My Father Before Me (25 page)

In the poetry class, I was a different person from the one I was in the Communications Building, where my peers were people who called each other
bunghole
and disco-danced at frat parties and looked blank or vaguely panicky if I told them I wrote poetry. We fledgling poets were a ragtag band of misfits who'd found a temporary home together: Ruth, brainy and amiable, a women's studies major; Carl, of the trim dark mustache, sardonic and provocative, who devoted his first semester to composing a winking misogynistic lyric sequence entitled “Women as Automobiles”; Patrick, who parodied him with “Woman as Bathtub,” in which an intimate relationship with either one involves “a ring afterward”; Michael, a graduate student, older and taller and wider than the rest of us, with patchy whiskers and thick-rimmed glasses, who favored Ginsbergian odes to inner-city bus stations; Yvonne, dark-eyed and serious, who wrote in the sorrowful shade of the other poet in her family, her dead older sister; and Jed, bearded and gentle, probably the best poet
among us. “Out of which lilac”: which of us wrote that line? I remember only that the rest of us agreed it was one of the best of the semester.

It was not I who wrote it. After all, as Alex pulled me aside one day to say, my poems lacked music. “Have you read Wallace Stevens?” he asked. “You should read Stevens.”

In the campus bookstore, I bought a paperback copy of Stevens' selected poems. Thumbing through it, I could see—I could hear—what Alex meant: the language was sumptuously insistent with music. I understood maybe half of what Stevens was saying. No, one quarter. But it didn't matter; the vowels and consonants lured me in—the sound of the whole voice, the whole mind, of the poems. The lines seemed piercingly funny and sonorously oracular, sometimes simultaneously. Traveling home to Seattle for Thanksgiving break, crossing the state on a Greyhound bus, I kept Stevens' poems open on my lap. The meandering ride would take nine hours: I had nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. The hours passed, the bus wheezing into one small town, then another, then another. The autumn sunlight dimmed and disappeared. I clicked on the overhead light. I was deep into the long poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The title had seduced me first, and then the first sentence:
Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, / The sovereign ghost
. I would need to read that again. Then again. This poet was philosophical; I would have to use my head to keep up with him, but I was game for the challenge. I kept at the poem, through
imperative haw / of hum
, through
The book of moonlight is not written yet
, through
exit lex, / Rex and principium, exit the whole / Shebang
, through
Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified
. In my seat at the back of the bus, blackness encircling the narrow column of light in which I read, the muffled groan of the engine the only sound, I felt extravagantly alone: filled with the sounds of the poem, filled with its thoughts—as far as I could follow them. And I was following them, mainly. Probably. Maybe.

When, at last, I stepped off the bus, weary and invigorated, I felt like
a different person. Or I felt, for the first time, fully myself. I felt that the world within me, my private mess of gladness and grief and tentative, intense impressions of truths to trust, had been confirmed by another, by a stranger, by a dead man, in a language of lush uncertainty. I felt that what a poem communicates might not be meaning, exactly, but something larger, something more like a sense of absolute authority—a sense of openness, of receptive attention to a life that enchants and baffles.

Around this time, in a class on modern poetry, I sat among a group of students puzzling over Stevens' “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” Here was an exceedingly odd poem that seemed subversive and wacky and chilling and true, even though I couldn't quite put my finger on what that truth was. With the professor guiding us, line by line, through the poem, we stalled on the lines
Take from the dresser of deal, / Lacking the three glass
knobs
. . . . Why were these knobs missing, and why were there three of them? “Stevens makes the point,” the professor said, “of saying that there are three missing knobs. Now, of what else might the number three remind us?”

I raised my hand tentatively. “The holy trinity?”

“Yes, yes, interesting,” said the professor, after hearing the answer she had led me to by the nose, but what intrigued me more was the rumbling, giddy noise the poem was making:
Call the roller of big cigars, / The muscular one, and bid him whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds
. Why was that voice so appealing and right? And how could one begin talking about it? Maybe one didn't need to. Maybe one only had to say the lines aloud, over and over again.

With Stevens in my ear, my own poems began to sing a little. I wrote one about an unidentified “you” who I imagined was some version of my father, floating among
l
s and
o
s:

A moon zooms northward

through the boiling blue.

You, in the pool, refuse

to move . . .

On my visits home to Seattle, I checked in with my brother, nervously reciting my recent poems to him. Were they poems? Did they have potential? Yes, Kevin kindly said, forgiving their trespasses. Kevin, who had been busy finding his own poets to love, read me Ashbery's “The Instruction Manual.” I loved it because he did, and because the poem seemed so delighted to exist, so delighted in existence—an extended act of imaginative liberty, with hints of something sadder in it (
What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do
)
.
Kevin read me a few of the riddling, jagged, heartrending
Dream Songs
of John Berryman—Berryman, who was eleven when his father, one early Saturday morning, put a gun to his chest and fired.

That mad drive wiped out my childhood.

———

I'd like to . . . ax the casket open ha to see

just how he's taking it, which he sought so hard.

———

Also I love him: me he's done no wrong

for going on forty years—forgiveness time.

55

Was it the fact of being the son of my father—son of a dead man, son of a man who, alive, I remember touching my mother with affection exactly once—that made me, in matters regarding the opposite sex, generally bungling and bashful? Thankfully, my timidity didn't matter to Lauren, a dimpled, auburn-haired, petite and brainy broadcasting major who decided she liked me. From the beginning, I could sense, even amid her high spirits, something worldly-wise and weary about her. At first we knew each other merely as pals within a group of pals. Then, one day, sensing that we were becoming friendly in a different kind of way, Lauren said, “Sit down. I have something I want to show you.”

She unbuttoned her left sleeve and rolled it up, then lifted her wrist toward me. Around it, like a fat pink rubber band, was a scar. “A couple of years ago,” she said, “I was working in a cannery. My arm got stuck in the machine, and it cut off my hand. The doctors were able to reattach it. But I can't move all of my fingers, and there's a lot of numbness.”

I am not proud to say this: I was heartsick on Lauren's behalf, but the ghastly and veiled nature of her injury made her more interesting to me. It seemed a badge of seriousness, a sign of her authenticity as a feeling, suffering person, and I was flattered that she considered
me serious enough to share it with. For the next two years, we were a couple.

Lauren had recently returned from a year in Germany, where she'd had a German boyfriend. She had liked Dieter, she said, but their union was imperfect: his penis was bent. Debilitatingly so. His self-consciousness about it was the worst thing, she said; his dysfunctional member made him feel unworthy of her.

A few months into our relationship, Lauren warned me that Dieter had called her: he had flown all the way from Germany. “He wants me back,” she said. “Don't worry. You're my boyfriend. That won't change. But I feel bad—he's come halfway around the world to try to win me back. He wants to talk with you.”

“With me?”

“He's being gallant. He thinks the honorable thing to do is ask that you step aside.”

“I don't even know him. Do I really have to talk to him?”

“Well, no, not if you don't want to. But he's traveled a long way. Would it hurt you that much?”

Dieter, as threatened, tracked me down. He knocked on my apartment door; I invited him in and offered him a seat.

“Yes,” he said, leaning forward, pressing his palms together. “I have come to tell you and to tell Lauren that my penis is straight now. I am okay. I have had the surgery. I am ready to be Lauren's boyfriend again. I am asking you to give her up.”

“Um, I'd rather not,” I said. “But it's not up to me. You'll have to speak with Lauren. It's her choice, her life.”

Dieter returned to Germany, disappointed. With him, I had held my own. But with Lauren's family, whom I met when we traveled through her hometown, I felt flummoxed and insubstantial. Sitting on a high stool at the kitchen counter, I heard Lauren, her parents, and her older brother speak freely and openly, launching into passionate,
friendly debates, breaking into peals of laughter at old shared jokes. Where were the tense moments of wordlessness, of silent judgment? Where was the satirical, self-protective teasing? These people did not seem to be speaking in code or censoring themselves; they seemed to feel safe saying what they thought, as if there were no risk in it. In such a household, in such a conversation, I could find no footing. I hadn't the training.

That evening, as we drove away from her childhood home, Lauren said, “My parents think you're polite.”

“I'm glad.”

“And my brother thinks you're stupid.”

“Why?”

“You don't talk.”

It's true. I didn't talk. My tongue was bent, debilitatingly so.

I felt most at ease with language when the communication was one-way and scripted: when I was reading an announcement into the microphone during my morning radio shift or, in the privacy of my notebook, tinkering with syllables, with the rhythms and whispery implications of them. Only a part of me was speaking then, a part I felt comfortable with, and no one talked back.

So timorous in conversations with strangers, so used to stewing in my private juices, I began to sense that broadcast journalism was an imperfect career choice. At the heart of reporting is a genuine curiosity about other people and a relentless desire to learn the truth about them, especially uncomfortable truths, the ones they would prefer to conceal. Me? I didn't like to use the phone. At the grocery store, if the shortest line led to a noticeably chatty cashier, I chose the longer one. Before leaving my apartment, I peeked through the curtain to confirm that I would encounter no neighbor or postal worker with whom I might be required to converse.

A journalist is required to converse. In my junior year, I was
selected to have a very difficult conversation. Two disgruntled members of the WSU basketball team had revealed to a friend of mine, another apprentice TV reporter, that a few star players were receiving special treatment from the head coach, and that treatment might be illegal. If not, they claimed, it was at least unethical. Players' academic transcripts might have been altered. Poor performers in the classroom were being reinstated and playing again, maybe without first meeting the university's criteria for improving their grades.

Four of us journalism students were put on the story. We would investigate and then, on our weekly cable TV news program, share what we had discovered. My duty was to confront the coach, a burly, gregarious, charismatic man who, I suspected, could squish me between his fingernails as if I were a flea. I would go to his office. I would ask him to respond to the charges against him.

Our faculty adviser, wanting us to catch the coach off guard, recommended that we not call him first. Instead, with a cameraman, I walked into the basketball office in the athletic building and asked to see the coach.

“Do you have an appointment?” asked his secretary.

“No,” I said. “We're with
Cable 8 News
—it's a student TV program—and we have some important questions for him. He really should talk with us.”

“Now?”

“Yes, please, if possible.”

The secretary left her desk. A minute later, she returned. “He'll give you five minutes. But no camera.”

Alone, I entered the coach's office. Surrounded by cabinets filled with golden trophies and plaques and signed basketballs, he sat, glowering, steely-eyed, behind a desk. “What's so goddamn important?” he said. He did not ask me to sit.

I explained the charges that his players had made against him. I
told him that we planned to air a story about them. Did he have a response? For twenty minutes, glaring at me, he fumed, sputtered, and yelled, claiming that the complaining players were bush leaguers. They were crybabies, fueled by envy. In taking them seriously, I was proving myself a fool. He'd recruited them and given them a chance to succeed, but they had underperformed, and now they were inventing stories to excuse their own failings. He wouldn't get into a “pissing match” with them. As for me, I should be ashamed of myself. Had I no self-respect? What kind of journalism were they teaching in the Communications Building, anyway?

Pretending that I wasn't trembling—having pretended so since I entered his office—I muttered my thanks, spun around, and left. I was Mike Wallace: I had ambushed him. But I wasn't sure I liked it. The next day, as I was walking across campus to class, the coach crossed my path twenty steps ahead. He spied me, pivoted, and strode straight toward me. “Hey!” he screamed, jutting his arm out, pointing at me, jabbing his finger at the air repeatedly, as if shooting off rounds. “Did you ever take a course in logic? Do you know what logic is? You need to learn about it!” Then he turned and stomped off.

I had done a journalist's duty. I had nettled a public figure. I had asked the hard questions. I had parted a curtain in service of the truth.

But I was beginning to feel that such curtains might be better parted by others. I wasn't up to it. I was a coward, probably. Nonetheless, after graduation, I would seek a job in broadcasting. This, too, was an act of cowardice, though I preferred to think of it as practicality. I had made a career decision years before; why change now and watch the work I had done come to nothing? Years before, Kevin had tried college—his most gratifying moments had been in poetry courses—but he had dropped out, unable to stomach the idea of all those classes he would have to take because they were required of him, not because he had a genuine interest in them. He was working on a Seattle pier
now, driving a fish delivery truck by day, writing poems by night. I, though, like my father, had stuck it out, through the physical education and geology and sociology classes, through the exams and term papers and oral presentations, and earned a degree—earned my ticket into a professional world waiting patiently with its fixed structures and meanings that I could take on as my own.

Still, I had begun to sense that a life in television might be a kind of betrayal, a silencing of the self I had coaxed into the light and encouraged to start talking. The truths I was interested in uncovering were of a kind not heard about on TV: they were permanent and unspeakable and incompletely knowable but present in poetry, behind the words, like ghosts. When I reported the news, the words I used were just words, delivering information only, erasing themselves in the moment they were spoken. How much good could they be on mornings such as that December one when I arrived at the radio station, as usual, at five-thirty, the sun not yet up, to prepare for my shift? Dave, the news anchor, was already there, the normally jovial, nimble-witted Dave, but he looked stricken.

“Morning?” I said.

“They got Lennon.”

He bit the words as he said them. He didn't have to say more. Somehow I understood immediately what he meant.

For the next three hours, I sat in front of the control board, microphone propped in the air before me, feeling inadequate to the task of talking. I merely played Beatles records and, when I spoke, said mainly that there was little to say. I was no broadcaster. I was someone who wished he were home, alone, who wished he hadn't woken up yet.

And what words did I say on the air that week in May, the one that began when I rose Sunday morning to an eerie gloom, a dimness not right for that time of day? Stepping outside, I saw, in the west, a wall of black cloud advancing steadily toward me; in the east, the sky was a
lucid blue. By the time the cloud had swallowed the sun entirely and a dark snow had begun to fall, I had heard that Mount St. Helens, three hundred miles to the west, had erupted. This was not snow; it was ash—a cadaverous gray descending upon everything, an inch of fine, dead powder shrouding the town. What words I spoke on the radio afterward, who knows? I remember only that morning: sitting by my window, silent, watching ash sift from the sky and gather on the branches and roofs and cars and roads, the world becoming blank and mute as the moon, and as implausible.