Sheerly Avni

So it looks like you’re the new Joycelyn Elders. What do you think it is about the M-word that has provoked such a strong response?

Well, there are certain words that trigger a response simply because they’ve never before appeared in a family-friendly context like the comics. “Masturbation” is obviously a loaded word, but as a descriptor, it’s not actually vulgar or coarse, which is why I’m comfortable using it. And the strip in question isn’t actually about masturbation or cancer, it’s about the inability of two particular adults to find a mutual comfort zone to discuss a serious subject. Since the more traditional viewpoint (Boopsie’s) is presented without mockery, conservative readers really shouldn’t be offended.

Still, the syndicate and I understood that some papers would not be prepared to accommodate this little depiction of the shifting nature of taboos. After all, editors are still arguing over the acceptability of the word “suck.” So we offered a substitute strip for editors who themselves felt caught out of their comfort zones by the strip.

Do you feel as if the climate for publishing controversial strips has changed since you first began publishing “Doonesbury”?

Absolutely. It’s much more friendly. In the early years, I was constantly preoccupied with blowback. “Doonesbury”-related controversies used to flare up at least once a month. One year there were 12 wire service stories about dropped strips. It was a constant struggle keeping everyone onboard.

But then two things changed: First, editors got used to me and began to understand that I did not wake up in the morning trying to figure out how to piss them off, but was actually writing about serious issues in a reasonably responsible way, considering it’s satire. Second, the world changed: The bar got lowered with raunch radio, “South Park,” and “Tonight Show” jokes about fellatio. Against that backdrop, “Doonesbury” no longer seemed quite so shocking. Which after 33 years is fine with me. It was exhausting to always be in a defensive crouch.

What do you personally consider to be the biggest risk you ever took with a “Doonesbury” strip?

Well, I never thought of myself as being at risk, which is probably why I got away with so much. I simply followed my interests and concerns, and trusted my editor to tell me when he thought I’d gone too far. Part of the secret to slipping tough material into a comic strip is pacing. Jim Andrews, my editor in the early days, once said to me, “You can write about bombing in Cambodia this week, but you damn well better write about football next week.” If you’re in it for the long haul, you have to know when to remove your knee from the reader’s windpipe. Aaron Magruder’s ["Boondocks" creator] still working on that one.

Which scandals, in hindsight, seem the most ludicrous?

In hindsight, of course, they all seem ludicrous, but my favorite was a series I did linking then-Gov. Jerry Brown to Sidney Korshak, who was on the FBI’s list of top mob figures. The strip was bounced from papers all over California, condemning it as unfair. In a nice touch, the only other newspapers in the country who shared their outrage were in Las Vegas and Reno.

Of all the characters in “Doonesbury,” who would be the most likely to “censor” a comic strip, and why?

You have to be careful here. Technically, the exclusion of my strip from a newspaper is not censorship. It’s called editing. Newspaper editors have a right and responsibility to control the content of their papers. They’re public stewards and have to make dozens of calls every day on what meets the standards of their particular community. I don’t always admire the rationale for dropping a strip (see California story above), but I see no reason why I should expect to be in every one of 700 papers every day. The miracle is that I have appeared as often as I have.

Having said that, the answer is Duke, whose fundamental belief in the efficacy of authoritarianism makes censorship a no-brainer.

And finally, which character do you think would be the one who would most actively launch a preventive strike against prostate cancer?

The college boys, Jeff and Zipper, although I’m sure all the characters take sensible prophylactic measures.

I can’t speak for gay men (they are speaking for themselves), but since you’re asking, please let me step in and say as a woman who knows you won’t believe me: Barring freaks of nature on both extremes, size doesn’t matter. And these photos prove it.

Not because of Mr. Law’s merits or demerits, depending on where you stand on the cut/uncut shower/grower divides but because, and can I say it again, please? We really don’t care.

But you’re not listening, are you. All you’re thinking is: How do I measure up to Jude Law?

Sigh, OK. First, the bad news:

Naked, clothed, upside down, from the back, from the front, you will never look as good as Jude Law. No one looks as good as Jude Law. Not even, given the miracles of makeup and airbrushing, Jude Law. (On the other hand, if you’re not screwing your baby sitter, you’ve just scored some major points.) And as for the size thing, we know you won’t believe us, you think it’s the female equivalent of “I’ll call you” or “No, I wasn’t looking at that woman,” but really, what makes that picture hot has nothing to do with Mr. Law’s impressiveness or lack thereof. Remember that most women are notoriously uninterested in porn images, which is why Playgirl will never outsell Penthouse, Hustler, Beaverama, Teens With Horses or whatever other mags we like to pretend you don’t keep hidden under your beds. For most of us, the ideal porn movie would be a man saying, “You’re right, you’re right” while doing the dishes, over and over again. Which leads us to…

The good news:

What turns us on is not perfect images of supersize beefcake, oiled and ready to please. What works for us is intimacy, or the illusion thereof. And that’s the illusion these photos bring, precisely because it’s a shot no one would ever pose for — Jude Law, sans fluffer. It jibes with the most precious images from our most private memories, not only just before, but just after. In other words, those pictures are hot because when we look at them, we’re not thinking of Jude Law, we’re thinking of you: Our husbands, our boyfriends, not the strangers but the men we’ve known.

In fact, if more women’s porn would speak back to that part of our imagination, we’d probably buy it, and put to rest the whole myth that visuals don’t do it for us. They do if they’re the right visuals and they let us pretend, for even one second, that Jude Law is our boyfriend.

But it’s only because he reminds us of you, baby. We promise.

Loya had a short but lucrative career as a bank robber. His first heist was in downtown San Diego; he left the midsize bank with $4,500. On and off over the next three years, he robbed his way up and down Southern California, netting enough money to always keep 30 to 40 grand in cash stashed under his bed. He never used a gun (a note for the tellers claiming gun or bomb ownership did the trick), and, with the money he stole, he lived a fantasy life of good cars, good clothes and good-looking women. The memoir does full justice to this portion of his life, and the book is a satisfying read — offering lots of car chases, comical accounts of his failed first attempts to strike fear in the hearts of jaded tellers, lurid yarns laced with thick jailhouse raconteur profanity — except for the one question that lingers in the mind after shutting its pages. Once the con man has convinced you he’s a con man, how do you know you’re not still being conned?

For this reader, the question is further complicated by the fact that the con man in question is an old and dear friend, and, since his release in ’96, a model of upstanding citizenship as well, with — to the best of my knowledge — not even a parking ticket to his name. Occasionally, over the years, he’d remind me he used to be a “bad, bad man,” but I never saw it. I knew he used to rob banks, and I’d heard about the car chases, the near misses. I knew he used to be violent; I knew he was abused by his father. I knew that, at age 16, he finally fought back, stabbing his father with a steak knife during a fight. I knew that he had once bitten off part of a fellow prisoner’s ear in a dispute over a stolen porn magazine. But that was the Old Joe, and little in my day-to-day interactions with the New Joe had prepared me for the creepiness of the young man who emerges through the pages of “The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell.” Right now, as we wait for our food and the sun sets over the Oakland Hills, I’ve got the tape recorder running, arms folded across my chest, wondering if I ever even knew Joe Loya at all.

We first met in 1998, two years after his release, at Pacific News Service, where we were both working as editors. He had come to the office’s attention through essayist and journalist Richard Rodriguez, with whom he’d struck up a lively correspondence while in prison. He was already a rising star, writing frequent and popular columns about life from an ex-felon’s perspective. I was immediately charmed by his charisma, his scholarly horn-rimmed glasses, his love for Rilke, his intimate knowledge of the Old Testament (a product of his religious upbringing) — and, of course, his thrilling and lurid tall tales about stupid cops, terrified bank tellers and fierce cellmates, all safely buried in his distant past. Jolly and burly, always ready with a smile, a compliment, an invitation to lunch, Joe was no more of a hustler than any other freelancer I knew.

Over the years, we stayed close, meeting up every few months to compare notes on our writing careers, our mutual friends and our shrinks. Joe Loya the ex-con became Joe Loya the literary man-about-town, with a successful and well-reviewed theatrical one-man show based on his experiences, steady work writing Op-Eds on the American prison system — and, of course, the holy grail itself, a publisher’s advance. There have been times when it was hard even to grant him credit for his obvious talent. Man, you’d think, I’d be a brilliant writer too after two years in solitary. Talk about a room of one’s own. And talk about a usable past!

But, of course, Loya didn’t have it easy. In the memoir he writes movingly of his childhood: At 9, he lost his mother to cancer. From age 12 on, he was molested repeatedly by a 22-year-old neighbor named Lorelei. She was troubled and passionate, and it would not occur to him until years later that the sex they shared was actually sexual abuse. The stabbing of his father, Joe Loya Sr., led to the then-teenage Loya’s first stint in county custody, for eight months. The other kids there saw him as a hero of sorts, and he fell in love with the image of himself as a tough guy, above the limits of the law, unanswerable to authority.

His father recovered physically, but as an authority figure, he held no more sway over his son. Thus began Loya’s descent into a rudderless and amoral criminality. He started by conning his friends and stealing from employers; he eventually stole a car. In his own mind, he’d killed God by stabbing his father, and now lived in a free-floating world in which the only thing he needed to answer to was his own greed for the Good Life. Still, after he was finally brought down on the UCLA campus (in one of the book’s funniest scenes) by an agent who had already arrested him once, and then had vouched for his trustworthiness with the district attorney’s office, he had no shame or regret — just a firm desire to claw his way to the top of the prison’s hierarchy. And he succeeded, through a stealth campaign of manipulation and calculated violence — all described in chilling detail in the book.

But what’s chilling is not the action itself — particularly if you happen to know and like the guy. The most disturbing section of the book is precisely the section in which Loya pitilessly outlines the cold and cruel thought processes behind his willingness to con everyone he knew, to play whatever role was necessary to incur their trust. He convinced himself he was a criminal mastermind, a Nietzschean übermensch, even though he was really just a self-centered, angry man who stole money from his friends, cheated on his girlfriends, embezzled money from his bosses, and treated everyone who trusted him or cared for him with pure contempt.

The fact that Loya, now 43 years old — reformed, planning a book tour, and grinning at me from across the table — also happens to be a gifted wordsmith doesn’t make the unsparing portrait of himself he paints in the memoir any more palatable. “If people trusted me, they deserved to get burned,” he writes, and goes on to detail his “intricate intrigues to separate a man from his money, patiently cultivating friendship before fleecing him.”

Loya is no longer a criminal, but the clearing up of a blackened heart is much more difficult to prove than a blackened record. Not yet ready to ask him if he’s ever tried to fleece me, I turn instead for more details about his transformation, and how, to quote from the book, his “thoughtless life of crime ended” and “life of remorse” began.

“It wasn’t one thing,” he says. “I was in solitary confinement, and trying to keep from going crazy. And I had time, lots of time to think about how I’d gotten to this place, and how much of a scared little boy I still was underneath all my bluster.”

He also rediscovered his earlier childhood love for literature. Throughout his two-year stint in solitary confinement under a murder investigation of a former cellmate (the killer was never found), Loya wrote and read incessantly: Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas and, fittingly, St. Augustine. One night in 1994, at the age of 33, after leaving solitary confinement to return to the general population, he found his very own Norman Mailer on PBS: Richard Rodriguez, the essayist and commentator on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Loya wrote to Rodriguez, and the two began a correspondence that helped him develop his ear throughout the rest of his sentence.

The letters between Loya and Rodriguez form some of the most lyrical passages in the book — but they are hardly proof of the honey-tongued prisoner’s progress. (During the course of the correspondence, Loya stabbed a fellow inmate for cutting in front of him in line.) Loya’s release in 1996 — the book ends on his first day of freedom — is indeed a cliffhanger.

A “free man” in only the crudest material sense of the world, Loya barely even left his brother’s house for the first three months after getting out of prison. According to statistics, he tells me, half of ex-cons go back within 90 days, and he was fighting that statistic the only way he knew how, by staying inside. He was fearful of the day-to-day confrontations — a bumped shoulder, a long line, a cutoff on the highway, which ordinary citizens take for granted, but which can lead to violence in prison. He was fearful of passing by banks and succumbing once more to their allure. Ten thousand dollars in 10 minutes. That’s what he used to tell himself, proudly, in his bank-robbing days: I can make $10,000 in 10 minutes. Now he had to be content with whatever he could earn as a writer, and none of his hard-won prison-yard respect could do him any good.

He was tired all the time, just as he’d been in prison, just as he’d been during his teens and 20s — but not just tired; chronically exhausted, almost narcoleptic. It had never occurred to him that there might be a chemical reason for his fatigue, but a girlfriend suggested he visit a therapist, who took just one session to diagnose him with depression and write out a life-changing prescription to Wellbutrin. The medication did wonders for him, as he tells me now in between sips of Tsingtao. “I began to walk a little more comfortably, less afraid that with every step the ground might be taken out from beneath me,” he says. “Honestly, it’s as close to redemption as I’m ever going to get.”

Or almost as close. His professional life had become more and more linked to the marketability of his personal history, but he’d married a woman named Diane, a nonprofit program director who was neither impressed with his past nor appalled by it. “I think that’s part of what made me fall in love with her — she loved me, the man I am now. She never asked me a single question about the damned banks.” But even with the Wellbutrin, he suffered bouts of depression and thoughts of suicide. Last year, when he and his wife decided to start trying to have a child, those bouts became worse. He spiraled downward and eventually checked himself into a mental hospital, where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and put on more medications.

Today, he and Diane are happy. Ongoing therapy, the new medication and the example of close friends who are also parents have convinced him that he has what it takes to be a father. “Right now is a good time,” he tells me. “But it’s still an effort for me to try to be the kind of person I want to be. And I’m ferocious about that. I still work hard to keep the demons at bay; I work really hard to make sure the rage doesn’t come back. So I can live a peaceful life.”

It all sounds good. Too good, maybe, because once you’ve learned how to size people up, how to manipulate, how to seek out the worst in people and exploit it, can you ever drop that skill, that awareness? “Give me an example of working hard,” I say, trying to keep the suspicion from my voice.

“I’ll tell you, it takes vigilance. I’ll give you an example right now,” he says. “I got this half-assed review in Kirkus this week. Not even bad, just half-assed — and, for a minute there, I wanted to find that guy and track him down.”

He’s not the first writer in America to wish bodily harm on the writer of an unfair review. If fantasies were real, Dale Peck‘s bullet-ridden, headless body would have been floating in the East River years ago, gift-wrapped in bloody typewriter ribbon. The Old Joe might have taken that fantasy to a new level, but the New Joe has a different strategy. “I take a step back and remember that every anger covers a wound,” he says. “Something about the review has wounded me in some way, and so I think about that, and then the anger goes away.”

Every anger disguises a wound: This is what he had learned about himself in solitary confinement, as he traced his thoughts and tried to hold onto his sanity by understanding where his emotions were coming from. He traced his rage back to old pains, old fears  and gradually began tearing down the facade he had built up. His new self-knowledge — achieved on his own, without access to therapy or counseling — led to a phone call to his father, one in which he brought up a particularly wretched episode from his boyhood, and asked, “Hey, Dad, why’d you beat the shit out of me?”

Faced with an honest question, Joe Loya Sr. gave his son an honest answer, and opened up about his own rage and helplessness in the face of his wife’s illness and how it turned into rage toward his son. Over a prison phone, they talked about the violence and grief that had bound them. “I’d been gradually forgiving him along the way,” he says now. “But now I understood that his rage came from missing my mother. It explains the mystery. My father and I shared the same wound, the loss of my mother, and this created a solidarity along the way.”

Loya also confronted Lorelei, the woman who began molesting him when he was 12 years old. “I asked her what was going on for her back then,” he says. “She was molested by a family member for many years when she was very young. That was about all she had to say about it. She said she felt horrible and I know she’s felt horrible about it. I’m not mad at her.”

Whether it was the therapy, his own personal vigilance or the softening of age, Loya’s capacity for forgiveness (he and his father are now close) now extends beyond Lorelei and beyond his father. “I’m done with anger,” he says. “I can identify it now. I’ve become a patient man.”

Finally, perhaps thanks to the Tsingtao, I say what’s been on my mind all evening. “I gotta tell you,” I begin, referring to the chapters that describe his late adolescent devolution into, in his own words, a mooch and a fraud, “you really were an asshole.”

He laughs. “That was the hardest part of the book to write, man. I was shady, and I know it.”

“So why did you write it down in such squalid detail?”

“You know, I was writing this as much for my friends as anybody,” he says. “The most important thing was to tell the truth, even if it was embarrassing, to tell the truth and tell it well. Sure, I want people to root for me, but I want them to be conflicted, not just think, ‘Oh, he got treated greasy by his parents.’ I want to feel that I’ve exhausted their ability to sympathize, because I have faith that by the end of the book, I’ll have got you back. I have to have confidence that the story itself will keep you hooked, even if you don’t like me when you’re reading it.”

This story has been corrected since it was first published.

And if you’re looking for more proof that the kids are not all right, pick up a copy of Meredith Maran’s “Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America’s Teenage Drug Epidemic.” Maran, a Bay Area journalist and mother of two, opens with some daunting statistics about our country’s adolescents:

“If someone comes along and says, ‘Hey, you and your friends — you’re in an urban tribe,’ the response is pretty much, ‘Fuck you, I’m not in a tribe,’” he admits. “I appreciate that. I just want to begin a conversation about this. And I hope the book is the beginning of that conversation.”

The conversation Watters refers to actually began in 2001 with an article in the New York Times Magazine, in which he suggested that people were staying single longer in part because they drew so much sustenance from their friends. Using his personal experience as a jumping-off point, Watters said that members of urban tribes (his coinage) spend their 20s and 30s roaming the cities, fixing each other’s leaky faucets, planning dinners and weekly “Survivor”-watching parties at each other’s houses, and — in San Francisco, at least — helping build hovercrafts for Burning Man. The period between college and marriage, he argued, was becoming longer not only because of declining economic and social pressure on women to marry, or boomer kids’ notorious fear of divorce, but because tribes themselves were so fulfilling. The book expands on the article, and paints a much less bleak picture of single urban life than, say, “Sex and the City,” or “Fight Club.”

I’m 33, single, and moved to San Francisco eight years ago from a small town. Like Watters, I have a group of friends to whom I’ve said, many times, and not only under the influence of pharmaceuticals, “Man, you guys are like my family …” But my initial response to his book was, “Fuck you, I’m not in a tribe.”

The 39-year-old Watters is affable, easy to talk to, and well prepared for my objections. Tall, handsome, now married and expecting a child of his own, he describes the book as his attempt to make sense of the past 20 years of his life, a memoir of sorts, but one that he thinks taps into a larger cultural phenomenon. So far, not all reviewers have agreed. In a piece in the Atlantic Monthly, Caitlin Flanagan writes that Watters and his tribesmen “might be representative less of a striking new social trend than of arrested development.” (Rule No. 1 for aspiring West Coast trend-writers: If you want to be taken seriously, don’t open the book with your epiphanies from Burning Man.) After we order, I ask Watters what’s so novel about his brand of tribes as opposed to say Michel de Montaigne’s famous 16th century musings on friendship, or the Bowling League, or the Algonquin circle, or the man-boys in Barry Levinson’s “Diner.” What’s he saying that the slogan from “The Big Chill” didn’t tell us in 1983,that “in a cold world, you need your friends to keep you warm”?

“What’s different now,” he says, “is that a bigger chunk of our generation is spending time outside of the family unit — both the family that raised them, and the one they might one day make after marriage — but even more importantly, they are doing it for longer than any group in American history.” Glaringly absent from Watters book are hard numbers to back up claims like these. However, the latest Census figures, even though he doesn’t cite them, do show that people are marrying later — the median ages of first marriage was 25.1 for women and 26.8 for men in 2001, up from 20.8 and 23.2 respectively in 1970 — but there is no evidence to suggest that later marriages are proliferating because people are spending more time hanging out with their close friends.

After his New York Times piece was published, Watters set up a Web site, Urbantribes.net, and asked people to write in with their own stories — in part to gather research material for his book. Thousands of people responded, and not surprisingly, they, like Watters, were overwhelmingly white, college-educated and relatively well-off. “We lack a lot of socioeconomic diversity,” wrote Jamie, about his Washington, D.C., tribe. “But are internally varied in most other ways.”

Throughout the book, and in conversation, Watters refers to “our generation,” though as far as I can tell, he’s not describing a generation at all, but a specific demographic: yuppie liberals with lots of disposable income who live in destination cities, people who hate to be thought of as a demographic.

When asked whether he thinks his tribal theory fits poorer urban neighborhoods, where groups that substitute for family are referred to as, uh, gangs, he reminds me that his book only describes one man’s experience. “This may sound like a bit of a cop-out,” he says, “but it was, like, lemme figure out what’s happened in my life for the last 20 years, and let me try to draw in everyone else who seems to sort of, you know, identify with me.”

Well, it does sound like a cop-out. Especially since the book does not bill itself as a memoir, but rather makes the hefty promise of explaining how a generation is “redefining friendship, family, and commitment.” But when I try to pin Watters down on any of these questions, he reminds me, again, that it’s “just his own experience.”

Part of what Watters is trying to debunk in his book, and rightly so, is the still popular conception that American men and women suffer from a Peter Pan complex, an extended adolescence in which we hold onto juvenile ideas of “freedom” because we are so afraid of the responsibility of adulthood. Maybe that’s because adulthood is still rigidly defined by the holy triumvirate of Marriage, Mortgage and Kids. What Watters offers up is clearly something different. But still, a social identity based on belonging to a specific group of people doesn’t sound like a huge step forward — in fact, it sounds like high school for adults, with no graduation in sight.

“What’s the difference between a tribe and a clique?” I ask, just as Watters’ friend Noah arrives at our table to take us to the softball game. Watters tries to dodge the question: “Uh, Noah, you want to field this?”

A fellow tribesman to the rescue: “A clique is exclusionary,” says Noah, curly-haired and serious. “A tribe is inclusionary.”

This difference is key for Watters, who nods his head vigorously. Ethan Watters is a nice guy, and nice people don’t do cliques; they are not snobs. “People can come participate [in tribes], and no one will look askance at you when you show up.” This seems true — at least as far as Watters’ San Francisco tribe is concerned. Throughout the ’90s, fresh out of school and sure I was bound for nowhere but a park bench, I attended several parties that I now know were thrown by Watters and company. While I do remember feeling intimidated by their important-sounding jobs (Editors! Freelancers!), I don’t remember ever having been snubbed or made to feel like an outsider. Of course, had I moved in and tried to reap the full-fledged benefits of tribal membership — in the book Watters details favors ranging from providing shelter to distilling home brew to driving friends to therapy — surely I would have had to jump through some hoops before indoctrination, right?

With my friends, it would take a lot more than hoops. In fact, none of them — disloyal, unsupportive and emotionally stunted slackers all — would do this kind of stuff for me, and they’d never chauffeur me to softball games on the other side of town. By now, my take on the tribe is not “Fuck you, I’m not in one,” but “Damn, I need to find me one!”

We head out to Noah’s car, and on the drive over to the Marina, I take the back seat and listen to them grumble like two old ladies about another tribal member who just won’t grow up. “I’m worried about him,” Ethan says. “I mean it’s one thing to want to go off and have your own TV show when you’re 25, but when you’re 35?” Watters had mentioned earlier that in tribes, people like to gossip, but since he and Noah are both journalists, I can’t help wondering if the conversation is for my benefit, especially since Ethan assures me that he’s not using the ne’er-do-well’s real name.

By the time we’ve found parking, the team is out on the field warming up. “The Elucidators” are mostly journalists, mostly in their 30s, and many of them turn out to be friends of friends of mine (or if you want to be fancy, people with whom I have “weak ties,” a term Watters borrows from sociologist Mark Granovetter). I meet Brad, a journalist, and his wife, Jennifer, a lawyer; there’s Christine, a consultant; Adam, also an editor; and finally a novelist named Alex and his gorgeous new wife, whose name I don’t catch. There are several others there, and they all greet me with genuine warmth and friendliness. It’s freezing and several people offer me sweatshirts. “Inclusionary” might not be a word, but is certainly a lovely idea. I take my position in the bleachers to watch the game, light a cigarette and start a heated conversation with yet another editor, Adam, about Spider-Man comics.

I meet with awkward silences, however, when I ask each person, in turn, “Are you a member of the tribe?”

“Uh, I just moved here,” says Adam.

“I married this guy over here just to get in!” jokes the gorgeous newlywed, pointing to her husband.

Sometime during the fourth inning, Watters joins me on the bleachers and offers a discreet behavioral corrective — it’s the first time I’ve heard any edge to his voice all evening. It turns out, not everyone on the team is necessarily a part of his tribe, some of them are just “on the team,” and it was a faux pas of the new social order for me to have made that point so clear.

“That question,” he says, “is antithetical to what this book is about, antithetical to what I’m trying to say. I found those questions unnerving. No one would ever, ever ask that.” I apologize, profusely, although for what, I’m not quite sure. Tribes aren’t cliques, right? They are organic, and naturally inclusive, no? But lines do have to be drawn, people get left out. The concept of a “group” of friends, no matter how loose, must leave some people out — even if that uncomfortable fact is anathema to Watters and the rosy picture he wants to paint of open and borderless single communities.

Watters heads back to home plate — and scores a double, but too late to save his losing team.

After the game, and some good-natured browbeating from Brad, Jennifer and Christine over my gauche queries, and on the verge of vertigo from all the slippery definitions and vagaries of the evening, I ask the women whether they feel that a “tribe” ever kept them single.

“Oh yeah,” says Christine, one of Ethan’s friends from the softball team — I know enough now not to pose indiscreet questions about her tribal status. “I have my friends so I don’t get lonely. And if a guy can’t get along with my friends, then there’s something wrong with him. My friends are smart and cool — if he can’t deal, he’s out.”

But what about marriage? Settling down? Growing up?

“I think it takes more maturity and courage to define your own priorities, and wait for the right person,” Christine continues. “You don’t need to be defined by whether or not you’re married anymore.”

Jennifer, the lawyer, drives the point home: “How do you define maturity anyway?” she asks. “By how you live? By how you treat people? By your values, what?”

The tribe to the rescue, again. Jennifer has inadvertently saved Watters’ memoir-pitching, generalizing, bet-hedging ass by touching on what makes the book worth reading. Part — not all — of our generation is redefining something, but that something is not “friendship, family, and commitment.’ Instead it is single life itself, which Watters doesn’t treat as a pathology, a neurosis or a condition from which America must heal, lest we all become bitter, Botox-addled old maids or freaky Chuck Palahniuk protigis. And for this he should be applauded.

Watters himself finally makes that point clear at the book’s end, when he throws down the gauntlet: “I have spent exactly 20 years — almost to an hour — living outside a family unit. It is impossible to see such a large chunk of time as a transitional phase between youth and adulthood. Twenty years is an era — a goddamned epoch in one’s existence.”

Whether one agrees with him or not, Watters has said something original, and to this 33-year-old single adult, it is a long-overdue addition to the national conversation about what being a “grown-up” really means: The old definitions don’t apply, the new ones haven’t been invented, and 20 years suddenly seems like a reasonable amount of time to take to figure them out. If it requires some sociology-lite and a catchy phrase to make this point about the new adulthood, then so be it.

I am pondering all of this when Watters interrupts my thoughts. “I’d love to keep talking about all this some more,” he says wryly. “But I’ve got to go home to my pregnant wife.”

The only hitch is that the story is real. “True Notebooks,” Mark Salzman’s memoir of the four years he spent teaching creative writing in Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall, is an unexpected delight, with not a treacly or self-consciously “inspiring” moment to be found. At the story’s onset, it’s 1997 and a minor character in Salzman’s stuttering work-in-progress is a juvenile delinquent. Needing more concrete information about a demographic he knows very little about, he reluctantly takes up a friend’s offer to attend a writing class and meet some locked-up teens face-to-face. He is full of trepidation: He doesn’t much like teenagers, especially the criminal kind, and he is both mildly pro-death penalty and comfortable with the idea of trying children as adults. In his own words, he “wishes we could tilt L.A. County and shake it until everybody with a shaved head and tattoos falls into the ocean.” Furthermore, burdened with his own memories of being teased and bullied as a teenager, he’s terrified that he won’t be able to win his students’ respect.

As Salzman and the reader quickly realize, his own personal issues are simply not that important. It is the young men — boys, really — who quickly take center stage. There is Francisco, an earnest recovering gangbanger studying for his confirmation test in the Catholic Church, who despite his newfound relationship with God cannot go five minutes without cursing; Benny Wong, an undersized, geeky outcast whom Salzman cannot protect from the others’ relentless hazing; and Kevin Jackson, a shy and “sweet-faced” young man whose murder trial Salzman ends up attending. These boys don’t need to be taught the importance of self-expression. Through their spirited class discussions and the immediacy and honesty of their own work, they emerge as complicated but fascinating characters, writers in their own right, whose humor, dark wit and surprising innocence hold the reader’s attention and affection as surely as they do Salzman’s.

Salzman spoke with Salon from his home in Los Angeles about the act of writing, what he’s learned about the American criminal justice system and how after hundreds of hours with the boys he still doesn’t like hip-hop — even though at this students’ urging, he has written a rhyme or two of his own, under the nickname of “M.C. Powdered Donut.”

You started working with kids in juvenile hall while you were writing your novel “Lying Awake,” about a Carmelite nun suffering from a crisis of faith. Meanwhile, you were having a crisis of faith about your worth as a writer, and working with a bunch of kids who were also in crisis: The kids were trying to keep faith in themselves and hope for the future alive. Did teaching this class help you in your own work?

Seeing the kids’ ability to shut out their fears and focus and write — because they somehow knew that when it was done they would feel better — was deeply reassuring to me at a time when my own writing was causing me so much suffering. I was feeling so lost and wondering if I was meant to write, and if I were meant to do it, wouldn’t I be doing it better?

But if the only measure of your work is the result — whether you get it published, or how it is judged by others, then as a writer you are in a terrible fix. The kids made me see that the experience of working has value, on its own, regardless of the future outcome.

Did you have any reservations about writing up the experience in “True Notebooks”?

I had two reservations: One, how do I present this story without seeming self-serving — it should be about the kids’ stories, not mine. This led to another: It should be about what they went through, and that means it should have an arc of some sort, something to leave the reader satisfied. But there weren’t any success stories here — not with kids getting life sentences, or disappearing from class one day unexpectedly because they’d been moved to another facility. But then I thought, my book “Iron and Silk ” didn’t have a big beginning, middle, and end story either — I was just trying to write about the experience of living in China. I decided that I would try to write another fragmentary and ephemeral book, but try to make it as satisfying as my time in the workshops.

How did you manage to keep yourself out of the book?

With editing. As I went through the different drafts, I could smell me coming out like a rotting carcass. So I’d just yank myself out each time, and do my best to let the kids take over.

Did you have moments when you were intimidated by the kids, or angry with them, when they showed their “thug” sides?

Oh sure. It would happen if they were goofing around, if they weren’t concentrating, and there was that moment when all the kids picked on Benny Wong. Oh God, did I hate those kids at that point. All of my experiences being picked on by bullies in junior high and high school came flooding back, and I wanted to just boil them in oil!

But then, a few minutes later, a kid would do something that was so touching and so vulnerable and so generous. And I would realize that this is exactly it: They are a complex mixture. They’re not misunderstood angels, they’re not monsters. Wherever they grew up, these are kids who would probably have been restless, the kinds of kids who are natural thrill seekers or risk takers. In a positive environment, I’m pretty sure nine out of 10 of them would have ended up being successful. But in the environments they grew up in, that restlessness got twisted into negative behavior.

Did you see your students as men or boys?

As boys. Before I worked in juvenile hall, I had pretty much accepted the idea that trying minors as adults was appropriate in some cases. Frankly, if I read about a gang member getting three consecutive life terms — say, if he had opened fire into a group of people because he was pissed off because some enemy had flashed him a gang sign — I just thought, “Fine. It’s sad, it’s tragic, but this person has forfeited the right to participate in society.”

But after meeting these kids, the deepest and most sudden impression I had was a shocking recognition that they were children. In fact I’d say that emotionally they were younger than other kids their age. It’s just that they want to believe that no one can hurt them: Out of jail and out on the streets, they have adopted this persona of hardness, of invulnerability.

One of the most poignant moments is Kevin Jackson’s murder trial. Throughout the book, he seems like one of the most thoughtful, most loving, most soft-spoken of all the kids you meet. And then at his trial, we learn that not only did he shoot and kill another boy in front of a movie theater, but afterwards he went to another theater and watched the movie. How did you integrate the two pictures you had of this boy, the sensitive writer and the callous killer?

For a while after that trial I was heartbroken, but I also came to accept that it is possible for a person to respond in drastically different ways to different situations. A person can be capable of great love and affection, but also great violence, great hatred.

Before I worked at juvy, I felt that if someone is awful, if someone is evil, then they had to be evil all the way through. And that was my justification for having no moral qualms about seeing criminals punished. Isn’t there a part of all of us that wants criminals to suffer because we are so angry at them?

But meeting kids like Kevin made me realize that it is possible to hold people responsible for what they do without hating them. It’s changed how I see the death penalty; it’s changed how I relate to the idea of trying children as adults.

One boy described receiving a life term as “dying without a funeral.” Now that Kevin is certainly going to spend his life in prison, do you see any hope for him, or is his life over?

I’m still in touch with Kevin, and he’s been out of trouble since he’s been in jail. He has a job in the prison library, he’s been reading a lot, and he’s been doing a lot of writing. There is a prison culture, which like any culture is affected by strong-minded, charismatic people of real commitment and passion, and I think it’s entirely possible that someone like him could have a positive effect on the people he is in contact with, within that society.

Was it hard not to judge the kids’ work, to notice bad grammar, or clichés?

No! That was the beauty of it! Teaching creative writing to college students was just so awful, because I was aware of the technical mistakes but I was also bored to tears by the writing itself. So much of what I read was about young people trying on fancy styles, so they could convince the world that they were Really Great Writers.

But the kids in juvy just told their stories, and most of the things that they described were inherently interesting because they were so intense. So I didn’t care about spelling mistakes and clichés because the foundational idea was so vibrant.

You didn’t seem to want the kids to use rhymes or raps in their writing. What is it about hip-hop that you don’t like?

With hip-hop and rap the emphasis on clever rhymes tends to distract from genuine expression. The other night I had to go listen to a rapper who had been in juvenile hall, and now he’s “made good” because he’s decided to be a rapper. His lyrics were: “Oh baby let’s go out to the club/ let’s find a place where we can make lub.” There’s been such an emphasis on the virtuosity of rhyming, that often the lyrics will serve the rhymes rather than the rhymes serving the meaning.

Plus there’s this overall gestalt in hip-hop, a posturing. The fundamental defining characteristic of rap in my opinion is the posture that the rapper is exhilaratingly powerful and in-your-face. I know there is a lot of great rap out there, but personally, most of it just turns me off: “You better watch out for your girlfriends cause here I come, I’m the best rapper in town and all you other suckermotherfuckers blah blah blah.”

I know I’m such a dinosaur when it comes to this. But when I’d ask my students to just make the rap into an essay, they’d immediately quit the whole “blasting on foes/calling up hoes/drinking 40 ounces to the neck” persona. Oh God, I’m sure this will be a very unpopular opinion. In fact, I think the term my students used for me was “playa hata.”

Do you like any rap at all?

Yeah, I used to love Ice-T’s old stuff. There was so much humor in it. And who was that guy with the big clock around his neck?

Flavor Flav?

Yeah, him! And it’s true, one time the kids challenged me; they said, ‘You make us write your way, now you write our way,’ and I did and called myself M.C. Powdered Donut. I can’t remember what it was now, but I think I just played around with the kids’ expectations of profanity, setting the rhyme up so you’d expect “motherfucker” and instead they got “chicken plucker.” Oh, we had fun.

So, speaking of powdered donut: As a white man, how did it feel going into juvenile hall, where most of the the kids were not white? How did differences in race and class play out in the classroom?

Let’s face it, do I have any street cred? I was brought up in a leafy suburb in Connecticut. But they made me feel comfortable very quickly because their responses to me were based on pure curiosity: “You’re a writer? What does a writer do?” The writing was what was important to them.

Which parts of the kids did you identify with most? What reminded you most of being a teenager yourself?

Well, mostly when I’d hear them talking about how desperately they wanted to please some older guy — who was usually a jerk, a brute, a thug — but they wanted that guy’s approval so bad. They didn’t want to be seen as soft. That was the root of my whole obsession with martial arts growing up. I was the teacher’s pet, such a fearful kid, and I hoped that martial arts would transform me into this glistening blade of a boy that other people would respect and fear.

Did it work?

Of course not! It was a total fantasy. I remember before martial arts, I’d ask a girl out and — you know, I was the shortest kid, with the highest voice — and she’d say “you’re like a little brother to me.” And then after a couple of years of martial arts, of meditation and being one with the universe, I asked a girl out on a date and she said, “You’re like a weird little brother to me.”

The last thing you write — not even in the book but in your acknowledgements — was that it was your experience with the kids at Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall that inspired you to have children, and now you’re the blissful stay-at-home dad of a toddler. How did that happen?

I’d been married for 14 years, and I had all sorts of rational reasons for thinking that I would not be a good father. Chief among them was that I did not feel any instinctive desire to have a child. Since I didn’t feel this desire to have kids, I thought it was a sign that I just wouldn’t bond with a child. Then, after time in Juvy, I was so surprised that I could actually come to like — even love — those kids, that it just started to dawn on me, that if I could love these kids then of course I could love my own child.

What lessons did the kids teach you about fatherhood?

That fathers are really important. (Laughs)

If I had to identify one single factor that all of the kids I worked with shared, it was that none of them had an adequate relationship with their father. Having a father figure who cares — it doesn’t have to be a father necessarily, just a father figure — clearly seems important in order for people to grow up with a sense of security, and a self-image that can withstand all the pummeling that life brings.

Finally, what lessons, if any, did they teach you about writing, and what it means?

It’s sort of like that Gandhi quote: “Everything is futile but you must do it anyway, because effort is full victory.” Writing — their writing, my writing, the effort we all make — is so satisfying; it’s about satisfying a hunger we all share, and it’s why I’m still writing. That effort is what redeems the experience.