Make Us Immortal:

A Family Memoir

by

Mark Scott
PO Box 377
Snowmass CO 81654
970-927-1580
mscott@rmi.org
 “You’ve got to keep going.”
—my mother

“I am not in love, but I’m open to persuasion.”

—Joan Armatrading

“If you don’t become immortal . . .”

—my father

Make Us Immortal:
A Family Memoir

by

Mark Scott
PO Box 377
Snowmass CO 81654
970-927-1580
mscott@rmi.org
Prologue
“Life happens to you, and you miss it.” Twenty-five years ago, when my
father read that sentence, it struck him as accurate, and so he asked me who wrote
it. “I did,” I said. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Are you sure you didn’t take it from
somebody else?” I was pretty sure, but I was in college at the time, reading books
and writing about them, and I couldn’t be certain. I thought it was I who had said
what he felt, even though I disguised it in the second person. Most writers, I was
finding out, disguised their authority in the third person.
When I went to college in 1977, my father urged me not to come out of it
and go into business, as he had done. He had wanted to study and teach history, the
only foundation for immortality, but had gone “for the money” instead, and hadn’t
made as much as he wanted to. He once defined romanticism as “looking back.”
He didn’t want me to look back.
“Go for immortality,” he told me. “You won’t make much money, but don’t
worry about that. We’ll help with the money.”
My father was a millionaire on paper when he said that, and so was each
member of our family. We were principals in Lake City Mines, a partnership
formed by Mike McGuire, my father’s good friend and my older brother’s
godfather. When the stock was issued, gold and silver were at all-time highs. We
had options. Inflation would rise, the price of gold would go up, and the assays
from the Golden Wonder would deliver on their promise of 40 ounces to the ton.
“Pray for its successful conclusion,” my father wrote to me in 1979, “on the
grounds that the project is prudently motivated, moderate in the demands of the
risk, honest (Just) in concept, and courageous in venture and perseverance.”
In the late nineteenth century, Alferd Packer and his men came to grief in
Lake City—right on top of what would be, in another generation, the Golden
Wonder Mine. But after an already long and futile search for gold, they were too
hungry, cold, and desperate to do any prospecting: their hunt was over. Gruesome
things were done, and Alfie Packer made a name for himself: he entered Colorado
legend as the cannibal who ate the last three Democrats in Lake County.
That’s the story Uncle Mike told us when he took our family to visit the
mine in the summer of 1978. It had been defunct for fifty years. All that was
needed, Mike said, was a lateral shaft, for safety purposes, and then the mining
could begin. Mike so enjoyed the irony of Packer’s fate, and the prospect of
making his fortune on the same spot, that he planned to remind Coloradans of it as
soon as he could. He had already made a mock-up of a front-page headline:
“Alferd Packer, Eat Your Heart Out.”
When I went back to the University of Colorado campus that fall, I took a
fresh look around the Alfie Packer Grill, where I ate lunch and drank beer on
Friday afternoons: Packer’s face was everywhere. With his black hair, black eyes,
and black mustache, he could have been a member of Lincoln’s cabinet or the
James Gang. It may have been in the Packer Grill that I wrote the sentence my
father thought I’d plagiarized, in a pocket notebook of the kind I’d been keeping
since my uncle, a writer, had given me one in 1974. My uncle, too, stood to benefit
from the proceeds of the Golden Wonder.
But Lake City Mines fell through. Mike lost control of it before the
partnership could sustain a mining operation. Some ore was sent to the smelter, but
the gold market had collapsed by then, along with the silver market. When that
happened, the Hunt brothers of Texas got squeezed, and one of them, Nelson or
Bunker, told a senate committee: “A billion dollars doesn’t go very far anymore.”
Uncle Mike, who chain-smoked Marlboro reds and did the cops in Irish
voices, got squeezed, too. When he died of consumptive heart failure, he was
bankrupt and homeless, and my father’s dream of being a millionaire died with
him.
 About ten years ago, I went to a party in Greenwich Village with my friend
Maro. Most of the people there had gone to Andover together, and they were
expecting their most famous classmate to show up—the only law-school graduate
whose failure to pass the bar twice made the national news. When he arrived, John
F. Kennedy, Jr., who had just returned from a show of support at the Kennedy
Smith trial, greeted his friends warmly, but told them he couldn’t stay for long. He
had too much work to catch up on at the District Attorney’s office.
I overheard him say this, from the outer edge of the circle that had formed
around him. When Maro managed to get his attention and introduce us, I said,
perversely, “What do you have to go do, write a poem?”
Kennedy looked at me and paused. “I wish I could write a poem,” he said.
He was not joking.
His sincerity made good on something my father had told me after my first
poem was published in The Denver Post—again by way of compensating me for a
world in which the main chance is a matter of numbers. “Don’t worry about the
money,” he said. “You’ll never make any money as a poet, and you won’t make
much as a professor. But you can write a poem.”
To which he added, characteristically, as a damper to any pride I might be
feeling, one of his favorite quotations: “It is better to write than to read; it is better
to write poetry than to write; it is better to live than to write poetry.”

In April 1995, I was finishing a two-year term as a Visiting Assistant

Professor of American Literature at Mills College in Oakland, California. In that
second year, I made a full salary, about $38,000—more money than I had ever
made in a year by more than half. I stood a chance of getting hired for the job on
the tenure track, but not a good one, and for two reasons.
 “We need to hire a woman of color,” the acting Chair of the English
Department told me. “But you’re welcome to apply.”
The second reason: I hadn’t published anything—anything but poems, and
those didn’t count, because they didn’t involve research.
And then there was this letter, which became part of my record. It made no
difference to the Provost, who didn’t think it worth bringing to my attention, but it
startled me.

This letter concerns a visiting professor, Mark Scott. In the

ordinary course of things, I would not be writing this letter, however, I
have seen petitions up around the campus requesting that Mark Scott
be retained as a professor here at Mills College. I would like to add
my voice to any consideration of hiring Professor Scott.
I was enrolled in his class, Introduction to Comparative
Literature this current term. Although he is, by far, the most boring
and pedantic professor I have ever had, what concerns me here is what
I consider to be inappropriate behavior. During a class discussion he
told a personal story in which he made two references to his sexual
arousal in a theater. In one instance he spoke of his arousal, in the
other, he spoke of his erection. The entire story was one of great
tragedy and poignancy, which adds to the complexity of the issue but,
as far as I am concerned, does not obscure the fact that this kind of
divulgence in a classroom is out of line and unacceptable.
I do not wish to pursue the avenue of sexual harassment, nor
have I confronted Mark. I just dropped the class. Now that I see a
movement to make him a permanent member of the faculty I feel that
I want to make you aware of this incident.
That letter was written by a woman in her fifties; the thirty other women in the
class were in their late teens and early twenties. What startled me was that she
alone had taken it upon herself to report to the Provost that I was, in effect, using
my own “tragic” and “poignant” story, not to interpret a passage in the book we
were reading, but to offer a glimpse, and perhaps an invitation, into my erotic life.
Of course, she left out the context in which I had told my story: we were
reading Toni Morrison’s Jazz. But any good novel in any literature will provide
one or two passages in which love, sex, and death are clearly, if disturbingly,
joined, and we were reading American novels.
At least, on this one occasion, I had failed to be “boring and pedantic.” So
had this student: it was the best insight she had had all semester. Her interpretation
proved useful: it showed me what an event in my family’s life twenty-six years
earlier had done to me, and what I was still doing with it.
Chrissie
Before June 25, 1969, I remember almost nothing. Of that day, I remember
something.
My youngest brother asked me to ride bikes with him. The phone rang. It
was my friend Gary, inviting me to a movie. He said his older sister would take us,
pretend to go in with us, leave, and then come back for us when the movie was
over. Going to a movie I wasn’t supposed to see with Gary sounded like more fun
than riding bikes with Chrissie, who was just beginning to ride without training
wheels. I told my mother what she needed to know; she let me go.
The movie was MacKenna’s Gold, a western starring Gregory Peck and
Omar Sharif. One scene has stands out in my memory.
Sharif, as an outlaw named Colorado, is floating on his back in a pool, high
up in a desert canyon. He’s smoking a cigar and laughing. The woman with him, a
squaw named Heshke, slips into the pool. Peck, the title character, dives into the
pool.
Heshke was played by a woman I recognized, Julie Newmar, from her role
as Catwoman in Batman. I thought she was pretty. She reminded me of another
Julie, who lived three streets down from us and went to our tennis club. She’d lie
in the sun by the pool in a white bikini.
In the scene, Heshke is naked. She swims underwater toward MacKenna
with a knife in her hand.
I saw her breasts. I got an erection.
When we came out of the auditorium into the lobby, Gary’s sister hurried
over to us. She said she had to take me straight to my neighbor’s house.
Mrs. Dodge was waiting outside in the front driveway. She was crying. I got
out of the car.
“Oh, Markie,” she said, and took me in her arms. She told me that Chrissie
had been hit by a car.
Mrs. Dodge
I don’t remember how long I stayed with Mrs. Dodge before my parents
called and she walked me home. Mrs. Dodge was my best friend Donald’s mother.
For all the time Donald and I spent together, I don’t think she had ever taken me in
her arms until the day Chrissie was killed, but now I seem to have wanted her to
always.
She was elegant, impeccable. Her face was beautiful and round, her hair
always finely done. She wore neat, pretty sweaters, and often had a scarf draped
“fetchingly” across her chest and fastened with a pin. She never looked over–
dressed or unnatural. Her manners were formal. When she smiled, she did so
quickly. It seemed to be a breach of some kind and she would retract it, distracted
by something, until she regained her composure.
 Like my mother, she had a talent for painting and drawing but didn’t use it
much. No one would have suspected either of them of being artists, of having
wanted to be artists.
My mother told me much later that Mrs. Dodge loved words and liked to
read the dictionary. She liked the word “fond”; I remember her using that word
often.
It was from Mrs. Dodge lips that I first heard the word “kumquat.” By then,
I was old enough to hear other words inside it: come, twat.
Outside her oldest daughter Diana’s room, she had two large pots with small
trees in them.
“Are those tangerines?”
“No,” she said, “they’re Phillipine kumquats.”
The leaves were almost as enticing as the fruit—dark green, veins prominent
but fine, edges smooth and sharp. The fruits, held loosely in their skins like
tangerines, asked to be eaten.
“May I eat one?”
“Sure you may,” Mrs. Dodge said, “but I’m afraid they’re quite bitter.”
When I see her now, thirty years later, in my mind’s eye, I see those
Phillipine kumquats.

In 1990, when I was picking blueberries one day in New Jersey, the leaves
of the bushes, waxen green, bright, their veins so finely etched, recalled the
kumquat leaves, the elegance of Mrs. Dodge.
On that day, I thought of how devious I had been: trying to fall asleep on
Diana’s lap when she babysat; jumping furiously on the master bed with Donald;
throwing a sixteen–pound crowbar on his back as he ran crying from our field into
his; and, worst of all, sneaking into the house and stealing splits of Pouilly–Fuisse,
quarts of scotch, six–packs of Coors.
I remembered these things about that house: metal strips that clicked on the
edges of the two steps in the hall by Diana’s room; sprigs of mint in a glass on the
bar; the picture of Mr. Dodge’s rowing team at Princeton; the smell of turpentine in
the basement, of the refrigerator when it opened; the dark, shiny arms of the
furniture; the puddles in the driveway; Mrs. Dodge in the driveway.
I called her to tell her about the leaves.
A few days later, a card came in the mail. In it was a snapshot of me looking
up at Diana on her wedding day, her head crowned with cornflowers and baby’s
breath. On the back of the photograph was a caption in Mrs. Dodge’s hand: “Airy
persiflage.”
The first word was Shakespearian; the second was new. I thought of
saxifrage and corsage, of florigellum. I looked it up. What light banter did she
think Diana and I were exchanging?
Another ten years passed before I called Mrs. Dodge again to tell her I’d met
the word twice, first in Gertrude Stein, and then in Mike Leigh’s film about Gilbert
and Sullivan, where the phrase is sung in the Mikado.
More than love of words clicked in my veins for what that image held.

When I graduated from college, Mr. and Mrs. Dodge gave me a shirt made
by Mr. Dodge’s London tailor. On that occasion, Mrs. Dodge mentioned that she
and her husband had been worried about me. I didn’t know if they knew that I had
stolen things from them, if my mother had told Ruthie about my two arrests, my
drinking, my pot–smoking, my running away from home. I didn’t know what she
knew.
“But you’ve turned around,” she said, “and you’ve come out all right, and
we’re so proud of you.”
After the First Death
When Mrs. Dodge brought me home, my parents and Bruce and Craig were
sitting on the windowseat in the room where we ate breakfast.
Our parents were saying that it was better that Chrissie die. He would be a
vegetable. He wouldn’t have life as we know it. He’s too badly injured. He doesn’t
feel anything. He’s in no pain. There’s nothing we can do. He’s better off with
God. “He never knew what hit him.”
I don’t know if Chrissie was dead then or if he died later that day. I never
saw him again.
He would have turned six the next day. Bruce was ten, I was nine, Craig was
eight. Our father was thirty-eight, our mother thirty-six.

The decision I made to go to the movie with Gary turned out to have been
the wrong decision. Had I been there, Chrissie and I might have stopped at the stop
sign and watched Julie drive by. Had I been there, I might have heard the car
coming that Chrissie didn’t hear, or sense, or see. I might have gotten hit, too. I
often thought that I should have been killed in his place. I make daring rescues in
my mind. I have the fantasy of saving someone’s life and losing mine in the event.
I first expressed such thoughts when I was fifteen, in a psychiatrist’s office.
That was the first time I remember being asked about the Chrissie’s death, and the
first time since that day on the windowseat that I remember crying about it. That
was in 1975. It wasn’t until 1989 that I sat in another therapist’s office and tried to
answer the question, “Why do you think it’s hard for you to make decisions?”

Some time after the accident, my mother and father petitioned Cherry Hills
Village to get a stop sign put up on Layton, at the corner of Lafayette. Until the
sign went up (it took years), and even after, my parents and brothers and I would
yell at cars that sped by while we were playing catch, or mowing the lawn, or
working in the garden. My father would run out onto the street, rake in hand, and
try to get the driver to stop, and back up, and listen to him.
I felt my father’s rage. He and I believed that every bad thing that happened
should have been avoidable—if only we had done something right beforehand. If
he dropped ice on the floor in taking it from the ice maker to the ice bucket, it was
because we had bought the wrong refrigerator. If I sprained my little finger playing
catch, it was because he’d thrown, and I’d gone out for, one pass too many. We
should have quit ten minutes before we did.
My mother, too, felt the force of this “should have,” but she rarely gave
expression to it, and she tired of my father’s constant recourse to it. In the smallest
crisis, he would bind in frustration: the thing that could have been done to prevent
the thing that happened had not been done, and what were we going to do about
that? My mother was already picking up the ice cubes, or wiping up the spill, or
getting another light bulb from the cabinet, or writing another check to send after
the one that hadn’t arrived.
My mother and Bruce kept their should-haves to themselves; they did the
next thing. My father and I stuck at the last thing, berating others first, and then
ourselves, if we couldn’t help it. Craig drifted off somewhere, annoyed with all of
us. He was on his own, bereft of the brother who had shared his room. He began to
collect coins.
But each of us felt that Chrissie’s death had not been inevitable; each of us
has carried the stubborn conviction that, had we done something differently,
Chrissie would be alive.

Our neighbors came together around us, to feed and hold and take care of us.
The women around us in the wake of Chrissie’s death didn’t say anything to me or
my brothers, at least not that I remember. They hugged me. They took my hand.
They sat next to me. They cried and I watched them. They looked sad into my
eyes. I would cry after they hugged me, after they cried. They comforted and fed
us. What else could they do? What could they say but, “Everything will be all
right”? They didn’t think I would understand; they didn’t think I knew what hit me,
what hit our family. They gathered in the kitchen. They cooked. They brought food
over. They answered the phone, accepted the flowers that arrived, washed the
dishes. I was overwhelmed by the love, by the caring. Death had brought out the
best in everyone. We were all suddenly close. There was even a kind of gaiety. I
think I experienced all of it as pleasure.
At the funeral, our mother smiled, held back her tears, greeted our friends
like guests. I couldn’t understand her smile. She was the first to look at the grave;
she put the first flower on the white casket.
“You have to keep going”: that was the first thing my mother said.
And we did. My father went back to work. My mother went back to work.
And when the summer ended, Bruce and Craig and I went back to school.
But before we did, we went to Grand Lake with the Keatings. There are
pictures of us in the boat, with our life-jackets on. We went to Carbondale with the
Marquises. There are no pictures from our stay, but I see myself on Marcia’s horse,
bareback. She leads us away from the house, into an opening. She gives me the
reins and stands back. I walk the horse; he tries to brush me off against a tree, but I
bring him around. Marcia approves. I turn to the open field; the horse takes off.
He’s galloping and I’m holding on, my head down by his neck. I see what’s
coming—I grab his mane, he jumps the ditch, I hold on, rein him in. I’m terrified
and excited. My parents and Marcia run out to see if I’m all right.
When I came home, I began to have crushes on girls with horses.
I also punched a little boy in the stomach to make him cry, so that I could
comfort him. I don’t remember who he was, but I did know where he lived, and I
took him home to his mother. I lied to her. I told her I found him crying. He was
too scared to tell the truth. She thought it was sweet of me to take care of him, and
thanked me for bringing him home.
He had a lost look on his face when I saw him. It was as if I punched him in
order to change that look. I couldn’t talk to him about his lost look. But I knew
what to do if he cried, and I knew he would cry if I hurt him. I wouldn’t have to
say anything. I could just hug him and tell him that everything would be all right.

Twenty-four years passed before I knew what happened while I was

watching MacKenna’s Gold with Gary. In 1993, Bruce sent me a letter he had
written to Chrissie, with a note explaining how he’d come to write it. He was in
counseling at the time with his wife. Lori and Bruce had been married for eight
years.
Dear Mark,
I wrote this letter because cathy had asked me to for our
sessions. Lori and I are going to see her today and I will give her this.
I wrote it on a Saturday after our last session on the sofa in our house.
It took alot of energy to write I felt zapped while I was doing it. It
took some time during that afternoon. I wrote it as I remembered it
that day many years ago parts seemed very clear and parts seemed
gray and foggy. I don’t know what you will get from it sadness,
strength, knowledge any way let me know.

Dear Chris,
It was June 25th 1969 you were going to be 6 the next day. I
was 10. Mom and I were home when I heard the tires screech I knew
something had happened. I ran from the house and mom followed.
When I saw the cars stopped and Sinks neighbor was out I knew it
was bad. I can’t remember Sinks neighbors name She was very
shaken, a college age girl on her way home she must still think of that
day you appeared in front of her car. It was an accident and no way
that she could have helped it. You were the little brother you had little
reflexes the bike you were on was too big for you and I know that you
never saw or heard her car and there you both were at the same spot
same time no match no time to be surprised. You were limp on the
corner you appeared sleepy then you passed out with out speaking
there were some small cuts and scratches but the blood from your ears
nose and mouth were very scary I stayed with you and kept you warm
Mom called the hospital and got the car to put you in we were in such
a hurry but it seemed like slow motion.
They told mom not to wait for an ambulance the 3 of us went
to the hospital mom drove in a controlled panic I held you in the back
wiping the blood and trying to keep you warm it was hot, but you
seemed so cold.
We arrived and I helped you from the car to the gurney I said
nothing and you were gone They took you away to the emergency
room they worked and Mom + I waited Dad arrived and Mark and
Craig later some time passed and they told us they did what they
could but your head was hit to hard. I didn’t cry then Mom was Dad
was Mark + Craig did I was very quiet. The next day your birthday
sucked we all cried the house seemed dark we stayed inside the
phone rang some one was there to answer it but we never talked to
any one People brought food people brought flowers. Your casket
 was closed It was very small the service was short It was mostly
family Your grave site has a beautiful view I wonder how Mom +
Dad picked it so fast. Mom kept your birthday presents for many
years right in the shopping bag they came home in In her typical
fashion she was going to wrap at the last minute. They never were
wrapped or returned they just stayed in the bag for years.
There was a set of hot wheels for your very own I had lots
already and sometimes would not share, you really wanted your own.
You always got lots of hand me downs from all of your older brothers
I always think of you on your birthday some years the months just roll
along but June 26th always stands out your memory just makes its
presense felt. I see your best friend Jeff Wolf through out the years
driving a car sharing a house with friends he lives with cutting lawns
for cash I get a picture of you. I thought of your 16th with a drivers
license or your 21st drinking beer or 1993 on what have would been
your 30th I always wonder, I know we would have all been so
different my sports Marks poetry craigs art + cycling Maybe it
would have been music for you I’ll never know.
I don’t remember calling Bruce after I read his letter. I did call him two
years later, after reading it again. I wanted to talk to him about it. I wanted to know
if he remembered being taunted when he went back to school, because he smelled,
because he shit his pants sometimes; if he remembered when he started to have
trouble reading and writing; if he thought that the trauma of that day . . .
He knew I’d been crying when I said hello. “I just read your letter to
Chrissie.”
He knew I wanted to go back over it all.
“Just close the file and put it away,” he said.
Horses, Jennifer, Liz
Where we lived, there was a horse or two to every other house, and their
riders were girls. They had all the tack and trim: the black boots, the pants, the
velvet helmets, the stirrups, the crops, the bridles and bits, the saddles and the
saddlesoap, the brushes, the curry combs, the hoof picks. They had trails to ride
and fields to cross, leather working as the horse worked, and the bit in that
mouthful of teeth.
I watched them sadly from my stingray—the horses’ heads, and higher still
the human heads, with the pretty hair in braids, in pigtails, in messy strands around
the face. Most of the girls rode English, but some rode Western, too, and all rode
bareback sometimes. I could hear them coming, hooves on the gravel shoulders.
They grew handsome on their horses as they neared, high up there. They looked
down on me. Nothing seemed as strong, as free. A boy on a bike had nothing on a
girl on a horse.
(“You’re beautiful and so is your horse,” I said to the woman by the
Philpotts’ fence. She took my arm. “Tell me more.” We walked along, she
mentioned her therapist. I told her about all the girls in the neighborhood who had
horses when I grew up. This was a dream.)
Diana Preshaw, who looked like Judy Collins and Peggy Fleming, had a
gray horse. Katie Austin had a black horse. I could watch them riding from our
field.
Katie Philpott and Libby Boucher had horses. They went to Pony Club. I
went with Libby one day, out of our neighborhood, down to Little Dry Creek, over
Saint Mary’s Field, into the fields behind Denver Country Day, then along the
Highline Canal. I was one of only two or three boys there. I could tell that the boys
suffered at the hands of other boys, and unjustly, because I had taken that wild ride
and knew what a horse could do. I also knew how long it took to get ready to ride
—to brush and comb the horse, pick the hooves, clean the tack, put on saddle and
bridle.
I liked the smell of saddle soap, of leather, hay, and manure; the warm scent
of barn, of the ointments in the tack room. I liked the tool that picked the hooves. I
liked a horse’s mane, a horse’s head; liked the way a rider looked in the saddle,
posting. I liked how the boots fit the stirrups and hugged the calves, how the pants,
hugging the thighs, featured their strength.
Liz and Jennifer were like boys. They sat together in the back of the bus that
swayed and bowed going up and down the hills on Holly Street. Out the windows
to the west were the mountains and the tops of the cottonwoods, the houses and
foothills, the tennis court and yard fences. There were trails through the fields. The
hills along Holly were flanked in the west by other hills, by dips and valleys and
mesas, heavy patches of green and light patches of gold and brown, blue beneath
low cumulus clouds and studded clear to the mountains with spruce, elms, poplars,
honeysuckle, aspen, plum, cherry, and apple.
There were horses in corrals, dark brown horses and buckskin horses. Liz
could mount hers from the side or the back in one fluid motion. She was strong like
a horse, and her hair was like the mane of her horse, and it blew back in the breeze
across her forehead. Her legs were strong from swimming and running, from
squeezing her horse and letting her feet dangle. The sweat and the hair of her horse
against her bare legs didn’t bother her. She laughed when she rode. She stopped
her horse with her touches and her voice, and she slid off.
I was afraid of her, and I wanted to go with her on her rides. If she was a
tomboy, I was a tomgirl. I would know her out of the pool we were teammates in;
we would ride.
 Years later, late in high school, she and I had the couch one night at Lori’s
house after the party was over. Stoned and drunk, we fucked on that couch while
Lori and Glenn fucked in the other room. And we fucked in the fall and the winter,
in the spring and the summer, for eight years after that.
We made what love we could. We corresponded. We kept in touch. In
Boulder, in college, we were housemates briefly. We had separate rooms but slept
together sometimes. When I went to graduate school in New Jersey, Liz came to
visit once and we did it under the weeping willows by the Raritan River. And we
did it when I’d go home at Christmas or during the summer—did it once by her
mother’s kitchen window, looking west, me coming up from behind, Liz’s breast
against the glass, head toward the floor, as if two men were testing each other’s
strength, then breathless, speechless into bed, involved and never involved, in love
and uncertain, restless and sensitive, full of drinks and cigarettes.
I never guessed Liz’s struggle with food, and she never guessed mine with
pot. Maybe we weren’t lovers, just brave strangers. We grew up together at the
pool. Her father was my doctor, the one who swabbed and shot me, gave me for
my life the scent of alcohol in its purest state. He was tall like his daughter, strong
and smart like his daughter, awkward and funny like his daughter; he was
unfaithful like his daughter and his patient, strict like them in his pleasures, and
hard to please.
His oldest son shot himself in their house, and in the aftermath Liz and I
came together again. We listened to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Taj Mahal,
EmmyLou Harris, Jerry Jeff Walker, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, James
Taylor, Joni Mitchell—and we talked about the deaths in our families, talked until
we kissed, kissed until we hugged, hugged until we took our clothes off and went
to bed.
Sara
I saw Woodstock tonight, the new four–hour cut, twenty–four years after
you invited me to see it with you and Doug Wilson, and my mother wouldn’t let
me go. That was one of the big disappointments. I was eleven. You must have been
fifteen or sixteen.
What a friendship we had! I went through three boyfriends with you: Doug
Wilson, Rick Diehl, Dell Thomas. I seem to remember more of what I did with you
than with my brothers. We made leather belts with Doug. We drove around in
Rick’s jeep. We smoked Lebanese blond hash with Dell in Kathy Boekel’s
basement, where we ended up spending the night. But you and I smoked cigarettes
alone in your basement before that, and you babysat me and my brothers before
that. I knew you before Doug, Rick, and Dell did—knew and loved you. The way I
remember it, I was your—you were my—first love.
When you babysat us, I remember trying to fall asleep somewhere on you, in
the brick room, on the couch. I was sitting next to you, plotting to fall asleep on
your shoulder and then slide down over your breasts into your lap. You sensed
what I was doing and stood up. Other babysitters, like Becky Brown and Diana
Dodge, may have known what I was up to, but they didn’t stand up. You never
seemed to hold it against me; I don’t remember trying it again. And it was you, not
any of the others, that I ended up doing things with through high school and your
first years of college.
We were already smoking cigarettes, listening to records, and watching TV
together in 1970. Your mother never seemed to know you were smoking. She let
us have our privacy in the basement when she’d come down to put something in
the deep–freeze or get something for dinner from the refrigerator. You’d hide the
ashtray under the couch, just in case, until she went back upstairs. We’d go back to
watching TV, drinking Coke out of those giant glasses full of icecubes, listening to
records, or playing pool. Sometimes we’d go outside and smoke behind those
bushes on the corner of Stanford and Lafayette, where my parents lived when I was
born. I can see us stubbing out our Kools on the street.
Your house was a sanctuary. I felt older and wiser when I was with you. It
was more than a matter of feeling accepted, since I felt accepted by people my own
age and lacked no friends in the neighborhood or at school. With you, though, I
was closer to freedom, further from home and the constraints of my age; nearer to
a driver’s license, to staying out late, to parties. In your company, I was much
closer to what the music we were listening to was about, and it was mostly about
love. I was in love when I was with you.
When I was in ninth grade, I gave you a turquoise ring. I had to ask for it
back when the guy I stole it from, Mark Perry, found out I’d stolen it. I was
humiliated twice for that, since I knew Mark’s sister Ann, and was messing around
with her at the Arapahoe Tennis Club.
I kept my relationships with my contemporaries separate from the
relationship I had with you. By the time you took me and my date to the movies
with you and your date, I was quite adept at this. Paula and I sat a few rows down
from you and Rick. I don’t know what you two were doing, but Paula and I had our
hands in each other’s pants, and I don’t remember the movie.
Woodstock I’ve always remembered. Your inviting me meant that I wasn’t
immature in your eyes. But that didn’t make up for my mother’s thinking I wasn’t
old enough to see the hippies with you, at night, on your date. Of course, my
mother was too late. I was already corrupted. I knew what Woodstock was about. I
was struck, seeing the movie, by how well I knew the soundtrack—and not just the
songs, but the announcements, the things the musicians said before and between
songs. Brian had the album, you had the album, and both of you had albums from
most of the bands that played at Woodstock. (It was upstairs in your living room
that I heard The Allman Brothers’ Live at Fillmore East for the first time.)
I was transported by “Long Time Gone,” the first song you hear when the
movie opens, and I wanted it to go on for three days. I had forgotten that
Woodstock was the making of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. “This is our second time
playing in front of people,” Stills says, “and we’re scared shitless.” I repeated those
lines during junior high and high school. Canned Heat followed that with “Goin
Up to the Country,” one of the anthems of ninth grade—“I’m gonna get drunk on
the water, stay drunk all the time”—along with “Wooden Ships,” with its promise
of a high lasting for weeks, and not getting sick once.
In the theater, I couldn’t keep myself from singing along. I had somehow
been there, after all: “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.” When Joe Cocker
started into “With a Little Help from My Friends,” I rocked from side to side in my
seat. “I get by with a little help from my friends”: that great voice, the voice that is
great within us.
There were times, walking down your long driveway, when I thought I
should turn around and go home, fearing that if I came again to see you, you would
say I had to stop, that it was ridiculous for me to keep coming. And I’m sure I did
turn around sometimes; but every time I came, you welcomed me, you took me in
—and if you weren’t there, your mother did. And sometimes when I came over, I
know I was sad, stoned, drunk: I was running away from home, trying to find
somewhere safe, looking for love.
You included me. You took me places. We did errands together in the blue
Volvo, where we could smoke cigarettes and listen to the radio. We swam
together, played tennis together, rode horses together, ate together. I remember us
hitting each other on the shoulder, and you telling me to stop because it would give
you cancer.
You will know how incomplete this is, and where I exaggerate and where I
falter. I hope I haven’t embarrassed you by singing out of tune, or longing out of
time.
Perhaps it is out of such longing that one writes at all.Snapshots
My eyes will never be that blue again, that clear, that open. I will never
smile so easily again. I am in first grade. My two front teeth are gone. Their
replacements will cost me my happiness: they’ll be crooked and spaced too far
apart. I will have to wear braces, and then a retainer. My nose will get bigger, my
deviated septum more pronounced. My right ear, pointed at the top, pinched into a
point, will earn me nicknames. My skin will never be so clear. I will love
turtlenecks, but I will never be what I might have been.

Smoke from my mother’s Parliament distorts my face. I am not smiling. My

mother is, my uncle is. My mother holds a red flower. She wears a yellow dress.
She is tan. It is August, 1970, and we are having a family reunion. I wear shorts,
white socks, loafers, a tan button–down Oxford. We are in the shadows of the elms
around the carport. My cousin Julie, age one, rests in my uncle’s arms. She and my
mother and I look at the camera. Uncle Jay looks at my mother, admiring her. She
is the center. We are waiting for Mr. Maxwell to take a picture of the whole family
—minus one. But you wouldn’t know it, the way she’s smiling, holding the sprig
of geranium.

Since we are the family concerned, the family within the family gathered for
this portrait, we are isolated in the shot, and each of us is isolated within it. Bruce
has something cupped in his hands: that’s what he’s looking at. My father, next to
him, looks at the lawn in front of my mother. He has his tennis clothes on. His
sideburns are long and his goatee is full, the goatee of protest against the Vietnam
war. His left arm rests loosely around my neck. I am looking farther out than he is,
to the photographer at least, if not beyond. Some brown string is wrapped around
my fingers. Mom is turned toward Nama, whose hands are folded in her lap. My
mother’s gaze falls under Bruce’s hands, behind Nama’s shoulders. Craig sits by
himself, not touching or touched by anyone, looking at the photographer. Our
mouths are open.

Same summer, give or take one, and six of us have taken our marks. The
photographer snaps before the starter’s gun goes off. I am in lane four, one of the
two fastest lanes, because I usually win or take second. Tim is in lane three. I beat
him nine times out of ten in the fifty-, hundred-, and two-hundred free. The timers
have raised their watches above their heads.
“Judges and timers ready? Swimmers, take your marks.”
I have butterflies in my stomach. My toes grip the edge of the starting block.
I look into my lane, into my water. I don’t want to get wet again.
The sky is blue, the water is blue, the lane ropes are blue, the tiles around the
edge of the pool are blue, my suit is blue, my eyes are blue, the ribbon I will win is
blue.

I’m eleven or twelve, sitting in an inflated black chair. It must be new.

Behind me is the bar, a bookshelf, and the white cabinets that hold the stereo and
the TV.
I’m almost smiling. My blond hair is neatly combed and parted low on the
right side. It is clean. I look straight ahead and my nose looks straight. I don’t
recognize the shirt I’m wearing, green and plush, with a large pointed collar,
buttoned to the chin. I recognize the pants. They’re striped like a train engineer’s
hat. They’re my first pair of bell bottoms.
My fingers have no rings. They touch the arms of the chair. Maybe I’m
having this portrait taken because the shirt is new, but probably it’s the chair that’s
new, and the portrait means to capture this new chair with me in it. I have no
memory of the chair. I remember my bean–bag chair, but not this.
I don’t recognize myself. I didn’t like to smile.
I recognize the things on the bar. Ginger Ale. Old Grand Dad. White Grouse.
Two ice buckets. A Tanqueray martini pitcher. The wooden salt shaker.
There must have been a cocktail party the night before, or there is going to
be one tonight. I will bartend.

Not quite the cocktail hour, to judge by the light, but close enough. My
parents stand on the patio by the back door. My mother holds a drink, a gin and
tonic, lime slice between two icecubes. She has her other arm around my father.
The tips of her fingers have a cigarette between them. She has the yellow cotton
dress on. My father wears a pink Oxford button–down, open at the collar, and
beltless white slacks. They are smiling. They look happy.
Our Father
When our father learned, in 1967, that we were not in Vietnam to defend
American liberty, he stopped marching his four blond, crew-cut sons to the
window every morning with the flag. He stopped having us say the Pledge of
Allegiance. He drank harder. He came home angrier and drunker.
He took his disillusionment out on my mother, who could drink more and
hold it better than he could, and who didn’t care about politics or Vietnam. She had
us; she had the Church; she had God; she had faith as casually as she’d light a
cigarette after dinner.
We could tell what kind of night it was going to be by watching how our
father drove in the driveway. He parked the ‘62 Volkswagen convertible under the
carport. We could see it from the big window by the back door, in the room where
we ate breakfast. There were degrees of crookedness to his parking, from slight to
frightening. When the angle was acute, he was elaborate in disguising his lateness
and his drunkenness. The later he was—and that was always the first signal—the
more crookedly he parked.
It wasn’t that I had nothing better to do than stand by the back door and
measure my father’s deviation. I might be stoned myself while doing it; and if I
were stoned, I might be working myself up into an indignation I was going to make
him feel—this time.
He’d start in at the cocktail hour, when my mother’s cheer–timer went off,
which was when Walter Cronkite came on, which was when Vietnam or the Nixon
administration came up. My mother tried to make the two hours between six and
eight her own by casting the opposite of a pall over the pall my father had cast as
soon as he parked. I’d start in right before the Ten O’clock News, which was when
we were all supposed to be in bed. Our timing was bad.
It sometimes took our father ten minutes to get from the car into the house.
As if he knew we were watching—he knew he was drunk, he knew he was late—
he’d try to compensate for his skewed parking by walking straight. That gave him
a stilted look. His hair, which he was very careful to keep neat and trimmed and
combed, would be mussed, more or less according to how many drinks he’d had
after work with Nimmo or McCabe, Bryans or Bryan, Sterling or Keating, Millick
and Chipman.
As he’d start up the brick path to the house, he’d either comb his hair or
smooth it with his hand, all the time trying to appear sober, to act natural. This he
did by looking over the lawn, checking for twigs. If he were bombed, he’d detour
out onto the lawn and pick up a twig, to show us he was cognizant of his duties, or
at least his habits, the most annoying of which was his solicitude for the lawn.
Though he rarely took a briefcase to work, he almost always took a raincoat
or an overcoat, and this he would try to drape casually over his arm and hold in
place as he attended to his hair and the lawn. If only the lawn could look like his
hair! If only it were as easy to manage, as inexpensive to grow and cut! The
flower–beds were my mother’s concern; the grass, the shrubs, and the trees were
his, and he could never keep up. He hadn’t sold any bonds, or none to speak of,
and here was his yard, after the weekend he spent on it, asking more of him
already. Guiltily, then, frustrated and dismayed, he would enter the house.
He never liked the back door, the old back door of our 1930s house, which
opened onto a cramped landing that led down the basement stairs, or up into the
kitchen by two steps, or into the pantry by another, a low ceiling at every turn. The
screen door would snap at him, or bang behind him; he’d turn to curse it and hit his
head as he stepped up into the kitchen. Once or twice, pausing after he got in the
door to collect himself, he’d stumble toward the basement, then curse the danger of
falling down the stairs.
“We’ve got to do something about this screen door, damnit Sarah!”
Once into the kitchen, unsteady on his feet, but doing his best to correct the
appearance of being so, he’d announce that he was home, and my mother would
greet him.
“Hi, honey.”
She was careful not to say that he was late, or ask where he’d been;
nonetheless, my father, acutely sensitive to tones of voice, behaved as if my
mother had made such a comment or asked such a question. I’d be standing off,
behind the stove near the back stairs, waiting to hear his uncalled–for explanations.
They were not elaborate, and they weren’t exactly lies; but whatever their content,
they were defensive and belligerent, and it clearly pained my father to deliver
them, to have to deliver them. The less pressure my mother put on him, it seemed,
the more defensive he became. She would therefore save the question “How was
your day?” until he’d gone upstairs, changed, and come back down to have a
cocktail and watch the news. Before he did that, though, he’d make his careful way
into the living room closet and hang up his coat, then come back into the kitchen to
look at the mail.
“Bills,” he’d say, “nothing but bills.” He’d smile, as though someone he’d
never met had just told him to, and then go upstairs.
That was my mother’s cue to smile and say something about starting to
make dinner, as if everything were fine.
I would go back upstairs, where Bruce and Craig and Chrissie were, or
Bruce and Craig and Lizzie. We’d watch another show: McHale’s Navy, Gilligan’s
Island, I Dream of Jeannie, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, Star Trek,
Batman, The Green Hornet, Gentle Ben, Sea Hunt, The Rifleman, Bonanza, Rat
Patrol. On good nights, later, all of us would watch The Smothers Brothers,
Laugh-In, The Dean Martin Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Glen Campbell
Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show.

There were times when I wasn’t there to see my father come home from
work, and times—probably the majority—when he came home, parked straight,
and walked up the path with his hair neatly combed, but still looking unhappy
about the lawn and his day at the office. On those evenings, I’d go to my parents’
bedroom while he changed.
He’d have the news on. He’d undress as methodically as he dressed, taking
wallet, change, Certs, and aspirin from his pockets. He’d remove his tie clip or
safety pin and take the handkerchief from his jacket pocket. Then he’d take off his
jacket and lay it on the bed. He’d sit down and unlace his shoes, setting them to
one side, then stand and take off his pants, careful not to let them touch the floor.
He’d grab a hanger from the closet, fix his pants neatly over the round, then fit his
jacket over the hanger. In placing the suit back in the closet, he’d make sure the
lapels weren’t hitched up against another suit, and he’d check the pants once more
to see that they were hanging straight. Then he’d loosen his tie and slip it back on
the rack.
He seemed particularly relieved to undo the top button of his white or blue
Oxford button–down, which he would examine to see if it had another day in it; if
it did, he’d hang it up in the closet; if not, he’d step into the hall and put it over the
banister for my mother to take to the cleaners. Still in his boxer shorts, with his full
dress socks on, he’d pick up his black, brown, or cordovan wingtips with one hand
and look them over, to see if they’d need polishing in the morning. Setting them
back down, he’d grab the shoe trees and insert them. Having put his shoes back in
the row, he’d sit on the bed again and look at the news. Thumb to his upper–calf,
he’d remove one sock, then the other, sometimes putting them in the closet over
his shoes, sometimes putting them in the laundry basket.
He’d change into corduroys or jeans, cotton shirts, desert boots, hirachis, or
loafers. Before he changed into them, he’d go into the bathroom and wash his face,
comb his hair. Once changed, he’d sit and watch the news until a commercial, then
we’d go downstairs together and turn it on there.
That was the first order of business on a good or bad day. The second was to
fill the ice bucket and ask what my mother wanted to drink. The third was to look
again at the mail, drink, and watch the news.
My mother didn’t allow the TV on during dinner, a rule my father disliked
and sometimes overruled, especially during Watergate, which often prolonged the
cocktail hour. With our mother enforcing cheer and our father worried about the
economy and the Republic, conversations at the dinner table never took place as
such. I don’t remember a single one. At my mother’s prompting, my father would
ask us how school went or how practice went. We’d eat.
 My father was angry from 1967, when he heard David Schoenbrun speak in
Denver, until Nixon’s resignation in 1974. After his youngest son was killed, and
Nixon began to escalate the killing in Vietnam, grief and fear focused his anger.
He started to read everything he could about our involvement in Vietnam, and he
wrote letters to the editor of The Denver Post—like this one, dated May 28, 1970:
I have been against this war since first reading of our
involvement there as a result of a speech of David Schoenbrun’s given
in Denver in April of 1967. From that point, I have searched diligently
for refutations of Mr. Schoenbrun’s contentions to little or no
avail. . . .
Allegorically, our posture as a nation relative to Vietnam is
somewhat reminiscent of the fall of the house of Atreus in Aeschylus
where we—like Agamemnon—are sacrificing our children so that the
winds will blow briskly to Troy and victory. Frankly, to continue the
metaphor, I thought we had expiated our “hubris” with Mr. Johnson’s
renunciation, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy—who stood for a
coalition government in “South” Vietnam, the only viable political
solution—the “students for McCarthy” movement that ended in the
Chicago riots, and, finally, the election of Nixon, who, free from the
curse of Atreus, could come to equity in Vietnam with “clean hands.”
It now seems he hasn’t taken up his mandate, but rather a
purple mantle of royalty and pride which educes a false patriotism by
insinuating that it would not be “American” to make him the first
president in the 190 years of our republic to accept defeat. This pursuit
of “victory” would gladly be allowed, semantically, to the President so
long as it really stands for withdrawal and disengagement, i.e.,
“successful” Vietnamization. But, if it turns out to mean “military
victory,” as it well could when we have a senator–general like
Goldwater talking of bombing Haiphong into a “mud puddle,” then
our policy could result in one of the most egregious examples of sado–
masochism in the history of the world, if not the last.
A nuclear holocaust over an Indochina confrontation with
China and Russia would only come as a surprise to the complacent in
our government and among our people—particularly and cruelly to the
innocent children of the world who, I submit, have every right, as
children, to be complacent.
Contrarily, it would delight the ghosts of Sade, as he, over 200
years ago, had prematurely deemed blowing up the world as the
ultimate sexual crime. It might also, I’m sorry to say, be welcome to
the cryptoapocalypticism of the self–righteous right whose militant
monism is as potentially lethal as the materialistic left. (William F.
Buckley’s “Let’s–knock–the–hell–out–of–them” rhetoric comes to
mind.)
The time has come for our nation, like Abraham, to spare our
firstborn and sacrifice our pride . . . not vice versa. I only hope,
somehow, our hand will be stayed, as was his, from continuing our
sacrificial offerings. Then, once more, fathers will become
“patriarchs” of respect whose authority—again reliable and undoubted
—will be sustained by the generosity of their gift of a chance at life
and longevity to the next generation.
There were times, like World War II and Korea, when fathers
could justly ask the “last full measure of devotion” from their sons for
the longevity of the community. “South” Vietnam is, after all, a
repressive, military dictatorship, and there is no moral justification or
defendable self–interest for the world or the American community
which requires our soldiers fighting and dying there. As there can be
no community without fulfillment of the law, there can be no
fulfillment of the law—since love and mercy and, even, justice
precede it—without community, the spirit of solidarity between
generations.
Birth and Death
Of the sons from whom my father feared he might have to ask “the last full
measure of devotion,” I was the second. I was born in the cocktail hour, in a storm,
in a hospital, in Denver, on September 28, 1959, eleven months to the day after my
brother Bruce. Craig was born on January 31, 1961; Christopher, on June 26, 1963.

My mother is an interior decorator, a graduate of the University of Colorado,

Class of 1954. The oldest of three children, she was born in 1933 and grew up in
Illinois. Her father was an engineer with Illinois Gas and Electric; her mother, a
graduate of Northwestern and used to a fairly high style, kept house, smoked
Winstons, and never seemed in the least hurried, ruffled, or confused.
My father is a retired municipal bonds salesman. A graduate of Dartmouth,
Class of 1952, he was born in 1930 and grew up in Denver. His father left him, his
mother, and his older brother when my father was ten. Vernon, eleven years older
than my father, became more a father than a brother, and more a surrogate husband
than a son. My grandmother, a Christian Scientist who worked at the Denver Dry
Goods Company and then at Lowry Air Force Base, struggled through the
Depression to make ends meet. She was thrifty and fastidious: until she was in her
seventies, she washed her bills and coins in the sink every day when she came
home.
My parents had a fifth child in 1971, a girl they named after my mother’s
sister, Elizabeth, and my father’s mother, Ruth.
In 1984, our brother Craig died of AIDS. He was twenty–three.
By then, we were not strangers to the cemetery. Soon after Chrissie died, our
friends Jane and Curt lost their daughter Carrie when a babysitter dropped her on
her head; she was three. Katie, my contemporary and the daughter of neighbors
and close friends of my parents, committed suicide in high school. Uncle Bob, my
father’s best friend, died of liver failure from alcoholism in his forties. Chuck
Kettering was hit by a car while trying to rescue his dog. Hig Gould died young.
Anita, a year older than I, and Archie, my age, died in accidents. Nick, in his early
teens, was found hanging in his basement. Peter, also in his early teens, was found
hanging from a branch over the Highline Canal. A high-school acquaintance,
Susan, was killed during a party: two boys were getting her drunk; she fell and hit
her head; she died in a coma. Natasha fell off a mountain into a crevice and died;
she was twenty. Susan, a sophomore in college, was killed in a car accident. Derek
committed suicide in college, and so did Tim, and so did Charlie. My mother’s
mother died of cancer in 1979. Our friend Lynn’s father died trying to go around
the world in a balloon. Mr. Gates, our babysitter’s husband, killed himself with a
shotgun in his basement. Noni Gould died of cancer in her fifties.
We went to Mr. Dellinger’s and Mr. Spencer’s funerals, and to Mrs.
Fellingham’s. We went to Mr. Cosgriff’s, Mr. Flanagan’s, and Mr. Burklund’s
funerals: they died early, too. Old age and disease took Nama, Gramps, Ed
Talmadge, Shades Owen, Mike McGuire, Malcolm Stewart, Mary Bell, Bob St.
Clair, Bob Bryan, Uncle Norman, Uncle Fred Fellingham, Eloise and Page Smith,
Carol Tempest, John Brock, Judge Brooks, Gordon Jacober, and George Hilliard.

On the anniversary of Chrissie’s death, and at Easter and Christmas, our

mother would bring out pictures of him. We would pick up our grandmother and
visit his grave at Fairmount Cemetery, where all our plots are. Our mother would
make a wreath. Our father would use a whisk-broom on the headstone and clippers
on the grass tufting up around it. Nama would notice the blossoming crabapple
tree. We would look through it toward the foothills and the mountains in the west.
Bruce and Craig and I would have to read passages chosen by our father from the
Bible. Then we would all say the “Our Father” and go home.
 The first death in our family changed the way we lived downstairs. My
parents had another living room built where the garage used to be. They added a
carport and a back driveway. They remodeled the kitchen. We stopped using the
old dining room, adjacent to the old living room. We stopped having Christmas in
the old living room and began having it in the new one, which we called the
“playroom.”
Lizzie’s birth, a year and a half after Chrissie died, changed the way we
lived upstairs. But Chrissie’s death, Lizzie’s birth, and Craig’s death failed to
change the way we lived.

Our Sister
Elizabeth Ruth Scott was born on February 25, 1971, after a difficult labor. I
don’t remember what the complications were—that would have been something
we didn’t need to know about—but our mother spent time in the hospital
afterwards, and then had to go back to have her varicose veins operated on.
Lizzie came home in a wicker basket, wrapped in flannel blankets. She
smelled so good. She had a beautiful round head and face. Our mother put the
basket on the foot of the bed. Bruce and Craig and I took turns holding Lizzie.
She became Craig’s favorite subject when he took up photography. He
developed the portraits he took of her in the basement, in a small storage closet he
converted into a darkroom with the help of our cousin Steve.
As we got older, and stopped having babysitters when our parents went out,
and invited our friends over, Lizzie entertained us. At first, we drank and got
stoned in front of her. Later, when she knew we were doing what we weren’t
supposed to be doing, she kept our secret. She seemed to like performing for us.
She would dance and talk and sing and make us laugh.
Like her brothers before her, Lizzie started swimming very early, and
became part of the swim team at Arapahoe Tennis Club before she was eight. She
had a strong, compact little body, and she excelled. She played soccer, too, like her
brothers before her.
Though Lizzie had her own room, she and Craig bonded as Chrissie and
Craig had when they shared a room. But their bond was always charged and
ambivalent, alternating between fighting and loving, between too much and too
little. Some of this probably had to do with Craig’s feeling that Lizzie had replaced
Chrissie and never could replace him. Craig and I never spoke about what
Chrissie’s death meant to him, and I know he never spoke to Bruce or my parents
about it, or to Lizzie. She must at some time have realized that her birth was a
consequence of Chrissie’s death—but we have never talked about that, either.
Lizzie was thirteen when Craig got sick. Her friends at school ostracized her
when word spread that what her brother had was AIDS. From then on, school was
never a pleasure for her, and she has not, steadfast and loyal as she is, made friends
easily.
Amy
When Amy Lemon learned that Craig was very sick, she came back from
New York, where she was an actress, to be with him. She was Craig’s age. She
knew that he was gay; she had known a long time before I did. She also knew that
Craig had been in love with Bryan, her high-school boyfriend, and now her
husband, for as long as she had.
Amy quickly outdid all of us in stamina, staying with Craig in the hospital,
staying near the hospital in order to come back when visiting hours resumed;
staying by his bed when he came home; staying at the hospice with him. She was
with Craig before we were in the morning, and after we went home at night.
I resented her for that, resented and admired her. I couldn’t believe her love
was genuine. I thought she was acting. But Amy did love Craig and, having played
mother to her three younger sisters growing up, she was doing what was in her
nature to do. Her father was a doctor, her mother had been a nurse, and Amy had,
as they did, a way of being very matter-of-fact, even humorous, when it came to
caring for the sick.
Amy and I had flirted since high school—after I got over her telling her
parents that I had sold her brother pot (it was oregano). In the summer of 1984,
Craig’s last summer at home, when he was diagnosed, inaccurately, with giardia,
Amy told me she wanted to make love with me, and had for a long time.
And so we did, one warm, clear night in the Arapahoe Tennis Club pool,
where we’d skinny-dipped for years. We were lit up from underneath by the pool
lights, in five feet of water; our friends were down at the other end, in three feet of
water, talking.
Amy reached down and took me in hand; I reached down and cupped her.
We kissed, using the water to sweeten our kiss, to slide on. We kissed lips, chins,
cheeks, noses, eyes, foreheads, ears. We smacked, we lapped. She guided me; but
here the water worked against us, and we seemed to squeak until I got well in—by
which time the contact and the surprise and the years of wanting . . . I came before
a minute passed.

That fall, when Amy and I came back to be with Craig, we were together
day and night.
For a few days early on, Craig could get up from his bed and take steps,
even touch his toes. My parents clapped for him when he did that once, a thing
neither he nor Amy nor I could quite believe, it was so incongruous. So was Amy’s
beautiful brown hair, her open face, her strong, healthy body—the freshness of her,
the playfulness: all of this was set off by the wasting of Craig’s body, the dulling of
his light brown hair, the stilling of his voice, the stopping of his play. “Daddy,”
Craig called from the toilet, helpless to wipe himself, holding the toilet paper in his
hand, blank. I took over that duty from my father. I wiped him and washed my
hands.
The last time we saw Craig’s doctor, Dr. Robinson, he offered to give all of
us HIV tests, even as he assured us that there was really no chance that any of us
had contacted the virus. He showed us his hands. None of us took the test.
We brought Craig home from the hospital and made a place for him in the
old dining room, where my mother’s office was. We rented a hospital bed. The
long French windows had wooden screens behind the screens, patterned like the
clubs on cards, and the cars at night—there weren’t many—would turn the corner
where Chrissie was killed, and their lights would make the club shapes appear in
shadow on the wall.
Craig saw these patterns. He loved patterns, and wove them into things,
printed them on screens, etched them into metal and stone, photographed them,
painted them in watercolor. Now, he watched them drift away on the white plaster.
In one corner, above the windows, there was a crack in the finish. He stared at it.
“There’s a cotenary volume of people on the quest . . . . There’s red corn
growing in my stomach . . . Dynamic surgery on your lips. My teeth falling out.
My stomach, nuts and bolts. Put your nose on the bar. . . A spot of AIDS on the
ceiling . . . Our actions are so complicated, aren’t they.”
Amy and I would stay with Craig, and cry over him, and hide our crying
from him, and tell him jokes, and talk to each other. He was funny sometimes.
“Care–free gum,” he said, “for the way you never are.” When our neighbor Glee
visited, she brought Craig some Silly Putty.
“The putty is disgusting, Mom. I think Glee’s trying to trick us. I like to
chew on this stuff. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Yes you have: it’s Silly Putty.”
“Yeah, it’s like that,” he said, and then twisted it once or twice.
“It’s Lizzie,” he announced. We laughed; he didn’t.
We would wash his face, massage his back, move him so that he wouldn’t
get bed sores. We would cover him and uncover him, as he seemed cold or hot. His
muscle wasted away. I carried him into the bathroom and wiped him when he was
finished. Once, some of his shit fell on his right shoe. I cleaned it, but a stain had
been made. I could still see it when I threw those shoes away fifteen years later.
We would listen for his occasional words, and hope for his recognition. He
started to tell us about a psychiatrist one day. Amy asked him, “What was the name
of the psychiatrist you talked to?”
“Mom? Or Dad?” he answered.
As the days passed, he couldn’t be recursive anymore, couldn’t have a
conversation. His confusion was innocent, blank. We wanted to laugh and cry at
him. He would stare off. He picked his nose once and pulled out some dry mucus.
He cocked his head intently.
 “At least it doesn’t have any dandruff,” he said.
Amy and Craig had loved to play; she could only console him now, and
console me, console all of us. I fell in love with her, and she with me.
Always, Amy could stay and give longer than I. Always, she could weep for
Craig and weep for me. I got angry with her one night. I told her it wasn’t her place
to cry; that it was our grief, my grief; that Craig was my brother but her friend. She
wasn’t supposed to cry with me, but to comfort me when I cried.
Why do you always have to start crying
just after I start?
You always have to ruin it for me.
Why can’t you bear it
without taking part
when the grief is not your grief
and the heart is not your heart.
We went to her house that night, two houses from ours, by the path we’d
walked back and forth on hundreds of times over twenty years. She took my hand
and led me quietly upstairs, past her sisters’ rooms. We got into her bed, and she
made love to me. We were lovers from that night until April Fools’ Day, 1985.
On Thanksgiving, Hall and Oates were playing, and our friend David was
working the concert. Craig had introduced me to Hall and Oates. He loved their
album called Abandoned Luncheonette. After the concert, I found myself singing
Van Morrison’s “Listen to the Lion.” As I write this now, remembering the guilt I
felt then—of loving Amy, of going to a concert, of having fun while Craig was
dying, of writing him down—I realize that the lion was inside of me; that the great
rush of life was all mine. Craig’s death was giving it to me.
After he died, Amy found among his things a translation of a fragment from
Heraclitus that Craig had copied out in one of the many scripts he could make:
“Life is everlasting fire, in measures ever kindling, and in measures going out.”
Craig
It was sixty degrees in Denver on December 7, 1984; a warm west wind was
blowing. I felt as though I were coming down off an acid trip.
Craig’s body was off-white and still, like a patch of old snow. The Saint
Christopher medal tarnished on his chest. My grandfather, who had put it there,
almost gave way to tears. The rest of us did give way; and then my mother smiled.
It was the same smile she’d smiled fifteen years earlier, when her youngest son’s
casket was lowered into the grave.
I kept my head on his chest. My father tried to pull me off twice.

“O call my brother back to me,

I cannot play alone.
The summer comes with flower and bee—
Where is my brother gone?”

The day he died was warm and dry;

Dust was on the lawn.
December snow was pushed back high
Against rails no train passed on.

“He isn’t there,” my father said,

“Come on with us outside.”
Then took my hand to pull my head
From the cold tide.

“He isn’t there,” my father said,

 And grabbed me by the arm—
Then let it fall and left the bed.
A breeze came in and broke the charm.

All Souls was full for Craig’s service, and so was our house, after it. When
everyone was gone but family, we danced to Prince. We drank champagne for
days.
I took a walk with Katie Philpott on one of those days. We took her father’s
Labrador retriever with us. He liked to fetch sticks. We walked in the fields behind
Denver Country Day, by the pond near the banks of the Highline, where the marsh
is, with the cattails and the red-wing blackbirds, and the cottonwoods, and the
hawks and sometimes an owl, where we used to float the canal in innertubes and
catch frogs, and get stoned, and meet up.
The dog kept bringing the stick back and we kept throwing it. I ended up
throwing the stick for what proved to be the last time. It hung up in the grass; the
dog leapt at it. He took it right down his throat, where it’s soft, above the tongue,
behind the hard palate. Blood rushed from his mouth; he whined and flipped
around like a fish. That was the end of our walk.
Mouth, bitter trace.

Craig never told me about any of his lovers. He did tell me once that he
enjoyed wiping himself while standing, and couldn’t believe that I wiped while
sitting. He said I ought to try it the other way. I did.
In the last month of Craig’s life, I met a few of his friends. I assumed that
they had been his lovers, too, but I didn’t ask and they didn’t tell. I did ask what
sort of sex Craig liked to have, and was told that he liked to have it done to him. I
flinched.
 Michael told me that Craig had a large appetite for sex, and that he did a lot
of cruising in West Hollywood. I had gone with him one night. He wore thick-
ribbed white corduroys, a thin black belt, and a short-sleeved shirt. His curly hair
was cut close. He was fresh from a shower. His body was in excellent shape from
riding over two-hundred miles a week. He had never cut his face in a crash, but he
had some nice raspberries on his arms. He was handsome.
I watched the men in the bar watch him coming and going. I felt proud of
him. He didn’t ask anyone home with him that night, but I saw that he (and I too,
for that matter)—could have had any number of takers.
Craig and I had mostly kept up with each other through our friends, through
what they asked and said about us. We praised what we thought we knew of each
other’s accomplishments—Craig’s in cycling and art, mine in school. Beyond that,
we said we loved each other; that seemed to be enough.
Craig left behind him signs of his art, signs of his power, the only signs we
know him by—paintings, drawings, photographs, posters, lithographs, etchings,
silkscreens, woodcuts, weavings, jewelry. He once collected hair from his friends’
pets and the pets in our neighborhood, spun it, and wove it into a scarf. One square
was woven from his own hair.
He left this letter behind him, too, undated and never sent:
Dear Mom,
I write to you in great despair and extreme depression—I left
the house tonight crying so hard I couldn’t see the road. I’ve never
thought it was possible that I could have an emotional breakdown
until tonight—I was so close, but I had to escape it. That’s all I’ve
ever done is escape it. I’ve tried to counteract my emotional weakness
by trying to be physically and somewhat mentally strong. I’ve always
thought I’ve had a pretty good hand on things but it seems to be a
front now—I’ve lost so much in so little time and still search for
things I’ve never had that are so basic. Coming home has gotten to be
too much of a chore—I know this sounds selfish and ridiculous for all
that you and dad have done for me, but all the good things leave the
room when the truth comes out—no matter what it is about—how
little or how big. So many things I believe are all wrong in Dad’s eyes
—which is fine but I’m sick and tired of being weighted down with
guilt about the dumbest things—let alone the more important ones.
Mom, I think you are very understanding and loving and caring
and all things that are good and matter but I have too many pent up
negative feelings towards dad and there is so much animosity that I
can’t honestly say I love him as a man—I love him as my father and
for all the things he has provided for me and I do respect him for all
his knowledge and belief, but it does not come from his heart, as does
your christianity—it is too much from his mind and mixed up ideas.
As he was outraged tonight about not being able to say what he
believes in his own house—I feel much the same and once considered
this my home too . . . sure there are memories of happy times but not
nearly as vivid as all the lonely sad times and bad times I recall. I can
no longer deal with the tension and sadness I feel—it is wearing me
out—making my youthful face seem sad and lost to people I meet.
When I think of what you have put up with—all the losses and bad
times when you seem to turn the other cheek—I don’t know how you
can do it. You, also, must have a lot inside that you want to get rid of
—maybe not. Maybe that is why you keep on going and always make
the best of things. I love you so much, but it’s hard when trying not to
hate also.
 I’ve been in California for two and a half years now trying hard
to separate my life—yet still being with you all and not once have you
or dad ever come to see me there because you expect me to come
home. Well, this is no longer home for me and I don’t want to leave
on bad terms. I don’t want to run away . . . In my cycling I feel that all
these conditions really have held me back—look at where Mark is
with all your support, doing what he wants—the most important thing
in life—I hope he is happy with his choice—and here I am, truly
convinced by all that I’ve wasted my time and made a stupid decision
—it’s all part of the great escape—riding away from it all—happy
alone in the middle of nowhere but having to go through with it to
prove myself no matter how hard everybody is making it for me. I
know this all sounds very selfish and senseless, but from my point of
view it really is not.
If I think that the stars—which have been constant for millions
of years compared to the few thousand man has struggled to prove his
belief in God—may say something about my lifetime, which is a
millionth of a millisecond in comparison, let me believe that and I’ll
let you have your ruled and stated and regulated Christian beliefs.
Don’t condemn me for it, make me out a pagan worshiper and ruin a
family tie because of it. If I am happy searching all my life for
meaning, then the search was well worth it even if I never found an
answer. I am not afraid of death—as is Dad—Dad has only one truth
and I think there are as many as there are stars in space.
I’ve always needed your love and support but am getting to the
point where I feel bad about it because I’m such a great
disappointment to you. I can’t cut myself off now because I no longer
have enough confidence in myself to survive. I only want you to love
me—not love who you think I should be—and since I can’t be just me
then I guess you don’t love me—you love Craig and your image of
what I am and am not.
My friends and I have very unique relationships based on a
simple love and concern and understanding for each other—yes,
common interests and yes, conflicting interests, but an openness and
honesty. Our “love” is based on blood relationships and a yielding to
truths that might offend or hurt—avoidance of reality. By living here I
have become the world’s greatest liar to avoid the truth and have
always hated myself for it. When I left I found I couldn’t love
anybody until I began to like myself, so I had to quit lying. When I
come home I find myself back in my bad habits, avoiding, lying,
being away from you all—and I can’t stand it any longer. My friends
and I are so supportive and open and honest and loving and
understanding—when we hug there are true feelings that I don’t get
when I hug dad and I can barely bring myself to embrace Bruce,
because we are distant too. Liz and I are so close that I hug her for
security and to get the love I miss from Dad—even though I know he
loves me in his way, and you and I have a mother-child bond, but
when we hug I don’t feel totally comfortable—a bit uneasy about all
that goes unsaid and knowing that you too hold back your emotions
and stay strong.
My friend Mel, who is 40, divorced with a son (13) who spends
most of the year with his mother in the midwest—the one who has
pushed me in my cycling—coached to the best of his ability—given
me the medal, a jersey, many meals and lots of love and friendship,
helped me up when I’m down—he says he wants to adopt me, even
build a room onto his house for me. In one summer he taught me more
than I’ve ever learned from Dad, and I’m so jealous of the way he and
his son interact.
I know you have a million questions and are afraid to ask them
—I can feel it when we talk about mundane things—I also know you
have a lot of answers, but that does not make them all right. I’ve tried
to get through to you before but chickened out because I didn’t want
to hurt anybody.
It’s going to be very hard for me to come back now that this is
said, although I think time will heal. I know this is not what you
wanted to hear and you’ll probably be saddened by it—but know that I
am much freer now that it is off my mind to a point and that just
writing this letter—which was very hard to do—has been a great
catharsis. There is still more that is unsaid but will come in time. If I
do come back to Denver to be with you, I don’t think I could ever be
here in the same house—which is very sad to me, but true. Right now
it seems that the less dad and I know of each other and the more we
avoid true feelings, the better we will get along. We would both have
to change a lot for me to love him entirely and for him to really love
me.
I probably made the wrong decision again by telling you all this
but I can’t go on much longer without going insane—if I’m not
already. I hope you will understand me a little more now and be more
honest and open with me.
It takes a lot of courage to initiate what might be very
dangerous to the most important thing in my life—and that is you all,
 my family—but now I have to ease my mind and love myself first to
prove I’m deserving of anyone else to love me.
I don’t want to run anymore, or to lie or to hate, but there have to be
changes in my life first before I can be on solid ground and know what
is right—

“There is still more that is unsaid but will come in time”: Craig’s coming out
to my parents is the “very dangerous” thing he is “initiating” with this letter,
written sometime after January 3, 1983, when he was probably already suffering
from the onset of AIDS.
A little more than a month before he died, Craig finally told his team of
doctors, who had no idea what they were looking for, that he was gay, and that he
had been sexually active with many partners. He then had to tell our parents. I was
never told about this conversation, and I’ve never asked about it.
In the last month of his life, Craig probably spoke fewer than a hundred
words—more because he could not, an effect of meningitis, than because he would
not. But that was there, too, that element of refusal. Those in whom he confided
were members of his family, not ours.
His unsent letter remains his completest utterance to us.

Even before Craig died, Bruce and I rented a U-Haul and drove to Santa
Monica to get his things. What I wanted most was his art. There were pictures,
photographs, cards, and drawings all over his room, both his work and the work of
friends he traded with, and more put away, inside portfolios, drawers, and boxes.
Bruce took charge of his bicycles, parts, and tools.
And then his clothes, some still holding his former shape. He had some fine
turquoise jewelry, too, some of which he’d stolen. He was an excellent thief.
 We packed the truck, and then went down to the beach and walked. We
didn’t say much. We drove home, again without saying much, both of us
thinking hard about Craig, maybe telling a story, trying to keep it light, getting
stoned, trying to keep it in. We didn’t know much about Craig.
I may have asked Bruce if he was gay; I may have only thought of doing so.
I know there were things I wanted to talk to Bruce about that I couldn’t, or
wouldn’t, bring up, and I blamed this on his longstanding unwillingness to talk.
Bruce and I didn’t know each other very well, either. We knew some of the things
each other did, the things we liked and didn’t like to eat, what we were good at,
what we weren’t. We hadn’t spent much time together: I was in Boulder or New
Jersey, Bruce in Fort Collins and Denver. All three of us had gone to see the
Olympic trials the summer before in Colorado Springs, and we’d enjoyed being
together. But we probably got stoned on the way, and so talked little about what we
were thinking and feeling.
I may have told Bruce that after I learned Craig’s secret from Mark Sink, I
accused Craig of not seeing how accepting I would have been, had he come to me.
Craig knew better. He reminded me of some things I’d said and done. We were
sitting cross-legged, face-to-face, on his bed. I apologized. He told me he had had
his first sex with a man in tenth grade, and that he’d been aware long before that of
being strongly attracted to men. He told me that many of his lone and long bike
rides had meetings in their middles.
In this, he was no different from Bruce or me. Each of us led secret lives out
of the house—and in it. Self-assertion, self-respect, self-esteem, self-report, self-
knowledge: our father had other names for these things: paganism, disobedience,
pride, arrogance, sin. Once we got used to thinking in these terms—however
inappropriately, unknowingly—it was convenient to keep ourselves at bay at home
and permit ourselves voyage in the world.
 I was the first to use drugs, Craig the next, and then Bruce, who was a
dedicated, superior swimmer. I think I was the first to have sex, too. I certainly led
when it came to questioning and rejecting catechism at Most Precious Blood on
Wednesday afternoons and mass at All Souls, where the pews smelled like lapsang
suchong—but it was probably our collective inertia in bed on Sunday mornings
that had the most telling effect. Our mother got tired of urging us to wake up and
get dressed. And once drugs, sex, music, and public education began to take,
church seemed less formidable to me and my brothers, and less worth insisting on
to our mother. Our father followed suit.
At first, our parents decided that we could go to church on our own, to a
later mass. We would walk or ride our bikes. But we would go past the church, to
the Big Top or the K-Mart, where we would spend an hour eating candy or
shoplifting, and then go back home. Sometimes we went with Brian, who had
shown us how to steal a cube steak: you slipped it into your underwear. Each of us
would, and then we’d go home and cook them, and watch the early football game.
“How was mass?”
“Fine.”

Craig’s deathbed was in a hospice. It was run—my parents had no idea—by

a gay Roman priest who had recently embraced the Orthodox church (or the other
way around). Father Paul was a blessing to my parents. He flirted with me one day,
while we were having a cup of coffee; he gave me the wrong kind of hug. He then
told Amy that he thought my father and I were gay.
In that last week or two of Craig’s life, my father caught a cold. There were
moments when it was hard to tell which affliction weighed heavier on him, his or
his son’s. But we were all living: I was taking notes, my mother was making lists,
Bruce was reading the paper, Lizzie—she was thirteen. Our grandmother was to
guess what her twenty-three-year-old grandson was dying of. My father, whose
theology is mostly Protestant anyway, was reading a book by an excommunicated
priest named Hans Kung. The book was called Immortality.
Our parents brought in a priest from All Souls to say last rites over Craig. He
had never met Craig; we hadn’t been to church in ten years. He didn’t know Last
Rites by heart, even though he was in his sixties. He might as well have been
reading directions for assembling a bookshelf made in China. It was the most
pathetic display of priesthood I’d ever seen. It didn’t touch Craig, who lay
speechless and full of morphine.

When Craig breathed his last breath, our staunch Catholic grandfather took
off his St. Christopher’s medal and laid it on Craig’s chest—St. Christopher, whom
the church had desanctified, and whose medal all of us had, in memory of Chrissie.
Bruce went outside to feel the tailwind.Our House
I was back in school a month after Craig’s funeral, studying Comedy, The
Age of Dryden, Elizabethan Prose, and the Victorian Novel. I had incompletes
from the last semester to work on, too—an essay on money in Shaw’s Major
Barbara seemed especially hard to touch.
Bruce and Lori got engaged to be married. Lizzie went back to school. Our
parents bought a new car. They looked to remodeling the house for “some new and
exciting things to get involved with”—enlarging the eating area off the kitchen,
putting in a skylight over their bathroom upstairs. “In the meantime,” my father
wrote to me,
we hope that the onset of spring will bring some elevation to your—
and our—leaden and bruised spirits, and that your very important
work will become easier—because we want this to be a sweet spot in
your life, before more pressing material responsibilities intrude. In the
 spiritual vein, we must always want poignant and quickening
remembrances of Craig’s past to intrude in our lives, for not to want
that would be truly losing Craig and our lives—of which he must
always remain a part—long before we see him (and Chris) again,
which, after a “little while” of remembrancing, however long that may
be for each of us, I faithfully believe we will.

The house we grew up in was built in 1930, at the corner of Lafayette and
Layton streets, on an acre of land. Over a hundred Chinese elms bordered the lot,
which divided almost equally into a yard and a field. In our yard, there were more
elms, some pines and spruce, a few lilacs, some Russian olives, a Newport plum,
fitzers, honeysuckles, irises, geraniums, tulips, mint, dandelions, vinca, daisies,
marigolds, petunias, crocuses, primroses, and hollyhocks. Across the street was a
cottonwood. Later, we had a few apple trees. There were ant lions, cicadas, garter
snakes, mice, squirrels, Monarch butterflies, Miller moths, robins, sparrows,
starlings, and magpies. Canadian geese flew over. My favorite bird, the red-wing
blackbird, kept to the marsh by the elementary school and the cottonwoods by
Little Dry Creek.
The field was elm and cheat grass. My father always referred to it as “the
back forty.” In it, my brothers and I dug forts, built tree houses, and hid from cars
we’d thrown rocks or snowballs at. People driving by would occasionally stop and
ask if the field were for sale; twice, my parents were shown plans for a dream
home.
As I look over the neighborhood in my mind, for two blocks in every
direction, I can’t find a dream home. With two exceptions, the houses weren’t built
when I grew up: brick or wood, one- or two-story, they were lived in, they were
not alarmed. No gates barred the driveways. Unfenced lawns kept ample room
between the street and the front door. You could have walked in our back door any
time you pleased (my mother always said: “If they want to get in, they’re going to
get in”).
Our greenish-gray house had two stories, an unfinished basement, and an
unfinished attic. The bedrooms were upstairs. When our parents put it up for sale,
it stayed on the market for a long time. Great location, but where were the maid’s
quarters? The utility room? The mud room?
Less than half a mile from our back door was Little Dry Creek. It was little,
but never dry, and never, unless it flooded, more than knee-deep. There were
snakes down by it, garter and bull-, and snakegrass, and frogs, and mice; there
were cottonwoods along it, water skates on it, and minnows in it. There was
cheatgrass along both sides that we would pull stands of and throw like hairy heads
at each other and into the water as bombs.
On the eastern side of Little Dry Creek was Saint Mary’s field, across which
we’d sometimes walk to school. That field today is full of dream homes. No girls
ride through there now toward Pony Club, because the fields on the other side of
St. Mary’s are stamped with dream homes, too, the walled and gated kind. When I
worked for Woody Jacober, he and I and John put in some of the landscapes
around them and the sprinkler systems beneath.
Cherry Hills Village used to be a relatively remote suburb. Today, people
commute into the city from thirty and forty miles farther south and east, where
houses cost six times—not adjusted for the inflation my father insists began in
1973, as one consequence of the Vietnam war—what our parents paid for the one
we lived in for more than thirty years. Since they sold it ten years ago, three
families have lived in it, all but the first adding on to it. When we lived on
Lafayette Street, only three or four houses, it seems, changed hands twice in thirty
years.
 Our block of Cherry Hills was McLagan, Yeske, Braught, Myrick, Bayless,
Smith, Fosnes, Eggert, Dellinger, Brown, Philpott, Hilliard, Tweedy, Williams,
Hall, Spenser, Watts, Meyer, Wood, Duell, Kemmer, Jones, Boucher, Schuster,
White, Fellingham, Birky, Scott, Dodge, Brooks, Smiley, Modeset, Sullivan,
Strausberger, Houghton, Claussey, Bardwell, Driscoll, Pear, Looney, Bryan,
Cohig, Steel, Shipman, Maloney, Austin, Turre—and those are just the patrilinear
names.
It was a beautiful place to grow up in.
There were no cherries except sour ones, and only one hill, as far as we were
concerned, and that was Franklin hill. Our landmark was the water tower between
Lafayette and Downing, on Stanford. The only other thing that rose higher than the
trees was the tower of the Mormon church. We knew nothing of the Mormons,
who came and went on Sundays. On the other six days, we rode bikes and drove
go-carts and motorbikes in their empty parking lot.

According to my friend Jeff, who envies us for it, we grew up surrounded by

a sense of beauty and by beautiful things. That was mostly my mother’s doing.
None of the things she and my father bought cost a lot of money—an antique chest
of drawers, a sofa, a loveseat, a set of dining room chairs, a table—and many were
small: boxes, frames, holders, stands, mirrors, paintings, prints, trays, figurines,
baskets, dried flowers, glassware. And they were reupholstered, rearranged, and
moved rather than replaced.
Everything was to be enjoyed, lived in and lived with, by eye and hand and
body. All surfaces adorned, but none cluttered or gaudy; nothing dark, dramatic, or
somber; no special collections, no patent schemes—only color, warmth, and
comfort.
Mom
Some boys don’t love their mothers, but I love mine. “You’d bang your head
on the floor whenever she’d leave the house,” Mrs. Gates, our babysitter, told me,
many years later.
“By your lonesome,” our mother would say, “all by your lonesome you went
out to play?” As if it were the strangest thing.
We’ve never had along talk. I don’t know her very well. I am forty-one as I
write this: my mother just told me that, with the exception of my brother’s death,
she has no memory of our family’s life between 1967 and 1977. I’m afraid I do.
They were not, on the whole, good years. But I no more remember everything
about them than my mother remembers nothing about them.

Our Mother
Not long after Craig died, my aunt and I were standing in the kitchen,
drinking champagne. “Your mother doesn’t need to be the center of attention,” she
said. “It’s just that she is. She can’t help it.”
She was 50; I was 25. I knew by then what she meant about my mother’s
getting her way, though I could no more account for the unobtrusiveness with
which she did it than my aunt could.
“She got it from Gram,” Aunt Bets said, invoking their effortless mother,
“and she got all of it.”
Even now, when she comes to visit, Aunt Bets spends half her time trying to
learn my mother’s charm and the other half trying to break it.
Our mother works by invisible means, by force of character, grace of
bearing, goodness of heart. She doesn’t waste words; if anything, she expresses
herself with difficulty. I have never heard her speak at length on any topic. She has
never chosen to speak at length. She didn’t speak at Chrissie’s or Craig’s funerals,
or at Bruce’s two weddings. Her letters are, with few exceptions, very brief. This
one, from July 31, 1989, is typical:
Dearest Mark— I started in first thing this AM, researching what I
actually have been doing since you left on June 19th!. By now I’ve
gone through lots of piles and made lists of my lists and tried to
collect thoughts and treasures to send to you—and it’s only 4 o’clock,
and I’m going to hop on my bike and ride this to the P.O.—it’s an
absolutely glorious day, and I haven’t been out in it yet. That’s what
happens usually, I think—after so long at desk or phone, I decide to
bag it and ride or swim, feeling that I’ve accomplished something by
just mailing the lists.
In reading through her letters to me, I found one from 1980, when I was in London,
in which she tells me something about her past, her inner life. I know it’s unique,
because I’ve saved all her letters. She is responding to a letter that must have been
full of complaining, dreary, dislocated, homesick tones.
Mark, I remember some very strange nebulous feelings in college—
having to do with where I was—who I was, I suppose—home and
family vs. college and friends and the world—hard to describe, but
maybe akin to some of your thoughts—but I think, simply, part of
growing up—if you’ll forgive such a motherly diagnosis—nothing to
be alarmed about—so stay busy and healthy and happy and all those
kinks will work themselves out.

She stands five five. Her hair is light brown. Her nose is remarkable. She
doesn’t like it, but it adds to her beauty, which is uncommon. I don’t know what
color her eyes are. Her skin is soft and tans easily; she loves the sun. Her hands are
gentle, the veins prominent and healthy, the fingers soft and strong, but not thick,
like her father’s were. She used to wear nail polish, geranium red, like her lipstick.
I would watch her dress to go out at night. After her shower, she would
come back into the room with a towel around her, covering her from her breasts to
her knees. She would put her underpants on, then her bra. Though she was careful
to turn away when putting it on, I saw her breasts once or twice. She would put her
arms through the shoulder straps, fit the cups around her breasts, then reach around
in back to hook the strap. Some women I’ve known hook the strap in front first,
then slide that part around to the back, then put their arms through the shoulder
straps, then fit the cups around their breasts. My mother never did this. All
deviations are from my mother’s ways.
Then she would take the towel off, comfortable to go about the rest of her
preparations dressed so. The next thing she did was put on her stockings (she rarely
went out at night without stockings), which must have involved her in a girdle,
because I remember liking the feeling of the top of the stockings getting taken up
by the button and then cinched down into that hairpin-like wire. But the fun was
watching her select the pair of stockings, check them for runs, then roll them
carefully down from top to toe in her hands, place her toes in the opening, and roll
them up her legs. She was deft at this, as I suppose millions of women must have
been.
Then she would light a cigarette, a Parliament, and take a drag. She would
blow the smoke out against the mirror, in which I could always see, from the bed,
the framed prayer of St. Francis of Assisi on the wall behind her. Now she would
take a sip of the cocktail my father had brought her, either a martini on the rocks
with two olives (less frequently a Gibson with two onions), or a scotch on the
rocks.
She would begin to decide what to wear, pushing apart skirts and dresses
and blouses in her closet. She might bring one or two out and hang them up to look
at, or slip into a pair of shoes and hold a dress up to her body, looking herself up
and down—a yellow cotton shift, with a nap like burlap; a green and white print
with a silken texture; a blue and white print, also cotton, but smoothly finished. I
liked that dress, and I might tell her so, or she might ask which one I thought she
should wear.
She put her hair up in those days. I can’t remember seeing it down, let down.
Her sister wore a braid; my mother never wore a braid. She pulled her hair back
into a roll rather than a bun, tucked it in, placed the hairpins in a row. She would
put a slip on, then her dress, followed by jewelry, a bracelet and a necklace, and
maybe a pin. She would finish her cigarette and take a sip of her cocktail.
Then it was time for perfume (Chanel #5), makeup, and lipstick. All my
mother needed, she’d say, was “a little lipstick.” I loved watching her apply
lipstick. She was concentrated and preoccupied at the same time—but the
perfection of that stroke! The very brim of each lip, then the smacking and the
checking, the devolving of the stick into the tube, and the click of the cap.
I suppose that entire act defined a woman for me then, because it was
something a man never did. Nor would a man touch perfume with the pad of his
index finger to three or four places on his neck and chest, or take a pencil across
the softest part of his eyelid, or a brush to his eyelashes, or a pancake to his cheeks.
When I see a lipstick on a dresser or a table now, I almost can’t not pick it up, slide
the top off, and twist it until that slope the lips form emerges. Sometimes I apply it;
sometimes just smell it; and sometimes I take it between my lips as a clarinetist
would the mouthpiece.
Finally, earrings—gold posts or pearls, maybe blue dahlia hoops—and my
mother was ready.

“What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” “Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Moderation in all things”: these are my mother’s watchwords, and with them she
brought us through some terrible passages—including her own stroke, ten years
ago.
She was gardening in front of the house when she felt the onset of the worst
headache she’d ever had (I was unaware she’d had one). She came inside and
collapsed at the bottom of the stairs. She called out to my father, who was working
on the lawn. He took her to the hospital.
The doctor was inside her cranium when the aneurysm burst. He was able to
tie it off and prevent any damage. She suffered no loss of movement or speech. She
was sixty-one.
Typically, she said very little about it at the time and has said little more
since. Thirteen years earlier, after a dentist pulled a perfectly good tooth from the
lower right side of her mouth, instead of the bad one he had meant to remove from
the lower left, she suffered in silence during a flight from Denver to Milan. My
father and sister told me about it when they arrived. I asked my mother if she was
going to sue.
“Of course not. People make mistakes.”
The complications at our sister’s birth, when our mother was thirty-eight, are
known to us only as “complications.” They have never been specified. After Lizzie
was born, our mother had to return to the hospital for an operation on her varicose
veins. They trouble her still. She has arthritis, too, like her mother before her, and
her back and neck pain her. She has had two small operations for skin cancer.
As soon as we bring up her health, she dismisses it as not worth discussing.
She hears what we say about her aches and pains, nods at our proposed remedies,
and then goes on as before. I think she takes her hypothyroid pills, but irregularly.
Scotch and gin are her medicine.
 Our mother’s capacity to look past, to get over, to relegate—we could not
have done without it. At the same time, we might have gotten along a little better
with our father—and she with her husband—if she hadn’t been so high in the art of
suffering, so nebulously heroic.
Few things annoyed my father more than what he called, and still calls, my
mother’s “insouciance.” As soon as he felt it, he would insist that my mother
acknowledge the things she didn’t wish to know or see, that she admit their
importance; that she never again make the mistake of trifling with bills, Vietnam,
the economy, Nixon, the twigs on the lawn.
To our mother, none of them was worth more than a moment’s notice. They
were “necessary evils,” like cars. Nor could she share my father’s feeling that a
common cold required sustained attention, or that a dropped icecube, a broken
glass, a change of plans, or a flooded basement warranted a lost temper. The very
attitude touched our father off.
Our mother was certain at all times that we were innocent; our father, when
drunk, that we were guilty. His post cocktail-hour monologues struck us, even
then, as wild and dangerous. He was aiming so high above the mark to hit the mark
that we couldn’t tell where the shooting range was. We knew only that the minute
any of us made our presence known, we were targets. That most of his shots
missed made us feel all the more wounded.
It strikes me now that my mother, during these rages, was a surrogate for my
father’s mother, whose every sweet word indicated that, when her alcoholic
husband, a straight-commission salesman with no buyers, came home between
1930 and 1940, she must have treated him the same way our mother treated our
father.
Our father’s mother—Nama—believed that we brought our ills on ourselves.
God, she would say, is like the sun, which does not exist to burn us, but to give us
life. If we get burned, it isn’t the sun’s fault, but our own. Our imperfections and
mistakes were not to be blamed on others, but to be “prayed on.” We were to “lift
our thoughts” above the things of this world.
My father found this Christian Science insufficient. It wasn’t rigorous
enough. Neither was my mother’s easy Catholic faith. Another mark against her
was that she hadn’t suffered in basement apartments during the Depression. Her
father was steadily employed and sober, and her college-educated mother never
had to work. This background, together with her sanguine disposition, made my
mother a perfect object for my father’s contempt.
He could tell the instant he walked in the door that our mother was being
cheerful—just as she and the three of us could tell by a glance whether he was
drunk, and to what degree. The drunker he was, the more unhappiness he could
cause; the more unhappiness he could cause, the more cheerful she had to be. He
felt indicted. After he’d hung up his coat, gone upstairs to change, and come back
down, he was spoiling for her.
His was the tragic, hers the comic, attitude; they could rarely see each
other’s point of view. That didn’t matter to my mother, though. She didn’t have to
see the other’s point of view. She had only to feel pity for it, or sympathy for it, or
empathy with the person who held it.
My father drew the hasty and unwarranted inference: that she felt superior to
him.
She was uninformed, flippant. He was informed, concerned. The republic
was going to hell, the fathers were sacrificing the sons, and she was smiling.
The relentless and the relenting.
If only she could have relented without managing to imply—so it seemed to
him—that his fury, and the events that incited it, were unimportant. The more she
tried to lighten his load, the heavier it became.
 “Now, Bill, Billy, come on! Not in front of the children.”
“They can hear it,” I remember him saying. “They can hear it.”
Our mother thought not. She thought: we have everything we need and
luxuries besides. Our pantry is full; our house is safe and warm; and the sun also
rises. Everything is fine. Couldn’t we just have a nice dinner together? What is the
problem?
Whatever it was, it was in my poor father’s head. Did the war in Vietnam
really have anything to do with our family? Did inflation? Were Johnson, Nixon,
Agnew, Laird, MacNamara, Westmoreland, and Kissinger worse than all the other
devils who’d ever possessed the power to deceive and kill?
But Walter Cronkite had to shove in the oar of the world, and our father had
to turn up the volume.
Isolated by hawks downtown and Republicans in the suburbs, he had no one
to talk to. He was alone in his disgust. It wasn’t enough that one father betrayed
him.
We spoke when spoken to and excused ourselves as soon as we could.

I’ve been unable to convince myself that there was something calculated in
my mother’s manner of coping with my father: that, because she knew she was in
control, she could allow him his drunken rages, his bouts of self-pity, his unfair
accusations, his paranoia. Calculation is not my mother’s strong suit. Instead, she
knew her husband.
I don’t know how many times our father threatened to leave us between
1967 and 1977. My mother doesn’t remember a single time; I remember many. But
I know that my father had too developed a sense of remorse to come home drunk
and, three hours later, threaten to pack his suitcase and walk out the door, two
nights in a row. It must have taken him at least three days to get over the trouble
he’d caused, before he’d cause it again.
On those hellish nights when he did leave us, our mother knew what we
didn’t: that he was going for a walk. She knew that he would come home; that he
would get into bed next to her and go to sleep; that he would wake up in the
morning, with a hangover for punishment, and go to work—or to hell, as he
sometimes called the office.
It might be a long night’s journey into day, but breakfast was in the nature of
things, and our father loved us. Our mother knew that. He could drink, he could
chafe, he could rage, but the next day belonged to her. He resented that; he resents
it still.
I sided with my father sometimes, but I sided with my mother more often. In
doing so, I learned from her how not to placate, and from him how to fight for the
last word. I also learned—a futile lesson—that there is no last word.

Our parents were not our friends. They loved us—my father said it; my
mother went along—“indivisibly.” None of us knew what that meant. They didn’t
discuss things in front of us or with us. They discussed things having to do with us
(permissions, grades, punishments, money) in their bedroom, with the door closed.
They never said a word to us about sex, for example. Bruce and I were sent to a
sex-education film one night in sixth grade. The next word I had about it came in
an envelope—a copy of Newsweek’s cover story about herpes, with a brief note
from my father. I was in college. My brothers got the same envelope.
Each of us knew parents who seemed to treat their children as
contemporaries, and Craig, in particular, longed for that kind of parenting; but such
a relation between generations was taboo to my father, on theo-socio-philosopical
grounds; to my mother, it was just “silly.” We owed our father obedience and
honor; we owed our mother happiness. In turn, they never policed our clothes or
our rooms; they didn’t read our mail or listen in on our phone calls. They didn’t
check up on us to see if we were where we said we’d be.
In practice, their “What-you-don’t-know-won’t-hurt-you” worked to our
advantage most of the time, especially when we were stealing, vandalizing,
drinking, having sex, getting stoned—and, even when we didn’t get caught, lying
about it all. Our mother, though, always noticed when we were worried, and
quickly tried to absolve us. When that didn’t work, she would ask us what was
wrong, which never failed to catch us off guard. We knew, or thought we knew,
that she didn’t really want to know, and so we said nothing. She knew it wasn’t
nothing.
“Why don’t you run around the block? That’ll make you feel better.”
It may have, but we weren’t about to do it. The gulf between her remedy and
the sources of our worries made her suggestion contemptible.
“O, Mark,” she said two decades later, when I called to tell her I’d checked
into a rehab, “I can’t tell you how important exercise is.”
As for solicitousness on our part—that was never encouraged. We too could
detect worry, guilt, and anger, and hope to stave them off. We knew a simple
remedy for my father’s drinking, the near occasion of so much of our trouble. We
knew that our mother spoke without much conviction when, after another episode
that reduced all of us but him to tears, she told us everything was fine. But instead
of pointing out that her chuckling when my father slammed his fist on the butcher-
block oven-top only made him madder, I would say, “No it isn’t. I hate him.”
It was not our place to intercede. I tried it, over the years, and it was never
less than disturbing. In fact, not until I was forty-one was I able to say calmly to a
calm father—albeit by phone—that I was worried about his drinking.
I spent twenty years dissecting my father. “Don’t psychoanalyze me,” he
said one night in an even tone. “You’ve got better things to do with your time.”
 So I spent ten trying to decide if my mother should undergo the same
operation.
And now look what I’ve done.

Frank Zappa said some thirty years ago: “If your children knew how lame
you really were, they’d kill you in your sleep.” That may be the most incisive
analysis of the family drama on record, but it doesn’t accord with the immediate
way I felt things in ours.
My father frightens me. My mother has an answer for everything. It’s no use
challenging him, and no use talking to her. He’ll always win, she’ll never
understand. If I go to her to protect me from him, he’ll take it out on both of us. If I
try to protect her from him, she’ll say she isn’t in danger.
Our mother wanted us, and still wants us, to lighten up, be happy, be busy,
be cheerful, have fun. Her sense of the activities that fall under these categories
may not be large; it may not have kept up with the times; but it isn’t asking much;
she isn’t demanding things of life that it can’t give. Is she so different from her
children, are they from her, that what satisfied her cannot satisfy them?
My mother did not drink and do drugs as a teenager; she did not sneak out of
the house at night; she did not have sex; she did not shoplift; she did not vandalize
her neighborhood.
She played with her sister and brother; she rode a horse; she had a dog.
She went to a Catholic women’s college for two years in Illinois, where she
grew up, the oldest child of an engineer and an engineer’s daughter, who went to
Northwestern in the twenties; then transferred to the University of Colorado, where
she drank “joe” and smoked cigarettes with her sisters in the basement of their
sorority house.
In 1954, she graduated with a major in Fine Arts and a minor in Botany,
moved into an apartment with two of her friends in Denver, and took her first job
at May, Daniels, and Fischer, as an assistant in the home furnishings department.
She married my father in 1957. By 1963, she had four children under the age
of seven. She told me, as if it would be absurd to think otherwise, that she didn’t
know what she was doing when she got married. She didn’t know what having
children would be like. She didn’t read any books about marriage or parenthood.
She took care of the next things. She crossed the items off her list one by one.
Love is the main force, and you have to keep going.
Manners are important; appearance is important. We were to say please and
thank you, and not to use the word “hate.” We were not to refer to someone in the
same room in the third person. A belt was needed. Shirts had to be buttoned up to
the top but one. Pants were to be worn at the waist, not at the hips. Plaids were not
to be mixed with stripes, brown with black. A white shirt was to be worn with a
pair of gray flannels and a navy blue blazer.
Of course, what she expected of us she seldom required; she let us off the
hook (that was one of my father’s favorite phrases.) She thinks she spoiled us.
Ruthie Dodge told me that my mother called her one day and said she was
bored. Ruthie was a little surprised that a woman with four young children could
be bored, but she understood. She and my mother drew and painted; both had
studied art and design. They weren’t going to change diapers and clean house all
day.
In November 1963, they invited some friends over to see a small collection
they had assembled for sale: fabrics, paintings, drawings, antiques, frames, boxes.
The day they chose turned out to be the day President Kennedy was assassinated.
Within a year, they had established Et Cetera, the interior decorating business our
mother still runs out of her house.
Every now and then, when she’s feeling assertive, or neglected, she repeats a
line she saw in a New Yorker cartoon: “There’s no time off for good behavior.”
Nor, after having five children and burying two, has my mother ever seen a
therapist.
Therapy? She read Erma Bombeck.

A few years ago, at Christmas, I meant to sit down and talk with my
mother, but we made no time. Afternoon and evening passed. Later that night, I
told her that I was glad to have her temperament and sorry to have my father’s
temper. She didn’t like that. She wanted me to lighten up, be happy; she always
has.
“You’ve had a rough life,” I said.
She pushed the words away with both hands. As she did, I noticed a scar on
her elbow that I didn’t remember (my sister’s dog pulled her over: she suffered a
broken bone and a cut). That, too, was nothing.
“May I feel your head, where the brain surgery was done?”
She pushed me away, even as tears came to her eyes. I think she was about
to say that she hadn’t had it rough at all; in fact, she’d had a blessed life. But she
thought better of it.
My father, who saw that she’d begun to cry, thought we’d gone far enough.
“You’ve been a lucky girl,” he said.
Birthdays
Dear Mark,
Here’s a little something from all of us for your 26th birthday, so spend it
frivolously if you want to.
We wish you all the best, and many, many more birthdays to come, because
we feel we’ve been shortchanged on children’s birthdays, and we want you and
Bruce and Lizzie to make a more special effort than most to stay out of harm’s way
and live after us, God willing.
I hope you overcame your “block” on the “rhetoric” paper, and that it is
behind you by now for better or worse—“you can’t be perfect when you pitch
every day” . . .
There’s not much news from this end—Lizzie continues to do well in
swimming and loves school . . . .
Celebrate this one a little extra for our dear Craig—I think you knew him
best of all of us, and we know how much you loved him, that he knew you did till
the very end (still does, somehow), and that gave him strength to endure longer and
so courageously. I will always be able to see you helping Craig on and off the toilet
at the hospital—your strong arms wrapped around his slowly leadening body. God
blesses you for that, Mark, and so do all of us on this your 26th year to heaven.
Take care of yourself—be patient, humble, pure and obedient to your best instincts
and “highest imaginings.”

All our love,

Dad
P.S. I know Mom will be sending something under separate cover.

Babysitters
 Diana and Sally Dodge, Hillary Weed, Becky Brown, Bridget Jacober,
Missy Dowden, Sue Snyder, Abby and Sara Steel, Tay Marlor, Carol Margolin:
they all lived within three or four blocks, and all of them babysat my brothers and
me. We had three male babysitters, too: Brian Bell, B.J. Hall, Scott Canby. B.J.
taught me how to ride a bike. Scott sacked groceries at Piggly Wiggly. Brian
taught me almost everything.
Another three of our babysitters were older women. Brocky must have been
over 60 in 1969. She was white-haired, round, and short. She drove a Chevy over
whose dashboard she could barely see or be seen. She never had an accident. Mrs.
Gates was probably in her fifties then. She would come over in a green Valiant
with her husband Dale, who was hard of hearing and rarely spoke. Mrs. Gates
spoke often and directly, and put up with nothing. Her main punishment was to
make us stand in the corner. We were always sorry to hear that she was coming to
babysit. She told me several years ago that I was a rascal.
Then there was Nama, our father’s mother. Her name was Mrs. Sweet, and
she was, though strict. She didn’t put up with orneriness, either, but she didn’t
make us stand in the corner.
Brocky (whom my mother no longer remembers), Mrs. Gates, and Nama
would come when our parents went away for a weekend or longer. Brocky and
Mrs. Gates would also come when my mother couldn’t be there to meet us after
school. The other babysitters came when my parents went out for the evening.
I think they were paid fifty cents an hour.
Bridget would take us on walks behind her house, where Little Dry Creek
was. She showed us snake grass, and named it. Becky tried to get us to play new
games; I seem to see us wrestling on the living room floor once.
I would try to fall asleep in their laps.
I had a crush on every one of them at one time or another, and sometimes on
two of them at once. Each of them was different, and I adjusted for that difference,
to get what I wanted, or to get away with what they didn’t want. I’d go to the door
with my mother when they came, to see what I could expect. There was no
innocence there.
We were four boys, or three boys, or, after after March 25, 1971, when
Lizzie was born, three boys and one girl. We couldn’t have been an easy job. I
don’t know when the babysitters stopped coming, but I haven’t stopped thinking
about them. In the past few years, I’ve gotten in touch with Becky, Sally, Diana,
Bridget, Hillary, Abby, and Sara.
When Diana Dodge became Diana Webster, and Hillary Weed Hillary
Erickson, and Abby Steel Abby Lochhead, and Sue Snyder Sue Dawson, and Sara
Steel Sara Davis, I was there with my family, watching them take their vows,
kissing them in the reception line.
HELP was written on the sole of one of Steve Dawson’s shoes, ME on the
other.

Diana
The one high–stool that stays stays because you sat in it, babysitting; you
more like leaned back in it, your back against the counter, your legs around its
legs. It must have been late morning, or not long after lunch, and you were leaning
back, back in the high stool, posting on the withers, cantering, galloping in the
flank-high grass—your horse lathered, your saddle soaped and sounding off, cinch
and latigo taut, the shod hoofs striking as a soundtrack.
I was leaning hard against the fence to watch you, turning the corral post in
its notch.
You were handsome, with that scar on your bottom lip from when your
horse threw you once, and I wanted you to tell me the story of that scar.
But I want more than that now, wanted more back then, back when you were
leaning back, and I was riding with you—riding, riding, riding in your lap.
Brian
None of the girls was ever mean, but Brian could be. He made me sit on his
feet to keep them warm at football games. He pressed a spatula hot from the
hamburgers he was cooking on my bare shoulder. He and his friend John Morton
chased me around the house until they caught me, then reached in their pants,
pulled out some of their pubic hair, and shoved it in my mouth. But it wasn’t pubic
hair; it was upholstery stuffing.
Brian was friend, brother, babysitter, uncle, coach, teacher. Once, when I
was riding my bike down Franklin hill, and my front wheel came loose, and I shot
through my stingray handlebars onto the pavement—I wasn’t wearing a shirt—
Brian took care of me. He poured hydrogen peroxide on my chest and cleaned the
gravel and dirt out of the cuts.
He took care of James Claussey, the bully in our neighborhood, for us. He
packed a snowball into an iceball and hit James in the back of his thigh as he ran
toward a fence; Claussey never bothered us again.
Brian taught my brothers and me how to shoplift, drive a go-cart, dress,
dance, talk about stereos and bicycles, choose records, race slot cars, kick a soccer
ball, pleasure a girl (“the velvet buzzsaw”), smoke hash, clean a pipe, store resin,
and speed-shift. He bought beer and liquor for us, and we bought pot, hash,
mescaline, and acid from him.
When I was in fifth grade, I took a Sly and the Family Stone record Brian
had played at our house to a show-and-tell. When I was in sixth grade, I danced in
the talent show to the Temptations’s, “I Can’t Get Next To You.” Brian taught the
steps to me and to Katie Philpott, in her living room, in front of a console stereo.
 Brian always brought albums over when he’d come to babysit. I was still
listening to top-40 AM radio; after Brian, I listened to KFML, Denver’s first free-
form radio station. It wasn’t until seventh and eighth grade that I started to buy
records, at $3.99 each from Budget Tapes & Records.
Over twenty years later, when I started doing a soul and R&B radio show in
Carbondale, Colorado, I dedicated my first one to Brian.
“Color My World,” sung by Joe Cocker, was his and Sue Mitchell’s song;
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Sly and the Family Stone, the Temptations,
Nazz, New York Rock Ensemble, Ballin’ Jack, Humble Pie, Vanilla Fudge, Boz
Scaggs, and Steve Miller were our bands. He shopped with me for my two-tone
platform shoes; he took me to my first concert, Santana, when Abraxas came out;
he carried me out of the auditorium when I passed out at Smokey Robinson and the
Miracles; he told me what to do next with Libby, and to keep an eye on Katie; he
played Ten Years After’s “Goin’ Home” over and over again, to annoy me.
Brian made me older when it hurt to be young; and if my admiration for him
made me impatient with my age, my looks, my abilities, and my feelings, I took
consolation in the fact that he never told me to get lost.
He was a natural athlete, confident and well-liked; he was funny and serious;
he was wild and well-mannered. Good manners and a minimum of precaution
cover a host of sins, and go a long way to making a double life not only possible,
but fun.
Effects of Summer
I realized the other day that I’ve been having sex since I was in fifth grade.
I spent most of my adolescent summers swimming in the morning, playing
tennis in the afternoon, and swimming again after tennis.
All those hours in a Speedo, in tennis shorts, around girls in Speedos,
bikinis, and tennis dresses—all that skin, water, sweat, towel; that going
underwater, eyes wide open; the playing in the grass, the ice cubes poured into the
bathing suits; the running around, the looking at girls getting tans; the showering,
the dressing and undressing; the peeking and imagining; the diving in and getting
out; the Minnows and Whales, the greased watermelon, the coin toss; the kicks and
the strokes and the matches and the races: dolphin, flutter, scissor; serve, slice, and
spin; the volleys and the rallies; the singles and doubles and faults and love; back,
breast, butter, free—the medley of our heads coming out of the water that combed
our hair shiny and tight, making our faces beautiful in that instant, for ourselves,
feeling it, and for the lookers–on, looking down at us from the balcony, wanting to
get wet, but hesitant to come in, feeling our water on us, envying us, taking their
dip.

Arapahoe Tennis Club was our summer camp. Our father didn’t believe in
the Boy Scouts or the Highlanders, and we never went camping as a family.
Though never a swimmer himself, he encouraged us to swim, and play tennis, and
to compete in both. And while we were doing this, our mother could go to Mrs.
Lillard’s Wayside West to buy antiques; to Chintz and Printz, to look at fabrics; to
EMW, to buy furniture and lighting; and to Fred and Florence Boucher and Jo
Calloley, for draperies, curtains, and upholstery. After her errands, she would come
and swim her laps.
We were lucky in our coaches and lifeguards. Jerry Kuretich was tall,
handsome, and strong. After he dove, he was more than half-way across the pool
before he emerged to make his first stroke. He taught Bruce and me how to swim: I
can still feel his hand under my back, floating me. Leslie and Peggy Reed would
take us to Burger King for lunch. Peggy’s radio never worked, but she would
pretend it did, singing snatches of tunes as she rolled the dial, mimicking
commercial voices and static. Terry Herzog was another tall, handsome man, and a
great diver. Jake Jackson, with his black-belt karate, broke bricks and boards for
us. Giff Cutler was funny and playful, and Cliff Robinson, whose Arizona driver’s
license we would use as the model for our fake IDs, seemed like a surfing movie
star.
It wasn’t long before Bruce and I, at eight and nine, were winning our
events, the short-distance freestyles; Craig hadn’t joined the team yet. As winners,
we were noticed by the oldest swimmers, in the 15–17 age-group, and by the club
members who watched our meets. We carpooled with the Talbott sisters and the
Bouchers; we got to know the Whiting brothers and the Wasson sisters, and
Charlie and Leslie Lee. After practices and matches and meets, though, we were on
our own, within our own age-group, looking across the pool at what we wanted to
be, or into the parking lot as someone we would have liked to leave with, dressed
now in cut-offs and a shirt, drove away to somewhere fun.
I never asked Craig, but he must have been as thrilled by Jerry and Cliff and
Jake as I was by the Talbotts and Jenny Sink and Julie Westerberg. And as
confounded. A girl a few years older might be known to me in five roles: as a
teammate, a babysitter, a lifeguard, a neighbor, and a friend. I could envy her, lust
after her, joke with her, and admire her all at once. I could cheer for her at a meet,
be here charge after practice, go out to lunch with her as a friend, hits balls with
her in the afternoon, and want to kiss her when the night came.
I had a crush on Meg Holyoke for years, and spent many Fourth of Julys
sitting next to her when the blankets replaced the towels and the fireworks started.
The cottonwoods became tall shadows, the pool a mirror of colored lights. We’d
lie on our backs and watch the explosions. The intervals between the booms and
the fire working in the sky—pure desire.
(I learned a little later that fucking in water isn’t much fun. Water and swim
suits provoke desire, but water takes away viscosity—at least chlorinated water
does. The body’s fluids are defeated; one squeaks instead of slides.)

By design, our club had no frills—no parking attendants, no grill, no servers,

no pop machine, no snack bar. We did have an ice machine, and it made the
sweetest, most perfect cubes, about the size of two throat lozenges. Some members
were strictly tennis players; I don’t think there any strict swimmers. Some few
were on both the tennis and the swim teams, but only a few won at both. I didn’t,
and my frustrations came out on the court. I yelled, threw my racket, played worse,
and lost. John Benson won almost every match he played. His tennis was like his
penmanship—neat, controlled, persistent. But he couldn’t take the water. He’d
jump in in his tennis shorts and look shocked, shake the water out of his curly hair,
if he got it wet, and then get out.
What I liked most about tennis team was going to other clubs to play
matches. But that was frustrating, too, because my losing ways made it harder for
me to hang out with the really good players, especially the girls—the Dunklee
sisters, Tracy Tempest, Anita Averich, Lori Janzen—but also the boys: Willie
Shafroth, Peter Boucher, Jake Ward, Peter Foster. My success as a swimmer didn’t
count with them. I knew who they were, but they didn’t know who I was—a
winning formula for resentment. I noticed things in others I wanted noticed in
myself, and wanted to say things to people I wished they’d say to me. But around
cream tennis shorts and skirts, white shoes and socks, white shirts and Jack Kramer
rackets, a Speedo seemed like a shameful loin cloth. It was worst when we played
the Denver Country Club, because that’s where the sons and daughters of Denver
society belonged, and I wanted to belong there, too.
Ann
Ann and Gyda would by the bridge, and sometimes Caroline and Lila,
having walked down from the pool, or through the fields from their houses and
along the Highline Canal trail. They would wait in the tall grass by the brown
water, hidden from view. They’d have cigarettes. After practice, I’d bring suicide
in a mayonnaise jar, liquors from my parents’ cabinet mixed with pop and juice.
We’d drink and smoke together, and then Ann and I would kiss. I’d taste the
smoke on the fine hairs above her top lip, and never forget it, and never stop being
stirred by it when I’d taste it again—on the lips of Liz and Kay and Libby and
Brenda.
Ann says that I was her first love, and that I was unfaithful even then—even
in first love, whose names are many.
Libby
Libby was the first. She was three years older, maybe only two. She had
thick black hair, cut short, and full lips and dimples. She rode horses and swam
butterfly, played tennis and lacrosse. She had the other girls on the street for her
slaves.
I was afraid of her. She’d stop me in the street, take the front wheel of my
stingray between her legs, put her hands on my handlebars. She’d hold me up. I
was supposed to say something. I couldn’t. She’d shake me. Cars would come and
she wouldn’t move.
Would she let me go? She would, but not until she said so. Would I come
jump on her tramp? Had I heard the Who’s Tommy? She would see me at
swimteam practice tomorrow, but I should come to nightgames tonight. I could go
to Pony Club with her on Saturday. We could jump on her trampoline after that.
A year or two or three later, she stopped me after swimteam and asked if I
wanted to smoke a joint with her. I said yes. I started down toward the Highline,
but that wasn’t what she had in mind. She asked if I could sneak out that night and
come down to her tent. We would smoke the joint then.
She’d pitched it by the Schusters’ white picket fence. The moon was full. It
was darker inside the tent, but I could see that she wore a thin blue nightgown and
no underwear. I felt awkward before we smoked and after. When we started to
kiss, I didn’t like the taste of her mouth, of the smoke and saliva as it moistened
with contact and then dried a little before the next kiss. I felt little hairs when we
kissed again, her strong lips pushing back.
She had to help me with the rest. I remember licking her down there, the feel
of her lips and hair on my tongue. I liked that, and so did she.
Then I think I disappointed her—how fast I came, how little I was.
I taste and smell her sometimes still. I never went to her tent again.
Missy
Missy lived in Brookside, across Bellview, about half a mile away. She was
a year older. She had long, straight blond hair and wore glasses, with hexagonal or
octagonal frames. She was short, stocky even, and strong. Like me, she was a
swimmer and competitive. She had a ready laugh, explosive, abrupt, and nasal, and
an easy, sarcastic sense of humor. She was playful and spoke her mind.
One night, our friend Chris was with us. We had asked Brian to get us some
Colt–45, which he was happy to do. He stashed it for us in the culvert that ran
under Lafayette Street where it intersected Layton, right in front of our house, at
our bus–stop, our meeting place. It was dark and raining when we picked up the
beer.
Missy and I were practiced beer–drinkers and deceivers by this time. I don’t
think we were sixteen yet, but maybe we were. We were companions for part of a
summer and part of a fall, after school, or for a complete summer, or two summers
—long enough, anyway, for us to have settled into an exciting routine.
We’d walk half a mile out of Cherry Hills Village into the city of
Englewood and buy two quarts of 3.2 Olympia, Budweiser, Miller, or Coors at Big
Top or 7–11. On the way back, the bottles concealed in our down vests or jean
jackets, or maybe just in a bag, we would talk, I imagine, but I can’t remember
what we said. Our destination was either the tack room of the McClagans’ barn,
across the street from my house to the west, or the tack room of the Dodges’ barn,
across the field to the east. Careful not to be seen, we’d slip in and sit on some hay
against a wall pitchforks and brooms leaned against and bridles hung from.
As we’d begin to feel the alcohol, or think we did, we’d start to kiss and
stroke each other, awkwardly at first. Missy would take her glasses off. Catherine’s
horse would stick its head in the stall and pull it out. If we were beyond kissing
when the horse did that, and into each other’s shirts—or I, at least, into Missy’s,
trying to unhitch her bra—we would startle and think we were caught, which
lessened the tension. We’d take a sip from our quarts and get back to our business,
which was pleasure, and which always ended with my fingering Missy and Missy
handling me. After buttoning up our jeans and making sure we hadn’t left anything
behind, we’d start to chew gum or candy to disguise our breath, and then we’d
head home, on time, for dinner.
The night Missy and Chris and I were out—it could have been Halloween, it
could have been New Year’s—we didn’t get home on time. We pushed past
midnight. When we got to my house, there was Missy’s father in his yellow
Carmen Ghia, and my father talking to him in the driveway.
“Where have you been? What do you mean staying out so late? We didn’t
know where you were. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
That speech.
Missy’s father got out and took her by the arm. He and my father knew we’d
been drinking (we knew they’d been drinking); I don’t think they knew we’d been
smoking pot. Chris was spending the night, and my father pushed us along ahead
of him into the house. Missy and I were grounded for a week. I don’t know what
punishment Chris’s parents meted out to him, but we laughed about it at school the
next time we saw each other on the field—smoked a joint and laughed about it.

Heidi
Heidi lay on the bed and laughed. Her legs were open, her mouth was open,
her face was red. Sometimes shyness looks bold, sometimes boldness is a mask.
Heidi was impudent. She skated over me, her strong thighs working hard, fanning
out, bringing me the constant variety of her sport. She was a good sport. She
gathered me up on her alluvial fan, her broad chest, her strong back against her big
white bed.
From her basement room in a suburban mountain house we overlooked the
Highline Canal. Sometimes we walked down to it, under the cottonwoods, through
asparagus and snake grass, to frighten the frogs and smoke. We were dopes,
embarrassed by each other, embarrassed for each other, and we slept together,
lovers for years, and never in perspective.
Her hair was thin and soft; I liked to comb it with my hand, feel her head.
Her intelligence put her off. She had to hide it in the company of friends, if any of
us had friends in high school, where some of our friendships started, and some
perished from cruelty, however unconscious, and benign neglect.
So much vanishes, but Heidi’s mouth and mine after we smoked got dry,
and I won’t forget that. All our mouths got dry, our many mouths, the one we
talked with first, which dessicated the one we kissed with, which stopped the one
we lied with, which made us laugh with the one we laughed with, which
embarrassed us. Three feet from each other, we tried to hide the ill effects.
We were high, high as a kite by then, and the stereos inside us, constant
companions, closed the gaps in our conversation, such as it was. But the gaps in
our teeth, the outcropping of our forward upper palates, nothing could be done
about that. The moment we got stoned was the moment we knew we’d been better
off as we were.
It was our thighs that mattered, our red pants and real forgetfulness, our
drives from west to east along Quebec, past Ralph Waldo Remmes, our history
teacher, drinking his rusty nails and stingers, past the rental yard, the sand and
gravel compound; past the Pelican where you could never find Preston when he
owed you money and you wanted quaaludes—across Holly, where Paula and
Nathan lived, heading home on Evans now, turning south on Colorado Boulevard
or University, whichever pleased, and rising up toward the fields of Denver
Country Day, and west again past geese and soccer goals on Quincy, where the
water tower comes into view, up Franklin hill, stingrays coming down, across
Tufts to Layton, then west one block to Lafayette and home, where I wished I were
back with Heidi, sprawled across her, lapped in her strength.

I think Heidi liked this when I sent it to her. I went for a visit, too. We had a
nice time, and then lost touch. I called her when my book of poems came out and
we talked.
Mary
“Who’s Mary?” Loretta said.
“Mary, the one we were talking about this morning. I’m going to her house
next weekend.”
“Who is Mary again?”
“A friend from high school. I haven’t seen her in ten years, maybe fifteen
years.”
“You’re so weird. Calling people up like that. You don’t even know her.”
“I know her. We were close. We were in the theater together. Theater people
get close.”
“You’re so full of shit. How close? What do you mean by close?
“I mean . . .”
“By my count,” Loretta interrupted, “she’s the fifth ex-girlfriend you’ve
talked to this week. I haven’t had that many boyfriends in my life.”

Mary was tall and lithe; her body had a beautiful slope. Jeans were made for
her to wear. Her wide hips featured the midst of her openly. She didn’t have a
falsely modest bone in her body. She was a very talented actress; everyone knew
she had a gift. She was funny and warm and sensuous. She had a sexy voice. She
liked to drink and mess around at parties, and she kept up with the boys in
drinking, innuendo, and sex. Her breasts were not large, but they were wide, and
she would touch them herself if she saw that you wanted to, or she would put your
hand on one of them. She was forward, but not easy or loose. She struck me as
being very comfortable with herself, but never stuck up. I liked her from the start.
She fascinated me.
I don’t remember whether Mary and I made love on stage, on top of the
grand piano. I’m not sure. It may have been something we began to do one night,
and talked of doing some other time, but then that other time, like so many other
other times, never came.
I am certain that Mary gave me a mohawk, which some might think a more
erotic experience than fucking on top of a grand piano (downstage left). We were
drunk in the basement of Jeff’s mother’s house after a show. I don’t remember how
it came about that Mary started to cut my hair with scissors, and then my head with
a razor. I don’t know if I invited her to, if the idea for a mohawk was mine that
night, or mine by premeditation, or Peter’s or Jeff’s or Mary’s, or if it was all of
ours. In any case, Mary gave me a mohawk, and both of us, all of us, enjoyed it.
I woke up alone the next morning. My mother yelled at me when she saw
me, and then cried.

When I went to Mary’s, I asked her if we had fucked onstage on the grand
piano. She laughed. “No,” she said. “But don’t you remember when we did, in
your little brother’s house?” Until then, I had forgotten.

Tony
What is Tony doing? He’s being tall, handsome. He’s smiling. He’s dressed
up surprisingly. He owns a car. He has a girlfriend. We go on a long drive. He has
a job. He’s making money. He’s happy to see me. I’m happy he is, relieved. It’s so
good to see him and know that he likes me, that he missed me. It’s sunny where he
lives. It’s comfortable. We spend a long time together.
I dreamed of him again last night. He looked like his father this time; his
blond hair was now dark like his father’s; his glasses were shaped like his father’s.
He wrestled and struggled with his wife in the halls of their high school. I had
never met his wife, except in a dream, a dream of Tony a few dreams ago, when he
was still blond and they lived in a beautiful house, and they were happy. Now, he
was older, heavier, and as tall as his father, six four. He wore a gray wool suit. He
came toward me in a crowd.
I spent some time with him at his school. He was not the principal, which in
fact he is, but a history teacher, which is what my father and I were going to be. I
couldn’t find his room; when I found it, I couldn’t find it again. He wouldn’t give
me his phone number or address, wouldn’t invite me to his house. I didn’t ask him
what I wanted to ask him, or tell him what I wanted to tell him.
Tony’s father, Peter, pitched for the Yankees. When I knew Tony, in
elementary school, Peter was a businessman. He drove a Volvo sedan with a Ducks
Unlimited sticker in the back window. I don’t remember anything he ever said to
me; I can’t hear the sound of his voice. I thought he was handsome. Tony’s mother
was named Betty, and in the dream he wasn’t talking to her. I couldn’t ask him
why, and I didn’t want to give him or her the impression that I found her attractive.
I wanted to tell Betty that I remembered her straw sun hats, her cream–
colored, loose–fitting, cotton clothes; remembered that she was a painter, read
Wittgenstein, got my father to read Wittgenstein; that she always wore big hats in
the summer; that she made us Ovaltine once after school. I wanted to tell her, too,
that I dreamed of her one night and of Anna Wood the next. Betty had a book by a
prodigy, and I was reading a book she’d edited about Saint-Saens. Maybe she
wrote it. In the other dream, Anna kissed me on the lips after all these years. Anna
is very dark, very beautiful; Betty, very light, very beautiful.
Tony didn’t want to remember, recall, reminisce. I didn’t push him. I felt the
tiredness of it all myself, and wondered why I wanted to see Tony.
We played together in third grade, in his yard—soccer, baseball, football,
superball. We had a crush on Miss Bullock. We wore the same shirt to school for
our eighth grade picture. Maybe we had crushes on each other. Maybe we stopped
being such close friends when Chrissie died.
 He stopped by after Craig died. I was in the yard, not far from the place
where a certain crossing pass-pattern I’d run would end when my father and I
played football. We leaned on his car and talked, caught up.
Six years later, his number was unlisted. I had to call his high school to get
hold of him. A friend said he’d become reclusive, wore a crew cut, was a
disciplinarian. Tony was surprised to hear from me. I wanted to tell him that I had
three recurring dreams: in one, I can breathe underwater; in another, I can jump
and fly; in the third, he appears. I wanted to give him something I’d written about
how we used to play together: he’d be Joe Namath, I’d be Johnny Unitas; he’d be
Brooks Robinson, I’d be Boog Powell.
He held me off. He said both he and his wife had moved from teaching into
administration, because that’s where the money is. He was investing in real estate
deals brokered by our friend Bob. He was remodeling his house. He sounded like a
cowboy or an ex-marine.
I wanted to tell him, “Sometimes you’re my innocence in the dream,
whatever dangerous amalgam that is; sometimes my happiness, what I want to be
tomorrow, what I want to have and do. Once, you were alone, walking through the
heart of Denver after a disaster. We’re never doing what we used to do.”
I stopped trying to reach him a few years ago. I did try to call his parents
when I was in Seattle doing a reading from my book in September 2000. I looked
in the Yellow Pages under “Fishing” and called what seemed a likely number. The
man who answered said I could have called all the other numbers and not found
Peter.
Of course, he said, he couldn’t give me Peter’s number, but he said he’d call
for me, which I believe he did. No echo there.

Lauren Hutton and Mark Sink

 I have a friend who grew up in the gap between Lauren Hutton’s two front
teeth, but the gap was too small, too thin. It had little or no depth. He forced
himself to find that out over and over again. It was bright and white on the front
side, the side he could see. He wanted into that light, that limelight. But no sooner
had he gotten into it then he’d come upon darkness, the gap as it looked from the
other side.
It was the darkness that had seduced him after all, or in the first place, and so
he started to pursue that. But he didn’t want to do it alone, and he wanted to be
able to come back into the light. He decided to take a light with him, a camera, a
dark box for storing light. He would expose the darkness in the gaps.
Men, almost by definition, had no gaps. They were not worth going into.
Women had gaps, had them everywhere. The belly button, which my friend had a
special fondness for, never ceased to disappoint him. It seemed to be an opening,
but it would not yield to penetration. Still, as a kind of compensation, it could be
beautiful—but, again, only on women. And that was the problem: it was on
women, not in them; and my friend wanted to be in women, not on them.
He got to like throwing things on women, or getting women to throw things
on other people—vomit, cocktails, a snake, popcorn—but he wouldn’t throw
himself on women, or have them throw themselves on him. As he got older, his
preference for being in women expressed itself more and more indirectly. He
would go in with a lens. He would go in with a feather. He would go in with a cat’s
paw. He would go in with a boot. And quickly withdraw. In and out. That
was his way with food, too; nobody ate faster. He inhaled his food. He didn’t use
plates. He ate out of paper bags and waxed serviettes. He ate off of napkins. He ate
down into wrappers. Beer he could pour directly into his stomach. He treated all
liquid equally. His throat was open to any beverage—flat, sparkling, still, mineral;
hot, warm, cool, cold. Nutriment meant nothing to him. It passed in and out. His
hunger wasn’t hungry, his thirst wasn’t thirsty. He ran on a stream of appetite, but
he lingered over a cigarette.
He was the most casual person I’ve ever known. Nothing hurried him,
nothing slowed him down, nothing particularly interested him. You could rarely
tell what he was looking at, thinking about, about to do, trying to say. He had that
one trouble: it cost him to express himself in words. If he were driving, and he felt
frustrated, or upset, he might turn the car up onto the sidewalk, park it, climb into
the back seat, and go to sleep; but he would say nothing. Often people thought he
had said nothing when he’d spoken for five minutes. He made up his own words as
often as not. He told me one day that he was an “instamatic” person. He never used
that kind of camera, but he loved to think of himself as spontaneous. He liked to
think he came up with things instantaneously. He loved the instant, not the
moment.
If he believed in anything at all, he believed in her. He told me that “it all
started” for him in her, in the poster he had of Lauren Hutton on the ceiling of his
bedroom. It must have been an Avedon photograph, from his first years at Vogue.
The image is a cluster of gaps: legs, arms, mouth, teeth, the part in her hair. Mark
must have imagined himself, inserted himself, into every cleft. When he would
leave his room, he would have to withdraw, pull out; but he would know that the
gaps would be there when he’d return. While he was out, he would see gaps
everywhere, and everywhere he would try to fill them, some with his tongue, some
with his handsome looks, some with an irrelevant gesture, some with a soccer ball,
some with a pipeful of pot. His eyes would dash out ahead of him. His hands
would reach out farther than his arms could reach. He was tall and thin. His legs
were long. His lungs were long. He had more breath than the rest of us.
One day in New York, about ten years ago, Mark saw Lauren Hutton in a
restaurant. She was eating lunch. He went over to her table. He got down on his
knees and told her that he worshipped her. She noticed the gap in his front teeth.
She told him that gap-toothed people had to stick together, and she gave him her
number. He took a picture of her—he didn’t go anywhere without a camera—but
he never called.

Sex in High School

Most sex in high school was a matter of the promise, not performance. How
many times can the erection go untouched? I won’t venture to say, since this isn’t
fiction, what it was like for Gretchen or Krista or Molly or Anne. My impression
was, that they rarely enjoyed what I was doing, and wished I’d slow down or cut it
out. But there they were, and I wasn’t holding them.
We were and were not getting what we wanted—if we knew what we
wanted. Four of us in bunkbeds upstairs in my parents’ house in the late afternoon:
what was that? We weren’t telling each other. I would try something, wordlessly,
and be allowed or put off, wordlessly.
I never went all the way with Margie, Julie, Molly, Chuck, Jennifer, or
Natasha. Missy, Sue, Shannon, and Kathy didn’t go all the way with me. Debbie
didn’t; Katie didn’t. Tammy, Vicki, and Lisa held up at second; Sally, Katherine,
and Abby rounded third.
Consequently, I masturbated a lot.
So when I say I had sex in high school with thirty-five girls, I mean
intercourse with six and any combination of feelings, touchings, bases, flirtations,
encounters, and holds with twenty-nine. Most of the detail has dissolved, but the
incompatibility of the stages in which I was always at the same stage—if that
makes sense—remains.
Joy and Melissa and Karen and I were naked in bed one day, up in my room,
and we were giving it a whirl. We lasted maybe half an hour before someone fell
out of bed, but all of us had fallen out of the mood ten minutes after we started, and
no amount of pot or beer was going to change that. It didn’t work any better when
we tried it with three, and in another bed, in another house, at night, and drunk,
with good music playing.
Ann and I would never have thought of asking Caroline or Gyda to come
into our spot in the tall grass by the bridge if what we wanted to do was kiss. Later,
Caroline and I wouldn’t have thought of asking Ann—and that was before Ann
was with Pete, and Caroline with Steve, and I with—who was I with? We changed
partners, but not lightly or rapidly, at least when there was a semblance of any two
of us being in love or going out.
Kay and I got to fucking so fast we could never go back behind that and start
over. With Jennifer and Gretchen and Debbie, there wasn’t much more than
awkwardness mutually felt, and a quick halt.
Margie, Dana, and Julie had to be drunk, and I had to be drunk, before we’d
fall into something in the bushes at the party—just before we had to go home.
Quick and crude, but still no going all the way.
Katie and I sat in the car, where we had most of our sex, preceded by
talking. She told me once that I had to be careful, because sperm stayed alive for
twenty-four hours. We were very careful.
Sue went out with me because our best friends, Kay and Pete, went out with
each other. In the strange little 4-H community we had going there for a while in
Cherry Hills, Sue and Kay were cowgirls. Both of them wore tight boot-jeans and
rode barrel-races in the gymkhanas. And Kay and Sue had driver’s licenses—and
knew none of the other girls we knew.
Katie and I ended up kissing in a hole—a fort—in the back of our field, but
that was all, and we were too much friends to do that more than twice. Then Katie
introduced me to Anita and Debbie, whose first kiss I was, in that same hole in the
field.
Leslie and Vicki, and Katherine and Abby, were a year or two older. What I
couldn’t do with the one, I might do with the other. When the one got tired of me,
the other might be ready, one night, to try something.
My two big prom nights, with Brenda and Kama, were the only sexless dates
I had in high school. They were the only dates, as far as I can tell. Junior year,
Brenda was by general consent the most attractive girl at school. She had long dark
hair, olive skin, black eyes, red lips, a charming smile, and a winning way—an
uncommon self-possession and maturity. I was over in the West Cafeteria where
the jocks hung out, being my obnoxious self, eating lunch with some of the
football players. I overheard at least two of them say that they wanted to ask
Brenda to go to the prom. Both of them were going to do this by telling a friend of
Brenda’s that they were thinking of asking Brenda to be their date.
As it happened, Brenda just then walked into the cafeteria for lunch. I got up
from the table, went over to her, and asked her to the prom. She accepted. I soon
learned that Brenda’s parents watched over, if they didn’t coach, her every move. I
had to have her home before midnight.
The next year, with Kama, the same thing happened, except Kama watched
her own moves and coached herself, and she didn’t particularly like me. (I had
more fun with her ten years later, at our reunion—though the fun for me then, as a
drug-free environment, was to watch her and Lynne and the others get drunk and
snort cocaine.) Once I dropped Kama off, I went back to an after-prom party at
Arapahoe Tennis Club and got wasted. Jamie Pobrislo and I walked home across
the muddy fields in our rented tuxedos at four in the morning.
So much for the promise of certain sex on prom night.
I don’t remember using the word “date” in high school, though that doesn’t
mean I didn’t do the thing. We talked about “going out,” by which we meant either
going to the same party with, or ending up in the same place as, the girl we
intended to see. And maybe that’s how a lot of us were, parts of one moving and
intermingled mass, with lots of space between each unit, in fusion now, in fission
then, orbiting sometimes, but always held in the same field of force, whether the
pull of it was strongest in the immediate neighborhood, or a mile away, or on the
playing fields, or at the parties, or in someone’s room, just the four of us. Two, in
any case, was not a stable number in high school.
Jenny and Richard
After Katie Austin’s funeral, I became friends with her older sister Jenny,
who looked like Tommy Bolin. She always had drugs and always shared them. She
and her boyfriend Richard dealt them. Richard drove a blue Datsun 240 Z. He was
wiry and blond; Jenny was tall, big-boned, dark and voluptuous. I spent lots of
time in their company, though I can’t place when that was, or for how long.
One day, I stole a bottle of pills from Jenny’s drawer. I took two and waited.
The feeling was frightening within an hour. I called a pharmacy and pretended to
be a worried parent. The pharmacist said that the drug was prescribed by
gynecologists. I went into the field behind our house and scattered the pills, bright
yellow capsules, crushing them under my feet and kicking dirt over them. I was
very high and very scared.
The next time I was with Richard and Jenny, they were upset. They couldn’t
find the speed they were going to sell; the bottle was gone.
It was the best speed I’d ever take, and the first drug I knew I’d never
become addicted to.
Peter, or the End of High School
On September 15, 1976, a fine autumn evening, I mixed drinks for
Democrats. Andy Strauss’s parents threw the party. Andy, a high-school friend,
knew that I had been talking about becoming a caucus member when I turned
eighteen. He didn’t know that I was better at bartending than at politics. While I
could recite the Declaration of Independence, rail at Ford’s pardon of Nixon, and
talk intelligently for fifteen minutes about the Vietnam war, my political ideas
were far less advanced than my mixing skills, which I’d honed at my parents’
cocktail parties.
My interest in the upcoming elections was, in part, an attempt to impress my
father by following in his footsteps. I was trying to revive my father’s faith in the
Republic, which Vietnam and Watergate had injured, and Ford’s pardon of Nixon
had insulted.
And I was still trying to make up for my arrest, two years earlier, on charges
of attempted robbery.
My friend Tim and I decided we needed some money to buy a pound of pot
we could sell at school. Our friend Mark was a dealer, and he did pretty well at it.
The fact that he painted houses after school told us only that that would be the best
time to rip him off. His house stood alone on what was then a stretch of Arapahoe
County prairie; now, it’s a Safeway superstore. As customers of Mark’s, we knew
he kept his lids in his bottom dresser drawer. We’d climb in through his window
and take one, sometimes two or three, depending on how many were there.
Tim and I wanted to get our own little business going. We liked Mark, and
he liked us, and we figured we’d do better to buy from him than to steal from him.
So, for two days after school, Tim and I rode our bikes up and down Broadway,
between Littleton Boulevard and Quincy Street, a three-mile stretch of stand-alone
retail shops in Englewood (the term “strip mall” hadn’t been invented), looking for
the one that seemed easiest to rob. Near the end of our second day of casing, we
decided on the corner gas station at Bellview and Broadway—more because we
were about to be late for dinner than because it seemed the best opportunity.
We rode our bikes up to the landing in front of the office. As it happened,
the two attendants were in the garage working on cars. We set our bikes down and
went in. The only sound we heard was the high-pitch whine of the bolt drill.
Tim nodded; I hit the lever that opened the cash drawer. As I did, the bolt
drill stopped; the cash register bell rang out. There was no other sound. In the time
it took the two attendants to realize that neither one of them had opened the cash
register, Tim said, “Don’t grab the ones! Fuck! The twenties! Under the till!”
He reached in; I froze.
One attendant appeared in the doorway that led to the shop; the other came
out from the garage and sealed off the doorway that led to the pumps. Tim bolted
from that door. I still had my hand in the till.
Before the police arrived, I had the presence of mind to use the bathroom
and dump whatever pot and paraphernalia I had into the toilet. When the police
came, they handcuffed me and put me in the car. I was ten minutes from home,
five minutes from our church, and one minute from Piggly Wiggly.
My father got his friend Dick Bryans to represent me. He told me to plead
not guilty. I told him that I wouldn’t be in court if I wasn’t guilty, and pled guilty. I
was sentenced to four months’ probation and two visits to a psychiatrist.
His name was Dr. Fredrickson. In the six years since Chrissie had died, he
was the first person to ask me about that day. I remember feeling relieved that he
did. He thought that my trouble-making had something to do with that day, and I
remember feeling that he was right, somehow.
That was in 1975. More than ten years later, when my father went to Dr.
Fredrickson to get relief for a chronic pain in his lower back, and we compared
notes about our visits, I learned that the doctor had written my parents a letter after
my second visit. He told them that he thought I could benefit from sessions beyond
the two the court had mandated. I assume he told them why he thought I could. My
parents kept the letter to themselves.
My parents liked to say, “Let’s get with the program” and “That’s all there is
to it.”

So: there I was, mixing drinks in the Strauss’ back yard. Several houses
down was Kay’s father’s house, with the same small back yard bounded by the
same Elcar fence—green grass, a sprinkler system, a cement patio, patio furniture,
a few locust trees, some shrubbery, an elm, a pine. In the company of the
presidential frontrunner’s wife and the local party leaders, with the bizarre energy
of Hunter Thompson’s prose to inspire me, I drank quite a few.
At the end of the party, Rosalyn Carter stood by the back patio door and
greeted well-wishers as they left. When my turn came, I introduced myself and
shook hands with the sweet, gentle woman. Her mildness was reassuring. I asked
her to tell her husband to remember what he’d said in his Law Day speech, which
I’d just read in Hunter Thompson’s Rolling Stone article, and to put his words into
action when he became president, which I said I was sure he would.
“I’ll tell Jimmy,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” I said, and stumbled, I’m sure, out to my parents’s car for the
drive home.

When I got home, I called my friend Peter and told him to pick me up in the
morning. I had become, in the short drive, maudlin, depressed, and sentimental—
just like my father, after his drunken engagements with politics.
Peter and I made a pact to leave in his car in the morning, to head for New
York, with a first stop in Beloit, Wisconsin, where the girl he loved had just started
her first year in college.
I had a terrible hangover when I woke up.
Of course, I went to school. My first class was English, with Carol Abrahms.
We were studying outline formats for our term paper.
When I walked out of the room at the end of class—there was Peter,
unavoidable, with a murderous look in his eye. I dropped my head and followed
him. We went to his car, a black Buick Electra 225, in the West parking lot.
“Gimme a fuckin’ cigarette,” I said, aping his usual line. He gave me a
Marlboro 100—more cigarette for the money. Peter always got the deepest drag;
his smoke was denser and more coherent than mine when he exhaled. Peter was
always having “brilliant” cigarettes.
“What the fuck?” he said.
Thirty minutes later we were at my house and I was packing. Mrs. Gates, our
babysitter, had gone off for the day with her husband. We put Cat Stevens on the
stereo, Tea for the Tillerman’s “Father to Son” and “On the Road to Find Out,”
followed by Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away.” I took the lyric sheets
out of both album sleeves and put them on my parents’ dresser, the Led Zeppelin
on my mother’s side, the Cat Stevens on my father’s.
With forty-five dollars between us, we headed east. The car broke down in
Commerce City, not forty-five minutes from my house, and right across the street
from Cliff’s Auto Repair. Cliff just happened to have a water pump for an Electra
225. He gave us part and labor for twenty-five dollars.
We bought a few cans of Underwood Deviled Ham and a loaf of bread. We
had plenty of cigarettes; we had some beer. We had a radio. Peter could sing; I
sang anyway. Peter drove, I took notes.
In Council Bluffs that night, we went into a Holiday Inn and ordered meals
we couldn’t afford. As we ate, we talked about how to beat the check. Peter
decided we should pose as musicians in search of a gig. After we finished eating,
we went to talk to the manager. He showed some interest and asked us to come talk
to him the next day. We thanked him for a good meal and walked out.
We slept in the car that night, and made Beloit the next day. We found
Crystal in her dorm and moved in. I don’t think she was too happy to see us; her
roommate was certainly not.
Peter was a hard person to get along with in the easiest of circumstances. He
was “intense,” as we used to say, too smart for his own or anyone else’s good—a
mad Hungarian with an eidetic memory. His humor was cutting. He was hard to
read. He had a habit of seeming, and then of proving himself, superior to everyone
he came in contact with. He daunted us. Crystal, who was quiet enough to begin
with, was silent in Peter’s company, beautiful and silent. Their relationship was
already strained, and here Peter was, showing up without notice and taking over.
The room wasn’t big enough for two, and we were four; Peter alone was a good
five.
I started to take an interest in Crystal’s roommate, who slowly began to take
an interest (forced) in me. We gave each other backrubs. I hoped they would turn
into more than that, but I don’t think she did. Peter and Crystal tried to keep to
themselves. We went out once or twice, but mostly we sat in the cramped dorm
room and talked, and smoked, and ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
Crystal smuggled out of the cafeteria.
Out of money, we started to search for work two days after we got to Beloit.
We had our first jobs—washing cars in a used car lot—by the afternoon. That
Friday, we were hired by the owner of the lot to help serve food at his company
picnic on Saturday. His house was on a little island in the middle of the Rock River
in South Beloit, Illinois. A pig was roasted, which we carved. We served baked
beans, potato salad, watermelon. We stocked troughs with soda and beer and ice.
We cleaned up after the picnickers; we hauled trash.
The host wanted his employees to see his house, but the river was running
thin; there wasn’t enough water to run his boat in. That’s how Peter and I came to
tug the boat back and forth between the boss’s island and the picnic area. I felt like
Tom Sawyer, though I had not read his adventures.
Our next job lasted a day. We picked potatoes. We had to be at the field at
six-thirty in the morning. We were issued a sack and told how much we’d be paid
per sack (I don’t remember how much). The tractor went before us and snagged up
the plants, loosening the potatoes in the ground. Peter and I worked alongside a
family—three kids, two parents, an aunt and uncle, a few cousins. They worked at
what seemed to us a leisurely pace. They’d even stop and go to their car. But they
each picked more potatoes than Peter and I picked. It was the hardest work I’d ever
done. We gave up by mid-afternoon, turned in our sacks, and took what little
money we’d made back to the dorm. We stayed another night.
Our next stop was my grandparents’ house in Barrington, Illinois, the town
my brothers and I had spent part of our summers in when we were little. Gram and
Gramps were somewhat troubled by our arrival, but they took us in and made us
dinner. We stayed the night. The next morning, Gram slipped me a twenty-dollar
bill and told me to go home.
We headed for Chicago. On the way, we stopped to pick windfall apples to
make a little money. We stayed in Chicago for less than an hour. The city
overwhelmed us.
Peter’s Hungarian relatives lived in Grand Rapids. Sponsored by then-
congressman Gerald R. Ford, they’d come over during the 1956 revolution. They
were in the house and garden supply business, and they handed each of us a Bible
and gave us work at their store.
 We stayed at Peter’s uncle’s house, a man he called Gigabaci. His porch was
littered with old issues of Time magazine. I picked one up on my 17th birthday, a
seven-year-old issue with the newsman Frank McGee on the cover (he’d died, as I
recall). I couldn’t enter the conversations Peter and his uncle had. The harder I
listened to Hungarian, the more unintelligible it sounded. All I could make out was
No and Yes.
Peter and I built containing walls on a parking lot for stores of peat moss,
gravel, fertilizer, and topsoil. With the money we made, we’d go out driving at
night and drinking beer. We’d talk and listen to the radio. Once, parked on the
shoulder of a road outside of town, in a storm, a car skidded and just missed hitting
us head-on.
Our next stop was Erie, Pennsylvania. We’d picked up a hitchhiker named
David Shriver Lally. He said he was part of the Kennedy-Shriver family. He told
us he had been a close friend of Phil Ochs, the folksinger neither Peter nor I knew
anything about. He told us amazing stories I don’t remember. I do remember that
he made Peter feel uncomfortable; he was the only person I’d seen do that. David
outdid Peter in his indifference to the normal course of things.
The three of us went into a mall in Erie and staged a performance. I read
from the poetry of Robert Frost, but as Charles Manson. We took turns reading
from the Bibles Peter’s relatives had given us, but as Robert Frost and Charles
Manson. This didn’t go over well with the Pennsylvanians in the mall that day, one
of whom happened to be the police chief’s son.
We were arrested and taken to the mall office. My fake ID was discovered. I
don’t know what happened to Peter and David; we were taken into separate rooms.
When the police found out I was a minor, they called my parents. To her credit, my
mother said that she knew I was traveling. The police hassled us, scared us with a
disturbing the peace charge, and let us go.
 David accompanied us all the way to Buffalo. I think we had by that time
discovered that he probably wasn’t who he said he was. His briefcase was full of
cards, of identities. We weren’t in the SUNY Buffalo campus dining room for ten
minutes before we watched the campus police taking David off in handcuffs. He’d
threatened a food-service worker with a fork.
We had to go answer questions about him. When they asked who he was, we
told them: David Shriver Lally. They said he would only tell them that his name
was John Doe. We could be of no help.
As we left the office of the campus police, I saw David sitting in a room
with my t-shirt on, a Stephenson’s Apple Farm Restaurant t-shirt. The Stephensons
are my relatives in Kansas City. For all I knew, David would soon be telling his
questioners that he was a Stephenson and worked in an apple orchard. Even Peter,
who had the highest tolerance for audacity, was relieved to have gotten David out
of his car.
We went to Niagara Falls.
Our next stop was Middlebury, Vermont. Katie lived there with her mother
and her younger sisters. Katie had been my first official date, complete with
chaperone, in seventh grade. She had olive skin, a scar on her temple, and straight
black hair. Her voice was small; she was shy. The four sisters were like an Indian
tribe, and seemed to live like one, with their unorthodox, unusual mother as chief.
When I was almost drowned by a cottonwood tree in a Little Dry Creek flash
flood, I lost a picture of Katie that captured everything I loved about her.
Katie and Paula became best friends. After Paula and I were no more, and
before she left with her family to move to Vermont, Katie asked me if I would
sleep with her. It would be her first time. She had gotten permission from her
mother, and had been fitted with an IUD. I said yes. She came over one afternoon,
a school day, when my mother wasn’t home, and we went into Craig’s house,
which used to be the toolshed, but was now his studio and our place to hide things
and do things we had to hide. The house had a gray shag carpet, from my
grandmother’s apartment; it had a table, two chairs, and a loft. It had no plumbing
or heat. It also had a day bed, the foot of which was the first thing you saw on
coming in.
Katie knew that I was not a virgin, but I was more anxious and
uncomfortable than she was. We didn’t smoke or drink anything.
It wasn’t much fun for either of us. Katie’s determination and courage shone
more than her desire, and I wished to be of service. It couldn’t have helped that my
mother walked in on us: she saw four feet, two up, two down, closed the door and
walked away. She never said a word about it.

Katie wasn’t happy to see me in Middlebury, and Peter instantly put the
whole family off. His directness was rude; he could look right through you. He was
sure of a dinner, and didn’t shy away from satisfying his appetites.
We needed money. Katie’s mother said we could pick apples with her, and
we did that for a day or two. Then, in town one day, we stopped at the Middlebury
Inn. I applied for a bartender position and Peter applied to be a busboy. I lied about
my age; Peter lied about his experience. We were hired for the lunch shift.
Every day at noon, a thin, sad-looking, middle-aged woman came in, sat
down, opened her purse, and lay four fresh one-dollar bills on the bar, placing on
top of each one a quarter.
“Dewars on the rocks in a highball glass, please.”
She ate nothing. She smoked four cigarettes. She spoke to no one. She left
no tip. In less than an hour, she was gone.
Another regular ordered a dry vodka martini. I knew what a dry martini
required, but I couldn’t make them dry enough for him. He kept sending them
back. He was never rude about it. On the fourth day, I poured vodka, no vermouth.
“Perfect,” he said.
On the fifth day, a couple came in. I recognized them: the Kirks. I’d seen
them at parties in Denver. My parents knew them, and Mrs. Kirk was my recent
girlfriend Caroline’s aunt. Of course, the Kirks didn’t recognize me, but manners
dictated that I introduce myself—just as if I were seeing them at a cocktail party.
They didn’t bat an eye. They didn’t wonder what I, no older than the son or
daughter they were dropping off for freshman year at the college, was doing
bartending in Middlebury.
Peter and I drank and ate well at that job. We hadn’t been at it a week when
the owner of the Inn asked us if we could help out his brother in Vergennes,
Vermont. The brother ran a resort up there, and he was shorthanded for a big
weekend. We would get housing; we would be paid so much an hour to wait
tables; the tips would be good. We agreed to go, and spent a week there.

When we left Middlebury, our tolerance for each other was wearing thin—or
mine for Peter was. Peter had no tolerance or intolerance. He couldn’t be read or
had or made. He pushed on in his own way, a true idiot, a fully functioning autism,
which made him annoying. I could never do anything to him with my annoyance,
though. He noted that. I wanted to best him, but never could. Still, I was useful to
him. I could write lyrics to his music. I could make him laugh. I could give him
things to work off of.
We had met in tenth grade. We did a show together, I Never Sang for My
Father. Peter was the father. I played a mortician. Peter was very good. I could tell
that even before we started rehearsal, from the way the others in the theater dealt
with him. He seemed older than all of us, more mature, more talented, smarter.
Everything came easy to him—his lines, his blocking, his readings. That quality
attracted me to him. I wanted him to know me, and I wanted to know him. He took
a liking to me, he and his friend Steve.
They were always doing bits together. One had to do with getting and giving
credit for a good bit. Something would pass between them, or they would make
some remark about someone else. If it had an effect, Peter or Steve would ask for
or give credit. Full credit was “Credit.” Partial credit was “Cre” or “Cred.” Credit
was also marked in arm-length: from finger tips to elbow was full credit. That was
too cumbersome, though, and Peter and Steve took to measuring it out between
thumb and index finger, from tiny to full.
“How much credit will you give me?”
And you would hold out your fingers to indicate the measure. All of us took
to using that bit—the bit that became the bit of all bits. Peter and Steve never
stopped haggling over who should get credit for inventing the bit that measured all
the bits.
I made use of the word’s root meaning—to believe—in nicknaming my
sister, the embodiment of my parents’ belief that life must go on. She was “Cred,”
“Creddy,” “Kredingdle.”
In the theater at Cherry Creek, we lived for bits. Jeff and Chip had their bit:
they’d stick out their hand to shake yours; you’d respond in kind; they’d insert
their arm under your leg and lift it up until you lost your balance. Then there was
the ball-grabbing and the tit-grabbing. I don’t know who got credit for that. Chip’s
bit was to pull out his dick occasionally and show people how big it was. There
were too many vocal bits to count.
Every bit had a sexual connotation; some were just sexual, without any
connotation. We were all ready to play any part. We were members of Machine
Shop, an improvisational troop. We were drummers, painters, singers, mimes,
mimics, actors, directors, set builders, make-up artists. Bob Wells, who ran the
theater, gave us direction and coherence, and played right along with us. We drank,
smoked, did drugs. And we were having more fun, and more sex, than any other
group on campus—and Peter was the king of us all.
There was a fearlessness in Peter. In driving, in drinking, in drinking and
driving, on stage, in front of people, with girls, against people, Peter and I shared a
willingness to feature ourselves, and to agitate, incite, and offend others. We did
theater together for two years (Peter was a year ahead of me), acting in plays,
directing plays, and writing plays. We improvised whenever we were together,
doing what we learned to call “gorilla theater.” But there was a seriousness in all
our play, a disgust (Peter could say that word with frightening gusto) with
conventions and rules that set us, or so we thought, apart from the others.
It was that seriousness we were taking across the country, where we would
end up showing New York a thing or two. But New York put a damper on us
within twenty-four hours of our arrival in Harlem. We were car-less and effectively
broke when a man in a truck dropped us off on 125th street. We had with us only
the things we could carry. The rest we left in Peter’s car upstate: my Frye boots
and my edition of Robert Frost stayed in the trunk.
I’d never felt so white as when I got out of that truck in Harlem. I was afraid.
I think Peter was too. We got on the subway and headed downtown.
My uncle lived in the Village, on West 11th Street and Sixth Avenue. He
was enjoying the success of his bestselling book, Meeting at Potsdam. He had a
car. He took us to the Broome Street bar in Soho and bought us dinner. He left us
there with twenty-five dollars. It was the only good time we had in New York.
Peter and I were fighting within three hours.
Peter was hungry. He wanted some money to buy a hamburger at
MacDonald’s. I wouldn’t give it to him. He started mocking me on the avenue and
making a scene—yelling so loudly that he seemed insane. But the passersby stared
at me. Again I couldn’t turn the tables on him. I gave in; he got his hamburger.
The next day, we bought the trade papers and looked for auditions. We went
to one. We were on time, but were something like fiftieth in line. Here were some
serious people, all kinds of serious people, resumes and headshots in hand,
primping, rehearsing, trying not to see each other, each in his or her own private
anxiety, all in plain view. We had our high-school experience, no headshots, no
resumes. We waited for over an hour before we left. There were still thirty people
ahead of us.
For the next few days, we scanned the trades, each with our own copies. We
sat apart in my uncle’s apartment, not speaking. We pursued separate jobs. I went
to a place in Times Square that needed a bartender. I walked in at noon, and what I
saw—a strip show—made me check the address: I had come to the right place. I
left without introducing myself. I wanted to go home.
I don’t think we lasted a week in the city.
One morning, my uncle took me to breakfast at Elephant & Castle. He knew
I was ready to go home. He said he thought it might be a good idea, since I didn’t
have any money, hadn’t found a job, hadn’t landed a part, and was only a semester
away from finishing high school.
I called my parents when I got back to his apartment. They bought me a
ticket home. My uncle bought Peter a ticket. Neither of us paid our benefactors
back.

It was too late in the semester for me to start classes again, so I took a job at
Jerry’s Leather Goods, an old Englewood store about six blocks from the gas
station my friend Tim and I had tried to rob. I sold belts, wallets, vests, coats,
boots, and moccasins. In the back room, I helped Chuck stretch elk and deer skins
for tanning.
 Chuck, all 350 pounds of him, was the taxidermist. He seemed to have born
with a full beard, a ball cap on his head, and a pinch of Copenhagen in his lower
lip. All day long he listened to talk radio, Alan Berg’s show, the talk-jock who was
killed a few years later, and on whose life and murder Eric Bogosian based his
play, Talk Radio. You could hear Chuck enjoying the show now and then. He was
himself an extremely gentle man who rarely spoke. He and I would go to a nearby
restaurant and have chicken-fried steak for lunch. The only story I remember him
telling me was about a man he’d seen at a swap meet who was looking to buy a
trailer hitch.
“I saw this guy right about when things got goin’. He finds a hitch in a stall
and measures it with his fingers. ‘Uh, yeannh, uh, yeannh,’ he says, then walks all
the way back to his truck, lookin’ at his fingers the whole time, sayin’ ‘Uh, yeannh,
uh, yeannh.’ Three or four times I saw him make that trip.” Chuck and I made that
phrase into our bit.
Peter went back to work for his mother’s janitorial service, cleaning schools
late at night. He and I got together to write songs, go to parties and movies, drink,
smoke, and perform.
I was doing LSD 25 that my friends Derek and Marty were dealing through
their older brothers. It was the best acid I’d ever have. I did it five days in a row.
When I was up to three drops per cube, I told Peter about it.
He wanted to do it. It was a Friday. I dropped near the end of the day at
Jerry’s. Peter came to pick me up in the used Honda his father had bought for him.
Peter wanted to do three drops. I told him he should start with one, but he
wouldn’t.
Two hours later, we were driving away from my house. Peter took his hands
off the wheel to roll a joint and I took the wheel.
“You work the wheel for the rest of the night,” he said. “I’ll work the
pedals.”
I agreed. I tested him about two blocks from my house. We were going
fifteen miles an hour. I took my hands off the wheel. Peter didn’t lift a hand. The
car veered off the road and scraped along a fence.
Peter said, “I told you I wasn’t going to touch the wheel.”
Six or seven hours later, I decided to slalom through the mile markers on the
interstate. It was sleeting. There was a half-inch of slush on the highway. The car
skidded, slid sideways off the pavement, up a slight embankment, through a fence,
and onto the service road that led to Julie Balfantz’s house.
Peter, who had been in the midst of a sentence when we slid out, finished
that sentence without dropping or adding a word, started the car, and, since it was
pointed north and in the correct lane, drove on. Five minutes later, we were
stopped in a Vicker’s gas station and I was changing a back tire.
We got home, somehow. The car had to be towed from our driveway the
next day. Peter never mentioned it again. Two cars gone within six months.
That morning was incredibly gray; the grayness seemed to come from the
inside out. Peter and I couldn’t remember stopping at a stop sign or a red light, or
seeing a cop, all night—and we drove ten miles into downtown Denver and ten
miles back, and ten miles east, and ten miles west.
Once, we ran a red light, stopped in the middle of the intersection, got out of
the car, and took a piss.

In 1999, at a concert in Aspen, I saw Hunter Thompson. I waited for the

right moment to tell him a story about the effect his essay on Jimmy Carter had had
on me twenty-two years ago.
He stood up and started to walk away from his friends. I stood up and
headed slowly toward him.
 “Mr. Thompson,” I said, “Mr. Thompson.”
He heard me, but he kept walking.

Peter held no grudge about his car. He didn’t talk about anything that
smelled too strongly of the past. He liked to do the same thing, pretty much, every
day. He kept his needs simple and few: food, cigarettes, music, writing,
masturbation, mind-fucking. Peter was a master mind-fucker, at least with me.
In his senior and my junior year, Peter and I got attached, probably through
scene-work, and then through the Richard Burton–Elizabeth Taylor–Mike Nichols
film, to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? For a while, we stuck to
Albee’s script. Peter was George, I was Martha. Peter was only George; sometimes
I was Nick and Honey, too.
It would start in the middle of someone else’s conversation, or at a party, or
when we were alone. It would begin lightly, playfully, and then turn. The phrase,
“to push [someone’s] buttons,” didn’t exist then (and shouldn’t now), but that’s
what Peter was good at. Before I heard much talk of method acting, of actors who
wouldn’t get out of character, there was Peter, always in character. He wouldn’t
quit. And when he sensed that I wanted to quit, he laid it on: the brow-beating, the
invective, the cutting remarks, the unanswerable put-downs. He flayed me every
time. As competitive as I was, and as used as I was to being defeated by my father
in arguments, I would not stop when Peter, having pushed too far, wanted to keep
going. He exploited every weakness I had. He put me into tearful rages.
Once, I threw him down on his back, jumped on top of him, and pinned his
arms down with my knees—which wasn’t hard: Peter practiced a maddening form
of non-resistance. I was poised to smash his face in when Steve pulled me off.
Peter kept right on talking.
 In my last semester of high school, I directed a one-act play by Mark Medoff
and acted in two or three others. I loved the theater and wanted to be an actor. (“I’d
rather shoot myself in the head,” my father said to me once, “than get up on
stage.”) I wrote poems. Steve Connor printed a few of them in Spectrum, the
literary magazine he and Brian Kelsall and Andy Strauss put together with Carol
Abrahms’ guidance. One of them was about the trip Peter and I had taken:

Somewhere Between Home

I shook the mangled hand of JUSTICE

and left for NEW YORK
the blur of highway air
the scenery backdropping Oklahoma
everything makes no sense NEVER!
clouds in plate glass ashtrays
bellowing
GO HOME
trying to make sense with a poem
ten thousand phones are ringing
I can see them now
wondering why I didn’t clean my room
something is gone they’ll say
maybe it’s Mark
but I haven’t left yet
and nothing looks like HOME

In my last semester, I began to tell people that I was serious, but didn’t take
myself seriously—a distinction that’s lost on me now. It was lost on others then,
which was perhaps the main reason why I didn’t get to make a speech at
graduation. I had written a serious speech about how we had to love one another. I
delivered it at an audition. I learned later that I was blackballed because of the
stunts I’d pulled on campus: hiding in cabinets during class and jumping out in the
middle of a lecture; wearing a dress; wearing a jock strap on the outside of my
pants with a “Nixon’s the One” button pinned to it; wearing boxer shorts on my
head; reading poems in the West Building cafeteria during lunch; being a known
pot-smoker. These were things the principal and the members of the graduation
committee took seriously. They liked my speech, but they thought I would
substitute something blasphemous for it on the night of the ceremony.
As we walked in procession into the auditorium, Henry Cotton, our black-
belt principal, took me aside. He said that if I pulled any sort of a stunt, he would
deal with me personally. I wasn’t about to pull a stunt. I was almost solemn about
the occasion, as solemn as you can be when you’re stoned and have had a few
drinks. The trouble at the ceremony was made by others, when they let mice go on
the floor. There were a few shrieks and a little commotion, but otherwise the
ceremony went off without a hitch.
Throughout high school, my counselor was a woman named Kathy Smith.
She worried about me. She didn’t think my grades were good enough to get me
into the University of Colorado (from which I graduated in 1982). She thought my
best chance lay with Goddard College in Vermont, an experimental school that,
had I gone there, might have introduced me to David Mamet and his crew of
actors. I turned down Goddard’s offer. I didn’t complete the application for
Dartmouth, my father’s alma mater. It was too long and complicated. I looked into
Franconia, in New Hampshire, where Peter was going, but I don’t think I ended up
applying—which was a good thing, because Peter was among the rowdiest of the
looters when the college went broke a year later.

Peter’s been a follower of the Reverend Sun Yung Moon for about a decade
now. I saw him once or twice after he became a Moonie. He knew I’d be
contemptuous, and played on that. It didn’t work. I couldn’t take him seriously. He
showed me pictures of his family. Nothing he said about Moon or his teachings
struck me as sincere. Everything that had once been so compelling and attractive in
Peter was gone. He looked like paste.
After that meeting, he sent me cards and called now and then. I told him to
stop. He did.
I used to think that he was biding his time, that he would emerge from
Moon’s Unification Church with a book of songs and an exposé. I don’t think so
anymore.
As our friend Jeff said, “Peter always felt that he deserved to be taken care
of.”
I hope he’s gotten what he deserves.

Boulder
I arrived in Boulder with a very short head of hair in the fall of 1977. Three
of us were assigned to the room in Farrand Hall. I was the first one there, I think—
or maybe Mark Yanowitz was. He thought he had a ROTC candidate for a
roommate when he saw me, but we pretty quickly got that straightened out by
establishing two things: that we liked a lot of the same music, and that we did
drugs.
I turned 18 about two weeks after my freshman year began. I threw a party. I
bought gallon bottles of rum, scotch, vodka, and gin; juices, soda, tonic, 7-Up, and
Coke; lemons, limes, and lots of ice.
 I had what I called my loving cup. It was a tall, stainless steel mixing cup
that I took from my friend Steve Cleghorn. Steve and I were friends in elementary
school. We would go over to his house and play music on a cassette player. We’d
pretend to be Tom Jones (“What’s new pussycat”); we’d pretend to be Elvis
(“Hound Dog,” “Suspicious Minds”). Steve played Jesus in our sixth-grade
production—we must have been the youngest company in the world to put it on—
of Jesus Christ Superstar. Steve was an only child. He called his father Bud, and
sometimes called his mother by her first name, too. I later learned that Bud wasn’t
Steve’s natural father—which helped explain some of the easy distance and
camaraderie between them.
Bud and Carol went on the hunt on weekends out at Phipps Ranch, in what
was then still undeveloped country southeast of Denver. They’d take us along.
While they were out chasing a fox, Steve and I hung around the barns chasing
mice, rats, and cats. When the hunters returned, they’d gather for cocktails in their
red jackets, cream-colored pants, and black riding boots. I liked the tapered cut of
those jackets. They’d drink, and so would Steve and I. Carol and Bud never
seemed to mind. One St. Patrick’s Day—I was in sixth grade—I got so messed up
on Irish coffee that I still remember the unsettling feeling of being depressed and
excited at the same time.
When we didn’t go to the hunt, we stayed at Steve’s with Lily, the
Cleghorn’s housekeeper. She was a thin, tough, black woman, and Steve could
make her laugh. He could also make her mad as hell—at which point she’d chase
him around the house until he made her laugh again. When I read Toni Morrison’s
Jazz twenty-five years later, I cast her as the narrator. Steve would imitate her
voice, and that made me laugh. Lily got a kick out of our singing. This was in
1970, when the movie Airport came out. Bud took us, and he let Steve drive home.
Bud was permissive. In high school, he’d buy Steve three or four cases of
Budweiser every weekend.
Needless to say, Steve had lots of friends on the weekends. Bruce and I were
almost always there, and Danny, and Peter. Peter and Steve took to each other.
They were both performers; they both had gifts for pretense. In their company,
Bruce, too, proved to be a compelling actor: he would throw epileptic seizures in
hotel lobbies. Just as things would get scary, Steve, Danny, and Peter would run in
and rescue their friend, apologizing profusely to the staff and guests. Back in the
car, they’d laugh and drive to another hotel.
Where he could get away with it, but not without drawing attention, Steve
liked to drive his Mustang convertible in reverse, with the windshield wipers on
and drawn out from the windshield. He called this “scanning for radar,” and he
would tell people as much with a straight face.
Steve could be a lot of fun, and the more people he had around him, the
more fun he could be. Late in high school, we decided to turn his basement into a
club. We remodeled it. We knocked out a wall, built a bar, bought a refrigerator, a
couch, pillows, and black lights. We made fake IDs for ourselves and charged a
modest fee to make them for our friends. We threw famous parties at our club. We
had every intention of making money by selling memberships, but that didn’t last
beyond the first few events. Bud and Carol didn’t seem to mind spending their
money on Steve and his friends.
The loving cup I took with me to Boulder was my club cup.

Before any of my friends from Denver arrived, I’d had at least two strong
vodka drinks in that cup. Mark and I were listening to Little Feat. Others from the
dorm were there. My Denver friends—Steve did not come—started to show up at
about eight o’clock. By the time Doug came, with a beautiful silk scarf bunched
neatly in a round wooden box, a dozen hits of speed inside it, of which I took a
few, I was very drunk. Jim Clevett got to the room at about nine-thirty. He
promptly escorted me downstairs and outside for a walk. To keep the door open, I
stuffed my black velvet vest with little red roosters on it into the door jam. Then I
took a few steps and threw up. When we came back, the vest was gone.
At three-thirty that morning, I rolled out of bed. Since my bed was the top
bunk, I didn’t notice anything until I hit Mark’s trunk, which was acting as our
coffee table. The glass bong was sitting on it at the time, and it broke under me. I
think I broke the navicular bone in my wrist in that fall, but it may have been in
another fall, because, as I remember it, the day after my birthday was a Saturday,
and the first home game of the season for the football team. My parents had seen to
it that I had a season ticket. It seemed as though we all had season tickets—no
matter how disengaged and cynical, or political and committed, we were.
I think I got up from my fall and back into bed; the bong could be cleaned up
in the morning. The morning came soon, and with it, a screwdriver and doughnut
party for the third-floor Farrand residents who were going to the game. After our
breakfast, we made pina coladas to take with us.
After we got to our seats, I looked around to see if I knew anyone. I saw Ann
Perry. I stood up to wave to her. I passed out and fell. I was taken by ambulance to
the campus hospital.
A woman stood by my bed and asked me questions. Apparently I had a
drinking problem. I assured her that the problem was the discrete result of drinking
so much in a 24-hour period. She kept after me. She’d heard I was rowdy in
Farrand; she knew my resident advisor. She thought I’d better watch out.
Some months later, drunk again, but this time after hours, I punched a Coke
machine in the basement of another dorm and gashed my right arm. I walked to the
hospital: there was that woman again. She tried to counsel me while the doctor
stitched my wrist. Our relations did not improve.
 I went home for the first time about two months after classes had started. My
parents wanted to know how my money supply was. Everything was fine, I told
them, and consulted my check book. I went out. When I got home, my parents
asked me about a check for $75 written to an ambulance service. I explained that I
had passed out at a football game from having had a little too much to drink.
A few days later, I got a letter from my father. His doctor had recently told
him that alcoholism runs in families. He reminded me that his father had been an
alcoholic, and that the doctor had told him to stop drinking. He did not say that he
was an alcoholic; he knew that I didn’t need to be told that he had a drinking
problem. He was simply cautioning me, passing on what his doctor had told him.
I was later to learn from my uncle that my mother had given my father an
ultimatum: unless he stopped drinking, she would divorce him. He not only
stopped drinking—he would start again—but converted to Catholicism. He was 47
years old.
My father’s conversion had been germinating for more than twenty years.
He had considered it before he married my mother. At the time, he wrote to his
Philosophy 58 professor at Dartmouth, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Huessy was the
kind of professor—I saw him do it on film in 1988—who browbeat his students.
He probably confused most of them with a version of providential history to which
he gave various names—the “autobiography of mankind,” “the Christian Future,”
“the cross of reality.” My father was not confused, and Rosenstock-Huessy’s
teachings are seldom far from his mind. In a letter of 1979, he explained a central
strain in his professor’s thought better than I’ve seen it captured elsewhere:
As Rosenstock-Huessy said, you must meet yourself as a child of your
time/(genius) first, for you can be sure God will confront you with
orthodox eternality sooner or later, one way or the other, because the
center of the Cross of reality is always there—“the way”—beckoning
 us back when our excesses in any one direction leave us enervated,
jaded and alone. Only madness, I think, can come from staying out on
any one of the extremities, since the “genius” of God Himself, in
Christ, came, in the end (and the beginning for us), back to the center.
But there will the acceptable time for that as long as “we, ourselves,
don’t put wax in our ears” (to paraphrase Buber).
I was to fall, that freshman year, as much under Rosenstock-Huessy’s
influence as my father had twenty-five years before me. One day, upstairs in
Norlin Library, alone in a carrel, reading a passage from The Christian Future, I
experienced the closest thing I’ve ever had to a spiritual awakening, a conversion.
The passage ends the chapter called “The Intermittence of Faith”:
What is as yet unfinished, uncreated, unprecedented, uncompromised
in the vicious circle of our thinking? And we shall find that the future
of Christianity is present here and now as long as two or three
Christians believe in it, and answer. And they answer, these poor
timeful creatures, by contracting time to a point of most fruitful faith
and love, and in this contraction, the suddenness of the end of the
world and the endlessness of the first beginning are coupled and bear
witness to the timelessness of our origin and our destiny.
I cried; I wrote: I would become a priest. I wrote my parents a letter. My father,
accurately, was not convinced.
In the essays I wrote for European Intellectual History, 1870 to the Present,
in my second semester, I quoted Rosenstock-Huessy at every turn. We were
reading Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche—but look what Rosenstock-Huessy was
saying! I ridiculed the pretense of objectivity. For a time, everything I thought, felt,
wrote, or said in any class was a function of Rosenstock-Huessy’s major theme:
“Our passions give life to the world. Our collective passions constitute the history
of mankind.”
Accused of making “straw men” by my philosophy professor—I thought I
had refuted Bishop Berkeley’s essi est percipi—I dropped out of his epistemology
class. Told, in a comment on my final essay for Intellectual History, that it was
hard to tell what I felt about Rosenstock-Huessy’s ideas, what they meant to me, I
wrote another essay on him attacking my professor. On the final exam, I
concentrated on the assigned authors and my notes; Professor Gross told me I’d
written the best final in the class.

I moved into another dorm in my second semester. My roommate was John

Martin, a poet a year older than I who had gone to my high school. John had
directed me in Beckett’s Play for his final project in his last theater class. We liked
to read and write, and we liked the same music: Steely Dan, the Beatles, Joni
Mitchell. Mitchell’s Hejira had just come out. We would fix a bong, put the record
on, and sit beside each other writing poems.
One night, I took some acid. As I started coming onto it, I walked into the
common room where another student was reading. I asked him what the book was
about. I picked up a book from his stack and started reading it aloud, in a
professorial voice, and commenting on it. A few people gathered around, both on
the floor near us and up above in the balcony. I realized I was performing. People
were listening and laughing. The student stopped reading and watched me.
Everything I had ever taken in through my ears and eyes was available to my
mouth. I had never been so fluent, eloquent, funny; I have yet to be again. Or so it
seemed at the time.
Within an hour, there was a crowd downstairs and a crowd in the balcony,
and I was in the midst of a monologue. I was drawing on all my high schooling and
what I’d read so far in college—Intellectual History, American History, English
198, East European History, Blake, Study of Words from Latin and Greek
Elements, Acting, Epistemology. Nothing escaped me. It was a moment of pure
power and narcissism. I seemed to have total recall; words, facts, and accents
poured out. Everything connected; every idea tripped an association. I could go
backwards, forwards, and sideways. When I reached for a book and opened it,
what was printed there attached to what I was saying. And I was, as I had never
been before or been since, hilarious.
Barb—big, beautiful, red-headed Barb—heard it all, and would bring it up in
amazement when I saw her after that. I remembered nothing.
My five years of college—some of the happiest in my life, until now—were
like that: a performance, one great night at the top of my bent, unbeknownst to me,
unrehearsed, and gone.

After my performance, I walked over to my former dorm to see who was

around. It must’ve been before midnight. The place was quiet, especially the third
floor. I knocked on doors. Nobody was home.
I walked until I came to an open door. It was Bud’s room. Bud looked like
he was about thirty-five. He was built; his face was scarred by acne. He had gone
to Thomas Jefferson, a rival high school. He had a friend with him, and they had a
bottle of Jack Daniels. They were sipping it. Bud asked if I wanted a drink. I did. I
took the bottle and drank from it easily. Bud and his friend were impressed; I
didn’t look like a guy who could drink them under the table. A man on acid can
drink anyone under the table. I didn’t tell them I was on acid, but I was in the
mood to tell a story.
I asked Bud if I’d ever told him about the time Gary and Mike Pulver
(infamous roughnecks at Thomas Jefferson) crashed a party at Steve Cleghorn’s
with a Vietnam veteran. I had not. “Tell us,” he sad, and offered me the bottle
again.
I was upstairs in Steve’s mother’s bedroom with Melissa and Karen.
Someone knocked on the door and said that the Pulvers had crashed the party and
wanted to fight. I got dressed and walked toward the back door. As I got to the top
of the stairs leading down to it, Gary Pulver was coming in the door.
I asked him what was going on. I took two steps down for his answer. Pulver
took two steps up, grabbed my shirt, and punched me in the nose. He pulled me the
rest of the way downstairs, tossed me out the door, and kicked me in the stomach.
Then he and his brother and their friend went inside.
As I lay on the driveway holding my nose, Wade Moore came up to see if I
was all right. He told me that Bruce, having heard that the Pulvers were outside,
had gone to get a rifle. Armed, he’d gone out to their car, pointed the rifle at them,
and told them to leave. Then he ran off. Nobody knew where he was. When Pulver
saw me, Wade said, he must have thought I was Bruce.
“That’s a good story,” Bud said, and handed me the bottle again. I took a big
drink.
“Mark,” Bud said, “I want to introduce you to a friend of mine. This is Gary
Pulver.”
We laughed and shook hands.
Illinois Jacquet, Allen Ginsberg, Istvan Eorsi, and my Father
My father was born in Denver in 1930 to Ruth Murphy and Forest Scott. He
had a brother, Vernon, eleven years older. Their father left the three of them in
1940; he died thirteen years later in a VA hospital in Oregon. He had been a very
persuasive salesman and, according to my grandmother, an unfaithful husband.
He had been awarded a scholarship to the University of Chicago, but after
the United States entered the war in 1917, he was sent down to Georgia to grade
exams at the Officers Training School. He didn’t cry often, my grandmother told
me, but he cried when he’d tell how the candidates for officer cried when they
failed the test.
My father grew up poor, in basement apartments he was ashamed to invite
friends into. His mother worked at the Denver Dry and then at the Air Force base,
and his brother mowed lawns. Some of my father’s friends were from wealthy
Denver families. They were not at all ashamed to invite him over.
My father was accepted to Dartmouth College in 1947. When he went there
in 1948, he hated it. He was on a partial scholarship from a hick town, and the
other students made him feel it. He was smart; they made him feel that he wasn’t
smart enough. They stole his coat, the greatcoat his mother had saved thirty dollars
to buy for him. He had to write and ask her to send him another one. (I wore that
coat through college and graduate school.)
After the first Christmas break, he was reluctant to go back, but he did. On
the train to Boston from Denver, he read Hemingway’s “The Snows of
Kilimanjaro.” He fell in love with literature. The story compensated him for the
homesickness he felt, the inferiority and the loss. And no doubt Hemingway made
him feel those things more keenly.
His mother had instilled in him the practice of learning poems by heart.
Some of her favorites—Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush,” Housman’s “When I was one
and twenty”—were already his. But Hemingway was his own discovery, and he
knew what was going on in that story. Money was in it and drinking was in it, and
some vague searching was at the bottom of it.
The next year wasn’t as bad as the first, the third better than the second, but
the going back after Christmas was always melancholy. He packed meat or moved
furniture in the summers, and worked in the dining hall during the schoolyear.
He saved up for a spring break in Boston; he couldn’t afford New York. But
there was jazz in Boston, too, and that’s what he went to hear. When he and his
classmates came back to Hanover, they told stories about what they did, who they
went to hear. When they asked my father who he went to hear, he said, “Illinois
Jacquet.”
“Oh,” they said, “Jacquet’s just a honker. You gotta hear Getz. We heard
Getz. Getz is smooth.”
That was probably in 1950, two years before my father graduated (though in
his one recurring dream, he never does graduate). He regrets having gone to Tuck
Business School in his last year. His grade-point average dropped below what he
needed to make Phi Beta Kappa. He still smarts from that. His thumb twitches, as
if he were shooting marbles. He used to be very good at marbles. The night I called
to say I’d been elected, my mother answered the phone. She cried. She called my
father to the phone, and when he came, having heard the inflection in her voice, he
wasn’t sure which one of his sons had just startled his mother so. He congratulated
me, said he wanted a copy of the letter. I didn’t tell him that it was a form letter:
my name wasn’t on it, and neither was the elector’s signature. He said he always
felt bad that he hadn’t been elected.
A few minutes later, he called me back. He told me to go out and celebrate.
“Send me the tab.”
It was All Souls’ Day, and I drank Guinness, that lovely liquid, that bear
fur.

In the spring of 1981, I was in my fourth year at the University of Colorado.

I was one of three poets—Gerda Norvig and Steve Martino were the others—
reading one night at the Brillig Works Bookstore on the Hill. When we’d finished
our reading, we went downstairs.
There was Allen Ginsberg, companionless. He invited everyone to his
apartment for a party.
His apartment was small and crowded. Ginsberg took off his off–white
jacket and the Elizabethan purse or wallet he carried over his shoulder. He went
into the kitchen and opened the oven. He bent down, his face almost on top of a cut
of meat that had the moistness of his upper lip and the color of his lower. I didn’t
think Buddhists ate meat, and was embarrassed to catch him so intent on his
tenderloin.
He looked up and asked for a kiss. I kissed him on the lips. He wasn’t
having it any other way.
I’d met him twice before, but he didn’t remember me, and I didn’t remind
him. The first time was probably in 1978, when he came to Denver to give a
reading at the Museum of Natural History. I went there with Mark Sink and Jamie
White, whose step–father and father is Ed White, a Denver architect who appears
in Kerouac’s On The Road as Tim Gray. White and Ginsberg had stayed in close
touch since their days at Columbia, and Ed invited us to go with him that night and
meet the famous poet.
When we were introduced after the reading, I said something about how
exciting Howl had been to me in high school, and how some of the things he read
that night reminded me of E.E. Cummings.
“Oh,” Ginsberg said dismissively, “We read Cummings in high school.”
 So I recited “oil tel duh woil doi sez” and “buncha hard boil guys” from
ViVa. Ginsberg said he hadn’t read that in high school.
“Yeah,” he said, “That’s good. Where’s that from?”
The second time I met Ginsberg was in 1979, in London, where my parents
afforded me a year to read European history at University College London, “the
godless college on Gower Street,” founded by Jeremy Bentham in 1827. I wanted
to become a history professor, and my parents wanted to see me through the
process. I worried in letters home about the costs. My father wrote to me on
October 4, 1979, in conjunction with wiring almost $3,000:
The most important thing we want you to keep constantly in
mind is to keep out of your mind any concern about your expenses
during this period in London. Of course, we expect you to be
moderately frugal and unprofligate, but not preoccupied about “what
it’s all costing.” This is an experience we want you to cherish each
moment of, without thought of cost (within reason obviously), or any
other material, utilitarian aspects, which will come into your life soon
enough, I assure you. Should you indulge in some extravagance on
occasion, it is only fitting and soul-building to suffer uncomplainingly
a counterbalancing period of impecuniousness until your funds
recover by way of the regular flow of infusions from home. . . . We
hope you are going to enjoy your studies and be inspired to continue
your superlative academic performance and accomplishment, without
“boxing in” your perceptions and enjoyment of your new
surroundings. Don’t therefore, strain at the gnat and miss the camel.

Jamie White was spending a year abroad, too. He was studying to be an

actor. On Thanksgiving we went to hear Ginsberg give a reading. When we got up
to him after the reading, he recognized Jamie and said his name. Before Jamie
could respond, Ginsberg turned slightly my way and said to both of us, “Did you
get laid yet? I did, last night, just after I got in. How long have you been here?”
Jamie and I went off to celebrate our American holiday at a Greek restaurant
on Charlotte Street, the street Dylan Thomas used to do a lot of drinking on. We
were both a little homesick.

I met Ginsberg one more time that year. I was on my Christmas break, back
in London from a magical week in Ireland. I spent no time in Dublin, in large part
because I met several pompous, pious Christians coming over on the boat who
were eager to show me around. I hopped on a bus and headed to Cork. From Cork I
went to a place called Bandon, I think, where I stayed the night. Very early the
next morning, I had the strangest breakfast with an old man. We stood in silence at
the kitchen sink. He plugged in the tea kettle. When the water boiled, he threw in
two eggs. When they were done, he made two cups of tea from the same water. He
handed me a piece of bread and an egg. I did what he did with it, drank my tea, got
my things, and left for Kerry.
It was 60 degrees. I hitchhiked and walked. At the end of the day, I
happened to be a hundred yards from a youth hostel. There was a little store across
the street. The woman there called the hostel’s caretaker, who opened the place for
me and told me where the coal was for a fire. I bought some beans from the store.
The woman noticed my St. Christopher’s medal. “I see you’ve been raised right,”
she said, and invited me to come over after I’d eaten and sing her and her husband
a song. I’d been told I’d be asked for a song in Ireland, and so had learned John
Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” I sang it for them in front of their fire. The
woman told me I had to come to mass with them in the morning.
I went back to the hostel and took a long, hot bath. I read Tim Severin’s
Brendan’s Voyage by the fire. I went to mass the next morning, then walked off
down the road. I was picked up after a few hours by a man and his two children.
His name was Murphy. “That’s my grandmother’s name,” I said, “and my middle
name.” Sensing that I thought I’d found my relatives, Mr. Murphy kindly informed
me that “Murphy is the second most common surname in Ireland.” He invited me
for dinner.
As I sat watching the Christmas parade from New York City on TV, I
looked out the window. There was the grandfather we were waiting for, walking
over a field. Mrs. Murphy said the potatoes were just now ready and invited me to
sit. The plate I thought would be a bread plate turned out to be a potato jacket
plate. After the meal, Mr. Murphy drove me out to the main road south and wished
me luck. I walked; no cars passed for an hour. It was getting dark. I had to pee—
but what if a car came while I was off pissing? I had to, and went. Two minutes
after I came back to the road, a car came. The woman took me into the town of
Dingle Bay, where the sand was like Guinness foam.
For the next few days, I rarely saw a soul under 50. The day after Christmas
was Wren’s Day, and I watched a small, chaotic parade in honor of it. Then I
rented a bike and rode out to Dunquin and Slea Head, the westernmost point of
Europe, I was told, closest to the Statue of Liberty. When I came around the Head,
the wind was so strong it held me stationary.

Back at my dorm, I dropped off some things, including the cup and plate I
bought in Dunquin, and picked up some others before I went to Paris to meet Tim
and Connie. I don’t know how I managed to pay for these trips, because before I
left for Ireland I lost sixty pounds in two minutes to a team of three–card monty
players in Soho. Having impressed a distraught Tim and an annoyed Connie by
finding the bindle of cocaine he’d lost between Victoria Station and my room—a
matter of retracing steps, only to find it on the sidewalk outside the dorm, sodden
and useless—I was trying to impress them again, this time with my local
knowledge.
I took a train to the point where I’d cross the channel. When I got there, I
realized I’d forgotten my passport. I knew that the dorm was now closed for the
rest of the break, but I had to go back to go on, so I returned to London. It took me
hours to find anyone who could open the place up. While I was waiting, I watched
people going in and out of an adjacent apartment building. I went over and peeked
inside the flat. I asked if I could borrow a book while I waited for the bursar to
come and let me into Ramsay Hall. A woman pointed me to a bookshelf. I saw On
The Road. I had never read it. Backtracking there for my passport, it seemed a
perfect time.
And that’s when I met Ginsberg—now as Carlo Marx—for the third time.
So I was meeting Allen Ginsberg for the fourth time when we kissed in his
Boulder kitchen in 1981. He still didn’t know who I was. I really didn’t know who
he was, either; all I could think of was the close resemblance of that beef to his
lips, and all he could think of was getting that beef cooked rare and sliced thick.
I looked around his apartment and noticed a man off by himself against the
wall. He was short, mostly bald, his beard trimmed close. He was smiling. He wore
a black t–shirt and jeans. He had a bottle in front of him and a short glass in his
hand. I looked closer at the bottle and saw that it was slivovitz.
I had read about slivovitz in the East European history classes I’d taken with
Stephen Fischer–Galati. If I remember correctly, the Serbs made it and sold it to
the Austrians, and then used the profits to fight the Turks.
Reading about slivovitz gave me a taste for it. Liquor Mart, our church and
community center, carried it, both the Serbian and the Israeli brands. I was partial
through my reading to the Serbian, though I tried the Israeli. The plums in the
Serbian brand made a more delicious liquor, and the bottle was more pleasing. My
housemate Jon and I kept a quart of it in the freezer. We drank it from snifters.
There in Ginsberg’s apartment was a man after my own heart. His bottle was
almost full. I went over to him and started talking about slivovitz. He was glad to
have me join him. He said he couldn’t get anybody to try it.
This man was Istvan Eorsi, a Hungarian poet and writer, one of Georg
Lukac’s last students, and the translator into Hungarian of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry.
We talked and drank almost the whole bottle together. He invited me to come visit
him in Budapest. I said I would, and took his address. When I was leaving, I said
again that I would come to Budapest.
“No you won’t,” he said. “Everyone says yes, but no one comes.”

I graduated in May 1982. My father sent me a letter with a check in it “for

terminal bills and some extra-curricular activities.” He added:
It’s truly a time in your life for some superbly entitled celebration, but
as a word of parental concern and caution, please leaven the festivities
with just enough solemnity and moderation to keep from harm’s way
and cloudy recollections later of this once-in-a-lifetime passage.
It was the happiest May in my life. I had been accepted into the PhD program in
English at Rutgers University on a fellowship that paid tuition and gave me a
stipend of $5,000 a year for four years. My parents were so pleased that they
agreed to pay for me to go to Perugia, to the school Mussolini established for
teaching foreigners the glories of the Italy, and learn Italian.
In November, from Perugia, I wrote Eorsi a letter saying that I would like to
come visit him in Budapest in early January. He wrote back and said to come. I
made plans.
I went to Venice from Rome on January 3, 1983. A young boy got on the
train when we pulled into Trieste. He was going back to Yugoslavia. His parents
were in the circus, and he had been to visit them on their tour of Italy. While there,
he bought a stack of Elvis Presley 45s. He told me—we spoke in Italian—that the
Yugoslav Customs agents would search his bag but not mine. Would I put them in
my bag when we crossed the border? I said I would. He asked if he could do
anything to help me. I said that my Eurail pass would be meaningless once we
crossed into Yugoslavia, and that I hadn’t bought a ticket that would take me
through to Budapest.
He said he would do his best, and he did. But it didn’t help. The Yugoslavs
confiscated my passport, then gave it to the Hungarians at the border. They kept it
all through Hungary.
They wanted me to buy it back with dollars, which I almost made the
mistake of doing. In the end, both the Yugoslav and the Hungarian officials
accepted lire in payment. They did so at the last possible minute: first at the border
of Hungary and Yugoslavia, and then again at the station in Budapest. The train we
were on was bound for Moscow.
When I came out of the station in Budapest, I took out Istvan’s address and
the letter he’d written me. It told me how to get from the station to the building his
apartment was in. The street led to the Danube, to the Elzabeth (I remember it
without the “i”) Bridge. Istvan said his apartment overlooked the bridge, the first
one built to link Buda with Pest. Istvan was on the Pest side.
I climbed the five flights of stairs and knocked on his door. Nobody
answered.
I took out my notebook and wrote him a note. I was sticking it in his door
when I heard someone coming up the steps. It was Istvan. He came smiling toward
me, but he was irritated that I hadn’t been specific about my arrival. He could have
been away, in the country; then what would I have done? I should have written.
Taking his keys out of his pocket, he said he had just gotten back from the country
and had some true Hungarian slivovitz.
“Come in,” he said, “Come in.”
He gave me slivovitz and soup.
I learned that Istvan spent four years in prison after the revolution of 1956.
Since then, his freedom to publish his own writing was granted him intermittently;
at the time, he was under a ban. As a member of the most prominent samizdat in
Budapest, he was disobeying it. Two weeks earlier, the authorities had seized
thousands of pages from the apartment where the members of the “boutique” met.
He was also writing lyrics for The Hobo Blues Band, whose leader wore a Rolling
Stones t–shirt. Istvan took me to hear the band practice. As we walked along the
Danube, he explained the song I’d be hearing: a man who lives under the river
surfaces now and then to sing to a bird, who then flies to the man’s beloved and
sings her the song.
Istvan told me he could leave Hungary any time he pleased. It sounded
something like Orr’s predicament in Catch–22. The authorities had offered him
passage; his absence would make it easier for them; all Istvan had to do was ask.
But Istvan, like his friend Laszlo Reuk, didn’t want to leave. Hungary was the only
place for a Hungarian writer.
Reuk, too, the son of one of the Hungarian leaders Stalin had had murdered,
was free to travel. He had studied architecture in Canada and the United States, but
he was staying in Hungary—even though the authorities were moving him over to
the Buda side of the Danube on the pretext that he had misfiled his housing papers.
When I asked Istvan and Laszlo what could be done to help them, they both said:
“Send money. Tell the Americans to send money.”
Reuk’s apartment was the samizdat headquarters. I attended one of its last
meetings. There were eight or ten writers there. In order to talk freely, they turned
on a radio, a TV, and a stereo. Jazz was on the turntable; Hungarian came out of
the TV and radio. Who knows what the censors heard in their recording.

At Istvan’s apartment, overlooking the Danube, which was ferrous rather

than blue, I read Kenneth Patchen, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and Ezra Pound.
Istvan had a copy of John Berryman’s Freedom of the Poet, too, and I read that,
delighted and amazed by his essay on “Shakespeare at Thirty.”
Istvan and I would have breakfast together—bread that was a workout to
chew, along with head-cheese, mustards, horseradishes, and garlic sausage; then
grapefruit, yogurt, milk, and coffee. Istvan usually left after breakfast. I read and
wrote.
One morning, under Ashbery’s influence, I think, the word “cloy” came to
me, and I started a poem called “Whittling”—which wasn’t what I set out to do.
That took me back to Vail before I was ten, when Mr. Dodge taught Donald and
me how to whittle a willow branch. It turned out I didn’t know what the word
“cloy” meant.
Reading Ashbery reminded me of the time I met him when he came to read
in Boulder, and of how my aunt had made me sit down to read him in the Catskill
Mountains. That led me to think of meeting Ginsberg, which made me think of the
wire cutters I used when I was putting in sprinkler systems. And the whole time, I
was mesmerized by the surface of the Danube, which is what I was trying to
describe as “cloying.”

The only “legal” means Istvan had of making a living as a writer during a
ban was through translating. He was at work on a Selected Poems of Allen
Ginsberg. One day, he came out of the kitchen into the room I was staying in. I
was reading The Freedom of the Poet, but I was thinking about the opening
sentence of a story Istvan had written. Apart from the translations, it was the only
thing of his he had in English.
It said: “There are three kinds of people: those who look in the mirror and
say ‘I,’ those who look in the mirror and say ‘You,’ and those who look in the
mirror and say ‘He.’ I belong to the third kind.”
Before I could ask Istvan about it, he said he was translating the “Elegy for
Neal Cassidy” and had come upon a problem. Maybe I could help him. He had not
translated this poem before, he said, and he wanted to do it right because he liked it
very much.
“I make good poems in Hungarian,” he said.
I said I’d never read the poem, but would help him if I could.
The passage that troubled him named “the prophetic honk of Louis Jordan”
and “Illinois Jacquet.”
Istvan said, “Now I know what is Illinois, but what is this Jacquet? And
what is honk?”
So I told him the story my father had told me, which was the only thing I
knew about Illinois Jacquet.

It made me happy to think that my father, thirty years earlier, had heard the
sounds that inspired Ginsberg and Kerouac, rather than those that soothed the rich
kids at Dartmouth.
My father, with his cold washcloths to wake us up in the morning and his
drunken rages to make us understand the world at night; with his love of Bob
Dylan’s “Wigwam,” George Thoroughgood’s cover of “One Bourbon, One Scotch,
and One Beer,” David Bowie’s “China Girl,” the drummers and percussionists of
Santana, War’s “City, Country, City,” Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby” (he loved
the line, “Just wanna play football for the coach”), and, after Craig’s death, Van
Morrison’s “Dweller on the Threshold.”
His recitations of “Gunga Din” made that the first poem I committed to
memory. He recited other Kipling, too, “Danny Deever” and “The Road to
Mandalay,” and Dylan Thomas’s “In my craft and sullen art.” He learned and
recited Yeats’s “Leaders of the Crowd” during the Reagan years.
Five months after Craig died, he wrote to me to ask that I take a minute to
read Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse.” He had just
memorized it “as a memoriam to Craig—it seems to have a mystical
appropriateness—prophetic—proleptic to Craig’s life and spirit. What strange,
inimitable figures of speech!”
He began to run in 1977. He finished seven marathons, almost making his
desired time of three hours and thirty minutes, and one team-triathlon, with Bruce
doing the swimming and Craig the cycling. He read Saint Anselm’s proof of the
existence of God and the long preface to it by an obscure professor. He could quote
the last paragraph of Camus’ The Rebel, and I copied him. When I played Tom in
The Glass Menagerie, he said he’d rather shoot himself in the head than get up on
stage.
My father, who gave me the Baltimore Colts and poetry.
He kept an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser running well for twenty-three years.
When he sold it, he sent me, with Bruce’s blessing—to whom, as final caretaker,
my father with his sense of fairness offered the money—a check for $750 dollars.
It was my thirty-sixth birthday, the only one, so far, that has troubled me. I called
my father to say so. I told him I didn’t think I’d make it to thirty-six; now that I
had, I said, I had little to show for it: no job, no career, no wife and children, no
house, no car, no savings. When you were thirty-six, I said, you had all of those.
I don’t remember what his response was, but I can hear him reassuring me,
telling me that times have changed, that “mortgage” means “dead hand,” that I
have to keep taking “the human footsteps.”
He had told me many times in my twenties, “Don’t go into business, and
don’t be in a hurry to get married and have children.”
On my thirtieth birthday, he wrote: “It enhances us and makes us proud to
tell people our Mark is a poet, a teacher, a scholar and a loving son. Keep it all up,
and don’t let the ignorance and indifference get you ‘down and blue.’

One January, at home on vacation, I went up into his room to see if he had
written anything in the notebook my mother had given him for Christmas. We both
wanted him to write again, as he had in college. I found a poem, dedicated to his
brother on his birthday, called “Reveries While Running.”
How the tall branches blew outside our
windows during spring rains,
And the ice for our summer tea
was picked from an ice box,
And you wheeled a lawnmower on
the handle bar of your Iver–Johnson
To make money for my shoes,
in those still–Depression years
before the War. . . .
I don’t think he ever sent it to Uncle Vernon. He never mentioned that he’d written
it.
Dad died in 1953, when I was in Augsburg.
You and Mom said he was in a VA Hospital
in Oregon. We hadn’t seen him in years and,
love lost for the drunkenness, misused intelligence,
obesity, none of us really seemed to care.
 Your lifetime already exceeds his, and mine
ever faster approaches it—how strange!

In the summer of 1990, he showed me a brief poem he had written for Craig.
I was moved by it; it was a good poem; I told him so. I took it and typed it up. I
sent it to him with a note, praising it for its quality as a poem, and telling him that I
was submitting it for publication, which I did. I included in the envelope a poem I
had written for him using lines from his poem for Uncle Vernon. Finally, in the
habit of my ambivalence toward him, I needlessly emphasized our different beliefs
about what happens after death, and asked him if he would allow me to differ from
him. He answered me:
I know I will never be able to fully articulate—and why should
one need or want to?—my glow and warmth over your reaction to and
praise of my “cry of the heart” for our dear Craig—so it is more than
enough just to carry it with me as a gift from you—and accredited
practitioner of “the sullen art.” Thank you so much for that, as well as
your marvelous poem for me, betraying your reading and recollection
of the “thing” I wrote for Vernon—how many years ago? Very
flattering and gratifying.
About “differing”: of course we can, except over loving each
other in spite of our differences, and my shortcomings over your
years. As Nama used to say, “If I’d known better, I would have done
better.” If, as I heard a priest, dying of cancer, say recently on TV,
God not only forgives our shortcomings, but also forgets them—why
should we go around carrying this great burden of guilt? . . . . we can
and will differ, Mark, with the proviso I already mentioned about
steadfast love, and each of us must forge our own consolations, and
 we must respect that—for, as even Jesus said to the complimentary
young man: “Good? There is only One who is good.”

He taught me folds of the paper plane, tucks of the army bed; told me to
keep my shoulders back when I stood and off the pillow when I slept; to oil my
mitt, to get down my knees down one day a week, to put one foot in front of the
other for speed.
It was from him that I first heard the beautiful phrase, “to carry oneself.” He
liked to say, “If you walk like a duck, and talk like a duck, you are a duck.”
He wanted me to know the job was tough before I took it.
He said, “act natural”; “you’re in the doghouse”; “don’t cry before you’re
hurt.”
He told me that “belligerent” was the first word he fell in love with.
“Justify,” “consolation,” “prudence”—he loves those words, too.
And these phrases: “mixed blessing,” “blessing in disguise.”

Once when he was drunk he caught himself “waxing sentimental.”

Craig said, “No, Dad, you’re waning sentimental,” and he laughed at
himself.
I’ve seen him use all his strength to stifle a strong emotion. A scene on the
Mary Tyler Moore Show, a comment by a sportscaster, Jack Lemmon in Save the
Tiger—his insides shuffle him, he chokes up.
“Let it go, Dad. Let it go.”
“I’m afraid it would never stop.”

Even though he’s found some of the poems I’ve written about him “a little
hard to take,” he has sent them to his oldest friends. He even told me, when my
first poem, “The Water Tower,” came out in The Denver Post in 1980: “I like your
imagery very much and think you have been more influenced by Frost and Auden,
in that order, than by Cummings.” He and my mother paid for the first and only
poetry workshop I’ve applied and been accepted to—at The Frost Place, in
Franconia, New Hampshire. He enclosed a note with the check:
Dear Mr. Keller,
As Mark’s father, may I say that we are proud that Mark’s work
merited an invitation to your workshop. As a Dartmouth graduate
(‘52), who had the privilege to hear Frost “live” on a couple of
occasions, your aegis is, for me, especially auspicious for Mark’s
career, and I gladly enclose my check for his fee with high
expectations from both of us that your program will be a richly
beneficial and rewarding experience.
It was. Charles Simic liked my “Pieces of Clothing” poem and took me into his
group. (“But,” he said, “how many lines does a shirt rate? Or a beret? Or a pair of
jeans?”) I met Alicia Ostriker, who would become a close friend at Rutgers, and
help me put my first manuscript together, and David Keller, and Peter Wood—all
three founding members of US 1, the poetry group I would be a part of in
Princeton, and through which I would meet Bob Welch and Rick Tibbetts.

I didn’t know how rare my father was until I went to graduate school, until I
started teaching in 1987. Somehow, I showed two of the brightest young professors
in our department a few of my poems. Several days later, at some reception, both
of them expressed amazement that my father not only read books, but read and
memorized poems. Their fathers, they said, came up poor, too, but they didn’t give
a shit about books. “You ought to be grateful,” Bruce Robbins said to me.
Three months after Craig died, Aunt Bets invited me to come visit her in
Mississippi during spring break. My father wrote to me:
I think it will be a memorable and stimulating journey for you to pass
into the land of Wolfe, Faulkner, Williams (you ought to take the
“Streetcar” when you’re in New Orleans—I understand it’s still
there), Styron, Warren, etc., etc., etc.—all those melancholy and
atavistic writers, whose spirits seem to me to have always been
burdened with a Southern racial virus from the carnage of the Civil
War on their antebellum, halcyon aristocracy. William Styron wrote a
book called Lie Down in Darkness in the early Fifties, which I read in
the Army, about a suicidal young southern girl in N.Y.C., and I’ve
always remembered this passage—“My son, never let passion be a
guide—nurture hope like a flower in the most barren ground of
trouble, and if love has fed the flame of your highest imaginings, then
passion will perish in that flame and only love remain.” I don’t know
why that’s stayed with me all these 30 years, but it has.”

My father tells me every time I talk to him that he’s behind me, that he’s
proud of me, that I can always count on him when I need money, that he prays for
me—words I’m sure he never heard from his father.
He wants me to read Cavafy’s “The God Forsakes Antony” over his pine
box.
“Make us immortal.”

Mr. Robinson
On the day I graduated from college, a friend who distributed cocaine among
us by the handfuls threw a party. She told us her father would be there. We knew
him only as a “shipping magnate.”
 Dave, Jon, Jonathan, Cal, and I stood and stared at him, this WASP Onassis
who had flown in on his jet and was already looking at his watch. The party had
just started. The five of us decided that someone had to come up with an
unintelligible way to thank him for having supplied his daughter with the funds she
so generously diverted to the cause of arts and leisure.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said.
He managed to pin me up against the central column in the playroom.
“So,” he said, “what do you do?”
That was always the problem, what “do” meant. I went for broke.
“I’m a poet.”
This, to the best of my recollection, was what he said.
Okay, you’re a poet. You gotta have no ego. You cannot have an ego.
Worrying is worthless. You can’t worry about the megaton bomb. It’s
useless. I couldn’t be effective if I did. You have to be effective.
Everyone in business is a climber. But you have to climb the right
mountain, be a Hillary, climb the Everests. If someone says no more
three–drawer filing cabinets, you have to think, how about a two–
drawer? Change is good. We accept change. You get an A. Today is
your day to begin to become the best in the business. Tell them to go
screw themselves. Stocks and bonds don’t interest me. I know all the
heads of the airlines. Braniff’s wife decorated their planes and they
went belly-up. The goal is infinity. Goal and change are of a different
order. Change means new ways to maximize profit. It’s a byproduct
of the way to the goal itself. The mountain is not to sit on but to climb.
You get an A. Money means nothing unless you do what makes you
happy. But if you have this opportunity—and every uncommon
person does—you must work in your happiness until you’re the best
 in the business—poetry, plumbing parts, or shipping—I don’t care. As
long as you’re the best. The best damned poet in the business.
Pete
The summer of Pete’s wedding must have been the summer of 1985. The
pop songs were full of heaven and baseball. I was trying to write papers on George
Bernard Shaw and money, and on Harold Pinter, Eugene O'Neill, and what Francis
Bacon in 1612 called “speech of touch.” My brother Craig was dead. I needed to
complete my incompletes.
I invited myself and Bruce to Pete’s wedding. We dressed in our matching
double-breasted jackets, light-blue and white, wide-striped. We wore white shirts
and white ducks. Bruce felt out of place; I felt left out by Pete. It was always my
feeling (we met in fifth grade) that Pete was better than I was, had more going for
him (in some ways: I watched him piss on the carpet in his room once). He was
more reckless, stronger, better-looking, more attractive to girls, funnier when
drunk. He got me to do his English homework for him. He had steers in his back
yard and a pond in back of that. He had a motorcycle. He could ride horses. He
could fight. He was fearless. He was a downhill racer, too, even though his knees
were weak. He’d pop his knee out and pop it back in with barely a wince. And Pete
could beat me in swimming, the one thing I almost never lost in, without much
effort.
Pete introduced me to masturbation in fifth grade, not long after he moved
into the neighborhood. We were lying on our backs down by Little Dry Creek. He
told me that his cousin Bobby in Wyoming had showed him how. I remember
doing it the night after we had that conversation. I liked the results—but I was
enough of a Catholic to know that I shouldn’t have. And there was the image of
elephantiasis: if I persisted in masturbating, my balls would have to be carried in a
wheelbarrow. Someone had a picture of this, one of the Lemons, I think—a nice
medical Hasselblad.
Pete and Scott and I knew that masturbation was second to something, but
we didn’t know that masturbation was masturbation, even when the hand doing the
job wasn’t one’s own. Probably Katie, Holly, Sue, and Amy had the same
knowledge, but we all drank and played spin-the-bottle anyway, and took what we
could get in the barn-loft after school. Shirts might come off, but even that degree
of nakedness was rare. Loosening was the rule. Pants rarely came down, bras
stayed hitched.
Maybe adolescence means, practically, having sex with your clothes on. I
still like it, sometimes, when clothes are in the way, when the touch isn’t
immediate, when the palms and fingers are restricted, and the legs are hampered,
and the shirt confines the arms.
I can still feel in my mind’s hands the firmness of Katie’s brown breasts.
Amy’s were white and soft. She was a tad more game than Katie; Holly and Kathy
were the freest. Pete kept us laughing. Scott we laughed at, because he got drunk
the fastest, was the hardest-headed, and slowest to pick up on the game.
I don’t think Katie enjoyed the sessions in the barn with the suicides very
much. She was somber and quiet. She was beautiful on her horse, black with a
white blaze, and probably at her ease only on her horse. People frightened her.

At Denver Country Day, Pete led the gang of long-haired, down-vested,

jean-wearing, clutter-booted, beer-drinking, tobacco-chewing rebels we thought we
were. This gang I didn’t fully belong to, formed in ninth grade, made up Pete’s
wedding party some ten years later: Ponty, Brad, Kenny, Shaun. They had one
more thing in common: all of them had money, trust funds, some quite large
(Budweiser money in Shawn’s case), and they knew they had money. I didn’t
know they had money, really, until now, as I write this down.
 At the wedding, Pete’s father, Fred, a prominent cardiologist who ate ice
cream and rarely spoke more than three or four words at a time, took me aside. He
had a bashful, gentle smile. He was always preoccupied, and almost always
dressed in his hospital greens, sometimes even keeping his mask around his neck.
He’d come home, get a half-gallon of ice cream from the freezer, grab a spoon, and
head into the living room. He’d turn on the TV and recline in his big chair. He’d
nod at us.
“Pete, Mark.”
An hour later the box of ice cream would be empty on the floor and he’d be
asleep, the TV on. He was a big supporter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes,
but I doubted he believed in much beyond his work, his children, and the grounds
around his house. At one point he was lending his patients and his expertise to a
study of the phenomena in which people who have “died and been brought back to
life” see a white light and a feel an unworldly sense of peace. He was trying to help
his friend (a bigger FCA booster named Loren Young, who wrote a book called
Sprint for the Sun) substantiate the case for immortality.
When Dr. Schoonmaker took me aside at the wedding and asked what I was
doing, I told him what I told Mr. Robinson, that I was a writer, a poet. He thought
about that for a minute, and then said: “Write and think about the earth and its
people. If you want to write, you have to be educated. That means you have to
travel. Go to Africa, northern Africa especially.”
Bob
He brushed me off when I told him he looked like Peter O’Toole—but he
did. He secretly loved the compliments he hated.
He is still handsome: I saw him in October 2000. From the fall of 1983 until
the spring of 1990, I went to Bob’s apartment most Tuesday nights, and often on
other nights, too, and sometimes on Sunday afternoons. I loved Bob and Bob was
in love with me.
He spoke long, complicated sentences, and he wrote long, complicated
sentences, and there was insight and wit and humor in most of them. He also
commanded an amazing number of tones in his voice, as many as my grandmother,
and as easily and naturally. He was theatrical, always after an effect, a “hit.”
He lived on Princeton’s main street, Nassau. He worked as a secretary for a
lawyer. After work, he walked two blocks back to his apartment, stopping, as
needed, at the grocery and liquor stores. For a time, he would cook for people in
his kitchen, charging five dollars a meal. The dinners were so good that word
spread, and spread too far, and he was shut down.
Bob’s two-bedroom apartment was up two flights of stairs. His two gray
cats, Dukey and Rumples, brother and sister, would greet him. He’d prop his door
open. After putting his groceries away, he’d sit at his kitchen table, light a Camel
straight, and read the paper. At six, precisely, he turned on his TV and began to
make a martini, very wet, in a sherry glass. That’s when I’d arrive.
I would make a martini just like Bob’s, and light one of Bob’s cigarettes,
and roll a joint with Bob’s pot, and listen to the news on Bob’s TV. We rarely
watched, but we often commented. There in the tri-state area, you could get the
big-three national news shows at different times, and McNeil-Lehrer too. Bob had
it worked out so that we could watch Tom, Peter, and Dan, plus Robin and Jim,
between six and eight. Bob began cooking at about seven. At eight, we would eat a
delicious meal—a roast, fish, chicken—always with vegetables, always finished
with a sauce.
Tuesdays at first were not as leisurely for us, since on that night the U.S. 1
writers’ group met somewhere in Princeton. We had to move a little faster the first
two years we knew each other. After that, we started not to go to the meeting
sometimes. We’d keep drinking and talking in Bob’s kitchen. We’d hold rump
sessions and read our things to each other, and to others who showed up.
Bob had an open-door policy. Debbie would come, and Joey, and the
Ostrikers, and Sylvia Elvin, and Cynthia Gooding, the folk singer, and Rick, and
Mark Daubert, and Scott—everyone was welcome. You drank, you smoked pot,
you talked. Or you listened to Bob talk, and egged him on, because his talk was so
vivid and funny and extravagant. And repetitive. And boring. “Boring is good,”
Bob liked to say.
I can’t remember how Bob and I (and Debbie Boe, I think) got to Lowell,
Massachusetts. Neither of us had a car, but I think we drove. We stayed with John
Sampis, Jack Kerouac’s relative by marriage (Kerouac married John’s sister,
Stella). Ronald Jonson was there, a poet liked by Guy Davenport. John, Ron, and
Bob were gay; I was straight.
At the time, I was some months back into smoking pot and cigarettes,
having had a disastrous affair with Jill and broken up with Loretta. John had some
cocaine, too, and I did some of that. We were there to read at the Kerouac
memorial reading. I don’t remember how we got invited or put on the list.
We sat around the kitchen talking, drinking, smoking. I told Ronald a story
about Robert Frost and Guy Davenport that I worked my way into doing research
for my dissertation.

Bob had two daughters. I met each of them once in seven years. He was
divorced, and he was gay. He is a year younger than my father. One night, he
seduced me. He loved my saying that he seduced me. He lived off that for a year.
But I couldn’t go through with the sex. As much as I loved him, as much pleasure
as he gave me, as much as he delighted me, and as drunk as I was that night—I
couldn’t kiss him deeply on the mouth, take his cock in my mouth, let him take
mine in his; couldn’t touch his cock, couldn’t embrace him. Couldn’t. I did sleep
with him once or twice or more—said goodnight and rolled over, having missed
the midnight bus back to New Brunswick.
The night after Bob seduced me, I called Craig to tell him that I’d slept with
a man. I thought—I don’t know what I thought—that Craig would be happy, that
this news would bring us together. Instead, Craig sounded annoyed, or hurt
somehow, and hurried to get off the phone. A little less than a month later, his
friend Jim would put him on a plane for Denver. He was too sick to take care of
himself, and there was no one in L.A. to take care of him.

It was a tough regimen with Bob: two martinis before dinner, and one joint,
and several Camels; after dinner, another joint, more Camels, a quart of Ballentine
ale, and coffee; after that, whiskey, joint, Camels. And a constant stream of friends
and talk and music and reading—Hawthorne, Dickinson, Emerson, Capote, The
New York Times, The New Yorker, our latest poems and stories—now mocking,
now solemn, now foul, now histrionic; never dull.
Sometimes it was hard to do all that before the midnight bus came;
sometimes I was too tired to get the bus. Usually, though, being twenty-four and
some, I managed.
When I started going to Bob’s twice and sometimes three times a week, I
knew things were getting out of hand. But Bob was hard to resist, and so were his
booze, his pot, his cigarettes, and his French country cooking. The stability of his
life was seductive, too, especially because it was built, like my father’s, around the
cocktail hour and the television news, but afforded such different views. And Bob
wrote it all down, and I was one of his muses—John Stuart was my character’s
name—and every visit was a new chapter. Life and letters had never been so
pleasantly confused.
Rick
 He said there’s no longing in my poetry. Then I showed him the word
“longing” in “The Last Twenty Pages,” which was then called “Stinson Lake,” and
this poem became his favorite of mine. He thought a poet’s greatest asset is
longing, by which he meant a desire for perfection that this world never affords or
satisfies. I told him he ought to sink a little and stop being absolute. He pestered
me with Plato. We played Caliban and Ariel, earth and air. I would lash out at him,
he would help me. He pretended he was free of animus; I helped him. He thought
he burned a higher grade of midnight oil than I. He helped me more than I helped
him. He made my poems better. I feared he wanted more from me than words.
Now we have no words.
Books
Some of the first books I remember—The Good Earth, The King Must Die,
The Renaissance, Medieval Cities, A Death in the Family, On the Beach—are from
my year in private school.
But the first book that struck me was called Frederick Douglass Fights for
Freedom. I’d like to think I read it in elementary school, after Jeb Barry read us
John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, and I may have, but it probably belongs to
tenth grade, and I stole it from the library. What stays with me is the fight
Douglass, a slave and a reader, had with his overseer, Mr. Covey. I was moved
when Douglass decided he’d had enough of being broken. I seemed to fight in that
fight, to get free of something, possessed of something. Reading Douglass made
me feel things in my body, and I still feel bodily things when I read. I don’t read to
see.
Frederick Douglass—with his big handsome head, his strong jaw, his wide
Roman nose—I loved him and I loved his fight. I wanted to defeat Covey, too,
humiliate him, as I felt I’d been beat and humiliated, no doubt by my father.
 I suppose the first black man I heard of was Negro Lewis, in a story my
grandmother would tell. He had been my grandmother’s grandfather’s slave, and
had been freed by him when the family moved north into Missouri. Negro Lewis
lived in Blue Springs, outside Independence, when my grandmother was a little
girl.
Nama’s father told her one day to go see Negro Lewis. She and her sister
went across the fields, and Negro Lewis gave them each a glass of lemonade on his
back porch. According to my grandmother, he said to them: “You’re Grandpa
Murphy was the finest man God ever let walk this green earth. I was his slave, and
he freed me.”
There were no blacks living in Cherry Hills—none in church, in the grocery
store, in school—except Floyd Little, a running back for the Denver Broncos,
whom we never saw, and Alex English, who played for the Denver Nuggets. We
never saw him, either. Once or twice, I saw his wife in her car.
But ten miles away, in Denver, there lived Sadie and her family. Sadie
cleaned the Lemons’ house. I met her grandson Charles a few times when he came
out to play with Kent Lemon. And Mary Lee lived in Five Points, too. She cleaned
our house twice a month for twenty dollars each time. When I’d play with my
friend Steve, I’d see Lily, who cleaned that house.
Tom Hathaway’s parents moved him and his brothers and sisters out of
Cherry Hills and into the city—because there were blacks in the city, and
Mexicans. The only Mexicans we knew were Pancho Gonzalez, Chi Chi
Rodriguez, Lee Trevino, Freddie Prince, and José Feliciano. There was also, after
Mary Lee began working full time for the Gould family, Philomena Chavez, who
cleaned our house and brought us one dish that my mother has cooked ever since,
white enchiladas, and another, green chile, that she never attempted.
The blacks I knew in Cherry Hills came into my life through the television
and the stereo and the book: Lee Elder, Arthur Ashe, John Mackey, Deacon Jones,
Artis Gilmore, O.J. Simpson, Cassius Clay, Lenny Moore, Lew Al Cindor, Earl
The Pearl Monroe, O.J. Simpson; Godfrey Cambridge, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor,
Flip Wilson, Lou Rawls, and the Mills Brothers. There were Sly and the Family
Stone, The Temptations, The Jackson Five, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles,
Diana Ross and the Supremes. There was Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, Dick
Gregory, and Martin Luther King.
There was my father talking about the “cultivated” black man he saw when
stationed in Germany during the Korean War, a man he never forgot the
impression of. And then, whenever Tom Jones or Engleburt Humperdink sang on
Ed Sullivan’s show, my father would comment on how “black” they sounded.
In junior high and high school, there were Malcolm Lee and Ike Lee, Erin
Pitts and Rhonda Pitts, and Eric Mosley, and Raymond, whose last name I can’t
remember, but through whom I learned how difficult it was to look neither black
nor white.
In high school, too, I took a course from Ted Kempton and Maury Lane
called “Race and Prejudice.” In that class, I learned about the treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo; I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee;The Autobiography of Malcolm
X, Soul on Ice, and The Negro West.

Robert Frost compares the mind in the act of reading to the action of frost.
Frost brings stones up out of the ground, discovers them. Reading brings the heavy
things to the surface. Reading makes obvious the obstacles and problems that
writing disposes.
The frost of Frederick Douglass’s experience brought to the surface of my
field stones I hadn’t known I had beneath me, stones out of all proportion to my
experience, stones of resentment.
 I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that these stones went, as in Frost’s
New England, to build a wall. That wall marked the field from the wood or waste
or wild, and marked it as belonging to someone by dint of work. But I didn’t know,
at that time, that I had work to do. I let the stones lie. My reading of Douglass had
been the making of a mine field.

Mark Gray, one of my high-school English teachers, had us read Joseph

Campbell and Alan Watts. Campbell and Watts and Gray had no use for
Christianity, which they said had institutionalized a very partial description of
itself, its predecessors, and its contemporaries. Campbell said that the hero had a
thousand faces, and he included Christ in this category. These ideas excited me,
but they didn’t sit well with my father. At first, I took them home to let him know
that I was learning; then I took them home to let him know what I was learning.
Finally, I took them home as weapons to use against him.
I wanted to convince my father that I was right and he was wrong. He had
the same purpose. We fought. My mother would cry. My brothers would go
upstairs. I would cry. My father would rant and shake his fist at me. Once, he
challenged me to hit him.
I didn’t know then that my father was speaking under the influence of Eugen
Rosenstock–Huessy. Born and raised a Jew in Germany, he converted to
Christianity at the age of sixteen. Like Saint Paul, he converted with a fury that
would eventually embarrass his new allies. In fact, Rosenstock-Huessy would
claim that no Christian church, after World War I, was worth paying allegiance to;
all were dead letters. Rosenstock-Huessy’s Christians could only be Christians
“incognito.”
Throughout his tenure at Dartmouth, from 1935 to 1957, Rosenstock-Huessy
rubbed the fresh faces of his students into the dirt of European history. He told
them that they lived on a “mildew layer of existence,” that life was sacrifice, that
history was the story of sacrifice, and that its central event was the crucifixion of
Jesus. Founded on the providential schema of a twelfth-century monk, Hugh of St.
Victor, Rosenstock-Huessy’s brilliant and eccentric historical vision made as
indelible an impression on my father as it had on W.H. Auden and Page Smith
before him.
Rosenstock-Huessy became a kind of surrogate father to my father, whose
rebellion against his absent father and his Christian Scientist mother had been no
more successful than mine against my ever-present father and my Catholic mother.
I learned from my mother that the way to live with my father was to appease him.
To oppose him, as we quickly found out, was to bring anger and sadness into the
house. If I couldn’t defeat my father, I could sidle up to him, make amends for the
sins I’d committed. So I went to college armed with the writings of Rosenstock–
Huessy. I copied the notes my father had taken in his Philosophy 58 class, and I
read The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun and Out of Revolution: The
Autobiography of Mankind.
With Rosenstock-Huessy as my guide, I had slowly been thinking myself
into my father’s positions—but not steadily or wholly. My drifts were beginning to
be my own. Rosenstock-Huessy could not explain my father’s opposition to the
Vietnam War; could not illuminate his poetic need to drink, his unburdened
musical tastes, or his love for the English poets of the late 19th and early 20th
century. But I could not understand how a man who hated Nixon, bought Dylan’s
Self-Portrait, read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and loved the Baltimore Colts,
could be so vehement about theology.

My uncle gave me 50 Poems by E. E. Cummings in 1974, on what turned

out to be the day Nixon resigned. That day, too, he bought me a pen and a pocket
notebook at a newsstand on the corner of 6th Avenue and 11th Street in Manhattan.
He said a writer should always have a pen and a notebook.
We drove back to the Catskills that night. My father called. As members of
The Citizens’ Committee to Impeach the President, my father and my uncle must
have been disappointed. Nixon had gotten away.
My uncle and I were standing out on the porch, looking into a sea of pine
trees. The night before, a raccoon had tipped over a jug of Almaden chablis and
pulled the cork. We caught him drinking.
My father said, “The King is dead; long live the King.”

I loved my father’s and my uncle’s fight against Nixon and the Vietnam
War. “What we really should perceive from our Vietnam involvement,” my father
wrote to The Denver Post in 1970, “is simply that we cannot justify a self-
righteous interference in foreign civil wars and wars of national independence
merely because the end of our endeavor may be a non-Communist outcome.” My
father’s opposition seemed to me to have nothing to do with theology. I wanted it
to be charged by a human energy, like the love of music and football and reading,
and a passion for justice, like Frederick Douglass’s. E.E. Cummings and A.E.
Housman were closer to that energy than Rosenstock-Huessy; poetry was closer to
it than prose; and love poetry much closer to it than theology.
Last night, watching a documentary about the Kennedys, I cried for Bobby
Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The tears were not fresh or idle, but seemed to
have their source in the abruptness of a former ending, the paralyzing of an energy
exhausted long ago. If, in 1968, I was too young to need the stimulus of hope, then
why am I so moved when I hear King’s voice, when I hear Bobby Kennedy,
brushing his hair awkwardly from his face, say: “Now it’s on to Californier and
we’ll win theah”?
 What succeeded those assassinations—Nixon’s election, McGovern’s
defeat, Vietnam, Kent State, Watergate—did not seem to me, at the age of nine or
twelve, like a betrayal. I saw it all on TV; I watched my father see it. I saw and
heard what it did to him, a true believer. I felt betrayed, too.
Uncle Chuck
I don’t remember when I first met my uncle, my mother’s only brother. I
remember him vividly in the summer of 1970, a year after Chrissie died, when the
whole family came to Denver. He came with his wife Suzi, his daughter Erin, and
his son Charles. Uncle Chuck used a crutch and a cane. He’d had polio, my mother
told me. He seemed to have a ball on his hips, and he’d cup it or rest his hand on it
when he stood. He had a strong upper-body, and a deep, authoritative voice.
He came again after Craig died. When I told him that I had found Craig’s
diary, blank but for a note on the first page, warning readers that if they couldn’t
accept Craig as he was, they should not read further, he said, “That included
Craig.”
He told me once that I was “open.” He seemed to envy that. In a letter to a
woman he was seeing at the time, he called me “callow.” I fell for her—Priscilla
Flood. There was a big Monet exhibition at the time, and I wrote poems about
Monet’s paintings for her. The three of us went to Central Park to hear Zuben
Mehta conduct the New York Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. I
fell in love with that.
I think my uncle still sees me as both open and callow, and still envies the
one and regrets the other. So do I.
There were summer trips to Twilight Park in the early seventies. On the first
visit, in 1974, Uncle Chuck took me early one morning in a big Lincoln down the
mountain to the train station. He used both lanes. We went to his apartment on
West 11th Street between 6th and 5th. We walked around Greenwich Village. He
pointed out where E.E. Cummings had lived, where Dustin Hoffman lived, where
Dylan Thomas used to drink, the bar where journalists hung out, the bar where
novelists hung out; he took me down Christopher Street; he showed me where
Woody Allen ate pizza, where Lauren Hutton bought make-up. He showed me
Little Italy and Chinatown; he took me to Soho and explained how the artists had
moved in and made lofts and studios out of old factory buildings. He explained
how it was that Italians lived on streets with Irish names. He took me to the lower
East Side, to the Second Avenue Deli. He explained streets and avenues; he named
neighborhoods on the way uptown to Lincoln Center.
At Lincoln Center, he bought me 50 Poems by E.E. Cummings. He showed
me 47th Street—the Hasidic diamond merchants, the Gotham Book Mart. He took
me to a lunch place on 48th at about Madison and told me that all the men behind
the counter were ex-cons. He took me to Central Park and the Museum of Modern
Art. He took me to Broadway and 42nd Street. He said it wasn’t true that New
York City wasn’t safe: every part of the city has its visiting hours, he told me, you
just have to know when you could be where.
I probably knew my uncle first as a name on the masthead of Horizon
magazine, and as the author of several books. He would send my parents copies. I
used his book on Savanarola for a report in ninth grade. His best-seller, Meeting at
Potsdam, let me see my uncle on the Today show. I read reviews of it in clippings
my grandfather sent us. That was 1975. When he came through Denver, I asked if
he’d come talk to my English class, and he did. I didn’t read Meeting at Potsdam
until 1982, when I was writing a term-paper for my history of science class on the
making of the atomic bomb. I sent my uncle a copy of it. He asked me to come out
after graduation, live in the city for the summer, and write a play with him. We did
that together.
He helped me with two other papers. I was trying to write about time in
Proust, which is like trying to write about oxygen in the atmosphere or light in the
sun. I read essays on and studies of Proust, but had read only Swann’s Way, the
first volume of In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past, as it was
called then. I was confused and unable to begin. I called Uncle Chuck. He told me
about Freud’s idea that you could begin with any part of a dream and, from that,
get at the whole of the dream. He told me to write about the first paragraph of the
novel; he said that the whole novel was in that paragraph, and that I should say
everything I’d come to know about Proust and time in relation to that paragraph.
With the help of Aunt Bets, who teaches French at the University of Southern
Mississippi, I translated the paragraph, then wrote the essay. My professor told me
to submit it for an award. He had me run it by Ed Rivers first, the Proust expert on
the faculty. Rivers said that my 18-page essay really began on page 9. I struggled
to see that, did, and then revised accordingly. I ended up winning half the prize.
The other paper I remember calling my uncle about was also a final paper,
and also one I’d done more than enough reading in secondary materials for, and
not enough thinking about on my own. It was about Frost, for a course on Frost
and Cummings. Cummings wrote poetry, I thought; Frost wrote talk. I didn’t know
what to say about it as poetry. Uncle Chuck told me about a man who lived near
him, Richard Poirier, who had just published a book on Frost. Reading that book
changed my mind: ten years later, as a graduate student of Poirier’s, I would try to
make good, in a dissertation, on what he thought was an original find in Frost
scholarship. I would fail.
My father has always admired Uncle Chuck, and Uncle Chuck my father.
Once, in the early sixties, when he visited New York with my mother, my father
went with Uncle Chuck to hear Woody Allen do stand-up. He likes to tell that
story, especially the part about sitting with Allen and my uncle in a bar after the
show while my conducted an interview. It amazed my father that Woody Allen
knew his routine backwards and forwards, word by word.
In 1979, I showed Uncle Chuck a poem I’d written about the incident that is
still, I think, generally credited with precipitating World War I: Princip’s
assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June or July 28, 1914. I called it “The
Suicide of Europe,” having taken my title, in what I thought of as filial loyalty to
my father, from a quotation in Rosenstock-Huessy’s Out of Revolution.
At the time, my uncle was in Freudian analysis, coming to grips with the
failure of his second marriage, the disappointing sales of the book that followed his
best-seller, tax trouble, and the feeling he says he can tap into at will: fury. His
object was his father. Uncle Chuck was certain that his father had given him up for
dead when, as a senior in high school, polio struck him on a football field.
Uncle Chuck read my poem. “You should call it ‘The Homicide of Europe,’
he said, “because it’s really about killing your father.” Though I was not entirely
convinced, I changed the title.
A few years ago, my uncle’s third marriage at an end, and his financial
position still precarious, Uncle Chuck grew tired of my struggle to kill my father.
His father had recently died, and he was back to writing plays, finished with
popular histories. He reminded me that my father was “just another guy trying to
make it through.”
That, too, I took hold of. I hold it still.
Last year, my uncle and I fell out. For me, a very unhappy, agitated,
resentful silence briefly followed. I was not getting what I wanted from him. He
could no longer provide what I wanted. He could no longer be my surrogate father,
my counselor, my solver and first reader. He didn’t have the energy or the time. He
had four children of his own who needed all that he could give them.
In the long list of great things my uncle gave me, many of which I
disappointed him by not following through on—ideas for poems, plays, and books
—that “no more” stands out now as the greatest of them.
Tim and Connie
Tim and I met in Boulder in our first semester. We took three classes
together: Eastern European History with Stephen Fischer–Galati, Shakespeare with
RL Widmann, and The Study of Words with Kay MacNamee. That was my
favorite class. It was the first course–listing in the Classics Department. We
studied etymologies from Latin and Greek.
Tim and I had crushes on words and crushes on Professor MacNamee. We
played with the roots we learned and played for the attention of the professor. Tim
called me “brave Marcellus,” after one of the guards in Hamlet. I called Tim “der
edle Ritter,” which he said meant “the brave knight.” Together, we would do our
impression of Fischer-Galati, a Rumanian, melting the wings of an ascending
American Icarus.
“What about the Albanians? You never talk about the Albanians and their
history.”
“The Albanians have no history. These people have been eating dirt for
centuries. They are merely a function of the great powers in the region.”

Then Tim slept with Jennifer when I was going out with her, and I slept with
Connie when she was going out with him.
Connie was one of the first people I met at college, and this was one of the
first things she said to me: “In Boulder, the women are sex objects and the men are
men.” She had a deep voice, like a man’s. I took to calling her Uncle Connie.
In the last month of college, she said she wanted to fuck me because she
thought I was going to be a famous poet one day. So we fucked in the basement of
a house in North Boulder, on the floor, during a party. A cool breeze was blowing
in.
I went to Connie’s wedding a few years later, and to Tim’s a year after
Connie’s.
Amy
I met Amy in the second semester of my first year of college. She came
through the door of the Art Building in a bright yellow raincoat. She was tall and
thin and shy. Sunshine came through the skylights. I had a clipboard in my lap and
a pen in my hand. I watched her pass and then wrote a poem.
I was doing a lot of that at the time, writing poems for women and then
giving them to them. There were times when I couldn’t write one on the spot, but
knew that I’d see the woman again, and so finished it at home. I sometimes made a
copy for myself—thus giving it, I suppose, to its true subject.
When I finished writing “For Amy,” my heart was racing. I guessed I would
find her in the basement, in one of the studios for graduate students. I found her at
a canvas in a studio that smelled of oil and turpentine. I liked its disarray, sketches
propped around, music playing, books open on tables, images torn out and tacked
on the walls, still–life setups, empty bottles and cans, cut flowers and dry flowers,
tubes of paint, brushes, palettes, canvas stretched and unstretched, masking tape on
the wall where canvases had been.
Amy was not alone. I leaned around her partition . “This is for you.” I
handed it to her and walked away.
We have been friends ever since. Until a year ago, we hugged and kissed
each other on the cheek when we’d meet and when we’d part—and we did that
only after we’d known each other for five years. She had a boyfriend at the time I
wrote her that first poem, and later married him. They had two children. Their
divorce was bitter.
Amy and I kept in touch mostly through letters, sometimes by phone. Maybe
we saw each other once a year, twice at the most, after I graduated and moved
from Boulder. But even when we were both in Boulder, we saw each other rarely
and briefly. We went to get an ice cream cone once. We sat by a tree and licked
them and talked. On Tuesday nights, Amy took tickets at the International Film
Festival. I went there to see her, and ended up seeing some good movies.
I’d write poems about her and the movie. The only ones I remember are
Bresson’s Four Nights of the Dreamer and Diary of a Country Priest. I wanted to
be the dreamer and I wanted to be a priest, but most of all I wanted Amy, and I was
glad to go early to see her—sometimes she let me in free—and to stay after the
credits rolled to see her again.
I was at the opening of Amy’s first show in Denver, and bought one of her
paintings with the money I made that summer doing landscape and sprinkler work.
It’s a painting of a broken sprig of geranium, a slice of watermelon (the whole
background is watermelon), and an eggplant. It hangs above my parents’ bed.
I went to Amy’s house one day. We went on a walk with her daughter
Vanessa, still in a stroller, in North Denver. In her next show, Amy had a painting
called “Mark’s Walk,” which she gave me a small sketch for. She also gave me
another small watercolor, “Seascape,” and wrote in the right–hand corner, “for
Mark.” It’s the first thing I hang when I move into a new room. It doesn’t seem
that I live anywhere long enough to warrant having the geranium painting with me.
It’s only in the last two years that Amy and I have begun to feel at ease when
we see each other. The last three times I saw her we spoke as contemporaries. She
was single and I was, if not single, my usual unattached and attachable self. We
had coffee the first time. Amy asked me if I had a soul–mate. We talked about
what a soul–mate might be. I guessed that my uncle was mine; later, I wished that I
could take it back. So I wrote her a letter and said that we were soul–mates, a term
I got more and more comfortable with the more I thought of it in connection with
Amy.
When I came back to Denver that winter, Amy and I went out to dinner for
the first time. Neither of us called it a date. We spoke freely, finally, after fifteen
years. As I drove her back to her car—we had never been in the same car—we
both marveled at our friendship. I said that I had always loved her. We said that we
had never kissed each other on the lips. She said that I was now a man in her eyes.
I said that she was as beautiful to me now as on the first day I had seen her. We
said we would always love each other.
I pulled up next to her car and parked. I turned off the lights, then turned off
the car. We were quiet. Awkwardness threatened us again. Then Amy turned and
put her arms around me and kissed me.
Such a surprise, so abrupt. My mouth was dry. It was as if I were kissing for
the first time, it was so wonderful and new.
But there were my glasses, and we were in the front seat, and there was the
steering wheel. We couldn’t face each other. I wanted to be outside, standing, our
bodies at length against each other. I put my hand on her face to feel it, put it
through her hair. And then she said she had to go, had to go home.
When I got home that night, I wrote a poem. I smelled my hands, tasted my
lips, cupped my hands over my face.
The next time I saw her, she invited me over for dinner. She showed me on
her wall by the kitchen the blessing she had asked me to write for her house: she’d
had it framed.
Bless this house
and the woman of it;
bless her children,
girl and boy;
bless the guests that come and go.
Bless the neighbors
and the trees around it—
apple, cherry, plum, and peach;
 bless the garden and the vine.
Bless the watermark she set upon it
and the room in which she’ll paint.
Bless her longing and her loneliness,
bless her anger and her joy;
bless her sense she doesn’t fit.
Bless her in her daytime here,
and bless her in her night.

Bless the making of it hers:

bless the woman of this house.

Then she introduced me to the man she was seeing, and to his daughter. The
three children ate in the kitchen; we ate in the living room. After the photographer
and his daughter had gone home, and Amy had put her kids to bed, she asked me
what I thought of him. I lied.
Gillian
I walked into Tavistock Square, in the vicinity of University College
London, where I was studying European history in 1979. I had seen it from inside
the History library, and from the yellow door of the library, but I had never gone
in. I picked a red leaf from a tree whose name I couldn’t remember, a red leaf for
Gillian. I looked back into the library and saw the ladder I used to get up to the
High Middles Ages. I saw the fat head of the President of the History Society (I
was a member of the Literary Society). I could see the blue door of the Linguistics
department, a door by which I never saw anyone come or go. I wanted to use the
yellow door and the blue door, but this was not, apparently, done. I picked two fat
roses for Gillian. I watched two history students turning pages on the grass and
making notes with blue pens. The black gangster cabs sped by, stopping always at
the zebra crosswalks if anyone was near them.
I walked out of the garden gates and turned down the road Gillian lived on.
Gillian had asked me to have coffee with her. I thought it meant she loved me and
wanted to find out why. She liked the red leaf, thought the roses
“extravagant.” I pretended to like the dusty coffee.

Weeks later, when I was drunk on bitter and stout from The Sun pub on
Lamb’s Conduit, I went to Gillian’s building on my way home and positioned
myself below her window. I bellowed out a line from A Streetcar Named Desire,
changing the name to suit the occasion.
She did not respond, and never spoke to me again.
A Real Letter
Dearest Mark,
I procrastinate because I want to sit down and write you a real letter, as you
and Dad do—both so wonderful, and expressive of your feelings—and both
straight to the heart of your feelings—your words to Dad have not gone unnoticed
—results? time will tell—but in the meantime, here’s some STUFF from Mom,
and her usual scribble. Please read my thoughts, which are filled with love and
encouragement!
Love,
Mom
Me, in England
My hair grows in the fields, grows colors, my eyes clap up thunder purple,
fingers cow-crease onion skin, boots lamb-warm lie down in spare grass, warmth
stealing on me as a pheasant’s breast, my butt round as a bridge duct, body thick as
a silo. I go headlong into a newspaper’s noise and the slipping fucking, wave-lick,
lipped-green, tuft-cunt sea, young chin spreading gnarled bristle flat out on the
razor blue foam sky. My flaccid third thumb whines for a roundhouse. Fall, when
my shoulders ache in a leaf-curve and my gut-hunk of beef lumbers and blathers
and hunches up to work its kink out with blood and acid through winter-fearing
limb vein in tunnel in fall forever. Checked dun, my flesh this body shoots up with
cud and gossamer in exile at Hastings on the sea.
Exile and Immortality (November 14, 1979)
Dear Mark,
Your letter of the 6th arrived yesterday here at the office. I appreciate your
concern about me and your shocked sensibilities about world conditions, which are
paradoxical, absurd, and possibly near to being apocalyptic. . . . First, to answer
your queries, October 1979 was a very inauspicious month for our business. I can’t
think of any business, in fact, that was hit sooner and more injuriously by the new
tight money policy of the Federal Reserve than the bond business—because the
results of such a policy are mathematically inexorable and pervasive in the
“electronic village” of the financial world: when interest rates go up—visibly and
unquestionably—bond prices must go down correspondingly . . . . At any rate,
we’re still here and actually doing a little better this month than last . . . . We have
also been fortunate that your mother’s business has been good of late and that she
is not only expert at her trade but also, on the whole, finds it manageable and
enjoyable. She is entitled to and worthy of the most appreciative admiration and
love and devotion for what she uncomplainingly does so smoothly each day for all
of us! We are so blessed with your “Mom” that such good fortune is beyond our
human capability to appreciate, understand, or express—it’s like a gift—so organic
and close, you tend to take it for granted.
Loved your quotations from Hugh of St. Victor—most apt for your present
situation of exile, which is one of the great chastening experiences that a young
person can have. As Rosenstock-Huessy used to say, “If you can’t live in two
places at the same time, you have no soul.” In other words, it is the time axis
crossing the space axis that makes for transcendence and gives us intimations of
our spiritual immortality by stopping the eternal flux of space and anonymous flow
of time. As Maritain wrote, it is anguish, duration, and fidelity by which we
transcend—intelligibly though mysteriously—our common physical essences into
unique, dazzlingly particular and existential intuitions of our ultimate heavenhood.
So enjoy the bittersweetness, as much as you can—there will be time to
come home again (Wolfe was wrong on that), and the stages of life allow almost
chronologically for the tender heart (youth), the stronger heart (one’s first real
exile/asceticism), and the pure heart—which God helps us develop in the maturity
of our last years—though perhaps only our saints, poets, and artists really achieve
that purest heart which, like Thomas More’s and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, would still
rather cling to and reach out for this present world until God gives it no other
choice.
Everybody’s fine here, so don’t worry about us, or me. We love you very
much.

Dad
Veronica
I took with me to England a letter of introduction from Mrs. Steel to
Veronica Anderson, the mother of the historians Perry and Benjamin Anderson,
and of Melanie, who has worked for Amnesty International for over twenty years.
The first time we met, Veronica asked me what it was about being American that
made me refer to her, whom I’d just met, by her first name, while referring to a
lifelong friend as Mrs. Steel.
Veronica, born in 1904, was in her seventies then. She looked a little like
Barbara Stanwick, whom I knew from the TV show The Virginians—every bit as
commanding, and not without hints of a former, unusual glamor. Her white hair
curled close to her head; her tiny features came to a point at her nose. Her voice
was not sweet, but she almost sang sometimes in her speech. She had an amazing
energy: she gardened, ran errands in a car, read piles of books, talked in streams,
forgot and as suddenly rejoined the four or five themes she had announced.
In telling each other how each of us had come to know Ruth Steel, she was
taken back forty years, and I to my childhood. Ruth’s mother had helped nurse her
sick husband back to life; Mrs. Steel had nursed me through adolescence. Nothing,
from that first meeting, was off limits with Veronica. I wondered if the English
reserve and stiff upper-lip I’d heard and read about were not confined to English
men.
That year, Veronica and I had several dinners together at her house in
Dorking, Surrey. She made wonderful dinners, oversetting the table elaborately
and overcooking the brussels sprouts and potatoes perfectly. These were four-hour
dinners, begun with South African sherry, accompanied by a bottle of wine, and
finished with whiskey and fruit. We talked about history and poetry and sex (“I
never talked to my children about it either”), about abortion, academia, family,
gardens, and silverware. We did the “washing up” together.
 We took walks.

Sleep, sleep in the eyes; sod smokes, a lump of fire, a rain of ash; the gist of
the gustings that push, a peacock’s pride; arbitrary gardens, mostly green, grow
gray in the morning and bird-and-bee-sounding air; clumps of yarrow crackle into
blue and a bough of apple shakes on the hot heap; the mouth chews at the air; a
dragonfly skirts the column that breaks into a swirl; vaginal folds of the rose, red
as Etruscan man; willow to rhododendron, faces of pansies, gravel and the lawn’s
impression, the green thin hair of it combing dew off on the suede of your boots;
Dorking in the chalk and split–off flint, dessicated sponges squeezed in rock, the
marbled fields hiding houses, clusters of purple berries, doves.

I helped her in the garden, pruning trees she couldn’t reach and moving
things she couldn’t budge.
She told me that anorexia was nothing new. She got it in a dark school in
London, in 1916, a school recommended to her mother by Bloomsbury’s Clive
Bell or Lytton Strachey. One day, when the lights were out to save electricity, the
girl next to her threw up on Veronica. When she overheard someone say that the
girl had vomited because she hogged the raisin cake, Veronica decided to stop
eating. Then she saw a drunkard get sick in a gutter. Nobody noticed that she was
starving herself until she expired (when I knew her, I don’t think she stood five
feet tall.) It took an Irish psychiatrist three months, using doll–house pitchers of
milk and sugar, to get her to eat solid food again.
We didn’t talk as freely when Perry, or Rory, as she and Mrs. Steel called
him, came to the house for dinner with his beautiful Hungarian wife, Gyongyi. I
had a crush on her the instant I saw her. By contrast, I knew what English reserve
was the minute I shook hands with Perry. Of course, Veronica had prepared me for
both of them. She said I would love Gionji, so young and lovely, and might not
hear but a few words from Perry the entire evening. Both were true.
I have 10 letters from Veronica, dating from 1981 to 1986. The first begins:
“It was such a pleasure to get your letter this morning! Hard to tell you how
touched (& flattered to be frank) I am that you should take time out to write to
me.” The last: “I think of you very often & long to know how you are getting on.”
It ends: “all very very best wishes for 1986 from your ancient rather gugga friend
Veronica.”
If I had written to her again, as she hoped, and as I should have, there would
be another letter from her. There isn’t. Only the notice of her death two years later.
Today, after reading her letters again last night, I got on the Amnesty
International website and wrote an e-mail to Melanie. I hope to meet her.
At Home and Abroad (1980)
Dear Mark,
We are vicariously looking forward to your Italian vacation in April. Having
been to Venice, Rome, and Naples myself, in my army days, I hope you can work
all of them in, and Florence, which I unfortunately missed. Landing in Naples one
rosy sunset evening in April, looking out the cargo hatch of a troop transport, after
three days in cold, dreary Paris, was one of those unforgettable moments of my
life. The Neapolitans seemed to talk animatedly on their warm, cheerful street
corners until the very late hours of the night, and the food and wine were as robust
as they. So try to get that far south if you can, and take the Amalfi Drive north
from there up to Capri—and, on the way, stop at the famous fishing village you
can see from the Drive, the name of which I can’t recall at this moment. . . .
Your brothers are both doing fine—especially Craig. He’s been riding 40
miles on his hard days, and he like his courses at the University of New Mexico,
his roommates, and the whole scene, so far as we can gather. . . . He also confessed
to us in his first long letter home that he had “quit smoking” and felt very good
about it! That he had been “smoking” came as no little surprise to me and makes
me question my naivete. Neither Mommy nor I replied to this admission in sort of
a silent “isn’t that good to know” attitude.
Bruce, the “illegible” one, is probably headed for his last swim meet—the
WAC championships . . . He seems to want to do well, but, with the exception of
the Utah meet several weeks ago, his expectations, so far, have far exceeded his
performance . . . The only advice I have given (or will give) him is to prepare
holistically with all the mental, physical, and spiritual concentration he can muster
so that, regardless of his results, he can always say to himself that especially at the
end—when the thrill was long gone—he gave it all he knew how. If he does that, I
think, bad results will be shortly assuaged, and good results, for which he still
hopes and we all pray, will be enormously rewarding. So keep your fingers crossed
for him, for when you receive this letter his last dance will probably be just
beginning.
Love, Dad
Wally
Walter Weir taught the Senior Honors Colloquium at the University of
Colorado. I took it in the Fall semester, 1981, with Tim, Nancy, Tom, Stuart,
Eileen, Ellen, Kim, Ken, Pierre, Dan, Bob, Dan, and Greg.
Wally would lay his finger on his lip and touch his red pen to his beard. He
would point out a problem of “man and sainthood,” sniff hard, clear his throat.
“Well, that’s enough to get things going.”
“All of us must express,” he said, turning from Camus’s The Plague to our
education. “All education must, in the end, teach us expression.” And then Wally
would express himself. His voice would lose its depth of roll and glurb and move
into a higher pitch. In the meantime, the Platonic banquet of food and wine sat on
tables just out of reach.
“Very good, very good,” said Wally. “The plague is the beginning of
wisdom, not the end.” He would light a Kent cigarette, put his thumb to his teeth,
and listen. Stuart pursued Ca–mus in his Illinois accent.
“I think this is basically right,” Wally interrupted, “but we’ve got to explore
it. We’ve got to explore it.”
And Wally would go on to explore the things he’d been saying about Camus
and Hemingway for the past twenty–two years.
“It’s absolutely fundamental for all of us, absolutely,” he insisted, banging
his fist on the arm of the couch when he didn’t miss.
“But we live in an interdependent world,” Ken would plead.
“I know, I know,” Wally would answer, his voice going high again, “but we
go on with our own anyway. And in our own, the old order no longer fits in with
the new order. Which is why Hemingway is so important. Hemingway’s
psyche”—and here he leaned forward—“is of the twentieth century, of the
twentieth century.”
Brenda
Five hours after we met we were polishing off a bottle of tequila in
Josephina’s in Larimer Square. We drank beers back. We were supposed to have
gone up in a balloon that morning, but the weather was bad. We landed at the
condominium of the man who owned the balloon, where we drank the champagne
that was meant for the other landing. We ate hotdogs at nine o’clock in the
morning. We were drunk by ten-thirty, when we headed for the bar with Sandro,
Pietro, and Lynne.
When we came out of the bar, we went to my car. In the middle of the first
intersection we came to, Brenda leaned into my mouth and kissed me with her soft,
wet lips. I don’t know what the other drivers did, but I tried to keep my eye on the
road.
It wasn’t a crush that made me ride my bike downtown to lie on the sidewalk
in front of her building. I thought every gold Honda I saw was hers. I rode to the
place where she worked and waited for her to come out. As I dug ditches at work, I
thought of her. I would stop digging or laying sod or sticking valves into pipes and
go to the truck and write down the lines that had come to me in the book I was
reading or the Burger King bag on the floor of the cab. When I’d get home from
work, I’d set my bike down and go to the typewriter.
“Men they take a thing you say and can’t repeat it,” I’d start, and I’d be at
her mouth with the next line. Her mouth overwhelmed me, and her face, and the
things she’d say. The day we met she told me about Evans Means and Pancho
Villa. She said her grandmother told her “she was built like a brick shithouse.” Her
Texas voice grabbed me like a hand. I wanted to climb into her mouth and
disappear.
“Put your mouth on me,” she’d say, and I would.
She was my food and my music—her music: Lou Reed, “just wanna play
football for the coach”; The Motels, “and I would sell my soul / for total control”;
Dire Straits, “all I do is kiss you / through the bars of a rhyme.”
She was living with a musician when we met and still married to her
husband. I knew she’d ruin my summer, but I wanted it to be ruined, it and the rest
of my days. She was my foothills, she was my plains.
That was June, 1983. By January, 1984, she had turned her back.

Sometimes, dancing alone, I catch myself in the middle of a motion and

smooth the boxer she said I danced like down, let her shoulders take mine over, her
head tug mine right, always right at first, then down until I feel myself leaning with
her weight, dancing as though she were dancing, but a boxer still, when her
shoulders take mine over.

Maybe I just loved the bed we made love on. Maybe pleasure has its epochs,
its classical age, its medieval, its renaissance, its enlightened reactionary
romanticism when we fought over terms and ways, hired typists, stole each other’s
observations of nature, passed our journals around. Now we talk only about
ourselves.

“Turn the music down so we can see better,” she said.

Kundera said: “What’s left over after you apply skepticism to feeling, that’s
love.”

I thought of her mouth all day. I drove the tractor, scooping rock up in its
front–loader, leaving ruts deep enough to lie in, and thought of her mouth all day.

“Stop thinking so much and fuck me.”

Then the leaves fell and she turned her back.

Priscilla e Benedetta (1982)

Last night Priscilla told me I had a quality of making people like me: her
father, who doesn’t like young people; her mother, who is very particular; Enzo,
the fascist horse-trainer, who is crazy, violent, and dangerous (and looks like Stacy
Keach); his wife, Fabbiola, who is Priscilla’s younger sister; and Benedetta.
Priscilla also said that I understand more than I seem to understand.
I noticed that Enzo kept his right arm close to his body—even during a ping-
pong game he held in the hand attached to this arm a pack of cigarettes and a
lighter. He asked us to leave the room as he dressed, but called me back in to tell
him a poem as he sat on the toilet to shit, or pretend to. His right arm was withered.
He took us on a mad tour of his ranch, twenty minutes outside of Rome. He
has forty-five horses. He rode in the army. He won awards for horsemanship. I
watched him handle a beautiful horse with great skill. The horse was called
Labbro; it had a huge lower lip. He tried to give Labbro a shot of cortizone, but
Labbro wouldn’t have it. Labbro flinched and bent the needle. Enzo got a stick (a
stick is easily found to beat a dog) with a loop of rope on its end. He looped
Labbro’s lip and twisted it. The horse hurt, flinched, winced, flexed, went taut, but
still refused to stand still for the needle.
Enzo kneed him in the flank five or six times, wrenched the loop still tighter.
He gave the shot.
“Non é facile,” he said.
As we walked away, he played with his spit, dribbling it out and then
sucking it back in. Then he told Priscilla that I was “prescioso.”
Kati
One night during my visit to Budapest, I went to a bar in Pest that Istvan had
taken me to during the day. He said it was a cafe until eight at night, and then a gay
bar until four in the morning. When I got there, a sticky-handed porter opened the
door for me. I pretended not to know it was a gay bar. One man tried to get me to
come back to his apartment. A song came on the jukebox as he did: “Baby, I’m an
addict, an addict for your love.” He had taken me for a German, and so began
speaking to me in that language. His English was very good, but I kept changing
the subject and looking away. I got him to teach me a few Hungarian words and he
offered to buy me drinks. I let him buy me one.
I went back the next afternoon, when the place was full of women,
intellectuals, and shoppers drinking beer and coffee. I had just taken a shower, and
felt very clean and fresh. I wanted to write in my notebook and drink beer—
Tuborg beer, in large bottles, some green and some brown, and very cold. They
cost about forty-five cents a piece, if I exchanged my money legally; but Istvan had
me exchange it illegally, and so they cost me about twenty cents.
I really wanted to meet a Hungarian woman, take her out for dinner, and
then take her to Istvan’s apartment. I was on my second bottle and my first
notebook page when I saw her. She saw me seeing her. She stared a minute, then
turned back to the woman she was with. I kept looking over, trying to get her to
look my way again. I tried to find things to do with my hands and head and legs,
but the bar stool limited me. I then realized that she had been watching me in my
fit of self-consciousness.
The woman she was with began to block my view. I was on my third beer by
then, and noticed that she wasn’t drinking. I didn’t want her to leave when I had a
full beer to drink, but it looked like her friend was getting impatient and wanting to
go. I finished the third beer and decided to order another anyway, it tasted so good.
I then saw the waiter take her a piece of cake.
She ate it quickly, stood up, and came over to me. Her name was Kati; she
was with her mother. Yes, she knew a good place to go for dinner. And she knew
Istvan and Laszlo—knew of them: they were famous. The samizdat was meeting
for the last time tonight; maybe she’d like to go there with me after dinner? I said
that Istvan had told me it might be dangerous for me to go, because my picture
would be taken, and I might be stopped at the border.
None of this excited her as much as it excited me.
We went to dinner. Kati was a state psychologist. She had thirty-five clients.
She was depressed herself, and drank too much, and thought of suicide, like most
of her clients.
 We drank Bull’s Blood wine.
Kati did not want to go to the samizdat, but she did want to come back to
Istvan’s apartment with me. We went into the room where I slept and took our
clothes off. We lay together and kissed. She told me my ring was the ugliest ring
she’d ever seen. I told her it was Zuni, as if that would make a difference.
She then began to masturbate; I told her she didn’t have to do that.
“If you knew the men I’ve been with, you’d know why I do.”
Then she put gum in her mouth. I wished I had gone to the last meeting of
the samizdat.
The next night, I got a phone call. A friend of Kati’s said that she was very
drunk and wanted me to come and pick her up in Buda. He gave me the address; I
got a cab. When I got to the house, Kati was sprawled on the floor. Her friend, a
film-maker, also under a ban, talked very calmly to me in precise English. He said
little about Kati, by which I understood that her condition was not unusual.
He and I talked a little longer, then took her out to the cab and said goodbye.
Kati gave the driver her address, and back to Pest we went.
In the cab, she was not as drunk as she had seemed at the house. In fact, she
asked me to marry her.
“I need to get out of Hungary and go to Bulgaria.”
Could that be right?
Bulgaria, to be with the man she loved.
I never saw her again.
A Woman in Venice
When I got back from Italy, my friends wanted to know if I’d had an affair.
“I might have,” I told them.
A woman followed me into Campo San Barnaba. I noticed her following
me. I looked back at her—three times I looked back. She came to the door of the
pensione I was staying in. She seemed to want to introduce herself, but didn’t. I
said something in Italian. My accent wasn’t bad. She left.
I never saw her again, even in Venice, that small town. Not for seven days,
walking every day for hours, and looking.
And then there was the beautiful woman in the leather shop in Rome. I wrote
her a longish poem in Italian. Turns out she was French.

Drinking and Drugs

The cocktail hour was sacred in our house, and in all the houses I ever went
into growing up. I knew how to mix the standard drinks before I was in ninth
grade. My parents knew that. They taught me what alcoholics were. I asked why
their friend was called an alcoholic when he didn’t drink. They said he didn’t drink
because he couldn’t drink, and that this made him an alcoholic. He seemed
depressed. My father, when he tried to stop, was depressed. Not drinking, like
drinking, cures nothing.
In any case, I started my second decade with that taste in my mouth, and I
liked it. I did my homework first, to justify my drinking: I learned the importance
of justification from my father, who always had a justification for his: crudely put,
that the world was fucked-up. I remember wondering why he drank to be unhappy
and angry. I would drink, like my mother, to be happy. For her, drinking is like
interior decoration, pleasing and comforting, aesthetic and anaesthetic. I learned
from her to say that I drank for fun, to be social. Only much later would I drink
like my father, as a poet for the truth in the wine.
I started smoking pot in seventh grade and doing chemicals in eighth—
speed, acid (the first time, to the music of the Doors’ Weird Scenes Inside a Gold
Mine). My acne kicked in at the same time; my teeth needed braces; I thought
myself ugly. Between ninth and twelfth grade, I added mescaline, quaaludes,
peyote, mushrooms, hash, and cocaine. For the most part, though, I smoked pot
and drank.
I quit drinking, smoking pot, and using tobacco on March 7, 1987, in the
aftermath of a day in New York City with Mark Sink. We started drinking scotch
at ten in the morning. By three the next morning we had also smoked pot, dropped
acid, snorted coke, and snorted heroin. I made an appointment with a drug and
alcohol counselor the next day.
He made me recount, in as much detail as I could, fifteen years of drug and
alcohol use. I was shocked by my report.

In ninth grade, I did more drugs than seems possible. We got stoned on the
way to school in Michael’s Z-28 Camaro; we got stoned between classes; we got
stoned again before practice. We ate mushrooms and acid in the smoking room.
Mescaline was popular. Opium was on tap for a month. Downers were big. Speed
was common. Coke was up and coming.
On Tuesdays, several of us had three hours off between milk and cookies at
ten and class at one. Carter, Steve, Pete, Chris, Tom, and I would pack into
Carter’s red Valiant and head for L&M Liquors on Colorado Boulevard, where
Carter would buy a case of Michelob. He looked like he was forty-five; he never
got carded. Then we’d go to Shit Hole, by Little Dry Creek. We’d sit on the trunk
of a fallen cottonwood and tell stories, get stoned, smoke cigarettes, chew tobacco.
When we’d finish the case of beer, we’d head back to campus—just in time for
Western Civilization.
Denver Country Day was for boys; Kent was for girls; but the schools
occupied the same campus, a beautiful landscape in Cherry Hills, with ponds and
cottonwoods, well-maintained playing fields and pristine open fields beyond. We
were read books at DCD that the Cherry Creek public school system didn’t make
available until senior year. Essay assignments were demanding, grading was
exacting, homework was heavy. We were introduced to Greece through the works
of Mary Renault, to Rome through Robert Graves’s I, Claudius; to medieval cities
through Henri Perrine, and to the Renaissance through James Clerk Sellery. We
read Shakespeare, Pearl Buck, Nevil Chute, and James Agee.
In Brewster Boyd’s English class, I tried to pass off Dave Mason’s lyrics to
“The Lonely Ones” as a poem of mine. I cheated in Chemistry and Algebra with
Steve MacDonald’s help, and I ate white-cross speed during exams. We did
mushrooms and peyote and hash before soccer and lacrosse. There were keggers
often, and more intimate parties, like the ones at John Trueblood’s, where we
drank wine and did bong hits from a gallon-sized Almaden chablis bottle.
And went to concerts: Steve Miller, Boz Scaggs, Pink Floyd, Elton John,
Jackson Brown, James Taylor, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Neil Young, America,
Jethro Tull, The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones. We listened to Jo Jo Gunne,
Spirit, Shawn Phillips, Phoebe Snow, David Essex, Ten Years After, Jerry Jeff
Walker, The Allman Brothers Band.
Some of the wealthiest Denver families enrolled their children at DCD and
Kent, where I went for one year and Bruce for two. DCD was in the Cherry Creek
school district, one of the richest in the country. My brother’s and my years at both
schools made for a welter of possibilities and frustrations, since Bruce and I were
not part of a wealthy family, but had friends from wealthy families and friends
from families like ours.
 We weren’t given cars when we were sixteen. We rode the bus to school, or
we rode in Michael’s Z-28, a birthday present, or in his brother Danny’s 2002
BMW, also a sixteenth-birthday present. The 2002 was the desired car; there were
two dozen of them in the DCD parking lot. The parking lots at Cherry Creek had
more cars, some as expensive, but most not. Bruce bought his first car with the
money he made keeping the grounds around a rich woman’s house. It was an
Austin Mini-Cooper, which was a lot of fun when it ran.
There were 40 boys in our class. About ten of us were fairly inseparable, but
Bruce was not one of us; he and Danny and Steve Cleghorn hung out together. We
wore down vests and clutter boots, flannel shirts and corduroys (we weren’t
allowed to wear jeans to school). We had long hair, and we were vain about our
long hair: keeping it clean, tucking it behind our ears, keeping it out from in
between our collars and our necks, making sure it fell nicely over our down vests.
We could all afford lids, which in those days we measured in fingers: a good
lid was four fingers; an expensive one was $25; the usual lid was $12 or $15. The
pot was Mexican, or Colombian, or Acapulco Gold. The hash, Lebanese blond,
came in grams or quarter-ounces. I thought the smell of hash was divine, and the
taste of it, too. But I started not to like being stoned. I felt inhibited the minute I got
high—uncomfortable, uneasy, uptight, self-conscious.
I liked getting stoned: the paraphernalia, the papers, pipes, screens, canisters,
baggies; the sorting of seeds and stems, the breaking-up of flowertops, the sifting-
down to powder; liked building up a supply of resin, storing pot in a chamber pipe
through which we’d smoke other pot until the dope in the chamber was black. I
was a fool for the smell of fresh pot, burning pot, dirty bowls, caked screens, thick
resin. It got on my fingers, I’d smell my fingers; it mixed with tobacco smells, I
smelled my fingers for that. All of that I loved.
I did not like being stoned. “If I could smoke pot without getting
stoned . . . .” When I went into the rehab and told my counselor what I’d been
saying since ninth grade, she said it was a very useful definition of addiction.
Next to drugs, the two things that stand out about ninth grade are stereo
equipment and motorcycles. Everyone at DCD seemed to be talking about Teac
cassette decks, Thorens turntables, B&O turntables, Bose speakers, Marantz
receivers, JBL Studio Monitors, Crown amplifiers; about how many watts per side
a receiver had, how light a turntable arm was, what kind of stylus was best, which
speakers had the highest fidelity in the mid-range, which had the best woofers or
tweeters; about pre-amps, reel-to-reels, resistance, peak load. You had to have a
killer stereo system and a great album collection.
And a dirt bike: a Husky 250, a Yamaha or Honda or Suzuki 125, or 175, or
250, for riding after school in the field behind your house, doing doughnuts; or
illegally on the horse paths, or to school without getting caught. Pete, Steve, Tullis,
Dave, and Ron had dirt bikes.
I suppose I felt deprived sometimes, and lonely, but I didn’t know I did—
with Steve, Dave, Pete, Steve, Tom, Chris, Kay, Ann, and Caroline; with the
concerts to go to, and the parties, and the games, and the classes. And I was still in
touch with friends at Cherry Creek, and still in love with the older girls I knew
from swimming and tennis, many of whom were in their last year or years at Kent,
or had finished one or two years ago, and were still around at vacation-times.
Loneliness has not been important to me.
Dave and Steve were typical of the private school set, but atypical in other
ways. They had money to buy what they wanted, which they did. They had dirt
bikes, but not their own cars. Their parents stayed downstairs; Steve and Dave
lived upstairs. It was as though there were two houses. Upstairs was a lair with a
fine stereo system, a generous supply of drugs, and plenty of beer. Downstairs was
practically a vestry where the parents lived apart. Dave and Steve communicated
with their parents, and vice versa, by phone.
In Dave’s room was what came to be called “the Dave-chair.” It was one of
those folding canvas chairs, but it was wired on the arm rests with light and sound
controls. Dave and Steve had a Thorens turntable, a Teac tapedeck, four Studio
Monitors, and a Marantz receiver with a Crown preamp. There was dark brown
shag carpet on the floor, and the walls and ceilings were draped with tapestries. I
spent many weekends in that room getting high and listening to albums.
Dave and Steve were very smart, controlled, organized, and generous. Dave
liked lighters, and he had a nice one. He made it a point to light everyone’s
cigarette. Steve soon had the same lighter, and followed suit. Dave was a business
man, Steve a scholar. Steve’s room was for studying and sleeping, Dave’s for
entertaining and conducting business. Dave had a wooden box in which he kept his
drugs and paraphernalia neatly arranged. Screens were here, roach clips there;
rolling papers—wheatstraw, white, Bamboo, wide, long—were lined up under the
lid and held there with a string. Hash, pot, mescaline, acid, speed—each had its
allotted space, sometimes within a smaller box. There were pipe bowls and
chambers, resin-picking tools, an Exacto knife for halving or quartering
windowpane and slivering hash, a razorblade for cutting coke. There were bindles
for coke and baggies for lids. There was a spot for the seeds of really good weed.
Dave and Steve grew pot in their closet and bathroom. In the stereo cabinet, Dave
had a scale for weighing pot and a sieve for sifting it.
One night, the three of us took some windowpane. We got off very nicely.
We each took a another quarter after a couple of hours. By midnight, strange things
were happening. We were laughing like idiots. I started to do accents. I hit on a
black vernacular and, taking off from a Cheech and Chong bit—“Wednesday
night’s honkey night; bring yourself a honky, get your ass in free”—came up with
the idea of having an “ass-beatin’ party.” You were to bring yourself “an ass to
beat.” We started to make the guest list. I called my parents at 2 a.m. and invited
them. We made other crank calls. We called in a bomb threat to a police station. As
the wolf-hour approached, we wore down. Things seemed less and less funny. We
had no more beer, no more rum. We were smoked out. We called it a night.
As I lay in bed in Steve’s room, I talked to him about how I guessed the
world would end: we would beat each other with whatever implement we could
find, a planetary ass-beating. We laughed a little more. When it was quiet, I
realized I could put my hands through my body. I grabbed my head; my hands
swept through my head. I turned in the bed and my body wasn’t there to turn with
me. In my eyes, there was an utterly perfect, particolored geometric plane of
millions of multi-dimensional quadragonal and hexagonal nodes. I was seeing
apocalypse, and my body had no mass.
“Steve,” I said, “I’m freaking out.”
Steve woke Dave up. He came into the room and got me out of bed. I was
now hearing things. Dave turned up the stereo and told me I was hearing real
sounds in the speakers, and to concentrate on them. I don’t know how long Dave
and Steve stayed up with me, talking me down, calming me down, but eventually I
went to sleep.
I have yet to see a flatter morning than the one I saw when I woke up. I
remember looking at our yard when Dave and Steve dropped me off at home:
completely gentle and still, the most ancient ruin, the purest gray.

When I visited the drug and alcohol counselor, I was in something like 20th
grade. By the time I finished my chronicle, he was alarmed enough to recommend
that I go into de–tox immediately. I said I’d think about it and left.
I went out that night and got drunk. At two in the morning, I found myself in
an attic apartment with a man. He was whispering in my ear.
 “Come on. There’s nothing to worry about. I don’t have AIDS.”
I quit everything the next day and began training to do a short–course
triathlon. Two months later. I was in second after the swim and third after the bike;
I placed seventeenth. I haven’t had a drink since that March, but a year and a half
later, I started smoking pot again. It didn’t work.
Jill
Maybe every crisis is finally lovable.
I thought I saw money in her. That’s the long and short of it. She was very
handsome, tall and strong; her carriage and the frames of her glasses suggested the
money. Her Massachusetts upbringing seemed to confirm it, along with her law
degree. But it was the fact that she spoke Italian with a decent accent that put her
over the top. Once I heard that, she seemed to radiate intelligence, sensuality, and a
trust fund.
The money, I realized only later—after four tests for the AIDS virus, a
resumption of pot and cigarette smoking (after two clean years), and the breakup of
a three–year relationship—was not her money. It was mine and my father’s, our
dreams of money. His dream of money had roots in the Depression and in literature
—in the “rich bitch” and “Swift and Armour” of Hemingway’s “Snows of
Kilimanjaro.”
In truth, my father married for love. But before he did, he gave up his desire
to teach history and went to Tuck Business School instead, for the money. I don’t
know if he was ever crossed in love, but he is crossed in money. Like Hickey in
The Iceman Cometh, my father has felt like a victim of too much love in his
marriage and not enough money in the bank.
I spent my summers during college at home, and there weren’t many nights
that I didn’t go out. As I did, my father would often tell me one of two things, and
sometimes both. “Don’t be in a hurry to get married” came first. The second came
jokingly, as I was on the threshold, just about to let the screen door go.
“When you do get married, marry a rich girl.”
When I met Jill, I’d been acting for a decade on my father’s humorous
advice without fully knowing it. I saw, dated, went with, slept with, wrote poems
for, a lot of women in those ten years, and I know I took some vague account of
their money, of their family’s money. As it happened, the only one who was rich I
went out with early in high school, when I didn’t know she was rich. By the time I
knew, she had invited me to her wedding. At least I hadn’t been in a hurry.
In Jill, I had found my father’s “rich girl.” She hadn’t interested me when I
first saw her, hadn’t attracted me in any way. In fact, I disliked something about
her. Then, when I heard her speak Italian, I had to see her, talk to her. I thought I
was in love.
Unfortunately, she found me attractive. We went swimming together. She
asked if I “had the balls” to come into the sauna with her—the women’s sauna at
the pool on the Rutgers campus. I must have screwed my face up when I heard
that. How could she be so vulgar? But I let it pass.
She came over one day. We sat on the couch and talked. The way she talked
made me glad that I had someplace to go, a legitimate excuse—but I let it pass.
She asked if she was “going to fast.” I said “Yes” to myself, but I let it pass. “No,”
I said. She was leaning over me by then; I was on my back on the couch. “I’ve
never known anyone so passive,” she said. It turned her on. I let it pass.
When we woke up in the morning, she said, with real disappointment, as if I
had the night before, “You don’t look like Robert Redford.” But I let it pass. Then
I passed on a condom. Four hours later, she was back, wanting to ask me
something.
“Do you have AIDS?” It took more than a year before I could let that pass.
I had fucked, not a rich bitch, but, I now thought, a sick one. Admitting that
she had slept with a heroin addict in Italy—“I’m pretty sure he tested negative”—
she demanded that I get tested, but refused to get tested herself. I had told her
about my brother’s dying of AIDS, and of how I had cared for him in his last
month. She managed to excavate every fear I had buried, every suspicion, every
paranoid fantasy I’d ever had about contracting AIDS through caring for my
brother or fucking without a condom—but that was all brass to her.
I had four HIV tests over the next year, all negative, but I believed only the
last one, when the counselors told me to get into therapy and not to come back.
This rich girl was neither rich nor a girl. She wasn’t handsome, she wasn’t
charming, she wasn’t loving. Nor was I, I came to feel, nor was I. I wanted, during
that year, to be taken out, hit by a car. I wanted to have the virus; I wanted the
phantom lumps in my throat to be cancerous. I was sick.

Recovery
The discrete event that prompted my call to what turned out to be the New
Jersey Collegiate Substance Abuse Program was hard to ignore: I caught myself
fishing around in my trash can for a tiny roach I’d thrown away less than an hour
before, after it burned my finger. I knew before I got down on my knees and went
in after it that there was no pot left in it. Still, I dug for it for fifteen minutes.
The next day, when I called the program, I wanted to know how I could keep
smoking pot without getting stoned. I didn’t exactly put it that way, but it’s what
I’d wanted to know for about seventeen years. The woman who answered kept me
on the phone for much longer than I wanted to stay on the phone, but I kept
answering her questions. She invited me to come to a group session that afternoon,
to see what I thought.
I got into a Relapse Prevention Group with Connie, Joanie, Carlos, and
Jamie. It seemed like a game, Nello led it so casually: list the five most important
roles in your life. So we did, each role on a separate piece of paper. Then we
ranked them. Now, we had to go around, each saying why the fifth role was
important, after which Nello told us to tear up that piece of paper and throw it into
the empty center between us.
The five of us chose pretty much the same roles—brother, sister, daughter,
son, student—and ranked them in pretty much the same order. (“Poet” was one of
mine.) It was easy and funny to throw five and four away, even three; but at three,
it dawned on us what we were doing. I’d never done anything like it. I lost my
disgust at the idea of “sharing” and “identifying.”
We all started crying when we tore up number two. Connie screamed when
Nello told her to tear up number one, which said, “Recovering Alcoholic.” She
refused. She heaved. She choked and cried. We all did.
I entered the Program officially two days later, on March 19, 1990—two
years after meeting with the drug and alcohol counselor. Ruth, who did my “in-
take,” wrote down that my reasons for doing drugs were “aesthetic.”
At the end of the first meeting with my individual counselor, in which I told
her something of my family history, I was given a writing assignment.
“Here’s your topic,” Elaine said. “Is it all right for me to be alive?”
It turned out to be a good question, and more difficult to address than “the
problem of reform in Emerson.”
Yes, I wrote, I feel survivor’s guilt, and it makes me feel pity—for other
people. I feel sorry for other people. I called my friend Ray and asked him what it
meant that I feel sorry for other people. He said, “It means you feel superior to
them.”
That wasn’t the answer I wanted, but it felt right; I felt touched by it. Yes, I
did feel superior: I judged people. I felt angry and mean. Other people’s problems
were beneath me. “One of my strongest feelings is contempt.”
 I thought Ray would tell me that I felt pity for others because life is so sad,
because life is a pity; I am pitiful; we are all pitiful. It would be better to get killed,
to be put out of my misery.
As I wrote, I began to remember what my parents said when they came
home from the hospital the day Chrissie was hit by the car.
To be killed means to be loved, sympathized with, understood. It is to be
finished and complete, comfortable and composed. Death is important; death is
complete. My wish to die felt complete, like a strong finish in a race. I used the
thought of death to feel stronger, better. Better dead than messed up here.
I wanted to be hit by a bus or a car—and managed to, twice; in fact, all three
of us managed to get hit by cars twice after Chrissie died.
But I didn’t die with my brother or in place of him; I couldn’t seem to get
killed.
Instead, I was taken care of; I was loved.
And where had it been, the day before, all that love, that touching, that
kindness, that closeness?
Death brought it out in us—and I didn’t want death to disappear. I didn’t
want the dead back.
Life had already advanced. The guest who says a long goodbye and then
comes back for a coat makes a bad impression. We are not good at goodbyes.
Having faced the fact that makes them necessary, and given way to the feelings
they provoke, we don’t want to be compromised by life’s former appearance—to
be reminded that we care about our coats and guard our privacy. The littleness that
clings to everything is disgusting. To go back behind death is disheartening.
But by showing us all the promises we’ve broken, death brings out the best
in us.
I think that’s what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote that “Parting is
all we know of heaven”—and, what does she say? All we need of hell? Or all we
know of hell?
My answer was ambiguous.

The next day, Elaine gave me the Feelings Handout and the Defenses
Handout—fourteen sheets of paper listing words that named feelings and words
that named defenses against feelings. I was asked to keep daily track for a week of
the feelings I felt and the defenses I used not to feel them—chief among which,
Elaine told me, was thinking. I will spare you the whole week. Here is a day:
Feelings, 3/20/90. I feel understanding, loved, warm, caring, sensitive,
patient, mean, loving, special, sympathetic, strong, jealous, worried, sad, confused,
comfortable, encouraged, different, misunderstood, and superior. (The last two
feelings were not listed on the “Feelings Handout.”)
Defenses, 3/20/90. I used rationalization, judging, analyzing, quibbling,
questioning, verbalizing, silence, minimizing, fault-finding, evading, justifying,
intellectualizing, arguing, complying, and withdrawing.
I was supposed to make notes about each defense on the back of each sheet,
but I did so on two only. Again, a sampling:
analyzing, theorizing, quibbling: These are habits of my schooling. I find
them hard to avoid. I quibbled on “considerably” and “net worth.” And I suppose it
was quibbling when I said to Andy in group today: “Andy, did you know that
‘shitty’ is not a feeling? Not according to the list. There are over a hundred feelings
on this list, but ‘shitty’ isn’t one of them.”
questioning: A lot of questioning of AA, of the push toward sameness, of the
insistence on recovery all the time.
smiling, laughing: I don’t see myself grinning, but I’ve felt good about
smiling and laughing—expressive, not defensive.
 silence: Was this defensive? I felt tired of talking and listening. But I also
felt nobody would listen to me, and I had lots to say.
minimizing: This is, as I have been seeing this week, my chief defense. I
have minimized feeling and emotion per se; I have minimized my anger,
frustration, hurt, sense of loss (a little), confusion, and addiction. I just did it above
when I wrote “a little.” Mike said that “I guess” and “I don’t know” are ways of
doing it; and even though I identified this in group yesterday as my major defense
against feeling strong emotions, I continue to use it.
intellectualizing: I could wish there were a little more of that in AA
meetings.

At first, I resented the exercise: I was thirty years old, a published poet, and
an All-But-Dissertation doctoral candidate in Elizabethan and Modern American
Literature. Didn’t the counselors know that the distinction between thinking and
feeling had been shown to be absurd, even criminal—or worse, mistaken? Why
would they perpetuate, on the State University of New Jersey’s central campus, a
condescending, anti-intellectual regime of getting in touch with one’s feelings?
I suppose I fear, as a writer, that the real feelings can never get written
down. Approximation is the limit. I can think it’s better to live than write poetry.
But, because I seem to be able to write poems, I put my life into writing them. And
then I find that I haven’t put enough in.
I’ve always yearned to be in touch with people, to love people. Always, in
moments of deep feeling, I’ve felt that love is what life’s about. I still believe that.
But there are all sorts of other feelings, and their names were on the sheets, and I
had to check off all the feelings I was having.
Telling, as I think J.D. Salinger found out, precludes living the things you
tell. Or sometimes it does; and so I don’t want to tell, and I keep to myself, so that
I’ll have something left over to do, to live.
I thought I differed from others in academia by trying to make feeling more
respectable. But all of us try to make our feelings respectable, and by many
different means, including logic and jokes and violence. I am the only one who
cares about my feeling of uniqueness—if that’s a feeling. Others are interested in
how I’m alike. I am here, it seems, neither to be like other people nor to be
different from them.
I asked Mike if I could make a copy of what I wrote on the question of
whether it’s all right for me to be alive. He asked me if this was a “need” of mine
or “a means of manipulation.” I didn’t know what he meant. I asked because I
feared that if I didn’t keep a copy, I wouldn’t see the writing again, and I’d already
forgotten what I said. Who was the writing for, if not me? I don’t seem to be able
to say straight out that I like what I write, that I want to keep it, that I take pride in
it, for fear that I might be seen as arrogant or untrusting (I won’t lose it, but you
will), or anal, or some other thing. Of my first published poem, my father said: “I
think you have a right to some ‘achievemental’ (terrible word) pride on the
condition that you, at least secretly, acknowledge the Spirit as working its gift
through you and not visa-versa, so to speak.”
I resist the very idea that I have ever manipulated anyone. Of course, I am no
different from anyone else in this. I’ve been manipulated; I manipulate. What the
hell is manipulation? It doesn’t have anything to do with our hands anymore,
unless we’re chiropractors, massage therapists, physical therapists, surgeons, or
mechanics. It’s about handling people with words. Frost said he’d much rather
handle people that way than any other way. I think I do it more by excluding
certain things from the words I say than by saying words—but this may amount to
the same thing. It may even amount to boasting that I can manipulate people with
fewer words than you can.
 I go through a lot of motions in my head before I talk. This is self-involving,
and not very useful in communicating with someone—though it does end up
communicating something. It makes most people anxious or impatient. It frustrates
both me and the listener.
I play on other people’s feelings without offering my own. When I’d write a
poem for a woman I’d see, and then go hand it to her, I wasn’t in as vulnerable a
position as she was. I’d give and go. “Here, this is for you.” And the poem would
be entitled, “For You.” I figured I had nothing to say that I hadn’t said in the poem.
I figured it was a poem for that woman because I didn’t keep a copy. I made a few
lasting friends by doing this, but I also had the police called on me once, and made
some women very uncomfortable.
I think of myself as improvising all the time, as being able to remain in
confusion and ambivalence without having to resolve anything; cut and run, a
sprinting detachment. I made sense to myself in moments, in transitions only. I
kept going: my mother said, “You have to keep going.” She didn’t know the half of
it.
Always the sense that I’m responsible for everything: that I didn’t do
enough; that I hurt someone; that I ran when things got too hard; that I had no
place to turn but away; that I did the wrong thing. I look over my shoulder all the
time, calculate effects, consider alternatives, justify myself. That’s improvisation
for you.
I didn’t think I did these things. I was no propagandist. I thought I was
different, that I wasn’t willing to catch anyone without being caught myself. I
thought I had it figured in feeling and in thought, and knew where the two met.
And all the people I hated because they thought they had it figured were just
versions of myself—or, not at all: they did have it figured; knew where they stood,
let me know; there was nothing mysterious or ulterior. I hated them because they
were plain.
We all at times must think we’re different. It’s a way of assuring ourselves
that we’re real, that we exist, that we have rights, that we’re not wrong, that there
should be at least one of us in the world. Physically speaking, even identical twins
are not identical. In a community of three hundred people, no person really looks
anything like another. Often, though, the first thing said when two people meet is
how one looks like someone the other knows. But that’s all it is, a semblance.
Physically, each of us is unique, unmistakable—even if mistakes are made and
identities confused.
But hear someone say something—you’ve heard it a thousand times before.
There are linguists who say that practically every sentence spoken is a new
sentence, never uttered before. But most conversations seem like most other
conversations, and it’s easy to suppose that nobody has said anything original for a
thousand years. Everything is refrain and return.
Kenneth Burke said that the spinal cord is the great identifier: I can’t have
your headache, you can’t have mine. The gulf between two persons is absolute and
unbridgeable. Well, these are just the kinds of intellectual takings-too-far that most
people don’t go in for. But pressed, those same people will instantly mark a place
where they can’t in their uniqueness be reached, touched, or convinced.
“Everybody’s different.”
In the rehab, where difference is discouraged but not ignored, I began to see
how useful my difference was to me, how it helped me to stand out, to emphasize
my pain and frustration, my pervasive sense of futility, my longing for
incompletion, my wonderful sadness. It helped me to face an enemy I could never
defeat. Ecclesiastes was my favorite philosopher: “all is vanity and striving after
wind.” The Preacher tries all the avenues and comes up empty-handed. That was
for me. And I thought it made me special to think of myself going down against
such forces. There was nothing I could do.
Robert Frost felt that way sometimes, or felt others feeling that way:
sometimes he gave way to the feeling, sometimes he braced himself against it. I
mimicked him. Then I found that whole roomfuls of addicts felt just this way—but
they had never heard me talk, or read Robert Frost’s prose.
I thought that there was nothing I could think or feel or do that hadn’t
already been thought, felt, or done. I was a repeat. I hated that. I wanted to be a
new verse, not an old refrain. Nonetheless, I tried repetition, clothing myself in
other people’s words and thoughts.
A student said, “Yes, but what do you think?”
I said, “Thinking is the hardest thing there is to do,” quoting Emerson.
In the rehab, they asked what a thing gets you, does for you. Hard question.
They asked that in graduate school too, about any argument you’d make: “What’s
at stake?” I never could answer it.
They made me, in the rehab. What does your difference get you? I wrote:
“It gets me what I want. It lets me call the shots. I can quit when I like, begin
when I like. Nobody can predict me. I can’t be pinned down. I won’t get hurt. I’ll
hurt myself.”

March 21, 1990. Recovery begins today, Mike says, some 50 hours after
entrance, with the recognition that I’ve been sad for six years; that I can feel sad
but not look sad, then look sad but not feel sad, then have the two come together in
the mirror: I cry, and it feels good.

“Client will discuss with his primary counselor why it is difficult for him to
identify what makes him happy.”
I had been smart enough to stay clear of popular psychotherapy for three
years. I was a poet, an intellectual; I read Freud and William James; I knew all
about feelings.
I did not. The sheets told me that I knew four or five chronically; I’d lost the
others. It was exciting just to see their names every day. I had forgotten there were
so many feelings. They began to come back to me with what Emerson called “an
alienated majesty.” The Defenses, too, struck me as household gods, the prickly
forces of my family’s irritable nucleus.
I remembered that two of my closest friends in high school said that I would
be a judge when I grew up. I said: an actor, a teacher, a writer. They saw
something in me that said judge. They tormented me with that. A judge can never
say, “I don’t know.” A judge must pass sentence; I can suspend judgment. I can
wait and see. The judge can take time, but he has to make a ruling. The sentence
may be inappropriate, subject to appeal; the statute or principal or precedent may
be misused or misconstrued—but it has to be applied.
My parents said that I would always be judged in life. They also taught me
not to judge. People don’t like to be judged, but it’s probably one of the most
frequent mental operations that we perform.
Songs
On the juke box at the Corner Pub, Denver, Colorado, June 17, 1986:

Dave Mason, “Only You Know and I Know”; Danny O’Keefe, “Good Time
Charlie’s Got the Blues”; Pure Prairie League, “Amy”; Sly and the Family Stone,
“Hot Fun in the Summertime”; Simon and Garfunkel, “Cecelia”; Strawberry Alarm
Clock, “Incense and Peppermints”; The Association, “Everything That Touches
You”; Rolling Stones, “Jumpin Jack Flash”; Doobie Brothers, “Listen to the
Music”; Jethro Tull, “Sweet Dream”; Bob Dylan, “I Want You”; The Guess Who,
“American Woman”; The Eagles, “Too Many Hands,” “Lyin’ Eyes”;
Roger Daltry, “Say It Ain’t So”; Jerry Jeff Walker, “Don’t It Make You Wanna
Dance”; Cream, “Crossroads”; Dave Mason, “Shouldn’t Have Took More Than
You Gave”; Van Morrison, “Brown Eyed Girl”; The Allman Brothers, “Blue Sky,”
“Ain’t Wastin Time No More”; Bread, “I Wanna Make It With You”; The Who, “I
Can See For Miles,” “Mary Anne”; The Chambers Brothers, “Time Has Come
Today”; Janis Joplin, “Down On Me,” “Bye, Bye Baby.”
Bunny
At forty, Margaret Fuller wrote, “the coarse, full–blown dahlia flower
charms the poet’s heart no more.” But the coarseness can and does, Margaret; the
rough petals of the muslin dahlia, wholesome, oatish, do; skin on those cheeks,
colors on those lips I kissed in the suburbs “of what is commonly called matron–
beauty,” did.
Past washer, dryer, linen closet, past daughters in adjacent rooms, drunk as
Jesus I knocked and was let tumbling in by a full–blown dahlia flower who charms
the poet’s heart no more.
Off hills on Dahlia Street we rolled kissing down on the sidewalk; feeling,
on the lawn, these “remains of beauty” and “poetic grace,” this “common woman
of forty,” and this boy, half that.

Over ten years later, Bunny changed her name to Laurel. I wrote to her,
having been out of touch. She was now living in California. I wanted to know what
she thought about our having been lovers.
I had just watched The Last Picture Show, and was struck by the scene in
which Timothy Bottoms becomes the lover of Cloris Leachman. She’s about forty,
he’s about twenty: I don’t know if there were as many years between Bunny and
me when we first made love. I was not then, like Timothy Bottoms, a virgin.
He gets on top of her, puts himself inside her, starts moving in and out. She
starts to cry. Her husband never makes love to her—and then she finds this boy
who wants to but doesn’t know how. There is no touching. But they come to have
a relationship that makes them both happy, gives them both pleasure.
I wanted to sleep with Bunny the first time I saw her. I was doing landscape
and sprinkler work. We got a call to come to her house. I was sitting in the truck;
Woody went to the door. I saw her when she opened it, and that was that. I wrote
something for her that night. I lived in the same neighborhood; I knew the Steins,
who used to live in her house. I went over one day to introduce myself.
Visit followed visit. I think we went from the patio one day into her
bedroom. Her daughters were out, the neighbors couldn’t see. She showed me how
to please her, and I was happy to.
Because we had to hide from neighbors, and keep her daughters in the dark,
we often met in the dark, usually at my convenience—unannounced, often drunk,
past midnight. I wondered how all of that seemed to Laurel now, years later—even
if, as it happened, we were still occasional lovers and kept in touch.
So I asked her these things in a letter. She never answered.
Loretta
My lover’s on the floor like Tommy Watkins in her cowboy shirt. She’s
reading theory to herself and she’s accusing me of whispering. I’m calling her
names she doesn’t like: Nester, Nesty, Nestacious. Stop, she says, and goes on
reading, pronouncing what sounds like nine in French, though she says it’s Meuf. I
get on the floor and slide around with her. Oh, she says, you’re so rough.
My lover is a bundler, a folder, a smuggler, a cuddler, a tiger, a cracker. My
lover is a loping bender and a snuggling bundler. My lover is a cover. My lover is a
cracking hugger, a licker, a mashy niblick, a warmer.
My lover lies flat. My lover lies in folds. My lover bends and spoons and
coughs.
My lover is a muffin tin. My lover is a belcher and a giggler and a squeaker.
Marcia
Smoking like a demon tonight, if a demon ever smoked like this, and all for
a novelist whose horses smoke, whose characters roll their own, light up over black
coffee, talk shit. Eastwood, Coriolanus-like in one of his urban westerns,
comes home at night to wedges of lime he fucks with his fingers and sucks with his
lips. I almost went to the store so I could follow suit.

Last Tango in Paris opens on an echo: not a streetcar, but a train. Brando
comes out a door and screams, hands over his ears, drowning his immortal
“Stellaaaaaaaa” with Bertolucci’s “Fucking cuuuuunt.”
That’s what he screams beneath the tracks, as the train screams through the
reel.
And the fart jokes are funny, later, because Brando says the word “fart” the
way a voice advertising butter says the word “butter”: glottis clogged with pats of
it, cheeks gouty with sticks of it.

For ten years the woman I watched the movie with did without sex: such is
marriage. She had her daughters, her work, her bodybuilding, she danced—but she
had no lovers, and very few friends. She wasn’t lonely then, or anti-social, or
anything else in particular. She pleased herself sometimes, but building up her
body took care of most of her restlessness. Love was out of the question. She
didn’t look for it; it didn’t look for her. Her marriage was one of those early ones—
she was twenty-two—that just didn’t work. She married to get out of the house.
Once she was in another house, she read her way out of the marriage. It took
time. The hours she spent with Henry James—and she read all of him—occupied
more than half of its last four years. James was much more interesting than
anything going on between her and her husband. Reading can wreck your life.
 After the divorce, she watched a lot of movies and started to listen to what
her daughters were listening to—thrash, heavy metal, garbage music: loud and out
of control, the opposite of Henry James. She couldn’t think in it, which was
another thing she liked about it.
It struck her later as a balanced life. And things went better with her
daughters, at least for a while. That changed, too, though. At one point, she didn’t
know where her oldest daughter was for six months. She went to look for her in the
Haight in San Francisco, but couldn’t find her.

I met Marcia in graduate school. She was a tenure-track professor. She wrote
about the male gaze. I noticed her; she was hard not to notice. I stared at her. She
knew I had a girlfriend—her opposite: demure, thin, sweet, a pure fem. I didn’t
take a class with her, but I talked to her, asked her personal things and things
related to her field. I spoke to her as a colleague, not as a graduate student. I was
not professional. I wanted her, but I didn’t do anything about it.
One Friday night, late, I was riding my bike in New Brunswick, catting
around. I wasn’t drinking at the time, but I was still going to bars, mostly to dance.
Marcia turned the corner; we saw each other; she stopped. She was going to get a
video with her daughter. We talked; she asked me to come over and watch the
movie with her. I asked which movie.
“Last Tango in Paris. I’ve never seen it.”

I sat on a chair, she sat on the couch. Her daughter sat next to her, but she
didn’t watch for long.
Marcia and I didn’t touch each other once.
That was the night I figured out what Brando screams in the opening scene.
As for the butter scene, Marcia had heard about it for years. There was
nothing erotic, nothing romantic.
Ten years later, I wrote to her about that night. She said she remembered it
perfectly. She said she could see me wanting to assert myself, but knew that she
wouldn’t: too much imbalance already; sex without ethics.
I told her what I hadn’t dared to then: that she looked like Madonna. Why
hadn’t I? Because I didn’t want to be the next person to tell her that. She said she
probably looks more like Madonna now than she did then.
I sent her my two poems about Freud—knowing that she writes about Freud.
She liked them, but said she couldn’t write back about them without quickening an
image held, and couldn’t quicken the image if she was going to write. She asked if
that made sense. Too much, I thought: she couldn’t write to me without awakening
those dreams, and she couldn’t awaken those dreams if she wanted to write to me.
I preferred the first balance: our memories of that night.

Experimental Farm (April 18, 1990)

Out of in-patient rehab, I start work in the experimental fields at Rutgers—
tomato fields, strawberry fields, corn, pepper, and spinach fields.
One of the first things I hear the foreman say is, “We can’t go cold turkey on
the pesticides and herbicides.”
After work, I go to a cocktail party for the tenth anniversary of Raritan. Two
of my poems, “Accumulations” and “The China Syndrome,” are appearing in the
Spring issue, my first important publication. I start to thank Tom Edwards, the
executive editor (and the best teacher of Pope, Swift, and Shakespeare), for
choosing “The China Syndrome,” but he insists he won’t start talking until he gets
a drink.
Jennifer Green, onstage tonight in New York, uses my poem “The Glands”
in her performance piece.
What makes the glands swell?
The half a pair of eyes
and the one hand you mostly use,
the slouch in attitude,
the dramatized mind.
Half a mind makes the glands swell,
and a lamp from the tomb where truth
has shone, makes the armpits wince.
The things that don’t count,
the ignorance.
The cigarettes, the flavored seltzer,
the highball martinis, the joints
before dinner, the whiskey after,
dinner itself, the after-dinner ale,
the coffee all the time, the teeth
that grind your sleep to pieces,
the lifting of the bike,
the shouldering of the pack
you don’t even like, the brakes
that fail, the swims at night.
These make the glands swell.

The calls you don’t make,

the calls you don’t take,
the lists nothing’s done on,
the letters piling up,
 the books unread, courage unfed,
thank you unsaid, the suffering
left over on the list.
The tightening in the neck,
the oil on the face, crud on the teeth,
the fever that almost always comes,
the weight that stays about the same,
the seven-to-ten-year
check-yourself-out game:
they make the glands swell.

The mold spores on the wind,

the insect bites, the handi-wipes,
the wastebaskets in men’s rooms
stacked up souffle-like,
the elbow, forearm, wrist
prints on the public doors,
the salad bars in stores,
the wash-ups on the shores,
the big first serve,
the man with the nerve,
the new sensation in the chest,
and all the backlogged rest:
they make the glands swell.

I’m on a break now from planting strawberries with Bill and Stan, from
putting the leafless plants into the soil, cupping dirt around them, then pouring
fresh cold water, scooped from a white bucket, around their stems. One pint each.
The drinks stand out on the furrows’ lighter brown like spots on a setter’s coat—
the best drinks I’ve poured.
Nama (in the nursing home, 1990)
I’m dreaming all the time, don’t you know. I dream in color. It’s always very
pleasant. I seem to be fixing up houses all the time. Now isn’t that strange? You
know, I suppose I’m realizing some of those things I never . . . well. They never
yielded to me, don’t you see.
I’m scattered out today, strung off with these elderly people . . .
Lived it to the nth, my life. I was just one of the loving ones, believe it or
not. My mother was kind of a deep one. The big thing is to love. Your mother is a
completely loving one. But if we know right from wrong, everything is so simple
really. Oh, I’ve become quite intimate with the Father, yes. Dear Lord, if this is
what you want for me . . .

I married your grandfather when I was twenty. Forest’s father Billy was a
businessman around Blue Springs, Missouri. He got to drinking, and he didn’t live
long after his wife died. Died in a hospital. Forest’s mother’s name was Olive. She
was the middle of three sisters, Aunt Emma and Aunt Mary. Forest was only three
when his mother died. His sister Ima was five and “pretty as a peach blossom,”
Aunt Emma said. Olive probably died trying to abort a child, an unwanted child.
Grandpa Billy Gore was Forest’s grandfather, your father’s great–
grandfather. Grandpa Billy Gore raised your grandfather. He was a Temperance
man, a Baptist, a businessman—fairly wealthy, too. A stable family. That’s how
we judged things then. There was a big write–up in the paper when he died, the
Kansas City Star. He was a historical man. But he spoiled Forest. So against
drinking. Would have broke his heart, but of course Grandpa Billy was gone before
Forest became a drunkard.
This was the Bible he gave Forest in 1913. The inscription reads: “May this
holy Book guide you into all truth, and your last days be your best days.” Well,
they were not.
Forest took to drink, like his father, left me to go to California in 1940,
already an alcoholic. He lost his liver, died in a Veterans’ hospital. You see here
where Grandpa Billy added to the inscription a year later: “God sent his only
begotten into the world to die for us that whosoever believeth on him might not
perish but have eternal life.”
Your grandfather was always wanting to “make a deal,” and he could make
one when nobody else could. One of the men he worked with told your Uncle
Vernon, I think, maybe your father, “If you’re half as good a salesman as your
father on the phone, you’ll be fine.” But he was spoiled. Didn’t have the proper
disposition. Spoiled from a baby. He’d do things to provoke. Said he was a
charmer from a baby. He was proper, and a pretty good–looking man, except for
his ears, the way he’d worn that old straw hat. Self–will, that’s the bad thing.
You were named after my people. They were Southerners, Democrats.
Jackson County, Missouri. Came up from Tennessee after the famine. My father’s
uncle, Uncle Mark Murphy—that’s your namesake. My father Leslie married a
Bowlin—B O W L I N. Now they said that went back to Ann Bolyn. Different
spelling. I always thought I could live in that time. Henry the Eighth and Queen
Elizabeth. Yes. That English woman I told it to, she said you’d have to have been
pretty tough. Well, I said, I’m pretty tough, raised two children by myself in the
Depression. Tough and thrifty.
I missed the mark, but see it’s being carried on in you. I just never
accomplished. I was gifted, but it just didn’t come to pass. I finished high school
and took one year of teachers’ college. I taught right there in Blue Springs, first
through eighth grade. The whole thing. Thirty pupils. Grammar, arithmetic. Three
little blond girls in first grade. Now if that wasn’t something. The Turner girls. One
of ‘em would come up to me every day. “Miss Ruth,” she’d say, “would you tie
my apron?” She’d untied it herself, Thelma Ferguson. Just for me to love her.
Sweet little thing. “Miss Ruth is one of the best teachers in this world I know.”
That’s what that boy would say. He was a so–and–so. Had to use my ruler on him.
They gave me high ratings, the citified gentlemen that’d come out to watch. Stay
all day, bring their lunch.
Teaching. That’s what my young husband wanted to do. Had a year at the
University of Chicago before the war. He was abducted into Officers Training
School. He passed for a Captain. They put him to grading papers down in Atlanta,
Georgia. He was only twenty–two. He never was much for telling things, pleasant
or unpleasant, kept to himself about those things, but he told how those men would
cry when they didn’t make it. Yes.
Oh, I always said I could just spend my life there, under the trees and the
vines growing over all the beautiful buildings . . . Yes, I could have. Good plays,
good music. Croatian girl, the first time I heard the word, blackest hair I ever saw,
the whitest skin. Oh, yes, we had some wonderful things. It was a real treat for
those students, the graduate students. He didn’t like poetry the way I did. They did
nothing for the soldiers when they came home. He wanted to go back to the
University of Chicago, but he didn’t have the money. We went back to Kansas
City. That’s where he got in with the, well, he got to bootlegging. That was a
terrible time for us. That bootlegging. He was arrested, but they paid ‘em off, you
know. He went out and bought this house, but he never cared much about Vernon
as a baby. He was gone at night. Got a job on the street railway. Knew we couldn’t
make it. Rented it out to a couple we knew. I had the upstairs. Forest was gone so
much.
So vague now—I guess it was vague to me then. I don’t know why it was all
going on. He wasn’t a very good husband, I’ll tell you that. Poor man. All that
intelligence, all those store–rooms of knowledge that could have been written out,
that just went to waste, a wasted life. But you don’t have to think about that. You
think about what you inherited, the good part, not the other part. He should’ve been
. . . no telling what he might have been. He didn’t pay much attention to us.
I left Forest in Kansas City, told Forest’s friend, the Italian, he was a decent
man, I needed some money and he’d have to get it from Forest. So he bought my
ticket and Vernon and I flew out to Denver. About 1925, that was. A friend of
Forest’s put us up. The Denver Bible Institute. His wife was a hellion. Some of
these people in frocked clothes, oh, I tell you. Soon as Forest heard I had a job in
the department store—I was foolish enough to tell him we were fine; that scared
him; so he came out after us. He liked the toughie gals he went out with. Well, he
came out and started selling real estate, and that’s when things got better for
awhile. Your father came along then.
Oh, yes, he came back, soon after. I wrote him a letter and said we were just
doing pretty well, we were getting along all right, and I should never have done
that, I should’ve wrote a sob letter, and he wouldn’t’ve come, you know, but he
couldn’t stand that, that I was making it and he might lose me, you know, so here
he came, and it was hell from then on. That was a bad time.
Got a job at Neusteders, got along wonderfully well as a salesperson. Forest
got with the streetcar company, a pretty good job, he was a worker, you know, and
intelligent, too, Forest, but then he wanted to make a lot of money, I don’t know,
spoiled to death by well–to–do grandparents, ye gods! Don’t ever let it happen,
couldn’t here, but that was in the old days, you know.
But I tried to get along, because what could you do, get up and go to work.
He didn’t come home much when he was doing these things, he wasn’t around a
lot, so Vernon and I got along pretty well. But then he did get kinda straightened
out, we bought a house, beautiful house, but there was a little something in there
that I wanted to say and I can’t, it’s gone now.
 We had to give that house up because Forest just quit. I kept everything
going. We moved to an apartment. Forest didn’t make life miserable for your
father, though. He was apart, and he was drinking. He always had a car, he
managed to do things, you know, he didn’t care whether he paid for them or
anything, but anyway, he took Vernon down and these bums that he played cards
with and drank, you know, and gambled and all, in some room, and he came
laughing back and said, of Vernon, “He didn’t like my friends down there at all.
He wanted to get out of there.” It tickled him that he didn’t like them. He was six
or seven or something like that then.
It seems to me it didn’t change much until the other war came, when was
that, now? I guess Forest just got up and left, and I don’t know where he went. So
there I was with two children. Your father was the one that graduated from
Dartmouth. He got a scholarship, got in with a nice group of wealthy kids, the one
whose father became president of the Denver college, or ... I can’t tell you now,
it’s so vague.
My young husband, he was just like you. Oh, but he threw his life away. Just
past twenty–one when we were married . . . So spoiled, he just wouldn’t see a thing
through. Oh my he was brilliant . . . Maybe the road isn’t just the thing, don’t you
know? I think of the Frost poem, two roads, And I, I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference. You see, if we just go along and let it unfold,
let it unfold . . . Self–will, that’s the bad thing. My young husband, he had a lot of
that.
I had the flu and I was terribly sick, and I had gotten better, and he had come
home from someone’s, maybe a woman, maybe a man, I don’t know, and he was
sober. He said, “I can’t understand why the two women I’ve loved most in my life
and who have been better to me—you and my grandmother—why have I treated
you worse than anyone else.” That maybe cleaned something out of his mind and
heart. I was glad for that confession. He said, Well, if you aren’t better by morning,
I’m going to call the doctor. I said, No, we’ll call the practitioner. Now you get
things straightened up for when the kids come home—we want them to go back to
school happy. We have to get the kitchen together, and you need to get cleaned up.
I kept thinking what would happen to those boys. I guess I got self out of the
way. I went back into the room and combed my hair, just saying mentally, just
saying my prayers, to let the spirit go through me and help me and so on. I guess I
lay down for a little while, and then it went clear through me, it almost burned
through my fingers, and I knew what it was, just tingling in my fingers, I was just
completely washed out of self. Combed my hair, put on my lipstick, a fresh house
dress. I went out there and told him to go read the paper. He heard something
different in my voice. “What has happened to you?” He turned white as a sheet.
Well, I’d had a healing.
He was gone out of our lives not long after. I was healed. It was pure love. It
was just beautiful. Even kind of tingled in my toes. And here the kids came
tumbling in for lunch and were off to school. If it weren’t for my boys, I wished I’d
had the courage to walk out in the lake until the water covered me.
I’m not versed in . . . it’s a deep thing, Christian Science. That you have to
do this yourself, you know. I can, here at 90, I can look at the people down there in
that room, and I can almost tell everyone of them that’s been mean and selfish—
it’s right on their face. Yes. And they yell out, “Bring me some coffee.” Now I’d
never do a thing like that. I think too much of myself to lower myself to yell and
demand and, oh, I tell you, I feel like I’m going through hell. But I don’t know
what I can do that’s . . . Maybe I won’t be here very long. Now we know that. I’ll
pass on, because you don’t live. I’m already ninety and a half. There’s very few
that live to be a hundred.
I lived a kind of a hard life here. And I didn’t intend to, but then of course
we’ve got the best of things . . . It’s a little slow process, because I’ve gotten it
more in my more peaceful times than like when I was working. I don’t regret
getting old, because you learn as you go along. There’s a softening.
I was born a Democrat. In my nature. A little softer people. Republicans are
more rigid. There’s a woman here, has a vicious look. Oh lordy! Everybody smiles
at me, but you wouldn’t smile at her. You’d turn away if you could. A lot of people
have brought this on themselves. Now that’s just awful of me to say. But they
haven’t been loving and trying to keep up above the carnal things, you know, the
unhappy thing. “My past is a collection of valuable lessons that aided my spiritual
growth. Happy experience taught me to laugh, to love, and to appreciate.” Now
that’s just like me putting it into words, you know, really. This next paragraph isn’t
so much like me. But the next again. “However I need not re-learn through similar
experience, so I now release the past. I look forward to today knowing that I will
experience laughter, love, appreciation, and learning of great new truths. I am a
willing student. I expect great new blessings, for I know that God has abundant
good in store for me today.” My land, that sounds just like my thoughts kinda
pouring out.
That’s what I look at some of ‘em and I think, my land, I’m not like that. Oh,
there’s one big man that just beats on the table and yells, “Bring me a cup of
coffee.” Just yells. Tch, tch, tch, tch, tch. You oughta come down there for
breakfast sometime. Vernon should, and see where I am in the midst of what. And
your mother should. Don’t think that I’m here being waited upon. The goonies.
The goonie birds. There they all were, just yelling. Making noise. Feel kinda sorry
for some of the old men, they look so beaten.

You know it was twenty-one years ago your little brother was taken from us.
How you used to pick on him! He was your mother’s youngest and he was my
youngest, too. I was the youngest in my family. Oh, I was picked on. Not that I
wasn’t loved, just picked on. I’d be in the apple tree reading the novels. Mary Jane
Holmes. Love stories they were. No sex. We had enough sex right out there in the
pasture. In the barn. First knowledge of the sex act. My mother would ask me what
I was going to do when I grew up. I would say, “I’m going to find a nice man, and
I’m going to have six boys.” I guess I didn’t like the girls. I was a tag–ender, you
know, the quiet one—Francis was the gabfester, a story–teller, much more popular
than I ever was—but I had enough gumption to know that it took a man and a
woman. They knew I was a bright child, no question about that.
You’re gifted without any effort of your own. Now, you see, that’s the same
way with Beethoven—yes, a gift! That’s all. Just a gift. I was watching Moyers,
Bill Moyers, and he had this woman on—what was her name? Maya Angelou.
Yes, yes. Did you see that? Marvelous, really. Now, there again, there was a gift.
And there was nothing she could do about it. She was raped when she was seven
years old. Oh my, she’s had a hard life. So many bad memories. My goodness, talk
about a gift. Well, she couldn’t escape it, really, don’t you know?
But then of course I was supposed to have had a gift. Now my sister Lila
told me that. She always said if I was born to a mother like Bette Davis—well,
they held us back in those days, don’t you see. I remember that declamation I made
—I was so mad, I thought I should have gotten it, but this little girl won—oh, she
did a rather cute thing—and I was back there just crying, more out of frustration
than anything. I represented Blue Springs High School. Della Tucker had trained
me. She was with me. Another gave Bryan’s Cross of Gold. He didn’t get anything
either. They gave first place to this tacky little girl who had no more talent than,
than anything. They said I was too dramatic. And this woman from Emerson
College in Boston, she came back to talk to me and she said, “Go ahead and cry. I
believe I would too if I were you. But I know talent when I see it, and you’ve got
it.”
Well, my father was an intelligent man and all, but they just held us back
instead of pushing us forward. I was just born thirty years too soon . . . Now I’m
being fulfilled in your success. Every morning I just send up praise.
My father always said that it was Mr. Wood who instilled in him the desire
for the better things, to study the classics, the poetry, you know, Gray’s elegy. My
father was pretty well–educated. A lot of times he would break out singing “On the
Wabash.” Had a nice tenor voice, and speaking voice, like I do. I remember we sat
and watched Halley’s comet. I guess I was about thirteen, because I was born three
years before the century, you know, ‘97. . .
I’ve always loved home. And now that I’m older, I remember my father so
much, I always admired my father. Now he had his snappy times too, you know,
when he’d jump and things, but he had a good brain, he had a good mind. My
father’s mother was clever, she came back with little smart remarks and
everything. She was popular. The men liked her. So she married this Mr. Woods.
He had an independent income. Thinking people were loving, a little above the
below-average, you know. To go a little higher, a step beyond.
My father was the main one for intellect. The others were nice. Leslie and
Wylie were the older brothers, and then Albert. Albert had a yen for making
money. My father said about Al, that if he was wiped out, well, give him fifteen
days and he was likely to be a billionaire again.
I don’t think I was his favorite, I don’t think so particularly. But I mean he
was perceptive, don’t you see, had the thinking mind. “C’mon Sissy, let’s dance.”
So we did. That was more fun. And Reilly, the fox terrier pup that he brought from
Independence, all white, took her out of his coat just in one hand. “Look here girls,
what I’ve got for ya. Her name’s Reilly because that’s the name of the porter that
brought her there.” And I said I’ll take her, he wanted to get rid of her, you know, a
little female, and so Reilly became the mother of a lot of them around there. We’d
be driving out sometimes and the little fox terrier would come out barking, and
Dad’d say, “There’s another one of Reilly’s.”
Lately, I’m just kinda draggin’ about, you know. Got the blues. That’s what
my father used to say. “Leave Sissy alone, she’s got the blues.” Oh, he had a
beautiful voice. Recite that Elegy of Gray’s to me. He was an intelligent man. He
could have been governor. He was a natural politician, and he loved history. Men
liked him. He was a man’s man. And he could make a good talk. He could win me
over, and I wasn’t too easily won over. He had an enthusiasm, you know. He could
have won a lot of people over. I think I was more of his strain. As I grew older,
step by step, I began to understand my father. Because I always admired him.
Some of the things I’ve gone through, I could have gone to hell if it hadn’t been
just looking up at him, at his thinking how ... and still, he wasn’t perfect.
The Bowlins, my mother’s family, they went after land, to build up an
estate, and my father was more, well, he was very leery of that. He was a
Democrat, all soul a Democrat, you know. I don’t think he was quite as ambitious
as he might have been, but he could’ve easily been, well, let’s say a Senator from
Missouri, or he might even have been a governor of the state, because he’d’ve
made a nice one, and he could talk and make no errors in his grammar or any
things like that. No, but he was only 53 when he passed on. That’s pretty young,
you know. And he had a political job, he was the Irish politico at that time, you
know, then I guess when he got with that educated man, Mr. Woods, his stepfather,
why he unfolded all of this to my dad as he was growing up. He was political,
everybody knew that, if they wanted a little trend, why they could all come to him
and say a word for it, you know. Someone said to me, “Well that was
Independence, where Truman came from.” Yes, I thought to myself, but Truman
came later. That was my father’s natural way. And people admired him.
 One day when we were at Horseshoe Lake, my father told my sister Frances
and me to go to the house across the way to call on Negro Louis or Louis and tell
him who we were. The old man was delighted and brought out some cane–
bottomed chairs for us to sit in the shade and talk. Negro Louis was a nice man.
Everybody respected him. He took care of his farm and all. Now this is all I
remember his telling us, but it’s stayed with me through the years. He said, “Your
Grandpa Murphy was the best man that God ever let walk this earth. You know I
was his slave. Drove up from Tennessee in the spring wagon with a good team of
mules and stopped at Westport Landing. While we were there, Mr. Murphy freed
me.”
My mother and father, they never were very compatible, in a sense; mother
was one of those persons that was always, she had kind of a disposition to be angry
about little things and, you know, it was too bad that he didn’t, that she wasn’t
more, you know, to kinda go along with him. She kept the house and the children.
You have to give her credit for that. But she was kinda jealous of anybody. We
went to one of the dances, she was about ready to tear into Miss Presley, she was
kind of going over Dad in a nice sort of way and hanging on to him, Mrs. Presley,
you know, and mother said, “Take your hands off of him.” She was jealous of
anyone, any woman that looked crosseyed at him.
Mother was small, pretty good–looking, well–dressed, and beautiful hair,
and she was, I would say, as good–looking or better than any of the others, you
know. They were all fairly good–looking, the sisters. Oh we always had bad things.
I can remember one of the slaps and things and spankings that I got from her—just
a part of growing up, she was that way. Now the Hillers were always kind of
happy, they’d kind of hold a meeting at the table with all their girls, you know, and
get ‘em all together and talk about the things. They were much more diplomatic
about their discipline and all, which I approved of even then.
 My mother, she was left alone a lot, a lot of evenings just alone there with
us. Dad was off in town, at these political meetings and all. She was high–
tempered and irascible and—you know all of that, or maybe you don’t, but
anyway, it happens. Mother always took a woman’s magazine, she always took the
Ladies Home Journal. I used to lay on my tummy, and it was a big magazine and
you’d turn the pages, and when I was, I don’t know, young, I had an awful crush
on the one that would have been king in England; what was his name? Edward,
wasn’t it, I believe it was Edward, with that Mrs. what’s-her-name, she was kind of
a notorious woman; she couldn’t be queen, you know, divorced woman, married
two or three times, no queen of that caliber. Well, he fell in love with her and gave
up the throne, and it was a pretty bad shock to the royalty in England. You’ll have
to get that and read it.
But when I was a little girl and there was Edward and there was always
something about the royal family. They were good news, and Queen Mary, and
everybody liked her, she was very popular with everyone, and King George was
his father, and, what was I going to tell you? Oh, one of the little stories was that
he fell for this woman and made quite a scandal, Edward, he was so darn cute, and
he always sat next to his mother at the dinner table, but Edward kept wanting to
butt in when Grandpa was telling a story, mostly to his son, King George, and
Edward wasn’t paying any attention to it all, kept saying, “Grandfather!”—just so
—”Grandfather!” and his mother said, “Edward, don’t interrupt your grandfather.”
When Grandfather got through with the story, his mother said, “Edward, now your
grandfather will listen to you.” See, they were very much disciplining of their
children, they had to be just so. And Edward said, “It’s too late now. There was a
slug on his lettuce but he ate it.” That was a royal thing, in some of the writings,
cute different little things.
Grandpa Bowlin, he was strict. I sometimes wish he’d been more loving.
Oh, I think he loved us all. In fact, when we’d go a lot of times he’d call a dog and
go walking up through the pasture, up the hill, and get away from us. Straight as an
arrow. Uncle Jess said, “I’m just sure he’s got some Indian blood in him,” but he
didn’t have. “Straight as an arrow. Look at him, the old man, going over the hill.”
He was king of all he surveyed there.
The Bowlins loved to dress. Nine children. Belle, Ruth, Jenny, Susie, my
mother. Then the four boys. Uncle George, Uncle Jim, Uncle John, and Uncle Sid.
They were dressy types, always had several pairs of shoes. Your father said to me,
“Oh, mother, you were always a well–dressed woman.” I was named after Aunt
Ruth. She had quite a lot of style. She was a good dress-maker, and she could look
like a million dollars, because she had that flair. Aunt Ruth, she used to race the
men on the horses. She was beautiful. She rode sidesaddle, I suppose, always taunt
them to come race her. They’d get on their horses and go galloping somewhere, the
way you’d go to the drugstore.

The day that I graduated was the day my father died. It’s on the gravestone
there in Blue Springs cemetery. I was eighteen. I told Aunt Jenny I didn’t think I
could do it. She said, “Of course you can, c’mon, it’ll make you feel much better.”
And she took my hand between her two warm hands and she put my hand on my
father’s hand that was there, he was in the casket in the little room there, and then
she took my hand and put it between hers. She was such a nice person. My
mother’s sister, married when she was way in years, big, good–looking person.
And we were so Irish, you know, that always amused me, pure–blood almost, we
were Murphys. Yes, when you say Murphy you know where that came from.

Oh, this is a hellish place. But they’re really very nice, courteous to us. It’s
the goonies here, the goofies. Why, two women got in a fight here last night in
their wheelchairs. I don’t want a wheelchair. I’m not gonna be in a wheelchair.
What would I do with a wheelchair? They’re all wanting me to do something, get
out and do something. Well, I’ve done all that I’m going to do, I’m gonna take it
easy now, if I can possibly do it, but I won’t last long in a place like this, nobody
would.
You know, people are awfully stupid, people out in the world. No wonder
we have all of the different things, the unhappy things that happen.
I’m dragging today, feel let down. I dreamed of Tracy last night. He chased
money all over the globe; sometimes he got it, sometimes he didn’t. He said, “I
hope my wives would rise from the dead.” Strange little things.
Well, I’m surprised the world is still here. I thought it had powdered off
somewhere.
Husk
“The last time I saw her,” my father said when his mother died, “I fed her
pineapple juice, by the aroma of it, in little sips. She was just tired out, wheezing,
couldn’t hardly cough up to clear the congestion. So dehydrated, so emaciated. She
squeezed my hand after she drank, as if to say thank you, or something. It’s hard to
believe a spirit, anything, can come out of a husk like that. But each of us has to
believe something’s happening then, has to interpret that metaphor of passing
through the veil in some way. Maybe you just have to be alone and suck it up.”
T.S. Eliot
I saw T.S. Eliot in a dream once. He was funnier than I thought he’d be. His
lecture didn’t quite end. He smoked. Nobody went up to him, so I went up to him.
He told me of a version of The Waste Land, printed in Independence, Missouri. He
said he preferred it above all other Eliot, as most Elizabethan, most dramatic.
Someone had a copy of it, he said; I said, I had read that someone did. I told him
that I’d be facing questions about him soon in my orals. He smiled. He asked if I
had one of those notebooks that he could write my parents’ address in. I did, and
handed it to him. As he started to write in it, someone poured a bowl of soup on his
head.
Our Personal Fraudulentness (1990)
About ten days after I entered the rehab, I wrote a letter to my parents. My
father answered it from the office.

Dear Mark,
Must say we were taken aback by your confessional letter because it
seemed to us that you’d gotten such a good hold on things the last two years,
especially manifested in your giving up drinking so entirely. In any case, this
sounds most constructive, and you have our full support, sympathy, and love!!
Related to other “news” our family has had—the irreversibility of AIDS and fatal
brain concussions—this seems almost benign. So work hard at it, and move on, as
we know you can and will, in time. Strangely, I think, we all spend more time and
effort than we would ever dare admit in covering up and dealing with our sins, or
shortcomings, if you prefer, our impatience, our addictiveness and our daily
fearfulness, that we get too self-involved and preoccupied with our personal
fraudulentness. And the answer may truly lie in taking only God, or something
totally outside us, seriously, and giving up all rights to ourselves. Gotta run! Love,
Dad.
A Birthday Letter (March 1991)
I’m writing to you on your birthday, Mom, and typing so you’ll be able to
read me. My penmanship was never what I wanted it to be.
My friend here, Rick, tells me that I scare people. I’ve been told that before.
Once up at CU I went on a walk with a girl I’d taken a shining to. I wrote a poem
afterwards and slipped it under her door. She called the campus police; she was
afraid I was going to rape her. For my part, I was too embarrassed to talk to her. I
suppose I thought it was all innocent.
You told me never to hate. I do hate one creature, though: the late-adolescent
male, dressed in shorts, boxers showing, a t–shirt with a college football insignia
(of a college different from the one he attends, if he attends), shoes untied, and a
cap worn backwards, as if to shade the eyes in the back of his head. But he has no
eyes back there and never the uses the ones in front for anything but the most
superficial kinds of seeing—the way a roly–poly uses its sheaf, to shut out the
world that touches him. Was I like that?
I’m just talking to you, Mom, saying what’s on my mind. Since I can’t be
there for your 58th birthday, this letter will be my proxy. I am, after all, a writer.
You don’t know how little and how much it means to me to make that claim, to
accept what Nama called, and you and Dad have called, my “gift.” Dad thinks it
comes from God. I think it comes from nearer home—from you and Dad and
Nama and Uncle Chuck. But you, too, know how hard it is to accept gifts.
I loved getting your notes. I’ve been a little scared to respond, just as I’ve
been hesitant to send the poems I’ve written. Any room is room enough for
misunderstanding. Stanza means room in Italian, and if poets have felt
misunderstood in a single stanza, why have they gone on to build so many
mansions? Maybe because they’re more faithful than they intended to be, like Tom
to his father through his sister in The Glass Menagerie. One has to come home.
 But, as Emerson says, “the plan is seemly and noble; the details are
melancholy.” Feelings are the details I’ve been getting to know
this year (March 17 will mark a year of my being “clean and sober”). My recovery
started when I was asked a simple question: “How do you feel?” That was on
March 21, 1990, 48 hours after I went into the rehab. My answer was equally
simple: “Sad.”
“And how long have you felt sad?”
I thought back to when Chrissie died—twenty years. I thought back to when
Craig died. “Six years,” I said.
“So you’ve been sad for six years. How does that feel?”
“Awful.” And I started to cry.
Mike didn’t stop me or comfort me; he asked if I’d ever been in recovery. I
said I didn’t know what recovery was. Mike got up and opened the closet door. It
had a full–length mirror on it.
“Look at yourself in the mirror. What does that person look like?”
“He looks sad,” I said.
“And how is that person feeling?”
I said again, heaving, “Sad.”
Mike touched my shoulder as he moved past me to the door. He looked at
his watch.
“Well,” he said, “your recovery has just begun.”
He walked out and closed the door. I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t want to.

Do you know what I thought of, Mom, to compare it to, later that day?
Remember the Drano commercial? The drain pipe is made of glass, so you can see
the clog in the bend the water is stuck against. The Drano is poured in. Bits of the
clog begin to trickle down, like sediment of cider; then the clog itself begins to
break and move, and then it all goes, and the clear water courses fully through the
pipe. That’s what it felt like.
The very next feeling was one of safety, a sad, free-floating safety. I felt
vulnerable, too, and real: I felt absolutely real and solid. What my addiction to
alcohol and pot had done—on top of all our sadnesses—was to fix a gulf between
what I did and what I was, an incongruity between what I was on the outside and
what I was on the inside; between how I felt and how I looked, how I was and how
I seemed. (This is what they told me. I fought it briefly.)
My recovery began when I knew I was sad, I felt sad, I said I was sad, and I
cried about it all.
I didn’t know anything when I went into the rehab but that I couldn’t stop
smoking pot, couldn’t stop wanting to smoke pot—even though pot never ended up
doing for me what I wanted it to do. But I couldn’t heal myself through pot, which
I smoked, I thought, to clear my thinking, to order it, to inspire my poetry, to
organize the material for my dissertation. That was the kind of delusion I was
under.
I cried almost every day for a month after that session with Mike. I admitted,
in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, that I was powerless over alcohol and
pot, and that my life had become unmanageable. Once I did that, things began to
fall into place.
I will give you two examples.
I was going to do a dissertation on Ralph Waldo Emerson as a reformer. I
put in front of me at my desk a line from Hamlet. The players have just told
Hamlet that they’ve reformed their acting “indifferently,” which in our idiom
would mean “partly” or “somewhat.” Hamlet replies, “O, reform it altogether!” I
went after the idea, read for several months, took notes, wrote 150 pages for a
proposal and into the dissertation itself. Then I said, No, this is leading nowhere: so
what if Emerson wanted all or nothing; we all do, at times.
So I went back to my first idea for a dissertation—about hands. What was
that about? What interested me about it? I decided that hands in literature were
images of management, control, and power—the problem of managing things that
can’t be manipulated. So I started reading and re-reading, taking notes, revising the
papers I’d written on the topic already, working at a proposal, checking out 40 or
50 books, copying articles in periodicals. I got ideas about how I could work this
up into a career: I could consult on the side, giving seminars to business managers
about the insights poets, dramatists, and novelists had into managing people. If the
tactics of Attila the Hun could yield a bestseller, so could those of Keats and
Dickens, Sherwood Anderson and Harold Pinter.
When I told Mike these things in one of our sessions, he laughed; and when
he laughed, I saw what he saw. It suddenly made sense, why I was wanting to
tackle reform and management: because I wanted to reform, because I wanted to
manage. But instead of reforming, I would study and interpret reform; I would talk
about Emerson as a reformer, how he wanted to dethrone success and restore
failure. Emerson, who said “To think is to act,” needed looking into, and so did the
critics who had misconstrued his failure as a reformer. He was pretty cagey about
it, pretty ambivalent; but he didn’t think, as his critics did, that he was too smart for
reform, that it was beneath him.
Once I got lost in that material, it made sense that I would find in the idea of
management a more pressing, a more engaging, problem. I could manage books
and papers and note-taking; I could manage my desk and my dishes, my bike and
my groceries. I could manage just about anything I could get my hands on. The
world for three feet on any side of me was tractable, but I couldn’t manage
anything I couldn’t touch, couldn’t get my hands on—my ideas, Emerson’s ideas,
my feelings, my desires.
 So I smoked dope.
All of which is to say, Mom, that I haven’t been thinking about “the facts/
theories/ origins/ genetics/ heredity questions,” as you put it in your letter of
January 25. As for heredity, though, it’s nearly indisputable that alcoholism runs in
families. (This is what Dad’s doctor told him in 1977.) It bridges the generation
gap. Of the stories I’ve heard in a year’s worth of AA meetings, I’d guess that 85%
of them have been told by “adult children” of alcoholics. And there are “origins”:
for most alcoholics, the likeliest one is the first drink. The more speculative
recovering alcoholics will go on to say, “I think I was an alcoholic before I took
my first drink.”
But recovery isn’t about those things. It’s about the practical problem of not
drinking, day by day, and coming to terms with one’s “behavior/ habits/
addiction,” as you put it in your letter.
I am writing this to you, Mom, because I too hope for “more understanding
and communication” between us. I love you. Your example—the courage to have
Lizzie after losing Chrissie, the courage to go on after losing Craig—means very
much to me. Your equanimity has always helped me through, and always will.
The other day when I was reading, I found your portrait in Proverbs 31, 10–
31: “Strength and honor are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come. She
openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.” (This is
what Bridget Fisher said about you.)
On your birthday, let my example, for a change, mean something to you.
love, Mark

I hoped for a response, but didn’t expect one, and didn’t get one. I started to
wish I’d never sent it. I called my parents. They didn’t mention the letter. They
talked instead about Loretta’s letter to them. My father said how controlled it was,
how “well-written,” “Euclidian,” “psychologically precise,” “more than human.”
My mother, too, envied how well Loretta expressed herself.
“Someone her age,” my father said, “isn’t really entitled to be so clear.”

Old Love for New (1992)

Dear Amy,
Yes, I own a computer. When I work on it, its keyboard sounds like the
mastication of a million mice—if I am on top of my game. That incessant clicking
—the sound of mitching your lips together right in front of your teeth, tongue up
and down off the hard palate. And yes, I know how to fill a page. But I don’t know
sometimes what it is I fill it with and who it is I fill it for. For you, in this instance,
I hope—ghost that I am, unattached swimmer, swimmer in my dreams, shower-
taker, drinker-up of still and moving waters, sparkling waters—“water of love,” as
the Dire Straits song goes, “deep underground.”
I have an ancient, common fear: that if I know what I’m doing, I won’t do it.
And I like to do it, I like to make it.
Your letter arrives as I try to formulate myself for the job market. What you
say on that score touches me to the quick. I’m no academic, Amy. I’m a
hodgepodge, a grab-bag, the rough around a diamond, a jack-joke, poor pot-sherd,
as Hopkins says.
I miss you, too. I like everything about you I know and imagine I’d like
everything about you I don’t. I like how, judging from what you write about the
new house, you’re surprised by doing something that feels like “an adult thing.”
How old are you? I’m two weeks past being old enough to be crucified, but the
chances don’t look good. I like the way you take pleasure in fruit and gardens.
Lord Byron told his friend Lady Blessington: “I love everything by turns and
nothing long.” Emerson said, “Our moods do not believe in each other.” I find
myself taken up in both sayings, but uncomfortably. Help me.
In the last paragraph of your letter, you imagine yourself as the city of
Venice—the city wedded, for better or worse, to the water. You cannot point a
straight line in Venice. Venice works like memory. The Bridge of Sighs is there,
and there in Venice is what Virgil called lacrimae rerum, “the tears of things.”
Venice is a sinking feeling.
I noticed the water in your letter because I’m working on a new project, a
book of poems I want to call Old Love for New. The title comes from a George
Peele play of the sixteenth century, in a passage about Cupid’s Curse: “They that
do change old love for new,/Pray gods they change for worse.” I keep as much of
old love as I possibly can, though I change for new, and I find no way to judge as
between better and worse. There is difference of degree but not of kind.
I think I told you, or maybe I just wanted to and didn’t, that I feel like a
thirty-three-year-old woman: my sex drive is in high gear and my appetite—O holy
Roman Appetite!—is healthy as a horse. “I’m healthy as a horse,” Iggy Pop sings,
“and everything is spinning.” So when you ask, “What is this dance people call
love, and sex, and longing?”, I answer, for now, it is life, such as it is. And since I,
like you, have searching and questioning and rebuilding to do, and since I do these
things partially through poetry, maybe I’ll have a better answer in time. Loretta, as
you might imagine, thinks the book is a bad idea. She may be right.
Gramps (August 19, 1995)
Gramps had the most gentle hands. They were large and heavy, but always
gentle. And expressive.
He reached into his pockets for things: money clip, change, golf tees, golf
balls, a ball marker, a Zippo. His pockets seemed bottomless.
I watched him reach in for that money clip, thick with bills, to pay for
doughnuts and green fees. Gramps was generous. He would pay for everything
when he was visiting, or when we were visiting him and Gram. And every birthday
there was a card from him, in his large hand, with a bill in it that hadn’t been
folded in his clip.
Gramps wanted us all to play golf, and he was patient when he took us to
play. Not that he was always patient; but the golf course seemed to settle him—
once he’d paid the fees that always seemed to him a little steep, even at public
courses. And sometimes he could be a little short with the people in the pro shop,
and with the starter. But once we were out on the course, he eased up; he relaxed.
He loved to be out on the golf course. He walked; he insisted on it. If they forced
him to take a cart, he’d let them know what he thought of that, and then he’d
mutter on the way out, “Goddamn racket.”
He taught me to keep my head down—”You have a ten–cent ball,” he’d say,
“and a ten–dollar tee: keep your eye on the tee”—and to slow down my backswing.
Then he’d step up with his three wood—he hated his driver—tee up his ball, and
address it (at too much of an angle, it seemed to me, and at too close a range). He’d
pause, and then take his club back too fast, and lift his head up on impact.
“Damnit,” he’d say to himself. Then he’d take a mulligan, usually in a hurry, and
with the same result: a short hook or slice. That done, he’d coach me patiently
through my hook and mulligan, and we’d be off to the first green, seventeen more
to go.
He taught me how to fix ball marks, how to stay out of sight lines, who hit
first, what four meant, when to pull the pin, and how to keep from throwing
shadows on the green. I loved playing golf with Gramps; I didn’t love practicing
with him out on the lawn. He insisted on plastic golf balls with holes in them; I
liked the ones without holes: they went farther. “That’s not the important thing,”
he’d say. “Keep your head down and make a smooth swing.”
 Gramps’s patience was at its most formidable when he was answering a
question. This was a life–long virtue, and perhaps now a family tradition.
Sometimes it seemed the simpler the question, the longer the answer Gramps
would give. And Gramps never answered a question without at some point—and
sometimes at two or three points—using his signature phrase: “with respect to.”
Gramps wanted you to understand what he understood, and he wanted to
understand what he didn’t yet understand. “Let me understand this,” he would say,
beginning one of his answers, or answering one of someone else’s.
Gentle, generous, patient, impatient, tempered, respectful, understanding:
Gramps was a gentleman of the first rank. Who didn’t love him? He was constant.
He was gallant. I can hear him calling Gram: “Hey Ferdie. Hey Chick–a–dee.”
He was unpretentious. “A beer and a sangritch” was a feast to him, and he
loved the cocktail hour. If he was never much for laughter, he had a ready,
engaging smile, and he took pleasure in people. He was a natural: his manners
opened him to company and opened company to him.
Gramps knew when we were in trouble, when things weren’t going well, but
he never spoke of it. He just helped—by hoping, by looking on the bright side of
things. “Mark, old boy,” he’d say, and give me his hand.
I only saw him cry once, when Craig died, and he stepped up and put his St.
Christopher medal on Craig’s chest. He was angry and broken up. Both of those
feelings showed unmistakably in that gesture, but neither one was fully expressed,
and he stopped crying.
Mercedes
On the whole, my mother hasn’t liked my girlfriends. When I brought
Brenda home for dinner, my mother was on her best behavior. She doesn’t trust
actresses. She says they can’t tell when they’re onstage or off—which only shows
how little she knows about actresses, who spend more time offstage than on. Like
cars, which are parked 96% of the time, and people, who spend 90% of their time
indoors, actresses and actors spend most of their time unemployed. They know
when they’re on stage.
What actors and actresses learn how to do is what waiters and waitresses
learn how to do: conserve energy, present themselves as accommodating,
available, and friendly—but not too, and to no one in particular, and yet to
everyone. Someone has to take notice of such a skill, the skill of the unattached, of
unattachment. It is not detachment, and it’s as charming as the rising inflection of a
friendly voice.
My mother’s brother fell for an actress in college. Their marriage was brief.
He married and divorced two more actresses, and is now living with a third. He
told me to stay away from actresses.
After Brenda, I fell in love with Amy; before Amy and Brenda, there was
Mary, and Cheryl, and Chuck (Charlene). I had my first stage role in elementary
school, as the wife in Moliere’s Doctor in Spite of Himself. My biggest role before
college was Tom in The Glass Menagerie. Like Tom, I am more faithful than I
intend to be, and less faithful than I like to think I am. I don’t go to the nearest bar
anymore, but I will speak to the nearest stranger, especially if she’s handsome. I
am not trying to blow out any candles. I am trying to keep as many lit as possible
—not torches, but candles, votive candles, candles hardly big enough to read by.
As a sophomore in college, I played a lover in The Rimers of Eldritch—on
the same stage where, as a sixth-grader, I watched college students perform
Moliere’s Doctor. During the run of Rimers, I had an affair with Cheryl Pishney.
I’ve never been married, but I’ve fallen for as many actresses as my uncle
has married, and maybe a few more. And not just actresses.
In 1965, when Petula Clark sang “Downtown” on The Ed Sullivan Show, I
asked my mother for some paper so I could write Miss Clark a letter.
I fell in love with Ricki Lee Jones when she made her debut on Saturday
Night Live in 1979. She wore a red beret; I wore one at the time and was impressed
by the coincidence—or switched from wearing my blue beret to wearing a red one
on the strength of her showing.

One night, putting a manuscript of poems together, and thinking about

quitting graduate school, I saw Mercedes Reuhl on Bob Costas’s show, “Later.”
She had just won an Oscar. She was telling her pre-fame story, of wanting to quit
acting after ten years of no success, of wanting to drop out of graduate school, turn
her back on her profession—when she got the call. Someone had gotten sick; the
show went up in a week: could she do the part?
Now she was on Costas’s show because she’d won an Oscar. It struck a
responsive cord.
A day or two later, on June 25, 1991, I was heading back to New Jersey
from Manhattan, having just seen the debut of my friend Maro’s first feature-
length documentary. I had taken a couple copies of the Spring 1990 issue of
Raritan with me (it had two of my poems in it), one for Maro and one for someone
else I might meet.
Coming down on the subway from the upper West side, it struck me that if I
got off at 42nd Street, I could go to the theater where Reuhl was performing in a
Neil Simon play—it was about that time of night—tell her I had seen her on
Costas’s show, and give her the copy of Raritan. I got off the train and went up the
nearest street, looking for a playbill. I found one; I headed to the Booth Theater.
The play was just letting out. Out came Jack Klugman. I asked where the
stage door was. I gave my name there; “Merce” was called. I waited—knowing she
wouldn’t answer, since she had no idea who I was. Waiting there, too, were Irene
Worth, Sigourney Weaver (her head shaved for Alien III), and Judith Ivey. I had an
uncomfortable talk with Worth about Bernard Berenson, whose name I’d come
across in reading about Berenson that day.
I waited. They asked my name again; they called again. Out came Reuhl’s
dresser: Merce would be along. After another fifteen minutes, Mercedes came
down the stairs with Herb Gardner. I said my bit, haltingly, and gave her the copy
of Raritan, now inscribed to her. She thanked me, said goodnight to Gardner, and
went off to dinner with Worth and Ivey and Weaver.
I went to New Jersey, sorry not to be invited along.
When I got home, I wrote a poem from what I’d remembered Mercedes
telling Bob Costas. I hoped to hear from her (I’d put my address below the
inscription), so that I could send it to her.
An Actor Prepares

The t–shirt has it all wrong:

you begin as a producer,
then become a director;
then, finally, an actor.

You put on operas at the age of four.

You stage plays until you’re ten,
when some death in the family
or cruelty at school takes your voice away.
The church pours what it can
from its vessel of guilt
and sets a numbness there,
or a yearning, or a wound.

Make–believe has desperation in it,

reflex, instinct that lands feet first.
But it gets opposed to “real life”
the first chance a parent gets.

The bottom of childhood is cruel,

the surface of adolescence crude.
Disbelief begins to dissolve you,
especially when you love,

when you dance and can really love—

because nobody believes you,
trusts the one thing you know.
“It’ll pass,” they say.

But it doesn’t pass.

We pass them over and fall in love
with our grandparents
and our friends’ parents; fall in love

with the great English actresses,

Maggie Smith, Zoe Caldwell,
the Furies, the Fates, Antigone
and Clytemnestra, the Muses,

Memory above all. We go to school

and we audition all the time.
There’s always a face in the house
burying itself in a pair of hands:

it’s that ancient disbelief again.

And in our own eyes we dissolve
a little more each day. But the stage
has grappled us to it with hoops of steel.

It’s this vocation we feel

for what Shaw said would harrow us,
expose whatever we’re made of.
Someone says, “Get real,”

and the room we lived in no longer

revolves around us, alone in arias,
the grand gestures, the sad affairs,
the rages, the despair—

production gone and direction too—

our occupation gone.
Behind your back you say to your face
that what you’re doing is what you hate.

Everything moves out of place;

the great renunciation makes its play;
it braces and cuts and charms you:
you turn your back and walk away.

Your father knows someone in PR

who makes films for the company.
In a zig–zag way it parallels
the ten–year course you’ve been on,

and you resign yourself to it.

You’ll hate Christmas and New Year’s,
but you have the interview
to look ahead to. You’re thirty–one.

It’s the end of your life.

But then your soul calls upon your name,
calls from behind, prosperous, admirable,
like the story of The Tempest in the end

that rises up and floods the play

when the house is empty, empty the stage,
when the book is closed on the last page.
You cannot turn around to see who calls
or why—which isn’t fair, but true.
It’s your life come back; it’s you,
from that day to this, at work, loving
this lineless role, what you are, and do.
Emily
I had designs on Emily Mann, the playwright and director. We danced one
New Year’s Eve to Clarence Carter’s “Slip Away,” and we enjoyed each other.
She thought I was gay; I didn’t know she did.
It went like this: could she give me a ride somewhere? Yes, I said. We drove
off in the Princeton night. I couldn’t bring myself to say that I didn’t have a place
to stay, that I’d like to sleep with her. So I slept at my friend Bob’s that night
instead.
During my second attempt to have that night back again with Emily, I had to
settle again for an older man—her father, Arthur, the historian. At the time, I was
deciding (again) whether to quit graduate school. Professor Mann seemed quite
happy to listen. Neither of us was interested in the tour we were being given. We
sat down in the Green Room of the McCarter Theater. Emily, her son, and her
mother disappeared.
I asked Arthur about his work, his life as an academic. I asked him about
Page Smith.
“He’s a message-giver, isn’t he?” he said. “I’m not a message-giver. I’m a
historian. I never cared for message-givers.”
He asked me who my dissertation director was.
“Richard Poirier. He’s a message-giver too, isn’t he?”
“No,” I said.
I asked him what he thought I should do. He was very careful to say that he
would not, could not, give me advice.
“I give no one advice, not even my children.”
He would, however, make one “observation.” He paused and looked me in
the eye.
“Now this is an observation. It is not advice. It is that friends I have known
have had their greatest happiness when they’ve done something they had to do.”
And then he added: “I’m not talking about in friendship or love, now. I’m
talking about in work.”

Going Sideways
My nine years in graduate school can be summed up in a remark Richard
Poirier made to me near the end of it: “You always go sideways; you never go
forward.” He was talking about some writing I’d submitted, ostensibly a chapter of
my dissertation on Robert Frost. A few days later, I told Poirier I was not going to
finish. He said he thought I’d made the right decision.
“Good,” he said. “That’s a good decision. You have your own way of doing
things. I don’t think a logical extended piece of writing like the dissertation suits
you. It’s a useful critical tool for training professional literary critics who will go
on to train others. I believe that. But if I were in your situation—I don’t mean
yours specifically, but you know—I would teach in a private school, or a college
like Amherst, and you don’t necessarily need a doctorate for that. I’m here—I see
myself now—trying to save people from this terrible professionalism. College
students are, most of them, no good, and graduate students . . .”
I thought it was a good decision, too, until early December, when I changed
my mind again and chose to write a three-part dissertation—“not recommended,”
according to the department bulletin, “for those who wish to pursue a career in
academia.”
When I told my uncle what Poirier had said about my going sideways, he
told me that I could do two things with it. I could take it as a criticism, adjust
myself, and go forward, point by point. “Which you can do,” he said. “Or, you can
take it as an insight into your work and go sideways all the way.”
That felt right, there and then: once again, my uncle had shown me who I
was and what I could do; once again, he had rescued me.
When I told friends the story, they almost always stopped me to ask what
Poirier’s remark meant. At the very least, it meant that I was a digressive writer; at
the most, that I was hopeless at making an argument and organizing my thinking,
and would never make a good academic literary critic, one who would go on to
teach others how to be good academic literary critics. In that mode of writing,
clarity is achieved by saying one thing and then another, closely related thing.
Emerson does not do this. He says, “The only objection to Hamlet is that it
exists.” He doesn’t say anything more than that. Now, a candidate for a doctorate
in literature would be expected to rehearse the arguments made by those who came
before Emerson; that is, to write a history of the reception of Hamlet the play and
Hamlet the character as “problems.” That would entail an explanation of what
Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Coleridge, and William Hazlitt—to choose a few—had
said about Shakespeare’s play and its main character. It would also entail one’s
knowing, and being able to describe, what it means to speak of “a problem play.”
This would involve the critic in summarizing the arguments of earlier and
contemporary critics who had published on the question. And so on. Obviously, the
patience required to write such a critical history of Emerson’s sentence is in short
supply.
But there are on the order of 5,000 people in the world who would have the
patience to read such a history, and to say, after they read it, and in writing, where
you were right, where you were wrong, where you were confused, and where you
were clear but not thorough enough. And to show, in each case, why and how.
That’s what “going forward” means. That’s the game.
Leaving aside the question of whether it’s easier to make remarks like
Emerson’s than to explain remarks like Emerson’s (or essays like Poirier’s), it
strikes me that the clarity achieved in either case isn’t exhaustive or durable.
Clarity doesn’t travel well. Clarity is a dubious virtue: I’m not necessarily happy
when it comes between me and the thing I’m trying to see, but more often than not
I am, at least in passing. When Stan Brakhage shot a film through an ashtray, was
he being unclear? There’s no one-size-fits-all clarity. It’s achieved in all kinds of
ways, it’s unpredictable, and it can be a problem. Everyone knows these things
about it—and about a thousand other desirables, like “going sideways.” Positions
are more familiar than drifts.

Emerson says that every man is “an infinitely repellent orb.” Richard Poirier
was no exception, but he was also very attractive. If you have seen Albert Finney
in The Browning Version, Under the Volcano, Miller’s Crossing, and Erin
Brokovich, you have seen the only actor capable of doing justice to Richard
Poirier’s character, tones of voice, and appearance. That said, we knew very little
about him. He liked to eat in expensive restaurants and order the most expensive
wines. He liked Julia Childs. He liked cats. He liked students who came, as he did,
from the working class, passing through Amherst and Harvard along the way. He
taught his father how to read. He was in the army during World War Two. He liked
to gossip; his talks with his friend Lillian Hellman must have been something. He
lived with a man named Richard Santino, to whom he dedicated at least two of his
books, until Santino died of AIDS. He never spoke of him; he rarely talked of his
daily life.
I will not forget my first course with him, a seminar on Emerson. We were
to read and be prepared to discuss “Self-Reliance” on the first day of class. I read
the essay three times. By the time I went to class, I’d probably underlined half of it,
made notes in the margins of every page, and written several pages of thoughts on
it. Before Poirier—sitting at the table, the book opened before him, underlined and
noted in pencil—had spoken for ten minutes, I wondered if I’d read the same
essay, he’d found so many things in it that escaped me, things that seemed obvious
and true the moment he said them.
From January 1984 to May 1992, I lived, it seemed to me, more intensely in
Emerson’s pages and in Poirier’s reading of him than anywhere else. I’d read for
twelve hours and go to bed reluctantly. Emerson wrote: “The squirrel in going
from limb to limb makes the forest one tree.” Every great writer, and every great
critic, is a squirrel like that.
The closest bit of autobiography Poirier seems to have written is a single
sentence on Frost in what is now a coda to his 1977 book, Robert Frost: The Work
of Knowing. In it, Poirier says that Frost was a “mature seventeen all of his life,
and that’s better than some of us do.”
Like other English professors, Poirier had an office; unlike any other, he had
his office in a house. There he edited Raritan, met his classes, and held office
hours. He was seldom seen in Murray Hall, where the English Department offices
were. His aloofness and our therapy were of a piece. When I learned, while helping
to move a refrigerator, that several members of the junior faculty at Rutgers
discussed Poirier with their therapists, I was not surprised. I discussed him with
mine, and so did other graduate students, with theirs.
I dreamed of him, but never discussed those dreams with my therapist. In
one, he and I and Robert Frost are standing in a hallway, waiting to see Gertrude
Stein during office hours. In another, he is walking up ahead of Frost and me, and
Frost is telling me that he liked one line of one of my poems that Poirier published
in his journal. I ask Frost if he liked the other one, but he doesn’t answer.
Most of the other professors in the English Department at Rutgers worked
as hard and as steadily as Poirier, but he was harder to be a student of, and so
easier to be “infantilized” by (the idea was Dominic LaCapra’s, from a lecture he
gave at Rutgers), even though he was an anti-infantilizarian. He told me once that
he preferred the English system, where the student writes the dissertation and puts
it on your desk when it’s finished. I think I speak for some of my fellow graduate
students when I say that we didn’t go to graduate school for the English system.
We went to find our true parents; for our pains, we found ourselves adopted,
orphaned, and abandoned by turns.
Most of us got hung up, or hung out, when it came to the dissertation. I
know I did.
“Don’t write about the hands thing,” Poirier said, when I came back from
break, having passed my orals, excited to begin it.
“Okay,” I said.
“So what will you do for your dissertation?”
I had no idea. That had been my idea for four years.
“Come back again and we’ll talk about it.”
At two minutes, that was the longest visit I’d had with Poirier in four years.
It took six months to recover from.
I had no strong feeling about “the hands thing”—or, all I had was a strong
feeling, plus all the essays I’d written. I didn’t know what “the hands thing” was all
about. I had simply gotten an idea, probably in college, probably while reading
Keats, about the cropping up of hands and touch in poems. It struck me as odd that
poets should try to describe hands, and to ascribe to them more power than they
seemed to possess—the power of thought, for example.
In my life, touching is one of the few things I do that seems to require no
words. When making love, I don’t talk much. I use my hands for touching, feeling,
caressing, hugging, holding, stroking, parting, opening, inserting, withdrawing,
combing, tickling, outlining, lifting, squeezing, brushing back.
Keats’s image of the “globed peony” never struck me as a visual image, or
as an idea—the world in a flower. It struck me as a tactile image: the peony would
fit in your hand (I tested it in Ruth Steel’s garden); the peony asked to be taken in
hand. Similarly, when Keats in talking about “negative capability” supposed that a
billiard ball might have a feeling of its own roundness, I took him to mean that he
had at some point done something with a billiard ball that had nothing to do with
billiards: he’d picked it up off the table to feel it in his hand—its weight, its
smoothness, its roundness. Moments later, he’d had “the feel of not to feel it.”
As for his thinking that the ball might be sensible of its own roundness: it
was the kind of sensible remark my grandmother might make.
Poirier told me once in his office that I reminded him of someone he knew in
high school, a kid who could balance himself—this is what I remember—on his
little finger. Something about my work (in prose, at least) must have struck Poirier
as trivial, juvenile. Performances that had seemed original and striking to him at
first looked peculiar and superfluous later.

Artists and Models

Irena is a character in Henrik Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken
(1899). Ibsen modeled Irena on Camille Claudel, a sculptor, and the sister of the
Catholic writer Paul Claudel (of whom Auden wrote: “and they will pardon Paul
Claudel/Pardon him for writing well”). The last picture taken of Camille Claudel,
in 1931, when she was in an asylum, shows “her hands folded on her knees in
complete abnegation.”
Camille Claudel was one of Auguste Rodin’s models and lovers. Rodin was
one of Ibsen’s heroes. Rodin was Ibsen’s model for the sculptor in When We Dead
Awaken. Irena is his model.
Late in the play, Irena, knife in hand, yells at the sculptor: “You have
wronged me to the depths of my being.”
The sculptor says nothing.
“Yes, you! I showed myself without reserve for you to gaze at, and never
once did you touch me!”
The sculptor insists that he had to keep “a gap” between himself and his
model.
“If you had touched me,” Irena says, “I would have killed you.”
“I was an artist, Irena.”
That was the problem.

Loretta
Three months are a twenty dollar bill, but the long duration is rich. I move
forward to come in behind. But we forget about it, you think, the way a fall is
broken, the way the banks are rarely run on, or the constitution, or the bill of rights.
We belay each other. It is and always was a surprise to walk along or ride
and realize you loved me. It was the taste of chicory, or the bud that makes the
coffee Turkish.
Italy for us too might have been paradise, and I do want to go to Moscow
one day, my ambivalence intact, your independence in place.
No, we will work through them before we go.
Today you read of women spies and I watch tennis. I don’t get it, their
“coming in behind their shots.” It’s one of those days.
You drink tea and read the news spread all around you. You hope the
exterminator comes,
but your traps are set in case. There’s no other way right now.
Goodbye, you say, I’ll talk to you soon. Yes, and I will talk to you.

Catherine
Catherine the Gracious, Present and Historical, Empress and Peasant, Sky
and Earth, Soul and Body! Her letters made me want to tear myself down, speak
only ill of myself, ask what it is at all that she found worthy and lovable in me,
beyond her own self therein projected and become lovable.
She would have been mundane, but she wasn’t. If she had been, she
wouldn’t have asked why I didn’t ask for her, but would take me as I came (which
in any case I did). She bowled me over. I felt unable to fall in love, able barely to
stand in love, able surely to lie in love, on the bed, on the verge of sleep.
If I could not have lived without her, I would have asked for her. She told
me I had only to say the word and she’d come, like a prayer answered. But she
knew I had all kinds of ways of ducking out and defending myself. I had plans. I
had dreams. I had ideas about her being twenty-four in thirteen days. I had
knowledge of myself. I had just left, physically, someone I loved, whom I left in
other ways the day I fell in love with her. Every true thing began with an
experience of death, I said then. I lived backwards into now.
I heard her laughing at that. Why didn’t I ask for her? I didn’t. Was I so full
as not to want? Like Saul Bellow’s Henderson, “I want, I want, I want”; so, no, I
wasn’t. Did I want other than her? Yes. Was I resigned to emptiness? She begged
the question: when was I empty? I hardly felt empty. Was I convinced that I didn’t
need? Same: was I ever convinced otherwise? Yes and no. Needed what? Needed
her? Needed another? I wasn’t convinced that I needed her; I was convinced that I
needed others. Too afraid to need? Not that I was aware of. Afraid in the least to
need? No. I’ve never been afraid to ask for help when I needed it. Too balanced?
Didn’t compute. Balanced or not balanced. I wasn’t balanced. Too spread-out
across too many? She knew the answer was yes, and so did I. Why didn’t I ask for
her? It was a good question. I seemed to fall back first on the distinction between
being in love and loving. Then I thought, I haven’t been in love for a long time.
Once, twice? Then, that I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but something
surely was. I felt wrong— perhaps not empty, not full, but blocked, so that nothing
got in very far, very deep.
And then she asked for a letter, either of one word, “Come!” or two words,
“Beloved, come!” or three words, “Catherine, come home!”
From the mundane to the ultra- and extra-mundane, she lacked nothing. I
was about to say, left nothing to be desired. I didn’t. That seemed awful. She didn’t
leave nothing to be desired. That was where I stumbled. What would I do with my
desires if she and I made home together? She wanted to know that I would be
faithful to her, that she would have me all to herself. What did I want to know? It
was hard to consider, painful not to know, not to want to stop to say, not to want to
be held, to hold, to stay, to persevere, to think every limitation somehow
exceptional to me—the arrogance!—to feel dead when stopped, suffocated to be
married, to be committed. I liked so much to spread out all over my bed.
For the first time she told me of her other lovers. You make me jealous of
the Taos man who tells you “everything” you’ve always wanted me to say to you,
“simple and blessed utterances of love.” But I already knew that there were men in
love with you, waiting on you, wanting from you; men, I suppose, who are in the
same relation to you as you are to me. So how do you answer them? What do you
tell yourself about them? I have corresponding lovers I could make you jealous
with, but you know this. You don’t know anything more mundanely, precisely,
about mine than I know about yours, but we both know.
And so I want to know how we look, plainly, to you. What do you suppose
we would do? Get married? Then move in together? Then, five months later, you
would have a baby? Where is this home you speak of? The prospect closes the
world down for me, at first; then—and I am not sure if as a reflex of guilt—it
opens the world up for me, makes it simple and blessed; then, I consider Loretta’s
pain and anger, and my parents’ shock.
These are the thoughts of a thirty-eight year-old man who feels twenty
inside, who shudders at the mess he is and has made, and is telling you about it in
uncertain terms; who thinks, if he were detailed, concrete, and specific about his
life, to whom could he show his face? It is a confession of sin, and thoroughgoing;
of lies, manipulation, and deceit; and I want it to end, daily I want it to end, but not
today—as Saint Augustine said.
And you represent, in this regard, a chance to end this life I lead and begin
anew, to quit, once for all—I want so badly the once for all—the zig-zagging
interruptedness, the loose conduct, the evanescent pleasure-seeking, the indulgent
forgetful oblivion, the got-to-go-on-ness. But I sleep at night. Prometheus is my
man: the birds tear at his liver and entrails all day, and the night restores him.
I listened to a speech by Ralph Nader the other day. He said that the pursuit
of happiness will be the pursuit of justice. Justice is what I want; what I have,
though, is justification, self-justification. Everything I do I have a way of justifying
to myself; if not, I wot not of it. I hide what I cannot justify. A friend yesterday
asked me what I did the day before: I couldn’t remember. I am just stuffing my
holes and running things through. I hear the line from the end of Rilke’s “The
Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “. . . for there is no place, none/That does not see you.
You must change your life.” And I hear Emerson’s, “Put a solid wall of sleep
between one day and the next.”
Here I am, Catherine. My home under the volcano. It is creepy,
uncomfortable. It has been for a long time. Decisions terrify me, so I make lots of
them, and let none—justifiable, mind you, because of the way the world is—stick.
Take all comers. Passive as hell. Open.
Open! Open for business. You want me. That’s so nice—for me. What did
Goethe write? “If you love me, what is that to me?” You can have me, on my
terms, which I will be silent about until you need to know. And then the lamb’s a
lion. Purpose, plan, goal, work, are you kidding? In this shit hole, this blizzard of
opportunity? I fuck anything that moves. I fuck myself. I fuck up.
And I get a lot out of being fucked up—you, for example. I get your
electrifying intelligence on the page, your magnanimous energy in bed, your
admirable discipline in the day; I get your wrestling with the angels at night, your
loveliness and warmth and promise.
And I don’t get it.

You confront me as Apollo does: “Make yourself over for me.” Terrible
words. And you know you catch me, have me, on the verge of saying “Yes!”—
even for all the wrong reasons, if there are wrong reasons (that is inauthentic
skepticism).
Bear a little while longer with my induration? I am fit to burst. I am getting
so tired of playing with childish, mannish things. But I hate to lose them, hate to
see them go. I have a little faith, but not as much as Emerson, who knew that when
the half-gods go, the gods arrive. You arrived early, I’m afraid, ahead of schedule.
I’m still getting rid of things; I haven’t started packing what I’m taking with me.
Where are we going?
Concretion to end with: doing yoga with you on my bed. I keep thinking of
that. You were so beautiful and powerful, and such a good teacher. My therapist
said, “Why didn’t you want to do it again the next day?” I said, “I don’t know.
Takes too much time. It won’t be the same, it won’t be different, it’ll just be
repetitive.”

Elizabeth
I’ve been thinking about her thighs all day, the weight of them, the space in
between. They swim out, they become part of a statue. She’s fertile, her gardenias
grow, the weeds beneath her porch thrive, her black cats love her.
She told me once, “I love your cock.”
I was as embarrassed as she was surprised that she had said it. She told me
to hold myself. She said she liked it when I did that, and then she put her mouth on
me. Each of us tried to watch and not to watch the other. We couldn’t put ourselves
in words.
Thighs and calves—part of our restlessness takes solid form there.

“I like to fuck,” she told me by the window, going down. She wore shorts
that day.
We’d say next to nothing when we’d make love.

“Did you call because you wanted to fuck?”

That was why I called, to say: “I wanted to fuck you so much today.”
Instead: “I was thinking of you, I guess.”
 She told me she’d dreamed of chocolate turtles with the name Emerson
stamped on the back.
“I read The Interpretation of Dreams,” she said, “and I don’t remember him
saying that one of the main functions of dreams was to protect sleep.”
I said that the dream I couldn’t remember protected my sleep this morning,
because with all the resolve to get up and write it down, I went back to sleep to
have it instead.
It was no dream of her. I don’t have fantasies, I tell her; she never believes
me. We had one together the other night—or she did, and I was written in. So I
played the part, and we had fun. I told her so the next day.
“The next time,” she said, “you can do the talking.”
Aby
I talked about her in class yesterday, how she was saying her poems still and
glad to have them by heart. Of course I didn’t mention her by name, and of course
I hoped to have her serve as an example (we were reading lots of poems then). I
think the students were touched more by my saying that she felt she’d failed than
by anything else.
I cared about Aby, and took no pleasure in hearing her call herself a failure.
She is not. She is beautiful inside and out, rich in imagination and awareness,
painfully open, painfully wary. She feels the stupidity of the world and registers it
too precisely on her heart.
And she caught me in more or less the same condition: feeling myself a
failure, unpersuaded by myself as a teacher and by teaching as a career, unhappy
with the way students are set up by administrations and departments, angry with
what I’m paid, frustrated as a writer, melancholy as a boyfriend, and all but
incapable of making my way in anything else. So why should I be welcome to my
useless despair and she not to hers? She was, and I admit to taking solace in her
company.
These are not entirely personal failings and feelings. They are endemic,
pandemic, epidemic, in greater and lesser degrees, to those of us who do not see
making money, “growing a business,” raising a family, networking, or selling
oneself as living branches on the tree of life. Emerson describes the feeling
in his 1842 lecture called “The Transcendentalist.” It’s the Bartleby Syndrome: the
feeling that we would work terribly hard—if there were any valuable work to do;
and, because there isn’t (but of course there is), we will wait, even perish if we
have to. That’s the extremity of the feeling as it struck me more than ten years ago,
and I guess it’s still persuasive to me now.
We are all temp workers and we are all subject to change. But there is
change and there is change. When the firm of Goldman, Sachs makes $2.14 billion
in profit in one year, and then divides that profit among its 200 partners—instead
of each employee getting a $300,000 bonus—there is something evil about
business as usual. And almost everyone is doing business as usual.
That I sit in front of the TV for three solid hours, then, doesn’t surprise me.
It gnaws at me, but it fails to surprise me. And every time I watch Homicide, I
think of Aby in Baltimore and hope to see her in a crowd scene—my former
student, and extra in a crowd scene.

Students
“Why is every fucking thing the real world except teaching?”
—Sean Connery in Just Cause

After eleven years of teaching English composition and literature to

undergraduate and graduate students, I doubted I could do my own assignments. I
was no longer sure of being logical, rational, rigorous, sympathetic, organized, or
careful; no longer confident of any words, of any rules, of any methods, either for
teaching or for writing. I couldn’t use the word “development” or the word “clear”
with any conviction. That went for the words “thesis,” “argument,” “concrete,”
“specific,” “experiential,” and “organized,” too.
Between 1987 and 1998, I made hundreds and hundreds of comments on
student papers. Most students didn’t want them, and yet most students said they
wanted them. The more I made, the less they responded to them. Making
comments and reading comments takes time, and time is what we had none of.
I tried circling or highlighting one good idea in a paper. Students felt
shortchanged. I tried marking typos, correcting grammar, revising sentences,
rearranging paragraphs. When I found a “thesis statement” buried in the middle of
page three in a five-page essay, I would write, “Why don’t you start with this?”
But I wouldn’t have had time to read the revised versions of twenty-five five-page
papers even if the students had had time to revise. They didn’t have time to do the
first draft—which was in most cases the only draft, and so by default the final
draft. And when they saw their final drafts marked as though they were no more
than notes for a rough draft, they got discouraged.
“The writing process” makes cowards of us all.

For ten years, students in my classes at Rutgers, Mills, San Francisco State,
and the University of San Francisco accused me of many things—even,
occasionally, of “making them think.” They accused me of talking slowly, dressing
poorly, not washing my hair, boring them. They said that I was disorganized and
digressive. They told me that I didn’t explain things, myself included; that I
changed things, chiefly the syllabus.
They accused me, above all, of not telling them what I wanted.
When I told them that I wanted them to be “personal” in their writing, they
asked if they could use the pronoun “I.” They then proceeded to retail slogans
about freedom, independence, and individuality. When I then told them that,
instead of having written a personal response, they had resorted to commonplaces,
formulas, cliches, and dead metaphors, I learned that these terms were dead to
most of them.
We all at times must think we’re different. It’s a way of assuring ourselves
that we’re real, that we exist, that we have rights, that we’re not wrong, that there
should be at least one of us in the world. And, physically speaking, even identical
twins are not identical. In a community of three hundred people, not a single
person looks anything like another one. (Often, though, the first thing said when
two people meet is how one looks like someone the other knows.) Bodily, each of
us is unique, unmistakable—even if mistakes are made and identities confused.
But hear someone say something—you’ve heard it a thousand times before.
There are linguists who say that practically every sentence spoken is a new
sentence, never uttered before. But most conversations seem like most other
conversations, and it’s easy to suppose that nobody has said anything original for a
thousand years. Everything is refrain and return.
Still, I can’t have your headache, you can’t have mine. The gulf between
persons is absolute and unbridgeable. In unison, my students insisted on their
uniqueness. “Everybody’s different.”
I discouraged such monotonous difference. I tried to get my students to see
that they were demonstrating how the things uniting us are stronger and more
numerous than the things dividing us. I could never get them to take their
differences seriously, and to admit that each person, each culture, each thing, is
different: that an abyss separates every one from every other, every me from every
you, every this from every that. They understood that, and wanted no part of it.

I once asked my students in First-Year Composition at Mills College to

write an essay on how they learned to read and write. First, I asked them as a group
to make a list of the rules they were taught to write by. All of the rules seem to be
derived from the manner children are taught to adopt in the company of adults: to
be seen, not heard.
And why not? Most students would rather be seen than heard, having been
trained to sound like this:
Rules for Writing
1. Always have an introduction, body, and conclusion.
2. Always have a thesis. Make sure the thesis is stated in the
introduction.
 3. In an opening paragraph, start broad and end with the thesis
statement.
4. Never use a sentence like, “In the following essay I will ...”
5. Be clear and concise in topic paragraphs.
6. Always have a topic sentence.
7. Always write in ascending order of importance.
8. Don’t get too personal in essays.
9. Don’t write an essay in first person.
10. Don’t use “you” to address your reader.
11. Speak formally in an essay.
12. Never use contractions or informal speech.
13. Never use slang terms in writing.
14. Use at least one quote per paragraph.
15. Never begin a sentence with “but,” “because,” or “and.”
16. Do not start sentences with “so” or “ever.”
17. Never start a story with a quote or dialogue.
18. Sentences should not be longer than three lines.
19. Always have at least five paragraphs in an essay.
20. Always have smooth transitions between paragraphs.

There are seventeen more, but enough is enough.

No wonder so many college professors now promise credit—anywhere from
10% to 20% of the final grade—for showing up. I quoted Woody Allen: “Ninety
percent of success is showing up.” Not one student, on hearing this, asked that I
change the distribution accordingly, so that written work would count for ten
percent of the final grade and “attendance and participation” for ninety. Most
students already equated coming to class with participating in it.
 As a rule, students forget how to talk when they write. They think of writing
as something other than talking. It isn’t their fault. Perhaps they don’t think of
writing as a form of communication at all. They think of it as a set of rules, the
purpose of which is to give the teacher what he or she wants. It follows that school
for them is neither a place of study nor a place of instruction, but a place where
you get “the right answers” or you “bullshit” your way around them.
“At first I wasn’t going to say anything,” a student without his paper
explained to me one day, “because I figured if the rest of the class did the
assignment, one of two things was possible. Either they got the assignment and I
didn’t, or they were bullshitting and I didn’t want to bullshit.” I suggested there
might be other possibilities. “Could be,” he said.

One of my habits was to begin class by saying, “Are there any questions or
comments?” (In ten years, maybe twelve questions and six comments.) One day,
on coming into the room, I knew that I wouldn’t have to ask that question.
Four students had formed a group; they were talking to each other. They had
their books open—not their psychology textbooks, not their nursing textbooks.
They were gesturing with their $1 Dover editions of William James’s Pragmatism,
and they didn’t stop, as usual, when I came in.
“We’re English majors,” one of them said, “and we don’t know why we’re
reading a philosophy book in this course. This is an English course, right? It’s
required. But we don’t know exactly what it is. I mean, what’s ‘Junior Seminar’?
What are we supposed to learn in here for our major? What’s the goal of this
course?”
Another person in the group spoke up.
“I mean, Pragmatism isn’t exactly a story. I’m a drama major, with a minor
in English, and in the other courses I’ve taken, there’s like a theme that connects
the stories. But I don’t see a theme here. It’s like, Pragmatism, and then
Coriolanus, which is Shakespeare, and I like Shakespeare, but this isn’t one of my
favorites of his, I mean I probably wouldn’t pick it, but that’s okay, and then
there’s the Cavalier poets or whatever, and Maud Martha, and I just don’t see what
the point is, why we’re reading this stuff. And yeah, I don’t know what ‘Junior
Seminar’ is either, just that it’s required.”
Hadn’t I written a syllabus? Hadn’t I, on the first day of class, read it aloud
and asked if it were clear, if there were any questions about it? Hadn’t I, the second
day, gone over the syllabus again?
There we were, three weeks into the course, and I was being asked to “go
over” what I thought I had “covered” the first two days of class.
How to respond?
“Like pragmatism,” I said, “‘Junior Seminar’ is hard to define. Its definition
depends on the temperaments, interests, and specialties of the professors who teach
it. One colleague is committed to theory, and so she treats the course as an
introduction to various theories of literature—how it’s written, how it’s read, what
its relations are to social, political, and economic structures, and so on. Another
professor treats it as an advanced composition course, a workshop in expository
writing. Another, a specialist in Renaissance literature, is finishing a book on the
institution of marriage in Shakespeare’s late plays; that’s why there are three of
Shakespeare’s late plays under the heading ‘Required Texts.’”
I was losing them. I tried again.
“The English Department hasn’t decided what Junior Seminar is supposed to
accomplish. Any university English Department is really three departments:
literature, composition, and creative writing. ‘Comp’ can be further divided: core
comp, business and technical writing, and remedial or developmental writing. So
can creative writing, into fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. And so can
literature, into theory and literature.
“There’s no consensus as to what Junior Seminar is. I was given no
guidelines. There is no pre-set syllabus, common to all sections. Each professor has
to choose according to his or her interests, habits, and concerns. As for me”—and
here I reached for the piece of paper I was required to hand out on the first day—“I
tried to say what this course is about in this syllabus.”
Nothing.
So I tried to say yet again, in different words, what the “goal” of the course
was—but without using that word. At some point during my new definition, I
broke off.
“As for a goal or goals, I’ve never had a goal in my life. I don’t know what a
goal is.” Most of the students laughed at this. When I told the story to a
colleague later, she said she couldn’t believe I’d say such a thing, by which she
meant she didn’t think I should have. It undermined my authority, and it
undermined hers.
After half an hour, I still hadn’t answered the other two questions.
My students wanted one-sentence answers. They wanted to know what I
wanted.
I turned to William James. I suggested that we were right then “doing” what
James was “talking about.” I said that James once defined pragmatism as “a
method for conducting discussions.” I said that he discussed the problem of
definition in Pragmatism, and I asked the students to turn to the passage in which
he did, in the chapter we were supposed to be discussing that day.
Only five of the seventeen students had done the reading—which didn’t
surprise me. Most students—maybe most people—read for two reasons: to confirm
what they already know and to see what happens next.
 I closed the book.
“Don’t you,” I asked hopefully, “want to define for yourselves what you’re
doing here—not as majors satisfying requirements, but as persons?”
The silence was heavy.

That night, I called another professor. He wasn’t home. I left a message

saying that I was in the middle of reading twenty-five student papers, close
readings of a passage from James’s Pragmatism. I said that the meanings of words
and phrases were leaving me; that I wasn’t sure what the old terms meant anymore.
I told him I was afraid to make comments.
“You give students A’s as long as they came to class on time,” I said. “I
think I’ll do the same.”
Some students hated to have their grades inflated, to get an A where they
expected a B-, but they were rare. More commonly, students disliked me for
assigning them too low a grade. I gave them a B-; they deserved a D; they expected
an A; I got called into the Dean’s office.

I liked to think that all students were moderately gifted, but many were not
—not as students, anyway. They would come to my office to talk about their
papers. What they would tell me was always better than what they’d written down
and turned in.
“But I got A’s in high school,” they said.
“Well,” I wanted to say, “you shouldn’t have. And you shouldn’t have been
taught that everything you read is a story and everything you write should have
five paragraphs.”

After class one day, I found myself walking behind three of my students.
They were talking about how to study for the exam.
“I suppose we should look at the passages he talked about in class,” one
said.
“Yeah, but which ones? He moves around so much. I mean, it’s whatever
floats his boat.” Yes, I improvised. I don’t think I ever left a classroom
satisfied with my performance. I left with things I meant and never meant to say
unsaid, and not simply because I didn’t write the lectures I gave. I admired
professors who wrote their lectures, but I admired those who didn’t more. I wanted
to know my material so well that I had it in me. But I never knew just what I was
going to say, and never quite said what I had to say the way I wanted to say it.
That may not be the practice of most professors, but it is probably the
experience of most people.
My students wanted me to know what I was going to say. They wanted me
to have what a high school teacher whose class I visited called “Sets” and
“Closes.” (Instead, I had what the same teacher called “Middles.”) They wanted
me to say where I was starting from and where I’d end up. They wanted me to
adhere to the standard formula for expository writing: “Tell them what you’re
going to tell them, tell them, then tell them you told them.”
Most writing, and most talk, doesn’t stick to that formula. And the students
who said they knew how to stick to that formula promptly demonstrated that they
did not.

What my students knew best was that nobody had any time. Many of them
worked 20-, 30-, or 40-hour weeks, on top of which they took at least fifteen hours
of classes, often eighteen, sometimes twenty-one.
“The normal academic load for undergraduates,” the university catalogues
told them, “is fifteen units per semester.”
 They stopped reading at that point. I would read them the next sentence on
the first day of class.
“Two hours of preparation for each hour of regular class work should be
expected.”
I told them I expected them to do at least that much preparation. They
laughed.
Later, when they asked me what I wanted, I forgot to remind them: two
hours of study for every hour of instruction.

“So you’re saying you want just our opinion?”

I don’t know how many times I heard that question.
“No,” I would say, “that’s not what I’m saying. And there’s no ‘just’ about
it. It’s a hard thing to have, your own opinion. What you usually have is someone
else’s opinion, someone else’s courage, someone else’s conviction.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want you to stop asking that question. Where did you learn to ask it?. I’m
not here to tell you what I want. I’m not here to relieve your stress. I’m not here to
set goals, make points, list causes, tell you the questions and give you the
answers.”
“Then what are you here for?”

Two weeks before the end of one semester, a student who had struggled
through everything we did in that class raised her hand.
“You mean,” she said, in the throes of discovery, “there’s a meaning behind
every word on the page?”
Teaching, with a few exceptions like that, was not rewarding work.
Accordingly, my students rarely thanked me for it.
Evaluations

I feel that maybe his lectures can be monogonous.

The instructor allows everybody to get involved in class and I suppose

he should percevere with this. He seems slightly philosophical to me.

His personality is very personable and I could see that he really spent
time on preparing, but sometimes he starts to babble. Maybe he could
watch it a little bit.

He seemed to know what he was talking about but no one else did. He
was very confusing and frequently went off on different subjects as he
lectured. He was very difficult to follow.

Our class doesn’t respect him because of the insecure look when he
first started teaching. If he could be more energetic, assertive and
enthusiastic, he could be better because he seems to know what he’s
talking about.

He wants to teach, but is unable. The discussion at first are too deep
causing them to be ambiguous.

The reading wasn’t too interesting for the class, which in turn
probably make the course better.

I would like to tell Mr. Scott to stop talking in circles.

 The instructor, I feel, is a very intelligent person, maybe sometimes a
bit too intelligent.

I don’t know if he’s super–intellectual or not very smart.

Joni Mitchell, 1994

Dear Cliff,
    David sent me your wonderful “A Seventies Girlhood (Joni Mitchell and the
History of My Sadness).” At the risk of putting you off at the start, let me say that I
want to marry Joni Mitchell.
    It hurt, a few years ago, when I read that she liked to hang out in video arcades,
where she met her current husband. Do you feel all the ways in which this could
hurt? Video games! Joni Mitchell? But why not? She could be alone there,
anonymous, most of her body framed—as a man’s is by a urinal in a public
restroom. And, as someone said on a 60 Minutes segment on video games, they’re
the perfect metaphor for the twentieth century: they’re electronic and you can
never win.
    So there’s Joni—single, alone, uncourted, unsparked—sparking and courting the
screen. My first thought was, why didn’t I live there and love video games? Surely
Joni, weighing the beauty and the imperfection, would have fallen in love with me,
and we would’ve gotten married, and I’d be crawling in at her mouth and at her
Magdalena—since my search for love, it don’t seem to cease. But this coyote was
in graduate school, in New Jersey, and I had only her music—but what an only,
what a music.
    You ask, “Is there, for everyone, a certain kind of music that doesn’t ever get
used up?” The first thing that struck me in your piece was how good it is to see
Joni’s lyrics quoted, and to feel the melody rush in and make them swing, but
without taking away from them a certain posture they have in standing there on
their own. In re-reading, your bravery struck me—taking this on yourself, this love
of Joni Mitchell and its attendant circumstances: your brother’s death, your
depression, the imputation of being stuck in a juvenile contortion.  
    The first time I thought of writing about Joni was after I heard “Chinese Cafe”
on Wild Things Run Fast. Then I heard Michelle Shocked’s song about Alaska,
“Anchored Down in Anchorage.” That made me think of “Song for Sharon.” All
three look back past marriage and children to “the birth of rock ‘n’ roll days.”
They’re beautiful songs of longing and regret, sisterhood and fellowship,
discomfort and dissatisfaction, love and melancholy.
    The best kind of history, stories of our passions giving life to the world at the
expense, almost, of passion for life—deepest passion, deepest life.
    I don’t know why my high-school girlfriends haven’t credited Joni Mitchell
(even though we came to her a little later) with teaching them more than their
teachers did, and with making us boys just a little less brutal. I suspect that Joni
taught a generation of girls, like your Marie, how to think and feel about love;
made poets, artists, and musicians out of them; and, perhaps more important, gave
voice to their melancholy, confusion, loneliness, and desire.
    I’m speaking, too, of my inside girl, saying what feels true to me now, in the
years of loss. My friend John and I would sit in our small college dorm room in
two straight-backed chairs, a trunk between us, a bong, cigarettes; in our laps,
clipboards with a quarter-inch of unlined white paper; on the turntable, Hejira, our
muse.
    As you say, “It helps to be so many years behind her. But doesn’t it hurt
sometimes, too?” Sometimes, listening to it, “Hejira” seems to say everything I
ever wanted to say in a poem, and nothing I could ever have said. I want it played
at my funeral.
    I would be the reel-to-reel Joni’ s getting it on with, on the other hand, and so
this album never fails to encourage, comfort, and remind me how useful beauty is.
In this mood, I’m like Joni’s instrument, her open strings, her open tunings,
prisoner of her fine white lines.
    On the endless subject of Hejira: when was the last time you looked closely at
that cover? Joni’s not only the black man on the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless
Daughter. She’s the woman smoking on the cover of Hejira with the heavily
tumescent penis sticking out of the shoulder of her highway cape. I know it’s her
other hand, her wrist, but I saw it first as a cock, and can’t fail to see it now as an
erection so energetic it wants to turn around and do it again, ventral vein bursting.
In this reading, the bracelet on her left wrist isn’t a bracelet but a head. It’s Sticky
Fingers unzipped.
    Did you read that piece about her in the NYT when Night Ride Home came out?
In it, she talks about changes she made when she turned Yeats’s “Second Coming”
into her “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Her reason for one change took me. She
said she could never imagine “passionate intensity” being used in a derogatory
sense. So, instead of “the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” she says, “And
the worst are full of passion / Without mercy.” I like the translation, but not the
reason. The only other time I felt embarrassed for her was when she told the story
about Van Gogh on Miles of Isles.
    I just listened to “Hejira,” the song you quote a snatch from. As I sang along
with the lyrics in hand, I thought of Tom in The Glass Menagerie, his last
monologue, when he speaks of strangers; of Beckett, “Between the forceps and the
stone”; and of Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October.”
    “In search of love and music my whole life has been.”
Richard Howard
As I said to Celeste after the first time Richard and I spent the evening
together: he didn’t make a pass at me, but I felt like making one at him. He is at
once alien and familiar, direct and indirect, generous and proprietary, calming and
unnerving. It’s that rapidity about him at close range. He does not seem to be 64
years old; he does not seem lonely or needy. Why, I keep asking myself, why in
the world should he take an interest in me? Why should he call me on Saturday
night to see if I am all right, if I am weathering the storm? Rick said that there
really is no place in our society for relations other than erotic or familial. Where do
older men and younger men fit in? What sort of relation is that?
In the last ten years, who have I been closest to in the most ideal relation?
Bob Welch, Richard Poirier, David Kalstone, Ron Christ, Fred Main, Barry Qualls,
Alicia Ostriker—all gay, all men, all professors, with the exception, in two
categories, of the last named. And now Richard Howard. And before that, for a
brief spell, Willard Spiegelman. (I hardly count the very brief liaison over Bob
Fosse with Paul Bertram.) I seek the assurance, the guidance, the confidence, the
conversation, wisdom, support, and confirmation of these men, these older men,
who are gay.
My early life was filled with older boys and girls and the desire to be with
them, to be one of them, to be included, acknowledged, invited, brought along.
This desire extended to my parents’ friends, the adults. It was by bartending at my
parents’ parties that I got to hear their conversation, see the way they held their
drinks and not their liquor, see the way they carried themselves. I wanted to be
included there, too.
I found my friends’ parents more interesting than my friends: George
Byram, horse trainer and writer; Tom O’Rourke, the man who introduced my
parents to each other, and would come over to the house at lunch and drink with
my mother; the parents on our block. I always wanted to be older than I was, and I
suppose I studied to be old, or not to seem young.
And then there were my teachers: Miss Bullock in third grade, Miss Hanson
in fifth, Mr. Barry in sixth; Ron Morostica and Gary Jensen in seventh; Brewster
Boyd, Ed Connors, Dick Coyle, in ninth; Ralph Waldo Remmes, Mark Gray, Bob
Wells, Mike Prevedel, Dave Jonas, Dick Schneider, and Carol Abrahms, in tenth,
eleventh, and twelfth. In college at CU there were Fischer–Galati, David Gross,
Gerda Norvig, Reg Saner, Gordon Mewes, Aaron Sayvetz, Walter Weir, Bruce
Bashoff, Will York, and Walter Simon, who gave me one-on-one tutorials in
poetry. All of these relationships were and are governed by different tacit
agreements and assumptions, conflicts and crises, pleasures and punishments,
offerings and concealments. My life has been extremely rich in this regard. So to
say that I have sought surrogate mothers and fathers seems too simple. To say that
I have put others in loco parentis seems too easy. And yet there are these two
constants, erotic and intellectual: older men and older women, the craving for
contact with them, physical contact, oral and aural, literary. The need for this
pleasure and, I suppose, for the insecurity that goes with it, this need to be
validated by someone older than I am and someone smarter, finer, better, richer,
than I am—someone who has more and is more than I am, who will tell me, in so
many words, that I am bright, open, handsome, good, gifted, capable, honest, and
bad; strange, odd, surprising, morbid, slow, numb, fucked up, frightening, funny,
inspiring.
No one person could satisfy these needs; no one sex could; no single sort of
eros could; no one age, no one face or body or voice, hand or head of hair, touch or
taste. I am bent in some sense to multiply rather than deepen my experiences, to go
sideways and never forward, to be unaccountable and unaccounted for, to fail at
the edge of success, to quit in the middle of things and start in the same place; to
confuse, to slow up and never be patient, to make haste slowly, to be a burden to
growth, to crave and be filled too quickly, to be critical and never critical enough.
Richard called me one day to make sure I didn’t feel “bullied” by him,
because he would “hate that” if I did. He said there were younger people like me
who felt “overpowered” by his “highly overdeveloped manner,” and he didn’t want
me to feel this way. “The awkward moment on the phone the other night, when X
answered and asked who I was—I being perhaps X to her—made me think you felt
you had to conceal something from me.” (“X” was Loretta.)
I said I did not at all feel bullied by him, and that I was sorry to have caused
him any awkwardness. He said it was sweet of me to show concern and said again
that he wanted our intimacy to be unbroken. He toyed with the root of a word at
some point, one I can’t now recall, having to do with covering over—but he didn’t
like it and found another. It was a great relief to clear that up and have him, at the
end of the conversation, call me “dear” again.
I told him I had seen about an opening for an acquisitions editor at the
University of Nebraska Press. I asked him if he knew their translation and literary
studies series. He said he was doing something for them: would I like him to talk to
them for me? I said yes. “But then you should be in Lincoln and I wouldn’t like
that.” He then told a story about his visit there years back. A woman, meeting him
for the first time and unaware of his accomplishments, asked him where he lived.
“New York.”
“Oh, New York City!” she said, “Where?”
“I live downtown,” Richard said, “roughly in the middle of downtown, in a
place called Greenwich Village.”
“Oh,” she said, “you must find that awful, with all those queers living
there.”
 “It’s mother’s milk to me,” Richard replied.
“And after that she kept her distance. And then she heard me read!”
I told him that I looked forward to hearing him “in voice” that night. I had
yet to hear him read. He said he had chosen some things that would be pleasing,
entertaining. And they were. “Like Most Revelations,” the poem about Isadora
Duncan putting off three advances by D’Annunzio, was hilarious and wise. He
then read a kind of elegy for a poet, a former student of his who died not long ago,
in the form of a recommendation to Sappho, the tenth muse. That, too, was
strangely moving.
There is in Richard’s poetry, as in his conversation and company, an often
startling and severe detachment, a bluntness that seems crude, but whose reference
or touchstone is not so much in manners as in “good form”—as when he told
someone that he “insisted on promptitude.” Hence the analogue for Richard’s
poetry is friendship, the forms of friendship, but friendship as an aristocratic,
intellectual, sybaritic affair, dependent on words kept, forms observed, gestures
displayed, reciprocities maintained.
He introduced me the whole night as “my friend Mark Scott.” He did not
name me as a poet, did not say that he had printed one of my poems, that I had just
had an essay accepted, that I had studied at Rutgers and taken a doctorate there—
none of that plebeian detailing. Above all was my standing as his “friend.”
It struck me that night as we left the restaurant that Richard may lack
friends. He has, as Rick remarked, many people wanting him to do things for them
—publish them, recommend them, back them, connect them, blurb them, teach
them, critique them, approve them. But does he have as many friends in that
group? He must, in fact, overpower more people than he pleases, something I saw
happen one night when he spoke on a panel about translation. There were audible
recoils from his words, audible gasps of disbelief at his behavior toward David
Ferry, and toward the absent (like Jerome Rothenberg), whose names he named.
Perhaps he sensed in me the day we met at the Modern Language
Association convention someone who admired and knew him for his highly
overdeveloped manner, for his genius, but who spoke to him with an appropriate
lack of ceremony. I was not afraid of him. I introduced myself. He said I should
call him; I called him. I sent him poems. I took his editing of “Drosophila” without
defensiveness. I was open to him. Perhaps—and perhaps I deceive myself.
It will remain a wonder to me for as long as our friendship lasts why he
decided that I might be his friend, that he might invite me into his life. He certainly
remarked the difference in our ages as one circumstance that might lead me to feel
bullied and overpowered by him, that might lead me to conceal myself from him.
And it was telling to me that, in his poem about the poet who died, he spoke of
how she confided her private life only “to her poems.” Richard also said that she
died just as they were about to become close, lasting friends. Richard keeps a line
between art and life, likes life to be life and art to be art—to put it crudely. He
wanted this woman to feel that she could talk to him about her life and preserve her
art for other conversations, other burdens—the idea being that, as he put it, his
great aim in writing is to entertain, and what sort of entertainment is it to listen to
someone howl in the desert?
At a certain point, Richard worried about the expense to the New School of
the meal for a dozen people. He had ordered only an appetizer. He thought, too,
that we might end up paying for our own meals, which he said would be fine,
assuring me with his hand that he would take care of mine, and urging me to order
the duck fritte. When I ordered the brook trout with a house salad, he said,
“Smart.”
Later, when I said that Allen Ginsberg was “smart,” he winced. “Well, he
used to be, but for the longest while he’s been reading the same people again and
again, the same authors and only his friends. It’s too bad.” Then I told him the
story Gerda told me about taking the Blake class at Naropa with Ginsberg. When it
was over, she asked Allen what the difference he was so adamant about was
between the University of Colorado and Naropa.
“At Naropa,” he said, “we fuck our students.”
Gerda replied, “Well, then, there’s no difference, because we do too.”
“Oh, lovely,” Richard said. “They both got good lines.”
This made an appropriate end to the evening, as we were then at the mouth
of the Path station on Sixth and Ninth. A half a block back, Richard had spotted
something on the sidewalk and stopped.
“A dime,” he said, bending down to pick it up, in his gray flannels, black
loafers, orange socks—“As Tom Wolfe said,” Richard had offered at dinner, when
the subject of his socks came up, “they’re the last frontier”—red leather longcoat,
red felt hat, green, orange, and white striped shirt, with a plain blue overshirt.
“One doesn’t stoop for pennies, but a dime one picks up.”

After lunch one day, Richard bought me Auden’s Forewords and

Afterwords. It was to be “part of my education,” whose continuance he is making
himself responsible for (my doctorate means nothing to him). The dedication reads,
“For Mark, between the two, my favorite learner, Fondly, Richard `93 NYC.”
When he got back to his apartment, Richard went to his bookshelf to find the
volume of T.S. Eliot’s that is dedicated to Charles Whibley. He wanted me to see
it. But the volume was not there. It was in Houston.
“Memory must suffice,” he said. “‘For Charles Whibley, to whom I
promised a better book.’”
Yes, that mortal promise: something better.
Indifference as a Career Path
Knowing that I was about to be unemployed, a friend at Mills paid for me to
use the services of Alumnae Resources, a job-search and counseling organization
in San Francisco. The first task my task counselor assigned me was to write a brief
autobiography. I did so. She read it quickly, highlighting a few passages with a
yellow marker—I didn’t like to work, I liked physical work—and discussed it with
me for five minutes.
That task complete, she then had me take a small battery of tests, among
which the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator stood out for the outrageous scope of its
questions and the tight slots one’s responses to them had to fit in. It took hours to
fill out, and reminded me so strongly of the examination Warren Beatty undergoes
on applying to the Parallax Corporation that I rented The Parallax View when I
finished it.
While waiting for the results, I was given another test, the SkillScan. It asks
you to record your Major, Secondary, and Minor Role Skills “according to color-
coded skill categories.” Three stand out: Creative Expression is Lavender;
Mental/Creative is Pink; Mental/Analytical is Gray. Having listed your skills, you
turn the page and are asked to list those for which you have minimal or no ability.
Here I excelled: “prepare food, manage records, repair/restore, build/construct,
calculate/compute, budget, facilitate groups, create images, take care of others,
negotiate, sell.”
I was then asked to check off, on a list of “Functional/Transferable Skills,”
categorized under the headings DATA, PEOPLE, and THINGS, 20 skills I used at
Mills, and then to circle 10 that I “preferred” to use. I circled read, compare, edit,
analyze, synthesize, integrate, write, improvise, counsel, listen, and public
speaking.
The third test was called the Strong Interest Inventory, and it was to the
results of this that my counselor turned her sharpest attention. According to the
Summary of Results, I had a “very high interest” in nothing that fell under the
categories of creating or enjoying art, selling or managing, helping or instructing,
accounting or processing data, building or repairing, researching or analyzing. My
interests in art, writing, athletics, music/dramatics, and merchandising were
“average.” So much for how I measured up according to “General Occupational
Themes” and “Basic Interest Scales.”
My fate rested in the “Occupational Scales,” which “measure how similar
your interests are to the interests of people who are satisfied working in those
occupations.” The scale went from “Very Dissimilar” to “Very Similar.” My
interests, the test suggested, were “similar” to those of a commercial artist, a
speech pathologist, and a flight attendant. They were “very similar” to those of an
advertising executive, a broadcaster, a librarian, a social worker, a musician, a
public relations director, and a fine artist.
I was strongly encouraged by the results not to pursue the occupations of
electrician, horticultural worker, or vocational agriculture teacher. Nor would I be
happy as a dentist, medical technician, optometrist, research & development
manager, respiratory therapist, science teacher, or veterinarian.
In fact, I had very dissimilar or merely dissimilar interests from all but two
of the forty occupations listed under the categories “Realistic” and “Investigative.”
Those two dots appeared in the gray area between Dissimilar and Similar, the
“Mid-Range.” Tracing over to the left, I discovered that I was, in effect, indifferent
about being a College Professor or a Psychologist.
Under the Artistic and Social Occupations, I fared better. My highest scores
came under the Artistic Occupations. The highest of the high—Advertising
Executive. The lowest—Medical Illustrator. Under the Social employments, I saw
that I had better not become an Athletic Trainer, a PE Teacher, or a Registered
Nurse (apparently, though, I’d be among friends as an LPN).
As for the Enterprising and Conventional Occupations, forget, again,
Agribusiness Manager, Optician, Math Teacher. If I wanted to settle on
indifference as a career path, my choices were numerous: Hair Stylist, Human
Resources Director, Investments Manager, Life Insurance Agent, Realtor, Travel
Agent, and Business Education Teacher.
In the end, the Strong Interest Inventory measured style: “Personal Style,”
“Work Style,” “Learning Environment Style,” “Leadership Style,” and “Risk
Taking/Adventure Style.” True to my sign, Libra, I hung in the balance, the
ambivalence.
I preferred to work alone; I preferred to work with people.
I preferred a practical working environment; I preferred an academic
environment.
I was not comfortable taking charge of others; I was comfortable taking
charge of others.
I disliked adventure and risk taking; I liked adventure and risk taking.

On Tax Day, the results of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator were returned to
my counselor. With one exception, I showed no “clear preference” for
“extroversion” over “introversion,” for “intuition” over “sensing,” for “thinking”
over “feeling.”
Out of a possible score of 60, I registered a 37 for “perceiving” over
“judging”: so much for my high-school friend’s prediction that I would be a judge
when I grew up.
“There are sixteen possible types,” my counselor told me. “You’re an
ENTP.”
She flipped the Report Form over to let me read the “characteristics
frequently associated” with the ENTP “type.”
Quick, ingenious, good at many things. Stimulating company, alert
and outspoken. May argue for fun on either side of a question.
Resourceful in solving new and challenging problems, but may
neglect routine assignments. Apt to turn to one new interest after
another. Skillful in finding logical reasons for what they want.
I take exception to being ingenious, resourceful, and logical, but the rest is
accurate.
What helped most in the month or two I spent with Alumnae Resources was
being reminded how many occupations there are. If I had ever known how many, I
had, in eight years of college and university teaching, forgotten how many.
Of course, none of this testing or counseling helped me in landing my next
job, which came down to a choice between cleaning houses for $7 an hour or
smoking salmon for $8. I chose to smoke salmon.
Page and Eloise Smith
Page Smith, American historian, died today, August 30, 1995.
I cried, which surprised me at first. And then I said it: “I counted on him.” I
did. I also counted to him. He understood me, in some ways, and he knew my
predicament. We shared a secret history, an implicit history. He made it explicit in
Killing the Spirit, a book he said I inspired. He knew what it was like to be crushed
out of one’s beliefs, ideas, thoughts, opinions—to be shut out and slightly mocked.
Perhaps he thought he understood me too well, better than he did. He didn’t
know much of my work; there wasn’t much to know—a few letters, an essay, a
few things I said. But after he heard me give a talk in 1988 (it was the first time we
met), he asked for the reports I had read passages from. They were evaluations
from professors I studied with in England in 1979 and 1980. He incorporated them
that afternoon into the keynote address he gave that night at Dartmouth, for a
conference celebrating the centenary of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s birth.
Page and I were connected through Rosenstock–Huessy, a teacher he, like
my father after him, studied with as an undergraduate.
That address became the basis for one of his last books, Killing the Spirit:
Higher Education in America. Page hired me to do a little research for it. We
exchanged letters. I visited him and his wife, Eloise, at their home in Santa Cruz.
Eloise was dying of cancer. Killing the Spirit had been published, to spare acclaim
and small sales. Page was working on a new book about the internment of Japanese
Americans in California during World War Two. The manuscript lay in sections on
a large table in the living room. I couldn’t see how he made sense of it; he assured
me that he knew. Eloise managed with a look to say that what seemed a mess was,
in fact, a mess.
Page loved Eloise dearly, but he was abrupt with her. Their old love looked
very trying. He would tell her to be quiet, and then ask her to find something. Still,
he was low because Eloise was low; he hoped for her because she knew there was
no reason to hope.
After sitting and talking for a time with Eloise, Page and I went into town
for lunch. As we walked to the car, I noticed that he was limping.
“It’s an old injury,” he said.
He ate with appetite. He talked; he asked me questions; he listened. After
lunch, he showed me around the campus he had helped to found. He took me to a
bookstore and bought me a copy of the correspondence of Mary McCarthy and
Hannah Arendt, a book he was very excited about. He introduced me to the people
who came up to him as we walked the streets, and showed me where the Penny
University met.
As we walked, he told me stories about Eloise. The gist of them all, though
he was embarrassed to say so directly, was that Eloise had brought him to his
senses, showed him the life of the body. When they were courting, he said, she
took him to the basement of Woolworth’s to buy race records and then showed him
how to dance.
He told me I had to read Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues.
“When we get back to the house,” he said, “I’ll play a song for you that a
student of mine wrote. It’s called ‘The Page Smith Blues.’ I guess I have to be the
only American historian—maybe the only historian ever—to be honored with a
blues song.”

I bought sunflowers for Eloise on the way back. They happened to be her
favorite, she said, with the South in her voice, and started to get up. Page tried to
stop her.
“I’m going to put them in a vase right now.”
“Stay there, Eloise. Let me do it.”
 “You wouldn’t know where to find a vase,” she said, and went into the
kitchen. She found one, put the sunflowers in it, and brought it back. She set it
down on the floor and got back into bed.
“There, now I can look at sunflowers all afternoon.”
I told her what Page had told me about their courtship.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I love that music. Page was such a prude, so straight–
laced.”
She enunciated every word; she was long on them; full of emphasis—varied,
funny, sincere, ironic, direct.
Then she and Page argued over how to tell me to get to their daughter’s
house.
“Oh, be quiet, Eloise.”
Page showed me around their place above Santa Cruz—the chickens, a
peacock, an old sway-backed horse, his library in the barn.
“When we moved here to start up UC Santa Cruz,” he said, “my younger
son was about ten. He made a friend and brought him over. They came in here
where I was working. The boy had never seen a library before. ‘What are those?’
he asked my son. ‘My Dad writes books,’ he said, ‘and he copies them out of
those.’”
I reminded Page about the song he said he’d play for me. We went and sat
out on the patio, and Page played the tape of “The Page Smith Blues.”
We talked some more about writing and music, about Eloise’s collages; we
talked about academia and history; we talked about old age.
“She’s so strong,” he said.
He was full of feeling, but kept it in check. There was something of the
soldier in him still. He never killed anyone in the war, he told me, but he
commanded others to. I knew that he could cry, because he had wept in front of the
audience that night at Dartmouth, and had said before he did that he would.
Page gave me a copy of Letter from My Father, a book that contains,
between Page’s “Preface” and “Afterward,” excerpts from a 10,000 page letter his
father had written to him over twenty or thirty years. Page and his father were
estranged, Page told me, and this gargantuan letter was his father’s legacy. It
recounts his sexual exploits from the first decade of the 20th century. Page said I
would find it “remarkable and strange.” When he was driving away after his
father’s funeral, he told me, he had gotten a few miles when he pulled over and
began to weep. He then said that he found paper in the car and began to write what
would be the afterward to the book. He told me it was in many ways his favorite
piece of writing, and the easiest.

Page never said goodbye. If on the phone, he’d just hang up; if in person, as
at Dartmouth when we met, he’d turn and go back.
But this time, he did say goodbye. And I hugged him, and he let me.
“Well,” he said, “call when you get back and come up and we’ll have lunch
again.”
We never did.
I got a call from his daughter Ann about a month after my visit. Eloise died
on August 29.
“All the family was there, waiting for her to die, to be there when she did.
And she did.” I asked how Page was doing.
The day Eloise died, Ann said, Page put his affairs in order, showed her
where his papers and manuscripts were, and wrote a letter.
He died the next day.

Reunion, Amends
 In 1997, nostalgic about my upcoming 20th high-school reunion, I wrote
three poems. Two were printed in our reunion booklet. The first of them was an
imitation of the New Year’s “Greetings, Friends!” poems Roger Angell used to
write for The New Yorker. The second had a more selfish motive: to give, twenty
years later, something like the speech I was not allowed to give at our graduation.
By helping the reunion committee prepare the booklet, I gained an occasion to
speak.
Days of 1997
I.
What will we, old strangers, say?
As if standing in some hallway,
thinking back to something then,
“Do you remember when . . . ?”
And only one of us will.
The other, listening, pleased
to be remembered still:
“Oh yeah, I remember now.”

II.
Wanting to be older:
that’s the first thing I remember.
Older and better:
better-looking, more popular.
And so I put on my exhibitions.

There was all that pain that didn’t seem,

at the time—I was stoned, drunk,
getting drunker—so painful.
And then the ulcer.

Above all, I wanted to be a lover—

in September, December, and the summer.
Summer! From here, older,
I climb back over twenty summers
to get to Paula and Katie and Kay,
to Tim and Mark, to you and you,
from West to East,
past field and theater:
not a single year was a bummer
(one trip was, which makes it, now, that much funner).

Remember? The big lot, the winter

winds across the tennis courts . . .

III.
Does belief enter into how hard it is,
was, has been? How long? How short?
What can’t we believe, these days?
Twenty years are a dollar bill
in the scheme of things too large
to pay too close attention to.

Paula Bley, Katie Wood, I know you;

Tim Gustafson, Bonnie Scott, Joyce Rossell:
didn’t we know each other, once upon a time, and well?
Now it’s the things I can’t remember that I’d like to tell.

IV.
Fields that were our strength,
when James Dickey read at Jimmy Carter’s inaugural,
and I had just come back from running away
to the best acid, liquid that made the sugar cube sweeter . . .

The lots, the courts, the halls,

the goals, the rooms, the lobbies, the cafeterias,
the lines we waited in for Jackson Browne,
Steve Miller, Pink Floyd, Stephen Stills, James Taylor;
the groups we were and weren’t a part of,
the buses that brought us there,
colored such a yellow
there’s no yellow in nature
it’s reminiscent of.

Who were we then? What have we made of ourselves?

Memory itself!
The being taken back there
between East and West,
across fields we played and drank and smoked and fought
and loved in,

the fields of strength, “the strength of fields.”

What was petty in us, what was real,
what belonged and balked at belonging:
our separatenesses, our spirit,
the learning that went on and off.

V.
Did you write, paint, act, weave, build, sing, solve?
Drink your fill?
And do you still?

But what can we make of what we’ve made

but more of ourselves? And what can we bring?

VI.
Lemon Up, Jungle Gardenia, Turtle Oil, Patchouli.
Paula, Anna, Katie, Julie.

“And I will never, never grow so old again . . .

O, sweet thing!”

VII.
Huddled up against the fence
behind left field—we were out in it—
smoking a joint; then the first drag
off a Marlboro green, or a Kool,
or a Parliament.
Around a fountain I can’t remember flowing,
Industrial Arts to the North,
IBM Selectrics to the West,
the West Lobby, South by Southwest,
the original one-room schoolhouse
to the East, where, as we were learning
from Mark Gray and Alan Watts,
our Western Civilization began.

VIII.
A kind of glory some us knew
that we have been estranged from since;
a kind of glory some of us lacked
that we have found a path to since.

Some of us ate our hearts out,

silent, longing, consumed by doubt;
some, to whom everything was easy,
excelled in everything they did.

But that was never true—and yet it is.

IX.
I regret being cruel.
And if for our class
of twenty years ago and now
I had to choose a motto,
 it would not speak of
sex in cars or getting blotto,
of apathy or sympathy,
of failure or success,
of being born to run
or overcoming stress—
it wouldn’t describe an Eric Clapton riff.
It might begin with Joni Mitchell,
“We love our loving, but not like we love our freedom,”
and end with Stephen Stills:
“Love the one you’re with.”

A third poem was mostly for the Wood sisters, especially Katie and Anna, to
whose faces and Mexican peasant shirts and Navajo hair so many memories
seemed to attach themselves—Colorado summer days, camping trips in the
Rockies, turtle oil, the sounds of Woodstock, the anaesthetic pleasures of being
stoned, the scent of patchouli.
After the reunion, I rented a car and headed for Montana, to make amends to
Ruthie and Dave Dodge for having stolen wine and liquor from their house. I
bought them an old wooden shovel from an antique shop in San Francisco, for their
cabin in West Yellowstone. Another amends I felt I had to make was to Willis
Wood, Katie’s and Anna’s uncle and my old neighbor, for stealing pot and liquor
from him. He was surprised by what I had to say. He accepted my apology
graciously and waved off my thefts.
He said he was sure that Katie and Anna would be happy to hear from me,
and gave me their phone numbers and addresses.
Simple Songs

Black hair in braids,

Anna, Katie, Cynthia, Charlotte, Caroline Wood.
Sun on the road where the old maroon 2002

kicked gravel in the creekbed.

River–washed hawk,
Neil Young, Stephen Stills.

We slept in the cabin and woke up

helpless in Johnny’s garden
and happy so

up Deer Creek, up Colorado

kicking boulders down the scree
round as the bowl of Bill’s pipe

and the twig–turned stem of Jim’s.

We smoked the twelve–dollar-an-ounce Mexican
the sun to make you cry

cold creeks like simple three–chord songs

and the wet red of the wood that drifts
arrested on its elbow, firm as a fiddle–neck

and the nose of Neil Young’s voice,

 sterling silver, fretted,
dragging rainbows over where we lay.

I had nothing to apologize to Anna for; I simply wanted to see her and talk
to her. She lived in Sheridan, Wyoming, and I drove all day to get there. We met at
the office where she did massage therapy. We hugged and said hello—as if it
hadn’t been twenty years since we’d seen each other, and then went to the grocery
store to get some things for dinner. Anna, everyone’s phantom lover in high
school, was striking still, but hard, hardened. Her black hair, which used to be so
long, was short now, and she was smaller than she had seemed.
As she prepared dinner, we spoke matter-of-factly in the present tense, of
things there in front of us, and of what we did. After dinner, we went outside and
sat under a tree. Anna rolled us each a Drum cigarette, and we talked, naming
names, comparing memories. I asked Anna how it was for her growing up in the
family that had seemed to our group of friends so free and easy. She said she was
angry at her mother for bringing her and sisters up so loosely, for allowing drugs
and having parties. She and her mother were not speaking, she said, and she was
now closer to her father, a strict Mormon, than she had ever been. We talked of
drugs and deaths and divorces.
I left for the Dodges’ the next day.
They have a beautiful house in Bozeman. I had seen it in its early stages in
1984, the summer before Craig died, when I drove one of their cars out from
Denver. On that visit, I broke Dave’s hand-made fly-rod by snapping it when I
lifted up the hatch of his car. I was still wanting to apologize for that, too, even
though Dave had assured me that such things happen.
He soldiered on with another rod. He caught a trout on his first cast, all six
feet and five inches of him prone on the ground. He told me that the fish “sip at the
surface when they feed,” a sentence that years later found its way into the elegy I
wrote for Craig.
I arrived at noon. Dave was out working his dogs. Ruthie took me to lunch
in Bozeman. We talked about Donald’s failing marriage, about Sallie’s and
Diana’s strange marriages—strange to Ruthie and Dave. Diana and Ruthie were
not talking at the time. I told Ruthie that I’d written a poem about my babysitters in
which Diana and Sallie appeared, and one about Diana. I also told her that I’d
written something about the day Chrissie died, and that I had a copy of it for her.
That evening, the three of us were sitting in the living room at the cocktail
hour. I was trying to find a way to begin explaining why I’d come when I
remembered that the shovel was still in the car. I got up to get it.
When I came back in, I told them: I stole things from you and I’m here to
make amends.
“I hope you haven’t been worrying about that all this time, Mark,” Ruthie
said. “My heavens, we didn’t notice that anything was missing, and Donald was
certainly never punished for it. Don’t you waste another minute thinking about it.”
And so we talked about the shovel, which pleased them, and which they
knew just the place for in their cabin.
That night, Ruthie read what I’d written about her. She told me she was
touched by it the next morning.

By the time I was pulling into Katie’s driveway in Ketchum, Idaho, I

wondered what I was doing there; so did Katie’s husband, and the older two of her
children. I had wanted to know what Katie remembered of, and felt about, what we
did when we knew each other. She hadn’t wanted to five or six years earlier, when
I called her.
She was happy to see me; we hugged each other quietly. She said she’d been
nervous about my visit, both because she was overweight and because old
memories had been stirred up. We talked about now; she introduced me to her
family, showed me around her house, showed me pictures of her sisters. Cynthia
was a Born-Again; the twins, Charlotte and Caroline, were athletes and players.
Katie was busy; she liked being a mother; she liked Sun Valley. She didn’t
want to talk about the past—but, like Anna, she had bitter feelings about how she
and her sisters were raised. I told her what I knew about Paula, and she asked me
about some of our other friends. We had a nice dinner; I played with her kids on
the lawn.
Before leaving the next day, I left Katie a copy of the poem I’d written, and
of the reunion booklet, and of an early draft of what appears about her in this book.
I haven’t heard from her since.
Anna answered one of my e-mails. She said that she was married again, to
another Christian on the path, and very happy. She said that I shouldn’t expect to
hear from her or Katie again.

Amy (again)
I was at her front door two days before Christmas. I wanted to kiss and hug
her, but she had gone to Iowa for Christmas.
I had just come back from Monterey with Loretta, where we saw the old
cannery and went to the aquarium. Most impressive to me were the big steelheads.
Were they trout or salmon? How did they weather the change from fresh to salt
water? Nothing so solid as a steelhead.
The sea otters feeding were a good sight, too, floating on their backs like
Omar Shariff and eating off their stomachs. I was a fish in a past life, a steelhead
that leads one life in a river and another in the ocean, and has two names, one for
each life. Now I’m just the one, who drinks coffee mostly, but has tea now and
then—black, green, mint. I have other names in a novel written by my friend Bob,
and in a play written by my ex-aunt, Kathleen. I’m John Stuart in the novel and
Fritz in the play, where I’m the cause of a lovers’ quarrel between my uncle and
aunt over the right reading of a Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken.”
Kathleen didn’t think that Frost undermines several times in the middle of
the poem the idea that one road is different from the other, appreciably different;
didn’t think he’s making a case for how we’re apt to lie later on, when we tell
stories about ourselves, inventing fateful moments out of casual pastimes, like
walks in the woods, that made no difference at the time—or in which we couldn’t
see any difference at the time. Kathleen thought we were complicating what was
perfectly clear. In the end, none of us would concede, even, that “all the
difference” was a small difference, made by one’s own choosing.

Amy is only six years older than I am. When we met, I was nineteen; six
years seemed a great difference to her. Now, as she nears fifty, the difference
appreciates rather than discounts her, but she still finds a reason to think, however
flattering my attentions, that there would be something unseemly in our becoming
lovers.
The day I visited, I was thirty-seven, she was forty-three. Neither of us was
in any commonly accepted prime. But she was in a Hamlet phase: men delighted
her not. The man she was dating when we met in 1978 was now her ex-husband,
and she was raising two children without much support from him. Her current
boyfriend, who had left her for a younger woman, wanted Amy back—and she
took him back.
Her sense of having lost again was palpable. And I was staying with Loretta,
which felt like losing. We both felt curtailed—“cabin’d, cribb’d, and confin’d”—
and neither of us could make that seem like infinite space. And not because of our
partners; the fault lay in ourselves. Fears mostly, shame at asserting ourselves,
going after the things we wanted; doing, as they say, what it takes.
It took hurting. It took making others unhappy.
Loretta and I were no longer having sex or conversation; I was unwilling to
work at either. Amy’s boyfriend photographed chimps: she and I never discussed
what they chattered about, or what their sex life was now like, having been
interrupted by the youth, and presumably the beauty, of another woman.
My two favorite songs at the time were Joni Mitchell’s “Chinese Cafe” and
Michelle Shocked’s “Anchored Down in Anchorage.” I had made a tape for Amy
as a Christmas present.
Disappointed, I left it in her mail box.
As I drove away, the French proverb about the soul knowing no age came to
mind. Knowing Amy as I had for almost twenty years, I decided that all proverbs
were entirely suspect. I looked forward to seeing her next summer, when I would
be back in Colorado for my twentieth high-school reunion.
Maybe then.

To the Child I Fathered in My Youth

The woman who gave birth to you wants us never to meet. If she finds you,
or if you find her, I have an idea what she’ll say about me, if anything. I have a
feeling you’ll ask.
I was sixteen when you were born. I saw your baby picture. You were no
less unattractive than I was. My brothers (I had three of them, and one sister) called
me plate-head. You, too, had a plate-head. I saw your picture at your mother’s
house, when she came home from the hospital without you. I don’t know the name
of the hospital, and I don’t know the name of the home for pregnant teenagers
where your mother spent the last months of her pregnancy. I never visited her.
 Your mother pointed out in a letter to me that I never signed any official
papers—not those releasing you for adoption, nor those that meant to initiate a
search for you twenty-four years later. This meant, your mother told me, that I
didn’t exist. She said I didn’t deserve to know you.
I don’t know what your name is now. Then, when you were born, your
mother named you Nathan (she spelled it “Nathen”). She and I must have
discussed naming you, but I don’t remember when or where.
Nathan was a friend of mine. Your mother knew him, too, I think, but only
briefly. Nathan was very handsome. He had long blond hair. All the girls liked
Nathan, and so did I. I went up into the mountains with him several times. I
remember one time in particular, up by his parents’ cabin in the Rocky Mountains.
We got stoned—he and I and your mother and our friends did a lot of that—and
went down to the river looking for driftwood. I can still see in my mind’s eye the
rusty orange piece I picked up and brought home with me. I kept it into my college
years. Nathan and I listened to Dan Fogelberg’s album called Souvenirs and an
album by Shawn Phillips whose title I can’t remember. He and I stole things
together, broke into a house or two, took liquor, beer, wine, and pot; we took
money out of men’s wallets in hotels; we shoplifted.
We don’t do these things anymore, and we haven’t for a long time. You
were named after Nathan because Nathan because I liked him and liked his name.
It was sweet of your mother to give you that name—sweet to me, anyway. As I
say, I don’t know your name.
Your mother holds against me every mean thing I ever did from the time I
met her, in ninth grade, to the last time I saw her, more than twenty-five years
later. She has such a low opinion of me, a friend of mine told me, because she
loves me so much. If she hadn’t told me herself that she was still in love with me
the last time I saw her, I wouldn’t believe what my friend said; I doubt it anyway.
Maybe you have found out already that our desires always outrun our judgments.
As I write this to you, I am still trying to outrun my desires: it is too late for
the judgments. They have caught up with me, as your mother said they would. I
tore up the letter in which she judged me almost as harshly as I’ve judged myself,
but I haven’t been able to throw it away. I am still trying to understand how she
could be in love, or think she was, with someone as horrible as I am. I refuse to
ascribe all the slander to bitterness and all the love to fantasy. Some of each must
rest on solid ground.
I am not on solid ground. As for your mother, you can be the judge. I will
only say that I ran from her twenty-five years ago. When we saw each other again
at our tenth and twentieth high school reunions, I did not run back. At the time of
the last reunion, your mother was in a loveless marriage. She wanted out of it, but
she also wanted the security it brought her. I was not in any position to rescue her
from that marriage—not emotionally, not financially. Your mother seemed to think
I should rescue her, or at least love her. Instead, we made love; we had sex. That
was a mistake, but it was one we both made. We were not sixteen anymore.
She moved to Florida; I moved back to Colorado, where you and she and I
were born.
I would think of you sometimes over the years, but not often. There were
long stretches in my slippery years, between 17 and 27, when I didn’t think of you.
In 1987, when you were twelve and I was at my tenth reunion, I asked your mother
to tell me everything. I had repressed and forgotten the few details I knew, the date
of your birth. I didn’t tell my parents about you until I was thirty-five. I was too
busy thinking of myself. When I did think of you, and speak of you, you were
something I did, something that happened to me. The friends I told about you were
always surprised at how matter-of-factly, how flatly, I spoke of you. And then I
would think about that, about me.
 I didn’t know how to think or feel about you. When I meet you, if I meet
you, I will know.
Mrs. Steel, or The Pursuit of Happiness
One day when I was probably thirteen or fourteen, I went to visit my friend
Sara after school. I could always count on Sara. But if Sara was out, and she often
was, I knew that the walk down her driveway would do me good, calm me down.
At the middle of the driveway, across from the house, there was a medieval tower
—a garage and storage room that had been, once upon a time, a silo. Silo: that’s
what I was doing over there.
My puberty was a sighing-low. Sara’s mother knew that, and she knew that I
had reasons. Sara’s mother would get me to speak up and put my sighs into words.
She’d hug me and call me sweetie. Then she’d pour me, several years before 7-11
caught onto the idea, an absurd amount of Coke. Patiently she poured. She’d ask if
I was hungry and, before I answered, start cooking me a quarter-pound hamburger
before there were Quarter-Pounders. I haven’t had many hamburgers since that
tasted as good. And then she would talk with me, ask me about school, about
home, about things.
The day I’m thinking of, I had been in Mrs. Steel’s kitchen for over an hour,
and I was leaving. It was a sunny day. We stepped out the back swing-door into the
driveway. Mrs. Steel’s arm was around me, and I was crying. She had something
to tell me, in her direct and philosophical way, with her sweet, ageless voice. There
was nothing harsh in it, though it never strayed too far from a teaching tone. It
sounded with the voices of both my grandmothers, and the voice of my mother,
even though hers never sought to teach.
Mrs. Steel told me that Thomas Jefferson hadn’t meant by happiness what
most Americans think he means by happiness. She said that people forget the
whole phrase, of which happiness is only a part.
 “We are not here to be happy,” she said. “We are here to serve, and we find
our happiness through serving others.”
Over twenty years later, the counselor I was seeing in the New Jersey
Collegiate Substance Abuse Program laughed when I told her this story.
“Of course it made sense to you,” she said, “because you were so unhappy.
And here was a woman you respected telling you that you were supposed to be
unhappy.”
I believed her, just as I had believed Mrs. Steel years before. I am always
believing the last speaker. But I don’t believe now that Mrs. Steel was telling me I
was supposed to be unhappy. Maybe I did then.
The things people say once tend to stay with me. My father told me to pedal
with the balls of my feet. My uncle told me that he couldn’t understand why
anyone would wear leather tennis shoes. My mother said, after my youngest
brother died, “You’ve got to keep going.” My grandmother said, “It is status, not
status; it is news, not news.” My younger brother said, on being told that a
vegetable was curly endive, that it was “curly divein.”
Whenever I ride a bike, or put on my leather tennis shoes, or hear of a death
in a family, or hear someone say status with a short a and news as if the e were a u,
or see curly endive in a salad, I hear those sentences.
When it comes to happiness, I think of what Mrs. Steel said—and of what I
discovered while studying Jefferson’s writings in graduate school, just before I
entered the rehab, in a book by Linda Kerber about the Federalists and the
Republicans. In a footnote, Kerber quotes a Federalist who attacked Jefferson for
his suggestion that people pursue happiness the way hounds on a hunt pursue their
quarry. I was glad to learn that a phrase so sacred to Americans had been ridiculed,
when it entered the language, as an unhappy figure of speech. I wanted to tell my
counselor this story, but thought better of it. I didn’t want to be accused of
“intellectualizing.”

Any declaration of independence is vulnerable to satire. Had Jefferson put

happiness on a par with life and liberty, his Federalist opponent would have been
more caustic still. Patrick Henry didn’t say, “Give me happiness or give me death.”
No one would rally to such a cry.
Behind Jefferson’s idea, and behind the Federalist’s sarcasm at his
expression of it, lies an ancient saying: no one alive can be considered happy.

Envoi (1986)
Mark—
I just wanted you to know that Mommy and I held each other in our
arms last Saturday night and thanked God that we had a fine son like Craig who
was so healthy and handsome for twenty-three years at least. Your mother wept
and said to me how “sweet” and “good” “Craigie” was when he was a baby and a
young child—and how dear he and all our children have been to us, and how
blessed we have been with you all—though each of you are ultimately God’s, and
only ours to nurture and love for an unknowable time.
Love,
Dad