But of course I can bring no meaningful event into sharp focus, only recognize in a general sense what had been going on at the time, in that bitter cold year. For anything more precise I have to guess. That’s okay now. Psychologists tell us that we all fake it. The past is a mixture of memory and outright lies. But even known lies contain the kernel of the truth—the truth as one recognizes it and clutches it to one’s bosom. In other words, though I lie, I do not do so intentionally. It is only in order to spin my tale and fill in the gaps time has erased. I do so in order to sound convincing. Understand? I must first convince myself, then the reader. So it is a kind of provisional truth I am after, and I must depend upon my initial recognition of the rightness of things and trust where it leads me. It takes me back to when I was nineteen, hopelessly insecure, and highly impressionable. But then, weren’t we all? Jack was. How could he be otherwise?

I had graduated from high school two years earlier, at seventeen, and gone into a college fraternity in much the same manner as a girl used to go into a nunnery, with a similar need for protection from the wide world, for fraternities and sororities serve as a safe haven for American youth. There you are shielded from just about everything except excessive drinking. A boy goes to college to learn, among other things, how to drink without getting out of control or throwing up all over his shoes, or somebody else’s, and if he is lucky he learns a few other things in the process, including how to make a living and get along with others, including those much different from himself. A fraternity provides an atmosphere conducive to learning, oh, all sorts of things, most of which are meaningless and expedient. But there are fields of study a few yards away on campus and the makings of a liberal education are at hand, or else he can go into one of the collegiate trade schools. Business, engineering, medicine. Or general business for the totally unimaginative.

Thus Jack and I met. We were at the same place at the same point in time and had similar unexpressed needs. We were hungry to know more and to experience life fully—whatever that might entail. Nearly the same age, his birthday was in July of 1930 and mine the following November—we went to Seattle high schools, mine Queen Anne, now converted to geriatric apartments (no, I do not live in one, but I probably could qualify and it would lend an awful symmetry to my life, one resembling the fate of Blake’s tiger) and his West Seattle, far off across the Duwamish River Bridge, and for practical purposes in a different city.

He had joined the Navy immediately upon graduation, I know not why. Enlistments in the Navy were generally for four years, while in the Army (my branch of service, in due course) they were for but three, unless the draft took us up first, in which case the period of active duty for us both would be two years. I entered college directly. Jack managed to finagle a separation from active duty after a couple of years and entered college, though he remained in the active reserve. So, while we were nearly the same age, I was a know-it-all junior, while he was a lowly freshman. However, he had had the military experience behind him, which impressed us all and transcended in function and importance anything we might have learned so far in college. Additionally he was well schooled in drinking. I was not, though it was high on my list of priorities, and I was working hard at it, almost nightly. So we were equals, true contemporaries, even though I was an upperclassman and he was not. That meant we could drink together nightly. And we did.

We went to college for lack of anything better to do and for various personal reasons, such as insistent parents (mine) and an acceptable excuse to get out of contractual military service (his). Funny how our lives already repeated each other’s, but in slightly different ways. Substantial disruptions in timing were one similarity. First Jack, then me, or first me, then Jack, with corresponding proportional intervals between us. Of course the likenesses were not apparent and did not take on sly and subtle meanings until much time had passed. I don’t think anybody else would have recognized the parallels except Jack, and he won’t, for he is long dead.

I was studying Political Science, having washed out of Journalism at the end of my sophomore year with a B-minus average, which was not high enough to be admitted to what was called JJ, junior-year Journalism, a sort of trade school which I was not cut out for and should be grateful to the University for not admitting me into, but instead was bitter and disappointed. Poly Sci was the next best thing for an undecided boy. The next year it would be English, my life’s love and work. Jack was already in the field, and therefore was a year ahead of me intellectually in our competition, which it was, and had a leg up on me in terms of reading all that was deemed important in the world of literature, while I was still feeling around in subjects of lesser importance.

English majors are a driven group, and no matter what happens to them later on in life, are forever yoked by a kind of crippling insistence in reading constantly, or else feeling that they are wasting time and are hopelessly guilty. And since not all the great books can be read in a single lifetime, it is a futile task, and one knows it at the same time one agrees to the terms and bends to the effort, seemingly disproving the rule. One tries, one fails, one picks oneself up, and one goes on with the chore. A life can be built out of the rubble of such efforts, and the results are not without attendant meaning or pleasure.

We were already doomed, Jack and I, to the literary life, while not quite recognizing what doom is, outside of the world of William Faulkner, its chief practitioner. This is what is involved in obtaining an education. I was being programmed to the pursuit of primary texts by an exceptional professor of history, one Thomas (as in Jefferson) Pressley (as in, well, The King of Rock and Roll), who taught American. His specialty was the Twentieth Century, just prior to the present time, and the era that just preceded it, namely, the Civil War and the Reconstruction. We had a reading list that was a lit freak’s salvation and delight, for it was so keen, so precise, so downright fascinating, that, if one had known so much, one might have made it up for one’s self, but then one wouldn’t have needed the course. It made the century become vibrant to anyone who wasn’t half dead already, and I wasn’t.

A key text was Only Yesterday, by Frederick Lewis Allen. It send my mind spinning off in a host of directions. Additionally we were encouraged to read books by Cummings, Dos Passos, Hemingway, William Faulkner, perhaps the best of the lot. There was not much written during the early part of the century that did not, one way or another, find its way into our reading list. It was marvelously open ended and expansive.

Jack was reading much the same stuff, too, though coming at it from a different angle. All his life he read omnivorously, rapidly, making us others seem slovenly, at least in application. He read like he drank beer—in huge mouthfuls. Of course being Irish didn’t hurt his case at all. He read books like others ate salted peanuts. I aspired to do the same, just to keep up, but always came in a gasping second.

There were more than the two of us to comprise the Problem Drinkers, as we were soon known. We were the local version of the Cosa Nostra, which simply means Our Thing. Additional were Gordy Anderson, Bart Redfield, Nick Chapman, Bill Beechner, to name only the first wave, and further back in the pack Bob Beatty, Rick Keller, Jack Schwabland, Tom Conklin, Jerry Norling, all of whom were older, veterans. Many others have faded from memory and would require a huge gymnastic feat to recall even a vague shape or visage.

A typical day went like this: rise from the class dormitory at one’s favorite hour; if you’d been out drinking the night before, which was only standard procedure, you might not make it to your eight o’clock or even a class beginning an hour later. But if you rose past eight-fifteen, you missed breakfast. A hangover and foul mouth made this prospect less of a loss. But to some of us breakfast was the most important meal of the day and to go without it was tantamount to a personal crisis, and how could a day recover from such an ominous start?

The frat house was tri-story, with a basement in which a pool game could be had, or a book be read in the joke of a library; it was also where we ate at great, long dark-wood tables laid out in parallel formation. At zero-eight-twenty, there would be a few lingerers, or malingerers, and since the feeding trough was purportedly now closed down one was at the mercy of the cook, Josephine, for his eggs and rasher, though she was invariably accommodating, or one could forgo eggs as a minor act of contrition and simply help himself to a bowl of cold cereal. And there was always a platter of soggy toast to bulk up with, store bread cut into yellow triangles, along with little open jars of jam and marmalade to slather across the top of each.

After which there was the return to the study rooms, where one kept one’s clothes, and the acting of dressing, either fast or slow, depending on what else the morning held, generally classes. The ones conducted on lower campus—for future engineers and prospective health-science professionals—required a fast pace to get to before the final bell, utilizing what was called the Lower Campus Stride. It was nearly a run. For the rest of us, a more leisurely pace was all that was required.

We lived three or four to a room on the second or third floor. The basement I’ve just described; the first floor was mainly two huge lounges with massive leather sofas that occupied both the right and left great rooms that you encountered after entering the stately front door. In the rear, surrounded by windows opening on to Twentieth Avenue Northeast, was the main library, but years ago it had been converted to a pool room, which was an indication of the direction things had taken. Intellectual content of college life had, over the years, given way to an emphasis on sports, of which pool admittedly was certainly a minor activity, and our other principal endeavor, bridge, even less of one.

Upstairs and occupying two stores were the study rooms. Study hours were held there nightly, except on weekends, but only pledges had to observe them; the rest of us were free to come and go, so we went. Since Jack was a pledge, ostensibly he was restrained to his room from fifteen minutes after dinner until ten o’clock at night, but in point of fact many of the pledges obtained release from this obligation simply by being in the company of an upperclassman. And this I was. We were housed with a senior in charge of the room, if available (for many had moved out to rooming houses, for the sake of greater freedom, as both Jack and I were due to do, in due course), a junior (or if no senior was available a second junior), a sophomore, and a lowly pledge. Pledges served the meals, did regular daily chores, and gathered early on Saturday morning (generally hungover) to thoroughly clean the house, work which lasted until noon and luncheon, but often was finished up in a hurry at a little past eleven, with the house (as it was called) less than spotless. Close enough.

In our study rooms we shared closets and were assigned tiny desks, ones seemingly designed for large children. Dressers were crassly shared. A low bookcase stood in most rooms, though books usually were stacked on far corners of desks in towering unstable heaps, subject to a sudden tumble. During the day a single student might be found ensconced in a study room and, if disturbed by your entrance, would look up angrily from what he was reading (trash, most likely) and glower at you in hope you would go away. If he was successful, and you did not outrank him by class, you left in haste. On each floor was a communal john, with a couple of open shower stalls, toilet or two, and a bank of urinals. On anxious Friday evenings, all facilities were in constant use, the room steamy and crowded.

Pledges could be excused from study hours during the week to go to the library, which has always been an excuse for planned mischief. Often we went to a tavern. (What better place?) If for instance I cut out early for a beer (because my eyes burned from reading or my throat was specially dry, or simply because the library always evoked in my mind its polar opposite) and I should come across Jack there, off to an early start, it was never to be mentioned afterwards, for he wasn’t supposed to be there. It was where I expected and found him, most nights. Nor would I mention encountering any other pledges. It was a matter of honor.

To say we drank and drank often would be stating the obvious. We punctuated our lives with schooners of beer. They cost fifteen or twenty cents, a draft glass a nickel or a dime. You could tie a good one on for less than a dollar, especially when a pitcher (64 ounces) went for about a penny an ounce. Bedsides providing a mild form of drunkenness, beer was presumed beneficial, for it moistened your throat so that your next cigaret recovered its taste and its delicious bite.

We all smoked. It was as natural as breathing. Jack went through a pack of cigarets like a monkey goes through a bag of salted peanuts. Something like that, anyway. Into his daily cups (he had been Navy, after all, and older than your usual pledge), he would sometimes light a second cigaret while the first was smoldering away in one of those metal ashtrays that had corner cups to keep the tube from rolling off onto the table and burning itself out.

The guy who said we came to college with a thirst for beer and knowledge had the word order right. Knowledge came in a close second. A wonderful camaraderie could be found in the nightly tavern—Blue Moon, College Club, Rainbow, Al’s, The Century, whatever. Seattle was, after all, a tavern town, proudly describing itself just this way in periodicals and tracing the tradition back to its Scandinavian heritage, centered in Ballard, with its congenial mixture of Norwegians and Swedes, its communal style of celebrating old-world events, even when there was nothing special about them. We students used taverns in our considerable spare time to escape from books. Taverns lightened our load and marked the transition of one grim day into the next, with the scant hope that it might be better, brighter. Is it not the same, the world over?

When I first started college, a senior condescended to speak to me, nobody better being in the study room at the moment t o observe the social lapse. "What are you studying, Bob?" he asked me, with a look off to the side as if to indicate that my answer did not matter in the least to him, but he had to say something to a new brother.

"Journalism," I replied, a little ashamed of the field, for it does not have high intellectual content and this guy clearly was a brain.

"Then you must be already familiar with the writings of one H. L. Mencken." It was not a question.

And I am sure I replied, as he must have hoped that I would, "Who? Who’s he?"

(I was asked this question a couple of years later, in a whorehouse, as we were waiting our respective turns with the ladies, but knew enough not to repeat my error and replied, "Of course. Who doesn’t?") For I read his works entirely.

The older brother was Jim Fish—his true name, not a made up one; who would make up such a name? He told me with extreme patience who Mencken was, and added, with patent familiarity, now that my ignorance was established, "And you ought become familiar with Mortimer Adler’s How To Read a Book. It is just the thing for a young person like you." He was about two years older.

I did not ask who Adler was, or proclaim that I already knew how to read a book, thanks you, but stood or rather sat, listening, as Jim pressed on, informing me that Adler was a leading intellectual and a Professor of Ideas, at the University of Chicago, an institution so dedicated to learning that it threw its football team to the wolves. President Hutchins said the sport was not cognizant with true learning.

I kept my disagreement with this nostrum secret. Football was the mainstay at this university. I loved the game and was determined not to miss a single one. It is what a freshman does. At the same time I was growing progressively aware that there were multiple ways of looking at life, especially college life, and not everything was as cut and dried as it had seemed at first. There were different points of view on nearly every subject.

I think Jack was going through a similar experience. Our frat, surprisingly, was believed to be one of the two or three brainiest houses on campus and each year we produced a grade-point average that was impressive. The guys who surrounded me and could act so silly at times were in reality fairly smart. And I, no longer so easily impressed with appearances as I was even a week ago, liked my new friends, and their mental acumen, though I knew better than to say so.

Jack. What was he like? His appearance, please. It is a good question. I, for one, need some kind of mental picture in order to maintain my interest in a character, be he real or fictional. Picture a young Frank Sinatra, the Sinatra of the Forties, wiry, bony, angular, only not Italian but Irish, perhaps with a face and frame a little like Samuel Beckett. A good big smile, but so scrawny that a good wind might blow him down the autumn street, or leave him clinging to a telephone pole for ballast. Substantial black hair that pretty much followed the shape of his skull but rose in the greasy pompadour of the day that made him look a little like Neal Cassady (with whom we had not yet become acquainted, of course), but without the muscles. Nor, like Cassady, did he wear his cigaret pack characteristically rolled into his sleeve at the shoulder.

Jack had an energy level that exceeded mine. I think it was a lifelong trait and I envied him that. He was swift, he was fast. He lettered in track at West Seattle High. Hundred- yard dash and 220, I think. Probably he was the anchor man in the relay race, or else the leadoff man, which ever was most needed by the team. He could play the piano well—fast keyboard stuff. Once he sat down at the frat house piano and began playing a two-part invention by Bach. No mistaking that flight of notes, all tailored so sweetly and spectacularly to each other, like birds on wires. Those of us in the room listened mouth agape until the music was over, the quick, melodious fusillade, and Jack rose a little apologetically and made his way from the piano, with a shy throwaway grin that told us that it wasn’t as good as it might have been, had he time for a little more practice. Years later, hearing Glenn Gould play the same music, over and over, I know Jack was right in his self-evaluation, but so what? Who is as good as Glenn Gould? I, who have no musical talent, am not the one to judge.

While he could run swiftly, he wasn’t well coordinated. He was poorly so, as a matter of fact. This surprised me. I expected him to be good at everything. Some of us used to hang out in front of the house after classes were over for the day, and we would throw the old football around, running down the street to catch passes, dodging traffic as though it were opponent linebackers. We would take turns throwing and receiving. Jack could do neither well. On foot he was a veritable deer. He would beat the ball to wherever it was going, extend his thin fingers, grab at the ball, and it would sail right through them. The first time or two I thought he was simply out of practice, as with the piano. But he couldn’t catch or throw. If he could have hung on to the ball, ever, he’d be into the end zone without anyone laying a hand on him. But, no, he would flub the pass again and again. It didn’t seem to discourage him, however.

Nor did it slow him down any. His pleasure was from the running down and out, plus the speed with which he could get under the ball, outspeeding it and its flight if necessary. What happened next was a near disaster. I was no jock, had little athletic proficiency, had not lettered in high school, but I could gather in a pass, even one thrown like a bullet (which we all tried to do), three times out of four. Okay, three times out of five.

It wasn’t just like football. Once—because we had a hoop out in back at the frat—I persuaded him to shoot a few baskets with me. I set no standard to measure yourself by in this sport, either. We all know how to play it. What is more innocent that a game of horse? He could shag a caroming ball like no one else. If he missed a pass (and that was about all that he ever did), he was off after the rebound before it left the court. I think he liked to see me miss, which I did often, so that he could chase the bouncing ball. Catching it before it left the asphalt was what mattered to him. He’d be on that ball and have it back in no time. It was a game in itself.

Custom was, you pass the ball to the other guy, when you are out of shooting range, as when you are retrieving an escaped ball. Jack, however, would take his shot in turn from any distance, as though he didn’t realize until he had taken a shot that it was impossible and the ball’s arc would fall short by yards. It was his zeal that was impressive. If I hit my shot, Jack would grin and be happy for me. As for himself, I think he had given up prospects of hitting one with any degree of regularity. It didn’t make him any less cheerful. When I rimmed a shot, he was off again like a Labrador retriever. I think he wanted to impress me with his deftness, his quickness. Well, he did.

His zeal applied to many things. He had an intense intellectual regard for the unusual, the insightful. He was always noticing things. They were things I’d missed. Not much got by him. Many of the things were about human nature—how men behaved, how women acted, how both reacted in each other’s presence. Years later, in our middle period, he said to me, apropos of nothing, "A guy goes into the bedroom and rips off a piece with his wife, let us say. Afterwards, he hears the TV playing in the next room and wanders in. On the screen is this beautiful babe. She is really terrific. He starts to watch her. He looks some more. He sits down, lights a cigaret. Now, I ask you, why would a guy who’s just been laid want to watch some babe on a television set? He doesn’t need anything in the sex department, so why does he do it? Answer me that and you’ll have said a whole lot about the male psyche."

I think he posed things to his students in much the same manner. It was direct, dramatic, succinct. He didn’t need a whole lot of words, as do I. He communicated viscerally, largely thought his intensity.

Once, years later, Jack was enamored of a girl named Barbara Davidson. She was the daughter of a professor of sociology and lived in a big white Colonial a couple of long blocks off campus. Pretty and blond, she was undergoing a period of sexual confusion (which often happens to otherwise nice people in college, or to others during what corresponds to the college years) and had leanings towards girls and women. But she thought she liked boys, as well. There used to be a joke about bisexuals having twice as much fun, but I’ve never believed it. Barbara often had devastating headaches, migraines, I guess they were, that incapacitated her for days, and menstrual periods that might have been related to the headaches and her resulting incapacitation.

Anyway, Jack had the hots for her considerably, but she would not have anything to do with him of that nature, and part of her ambivalence was not to tell Jack a definite "no," but to leave the situation open, which was unfair, unkind, but, young people are like this, and it is an essential part of what passes for courtship among the uninitiated. I paid next to no attention to their relationship, for I was not interested in her and the fact that Jack was entranced with her seemed only amusing in an obscure and distant way.

This happened during one of the periods in which Jack frequented whorehouses. (Maybe he did all of his life, and I never knew it, but as a single young man, a college student, just out of the Navy, it did not seem unnatural to me, though it was not part of my routine.) Jack idealized this very confused, very pretty, girl, and since he couldn’t have her, even in a large, social sense, visited whores, or else the girl and the whorehouse represented the poles of existence to him and he liked ambiguity they produced. It was not unlike the pull of the library and the push of the tavern. First one, then the other, and finally the hope for a synthesis that never quite arrived.

One night Jack was suffering the pangs of routine angst, that is, rejection. Once more Barbara had refused to have a date with him. He was consequently testy and full of pique. "Come on," he told me during study hours. "It’s time for us to get laid."

A good idea, though I was not especially in the mood. I didn’t mind tagging along, though. The problem was, we had no car. At least I didn’t, and Jack not only didn’t have one but didn’t know how to drive. So we rooted around, looking for one. Gordy Anderson had one, of course. He was a car lover and already something of a collector. But at this impecunious time in his life it was an old one, one that barely ran. It was an old Chevy, a battered sedan, ivory colored, with enough rust spots to give it a mottled appearance. Its front bumper was missing. But it was ours for the evening. We needed to buy gas for it, Gordy said. Happy to. We had a hard time getting it to start, then to keep on running. I, who drove, thought the battery would quit before we got rolling, but, no, we were soon underway.

Seattle was shut down by edict, these days, and the houses ostensibly closed, the police in close attendance and intimidated by an internal scandal that looked to become widely known. So they decided to get tough. Jack knew the story better than I. "Not a house operating and the after-hours joints closed as well." The city had blue laws, and the word was that the bootleggers who supplied the after-hours trade were out of booze. The whores had gone underground. You could ask a cabby where to go, true, but they often knew less than you, or so Jack said. Everett—thirty miles away over slow US 99, with a lot of traffic lights—had a few establishments still functioning. A different police force looked the other way. Perhaps they were paid off. So it was there we headed, on a rainy school night.

We turned off Broadway onto Hewitt and proceeded three grimy blocks to a dirty brick building that looked closed down except for a couple of dim yellow lights on the second floor. On ground level stood a tire recycling business that was closed. We entered through an unlocked front door and ascended a steep flight of stairs. Jack led the way. The stairs ended in a dark doorway. Jack rattled the door with his knuckles. After a moment it opened halfway and yellow light poured into our faces. I thought a password might be required of us, but evidently not. Maybe the man saw Jack as a familiar face, or else that face was the kind that looked acceptable to most everybody, it was so eager and cheery.

I elected to remain in the large central room, or parlor, with its worn sofas, padded armchairs, and prim straight-backed chairs crying out for customers to sit on them, this wet night at mid-week. One guy was waiting ahead of us. He sat nervously on the distant corner of the main sofa, semi-apologetically, as if not wanting to take any more room than he had to. Nor did he seem to want any conversation. No problem with us. There was a large center table, the size of a dining table, with a lace tablecloth on it that had turned yellow with age, and more stiff-backed chairs. The madam was Louisa; she sat at the table with two of her girls and I joined them. They were nearly twice my age. Three times I told the madam I was not interested before she believed me.

"Tea?" she then asked, and I eagerly accepted a cup, half expecting it to be whiskey, but, no, it was tea and cold. I deserved no better. Jack selected a partner in a wink and they disappeared behind a door that was covered with a curtain. It seemed only moments before he was back with us again, his girl trailing him. He seemed a bit sheepish. "Well," he confided to Louisa, me, and the two girls in the room, "it had been a while. Makes a guy quick." He grinned.

I rose to my feet, eager to be gone, since I had nothing to do here. Jack started for the door, opened it, waited for me to get there, closed it behind us, and started down the stairs. "Wait a minute," he said, halting in mid-staircase. He looked brightly in my direction. "I do believe I could go for another of the commodity which they deal in," he said, affecting that stilted literary manner we both spoke to each other mockingly.

"Yes, indeed I can. My friend seems to have recovered nicely." He gazed down at the front of his pants.

"Jack," I said with cautious disbelief.

"Must do it," he explained. It was a closed matter.

There was no need to impress anyone, especially me, and he had no such intention; he simply had accomplished so quickly what he had set out to do that he found himself undiminished A quick stirring had reminded him. We were both young, at the top of our form, sexually speaking.

So we went back in. "Forget something?" Louisa asked pleasantly.

Jack grinned and muttered something I did not hear. It was clear enough what he was after. Louisa mentioned the girl’s name and asked if he wanted her again. Jack shook his head from side to side, frowning.

"No," he said. "I guess not. She’s wonderful, but maybe you’ve got someone in a little less of a hurry. " He looked the field over; it was comprised of three. "Maybe," and here he played eeny-meenie-miney-mo with his finger, "You." He stopped at an overweight brunet who frowned. "No?" he asked, continuing the game with his finger, until he came to the third girl, a skinny, hatchet-faced blond with black circles round her eyes. "Okay? You willing?"

She shrugged indifference. It was, after all, what she was here for. She did not exactly bounce to her feet. She led Jack away by the hand, as if they were going to dance. He caught the mood quickly and seemingly dragged his feet. Then he quickly gave in and was led forward, as if to say to me, who was the only one watching, "What is a poor guy to do? She’s got to have it, doesn’t she? And who else is there?"

I might have answered that look with some mugging and a quip of my own, but neither seemed called for. I was his driver, his friend, someone to keep him safe from harm, ostensibly, but not a full partner or participant. My role was like that of observer in a Henry James novel. A teacup on the table, I saw, held an inch of dregs and, recognizing it as mine, I lifted it to my lips and finished it off.

"Your friend is some lover," said Louisa.

"Big showoff."

"You sure you won’t have some?"

"Tea?" I asked.

"Don’t be stupid, kid."

"No, thanks, just along for just the ride."

Jack was longer this time than the first. That was understandable. Twenty-year-old boys have rapid recovery rates. They do not put on a show of virility for anyone, certainly not for the likes of Louisa and me. Soon he returned, with a lot left of that not-so-sly grin, and seemingly a little less enthusiastic than before, slightly chastened perhaps, and experiencing a degree of physical and emotional exhaustion that might be mistaken for thoughtfulness, or even a philosophical bent.

"Done, are you," I asked snidely, "or must I yet wait another time?"

"Done indeed," he replied, with no grin riding on the end of his words this time. "That should do it."

But his evening wasn’t quite over with. We reached the ancient Chevy and I threw open his door, then mine. I plunged the key into the ignition lock and the starter made an obedient moan, which quickly died out, and spoke no more.

"Uh-oh," I said. "No go. Goddamn Gordy and his clunkers."

Jack didn’t understand at first. All his life he was unfamiliar with cars and their mysterious, internal processes. "What are you waiting for?" he asked, settling back on his cushion.

"We’ve got a dead battery," I explained, "and perhaps a faulty starter. The car won’t go. Our only hope is"—I glanced down the darkened industrial street—"to start it by compression. It’s worth a try."

"That sounds good to me."

"Compression means we’ve got to push it until it reaches a certain speed and when I kick it into first gear the starter will turn over."

"Okay. What do I do?"

"Well, since you don’t drive and I have to kick the car into low gear. . . ."

"Right." He was listening closely, as if in hopes of learning something."

"It means, you push."

"You’re kidding?"

"Somebody has to. There are only the two of us."

"Shit. I’m all used up."

"Sorry."

"Shit again."

It was a flat street, with no traffic on it, none appearing for a half hour, or else we would have flagged down some night errant and begged a push. I tried to believe that the wet street reduced the coefficient of friction to the point where it was low, negligible, practically non-existent, and spoke this false truth to Jack, and he looked at me doubtfully.

"Okay, let’s go. What’s next?" he asked.

"I’ll roll the window down so you can see my hand. I’ll signal you. You push. I’ll put the car in low gear but keep the clutch in, so there will be no resistance from the transmission. Do you know what keeping the clutch in means?"

"No."

"It’s not important. When we are going fast enough, in my opinion, I’ll drop my arm as a signal to you and kick in the clutch."

"The clutch, " he repeated, the new word he was trying to memorize.

"When I do this, you stop pushing quickly and step back, off to the side. You do this because the car will come to an abrupt halt and you are apt to over run it and hurt yourself. If all goes right, the compression will cause the engine to turn over."

"That means start?"

"That means start. Then I gun the motor to keep it going and you scurry around the side and pile in. Then we’re off to Seattle."

"Sounds good to me."

He got it up to about six miles per hour before I gave the signal and let in the clutch with a kick. Nothing happened. Oh, the car ground to an immediate stop, all right, but the engine never caught, didn’t even cough.

"Sorry," I said.

"We try again?" Jack asked. He was catching on fast.

"Right."

"I’ve got about one good try left in me. See if you can get it to work this time."

And I did. The engine caught, sputtered, nearly died, sputtered some more, and roared into noisy life. It hadn’t cooled much in so short a time and soon was idling nicely again. It ran that sweetly all the way back to Seattle without faltering once. Jack slept, head thrown back, eyes rolled up into his head, mouth slack.

It was a remarkable night in several ways. We hadn’t drank a drop, for a change. The car was really a good one, despite its spotted appearance, and the problem was only with the battery. When I told Gordy about what had happened, Jack not being able to drive, and all, he laughed heartily. And you know what? He sold me that car.

This narrative will soon develop the annoying habit of jumping back and forth in time and not signaling what year it is; it will do this because it is simply how my mind behaves. There is no time present in autobiographical writing; there is none because in one’s mind there is no here and now, only the past, the near past and the far past, and the two combine for one past, which makes its presence felt in how material reaches the mind and the mind sorts out what its coming at it in helter-skelter fashion, and for one long moment one is living in, say,1949 (as is the case here), and suddenly, without warning, my mind and I are caught up in the year 1952 or 1953. As for exact periods of time, the mind doesn’t care. Close enough, it says. What’s a decade or more, between friends? This doesn’t help one’s narrative at all.

So now it is a couple of years later, Jack gone off to wherever it was he went (the Navy again, I guess), myself in Seattle, still attending college, graduate school now, working for my MA, and in love with a girl named Cheryl, who is giving me a bad time. She has deserted me again, leaving me to my own amusements for a long while, which is not a good idea, if you love someone. I love Cheryl but believe nothing she tells me, for her words have so often been disproved by actions that my mind is in a mad swim and does not know at any given moment exactly what I’m doing or where I am. Okay?

I am something of a lost soul, these days.

Cheryl is beautiful, an aspiring actress, one who is not given the best roles, for some reason I cannot fathom. In my mind her talent is great. She is on the road with a production company that seems to value her more. Off to Canada. So I am alone, a horny boy with too much time on his hands. I am no more faithful to Cheryl than I have to be. There is a girl, Barbara Davidson, the same one who so enamored Jack, a couple of years back, but both of them have gone on. I am surprised to find her aimed in my specific direction. What is this? Normally glum and self-occupied, her lovely blue eyes turned inward, she suddenly brightens in my company and becomes highly attentive. She is sending me a message and I know just what it is:

I want you, she is saying. In my bed.

Well, all right! Just what I need.

Cheryl is found to be attractive by both men and boys, but by women as well. This makes life around her tres complicated.

Repeatedly I find Barbara looking at me with a big ingratiating smile, her knockers on parade. Finally I ask her, "Would you like to do something with me tonight?"

"I never thought you’d ask."

"I’m going with Cheryl."

"I know."

"And you still want to go out with me?"

"Yes."

I shrugged agreement.

It never occurred to me that with just such a gesture I was announcing my infidelity and that I was not to be trusted in the sexual department, and in practically every thing else.

Sliding into Barbara was as easy as buttering hot toast. The sex was terrible, though. I used to rank sex according to how awful it was, because it was never very good. This was about the second or third worst lay in my life to date. True, I didn’t have a lot of experience to draw on. Barbara lay there, hardly moving. Was her mind some place else? There was no question of her having an orgasm, not with such passivity. As for me, I have long maintained that men may ejaculate without having an orgasm, an orgasm being a good thing in itself, very pleasurable, special, and definitely without pain. Ejaculation is simply getting rid of one’s semen. I mention this to-me-obvious fact of life because women seem to universally deny it. To them if a man ejaculates, he has had an orgasm.

Wrong.

I never called Barbara afterwards and she never called me. We had had a pleasant evening, up until bedtime, which was a predestined event, inescapable, and the sex act ruined the bland, cheerful evening that had preceded it. And it never occurred to me until a few days ago, some fifty years later, that the reason she wanted so desperately (and it was a desperate act) to go to bed with me is because she wondered what it would be like to be made love to by the guy who was sleeping with Cheryl.

It was all about Cheryl, not me.

Life has a nice shape to it—college life, that is. A fraternity serves a rather timely and limited need for young men living away from home for the first time and entering a world so different from what they have known. A frat provides structure where order and stability are lacking. And it provides about a hundred similarly lost and confused young men with something that, if not true friendship, seems for the time being to do the job. It is badly needed. And then it is over. Fraternities and the superficial order they supply are no longer needed. One matures (or simply grows older) and has no further use for such juvenilia and the company of uncritical young men, guys who must advance together, in lockstep fashion, or not advance at all. One learns that it is infinitely better to move along at a snail’s pace, both socially and intellectually, on one’s own, or else take great cerebral leaps forward alone, than to stride ahead in a dull, collective fashion. To make solitary advances is, well, delicious.

Classes were sprinkled all over campus, some in the most surprising and remote locations, and scheduled at various odd times of the day. This was a big surprise to me. For instance, Jack had a class in the evening from a professor who had the strongest influence on him and undoubtedly caused him to become a college teacher, in due course. This was Chittick, whose first name I have forgotten or mislaid, because I met him only once and the impression (and what Jack, enthralled, told me about him afterwards) has faded over so many decades. But he was outstanding.

Chittick was a contemporary of T. S. Eliot and a Rhodes Scholar. He didn’t have a Ph.D, but then many of the best teachers didn’t. The M.A. was considered a sign of proficiency in one’s field. He taught modern American lit and wore four-button suits of black flannel, high lace-up shoes, white shirt with rounded collar points and collar pin that held his skinny Rep tie jutting forward like an extra chin. It was probably red or black. On his head, but not in class, rode a black slouch hat and over his shoulders a slovenly raincoat of that special color the British affect—neither gray nor beige but a combination of both, a color that looks good neither with gray nor beige, or much of anything else. It had long ago lost its waterproofing and showed dark splotches where the rain struck it. His hair was white and abundantly so. No beard because beards were still out, even in England, for they are the hallmark of a century’s end, not its beginning, and we were at mid-point, neither this nor that.

Chiddick taught in the evening. (That may mean that he was in semi-retirement.) At Jack’s urging I attended a lecture. No democracy-in-action here, folks, no Socratic method. He lectured from his pulpit. He strode around the podium—what proved in effect to be a true stage in the form of a lecture hall, one with echoing floorboards, those great clodhoppers of his resounded loudly in a way that must have been satisfying for him to hear, while his thunderous voice roared on, making its points, dismissing others he posed for just that reason, which he must have loved to hear in the back of his mind while he droned on and on, describing the life and work of Dos Passos and Hemingway, which were his subjects for tonight.

Once—this was told to me by Jack and I was ever sorry not to have been there to see it—to prove some obscure point, Chiddick swung a long booted foot at a wastebasket, striking it cleanly and sharp, and lofting it in a flat arc through the adjacent window of Parrington Hall and out into the night. How it must have startled students on their way to classes.

My personal mentor was Joe Harrison, pale in comparison to Chiddick. Joe, as I came to call him, and Chiddick were both Rhodes Scholar (we had more than our share at Washington) and had gone to Harvard about the same time. They must have been friends, yet when Jack and I discussed this, neither of us could remember ever having seen them in each other’s company. Perhaps it was the night school element and Chiddick’s partial retirement, while Joe was in his prime, a full professor, with the cream of the daytime classes assigned to him, a real honor.

I took them all, all three. The first was Modern American Lit, my interest of course provoked by Tom Pressley’s class, in which I had been introduced to the fiction writers of the Twenties. Joe also had a reading list and a few years later I was not surprised to find it nearly identical to the writers on the MA list for the period, which in turn was a synopsis of the Major Figures list required for the Ph.D. exam, since academe was pretty much agreed on who was who and part of their never-ending game was to rank them, reevaluated them again, and maintain on ongoing discussion of such minutiae in the pages of the "little magazines," periodicals the whole great world was oblivious to.

But I am getting ahead of my story. In that bleak winter of 1950 I was still in Political Science, studying with Hugh Bone on the local scene and Paul Lewis on the international scene, the latter courses being mostly an instrument for recruiting young men (women then excluded) into the diplomatic corps, which necessitated attending graduate school at some famous university far away that specialized in such placements: Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford. I was not interested in diplomacy, was not the type, and had not the right personality for it; besides, none of these schools would be remotely interested in the kind of casual student that I was, barely getting through my classes with B-minus grades.

As for Jack, he was in the grip of sociology and anthropology, two fields that had no appeal to me, so Jack’s interest was surprising. He studied for a while with Irma Gunther, well known for her work with Northwest Indian tribes. A few later, his studies proved invaluable when he wrote a novel and sited it in Kalalock, on the Olympic Peninsula, among the Quinault Indians. He found an agent, Curtis Brown, who shopped it around shortly, and it was accepted by Alfred Knopf, who had visited the peninsula the previous year and liked what he saw of Indian life there.

We were both writing intently then. I watched with envy as the book went through printing production. As is common practice, Jack was given five complimentary copies. He gave one to Dave Wagoner, the novelist and poet, who was on the University faculty and hitting his stride. One he sent to Wright Morris in Oregon, I remember, who was an idol to us both, and to whom the book was dedicated. I don’t know what happened to the other copies but am certain they were carefully placed.

He loaned one to me, insisting that I return it to him after I’d read it. I was a kind of compliment, but not too great a one. He made me shake hands on agreeing to buy a copy if he would lend it to me. What, didn’t he trust me to do so? The novel proved not as good as his short stories, which were being regularly published in the little magazines, one of which made the Martha Foley annual collection. That was an award of great significance in academic circles. His collection of short stories, which I thought excellent, was never accepted by Knopf or any other publisher. It was a great disappointment to both of us. Soon his agent dropped him, another low blow.

I kept my word, but cheated on it a little. I waited until the book was remaindered and I saw it on the table at the University Bookstore. Then I bought it for a dollar.

It sat unreread on my shelves for two decades. Then I sold it to John Huston, a used book dealer, who knew us both and spotted it on by shelves when he came to thin my collection and expressed an interest in it. It brought twenty bucks, but he rooked me on most of the other books. Today I’m sorry I don’t have it.

I continued to live in the fraternity, a fledgling, not yet ready to test my wings. I slept in the junior dorm on the top tier of a triple-decker bunk of military design, with wire coil springs stretched lattitudinally and a kapok mattress that was hard as a board from the countless bodies that had preceded me. Sleeping below, and always on his back so that he could not help but snore throughout the long night, whether it be warm or cold, cold as it presently was, lay Ken Walters, a big blond Nordic looking guy who was co-captain of the crew, which in those days was formidable and, perhaps, even world class. It won at Syracuse, beat Harvard, and went on to Henley, which I believe it won.

Below Ken lay Howie Bonebreak, a Southerner, and a classmate of mine, about whom I can remember very little, just his unusual name. A business major, I think. We all had nicknames in my pledge class (I was Stick, because to some wag with a penchant for awarding names the width of my shoulders was about the same as my hips, not to mention my waist), but Howie didn’t have one, perhaps because his last name was peculiar enough to satisfy that requirement.

Outside was snow, piled deep and trampled hard and pressed flat by countless feet on their way to classes, and back again. It thawed only for a few minutes around noontime, long enough for it to develop a slick glaze, then turned ice again, slippery and dangerous. Chronically overheated houses nearby sprung fires from electric heaters, but the fire department was close by and managed to keep all from one from turning into a conflagration. One night the Chi Mu house ignited and burned to the ground. We gathered round and watched, freezing our buns, gathering dangerously near the huge blaze in order to warm ourselves, too intrigued to return to our bunks and blankets. It was the highlight of that long ago winter and in distant retrospect a wonderful event. It left many with no place to live.

We returned from morning classes near noon for lunch at the frat house and Mabel, huge and round, white as her dough, was an excellent cook, famed throughout Greek Row for her meals, a great rushing inducement, had prepared soup and sandwiches. It was a meal not to miss. I, who might have forgone breakfast, in need of a few minutes more sleep, could be counted on for lunch. Jack, a pledge, was among those who served us and performed other housekeeping duties, which we actives were openly contemptuous of but had done in our time. I don’t actually remember him doing this, but it was inescapable duty. Actives had little association with pledges and they formed a tight, homogeneous group of their own, envious and contemptuous of us, in turn. They had their code words, secret sayings, and private jokes. This was encouraged for they were supposed to be developing esprit, which would unify and bind them We condescended to speak to them as seldom as possible, but we envied them their camaraderie and perhaps liked and admired them as individuals. We would not willingly admit this, however.

After we left the dining table, we loitered in small groups on the main floor, awaiting the mandatory time to return to classes. It is also where we gathered in the evening to await the dinner bell, like a pack of hungry dogs. The second large room there was called the Music Room, and it had sliding doors to shut itself off from the rest of the house and guarantee some privacy. We held our chapter meetings there late on Monday afternoon, before dinner, in hopes that growing hunger would hurry us to the table and not draw out discussions indefinitely.

A baby grand piano stood waiting for someone to play it, and various brothers would seat themselves and begin to play at odd moments, odd hours, of the day. One senior pretty much monopolized it. He was good, in a flashy way. He played mostly show tunes, but occasionally boogie woogie, with a rocking bass. This comprised the full musical taste of the fraternity. Aside from his performance of Bach when nobody else was present, I don’t remember Jack playing more than popular music. I think Bach would have embarrassed both player and audience. Years later, in his middle years, he took up jazz piano and studied with Joni Metcalf. I never heard him play this kind of music, but would imagine he was awfully good at it, or else he wouldn’t have stuck it out.

Our intellectual development was proceeding in fits and starts. It is always a painful process. Most of the time it seemed an anti-intellectual atmosphere and the reading was textbooks and popular magazines. But I read my first Joyce in my junior year and was enthralled. (Joyce Cary, Joyce Carol Oates? No, no. The real McCoy—James, Jimmy, the one who fashioned himself "germ’s choice.") One usually starts with The Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man. I started with The Dubliners, since I was most interested in the short story. Normally an evening went like this: We returned to the house in late afternoon, after classes or else a stint at the library. We ate our formal dinner about six, which required a jacket and tie. In this custom, and perhaps only in it, we resembled the private East Coast universities we so envied and admired and despised. The meal—excellent almost always—was punctuated by the singing of Pac-Ten fight songs. It would burst out at any moment, seemingly spontaneously, with one voice booming out the starting words, and we were all expected to put down our forks and join in. So m any years later, I still remember the words to most all the school songs, astonishing my wife with one or another during a televised football game, almost as though that lone, lost fraternal voice had triggered me.

We sang many others, most of them semi-raucous and having to do with legendary persons, such as Shag O’Reilley and his daughter. "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall" was a favorite, and went on and on, as one’s dinner got cold. And that song that took place "in a tavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine." It was "My Darling Clementine."

Deep male voices boomed out the words, the pledges in their white serving jackets and black bow ties halting in their tracks and joining in, Jack among them, I guess, the rest of us in navy blue jackets or tweed, rising when our own sweetheart song was started, and remaining upright until the last note died out. It was impressive, at least at the moment. Most of us mocked it, though—the high seriousness and the phoniness of it all, while secretly responding. The same songs today are capable of bringing an unwelcome tear to my eye.

The meal over, it was properly evening.

The pledges went to their desks for study hours, which were mandatory for them, or else signed out for library, which was a diversion. Library and tavern often are, then and now, synonymous. One suggests the other. Study hours were optional for the rest of us. I usually read for a while, but did most of my studying for the week on Sunday, a day that I thought fit for not much else. But often a book would grab my attention and I could not put it down until I finished it. Study hours at the fraternity were a good time to follow your interests. This is how I began to read the Modern Library Giant edition of Joyce’s Ulysses. I couldn’t put it down.

When the gang left for the Blue Moon Tavern (at this time a gathering place of Greeks and not yet colonized by the legions of pseudo- and genuine intellectuals I tore myself away from my pages and joined them. What I remember best is following Ulysses far into the night. When I came back from the tavern, I picked it up again; I could not help myself. It was fascinating, a whole new language, one that only resembled what I had been speaking, all my life. Slumped in my chair, half-lit, from beer I snapped on the floor lamp, and resumed the tale. Finally I came to the long final section, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. It runs about sixty pages, with scarcely a pause, never a period. A long lyrical poem, it is meant to be read in one breath, or at one long sitting. It seemed so true, so revealing, so epic in scope. Women, their lustiness, their complexity. I found it utterly real and convincing.

I finished it about two in the morning and walked out onto nighttime streets, transformed. I wandered through the still darkness, unable to sleep. The world—collegiate, snowbound—was a foreign place. It sparkled familiarly with frost, yet was stunningly new in a somber way. I saw every minute thing through eyes that had just opened. They were the eyes of wonder.

Joe Harrison, it was widely believed, had been gassed in World War I, but this was not true. It was Harry Burns who had. Joe’s peculiarity—he spoke out of the corner of his mouth, his teeth clenched, snarling over his words, then spitting them out—was the result of a stroke suffered in late middle age. It made him sound like a tough guy and I suppose he liked that aspect. (He was not tough at all.) The trait was riveting, at least at first. It soon grew annoying, boring, a pointless mannerism that had no real intellectual purpose, since it was repeated over and over, in a wealth of contexts, with ever diminishing effect.

People tended to cut his classes, his delivery was so dull and dry. (Sorry, Joe, but you taught us to think and speak the truth, regardless of its consequence.) I cut him more than I should have, but, after all, the class met at nine o’clock.

There was a reading list, long and extensive, and we were expected to read any ten books from it over the course of eleven weeks, which is the duration of a school on the quarter system. We had to write one term paper and successfully pass a mid-term and a final. That was all. The lectures followed the reading list closely and the list was chronological, but we could read any book in any order. So while Joe’s lectures on the writers started with the turn of the century, the students could be reading books written closer to date. It was the most modern of the writers who most interested me, who fashioned himself a writer now too. Thus while Joe was droning on about, say, Sinclair Lewis, I was reading Truman Capote, having gotten special permission to add a few books to the list, which was not quite current.

Jack and I were both reading everything we could find. One writer suggested another, and we leaped back and forth in time randomly, without much of a plan. I try to comprehend how each of us read so much in so short a time. We must have been reading all of the time we weren’t drinking or sleeping. School seemed a separate matter, one not connected to the need to read and comprehend. When I made it to class, Joe seemed not to notice my presence, and I presumed (wrongly, it turned out) that he did not miss me when I wasn’t there in, so large a class. There must have been nearly a hundred of us in the large room, if we all showed up at once, which we didn’t. Each day it was sparsely occupied. When tests were given, we were astonished at how many of us showed up. Some were friends or acquaintances. We looked at each other with astonishment. "What, you here? In this class? What a surprise."

While an exam went on, Joe smoked steadily and paced back in front of us. It was not the kind of test you could cheat on, so the pacing must have been from nervousness. We both smoked Chesterfields, a real lung-burner, and a few years later, when I returned from the Army and was his reader, this drew us together, for he was always running out or running short. Often he would beg one from me. When I shook the pack in his direction, he would thoughtfully study it as though I were offering him a card for a magic trick, then select one from the middle (as though they all might be different), study it for a moment, tear it carefully in half, put one half to his lips, the other in his shirt pocket, and lean forward wordlessly for me to supply the light with my Zippo.

Endearing.

The class complimented my reading but was not enough for me. I had the beginning intellectual’s compulsion to read everything, not knowing how extensive that challenge was, and seriously believing it was possible to work one’s way through the best of what had been thought and said in a reasonable period of time, one well short of a lifetime. That is a sign of how little I knew.

Jack served as a role model in this regard. How could anybody read, and retain, so much? He always had his nose in a book and, my, how quickly he could go through them, one after another. I could not read so fast, but I did my best and picked up a great deal of incidental information along the way. For instance, did you know, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were friends, while at the same time close rivals? Fitzgerald generously helped Hemingway get started, but later remarked, enduring his own hard time, that Hem was the kind of guy who gave a helping hand to the man who stood on the rung above him. It was a telling remark. It also seemed familiar to me. It was not unlike Jack and my relationship. We lived parallel lives. It was the same world once occupied by the two famous writers, one filled with duplicity and intrigue, competition and cooperation, envy and spite, anger and empathy.

Literature was not some foreign place where people spoke stilted language and assumed false pedantic airs, like Jack and I enjoyed doing, speaking in a kind of literary shorthand, saying "thou" and "spreckest," in a wrong-headed mockery of the Old English and Chaucerian and Shakespearean English we hadn’t studied, or didn’t know well. But we were both skilled in the applications of language. Back in high school, neither of us the toughest of guys, I (and I suspect he) were able to render any bully who threatened us into a quivering mass Jello or ineffectual rage, by words, words alone. I left such guys fuming in their shoes, wanting to punch me out, but not quite sure what over, what had been said, what had been done that left them so angry.

I can only speak for myself, but I’m sure Jack had also that trait—let’s call it power. Word people do. They possess a unique weapon. It is like the having the Stealth Bomber in your arsenal, available at your beck and call, ready when you most need it. You hope you don’t have to use it. But it is always there, fully functioning.

Joe gave me an A for the course, though I only earned a B+ on his mid-term and the final was never returned to me, so I never knew how well I had done. I had only the vague sense that I had missed the main point of the course and what he was teaching. I might have been wrong in my surmise. One of my papers was an A-, the other an infuriating B+. That does not equal an A in anybody’s grade book. Yet that is the recorded grade.

Next quarter, when I signed up for his Modern British, a glutton for more of the same, only different, I asked him pointedly about my grade. He merely smiled his response. Then he winked at me. It was as though he knew a secret that involved me. I got another A from him. Of course I took a third course, Modern European, waded through two books of Proust, The Magic Mountain, Kafka’s The Castle, and some less important stuff that has since fled memory. This was during my first quarter of graduate school, after which I was swiftly inducted into the Army. This was during the wind-down of the war in Korea in 1953. When I returned two years later for an early return to school, I had the GI Bill to pay my major expenses, but felt desperate for more money. I applied to the English Department at large for a readership, or any paid work. The next day the department secretary, Dorothy Bowie, told me I had job. Joe Harrison had offered me a readership for all three course.

"I am not worthy," I told him a few minutes later. I was sincere. "Remember, I barely got through your classes. Besides, I haven’t read all that stuff. Your course cover the whole of modern literature. Why, your lists include everybody."

He winked at me, the wink of old. What did it mean? It was enigmatic, confusing. Was the wink incidental, the product of the long-ago stroke, unrecognized and unintentional on his part? Or did he pick me simply because I smoked Chesterfields.

Fraternity life is designed for unsure young men who need propping up in the department of uncertainties. If all goes well, and they start to mature, learn a few critical things in the process, they ought to outgrow their need for communal living and acquire some personal values and tastes. They cut themselves off from the herd. It was so with Jack and me, and took place at about the same time. We were nearly the same age, though I was ahead of him in school at present because of his long stint in the Navy. We fashioned ourselves writers, with a capital W, and teaching was but an interlude until we had made our imprint on the literary scene. Which we did in our own very dissimilar, lengthy, and oblique ways.

We were still living in the frat house as undergraduates and the long cold winter of 1950 continued unabated. The hard freeze held for a week, then began to gradually ease. Some days it snowed as if there would be no tomorrow, and in a few cases this proved symbolically true, for classes were cancelled and though we lived only a short walk away from campus, and could easily have trudged to classes, they had been called off. So we had snowball fights with other frats and in other ways killed time. Snow was a wonderful change in our lives. Our snowball fights started out light-hearted and benign, the snow being so fluffy and hard to pack that first one side, then the other, would either dip a loose ball in water in order to harden it, or else pack a rock inside the ball to give it weight and substance, and he who got hit by such a missile often left blood on the snow. A true fight would ensue, with fists flying, and the ending was none to pleasant to behold.

Inside the frat Mabel had made a great steaming caldron of cocoa, to which we helped ourselves with a long-handled ladle, filling our heavy scarred China mugs, either white or green. You might get a submerged marshmallow, if you didn’t look out. We glimpsed our world through fogged windows and saw banks of snow exactly the same color as the steam. Our cheeks red from the cold and sudden transition to indoors, we muttered words of revenge against our neighbors, our casual friends until a few moments ago.

A beer would have been nice, but the house was dry by law or edict, perhaps an extension of that mood of temperance that had led to the state’s blue laws, and in order to find a beer we had to drive or walk a full mile to a tavern, and it being daytime, and daytime drinking thought by most of us to be an act of the fully dissolute, we generally went without., at least until nightfall.

Jack, being Irish (I am Irish, too—Irish enough to tell Irish jokes, but not Irish enough to tell them well), had no such scruples against becoming besotted while the sky was still light. Classes were in a hiatus, and I was accommodating, so I accompanied him to a taverns and sat there stupefied throughout a long afternoon. I, an active, thus contributed to the delinquency of a pledge. Was I not returning the favor to those who so tutored me? During my own pledge year, when I was seventeen, I had quickly taken to tavern life and enjoyed it almost nightly. Then why shouldn’t I offer Jack the same companionship and tutelage?

Our life was idyllic, at least in retrospect. Te cold snap ended and classes resumed. I continued my pursuit of the Romantic poets, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, bound to be linked forever together in literary history, along with that other triad, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Blake. These were required course, a bit remote seeming. I much more liked Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner who spoke more directly to me about a world, or worlds, that were highly familiar, though largely distant. Fitzgerald at Princeton was not all that different from my own university, except in each and every way. He was a writer who made it big. He and Hem were the ones to emulate. Both were heavy drinkers. We imitated them in all the ways we could.

To drink as they did, to date beautiful floozies, to run around in fast cars, to attend parties every night of the year—they were great goals, though highly unobtainable. They seemed greatly desirable, a wonderful life. If you die young, say, at thirty, well, that was the price you paid for it. It seemed not unreasonable. Fitzgerald had died young, as he had prescribed. Forty seemed a long ways off. In the meanwhile we had the campus. It was not a bad place and suitable for leading the literary life. If some of us didn’t make the grade, well, that was what happened in life; if the odds were against us, we didn’t care. The odds were something the clever were able to beat. If life ended early for some of us, well, that was what happened. The future lay far enough off to pose no true threat.

In the meanwhile, we though of ourselves in interim terms. We would teach our favorite subject, literature, just as our mentors had taught us. It is how we would support ourselves until our writing began to pay off and we had considerable money in hand. We’d heard of "publish or perish," but did not yet know that it was not a choice, but a dictum, and even if it were not, the decision was not up to us.

We were still much in and of the fraternity, and the life it provided we more or less unquestioningly accepted. It had its benefits. It provided a means of meeting girls, for one thing. On every Friday night of the school year there were social events called Exchanges. A fraternity was matched up against a sorority in an activity scheduled a year earlier, and guys and girls called Social Chairman put their heads together and paired up couples according to their purported mutual suitability. Criteria involved age, looks, and interests. It was not exactly like breeding bulls and cows, but had many correspondences. Suave, good-looking guys were matched with girls who were their counterparts. Ugly girls, or plain ones unsure of themselves, but often bright as stars, found their social equivalent in guys studying engineering, who lived proud linear lives, going to bed early and keeping their noses to the academic grindstone. Generally the matches worked out well. Even a few marriages came of them.

There were some notorious mismatches, however. I would like to say that I was one of those suave, handsome types for whom it would be hard to find a suitable female counterpart, Elizabeth Taylor already having been taken (more than once, I am afraid). But that would not be the truth, and something resembling the truth must occasionally be found in these pages, or else why write them?

I was paired with plain, wholesome girls who did not have much of a social life, either—such girls populate sororities and attempt to blend in with girls prettier and more seductive than themselves, to be accepted by not trying to stand out, to be recognized as healthy and well groomed, with a good bones and teeth, and a positive attitude. And there is—let us admit it—a monumental difference between what a girl finds attractive in another girl, and what a man or boy does. Girls described as perky, cute, cheerful, bouncy, effervescent, etc., by other girls are never sexy, seductive, eager, fast, or easy. And so the differences in male and female perception are perpetuated.

Exchanges weren’t so bad. What you did on one was usually this: the guys filed over to the sorority house, reeking of aftershave, newly closely shaven and their hair freshly cut, dressed in jacket and necktie, looking anxious and bored, both qualities capable of existing side by side and usually (and this fact odd) almost always found in each other’s company. Then you would be introduced to your companion by the two Social Chairmen working in close conjunction, the newly formed pair of you going off to the frat house, where some kind of entertainment was provided. Often it was to dance to the music produced by a local jazz combo, usually black. (What a treat it must have been for them to catch a glance of the fraternal world, we being thoroughly unaware of their contempt for us.)

Dancing was a highly sexual experience. Girls overlooked, or else tolerated, the sexual explorations of their bodies that took place on the dance floor. It wasn’t called, "close dancing," as some now think. It was simply dancing. The boy pressed his body hard against the girl’s, and she did not pull back; by the end of a three-minute engagement they knew each other’s anatomy pretty well. He tried to detect whether or not she wore falsies and to learn the degree to which she would permit her nylon-clad thighs to be parted by the thrust of his leg. The dance was conducted at a slow pace, unless it was a schottische or polka, which served as a respite from his persistent mauling, and was conducted at frenetic pace. Then it was back to the same old bump and grind.

Did they enjoy it, the girls? I am not the one to ask. We thought of them as delicate ladies, innocent in the ways of boys, but who could be overcome by stealth and indirection and diligence. Booze was on your side. If you could get her halfway drunk, good. Many girls were seduced by clever young men who played their cards right and plied them with enough liquor. Of course the girls knew more than we did. The game they played was largely illusionary. But they seemed to enjoy it.

There were soft drinks served at Exchanges and Mixers, as they were sometimes interchangeably called. But there were also dances held off campus, where booze was allowed, and a greater air of permissiveness took place. It was exciting to both sexes. You could leave the dancehall, go out and sit out in a parked car, or walk down to the lake (there was always a lake nearby, even in mid-winter), or find a cloakroom or closet. The john would do for some. You got your date as drunk as your could and took whatever she permitted you, and sometimes they let themselves seem drunker than they really were, as a kind of test of your sincerity. Feigning it, perhaps to permit herself greater sexual expression than she was used to having, and later shrugging her shoulders at the memory of what went on. For girls are human. A lot depended on whether or not she liked you.

These were highly anticipated social occasions, quite meaningful, and couples formed, broke apart, reformed, and sometimes married, according to the code. Boys were after sex, but girls were after marriage, husbands, everybody knew. It was a game both played, the two sides knowing well the rules and the penalties for violating them. Looked at from a more distant perspective, it was institutionalized horror. Fortunately, we soon learned, it wasn’t the only game in town, or elsewhere.

Girls who weren’t in sororities played by a slightly different set of rules. They were more open and friendly, and didn’t put on airs. You met them in class and could approach them directly. It didn’t take long to learn whether or not they were sorority members. We learned to seek out the ones who were not. Often they were English majors (which we were both now and had been for a quarter or two). I’d hate to say that Jack and I moved out of the fraternity because we had learned there were girls who didn’t expect your to spend a lot of money on them or take them to stiff social occasions. Why, if you lived in a room or an apartment, you could entertain your friends in more intimate circumstances. And some of these girls were not reluctant to invite you to their places. This opened up a world of fresh possibilities. You didn’t have to be an intellectual genius to figure it out.

Our friends were coming from a different direction, too. We remained buddies with some in the fraternity, but our best friends were undergoing a similar metamorphosis. Gordy Anderson was studying art, namely sculpture, but drawing cartoons in his spare time, and getting known for them. He was not as famous as Dave Horsey was to become, in his time, or Brian Bassett, but his artwork began to appear on the walls of the Blue Moon Tavern and, later, when the crowd’s tasted shifted away, the Northlake Tavern. He was a guy with a lot of talent. He could write, and write well, Jack and I learned. This was not our private province. It was no surprise to us. It is second nature to anybody who thinks unconventionally and develops a certain well-earned cynicism. (What is a cynic but an idealist gone sour? We were not too young for that.)

Gordy could pick up any musical instrument and in a few seconds tootling around with it, honking or plucking, begin to play a recognizable melody; leave him alone with it for half an hour and he became proficient. Piano, banjo, penny whistle, trombone—you name it. But drawing—cartooning—was second nature. He did it easily, with skill. It brought him beer money and a bit more. I suspect he was a closet graffitist, sketching while at the urinal, setting down some clever thought too deep to keep to himself, but soon expanded his drawings onto the walls of public places at the owner’s request. Years later, they stood there still, dimming, dark with soot, passing into illegibility.

Dave Norton was another one of us, recruited from the same pledge class as Jack, a bright, heavily troubled guy, brought to the fraternity by Bart Redfield, a business major so unexceptional in appearance, personality, and behavior that it was hard to comprehend when he was with us, when he was not. Bart’s cohort from Stadium High in Tacoma was Nick Chapman, a guy with a nice, sardonic sense of humor that cut deeply into the froth of fraternity life and showed it to be the sham that we were all beginning to recognize it as being.

Norton was a special case, half genius, half bum, and I suppose more about him is in order here, since he was tight with us for years, and unmistakably one of the expatriates, you might say, for during the next six months we all moved out of the frat and never came back.

Norton might have been the brightest of us, but he kept it well hidden and was so thoroughly fucked up in his head about most things, including his sexual orientation, that he failed to prosper to the degree he should have, if things had gone differently. As well they might have. He either got an A in his classes, or else failed them miserably. This resulted in a dismal C average, if you factored both grades in. Yet he was not average. And he was notably odd. If you did not notice it, he would tell you so, in abject confession that, at first, might be doubted but later would be confirmed in many ways. Because he was so quick and reasonable, perceptive and sharp, one tended to think he was under control, but this was not the case and was a mistake I was guilty of making, many times.

He was a talented guy, too. (All my friends were more talented than I.) He played tennis in high school and was on the team. Normally this doesn’t mean much, but he was the only guy I knew who went up against Ted Roethke, the professor and poet, and could sometimes beat him. They had similar off-hand manners and were capable of incapacitating their opponents through psyching them out before the match had even begun. I think they recognized this characteristic in each other and saluted it. I regret I never saw them play, but play they did, and for a while it was often.

Bart and I had taken up hypnotism before we left the fraternity and went our separate ways, seeing each other seldom. We knew we could not hypnotize each other, and didn’t try, but we were able to hypnotizing practically anybody else in the fraternity who was willing, and several were. It was easy enough to do, once you learned how. And the process confirmed for me dramatically what Freud had said was true, and we all had now read, about the unconscious mind and the wealth of material it contained and could be recalled, but only under hypnosis. This part was fascinating. For our eager volunteers it was a pleasant enough experience and often produced beneficial results, such as leaving an insomniac with the post-hypnotic suggestion that he will sleep well the following night (which always works) or helping a heavy smoker who wants to cut down or quit outright by making him believe his cigarettes will taste unpleasant. The latter requires reinforcement, however. And we would often regress someone back to his early years and have him describe to a watching roomful of observers what his life was like, most specifically. He would remember and then recall the students in, say, his first grade class, speak to them in a squeaky voice, call them by name, and describe the teacher or student in details that could not be faked or we could deny.

Some times Dave was present when Bart or I hypnotized someone. As I recall, it just so happened that we used his room in the frat house. Hypnosis requires terrific concentration and I was exhausted afterwards. The subject, however, awakens refreshed, invigorated, , almost as though cerebral energy from the former had flowed into the mind of the latter. Shades of vampirism! I think Dave must have remembered me from my days as hypnotist when long afterwards he described me to myself in an amusing manner, which was untrue to life, but certainly true to his emotional memory of what went on. It is also an indication of how his mind worked in ways to romanticize us and is illustrative of how he saw each of us, as boys and later as men.

He described me as standing by one of those huge globes that requires a special stand and into which the earth nestles like a cradle and in which it may be positioned by the light touch of a hand. The fraternity had no such globe; it existed solely in Dave’s mind and perhaps came from a movie or a book he’d read. Similarly, I did not wear a tweed jacket and rep tie at this point in my life, but Dave swore he saw me this way, and in time it became slightly prophetic. He said I had my hand resting lightly on the world, the globe, giving it from time to time a gentle nudge or push, which brought another country, generally an unknown one, up on top and into prominence. I held a slim volume in my other hand—when he couldn’t define what it was, I always told him, "Keats," playing along with his game and trying to humor him in this flattering portrait that was so untrue, even in a poetic sense. But he clung to it, and kept recounting it to me, as a kind of running gag that he maintained.

What did I say, I asked? What profundities rolled off my tongue? Dave never told me. The illusion is what was important and it remains inviolate. Perhaps my ghost image said nothing to him, but that would be out of character. In his mind, and now in mine, I stood poised as a dramatic figure— urbane, sophisticated, forever silent in all his wisdom. What a laugh.

Though we were soon to negate its influence, and each in quick turn to move out, we came to know each other as fraternity brothers. The brothers bond held us weakly together over the ensuing years. We were bound in a strange brotherhood, by an odd link, though we would never admit it, even to each other, and perhaps might fight among ourselves, if we had to, to dispute or deny it, and its strength. We were proud of our fraternity, at the same time evidencing great contempt for it. We had jocks in our frat—the captain of crew, the co-captain of the football team, Joe Cloidt, who went up against Leon Hart of Notre Dame in a close football game and was systematically, repeatedly, smashed into the ground, managing to stay on the field and not be carried off. How proud we were of him and his courage.

We had runners among us, baseball players, and they were vague heroes who consented to speak to us occasionally, but we had our share of average and sub-average members, too, and our share of odd ones. Today they would be called Nerds. I don’t think any of us realized what lies in the depths of the individual psyche, even among average-seeming fraternity boys. Dave had such weird depths.

He could beat the world at tennis, Ping Pong, and other quick sports. This is what counted for so much in the world. He didn’t play bridge, though, but was very good the few times I saw him play pool. Chess he would have been good at, but I have no report on this. Once, a few years before his suicide, he came over to my house, which he often did, unannounced (annoyingly so when I was writing), and he suggested we adjourned to a nearby playfield and play a game of horse. I consented, knowing I would get beat, beat again. He let me get three horses up on him, just to make it interesting to him, then put me away in a shot or two. One, two, three, four, five, I was done. I never asked for a chance to get even, nor did he offer me one. I played and lost until it was time to quit. I was no competition for him, but I guess he needed the exercise.

He had problems, self-admittedly, and had been going to a psychiatrist off and on for years. I learned this from others. It is not something he would confide in me. His poetic image of me standing by the globe should have clued me in, I suppose, but we knew nothing about homosexuals and the covert world they occupied. I suspect he knew quite a lot. I think he was probably bi-sexual. Some homosexuals say that if you confess to being bi-sexual, what you really are is homosexual. Dave’s problems probably lay in this direction, this orientation, which he tried to suppress and which produced the confusion and disorientation that plagued him throughout his short life.

The war in Korea was pressing us, Jack in and out of the service, myself fighting the draft by not dropping out of school, then going right into graduate school to escape its hand. Dave came up with a mysterious deferment. Later I learned it was granted on psychological grounds—whatever those were. I never understood specifically. I did not ask him about it, but envied him mightily. Nor the psychiatrist bit. I did not sense anything much was wrong until a decade or more had passed, and his situation had worsened. He had become more desperate.

Five or six years later, after he had married Connie Gebracht (who had sexual identity problems of her own) and they lived in one of the string of cottages jutting out into Lake Washington at Madison Park, my wife and I paid him an evening visit. He had been drinking and was obsessed with a neighbor, a guy, pretty much a roué, who lived in the first cottage on the pier. This guy was hounded by a succession of beautiful women, who knocked on his door and quickly disappeared inside. The sexual element was strong and perplexing to Dave. In fact, he could talk about nothing else for the entire evening. What must be going on inside the cottage, he kept asking us? Well, sex, but that was not uncommon. Every time we started talking about something else, Dave returned the subject to the roué. It became boring, a real annoyance. Finally I realized that Dave was not so much interested in all the girls getting screwed but the guy. How could he handle so much sex? I didn’t get the message. The point missed me entirely.

Bill Rule was a swimmer. He was a frat brother, a year behind me in school. He fashioned himself a writer, too. His short stories (like mine) weren’t outstanding. He married Ann, also an English major, a police reporter who went on to become a first-rate true-crime writer, who became rich and famous with her books about intriguing murderers.. She bore him four quick children and he had to take a job a Boeing. He was a supervisor in Contract Administration with a desk just down the hall from me at Plant Two, on the edge of the factory area. He had a private office that I envied and read little magazines by the hour—you know, the kind we were all supposed to consume each quarter when they came out, full of rich literary essays and esoteric poetry and fiction. The kind of stuff we were supposed to be writing.

We took our breaks together occasionally, with me wandering down to his office with my thermos and cup in hand, just as the coffee bell rang, in the Boeing manner. I was in Finance, but neither of us was unable to understand what the other did, or our respective responsibilities. It made us both laugh. Suddenly Bill became vague, inattentive, and began to complain of piercing headaches. He started taking sick leave. He went to a succession of doctors and then to specialists, who all told him the same thing: the headaches were stress related. Well, the experts were wrong. It was a brain tumor, and within the year he was dead. He simply vanished from the Boeing scene, our mutual world, and reports trickled in from friends and associates at work on his condition. He wanted no visitors. His case was hopeless. How young he was, how short his life had been, I reflected. We had just begun to get to know him and then he was gone.

He and Ann had four young children. She had a leftover life to live, which she did admirably, from the standpoint of being a successful writer, perhaps the most accomplished of us all in school at that time.

Gordy Anderson worked for Boeing, too, before he became independently wealthy through amassing real estate. He told me he spent literally hours on end, sitting in the men’s room, reading paperback books. I never knew what specifically he did at Boeing, either, but it would have been beyond understanding, each of our duties being so esoteric and obscure. I would like to say our jobs were so highly technical, but that wasn’t the case. Any fool could have done them.

I don’t suppose it is so odd, all of us coming out of the same fraternity, a situation which must repeat itself with minor variations in space and time all over America. A fraternity serves as a microcosm (admittedly a same sex one, and therefore greatly limited)and the short time we were all together provides another knot on the string of time that is our life and lives. It prescribes our collective lifeline and provides a graphic representation of the flux into which we are born and as individuals and which we leave at different moments across a broad span. We are interesting and of concern, if only to each other, and only briefly then, and each of us retains at the least a mild curiosity about the others, for which of us does not see in the mirror his own destiny when somebody dies? And don’t we feel relieved when we hear the whistle blow and learn that the call, this time, is not for us?

Bill Beechner was another one of our group, a bright guy, honest as a summer day is long, and when he went up before the review board for a Rhodes Scholarship told the assembled geniuses that he could not define "great literature," but surely could recognize it from the way it made him feel when he read it. Needless to add, he did not get to go to Oxford for his fifth year.

Nor did any of us. We were what you might call ordinarily bright. We had good minds, but not exceptional ones. I know my limitations better than anyone and they are considerable. Jack was plenty smart, but I suppose no great mind. We were all good students, tolerable scholars, fairly good writers, and had the knack of giving the professor what he wanted without appearing overly obsequious or toady.

Probably Dave would have tested out with the highest IQ, but did not do well in school and was always on the verge of flunking out. He perversely drew Ds when any twit could pull a C by simply showing up. He had what today is called "an attitude." His pessimism was chronic and on a grand scale. He had a way of bringing you down along with him; accomplishing things, attending events, which seemed ordinary enough to each of us, loomed impossible to him, and he was articulate in describing his despair to me, if not to the others. If he could so accurately comprehend the situation, why (oh why?) couldn’t he cope with it? That is the classic tragic situation. And down in flames we go.

All he could see was the down side of things. The positive side had no meaning to him. His assorted smarts helped him not at all and, in fact, went to waste. When Dave dropped out of school, we missed him, but thought little about it and hoped he might show up again, as people do, with a load of books under his arm, those hard little bright eyes of his twinkling with wit and irony. If so, life would have been as before. But no, he simply disappeared, dropped out. So I was astonished and delighted when he turned up a few years later in California. Berkeley it happened to be, but it might as well have been San Francisco, the Mecca for so many of us, when we simply had to get away.

During the break between quarters, I hitched a ride to San Francisco—something I was to do on a regular basis whenever I got the chance. I stayed at the Senate Hotel on Turk Street, or else at the Y, in San Francisco, or else at my frat house at Stanford, in Palo Alto, where the brothers were all either brains or jocks, sometimes both. They too went away on spring break, so the house was nearly empty.

Most of us suffered from California envy, you might call it. It was the golden state, a magical place, warm when our climate was not, and the skies contained a special sparkle, nightly manifesting itself in a blue neon glow to the westward sky that in reality was the product of air pollutants and incoming oceanic air, that is, fog. To us it was beautiful, electrifying. We drank it up. We turned our faces up to the warm red sun, and believed we were blessed in return. But it was only sunburn.

So it was only natural, after the Army let me out early to go back school, a few years later, and I had taken and passed my MA exams at Washington, I headed for California and Berkeley, which had accepted me into their Ph.D. program. San Francisco was only a half-hour ride away on the F-train, across the Bay Bridge. The city was a place where you might run into an old friend from Seattle. It defied expectation. (Paris was like that, too.) Seattleites became transformed in California and elsewhere, including Europe; we shed our wet skin and lost our daily reluctance to engage strangers. At once we were extroverted, effervescent, nearly unrecognizable. We hailed each other warmly, as we never did at home, kissed each other’s cheek, and invited each other home for dinner—something we never did in Seattle. So one day in October—newly married, with school just started—I was walking down Shattuck or Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and there was Dave Norton. He seemed not in the slightest bit surprised to see me.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

His dark little eyes twinkled mischievously, but perhaps only at the humor of my consternation. The myriad tiny acne craters of his face cast shadows the cross lighting of late afternoon. I saw him for a moment as a stranger would, my old friend from the fraternity and school days. His face was bright red, as though he had been at the beach for days, sitting in the sun and wind, much as I had used to do, to fake a tan. But this, I realized, was his normal color. Chronic acne had done his face a lot of damage. Hair was a bit thinner and receding from the temples and the part in front had worked its way backwards. He would have to buy a new belt soon. He had acquired the look of a squire, at least around the waist. His clothes were nondescript, as usual—striped dress shirt, open at the collar, and dark slacks that had no detectable crease down the front. Shoes that had never been shined. Socks, my God, with clocks on them. We shook hands. It was at my insistence and he seemed reluctant to touch my hand in greeting. That was a Seattle hangover, I thought.

He told me he was married to Connie—did I remember her? Indeed I did. We had worked at the same bookstore on The Ave, just a couple of years ago. Hartman’s. At the time it had seemed an ordinary job, a job that many of us rushed to take in near desperation, since jobs were not in great abundance. Seattle was really a small world.

Dave was working at the race track in Berkeley. It was one in a succession of cheesy jobs that he took, we all had to take, before we could settle into something more definite and dependable. More respectable, I might say. He had held a job in parole work and, later, worked in youth detention. This was called social work; it would become his staple. Connie had immediately found a job in a bookstore in Berkeley, what with her experience as a manger and her deep knowledge of books. The store was on a corner of Telegraph.

We got together for dinner at our place, that night or the next. Another time it was their place. Dave was drinking a lot, more than I remembered, but in California everybody had wine with his meals, and beer at any hour, a mixed drink after the dinner wine. I watched him closely. He spilled not a drop nor did he stagger. Yet he was drunk. He smoked cigaret after cigaret, sometime lighting two at once, forgetfully. Well, how could I fault him? Norma and I both smoked and drank, too. It was the way we all were, and nobody thought to be different.

TV provided thin fare, was in its infancy, so often we went out to a movie. It was a good escape from school and textbooks. We saw movies regularly, often as couples. Or else we sat in each other’s meager living rooms and drank through a long evening. We talked incessantly and sometimes disputed a point or two noisily. But we were friends and lonely here. Norma had quickly found a job in acquisitions at the Doe Library at the University. I had the GI Bill still and had stumbled into a part-time job teaching Freshman English in the University’s extension school. The class met on campus during the daytime, just as did the classes I took as a student. How convenient. I went from a room in one building in which I was a student to a room in the next building, where I was the teacher. It didn’t seem odd or unusual. College is innately casual and a comfortable way of life.

It was an intense life, highly enjoyable in a complex way, but it was not the one for Norma and me. Nor for Dave and Connie, as it turned out, for shortly afterward, and independent of the other couple, we returned to Seattle. It gave us another laugh when we found each other on the streets there. "What, you again?"

But this was much later, and I fear I am getting way ahead of my story.

The same spring as the Great Cold Snap (which set low temperature records that still stand today, exactly fifty years later) I moved out of the fraternity. That was in Fifty. I think Jack remained in the frat house a few months longer than I. We had slightly lost touch. We spotted each other, coming and going, and waved. Now and then we drank a beer together. He may have been back in the Navy again, in those uncertain years, when he was in and out of the active reserve and on active duty. It was hard for me to tell the two apart. Meanwhile the war in Korea dully raging.

I moved exactly one block away, North, up the street to a rooming house run by a kindly widow from Longview, who rented me an upstairs bedroom from which I could see, around a gnarled elm, the red brick balustrade of my fraternity. You might say that I left the frat on the training wheels on my independence. Come meal time, I trotted down the block and joined the other brothers at the food trough. I continued to take late breakfast there, getting to the kitchen just Mabel shut down the griddle, and had to resort to cold cereal and soggy toast. Then I hastened to my first class of the day without a minute to spare. I had learned my first important lesson: how to call things close.

My roommate was Bill Billingsly—you must believe me, for I would not make up such a name. He was a grad student in chemical engineering and had gotten his undergraduate degree at Reed, a college famous for its bright eccentrics. They would have been proud of him. He always had a beer in hand. Was everybody I knew an alcoholic, or was I simply on a crooked course that led me rapidly from one to another, without a pause in between? Or did I only feel truly at home among them? What might that say about me?

A room away from the fraternity was the next best thing to full independence, but without the attendant pitfalls of being truly on my own, alone and free at last. At first it felt great. Though we weren’t supposed to, I could have beer in my room. The rule had been explained to me by the widow and, a moment later, I was introduced to Billingsly, who had an open bottle on his desk and several empties on the floor, where he had apparently thrown them and missed the wastepaper basket (though it was a huge one). The widow, a bit miffed at this contradiction, left us and Billingsly kindly uncapped a beer and thrust it at me. Though it was but two in the afternoon, I gratefully accepted it, recognizing it as a gesture of hospitality. It would have been rude and unfriendly to have refused.

Not only could you bring beer to your room—oh best of all possible worlds—you could also bring girls. The widow knew what for. You would slip them in the front door almost in the manner that somebody else would slip an envelope under the door, only, of course, much faster. Girls, you learned, knew how to slither in sideways, much like in the roadrunner cartoon. It seemed to me quite remarkable and an experience not possible in the closed fraternal world. For having left it, if only by a small distance, I was now living in the realm of English Majors. There is only a surface resemblance between the two. The girls seemed to be the same, for English is traditionally the sorority girl’s major, an easy field of study leading to the certainty of a degree, but a whole new range of sexual behavior is unveiled there, and the girls responded to it happily. We rutting boys were the beneficiaries.

Billingsly spoke a better game than he played. If you believed him, girls were in a constant state of estrus, something I though happened only in the animal kingdom. I listened to his announcement on this and other subjects a bit skeptically. Perhaps I had approached girls all wrong. I had been timid, in a situation where timidity was detrimental. What they liked was directness, or even boldness, according to my mentor. Charge ahead, overcoming their false reticence with authority. It’s what they truly wanted. Works every time, he said. Why was it then I never saw Billingsly in the company of a female? This was one of the many enigmas that fronted me. So I asked him why not. This was, you understand, sometime later.

"I tire of the chase," he told me, with a yawn. "It is possible to dull the sword to the point where it will not sharpen again. You have to watch out for this. You don’t want to maim yourself over love."

Oh? I didn’t know that, or a lot of other things he was to tell me in the months to come. But as time passed we came to see less and less of each other. I was, in fact, so busy that I didn’t see anybody except my teachers and the library shelf.

On my own, more or less now, my expenses were beginning to pile up and I owed everybody money. Stores, I mean. If things continued this way I would soon be in serious debt. In the past, summer jobs had produced a reserve, but now I was spending money on my three major preoccupations. Not counting girls, they were beer, books, and records. My father gave me a quarterly stipend, but it was never enough, and it was humiliating to have to go to him for additional money, especially when he drew out the ordeal painfully before sweetening the pot by about half as many dollars as I needed. I was left broke still and nearly in tears. A job seemed the only way out, but I could not wait for summer. I had to find work before much more time had passed. And this is where Jack came in.

Jack had no father, at least not one I ever heard of. A mother off in West Seattle fed him a little money, but generally he had to work for it, because he hadn’t the G-I Bill, not yet. Now West Seattle is practically another state, geographically speaking, for it is separated from the city proper by a saltwater channel and a long, low bridge which takes you into a mystery land that bears only a surface resemblance to the world in which you conduct your business and meet normal people. True, the people there speak the same language and, true again, they go in and out of chain stores that bear the same name, such as Safeway, as do yours, but there the similarity ends. I went to West Seattle once or twice with Jack, principally because I had the use of a car and Jack still had not learned how to drive. So I guess I met his mother, but I don’t remember a thing about her. She lived in a forgettable house and worked for the railroad. Her job was in the office. She knew people.

Jack was already working off and on for the railroad, Northern Pacific (since absorbed by Great Northern, then by Burlington Northern, then by other companies as a host of other mergers took place) down in the area occupied by Sears, a sparsely populated place, dark, industrial, laced with railroad tracks, which lay just beyond the old Skid Road, where logging used to be done. The mill pond was gone, but the mill stood in ruins. The railroad was invited in to haul the logs in and take the timber to market. But when the logging grew off to a distance, the milling moved farther away. Skid Road became an industrial site, the railroad remaining and becoming active in moving goods to and from newly sprouted factories.

The area became grimed and decrepit, a kind of wasteland. Trains passed rapidly by on their way to locations of greater industrial activity, but the location served as a terminal and storage yard for hundreds of boxcars and the components for passenger trains. There was a roundhouse and a wash track. Two of the city’s major terminals stood at one end of the maze of tracks. This is where passengers arrived and embarked. At some times of the day it was incredibly busy; at others it was gloomy and deserted. Soot and heavy grime settled on everything. It was pointless to clean the outside of buildings, for they would soil again within days. The dirt penetrated the inside of the buildings and left a thin coat of grime on all interior surfaces.

We were firemen together, but never saw a fire nor, for that matter, much of each other. Our engines were diesels. Jack was on the day shift (perhaps this explains how he was in Chiddick’s class in the evening), while I worked nights. The shifts were a grueling twelve hours, even though we had next to nothing to do. We were positioned on what is called the Extra Board, Jack a little higher up the ladder than I, for he had seniority—"had more whiskers," in railroader’s parlance. It worked like this:

A man went to work for the company and started out at the bottom as a fireman. He was inexperience and learned what he had to do from the engineer he was assigned to. This wasn’t much—to keep an eye out for signals and to ring the bell at crossings. (The whistle belonged almost exclusively to the engineer.) A fireman was ranked at the bottom of a great chalkboard, called the Extra Board, and he was the lowest of the lowly. That’s where I was sent. In time—a lifetime’s worth, often—firemen and engineers came and went, through natural attrition, and the apprentice fireman worked his way up the ladder; the top of the fireman’s ladder was the bottom of the engineer’s ladder. It was in effect a giant step upward. The fireman supposedly had learned his craft, which in the old days was mainly shoveling coal into the hot box in such a way that it spread out evenly and did not smother itself somewhere in an unburnable heap. Also, he was to watch the boiler gauge and make sure it didn’t produce so much pressure that the boiler exploded. That would be very bad, indeed. He was to keep watch out the left-sided window of the engine for those odd-ball times when the switchmen worked that part of the train. It was not often. But just when you began to take for granted they’d be on the engineer’s side, they switched over for some good, practical reason—that was why they called them switchmen, I gathered. Then, oblivious to what was going on outside the cab, the fireman’s nose in a paperback book (the fireman’s mainstay and solace to ward off boredom), they would go to your side of the tracks and be waving their arms at you, or if it was night, their lanterns, tiny dots of brilliant light off in the fog or distant starry darkness, and if you didn’t catch the message and obey it, oh woe, the train would run into something. Great damage might be done, lives lost. That is why you were there, paid to do nothing, or next to nothing. You were a safety factor.

On a diesel engine, such as 99 percent of ours were, you didn’t have to shovel coal there and there was no boiler gauge to read and keep a weather eye out for its needle moving up and across the red line. But Jack and I were not really railroad men but college students, unconcerned with seniority and moving up on the fireman’s Extra Board and after a long time becoming engineers. We’d be long gone before then, off to more interesting lives. In the meantime, we were well paid, but had to find ways to amuse ourselves..

There were diversions. Poker was one. It is what we played nearly every night at Beans, which in railroad parlance is dinnertime. It is when everything stops and you open up your lunch pail and eat whatever happens to be inside, if you hadn’t eaten it already as you rode along through the night. For Beans you returned to the yard and the vast room set aside for the train’s crew. You entered anew a world of sudden brightness and warmth and sat down at a big table littered with the remains of other people’s lunches, and today and yesterday’s crumpled newspapers, an array of filthy ashtrays, and broke out the deck of cards for what was called "a friendly game," a game during which in the course of an hour a man might drop a hundred dollars or more without so much as the blink of an eyelash—no matter how much he inwardly smarted at the loss.

It was, as they say, a life, and to a college student it had its appeal. With a two-week paycheck I bought a well-used 1938 Pontiac sedan, which I dubbed Jeffery, and outfitted it with crisp new bright green plaid seat covers, front and rear. And, still not broke yet, I purchased a three-speed record player made by Webcor, the best. All this was made possible by the world’s best featherbedding scheme.

I had University classes at nine, ten, and twelve, and made it to an occasional one of them, but missed most because I was weary from a night on the rails. My professors seemed to understand. After a quick breakfast at a diner on my way home, wide-awake for a change, I headed for my first class—Brent Sterling’s course in Shakespeare’s comedies. I was in no mood for mirth, exhausted, my eyes drooping as he lectured on and on. How irrelevant Shakespeare seemed. A nice guy, Brent was sympathetic to my plight, liked me, and once confided that he had me earmarked among the five percent of any class that a professor addresses his remarks to, in wan hope of being understood, and so was disappointed when I skipped his class.

I said, "Hey, that’s okay. I understand your situation."

He continued, "That’s why you’re getting a B—B+—when you were a natural for an A."

"I don’t deserve an A."

"Yes, you do. But you have to earn one."

I knew he was right in my heart and in my bones. I was shorting myself intellectually while I shorted myself with sleep. It was all I could do to hang on. Foolishly I had signed on for 20 credits in English, while agreeing to work six day twelve-hour shifts for the railroad, and while I could read a lot on the job, real studying was hard to accomplish there, what with all the commotion and visual distractions. The comedies of Shakespeare require more than perfunctory attention, and I didn’t have the time or the energy to give to them. Now, the Tragedies are rich and straightforward enough, though awful and gloomy, but are not imbedded with so many layers of meaningless complexity and intrigue. In other words, they are easier to get to know. Or so I thought at the time. Besides, what did it matter? What did anything matter? Both Shakespeare and my worlds were disjointed and terrifying.

That was Shakespeare’s real lesson.

This was the same year that I met and studied with the great poet, Ted Roethke, and while much as been said and written about him with insight and perspicacity (see Robert Heilman’s first-rate remembrance, and now, Wes Wehr’s), each of us who came into his class in Modern Poetry–the appreciation of it, not the writing of it, which was different, and a much harder course—has his or her own version of what happened there in the pale green room, and each is true, true in its own way, as much as anything is ever true. Roethke changed us. He changed us for the better. But nobody can say how or precisely in what manner he brought off the trick, his manner was confrontive and oblique.

I had been steered there by a female undergraduate adviser, Jerry Willis, who was not in the best of mental shape and whose inattentiveness to details large and small might now may be seen as the start of some progressive dementia that comes often with age. She urged us to take classes taught by friends of hers, ones that often were threatened to be canceled by low enrollment, or else classes she had merely heard things about and did not know at first hand how dull and stupid they were. Often they were courses that did not count toward graduation, when that was expressly what somebody needed to get out of there. We learned about this the hard way—from the registrar’s office, when we were told we had too many electives and not enough of the core course that counted. And so we—I say we but I mean they, for I avoided this fate—had to take another quarter or two of courses to meet the requirements of the College of Arts and Science.

Aside from this major deficiency, Jerry was a nice person and we all liked her and her warm, vague manner. She held teas on dull Sunday afternoons in her genteel widow’s apartment, on the crest of Queen Anne Hill, and attendance was not mandatory but a good idea, and most of us found ourselves there by mid-afternoon. Besides, what else was there to do at that slack time of day, besides continuing to nurse a hangover from Saturday night? Study? You can’t be serious? She served us tea or sherry, and little cakes of the kind that might have inspired a remembrance of things past if we were yet old enough to have a past. My own short life was in chaos, alternating between great bursts of activity and an inertia t brought on by physical collapse.

Picture this: six days a week spent in the company of railroad engineers, brakemen, switchmen, drinking beer at breaks, playing poker, trying as best I could to keep up with them and their riotous unseemly life, followed by a three-hour Sunday tea and little cakes and conversation about Tough Shit Eliot (as some of us called him) and E. M. Forester and (thank God for him) Chekhov, whom we young writers worshipped. Anyway, it was Jerry Willis who steered me into Roethke’s noon-time class, not yet full, and in spite of pushing others in the wrong direction, this was one time she was right, dead right. She did me a big favor.

Roethke is often described as a bear of a man, bumbling, clumsy, preoccupied, distant. Not quite true, only on the misleading surface. The bearskin was a mask, or rather a full-fledged disguise, for living within that hulking brute of a body was a shy slender man who liked the idea of disguises and didn’t want to be seen naked, so to speak, and spent most of his hours among people engaged in one kind of evasive action or another. It took me a long time before I could see this. At the time I was, forgive me again, a fraternity boy. On the first day of class we went round the room and each read a poem aloud. O, the humiliation of it all! How do you read poetry without sounding like a pansy, a fruitcake? Let’s use the correct word for it, a queer? Well, you ask yourself what Humphrey Bogart would do in a situation like this.

"Read it like me, Kid."

And I did. The poem was Frost’s "After Apple Picking," and I understood nary a word of what came out of my mouth but knew that the words followed one after another, as most things do, and when you had masticated them long enough you would come to the end of the poem and you could stop speaking. Which in due course I did. A pressing silence moved round the room. Ted knew my difficulty. He was vaguely sympathetic but unforgiving in his contempt. He had seen a hundred like me, maybe more.

He hemmed and he hawed and looked, as usual, excruciatingly pained. "Well," he said. "There we are. Thank you, Mr. Arnold."

And I knew I had failed some major test in my life. I was an immature clod, a bumpkin, a boy with a mouthful of teeth rattling in his mouth, and a tongue too thick. I would strive to do better next time, but knew it would be more of the same. How could I get out of here? He took out a cigaret and we all followed suit. I think it was really a class in smoking. Janet Keller leaned forward with her Dunhill and supplied a torch for him to light it off of. He gave her a brief nod of acknowledgment and blew out some smoke. She gave him her bright red smile, mostly lipstick, which meant, we all knew, that he could have his way with her, if he wanted, but she was supposed to be my girl at the moment, and it pained me to see her offer herself so brazenly.

He could have had his way with any of them and perhaps did so, but was so discrete (after all those years at Bennington and on the tennis court, teaching them, girls only, the nuances of stroke and backstroke, strophe and antistrophe) that he was careful about his indiscretions, and whom he chose, and they, the girls, in turn, did not leak a word of what went on, which meant we were all left up in the air and had to guess. We decided that he was successful and pretty good at whatever he did with them, the beauties. And if he didn’t bed Janet, he was the only one of us who didn’t, and it would have had to be his decision, not hers. Sex then (and now) is a prevalent form of self-expression, not exclusive, and about this time in their lives sorority girls have their Black Experience, or else try on the garb of Lesbian. Once over with, it is usually followed by a lifetime of going more or less straight.

Ted taught me as an inarticulate Junior a host of valuable things , two of which were: how to think in metaphor and how necessary it is to keep a notebook in which you jot down things, such as favorite new poems found in magazines and other people’s bon mots. Metaphorical thinking is most natural, perhaps the only way our minds truly work well, and we must learn to set aside our tendency to think and express ourselves in lineal fashion. The mind rapidly leaps from one thing to another by a kind of free association and is at home with the symbolic language of dreams. Thinking, or whatever it is the mind does most of the time, and especially at night, asleep, is a random process. It is mysterious and weird. Similes serve as a sort of halfway house on the road to poetical expression and analogies are what similes quickly grow into, if you don’t strike them down with a thick stick. Metaphors, well, they are something else. The rank at the top of imaginative thinking.

Ted would wheeze into the appreciation class at ten minutes after the hour, noon. An exact hour later he met his writing class in the same conference room at the back of Parrington Hall. When the second class ended at two, he scraped up his books and papers, what was left of his cigaret pack, unclaimed class papers (folded the long way), stuffed his gear haphazardly into his book sack, and was out of there, trailing students and smoke.

He didn’t like testing us, seemed apologetic about it, as if to say, "Hey, it’s not my idea. They make me do it." And the inference was, if it was left up to him, he would not do it, which I am not sure was the case. He was as much at home in academia as he was any place except perhaps a bar.

Let's see, who were we? Liz Patterson, Carolyn Kizer, Janet, of course. A bunch of guys who, like myself, felt out of place and in unfamiliar surroundings. We were to read our way through the modern canon and keep notes on the poems and poets we liked. Nothing was too small to jot down. We would turn the notebook in at the end of the quarter; it was a large part of the coursework and would strongly effect our grade. A lot of names were spoken in class, but he never mentioned T. S. Eliot to us, the most influential poet of the generation. If we brought up Eliot’s name, he would artfully skirt whatever we said and hurry on to something else. Auden’s name was frequently on his lips. When he married, much later, it was Auden who was his best man. And Dylan Thomas was frequently talked about and read aloud in class. Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Leonie Adams, Henry Reed. Ted read to us in his scruffy booming voice in an off-hand manner. It was hard to know how he felt about anything. I began to wonder, Did I get my Bogart delivery from him? If so, it was important not to mince my words or lisp, as Bogart occasionally did. Words were what was important in this matter. Poetry is words, primarily. Words and sounds and a kind of beat. Rhythm it is called. Ted’s enunciation was thoughtful, deliberate. He seemed to be tasting the words before he spit them out. They held lots of flavors, evidently.

We followed his lead like dutiful dunces. We lacked confidence in all our departments. We knew nothing. It was unknown territory. Ted had his two favorites. He labeled them Willie One and Willie Two. They were Blake and Yeats. Oh, yeah. Heard of them. We read both aloud in class, and Ted would not allow a word of disparagement. It was hard to know what Blake was talking about in his terse taut lines. And Yeats, you thought you understood him, but when pressed to explain yourself, it turned out you didn’t. His meaning was flighty. Both poets were full of pleasing sounds and you had to fight off a natural tendency to read them in a singsong voice. Nobody wanted to sound like a prancing soprano.

Rarely did he read to us his own stuff. This was at the time he was writing some poems for children. Carolyn and Liz kept after him until he read us some of his unpublished verse. Hmm. The others didn’t know what to make of it, it was so different from what we were getting used to by degrees.

Poetry was a masculine endeavor, but you had to keep proving it to yourself and others. Ted drove a four-holed Buick for expressly this reason. It was testosterone at work. Men must fight against lyricism in their voice and in their life, while secretly admiring the stuff. Did people actually like poetry? A conflict stood tall in each of us. In Ted you could always hear the catch of his voice in suppressing feeling, the wincing pain it caused him to read aloud something he admired so. So he emphasized the gutturals—the speech he learned back in the greenhouse as a boy Michigan. And so did we, sheep that we were. Young poets mimic each other in their affectations, their habits, their phrasing. It is flattery in its sincerest form. And older poets are not beyond imitation, either.

We wanted to be just like Ted, lumbering and huge, semi-famous and perhaps some day great. We would wear our greatness casually and not be dramatic in any grand sense of the word. But we did not want to bear a full load of sorrow, as he seemingly did. It would be too much, too great a load for any human being. Why didn’t he buckle under the strain?

He would.

His influence was powerful and undeniable. A few of us wore our overcoats the way he did, across our backs, arms out of the shoulder holes, the garment furled like a cape, flapping behind us like an afterthought. But the gloom and angst—who wanted that? Well, there were some who did. Some students actually came to resemble him It was uncanny. They were so like him in manner and appearance that it gave me a chill each time I saw them. I am thinking of Richard Hugo and James Wright primarily. Both grew fat, pinched-faced, pale, lumbering, sullen. When Ted died a decade or so later, they became even more so like him, as if to fill the void. It was as if he had been cloned.

There is a price that talent pays for its ticket to ride. It is a high cost, in some instances a fatal one, but most of us were safe enough. No fear there. We had not the talent to undertake the awful journey. And a good thing it was, too, for if anybody has any choice in the matter (and they don’t) he should opt for a full, long life, years of good living and relative tranquility, not some debilitating madness that leads to alcoholism, an early grave, and a few good poems.

There are exceptions, but the rule holds true for many lyric poets. For every long-lived, productive one like Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur, T. S. Eliot, or Stanley Kunitz, there are two who pay the steep price. The cost was excessive for Pound, Thomas, Lowell, Plath, Berryman—many more who have slipped into the ground largely unmourned. Does genius equal madness? Do you have to be crazy to be any good? No, but it helps some. I think those of us who were not blessed with talent and genius may have been lucky in a way. Is not ordinariness a kind of blessing? If so, I am grateful for my lack of talent as a poet and fiction writer. I would have to make my living some other way, though I loved the role of poet: the seemingly carefree life, not shaving regularly or at all, wearing soiled clothes, letting my hair grow long and dirty, getting drunk daily and embarrassing myself in public places, spouting verse at every imagined opportunity. Such as on a bus.

This may be a tremendous rationalization on my part. If so, let it stand. It isn’t as though I had a choice. One doesn’t consciously choose greatness.

Roethke dominated the scene, our not so large English Department; he was its darling, and deservedly so, the pet and protégé of Chairman Heilman, who was sort of our Mao. Ted had open contempt for most of his fellow professors and considered them dullards, people of no talent, which was often the case In turn they loved him masochistically and turned toady around him. It was probably hypocritical. They knew better than to oppose him or what he wanted. They feared him.

The office staff—all women, for office work was deemed women’s work—fawned over him, including that Jerry Willis of the Sunday afternoon high teas, and the real power in the department, who called most of the shots, Dorothy Bowie, Heilman’s administrative assistant. The day the cops were called in to lead him away—in handcuffs, no less—was special and everybody stood dumbfounded. Ted would have loved the scene, were he in possession of his senses enough at the time to appreciate it. He was a big, strong man, in spite of his extra weight, who could move quickly, feint and dodge. The cops thought he would not go gentle with them. A straight jacket might have been in order, but he was too formidable an opponent, too proud, too wild, for them to worm him into one. Besides, he knew the jig was up. It was best to go along with them. He could always make his move later, when they were off guard.

Sure, this was movie stuff, but the situation was appropriately dramatic. I think he went off with a great sigh of relief. They would take care of him there—wherever it was. He knew he needed help and was not the kind to turn himself in without a fight. He had his pride, after all. If they came for him with guns, well, what could a guy do?

The beefy Seattle cops were respectful. They had a great man in their custody and not just another armchair nut case. It was not a matter of a maniac on the premises, just a deeply troubled man who was momentarily raving. A poet. You knew about them. Different in every way. This was a university, after all, and everybody was so damn smart. It was best not to follow normal procedure. There might be repercussions from any rough stuff. Besides, who was afraid of a poet, even if he weighed nearly three hundred pounds? He appeared effete.

We were left without a teacher of extraordinary reach and ability. He was to be gone a long while in a hothouse-like environment, a private sanatorium, or sanitarium, a place where they treated alcoholics and mental patients who had money and influential friends. The place was called Firlands, and the word had a pleasant ring, one redolent of tall, dark conifers and a pervading sense of quietude. (Or was it Pinel?) Whatever, they treated individuals according to the severity of their illness and their special needs for help. They had a number of famous drunks there at any given time. You did not have to go too far afield to know that it is where he belonged.

"A far field," they might have called it, with some degree of prescience.

Back in the day when there were trains and people regularly rode them to reach destinations that had a magical ring to their names, a vague status came from working for the railroad and being known as a Fireman or Engineer, the initial letter of each capitalized out of respect in the working world. The pay was good and the hours, though long, were not physically or mentally taxing. And there were amenities— regular diversions to be had. A bottle was always being opened and generously proffered. I took my belt along with the others, though I never had much of a taste for whiskey. There was beer, as well. My manna.

I remember crisp October nights, the moon full, the frost already down, the engine ploughing along its bed of tracks, leaving shining rails in its wake. It was a lovely time, in its own lonely way, and there was nothing at college to approach it, let alone equal it. I grow faintly nostalgic for that life when I hear a train wail for the Conway crossing on its way to Bellingham and Vancouver, Canada. One of my engineers (Jack may have had him, too) was a tenor, this being in the day of famous tenors, Mario Lanza and Richard Tucker. Mine is long gone and forgotten. He was biding his time, going to auditions of the Seattle Opera, hoping for recognition, routinely being turned down for all parts except the chorus, usually disdaining what he was offered, for his job interfered. He was a proud man who took rejection well, or at least was able to stomach it. From time to time he would consent give me a lengthy blast from Aida or Figaro; sometimes this would surprise me, for it took place when least expected, his voice booming out into the crisp autumn air, as we chugged down the tracks, hauling our noisy load of passenger and box cars to a distant siding like some long dingy snake.

In time I would issue requests for arias or short musical passages, and he would happily oblige me. It kept the tedium at length for a few minutes. The railroad would be great place if only it weren’t so damn bor-ing, I said to myself!

I met only engineers in my job, having my assignment change almost daily, being at the bottom of the Extra Board, and having no say in the matter. There were the switchmen, of course, but they pretty much stuck to themselves. I never saw another fireman except at Beans and that was rarely. The engineers I got to know fairly well. We used to talk at length, since Beans usually lasted more than an hour. One engineer confided to me he had serious problems sleeping. It was bothering him.

"Easy enough to fix," said the armchair hypnotist.

So I put him under, easily, with about fifteen fascinated people in the room, brakemen, switchmen, other engineers, a yard hand to two, took him through a few set routines (eyelid paralysis, followed by the inability to move his arm, etc.), then gave him the post- suggestion that he would go right home after work and fall asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. He would sleep through the night like the veritable stone.

"How’d it work?" I asked the next evening.

"Wonderfully," he replied. "I slept like the stone you told me about."

And Sigmund Freud #2 smiled beatifically.

I told him the suggestion might wear off in time and lose effectiveness. It would need reinforcement. Then, because they asked me to do it again and I knew it would be even easier, the second time, I put him under fast. He was so suggestible, such an ideal patient (I mean, subject), that it was difficult for me to tell whether or not he was as deeply into a trance as all the surface clues indicated, and he seemed to be, so I did a few more harmless tricks and regressed him back to when he was in the third grade. I questioned him about what was going on around him and he responded in a child’s voice. All were duly impressed, as was I. I reinforced his sleeping potion and gave him the post-hypnotic suggestion that cigarets would taste lousy, since he was wanting to quit smoking, too. I had less hope that this suggestion would be very effective. But it was satisfying to see him forget and light up, look at the glowing tip with distaste, and snuff the long tube out.

Of course I smoked myself, so my efforts were highly hypocritical.

Hypnosis is hard work and requires a concentration that is tiring. It has a few inherent small dangers, but no severe ones. I think, somewhere about then, I lost my interest in performing what was largely a parlor trick because it came to bore me and was so exhausting. Jeff, my engineer, was just about my last subject. Shortly afterwards I was notified by Northern Pacific that one of their engineers on extended sick leave had come back to work, claimed his job, and bumped everybody down a notch. Since I was at the very bottom, there was no place to go but down and out.

Fortunately Jack’s mother’s friend, Edna, knew everybody in the local railroading scene. Immediately she found me a job with King Street Station, which employed a small but stable detail of engineers and firemen to perform yard work and, sometimes, to haul a string of cars out to an outlying area for either NP or GN. This meant we were on the road, but only for short distances and never overnight. It was a change of scene, and I enthused at the prospect of something different.

It was a more interesting place to be, too, for it was at the edge of downtown Seattle, with all its seedy attractions and neon blitz, traffic coming and going in the form of crisscrossing light patterns, blazes of red and white lacing the sky, and we ever in motion, coming to crossings with cars queued up, waiting for us to pass, and always it was the fireman’s duty to ring his bell and wave at them, issuing them his patented smile. They often responded with anger and derision, sometimes honking their horns or raising a middle finger to the sky, but most of the time replying in kind, kindly, for friendliness begets friendliness, or an evident attitude that comes close.

We hauled our string of boxcars North to Interbay, or further, to Carkeek Park , and sometimes circled Lake Washington, and at times the train ran parallel to a highway, such as the straight shot that went to Bothell, and we would pass cars stopped at a traffic light, or simply outspeed them, and inside our cab this lonely, horny boy would see couples together, bright girls at the window seat, gazing idly out into the spangled night, full of stars and headlights and reflections from crisp autumn skies, and he would feel deprived, robbed of social intercourse, especially the company of young women, though to tell the truth, not closely attached to any one, I presently had a string of eight, constituting admittedly a pretty loose necklace, one from which the bead of any single girl might easily come detached and not be deeply grieved. Nor would they much miss me in turn.

When my nightshift ended (so aptly named the graveyard), I would return to my rented room and Billingsly would probably still be deliciously and enviably abed, hurry to catch a meal at my frat house, only one block away, and then head for Brent Stirling’s Shakespeare class, but more likely my bed would claim me, and I would sleep through another hour of the high-sounding speech of the comedies, laced with keen Brent’s insights. The sight of Billingsly, still slumbering, presented too persuasive a case for me to overcome it.

Shakespeare was irrelevant, as everybody knows. I rarely missed Ted’s noontime class, for I knew it was important to both of us, pure agony for him to teach (judging by his face and his manner) and to cut it might add immeasurably to that burden of suffering he carried with him everywhere. It and he were too intimidating. I think I had a class between the two classes, something having to do with writing fiction, for there is no law that says you can’t write fiction while you are immersed in the study of poetry, but you probably won’t be able to write both poetry and fiction at the same time, and beware if you try, for that is the path to certifiable insanity. If that was the class, the short story, it was from (1) Will Stevens, (2) Grant Redford, or, (3) Markham Harris. Probably Will, for my teacher urged me to drop out of school and to Mexico, where the living was cheap, and easy, and to write, write, write. Quite soon he cut out himself, as if to prove the point and not be adjudged by us some form of hypocrite.

It wasn’t Grant, I’m sure, who became a friend; I liked him a lot, and studied with him later, but not for long. To do so might stand in the way of comradeship. And I studied with Markham, who went by the name of Mark, who had produced a single book of fiction, a novel, and nothing else that anybody had ever heard of. No short stories, which is what he taught. He had a good analytical mind, and we learned a lot from his reading aloud to us, say, from Aldous Huxley, who was all the rage. It was the opening pages of Point Counter Point, another time a selection from Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, or a story by Eudora Welty or Elizabeth Bowen, who had recently come to the University on a lecture series, and we all had been introduced to her.

Elizabeth had a terrible stutter and was on the tour for, among other reasons, to try to overcome it by forced public speaking on a regular basis. Accordingly she read us a short story, very slowly, then met with us afterwards and gave us of her time. A girl I was going with asked her what she though of one fiction writer marrying another. "I c-c-c-can’t imagine a w-w-w-worse situation for either of t-t-t-them."

This is how we wrote our quota for course credit: A five-hour Advanced Short Story Writing Course required ten-thousand words. We produced our drivel in one or two long sittings. If you didn’t have a fragment or completed story by mid-term, you most likely would not have one as finals week approached, when the full burdensome quota must be turned in. This was horrible. It meant you bought yourself a fifth of Scotch (for writers favored Scotch, the best ones Teachers’ Highland Cream) and you sat your butt down before your Loyal Royal and began to type. If stuck for starters, you wrote the magic word, "The." We all believed the words would automatically flow from there, if you were adequately lubricated. And usually they did.

You produced yard after yard of loose nonsense. Blather, the Irish called it. You scarcely knew what you were writing after an hour because you were so drunk. And because your experiences were pathetically limited because of your lack of years, you drew upon those few familiar themes that serve beginning writers, well or not so well, and which in turn drive writing instructors to drink themselves, if they did not already have ample cause.

These themes are: The Death of Grandmother. My First Piece of Ass. The Romance of The Tavern and the Wonderful Assortment of Characters That Can Be Found There, Nightly. Or, when you became more experienced and flip, some variation on College as Kafkaesque Nightmare. Or My Childhood as Seen Through The Eyes of Charles Dickens, Ferdinand Louis Celine, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote. Take your pick.

There were various forays into fantasy, surrealism, naturalism, realism, and different kinds of poetic statement, the last of which tended to head in the direction of one of two stylistic idols: Tough Shit Eliot or Diddlin’ Thomas. It was probably Joyce more than anyone else who dominated our thinking and style—unless you had just read Faulkner, in which case some of his excesses had rubbed off on you and none of the excellences. The Dubliner stories—ignored by the public during much of Joyce’s lifetime—were fully recognized by mid-century and universally admired. The New Yorker sought stories written in the manner of "The Dead." We all tried to write like that, but descended into bombast and other forms of exaggerated imitation, if not downright copying out of passages, changing only the names (not to protect the innocent, you understand, but ourselves). Plagiarism may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it generally got you a F, if identified, or a C, if not pinned down. A C would not get you into graduate school, which was our common aspiration. We all knew that was where real learning took place. We longed for release from this treacley limbo which is undergraduate life.

I was being stretched thin in a number of crucial areas, and Billingsly was clearly a detriment to a healthy life style, generously offering me a beer at whatever hour I trailed in. And though talk about girls was ever on his lip, he never seemed to bring one in to our room, yet was usually there when I had a girl of my own in tow and something in mind besides male fellowship. I needed a place where I could catch a meal at any odd hour—and my hours were indeed odd—even if it meant cooking it myself. My harem had shrunk from eight to six, and would soon to be further reduced to four, two or three of which would willingly deliver themselves into my hot clutches. Though not happening nearly as often as I would like it to, I felt thwarted by the presence of a room mate of the same sex. I had tired of coming home from work or classes and finding my landlady’s blond spaniel lying on my bed, her tail wagging guiltily as she heard me approach. And all that business of sneaking girls sideways up the narrow staircase and pussyfooting them into my narrow bed had become unsatisfying.

It was growing imperative that I leave, and fast With the hours I was keeping at the railroad, I had little time to do an apartment search. The daylight hours I spent in class or at the library, or else curled up in a chair, pretending to be reading a book but in point of fact dozing. Finally I heard of a place that was within my price range.

A houseboat, at fifty bucks a month it was way more than I could afford. I needed a roommate (again, but a different kind from Old Billingsly), and immediately one came to mind. I hoped he would be agreeable to the idea.

It was Jack.

Nothing much, the houseboat was in fact perfect for our uses. It was moored at the foot of Shelby Street and had one bedroom, but the small living room contained a sofa that with some effort could be folded into a small bed. Neither Jack nor I had our own bedding, for it had always been provided at first the fraternity, then for me at the widow’s, and for Jack by the Navy. We solved the problem by trotting to a surplus store and each of us buying an Army surplus down sleeping bag. What an awful invention. They are too hot in normal weather, such as we usually had in Seattle, and were comfortable only when it was freezing outside and, even then, you had to leave your window open. Most of the year you slept half in, half out, of your mummy bag. The great thing about it was, it didn’t require sheets. Of course you began to smell badly rather quickly, and had to begin each day with a shower. This was good for you, we kept telling ourselves. After a shower, you stayed clean until you went to bed again. On and on. If you had a girl friend, you apologized for the sleeping bag and she thoughtfully pretended not to notice the odor. If it wasn’t raining, you turned the bag inside out in the morning and hung it over the porch rail of the houseboat until late evening. This helped considerably.

A houseboat is wonderful. They exist in only a few suitable locals, such as Seattle. Ours was kept afloat by logs. The rocking motion when a large boat passed by took a little getting used to, but Jack was a sailor and I always had a fondness for water. Ours was the first houseboat you came to at the foot of the Shelby Street and our dock continued on a goodly distance past us, with other floating devices moored on opposing sides, one after another, until you reached the end, the dock’s outer limits, where the walkway split to the right and to the left. Bearing straight ahead, you came to the most expensive one. It was moored with its backside on open water.

It was in effect the penthouse apartment. There lived Judd Pearson, a sociology professor and a friend of Jack (who had taken his introductory course) and soon a friend of mine. Parties formed almost nightly at Judd’s. It was know as the place to go, come dark. Highly informal, you could either attend or not, depending upon your inclination at the moment, even if it might change later. No invitation, written or otherwise, was issued for such a party, but if an occasion presented itself or a special event was named, so much the better. (A year later, when I went in the Army, it was Judd who threw a going-away blast for me, and I went on the plane to Fort Ord early the next morning with neither sleep nor breakfast, feeling pretty rocky.) Judd’s houseboat went into motion whenever a boat passed by; the bigger the boat, the greater we would pitch. Sometimes it seemed as though we were on the high seas in the midst of a gale. Judd’s made our small houseboat seem more secure, even sturdy, for we were tied to the foot of the pier and nearly moored on land.

At Judd’s beer and wine flowed (though you were expected to bring your own). The phonograph played loudly one of Judd’s favorite records--Ima Sumac or Mario Lanza—the kind of high class stuff you might expect from a professional sociologist. It was Judd who one night drunkenly proclaimed, "Tony Martin has a better voice than Mario’s, by far." I think he was playing the bongo drums at the moment, having just undergone one of his mysterious personality changes that often took place early in the morning, when he had been drinking for hours. We had learned to take these pronouncements in stride and often he proved right in his astounding assertions.

Jack was back in the Navy, recalled from the active reserve because of the war in Korea. A police action, they called it, but it could pass any day for a full-fledged war, accompanied by a draft. So Jack again commuted by bus to Sand Point Naval Air Station, which was only a couple of miles away, and there were some mornings, I am sure, when he walked the distance through the chronic drizzle, when he had overslept and missed the bus. This resulted from drinking way too much and arguing some moot point that had seemed vital, only a few hours ago.

There was a rule that faculty weren’t supposed to fraternize with students, especially female ones, but it was so frequently violated that it nearly became policy. The girls were easy for unscrupulous professors and we students were envious of their success rate. They seemed to have everything going for them.

I remember how angry I got that students like Ursula Spier, with her enormous breasts and wide hips, could get a grade as good or better than mine simply by provocatively offering herself to some seedy old professor such as Sophus Keith Winther, who was a notorious lecher. Whether or not he slept with her was broadly supposed but not specifically known. Who could prove it? It was one of those areas of extreme ambiguity. I have a hunch that Ursula (does that mean bear in Russian?) only needed to tease him a little to get the grade she wanted. I doubt whether she had to go down on him to get an A.

There was a large group forming and reforming, writers for the all or most part, writers in the formative stages of what might turn out to be lifelong writing careers, including work as editors or book sellers. Names, some with faces attached, flood in and out of my memory with a high degree of inaccuracy, I fear, all members of our literary Cosa Nostra: Levi Thompson, a quiet, thoughtful guy. He gave up the scene early in graduate school and in departing distributed broadly among us his expensive library of books, many of them pristine first editions, as though there was no tomorrow or he would have no use for them in whatever future he was rushing off to. I can not guess what it was, or what comprised it, but Montana figured in it, and it is where he was from, though he seemed most unMontanalike. He simply disappeared at the end of one quarter. Many did, come to think of it. I wish him well, wherever he is.

Les McIntosh was another one of us, our solitary black-in-residence. For a long time whatever I knew or surmised about blacks was based on knowing him. He was just like the rest of us, only different. His skin was black, for instance. And he had some oddities of behavior that I thought were individual, not racial. Now I’m not so sure. Blacks stuck to themselves—at least they did, back in high school. So we rarely got to know them. A nod of recognition in response to our greeting was all we ever got, if that. We soon gave up the effort to get to know them because it was too complicated, too difficult. But Les was one of us and liked.

He had a broad face, a flat nose, nubby hair. Otherwise he was just like us. He had an annoying habit, however. He cozied up to the women among us and soon he would be hugging them, running his hands all over their bodies, covertly feeling them up. We didn’t know what to do or say about this—the men, of course, but the women as well. In fact, I didn’t notice this until it was pointed out to me, and then I didn’t notice much else. At first I took it as an outward display of affection, even though he was getting huge handfuls of breasts and thighs, and never groped the guys in a similar manner.

We didn’t know what it meant, but we didn’t like it, us guys. Yet we were too hesitant to say anything to him about it, for we were sure he would deny that any such thing was happening. When I started going with Cheryl he didn’t exempt her from these attentions, and it bothered me greatly. She was much more worldly than I, and when I mentioned it to her, finally, she shrugged it off, as if to say, "They’re like that." Who are just like that? Writers, men, blacks? Blacks, she meant, and perhaps only some blacks.

It was called, in schoolboy parlance, copping a feel. A guy might have done it in private. With Les it was out in the open and so pervasive as to be practically continuous. It was as if he was saying to all of us white guys, "Look—see what I’m doing? I can get away with it, but you can’t." Which was true enough. But then we didn’t really want to do it. It would have been entirely out of character for any of us.

Les was a writer, but I don’t recall him writing anything. Maybe he wrote only for class. He was in several of my writing classes, but never was a story of his read aloud. Perhaps he never submitted the course requirement. Did he really write stories and turn them in? Did he finish the ones he presumably started? Or did he take incompletes, one after the other? Ten thousand words were a lot of words to set marching across a page and in the direction of an idea of completion. Did Les do it? I doubt it. Maybe he got the Gentleman’s C as a genial form of incomplete that wouldn’t hold you back but wouldn’t exactly push you into graduate school, either.

He drank with us evenings at the Blue Moon Tavern, slurped countless cups of coffee with us at Howard’s Restaurant, ordering as we all did the famous Number Two Breakfast—two eggs, hashbrowns, twin pieces of buttered toast cut into triangles, a pat of jelly, coffee. It cost sixty-five cents and nearly filled you up, but by noon you were ravenous again. We sat four or six to a booth on fake leather cushions and looked out the streaked windows as life (mostly student life) passed us by. We thought of life as an existential (whatever that meant precisely), but it was actually quite a nice and sheltered life. Outside lay the broad world as we envisioned it according to whomever we had read last—Sartre, Conrad, Steven Crane, Faulkner. All were dismal and naturalistic. The world was indifferent to the likes of us, but who cared? We were collecting words to describe the universal condition, which we reveled in. It was a world of unmitigated sadness, loss, pain, and suffering. We were lost. In effect, lost sons and daughters, the mythical children of Ted Roethke. Only, in spite of our misery and poverty, we were fairly happy. How could we relate that to the universal angst? Well, we couldn’t, not really. Maybe we were pretending to be authentic.

My twelve-hour shifts at the railroad were real enough. They revealed to me the universal condition and I didn’t like what I saw—a lifetime of working for someone I didn’t know, like, or respect. It was highly impersonal. The job was wearing me down, cramping the style with which I wanted to move through life, and hurting my grades, besides But it was a good job, as jobs went. That means it paid well and asked very little of me in return. All it wanted was my time, and that was exactly what I didn’t want to give them. Time is what was in short supply.

How wonderful it would be to split a shift with somebody. There would still be plenty of money to take care of my needs. If Les, for instance, split the shift with me, we’d each have enough free time to study, go to classes, play around, and money to do what it takes. Being friends and in daily contact on campus, we could cover for each other when necessary at the railroad via a simple telephone call. It would work out perfectly. When I explained my plan to him, Les looked at me with that wide grin of his (a missing tooth in the front of it produced that peculiar expression, I recall) and said nothing about my naivety.

I knew nothing about the reality of the world, of course, and how it was for blacks. My life had been totally sheltered, in spite of how worldly I thought myself. I don’t know how the truth broke over me, the awful truth, that the railroad didn’t hire blacks for anything other than (1) porters, or (2) gandy dancers, that is, the guys who pound spikes into ties to hold the rails into place when a roadbed is being laid. All other jobs were closed to them. Life was a shut door. But somehow the word got to me. Perhaps it was an engineer who explained to me in terms I could not misunderstand: "We don’t hire niggers."

There it is. The word didn’t have the awful meaning it has today, though bad enough. Blacks weren’t blacks then, they were Negroes, said respectfully, or less so, Niggers. I knew it was derogatory to some degree and the people I knew said, "Nee-gro." When I came back and told Les what he already knew and apologized, he gave me that same old smile of his that contained worlds and humiliations I would never experience and, consequently, never truly understand.

Was that why was he always putting his hands all over our girls? (Did I say our?) He was attracted to them, of course. And maybe they were attracted, in turn. If not, they were afraid to say anything. Why? Because he was black? To me it seemed a two-edge sword. Either way you tried to grasp the blade, you cut your hand. We know a lot more now about the enormous complexity of black/white relationships and the attendant ambivalence. At the time I can only say we were relatively inexperienced and, with Les, well, we made allowances. That’s how we looked at it, anyway.

The Blue Moon Tavern had undergone a change in character that nicely paralleled the world of my friends and me. It had started out as place for the fraternities and sororities to gather and chug-a-lug pitchers of beer and sing school fight songs. But when we lost our innocence and gained our first taste of experience, the Blue Mood changed character, too. The frat crowd began to shun the place for the same reasons we ex-Greeks sought it out. It was literary and intellectual. People read books and literary magazines there most afternoons, tucked off in some dim corner. Jack often wrote there; he carried a green Harvard bookbag, just like Ted did. We all affected them now; you could buy them at the University Bookstore for under five dollars. Jack brought along a 100-watt light bulb, for the Moon was atmospherically dim and otherwise Jack couldn’t see the words lie down on the page in that neat, slightly crabbed, dense handwriting of us. (When you left the Moon, you took your bulb with you and replaced theirs.)

He was one of the mainstays of the Moon and, like Balzac before him, sought out public places in which to practice what is perhaps the loneliest and least public of all endeavors. To be seen actually writing in a restaurant or tavern got to be am affectation for some of us. As for me, I simply couldn’t do it. I couldn’t write that way. Yet the tavern—the antithesis of the library—figured strongly in our collective life. It was the anodyne to the library and embodied the polar opposite of what the library represented, tedium and misery of an introspective nature. It shouldn’t have been necessary, but it was, to run from one place to the other, like a light-stunned moth. Yet we kept believing that the one couldn’t exist without the other. To me there was something eternally wrong with the equation.

It was a moot point anyway, because during a college student’s normal drinking hours I was astride the fireman’s chair, with absolutely nothing to do, the train plunging into the dark wintry night, with its load of passenger and box cars rattling behind, or aft, as the case might be. How I missed the campus when I was away from it. How foreign and drab and ordinary seemed the ordinary world, where work takes place without respite or relief. I felt myself a visitor to campus, not an integrated part of life there, hurrying off to my classes and then away, in dire need of breakfast and bed. Daily I was slipping behind in my reading and test preparation.

The job, had its perks. I read in my fireman’s swivel The chair as the diesel rode through the night, its interior let by a single small bulb . I read, not always what my courses had assigned. One night we were pushing a load of passenger cars through the washtrack at King Street Yard and I was deep into my paperback copy of The Great Gatsby. What a great story—so romantic and at the same time depressingly real. The switchmen were on my side of the train, for once, waving their lanterns back and forth, as the train proceeded at about the speed that a man walks. That is not fast for a train.

The switchman gave the two-car signal and the sign to prepare to stop. I missed it. One car and stop. Slow down. Slow down now! Stop! My nose remained in the book. Washout (which means to stop immediately, for something serious is wrong). We hit a the cab of another switch engine going onto the track from the opposite direction, slamming its brakeman into the firebox wall, or the thick sheet of riveted steel that separates the cab from the engine on a diesel engine. It was a place where switchmen and brakemen like to ride when the train is underway and they have nothing else to do but ride. The man on the other train wasn’t hurt so much as rattled, righteously angry, wanting to find the guy who had caused the accident. He was clearly on the other train.

I looked sheepishly guilty and scared, I suppose. Both trains had both come to a full stop now. The crews were encountering each other, asking questions. It was my fault, of course; no doubt about it. I’ll say this for my crew, however: they covered up for me. It is how the railroad works—I hadn’t known before. They gathered round me, so to speak, and formed an impenetrable barrier with their bodies and would not admit any questions that might pin the blame on me. I had no reason to be scared, I learned, for the railroad men’s code protected me. It was inviolate. Nobody squeals on somebody in his crew. You don’t rat. It is how things are.

Dishes were broken in the diner, which was in the middle of the other train’s string of cars, but there was no other reportable damage that couldn’t be ignored or hushed over. The dishes weren’t mentioned in the written report. It was an accident without blame, with no costs connected to it. The matter was officially over. Closed. But how terrible I felt. And while The Great Gatsby remains one of my favorite novels, it shall ever evoke the shame and embarrassment of that accident.

Years later, while in the Army on a laboring crew stringing telephone wire for a new pole line along the Richardson Highway, I read The Great Gatsby again, this time in a paperback edition. Off in the deep woods, digging a hole for a telephone pole, I was struck by a bad case of the trots. The only thing I had that could be used for toilet paper was my book. Regretfully I tore out the first dozen or so pages of The Great Gatsby and used them for what was necessary.

I’ve never forgotten either instance. The book continues to mean a lot to me.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, you get educated, I don’t know how. The process seems incidental, random, careless. You start out troubled in certain ways and end up troubled in others, but the earlier ones have grown inconsequential and without discomfort now. You may even be able to laugh at some of them.

The new ones, though, may be larger and of more importance. Yet you endure them. You survive, and pretty soon the university tells you they are going to graduate you.

Hey, wait. I’m just starting to learn things. Don’t set me free quite yet. But they do, unless you opt for graduate school, which is a far different matter.

There are days fifty years later when I am back in an undergraduate classroom, say, Bostetter’s, reading Coleridge again—I remember the substance of the prose better than the poetry, which seems to have boiled down to some tags about the albatross and an old geezer at sea. Or I recall Wordsworth again, so aptly named—a man who forges words out of the smithy of his soul and makes us value their iron as never before. And then t here is Keats, who today is little more than a few bits and phrases, remnants of wondrous speech, until I turn to his pages again and am struck anew by his marriage of music and meaning. Doors and windows open up on a realm of myriad pleasure.

Suddenly I am back in Old Joe Harrison’s classroom, this time his course in Modern European Lit, reading again the masters. There is Thomas Mann, so difficult (and boring!) to approach and fight my way through, but so deep, so full of revelations I was not prepared to handle. (Am I now? No doubt, no still.) Some of us are not cut out for the intricacies of Germanic thought and expression; we fidget and fume. We forget what we are there. We long to set ourselves free from the past and what is troubling us, namely burgher life. Mann is very much where we live, where we have come from—a middle-class American life and the parents who bore us, men and women engaged in the business of life, which is business. What else do you do, if you are going to raise a family? And isn’t that what most of us students did, in our own delicious sweet time. As for the Serious Writing, it seems to have gone the way of our youth. And yet we remain estranged from the bourgeois life we so despised, back then. We couldn’t escape from it, even if we really wanted to. How ordinary we were and are. That is the lesson we all learned.

Joe Harrison was a great one for tags. They are a key to learning and remain everlastingly usefully. He taught me how to remember the Seven Deadly Sins by giving his neologism, PEWSAGL, pronounced (in case you have any doubt) Pue-Sagal. One letter stands for each of the sins. I’ve never forgotten it. The word is etched in memory. The named sins have gone with me everywhere I’ve gone in fifty years. Joe would stand in front of us, lightly hunched over from that series of strokes he had, pacing the small stage that was 110 Parrington Hall, and pontificate on the greats who preceded us by, oh, a generation. About half of them were still living. In the years to come, when one of them died, we each felt a strong sense of personal loss. Oddly, in some cases, the pain was greater than that of the loss of some distant family member, say, an aunt or first cousin.

We had no day then to celebrate James Joyce, and nobody could remember his birthday, let alone that of Leopold Bloom, a key protagonist in Ulysses. Now we have one, and people in the Irish fashion who have read no or little Joyce are quick to celebrate it by getting appropriately drunk. Some of us don’t bother. For once you’ve read him, every day is Bloomsday. He sticks with you. And it was Joe who turned us on to Joyce, if we didn’t happen to have picked him up by ourselves earlier. If you did, the bond was no weaker.

Joe’s hair was thin in front and white, he wore little round glasses not yet called Grannies, his lips seemingly curled round some invisible lemondrop as a result of his stroke and its impediment, he spit out his words slowly, deliberately, sardonically, eyes twinkling, mocking, treating what he himself had just said ironically, in case you missed the point. Was it the truth or somebody’s version of it? And what was the difference? And since he wouldn’t permit himself to smoke in class, though everybody else did (but not me; I waited with him), when the fifty minutes were at an end, and we all rose to go, out of his pocket would come that one-half a Chesterfield, mine, now his, and its ragged end would await the light that (not being Roethke at the seminar table) he would have to provide for himself, and he would draw the poison deliciously into his lungs and let it leak out through his nose in twin tendrils that merged in a plume. How sweet it is, he seemed to say, for he had earned it.

For a professor finds himself eternally in the society of children, relatively speaking, and they must provide what is lacking in his own life, namely what is so apparent in theirs, youth, energy, hope, opportunity. And, let’s face it, the ego rewards of teaching are tremendous. The professor is absolute. He holds power supreme and doesn’t need to threaten to wield what everybody knows what he has in his hand, the power to fail you or give you the next lowest grade that will probably rob you forever of entry into professional or graduate school. It is why you laugh at his poor jokes and toady up to him in every undeserved way. It is from fear itself. The professor is a giant among grown children.

I wanted to teach and yet I didn’t. Somewhere along the line writers begin to think of ourselves as teachers, for the cold truth is not held back by those who had faced it earlier in their compromised lives: few can make a living at writing. So what else do you do? Our professors looked immodestly at their fingernails and we recognized the message contained within the action. You taught. You taught others to do what you could not do well yourself, that is, make a living from writing.

"Be like me," said our teachers.

"Why?" came the individual snide reply. Then: "Do I have to?"

What else can you do?

I had worked on the literary magazine from the time it was reproduced by mimeograph (under the appropriately modest moniker, Month’s Best) until it was typeset and had a wraparound cover that made it slightly resemble Partisan Review. The new version was called Assay, and of course many puns and bad jokes followed on the heels of the name. The word came from Chaucer and had to do with the test of good metals. The analogy was to how long and hard a trial writing will be. Previously, the mag been cranked out by the departmental secretary on the state-of-the-art mimeo machine. Now it was offset printed, la, de, da. It looked nice, something proud to be associate with, but what an incestuous rag it was. Usually the list of editors could be superimposed over the contents page without alteration, which means we had an agreement to publish not only but mainly each other’s stuff. From the standpoint of intellectual integrity this was despicable. But it did not hold us back and there was a strong precedent that said the practice was approved by tradition.

In time I became its editor. We published mostly fiction, which is what the editorial board wrote, for the most part, with a little poetry thrown in, most of it bad. It didn’t rhyme and its endlines ran raggedly down the page. Roethke was off again in the madhouse and Richard Eberhart had come from the East to fill Ted’s sizable shoes for a year, after which it was hoped that the ailing poet might be able to return. (He wasn’t.) Here in the American West we are all instantly on a first-name basis, the teacher and the student, the poet and the young versifier, the great and the not so great. Dick was faculty adviser to the journal; I was taking a writing conference class from him, besides. Since I had urged that we not publish an issue earlier because—and this was concurred in by the other editors, the material was so bad as to be shameful, embarrassing to the writers and editors alike— we had money left over in our budget for a double issue. I was determined that it be a great one. As it turned out, it wasn’t any too bad.

It included the poem by Jim Wright that begins on an note that will offend any environmentalist: "We threw our beer cans down among the rocks," later published in his first book, The Green Wall. My friend, Mel LaFollette, who later matriculated to Berkeley at the same time I did, contributed "Ballad of Red Fox," which later appeared in his first book of poems, The Clever Body, after which we went our separate ways and never heard a word from each other since.

Wesley Wehr, the painter and miniaturist, thought of himself as a poet then and contributed a characteristically short poem which I remember stating that someone’s words had "come back and fit like a terrible glove." I did not much like the poem, but Eberhard did, and so we published it. I soon saw that I was wrong. It was pretty good, not at all like the mediocre verse we had been publishing.

Fiction was my field, so the issue contained a number of short stories, about which I remember nothing. Janet Keller probably had one of hers in it, a tale full of obtuse symbolism for which she was locally famous; since she and I had been together shortly before then, I had no doubt read and recommended it. I was the editor, after all.

Occasionally some stranger’s story slipped in on the grounds of talent alone, but not often. The group was incestuous in more ways than the editors exclusively publishing their own stuff. Over the course of a year, most everybody ended up under the covers with everybody else, I mean, partners not of the same sex, though there must have been exceptions to this rule. (Kinsey would support this theory statistically.) For we were the English Department. Our parties were meant to be notable. They would start out staid and proper enough, much like one of Jerry Willis’s Sunday afternoon high teas; people would sit or stand stiffly around the room, sipping a drink, making literary small talk, or talk a little larger than that, and then the group transition would take place in the space of a wink. Monsters all.

I used to watch for the exact moment of transition, but always missed the critical magical instant—surely no longer than a second. Suddenly everyone (except me, of course) was rollickingly drunk. The guys were all hands after the nearest female and they, the girls and women, were openly receptive, almost as though they were beasts in mass estrus. It was beautiful and ugly, both at once. Guys loosened buttons and sometimes zippers—theirs and the objects of their desire. The women, well, large amounts of visible flesh became available as garments were opened provocatively or thrown quickly to one side.

Mouths pressed against mouths, open wide, tongues lunging. Breasts leaped into waiting hands . Skirts hiked up around mid-drifts, shoes got lost, stockings went unfurled. Some became instant nudists, each person seeking some flat surface on which to lie down with whomever was handy. The amount of kissing going on was extraordinary. It was as common as shaking hands at a business convention. But nobody would let it go at that and strove to complete his or her hasty union. It didn’t much matter who it was with, so long as it took place quick. If it was violent, so much the better.

I would like to think I was not like the others, but people tell me I am wrong. Reports filtered back from the hinterland confirming this, I am sad to say. "You were as bad as the very worst," I was told. "Come on," I replied tersely. "You can’t mean it?" But mean it they did. And they would recall it to me. I had trouble remembering the details, they were so gross and repugnant, or even which girl was involved.

"Was I successful?" I once asked a girl after a party. Tactfully she offered no clue. I am today as much in the dark as I was then, as to expressly what had happened. Stains on my clothing could be spilled food or drink. Or they cold be the jolly proof of me coming together with someone. In the morning, if I was alone, and often I wasn’t, there was always the sickly stench of stale booze and cigarets. It is something you can get used to encountering.

Deftly I removed myself from any involvement in last night’s debacle or the critical judgment of my peers. "Simply terrible," I would proclaim, as though I hadn’t been present at the occasion and knew of it only through detailed reports from some authentic source. No disgusting event or episode escaped my eager ear, for I had not witnessed it, I affirmed.

"What? Not really? Who would do such an awful thing?"

It well might have been I. But by asking the question I distanced myself from the answer and clearly proclaimed that I had no prior knowledge. Once the event from the previous night involved a clinical definition of rape. A woman had complained and had said she would call the police. I hoped that it had occurred far, far off. My friends or I could not involved in such an act.

Is it rape of she agrees, but later changes her mind, so to speak, in mid course? Certain women were known to be receptive to the point where it couldn’t be a case of rape, namely because she was never known to decline. On and on. We used to argue, What is worse than a rapist? What is society’s view? (For that matter, what is society?) From a cosmic viewpoint does rape exist?

We used to argue about things like this by the hour, never reaching any conclusion, not even one that might be sarcastically called an academic one, or one of the kind called rhetorical, which means it didn’t really happen. It was imagined. But—what if it had? Can saying you’re sorry be sufficient amend?

We wanted to attach a name to everything. Without a name, a label, nothing was clear. We were lost, we had no moorings, no fruitful direction in which to aim ourselves. Words were our business, talk our way of reaching for the ambivalent truth and making it our own.

In almost every case it remained elusive.

A houseboat in summer is ideal, the breezes gentle, the sun warm, little flowers appearing prettily wherever the hot earth encourages them. In winter a houseboat is a trial by ice, cold as cold can be, more frigid inside than out, you would swear (and swear a lot you did at the pervasive dampness), and at night you lay in your mummy bag, looking and feeling like dead King Tut. You shivered until morning.

Jack and I had an oil stove that was fed from two Siamese tanks of fifty-gallons each suspended sideways outside our houseboat from a two-by-four frame erected on the side. Normally you didn’t walk there. We kept the stove burning through the daylight hours, whenever we were home, and well into the night, even when we weren’t, the heat passing through the paper-thin walls and out into the foggy air that hung over Portage Bay of Lake Union. When the moist cloud lifted, a chill wind arrived, announcing itself with an icy breath that blew around corners. There was no escaping it.

Lakes have no corners, of course, not unless the houseboats that dot them in banded clusters are jammed together like circled wagons, as ours were, We were on the outside edge of almost everything, the most shoreward of the group, holding our positions almost as houses would, we were so near to land. We could not be more grounded if we had a basement.

When the wind blew and the boats rocked, only one end of our houseboat evidenced any motion, for the other end was hard lodged on land. This gave the living room floor a peculiar gait or motion. The old houseboat creaked and groaned, as one end pitched and the other fought against the induced motion, and the two contested each other and each other’s physical presence, almost like brothers would, throughout the night.

Similarly, brotherlike, Jack and I found we were not ideal roommates, though fortunately we occupied the houseboat at mostly different times of the day and strived to keep out of each other’s way. Isn’t that how it goes—one resents the presence of the other and wishes him elsewhere? A man strives for loneliness, while at the same time wsishing for company when he chooses. We were the best of friends and the worst of enemies; no, that isn’t right; we were good friends who were thwarted by each other’s existence, for bachelors are always plotting seductions and there are already enough barriers standing in the way of success without adding to them. None of us in our group—especially the women—were so sophisticated that the intrusion of a third person would not destroy the mood of intimacy at the critical moment when sex was imminent. Which is not to say Jack and I didn’t walk in on each other when we were in bed with a girl, but when we did the intruder was quick to excuse himself and disappear for the next hour or so. This usually meant a walk to the Red Robin Tavern, a couple of long blocks away, where a schooner or two could be nursed and a half pack of cigarets smoked. By the time this was done, sex for the couple would be completed, the obsequies observed, the girl gone, and the intruder could assume the other would be alone again, the place newly vacated, and normal cooperative life could be resumed. But if you were wrong and mistimed your return, she would be dressed by now and innocently occupying the end of the sofa, coolly sucking on a cigaret, a big wide smile pasted on her face, her legs demurely crossed. No mention of the intrusion was made. Life went on.

Jack and I were attracted to a very different type of woman, thankfully, and this might help explain our long friendship and lack of rivalry in matters not intellectual literary. When one of us had a date that might be expected to be heavy, and all dates were anticipated to be like this, the other guy was expected to find something else to do and some other place to be. He was to be gone for the entire evening. I’m sure we caused each other great hardship with tacit agreement, but our different needs and occasions probably evened out, in the long run.

There were a couple of exceptions to the rule of not being attracted to the same girl. Once, after about a month of taking turns being gone certain evenings, we discovered we were dating the same girl, a buxom red-headed beauty who was student body secretary. (She was slumming with the likes of us, evidently.) Since neither of us scored, we ultimately learned, she must have been having a lot of fun with each of us and waiting to discover who would be the first to learn what was going on. It took longer than one might suppose. We both liked her a lot and kept the other guy in the dark about our maneuverings. And it probably amused her, rather than bored her, to hear the same escapades retold from different points of view. Especially if they alluded to her.

We lived compatibly in the houseboat for about a year. It is not such a short time when you’re young. How we came to give it up I’m not quite sure. Particulars have a sad way of fading with time. Jack’s being called back to active duty in the Navy surely had something to do with it. He was stationed once again at Sand Point and billeted there. Apolgetically he moved his stuff out. I wasn’t able to afford the rent by myself, so I took a small apartment just off The Ave at the Fortieth Street intersection. It had no bedroom, but a Murphy bed could be pulled down and, when it was, it fully occupied the living room. Bedrooms were luxuries that none of us could afford. When you began to live with a girl, things became immediately crowded, since neither had a place to escape except to the bathroom or kitchen, neither of which will do. The kitchen had no door you could close, which left only the bathroom, which is no place to try to achieve privacy, for more than a minute or two.

I met Cheryl about this time, and she changed my life in a major way. It is impossible to remember how these things happen, not clearly, precisely, or in exact chronological detail. How quickly the order of events gets scrambled. Memory, according to William Maxwell, is largely a lie, anyway. The literal truth is not only evasive but proves to be unnecessary, irrelevant, so you settle instead for something approaching verisimilitude, and let it go at that.

Suddenly the one-room apartment on Fortieth was too small. As much as we loved each other, and enjoyed at length each other’s company, there were decided limits how much either of us could take of the other. (Even the caged lions in the movie, Born Free, needed their individual space, remember.) The apartment and the building had other drawbacks as well. Under orders from the owner, the elderly manager locked the front door promptly at ten. Everybody ought to be in his or her bed at that hour, anyway, they both believed. Well, not us.

Cheryl was a student actress whose exact amount of talent was yet to be determined. Blond, pretty (I thought her beautiful), she got good roles but not the best ones, well, not the best ones often. When the theater closed for the evening, and the actors dispersed, she naturally headed for my place. Usually she found the door locked and my key was the kind that could not be duplicated. She had to throw pebbles at my window for me to come downstairs and let her in. Pebbles are in short supply on city streets, and the local supply was soon exhausted, so she called softly to me in her stage-trained whisper, a voice not lacking in decibels and about as penetrating a one as they come. It is intended to be easily heard in the back row. This soon drew attention to our living arrangement and the ancient manager asked me to leave by the end of the month. It was a week off.

There is a certain amount of irony involved in living arrangements. The apartment I found for us was on the third floor of The Monarch—a colossal dump that had long ago given up any illusions of living up to its name. Cheryl needed to maintain a place of her own, for appearance’s sake (her mother lived in town and occasionally paid her a visit). So she found a cheap room and kitchenette three blocks up Fifty-Second street. It served to get away from me, as well, since I can be a bit oppressive. And then I would be painfully alone again for a bit.

We lived together in my hovel, not hers, for mine had a full-sized kitchen complete with gas stove, large refrigerator, and a bedroom just big enough for a double bed, which was its main attraction. A big closet opened up off the bath room and lacked a door of its own; it did have, however, a thick pull curtain that partitioned it off from the rest of the apartment.

From our bedroom a window opened up across the alley and gave us a few of a dirty gray apartment building. The people who lived there could see into our windows equally well. That seemed only a fair exchange. A wooded staircase designed for fire emergencies ran up the back of the Monarch. Friends sometimes used it as an entrance to come to visit us, and that sometimes provided not a fully pleasant surprise.

Our windows faced West and caught the sinking sun; in spring and summer it was so blinding that you couldn’t see much of anything for several hours of the afternoon and early evening. The shades were nearly opaque, though tattered by years of being pulled down against just such an onslaught, and could not be comfortably raise until dark, at which time anybody across the alley could see in. It was not a good arrangement.

A graduate student, Bob Whiting, had clued me as to the apartment’s availability and later warned me, "Beware. There ought to be a law against gas ovens in apartments for graduate students. How tempting!" He meant, of course, that it would be tempting, sometimes, to stick one’s head in the oven and turn the gas on. In spite of how bad things went, however, I never considered it. And in the future my oven was always electric and there was no urge, either, to put my head inside and fry my brain.

Cheryl and I were happy there, or believed we were, which is the same thing, isn’t it? There is a kind of misery that comes disguised as joy, and you see the world through a veil of pain and anguish. One instant your world seems beautiful, the next it is simply awful. You can’t tell up from down. Often you don’t know quite where you are. When you are together, all goes well for a few minutes, and your pleasure seems supreme. The world is a happy place. But then doubt returns, along with sorrow and the old misery. What happened? You find you are living disparate lives that touch only at random points, sometimes not at all. In the touching there is great pleasure. You believe yourself to be happy. You tell each other you are, through your tears, and each strives to convince the other. But you both know you are living in a hell of your own manufacture.

Meanwhile Jack was living in Cockroach Manor; it was there or else in the Green House. I always got the two apartment buildings mixed up, they looked so much alike. They sat side by side directly behind what is presently the University Bookstore and occupied the space where the large parking lot stands crammed with cars in the area just off Fifteenth Avenue Northeast. (A little piece of historical Seattle, for those who like this kind of stuff and might like to visit the site.) I imagine most colleges and universities have places like these and they are uniformly seedy and badly in need of repairs. Paradise wasn’t exactly paved over to provide a parkinglot, for the apartments did not exactly comprise a shrine, as Joni Mitchell might have it in her famous song, but this is how it goes—the way of the world, or at least our nation. Fifty years has seen much of the past paved over. This is not always for the worst, you understand.

Jack had a narrow single room in the basement of one building, just off the alley entrance. It was very much like a jail cell, only smaller. A little more width to the room would have permitted his bed to be placed in more positions than just one. Down the hall were communal toilets and showers. You were allowed an electric hotplate but nothing to keep things cool except a window ledge. Unfortunately he had no window.

Here he was happy, or claimed to be, which is much the same thing. Books were stacked everywhere and teetered in precarious columns that climbed to the ceiling and often failed. He read omnivorously, or have I already said that? If so, it can stand repeating. Books are vital and must be kept near at hand, for if a budding writer does not devour what the previous generation had to say, he is apt to say something foolishly and, perhaps, try to write The Sun Also Rises, all over again. Which might not be a bad idea, you understand, but it is unlikely to get published and will not displace the old one in our mutual affection.

I’ll admit, I used to look closely at what Jack was reading so as not to miss a name not on my own list of writers who I simply had to read, or else fail at my task, which was simply to have read everything. Who, for instance, was Wright Morris, and why should one bother with him? Was he famous and, if so, what for? How important was he, really? I was soon to find out.

I think the Green House was the most northerly building, the one managed my Maggie Hedstrom’s parents, and it was Jack who lived next door. Wasn’t her father. . .Lars? Her mother’s name and personality are total blanks. Cockroach Manner either had another name or else no true name, only an address and rows of brass-plated mailboxes tarnishing in a vestibule behind a front door that was never locked. (If it was locked, whoever could get in, for people were forever forgetting or losing their key.)

Nearly everybody lived at one time or another at Cockroach, or the Green House, but never me, and I guess I missed out, but I visited there often, for it is what mattered was happening and I did not want to miss out on any of it. The parties there were continuous and some of them lasted for days. They would put Judd Pearson’s to shame. And they were pretty much open-ended, which means you were welcome to join almost any party in progress.

Rick Higland lived there, several stories above Jack; he was a painter in the Mark Tobey school, or at least in the sense that he drew with his pen on napkins furnished by various eateries, much in the manner of Tobey, who was well-known by sight. Rick too frequented the Pike Place Market with his sketch pad. Mark, and his constant companion, Pere, could be seen walking up and down the Ave. in their matched berets and great coats, headed for the green grocer. They stood out because they didn’t look like us ordinary folks. They were special and standoffish.

Tobey was greatly emulated by anyone who thought he had talent, and Rick did. He had his own style, but napkin sketches tend to look alike, if quickly drawn. Rick drew girls in cafes. If he was satisfied with the sketch, or even if he wasn’t, he would afterwards present the napkin to her as a modest gift and, depending on how gratefully she accepted it, take the next step. Rick was good-looking in a chiseled sort of way and was highly successful with this approach.

But he—like so many of us—had the bad habit of falling in love often, and the technique was no longer needed or extraneous. When he wasn’t busy sketching, he painted in oils, which is what a true artist did. He smelled up the apartments with his turpentine and oils, which mixed with the astringent odors from uncollected garbage and cooking to form a lingering stench that would not go away and became part of the miasma of the place.

There were no smells of cover-up patchouli or marijuana, for we knew little about them. But soon there would be mescaline and peyote. Usually it was beer and wine we drank, with a little whiskey and gin thrown in, whenever available. Nobody was particular about what he or she drank. I was a bit on the outside at Cockroach Manner. I didn’t live there and it wasn’t my usual haunt, though I went there more often than I might want to admit, visiting Jack and other friends. Like the smells, one man’s music mixed with music from another apartment, especially in spring and summer, when doors were left open, and a cacophony was produced. Thus you might smell dirty feet and some girl’s perfume, hear Dave Brubeck and a Mozart’s piano concerto, detect cooking cabbage and garlic, all shuffled together and forming a kind of gregarious stew, with certain sounds and smells repeating themselves, but seldom exactly the same, not twice, but never very different from what you’d previously experienced. It was wonderful and awful, both at once.

We took up fencing, after a fashion. It wasn’t real fencing, however. Rick owned several sabers, deadly weapons, with a cutting edge and a point, but he only showed them off and kept them sheathed the rest of the time. He had some foils, as well, and they had blunted tips; hekept them stacked in the far corner along with umbrellas and sections of fishing rods. The foils came out around midnight, when each of us had drunk about six beers and now fashioned himself a musketeer in the grand style. A swashbuckler.

We ranged noisily up and down the alley that ran between the apartment buildings and what would soon be the huge bookstore. It was midnight or later. A garbage can lid makes a pretty good shield, even though shield and foils don’t quite go together. Nobody was about to argue the point. Too much fun was at hand. One night my blunted foil came in hard over the raised hand guard of my opponent, Bill Beechner, and struck the skull bone right over his left eye. Instantly I was sober and knew how close I had come to blinding my friend. I don’t think he realized it, from the jolly way he continued slashing at me and thrusting his foil, but I did. I quit right then and never fenced again.

There were other diversions easily had. Our conversations were inspired and ranged widely. We were discovering art and literature, deeply involved in the learning process, everything new and exciting to us, sharing viewpoints, arguing this thesis or that, wanly or vehemently, it didn’t much matter; it made no difference who was right, for there was no right, no wrong, no anger that lasted more than an hour or two, no true animosity or hatred. We were friends—existentialists, after all. Our basic conflict with that philosophy, however, was that some things really mattered to us, and we would not sacrifice them to a cause. So we were more your garden breed of nihilists. And with the years I think we were all confirmed in what we started to believe—that fiction matters. It speaks an oblique truth. What the great writers say has relevance in our lives. Painting is important and forms another kind of truth that does not whither. Picasso, Cézanne, Van Gogh, not to mention our local painters, Morris Graves, Mark Toby, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson, sustain us, as the decades slip by. Roethke, Yeats, Auden, Thomas, Eliot speak with voices that do not dim with time and rarely tarnish. They are there when you need them—and even when you do not. Right up there on the shelf. Eternal.

Plus those who followed them—Hugo, W. S. Merwin, Ginsburg (yes, him!), Wagoner; many others whom I do not know that well, or feel so deeply about. I grow old, my interests diluted and dim, my attentions wandered. But it is consoling to know the writers and painters are there for those who seek them out. We literary types, we English majors, are a practical lot, in spite of what others might think or say about us. Take my word for it, they do not know us well enough to judge with accuracy. I remember dating an English major (they were usually pretty, belonged to sororities, limited in their thinking, experience, scope, full of all the prejudices they needed to last a lifetime) and my old car had a flat tire. It was a hot day. I quickly changed the tire. The girl was astonished that I knew how to do this. I mention this because many believe that male English majors are effete. The opposite is more likely to be true. Because we do not have the mundane worldly skills to trade on—engineering, for instance—we have had to be doubly tough and clever in order to survive, for isn’t the ultimate test of one’s learning how one successfully one lives? How fully and satisfyingly? I have always thought so.

In spring of my senior year Cheryl and I decided to throw a party. I can’t remember the occasion. The Monarch apartment was too small for what I had in mind. Since my parents had a large house across town, I persuaded them into turning the place over to me for one night. They secreted themselves in the TV room upstairs and we took over the rest of the house, primarily the split-level lower floor that opened up onto my mother’s rose garden and a long slope that rolled away to what was left of a deep woods and an estate. Nobody there would bother us.

Jack had met a girl, Rusty, but still did not know how to drive a car. He was one of those in the ranks of people eternally seeking rides. I agreed to give him a lift the six miles cross town to the party, and since I was its host we arrived much earlier than the guests. We began to set up tables and chairs, put the beer and mixer under refrigeration, break open boxes of crackers, and arrange foods on plates for later. Jack and Rusty lent a hand but generally were too busy with each other and exchanging deep promising looks to be of much real help. Soon Cheryl and I stopped trying to involve them in the work. The sun was still high when people began arriving in twos and fours, and in a moment everybody had a drink in his or her hand. The party did not explode into full frenzy for hours.

All the while Jack and Rusty stared into each others eyes and remained wordless. People generally circled them and attempted to make no conversation where it was clear they were not wanted. It was a private thing they were experiencing. From time to time Cheryl and I exchanged the kinds of looks where first one, then the other, rolls his eyes into the top of his head. Later Jack and Rusty accused us of practically shoehorning them into bed. I assure you, as I did them, that they needed no help in that department.

For a decade or longer Rusty had been going through psychiatric treatment and had spent, it was rumored, tens of thousands of dollars on what might be termed her cure. Well, it wasn’t working. She was schizophrenic and no borderline case. It was full fledged case and not a part time condition. Her preoccupation with her psychic problems took up all of her time. It left little time for anything else. In Freudian analysis a time arrived when the process of transference takes place. It is when you lay all your troubles on the psychiatrist and he assumes the burden. Also, at the same time, a strange and unhealthy attachment takes place between the two parties. They exchange roles and sometimes identities. They become as one, or so the patient thinks. It is hard on the psychiatrist, but he is well paid and expects this to take place; he has anticipated it. With Rusty this resulted in her having to call him at critical moments of the day or night, and describing to him over the telephone some new symptom or aspect of her problem, or problems. He would listen, the meter running, and offer her a series of planned consolations or suggestions that were intended to help. They must have helped some, or else wouldn’t have kept phoning him. Or he would have stopped responding.

She was a pretty girl, a bit emaciated and worn in the face, heavily made up, with hair the color of Rita Hayworth’s. People will excuse, at least for a while, unusual behavior in one who is exceedingly attractive. Under the pancake powder her face was an ashen mask. Her bone-thin arms were heavily freckled, as if with paprika, and her mouth was crimson. She was beautiful, we would all agree, in an unhealthy, California kind of way.

Often she would break down in tears and her face streaked with wet mascara. She would look up at you with big green eyes, eyes heavily ringed with mascara and agony, and seemingly ask you for help. In the opinion of those who knew her well, she was to be avoided. She would drag down to the depths anybody who got to know her well or who was involved in her life. Neither Jack nor I knew this much about her.

The party bore on and reached its climax, after which people began to drift away. Cheryl and I could not leave until all the others were gone. Jack and Rusty had to wait, too. Finally, near dawn, it was over. Partially empty glasses and crumpled beer cans lay everywhere, along with paper plates containing uneaten food. A cigaret butt had been put out in the middle of the cheese dip, I saw with disgust. Cheryl and I had drunk too much, had argued a little, and we were half asleep. Jack and Rusty needed a ride across town. Well, so did Cheryl and I, though the clean up process wasn’t done. This was the terrible kind of thing I used to leave for my parents. When we got to Rusty’s small apartment at the foot of The Ave, they disappeared inside without a backward look over their shoulder. I wasn’t surprised.

Nor was I surprised not to see neither of them for the next couple of weeks. She and Jack had simply disappeared.

Cheryl and I were having problems of our own and they had manifested themselves at the party. She was a pretty blond, curvy, and drew male attention wherever she went. This is not conducive to a good, solid relationship. She seemed to offer an open invitation to approach her. This was unnerving, at least to me, and made me feel that I ought to carry a sword, and, no, not one with a blunted foil point. It must have been a big problem to all the guys she knew over a long lifetime. My heart goes out to all of them. Well, at least a little.

I can see myself as merely a knot on the long string of time and men she knew, though she assured me, back then, that I was important to her and she loved me. Be that as it may, and I believe it, her actions often contradicted her words and I was lacking for assurances. It is a rare love affair that has an easy course, and if it does, I suspect it is not real love but some needy approximation of that emotion. Ands I truly feel sorry for all the guys to come, for the roadside is littered with corpses of those who loved and failed, including mine. That our affair failed proves the case, or rather disproves it. To the survivors, let me add: Brothers, you will never be the same again. Your tender psyche is permanently scarred. The most you may hope is a high rate of recovery.

That night in June, at my parents’ house, my childhood home, in the large, made-over rec room, in which I had slept for years, a roared. It seemed like it would never end and had a life of its own, one I had no control over. I was a guest in my own home. Had I wanted it over, I couldn’t have ended it. It was out of control. But it didn’t want it over. I wanted it to go on and on, for I was enjoying it immensely. There is a point at parties when all those nice, likeable people (your friends!) making small talk and pouring themselves drinks simply become virtual monsters. Who are they—these people? The look familiar but their behavior is so different. The men became lechers, the women sluts; nobody knows what he or she is doing. They issue wanton invitations they are not truly responsible for. I remember Paul Tufts chasing Cheryl through my mother’s rose garden and she attempting to fend him off with both hands, laughing wildly, smiling off in all directions, sort of fiendishly, while Paul’s wife (Ann London, at the time) pinned me to my favorite study chair by deciding to sit on my lap and held me there for what seemed hours, but was more likely just long minutes. It may have been a case of all the chairs being occupied that led to her doing this, rather than from a desire to seduce me from this crushingly awkward position.

Not wanting to offend or insult her by changing my position—both legs had gone to sleep—so I fell asleep. Of course I was drunk. But then, who wasn’t? And the hour was getting later, the people drunker.

There were people at the party I barely knew, others I did not recognize at all, for the word goes out that there is a party and uninvited people show up for lack of anything better do. I remember greeting some of them at the front door upstairs and wondering who they were. Perhaps good friends had extended an invitation and not notified me. That is sometimes the case, and I didn’t want to refuse admittance to a friend of a friend who thought they would be welcome. After a bit, the door stood open wide.

Les was there, Les McIntosh, our black in residence. And Ursula Spier, I suppose, another writer. Janet, I think not. Dave and Connie probably, not yet married. (You hve to get married before you can get divorced, otherwise you just inconspicuously break up.) A Rae Somebody, who became the second Mrs. Tufts, and of course got divorced in time but kept her second husband’s name. The current husband was an engineer named David, though I can’t be certain. Fifty people, sixty, many of whom I hadn’t seen before or, for that matter, after. Spilling out into the yard and the neighbor to the North, the party raged into the four A.M. dawn, and then, like some organic thing battered by the tides, began to breakup by quick degrees

Cheryl and I returned to our apartment at the Monarch, and in our own little bed, too exhausted to make love, or even to bother to speak. We piled into bed. We woke and recovered. Our life rolled on, usually painfully so. Rarely did we argue and when somebody cried it was generally me. She became pregnant and I thought we should get married. She knew better. So we had an abortion—if I dare to use the plural pronoun for so private and painful a thing. But, I assure you, I suffered, too. I paid for most of the cost. An abortion cost $200: it was big money then. Today it would cost a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars, I should guess. Abortions were illegal, but there were a number of abortionists around, some of them compassionate doctors, Obs, who moonlighted lucratively. They could be trusted. They risked their careers.

To raise the money I sold practically everything I owned that somebody else might put a value on. The rest I pawned—books, typewriter, wristwatch. I wrote out a string of checks that I knew ahead of time would bounce. Bounce they did, one after another. Jim, one of the twins who owned and worked the Blue Moon Tavern, cashed a $50 check of mine without batting an eye. He trusted me. How ashamed I was. Did my sickly grin give away the show? He was a good guy, nearly a friend, and here I was, cheating him, with a big guilty look on my face. What an unhappy day. It was followed by another. I gave a smaller check to his brother, Jack, the next afternoon and pocket the money in a hurry. I rushed off, leaving my glass of beer half finished. How sneaky and ashamed I felt. I sensed that I was getting good at the deception. What a wonderful feeling it is to have the needed money finally in hand.

You’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson, wouldn’t you? Within six month Cheryl was pregnant again. Poor Cheryl, poor me, poor us. I inject this abject litany here mainly to give some perspective to Jack and Rusty plight, She became pregnant, too, in between Cheryl and my two pregnancies. Jack came to me seeking advise, and I told him what I had earlier told myself, then had gone against—marry the girl. It would have been a disaster. I suppose the major riff that took place between us, and lasted the rest of the life we shared, was the result of what I told him. It never healed, let alone smoothed over.

Sex was important to us, but it came disguised as love and was recognized accordingly. Our sex lives were an important part of what was happening to us, for these were our vital years. We were young and had strong feelings about practically everything. We were searching. Sex was how the search was conducted. It is done by Braille, in a kind of groping manner. But we were engaged in a spiritual quest as well. Aesthetic and intellectual values were what really mattered. We used the hip word, pseudo-intellectual, to disparage those who didn’t seem as sincerely involved in the quest as we, or who didn’t think as we did. We were snobs, I suppose, and highly intolerant of others. We must not have been much fun to be around, we hated so much and carried such a burden of contempt for the world, which included some of our friend. They differed but little from us, when you came right down to it. We saw ourselves as the true seekers.

We looked for our truth in books that might affirm our ideas. Rarely did they do so. The amount of reading Jack and I did was enormous and I wonder today how we could have digested so much by the time we reached our early twenties. Since then, in all the years ahead, I’ve not had half the mental energy, nor read a fraction so much. By the time I came of legal age I’d fought my way through all of Faulkner’s books and, as new ones came out, those, too. The canon is extensive.

To read all of Hemingway is no major feat. His books numbered less than a dozen, and none of them very long. Dos Passos was something else, but we tackled him dutifully and liked what he told us. Ford Maddox Ford, Joseph Conrad. Sinclair Lewis, of course, though he was already badly dated, as was Eugene O’Neil. When Long Day’s Journey into Night was made into a TV production, our fiction-writing teacher, Grant Redford, invited us to his studio apartment (he was newly divorced and living with a former student, a couple years prior to his suicide by carbon monoxide in a closed garage), and we watched convivially this dreary tale of family disintegration and degeneration, little knowing how close it would come to what real life had to offer us. We thought fiction was some kind of dramatic hyperbole.

The idea we all shared was to read not a book or two by an important author but to read everything he’d written, even his early, forgettable work. Fitzgerald, it went without saying, was not like us, but a recognizable type, an Easterner (actually Mid-Westerner, but that was close enough), and his private school experiences rang a bit false and stilted, almost English in their quaintness, say, like Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, or any of the Oxford writers, including that Laborite, George Orwell, who we all had read and some of us had tried to write like, at least in his parables, totally ignoring his societal novels. I had read those and so had Jack. We read Hardy, Dickens, even Trollope, Thackery (practically unbearable and ringing ever phony), Huxley, Greene and Green, Cary, Anthony Powell (pronounced, Po-ell), C.P. Snow, Kingsley Amis, Long Play Hartley, Philip Larkin. On and on, into the night and early morning of our literary lives, to coin a phrase badly.

We mixed our Britishers and Americans together without a sideways look backwards or having a contrary thought; aren’t we all one, with a common language to unite us? I don’t suppose we are, but the idea served to create a bond, no matter how tenuous and artificial it might become. No other writer’s experience was exactly like our own and we kept reinventing the exterior world to fit it. We thought ourselves unique. And so we were. But there were so many just like us.

Across our great country, democracy and the land-grant process of funding universities, two to a state, spread the wealth, provided academic employment for millions, and produced a terrible uniformity in its product, we students. We were mass-produced people who though much alike; we were Pasteurized, cast-molded, pre-formed, structurally recognizable as being slightly different from one another. Nationwide our curricula was much the same, varying only in its minutiae. We all read I. A. Richards, Tough Shit Eliot’s prose, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, William Empson, whomever was served up to us under the banner of the New Criticism. We read the quarterlies, the so called little magazines, and wanted to write for them, but they were a closed circle and returned our contributions to us often unread or with a condescending sentence or two scrawled on their preprinted rejection forms.

So what could we do but strive to go into college teaching ourselves—which was more and more was held out to us as a carrot). We strove for excellence that was unexceptional. The men wore button down Oxford-cloth shirts, tweed jackets, flannel slacks, cordovan shoes with capped toes. Our ties were rep striped, British, representing military orders we had never heard of, mass-marketed in a country that shared not much more than its language. We affected a Bohemianism that was borrowed and had bourgeois origins, though our poverty was personal and genuine enough, however short-lived. We bathed seldom and usually had beard stubble on our faces. The women dressed in cashmere sweaters and straight woolen skirts, or else became more in keeping with their radical ideas by adopting peasant blouses with scoop necklines and billowing skirts. With this costume they wore ballet flats. They baked bread and made thick homemade soups. As different as each thought herself, you could pluck one such woman out of a crowd and plop another in her place and most guys would be little the wiser, for we were equally interchangeable.

Each of us believed himself to be brilliantly unique and outstandingly individual. We were—as much so as peas in a pod. It takes a keen eye to spot the differences

Jack, if you are listening, wherever, I am truly sorry for the bum advise I gave you. My recommendation is to never ask for advice and never offer it. How late that wisdom is in arriving. I wish I could inhale my words, chew them up, and swallow them. Them shit them out the next day and be done with them forever. In the true Irish fashion we all fear and admire, Jack cut me off, cut me dead, from that day on. One part of me deserved it, another part did not in any sense of the word. I still ache from it, my own bad advise. And the loss.

Jack did not marry Rusty; he married Maggie, and our friendship was still elastic enough that he asked me to be, not his best man (for Rick Higland was that) but his usher. It’s not as bad as it sounds. A small wedding, there was only one usher and I was happy to oblige and cheerfully played my small part.

Meanwhile Rusty had beat a retreat to California, not because it was where unmarried pregnant girls went until they gave birth, which it was, but because it was where she was from and where the vestiges of a family (truly an O’Neil-like family, I’m sure) lived and gave her brief succor. Then she was back with us, baby in tow, on her way to Bartell’s Drugstore to pick up her prescriptive ration of Nembutal or Phenobarbital, to calm the raging emotions that threaten to return her to a course of madness.

Jack ignored her. That was the path his sanity took, and with good reason. We must each save ourselves first; this is the cardinal rule of the universe, and I’m sorry, but it was not my idea, not one of my making, and I offer no apology for it, since it is not my invention, and it is, I must add, what makes us beneath our civilized veneer uncaring and callous. How could this girl, I wondered, barely able to feed and take care of herself, unless sedated into automaton status tend a demanding baby? Well, she couldn’t, but—give her some credit—she tried. And we denizens of the Avenue began to see her daily, often in the rain, wheeling her baby carriage up the steep cement of our common street, University Way, where she entered a café such as Howard’s, took a booth (usually the same one unless it was already occupied), ordered her usual meal, ate barely a third of it, and smoked one cigaret after another. Every once in a while some friend or acquaintance ambled over and admired the baby and asked the usual questions about it, its sex, and was told, "A little girl." Never, "Who is the father?" For the grapevine knew.

And Rusty would look up at you in total self-absorbed gratitude and isolation and singular pity with her great mascara-ringed eyes and open that heavily lipsticked mouth of hers behind which her stained but even teeth could be seen, one of them smeared with thick red, and would smile winningly at the kindly query. And who could not like her? Did I say she was beautiful? Picture a Rita Hayworth who had slept in her car for the past two nights and put on her makeup without benefit of a mirror. You get the general idea.

Later, when I came back to Seattle as a soldier and was stationed there for a year, I used to see Rusty. I liked her and we both were suffering from an unbearable loneliness. The baby was gone, placed in a home, but she talked about it, the little girl, much of the time. When I got transferred overseas, I sold her my Olds convertible for a pittance, then, in the manner of good friends, forgave the loan amount. Perhaps guilt for what I’d told Jack had something to do with it. I mean, what is the cost of a used car between friends? After all, she wrote to me, when some other girls were too caught up in their own affairs to remember to do so.

But I am getting ahead of my story again. Jack married Maggie, and it was in a church. Jack was a Catholic, Maggie probably Lutheran, so it was the Green Lake Lutheran Church, the result one of those marriages deemed unsuitable by many that seem to work out well and last so long. I remember the ceremony hardly at all. I must have led people to their pews on the correct side of the aisle, which was simple enough, for all the friends were Maggie’s, or her parents. Jack’s mother was there, I’m sure, though I don’t remember her, and perhaps the woman she worked with at Northern Pacific who had gotten us our jobs. No father, no brother, though I’d heard he had a brother who lived in Montana.

Maggie was in white, deservedly so. Jack in a tux. I had rented one for the occasion, and so had Rick. Rick, the artist, was accident prone. It is always interesting and instructive to learn what a special occasion will bring out in an accident-prone person. Jack and I discussed this. What might Rick do to become the center of attention that was so vital to his character and an essential part of his psyche? You could only wait.

It happened three days before the wedding. The accident took place at the Green House, where both of them still lived. Rick and somebody else—not Jack, for he was not very strong—were moving a piano down the outside staircase in back, which was in fact the fire escape, to the alley where we used to come and go and sometimes fence or fight. Rick was on the bottom, the other guy above him, unable to see over the piano’s great height. Somebody stumbled. Rick . . . tripped. The piano came down on top of him a couple of stairs lower down, where there was a right-angled landing. Friends had to come to lift the piano off him. He broke his wrist in the fall, a bad break. It was not his painting hand, thank goodness. But at the wedding the best man had a black eye and his arm in a sling, his wrist in a cast.

Afterwards there were two receptions. The dry one was at the Green House. The wet one at Cockroach Manor, where I was bartender. "One for you and one for me," was my motto. I had a date for later that night but forgot all about it, her, until nearly eleven, when the party was going strong. I phoned her. She sounded not in the least bit angry. Sure, I could come over. When? In about forty minutes? That would be fine. My words didn’t sound slurred in the ear of the mouthpiece, coming back at me. And later all was well with her, understanding lady that she was. As for me, I could hardly walk.

Life was like that. We lived from day to day (which is the only way to do it). In the winter, with the surcease of the railroad job, I was hired as reader by Russell Blankenship, a professor of American literature, and a good old boy from Missouri; it was no coincidence that Mark Twain was his favorite subject. But the curriculum paired Twain with his polar opposite, Henry James. Were ever two writers less alike? I’d taken the class and cooled it, so when the departmental secretary told me Professor Blankenship was looking for a reader, it was simply a matter of walking into his office and signing up. I think I had more reservations in accepting a reader’s job than one teaching because you can’t bluff your way through a comprehensive reading list the way you can the day-to-day task of staying ahead of your students. But he poo-pooed my modesty and said I would handle the job fine. And this of course absolved him for any responsibility in passing out grades both high and low, for it was up to me.

What power, what responsibility! I could flunk a student, if I wished, and he or she would have little recourse, for Blankenship would back me up. It was implicit in our relationship. But of course I wouldn’t do such a dastardly thing. Students, I learned, fail themselves. Generally they don’t do the work. This makes it easy. A few have enough confidence to take a test for which they have had no preparation. In lit courses, tests are usually essay—compare and contrast, describe, discuss, analyze are key words in which you are expected to perform like a circus aerialist. And somewhere in the pages of the bluebook posed in front of you you must come to grips with the matter at hand, the specific work your are being tested on, or you will reveal yourself to be an ignoramus, perhaps even a fool.

Harder to grade were those who had evidently read the material but did not comprehended it, or else did not understood it well enough to make intelligent commentary. I graded on originality of thought (as it is called), so long as the thoughts expressed had some cogency, some perception behind them. It was easy enough to get a B from me, but you really had to buzz my mind to earn an A. Similarly, write enough words, however unintelligible or unreadable, and you might luck out with a C; you probably would. I figured you must know something in order to write so much. As for Ds, they practically announce themselves in the first couple of sentences. So, worried about my knowledge as I was initially, I soon found the task was merely a matter of quick perception whether a student had done his or her homework, or if he or she knew anything at all about what they were writing on. Weren’t we students ourselves, and well grounded in the fundamentals? We could all write long obscure essays, but somewhere in the flow of words there had to be a morsel, some genuine nugget, of sense and meaning.

It takes one to know one.

The second quarter had Emerson paired with his old cohort, Thoreau. Most of our students were sorority girls, and I remember how both writers ideas on individuality and liberalism upset them and how they had great difficulty in accepting the idea of non-conformity, even as an idea, for they largely thought alike and the sorority had programmed them for herd behavior. They took pride in their loss of individuality, these beautiful young creatures with jutting breasts enclosed in firm cashmere. Attractive they were, up until the moment they opened their lovely mouths. Then, pure drivel. Thus, any one bluebook exam completed by anyone of them read just like the others. Most of them got the female version of the gentleman’s C. If I detected any serious questioning of their earlier modest assumptions, I tried encouraging them along the way with a B- and a note of praise.

The A students clearly announced themselves early in a test and it was a pleasure to read their papers. They could recall certain important tags from their readings, and those belabored in Blankenship’s lectures, and discuss the ideas freely, easily. These were the kinds of papers I had been glib enough to write myself, about one year ago. Only once did I have any great difficulty with assessing a student’s paper, and I spent hours in the library trying to track down its source, for I was certain it was plagiarized. No luck. Finally I turned to Professor Blankenship for help.

"I don’t think Joe plagiarized it," he told me. "He’s too smart for that."

Blankenship then described the student to me and, all of a sudden, I knew who he was; he had been in one of Roethke’s classes I’d audited. I hadn’t recognized the name. Fair-haired and always smiling with lack of guile, he was brilliant, and Ted had acknowledged as much in class by turning to him whenever he had some peculiar word he wanted explained, elucidated, or particularly defined. "Joe?" Ted would ask, and Joe would expound its connotations, while Ted smiled paternally and nodded affirmatively in a kind of wonder.

"The guy’s a genius," I told Blankenship.

The professor replied, "That well may be."

"I’ll give him an A and question the paper no further."

"No, you’ll give him a C+."

"I don’t understand. It’s a brilliant paper. It’s worthy of publication in a scholarly journal."

"Perhaps it is, but we don’t want to encourage people like him to go into the teaching profession."

"You mean, brilliant people? To become college-level teachers? Seems to me we could use more of them."

"No, homosexuals. We have too many of those already in the profession."

"But he’s clearly earned an A. I thought his paper too bright for a student. His is an A, in my book."

"Not in my book or in yours."

And there the matter ended.

I felt terrible about it. And while it may seem a strawhorse set up here merely for me to bowl over, I assure you it happened exactly like this. It shocked me that such things were done in 1952. And they were done not quite routinely but often enough. I regret that I did not protest the matter more strongly. But I could not prevail. Today there would be a faculty committee you could take your problem to and a jury of your peers to review it. Then, as perhaps now still, if you were a student wanting to get into graduate school, you might get your comeuppance; you’d be tacitly screened out. The M.A. or the Ph.D. program would be closed to you. You never knew exactly what or how it happened.

You found yourself a new and different life.

Jack now had a job at the Bookworm, a used book store on the West edge of campus. A number of friends worked there, off and on, including Connie Gebracht, who later married my troubled friend, Dave Norton. Later, when I came back from the Army, there was a big new bookstore on The Ave, Hartmans, with scholarly volumes and best-sellers on the street level and on the upper used books and phonograph records. The same bookish people worked there as at the Bookworm, plus a host of others, including myself. At the present time, it was just Jack and Connie, who alternated shifts at the desk at the Book Worm.

The Bookworm is where you could buy a pirated edition of Lady Chatterly’s Lover. It came from Italy and cost, old money, about $25. I couldn’t afford a copy, so I read somebody else’s—the circulating edition. All those dirty words in print for the first time! Wonderful. It’s what we used in ordinary conversation, of course, and some of us during intense moments of lovemaking. But what a breakthrough for the language! Hemingway, in his time, and Norman Mailer, in his, had been coerced by their editors into taking the fuck word out of their fiction and inserting, in its place, some silly quasi-phoneme like fug. Everybody knew what was meant, however, so who got fooled? There was a kind of refreshing feeling that came out of the book—it seeing all the wonderful dirty words in the places where they truly belonged.

Jack and I read. . . most everything. Words without limit. Books—the longer the better. He developed the most unlikely affection for Henry James. Now, Jack Leahy was the least Henry James-like character I can imagine, with the possible exception of Mark Twain. But he loved the guy and kept coming across first-edition copies of the old (Harpers?) editions of James, and since James wrote at length, there were lots of books to be found and bought cheaply, in most cases. Jack took great pride in his collection. It followed him and Maggie from house to house, in the years to come. So I was distressed to learn that, one night, when he had been drinking (and that might have been any and all nights), he got angry and started tearing the covers off his Henry Jameses. It sounded, at the time, a bit out of character, and I should like to believe it never happened. But it did; it’s been verified. I think it was anger directed largely at himself.

My own miserable life consisted of rising late, going to class, hanging out at Howard’s Coffee Shop, using the library only when necessary. I’ve always preferred having my own books that I could mark up and refer back to, even decades later, with my own occult symbolism telling me (and nobody else) what I might need to retrieve. I enjoyed my carefree life, eating out of tin cans or in restaurants, reading into the evening, and adjourning for a brew around ten at night. Then—around tavern-closing time, I would return home and resume reading, often falling asleep in a chair and waking up in the morning there, never having gone to bed. Living like this, it is possible to read a great deal in a relatively short period of time, say two or three years. Jack’s life was much like mine, but lived in parallel fashion increasingly now, with only incidental contact, mainly because of the Rusty Incident. (I capitalize it because of its personal significance.) Yet whenever Jack had a party—he and Maggie were great party goers, but even more important party givers—I was usually invited. This meant invariably Cheryl and me, for we were a recognized couple now. An entity, or some might say today, an item.

Because I had goofed off badly in spring of my Freshman year, I was lacking in enough credits to graduate with my class. This was not important in itself for me to do, only a point of personal pride. I mean, you graduate in four years, don’t you, unless you are some kind of sloth or sluggard? So this is why I took twenty credits, or class hours, that previous fall while working my twelve-hour shift at the railroad. I managed, a little surprisingly, to graduate in spring of what was my senior year. Immediately I entered graduate school. This happened in June, with hardly a break between classes. But—oh—what a difference!

I barely qualified for graduate studies, with a B+ average. It is much tougher to get in now. I took two classes, that summer, which is a normal load. One was English 509, Modern Literary Criticism; it I remember most specifically, for our instructor was a critic and writer from New York City. A young man, keenly intelligent, he was Irving Howe and he had written two books, one on Sherwood Anderson, the other on my idol, William Faulkner. My other course I don’t remember clearly, but I think it was one of Joe Harrison’s sequence, probably Modern British or Modern European; whatever, it was to stand me in surprising good stead when I came back from the Army and needed a job. And since this is (among other things) an intellectual history of both Jack and myself, it is probably appropriate to say something about the influence of Howe on me. Jack did not know him and come under his influence, as I did not come under Chittick’s. So our routes continued to be roughly parallel but divergent.

Howe treated me as though I were intelligent person, one capable of original thought. What a surprise and delight; how that motivated me. Ted wasn’t this kind of teacher, though he did indeed challenge us, usually on a personal level, it often seemed to me that whatever we accomplished as individuals was done in keen opposition to him. Or rather in competition. But Ted was gone and he had been temporarily replaced by a colleague.

The Poet Dick Eberhart was clearly the professor, though he related to me and to our classes on a most engaging personal manner; he left no doubt, however, who was in charge. With Howe, however, it was seemingly a relationship of equals—even if we weren’t anywhere near equal and he was so much smarter and better read than any of us would ever hope to be. It gave me a taste, anyway, of what intellectual life might be like, at its best, if the rest of graduate school was anything like this. It approached the classical ideal of the liberal education that purportedly takes place in small colleges devoted to the humanities. Only it seemed to be happening right here, at a big state university, with a famous football team and with fraternities and sororities catering to the whims of thousands of its students.

Out of sight, in seminar rooms on campus, in taverns, in coffee shops, in rented rooms and tiny apartments, education was taking place for a minority of students who insisted that it happen and they not miss out on it. I did not know this at the time and would have denied it, being in its midst, with attendant pain and confusion blurring my vision, but I was becoming educated, almost in spite of myself. Only now—in graduate school at last—I was able to recognize some of what was happening around me and happily respond to it. A surprising number of our old group—those of us who in guarded tones described ourselves sometimes as writers, to an audience that might not turn and ridicule us—did not go on to graduate school. Archie and Janet (now married and off in San Francisco, with jobs), Dave and Connie, Bill Rule, Gordy Anderson, many other classmates and friends. They had had enough of school, and with systematic learning. They felt complete, perhaps even fulfilled.

I did not. Nor did Jack.

That first quarter, summer, was a lark, which does not mean I didn’t work hard. I read things that would stick with me forever. Conrad’s Nostromo, Wallace Seven’s wonderful "Sunday Morning," Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, Proust’s Swann’s Way and The Captive, my teacher’s book on Faulkner, which he inscribed to me, "To a very good student," which sent my mind soaring. The Magic Mountain, of course. Empson, Eliot, Burke—their criticism. Books seemed to fly into and out of my hands. I taught myself a kind of speed reading, a practical and vital thing to do, when there was so much to read and so little time in which to do it, no leisure, reading only the highlights, breaking a book down into parts and those parts by other parts, parsing it, tearing it assunder, reducing its ideas to their fundamentals and then going still further, deeper, writing notes to myself, memorizing lists, coming up with mnemonics (like Joe’s PEWSAGL) to keep myself from forgetting what I now know was ultimately unmemorable and could be easily lost.

It was a charged time, a supercharged two months of summer, where school is intensified and three weeks are subtracted from the term. Howe had been met at the airport by the department chairman, the eminent Bob Heilman, brought to where accommodations had been arranged for him—an apartment on the edge of campus, deposited there with his suitcases and boxes of books, and more or less abandoned. I think Heilman introduced him around the room at the first faculty meeting. Aside from those two contacts, he was on his own. He later expressed some astonishment at our lack of cordiality. I mentioned that Westerners (but not Californians) tended to be standoffish; perhaps it is a Scandinavian trait. Howe, who was Jewish, nodded. He was alone and lonely; so was I, for Cheryl and I were having rifts and she was often gone with her theatrical troupe. So, wandering up and down The Ave in early summer evening, we would come across each other and feign, at least at first, surprise. We would stop on the street to talk and then we would enter a café together. Howe (I never once called him Irving, though he was only a few years older than I and boyish seeming, but only until he opened his mouth, when he became instantly wise and profound) drank only Green Rivers, a weird drink by Western standards, but perhaps a favorite in NYC and elsewhere. I would drink endless coffee.

It was a good arrangement, for I introduced him to what this strange, aloof city had to offer (not much to choose from, back then) and in return get some additional off-hour tutoring in a course by the professor himself. He had read every worthwhile book in the world; I believed it then, and I believe it now. Once he told me, when I was disparaging an obscure novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne—The Blithedale Romance, I believe it was—to "keep room in my mind" for the minor novels of the major novelists—not to mention the major novels of the minor novelists, which I decided later he also meant, its corollary, including those of George Gissing, whom I grew to favor, perhaps because of his Fleet Street series and the difficult time his protagonists had making a living in journalism (just as I would have, in my time).

One of poems we had for class assignment in textual analysis was "Sunday Morning," so I read a few yards of other poems by Wallace Stevens and found him difficult to fathom but subtly delightful, though I did not quite ever know what was going on in the middle of a given poem. Howe shared my enthusiasm for the poet; he had discovered and absorbed him long before me. I read Faulkner’s Intruder in The Dust and went back to Huckleberry Finn for a moral parallel, wrote an assigned paper on what they had in common, finding them parallel in matters involving human dignity, moral offense, transgression. When Howe read it and gave it back to me with simply "Good" written across the top, I had no doubt I would get an A in the course. But so what? An A in graduate school is tantamount to a B for an upper division student, well, almost, and even before grade inflation it signified nothing special. But something other than an A would get you an MA, but it counted for naught towards the Ph.D. degree. In fact, it held you back. A single B had to be made up with two As to keep you on track for the advanced degree.

Fortunately Joe’s course in Modern Something Or Other was one in which a student could get graduate credit by writing a long paper or two, but the class was largely filled with undergraduates, seniors mostly. When I pulled an A in both classes, it was my first college-term four-point, but one that was only satisfying in a small, personal level, for I already knew that it was but par for the course and denoted nothing exceptional. It might help me stay out of the Army, however, for it was barking up my tree.

All my friends were pulling four-points as well. My grades had improved considerably and my old college frat had kept me on its roster in order to bolster its overall grade point average for the University’s ranking among the Greeks. Each year they had a steak-and-mush dinner, matching up two brothers who had been producing similar grade-points over a year or two, and each year I went back happily to eat my free steak.

Returning to your fraternity is a little like going back to high school, or maybe grade school, and you don’t find the drinking fountains so much lower than you remember them so much as you find you have little to talk to your old friends about, not because you are so sophisticated and knowledgeable, but simply because you have grown so specialized, so narrow, in your interests and outlook, that very few people on the planet talk about matters that will interest you. You have become so ingrown, so much of a snob, so intense, that you are poor company, anyway. It is immediately apparent to each and all, and any perceptive person will choose to avoid you. And rightly so. They are not missing anything at all.

The war was grinding on in Korea and my draft board was in the Queen Anne/Magnolia part of the city, where nearly everyone went on to college. Consequently, the pool of young men without college deferments was quickly exhausted and the board started drawing on students who had been going to school for the longest time. Which was only fair, but one doesn’t look for fairness when he is trying to avoid the draft. He tries to hang on to his deferment any way that he can. And all of us knew better than to drop out of school for so much as a quarter, for we would lose our deferment and be ordered to take our physicals immediately. This was tantamount to induction. We knew this to be a fact and it is why we kept attending school when we didn’t want to, when we most desired and needed a break. We continued attending classes in our usual, desultory manner, and grew dull and bored from the same old routines, quarter after quarter, year after year. We envied those who had already served their tour of duty or were in other ways exempt from military service, like Dave Norton, who had some special deferment unlike ours, but we didn’t understand it, or how he did it. He was 4-F, but not for physical reasons, for he was more athletic than most; his problems were mental, but we had no idea in what direction or to what extent, he was so funny and congenial, though he tended to get pretty moody and sour, come to think of it. But didn’t we all? Well, not quite like Dave did.

In fall, autumn quarter proved not the lark that summer was. My courses were absolutely no fun. What had happened? It was rainy and the political climate of the land was depressing. There was Senator McCarthy, for instance. The Red Menace. Howe was gone and we were back to our regular faculty, who seemed pedestrian in comparison. I took a required course, the Introduction to Graduate Studies, but immediately dropped it, for I was in no mood for something so dry and pedantic. I was restless, bored. I was writing like crazy, writing badly (I might add), writing compulsively, and had grown a little crazy from a love affair gone awry, completely out of control. I was entirely frustrated, lost. My other course that quarter was Early Literary Criticism, taught by Malcolm Brown, who was pretty dry, pedantic, and a somewhat vindictive person. His course did not go well. He wanted us to learn to transliterate Greek. What on earth for? There was no practical application, for translations were everywhere. "It might prove useful sometime," was Brown’s explanation, when I asked him in class. When might that be, I persisted? Well, if ever we traveled and somebody asked us to translate a phrase or a few lines of modern Greek, what would we do without it? What, a knowledge of ancient Greek grammar and vocabulary? Not likely, for people speak a modern-day idiom. Don’t most people in the world now speak English, or some variant of it?

Learn it, Brown said, or fail the course. The discussion period was over.

It wasn’t so difficult to do. Those of us who had been in fraternities already had the alphabet memorized. Halfway home, we thought. We read a number of ancient scholars who had laid the foundation for modern criticism, but what was that? Criticism was for scholars, for book reviewers, for pedants, but not for the likes of us, not the ones who fashioned themselves writers. (The word "great" was reserved for others to use about us, in due course.) This stuff was impractical, near worthless. Why were we attempting to learn it? Why, in order to teach others to learn it, down the road.

Somewhere along the line (the assembly line?) we began to think of ourselves as teachers. After all, we were surrounded by them. They were ever in our thoughts. We had to please them or be vanquished. So we emulated them, at least a little. Future college teachers, we would be, with Ph.D., if only long enough to getting our writing careers established and be earning the good money. It is a subtly transforming process, that of scholar to teacher, or in getting a young person to think of himself in such terms. The process is seductive and sly. It takes place through association. It goes on when you least think it is happening to you. But happen it does.

Jack knew all along he wanted to be a teacher. He had the right stuff, I didn’t. But by stages I thought of myself as possibly teaching the books that I loved so and believed I knew something about. That wouldn’t be too bad, would it? Being a compulsive reader helps in this role identification. Not everybody can be a good teacher, I realize, but having had so many poor ones makes one consider such a choice, wisely or not. I had been in school practically all my life. What else did I know? Next to nothing. Perhaps the coming experience of the Army would be what I needed to complete myself, I told myself. I didn’t really believe this. I wouldn’t have put any real money on the prospect. A dual perspective was my ordinary way of looking a life; sometimes I had three or four ways of thinking about things going on at once.

I thought of myself as a poet, a kind of Wallace Stevens in the making. Ha, ha. I was terrible at writing verse, and after a good line or two my effort would promptly peter out in drivel. My teacher, Dick Eberhart, was a kind man and did nothing to discourage me. He probably should have. He’d seen the disease run its course in many feverish young people. Ultimately they got over it and went on to live useful lives. My life was absolute chaos. I was in love with Cheryl, but we were having major difficulties. I had grown arrogant, slovenly, and careless in my dress and personal hygiene. In short, a typical male graduate student. I was drinking way too much (beer, but it will do the job of getting you drunk nicely, if you drink enough of the stuff) and I was reading my eyes raw and watery. They bulged in their sockets. It often appeared that I was crying. Unhappy love will do it. Additionally, I had lost about thirty pounds in the past six months.

I went to see the doctor and he gave me Vitamin B shots. My God, they were like some mysterious Aztec drug taken to induce visions. I would flush beet-colored even before the needle was out of my arm. I left the doctor’s office perspiring in dead winter. I’d shiver and sweat, both at once. I’d lie down for the next three or four hours, but be unable to sleep. I remained hot as a poker in a bed of ice. Gradually the effect wore off and normality returned. My skin cooled, I could sit up again, my eyes cleared focused. Did I feel any better? It was largely an academic question.

Incredibly worse, I finally decided, after giving myself several ad hoc tests.

I think I would have died of natural causes, plus those most unnatural, if the draft hadn’t sucked me up in February of the following year, 1953. I did not have the M.A., had not even taken the general exam for it. Additionally, I needed to demonstrate a reading proficiency in a foreign language, preferably French or German, and hadn’t studied either. Worse, my attention span had dwindled to only a few seconds. My mind flitted from this to that. Whatever subject was at hand, I couldn’t remember it, a few minutes later. I developed a twitch that manifested itself in a variety of places. It changed places every few hours.

Cheryl had left me, ostensibly to join a traveling Shakespeare troupe where she would be the second lead, but largely to get away. What, from me? In Hamlet she was neither Ophelia nor the Queen; she was the Player Queen and understudy for Ophelia, which mean she must know the lines for both parts. But it was a start. It was legitimate theater and serious, to boot. The troupe was led by a man who was the director and played whichever part he wished, generally the lead. He was Hamlet. But he never should have chosen a role for which tights are a requirement. Tights brought out a special quality in him.

And it made the audience laugh.

I took the ferry to Victoria, one Friday night, a long holiday weekend ahead, to see Hamlet produced for a junior high school audience. All were boys, in caps, gray flannel shorts, and navy jackets. They laughed through out the first act. This was terrible, but the acting was horrible. At the start of the second act I heard myself laughing along with them. I was helpless to do otherwise and gave up resisting. For the rest of the play we laughed together. Then the curtain came down and I felt sad. The kids did too, I think. It was a great play and deserved more. I spent the night with Cheryl in a Canadian hotel. She confided to me that Ophelia was pregnant, she knew not by whom. That was a twist on an old plot, not Hamlet. "Get thee to a nunnery"? Too late, too late.

Then I was summonsed to take my physical and the Army swallowed me up, like an olive. A month earlier—in desperation, trying to head off what was inevitable—I’d talked to the Air Force. They offered me a reserve commission as a lieutenant, but said I’d have to request immediate activation. What would I do, I asked? I’d be a PIO. What’s that? Public Information Officer. Hmm. Immediate activation—does that mean what I think it does?

What do you think it does? You go right in.

Oh, no. Not that. I walked away, a free man still.

Now it was too late to have any choice in the matter. I was Army property, government issue. So I tried to beat them to the draw. I enlisted to get a branch of service that would exempt me from infantry duty and probable shipment to FECOM, which is what they called Korea. It meant three years of soldiering, instead of two, but I wouldn’t have to kill anybody— no remote Orientals whom I had nothing against, hadn’t even met—or else permit them to kill me. A year more seemed a fair trade to escape such an ignominious fate. So I signed up. I gave them my life.

I returned from the Army three months before my enlistment was up in order to go back to graduate school, which looked to be a pretty sweet deal for both of us, for I was a poor soldier and, in spite of many clever ploys, had fooled none of them into thinking otherwise. My MA needed six-months more work to complete and I was eager to get at it. In the Army, overseas, I’d read all those books many people plan on reading, but never do, including Finnegans Wake. (So had Jack, by the way.) Years later, at a campus concert featuring the Philadelphia String Quartet, once in residence, I ran into Professor Malcolm Brown—he of the Introduction to Literary Criticism fame. Quickly I got him on the subject of Joyce, which was his specialty.

"I’ve read The Wake," I told him proudly. "Pure music."

"I haven’t," he said, turning away.

Whether it was the truth unvarnished, or else a terse putdown, I’ve never been able to fathom. At least he didn’t ask me to transliterate some Greek. It was, in fact, the last time I ever saw the man, though I got to know his son, Bruce, another writer, when we both freelanced for the same weekly. I found them very different, but then sons often are.

Jack was teaching Freshman Composition. These jobs were hard to get and I was envious, for they had turned me down for one (and would again). One of those things that were not destined to be, I guess. Also, he was living in University-subsidized housing, which was a great deal financially, for apartments there went for about half the price of others and comprised individual units with outside entrances, actually small frame houses whose only drawback was that the omnipresent Pacific Northwest wind blew through the walls and required that the oil heat be left on most of the time. Shades of our houseboat living, not all that long ago..

The head of Freshman Comp was Glenn Leggett, the man with three redundant constants in his name. He played favorites. He liked Jack. I was in the Army when the appointment was made—Glenn was able to parlay it into considerable advancement, rising to assistant provost when I went to work at the University as an editor, then provost, and ultimately president of Grinnell College, much later in the game. I wanted badly to teach, but only received the consolation prize of frequent readerships, which in some ways are more interesting and require a much more detailed knowledge of literature than simply to teach writing to those who don’t care much about writing well. If I had taught English before going to Berkeley (where I did teach), I might have learned earlier that teaching was not for me—that I was not temperamentally suited for it, as many writers prove not to be. And that is why they write.

It was odd, too, because graduate students at Washington taught students only a few years younger than themselves composition courses for which they themselves had done poorly and may have had no aptitude for. Graduate work in English presupposes a good knowledge of the language, grammar, and usage, which often is not present in the students who chose to study it and then teach it. It is not so much a case of the blind leading the unsighted as one of the ignorant perpetrating his ignorance on one less well informed than he. It often happens. And vindictive graduate students often take out their problems, both academic and personal, on the students which they are teaching. Not to mention seducing the pretty coeds in their classes.

That is part and parcel of college-level teaching and by some considered a perk, since the salary is historically poor. It has gone on since Chaucer’s time, I am sure, and will never go away so long as there are willing female students and instructors who are looking for sexual victims. I was not past dating a student or two in courses that I read for. I seduced none of them, but that may have been due to bad luck and no personal scruples.

Jack and I continued to work towards our Masters degrees. I was closer to one than he, but had been at it longer. Both of us now had the GI Bill to help support us. What a Godsend it is, though in every case well earned. The money was not enough to pay all our expenses, but it helped considerably. He had his teaching job, me my readership, and we both held outside jobs, as well. At one time we worked at Hartman’s Bookstore. Back in the mid-Fifties, Hartman’s posed a serious challenge to the formidable, monolithic University Bookstore. It occupied space on The Ave directly across The Ave from it—where today Big Five stands and before it, for a decade or two, a Nordstrom specialty shop. Hartman’s was a direct challenge, but failed to usurp that venerable institution. It had an ephemeral glory, however. Bill Kimball managed it. He was a Faulknerian looking man, mild and gentle, with white hair and a militarily trimmed mustache; he had come across the street from the University Bookstore’s general book department, which he was in charge of, and afterwards, when Hartman’s collapsed, he went to Palo Alto to manage Stanford’s University Bookstore. It was not a downward step.

We had a outstanding staff at Hartmans’s. The art buyer was Marcia Katz. Her husband was Sol Katz, a distinguished historian, department head, and now University provost. The couple had an art collection and later donated many fine works to museums, and since many of the paintings in offices on campus were by faculty members, and had matriculated into various other offices, it became increasingly necessary to inventory what the University owned during Sol’s time. The effort was heartily resisted. Professors believed they owned the paintings in their possession—works by Walter Issacs, Ambrose Patterson, Alden Mason, plus many others. They were told that, indeed, they did not; they were simply temporarily providing storage space for the University, who was the rightful owner.

None of us students could afford original art. This was the era of the Dollar Print, and we could afford a famous reproduction that cost about as much as a schooner of beer. A student could paper his walls for less than a five spot and be the proud owner of an oversized Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, or Picasso. Jack bought some, and so did I. Four would cover a room.

Clarissa Ethel, a fine, intelligent, wonderful woman, was married to Professor Garland Ethel, a madman and incidentally an associate professor of English, a man who had ratted on his colleagues during a Legislative anti-Communist investigative hearing and paid the price afterwards in total ostracism. Once everyone in the department wore a yellow necktie to salute him and signify how he had dishonored the department and himself. (In old age, Ethel murdered his wife, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and tried to kill himself with a shot to the head, but bungled that, the last named, and lived on for more than a week or in critical care before he died. Long before this happened, his wife was our friend and confidant, an intelligent and nurturing woman; we wondered how she could stand being married to a man known for his arrogance and hauteur.

Liz Patterson worked at Hartman’s, too. She was a writer (that is, one studying to be a writer, as were the rest of us), the widow of a wealthy Englishman, had lived most of her life in India, and had migrated to the United States after her husband’s death to get the education an early marriage had denied her. She was in our fiction-writing and poetry classes and, being much older than the rest of us, served as a guide and mentor. She often brought rum chocolates to coffee and was an essential part of our claque. Everyone loved Liz, with her soft voice containing elements of a lost empire, so elegant and romantic sounding. And she threw great parties. One of which I remember because Sol and Marsha had to leave early to take their teen-aged daughter to a rock concert to hear some new popular singer named Elvis Pressley.

Liz lived in an immaculate cottage on the edge of Lake Washington behind a mansion in Laurelhurst; hers was really a guest cabin that was rented out. Perhaps she did a bit of baby sitting, for she loved children. We often went there in the evening to drink and talk about books. One night Cleve Leishiker, a writer and one of our large group of associates, who happened to own a used bookstore across the Eastlake Bridge, in a drunken rage tore all the dustjackets off Liz’s fine book collection, arguing that paper covers demeaned a book’s contents and made it look cheap. Many of Liz’s were expensive first editions and expensive. Liz characteristically shrugged off the act, and the loss, with her usual nonchalance.

A writer friend of mine in Alaska prophesized that I would be married within six months of my return to Seattle. She was wrong. It took me seven.

Jack and Norma did not exactly hit it off, and I think my long friendship with him waned as a consequence, much as my bad advise in the Rusty Matter permanently altered our relationship for the worse. So it goes. One plays the cards he is dealt as best he can and suffers the consequence; in long retrospect, I’m not sure whether I would have done things any differently in the light of my later knowledge of how things turned out. But there is a side of me that missed Jack then and misses him now.

For instance: We had some great parties, the two of us, over the years. These were generally during our crazy bachelor days, and I am aware that they might seem more delightful in memory than they really were, back then. Take, for instance, the instance of Jack’s going to the whore house in Everett already recounted, one rainy night, when we were young. To party excessively may be a trait peculiar to the Irish, but young people the world over indulge themselves in heavy drinking and seem to survive it. One drink leads assuredly to another, and soon the evening is streaming past in a haze. I’ll admit it is fun occasionally, though a bit grueling as daily fare.

One night in the early Fifties, Jack, his blue eyes twinkling, announced that he had a new place he wanted me to see. Okay, I’m willing to go there. I have a car of my own, so off we head for downtown Seattle. We found a place to park on the curb—this is an old story, you understand, and it used to be easy to find a place to park, at least at night—and walked the short distance to First Avenue, where all the taverns, arcades, cheap restaurants, clip joints, food kitchens, card parlors, etc., were situated. We started out at Pine Street, where we glimpsed through a phalanx of low buildings the cluttered blue edge of Puget Sound, and headed South on foot. First we came to the Blue Parrot Theater. I can see it now, its marquee promoting the usual double-bill of Westerns. No appeal to us there.

We caught a quick beer in the first tavern we came across, chug-a-lugged it, and were out on the street in no time. It was twilight, the neon starting to bloom all round us, the street dark and sparkling, where a light rain had brought oily puddles to life. Pawnshop windows called out to us with their marvelous assortment of wares—musical instruments, prostheses, circular saws, cameras. The window glass was protected by vertical steel bars. We stared into the dim interior with eyes hungry for experience and the knowledge it brings. Pity the poor guy who hocked his artificial leg—what did he need more than to walk? A drink, dope, a woman? A silver flask beautifully embossed though darkly tarnished—we considered buying it, but the store was closed. Wouldn’t it put down certain people that we knew? An accordion stood on edge, its bellows partly closed with a snap; the other clasp was missing. Now, there’s an instrument, if you want one. A row of campaign ribbons topped by a Purple Heart. Poor guy, it must have once meant a lot to him, poor dope. A tool kit, a tire with no indication of wear. (What can you do with one tire, provided you already have a spare?) We could glimpse, far back in the darkened store, rows of wristwatches, pawned or sold outright for cash, some of them actually running. All the famous names, along with the ones nobody has ever heard of. We moved along, less than intrigued by glimpses of what we had already seen, now repeated over and over. How quickly one forms disdain for what is too abundantly familiar.

A hotel with empty lobby and chairs deeply dented from countless ancient bodies. Where have they gone, what has happened to them? Who lives in such a place and what is his life story? What is the sum of all the hapless stories? We had another schooner, then he grabbed my arm, pointing at the door. "Enough," he said, whatever that meant, for I had an inch of suds left in my glass. "Let’s go. Be off." Oh, well. He had a destination in mind and was hastening me in its direction. We walked for quite a while and finally reached Pioneer Square, which is not the posh place it is today but then merely the most rundown section of the city, with bums loitering, a bunch of dark storefronts, and streets full of litter. Crumpled newspapers and empty bottles of wine. He headed for a tavern on a side street. Occidental, I think. Its marquee beckoned brightly, The Double Header.

We took a booth in the front, near the door, next to the big neon-lit window, the only empty booth in the place except one, far in the rear. A couple of guys across the room were playing pool—not very good at it, I noted. There were other guys seated at bar stools or in open booths like ours. No women in the place, but that wasn’t unusual for Skid Road. Two guys got up and headed for the john. Jack was watching me closely. It made me uncomfortable and I suspected some joke in the making.

A man in the booth behind ours, facing me, winked. My face must have registered something usual; I think I blushed. Jack saw this and laughed. It was not what had taken place so much as my reaction—seen as in a mirror—that mattered to him. It had taken him much of the evening to set it up and to spring it on me. A gay bar. Back then, though, the word gay hadn’t been invented. What went on between or among men who weren’t attracted to women was only hinted at in a vague derogatory way. It wasn’t discussed in society either polite or impolite. There were no euphemistic words for what went on among these people. The word to describe it was queer. It didn’t have specially bad connotations. It was more or less generic.

I knew of course that there were queers around They occupied a special niche in our world, I gathered. They had their own life and what is called a life style. It didn’t concern me. In fact, I didn’t know any of them. Of course I knew many of them, but didn’t know that was what they were or, expressly, what they did with each other. Felt each other up, is what I might have guessed. Kissed. "Homosexual" was in our vocabulary but it was mostly used to describe someone psychologically. A guy might be "a latent homosexual," meaning, I guess, that the guy didn’t know he was that way and had suppressed or sublimated his tendencies into other a more socially acceptable kinds of behavior, such as a great interest in sports and those who excelled in them.

Gays hadn’t come out of the closet yet—they didn’t dare to. They would be ostracized or, worse, attacked. So they stuck to themselves, kept their own company—I suppose as they have since the start of time. And this was one of their private places. It was known to them through a homosexual underground. Both homosexuals and by those who preyed on them knew the location of these places. But other people belonged to neither camp and simply became fascinated with how they lived and the places they frequented. Jack had. He was in this third group. They amused him, they were so funny and different. Now he wanted to introduce me to what he had discovered.

Jack and I had several fraternity brothers who were a little odd and unusual. Probably they were homosexual and only thinly disguised their orientation. They left it up to us not to be able to recognize it. And they were successful in this regard. I remember a couple of pledges who were discovered smoking strange cigarettes late on a weekend night in the downstairs lounge, the place nearly deserted, and they—perhaps emboldened by the weed—were playing exotic music on the stereo. Strange, screechy stuff. I recognized it as Ima Sumac She was an Aztec woman with a terrific range to her voice—eight octaves, I believe. What else the pledges were doing besides listening to their music I wasn’t concerned with and couldn’t have guessed. Maybe they were gay, maybe not. Theirs was a foreign world, unrecognizable in what went on there. It was beyond our ken. Besides, who would want to know? Tonight Jack had led me blindly into their lair. It was a joke. Oh, yeah?

No, Jack was in no way queer or gay, nor did our relationship have such overtones; he wanted to astonish me at how narrow our daily life was and shock me into recognizing the vastness of the great world. Queers, eh? I had never thought about them and was vaguely grateful. As writers, we needed to know as much as we could about everything; we had to expand our horizons, otherwise we would go on writing about the very little that we had experienced at first hand. That world was overly familiar to us and a big bore.

I learned that there were other homosexual haunts—The Garden of Eden, for instance, and it featured female impersonators. These were guys who dressed up as women. I wouldn’t have believe it. It was a high style kind of place, very sophisticated, and lots of friends went there for the laughs it provided. I heard that Jack went there frequently. I don’t remember going there myself, but recall the posters that hung outside. They were meant to entice you inside. There they would seduce you, introduce you to their evil ways.

Men dressed up as women? Hard to believe. Most of them on the posters looked masculine still, but there were a few that might have fooled many. They were pudgy, effeminate. Much of straight society visited The Garden mid-way through an evening of heavy drinking. A mixed crowd, I suppose the true nature of place came as a shock to many ordinary men and women, a joke in the same manner as the one Jack had pulled on me.

Seattle had its blue laws and hard liquor could not be bought by the drink anywhere in town. But there were clubs, black owned and catering to blacks mainly, but allowing a mixed clientele inside. The police, for a price, looked aside and the clubs prospered. They would sell you ice and mixer, but you provided your own bottle and it must be kept hidden from sight in a brown paper bag. Those were the rules and if you didn’t obey them you were immediately tossed out. These places were called bottle clubs.

Jack loved them and I had to admit the attraction they soon held for me, for jazz was a key component. Black men predominated the places, a few black women were present, and a surprising number of beautiful white women were in attendance, generally blonds, escorted by tall, sullen black males. About this time I was dating, a beautiful redhead, but she had just given me the gate; she did it over the telephone, when I called to confirm our plans for the evening. Sorry, but she couldn’t make it tonight. I spotted her a few nights later at one of the clubs—Sessions, I think it was. She was in the company of a slender black man, a musician. I recognized him as Quincy Jones. Of course I was furious.

Seattle wasn’t exactly a jazz Mecca at the time, but it had its resident musicians including Jones, who soon left for L.A., New York, and I believe Paris. Floyd Stanifer was a local trumpet player, quite good, who never left the city, at least not for long. There were white musicians as well. I recall a vibes player named Metcalf, who had his own band. It was mixed. His wife, Joni, played piano. Years later Jack studied jazz piano with her. He did for a long time, I heard. Funny, I never heard Jack play jazz, only a little boogie woogie. Aside from the Bach two-part inventions, I remember recall his rollicking walking bass at the frat house piano. That wasn’t jazz, not quite.

We regularly, almost nightly sometimes, visited the clubs—the Washington Social and Educational (there was irony, if you needed any), the Black and Tan, its orientation pretty clearly stated (every city had one of those), Sessions, Birdland (yes, we had a Birdland, didn’t most cities?)—much later Jazz Alley, Pete’s Poop Deck. At dusk we bought a bottle of whiskey from a bootlegger, or a cabbie (same thing), and toted it in its brown paper wrapper to the club’ s front entrance, knocked lightly on the door, waited for it to swing open, smiled widely with idiotic nervousness, were stared back at by a tall unsmiling black man, paid an admission charge, and were finally admitted into an electric new world. How exciting it was to belong, even if we truly didn’t. The party was already well underway. Sara Vaughn might be singing when we went in. Really. Or some other famous jazz artist. When they came to Seattle, and put on their concert for white people, it was generally known that they went to a black club afterwards and played their own music for the people who really understood it. It sounded a little different, I had to admit. It was called, "getting down." And we confirmed club-goers got to get down and hear it.

The clubs were orderly places. The owners didn’t want trouble from the Seattle police, who were infamous and demanded bribes. Thus, decorum reigned; if you wanted trouble, you went outside to start or finish it. Jack and I were peaceable. Aside from the blondes with blacks, there were black women who were available, especially to white men, even young men like Jack and me. Women of the night had always appealed to Jack, but he was married now and I don’t remember him ever going off with one of prostitutes. Each time I expected him to and each time he disappointed me.

Later I would later spot him sitting at one of the black tables. Often he was the only white guy. He seemed well known at the different clubs. Musicians mixed in with the others, but always black, with the exception of an occasional white woman. So Jack stood out. He was easily accepted, there and most places, for he made people laugh. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this trait before. He was a funny guy, with a good sense of humor, always cracking wise in his Irish manner, though I don’t remember him telling jokes ever. But he was always laughing. Meanwhile, I remained at my table, one peopled by frat boys or English majors. White guys. Jack didn’t exactly avoid us so much as not join us, join in. He was already fully occupied with his other friends. It was a separate world, one that didn’t include us. It didn’t seem unusual, if a bit odd. Did he prefer their company to ours? If so, did it signify something? Was his friendship with them more important than his with us?

By morning, however, the errant thought was gone.

If you headed in the opposite direction from the Double Header Tavern and away from the Black Distict, which lies North, you came to a depleted area of the Denney Regrade now called Belltown. Then it had no special name. It hadn’t gone through its urban metamorphosis and become posh. It was simply a seedy part of town just off the main business district and, at night, was just about deserted. It was only a short walk from there to everywhere else. There was a hotel on First Avenue North, the Moore Theater, and an evangelical mission, with a preacher who had a flashy style. He beat a tambourine, while calling out to the people on the street to come inside and join the assembly and be saved. Jack couldn’t resist him. Over and over again, stumblingly drunkenly, he went inside to be saved.

One night he dragged me in to the mission, which was the deep ground floor of an old hotel. It was early in the evening and he was hardly lit. I sat in back, watching and listening, and when the call came out, Jack made a beeline forward. The guy must have recognized him. A lapsed Catholic, Jack seemed to enjoy the personal act of salvation and sincerely admitted to the need to be saved, at least for the moment. And it was the moment that counted. Such was my understanding of the situation and the events that followed. Saved again,, he wandered back to where I sat waiting, bored,, that big, crooked grin pasted sideways of his face, as if to say, "Thanks, I really needed that." We returned to the night, the street, and the serious business of getting drunk. Getting saved seemed a necessary part of the ritual, at least when we were in the area.

I saw this as variant behavior, an essential part of being Irish in America. One who doesn’t go to confession or mass any longer remains in his heart a Catholic. He will be Catholic till his dying day, maybe longer. It is part and parcel of his faith, even is lack of faith. An Irish Protestant, well, he is different. There are no words bad enough to describe you. Wars have been fought over such matters. So what the point was in Jack’s getting saved, time and again, I never understood and can’t explain here. I can only describe it and state it as a fact of life. It seems to me meaningless. Perhaps it began as a joke, and usually such jokes wear thin, even for the instigator. He kept urging me to come up and get saved, too. What for, if you didn’t mean it? I didn’t go. Surely it wasn’t because, down deep, I had a religious streak and didn’t want to offend God. The whole thing seemed macabre. Jack didn’t do it to fool or impress me, I’m sure. I was not worth the effort.

I’m not Catholic, so I don’t understand the process of salvation. Is it a game you play with a priest? I went through a flirtation with religion—Catholicism, in fact, while in the Army in Ketchikan—and got to know a couple of priests fairly well. Nice guys. I can see how one might try to play an intellectual game with them, but I was deadly serious, all the while. We drank together and kidded around. I don’t think it was my soul they were after. I can’t believe they were that devious.

I was truly interested in the religion and its background. Call it history. But it "didn’t take," as you might say as though it were an inoculation. My reasoning was, if Gerald Manly Hopkins was Catholic, and Graham Greene, there must be something to it. So I started my investigation, first, with a Jesuit, who knew Hopkins well. He argued with me about First Cause Uncaused, with that incredible double-think logic that Jesuits have, designed to put you at a mental disadvantage. Then I got to know a Dominican friar, an easy-going guy who had gotten into trouble with the church. He had nearly been defrocked over a scandal involving a young Indian girl in one of the fly-in places deep in the interior Alaska, which is mostly rock and snow. Now he was chaplain at the hospital in Ketchikan. He kept bananas on his desk for an old guy who was dying.

More amicable and less didactic, we got to be drinking buddies. We had a regular schedule of getting together that lasted until the Army transferred me to an island about fifty miles off shore. So I learned a little about the Catholic catechism and what it meant to practice the faith. My case might rightly be called a flirtation. And from this I deduced that Jack was a true Catholic, however much he had strayed, however much it had failed him, or he it. So what was the point, anyway, in all these obtuse machinations—this always hastening forward in order to be saved? I ask this rhetorically, because I know that there is no final answer to the enigma that has nagged at me now for nearly fifty years.

Jazz lay at the heart of our evenings out on the town and gave us a good excuse for them. Most of the important music of our time—like so many other good things—came from California. It was the Golden State, and however much we mocked it and spoke ironically of it, we were impressed with what happened there and were envious that it didn’t happen where we lived. The best jazz came from the Bay Area—Chet Baker, Jerry Mulligan, and Dave Brubeck, who was very popular now. It was white man’s jazz, true, but had value and originality; it was a music that spoke directly to many of us, who knew ourselves to be not black in our heart of hearts, as black as those hearts might sometimes appear to others. Which was not truly black.

Previously jazz had meant Louis and Miles, Dizzy and Bird, etc., a highly specialized New York style of black music evolving into be-bop, intricate, often dissonant, complex, cerebral, challenging music. You sat and listened to it; you dared not move to the beat. But West Coast jazz was cool, that is, laid back, cerebral, beautifully melodic, low keyed. It was music in keeping with the times and who we were in our secret identity—Subterranean Man, one who would not let his emotions be revealed by anything more than a sly smile or perhaps, in extremis, a low, "Yeaaaaah." It was the moan of something more than tacit agreement. I mean approval.

The time and its music have best been characterized by Jack Kerouac’s writing, as much as we might have hated hearing much of what he said. He was a kind of mouthpiece for us and another group of dissidents to the war who had more courage than us. We stayed in school when the others were exercising their options in being hip. It was slightly different from our cool. They split, we did not. We were not exactly Organization Men, in gray flannel suits, but our sympathies were more with them in comprehending that if you wanted to avoid disaster you had to play life by somebody else’s rules; you could sometimes flaunt the rules, but you had to know and respect them in order to flout them. And you broke them at your peril. There were hideous examples around us. The specter of Joseph McCarthy loomed large in our thoughts as a severe warning. In Washington State the Legislative Canwell Committee crucified people we knew and studied with, such as Melvin Rader and Joe Butterworth. Guilty of what, exactly? A perceived, theoretical Communist sympathy. Communists were the enemy and we were fighting them in obscure corners of the world such as Korea. But of course. Only, not.

When I entered the Ph.D. program at Berkeley the following year, and accepted a teaching position in the extension program, I had to sign a loyalty oath. If not, no job. Chancellor Clark Kerr’s name was at the bottom of the letter. I struggled with my conscience, my intellectual integrity, for about forty seconds, then signed the vile sheet with m Eighteen Century flourish. My education, and Jack’s, were at stake and they were a long ways from being completed. And—let’s admit it—there was a cowardly aspect to our behavior, if not our ideas.

I mention these things simply to try to characterize those nearly forgotten times, for much of it has passed into oblivion, along with its attendant perils, its promises, its tremendous insecurities. Such a context is needed because there have been no times quite like those, before or after, and it is difficult for others to know what a cork it was in our bottle. Yet in spite of the rigor of conformity there was always an underground that you could run off to. It was . . . everywhere. It was not as extensive and popular as the one during the war in Viet Nam. Subterranean Man existed in a kind of behavioral closet. He was never secure enough to come out in the open. We were both envious of the Beats and wary of them, for they seemed foreign and extravagant. When Allen Ginsberg came to Seattle, took off his clothes, read his long, unrhyming Whitmanesque verse, clanging his tiny finger symbols, all the while, or else strumming his lyre, he offended us in every intentional way. We laughed at and mocked him. But we attended him spiritually; we listened to him hard, trying to understand and failing, no matter how extreme we considered his ideas and flamboyant gay lifestyle. We often took his side in an intellectual dispute, then felt ashamed of our sympathy. We knew there was something solid to the man and his friends. Corso, Whalen, Burroughs, Holmes, Snyder. They were writers, after all. A bond exists among all writers, however tenuously.

Our side was ostensibly the establishment’s. Everything Jack and I and the others hoped to accomplish, little or great, was to be done within the system, the existing order. We resisted it, we hated it, we mocked it, we spoke of it with bitter irony, but we did not break away it, for it had, in fact, made us—whatever we were or would become. We did not form communes, become Beatniks, join the counterculture, dip into drugs (other than our mainstay beer and whiskey), or for more than a moment consider fleeing the country, right or wrong, which we loved. Instead, we listened to jazz, our opiate, and read Great Literature. We aspired to write like our role models, and failed terribly. Our talents were minimal. When you have little talent, you have no choice in what direction to point your efforts. Instead, we married and had our children. We went to work for large organizations and, often, the universities that had formed us to a large degree, in spite of our arguing otherwise and putting up a token resistance, for it is a well known fact that the same university that put hurdles in your path to graduate will probably employ you later, if you do not offend them severely, all the while.

This both Jack and I did, though we might now admit to some shame at having been so docile and argue to no avail that such was not the case.

Norman Mailer was the quintessential writer of our time, though none of us would publicly acknowledge the fact or admit to having read much of him, for he was thought to be a popular writer and not the presiding intellectual and a formative figure he truly was and perhaps remains. Saul Bellow greatly influenced us, too. I met him once when he was on an early lecture tour, and while he was at it, looking for a teaching job. He applied at Washington and at Princeton; Princeton won. Later, when he won the Nobel (at such an early age, too), I wrote an article about Bellow for a weekly local magazine, The Argus, that Jack and I both wrote for, but at different times. This was a full decade later.

I got paid $50 for it, big money then, more than The Weekly writers got by fifty percent, but in order to do it justice had to go back and reread five major novels, and his books usually are lengthy. As are Mailer’s, come to think of it. It is almost as though it is impossible for either of them to write something short. Life is too rich, too complex, to confine within the short story form, or a novella. The story expands until it has become a novel, a proposed article a book of semi-autobiographical nonfiction.

The wonderful thing about spending your formative years around a major university is that so many important people pass through it on the lecture circuit, or else accept a teaching position, and you get to meet and occasionally come to know them (you, an unformed vessel), and later you can write about it. Such things do not happen to you elsewhere, unless it is at an expensive fishing camp or on safari. Universities will have to do for the rest of us to get to meet the great and near-great who pass through. Thank God universities exist. Without them we would be lost. At the same time, they are bastions of mental conformity—though they profess to be the exact opposite. They are pleasant places to be, especially in the spring, when the perennials are in bloom and the coed blossom into their warm-weather dresses.

The academic life was not for me, however. My bones told me so. I remember sitting in a Shakespeare seminar, one bright June morning, and hearing a student tell the class that she could imagine no finer thing to do on such a day than sit under a tree, a book in hand, reading the afternoon away. Well, I sure could, I remember thinking, and suddenly the division between academe and myself became underscored. What was I doing here, when the whole world beckoned beautifully? I had never liked the fundamental classroom situation as a place to learn. I was uncomfortable there. I read and learned alone. It took place usually late in the day or night, and lasted into the evening. It happened when I was alone. And what had I learned so far? Next to nothing, where the tires meets the road, as they say. Of course I had learned considerably, but I was unable to recognize it as such.

Learning is an insidious process. There are so many books to read that the library will never get more than dented. Each book conquered gives birth to a dozen more that won’t get read, for nobody has enough time, not in a single lifetime. And when you read you are not experiencing life directly, as the masters tell us we should be doing. Emerson, Thoreau, so many others. Furthermore, my friends and I were further handicapped by the fact that we fashioned ourselves writers. Writers had to read more than the others, read books from an entirely different viewpoint. We not only read for contact and style, but we had to teach ourselves how to write. That is the real lesson of the masters.

At the same time, we identified with our teachers. They were the ones we knew best and came in daily contact with. They were older than we and purportedly wiser. Aside from each other, they were practically the only people we came in daily contact with. So after a while it was natural for us to think of ourselves as teachers, too, teachers in the making, teachers in the formation process, while at the same time, with many of us, we hated the classroom that had held us prisoner for so many years. The very act of teaching and being taught was anathema. Thus is the great misunderstanding perpetuated.

Jack was teaching Freshman comp. At Washington it is a series of three classes which the regular faculty so disdain that they pass on the responsibility to their graduate students, who often do a poor job of it. The Freshmen pay the price. Some don’t survive. At Berkeley teaching Freshmen comp is performed by the regular faculty, and important scholars pull the duty along with the others and accept it as a fact of academic life, however onerous. But Jack was teaching and I was not and was envious. Also he was writing some pretty good short stories and getting some of them published in the little magazines that were so important to us beginning writers and comprised our collective target. They were hard to get accepted in and only the most desperate obscure journals ever considered publishing most of us. We got routinely turned down by them and The New Yorker, to which we mightily aspired. One of Jack’s stories made the coveted Foley annual collection, no mean feat, which put him up there in the heady company of John Updike, Eudora Welty, McCullers, Joyce Carol Oates, and Truman Capote.

Jack’s stories generally had an Indian theme. Irma Gunther was an early teacher of his and it was only natural for him to develop an interest in the Coastal Tribes, which were her specialty. The tribes had a rich oral history and their stories involving Coyote and Raven were fascinating to anyone who became acquainted with them. Jack visited the Quinault tribe on the Olympic Peninsula and observed them closely. He studied their lore, their myths and mythology. And then his stories began to come to him, for it was a difficult time for them and their exploitation by white society. This was the time when the big timber companies bought their timber for a pittance and left the land ravaged. The stories were excellent. But though he had already published a novel about Indians with Knopf through Curtis Brown, his agency, he was unsuccessful in finding a book publisher for his story collection. This was a shame, for the stories were better than the novel, which targeted an adolescence audience. Jack though of it as being aimed at adults. In fell right in the middle and did not sell.

He became rightly discouraged. I remember him writing away in cafes, the Blue Moon Tavern, coffee shops. It seemed an affectation, to write in public, and draw attention to yourself, writing, but it had a long Balzacian tradition; it was simply Jack at work—how he wrote. Public places somehow encouraged him. He used to carry a 100-watt light bulb with him in his book bag, for the taverns and restaurants were frugal and though darkness atmospheric and romantic. He’d remove their 25 watt bulb, screw in his, and sit beneath the blaze of light scribbling away in his characteristic tiny crabbed handwriting that I knew so well. He slowly filled up his narrow-line notebook paper.

He and Maggie were living in housing subsidized by the University. His teaching job made him eligible for it, along with his veteran status. I visited him when I came home on Christmas leave from the Army. I was stationed Ketchikan, Alaska, but had a month’s leave coming, which I took in Seattle. His unit was one of those clap-built temporary buildings erected during World War II to house officers who taught ROTC classes and other training programs for the military. They were called Portables. The University owned them and had converted those on campus into classrooms and to graduate-student housing off campus, only a short walk away. They proved to be miserable places in which to live, cold and damp, and whenever the wind blew, a steady breeze moved through them.

When the weather was warm, the units were more pleasant, though Jack and Maggie kept the oil heater going most of the time. Visiting them, I noticed that it was a little like a return to our houseboat experience. The place was cold and damp and never got the benefit of the full sun. They were cat lovers. In the future there were multiple cats in their life, cats that had litters, cats that came and went, cats that slept in bed with them, cats that never went outside because they might get hit by a car traffic streamed by. Their cats used a litter box. It was not emptied frequently. The place had a sour odor. In short, it stank. The first time I spent an evening with them I was nearly overcome with the fumes. Cat urine. It will gag anybody not accustomed to it. By degrees you can train yourself to get use to it, I guess.

I liked Jack and Maggie’s company. On future visits, my stomach quickly settled down and I could almost ignore the odor. Their rental unit, like all their houses in the future, was filled with books. His Henry James collection of first editions was prominently displayed. He was proud of it. It was something to marvel at, if you liked books—all those wine-colored tomes, row on row. I remember his Wright Morris books; I soon had my growing collection of them, for he was an exciting writer. Jack turned me on to a number of them. Morris sparked my burgeoning interest in photography and showed me the importance of observing and writing carefully. Soon I was reading James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and marveling at Walker Evans’s exceptional pictures that accompanied and illustrated the text. This led me on to Thomas Wolfe. These are two writers who can just as easily lead a young writer astray as they can help him, for they both have ponderous, torturous styles that tend to rub off on a young writer. They simply overpower him and he can’t fight off their influence.

Faulkner was important to both Jack and me. At first, Faulkner’s world seemed as remote and strange as Dostoevsky’s. Both were weird and unfamiliar. And then it dawns on the reader that neither writer is recognizable except on the surface and his characters bear strong resemblances to people we come across in our daily lives. Elements of their behavior and personalities can be found in our friends and acquaintances.

A Snopes and a Karamazov are not so awfully different from what we have already experienced in our short lives. Their troubled personalities are familiar. We have met similar people in our classes and on The Avenue. Especially on The Ave. It is possible, we learned, to be both a type and an individuals. There is no conflict. We recognize them at once. The same thing happens when you first read Shakespeare. It comes as a shock, let me tell you, but then you get used to it and the act of recognition becomes part of your daily life.

You wouldn’t want to be without it.

The dominant role that Hartman’s Bookstore played in many of our lives was short lived, for the store soon folded. Rae Tufts and Connie Norton (nee Gebracht) together managed the used book department. To reach it you climbed many steep steps. Both Jack and I worked upstairs with the used books and new records, as well as downstairs with the new books and fine art prints. (It is where I bought Morris Graves’s fine "Young Sea Bird," which has been with me ever since. I look at it nearly every day.)

Upstairs we had the dollar prints for sale. They were stacked in bins and special wide flat drawers. Cézanne, Renoir, Rouault, Picasso. What a bonanza lithography has been. Even poor students can own and enjoy great works of art that previously could be glimpsed only in expensive tours of European museums. And now, as well, there were fine books of art lavishly published for those who could afford them by Abrams and the New York Graphic Society. Hartman’s sold the best selection of prints, along with the cheapest.

So much color, so much visual excitement. These were good times to be alive. Remember phonograph records—brittle 78s, soon to become vinyl, unbreakable but noisily scarred the very first time you played them, no matter how careful, how gentle, you put them on the spindle and lowered the steel or diamond needle to the flat start of their grooves? Hartman’s had records in rows of bins, each displaying its colorful cardboard cover: Londons and Columbias and Angels, and even those wonderful cheap European imports that sounded a bit tiny, but were a bargain. They cost about half of what the expensive labels did. Music for the millions. Good stuff, too.

Working in the used book department was an education in itself ; it was different and instructive in ways I hadn’t imagined it might be, nor did Jack, I suppose. The idea behind buying used books is to find libraries of the recently deceased and offer the survivor a pittance for what is rare or scarce in the midst of such chaff, and worth much more money. What you do is this: you paw through the bookcases of the dead as though you were at the goods tables at Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul, noting the books that might readily sell in your store and offering about a quarter of the price you would mark on them, paying a flat nothing for all the others. Those you would kindly haul away for them gratis and price as you saw fit; they might go out in front of the store for less than a dollar each, or else quickly go into the garbage.

The price you offered the heirs they nearly always accepted and were grateful for, even though they were being badly fleeced. Then you hauled the books away to the store. If you were a private collector, and Rae and Connie both were, you culled out the ones you wanted for yourself, paying the store whatever you paid the heir, or less. You might simply forget to pay the store anything. You spirited the books home and placed them on your shelves and they became part of your permanent collection, yours and nobody else’s.

It is important in the used-book business to have a marking code and to write in the front or, better yet, in the last blank page or inside the back cover of a book what you paid for it, or rather what the store paid, if anything, for time passes rapidly, and these things soon get forgotten. Rae and Connie had a code, but for the life of me I could not figure it out, and of course they wouldn’t tell me what it was. Very secretive, that pair, and of course it was driving me crazy. Jack was not at all interested in breaking the code but I simply had to do it. I spent my evening hours at the upstairs counter trying to work out all the possible letter-number combinations. They led nowhere.

There are some standard codes dealers use—Black Horse and Charleston being two popular ones—but theirs was neither. I worked on certain frequency of letters appearing; I mean, I could pretty much guess what was a one or a two in pricing because in the front of the book was the asking price, and we stuck firmly to it unless a sale was in progress, in which case it was a fixed percentage reduction for all books included.

Certain blanks appeared in a book’s code—letters that had no value. X was one and Z another. They counted for naught, or else they indicated a zero. I couldn’t figure out which. If a coded entry began XX or XZ, this meant the book had cost the pair less than a dollar. This was often the case. I noticed that the vowels, O and U, appeared frequently, sometimes following an X or two. So I tentatively assigned the values 1 and 2 to them. So the code began with OU or UO. Then I got busy with customers and could work on it no longer that night. We closed always at nine, emptied the till into the safe, lowered the lights, and left through the front door, the last one being in charge locking it behind us. We spilled out into the wet nighttime streets of The Ave and went our separate ways.

I worked on the puzzle the next afternoon when I wasn’t busy ringing up book sales or helping a customer find a record or print. R and S were tough letters to put numerical values on. And then I had it! The key words to the code were: OUR SWINDLE. How clever of them, and how accurate. It wouldn’t do to tell the pair that I had cracked the code. Better it was to quietly watch them price and mark books and then discover what they had paid for them, these two accomplished book dealers and thieves. "Let the seller beware," I concluded, about the person with a library for sale. As for the buyer for the store, she could either buy the library or not. Often they turned down a seller, if there was nothing valuable in the collection. The buyer had nothing to lose. The money belonged to the store.

Downstairs worked a number of interesting people. All were intelligent, some of them skilled at a variety of things. One salesperson was Phyllis Hawthorne. She sold books along with the rest of us who worked sometimes on Bill Kimball’s new book staff, but she was also a part-time music writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the morning daily paper. Reporting on music was not a full-time job and she needed another to make ends meet. At Hartman’s she was in charge of buying records. She was a jazz singer, as well. At work she seemed a bit mousy, with scholarly-looking glasses, and a quiet demeanor, but put her on the bandstand and she could belt out a tune with the best of them. The music seemed to change her personality and make her ebullient. It was hard to see her as the same person. We liked her a lot and admired her talent. She was diagnosed with cancer and lived less than a year longer.

So did a young man who worked with us. I forget his name. He worked evenings, and not every night, and as he became sicker he could barely hold on to the job, but Bill kindly kept him on and we helped him out and carried whatever was heavy that normally was part of his job. His cancer was particularly pernicious and he soon stopped coming to work. We learned that he had died within the month. It is possible, I learned, to grieve for somebody you did not know very well. When someone dies young, his potential dies with him.

Hartman’s was an experiment in bookstore expansion, for its parent store existed marginally in downtown Seattle for decades, and was risking its future on expanding to the busy Ave, just a short block from campus. It hired the best available staff (namely us) and we did our best to satisfy our customers, but the University Bookstore was more familiar to students and former students, for it had sold them their textbooks, and they kept going back there. It did a tremendous business. Its general book department was, and still is, first rate. We at Hartman’s did not know the money flow problems the store was having and it seemed to us the store was prospering when, in fact, it was rapidly failing. A not-too-busy Christmas season arrived and went. It was a huge surprise to us when the word trickled down that the store would close its doors for good in two weeks. And we would be out of work.

We lost more than a job. Hartman’s was a rallying point for intellectuals and artists in a way that the University Bookstore had never been. The people who worked at Hartman’s, however briefly, were outstanding and a fierce loyalty connected us. It may still. I don’t think any of us realized how important it was to our intellectual and artistic development until its storefront went dark and we were set adrift.

The jobs we held! Simply incredible! I wouldn’t have believed they existed in the cloistered world known to me and my friends. Archie Tegland was a partner in a small landscaping business with a man named Milt; both were English majors, Archie one of us writers, and nobody in the reach of memory had ever seen Milt on campus, so we had to take Archie’s word for his literary credentials. He seemed pleasant and knowledgeable enough. Archie handled all the temporary labor, namely, jobs for fellow writers, if they could hack it. It was hard work and none of us was used to it. Their main effort was installing rockeries in new housing, usually expensive one-family residences. The Pacific Northwest abounds in hillsides and rockeries are what hold the unstable slopes together in a kind of tenuous bond. One huge rock binds another and the second rock the third.

The jobs they offered seemed constant, ongoing, but the work was exhausting, and casual labor (that we were) turned over quickly. Nobody could do it for long. Trucks hauled the huge rocks to the site, or sometimes it was Archie or Milt with a flatbed truck, or else in their battered pickup, after which we nudged off and levered the boulders into place with pevies and prybars until one or the other of our employers were satisfied with their placement and nodded to us to stop. Until that happened, we kept digging and turning over the rocks, again and again. When the last rock was put into place, and that place approved of, we moved on to the next job.

After a day of this I could hardly get out of bed. Young as we all were, most of us could only handle two consecutive days of such work before we collapsed into weary heaps and found ourselves sleeping through our morning classes. The pay was good, however, so it was always tempting. Archie had taken his measure of each of us. He was always looking for fresh hands and backs. He was incredibly strong and sometimes, disgusted with our puny efforts, would push us aside, straddle the rock, and move it into place alone. He was proud of his strength and we admired him for it. But nobody got close to him and it was rumored that he had a terrible temper. I never saw any evidence of it. Years later, when Norma and I were in Berkeley, we visited them a couple of times in San Francisco. He was writing TV scripts unsuccessfully and she was a beginning editor at TV Guide there. He drank a fair amount (we all did) and for fun used to drive into North Beach and participate in street fights, bringing along this purpose his special studded leather belt, which he whipped off and wrapped around his fist before throwing the first punch. I’m not sure if he targeted homosexuals, but this area was a known hangout for them and beating them up was a popular sport then.

While in school in Seattle, he had a philosophic slant and enjoyed wide ranging discussions over, say, the nature of good and evil, never seeming to get enough. I remember him arguing vehemently that man was an intellectual animal governed by his emotions. True enough, I suppose, and a good description of Archie, if not the rest of us. The statement contained the kind of ambivalence that appealed greatly to Archie but left most of us with a numb feeling.

Working for Archie and Milt was a good way to get out of debt quickly. But what a physical price your paid for it. I found a job renting out tuxedoes to the less than needy. A surprising number of people had frequent use for formal wear. This surprised me. It was a steady business. The store, Brocklin’s, was a short walk from where Norma and I lived and it filled our needs for a while, which was mainly for money. I learned how to measure young men who were going off to a prom or getting married. Soon I got so I could closely estimate a man’s suit size with one swift glance and was seldom wrong. Except in the case of black men, whose arms and legs were so much longer than what I might guess that I was frequently wrong. "Extra extra long," was usually what was called for.

The clothes were immaculate and freshly pressed when they came back from the cleaners and when we rented them out; when they came back to us they were unimaginably filthy. How could they have gotten so dirty? Had the renter purposely rolled in the dirt, just to vex us? Sexual use was clearly evident in many soiled garments, with both male and female unguents glued to them, some of them not yet dry. Phew! The clothing had to be handled on its receipt and checked in. It made me wonder if sex didn’t really take place outside the body for many people.

The tuxedo shop was situated in downtown Seattle, on Olive, just across from the Greyhound bus station. In the rear of the building was a costume department. Costumes could be rented by the day or weekend, but you could buy them, too, and the various items that were their components, such as masks and capes and hats. Aside from Halloween, a very busy time for us, I never could ascertain why people wanted or needed costumes. (Were there costume balls that I never was invited to and never heard of?) Brocklin’s also rented wedding gowns and dresses for the bridesmaids. It was a lucrative business. Of course I hated it.

This job, along with most of the others, never lasted for long. There were seasonal layoffs, or else people got tired of them and the low pay that inevitably went with them. But writers sought and needed such jobs. Perhaps the existed mainly for writers and the kind of dreary experience they sought, especially when young. They were essential to a writer’s "real world" experience, as we called it, and one could not have too much of this, at least not during his formative years.

Those years seemed to stretch on and on, and be inseparable from what is roundly called unskilled labor. Anybody can do it, with a few minutes training. The jobs are designed for the short term, as stop-gap measures for the desperate and the chronic poor. For a week I dug a trench for a restaurant named Tenney’s, whose owner who was too cheap to go to the union hall. I wasn’t told what the trench was for, only that it had to be four feet deep and forty-five feet long. A pipe would be put at the bottom, I was informed, and another man would be hired to lay it. A layman pipe fitter. The soil was sandy, with lots of small rocks left over from the glaciers’ retreat, and not disturbed until I came along, millennia later. I removed them, one by one, tossing them off to the side. If I stopped to catch my breath, the owner, who was busy watching me, was quickly on my case and wondered aloud why I had stopped digging. He didn’t want an answer, only for me to return to swinging my shovel. I stuck it out till the end of the week, and when it came time to pay me, he short changed me.

There is no recourse for most of these jobs that often gyp you. They are filled by broke, intelligent students who find them listed on campus bulletin boards. Sometimes your employer doesn’t pay you at all, stalls, and becomes suddenly inaccessible, not returning your phonecalls or admitting you into his office. The competition for these jobs is great and you have to be quick or someone will get there ahead of you and it will prove to be filled. Consequently you can make a lot of phone calls and appointments, drive all over town, be cursorily interviewed, and not find work.

Labor halls were occasionally on the lookout for temporary workers, but as soon as a union member became available he claimed the job and you were out in the cold again. In fact, many of the jobs Jack and I held were unionized, but we were considered temporary workers (as with the railroad) and did not receive the full pay that the regulars did, or when we did, benefits were withheld and the union (or Brotherhood) gave us no support when we asked for help. It was not uncommon to work alongside a union member who was making twice what we were getting per hour without knowing it, unless he just happened to mention it incidentally.

I had a job in auto freight for a while, when I was writing my first doomed novel. The poet Robert Sund had held it before me, but no longer wanted it and had to work until he found his replacement. This turned out to be me. So I attended my conference classes, wrote in the early afternoon, and reported to the freight docks late in the day, where I worked until midnight helping a woman with the company’s billing. This was in the fall of the year, with goods for the Christmas season being shipped in a great hurry, and business was good. The pay was that of a Teamster apprentice, supposedly, and it wasn’t until I left that I learned it wasn’t and the union, to which I had paid dues, would do nothing to get me the back pay I was entitled to. It came to hundreds of dollars. The railroad jobs Jack and I held had payscales determined by the Brotherhood of Railway Engineers and Firemen, but we had no medical benefits, sick leave, or paid vacation, though there too we had paid our dues.

For a while I worked with a carpenter building a house, a nice guy, who quickly spotted my ineptitude. I was his helper. Since I couldn’t cut a board straight or drill a hole that wasn’t crooked, he put me to work pounding nails. I got good at it and nothing else. I was grateful to him and his many kindnesses. He could have fired me, but he enjoyed my company, he said. Many years later my wife came to the same conclusion about me and carpentry. When the carpenter ran out of work for a few days, he couldn’t afford to keep me on and pay me, so he suggested that I might look for some other work. I was grateful and did so.

The prospect of staying on campus was greatly appealing. However, aside from teaching comp or obtaining readerships from a benevolent former professor, the only jobs available were office work and men weren’t hired for such jobs, not ever. We envied the girls and women who were quickly interviewed and hired for them. Many were English majors. The job market didn’t always work to their advantage, however. When we left school for good, and went out into the broad world, men got offered semi-professional work, while women were stuck forever in deadend clerical and secretarial jobs. So their seeming advantage soon turned against them.

In the meantime I still had no advanced degree.

In spring of the year I returned from the Army, 1956, it became imperative for me to have more free time to complete my reading for the MA exam, which was a long list of books from five literary periods, three of which I would be tested on. It was my choice which periods they were. And I had to be able to read a foreign language, probably French or German, and successfully translate an unknown passage into decent English. We would be tested in a huge room full of other graduate students attempting to do the same thing in a fixed amount of time, perhaps one hour. A bilingual dictionary would be allowed, but time would limit the uses to which it could be put. Fair enough and no surprise to any of us. For we were professional students.

I chose French and took an intensified short course in reading it. We spent no time on conversational idioms or in learning pronunciation. We met for two hours a day for eleven weeks. Then we paid our small exam fee and filed in to a huge room, a nervous hundred or more of us. I failed the exam; most of the others did, too. It was widely rumored that it was a particularly difficult passage and most of us got the verb tenses wrong, which was automatic failure. So I took my stack of three-by-five flash cards containing the irregular verbs and tenses and, and those damned cognates—unintelligible figures of speech, for the most part—wrapped them tightly together with rubberbands, tucked them away for future reference, and headed for California. A year or so later, on my return from Berkeley, I took them out again, looked them over, cracked open a beer, studied them for half an hour more, and took the test again the following morning. I passed it this time. How, I do not know, for I knew less about the language than I had the year before. So it goes.

It was important for a graduate student to know the precepts of literary history and criticism. Why, was never adequately explained to me, but I accepted the principle at face value. It was necessary for me to become a well-rounded literary person. Okay. No matter where I went in this huge world, if I ran into another English major we would recognize each other’s reference points. Literary criticism is a special form of English spoken only by a privileged few and consists of speaking a few tags or phrases from writers as long time dead and might be recognized by the person you are speaking to. If not, that is okay, too, and puts you one or two points to the good.

One of my professors was Harry Burns, who was working on a book on Hemingway (his lifetime effort and slated never to be completed or published, and imperative for his being promoted to full professor) and taught literary criticism, the middle course, for I had taken the first already before entering the Army. The course was not even vaguely interesting but imperative to my getting the degree.

He was an aging bachelor who lived with his mother in the Stanford Apartments, just off campus, and who was a Blue Moon habitué. Shortly after the term began he ran into Jack at the bar and asked him "if Arnold is knowledgeable." His exact words, and nicely phrased. Jack assured him I was. From then on I was treated as somebody. This involved a kind of respect previously unknown to me at the University, however misplaced. Harry paid attention to whatever I said, and, however banal it was, treated it as though it were something meaningful. How fortunate, and I had Jack to thank for it.

All through our subsequent lives Jack and I were able to perform such services for each other with a kind of professional courtesy that served each of us well, and for which I am forever grateful. It was easy enough for each of us to do, and neither of us had to go out of the way. When we became less than close friends, it would have been easy for either of us to do the exact opposite, but we didn’t. And English majors the world over resort to painful backbiting and carrying grudges (often imagined ones) long distances. But we didn’t, and it counts for something. That something is important.

I had met Norma and by now and quickly we were living together, first in a one-room bachelor apartment, then in a delightful three-room houseboat on Lake Union, a fair distance from campus and one necessitating a daily drive to school for both of us, for she worked there as a student librarian. It was spring and we were in love. I was studying hard for my general exams for the M.A.. The test would be given in late June and would last eight hours. So I read all day long, read until my eyes refused to focus and see the pages, at which point I would fall asleep in my chair. Refreshed and able to see again, at least for a while, I read some more.

We had a meal and our short evening together, then I read some more. I read into the night, literally galloping through books in so short a length of time that it is a wonder I retained anything from them. I was happy in my narrow, eventless world. In a way it was beautifully bucolic. I caught fish off our dock, scrap fish that were inedible, and I swam when the weather was hot, though the water was polluted and contained huge chunks of floating waste. I swam through it with a breaststroke, my head held high out of water, parting the way with my cupped hands, avoiding half-submerged debris, and afterwards hurried to the shower to wash away what had stuck to me. Then I vigorously toweled myself dry.

Sometimes at the moment you are happiest you do not know it for a fact, but only that you are incredibly busy and have no spare time, only you do have some and you make those moments count. This we did. And when I took my exams at the end of June, my key question in American Lit was asked by a visiting professor, and the authors I was tested on were not on the reading list, but were well known to me, and so I pounced on them, comparing and contrasting Frost and Eliot. I cooled the exam, but still had the language requirement standing between me and my degree.

While in the Army Berkeley had offered me a tuition scholarship and, now, some paid academic work, and I was eager to get to it and a new life. It did not include a woman, I thought; too busy. I kissed Norma goodbye, left my female German shepherd in my parents’ care, clear across town, piled in my six-year-old Chevy convertible, and took off for new vistas. I would stop in Ashland Oregon to attend a few says of its annual Shakespeare Festival and, once in Berkeley, find myself an apartment (we called them digs, in the English manner, for nobody in the world is more affected in that direction than a graduate student studying the subject). The apartment was a full mile away from the University campus, but as close as anybody could find a suitable place in which to live. Besides, the walk would do me good.

I did not immediately realize the incredible loneliness I was suffering. It soon became unendurable. I had become highly dependent on Norma and our life together. School did not start for three weeks yet; it was to be my acclimatization period. It just so happened that Norma had planned a short vacation in California just about this time. (What a coincidence, or was it?) She arrived about midnight on a day in the middle of the week; I was lying awake, listening for the distinct purr of her MG-TD, which I knew by heart, and believed that I would be able to sort it out from all the heavy traffic streaming along Dwight Way, even so late as midnight. And there she was, rapping at the door, for I had dozed off. A few days later we returned to Seattle to get married. (Parents on both sides lived there.) We returned to our dreary two-room apartment in Berkeley a few days before classes started.

I had my old dog back, a female German Shepherd named Wolfe, since my parents had told me that, since I was married and presumed responsible, I should take charge of the dog, which was after all mine. I knew it wasn’t a choice I was being offered. But she was a fine dog, loyal and obedient, and remained with us until her death many years later. By then we had a son for her to be loyal to, too.

English Departments the world over are pretty much the same, differing only in their particulars. Literature there is divided into the same ill-fitting compartments as elsewhere, codified, and writers who would not nod to each other on some ancient street are treated as though they were close friends. Thus Keats is forever linked to Byron and Shelly, Wordsworth to Coleridge and Blake. Classroom teaching makes for strange bedfellows. Influences become magnified or else distorted, books are written from false such premises, rivals are attacked and dismissed unceremoniously, history is twisted, lies are exchanged, and life goes on in its usual immodest fashion.

I took three courses and taught another. Whew. I studied Chaucer (Jack had studied him as an undergraduate at Washington with the already doomed Garland Ethel) and my instructor at California was the son of the renown movie maker, Renoir, and grandson of the world-famous painter. He had come to Berkeley via Harvard, where he got his Ph.D., after World War II, and his heavy French accent made his lectures difficult to understand, but the Norman French occupation of England influenced Chaucer in his time and strongly affected the language. Forever will I pronounce my Chaucer Renoir’s way, and it makes weird historical sense. And I, who did not learn how to pronounce modern French for his reading exam, now read aloud my English author as though I were a Frenchman, or at least a Frenchman struggling with his adopted language.

The class was the toughest one I have ever been in. It was predominantly undergraduates, but they were sharp and competitive to a fierce degree, and I could imagine Harvard being no more difficult. (Renoir would have had to testify to the correctness of this assumption.) We had weekly quizzes that were graded on the dreaded bell-shaped curve, and it showed no numeric mercy. Anything other than an essay type exam, one you can generally bluff your way through deftly, is practically unheard of it lit courses. Renoir came up with something patently objective and fair. Some of the students—there were about three hundred of us—read the material three or four times in order to get it down cold. I had time but to read it once. It showed in my close-reading test results. I did medium poorly.

Students were required to write three critical papers if they wanted graduate credit. These were papers wherein you elucidate the text closely and explicate it, clinging to a single often obscure point and hammering it into the ground with textual examples. My papers saved me from a dismal C based on the weekly quizzes, but just barely. Renoir’s scrawled remarks on my papers were scathing. He didn’t believe in showing mercy to any of his students, especially ones in graduate school. I got a B and deserved no better, perhaps less.

My other two classes went better. One was from a wonderful North Carologinian named Sledd. He would not object to being called a Tar Heel, for that is what he was and proudly so. It had no inherent limitation in his opinion. He wore a shiny brown sharkskin suit that made him appear unbelievably old, along with granny glasses, was slender to the point of emaciation and cerebral looking, and wore a big round Adlai Stevenson button on his lapel, for November was fast approaching and Stevenson was Ike’s opponent in the presidential election. Though looking old, he was father to a young child, I learned.

The course was in Old English, not to be confused with Anglo Saxon, which is the collective name of certain tribes and the early written literature they produced. We had a syllabus and proceeded through it in orderly fashion, the way all foreign languages must be taught. There were weekly quizzes and for a final; additionally we must each translate a long poem, "The Battle of Maldon."

My classmate was Mel LaFollette, also from Washington. We were glad to spot each other across the classroom and renew a recognition that was in reality one of those short-lived friendships. He was a bright pudgy little fellow who sang contra-tenor in the nearby Episcopalian church. Probably gay, he wrote impressive poetry and I had published him in Assay, the campus lit magazine, when I was editor. A big university like Washington or California is only sufferable when you’ve lived there a while. Otherwise it is a cold and lonely place.

As we became more proficient in our study of Old English, we began speak a bastardized version of it. I doubt if it resembled anything spoke twelve hundred years earlier, but we treated it as if it did and tried to make it contemporary in our usage of it. Thus, together, as a lark, we translated Eliot’s "The Waste Land" into our newly emergent spoken language, more or less making it up as we walked along, crossing campus.

"Leton goe than, thu and ich. . . ." As I recall it began something like this. There was no "th" in Old English, only the runic character, thorn. But "th" comes close to how it was pronounced, if anybody truly knows. In the absence of any certainty, you are free to do whatever you like; no living person can criticize you.

When it came time to translate "The Battle of Maldon," I was doubtful and considered this a great waste of my time. Since Sledd was highly approachable, I argued my point with him. He smiled his response. "Do it," he said sweetly, "and tell me afterward whether it was worth while."

I did and he was right. It was an incredible learning experience. The poem is importance and I would not have known it so well without doing the translation. Its rhythm and beauty, its powerful heroic message, are still with me.

It is a marvelous poem, a relic from a time that otherwise would be unknown to us. It deals with high moral values, namely heroism and a man’s willingness to die for what he may believes in, even if his belief is wrong, or wrongly realized. After the final, I told Sledd, and at a time when it could not affect my grade, that he was right and I was wrong. It was a great poem and the work was worth the reward. He nodded enthusiastically. I drew an A. So did Mel.

My third course was from Robert McNulty, a Ph.D. from Columbia, who immediately lorded it over me because of my inferior academic background, a degree or degrees from Washington. I quietly pointed out to him that Padelford came from there, as did Parrington, both landmarks in American Lit. The department head was Heilman, one of the best of the New Critics and a well-published scholar, whose specialty was theater. And Roethke taught at Washinton and was, perhaps, the best living American poets. McNulty received this news impassively, but I could see he was moderately impressed.

His course was Spenser. Now, I don’t know what I was doing, studying Old English, a special language, Chaucer, another special language only dimly related to modern English, and now Spenser, who used the language in yet another highly specialized manner. All three were far from the English we used in daily conversation or in writing. Each, in fact, was unique and esoteric. I found them strangely compatible. A good thing, too.

Spenser was a voluminous writer. The Fairy Queene was his major opus and a form of the sonnet was named after him. He was a good poet, just as Milton was, and Shakespeare, but they lived so long ago that their forms, their ideas, and the plots of their poems seemed irrelevant. It was hard to find much relevance in any of them. Ours was a dynamic group of students, and we challenged each other and spurred each other on. We had to write several of those terrible scholarly papers and read them aloud to each other and pretend an interest which in many instances none of his truly had. The class met for two long hours twice a week, and I came to dread going.

And then there was my own class to teach, which deeply troubled me, for I am no teacher but did not know it yet. I taught it with an unfamiliar syllabus, probably a good thing for me and the class, since young instructors are in no position to come up with a better one, or one so good. Ours was Edmund Burke’s, Reflections on the French Revolution, which I came to love. I found it easy enough to take Burke’s point of view, which was highly anti-democratic, and support it. It was great fun being challenged by my students for being not so much an aristocrat (which I wouldn’t have minded being identified as being) as a modern-day fascist. Burke was so persuasive, so logical in his arguments, so beautifully rhetorical, so skillful in crafting and balancing his sentences, that it was a joy to read and teach him. I think I revenged myself a little, in the manner of my previous professors, by giving my students the same tedious little papers to write that I myself hated so, and tried to avoid whenever possible. Also, I adopted the Berkeley manner of telling my students that there was apt to be a pop quiz on Friday, then rarely giving them one. The threat, you see, keeps attendance up, which is what I was after, at least on Fridays.

It was too much work to take on, of course, and the load began to tell on me. I had trouble falling asleep at night, then slept too long into the morning when I finally slumped into a near-coma. I lost weight, developed a nervous stomach, had headaches—in short, evidenced all the signs of an eminent breakdown. We were on the semester system, and instead of the term ending just before Christmas, as I was used to having it do, my classes pushed well into the new year. So there was no true surcease, no peace. I dreaded my return to school at the start of the new year, which seemed depressingly like the old one, and was. During the break I had read constantly; there was so much ground to cover. My father wanted his family together for Christmas and bought us plane tickets to Seattle. In a way we were happy to get away, though I resented the lost time. I took my books with me.

Norma’s car—a MG-TD—was one more car than we needed and we put it up for sale in Seattle. We cemented the deal Christmas Eve, in a snow storm, interrupting our dinner to accept the down payment. I stayed over to see the paperwork complete the day after Christmas. Norma, who was working in acquisitions in the Doe Library at Berkeley, and no accrued vacation time, so she flew back to her job. The kid took his Christmas present out for a spin on snowy streets, hit a patch of black ice, and totaled the car. But it was his, or rather his father’s. All this took place within forty-eight hours. Signed, sealed, delivered, destroyed. Fog blanketed the area and Norma’s was one of the last planes out of Seattle. I had to take the bus back to California. It was the milk run and we stopped at every hamlet and crossroads store. I felt fluish. It was a grueling trip and I arrived home feeling awful, even worse than ever.

The semester mercifully ended. UC offered me a regular teaching-assistant position for the coming semester, which paid more than my acting-instructor’s job, but I was too ill to take it. I moaned and lay about the apartment, too ill to go to classes, seeing doctors who could find nothing special wrong with me, and finally I dropped out of school. We decided to return to Seattle and see if, back at home, I might find the road to recovery. Norma quit her job, and we drove North in my Chevy that was packed full of books and records, and the few household items we had begun to accumulate. Slowly, but way too slowly, I began to feel better.

It was not a victorious return, but a necessary one. I had unfinished work here. I completed the pair of A-grade seminar papers in lieu of a thesis and took and passed the language exam, meeting all the requirement. They awarded the degree the next quarter.

Still thinking of myself as a poet, though my verse was next to terrible, I signed up for a poetry writing conference with Dick Eberhart, and a conference in the novel with my old friend Wayne Burns. It was a copout, of course. Conferences meant I did not have to attend regular classes, but would continue to get my GI check each month. And Joe Harrison gave me another readership for his three modern literature courses. I had a job at Hartman’s, for the time being. With Norma’s job back at the University library, we were not lacking for funds. It was, in fact, a fairly flush time.

I was writing regularly, which was good and what I wanted most to do. My poetry soon turned in the direction of fiction. I was not much good at it, either. It took years for me to learn this essential fact of life. By then I was working as an editor and writing a kind of literary free-lance journalism.

You can’t discourage a real writer, anyway. Only a pretender.

This was my third return to Seattle within a short period of time. The city and the University worked as a sort of magnet on me. The first time was after completing my Army basic training in 1953. after which I was stationed in Seattle for a year doing office work in the federal office building downtown and living just off The Ave, where, given a choice, I felt most at home. I seemed a civilian to most people, including girls I met, but knew in my heart that I was government property.

The second time was when I got out of the Army to go back to school. Was it only a year ago? And now I was returning to Seattle from Berkeley—not exactly triumphantly but still full of youthful hope and energy. The problem was, it meant more school, for the government paid me to go on with college, and I was sick of it. But I badly needed the money and would be hard pressed without it. Part-time jobs paid only a little.

Wayne Burns understood my predicament. He was a student’s teacher, which means he had the student’s best interests at heart, and not his own advancement, nor the department’s, nor even the University’s. He was already a full professor—what could they do to hurt him? His Ph.D. was from a university not known for its English department—perhaps USC?

He was a devotee of Alex Comfort and D. H. Lawrence, a pair of writers not normally linked, and a proponent of the new sexuality. He wasn’t married but lived with an attractive woman in a fine house in the suburbs, being privately wealthy. He had wanted to play professional baseball, he told me once, but hadn’t made the grade, not even to Triple-A ball. So he got a Ph.D. degree in stead, as a consolation prize, or so it he made it sound. He threw frequent parties and they had a licentious aspect. Girls having problems with their parents or sorority often took shelter in one of his spare bedrooms and could be found hanging around the estate, a book in hand, which is all the credential anybody needed, looking lost and forlorn.

He was an avuncular figure to us males. If his relationship to the female students was different, well, that was their problem and his. We males would have been surprised and delighted and envious, if we had learned that he was scoring with one or all of them. Wayne never enlightened us. We liked it, not knowing. Ambiguity was a fact of life, he taught us, and we were getting close to the heart of the matter that exists between men and women. He was discreet and we tried to be, too. A lot of things in life seemed to have seedy or unpleasant elements, but nothing was clear. All was circumspect. We were learning to enjoy the certainty of uncertainty

Of course we were all dying to know the truth of these matters. Did Wayne really diddle Harriet or Margo, who lived there with him? It would have distressed us to know he had because some of us had tried to score with them and failed. And it would have troubled us to know he hadn’t. He was so much older. He got kidded about this. We wanted to know the truth. Had he or hadn’t he? Each time we approached the subject, he smiled and started talking about something else—his favorite subjects, Lawrence or Henry Miller. They were men obsessed with sex.

Norma and I were on his party list and stayed there even after I had abandoned school and the conferences with Wayne that took place only when I requested them. It was a wonderful arrangement and I could read whatever I liked and get course credit for it. It was an honor to be one of his students and, especially, to be on his select party list. Often I wondered what I did to deserve it. His party list became the source for other party lists. "Who is Wayne having, these days? I’ll have them, too." Or so it seemed.

Others so chosen included Chairman Bob Heilman and his wife, Dave Wagoner (poet, novelist, teacher, and his wife, Patty; Professor and Mrs. Arnold Stein (a Milton guru and powerhouse in the department), Paul and Ann Tufts, soon to be Paul and Rae, Sol and Marcia Katz, the provost and his art-buyer wife from Hartman’s, and the painters Richard Gilkey and Ward Corley. Ward was already sick with the cancer than would take his life, oh, so young. The Nortons were regulars, I think, though I don’t specifically remember them being at any party. And Jack and Maggie Leahy, though I remember best their own parties and when they were at parties thrown by others they seemed a little disadvantaged or ill at ease. I guess you could say it was the party time of our life, and Norma and I had very mixed feelings about them. For we are not party goers.

I don’t know about you, but I attend parties with a dread that has become familiar and barely endurable. Wayne’s parties were different from most and I looked forward to them. They were easy, euphoric, and a general sense of well being prevailed. You could say or do practically anything you liked without fear of censure. I remember them taking place in the spring or summer of the year, and since he had ample grounds around the various houses he inhabited, and there usually was water nearby, and an alder woods, people were always drifting off, singly or in pairs, wandering down towards the shore, which has always time struck me as a wonderful thing to do, and perhaps explains how I’ve lived near water myself, first a river, then a lake, and now a river and a lake.

When you returned to Wayne’s house from the lake, there had been no palpable change. Nothing had happened in your absence. People weren’t noticeably more drunk or licentious than they had been before, though parties are often like this and you are shocked. A few may have slouched, or be now observed taking naps (passed out, that is), or new couples may have formed, out of old ones, some people coming, others having left, but the general mood or ambience nearly the same as before—happy, nearly joyous, perhaps a bit louder with several of them newly grouped and involved in one of those intensely intimate discussions of an intellectual nature that at the moment seems to mean so much and later means practically nothing, with the others gathered round the major participants, listening adding a comment now and then, perhaps mildly disagreeing, or else passionately agreeing, all done in a mood of mutual respect. In short, boring and essentially eventless.

If sex took place at these parties (and I am sure it did), it happened casually, discretely, and one might accidentally come across a couple, or perhaps three persons, deeply involved with each other, or embraced, but there were no cries of anger or alarm issuing forth from them upon being discovered. No, the participants would sleepily greet the intruders, smile, exchange a word or two, listen to a brief apology or statement of surprise, shrug it off, and resume whatever activity they were previously engaged in. If it was sex, and it often wasn’t, they might continue on with not so much as a lost stroke, while the other people did whatever they had come here to do, use the restroom, casting the occupied people a sweet knowing smile, while soft laughter reigned in the other rooms, and perhaps some soft recorded jazz hissed and bleated from invisible speakers.

It was not so much that sex may have taken place during these parties as it made no difference whether it did or not. Love, sex, is a private matter. Wayne’s was a permissive atmosphere and one in which normal annoyances or fresh anger were suspended for the duration of the evening. These common elements remained in the outside world and belonged there. Here it was different. Peace reigned. Tranquility was the order of the day. People put aside their usual militancy and became whatever they really wanted to be and, if interrogated as to what that might be—any ruthless interrogation being of course out of the question—they would deny that they were not that already. Here we were all benign and cerebral, free spirits attached to disembodied heads, our bodies cut loose from their chains and set adrift on a calm sea. Lawrence would have approved and, of course, Miller.

It was a shame that such parties could not last forever, we all thought. But some of them lasted for days. They persisted until interrupted by something from the outside world that insisted on making its presence known and inescapable. For all along we knew the world existed outside and would ultimately claim us. Back we would go into the quotidian reality of our usual lives, humdrum and pedestrian. Yet while the party lasted we lived a dream in a world of our own making, or Wayne’s making, or so we thought of it. We were grateful for being permitted entry into the world of the eternal soft party for whatever length of time we might be allowed to remain there.

Jack had a curious pugnacious streak that came out when he had been drinking sometimes and thought he had been insulted or in some other way deeply offended. Usually he hadn’t been, but it was impossible to convince him otherwise. Similarly, when he had been truly insulted (for he could be obnoxiously drunken and rude, deservedly in need of a rebuke), he seemed to miss the slur and the moment streamed by him, unheeded.

I remember a New Year’s Eve party at his house. It was late and everybody was loaded. A long table had been set out laden with platters of food and ice and drink. There was this guy, drunker than most, who was leaning up hard against one end of the table, and he kept putting more of his weight on its edge, sinking lower on it and his spine, when suddenly the entire table went over and its contents crashed to the floor.

In an instant Jack was on the guy and we were pulling him off. Clearly it had been a careless accident, even though it had created a terrible mess. I mean, the guy hadn’t done it on purpose. Jack, who was quick but not strong, wanted to punch him out. It mattered not the guy’s size. Jack was all flailing arms and fists. I grabbed one wrist, I know not why. Several of us hauled Jack back. As for the guy, he seemed truly puzzled how he got on the floor, amid all the food and broken glass. Had somebody slipped him a punch? A Mickey Finn? All he wanted was to towel off the splotched food and have another drink.

Jack ordered him out of the house. Or apartment, as the case might have been. It was his right as host and, of course, he had been abused, though clearly an accident. Other people escorted the guy to the door, Jack hollering at his back. The guy didn’t protest or think anything was unusual about being ordered out. People were always crashing parties and being evicted. One by one, we released our grips on Jack or else he was allowed to shake us free. Soon we were back to our drinks and long slow conversations, for it was the quiet time of the night when people are feeling the heavy load and killing time before making their departures.

After milder incidents elsewhere, another time or two, I began to wonder what would happen if, instead of straining to hold Jack back, I or we egged him on to do what he insisted on doing? What if we encouraged him to pummel the guy with his small fists? What then?

Would Jack have slacked off in his vehemence, unrestrained, or would he have forged the attack like a terrier? The former, I think, for our efforts were imperative to his demanding the opportunity to smash the guy. But I will never know, for I never had the chance to see what Jack would do, once the human shackles were taken off. And now it is too late.

I dimly remember only a couple of parties at Jack’s in the years that followed. We were drawing apart and to do so didn’t seem unnatural. We were married now and had separate lives with our new partners, and soon there were children to complicate the mixture and the matter. Some years passed when we ran into each other only in passing and not by intention. I neither phoned him nor he had occasion to call me. I had grown out of a party mode and my wife was uncomfortable at most of them. And I’m sure Jack and Maggie regularly had parties to which I or we were no longer invited. Parties were an essential part of their lives. But there was one to which we were included, and it was an important occasion. In retrospect it looms ever larger.

We gathered at Jack’s one night early in November, 1960, to listen to the returns from the presidential election. The writer Barry Farrell was present, fairly successful now, with his young wife, Nancy. She was pregnant. Others were from the English Department—still very much a part of our lives. There was Stan, who knew all the stars by name, plus many things having to do with water and trees, an early environmentalist, who went on to complete his Ph.D. and taught at Colorado. And Dave Enslow, who stopped short of his Ph.D. degree, like many of us, but was known as a brain. And Jim Lewis. A Herb somebody. Young couples, with an odd bachelor thrown in for ballast, or levity, all of us gathered around the Leahy’s TV set, seated on a big long sofa, chairs, or on the rug, which is what people did when they ran out of seats, listening hard as the states reported the popular vote and what the electoral college would do. We could hardly believe our ears and eyes. We were winning. It was for the first time.

It became clear early in the evening how the vote was going and our excitement grew accordingly, for it was the first time any of us liberals had voted for a candidate who was successful. The mood was euphoric, and if you happened to be Irish (and I was, partly), and reared-Catholic, you had two special reasons to be happy. Leahy and Farrell, especially. We were drinking, of course, and even after the outcome became clear, we stayed stuck to the set in a celebratory mood, watching whatever they threw at us. The news was delightful. A war had been won, and the bad guy, the Nixon, vanquished to oblivion. The evening ended on a somber note, with everybody either drunk or asleep.

Soon Barry moved East to progressively better writing jobs with Time and Life, got transferred to England, and wrote his book on Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. His and Nancy’s little boy died in a freak domestic accident involving electricity. Few marriages can survive the death of a child and their didn’t.

What a wonderful evening it was, our hopes taken flight, and of course those hopes, and many others, would be squashed, pounded into the ground, just three years later, with Kennedy’s assassination. For a while, we gatherers participated in the liberal’s universal dream of a country that had shed the dark years of investigations of Communist sympathizers, academic loyalty oaths (loyalty, my eye; we were nearly all veterans, and why on earth should be required to affirm our proven oath?), and generalized fear and trepidation for what the future might hold. America would bloom under Kennedy, we all believed that night, and here was the fruition that Stevenson had promised but had not been permitted to deliver.

We were of an academically liberal persuasion, we who hung around colleges long past the point where we had been expected to do so and had failed to enter the recognizable areas of commerce, such as banking or stocks. Something about college life still held our varied particular interests. If it was not learning and teaching in a kindly atmosphere, it was being nurtured and sheltered through an early adulthood, for colleges provide soft sanctuary to the undecided and act as a refuge from the economic determinism that dogs sensitive souls at the threat of being cut loose from the cord that nourishes them. Something like that, anyway

The classroom and seminar held us close still. It is hard to break away from the university’s iron grip. Jack was much more at home in academe and the intellectual give-and-take that takes place in the classroom, especially his own. He had the example of Chittick to guide him—the same teacher that had formed him. I had only Joe Harrison to go by, who I think secretly hated what he did, but loved literature to the exclusion of nearly everything else, including people, students and faculty. One generation feeds the psyche of the next, and those generations don’t need a bloodline relationship to connect them in order for it to work out in a mutually beneficial manner.

I was beginning to feel very much an outsider. My interests lay elsewhere, but I knew not where. A university cozens a beginning writer, then it stifles him, but it blithely encourages him to continue what didn’t work before. He does not grow. Or I didn’t. A writer must test himself and learn first hand whether he has the talent. If not, he must go on to something else—learn a new trade. Writing is an acquired skill, no matter how natural it may seem to the writer, and independent effort is successful only if it moves in opposition to whatever seems ordinary and comfortable. A writer must shatter the aura of tranquility that is the chief benefit of life at a university. Growth and accomplishment can only take place when one is truly alone.

Off and on, throughout my life, my escape was to go fishing. It sustained me then and continues to do so. Among a small group of friends I was known for being good at catching fish; good is a relative term, let me point out. Truth is, I am only an average fisherman, but enjoy it so. Jack didn’t know this limitation and frequently wanted me to take him fishing. Part of his motivation was that I had a car and knew how to drive it, whereas he didn’t. He was always needing a ride some place or other.

I was glad to give him a ride, when the conditions were right. A loner from day one, I prefer to fish by myself, but occasionally it is nice to have a friend along, to make the day different, and Jack was not only a friend but good company. And if it takes one to know one, as the saying goes, the opposite is also true. Jack was no fisherman. He liked to be taken out and shown how to catch fish and have a good time out of doors. He never caught on to what was involved in fishing, the tricks, the nuances. I saw to it that he caught a few fish.

Often girls went along with us, which made it more of an excursion than a bone fide fishing trip—which was okay, too. I remember two trips to Cottage Lake, a nearby haunt of mine. In spring it was full of stocked trout and the rest of the year, when the trout had been all caught out, there were perch, crappie, and bass to be caught. I never caught a bass there, but many of the other spinyray species. It didn’t seem as though I were missing anything.

By June, when school let out, the trout population in local lakes was greatly diminished, but the spinrays were coming into their own and could be easily caught. Jack—I’ll say this for him—really wanted to catch trout, and so did I. We would rent a boat from Norm Fragner, who owned the resort on the North end of Cottage Lake, and push off from shore into the mist-clad waters. I always rowed and Jack never asked to take over the oars, which was fine with me. I liked rowing because it permitted me to make sure the trolling lines (namely mine) were working at the right speed and we were putting the boat over known lies where I had caught rainbows or big crappies in the past.

My favorite lure was a small silver spoon, a Roy. It had a single trailing hook which I had made barbless so that I could easily release an undersized fish or one of the undesirable species. I had several spoons that closely resembled the Roy, but each had proved by experience to be its inferior. Naturally I kept the Roy for my own use; this is what fishers do. Okay, so it is a character flaw, but all of us have it. I always gave Jack the second best lure. And, yes, I caught more fish than Jack, but this success came mainly from the fact that I could control the boat and put the right amount of tension or torque on the line and spoon. Of course I favored my own spoon, fished it right, and that is why it got more strikes and more fish in the boat as well.

It was much like being a guide, Jack was so passive. I didn’t mind baiting his hook for him, when we stopped to still fish, but when it came to taking his fish off the hook I was irked and further irked when he wanted me to bonk them on the head or bend back their heads, thereby snapping their necks, to kill them mercifully. After trying a few times to persuade him to do it with his own fish, I gave up trying and uncomplainingly did it for him. I don’t think he noticed my frown of resentment.

This is what guides do for their dudes, I know, but to me killing your own fish always seemed an essential part of the act of fishing and he was missing something essential, repugnant as it is, at least at first. So when Jack kept after me to take him fishing, in the years to come, when we were nearly estranged, the idea seemed about the same to me as having to take a small boy fishing. Then you have to do for a kid except reel in the fish. So I became unresponsive to Jack’s request, and perhaps this contributed some to the severe drifting apart that was taking place. In other words, I contributed strongly to it.

A few years later Jack held a Halloween party. It was about the last party of his I was to attend, for a number of reasons. Because my wife had given birth to our son a few weeks previously, she did not attend and I felt uncomfortable being there without her, for we were an entity now, a complete and complicated unit. We had extended tentacles into each other’s being. Alone at the party, it was in superficial ways much like before I was married, and I tried unsuccessfully to imagine myself a bachelor again, and to act like one, but it was impossible, for I had changed. I felt lost and lonely without my wife, much like my first weeks at Berkeley before Norma came down on her visit, so I excused myself early to Maggie (Jack being busy holding court over in the corner and sparking some intense discussion) and hurried home. In the future they either didn’t invite us, or else stopped asking us after we declined twice in a row, which is tantamount to disinviting yourself in the future. But we didn’t lose touch, not quite. Our lives continued to bump and brush, but with considerable intervals in between contacts.

Jack was offered a job on campus teaching in the Humanistic Social Studies Program in the College of Engineering. It was a spurious department specially designed to help engineering students pass courses which they often failed in Arts and Sciences, and after twenty years or so of nurturing their students Arts and Science persuaded them to throw the students to the wolves. In the meanwhile the department functioned fully. His position was provisional at first, an acting instructor’s job, but he took to it well and enjoyed it greatly. What is more, he was good at it. I envied him it—a professional teacher who loved his work. What could be more perfect?

Somewhere early in his career, Jack was told he must abandon work on his Ph.D. in order to become tenured; they would not tenure someone who was still in effect a graduate student. So he did. He kissed off all that work and the credits he had acquired. There may have more to it than that, but if so I never learned the particulars. First thing I knew he was an assistant professor. Other English majors had gone to work there, including Jim Souther, Mike White, and Del Skeels, the last two with Ph.D.s under their belts. Jack was comfortable in the department, and years later our paths were to cross again when I went to work in the same building as the college’s editor. For now our paths crossed infrequently, and while we always acted glad to see each other, no party invitations were issued. These would have probably come from him, because he was more of the party thrower. Come to think of it, Norma and I had put on a few parties ourselves, and we always invited Jack and Maggie and they always came. Others included a few mutual friends from undergraduate days, but mostly men and women we knew in graduate school. The group did not expand for years. It was always the same nucleus, but the number grew smaller as people found jobs (usually teaching) and moved away. But then we lost our taste for parties. If you don’t throw a few yourself, you stop getting asked.

When Norma became pregnant after five years, it became imperative for me to find a steady, full-time job. I had been writing and working part-time, and we had gotten by; she had always worked and was our financial mainstay. In Seattle, when desperation reaches the panic state, one thinks first of all of Boeing. Most of us worked there, one time or another, if they found us even vaguely qualified for one of their highly specialized jobs. Individually we snapped them up and were grateful. (When they hire you, and you read your job description, you become greatly impressed with yourself--to think that anybody would find you capable of performing such complex work. And then you realize it is all a sham, and you become progressively bitter, and when and if you can bring it off, you quit, with a feeling of supreme relief.)

I can easily remember when I started by simply taking my son’s birth date and adding six months to it; in other words, I went to work there when my wife was three months pregnant. No longer could I seek those unskilled temporary jobs of a despicable nature that most of us took in order to pay the bills and keep on writing. I learned I had gained a peculiar kind of experience while in the Army; during my year stationed in Seattle I wrote what were called Standard Operating Procedures. These were descriptions that codified the different ways of doing various jobs by writing down the duties performed, step by step, so that when it came time for a replacement to be hired (and often it was sudden) they had something specific to go by. Boeing knew just what Army procedures were and hired me to write their own.

Only, it didn’t happened exactly that way. Instead, I was into a GCA program they were hiring for, at the time. The acronym stands for Group Capacity Analysis. These were men with stopwatches who traveled around the company, from unit to unit, surprising people and timing whatever they did that was of a repetitive nature. Our training program was conducted, not by Boeing managers, but by consultants on loan from Touche Ross, then an accounting firm. The work was an obnoxious activity and not for me, I soon discovered, and told them so, heatedly, but since my paperwork (security clearance, payroll deduction forms, social security papers, etc.) had been sent out all over the company, it was easier for them to keep me on and find me another job than to fire me. They placed me in what was called the records management unit. This was in the treasury section of the finance department of the aerospace division. These duties were more to my liking and I stayed on for the following eighteen months. By then my son had started walking and we had saved enough money for me to quit and begin writing again.

I need not recall much of this dim period of regression in my life, but a couple of points should be noted, so that I might not seem totally incompetent or unfitted for the world of business. First, I was promoted to supervisor after only ten months on the job. The papers approving it came through on the day before Christmas Eve and my boss gave me my brown badge (denoting supervisor) just before we all went home for the holiday. I pinned it on the tree, along with the other ornaments. But this one meant quite a bit more money.

At Boeing I found a surprising furtive underground of intellectuals, artists, and writers that would have been hard to duplicate anywhere else in the Pacific Northwest and, perhaps, in the world. It was largely a quirk, I think. The place proved a warmly nurturing atmosphere and was peopled with expatriates from arts and science, including fellow English majors. Necessity had taken them there.

Meanwhile Jack and I continued to occasionally run into teach other. Some months would pass before we stumbled across each other and exchanged looks of mock surprise that said, in effect, "What, you? What are you doing here?" And a laugh always followed. It was only natural, our lives having taken such different courses, or so I told myself, and presumed he did, too. I was out in the business world, where they made airplanes, of all thing, while he remained in the academic world, the world that had in many ways given us birth. I envied him it, on my worst days.

The Ave was central to our lives. It combined the life of the University and that of the street, the library and the tavern, the orderly and the chaotic, God and Mammon. It had been home to Jck and me for a decade. It had to so many others. All university cities have a street or avenue that correspond to The Ave and an intellectual excitement radiates outward from it, its shops, and the people who frequent such places. In Berkeley it is Telegraph Avenue. UCLA and Stanford have such venues, and Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz do, too, all the great California coastal cities, for I have visited them and felt the excitement. Life on the street is marginal, but often thrilling. So much is happening, both seen and unseen. There is an atmosphere to the street that is nearly carnal, for it is where young people congregate, and young people are looking for sex and finding it. The street, behind its storefronts, its facades, is loud with the beat of rock music, the noise of foot and vehicular traffic, a cacophony of foreign languages, a sense of intrigue, and a constant tense excitement that often comes close to violence. And often it contains the dim constant activity of from drugs being bought and sold.

A couple of things may contain a clue as to how and why Jack and I drifted apart and gave up the ties of old that once bound us in friendship. The clues exist in the form of brief scenes that even to me are not awfully clear.

One picture I have is of Jack standing at the foot of the steep three-storey staircase leading to the English Department Library in Parrington Hall. It was in the Mid-Fifties. He had a couple of heavy books in his hand; they had been checked out on faculty charge and Norma, not yet my wife, was intensely talking to me. It was clear to Jack and anybody else around that she was headed back to work at the library, three flights up. Jack didn’t want to make the climb just to return a couple of books, so he asked her if she would do it for him. Climb the stairs with a ten-pound load of books that belonged to the library. Friends do this for each other, he seemed to say. Or employees for those who rank above them. But Jack and Norma were not friends, nor did they even like each other. And she was not in his employ. There was an antipathy that stretched between them. I didn’t understand this or how it might work. She was an excellent judge of character, I knew. I trusted her and her judgments. In the case of Jack, I thought she had made a mistake. Perhaps she didn’t know him well enough. She, not he, was being unfair.

Jack didn’t exactly ask her. He told her to do it. And his manner was a bit short and abrupt. He was in a hurry. Well, he often had an annoying self-important air about him, as he did this time. He didn’t seem to see the person he was talking to; he looked over that person’s head. She was a student and he was faculty, though of minor rank. She ought to unthinkingly obey him. He seemed not to remember that we were all friends who partied together. He was in a hurry to go—off to some place more important than here, undoubtedly. She took the books from him without comment, carried them up the long stair, and checked them in. But she never forgave him for making her do it.

The other instance was took place a year or two later. It did not involve Norma, but the situation was similar. We lived in a tiny apartment just off campus in the front of a house that was an annex to a fraternity. Another couple lived to the back and a couple of students upstairs. It was cheap lodgings and we were packed together, but this is often the case if you live near enough to a university to walk to classes. With us lived our female German shepherd, Wolfe, the dog I had bought back from Alaska, when I had been so terribly lonely.

Wolfe thought herself a watchdog. She kept her eye out for strangers, but once she got to know you, you could approach her without fear, even if we weren’t home. But it took a little foresight and preparation. She greeted our friends with a bark of announcement, then was all friendly wiggles and led them into the house.

Not Jack. He was the exception.

Something there was about Jack that she didn’t trust. From the start she was suspicious of him. She perceived him as the enemy. It’s funny how dogs are, when it comes to people. She became a different dog, not my own. Rarely had I seen such a display of ferocity, and not from Wolfe. She crouched down, barring her teeth, growling deep in her throat. It sent a shiver up my spine, let me tell you. I thought she was possessed. But, no, when it was over with, she was my old dog again.

Jack, as I’ve said, was a cat person. He and Maggie had indoor cats, two or three at a time, and they had the run of the house. Dogs were unfamiliar to them. But this doesn’t start to explain my dog’s behavior. Jack was bothered by it, I don’t really have to say, and became perplexed and uncertain about entering our place—that is, our portion of the house. It was understandable. I would have been, too, had a dog taken such a dislike to me. The first time I saw it, Jack backed off, holding his hands out in front of him, clearly afraid. (So would I have been—to protect my vital parts from those powerful teeth.) I quickly grabbed Wolfe by the collar, hauled her off to the side, all the while admonishing her: "Bad dog, bad—what are you thinking of? Shame on you, he’s a friend. Bad, bad." But my usually obedient dog, my obedience-trained dog, would not back off. She knew better. I had to haul her off into the next room (our only other room) and shut her up for the duration of the evening. There she did not snarl or growl, but she lay with her nose pressed up against the door and never relaxed, while the party lasted. Our other guests arrived, but I gave Wolfe had no opportunity to come out and greet them. This disappointed her, I know, for most of them were recognizable friends. The party went on until the early morning hours.

When our guests were gone, I had a talk with my dog, taking her task for her monumental inhospitality. Jack was our friend, I explained. Her expression never changed and she didn’t show the remorse I sought from her. Norma didn’t exactly back me up. A few months later, when we moved to Melrose Avenue, and a house that more room for us and a dog, we had an occasional party. Jack and Maggie were invited and usually came, but I was careful to put the dog away in the basement before our guests might be expected to arrive. Jack never said a word. There was no further incident.

I had a host of screwy jobs in those days, trying to write and get published and thinking of each job as a stopgap measure and in no way leading to a career. But careers happen to innocent people just trying to get by. As time passes, each temporary job seems to be worse than the one before it and exists almost as a mockery of your endeavors. Friends have settled into their professions by now, usually teaching, and are receiving slow but steady advancement, or tenure, as the case may be. And a writer without major success, recognizable ones, gets tired of lying to people about what it is you do for a living, while they go off to definite jobs. You write in secret, and you recite to yourself all the dreadful jobs, say, Tennessee Williams held, while he wrote the plays that ultimately paid him a lot of money.

They started with elevator operator, but elevators were all automated now, except for one or two in the most prestigious buildings, where old geezers worked the controls for years before mandatory retirement, and then were replaced by a mechanism. Later, when I published a short story in Esquire, the issue before mine had one by Tennessee Williams in it, and I felt a hardship bond still; the succeeding issue, had one by Tom Robbins. I felt I was in very good company.

Finally I went to work for the University that had granted me my two degrees. These jobs were hard enough to get and I had been out of work for six months before, in desperation, I applied for one. I fudged (good word for lied) on my resume, as many writers do of necessity, for how else do you explain to the world those enormous gaps in your gainful employment? Well, you can’t. To explain away one particularly large one, I wrote in the name of my New York agent, Paul Reynolds, along with his Madison Avenue address. The agent representing me would recognize the ploy, I figured, and cover for me. But the name alone impressed my future two bosses while they were screening me; they thought Reynolds was a big New York advertising agency. Any person—and an English major to boot (we were all English majors in this editorial office, and most)—would be an asset to their group, they thought. (Their reason for hiring me aired much later.) I was quickly hired.

Hey, there are worse frauds perpetrated in the name of finding work. Besides, I hadn’t misrepresented myself; it was my bosses who had misread what I had written down on my job application. Since they both were writers, or professed to be, they ought to have known who Paul Reynolds was.

Occasionally Jack and my paths crossed on campus, usually in one of the student cafeterias, where everybody who could, or wanted to, went for coffee or a snack. Or at the faculty club. I was eligible for membership, since many of the staff were, including editors; a couple of years later I did join, because of its first-rate pool tables. I rarely ate there, though, and when I did Jack was always seated at a table with people from his department, and while I knew them all, knew them fairly well, I never felt inclined to join them. Perhaps I was wrong. Such groups seem exclusive or emit an air of exclusiveness, whether they are truly this way or not. And Jack never seemed particularly glad to see me, across the crowded room, or waved me over, though he had a jovial, offhand manner with everybody, including me, that seemed genuine. Why was it that my wife didn’t like him, or my dog, either, and why should this influence me? Well it did, and I could not say why, if interrogated under a bright light.

So we went our separate ways, often in each other’s sight. But we did not do more than catch a glimpse of each other. And it was sad, for such things can be unbelievably sad, because we had been such close friends, almost brothers and, in fact, fraternity brothers—whatever that counts for in a checkered world. Our intellectual development had progressed together, or perhaps in parallel fashion. It had been a long time since we had shared the discovery of some new writer or an important book—Jude The Obscure, or The Sound and The Fury, or "Pomes Penny Each," or Love in a Dry Season. Or came across the first book by Beckett, Celine, Koestler, or Turgenev. Borges, Eastlake, Foote had come to us in quick succession, as one or the other of us came across him and was quick to share the news. But not recently.

I go back a bit in my efforts to explain the rift and understand it. The Christmas I came home from Ketchikan on a month’s annual leave from the army (1954, I’d guess it was), was a memorable time for me. It was vacation and important in part because it was such a respite from the work I had been doing building a transmitter station in the daily hard rain. The parties that holiday season were mostly at Jack’s, Jack and Maggie’s. They seemed golden to me. The Leahys, as I now thought of them, were living in a housing project on the North outskirts of Renton, a suburb to the South of Seattle; Maggie was teaching high school there, but Jack still went to the University, which required taking the bus into Seattle each morning, for he still didn’t drive. He didn’t seem to mind the trip. Shortly afterwards Maggie quit her job and went back to school to get an advanced degree in library science. Again a strange parallel came into our lives. Norma was working for the same degree.

I hadn’t yet met her, of course. That was more than a year away. At one of early Jack’s parties, held at mid-December, I met a girl, probably a friend of his rather than hers, and at the end of the evening, when everybody else had gone home, Hanna stayed on. So did I. It seemed only natural for us to share the spare bedroom. In the morning, she cheerily roused us about an hour early and presented us with a huge breakfast she had just cooked. None of us had any appetite for eggs, pancakes, bacon, etc.\ we were still so sleepy and badly hungover.

A soldier home on leave, in uniform or not, with a war on, has historically a romantic appeal for some women, especially very one. Hanna needed a man, I needed a woman, and we cured our neediness together. Christmas arrived and I gave her an expensive phonograph, a Webcor, for I had a lot of money and wanted to thank her for all that she had done for me in the sex department. The relationship, at least to me, was a happy interlude in a grim world of soldering.

How she saw it didn’t concern me much. Perhaps I led her into thinking the phonograph as a gift of love, rather than of service. Well, sexual service is a love of sorts. Loosely you might call it love. I spent most of my nights in her bed in a basement apartment. New Year’s Eve was our last time together. I bid her goodbye. I was expected at Sun Valley the next evening for a week’s skiing before I flew back to Alaska. She knew this, but didn’t know how final "goodbye" was for me. I took the train the next day, hardly giving her a second thought. Sun Valley proved an exciting place and kept us all busy. She kept phoning me at the Challenger Inn, where I was staying, having me paged, but I had nothing more to say to her, so I did not respond, not once. It became an attractive embarrassment. People said to me, "Isn’t that you, Bob?" And I replied, "Yes, but pay it no heed. It’s nothing important." And later, when they told me it might be important, I quick replied, "No, it isn’t. Believe me."

Hanna didn’t understand that goodbye was goodbye. She thought it meant something else, a brief parting. Much later I heard that Hanna had become pregnant. Then there was a rumor that she had taken her own life. I didn’t want to believe either story. My life in the Army or elsewhere didn’t include her. It is a shameful episode in my past and I try never to think about it. Perhaps both stories were wrong.

Nor did I check them out. Too troublesome, too distressful. Too potentially disturbing.

When I went back to the University to work, I had been four years out of school and my GI Bill had run out. I I stayed for five years at the Office of Publications, where I never had fewer than two bosses, and enjoyed my work about as much as anything you can, not working for yourself. I help edited The General Catalog each year and, a couple of times, by myself, the University’s Biennial Report, which is produced mostly for the benefit of the State Legislature, and is intended to make the University look good to them, whatever the cost, without looking too lavish, in the process.

The regular editing routine was to turn out brochures and flyers for the various colleges, schools, and departments. (This has been detailed in volume four of my memoirs, Sorties Into The Fray.) But I still wanted to write for myself, freelance, and felt as though I hadn’t given it a good enough try. A few bucks ahead now, with a country retreat on my favorite river, the Stilly, albeit a rented coldwater cabin, I felt that I had better do it now, for I was thirty-five. Jack and I were nearly the same age, he born in July and myself in November of the same year, 1930. He was now an associate professor in the Humanistic Social Studies Department and writing for a weekly, The Argus, reviewing plays produced locally. (I was to write for them a few years later, after leaving the University for good, my area of specialty not drama but art, books, travel, basketball, photography, and very occasionally, when I could convince them to work it in, this one time, flyfishing.)

In between stints at the University I worked for Safeco, hired through an employment agency when I was most desperate and broke. I was given the job by Doug Woodward, an excellent copywriter himself and a nice guy; he took me into what they, without mirth, called their Creative Department, where I produced copy for brochures and mailers intended for their many independent agents, who they had to woo in continuous fashion or else the agents would sell somebody else’s insurance. I had the spurious honor of writing an envelope stuffer which the company printed one-million copies of—it was put in envelopes sent out with a premium notice.

I was not very good at this specialized type of writing, however, and lacked a certain kind of imagination which my boss had in abundance. Doug and I were friendly and I admired his prowess with words. A very clever guy and fair—as fair as Safeco would let him be. In comparison I knew I was an inferior talent and, besides, had no love for the company and its strict, old-fashioned ways. We not only had to wear suits and ties, but our shirts had to be white. I worked there only a year and a half, wishing all the while I was back at the University, only a couple of blocks away.

The Safeco Building was a block off The Ave and frequently in sight. Anti-war demonstrations were taking place almost daily on the street, as well as on campus. Working for a strait-laced insurance company might seem idyllic to some, but to me it was an institution severely out of time and place, totally insular in its outlook and behavior. When the students were rioting on the streets, and most Safeco employees scared stiff, I tended to identify with the rioters—mostly angry young people who had a good cause— and had no fear of them as they ranged up and down the streets, smashing property but rarely people. Without a beard, I looked like everybody else at Safeco, I suppose, but my heart was pure and I was against the war. I felt like a radical and I wanted to get out. I began to read the help-wanted columns and make regular visits to the campus employment kiosk.

A job opened up in the College of Engineering for an editor; their quarterly, The Trend in Engineering, was mailed all over the world to engineers and engineering libraries and institutions in Russia, India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia. The magazine was pedestrian enough, highly technical in scope, unexciting, dull, boring. I thought I could fix that. I began to think of ways to make it more attractive, readable, interesting to people outside of engineering, such as myself. They listened to me and my plans. Perhaps I was a little radical. I tried to disguise the degree to which I hoped to turn the magazine around and into something quite different. Perhaps they weren’t paying close attention to me.

I got the job partly because of Jack. When asked about me, he gave them a glowing recommendation, or so I’ve been told. In his opinion I could hardly do the quarterly any harm. I would have expected no less from him, and in time had an opportunity to return the favor. After all, weren’t we fellow intellectuals, members of the literati, who lived in a Philistine environment and must make our way within it? In our hearts we lived in opposition to it, we English majors, and cooperated out of a sense of brotherhood and a need for mutual survival.

Yet I saw no more of Jack than in the past. We were housed in the same building, a beautiful Fred Bassetti brick structure,with my small staff and I occupying a sizable part of the basement and Jack and his department ensconced three stories above. So it was only natural that we saw each other in passing, but unnatural in the sense that we didn’t seek each other out, as we had in the past, and our chance encounters seemed to produce a mutual embarrassment ("What, you? What are you doing here? Oh, yes. You work here.") and short but cordial exchange. Most such remarks could be executed in passing without breaking stride. I got to know his colleagues much better than him and some of our friendships have persisted.

Jack no longer seemed to enjoy my company and I, feeling this acutely, responded in kindred fashion. I tried to avoid him. I don’t know why this happens, why things develop the way they do, but can attest to the fact that they assuredly do, and the situation is a sad one, what with nearly daily reminders of how things had been as we glimpsed each other in passing.

He and his department had a lot of latitude in what they taught, for the administration of the college was all engineering and they knew or cared little about the humanities, which was uncharted territory. Jack and Mike White, the chairman, for instance, jointly taught a course in science fiction. This was conceived to interest engineers in reading fiction, and based on the idea that, if the subject matter was of a scientific bent, or pretended to be, they would enjoy it. Another case of the bitter with the sweet. And it worked. It was probably one of the first times it had been taught anywhere.

The term, Sci-Fi, was new and Jack and Mike were on the leading edge of what was being written and published in the special magazines, generally printed on pulp and not highly valued. I was never much interested in the stuff, but decided to give it a try, since I intended to publish two of the pair’s scholarly essays on the subject, arguing its high seriousness, in my magazine. So it would behoove me to know a little something about it first. So I four of its best specimens—Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune (whew!), and 2001, plus its sequel, 2010. I had to admit that there was something literarily good about it, this Sci-Fi, though I could not exactly put my finger on it. It was a little like when I first read Truman Capote, and could not really define to my teacher, Joe Harrison, what was so good about him, only that I sensed there quality present. I told Joe I knew good writing when I saw it.

I think literature with that quality about it overwhelms you with its significance, but leaves you at a loss as how to pin down your reasons and explain them to others. You simply enjoy what you read and respond to it directly. So I sympathized with the difficulty to teach a subject that had no precedent, though the literary precedent was well established. Jack read so extensively, so many books, over so many years, that I sometimes wondered if he had really read them or simply "experienced" them enough in a general sense—enough only to know what they were about and to be able to speak about them with some authority.

Woody Allen once described his experience of speed-reading War and Peace. Asked what he remembered about it, he said, "It’s about Russia." But I think Jack was a good reader and retained much more than a thumbnail synopsis. Still, in order to stay ahead of your students (especially engineering students) you needn’t be too literarily astute, and any question that zeroed in too precisely on some matter could be sophisticatedly turned aside with ease. If Jack was fooling anybody, I was among the crowd and had no reason to doubt him or question his extensive knowledge of the genre. My only question might be, where on earth did he find the time?

In the course of a day, he found time to get in twice as much reading as I did, perhaps more. And still had time to spend in coffee shops, taverns, conferring with colleagues, and meeting with students. He seemed to be everywhere—everywhere at once. So I came across him often, coming and going, but spoke with him seldom and then not ever for very long. He was the one who seemed to busy and I respected that, at the same time I thought it a lame excuse. Yet I considered us good friends still.

I had a coffee klatch that was fairly high up in the college pecking order—the department chairman of ceramic engineering, a full professor of mechanical, a professor of nuclear, plus others who came and went but were never a firm part of the nucleus. Two of these men were on the college’s tenure committee. That is, they decided who got promoted to associate professor, which generally granted tenure, and to full professor, which was practically the Godhead. Others were kept simply treading in place from year to year. The tenure committee understood engineering well enough, even though the various disciplines were becoming increasingly specialized and unintelligible to anyone not in that field or in one closely aligned. They had little understanding of the world outside. In literature, art, social science, history, music, they were ignorant. The degree to which this was true astonished me. Some of us English majors could make an intelligent statement about the nature of, say, quantum physics, nuclear theory, hydrodynamics, electronics, but none of the engineering faculty could discuss Hopkins’ sprung rhythm, or Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness, or the spontaneous bop prosody of Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg). And yet, too, this is what was happening all around us.

So the tenure committee asked me about Jack’s professional credentials, and, what could I say but the truth—that they were strong, much stronger than those of his colleagues who had been promoted earlier. He had published a novel with a major house, was writing perceptive reviews of plays for a weekly, had a short story selected for the annual Foley collection, plus several more stories that were equally as good in various other literary journals.

He got the promotion. It meant a great deal more money immediately. The favor—if favor it was—was no more than he had done for me when I was hired. And who knew each other’s credentials better, or could speak to them? Besides weren’t we friends, no matter how thin that bond had been stretched? Of course.

Still, each of us, recognizing his debt to the other, remained distant, aloof. I guess there is better word for it than estranged. Mine was a good job, with lots of free time, and I enjoyed the work more than any other I’d done to date. I took to editing naturally and took great pleasure in its graphic appeal—how the cover and inside pages looked, the quality and suitability of the photos, the high level of the writing, its overall appeal and appearance to a reader who might not be an engineer.

For the issue on science fiction I took special care in photographing my authors. The picture I took of Jack was first rate, if I say so myself. He liked it a lot, asked for copies, and later used them for whatever promotions he was involved in, never thinking that the photographer’s art is special and worth remuneration. This sounds petty, and I suppose I should have been complimented, but I was trying to develop a second career as a fine-arts photographer, and to see the copies of my photography appearing here and there, gratis, unacknowledged, irked me. But then many people look at photographs, whatever their source, as being in the public domain, and perhaps they are, once they’ve been published. It would have been natural for Jack to have this attitude. On the other hand, using the photos freely without asking my permission seemed to me the quintessential Jack.

My favorite picture showed him sitting at his desk inh Loew Hall. It was printed in high contrast, taken from a dramatic low angle, his bony face highlighted by window light streaming from a high angle, a cigaret characteristically in one hand, its plume climbing toward the ceiling in the manner of smoke from a country chimney on a calm day. He looked a little like Samuel Beckett, although the planes of his face were not so craggy or exaggerated. I think Jack knew of this resemblance and enjoyed it—its very Irishness, the literary shock of recognition it produced in those who were knowledgeable. Mike White’s photo was also a good one. Tall and skinny, he had sharp facial characteristics that photographed well. As for Souther, who also contributed an article for this special issue, he was hard to photograph attractively, for he was badly overweight and bald, but I took some extra shots of him and found one that was not bad. He seemed happy with it, when it came out in print, and asked for copies, which I was happy to give him. I never ran across them in print, however.

There were faculty members who thought the issue a waste of money and space, the Humanistic Social Studies department a coddling of engineering students in subjects for which they would have no future use. So why not dispense with the department? This was a common attitude throughout the departments. Let engineering students take courses in Arts and Sciences, ever though they had done poorly there over the years.

These faculty members also thought an engineering magazine ought to be dry and technical, readable only by other engineers; if it didn’t look like similar dry journals produced in the past, something was wrong and perhaps good work wasn’t being done by that institution. I didn’t agree with this criticism, but quickly produced a double issue highlighting research projects currently underway. This appeased my critics and delighted the college drones. It gave me the opportunity to roam through the college’s various labs and workshops, taking pictures of lasers and chemical apparatus and mechanical contraptions with which I could illustrate the issue. The text was pretty dry, but I was surprised, along with many others, with the number and complexity of engineering projects currently underway, some financed by the state but many by the federal government. The issue clearly stated the amount of government money that went into research and it was impressive.

I thought the Humanistic Social Studies Department an anomaly. It performed a useful service, so I was generally in favor of it and back it up. I knew that Jack enjoyed teaching budding engineers to express themselves in writing and to read books full of unfamiliar ideas. This was valuable. Literature offered a challenge in which the required response helped a student learn and think clearly. Often Jack baited them by taking the Philistine attitude and asking them to attack it. It is an effective academic technique and one he learned from Professor Chittick; I had practiced it myself with my students at Berkeley who were upset by Edmund Burke’s conservative ideas. So I knew and respected what Jack was trying to do.

Jack excelled in this type of teaching. He made the classroom difficult for himself and for his students, but he asked nothing of them that he did not demand of himself, and they respected him for his dedication, his intensity, and his very passion for literature. He was able to communicate his enthusiasm directly. A good teacher does this, and I admired it especially, for it was foreign to my nature. I was a reluctant student and, the one time I tried to do it, a poor teacher.

My job as editor lasted for five years, at which time a major cut in state-sponsored research did away with the assistant director of research’s job and the dean (who had named the magazine, twenty-five years ago, as a young assistant professor of electrical engineering) decided to eliminate the magazine as an economy measure and in order to convince the state legislature that the college was serious about reducing its costs, including its research-related magazine. A reduction in what might seem frivolous in self-advancement had happened elsewhere in the University and the Office of University Relations had recently eliminated its fine magazine for exactly that reason. The Dean could only follow suit. It is in such areas as publications that demonstrable economies can dramatically be seen and felt.

Eliminating the magazine was the kind of decision I might have made, in similar circumstances, had I the authority. But without it there was no joy to my job. The college had other work for me to do, (brochures, a tabloid newsletter, various flyers and circulars), but did not much challenge me. I had done those before. A magazine is ever new and interesting. So I tendered my resignation. Besides, I wanted to write and engineering subjects were too limited in scope.

Dean Ryland Hill—a bright man, and one not without compassion for me and my situation, for he had founded and even named the magazine, twenty-five years earlier—threw a farewell tea for me. It was customary. Unhappy the change, I considered not attending, but decided at the last minute that it would be a tactical mistake and take away my last chance to say goodbye to a few cherished friends. The Dean’s secretary ordered a big cake and broke out the silver and china. Ryland made a nice speech, saying the kind of tasteful things he was good at. I thanked him and murmured a few words about how much I had enjoyed it here. We both spoke sincerely. People wanted to know what I intended to do with my new-found freedom. "Write," I wanted to tell them; it is about all that had ever mattered to me. Bit I avoided the direct answer. I looked round the room for moral support of my decision, searching for Jack’s face. But his was not among them.

Later he apologized to me for not attending with an excuse that was fully convincing. I forget what it was. It was Quick Jack again stepping to the fore.

I began to freelance with a not too quiet desperation. I went noisily out in search of work. I was paid in nickels and dimes, so to speak. I began to write a book—a daily journal—which twenty-five years later was published as Country/City: A Year At The River. In it I described how I spent my time driving back and forth between Seattle and my camp (an installed travel trailer) on the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, where I had flyfished for decades. But my life was more complicated than that simply fishing and writing.

My journeys took on a peculiar configuration, for I couldn’t make up my mind where I wanted to be, or where to live, though this was largely a literary device and I was posing. Definitely, I wanted both places in my life, the best of each world, and was taking my measure of each. In the long run, the country won out.

Jack never came up to my riverfront property, but that was probably my fault, for I never saw him often enough at the right time of the year to invite him, which I would have gladly done, in spite of the minor lake-fishing difficulties we had past. It might be fun to introduce him to river fishing. I would have buy a pair of waders for him, for I only had my current, well-patched pair and he depended on me to furnish all gear, or had in the past. By the time I turned my attention to rivers, Jack and I had pretty much parted company, and I regret this, for rivers are wonderful, dynamic places. They change dramatically with the season. I know he had experienced rivers, too, for I remember him mentioning them to me at a party once. It was at our place. He particularly liked the Olympic Peninsula, probably because of his novel, though this was pretty far to travel for one day’s fishing. You’d have to stay overnight in a motel or campground, which poses additional problems.

Maggie was working as a librarian at Roosevelt High School near to where we both lived and, in due course, my son went to that school, and Maggie got to know him a little, and I think she was glad, and so was I, for weren’t we old friends? It gave me a good feeling, knowing my son was being attended to by a kindly, contentious person when he needed a reference book. They had two children of their own, Peter and Timothy. The way things turned out, I never got to know them. They had nannies, I recall, various live-in women, often a foreign student, who worked cheap and long, and when they had parties, the boys were sent away or else already in bed, so we never saw them except briefly, on the way to bed. But as the years passed I got reports about them from mutual friends, or ours is a gossipy world.

Tim was the dutiful son, closer to his mother than his father, highly dependent, or so I was told. Peter, who was the eldest, got involved in drugs and became lost to them in his late teens, right up until the time of Jack’s death. I absorbed this information into my personal data bank and thought no more about it, unless it was to tentatively conclude that it might be best to have two sons, for if you have problems with one, chances are the other one will turn out to be okay. That means normal—whatever normal is today. Both boys were probably normal enough.

We were fortunate—perhaps the luck of the draw—that our one son turned out to have none of the problems many of our friends’ children had, and, like Jack and Maggie, we were not divorced. Theirs seemed a solid marriage, thanks to Maggie for the most part, for Jack continued to drink in public places and often came home late at night, soused. Maggie was the one who held the marriage together. In such instances there is usually one steadfast one, and it is often the woman. I would like to think Jack abandoned his going out on the town in search of adventure, that these were the activities of the young and inexperienced. But I don’t think this is how he operated, nor did I wish to pursue the matter.

Away from the University for several years and now in my fifties, word trickled back to me occasionally about Jack, or Jack and Maggie. Once I heard he was sick. From the description, it sounded like his heart. He was short of breath and could barely climb the gentle slope from his office in Lowe Hall to his classroom building, not far away. He would arrive gasping, hardly able to breathe or speak. A shame, I thought, for I had lost several friends in the intervening years to heart disease; it sounds like a case for bypass surgery. One or two valves were at fault. And I suppose I should have called Jack to inquire, but what was there to say? Sorry you are sick? It is not the kind of thing friends like we were say to each other except in extremis. And this was not the case.

I tried to treat him as I would have wanted to be treated myself. When I was sick, I disliked talking to somebody on the telephone, or even having a visit from him. Who wants to entertain people from a sick bed? Rather, I wanted to be alone, aching, complaining noisily, grumbling, in short, an intensification of my normal contentious self., perhaps a bit more vocal. I tried to offer him the same degree of consolation I wanted, were the situation reversed. Complete isolation until I was well or much better.

This idea proved entirely wrong.

There are people whose lives run strangely parallel our own, but we do not know it at the time and are continually surprised by encountering them at widely distant points in your life and theirs, seemingly looking up and observing that they are there, there again. Surprise!? It makes you feel good to know they are there, a constant, and their lives are precisely on a contemporary track with yours. If you do not have exactly the same value system, so what, for you at least recognize the what is involved in what concerns you, what is at stake, and are conversant with the elements that comprise the important things in life, but in perhaps a different order of importance. This means you may disagree with them, but never violently nor irreconcilably, and not by much.

Jack and Maggie once played this role in our lives, Norma and mine, and so did Ken and Verna Maclean, two more friends from school days who met, married, and stayed together for decades. We kept appearing and reappearing in each other’s lives over at unexpected moments, never really surprised. Such friends provide a continuity in a world in which that commodity is often in short supply. Verna was a sorority sister of Janet Keller’s at the Delta Gamma house, Ken a classmate of mine, both as an undergraduate and as a grad, when I came back from the Army; Ken’s Army duty came before he started college, so he was a little older than I. We were not very close. Looking back, we were never very far apart, either.

It was from Verna that I learned Jack had died. She was an inveterate reader of obituaries. What, Jack . . . dead? It cannot be so, I said. There was so much left unsaid, so many parties not held, or unattended, or simply missed. Now the situation was impossible to remedy. No more parties? How foolish to put it this way, but is how I did. I was shocked, hurt to the quick. I wanted a party, not a wake, and for him to be there, garrulous, winking across a crowded room, wanting to defend his honor against some slight that may be entirely imagined.

The news came in midst of a roll call of the dead. Worth Hedrick, Dave Norton, Bill Rule, all brothers. Now Jack. This was the worst news and hit me like a hammer. How odd, for there are important deaths that leave one only mildly affected, dry-eyed, thoughtfully inclined, and there are others that are like bombs gone off. Time bombs, I might say, with some degree of irony attendant on the scene, for we were now much older, those of us still alive.

Jack, dead? How, why? I learned the answer to this question once again from Verna, and a bit later, from Maggie herself.

It was not his heart, it was cancer. Lung cancer. And he had lingered for some time. Death had been slow and unmerciful. He met his classes, I learned, until shortly before he died, when he had become totally incapacitated. One night during his long illness there came a knock on the door. (Knowledge of the knock arriving and what it portended, you might say, germinated this book.) Maggie went to answer it. Jack was probably in his chair, under a blanket; at least, under the conditions, I would have been. A pretty young woman stood there. She was slender, her hair was red. "Is this where Jack Leahy lives?" she asked.

"It is," Maggie replied.

"Well, I’m his daughter. I’d like to speak to him."

Had Maggie known that, some day, such a knock would sound on her door and an introductory remark of that nature be spoken? Possibly. But over time one learns to ignore dim possibilities and the likelihood that one of them might happen, right up to the point when it does. And then it is to late for defensive action. No doubt Maggie (and I am guessing here), seeing the striking looking girl with hair of undeniable color, mulberry or wine, knew who it was and what the matter would be. For she had foreseen it all a million times. So Maggie was already moving aside to permit the girl entry before the very ring of the knock had died away. She had rights, this girl did.

"Jack," she called out, over her shoulder. "You have a visitor." Those would be her very words.

And Jack: "I’m in no mood to see anyone." For he was sicker than two dogs. "Tell them to go away. Tell them to phone me. Take a message." Anything to get rid of anybody who come between him and his tenuous serenity, fi there was any.

But it was already too late. She had come, no doubt, some incredible distance, perhaps from as far away as the Bay Area on this singular mission. To see her father while he was alive. Perhaps Rusty was dead, too; she was always in poor health and a drug overdose, malnutrition, the chance of suicide, most anything, was likely to take away a life that had never started or reached any fruition. And whatever was discussed between the girl and the sick old man (he was fifty-five, but cancer adds a quick twenty years to appearances) nobody will ever know, probably not even Maggie, specifically, who acknowledged the meeting to me casually, several years later, Jack gone, and did not choose to elucidate the matter, nor did I choose to interrogate her about it.

She—this nameless girl--stuck around. Of this I am certain. Maggie probably invited her into the house and offered her a bed for the night and longer, and the girl never thought of refusing what she knew to be her due, even from the man’s wife, the woman who was not her mother. Maggie probably had no envy or much of any emotion at the girl’s arrival. It was an event fulfilled, one devoid of emotion, allT genuine emotions these days being stretched to the breaking point.

The Rusty episode had been several years over with when Maggie met and married Jack, so there was nothing to be spiteful about, or envious over, nothing to deny or resent. Only history, which is not worth holding a grudge. Some women are inexplicably jealous, envious of the past, but not Maggie. Peter was gone from their life and into that nether world that only druggies know and understand, and Timmy ensconced in a basement room, where he usually went, when he was not eating with or watching TV with his parents. A bed could be found for the girl, Peter’s unused bed with fresh sheets already on it, perhaps in long anticipation, and the girl probably had with her a little overnight suitcase with a nightgown pressed into one corner of it, and whatever else women take on short journeys when they know they will be spending the night.

A death from lung cancer drags on, then speeds up with a terrible final rush. Drugs are administered in increasing doses to try to hold off the pain that is mounting. The drugs have horrible side effects. One hallucinates. One goes halfway mad. I would like to think that his daughter remained with them until the end and gave Jack some satisfactory degree of finality to the door closing on his life. That Peter would shed his own drug dependency and take up a station on the other side of Jack’s bed, and Timmy come up from his room, every now and then, to lay a kind word on the wasted man in the chair under the heavy robe, the man who was never very large or heavy in the first place. Quick Jack I’ve called him. A track man in high school, very fast, he could not sprint away from this pursuer. Under his robe he was cold; never again would he be warm, warm enough. A wife, two children, and this other person, another child of his, and his wife of the years, waiting, watching. It could be worse. I can imagine it so.

It was a gristly scene of adoration, but probably not recognizable as such, only a man dying in his prime, before his allotted time, as prescribed by The Bible and its agents, the actuaries. I have only my imagination to work with and to draw upon when it come to this most important of earthly matters, death. The imagination is a poor organ, if organ it is, and is prone to enormous error. It is highly undependable, besides. It tends to be romantic and to envision events with a high degree of drama, to succumb to its own verbosity, and to disregard the numb edge of reality that says things will be better or even much different than in the past. In short, it falls short of its mission, which is to describe the truth of things in an oblique manner.

Ultimate things are the opposite of romantic and dramatic. They are dire, boring, and full of quite dread. His last days were filled with trips to the hospital and back home again. Chemo and radiation were administered in hopes of gaining some time. With lung cancer radiation is always the hope, until the situation is hopeless, and then it is continued, right up to and past its limits as a palliative. Its only value is perhaps in giving oncologist a feeling of having done something useful. This is an illusion. Hospitals don’t want you dying there, so they keep sending you home to die, as long as you are able to make the trip. And then, at either one or the other place, you die.

Perhaps he died some long afternoon, the TV on over in the corner, with its meaningless drone filling the room with its incessant drivel and muffling Jack’s last sounds. Or at mid-morning, a nicer time, when people are having their normal coffee. The funeral would follow. It would be Catholic, Catholic again, Catholic still, Catholic at last. The familiar grieving would follow, along with rain, familiar rain.

I missed it all.

Am I grateful? Of course I am. Who likes funerals? But there are some things left incomplete when you don’t attend, like a class where you haven’t turned in the final paper. It used to be, you have two years in which to do so, before your final grade becomes a failure. I missed the deadline and how sorry I am. I am left incomplete myself because something I failed to do.

Hence this book.

Upon learning of Jack’s death I called Maggie. It took me a day or two to get around to doing it. She was not adverse to talking about what had happened; some time had passed. Rusty’s daughter—whatever her name, I picture her as looking just like Rusty, only perhaps a little less shopworn and weird—was there for some of the time, but not at the end. And the boys were present. Peter had emerged from his nether world, though there were some doubts whether he would remain free of it. Later I met him and decided there was hope, high hope, for him and in his own sweet time he would make his adjustment. The darkness would vanish and he would live a useful life, joining us in the daily world of ordinary unhappiness, which Freud tells us is the norm.

Maggie evidenced no bitterness or surprise that I hadn’t known of Jack’s death and had failed to contact her. In fact, she seemed a little surprised to hear from me. She invited me to the house and I accepted.

It was the kind of house I’d always admired and wished I lived in. If you had to die, there were much worse places to do it. It was built of cedar and glass, hidden away in a tiny canyon—a ravine, really—in the heart of the city; it was only a few miles North of where Norma and I lived in the Bryant District. A small creek ran through the property and the house was elevated to permit the water to flow beneath it. This appealed to me greatly, for it was much like an urban river, only of course on a much smaller scale. The house was tucked away in a small stand of Western red cedars and hemlocks. Perfect, I thought.

Soon after Jack’s death Maggie bought the house next door—a more airy, spacious, open place, up a bank, and connected by a steep walkway that led up from the dark ravine. It was a symbolic journey toward light, I suppose. Tim and his wife lived in the old house now, though Maggie still owned it and offered to show it to me, for they were proud of what they had produced together. It held a pair of early Richard Gilkey paintings that I remembered from our school days and wanted to see again. Were they as good as I had thought them to be? They were.

The house was full of books—Jack’s books. Librarians as a rule don’t’ value books the way writers do and see them as an expendable commodity and somewhat of a problem. They collect dust and take up valuable space that could be used for living. I doubt whether Tim or his wife had read Jack’s books, but I scanned the shelves and saw my own former tastes reflected back at me, almost blindingly, so familiarly. It was as though I were revisiting myself. At the same time it seemed distinctly Jack.

The Gilkeys were good to behold—old friends whose faces had grown dim with the failure of memory. They were different from how I remembered them. Recently, having some money in hand, for once in my life, my wife and I have acquired three Gilkeys. Jack had paid seventy-five dollars for his first small, choice painting. My own had cost in the low thousands. They were no better, I decided. Often painters and writers do their best work before they are thirty.

It was a warm house, built on multiple levels, the rooms without doors and opening off, one onto another, connected by a stair or two. They lived, as it were, on several different planes. (I almost wrote "levels, as in levels of meaning, a literary term.) How difficult it must have been for Jack, no longer quick, to get around from one room to another, when he was so sick. How did he manage those steps? Was he in a wheelchair at the end? It did not seem fitting to ask Maggie for details. But there were the inevitable logistics of the dying to take into consideration. Perhaps Jack had remained stationary for hours on end, for days, living on a single level in his Ames chair, his feet propped up on the matching leather ottoman. (It is what I would have done, in his situation, only I had only an ordinary mohair chair, and an old table on which to prop my feet.)

There is something special, unique, in what is involved in the death of a friend, a contemporary of yours, someone the exact same age, give a month or two: your empathy, or whatever it is, is plumbed to its greatest depth and you can easily imagine yourself in the same situation. This is the truth that marks the quintessential difference between the quick and the dead. Death gives you an inflated sense of being alive and vibrant. You are tearfully grateful for your great good luck. You feel a rush of emotion. You want to sing aloud. Praise be! And I think the beautiful house enhanced my sense of elation. It was the kind of house many of us envisioned living in, when our ship has landed, which we were all sure it would do, given a little more time

They had had a good income during their working years, Maggie with a school teacher’s salary that comes from having an advanced degree (her MS in librarianship) and Jack, a full professor in the College, though not drawing so high a salary as if he were in one of the recognized engineering fields in which a doctorate is required. Maggie told me about their life together, how they had traveled extensively—of course; teachers had their summers were free. There were tax write offs for travel and presumable study overseas. They’d gone to India, Russia, South America. She recounted in excruciating detail a boat ride across Lake Titicaca, on the Bolivian/Chilean border, during which time they’d come down with dysentery of the worst kind. Long past, she was able to describe it with a kind of glee. Things soften somewhat in memory, I guess. It must have been terrible and their illness lasted for days. Compared to Jack’s last days, it probably was insignificant.

Travel had become an important part of their life and she continued to do so herself, choosing special trips that had always seemed to me of the nature of work-release. She participated in archeological digs, for instance, and still had the calluses to prove it. This brought back Jack’s anthropological interest in the coastal Indians of the Pacific Northwest, and I surmised that the two of them had pursued and expanded their fascination with native cultures. Now, alone, Maggie continued to some degree their previous life. Marriages are often like this.

This was commendable. Their life together, at least on the surface, seemed idyllic and highly successful. Timmy lived next door and now Peter was back in their life, or rather in hers. If there was a downside to all this, I didn’t want to hear about it. So I listened, but didn’t probe much. This book is not your basic journalism, you understand.

Maggie and I met irregularly after that. She always seemed glad to see me and become reacquainted, especially with my wife, who she hardly knew. It was almost as though my soured relationship with Jack had stood in the way, all those years. They had a dog, Finnegan (named after Joyce’s book, doubtlessly, and from this I deduced that Jack had read it, too, and learned to love dogs), plus cats, of course, always cats. I had a Lab, Sam, so it seemed natural for Maggie and me to get together, at least during fair weather, to exercise our dogs, something the big breeds need daily. I would phone Maggie, go by the house, and then we would walk down her long hill to a school playground with a running track, which we would circle, gabbing, until our dogs began to drag. Both males and aging, they were not friendly but accepted each other as part of the available outdoor environment and grew tolerant of each other. This meant we didn’t have to worry about the aging beasts getting into a domain fight.

Our own relationship was similarly easy. I learned a lot during those walks. Nothing special or of great event, just ordinary things that happened throughout their life together and what was Maggie was doing to stay active, now that she was an early widow. What is important here is, Jack dead, we were friends again.

We were on Maggie’s short list for parties, New Year’s Eve being the one she was most famous for. This seemed a familiar scene. Only Jack was gone now. The parties weren’t the same anymore. They had moderated over the years, of course. Hadn’t we all? They were ghostly echoes of our common past. Had we all been thusly tamed? I hadn’t been out on New Year’s Eve in thirty years. The first party was coming right up. Suddenly I remembered a special one from the past. I was in the Army, the year before I went overseas, and a wonderful crone of a woman had told my fortune with a deck of Tarot cards. I had laughed at her predictions. But—with the greatest of broadly applied interpretation necessary in cases like this—I was able to trace most of what had happened the following year to what she had prophesized. It was spooky, chillingly accurate. She made me an instant believer in fortune telling.

She told me about trips over water that I would take. I’d laughed, no sailor I. But looking back over that year there had been such trips, only they were overflights, the water lying down below us—Puget Sound, The Straits of Georgia, Bristol Bay. My destination was Alaska, then, at year’s end, a repeat of the trip but in reverse, until I was back in Seattle, crossing all that water again. There were other things she had foreseen than seemed eerily unlikely but had come true, though sometimes I had to stretch a point or two to make the connection. A girl appearing, a new authority figure in my life, a conflict and its partial resolution. True, all true.

So I looked forward to New Year’s Eve again, imagining the great bashes of some forty years ago. And some fortune telling, as well. The party began very quietly. It was slow in getting underway. Norma and I met a bunch of people we didn’t remember—and some we did, only they looked so different; they had aged terribly. There was a Nancy Davis who had been in school with me. She remembered me, but not I her. I stared at her old face, trying to find the girl she once was. (No doubt she was looking for the boy I had been, too.) I thought perhaps I detected some ancient bit of a past that we shared, but when I tried to recount it to her, her face went blank. The connection was so tenuous I knew I must have been imagining it. So much for a shared history.

Norma and I weren’t much at drinking, not any more. I nursed a beer well into late evening, Norma a Seven-Up that, in a highball glass, might have been thought some lethal beverage. Funny but the people around us did not get noticeably drunk, not like at the English Department parties of yore, which were an opportunist’s delight. I met a young man who was the son of the Davis woman, who now was somebody else, having married a Bruce or Larry, who owned a restaurant. All his life he had been in the restaurant business, even back in school.. He had managed, then owned, a bistro where we had all gathered on a chronic basis. It was in the basement of the YWCA, but in the evening drinks were served, illegally, right in the shadow of the campus. How daring, then, for such things were prohibited by state law. But then the laws were changed and it became ordinary. First they permitted cocktail lounges, so long as they were located a mile from campus. Then, beer and wine, much nearer. Finally, almost all the prohibitions on drinking were dropped. It was a liberal time, perhaps a time for libertines, as well.

Their son was in his early twenties and suffering from multiple sclerosis. He mentioned it immediately, as if to explain his jerky motions, and added that he was in remission, but it would last only a little while. The disease was progressive and there was no moving backwards, only ahead, along a deadly course. I could think of nothing positive to say to him about it, sad indeed, and he, used to this reaction, I guess, beamed at my discomfort and continued his discourse. Soon he would be entirely paralyzed. He grinned and looked at me for expectantly. What is there to say? After that his internal regulating systems would shut down, one after another, (kidneys, lungs, stomach, bowels) and he would die. He smiled.

I muttered something like, Tough luck. Whatever I said, it would have been the wrong thing, for there was no right.

He drifted off, perhaps bored with me, and I was glad to see him go. I needed to lift my spirits, but getting drunk wasn’t the answer. It proved an odd, disorienting, disjointed evening, and it was a long way from being over with. I met women who were on their second or third husbands, men with women thirty years younger than they were and whose relationship was not what it might have seemed. I had to guess at it and thought I guessed wrong. Everybody was indefinite or ill defined. I was getting used to obscure situations, and found them natural.

I met the widow of the music conductor, Rainer Meidel, Cornelia, born in Germany and with a heavy accent, an excellent cellist, who explained to me how I must never listen to music while I worked, wrote, or did anything else; I must sit upright and be still, giving the music my sole attention. Not to do so was an insult both to the composer and to the performer. She was right, I suppose, from a technical standpoint, but most of us don’t listen to musically technically but for pleasure. I heard her out with a sense of dread, silently pledging never to change my listening habits.

I tried to change the subject to books we had read—I knew some of the modern German writers; Handke, for instance—but she quickly returned it to music, about which I really knew nothing, only that I liked some more than others. She and Maggie, it turned out, were widows together, close friends, living lives without men in them anymore, and, I gathered, enjoying it, at least in part. It was more tranquil, simpatico.

There, across the room, holding court at a cardtable set up in the corner, was the woman I remembered from long ago, the one who told fortunes with a Tarot deck. She had aged, I decided, less than the rest of us, but she was nonetheless old, very old. I hurried over to greet her, but had to wait, for she was finishing up with the fortune of a middle-aged woman, and all that woman’s cards were lying face up on the table, where they had been picked up and put back down again multiple times. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, waiting. Of course I wanted to know the future.

She remembered me vaguely. Do many people, so many deals of the deck. I told her how prescient she had been and how all my doubts about the Tarot deck had been dispelled over the course of that long-ago year. It was proof positive. She smiled; she had known as much all along, of course, but it was nice to have it confirmed. Would she tell my fortune again, please? I would gladly pay for it. No, it was not something to do to be paid for. Yes, she would do it.

Was her accent a little foreign-sounding, or was my ear still attuned to Cornelia? She looked tired. Fortune telling was exhausting work—I thought of hypnosis and why I had quit it. I could understand the woman’s reluctance to begin. She would give me a quickie, she said. She laughed, I laughed. I don’t think the word had sexual overtones in her life. Her laughter must have been for some other reason. A sense of irony, perhaps.

The quickie was vague. Well, that was understandable. Fortune telling was inexact. Her heart wasn’t in it tonight. Well, why should it be? I was a stranger, somebody standing in line almost as though at a checkout counter at the supermarket. Another person taking up her time and energy. She was in great demand tonight.

She must have been near eighty. Her eyelids were large and veined, the color of paper, foxed. I sat down, ready to offer her my hand, palm up, but that isn’t how it is done, the Tarot reading. She shuffled the deck—this much I am certain of. Perhaps I cut the cards. She began to deal them out, face up. If she saw things in them, as they came up, she didn’t make a sound, not so much as a sigh. Here was the Hanged Man. Depending upon the context, the order in which it came up, it was not necessarily a bad card. In fact, it could be good, depending, she said. I had not seen the Tarot deck since the last time. I became aware, card by card, of a long, desperate tradition and of how context alone determined the cards meaning. Not all cards were sinister. Maybe ominous would be a better word for that numinous quality they had. On the other hand, I might have imagined it. The cards were neutral.

I’ve never quite known how to regard things of a superstitious nature. With fortune telling, Tarot, one must apply the pragmatic test. Did something happen, as predicted, or must the prediction be disregarded because it proved wrong, inaccurate? The truth seemed somewhere in between. It took a year for what she said to be proved either right or wrong, and then it was too late. Yes, I made a trip, but not at the time or season foretold, or ordained. And other things were not quite right, either. I concluded, as the time approached for another new year and the prospect of a second annual fortune telling at Maggie’s party, that I was not exactly eager for it to happen again. At the same time—if the old lady was willing again—I wouldn’t want to miss it. Talk about ambivalence. As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. The old lady wasn’t at the party. She had been seriously ill the previous yea, and had died.

Maggie told me this over the phone at Christmas time, when she called to invite us to her next party. I was glad to get the invitation and believed that it signified a special occasion. I was home again, in several ways. I would be among old friends—well, one of them an old friend, anyway. A friend of the years. Not Jack, true, but as close as one could come to what remained of Jack. His wife.

We attended with a strong sense of what I might call sadness. Yet there was a feeling of peace, as well. Maybe the correct word is solemnity. No, sadness will have to do.

After her parties, though I had drunk next to nothing, I awakened early, with a terrible headache, and was not able to fall back to sleep. Aspirin helped not at all. It was a hangover, to be sure, and it lasted throughout the next afternoon, New Year’s Day, a time dedicated to recovery from one’s debauch and watching a bowl game. It was almost always the Rose Bowl Game for us, even though Washington was invited less and less often. The team was just good enough to be asked to a bowl game somewhere else, at a different day in the holiday season. But in the West, the Rose Ball Game has an aura.

In deference to changing times and to the fact that so many people had given up smoking, Maggie did not smoke at her own parties, at least not until about midnight, when she and her son Tim (called Timmy) and Timmy’s wife, all lit up, as if to say, To hell with you. We sacrificed ourselves for you, all evening, and now it is our turn. If you don’t like it, to hell with you. You can always go home. Something like that.

I remember that this is often how their parties ended: a nonchalant mood settling down over both Jack and Maggie, and an impatience with us manifesting itself. All at once, they wanted everybody to go home. Years ago I thought it something sexual they had in mind. Now I’m sure it wasn’t. They’d simply had enough of us all, their favorite people. In their minds they were no longer hosts but tired partygoers who needed their rest. If it had been somebody else’s house, they’d have left long before ago, or so their manner suddenly stated. It came to me as a big surprise, that I had overstayed my welcome. Of course we left immediately.

The smoking was poisonous. I will put up with a lot from my friends, having smoked myself for so long that, but after forty years of abstinence, I am afraid I’ve grown self-righteous about the matter. I am allergic to cigaret smoke and have grown intolerant. Smoking is addictive and smokers are addictive. Of course my own developing allergies are what made it easy for me to quit. That and the fact that I am lucky in not being an addictive type. Many are not so lucky.

For luck it is, I am certain, and one should not try to take credit for things that are easy to do, when one knows in his bones that it is impossible for some people to quit whatever it is that is controlling their lives—cigarets, liquor, drugs. So, after a couple of Maggie’s New Year’s Eve parties, and the price I paid in coughing, runny sinuses, and headaches, I began to dread them. I sought out excuses not to attend that sounded both plausible and acceptable. Anything but the unbearable truth. The parties weren’t all that exciting, and we didn’t think we were missing much. The people who attended them were not merely aging, they were old.

People throw because they enjoyed doing so, I rationalized, feeling guilty. Party givers have elevated status. They are controlling people, benevolent and slightly condescending—all in a quite natural and pleasant manner. A lot of work is involved in putting on a party. And it costs money. It is better in many ways to throw a party than attending other people’s parties, for you will know everybody who is there (if you don’t, there is something wrong with your guest list) and can play God to match-making and predicting general modes of who will enjoy each other’s company. The food and drink are always to your liking. And –in Maggie’s instance—you can choose people who will play Jack’s baby grand piano that still sits off in the corner and remains as an immovable icon to him. It will lift the mood and cheer everyone when you ask someone, "Why don’t you sit down and play us something?" After a tiny hesitation, the order is almost always obeyed.

We only attended two or three of the post-Jack New Year’s Eve parties. The last one I begged us off on, which was easy since the invitation came only two days before the evening, almost as though we were an afterthought. Perhaps we were. "Bob and Norma? Of course. Did I forget them?" A laugh on the heels. "I guess it’s not too late to ask them. They won’t have other plans, those two." Laugh again, this time at us. Or so I imagine it.

Only I said that we did have other plans. Sorry, Maggie; I lied. Teach you to think of us so late. And it occurred to me that I hadn’t called Maggie to suggest we walk our dogs together, not in the past year. Another mea culpa.

Instead, we stayed at home and watched some terrible old movie on TV. Funny but I hadn’t remembered the plot as being that bad. And we thought, off and on all evening, of Maggie and Jack, Maggie now, and those friends of hers from school days who we never quite knew or remembered, plus her new partners in traveling, old co-workers from the high school library, and people who had once been part of an ancient English department. We were on the edge of all that.

When Maggie I took our last dog walk together, it was raining, spring, and the middle school happened to be on vacation, so there were no children pressing faces to the window glass, no muffled sounds from inside. We circled the running track, not exactly recognizing it as that, which was also the perimeter of the baseball diamond, our dogs trotting side by side, like old pals, a bit like Jack and myself once. Then one dog, probably mine, went off in a private direction, without so much as giving the other a clue, returning to rejoin us at some indefinite, undefined point in our walk. We came to a bench. It was where the softball team awaited its turn at bat. The dogs halted expectantly, turning their faces to us, their dual tongues lollilng.

"I’m tired," she said. "I swam this morning." There was a community pool only a few hundred yards away and even closer to her house. "It’s a good form of exercise. About the only kind that I get."

"Did Jack swim?" I asked.

"Heavens, no. He would sink like a stone. He was deathly afraid of water. But trips across water in an ocean-going ship were something else. He loved boat travel, or rather, travel by ship. He never thought anything so big could possibly sink. It would go on forever." She laughed. "Like the Titanic."

I tried to remember whether on our fishing trips—out in a small boat on a small lake—whether Jack had evidenced any fear of water. Nothing there, another blank. It is possible he did and I simply missed the sign, or ignored it, all caught up in the particulars of the day outside. It is how I am. I looked into Maggie’s eyes. They were Nordic blue, and she was not so lightly freckled across the bridge of her nose and under her eyes as I remembered her. Time takes away some features, just as it adds others. Small boned, as was Jack, she had put on weight, and might now be described as slightly pudgy. (She would say about this, "Who cares? Who is there to look at me or to care?") Her fair hair was still the color of corn tassels, the kind that doesn’t exactly gray but merely lightens by a series of degree until it is past the point of being blond and is some neutral shade, say, straw. The kind that never grows white, nor is called platinum. The color she and my wife might enjoy.

Her teeth were no longer her own. Jack had had his out, oh, in early middle age. I saw this as some sort of loss, perhaps because my own teeth are not good (heredity, more than one dentist has told me), but I still put up with the pain and cost of trying to keep them, or most of them, in my mouth, knowing that false teeth are not so much a sign of failure as defeat. Both my friends were then defeated. Life deals you some hard blows that can not be easily shaken off. It diminishes you by degrees. It had them. Yet she walked miles each day (in spite of what she said), swam regularly, and when she went on vacation worked hard with her hands in archeological digs that required great strength and perseverance. These were not the hallmarks of a quitter.

Jack and I both had one trait in common, if not more. We would worry things excessively—worry them to the bone, we both used to say. Worry them to death. We’d latch on to some idea, some fixed entity, and follow its course until we had resolved the matter to our satisfaction. Over and over again. We’d never quit, though it might seem to others that we had. Professor Garland Ethel had ratted on his colleagues during the state House of Representatives investigation of subversive activities on campus (commonly called the Canwell Committee). This troubled Jack, who had Ethel as his Chaucer teacher and had been drawn into the controversy as a result. It was important to everybody to take sides. One special day all the English faculty wore yellow neckties in order to mock Ethel and show their solidarity in opposing him. Ethel, long in retirement, no doubt demented, feeling on his back the burden of life, of death, one day twenty years ago took a gun in his hand and killed his wife, her brother, her brother’s wife, then turned the gun on himself. He did an inferior job on himself. He lingered in intensive care a week before he died.

This act had long puzzled me, I told Maggie. We had discussed the demise of old friends and enemies on our walks. Ethel’s act seemed extreme, bizarre beyond common recognition. Why, why, why? I asked, tiresomely.

"Old people get tired of going back and forth to the doctor," she said dryly.

This remark struck me as though a board had been slapped against my face. Old, us? Is that what Jack and Maggie’s last years had been truly like? Constant trips to the doctor, to teams of doctors (oncologists, radiation specialists, chemotherapists, pain managers, physical therapists), hospitals, clinics, and back home again? The pain in between trips, the panic, the recurring flash fevers and fear, the delirium, the hope that medicine can bring a positive change in inevitable events, the disappointment when it doesn’t? A long year of this, perhaps two, and then the gritty slide into death that is both welcome and meant to be fought against— with two stiff arms for as long as possible?

There is a time in a man’s life, and in a woman’s, when it may seem that life goes on forever, following its blind course, and whatever untoward events may occur are far off, never ultimately to be faced because there is so much time left, an ocean of time, ready time, time that does not press its case, or argue necessity, all the time in the world, and then suddenly there is no more time, none at all, and one’s life is shutting down fast. The glass is no longer half full, nor half empty. The glass is nearly gone itself, the measure of life, vanquished, the thin joy of life departing fast. There is a ghostly echo in your ears.

You are not quite all alone in the world, but there is nobody strong or important enough to offer you succor or absorb the unfair part of your individual burden. There remains an enormous sense of loss and the knowledge that you have largely wasted your life, your endeavors. You have laid waste your valuable friendships, along with the invaluable one, not knowing one from the other. You are long past the point of making sense out of anything that has happened to you. You must settle for the sparse baggage that you have left on the next journey. It is all you have or ever will have, and it is not enough. But it will have to do.

I remember an evening in the early Fifties, back when Jack and I were close, just of legal age, and wild about girls. My great love affair with Cheryl had reached one of its critical stages and was beginning to unravel down a painful course. Daily it got worse. We were living together, but she had maintained up the street a one-room apartment, mainly for appearances, to satisfy her mother, but also I think as a place to escape from me. Her mother was a Christian Scientist, who had been married three or four times, and cared greatly (as we all did then) about appearances. Cheryl and I had had one of our terrible rifts, a noisy fight, and had separated again. Each of us was ostensibly alone, supposedly not seeing others of the opposite sex. Don’t you believe it. Jack and I had dropped into The Century Tavern for our evening’s allocation of beer, and we were sitting in a back booth, when in walked Cheryl with the ex-husband of her best friend, Beth Zanitas. His family owned a waterfront seafood restaurant. They were not poor.

Jack said to me, "Well, if it has to be anyone, Bob, I’m glad it’s Nick. He’s a nice guy."

I could not believe my ears. The fellow sitting so nonchalantly across from me, drinking a schooner of beer, he was not my friend. How could I ever have thought so? A friend would not have said such a thing. Jack? I was filled with instant rage. It is made the same way instant coffee is made; you just add hot water. I looked him coolly in the eye, lifted my nearly full schooner, and threw its contents in his face and down his shirt front. How much better such an act makes you feel. Instantly my rage was over.|

Jack was furious. He stood up, beer streaming down his chest, his bright blue eyes glaring, his arms and shoulders trembling, ready to throw a punch at me. I remembered how he was always getting into fights, here and in other taverns, and at parties (where almost everything goes, except a few choice things), and how he would wildly start throwing punches in all directions. The funny thing was, somebody always restrained him. It happened in the nick of time, from his standpoint. Sometimes I would grab him and hold him (amazingly light) back, his arms flailing, while the other guy took defensive measures, perhaps left the area, or else other people held Jack back, so there was a terrific crowd surrounding him in a milling fashion, all clasping him and the other guy and keeping the pugilists from coming together and exchanging a few punches. All you could see was bobbing heads and clenched hands extended into the air. It was funny and nobody ever got hurt.

Tonight I rose to my feet completely disarmed by what I had done. I was no longer angry. A great peace had descended on me—you’ll have to try it sometime; throw a beer at someone and see how wonderful, how calm, it makes you feel afterwards. All that spare anger, well, evaporates. I got to my feet because I knew Jack would start throwing those memorable punches at my deserving head and shoulders, and I must fend them off or else get injured. The first punch arrived amazingly slow and I caught it in the palm of one hand, turning it at once sideways and looking at it, as though I had never seen a man’s hand before. Yep, Jack’s fist, all right. He threw another punch and I caught it in my free hand. Now I had two punches captured, two hands. They were like birds, the proverbial birds in hand. Neither punch had landed and both were so lightly, so loopily, thrown that even if they had hit me they would have done next to no damage. They’d have glanced off as though they were pillows. No, pillows would have landed much more heavily. A pillow can hurt you.

I was amazed. We had spilled a lot of beer (besides what I had thrown) and glasses had shattered and sharp shards were on the table and floor. The booth was made of light-weight wood and we had damaged it badly. Guys from other tables had rushed over and now there were hands restraining Jack and others poised to hold me back, if I made a move. As clearly as though it were today, I can hear quick Jack shouting, "Let me go! Let me at him!" And I replying, "Yes, let him go. Let him at me."

Had this guy ever gotten in a serious fight, or had each time in the past some enterprising crowd materialized to bail him out of trouble? The familiar scenario, and yet unreal. I remembered shooting baskets with him once and how it was all he could do to bounce the ball up and down, and heave it in the direction of the basket. He missed by yards. Clearly track was his métier and the other sports were not his.

Ben was the bartender and owner. He hated fights (which took place almost nightly) and the damage they did to his property, and how he might catch a stray punch if he ventured too close and get incidentally clobbered. He had a habit of hiding behind the bar until a fight was over. Then he would emerge, enraged. "Get them out of here," he shouted at us, and the same people who had restrained us now led us to the door and saw to it we went outside. Once on the street, we faced each other unsurely, not quite knowing what the other might do, then burst out laughing.

"Let’s get a case to go," Jack suggested, since it was impossible for us to go back inside and start drinking again. To me it sounded like a great idea.

"Will they let us inside to buy it?" I asked.

"Let us see."

They wouldn’t, but a man sitting on the stool nearest to the door offered to buy it for us. Jack and I reached into our pockets and gave him a bunch of crumpled ones. Jack carried the half case on his shoulder, as though a stevedore. We went to my place, for it was closer, and I forget how the evening ended. There was no Cheryl to join us, as usual, and that made long hours sad for me.

A thoughtful guy, Jack, he didn’t want me to be alone in my misery. Often we showed each other just such acts of consideration. While our friendship lasted evenings like this one were common. It was not for long.

When Maggie threw a party she always wore a long, flowing hostess dress. Since she was not tall, this made her look shorter. She would greet you as you entered, point out the food on the long dining table (mentioning the specialty dishes she wanted to make sure you sampled), and then go off to greet other friends or to build fresh conversational groups and make sure different people (since only she knew them all) were introduced and what they had in common made known to each other. I don’t know about you, but whenever somebody tries to make me get friendly with somebody I purportedly have much in common with, I want to run. It is a sure way of alienating both people. But Maggie could bring it off, and many other things, with charm. She could make people who intrinsically didn’t like each other at least go through the motions of what seemed to be achieving a breakthrough, and in the process establishing areas of trust. For you didn’t want to offend her.

After the introduction I never saw Maggie again for the course of the evening, at least not at close range. Oh, I’d glimpse her across the room and she might catch my eye and smile her shy smile, bunching up her eyes, hunching her shoulders as if to say, "What am I to do? I’m trapped." It was a winning trick and I always tried to draw it out of her, in order to see it again, and did so many times, every time, and smiled to myself triumphantly afterwards. Sometimes I tried to move towards her and join the group she was with, but never made much headway through the crowd. Sometimes, though, she would appear behind me, usually late in the evening, with somebody in tow, announcing, "Here is somebody you just have to meet." And it would turn out that, indeed, I did want to meet him or her, once the connection had been made by Maggie. We truly did have something in common.

A few times it was somebody I had known slightly almost fifty years ago. We’d stare at each other and pretend we remembered each other’s faces, and slide into that process of false trial recognition people go through when they don’t want to offend the other party. It is a kind of lie, of course, but a lie in being sociable is not punishable by death, and we all commit our tiny crimes a few times every day, even more often at parties. We would chat, this person and the one he or she was paired with, often a second or third marriage partner, and it would turn out we were soon laughing over some shared memory or in recognition that we knew, or used to know, a special person, and could call forth the right name.

Norma and I always left early. We don’t like parties and a time comes when a party is softly dying and it is no great slight to depart it, for the atmosphere has changed and is conducive to leaving. Often it was hard to find Maggie and to achieve a fawning exit. What you do is barge through conversational groups, or else skirt them, bearing ever forward, in the direction of your hostess, and hopefully the door, and when you arrive there, reach your goal, there is a spirited conversation going on, which you must interrupt after either a long or a short wait, in order to effect your departure, and the people involved in the conversation know exactly what it is you are up to, what you intend to do, and most times are uncooperative, for you are leaving, and they must stay at least a while longer. This makes you a party poop of the second, if not the first, order.

Maggie always evidenced great disappointment that we were leaving, as though we had just arrived, even though this was never the case. It was a cute little trick. I think it is a social convention and probably means the exact opposite of what is said. The length of time she held us there uncomfortably depended on circumstances beyond our control. She protested our leaving, disputed it and our proffered reasons, but then suddenly caved in, agreeing with us, accepting it as a fact, indisputable, which had the net effect of making us feel that she was truly glad we would soon be gone, along with everybody else, though she did not in any way state this, or communicate it by body language. Sometimes she would go with us into the spare bedroom, where (since it was dead winter) our coats were piled on the bed, along with everybody else’s, and we would cursorily inspect the books on the bedstead or in the low bookcase across the room, looking for old friends, book friends, or for new ones, books we hadn’t heard of. The books a writer owns were no longer in evidence, and that seemed sad to me, announcing the loss of more than the books themselves and what they stood for. We saw mysteries and best sellers, the books of a professional librarian who reads to pass the time and be generally knowledgeable. No writer’s books. I was disappointed.

And then we were flushed out into the cold night, the post-midnight air striking our pink indoor faces like a hand. We walked the short, snappy distance to our car, since it was a large party and we were not the first to arrive and had to park far down the street. That distance had to be closed again and there were car gaps in it. Come early and have a short walk to the house; arrive late and walk a distance, coming and going. It is nearly axiomatic.

There was no problem the following year because we begged off. The idea of all that cigaret smoke defeated any prospect of having a good time. It was too great a price. Yet, as things turned out, I would have gladly paid it, even if I had known ahead of time that it would be an evening dully exactly like all the others.

It must have been spring, or early summer, when we got the bad news. Again it was our old school friend, Verna, the habitual reader and recorder of obituaries, who told us. It merited a special long-distance phone call from her.

"Maggie Leahy died—have you heard?" she asked, after we’d been talking only a moment.

"My God, no. What happened."

I was nearly dumbstruck.

"When, how?" I must have asked, though I was can’t remember saying anything at all.

"Cancer," said Verna, as though those two syllables might explain everything--all the misery and unhappiness in the world and how it drops down like a bomb.

She knew no more about it, Maggie’s death. In time I learned a bit more, but not much. I tried to locate Peter, but he seemed to have disappeared. Was it back into the world of drugs, I wondered? He was no longer in the Seattle telephone directory. I tried the outlying directories without luck. I never thought of contacting Timmy. He seemed a total stranger.

Had I known, would I have gone to Maggie’s funeral—I who do not attend funerals, ever? Yes. Meeting all those former party-goers, mostly widows, was not the dismal prospect it might have once seemed. It would have provided me with a finality I needed, I think. I swallowed hard and told Verna goodbye and thanks. Thanks?

Was it lung cancer, I wondered—lung cancer striking the second one? Did she already have it, a year and a half ago, at the last party we had attended? Did she know it then? Did she suspect it? Once I had mentioned to her that I saw she was smoking still; former smokers insist on cruelly doing this, I know not why. It is highly vengeful. I received the familiar shrug and reply, "Who wants to live forever?"

Yes, but that was not the question, I might have insisted. The question was, after experiencing Jack’s death at close hand, wouldn’t she want to do everything to avoid repeating it? I knew so little. And then I remembered another couple, both of them heavy smokers. They worked in a pear orchard in Eastern Washington. He had died of cancer of the esophagus, she of lung cancer a couple of years later. She would not quit smoking either. Why not?

In Maggie’s case, I already had my answer. That day she had told me, with a shrug:

"Because I do not want to live forever."

We were young together, Jack and I, and being young fosters a unique relationship, a special one, a request for and the granting of extraordinary terms of friendship. Those conditions change, but the original bond still seemingly stands. There were dozens of times over the ensuing years when we did not ask anything of each other, or evoke what the bond portends. Perhaps we didn’t dare. Perhaps it was gone. We continued to want each other’s good opinion, but not to seek it. I think that was it. No matter which way things went, we did not want the other person to think ill of us.

I remember an odd situation that might reflect the nature of our relationship at the end, its quality, and the degree to which things had changed. There were occasions when it might have seemed natural (at least, to others) to reestablish contact, and to renew our old bond, but neither of us made the effort. Each had his own good reasons, I suppose.

One noon hour while I was working on campus for the second time, about 1975, I went for my customary walk. Usually I left the campus and went over to the stream of shops on The Ave. The shops renewed themselves frequently, in part because of the escalating rents, so there were always new things to see and fresh places to spend your money. Most shops had become hole-in-the-wall Asian restaurants that served cheap, tasty food. I’d eaten at my desk, however. So I went to the Undergraduate Library, on the edge of the redbrick quad. It was a good place to visit and to grab a book or current newspaper.

I soon spotted Jack. He was on his noontime break, too. I saw him before he saw me. This is good, a situation to one’s advantage. It permits you to observe without being seen—a very Jamesian trait—the kind of thing we both enjoyed. You go on about your business, all the while keeping your subject in the corner of your eye. This might be called "mapping him." You occasionally glance up from an acute angle to see if he has spotted you. Not yet. There are give-aways in the game, certain signs that you have been caught looking. If so, and you catch each other’s eye, there is usually an exchange of mutual surprise and mugging. It is all false, of course, a mock show. "What, you, here, today? Wonderful. How glad I am to see you." Etc. And sometimes it is true. People embrace today, even those of the same sex, as a clear sign of sincerity. But my generation disdains it.

Finally Jack caught my unrecognizing eye. I saw him do it from my advantage point. I waited for the mock response of delight. There was none. His look was one of near panic. Is that the right word? Fear? Strange as it seems, I think so. Clearly, he did not want to encounter me. In the old silent movies, actors communicate through a wide range of easily recognizable emotions. They involve facial expressions and the use of hands. Often the eyes roll. Jack did not exactly look like the villain being set upon by a posse, looking first to the right, then to the left, searching for an escape route. But that comes close.

At first I thought he was joking. A game. He’d seen me seeing him and, knowing that I had spotted him first, and had the natural advantage, he’d pretend he’d spotted me first, and take away the advantage. But this clearly was not the case. His take was the first take, one of true disdain. He really wanted to take flight. But why? I was harmless.

I played along with it, hoping I was wrong. Maybe he hadn’t really seen me. He took a course in the opposite direction for some other reason and hadn’t really seen me. But I knew I was wrong. Nonetheless I tailed him, moving in parallel fashion, searching the rows of shelves for some imaginary book I needed. And, in the process, playing my game, I tricked myself. I took a faster course and met him coming round a corner. There was no escaping each other now.

The look on his face I’ve never forgotten. It was surprise and delight, plastered over a visage of pure agony. He had such a plastic face, a Beckett-like face, all angles, bones, and emotion, and it couldn’t hide much. It was both handsome and highly dramatic and tended toward over-reaction, or mugging, which is ugly. We both had mugged a lot, in the old days. It was a private form of communication, one not meant to be shared with outsiders. Now we were the outsiders. Agony I saw. I learned it a much stronger expression than the one of general displeasure.

Finally we came at each other from an unavoidable angled. We met, coming round a corner; I had seen to it. Escape for him was impossible. I needed this encounter. Having dodged each other for years, we needed to meet someday. Former good times demanded it. He smiled unsurely and spoke my name. How could he forget it? He cocked his head, wordless—how well I remembered how he would cock his head, like a listening bird (if what they do is listen), and smile out of one side of his face, a real neat trick. It was a true half smile. He had a questioning visage, as though he didn’t quite trust his eyes. You? Or was it you? And then, how glad he was to see you, he said. A sudden loss of words overtook him, he who was never at a loss for words.

It was ugly, I tell you. I laughed out of nervousness. The fact was, we no longer had anything to say to each other, and it pained us both to recognize it. That is where the pain we were experiencing came from.

I was sickened and ashamed. I stood ready to hear any excuse, any sincere gesture of finding pleasure at encountering me again. I’d settle for an insincere gesture. There was none, and I had none to offer, either. I should like to lay all of the blame for our drift and failure to connect on him. But that may not be the case and it is not fair to imply it. I am half to blame, or more. But today I had nothing to deserved all this dodging and evasion. I stood there, my tongue in my mouth. We had not been friends for years.

It was a little like being at an airport and telling a favorite person goodbye and how much you’ll miss them, then learning the flight has been delayed and you must spend the next three hours in their company still. No, it wasn’t like that. It was a thousand times worse. It was indescribable.

That was the last time I ever saw Jack. Not something much to remember him by, is it, but who is given a choice in such matters? Soon I heard he was sick and I presumed from the verbal evidence that it was his heart and—now that the problems had been identified—it would be routinely repaired by one of those miraculous operations done today by the thousands. Open the chestal cavity and reach for the plastic. But I was wrong, wrong again. He lingered, got sicker, then died. Death often takes place at a comfortable distance. And now Maggie, dead too. Where was the fairness in life? I would choose fiction because it is fairer. Maggie’s illness and death took place without any contact from me. Why? I should have liked to offer them at least my hand in parting.

The fault clearly is mine. It always has been. It was I who was lacking in making any decent gesture, one based on a past that persisted, if only in my memory. And I deeply regret it. This book is my lengthy, belated way of saying I’m sorry, Jack. Maggie.

There is no one to hear. Everything is gone. I have not cried yet on the outside for either of them or both. All we really had in common was that we were young together. It is not enough for eternity. It will have to do, for I have nothing more to give. My heart is empty, or is it full? Do the good times ever out-weight the bad? I should say they do. But we must insist on it.

The final word comes from my good old friend Verna, who was with us all, back then, and remains part of the cast of. . . let us call ourselves characters. Her message came to me recently in an email—a modern means of communicating that neither Jack nor Maggie lived to experience.

She wrote: "The last time I ever spoke with Jack I was in the HUB (student union building) having an early A.M. cup of tea and a roll.  I remember the shock of seeing him so gaunt and white, but we both ignored the obvious and sat at a little table with sunshine pouring over us, almost like a blessing, as he talked about the past and what a privilege it had been to be an English major at that particular time and place."

Indisputable.

Robert C. Arnold

Lake Ketchum

February 23, 2000, 8 PM

Revised, September 13, 2000, 4:25PM

Revised again, October 14, 2000 3:35PM