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.

Eye for an Eye

The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
What? Mr Deasy asked.
A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
-- James Joyce, Ulysses

The clatter of feet, the hissing radiators, the bang of the teacher's bag on the desk...I remember this much of Brooklyn's PS 99. I remember the red door and short, black picket fence, the cloakroom, where we put our wet slickers on hangars and stood our rubber boots in neat rows, and the shelf where those of us lucky enough to have a lunch put up our colorful pails for the noon hour.

I don't remember much about second grade, but I remember that my best friend was also named Gary and that we came as a matched set of 1950s boys, with our wool shirts and bluejeans with the legs turned up in three or four inch cuffs that were called "buckets". We wore matching crew-cuts with the front of our hair held up in a ridge with pink "butch wax" and the backs scalped so closely that you could spot all the imperfections of the skull where the plates came together like continents of a living globe.

Not only did we look alike, my namesake and I prided ourselves in forging an alliance against "the others", the non-Garys. But that December in our second grade -- if only for a few days -- our friendship was cleaved by fate. We were in Prospect Park, a sprawling 585-acre playland with a skating rink, zoo, and forest designed by the same landscape architect who masterminded New York's Central Park across the river.

I can't recall the other rider, perhaps she was Gary's sister, or another friend. We were lined up on a toboggan atop one of the parks rolling hills, with a wide expanse below. Gary sat in front, the girl tucked in behind him, and I sat in the rear. With a rush we were off, the landscape spinning by on each side beyond the roostertails of spraying snow.

I didn't see the park bench, even at the moment the girl ducked out of the way. Gary must have ducked first, because I was the only one to take the full stopping force of the concrete in my face.

The next day at PS 99 the shiner under my right eye was the talk of the class. I had gotten it in a fight. I had been hit by a mugger. I wish I could have come up with a number of less humiliating explanations. My teacher and classmates referred to me as Gary with the Eye. The other Gary laughed at me along with the others. As far I as was concerned, we were no longer a matched set. He was one of them.

A day or two passed that way. I guess, finally, it bugged him. Gary came to see me after class.

Our family lived near the corner of 13th Street and Avenue M.-- a few short blocks from PS 99. We rented the top half of a duplex. The kitchen had black and white checkerboard tiles on the floor and a red Formica table with matching chairs. Visitors had to ring an outside bell to get into the foyer, then climb a long flight of stairs with a hardwood banister to reach the landing.

On judgment day, my friend Gary rang the bell, raced in from the December chill, and smacked headlong into the banister. His shiner, quite naturally, welled up under the right eye. And when we returned to PS 99 the following morning, we were twins again.

Fries, No Flies

The Hebrew characters spell the word Chai (sometimes pronounced "hai"). It means life or refers to the living God--depending on how it's used or defined. A variant, l'chaim, is the common toast in Hebrew, meaning "to life". My last name, Hyman, is also a variant on the word, meaning that my last name refers to life and the God that lives inside me.

My last name was changed to Hyman when my forebears arrived from Romania at the turn of the 20th Century, having been hunted and killed by mobs and their villages burned to the ground. Grandpa Max came to America when he was still young, quite without the English language and familiarity with life on these shores. Along the way, he changed our name.

Jewish boys and girls attend Hebrew language and culture training for several years leading up to the Bar/Bas Mitzvah, a ritual that signifies adulthood in the tribe. You learn common prayer, special prayers selected by the calendar that match the season in which you turn 13 years old, our cultural history, and the language used to read and recite scripture.

My family initially sent me to a school that was not affiliated with a synagogue, but a bar mitzvah mill that churned out celebrants by the dozens. We met in a converted store filled with school desks and blackboards under the direction of a taskmistress whose name I have blocked from memory to protect myself from recurring trauma. I love a story from Donald Barthelme in which he calls the teacher "Miss Mandible", and it will suffice for this recollection. My Miss Mandible walked behind the desks--not unlike the demon nuns that have been described to me from recovering Catholics--making sure we kept our Sephardic noses to the grindstone.

I had trouble making out the consonants, although the vowels were simple. They appeared beneath each letter, or to the side, and were few in shape and number. But the consonants! Some were uttered from deep in the throat and when you pronouced them correctly, it sounded as if you were trying to clear a bolus of half-chewed beef from your windpipe. Several characters looked exactly the same to me, which is why I sunk into depths of multi-generational despair when I confused them in recitation beneath Miss Mandible's gaze. When I went to the synagogue, I always chanted the notes to the prayers, mumbling the actual language, which seemed impossibly out of reach.

What I truly loved, however, were the short historical films we watched on biblical heroes from the Old Testament. I particularly had a crush on Ruth, the Moabite woman who said, "Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following you; For wherever you go, I will go." In the film she was utterly delicious, impeccably tanned, lean, and graceful in her white robe and sandals. From then on, I was to search the continents and islands of my travels to find a woman who would commit to everlasting fidelity.

Bethlehem, as it was presented in the film, was a small village with neatly arranged little adobe houses tucked among smooth pathways that ran between desert rocks and plants. In the close-ups you could see Ruth's skin--like spun chocolate--and pleasant eyes. This a was a Bethlehem quite without scorpions, flies, and pestilence--whether biblical or otherwise.

One afternoon--for we went to Hebrew school after regular school let out--my friend David and I made a discovery that was to influence our religious training forever. Just up the alley that ran behind the Hebrew school was a cafe that sold french fries by the bag. These were no diminutive fry bags issued by fast-food joints. These were Number 10 shopping bags, brown as Ruth's skin, and stuffed to the top with hot, oily, heavily salted fries. They made for fine eating and quelled the imperious, full-body shame that rose to the heart from scripture dyslexia.

How many times did we sit in the alley, ignoring the fear of flunking out of Hebrew school, wolfing down those delightful, crisp, heavenly fries that surely God had delivered unto us? I cannot say, except that as my bar mitzva date grew near, my father was disturbed by my apparent inability to read or speak the most rudimentary of expressions required for the ritual. A private tutor was arranged, thereby wiping out the savings my parents might have made by sending me to the cut-rate, bar mitzvah factory run by Miss Mandible.

The venerable David Starr made house calls, teaching me how to perform the entire ceremony phonetically. Ever-more chubby, now entered into a lifelong struggle with my overeating, I mastered the Torah melodies, which I sung in my cherubic, bell-clear soprano voice just months from changing forever--and everyone was proud of me.

Years later, I visited Bethlehem on a day trip from Jerusalem. There was no sign of Ruth in the crowds of Sabras who walked among the modern apartments and rumbling buses. Her descendants wore bright miniskirts, Western jeans and baseball caps, and several carried Uzi machine guns. These were tough women, who had no notion of taking an oath to follow me wherever I went.

And the biting flies, dear God, oh the flies!

Going Under

The Granada Hills High School "Highlanders" chose the McLean tartan. Only a few members of the marching band were allowed to wear kilts, sporrans, and flashes. I took great pride in it, although I was a Russian Jew and the closest I had come to the highlands was the corner of Chatsworth Street and Zelzah Avenue, where palm trees and burger joints dotted the landscape.

I wore the kilt around town just to call attention to myself. I wore it to the store, the dentist, on cruise nights on the Sunset Strip, and to the pancake house. If I could, I would have worn it to synagogue.

I was certain it underscored my manhood. Matt Garbutt had a Falcon station wagon and after football games, I'd ride in the back deck, my naked legs hanging out the open window toward following cars. There were jokes about what we wore underneath, but none of us would tell.

In the fall of my senior year I wore the kilt to Dr. Abraham's office. The doc was a fully paid member of one of the twelve tribes of Israel and, like myself, had no prior experience in man skirts. At the end of the appointment it was decided that I had a lazy eye that would require surgery. The procedure was scheduled and off I went to parade my uniform about Ventura Boulevard.

The operation required a mild sedative. In those days, strabismus surgery had to be performed without anesthesia so the patient, gazing consciously at spots on the ceiling, could let the physician know if the adjustment to the muscle was on target. Only then would the anesthesiologist deliver the knock-out drug.

To begin, the anesthesiologist injected my eye socket with a numbing solution, making six or eight insertions around the orbit. They burned like iodine. When the doctor had successfully moved my eye out from its setting to reach the muscles beneath it, the pain was absolutely intolerable. It felt like he was pushing a screwdriver into my eye. Worse, I could see everything through my good eye, reflected in the mirror the surgeon wore on his forehead.

"Just a little longer, " he said. I was wriggling in my restraints and the nurse put her hand on my shoulder. The dots on the ceiling seemed close and in focus through my tears. "A little more," he said, "you're doing great."

The pain shot back into my skull and down my neck, and I cried out. At that second, Dr. Abraham lifted up his mirror and peered at me.

"What do you wear under that thing, anyway?" he asked.

For a moment we were laughing. And just after that, the full anesthesia hit like a sledge and I passed into the heather.

In the Wiregrass

I visited two high schools as a teacher of writing in the fall of 1985 in rural Alabama. One was located in Abbeville, in the southeast corner of the state, just across the Chattahoochee River from Georgia. The other was in Wicksburg, less than 20 miles from the Florida State Line. It was called Wiregrass Country because the vegetation that poked through the plains could slice open your ankle.

The towns -- and their schools -- were separated by less than a half hour’s drive by automobile but, as I visited them in a two-day period, they seemed to be cleaved by a intellectual and spiritual chasm that was unfathomable.

On the first day, I walked up Abbeville’s main street, walked along the raised wooden sidewalk outside the Rexall Drug, then passed beyond the courthouse, down along the scattered leaves beneath the oaks and hackberries, finding my way to the broad grass lot where the students, all of them African Americans, sat on the fenders of their cars and talked and smoked cigarettes, their stereos blazing. Several couples pressed up against their cars, or leaned up against the hackberry trees.

The classroom windows were taped across the cracks, and the boy’s bathroom was lighted by bare bulbs, the sinks broken and faucets leaking. In the library, I waited for students to come and show me their writing. One girl had crafted a marvelous story about magic and superstition, about the spirit of a murdered seamstress who inhabited the shadows beneath the football bleachers. Another told how you know the moment an illness steals its way inside you.

I attended an afternoon English class and while I was midway through a lecture on metaphors, a bumblebee blazed through the open window and nested in my beard. The students leaped from their desks, shouting, laughing, singing, and their teacher, a gaunt, middle-aged Caucasian woman leaned against the rear wall of the classroom and buried her face in her hands. Class dismissed.

I spent the evening in Wicksburg, a hamlet just west of Dothan, a flat Alabama town with a military base and a sky filled with the drone of jet helicopters. I dined at the home of the high school principal, a burly white man who wore a red college ring on his right hand. We sat in his living room before a coffee table strewn with Baptist tracts. When told I had spent the day in Abbeville, he remarked that their football team had “a nigger guard that’d rip your head off.”

The next morning as I waited for my students in the Wicksburg school library, I found in the stacks a first-edition copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls that had not been checked out--recently or ever for all I could tell--with crisp pages and binding. These white students arrived punctually for their conferences bearing rather blasé and sanitized tales of hunting and fishing and cheer leading.

The hallways were scrubbed, and posters of football heroes painted in tempera hung from the rafters. The boys and girls did not touch each other, although a fellow in a varsity jacket and a girl in a plaid skirt and sweater held a pen between their fingertips just before they parted for separate classrooms. It reminded me of two people sucking at opposite ends of a strand of spaghetti except, of course, that the gesture lacked any real suggestion of sensuality. Rather, it seemed desperate.

At the bell, the students in the English class sat erect in their desks, pencils held tightly to their writing tablets, eyes forward. “If they’re not in their seats at the bell,” the teacher informed me, “they’re sent to the vice-principal’s office.” The paddle was a common remedy. The teacher was a robust, round woman with bright eyes behind thick metal glasses. When I began to speak to students about images and metaphorical language she informed me, “Honey, I have my hands full with the basic R’s, let alone you bring up anything difficult.”

I was invited to attend the pep rally after lunch, but I declined. I drove home to Tuscaloosa, where I’d been teaching composition and creative writing to university students who had been graduated from the high schools of the cities and towns of Alabama.

What I want to say -- what I need to say -- is that rationalizing away my experience simply by saying, “Well, that’s Alabama,” is insufficient. It would be negligent. My experience played itself out over and again across heartland Illinois, the Alaskan north, the Tidewater of Virginia, and other places where I taught over the years. In college-town Illinois, my best friend was told that because she was sporting a New York Mets baseball hat, she obviously liked "Hebrews".

But everywhere I went amidst the monstrous idiocy I found a resiliency that simply isn't attached to justice or an equitable distribution of money. The creative mind flows like water seeking its own level beneath the hardpan of ignorance.

There’s an awful lot of Alabama everywhere you go, far outside the Heart of Dixie. American schools and communities are but an organic outgrowth of behavior and belief, embodying the best and worst of the families that send their sons and daughters out to the world.

Music Lessons

Mr. Schackne's beginning band class met during the third period. The way we butchered standards like Sousa's "Liberty Bell" and Mancini's "Pink Panther" would make the deaf wince. When Schackne was sick and they called in a substitute, we swapped instruments. I'd hand my metal clarinet to the drummer, and he'd hand me his tympani sticks. We almost sounded better playing unnatural instruments.

At the time, one of the more sadistic junior high fads involved curling a girl's hairpin, pretzeling it around into a wicked tool that--when pressed against the victim--snapped the skin and raised an angry welt. The trombone players found a way of inserting the modified pin into their spit valve. The valve was strategically located at the end of the slide. On a long glissando, the trombonist ran the slide all the way out, popping the loaded hairpin into the ass of any one of the musicians sitting in the row ahead laboring furiously against the logic of the printed music. The flautists usually sat in that row, punctuating the end of the glissando with a agonized yelp. It was, using the parlance of the time, bitchin'.

I have long since forgotten her name, but in reflection I am delighted that she had been the recipient of choice along that vulnerable row of pre-adolescent fannies. Two years before I joined Mr. Schackne's slaugherhouse, my mother had taken me on an errand of some urgency in our '54, powder-blue Bel Aire. There was a huge crowd in the parking lot at Valley Plaza--one of the first large shopping centers in booming suburban Van Nuys--and when we got out of the car, my mother took my hand and we wedged through the throng to a stage that had been erected in front of the row of shops.

Walking with stiff confidence (no doubt owing to a bad back), candidate John Kennedy was making a point of shaking hands, and he took mine for a moment as my mother beamed. I remember the look on her face with greater clarity than I do the man on the stage. Even so, the event is colored more by what happened in Mr. Schackne's music room two years later.

There was a substitute teacher that day and we were grinding out a medley of Christmas tunes for the coming season, when the loudspeaker in the hall cackled to life. It was the principal. Kennedy, he said, had been shot in Dallas and we were to assemble in the schoolyard for directions to go home early. The room buzzed. Some of us were more excited about the prospect of getting out of school than stunned by the news. We hurried to put our instruments in their cases.

In the center of the hubub, the flautist rose with a flourish. She sorted out her dress around her, then proclaimed how bitchin' it was that Kennedy was killed. Good riddance, she said.