430 words on

Robbing and writing:

It was snowing, and I was driving slowly, listening to a podcast called The Score about a person called Joe Loya.

In the 1980s, Joe robbed 30 banks across California. He talks about those robberies on the podcast. He also talks about his life, childhood, family, how he felt then and how he feels now, hindsight, clarity, guilt and regret, humility and acceptance, forgiveness.

Joe talks about many things with remarkable eloquence and vulnerability. His writing is good, too. After prison, he wrote a memoir and recorded The Score to promote it. On episode ten—his “Ask Me Anything” episode—a listener wrote Joe this question:

“Is it harder being a writer than it is being a bank robber?”

It was snowing harder now. It felt cold in the car.

“You know,” Joe took a beat, “the first time I ever got paid for writing was that first bank robbery note.” He laughed.

I pressed a button, and warm air came out of the vents.

“Man, that’s a great question,” Joe said. “It is much harder being a writer than it is being a bank robber,” he said. “Because as a bank robber, you can be as indiscriminate with your rage as you want. I go in there, and I see somebody and just throw it at you. Dark magic, raging at you—”

I put my hand up to a vent and kept it there. Holding my hand there felt good. My fingers were cold, still. The car was heating up, still.

“—and I animate you to run to the vault and get me my money and give it to me, and then I run out,” Joe said. “It’s instant. It’s compact violence. BOOM! In and out.”

I put my hand down. The car was warm now.

“With writing,” he said. “I have to sit there. And I have to be traumatized by it. And I gotta dread coming back to it. I gotta reread it, feel like I’m so stupid. First draft. Second draft. Feel like I hate myself. Tell myself nobody wants to read it. All the anguish. It’s terrible.”

I turned off the heat.

“And even if you’re a good writer,” Joe said, “you still have to do first and second drafts. So you’re going a hard, long way, thinking, oh, I gotta focus, sharpen, focus, sharpen. It’s so much easier to just be brutish. Which is why most people are brutish. It’s much more challenging to try to become a supple person.”

The temperature in the car was perfect. I paused the podcast to think.

I felt seen.