July 2006 Archives

Seems as if every woman with whom I have ever been remotely involved in a kind of intimate connection had a problem father. Could be these women were drawn to me on a superficial level as a sort of nice-guy, possibly unlike their father, but deep down they know I am a real trouble.  We all suffer the compulsion to repeat and have a deep nose for the connections that allow us to do so.

BJ, the woman who delivered me of my virginity, had a problem father, I am pretty sure.  She also had a brother, but she hardly ever talked about him.  I got the feeling he had done something terrible like be “gay.”  BJ’s father was some sort of salesman who traveled a great deal and was really successful.  But BJ indicated that he was on-the-road an awful lot and she was sure I do believe that he had been untrue to her mother repeatedly.

So one day, we borrow a car—because my car wouldn’t have made it—and we drive clear out to Palm Springs to meet her parents.  Well, it was sort of confusing really.  Maybe I was supposed to meet the parents or maybe she wanted to talk with her mother because that was how it mostly turned out. As I step out of the car once we get there my old jeans just rip from the crotch right up the back so that my butt is sticking right out, at a time that I am not wearing underwear.

Her parents are staying in a house right next to the golf course.  So no sooner do I walk in, all skinny with a beard to my Adam’s apple and my red hair sticking out, all curly, like an afro, than I have to say I need a pair of pants.  I do not make an initial good impression.  I borrow a pair of pants from her father, who is bigger than I am, and all he has is slacks, and I have to cinch up the belt real tight to keep them from falling off.  By the time I get the pants on BJ’s father is gone and she is in deep conversation with her mother.

So I decide to get out of there and go wondering around outside and find that the house is right next to a golf course.  That’s where the father had gone; he is playing in a tournament.  Lacking anything else to do, I walk up right to the edge of the course near one of the holes and sit down, and to my amazement people start coming through and some of them are people I have seen on TV.  Why, lo and behold, there is Bob Hope, because it turns out I am an accidental spectator at the Bob Hope Desert Classic of 1968.

I don’t know what went on back then, but there are no guards or ticket takers or whatever.  I just sit there on the edge of the course with red hair sticking out all over, wearing pants than don’t fit and looking sort of like a derelict and nobody bothers me or says a word. 

Around Whittier, like driving back, you can see the smog coming down like a giant curtain in front of the LA area.  We don’t talk much and I guess I am a bit confused having stepped a bit into her life with a powerful and wealthy father who plays golf with Bob Hope and a betrayed mother and I feel like I have smog in my head.

When it came to phonal usage, I didn’t have any good role models either, except the old lady, and be damned if she was going to be my role model for anything.  While there was nothing to sit on if you were on the kitchen side of the pass through or cross over, there was a chair on the so-called front room side, and the old lady would sit there gabbing for hours on end to her two or three phone friends.  I don’t know what the fuck they talked about or even who they were; I just didn’t fucking want to know.

 But yak, yak, yak.  It would go on for hours.  And these were true phone friends because she hardly ever saw these people in the flesh since, as I said, she didn’t drive.  I can’t imagine a person not learning to drive in 20^th century California unless you don’t have a car—always a possibility—or you have like some severe disability that disqualifies you from being able to drive like being blind as a bat or maybe lacking arms. 

 I suppose the old man had tried to teach her to drive at one time or another back in SC.  Hell, back there you could get a drivers license at the drug store for like 5 bucks.  But maybe that was the problem.  The old man was a lousy car instructor, what with the yelling and the pounding on the dash board, and the fear of getting bonked at any second.  Hell, it was scary enough driving the car without having old exploding bowels sitting next to you at any second ready to go off.

Really I don’t know how I managed to learn to drive.  I flunked the test the first time and only passed it the second because the DMV guy lived in our neighborhood and his son was in my class, and he gave me a break.  We didn’t have driver’s ed back then like when you got to drive around and practice car driving with a teacher.  We had something they called “driver’s ed,” but that was a class where you sat and watched movies of the Indianapolis Five Hundred which I don’t think is the best way to teach kids about responsible driving, though they did throw in some films of car wrecks and mangled kids.

Every now and then, the topic would come up, like ma why don’t you learn to drive, and she would say the same thing every time.  This doctor had told her that she was like a thorough bred horse.  High strung.  No she wasn’t nuts.  She was a thorough bred horse and high strung and couldn’t do a damn thing about it because it was all genetics.  So that was that and there was no using bringing it up again because a zebra can’t change its spots and so on.

 So like she hardly ever went out of the house, except on Friday evenings to get groceries with the old man, or to church, to a never ending series of doctor appointments for this or that.  That was about it.  So she was always in that house like a giant spider and the house was like a giant spider web.  And really she didn’t have to go out of house, because we went out of the house, and since, as I said, she had no boundaries, we were sort of eyes and ears outside the house.  If you have seen that movie with Steve McQueen, called ‘The Blob,” well, it was sort of like that.

I have never gotten used to the telephone.  I hate it when the phone goes off because it means I might have to talk to somebody or there is some problem that has to be taken care of.  The phone also is fucking insistent; you could be doing anything and if you want to know what the call is about, you have to pick up the phone. I do not consider the phone my friend or look upon it with any particular affection.  That’s probably because I did not get the proper phone socialization.

In SC we had a phone at least for part of the time back here.  It was hung up on the wall and it was a party line.  If you don’t know about party lines, maybe you have seen that old TV show, Green Acres, about this rich couple that decides to go live in the country.  And there was a talking pig in that show too.  Anyway they had a party line; sometimes the pig talked on the party line.  That means you could pick up the phone and there would be other people talking on the line.  I don’t know what you did if you wanted to talk; I suppose you could have asked them to get off the line while you talked to the person you wanted to talk to.  I don’t know because I never got to use that phone. Who the hell was I going to call; my swarm of little ten year old friends that lived like I did out in the middle of nowhere?  Not likely.

 So I don’t think I talked on a phone, in the sense of dialing it myself and hanging it up myself, till I was in my teens.  I suspect I talked to somebody on a phone before my teens because my parents wanted me to speak to whoever the person was on the phone. But really this is speculation.  So I don’t know for sure that I talked on a phone till was in my teens. You’d think a person might remember the first time he ever talked on a phone but I don’t.  I remember my first shower.  That was in Louisiana.  But that concrete little room with water squirting out of the wall scared me.  The phone didn’t scare me any.  I knew what it was for anyway.

 In California, we had one phone.  Right smack dab in the middle of the house.  It was located on what I believe was called a pass through or pass over (though a think a pass over is religious) that was cut in the wall between the kitchen and the so-called front room.  I suppose the phone was stuck there for the sake of convenience, but its placement also seemed part of the absolutely no privacy policy of the household.  If you had a secret, you sure couldn’t talk about it on the phone because the old lady would always, in the evening, be lying about ten feet away on the sofa reading the obituaries to see if somebody she knew had died lately and she would be listening to every damn thing you said. 

And there was no chair there either so I never did get really comfortable talking on the phone, like these kids you see on TV with their own phones lolling around on their own bedrooms talking who knows what manner of shit to each other.  The best you could do if you wanted to “talk,” in any sense other than a pure informational exchange, was to hold the receiver to your ear, and sit on the kitchen floor between the refrigerator and the dog food bowl that was next to the dog bed.  This just wasn’t a place for getting comfortable.

I know or I have heard of people who get on the phone and talk to other people in a conversational way about the events of the day and so on.  I guess you could call these people you talk to phone friends.  But I have never done that because I was not properly socialize in phone usage and am generally retarded in that area.

I forget when it was exactly, but it was after the that’s your problem not my problem psychobabble stuff which was the precursor to boundary talk, like this person has boundary “issues” and so forth.  I didn’t know what the hell people were talking about because I had been raised by a mother who had no boundaries whatsoever. 

I watch TV or a movie and I see the inside of houses where kids little and otherwise have their own damn bedrooms with their own damn TV sets, and on the door of their own damn room there’s a sign that says, Keep Out, or Beware of Dog, or Have the Simple Decency to Knock.  I don’t know where these kids get off because if I had dared to put up a sign like that my father would have, at the instigation of the old lady, hit me over the head with it.

 Nobody kept a journal in that house, I can tell you.  And if for some ungodly reason, you got a letter you could be sure she had pre-opened it for you.  If for some reason, she got it in her head to do so she would turn all of your crap over like those FBI people do when they have a warrant for your arrest.  And she didn’t have the slightest shame about it.  Like motherhood gave her the godgiven right to look up your asshole whenever she felt like it.  I speak figuratively here.

Privacy?  Well, you were allowed some in the bathroom, though you had to be sure to time that carefully.  Because there was one bathroom for four males, and when the old man had to go he had to go, and he would let you know it.  He had these explosive bowels that left a humungous stink.  You just didn’t want to go in there till it aired out.

He would go, where is that reader’s digest, where is that fucking thing, and he would be all heated because he wanted it right then and there because he was going to the fucking shitter, and so we would all have to run around looking for the fucking reader digest before he pooped in his goddamn pants because he wasn’t going to that shitter without the reader’s digest. 

Though I don’t know what for.  As I understand it people who take reading material to the john usually do so to have something to distract themselves while they WAIT for their bowels to move.  So they sit there polite like reading while they wait for their bowels.  But no sooner did the old man hit the pot than the explosion went off; maybe he read a little afterwards like some people smoke after sex to calm himself down from the excitement.

And then he would come out, with his pants all hanging down and his gut slopping over his belt and read some goddamn joke out loud that he had read in the reader’s digest, and then he would fart.  Like when he we were little, he was all the time going, pull this finger, and when you did he would fart.  And you got sick of that joke pretty fast.  But he would still go, pull this finger, and you would say no and he would say, aw come on, give it a yank.  And he would still fart even if you didn’t pull it.

And one evening for some fun I guess he was walking around in his baggy white underwear with the bad elastic and as he walked across the living room, he paused, farted and in a continuous motion flicked on a cigarette lighter, so it looked like his fucking asshole was a flame thrower.  That’s the only time I have seen that done in real life.  I have tried to do it a couple of times myself, but never successfully although I did singe some asshole hairs.  So I got a little smoke but no fire.

So I get my MA with a dissertation on Henry-the fuck-James and I go to work to get out of the hole by applying to jobs at community colleges.  I get a couple of classes to cover for a professor who got cancer and I get another job at a federal program, I think it was, working with the sons and daughters of migrant workers.  I am acting you know optimistically like something positive is going to happen and I will get my ass out of the hole in the PU’s basement.  So I am working to get a bankroll in case I have to cover moving expenses and first and last months rent.  Because at that point about all I have to my name is a few pairs of jeans, some blue work shirts, some pretty crappy looking underwear, a typewriter, and a Volkswagen.  A pile of books and no credit.

So these are disco days and people do happy hour.  A bunch of us working at the sons and daughters of migrant workers, men and women, on Fridays would go out and get a little wasted and move on to a disco place or some bar somewhere or other where they had music and dance.  Now, I am not a natural born dancer.  Along with all the other social stuff I missed in high school I missed all the sock hops and such, and even in college I didn’t do the mixer thing.  Looking back I see I had missed the central ingredient for experiencing such social occasions and that was a good bit of alcohol.  But once I figured out the drinking part, the dancing stuff wasn’t all that hard. 

There were three or four women who worked at the sons and daughters of migrant workers thing.   And to say that I was looking, after seven years of no company but my good right hand, doesn’t quite describe my state of mind.  This was something deeper than simple horniess.  If I may recapitulate, I had a nervous breakdown and had a whole bunch of pretty odd jobs and slowly, very slowly I began to emerge from the hole.  There I was—or here I am—nearly thirty years old, with no money, living in a hole under my arents’ house, not exactly stylishly attired, and at moments looking like I had crawled out from under a rock, and the idea that a woman might even look at me with some interest was like a fucking miracle.

What do you know but I sensed just some such interest on the part of one co-worker.  Mary, she was.  Although I guess to get my attention she nearly had to hit me over the head with a rock.  I won’t say she threw herself at me, but something nearly knocked me over.  She was my age, and looked sort of like me in a general sense.  She was a woman of course, and I wasn’t but she was thin and boney, like me, and white, and had beautiful auburn hair that was prettier than mine.  And she liked to get drunk and laugh.  She had a good sense of humor and a good laugh that was sort of a burbling giggle.  Well, I liked it anyway.

So assisted by generous quantities of wine, as they say, one thing led to another, and seven years of wondering whether I would ever have sex again were over and I thought damn I am back on the road to being a normal human being.  I was wrong of course, but the delusion felt pretty good at the time.

The old man from his days as a farm kid to his days as a brick layer was out in the sun all of the time.  He wore a hat though mostly because people in the south wear hats to keep from passing out in the heat.  But he didn’t cover his arms, especially his forearms, and after a lifetime in the sun, the skin on his arms didn’t look like human skin, but more like alligator hide with some sort of alligator hide skin disease.  As a dermatologist might say, his forearms were just one big pre-cancerous lesion.  So he got to going to the dermatologist once a year and the doctor gave him some salve or maybe he spread it on right there, I don’t know, but this stuff was some sort of acid that would burn down the pre-cancerous lesions a bit.

So one day, I am looking in the mirror and I see this pimple forming on my upper lip, so I keep an eye on it, and it comes to a head, and I think it’s going to pop or disappear, and it does disappear a little, but then it comes back, and it looks like it is going to pop, but doesn’t, and when I squeeze the sucker it feels hard inside.  I am a hypochondriac, and every day I get up I think I am not going to live to the same day, next week. 

So I am totally freaked out—like the time I thought I was getting herpes on my eyeballs—but I go to the dermatologist and my worst fears are realized.  I am sitting in that little fucking patient room where they make you sit, and the doctor is talking to the nurse right next door, and I hear the word “cancer,” and they said it with a sort of hush around it. 

 So before I know it, I am across the hall in another room, flat on my back, and they numb my lip and the doc goes to work, and I have blood going up my nose and down into my mouth, and the motherfucking doctor pauses to call the nurses in, and asks them to take a look at that.  The fucker wants them to admire his handiwork.  And what the hell, but I am right there and feel like I am a bent fender or something.

So the doc leaves and I ask the nurse like what the hell is going on.  And she says the doc just removed a cancer from my lip, something called squamous, maybe, and that the doc thinks he has got it all and that he did a good job sewing up my lip, since he has done the procedure about 300 times, and that’s good because some doctors screw up and sew the lip back together crooked and you come out with a crooked or twisted looking lip.  So while I am pretty pissed off at this doctor for being an egomaniac, vain glorious motherfucker and treating me like a piece of meat, I am also happy that the vain glorious mother fucker knew what he was doing.

I have to say but on the basis of my experience with five or so dermatologists I must conclude they all have severe personality defects.  They walk in and I point to this thing on my skin and without saying a word they grab the nitrogen bottle and blast the spot.  The first time that happened the mother fucker didn’t even bother to tell me what would happen, so I was like shocked when I got home and found these huge blisters all over my face.  The only dermatologist I met that seemed sane was a real old guy who retired soon after I saw him.

He actually talked with me a bit.  I know because I asked him a question, and he said being a dermatologist these days was not being a dermatologist at all.  Like a real dermatologist was supposed to cure mysterious skin diseases and such, but today all a dermatologist does is cut cancerous shit out of people.  And that is surgery, not dermatology. We are seeing he says, cancers that we used to see only on sailors, and we cut the shit out and they go back and lie in the sun.

I always forget which one it is, but in meiosis or maybe its mitosis the sperm and the egg get together and sort of swap half of their genetic material with each other, and the genetic material that comes out of this random swapping is you, the individual.  This damn exchange is pretty much a crap shoot, but that’s where you come from.  And there’s no doubt about it but this swap pretty much determines who you are going to be, like a woman or a man, or a black person or a white person, or somebody who lives in India or in the United States.

Somebody quoted Henry James as saying we go through life wrapped in an envelope of contingency.  Bullshit.  We are the envelope.  Consciousness is just the lie we tell ourselves to convince ourselves we are in control; really consciousness is just along for the ride.

My brothers and I for example are all white men.  We all have penises that denote us as men, and we are all damn white.  One look at one of us and you say, Hey, that’s one white guy. Some people say white people are really pink people, and maybe that’s true, but those parts of me not usually exposed to the sun are pretty damn white.  

I am probably the whitest of the lot being the most fair.  I do not tan.  I burn.  I am like 80% Anglo-Saxon with some Irish thrown in there, though as far as I know they are probably related to the Anglo-Saxons too.   I might be more Saxon than Anglo because—though this is pretty speculative—some people in Denmark have names that sound a lot like Tingle.

 My brothers are Anglo-Saxon too of course and as I said pretty white.  If the four of us were in the same room, though, I am not sure if people who didn’t know us would know we were related or not.  I look in the face like the old-lady; and my youngest brother, brother #3, looks like me, so he looks like my mother too.  Brothers #1 and #2 look a bit more like the old man.  They both have dark hair; while I and Brother #3 have lighter hair.  Mine was red, though I like to say auburn, and his had a lot of red in it and was sandy. 

 I can’t quite tell where we got our bodies from.  My body is a dead ringer for the old man’s.  I have chicken or tooth pick like legs; my upper body sits on those and is more slight in the bone structure than not.  The old man got a gut after 50 or so and so have we all.  If I gain weight it goes straight to the gut; the same for brothers #1 and 3.  Brother # 2’s weight spreads out a bit more and doesn’t stick out like he had swallowed a cannon ball like mine does.  We all stand within an inch or so of six feet either way.  So we might be called big guys, though I have never thought of myself as a big guy.

As I said, the genetics thing is a crap shoot.  But people who look at us a while all say we look alike “through the eyes.”

I wish I could remember my 2^nd grade teacher’s name.  But I can’t.  My first grade teacher was Ms. Martin.  My second grade teacher wasn’t mean like Ms. Martin who was all the time whacking kids with a yardstick.  Ms. Martin was short, dark haired, and boney.  My second grade teacher was short, grey haired, frumpy and sort of rounded.  But I don’t remember having learned any academics in her class unlike Ms. Martin who more or less tattooed your Dick and Jane to your ass.

Every day in second grade we started off with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a group recitation of the Lords Prayer, and then some reading from the Bible.  This was followed by what you’d have to call a little sermon on the material read for that day.  Ms. X, I will call her, was strong on the New Testament and read to us about Jesus, which is where I really got the idea that he loved Me, because of the stories about him and children, especially the one about bring the children unto me and lest ye be like one of them you won’t get into the Kingdom of Heaven.  Maybe this was Ms. X’s way of building up our self-esteem.

But she was also pretty strong on the more Old Testament stuff, especially honor thy father and thy mother.  That was a big one because she would go on about how our fathers and especially mothers loved us and thus we should honor them as the Commandment says.  I can remember vividly the day she told us about the power of a mother’s love.  I can still see the room; she was wearing a frumpy dress with a blue pattern, and she told us this story she must have gotten from Reader’s Digest.

It seems there was this loving mother whose little boy got a powerful stomach ache and fearing that it might be the appendix, the loving mother got her boy in the car and when her little boy bellowed out in pain, she lost track of the road for a moment and went too fast around a curve, and the car rolled over and over and came to rest smack dab in the middle of the railroad tracks.  Now she had been thrown free but the little boy was stuck, and no sooner did she stand up and get the cobwebs out of her head than she sees his train heading right for the car with her boy still trapped in it.  So this loving mother goes over and with the power of her love, LIFTS THAT CAR RIGHT UP so her little boy can crawl out, and just in the nick of time too, since no sooner had they gotten away than the train hit the car and smacked it to smithereens.  And she had done all this on a broken leg though she hadn’t known it because of her powerful love, and so she carried the boy the rest of the way to the doctor—on one leg, mind you—and saved his life because it was the appendix.  And this all goes to show there is no force more powerful than a mother’s love.

I found this story of the power of a mother’s love horrifying.  I got enough guilt tripping at home without the public school system getting into it too.

Sometimes I wish my brothers and me had been born in the old west and had been like the Younger brothers riding around on horses, scaring the piss out of folks, and killing somebody now and again if we felt like it.  I can see us now all scarred up, bearded and gnarly looking spitting this way and that,  all liquored up and scaring old ladies in the street just for the pure nastiness of it. Folks would say, them boys is riding them horses straight to hell.  Those Tingle brothers.

Tingle brothers, though just doesn’t sound right.  Who the hell ever heard of a crew with a name like “Tingle.”  To have been proper outlaws we would have had to change our name.  But there was those 6 Tingle brothers who went off to fight for the confederacy in the Florida Campaign. That’s enough for a whole platoon, isn’t it.  I can imagine those six boney guys sitting around their campfire, beating off mosquitoes spitting this way and that and generally being as surly and uncooperative as possible.

I just hate to think they would have been all gung-ho, with yes sir this and yes sergeant that and yes, I am ready to change into the face of cannon cause God’s at my side and I have seen the glory on my lips.  But come to think of it, that’s pretty twisted too.  A bunch of drooling glassy eyed fanatics going off to meet their maker.

The old man in his last years talked about going to meet his maker.  I am going to meet my maker, he would say.  I thought about that a bit.  It was like he was going to meet his long lost father and his father would recognize and welcome him and take him in his arms and if the old man found the idea comforting, well, OK.  But he didn’t always seem comforted.  Once he started reciting the 23^rd Psalm which he had down by heart:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

But when he got to the part about the Lord guiding him down the path of righteous, he changed the words and said but Lord, you are walking too fast.  I can’t keep up.  I can’t keep up. 

I kept thinking what the hell sin did he think he had committed to warrant being left behind like that by his maker.  I don’t think he had been unfaithful to the old lady.  But maybe he felt guilty about those  salacious magazines he kept hidden around the house with names like “Titties” or “Big Ones.”  I got to say those magazines were something, not like the slick jobs they have out now with all those airbrushed young things looking all perky and healthy.  He must have found some backwoods, red-neck outlet cause the women feature in his magazines tended somewhat more towards the humanly grotesque than towards the impossibly perfect. 

I sure hope that’s not why he thought he was going to hell.  But you never know.

Brother # 2 was graduated from the same college as I with a BA in philosophy.  If anything he had elected a career path even more useless than mine, and while we have not discussed it, since we don’t discuss anything, I surmise that like myself as an English major he had small grasp of what being a philosophy major was about.  In any case, he was accepted in graduate school, but dropped out in his first year, in part because of the draft, and in part because he started to learn what academic philosophy is about.

But for him as it would have been for me, the philosophy taught in graduate school was not the real thing.  It was analytic philosophy, which as far as I am concerned is the death of philosophy, major league knit-pickers, knit-picking to death philosophers whose thoughts they could not match if their lives depended on it, and making up elaborate intellectual puzzles, that they try to dignify with the term “thought-experiments,” which can be used to justify or knock down any argument known to humanity.

I do not speak for him of course since I have no idea what’s on his mind, but I expect that he believed that, if one went to graduate school in philosophy, one became a philosopher, that is, a person with a philosophy by and according to the values and knowledge claims of which one lived, or tried to live, since no real philosophy has ever been a piece of cake, and suffering is to be expected along the path.  His naiveté, as well as profound ignorance of what becoming a “professional” anything means for the middle class person, is here demonstrated.  To believe that one would become a philosopher by attending graduate school—why that’s a fool’s errand.  We were rubes in the ivory tower.

That he was inclined to view philosophy in this way seems also indicated by his having on occasion thought about becoming a reverend or minister.  He did not want simply to have a set up beliefs by which to justify and rationalize his actions, he wanted to live the beliefs and thereby to test them and himself, as the believer.  The problem here, I think, was that he did not believe in God, or let’s say the God he believed in would not be recognized as a God by anybody else. 

 He also expressed a desire to join the Marine Academy and become a sailor.  He loved as I recollect the Captain Hornblower novels. This was a path within his grasp upon being graduated from high school but he did not take it.  I think he would have made an excellent “salt.”

But of course we all could have made an excellent something else if we had bothered to go in that direction.  Instead we took the educational means of moving up.  With his philosophy degree in hand, pursued by the draft, married soon, and then with a child on the way, he applied for a job in the post office, got it, and stayed in their employ for near on twenty years by my calculations.

For a working class person, a job in the post office is not to be scoffed at.  It’s civil service, the work is steady, and the pay reasonable.  And one gets to wear a uniform.

I was irritated recently to learn that I did not nearly die in the Enoree River as I previously claimed in one of the entries here.  I regret not only the historical inaccuracy but the time I spent trying to re-enact my near death experience in the wrong river.  First my brother #2, attempting to assist me in the historical re-enactment, took considerable time, riding here and there, with his son to locate the spot on the wrong river that resembled what I had spoken of.

He called to say he believed he had located the spot at MusGrove Mill.  The following absolutely sweltering day, my wife and I drove hither and thither through the countryside, through Enoree, the town proper, over hill and dale till we hit the interstate and driving back towards the historic town of Clinton, since every town there is now historic, saw a turn off to Musgrove Mill.  Victory, I thought.

The turnoff took us to my surprise to a parking lot and located near it a new building created by the National Forest Service—or some government organization like that—intent upon preserving the area in its natural state since it too was historic, an important or perhaps relatively insignificant, Revolutionary war battle having been fought there at Musgrove ford.  A helpful sign told us that fords were places of tactical importance since they allowed horses and people to ford the river relatively easily (that being by definition the nature of a ford) and thus holding this or that ford meant control over the movement of the Red Coats.

So we plodded in the sweltering heat through trees and brush down to the river proper so that I might find the precise location of my near death experience.  I was certain I had found it near some concrete pilings.  The wide expanse of the low river swept before me, and when I stepped into the water onto the stones beneath, my toes told me this was the place or very near it.  Slipping and sliding on my creaky knees I waded out as far as I dared, for the water became dark, deep and swift towards the center. 

For the purposes of the re-enactment I wanted to submerge myself and then pop my head out of the water as a symbolic manifestation of my having been saved.  But I dared not do it, and so contented myself by standing knee deep and waving my arms about in a panic stricken manner as my wife snapped a photo.  The photo did not turn out particular well since a still camera does not of course capture motion, and rather than looking panic stricken one might have surmised that, with both arms up in the air like that, I was being held up by bandits in mid-stream.

But all this was for naught because according to my mother I did not nearly die on the Enoree but on Warrior Creek, not far from the Enoree, but not the Enoree.  I don’t know why you make such a big deal of that, she said.  Why not, I said, a near death experience is a near death experience and not without significance, and besides, to set the record straight, the big deal really was that with her boo-hooings and goings on one might have felt she was the one who had nearly died.  To which she had nothing to say.

The old man’s claim to fame—of a very local variant—was his having built each house that we lived in.  Except for the very first, that had a tin roof and an outhouse and was rented for our first year or so back in South Carolina.  While we lived there, he built his first house on land adjacent to his mother’s house out of cinder block.  This made for quick, sturdy, and above all cheap construction but was not a style favored at that time or to my knowledge since.  

One may make a house out of brick and it is an excellent house. But cinder block is used primarily in commercial construction, and is then painted because cinder block unpainted is rather ugly.  But the old man made it with his own hands, including I believe in this case the electrical, but without indoor plumbing.  It was a functional house and served the primary purpose of a house which is to keep out the elements.

He also built with his own hands, and the help of an electrician, the house in which we lived in California.  As I may have mentioned the original mortgage for this house was 12000 and was a kind of house in a box, lacking a better description.  All of the materials for the house were provided by a company, Whiting-Mead, so that, for example, all the wood was pre-cut to the dimensions of the house plan selected. This reduced considerably time and thought, both rather in short supply when it came to the old man.

But build the house, he did, and later he added on what we called a family room.  This had the table where we ate and the TV at the other end and in between a fancy fireplace of his own construction that had a place not just for a fire but also a grill for grilling meat and such.  The first time he lit a fire it did not however draw properly and flooded the house with smoke.  Over time, with much cursing and flinging about of tools, his defect was repair.  The building of this room took perhaps ten years.  Admittedly, most of it was there from the beginning, but finishing touches such as proper flooring were a long time in coming.  For years, before some linoleum got put on it, the flooring was simple and serviceable plywood.  

The exterior of this house was covered in shakes painted grey.  Why, I don’t know.  But that they were part of the original package for the house in a box.

But the old man’s master piece, over the construction of which he would wax eloquent saying the The Lord had guided his very fingers, was the last one.  The adobe, as we called it, since that was what it was constructed of.  This house took perhaps five years to build as the old lady and old man lived in a trailer located on the property.  The bulk of that time went into the making of the adobe block directly from the earth of the property itself.  The old man would shovel the adobe into a cement mixer, liquefying it, then pour the adobe into molds, then remove the molds and let the adobe cure.

He made himself 10000 block and I must say I find something Egyptian about the feat.

Rousseau asks the reader to imagine infants born six feet tall.  And if we add to these creatures the emotions Freud believes infants and children feel, we have monsters indeed.  Or let us say we have adults but with no concern for the consequences of their actions and no sense really of their strength.  If I were a woman I would of course be thankful that infants are not born 6 feet tall; we can all be thankful because the massacre would be enormous and the human race would come to a bloody pause.

I have seen a two year old wrench the bottle from its infant brother’s hand and run away to suck fiercely at it in some corner.  The two year old feels murderous but relatively small, somewhat portable, and surrounded by giants is not likely to commit homicide.  The feeling of having been abruptly uprooted and removed from the center of parental attention, however wavering, polluted, and pathological that attention may be by this obnoxious intruder and Johnny-come-lately may abate under ideal conditions, but is not likely to do so, as was my case, if one experiences one’s self as having been cast aside like an old shoe.

The face of the intruder will always remain the face of the intruder however much time and experience alter and weather that face. One cannot help but feel something darker and more mysterious than dislike because while one will always blame the intruder, one cannot help but wonder if something was and continues to be wrong (perhaps for example one’s nagging desire to strangle one’s brother) with one’s self to have been so early and precipitously handed over to the elements.

Why did he always get the larger ice-cream cone?  Why when disputes arouse was he invariably in the right and I in the wrong?  Why was he so confident and right when he said the world was flat, and I so dithering, and on the verge of wringing his neck, when I dared to contend otherwise.  Why when I said he had done it, did my father say, he didn’t care because surely I had done something that week deserving of the licking he was going to administer.

He had the higher IQ (if one believes in such things) I was told on more than one occasion.  He was tall, dark, and handsome.  I was pale, boney, red-headed and homely.  He looked more like my father; and I could have been my mother’s twin.  He studied only what he liked to study and success was a snap.  I did well in school but only because I was a fucking “over-achiever.”

I knew a man, a professor of literature, who seemed always happy.  I said, why are you always happy?  He said,  with curious honesty, because my mother loved me.  There is nothing like a mother’s love.  True enough, but a mother’s love comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes.  And knowing our mother, I must believe my brother may have paid a highly complex price for having been the apple of her peculiar eye.

The textures of brotherhood, in their yin and their yang, are buried very deep and out of sight.  Rather like one's skeleton one knows those textures are there; but one is happy not to see them in the way one might be happy to be spared ever seeing one's skeleton. The sight and the experience of it would be very disturbing indeed. 

While my father jokingly called me son number one, the second son is my brother number one. Brother 1 and I shared the same space or bedroom for about 15 years.  Shared is not quite the right word; rather we inhabited it as two young monkeys might the same tree.  While the tree provided shelter and sanctuary for both, we sat on very separate branches.  He tended to his business and I tended to mine.  Through long and unconscious practice we learned how not to get in the other's way.

He did not tell me about his day and I did not tell him about mine.  While we caught diseases from each other and endure the other's farts, we did not talk to each other about our worries, concerns, or ambitions. We did not talk either about the old lady or the old man or our other brothers when they came along. We had some of the same teachers in high school, but we did not talk about them.  We both liked to read but we didn't discuss what we had read.  Nor did we talk about world affairs or the latest scientific developments.

He attended the same college that I attended. We lived at or around  the same school and for those two year I don't think we dropped in on each other more than a couple of times.  After that I had a nervous breakdown around the time he got married and started a family.

He was my mother's favorite.  As I believe I may have mentioned, I know this because my mother told me so.  By the time my brother appeared, my mother had concluded that our father was not a proper man and that, consequently, she had to start over.  I accordingly was to be my father's son, since I suppose she had decided not to abandon me by the roadside and my brother was to be her son.  My mother says that for the first 2 or 3 years of his life I followed my younger brother around as if he were the older brother and I the younger. 

I don't know if this is true or not (especially since the old lady's primary purpose in life seemed to have been the emasculation of her boy children), but if it is true I suppose I did so to get whatever crumbs of affection that might come my way. The affection and attention that she gave to my brother and took from me accordingly was not compensated for by increased attention from my father, my  mother having apparently failed to inform him that I was now “his” son.       

I have 3 brothers acquired over the years.  One in 1948, one in 1952, one in 1960.  That makes 14 years between me, the oldest, and the youngest.  We are rather strung out.  Brother number

2 was born after the death of our sister, who died of the RH factor, after being on the earth for a week or so.  But by the time brother #2 came along they had come up with stuff to combat the RH and he, success story that he was, was written up in some medical journal.

We are all rather nuts in some way or the other.  As the psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott says, if you have one mother and 8 children, you have eight different mothers.  This is true; we all have different perceptions of our mother.  But we agree, even with these differences, that she is crazy.  Or maybe she is evil.  We have discussed this matter and have not really reached a conclusion.

I think she is crazy.  Brother number 1 thinks she is Evil (or at times he thinks this).  Brother #2 believes she is capable of any manner of horrible acts.  And brother #3 would just as soon she went away.  Our different perceptions of her are probably related to the differing reasons we have for believing she is crazy and/or evil.

The thing that has kept us in contact with each other over the years as we went our different ways and to different parts of the state is the shared experience of having been raised by our crazy mother and impotent father.  Without these two we would not have much in common. 

We are rather like those poor soldiers flung together in the same trench from different parts of the universe; and as they undergo the terrors of war, they bond, as they say.  After the war, they go their different ways and sometimes never contact each other again because really they had nothing in common except the shared misery of a miserable experience.

 One must face the fact that genetics is a crap shoot and just because you are related to another person by blood does not mean you have any deep elective affinity with that person as another person or soul.  Though of course you are probably all human beings. And in that respect, as much as you may dislike, fear, or simply hate, another of the same blood, you are bound by that blood to respect the fact that the blood relation is, in fact, a human being, something not as easily accorded a biological stranger.

This is no small or easy thing.  Many are much nicer and more pleasant, courteous and respectful to complete strangers than they are to members of their own family.  I think this much more the “norm” than many might imagine.  We say things to members of the family that we would never dare to say to others, unless we wish to get shot or be beaten to a pulp.  And we do not usually get shot or beaten to a pulp because we are family.

Sometimes this may well be a terrific mistake.

In 1967 I began to think about going to graduate school though I was thinking more about getting drafted.  When however I thought about the former, I realized I would need to apply and take the GRE’s and get some letters of recommendation together.  I knew I could get one from my favorite teacher, but I was sort of lacking in that department till something showed up.

I took a class on Aesthetics; really it was a seminar, the only thing of its kind I had at college.  We met at the Professor’s house a couple blocks off campus, sat around in his living room and discussed Aesthetics.  Maybe we had eight people in the seminar.  I remember one guy talking with great enthusiasm about driving his little sports car at high speeds in the mountains and wondering if what he felt while doing so didn’t constitute an aesthetic experience.  We read stuff too like Plotinus and Kant.

The only “work” for the course was showing up for the seminars, writing some journal entries, and one long paper.  This was, by far, the most wide open and relaxed class I had taken.  I enjoyed the subject and I had gotten my hands on some Dexedrine.  So I took that and paced back and forth in our little kitchen in the apartment over the garage and thought up a whole paragraph in my head and then wrote it down and then thought up another and wrote it down.  The paper was exploratory and speculative though I had a general idea about where I was going….

 I wanted to disassociate the aesthetic experience from things people might call art—of any kind, and argue that it was an “everyday experience” that anybody could have because its primary locus was not the fucking brain but the body.  So I concluded the guy’s sport car experience was an aesthetic experience, though my primary personal reference was basketball.

While I was not really tall enough to do it effectively I worked hard on my back to the basket game, especially on a quick turn around jumper.  On several occasions during pickup games especially, I did this turn around and had sort of an out of the body experience—I could sort of see myself with a little camera located over my head.  Somebody else had the ball, eye contact was made, and I would move away from my position five feet or so under basket out in quick movement towards the ball, so

I caught it ten to twelve feet from the basket when I caught it in motion, mind you, and still in motion, and with the momentum of moving away from the basket, I caught it, turned in air, and made the fall away.

Once, maybe 30 years later, when I was over forty, I did the same thing in a pick up game at the “Y” and the guys, a bunch of strangers, spontaneously applauded when I successfully and surprisingly made that move.  Why the fuck not.  It was a thing of beauty.

So the Professor wrote on the paper that on the basis of it he would recommend me to any graduate school in the country.  So I picked up another letter of recommendation though I don’t believe I mentioned basketball in the paper.

The ancient Greeks are probably just as bad as the people in the Bible.  They were all a bunch of pathological whacko-jobs.  Those guys in the old and New Testament who thought they were talking with God; well, they weren’t making it up.  Most of the ancient world was psychotic; that’s what you had to be to endure the endless shit going down.  But while I had plenty of intro to the Bible forced down my throat, I didn’t really get to read the Greeks in much detail till college.

Or let’s say, I had read quite a bit of them before college, but wasn’t ready till college to look at them with clearer emotions.  I was bowled over especially by the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Of course, in the Iliad, just like in the Bible, you find endless stretches of dullness where they make lists of things, like what armies were here or there or who was in them exactly, like the begat stuff in the Bible.  These lists suggest the value of list making at any time in human history as a mechanism for getting your feet on the ground and dealing with blasts of overwhelming anxiety.

But when Homer wasn’t making lists, he was talking about fighting.  And that’s what got me most.  Like with those Greeks, there was no breast beating or me-oh-my I have got to kill somebody or why the fuck am I doing this sort of thing.  No questions about meaning or guilt or any of that shit.  Just here I am and I am going to knock your fucking head off, and they would go at it till they were knocking each over the heads with rocks or whatever else came in handy.  No knights in shining army shit, just blood and dust till the day was done and they collected their dead.

And it didn’t seem to be about courage either.  Really no choice was involved.  So that wasn’t a question.  Odysseus at one point is getting the crap beaten out of him and he just starts talking to his opponent, pleading pathetically for his life, like hey, man, I am not ready to die and I have duties and obligations etc.  And he talks the guy out of killing him, and that didn’t mean Odysseus wasn’t sufficiently manly.  It meant he was and on top of that he was smart.

So maybe I was a proto-nerd because I was so knocked over with this stuff that I wrote an extra, un-required paper about what I was feeling and gave it to the professor.  She gave it back to me with no marks on it and said something like she had found it interesting.  OK, so maybe it had been filled with specious generalizations and based on extremely limited knowledge or whatever the heck had been wrong with it.  Or maybe I had come off sounding like a proto-fascists or something because as women since have reminded me the macho hood of those ancient Greeks was based on a society where women were treated like chattel, a sort of polite way of saying they were slaves.

Not till years later when I was reading the Romantics did I realize that back then in 1967 I had gone through a sort of literary rite of passage as it were.  All of the Romantics, well, most of them, had been bowled over by their first readings of the Greeks, which they usually did actually in Greek, while I read stuff in translation having, like Shakespeare, little Latin and no Greek.  I don’t know how to say it but the Greeks seem to breathe a clean and pure and cold air, while the air of we moderns is polluted and we in turn are sickly.  Almost as if all the pathology that had once been out there and accepted in the social structures and mythology of those days had moved right into our sickly heads.

It always gives me pause to remember that when, on the road to natural rights, the French knocked down the Bastille, one of the guys that game strolling out, was the Marquis De Sade.

It might have been a couple years ago, and I hear a couple of students talking.  And one says you know some people believe the pyramids were built by aliens and that’s where human life comes from.  And the other guy says, sort of pedantic like, well, that’s one theory. And I go to myself, for god’s sake and Jesus H. fucking Christ who the hell are these people that I am supposed to be teaching.

I wanted to grab the pedantic sounding guy by the neck and say, the idea that aliens built the pyramids, aside from being a statement based on profound ignorance, is not a fucking theory, but goddamn untrammeled and uncontrolled speculation of the most rampant kind.  Not that I am opposed to speculation, mind you.  The power and importance of what some people call speculative philosophy, meaning mostly continental philosophy since Kant, is under-rated by the master knit-pickers of English analytic philosophy, who have added nothing to the philosophical tradition except picked nits.

But something I did get out of college—and it goes along with ambiguity tolerance—is the importance of the fact/value, belief/fact distinctions.  Now I know these distinctions, arising as they do from empiricism, instrumentalize reason and make anything like wisdom, as a combo pack of knowledge and value, in the practical world impossible.  But that said, it alarms me to feel that many of my students today don’t know or care about these distinctions.  Marx—he too, is just another theory, and so is Freud, or Darwin for that matter; and because they are, like the question of the aliens and the Egyptians, just another fucking theory, it is pretty easy just to blow them all off.

But the real problem as I see it isn’t so much that students blow off scientific theories as theories but they don’t use these theories to think about themselves or to look into their own interiors in different ways.  While I stupidly set “The Truth” as the goal of my studies, I came with time to see the “Truth” is NOT OUT THERE.  No, it’s in here; or rather the determination to seek the truth is in here.  My goal was to have the strength to acknowledge that truth, whatever the fuck it was. 

For example, looking inside myself I realized that homosexuality made me uncomfortable.  Well, why not, when I went away to college, I knew what homosexuality was but in a completely abstract way.  I hadn’t knowingly seen a gay person till I got to college, and there was this one guy who hung out with the girls and had no hair on his legs.  So I mentioned the hairless legs to some guy as a matter of speculative interest and he said the guy with the hairless legs was a faggot.  Oh! Like things started clicking into place.

But during my seven years in the hole, during which I much doubted my own masculinity, I decided to look at the truth and did what I do on such occasions.  Read all I could get my hands on that had been written by gay guys.  I read Gide first and then Genet, and I’ve got to say the guy had me in the palm of his hand when he started out Our Lady of the Flowers, I think it was, observing how people hated other people’s farts but loved their own.  Real prison literature, from a guy who had nothing better to do than lie in his bunk with his blanket over this head smelling his own farts!

I still get sort of ticked off to think that in my entire history as a student I never got back a single paper with the “Brilliant!” written across the corner of the first page.  You’d sort of think that a person who went on to get a PhD would have gotten one “Brilliant!” or maybe he got the PhD under false pretenses or something. 

My friend, who really was at Woodstock and who later became a schizophrenic, routinely got “Brilliants.”  He was in that English class for English majors in my freshman year and every paper he wrote got a “Brilliant” across the top and the same for his in-class philosophy exam.  And that was like throwing pearls before swine—or something like that—because he didn’t give a shit and was already dropping out by the end of the first year.

But really I was, I guess, incapable of being brilliant not because I lacked brains exactly but because I really didn’t know what brilliant was all about.  Being brilliant was writing back what the professor had said in such a way that he or she recognized his or her brilliance in what you had written.  This is no small thing since some professors are really brilliant, so it’s not really something you can fake.  It’s like you are playing back the song they played for you in such a way that the song is recognizable as their song but in such a way also that you open up new like meanings in it.  I think the French might call these little moments of new meaning apercu.

But of course I am being a bit snotty here.  Because being brilliant is not merely a matter of pleasing a Professor.  Beyond being brilliant in the professor-teacher relationship is what we might call advanced “brilliance.”  That’s where you write something for a professional journal, and you have read so much of the shit that the editors of the journal have written that you make them all think they are brilliant.  This takes fucking work and in the course of that you can get so fuddled up that you can’t be brilliant. 

Instead what I got written across the corner of the first page of my papers was “Original” on two or three occasions.  I wouldn’t have known this was praise but for the “A” grade attached.  Because after the “original” I didn’t find lavish praise for what I had written.  It was like “original!” was the only thing that could be said about it.  Because being original is sort of the opposite of being brilliant; here the errant and untutored student decides to write about some idea that was not discussed in class or maybe not even written about anywhere.

Being original took its own kind of work, you had to write and rewrite, and provide examples and such to make a sort of framework for making sure the Professors didn’t think you were nuts or something.  It’s like while you were writing you had to take their heads and move it to another place so they could see what you were trying to see.  So one time I wrote a sort of theoretical preface to a paper on Passage to India, saying, in brief, that if a work of literature was indeed a whole and unified in its parts, I should be able to take a tiny part and working off that show the unity of the work.  What was the smallest unit I could work with? Why a single word. 

So I picked the word “distinction” and went through the book and tried to find every instance of that word’s use.  Then I analyzed the immediate context of the word’s use, and, tracing it from the beginning of the book to the end, showed how the meaning deepened and changed as it went along…Something like that.

 I really didn’t have the faintest fucking idea what I was doing.  But I enjoyed writing it because it seemed to hold together and I was temperamentally unable to say back to the teacher what the teacher had said.

So, as English major, I have to take class on Goeffrey Chaucer and write a paper on Troilus and Criseyde.  This is a pretty long poem with the same name as a play by Shakespeare, though Chaucer wrote before Shakespeare in Middle English.  I read the poem in translation and I hated it because the so-called hero, Troilus, was like in love with Criseyde.  I forget the particulars but every time the guy made it into an intimate situation with Criseyde where they might have consummated their relation in a physical way the fucker, Troilus I mean, would actually faint or pass out or something to that effect.

 So I started writing this paper on how screwed up Troilus was and how he couldn’t be a proper hero and so on if he fucking fainted when he had the opportunity to get some snatch (excuse me).  I even read some Freud on sexual hysteria to back up my claim and tied all that back into the religious theme of the poem because it did have a religious theme.  And I am typing away on this thing at around 4 in the morning of the day it is due and realize I have just written a pile of crap. 

It was a sort of light bulb experience because a number of other things came together.  I realized that in attacking Troilus as an impotent and ineffectual jerk I was not talking about the poem “as a whole.”  I was making the mistake of actually identifying with a character, Troilus, and I wasn’t supposed to do that at all.  I couldn’t do that if I was to understand and write about the poem “as a whole.”  And I saw then rather dimly but more clearly later that my dislike of Troilus was an obvious projection of my own sexual problem.  Like I was the one who felt like passing out in situations with potential for fucking.  So actually writing on Troilus in that way I had been engaged in psychological self-flagellation.

 s I said, this was a major break through.  I would have to stop identifying with the characters if I were to write about the work “as a whole,” as, as it were, a whole universe in microcosm, complete down to its own laws of gravity.  The problem here was that really, unless you were an English major and had to write papers on stuff, if you cut off your identification with the characters you really didn’t have a whole lot of reason to read the book, except that it was a book on the must read list of books for English majors.

So I got a D+ on the paper but an A for the class because the professor gave A's to everybody that had a beard because he was on LSD all the time.  And I didn’t learn how to pronounce Chaucer properly, his being in middle English and all, and that came back to bite me in the ass like 20 years later when I am taking my first orals for my PhD, and I am just flying along knocking them dead with my knowledge of the novel, until this jerk hands me some Chaucer and asks me to read it.  I mean hell it might as well have been in a foreign language because Middle English is nearly a foreign language.  And the fuckers have the gall to pass me through the orals, but with “reservations” one of them being that I should learn how to speak Chaucer properly.  

Now why should I learn to speak Chaucer properly, you might well ask.  Absolutely no reason at all.  Just that if you were an English major you were supposed to know how to speak Chaucer in case somebody came up to you at a party and asked you to talk Chaucer, since you were an English major.  Like in the same way, I guess, that if you are a doctor and somebody has a heart attack at a party you, as a doctor, are expected to act like you know what you are doing. Well, in the 28 years since I fucked up that orals and sat through a whole class on how to speak Chaucer, nobody has ever asked me to speak Chaucer because nobody gives a shit about Chaucer or Middle English, except English Majors.

The whole thing is a like a sociological tautology.

I have never been one to arrange social outings.  But a couple or three times with movies, I did.  I got together some guys and we went to see this movie I had read a review or two about.  Afterwards, I was the only guy standing up and shouting Bravo! Bravo!  Heck, maybe 30 people were in the theatre so nobody really noticed.  

Bravo! Bravo, I went for Clint Eastwood in a Fistful of Dollars just released in the USA in 1967.  I had trilled with every scene.  A breakthrough, I said, of revolutionary proportions; the Western would never be the same again and good riddance to bad rubbish.  No more John Wayne sanctimonious moral fable shit.  This was the Western stripped down to its core.  Ugly men, in an ugly, greed ridden town, killing each other quite liberally and graphically.

 Call it nihilistic.  I wouldn’t have minded back then.  But mostly it was incredibly macho in an absurdist way.  Aside from a kind of half-assed plot line about the man with no name protecting a woman, women don’t play a part in it.  Romance in the western was always damn awkward anyway, and quite unbelievable if John Wayne was doing it since the man walked like he had a pole up his asshole.  But Clint was macho in the mode of the maxed out, stay out of my face, I hate authority and the human race more generally, loner.

 People said Eastwood was a fascist, anti-flower power, and a woman hater to top it all off.  I didn’t think so really.  Maybe because I never was really pro-flower power.  When push came to shove people would hit each other.  I had learned that pretty early and was scared of the prospect.  Hell, I liked Dirty Harry too.  

My other outing of this kind was none too successful partly because we had to drive to get there in my 1950 Plymouth with the bad brakes that needed to be pumped every time I needed to stop.  This was quite hair raising.  Also the movie this time was Warhol’s Chelsea Girls.  Once again I had read a review and talked some guys into going.  Hell, I said, a movie like this comes around only once in ten years, and when you are old you can tell your kids you saw it.

As I recollect that movie was fucking 3 hours long; hell it was 6 hours long because Chelsea Girls was experimental and had two movies running right next to each other on the same screen, or maybe they were one movie.  I don’t care.  It looked like two.  Most of the time you didn’t know which one to watch or if it was worth watching either one. And most of the time, the two movies didn’t have anything at all to do with each other.  It didn’t seem to be about anything in particular.  Just a bunch of fucking weirdoes talking about something and shooting up.  I remember particularly one big hefty gal who would drop her drawers and throw her needle into her buttock like it was a dart going into a dartboard. 

Guys started getting antsy, but be damned if I would leave.  Once I had paid for a movie be damned if I was going to walk out.  So we stuck out the whole thing and now we are old enough to tell our children and our grand children about it.  Not that they would give a shit.  Most of them haven’t even seen the Godfather.

One day I am walking back to apartment building that has my office in it and Anne, the woman of home coming potential, asks would I want to go to a movie.  I am a bit perplexed.  It’s like noon for one thing.  So what exactly is she talking about?  There’s a matinee she says at a nearby theatre showing the The Four Musketeers (1974).  I had read about the movie and knew it was directed by Richard Lester, the guy who had directed the Beatle movies.  I hesitate because a) I haven’t been to a movie in a long time and b) I hadn’t been to a movie with a woman since I didn’t know when.  But “OK” I say.

I still think the Four Musketeers is the best of all the Three Musketeer movies and certainly the best of all the Four Musketeer Movies.  It had like Michael York, and the Doctor Kildare guy in it.  And Racquel Welch. So we go to the movie, get a good laugh, talk a bit and go our separate ways. 

Hell, I don’t know what was going on if anything.  I went to her house once and I can only say her husband was none to friendly.  And they sort of started sub-bickering with each other about something.  I felt awkward pretty quickly. But I got to meet her kid who was a nice little kid.  Maybe she had wanted to see that movie and her husband hadn’t wanted to.  Or maybe she just didn’t want to go home that day?  And I do understand that while I like to go to movies by myself this isn’t the case with most people.

I went to my 40^th  high school reunion.  That was sort of like a bad LSD trip.  But one thing I noticed.  A lot of the women there seemed pretty tired out.  They had all been part of that first big group of women in American history to feel the pull of career as well as family. Also women’s lib hit the whole generation really hard.  Seemed like every woman I knew—true, that was very few—had a copy of My Body, Myself stashed away somewhere.

I don’t know what it was like.  But it must have been, well, liberating, and also damn hard.  They all seemed to have been married once at least and then divorced.  Getting divorced when your mother hadn’t gotten divorced, and striking out on your own to make your own life in your own body when your mother probably hadn’t done that had to have been pretty scary stuff.  The shift from being largely a mobile uterus and a source of free labor to a person who happened to have a uterus and who deserved to get paid just as much for her work as anybody else—well, that was a pretty big switch.

That’s what Anne—of home coming potential did—or at least I heard.  Eventually she and her husband split, and she used her Masters degree, with a dissertation on Henry James, to get a job as a community college teacher. Come to think of it—getting married, divorced, and starting a life of one’s own seems to be true of every day woman I knew from that period (admittedly a small sampling).  And then, of course, the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass, and the light at the end of the tunnel that had prompted many of these women to go on a new path turned dark again under a general gloom.

I didn’t see many movies back in SC.  Three maybe.  They were expensive even at the drive-in.  But I do remember the first ever movie I saw.  It was there at the Lauren’s Drive-In, right next door to the place that made hash.  It had Humphrey Bogart in it and the main character, really, was the tank, as far as I was concerned.  That’s all it was about: Bogart, the tank, and some guys from different countries (probably intended to symbolize the allied effort) in the middle of the desert trying to get back to civilization in WWII.  It was called, fittingly, Sahara, because that was where the desert was.

The movie was made in 1943, during the war, and I saw it in 1951 or so.  I guess the Lauren’s drive-in didn’t show first run movies.  But I remember it pretty well because I made an observation while viewing it.  I observed that there was not one goddamn woman in the whole fucking movie, from beginning to end, just a bunch of guys and their glorious tank out in the desert.  I remember thinking this because I remember also that I considered telling someone about what I had observed.

My father sat a little to the left of me and my mother to the right of me, as I poked my head up between them to get a look at the screen.  Had I any sort of male bonding with my father of the more archaic kind I might have leaned forward and whispered in his ear, Hey, old man.  There ain’t a goddamn woman in this whole fucking movie.  War is fucking a paradise. I mean you can drop your pants and piss where-ever the fuck you like.

 But lacking such bonding, I didn’t even think of addressing my father.  In fact, as I had the thought, I thought immediately of my mother.  I felt the urge to say to her, Hey, there aren’t any women in this movie.  Did you notice that?  I wondered if she had noticed and if she thought anything one way or other about it.  I wondered maybe if she was offended that no women had been in the move.  But I felt some sort of anger when I decided not to say anything maybe because I knew at some level she was not offended at all but was probably sitting there enjoying the idiotic spectacle that men could make of themselves.

I can’t remember the other movies, but I am sure we saw a couple more, maybe.  And of course we didn’t have a TV so I didn’t see any movies on TV when I was just a little kid.  I have met people since who seem to have spent their entire kidhood watching movies on TV.  But not me.  My favorite aunt got a TV in 1955 and the first thing I ever saw on TV was Walt Disney Presents or something like that.  Uncle Walt would talk a bit on every show and then they would show cartoons. 

 Later on when I went to college my first ever college roommate had been a member of the Mickey Mouse Club by which I mean he had been on TV as a back up substitute should any of the other members of the TV show get sick or something.  He had seen Annette Funicello in the flesh.  I had really moved up by then.

I am walking back to the former apartment building where are offices are with the woman of home coming queen material, and she is lamenting that she has been trying the whole semester to teach her students the difference between the abstract and the concrete and she has failed, and I want to go, well, duh, you silly woman.  The students in their ignorance are telling us that it’s damn hard to tell the difference between the abstract and the concrete.

If Marx is correct, as I believe he is, our consciousness is informed through and through by abstractions; this massive thing that we call common sense (and take as reality) is socially constructed on the basis of economic and power relations.  One does not pile up examples of the concrete so that one may rise to the abstract, but the other way around, one must chip and chip away at befuddling abstractions to even begin to get a glimpse of the concrete.  History is made behind our backs and mostly we mouth unaware  what it says.

Perhaps too that’s why I read phenomenology so much.  Its motto was, “Return to the Thing.”  I was actually motivated by the desire to get to The Truth.  I didn’t want to live in darkness.  At college this desire got me into some trouble.  When for example we were asked to think about the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance my desire to get at the truth was so strong, that I did extra reading beyond what we had been asked to read, trying to figure out the difference, and I got screwed up on the final essay exam because I knew more than I needed to answer the questions they asked.   

I had not learned one of the basic rules of being a good student: never think about anything more than you absolutely have to and seek especially to take classes where no thinking at all is required.  Thinking may lead to the uncomfortable sensation of confusion and the slightly humiliating sense that you don’t know what you thought you did.

My pursuit of the heroic ideal of truth mucked me up especially when it came to writing papers on literature.  One evening I was sitting in the stacks trying to write one of those, surrounded by piles of books, cast off first drafts, piles of papers and coffee cups, and a colleague came by and said, “Man, what the heck are you doing?”  And when I began to describe what I was trying to understand and how befuddled I was, he said, “Man, it sounds as if you are looking for the truth.  All they want is a gracefully written essay.”

This guy was a good guy and as they say “well-rounded” and unlike myself socially poised, and while he got really good grades, he was not viewed as some sort of proto-nerd.  Maybe because he really didn’t sweat it.  I should have listened to him but I couldn’t.  I had to believe that, to wade through all the shit I was wading through, coming as I did from a working class background, I was in pursuit of no less than The Truth.  Writing gracefully was not enough to justify my misery.  He however was the son of a College Professor and knew better.

I came out of a lecture in my sophomore year of college and said to my good buddy, poking my finger in the air, Ambiguity tolerance.  I have got to cultivate ambiguity tolerance.  We had on three days just sat through three lectures on the Russian Revolution.  And I had found them unsettling, even upsetting.  I felt a sense of frustration because all the lectures had been different.

They were of course all about something called the Russian Revolution but one was about serfs or something like that, and one was about the bread riots or marches, and another about the various parties and by the time it was all over you didn’t know when the Russian Revolution actually took place, when it started exactly or when it ended.  So how could you even call the Russian Revolution an event if you couldn't figure out such simple things as when it started or when it ended.

Ambiguity was a big word for me in my literature study, along with paradox, because literature was taught where I was generally from the perspective of what was called way back then, “The New Criticism.”  The New Criticism is probably more responsible for the formation of things called English Departments than anything else because it stripped literature of its relation to history and to philosophy, and set it apart as something that might be studied apart.  One looked for the meaning of the art object just in itself and not relative to when or where or why it had been produced.  The overall goal of this study was to say what a book or poem meant.

But mostly one had great difficult saying what anything meant.  One guy said this and another guy said that and nobody could prove or disprove anybody else, so the result almost invariably was ambiguity and/or paradox.  So that’s how I felt after those three lectures on the Russian Revolution.  I came out feeling that it was all ambiguous.  But this was not some book being ambiguous, but something that had actually the fuck happened, the Russian Fucking Revolution.  So if I were not to be upset by the ambiguity, which I was, I had to learn to tolerate it.

That was a big moment in my education though I didn’t at the moment see all the ramifications or consequences of it.  I saw that there wasn’t One Truth, but many, or rather there were many theories and each generated facts that were asserted as important by the theory itself.  Or to put it another way, whatever anybody said about a book or an historical “event” was the result of their original assumptions, sometimes clearly understood, sometimes relatively buried. And if you could dig those out what anybody had to say about anything was relatively predictable.

So I did learn something in college.  Maybe the most important thing.  Middle class education was not about morality or religion or values (just like they said) it was about knowledge, about how you knew something or how you didn’t.  And that was important because many of the middle class professions were based on the claim to knowing something whether they really knew it or not.

Naturally not being able to go off to war and kill people as well as my failure to have sexual intercourse (with another person) during my seven years of living in the hole lead me on occasion to doubt my manhood.  This whole manhood thing is a terribly mixed up mess, and in my despair at being unable to reach, wholly introspectively, any sort of conclusion on the matter, I am ashamed to say that on one occasion I attempted a more objective assessment and measured my putz while it was erect.

This was difficult since I didn’t have a proper tape measure but only a straight edged ruler and the putz in an erect state tends to curve upwards.  Trying to make it lie flat on the straight edge rule required force and concentration and a concurrent loss of the erection itself.  Also how long it was in actuality seemed to differ considerably depending on whether one measured it from below or from above.  If from below, determining the exact point where it started or stopped was rather difficult.

Overall the exercise was singularly unrewarding especially as my putz seemed unremarkable either way.  Just an average putz in short.  But because it was unremarkable in its magnitude, I was able to torture myself by feeling, that, though average, it was shorter than it should be, were I to take the measure of it as a measure of my manhood.  I had to admit that my putz, or dangling modifier as I sometimes called it more grammatically speaking, was not a particularly awe inspiring sight.

Such was the lack of my self-esteem that I could take no solace from my knowledge that what was considered a properly masculine dick was, as they say, a social construct and had varied across the ages from culture to culture.  The ancient Greeks for example are on record as having preferred your more diminutive “package” as an indicator that the possessor thereof was less under the control of the animal passions and more a creature of reason.  

But as I said I could take no solace in this abstract knowledge especially since I was not an ancient Greek living in an ancient Greek culture but in one that seems to feel a truly manly man has a dick as big as that of a horse or thereabouts.  That I—a person of high intelligence—should attempt to measure my manhood by the measure of the “little man” suggests how primitive all of us still remain.  How primordial indeed.  Especially in this age where the package and packaging seems to count more than the thing packaged, where appearances count for much more than realities, and one can tell a book my its cover.

Women of course know about this probably more than men.  I had a lady friend over six feet tall, and according to her sworn testimony small men pursued her in droves.  When I asked why, she said, because she looked like Mount Everest and they all wanted to prove something by climbing her.  When I went to my 40^th high school reunion my wife asked the women with whom I had gone to school if they had found me attractive.  Yes, they said, because I was tall.  And according to sociologists the average western woman prefers to date and wed a man about four inches taller than herself.