Yesterday Mohamed and I returned to the KU Cancer Center for the regular six-week blood work and consultation. Every other six weeks, I have CT scans, perhaps skeletal x-rays, and a bone-strengthening shot, but this was the easy visit. The main KU Medical Center is about two miles north, and we pass it on our way to the cancer center. The Med Center is a huge, sprawling complex of buildings in a mishmash of architectural styles. Although individual buildings from various periods can be attractive, the campus itself is not: it's too crowded and feels haphazardly planned. The road we take begins as a turnoff from I-70 onto the 7th Street Trafficway. The surroundings are industrial with huge railroads yards everywhere you look. Although it's poor and ugly, when I first moved to the KC area, I loved coming into the city this way. For a small town boy, it seemed like the essence of industrial urbanism. The Trafficway changes its name, not very aptly, to Rainbow Boulevard and suddenly the Med Center complex emerges, construction always underway somewhere on campus. Rainbow is the west boundary of the Med Center; the eastern boundary is State Line Road; cross it and you're in Missouri.
On the north, 39th Street used to contain the Med Center, but there's now a lot of construction to the north of that border. One handy thing about 39th Street is that if you cross State Line, there are several blocks of a restaurant row, so good and various restaurants are always at hand. To the south, the campus sort of peters out with no clear defining street. The teaching facilities are there, as is the hospital. Two years ago at this time, I was in my 7th day at the hospital, trying to adjust to the abduction brace and learn to climb two steps, ready to go home two days later. Mohamed had slept in my room for those seven nights, but would drive back to Topeka this night to get us both some fresh clothes and to prepare the house for my return.
If you continue past the Med Center on Rainbow, the entire scene changes. Like Gaul, all of Kansas City is divided into three parts: KCMO, which is which is the main city with most of the population and all of the major attractions; Kansas City, Kansas, which is generally poor; and Johnson County, Kansas, which is where the rich suburbs are. Once you pass into Johnson County, the atmosphere is entirely different (and if you go a couple of blocks beyond Shawnee Mission Parkway, where the cancer center is located, you're in the richest suburbs of the KC area). About two miles south of the main Med Center, you turn right off Rainbow for a block, and there's the Bloch Cancer Center. It was originally one of the first Sprint buildings in KC, but when Sprint was experiencing better times, the company built a huge billion-dollar campus on the far south side of KC. The Bloch family (of H & R Block), major philanthropists in KC, sponsored conversion of the building into the cancer center. Although I still occasionally have tests at the main Med Center, it's at the Bloch building that I normally have tests and see the doctors.
The bottom floor is devoted to x-rays, MRIs, and CT scans; the second floor is where blood is drawn and where the doctors have their offices and consultations; and the third floor, which I visit only to get my shot, is where people undergoing chemo have their treatment. It's divided into myriad cubicles with TVs and DVD players, since some patients must spend several hours getting their chemotherapy. I signed in and was called immediately for my 12:15 drawing of blood. That took a couple of minutes, and then we had nothing till a 1:30 appointment with Jennifer, the physician assistant. I thought about asking whether she was available then--and should have because she was--but assumed that she couldn't see us 75 minutes before our appointment. So we walked west across the street to a small shopping area and met our friend TJ (T.J. on his Equity card) for a very hurried lunch. Still, we were happy to see him and happy, too, that he had made the effort to lunch with us, fast as it turned out to be.
At 1:30 we went back, signed in again, and were called to see Jennifer before we even found a seat. She printed a copy of the tests results for the last six visits, most of which were, as usual, in the normal range, though there were several that had exclamation points and arrows (too high, too low) beside them. The only one that seemed to worry Jennifer was the hemoglobin number, which has been too low for the last six times (all those exclamation points!) and which continues to decline. Still, she said, we have a ways to go before we need... Mohamed and I were nodding, not that we understood, but just to show we were following, though Jennifer assumed we knew more than we did. We were thinking another pill or perhaps a shot, but she finished her sentence with "before we need a transfusion." At any rate, generally the tests were good, and there were only six exclamation marks (out of perhaps 40 results) from this series of tests. We scheduled our next, fuller set of tests and said goodbye to one of our favorite nurses (hugs all around) who is leaving. And then Mohamed drove us home, me sleeping fitfully in the car.
Once home, I had barely enough energy to make it out of my clothes and fall into bed for two hours of profound sleep. The rest of the evening, I was wiped out. I had jinxed myself by telling Jennifer that the nausea had been much less frequent. One of the most frustrating parts of the last two years has been how quickly my energy level plummets. For social occasions, which luckily remain frequent, with some planning I can usually manage three good hours. But then both brain and body stop working. For physical activity, though, 30 minutes is a stretch. It's hard to build momentum through the day when mornings are interrupted by an hour crash, and right after lunch, even though I haven't been awake for more than a couple of hours, I fall into bed for two full hours.
We'd like to make plans for a little variety in our days--perhaps a weekend in KC (without doctors' visits) or, if SCOTUS strikes down DOMA, four days in Iowa to get married. In the meantime, we need to get our mailbox replaced (every few years, "fun-loving" teenagers take baseball bats to the mailboxes on our road) and to get a support post, knocked out of position by a guest's errant driving, for our balcony repaired. Little annoyances seem to take on unncessarily major proportions these days. And then we'll think more seriously about a break.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Sunday, May 26, 2013
All that remained to complete my coming out was to tell my parents. The draft board hastened that process along. During my first year in graduate school, grad students got an automatic deferment from the draft, but that soon ended as more and more troops were needed to go to Vietnam. As important as what happened was in my life, I don't remember the exact year. I think it was 1967 or 68, nor do I remember whether the lottery had been instituted and I drew a low number or whether some other circumstance led to my being drafted. But I got my notice that I was to report for my pre-induction physical. As someone who had spent a lot of time protesting the war (and someone who did not want to kill or be killed), I knew that I wasn't going to go. One popular alternative was to flee to Canada or Sweden, so I started investigating that possibility. But according to popular myths, there were other ways to avoid the draft. I remember getting up in the dark and meeting the bus that was to take us to Oklahoma City for the physical. I had been told that drinking a lot of Coke would increase the sugar in your urine to unacceptable levels. I drank two two-liter bottles, and sure enough, the sugar level was too high. All that meant, however, was that I had to go to the OU health center every day for a week to have the level tested, and eventually it returned to normal levels.
I was called again. This time the Coke--in addition to making the wait for the physical very uncomfortable--raised my blood pressure. Again, I had to spend a week making daily visits to the health center; again, the level returned to normal. I was called for a third time to make the trip to OKC, and this time I decided to fess up and "check the box," shorthand for declaring on the form that I was homosexual. With hands even shakier than normal, I filled out the form, checking the box and waiting my turn to present it to the officer in charge. When I was called, he took one look at the form and called out to the 200 men in the room, "Hey, we've got a queer over here." I'm sure I was quaking. "How do you know you're queer?" he asked. Always quick on my feet, I said, "Experience." "What kind of experience?" he continued. Even more deftly, I said, "Homosexual experience." He told me to go sit down and wait to be called by the psychologist. Inwardly, though shaken, I felt a sense of relief: the worst was over and the rest would be smooth sailing. The psychologist wasn't convinced, however. He said there was no reason to believe my declaration and I would have to find a psychologist to write a letter confirming that I was gay.
I thought that at least this would be easy, but every psychologist I called in Norman said s/he wouldn't write the letter without treating me first. I argued that I didn't want or need treatment, that I was quite happy being gay, but I made no headway. Finally, a friend said he knew a hippie-ish psychologist at the federal penitentiary in El Reno, Oklahoma. So I got someone to drive me to El Reno, had a fifteen-minute meeting with the shrink, and waited for him to write to the draft board. (When I finally saw a copy of his letter, it was so filled with errors of spelling and construction that I was afraid the draft board would think it was fake. They didn't.)
I was registered with the draft board in Iowa, so the letter exempting me from the draft went to my home address there. And that meant that I soon got a call from my parents asking why my draft status had gone from 1-A to 4-F. So the moment was at hand, and I explained to first my mother and then my father that their son was gay and had used that fact to get out of the draft. Much to my surprise, my father took it better than my mother, who seemed most concerned that the word would get out in Ames, where my father worked, thus ruining his reputation. I can't imagine that my parents hadn't suspected, but at least now it was out in the open. I don't remember how the conversation ended, but it must have been awkward. My friend Darrell still recalls how that evening I shlepped my portable, manual typewriter to his apartment and spent what seemed like hours typing out a letter--several pages long, I'm sure--to my parents. The next few conversations must have been equally strained, but the 600 miles between us made them easier. And eventually my parents came around and accepted the reality. Since I was an only child, their decision was probably easier. I felt a little guilt since they would never have grandchildren. But otherwise, it was the final step in coming out and led to two big sighs of relief--one, that they finally knew and I could live honestly, and two, that I wasn't going to Vietnam or Canada. It helped, too, I spent the entire 1970s with one man, and my parents liked him very much and soon thought of us as a couple. His parents felt the same way about me, so all was well.
I've listened to a lot of coming out stories in my life, and mine seems rather unremarkable, easier in many ways than most. It wasn't always without difficulty, but neither was it as traumatic as many I know.
I was called again. This time the Coke--in addition to making the wait for the physical very uncomfortable--raised my blood pressure. Again, I had to spend a week making daily visits to the health center; again, the level returned to normal. I was called for a third time to make the trip to OKC, and this time I decided to fess up and "check the box," shorthand for declaring on the form that I was homosexual. With hands even shakier than normal, I filled out the form, checking the box and waiting my turn to present it to the officer in charge. When I was called, he took one look at the form and called out to the 200 men in the room, "Hey, we've got a queer over here." I'm sure I was quaking. "How do you know you're queer?" he asked. Always quick on my feet, I said, "Experience." "What kind of experience?" he continued. Even more deftly, I said, "Homosexual experience." He told me to go sit down and wait to be called by the psychologist. Inwardly, though shaken, I felt a sense of relief: the worst was over and the rest would be smooth sailing. The psychologist wasn't convinced, however. He said there was no reason to believe my declaration and I would have to find a psychologist to write a letter confirming that I was gay.
I thought that at least this would be easy, but every psychologist I called in Norman said s/he wouldn't write the letter without treating me first. I argued that I didn't want or need treatment, that I was quite happy being gay, but I made no headway. Finally, a friend said he knew a hippie-ish psychologist at the federal penitentiary in El Reno, Oklahoma. So I got someone to drive me to El Reno, had a fifteen-minute meeting with the shrink, and waited for him to write to the draft board. (When I finally saw a copy of his letter, it was so filled with errors of spelling and construction that I was afraid the draft board would think it was fake. They didn't.)
I was registered with the draft board in Iowa, so the letter exempting me from the draft went to my home address there. And that meant that I soon got a call from my parents asking why my draft status had gone from 1-A to 4-F. So the moment was at hand, and I explained to first my mother and then my father that their son was gay and had used that fact to get out of the draft. Much to my surprise, my father took it better than my mother, who seemed most concerned that the word would get out in Ames, where my father worked, thus ruining his reputation. I can't imagine that my parents hadn't suspected, but at least now it was out in the open. I don't remember how the conversation ended, but it must have been awkward. My friend Darrell still recalls how that evening I shlepped my portable, manual typewriter to his apartment and spent what seemed like hours typing out a letter--several pages long, I'm sure--to my parents. The next few conversations must have been equally strained, but the 600 miles between us made them easier. And eventually my parents came around and accepted the reality. Since I was an only child, their decision was probably easier. I felt a little guilt since they would never have grandchildren. But otherwise, it was the final step in coming out and led to two big sighs of relief--one, that they finally knew and I could live honestly, and two, that I wasn't going to Vietnam or Canada. It helped, too, I spent the entire 1970s with one man, and my parents liked him very much and soon thought of us as a couple. His parents felt the same way about me, so all was well.
I've listened to a lot of coming out stories in my life, and mine seems rather unremarkable, easier in many ways than most. It wasn't always without difficulty, but neither was it as traumatic as many I know.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Religious guilt pretty much dispensed with, I made some progress at Northern Iowa, my undergraduate school (then State College of Iowa): my roommate for the last two of my three years there was very openly gay, so I was exposed to what was usually the secret world of gay life, and I told several friends that I was gay. But I continued to think I could be straight. I tried to date, even though my heart wasn't in it (nor was my body). I had a rolonged, if forced, crush on Karen Gaither, and I hoped she would ask me to a big sorority dance. She already had a date, but she did have a plan for me: one of her sorority sisters was the campus queen, was Miss Iowa, and was eventually a finalist for Miss America. Jeanne was beautiful, blonde, and very shy; she was like one of Hitchcock's lovely, but almost frigid heroines. Karen arranged a date between Jeanne and me. Jeanne's beauty was so intimidating that no one had had the courage to ask her to the dance. So there we were--Karen (in whom I was supposedly interested), her date, and geeky me with Miss Iowa. I spent the entire evening, however, lusting after Karen's date: Mark Greenberg. I had never met him, I never saw him again, and he ignored me completely, but even after nearly 50 years, I remember his name. Only once in my three years at UNI did I get up the courage to make an overture to another man. It took me three hours of helping him do research in the library (my excuse for following him around for so long), and then I stumbled through a proposition. He said no. He was polite, but his response was unambiguous. And that ended my taking the initiative.
In the fall of 1966, having just turned 21, I went off, still a virgin, to be a graduate assistant at the University of Oklahoma. I didn't know anyone there and will never forget how frightened I was when I walked across campus to teach my first class. But making friends turned out to be easy, and I quickly got into the swing of graduate school life. And then something totally unexpected happened. I met a nice, Jewish girl, Barbara, and we began seeing each other. For the first time in my life, I was sexually turned on by a woman. I told her I was gay, but she thought she had converted me. One night, someone asked us how long we'd been married, and Barbara said that we were getting married as soon as school was over. Then she began telling people that we were getting married on May 28. Instead of putting an end to this story, I played along. One Saturday night, we had both had too much to drink, and I said, "Should we do it for real?" She said yes, of course, and we ended the night thinking that I had just proposed seriously. When I woke up Sunday morning, I was more lucid and had an Oh My God! What Have I Done? moment. I called Barbara to try to undo the damage, but she had already called her parents in St. Louis and they had made plans to come the next weekend to meet their sheygetz future son-in-law. I chickened out of backing out.
They came the next weekend, and since I was already into my long ersatz Jewish phase, I gained their approval. Would I convert? Yes. The mother kept wishing that Shecky Greene, a comedian, could give me conversion lessons. Would we raise our children Jewish? Of course. The adjective 'surreal' is badly overused, but there was something surreal about the entire weekend, based as it was on a series of lies. Once they left, I summoned my none-too-plentiful courage and told Barbara that this was all a huge mistake. She was devastated and even though the semester was nearing its end, she dropped out of school. During the vacation between the spring and summer sessions, I contemplated what I had done and how stupid, to say nothing of cruel, it had been. I knew I was gay. I knew that I wanted to spend my life with a man. And because of my cowardice and passivity, I had really hurt another person. That was the belated end of all the pretense. I knew that there were three men who were attracted to me, and I resolved that as soon as I returned, I would sleep with all three of them. One, two, three. Check, check, and check. There was nothing romantic about it. It was just finally turning the page forever on the silliness of not being who I was--and its consequences.
I'm sure I must have been nervous as I bicycled for a rendezvous with Robert, my choice as the first of the three. But I don't really remember the nerves. He greeted me in a robe, so their was no ambiguity about what was going to happen. What I remember the most is the utter relief I felt. Everything was so natural. My mind wasn't elsewhere. Nothing was complicated. We might see each other again--or we might not. It didn't make any difference. I had not only talked about being gay; I had acted on it. The floodgates had opened, and I had no intention of ever turning back. What was also remarkable was that there were no repercussions from friends or colleagues. This was the high 60s, as John Barth called the period, and the motto was "If it feels good, do it." We talked blithely about polymorphous perversity and cited Norman O. Brown. Make Love, Not War didn't discriminate about whom you made love to. Although the process of coming out hadn't been easy, once the door was opened, even in a conservative state like Oklahoma, the university was a welcoming place to find one's niche. And find it I did.
To be continued one last time: I tell the Army and my parents.
In the fall of 1966, having just turned 21, I went off, still a virgin, to be a graduate assistant at the University of Oklahoma. I didn't know anyone there and will never forget how frightened I was when I walked across campus to teach my first class. But making friends turned out to be easy, and I quickly got into the swing of graduate school life. And then something totally unexpected happened. I met a nice, Jewish girl, Barbara, and we began seeing each other. For the first time in my life, I was sexually turned on by a woman. I told her I was gay, but she thought she had converted me. One night, someone asked us how long we'd been married, and Barbara said that we were getting married as soon as school was over. Then she began telling people that we were getting married on May 28. Instead of putting an end to this story, I played along. One Saturday night, we had both had too much to drink, and I said, "Should we do it for real?" She said yes, of course, and we ended the night thinking that I had just proposed seriously. When I woke up Sunday morning, I was more lucid and had an Oh My God! What Have I Done? moment. I called Barbara to try to undo the damage, but she had already called her parents in St. Louis and they had made plans to come the next weekend to meet their sheygetz future son-in-law. I chickened out of backing out.
They came the next weekend, and since I was already into my long ersatz Jewish phase, I gained their approval. Would I convert? Yes. The mother kept wishing that Shecky Greene, a comedian, could give me conversion lessons. Would we raise our children Jewish? Of course. The adjective 'surreal' is badly overused, but there was something surreal about the entire weekend, based as it was on a series of lies. Once they left, I summoned my none-too-plentiful courage and told Barbara that this was all a huge mistake. She was devastated and even though the semester was nearing its end, she dropped out of school. During the vacation between the spring and summer sessions, I contemplated what I had done and how stupid, to say nothing of cruel, it had been. I knew I was gay. I knew that I wanted to spend my life with a man. And because of my cowardice and passivity, I had really hurt another person. That was the belated end of all the pretense. I knew that there were three men who were attracted to me, and I resolved that as soon as I returned, I would sleep with all three of them. One, two, three. Check, check, and check. There was nothing romantic about it. It was just finally turning the page forever on the silliness of not being who I was--and its consequences.
I'm sure I must have been nervous as I bicycled for a rendezvous with Robert, my choice as the first of the three. But I don't really remember the nerves. He greeted me in a robe, so their was no ambiguity about what was going to happen. What I remember the most is the utter relief I felt. Everything was so natural. My mind wasn't elsewhere. Nothing was complicated. We might see each other again--or we might not. It didn't make any difference. I had not only talked about being gay; I had acted on it. The floodgates had opened, and I had no intention of ever turning back. What was also remarkable was that there were no repercussions from friends or colleagues. This was the high 60s, as John Barth called the period, and the motto was "If it feels good, do it." We talked blithely about polymorphous perversity and cited Norman O. Brown. Make Love, Not War didn't discriminate about whom you made love to. Although the process of coming out hadn't been easy, once the door was opened, even in a conservative state like Oklahoma, the university was a welcoming place to find one's niche. And find it I did.
To be continued one last time: I tell the Army and my parents.
Monday, May 20, 2013
I've posted 163 entries, and I've never told my coming out story. What kind of gay man am I?
A couple of early hints: Over the years, friends have often asked me when I "knew" I was gay. In retrospect, though of course not at the time, I remember clearly an early indication. My father was generally against new-fangled inventions on the grounds that they just meant there was more to go wrong. But for some reason, we bought a TV very early. I want to say 1950, but a couple of years later is probably more like it. One of my favorite programs was wrestling, and I knew that there was an extra pleasure in watching it while lying on the floor on my stomach. My favorite wrestlers were Killer Kowalski and Yukon Eric. Finding pictures of them now, I wonder why, since they weren't particularly attractive. But my favorites they were. And when I'd go to bed, I'd have frequent fantasies that Killer Kowalski and I would run off to the Yukon, where we'd live happily ever after in a small cabin.
Perhaps this is too clichéd, but we lived in a house without music. In the mornings, the radio would be on to Des Moines' WHO, where my father would listen to the farm-to-market reports. Although he had grown up on a farm, he wasn't a farmer, and I'm not sure why these reports were important; for me, they were just white noise. Then the radio would be turned off for the day. We had no record player or hi-fi or stereo. But despite the lack of exposure to music, there was a TV program that I couldn't miss: "The Voice of Firestone." It had been on the radio, but moved to television and sometimes was simulcast (very advanced for the times) on radio and television. The show had famous opera singers--Risë Stevens and Robert Merrill were regulars; I remember Jan Peerce as well, but wikipedia doesn't agree with me--singing popular arias and sometimes songs from operettas. My parents had no understanding of my fascination, but there I was at six or seven engrossed by the most beautiful music I'd ever heard.
Then, of course, puberty struck, and my understanding of my sexuality became more explicit. It wasn't easy in the late 1950s to find erotic material. One of my friends managed to obtain body-building magazines, but the men in them weren't my type. Even though my parents didn't go to movies, my mother would occasionally buy movie magazines, and some of them had sections called "Beefcake Bonus." I spent years drooling (not the exact verb) over Hugh O'Brian and Mike Connors and Gardner MacKay, among others. Better yet, my mother kept the magazines in a cupboard in the bathroom, where they were extremely handy. (I also found in the same cupboard, stuck way at the back, copies of Lolita and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lolita was much too complicated and clever to be erotic, but I thought the sex scenes in Lady Chatterley were unbelievably hot. Was there a whole new side to my mother that I never knew about?) Even though I wouldn't say that I knew exactly that I was gay, I couldn't not understand that I never looked at pictures of semi-naked women or fantasized about them. It was always men--and a very specific type of man that has never varied.
More confusing to me was that with a couple of my friends, both of whom turned out to be straight, we'd have study sessions that quickly moved into teenage sexual experimentation. What I couldn't understand at the time was that for John and Alan, my two regulars, these were just means for always horny teens to get some relief: it made no difference to them who their partner was. For me, however, these experiences were invested with an extra layer of meaning. I wasn't playing around with just anyone: the other was male. And by this time, it was pretty hard to deny where my sexual orientation lay.
Pretty hard, but not impossible. Despite all the pleasure and the fact that I would never say no (and would indeed be sometimes too eager to initiate the sessions), I still felt uneasy, guilty even, about what was happening. My Portnoy-like rushing from the dinner table to thumb through a magazine with its Beefcake Bonus and my avidity for "study sessions" were unabated and uncontrolable, but there was also the nagging feeling that there was something wrong with all this. And even though my family had never been particularly religious, I felt that I was alone in my feelings and that God was going to get me for what I felt and did. I'm not sure exactly why, but it was in these teenage years that I became fascinated with Catholicism. In addition to the pageantry and other aesthetic attractions, I think it was that I thought the ritual of confession could take away my guilt. In small town Iowa in the 1950s, there weren't psychologists. So Catholicism and confession may have seemed a good alternative.
As I recounted in an earlier blog, I was going to convert while I was in high school, but my parents put the kibosh on that. When I went to college, however, one of the first things I did was enroll in a conversion class. After a few months of study, I was baptized (for a second time, the infant Protestant one not counting) and for a while I was a very devout and fervent Catholic. Confession wasn't terribly effective, since I had "impure thoughts" a few minutes after I'd been forgiven, and then I'd be back to zero, but I kept at it. Then one evening, at some sort of Catholic Center event, a man picked me up. We drove out into the country where we parked, he made his advances, I began by responding but then panicked. I felt so guilty that I called Fr. Gregory, the priest, and asked to go to confession. He said he had a cold and would prefer to do it another time. I insisted. He reluctantly agreed to see me, but was clearly impatient and repeated that he had a cold and would prefer to hear my confession another time. I insisted. So he grudgingly agreed, and face-to-face we went through the ritual. I remember walking back to campus and not feeliing very satisfied. And then I had an eighteen-year-old's epiphany: yes, the Church might take the guilt away, but who gave me the guilt in the first place? Why not just eliminate the middle man? No church, no guilt. No guilt, no church. And thus ended my Catholic venture. Thanks, Father Gregory.
To be continued...
A couple of early hints: Over the years, friends have often asked me when I "knew" I was gay. In retrospect, though of course not at the time, I remember clearly an early indication. My father was generally against new-fangled inventions on the grounds that they just meant there was more to go wrong. But for some reason, we bought a TV very early. I want to say 1950, but a couple of years later is probably more like it. One of my favorite programs was wrestling, and I knew that there was an extra pleasure in watching it while lying on the floor on my stomach. My favorite wrestlers were Killer Kowalski and Yukon Eric. Finding pictures of them now, I wonder why, since they weren't particularly attractive. But my favorites they were. And when I'd go to bed, I'd have frequent fantasies that Killer Kowalski and I would run off to the Yukon, where we'd live happily ever after in a small cabin.
Perhaps this is too clichéd, but we lived in a house without music. In the mornings, the radio would be on to Des Moines' WHO, where my father would listen to the farm-to-market reports. Although he had grown up on a farm, he wasn't a farmer, and I'm not sure why these reports were important; for me, they were just white noise. Then the radio would be turned off for the day. We had no record player or hi-fi or stereo. But despite the lack of exposure to music, there was a TV program that I couldn't miss: "The Voice of Firestone." It had been on the radio, but moved to television and sometimes was simulcast (very advanced for the times) on radio and television. The show had famous opera singers--Risë Stevens and Robert Merrill were regulars; I remember Jan Peerce as well, but wikipedia doesn't agree with me--singing popular arias and sometimes songs from operettas. My parents had no understanding of my fascination, but there I was at six or seven engrossed by the most beautiful music I'd ever heard.
Then, of course, puberty struck, and my understanding of my sexuality became more explicit. It wasn't easy in the late 1950s to find erotic material. One of my friends managed to obtain body-building magazines, but the men in them weren't my type. Even though my parents didn't go to movies, my mother would occasionally buy movie magazines, and some of them had sections called "Beefcake Bonus." I spent years drooling (not the exact verb) over Hugh O'Brian and Mike Connors and Gardner MacKay, among others. Better yet, my mother kept the magazines in a cupboard in the bathroom, where they were extremely handy. (I also found in the same cupboard, stuck way at the back, copies of Lolita and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lolita was much too complicated and clever to be erotic, but I thought the sex scenes in Lady Chatterley were unbelievably hot. Was there a whole new side to my mother that I never knew about?) Even though I wouldn't say that I knew exactly that I was gay, I couldn't not understand that I never looked at pictures of semi-naked women or fantasized about them. It was always men--and a very specific type of man that has never varied.
More confusing to me was that with a couple of my friends, both of whom turned out to be straight, we'd have study sessions that quickly moved into teenage sexual experimentation. What I couldn't understand at the time was that for John and Alan, my two regulars, these were just means for always horny teens to get some relief: it made no difference to them who their partner was. For me, however, these experiences were invested with an extra layer of meaning. I wasn't playing around with just anyone: the other was male. And by this time, it was pretty hard to deny where my sexual orientation lay.
Pretty hard, but not impossible. Despite all the pleasure and the fact that I would never say no (and would indeed be sometimes too eager to initiate the sessions), I still felt uneasy, guilty even, about what was happening. My Portnoy-like rushing from the dinner table to thumb through a magazine with its Beefcake Bonus and my avidity for "study sessions" were unabated and uncontrolable, but there was also the nagging feeling that there was something wrong with all this. And even though my family had never been particularly religious, I felt that I was alone in my feelings and that God was going to get me for what I felt and did. I'm not sure exactly why, but it was in these teenage years that I became fascinated with Catholicism. In addition to the pageantry and other aesthetic attractions, I think it was that I thought the ritual of confession could take away my guilt. In small town Iowa in the 1950s, there weren't psychologists. So Catholicism and confession may have seemed a good alternative.
As I recounted in an earlier blog, I was going to convert while I was in high school, but my parents put the kibosh on that. When I went to college, however, one of the first things I did was enroll in a conversion class. After a few months of study, I was baptized (for a second time, the infant Protestant one not counting) and for a while I was a very devout and fervent Catholic. Confession wasn't terribly effective, since I had "impure thoughts" a few minutes after I'd been forgiven, and then I'd be back to zero, but I kept at it. Then one evening, at some sort of Catholic Center event, a man picked me up. We drove out into the country where we parked, he made his advances, I began by responding but then panicked. I felt so guilty that I called Fr. Gregory, the priest, and asked to go to confession. He said he had a cold and would prefer to do it another time. I insisted. He reluctantly agreed to see me, but was clearly impatient and repeated that he had a cold and would prefer to hear my confession another time. I insisted. So he grudgingly agreed, and face-to-face we went through the ritual. I remember walking back to campus and not feeliing very satisfied. And then I had an eighteen-year-old's epiphany: yes, the Church might take the guilt away, but who gave me the guilt in the first place? Why not just eliminate the middle man? No church, no guilt. No guilt, no church. And thus ended my Catholic venture. Thanks, Father Gregory.
To be continued...
Friday, May 17, 2013
Story City, my hometown, was overwhelming Norwegian. My classmates were named Anderson, Carlson, Ericson, Jacobson, Johnson, Knutson, Larson, Madsen (that 'e' a sure giveaway that he was an outsider), Nelson, Olson, Paulson, Peterson, Samson, Thompson. My two best friends growing up were Kathy Johnson and Bobby Knutson. Now, there weren't many class differences in a town of 1600, but the Knutsons were definitely near the bottom. The abandoned car and the chicken coop in the yard were two clear signs. So, too, were the missing father and mother. Bobby and his younger brother, Frankie, lived with Selma, their grandmother. There was never a sign of a mother; the father worked in Des Moines, though no one knew doing what, and came home once or twice a month.
Mrs. Knutson's most distinguishing characteristic was that she had hair longer than she was tall. Normally, she wore it in a large, intricately coiled bun, but a couple of times a month, she'd wash it, and we got to watch the spectacle. She'd heat a large pot of water on their wood-burning stove, bend over the sink, and slowly pour the water over her hair, which she had carefully gathered up so that it didn't touch the floor. The highlight for us kids was when, having wrung out most of the water, she'd stand on a chair, her hair almost touching the floor, and carefully comb it out. We also liked the Sunday morning routine when she'd select one of the chickens from the coop, either swing it around and then snap its neck or more often lay it on a stump, take a hatchet and chop its head off, and wait till it was finished running around like, well, like a chicken with its head cut off. Then she'd pluck it and dress it, and Sunday dinner was well on its way.
What the town most gossiped about was that until it was time for Frankie to go to school, she dressed him as a girl with long hair coiffed into ringlets and wouldn't let him play outside with the rest of us. I can still picture him standing at the front door, looking longingly outside. The last news I had of Frankie, he was in a penitentiary for bank robbery.
Bobby and I spent a lot of time "raising" animals, none of which survived very long. Since their garage was unused, it became the breeding ground for mice and rats, rabbits, garter snakes (as we called them), whatever we could capture. We spent one summer capturing bees. The telephone company had their building just east of the Knutsons' house, and between the two there was a huge lot, full of clover and an endless supply of honeybees. We'd take jars, sneak up on the bees, trap them in the jar, and then--and here was what we thought was the genius of our scheme--take them to the abandoned car, quickly open the door, and release them inside. We were convinced that we were creating a hive, though the fact that the car was rusted out and the bees could fly out didn't deter us. Of course, we were stung many times. Early in the summer, we'd run to the house for baking soda and water, but after a while, we just accepted the stings as occupational hazards.
The telephone company building had an old-fashioned exchange with an operator who actually connected calls by plugging them in. The whole town was convinced that the operator listened in, a conviction probably reinforced by the fact that many people had "party lines," meaning that they could listen in on calls to the same number. Our telephone number was 97; my aunt and uncle's was 229. There was general consternation when we went to a REdwood 3 exchange, followed by four numbers. How were we supposed to remember such long numbers? The operator and her daughter, Rhoda, were the subject of more gossip than just the suspicion of listening in, for Rhoda was the town lesbian. She had a ducktail haircut and wore nothing but jeans and white t-shirts, in the sleeve of which she rolled up a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes or Chesterfields.
One day while we were in high school, the Knutson family suddenly moved away. No one had any inkling that they were going to leave or any idea where they went. By that time, Bobby and I had drifted apart. He didn't participate in any school activities and was generally considered a bad seed. Many years later, though, the Reverend Robert Knutson paid a visit to my mother. He'd gone from beekeeper to evangelical preacher. One brother in the slammer, the other saving souls. Who'd have thought it when Frankie was wearing dresses and Bobby and I were jumping off the roof of their garage, the rabbits and mice scuttling around inside?
Mrs. Knutson's most distinguishing characteristic was that she had hair longer than she was tall. Normally, she wore it in a large, intricately coiled bun, but a couple of times a month, she'd wash it, and we got to watch the spectacle. She'd heat a large pot of water on their wood-burning stove, bend over the sink, and slowly pour the water over her hair, which she had carefully gathered up so that it didn't touch the floor. The highlight for us kids was when, having wrung out most of the water, she'd stand on a chair, her hair almost touching the floor, and carefully comb it out. We also liked the Sunday morning routine when she'd select one of the chickens from the coop, either swing it around and then snap its neck or more often lay it on a stump, take a hatchet and chop its head off, and wait till it was finished running around like, well, like a chicken with its head cut off. Then she'd pluck it and dress it, and Sunday dinner was well on its way.
What the town most gossiped about was that until it was time for Frankie to go to school, she dressed him as a girl with long hair coiffed into ringlets and wouldn't let him play outside with the rest of us. I can still picture him standing at the front door, looking longingly outside. The last news I had of Frankie, he was in a penitentiary for bank robbery.
Bobby and I spent a lot of time "raising" animals, none of which survived very long. Since their garage was unused, it became the breeding ground for mice and rats, rabbits, garter snakes (as we called them), whatever we could capture. We spent one summer capturing bees. The telephone company had their building just east of the Knutsons' house, and between the two there was a huge lot, full of clover and an endless supply of honeybees. We'd take jars, sneak up on the bees, trap them in the jar, and then--and here was what we thought was the genius of our scheme--take them to the abandoned car, quickly open the door, and release them inside. We were convinced that we were creating a hive, though the fact that the car was rusted out and the bees could fly out didn't deter us. Of course, we were stung many times. Early in the summer, we'd run to the house for baking soda and water, but after a while, we just accepted the stings as occupational hazards.
The telephone company building had an old-fashioned exchange with an operator who actually connected calls by plugging them in. The whole town was convinced that the operator listened in, a conviction probably reinforced by the fact that many people had "party lines," meaning that they could listen in on calls to the same number. Our telephone number was 97; my aunt and uncle's was 229. There was general consternation when we went to a REdwood 3 exchange, followed by four numbers. How were we supposed to remember such long numbers? The operator and her daughter, Rhoda, were the subject of more gossip than just the suspicion of listening in, for Rhoda was the town lesbian. She had a ducktail haircut and wore nothing but jeans and white t-shirts, in the sleeve of which she rolled up a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes or Chesterfields.
One day while we were in high school, the Knutson family suddenly moved away. No one had any inkling that they were going to leave or any idea where they went. By that time, Bobby and I had drifted apart. He didn't participate in any school activities and was generally considered a bad seed. Many years later, though, the Reverend Robert Knutson paid a visit to my mother. He'd gone from beekeeper to evangelical preacher. One brother in the slammer, the other saving souls. Who'd have thought it when Frankie was wearing dresses and Bobby and I were jumping off the roof of their garage, the rabbits and mice scuttling around inside?
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Late yesterday afternoon, we went out for drinks with our cute, young friend Sarah. The restaurant has a large patio, and the afternoon was warm. We were all on different rhythms: for Sarah it was two drinks and no food, for me, one drink and half a plate of appetizers, and for Mohamed, one drink, the other half of the appetizers, and an entrée. Towards the end of our stay, the conversation turned back to cancer, our reactions to the initial diagnosis, and our feelings now. I said that sometimes I feel a little strange, almost guilty, though that's much too strong, for being so seemingly healthy. The initial prognosis was so dire that everyone showed immediate concern: tears from friends, lots of visits with casseroles and pies, a certain awkwardness. When I first started doing the blog, I wrote lots of entries about death, dying, and atheism. But it's been two years since then, and I look and feel generally pretty healthy. I said aloud for the first time that what I really wanted was to live long enough to see Mohamed graduate. But now he's only 15 hours from that goal, and my condition hasn't really changed for the last year, so that sounds somewhat melodramatic.
As we were having this cheerful conversation, suddenly five large buzzards or vultures, whichever we have in Kansas, appeared in the sky, lazily circling over the patio. If I believed in omens, this wouldn't have been encouraging. Sarah mentioned a culture that valorized vultures because they did the work that no one else wanted to do: they kept nature new. And that made me think of one of my all-time favorite poems, "Still, Citizen Sparrow" by Richard Wilbur, which makes exactly that point.
The turn in the poem comes in stanza four. Just as Wilbur has reversed our initial unfavorable opinion of the vulture, he shifts our perspective on Noah, though in the opposite direction. Most readers begin thinking of Noah positively, but the focus here is on the time when Noah is building the ark, the "bedlam hours" when "his saw / Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw." The sound of the lines is nearly as ugly as the sounds of Noah's saw and hammer. And then, once the reader has had second thoughts about Noah, the new point of view is modified once again, as Noah, like the vulture, is portrayed as one who has the heart to renew the world, to put death in perspective and mock mutability.
The vultures or buzzards that circled the patio last night weren't omens. They were beautiful birds "making lazy circles in the sky." Wings spread wide, they scoured the landscape, ready to devour death and keep nature new.
As we were having this cheerful conversation, suddenly five large buzzards or vultures, whichever we have in Kansas, appeared in the sky, lazily circling over the patio. If I believed in omens, this wouldn't have been encouraging. Sarah mentioned a culture that valorized vultures because they did the work that no one else wanted to do: they kept nature new. And that made me think of one of my all-time favorite poems, "Still, Citizen Sparrow" by Richard Wilbur, which makes exactly that point.
Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call
Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air
Over the rotten office, let him bear
The carrion ballast up, and at the tall
Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you'll see
That no more beautiful bird is in heaven's height,
No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight;
He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free, The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you
Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he
Devours death, mocks mutability,
Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.
Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget
How for so many bedlam hours his saw
Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw,
And the slam of his hammer all the day beset
The people's ears. Forget that he could bear
To see the towns like coral under the keel,
And the fields so dismal deep. Try rather to feel
How high and weary it was, on the waters where
He rocked his only world, and everyone's.The poem begins in the middle of a discussion between the speaker and a sparrow (hardly the most glamourous of birds), which has argued that what the vulture does is 'unnatural.' The speaker's three alliterative words of address are respectful enough and acknowledge that the vulture's ascent is less than graceful. But once the vulture is in the sky, its ballast carrion, the description of the flight--also marked by pronounced alliteration and contrasted with the "dart[ing] in orchard aisles" of the sparrow--is one of alloyed and beautiful praise for the bird's watchfulness, its grace, its natural burden of renewing nature. (And what is the sparrow doing if not looking for worms to devour?)
Forgive the hero, you who would have died
Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide
To Ararat, all men are Noah's sons.
The turn in the poem comes in stanza four. Just as Wilbur has reversed our initial unfavorable opinion of the vulture, he shifts our perspective on Noah, though in the opposite direction. Most readers begin thinking of Noah positively, but the focus here is on the time when Noah is building the ark, the "bedlam hours" when "his saw / Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw." The sound of the lines is nearly as ugly as the sounds of Noah's saw and hammer. And then, once the reader has had second thoughts about Noah, the new point of view is modified once again, as Noah, like the vulture, is portrayed as one who has the heart to renew the world, to put death in perspective and mock mutability.
The vultures or buzzards that circled the patio last night weren't omens. They were beautiful birds "making lazy circles in the sky." Wings spread wide, they scoured the landscape, ready to devour death and keep nature new.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
What do Topeka and the new version of The Great Gatsby have in common? It seems that the director, Baz Luhrmann, was stuck about how to work in Nick Carraway's observations, since it is Carraway who narrates the novel but plays only a peripheral part in the story. In Fitzgerald's version, Carraway says that he writing his narrative as a book, and Luhrmann, wanting to avoid a simple voice-over, was looking for an audience for Carraway's writing. An editor? A confessor? It was then he thought of a psychiatrist, so he consulted Walt Menninger, who is cited in the final credits, about writing as therapy and settled on putting Carraway in a sanitarium with scenes of his writing for his doctor bookending the movie. Supposedly, the sanitarium in the movie is modeled on the Menninger Foundation.
We've been bombarded for weeks with promos for the movie. Each time I've seen one, I've cringed at how false to the spirit of the novel that movie seems to be. I can't think of a director less temperamentally suited to Fitzgerald's delicate and understated sensibility than Luhrmann. (Well, that's an exaggeration: there is no shortage of directors in Hollywood who would be wrong for the movie version.) While it's true that the novel is about the very rich, about conspicuous consumption and ostentatious display of wealth, that's only the background for Gatsby's unfulfilled desire for the shallow Daisy Buchanan. It's not meant to be a gaudy, 3-D display of what modern technology can do. Indeed, underlying the excesses of the parties Gatsby gives is his loneliness, his isolation, and his longing. Even when he finally "wins" Daisy, his terrible mistake is to try to undo her past, to get her to say not only that she loves him but that she's never loved her husband, the despicable Tom Buchanan. That she cannot say.
In the generally mixed reviews of the movie that I've read or seen on TV, one of the statements that occurs over and over is that the novel is read by almost every high school student in America. I doubt that that's entirely true, but one of the qualities that makes Gatsby a good choice for younger readers is, frankly, that it's short. Fitzgerald once said that all writers could be divided into the putter-inners and the taker-outers. He was among the latter. Compression was usually among his virtues as a writer. Luhrmann is definitely in the other camp: the kitchen sink variety of director--and in his case, the kitchen sink would be an ultra-sleek, bold look of Kohler or whatever is most fashionable. It's another reason he's the wrong director for Fitzgerald.
Another comment that is often heard is that when Fitzgerald died all of his novels were out of print. In 1946, when Edmund Wilson published Viking's collection The Portable Faulkner, all of Faulkner's novels were also out of print. How can this be when writers like Fitzgerald and Faulkner are now so firmly established in the American canon? We have to consider, however, what exactly the "canon" is, how it's established, and how books are distributed. Until roughly the 1880s, you wouldn't find Shakespeare or Milton on a university curriculum, not even in England. Universities were devoted to the classics; it was only the Greeks and the Romans who made it onto the curriculum. Once universities began teaching British writers, American literature still wasn't considered worthy of study. When Fitzgerald and Faulkner were alive, no students were reading their novels. It wasn't until after WWII and the passage of the GI Bill that the curriculum changed for a second time. Now it seems perfectly normal to take classes in the American novel (or American literature in general); seventy years ago, that wasn't a possibility. Now Fitzgerald and Faulkner are taught in every university, and their works are available in many different editions. Now it's almost inconceivable that their works were once out of print. But before universities made them household names, who exactly would their audience have been? (A third major change appeared in the late 1960s and 70s when African-American writers suddenly became part of the curriculum. When I was an undergraduate, I don't remember reading a single Black author; now an American literature syllabus without a number of minority writers would be considered unacceptable.)
In 2013 when the gap between the haves and have-nots is greater than it's ever been (the six Wal-Mart heirs are worth $90 billion, the same amount as the bottom 140 million Americans), the time would seem right for a movie about wretched excess and the failure of the American dream. Unfortunately, The Great Gatsy, isn't that movie.
We've been bombarded for weeks with promos for the movie. Each time I've seen one, I've cringed at how false to the spirit of the novel that movie seems to be. I can't think of a director less temperamentally suited to Fitzgerald's delicate and understated sensibility than Luhrmann. (Well, that's an exaggeration: there is no shortage of directors in Hollywood who would be wrong for the movie version.) While it's true that the novel is about the very rich, about conspicuous consumption and ostentatious display of wealth, that's only the background for Gatsby's unfulfilled desire for the shallow Daisy Buchanan. It's not meant to be a gaudy, 3-D display of what modern technology can do. Indeed, underlying the excesses of the parties Gatsby gives is his loneliness, his isolation, and his longing. Even when he finally "wins" Daisy, his terrible mistake is to try to undo her past, to get her to say not only that she loves him but that she's never loved her husband, the despicable Tom Buchanan. That she cannot say.
In the generally mixed reviews of the movie that I've read or seen on TV, one of the statements that occurs over and over is that the novel is read by almost every high school student in America. I doubt that that's entirely true, but one of the qualities that makes Gatsby a good choice for younger readers is, frankly, that it's short. Fitzgerald once said that all writers could be divided into the putter-inners and the taker-outers. He was among the latter. Compression was usually among his virtues as a writer. Luhrmann is definitely in the other camp: the kitchen sink variety of director--and in his case, the kitchen sink would be an ultra-sleek, bold look of Kohler or whatever is most fashionable. It's another reason he's the wrong director for Fitzgerald.
Another comment that is often heard is that when Fitzgerald died all of his novels were out of print. In 1946, when Edmund Wilson published Viking's collection The Portable Faulkner, all of Faulkner's novels were also out of print. How can this be when writers like Fitzgerald and Faulkner are now so firmly established in the American canon? We have to consider, however, what exactly the "canon" is, how it's established, and how books are distributed. Until roughly the 1880s, you wouldn't find Shakespeare or Milton on a university curriculum, not even in England. Universities were devoted to the classics; it was only the Greeks and the Romans who made it onto the curriculum. Once universities began teaching British writers, American literature still wasn't considered worthy of study. When Fitzgerald and Faulkner were alive, no students were reading their novels. It wasn't until after WWII and the passage of the GI Bill that the curriculum changed for a second time. Now it seems perfectly normal to take classes in the American novel (or American literature in general); seventy years ago, that wasn't a possibility. Now Fitzgerald and Faulkner are taught in every university, and their works are available in many different editions. Now it's almost inconceivable that their works were once out of print. But before universities made them household names, who exactly would their audience have been? (A third major change appeared in the late 1960s and 70s when African-American writers suddenly became part of the curriculum. When I was an undergraduate, I don't remember reading a single Black author; now an American literature syllabus without a number of minority writers would be considered unacceptable.)
In 2013 when the gap between the haves and have-nots is greater than it's ever been (the six Wal-Mart heirs are worth $90 billion, the same amount as the bottom 140 million Americans), the time would seem right for a movie about wretched excess and the failure of the American dream. Unfortunately, The Great Gatsy, isn't that movie.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
I seem to be going through a rough patch these last few days beginning Friday evening. I think (and hope) that the nadir was Monday when I didn't feel like a human being, let alone like myself. My body has a mind of its own, and my mind doesn't seem to have much body to it. I felt better yesterday, and we went out to dinner last night; today I feel pretty good. Twice in the last three days I've slept till 8:30, unheard for me (although the nights were interrupted a few times by trips to the john), so I hope the added rest is helpful. This, too, shall pass...and is passing.
There were a few bright spots. Sunday afternoon an old friend and his husband of slightly over a year (they got married in New York's Central Park) came for a visit. It had been at least four years since I'd seen Dwayne, and I'd never met his husband. A couple of friends have asked me since I've done two blogs on what not to say to someone living with cancer, what they should say. It seemed to me that Dwayne handled it very well. After the initial introductions, hugs, and drink offers, he began with a number of questions about how I'm feeling, what the effects of the meds are, whether I'm in pain. I think a PLWC likes having the cancer acknowledged, not avoided and appreciates a frank, matter-of-fact tone. And then when that part of the conversation had come to its natural end, we moved on. Since we hadn't been able to go to their wedding party in KC because I was in the abduction brace, there was a lot to talk about and pictures to share. I don't think people should avoid talking about their own good times. It doesn't sound like gloating. PLWC know that life is going on and, I think, are happy to share in it, even vicariously. It was fun seeing Dwayne again and meeting Scott, but Sunday wasn't a very good day and after about 75 minutes, I suddenly lost my energy. Dwayne and Scott noticed, wrapped up the conversation, and left. Again, I think it's important for someone visiting to be sensitive to the other's energy level.
Another high note was spending parts of two sunny afternoons sitting on the back deck editing the manuscript of a novel by my friend and colleague Tom Averill. The novel has already been accepted for publication (it's his fourth to be published), so I knew there wasn't going to be much to do, but I had my trusty number two pencil in hand. I'm afraid this time I didn't make any major contributions, since except for a 'which' that needed to be 'whom' and a couple of missing tildes, the novel was in fine shape. I like editing my colleagues' work. In part, it's good to feel trusted, but even better is seeing the work that my colleagues are doing and appreciating how creative or scholarly it can be.
I've finally abandoned my two months' effort to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I've read 20% of it (as Kindle measures things) without one moment of pleasure. I thought it was going to be 'madcap' and 'zany'--not that those are adjectives that would entice me--but it's absolutely humorless. Since Wallace has been compared to Joyce, I thought the experimentation would be dazzling, but the novel just seemed plodding. A more just comparison might be O. Henry to Henry James. The turning point in my masochistic reading came in what was obviously meant to be a set piece: a scene in which the grandfather of Hal Incandenza (as close to a protagonist as the novel has) delivers a very long and very boring monologue to his son. As he speaks, he drinks, and the monologue is supposed to become more revealing or touching. The speech goes on for many, many pages, and it is completely banal. It's half-baked philosophy and quarter-baked psychology, and the final drunken revelation is worthy of a Lifetime movie. I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with Harold Bloom, a critic who was almost my undoing at the comprehensive exams for my doctorate, but Bloom wrote that Wallace "can't think and can't write." Exactly.
There were a few bright spots. Sunday afternoon an old friend and his husband of slightly over a year (they got married in New York's Central Park) came for a visit. It had been at least four years since I'd seen Dwayne, and I'd never met his husband. A couple of friends have asked me since I've done two blogs on what not to say to someone living with cancer, what they should say. It seemed to me that Dwayne handled it very well. After the initial introductions, hugs, and drink offers, he began with a number of questions about how I'm feeling, what the effects of the meds are, whether I'm in pain. I think a PLWC likes having the cancer acknowledged, not avoided and appreciates a frank, matter-of-fact tone. And then when that part of the conversation had come to its natural end, we moved on. Since we hadn't been able to go to their wedding party in KC because I was in the abduction brace, there was a lot to talk about and pictures to share. I don't think people should avoid talking about their own good times. It doesn't sound like gloating. PLWC know that life is going on and, I think, are happy to share in it, even vicariously. It was fun seeing Dwayne again and meeting Scott, but Sunday wasn't a very good day and after about 75 minutes, I suddenly lost my energy. Dwayne and Scott noticed, wrapped up the conversation, and left. Again, I think it's important for someone visiting to be sensitive to the other's energy level.
Another high note was spending parts of two sunny afternoons sitting on the back deck editing the manuscript of a novel by my friend and colleague Tom Averill. The novel has already been accepted for publication (it's his fourth to be published), so I knew there wasn't going to be much to do, but I had my trusty number two pencil in hand. I'm afraid this time I didn't make any major contributions, since except for a 'which' that needed to be 'whom' and a couple of missing tildes, the novel was in fine shape. I like editing my colleagues' work. In part, it's good to feel trusted, but even better is seeing the work that my colleagues are doing and appreciating how creative or scholarly it can be.
I've finally abandoned my two months' effort to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I've read 20% of it (as Kindle measures things) without one moment of pleasure. I thought it was going to be 'madcap' and 'zany'--not that those are adjectives that would entice me--but it's absolutely humorless. Since Wallace has been compared to Joyce, I thought the experimentation would be dazzling, but the novel just seemed plodding. A more just comparison might be O. Henry to Henry James. The turning point in my masochistic reading came in what was obviously meant to be a set piece: a scene in which the grandfather of Hal Incandenza (as close to a protagonist as the novel has) delivers a very long and very boring monologue to his son. As he speaks, he drinks, and the monologue is supposed to become more revealing or touching. The speech goes on for many, many pages, and it is completely banal. It's half-baked philosophy and quarter-baked psychology, and the final drunken revelation is worthy of a Lifetime movie. I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with Harold Bloom, a critic who was almost my undoing at the comprehensive exams for my doctorate, but Bloom wrote that Wallace "can't think and can't write." Exactly.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Last night we decided to out for steak. Spring is still hesitant, and the weather was damp and chilly. At the end of our street was a girl on her way to prom, making her way down a long driveway to the waiting car. Her dress was light green, sleeveless, and low cut. And she looked absolutely miserable as she shivered through the drizzle. Topeka has three great roadhouses for steak, but they're all at least a twenty-minute drive from our house, so we settled on Longhorn, which is only so-so, but is close. I managed to eat most of my meal except for the sweet potato tots, which were cloyingly sweet. All seemed well until 1:20 a.m. when I had maybe ten seconds to get from the bed to the bath. So much for a simple meal of salad, potatoes, and meat.
I was thinking some more about Story City, my hometown. It has a good name for an English teacher, though, originally named Fairview, it was actually renamed after Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, not for its narrative tendencies. I loved growing up there. Between school, church, and scout activities, there was always something to do. Six nights a week were scheduled with activites for most of us, and when the town is about six block by six blocks, no one needs a parent to chauffeur him. That we had our own library and movie theater made it even better. My parents and I lived with my grandma, whose house had a double lot. On summer evenings it was a great spot for games of capture the flag or touch football or, when we were younger, hide and seek. There was another vacant lot a block away with wild strawberries and wonderful trees for climbing.
Still, as the last blog suggested, all was not Edenic. In my class, as well as the one a year ahead, there was the girl who suddenly disappeared to go "stay with her aunt for several months." In the older class, the girl was pretty and perhaps too popular. In my class, she was plain and a little "slow." There was nothing uncommon about this; it seemed to happen every year. My best friend, Kathy, had a prolonged visit every summer from her "cousin." Everyone in town, except Kathy, seemed to know that the cousin was really her half-sister from her mother's earlier indiscretion. I don't know whether there had been a period of shame, but by the time I remember, the mother was a pillar of the Lutheran church.
There were 33 in my high school graduating class--22 boys and 11 girls. The class had been remarkably stable for the entire time I was in school. Perhaps 27 or 28 of us had been together since kindergarten. Yet there were some anomalies: three of the 22 guys turned out to be gay. And within a year of graduation, three of the 22 were dead. Two were killed in a car accident, where, I assume, drinking was involved. Another, so the story went, was twirling a pistol like a Western hero, not knowing that it was loaded. His finger accidentally hit the trigger. Some things were hard to know for sure; gossip was the unvarying bitcoin of the community, but how reliable it was was uncertain and what the adults let slip before us children was unpredictable. When I was very young, the adults would slip into Norwegian when they didn't want us to understand but as the first generation immigrants didn't teach their children the mother language, this strategy didn't last long.
Racy Peters and her family were outsiders. They arrived in maybe my sophomore year and bought a big and presumably expensive (by small town standards) house on the southern edge of town. No one knew what the father did; he didn't work in Story City. Rumor had it that they were wealthy and "artsy" (i.e., rather strange). No one welcomed them, and they made little effort to fit in. On the other side of town (not that the two sides were that far apart) lived the Munsens in perhaps the biggest house in town, set high on a hill, overlooking the park and school. Although they were good Norwegians and long-time residents, they didn't exactly fit in either. Dick Munsen ran the local Chevy dealership, and they seemed to have more money than the rest of the townspeople. They were considered "uppity." Their daughter Sylvia (who named a child Sylvia?) played the cello and went to Ames to play in an orchestra, while the rest of us played trumpets and clarinets (and in my case the baritone) and were in the band. When Sylvia went to Brazil and became a member of the Brazilian National Sympathy (and married a Brazilian!), that was further proof of the family's oddity rather than an object of pride.
Despite the talk, Dick Munsen was extremely kind to my father, who always had a difficult time holding a job. He usually worked as a car parts salesman in garages in Ames, about ten miles away. But something always went wrong, and he moved from one garage to the next until there were no more to choose from. I think I mentioned in an earlier blog that one year he was the janitor at my school--just what every kid wants: his father in the school's hallways. But children made my father nervous, and that job didn't last long either. Dick hired my father, protected him and his difficult personality, paid him the best salary he had ever earned, and made sure that he had health insurance. I don't know whether people gossiped about that but it was a boon to our family.
In retrospect, Story City may have been more Winesburg, Ohio, than BeaverCleaverville, but at the time, I loved my childhood and the easy living of a small town. Of course, when I was 17, I left town for good, ready for a different sort of life and different kinds of adventures.
I was thinking some more about Story City, my hometown. It has a good name for an English teacher, though, originally named Fairview, it was actually renamed after Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, not for its narrative tendencies. I loved growing up there. Between school, church, and scout activities, there was always something to do. Six nights a week were scheduled with activites for most of us, and when the town is about six block by six blocks, no one needs a parent to chauffeur him. That we had our own library and movie theater made it even better. My parents and I lived with my grandma, whose house had a double lot. On summer evenings it was a great spot for games of capture the flag or touch football or, when we were younger, hide and seek. There was another vacant lot a block away with wild strawberries and wonderful trees for climbing.
Still, as the last blog suggested, all was not Edenic. In my class, as well as the one a year ahead, there was the girl who suddenly disappeared to go "stay with her aunt for several months." In the older class, the girl was pretty and perhaps too popular. In my class, she was plain and a little "slow." There was nothing uncommon about this; it seemed to happen every year. My best friend, Kathy, had a prolonged visit every summer from her "cousin." Everyone in town, except Kathy, seemed to know that the cousin was really her half-sister from her mother's earlier indiscretion. I don't know whether there had been a period of shame, but by the time I remember, the mother was a pillar of the Lutheran church.
There were 33 in my high school graduating class--22 boys and 11 girls. The class had been remarkably stable for the entire time I was in school. Perhaps 27 or 28 of us had been together since kindergarten. Yet there were some anomalies: three of the 22 guys turned out to be gay. And within a year of graduation, three of the 22 were dead. Two were killed in a car accident, where, I assume, drinking was involved. Another, so the story went, was twirling a pistol like a Western hero, not knowing that it was loaded. His finger accidentally hit the trigger. Some things were hard to know for sure; gossip was the unvarying bitcoin of the community, but how reliable it was was uncertain and what the adults let slip before us children was unpredictable. When I was very young, the adults would slip into Norwegian when they didn't want us to understand but as the first generation immigrants didn't teach their children the mother language, this strategy didn't last long.
Racy Peters and her family were outsiders. They arrived in maybe my sophomore year and bought a big and presumably expensive (by small town standards) house on the southern edge of town. No one knew what the father did; he didn't work in Story City. Rumor had it that they were wealthy and "artsy" (i.e., rather strange). No one welcomed them, and they made little effort to fit in. On the other side of town (not that the two sides were that far apart) lived the Munsens in perhaps the biggest house in town, set high on a hill, overlooking the park and school. Although they were good Norwegians and long-time residents, they didn't exactly fit in either. Dick Munsen ran the local Chevy dealership, and they seemed to have more money than the rest of the townspeople. They were considered "uppity." Their daughter Sylvia (who named a child Sylvia?) played the cello and went to Ames to play in an orchestra, while the rest of us played trumpets and clarinets (and in my case the baritone) and were in the band. When Sylvia went to Brazil and became a member of the Brazilian National Sympathy (and married a Brazilian!), that was further proof of the family's oddity rather than an object of pride.
Despite the talk, Dick Munsen was extremely kind to my father, who always had a difficult time holding a job. He usually worked as a car parts salesman in garages in Ames, about ten miles away. But something always went wrong, and he moved from one garage to the next until there were no more to choose from. I think I mentioned in an earlier blog that one year he was the janitor at my school--just what every kid wants: his father in the school's hallways. But children made my father nervous, and that job didn't last long either. Dick hired my father, protected him and his difficult personality, paid him the best salary he had ever earned, and made sure that he had health insurance. I don't know whether people gossiped about that but it was a boon to our family.
In retrospect, Story City may have been more Winesburg, Ohio, than BeaverCleaverville, but at the time, I loved my childhood and the easy living of a small town. Of course, when I was 17, I left town for good, ready for a different sort of life and different kinds of adventures.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Since it's prom season, here's a prom story--even though it happened 51 years ago.
My hometown (population at the time about 1600) was proud of many things: we had two parks, one with an antique carousel, tennis courts, and later a swimming pool. We had our own library. On summer nights, the high school band performed concerts in a downtown park. For Christmas, there was always a large tree at the intersection of the two two-block long main streets. The big celebration of the year, though, was Scandinavian Days. People drove from miles around for authentic Norwegian cooking, especially lutefisk and kumla. As one of my friends said, it was like Beaver Cleaverville. One of the objects of pride was that we had our own movie theater. It was originally called the "Opera House," like so many buildings erected in the 19th century American Midwest by towns striving for respectability and sophistication. The theater showed one film on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evenings, and a different film on Friday and Saturday nights. When I was little, the entrance for kids cost a dime.
The theater was run for decades by one family: a mother (Dora, I think) and her two unmarried sons, Dick and Virgil, who lived above the movie house. When there were movies, Dick sold tickets, Dora ran the concession stand, and Virgil projected the films. During the movies, Dick often patrolled the balcony, which was off limits and thus an object of temptation for all of us. The family was respected in town; after all, they kept our movie theater going, but they were also the object of some gossip, since the living arrangments seemed a bit odd. Dora wasn't seen around town very much and didn't seem particularly friendly. Virgil consistently wore overalls, even though he wasn't a farmer or a mechanic and didn't seem to do anything except project the movies four times a week. He rarely spoke to anyone. It was Dick who was the respectable one. He worked for an insurance company and always was dressed in a suit and tie. He was the sociable one. He was also the one person in town who everyone knew or suspected was "queer," as they said then. Not that people actually said it, or at least not very often. But somehow it was understood.
When it was prom time, the tradition was that the junior class put on the prom for the seniors. That meant decorating the lunch room, serving the dinner, hiring a band, and organizing a midnight movie that was supposed to keep randy teenagers out of trouble. The theme that year was South Pacific or Bali Hai. I remember painting (badly) murals on butcher paper which we taped to the walls. Serving the seniors was a nightmare for me. My hands, like those of my father, have always shaken, a condition that used to be called Intention Tremor (they shake more when you're conscious of intending to do something), but is now called Benign Essential Tremor. I carried one plate or one glass at a time from the kitchen to the tables, the drinks always slopping over the rim, while my classmates blithely carried several plates at a time. After dinner we cleared away the tables and there was the dance--not the "sock hop" without shoes which was the norm for high school dances, but more formal, the seniors dressed up, shoes allowed.
I was the president of the junior class, so I was in charge of organization, including arrangements for the midnight movie. So Dick, the proprietor of the theater, and I made an appointment for an afternoon meeting. I remember climbing the stairs to the family's apartment above the theater; it all seemed rather exotic. When I knocked at the door, Dick appeared dressed only in a kimono-like dressing gown. I thought I must be early and said I could come back later, but he insisted that I was on time. None of the rest of the family was about. We talked for a while, as his robe seemed to become looser and looser. After a while, he asked me if I'd like to see the old props that were stored downstairs behind the movie screen, and I said yes and followed him to an area few had seen. Nothing happened, though the possibilities were clear, and I finally left. I never told anyone about the experience.
This isn't a story about potential sexual predation. I was just as interested in sex as most of the other twenty-one boys in my class; it was just that my interests lay in a different direction. Although I wasn't exactly "out" to myself, I wasn't an innocent. I had never fantasized about a woman in my life; my Portnoy-like adventures always focused on men. In some ways, I was "confused" (there was certainly no public discussion of being gay in 1962, nothing but derogatory, locker room jokes), but at another level, I knew what I wanted. Had something happened, I wouldn't have been a "victim."
But as I look back on the story, what strikes me is the desperation of what it must have been like for Dick to live in such a small town and the chance he was perhaps willing to take that afternoon. What if something had happened? Did he think it would just be once and that no one would ever know? That I wouldn't ever speak of it? Did he think there would be some sort of continuing liaison that could be kept secret? What sort of life did a gay man live in such a setting in 1962 that he was almost willing to take his chances, to gamble so much?
But nothing did happen, and I kept my mouth shut. The prom went on, and most of us went to see what must have been "South Pacific." What else could we have chosen given the theme, though it's hard to imagine that that was a popular choice? A few, of course, sneaked off for more exciting moments. After serving the dinner, the juniors were allowed to go the dance and the movie. My date's name (and I'm not embellishing here) was Racy Peters.
My hometown (population at the time about 1600) was proud of many things: we had two parks, one with an antique carousel, tennis courts, and later a swimming pool. We had our own library. On summer nights, the high school band performed concerts in a downtown park. For Christmas, there was always a large tree at the intersection of the two two-block long main streets. The big celebration of the year, though, was Scandinavian Days. People drove from miles around for authentic Norwegian cooking, especially lutefisk and kumla. As one of my friends said, it was like Beaver Cleaverville. One of the objects of pride was that we had our own movie theater. It was originally called the "Opera House," like so many buildings erected in the 19th century American Midwest by towns striving for respectability and sophistication. The theater showed one film on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evenings, and a different film on Friday and Saturday nights. When I was little, the entrance for kids cost a dime.
The theater was run for decades by one family: a mother (Dora, I think) and her two unmarried sons, Dick and Virgil, who lived above the movie house. When there were movies, Dick sold tickets, Dora ran the concession stand, and Virgil projected the films. During the movies, Dick often patrolled the balcony, which was off limits and thus an object of temptation for all of us. The family was respected in town; after all, they kept our movie theater going, but they were also the object of some gossip, since the living arrangments seemed a bit odd. Dora wasn't seen around town very much and didn't seem particularly friendly. Virgil consistently wore overalls, even though he wasn't a farmer or a mechanic and didn't seem to do anything except project the movies four times a week. He rarely spoke to anyone. It was Dick who was the respectable one. He worked for an insurance company and always was dressed in a suit and tie. He was the sociable one. He was also the one person in town who everyone knew or suspected was "queer," as they said then. Not that people actually said it, or at least not very often. But somehow it was understood.
When it was prom time, the tradition was that the junior class put on the prom for the seniors. That meant decorating the lunch room, serving the dinner, hiring a band, and organizing a midnight movie that was supposed to keep randy teenagers out of trouble. The theme that year was South Pacific or Bali Hai. I remember painting (badly) murals on butcher paper which we taped to the walls. Serving the seniors was a nightmare for me. My hands, like those of my father, have always shaken, a condition that used to be called Intention Tremor (they shake more when you're conscious of intending to do something), but is now called Benign Essential Tremor. I carried one plate or one glass at a time from the kitchen to the tables, the drinks always slopping over the rim, while my classmates blithely carried several plates at a time. After dinner we cleared away the tables and there was the dance--not the "sock hop" without shoes which was the norm for high school dances, but more formal, the seniors dressed up, shoes allowed.
I was the president of the junior class, so I was in charge of organization, including arrangements for the midnight movie. So Dick, the proprietor of the theater, and I made an appointment for an afternoon meeting. I remember climbing the stairs to the family's apartment above the theater; it all seemed rather exotic. When I knocked at the door, Dick appeared dressed only in a kimono-like dressing gown. I thought I must be early and said I could come back later, but he insisted that I was on time. None of the rest of the family was about. We talked for a while, as his robe seemed to become looser and looser. After a while, he asked me if I'd like to see the old props that were stored downstairs behind the movie screen, and I said yes and followed him to an area few had seen. Nothing happened, though the possibilities were clear, and I finally left. I never told anyone about the experience.
This isn't a story about potential sexual predation. I was just as interested in sex as most of the other twenty-one boys in my class; it was just that my interests lay in a different direction. Although I wasn't exactly "out" to myself, I wasn't an innocent. I had never fantasized about a woman in my life; my Portnoy-like adventures always focused on men. In some ways, I was "confused" (there was certainly no public discussion of being gay in 1962, nothing but derogatory, locker room jokes), but at another level, I knew what I wanted. Had something happened, I wouldn't have been a "victim."
But as I look back on the story, what strikes me is the desperation of what it must have been like for Dick to live in such a small town and the chance he was perhaps willing to take that afternoon. What if something had happened? Did he think it would just be once and that no one would ever know? That I wouldn't ever speak of it? Did he think there would be some sort of continuing liaison that could be kept secret? What sort of life did a gay man live in such a setting in 1962 that he was almost willing to take his chances, to gamble so much?
But nothing did happen, and I kept my mouth shut. The prom went on, and most of us went to see what must have been "South Pacific." What else could we have chosen given the theme, though it's hard to imagine that that was a popular choice? A few, of course, sneaked off for more exciting moments. After serving the dinner, the juniors were allowed to go the dance and the movie. My date's name (and I'm not embellishing here) was Racy Peters.
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