Chapter 2 of My Accursed Novel

CHAPTER: Revolution and Social Upheaval in the Twentieth Century.


Clark put away his books and papers and went upstairs for the night. It was four o'clock in the morning, and he had a class to teach in six hours. He still hadn't heard from Maureen since she had left the previous evening. His sleep was filled with visions of her being pulled into vans or beat up old station wagons by men with cold or wild looking eyes. Every time the phone rang he jumped, terrified it would be Maureen's parents or the police. Or Maureen to say she wasn't coming back.
Right now, though, even that call would be welcome. He could talk her out of that one. He just had to get the chance.



After an hour, Maureen still hadn't turned on the light in her room. With the curtains open, she a view of a giant lighted rodent, a gopher on a pole. She began to jump up and down on the bed, her red spirals flopping up and down. She stopped for a moment to take off her tennis shoes. Then came the jeans. And the t-shirt. In a bra and panties, she climbed back up on top of the bed and jumped some more, holding the remote control in her hands turning on the television and running the channels while she jumped. She had come t the motel room with only the clothes on her back and whatever was in her backpack. She wasn't sure what she running to or from, and so wasn't sure when she would go back. She spread out on the floor, on all fours, and did a yoga cat stretch, arching her back out and in. She sat for a few minutes with her back to the bed, perfectly straight and closed her eyes, but jumped up almost immediately and grabbed her notebook. She had the urge to write down everything she could possibly remember all at once.



until my life falls away and I can float through a world



until my life falls away and I can float through a world



until my life falls away and I can float through a world




I want to sit perfectly still and meditate until my life falls away and I can float through a world where nothing I know exists, until there are no rallies or causes or classes or internships or obligations, no cliques and no one to impress and no one who can make me feel inferior about my choices and my mortal coil which I've never given much mind to yet is asserting itself so much into my psyche as inadequate, as ugly, as not good enough, I want to find emptiness and I want it now.



Maureen had been a student in one of Clark's senior seminars. He was 33 at the time, and she 21. She was just shorter than medium height, with dark red spiral curls and brown eyes. She schlepped to class every day in faded jeans, tennis shoes, more often than not knotted together and slung over her shoulder in warmer weather, a second hand olive drab army jacket, and a new slogan on her t-shirt every day. Emma Goldman. "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." Gloria Steinem. "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." "U.S. Out of North America". She loved to confuse people, to make people laugh, but also to think. Somehow, she managed not to come across too preachy or self-righteous. Not that she had throngs of apostles. No one had those anymore. But everyone did seem to like her, even if she was unable to turn that sense of goodwill into an organizing tactic.


Maureen was always in motion. She organized anti-ROTC rallies on campus. She led the anarchic shout-down of G. Gordon Liddy's campus speech. She idolized Abbie Hoffman and she desperately want to be able to create something new. When she talked, he didn't just smile reminiscently indulgent of her enthusiasm. She was the new prophet on the block, the one with heaven still in her eyes. The Shaman, whose vision Clark could enter into.



Clark and Maureen kept their friendship at a distance while she was in the class. He wanted no hint of impropriety, and she didn't want the uncertainty of whether or not she had earned her grade. But the spark between them and their mutual admiration was clear. When the semester ended, they continued to get together for coffee. When they started dating, many in the department suggested, not entirely to themselves, that it was something other than an "honest relationship." They accused Clark of trying too hard to stay an "eternal student"-- a way to deny that he was a grown-up and professional member of the University and not just some young person observing the whole process from the outside.


On the other side was Maureen, chiding him for hiding behind safe Theoretical University. He always contended that was reaching young people like her, raising up the next generation to follow her leadership.


"Clark, no revolution has ever been won in the universities," exasperated, her hands waving in the air, conducting her words like an imaginary orchestra. "That;s why the 60s 'radicals' couldn't sustain it. Once they had to live their rhetoric, out in the real world, they couldn't apply it. Look at the Russian intellectuals, the provisional government. The Bolsheviks, the revolutionaries of action, ran right over them. The Bolsheviks were elitists every bit as much as the Tsarists, Clark, but they acted. They fucking got things done. Look at the Spanish Civil War, where the intelligentsia actually did get down in the trenches and fight, and they still couldn't pull out a victory."


"That was much more complicated than George Orwell or Ernest Hemingway running over to Spain with a musket. Besides, they lost, remember? Intellectuals don't always make good soldiers."


"Exactly. Soft intellectuals make lousy warriors. Theory is the death of the revolution, Clark. It's in the coal miners and the workers and the peasants dying for the king. There's no revolution at the blackboard, on the page. . . " She became more animated, slapping her palm down on table, leaning forward and looking into his eyes, as if to hypnotize him into seeing her point.


"Slow down. You don't need to convert me. I'm already on your side."


"Yes. And no."


"What does that mean?"


"Whoever is not with us is against us."


"How are you going to build your movement with that kind of divisive rhetoric? Not everyone can take up arms. We all have our role to play. Revolution with no reason, no theory behind it, is just mob violence."


"It sucks the life out of us, Clark. Don't you see that? We're spread too thin as it is. We can't afford to lose one person to inaction. Theory allows you to sit on your ass patting yourself on the back and saying 'Of course I'm a good radical. I teach about Emma Goldman.'"


In Maureen's eyes Clark was just trying to make his views more palatable to the head of the college and his colleagues across the ideological aisle. As a true liberal, and someone who now had a stake in his position within the University, he was expected to appreciate and understand everyone else's viewpoint. Maureen didn't always find this tolerance reciprocated. And she hated sharing his attention with the receptions and the journal publishers and sometimes even the students. If Clark had been reduced to a charming anachronism, Maureen could feel the eyes of Clark's fellow faculty virtually patting her on the head, thinking "I was 20 once, too". She wanted to stop him from becoming what he hated, what at her age, he had sworn never to become.


"If I don't teach about Emma Goldman, then how will people who come after me know about her. Where would you be if you hadn't had me as a professor?"


"Living with my girlfriends?"


"I'm serious, Mo. There is no shame in what I do. It's important to make sure this knowledge gets passed down. And whether you agree with me or not, it's important that I manage to keep my position in the department. It's important that I be able to teach what I care about."


"But at what cost? Even if you're a joke?"


"Who am I a joke to?"


"Students, other professors."


"Is that what you think? That everyone thinks I'm a joke?"


Maureen slumped back into the booth and sighed. "No. Not yet."


"What the hell are you talking about? I work very hard, who thinks I'm a joke? You?"


"I've just seen it before."


"What have you seen before? You're twenty-five years old."


"Fuck you. That doesn't mean that I haven't seen things. That I don't understand what's happening. You know, it's bad enough I have to put with this crap from Harry and the other faculty, but if you don't respect me . . . "


"Well, Mo, you don't seem to respect me."


"That's not what I'm saying. If you'll let me finish . . . ?"


Clark nodded at Maureen gingerly. "Fine, go ahead."


"I just don't want people to be able to say that you teach one thing and live another. That's all. If you're always kissing the asses of people who work against you just to get some tiny little crumb thrown to you, what kind of credibility do you have to talk to your students about changing the world?"

Chapter 1 of my accursed novel

That is what I have come to call the project that I have worked on intermittently and/or has sat in a drawer, on my computer, etc. for the past 25 years. I think that should I ever finish it, which I probably won't, maybe that will be the title. My Accursed Novel. For now, to have something to post, and maybe even get some comments, I think I will serialize it here. I would especially like comments such as "it's not so bad . . . ." But criticism, particularly the constructive kind, but whatever, is also welcomed, nay, highly encouraged!

CHAPTER: THE STARLIGHT MOTEL


I am a woman escaping.


Maureen looked around at the room that had become her "halfway house". A sterile, quiet, beautiful motel room with a white wood desk. She felt like the battered women she had spent two semesters working with as a volunteer at the shelter. She was grateful for a moment of peace, the breather. Unlike those women, what was chasing Maureen was not going to come bursting through the door with clenched knuckles and a red angry face. It would come out of her own mouth, and so she tried to remain silent. It would conjure in her sleep, and so she hadn't slept in days. This space belongs only to me, she thought, only to me. The way the ducks and the ice own the river in the winter.


I am a shaman, she scribbled quickly into the notebook she had picked up at Walgreen's on the way over. I have come back from walking death. I heave been empty among my own bones and felt nothing. Not numbness. That has its own feeling. I am empty, fleshless, and now I dance because I have come back and because I have bones that creek and bend that have reconnected themselves in the right sequence and because I am not a bee pollinating dandelions, attaching myself to other people. I've come a long way to get here and tonight I can finally sleep in a strange bed.
Freedom is its own squandering. It's why we probably need marriages and church and school and government. Left with absolute freedom, we sit in a stupor, our minds racing over the things we could be doing, while we sit inanimate in indecision. Or we flit from one thing to the next. From tv to dancing to praying to singing to writing to whatever comes next. Our free self becomes an adolescent sleepover at the house of the family with neatest stuff. We know our freedom can't last forever, and so we try to do everything at once and pretend our freedom has no limits. And so we never get around to what matters most.


Jack Kerouac would have called it her Sansara self--this false world. But eventually, Maureen tired herself out and began to feel lonely. She got up from the bed, where she had been lying down and scribbling in the dark, and turned on the lights and the television. She put her sweatshirt back on, but not her pants and stepped quietly out of her room and went down the hall for a soft drink from the machine, careful not to let the door close completely behind her, as she had left the key somewhere under a pile of clothes and notebooks and whatever else was in her backpack. She went back to her room undetected and closed the door. She could hear someone else's television through the wall.


Motels like this were where you came for illicit affairs and she thought about meeting someone in the hallway. She focused on one of the men she had seen earlier at the ice machine. She slipped her hand inside her panties and began to imagine what might happen if . . .


She removed her t-shirt and leaned against the side wall. She felt sexy and melodramatic and unreal, like a character in a play. Maybe Blanche DuBois. She looked own at the round white parts of her breasts cupped by the lace, lighted by the moon. She wanted all of the men she had ever been in love with, who had not loved her in return, to be there now, to see her sitting in the half-light, half-dressed. She picked up the remote and turned off the television and laid back, running her hands along her body. She was torn between her sensual self-exploration and the desire to get up and write some more of her thoughts down.


Masturbation, it occurred to her, as she rubbed her hands over her belly, is like a form of meditation. You have to empty your mind of day to day things and focus on your breathing, your clitoris, your hands. It's no good if you conjure a conversation you had last week, or a Jerry Lewis movie, or start making a grocery list or worrying about your unpaid phone bill. With a partner, there is always someone to focus on, someone to pull you back. But alone, you need a Buddhist's self-control to stay focused.


She picked up the remote and turned the television back on. She turned sideways on the bed and propped her feet against the wall for balance, so she could still look at the television while she touched herself. All cheap motels have a dirty movie channel, she told herself, and when she came upon channel 43, she put the remote down and focused on the movie on the screen, thinking again about the man at the ice machine.


Maureen got up and looked outside the window. This was the kind of motel room women disappeared from. A busy, urban road that had narrowed into a slightly rundown section of town, it was nestled a long driveway's length from the road. It was not too far from the lake and still had a sign advertising color televisions in the room.
Once inside though, the room was suprisingly clean. There were a few cigarette burns on the bedspread and some permanent ink stains on the formic and faux wood desk. It was not the kind of hotel with its own stationary and a pristine bible in the bedstand.


The mysterious second door led not to an indoor lobby with a whirlpool, the way it might at a Ramada Inn, but to a cement balcony that, were it not lacking a ladder, might just as easily have been a fire escape. Maureen stepped out the back door and eased herself onto the cement. She sat with her back to wall, her knees arched, and feet flat on the cement. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Without realizing it, she began talking outloud, answering people she would see later in the week, or replaying conversations that had already happened. She sighed and "shushed" herself, leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes once more.


Maureen could hear fighting out in the hallway and someone pounding on the door of the room next to her. She started to lift herself from the balcony, to go back into her room and lock the door. Instead she relaxed her legs and sat back down. After a few minutes the manager came stomping down the hall and the noise subsided.


Eventually, Maureen became bored with her self and wanted to talk to someone. She ran down the list of people she knew, pacing slowly around the room. It occurred to her that of all the people she knew, she didn't feel close enough to any of them to call and talk to them about what had happened.


She started to take inventory of her "friends". Who could she call now? She tried to think of someone she would want to talk to right now, or someone she could crash with while she decided what to do next.