September 2006 Archives

I felt after the on campus interview how I felt after the interview at the convention.  OK, I guess.  I would feel bad if I didn’t get the job.  That would be for sure.  But I wouldn’t feel as if it had been a complete waste of time.  Because I felt I had made however briefly one of those human connection sort of things.

The talk was alright, I guess.  Though I don’t remember anything I talked about but quite a few faculty persons were there and some graduate students.  Not exactly a monstrous crowd.  But that was fine with me.

And then a couple of them said they were going to take me out to dinner.  I would have preferred, given my dazed state of mind, to go back to the rustic motel, eat something in the wainscoted dining room, and then hit the hay.  But they were nice people and wanted to show me around a bit and took me to the Saint Louis Golden Arch down by the river, and through a few neighborhoods and we talked about the price of homes.  At that time you could get a place that was not a complete dump for around 75 K and a damn mansion for 120K.

We end up at a restaurant that called itself a bistro or something like that.  They had wanted to do me the courtesy of taking me somewhere that served “California” food, whatever the hell that was.  At this place California food seemed to be a good wine selection, dishes with lots of lettuce in them, fish, and relatively small portions.  I would have preferred a pork chop, but when in Rome do as the Roman’s do so I ate California food right their in Saint Louis.

I don’t know what they thought of the food but they sure did like the wine, and after a bit we started to talk more openly.  One of them was a big shambling guy, with thinning hair, a big face and an ernest manner.  I think he may have been Irish.  Also present was a female faculty person who was definitely Irish I remember.  Somehow it popped up that the female faculty person was formerly a nun.  I was pretty impressed by that.  A Catholic institution hiring somebody who was formerly a nun seemed pretty open minded to me.  Though what do I know, and as the evening wore on I heard about the gay faculty member and the lesbian faculty member who was not the lover of the ex-nun.  She was straight but hadn’t married.

Damn, I felt right at home.  These people were a bunch of nuts.  And earlier in the day, I had taken a walk and had a smoke with the big, shambling guy, and I was talking along something about education, and he said out of the blue, “Man, you really are an idealist.”  “Yes, I guess so,” I said a bit sheepishly but not embarrassed or humiliated because the way he said the word “idealist” suggested he didn’t think being one was entirely a bad thing.

I got to Saint Louis late and went to the motel.  It was a funny sort of place with character--I guess you would call it--with a dark varnished wood that ran midway from the wall down to the floor.  What’s that called?  “Wainscoting?”  I figured they were giving me a taste of old Saint Louis or maybe they had some deal with the place.  But it this was no holiday inn.  I got up and had breakfast in a room that also was made dark by this rustic wood wainscoting.  I always forget how dark it is where it’s cold because they have these little windows to keep out the cold, and in California you have these huge energy inefficient windows to let light in.

Then I went and stood where I was supposed to stand under the sign right outside the motel.  Dirty ice was still on the ground, maybe the remnants of snow, and my toes were a little chilly. 

The day went as planned.  I don’t remember anything about the President except in my job journeys I have noted that Chancellors and Presidents have these huge offices, with huge desks, and usually for some reason or other an American flag stands by one side of the desk and on the other side a state flag if it’s a state school.

 The plant was a hoot.  The buildings were brick and had ornate decorations featuring Saints and Martyrs. The school was Jesuit, and I don’t remember Jesuit nuns. Maybe an order of nuns had lived there too because the offices for the folks in the English Department had been formerly nuns’ quarters.  These had brick walls and high ceilings, were long and narrow with one window sort of high up on the wall.  I thought these were great rooms, and the folks, from what I saw, had fixed them up and made them their own mostly buy sticking bookshelves wherever possible. 

So far though I had not seen a single person dressed up like a nun or a priest.  But then at lunch one showed up dressed in that dark flowing robe thing.  But at lunch he was pretty lively and with his black slicked back hair he could have been some Mafia guy hiding out in a monestary.

By the time the talk came around at 130 or 2 I was too dead tired to care that much.  I was light headed from exhaustion because I don’t know if I had slept 20 minutes the night night, tossing and turning, over and over, and lying on the floor to try some deep breathing, and working myself more and more into a sweat about how I would be so tired I would screw up the interview if I didn’t manage to get some sleep. 

So as usual under these circumstances, there I was practically a zombie and so far I had not screwed up any as far as I could tell.  But then who knew?  I was running on auto-pilot.

The interview was at the University of Saint Louis.  I didn’t know a thing about Saint Louis except that it had built a huge arch near the river for some reason and that’s where the Saint Louis Cardinals played.  I had kept track of the Cardinals at one time because they had a good team.  That was during the time they had Bob Gibson one of the greatest and meanest pitchers of all time.  Watching him throw was a glory.

I liked their name too.  Cardinals.  Not enough teams are named after birds, except maybe the eagle which is a cliché.  And as a kid in the south, I had enjoyed it when the cardinals arrived in the spring all bright red and perky looking.  So I had good associations with the word, “cardinal.”  Maybe because of the cardinals I thought of Saint Louis as being in the south; though when you look at the map, maybe it’s in the Midwest.  I couldn’t tell you.

I was going to a place that I didn’t know anything about and where I didn’t know a living soul to get a job and leave the place I had been for 15 years or so.  But the job was tenure track.  That meant if I did some publishing that probably I would get tenure and finally get that holy grail of lifetime freedom from the fear of unemployment.  And the housing had to be cheaper than where my wife and I were living, pouring 900 a month into rent, and with absolutely no prospect of ever owning a home, not when they wanted 20% down.

So in spite of the fact that the very idea of the on campus interview tied me into knots and cast me into a near hysterical fear of peeing or befouling myself in a public situation, I felt I just had to do it even thought one glaring problem with the whole gig was sticking out like a sore thumb.  The University of Saint Louis is a catholic institution, and I am not.  Catholic I mean.

I had to face it. They odds were they would hire a fellow catholic, and I couldn’t blame them for that.  Birds of a feather flock together.  I thought for half a second about pretending to be catholic, and took about half a second to dismiss the idea because I didn’t know enough about being catholic to pretend to be one, and pretending to be one wasn’t honest anyway.  And knowing me, if I did pretend, my honesty would break through I would end up declaring that, while I had pretended to be a catholic, I was, in fact formerly a Presbyterian, and at present an atheist.

And maybe they knew I wasn’t a catholic anyway.  I couldn’t remember the interview that well, but I couldn’t remember any discussion of religion.  I don’t think that legally people are allowed to ask about your religion.  I don’t think, in all my interviews, that I was ever asked anything about religion.  I wonder if there’s a way to get around the prohibition against asking about religion.  Maybe you could ask, “Do you believe in God?”

That would be one hell of an interview question.   

CONTINUED FROM BELOW

What do you know but in early February I get a letter from the smokers saying they wanted to invite me for that precious on campus interview.  That was big time in the job search because it meant you had made a cut that meant you were one of three.  So I called the department, got a secretary, and arranged a time a couple weeks down the line for the interview.  Thank goodness, usually—but not all of the time—the campus would pay for your plane fare.  These guys were paying and they paid for the motel too.

I was to fly in, go to the motel via taxi, sleep, and then I was told the spot where I was supposed to stand where somebody would pick me up and take me to the campus.  Then I would spend the whole damn day being interviewed.  The itinerary read something like.  brief meeting with President of University (largely ceremonial); extended interview with Dean (a very important part of the whole process); interview with chair of the department; lunch in the cafeteria with assorted faculty (meaning whoever was around); and then the goddamn talk. 

 I hated the goddamn talk part.  When I first started interviewing, people actually read a paper, something they had written, to a tired assed bunch of faculty who seemed to loathe your very presence.  But later on, they started asking for talks rather than paper readings.  I would worked myself into a lather over these talks, like the fate of the whole interview depended on it, which maybe it did, since the people you talked to would be the people who voted, though there would be a lot of corridor lobbying before the vote by interested parties, if there were any.  And for a position like the head of composition there might not be any.

The talk part had gotten worse since I had started having anxiety attacks when I had to speak publically.  This was part of my psychotherapy.  Before I started that, I had not particularly liked public speaking but I hadn’t had any anxiety attacks.  But if psychotherapy works, it does so by making you worse for a long time before you start getting better.  If you sit around thinking and talking about your emotions that has a way of bringing them right up to the surface.

The first time I had a public speaking anxiety attack (as opposed to an every day, walking around, run-of-the-mill, for no obvious reason anxiety attack, which I also had though less predictably) was when I gave a “talk” at one of those damn conventions.  I hated those damn talks and those damn conventions, but you did them to get brownie points to make sure, in my case, that I got hired again and to “net-work” which I didn’t do.  So I was giving this talk when I began to sweat profusely.  My shirt was visibly saturated hung on me from the weight on the sweat.  I had to stop before I was done because I thought my head was going to explode.

So I had to worry not just about the talk and what it should be about but also about whether I would have an anxiety attack, and sweat all over the place, and crumble up like a wet rag or maybe just pee myself.

(to be continued)

I don’t remember what city this interview was in, but it was the very late 80’s, maybe early 90s, and I was up somewhere in this huge hotel hanging out in the corridor.  Through the door you could usually hear them interviewing the person ahead of you; I didn’t like that so I would walk far enough away that I couldn’t hear.  Now that was a funny moment—when the person who had just been interviewed walked out and the soon to be interviewed walked in.  Most of the time the former and the latter wouldn’t even look at each other in spite of their shared misery or maybe because of it.

So I walked into this one and a couple of guys are sitting behind the hotel table, and what do my eyes behold but an ashtray.  No, two ashtrays, and one was overflowing with butts.  I couldn’t believe it.  In all my interviews before and after, no ashtray and no butts.  I relaxed all over just at the sight of an ashtray with butts.  So few people smoked at these conventions that usually I stuck them out of sight in my bag or something rather than carry them in my pocket where people might notice.  But these two guys were flagrant smokers or they wouldn’t have left the ashtray and the butts out like that.

We introduced ourselves and I waited a decorous interval so I wouldn’t seem overly excited and asked would they mind if I smoked since there was an ashtray right out there in the open with butts in it.  They said, no, they wouldn’t mind.  So I lit up and they lit up and there we were puffing away.  Damn that was one relaxed interview.  We even had some laughs.  Usually I would try to make some little joke to get myself relaxed, but most of the time those people seemed impervious to laughter.  But not these guys.  They yucked away.

 I left the interview as usual not knowing if I had done a good job or not.  But I felt good after.  I had a good time and when I left and said it had been a pleasure to meet them, I meant it.  That made it alright for some reason.  Even if I never heard from them again, it was OK.

 By this time I had given up looking for jobs in literature.  I had switched over to writing since that’s what I was doing and I had published a couple of articles in the area.  So if the little job blurb said, Romantics or Romanticism, I just ignored it, even thought that’s what I had written my dissertation about.  Instead I looked at the listings for “teachers in composition/rhetoric.”  Usually it said PhD in Literature or Rhetoric required.  That was because at that time they hadn’t yet started churning out ill-educated people in Rhetoric, so to get anybody for they job they had to say PhD in Literature too though you had to have a demonstrated interest in writing and plenty of experience at doing it.

The smokers had advertised a position for someone to head their little composition program.  Mostly in their case that meant working with the Teaching Assistants and making sure they had some idea what the heck they were doing and other administrative chores with plenty of writing classes thrown in for good measure.  After that interview, I thought well maybe I had a shot.

(to be continued)

Damn!  I am aggravated.  I don’t need aggravation.  It wears me out.  And I am aggravated by one of those things—I should  by now have developed a tougher hide—that makes me aggravated to be aggravated about.

But I am walking from the parking lot to the the computer room to run some stuff off for my classes that start in a couple of days, and I bump into this guy I have known for years.  Most all of our socializing has been of the parking lot walk and talk variety with few varaitions.  But he’s ok and I like him to the extent that I know him.  So I ask him how many years has he been coming out to the university to get ready for the first day of classes—because clearly that’s what he is doing too—and he says 36.  And you, he asks.  26, I say.

And then he goes on to talk about how much better he has had it than me, what with his being a tenured faculty person who gets to teach literature and pretty much whatever literature he wants, and he wonders how I have stood teaching one thing—writing and being told on top of that what kind of writing to teach—for 26 years.

And the guy does have it better.  He’s about five years older than I  and wasn’t apparently bothered by the draft and finished his PhD in 1968.  Those were the glory days.  Even thought he graduated from nowhere U, his advisor wrote letters for him to three places.  And all three wanted him.  Back then you were a shoe in.  And he got tenure and teaches four classes a year while I teach 8, and gets sabbaticals which I don’t and never will get, and makes at least twice as much as I do, probably 20 thousand more than that.

So I go run off the stuff I was going to run off, and driving home realize that I am aggravated by my talk with this guy.  And it’s hard too because I know he was trying in his own way to show some sympathy for my “plight.”  So why am I aggravated?  It’s the tenure thing I guess.  He got it and I didn’t and as far as I can see he is and was no more qualified to get it than I was or am. 

He got it and I didn’t because of timing.  That’s all and the fact that it is makes the whole thing seem accidental and contingent.  What’s that old song, “Born to late for you to notice me…”  .  And then there’s the fact of tenure itself—that it exists and functions as a sort of invisible wall or divide between those of us who have it those who don’t.  He can just sort of assume that I have had it hard because I have been a teacher of writing and he gets to teach literature and he loves doing that, of course.  

And assumes I would love it too and must feel terrible that I don’t.  When if the facts be known, I don’t know how people who teach literature these days can justify their existences.  They really aren’t doing diddly—though I am honest enough to admit that I might have preferred the diddly that they are doing to  the diddly I am doing. It’s a more prestigious form of diddly.

So I am aggravated and as usual not about one simple thing but about a whole complex of aggravation.

In any case, I was so upset by all the people being fired, and feeling myself as if I were one of them and not rehired, as was in fact the case, led me to perceive that my grasp of reality was off a bit.  I had of course known that for a very long time, given my seven years in the hole, and the results of the MMPP saying I was a danger to myself and others, and getting out of the draft because I was nuts.  But with my new self-terminating one year contract, I would be making something like 18,000 dollars in the upcoming year (this was 1981 maybe) so I could afford to seek the assistance of a professional.

So not only was I the first person in my family to get a PhD, I was also the first to seek the help of a psychotherapist.  The two things are not unrelated.  Working class people do not seek the assistance of psychotherapists, though they will take meds if they have a doctor who prescribes them, but a shrink—that’s a different matter.  As one working class friend put it, he could never go to a shrink because doing so was just too self-involved and self-indulgent.  That’s how I felt about it too. 

And going to a shrink seemed as if you were sort of officially declaring that you were a nut.  If you didn’t go to a shrink, you could think that, while you were nuts, you were not really nuts, just sort of psychologically off your feed, or maybe a bit moody, you know, or perhaps given to the “blues.”  Hell, lots of people feel like crap till the day they die.  That doesn’t mean they are nuts.

But this shrink thing didn’t make any sense unless you accepted, at least provisionally, that you were nuts.  Why else would you go to see a shrink and pay that shrink money to talk with you unless you were nuts.  I took the whole thing too seriously I guess.  I hadn’t been raised middle class, and didn’t know that for some middle class people going to a shrink was more of a lifestyle choice like buying a BMW or something.  I didn’t know that some people—way up there on the social and financial scale—were not ashamed or embarrassed to go to a shrink but actually competed with each other as to who had the most famous or expensive shrink.

So not only was going to a shrink a lifestyle choice—to help you over life bumps or to help you maximize your potential and become self-actualized—it was a status symbol.  But these people most went to righteous Freudian guys where you went like three or four times a week and paid an arm and a leg to do it.  For me getting a shrink was not a lifestyle choice.  I was not concerned about self-actualizing my potentials but about falling off the face of the earth.  Also I couldn’t afford a status symbol shrink.  I needed a bargain basement Wal-Mart sort of shrink. 

Being around more middle class people I had heard a few of them—fellow graduate students or visiting lecturers—mention having gone to a shrink for this or that.  They didn’t seem embarrassed by it but then they always went for something pretty specific—like, my mother just died, or I was having a lifestyle transition.  Me though I knew I looking for a bargain basement shrink because I was nuts.

One morning in May or early June I walked into the English Department mail room and there’s an official letter in my box that says, “We are happy….”  When they start off like that usually something good was in the letter, and there was because they were happy to offer me one of those self-terminating contracts for the upcoming year.  A couple of other Visiting Lecturers were in there checking their mail too, and one, a lady I liked, opened her letter and turned red and put her hands over her eyes and walked out, and another guy gave a grunt, sort of like he had been hit in the stomach, and walked out.

Turns out their letters had not started with “We are happy…,” but with whatever words people use as the lead into “You are fired…”  Over fifty percent of the Visiting Lecturers—and there were a good 30 of us by that time—had been fired.  And nobody knew why either because the Department with its four years and out rule were under no obligation to tell you why you were fired.  Hell, they had done more than they were legally required to do by just telling us we had been hired.  Or fired.

And for weeks nobody could look anybody in the eye because nobody knew who had been fired and who hadn’t and it was too damn awkward to ask, unless the person happened to be a friend.  Because whatever the reason might have been for the mass firing, everybody knew that somebody had sat in an office, made a list of the Visiting Lecturers, and then drew a line between the hired and the fired.  The hired being good enough to continue; the fired not being good enough for whatever unknown reasons.  So if you told somebody you were fired, you were just a loser, and if you told somebody you were hired, you probably were a kiss-ass suck up who had cultivated the right connections or fucked the boss.

I spent hours talking to the people who had not been hired.  I couldn’t leave the place. On the way out to the parking lot, I would walk by the office of a fired person and lean in and ask them how they were doing, and end up sitting there listening to them lament and both of us chewing things over to figure out what had happened for hours at a time.

 I began to realize that something was out of whack in my response to the situation.  I really didn’t feel good about getting rehired; I honestly didn’t feel any sort of secret glee or inward sense of superiority.  I felt terrible.  Maybe it was the survivor syndrome or something.  Like everybody on the airplane dies in the crash, but you and you go around saying, “Why me, Lord?”  And given my complete lack of self esteem or self worth that was a hard question to answer unless God was just an arbitrary jerk.  This event precipitated a form of life-crisis that led me to seek the aid of a psychotherapist.

 As it turns out though, the event was a non-event.  Everybody by the middle of the summer was rehired.  As it turned out, the money for funding us was slow coming down the bureaucratic pike.  Whoever the boss was knew the money was more than likely coming down the pike.  But we were Visiting Lecturers so nobody had to explain anything to us, and firing a bunch of us was a good way to remind everybody: your contract is self-terminating.

I was lucky while I looked for work elsewhere to have a full time job as a teacher of writing at a university.  I was not a true faculty member—one with tenure and the right to vote on issues of faculty governance—but something called a Visiting Lecturer.  In the academic manual this position was described vaguely in a couple of lines.  Actually none of us Visiting Lecturers were Visiting, so what “visiting” really meant was temporary.

The university started using this position a great deal in the early 80s because they had become tenure “heavy.”  The problem with tenure, for the institution, is that a huge chunk of money is locked into one person for the entire working life of that person.  If you are tenure heavy you have too much money locked in too far into the future for too many people, so that the university is like a giant with shackles around its ankles.  It can’t move without falling all over itself.  

So to achieve a degree of fiscal flexibility, the U. started hiring temps on year to year contracts.  That’s what a Visiting Lecturer was.  A temp.  We were given what were officially called, in the letter telling us we had a job, “self-terminating” contracts.  Self-terminating.  Sort of like a contract that commits suicide at the end of a fiscal year.  In practice, this meant that at the end of a year you were to assume you had been terminated, unless you heard otherwise.  

One was not to expect a letter indicating one had been terminated or certainly nothing to explain why one had been terminated.  Rather one was simply to assume one had been terminated at the moment one signed the contract.  If one did not receive a letter saying one had another self-terminating contract one was simply to disappear into the sunset.

Also the Visiting Lecturer was to understand that after he or she had received four such self-terminating contracts one was terminated.  The fourth contract was the terminal self-terminating contract. When one’s fourth contract had terminated, one was to pack up and disappear into the sunset because no further contracts would be forthcoming.

Why four years and not five or six years?  One might ask if one has one of those self-terminating contracts.  Legal things we figured.  Six years is about the point where most people who are on a tenure track get tenure or not.  That’s the typical “probationary” period.  So we figured that they picked four because it was not six.  Six would make the Visiting Lecturer position resemble a tenure track position, and that might be misinterpreted by, say, a Court of Law as implying the possibility to permanent employment.  So four was the rule not six, and this became known among Lecturers as four years and out.

Many of my colleagues from middle class backgrounds really didn’t understand this self-terminating contract in an elemental way.  They thought it was unjust.  I didn’t think it was just or unjust.  Just the way it was.  The boss is the boss and you are not.  It’s simple really.

Like the old man said life is making the best of a bad job.  Except for one semester when I was getting my Masters, I had never taught more than one writing class a semester or a quarter.  But when I was working for my PhD theEnglish Department got word that I had pretty well finished my dissertation, so they gave me three classes to teach in my last quarter as Teaching Assistant.  Technically, this wasn’t supposed to be legal, but they figured I would be done with the teaching by the time the paper work caught up to me.

Teaching three classes of writing per quarter is a lot different than teaching one.  By the numbers one is teaching 66% more than one did before.  But that’s not how it works really.  The first class is 33%, the second is 33%, and the third is 50%.  That third one is the back breaker.  I had those classes all on the same day, and by the time I was done, I had nothing left.  I was drained.  Then you had to mark up and respond to 75 papers four times a quarter rather than 25 papers four times a quarter.

I felt pretty bad.  I just couldn’t do all the things I had done when I had taught one class.  I couldn’t see the students as frequently in my office, I couldn’t remember their names, I couldn’t spend the same amount of time responding to their papers.  I told the same jokes over and over in class repeating myself and not even knowing it.  I honestly did not think I was doing my job properly and was letting my students and myself down.

But I had to make a living; I had to make the best of a bad job.  That’s how and what it is.  Rarely does one do anything under the ideal conditions for doing it.  There’s always some major fly in the ointment, like some Moby Dick of a fly.  Some people lay brick on foundations that are crooked while their hands are freezing from the cold.  Some doctors are so emotionally overload with what they have to do they become pill popping addicts and operate on people while completely loaded.  You do what you have to do, I guess, is the motto to make the best of a bad job.

I have heard of places—though they are few and far between—where people teach two writing classes a quarter and have less than 20 people in a class.  That approaches ideal conditions (although I have no idea what other rotten conditions might be interfering with these ideal conditions).  I am a good teacher but I will never know just how good I might be or might have been had I been able to teach under ideal conditions.  Instead, what once felt like a short cut is now just the way I do things, what once felt like not being responsible is being responsible.

So you adjust to the bad job.  Screw it!  What’s the use?  You can’t go around flagellating yourself because the conditions of the job make it impossible for you to do the job right.  That means going around being constantly irritated, upset, and chafing at the limitations of what you do.  Instead, you forget that you are making the best of a bad job.  You are just doing the job.

I wasn’t a total idiot, I guess.  I knew when I started working on the PhD that the job market in literature had changed radically. Colleges and Universities just weren’t hiring as they had in the 60s and early 70s.  I am no economist so I can’t say why this happened.  But maybe it had to do partly with the baby-boomers.  I was one of those and, while perhaps the percentage of persons with PhDs in lit. had not gone up, the raw numbers had gone up because the baby-boomers were a huge generation.

So supply exceeded demand and demand too had lessened.  I don’t know why that was either, but I think it had to do with two things: the Arab Oil Crisis, and in California the tax payer revolt.  I think the Arab Oil Crisis shook the economy to the core.  We were vulnerable and spending accordingly became more conservative.  And in California and eventually the rest of the country the tax payer revolt, as it was called, undermined the funding base for public colleges and universities.

At the time though, I figured I would give it a shot and maybe I would be the exception to the rule.  You never know.  I guess everybody who plays a long shot thinks he or she will be the exception to the rule.  I wasn’t alone at least in thinking I was special.  At one convention I remember this guy, who had written a book already, and who was, at the time of the convention, on a Fulbright Scholarship teaching in Yugoslavia, I think, when it was still Yugoslavia.  In any case, he had applied to numerous places because his book had just come out and, though he had not received a single letter for an interview, he flew half way around the world from Yugoslavia to San Francisco just in case a letter had been sent and he had missed it because he was living half way around the world. But he didn’t have a single interview.

I learned the hard way that they call it a rule because it is a rule and the word “exception” indicates something pretty rare.  I didn’t turn out to be one in any case.  And while I had some inkling that larger things like the economy were not under my personal control, I tended to feel that my inability to be an exception was, well, my fault.  Work hard, keep your nose clean and you would move up.  But it wasn’t happening.  I concluded that I had to be in some way deeply flawed. 

In light of my previous nervous breakdown and advanced state of neurosis, this was really easy for me to think.  I had done something wrong or I had failed to do something right. Or maybe I had just plain been cursed from birth. So I did what I could and read and wrote articles because I thought that if I could get a few things published maybe that would make somebody somewhere pay attention to me.  So for maybe five years that’s all I did in my “spare” time, read and write, write and read.  Then I would send off what I had written and it would be rejected.

Doing this I managed to increased my rejection rate astronomically.  Not only was a being rejected for job interviews, the articles I was writing so I could be rejected for job interviews were also being rejected.

The job market scene was pretty strange.  I was unfamiliar with it. For one thing you had to have clothes.  All the other jobs I had got, except for the one at the department store, had required only that a person show up not naked.   But the interviews for jobs at the big convention required that a person dress up.  Well, actually I suppose you could have turned up wearing jeans and a t-shirt but you would not have made a favorable impression.

Fortunately Aunt Susan, as part of her attempt to recognize my accomplishments and make my mother feel like a piker, had bought me some clothes.  She had bought me a suit, but it was a real 70’s thing and not right for the interviews.  But she had got me shoes and a shirt or two and a belt, and I went and bought a jacket and some slacks so I looked OK.   But OK was it.  I didn’t and don’t know anything about clothes but I could tell that some of those people at those conventions were really, really dressed up.  They looked sharp and the clothes weren’t cheap. For some reason, the conventions in NY were the worst; people had these wonderful looking overcoats for the colder weather.

Not that how I dressed made much difference since mostly I stayed holed up in my room for the duration coming out only for an interview or to walk around whatever city I was in.  And for that I wore the usual.  I hadn’t traveled at all, except from the south to California and that was when I was ten years old.  I had been on a jet plane before for some reason, so that was not completely new.

The first convention I went to was in NY.  To save money I took the red eye.  That was one huge plane with hardly anybody on it.  I didn’t sleep a wink and arrived before dawn at Kennedy.  I didn’t know how to work the subway so I got on a tram that deposited me at the Port Authority.  It was freaking dark.  And the only people around were bums, so I started looking and found a spot where taxis were hanging out,  and got in one and told the driver where I wanted to go, and acted like I knew what I was doing though that was the first time I had been in a taxi.

The hotel was the Hilton, and of course, when I got there, my room was not available; I was a bit startled since I was not completely familiar with check in and check out times.  I didn’t know what I was going to do, till a clerk said helpfully they could store my stuff till my room opened up around 11.  So there I was at around 7 in the morning, dead on my fucking feet, with five hours till I could lie down.

So I went out walking and looking for a place to eat and I found a deli with lots of small tables and people sitting around reading the paper and eating bagels and drinking coffee, so I went in got a paper, a bagel, a coffee and sat down.  I liked the place.  It was well lit and warm. I folded up my overcoat and put it over the back of a chair.  I hadn’t noticed that other people were hanging their overcoats on racks by the door.  When in Rome do exactly what the Romans do because when I went to leave I saw somebody had stepped on the tail of overcoat and left a long black mark on the London Fog my aunt had bought for me.

God, this must have been 1982. 

So seven or eight years during the 80’s and some too in the 90’s, I went out on the market looking for a job in lit.  The process started in October.  That’s when the biggest professional organization for people in lit, the Modern Language Association, put out the job list.  Every college looking to hire somebody from Harvard to Podunk U would send in a little description of the kind of position they had open and it would go into that list.  The list wasn’t free by the way; you had to pay money for the wretched thing.

The first edition of it would come out in October, another in November, one in December, and one would come out in June.  The first two usually had pretty much the same job listings.  A few new ones would appear in November, but mostly the November list had fewer openings because many of the colleges that had listed in October by that time would have closed their searches.  So the October one was the really important one.

I would get it in the mail and I wouldn’t be able to look at it for several days.  I had to steel myself and then I would go through it looking for jobs for which I might be qualified.  I would circle the ones I thought I might be qualified for and then I would go through the list again and write letters of application to the places I had circled.  This was onerous work.

Then you sent the letters off and sat there and waited.  Sometimes I never heard from some of the colleges at all.  Mostly I got rejection letters.  Rejection after rejection after rejection.  But sometimes I would get a letter saying that the college would like to interview me at the big MLA convention held each year in the week right after Christmas.  These conventions were held in cities all over the USA in Chicago, or NY, or San Francisco or Washington D.C. and a couple of times in other places. 

I had to pay for the plane tickets and the room where I would stay at the convention.  So if I got an interview I had to decide whether it would be worth it to spend all that money to go to the convention.  Usually, I was so desperate, especially when I first started looking, I would go even in the college I was interviewing for was at the end of the known universe.

Then I would go to the convention and be interviewed—a couple of times I had three interviews at one convention—the week after Christmas, and then I would sit and wait to see if I would be called to the campus for an interview there since most colleges would invite at least three candidates for on campus interviews.  Sometimes I had to wait clear into March before I heard that I had been rejected by all of the places that had interviewed me.

Maybe a half dozen times over the years, I was invited to an on campus interview, and then I would wait to hear if I got the job.  Twice I was not notified until June.  So over a decade the guts of my year were eaten up emotionally by the waiting and anxiety attendant upon the job search.

As I have previously said I had no idea what I was getting into when I became an English major.

I had thought that, taken together, these entries might constitute a “success story” in the Great American tradition of rags to riches.  Not, certainly, an epic or grand one, like Marilyn Monroe coming from nowhere to stardom and then suicide;  more minimalist, surely, but nowhere to somewhere, at least.  But that’s hard for me to maintain when I consider my point of departure not a "nowhere" but a very distinct and particular somewhere in time and space.

But that place because it is in time is no longer what it was: the very rural south after WWII.  The last time I visited I had a hard time recognizing the place; changes are occurring at an accelerated rate.  Not far from where we lived now sits a monstrous Wal-Mart distribution center.

And the place where I was going, well, for a very long time I really had no idea where that was.  I just moved along as I could doing my best to stand on my feet.  And when things settled down a little and I aimed to get the PhD and got it, things did not turn out as expected.  Back in the late 60s a person could have walked in with a PhD from anywhere tech and got some fairly decent offers for a job in lit. But by the time I got mine the market for PhDs in literature had collapsed.  With that the place you had been graduated from became all the more important, and I had graduated from a university that at that time was probably not ranked in the top 50% of graduate schools in literature.

Also the time had come for institutions of higher education to hire women.  I think this was the right thing to do, but being male the trend didn’t help me any.  I went out on the market, wrote letters of application, went to conferences, was interviewed, was called to campuses, was interviewed and nothing over the next ten years turned up.  By that point, the very concept of a PhD in literature had changed substantially. 

I wanted a job at a small liberal arts college.  I would have been an excellent teacher at one of those places, involved and concerned.  I might having students for four year stretches have developed significant relationships with some few of them and reaped the rewards eventually of that in respect and honored memory.  I would have read too and written on literature, and I would have enjoyed that.  And I would have reached the holy grail of tenure.

So maybe this isn’t at all a rags to riches tale.  My nowhere is somewhere and my somewhere vanished before my eyes.  So that in the years since receiving the PhD I have gone on pretty much as I did before, moving along and trying to stay on my feet. 
 

I started entries here a month or so before my father died (and I knew he was dying) and not long after I turned sixty.  It felt like the thing to do.  I have long externalized stuff by writing about it and that sometimes gives me at least a momentary hold on what I am feeling.  But I don’t know about all this looking back.  William Blake said, drive your plow through the bones of the dead.  That I think means “screw the past” and/or “forget.”  I like that idea really and am a firm believer in the powers of positive forgetting.  Thank god, we do forget.

 But I have long worried about the death of my parents and how that might affect me.  I remember at college a Professor of Philosophy, much beloved, who, a month after his mother died, committed suicide.  Psychological dependence is a powerful thing, and while I cannot say that I have positive feelings about either of my parents, I do think that powerful negative feelings may also indicate signs of dependence or at least attachment.  Working these feelings through may be important.

Also over the years, I have tried to tell, now and then, stories about my growing up, and while my auditors generally laughed, at one point somebody would always say, “You should write a book!”  In light of my paranoia, I did not feel people were saying, “You have great material there,” but “Would you please shut up, go away, and write a book.”  I can understand how stories of homicidal rage might perturb people, and I have a strong anal streak too that some find offensive.  I guess not everybody liked hearing that my father had become so constipated that he had taken to digging out the shit with a spoon.

Well, what can I say?  It happened.

While I did want to do justice to the darker material, I wanted also to be humorous about it.  But I am not sure I have always managed to achieve comic effects, and some people might find funny some things that I don’t.  So that part is confusing, especially since one of my readers says that I appear in these entries too frequently angry, rage full, mentally and perhaps criminally unstable.  In addition, this reader continued, you are not the person in these pages.  You are in fact caring, compassionate, very intelligent and don’t use fuck every other word.  

Well, that’s true too. But when I wrote these entries I didn’t try to filter them through my more compassionate side.  I wrote from the emotion that the particular memory evoked, and these emotions were not always compassionate or caring.  Sometimes, they were homicidal.  I can’t do anything about that.   Though I should say that I have never murdered anyone and am in fact opposed to murder on general grounds.

I write these remarks because I feel that I may be reaching the end of what I wanted to remember about my mother, my father, and my family.  But who knows, something may turn up in the memory banks or I may go in another direction.

Down to the last feeble days of his life, I feared the sound of my father’s voice raised in anger.  Hell, here I was an old man myself, a few months from sixty, and he could still scare me even though a stiff breeze could have knocked him over.  He outwitted me by getting that old.  It would not have been seemly for me to have gone up to that dried up old man and knocked him flat to the ground and kicked him repeatedly as I had so deeply desired to do in my youth.  But fear breeds anger and even when he was dried up, I could still feel that heated impulse to do him grievous bodily harm down there poking at the inside of my chest like that monster in Alien.

As a youth, in my teens and in my twenties, I had also desired to knock him down and to beat him to a living pulp.  But prohibitions against raising your hand to your father are deeply interwoven in the fabric of the superego, and to top it off I was fairly certain that had I attacked with vigor, he would have felt little or no compunction, about knocking the crap out of me.  He was, throughout most of my adult life, bigger than I.  I was skin and bones and while he was too mostly all those years of laying brick and blocked had developed his shoulders and arms.

Being a male or developing male hood—or whatever you might call it—is a treacherous thing and has much more to do with the male’s relation to the father than to the mother.  He was a first born son and so was I.  We would inevitably have knocked heads, I think, even in the best of conditions.  But I burn somehow when in my mind’s eye I see, as if I am peeping through a keyhole, the old man with one of my infant brothers.  The old man holds him up on his fingers and encourages him to walk and when he does the old man reaches out and pulls down the diapers around the infants ankles and he falls, not far, because infants don’t have far to fall.

I can’t quite describe the ripping inside I still feel, as if muscle were being pealed from bone, when I think of that little spectacle.  My father laughing, the baby falling, and feeling myself torn between laughing and wanting to scream, what the hell are you doing, especially, when he would do it again and again.  And below that, just below, to feel fear at what might happen if I did scream just that: what the fuck do you think you are doing?  So the whole thing just gets wrapped up inside in an explosive ball.

When I mentioned to a kindly friend that my father was on the verge of death she said be sure not to leave things unsaid.  Have you said what you have wanted to say, have you asked the questions you wanted to ask, because if you don’t it feels terrible if later there were things you wanted to say and wanted to ask?  I assured her that I had asked all the questions I wanted to ask. I did not say that the only thing I had not done that I was sure I would regret upon his death was that I had not beaten the living crap out of him while I still had the opportunity.

Some day I hope not to feel that and I will be all the better for it.

 The old lady didn’t want any of her boys to get married.  This is pretty strange if you stop to think about it.  Especially since, as I believe I have documented, she pretty much hated men down to her and their very core.  But living in the semi-delusional world that she regularly inhabited, I don’t think she was able to distinguish us, her sons, as men, from her father, as a man.  He, as I have said, was a pretty wretched guy who abandoned my my mother and her family.

My spot analysis then: we are dealing with abandonment issues.  For her boys to get married would mean they had abandoned her, and that meant moreover, at another level, that she had lost control over them.  It’s all symbolic sex/gender stuff and runs, in my estimation, deep down into the old unconscious.  That’s how she kept the old man around, not by her inherent attactive or lovable qualities, whatever those might have been, but by stark manipulation.  And, of course, being able to manipulate a man in that way pretty her much put her in the driver’s seat of her odd universe.

When I let it be known that I was planning to get married—this is some time in the early 80’s and I was almost 39 years old—the old lady and the old man decided to pay me a pre-marriage visit.  I tried my best to dissuade them, but one of my brothers too live in the area and so they pretended that they mostly wanted to visit him. 

I was then treated to the spectacle of my mother sitting at the kitchen table in the wretched apartment I and my wife-to-be were living at the time and going on for a good twenty minutes about how awful marriage was; how if she had it all over to do again, she would not do it; how it only lead to heart ache and misery; how you never knew what you were getting into; and how she had been led into it only by her innocence and the fact that my father had deceived her into thinking that he was a gentleman. 

And all this was delivered with vehemance with my father—the man she had been married to since 1943--sitting right at her elbow.  Whatever effects her description of marriage as a regular shop of horror might have upon him apparently did not concern her.  He for his part sat perfectly still and absolutely mute.  He uttered not a word.  And after a while—thank the Lord--they left.

I walked them out to the street and as I turned to return to the house, I saw the old lady fumbling to open the passanger door and the old man rearing back to throw his keys and key chain with considerable force directly at her head.  He missed however and the keys went over to the other side of the street.  She, without a word, retrieved them, unlocked her door and off they went—into whatever hell it was they lived in.

Who knows what he felt?  Who knows what she felt?  I don’t know and in some ways I am glad I don’t.  Although in some ways, sadly, I do.

Sometimes I wondered if something might be wrong with the old man, aside that is from his being a curser, a farter, and a petty tyrant.  Something, I mean, instead, wrong that might explain these “behaviors” as mere epiphenomenon of the phenomenon itself, what ever that might be.  Many theories as to the source of his sudden explosions or spasms of rage were bruited about over the years.  That he had a “bad temper” did really not get at a cause and didn’t either really do justice to the phenomenon.

A kind of genetic cause was hinted at.  Over the years, I became familiar in larger family circles with the phrase “Tingle Tantrums.”  At one family reunion, one of the non-Tingles put up a sign, I have heard, saying “No Tingle Tantrums.” These tantrums or fits were then generally recognized, acknowledged, and were in part to be excused as something to which those who had any admixture of Tingle blood might be prone.  When struck by a tantrum a Tingle would spit, sputter, stutter, curse till he turned red, throw things, and generally exhibit signs of a person about to blow his top.

More locally, at different times, the old lady thought the old man had high blood pressure, low blood pressure, a thyroid problem, a digestive disorder, diabetes and hyperglycemia.  

I have no idea myself.  But I found most curious his attitude towards the pigeons that one of my younger brothers had decided to keep.  I don’t know how many there were, maybe a half dozen, and they lived in a pretty large cage that hung, appended to a rafter, over the deck that was the roof of the hole where I stayed.  I did not like these pigeons much, though I generally like animals, because they looked ill at ease so cooped up and they were quite dirty with their droppings and all.

At any case, when the sun came up, the pigeons would wake up.  Many birds it seems sleep at night just as humans do.  They would tuck their heads under their wings and stand on one leg the night through (though people do not do this).  Come dawn, they woke and began to converse with each other in friendly morning greetings. Pigeons do make a noise, but nothing like your cackling chickens.

Their sounds never woke me, but on more than one occasion I heard the kitchen sliding screen door squeak open, my father’s footsteps pounding on my roof, and then I would hear the old man yelling at the pigeons, “Shut up.” I would lie there then wide awake very aware now that the pigeons were talking up a storm.  I grew tense fearing another eruption.  And indeed, at least, on one occasion it came; the old man returned, bellowing in fury at the pigeons to shut up and this time shook and rattled their cage. 

Now, I know I am dense in some ways, but even I had the sense to see that screaming at pigeons to shut up and rattling their cage was bound to have the opposite effect of shutting the birds up.  True, for an instant of a moment, dead silence reigned but then the pidgeons would launch into a panic striken discourse. And then I would hear from inside the house, the old man screaming in a fearsome way for the fucking birds to shut up.

How could one become so irritated at the sounds of birds that one would forsake all reason and logic in one’s attempt to get them to shut up?

I don’t know what was wrong.  But I know it frightened me.

Amazing.  I was going through a box of junk, old letters and such, and found an article, dated 1963, reporting the winners of the essay contest in my local area.  It reads in part:  “William ranks fifth in his class.  He is looking forward to a career in teaching though the field of his major hasn’t been decided.”  I am William—god, I hate that.  Mostly I just forget that’s my first name.  But what’s amazing is the career in teaching part.  That must have been the old lady talking because I don’t remember having thought about teaching as a career, except maybe as something I had a pretty good chance at doing.

 But that’s how it turned out.  Teaching has been my primary source of income since 1973.  That’s about 33 years of teaching, I guess.  At one point, I thought, when I got my PhD, I would be a professor instead. That doesn’t involve much teaching.  But that didn’t work out and I became a teacher of writing at a University.  That’s what I have done most of my adult life.

Looking back I think maybe it was in the cards.  The title of my PhD thesis was:  “Romantic Thought: Education and Alienation.”  Seems as if I had been thinking about education all along—and alienation too, as part of that.  For a long time I thought about writing a book for which I have only the title, “Growing Up Educated” which is supposed to be an allusion to another book called, “Growing Up Absurd.”  I guess that’s because I decided somewhere along the line that education as it is currently practiced is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

But I was lucky, I suppose, in a way.  Because I turned out to be pretty good at the teaching racket.  I have always taken it really seriously.  I think about it a lot; and I feel almost that I have been given a sort of public trust, and I should try to live up to that trust and do the best job that I can.  But I have wondered why I have stuck it out so long.  The reason could be pretty simple: fear of unemployment.  I shouldn’t minimize that reason because I don’t think I have ever fully grasped how much those early poverty years filled me with a deep fear of there being no limit to how far a person could fall.

But I don’t think fear makes a person good at teaching.  And I think I am pretty good and I have thought a good deal about why that might be.  I am not sure I have reached the bottom of it.  But one day I visited an elementary school class in creative movement that my wife teaches and afterwards the kids were all putting their shoes back on.  But one kid was left there.  He was retarded, as people used to say, or developmentally disabled, as they say now, and I could see that the idea of tying his shoes was wearing him out.

So I went over, knelt down, tied his shoes, and when I was done, instinctively, tapped the side of his shoe to indicate I was done and he got up and left wordlessly.  I sat there realizing that I had tapped a lot of shoes in my day.  One brother is seven years younger than I, another 14, and I do believe I had tied and tapped their shoes a good deal in the years before Velcro.  In some complex or confused way, my being a teacher and being good at it and still receiving some satisfaction from doing it is related to tying my brothers’ shoe laces. 

I have generally attributed my obsession with language to my mother.  Actually I should say my obsession with the English language, since I don’t know or really give a hoot about any of the others, except Latin maybe and it doesn’t count. She was the one who consistently harassed my ass to make sure I spoke grammatically not out of any respect for the language but to insure I did not sound like a hick or pick up too thick a southern accent.

But I must say also that the old man exhibited some degree of linguistic liveliness one might say.  He told off-color jokes that we were not allowed to hear but which usually hinged on some ridiculous pun.  I know he liked, “Woman who fly upside down have big crack up.”  And while farting is sort of a universal language and not essentially English, his prowess in that area certainly contributed to my particularly low sense of humor.

More importantly though he used expressions such as “son of a gun.”  This was used to express surprise and even consternation.  He also said things like, “I did not cotton to it.”  He once said, “I haven’t seen you since you since Hector was a pup.”  Here we can perhaps see a classical reference in the mention of Hector.  Or: “Mad as a wet hen.” These were mostly all southern ruralisms passed down no doubt from generation to generation.  Though one of his favorites—It’s as cold as a witch’s tit in a brass brassiere—had to be of more recent origins since the brassiere only appeared in the early 20^th century.

I have already mentioned, “Kiss my rusty red bunny” and “bleed my whistle.”  These euphemisms were designed I do believe to be if anything more repellant that the actual “low” expressions, those being “Kiss my ass” and “take a piss.”

I have also mentioned swearing at which he was prodigious, the most classic being “goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch,” said as one word.  Also he would say in moments of frustration, “If I had a shot gun I would blow my fucking head off.”  At which I generally had to stifle my urge to say, “And boy do I wish the fuck you had one!”

 Perhaps most irritating was his tendency to turn the language into a code.  For example, one would be sitting at the dinner table and he would say, “PPMB.”  This was confusing until somebody muttered, “Pass him the butter,” since PPMB stood for Please, pass me the butter, one of the rules of his code being to leave out the articles, “a”,”an,” and “the.”

Mostly, I found this practice so ridiculous I could not be bothered to figure them out except for WFDS which through dint of sheer repetition I came to understand as What’s For Desert Squirt.  Sometimes he would come out with a whopper such as, “FDCQRTS,” which nobody could figure out, and since he would never explain them, as far as I know some of his deepest thoughts were never understood.

We were not allowed to put our elbows on the table or burp or fart while at the table. Although the old man could fart anywhere he wanted it being his god given right to do so.  We were not either to sing, at table, or hum.  One brother, when early still in years, took to humming uncontrollably.  He did not hum a tune exactly but made a sound like the hum perhaps of an electric generator.  This sound didn’t require that he move his lips.  It just came out of his head sort of and sometimes when he was ordered to stop it, he said that he didn’t know he was doing it.  I believed him since I felt then as now that all us boys were a bit autistic due to sensory deprivation.

We also had to sit erect at a proper distance from the table with no slouching allowed.  We were not to reach either for anything but if something was out of our reach we were to say, Please (the name of whoever was nearest the wanted item) pass X.  When X had been passed you were to say Thank You, and the person who passed it was to say You Are Welcome.  Sometimes this was about all the conversation we had at the table.

Of course, we were to keep our mouths closed while chewing and we were not to speak or hum or sing when our mouths were full. Also we were to chew our food before swallowing.  For a brief period we were required to count our chews, ten being the minimum number necessary before swallowing since the old lady had been influenced at one time by the Great Masticator.  But this command was too difficult to police and was given up as impractical.

Why I was assigned the chore, I don’t know, but there being no girls in the family, I had to set the table.  This was an exacting task.  The knife had to be to the right of the plate, which was to be centered on its place mat, along with the spoon to the outside of the knife, and on the left side was the fork with a paper napkin folded neatly and placed under it.  This made no sense to me since we were all right handed, and placing the utensil we mostly used—i.e. the fork—on the left required making, as far as I was concerned, an unnecessary transfer of the fork from left to right.

Meanwhile the knife, once employed, was placed cattycorner on the edge of the plate with the handle end always to the right.  Moreover, if you had a piece of meat such as a pork chop, you were not to cut the meat all up at once into bite sized bits so as to facilitate the meat’s consumption.  No, you were only to cut off bits of bite sized meat as needed.

Nor were you to make noises with your food, such as gargling noises with your ice tea.

When consuming soup one was not to pick up the bowl and apply it directly to the lips, nor was one to make slurping noises from the spoon.  Further when one neared the end of the soup one was not to tilt the bowl towards one to gather the last remaining fluid.  No, one was to tilt the bowl—contrary to all common sense—away from one.  Additionally, one was not to draw the spoon directly up and to one’s mouth, but away and then up to one’s mouth.

If one ate in this fashion, one would be recognized as having good manners—the purpose of which as far as I was concerned was to make eating as difficult as possible and to increase the possibility of one being yelled at for screwing up one of the rules.  If one was lucky enough to make it through a meal without screwing up, one stood, pushed one’s chair under the table and asked if one might be excused. 

What I was being excused for or from I have no idea.  But I was happy to be excused nonetheless.

I read this article where a working class academic took umbrage with his middle class academic colleagues when they described those who supported gun control as rednecks whose idea of a big Friday night out was going to Wal-Mart.  How could such people who would never think to stereotype a woman or a minority person or a gay person stereotype so completely members of the working class?

Hell, I say if the shoe fits wear it.  My idea of big outing, in light of my working class background, is going to Costco.  My idea of a really big outing is taking a truck load of crap to the dump.  The dump is usually pretty exciting and you get to throw all that shit out on the ground, and the whole place has a powerful odor and lots of birds, plus big tractors and shit like that.  I always found trips to the dump fulfilling.  What the hell is wrong with going to Wal-Mart or Costco or the dump?  If I really felt middle class people had better things to do on Friday nights I might be envious. 

My parents never went on outings.  I have absolutely no recollection of their ever having gone out for example to a movie.  They had two big outings:  Church on Sunday, and Friday evening a trip to the grocery store.  Because they went out to get groceries on Friday evening, the old man frequently bought a roasted chicken at the local market, so there wouldn’t be much to clean up after before they headed out to the grocery store, and when they got back we had to run out to the car immediately and bring the shit in because be damned if the old man was going to carry one of those bags in not when he had us slaves to do it for him.

We did have the obligatory family outing every summer when I was in elementary and maybe junior high to the beach.  Since we were an hour or so drive to the Pacific Ocean I guess we had to take advantage of its presence.  These were dreadful affairs rife with potentials for disaster.  First, since these trips involved roasting weenies, we had to find the ice chest, the charcoal, the charcoal lighter fluid, and the hibachi like thing the old man used to roast the weenies.  By the time we had rounded up the shit necessary to make the trip, I was usually a nervous wreck.

That was followed by the drive.  Before they put in the freeway, there were actually stop lights, and it seemed every time we made the fucking beach trip half the city had also decided to go there.  This made for much swearing and cursing and pleading on the part of the old lady for the old man to drive more carefully.  Then the ultimate horror was locating a parking place near where my mother liked to go on the beach, a place without much sand but with tide pools for educational purposes.  The looking for a parking place could go on for some time attended throughout by cursing and whimpering.  Then there was lighting the fucking coal in the fucking hibachi…

So we usually ended up drinking some lukewarm soft drink and eating weenies in buns with sand in them.  Fuck but I would much rather have gone to Wal-Mart.

During the time I was living in the hole,  brother number 3 broke his arm falling out of a tree up at the elementary school.  I guess he fell out sort of sideways and to protect his head stuck out his arm as people do and broke his forearm.  Those are pretty big bones and to think of breaking one—well, one has to hit the ground pretty hard.  I have never broken a bone, though, playing basketball once, an idiot tripped me and I fell and hyperextended my arm so that it swelled up, at the elbow, to the size of watermelon and I lost all strength in my fingers and the x-ray showed I had fractured the bone a bit right at the joint.

But my brother had a real broken arm that you could see with the naked eye.  Clearly something was not right with that arm; the forearm is supposed to be straight, but this one took a good 60% turn at one point and was clearly headed in the wrong direction.  The bone was not poking through the skin with blood coming out, but it was poking enough to show through the skin that the bone was not in the right place.  Also my brother had gone pale and he was groaning in pain also indicative of a broken bone.

Maybe it was a Saturday or a Sunday; had it not been one of those days I would have put my brother in the car and taken him straight away to the emergency room at the hospital.  But because my parents were there, they were going to take him to the hospital.  I stood by the car waiting to see them off, but when they didn’t come out right away I became alarmed and went to see if something was wrong.  I heard my parents in their room and went to the door to peer in; it was not a room I liked to enter.

My brother was lying on one of their beds—by this time they had separate beds—moaning, and to my consternation, my parents, rather than taking my brother to the hospital, had apparently decided to prepare themselves to go to the hospital.  My father was changing his clothes.  He was putting on his church pants and my mother was telling him what shirt to put on and she was in her little half bath changing into a dress.  Meanwhile my brother was lying their groaning; whereupon I suggested that I would be happy to drive him to the hospital where they could catch up later.  Perhaps detecting a note of judgment in my voice, I was told, in so many words, to fuck off.

I left the room and to this day I don’t understand their behavior.  One of their children was lying there in pain with a broken arm and they decided to take 20 minutes to prepare themselves to go to the hospital.  The old lady even applied make-up.  One would think they were going to see the Pope or something.  I don’t wish to stereotype poor people, but I have wondered if perhaps their dressing up had something to do with having been very poor and feeling that because they were they would be ignored by people like doctors and lawyers and nurses unless they appeared in appropriate attire.

Whatever the underlying cause, I find in the occasion yet another instance of my parents living out their pathetic psychodrama in which my brothers and I were but bit players or even perhaps pieces of furniture. I suspect we are all just bits of each others imaginations but humanity lies in trying to see beyond that.

I didn’t always curse up a storm.  As I reported, when I first told my parents to “got to hell,” I got my mouth soaped up.  That’s a pretty literalistic way of telling a kid not to develop a dirty mouth, but it worked for me for a good while.  Except “fool,” one day I called somebody a “fool” and the old lady snapped at me and said I shouldn’t call anybody a fool because it says in the Bible if you call one of your brethren a “fool” you will go to hell.  I hadn’t heard that one so I said where was it in the Bible which was a mistake since she accused me of talking back, being insolent and so forth.  So I went to look it up myself, but with no luck since as you may have noted many Bibles don’t have an index.

But it’s there all right:

But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca, ' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.

That’s from Matthew and I have no idea what that “Raca” is.

For a long time, I didn’t curse and was pretty proud of myself too.  But one day maybe I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I remember the occasion pretty clearly, I was up at the elementary school sitting in the cool of the shade and watching other little boys my age playing a game of touch football and cursing up a storm.  It was goddamn this and goddamn that!  And fuck you!  And up yours!  Asshole!  And go fuck yourself!

And I remember thinking I wasn’t like those bad little boys since I didn’t use dirty words but, cursed as I am with introspection, I really didn’t like the idea that I was so prim and proper and a regular goody two-shoes.  And I went on like that inside for a while between being a good little boy and being a regular goody two shoes, and after going on at this inward struggle for a bit, I just said fuck it.  I guess you could say I just gave into peer pressure, but if I did, I did it thoughtfully and not without agnoizing over it.

Not that I went on some sort of cursing rampage.  No, what I had decided was that cursing didn’t make a person bad.  But after a while I accustomed myself to fuck this and fuck that, and my father, when it came to cursing, was a pretty good role model since he cursed all the fucking time, most especially, he liked to say goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch.  He also liked to say, well kiss my rusty red bunny.  Which was his socially acceptable way of saying kiss my ass, though what that has to do with a bunny, and a rusty red one at that, I don’t know.  He also liked to go bleed his whistle which meant take a leak or piss.

So I had a pretty good source of off color pungency right in the house and I didn’t have to go far in my neighorhood to meet kids who used fuck like a punctuation mark, as in, “Fuck me, but I am so fucking tired I fucked up and didn’t fucking bring that fucking essay.  But who the fuck cares.  I certainly fucking don’t.”

And of course the biggest fucking foul mouth of all was this guy on the basketball team whose father was a minister.

One day I got this notice that I was eligible to become a member of this secret organization in the Boy Scouts.  At least I had never heard of it.  I don’t know how they got my name or what made them think I was qualified for such an honor.  I was not an Eagle Scout though being a Life Scout, the one right under Eagle, put me pretty high up in the organization, I guess.

I had to go to some sort of class, it seemed, to get into this secret organization and it started at the fucking crack of dawn.  At least it was dark when I reported to the pick up point and then a group of us was driven up into the woods somewhere.  Well, sort of woods.  There were lots of trees hither and thither and open ground and brush and such indicating woods of the kind that grow in Southern California.

There was maybe about 12 or so of us boys, and more adults than usual proporational wise.  We were lined up and addressed being told that starting at 8 in the morning we would take a vow of silence and we would not speak or eat again until 8 that evening.  We weren’t given any options, like four hours of silence and a little eating.  That was it, and while I don’t remember what I thought of all this I was pretty much stuck since I was out in the middle of nowhere without my own mode of transportation, and there was no way I could lead a revolt since I didn’t know any of the boys there since we had been gathered from all over the county for this special occasion.

There was some little talk about Indians and shit, and then we hit the road by which I mean we spent the entire fucking day marching from one patch of trees to another because it was hot.  So we would march and then rest awhile under a bunch of trees and then we would march some more.  Oh, and we could drink water so we would not pass out from the heat.  And we would sit there under the tree and we couldn’t even talk to each other, and if you saw I cowpie and wanted to warn somebody about it, you couldn’t do that. 

Mostly it was awful boring though I did get to feeling pretty hungry and somewhat light headed as the day went on.  And then just as it was starting to get really dark, they did this strange thing and put us in a line and took a rope and wrapped it around the wrist of every boy in that line and then we were supposed to walk following each other in the dark like the blind leading the blind.  I say this because it was a dark night with no moon and you couldn’t see shit. 

I was somewhere in the middle of the line and I got to say that after a little bit that rope wrapped around the wrist began to chafe a good little bit because it was your rough and prickly rope and not your smooth rope.  And then all of a sudden, I stepped directly into a ditch and fell to my knees and that rope just cut into my wrist and I cried out, like, Oh!, and I figured I had flunked out of the whole thing by breaking the vow of silence after wasting a whole goddamn day at it.  And felt pretty ashamed of myself for falling down in the dark and yelling out Oh!

And a while later I got a card saying I was an official member of the “Order of the Arrow,” which was the name of the secret organization.  So I guess I didn’t flunk out though I never heard from them again.

Thoreau says a person should never read the newspapers because really there’s never anything new in them.  Pretty much the same old shit,  different bucket.  He’s right, of course. But it’s really hard not to hear about current events these days what with television, radio, the newspaper and weekly magazines.  They have TV’s on the machines I “work out” on.  I never have mine on; I mean the one on my individual machine.  But the one next to me was on and I saw out of the corner of my eye that some guy is trying to put a luxury hotel, spa, and casino up in outer space.

So in this era of the free market and free enterprise, some entreprenuer is going to commercialize outer space.  So much for the final, fucking frontier; instead a bunch of the mega-rich will be up in outer space partying down.  Of course, there will be a reality TV show about the mega-rich and what they do up in Outer Space.  And the outer space hotel, spa, and casino will generate a stream of outer space pornography over webcams.  

These porns will feature outer space zero gravity fucking.  I think it will prove pretty difficult to fuck in zero gravity, but I am sure they will figure out a way to do it with harnesses perhaps and a lot of velcro.  I wonder if there has already been some secret outer space fucking on the space shuttle, you know for scientific purposes.  I bet some mice have fucked up there.

The next time the WTO and the other members of the fucking global elite want to meet they can meet in the fucking outer space hotel, spa, and casino far away from any possible public disturbances.

So this is what we have come to.  I watched the original moon landing.  I don’t know where I was exactly.  But I remember I was depressed, per usual, and the TV was black and white.  The whole thing involved a lot of waiting and was sort of boring except for those critical moments when there was a possibility the astronauts might kill themselves, like when the rocket took off or they actually landed on the moon.  Officially, at that time, I was against the whole moon thing as a complete waste of money.  Fucking juvenile, given all that needed to be done right here on mother earth.

The arrogance of youth, I guess.  Now I, given the way things have gone, I am not so sure.  When you get right down to it, the moon program was the last great public works program—like the TVA or the building of the interstate highway system after WWII—we have had in this USA.  NASA employed a lot of people, some knowledge was generated, and the whole thing had a purpose, a public purpose.  The whole thing was kind of heroic in a square-jawed, thick headed way.  When Armstrong put his foot in that dust, he made a point of speaking, admittedly in a sexist way, for everybody.

Now we are going to get an outer space hotel, spa, and casino for that the elite of the mega-rich that rules the world.  And also a whole new kind of porn.