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.

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.

The Pursuit Race

Ernest Hemingway penned a fine story with the same title, which begins:

"In a pursuit race, in bicycle racing, riders start at equal intervals to ride after one another. They ride very fast because the race is usually limited to a short distance and if they slow their riding another rider who maintains his pace will make up the space that separated them equally at the start. As soon as a rider is caught and passed he is out of the race and must get down from his bicycle and leave the track. If none of the riders are caught the winner of the race is the one who has gained the most distance."

In my pursuit race there was a sad and lovely woman with blazing red hair who was in love with a man who would never give himself to her. In loving her madly, I was sure to maintain the space between riders, with the three of us arranged in tidy intervals in a constant spin. This all began one Fairbanks winter when I visited a Sikh chiropractor who had hired R-- as a masseuse. From the moment she put her hands on me, I was a gonner.

But R-- lived a holistic lifestyle, eating right, doing Yoga, and meditating her way into the realm of the spirit. I had no such inclinations. So, if I were to capture her heart, I would need to reform my errant ways.

By summer I had completely given myself over to the chase. I was avoiding drink, eating lots of fruits and veggies, getting regular physical exercise, and had agreed to visit a therapist that R-- had recommended.

The therapist suggested that I use relaxation tapes to get into the proper vibrational alignment. The tape began with the therapist's soothing voice, asking me to shut my eyes, then to relax them; to clench my teeth, then to slacken my jaw; to tighten my belly, then let it go loose; and so on until I had submerged my entire body into an ocean of sublime peace.

I was living in the home of a local poet who had gone outside of Alaska for the summer. It was a stunning log house in the hills of Ester, overlooking the Yukon basin. In the morning, I would get out of bed, lay naked on the back deck beneath a canopy of trees, and listen to the relaxation tape. Aside from hearing the sound of the wind and the occasional whirring of an insect, I was truly submerged. Surely I was becoming the living incarnation of what I hoped Miss R-- would find irresistible.

One morning as I drifted off into the rhythm of the recording, I felt an odd stirring in my loins. And when I raised my head to look, there was a wasp nesting at the head of my penis, gathering whatever wasps gather at such times. It seemed quite satisfied to be in the moment. I lay with the headphones on, asking for divine deliverance, yet the wasp took its blessed time before flitting off to the woods.

"Make haste my beloved, and be though like to a gazelle or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices...."

A few weeks later when fall showed its sudden chills, I decided to leave Alaska, for I saw only endless pursuits and losses, dark days, and endless winter. And when the poet returned, she had her eaves sprayed for wasps.

Down in Mexico

There were only two others that early morning on the clanking bus from Puerto Escondido: a young Mexican poet and his traveling companion, an auto mechanic from Mexico City. They were engrossed in talk about the government. I was heading south along the Oaxacan coast, seeking refuge from the deep Alaskan winter.

We were rolling along a sparse stretch of road near Pochutla when the poet suddenly switched over into English to ask if I wanted to visit a peaceful beach where one could stay "cheaply and in silence if you want to." He said the accommodations would be Spartan by my overblown American standards, but after my short experience in Puerto Escondido where rowdy Americans packed the beaches with their blaring stereos and hucksters walked about with chintzy wares, I was more than willing to try another standard.

From where the bus deposited us along the highway, we hiked along a four-mile stretch of dirt road, beyond a failed and deserted resort hotel and through a dark grove of banana trees to a breath-taking crescent of beach where huts jutted from beneath the foliage.

The poet led us to the northernmost cliff of the crescent. This was Shambala, a hammocks-only retreat run by an American woman who had fled to Mexico in the 1960s to escape what she saw as a war-torn culture with crumbling spiritual values. I learned later that it had been a rough transit for Gloria, who lost her husband and then her daughter to the unpredictable currents that lurked just outside the safety of the cove. Yet there she was, a smile played out across her face as she welcomed us and directed us to a string of hammocks that faced out into the mild southern wind.

The poet had been right. After a few days, I was baked clean by the sun, and I sat by night under a waxing January moon and thought nothing of the gloomy winter that I had abandoned. I met travelers from Europe, Australia, and South America -- wanderers who had shunned the glittery and obnoxious resorts in favor of simple pleasure. We used pit toilets and washed in the morning at the community well -- not for everyone, I suppose.

I learned that the nearby resort hotel had failed because of the dangerous rip tides and the absence of gift shops and discotheques. There seemed to be a curse as well: the beach had been named Zípolite, “Bay of the Damned,” I was told. A huge sea-mount rose from the waves from which, apparently, Spanish conquistadors had thrown hundreds of non-reforming Indians into the sea. I was not sure how much of the story was simply folklore, but it seemed to explain the vengeful tides which had borne off Gloria’s family members.

During the second week I joined the poet, his mechanic friend, and an Italian traveler in a hike over the northern bluffs. It was a rough mule track, but we found a narrow lagoon just beneath an overhang, and the water was heavenly. After we had swum and sunned ourselves for several hours, we spotted a slight man in gray slacks and a fedora, who sat alone with a book on the outcrop of rock above us.

I invited him down, but he replied in pleasant, broken English that he preferred to be alone. An odd bird.

And at twilight, when he joined us for coffee on the cliffs of Shambala he offered little in conversation that would change my impression of him. The poet and mechanic were engaged in a cup-slamming round of backgammon, so the Italian man and I wandered up the beach in search of the barracuda fisherman who had been cooking dinners of the catch of the day, black beans, and tortillas.

After dessert, we were lounging in the sand under the full moon when the man in the fedora came up and, after polite conversation, he declared himself a Shaman, interested only in our welfare. The Italian man rolled his eyes.

Quite uninvited, the Shaman touched him gingerly on the neck.

“Your muscles are tight like steel, he said. "With grief.”

The Italian man bristled, “It’s my rheumatism -- the cold water of the lagoon.”

“Not so,” said the Shaman. “It is from the loss of a woman, named . . . Isabella. In Murano…. In Italy.”

The Italian man slouched in the sand and began to weep. He shuddered for a little while and then he seemed at peace. We did not speak again for the rest of our time there.

That moment, under the fat Oaxacan moon, I was certain that there was no way on earth that I was going to let that Shaman lay a hand on me. But in those blurry years, I was terrified of self-knowledge.

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.

Brighton Beach

This is the earliest photo I have of myself. I'm in the carriage. Whenever I look at this picture, I admire the tips on my dad's flashy shoes (click on the picture, you'll see the details). I was born in December.

Dad has a compelling grin, but if you linger on the image, you'll see a very complicated man standing in the winter chill. Analytical and methodical, he quit his plans to become a chemist and went to community college to train as an accountant. His way of bonding with me during my adolescence was to lug me along to help him inventory--by hand--the thousands of ballpoint pens at the Lindy company.

Like all of my memories, the Brooklyn-Brighton Beach years are more a series of repeated narratives assembled by my mind to serve some emotional pattern. They're well-grooved tales that are as unrelated to The Moment as any story colored by perceptions, motives, and constant repetition. It's a catalog of show tunes--Gabby's Greatest Hits--with lyrics and a choreography of events, unalterable over time.

Several years ago, I returned to Brighton to find the Little Odessa of thousands of landed Russians. These were not the same Ukrainian Jews of the 1950s, who like my relatives sat in the cafes talking about Robeson and Roosevelt and Jackie Robinson. The lanes where dad might have wheeled my carriage, passing below the El train to shop for for warm knishes and potato kugel, were now choked with roiling crowds of immigrants bickering over the price of mp3 players--blonde-haired, ruddy-complected, Russian-mafia youth. Thugs.

Shop signs, which had been in that oddly mystical Hebrew lettering of my youth, were now printed in Cyrillic, a language I had associated with cosmonauts and evil people in black fedoras wielding hydrogen bombs. Unlike my static memories of the cold winter morning where my dad wheeled me out for fresh air, the neighborhood had changed its tune, as well as its book of lyrics. Nonetheless, the vision I retain of modern Brighton, too, is an assemblage of images that suits my sense of loss. The nugget of hope, of course, is that I know these things.

So, Why Not Me?

Robert Holbrook Smith, better known to people in recovery from alcoholism as Dr. Bob, was credited with having helped more than 5,000 alcoholics find a solution before his death in November of 1950. He remains a glittering role model in that, before becoming the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Smith toiled drunkenly for years as a proctologist, a surgeon who specialized in the treatment of diseases of the colon, rectum, and anus. It's too simple a leap to say that if I were to hold that distinction, I would need to remain drunk on the job, too. More likely, if I knew I was to have a prostate procedure performed by a drunken man from Akron, I'd pop a few scotches myself.

I once met a obstetrician who said he had caught babies while in a drunken blackout. I've met a pilot who claimed to have flown Boeing airliners from New York to Sweden while intoxicated with a stewardess (as they were then called) in his lap. I have a friend who loaded bombs into B-52s during the Vietnam war while stoned on LSD. So many near-misses, if you will. Hence, it's comforting to know that Dr. Bob survived years of behaving like a wickedly sauced, unrepentant intruder to eventually transform his life and to help countless others find peace.

So, in this initial post, let us say that I shall (despite my narcissism and sense of entitlement to hard-won cynicism) search with diligence to find in each day the essence of what poet Emily Dickinson once remarked:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all...