fact, it seemed that he had lied about important events in his life. All of this made me question my own purposes for writing the book, and also ask myself whether I was helping him or hurting him by digging up painful memories. i Copyright Brian Robert McMillan 2009 ii DEDICATION For Hailey, Jackson, Grant and Lee iii PREFACE The stretch of State Road 53 from my apartment in Bradenton to Lakewood Ranch, Florida, was mostly a straight shot, and only about eight miles long. I drove it round trip every day, and occasionally, two and three round trips depending on which sporting events I needed to cover for the weekly newspaper that had hired me in 2004. About halfway home from the office, I passed the Braden River Library. When I grew tired of the sports and news talk radio shows, I stopped at the small library to check out books on CD. Over the next couple of years, I listened to dozens of audio books, and much of it was nonfiction: histories, biographies, political commentaries. One book, American Sucker, opened my eyes to a new genre. It was an author I’d never heard of—David Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker—and the subject matter at first didn’t seem particularly riveting: a chronicle of Denby playing the stock market. But I had already exhausted much of the library’s audio book collection on CD, and my car didn’t have a tape player. I checked out Denby, figuring that anything was better than more Rush Limbaugh clones. The book opens with Denby’s realization that he has been “jabbering.” On the phone with a friend, he was speaking as breathlessly as a cattle auctioneer in full cry. Jumping over verbal fences, mashing participials, dropping qualifiers . I was talking to an old friend about movies, and I said something like this: Movie people think platforming works only with quality-word-of-mouth and slow-building-three- four-million-a-week pictures in which buzz rolls into multiple viewings like iv The English Patient or Shakespeare in Love . I had trouble saying one thing at a time. (3) Denby’s style was fast-paced, and it matched the content. I listened carefully to the remaining few hundred pages of the book, always fascinated by how he crafted a topic like tech stocks into a story with an arc, metaphors, characters and themes. Really, it read like a novel, rather than a “nonfiction” book. Moreover, the act of writing the book was an intriguing variable in the plot. As Denby sat down to lunch with important figures in the tech stocks boom, they knew he was writing a book, and sometimes the line of friend and journalist was blurred. Would he have become “friends” with these people were it not for the book? Although American Sucker may not be particularly significant in the long run, it was the book that introduced me to creative nonfiction. Around the same time, I also reread James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as a few biographies of Joyce. To my surprise, I learned that A Portrait was so autobiographical that it was even cited as a source to clear up aspects of Joyce’s childhood in biographies. Moreover, critic Zack Bowen points out that “Joyce went so far in identifying with his character as to append Stephen Dedalus’s name as author in the original publication of some of the stories later to appear in Dubliners” (para. 23). I decided that if Joyce had written his famous novel not in 1916 but in, say, 2004, publishers would have labeled his book a “Memoir,” just like Denby’s. Both writers essentially turned “real life” into art. I began to see creative nonfiction and memoir as an intriguing artistic goal. But the two authors chose much different strategies for creating their art. I am grossly oversimplifying here, but one way to think of it is that Joyce employed a third-person point v of view despite writing about himself, while Denby wrote in the first person as a journalist. In other words, while Denby was front and center in his book, Joyce essentially hid behind the “fictional” persona of Stephen Dedalus, which was a technique that reinforced his philosophy of the author remaining “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (217). It seemed that Joyce, or at least Stephen, would disapprove of Denby’s role as both the main character and narrator in his artwork. In any event, the two strategies intrigued me and would eventually inform the book that I would write, and help me to think through the problem of where to place myself as an author and narrator. The project all began when I met Jerry. He was homeless, he was willing to talk and he needed a ride. He agreed to let me interview him to tell his story. At the time, I wasn’t sure what shape the book would eventually take, but I wanted to know everything about the world of this homeless man so that I could turn him into a character in a book that would read just like a novel. Once I got to Northern Michigan University, I was able to concentrate more fully on my book, On Cortez Road. On Dr. Paul Lehmberg’s recommendation, I read two books that further demonstrated the different roles the author can play in his own story. One was Susan Sheehan’s Life for Me Ain’t Been No Crystal Stair. In this work, Sheehan removes herself from the story, instead focusing completely on her subject, Crystal Taylor. The book begins with Crystal waking up and noticing that she was “bleeding lightly” (3), and following her through the birth of her child and other struggles in the American welfare system. Not until the book’s final pages does Sheehan reveal how she came to know Crystal and learn about her through interviews. vi Although Sheehan and Joyce are much different—one is reportage, the other a fictionalized memoir—their stance on the role of the author in the story seems to coincide: the author is absent, seemingly indifferent. In the other book, Salvation on Sand Mountain, author Dennis Covington is a central character. The premise is that he is trying to write about a snake-handling Pentecostal churches in Appalachia. But as the story progresses, he finds himself becoming converted to the faith, and he actually handles a dangerous snake, just like the other church members do. In this story, the writer/reporter begins the story thinking he’ll write a more objective, third- person account, but ends up going through a change so unexpected that his own awakening dominates the work.

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