Melanie's Notes about Max

Before I came to UNC, someone told me about Max Steele, and somehow I knew that he was going to be my mentor.  At age eighteen, on my best stationary, I wrote him a note informing him.

a)  That he was Great.

b)  That I was going to be a Great American Writer.

c)  That we should get together.

I may or may not have included a poem.

Thereafter, he avoided me as if I were a speeding car swerving down the wrong side of the road.  Semester after semester, I failed to get a seat in his class.  The notes I left on his door went from strident to pesky to morose, and remained unanswered.  Finally, as I was taping up my last letter, announcing my decision to part with him forever, he opened the door.  He was so big in that tiny, cramped office, and his voice was huge and wonderful--- a preacher’s voice, but without the bitterness.  I told him I was going to run away.  (for various reasons, my maturity had stalled out at age 14.) He said, “Don’t do that,” and signed me up for his class, adding that if I thought I was going to be a Great American Writer, I would never write a thing.  I vowed never to think that again, and we were on.

I always wanted to write a book with Max, and he was hip on the idea sometimes; when email first came out, he thought we should do it as a series of emails.  He liked email because it kept letters short; he said if  you write more than a page, you’re writing to yourself.

Max Steel, said that people can’t absorb the negative in writing.  They just don’t see it.  If you describe a character by saying, “He was not handsome,” everyone will find him handsome.

Max used to say something like, “You tell all the lies that get to the truth,” or something like that, but whenever I repeated it back to him, he would say, “That’s not what I said.  Why don’t you listen!” 

He said you can park anywhere you want in the rain because people don’t go out in the rain to check meters.

He lived in a house divided, and it stood.

The last thing he told me, a short time before he died, was that he was tired.  I had sent him some funky dialogue, and he said he didn’t understand the language.  He said that he was old --- and tired.  Later I learned that he had fallen, broken his hip, and died a few days later of heart failure in the hospital.  Still, I pictured him with that gold necklace he told me about once; he said he carried a tiny vial of poison in it, and that when it came time to die, he would take his own life.  It was very beautiful, he said, the 18 karat gold chain and the crystal vial.