The Birth of a School

The fall in Tuscaloosa seemed an odd amalgam of earthly effects: the leaves burned with color and curled to crackling on the ground. The late afternoons felt like New England with a refreshing breeze, while the sun in its mid-day arc leaned down on the dry, baked ground so that you thought that summer with its humid swelter might go on forever.

We gathered in Morgan Hall for orientation into the graduate writing program, sizing each other up as we sat in neat rows of student desks, tuning our ear to the spoken tongues from New York and Chicago and the small towns of Dixie, wondering what our peers would sound like on paper.

The poets were an odd lot, easily given to maudlin sentiment, while fiction writers fell by turn to the mimicry of suburban prose, the K-Mart fiction of drunks, hypochondriacs, used-car salesmen, and adulterous wives that populated the fictional worlds of Ray Carver, Anne Tyler, Bobbie Ann Mason, or John Updike. I had read too much of it all, with its facile repetitions of brand names and parking-lot angst. And the poets, with their gnashing and wailing about poor dead John Berryman (a suicide) or the sad Montana taverns of Richard Hugo just seemed a bit over the top for me. I trusted neither.

That year, too, the writing world was reveling in what later came to be called "Sudden Fiction", works several paragraphs in length that mapped the immediate launch of a skyrocket without the fuel and oxygen sufficient to sustain your interest. They once might have been called "tone poems", but to me they were examples of Fiction Lite. It was like leaving town under the cover of darkness after selling snake oil to the locals.

That fall -- and perhaps always -- our writing faculty believed in the shorthand of drinking and adultery, and they led by example. In my first semester, I knew of at least four professors who were walking a sloppy line. One writer was sleeping with a current student and another wooed a married departmental secretary. A literature professor had a casting couch in his office and students delighted in speculating who was attending his darkened seminars.

That fall as we crowded into the seminar rooms of the writers' workshop, our fiction teachers championed two themes regarding our stories: the avarice of puerile prose and the requisite pearl of literary verisimilitude.

Let's examine each, shall we?

puerile
French or Latin; French puéril, from Latin puerilis, from puer boy, child; akin to Sanskrit putra son, child and perhaps to Greek pais boy, child; 1 : juvenile 2 : childish , silly

Don Hendrie, or Red Don as we called him, could make you cry in front of the workshop. He had a crimson beard and spatulate thumbs. He would do anything for you as a writer. But his face flushed raw and you could see him building up to an outburst when he found a line you wrote that was objectionable; he jabbed at it with his finger, then slammed his palm on the table and stammered. He called your writing "puerile".

Hendrie was sleeping with one of his students--a dark foreigner who would goad him during workshop and once remarked quite proudly that while he trashed her prose in the small classroom with the large table, he'd call out her name in religious fervor in their bedroom later that night.

verisimilitude
from Latin verisimilis; 1 : having the appearance of truth : probable 2 : depicting realism

Meanwhile, our other fiction professor, A--, was all about the baroque possibilities of language, was soft-spoken, and insisted that while the prose might reflect the complicated observations of the emotionally charged mind, it should bear verisimilitude on the page. He was wooing a fabulously stunning English Department secretary (whom he later married). But her divorce wasn't quite final and so A-- fearing that the ex was stalking him -- brought a loaded pistol to workshop in the briefcase which bore our stories for discussion. He asked the men in the fiction workshop to surround him with our bodies as we escorted him to his car in the parking lot. Got verisimilitude?

On one afternoon, after school let out, I was privileged to see both workshop expressions brought to bear at once in a convincing way. Hendrie asked me if I could help out in a delicate matter. As I was brand new to the school and invested in presenting a helpful, eager facade, I agreed.

I climbed into A--'s pickup truck and we drove out in the fall light to the secretary's former residence where A-- was to help her remove some possessions before her ex returned. Hendrie held a loaded shotgun as he guarded the driveway against demons. And when we had spirited the marital artifacts into the pickup, Hendrie put the shotgun into his Honda, and I climbed in for a drive to the tavern. A-- went his own way, having squired the last of Helen's finery to his personal Troy.

It was nauseating and delicious at the same time, for that night a fresh genre--Sudden Nonfiction--was born pink and screaming into the deep heart of Dixie.

Officer Gardner

In the fall of that year came the very day for which I had held my breath so many years. I drove up Highway 101, leaving the San Fernando Valley in my spiffy ragtop Buick--the sweet ride that I bought for $500 to replace the dead Rambler--through the flat and baking subdivisions of southern California, up into the verdant hills of the coastal farms that lined the route with fruit stands and orange juice stalls, beyond the plains and misty fields of the Salinas Valley where migrant workers bent to rows of lettuce and artichokes and strawberries in the late afternoon sun, past Gilroy and Morgan Hill, suddenly into the last prune-tree orchards where new subdivisions burst through in the Santa Clara Valley to the campus of the college--once founded as the California Normal School--where I'd spend my freedom.

That year, Allen Hall (since demolished) was a long, brick dormitory with three floors, the first of which was reserved for coeds and the top held alternating rooms of men and women. It was the only mixed dorm of its kind in California for the era, and I played the idea of roommates and sex across my mind like tumbling cherries and bells of a slot machine as I drove the last few miles, wondering if I'd land in the paradise of the upper floor.

Apparently I had no such luck, but my hopes soared when I checked into Allen at the front desk and saw from a list that I had been teamed up with Lynn Gardner on the second floor. I had but a few bags to haul up the stairs, listing to the booming stereos rocket out songs I had never heard in my sheltered life in Granada Hills, brutally strident guitar leads mixed into the pre-semester air of Mexican reefer and delight seeping out the closed dormroom doors in the hallway as I made my way to my cell in the honey hive.

The room was narrow but bright, and overlooked a lawn to the one-way bustle of 10th Street and its convenience stores, laundromat, burrito place, a liquor shop, and used bookstores. Paradise!

Miss Gardner had yet to check in, so I captured the bed against the brightest wall, spread out the bright floral sheets--neon green by choice--and sat on the bed, leaning against the wall and drinking down the relief of having escaped the tyranny of family, weeks before the sudden realization of deep severance and loneliness would creep through, but for now, amazed at my fortune, listening to the blaring television through the brick wall that separated my space from the room shared by fellow journalism majors Benjamin Reed and Gary Rubin. They had their own TV!

I popped over to introduce myself, jumping back as from a frayed wire from the proffered joint that Rubin held out, still in my ardent opposition to all things immoral -- a posture that would weaken and collapse along with so many other unwritten oaths I had taken in as little as a month at Allen. But for now, I retreated to my room to wait for Miss Gardner.

It was after dark that I heard the key in the latch and the door opened to a lanky, tousle-haired lad from a bumpkin town in the California Gold County, a valise in each hand, moving into the light, a well-scrubbed, hugely gentile face, my roommate.

"Lynn Gardner," he announced, dropping his bags on the opposite bed and holding out his hand in easy friendship as my heart fell to my knees, through my ankles, down beyond the linoleum floor, past the coeds who were only a stairwell away in their beds on the first floor, through the rich loam of Santa Clara farm soil, falling like heavy obsidian, coursing through the fiery magma, all the way to the other side of the globe where small Chinese school children were pecking through a breakfast of rice and tea.

"Surprised?" he said, kicking off his shoes and flopping on his bed. "Yeah, I get that."

After a while we stopped talking and Gardner spread out his sheets and we turned out the light.

We whirled through the first semester in disparate orbits. I joined the tribes of the marching band and journalism students, Gardner his small and alien planet of criminal justice majors. I learned to roll fat joints and sip on soda-pop wine; he learned the use of the nightstick and the California Criminal Code. I loved my newfound anti-war march of Neil Young's Ohio; Gardner loved Creedence Clearwater's Out My Back Door, with its paean to small town life.

And yet, and yet, we were fast friends, yakking late into the night about the girls who stole through the halls at Allen with six packs of beer, hopping into bed with you like they were visiting old family. Even wannabe cops could handle free love.

Outside of Allen, away from Officer Garner--as my pals and I would refer to my roomie--we called cops "pigs", hated the tramp of jackboots and flailing nightsticks at the anti-war rallies, hated anything in a uniform. I guarded my tongue in friendly conversation with him, yet I truly never thought of Lynn as a pig. He liked fast cars; I liked fast guitars. We danced around topics like the war or religion with ease.

I took delight in Lynn's odd tic for sleepwalking. Once he climbed out of bed at three in the morning, went into the dorm bathroom to shave, shower, and comb his hair for class, then wandered casually back to the room, dressed in his shirt and slacks, and climbed back into bed and snored.

In our second year, we moved out of the dorms into a swank, swinger's apartment complex on the East Side, an expensive two-bedroom place in a lush setting with a creek, swimming pool, and workout gym safely tucked inside a locked gate, all made affordable when split among four students. Gardner and I took one room while Rubin and another man shared the other. By then, Gardner was donning a uniform and riding by night with sworn Santa Clara police officers. By then, Rubin and I would buy pot by the pound, divvying it up among our friends, thereby getting our own for free.

One afternoon we were cleaning out the stems and seeds on a screen we had taken down from one of the scenic windows that looked out over the creek and Japanese maples, waggling loose the detritus and putting the shake into baggies, when our uniformed Gardner burst in, furious! He had been riding with his pig pals on duty and nearly invited them in for a beer. How would that have helped his fledgling career?

He marched up to us, pulling out his can of mace and spraying the tear gas into his handkerchief.

"Here!" he said, holding the noxious stuff up to my nose. "Try some of my stash!"

And so ended the Gardner era, an era of tolerance and wildness and rides in his fast car up to Gold Country to drift down the American River in rubber inner tubes, or try the pie at one of the rustic diners off of Interstate 80.

Two lanes forked out from that afternoon. I took the path to the left, with attendant decades of pot and insanity. Officer Garner went east to the right, to a job with the Placer County Sheriff's Department, a long and prosperous career that he finished up with the Sacramento County force.

Oddly enough, I would eventually move, sober and relatively sane, thirty years later to Auburn and a home in the hills, growing up finally in the town where Lynn was raised. Out my door I saw mule deer and a pond and wild turkeys scurrying through the brush. But by then, Officer Gardner was but the stuff of folklore among my friends and among the officers in town who told me they once had known him.

He had married--I later learned--a woman named Lynn.

Allusions

In the fall of that year Maki Yamada and I took a small house on Lakeview Drive, less than a minute's walk from the beach. At night the fog rolled in and you could smell the sea and the eucalyptus trees through the window. It was a tiny converted garage with a smelly carpet and leftover flea population from the previous tenant, but we cleaned it with love and made it a safe place to live at a time when Ronald Reagan was President and Mark David Chapman had shot John Lennon.

In the morning, I walked past the sprawling gardens where our dirt road turned to asphault, where chickens ran free across the path and an old mare grazed silently at the fencepost. We had no money, but the university included a bus pass and there was a stop at 26th Avenue for the 56 line that ran right up to Porter College and my morning class. The return bus dropped me off in front of Kong's Market, where I bought our egg rolls for dinner. It was the happiest time of my life.

I was a good decade older than the students in Paul Skenazy's modern novel course, and I had no idea how to read critically or talk about writing. I'd listen for an hour while students bantered about the structure of Gravity's Rainbow or Absalom, Absalom!--difficult novels for a first-year student who was just stepping into the river. And so I'd weep on the bus ride home for fear of failure and my inability to wrap my mind around the muscular narratives.

Maki had a car, a VW that seemed to blow out a part every month, sending me scrambling for the idiot book and the box of metric wrenches. I had never even changed the oil before in my various Buicks, Dodges, or Datsuns and now had to crawl under the back hood and see what I could do to keep the bug from separating into disparate parts under its labored idle.

We had no money.

But Maki waitressed at night at a Japanese restaurant on the west side, and she'd come home with a plastic bag of sashimi and California rolls, and we ate like high members of the shogunate. On weekends we splurged and went over to Chef Tongs for a chicken stir-fry of charred peppers, vegetables, and peanuts. While she was away, I sat in the chair by the window and read novels, marking up the margins with arrows and multiple question marks that underscored my utter failure in understanding the arc of the plot, let alone the subtle literary allusions and call outs to Shakespeare. In the late afternoons, when the wind picked up, I'd pull on a hoodie and jog along the beach.

If we had a little extra cash, I'd ride my bike up Portola to the fruit and vegetable stand and buy dried apricots and dates, or eggplants and onions for our own stir-fries. Some nights, when Maki wasn't working, we took our books and rode down to Capitola Beach and had coffee at Mr. Toots, overlooking the harbor where pelicans curved down from the cliffs in tight formation, screeching down where the anchovies rolled in on the tide as easy prey.

I loved looking at our shadows fall before us when Maki and I walked in the sun. I was over six feet tall and she barely reached five, and we looked like a parent and child. Years later it occurred to me that she had relied upon me to teach her English, the odd customs of the Santa Cruz hippie lifestyle, and even how to drive the VW. And once the parent/student relationship had outgrown its utility, what would come to take its place?

Some nights the stray cats used the fat planters of rubber trees at Toots for a litter box and you had to run out of there squeezing your nose. Teen-aged tourists and gee-gawkers from the crowded peninsula drove out at dusk in their souped-up cars and drove the Capitola loop in search of sex or a proximate encounter in conversation.

But we'd end the evening together, cuddled under the comforter in our little house, listening to the waves out the window and feeling very happy.

Skenazy saved my life in mid-semester after flunking me over a poor paper. I had no idea how to write a paper; I'd been trained as a journalist, and while my powers of observation were sharp, you didn't pen a critical essay in the inverted pyramid format of a news story. I was nearly washed out. I sat ashen in his office at Cowell College as he explained that I had to learn the literary form and aeriodite lingo of the trade.

The door to his office was open and you could hear the great American classicist Norman O. Brown chewing out an undergrad: "You don't have the courage to drop out of school!"

Well, neither had I. Nor did I have a source of income save my scant student loans and scholarship. But I was willing to follow Skenazy's directions and spent long hours in the undergraduate library trying to make sense of my suffering. One afternoon I was nearly laughed out of the seminar room by my utterance of a wicked malapropism: "architypical".

Across town, Maki was making quick work of building a wide network of Japanese students who had enrolled at the nearby community college where she was taking undergraduate classes of her own. Unlike me, she had a social life, and I was insanely jealous. The platters of late night sushi went away. And so had she.

I'd come home to our empty house by the beach and mope. I'd try to chase her down by telephone, ringing up her friends to see if she were there, stammering in Japanese when I couldn't find her. I had enrolled in a Japanese language class, prospering wonderfully, learning the hiragana and katagana and speaking with uncanny mastery--like a woman! I had picked up Maki's inflections and feminine nuances with sufficient acumen that my professor bristled. "You talk like a girl," she said.

And in the spring semester, Maki was spending more and more time away from the beach-house while I brooded in the library over biblical references in Faulkner. We had two languages between us now and so little to say. And Maki had begun to drop references to a man in her pottery class.

One night I sat alone in the dark, listening to the waves, and phoned her at the number she had for the classmate in her address book. Yes, she admitted when he put her on the line, she was there. And she wasn't coming home.

In the morning I had my valise packed, waiting outside the door to the beach-house. I wanted to be anywhere but inside my own crawling flesh. But she had been unfaithful, so why was I to leave? We agreed to find separate homes and when I left the solitude of Lakeview Drive, I moved into a bustling, dysfunctional community on East Cliff Drive, a house and cabins on a giant lot where 14 people lived and ate together. (Today, Lakeview is paved and the little house has made way for a choked row of overpriced condos.)

In the summer of that year, Maki flew home to Japan and I sat in my basement room of the noisy coed house speaking to the twenty books of my oral exam list where they were stacked on my desk, reciting to each literary character what I knew about them, how their world was structured, from which biblical or literary work did their titles spring anew, and how the landscape suited the thematic considerations of the form.

And out the window the afternoon light faded and the gulls screeched as the fog swept in.

Tuscaloosa

The Druid City lies along the shoals of the Black Warrior River at the convergence of 19th Century trails used by Muscogean-speaking tribes led by Chief Tuskaloosa. When I arrived in the fall of 1983 the city had become home to 80,000 frenzied members of the Bryant tribe, typified by packs of crimson and white-painted devotees of the Church of Saturday Football. They arrived by recreation vehicles in the middle of the week, posted up revelry headquarters in the parking lots astride Bryant-Denny Stadium, and got their barbecue on.

For the rest of us--yankees and interlopers of confounded cultural identities--the pilgrimage resembled a tent meeting of elders from stratified sects as disparate as Birmingham (decked out in duck-head pants and expensive loafers) and Cottondale (casually attired in blue bib overalls, huntin' boots, and bright red ballcaps). Sunday you went to church. Saturday you prayed at the Shrine of the Everlasting Bear.

To fully attend a football game at Bryant-Denny you had to drink the Coach Bear Bryant kool-aid amidst a horde that doubled the city population for an afternoon. Not everyone was liquored-up to their Dixie gills, but most were. Certainly the sorority goddesses in their pastel formal gowns despite the raging heat and bone-melting humidity had a little bourbon at breakfast. By halftime, many would sport patches of sudden vomit at their breast. Fraternity lads, dressed in Sunday go-to-preachin' finery, would leap across sections of rooting fans to rip the dress tie off a real or imagined foe. And locals would craft clever stadium totems, such as the red and yellow box of detergent and toilet paper mounted on a staff of wood, a tale told by an idiot signifying: Roll Tide!

Along University Boulevard at dawn the merchants had already set out tables of iced beer and red and white pennants, the crackling loudspeakers playing "rama-jama, yellowhammer, give em hell, Alabama". You could dine from plates of biscuits in red-eye gravy (a tincture of ham fat and coffee), breakfast slices of pepperoni Bamabino pizza, trays of iced donuts, quadruple-shot tumblers of Long Island iced teas, throat-cauterizing delicacies from Wings n' Things, or purchase celebratory Bear Bryant effigies on coke-cola bottles and license-plate frames that read: "American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God". Say, hallelujah!

At kickoff time, you could drive 80 miles an hour down the deserted city streets, hearing only the sound of squealing tires and a cresting roar from the stadium. Tables were deserted with Bryant relics and platters of ribs still sitting on them, the merchants departed for their own stadium seat or tucked back into their shops where they listened to the game on the radio. Rag-pickers walked along under the hot fall sun in near solitude, plucking up recyclable cans, or sitting on the curbs under the hackberry trees with their scavenger's bounty.

We writers, out-of-towners, grad students with portfolio typically met up for cheese grits and eggs, then strapped plastic flasks of bourbon to our calves with duct tape, pulled down our cuffs, and walked undisturbed past distracted guards into the brilliant sunlight of the stadium, heat shimmering from the grass, all in a blur of crimson bunting and plastic pompoms. Loudspeakers blared "Sweet Home Alabama" as wave upon wave of footballers took their drills across the turf.

It is simply impossible to over-write the splendor, the fanaticism, the crowd rising as one to the kickoff with a growl that began in your belly and rose like the scream of some freshly pole-axed hog as the ball was struck. Roll-Tide-Roll. Stand up, my brothers, rise up sistern, feel the recollection of the blood of the lamb, see the bright parallax of angels guiding you skywards, light-headed in the blood-red sauce of barbecue and sweet nectar of warm bourbon in God's own humidor of fun, the smiting of foes, the crushing of heathens, the urpage of slight cheese-grit bouquet on the back palate of a scream, waves of helmeted seraphim a-flow across the turf where the ghastly visage of Barry Krause is forever staunching the goal-line plunge of Penn State, where the shadow of the Bear, dearly departed, still prowls the sidelines, frowning Gibraltar in his houndstooth hat...

... and in the end, you had a brutal headache.

You walked with friends in silence--no matter the outcome--having tithed more than you earned. Cars began to stir again along Bryant Drive, then the Tuscaloosa bars and cafes once again swelled to life and patrons burst out onto the sidewalks. But along Hackberry Lane or 10th Avenue there was just the sound of fall leaves crunching underfoot and the pulse of your heart pounding into your temples, and the hope of cool weather someday coming to the South. And that night, if you stayed awake, the line of lights from vans and campers still streamed toward the interstate en-route to Thomasville, Demopolis, Alabaster, and Selma. You could hear car horns blaring the Bama fight song, then the final whoops of desperate revelers and, much later, just the sound of cockroaches as they marched beneath the dried up leaves in the windless night. But you would have to sleep soon enough, dreamless toward Sunday, when the chimes rang from the steeples of Tuscaloosa and the rest of the world was deep in prayer.

Peace Is Hiding

Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life. -- Gerald Stern

TD went to a different high school than I had, but was a dear friend through music. He was a tuba player and we'd spend hours at each others homes, playing 33 1/3 recordings of the symphonies we loved. I had my Russian phase, and we'd darken the room, put on Shostakovitch or Tchaikovsky and imagine the Tartar hoards blazing across the steppes. While our friends were tripping out to Cream's Disraeli Gears, TD and I would light incense, lie on our backs in the dark, and imagine the fat worlds created by Gustav Holst or the bubbling streams that ran through Elgar's lush England.

We ran with a crowd of devoted musicians and lived for the most over-the-top symphonies. Louder was always better. And while we loved rock n roll, too, we spent more time discussing The Merry Wives of Windsor--or even the advantages of Hurst shifters in your Chevy--than we did the British Invasion.

TD would catch fire over a hobby, then quickly lose interest in it. Once he bought a 16mm movie camera. We went to the desert and made student films. Then, one day, I found the camera on my doorstep in a cardboard box. It had been completely disassembled down to turn screws and springs.

After high school, TD and I took divergent paths. Frankly, he startled all of us by enlisting in the Army and shipping out to signal corps training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. I thought we were all in total agreement that the Vietnam War was illegal, immoral, and unnecessary, and that it was plain stupid to let yourself get drafted if you could get a student deferment. My friends were deferred, I was spared service because of a heart ailment, but TD followed the stern advice of his father, who believed the military would teach him proper discipline. His father said he needed straightening out.

TD shipped out and I moved into the only co-educational dorm at college, a three-story hall on campus so filled with pot that you got high just walking through the halls. It took a while before I joined in earnest, but when I joined, it was most certainly in earnest. And while I became drum major of the marching band, my interests had shifted to protest marches and rock 'n roll. I jammed on sax and flute with the dorm band and we covered anti-war songs: "Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box."

TD's first letter from Fort Gordon arrived in my dorm mailbox in mid-year. It was a thick letter, stuffed into an envelope with a dove painted on the back flap with the notation: peace is hiding inside envelopes, let it out!

In sum, TD was completing training, preparing for an overseas assignment. He would not say exactly what signal school had taught him, and he was worried about shipping to the war. He asked questions about college life, what we were listening to in college, whether I had discovered pot, if I had joined the peace movement. Strange stuff, I thought, for a soldier to ponder. But that year, as we exchanged letters at least every two weeks, I realized I had become part of his lifeline.

The letters always bulged in their envelopes. He had studied photography and sent pictures of the Georgia countryside, inventive landscapes and experimental exposures. There were no self-portraits in uniform and anything in the letter to suggest TD was in the Army.

Then, early in the year, the first letter arrived from Garmisch, from a military base in Bavaria. The back flap had several doves and the words: Let It Out. He had been spared! The letter was thick with descriptions of German beer, photos of the rolling hillsides and woods, and descriptions of off-base food, how amazingly fast you could drive on the Autobahn. I couldn't tell what he was doing there, officially, or how he really felt about the Army.

I wrote about the marches up Highway 101, the demonstrations at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco with Joan Baez and Stephen Stills, the heady mead wine we squirted from bota bags as we walked along the panhandle of Golden Gate Park, the mounted police with long billy clubs and how it felt to have one poked into your back. There was nothing remarkable about what I was doing; it was what everyone did, wasn't it? Mid-week I was a college drum major in a uniform with bright buttons, and on weekends I smoked weed and wore blue overalls without a shirt and marched in protest.

By my senior year, there was something disturbing in TD's missives, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. His prose had gotten truncated, bitter, and stayed off topic. One envelope had a wad of hashish in it. Another came later that said he had been in a horrible off-base accident, that he had rolled a jeep off the road. His lip had been damaged and he might never play brass instruments again. There were no pictures inside, nor any tangible peace to let out. Our letters trailed off, then stopped entirely.

A few years later I heard from friends that TD had come home. In fact, he was moving to Davis with another friend, to live in the town where I was working as a journalist. We gathered together and got mightily high and listened to Pink Floyd. We especially loved Atom Heart Mother, which was a rock symphony done in atonal measures with brass, strings, synthesizers, and raging guitars. TD never spoke about the military. If I had felt guilty for not writing at his darkest hour, the pot took it all away, and he seemed to harbor no resentment. After a while, though, the blush had worn off. I had a reason to be in Davis, and they did not, and soon they went back to the San Fernando Valley.

Not long after that, I received a call that TD was in a bad way and I flew down for a visit. He was hearing things, saying things that did not make sense, and was flying off the hook at apparently the slightest remark, my friends reported. I could see it for myself, buy we seemed to be of little help. One of the fellows called county mental health and we got an appointment to bring him in. At first, TD got in the car, seeming happy to be getting help, and he walked into the interview as we took seats in the waiting area.

When he emerged, followed by the worker, he was all smiles. "There's nothing at all to be concerned about," the worker said. "There's no reason for him to be here."

I felt shaken to the core. But we walked with TD back to the car where he instantly turned on us as a stranger, threatened to get even with us, to teach us a lesson. We spun him around, marched back into the facility and reported his remarks to the intake worker who immediately found him a room. The last time I saw TD I brought him a paper grocery bag filled with his clothes. I had gone to his house and his mother would say nothing to me.

I flew home to my journalism job, still unsettled that we had done the right thing. And later, after Tim had gotten out, moved far away somewhere, we all lost track of him.

For the longest time I felt guilty for not going to Vietnam. But I also have befriended men who had gone, who told me I was lucky to have missed it, and that there was no sin in a medical excuse. To this day, Steve cannot sit in a public place unless he has a view of the door. In Vietnam he buried civilians alive. More recently, William came home from Afghanistan over a year ago and cannot keep from getting drunk and putting his fist through walls.

I don't know what you needed to get straightened out in Germany, TD, but wherever you are today, wherever it may be hiding, no matter how many pieces have come apart into so many boxes, I hope you've found a way to let peace out again.

Undefeated

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. -- Hemingway

Though he has fallen into so much disfavor over the last 50 years, Ernest Hemingway remains the most accessible and immediately emotional author of contemporary American prose. Most of us who wander sideways into literature from journalism identify with his lean and muscular style, although our university professors hammer home his brutal sexism and defiance of more textured literary conventions. When I taught at the University of Illinois, I loved to use his short story, Hills Like White Elephants, as a brilliant example of how setting amplifies character. The protagonists share an oblique argument over abortion. For the man, anyway, it's an idea. A baby would crimp his style. For the woman, it's real and she has heard enough. They wait on a station platform, railroad tracks moving off in opposite directions. In the end, he believes he convinces her, but what he has done is kill off any remaining love she may have had for him.

In his time, Hemingway's language introduced a wide American audience to the experience of literature. There is little doubt that Hemingway became a caricature in the end, crippled from successive concussions and alcoholic depression. His suicide is deconstructed as a death wish, but anyone who feels his prose -- the rhythms of Bach beneath repetitions of sentence structures, the vivid Cezanne brush strokes in Hemingway's landscapes -- understands that he had a thirst for life. His prose ignites the Now-ness of things.

While in graduate school, I wrote about Hemingway's homage to painting and classical music. and my professor sent the paper to the New York office of the International Hemingway Society. I was invited to present the paper to the society's annual meeting in Lignano Sabbiadoro--a small beachfront resort near Venice.

I landed in Milan and took a four-hour train to the sea, speaking my poor Spanish with fellow riders, sampling Italian cheese and bread, and chocolate laced with liquor. I reached Lignano at dusk. The following morning, the convention met in a conference hall shaped like a conch shell at the end of a pier that stretched out into the Mediterranean. To each side of the pier women from northern Europe sunned topless on the strand while Italian men scurried about indelicately with cameras. In the afternoon, racing boats raised their dazzling sails against the sky.

On the afternoon I was scheduled to appear, I was terrified. I was the only graduate student selected to read a paper. All around were full professors and authors who had written critical books and biographies on Hemingway. I was certain I was a fraud. Local dignitaries filled the tables, sipping regional wines and working through plates of cold cuts and melon, city elders who wore their suit coats draped over their shoulders and pinky rings that caught the overhead lights.

I worked through the paper without much flair, but in a steady voice, looking my public in the eye. And when I was done, there was great applause and two professors I had met at my hotel spirited me off for cocktails.

We were seated at a seaside cafe in the blush of sunset, aperitif saucers piled neatly in the center of the table, and I praised the mighty gods for carrying me across the prickly seas of academe. My two table-mates, Roger and Mary Grace taught at Canisius College. Roger suggested that I consider pursuing my PhD immediately. I was beaming.

The night settled down about us and the lights came on the masts of idle boats in the harbor. We had finished the antipasto and settled on our dinner order when two critics marched up under the arc of the table lights.

"You know," one of them said rather drunkenly, "everything you talked about has already been done."

The other pointed his finger at my chest. "Been done," he said. Several critics at the conference who had written books on the subject, he said.

I looked down at the plate of olive pits. Mary Grace put her hand on mine.

Just as suddenly, the critics turned and walked arm-in-arm into the night. If there was more to say on the subject, neither I nor my dinner companions choose to bring it up.

We had four more days in Italy, traveling to Harry's Bar, where Hemingway had held forth with peach bellinis, toured the countryside in WW1 trucks courtesy of the Italian army, and I shared laughter with one of Hemingway's granddaughters at the villa where Hem had written Across the River and Into the Trees. She had his high forehead and melting smile. And I got to tell her that I loved her grandfather for other than the obvious reasons. That I heard the footfall of his sentences in my ear. That I dipped my hands into his icy rivers and threw water on my face when it felt too damn hot to walk on.

And when I flew back to Alabama, I vowed to shun literary criticism for the rest of my days.

How Myoko Sakatani Saved My Life

It was the summer of 1969. On August 15, thousands of the Woodstock nation gathered at Max Yasgur's farm for the greatest music festival of the modern era. A month earlier, on July 16, the Apollo 11 spacecraft carrying astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins blasted off for the moon. That same day, I had visited a friend's house in Granada Hills. We had graduated high school just weeks before and we opened a few cans of Old English 800. I got drunk for the first time.

I went home to sleep, the world swirling at a nauseating clip around the bed. Around three in the morning I woke to a blistering headache, took some aspirin, and went back to sleep. The following morning, the 17th, I felt woozy, and still nursed a powerful headache. It was lawn-mowing day, and I was in the backyard with the push mower, running even rows across the grass in the hot sun while listening to updates of the Apollo flight on my transistor radio.

That night I went to sleep with an unabated headache and an odd twinge in my left arm. No matter how I turned in bed, it wouldn't go away. And around dawn, I woke to a suffocating chest pain. My mother woke and telephoned the doctor, who recommended in customary fashion that I take some aspirin and go back to sleep.

But I couldn't sleep, and the pain grew worse. My peripheral vision was flagging too, and I felt like I was descending down an ever narrowing crevasse. My mother got me up and into the Rambler, then we drove for the emergency room.

The doctors took one look at me, wheeled me into the coronary care wing, fitted anti-embolism stockings on my legs, and injected my stomach with a blood thinning agent that burned like a wasp sting. I spent the rest of the day in a blackout.

In the morning, the Apollo astronauts had begun orbiting the moon, and I was far from Earth as well. I woke as a cloud, floating on the ceiling of my hospital room, washed in a purple cloud, gazing from what seemed miles away at my inert shape in the coronary care bed, wires and tubes running out of my body to a bank of machines. Considering the brutality of the pain of the previous day, I felt wonderful. Peaceful. Joyous.

But moments later my mother walked in, the doctor behind her. She sat on the bed and wept. The doctor was talking to her. And at once, I felt as if I were tumbling, sucked down into a whirlpool of graying light, spinning deep into darkness.

The next time I woke, I was back in bed, listening to the beep of the heart monitor, gazing at the dull morning light streaming through the window. The Eagle had landed, and Neil Armstrong was taking humankind's first steps into moondust. I didn't know about that. What I knew was that my chest ached, my head spun, and that I felt very alone in a small room where nurses watched through a plate glass window.

One of them was Myoko Sakatani. She spent hours at my side over the following week, talking softly, reassuring me that all would be well. I was surely the only 18 year-old to ever have occupied center stage at the coronary care unit.

Edwin Zalis, head of the UCLA heart team, was brought in to diagnose the trouble. He said I had myocarditis, an infection of the heart lining. Usually fatal. Cause uncertain. I would need plenty of undisturbed rest. I was lucky, he said, to have been an athlete on the high school track team my senior year, running the hills above campus and strengthening my heart.

Myoko came in and out of the care unit in her white uniform. She held my hand. And when I asked to see my girlfriend she said that there were orders that only my immediate family could have access. I asked again, and she shook her head. The days and eves were a long blur of intravenous meals, bedpan interventions, and powerful drugs. There were other patients in the room now. I recall a man dying in the bed adjacent to mine and his monitor alarm ringing with sharp insistence until the nurses turned it off.

A week later, I had been wheeled out of the coronary care unit into the regular population. Even so, Myoko came to visit. And one evening, after everyone had gone and the halls were dark, Myoko opened the door to my room and led my girlfriend over to the bed.

* * *

I had been released at the end of the month. My father collected news magazines of the Apollo triumph and brought them to my bed at home. As I learned to walk again and build strength, I toured the neighborhood, hand-in-hand with my sweetheart. We watched the throngs at Woodstock on the television.

That year America sank further yet into the mire of Vietnam and my draft number had been called for the lottery. I was chosen 19 out of 365, destined for active duty. But Dr. Zalis said I was in no condition to serve; he wrote a letter to the draft board, and I was excused from military duty. I would go to college in the fall to study journalism at the end of the summer of 1969 when Myoko Sakatani saved my life.

Years later I contacted the hospital to try and find her. But the personnel department reported that she had left the hospital and there was no way to track her. Since then, the hospital itself has closed. But I found my own way. When I look at the moon and think of men walking there, I think of my longest summer and say a prayer of thanks.

Us He Devours

A few months ago I received an email from a former student who had been in my fiction writing class at the University of Illinois. It began, "You may not remember me, for I was an unremarkable writer." When kindness drops into your laptop after years have passed, it's a remarkable gift. I only taught for a few years and probably had no more than 1,2o0 students. Not many. And I left the profession feeling that I was not good enough, that I had not published much, and while I had been a good lecturer, I was something of a fraud. The email wiped the last notion clear, and I cried with gratitude.

At the beginning, up on the hill in Santa Cruz, I studied writing with James B. Hall. He preferred to be called JB. Born in Midland, Ohio, he served in the Africa campaign during WW2. A wry, inventive writer and brilliant scholar, Hall was one of the first to attend the legendary Iowa Writers Workshops in the late 40s, and spoke of his classmate Flannery O'Connor. He authored a half dozen novels, five books of short fiction, a book on craft, and several books of poetry before passing this year in his home in Portland.

He had started the writing programs in Oregon (where he mentored Ken Kesey), at Irvine, and Santa Cruz. He gave Ray Carver a faculty spot for a semester when Carver was struggling with alcohol and beginning to publish his tales of mean suburbia in The New Yorker. Hall liked me from the start, possibly because I was older than most students, returning to school for a second bachelor's in my 30s, or because I had a newspaperman's experience, which had served many fledgling authors. I was insecure among the youngsters, and more insecure trying to speak the rarefied language of literary studies. So, I hid out in JB's office, where he never minded when I showed up or how long I stayed.

Once, when a young freshman came to visit, he nodded for me to remain seated. The visitor told JB she wanted to study writing, that she loved writing. I could see the twinkle in his eye. He asked her about her favorite authors. She told him that she loved James Joyce most of all.

"Can you tell me the opening lines of Portrait of the Artist?" JB asked. She could not. He looked over at me.

I said, "Once upon a time, and a very good time it was..."

Hall smiled. Then waved his hand dismissively. Visit over.

He could be brutal. He uttered outrageously bizarre or unnecessary things. He called my Japanese lover "baby doll". We were riding in his Volvo wagon on a way to a reading once, an open bottle of wine on the seat, when he spun an illegal U-Turn. "Hall's Law," he said.

Once he was in your corner, he was there for keeps. I had never read literature with a discerning eye before and had two years to learn as much as the four-year students. Hall would look over my short stories, pen in hand, and announce: "I can make this bleed anywhere." Or, he might say, "It's good, except for the whole thing."

I found one of his novels in a college office and stole it. It was out of print. When I took it to him for signature, he asked where the hell I had found it. Stupidly I said I discovered it at a local garage sale. He had that look in his eye, but wrote in it: "For Gabby, who has drive, initiative, and that other thing going for him."

At the end, I was to sit for an oral exam with three professors who would grill me on the 20 books of prose, poetry, and drama on my list. The idea was that you'd answer most of the questions. As the hour ended, one of the professors asked me the origin of Faulkner's title for The Sound and the Fury, and I said, "Macbeth, Act Five, Scene Five." With that, it was done.

I was to wait out in the hall while they deliberated, but it wasn't long. When I came in, I saw tears in JB's eyes. He informed me that I had earned high honors.

In February of 1991, I was living in the woods in Washington State. I had been to rehab, was trudging through a rough patch of things, and from the blue came a letter from JB. He had moved to Oregon after retiring from Santa Cruz, for there was better healthcare in Portland to assist his ailing wife. I wrote back, explaining my departure from academe, my struggles, my hopes.

A week later an envelope arrived from JB with money inside.

We wrote occasionally over the ensuing years, but our letters eventually tailed off. My mistake. After receiving the email from my former student, I was searching for JB's address when I came upon his obituary.

I have found that kindness begets kindness--but I had to have my teachers. And I need frequent reminding, for I often default into selfishness. What I know for sure is that my unremarkable writing student grew to become a remarkable woman. And perhaps JB thought the same of me, the lost orphaned lamb redeemed.

Hence, this message out of the blue is for you, JB--even though it bleeds everywhere. I hope you get it.