Thomas Barnard, writer
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Home Writing Articles Artifacts Contact c2003-2010 Thomas Barnard
I don't know how old I was. I was the age you learn to cut meat for yourself, however old that is. The meat, I remember, was a lamb chop. I was cutting a piece of the tasty charred fat and was about to tuck it neatly in my mouth when my mother said, "Don't eat that, it's all fat." Which at the time meant nothing to me except that I was going to be deprived of something I wanted. My father intervened, thank God, and said, "Let him eat it if he likes it." I thought Dad was an all right guy for letting me eat that delicious salty stuff. Of course that was long before I learned about cholesterol and triglycerides. That was a good time, the time before knowledge, that was the easy time - though I do remember wondering: why the difference of opinion?
And I don't know how old I was when we went to Riverview for the first time. I do remember the roller coaster rose above the park, a monument to peaks and valleys. I pointed to "The Bobs" and said, "That's what I want to go on." We went in, Dad bought the ride tickets and persuaded me to take a few of the easy ones with him first. But I soon grew bored of that - I wanted thrills; I wanted to ride the big roller coaster, "The Bobs." Finally, after much needling and nagging, he went along.
The gears took control and dragged us up to the first peak, and when we came down I gripped the bar in front of me for dear life, wondering just how well built these roller coasters were. They didn't jump the rails did they?
But exciting? There's nothing like quick ups and downs for excitement. I didn't look to see how Dad was taking all of this till we got off. He said, "You'll have to go on that by yourself next time." And I did. Once I'd gotten the hang of it I went a couple more times.
***
As a kid, my outdoors activities were limited. Never stayed out overnight, and my father took me fishing with him on our summer vacations only after a monumental siege. But it was somewhere around that time, maybe eight or nine, when I wanted to go on a cub scout camping expedition. I was caught up in the brown uniform of the cub scouts. The uniform was important, so official. Obviously it signified entry into the real world.
Same goes for the camp out, I remember I wanted to be outdoors in the wild and the woolly, to rough it. Mother was apprehensive. She said I'd catch cold or get a snake bite or something. So naturally, that night I worried myself sick about snakes, and escaped into sleep only to come out of it with a vision of a python's silvery fangs. But I didn't tell anyone. Snakes or no snakes, I was going on this camping trip. My father concurred; he said, "Let the kid go, it'll be a good experience for him."
Well, there were no snakes that day much less the poisonous variety though I looked for them as we cut our way through the weeds of the forest preserve. I didn't catch cold; it was summer still and it took a breeze just to make it comfortable. The ground wasn't much worse than the floor, and I'd slept many times in my sleeping bag on the floor of my bedroom. It's the only way you can rough it when you're not allowed out of the house. Later I did get these annoying itchy blisters on my skin, which got me worried, so I showed them to my mother. She didn't know what they were but on general principles she told me to quit scratching them though they begged to be scratched, ached to be scratched, and sent me out to the porch to ask my father what they were. He dropped his feet, took the corncob pipe from his mouth and put it on the ledge. Pushing his glasses up on his forehead, he examined my hands - closely, as though he were looking through a microscope. He said, "I believe you've got poison ivy." With a finger he moved the glasses back down, kind of chuckled and said, "Well, those things happen on camping trips."
Mom got me an appointment the next day to confirm the diagnosis. The old man was right; it was poison ivy. He complained, "Why did you spend money on a doctor for that?" But the doctor did me a favor by prescribing a calamine solution so I would quit "itching the itch." It wasn't fatal; eventually it went away. The body heals itself; the doc's solution merely provided protection from my worst enemy - me. I was quick to learn the plant lesson by having someone point out the sneaky, hard-to-pick-out three-leafed offender, but I was slow to pick up on the general principle about self. I wondered for some time after why my father hadn't forewarned me about poison ivy; Mom had at least warned about snakes. And why did he laugh? That was mean, making light of my misfortune.
***
Mom had been on my side that time, but our relationship was strictly a tug-of-war. She was much bigger but I was a little bundle of sullen, stubborn, determined will. There was a pattern to our tugs-of-war, a routine, a ritual, a well-worn path to the bedroom. For example, there was the time I refused to eat my waxed beans. Waxed beans were yellow, funny-looking, not of nature.
"I hate waxed beans. They don't have any taste. This isn't food."
"You're not leaving the table till you eat your beans."
"I'm not eating these. I hate wax beans."
"Tell him, Bob."
"Eat the beans."
"I ..."
"No argument. Eat the beans. That's it and that's it."
Well, maybe he thought that was it. I sat at the table till the heat of cooking was spent, till they were limp as cold fish, till my father had walked off to watch Walter Cronkite and my mother finished washing the dishes. Still I was not allowed to leave the table. So, finally, I ate the beans. Moments later they came back up in a rush.
Smack, Mom's hand came down on the back of my head.
"Go to your bedroom and shut the door."
I ran to my room, slammed the door, and cried bloody murder. It didn't seem to have much effect but after half an hour when I had quieted down, Mom came in to to see me. She said, "Why do you do this to me?" and she cried. And I cried. We each cried our solos, then we cried in harmony, bellowed arias of crying. And when we had cried enough she held me and we made up. That was the way it went with Mom.
***
The summer after sixth or seventh grade (I can remember the landmarks, it's the street numbers which are in a fog) a friend of mine who was leaving the neighborhood asked me if I wanted to take over his paper route. This sounded like a great idea; I was enterprising, or thought of myself as enterprising. So I went the route with him a couple of times, and went through his ring of subscriber cards learning who got the paper everyday, who got it only Sundays, who paid the bill directly to the newspaper agency, and who I had to collect from.
The day I heard about the newspaper route my father came home from work at his usual time, six o'clock. We asked him what kind of day he had had. He gave his clockwork reply, "A day like all days." We, Mother and I, followed him into the bedroom while he undressed. It was a ceremony of sorts, kind of a Louis Quatorze state dressing in miniature. He undressed; Mom brought the cheese, the latest in crackers (Bugles, I believe it was at the time, salty little nothings, grain contorted to the shape of tiny megaphones), and two martinis. She sat on the bed, and I sat on the chair across from the bed. My father didn't crave this attention, he didn't need us around to watch him strip to his boxer shorts, hang his suit on the silent butler, and change into his gray cotton Sears pants and flannel shirt. But he didn't object either; it was simply the routine, and my father was a creature of routine.
Finally, I told him about my newspaper route. He didn't say much while I was still in the room. Just, "Good." When I left the room I overheard him say to Mother, "This'll be a good work experience for him."
So for two weeks I ran the route. The delivery part was easy; it resembled the chores I did at home. No problem at all. It was the collection part I disliked. The first week my boss reprimanded me for being short in the collections. So during the second week I tried harder to make the collections, but I was easily dissuaded. If no one came to the door in twenty seconds, I split. I hated barking dogs, and I felt I was putting people out when they had to retrieve their purse from the kitchen for some change.
I would ring the doorbell. But ringing the doorbell was too much of an announcement for me. My code was: Keep a low profile. This ringing of the doorbell attracted too much attention. Too much like the Redcoats, which I saw on The Swamp Fox. My preferred method of attack was ambush, which I had learned from the westerns. Which reminds me of my father's persistent complaint about westerns. You never pick up a bad guy to hit him in the face again. Once he's down, kick him in the head. You don't let the dirty bastard up again. That would be stupido, as he would say, that would be a no-brainer.
Anyway, back in the days before air-conditioning, Mrs. Straley would say through the storm door, "I'm coming. Just a minute. Who is it?"
"The newspaper boy."
"What do you need me for?" The sweat glands suspected something even before I did. They were working overtime.
"I've come to collect the subscription."
"Don't they have any records? I pay by check directly to the news agency."
"Sorry, I'm new."
Boy, was it embarrassing. Lord, I hated to be embarrassed - there wasn't any more potent emotion. I was beginning to feel I would always be new. But there it was clear as day by the white color of her card on my ring of subscription cards - she paid direct.
I became very keyed up about the whole collection process. Fear gripped me every time a hall light went on, every time the door opened. Would they give me the money? Some did, some said, "Come back tomorrow," and some said, "I already told you, I pay the agency directly with a check." Not again. I was a moron, a dimwit, a nincompoop. How was it that I couldn't even learn a simple thing like that?
In the end, the business of collection was too much. My boss said I should be angry and outraged if they didn't pay because they had gotten a paper, and gotten it on time. He looked at me for confirmation, and then said, "They got it on time, didn't they?" Yes, they got it on time.
Well then, I provided a service, and their part of the bargain was to pay for it. Needless to say, he didn't understand my feeling about the whole thing. All I was doing was a chore, and it was too much of an imposition to expect people to pay for a chore. I told him I wanted out. I gave him the dough I'd collected. He said I wasn't very businesslike or grown-up, hoping he could intimidate me out of my childishness, but this only served to chart my course of action. I wanted out. Out out out. He refused to see my side. So, I cried, and that was end of that. Crying still worked. Probably the last time it ever would, but I was relieved to be done with it. A little relief always comes with failure. But not from the old man. "Quitting is chickenshit," he told Mother when he thought I wasn't around. "I wish he had worked it for six months or a year, and then quit." Of course I heard it all, my middle name hadn't been Big Ears since age five for nothing. What it came down to was this: I was his son, his reflection, but I as far as he was concerned it was a dim reflection. I could see that. To me he never actually said anything; maybe he was waiting for the final returns to come in. But I was angry in advance, I was ready for him.
***
Some situations you dive into head first, like the paper route, some you jump into feet first, like water when you first learn to swim, but then sometimes you're pushed into things even though you may obstinately refuse, like when you learn to water- ski. My father took us up to Lake Holcombe in Wisconsin, near Chippewa Falls, where the family played volleyball and fished and swam and water-skied. I didn't want to learn to water-ski, I turned down every offer, tucking my chin into my chest, hoping to elicit sympathy for my delicate condition, fear of the unknown.
I thought it was unfair that I always had to be the first one, the test pilot, the laboratory animal (poor little white mice, they'll never understand my affection), but first-born is always the experiment, the trial case. My younger brothers could barely stand much less ski.
After a couple of summers at the resort, I had exhausted my father's sympathy. He was tired of watching the children of his buddies ski like they were born on a boat's wake; he wanted me skiing before these kids shucked skis altogether and skiied on the balls of their feet.
He said to me, in a way that would not permit crying, "You're going to have to try this. You don't know what you're missing." He took me by the hand into the water and adjusted the shoes to fit my feet. The ski belt looked kind of complicated, which created a brief moment of hope, but he knew how to put it on, and if he hadn't I knew he would have gotten help.
There was no way out of this one but my mind was scanning for exits like I was about to sit on the electric chair. At last I put the skis up and squatted the skier's squat and waited for the line to tighten up. Pretty soon they called from the boat to see if I was ready and my father gave the signal to go ahead. The engine roared, the blade churned the dark water to carbonation. It looked like root beer. I was soon out of the water, and soon back down again, but I didn't let go of the line. I held on for dear life, becoming a human submarine. After about a hundred feet someone noticed and they stopped the boat. I came up with a nose full; water had found its way into my ears and in my head, and so I learned about sinuses. I blew all this water out, and my eyes started to tear. I quickly got rid of the skis and owing to this disaster I didn't have to try again that year. When they brought me back to shore my father shook his head, he could barely look at me. I headed for the shadows. I never wanted the limelight anyway. Low profile, remember, was my cardinal rule. He was the one who wanted this skiing success, I told myself, nursing my father-anger.
I was safe for that summer, but there was a summer to follow. And when the next summer came I figured I'd best volunteer rather than have my father insist. This would garner some small approval. It didn't take but two times to get me up, and when I fell this time I was smart enough to let go of the line. When I did get up, I skied until my legs wouldn't keep me up anymore. I skied inside the wake, then ventured outside the wake, then went from the outside of one wake to the outside of the other. Later I learned to ski on one ski, then banana ski (skis with no rudder). So I became really proficient at skiing, a regular water wonder. I even tried to ski on the balls of my feet; I didn't succeed; it was decided that the red and white Johnson 40 H.P. motor was not powerful enough, but the effort won the elusive approval of my father.
***
Getting up on skis was a breeze compared to dating. When I finally conducted my first date I heard my father say to my mother, him sitting on one side of the kitchen fan while she was frying chicken in Crisco on the stove from the other side, "So he's finally going out on a date. It's about time he got a little experience with women." Women? Sarah was fifteen. But I began to notice that word, experience. It was years before I looked it up in dictionary to find its root. That would have to wait until the etymology course, but I was developing a feeling about it. Pattern recognition was beginning to kick in. A likely synonym I thought would be ordeal or disaster. So, to fully translate Dad's remark, it would go more like this: "It's about time he had a little disaster with women." Thanks, Dad.
Well, I couldn't take much credit for arranging the date. It was one of those Sadie Hawkins affairs where the girls ask out the guys. It was our sophomore year, and Sarah wasn't a bad looking girl and I was flattered as hell. I started to look at her a lot during class after she'd called me up, and she looked back at me and smiled a lot. The whole thing was a dream - daydreams during the day, damp erotic ones at night.
So anyway, I drove over without having an accident. I met her parents. Tall and gangly, I was never the hail-fellow-well-met type; I slouched despite reproofs from my parents; I mumbled; my hands were so coated with sweat that after our handshake her father probably had to wipe it off with a towel. That night I was self-consciousness raised to the nth degree; watching myself, watching her watching me; small wonder I blew it, being as wrapped up in myself as I was.
We got to the dance somehow. I was an awkward dancer. Well, I was awkward, period, but an especially awkward dancer. Sure, I'd gone to Fortnightly, the dance class my mother insisted on, but this didn't prevent me from trying to give Sarah's foot a hair-line fracture. I didn't succeed, thank God. But I didn't know what to talk to her about, so we talked about our biology teacher, Mr. Flemm. He was very awkward about sex education. In his stuttering, dry, monotonous way he tried to disinfect the subject, but this was a subject that refused to be sterilized.
"The male inserts his sexual organ..."
Hands go up.
"Is it painful?"
Flemm: "No. During arousal the female secretes a lubricant."
From the back of the class, "Oh, you mean she gets all wet and juicy?"
"This is going to be impossible."
That was for sure, but clumsy as I was with Sarah, I was beginning to feel a lot of sympathy for Mr. Flemm.
After we'd exhausted that subject, we lapsed into a long period of silence followed by struggling attempts to resurrect the conversation. Still she smiled, still she was pleasant. The final straw was the ride home. I had driven both her and her friend, Ruth, and her friend's date, Al, to the dance. Being practical, I took my girl home first because her house was the closest. Sarah left the car stormily and I thought I saw her crying by the time she hit the doormat. I was dumbfounded; whatever had I done? I asked this question aloud, and Ruth answered from the back seat, "You were supposed to take us home first and then you could have driven Sarah home and kissed her good night." Oh, that's what I was supposed to do! A little knowledge would have made all the difference.
***
Years ago time was marked by floods and earthquakes. I suffered a miniature of just such event, which they days might be called a PC, personal calamity. The event occurred when I was 17 or 18. I'm sure it's annoying for you, the reader, but I have figure when these things happened. It was after I'd gotten my driver's license but before I went to college. It was cool and rainy so it had to be spring or fall. I hadn't been in a hurry to get the license because I didn't want the responsibility; what if I had an accident? But here's the hell of it, no amount of worry and pre-regret can prevent a rendezvous with your ineluctable destiny.
In my case it involved an act of good enough intentions: Mother needed walnuts for her fruit cake. This further narrows the time frame, it had to be autumn. That was the only time we made fruit cakes. I offered to run to the grocery store to get the walnuts.
It was raining out, and Mother said to be careful. The car I drove, our only car at the time, was a Buick Riviera. This was the late 1960's when the Riviera was first brought out. A sharp marine blue, it was a car of cars at the time. I was driving carefully; I always tried to be careful. But I made a left turn on the way, and as I made the turn I pressed the accelerator as I was coming around to gain more control of the car the way we learned in Driver's Ed. That instruction about accelerating at the end of a turn was still fresh in my memory at the time, so it must have been three months after I'd gotten my license (see how you can figure these things out with a little application). Junior year I was seventeen. Anyhow, I accelerated per Driver's Ed, but the pavement was slick, the car hydroplaned, and I hit the two cars waiting at the stop sign. The rear of the first car and the front of the other. The loss of control was a bad feeling, I remember.
A bad feeling? Another understatement. I was damaged, my top lip hit the steering wheel and rapidly fattened. The Riviera was really damaged, the left side crinkled up against the front left tire, making the car undrivable. The woman in the corner house called the police. The police came and gave me a ticket for driving too fast for conditions, but other than that, they were helpful. A tow truck was sent for, and they really seemed concerned about my lip and my health in general. The woman from the corner said it was a bad intersection and recited all the accidents that had taken place there. The policeman said if I brought her as a witness to the traffic court, I'd probably get the ticket thrown out. A policeman on my side, now that was a miracle! Later, as he advised, I brought the woman from the corner to the traffic court, and I did get off.
The police then took me to the emergency room at the hospital. The doctor took one look at my lip, the cut running up to my nose and said, "You're a lucky boy, we just happen to have a plastic surgeon on duty today." So he fetched the plastic surgeon. I guess his specialty is in the stitching - he must have sewn twice the number of stitches any other doctor would have. He told me I was going to have a scar under my nose to the lip, but with any luck it wouldn't be noticeable.
The hard part was after Mom brought me home. She made it clear that under no circumstances was she calling my father about this, I was going to have to call him myself. I called.
"Hi, Dad."
"Hi."
"Dad, I had an accident. I was going to town to get some walnuts for the fruitcake, and made this left turn at Hickory and Washington, and I hit two cars."
"Two cars?"
"Yeah, they were waiting at the stop sign. I hit the back of the first one and the front of the other."
"It was raining out?"
"Yeah! In fact the woman on the corner said there were a lot of accidents there."
It would have helped if I could have fully justified the event but somehow, it didn't matter. Dad was calm enough; he asked about me; I told him about the lip, the emergency room, the plastic surgeon. You could see hear the cash register in his mind ka-chung every time I opened my mouth. He asked again how it happened; I told him about the rain, the turn, the corner. He asked about the car; I told him how crinkled it was, the tire that wouldn't move, the tow truck. He said we'd talk about it later, that he had some work to do. But we never talked about it except when the insurance adjuster came about two weeks after the accident and I regurgitated all the details.
The old man made a trip over to the body shop on the way home, and when they brought it back two weeks later it looked like new. I was happy about that. But less than a month later he traded it for a new one, same thing, another Riviera. This seemed very strange to me; however, it was my turn not to say anything. As for me, I put the salve under my nose every night as instructed, and eventually it healed. The scar was not very noticeable, but up close you could still see there was a little something there. Hardly there from a distance, but just distinguishable enough up close to keep me away from those who had the best potential for healing my psyche, girls.
Well, the new car's motor didn't have the spunk of the old car's motor, and my father complained about that. And he didn't like the looks of the new model quite as well as the old. From this I concluded that in some things you can never be made whole again. The repaired car was not quite good enough, nor the new one. The car my father wanted was the old car in its pre-damaged condition.
Years later I came across a friend who bought a new car after his old car had suffered substantial damage in an accident. He told me it was the damage to the frame that had concerned him; the tires wear peculiarly; the weakened frame would leave a driver more vulnerable in a subsequent accident. Putting two and two together, I'd say, knowing my father, that was his thinking.
Although maybe, as I was soon to say in college, he felt the car had too much bad karma. I have no clear feeling about this: some things remain mysteries.
***
The summer after the accident my father put me on one of his construction jobs over by his alma mater, The University of Chicago. We were doing an addition to the Nuclear Research building. I use the term "we" loosely. That was what the rest of the employees were doing. There was just not much that a guy with my spindly physique could do on a construction job. Carry bags of cement? No. Lift even one end of a support beam? No.
So, it was kind of an Actors' Studio exercise: Geoff, show us how you would play summertime help, a teenage laborer on the job for a couple of months.
I did my best. I was good with the small stuff. Nails, two by fours. I was good for going to the hose for a drink. I was sent on a lot of Coke runs.
My companions on the job were hard. Callused. Women were no longer characterized in any kind of romantic light, they had that which replaced the hand in stroking the excited organ. One could use vaseline, butter, and the men claimed strange uses for liver, but women had natural lubricants. Could squeal and utter delicious nothings during the act. More acting. I could dig that. Women did with men what I did on construction jobs; tried to look like we belonged where we were.
***
After the Wunder years, and the Blunder years, I went off to college - still inexperienced with women, and with studying, for that matter. I ended up in the dorm out of indecisiveness, and a fear that the braces on my teeth (Lord, everything was slow with me) would jeopardize my chances with a fraternity. But to be fair, the dorm had the widest student mix of any place on campus. We had the valedictorian, we had those who could only make it one semester. We had the queers; we had the druggies; we had university cooking; we had it all. Everyone seemed to complain about pigs-in-blankets, but I always liked them.
Well, before girls came drugs. Mind expanding, psychedelic drugs. Taking drugs was easier than asking out a girl. Going to war was easier than asking out a girl; anything was easier. Some went to extremes. One of my comrades on the wing, even more out of it than I, was aggressively unbalanced. He used to say, "Sex is an unnatural substitute for drugs."
I didn't do that much really. I started out with the beer drunks, and for a while it seemed everyone was drinking Boone's Farm berry wines. Then there was pot. Columbian, Jamaican, Acapulco Gold, oregano (always learning the hard way). With pot I was always forgetting, remembering I was forgetting, forgetting again, remembering again that I was forgetting. It was a big paranoia thing. Everyone talked about narcs like they were the KGB, but there was only one drug arrest during my four years at school. It was a case in which a guy was inept and indiscreet to the point of exasperating us all; someone ratted him out to get rid of him. But unlike the narcs, the marijuana munchies were for real; with me it was usually chocolate icecream.
What else do I remember? I remember making impossibly complicated pool shots on psilocybin, figuring out the world on mescaline during the movie If; and on acid I remember swallowing my coughs and eating a donut that seemed very organic and alive, coiling around like a worm. I knew I was really with it when I saw in a mirror how wide my pupils were, enormously black, and when inhibitions were so diminished that I could piss right in the street. I was so disoriented by the LSD and so naive that when one of my cohorts said facetiously that he was seeing God, I looked around to see where He was.
Afterwards, of course, I was unable to make the pool shots, donuts stayed put, the world was as impenetrable as ever, and God receded back into the Everything. But it had been an exhilarating feeling at the time. However, after the acid, I developed a cough that was untreatable; I went to the student clinic so many times that at one point I had four different bottles of cough syrup and eight bottles of tablets, all totally ineffective. Even I, operating with my usual inefficiency, noticed there was something unusual, even preternatural, about the cough.
One day outside the student union I coughed so many times that I thought I would expire from a lack of oxygen; I had, with the aid of the drugs, frightened myself with death to death. I confided my condition to a friend who turned me on to John Stuart Mill's autobiography, the section about his mental breakdown, but that seemed small potatoes. Mill was afraid that there were only a finite number of musical compositions. I, on the other hand, was afraid my lungs would cave in. And when my lungs weren't collapsing they kicked into extended periods of sustained hyperventilation. I was breathing for all of mankind. In time, a long time, six months or more, the cough subsided. And I suspect that it was seeing how dramatic an impact a chemical (of any kind) could have that drove me into health foods. If chemicals, food, anything I ingested could have such an impact on me, and I could see then (and perhaps never before was I quite so aware) that this was true, I was going to make certain it had a good effect. It was going to be yogurt and Vitamin C for me. That was for sure.
***
Real death was the death of my grandfather. He was the first person I knew, whom I had shaken hands with, spoken with, eaten with, who had died. My mother's father.
He had not been well for some time but he was still going for long walks. Walked twelve or thirteen blocks the day of his death. He had gone in his sleep.
Mother came into my room where I was groggy with sleep, "Grandpa died."
"When?"
"During the night. In his sleep."
"Wow."
"I'm going to take a shower."
Mother went off to her bedroom, and took a long hot shower. I was interested in her reaction. She had never done such a thing in all the years of my life. I don't know if she thought she could wash off death. I don't think so. Maybe the hot shower, the steam, the closeness reminded her of the primordial space back in the womb. I was hip to this, "Womb" was the name I scrawled and taped on my dorm room.
***
When death moved far enough out of my field of vision, I saw that a lot of my classmates were going off to Europe for their junior year of college. I didn't qualify because my grades were no good, but I got my chance anyway. One of my friends organized a summer trip. Our original plans called for using a rail pass, but one of the father's arranged for us to pick up a Land Rover in England. My father joked, "Be sure to drive over to the red light district in Amsterdam or Hamburg." I was too embarrassed to respond; I just nodded agreement.
We picked up the Land Rover in England and safaried all over Europe. Funny thing but some of the most memorable experi..., uh, memories, were the nights we camped. Hated all of them. We slept on a beach in Walberswick in England; actually we slept under the Land Rover because it rained all night. Our bags were so completely soaked we couldn't sleep out for days, thank God, and luckily we only slept outdoors one more time in England - in Folkstone before we left. We slept under some kind of dock; it was more like a tunnel the way the waves reverberated as they rolled in. Not soporific in the least, it gave us yet another sleepless night. This almost cured us, but we tried one final time. One of my pals insisted we sleep on an Alp. So we did. When we found one that was suitable, we climbed with our sleeping bags on our shoulders for an entire day. At the top of our pint-sized Alp we found some intransigent mountain goats. Tired, we stared them down.
It was cold, that was my primary impression of the Alp. In fullest summer I was thinking in terms of the windchill factor. Definitely the $15 K-Mart sleeping bag was not up to the demands of Alpine sleeping. I spent the night checking periodically on whether or not my companions were sleeping. They weren't. Of course the next day I was sick as a dog, letting go at both ends of the peristaltic channel, but that night I remember seeing shooting stars all over the place. It was a regular light show. I'd never seen a shooting star before and I've never seen one since, but on that night I saw them like crazy.
We did stay in Amsterdam for a couple of weeks. The youth hostel was curiously located at the edge of the red light district. This was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Women sitting in windows brazenly advertising their bodies. This was too much for my sheltered Chicago suburban upbringing. But there was one, she was a little older, but good-looking. Every time I passed her on the way to the youth hostel, maybe five doors away, she waved to me and smiled. I figured if she was in her late thirties and I was twenty, she was old enough to be my mother. And that didn't sit well with me. But one day as I was coming back from Anne Frank's house and a trip to the Heineken brewery, she waved again. The lipstick, eyeshadow, and hair style were right; it all spelled sex. Maybe it was the beer.
I walked up to her, nerves so on edge I figured I might have a problem, but we struck a deal for thirty-five guilders and I'm in the room with her. She closed the drapes and started to take off her clothes. I started to take mine off too, although slowly. I was lying on the bed and she started to massage my pants where the legs met. There wasn't going to be a problem, I could see that now. She rolled on the rubber and slid underneath, whereupon I thrust, and thrust, and thrust. I wondered if I should be kissing her, but decided not to. In the meantime, she's moved her hands from my back down to my buttocks which was like priming the pump. I thrust some more, the rubber kept me from feeling anything, but finally I filled the bulge at the end of the rubber. Well, what can I say? This was fun. And somehow, in the end, a rather natural thing. Like food liberally salted, I went back for more. I stuck with her a couple more times for confidence and then tried a few others. The best was the one who didn't have a rubber. I think she said damn in Dutch for not having one, but we went ahead anyway. That felt terrific. When I got home my father took me aside and asked if I paid a visit to the red light district. I didn't say anything but nodded yes. He didn't quiz me further.
It wasn't terribly long after I got back to the States that I noticed something strange going on down there, down there where the zipper is. It started itching like crazy. I tried not not to scratch it - on general principles - but failed. I went to a clinic, not the family doctor (I didn't want the word to get back). The doctor at the clinic gave me some powder, a penicillin shot, and some penicillin tablets. It seemed a shotgun approach. The whole thing didn't last very long, thank God, but it disturbed me, no doubt of that. I couldn't help but think of the damage syph could do a hundred years ago. Look at Winston Churchill's dad, Nietzsche, Scott Joplin...
***
Back on campus I signed up for the etymology course. This was another brainstorm of the old man. Increase your vocabulary. He thought it was a good idea. "Good idea" - that was the expression he used when he was afraid of overworking his favorite phrase, "good experience." Same thing really, just some antics with semantics. I was really a recalcitrant kid back then, so his wanting me to take the class was usually enough for me to opt out, contrary as I was for contrariness sake; however, this time I went along because it was already on my agenda.
Not only was I able to combine my father's wishes with my own, but I could investigate the word "experience" on company time: I made it the subject of one of my assignments. Like Caesar, my strategy was divide and conquer. And like Caesar's Gaul, experience divided naturally into three Latinate parts, ex-, meaning going out; per- from experiri, meaning to try, test or risk; and -ence was an ending which meant process. Combining the three parts I was coming up with: "the process of going out to try, test or risk."
"Risk" sounded like what I thought I might find when I began this verbal expedition. Even better, though, was that the dictionary referred me to "peril." The root of peril was pericul(um), which meant trial, test or danger. This confirmed what I suspected when I'd taken on this assignment - that beneath its "adventure" exterior lurked hazard and jeopardy, and my investigation surprisingly turned up this:
In the OED, that is, the Oxford English Dictionary, I found
1860 TYNDALL Glac. I.ii. 22, I had but little
experience of alpine phenomena.
Well okay, I understood that. I, too, had lacked experience of alpine phenomena, but not any more. I knew about the cold of an alp, that's what I knew. Cold. And falling stars in August.
Another entry was more like it:
c1534 tr. Pol. Verg. Eng. Hist. (Camden) I 64 Well
experienced that mistruste or confidence depended
on the first casualltie of the battaile.
This sounded more like what I had in mind, it seemed to me that experience was won by casualties, like the episode with the Buick Riviera. Jimi Hendrix was a casualty. When he asked, "Are You Experienced?" he wasn't just fooling around, and when we heard him at the Coliseum in Chicago, we vibrated, reverberated - like the walkway that collapsed at the Hyatt in Kansas City, with the sounds of his unique mania. Manic Depression took him on a roller coaster ride, finally with one long, scary acceleration on the down side. Drugs. About which I knew a little something.
But to close I gave the paper a Hollywood ending, with this entry from the OED:
1576 Baker Jewell of Health 112 a, The Aucthour..hath
both seene, and done many experiences worthy memorie.
I wrote a sequel in which I did what my professor liked best, I wrote how I felt word "literature" really should have been co-opted, pre-empted, usurped by "experience." After all, we read stories principally to confirm our own experiences or pick up on someone else's, what is called vicarious experience, and not for their verbal appeal. [Though verbal appeal can have its moments also, but it's like late night video experiments on public television, the appeal is limited.] So I concentrated on the story aspect, the mythic. My prof loved it because, you know, I was right.
In my paper I did the totally outrageous. I said Intro to Literature should be re-titled Intro to Experience. But he loved that too. Though he wrote "vicarious" between the "to" and "Experience." Shoot, I knew that. But I was always a little careless and forgetful. Professor Hollis thought I was a good-hearted loon, but with that bow tie of his, so was he. A thin sprightly character, called everyone Mister or Miss. "Mr. Shoemaker, what is the root of "poetry." I knew the answer, it was part of an assignment, "From the Greek, to make."
I was dazzled when we met for our conference for my term paper. He knew the town where I came from, the courses I took in high school, the courses I'd taken so far in college, the dorm where I was staying. This was all transcript information, but it was also a little unnerving, since no other professor bothered to look at that stuff. With those eyebrows and penetrating gaze, with his theoretical knowledge of experience, I thought he might be able to work his way back the particulars: my Sadie Hawkins date and the car accident.
Everyone thought he was a little out of date, but that was all right with me. Everyone thought I was out of date, too. Professor Hollis was viewed as a harmless eccentric, but me, given the opportunity, and the appropriate fulcrum, I would be the Lenin of letters. I would overturn the whole schmeer. I found at the bottom of one dictionary entry, this tipoff: [see EX-, PERIL, -ENCE]. This gave me a brainstorm, I felt the lexicographers should just go ahead and change the spelling to experilence.
***
After college I decided I would get a job on my own instead of going with the family businesses. My father said, in his best hang yourself mode, "Good idea, be a good experience." Mistake, Dad. You're not supposed to use both "good idea" and "good experience" in the same sentence, it's redundant. But it was more than that, it expressed his irritation with an unmanageable, intractable son.
Anyway I scanned the help wanted ads; I responded by telephone; I made appointments with employment agencies, the "meat shops." They had big offices in the John Hancock and Sears Tower. The guy in the Hancock building was dressed in a dark pinstripe suit. Big, overweight, he couldn't button his vest then, if he ever could, but you could see he wasn't going to give it up. The vest was a critical element in the business uniform, it conveyed a sense of importance. I was certainly impressed; I was still wearing the out-of-date green tweed suit I'd bought from Marshall Field's for college.
I applied for a stockbroker position, because stocks interested me. I had no idea what a stockbroker did; I figured he'd set me up in one of those trainee programs mentioned in the advertisement. He asked me what I'd had in the way of sales experience (where was Dad? this guy was using his word without paying a copyright fee) and I told him none, I was fresh out of school. He looked relieved. They were really looking for someone with five years of sales work. A life insurance salesman, for example, was more like what they had in mind. The job was sales, not stocks. They were looking for someone who was bold, aggressive, had connections with monied people. Who, he asked me, was I going to sell to? I answered with total sincerity: I told him I had no idea.
With that out of the way, he asked me if I might like to do back office work for a brokerage - bookkeep, do the wire or margin. I had, of course, no idea about this except that I would still be working for a stock brokerage. I said maybe. The guy continued his spiel, and I listened in my now awakened, now humbled, now suspicious state. He made appointments for me. I said I would show up for those appointments, but it wasn't at all clear to me that I would. I felt this was bait-and-switch; bait me with the stockbroker job and switch me to the back office, some kind of clerical job.
I went directly to the employment agency in Sears Tower. There I spoke with another guy whose vest couldn't make it around his belly, leading to the perception that maybe people do fit into types. This guy wasn't as patient as the last one. He didn't even suggest the back office alternative - he just wanted to get rid of me. He told me I might see some other woman in the office who might have something for me; maybe she would have suggested the back office thing, but I didn't stay long enough to find out. Damaged, I ran for cover.
After healing, I decided to keep the appointments the first guy had set up. After going to the interviews I was presented with two alternatives: a wire operator for Merrill Lynch or a margin clerk for a smaller firm. I chose margin. As a matter of pride I would work back office for peanuts before I would go back to Dad after his hang yourself remark. I learned something about margin, but there was such hubbub caused by a new producer (the kind of salesman the broker firms were looking for me to become, who in fact did so much business that he created my job) that the bookkeeper never had much time for me; he ended up doing a lot of it himself. Instead, I became the bookkeeper's helper, calling up customers who failed to meet house maintenance or Reg T (Federal Reserve) requirements - in other words I was making collections again. This time I was tough.
But soon enough, it was all over. The firm toppled in the wake of this new broker's consuming ambition; the stocks he was selling fell because of some market advisor's recommendation to dump them. Undeterred, the new producer went right on buying stock for himself and others, putting in orders for customers who had no idea what he was doing. The firm went down the tubes in short order.
It was a bizarre happening. This salesman and I didn't get along, but when it was over, he was ruined. Me? I went and had one of those humbling talks with Dad. He aligned me with my uncles in their stockbrokerage, which should have been a natural all along.
***
I thought of myself as a conservative, prudent person; however, when I started investing in stocks, my choices revealed the true inner man. I went with something called Shipper's Express, which owned a fleet of ships worth, if I read the balance sheet properly, three times the price I bought it for. The earnings potential was equal to the book value, and The Value Line Survey thought the stock price might increase by tenfold. I didn't see how I could lose.
The stock price didn't move much after I bought it. Then it suddenly doubled. I was in the money. Too early to sell, though; as I saw it, this was just the first step of a ten-step move; I held on like a baby to his mother. Then news developed: apparently they had borrowed enormous sums against their fleet and business was slowing. I soothed my nerves with the knowledge that they could sell their fleet and get three times my purchase price. Then I read in the paper that they were bringing in an ex-president of Chase Manhattan Bank to add credibility and expertise to the financing problem. I was happy to hear they were bringing in such reputable help while at the same time wondering why there was such a pressing need for such assistance. Doubt lingered but everything appeared under control; the stock price was stable; I was still in the money. I fretted over whether I should sell the stock on this news, or sit out the night of doubt which would bring the morning of higher stock prices.
In the morning, trading was halted pending news developments - the executive from Chase was not going to join the staff after all, and a creditor had initiated proceedings to force the sale of one of the ships. I rode the news developments like the big roller coaster at Riverview, the "Bobs," but finally the ride came to an end. The stock never traded again; next, I found out that in a forced sale you never get full market price. The bank is interested only in getting its money out, and the company can have the rest, if there is any. In this case, there wasn't. Well, the Wall Street Journal was full of little three-inch columns reporting forced sale after forced sale. I cut out these little financial obituaries and made a collection of them. In the end I obtained a letter from the company advising me (for the IRS) that the stock had no value and I wrote it off. I felt something had happened here but checking my body I found no cut marks, and no black-and-blue marks. Nevertheless, I had an uneasy feeling; I observed that the bruises of adulthood made its black-and-blue marks on the invisible skin of one's morale.
To those of my friends who kept their money in savings accounts of 5% during periods of 14% inflation in the 1970's, I pointed out that they were losing 9% of their purchasing power a year (mattress-stuffers 14% a year) so even doing nothing involved substantial risk. At that rate, in ten years' time, a thousand bucks in a mattress would only be worth $270. The point was: risk was everywhere, so deal with it. Ignorance offered no immunity. Since I was the big risk taker and big loser, my remarks were fully discredited; friends went their own way, justified by the failure of my judgment, unencumbered by my observation about risk. Later, undramatically, my results improved.
***
It was during the Shipper's Express ordeal that I decided to take a ski trip. In my mind's eye I saw in the downward slope of my graphs of Shipper's something like the jagged downhills of the Rockies. So, I headed west. Maybe hoping I would have an accident that would wipe me out and therewith the pain of failure. And as this thought actually entered my mind in a real way I got on the ski lift with Kathleen. Adorable. I had to say something, even if it was stupid.
"Skiied much?"
"Since my teens."
"Live nearby? Or do you also have to fly in?"
"Used to live in Colorado, now I live in Chicago."
"So do I. Where are you staying?"
"The lodge at the bottom of this hill."
"You can call it a hill, but it looks steeper than that to me."
"Didn't you take any lessons?"
"Lessons. Come on, lessons," I laughed.
"Typical cheap male." She mimicked the stereotypical male, "I don't need lessons, I'm coordinated. Two or three times down the slopes and I'll have this thing mastered. Lessons are just wasted money." And she said, "I'll bet you never ask for directions when you're lost."
I started laughing. And laughing. I mean, of course was she was right. Dead right. I was beginning to think about this ski business and the slope.
"Okay, okay. You're the expert. I wonder if maybe you would follow me down. This is my first time skiing."
"Well I don't really want to go down the easy slopes, but I'll give you a headstart so I can go a little faster."
Getting off the ski lift was a tricky business. I fell. Somehow it felt like I was always falling. And I'm not just referring to the slopes. I should have made it my business to fall as they do in wrestling. Fall with a purpose, fall and bring your opponent down with you, and then pin him to the mat.
Well, I got up. I coasted down one of the intermediate slopes without incident. I took it slow and glided from one side to the other. With that behind me, feeling in control and eager to impress the girl, I went for one of the difficult slopes. She tried to dissuade me - she suggested I work the intermediate slopes some more before going down the difficult ones, which had moguls in them, holes, and were steeper. I just smiled; I knew what I was doing. So I went down and I was soon moving fast - too fast.
It's a deceptive thing when you're moving fast but still standing, you figure everything's okay - you don't realize you've lost control. But I hit a mogul and careened off the slope. I was stopped by a tree, my glasses went flying, and one of my skis fell off and slid down by itself for awhile. I suppose if I could have distanced myself from it, I must have looked like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon where they show the paths of both skis around the tree. As it was, I was stunned. My leg hurt some from where it hit the tree, but it wasn't till I tried to get up that I suspected something was wrong. I think it was the pain that clued me to my situation; as pain goes, it was pretty spectacular. Hoping for just a bruise, I sensed it was going to be worse.
The girl helped me down the hill; I complained unendingly. She retrieved my glasses, one lens missing, and the other ski. I didn't have much use for skiing at this point, so it must have been pure possessiveness that caused me to ask her to fetch the other ski; I had just paid three hundred bucks for those skis, and, by God, I was going to keep them.
***
I ended up becoming very close to the girl from the slopes. I was able to make a connection with Kathleen because we had a few things in common. She'd had an episode with poison oak, as she called it; she'd been to a resort in Wisconsin; she'd had a car accident. Not only that but she'd been to Amsterdam and had seen the carnival they call the red light district: the store window displays, the porno theaters, the live theater with the advertisement that read, "Real Fucky Fucky." She told me that if it weren't for the health risks, she'd make a fortune in one of those store fronts, and I had to believe her. She was a knockout.
Not everything was identical: no newspaper route, a different resort in Wisconsin. But she had taken an etymology course at her mother's behest. It seems as a kid she was always getting into things - was the first to try swimming, skiing, the first to check out all the swinging joints, and she'd lost her virginity two years before I'd lost mine. Headstrong Aries, her mother had nicknamed her "The Experimenter." So when she had taken etymology, she looked up the derivation of "experiment"; this interested me, we were dealing with the same root, experiri. I liked "experiment": I felt it was a more positive, head-first approach, and jealously I thought that "experiment" was more masculine, which had me a little upset. Nevertheless, I kept my mouth shut as she talked about all this experiment stuff, not mentioning my experience with "experience," but waiting, poised like one of the big cats to see where this would lead, heavy with anticipation. She said, "You know, when you think of experiment you think of chemicals in a beaker on top of a bunsen burner. It blows up in your face; that's an experiment. But it has a laboratory-control connotation, a safeness I'm not happy with. The root is experiri, and the dictionary refers you back to experience [thank God, my respect restored] which leads you to the word 'peril', and that means danger," she explained to my feigned ignorance.
Well, that clinched it. Somehow, I had to find the means to get her to marry me.
All I could say at the time was, "What they should do really is change the spelling to experilment, to emphasize the risk aspect."
"Exactly," she laughed, "Someone really ought to put the peril back into experilment." She laughed, and she looked me over closely. If she was looking for where peril had left its signature on me, she had only to look for the scar under my nose.
Later, I fessed up to my interest in the word and its root and allowed as how I was0 upset that she had the more masculine manifestation of the word. But she was quick in reply, as though she had already thought this one out. She said that at the bottom of the ex∙per∙i∙ment entry in the dictionary, where mine said [see EX-, PERIL, -MENT] hers said [see EXPERIENCE], the root of all experils. Moreover, she had found "experiencer" a few entries down from experience. See how kind women can be if they want to. Really, hers was still the more masculine entry, "experiencer" sounded like the passive-aggressive's approach, but she had made me feel much better about the whole thing. Of course, in the late seventies and early nineteen-eighties, this was an enormous concession, which women weren't happy to make anymore.
Well, the war of the sexes notwithstanding, we got married and soon enough Kathleen was pregnant. My father got a kick out of this children business; that was the experience of experiences. And believe me, we had them all, staying up until 3 a.m. for the birth, changing diapers, sleep-ravaged nights from all the crying the kid did, when the kid was sick we were sick - and all that child-raising hell.
And when the kid was older I witnessed the scene over the frozen peas. He wouldn't eat them, and they got colder and colder. Finally he forced down a knife's worth, but they came right back up. The kid got smacked and was sent to his room where he cried defiantly. When he stopped at last Kathleen said, "I can't leave him that way," and went to his room and they made up. Actually, I could see the kid's point because I never liked frozen peas either. Making me wonder if my father liked waxed beans.
My parents visited often; Mother helped; she changed diapers and babysat a couple of times a month. Dad didn't do much. I had the feeling he viewed the whole thing as theatre. It must have been years before I picked off that look in the old man's eye, before I figured out what it meant. But at some point it dawned on me that grandchildren were all right, were okay, but what he was really getting off on was seeing me deal with the little cub. Seeing me handle the kid's anger and unhappiness, seeing me stand there and try to instruct the kid because you're not always going to be there to wipe his butt and catch him before he falls. Grudgingly, I could see Dad's point: sure, you could try and protect a kid from all manner of danger, but you could never be there all the time; perhaps giving the kid a sense of wariness was all you could do for a child, and help when it seemed appropriate. Maybe it's best to see him fall a few times and pick him up afterwards.
***
"The Bobs" at Riverview are gone now, but the pattern repeats itself. There's Great America up north; I've never been up there, but Kathleen took the kid. I was along, however, for Disney World. The kid pointed to the Space Mountain and said, "I want to go on that." I said, sure, we'd go on that, but first I steered him to other rides. He was not to be put off. We were going on the Space Mountain; his will in this matter was a lot stronger than mine. So I went with him.
I thought this was Death Ride; I felt an unbearable loss of control. I thought my heart would fly out of my mouth and splat on the ground below; I thought it would freeze in terror, and they would have to remove my corpse from the car. I mean, I understood about father-anger, but why kill me off this early in the game? The kid hadn't really had a good chance to work up a good hate. I wanted to give him the chance to hate me in person.
I walked off the car alive somehow; the kid probably thought his old man was a little weird because I kissed the ground after I got off the car. And if I ever need a pacemaker later on, I'm going to trace it to this time and this place. Rotten kid.
***
But children aren't the be-all and end-all of life. I turned thirty-five yesterday, or so my wife informs me (not that I couldn't figure it out for myself), and one must continue to add to one's storehouse of memories, risk something new to make certain one is still living. So, K. and I are planning to go on a safari soon (we'll leave the kids with their grandparents since they think children are such fun). A safari is not exactly camping. I understand the weather's not that great, conditions are primitive, the natives restless. When I told my father, now a grandfather, now white-haired, now the great white father, that I was going on a safari, he said, "Go ahead, it'll be a good experience." Well, this had an almost physical effect on me as though someone had pricked my ears with a needle; a neon sign formed in my head which read, "PROCEED WITH CAUTION." I am harrying my travel agent for more details. I'm not backing out, I'm still determined to go, but I'm on my guard. We won't be handling any guns, since it's only a photo safari, but I'll be on the lookout for poison ivy and snakes, the potions of witch doctors, and wet pavement. Still, I'm sure the trip will be worth it; all these things are, at least when they fall from the present into the past and serve as markers, bricks in the highway of recall.