My Tobias Wolf Connection

Why I have Not Used My Tobias Wolf Connection

I have never taken any advantage of my friendship with Tobias Wolf before he became famous. And I have to admit that when he started to be mentioned in newspapers and magazines, I wasn’t sure that it was the Tobias Wolf that I had known or that the person I had known had been called Tobias Wolf. You can see my dilemma. But despite all of this confusion, I can be proud of not taking advantage of this acquaintanceship like some people might.
I knew him in England. Some of the elder dons gossiped that they had seen him at a truck stop on the M-1 motorway. I think the word ‘prostitutes’ was mentioned. But in his defense, I never substantiated any of this. Not that I wasn’t interested, but not enough to do any snooping. I had no car, would not have known how to get to the M-1.
And besides, he seldom went down to dinner. I knew about him from a fellow American named David, a big blond guy who had worked for a winter as a lumberjack and was more amiable than I. I don’t remember if it was David or one of the dons who occasionally boarded at Pusey House that gave me the low down on Tobias Wolf. He had been in Vietnam. He had written a book about it. The Washington Post had offered him a job.
I think he ate at his college, but liked the atmosphere of Pusey House better. It was more anonymous. The rooms had once been the servants’ quarters when each priest at Pusey House had a retinue of servants. He had a corner room which may have had a view of the street. My room was across from the bathroom and had a view of a dreary courtyard if you stood on the desk and looked directly down. Otherwise what I saw was a gray wall.
At the time I was young and felt that it was height of decadence to buy a bottle of port and drink it in bed in the morning. I wanted to be decadent. Few people knew this, though I thought if it could somehow be worked into my biographies it would make me sound more interesting. Later in life, I did get drunk every day for six months, but it has never been anything I could make enough sense out of to write about. It was not the occasional bed drunks with the sweet oak-flavored port. But I am wandering from my real story about Tobias and me.
We went our separate ways. I was on semesters abroad. Tobias, the dons referred to him as Toby, was in his last year and was preparing for exams. The only time I saw him, other than when he went to meals, was when he walked to the bathroom in his plaid terry cloth robe, his hair curly and unruly everywhere except on his head which prematurely was bald.
He continued to dedicate himself to studying and occasional trips to the M1 motorway. All biographers are allowed to fill in the gaps and I think the M-1 story adds something charming, decadent, and desperate about an exceptional student who knew how to get ahead. Although Tobias was not quite a role model, I also studied and tried to find true love or sexual adventure at Pusey House, which was rife with gay Episcopal seminarians. One of them would linger blatantly over the underwear ads, drifting to the open doors of those who wanted Sunday morning conversation.
The director of Pusey House was Cheslyn P. Jones, a tall portly man who wore glasses for reading, and tilted his head down to his chin so he could look at us. Though rumored to be brilliant, he had the air of being always just at the point of understanding. When he finally did talk, it was as if something in his mind crumbled and the words finally spilled out, with little stuttering ripples along the mental rocks. When he walked down St. Giles Street, he had the wobbling look of a huge teddy bear, his large stomach protruding from his black cassock that came to his shoes, and his head down to see over his glasses. I once tried to describe him to an ex-monk who studied at Wycliffe Hall and who used to enjoy visiting my rooms when I lived there so he could look down at the boys playing in the schoolyard of another institution. His perversion, as he described it chummily, brought general giggling moans of disapproval from the Baptists with whom he studied. This man, whose name I do not remember, suddenly lit up as he asked me if this could be the same man who always walked down St. Giles with food on the front of his cassock. There are times when we do not realize things until others point them out, and for me that became one of Cheslyn’s memorable traits.
Not everyone at Pusey House became my friend in the way that Tobias Wolf did. For example, I never really warmed to Nigel Knight. For one thing, he was a radical monarchist and after reading Peter Gay’s and Ernst Cassier’s books on the Enlightenment (I liked to drop facts to make the scope of my reading appear broader and these were excellent sources.) I was definitely anti-monarchist. I kept this to myself. Nigel was an older man, perhaps in his forties or fifties. At the time I still lumped people from thirty-five to fifty-five together in vague group, the way today twenty to thirty-five seem to be one group. Nigel had become the only subject of a Romanian princess who lived in Oxford. She had ruined his car and he was on a meager pension. As a monarchist he was unable to separate himself from her or to find fault even with her driving. The matter was discussed thoroughly when Nigel was at meals and when he wasn’t, because he often missed meals so he could serve his princess. He never made any attempt at becoming more friendly, perhaps because I was an American without any chance of royal blood, but if he had, I would have kept my distance.
I never talked to Tobias about how he felt living in a 20th century building that had been constructed to look like a Romanesque monastery or if he ever had a tingling of holiness when the incense wafted up to the halls from the procession that went from the hallway, took a sharp right and went into the chapel. As far as I knew, he never went to mass, which was held daily. (It had been rumored in my presence that the librarian, who was also a priest, had given mass without anyone present, which I was informed was a great sacrilege). I went a few times because I was in the process of becoming a Christian again by eliminating the content and enjoying the ritual. It seemed to me that at Pusey House it was all ritual. At one of the afternoon masses that I attended infrequently, Cheslyn officiated and perhaps because of the stressful schedule he kept, or because the eleven o’clock martini he drank everyday had been a bit larger than usual, he had fallen asleep in the middle of the mass. I watched in shocked amusement, and a bit worried about the complicated feelings of the two Episcopal nuns and Nigel who could not have missed the librarian whispering to the altar boys and the alter boys bumping and shaking Cheslyn. He came to as if he were the Red Cross Knight freed of Duessa’s veil of deception, twitching and fighting his way back to consciousness. The relief of the parishioner, who had watched his body swell and shrink to the tangled sounds of his congested breathing, was so great that it reminded me of the quiet rapture of the onlookers in Juan de Flandes’ Resurrection of Lazarus.
As far as the martini at eleven goes, that is first-hand information. Cheslyn had once invited me, a German history student named Fritz, who had everything he had read in years on index cards in a huge library file cabinet, and the librarian to have drinks with him before lunch. Perhaps I had mentioned that I knew some Spanish and Cheslyn had shown me a bilingual version of St. John of the Cross with a rather erotic translation. The German student had been convinced of my intelligence by a few stray comments based on Peter Gay and Ernst Cassiers and never thought of delving the depth of my knowledge. He was also refused a scholarship to do a doctorate a year later when he insisted on answering questions on Bismark and ignored the other questions in his orals. His parents were personal friends of Cheslyn’s, so occasionally Fritz was invited for a drink. If I remember, that was how I was invited.
After this invitation, Cheslyn seemed to have lost sight of me. He usually had special guests, donators to the house or Anglican high church dignitaries who were in Oxford. He had been a rising star once, but his star had become stuck, and some of the hallway tongues on Sundays when they weren’t sharing sighs and muffled squeals over the bulges in the underwear ads in the Times, remarked on Cheslyn’s stalled career and his attempts to ingratiate himself with these special guests. Cheslyn would hold a tete-a-tete, so engrossed in his guest and his own comments that the food in the spoon he was bringing to his mouth would halt in mid-air, and when it finally reached his mouth, most of its contents were slowly sliding down the front of his cassock.
I’m not quite sure where Cheslyn would fit in a book of realism, ala Richard Carver, which seems to be the style my friend Tobias Wolf chose, but I expect to see him disguised as a gas station attendant ‘with an unfathomable southern accent or someone’s vacant-eyed drunken mother in one of his stories. I’m not sure I myself am fit for realism. If Tobias, also known as Toby, reads this, I hope he keeps that in mind. Of course, he could change me so completely that I wouldn’t recognize myself.
As close as we were, (we lived less than thirty feet from each other with only two doors between us), I don’t think Toby knew me well enough to use me as a character. I was more guarded then than I am now. I don’t think he even knew of the two affairs I had at the same time, two theologians. For a week I believed that I was in a dilemma because the two of them could not live without me. By the end of the week, both affairs were over, though I had tried to keep them going. I was sure they both were convinced that my desperate gaze represented my agony at their rejection. As far as I know, until they read this, neither of them has known about the other. This was one of the many secrets I kept from Tobias. No one else knew either.
Karl, the one who was more tortured about sex , invited me and David to a Christian meditation. I’m sure that he was trying to introduce me to pleasures of the soul since he had withdrawn those of the flesh from my consumption. I thought this was my chance to cut my losses, to throw all my eggs into one basket and forget the other loss. I might convince Karl of some holiness I had.
A woman with the power read from a long repetitive script while we were supposed to open ourselves up to a subconscious infusion of spirituality. There were probably twenty of us, including another woman, in a small meeting room next to one of the rooms where underwear was always a Sunday topic. David began to laugh first as I vaguely remember, but soon both of us were shaking, our bodies trying to muffle the need to laugh hysterically. Ambiguous tears rolled down our cheeks.
After the reading was over, David’s and my own tear streaked faces appeared as some type of miracle for the others. We quickly excused ourselves so we would not begin to laugh again. Unfortunately, Karl wasn’t fooled. I began to think of myself as a temptation vanquished. It suited me better than tried and dumped.
Fergus was older than Karl, though he had a boyish voice and body. I think in his case I had been under consideration. I went with him and a friend to the Red Lion and we looked at the other men. He was serious and yet I remember him as always smiling. He was not confused by his sexuality or his religious beliefs. God wanted us to enjoy our bodies without hurting others. I had the same formula minus God. Unfortunately, he was not especially confused by me either. I guess he sensed I wasn’t cut out to be the priest’s special friend. He wrote me a long letter when I returned home, friendly but not sexual. I don’t think I have it anymore.
Fergus had lived at St. Stephen’s for a while, but left before the scandal when some of the seminarians had an orgy in the wine room. I am only repeating a rumor, which included the mention of the locking of the wine cellar. If any punishment suitable for the soul had taken place, the spreader of this tale had not mentioned it. Unlike Wycliffe, St. Stephen’s had no female seminarians at the time. I may underestimate Fergus to assume that he had not participated. A friend of mine from college back home, about as close to me as Toby, left St Stephen the same year that I arrived in Oxford, shaken in his faith.
So I had to console myself that I had been bodily pleasure for Fergus and a misstep for Karl. But the hardest was that I had imagined myself as essential to both of them, so I had been unable to choose, and here I was a small bump in their long lives. And of course, Toby was studying so much for his exams that I wouldn’t have imagined crying on his shoulder.
Our last encounter seems especially significant to me. The core of it has burned all the details away. I don’t remember if I was stumbling out of my room in the middle of a day of Cockburn’s port in bed or if I was on my way to the bathroom across the hall, or if I was planning to walk back and forth in front of Karl’s door, but suddenly I was aware of Toby standing in his bathrobe in the cold stone-walled hallway, and then in a booming theatrical voice, he began to recite the final lines of Faust as Faust sinks into hell. His hot humid just bathed body steamed slightly in the cold air of the hall. And then the door closed as if he had been swallowed by hell and our relationship ended forever.
I heard that he had gotten a first. The gates of hell turned out to be the road to success. He was leaving for a job at a large newspaper. Our paths which had crossed were to divide forever.
I write this so my detractors can see how easily it would have been for me to use this contact and how I have avoided using the name of the famous writer Tobias Wolf to promote my own career as an unpublished novelist. My reasons may be obvious from the text.
On the other hand, I have completely detached myself from this part of my past. I have not heard from David or Fergus or Karl or Fritz or Cheslyn or Toby in thirty years. I once read an op-ed letter in the New York Times by a mutual friend of David and me, but she for some reason was not interested in restarting our deep friendship, which perhaps could have been a road back to David, who never understood why the others looked at men’s underwear ads. I can only think that she had taken some hair-brained self-help course, which had forbidden her from looking backwards at her past or encouraged her to dump unsuccessful friends, or that the fact that I told her I was gay as she was taking her clothes off in my bedroom made her eventually hate me. As Toby also knows, life is full of secrets and they are not all ours.
Finally, I think my refusal to use my connection to Tobias Wolf shows my real moral self, barred of all the missteps one can so easily make in cities like New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, and even London that my detractors might dig up. Others may not see the point of this story, but I am sure my friend Tobias will.

The Stone

The Stone
It should have been obvious that I was always happy to see you. Before I unlocked the gate, I reached my hand through the mesh to touch your face. My voice would be high with excitement and sometimes I would chant your name as if you were a divine vision whose attention I had to hold or it would vanish.
Minutes before as I drove up the hill, I would wonder, “Will they be waiting for me?” A few times that the others came to the gate and you didn’t, I would scream your name, fearing that you were dead or injured. Usually you came running as I was opening the gate. A few weeks ago, age had pulled you into a profound sleep, and because you were almost deaf, you did not wake until I touched you. For a second you didn’t know where you were, and were startled that something had gotten close enough to touch you, without you even being aware.
Luckily that was not how I found you today. You came to the gate with the two females and left to mark your territory. But you didn’t wander far. Sometimes I had to walk down the road until I saw your whiteness, which was visible even on moonless nights. You always tried hard to both obey and act like you were ignoring me. I thought I understood you. All my life I have been trying to follow demands with a weary resignation: obeying so I would not be punished while acting indifferent so I could salvage some dignity.
I wondered if you were happier to see me than I was to see you, if perhaps I was reacting to your joy or you were reacting to mine. Neither of us could measure our feelings for each other, let alone compare them. I will never know if I was in your dreams, if when your legs twitched, your lips trembled as you slept, I was running next to you on the beach in Ocean Park or if we were jogging up the stony road to the Espíritu Santo River to plunge into a cool river pool. The green light filtered through bamboo on the rock road up to the river makes your whiteness iridescent, and the breeze suddenly transforms the air into rattling exhilaration and our images flicker like green flames.
When I lifted your head Saturday night and it hung limp from your neck: it was no longer yours, yet the body was still warm. Though you walked at times with a limp, were deaf, and had lost interest in eating unless provoked by the unhealthiest food, it was not until the moment that you were dead that I thought of your body as being a burden, something useless.
What strange things sorrow does to us. I kneeled next to you in the rain for a few minutes. I had been soaked when I arrived that night, foolishly gone to the country on a rainy night in sandals and shorts. The cries that came from me at first were wordless. They seemed to well up in my stomach like geysers and then rage up to my head. The misery of the cold rain fit perfectly. Then I chanted your name in a rhythm determined by my sobbing.
At the time, I had no awareness of how I felt, but then pulling strands out of the moment, I sensed anger, despair, guilt, alienation, and pain. For the second time you were a complete stranger to me. An hour before you had been a picture full of nuances and symbols that I read expertly, or imagined I did. Suddenly you were unreadable. You were a foreign language with sounds beyond my pitch, a silence that made me despair because I could not interpret it.
I didn’t want you lying out in the rain, but you were too heavy to move. Dead weight. I slid a heavy black plastic bag up to your neck, as if I wanted you to breathe and hoped that maybe you might quicken. And then I stood again just out of the rain. Tears pushed from my eyes. Blind anguish. I called someone to say that you were dead, but I could only get your name out and the word dead before grief stuck its fist into my throat and I could get no other word out.

You were not mine. Arturo had bought you from a client and then decided that we should wait until we moved into a new house that he had had built. For six weeks we waited and then when we went to get you, you were already three months old. Arturo insisted that you spend the day outside in the hot sun in that walled patio in Condado. I bought a small swimming pool so you could cool off, but you never used it. I tried to come home early to let you in. Then on New Year’s Eve you became sick and almost died. You lay on my lap on the way to the veterinarian, almost motionless, not able to lift your head. From that day on I felt that I had to protect you. For a while you were allowed to spend the day inside.
One other time, you almost died. When I lived alone in the country, I let you and Jobita sleep inside. Arturo had left and we did not really talk. He refused to change his mailing address, so I still picked up his mail and left it in San Juan. The couch got termites and the cleaning lady fumigated. I didn’t know that you slept on the couch, but a few days later you were stumbling and I took you to the veterinarian and he said it was pneumonia. I think the poison made your lungs fill with liquid. After a few days I came to get you and he said that you still had to stay. He wouldn’t let me see you because he said you would get too emotional. The day I finally came to pick you up, you peed in the reception area and twisted around in joy.
Arturo was domineering. He swung between cajoling and sudden outbursts. If he was not in control, he was in anguish. I was raised to fear conflict. I protected you, but gave in. One day he was going to teach you how to walk on a leash. Scared, you reacted by planting your feet on the ground. He dragged you for a block. When he returned, I noticed four trails of blood across the garage floor. He hadn’t seen them, but when I pointed it out to him, he felt horrible. I felt guilty for not protecting you and trapped because I had let myself be dragged by him for years, always giving in at his insistence, forming a superego, an angry father from his admonitions and sudden anger, becoming depressed by a sense of powerlessness. He insisted, but often relented when I became depressed. He himself felt trapped by his need to control. He tried to change, and eventually got tired of trying and became even more despotic, until I fought back. Then the relationship ended and I was left in the mountains with two dogs.
The same day he took you for the walk, I put a chain on your neck. I placed food in front of you and you moved with the chain on. Soon we were walking around the yard. In less than ten minutes, you learned to walk on a leash. I said nothing about this. It was not a time to gloat.
You were the only one who always came to see me when I left for the city. The others sat or lay comfortably in the cool afternoon light. Each time I thought it might be the last time we saw each other. I would park the car and walk back to the gate. Why did you come to watch me, to follow the car down the road with your eyes, perhaps listen to it on the road, chugging up the hill on the other side of the farm.
After the three years alone in the country, I left to study. You became sick. You lost huge patches of hair and stopped eating. Arturo took you to the veterinarian. The professional opinion was depression and anxiety. Was your stare as I left an attempt to form a bond that would pull me back? Was it an accusation? Did you stand there and feel me become a memory again or an intuition of loss, milder than those three years, but perhaps a preamble? Another long separation?
Of course, I could have given your life more joy. I was always aware of that. I had so much power over you. I could have let you in the house when he wasn’t there. I could have taken you for rides in the car, your white hair floating in the car like snow in a glass ball. You loved to climb the bamboo-shaded path to the river, wade into the cool water after the hot climb, to swim to the big rock next to the waterfall. After one of these trips, the next day, you and Jobita would sneak into the car if I left the door open for a second. The night you died, it had been years since we had gone to the river together. Lately it had been impossible even to coax you into the car. The river was beyond your capacity. It was part of a joy from younger years.
That last night you came to the door and I rubbed you. You were wet and shivered. I thought of letting you in, but didn’t. It was not my house. You were not my dog. Four bloody trails across the garage.
Pedro came the next morning. He began to dig a hole behind a row of red cordyline down the hill from the house. He helped me put the body in a wheelbarrow and I guided it down the hill until it hit a hole and turned over. You were stiff and heavy and your tongue had turned gray. I understood why morticians hide the foreignness of death. We lifted your body back in and I guided the wheelbarrow back and forth on the hill to control the descent.
Pedro told me that when he was a boy and his father died, he had been told to help carry the casket and when it was pulled out of the hearse, he had dropped his corner and it had fallen on him. We tried to get the collar off, but your head was twisted and it wouldn’t come easily, so Pedro suggested that you be buried with your jewelry. We laughed.
I called Arturo and after several attempts, I managed to tell him that you were dead. I could tell that he was angry when I told him that we had buried you already.
“I wanted to see him again,” Arturo said.
“He looked horrible,” I said. I thought of the gray tongue, the body hard and twisted. “You wouldn’t want to see him.” I couldn’t say any more.
His tone softened, “I’m coming up.”
I told him how you died. The story was already becoming the meaning and explanation. That you had seemed so normal when I arrived was part of the story, that you were lying out in the rain and I wanted to wake you up so you wouldn’t sleep all night in the rain were facts that seemed to have special meaning. I cried and Arturo clumsily held me.
“Remember when I dragged him a whole block to teach him how to walk on a chain.”
“Neither of us knew much about dogs then,” I said.
He left early and when I went down to the grave again, I saw that he had moved a large stone by himself and placed it over the grave. Pedro had said that he had heard horror stories of dogs digging up other dogs. I knew that Jobita and her daughter would not do that and I think Arturo knew that, too. When you and Jobita killed chickens or ducks, I buried them before you could eat them, and you never dug them up.
I thought that the stone looked so light on the patchwork of overturned clay and grass. It must have weighed seventy or eighty pounds, but I thought that if you suddenly began to breathe again, that it would move.
The first summer I lived alone on the farm, Jobita gave birth to nine puppies. At first she did not know what was happening, and left one on the grass, which died, and then she dug a hole and gave birth to two others. Arturo came to help because I couldn’t get Jobita to move and he finally got her into the pump room where she gave birth to six more pups. A few days later, when I returned from work almost at midnight, I found two of the remaining eight pups dead. At one in the morning, I disinfected the pump room, moved Jobita and the pups back and then buried the two dead ones in a small herb garden near the house. As soon as the first shovel of dirt fell on the bodies, I heard squeaking and desperately pulled them out. What I discovered was that one of the pups had been dead for a while and was full of gas. The pressure of the dirt had forced air out. For a desperate second, I believed that there was life. I had been fooled by a Rabelaisian joke, in part because I wanted so badly to believe that the pups were alive. I want even more to believe that you are still alive, so I imagine it.
You would not have lasted much longer. Everyone tells me that. When you came to the door, you were wet and your hair was spotty. You were shivering and I rubbed you to get you warm, but I wasn’t willing to let you in. You would sleep on the couch if you got a chance. Lately you had done things that you had never done before. You twisted the gate so you and Jobita could get out. Although it was forbidden, you walked through the house, instead of going around. You came to where I was sitting inside and were deaf when I screamed “Afuera. Afuera. Outside. Outside.” You had grown up in a house, but had spent your last nine years in the country where Arturo did not allow dogs inside. I had let you and Jobita sleep in the house at night for three years when I lived there alone, but now I was only a guest. With age came haughty indifference. You did not care.
Of course, since you are a dog, there is something bathetic about this letter to you. So much emotion and thought for something that is not even human.
A letter like this can never end. I have learned that from having lost people. I can’t help but feel that so much has gone with you. The twelve and a half years that you were alive have suddenly slipped away. Nothing worth anything emotionally can ever be contained. Though I do not believe, I like to imagine you getting to know my dead friends, a softer type of non-containment, the imagination to ease the sorrow of death and the horror of dying. Bill Meshey, who died 20 years ago at the age of 85, is stroking your head as he sips his whiskey in his Upper West Side apartment. You are in Ove’s backyard on Fyn in Denmark in the shade of “North Fyn’s most beautiful red beech tree” while Ove, who died ten years ago, a few months after his fiftieth birthday, and I eat lunch on his terrace.
Today before I left, I stood before your grave. The grass has become wild and spread over the red clay. I have thought of planting flowers there or a pitanga bush. This seems culturally programmed and not authentic. I like best the idea of your fitting into the land and the grass covering you. In the tropical light of the late afternoon, the soft contour of the mountains looks alive, many green shoulders of a living being.
And I feel no special affection for the grave. You are everywhere I look; You dart down the hill after sitting on a fire ant hill with me running after you trying to brush the ants off: You chase Harrison, Pedro’s peacock, until that haughty creature is featherless and its long talons are pressed against its breast for its final defense, which I spare it from having to make: You, Jobita and six pups sit with me in the bathroom as we wait out what was to supposed to be a hurricane, you lose your first fight to Jobita; Jobita mounts you to show she is dominant, as if she were the male, and you stand in embarrassed resignation: You pose under the hanging orchids or next to the bird of paradise where you act like you are sniffing the scentless flowers; and when you are just two years old, a friend of mine brings her whole Montessori class to the country, and you canter around the yard smiling with 20 children trying to throw their arms around you. The more incidents I mention, the more I realize that you are more than a summation of experience. The stone, which you would have pissed on if you passed by it, in its hard conciseness, coldness, weight and muteness is just an emblem of loss.

Rambling On

My friend Cynthia wrote a blog about the murder of her mother and her mother's lover by a neighbor who felt he was cleaning up the neighborhood by killing his neighbors. I knew this story already and cannot imagine the horror or the hate of the perpetrator. I have been very close to several women who were lesbians. My friend Mary Jo died last year at about this time. My Christmas card with a donation to her endeavor to stay alive came back with Deceased stamped on the envelope in a way that it was almost impossible to read. I would say that Mary Jo changed my life. But that is a long story.
Reading about these two women who had lived in the country, I was thinking about the lesbians I had known who lived in the country and a visit to a house in St. Paul in the early seventies. I will start with the visit to the house in St. Paul where I was the only male (I must have had the demeanor of someone who was male without being male). That day the women at the table (we sat on the floor around a large slightly elevated board, perhaps 12x4) talked about a women's commune that forbid the presence of men. One of the women who had visited the commune had brought her infant son and had been denied entrance. And then there had been problems getting propane gas because of the deliveryman was a man and could not enter the farm. There seemed to be an undertone here of who was the better lesbian, but also freedom from all types of male dominance. When I used the toilet, there was a sign that said, DOWN WITH MALE CHAUVINISM.
A funny thing happened that day. I went to the house with Mary Jo who I think was still not living in St. Paul and Tuny or Susan who was not a lesbian, but had hung out so much with gay men and lesbians that she began to doubt her own sexuality. She once confessed to her mother that she thought she was a lesbian and her mother asked her if she was sexually attracted to women, very calmly, and she said no. During this serious conversation, Tuny picked up a very large lettuce leaf and swatted the woman next to her on the face. I forgot to mention that Tuny had a demeanor and voice that seemed imperceptible despite her six-feet -tall frame. It caused a few moments of silence, an inexplicable action.
The women I knew who lived on farms were friends of a lover I had for two years. I think they had been happy until the older woman's son moved onto the farm and started building his own house. The woman's grown children took up more of her life and then the relationship ended. I knew another woman and know this story from my late friend Arthur. This woman lived on a farm by herself and developed a bizarre frugality. She would use coffee grounds and tea bags three or four times. That was one of Arthur's examples that I still remember. The clincher was that she had a huge trust fund and drove a Mercedes to the simple cabin where she lived. It is not much of a profile of a person and the times I met her, she was fun and charming and I could see why Arthur liked her so much. Arthur collected odd friends or they were drawn to him. He died in 1990 and I have written about him a few times.
The other story I told in my reaction, which I think I heard at that house in St. Paul was about a lesbian bar that was trying to go male gay so they had begun having drag shows. Perhaps the bar wanted to get rid of the lesbian feminists who talked more than they drank. These women were disgusted by the portrayal of femininity of the drag queens. On the other hand, the butch leather jacketed lesbians loved the drag queens. The lesbian feminists heckled the drag queens and threw things at them , but when feminists left the bar, the butch lesbians were waiting for them and beat them up. At the time I thought it was ironic, but now it seems to have no contradiction. The feminist lesbians were against women having to play a role so they wore blue jeans and no make up and felt liberated of the trappings of womanhood, but the others felt safe in the clothes of tough lower-middle class men and empathized with the sense of liberation at being who you were not supposed to be.
Today I have been thinking about the shooting. People without power in America use guns to be right. People with power do not need to use guns. I'm thinking of Ada Haiman, who does not necessarily articulate her hate, but uses her power to humiliate others and so makes herself feel better. How many spirits has she killed in her lifetime? How many more will she kill to make herself feel respected. Power is so intertwined with our sense of justice and dignity. And power allows you to cover your trail with documents.
My mistakes were several. First I refused to agree with her about a student magazine Bridges. She insisted that the whole publication had been ruined because the letter at the beginning had a paragraph with less than three sentences. I can imagine Ada on a campaign to ban all books with paragraphs with less than three paragraphs. This would be similar to the hell she and Mildred put the 3003-4 level through with embarrassing essay evaluation sheets. Instead of talking about how we got students to write better, we spent hours and hours discussing points for grammar, capitalization, for topic sentences, in other words creating the perfect instrument (that is edu-ese) so that anyone, even those who did not write, did not understand writing, could teach it, since it was mostly a matter of counting and not thinking. This sums up Ada. She was trying to turn her friend Mildred into a writing teacher since they both were pushing for writing in the basic classes, but their whole approach was anti-writing and pro-calculation. It was a humiliation that we had to participate in.
My next error was the seminar. I had been given 18 credits without any discussion. M. Hudders had handed me my program and said, "It's the best I can do,"and then twirled her hotdog body stuffed into the carnival colors of her clothing on her high heels and walked away from me. And then on top of this, I had to attend 8 seminars on General Education without being asked what might interest me about the seminar, how it could be set up. I was asking for a small questionnaire. It became obvious that this was a show of power when the seminar was put on my schedule as if it were an extra class.
In the first session of the seminar, I brought up some of these points and some were answered, but Ada had expected complete control. She talked about her discourse analysis technique in the class which allowed her to reveal the racists in the class to the blacks in her classes. When she began to discuss epistemology I mentioned that if we were really studying epistemology, we should look at the essay itself to find out how it controlled knowledge and structured knowledge. She quickly agreed, but a few minutes later she returned to me. Her mind had been working on how she could humiliate me, how she could do to me what she does to her students, in other words show that my language proved my prejudices. "Wait a minute, Mawk. You said should. You said we should do that in our classes. You're saying that we do not."
"No, Ada, I do not know what other people do in their classes."
You could tell that she felt that she had me. I was to be silenced, just as her students were. It was going to be her voice.
"NO, no, no, you said should."
Then I said the words that would feel great, but make my life miserable later, "Ada, I can say that you should not kill people, but that does not mean that I think you kill people."
I had done it. Some people laughed, who perhaps thought that in her own way Ada had already killed quite a few people. She tried to move on as if the conversation had never occurred, but she was frazzled. She was not used to people contradicting her and she did not want to begin a tirade in front of so many colleagues. For her, screaming would have meant she won the battle, but she couldn't do it here.
After the seminar, I went up to Ada to make peace. "Ada, it was much better than I expected."
"You were busting my balls," she said.
It seemed like an inappropriate comment on her part. She had been trying to humiliate me and impose her will. She had wanted to bust my balls.
And then I said the other stupid thing, "Ada, I didn't know you had balls."
Even though there was an attendance sheet at all of the meeting (it was obligatory for all untenured faculty), when I went up for promotion that same semester, I had to hand in my typed notes from the seminars.
During the course of the seminar, she had to admit that none of her readings had anything to do with General Studies or the Interdisciplinary Approach. In one of the following sessions, the next one I attended, she brought in the English director to make sure that we behaved. Those were her words. We also learned that people teaching English in General Studies should probably have degree in linguistics, as she did, because what we were really teaching was the English language. To most English educators this would be absurd. Language is taught through use, but in her interdisciplinary approach, you related language to physics by studying physics, through socio-linguistics you included sociology, through articulatory phonetics, you included biology. It was an example of teaching the structure of the elephant by having the elephant stand on top of you.
Perhaps if the man with the gun or Ada Haiman and Mildred Lockwood were more sure of themselves, the attacks on others would stop. Power can always find excuses for itself and because it can destroy others, its proclamations and assessments become a type of unquestionable law. In a university, that is a horrible state.
Once again, writing has helped to give me a bit of equilibrium, though I do feel a bit sad.

Seeing at the Arches

Seeing at the Arches
I went to the arches recently, but it was in early June and it was not so hot as bright. The sun was insistent, like a little sister who is starved for attention. The arches dwarfed everything, especially in pictures. Our eyes and brain are able to focus on what is important, but a camera has to do this mechanically. So I took pictures and noticed how in a sense the persons in the picture disappeared in the vastness of the arch. Now when I think of it, I cannot help thinking of MacDonald's. I suppose that means that my mind is warped or that all my experience has become so layered that I can never see anything for itself. Actually studies show that we have to learn how to see and people who do not acquire sight until they are older never learn how to see. They cannot conceptualize. It is a blur of color, which perhaps without the mind, it may just be. Like when the sun is in your eye.
Those western spaces give me a sense of emptiness, which is not all together bad, but it is not sustainable. I found the marvel of the slot canyons more beautiful, curving living things, smoothed by water, twisting, the light dropping into the slot canyons to create rich textures which the blazing sun outside had bleached away.
I went with a group of four other men. We shared experience at times more than having it. But that was okay. I usually have most of them alone and realize that the flower opening, the black and red bug, the spider in the shape of a squat bat, that the memory of these things are more fleeting because they are not shared, but at the same time I have to learn to focus on experience and less on the narrative which is for someone else, even if you are talking to yourself.
I spent this vacation with a knee brace on. My steps were careful and often a bit painful. If someone kicked my leg by accident, as happened once in a bus, I had extreme pain. But I walked up and down canyons and perhaps was more aware of my body, and at times less aware of my surroundings.
I don't know if I would go on this trip again. I knew a woman once who loved to go to Niagara Falls. She lived near the Mississippi River in a suburb of New Orleans. I didn't understand her enthusiasm for the falls, but then I haven't been there.
But I think I would rather sit for a few hours next to a pool of the Espiritu Santo River than to see The Grand Canyon again. I guess with everything in the west, I have the feeling of seeing it and not being there. Here I have lived long enough to be there.
On another thought, don't you think all institutions have their magnets of power that make people worse and some people horrible. Of course, they feel they are only protecting what is theirs. The world is so transitory let them hold on to the power. It will sink them and they will miss the world. I think Kierkegaard repeats many times the phrase that it's better to lose the world than to gain the world and lose your soul. I tried to find this passage and opened up the old leather bound volume of Either/Or in Danish. I keep it in a Ziplock bag, but just opening it lets out that sweetly acrid scent of pages decaying. It once belonged to my great uncle. It did not look like he ever read it.
As you can see, once I get started it is hard for me to stop. But all that stone doing yoga bends has inspired me and now however I am out of wind. I hope you get this. Mark

Orange Peels

Orange Peels

It is Iowa in 1966. A lot of things are happening in the world but I am focused on one thing, surviving gym. I know I can survive it physically, a certain amount of the humiliation I can take. I am fourteen, have acne, and have learned to make friends by being witty. I have suffered under the shadow of my father who plays baseball, knows a lot about cattle and crops, and is the local Lutheran minister. We are not from town like everyone else. Or we live in town and everyone else lives in the country. It is still possible to have a family farm in 1966. But we are outsiders. My mother is from Detroit and becomes friends with some of the younger women, but she cannot really get the hang of being the pastor’s wife. I live in my own world until about fourteen, which has meant that I have not been a very good student. My own world goes on when I am sitting in class. I find it hard to make school seem real compared to the movies on television and my fantasies that explain why I am loner. At times my explanation was that I was a space alien whose world has been painstakingly reproduced here and everyone is watching me. I am the specimen. Others were less futuristic and traditional, hybridding off from the Brontes and Dickens and all of those fairytales of lost children.
But when I reach fourteen things are looking up. I stay overnight with Randy Jensen and Alan Hansen. I go to parties, which my father in an earlier more pietistic incarnation would have banned me from going to. There is just the gym that ruins my life and not the gym class itself, though boys from the eighth grade, my older sister’s class, often hit me in passing or in football slam me in the nuts so that next time I will leave a hole for them to run through. I have forgotten the names of many of them, but they still appear in my dreams and in my dreams I remember their names. .As I said, it is not the class, but the showers afterwards where I am forced to rub lineament on my testicles and penis and am punched randomly. There is nothing sexual, I guess. It is just humiliation, which eats at my soul and lasts the rest of the day. I cannot even escape into that old other world because I reek of lineament. Although I feel that these boys have seen something inherently wrong with me, but later I will realize that it is the feeling of power and the system is set up and encourages them to prey on the weaker. I know the gym instructor knows from some comments he has made.
I have gym on Tuesday and Thursday so Monday I begin to worry about it and on Tuesday I can think of nothing else or if I do I have to trap those fears, hold them back and it is exhausting keeping them at bay. Tuesday after gym, I begin worrying about Thursday. Friday and Saturday I can shut it out, but by Sunday night, it gets worse.
Then it begins to invade other parts of my world. During lunch hour I am walking in the hall by myself and three of them surround me and push me to an empty side hall that is the entrance to the music room.
Tom Potts drops a large piece of orange peel on the linoleum floor and steps on it. “Pick it up and eat it.”
I hesitate for a moment and am punched.
I pick it up and put it in my mouth and chew slowly.
“Swallow,” Stewart says. Then he grabs the back of my neck hard and I swallow.
Then they turn and walk away.
In the fall, I am mowing a lawn near the school and the athletes are there for some reason. Some boys from my sister’s class walk over and surround me. They grab the mower and shut it off and then turn it over. I don’t react. This is not logical. It will be over eventually. I have learned to cut off chunks of my life from what I think is real and then let them float as if they were icebergs. When that time is up and my life looks bearable again, then I will reassume my body. I do not enter the other world that I had as a child. That is a stranger whose head hits the shower stall wall. That is someone else living with so much fear that everything else is a blur.
A few years after we moved to Iowa, I became a paperboy and perhaps this was how I developed the idea that Iowa was the best place in the world to live. Local newspapers are the voice of boosterism, the text of provincialism as the only way. The world of those old movies, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London did not seem real, but Iowa was real and wonderful. And of course, the small town where I lived was also the best. All of these assertions needed occasional support. Enough trickled in. Our basketball team won a tournament for small-town teams. A pitcher on the high school team was scouted by a professional team. A flood put the town where we went to shop on the map for a week. A kid in my sister’s class did 1,200 situps at one time. Iowa had the richest soil in the world. The Rothschilds bought farm property in Iowa. I had no doubt that I lived in the best place in the world.
I also saw that the school authorities in a sense condoned it. If someone had been killed or committed suicide, they would have denied any knowledge. Nowadays it seems like the bullying still happens and occasionally the bullied flip out, get a gun and look for revenge indiscriminately. But I knew the coach was aware of what was going on. He never came in when things were happening.
Then at fifteen, I saw my real life waiting for me as soon as I could leave Iowa. The reason I wanted to leave was to escape the hazing. I wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t happen some place else. When my parents told me that we were moving to Wisconsin, I don’t think I felt at all sad. From age six to fifteen I had lived in the same house, walked to the same schools, seen the same people on Sunday.
It proved in many ways to be true. I left to a bigger town with a bigger high school where I could be more anonymous as a kid and more outstanding as a student. And gym was not a harrowing experience. A friend of mine even came out of the showers screeching, “I am the water fairy.” I didn’t get the joke. Perhaps a lot of others didn’t get it either.
I wish I could say that this experience made me a more understanding boy, but that is not true. I actually remember trying to bully someone myself. He was a much better person than I was. His name was Arlo Petersen and his father had died in a silo accident the year before so he had stayed back for a year. I remember we were in the entrance to the school. I don’t remember what I tried to make Arlo do, but he resisted and after he had won, he wanted no hard feelings. I mumbled an agreement to the pact, understanding suddenly what I had tried to do. I wish my memory was good enough to set the scene better. Whenever I have an attack of righteousness, I am again humbled when I remember Arlo.
One of my heroes was Dean Jacobsen. He was only a year older than I was and I saw him when I went to take piano lessons at his grandmother’s house. Sometimes he drove tractor as the men did the heavy work. He was only 8 or 9 at the time. His grandmother played the piano in church and I doubt if she had any method other than the piano lesson books she bought. I never got beyond playing by numbers. She gave lessons in her parlor which was heated by a corn cob stove. She dressed in wool pants with a skirt over them and a jacket. She wore gloves with the fingers cut out. I suppose I kept my coat on when I played. She never smiled or gave any words of encouragement that I remember. I remember her hunched over on the bench next to me to keep warm and her periodically tossing corncobs into the stove while I tried to synchronize numbers, fingers and keys.
I took piano lessons from Mamie for only six months at most. I remember Dean on the tractor in the spring when the embers in the pot bellied stove and the open parlor windows that let in the April sunlight was enough to warm the parlor so there were no interruptions to cast a cob into the mouth of the stove. I had learned to play a few other pieces as badly as the first ones. I don’t remember why I stopped going to Mamie. There were several other teachers after her, all with miserable results.
I came out of her house. My mother was waiting and pointed out Dean to me on the tractor. He waved to me. I don’t think I had a crush on him, but I felt proud that he had waved and I thought he was beautiful. His arms and torso were already brown from the spring sun. I kept this feeling of admiration for him. He was not one of the boys that hazed me, at least not until one day when he hit me and made me crawl on the floor in the locker room. My memory again fails. I have told this to no one. I can’t really recall anything other than the feeling that the world was no totally bad. That he had not stopped them, I understood, but now he had become one of them. Real disappointment is not a moment for tears. Everything pulls in, including tears. The air seems locked in your lungs. Your body becomes heavy and your tongue disappears down your throat.
I was probably not the most harassed kid. The sheriff’s son was feminine and girlish. He walked to school and his father followed in the car. They might call him names, but they did not get out to rough him up. To me it seemed as if he travelled in a protective bubble that separated him even more from the world. Out of curiosity, I would like to know what happened to him.
You learn to cope with everything. Your whole life might be changed by one of these people when the age of being cornered in a hallway and silenced by the fear of being known as the sissy is over. Then people have power over your job and can silence you as they please, even in a university which preaches free expression.
So what do I know about bullies. One thing is that whatever they say is true. It doesn’t matter how absurd, how demeaning to one it might be. They are often people who have suffered because of a lack of power and once they get power over someone, they see it as their turn, their right, and any act can be justified. I would not categorize Dean as a bully, even though that one time he acted as one. A bully needs constant reinforcement by demeaning someone else. They love the sense of power. In academic situations they get power by kissing ass, not necessarily by performance or by excelling. And as ass kissers need a sense of dignity as much as anyone else, so they necessarily force others to become their sycophants. It can be totally demoralizing to a department and those who are not protected by tenure are easy victims. If a professor refuses to play along, they are singled out. Their evaluations become worse. It seems to happen one by one, but the numbers pile up.

The Red Beech Tree

One of my favorite people in life so far has been Ove Rasmussen who died in 1995. After becoming ill, he left Copenhagen to return home. His mother had died and the family farmhouse was to be rented. North Fyn is flat with sugar beet fields that do nothing to interrupt the flatness, but instead seem to engrave it. I stayed with him one summer when he was sick and remember those long dusks lasting almost until eleven o'clock and the cool night air. We would sit around a table on a small cement terrace that extended from the back door and drink wine as we talked, letting that dimness, not quite dark, soak into us. In the corner of the yard was an old and enormous red beech tree, which Ove called den smukkeste bøg træ i nordfyn - the most beautiful beech tree on North Fyn. From the flat chalky road for half a mile you could see the mound of red leaves since the branches seemed to curl under as they touched the ground. The farm had buildings had been built at the beginning of the 20th century, but they resembled older farms with the house connected to the barns so that they formed a square with a courtyard in the center with an entrance from the road.