Found this in some journals I had written a few years ago.
I.
I am tired of being sad. Tired of being mad. Tired of being fearful, afraid of the phone, afraid of conflict, afraid to talk to anyone because they might recriminate me—is that the right word? Tired. Tired of being offensive, defensive, unacknowledged, overly noticed, of coming out with my hands up, with my dukes up, with my fists in front of my face ready to strike, protect. I just want to be in love with two people, the 2 out of 9 billion – is it 9 billion yet, or still only a puny little 8 billion? We’re not special anymore, being 1 out of 9 billion, and anyone who you can love out of 8 billion – or nine – that makes two less lonely billionaires. But I’m too sad to love anyone right now, to show affection or love and I really just want to be alone among 8 or 9 billion people, but I am also afraid. I am afraid to leave and afraid to go, like so many other people, maybe most people, maybe at least 6 billion other people are afraid of this right now, or maybe only 5. I am . . . I am. Period. I am. Tired. And I want. To be happy. It is all I have ever wanted. I don’t want to fight with my landlord my student loan officers bill collectors my father my friends my lovers. I want no argument no last straws no ultimatums no broken dishes no hurt looks no pride injured.
II.
The Days of the Last Straw are both followed and preceded by a seemingly endless but imperceptibly elliptical cycle known as the Days of the (Temporary) Peace, also known to many, women in particular, as the Days of Danger. These are the days when things appear to be normal. When you joke and laugh without incident, without argument, and you lull yourself into believing that everything can be alright, that it can be normal, that you can go on like this and that this time it will be different, the way you have always wanted it to be. It will take many many repetitions to remove yourself from this vortex.
III.
These are the Days of the Last Straw, when the weight of the world, our destinies, rest upon every single repetition of every fight over the years Every bottle, every wrapper left open, every toilet seat left up, one wrong move could set the whole thing off, trigger the end of the world. An exaggeration, but definitely the end of worlds that we know, the end of a way of life, sending each of us off in a different direction, paths potentially parallel for a while, only to wildly diverge, to wildly wander, to deviate at some future unnamed point in time.
IV.
I lack
time
distance
the will
to walk away. I don’t want to walk away. I can’t make it better and I can’t walk away. I will say something that I cannot take back
V.
The Days of the Last Straw are both followed and preceded by a seemingly endless but imperceptibly elliptical cycle known as the Days of the (Temporary) Peace, also known to many, women in particular, as the Days of Danger. These are the days when things appear to be normal. When you joke and laugh without incident, without argument, and you lull yourself into believing that everything can be alright, that it can be normal, that you can go on like this and that this time it will be different, the way you have always wanted it to be. It will take many many repetitions to remove yourself from this vortex.
Is there a mechanism to have this break and not repeat every break that every one else has ever had through time? Is it possible to have a break that is not the same as every other break that I have had? Is it possible to do it all originally, without the use of a thesaurus to try to avoid the break up clichés? Can one stay with someone long enough to discover the originality in breakups, or are we doomed to repeat them, performatively, performing the exact same phrases that came before us, as in a ritual, as in an un-marriage.
And so in our grief, even then, we are modern, worried about how to have an original thought, an original feeling. Perhaps this is what gets us through the process, distracts us from what matters or makes us see that in our clichés, this is what happens to everyone and it isn’t as tragic as we had originally thought.
VI.
After a fight, the need to connect with someone else, the desperate need to prove that someone can still love you. That you are still worthy., The fear of losing others, of losing everyone. I want to break up with the whole world at once.
VII.
Don't read anything into this. Just read it.
Surrealist Doodle
This was used as the cover of Karawane in 2006 and I have included it in on a number of bags and postcards over the years. Someone on the subway asked me if it was a Miro. I was very flattered!
Showing posts with label breaking up. Show all posts
Showing posts with label breaking up. Show all posts
Saturday, January 02, 2016
Saturday, May 03, 2014
Love Songs Lie
She had to forget about every love song she had ever heard. They were all written by men anyway – about how misunderstood they are and how the right woman could save them and how that was only you – only you understood the real him. Johnny Lee was wrong – just because you heard it in a lo-ove song doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong. In fact, it likely was.
As she went through her day, doing laundry, writing, grading papers, she tried to drown out all of those infernal, misleading lyrics combined with pictures of him and the sound of his laughing voice or his apologies ringing in her ears. All of those were lies. Maybe not intentional lies, but they were certainly not truths to be believed, that much was certain.
The fact that she was still in this relationship at all made her feel worthless and stupid. Stupid most of all. How many other women had she worked with and counseled? She of all people should have known better and here she was falling for all of the apologies that all of the abusive men had been making for decades (since it was only in the past few decades that this was even thought of as abuse) and she had been listening to them for years – since the very beginning of the relationship. What was wrong with her? Why had she put up with this all these years?
She couldn’t bear to admit it to herself – was it because he was one of the few men she had liked and approached that has reciprocated? The first blush of a new relationship had stayed, maybe even been renewed through the constant pattern of fighting and making up. It was as if she had met him all over every time he apologized and was tender. She was embarrassed to think that she had been just as stupid, just as fooled as all those women before her.
Or maybe it was her black and white way of thinking. When she had worked with abused women, she saw only the bruises, the fighting man, not realizing that there had been reasons that the women had fallen in love with the men in the first place and that it was those traits the women saw in the men, just as she had seen his vulnerable, tender side all these years – had seen and even shared in his dreams. She had to let his desires for a new life go, perhaps even more than her own. She laid down her head and cried.
She was not going to see their every moment together as a lie. That kind of denial would not serve her well. But she was going to try not to be taken in anymore. I have loved you and will be glad for that.
As she went through her day, doing laundry, writing, grading papers, she tried to drown out all of those infernal, misleading lyrics combined with pictures of him and the sound of his laughing voice or his apologies ringing in her ears. All of those were lies. Maybe not intentional lies, but they were certainly not truths to be believed, that much was certain.
The fact that she was still in this relationship at all made her feel worthless and stupid. Stupid most of all. How many other women had she worked with and counseled? She of all people should have known better and here she was falling for all of the apologies that all of the abusive men had been making for decades (since it was only in the past few decades that this was even thought of as abuse) and she had been listening to them for years – since the very beginning of the relationship. What was wrong with her? Why had she put up with this all these years?
She couldn’t bear to admit it to herself – was it because he was one of the few men she had liked and approached that has reciprocated? The first blush of a new relationship had stayed, maybe even been renewed through the constant pattern of fighting and making up. It was as if she had met him all over every time he apologized and was tender. She was embarrassed to think that she had been just as stupid, just as fooled as all those women before her.
Or maybe it was her black and white way of thinking. When she had worked with abused women, she saw only the bruises, the fighting man, not realizing that there had been reasons that the women had fallen in love with the men in the first place and that it was those traits the women saw in the men, just as she had seen his vulnerable, tender side all these years – had seen and even shared in his dreams. She had to let his desires for a new life go, perhaps even more than her own. She laid down her head and cried.
She was not going to see their every moment together as a lie. That kind of denial would not serve her well. But she was going to try not to be taken in anymore. I have loved you and will be glad for that.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Another scene from my accursed novel
By 3:30, Clark decided to give in to his insomnia. He stumbled down to the kitchen to make some coffee. Then he sat down in the dark, mesmerized by the light of the stereo. There was a lot to be seen in darkness. He could see past lives that were more easily forgotten in the business of the day.
Not all of his memories were bad, either. Maybe they should be. People should be consistent. They shouldn't play with your feelings and leave you with ambivalence. They should be good or bad. Period. That would make it easier to love or hate them without any remorse or concern about their feelings or motives.
Clark threw the mug against the wall, embarrassed by the triteness of the gesture, but the movement felt good.
"Why do you always blame everything on me? You know, that's the problem . . . "
"No, that's the problem. The problem is that whenever I bring anything up, I'm blaming you, or I'm nagging, or, whatever. The problem as I see it isn't that everything's your fault. It's that nothing is your fault." She poked her head out the bathroom door and looked at Clark. "Let me put it this way, then, I know us."
"Don't you think we've both changed?"
"Not enough. Look, sit down, let's talk about it this time, ok? Not fight, not get defensive, just let me tell you how I feel." They sat caddy-corner from one another in the oversized red chairs. "I know that I'll want to start leaning on you, and you'll get scared and pull back and you'll get that trapped animal attitude. Then I'll get angry with you and we'll be right back where we were before."
"No we won't."
"Ok, you're right. This time it happens, I'll completely hate you. As it stands now, I'm starting to like both of us. Let's keep it that way." She picked up her purse and started out the door.
"Where are you going?"
It was 2 a.m. when Clark got home. He thought they'd never get the papers done.
He walked into the bedroom without noticing that Maureen was sitting quietly in the dark living room. She didn't say anything to him, either. She looked out the window. Her eyesight and adjusted to the darkness now, and she looked around the room.
Around noon, she shuffled out of the bedroom in a shaggy blue robe and elephant slippers. She yawned and looked blankly at Clark.
"Good morning." It took effort.
"You look terrible."
"Thanks. Love ya. I'll bet you say that to all the girls."
"Where were you last night?"
"Just sitting out here thinking. How'd it go yesterday?'
"You know," Clark said, moving towards Maureen and putting his arms around her, "after this semester I could probably get away for a while--take a sabbatical."
We both know,€ that despite all of your best intentions,€ you're not going to keep any promises you make about spending time with me. So this whole conversation seems pointless."
"So that's what this is about? You're pissed off because I haven't been spending enough time with you, so you're going to get back at me. 'No, that's ok, dear. I don't want you to give up your career for me.'
Bullshit!€ You know, most women would love for their boyfriends or husbands to drop everything for them."
"Look, it's early and I'm not awake enough for a fight right now."
"Well start chugging some coffee, because I am."
Mo woke up early the next morning with squinty eyes and a pained expression, as if there were oil drilling inside her head.
She laughed a little, but it only hurt her head worse. Wouldn't everyone be surprised to see her right now? wouldn't she be surprised to see them, since she was just getting out of bed? Ow. No humor. It was well-known that Maureen never drank and didn't even like the taste of alcohol.
But she had made an exception this weekend. "I just felt so shitty, you know?" she explained to Alice later on the phone. "Every little thing becomes a catastrophe. I decided if I was going to feel so bad, at least I should have a good reason."
The hangover started to wear off, though, as she moved around a little and got dressed. At least she was alone and didn't have anyone harrassing her about her weekend's activities.
She realized that weekend that she was, in fact, a workaholic. Work was all that she really enjoyed anymore. If she was drawing or meeting with someone or staying in an office from sunrise until sunset, it was o.k. with her. In fact, she was known everywhere as one of the most agreeable, hardworking people to be found. That reputation had been a large part of her success.
She had begun to think more and more about her "addiction." Would she end up alone for the rest of her life? Would she end up with eight or nine different husbands, each with a successful life of their own, but resenting a workaholic life? Neither proposition looked very eppealing. Well, ok. She probably wouldn't be Zsa Zsa Gabor or anything, but the prospects of one, healthy relationship didn't look too good, either.She liked the idea of independence, and certainly loved her work, but she knew that there had to be more in your life than just work to keep you from eventually feeling bored and restless with yourself.
Clark spotted Maureen across the plaza. He felt disoriented and couldn't quite place where he was. The plaza, or maybe even a piazza, was like something he had envisioned from a Greek myth. There was a small gazebo, round with white columns, slanting at the foot of a small, but respectable hill. The grass was more lush and green than he had ever seen before, and there were people standing around talking, leaning on tables. He shook his head as miniskirts appeared almost as togas. And yet this place was very familiar, too. He spotted Maureen and walked to her in slow motion and real time. When he approached her, she simply ended the conversation she was having with someone and fell into step beside Clark. Neither said where they were going, the just walked.
Suddenly Clark and Maureen found themselves inside a room. He lay her back on a table or an elevated bed of some sort and began to kiss her neck while tugging her shirt out of its tuck inside her pants. He felt a great melancholy as he did this, as his lips came into contact with her skin. She kissed him back, pulling his face to hers, twirling light the small hairs from his beard into curls. Distracted and without a word, silent as she had been throughout, Maureen stood up and walked out of the room and into the crowd. Clark tried to pull himself together and chased her out into the plaza. Without running or trying to avoid him, Maureen managed to always stay a few steps away from him. She never appeared to hear him--in fact no one heard him call out after her--and eventually, she disappeared into the crowd completely.
Clark continued to look for her, certain that once he was outside of the crowd, he would be able to spot her walking across a park or a field, but it was as if she had evaporated completely, decrystalized in front of him. He suddenly remembered where he was--this was the hill where the Washington Monument stood, the very hill where they had met up after being separated in the middle of the March on Washington for affordable housing. This was the place they always agreed to meet when they got lost from one another. Clark sat down on the side of the hill, scanning the crowd for some sign of what the people were rallying for today.
Over the next three nights, this dream repeated itself in various milieus--on campus, at a faculty party, and in the middle of a Greyhound station. Despite the change of venue, the dream was always the same. A rendez-vous, a tryst that was leading toward sex, but not just sex. It was very emotional for Clark. And then just as they were about to come together, just as clothes were starting to shed, Maureen would become distracted and wander off, as if he had never been there.
This much he knew--that Maureen was probably on a Greyhound right now, "finding herself" in middle America, or maybe dancing on the beach in San Francisco, trying to live a life that she had never lived but always wanted to. He knew it was irrational--what his flaky sister-in-law in all her 12-step self improvement lingo would call "co-dependent", but it hurt him to think that there was so much longing in her that Maureen that couldn't be satisfied in the world they had built up together. And now, no matter how much he tried to reach her, Maureen was now out of reach altogether.
Not all of his memories were bad, either. Maybe they should be. People should be consistent. They shouldn't play with your feelings and leave you with ambivalence. They should be good or bad. Period. That would make it easier to love or hate them without any remorse or concern about their feelings or motives.
Clark threw the mug against the wall, embarrassed by the triteness of the gesture, but the movement felt good.
"Why do you always blame everything on me? You know, that's the problem . . . "
"No, that's the problem. The problem is that whenever I bring anything up, I'm blaming you, or I'm nagging, or, whatever. The problem as I see it isn't that everything's your fault. It's that nothing is your fault." She poked her head out the bathroom door and looked at Clark. "Let me put it this way, then, I know us."
"Don't you think we've both changed?"
"Not enough. Look, sit down, let's talk about it this time, ok? Not fight, not get defensive, just let me tell you how I feel." They sat caddy-corner from one another in the oversized red chairs. "I know that I'll want to start leaning on you, and you'll get scared and pull back and you'll get that trapped animal attitude. Then I'll get angry with you and we'll be right back where we were before."
"No we won't."
"Ok, you're right. This time it happens, I'll completely hate you. As it stands now, I'm starting to like both of us. Let's keep it that way." She picked up her purse and started out the door.
"Where are you going?"
It was 2 a.m. when Clark got home. He thought they'd never get the papers done.
He walked into the bedroom without noticing that Maureen was sitting quietly in the dark living room. She didn't say anything to him, either. She looked out the window. Her eyesight and adjusted to the darkness now, and she looked around the room.
Around noon, she shuffled out of the bedroom in a shaggy blue robe and elephant slippers. She yawned and looked blankly at Clark.
"Good morning." It took effort.
"You look terrible."
"Thanks. Love ya. I'll bet you say that to all the girls."
"Where were you last night?"
"Just sitting out here thinking. How'd it go yesterday?'
"You know," Clark said, moving towards Maureen and putting his arms around her, "after this semester I could probably get away for a while--take a sabbatical."
We both know,€ that despite all of your best intentions,€ you're not going to keep any promises you make about spending time with me. So this whole conversation seems pointless."
"So that's what this is about? You're pissed off because I haven't been spending enough time with you, so you're going to get back at me. 'No, that's ok, dear. I don't want you to give up your career for me.'
Bullshit!€ You know, most women would love for their boyfriends or husbands to drop everything for them."
"Look, it's early and I'm not awake enough for a fight right now."
"Well start chugging some coffee, because I am."
Mo woke up early the next morning with squinty eyes and a pained expression, as if there were oil drilling inside her head.
She laughed a little, but it only hurt her head worse. Wouldn't everyone be surprised to see her right now? wouldn't she be surprised to see them, since she was just getting out of bed? Ow. No humor. It was well-known that Maureen never drank and didn't even like the taste of alcohol.
But she had made an exception this weekend. "I just felt so shitty, you know?" she explained to Alice later on the phone. "Every little thing becomes a catastrophe. I decided if I was going to feel so bad, at least I should have a good reason."
The hangover started to wear off, though, as she moved around a little and got dressed. At least she was alone and didn't have anyone harrassing her about her weekend's activities.
She realized that weekend that she was, in fact, a workaholic. Work was all that she really enjoyed anymore. If she was drawing or meeting with someone or staying in an office from sunrise until sunset, it was o.k. with her. In fact, she was known everywhere as one of the most agreeable, hardworking people to be found. That reputation had been a large part of her success.
She had begun to think more and more about her "addiction." Would she end up alone for the rest of her life? Would she end up with eight or nine different husbands, each with a successful life of their own, but resenting a workaholic life? Neither proposition looked very eppealing. Well, ok. She probably wouldn't be Zsa Zsa Gabor or anything, but the prospects of one, healthy relationship didn't look too good, either.She liked the idea of independence, and certainly loved her work, but she knew that there had to be more in your life than just work to keep you from eventually feeling bored and restless with yourself.
Clark spotted Maureen across the plaza. He felt disoriented and couldn't quite place where he was. The plaza, or maybe even a piazza, was like something he had envisioned from a Greek myth. There was a small gazebo, round with white columns, slanting at the foot of a small, but respectable hill. The grass was more lush and green than he had ever seen before, and there were people standing around talking, leaning on tables. He shook his head as miniskirts appeared almost as togas. And yet this place was very familiar, too. He spotted Maureen and walked to her in slow motion and real time. When he approached her, she simply ended the conversation she was having with someone and fell into step beside Clark. Neither said where they were going, the just walked.
Suddenly Clark and Maureen found themselves inside a room. He lay her back on a table or an elevated bed of some sort and began to kiss her neck while tugging her shirt out of its tuck inside her pants. He felt a great melancholy as he did this, as his lips came into contact with her skin. She kissed him back, pulling his face to hers, twirling light the small hairs from his beard into curls. Distracted and without a word, silent as she had been throughout, Maureen stood up and walked out of the room and into the crowd. Clark tried to pull himself together and chased her out into the plaza. Without running or trying to avoid him, Maureen managed to always stay a few steps away from him. She never appeared to hear him--in fact no one heard him call out after her--and eventually, she disappeared into the crowd completely.
Clark continued to look for her, certain that once he was outside of the crowd, he would be able to spot her walking across a park or a field, but it was as if she had evaporated completely, decrystalized in front of him. He suddenly remembered where he was--this was the hill where the Washington Monument stood, the very hill where they had met up after being separated in the middle of the March on Washington for affordable housing. This was the place they always agreed to meet when they got lost from one another. Clark sat down on the side of the hill, scanning the crowd for some sign of what the people were rallying for today.
Over the next three nights, this dream repeated itself in various milieus--on campus, at a faculty party, and in the middle of a Greyhound station. Despite the change of venue, the dream was always the same. A rendez-vous, a tryst that was leading toward sex, but not just sex. It was very emotional for Clark. And then just as they were about to come together, just as clothes were starting to shed, Maureen would become distracted and wander off, as if he had never been there.
This much he knew--that Maureen was probably on a Greyhound right now, "finding herself" in middle America, or maybe dancing on the beach in San Francisco, trying to live a life that she had never lived but always wanted to. He knew it was irrational--what his flaky sister-in-law in all her 12-step self improvement lingo would call "co-dependent", but it hurt him to think that there was so much longing in her that Maureen that couldn't be satisfied in the world they had built up together. And now, no matter how much he tried to reach her, Maureen was now out of reach altogether.
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
The Protest: Scene from my Accursed Novel
When Clark walked into the house, he heard yelling come from the living room. He set his backpack down by the door and ran in to see what was wrong. Maureen was sitting on the floor stuffing envelopes and screaming at the television.
"You fucking lying bastard! How can you sit there and say that shit?!"
"Mo?"
Maureen looked up at Clark. "Oh, Hi. Can you believe these guys?"
Clark leaned over and kissed Maureen on the top of the head. "I thought you were being raped or something."
"You're so melodramatic sometimes."
"I'm melodramatic? You're having a premature stroke watching Crossfire and I'm melodramatic? Mo, maybe you shouldn't watch so many of these things. This can't be healthy, even at your age."
"At my age? What should I be watching at my age? Bozo's Cartoon Circus?"
"I'm just saying, that you don't have to watch every news show just because it's there."
Maureen looked at Clark blankly, as if he were speaking Swahili. "That's what they want, Clark."
"There is such a thing as too much information."
"Sure. I can pretend it's not there and sit around watching sit-coms or docudramas and wait for them to show up at my door and drag me off for thought crimes. Or better still, they could find me so innocuous that they would ignore me completely because my brain is so addled and placated . . . "
"That's not going to happen."
"Tell it to a campesina or a Bosnian Moslem."
Maureen to continued to stuff and label envelopes without missing a beat. "I'm just saying," Clark continued, "that one day without being in a snit might actually be good for you. You push yourself so hard sometimes." Clark sat down on the sofa behind maureen and began rubbing her shoulders as she sat on the floor, back to the sofa, with a pile of flyers, a roll of printed mailing labels, and a sheet of stampls on the coffee table in front of her. She leaned her head back against his legs and sighed. Clark leaned forward and kissed her. "Tyranny will still be there tomorrow for you to battle."
Maureen snapped forward and began folding flyers again. "Don't patronize me, Clark. Just because you and your friends got tired and sold out . . . "
"Don't start on this again. If what I do is so shitty, why do you put up with me? Not everyone can throw themselves in front of traffic or chain themselves to the Armenian Embassy."
No. Some of us have to prop up capitalism while me make the pretense we're bringing it to its knees by writing positions papers and textbooks and putting on red face and doing our little Marxist minstrel show for the department heads."
Clark stood up and snatched a paper from Maureen's stack. "And how is this dead tree pulp going to bring fascism to its knees? Political assassinations through paper cuts?" Clark balled up the flyer and through it across the room. "I really want to know, Mo. WHY DO YOU STAY WITH ME? I'm so clearly inadequate. Am I your practice? If you can improve me, you can improve the world? Or is it just that you can't hang onto your rich Mommy and Daddy forever while you live in your fake poverty, so I'm the least onerous way for you to get a hot meal and a roof over your head and get fucked every once in a while?"
"Fuck you."
"Is that it? Does it make your clit hard when I recite Das Kapital? Or is it just the sexy way I draw out Hegel's dialectic?"
"Maybe I just wanted an A in poli sci."
Clark kicked the table away from Maureen. Stamps and papers went flying and the stapler landed with a thud inside the upended table.
"Why do you do this? You know we never dated while you were in my class. Why do you have to be such a bitch when you're mad?" Maureen cringed against the couch with her hands in front of her face as Clark stood over her screaming. "Why are you crying?"
Clarked stormed upstairs and slammed the bedroom door. Maureen could hear the deadbolt turn and Clark was slamming things down on his dresser. She started when she heard something smash against the wall overhead.
Maureen sobbed loudly, gasping for breath, as she got up and set the coffee table upright. Her hands shook while she gathered up the flyers and supplies. She fished around in the couch for the remote control and turned the channel over to a cartoon. Mechanically, she folded, stapled, stamped and labelled a few more flyers before finally giving up. She crawled onto the sofa and lay down, cradling a pillow in front of her. She stared blankly at the television, sobbing quietly.
At 4:10, Clark came downstairs and looked at Maureen, who had falled asleep curled around the throw pillow. He touched her gently on the arm and she jumped up, startled and scared. Clark sat down beside her, putting his arm on her shoulder.
Maureen snuggled against his torso, trying to go back to sleep. Clark lifted her to her feet. "Let's go to bed. You'll be more comfortable there. I'll help you with your mailing in the morning."
"What time is it?"
"After four. C'mon." He led her upstairs to their room, leaving the lights and television on.
In his small apartment, Clark woke up in the middle of the night, briefly disoriented. He lay on his side in the dark, trying to orient himself, to remember where he was. Once he finally remembered, and realizing he now needed to go to the bathroom, he rolled over in bed, fully awake now. He saw a very small man, no more than 3 1/2 feet tall, the same size as the divider between his kitchen and dining room. The little man had a wrinkly face. He was hunched over, wearing a dirty little trench coat. His face looked like a caricature, like a drawing of Jimmy Durante, with the big nose and big eyes. He put up a stubby, swollen wrinkled hand and waved at Clark, then before Clark’s eyes, disintegrated, decrystallized. Clark immediately jumped out of bed and began sorting socks and underwear. It was 5 a.m. Within 10 minutes, he was dressed and out the door, headed for the fluorescent lights of an all-night laundromat.
The next day, Maureen loaded up a few signs and began to drive around town, collecting her friends. The five of them had planned to drive to the nuclear power plant outside of town. No big deal, just issue a few manifestos, stand across the street with some signs, show that not everybody wanted to go inside the plant for a sanitized "tour" promoting nuclear power. As an older plant, this one could potentially have some real problems, and Maureen and her friends wanted to open the debate--a debate that had seemed absent in this community.
Not too far from her hometown, maybe 150 miles or so, the power company had put up a nuclear plant, promising the residents that the lake, built to cool the plant, would provide recreational opportunities. There were images right out of the Simpons of people boating, fishing and swimming right next to the twin towers of the plant. The thought of swimming in a lake that was created for and fed into by a nuclear power plant made Maureen's skin crawl. Not surprisingly, once the plant was open, the residents were unable to use the lake, due to the proliferation of unsafe microorganisms in the overheated water.
All over the country, unsophisticated small towns had been talked into nuclear plants. This one was on the river. Maureen loved living in river towns, and in fact, had vowed never to live anywhere that didn't have a significant lake or river. And she couldn't stand the thought that this plant was pouring unsafe substances into her river, just like all of the other manufacturers that dotted the shores.
Maureen had sent out a press release a few days before indicating that the local "Greens" chapter would make an appearance at the plant. In reality, the Greens chapter thus far amounted to her issuing position statements and having her friends stuff envelopes. That she had a full carload of people gathered for this event was a major coup, she felt.
Once gathered, the local Greens chapter as now configured, decked out in jeans and tie-dye, knee to knee with their signs and posters in their laps, cranked up the radio and sped off along two-lane highways out to the plant. As they got there, they saw both sides of the road full of police cars--county sherrifs, local cops, state patrol. There were more police cars than there were people in her car. At the same time, she saw no media vans or reporters and this was, primarily, a photo opp. It wasn't like they had any plans at all to shut down the plant or anything. Maureen felt at once terrified and proud of her public relations abilities.
"Shit. Look at all the cops. They must have been expecting a lot of people. Maybe I overdid it with the royal 'we'." Maureen slowed down, but did not stop. One of the police cars, perhaps noticing the proliferation of bumper stickers such as "US out of North America" and "Lobotomies For Republicans--It's the Law" began to follow them in a slow-speed OJ Simpson type pursuit.
"What should we do? I wasn't prepared for this. I just thought we'd come out, read a statement, nobody would notice us, like usual, and then we'd go have pizza."
Everyone in the car murmured "I don't knows" and "what do you think." After a few miles, the police car turned around and headed back, confident no doubt that he had defended the power plant from left-wing nuclear terrorists.
They pulled over and turned the car off. Maureen turned around to talk to her backseat activists. "Ok, let's do this. We go back, and if we see any media, we get out and talk to them. Otherwise, we just keep going."
So the white Maverick turned back and rode back and forth in front of the plant a few times but they were unable to identify any photo opportunities. They headed back into town and stopped off at a diner for debriefing and chocolate shakes. The headline in the next day's paper read "Greens Turn Yellow."
"You fucking lying bastard! How can you sit there and say that shit?!"
"Mo?"
Maureen looked up at Clark. "Oh, Hi. Can you believe these guys?"
Clark leaned over and kissed Maureen on the top of the head. "I thought you were being raped or something."
"You're so melodramatic sometimes."
"I'm melodramatic? You're having a premature stroke watching Crossfire and I'm melodramatic? Mo, maybe you shouldn't watch so many of these things. This can't be healthy, even at your age."
"At my age? What should I be watching at my age? Bozo's Cartoon Circus?"
"I'm just saying, that you don't have to watch every news show just because it's there."
Maureen looked at Clark blankly, as if he were speaking Swahili. "That's what they want, Clark."
"There is such a thing as too much information."
"Sure. I can pretend it's not there and sit around watching sit-coms or docudramas and wait for them to show up at my door and drag me off for thought crimes. Or better still, they could find me so innocuous that they would ignore me completely because my brain is so addled and placated . . . "
"That's not going to happen."
"Tell it to a campesina or a Bosnian Moslem."
Maureen to continued to stuff and label envelopes without missing a beat. "I'm just saying," Clark continued, "that one day without being in a snit might actually be good for you. You push yourself so hard sometimes." Clark sat down on the sofa behind maureen and began rubbing her shoulders as she sat on the floor, back to the sofa, with a pile of flyers, a roll of printed mailing labels, and a sheet of stampls on the coffee table in front of her. She leaned her head back against his legs and sighed. Clark leaned forward and kissed her. "Tyranny will still be there tomorrow for you to battle."
Maureen snapped forward and began folding flyers again. "Don't patronize me, Clark. Just because you and your friends got tired and sold out . . . "
"Don't start on this again. If what I do is so shitty, why do you put up with me? Not everyone can throw themselves in front of traffic or chain themselves to the Armenian Embassy."
No. Some of us have to prop up capitalism while me make the pretense we're bringing it to its knees by writing positions papers and textbooks and putting on red face and doing our little Marxist minstrel show for the department heads."
Clark stood up and snatched a paper from Maureen's stack. "And how is this dead tree pulp going to bring fascism to its knees? Political assassinations through paper cuts?" Clark balled up the flyer and through it across the room. "I really want to know, Mo. WHY DO YOU STAY WITH ME? I'm so clearly inadequate. Am I your practice? If you can improve me, you can improve the world? Or is it just that you can't hang onto your rich Mommy and Daddy forever while you live in your fake poverty, so I'm the least onerous way for you to get a hot meal and a roof over your head and get fucked every once in a while?"
"Fuck you."
"Is that it? Does it make your clit hard when I recite Das Kapital? Or is it just the sexy way I draw out Hegel's dialectic?"
"Maybe I just wanted an A in poli sci."
Clark kicked the table away from Maureen. Stamps and papers went flying and the stapler landed with a thud inside the upended table.
"Why do you do this? You know we never dated while you were in my class. Why do you have to be such a bitch when you're mad?" Maureen cringed against the couch with her hands in front of her face as Clark stood over her screaming. "Why are you crying?"
Clarked stormed upstairs and slammed the bedroom door. Maureen could hear the deadbolt turn and Clark was slamming things down on his dresser. She started when she heard something smash against the wall overhead.
Maureen sobbed loudly, gasping for breath, as she got up and set the coffee table upright. Her hands shook while she gathered up the flyers and supplies. She fished around in the couch for the remote control and turned the channel over to a cartoon. Mechanically, she folded, stapled, stamped and labelled a few more flyers before finally giving up. She crawled onto the sofa and lay down, cradling a pillow in front of her. She stared blankly at the television, sobbing quietly.
At 4:10, Clark came downstairs and looked at Maureen, who had falled asleep curled around the throw pillow. He touched her gently on the arm and she jumped up, startled and scared. Clark sat down beside her, putting his arm on her shoulder.
Maureen snuggled against his torso, trying to go back to sleep. Clark lifted her to her feet. "Let's go to bed. You'll be more comfortable there. I'll help you with your mailing in the morning."
"What time is it?"
"After four. C'mon." He led her upstairs to their room, leaving the lights and television on.
In his small apartment, Clark woke up in the middle of the night, briefly disoriented. He lay on his side in the dark, trying to orient himself, to remember where he was. Once he finally remembered, and realizing he now needed to go to the bathroom, he rolled over in bed, fully awake now. He saw a very small man, no more than 3 1/2 feet tall, the same size as the divider between his kitchen and dining room. The little man had a wrinkly face. He was hunched over, wearing a dirty little trench coat. His face looked like a caricature, like a drawing of Jimmy Durante, with the big nose and big eyes. He put up a stubby, swollen wrinkled hand and waved at Clark, then before Clark’s eyes, disintegrated, decrystallized. Clark immediately jumped out of bed and began sorting socks and underwear. It was 5 a.m. Within 10 minutes, he was dressed and out the door, headed for the fluorescent lights of an all-night laundromat.
The next day, Maureen loaded up a few signs and began to drive around town, collecting her friends. The five of them had planned to drive to the nuclear power plant outside of town. No big deal, just issue a few manifestos, stand across the street with some signs, show that not everybody wanted to go inside the plant for a sanitized "tour" promoting nuclear power. As an older plant, this one could potentially have some real problems, and Maureen and her friends wanted to open the debate--a debate that had seemed absent in this community.
Not too far from her hometown, maybe 150 miles or so, the power company had put up a nuclear plant, promising the residents that the lake, built to cool the plant, would provide recreational opportunities. There were images right out of the Simpons of people boating, fishing and swimming right next to the twin towers of the plant. The thought of swimming in a lake that was created for and fed into by a nuclear power plant made Maureen's skin crawl. Not surprisingly, once the plant was open, the residents were unable to use the lake, due to the proliferation of unsafe microorganisms in the overheated water.
All over the country, unsophisticated small towns had been talked into nuclear plants. This one was on the river. Maureen loved living in river towns, and in fact, had vowed never to live anywhere that didn't have a significant lake or river. And she couldn't stand the thought that this plant was pouring unsafe substances into her river, just like all of the other manufacturers that dotted the shores.
Maureen had sent out a press release a few days before indicating that the local "Greens" chapter would make an appearance at the plant. In reality, the Greens chapter thus far amounted to her issuing position statements and having her friends stuff envelopes. That she had a full carload of people gathered for this event was a major coup, she felt.
Once gathered, the local Greens chapter as now configured, decked out in jeans and tie-dye, knee to knee with their signs and posters in their laps, cranked up the radio and sped off along two-lane highways out to the plant. As they got there, they saw both sides of the road full of police cars--county sherrifs, local cops, state patrol. There were more police cars than there were people in her car. At the same time, she saw no media vans or reporters and this was, primarily, a photo opp. It wasn't like they had any plans at all to shut down the plant or anything. Maureen felt at once terrified and proud of her public relations abilities.
"Shit. Look at all the cops. They must have been expecting a lot of people. Maybe I overdid it with the royal 'we'." Maureen slowed down, but did not stop. One of the police cars, perhaps noticing the proliferation of bumper stickers such as "US out of North America" and "Lobotomies For Republicans--It's the Law" began to follow them in a slow-speed OJ Simpson type pursuit.
"What should we do? I wasn't prepared for this. I just thought we'd come out, read a statement, nobody would notice us, like usual, and then we'd go have pizza."
Everyone in the car murmured "I don't knows" and "what do you think." After a few miles, the police car turned around and headed back, confident no doubt that he had defended the power plant from left-wing nuclear terrorists.
They pulled over and turned the car off. Maureen turned around to talk to her backseat activists. "Ok, let's do this. We go back, and if we see any media, we get out and talk to them. Otherwise, we just keep going."
So the white Maverick turned back and rode back and forth in front of the plant a few times but they were unable to identify any photo opportunities. They headed back into town and stopped off at a diner for debriefing and chocolate shakes. The headline in the next day's paper read "Greens Turn Yellow."
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
Chapter 6 of My Accursed Novel
First phone conversation with her parents:
“Clark has forwarded your mail to us.”
“Oh?” Maureen’s stomach knotted. Only gone a few weeks and he’s already clearing her out of his life.
“I guess he thought we’d make sure everything got to you. You know, that the bills got paid and everything.”
But if he loved me, if we were really a “we”, wouldn’t he keep paying our bills, she thought?
“He kept your clothes and books and things . . . for now, he said. You know, honey, I was never . . . well, I never approved of this thing with Clark. I mean, for God’s sake, he’s fifteen years older than you.”
“Twelve. And is there a point to this, Dad?”
“Well, still, don’t you think you owe him the decency . . . You should really call him, honey. He’s very upset. It sounds like you haven’t called or spoken to him at all. If you want to have a relationship with someone his age, you need to act like more of an adult.”
“I’ll drop him a card. I’m not ready to talk to anyone else just yet.”
“Is there anything we should know about it? He didn’t beat you up or anything, did he?”
“No . . . no. It’s not that.” Maureen became distracted picturing Clark puttering around the house, watching the door, running for the phone. Tears slipped from her eyes. “I’m just not ready to be found yet. Tell him I love him.”
“I’m not telling him that. You tell him.”
“I love you, too.” She hung up the phone and hoisted her backpack higher onto ther shoulder, stumbling down the sidewalk and back to the greyhound station. Her pass expired tomorrow. She would have to pick a far off destination, a 2 or 3 day trip to somewhere she could settle and work for a while to scare up a few bucks for the next leg of the trip.
“Clark has forwarded your mail to us.”
“Oh?” Maureen’s stomach knotted. Only gone a few weeks and he’s already clearing her out of his life.
“I guess he thought we’d make sure everything got to you. You know, that the bills got paid and everything.”
But if he loved me, if we were really a “we”, wouldn’t he keep paying our bills, she thought?
“He kept your clothes and books and things . . . for now, he said. You know, honey, I was never . . . well, I never approved of this thing with Clark. I mean, for God’s sake, he’s fifteen years older than you.”
“Twelve. And is there a point to this, Dad?”
“Well, still, don’t you think you owe him the decency . . . You should really call him, honey. He’s very upset. It sounds like you haven’t called or spoken to him at all. If you want to have a relationship with someone his age, you need to act like more of an adult.”
“I’ll drop him a card. I’m not ready to talk to anyone else just yet.”
“Is there anything we should know about it? He didn’t beat you up or anything, did he?”
“No . . . no. It’s not that.” Maureen became distracted picturing Clark puttering around the house, watching the door, running for the phone. Tears slipped from her eyes. “I’m just not ready to be found yet. Tell him I love him.”
“I’m not telling him that. You tell him.”
“I love you, too.” She hung up the phone and hoisted her backpack higher onto ther shoulder, stumbling down the sidewalk and back to the greyhound station. Her pass expired tomorrow. She would have to pick a far off destination, a 2 or 3 day trip to somewhere she could settle and work for a while to scare up a few bucks for the next leg of the trip.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Chapter 4 of My Accursed Novel
CHAPTER: SABBATICAL
At thirty-seven, Clark was finally starting to receive recognition for his work within the department. He felt the pressure to keep up this momentum. Yet, his work was becoming less engaging. He had always enjoyed academic research. Otherwise, he would not have opted for the university. Maureen was wrong to accuse him of hiding behind academia. Writing and doing research was, for him, a way to learn continuously, to connect his life to the past and dream about visions of the future. But now it was work . . . career advancement. Fifteen years ago he had railed against his own smug self-serving professors who had no life in them, the ones who were there putting in their time, publishing for prestige, not because, in his opinion, they had anything to say. Career advancement was not something Clark ever thought he would concern himself with. That was for men with two-syllable names like Michael. Or Robert. Or Charles, who was occasionally Charlie, but never Chuck. Sandy blonde-haired men named Michael who wore turtlenecks and blazers and went to faculty dinners to schmooze and be seen. Burnt out intellectuals with a home on the lake and an office no student was ever invited into. It was not for political radicals and revolutionaries who taught classes on anarchy and social upheaval in the twentieth century. Not for PhD's who wrote about the necessity of dissent in society and had their TAs over for beers on the weekend.
But lately Clark had picked up a new vocabulary. Not one that indicted the intellectual hegemony at the University. Not one that challenged the increasing conservatism on his campus. One of conciliation and peaceful coexistence, as the cold warriors had once agreed to. He knew these people didn't understand what he devoted his life to. It was just a cute childish political theory that he was clinging to for career survival. the Soviet Union had disbanded, socialism was dead. Liberalism as they understood it was dead. The more he started to "move up" within the department, as one of the few remaining "radicals" teaching political science, the more he proved them right.
Maybe it was the final nail in the coffin of the Left. Conservatism's grip was so tight, they could indulge the remaining irrelevant leftists on the faculty. Rush Limbaugh had once said that if he were running the country, it would mean that liberalism had completely died out, but he would want to keep a couple of liberals around in the universities to remind people that they once existed. On his more cynical days, Clark suspected that he fit that bill.
"Morning Clark. Will we see you at the party tonight?"
"Hi, Harry. What party?"
"Remember? Book reception? The Rise of Conservatism? We will see you there, won't we? We're counting on you to provide some lively debate. A little 'point-counterpoint'."
"Oh, yeah. Uh, look, Harry, some things have come up at the last minute. I'll try to make it, but don't be offended if I don't, o.k.?" Clark reached into his office mailbox and looked a few envelopes, trying not to look at the insulted stare of his colleague. He was in no mood today to provide that kind of academic gladiator entertainment. "I'm really sorry, Harry. I'd like to explain it to you, but I've got to get to class. You know how they are. If I'm not there, they'll use it as another excuse to duck out."
"Look, I know you're upset about Maureen. But Clark, you have responsibilities here. You can't just drop everything because you have a broken heart." Clark looked incredulous. "Besides," Harry squirmed, making a tactical shift, "it'll do you some good to get out and be among friends."
"Friends," Clark muttered absently. "Yeah, probably. Look I'll do what I can, but I can't make any promises. I really have to go now."
Clark decided to take some time off that summer for research. He needed to immerse himself in his subject for a while -- just for the sake of the project. He wanted to see if he could get back some of his enthusiasm. He walked into Harry's office with great deliberateness and stood over the desk, trying to convey to Harry the urgency of the projected.
"Well, you know we 're really counting on you," Harry had told Clark when he first heard his request. "A lot of other people already have their vacations and their own study projects planned," Harry said, leaning forward over his desk. Clark was fond of Harry, despite the fact that Harry was a career academic. Maybe even because of that. If Clark saw a younger version of himself in Maureen, as she had contended, he sometimes wondered if Harry represented his future.
Harry had brought Clark into the department. He hired Clark initially as a part-time instructor while Clark finished his dissertation. He had taken a particular interest in Clark's career and had supported him through his tenure application. Without Harry, Clark's career might have been very different. Clark appreciated this fact. But moreover, like everyone else in the department, Clark genuinely liked Harry.
"What's the matter, Clark? You haven't really been with us all semester. Since . . . well, Maureen left town, you haven't been coming to receptions, or seminars, or departmental meetings. Are you nursing your wounds, or is there something else I should know about?"
"No, I think it's just a little burnout. Have you looked at my request for a sabbatical this summer? I really need it."
"I have seen it but it's very short notice. A lot of other people have already put in for the summer off."
"They're just intro classes, Harry. Any Graduate Assistant could handle them. I may not be able to do this much longer if I don't get a break from it. Come on Harry, be a sport."Clark paused and leaned forward. “Why am I here, Harry? Because I’m brilliant? Because I provide a counterpoint to the rest of the staff?”
“Now you sound like Maureen.”
“What’s so wrong with that? Because she is occasionally right, does that make me her mouthpiece, Harry? I heard some kids . . . some students walking down the hall complaining about how much money they pay to go here and they can’t even get their professor’s attention. Is that why we’re here? To take their money, or the state’s money, so we can study and do research as if we’re the students?”
“What’s gotten into you, Clark? You know we’re a research university, not just an overgrown high school. What we do when we’re not in the classroom is just as important as when we are. What’s the matter with you?”
“I need time off. I’m no good to those kids right now. What the hell am I doing here, anyway? Nothing I do matters, Harry. Nothing.”
Clark slumped into the chair and stared at Harry.
"Let me see what I can do But if I approve this, you owe me, Clark. When you come back in September, you'd better sparkle."
On June 3rd, Clark gathered together his last armful of mail and walked out of the Arts and Sciences building. The warm air hit his face and called for him to follow it. There was even a scent in the air that brought back memories. He remembered his senior year, exams over, the week leading up to receiving his sheepskin in the dark hot nylon cap & gown. Then, a summer off to do whatever he pleased before facing the responsibilities of adulthood. He walked down the cement steps of the social sciences building and like that 22 year-old, threw his papers across the parking lot. They skipped across pavement and cars like stones over water. He was going to do all of the things he couldn't do 16 years ago.
That night, Clark worked furiously on his research which he had begun during the past semester. The role of intellectuals and artists as mercenaries in the Spanish Civil War, something he had been fascinated with for years. The intellectuals and artists, sleeves rolled up, fighting side by side against an evil enemy, in defense of their ideals. It made his own life seem squeamishly safe and secure. Tonight he felt consumed in his work. He wrote free form for hours, without referring back to sources or meticulously writing down documentation, as he had come to do for all of his "scholarly" articles. He would go back later and fill all that in. Now, he was writing with a passion for the subject, reinventing and conceiving the things he had been studying for years.
Maybe this summer he would spend more time on marches and protests and activities that the department had discouraged. An arrest or an incident, Harry was afraid, would jeopardize the reputation of the department and possibly endanger endowments and donations to the department from successful alumni. But he was on his own time, now, and he didn't have to worry about such things. He thought again of Maureen. She would be proud of his resolve. She would have a million different suggestions of things he could do. She had always made it her job to know about as many different groups and activities as possible, like a clearinghouse for all the campus activists and radicals. She would definitely have pointed him toward some of her own pet projects.
Clark sat up in his bed. there were papers beside him, like a sleeping lover passed out after a night's passion. Half open books had fallen to the floor. He rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 8:37a.m. He flipped the covers off and shuffled to the bathroom. He knew it would no longer be enough just to write about his fantasies or to act them out. For 15 years he had read about men and women of action, while he merely talked about it. While he told others about their exploits. He had infiltrated the system, as he once put it. But had he brought anyone else in there? Had he really changed anything, they way he said he would?
All of the subtle confrontations he'd had over the years were starting to come back to him. And he wasn't feel good-natured about them this time. He was angry at them and angry at himself for seeing it as just good natured debate. The resident radical. He used to revel in the notoriety. Now he was just suspicious of his reputation. He was sure they all saw him as an old hippie, someone whose ideals were cute at one time, but that obviously had not held up in the real world. If they had, he would be the head of the department now, and the world they taught their students about would be a very different one. They wouldn't be discussing the Gulf War or the notion that dissent was bad for morale. That distasteful theory of General Westmoreland's, actually blaming the dragging out of the Viet Nam war on the protesters and their effect on troop morale, had become an accepted part of the country's attitude toward war. If the hippies and the peace protesters had accomplished anything at all, it would be this theory, that was seen as an anachronism. Not the peace movement itself.
He remembered Maureen coming in, shaking but exhilarated, throwing her banner down on the floor and slamming her body into a chair at the kitchen table to begin writing a letter to the editor. "They almost beat the shit out of us. Three women. The fuckers."
"What? Are you ok?"
"Yeah. We showed up at their little 'Support the Troops' rally."
"Maureen!"
"Yeah, well, we almost chickened out. We sat at McDonald's and talked about it. It was scary. There were at least 50 people there. But we decided to tough it out." She started to laugh as the absurd memories came to the surface. "They were really friendly to us at first. Then we unrolled our banner and eventually someone stepped off the curb to read it and all hell broke loose."
"What did it say?"
"Same things as theirs, only a little different. Support the Troops. Bring them home alive."
Clark put his arms around Maureen who was scratching out a letter to the editor, pausing periodically to give him the details of the day. After someone had noticed the content of their banner, which was draped over an American flag, things got very heated. The three women--Maureen, her friend Cindy, slightly younger, 19 and barely 5 feet tall, and Donna, a woman slightly older than Clark, an original Sixties Radical they knew from the peace coalition--vainly tried to discuss their feelings with the pro-war protesters. Before they knew it, the three women were surrounded by a crowd. Donna was wrapped up, mummified in the flag, and the crowd was becoming increasingly angry and hostile. People were spitting on them and contesting their right to be associating an American flag with their banner. "That could be me," one young woman shouted angrily. "All the more reason," Maureen told Clark, "that you'd think she'd want this stupid thing stopped. Is this what equality brings us? To be equally stupid in our blind patriotism. Is this what I've been marching with the feminists for?"
"Baby steps." Clark rubbed Maureen's shoulders. They were tight like rubber bands stretched to the breaking point. She sat back in her chair for a moment and relaxed her back. Then, the tension broken, she snapped back forward to the paper in front of her. Then she got up and started pacing.
"Fuck that. Anyway we thought for sure these rednecks were going to beat us up. And the whole time, there was some guy there with a camera on us. Just us. I don't know. It wasn't a media camera. Police? FBI? Thank God someone stepped in and calmed it down a little bit. I don't even think about what could have happened. And then . . ." Maureen whipped around, pointing to Clark, "do you think the cops are any help? We've been assaulted. Assaulted. Three women and a mob of mostly men, and do you think they'll let us file a complaint? Hell no. We went back to Donna's house for a while and called the media to see if we could get some photos to corroborate. But, no, just as bad as the cops."
The last of a dying breed. He sometimes thought he saw amused nods and smiles when he began talking about his field. After all, it wasn't serious politics, the way you could talk about the Russian Revolution, or the Bill of Rights. It was all theory and idealism. Even the Russian Revolution had fallen apart. The Left was just a charming idealist anachronism, it's danger dismantled like an obsolete missile, or a memento brick left over from the Berlin Wall. And how could he argue with that? If they had succeeded, Maureen would not have had to go through that. She wouldn't have been still fighting the same battles Clark and his friends, and Donna and her friends, had already fought in their youths.
Clark looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like every other aging hippie professor at the damn university. Shoulder-length auburn hair. Trimmed beard with just a little bit of conspicuous shagginess to it so as not to look too groomed. Jeans and worn tennies with a tan sportcoat to dress it up. He pulled a pair of scissors and his razor out of the drawer and took a deep breath. He cut his beard and his hair down as close as he could, as large chunks of hair began falling to the floor. As more and more of his bare head began to appear, he found himself hoping that his skull was not too oddly-shaped, as he would have to live with this for quite some time. The razor buzzed and his skin tingled, shaving his face closer and touching up his nearly bald scalp.
Then he walked to the kitchen in his underwear, foraging for food he wouldn't have to prepare. He felt a restlessness that he didn't know how to cope with it. A call to action, but with nothing to be done. he needed to get out of the house. Do something different. Whatever that was. He gave up on any foraging to be accomplished in the kitchen. He returned to the bedroom, pulling on the pants and t-shirt he had left huddled in a pile a few hours earlier. He grabbed a backpack and some notebooks and headed out the door.
Down the street was a coffee shop. Clark had always meant to spend more time there, but never got around to it. He was not a neighborhood regular. Most of his coffee had come from the vending machine down the hall from his office. He walked toward the cafe now, stopping along the way to get a paper from a newsbox. He looked at the people around him. Many were street people who came in during the day to shake of the heat and have a place to sit for a little while, until the waitress kicked them out, anyway. Buoyed by his new life and his new resolve to do the right thing, he told the waitress, "Breakfast for everyone. I'm buying." It felt good. It fit with his new resolve about what he was going to become. Ironic that it was Maureen who had brought about this change in him and now she wasn't here to see it.
In his mind, it was always the fight that had ended it. The Last Straw Fight that so many couples have. Until then, everything seemed ok to him. Just a little creative tension. Romantically flawed, but the complemented each other. At least, he'd thought so. But maybe that was the root difference. Where he saw creative tension, intellectual differences among well-meaning people, she saw co-option. It still surprised him that she usually managed to maintain herself without coming across as too rigid or self-righteous. She challenged people to be more, without indicting them for what they already were.
Except, of course, for Clark. There were different standards for the people she was closest to. Of her brothers and sisters in arms she expected more. Purity, honesty. Anything else was too damaging to the work that had to be done. But for ordinary people, for the people she talked to on the street, like the ones in this coffee shop, she had compassion and kindness. She believed that they were on her side, but they just didn't know it.
"Listen to them on the bus. In the cafeteria. Are you that removed from everyone but your students?"
Clark had to admit, his students did not fill him with great hope. They were lazy. They were victims of television. They didn't do their work because they stayed out drinking all night.
"How is that different than not doing it because you took over the Dean's office and smoked pot all night."
"Oh come on. You can't be serious. It was very different. We believed in something. We weren't just numbing ourselves stupid."
"You were turning on, dropping out? Anyway, that's not all of us. And it's not the people out there. They hate the government. They want something different. They've just been programmed not to listen to us, because we're just 'radicals'. We don't need to educate them--we need to deprogram them."
Maureen believed in the proles, as they would have been called forty years ago. The ordinary people were not stupid, and in her mind, it was the radicals who were stupid for being so condescending. "Who wants to work with a bunch of people who think they're better than you? Who wants to live in a society that's run by a bunch of removed intellectuals who think you're stupid and lazy. How is that better than a bunch of corrupt businessmen who think you're stupid and lazy but at least sell you a tv or make a movie to take your mind off of it. They can't dance here, so they don't want our revolution."
Clark looked up to find a bill sitting on his table. He looked over at the waitress and smiled, turning over the slip of paper. $128.72. He pulled a credit card from his wallet and laid it on top of the bill, after writing in a $30 tip. Suddenly this picture seemed ridiculous. Patronizingly buying breakfast for the local down-and-out with his Gold Card. Very radical. Even this smallest action took no risk on his part. Fraud. Irrelevant. Dangerous. You're right, Maureen.
He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a notebook. He began making two lists. Everything he owned and everything he felt he needed. Soon, a third column emerged, precipitated by the television and VCR. It was important to keep up, to use very possible avenue to educate oneself, even if it was easy to use them for frivolity and escape. Thus, the first items under the "unsure" column. He tried to be ruthless in his determinations. Car? There was a bus stop right in front of his house. The city had a good transit system. Many people managed just fine without a car.
Artwork? Everyone needs some aesthetics in their lives. Bread and Roses, as the activists would say. He tried to discriminate between the things he was attached to, things that meant something to him, from the ones he had for show to prove his "good taste". Art for company's sake. He listed every book, every piece of music, every stick of furniture he owned in this same way, winnowing out those things he felt strongest about from the things he owned because he thought he ought to.
He walked mentally through the house, picturing each room. A too big house for just him. Two stories. Two bedrooms. A den, extra half-bath, slightly winding stairs. he had bought it when he was brought onto the faculty full-time as a reward for "making it." When he met Maureen later, and she moved in, he was happy to have a nice home to offer her. It was a place they could grow into, with family and friends. There was room for him to work and for her to have her meetings. Plenty of space for files and posters and placards and brochures and fax machines. When she left, a few months now, he tried to fill the space up again, reminding himself that it was his home long before it had become their home. Was he now ruthlessly taking stock of his own life or was he trying to find an excuse to run from the empty space she had left behind? He added the house to the sheet of paper, crossed it out, and moved it to a different column five times before making his final decision.
He had become so intent in this activity that when he looked up, two hours and twenty minutes later, he was disoriented. Was he in the kitchen? The school snack bar? Faculty lounge? He was still in the coffee house, with a hot cup of coffee that had been silently refilled several times throughout the morning. His credit card was still lying on top of the bill at the corner of the table, but with the bill now marked. Thank you. J
"Want anything else? You've been pretty engrossed in that."
Clark smiled up at her. Thank you but no. He gather his things into the backpack, took one more sip of coffee, and left, sent on his way cheerfully by the other waitresses' goodbye and have a nice days.
At home, Clark pulled out his lists and began to pack up the things on his keep list. He went to the store three blocks over to get more boxes. He set aside several rooms for the things that didn't make the cut. He pulled out the phone book and began paging through the yellow pages. Abortion. . . Accounting . . . Arts . . . Attorneys . . . Auction . . . He wrote down a few numbers. It was Saturday evening and he didn't expect to get ahold of anyone. He wrote down some numbers and put the paper up on the refrigerator. Then he went to the stereo and pulled out some music, some anachronistic idealistic music and went upstairs to grab his books and his notes from the previous evening.
Clark rolled over and touched Maureen. They were walking on a plaza among dozens of other people. The sun was shining and the trees, planted among the cobblestone, gave off a comforting shade. Maureen giggled like she used to when they first met, when he said something particularly witty or sarcastic. She blushed the first time he talked about Helen Caldicott's notions of nuclear missiles as phallic symbols and unfortunate terms like Minuteman and hard and soft silos. She giggled that way now, and he brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. He pulled her chin toward him to kiss her, putting his hand on her shoulder, and she stood up abruptly, dashing off into the crowd as if she were completely unaware of him.
Clark chased her up the steps and slants of the plaza, but she kept walking, quickly and with purpose, without looking back. She was not trying to taunt him or even get away from him, but no matter how quickly Clark walked he couldn't catch up to her. Eventually she disappeared completely and Clark stood still, looking around for her, with a kiss still sitting on his lips, wishing for its intended.
Clark got out of bed and immediately began making phone calls. By the next day, he was loading up his "keep" list into a U-Haul. In the afternoon, around three o'clock, as Clark was nearly done, a woman in her middle forties pulled up in front of the house and walked to the front door, carrying a clipboard and a briefcase. Clark invited her in the house and showed her around. She began making an inventory of everything. She tried to engage Clark in discussion about the relative value of each item, but he wanted no part of it. After about an hour, he signed some papers, handed the woman his house keys and said that he would be in touch with her after the auction to collect the proceeds.
"Oh, I almost forgot these", he said, turning around and handing her the keys to his car, a perfectly ordinary burgundy two-door sedan parked in the garage.
"Are you sure about this?" The woman asked him. "Where are you going? Leaving the country or something?"
"Not at the moment," Clark smiled. "Just cutting out the unnecessaries. You know--live simply, that others may simply live."
The woman looked at Clark for a moment, not sure what he was talking about, and then went back to her list. "Well, whatever you're doing, Good luck. Where should we send the check?"
"Ill be in touch."
It was the first and only apartment Clark had looked at -- a cheap, furnished efficiency with the bedroom doubling as the living room. It was on the other side of town from all the other professors, and was also away from where most of the students lived. Only his books and clothes would remind him of his "old" life. He didn't forward his phone or mail.
Clark began to unpack the small moving truck, which was the size of a pick-up truck and camper top. He used the cupboards in the kitchen to hold his books, having kept only a few dishes and pots. He carefully unwrapped a few framed posters and paintings and hung them around the apartment. Taking stock of his wardrobe--tweeds, workshirts, jeans and tennies. He went down to the Goodwill store to pick up some t-shirts and denim jackets--a little less of the "uniform" he had worn for the past ten years, a uniform that had allowed him respectability while still feeling like he hadn't totally given in.
Clark hadn't been on a city bus in years. The following morning, having unpacked the truck, he returned it to the rental agency and walked over to the corner stop. He decided to ride the bus for its full route just to see where it went. He tried to listen to conversations around him. He wanted to see these people the way Maureen had talked about them. There was a mother pulling a crying child onto the seat roughly. "I'll give you something to cry about. Quiet!" A couple of people smelled like alcohol. Clark double checked his watch. 9:43 a.m.
A few students, between 18 and 20, Clark guessed, with heavy laden backpacks, got on the bus. New students always took too many books with them to class on their first day. Clark mused that any other summer, he would be handing out a syllabus right now, trying to keep the attention of 18 year-olds who were still accustomed to having their summers off and who would much rather be playing frisbee at the beach than learning about the differences between communism and capitalism, and who, citing Stalin and the arms race, would passionately deny that it was purely economic theory.
Over the course of the summer Clark rode all the buses just to see where they went. He tried to use the time to sit and think, without feeling pressure to work on his book or be somehow productive with his time off. He found himself in parts of town he had never been in before--housing projects and gentrified GI subdivisions. He didn't always like the people he saw on the buses. At the back of the bus, teenage boys peppered their language with "mother fucker" the way someone might use common pronouns. Young mothers yelled at screaming children, tired from too many trips from preschool to social worker to shopping mall to grocery store. The children would squeal over things they wanted from afar but couldn't have, missing out on toys and candy and everything else their hearts thought they desired. In ten years, maybe these children would be sitting at the back of the bus yelling motherfucker this and motherfucker that.
Then there were the just-too-loud, usually insipid, conversations, the ones that drown out any other thoughts Clark might have been trying to have. He would hold his breath, feel his chest tighten and his face clench, trying not to jump up and scream for everyone to shut up. These were not the ennobled working class Clark had been so passionately wanting to set free. He wasn't sure these people were ready to accept power, to be emancipated.
Clark worked through the summer and his manuscript began to take shape as a book. The direction of the work was starting to change in light of his experiences in the real world. He was starting to think that Maureen was right about him, but it no longer bothered him. Maybe it was all abstract to him, but he was starting to wonder if he could have sustained his belief in freedom and liberation all this time if he had been living this life for the past twenty years. He wasn't sure he would be able to see humanity's salvation in the small, rare acts of insight and decency of ordinary people that Maureen had always lectured him about. He was becoming much more sympathetic to the notions of the Bolsheviks--the idea that a small, organized group of revolutionaries would have to lead the masses until they were ready to lead themselves. Clark's research was now leading him to try to discover exactly where and when it went wrong. The betrayal of the revolution was the problem, not its lack of populism, as Maureen would have countered.
Every day Clark tried to remind himself of the life he wanted to live. He wanted the distinction between his old and new lives to be clear cut. The book was helping him figure a lot of things out for himself, to work out some questions in his own mind. But it was still all theory. Where would it lead him? This wasn't exactly a romance novel, a mass market paperback he was writing. It would be published by and for the same people he had just walked away from. At best, it might become a textbook in a some junior or senior level class. It was just a small puddle jump from the life had was leading three months ago. It was not Hemingway fighting Franco in a Barcelona trench.
At thirty-seven, Clark was finally starting to receive recognition for his work within the department. He felt the pressure to keep up this momentum. Yet, his work was becoming less engaging. He had always enjoyed academic research. Otherwise, he would not have opted for the university. Maureen was wrong to accuse him of hiding behind academia. Writing and doing research was, for him, a way to learn continuously, to connect his life to the past and dream about visions of the future. But now it was work . . . career advancement. Fifteen years ago he had railed against his own smug self-serving professors who had no life in them, the ones who were there putting in their time, publishing for prestige, not because, in his opinion, they had anything to say. Career advancement was not something Clark ever thought he would concern himself with. That was for men with two-syllable names like Michael. Or Robert. Or Charles, who was occasionally Charlie, but never Chuck. Sandy blonde-haired men named Michael who wore turtlenecks and blazers and went to faculty dinners to schmooze and be seen. Burnt out intellectuals with a home on the lake and an office no student was ever invited into. It was not for political radicals and revolutionaries who taught classes on anarchy and social upheaval in the twentieth century. Not for PhD's who wrote about the necessity of dissent in society and had their TAs over for beers on the weekend.
But lately Clark had picked up a new vocabulary. Not one that indicted the intellectual hegemony at the University. Not one that challenged the increasing conservatism on his campus. One of conciliation and peaceful coexistence, as the cold warriors had once agreed to. He knew these people didn't understand what he devoted his life to. It was just a cute childish political theory that he was clinging to for career survival. the Soviet Union had disbanded, socialism was dead. Liberalism as they understood it was dead. The more he started to "move up" within the department, as one of the few remaining "radicals" teaching political science, the more he proved them right.
Maybe it was the final nail in the coffin of the Left. Conservatism's grip was so tight, they could indulge the remaining irrelevant leftists on the faculty. Rush Limbaugh had once said that if he were running the country, it would mean that liberalism had completely died out, but he would want to keep a couple of liberals around in the universities to remind people that they once existed. On his more cynical days, Clark suspected that he fit that bill.
"Morning Clark. Will we see you at the party tonight?"
"Hi, Harry. What party?"
"Remember? Book reception? The Rise of Conservatism? We will see you there, won't we? We're counting on you to provide some lively debate. A little 'point-counterpoint'."
"Oh, yeah. Uh, look, Harry, some things have come up at the last minute. I'll try to make it, but don't be offended if I don't, o.k.?" Clark reached into his office mailbox and looked a few envelopes, trying not to look at the insulted stare of his colleague. He was in no mood today to provide that kind of academic gladiator entertainment. "I'm really sorry, Harry. I'd like to explain it to you, but I've got to get to class. You know how they are. If I'm not there, they'll use it as another excuse to duck out."
"Look, I know you're upset about Maureen. But Clark, you have responsibilities here. You can't just drop everything because you have a broken heart." Clark looked incredulous. "Besides," Harry squirmed, making a tactical shift, "it'll do you some good to get out and be among friends."
"Friends," Clark muttered absently. "Yeah, probably. Look I'll do what I can, but I can't make any promises. I really have to go now."
Clark decided to take some time off that summer for research. He needed to immerse himself in his subject for a while -- just for the sake of the project. He wanted to see if he could get back some of his enthusiasm. He walked into Harry's office with great deliberateness and stood over the desk, trying to convey to Harry the urgency of the projected.
"Well, you know we 're really counting on you," Harry had told Clark when he first heard his request. "A lot of other people already have their vacations and their own study projects planned," Harry said, leaning forward over his desk. Clark was fond of Harry, despite the fact that Harry was a career academic. Maybe even because of that. If Clark saw a younger version of himself in Maureen, as she had contended, he sometimes wondered if Harry represented his future.
Harry had brought Clark into the department. He hired Clark initially as a part-time instructor while Clark finished his dissertation. He had taken a particular interest in Clark's career and had supported him through his tenure application. Without Harry, Clark's career might have been very different. Clark appreciated this fact. But moreover, like everyone else in the department, Clark genuinely liked Harry.
"What's the matter, Clark? You haven't really been with us all semester. Since . . . well, Maureen left town, you haven't been coming to receptions, or seminars, or departmental meetings. Are you nursing your wounds, or is there something else I should know about?"
"No, I think it's just a little burnout. Have you looked at my request for a sabbatical this summer? I really need it."
"I have seen it but it's very short notice. A lot of other people have already put in for the summer off."
"They're just intro classes, Harry. Any Graduate Assistant could handle them. I may not be able to do this much longer if I don't get a break from it. Come on Harry, be a sport."Clark paused and leaned forward. “Why am I here, Harry? Because I’m brilliant? Because I provide a counterpoint to the rest of the staff?”
“Now you sound like Maureen.”
“What’s so wrong with that? Because she is occasionally right, does that make me her mouthpiece, Harry? I heard some kids . . . some students walking down the hall complaining about how much money they pay to go here and they can’t even get their professor’s attention. Is that why we’re here? To take their money, or the state’s money, so we can study and do research as if we’re the students?”
“What’s gotten into you, Clark? You know we’re a research university, not just an overgrown high school. What we do when we’re not in the classroom is just as important as when we are. What’s the matter with you?”
“I need time off. I’m no good to those kids right now. What the hell am I doing here, anyway? Nothing I do matters, Harry. Nothing.”
Clark slumped into the chair and stared at Harry.
"Let me see what I can do But if I approve this, you owe me, Clark. When you come back in September, you'd better sparkle."
On June 3rd, Clark gathered together his last armful of mail and walked out of the Arts and Sciences building. The warm air hit his face and called for him to follow it. There was even a scent in the air that brought back memories. He remembered his senior year, exams over, the week leading up to receiving his sheepskin in the dark hot nylon cap & gown. Then, a summer off to do whatever he pleased before facing the responsibilities of adulthood. He walked down the cement steps of the social sciences building and like that 22 year-old, threw his papers across the parking lot. They skipped across pavement and cars like stones over water. He was going to do all of the things he couldn't do 16 years ago.
That night, Clark worked furiously on his research which he had begun during the past semester. The role of intellectuals and artists as mercenaries in the Spanish Civil War, something he had been fascinated with for years. The intellectuals and artists, sleeves rolled up, fighting side by side against an evil enemy, in defense of their ideals. It made his own life seem squeamishly safe and secure. Tonight he felt consumed in his work. He wrote free form for hours, without referring back to sources or meticulously writing down documentation, as he had come to do for all of his "scholarly" articles. He would go back later and fill all that in. Now, he was writing with a passion for the subject, reinventing and conceiving the things he had been studying for years.
Maybe this summer he would spend more time on marches and protests and activities that the department had discouraged. An arrest or an incident, Harry was afraid, would jeopardize the reputation of the department and possibly endanger endowments and donations to the department from successful alumni. But he was on his own time, now, and he didn't have to worry about such things. He thought again of Maureen. She would be proud of his resolve. She would have a million different suggestions of things he could do. She had always made it her job to know about as many different groups and activities as possible, like a clearinghouse for all the campus activists and radicals. She would definitely have pointed him toward some of her own pet projects.
Clark sat up in his bed. there were papers beside him, like a sleeping lover passed out after a night's passion. Half open books had fallen to the floor. He rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 8:37a.m. He flipped the covers off and shuffled to the bathroom. He knew it would no longer be enough just to write about his fantasies or to act them out. For 15 years he had read about men and women of action, while he merely talked about it. While he told others about their exploits. He had infiltrated the system, as he once put it. But had he brought anyone else in there? Had he really changed anything, they way he said he would?
All of the subtle confrontations he'd had over the years were starting to come back to him. And he wasn't feel good-natured about them this time. He was angry at them and angry at himself for seeing it as just good natured debate. The resident radical. He used to revel in the notoriety. Now he was just suspicious of his reputation. He was sure they all saw him as an old hippie, someone whose ideals were cute at one time, but that obviously had not held up in the real world. If they had, he would be the head of the department now, and the world they taught their students about would be a very different one. They wouldn't be discussing the Gulf War or the notion that dissent was bad for morale. That distasteful theory of General Westmoreland's, actually blaming the dragging out of the Viet Nam war on the protesters and their effect on troop morale, had become an accepted part of the country's attitude toward war. If the hippies and the peace protesters had accomplished anything at all, it would be this theory, that was seen as an anachronism. Not the peace movement itself.
He remembered Maureen coming in, shaking but exhilarated, throwing her banner down on the floor and slamming her body into a chair at the kitchen table to begin writing a letter to the editor. "They almost beat the shit out of us. Three women. The fuckers."
"What? Are you ok?"
"Yeah. We showed up at their little 'Support the Troops' rally."
"Maureen!"
"Yeah, well, we almost chickened out. We sat at McDonald's and talked about it. It was scary. There were at least 50 people there. But we decided to tough it out." She started to laugh as the absurd memories came to the surface. "They were really friendly to us at first. Then we unrolled our banner and eventually someone stepped off the curb to read it and all hell broke loose."
"What did it say?"
"Same things as theirs, only a little different. Support the Troops. Bring them home alive."
Clark put his arms around Maureen who was scratching out a letter to the editor, pausing periodically to give him the details of the day. After someone had noticed the content of their banner, which was draped over an American flag, things got very heated. The three women--Maureen, her friend Cindy, slightly younger, 19 and barely 5 feet tall, and Donna, a woman slightly older than Clark, an original Sixties Radical they knew from the peace coalition--vainly tried to discuss their feelings with the pro-war protesters. Before they knew it, the three women were surrounded by a crowd. Donna was wrapped up, mummified in the flag, and the crowd was becoming increasingly angry and hostile. People were spitting on them and contesting their right to be associating an American flag with their banner. "That could be me," one young woman shouted angrily. "All the more reason," Maureen told Clark, "that you'd think she'd want this stupid thing stopped. Is this what equality brings us? To be equally stupid in our blind patriotism. Is this what I've been marching with the feminists for?"
"Baby steps." Clark rubbed Maureen's shoulders. They were tight like rubber bands stretched to the breaking point. She sat back in her chair for a moment and relaxed her back. Then, the tension broken, she snapped back forward to the paper in front of her. Then she got up and started pacing.
"Fuck that. Anyway we thought for sure these rednecks were going to beat us up. And the whole time, there was some guy there with a camera on us. Just us. I don't know. It wasn't a media camera. Police? FBI? Thank God someone stepped in and calmed it down a little bit. I don't even think about what could have happened. And then . . ." Maureen whipped around, pointing to Clark, "do you think the cops are any help? We've been assaulted. Assaulted. Three women and a mob of mostly men, and do you think they'll let us file a complaint? Hell no. We went back to Donna's house for a while and called the media to see if we could get some photos to corroborate. But, no, just as bad as the cops."
The last of a dying breed. He sometimes thought he saw amused nods and smiles when he began talking about his field. After all, it wasn't serious politics, the way you could talk about the Russian Revolution, or the Bill of Rights. It was all theory and idealism. Even the Russian Revolution had fallen apart. The Left was just a charming idealist anachronism, it's danger dismantled like an obsolete missile, or a memento brick left over from the Berlin Wall. And how could he argue with that? If they had succeeded, Maureen would not have had to go through that. She wouldn't have been still fighting the same battles Clark and his friends, and Donna and her friends, had already fought in their youths.
Clark looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like every other aging hippie professor at the damn university. Shoulder-length auburn hair. Trimmed beard with just a little bit of conspicuous shagginess to it so as not to look too groomed. Jeans and worn tennies with a tan sportcoat to dress it up. He pulled a pair of scissors and his razor out of the drawer and took a deep breath. He cut his beard and his hair down as close as he could, as large chunks of hair began falling to the floor. As more and more of his bare head began to appear, he found himself hoping that his skull was not too oddly-shaped, as he would have to live with this for quite some time. The razor buzzed and his skin tingled, shaving his face closer and touching up his nearly bald scalp.
Then he walked to the kitchen in his underwear, foraging for food he wouldn't have to prepare. He felt a restlessness that he didn't know how to cope with it. A call to action, but with nothing to be done. he needed to get out of the house. Do something different. Whatever that was. He gave up on any foraging to be accomplished in the kitchen. He returned to the bedroom, pulling on the pants and t-shirt he had left huddled in a pile a few hours earlier. He grabbed a backpack and some notebooks and headed out the door.
Down the street was a coffee shop. Clark had always meant to spend more time there, but never got around to it. He was not a neighborhood regular. Most of his coffee had come from the vending machine down the hall from his office. He walked toward the cafe now, stopping along the way to get a paper from a newsbox. He looked at the people around him. Many were street people who came in during the day to shake of the heat and have a place to sit for a little while, until the waitress kicked them out, anyway. Buoyed by his new life and his new resolve to do the right thing, he told the waitress, "Breakfast for everyone. I'm buying." It felt good. It fit with his new resolve about what he was going to become. Ironic that it was Maureen who had brought about this change in him and now she wasn't here to see it.
In his mind, it was always the fight that had ended it. The Last Straw Fight that so many couples have. Until then, everything seemed ok to him. Just a little creative tension. Romantically flawed, but the complemented each other. At least, he'd thought so. But maybe that was the root difference. Where he saw creative tension, intellectual differences among well-meaning people, she saw co-option. It still surprised him that she usually managed to maintain herself without coming across as too rigid or self-righteous. She challenged people to be more, without indicting them for what they already were.
Except, of course, for Clark. There were different standards for the people she was closest to. Of her brothers and sisters in arms she expected more. Purity, honesty. Anything else was too damaging to the work that had to be done. But for ordinary people, for the people she talked to on the street, like the ones in this coffee shop, she had compassion and kindness. She believed that they were on her side, but they just didn't know it.
"Listen to them on the bus. In the cafeteria. Are you that removed from everyone but your students?"
Clark had to admit, his students did not fill him with great hope. They were lazy. They were victims of television. They didn't do their work because they stayed out drinking all night.
"How is that different than not doing it because you took over the Dean's office and smoked pot all night."
"Oh come on. You can't be serious. It was very different. We believed in something. We weren't just numbing ourselves stupid."
"You were turning on, dropping out? Anyway, that's not all of us. And it's not the people out there. They hate the government. They want something different. They've just been programmed not to listen to us, because we're just 'radicals'. We don't need to educate them--we need to deprogram them."
Maureen believed in the proles, as they would have been called forty years ago. The ordinary people were not stupid, and in her mind, it was the radicals who were stupid for being so condescending. "Who wants to work with a bunch of people who think they're better than you? Who wants to live in a society that's run by a bunch of removed intellectuals who think you're stupid and lazy. How is that better than a bunch of corrupt businessmen who think you're stupid and lazy but at least sell you a tv or make a movie to take your mind off of it. They can't dance here, so they don't want our revolution."
Clark looked up to find a bill sitting on his table. He looked over at the waitress and smiled, turning over the slip of paper. $128.72. He pulled a credit card from his wallet and laid it on top of the bill, after writing in a $30 tip. Suddenly this picture seemed ridiculous. Patronizingly buying breakfast for the local down-and-out with his Gold Card. Very radical. Even this smallest action took no risk on his part. Fraud. Irrelevant. Dangerous. You're right, Maureen.
He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a notebook. He began making two lists. Everything he owned and everything he felt he needed. Soon, a third column emerged, precipitated by the television and VCR. It was important to keep up, to use very possible avenue to educate oneself, even if it was easy to use them for frivolity and escape. Thus, the first items under the "unsure" column. He tried to be ruthless in his determinations. Car? There was a bus stop right in front of his house. The city had a good transit system. Many people managed just fine without a car.
Artwork? Everyone needs some aesthetics in their lives. Bread and Roses, as the activists would say. He tried to discriminate between the things he was attached to, things that meant something to him, from the ones he had for show to prove his "good taste". Art for company's sake. He listed every book, every piece of music, every stick of furniture he owned in this same way, winnowing out those things he felt strongest about from the things he owned because he thought he ought to.
He walked mentally through the house, picturing each room. A too big house for just him. Two stories. Two bedrooms. A den, extra half-bath, slightly winding stairs. he had bought it when he was brought onto the faculty full-time as a reward for "making it." When he met Maureen later, and she moved in, he was happy to have a nice home to offer her. It was a place they could grow into, with family and friends. There was room for him to work and for her to have her meetings. Plenty of space for files and posters and placards and brochures and fax machines. When she left, a few months now, he tried to fill the space up again, reminding himself that it was his home long before it had become their home. Was he now ruthlessly taking stock of his own life or was he trying to find an excuse to run from the empty space she had left behind? He added the house to the sheet of paper, crossed it out, and moved it to a different column five times before making his final decision.
He had become so intent in this activity that when he looked up, two hours and twenty minutes later, he was disoriented. Was he in the kitchen? The school snack bar? Faculty lounge? He was still in the coffee house, with a hot cup of coffee that had been silently refilled several times throughout the morning. His credit card was still lying on top of the bill at the corner of the table, but with the bill now marked. Thank you. J
"Want anything else? You've been pretty engrossed in that."
Clark smiled up at her. Thank you but no. He gather his things into the backpack, took one more sip of coffee, and left, sent on his way cheerfully by the other waitresses' goodbye and have a nice days.
At home, Clark pulled out his lists and began to pack up the things on his keep list. He went to the store three blocks over to get more boxes. He set aside several rooms for the things that didn't make the cut. He pulled out the phone book and began paging through the yellow pages. Abortion. . . Accounting . . . Arts . . . Attorneys . . . Auction . . . He wrote down a few numbers. It was Saturday evening and he didn't expect to get ahold of anyone. He wrote down some numbers and put the paper up on the refrigerator. Then he went to the stereo and pulled out some music, some anachronistic idealistic music and went upstairs to grab his books and his notes from the previous evening.
Clark rolled over and touched Maureen. They were walking on a plaza among dozens of other people. The sun was shining and the trees, planted among the cobblestone, gave off a comforting shade. Maureen giggled like she used to when they first met, when he said something particularly witty or sarcastic. She blushed the first time he talked about Helen Caldicott's notions of nuclear missiles as phallic symbols and unfortunate terms like Minuteman and hard and soft silos. She giggled that way now, and he brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. He pulled her chin toward him to kiss her, putting his hand on her shoulder, and she stood up abruptly, dashing off into the crowd as if she were completely unaware of him.
Clark chased her up the steps and slants of the plaza, but she kept walking, quickly and with purpose, without looking back. She was not trying to taunt him or even get away from him, but no matter how quickly Clark walked he couldn't catch up to her. Eventually she disappeared completely and Clark stood still, looking around for her, with a kiss still sitting on his lips, wishing for its intended.
Clark got out of bed and immediately began making phone calls. By the next day, he was loading up his "keep" list into a U-Haul. In the afternoon, around three o'clock, as Clark was nearly done, a woman in her middle forties pulled up in front of the house and walked to the front door, carrying a clipboard and a briefcase. Clark invited her in the house and showed her around. She began making an inventory of everything. She tried to engage Clark in discussion about the relative value of each item, but he wanted no part of it. After about an hour, he signed some papers, handed the woman his house keys and said that he would be in touch with her after the auction to collect the proceeds.
"Oh, I almost forgot these", he said, turning around and handing her the keys to his car, a perfectly ordinary burgundy two-door sedan parked in the garage.
"Are you sure about this?" The woman asked him. "Where are you going? Leaving the country or something?"
"Not at the moment," Clark smiled. "Just cutting out the unnecessaries. You know--live simply, that others may simply live."
The woman looked at Clark for a moment, not sure what he was talking about, and then went back to her list. "Well, whatever you're doing, Good luck. Where should we send the check?"
"Ill be in touch."
It was the first and only apartment Clark had looked at -- a cheap, furnished efficiency with the bedroom doubling as the living room. It was on the other side of town from all the other professors, and was also away from where most of the students lived. Only his books and clothes would remind him of his "old" life. He didn't forward his phone or mail.
Clark began to unpack the small moving truck, which was the size of a pick-up truck and camper top. He used the cupboards in the kitchen to hold his books, having kept only a few dishes and pots. He carefully unwrapped a few framed posters and paintings and hung them around the apartment. Taking stock of his wardrobe--tweeds, workshirts, jeans and tennies. He went down to the Goodwill store to pick up some t-shirts and denim jackets--a little less of the "uniform" he had worn for the past ten years, a uniform that had allowed him respectability while still feeling like he hadn't totally given in.
Clark hadn't been on a city bus in years. The following morning, having unpacked the truck, he returned it to the rental agency and walked over to the corner stop. He decided to ride the bus for its full route just to see where it went. He tried to listen to conversations around him. He wanted to see these people the way Maureen had talked about them. There was a mother pulling a crying child onto the seat roughly. "I'll give you something to cry about. Quiet!" A couple of people smelled like alcohol. Clark double checked his watch. 9:43 a.m.
A few students, between 18 and 20, Clark guessed, with heavy laden backpacks, got on the bus. New students always took too many books with them to class on their first day. Clark mused that any other summer, he would be handing out a syllabus right now, trying to keep the attention of 18 year-olds who were still accustomed to having their summers off and who would much rather be playing frisbee at the beach than learning about the differences between communism and capitalism, and who, citing Stalin and the arms race, would passionately deny that it was purely economic theory.
Over the course of the summer Clark rode all the buses just to see where they went. He tried to use the time to sit and think, without feeling pressure to work on his book or be somehow productive with his time off. He found himself in parts of town he had never been in before--housing projects and gentrified GI subdivisions. He didn't always like the people he saw on the buses. At the back of the bus, teenage boys peppered their language with "mother fucker" the way someone might use common pronouns. Young mothers yelled at screaming children, tired from too many trips from preschool to social worker to shopping mall to grocery store. The children would squeal over things they wanted from afar but couldn't have, missing out on toys and candy and everything else their hearts thought they desired. In ten years, maybe these children would be sitting at the back of the bus yelling motherfucker this and motherfucker that.
Then there were the just-too-loud, usually insipid, conversations, the ones that drown out any other thoughts Clark might have been trying to have. He would hold his breath, feel his chest tighten and his face clench, trying not to jump up and scream for everyone to shut up. These were not the ennobled working class Clark had been so passionately wanting to set free. He wasn't sure these people were ready to accept power, to be emancipated.
Clark worked through the summer and his manuscript began to take shape as a book. The direction of the work was starting to change in light of his experiences in the real world. He was starting to think that Maureen was right about him, but it no longer bothered him. Maybe it was all abstract to him, but he was starting to wonder if he could have sustained his belief in freedom and liberation all this time if he had been living this life for the past twenty years. He wasn't sure he would be able to see humanity's salvation in the small, rare acts of insight and decency of ordinary people that Maureen had always lectured him about. He was becoming much more sympathetic to the notions of the Bolsheviks--the idea that a small, organized group of revolutionaries would have to lead the masses until they were ready to lead themselves. Clark's research was now leading him to try to discover exactly where and when it went wrong. The betrayal of the revolution was the problem, not its lack of populism, as Maureen would have countered.
Every day Clark tried to remind himself of the life he wanted to live. He wanted the distinction between his old and new lives to be clear cut. The book was helping him figure a lot of things out for himself, to work out some questions in his own mind. But it was still all theory. Where would it lead him? This wasn't exactly a romance novel, a mass market paperback he was writing. It would be published by and for the same people he had just walked away from. At best, it might become a textbook in a some junior or senior level class. It was just a small puddle jump from the life had was leading three months ago. It was not Hemingway fighting Franco in a Barcelona trench.
Saturday, February 02, 2013
Break up cliches
A little something I dashed off today:
These are the Days of the Last Straw, when the weight of the world, our destinies, rest upon every single repetition of every fight over the years Every bottle, every wrapper left open, every toilet seat left up, one wrong move could set the whole thing off, trigger the end of the world. An exaggeration, but definitely the end of worlds that we know, the end of a way of life, sending each of us off in a different direction, paths potentially parallel for a while, only to wildly diverge, to wildly wander, to deviate at some future unnamed point in time.
Is there a mechanism to have this break and not repeat every break that every one else has ever had through time? Is it possible to have a break that is not the same as every other break that I have had? Is it possible to do it all originally, without the use of a thesaurus to try to avoid the break up clichés? Can one stay with someone long enough to discover the originality in breakups, or are we doomed to repeat them, performatively, performing the exact same phrases that came before us, as in a ritual, as in an un-marriage.
And so in our grief, even then, we are modern, worried about how to have an original thought, an original feeling. Perhaps this is what gets us through the process, distracts us from what matters or makes us see that in our clichés, this is what happens to everyone and it isn’t as tragic as we had originally thought.
These are the Days of the Last Straw, when the weight of the world, our destinies, rest upon every single repetition of every fight over the years Every bottle, every wrapper left open, every toilet seat left up, one wrong move could set the whole thing off, trigger the end of the world. An exaggeration, but definitely the end of worlds that we know, the end of a way of life, sending each of us off in a different direction, paths potentially parallel for a while, only to wildly diverge, to wildly wander, to deviate at some future unnamed point in time.
Is there a mechanism to have this break and not repeat every break that every one else has ever had through time? Is it possible to have a break that is not the same as every other break that I have had? Is it possible to do it all originally, without the use of a thesaurus to try to avoid the break up clichés? Can one stay with someone long enough to discover the originality in breakups, or are we doomed to repeat them, performatively, performing the exact same phrases that came before us, as in a ritual, as in an un-marriage.
And so in our grief, even then, we are modern, worried about how to have an original thought, an original feeling. Perhaps this is what gets us through the process, distracts us from what matters or makes us see that in our clichés, this is what happens to everyone and it isn’t as tragic as we had originally thought.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
I felt briefly sad this morning, set aside my anger as I imagined you afraid. Remembered when you called every minute, we couldn’t get enough of each other. It’s sad not to love you anymore.
You said I said you did you said you said you would you didn’t i did not i never you said.
I wish I knew how to leave without pronouncements.
When I think of you I want to go to New York
Paris
Chicago
somewhere large and exotic and far away
You do not listen and you do not speak
I cannot know you nor become known
When I’m lonely I got to public places to call you
(empty house)
To be angry with you is to be mad at the world.
I dreamed of a widow with five beds.
I dreamed of a woman with 5 beds.
I dreamed of a woman with two heads.
(spinster)
I dreamed of a widow with five
In love with the light brown boys
I wait for fate to take me away from him. The though of giving him up hurts too much. I lack
time
distance
the will
to walk away. I don’t want to walk away. I can’t make it better and I can’t walk away. I will say something that I cannot take back.
It’s not like a gunshot or a disease. Always we try to pinpoint “the thing” that hurts us the most, but unlike physical death, it’s a lot of different causes, indications.
After a fight, the need to connect with someone else, the desperate need to prove that someone can still love you. That you are still worthy., The fear of losing others, of losing everyone. I want to break up with the whole world at once.
She wandered the streets wondering if she had more crying to do.
She went to the movies every day for nine days. Permission to cry without having to know why, without summoning logic and analyzing feelings and understanding and explaining herself.
To lose what sustains you is to lose everything.
She sat alone, seeing a strong man walk by who might be menacing, who might look safe but prove otherwise, lurching toward her. Sometimes she wondered if she would resist the rape. The murder. She could look at a man and feel his thumbs at her voice box, his big fingers straddling her throat and in her wondering, closed her eyes to surrender like a drowning, flailing her arms involuntarily but sinking into the earth accepting her body as a grave being dug a coffin being built, to surrender and be quiet.
We’re all afraid that our detractors are right about us. We want to be worthy of our eulogies but we fear it will be our enemies critics who will have the last word instead.
I need to go where there is no music.
Maybe we need love because we need god. We see the divinity in other people and desire communion, transmission.
All the great mystics were epileptic. Is god a disease? Or are we pre-wired, hotwired with the commission?
Love is radioactive. It dies in half-lives and never fully extinguishes.
You said I said you did you said you said you would you didn’t i did not i never you said.
I wish I knew how to leave without pronouncements.
When I think of you I want to go to New York
Paris
Chicago
somewhere large and exotic and far away
You do not listen and you do not speak
I cannot know you nor become known
When I’m lonely I got to public places to call you
(empty house)
To be angry with you is to be mad at the world.
I dreamed of a widow with five beds.
I dreamed of a woman with 5 beds.
I dreamed of a woman with two heads.
(spinster)
I dreamed of a widow with five
In love with the light brown boys
I wait for fate to take me away from him. The though of giving him up hurts too much. I lack
time
distance
the will
to walk away. I don’t want to walk away. I can’t make it better and I can’t walk away. I will say something that I cannot take back.
It’s not like a gunshot or a disease. Always we try to pinpoint “the thing” that hurts us the most, but unlike physical death, it’s a lot of different causes, indications.
After a fight, the need to connect with someone else, the desperate need to prove that someone can still love you. That you are still worthy., The fear of losing others, of losing everyone. I want to break up with the whole world at once.
She wandered the streets wondering if she had more crying to do.
She went to the movies every day for nine days. Permission to cry without having to know why, without summoning logic and analyzing feelings and understanding and explaining herself.
To lose what sustains you is to lose everything.
She sat alone, seeing a strong man walk by who might be menacing, who might look safe but prove otherwise, lurching toward her. Sometimes she wondered if she would resist the rape. The murder. She could look at a man and feel his thumbs at her voice box, his big fingers straddling her throat and in her wondering, closed her eyes to surrender like a drowning, flailing her arms involuntarily but sinking into the earth accepting her body as a grave being dug a coffin being built, to surrender and be quiet.
We’re all afraid that our detractors are right about us. We want to be worthy of our eulogies but we fear it will be our enemies critics who will have the last word instead.
I need to go where there is no music.
Maybe we need love because we need god. We see the divinity in other people and desire communion, transmission.
All the great mystics were epileptic. Is god a disease? Or are we pre-wired, hotwired with the commission?
Love is radioactive. It dies in half-lives and never fully extinguishes.
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