At school there was no talking or moving or breathing, as per usual for this period in world history. The sixties were over, the barricades had evaporated, and almost nobody in this hopelessly reactionary cubbyhole of the continent was prepared, quite yet, to shave his eyebrows and behave like David Bowie. So finding topics of conversation was very difficult. Furthermore, we were located in the Far West, ancestral home of the taciturn type. Papa Hemingway had pinched his tight lips shut for the last time in our general vicinity, and, of course, that only served to exacerbate matters.
This is not to say, however, that all was somnambulism and futility on campus, not by any means. The pair of us scuffed along a corridor lined with sheepish deaf-mutes, it's true, but on our way to link elbows with a "community of writers"—for that seeming oxymoron is how they liked to think of themselves.
My schoolmates, many of them—or, at any rate, a fairly solid majority of the post-structurally inclined—prided themselves on being part of the first major overhaul of the disposition of literature since Dr. Johnson and his compeers sounded the rallying cry: "That man is a blockhead who ever wrote except for money!" Those venerable Londoners, once and for all, had done with patronage, and placed the professional writer at the beck and call of the anonymous arbiter of taste, the "common reader"—a coinage of the Great Cham of Literature himself, and an expression of faith in the very book-buying public that had made possible our beloved teacher's presence among us today, for which we were duly grateful.
But these Creative Writing grad students, particularly the hermeneutic Ph.D. candidates, represented a further step in the evolution of the species. With them, there would be no more coffee houses, nor royalties, nor flat kill fees. This new generation would replace such with seminar rooms and stipends and two free contributor's copies. They had a sense of being on the cutting edge. They were forging, in the smithy of their mimeographed literary magazines, the uncreated conscience of their guild.
These unacknowledged legislators no longer needed to fret about that lack of acknowledgement, because they were on fellowships now, and, if everything went well, would soon be on salaries outright. And this lifetime support would remain forever unconnected with the reception of their works, if any.
Furthermore, as this was a public institution, my classmates were one rung higher on the evolutionary ladder than their coevals in the private university across town. Their situation was even more consistent with the leftist ideal, which in those days remained yet the default mode of most members of humanities departments, regardless of their opinions about how, or whether, to hawk words. My classmates were pursuing their terminal degrees with state funds. The power structure was reimbursing them to tell the truth, or at least to say nothing recognizably heretical (the path of choice for most of them). They were writers paid by the government.
Streckfuss heard me expound upon this heady prophecy as we approached the venue, and it made him feel intellectually inadequate. He'd been sort of planning on made-for-TV movie deals and cherry-red vintage T-birds full of star-struck groupies. He squeezed his "admission ticket" with nervously perspiring fingers till the perforations got soggy and lost some of their definition, becoming more oval than rectangular. God only knew what class I'd find myself in next semester.
Following an impulse, which, I confess, was not unmixed with gratuitous cruelty, I whispered into his blushing ear Keats' words of small comfort. "We're going among the 'hierophants of unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.' I sure as fuck hope they like your stuff, Streckfuss."
So we slunk down the beige-speckled linoleum ("down" is here used idiomatically, for we felt as though we were going uphill, as on one of those ramp-like approaches to the summits of ancient temples; and we were indeed ascending, both of us in a psychoactive, and one of us in a socioeconomic, sense). Suddenly, almost in mid-phrase, and with little enough context, I surprised myself no less than my friend by shrieking, in my most convincing, Emmy Award-winning voice of revulsion, "You were wasting lots of Veecee and enjoying it?" I had an idea for the workshop now.
My shriek was calculated to compound with embarrassment whatever other counterproductive emotions he might be feeling—assuming someone like Streckfuss was capable of embarrassment.
His eyes got their trist look and he pressed his little lips together. "Yeah," he said. "Nam'd make a guy like that."
If I shrieked, he whispered self-consciously. And it was the latter, not the former, which caused several hall-lurkers to make emergency dives and ducks into the nearest rooms: wrong-sex toilets, and classes they weren't enrolled in, not even as "audits."
"It got to be sexy, almost. I didn't think it was crazy at the time when it was happening. Now I do, and all I want to do is mellow out."
"Well, you'd better 'mellow out' if you want to live in the real world with regular people, and go to normal places like college classes! Sweet Jesus!"
I hit myself on the forehead twice with my left fist, just as the women in dirty movies do when plying their plastic penises on themselves. I glanced over to make sure Streckfuss was watching.
While I grunted, moaned, grimaced and went "Eeeeew!" at the icky bestiality of it all, he continued with numb momentum, still whispering with a sense of shame that surprised me, and almost made me feel like a horrible fucking bastard.
"I remember the first time I ever shot somebody. It was this lady. She was bringing a tray of Coca-Colas across the paddy. She was talking a blue streak to her girlfriend. I got so nauseous I crawled back in the chopper and barfed all over the navigator's lap. I hallucinated my heart, lying there, beating. And then he said, 'Do you see what I see?' and we both freaked. I just crawled back out to my position and started firing some more. There was nothing else to do. Those guns are so powerful, they make the Veecees' tongues stick out—"
He worked his rosebud mouth a little, as if trying to add something. But no sound came out. He'd rendered himself speechless, aposiopesized himself into a corner.
It was better this silent way. What was needed this morning was a visual prop, some tangible proof that adolescent frosh-boy Tommy was old-fashioned, like the teacher, and wanted to live up to the Johnsonian ideal of serving the book-buying public at large. I wanted to be a royalty-subsister, so I shrewdly and bravely surrounded myself with distasteful, even dangerous, but topically promising research subjects, like this poor shell-shocked veteran, who might have a combat flashback any minute and do something rollickingly marketable, and in the meantime could be pumped for ready pathos.
I wasn't, like so many of the other students, a whored-out hireling of the government propaganda machine, a bought and paid-for Big Liar, a la Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels. I was no academic. Royalties and advances against same, and proceeds from the sale of spin-off rights, and movie and mini-series deals—the very sort of thing the Chi-coms were totalitarianizing my teacher out of: these were my fondest goals, not a government pittance and a tenured trammel on my pen. I would never be ashamed to bathe in tubs full of filthy lucre, just as my teacher was doing, so long as I could do it without feeling obliged not to write nasty things about anybody I wanted to, such as the Chairman of the English Department and the Dean of Humanities and the Governor of the State, and whatever tarted-up scribbler they recruited to flaunt his tawdry wares in my face.
I was assuming that the famous novelist, though willing (if not obliged by necessity) to milk provincial universities like cash cows, felt no surplus affection for the parasites he found fastened to their udders. And I was secretly hoping to impress him with my weaned self, and to get a recommendation to his literary agent—though I honestly cannot recall if I'd written anything with that untrammeled pen of mine to submit to her. Somehow I doubt it. My eyes were swirling so in those days, I could barely see my feet, much less operate a typewriter. In fact, I now wonder what I produced to justify or at least apologize for my snoring presence in the workshop. Perhaps I felt that, being the result of a random computer glitch, my interloping didn't need justification. I wonder if I even passed.
Whether backed up by any substance or not, this pitching of me would be effective enough if my sidekick said nothing and just sat there looking other-worldly and lower-class in his borrowed Negro clothing. I didn't necessarily want any rib cages squatted upon, or overmuch blood spilled. That's why I'd pretended to almost ralph over those comparatively mild war stories: to shut the little beast up and shut him down. I was very young and callow, even for my tender age, and hadn't yet developed the ethical tone that I enjoy as I sit here and compose my nonfiction memoir today.
As we approached the classroom door, a voice could be heard on the other side. That gave me serious pause. I dragged Streckfuss to a halt, and he froze obediently, as at the signal of the point man on jungle patrol. (Still speechless, he didn't require shooshing.) I cocked both ears at ninety-degree angles to my skull.
On every session before today, the workshop had been silent. This might seem paradoxical for a place where tuition was supposed to be taking place, but wordlessness reigned in that room. A certain garden on the far side of the Wadi Kidron had not been more silent, early in that sleepless night of long ago. And it wasn't just one of our number who wept tears of blood. We all did, watching our teacher, this significant man of letters, as he wrestled with his tongue-tied demons, all the while stroking abstractedly his well-trimmed dark-brown beard. His eyelids twitched. I think he wore contact lenses.
One expected orotundities to issue from such august lips. And they eventually did, somewhat later in his career, when he returned to his amply blessed region of the United States and blossomed personally. He was to become a regular literary lion, and even gained a reputation for having screaming matches with other famous novelists at the PEN International meeting. However, at this stage in his career, he was a very quiet type, with pain and sadness in his face, and seemed to have reached a brooding place in his intellectual, artistic and emotional development.
My older classmates sometimes wondered in whispers, on those days when he didn't show up on time, or not at all, whether he had arrived at some deep and advanced notion of the utter inutility and inscrutability of words, the inherent oppressiveness of language. Maybe our mentor was registering a silent protest in the face of the Universal Gab. And what more powerfully moving place to express this mute cosmic disgruntlement than within such a haven for unmeasured logorrhea as a seminar, a symposium?
At any rate, the Ph.D. candidates and the MFA candidates seemed content to sit and witness this widely acclaimed genius bathing in the Ganges that noiselessly flowed inside his own quiet self, for ninety minutes at a stretch, every Thursday morning, when he remembered to show up. It was enough simply to be in the presence of a man who commanded such admirable sums up front as he was rumored to have gotten in exchange for agreeing to conduct this single workshop.
He was a creature of admirable consistence. In class (and I never saw him elsewhere—I can't imagine how he exited and entered), his nose was forever sunk deep in a book, and always the same one. We never knew the title because he held it flat on his lap, like a monkish missal borrowed from a tradition not his own.
The individual sitting and reading so magisterially before us contained within the lineaments of a single compact human frame so many different types of success that it was a sexual experience for more than one of us to hear him pronounce our names during roll call. He kept strict attendance records, as our grades would be based on class participation. But I feared there was not going to be a disproportion of A-plusses. Nobody was going to accuse this of being a "pud course," subject to grade inflation—for none of us participated any more than he did.
Among my further-along co-learners were one divorced graduate student who was working on a divorce novel, plus a writer of 700-page folk tales, along with half a dozen hard-boiled detective novelettists, and a quorum of post-structuralists who penned hermeneutic vignettes in the prose-poetic form, I think. In spite of this redoubtable arsenal of talent, one is forced to admit that much of the reciprocal silence from the receiving end of this adventure in learning was caused by a kind of regional pudency. We all had contemptibly hard R's, and nobody wanted to betray a manner of speech identifiable as other than New Yorker—for our teacher was most emphatically that. He had contributed generously to the rich and venerable tradition of bildungsroman about growing up in the Bronx in the thirties.
When he used it at any rate, his was an irenic speaking voice. "Um" was a major element in his disarmingly self-effacing idiolect. Exactly four, or maybe five, words (not counting our surnames during roll call) had risen from his well-known trachea. Early in the term, a non-post-structural type, a naively unabashed citizen of an even punier community deeper in the same desert that, like a sponge, sucked the interest out of our own (this person wrote cow-puncher tales, a la Zane Grey, and was soon persuaded to stop attending), had asked him a direct question—not the rhetorical sort, but one requiring an answer in order to avoid the impression of rudeness. The ludicrous question was, "What advice can you give us?" And, to this mere unfellowshipped tuition payer, with admirable succinctness, he replied, "Um, get a different address."
We knew he spoke to all of us, and not just to our country cousin. So we fixed our gazes on our laps, and there they tended to remain. It was an almost genetic chagrin, a deoxyribonucleic mea culpa that, among my fellow rubes, at any rate, tried to compensate for itself with meticulous personal hygiene and religious punctuality.
Unfortunately for me, this was the era before the widespread application of microwave technology in the major nation-wide convenience store chains—at least those franchises that had the bad luck of being located in the unwiped fundament of America, which we miserable half-humans called, with an apologetic yawp, home. And it had taken some time at the Seven-Eleven near the university to render the brick of frozen cheese sauce liquescent enough to bear pouring over Streckfuss' latest dog. And he had, as always, asked for extra, which did not expedite matters one bit. So we were a little late.
Normally, for a teen of my fashionably devil-may-care attitudinizations, tardiness was no problem, and never prevented me from bashing my way into any situation. Such is the headlong vitality of youth. But today the freakish juxtaposition of the classroom door with the sound of a voice coming from the other side made me cautious. Of course, it didn't help that my senses had been systematically deranged for about seventeen hours straight. I could have sworn it was Henry Kissinger talking in there. I thought I heard the words "ultimate aphrodisiac."
Streckfuss hovering hungrily behind me, I cracked the door, ever so slightly. I prayed with success to the Shivwit Mother Bear Spirit for no hinge squeaks as I slipped part of the flange of my right nostril through, opening a tiny but serviceable line of sight. I could not make out the possessor of the mysterious voice, but only one or two students (mouths shut, eyes downcast in humility), and, beyond them, the ancient Unabridged Webster's, the departmental dictionary.
This book was the sole indicator (aside from the cushions on the chairs) of the chamber's significance. It was usually the faculty meeting room, and nobody under the rank of assistant professor was allowed. But, in consideration of the sheer significance of our guest teacher, the temple veil of the sanctum sanctorum had been flung open, for the first time in living memory, to the odoriferous likes of Streckfuss and me.
It was like any other land-grant classroom, all pastel-enameled cinder-brick and beige speckled linoleum, rectangular and fluorescent lit, with institutional gray aluminum Venetian blinds (that day, for me, a luminous avocado shade). But on its podium in the corner stood that vasty relic from an earlier phase of the campus, a leftover from a frame structure of pioneer times that had once drawn termites and bats on this spot.
This Webster's was a reminder of the continuity of the humanistic tradition, and was kept perpetually turned to the page upon which the word collegiality was defined. Certain senior members of the faculty wanted to erect a velvet rope corral around the venerable lexicon, strung along knee-high bronze posts, but such a measure had been deemed undemocratic or something.
The publishers—an undying outfit back east—had, as a quaint nineteenth-century promotional ploy, equipped their product with a broad silken bookmark, tasseled and embroidered. It looked like nothing so much as a liturgical stole waiting to be kissed and donned by the celebrant on a day of holy obligation in some papist shrine. Such were the ham-handed attempts at book salesmanship in the era before the formulation of modern qualitative marketing theory.
Some of the young Turks on the non-tenured teaching staff wanted in the worst way to clip that bookmark flush with the binding, as it reeked of priestcraft in their view. "We're not Brahmans," they protested (perhaps too much). But, so far, their elder colleagues had prevailed, and the fabric remained flapping from the pages of the doughty tome, dangling in our faces every session.
I only noticed that day, as I peeked in, just how deep and satiny and shimmering the embroidery had remained all these generations, particularly the green threads. I would have affirmed in the presence of a notary public that the bookmark was vibrating like the strop in a barbershop on Saturday morning. I could hear it hum and slap.
The Webster's podium was specially made of some no doubt inferior desert wood, carved in the naively ornate and representational style of our frontier forebears. Needless to say, this hokey antique mortified the Creative Writing students. Even though it was too warm to wear outer clothing this semester, they did, especially the Derrida devotees and the Foucaultians—and the Webster's and its podium became their coat rack, to cover it up and forefend what they feared would be a disdainful glance from the teacher.
Speaking of whom, I was unable to see him within the angle I had allowed myself through my tiny separation of door from jamb. But Streckfuss must have suffered another full-body spasm, or else he was visited by an especially severe access of eagerness to learn, for he pushed me from behind, and made the other flange of my nose pop into the crack, opening a wider view into the enclosure, which included the teacher's special chair.
And, I must confess, at that moment, for the first and last time in my academic career, I regretted my unpunctuality—because the voice that had greeted us through the frosted glass and maple veneer was none other than you-know-who's. Yes, this was the legendary day the legendary author separated those much-photographed jaws and actually said something besides "Um, get another address." He sounded even more like the former secretary of state in person than he did on "Book Beat with Bob Cromie" and "The Dick Cavett Show."
We were bearing aural witness to his sole utterance amounting to more than a partial mouthful of syllables, perhaps only the second or third complete grammatical construction to exit those iconic lips since they'd ventured west of the East River. And it sounded rehearsed. Clearly this statement must signify a home truth dear to the heart and methods of a successful artist. The air was thick with the sounds of ballpoints and pencils transcribing the pronouncement verbatim. He was propounding his personal creed and artistic manifesto—and the little dishwasher and I had missed the first part. We'd arrived too late to burn the entirety of this revealed gospel onto the walls of our very ventricles.
The collegians were breathing hard. Various buttocks were scooted way forward on seminar chairs. Their idol, their solid-gold calf, was finally starting to open up. Their vocations were on the verge of being endorsed forever.
"—and so," he was saying, "if people are paying for nonfiction these days, you make up a nonfiction, and falsify volumes of spurious documentation to back yourself up, and—"
I chose that moment to come barging in.
And the English Department never treated me the same after that day. It was a public university and bound by regulation; otherwise, as punishment for interrupting their celebrity guest, they would have found a way to make sure, if this Bradley goon ever did get around to declaring a major, it would not be English—because I caused the delivery of the oracle to stop in mid-phrase, never to be taken up again.
What made the famous writer clam up before bringing his unique pronouncement to full period? Why did he re-bury that heavily televised nose in his customary book, and freeze like a spaniel in the presence of a dead duck? I, myself, was briefly puzzled—till an explanation registered in my nostrils.
Someone in this usurped faculty meeting room carried, on his person, the dioxin-drenched jungle mildew of the former French Indo-China. I just noticed it myself for the first time, even though I'd been inhaling this deliciousness for a long while. It was an olfactible greenness: yet more of the sultry hue that had tinted my whole life over the past year or so, but of a damper, darker shade and saturation, which not only I, but evidently my illustrious teacher could sense, synesthetically.
It took the juxtaposition of the green-reeker and the college-deferred non-combatants to bring it out by contrast. My little Streckfuss was certainly the only person around here who'd ever killed someone, and he exuded the pheromones to prove it.
Toting his unwholesome breakfast of gastric crutches and a sheaf of sinister hieroglyphics, fixing all to their chairs with his huge, dead eyes, Streckfuss was gaunt beyond the point of cadaverousness, but not in any remotely fashionable sense. Even through the opalescent billows of his blouse, cuffs pulled way down over his forelimbs to conceal the inked misjudgments of his youth, he exhibited a malnourishment too genuine to be desirable. There slithered my reptilian sidekick, an "audit," that most problematical campus creature, and he trailed an emerald-colored smog, which caused all commentary to cease.
He broke free of my gravitational influence and very bravely set off on his own orbit. With one of his purple-stained hands this dish jockey was waving his "ticket" in everybody's face, trying to find the person whose job was to tear it in half and hand over the stub for retention.
As his other hand was occupied with the "novel-book" and cheese dog, one wrapped around the other, Streckfuss held his photocopied imaginative work in his teeth. By some very skilled contortion of lips and tongue, he was dropping one damp copy into each graduate lap he passed in his search for the usher.
It was quite an incredible performance for someone so beset with butterfly tummy, especially with just about everyone staring at him. Here was a man going among his betters, and reaching deep inside himself to find a reservoir of competence. This was his lifetime's sole chance to transcend his origins, and it was all very touching and moving and so forth. I have no idea what he did with his Big Gulp root beer.
Our teacher's nose being textually interred (what title was it, in Christ's name, that had been holding the man so enrapt all semester?), I'm not sure if Streckfuss at first recognized the star, and star-maker, whose autograph and benediction he sought. But he did not single out this averted face for neglect. Streckfuss slid his admission ticket in the narrow space between those eyes-full-of-unfulfilled-longing and their reading material, and slid it back and forth a few times like a poorly functioning key card in a fancy motel of a somewhat later period of American history.
And he got no reaction whatsoever. Our teacher budged neither face nor book. Like some graven image, he didn't even blink. It was as though these legendary east-coast intellectuals possessed such acute vision that they could read uninterruptedly through waggling perforations in a computer card.
But, unlike me, the former army man was reluctant to entertain this astounding possibility. He chose to interpret the guy's behavior (or lack thereof) as simple rudeness. At least the other eggheads were flinching and glancing at Streckfuss uncomfortably, which was a response, an acknowledgement of his tenuous existence. Yet here was this old fart at the head of the table, not even bothering to brush him off like a hovering fly. Anger started to grow in Streckfuss' eyes. Men with a background of selfless service to our country do not like being ignored. Not one bit. It never occurred to him that such a mighty genius might be paralyzed with trouser-soiling horror.
Streckfuss' mouth was full of narration, so he was unable to separate his lips and incisors to snarl. But, rather than simply allow the old fart's copy of the "Basket Balls" memoir to drop, Streckfuss spat it out, with such humid force that it wedged itself, this xerox, impossible to ignore, between the book and the nose buried therein. The recipient was too terrified to flick it onto the floor—which, I can affirm here and now, was much the better for all involved.
"Read that, whiskered possum," my partner sizzled through clenched dentition.
I had assumed those Ricky Ricardo sleeves would be kept rolled down. But now, snubbed, Streckfuss emptied his hands onto the table, in order to mash flat the puffy white clouds and roll them unabashedly past his depicted wrists, beyond his forearms, clear up to the needle tracks, which I'd never seen before, sunken and swollen in the meatless crotches of his elbows. They put me in the presence of a soldier for the first time. Mars made manifest, red, not green, stood at attention in our midst. Streckfuss had re-upped. Something like pride suffused my awareness, though I was too young at the time to pinpoint the source.
