Rintrah: Essay upon a Cat — Patrick J. Keane

Jul 232011
 

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In the tradition of J. R. Ackerley”s My Dog Tulip and Christopher Smart’s “My Cat Jeoffry,” Patrick Keane’s “Rintrah” is a gorgeously jubilant, poignant, mysterious paean to the lifelong companionship of a pet. Patrick Keane is a great friend, a brilliant raconteur, an eminent scholar, and, yes, a lover of cats. This is his second contribution to the pages of Numéro Cinq; see his essay on the “lost” Waste Land manuscript here. But first, read “Rintrah.”

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Rintrah

By Patrick J. Keane

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In researching a book I recently wrote on Emily Dickinson, I came across a letter, written in the autumn of 1858, which has become controversial. Overwhelmed by the world of mutability in which she found herself, she seemed to equate the death-by-frost of flowers in her garden with the death of a servant’s “little girl through scarlet fever.” I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, who imagines people saying of her, “she cared much more for her roses” than for human “victims of cruelty and injustice.” But the comparison was unfair. Emily wasn’t being insensitive or callous. In addressing “Democratic Death,” she was really expressing the communion and equality of all living things that come to dust.

The life and death memorialized here span a near quarter-century that began with the end of my marriage and includes the pain-filled final years and death of my mother. Along with the ending of another long relationship, these losses affected me deeply and, though they are not front-and-center in what follows, they are an implicit part of my recounting of the adventures of Rintrah. Since Rintrah was “just a cat,” the love, admiration, and sense of loss expressed may seem excessive. But love is not restricted to our human relationships. Emily Dickinson herself, who anguished over the loss of so many close to her, was devastated by the death in January 1866 of Carlo, her beloved dog and constant companion. Anyone who has had a similar experience with a cherished animal will understand both her love and her mourning for what can never return.

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I didn’t know then, and never found out afterward, where he came from. And, though I wish I could take the credit, I didn’t give him his wonderful name. One of my students did. We had just begun William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell when the kitten walked into the classroom. I almost said “strode” because, from the first instant, he displayed complete self-assurance. For all his confidence, he was small, not much beyond weaning. But his front paws seemed large (I later discovered he had six claws on each); and he already possessed a kind of majesty and grace. He even seemed aware that he was beautifully colored: a white mask and underbelly, tawny coat and ears, with that same soft amber surrounding a white star-shape between his gold-green eyes.

He took the measure of the room, then proceeded to stroll among the desks. At the end of his tour, he returned to the front, looked me over, leapt effortlessly to the chair, then to the desk. A student filled a paper saucer with water and placed it near him. The kitten nosed it, then took a few diffident sips. I petted him and he permitted me, despite the affront to his dignity, to pick him up and display him, tummy exposed, to an appreciative audience. The work we had been reading prior to this mysterious visitation opens with a poem that begins, “Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air.” The kitten’s boldness and color inspired one of the students to propose Rintrah for a name.

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Categories of Untruth: the CNF debate continues, by Adam Regn Arvidson

Jul 192011
 

While salivating my way through the most recent issue of Creative Nonfiction (the “food issue”), I encountered a discussion (some might say THE discussion) that continues to define (plague?) creative nonfiction writing in general.  I am of course referring to the issue of accuracy.  The old argument goes like this: on one hand, this is NON-fiction, so everything must be accurate, wholly accurate, and verifiable.  On the other, this is CREATIVE, so bending, slanting, embellishing is just fine as long as the spirit of truth is upheld.

This debate is not engaged directly in the pages of issue 41, but rears its head in two places.  There is this, in an interview with Ruth Reichl, restaurant critic, former editor at Gourmet, and nonfiction writer:

You can’t [make things up in a memoir] but you can combine things… Certainly in “Tender at the Bone,” for instance, the best story is the one about my brother Bob’s engagement party.  It’s a wonderful story, all true, but it’s really two parties conflated into one….. Nothing in there is made up, but it makes a much better story put all together in one place.  I think one of the great things you get to do with memoir is selectively cherry-pick your memories.

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The Immortality of the Crab: Nonfiction — John Proctor

Jun 242011
 

The Immortality of the Crab

By John Proctor

 

…and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock
in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency
is to refuse to face things as long as possible
by retiring into an infantile dream…
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”

It’s 3AM, I must be lonely.
—Matchbox 20

Two days a week between mid-June and mid-October, I wake up at 3:00am without an alarm clock, thinking about crabs. I get dressed in the dark while my wife sleeps and feel my heart beating, hands twitching, mouth grinning involuntarily. I walk out to my car, where my traps, handlines, and bucket are already packed, and I head out to the sea, thinking about blue crabs. I drive toward the end of the earth and then walk out with my equipment, where the sea meets me at the edge of the pier. Sometimes a lighthouse searches in the distance; most times I see black islands shadow the water in the twilight; a few times I notice the dockside lights of boats whose captains beat me to the water. The morning mistral’s brisk song chills even the hottest midsummer night. On the pier I am all alone with the sea, surrounded by millions of ravenous blue crabs.

From November to June, I dream about blue crabs. Sometimes I’m back in Kansas fishing for catfish in the Wakarusa River where I spent so much time as a kid. I’m walking along the cliff overlooking the river, with the wild heather and cattails up to my armpits. I look down into the water from the edge where the grass meets the red clay, and I can see everything. Below the surface, huge flatheads are curled up in their red clay mudholes, or in the hollows of submerged tree stumps. And all along the edge of the river I see thousands of turquoise claws, all busy at work – good little members of the working poor, snapping up stray shiners, collecting detritus in the mud, and building fortresses from everything they find. Sometimes I’m so far up that I can see the Wakarusa River flowing into the sea, disregarding – and this is the great thing about dreams – that crabs and catfish generally don’t coexist, especially in Kansas. What’s important is the work they do, the order they make from the chaos. I don’t even try to catch them – I just watch, as the crabs and the catfish build their homes in the muddy water.

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In  one of my favorite scenes from the ‘90s sitcom Mad About You, Helen Hunt walks in on Paul Reiser, and he’s sitting comfortably in his chair, doing – well, nothing.  He’s staring off into space, and she asks him for help with some random chore. “I’m busy,” he tells her. She does a double take, and then asks incredulously what he’s busy doing. “I’m working,” he replies. She asks him what he’s working on. “I’m thinking.” He’s a filmmaker, a profession only slightly less physically lazy than writing, if only because of the heavy equipment. In this scene, Paul’s thinking is rather heavy. “I’m developing ideas,” he says. “The less it looks like I’m doing, the harder I’m actually working.”

There is a Spanish expression for Paul’s labor – pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo, or thinking about the immortality of the crab. Basically, if you’re standing around doing nothing and someone asks you what you’re doing, instead of admitting you’re not doing much of anything, simply tell that person you’re thinking about the immortality of the crab. And thinking, done well, is hard work.

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My First Job: Melissa Fisher — Winner of the 3 Quarks Daily $1,000 Arts & Literature Prize

Jun 162011
 

Editor’s Note: Melissa Fisher’s “My First Job” essay won the 2012 3 Quarks Daily Arts & Literature Prize competition judged by Gish Jen. Gish Jen wrote: “This memoir of growing up in Vermont begs to be turned into a book. At once deeply universal and deeply strange, it is wonderfully unpretentious, completely appalling, and appealingly clear-of-heart.”

 

Melissa Fisher, already “a person of interest,” as the police say, for her satirical photo essay “And the Sign Said” now offers us a “My First Job” in which she manages to insert blood, mayhem, drunkenness (not the author), underage driving, romance (the brown-haired boy) and a gorgeously hilarious picture of growing up a girl in rural Vermont. Nothing more to be said. Read it.

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Out There

Growing up with eight older brothers, I had a feeling that I could do anything.  I was keeper at soccer (not afraid to get kicked in the head if it meant making a save) and played first base, feeling pride in the shocking sting across my palm whenever anyone fired one in my direction.  It was the Fishers vs. anyone else in the neighborhood, and I was always the only girl on the field.

When we moved to Vermont, expanding our summer camp into a home, we traded neighborhood friends for trees. Thousands of trees. Our nearest neighbor was a mile south down a single-lane dirt road that was often impassable in the winter.  From our house-in-progress on Cram Hill going west, it was two and a half miles to asphalt, and the first house that way, a log home belonging to the Potters (their name spelled out in stones at the end of the driveway), appeared in the last half-mile.  We had a quiet view of Granville Notch to the west without a structure or speck of light in sight for miles across the panorama.  When weather shifted, a gray sheet of rain would spread across the valley toward us providing a 90-second warning to get the laundry off the line.  Some days the only hint of civilization was a distant loon-like call of the train whistle twice a day, southbound in the morning, northbound at night.

The electric and phone lines didn’t reach us, and cell phones didn’t yet exist.  We had a CB radio for emergencies.  In summers when humidity was high, a skip allowed my father (his handle was Preacher Ed) to talk on the squawk box to southern drawl truckers hundreds of miles away. These were our only conversations with the outside world. We were out there. .

First Babysitting Job, Starts with the Pig Blood in the Yard

So when I was 10, perhaps out of boredom or arrogance, I didn’t see any reason to say no when I was asked to babysit two kids of a couple I didn’t know well (they also lived in a house without electricity).  Later, I saw many reasons why this was a terrible idea, and I also questioned my parents’ judgment in letting me go. But the lure of two dollars an hour trumped any good sense I might have held.

My mother dropped me off in the driveway and backed around leaving me to walk to the house alone along a stone path that led by a stump steeped in blood with fresh blood lying in pools all around. Perhaps, I thought, I should have asked more questions, but how to prepare for this?  When the father, John, opened the door, I turned back to wave and watch my mother’s car head down the driveway back home, realizing suddenly that I was a bit homesick, scared, or both. John explained the blood—I had just missed the pig slaughter.  I wondered if I’d been expected earlier to help out.

The boys, blond-haired and shy, watched me suspiciously.  This was our first meeting so I reached out to them slowly, the way I had with the stray before he became Snowflake, my mother’s favorite cat. It didn’t work with the boys as well as with the cat. Their mistrust lasted long after the parents left for the wedding, and we spent the afternoon only half-playing, half-wondering when the parents would reappear.

I was ten. I didn’t know what a babysitter did. I fed them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and we went outside and threw rocks. Boys like throwing rocks. When they’re not eating them they’re throwing them. We stayed well away from the front yard, the stump, the blood.  I didn’t ask about the pig.

The afternoon dragged on. I only wanted to go home but had no idea when that might happen.  I hadn’t been forward enough to ask exactly when John and his wife would return. They were vague. I had the impression it was going to be just a few hours. In my mind, they were coming home at two or three in the afternoon.

The boys moped, grieving abandonment.  “Do you want to read a book?” I asked.  “I want Mommy to read it to me!” “Do you want to go outside with the trucks?” I asked.  “Mommy take me outside!”

By hour five, I had started to watch the driveway incessantly.  I couldn’t call home, of course—in my world calling home wasn’t an option to consider–and I wondered why my parents hadn’t come looking for me.  The boys weren’t the only ones feeling abandoned.

The boys refused to nap. I wondered if I should I walk them half a mile to the closest neighbor?  I didn’t want to get the parents in trouble.  Were they in trouble?

After 10 really, really long hours, and long after dark, headlights finally haphazardly probed up the driveway. When the boys’ parents came stumbling in, I was already at the door ready to go home. The mother drunkenly waved her arm (really her elbow) in the air and disappeared to bed. John’s head drooped. His eyes stared out without focus..

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Heading Home, the Body in the Backseat

When we finally got into the beat up Toyota wagon, he mumbled something about watching my feet.  At first, I didn’t know what he meant, it was dark, but soon I realized there was a hole as big as my foot in the floorboards.  We didn’t talk.  Something kept clunking in the back.  Turn left, clunk right.

When we hit the pavement, I suddenly could see light at my feet.  I watched a blur of the road between my heels.  Lines would appear, some double yellow, some white.  Back on the dirt road to my house, the clunking returned. Turn right, clunk left.

The driveway ended at the garage, but John drove across the lawn to the front steps. At last, with the dome light on, I could see a large mass in the back seat. I had been afraid to look. I had no idea it was a person. A toolbox maybe. When you live on the back roads things always clunk and roll around, but this was a big clunk.

“My brother-in-law,” John growled.  “He’s a waste of oxygen.”

John walked me to the door—I was only ten. And all I remember after that is going straight to bed, climbing the wooden ladder to the curtained loft room that was mine. But my parents must have seen John’s condition because they invited him in and made coffee. At some point, the brother-in-law wandered in, disoriented either from the repeated head trauma or the unfamiliar surroundings..

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Aftermath, More Babysitting, Animal Attacks, I Scar a Child for Life

Afterwards, my parents never said anything about that night, whether they wondered if I was okay.  They rarely said what they felt.  They seemed to accept John’s drunkenness without judgment. Oh, that’s just John… Somehow I can’t imagine parents being that open-minded today. And a few years later, when my 17-year-old brother arrived home late after school completely bombed on strawberry daiquiris, my father expressed his disappointment by grounding my brother for a month—a month alone out in nowhere without a phone; it was like solitary confinement.

It didn’t strike me odd that we’d have a drunk or two in the house. Rod, a neighbor well-known for his hundreds of junk parts cars in various stages of impermanence, would wander down the “thrown up” road (now more of a path) from his trailer a few times a year. He refused all food, lived simply on 16 oz. Budweisers or whatever other version of beer was handy.  He was friendly, smelled of urine, booze and cigarettes, and said Jesus Christ more often than my father ever did in the pulpit. Rod had a bony chest and his Dickies hung belted at the waist, cinched around fumes.  Rod’s granddaughter, Belinda, once bit me on the arm because I was using the bathroom. I wasn’t babysitting her.  She was just visiting.

What does (did) surprise me is that my parents ever let me baby-sit again.  But they did, many times.  Through trial and error I learned valuable tips such as Kool-Aid is more complex than Tang and requires infinite scoops of sugar.  And sugarless Kool-Aid on a picnic will destroy a child’s day and will ultimately be tattooed to his or her memory for the next 20 years. (I know because 20 years later I saw this person on the streets of Montpelier and his first words were, “Remember when you (tonal implication of ‘you moron’) forgot to put the sugar in the Kool-Aid?”)

B-Bet (short for Elizabeth) fast became one of my favorite watches and not just because I got to saddle up her mother’s tar-colored brute of a horse, Mischief, from time to time.  Mischief tried to buck me off more than once and would very reluctantly go for halting walks. On the way home he’d gallop if given the chance.  In my limited riding lessons I had only made it as far as a delicate posting trot on a pony. I was afraid even to canter, but I’d learned to hold on like hell.

B-Bet always had to come out to the car when I arrived to save me from Gus and Geezer, the geese watchdogs.  Gus was one-legged and cranky. Geezer was particularly vicious and would make a spear of his body, aggressively flap his wings and repeatedly stab my legs with his beak. I’d yell to no avail.  Two-year-old B-Bet would shake her finger at him, scolding, and he’d ashamedly retreat.

My best friend/rival Beth also babysat and we had our regulars.   One of her families had a cute rhythmic ditty that the father sang to lighten moods:  “Me-lis-sa-Fi-sher, ate-her-ki-tties.  Me-lis-sa-Fi-sher, ate-her-ki-tties.”  I have no idea where this came from.  I had never spoken with this gnomish furniture-maker, though I knew he crafted beautiful stuff. Understandably, his kids never spoke or made eye contact with me, either..

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Crossing the Line into Criminal Behavior with Accomplice and Small Children

The family I babysat for most often had two charming girls, one of whom once fondly asked me, “Why are you so fat?” At first, I’d put Meredith to sleep in the crib and then read to two-year-old Stephanie.  She would make me read every single book at least once and instantly scream if I stopped for the briefest moment, threatening to wake the baby.

After they were both in bed, I’d engage in battle with the wood cook-stove. I never understood the drafts.  My two options were to keep it wide open, meaning the temperature in the old schoolhouse would quickly escalate to 95 degrees, or damp it down and fill the house with smoke until the fire choked out. Either way, I’d end up opening all the windows and doors.

I loved their parents, Steve and Jude.  At nights on the drive back to my parents’ house, Steve would holler out, “ENGLAND!”then swerve and drive for half a mile on the left side of the empty road, a great belly laugh shaking out of him.

Stephanie and Meredith were terrible secret-keepers.  Once, when I was 14, their parents left me the car keys for the day—for emergencies.  Or perhaps so I could run to the Roxbury General Store for milk.  Along with milk, the store had two well-stocked coolers of cheap beer, gas, a dome-covered cheese wheel, flies, penny Swedish Fish, Charleston Chews—best after being stuck in a snow bank and frozen solid—more flies and Atomic Fireballs but not much else.

I didn’t drive to the store, not at first anyway. Instead I called a brown-haired boy.  Technically, he lived in the opposite direction from the store, but that’s fine. I just figured this would catch his attention.  I loaded the girls in the car, popped in the Genesis Land of Confusion tape I found in the glove compartment, and headed for his house—choruses of “Where are WE GOING?” rising from the backseat.

I was actually a pretty good driver with three years of experience.  My father had taught me to drive his Jeep when I was 12. Given where we lived, he’d been careful to explain about driving on washboards, how to do a hill start on loose gravel, and where to pick up the firewood he’d cut up down the road that needed to get stacked in the shed.

The truck I learned to drive in.

When he handed me the keys, Steve, the girls’ father, had pointed out that the car’s low gas light was on. But he was pretty sure there was enough to get to town and back if we had to.  So when we picked up the brown-haired boy—and not wanting to get stranded—we carefully poured in some gas from a red can in the barn. Then, a bit horrified (a sinking, Oh shit! moment when the gas warning light FAILED to come on), we realized it was too much and proceeded to spend the afternoon driving every dirt road in town until the yellow dot on the dash reappeared. (Okay, it WAS a nice realization that we would sneak around all afternoon, driving unlicensed and free. And 14!)

We weren’t worried about cops. I had never heard of the Roxbury town constable doing anything more than grudgingly volunteering for the position at town meeting.  Also I had heard and fully believed that regular laws didn’t apply to dirt roads (I think my father the minister was the one who told me this questionable fact).  The locals who usually hung out on the store’s porch were in and out of jail for various bits of misconduct—we were known as an outlaw town—but I was never sure how they got incarcerated (this reminds me that my friend Anna used to call jail “Three Hots and a Cot”). When my mother and the planning commission tried to clean up the village, Dave Santee, who lived next to the store, fired up the “Uglification Committee” and promptly hauled a toilet, two rotting dormers, and a one-wheeled tractor to his front yard.

I was aware, yes, that I was taking advantage of the situation, and, being a respectful minister’s daughter down deep (very deep), I was really afraid of being caught. Steve, the father, was a playful and irreverent ex-hippie. He loved it when I was a little bad—he’d say, “Oh, I bet that pissed off Ed and Ellie” and laugh. I adored him and looked up to him, and I hated the idea of losing his esteem. Not to mention the fact that my father might have had some feelings on this one, too (though, clearly, he TAUGHT me to drive at the age of twelve and, if the truth be known, wasn’t averse to a bit of rule-bending now and then either).

Late in the afternoon, when it finally occurred to me that Steve and Jude would be appearing in the driveway any second, we headed for home. I threw the brown-haired boy out of the car at his mailbox, barely stopping. Then I casually, airily (and very carefully) discussed with the girls the fact that what we had done all afternoon was perfectly fine, normal, unremarkable and not worth mentioning to ANYONE. There was no reason to say anything about it to their parents, and besides, their parents wouldn’t care.

We pulled into the empty driveway, unloaded, and were lingering on the lawn when Steve and Jude arrived moments later.  I was in a panic, the hood of the car was still hot, but ALL was well.

Then, suddenly, the girls were dashing toward their parents, screaming, ”Mommy, Daddy, Melissa drove THE CAR! We drove EVERYWHERE and finally the light came BACK ON! She told us not to tell you.”

I thought, Oh shit.

Steve said, “Is that right?” He looked right at me and laughed.

—Melissa Fisher

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Melissa Fisher is a writer and college administrator still living in Vermont.

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What it’s like living here: Stanley Fogel’s Cuba

May 182011
 

Stanley Fogel’s ¿Que Coño Pasa? Snapshots of my Wonderful Cuban Life is the first book-length text ever published on Numéro Cinq, another first, another huge milestone in our adventure in digital publishing. I am calling it a “What it’s like living here” because, in fact, it tells us what it’s like living in Cuba today. But, of course, it doesn’t fit the pattern: it’s a book. The first chapter, the introduction, takes the lesson of Edward Said’s Orientalism and applies it to the West’s construction of the so-called Cuban historical fact. The next three chapters are very much a memoir of the years Stanley Fogel has spent living and teaching in Cuba, the personal facts behind the wall of words. Snapshots is thus a blend of the critical and the personal (with a dash of Fidel Castro’s own rhetoric added for flavour). Stanley Fogel is in a good position to see what he sees. A Canadian scholar with a yen to be “displaced,” he has spent about four months a year since the early 1990s in Cuba. He is a quirky, perceptive, thoughtful (critical in the best sense) guide to that other world. He tells a story different from the received wisdom, he fills his story with people and anecdote—our Virgil.

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Me: I spent 36 years at the University of Waterloo/St. Jerome’s University where I was overcome by deconstruction and taught critical theory. A travel book, Gringo Star, ECW Press, only partly captures my desire to be displaced in the world. In 1999 I was awarded an honorary degree from Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Re. the opus at hand: I have spent c. 4 months per year since 1991 living in Havana, discovering the richness and distinctiveness of Cuban life–culture and politics transformed by the Cuban Revolution. I am retiring there shortly. (Do come visit if you’d like an ‘insider’s’ sense of Havana.) —Stanley Fogel

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¿QUE COÑO PASA?

SNAPSHOTS OF MY WONDERFUL CUBAN LIFE

By Stanley Fogel

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A mi hermano, Mario Masvidal, y la revolución cubana

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Thanks to Elizabeth Effinger and Trieneke Gastmeier
for typing and grooming the manuscript.
Thanks, also, to St. Jerome’s University for grants
towards the preparation of the manuscript.
The photos, man with libreta and man with eggs,
were taken by Giorgio Viera.

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Chapter 1: ¿COÑO, QUE PASA? An Introduction

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A loose translation of “¿Coño, Que Pasa?” is “Jeez, whazzup?” “¿Que Coño Pasa?” is a grammatically skewed version of the first phrase. Its speaker is betraying more bewilderment and/or astonishment at what s/he has witnessed or heard than in that initial formulation. Both, though, transmit the effusive, gestural nature of Cubans’ speech and flamboyant responses to what is happening locally or beyond. Indeed, to absorb the import of the remark most fully, it is best to hear it uttered by someone, steeped in Cubans’ idiomatic lexicon and delivery, who shortens the noun to “’ño,” confident its meaning will survive. If you’re planning on spending time in Cuba and want to sound authentic, work on your “’ño”; remember, the shorter the syllable the better: taking the first, small bite out of the word “gnocchi” will suffice. Despite the possibly sexist dimensions (coño=cunt) of the formulations, no offense, feminist or otherwise, should necessarily be taken by the addressee of either remark, given that both men and women have been heard to repeat them, most often in gender-free contexts.

Too often, however, the voices of individual Cubans have been muffled or overwhelmed, most noxiously, of course, by pervasive U.S. media disseminating their political leaders’ rabid and hawkish views regarding the island. “A Caribbean gulag” is the mantra incessantly uttered, one which erases any sense of the lively, polyphonic voices existing there. Much more persuasive and compelling than dogmatic right-wing comments, to my ear at any rate, are Fidel Castro’s speeches which offer the vision of utopian and egalitarian possibilities for Cuba’s inhabitants and, indeed, for the world. That impressive voice, however, has come to represent, metonymically and univocally, the diverse people who live in Cuba. In addition, it often offers idealized visions that can by no means always or easily be translated into quotidian life. Nonetheless, not least because Fidel’s speeches have been so influential in shaping Cuban government policy and because they have not had the widespread reach of American anti-Cuban material, excerpts from some of those speeches are presented here, interspersed with my own commentary. They are meant to act more as a parallel discourse than as a countervailing commentary. While it is true, that they can draw attention to a discrepancy between the ideal and the real, they also point to genuine achievements as well as noble aspirations.

These pages, it is hoped, give some hint of the richness of Cuban life, a fecundity jammed, again, to a significant extent by American efforts to isolate the country and to caricature its unique political, cultural and social dimensions. While the U.S. bombards Cuba with messages, threatening, hectoring and proselytizing, Cuban versions of itself and its interpretations of world events and tendencies don’t get a hearing of any kind in North America, unless one subscribes to Granma International or accesses granma.cu on the web. With globalization of an American-capitalist kind that has produced homogenization in much of the rest of the world, the idiosyncratic qualities of Cuba since the Revolution are even more worthy of examination, respect and transmission. In Orientalism, his groundbreaking work that in many ways launched postcolonial studies and strove to articulate a postcolonial sensibility, Edward Said pronounced on the dangers and distortions inherent in a Western imposition of meaning on the East. Surely, U.S. constructions of Cuba are no less pernicious; they may, in fact, be more deleterious given Cuba’s size, its proximity to the belligerent presence immediately to the north and its pre-revolutionary interconnectedness with the U.S.A. To that list, one could add the current constellation of political forces in Florida which dictates, in large measure, the direction of Washington’s policies towards Cuba.

I have lived in Havana for approximately three months a year since 1992, the epicentre of the “periodo especial” [special period], when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, then Cuba’s sponsor and ally, food, gasoline and electricity all but disappeared for a time from the lives of ordinary Cubans. I witnessed the seismic shift firsthand when, early in my time spent in Havana, I happened to be passing by the University of Havana Library. Just outside the doors was a large, unsightly pile of Russian language books dumped there unceremoniously by the staff. The special period’s duress may have begun; at least, though, there was the satisfaction of jettisoning a Soviet presence that many felt was joyless, arrogant, oppressive and, possibly even, racist. Traces of that occupation do remain, principally in the numerous Ivans, Liubas and Vladimirs registered in Cuba’s census. Freed from naming their children from such imperialist sources, many parents opt for such freewheeling monikers as Misleidys (my lady) or Roelvis (you’re Elvis) that augment the sense, readily apparent, of Cuban expressiveness and buoyancy. Not that politically-based nomenclatures are passé; there is always the chance of encountering a Usnavi (U.S. Navy) or, more in line with official Cuban sympathies, a Hanoi. Famously, a kid with that latter name in the early 1970s was a “one hit wonder,” singing a song demanding the release of American dissident, Angela Davis, then in a U.S. jail. When she was freed, one of her first stops was Havana where she appeared at a huge rally in her honour.

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Kilroy: A Writer’s Childhood — Keith Maillard

May 132011
 

Keith Maillard2

Because he had a difficult time pronouncing “Keith” when he was a child, Keith Maillard called himself “Keats.” Because he was sick a lot, he made up stories; he drew stories on the bathroom tiles and his grandmother cleaned them off every day so he could do more the next. Because he was a kid during the Second World War, he thought Kilroy was a magical, ubiquitous person. Herewith is a second excerpt from Keith Maillard’s memoir Fatherless (NC published “Richland” in March). It goes straight to the heart of childhood, that gorgeous, magical moment in time when adults are mythic creatures, the night holds unspeakable terrors, words are mysterious and difficult to control, illness visits and strange medicines applied, and the self applies itself fiercely and joyously to the task of understanding. Keith Maillard was born and raised in West Virginia. Currently the Chair of the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, he is the author of thirteen extraordinary novels and one poetry collection.

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I’ve always had the impulse to tell stories. It must have started with wanting to hear stories. When I was little, my mother put me to bed by telling me the adventures of Bucky the Bug, a tale that she made up on the spot, that evolved day to day. I was so little that I had to go to bed before it was dark. “You never minded,” my mother told me. “You always wanted to hear the next part of the story.” Those summer nights, as they settled down on me, felt as huge as continents. The light would be fading out at the windows; I’d be tucked into bed but not sleepy yet, and my mother would be telling me what was happening to Bucky the Bug right now. I don’t remember the stories, but I do remember the sense of living inside them. When my mother stopped telling me stories, I begin to tell them to myself. As soon as I could, I notated them—first with stick figures, then, much later, with words.

The lower half of our bathroom walls was tiled. Each tile—cream-colored and blank—looked to me like the panel of a comic strip. I’d sit on the bathroom floor and draw on the tiles with a soft lead pencil, filling in each one with the drawing that went with the story I was telling myself, working my way around the bathroom walls until I had filled all of the tiles as high as I could reach. Every evening my grandmother would scrub them clean with Ajax Cleanser so I could start over the next day and do it again. I felt no sense of loss when my comic strips were wiped away. I loved waking up in the morning knowing that I had all those shining blank tiles to fill—more than I could count—unending rows of cartoon squares where I could tell myself stories.

When I got older, I moved from bathroom tiles to paper. I was sick so much as a child that they bought me a bed table and a special wedge-shaped pillow so I could sit up and draw. Whenever I got sick, I had to take unbelievably nasty blue pills called “pyrobenzamine.” My grandmother would smear my chest with Vicks Vaporub, cover it with a layer of cotton, then a layer of cloth—thin t-shirt material. She’d set the vaporizer going in the corner of my bedroom; it hissed quietly, making everything steamy and scented of camphor. She turned on the radio for me—a box made of Bakelite with a green dial. Voices from the radio told me stories as I drew my own stories. The first two fingers of my right hand became callused from holding pencils and crayons. Sometimes I had fever dreams as thick with images as wallpaper. In my earliest years I had visitations that were worse than nightmares.

Night terrors occur in the early part of the sleep cycle when there’s no rapid eye movement. They afflict toddlers and young children, can be deeply frightening to adults if they don’t know what’s happening—as my mother and grandmother didn’t. Adults often describe the children as looking possessed. They cry out. They’re obviously deeply distressed, and sometimes stare fixedly at something just beyond their field of vision. Most children, when they have night terrors, don’t remember them, but I remembered mine. My mother and grandmother kept saying, “Look at his eyes, look at his eyes, look at his eyes.” I don’t know what my version of “Oh, my God!” would have been, but that’s what I was feeling. My mother and grandmother’s voices sounded rumbly, echoey, as though they were in another room, a huge one with stone walls. I couldn’t move a muscle—Wrong with my eyes, wrong with my eyes, what could be wrong with my eyes?—heard them saying over and over again, “Look at his eyes.” My eyes, my eyes?

Another time it was a shower of pins that were many different colors. They weren’t nice colors, like rainbow colors; they were sharp nasty colors—blue and black and red—and they were falling in a thick cloud of little pins all lined up together, not dispersed, coming down all together. From the way I was seeing them, they were above me and to the left—a countless number, millions of tiny pins raining down on me, trying to do something pitiless to me. I don’t know how long I had night terrors, but they made the night dangerous. I tried to keep them out by pushing on the front door to hold it shut. I might have sleepwalked there; I was not fully awake—I know that—and the radiating glow of that awful yellow light, threatening, disgusting, smeared through the curtain on the door, on our door that led outside to where there were things. I drew that shower of pins. “Like that, like that. It looked like that.”

When I’d first been learning to talk, Keith had been hard to say, so I had become Keats. That’s how I thought of myself, and for years that’s how I signed the cards I gave my mother and grandmother at Christmas and on their birthdays. While I was still inside that eternity of “not-in-school-yet,” I consumed comic books like peanuts, and the classic, iconic pop-culture images from the late Forties flowed into my own stories. Like Batman, I drove a sleek, murderously fast car jammed with amazing modern gadgets; mine was called “the Keatsmobile.” My headquarters was a complex series of interlinking caves deep underground beneath our apartment; the walls were lined with jewels—diamonds and rubies and emeralds and sapphires—and I could see them in my mind, fabulously glittering, as I strode down the corridors. This wondrous place, my home inside myself, was called “the Keats Cave of Splendor.” I lived there with a dozen or so of my friends, and I was the ruler of that world, the fearless hero in charge of the whole works. Like Superman, I wore a uniform with a cape; the letter K was emblazoned on my chest. My best friend and constant companion, my advisor, my right hand man in the Keats Cave of Splendor, was Kilroy.

In the war that was just ending—the terrible exciting war I saw in movies and newsreels and magazine photographs—Kilroy had been everywhere. Wherever our soldiers had gone—even into the most dangerous, bombed-out, desolate, death-ridden cities of Europe—Kilroy had always been there ahead of them. He left drawings of himself, two little dots for eyes, his big nose hanging over a fence, and his eternal message: “Kilroy was here.” The GIs kept trying to find some place, any place at all, where Kilroy had not been there ahead of them, but they’d never been able to find it. That’s the story of Kilroy as my mother had told it to me, and I was lucky to have Kilroy as my best friend. Because he’d always been there first, he understood everything. If I was ever confused or upset, Kilroy would come and explain to me what was going on and why things were happening the way they were. He was a magician, a shaman—my tutelary deity, my guide, my mentor—and these are all adult words. In my childhood he was simply my pal. He was a wise man who knew everything, who could tell me everything I needed to know. He was—and it’s taken me sixty years to see this—someone like a father.

My first work of fiction, written in my head and notated in stick figures that were wiped away every evening, was entitled “Kilroy and Keats.” What we did in the Keats Cave of Splendor was fight against evil. I knew what evil was because I had stared at it when no one else could see it, because it had rained down on me like pins. I knew that evil sometimes sniffed around outside our front door. Evil is what the Japs and the Nazis had done to people—the worst things that anybody could imagine—and they’d done it happily and laughing like the villains in Superman and Batman stories. There were things called “concentration camps” where the Nazis had done really evil things, but Kilroy had been there, and he could explain it to me—how people could have done things like that.

I can remember—just barely—when the War was still going on, imagining it on the other side of the river, but I can’t remember it ending. I told my mother that I wanted to build a fort in our back yard. She said she’d help me do it, but that we’d better put little American flags on it so that when our planes came over, they wouldn’t bomb it. I was terrified. If there was even the faintest possibility that our planes would bomb my fort, then I simply would not build a fort, and I never did. Later—how much later, I don’t know—it came to me in a flash: Nobody would bomb a little fort in our back yard. My mother had lied to me. Kilroy would never lie to me.

We were Americans, and we’d won the war. We’d beat the evil Japs and Nazis. We’d beat them with the bombs that I saw in newsreels, atom bombs brighter than a thousand suns. Kilroy knew all about them. He’d been in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and watched them fall.

—Keith Maillard

 

 

Kindred Spirits, 400 Years of an American Family: Nonfiction — Joe David Bellamy

Apr 112011
 

Joe David Bellamy is the legendary founding editor of the magazine Fiction International, at one time champion of all that was new and bold in American writing. He is also a former president of both the AWP and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, and he served as Director of the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts in the early 1990s. A prolific author in his own right, Bellamy won the Editors’ Book Award for his novel Suzi Sinzinnati,and his collection of short fiction, Atomic Love, was an AWP Award Series Selection. His other books includeAtomic Love, Literary Luxuries, and The New Fiction. His essays, fiction and poetry have been published in: The Atlantic, The Nation, Harper’s, Narrative, Paris Review, Saturday Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, and some seventy others. It’s a pleasure and privilege to present here the opening chapters of his just published family memoir Kindred Spirits.

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Beulah Pearl Bellamy

 

The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

After the death of my mother made me an orphan in middle age—my father had died twenty-four years earlier—I developed a sudden interest in genealogy that was close to an obsession. I realized, fairly quickly, that this obsession was probably a certain form of bereavement, but that did not lessen its intensity. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the feeling that my mother’s life and the immediate past of my whole extended family was in danger of being lost forever, as the far past was already lost. I was perhaps the first person in my lineage, a lineage that was undoubtedly ancient—as ancient as everyone else who is alive today—with the opportunity to discover whatever past was there, and I felt I had to take a stand about it. In spite of all the usual distractions, I was simply going to do it. I felt it as an important responsibility.

I was not interested in genealogy in order to prove that I was somebody, the legitimate heir to the English throne perhaps, or a descendant of the Pilgrims. The fact is I had come from a rather large extended family, and now—with the death of my mother—most of them were gone. I remembered them all vividly, mostly with affection, but no doubt I was feeling lonely. I had had children of my own, a daughter and a son, but they were out of the nest starting their own families now, living far away. I wanted to reclaim the sense of having a family once again.

Who were we anyway? We were, I supposed, an ordinary middle class family from the American Midwest, a family of white people, vaguely English (or Irish, I thought) with a little bit of German and Swiss from my mother’s side. We were basically standard whitebread Americans, just plain folks, people somehow without ethnicity or real history, yet people who had been lucky and privileged enough that, in the latter part of the twentieth century, we had been taught to feel a little bit guilty about being so white and so bland, so lacking in any specific cultural identity, as if we had reached whatever middling level of economic security we had attained through almost no effort at all, simply because we were white and ordinary.

In a tangible sense, I didn’t know who we were. I felt we needed to identify ourselves more clearly and fully, find out where we came from, when and under what circumstances we arrived in the places we called home, and pass this information on to future generations of descendants. This information was perishable, after all—some of it had surely perished already. It would be ignorant and careless of me not to do what I could to find out what was left and make it permanent, if possible—put it on a CD or bury it somewhere deep in the bowels of the Library of Congress—so that it might survive. Of course, I wouldn’t have minded if my ancestors all turned out to be decent and accomplished. But if there were horse thieves or worse, I wanted to know that too. I was determined to be ruthless—I wanted to know the truth, even if it might be unpleasant.

The last time I saw my mother, about two months before she died suddenly from a heart attack in 1998, we had spent an afternoon going through boxes of old photographs from her attic, many of which she had inherited from her own mother. She had pictures of herself as a child that I had never seen before—she was an adorable little girl—and as a ravishingly beautiful young woman, or so she seemed to me. At one point, marveling at the pictures, I blurted out something about her having been “the most beautiful woman in the world,” and I felt at the time that I probably should not have said it in spite of the fact that she seemed pleased and I felt it was true. It seemed a little silly and self-indulgent saying something like that to this sweet, wizened 79-year-old woman with age-spots on her forehead who was hardly a beauty of any kind at the time. What immoderately well-loved son does not believe his mother is beautiful? Still, after she died, I was more grateful that I had made that one rash statement than anything else I may have said that day.

She showed me pictures that afternoon that amazed me. For the first time in my life, I saw a photograph of my great grandmother, Hannah Siple, my mother’s mother’s mother. She was so far away in time; she had died long before I was born, and her life had been tragically sad. But I felt so close to her at that moment. Her life had made my life possible. I was certain we would have been close friends, if only because she resembled my mother so completely. I don’t quite know how to express this, but I wanted to speak to Hannah Siple. I wanted to be able to tell her that her misery had not been entirely in vain, that life she had set in motion had gone on and was going on still. That photograph of Hannah Siple was a revelation for me and led to a search for many other photographs—as many as I could find of all my missing family members.

Why did it take me so long to learn about Hannah Siple’s life and to come to a point in my own life that I could focus on her and come to include her in my idea of the family I had inherited? My family, like so many others, seemed to accept the tacit conviction that there was no way to know, finally, who our ancestors were. If our immediate relatives could not tell us about them, we assumed we would never know. When they did try to tell us what little they remembered, perhaps we were too young and preoccupied to listen.

Perhaps our ancestors had been so engaged in simply living their lives, of hacking their way through the wilderness, they forgot their history—or they never knew it—or they died before they could pass it on. It takes only one lost generation to engender oblivion. Perhaps because so many of them were living on the very edge of civilization, without the resources of civilization—including, in some cases, literacy itself—and perhaps suffering too from a kind of permanent homesickness, having left behind their own extended families—they let it slide away. Americans are, after all, the offspring of banished peoples—revolutionaries, renegades, rebels, and rabble-rousers—nonconformists, adventurers, indentured servants, slaves, religious fanatics, the offspring of murdered martyrs, and opportunists—the dispossessed from every corner of the world. Certainly my ancestors were exactly that sort of people—people, in some cases, who might have wanted to forget their pasts.

Or—as in the case of Rolla and Harriet, my mother’s parents—each inherited lovely, thick family histories, Rolla Zutavern for his mother’s family, the Spaldings, Harriet for her father’s family, the Kagys. There is evidence that they did read these genealogies. But perhaps, for them, the contents of these volumes seemed a little abstract and musty, something very far away. And the family histories they did inherit, though valuable, were hardly perfect. The Kagy genealogy listed my grandmother (the owner of the book when I discovered it) as dying when she was nine days old! Actually, she lived to be 89. The Spalding genealogy listed Mercy Mary Adams as if she were just any little Adams hausfrau who happened to marry a Spalding, and it said nothing about her incredible lineage (more about that to come)—because her lineage was not known to the collator (or to anyone else in the family).

Perhaps there are any number of plausible excuses for the muddle we had gotten into as a people apparently without a knowable past. But now all that has changed.

What I didn’t know at the time was that my sudden interest in genealogy coincided with a revolution, and that revolution is even bigger than the popular phenomenon that struck in the late seventies with Alex Haley’s Roots. Twenty years after Roots, family history hit the internet. All over the world, websites were launching, and they still are. The Mormons, with their enormous repository of genealogical data kept safe inside the Granite Mountain Vault in Utah—nuclear-bomb-proof and climate-controlled—were about to go on-line. Then they did!

Suddenly, through the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) at familysearch.org, it was possible to access information on more than a billion-and-a-half of the seven to eight billion humans who ever lived on the planet and who left names or records behind. Suddenly there was the U.S. Genweb Project, which made it possible to access a great many county birth/death/marriage/ probate/land and court records from almost any county in the U.S. in the comfort of your home via the internet. Suddenly there was Ancestry.com for census information and for archived family histories on-line. Suddenly the vast record holdings of the New England Historic Genealogical Society were available on the internet.

Suddenly it was possible to join a user group on-line where everyone involved was a cousin you never knew you had and the avowed purpose was to discover more about your common ancestors. Suddenly everyone and his uncle had a family history site on the web that listed the several trees within that family—with regular updates as new information was discovered and recorded. According to several sources, genealogy is now the second most popular subject area on the internet after pornography!—and if you try to access the LDS site on a Sunday afternoon, you will find out just how true this is. You can almost feel their huge servers straining under the torrent of hits.

With the help of the access to multiple worlds of knowledge made possible by the internet and the computer, genealogy might become the human equivalent of the genome project or constructing the first replica of the DNA molecule. Instead of looking at the two or three immediate generations of a family or a person—only those living or those whom the living remember—what if we could stand back at some greater distance from the teeming, then lost, lives within a family and examine ten generations or twenty generations or thirty generations? Not just one line of twenty or thirty generations but multiple lines or every single line—the whole picture. What giant patterns might emerge? What genetic tendencies might become clearer? If one could accomplish such a study within one’s own family, what better path to greater self-knowledge could one possibly find? What better way to understand one’s own inclinations and aptitudes?

What I am here to report is that such a thing is now possible, and I have done it—with unexpected results. It is a humbling experience to uncover and then to understand and to come to terms with the hundreds, the thousands, whose lives preceded one’s own. I started out by wondering how I could have made the choices I did that defined my modest life in my peculiar field, given that my immediate ancestors seemed so unlikely—and so unlike me. I ended up seeing exactly why I had made so many of the decisions that defined my life. I wish I had known sooner just where I came from. It might have made the choices easier.

Of course, it is one thing to find out and prove the names of one’s ancestors, and quite another to learn something worth knowing about the lives they lived. The names themselves seem valuable to me, and I still want to find more of them; but the names have little interest to anyone not in the immediate family, and sometimes not even to them. But the lives—if they can be learned—can be revelations. To discover the lives, if possible, became my goal; and what an enormous effort it took.

It’s true—one of the pleasures of genealogy is in solving mysteries—in finding where all the bodies are buried—and another is the purely clerical enjoyment in the working out of a gigantic crossword puzzle, filling in all the little boxes. But these are boxes that count for all time once you get them right, and the satisfaction of resurrecting some long forgotten soul, whose life was absolutely necessary to your own, and restoring them to their rightful place in the historical record, is gratifying.

Of course, some of what one finds out there is not all it seems—even the Mormon researchers are fallible. Their belief in the importance of the family and the sheer grandeur of their vision is admirable, and the work they have done to preserve records is an incalculable service to humankind. But their genealogy program is, after all, an arm of their missionary effort. Each church member is admonished to seek out his ancestors in order to perform various religious rites that will assure all can meet again in the Celestial Kingdom. Such motives coupled with the fact that even the uneducated among them must perform the same rituals may not be the best prescription for accuracy. Some observers are simply suspicious of any motivation that is not purely scientific.

Genealogical research is like any other research—its quality depends upon the experience, intelligence, care, and unbiased attitude of the researchers.

There are other good reasons why, up until now, genealogy has had a dubious reputation—somewhere between pseudo-science and fanaticism. In the early part of the 20th century in America many fraudulent genealogies were prepared for the nouveau riche who wished to prove they were descended from European aristocracy. If you could afford to pay a “genealogist,” you could receive impressive “proof” of such descent, and the Mormons had nothing at all to do with it. Unfortunately, some of these fictitious trees are still in circulation, and their presence, like bad science, mucks up the whole and sullies the reputation of the enterprise

Also, there is the age-old problem of paternal descent. Even if one finds good evidence from the record that so-in-so’s parents were Mr. and Mrs. So-in-So, how could anyone ever know with certainty it was true? You could be relatively certain that the child’s mother was actually the correct mother—if the record said so. But what about the father? Certainly you could never know that part with scientific exactitude. Therefore, why bother? Genealogy seemed to its detractors nothing more than an excuse for self-deception, wishful thinking, or self-aggrandizement. But now we have DNA testing! A father’s link to the next generation can be proven scientifically.

Even with the immense resources the internet makes possible—and the many breakthroughs and leads it may generate—there comes a time when there are no new sites to find, no one with good information you haven’t already talked to, and every new FamilyTreeMaker CD is just another dead end. You are in terra incognita, and that is when you are on your own and you have to start doing the original research yourself—traveling long days to distant courthouses and libraries, filling out National Archives forms and waiting for weeks for some tiny tidbit, making dopey phone calls to bewildered elderly cousins residing in nursing homes. And that is when you find out just how full of holes, lies, and not-so-inspired suppositions everything else you have found up until then may have been. It turns out there is an incredible lot of junk on the internet too—and sometimes in people’s recollections.

Nevertheless, in a few short years of working in the new world of information access and internet genealogy—plus taking my research to several remote courthouses in Virginia, to the LDS Library in Salt Lake City and the Daughters of the American Revolution Library in Washington, DC, to family reunions, to Jamestown, to Plymouth Rock, to the New York Public Library, to FamilyTreeDNA.com, to ancient houses and graveyards, including the site of the oldest brick house in America—I can now say with absolute surety: I know more than I ever thought I would know about my family and its history. In fact, I know more about my family than any member of my family has ever known before in the history of the world—and more than all but a handful of contemporaries have ever known about any family. I’ve located over 2000 direct ancestors and tens of thousands of others, and I know their names and, for some, I know about their lives.

This book is a family saga, and the saga of many, many families. It is not just about finding one’s great grandmother. It’s also about finding her great grandmother, and hers, and hers, and hers—back into time farther than you could have imagined—and grandfathers and great great great grandfathers too—with a degree of accuracy never before achieved. The acquisition and salvage of these lost generations is now attainable.

 

A Magical Relationship

My parents near the time of their elopement in 1938

Sometimes the barest genealogical details seem to suggest a story. I started to appreciate that when I first came across my relation to the Bulkeley family in 16th-century England.

Frances Bulkeley, born in 1568, had died in 1610 at age 42, and her sister Sarah Bulkeley, born in 1580, had died a year later at age 31. Yet both had lived long enough, according to the record, to bear children who outlived them, who carried on and bore children of their own. I immediately started to wonder what might have caused these sisters to die so young; perhaps they had died in childbirth or from the plague. I imagined that Sarah, the younger sister, who was my father’s ancestor, must have been devastated when Frances died and probably had no inkling that she would be dead herself within a year.

I imagined the sisters as very close—I imagined that Frances, who was twelve years older than Sarah, had been like a mother to her; and I imagined Sarah grieving for her, in particular, for that reason, grieving more than the others and grieving for a longer time.

I felt lucky to have scraped by myself, because if Sarah had not married Mr. Oliver St. John in 1597 and given birth to a son in London in 1604, I would not be here today to tell about it. I felt astonished to realize that I had had ancestors who were contemporaries of Shakespeare. But, of course, everyone who is alive today had ancestors who were contemporaries of Shakespeare. Of course they did.

The day I discovered the Bulkeley sisters was a red letter day at the LDS site. The line I was following went all the way back to 1300 with incredibly detailed documentation. The Bulkeley sisters were descendants of William De Bulkeley, born after 1300, and Maude Davenport, daughter of Sir John Davenport and Margery Brereton. Sir John Davenport and Lady Margery sounded like the kind of people I wouldn’t mind claiming as members of my family, even if they did live seven hundred years ago.

In 1938, my father, a direct descendant of Sir John Davenport and, later, of Sarah Bulkeley, turned down a humped back country road near Bloomville, Ohio. He was a lonely, divorced 30-year-old vacuum cleaner salesman from the Ohio River town of Portsmouth, a branch manager with a new car and a rakish reddish mustache. He turned in the driveway at my grandmother’s farm and knocked on the door. While he was attempting to sell my grandmother an Airway vacuum cleaner, he noticed my mother’s picture in a gilt frame on top of the piano and he said, without hesitation, that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

My grandmother informed him that the woman was not a woman at all but only her eldest daughter Beulah, who was not yet twenty years old. My father replied that her daughter had the loveliest eyes he had ever seen on a human face, including any movie star she would care to name. She might not realize it yet, he said, but her daughter was indeed a woman. Half an hour later, my grandmother bought the vacuum cleaner.

My father was an affable, persuasive man who was not above flattery, but he seldom lied about his true feelings. A few weeks later he stopped by unexpectedly at the Zutavern farm—to see how the vacuum cleaner was performing, he said. My 19-year-old mother, who had returned from college in the meantime, was on the phone when he walked into the room, accepting a blind date. After she hung up, he said spontaneously: “It’s really too bad you accepted that date because I was going to ask you out myself.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “I can break it.” There was a kind of instant recognition between them that the attraction they felt for each other was serious.

After they had been out a few times, my father tried to coax my mother to return with him to his hotel room. But she wouldn’t go. My father said it was very discouraging to him that she didn’t trust him. My mother said: “Oh, I trust you, Jim, but my mother always told me that I should never do anything that might have the appearance of evil.” (I never heard her say anything even faintly like this again.) Two weeks later, they eloped!

My parents were deeply, romantically, in love their whole lives together; and they stayed in love for the better part of four decades—until my father died—and, of course she never stopped loving him after he was gone. They held hands in public like teenagers, even in their sixties.

Now here comes the scary part of the story. One day while I was working on my mother’s Spalding line, I found that Benjamin Spalding, her gggggg grandfather had married a woman named Olive Farwell, born in 1647 in Concord, Massachusetts. Olive’s father was Henry Farwell, an Englishman, and her mother was named Olive Welby, born in 1604 in England. Olive Welby was the daughter of Richard Welby and Frances Bulkeley.

When I hit upon the name Frances Bulkeley, it didn’t register at first. I had been plowing through hundreds of names, and I remembered that I had seen the name Bulkeley, a possible precursor of “Buckley,” before. But it had been a while since I had been working on my father’s line, and I was not sure where I had seen it.

The truth came to me in the middle of the night, and I got out of bed to compare the genealogical lines on my various print-outs. The connection caused the hair to stand up on my arms and on the back of my neck as if a chilly wind had blown in through an open window. My father was a direct descendant of Sarah Bulkeley, who died in 1611. My mother was a direct descendant of her sister Frances Bulkeley, who died in 1610, and who, I imagined, had been so deeply mourned by her younger sister Sarah.

In other words, roughly 400 years earlier, two daughters of Rev. Edward Bulkeley and Olive Irby, Frances (1568-1610) and Sarah (1580-1611), married, gave birth, and died in England. Their respective descendants were born, grew up, moved from place to place, married into several different families, had children, and died. Roughly 375 years after their births, my father (Sarah’s gggggggggg grandson) married my mother (Frances’ ggggggggg granddaughter). Need I add that, during their lifetimes, my parents had absolutely no idea about this connection, though, had they known, I think it would have delighted them.

If it is true that—in some respects—we are born to fulfill the unrealized dreams of our ancestors, then was there something of Sarah’s longing to be reunited with her departed sister Frances in my father’s love of my mother? and something of Frances’ almost maternal love for Sarah in her love for him? Who can say?

—Joe David Bellamy

Praise for Kindred Spirits

 

“It’s easy to understand the temptations of genealogy, the apparent promise of being able to locate oneself in space and time, acquiring, if one is lucky, a bona fide sliver of something like divine perspective. What’s remarkable about Kindred Spirits is Joe David Bellamy’s ability to make a private quest into a work of fascination and suspense for his readers.”

—Kathryn Harrison, New York Times Bestselling author

“Kindred Spirits is a wise, wild ride, written with wit and energy and charm, and packed with stories that read like fiction. By the last page you’ll have read a surprising history of America, and you’ll have a new notion of just how eerily connected we all are.”

—Josephine  Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else on Earth

“I really enjoyed this book! Joe David Bellamy’s Kindred Spirits is so engaging, charmingly inclusive, and skillfully and tenderly spooned out, there is real comfort here in the universal message that many of us may quite possibly be at least cousins.

An exceptional and compelling new breed of memoir, history lesson, genealogy tutorial, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, personal meditation, and fireside seat-gripper, Kindred Spirits is rich with stunners and head-spinners that both entertain and leave the reader pondering the nature of chance and destiny that inform all of our origin tales. It will be hard to read this and not decide you are related to Joe David Bellamy.”

—Steve Amick, author of The Lake, the River & the Other Lake and Nothing But a Smile

Fatherless: Memoir — Keith Maillard

Mar 292011
 

Keith Maillard

Here’s a gorgeous yet chilling excerpt from Keith Maillard’s creative nonfiction book, Fatherless. Keith was five when his father went to work at the Hanford nuclear plant in Richland, Washington, on the Columbia River. Originally part of the Manhattan Project (nuclear material for the bombs Fat Man and Little Boy dropped on Japan came from its reactors), Hanford grew rapidly during the Cold War. Now it is mostly “decommissioned” although vast environmental damage remains. Keith’s memoir is chilling in part because of the very ordinariness of domestic life within the immense and hugely dangerous nuclear manufacturing community but also because, to a large extent, not much has changed—the illustration of the fast breeder reactor bearing Keith’s father’s signature below is eerily like the many plant drawings the press has been using to explain the current nuclear plant disaster in Japan. All of this is aside from the poignant recreation herein of Keith’s search, as a grown man many years later, for the estranged father he never knew. Keith Maillard was born and raised in West Virginia. Currently the Chair of the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, he is the author of thirteen extraordinary novels and one poetry collection. Many thanks to our mutual  friend, Lynne Quarmby, for bringing Keith to the NC fold.

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Richland

My father began working at the Hanford nuclear plant in 1947, the year I turned five. He pasted into his scrapbook only one reference to his official work—a pen and ink drawing so anomalous that it jumped right off the page. He’d made a clear, simple, easy-to-understand drawing of a “LIQUID METAL FAST BREEDER REACTOR (LMFBR),” labeled all of its parts, and signed it “E. C. Maillard.”

breeder-reactor

Within his first year in Richland, Gene Maillard had clearly established himself as the number one song-and-dance man in town. In 1948, while living in a dormitory room and composing on a “collapsible” organ, he wrote “Our Richland,” a song that told the story of the building of the “atomic city,” a song approved by the General Electric Company suggestion department.

The Richland Junior Chamber of Commerce produced a brochure to accompany the “Atomic Frontier Days” that were held during the first week in September of 1948. Celebrity guests Roddy MacDowell, the Cisco Kid, and John Wayne entertained, with Rudy Vallee as the Master of Ceremonies. The cover of the brochure is illustrated with a crude silhouette-style drawing in red and black—the skyline of a booming town with smoke rising from smokestacks, a great flair of white-out at the center, the whole works crowned with an atom, its neutrons zipping in orbit around the dot of the nucleus. The white nothingness that represented nuclear power is firing straight lines of white in all directions and hangs over rolling hills where a chuck wagon and three men on horseback are making their way across an empty desert spotted with sagebrush.

Under the heading of “Let’s Look Back,” the Junior Chamber of Commerce presents its version of Richland’s history.

In the year 1943 a group of men sitting around a table in Washington, D. C. seriously watched as one of their number pointed to a tiny spot on a large-scale map of the Pacific Northwest. Richland! Here, they decided, was the place! Thus was sown the seed from which sprouted a great plant and a thriving community.

Within a few months the pastoral quiet of this agricultural region was no more. Giant bulldozers leveled great tracts of ground, massive trucks roared day and night along erstwhile country lanes, new roads appeared and factories exploded into being from the desert sands. The fantastic barracks town of Hanford materialized to house thousands of construction workers. The nucleus of a vast, secret plant, born of wartime necessity, had been created.

The old farming center of Richland was evacuated and transformed into a modern community designed to eventually house thousands of production workers and their families.

Erection of plant and village ended; production of plutonium began. Only a handful knew “What”, and they were not talking. The village kept its secret well, so well that the nation and the world first learned of its existence only after the announcement of the A-bomb.

The Second Annual Atomic Frontier Days was held in August of 1949. The accompanying brochure was no longer free but now cost twenty-five cents; the cover had changed from red to blue, from hand-drawn illustration to photography, and featured “hard hats and assault masks in the northwestern desert.” Gene has pasted a clipping to the front of the brochure—a picture of close harmony being sung by the “Atom City Four” and a shot of himself with the caption: “A soft shoe tap in black face was an Atomic Frontier Days variety show headliner as done by Jean Millard.”

The Richland Chamber of Commerce expressed its gratitude to the people who made the 1949 Frontier Days a success, and one of them was my father. Once again, we are given Richland’s proud account of itself.

Scattered deep within this natural isolation are this nation’s most modern industrial plants. The vaunted American mass production, the assembly line method by which we lead the world in motor cars, in refrigerators, in turbines and egg beaters and pots and pans, is merely a fumbling dress rehearsal compared to the engineering know-how, the construction skill, the unusual operational methods required in this plutonium manufacturing plant.

The product itself, plutonium, is a man-made element which will be usable a thousand years from now for either war or peace. It is a packed power which will not deteriorate with time, which is a million times more powerful than any known fuel. Its manufacturing raises problems of production, storage, worker protection, national security, and world-power-plays, as no other American made package has ever done. It is owned by a free people; it bears a union label.

At the August, 1950, Atomic Frontier Days, thirty-five booths were set up in Riverside Park, offering “fun and refreshment.” Professional wrestlers went at each other in two exciting matches, and there was a fireworks display with “more than a dozen set ground pieces and bursts of two and three aerial displays at the same time.” The Queen of Atomic Frontier Days was crowned, along with her four princesses. And, of course, there was a free variety show—with twenty-three acts that included a comedy routine starring “Tony the Atomic Clown, Little Atom, and Koko, Hydrogen (H20) Bomb.” The night ended with the entire cast doing “Baked a Cake.”

Gene is listed as one of the directors and appears a number of times in the program, dancing twice with his fifteen-year-old student, Gail Muller. He’s a year away from turning fifty but in the pictures looks younger than that—a lean, fit, grinning showman in two-tone oxfords and a theatrical suit. Two shots catch each of them at the height of a “wing”—balanced in the air with arms flung outward, one foot kicking and the other striking the floor with a toe tap. We can almost hear the laughter and shouting voices egging them on, feel the electrifying exuberance of their performance.

The last photograph in the sequence shows Gene and Gail acting out the story of “Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy.” The image is so crisp that we can see every detail of Gene’s hairline moustache. Gail has one foot resting on the top of a folding chair. Gene is polishing her classic black patent tap shoe with a rectangle of cloth. On the bottom of this photo, Gail has written in a schoolgirl’s careful hand—“To the nicest and best dancing teacher anyone ever had.”

When my father was working there, Hanford’s only business was the manufacturing of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Not until 1963—when the N-Reactor added its bit to the Washington Public Power Supply System—would Hanford’s nuclear energy ever be used for any peaceful purpose whatsoever. Hanford officials constantly reassured those employed at the plant, or living near it, that they were perfectly safe, that “not an atom” escaped, but Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in North America. It had always discharged radioactive material into the Columbia River and continued to do so until its reactors were decommissioned. It fouled not only the river but the groundwater beneath it and left behind fifty-three-million gallons of radioactive waste stored in underground tanks that are leaking. Radioactivity from Hanford has been detected as far away as Oregon, northern California, and southern British Columbia. By 1951, the plant had sent more than 700,000 curies up its smokestacks, most of it in the form of iodine-131. For the sake of comparison, the 1979 Three Mile Island accident released less than 25 curies.

On December 2, 1949—in an exercise called “the Green Run”—the Hanford Works intentionally released radiation into the atmosphere so that scientists could monitor the resulting radioactive plume and apply that knowledge to the monitoring of Soviet nuclear production. My father—and anyone else living near the Hanford site—was exposed to twenty times more radiation than the limit allowed by the lax standards of the day. Readings on vegetation afterward were nearly a thousand times over that limit. The Green Run was conducted in absolute secrecy. No one was warned. The public would not know a thing about it for years.  By the time that Gene could have first read a newspaper account of the incident, he would have been eighty-five years old.

On July 31, 1997, I interviewed my father’s old friend, “Brink,” and a younger man, Carl, in the Travel Lodge in Delta, British Columbia. The notes I took are sketchy, cursive. Most of what I heard about my father, I wrote down, but large chunks of the interview didn’t make it onto the page.

We sat in the room as the daylight faded away and no one bothered to light a light. The TV was on, a bunch of pros playing a game of something, somewhere—baseball? The volume was low. Carl—along with a possible shadowy fourth presence—was watching the game, but Brink wasn’t. He was talking to me. In the distorting glass of my memory, the scene is set in twilight, lit with the flickering pixels of the TV screen. Brink was friendly enough, helpful enough, but as blunt and straight as a hammer handle. Initially, I read him as a man who had reached an age from which he figured that there was no reason to speak anything other than the plain truth, and I liked him for that.

I see from my notes that Brink had been an engineer. He and his family moved to Richland in February, 1948. Brink originally worked for DuPont, but his employer kept changing names. DuPont morphed into General Electric, and there were several others—United Nuclear, Martin Marietta, Isocan Rockwell. The word “Hanford” must never have been spoken because it doesn’t appear in my notes at all.

When Brink first arrived in Richland, Gene was already there working as a draftsman. He lived alone and avoided crowds because he didn’t want to “get a bug.” Later he bought a little two-story apartment building in Kennewick, lived upstairs, called it “the Maillard building.” Brink laughed at that—at Gene’s seemingly boundless ego—and so did I.

Gene “performed tap dancing”—yes, that’s exactly what I wrote down, so that’s how Brink must have put it. He’d told Brink a story from his early days on stage. Gene was in a comic role, so he used pecan shells to make himself look cross-eyed, but the effect was too realistic. Instead of finding him funny, the audience felt sorry for him. There was nothing worse, he said, than trying to be funny and not getting any laughs, so he worked out another gag. When he made his exit, he was supposed to tip his derby. He lifted it up, and there was another derby under it. He lifted that derby, and there was another one yet—and then another one. He got a big laugh for that one.

Brink told me that he’d built a little studio in his basement for his daughter, Kippy. He had to dig out the basement first because it was only half dug when they’d moved in. He finished it and tiled it, and that’s where Gene gave Kippy her tap lessons. Gene came every Tuesday night. He charged $2.50 for an hour. Then he’d stay and eat supper with them. As Kippy got older, she gave lessons to other kids in that basement studio.

Carl joined the conversation, and for awhile the two men reminisced about Kippy. Carl was a talkative guy. He’d known my father too, had seen him dance lots of times. Richland had been packed with remarkable people like my father—interesting, talented people. It was a nice little town, a great place to grow up. I’d read a lot about Richland by then, and I agreed with him—it must have been a nice little town. Carl said that he couldn’t imagine any other high school anywhere in America that would have had as many PhDs teaching in it. Yeah, he said, it was a nice little conservative town—making sure I got the point. He didn’t need to do that; I’d got the point awhile back.

“When I was growing up,” I told him, “I imagined my father dancing like Fred Astaire.”

Carl laughed at that. “Oh, no. He wasn’t like Fred Astaire at all. He did fast tap dancing, really athletic stuff… definitely athletic. If you had to compare him to somebody, he was more the Gene Kelly type.”
I wanted to bring Brink back in. “Did Gene talk about his wives?” I asked him.

“Well, he had three wives. He didn’t talk about them too much. One couldn’t be without her mother. She wrote to her mother every day. If she didn’t get a letter from her mother every day, she’d get upset. She’d say, ‘I didn’t get a letter. I have to call her.’ Gene asked her, ‘Do you want to live with me, or do you want to live with your mother?’ She said, ‘I want to live with my mother.’ ”

That was my mother—I’d recognized her instantly. I waited to hear the rest of the story, but there was no rest of the story. Could my mother have actually said something like that—made that admission? If she did say it, maybe it had been on the day she’d left him.

“Gene knew you were a writer,” Brink said.

“Oh?… Did he ever talk about reading anything I’d written?”

“No, he didn’t.”

Before I could find another question, Brink said, “Gene had the impression you didn’t want to see him.”

“That’s not true. I did want to see him.”

“Well, that’s not the impression he had.”

I’d known right from the beginning that there was something going on below the surface, and I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I kept coming up against a hard edge in this man. Gene and Brink had worked together, had known each other for years. They’d been friends. I now read Brink as very much on Gene’s team, so what did that make me? Some unknown guy who’d arrived too late, appearing out of nowhere to ask a lot of dumb questions? It was as though Brink felt it was his duty to present Gene’s point of view as clearly and firmly as possible. “He thought your mother had poisoned you against him,” Brink said.

“Maybe she did,” I said. “I know she tried to do that, but…” I made an expansive gesture. “Here I am.”

“He had cancer, you know… testicular cancer. He had a testicle removed. The day he got out of the hospital, he got into his car and drove into the desert. His car broke down. He got stuck in the desert. He had to walk back. It was right after the operation.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“We could never figure out why he’d done it,” Brink said. “It seems like an odd thing to do… to drive off into the desert the day you get out of the hospital.”

We must have talked about other things after that, but I can’t remember them. The last entry in my notebook might have been the last thing Brink said—“Gene always talked low. I never heard him raise his voice.”

Talking to Brink was as close I was going to get to talking to Gene, and it badly shook me. For days afterward, I woke up feeling not right—a particularly nasty variety of not-right that was like waking up sickened by the stench of bad breath and realizing that it’s your own. I felt as though I had received a message directly from my father—one that predated the “fuck you” he’d sent me in his will when he’d disinherited me. If I was going to continue the conversation, what was I going to say back to him? I’m sorry about the surly letter I wrote to you when I was twenty?  Gene would have been sixty-one when he got it—if he got it. He was still working at Hanford then. He might have talked to Brink about it. I hated the thought, but maybe that had been my only chance to connect with my father.

I knew why Gene had driven into the desert the day he’d got out of the hospital. I couldn’t have explained it to anyone, but I understood it because I could have done the same thing. Walking in the desert with one ball, Gene had been thinking about me, I was certain of that. How the hell do you get testicular cancer? I didn’t have a clue, but I suspected that being dosed with several hundred thousand curies of radioactive iodine probably didn’t help.

—Keith Maillard

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Julian Barnes on Oates, Didion and the Memoir from The New York Review of Books

Mar 252011
 

Here’s a Julian Barnes essay on memoirs by Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion, both widows mourning the loss of a partner. They are a study in contrasts, and the contrasts illuminate the art of the memoir and personal tragedy.

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“Yet Oates’s A Widow’s Story and Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking could not be more different. Though Didion’s opening lines (the fourth of which is “The question of self-pity”) were jotted down a day or two after Dunne’s death, she waited eight months before beginning to write. Oates’s book is largely based on diary entries, most from the earliest part of her year: so in a 415-page book, we find that by page 125 we have covered just a week of her widowhood, and by page 325 are still only at week eight. While both books are autobiographies, Didion is essayistic and concise, seeking external points of comparison, trying to set her case in some wider context. Oates is novelistic and expansive, switching between first and third persons, seeking (not with unfailing success) to objectify herself as “the widow”; and though she occasionally reaches for the handholds of Pascal, Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Richard Crashaw, and William Carlos Williams, she is mainly focused on the dark interiors, the psycho-chaos of grief. Each writer, in other words, is playing to her strengths.”

via ‘For Sorrow There Is No Remedy’ by Julian Barnes | The New York Review of Books.

Excerpt from Trail of Breadcrumbs: Why I Joined and Left the US Navy — Memoir by Christy Clothier

Mar 192011
 

Christy Clothier is one of my former students and a dual-genre graduate from Vermont College of Fine Arts in fiction and nonfiction. A small, feisty woman,  Christy taught me more about the nature of the military, returned soldiers, trauma and its aftermath and life than perhaps I wanted to know. Her memoir is riddled with sadness, injustice and  innocence betrayed.  Just to give you a taste: there is an incredibly telling moment in an early chapter when she realizes she feels safe amid the horrors of boot camp because no one is allowed to hit her. The chapter I selected is perhaps one of the most benign. Another chapter, the one dealing with her near-rape by a Navy Seal, has been published elsewhere (see below) and turned into a play. Christy served in the US Navy from 1997-2003 as an air traffic control tower supervisor. She writes short stories, research articles and essays that connect childhood abuse with military service and trauma. Christy’s writing has appeared in Inquiry and Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq, from which her essay “The Controller” was adapted for the play Coming in Hot, currently touring the United States through 2011. Christy lives in Colorado with her dog, Jauss, named after a famous author.

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Excerpt from Trail of Breadcrumbs:

Why I Joined and Left the US Navy

A Memoir by Christy Clothier

From the air, Naval Air Station San Clemente Island resembles a malignant mole on the skin of an ocean freckled with small islands. Twenty-five sinewy miles of salt and rock, San Clemente rose nearly 2000 feet above the sea after tectonic shifts deformed the region. The sea continuously feeds on the island’s borders and leaves behind erosion’s bite marks. Large sections of earth are left to hover over the water like a ship’s plank before breaking off daily into the sea.

A small military community works on top of this unstable foundation. Where untouched sand dunes named Castle Field once lied, the Navy took over. First, they covered the area with white rocks and small shells and used the makeshift airstrip for emergency landings only. Today, the runway sits on land renamed Sherman Field and paved over with a 9,300 foot concrete runway capable of supporting the heaviest warcraft. That was where I was headed.

A one-way flight from the Naval Air Station North Island, Coronado, California, to Naval Air Station San Clemente Island takes approximately 30 minutes. The refitted Orion P-3 levels just above the first cloud layer, skimming the frothy blue-white haze as though it were riding the crest of a wave. I do not peek out the oval windows. I shut the plastic screen. The familiar scent of industrial fabric on the seat back in front of me lulls me into an uncomfortable sleep, until the P-3 plunges into the froth of clouds on final descent. I ride the white rush until I land with a hard screech on the rocky surface below.

On the tarmac, the view gets only flatter. Aluminum buildings still look as they would from the window seat on a plane, all sides and roof. The island is the shape of a landfill. Dust settles in thin coats on the World War II relics, tanks that mark the fields like billboards.  Macadam Road snakes six miles along sharp cliffs and deep canyons from the airfield down to the pier at Wilson’s Cove. The remainder of the island is sectioned off, either unused by the military or inaccessible to individuals without prior authorization. The entire island sits beneath an invisible barrier, airspace designated as Warning Area 237. Dangerous flight activity occurs from the surface of San Clemente Island up to 5000 feet in the sky and for 10 nautical miles in every direction. Without authority, no one flies in or out of San Clemente’s airspace.

I had been in the Navy for a year and a half, all of that time spent at Chicago’s boot camp and Pensacola’s Air Traffic Control School. I was an E-1, the lowest rank in the military. I knew my official title was Air Traffic Controller Airman Recruit (ACAR). I knew to dress properly in my uniform, how to pass military inspections and ATC exams. I knew not to do anything without being told. I stood alone outside the airport terminal and waited for someone to claim me.

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Childhood — Michelle Berry

Feb 192011
 

Michelle & her brother in the Badlands

Here is Michelle Berry’s “Childhood,” the third in Numéro Cinq‘s new essay series (click on the “NC Childhood Series” tag to see the others), a gorgeous, lively, poignant tale of  a nomadic youth and the bond between a writer and her brother growing up. Very human, achingly real. For the truth is these essays are also about what they do not tell—growing older, looking back through the haze of memory and the struggles of adulthood. Most of you are already familiar with Michelle through her “What it’s like living here” essay earlier published here. I put an hilarious Michelle Berry story in Best Canadian Stories in the days when I still edited that annual anthology. She’s energetic, comic and prolific. A new novel This Book Will Not Save Your Life and a new story collection I Still Don’t Even Know You were both just published last year.

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Childhood

By Michelle Berry

 

Robin Hood

A Robin Hood record with a book attached to the sleeve. My brother remembers I coloured all over the record book, red and blue crayon. He still doesn’t believe me when I tell him I have no recollection of it.

“Why,” I ask him, “would I have done that?”

“You were always doing things like that,” he replies.

Like the time he got a Swiss Army knife for a present and, sneaking into a barn in Virginia, climbing the huge bales of hay and jumping down to the floor, my brother tossed me his Swiss Army knife for safe-keeping. I can still see the glint of the metal as it twisted through the air – slow motion – and disappeared in huge mounds of hay.

“I was six years old,” I say. “You should have known better than to throw it to me.”

“Still,” he says. “It was a great knife. We never found it.”

I thought my father rented a metal detector but he has no memory of this. I think we did apologize to the farmer for sneaking into his barn.

I worried for a while that a cow might have eaten the knife in a mouthful of hay, and then I would imagine someone cutting into a steak one day and finding it.

In England

Road Trips

The long road trip of my childhood.

Moving, traveling. There was a lot of both.

I was born in San Francisco, spent my first year in Claygate, England – first word: “hoss,” because they clip-clopped down the street carrying young girls going for a ride – lived in Virgina until I was seven, then Victoria, B.C.. We traveled across the country in a huge moving van, my mother driving the car behind us with our cat, Sassafras. I sang, “Leaving on a jet plane,” with my hand surfing wind out the van because my teenage cousin from New Jersey had taught it to me while she played the guitar. Every day in the van or car we had a new gift to keep us busy – colouring books, puzzles, snacks, mazes. We saw Prairie Dogs in the Badlands standing on their little back feet watching us watching them. Every motel we stayed in had a roadside pool. Once the gas in our U-Haul moving van was siphoned out of the van somewhere in Pennsylvania. Super Bowl this year my husband and father made silly jokes about the Steelers misspelling their name.

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Childhood — Brad Green

Feb 112011
 




























Here’s a splendid, gritty Texas “Childhood” essay from Brad Green in Denton. You all know what Denton, TX, is like because Brad also contributed a gorgeous “What it’s like living here” essay in December. Brad Green is a prolific author and editor, a uniquely rich, harsh, dry and despairing voice on NC, and he’s about to be a father again as dg types these words.

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Childhood

By Brad Green

 

Sloth and Envy

When I was twelve, I had the world’s meanest boil on my ass. Picture the swollen eye of a pissed-off bull, Aztec red and glaring. I’d run my palm with wonder over the furuncle’s tender heat and trace the rising, tight flesh to a pale tip that when brushed made my arms stiffen and toes clench. The day that boil popped was one of the worst of my life.

Hours were spent face down on my bed while the attic fan in our small elbow of a house droned, culling the scent of honeysuckle through my bedroom window. Those bushes were my favorite place in the world at that time. They’d inched up through the clay-cobbled dirt around our trailer in Argyle, Texas, and as they unfurled in the sun, I retreated to their shadow. That crosswork thatch of limbs laid sun-dappled shade under my window and I’d sit on the cool, damp earth, full of breath and light.

Butterflies flooded the air around the vines. The honeysuckle attracted clouds of them, each a fluttering thumbsmear of color. Flying in and around the bushes, the butterflies landed on my arms, tickled paths across my scalp. There was an immediacy to that experience that lifted one beyond the gravity of the skin.

But of course, my hidebound father tolerated none of that woolgathering. One day he thumped his Bible down on my bedside table, opened to Job, his mophandle finger stabbing at the verse. “Unlike him, I believe you done something wrong,” he said. Then he flicked his finger against the back of my thigh near the boil and I bucked on the bed. “You think about what sins brought this upon you.”

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The Problem With Memoirs – NYTimes.com

Feb 052011
 

Guidelines for not-writing your memoir. This should provoke some R & D (rage and derision). Noticed via Frank Tempone’s Facebook reference.

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A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.

There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occur­rences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.

But then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose. These days, if you’re planning to browse the “memoir” listings on Amazon, make sure you’re in a comfortable chair, because that search term produces about 40,000 hits, or 60,000, or 160,000, depending on how you execute it.

via The Problem With Memoirs – NYTimes.com.

The Moonstrone Ring: From The Secret Life of Objects — Dawn Raffel

Dec 232010
 

dawnraffelDawn Raffel. Photo by bill hayward.

I discovered Dawn Raffel through her stories in The Brooklyn Rail. But then I heard her read at The Brooklyn Rail anniversary reading and that sealed the deal. Here is a piece from her memoir in vignettes, The Secret Life of Objects. She has a short story collection Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (see the amazing book video at the bottom of the post) just out with Dzanc Books earlier this year, and she is also the author of Carrying the Body and In the Year of Long Division. It’s a pleasure to be able to present her work to NC readers.

(The photo was taken by bill hayward, part of his Bad Behavior project. Coincidentally, bill took the author photo for my novel The Life and Times of Captain N. The Bad Behavior project, as I understand it, consisted of giving subjects—artists of various sorts all—a huge sheet of backdrop paper and a bucket of black paint and letting them act out. The results were/are amazing. See above. See some of the photos on his web site, or buy the book. Hell, buy everyone’s book! It’s Christmas.)

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The Moonstone Ring

My future husband bought the ring in India in 1981 with the idea that he would give it to the woman he married.  Besides, he said, when he presented me with the ring in 1984, it was only $15. The ring is silver with a moonstone flanked by blue gems. It was not my engagement ring—that was a quarter-carat perfect diamond. Anyway, the moonstone ring was too large. My fingers at the time were a child-sized four.

I took the ring to be sized. During the three days it was at the jeweler’s, the 400-square foot apartment my future husband and I had just bought together in Chelsea was burglarized, and my jewelry, including the few pieces I owned that had belonged to my grandmother, was stolen. All I had left was my engagement ring, which was on my hand, and the moonstone ring in the shop.

In a few months, I also had a wedding band, and over the years my husband bought me jewelry, in part to make up for what I had lost. I rarely wore the moonstone—even properly sized, it seemed too big, too serious. Years went by; we moved from one apartment to another and out of Manhattan and had children.  The diamond fell out of my engagement ring, never to be found, though the kids had a field day looking for it, pulling the cushions off furniture, sifting through the contents of the vacuum cleaner bag. I took off that ring with its empty prongs and thought about wearing the moonstone in its stead but by now, my knuckles had thickened and the ring was too small. So I returned it to the jeweler to be made bigger, only to be told it could not be sized again without destroying it.

The ring sat in my top drawer for more than a decade.  During this time, a man in our small town opened a jewelry booth inside the liquor and soda store across from the takeout pizza joint, and I would occasionally browse while I waited for the kids’ slices to heat. One day I was looking at a pair of earrings when someone dropped off a ring to be sized. “Do you do that?” I said. “Sometimes,” he said. I brought in the moonstone-and-blue-gem ring and he looked at it and said he thought he could enlarge it, despite what the more established jeweler had told me. Sure enough, he did.

So now, 29 years after my husband brought the ring from India, I wear it next to my wedding band. Those sapphires, the jeweler said, with some surprise, are real. The band slides over my knuckle and the ring fits fine.

—Dawn Raffel

See another  excerpt in The Brooklyn Rail.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JXULFGiRCo]

 

 

 

 

Unintentional Pugilism: A Memoir — Richard Farrell

Dec 132010
 

T-34C

My first diagnosed seizure occurred in the cockpit of a Navy T-34C Mentor, on a formation flight over Pensacola, Florida.  I was 23.   Another pilot flew ‘lead’ that day, and I was the ‘wingman,’ which meant I  flew by staring straight at lead’s plane, judging distance and spacing by markers on the other fuselage and by constantly adjusting altitude, airspeed and direction to stay in formation.  We flew tucked in close, less than ten feet away, wingtip to wingtip. We were practicing a ‘turn-away,’ a maneuver where, on signal, the lead would bank sharply away and I would follow instantaneously and  in synch, maintaining tight spacing throughout the manuever.   Lead’s orange wing was so close to my cockpit that it seemed almost reachable.  I don’t remember a signal from the other pilot.   I don’t remember his plane turning away.   All I remember was coming to, his descending wing drifting rapidly away in the hazy sky, and the bellowing voice of my Marine instructor screaming at me over the intercom.  Something about me being ‘fucking nuts.’

(You can read the abstract of my case here, in an article published  by the flight surgeon who diagnosed me upon landing.)

I recently started re-reading The Pugilist at Rest, by Thom Jones, a collection of stories I read during my first semester at VCFA.   The titular story deals with the training of a young Marine during the Vietnam War.  The narrator goes through boot camp in San Diego where he assaults an abusive recruit-classmate with a rifle butt.  The narrator then ships off to Southeast Asia, survives a ferocious battle by faking his own death and receives medals for false heroism while the real hero lies dead on the battlefield. The narrator returns from the war and struggles with reintegrating into post-war civilian life.  We learn that Jones’ narrator suffers from epilepsy (as did Dostoevsky, as Jones himself does) and the story ends with the narrator preparing for an operation on this brain to help alleviate the symptoms of his disease.

The story has an odd structure, with scenes interrupted by historical and philosophical intrusions (about Greek boxers, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, etc.)   The eponymous pugilist is supposed to be Theogenes, a gladiator and Greek boxer who fought his opponents (to the death) while chained to a stone.

There’s a long passage in Jones’ story about the aura of seizures.  He’s thinking about his own disease and about Dostoevsky.  As a person who’s had epilepsy for almost twenty years and experienced far too many of these auras, I found this passage to be uniquely compelling:

“The peculiar and most distinctive thing about his epilepsy was that in the split second before his fit—in the aura, which is in fact officially part of the attack—Dostoyevski experienced a sense of felicity, of ecstatic well-being unlike anything an ordinary mortal could hope to imagine.  It was the experience of satori.  Not the nickel-and-dime satori of Abraham Maslow, but the Supreme.  He said that he wouldn’t trade ten years of his life for this feeling, and I, who have had it, too, would have to agree.  I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it—it becomes slippery and elusive when it gets any distance on you—but I have felt this down to the core of my being.  Yes, God exists!  But then it slides away and I lose it.  I become a doubter.”

In my experience, the aura sneaks up randomly—there are no precursors, no triggers that I can identify.  It feels like the most intense déjà vu imaginable, beginning as this prolonged sense of recurrent action, almost like a vivid memory.  In those weird seconds as the aura passes from something subtle to something more sinister, everything that’s happening—every sight, sound and sensation—seems to have happened before in the exact same order and sequence.  And here’s the kicker for me: the future feels predictable too, as if I know exactly what will happen next.  Then the aura shifts, and rises into a more and more intense, almost crippling feeling as the déjà vu spreads and becomes more pronounced, mixing with darkness, with a sensation of fear and gloominess.  In “The Pugilist at Rest”, Jones describes this as the “typical epileptic aura, which is that of terror and impending doom.”  But these darker sensations blend in delicately for me.  As loopy as this may sound, as I experience the aura, it feels life-altering, epiphanous, expansive and eerie all that the same time.   It’s both terrifying yet inexplicably peaceful.

I feel no panic in these moments, just dread and calm mixed together in an unmixable cocktail of lucid emotions that take over, then, almost as quickly, let go.

One of the more vivid of these auras happened to me about two years ago.  I was running on a deserted road in Spain (where I was living at the time).  The run felt normal and I ran that road a lot.  Nothing seemed off-kilter or indicative of any somatic disturbance.  Then I noticed the beauty of the trees along the road.  This sounds like bad poetry, I know, but that was my first sensation: “Man, those trees look beautiful.”  And the sun shone brilliantly, and the sky appeared crisp and bluer than I’d ever seen it.  The asphalt road bent around to my right and a guard rail separated the road from a low wash filled with reeds.  The moment felt dreamy, but entirely sensuous too. Like hyper-reality.  Seconds later, overcome by an intense emotional feeling of having lived through this exact experience before—the trees, the reeds, blue sky, sunshine, pavement and the curving guard rails—a wave of physical symptoms hijacked my body.  My knees went weak.  I began to sweat, then my body went cold,  then started sweating again.  I felt nauseated and light-headed.  I knelt down along the side of the road and tried to shake it off.  There was the oddest feeling  that something dramatic was about to happen, something almost indescribably sad but predestined, too.  Jones’ dread and doom here.  Then the aura simply receded.  The sensations passed completely in a minute or less, and all that lingered was a slippery sense of uncertainty over what had just taken place.  I even managed to finish my run.  As if nothing had really happened.

I would not, like Dostoevsky or Jones, trade ten years of my life to re-experience these auras.  Though I agree about their ‘slipperiness’, their ‘elusiveness with distance’, I’ve experienced them enough times that I do not long for repeat performances.   The auras I’ve experienced (and the seizures that sometimes follow) have not triggered any great religious awakenings in me.  I heard no voices of the gods, saw no window into heaven or hell. To my knowledge, I’ve never been accused of being possessed by a devil.

And I’ve been lucky.  Medication seems to manage my symptoms quite well.  And while it hurt intensely to be told at twenty-three that I would never fly again, I can look back at that moment (even at the screaming, cursing Marine instructor!) and feel thankful that my seizure happened when it did, and not out at sea or on final approach into the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier.

A long time ago, I read all of Dostoevsky’s works.  I became obsessed with his novels and stories and the critical work on him.  I’m proud to say that I even managed to read all 5 volumes of Joseph Frank’s incredible biography of the Russian author.  Few writers have a more compelling life story than Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.   He suffered intense anxiety over his epilepsy, constantly afraid that it would strike him at any moment.  These were the days when epileptics were closely associated with mental patients, whereas now there seems to be a more clinical, medical sensibility about the disease (as, quite fortunately, there is about most types of mental illness).  Epileptics were shunned from polite society and confined to mental hospitals.  I imagine Dostoevsky worried that his disease would ruin his writing career.  Of course, his disease went almost untreated in the nineteenth century.  For Dostoevsky though, the attacks were often portals into his fiction.  This has never been the case with me.  I’ve never even written about the sensation before now.

Epilepsy has been called the “Sacred Disease.”  It’s long been associated with demonic possessions and spiritual visions.  Paul of Tarsus was said to have suffered a seizure on the road to Damascus which he took as a religious vision.  Muhammad may have suffered seizures; Joan of Arc, Joseph Smith.  I imagine that a religiously inclined person might feel some ineffable divinity in those moments.  I do not, but I can’t fully convey or describe what they do feel like.

I didn’t get up this morning to write about any of this.  I wanted to offer up some of what I’d been reading and seek suggestions from others on NC about good reads for the upcoming holidays.  Funny how these things work.  Toward the end of Jones’s story, he says this:

Good and evil are only illusions.  Still, I cannot help but wonder sometimes if my vision of the Supreme Reality was any more real than the demons visited upon schizophrenics and madmen.  Has it all been just a stupid neurochemical event?  Is there no God at all?  The human heart rebels against this.

-Richard Farrell

(All quotes are from The Pugilist At Rest, by Thom Jones, 1993)

What it’s like living here — from Kim Aubrey in Toronto

Nov 262010
 

Kim Aubrey writes about Toronto, her adoptive home, soon to be left behind. Vet visits, bed bugs, in-laws—and the silence and melancholy of being uprooted and leaving loved ones and things behind.

dg

What it’s like living here

from Kim Aubrey in Toronto



Bathurst Street

You drive the six miles home down Bathurst from your doctor’s office, where you’ve been weighed, measured and questioned about the year’s habits, good and bad. You pass the bagel shops and delis, the Bowlerama where you used to take your daughters for birthday parties, and a little further south, the square squat apartment buildings with their blond-brick facades. A young man in jeans and a light jacket dances up the sidewalk, hips fluid, hands pressed together, long arms flipping outward and upward, as if he’s a yogi praying. When someone approaches him from the opposite direction, the dancer lowers his arms, quiets his body to a walk. You wonder if he’s just being polite and will start up again once he has the sidewalk to himself.  Or if it’s simple Canadian diffidence, only surprising in one willing to dance at the edge of a busy street in the middle of morning.


Yonge Street

Your Jetta crawls in rainy rush-hour traffic up what used to be the longest street in the world. You and your husband were in Paris yesterday morning, eating croissants and jam in a sunny café, the Pantheon cutting its iconic shape into a blue sky. Now you’re both jetlagged, ready for bed at six in the evening.  Instead, you’ve agreed to pick up your daughter and her field spaniel, Iggy, from the vet, who has sliced away the puppy’s testicles and sewn him back up again.

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2010 Numéro Cinq Memoir-in-a-Box Finalists

Sep 232010
 

The judges are dumbstruck (all right–their usual state) at the daring and profundity of the entries in the first ever Memoir-in-a-Box contest. These memoirs are searing, honest, startling and bold. Amazing work of the sort we did not expect. Honour to all the entries. If, as the psychologist James Pennebaker says, there is healing in writing the trauma down, the judges hope you have all found solace in putting these words on the page (in the box). (We were disappointed that no one felt boxed in, but perhaps it was better to avoid the obvious.) But then it’s also true that if you’re not willing to put it out there, then you’re better off writing fiction. This year’s entries all passed the test of nerve and honesty. They all have a great subject–themselves and the drama of life.

Read the finalists below.

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Burroughs & Son: Memoir — John Proctor

May 242010
 

burroughs1William S. Burroughs & James Grauerholz in Lawrence, Kansas

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When I was in grade school, William S. Burroughs visited my house. At least I think so. Strange old men with secrets were fairly commonplace in Lawrence, Kansas.  Old Man Puckett, our octogenarian next door neighbor on Delaware Street, lived alone in squalor for all the time we knew him, until he was robbed and murdered in his home. The men who killed him found little of value, but it was obvious they were looking for something. After the crime, police searched his house extensively, and after removing the floorboards they found just shy of $100,000 hidden. Old Man Puckett came to our door once trying to get us to sign some sort of petition. When he tried to come in the door without my parents’ permission, my bulldog just about ripped his arm off. My mother brought him in and wrapped his arm in gauze, but he refused to go to the hospital.

Old Man Burroughs was better prepared when he came knocking. When mother opened the door and my bulldog growled, he simply waved his cane at her and she slunk back away from him. He spoke slowly and lucidly to my mother, accusing me of trespassing on his property and chasing his cats. This was probably true – I chased every cat I saw, and so did my bulldog. My father glowered in the corner, but didn’t open his mouth.

Old Man Burroughs didn’t say a word directly to me until he’d laid out his case to my parents. He then looked directly into me. “You should know,” he said, “that I’m quite proficient with a handgun.”

Burroughs and I came into Lawrence from opposite ends. He was at the end of a life lived fuller than most, and I was just beginning mine. Both of us were bewildered. He arrived in 1981, when I was eight years old. He seems to have spent most of the eighties fluctuating between the peace of an old warrior retiring to his cottage and deep depression.  His friends had left him and the anti-establishment movement he’d helped found had been co-opted by the establishment. He grudgingly accepted his induction into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983, and went home broke.  He tried to get Ginsberg, Gysin, Giorno, and the rest of them to come visit him, but they mostly scoffed, referring to his new home in Kansas as Nowheresville.

For the life lived outside the communal graces of religion, family, and conventional sexuality, he was now paying in loneliness. His closest friends were the brood of cats he gathered around his house on Learnard Street. By 1987 he’d finished The Western Lands, the final volume of his Red Night trilogy, in which he supposedly gathered the loose ends of his previous work into a cohesive mythology. I haven’t read the trilogy. I have, however, read The Cat Inside, a brief and surprisingly tender volume he published in 1986 about his beloved brood. In one passage he recounts a series of dreams he has about Ruski and Fletch, his first cats, in which their heads are on the bodies of children. He doesn’t know how to take care of children but he vows to protect them, saying, “It is the function of the guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy.” I’m now very sorry if I tormented his cats.

When I left home at 17, I discovered William S. Burroughs – the writer, not the old man. It wasn’t until I heard a recording of him reading that I made the connection between the two. I read Naked Lunch three times, desperately trying to make heads or tails of it. Like most other male college English majors, I became obsessed with the Beats. But mostly, I loved, still love, the voice of William Burroughs. It was at once weathered and sarcastic, two attributes I assumed of myself way too early. But that’s what it was – William S. Burroughs was who I wanted to be, the literary tradition I wanted to come from, and I’ll even say it – the father I wished I had. His death in August of 1997, just a couple short months after Ginsburg’s, officially ended the Beat Generation, though it had long been usurped and bowdlerized by its own legend. I eventually wrote my graduate thesis on the influence of Naked Lunch on film and popular culture, but I wanted much more than that to write about the influence of William S. Burroughs on me.

Burroughs had a son of his own, Billy Burroughs. I’m continually surprised at how few people know this – or even believe it – when I mention it. But it’s easy to understand why, really.  Not even taking into account his homosexuality, Burroughs just doesn’t seem like father material. He had, after all, shot the boy’s mother. And he in fact wasn’t much of a father to Billy, mostly allowing his own parents to raise him. Billy went to stay with his father in Tangiers where,  according to an article Billy wrote for Esquire, Burroughs allowed at least one of his friends to molest his son. Billy wrote that article shortly before he died at age 33, saying that his father had poisoned his life. He did, though, read and reread his father’s books – I imagine this was a way to feel close to his shadow-father – and cherished every scrap of affection his father threw him, like the Rimbaud copy mailed to him when he reached puberty, the glass-cased Amazonian butterflies , and the shrunken heads mailed from Africa. Billy also wrote two novels. While his father was recovering from his heroin addiction, Billy became an alcoholic of the most extreme sort, vomiting blood while having dinner with Ginsberg, needing an experimental liver transplant, and eventually dying alone in a ditch in Florida. William Burroughs was in New York when Ginsberg called and told him. That was 1981, the year Burroughs moved to Lawrence. Burroughs fell back into methadone and/or  heroin use around that time, and was addicted for the rest of his life.

My Grandpa Light, my mother’s father, died in 1997, a few months before Burroughs. I loved him, but I didn’t cry at his funeral the way I cried in my apartment  that August. My Grandpa Proctor, my adoptive father’s father, died just last October.  He’d had lung cancer for about a year. I hadn’t gone back to see him because he wanted me to reconcile with his son, whom I’d chosen not to see since my mother divorced him. When I said I couldn’t Grandpa Proctor disowned me, via email. But I went back to Kansas when he was pissing blood and treatments were stopped. I didn’t know if he’d let me in when I showed up on his doorstep. But he did. He was old, and broken, and wanted to talk. So we talked – about his job as the first union projector operator at the theater downtown, and how all his sons got smallpox the same summer when they lived on 19th Street and they had to quarantine the house and have the rest of the family stay out at the shack on Lone Star Lake. I remembered that shack – we used to spend our summers there when I was in early grade school. It was only about half the size of the loft apartment my wife and I were sharing when my grandpa got cancer, but somehow my grandparents fit all three of their sons, parents, siblings, and their families into it. I asked him what happened to that old place.

lone-star-lake-crewAt Lone Star Lake – my grandpa (far left), adoptive father (middle), and uncles (photo courtesy of my Aunt Carol)

“Oh, we sold that place sometime round ‘85, to some old artist type, name of Burroughs. You probably heard of him.” He then told me how this artist type didn’t even do much out there after he bought it, just rowed out to the middle of the lake and sat all day. “And get this,” Grandpa told me, “I sold it to him for under $30,000. Now just two years ago the owners sold it for $160,000 to some guy in England, just because that old Burroughs lived there.” I didn’t believe him when he told me, but I googled it and found the eBay listing. I even found a journal entry from Burroughs himself about our shack:

I got me this cabin out on the lake. Got it cheap since I was able to put up cash, which the owners needed to put down on another house they is buying out in the country. Could easy sell it now, but what for? A few thousand profit? Nowadays what can you do with that kinda money? My neighbor tells me right in front of my dock (I’ve got access, and that is the thing matters here on the lake… a dock, see!), well, my neighbor tells me that right in front of my dock is the best catfish fishing in the lake, but I don’t want to catch a catfish…I could cope with a bass, or better, some bluegills — half pound, as tasty fish as a man can eat — fresh from the lake, and I got me an aluminum flat bottom boat, ten foot long, $270…a real bargain. I likes to row out in the middle of the lake and just let the boat drift…

So there it is. Burroughs spent the last years of his life in the middle of the lake of my youth. I won’t even venture a guess as to what he thought about out there, but I do know that less than a month before he died in 1997 he wrote in his journal:

Mother, Dad, Mort, Billy – I failed them all –

And I don’t know what conclusions to draw from that, what lesson there is to be learned, what connections there are to make. I’m now 36 years old, three years older than Billy Burroughs was when the weight of his father’s legacy ravaged his liver and landed him in a ditch in Florida, but less than half as old as William Burroughs was when he exited the world addicted, without a family, and adrift alone in the middle of a lake so muddy my wife refuses to set foot in it. I have a daughter now, who will be a year old in just a couple of weeks. Somehow I’m glad she’s not a son.

burroughs-rowingBurroughs, rowing in Lone Star Lake

— John Proctor

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On White: Nonfiction — Kate McCahill

May 042010
 

kate_waterKate McCahill on the Ganges

It’s a huge pleasure to introduce Kate McCahill who is a former student of mine at Vermont College of Fine Arts (she hasn’t graduated yet). Before coming to VCFA, Kate traveled in India, and when she came to work with me, she was writing a series of essays about that experience (with a book hovering in the near distance). These essays were remarkable for their structure and verve, their plots and their attention to character and detail. This is one of my favourites.

The big news for Kate, though, is that she’s just been awarded the Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship, funded by Wellesley College (Kate’s undergrad school). Kate expects to get about $15,000 to finance a writing trip from Guatemala to Patagonia.

dg

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The day I met Teddy, the heat and the grimy streets of Pune had mixed a muggy haze outside, which leached its way into the bookstore, slicking our foreheads and necks. As I examined the travel section, the bell above the door clanged and Teddy came in, stood for a moment in the doorway, backlit by the sun, and then walked over, close to where I stood, so close I could hear him breathing. I watched from the corner of my eye as he scanned the horror novels and selected an old hardcover. I caught a glimpse of the curling binding: Carrie, by Stephen King.  The bell above the bookstore door clanged again; hot wind blew in.

Teddy was a tall black man with close, tight curls and white teeth save for a brown one towards the molars, which he’d learned to hide by keeping the left side of his mouth closed. Because of this, he talked with only half his mouth, and that, combined with the rotting tooth behind full lips, gave him a sly, crafty look. We were four hours northeast of Mumbai, in a city known mostly for an ashram, built by the guru Osho.

Teddy’s eyes sidled to mine as we browsed, but I looked away. Aman had warned me of certain people on my first night in Pune. There were those who came to Pune for the money there could be made selling drugs to hippies at the ashram, or slipped pills into their coffees at the German bakery, or took them away by motorbike into the night. Aman was a friend of a friend, a second cousin of a farmer I’d met while still in Dehra Dun, and I figured he was exaggerating a little, trying to scare me into being extra-careful. But I took the horror novel in Teddy’s hands as a sign nevertheless. The books on the shelf before me bore beaten bindings and dated titles, and I set my attention on those. The USSR Today, one stated gloomily. Myanmar: Temples of Splendor, read the cracked yellow spine of another. When I tugged it down, opening the long cover that drew stickily back, a flattened moth broke off and spiraled to the floor. The pages showed Technicolor tourists admiring a crumbling, sunlit temple.

Those books were like the maze-like, rutted streets outside, the old men on rickety gray bicycles, even the street-children, their cries at once pitiful and joyful, and the beggars with their practiced wheedling. I would remember each one as an enduring, Indian staple: worn by time, accustomed to crowds, doggedly resilient. Teddy, on the other hand, was fresh, with pearl buttons on his Western shirt and pointy shoes on his feet. “Have you read this?” I heard him ask. I looked up; he waved Carrie. I couldn’t help it: I smiled, shook my head, and pretended to look grim. He wasn’t like the enduring things of India, standing so tall in the bookshop, and speaking English, too.

“What’s wrong?” Teddy asked, seeing the look on my face. “What’s it about?” His question was mockingly innocent. Even if you knew nothing about Carrie, the cover, with her body stained red, told you everything. “Just joking,” he said at my raised eyebrows, and flipped fast through the pages like he was just seeing how long it was, how closely set the type.

“So, you can’t stand the gore?” he asked after another moment. When I looked at him, he winked. Be careful, Kate, a little voice said. But Teddy continued talking, and I kept listening. “That Stephen King—he’s something else,” he remarked, lowering his voice a little as an elderly Indian couple brushed past us. “He’s American, like you?”

I could tell by the way he said it that he knew the answer, but I nodded anyway. His own accent sounded imprecise—a little off-kilter, rolling and round. He was from South Africa, if I had had to guess.

He looked at me like he was waiting to hear me ask where hewas from, but I remembered Aman’s warning and said nothing. When I looked up from the Myanmar book again, he’d bent to examine the rest of the Stephen King section. I slid my book back beside the others on the shelf, and as I walked towards the door to leave I ran my fingertips along the soft spines once more. Just before I reached the end of the stack, the pad of my first finger caught on the broken coil of a spiral-bound book, and I drew my hand back. I thought I felt a tiny spark as my fingers left the book. I stopped, peered at it, then eased it out from between the other books. It was a loose-leafed notebook, the kind you buy in American drugstores. I felt Teddy glance over, but in that moment, nothing could keep me from lifting the cover and looking inside. There was something funny about that notebook, I just knew.

Handwriting choked the inside cover and the very first page: all Sanskrit and all in pencil, delicate marks made by a trembling hand. The words spilled onto the next page, and then the next and the next. In places, the writing ran over itself, and as I turned the pages the characters grew smaller and began to march up and down the margins and snake between each coil of the binding. It was as if the writer had had the book as his only source of paper for a very long time.

“Someone’s journal,” I heard Teddy whisper beside me.

“Maybe,” I said. Put it back, the little voice said, and leave Teddy. That’s what Aman would want you to do. But I just couldn’t take my eyes from those pages. The notebook felt both heavy and flimsy, like the words were weighing the cheap paper down. Teddy didn’t try to take the book, didn’t say anything else, and together we looked at the pages the way little kids look at picture books without reading the words. The tightness of those words; their growing frenzy.

Towards the very end of the notebook, we came across a nearly clean page, startling and white like a flat, smooth stone in grass. The lines resembled the veins on a wrist, and the only other thing there was a signature at the lower right. The signature was both scratchy and looping, if that can describe it: hard at its points, but soft in its curves. How had it happened, this page? I heard Teddy’s breath quicken a fragment. Had the writer waited as he filled up every other page for the person who would sign their name on the only blank one? I imagined a prisoner, or someone exiled. Someone banished. Was it a hastily scribbled prayer?

Teddy brushed the signature delicately with one calloused thumb. I reached out myself and felt the way the writing cut into the page. It was impossible to tell whether the signature was a man’s or a woman’s, in the way it both rolled and cut into the page. I glanced at Teddy; he shrugged. When I looked down again I felt a little chill, even in the hot store: looking at that page was like seeing a secret.

I felt guiltier and guiltier as I held the book in my hands. What was it doing on these shelves, anyway? I glanced towards the counter at the young shopkeeper, who was typing into her cell phone intently, perched on a stool with her legs crossed. I closed the book, knelt down, and slid it onto the lowest shelf, taking care to tuck it in so that it wasn’t easily visible to a browser. Teddy didn’t protest. It didn’t occur to me to even ask whether the book was for sale: I simply assumed it was not. For one selfish second I imagined waiting for Teddy to leave, and then slipping the book into my purse, hurrying back to Aman’s and holding it open again, this time alone.

We stood there for a while, looking at the place where I’d slid the book back. Teddy finally broke the spell. “Want to grab a chai?” he asked, and I felt relieved that he’d broken the strange book’s spell. What could be said, after all, except that those pages had held a mystery? All of a sudden I was aware again of the shouts of chai-wallas outside and the shotgun explosions of motorbike engines in the street. No, I didn’t have time to drink chai, meditations started in an hour and I still had to meet Aman beforehand. I shook my head.

“Can I at least get your name?” Teddy asked, and I gave it to him. What the hell; we’d already shared one secret. “I’m Teddy,” he replied, and plucked Carrie back up off the shelf. “I’m taking this one,” he added, grinning.

“Good luck with that,” I said, and without looking again for the spiral-bound book on the shelf, I left the store and went back out into the sunshine.

The ashram wasn’t like the rest of Pune, which was built, as far as I could tell, around the wide, trash-littered, dried-up river that divided the city. Aman lived on the northern side, opposite the ashram, up a little street lined with apartment buildings built in the seventies. Most of Pune’s streets were unpaved—except for the wide avenues that circled the city center—and were crowded with vegetable stands and bidi shops, vegetable-wallas and munching cows. If you walked from Aman’s flat away from the river and up the hill a ways, it was like stepping back in time: no cars, just cows and bike rickshaws and a crumbling red temple, centuries old. Strings of marigolds for sale. But the ashram was always gleaming, always manicured, perpetually gated to keep in the scented flowers, the shining floors, and the servants in their clean white linens.

Beggars gathered at the ashram gates, but of course they could never go in; two guards planted there day and night made sure of that. You could feel the shift as soon as you entered; gone were the noisy cars, the shouting hawkers, the trash on the ground. Fake waterfalls obliterated all unpleasant noise. Neatly shaven grass; tall, carefully-planned stands of trees.

I was late to meet Aman after the bookstore, even though I’d been rushing. It always took longer than I thought it would to race back to the flat and change into my red robe. Everyone at the ashram had to wear the red robe, even the guards and front-desk agents. The robe was to keep us all looking the same, all equals I suppose, but when you walked around the city you sure could tell who was part of the ashram and who wasn’t. The most devout in the ashram wore their red robes everywhere. Personally, I hated my robe, which chafed against my skin and made me sweat profusely, but when I didn’t wear it to the ashram Aman took offense. He’d given it to me as a gift, and wore his each day, washing it carefully in the evenings and putting it out on the little balcony to dry in the night.

I didn’t tell Aman about Teddy as we sat sipping our tea before meditation. I didn’t mention the notebook either. I wanted to keep it a secret, preserve the mystery. I held it in my mind like a precious stone, something to be guarded and saved. Instead, Aman and I just drank our tea and talked about our schedule: noon meditation, another at two, and then the White Robe ceremony in the evening.

Aman had taken great pains to ensure that I attended at least one White Robe ceremony. In the first few days I’d arrived, we’d both been too exhausted; meditation at five AM followed by afternoons of touring Pune tired us both out. But today, Aman was determined. The morning before, he’d sent me across the street to his neighbor’s, a woman who lived with her teenaged daughter. They lent me a white robe stamped with cream-colored flowers. Aman laundered it again for me after I brought it home – just in case, he’d said. In case of what? I wanted to ask, but bit my tongue. Deep down I knew why. While Aman’s apartment was clean right down to the shoes lined up by the door, the neighbor’s house was really a two-room flat, smaller than Aman’s and stinking of cigarettes, the windows shut tight to preserve the air conditioning. I didn’t mind the smell, just the close, freezing air. The television blared.

Aman drank down the last of his tea now and we made our way to the meditation room. It was just as the website pictured: the whole room sparkled with mosaics made of mirrors. Aman and I showed our ID cards at the door, removed our shoes, and went in; thirty people or so already sat cross-legged on the low, wide steps that rose toward the back of the room, their eyes closed. Silently, Aman and I joined them, and he settled into a cross-legged position. His breathing soon deepened and slowed. I closed my own eyes.

I tried to let me thoughts slip from me, but my legs fell asleep right away, still unused to the position. I cracked my eyelids open: everyone around me kept their backs straight and their hands folded. Someone dimmed the lights and a gray-haired woman wearing lots of turquoise jewelry lit a candle up front, clicked two little chimes together, and the room fell into an even deeper quiet, steady breath the only sound.

But I couldn’t keep my mind still. This wasn’t like the yoga I’d practiced up in Rishikesh, in an old man’s living room that became a studio every afternoon. In this glittering space, thoughts crowded in on me and raced around. Little twinges in my muscles and on my skin grew into itches, cramps, and I wanted to stretch so badly but knew that if I did, I would bump the people around me, break them from their trances. The candle smelled sickly sweet, and the room grew very warm with all of the bodies. Notice your breath, I reminded myself, but my thoughts just shot away from me again like little film reels. I was hungry. What were my parents doing, right now? And where was that scarf I bought in Thailand? I hadn’t seen it lately. My mind circled over itself, and then I remembered the journal. I thought of the words that filled the pages, and then startling empty one. I settled on the thought of slowly turning the notebook’s pages. I imagined touching the penciled words. Teddy’s breath on my neck. When the gray-haired, turquoise clad woman touched the chimes together again, I blinked in the light with everyone else, like waking up from a dream. I hadn’t emptied my mind, but I’d come close, had thought only of that creamy blank page for the final long minutes of the session.

Aman never spoke about his actual meditation. When I tried to ask him, on our second day together, what he tried to think of when he meditated, where he tried to send his mine, explaining that I was struggling with the concept, he’d shrugged. “We each find our way,” he’d said, and though he was never short of words anywhere else, we both avoided further discussion of the hours we spent in inward silence. After this meditation, we talked of yoga later on, of his adopted son who was planning a visit later in the week, and of where we’d take our lunch. We ambled to the German bakery, still in our robes, and ate soup together at a long table where other soul searchers, also in their robes, talked and ate too. Outside the German bakery, vendors displayed long racks of red and white robes for sale. I tried not to meet their eyes on the way out.

Aman liked to wash before the White Robe ceremony, so after we’d attended the second meditation and eaten dinner, which Aman purchased in tins from the same neighbor who’d lent me the robe, he went into the bathroom. I could hear the water running as I took off my red robe and slid on the white one. At least it was cooler, sewn of thin cotton instead of the red robe’s scratchy polyester. Aman emerged from the bathroom eventually, his hair slicked back with water, his white robe cloaked over him. He’d ironed the robe that morning; I told him it looked nice. He told me mine did too. Then we walked back across the river to the ashram, where a hundred other people in white robes waited outside of the big auditorium, its silhouette reflected in the meditation pool that lay before it.

You weren’t allowed into the auditorium until right before the White Robe ceremony, so while Aman chatted with old friends who’d donned the white robe for years, I recognized an Israeli girl, Eti, that I’d met in a yoga class the day before. She, too, was looking around, standing a little apart from everyone, so I went over to say hello. She always toted a huge backpack, and it was no wonder, with the number of robes we needed here. She smiled when she saw me coming over, and we talked about the mall, where she’d been that morning. “I just could not get up for this morning meditation, you know?” she said. “Maybe tomorrow!” And then the doors were opening and people began flowing in along both sides of the meditation pool.

It took quite a while to get to the door, because everyone needed to remove their shoes and place them in cubbies, then grab a handful of tissues for when the breathing meditation got started. People murmured and mumbled in line, but no one spoke too loud or laughed, unwilling perhaps to break the stillness of our reflections in the meditation pond. Slowly we made our way up the stairs and into the cavernous auditorium lobby. I unlaced my sneakers and tugged them off, tucking my socks inside, and stuffed them beside Eti’s in an available cubby. We started to follow the other white-robers inside.

“Miss,” I heard a woman call from behind me. Eti and I turned; the woman was talking to me. “Miss,” she said again, and beckoned with her hand for me to come back. Eti and I looked at each other; I shrugged, and she found a place on the floor.

“I’m sorry, miss,” the woman was saying, as I pushed back through the doorway, against the flow of the white robes. “You can’t attend the ceremony today.” She glanced at my robe. “It’s the flowers, these little flowers here. The robe needs to be totally white, just plain.” She shrugged her shoulders and legitimately tried to look sympathetic. Sorry, they’re the rules, her look said.

“Are you serious?” I asked her, and a few heads turned. I was making a commotion, but I just could not believe it. After Aman washed the robe? After the neighbor lent it to me? The woman nodded. “Sorry,” she said, out loud this time, and then coolly moved her gaze from my face to monitor the others who still trickled in. I glanced through the doorway; Eti had craned her neck from where she sat and was watching me, confused. I didn’t see Aman anywhere. I held up my hands at Eti, the universal gesture for who knows? Eti waved, smiled a little smile that genuinely seemed sorry, and I was at least grateful for that as I laced my shoes back up and left, taking the stairs two at a time, my face aflame.

Mostly, I was annoyed—after the initial shock of being banished wore off—that I didn’t have a change of clothes. I figured, as I tried to steady my breath and slow my beating heart, that I had two choices. I could go home, or I could wait for the White Robe ceremony to end so I could still walk back with Aman. After pondering the walk home alone, across the bridge beneath the dimming sky, I chose to wait, and so I walked out the ashram gates, white robe and all, and down to the German Bakery, where I thought I’d get a coffee and try to find a magazine, or a person to talk to, that would take my mind away from this mess.

Stupid white robes, I muttered as I walked past the beggars, who must have sensed my frustration because they didn’t even bother to approach me. Or maybe they just figured I was stingy. Or, maybe even beggars hold off when someone’s having a conversation with herself. Damn freaking flowers, I mumbled as I entered the German Bakery, and what finally stopped my cursing was the sight of Teddy, standing there at the counter plain as day and talking with the girl serving coffee.

He turned and grinned, recognized me immediately, then took a moment to look at my white flowered robe. He studied my face. “Everything okay?” he asked carefully. I must have still been red in the face.

“I’m okay,” I said, then blurted it out. “I got turned away from the White Robe ceremony just now.” He grimaced.

“Was it the flowers?” I nodded. “How’d you guess?” I asked, half sarcastic.

“I’ve been to a few of those White Robe’s in my time,” Teddy said. He put on a grim doctor’s face: “I’ve seen this a few times before.” I laughed at his tone, which compared the ceremony to a serious condition that lacked a cure.

“It’s silly,” I admitted, “but I was so embarrassed! It really sucked, you know?”

“Let’s have a coffee and make fun of the ashram,” Teddy said. I couldn’t help but laugh, and nodded yes. A coffee was what I needed, all right. For those moments I forgot all about the empty page in the journal and the little voice that warned me about Teddy, and instead just felt happy that Teddy was there, for sly as his half-smile was, he was being kind. He bought two coffees, and we looked around for somewhere to sit. All the chairs were full, tables littered with dirty cups and newspapers.

“Let’s go outside,” Teddy suggested, so I followed him out the door and we sat down on the sidewalk outside of the coffee shop, lowering ourselves carefully so as not to spill the steaming contents of our mugs.

“So what do you do here, Teddy?” I asked him as we sipped. I could smell chocolate emanating from the bakery.

“I’m a PhD student,” he answered. I was surprised, but then I knew nothing about him. “Anthropology,” he added, anticipating my next question. “I’m especially interested,” he paused, put down his books, stretched his hands out before him, “in the palms.”

“You read palms?” I asked, before I even realized the words were out of my mouth. Sure enough, he looked offended.

“I don’t just read palms,” he insisted, like he’d dodged the question all his life. “I read them in the traditional, voo-dooey way, yes,”—he wiggled his fingers in the air to emphasize voo-doo—“but my degree has many levels. Astrology, physiology, human biology, psychology…” the list petered out. He set his coffee down beside him and leaned back on the heels of his hands. “It’s a complicated degree,” he finished, and drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

I watched him strike a match and light a cigarette. As an afterthought, he offered the pack to me. I shook my head. “So, what can you see in the palms?” I asked him. I looked at my own; they were sweaty, for one thing, with a few scooping lines.

“Oh, you can read many things,” he finally said vaguely, maybe still miffed at me. He drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke out into the street. He took another drag, exhaled.  “Many things,” he said again, this time as if to himself, drawing the words out like swoops of honey pulled from the jar. I guessed he’d decided to make me beg. He turned and looked at me for a long moment, his gaze uncomfortably piercing. I looked away.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. I reached for his pack of cigarettes and took one out. He struck the match.

“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you,” he finally said. “It’s that…” he paused, dragged. “I’m afraid to tell you what the palmist sees.” I waited for him to explain. The cigarette tasted smooth and had a thick gold filter.

“Everyone wants their palm read,” Teddy said, “but when they hear what the lines mean, they often see them as…” he waved his hands, looking for the right word. “As ugly,” he finished. “People are afraid of the truth in the lines.” He looked over, down at my hands. I was touching the lines of my left hand with my right fingers. When I noticed the movement, I lifted my cigarette to my lips.

He grinned at that. “Do you really want me to read it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and then I realized that I meant it. I guessed I wanted to hear what was so bad, the way we’re compelled to stare at car accidents we pass on the freeway.

“You sure?” he asked. “Because I will. I’ll tell you what it says.” His voice was still lighthearted, and I nodded.

“Okay then, hand it over. Ha, get it? Hand it?” He snickered. I fake-laughed. “I get it,” I told him, and stuck my left palm out.

He flicked his cigarette into the gutter. “Get rid of yours, too,” he said. “I need to see both.” I obeyed, tossing the golden butt in behind his. He rubbed my outstretched palms with his thumb, as if to draw out the lines. For a very long time he stared at them, looking back and forth between my two hands.

“It’s a very interesting hand,” he muttered finally. “A very, very interesting hand.” Again he went quiet, pressing my palms again with his thumbs. Then he let both hands fall.

“You will have an ordinary life,” he said with a shrug. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“That’s it?” I checked my palms again myself; what was so wrong with them? “Tell me, Teddy,” I urged. “I won’t be hurt.” Even then I think I knew that was a lie.

“Yes, you will,” he affirmed, and inhaled deeply, let the breath out slowly. “This is why I never read the palm of a friend,” he said, and went for his cigarettes again. “They never leave me alone, after that.”

But I wanted to know! I had to know. “Please tell me,” I said, and now I really was begging. What could be so terrifying in the lines?

“Okay,” he finally said, after a few long drags on his new cigarette. “Okay. I can tell you about here, because the hand is always changing to show the present. Here,” he reached for my right palm and poked a finger into the longest line, “in India, you are afraid. You are suspicious. And, you are often alone?” he looked at me. I nodded. “But, you feel as though you are searching for something here?” he continued. “And,” he added, “you worry you’ll go home without it.” Again he looked at me, confirming. I nodded yes. “You’re expecting something. Not expecting,” he laughed, “as you Americans say, but expectant. You’re waiting for something.”

“That doesn’t sound so horrible,” I said. It was all I could think to reply. Only later would what he’d said would really sink in; all throughout India, I felt challenged by the constant eyes upon me, the crush of people always.

“There’s something else,” he told me. “Something happened, before you were born.” He let the words sink in for a moment, then continued. “Maybe something happened with your parents, or in your family, or something. I think,” and he paused, took a drag, let the cigarette fall. “I think it was something bad.”

Ever since that moment, I’ve wondered what he meant when he said that. My parents lost a child before me; is that what so darkened my palm? But Teddy was standing now, his coffee cup empty. He stretched his arms high and glanced down at me. I must have looked bewildered, because he said, as if to comfort me, “Don’t worry, Kate. Luck will be on your side.” He mumbled something about how he had to meet his friend inside. “You okay?” he asked. I nodded. “See you, Teddy,” I called softly as he walked away, but I can’t be sure whether he heard.

Instead of returning to the ashram, I walked towards the city center, letting my mind wander into everything I passed. I just couldn’t think too much of what Teddy had said, I just couldn’t. Yet his words were like the empty page of the journal we’d found together: meaningless without context, yet important too, somehow. The most frightening thing was his hesitation, and what he withheld. I thought of the meditating rooms, and tried to send my mind to the quiet tranquility they claimed to hold. I took in the world around me, and walked for miles.

The walk to the city center was always rich for the senses. Food-sellers tended stands from dawn until dusk and the cigarette and sweet shops stayed open through the night. Boats on the river pulled up to the banks, and bums and sadhus slept on the shores, shaded by day and protected from the wind by night with trees and boulders.  Taxis pulled up from the train station; buses came through from Bombay and sometimes from as far away as New Delhi.  The wealthier, more modern side of Pune came next, with paved roads and expensive restaurants, a shopping mall and a university. Aman’s side of the river had bumpy, narrow streets, the buildings alongside crumbling from a dozen layers of paint. I thought that old paint made walls more beautiful, because you could see every color of paint ever used on the place—cream was popular, and yellow and blue. The paint told a history of the building it clung to, and judging by the number of layers around here, that history was usually long. Thin old men pedaled bike rickshaws as I approached the city-center, their sandals flapping on their feet.

The center, when I reached it, pulsed with people bicycles, a score of buses, cars that slunk through the crowds. The visitors ambling around the mall were dressed in Western clothes; almost everyone wore sunglasses, their skin tanned. I forgot about my white robe and let myself observe: the women walking here could have stepped onto Fifth Avenue and would have been admired for their beauty, their cutting-edge style. I hadn’t seen Louis Vuitton since Hong Kong, and suddenly I was surrounded. There was Jimmy Choo and Vera Wang, draped over the wrists and arms and heads of the women who glanced at me, taking in, I guess, the silly robe and the sweat at my hairline. Clearly what they thought of me was not much; they didn’t interrupt the flow of chatter into their cell phones, just raised curved eyebrows or half-smiled to themselves and turned their eyes down, amused. Still, I liked the walk, a striking contrast to the crowd Aman’s street. The woman here picked their way along in stilettos, the men in polished loafers. I imagined them pausing for a bag of mangoes or a pack of American cigarettes before hurrying on down towards the bridge to catch a rickshaw that would rush them back to the city center’s magnetic glitter.

I remembered the wealth I’d encountered in America: a few friends with houses like mansions, a ride in a limousine, dinner at an elegant restaurant with my parents, one night in a four-star, silk-sheeted hotel with my boyfriend.  Here in Pune, amidst all this downtown glamour, I felt a pang at the disconnect. How strange it seemed to have known such comfort, in a place where such a level was now inaccessible to me. I had little money, and my pack at Aman’s contained everything I’d needed, this whole time I’d been traveling. It struck me that everything I had could fit in one bag and meant nothing.

I got lost in the winding streets of Pune, and it was dark before I took a rickshaw back to Aman’s flat across the river. He’d been worried sick about me, it was clear; when I knocked on his door, he opened it immediately, relief in his eyes. His hair was greasy, like he’d run his hands through it over and over. He’d changed out of his white robe, but still had his black sneakers on.

“Oh, Katie,” he gushed, before I was even inside. “I heard about the robe.” He looked me over. “I guess I should have known. They’re very strict about the white robe.” He went to the stove to start tea. “Oh, Katie,” he went on as he filled the kettle, “Where were you? Oh, I’m so sorry. I apologize. What a long night you must have had.” He turned to look at me, to check whether indeed I’d had a long night, and perhaps to hear where, exactly, I’d been. But I couldn’t think of an excuse. How could I tell Aman that a palmist had seen something bad in my hand, and I’d wandered the city as a way to escape? I apologized, explained that I’d gone to the library and lost track of time. As we sipped our tea, I thought of being banished from the White Robe ceremony, but spared Aman the details.

Aman and I resumed our routine. For three more days we rose in the morning, walked across the river to morning meditation, then sipped tea at the ashram. I walked around the city again, this time with Eti, and together we strolled through the mall. Malls are universal things, I realized in Pune. The shops are just an excuse to gossip, to waste time, to escape from whatever burdens your home life brings to you. Each shop window was painstakingly decorated, the costumed models thin and exuberant. Aman and I did not attempt the White Robe ceremony again; we didn’t ever again speak of the night I’d been turned away.
But the ashram wore on me. Beyond the issue of the flowers on my robe, there were the fees, and the guards at the door, and the aging hippies who floated around, seeking nirvana. There was the overpriced tea, the glittering meditation room, the pristine, manicured lawns. This was not what I’d come to India to find; the closest thing to peace I’d encountered so far was the illicit blank page in the journal, the one I could settle my mind upon. After my seventh day in Pune, I told Aman I’d be leaving. I told him while we both stood in the kitchen that night, preparing tea. He was sorry, wishing I would stay so as to more fully experience the ashram, but in the end he relented, helping me to book a train ticket online to Goa, where I planned to meet a friend.

That night, Aman and I went out to dinner, I guess to commemorate my final night in his city. Aman selected a touristy place in the city center, where he was practically the only Indian man ordering dinner, but we had a fine time in any case. We both grew jolly with Kingfisher beer, and I paid the tab in order to thank Aman once more for his hospitality. We took a rickshaw back home, and then Aman lay down in his hammock and I shut out the lights. I packed the rest of my things; my train left at five the next morning. I wished, right before sleep came, to see Teddy again, of all things, and then my alarm was going off, and it was time to wake up and get going.

Aman still slept as I crept out the door. I scribbled a note on the pad beside the phone: Aman: thanks for everything. Will call when I get to Goa. Then I let myself out, closing the door quietly behind me, and then I saw the envelope on the ground.

Whoever had left it had tucked it halfway under the door. I thought it was an electricity notice, or some apartment document, but when I picked it up and lifted the open lip, I saw that it wasn’t anything Aman was meant to see. I drew the page that was inside from the envelope, knowing what it was and at the same time hoping it was anything but.

It was the empty page, with the signature in the lower right corner.

The edge of the paper was ruffled from where it had been torn from the notebook. Now ripped from its context, it had clearly been folded and smudged. It resembled trash. I held the envelope and the piece of paper with trembling hands. I remembered my train. With the papers still clutched in my hands, I ran down the stairs, through the gate, and out into the main road, where I caught a rickshaw that would take me to the station.

I don’t have the empty page anymore. When I got to Goa, I looked up the address of the bookstore and mailed it back. I don’t know why Teddy tore the page from the book, or how he knew where to leave it. But the story has stuck with me, even as my time in the ashram has fallen away. That ashram was a place where I failed, spiritually and logistically, but Teddy and the empty page remain unanswered questions in my mind. Maybe, holding that book in my hands, with Teddy looking over my shoulder, I did find what I was seeking in India. No, the memory of that moment has never left me. I think of Teddy now, his sly half-smile, and realize that perhaps its purpose was both sad and true: the gesture’s most basic intent was to hide something ugly from the world. And I can only hope that whoever wrote that journal will someday come to claim it again. I’ve prayed that they will open the cardboard cover, checking for the scrawled name, and find that page just where they left it, torn from the spiral rings but still intact, blessed in its comparative bareness.

—Kate McCahill

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The Fine Art of Death & Dismemberment

Mar 272010
 

Marine Eugene Sledge

Joe Mazzello as Eugene Sledge

This post is prompted by working with Ross Canton who is writing a Vietnam War memoir. Ross was a radio operator and a member of a mortar team til he was wounded the third or fourth time, dreadfully wounded, hospitalized, and finally sent home. In any case, we’ve both read the standard Vietnam books; I’ve read several World War One memoirs by British writers like Guy Chapman, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. And I’ve read Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory in which Fussell argues that the writing that came out of World War One established a template for describing certain life experiences ever after. Certainly, I think it is very difficult for people to write about war without falling back on types and patterns set in the early 20th century.

The other day I noticed promotional material for the Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg 10-part, $195 million, HBO miniseries called The Pacific. The series is based largely on the reminiscences of three soldiers, especially Robert Leckie’s Helmet for my Pillow and Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed. Both Sledge and Leckie were enlisted Marines (Chapman, Sassoon and Graves were all officers). The Sledge book is the best by far; Leckie gets boring with all his teenage hijinks and his endless nicknames,vague characterizations, etc. But Sledge is good and he is tough to read (like my student Ross Canton, he served with a mortar team). We have become so conscious of battlefield “atrocities”–in Vietnam, atrocities seemed to define a moment of excess inside the bizarre horror of the battlefield, excess within excess–that his matter-of-fact portrayal of the debasing experience of war and its effects is fascinating and awful. In the Leckie book there is a Marine named Souvenirs who goes around prying gold teeth out of the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers. In Sledge, you get the idea this was pretty common and at one point Sledge himself starts to think about it and is barely headed off by a gentler, smarter friend. One wonders what Spielberg will do with Sledge’s Marine lieutenant Mac, fresh from the States, who takes his carbine and shoots off the tip of a dead Japanese soldier’s penis for target practice. Or the Marine who casually shoots an elderly wounded Okinawan woman to death while Sledge is off trying to find a medic to help her. Sledge is also good on the smell of war–the heat, the rotting bodies, the blow flies, the diarrhea, the maggots. Sledge makes it clear that experiencing war is a constant struggle to compose one’s self in a world of, to us, unimaginable horror, cruelty, boredom, and exhaustion. One of his worst fears is that he will give in to fear. Many do.

The Vietnam war books I recall (and I haven’t read them for a while) might be better written, but there is a truthful naivete in Sledge’s book. And he never gets up on a moral high horse which makes me trust him. His sense of the human capacity for moral corruption is wise–I feel as if we have become more foolish about war, or the media has made us so. By contrast, there is a book called The Pacific, a companion to the TV series, which is just dreadful, thin, unpleasantly breezy, cliched, distant, and abstract. Here as an excerpt. With books like this veiling the experience of war, it is no wonder we are constantly surprised by what actually happens. At this point, one is reminded that writing well is a moral act. Think about it.

This is just a pre-thought. I haven’t studied the matter. There is a book or a paper to be written on war writing that includes things written between World War One and the Vietnam War and the wars beyond that.

Or just for starters think about the difference between the two photographs at the top of the post.

dg

4 a.m.

Jan 202010
 

Up til 4 a.m. The Robert Wrigley epigraph sent me to D. H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems with the amazing Kenneth Rexroth introduction.

In a world where death had become a nasty, pervasive secret like defecation and masturbation, Lawrence re-instated it in all its grandeur–the oldest and most powerful of the gods.

Read “The Ship of Death” as soon as you can.

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises/ We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying/and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us/ and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world./We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying/and our strength leaves us,/and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood,/cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

Also check out, for that matter, Rexroth’s gorgeous An Autobiographical Novel which isn’t really a novel but a memoir.

dg

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