Proteus

 

 

     After graduation from college I had no hopes, just a funny feeling in my legs as if I were standing on the  edge of a roof. It seemed too easy to send out 120 letters to school districts all over the US and hope for a repy. It was. Only two answered, one from The Southern Colorado Ute Reservation and the other from a high school in Winslow, Maine. The Indian Reservation had a certain appeal. Maine too for that matter. Both were far from home and both places seemed to foster a reputation for independence. I thought of the bragging rights that came with living in an out of the way place. They delivered special status, like that given to those that kept exotic pets. On the reservation I could play a modern version of Natti Bumpo. I am still a kid really. My life had been softly hammered in post WWII America, on the sycamore lined streets of the Down Neck section of Newark, New Jersey. Eventually I came to be at odds with it, a place from which to run. I ran leaving Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Little Theatre behind. A log cabin on a hillside called to me like a Siren. Perhaps my estrangement came with my removal from the neighborhood at a young age. In seventh grade I was shuffled off to Morristown, to be taught by the Benedictine Monks. Morristown, where you could still see people on the square in bib overalls. After my enlistment, Stephanie Crecca, the gum snapper on the corner, started to look like a stranger. In fact, the entire neighborhood I once knew began to look different. However, the Garden State and its preoccupations were still with me. After all, our leaden past is tied to our tails. One day when asked what the state motto should be, a friend replied, without a second thought, “I deserve this”. I could see it on the license plates. That just seemed to define the Garden State. Finally four years of in loco parentis at college in the 60’s will reduce anyone's hat size.

          I never wanted to be a cowboy as a child. Better an Indian. No particular tribe, because I didn’t know much about Indians but when we played I let the others be cowboys and pioneers. It felt better to play the victim. That says a lot about me. To be bound and humiliated by buckaroos or ranchers was where it was at, comfortable on the losing, but eminently just side. Better to be going extinct than be a living fossil. The Indian would always be more wise than the true barbarian and honest too. Ranchers were entitled drunken killers. That is because Million Dollar Movie had shaped my idea of the Wild West to the beat of a tom tom fourteen times a week. I saw clouds of dust,  bandits, prairie schooners, victorian whores in bloomers and frilly decollete, a few Chinese sprinkled like jimmies on an ice cream cone, yipping injuns who could shoot a rifle while riding a pinto upside down without a saddle, bullets darting about saloons like a swarm of angry wasps, wheels flying off stagecoaches,,, stagecoaches flying off cliffs, an enormous herd of black horses, twenty pintos, and three or four white well behaved stallions, and a million barrels a day of highly combustible visual fuel. However, I was attracted to the fantasy about living with the Indians on the Ute Reservation about whom I knew nothing. I tendered the apologetic narrative held, by all those who did not own a mining company, the idea that all indigenous peoples were disaffected yet proud and noble.

     It was near the end of the school year when I scuffed across the street from the dormitory to the apartment of Mr. Colgate, my chronically inebriated English teacher who I will always credit for introducing me to Thomas Mann. Mr. Colgate was a barrell chested man always well appointed with thinning blondish hair, originally from Scranton but who sported a hint of an English accent. He never seemed to smile and always took a deep breath puffing up before he spoke in a nasal tone, not unlike Terry Thomas. Colgate seemed a kindly man, dulled over the years by liquor and had long ago given up on unworthy students. Colgate had paid his dues I imagine. He had become resolved to his life splitting his waning years between Beefeaters, a checkered past, and English classes,  and for many of those classes he did not appear. One time he arrived in a deep state of inebriation and began speaking in garbled tones about Rikki Tikki Tavi and merry mince pie. Father Connell miraculously appeared and with the utmost respect escorted him back to his apartment. The priests seemed to respect this aging gentleman. They seemed to forgive his sins perhaps because years ago he had enlivened any event with his knowledge and worldly adventures. 

     That day he and I had been slated to discuss a novella on the reading list, Death In Venice. I knocked on the blue gray door. Colgate answered head held high, neatly dressed in a double breasted blue blazer with gold buttons and hard pressed gray pants. The edge of a maroon hanky, like a kangaroo baby,  peeked out from his blazer pocket. He resembled Lord Mounbatten. Colgate did not make eye contact. He never did. It was as if he didn’t know me. I presented him with a brook trout I had caught early that morning near Buttermilk Falls which was graciously accepted. He bid me a place on the sofa and went to the kitchen to guard the fish then seated himself on a high backed brown leather chair studded with tarnished brass tacks. The floor was covered in a reddish oriental rug. Directly behind him were two elepant tusks crossed at the tips framing the ebony mask of a sleek almond headed African woman. Colgate sighed as he sat and crossed his legs looking like an English grandee very out of place in this Pennsylvania town. It was rumored he was gay.

     “So you are an angler”, he queried. “Fly or spinning rod?”

     In my most respectful voice I replied, “Fly fishing Sir, it’s quiet and elegant. The wind and the water are soothing.”

     At the word elegant he perked up a bit. He scrunched up his lips. “Yes as a youth I often angled in the Lackawanna river, but the the trout I remember best were in Wessex. The Piddle at Throop. The water wells up through the calcite, purified holy water from Panagia’s chapel.”

    He lost me after Lackawanna. I dumbly repeated, “Lackawanna.”

    “Yes, in the Lenni Lenape tongue it means stream that forks.”

     I desperately needed to steer this dialogue towards something in which I was familiar or expose my profound ignorance so I asked like a perfect ingenue, “Mr Colgate, do you think Indians were noble, more noble than us?”

     “Noble? It comes from the latin nobilitas which means celebrity.”

     I hoped he would begin a new search and overlook my childish manifestations.

     “Heavens I don’t know about their nobility measured against another civilization.

     He pronounced the word “civilization with his most nasal English accent.

     “The accepted perception was that because they were the preverbial underdogs that has afforded them much consideration,, and rightly so. They went about asking forgiveness from deer and bison after the hunt and this does show reverence, not unlike the Baka Mbotaki hunters of the Congo,, or a hymn to the fallen stag from the Carmina Gadelica.”

     “And reverence is something cultivated”, I added.

     “Yes it is, yes it is." After a short pause he recaptured his previous thought. “And Aristotle ambled about in a toga thinking about dolphins and authority.”

      I had to chime in for the mention of Aristotle provoked a familiar image. “My uncle Toz strutted about in a tyrolean hat with a tiny feather in the brim, blue patent leather shoes, and only speaking of good chorizo.

     He leaned a bit forward in his throne, ignoring my statement, probably thinking it was a might grimy. I felt a little stupid wishing I could retract the line.

     He continued. “More noble? It comes down to the basic question of what really is more noble, a buffalo skin robe, a ghanian schmock, or a mohair suit? Lazy minds do need to project onto some groups certain traits don’t they? There is a “good” feeling that comes from taking the supposed noble side especially when we operate DWI. Driving while ignorant that is. Accomplishment does not come from the comfort of an easy chair. However, son, ignorance unlike stupidity is a curable disease.”

     I felt this was directed towards me but I settled on the idea that my question had just triggered a flood of memories he harbored. He began again and to my surprise began a long dissertation.

     “Projection of us onto them reeks of artificiality given the heinous transgressions committed by all cultures. Look what the Germans did by juggling the words nobility and degeneracy. These terms became their devices to implement control. The idea that one race is naturally more noble than another can be folly if you really study history. Humans may be noble or despicable or both at the same time.  Human character is a jumbled mystery. Learning what is valuable after sifting is the hard part. It is a fact that indigenous people viewed the world differently than the Europeans. I own this tree verses I am using this tree. It’s all about the details of ownership. In the hazy distant past when we all ambled in skins everyone considered dirt sacred. How could you not. It was the primordial source material from which spang both corn and bison hides."

     He gathered himself and continued. "Sometime after the last ice age there was a deviation. Western culture redirected the word sacred towards only what pertained to religion and religion was closely associated with a king or a pope. One day, an ambitious William The Better declared himself Lord Of The Rivers, Oaks and Tubers for that matter. In addition, I will protect you against James, Lord Of The Fauna. Euro land ownership started as the noble’s route to great power and a means to personal wealth, possibly a chance to franchise it all and become The True Man For All Seasons. All was all bundled neatly into the alliance of politics, banking, and battle. This land is my land, it’s not your land, get off of my land, this land wasn’t made for you but me. In indigenous culture ownership was viewed as held in common by a tribe. There were chiefs but they didn’t proclaim their second hand tattered divinity. When the first englishmen landed on this northern shore, they couldn’t find a written counterpart to ownership rights, some kind of  bible, or certifiable dogmas in indigenous culture so they deemed it to be uncivilized. If they found something they burned it to bolster their perception of, excuse my language here, the “bare asses” as barbarians."

     I thought, what they did realize however was that they had stumbled upobn a vast new realm, readily available resources, and permission to exploit all of it in the name of God and King. Just kick back something to the permission givers.Their eyes as well as their codpieces bulged at the sight of virgin forests, wild turkeys, stags and a horizon without seeming limits. 

     "All were overwhelmed with sacrosanction. “After all our hardship, and if no evil doth befall us, for we have left so much behind, Dear Lord impart unto us the strength to commence anew,,,, now let us pray for a split second,,,, for we, the anxious must begin work, yes to convert this largesse of Indian nothingness into something before it someone else does. Raise thy heads and behold the Lord’s bounty!”  

     Then Colgate seamlessly shifted into an Uncle Tom accent. “Now I gots to say my brethren, now we all gonna make it that wants to and ‘iffin ya don’t ain’t nobody’s fault but yer own. The King had armed them with Christian mission, canons and powder, and they didn’t know it but God had armed them as well with filth and millions of loyal soldiers in the form of disease. They were crawling with microscopic soldiers, and hadn’t changed their garments in months but they did have seeds, a calendar, and their steel axes were sharp. How were the “other”,,, conquistadors,,, the southern catholic servants of God different? They were just as serious justifying their New World monkey trials and inquisitions by decreeing them,,, well them. Who came first? We do. However the catholic counterparts from the far south too were,,,, armed with mediterranean erudition, a less sober lot than the stoic northern sons of Calvin for soon after arrival the good friars planted grapes and the Iberians and their black slaves turned sugar cane into rum, but both were clever enough to make big business with the New World ,,, helping them to ease the burden of paying their rent on time.”

      He offered his hands palms up, as if about to recite the Lord’s Prayer and raised his eyes heavenward. “And upon the endless stars it is written, the story without beginning or end, where the present and the past gather and proceed concurrently, the juggling of composition. The future is merely a lame guess, a quorum of dilettante vapors. It is a world of perfect fantasy, crystal clear, distilled from a precise juxtaposition of pearlescent words that stand out like a comet yet only few raise their heads to see.

     In the winter I often think about the plump furrow faced Inuit who came first to the new world in their skin canoes. My mind often wanders now. Eskimos lived tens of thousands of years in the harsh arctic. They became the penultimate survivalists with a minimum of tools,,, like snakes,,, but their invention became stalled in thick pools of blubber ,, that illuminated those dark desolate winters and of course they spent that bleak time comfy in an igloo or hut, under a pile of furs eating dried seal, procreating in silence so as not to wake the naarlunggiarsuk.”

     Here he stopped for a moment then reignited.

     “I know this image isn’t the pinnacle of human civilization. It is the ignoring of the beautiful convoluted western canon of doubt and contradiction that haunts me.The world took another path towards transubstantiation headlong into celluloid expanse of large mammaries and thirty easy payments. Esquimos had little free time. Their world was harsh, like medieval peasants, their overlord fourty below zero and a Polar Bear. Even if you are born a genius you might only be able to focus your talents inventing a better spear or a new word for some type of ice. The Huichols of Mexico, a prime example of a culture without ambition. They may have become victims of their own potions that overwhelmed the spark of culture in spiritualism. They took peyote, made intricate beaded images, and walked great distances. They made pilgrimages from Wixarika, to the Pacific Ocean in Nayarit. Over 800 kilometers the way the crow flies. Peyote sustained them physically and spiritually. Crazy injuns,,,,,,,, I think not! Could I ever see like they? The Huichols defied the human norm that features ambition as the only thing on the menu. No great cities, no social organization beyond their rituals. On the other hand some tribes stopped walking and marshaled their goals. It may be a paradox but some settled their ranges, organized food production, dug trenches, and erected great cities. Look to the rich gothic cathedrals if you want inspiration. Was it the nature of peyote or something in their character?”

     My mind began to wander. I thought of a sermon I had written  for a literature class two years prior. It was titled, A Brief History of The World: 

     Those who stopped and rooted were not satisfied with only architectural spaces. They kept on inventing things that changed humanity for the better in as many ways as those inventions created more ambiguity. Capitalism emerged from the swamp of ideas, like the Creature From The Black Lagoon, only this time he wins the girl. Mind theives invented organized religion, a direct descendant of magic, to mesmerize the populace with flickering candles, ceremony,, and strange languages,, and the people were easy for they always yearned for the possibility inherent in mystery,, and so education was given to them and they were happy to serve. Electricity was harnessed by a guy in knickers, a good thing, but when combined with car and house payments, and my God,, insurance then everyone forgets how to walk in a dream state being held like hostages. Then inventors came up with the idea of marketing, the right to purchase, and a subtle created stress, designed obsolescence, and of course the need decorate ourselves in neon. They invented George Washington Day sales and finally credit, making "everyman” just a very very very little like Pierre Dupont", until the end of the month anyway, and then came Keynesian economics, the big panacea, where supply and demand revealed themselves as two big dials in a government office somewhere,, and all this before we lost neanderthal man. Something seemed missing in a world where everything was done for them. Their children began to talk back. All this mayhem to fool the restless into thinking that there was order in the chaos,,, and of course "the few" knew it was just another shovelful of ledgerdemain, but by then it was too late for Farenheit 451 was already approaching the library. They had captured us as we treaded water within the sonambulant state of our very own hot tub until we couldn't hold on anymore. Now all the the populace had to do was to work twenty-five jobs to pay for an ever burgeoning system. Well that's the world in a nutshell, maybe not in order. Yet there it hovers still, like a romantic encounter, the choice to downsize, but for the majority it’s too late and all follow The First Church of “gimme two yesterday”. 

     I tuned in once again to Mr. Colgate.

     .“I make no recommendations. It’s futile to return to some more “primitive” state. If one were a dictator, they’d be lynched, by the unified force of the people and the mafia. The mystic perspective requires heavy mental mobilization in another direction. If we all took peyote and wandered about pasting a heavy spirituality over the present world there would be chaos. Humanity is condemned to “step forward” now each day into the breach.

      “Can you imagine hunting the thundering bison herd, the powerful grizzly, the dark Cape Buffalo or the mighty pachyderm? The last one is a name that invokes something bacterial, not majesty and danger. The hunter who faced these was in great peril. Touch The Clouds was such an example,, a great hunter and a great warrior, perhaps even a diplomat,,  however, to think all the indigenous people were noble is a vulgar fantasy.They bickered like the Jesuits and Franciscans. The plains indians set fire to the praire in order to send a grand herd of buffalo to the precipice. They enslaved women and eliminated  competition.Their story is human in every aspect.”

     I don’t remember when Colgate ended his oracion because I was in and out of my own thoughts but what he said prompted me to think of my dilemma of wether to put on a headdress or a watchcap. When you are up to ass in naivete your thinking is unclear. I thought indigenous culture a higher caliber. It was the historical narrative I was taught. I assumed that culture would instill in me a watch dog conscience for combatting moral and environmental injustice.

     I received a solid B+ in his English course. I think it was the trout, not my performance. We never did discuss the odd form of passion expressed in Death In Venice. My quieries about indigenous culture just set him off on on a addled rant that was as interesting as it was discursive. I left knowing I knew little and that I was a work in progress.

      Like gypsy moths and Japanese beetles they arrived,

     On the timbered eastern shore,

     And we reached the great divide,

     In 200 years no more.

    

     Shaped boatmasts and floors, eight by eight four by four.

     But when Ira Grossel played Cochise,

     I reached for my tidy tattered valise,

     In search of the comforting before.    

      Then there was Andy Devine, the wheezy voiced stagecoach man, the guy who, on Saturdays, introduced us to Sabu, underground treasures, ancient ruins, and talking cobras. Years later on a trip to Arizona I visited a short remnant of route 66 in Williams, not too awful far from where Andy and his gang spent their childhood. God almighty. The architecture was frozen in the 50’s, a mix of the old west mission façade with that little architectural action going on atop. There were Giant Plastic Dairy Queen cones, neon cocktail glasses, and a motel with an I-beam exoskeleton, that was a cross between an insect and a dinosaur, and looked as if it might crawl away. I took a stroll down main street almost to the point where 66 met 40. I could see the trucks and cars in the distance on Interstate 40. There was a tourist bureau. Had to go in. A stout blond german lady managed the operation.

     I strolled up to the long curved desk and innocently asked “What’s to do in Williams?”      

     She replied, “Vel u cood go oop Bill Williams Mountin. Der ist un tower der for fire. Goot view from der.”

    I was up for a good view of the lay of ths dessicated landscape still unfamiliar to my moist eastern eyes. “Thanks. Where do I catch the road up?” She brought out a map. The imp in me wanted to say “Thankee Much Missy Hildagarde” but I thought better of that.

     So up it was, the winding road passing the porous red lava patches and burnt toast grasses. Bill Williams mountain topped off at 10,000 feet or so. However at about 9000 feet some trees appeared and the ground seemed tinted reddish orange. I didn’t think much of that but by the time I reached the top the trees were coated red and the ground thickly carpeted in the same color. This was disorienting. My eyes had’t caught up with my brain yet. Everything undulated. I stopped  30 feet from the fire tower and opened the door placing my foot on the ground crunching 200 lady bugs. Their cousins were on me in a flash, under my shirt, biting my stomach. In 5 steps and another 1000 ladybug corpses I was at the fire tower ladder and climbing with alacrity. I glanced back to see my footprints in squashed dead beetles just as I entered the green colored cabin from below. It was windowed on all sides. There was a short dude with a handlebar mustache, a plaid shirt, and suspenders peering through binoculars at another Bill Williams type mountain rising up out of the scrubby dry beige landscape in the distance. Being astonished by what I had just seen, emotion had temporarily sequestered my tongue.

     “Excuse me, hello sir. Good morning. This is incredible. What is going on here with the ladybugs?”

     He didn’t leave his deep concentration, just stared out towards Joe Williams Mountain # 2. Perhaps he was just a prop and had died years before, or he was another one of those western men of few words whose solitary confinement had been rudely interrupted by this excited skidmark with an jersey accent. But no. Wait for it. He puffed up one cheek and leaned forward spitting out a gooey creosote colored tarry bola of tobacco juice, boooooowheet,,, right through the open window showering the sorry ladybugs below. There was a pause between the big brown viscous oyster and the response. His gaze never faltered from the view as he drawled a short, “Dunno:”  Somehow I felt he was not pulling my leg. Change the subject, that’s it, change the subject, I thought. Maybe this guy is really bothered by my presence. “Any fires?” Another longish pause. “Yup over there a flimsy little plume comin off Mingus.  Already called it in though.” All the while he ignored me and never stopped peering through the binoculars except to spit.

     Feeling self conscious I thought it best to leave so I climbed down from the tower and toe stepped to the car trying to minimize the carnage, then descended Bill Williams Mountain. The tires made crunchy noises like chewing dry cereal. I needed to find out what caused all the ladybugs in the entire world to congregate for an old time revival. Did they have a leader? And they bite. I didn’t know that. We always let them amble up our finger like cute little polished buttons. Alone they charmed but in a group they became malignant. Creo que son depredators sin piedad. It would be a quest. I thought of Hildagarde and returned to the tourist bureau. She saw me enter and said, “Vell den how vas it?”

     “Fantastic, one of the best nature surprises I have ever had the opportunity to witness, but I have a question why are there so many billions of ladybugs at the top.”

     She looked puzzled and said, “Vaat?”

     “Lady bugs, you know the little red beetles with black spots. Why are they congregated there?”

     “I am sorry but I do not know sir. I hav nayver eard of dis.”

     I didn’t know what to say. I exited like a child disillusioned by his parents because he caught them stealing ham. I walked towards the praying mantis motel stopping in one store after another asking the same question yet I was met with the same ignorance. No one, it seemed, had ever even heard of this phenomenon. It would be as if all the mosquitoes in New Jersey gathered in Branchbrook Park in spring to receive orders before going forth to unleash their pain and havoc upon us throughout the summer. No! Far more moving than that. Was I the only one who saw this? To all here this was invisible? I began to doubt myself. Did I have a stroke? Just before the motel there was a small shop called The Turquoise Teepee. I entered the foyer trying to hide from the sun The Teepee was run by two hippie types spangled in turquoise and silver. A blond lady in a white halter approached ringed in jewelry, her bangles jingling dully like silver will do. She asked if I needed help. I thought, well, no, asking myself if I should petition one more time and be disappointed.

     I hesitated then blurted, “Look, I’m a little self conscious asking this question,,, again,,, and again,,once again,, but I just came down from Bill Williams mountain and the mountain top was carpeted,,, no encrusted,,, bejeweled, in a thick carpet of bazillions of ladybugs. You wouldn’t happen to know why would you?”

     She smiled. All her jewelry brightened and her turquoise took on a deeper hue. Why be self conscious? Oh they gather once a year on some of the mountaintops to mate.

     I was suddenly sort of relieved. Half an hour earlier this town, frozen in the 1950’s by interstate desertion syndrome, resembled Village Of The Damned where all who dwelled there could only know the space bordered by their own four walls. Anything outside the fence was laced with plutonium. The turquoise silver spangled hippie suddenly became a heroine. She saved the whole town. A billion ladybugs. I felt suddenly lucky. I learned something that day though. If you don’t know your own backyard you probably will never know anything and I imagine will forever be susceptible.  

     I settled on Maine over Colorado. It was a shitload closer. So I packed up the 1960 pale green Renault Dauphine with ruined shock absorbers and traveled alone from Jersey to Maine. This was new ground  and even though Maine was within the USA it might as well seemed like a moon landing. Outside of north central New Jersey everything seemed strange. Christ, Sussex county made me uneasy. How do you talk to them? Tommy you are the real amateur. I knew what Yoknapatawpha county was, the mystical heart of darkness in the good ole’ USA  but it existed in a book,, words on a page so far from my provence.

     It was a long ride to Maine on the new Interstate 95. Every wave or bump sent the Renault to bobbing like a lizard in heat. The Renault’s suspension was like that of an old stagecoach, a compartment suspended on two front and back pillows of jello ping ponging back and forth with every defect in the road. Drove slow so there was plenty of time to think. However, my ass itched from a sit down encounter with poison ivy. To itch and to burn at the same time. Once in a while I moved side to side on my seat trying to sand the conflicting pains away.

     Finally, I crossed into Maine. It was August. There was a slight chill in the air that evoked a mournful tune. The odor was of pine and humid forest floors now thickened with detritus. The bunched red maples in the boggy lowlands were already turning crimson. August was late in the year to hire a teacher. Either no one wanted the job or it was a lean year for teacher manufacture. Maybe both. The district was desperate. 

     Waterville emitted the acrid aroma of sulfur from the paper mills. The devil was near. Fire and brimstone to punish the wicked. Suddenly I was overcome with a strange feeling of aloofness,,, of being on my own far outside the cocoon. What I did from this point on would affect my future. I felt like a wounded bushwacker as I crossed the mighty Kennebec entering Winslow. The police station just over the bridge came into view so I stopped to ask directions. At the desk there was a policeman in a tight blue shirt. I wondered if they all bought tight shirts or they just bulged out into them over time. I noticed a potted marijuana plant growing in the back window. What is this?

     Winslow high was just around the corner. I parked and exited the Renault giving it a healthy push on the hood as if to say keep up the work good girl. The Renault lightly bobbed up and down in affirmation like a lizard. On the side of the school was the football field from which emanated sounds of preparation for the rapidly approaching first game. I paused and thought of my own brief football career.

     New Jersey is much hotter in August. In Maine there is an impending cold. The football field was at the bottom of a hill sculpted to act like a stadium. I remembered that time we were doing drills, running up that cursed steep hill over and over again. Making men,,, getting in shape,,,creating consensus. Lost 10 pounds that day. The drills finally ceased and the sweaty team all took a knee, one hand on their helmets. It was an unspoken rule that one could not sit. The coach, a short fellow with a military buzzcut, sporting football pants without pads, who like so many trainers was also tapped to teach civics and drivers ed, gave us one of his memorized cliched lectures without any eye contact at the same time unconsciously pulling out a portion of his molar bridge with his tongue and reinserting it. Like Sha Na Na and the lit cigarette trick. When he finally finished, he said ok get some water. I heard the word water and was rising to my feet when we, the thirsty few who salute you, heard the star fullback scream “We don’t want water!” Everyone fell back shamed into obedience for demonstrating thirst. We returned to the hill. An hour later Carl, the kinky haired State Trooper’s son, the kid who played cowboys and Indians with live ammunition, passed out from heat exhaustion. His blue eyes thrust up towards his forehead and he crumpled to the ground. He was out having sacrificed himself to the greater good. He quit the next day.

     Football taught me that human value was equivalent to its capacity to produce obedience to a group of superiors by cultivating one’s willingness to bend to the will of an irrational group. It’s a form of preparation in order to be better controlled throughout life. Of course if you make it into the club with no formal name and happen to excell as an atheletic star every guy with a beer belly and a business will want to shake your hand.

     But is that all I learned? Let’s be fair. By allowing an authority figure dominion over a group goals were accomplished. Certainly I was in shape from football,, best in my life,, then,, during swimming season it continued, that feeling of well being and confidence and belonging. The goal of body excellence combined with a team translated into success and personal recognition, however brief. What a great attitude we adopted, like marines fresh out of bootcamp, open to any suggestion of challenge, ready to leave the checks and balances behind.

     I entered the now empty high school. The long hallway was lined with newly painted gray lockers. There was the glass case that enshrined the past valor of football, basketball, and hockey. The scarred champion’s puck glared at me through the glass. The office door followed immediately where I presented myself. They were expecting me. I was rapidly buzzed into the inner sanctum by the secretary in a polkadot dress and a wide frilly collar. There, in the office I would meet my destiny, the iconic principal of Winslow High, Mr. Boyd Giggey. He had an adolescent look. Attention was drawn to his mouth, the left corner held a slight frown and the right a faint smile. He had a boyish crop of hair neatly combed over. Giggey wore a light gray-blue suit, a starched white shirt, and a dark blue tie printed with little brown pine cones. His large nose protruded from between his light metal frame glasses.

     His nose looks like mine, I thought. Proust said it is the organ of intelligence. For the Spanish las butanescas are equated with importance. They were both wrong. This was pure unappealing organ justification. What the fuck does a nose signify anyway. Certainly not a character trait. My nose is long and my nostrils are small hence the lack of oxygen to my brain throughout life.

     I sensed a vibe from this fellow. Giggey was an authority figure, but his power was derived from his seat not from his character. Later I found out how much he was disliked by students and teachers alike. He was motivated by ambition and a short stint as a failed teacher. Giggey catered to the football and basketball coaches like a groupie. That was all that was required. He had wrangled a seat no one else wanted and it paid much better. I soon found out that no one regarded this man’s opinion or directives with any respect.

    

     There was a man from the north named Giggey,

     Clean shaven yet a bit squiggly,

     All day he passed, in his office alone,

     Emitting trivial communiques via microphone,

     Never beloved, socially snub-bed,

     Slippery he was and so damn priggy.

    

     Really it wasn’t much of an interview. It only lasted 10 minutes. Strangely, I felt hired the minute I walked through the door. One could sense the school’s desperation to fill a void. Where’s the competition? It seemed the outgoing art teacher was pregnant and chose at the last minute to tend her increase instead of a classroom. I must make a point to talk with her. I was certain I had the job the moment Mr.Giggey requested that I shave my beard. After all it was 1966 and beards were associated with demonstrations and pot smoking. Then Giggey stated that art was imporDant to the school and ushered me to a classroom where the proof of art’s eminence was a small metal cabinet containing one shelf with a few crayons, some blunt kiddy scissors and two reams of orange and black construction paper. Most people equate distressing old furniture as art.

     The salary was $4500 per year, not a royal sum at all yet in some strange way as I walked out to my pet Renault I felt like I had won something, not definititivly but like the hangover from a hazy early morning cotton head dream. In the dream there was a room in which all the people with whom you would never want to group up were gossiping about you and then  you hiding in a closet. They gathered about the door and began to point and laugh. When you awakened you learned that you had pissed the bed. There in the parking lot of a highschool, pondering incoming students students only four years my junior I breathed in the acrid odor of sulfur. I was on my own.

     I returned to Newark and within a week, barely enough time to think about what was to happen, I returned to Maine and moved into an 250 year old farm house owned by Ezra and Phoebe Harkin in the small town of Liberty. They kept some beef cattle there. I had just a week to prepare for classes as school started in early September. Maine was becoming chilly. People burned wood for heat. Unfamiliar plumes of sweet smelling wood smoke spiraled up from the chimneys. The houses here reminded me of The Wick House in Morristown. Nothing seemed real. A teacher a teacher, never imagined I would begin my professional life as a teacher.

     One evening in early September, I waxed pensive as I stood outside the farm house listening to the cows bellow and plop, as the sun inflamed the clouds drawing them towards a point on the horizon. I walked over to the barbed wire fence and unzipped my fly. Can’t do this in Newark I thought. Out came a stream of urine. Peeing is better than sex sometimes I thought just as the leading edge of the stream contacted the wire ricocheting a jolt of electricity back through my glans.The damn fence was charged. I stepped back looking about to see if anyone saw me gripping my crotch. Thankfully there was no one about to witness what I had just done. I quickly zipped up as one of the steers lowered his head and mockingly mooed. 

     I had a job but as ever I was filled with doubts. Could never quite place myself anywhere specifically in the world. However one employment fantasy that had repeated itself was life as an engineer on the Canadian Pacific, alone, with plenty of time to think, captain of an iron beast 125 cars trailing behind,,,, gliding through the wilderness sounding the horn to clear grizzlies, moose, or maybe an errant retarded Indian with his ear to the tracks. I would know everything about the ponderous machine. I would be able to divine its mechanical vigor from sounds emitted from the grinding steel bowels and barreling steam, my ears and my experience, my stethoscope. In my spare time I could explore the northern forests writing about adventures and close calls.

     I relished those that did something with their hands besides masturbate. All those career tests in school stated I should be a forester or an artist but Mom squashed that early on.

     “Be a doctor that’s where the prestige and money is.” When she often said this, the family doctor, who I loathed materialized, a well tailored fiend sporting an oversized pinky ring and a Cadillac. What prestige? No one wants to be friends with them and they in turn with nobody. They are the loneliest wealthy drug dealers without a gang on the planet. In fact the family doctor almost killed me. One summer I abruptly began wasting away as my joints began to weep than after a few days groaned in pain. I walked like a candidate for the March of Dimes Telethon.The Doctor checked in twice telling my mother, “He’s just lazy Rosa” Make him walk”. My father and uncle were ordered to make me walk up and down the street which by this time was excruciating. Look at Tom he’s walking, look at Tom he’s balking. After ten days of this proscribed treatment I was sent to the hospital only to discover I had contracted Rheumatic Fever. I spent the rest of the summer in there.

     You know maybe I believe in nothing. Doubt helps in the pursuit of truth but too much and the cake doesn’t rise. It may keep you fresh through detachment, but an overload of doubt may paralyse. Once you have committed to a popular path, though, you begin to relinquish your detective skills. Commitment dulls doubt. Vince Lombardi said “Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work”. That of course says nothing about how that society operates. In fact the core characteristic of almost all quotes about commitment is capitulation,,, relinquishing self and that is dangerous to thinking let alone speaking freely. Rarely, after we have made our vows, does someone become enlightened enough to question group goals. So we go along. It’s a trick to walk the fence between black and blue without turning into a cliché. I remember the Vietnam Vets in college. They came to class prepared. I derived comfort from their outside status and their studious discipline.

     My mother used to say “Do something, be governor”. She admired power no matter how it revealed itself. As a matter of fact growing up in New Jersey your stability was shattered each morning. You might go to sleep with a certain image of your town only to wake up to a wrecking ball making room for some unecessary elsewhere all greased by skewed tax codes. I do not wish to admonish the faithful. After all they might beat me up, however, at times I ambled along without passion, only doubt. Or perhaps at that early time in my life it was just too soon to tell,,,, yet I don’t believe people fundamentally change after third grade.

     At Winslow High I taught sophomore and senior English as well as freshman through senior art. In my sophomore English class, which consisted of 6 students,  I had the brilliant idea that these future loggers should put on a play so I chose Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Humor, mystery, love. It had to be a hit. It was to be a mini production just for the class and it didn’t matter that no one knew who Shakespeare was. Anyway the class might have fun making the costumes. An ass’s head for the red headed malnourished out of place Justin, who played Nick Bottom, tights and a leafy crown for Edward, who played Puck. There were just enough players although due to the fact that there were no girls in the class some boys took female roles. However two refused to go drag so they just stood and delivered teir lines. Their resistance to be in costume helped make the whole project lame at best but a few got into it and that’s the story of 20th century education. A few got into it,,,,, and what follows shortly afterwards is,, then they all forgot. That little generator attached to your bike tire rim only makes juice if you keep pedaling.

     It was fate, that the day of the play Mr. Giggey came into class,, most likely alerted by gossip from one who may have thought that I was turning young boys into fags. I suspected the reluctant male who played Hermia. It was the first sign of concern by the principal who by then, near Christmas, had already prepared my dismissal. Me! What a schmuck. I never suspected I was fostering animosities among peers, or parents. The witch hunt had begun behind my back when I arrived. Another event that followed the ill fated play was the sinful art exhibit hung in the library, the only place with enough clear wall space that saw quiet controlled traffic. I thought the students needed to show some respect for their work and not just attach it to the refrigerator for a few days before it was tossed away.

     The day after I hung the show, Mr. Giggey called me into his office and in a hushed voice said, “Do you know there is a picture of an exposed breast in your art exhibit?” I wracked my brain but just couldn’t remember any nudes. Some psychedelic images, a sign of the times, that may have been projected to be something risqué by a cock-eyed lunatic all wound up like a whalebone corset. Speaking up trying to be diplomatic and mildly sarcastic, something I knew Giggey would not perceive, I said, “Mr. Giggey with all due respect to you and the watchful eyes of the community, I don’t remember any image in which anyone could take offense.”  “Would you excuse me a moment while I revise the content of the exhibition.”  

      I wondered if that little dunce in senior english may have sabotaged me. I rushed to the library and scrutinized the 40 or so works of art. Nothing there, just a modest charcoal sketch of a woman’s shoulder blade mostly draped in cloth done by Melissa Pleau, just about the purest angel in the class. I took her drawing down and returned to the office.

      “Is this the offending painting” I asked?

      “Yes Mr. Giggey replied.”

      “Excuse me sir but that is a woman swathed in a robe whose shoulder blade is exposed. It isn’t a breast.”

     He didn’t seem to hear the words.

     “We cannot have that in this school.”

     I was puzzled. And they thought I was on drugs. Giggey must have flunked biology.The guy couldn’t tell the difference between a mammary and a scapula. He didn’t see it, he cannot see it. Wonder who told him. Perhaps that overbearing librarian Mrs.Cockburn? She is always gruff. She acts like Giggey’s bloodhound. The penny finally dropped. I was a threat to the natural order. But how? I pondered how I appeared to people. I suppose like a macroscopic foreign organism. To know know know yourself is to to love love love yourself and I do, yes I do, but oh that was fading fast.

     The third strike was allowing the senior English students to read and discuss A Catcher In The Rye like I had done in prep school. Giggey’s carpet of castigation beckoned once more. I lamely told him, “But it is in your library.”

     “Not any more it is, replied Giggey”.

     I knew he had never read the book nor could he. Strange, I thought, how Catcher In The Rye and Lord Of the Flies were prohibited, but Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth were sanctioned. I wondered if time had rendered them sacred or simply a confusing array of double entendres delivered in a strange but respected “higher tongue” became the latter’s condom. Really few here understood what themes these two works explored.  

     The fourth strike came with overseeing of the school newpaper,,, because no one else wanted the job. They knew. By this time I was aware that this teacher ruse had run its course. I seemed not to care anymore. My final error, made in half depression, was allowing a student to publish a rambling dialogue in the school paper more discursive than Bob Dylan’s Tarantula. Stupid career move but predictable given my deteroriating mental state. I had failed at my first job after college. Winslow, Maine was already fading from view.

     The fifth blow was more insidious. I looked like a Jew. Jersey accent, swarthy, curly haired, likes literature and art, from away,, well hey he must be a Jew. Some dying to confirm their own prejudices would sheepishly ask, “I’ll bet you speak Hebrew”. With a nice jewish name like Tommy Rossi, I’d been exposed.  Hey friend the cat is finally out of the bag. I’m a Godamned Jew. Pull up a chair, big fella, pull down yer pants, and we’ll compare prepuces, and then I’ll divulge the secrets of kosher wealth.

     Don was the music teacher in the elementary school next door who employed the Orf Shulwork method of music instruction. Short and bald, he looked like Mr.Mxyzptlk, one of Superman’s enemies. No vowel man. His real name probably was Gregor Szczyz, changed into Mxyzptlk by an arrogant official on Liberty Island who couldn’t pronounce Szczyz.  The real or unreal Mxyzptlk had the power to warp reality entangling Superman in his bizarre creations. We don’t often think of Superman as confused. Perhaps he was susceptible to ledgerdemain, or the wow factor in magic tricks. Forget kryptonite, perhaps his superpowers could have been negated by a game of three card monte. Maybe Superman could have been hypnotized and turned into a clucking chicken on some stage somewhere. The music teacher, Don, somehow wrangled money to buy wooden xylophones and percussion instruments. On the other hand, I was always scavenging the countryside on Saturdays for art materials. The Brooks leather pile, scrap wood, old linoleum, paper, old paint, and anything that might be used in art class.

     Orf Shulwork uses different musical scales, and encorporating a child’s imagination into music,,, a little like jazz exploring improvisation as a means to achieveing melody. It’s not super sophisticated. It’s an infant’s introduction to musical composition. The children weave percussion rythmns, pulses, pauses, rhymes, poems, and movement to create a work. In spring the elementary school Orff orchestra presented their concert to the public. The sounds softly and silkily rang out accompanied by bumps and boomps of percussion. They kids spoke and they moved. They moved me.

     I thought of Don’s antithesis, the high school talent show I attended in may, held in the gymnasium. Since the floor was flat and I was positioned in the center all I could see were backs of the heads of parents straining to see their little Sally’s turn at stardom. Her act was memorable. To the song “Crying” by Roy Orbison little Sally, decked out like a circus zebra did a cartwheel. I could see her legs rise into the air. The words sang out, “Cry, ayai, yai, yaing”. Her sequined pink slippers appeared over the heads of the parents straining to see and just as Sally balanced at full apogee, all her sequins dazzling in the spotlights, hanging there upside down for just a second, her legs askew, when Orbison crooned “Over You” she failed and haphazardly went limp like a sack of slabwood dropped off a truck clattering onto the floor. “Over You-mph-aaaa-da-ba”. The music continued. Not too long after Don’s concert a group of parents accused him of bewitching their little boys and girls. I could be in Alabama, and Don was gone at the end of the year. I never knew if it was voluntary or forced. The threat to society in education is teaching kids to think. If they think, they might learn how to evaluate all on their own, and good consumers shouldn’t be allowed to tell the difference between a fancy dress and a sandal.  

     I lasted one year and was politely not renewed. Giggey didn’t say you’re fired. I was cut loose without any formality. Maybe I could have behaved and begged continuing as a teacher, but my future would have most likely been perpetually mired in the toxic politics that pervaded the scholastic hen house and of course after a while out came the cement shoes, anchored in place with a mortgage, car loans and threat of losing retirement,,,, tossed into the deep blue sea driftng down accompanied by all my accumulations towards the slimey bottom and then “the oozey weeds about me would twist”.

     The last day of school took place in the cafeteria empty of students, only a gaggle of teachers chomping at the bit for a must needed vacation.The awning windows were open allowing a chorus of spring thrushes to usher in conclusion exercises. I felt so alone. Everyone had looked the other way, teachers, the union. Easy to eliminate a person from away who lacks that teacher’s ilk and of course formal certification. Papers s’il vous plait. What is your destination? Follow me please this way,, no don’t look back. I had forgotten why I boarded this train in the first place. I felt failure and relief simultaneously and couldn’t muster the will to fight this battle. It most likely would be another struggle to conserve something ultimately tasteless. Was education nothing more than a gang of “Go-alongs”. Sounds like an path in the australian desert. Go-alongs have shaped the face of education. Go-along or be cancelled. You must not question that Columbus discovered America or that Lyndon Johnson was a caring man, and that the USA is a democracy. Never forget that.Teachers can only order what’s on the approved kiddie menu. In fact, after a short while there is no need for Mr. Giggey for they will oversee themselves. Outside the cafeteria window thrushes warbled and I thought of a pithy seminal moment. This moment defined my love of solitude.  After all I wasn’t always like this. I adopted a syndrome,, like everyone else.

     I was once a happy boy of ten who liked to draw. One summer evening I asked my mother, mama, mumsy. Ma is supposed to be our first word. Lips together and exhale lightly, almost like a prayer “Ma can I have some paper?” She directed me to the cabinet under the sink where there were several reams stored by the great accumulator. I got royally reamed that evening. I opened the thickly painted cabinet door peering in at the abundance of stock and taking two sheets. I didn’t pay much attention to the heading printed on top marked Columbus Hospital in Newark. I lay down on the floor completely comfortable protected from the summer heat by the linoleum floor’s coolness,,, doodling. The cocoon was abruptly shattered with a hard crack on my back. I was shocked to my feet stunned by a series of facial slaps and wild screaming.

     “That is Columbus Hospital Staionary for my bandage rolling”, screeched mi ma!   

    The war had only ended eight years before and its austerity still haunted the air but this was more than that. The beating and berating didn’t stop. I sprinted out the back door into the rainy night crying and confused, crossed the hedge into the neighbors yard and onto Tremont Court. There on the edge of the circle was my friend Michael’s house. The rain was hard and loud. There, where the driveway widened a bit was one of those children’s cabins popular at the time made of cedar slabs. There, I sought refuge. My chest was heaving and I could see the warm yellow light of Michael’s kitchen through the window of the cabin which leaked like a colander in long drizzles that zzzzed and hit the muddy floor. After a half hour I walked the dog’s leg asphalt fairway of Tremont Court to the place where it met Tremont Avenue and slowly climbed up the hill towards my house wanting to return but still terrified. The rain had eased and voices could be heard calling Thomaaas,, Thomaaaas. I hid behind a bush still frightened but they saw, my father and his friend Mr. Rochford. Dad scooped up my writhing body and held me tight to his chest forming a cross.

     No wonder Huckleberry Finn was my favorite book in 7th grade. Run Tommy run and leave the pain behind. Someoneor some place will save you. Then there was that silly plan in 8th grade, solid as a quaking bog. While studying the Caribbean in geography class in which climates were explored it seemed a good idea to stowaway on a ship to sunny Bermuda. The Encyclopedia Britannica claimed that at the time one didn’t need a passport. Perfect. Just hide in the bathroom or down below behind a tangle of pipes. Upon arrival I could make a living renting motoscooters. Perfect cushy mushy plan that most likely would have been interrupted by some deck hand before the ship departed. I never followed through with the early run-a-way plans always reeling myself back into the arms of the suburban cocoon. The mentality of a chicken shit. I ran away from running away until later. Maine was that place, a nowhere somewhere.