Draft Night (Part I)

Gavin Michaels was 13 and good, 14 and promising, but it wasn't until he turned 15 that the national media started covering him. Here was a true phenom. The lad could write, and write he did. At the 1991 National Scholastics Summer Camp For Young Writers he took home every top honor, and when his gleeful visage graced the cover of Writing Today with the headline "Hemingway Who?" scholarship offers from the nation's top universities flooded in. Speculation ran rampant as to whether Gavin would write for Harvard, Oxford, or Cambridge; and when he surprised everyone by declaring out of high school to enter the National Writers Association Draft, there were a number of opinions, ranging from "Michael's intention to enter the draft before college will one day be remembered as a cornerstone in American fiction*" to "It's one thing to write admittedly impressive short stories about girls eating bicycles and bombs disguised as tomatoes at La Tomatina, but [Michaels] has never proven that he can write anything other than interesting ideas encapsulated by a stark warning sign that the raw youth needs more time to work on his form.**"

Those opinions wouldn't matter, because one month before the draft was scheduled to take place, NWA comissioner Daniel Stine declared that the association would, effective immediately, no longer accept writers fresh out of high school.

The media storm that would follow was considerable, but the only statement from Michaels was this:

"I'm going to Europe. The continent, not the band."

Twelve years later, Gavin Michaels's notebook would wind up in the hands of WSPN writer Jerrod Keyes.

What follows is both the harrowing tale of a man's obsession with the written word and his penchant for, well, astronomy.

And shaving cream.




* A.O. Schott, The Philadelphia Writer's Chronicle

** Sonny Hawkins, The Long Island Star Ledger