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 f