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One torpid June evening, a decade or more ago, my wife and I attended a dinner party at a modest home on tony Mercer Island, a short bridge crossing away from Seattle. The island rises like an afterthought from Lake Washington in a determined effort to break away from the lake’s expanse and divide it into two narrow and long channels, an effort at which it fails but on an admirable scale. The lake affords a vast amount of beachfront real estate that, because its nearness to the city’s pulse, is beyond what any of us can afford, including our friends, the Peter Tonglaus, who live on a bluff high above the water and not even in sight of it. The house, though new, was nothing special and was, in fact, pretty much like the houses in which all of us lived. They were modest, genteel. They were nice, but not awfully nice, and were considered good values. They would appreciate slowly, steadily.

The party was ostensibly to celebrate some minor personal occasion but was really to salute summer, which was nearly upon us and existed as an oppressive reminder tonight with its humidity and temperature more suited for August. All of the women and some of the men were librarians; the rest of us spouses. Spouses is no longer the correct word, I know. Some of us were true husbands and wives, others live-ins, and a few same-sex partners or mates—whatever they are called, in that current bureaucratic, euphemistic jargon we have all hate and use unquestioningly. The library was Seattle Public, its main or downtown branch, that is, a large central facility, and the sponsoring department was Humanities, a recent melding of History and Literature, which my wife headed, a division now made permanent by edict, long after staff had grown accustomed to each other and to sharing a reference desk for years, teaching each other courteously how to behave as interchangeable entities (for practical purposes, anyhow) but calling upon each other from time to time in order to field tricky specialist questions that arrived in the form of ground balls hit by batter patrons, either in person or over the telephone. Morale was high and everybody respected and liked each other.

Parties such as this one were held no less frequently than twice a year, sometimes quarterly, when our occasions demanded fresh gatherings, so we all knew each other fairly well, at least by sight, even those of us who were but spouses, etc., and not co-workers enriched by daily interaction. Thus I knew Peter Tonglau, and he me, but not very well, and we would call out to each other jovially and address each other by the correct name, after which we retreated and began to look for somebody else to talk to. Usually there was no one better around, so we would wander miserably, desperately, forlornly around the room, studying the bad art on the wall (often children’s classroom exercises) and the non-library books arranged alphabetically or by category with our heads tipped ninety degrees from the vertical in order to try to read the authors and titles, for librarian families are nuts about books and hoard them according to their tastes, often revealingly, nakedly, regardless of what the public’s may be. Shelf-reading is a reasonably interesting way of killing moments that might otherwise be deadly dull.

Not a breath stirred the warm, heavy air; of course not, for we were inside, and the open patio door inhaled nothing refreshing but only more of the same oppression. What the open door was thought to do was to let out a little of the amassed body heat. This was psychologically a good thing, if true, for it helped us believe we were getting cooler. And perhaps we were. We all held something to drink in one hand. Few any longer smoked, or owned up to doing so, or would have a nicotine fit within an hour of being deprived of his or her tobacco fix. Glasses mostly held the ubiquitous white wine (yellow, really), or some weak mixed drink from the limited stock provided by the host and later to be reimbursed from the Staff Fund. My SevenUp and my wife’s could easily pass for vodka and tonic, if the curious did not get near enough to sniff our glasses. (And they’d better not.) I thought back (I am always doing this; better get used to it) to the time when Norma and I would both be puffing away on a Chesterfield (me; a real lung-kicker’s poison) or a Benson and Hedges (hers; filtered of a fraction of its deadliness by means of a foam insert at the tip) and clutching a well-watered Scotch in our hands. This was before we retrogressed to beer and then to drinks that could only be called soft. It was a matter of conjugal self-survival, we decided. Some of our friends had drunk themselves to early death. Others had smoked themselves there.

After a few moments all the spouses and spouse-surrogates were circling the living room, dining room, den, and TV room in counterclockwise fashion, as Peter and I were doing. We had started it, but traffic patterns have their own atomic structure and strict rules govern how they will behave. Meanwhile, the humanities staff was totally at ease with each other, chattering away and exclaiming aloud over minutiae. How I envied them, though this was much like work to them and the cooperation made necessary by having a common goal, serving the public. It was the old, You Do This, I’ll Do That sort of thing, but made more complicated by the fact that more than two people were involved; all the female staff members cooperated cheerfully, routinely, while the males held back, as if shy, but really just chronically lazy, and let the women organize, arrange, and perform most of the work. At least the most difficult, time-consuming stuff.

I am uncomfortable at these outings and, along with a recognizable number of short- and long-term partners, and fiddle a lot and look mildly dyspeptic. Well, I hadn’t eaten for about eight hours and was not much heartened by the food prospect ahead. It was the kind of gathering where everybody brought a favorite dish. The dining table was laden with these, some of them hot, none of them really, but the host had not yet given the signal to dive in. What was the problem? It’s always been a wonder to me the process by which this announcement takes place. Clearly it is the host’s duty to wave the starting flag, but he or she (usually she) is guided by the urgency radiated by the guests and the gesture comes tardily. It is an inherently female thing to do, though the task is sometimes performed by a man. He does it poorly, probably because he doesn’t fully understand the rules and is blind to the nuances of the situation. I, my stomach whining, waited impatiently for the pulse, the motion towards the table, but a large part of me didn’t want to eat at all. That part would gladly flee the scene and go foodless for the rest of the evening, as a tradeoff for being issued some socially acceptable form of escape. But none is given, not ever.

I am a finicky eater. It’s not that I believe I am about to be poisoned by people I scarcely know—though at these things it is a distinct possibility—as I am keen to the fact that unknown food substances undoubtedly contain spices and herbs unfamiliar to me and my stomach. My tongue will not identify them soon enough and semaphore to my esophagus and stomach that they are benign and okay. Therefore a precautionary tightening up takes place, all along the food canal. My tongue rolls back in the mouth, my jaw narrows, my throat clenches, etc., all the way down to the entrance to my anxious stomach. It becomes a fist. You get my point. So when the time to eat finally arrives, I am in no shape for the task, though paradoxically I have been hungry for hours.

The solution, I know, is for us to be the first couple to leave the party, hurry home, and gorge myself with known safe substances such as pasteurized cheese and crackers, home-baked cookies, etc. But that time is presently as long off as sleep, nearly, and my stomach knows it. There are hours left before that can take place and I must somehow get through them, one by one. So I carefully, moderately, pick and choose from the wealth of items displayed before me and select only those that I recognize and have thoroughly tested and are known to be harmless. This includes bread stuffs, ham (it is hard to ruin a ham), roast beef that has clearly not been contaminated with additives and lies nakedly on its platter, sliced brown and black and pink. And my wife’s scalloped potatoes, clearly identifiable among many similar dishes by the Pyrex container and lid used to transport it each time, still warm, to wherever we are invited to such a communal dinner.

Still I take tiny portions. Specially to be avoided, I caution you, by people like me, though compromising but a fraction among what are already minorities, surely, are innocuous-looking salads. One time I was tricked by a clever hostess into trying one; she stood over me to ensure that I wouldn’t refuse to put some on my plate. A large, empty area stood waiting. The bowl looked innocent enough—three types of greens, including endive, a little crumbled hard-boiled egg, chives (they don’t bother me and actually aid in digestion), firm attractive tomato wedges, croutons of a normal color (that is, not spiced up), perhaps a bit of grated cheese that appears harmless. This is all that was there. I chose a long-respected dressing from a chilled bottle. You can always trust the folks from Kraft. I took a tentative bite—and almost spit the stuff in the lap of my dinner partner. Shrimp. Tiny, fragile shrimp, devoid of color, disguised in some sort of slime that looked like ground cheese in oil, had been added to the salad in a devilish plan to sicken me, or otherwise ruin my evening.

"Excuse me," I muttered, rising to my feet, putting my reinforced paper plate down on my chair as if to mark it as mine and, clutching my paper napkin tightly, darted to an unoccupied nook of the next room in order to divest my mouth of its foul contents. Let me tell you, there is not enough SevenUp in the world to wash away the taste of shrimp from someone not prepared to ingest it.

Many people, I’ve since learned, have favorite dishes they have prepared for decades, and they enjoy parties because it gives them an occasion to mix up another batch of familiar slop. Often the chief ingredient is some special spice (curry will do) or some unheard of combination of herbs. Thus every meatloaf is suspect. Mixed vegetables in a sauce is a favorite culprit. How we wish to distinguish ourselves and be made famous by what comes out of our kitchens. But how little real culinary skill is involved in this near-criminal experimentation. And how often people, namely women, get away with it because nobody dares to speak up and announce the truth of what is being done to them: subtle poison.

This includes myself. I have never, never, ruined a dinner party by rising to my feet and speaking what I know about that lies at the heart of the situation. Instead, I quietly retreat and eject the matter into a paper napkin, which I leave wherever I wish. Let them try to identify me later. It is impossible to get clear, readable fingerprints from a heavy, wadded up napkin.

Desserts are generally safe. The simpler the better. The worst thing you can do to apple pie, for instance, is to put in a lot of cinnamon. Cinnamon won’t hurt you, though it surprises your mouth in much the same way as chili powder does. Now, chili powder can burn your gullet for hours afterwards and take away your appetite for a day or two, but does no real harm, I am aware. The mouth, even the tongue, recovers quickly from a large, unnecessary dose of cinnamon, though for the moment you may doubt it. Trust me. A covered dish may do you wrong, but I won’t.

So I ate some ham, my wife’s clearly identified scalloped potatoes (mild and delicious, as always), and three or four different kind of bread and rolls. I stayed away from two or three voluptuous Jell-O salads because you never know with what the stuff is polluted. And I tried a piece of layer cake, but left most of it on my small plate, for it had an odd aftertaste that stopped me in mid-chew and made me hesitant to masticate and swallow the rest. It took five solid minutes of chewing before I finally decided to risk it. Then we all put our plates on the kitchen tile and I, feeling relieved that this trauma was over, flowed with the others back into the living room, dining room, and den, and faced the rigors of the remaining evening, which could only be more pleasant.

I saw Peter Tonglau talking to another Peter. This was Pete Garrett. We were all three long-time library spouses. The real McCoys, not surrogates, not intendeds, temporaries, situationals, shack-ups, live-ins, or recently uncloseted come-out partners or mates. True husbands, I mean. Long-termers at life. This we had in common, much like graduates of Army basic training, whatever the year and war. Tonglau was tall and thin, but his features rather rounded, a bit hesitant and shy-seeming, as Chinese-born Taiwanese often are, or are reared to be. It is a type of diffidence not to be accepted at face value. He is sharp, perceptive. He wore small, wire-rimmed, white-gold glasses, each lens nearly round, and they looked thick without being noticeably bifocular. He was, I knew, an engineer at Boeing. Well, I had worked there, in my time, and had extensive experience with its vast aerospace engineering department, though I had been in finance—indeed, in a marginal subset called record management, intended to save the company money but instead costing it a lot more because of its elaborate hokum.

I thought I should be able to talk a good game to him, though cautioning myself against excessive sarcasm. The place was not called The Kite Factory for nothing. It had to do with a certain flightiness of the people who had bit the bullet and determined to work there past the first five years, after which time their retirement was vested.

Garrett was tall also, but sharp-featured, somewhat angular, with a growing little potbelly that might have been cultivated and not exercised away, for it comprised his link to the gentry—if we have such a class, and we do. He was of Scandinavian descent, despite the Irish name, and his thin gold hair had recently silvered attractively, and he knew it. Accordingly, he chose grays and blues that would enhance him and it. He was five or six years older than me and twenty-five or more senior to the Boeing Pete. He worked for Weyerhaeuser, the huge international firm known far and wide for its debasing of its land, but it claimed to be recently modestly reformed in its logging practices and advertised itself widely. Pete had risen moderately high in the company, over all these years, was now head of its facilities, at least regionally. He worked at their headquarters campus in a nearby meadow near Auburn. It was an industrial park that did a successful job of imitating a greensward coastal university site, such as Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz.

The Weyerhaeuser campus was a truly pretty place. I had been there for a series of meetings hosted by a vice-president who looked and acted so much like Garrett that I kept getting them mixed up and thought perhaps there was a corporate cookie cutter which management used to sort out and move ahead those with the correct physical appearance, assuming all the other ruthless qualities would follow. But no, they were different men, though differing similarly. I could imagine the Weyerhaeuser Pete driving to work each day in his Volvo (a Mercedes was probably out of reach for him, just as Mercer Island waterfront was for the other Pete) and arriving here at the sprawling glass and concrete palace, where he spent the day planning the purchase and distribution of vast quantities of office supplies and industrial equipment sent round the world to branch operations. This was fairly impressive, at least to me.

We went into the Boeing Peter’s study, which was in the process of becoming a bedroom for their first-born daughter, who now required one of her own. Betty Tonglau was pregnant with their second child, who would soon take over the large closet off their bedroom deemed the nursery. Thus we move up and out through life. Peter accepted his displacement with stoic fortitude. I remembered the Weyerhaeuser Peter’s study in a fine mainland house, with a view of the same lake, a room which was really an extension of the kitchen and was intended to be a family room, or TV room, but held most of his modest implements, such as pipes and tobacco and staid men’s magazines. Oh, yes, it contained a black leather Eames chair and footstool. A real one, not a crude imitation of the kind that can be found deep in. the recesses of major chain department store. Nothing quite caresses the fingertips like real leather does. Just as the Boeing Peter was being displaced by the next generation he sired, the Weyerhaeuser Peter was acquiring living space recently given up by a family gently dissolving its bonds, as his children went away to college, or else returned briefly after graduation and then found jobs and apartments nearby. He had a son, destined to be a minister, and a daughter, who after a few more years of law school, became first a deputy prosecuting attorney for the county and then a public defender. I take it the two jobs are pretty much the same.

It was so hot, close, and muggy, that we soon flowed out onto the patio; others quickly followed our lead. The idea was, if a ghost of a breeze were to arrive, nobody wanted to miss it. We had shed light-weight jackets and loosened ties—those who had bothered to wear them. Weyerhaeuser Pete brought his pipe from out of his side pocket, made an overly elaborate fuss out of examining its scarred bowl, cramming loose tobacco into the void, inspecting his work, tamping the loose stuff with a special little tool that collapsed back into itself neatly afterwards, looking to see all was done according to ritual, then applying a match that flared excitingly but did not ignite the nearby drapes, disappointingly. The pipe issued forth a thick white plume as Pete drew noisily on the stem. The aromatic odor was seconds behind the cloud. It spread around the patio as fast as bad a chemistry-class experiment. Then it hung in the air flatulently.

Our subject was work. We came around to it immediately, or rather they did. It was a common enough topic but always made me nervous, for I have trouble explaining myself. Not these two. Their identities were closely identified with their companies. They had careers. How I envied them. And how I dreaded the question I knew would come up, sooner or later, as it always does: "What is it you do, Bob?" I’ve always had trouble stammering out an acceptable reply. You could say I give myself away early by my hesitation.

As a writer, I cannot simply tell people I write. It’s what I do. This problem goes back to school days, when everybody was pretending to be something that he or she wanted to be but never was, not quite. To say you were a writer in an English Department was asking to be compared to John Milton. You were asking to be laughed at. (They were happy to oblige.) Or else you were expected to have already produced a thing or two. A short poem in a literary magazine would carry you a long, long ways. But nobody I knew had done it, so far. Now, years later, the prospect of self-stigma remained with me. How I longed to say—truly or untruly—I was a carpenter, say, or engaged in direct sales. Even indirect sales seemed a firm and respectable identity. When I went to the Blue Moon Tavern for a beer, and took a seat up at the bar, there was always some clown who would challenge me as to what I did. Most the patrons were some kind of pseudo-intellectual. Often they were engaged in the manual trades. For a while I told people I was a fisherman, which was true enough. Then one day I ran into a real commercial Bristol Bay sockeye fisher and he wanted to know the name of my boat. That showed me up for the pretender that I was. My total sales from writing that year was less than $600. Fortunately I had a wife with a good job. Little did I know, in my less than splendid state of isolation, that most writers have spouses (that word again) with steady jobs. I thought I was the shameful exception. Rather, it is the rule.

So I contented myself, that torpid evening, with listening, believing that if I did a good job of it the subject might never turn to me or my occupation. I was fifty. Time to be something useful, however dishonorable. Yet they all knew I really wrote and had a Grand Pyramid of manuscript to show for it, with little published. And a decade later, with two published books under my belt, the situation was not much different. Both books were on flyfishing and had sold something less than two thousand copies each; these numbers did not much matter to these people. They saw writing as decent, respectable work. In their circle, the fact that I had sold so few copies was more redeemable than if the books had been best sellers. Some of the great books of all time had sold pitifully small numbers of copies originally. I had been told this, over and over. To me it was just another example of the old "undistributed middle term." A number of terrible books had sold large numbers of copies, as well.

So it was mostly I who was ashamed of what I did and my lack of success, as it might charitably be called. Yet I did not envy the engineer or the facilities manager who stood in front of me, exchanging familiar chitchat. Or rather I envied both of them their paycheck, but not much of anything else. Oh, yes. The Eames Chair. That decidedly. Aside from these items, their lives did not evidence much diversity and challenge. They were solid citizens, dutiful, and probably voted in every election, including those for school bonds and street repair. I doubted whether either had watched a pornographic movie—at least till not to completion.

Well, I had, plus a number of other things I might not want to own up to. And I had held many jobs, some of them incredible, that qualified me for an award for what might be called the direct opposite of dependability. For now I was content to listen to these careermen exchange veiled confidences to a world and worlds to which I was an outsider. Or was I? I had worked more than a year at Boeing, and I could tell you the period of time exactly, for it began when my wife was three months pregnant (I take my son’s age, and add six months on to it) and ended when he was just over a year old and racing all over the house at breakneck speed.

I had been hired as a procedures analyst because I had done similar work in the Army. Experience counts as experience, no matter how trivial or menial. My grade was GS3. At the same time, a woman friend of mine, a fellow English major, was hired as a GS9 or 10. The higher the number the lower the rank and pay. She was at the bottom rung, a helper to a secretary, while I was near the top of the peasant’s ladder. Shows what a pair of testicles will do for you.

I had thought to make some joking reference to this, but realized that both Petes were so much a part of the system that they would find no humor, no irony, in the fact that the company (Weyerhaeuser would have done the same thing) would treat the similar pair of us so differently. There was nothing I could do that Verna could not do, and probably better. Her typing was much better than mine. Yet I made six-hundred dollars a month, while she made about half of that. Of course, both Petes would have asked; what part of it don’t you understand? So I kept mum. Eventually, in nine-months time, the same length I now realize as my wife’s gestation, I had risen to supervisor. La-de-da. It came through on Christmas Eve Day and my boss had given me my "brown badge" (don’t ask what the brown is for, for you already must know) in mid-afternoon; this was a decade before that day became a holiday, too. I took home my new status symbol and fastened its clasp to our Christmas tree. This act my pair of Petes would understand. By now I was far past performing such a gesture and somewhat ashamed of what I’d done, though it was no more than an expression of simple vanity. And more money was nice.

I could not wait to quit. Each payday—every other Wednesday, it was, shortly before first lunch—we were issued our paychecks. "The bi-weekly insult" we called it, though it was much more money than any of us could earn anyplace else, so it was really a kind of fond complaint and ironic tribute to the company all of us—my friends, anyway—hated to the core. Responsibility had been diffused to the point of being a vapor. They had an appropriate joke, "If my boss calls, get his name and I’ll call him back." But the reality was, many of us had multiple bosses, along with several duty stations (as the military, which I was just out of, called them), so if you reported to no one person, you in fact reported to nobody, and if you had desks scattered around the company, nobody could expect to find you at any particular one of them, not at any given time, so you could be anywhere, and I often was. Nowhere. I couldn’t be located. I never left the company property, but discovered mysterious nooks, unknown then and now, to anybody but me. There I scrunched down and read my books.

Tonight I listened to the two Petes, a half-smile on my face, my mind space-traveling back to my own tour of duty at Boeing. Pete Tonglau described a company I had never experienced, one comprised of serious young professionals, engineers all, involved in meaningful work of great complexity and import. I and my friends had mocked them with our comical, self-indulgent behavior. We had taken the company’s money and given them nothing in return except disloyalty and lack of devotion. I felt suddenly ashamed—but only briefly. (It never lasts long.) Apparently there were people, perhaps out in the vast prison of a factory, who worked hard and ceaselessly, or else those magnificent airplanes wouldn’t roll off the assembly line.

But me and mine had been involved in aerospace, not airplane manufacture, and our product was paperwork weapon systems and space exploration vehicles (Bomarc was one, Dynasoar another) doomed never to be built. And nuclear-headed rockets, Minuteman, never fired in to be anger. (And what anger it would have been!)

We formed an underground, we company haters, recognized each other by not so secret signs of public dismay, frequented each other’s company, avoided the rest, goofed off with professional expertise, wandered the long, echoing corridors with literary little magazines in our briefcases, searching for our special nook, wherein we could waste away an entire afternoon, with a little luck. And then on every other Wednesday, our crisp check for some undeserved sum in our pocket, we waited for the four-thirty factory whistle to signify the day was ended (but in truth the real one just beginning). We hied ourselves to where our personal transportation vehicle, our car, was stashed in the vast company parking lot, and headed away at breakneck speed to our favorite tavern. For I presumed that the other dissidents did as well.

Mine was The Elite, another joke, one with terrible irony attached. The pub was owned by Doreen, who served as barmaid until the day grew dark and the usual nightly crowd materialized, after which she retreated to the cashregister bastion, which was always clanging, while a steady procession of scantily-clad women, some down on their luck, worked the tables, delivering overflowing pitchers of draft beer to table after table, while poolballs exchanged clacks and the juke blared. I, on whatever barstool I could find vacant, generally down at the end by Doreen, whined to her and whoever would listen my lament about my lot in life, while I slurped down three schooners before returning home to my wife and month-old son, a little looped but eager for dinner.

Peter Tonglau’s Boeing was like Peter himself, dour, slightly sad, conscientious, efficient, brave, industrious, dedicated, intelligent, and steadfast. Mine was wasteful, idiotic. How could the places be one and the same? And yet they were. It was then that I began to realize that the world was multifarious and rich. There were as many solutions to the puzzle as there were people to pose problems about its nature, or who could attempt to define its terms.

I had a casual friend who worked his whole productive life at Boeing, a Stanford grad, no less, also an engineer, who began his day driving by to the Renton plant, eating his breakfast on the way, which consisted each day of two cold hotdogs and buns provided by his obedient wife, along with coffee out of the huge inevitable green metal thermos poured into one of those bottom-weighted cups that dared you to overturn it. Others continued to work there more or less happily. I simply couldn’t; it wasn’t in me. I quit when I was a few dollars ahead, my son ready to walk, announced my departure in spite of the fact (or perhaps because of it) that they had just promoted me to supervisor. This became a touchstone of my life: Promote me only if you wish to lose me.

"So you worked at Boeing, too?" asked Tonglau Pete, turning his serious face to mine. By now I was dead serious, too. It was a result of long listening to the preceding conversation and keeping an agreeable smile on my face, all the while. I saw no reason to change it now, even though I was being given an opportunity to reduce their world to shreds. Boeing Pete was, after all, my host for tonight, even though this was technically a no-host dinner party.

"Nice bunch of people," I murmured. "I shall not easily forget a few of them." There; that should do it.

"You were, I believe, in records management?"

I had foolishly said as much at an earlier gathering of these people. My mistake. People remember. Not so much as a grin as he spoke the words. What an opening. As if records could be managed in any other way than in speeding up their destruction. Or for that matter in reducing their sheer volume. I was tempted to tell them about the madness of a division-wide reports-control study that my boss and I had foisted on top management and relate some of the humorous episodes that resulted. With straight faces, we had told everybody in the division to forward to us one copy, and one copy only, of every recurring report that and to include with it a list of its recipients. Experimentally we included all machine-prepared reports as well, just to get a handle on the extent of them, we said, there in these the early day of computers. By the end of the second day after our memo went out, over the signature of T. Wilson, the division’s head, we had filled a room the size of a basketball court with bundled paper. I spent the morning of the second day hunting for additional storage space. Nothing I found was adequate.

But why bother telling the two Petes? They would think I was making up the story. That’s the trouble with the exact truth. Nobody believes it. Or else—much worse—they would recognize the story as reliable and see no horror, no irony, in it.

So I simply said, "Yes, right, records management. A dubious science. More of an art. We are envious of you real scientists and engineers. But as I remember it, your record keeping was awful. Always losing important files just before a critical meeting. We had a bevy of women you were always requesting help from in order to straighten out your messes."

Peter Tonglau smiled. We lived in the same world, after all. The world of Boeing. It was a real place. It had borders and limits. It occupied space. I did not mention what the file consultants told us about the engineers, upon their returned from that world of organized folly. They were mostly new hires, girls and women fresh out of high school or arrested at some point in college, on the lookout for men, husbands, and never did they go into a well-paid engineering area without taking the measure of the man who was in such sad in need of having his files reorganized in order to save him from the state of entropy rapidly approaching.

"How can a guy be so dumb and smart at the same time?" was an often-heard complaint. Or, "If he never opened his mouth, he might pass as an intelligent human being but, my God, everything is of exactly the same value to them. Don’t they have any sense of humor?"

"They have engineering jokes," I told them. "They’re pretty funny, but only if you’re an engineer."

"And if your aren’t?"

"Unintelligible," I replied, without any evident irony or mirth, for I am at my funniest when dead serious. The reverse is true, as well, for it is hard to try to be funny. So I played it straight tonight—that is, earnest and solemn—in my statements about working at Boeing and, as a consequence, perhaps, soon had the pair of Petes in stitches. But all said lightly, with evident good humor. Gone was the bickering rancor that had filled my days there. So does time heal old wounds, or else sand smooth the jagged edges of old scars.

Tonglau now revealed teeth that were white, even, and had received excellent care under the Boeing dental plan; whoever made his crowns knew what he was doing. I looked deep into the shining porcelain and was quickly taken up in the throes of remembrance, those ancient days gripping me again and denying escape. The two Petes seemed to be asking something of me now, something specific. Was I to . . . entertain them? Well I could, though I never saw myself as an entertainer, except in the stillness of my writing. They were asking me—the air of them—for a perspective different from their everyday. They wanted me to return to a past life and to communicate to them some insight into the lingering confusion that still was there, that never changed.

But that world was no longer mine, if it had ever been. No matter. Entertain them. Make up a story. You are supposed to be good at it. So, caught up in a flood of the past, my audience captive, attentive, wholly mine. It was not hard to find the words to begin. Words, after all, are my medium. They are the tools of my trade.

I had been hired as a trainee for a newly formed group called Group Capacity Analysis, or GCA for short. We were immediately issued stop watches and told we would be trained how to use them to time repetitive office tasks. We had clipboards and nifty Scripto pencils, with endless leads and replaceable pink nipple erasers (highly erotic themselves). We also had flow charts, organizational outlines of Boeing units, departments, and sections, lists of personnel with their GS and supervisory grades, which were the equivalent of salary grids, etc.

The first day of our training, I listened nervously to a presentation by a highly paid consultant from Touche Ross put us at our ease by relating how he had once told an office staff that in the morning his team was coming into the area to take some preliminary measurements. No big deal, nothing to get excited over or to worry about. Staff relaxed. Next morning he arrived at work, hung his jacket on a hangar provided by an accommodating secretary, sat down beside, her, smiled, she smiled back, and he said, "All right, Betty, go ahead. Begin. Do the work you normally would do if I wasn’t here." And he pulled out his stopwatch and punched the start button.

Betty fainted dead away.

Everybody in the room laughed except one. I stood up and announced, "This is not for me. Goodbye, all." And headed for the door.

"Stop. You can’t quit now."

"Just watch me."

"No, I mean, you can’t quit, even if you want to. Your paperwork is spread all over the company, at the moment. Your security clearance is at the FBI. We can’t call it back." I wondered who the "we" was, since he was only a consultant.

GCA was the equal to the Gestapo, I was beginning to think. And this hired consultant? One of the SS?

It proved true that I physically couldn’t quit, not at the moment. They had to find me another job until my paperwork reached a stopping point and the terminating paperwork could begin. It would take two weeks—longer for the security clearance. And what would the FBI say? Or rather, what would they do on hearing the request was revoked?

So Boeing found me another job. It was in records management, that dubious field of business science, where one bunch of idiots hid records in unlikely places, then begged other idiots to help them find the records and put them into some kind of seemly order, please. All this activity had to be documented, of course. Because I had done much the same sort of thing while in the Army, writing down procedures that were intended to be repeated, because soldiers were always being transferred elsewhere and all continuity would be lost without written records, and the veneer of order would be reduced to babbling incoherence, Boeing now firmly requested that I not leave but remain and join another small group of dolts assigned the documentation responsibility for the records management unit. How could I say no? I needed the money badly, what with a wife soon to end her employment and slowed down considerably by morning sickness? Besides, all those records (records again) having to do with my hiring were now being routed through the company mail in every direction, not to mention outside the company to the dreaded FBI. They were impossible to retrieve while in transit and so I could not leave, for I did not already quite exist. That is, I had no completed forms on file, which would have to be canceled by other forms sent through the same company mail that would permit me to terminate, as they called it. Did I not understand the problem? Couldn’t I remain for a few days longer, so that I could officially leave? Of course I could, they’d put it so nicely.

Better yet would be if they could find something else that I might like. I’d had enough experience with Boeing so far today to think this was unlikely. But I wanted them to remember me as a good sport. And I did not want to sabotage the national effort to build missal-delivery systems for nuclear weapons and space-exploration vehicles before they could be built. So I stayed. And stayed.

It was the most tactful, gentlest, considerate falsehood I’d ever delivered, and I’ve had my few. Both Petes beamed. I told them the one about leaving the plant with a new-hire secretary, a real beauty. With my usual flair for sarcasm that often goes unnoticed, I turned to this red-headed, high-heeled knockout, who loomed an inch taller than my then-six feet, and murmured, as a huge commercial airliner rose from the Plant Two Air Field, "Doesn’t it make you proud to know that you helped build this baby?"

"Oh, yes," she cooed. "Every time I see one of them. Proud indeed. But I’m not sure I can tell a Boeing from a Douglas. Is there some trick to identifying them?" She touched my sleeve, turning, and asked: "Look, do you have time for a drink? There are a whole lot of questions I’ve been dying to ask somebody who has worked here a long time."

I’d been there three months now, but why give the show away?

I said, "I’ve got a pregnant wife got o get home to a hot dinner."

"I didn’t meant anything by it," she explained. "Jeez."

I had the two Petes in stitches now, though nothing very funny had been said, and knew myself that my story was roughly forty percent true, which is pretty accurate for me, in public-speaking situations.

The Weyerhaeuser Pete said, finishing up his chuckle, "You guys. Boeing must be a terrific place. I envy you. A laugh a minute."

"No, not at all" said the other Pete, but the first one was not done and continued, "Can’t say the same thing about my firm." Note, firm, not company, or business, or industry. Not even its hallowed name, for it must be self-evident.

"I don’t suppose, Bob, you’ve had any experience with Weyerhaeuser"—and now the name was reverently spoken—"I mean, its people or its physical plant?"

"As a matter of fact, I have," I replied drolly. "Do you know Dave Mumper?"

Indeed he did. Mumper was a senior vice-president for something important, such as public relations. He lived on a lake front home near here, where we stood this heat-soaked night on the crowded terrace, where couples and singles kept drifting out and past us.

I’d been to meetings with this physically impressive dude as a member of the advisory board to the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority. Lest this impress you unduly, the board was comprised of 97 people picked half at random, half to give voice to a diverse majority of citizens, some of them members (as was I) of environmental organizations without whose selection there would most likely be a public outcry. I was known to be flyfisher who wrote on a free-lance basis, and therefore had unlimited time at his disposal. What better way for him to use it than on a board where his small but noisy faction would be squashed by so many formidable figures from industry?

On the committee Mumper and I were ostensible equals. Ha-ha. The man was about seven feet tall and wore thousand dollar suits. He had silver hair and a remarkable tan, considering that it was dead winter. He had a pleasant way of addressing you as though you might work for him, he had so many who did, and he couldn’t be expected to recognize them all. It was designed not to urge you to put away your fear and discomfort, for you were among friends, but rather to make you increase your apprehension accordingly. He had a way of looking a few inches over your head when he spoke, as though to remind you that you were not as tall as he and must be wishing otherwise; he did this even when we were all seated at a conference table. The Weyerhaeuser Campus was where we met; the room had no windows and its airflow mechanically changed every five minutes by compressors, a room without a wallclock (much like the military, which presumed every soldier had a wristwatch) and no other visible means of indicating time, so you could hardly complain about how long the meeting was lasting, since there were no visible clues available to us.

Mumper would always nod dim recognition in my direction but never call me by name, though I immediately began calling him Dave as though we were old friends. Perhaps the two actions were connected. I hoped so.

Additionally I knew some other Weyerhaeuser employees, but these could correctly be called field hands, since they worked away from the campus and had grit and cuticle problems from repeated contact with the soil and with trees either on the ground or soon to be cut down. Some were engineers, others were soil scientists, wildlife biologists who had sold out, superintendents, crew chiefs, botanists, surveyors, clear on down to cutters and fellers and guys who ran those mammoth machines that could embrace a tree, snip it off deftly, delimb it in one fell stroke, turn it horizontally, and load it on a waiting truck How mechanized logging had become. Soon it come be done without people.

At the first meeting of the non-point source water pollution committee, I arrived twenty minutes late. I usually am punctual, but get easily lost, almost as easily found again, and I took the freeway I-5 South from my home, in the direction of Auburn, allowing myself plenty of time. But my mind must have wandering (it was a nice day to be fishing) for I went past my exit and found myself looking off in the distance at a Mt. Rainier that loomed much larger than it should have. I found an off-ramp, swung under the noisy freeway, circled a distance, found an on-ramp, and soon was speeding in the opposite direction, the mountain now over my right shoulder. Once again I missed the right exit. I performed the maneuver again, but in the opposite direction, with my friend the snowcone in front of me again. This gave me a certain unearned sense of security. Now when I came to my exit I was wary and alert. A green sign on the shoulder announced, "Lodging, food, gas." Well, you can’t go too far wrong, with those amenities.

Signs every few hundred feet announced "Weyerhaeuser Central Campus". Many large universities are not advertised so well. Nor hospitals with emergency rooms. I swung off the micro-freeway onto another long, curving, cement glide and spotted the complex ahead. It was beautifully landscaped in towering old grown firs, no doubt imported for public-relations purposes. It was also ringed in lush budded rhododendrons. Many cars were clustered near the hotel-like entrance to the major buildings. I parked at a distance and began the long trek to the entrance. It took me another five minutes. Then I had to sort my way through the lobby and search the directory for the room reserved for us—a room that was identified by a combination of letters and numbers. To reach it I had to take an elevator. More time gone. It was playing a Haydn string quartet.

The rugs were thick and looked like they had been laid just last night. White noise issued forth discretely from overhead devises that resembled smoke indicators. Now I like meeting rooms that have a glass panel in the door so you can preview what you are getting into. There was none. I entered blindly and saw about thirty people hovering over a table, all engaged in rapt discussion of some advanced technical matter.

"I’m glad you found the place," Mumper, who chaired the group, called out to me, in a more or less public aside.

There was no chair for me, none at the table, but I spotted one against the wall, one on which everybody had piled his winter coat, and it was quickly emptied for me, the coats all dumped on the floor in a heap. I drew up to the table. Mumper was waiting to go on until I had made some sort of explanation for my late arrival. I tried to oblige.

"Freeway trouble," I told them all. "Nearly got lost." Faint chuckle—I had them now. "But then I saw a sign. ‘Lodging,’ it said. I misread it, in my haste. Thought it said ‘logging.’ Turned right and it brought me here in an instant." They were all laughing now. Mumper continued to look Nordically coldly annoyed. I would never win any game with him, I knew. As an environmentalist, I was his natural enemy until death.

I told the two Petes only a fraction of this and what had followed. It was best to change the subject. I began to talk wildly about the subject of non-point source pollution. It was the worst kind, for it could not be traced quickly back to a single culprit or a tangible source. It was insidious, deadly, obscure. It ruined lakes and rivers, creeks and ponds, all that it came in contact with, and it came in contact with everything. Bad dairy practices (cows shitting at the edge of a stream, for instance), logging and road-building over mountainous terrain, privies and failing septic systems, paved parking lots (which collected rainwater and mixed it with effluent from cars, etc.), agriculture, etc., all were proven sources, but ones that couldn’t be traced back to a single point. Hence its name.

Another advisory group was studying and would report back on point-source pollution—that which emanated from, say, a pipe or factory outlet or oil-storage facility. They were our closely-aligned other self, a somewhat warped mirror image of what we were concerned with and met regularly over, in dual committees ordered to report back to the central authority, which was made up of politicos, famous scientists, vocal Indians, and environmental activists whose chief aim was apparently getting their names into print. Weyerhaeuser often hosted such events and played the fatherly role of facilitator (a term already suspicious to me) in order to put a veil over their daily crimes being perpetrated on the environment.

I did not discuss much of this with the two Petes, instead describing how impressed I was with the facilities of the campus. This was true and pleasant enough. There did not seem to be many real people around the place. I caught a meal in the employees cafeteria—a vast area comprising about an acre of Formica tables and chairs. The executive dining room was pointed out to us, its door locked when I tested it. It was here that Mumper and his cronies ate on fine China, away from the roar of the rabble. I tried to imagine the noon menu, but got no farther than cold cucumber soup when I had a dire need to relieve myself, standing up. I began to range up and down the hallway, darting right, then left, looking for a door with a sign saying Men, but the rooms only had numbers and letters, and some of them not even those. Finally, after about half a mile, I came to one that said simply Restroom. Unisex, was it? Good. I flung back the spring-laden door and was hit by a wave of perfume and urine. A scream surely followed. Clearly it was intended for women only and currently in use. I tried an adjacent door and was met with a row of urinals. Relief!

Why not leave now, since the meeting was making no forward progress? I would hardly be missed, what with people coming and going in good numbers. I met a young woman in a hushed corridor who looked equally lost.

"Know where you are?" I asked cheerily.

"Not really," she admitted. "This is my first day on the job."

"I’m on my way out," I confided, like an old-time employee. "Walk you to your car?"

"I’d be much obliged," she said with a bright smile.

But I soon gave myself away and looked lost.

"Do you really work here?" she asked.

"No. I’m a fraud."

‘Do you know where we are?"

"Haven’t a clue."

"Come on, follow me. I have a pretty good idea."

Our cars were within sight of each other’s. We parted there, without another word. I wondered whether she came back to work the next day or thought better of it, as I had, or had tried to do, at Boeing, oh, so long ago.

By the time of the next Weyerhaeuser meeting, I had my room number memorized and had no trouble finding the room. It was in a different building, at its far end—about as far away from the first room as one could get. It was as though Mumper were anxious to expose us to as much diversity as he could in so short a period of time. Meetings continued to unfurl like a long banner carelessly on which no single word was legible. Timeless, purposeless our discussions took place in a world in which there were no minutes or hours, no daylight, no night. Occasionally we got off the subject and into some daring areas where we stayed for long, perhaps hours. Point-source issues were continually injecting themselves into our non-point source world. What a difference a piece of pipe meant.

Then all at once our time was up, the work done with, or carried as far as we could towards completion; a final report had to be pulled together by those not smart enough to duck assignment when the selecting finger pointed at him or her. This included me, for I had foolishly let them know I was a writer, and we get drafted for such tasks. Meanwhile Mumper had cleverly vanished. He had real work to do, places to go, important people to see. But the use of his company’s facilities was graciously extended to us. More meetings followed. When would they ever end?

The two Peters stood fixed and fascinated, there on the hot patio, as I prattled on. Not all of what I told them was literally true, only figuratively. A good story in my book counts for a lot.

Peter Tonglau said, with a sly smirk that said he didn’t believe a word of it, "You have certainly had an interesting life." Was this a variant on the ancient Chinese curse, I wondered? "So many jobs. So many people from so many different places. Nothing much ever happens to me or my friends at Boeing. All we ever see is each other. Of course there are thousands."

And the other Pete added, "The same with the people I know at Weyerhaeuser. Your portrait of Dave Mumper is unrecognizable. Nice guy, though I hardly know him. He always speaks to me, calls me by name. Of course I am a long-time employee and eat in the executive dining room. It isn’t much like you describe it, Bob. But then you are a fiction writer, aren’t you? In fact, the physical plant sounds more like the Green River Community College, down the road a piece. You sure you weren’t there?"

I smiled. It is what we do when our veracity is doubted.

The Weyerhaeuser Pete continued, "Anyway , you seem to have a had a lot of interesting jobs. Certainly more than the pair of us. Tell me. . . . What else have you done? Where have you worked?"

For a minute there I thought he was going to ask me what I did each day. And how do you explain writing and rewriting to someone who does his work with others—by committee, so to speak? Well, you can’t. But in the real world of work I have had considerable experience. Mostly menial. Awful jobs. But a few of them good jobs and all of them, in the long scheme of things, interesting. That word again. The ancient curse: may you live in interesting times.

I think times of revolution were meant.

Both men had worked at only the one job since they got out of college. The jobs they had before then were very much like the ones I had afterwards. That is to say, they are only amusing in long retrospect.

One of the Petes (I forget which) rattled off a list of jobs. I surprised them and myself by having worked at many of them, eighty or ninety percent of what was mentioned. Let’s see, and here I tick my fingers: Carpenter, house painter, rockery installer, processor of turkey carcasses on the way to the cold-storage locker, auto-freight biller, railroad fireman, polelineman, several kinds of accountant, electronic repairman, ditch-digger (non-union), teletype operator, tuxedo-rental outfitter, limousine driver, on and on. I had written short stories, poems, a few bad novels; advertising copy, insurance brochures, obituaries, Signal Corps standard procedures; had proofread, edited, laid out magazines and booklets, and been fired from two local daily newspapers. I had freelanced like a fiend for two weeklies, one monthly, and several national magazines with staggered (and staggering) publication schedules.

There were more. It seemed once that they would go on forever. The two Petes had led me to an important realization. All I had ever wanted to do with my life was write. But in order to do so I had to do almost everything else, at least for a while. And then I got lucky. I found free and able myself to do just what I wanted. Until that time, however, a lot had happened to me. I’d had a lot of jobs, a lot of life experiences having to do with work, that is, labor.

It seems to me it is a subject worth further analysis and effort. I mean, putting it all down. Do you get my meaning?

Write? Right.

2

My father was a businessman. Yours, too? Though he worked for a large department store that paid him a salary, and in time inched his way up to an admirable executive position, in his mind he was an entrepreneur. You know what that is? One who makes money out of . . . air. Thus, as his son, I would be one, too. He would help me, for I was too young to know my own natural course or the intricate workings of the world of commerce, and without a bit of direction would founder helplessly. So he helped me start my first early businesses. At the time I submitted because I was too small to do otherwise. He weighed about three times what I did. Big hands and arms, heavy frown. Besides, it didn’t occur to me I could resist or even refuse. So I did what I was told. I learned then what all of us are supposed to learn: Little Practical Lessons in Life. They will stand you in good stead when it comes time to go out into the world and make your own way. This means cheerless, tireless work.

In time I forgave him. I even came to love him. I did so for my own good. It is better to love and admire your father than not to. I pass this along to all of you who hate your fathers, however substantial your reasons. Turn all that early rancor to love and it will be much easier on you, you and your stomach lining, you and your throbbing brain. But each of must do his own unfair share of suffering. I can’t deprive you of it, even if I wished to. No, it is your lot.

There used to be weekly magazines other than Time, Newsweek, Business Week, and US News and World Report, family magazines, homey publications that were delivered to your door—usually the backdoor—probably on Wednesdays. Small boys did it. I was one of them. We formed a legion. We were and are an unsung national phenomena. Here I wish to sing about us briefly.

We sold subscriptions to what we were later to deliver, magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post (long before it dropped "evening" from its title), Colliers, Look, and perhaps Life (but I suspect not and don’t remember carting it around in the little canvas sack slung over my shoulder). I don’t remember the financing, either. My father probably helped me with this to the point where none of it remains for my memory to clasp. Nor do I recall climbing back staircases and knocking on doors with broken and sagging screens that fail to quite close in front of them. But I must have. And rather than suffer the ignominy of terse refusals and that self-same screen being drawn closed between me and them, it must have been only one more slight in a boy’s long day. I do remember the rather awesome duty of having to make the weekly delivery, no matter what. In this regard we boys were rather like postmen. Bad weather could slow but not deter us. And we were nearly married to our dreary little jobs, for we delivered in sickness and in health.

I think it began even before Norman Rockwell was in his heyday. The Post had covers drawn by less worthies. There was a kind of smooth cartooning style, pre-Disney, in which real-looking people had soft edges and were engaged in primarily household tasks, the men fixing things with a smile and chuckle, while a small boy paired with a small girl, brightly watched, the women in their kitchens (their primary duty station, as it were, in jargon of the war not yet quite hatched), smoothing the edge of a cherry pie or pummeling a meatloaf into a pan, in both cases a porcelain-clad oven door waiting in the background to be opened and the dish admitted. Usually the pictorial was haloed, or encircled in an oval frame, almost begging by the design of its shape to be stuck up on a wall as a handy object-lesson to all of the abject nature of domestic tranquillity.

It was not yet a lie.

We left Chicago, let’s see, when I was nine, and all this occurred a year or two earlier, and I was in, say, the second or third grade, in Coe Grade School, in a true polyglot neighborhood, where people spoke German and Irish and Polish and Negro and Italian openly in the streets, and everybody but us was poor as the soil down at the corner rapidly being turned into a public stadium by armies of the lazy and indolent, that is, the unemployed, the WPA. Our brick apartment was spacious and new, my father an assistant buyer at Fields, no less a store, probably on a bonus and override and his department was Furs, don’t laugh, and the fact that nobody in the South Side could afford fancy furs didn’t make a whit of difference, there were people in Chicago who could afford them, and bought them. But you couldn’t be too poor to buy a magazine from a boy to be enjoyed by the whole family, or to save up for a Philco radio that would bring you all the news, free, plus the blessings of Jack Benny and Fred Allen. These were the fruits of labor

Do I make myself seem old? Well then, old I am. But I don’t want to strive to glorify those precarious times, only to signify that we were well off. My mother didn’t have to work (heavens, no!), but I did. How else for a growing boy to learn all the vital imperative to his future success in the modern world? But first, survival.

I was an ugly kid and it was a wonder—looking into my eager little snarly face, eyes rimmed in perfectly round little gold glasses—that anybody bought anything from me. But don’t forget about the pity element—maternal pity. I must have drawn it forth unconsciously, even while I pridefully fought to evoke every emotion but it. Picture this: A Chicago winter, ungracious, cold, the famous wind howling off the lake and carrying the infamous stockyard smell in the providently in the opposite direction. Here is how I am clad: brown/gray whipcord knickers; high boots (for snow), with empty pocket- knife pocket on one, for already I had permanently misplaced the tool or weapon; fleece-lined real leather aviator’s jacket, with both slash and zipper pockets; a helmet of matching black leather, sans goggles, which they didn’t come with and would have caught us all unprepared as what to do with, without an airplane to go along with them. No gloves, and they would have been nice and useful. And slung across our universally narrow little boys’ shoulders the beige canvas bag sagging with about thirty pounds of corner-curled fresh magazines, delivered to our own backdoor only moments earlier, baled, as if fodder for distant cows, perhaps the apartment-dwelling housewives who would buy them.

Remember that I was already goggle-eyed, almost a forerunner of a young John Lennon, though he decades off and I nowhere near so hiddenly handsome. I had a bit of a squint and the glasses helped correct it but did not remove its puzzling and puzzled gaze completely and gave me a querulous, slightly questioning expression, as though not clear myself as to what neighborhood I was in, or in reality which world. This evidently evoked some pity (but no Aristotelian sense of terror), for generally large, overweight women signed up for my magazines and for me myself and I to deliver them weekly. Wednesdays, after school and before everybody’s dinner was set on the table.

I had a certain adenoidal, slack-jawed look, my thin lips wet, my lower upper teeth edges slightly showing. At my nose there was a constant drip—every thirty seconds I kept wiping at it with the back of my right hand, in hopes of permanently banishing it but always failing. I wore the ear flaps of my heavy cap deftly turned up, their chin straps fetchingly dangling up and down, reminiscent of the open doors of the Mercedes Benz 300, which would be a long-time in arrival. My cap was too big, in fear that I might outgrow it too soon, and tended to slip on my narrow skull to one side of the other, and this gave me a jaunty look that the situation wouldn’t otherwise acquire. So I must have appeared intentionally rakish to the matrons who opened their screens to me in piercingly cold weather and, with a nod of recognition, accepted the flat magazine which was only their due, since it was already paid for.

A cup of cocoa would have been nice, but I don’t remember ever being offered one, or even one of prevalent coffee, widely drunken by children then, with canned Carnation milk and a tablespoon of sugar, if you were among the employed. Or in summer a Coca Cola, which might have replenished all the moisture I’d lost sweating, climbing endless back steps in the long slanting afternoon sunlight. Or a kind word and not a grunt upon delivery. But I remember a nickel tip I once received. It was from a man, and he might not have been the woman’s husband, it now occurs to me. Married men are a lot more frugal.

We moved away from Chicago the following year, but the requirement to work continued. I had a small allowance, enough to buy a five-cent Good Humor bar thrice a week, my decision which days, after which it was gone, cry your heart out, son, until the following Sunday night, when the stipend would be renewed. My earned money went for tops and kites and small colored balls, and gum (chewing) and candy bars and hamburgers on the way to and from matinee movies at the Avalon Theater, a walk and a streetcar ride away from home. Milk Duds and some kind of plastic-like chewy gumdrops and of course popcorn with real butter (the imitation hadn’t been invented yet, but there was a kind of prevalent yellow grease or tallow that was sometimes substituted; it came from the stockyards, right down the street) and bottles of pop, usually warm, the latter an item I was to get to know much better and soon.

We went to Highland Park, a tony suburb from which everybody, every man, that is, and shopping-fevered woman, as well, commuted by rail to Chicago, an hour away; the Loop was their destination. I was soon gainfully employed again, to my father’s relief. Ten now, nudging eleven, a cub scout, I ran a little cold-drink conspiracy at local softball games. Dad’s idea, of course. I would buy the bottled drinks, paying a deposit on each glass container, at about half-price of what I would sell them for, a real racket, or was it, perhaps only business as usual, and purchase ice by the block, moving all of this cargo in my little red wagon to the ballpark three blocks away and set up my heavy cases of drink on or adjacent to the ice block, which quickly took on a free-form rounded form, drawing in on itself alarmingly until it disappeared into its own puddle on the ground. Then everybody got a warm drink. I remember the orange, oddly (girllike) shaped bottle, and how the cap would bend before it budged, becoming a soft vee, and how I must gather most of them up during the game and all of them by the time the crowds dispersed after, leaving no litter aside from my puddle. The empties went back into their cases, no longer orange or brown (Coke) or brown (rootbeer). And, no, I did not have a nifty changemaker, chrome, belted to me and filled with dispensable coin, only wished desperately that I did, to no avail. I would pay my bill with the soft-drink company—there was one that sold all three beverages—on Monday, then count what was mine. My take. It was always amazingly small. I had worked hard, in the strong sun, hauling ice and pop cases that must have weighed thirty pounds apiece and made—get ready for this—a cool dollar thirty-seven. I had? It would buy something then, but not much.

Enough perhaps to treat my friends to malted milks. The first of last of the big-time spenders. I was he. Another Little Lesson Learned, but what was it? It has taken me a lifetime to fish through all the possible answers.

Weekly I had my magazine delivery route, city or no city, winter or summer. I had still my tan canvas magazine bag, or else had acquired another one from my new distributor, clean, unworn. My fate was to service central Illinois with weekly family rags cozily catering to advancing the cause of domesticity. A certain type of news enhanced the women’s rather cloistered existence. There was romantic fiction for Mom; the magazines catered to her interests and, where they found none, created new ones. She was to cook a wide variety of dishes all pretty much the same but differing only in blandishments not generally known and none too extreme. She was to sew, and already knew how, but needed imaginative stimuli in the form of patterns to devise new and attractive designs for bedspreads, pillow covers, throws, and curtains that would make Pop whistled in admiration first time he beheld them, coming home from the shop, office, or factory the same night.

There were no daring clinical articles on how to hold your man sexually, only on how to renew romance in a marriage grown dull with repetition. Men—poor dears— never quite knew what was going on. America was a nation of Dagwoods, who had lucked into marrying pert, curvaceous, knowing Blondies. Men were manageable clods, good-hearted, fumbling, dumb in all ways but in making money through business—and this was passing strange, for the smartest man alive was no match for the average dumb woman, who could get her way through patience and guile. Every time. A bit of scent, a flounce or two, his favorite dish prepared for the table—it was all the answer to the female frustration and won the sexual dependency game in the last inning.

I was not aware of any of this, of course, only of the need to please my father and demonstrate early money-making skills. These were the rewards for relentless application, that is, work. Dull, stupefying, grim, grudging, ceaseless toil. Women did not work, men did. It was out in the true world. I was in training to be a man, you might say, at eleven. I was apprenticed to the trade. I was to do, on a micro-scale, what men did largely, what I would do when I had acquired my size and the strength. Thus programmed, I could hardly wait, even though what I had performed so far seemed largely fraudulent, that is, intended to delude and trick a small person like me, with growing mind and perception. No, women did not work, not really, only played at working with jobs such as receptionist, nurse, grade-school teacher. These were temporary, tasks to tide them over until men destined to be their husbands came along, motorized knights on gasoline chargers. Nobody, especially tutored sons, took their efforts seriously. They belonged in the kitchen and, more mysteriously, in the bedroom.

Chicago had extended its unruly sprawl Northward to a string of bedroom communities linked by the lake and the commuter train, a silvery diesel. Everybody strove to be much like his neighbor, only a little bit better, or better off, when measured by a set of commonly-agreed upon standards, mostly ones of status and social significance. We lived in a two-storyed stucco house, cream-colored, with an expanse of lawn fore and aft, and it was my job to cut it when my father went to NYC on one of his annual buying trips, which took up the month of lush June, when grass grows fast. I’m not complaining, you understand; little apprentice men do not whine or complain. They bear up and complete the task at hand. So bowing my skinny little legs and arms, I ran the mower along the ground, sending the grass catcher flying, spilling its heaped contents every few seconds, which was only par for the course, that course being one suitable for golf. Occasionally I indulged myself in guiding the mower blades across some of my mother’s peony blooms, subjecting them to the guillotine. From the edge of the newly shorn lawn their petals looked up at me in pained surprise. I grinned back and pushed on. I pushed hard, for it seemed to be an uphill battle, and in fact was.

This was good training for what lay ahead, for when we moved to Seattle a couple of years later, with my dad’s promotion to Fur Buyer at Field‘s satellite store, Frederick and Nelson, mowing laws for new neighbors was my chief means of earning pocket money, so necessary for being anything other than a sniveling dependent, his slave. Please don’t tell me I was already that; I knew it well enough. I cut his lawn, now regularly, but I had honed my skills to the point where I could expand my cutting activity into an exhausting, sweaty little business. It was one in which I could learn further. I don’t know exactly where this idea came from. I was not mine. It must have come from someone older, someone with whom I was in daily communication at the dinner table.

With my new bicycle I was able to range freely the attractive town, Highland Park, and there was a new carrier on the back of my red and white Schwinn that held the canvas bag jammed with this week’s issue of magazines. So I pedaled wide in search of sales, knocking on front doors, for this is what custom dictated in the suburbs for me and other tradesmen. Chicago is comprised of apartments, at least in the newly developed South Side, and we took our trade to the rear staircase, for the front door to the apartments (three-storey, two units to a floor) was locked to all except the mailman; he had a special key to the outside door and others that opened the individual gold-fronted slotted letter boxes. The slot was so you could peek inside to see if there were any letters yet.

Everybody else—the whole world: men with ponies on which to photograph terrified children, men who bought old suits, men who delivered ice or milk, men who desperately sought old gold and called out their willingness to buy it, men with trays of notions including but not limited to shoelaces, cold creams, furniture polish—used the back fire escape that opened on everybody’s kitchen, one after another, each with its dutiful wife busy over her bubbling stove. No, this was the country, or rather suburbia, for the real country was more distant, with its cows, horses, fields of beans or corn. We glimpsed this when we took the train into the city to shop at Fields or to attend some important event. The country was always a league away and the people and animals small and indiscernible from such a distance.

I went to front doors now. I had no special guidelines. Women opened doors easily to the likes of me, fearing no threat because they could see a small boy coming up the walk. My beige canvas bag proclaimed my business. I think it even was stenciled on the front, Magazines.

Some of my work took me into the early evening. I remember an unhappy Halloween when, with a raging fever, I went to my appointed task, feeling awful, and finally vomited in relief at the curb. I was in bed for the next three days and happily listened to the daytime radio programs ordinarily not available to me. It was a sick boy’s privileged by many in his time.

If hypnotized, I’m sure I could remember more jobs between 1939 and 1941, when I was nine and ten, but no hypnotist is handy and I must rely on frail memory, which is short of facts. I played the B-flat cornet and took lessons from a man who has no face today. I hunted frogs and gophers and garter snakes, and imprisoned them in Mason jars with lids in which I had punched holes with a hammer and nail. They died in time, a little early. I read cheap mysteries and onerous comic books. My mother hated the very idea of them. This made me love the even more. They were exciting and harmless, a great source of anticipatory joy. When I had a son, I encouraged him to read them. He did not have my enthusiasm, however. I, however, always did what I was told. I joined things, took on projects fair and foul. I could see no alternative to doing so.

When I compare my life to his, my son’s, I detect one strong difference. Early on he learned how to say, "No mas," in English. In other words, he negated doing things I had no idea I could dispute or get out of. My life was closely parsed out for me and there were few options. Oddly, though, most of the time I swam in free time. That is, when there was no school.

I had some kind of paper route, perhaps two different ones. The early one might have been delivering a slender local advertising flyer of four or eight pages, insubstantial, suitable to being folded in quarters, not long thirds, so that each paper formed a perfect square, like a handkerchief, resembling greatly a half-completed triangle that could be sailed, not flung, in the direction of a front porch. If you did it right, it would settle to the ground like a parachute, a thing beautiful in itself, but if done incorrectly would boomerang slightly and come to rest in the laurel bush that stood nest to everybody’s elevated front stoop, three steps leading up to the freshly painted porch.

I would make up many neat slender squares and arrange them neatly in my newspaper bag (a bag different from my magazine shoulder bag in that it hung over my head and came to rest snug on both shoulders ideally, and bore its load equally divided, fore and aft, front and back. I would fold my papers while walking slowly from one block to the next, one house to another, until my bag was crammed full. Then I would begin sailing them at houses. I even hit a few.

I fetched things for people on my ready Schwinn. It is why I had the little wire basket fixed in front, and a powerful spring clamp on the back fender. A pharmacy rises, then fades. Surely I did not run drugs, though I might have liked to, at a later age. No, no, no. The pharmacy rises, then falls, in memory. Do I imagine it? It is hopelessly mixed up with comic books, wirebacked icecream chairs, malteds (I had not yet learned that if you asked them to "hold the malt powder" the concoction became a milk shake, and cost a little less and tasted just as good, if not better), a rack of magazines not quite like the ones I formerly sold subscriptions.

The pharmacist of memory looks like a doctor or dentist, or a good impersonator, kindly, firm, distant, old. I believe I delivered groceries, too, for one of those long departed Mom-and-Pop stores , of which there were many, but no big ones yet that belonged to chains and displaced the small ones. These were coming, but had to wait for something significant to occur first and to run its course.

3

There were more jobs available when the war began. Women took them. But there were many that went begging. Old men came out of retirement, long past military age, and seized the opportunity to make the biggest money of their long life. And small boys were quickly hired to do the work that older boys had done only months earlier. In some cases the work of grown men. The situation created about the only true labor market of the Twentieth Century. It was a truly wonderful opportunity, if you liked to work. I didn’t, but how could I avoid it, my fate? I was able to fool people into hiring me for various chores, after school and on Saturdays. At the age of eleven, I began a ponderous succession of short-termed employment that was to dog me for many years. And—though this is out of place in my chronology—I remember exactly when the realization hit me that this was not what I wanted to do with my life later. Forgive me if I interrupt the chronology to described it here, but it is of paramount importance. At least to me.

The year is 1953 and I am 23. I have just returned to Seattle from Fort Ord, California, where I’ve completed my Army basic training. I cooked a deal with them before I enlisted; what with my draft board depleted of candidates and my deferment for purpose of going to college having been charitably extended into a further year of graduate school, I agreed to sign up just before my induction notice was sent (at which point it would have been too late in the game for cooking deals) to serve for three years, so long as my duty station would be in either Seattle or Alaska, and in either place I would perform whatever duties the Signal Corps asked of me. They, in turn, would not send me to Korea. Or to Europe, much better, but I would have only a five percent of drawing, which was not good enough odds to draw to.

So I spent a few months playing with guns, call them pieces, and mix with wonderful guys I would not have otherwise met, and learned how to punctuate my speech with works like fuck, fucking, mother fucker, etc., heedlessly, frequently, inappropriately, and sometimes tellingly. I walked long distances under heavy loads, relieved myself in public open places called latrines, ate food so over-seasoned that I could not tell whether it was hot or cold, put on weight, became lightly muscled and very bitter. I marched around, ran at double time, singing out stupid chants with the rest of my squad, platoon, company, regiment, and division. I thrust my newly sharpened bayonet on the end of my M-1 into canvas bags stuffed with sand that looked nothing like the enemy. I crawled through mud with my piece cradled like a baby, while overhead every fifth bullet fired by a stationary machinegun lit up the sky like a little red mosquito. Once, on a calm blue California afternoon, I looked up from my low station and actually saw a real bullet in the air. Fortunately, it did not have my name on it.

I got sick with soldiers, drunk with soldiers, well with soldiers, washed my clothes with soldiers and stood in endless lines endlessly with soldiers. We looked alike but were ultimately as different as we could be, in spite of the Army’s effort to standardize us and make us act in lockstep. When they finally issued the temporary command to stop executing some silly drill, "As you were," I always murmured, I was a civilian. But I never walked away from a formation. Not even that final day of basic.

I returned by bus to Seattle at the end of my training. Everybody but me took his money and flew. I rode the bus, first into San Francisco, then to Seattle, pocketing the difference in cost. Elizabeth had just been crowned queen and I wished her well. The man sitting next to me was a migrated Englishman, and he raged all the way about what he’d like to see done to the Queen. It involved various kinds of buggery. I was ill with URI (Upper Respiratory Infection) and running a high fever. Drifting in and out of consciousness I could only listen to him, and soon realized that even the army non-coms did not express themselves with such variety and inventiveness as this Englishman.

Back in my home city,
Seattle, my friends who had given me a going-away party, and recently recovered from it, three months later, organized a welcome home blast. I went to it, with a former girl friend, then immediately to the hospital, for I was sick-sick. In the Army there is no place for malingering. You are either at your duty station or in a hospital bed. There is no in between position. Some people like the military, for no ambiguity dwells there, as it does in real life. Isn’t the Army real life, somebody might ask? No, I would reply; it is a dream state. Everybody lives in a dense vapor.

Out of the hospital, into a freshly starched tan summer uniform, I went to work for my first day of duty at the Federal Office Building, feeling a little weak and buoyant. It was a gorgeous June day, complete with sun peeking over the transom, as eight A.M. drew nigh. I remember climbing the wide cement steps to the large brick building; I see it as though it were only this morning. I entered the sparkling lobby. Nearly three more years of this, I reflected. My heart sagged. All around me were civilians sentenced to a longer term, a lifetime of going to work here awaited them. I studied a few faces. No despair, no heavy sense of trepidation. Each wore a calm, morning face. It was a fresh Monday. Each mug was filled with cheery hope and anticipation. I almost gagged on it.

Here it is, gang, the rest of your life. Not mine. They could quit, sure, I could not, but it was worse than that. Let me put it differently, my acute realization, my epiphany. Satori. There is a scene in "Born Free," the movie, when the marvelous lions, forced to enter cages and transported for days or weeks to some new relocation, are bid leave said cages. And you know what? They refuse. They have adjusted, adapted, acclimated—whatever the right word is. They won’t come out of their cramped quarters. They believe they love their cages. They are at home there. Offered freedom, they decline it. No, thanks; we’ll stay inside. Lions. Wow.

Similarly, there are men sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison, without ever hope of parole, who believe they have the world knocked. Three squares, a dependable bed, free medical care, a cigarette allowance, barbells to work out with, TV, and—get this—each day a walk in a closed courtyard in which the very sky looms overhead like a tiny blue box. If you want to get regularly buggered in some additional ways, that can be arranged as well.

Sure, a regular job is nothing like the lion or the prisoner, not unless you want to pull up a chair and look at it closely. I did, that June day. My vision, or whatever it was, is still with me. It has governed my life ever since. It has been implicit in my behavior since. It will be with me until I die. And I think the overwhelming desire to write was part of it. I needed the time and the freedom to do my work. The decision was ultimately selfish. I don’t really understand it myself, only that it is strong and irresistible.

The jobs I’ve taken, early and late, have been some form of dire necessity. I’d say, "Isn’t it always the case?" but the answer is no, not necessarily. Career People would work, and often do, for free, just to keep busy. The Profession Calls. But somehow money manages continues to stick to their fingers. It is so even with some writers, but not many. What is our life for, we ask? It is to write about. The unwritten-about life is not worth living. Plato said that, or was it his buddy Socrates? All I know is that it sounds Greek to me.

To write, however poorly, requires much time, paper, pencil or pen, today a computer, a dictionary (ever wonder why ninety-nine percent of those words are doomed never to be used, not by the likes of you and me?), a chair to sit in, and a neat little table, with a light that can be turned on, when darkness comes. All else—food, sleep, booze, coffee, smokes—is irrelevant. But in order to write, one must first take care of what Thoreau called the Necessaries. We make our arrangements with society. The story of a man, a writer’s, work arrangements, runs counter to his list of achievements as a writer. It is a nagging, niggardly, negative thread running through his life.

The days that followed my assignment to my first duty station were hell and I took out my disenchantment (let’s call it) on everybody around me, all civilians except a colonel, who didn’t want to hear from me on any occasion, for even one instance would mean bad news to me. I understood completely. This was the army.

My days went something like this: rise, after three hours of drunken slumber, at around ten to seven. I had a bachelor apartment in the familiar University District and was frequenting in mufti those self-same places I had haunted only a few months ago dressed much the same way as a student. On the surface there was not much difference. My scrawny beard was gone, my hair was shorter, but I was still rail-skinny, and because I would not wear my glasses considerably cockeyed. (I don’t know which is less becoming to women, wearing corrective lenses or looking off in two directions at once.) The army claimed me, but for only forty hours a week; they held a raincheck on the rest of my time. I never forgot it.

Aside from the plump bird colonel (nice guy, really), who was Comptroller, everybody on my floor was a civilian. To find another uniform I had to board the elevator and ride up to Five. There I reentered the familiar khaki scene. Men dressed like me, with similarly cut hair, dashed around clutching pieces of paper in their hands, shouting and vying for attention. I relaxed in my cordovan dress shoes. If I wasn’t home, this was the next best thing; I was among my peers. Enlisted men. For aren’t all victims equal? The looks we exchanged were ones of shared doom.

It was not all that bad. In fact, there were moments of pleasant illusion. Freedom is a word. I was almost an equal with a civilian woman, elderly, who taught a course in Work Simplification. Don’t laugh, there used to be such a practice, a kind of pseudo-science. She was a GS-7. We had a secretary with long red fingernails, but we shared her with the Colonel. She became a friend of mine and we rode the same bus to and from work, and sometimes shared a car ride. And there was a fat GS-9, Hal, a man who lived with his mother, about fifty, and we used to talk sports (the universal language of men), the various pro teams, far off, for our city had none to date. We used to quarrel, Hal and I, and he would get pissed and not talk to me for a week, but this hurt him more than me, for it was he who needed the talk, not so much I. Our boss, a GS-11, Herb, who was a pretty mild-mannered all-around good guy, felt sorry for me, the poor GI, and let me get away with murder. I did not decline.

I was a sorry soldier, one wishing desperately to live the civilian life and trying to come as close as I could to it, shedding my khaki as soon as the bus spirited me home after 4:30 P.M. I had a bachelor pad (read: one big room, kitchen at one end, bed at the other) in the U District, which was as near as I could get to the University Itself, the source of all good things and bad in my recent civilian endeavor or life. Mama. I knew girls there, had buddies in school still, or hanging on, knew the stores and shops and taverns intimately; taverns were important, a place for nightly rendezvous and assignations and spontaneous parties, which seemed to grow out of the beery mists of cigarette smoke about midnight, each and every night. After dinner, often in a nearby restaurant, if I hadn’t a girl who would come in and cook for me, and usually I didn’t, it was a search for a warm bed other than my own. I was twenty-three and penis-driven.

At work, we followed people around at their tasks and wrote down what they did. These eventually resulted in Signal Corps Standard Procedures, or Operating Procedures, depending, according to a fine-line separation that I knew then but cannot discern clearly today. One was longer lasting than the other, I think. And the principles of work simplification—I was a long time coming to the realization that it was different from doing as little work as possible, which was the Army maxim—were to be rigorously applied to each repetitive task. Little did I know that this tedious form of experience would stand me in good stead when I took my first steady job, about five years down the pike. So I paid as little attention to what I did daily as I humanly could and became next to invisible—though Ralph Ellison, whom I was reading at the time, would surely find fault with my version. I only strove to blend in to the point of almost disappearing. In my little brown uniform, without a single stripe yet on my sleeve to call attention to myself, I moved like an automaton and often went unrecognized, which was a good thing, for if not drunk still from the night previous I was surely badly hungover and in strong need of being left mercifully alone.

The Army’s idea was, and I knew it, that I would remain in Seattle for one year of my military service, then be transferred to Alaska to serve out the rest of my tour. It was in fact a pact. Only I had signed it, but the Army honored it, and in a way when that civilian-like year was up, and I was flown to Anchorage, then taken by convoy to Glenallen, my life was saved, for I was badly wasted through dissipation and my own bad cooking. It was as nearly as abrupt an upheaval as my leaving graduate school for infantry basic training. I went from a warm office to the spring woods in a country not yet a state and still sparsely settled. Where we went the settling got sparser by the mile.

But first Anchorage. I arrived with a fresh crewcut on the longest day of the year, June 22. The year was 1954 and the Korean War was winding down like a cheap watch. Our ranks were comprised of those fortunate enough to delay conscription this long. Among our numbers at Fort Richardson was David Shine, made famous by the Army/McCarthy hearings recently ended. It was easy to see that David was rich and famous; he drove a new Ford with dealer license plates. He treated it like some men treat their women. One of its tires was flat when I first saw it. Later, it was covered with mud and grime. I suspect, in five thousand miles, it was ruined. David drifted in and out of view, tall blond, often with a girl in tow, which proved that his association with Roy Cohen hadn’t ruined him for their charms. It was rumored he was in the movies and could walk away from the army any time he wanted to, without reprisal, for he had friends in high places. He just didn’t want to. Peculiar.

I spent two weeks in a temporary duty assignment in the supply shack, awaiting orders. There I entertained the non-com in charge with a stories, lewd fictive accounts of my past life, and would stop at critical points in the development of my tale until he had agreed to issue me some item of gear or clothing that I deeply desired but was not supposed to have. I had to sign a hand request to make each item legal, but then it was mine. So when I went out in the field I had a load of stuff the likes of which nobody else had and all were wildly envious and covetous. Here are some of the items: bunny boots, white, so my feet at least would be invisible in snow; Splitkin skis, also painted white, with metal edges, web-bottomed poles, and skiboots of the same color. Alpaca field-jacket liner, when everybody else was wearing the new, bulky green kapok. Ear-flapped cap to match the liner, also non-issue, and verboten. I don’t know where I got the idea I could wear the stuff, but I tried, and got away with it. In the field my gear slowly disappeared, as it was either stolen or taken from me in my presence by some sergeant who knew I wasn’t supposed to have it. And then, sometimes the very same day, I would see him wearing it.

Law of the jungle, part one. Adapt or die.

To celebrate my arrival, Anchorage had an earthquake. It was a five or six on the Richter Scale. This proved ordinary. I celebrated my arrival by working my way systematically through all the bars on Fourth Street, which ran like an arrow through the center of town. I started on one side and had one drink in each, and moved on. I went East, or was it North? Already I was turned around. Meanwhile a large red sun dipped in the West. I reached the end of Fourth, the furthermost reach of Anchorage, and was still on my feet, the sun low on the horizon. When I emerged from the bar, the sun held steady. I crossed the street unsteadily and entered a bar opposite. One was indistinguishable from another. I left a quarter of my beer in my glass and went back out on the street. Now sun was rising. The time was nearly one A.M. It was already the next day and the moving u in the pale sky. I returned to my bunk at the Y, where all us temporary soldiers were housed, and caught a few hours sleep before it was time to report to my duty station, the supply shed, where my chief task seemed to be to entertain and extort.

A week later we sad soldiers were loaded in the back of deuce-and-a-halves and were trucked out on the Richardson Highway, pointed at Valdez. Our destination, however, was fifty miles to the East, a tiny settlement West of Glenallen called Tonsina. All these place names prove a huge disappointment. You await the next map name with excitement and anticipation. Nearly always you could whiz on by it with only a moment’s lapse of attention. Blink and it is gone. But as they say about a lot of things that are awful, the pleasure’s all in the journey. Or else, the journey is all. And the scenery was splendid, seen standing up in the back of a truck, as one of several men in fatigues, issuing catcalls to each new roadside attraction. These included mountain sheep, glaciers, truckstops, crumpled cars at the edge of the road, and, most excitingly, logging trucks whose brakes had failed on some hairpin turn and now lay barely recognizable as such, belly-up, at the bottom of a ravine. A truck minus its load and seen upside down, buried in fresh undergrowth, resembles some prehistoric beast (perhaps a mastodon) that has met its evolutionary end and been left to decay on its back, deep in a natural grave. Or grove.

There is a certain low order of social behavior made viable when you are wearing fatigues, riding along in the back of an open truck through countryside never any less than magnificent. Any female of any age seen in passing, no matter how distant, is deemed fair game. Anonymity bestows privilege, or so we thought, and adopted behavior patterns deemed appropriate, on the spot. We hooted after them, females, or whistled, or shouted our odd obscene greetings—whichever seemed most appropriate to us as individuals. This was not very often, of course, for most of what we saw was mountainous and unoccupied woods. Once we saw a bear at an obscure roadside garbage dump and it, heavy-assed, glared at us over its shoulder, then resumed its feeding task.

"Female bear?" wondered the soldier wedged beside me, then, not waiting for a confirmation from me, expressed expressly what he would do if it was.

Fuck a bear? You got to be kidding?

It was a different army than the tamed and docile one in Seattle, where all was done in a warm office, with the weather raging outside. Now we were outdoors permanently and it was others, yet unglimpsed, who lived and worked indoors. I began to think I might never be less than cold again. A hundred miles rolled by, two. We came to the important intersection where a highway branched off from ours and headed for Tok Junction and, beyond it, far Fairbanks; continuing on, we soon reached Glenallen, where some of our contingent were housed. It was a lodge, with bar, and some kind of barracks out behind and a few solitary buildings arranged alongside. This I soon discovered was your basic domestic unit in Alaska and comprised a map point or vehicular destination. There was no more. It offered shelter, a kind of tasteless bulky food, liquor of course. All this cost money. The army provided each of us with what they called Temporary Duty Pay. This was a food- and-shelter allowance. At each inn (as it might be called, in another lifetime, in a different place) they knew exactly what TDY was worth, in dollars and cents, and our room and board bill was exactly that amount. It was another form of separating the wheat from the chaff, the victim from his currency. It is exercised worldwide.

Our station was Tonsina. A sweet little river ran beside the gravel highway and in back of the lodge. The place was run by a tough old skinflint named Foster and the bar scotch was Dewars, though there were several kinds of bourbon. Our TDY was $257 dollars a month and it is what we paid him; for this we got double-tiered bunks with cotton mattresses, all in one great room (there were no women except the cook and waitress, who lived away) and a john down the hall, with open toilets and showers a deux. The food was copious, brought up on the boat, and unappetizing. Uncooked thawed meat tends to be green, perhaps from the freezer, but when your rib-steak is cooked, it becomes just the right shade of brown. Nobody ever got sick except from drinking too much. And for lunch, which we ate in the woods, they packed you as many sandwiches as you thought you could handle, plus stale fruit and cookies. I started out with one sandwich and worked my way up to three. In the process I started putting on muscle and weight.

We were to build a telephone pole line from Glenallen to Valdez, the old Valdez, the one to be destroyed by earthquake and rebuilt away from the beach, where a tidal wave had destroyed it. There was already a phoneline in existence, on tripods that had no roots in the hard earth and was regularly blown over or else toppled by snowfall. At first I was assigned to the gain-and-frame crew. Our work went like this: First we dropped telephone poles from a flatbed truck along a line surveyed and cleared by a crew that worked quickly ahead of us. Then we followed up at the location of each pole by laying on the ground a cross arm, pegs that fit the cross-arm holes, and screw-on glass insulators. Plus bolts and screws and washers, fore and aft, to hang the arm on the pole.

We gain-and-framers trotted from pole to pole, doing our cheery little duty, a bag of tools on our shoulder, like some woebegone Johnny-Appleseed of the pole-line construction business, or good Samaritan of the North. When we came to a pole, we halted, unshouldered our bag, measured the pole for curvature, sawed a couple of cuts into the concave side of the pole, took out our cold chisel and went to work forming a flat surface that would be home to the cross arm. Meanwhile the north woods hummed with bees and birds, moose and bears, the distant comings and goings of Army trucks, aircraft passing overhead. Mountains were within climbing reach, for those of us so disposed, if only we had a couple of days off in a row. Our single Sunday wasn’t long enough. It was when we collapsed and slept ourselves back into shape for the coming six-day week.

It sure beat Korea.

Zeke—Sgt. Zekewitz—had recently returned from FECOM (Korea to you; Korea to you, too) and we envied him some but not much of for long. God, he was stupid. He had matriculated as an E-2 Private, gone into combat (or so the story went, and I had no cause to doubt it), and had an assortment of non-coms shot out from under him—first his corporal, then his platoon sergeant, then his field first, then his first sergeant. Dead officers were flying all over the place, as well. Everywhere you walked there was some lieutenant or captain lying in a pool of blood. They moved Zeke up, up. It didn’t matter that he was stupider than a board. There was a hole in the command that needed plugging and who else was there at hand? He finished his tour a master sergeant. He had hoped for a career and now he had one. And because the Infantry couldn’t stand what it had created out of adversity, they gave him to the Signal Corps. Their loss was now our loss.

That first night on the job, an easy one, I went into the bar after dinner for my nightly libation. I had in mind about six, then a turn-in about nine o’clock. So had Zeke. It was his regular practice.

"Arnold, have I bought you a drink yet?"

I had to admit he hadn’t.

"Give this young soldier a drink and bring one for me," he said. His was Dewars. So was mine.

We drank them down, his fast.

"Now you buy me one," he ordered, my generous sergeant.

I could see how this would work out, over the course of the evening. He would probably end up one up on whomever tonight’s sucker was. He would stay on his feet until it was certain he would not lose. It was the other guy who quit first, nearly always. Bed time was nine or nine-thirty, if someone was buying.

In the morning, after nine hours deep sleep, the guy was a veritable daisy. He smoked cigars, not cigarettes, and had no hangover. But in the night, if you had wanted to, you couldn’t have wakened him. Dead drunk.

We had another master sergeant named Moose, a little guy. Army humor. Moose was married, had a wife a short ways away, who was nicknamed (of course) Mrs. Moose. She looked just like him. Moose was about five-six and so was she. He was round and bovine-looking, and she was even more so, nearly a mirror image. True, she didn’t have his sparse little mustache—at least I don’t think she did. Rumor was—awful Army rumor—that they were going to have a calf. It made him a little testy.

Moose was in charge of the gain-and-framers, while Sgt. Stockdale had the hole diggers. I don’t know how it happened, yes I do, but in one more week all of us who had some college, or a lot, were transferred from the various functional crews and assigned to Stockdale, whose crew was known as the absolute bottom, the dregs. We dug holes for telephone poles and nothing else. We were too dumb for ordinary work, having been to college. We had our bag of gaining-and-framing tools taken away from us and were issued five-foot shovels. We also had solid steel prybars, and a couple of long-handled weapons called a spade and a spoon. They were for reaching into the hole when it was too deep to be worked with a shovel and had approached five feet in depth. The long spade would continue our effort past that point and the spoon, a slightly cupped implement, would lift out the dirt and clay and small stones. For bigger stones, you got down on your belly, took up your prybar, and Young Soldier, you worked that rock back and forth until you could clasp it in your own two hands and you lift it out. You understand me?

I understood too much already. It took me about two days until I discovered I could put a brand new five-foot shovel into a hole with two big rocks at the bottom and bend it in such a way that I could break the hardwood handle off right where it met the metal. All of us could. It was not a matter of strength, only know how. The trick provides an hour or so of idleness until a new shovel can be found and you are able to go to work again. You are left alone in the silent woods with your soul.

Stockdale knew all about us; he had seen our type before. It did not matter to him that we were a variety of types and (academic) disciplines, short and tall, thin and stout, smart and not so smart, lively and languid, inventive and plodding. He knew everything there was to know; if not, it was not worth knowing. He could have gone to college, too, and wasted his time loafing, like we did, but instead went to work young, right into the Army, even before finishing high school. This was because his Dad died in a mine and there were younguns (the number varied from three to eleven, depending upon who he was talking to) that needed support. They were his military dependents. So he had worked for a man’s wage, while everybody else had played at foolish games, read books, and dated girls. He had begun his life’s work, poleline construction, done military style.

What, digging holes for telephone poles? God, there was heavy equipment that could do it easier and faster. Hadn’t the army heard of it? Not Sgt. Stockdale.

None of us could make it in the civilian army, he told us draftees. We were too soft. The war came along and filled the army with lazy no-gooders like ourselves, and it was his job to try to accomplish his mission—namely, a lot of holes in the ground, with men who were square pegs. We made his task nearly impossible. But as a good soldier he would not shirk nor complain. But let us step out of line and make matter worse. . . . On and on, every day.

Stockdale thought I was lazier than most and I set out to prove him right. Once, when I had hovered over a difficult hole for several days and he thought I might be stalling, he announced, "Arnold, I’ll swear, you’d turn down a piece of ass because it’s too much work."

"Sarge," I countered, "give me a three-day pass and I’ll prove you wrong."

He let that go right on by him. Unarmylike, we had no passes, only our free Sundays.

"Maybe you’re just dumb. Is that it? Don’t know how to dig a hole, get a great big itty-bitty rock out of it? Didn’t they teach you that, in that college of yours."

"Right, Sarge."

He leaped on it. "I knew it. You look here." He smiled. He lay down on the ground that had recently been soften by rain. A good three inches of water stood at the bottom of my hole I had been fooling around with a big rock that I had been careful not to dislodge. "Hand me that bar and you watch close. I’m going to show you something" He took the tool and noticed appreciatively that it was slightly bent.

"You do that?" he asked over his shoulder.

I nodded modestly.

"Now look-ee here."

He began to work away on the rock, both arms extended deep into the hole. I watched, something I do well.

After a few minutes he said, "Hmm. Not so easy as I thought. Now, don’t go getting the idea I can’t do it."

"Do what, sergeant?"

"Get the rock out of the hole, stupid. Why do you think I’ve got my head in this hole in the ground?"

"Beats me. I was going to ask you."

The hole was between four and five feet deep. Since it was raining moderately, the hole was filling slowly with water, which was now about six inches deep. Stockdale now had the prybar wedged deep in the hole and was shoulder-deep in it.

"Arnold, hold my ankles. Get a good grip, will you?"

"Sarge, you’d better not."

A pen and pencil set, clipped to his shirt pocket, now released its grip and spilled into the hole. "God damn it," he said, and began to grope for them, feeling around in the mud. He extracted first one, then the other.

"You hold these, you hear?" He was from the South, and in times of stress you could hear his twang become pronounced. He passed me his writing implements for safekeeping. I put them in my own pants side pocket.

"Take a firm hold, Arnold. I’m going to get that mother of a rock."

That was about as close as he let himself come to swearing. I had to admire his self-restraint. Stockdale dove deeper, both hands working hard. He was heavy. He was exceeding the balance point

"Sarge, I can’t hold you. You’re slipping." And he was, for I was releasing my hold by degrees. I pulled at his boots, but only to the side, as he plunged deeper into the hole, head first..

His descent was arrested by his head striking bottom. I released my grip on his boots and rose to my feet.

"Sarge, I’m going to go for help."

"No, you’re not," came his muffled voice. "You’re going to stay right here and pull me out."

"Anything you want from the canteen?" I asked. But I remained. And by degrees, with his considerable squirming help, I worked him feet-first back out of the hole. First his knees hit solid ground and then his big hips. He was solidly built and strong. He pushed himself up and away from me.

"Goddamn you, Arnold," he muttered.

"Going to court-martial me, Sarge? Send me away from here? Put me on a worse crew?"

He looked at me levelly and began to laugh.

"Saved your life, I did, " I added.

"You are a sorry son of a bitch," he told me, shaking his head from side to side.

"What makes you think I’m sorry?"

4

It was all fun and games, off in the woods. YMCA and Boy Scout camp had been worse than Army Alaska. The people I met and got to know were straight out of Dickens. For instance, there was Blankenship, a Mormon. I had known him earlier. In college, we had been in neighboring fraternities. A shame like this, carried into later life, is a tie that binds.

He too had skis. His had civilian bindings. The temperature was in the mid-eighties and it was a long time off before we might encounter snow, but we were of a mind on this matter. He wanted a winter coat, unique, non-GI, and to this end was trapping or else shooting with a .22 rifle as many rabbits as he could find. Then he skinned out about a dozen and, spread-eagle style, stretched them on a drying rack he had fashioned out of green alder. His scraping job had been none too thorough and the rack was visited by hoards of flies and stank. This did not bother Blankenship, and I soon got used to it, too.

We compared skis. Five-ply Splitkins, both, mine painted white, his showing the natural wood, a little bit worn and frayed, with extended metal edges for ice conditions.

"You got yours from supply, didn’t you?"

I said I did.

"Lucky. What did you have to pay for them?" he asked.

"Pay? I told the bastard stories."

"These cost me twenty bucks," he explained. "You’ll notice the lack of paint. They can’t be traced back to the army."

"You must have wanted them plenty bad."

"I plan," he said, his voice lowered modestly, "to transfer to the Ski Patrol, after the summer is over. Come join with me."

"The Signal Corps has no Ski Patrol, " I countered. "It’s only the Infantry at Fort Richardson that does. It means transferring into the regular army."

"Exactly."

"Fool, it means Korea."

He shrugged. "If I do it right, it could mean a winter of downhill skiing instead."

"Not worth the risk."

"We’ll talk about it later. You might be surprised how different things may look to you, when a little snow is flying."

"A white world?"

"Cold and white. They have rope tows, I hear."

"Who has?"

"Ski Patrol at Fort Richardson."

"You wish."

Blankenship received the Wall Street Journal by mail, which is a near daily, but the mails being what they were, his arrived in big batches. Thus six or eight would come at once, after which there was a dearth of news about the world of business, in which he was greatly interested. He would arrange his newspapers chronologically, then begin to wade his way through them, working front to back. I helped him. There we sat, in among the mosquitoes and drying bunny skins, the June sun beating down, in front of his tent. Reading. He was camping out, living on chili and Dinty Moore beef stew, pocketing his TDY pay and not paying homage to Foster at the lodge, who would take it all. Talk about frugal. The lodge had little that he needed. The Dewars offered no appeal, for he didn’t drink, and our food was nothing to write home about.

He had gone native. It is what happens when a good mind is sent into exile and decides to make the best of the situation. He doesn’t cope, he triumphs, at least in his own mind, though is many others he might be thought to have gone into rapid decline and his mind in a dangerous condition. But I saw in Blankenship the survivor instinct taken to a new level. He was Natty Bumpo, Robinson Crusoe, the father in Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast; you know, the Harrison Ford type. Blankenship was tall and fair, with good teeth and a big, ready grin. We got together regularly, lay in the sun, tanning, reading about the nefarious schemes of big business, enjoying the shade provided by his drying racks of stinking skins, I smoking my Chesterfields and drinking coffee out of my Thermos, while he taunted me about my harmful habits. To confirm his bad opinion of me, I used to suck on an occasional warm Schlitz. He made his head go tsk-tsk.

Aside from this, we were good friends. He always greeted me warmly. Mormons are a worldly, forgiving lot. They always hope for a spontaneous conversion. Fat chance. But my soul—immortal or not—was worth the effort, in his opinion. I was flattered, until I learned that it gave him bonus points with Jesus.

He ended up on the lowly hole-digging crew, too. It took him a little more time. Sergeant Stockdale admired Blankenship—his business acumen. Perhaps he feared him, for he gave him continual wide berth. Stockdale had forgiven me for letting him slide into the hole, head-first. The army is no place to hold a grudge. He believed it to be an accident. It fit my profile. I was not very strong, he knew. I didn’t remind him of my flair for breaking shovel handles.

Because Lady Moose was overdue to calf, we had to play her husband, Sgt. Moose, on a slack line. He was snarly and mean, not having had any sex for a while. This made him more like the rest of us, but he wouldn’t recognize this shared trait and behaved like Hamlet, wandering around in a constant slow pout, muttering soliloquies to himself. Daily he got weirder. He demanded attention, and because he had rank but not size, we used to pick on him. He loved it. The things we did to him got worse and worse. Why did he put up with them? One of our favorite tricks was to kick his feet out from under him and, with him lying helplessly on the ground, one of us would sit on his chest and begin to pluck the hairs out of his already sparse mustache. It must have hurt like crazy, but he would lie there, whining softly, smiling his protest, hardly defending himself at all.

"Come on, you guys, have a heart."

"Have two," we’d reply, pulling again on reluctant hair, just to hear him whimper. Then we’d let him go and he’d slink off. Back to work.

The muskeg, permafrost, and tundra had absorbed about all the holes we could provide and our poles were all pretty much buried in the ground, but no wire was yet stung and still the tripod line, side by side with ours, continued to function. A few interesting things had happened along the way. As we entered true mountain country, frozen ground rose nearer to the surface and impeded our digging, so that each individual hole took longer to accomplish, as the year wore on. Usually, when we had encountered reluctant ground (you might call it), a special crew was called in, one with jackhammers and dynamite. Narrow holes were drilled into the problematic ground, the holes jammed with explosive sticks and powder caps with fuses, all told to stand far back, for there was "Fire in the Hole." And—boom—the recalcitrant rock was smashed to a million powdery smithereens, and the solitary hole digger resumed with his work, until he reached a predetermined depth—say, six feet. Then he moved on to the next flagged stake one hundred and fifty feet away and began digging again. On each stake was written the depth the hole was to be dug. A machine, of course, could have done it in no time, but a machine was not available. What we had was a surplus of manual labor.

One time we tried something new on a particularly stubborn hole. It was called a "shaped charge," and had proved its worth in FECOM, unpopularly known as Korea. The thing looked like a landmine and lay nearly flat on the ground like a plump griddle cake. It was detonated electronically. We stood back thrice the ordinary distance—which proved none too much. The earth shook and we thought an atomic device had been triggered, but the permafrost proved a worthy adversary and did not yield the ground to any depth. Instead, the shaped charge blew a hole eighteen inches deep, but sixty yards in diameter; it formed a true crater, one similar to a meteorite implosion. We stood back and gazed at it in wonder. Then officer in charge ordered in deuce-and-a-half loads of quarry rock to fill it up. Good ordinary dynamite completed the job, providing the additional depth the hole required. We never used the shaped charges again.

Enough holes dug and filled in the Tonsina area, we began to commute longer distances daily; soon we had to move our base camp West, towards Valdez and the sea. We scouted out the land ahead and found Thirty-Five Mile Lodge. It had a bar and restaurant, but no sleeping accommodations, which necessitated our buying small, cheap travel trailers. For this we used our TDY pay. This was a common Alaskan problem pegged to the traditional Alaskan solution. A soldier named Harvey and I traveled 350 miles into Anchorage and bought a small ratty trailer from a dealer who sold them in spring and bought them back at half-price in October, when cold and snow brought construction to a halt.

Harvey—his last name is lost to time—and I had much in common, including a taste for bebop, Dewars scotch, and Chesterfields, or practically anything else that could be ignited. We had no electric lights in our trailer, only a twin-mantle Coleman lantern, and we had to use the toilets and showers out back behind the lodge. If you’ve seen the movie, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, you will understand our basic situation. Only we didn’t whore houses. These were thirty-five miles away in Old Valdez. To get there you had to have free time and a way to cross Thompson Pass. The girls there looking nothing like Julie Christie.

Harvey and I read evenings, mostly paperbacks, but about eight or nine became restless and withdrew to the bar, where we found everybody had a head start on us to which we could never quite catch up, try as we might. One night, after both having been visited by some cruel and unusual Army punishment for being disobedient, perhaps caught sleeping in the woods, we’d both been punished. Feeling badly put upon, we took our revenge the only way possible—on yourselves. We each tried to drink a fifth of Scotch and almost succeeded. Then, almost at the same moment, we lost our dinner and the Scotch on our shoes and on the ground outside our trailer.

Fit punishment.

"People who drink like that," said the bartender, "are known to howl at the moon, besides."

Dead right.

Usually we sipped our whiskey and complained bitterly about life in the Army. I had a part-time job most evenings helping out a kindly hopeless drunk do the payroll for Morrison-Knudsen Construction, whose road crew worked along side ours and was billeted near by. Barney needed companionship more than he needed help, and we used to chat into the early evening hours, while he drank. He never offered me a shot, probably on the assumption that there wouldn’t be enough left for him; I understood the principle. It was never discussed. Construction workers were making an outlandish $2.50 an hour, and so was I. Overtime pushed them (but not me) to the outer limits and some of paychecks were astronomical. There was nothing to do with so much money except gamble. The game was poker. The ante was modest enough, but the raises in seven-card stud were enormous, and a single pot often contained hundreds of dollars. One big winner quit his job and caught a lift to Fairbanks, where he bought a new Pontiac. Then he got in another game, lost the Pontiac, sobered up, and asked for his old job back. A good worker with only the common weaknesses, he was immediately rehired.

Blankenship had gone off in the opposite direction and was now working with a survey crew a hundred miles to the East. Sundays in Valdez were generally solitaire, for Harvey had his own life. I bought a week-old copy of the Sunday New York Times, withdrew to a favorite bar on Front Street (every town has a Front Street), ordered my favorite drink—a screwdriver, made from fresh/frozen orange juice— and read my heart our about a world populated largely by civilians. The huge quantities of Vitamin C I ingested I believed would improve my health even better than a workout in a gym, had one been handy.

Old Valdez was undergoing a street-improvement project and had open canals, that is, streets opened up with diggers to a depth of six or eight feet, at the bottom of which lay unjoined sewer pipes. Since it was raining, the sewer pipes were awash, the bottom of the holes thick with mud. One Saturday night, a friend visited the whore house, had a stiff drink afterwards with the madam, stepped out the front door, and fell at once into an open sewer. He lay face down for almost an hour before being rescued by the next visitor to the house, who also upon departure fell in. They went off together to celebrate their new friendship with a drink.

So it goes.

Meanwhile, Lady Moose had given birth to her girl calf at the Army hospital at Fort Richardson, in Anchorage. We went in to visit her on one of our biweekly journeys for groceries to the PX there, a round trip distance of 700 miles, but we didn’t complain, for they had fresh eggs, airborne steaks, live music, and girls in a seedy section named Eastchester Flats. Their whiskey included brands other than Dewars. We used to argue, Harvey and I, whether or not we could taste the difference between Johnny Walker red and black. This required repeated testing, with a waterback to cleanse the palate so we could taste and argue again.

Nights grew cold, while days remained warm but not so punishingly, and the mosquitoes seem to have taken their squadrons elsewhere. The pole line grew in length and crossed Thompson Pass, a real feat. When we went in the opposite direction into Anchorage for grub, I could always recognize the poles I had gained and framed because they were crooked. This was because of my chronic depth-vision problem; it caused me to cut the bevel for the cross arm wrong and to drill the hole on which to seat it at a beveled angle. Each of my poles greeted me like an old friend. Eventually, in time, the army had to replace them.

We Chechacos donned GI wool shirts mornings, when frost stood an inch thick on the ground. Soldiers who had a year on us of Alaskan winters laughed and called out, "What are you going to do when winter comes?" Apparently twenty-degree dawns weren’t enough to merit bringing out the cold-weather gear. The old-timers went around in T-shirts or fatigues, scorning even unlined field jackets. The idea was, if you used up all your issued warmth so early in the season, you would be left shivering in your boots when true winter finally got here. It would be soon.

We didn’t care much about the taunts. Most of us knew we would be transferred to Southeast Alaska, where the outdoor work goes on year round. These guys would remained Quonsetted here, gathered round their gasoline fires, drinking the winter away and dreaming about The Outside, as they called the contiguous states.

With the first light brush of snow on the ground, we were trucked into Anchorage, which had turned bitter cold. We were housed temporarily at the YMCA again and took precautions against nightly assaults in our beds by homos and thieves. Harvey and I drank our evenings away, of course. We returned to our favorite haunts in Eastchester Flats. The music was lively and so were the girls. I think Billie Holiday sang there then; if not, some impostor did her songs just like her and sat alone at the end of the bar afterwards. A number of apartments were under construction and stood unfinished, and the whores used to operate out of bedrooms that had no doors, plumbing, or electricity, and had no more than an old mattress thrown on the floor. Most were black and either gaunt or obese. No middle ground could be found.

Often on our nightly wanderings, Harvey and I would pass the lot where our small travel trailer stood and thought it looked at us plaintively. Did it remember us? I was drinking too much, I realized, and determined to knock it off, or at the least cut it back drastically. L I began to read again, E. M. Forester, and to play cribbage at an all-night lunch counter. While I was gone from the Y, one night my dufflebag and its accumulation of paperback classics disappeared. Nobody had a clue. It was the usual case.

November dragged on dismally. Each morning we reported to Fort Richardson and the army found meaningless chores for us to do. But we kept hearing rumors we would be shipped out soon. Rumors are to believe. Finally my orders were cut and I was given them in triplicate. I went for my gear. My two footlockers full of Mozart and Dizzy Gillespie were safe, along with my 78 rpm record player, much mufti, and all my books with hard covers. These weighed so much than when it was time to fly out of there for Juneau and Ketchikan, a second DC-3 had to be charted. It wasn’t all my fault. We were allowed fifty pounds each, and I had two-hundred, but nobody was counting or casting blame. We were off.

The flight was in an unheated DC-3 and there was no oxygen. We flew at sixteen thousand feet, for the sake of the bumps. I remember spitting on the metal floor and watching it freeze before my eyes. Many were sick, but for once I wasn’t.

I spent a night in Juneau and the next day flew by Grumman Goose to Ketchikan, where I was led to believe I would remain. I soon found a bachelor apartment. Again we were on TDY pay, which makes everything possible. In the morning some of ate in oatmeal or eggs and toast in a little workman’s café across the street; at night we ate dinner in round-the-clock restaurants that were pricey. We rode public transportation in our fatigues to one of two duty stations—then transmitter site on the North end of town or the receiver station to the South, where an antenna field was being installed on a rainy hillside.

The transmitter site was also our unit’s headquarters. Inside the building, soldiers strolled around in Class A uniforms and moved pieces of paper around from desk to desk. We watched them through the streaked glass enviously and hated them at once. How dare they, while we slithered stupidly in the ceaseless rain?

We were part of the same organization, but as different as day and night. They were ACS, Alaska Communications System, signal Corps, US Army; we were the 530^th Heavy Construction Company, Signal Corps, US Army. Two different units of the same corps. One did the shitwork, while the other lounged under fluorescent light, warm and dry. Off duty, they would not speak to any of us, the bastards. We were the dregs of the army. And they were right. Oh, how I wanted to be one of them.

And I soon was.

5

I had some vacation coming. In the Army it is a month’s worth each year, but try to find the time and permission to take it. However, the Army softens its hard heart around Christmas, where, throughout the Western world, much meaningful work comes to a halt for fifteen days on each side of that holiday. What I was doing lay on the far side of essential. So I flew home to Seattle and tried to be a civilian again. I worked at it diligently.

I did everything by twos and threes. If you wanted to have a beer with me, I would drink two schooners to your one. As for sex, there was a steady progressions of coeds and working girls on the Ave. that were easy to meet at parties and found their way to my bed chamber. (It couldn’t have been the uniform, for I doffed it immediately after work.) Some of the parties were for me, to welcome me home again, and when girls thought it was for good I didn’t dissuade them. And I found my way to parties held by absolute strangers, parties to which I was not invited through some small oversight on their part, but attended, all the same. I had money to spend and needed help. I was after memories, emotions to be recalled in tranquillity, when I was back in dreary Alaska.

None of my bitterness was gone; in fact, the ironical contrast with civilian life made it even stronger and more unattractive. But young women are attracted to sad young men who hate the world, and think them romantic, especially if they are drinking heavily and tend to express themselves in obscenities. I was known as a poet. Ha., Anybody can be anything he says he is around a university, at least for a while, for it takes people a while to separate out the real phonies from the unreal ones. If a guy calls himself a writer, and can drop the name of a few authors, there is no limit to how far he can go in perpetrating a personal fraud. If he is a soldier, too, and a war is tapering down to a less than grand climax, he is all the more romantic-seeming. Girls will lie down for him readily, often even before he has learned their names and where they can be found again.

Arriving in Seattle in mid-December, I had two weeks until Christmas, days which I spent with my parents, nights with old friends and new ones. Christmas came and went in a daze. The army seemed far off. There was a interval until New Years Eve, and on the following day I had a train ticket to Sun Valley. (I thought of Blankenship, now in the Ski Patrol at Fort Richardson, and knew he would eat his heart out with envy. Soldiers always promise to stay in touch, but rarely do. We exchanged no letters, for we lost each other’s army address.)

I had met a girl at a party held by the Leahys, one of many, and when it came time for bed, she joined me. We had a fling that lasted about a week before I left. I thijnk she expected me to stay in touch; this was not my intention. For Christmas I gave her a three-speed phonograph as a way of thanking her for her sexual favors, but she took it as a sign that we were engaged. Now at Sun Valley I was billeted in a unit behind the Challenger Inn. I took my meals in the bar, the Ram, or else in the cafeteria.

This girl, Molly, kept phoning me. Since nobody had a private phone, she had me paged repeatedly. Soon everybody knew who I was. It is a great way to become well-known fast, but I do not recommend it. For a solid week, wherever I went, my name was being called out over the PA system, or sometimes by a guy in person.

"Isn’t that you, Robert-o?"

"Another Bob Arnold staying here, I think."

"Hadn’t you better answer the page?"

"It’s not for me."

"You sure?"

"An imposter, certainly."

At The Ram, my favorite place to drink beer, the din was so loud that a page couldn’t be heard. I started my nights early. The Ram had beers on tap that I had never heard of, and I was determined to sample them all. There I met a girl from Chicago; I told her I was from Chicago, too, and that was all it took. Everybody was on the lookout for somebody of the opposite sex, especially the women who had come here for naught much else. We went on a sleighride, out to an inn that served hot mulled wine and fried chicken on red checked tablecloths. It was so cold on the ride that we and the others all huddled together under thick gray Union Pacific blankets on the straw, studying the sky and its salted stars. The reminded me of Van Gogh. The temperature was about zero, according to a gauge I spotted outside the inn.

While all this was going on, I spotted a blond and began to eye her; she was from Duluth, a Nordic beauty, and I managed to get her alone for a moment and ask her for a date. She agreed to one the following night. I was not discrete about this and the girl from Chicago got properly miffed. So what? Sun Valley was full of girls, most of whom would pass at twilight time for beautiful.

I thought of less of Molly, and only when I was being paged. So many distractions, including snow. Time was growing short. Soon I would be headed back to dread Alaska. The slopes here were the best I’d ever seen, though to tell the truth, I was not the world’s best skier. Corn snow makes one better than one thought he was.

I stuck to Dollar Mountain mostly, a place for beginners and intermediates, which suited me fine, and was where all the girls were. Once, though, I rode to the top of Badly. It had three chairlifts, each steeper than the previous one, and slightly terrifying in combination, as we sped towards the sky. I had mastered the stem Christy and my Christy was dependable only on easy slopes, though it was getting better daily, or so I told myself. Coming down I fell only twice. Okay, three times. Maybe four.

In the cafeteria that night I took a table with another guy. The place was jammed. He was a little grim and sour, just having broken his ankle on the slopes. It was in a big white cast, barely yet signed. I picked at my meal. "This chicken is sure tough" I told him. "But the rice and gravy are okay."

"Fool," he said, "this here is bunny."

"You’re kidding? Bunny, as in rabbit?"

"The same, asshole."

"I knew that," I said. "I was just testing you."

I did not eat any more of the stringy dubious meat, though I slopped up what I could separate of the rice. I kept a weather eye out for anyone carrying a tray to a table who had made the same mistake as mine. Everybody managed to keep a straight face.

That night might luck improved. I met a dental hygienist who was traveling the West for the feds, that is, the government, examining and treating Indian children for gum disease. We hit it off immediately. She told me she once taught dancing for Arthur Murray. I couldn’t doubt it, the way she whirled me around the floor. She was gorgeous, with a mane of blond hair like a palomino and breasts large enough that I couldn’t get really close to her without crushing them. She didn’t seem to mind. It was soon evident she liked me. Now, I’m distrustful of women who like me; it seems a sure sign of obvious bad taste on their part, but decided to give her a second chance, all the same. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to see through me in the short amount of time we would have together.

We hitched a ride into Ketchum and experienced some great jazz, live. It was as cool as the weather outside. We danced until I was thoroughly sweated under my heavy sweater. Then she wanted us to sit by the fire a while. It was almost too much.

Try to keep a girl like that from dancing. Her feet kept moving even while we were sitting down. She was the type to dance alone, if nobody else was willing. Me, I was pooped. I think I was running a slight fever. My mouth tasted like pennies. Was it my trench mouth coming back? What a time for it. A dental hygienist, she certainly must know it from my bad breath. She was a pro, wasn’t she? Maybe she had some medicine—penicillin in her purse that would put me right immediately. Dare I ask?

Evidently she had no clue, for she kept tilting her head back and thrusting her tongue into my mouth. It is a way of getting to know somebody rather quickly. In fact, I became closely acquainted with her from the waist up. No farther, he hands and mouth kept telling me. She was not going to get involved beyond that point with some stray soldier. Smart girl.

We took the bus from Ketchum to Omak, Washington, where she was temporarily stationed at the Indian reservation just outside of town. We necked all the way, heedless of the other passengers, who must have been embarrassed for us. The good thing about the Army is, it makes you somebody other than your true self. All that necking, I had to admit I missed Molly, who was eager to provide more. But kissing can be fun, nearly an end unto itself, if your partner is any good at it, and she was. You can get used to a condition of semi-permanent disappointment.

She had a car waiting for her in Omak, a sedan that was government issue. It had that familiar inhuman look. We rode around town in it, visiting various restaurants and bars. There weren’t many. "Friendly Omak," it proclaimed itself. Oh, yeah? I made a simple U-turn in the middle of the street, in order to circle back to a parking place near the movie theater where we were headed (Van Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor, pretending to be Scott an Zelda in The Last Time I Saw Paris) and a cop lurking behind a billboard pulled me over without using his siren, only his flashing red light. What I had done was safe enough, for I could see ten miles in either direction in this flat unoccupied country, but he wrote me out a ticket, all the same, the bastard. I explained that I was a soldier home on leave for Christmas. No mercy. In Omak they have hard hearts for all strangers.

I posted my forfeitable bail. This left me with ten dollars, what was left of my bus ticket back to Seattle, and a motel I’d already paid for for the night. My date dropped me in front of my unit, the motor idling. No, she wouldn’t come inside. It was goodbye and good luck. I knew as much.

We parted with a chaste kiss front lips that had been gnawing mine only hours later.. I touched her breast under three layers of wool and she smiled at me patronizingly, I thought. In the morning I made it to the bus station just as the Greyhound was hissing its front door open. I had two days before my plane back to Ketchikan left from SeaTac Airport. I spent them wastefully, with a sense of impending doom whose poignancy only someone still in the military can testify to.

6

I returned to Alaska in a driving rain. What else is new? It rains all winter long, without respite, and for most of the summer, too. There are about six days out of the year when the skies are cerulean and not a drop falls. People tend to remember each one of them and frequently remark about them.

I learned that I had been transferred indoors, as I had requested. What joy! The major in charge of the station had noted by constant whining and self-debasing. He didn’t much like the rain himself and saw a lot of benefit in keeping dry. A man after my own heart, I thought. I was put to work on a maintenance crew at the transmitter site. It is but a short step from there to a state of total indolence. But the men I worked with were the best I’d seen in years. They were one kind or another of electronic nuts. The guy who was in charge of the night shift, which I was on, had sold his car in order to buy a hi-fi stereo systems. They were brand spanking new, then. The equipment took up his entire living room, but he didn’t care; so much the better. He spent his early evening hours, before heading off for work, fiddling with his dials, aligning his tweeters, building his speakers (which were huge, of the infinite-baffle woofer type), adjusting his gains (but not, I guess, his losses), attenuating this, minimizing that, twiddling with buttons and switches, pushing knobs, fine-tuning rheostats; scanning, searching, maximizing, minimizing, enhancing, dropping, drooping, adding stuff, and God knows what else he did, before hurrying away to the transmitter site, where further instrumentation awaited him. Even though it belonged to the Army’s, it mattered to him.

He had a record of a train he once played for me: it blew its whistle, it rang its bell, it hissed its passenger doors open and closed with a snaky hiss, it chugged, it puffed, it pulled away from the station with a Doppler sound, it drew back in again with a sigh and a moan, as though air were being let out of its tire. You could hear the train slowly getting underway again, hesitantly, after disgorging its load of passengers or cargo. Railroads were familiar stuff to me, for I had worked for Northern Pacific during my college years, and so it was more of what I was already well used to, but to Pete it was more fodder or grist for his mill, the stereo set. He would put on a long-play record and listen as if— previously deaf—these were the first sounds he’d ever experienced. He liked to have some listening company, which included me. Bored, I was happy to oblige. He liked his friends to enjoy what he had assembled and to experience all the wonderful effects, which were one kind of noise or another. And . . . he served drinks.

Pete loved Ima Sumac, a songstress from Peru, whose range spanned eight or more octaves. He would turn the treble up, heighten the bass, and play an illustrative track of hers, lying back in his chair (and expecting you to do the same in yours) and listen as though it might be the last thing you’d hear on earth; then he would twiddle the bass some and take a little off the treble, and play the same track over again. Lo, a new Ima was produced, a different one, with a voice fuller and more luxurious—if that were possible. Or so he said. Truthfully, I couldn’t tell much difference or state for a fact which Ima I liked best. Some people have such an ear, others do not, but Pete was keen to subtleties and could detect minute changes in pitch. He knew what Ima needed to complete herself, to be perfect, right down to the kilowatt and, if need be, a decibel’s difference.

He had the only 15-inch woofer in Ketchikan, perhaps in all Alaska, and ordered it custom-made. Huge, the freight bill must have been stupendous. He set it in his closet door, using the compartment inside (where his clothes lay hung in rows) as a sounding board. The effect was tremendous. Perhaps his clothes, including his dress uniforms, made the difference.

I was only mildly envious and made do with a tiny portable radio that could be slipped in and out of my dufflebag. My old phonograph was till with me, a bit battered and bunged, but it played only monaurally. There were no special effects for me to enjoy, no knobs and dials to tweak for woofing and tweeting. Just a dull volume switch, plus off and on.

Nights were like the aftermath of a good party, slightly sad and laid-back. We didn’t drink on the job, but we could smoke and eat, and enjoy ourselves immensely in most other ways, so long as we didn’t leave the premise. That was okay with me, for it was raining outside and I was grateful to under shelter. Great intervals of deathly quiet and inactivity stood between work chores that occupied only minutes or moments to perform. We carried impressive clipboards around the site and wrote down our entries in preprinted forms, often guessing at the data when the instrumentation wasn’t reliable or we were too lazy to walk a few yards to get true readings. Throughout the night we entertained each other as best we could, or else read materials brought into the building, along with our lunches. This was often low-grade pornography.

I read great literature, of course. It was my mainstay, my method of staying sane, when all about me at times seemed mad. College prepares you for the long hours of idleness that lie ahead and gives you the means to fill them up meaningfully. Nightly you either drink or you read. There is a time for each, for both. The two sort themselves out nicely, I’ve found. I read long into the night, as though death was near and I was eager to soak up all the earth’s accumulated wisdom for a future void of light and intelligence. I read all the chestnuts I hadn’t had time to tackle in school. Moby Dick, the real thing and not the tepid Maxwell Geismar version that has been gutted of its wonderful blubber-rendering detail. I found that if I could stomach this, I could digest the entrails of most other books, ones that were tame and tedious in comparison. Literature has seen me through the long Alaskan nights of the soul, a time in which many perish. Books are a crutch for the stumbling soldier.

Most of the men were career military, un- or poorly educated sods, whose tastes had been arrested at the girlie magazine level. They presumed I was exactly like them and reading the same stuff, though mine seemed to lack adequate pictures, which made it inferior stuff.. Consequently, I often had somebody looking over my shoulder. He would be wondering, I could tell, if I had found a book that he might borrow next. Were there any pictures? How explicit was it, anyway? A common greeting to a reader in the army and elsewhere in the world, I reckon, is, "Get into her pants yet?"

"Almost there," I would invariably proclaim.

"Oh, boy."

"You want to be next on this one? Plenty dirty." The book in question was Finnegan’s Wake, dirty enough in places for a anybody’s taste, but admittedly takes a bit of effort to fully fathom.

"Any pictures?"

"Sorry. You got to use your imagination."

"Shit. I’ll wait for the next picture book.."

"Don’t blame you any. Excuse me, I got to get back to my page. Guy’s about to get off on her."

"Oh boy. Don’t let me stand in your way, buddy."
If I had been reading the Bible (a genuinely dirty book, by the way), the questions would have been much the same, and I would have answered similarly. These guys were largely unprincipled, concerned with second-hand sex. That was not readily available to most of us.

Now I was tackling Proust, and the questions were all of the same kind and totally irrelevant. I answered them as best I could—devious and appealingly, but nobody would bite and ask to be next on the book. It is a weird world where sex itself is not the target but only some illusion to it, some surrogate version of the real thing, false and insubstantial. Why, a real woman walking into the transmitter site would throw these guys, these sad pretense for soldiers, into a panic. They would bolt for the door or, worse, become tongue-tied, real wallflowers when confronted by the real thing, about which they chattered incessantly. And me among them, I am afraid. It is another case of the lowest common denominator. What joins us is also what drives us the farthest apart. It’s an irreconcilable world, I’m afraid.

You might think that nighttime at a transmitter maintenance site would be the ideal arrangement for a man who considers himself a writer, wouldn’t you? But I couldn’t write a thing. There was something about the place, all of the men with next to nothing to do, wandering around, peeking over your shoulder at what you were reading, seeking conversation and diversion, that, though not busy, you were never able to make use of your time for something practical and beneficial. Such as writing. It was a non-conducive climate. All of us were miserable. There is a certain kind of misery that does not lend itself to creative endeavor. It tends to promote the opposite.

We entertained ourselves by listening in on radio/telephone conversations under the guise of monitoring them, which was one of our duties. Ha, ha. Phone calls travel over copper wire until they reach us, where they enter radio transmission equipment and are changed into radio signals. FM. This means their frequency is modulated. We had to make sure the channels were clear and working. So we listened in. What some people will say to each other over a wire to which they think nobody is listening! Absolutely incredible and too lewd for repeating.

Want to hear some? I did..

"Love you, baby. You being true to me?"

"You know I am, honey.."

"You keeping that muffin closed up tight, like a good girl?’

"You know I am, honey. It’s only for you. I’m tight as a clam."

You know she’s lying by the sweet sound of her voice. When people are telling the truth, they tend to speak in an even tone, with little modulation. When the tone is cloying, you can be pretty certain someone is being unfaithful.

It didn’t much matter who the poor guy was—soldier, sailor, coast guardsman, marine. All were being cuckolded in much the same manner. This poor sap was in the Coast Guard, because Ketchikan had a large detachment station there, but I, a soldier, could easily identify with him. We were all in the same boat in the same swim, namely the Pacific Ocean. Each of us had been reduced to the protagonist in a dirty joke. On and on this couple talked, exchanging lies, while his meter ticked. It was always the guy who paid the long, long-distance charges. One way or another. He was all of us. A kind of Everyman.

7

Just about the time I learned to tune a transmitter really well, and had caught on to the true nature of the world of men and women, and what constituted high fidelity, at least as revealed among them over our radio/telephone circuit, the major in charge called me into his office one dim afternoon and said sweetly, "Arnold, I have the perfect job for you. You are exactly the right man for it. I will hence describe your duties to you. I want you to think it over and let me know your answer. It need be in the affirmative."

So I listen, as he outlined what I would do in the most glowing of terms.

I listened dutifully, then replied, "No, no thank you, Major. But thanks for asking."

He urged me to think on it some more. He was, in real life (for this was clearly the phony one), a lawyer. Now he was an army lawyer. Why (I asked myself) would a man go through law school, pass the bar exams, then go into the Army and make it a career?

There was no good answer. It defied reason. The major (Stang was his name) was moderately smart, I knew, and certainly clever. He knew enough to give me a choice in a matter not involving any choice at all. This was right out of Catch 22, and he corresponded directly to its famous character, Major Major. Perhaps he aspired to be this person, unreal as it might seem, for we were living unreally in unreal times. I wanted to shake his hand and compliment him on his sense of humor. But you don’t offer to shake an officer’s hand, let alone a major, not unless he proffers his first, and they seldom do. So mine hung limply by my side, greatly unused.

I went away; I thought over the matter for a few days and gave him my response. I declined again.

He urged me to think about it some more. He was, in real life (for this was clearly the phony one), a lawyer. Now he was an army lawyer. Why (I asked myself) would a man go through law school, pass the bar exams, then go into the Army and make it a career?

There was no good answer. It defied reason. The major (Stang was his name) was moderately smart, I knew, and certainly clever. He knew enough to give me a choice in a matter not involving any choice at all. This was right out of Catch 22, and he corresponded directly to its famous character, Major Major. Perhaps he aspired to be this person, unreal as it might seem, for we were living unreally in unreal times. I wanted to shake his hand and compliment him on his sense of humor. But you don’t offer to shake an officer’s hand, let alone a major, not unless he proffers his first, and they seldom do. So mine hung limply by my side, greatly unused.

I went away; I thought over the matter for a few days and gave him my response. I declined again.

"You are going to Annette Island, where you will be in charge," he continued, as from the previous time, not having said anything to me this day, not even hello, only looking up at my entrance as though I were a large insect come fluttering into his office, which was unlikely, for this was still drear winter.

"Let me congratulate you on the wisdom of your choice. I knew all along you were the right man for the job."

He was not only dull, it would seem, but obtuse. He looked at me with true exasperation and I could see the kind of man he was at heart. There was not an ounce of kindness in him anywhere. Nor benevolence, either.

"Arnold, you try my patience. You are going, whether you want to go or not."

"Thank you," I replied. "It was not my intention to try you patience, only to get out of going. I like it here. Ketchikan suits me"

"You leave for Annette Island at oh-seven-hundred hours tomorrow. Be on time. It isn’t that the boat won’t leave without you, only that the captain doesn’t like waiting and will make your trip unpleasant. Take the rest of the day off to pack your gear. No, don’t thank me. The army always gives you the rest of such a day off. If I could I wouldn’t, you exasperate me so."

"Thank you, sir."

A wise man, soldier or not, knows when he is licked. There is a time for submission, and this was it.

The island was shaped like the letter C, lying on its side, as though somebody had delivered it a knockout punch and it now lay groggily trying to recover. It was long ago settled by a renegade band of Indians who now owned its entirety, having emigrated from the wilds of Central Canada and been led by a (now long-deceased) Father Smith, a wild-looking, slightly mad, flame-haired minister, to their new home. The US Government had deeded them the island, I know not why, and then had been forced to lease it back from them during World War Two to build a airplane landingfield for its military. After the war it became a commercial venture, leasing the field to various airlines, and the Indians—well, some of them—became wealthy.

Standard Oil was one of the largest concessions. Naturally it cost them. Pan Am, Pacific Northern, Ellis, all airlines, plus the Coast Guard, used the field and paid through the nose, for the location served Ketchikan, being the only flat enough place around for hundreds of miles on which to land a commercial aircraft, plus the smaller amphibian Grumman Goose flown by the shuttle service that took people too and from the island. The Army controlled all communications for the island, and I was in charge of them, which meant I must maintain them in good working order and collect the user fees. This included land telephone, radio telephone, teletype, and a office at the airfield, where I met the planes and offered them my telephone/teletype services for a fee.

The Indians owned and controlled most everything. It was said that, if you had to go to the john, they would pick up a fee for you using the public toilet. And, smart, they would make you pay first. (Toilet paper was additional.) Besides myself and the Indians, there were personnel from the three big airlines, the Coast Guard Air Detachment (rescue at sea was their specialty, nay, their mission), and the CAA, whose staff numbered but three. They kept pretty much to themselves. There were also assorted maintenance personnel for the airfield and service personnel for the Coast Guard detachment. I could have lived with them, I suppose, but nobody had thought about it and I, for sure, was not one to suggest it.

I lived with Pam Am, who had the biggest contingent of personnel on the island, including cooks, airplane mechanics, groundskeepers, maids, launderers, ticket sellers, baggage handlers, etc. This was because we often had passengers staying overnight because they were socked in; the shuttle aircraft were not flying because of the inclemency. Occasionally passengers were trapped here overnight, and had to be billeted and fed. Also there were the meals onboard the plane that had to be prepared ahead of time and put in warming trays. So we had a full complement of cooks at Pam Am. Additionally we had to put up the plane’s crew, which included yummy stewardesses. They were a tasty morsel. We valued the arrival of each plane from the States, for it brought with it fresh meat and vegetables.

I maintained communications for the island, including the Indians tripod phone line into their major center, the town of Metlakatla, which my personnel record indicated I had plenty of previous experience doing, though in point of fact I had none. I would go to the airfield each time a commercial liner landed and open up my little office, enabling them to make phonecalls and send telegrams. When something broke down, I would fix it. And my diplomatic skills would often be called upon to work closely with all these mutually dependable people, most of whom were hopeless alcoholics. I myself was a borderline case.

The way the major described it was pure artistry. I was a veritable one-man band, you know, one of those guys with a kazoo in his mouth, a washboard on his chest, a couple of squeeze-ball horn beepers, all the while working a great bass drum with my foot pedal. The wonder wasn’t how good the music was, only that there was any identifiable melody emitted. A Renaissance Man of Communications, the major might have called it, me, but did not. He knew I was a college man and as a consequence could be snowed, or bullshitted, only in certain areas, not in others. There is a fine line. Thus he recognized my need for privacy and running my own show. It was a job for a man for all seasons, namely, the long wet winter ahead, which would follow a spring and summer measured in but minutes. In his opinion, I was the one.

I, in turn, learned to respect and admire the major’s special talents. One of the reasons he was put there, in dreary Ketchikan, was because he was a lawyer. Yes, an Army lawyer. It was he who negotiated the contracts with the Metlakatla Indians and, in the process, gave them nearly everything they wanted. Such generosity. Imagine a small tribe living snugly together in new government housing, the streets of pure mud, no sidewalks, but with every imaginable electrical appliance provided, some of which continued to work past their warranty period. The government not only gave them a world of concessions but paid them for accepting and using the concessions.

It went something like this: Say the tribe needed telephone service. Fair enough; we all do. Try to live for more than fifteen minutes without a functioning telephone. Anybody alive will tell you, "Impossible."

So the Army, my major, negotiated a contract to put in the phoneline, which I was to maintain and keep in good working order. Of course the Army paid them to provide this badly needed service. Say it was two-hundred a month. Then the line broke down and need work to be made functional again. The Indians charged the Army to do this for them. It gets weirder. For each telephone provided, working or not, the Army paid them. And each time it had to be repaired, or a shorted-out line made to operate again, the Army was presented with a bill. For each of these operations, an Indian consultant had to be retained. He was a specialist, a specialist in Indian affairs, and generally nothing else. Nobody knew the Indian requirements as well as another Indian, it only held to reason. Indian Reason.

What he really knew was how to charge for his time. The exact amount of time he expended assisting and in other ways advising was known only to him. He kept track of it. The place he kept it in track was in his mind. Upstairs. Often he would tap his forehead in order to come up with a calculation. It was a wonder to see. He rounded out his time to the nearest hour, but since the hours spent tended to get all mixed up without having been written down he could only remember it to the nearest half-day. There was really very little difference, say, in a period of time that came to nearly an hour and a period that was half a day. Thus, if you called him on the telephone about a matter, not only would he charge you for the call, but he would charge you for the time he spent talking to you about fixing whatever it was that had gone wrong that he was complaining about. To make his bookkeeping more manageable, he would round off a little more. He rounded it upward. The agreed-upon basic unit of time for consulting work (the tribe discussed this for months before it reached agreement) was one full day.

Rate of pay was that of the highest paid non-Indian involved in the transaction. This was nominally the major. If a major made ten dollars an hour, let us say (for this was 1954), so did the Indian consultant. He was to be paid $80 each time you talked to him, even if it was about when you might repair his telephone. He may have broken the phone using it to pound a nail in the wall in order to hang up his hat. If he had a hat. Whether he did or not didn’t really matter.

I was to be party to this and much more. The major did not want to alarm me with more details about doing business on Annette Island, so he stopped there and asked again for my compliance.

"If you don’t mind, sir, I’d just as soon stay here in Ketchikan. I have a nice apartment and I’ve recently made some friends."

"A girl?"

"Would a girl help my case any?"

"No."

"Perhaps a girl, perhaps several girls, but most assuredly friends. You remember Pete, who sold his car to buy a stereo, since we don’t have much here in terms of roads to drive a car on?"

"I know the man."
"A career soldier, unlike myself. He is in charge of my shift at the transmitter and is teaching me a lot. I’ve just begun to grasp it, the basic elements."

"Let’s see, Arnold. Wednesday morning, 0700, we have the first flight scheduled for departure for Annette.."

"Can’t possibly make it, sir. That’s the day after tomorrow. I’ve got a dozen, two dozen, things to do before I could even think about departing."

"Hasten your thinking and have good day. Dismissed."

"You have one, too, sir. Have two."

And so I went off to my new home. I settled in and could think only of escape, for it was a bleak and forlorn place, with minimal women. I would beg a ride to Ketchikan on Saturday afternoon. I used to ride bravely in the co-pilot’s seat of the Grumman Goose; the controls had been removed in order to make room for one more passenger, a place which left me white with terror. It was a joke among Ellis Airline pilots and also the ones for the Coast Guard, whom I often drank with, in their club, which was not segregated according to officers and men but allowed us to mix indiscriminately and with no harmful after effects.

The Coast Guard pilots were among the world’s best and would often fly when nobody else was fool enough to try. They thought of themselves as fighter pilots, I guess, deprived of combat aircraft, and were determined to a man to get revenge on the system by trying to smash up their expensive patrol aircraft by going out in the worst of weather, which they laughed at like the madmen they were. They were heavy drinkers and barely had time to sober up from the night before before being told to rev up their engines and head out. This they did cheerfully enough. You simply could not keep them on the ground.

Contrary to what I’d told the major, I had a girl in Ketchikan. Actually I had three, but when you have three, you often find you don’t have even one. which turned out to be the case. So I was often on the outlook to replenish my stock, that is, to have more, or to even have one I liked a lot and could depend on. This was more than I deserved, for I was totally undependable and often ruined my chances of a second date by turning up an hour or two late for my first one. Or not at all.

I would fly back to Ketchikan at every opportunity, though I was not supposed to, was supposed never to leave my duty station, the island of Annette. Of course the major, to whom I reported ("Arnold, I never want to hear from you again, get it?") knew I was derelict in my duty and was, in fact, often gone briefly from my island and drunkenly roaming the one he inhabited, slinking around the streets, a bottle of Dewars in my hand and sucking on one of my deadly Chesterfields. I was looking for women, fresh or stale; it did not much matter to me.

If Ellis Air wasn’t flying because of raging inclemency, I would petition my buddies in the Coast Guard. If they were not immediately responsive, I would plead:

"Hey, friend, I got a babe waiting. Long blond hair, down to here. Long blond legs, up to here." My hands flew in illustration.

"If a duck won’t fly, I won’t, either. And the mallards gave up the cause hours ago."

"Pretty please? Maybe she’s got a friend."

"Are you offering me a girl, soldier?"

Suddenly we were military again, opposing branches of service, not guys who had been sipping from the same bottle, a few hours back. And he knew how sensitive I was about being an enlisted man.

"No, not just any girl, nor a friend of my girl. The very girl herself. You can have her, I’ll set it up, it’ll be easy, she is easy. I’ll go off and find myself a new one. But, whatever, please fly me into Ketchikan, or else I’ll go mad. It’s a sight you don’t want to see, believe me."

"Might be worth it. No, I don’t like being stuck here, either. I’ve flown in worst stuff than this. The question is, can you handle such a flight? I remember how you spreadeagle yourself each time we come in for a water landing."

"That’s just so you will be able to see out my side window. I have no personal fear, believe me." It was a lie, of course.

So off we would go, into the peasoup weather, the wind blowing so hard that a man can’t stand on his feet at less than a thirty-degree angle, rain splashing on the cabin windshield as though we had dove into the sea itself. The wings would rock back and forth as the pilot held the brakes and throttled up for takeoff. One time we taxied down to the end of the field, which was awash and ablown, and wheeled into the wind.

"Shit," said the pilot, a lieutenant, "I’m not taking off in this slop. What kind of fool do you take me for?"

"Only the very best kind," I replied, my morale descending like a plumb bob, as I suddenly realized I had lost my last chance to get laid tonight, small as that might be. The heart (not to mention the loins) live in eternal hope and constant disappointment. We are all characters straight out of Samuel Beckett, most of the time.

On those Saturday nights when I managed to get flown in, I roamed the streets like a lunatic. It is important to have a clear visual image of me. I wore a gray glenn plaid suit, skinny rep tie (mostly black), not too clean white shirt, camelshair topcoat, black Tyrolean felt hand with silver band—the same one that had stood me in such good stead in Sun Valley. None of this was ideal for the rain, which was constant. I was generally soaked as I walked stiffly down the slickened streets of Ketchikan, drunk, careful not to slip, slide, and fall down in the streaming gutter, which was flowing dangerously high. I went from bar to bar, never remaining long in any one of them, and was generally tolerated by the bartender, a he or a she, who instantly recognized me and knew I was no threat to the overall tranquillity of the place. I mean, nothing a bartender wants less on Saturday night than another fistfight fight. Often my first drink was on the house. In return I only stayed for one.

Restless and ever on the prowl, quickly I surveyed the scene for available women (usually none; none again) and was ready to move on for richer ground, for the truth was, a bar is a poor place to meet women, and most of the ones you encounter you don’t want, movies and novels to the contrary.

So anxious to meet and mate, I usually forgot to get a hotel room, or else I was over optimistic, and when one AM sloshed round, and I was ready for sleep, I had no place to go; the hotels were all full. Then I had to made do. It is at such a time that one’s sense of enterprise is truly tested. I knew one place where I could always find a place to lay me down—the major’s desk. He would no more come into the office on a Saturday night than he would invite me to his home. It was the safest place in the world, the most secure, place in the world. I’d push his stack of work papers off on the floor, or more charitably stack them there, and curl up on the desk the way a possum would, my topcoat over me, and in a matter of seconds I’d be dead to the world. I didn’t exactly pass out, but you might say that insomnia never bothered me.

In the morning, holding my jaws tightly clenched so that my teeth would not rattle from my shivers, I’d regard the world through bloody Mary eyes and not like what I saw. I’d have to fly back to the island immediately, for it was too late to grab breakfast in a restaurant, and would get to Pan Am just in time for lunch. Everything there was a la carte and I would order myself a great bloody airborne steak from the grill.

"Throw it on and turn it over," I told the cook, a personal buddy and a great fishing companion who taught me how to bevel-cut large herring that no salmon would refuse.

He did expressly this.

The steak looked into my eye and said moo. "Put it back on and count to one-hundred," I asked.

He did what I told him, but the steak was still blue and cold in the center, but that was the way I ate them. I had some strange idea it was manly; also, a sure cure for the hangover that was pressing at my temples.

A flight was due in a at two o’clock in this otherwise languid afternoon, and I would have to open up shop for the passengers and offer them my commercial telephone and telegraph facilities. Then, unless one of my circuits was down and needed immediate tending and repair, I was free for the rest of the day, or until the next plane arrived. So my sense of loss of my freedom was ever brief.

My equipment was stored in a loft upstairs in the huge Coast Guard Air Detachment hangar across the airfield from the terminal and my office. There were four large Motorola FM units, about which I knew nothing at all. Two were active, two held in reserve. If something went wrong with one unit, and it often did, I was to carry it across the field and put it on the first seaplane headed for Ketchikan. Then I would kick in one of the standby units, I hoped with a minimum loss of continuity. How the damn thing worked internally—the guts of it—remained a mystery, but I was told that if I wanted to fool around with it (after I’d gotten the standby unit up and working, of course) there were spare vacuum tubes in a metal locker, plus a little tester for them, since they were highly undependable. The special tubes were about $25 each and you never knew until you plopped one into its many-pronged socket whether it would light up or not. And some that were lit like veritable Christmas trees did not function, bright as they glowed. So I plugged them in, pluck them right out again, and threw them away if the set did not perform. Often I would throw away three or four hundred dollars worth of tubes before I got one that transmitted and received the way it should, hang the expense. It was the Army’s problem. Then, proud as I could be, for I had corrected the problem unaided, I would radio Ketchikan that I and I had fixed the problem, so as not to worry about the dysfunctional set presently arriving by floatplane.

I thought this enterprising attitude might lead to a promotion, but it didn’t. There was one good reason why. Let me explain.

At the airfield, in a safe, I had a cash box. It always held fifty dollars startup money, plus whatever I’d taken in the previous day. I banked through the mail each working day. Each morning bright and early it held fifty bucks in cash, or was supposed to. Point of fact it usually was somewhat less. This was because some poor goof of a Coast Guard enlisted man, a brother to myself, would get on the wire to his girl, say in Tennessee, and they would talk about whether or not they would ever get together again to, ahem, do it, and, by his sly indirection, whether she was doing it with somebody else, ("of course not, what do you think I am?"), and on and on it would go, while she tried to console and comfort the guy with tales of her faithfulness, probably while the other guy was feeling her thigh, and the Coast Guardsman would end up with such a bill. I instantly calculated it and asked for payment. The guy simply didn’t have it; he didn’t know he’d talk so long and the bill would be so much.

So I would cover for him, one way or another. That is, I would come up short in my till and carry it over. I’d let it go. He promised to borrow from his buddies, but often the money came late. The, most unexpectedly, he’d show up and thrust the crumpled bills and loose change in my hand, murmuring thanks. Then I would have to make everything right in my books. Balance them, I mean, and account for the missing money. In my mind I knew right to the dime or dollar how much I was short. Sometimes I’d make up the differences out of my own pocket and then pay myself back later, out of the till. Each morning I had to send the right amount to Ketchikan by courier, that is, in a little locked bag on the first seaplane flight of the day.

One morning I reported to my office at about nine, my self-appointed starting hour; a flight was due within a few minutes. A strange gnarled man in a blue/black suit was waiting for me; looking angrily at his watch, he said had been waiting an hour. His glance took in my costume, a unique blend of civilian garb, Army uniform parts, and odd bits of clothing given me by my buddies in the CG. He did not like what he saw. (I thought it rather fetching myself, a sure sign of style in these remote parts; the very best a man could come up with.) He was an Army auditor. They are not known for their wit or sense of humor.

"Where the hell have you been, Arnold?" he greeted me. Now, civilians have no real power over the military, but they can make things difficult, and their recommendations often lead to bad events. He had something of that sort in mind for me.

"You don’t want to know."

Actually, I’d been in bed, until moments ago.

"Let’s see your cash box," he persisted.

Oh God, here it was. I was short, short again. A CGsman yesterday had run up a real bill—I’d monitored the call myself from my office, and if anybody did real need, he had. His girl was pregnant, and she told Philip he was the father, even though he’d been in Alaska for a year. She was explaining to him how this could be, and he was trying to comprehend. I mentally complimented her on her skill in story telling. She almost had us both convinced. I knew in my head that I was about eighteen dollars short. I hadn’t enough in my pocket to make it up.

I searched my pockets. "Can’t seem to find the key to the box," I told him, this nameless accountant who suddenly had such power over me and how I operated.. "Be right back." And I dashed off across the field to my maintenance loft, even though I knew it was no source of ready money. I needed time to think. Where could I find some money fast? I could not stall and play dumb for long.

I spotted the Lt. Commander who was second in command of the station. His name was Pete and he was nearly a friend. I briefed him on the situation.

"How much money do you need?" he asked, reaching for his wallet.

"About eighteen bucks. Boy, you should have heard her, Pete. What a line she fed him. You know, it could have been you, it could have been me, just as easily."

"I know. Just lucky, I guess."

I tucked the twenty—a shade too much, but no time to make change?—in the sole of my hand, inexpertly palming it, and raced across the field and back into my office.

"Found it. It was in my shop. Left it there last night, I guess."

"My, wasn’t that dumb of you?" he said sarcastically. "Now let’s see the insides of that cash box."

"Coming right up, boss," I said, in my most unctuous manner. I’m afraid it wasn’t very convincing or sincere.

I spun the dial on my safe, reached into it, and most crudely brought out the black tin box, opened it up clumsily, and flopped the bill onto the top. The auditor looked at me askance and said he had never seen such a poor performance. I grinned sadly and shrugged both shoulders. Slowly, as though it were his own money, he began to count it out.

"You’re three dollars and thirty-one cents over, Arnold."

"It’s Pfc. Arnold, let me remind you," I said, and it stayed Pfc. Arnold for another six months, when his report hit the fan. I was six weeks overdue to become corporal and this lengthened the time further.
The major called my office the same day.

"You dumb son of a bitch," he began.

"Hi, Major," I replied. "I thought you didn’t want to hear from me again?"

"Look, I don’t mind you sleeping on my desk. . . ."

"You know about that, sir?"

"I know about everything you do, Arnold. I am God, so far as you are concerned. And God says you’ve fucked up. Again"
"Yes, but I’ve got a good explanation."

"There is no good explanation for an auditor, Dog Shit."

"You can’t call me Dog Shit, sir. There’s the Uniform Code of Military Justice that prevents you"

"You forget, Dog Shit, that I am a lawyer. The Uniform Code of Military Justice says expressly that I can call you Dog Shit, Dog Shit, under special circumstances. Any time I like. This is one such time."

"As you keep reminding me."
"As you keep reminding me, sir."

"You don’t have to call me sir, sir. I am but a humble enlisted man."

"Don’t toy with me. I could bust you, son."

"I’m about as low as I can get, sir."

"You aren’t stupid, Arnold."

"Thank you, sir."

"But you’re dumb."

"Explain to me the difference. Sir."

"I’m not about to explain anything to you. You won’t be corporal, that’s about all I can tell you."

"It means forty bucks a month to me, sir."

"It doesn’t mean dog shit to me, Dog Shit."

And there it stood. It wasn’t bad enough to courts-martial me over, but it was serious enough so that my major had a tiny blemish on his record because of me. I wanted to tell him that he wouldn’t have made light colonel, anyway. It was pretty well known around the islands that his job and his rank were terminal, and he was stationed in Ketchikan mainly to deal with the Indians on Annette Island. Otherwise, anybody else could have done the job.

To me it was a major matter though only comprising three-dollars and thirty-one cents. It would buy a medium breakfast then in practically any restaurant. But the fuss it led to, and what it cost me, and perhaps my major, who usually only dealt in larger tariffs paid to the Indians at $80 an hour, government money, it loomed large. I tried to forget it, but never quite managed. And, oh yes, I did make corporal, but it wasn’t until the end of my tour of duty.

8

Once upon a time there was a man and he went to Alaska and stayed there, oh, three months or six months, then flew home, and during all that time he not only wasn’t an alcoholic, he never took a drink. There is a monument to him in Anchorage.

Bronze, it has since turned green and is coated with white pigeon excreta. It figures.

Here is an Alaskan love story. A man is married and has three children, two boys and a girl, but that doesn’t matter, and things are not going too well between him and his wife, and he drinks some, and she drinks, too, and when the kids are old enough, they begin to drink, but long before this, the man decides he wants a new life, so he quits his job (they were about to fire him, anyway), grabs the family bank account, strikes out, flies to Alaska, is instantly hired at some shit job, continues to drink heavily, but who there doesn’t or is apt of complain?

Ten years passes. He thinks, I ought to return home and straighten out the whole mess, make everything right with everybody, at least get a divorce. Five years more pass.

He meets a woman. She has three children, two girls and a boy. She has been separated from her husband ever since she moved in with a guy who turned out to be a bad character and use to tap her with the palm of his hand along side the skull whenever he felt like it. When she ditched him at a movie theater, saying she had to pee, pee again, the way women do, she took up with a guy who said he had a lot of money and was in the business of recycling VCR that came into his hands unasked for, some every night. But he was arrested for having in his pocket a simple baggie full of talc that a man he hardly knew had asked him to hold for him, just for an hour, and would pay him well for doing so, and innocent old he, it turned out, was stuck with the bag, which held a small quantity of cocaine that had been stepped on so many times tested out to be almost pure talc. But it contained just enough cocaine that he went to jail for a year and she headed for Alaska. She began to drink a little more than in the past because it helped to endure the long black Alaskan evenings that began about noon and didn’t end until nine the next morning.

The two met. It was something at first sight.

Soon they began to live together. It happens. They had so much in common, you see. Both liked ribsteaks smothered in onion, with chili alongside, and a big glass of beer, not so cold as to lose its taste. They liked Cagney and Lacey reruns, Seahawk football, looking a Dahl sheep through powerful game-spotting scopes that you could rent with quarters, boilermakers, the rich produce fields of Palmer. Had any couple ever so much to share? Their sex life was good, if not great, and she found no reason not to go down on him, when he asked nicely, so he returned the favor, though not so eagerly. They would have gotten married, if they hadn’t already been married to somebody else. It was but a technicality. Both carried snapshots of their kids, though they knew said kids had grown to adulthood and probably they wouldn’t recognize them if they bumped into them on the street. How sad, but then life was no extended picnic. Daily the past they shared grew longer.

He was Ralph, she Wilma. They were the salt of the earth, they believed. They could not be surprised and hardly ever delighted. So it goes. He drove a gravel truck for M-K. It paid twice what it would have, Stateside. She found she was better at doing nails than at hair styling. She opened up a boutique, which is a fancy name for a small shop catering to women. Then she opened another. Each lasted about a year. She blamed each failure on landlords who raised the rent exorbitantly. A lie is generally partly true.

As Christmas approached each year, they were filled with separate dread. The two were very much alike. Each planned to return home and straighten out disparate matters. But each year there was something that got in the way. Wilma went through the menopause, secretly stating, "Thank goodness. I couldn’t endure getting knocked again." Ralph found a brand of bourbon that made his morning headaches a little less debilitating. She said it was really from all the cigarettes. It took one to know one, he said angrily. Smoking was one of the few things they now had in common, he believed. One night on a long haul he stopped for an eye-opener, but had a double and remained for some good, male conversation. They found him the next day at the bottom of Sumpter Canyon, still in the cab. The truck lay on its side like some great slain beast, perhaps a mastodon. There was little blood, so the cops reasoned he hit his head on the dash and that was sufficient. It often is the way.

Wilma closed her third shop, which was barely profitable, and went to work as a counselor for Indians who did not know how to drink. They had associated problems as well. She was supposed to listen to them talk, look interested, then make referrals to people with more specific skills who would help them, such as rehabilitation centers and places where they distributed perfectly good, clean used clothing and food stuffs deemed surplus but not to be resold. There she met a man, part Eskimo, looking for some overalls. He looked right, had all the necessary attributes, so she invited him home for a steak dinner as only she knew how to prepare, she bragged. First you had two belts of Jim Beam, and then you slid the ribsteak into the pan, along with a little bacon grease to keep it from sticking and to give it a little special flavor, not that they needed any, not really. Meanwhile the chili came to a fast boil. You wanted to slice the onion as thin as you could, so you could almost see through it. The beer didn’t much matter, but Pabst was okay, and it was okay too if it hadn’t visited the refrige since it had left the store..

Afterwards she would put a tape in the VCR. It was either more Cagney and Lacy (he had passed the liking it test) or B&B, which is what they called Bevis and Butthead, as though it were a drink. They had the same kind of humor.

I could go on, but I needn’t. You get the picture, such as it is? An Alaskan Romance should leave some things for the imagination, such as it is.

9

There really wasn’t very much to do in maintaining the Annette Island Station, but I tried to each required task with as much twist and flair as I could, as though somebody were watching. Perhaps the major.

Once he flew in and I met his flight. It wasn’t to see me expressly and so I wore my usual original uniform. He scarcely gave it a glance. I gave him a ride to Metlakatla in the car I had just bought for $35 and ran only on helicopter gasoline. He was here to negotiate a new deal with the Indians and I feared that, once again, they would get the best of him. He was their patsy. He figured he would save the Army some money by not taking the taxi, which was owned by one of the Indians and who charged excessively for, whereas I was free. The idea was, you save five dollars on a ride in order to spend twenty-five thousand on more unneeded consulting services for furnishing the Indians with another needed service. Now, that’s economy. When he had done his nefarious business, I drove him back to the airport and waved goodbye. He had not said a word, the whole trip back. Come to think of it, he hadn’t had much to say on the first trip.

I liked and admired the Indians, and some of their young women who, if you looked at them not too closely or in the wrong slant of prevailing light, were almost beautiful. In a couple of years they would turn to fat. So they had a brief period of bloom when they were attractive. This was the same year when some of them found white husbands. We military knew enough to try to avoid them, though not everybody was successful. Also, there were the Pan Am hostesses, but they seldom overnighted, unless there was a terrible storm that grounded the planes. We lived in hope of such an event. Rarely did they occur.

Movies were flown in to benefit the troops, who were Coast Guardsmen. I was the only soldier on the island and had full privileges. The movies were shown in the CG canteen, which is also where they ate. It contained a bar; it was the only one on the island, for it was dry; the Indians saw to this. We saw all the first-run movies and drank beer until mandatory closing, which was weeknights at eleven. That is plenty of time to get fully drunk. It was in the canteen nightly that we got to know each other, those of us compelled to be here, for whatever his reason.

There was Orlo, who was representative for Ellis Air, the Grumman Goose seaplanes painted blue and orange. He did not like to drink alone, but would, if he couldn’t find somebody to stay up with him, to all hours of the early morning, to keep him company. One by one we did, then begged off in the future because it was too exhausting and demanding. So he drank alone, usually in his room, when the canteen closed and he still could walk. His room at Pam Am was next to mine.

Orlo was the chief PNA officer on the island. In fact, he was their only representative. He reported to himself. It is a nice arrangement if you can get it. As in my case, his superiors didn’t want to hear from him unless there was an emergency. We both strove never to recognize one. He sold tickets, handled baggage, logged the shuttle flights in and out, along with their passengers, checked them off on his list, one by one, until he had them all safely, or knew the good reason why not, finally waved bye-bye to the Super-Constellation as it lifted up at an incredible sharp angle that would guarantee a stall and crash for any other plane. Then he was free to resume his primary duty, which was to drink. This he did extremely well.

Orlo and I and a guy named George, a cook, a passenger agent named Rick, who was remarkably handsome, and a few more assorted characters lived at Pan Am. We each had individual room connected by a long hallway. It was much like a military hospital in that it was one-storey, made of wood, and strung out in a wandering course as though built in afterthoughts. Our building additionally was built on stilts, a few feet above the pervasive muskeg. It was an impossible place to heat in winter because the walls were thin wood. The heat ran all the time. Either you shivered or you roasted. Noises were easily transmitted and seemed to be greatly magnified, almost as though we were all living in one room. Thus we had few secrets.

Rick was a passenger agent, as was Snyder, a married man who had special married quarters, that is, a house, as did the station manager, Juan, who was Mexican. There was a young woman, a former stewardess, who was also a passenger agent, but she lived in Ketchikan and we only saw her at parties. I think I dated her once, but it was uneventful and her name continues to escape me.

To pass the time I read a lot, but then I always have. There comes a time in the long Alaskan night of the soul when a book is not enough. It never is. The heart, or soul, cries out for some human contact. This usually meant some kind of party. Parties were always spontaneously happening. And thank goodness. One by one we’d come out of our lairs, a silly grin on each of our faces, and we’d party. This was nightly. A party would last until, one by one, as we had started out, we’d quit.

Orlo usually started the party. You came to dread it, at the same time you looked forward to it. A pixy grin on his flushed elfin face, he’d rap at my door, which was only a few feet from his. He’d usually had one or two for starters, all by himself. He was what you might call a crazy drunk, but an enormously good-nature, and this part of his personality never changed, no matter how much he imbibed.

He had a full-sized hi-fi stereo assembled in his tiny room, or cell (a room just like mine), with speakers the size of armchairs, and though he didn’t much care about music, as such, considering it all carefully organized noise, there was some noise he liked better than other, and his present obsession was Beethoven’s Ninth. This was about the time when long-play vinyl records (33s) had just come out and Toscanni had recorded the Ninth with his orchestra and some famous choir. The last part of it was vocal. He’d play his record at top volume, over and over, and the walls would rattle, the floor shake, and off in the hills the wolves would hear the sound and hit their high note, or series of notes, either in harmony or protest.

We drank steadily and often. There was a liquid called Everclear. "Everclear, beware," the label should read, for it was five-percent short of being pure grain alcohol. Orlo had a source. All booze was illegal on the island, but there were ways. The stuff arrived in an unlabeled Mason jar, looking completely innocuous; it was rumored that if a drop fell on your bare skin it would burn you like infamous white phosphorous would. We cut the stuff, of course. Canned grapefruit juice was a favorite choice; the stuff was tart enough to neutralize the bite of the noxious stuff. (If we’d had frozen orange juice, it would have been the perfect mix, but all we had on hand was canned, and grapefruit proved better.

We all had different ways of exiting the scene when we were drinking. Rick had the room on the other side of mine, and he would simply sink deep into his armchair and nearly disappear. He’d start to nod off, snap himself awake with a nacreous grin, full of teeth, rise, stretch, excuse himself, and go off to bed. Because of this I never thought he was an alcoholic, but he might have been. His behavior didn’t rule it out.

Orlo drank long into the night, becoming more manic as it wore on. He usually experience total amnesia afterwards, not remembering anything that took place after midnight. We would recount to him his antics and he would be disbelieving. This made him a weird Cinderella type, who continued to believe his coach was not really a pumpkin, drawn by a legion of field mice.

When sober, Orlo could dance not a step, but past midnight you could not stop him. If a woman wouldn’t dance with him, okay, he would dance alone. And he did, asweat, as the hours passed. He was a veritable whirling dervish. Women (the wives of Coast Guard officers and CAA civilians personnel) were terrified when they saw him approaching. But, drunk, he could dance like a tripping wind, you might say, but he was also a bit out of control, wild, apt to veer off in any direction, and perhaps fall down.

In the morning he would remember none of this . We’d describe to him in detail his various actions, and he, red-faced, would deny them, one after another, which sent us into mocking gales of derision, so he knew he was probably wrong and had done what we said. Poor guy.

We took turns chronicling his events—"You did this, you did that, don’t you remember, you went up to her, you said, you put on this hat, you took off your shirt." "I did not," he roared. Oh, it was wonderful. But if you were Orlo—if you lived inside Orlo, as he did—it must not have been much fun, hearing all this described, over and over, as though his hidden life were a movie known to all but him.

A huge blue vein pulsed at Orlo’s temple. Right, I think; it was on your left, when you looked at him. Yes. I wonder if it wasn’t an aneurysm in the making? When he had been hard at the bottle, in the morning it was fierce. It bulged up as if a small snake had secreted itself under the skin. He must have known about it, seen it in the mirror when he shaved away his stubble—if he could see anything, those awful mornings.

He crawled late out of the sack and drove without breakfast over to the airfield, just in time for the arrival of the nine-o’clock flight, in order to greet the first PNA passengers, alighting. He still had that screwy grin on his face from the previous night, a bit lopsided and crooked. It was with this air of self-mockery that he greeted us all, as if to say: I know, I know, I’m a lush, a bit of a clown, too. Well, all right. So be it. I look slightly mad to you, don’t I? Well, if you could look inside, you’d really see something weird. You don’t know the half of it. You are seeing me at my best."

No woman would have him, but all found him and his ways fascinating. How long would he last, on a given night; when would he drop? And he was highly likable. Memorable, too. The stews that landed were always asking, "Hey, where’s Orlo? Show me Orlo, will you, please? Pretty please?" For Orlo was an assurance that a great good time was happening, or soon to happen. He brought it into being.

On one of those rare nights when a plane or two had been grounded by weather, the stews would take turns dancing with him, down at the Coast Guard club. He was known as an incredible dancer, and it was true, but only if he was drunk. You had to see him to believe it, and it was a great shame he never could see himself as we did, for it was a natural phenomena.

There are several stages of drunkenness, of course. Or that drunks go through repeatedly. Some people (me, for instance) get a little high and become garrulous. We raise our voices, laugh a lot, tell stories we would not otherwise think to relate. When we pass into the next stage, we get sloppy. Then sleepy. This is tantamount to passing out. We become quieter and quieter, until we are still, asleep.

But with drunks like Orlo, they are long past spilling. Neither do they slur their words. They rarely stagger. But those of us of us who drank nightly with Orlo saw a small, subtle change take place. It was as though he had taken off a tight hat. He was liberated, deep in some interior recess, and the new freedom gave his body a corresponding sense of release. He was free to soar. Hence the mad dancing, and whatever else might follow. Usually nothing else did. When the music stopped, as it often did, he didn’t not hear it, and continued dancing, alone or with someone. The necessary music was all in his head. And that head carried a huge bulging vein at its temple. Weird.

I kept waiting for something to happen. I mean, that blue vein, the color of a nearly raw steak cut sideways with a sharp knife. At its center. Blue-black you might call it. I waited for it to, well, explode. The life flow out of it. But it never happened, not so long as I was stationed on the island. Orlo continued to function and do his job well. It was physical, it was grueling, it went on day after day. And night after night he drank long and excessively.

10

Even when we were partying—Orlo, Rick, myself, and the others—I was on duty. I never forgot it. I was Army property—what is meant by the term Government Issue (GI).

Even when you are a one-man band, as I was, you are the only entertainment, the only one on duty; there is not substitute or replacement, no other soldier for many, many miles, to bring one here would require either a water or an air journey. In effect I was alone. If anything went wrong with my circuits, all communication between our island and the rest of the world would stop. Pan Am, PNA, Coast Guard, Ellis, Standard Oil, CAA, Indian Tribe, assorted peripheral persons gainfully and ungainfully employed—traffic with them would halt. It would stay that way until I fixed it.

It was a responsibility that wore on me. It ground me down. A phone stood by my bed. I could her its ringer trip over before it actually rang, and the sound filled me with dread. It might happen in the middle of the night, for instance. I would wake instantly. I’d answer the telephone and every time it was bad news. Get out of bed and go fix something, whatever it was that had broken down.

There were situation when this might happen. The first was when my FM/transmitters or receivers went out, and my hurrying down to the airfield and plugging in a fresh tube didn’t do the job. Then I’d go over to a standby unit and in the morning I’d have to ship the failed unit to Ketchikan.

The other time was when my tripod telephone line to Metlakatla blew down in a storm. And it regularly did. Oh how I dreaded the onset of a Pacific storm. It meant a lot of wet work for me. It was a time of misery.

The telephone line served Metlakatla solely. But the Indians used it a lot. When it stopped functioning, so did they, as individuals and as a tribe. Usually the line became grounded. They kept picking up the telephone and hearing no dialtone. All the same they sent out a mechanical ring from a crank on a box; it was an audible signal that traveled at about a thousand Hertz. It tripped a ringer on the receiving telephone that somebody was waiting to talk to them. It was a funny arrangement. Since the signal was in the vocal and audible range, I could approximate the frequency with my mouth and tongue (still can). It was taught me by Dave, the sergeant who preceded me on the island and passed it along to me, as a parting shot. There we stood, telephones in hand, trilling away at each other like a couple of berserk magpies, until the relay on the other end tripped. We could always hear it, for it was a kind of double click arrangement, when we did it right. And then the person on the other end, an Indian in Metlakatla, picked up the phone. And nobody was on the other end.

Dave laughed, hanging up, passing the phone on to me. I’d hold down the talk lever and trill myself, sounding like a fool (had there been anybody except Dave to hear me), tongue against front teeth, modulating and varying my pitch until I got it just right and the relay kicked in and the ringer did its job. It was a useful thing to know how to do, for you can call somebody from a headset or handphone that has no ringer.

Anyway, I had a box with a ringer right over my goddam bed. So I was never free, not really. In the middle of the night I would wake to the click-click of the relay being activated, even before the ringer was. I’d snap awake in my bag like a current of electricity had passed through my body. Already, before the first ring had sounded, my hand was reaching over my head for the phone on its hook. I’d flip the talk switch and groggily answer, "Yeah?"

The voice on the other end would already be talking. "Arnold, you’ve got a big problem." This I already knew. "You got a line down, the one to Metlakatla."

"But it’s raining, Sarge. There’s a storm raging."

"I know there is, Arnold. Why do you think I’m calling? Soldier, on your feet and into your boots. We’ve got an outage here. Hop to it."

And I would drift back to sleep, or half-sleep, knowing there was no pair of eyes watching me. But of course I couldn’t sleep, not really, knowing what awaited me. A short drive, followed by hours of hard work. It was best to get up, get dressed, and get the matter over with. There would be no rest, no peace, until I had.

One time, with the wind howling, soaked to the skin from rain that hit at a slant as from a showerhead, I picked up the downed copper line, just as somebody in Metlakatla cranked the ringer to see if the line had been fixed yet, and the jolt hit me much like lightning, and I must have arched in my shoes, my arms extended, my fingers frozen in their knuckle curl to the bare wire; I couldn’t have let go of the wire if my life depended on it, which it just happened to do. Not until the goof on the other end let go, thinking, no, it wasn’t fixed, for there was no answer. Then my fingers could unclench from the wire.

I hurt in every bone of my body. My hair was frizzed. The next day was worse. But I got the line up off the ground and temporarily suspended on an insulator that would permit current to flow again. The next day the Army sent over an expert. I met his plane, eagerly. He and I knew each other from Ketchikan. He was a jack of many trades and a fearless climber. When an airplane warning light went out on a tower, it was Bill who volunteered to replace it. He climbed the ladder like an ant, going hand-over-hand out on a girder until he came to the dark bulb, which he deftly unscrewed—there, three-hundred feet in the air—holding the fresh one in his mouth, base first. Then he exchanged them. If a jolt of electricity had gone through him, as it had me, the bulb in his mouth would have lit brilliantly. You could have seen a mile by its light.

The downed pole had been rocked into position, the ground being either so soggy (muskeg) or hard (permafrost) that it would not support a properly dug hole. (And oughtn’t I know about those?) So we moved aside some supporting small boulders and cut loose the line from the pole. Then we righted the pole, just the two of us. It was an interesting operation and went like this: We rolled the pole into position where the butt would be stationed. Then Bill picked up the small end of the pole. It had no crossarm on it, only a peg and glass insulator. Lifted it, I say, by both hands under it, doing a neat clean-and-press. Then he hobbled himself forward a yard or so. He screamed for me to relieve him. I lunged forward and grabbed the pole where he had originally held it. Now I took its full weight, while Bill moved forward, cursing. He lifted. I merely followed up on his lift, assuming very little of the weight. We repeated this simple calisthenic until the pole was nearly vertical.

"I’ll hold it, Arnold, while you go get some rocks."

"Where am I going to get them, Sarge?"

Everybody in the Army was a sergeant, you see. Except me, who wasn’t yet a corporal, one rank lower You couldn’t go too far wrong, calling whomever it was yelling at you, Sarge. Not unless he was an officer. Seldom, if ever, was an officer present, not if real work was at stake.

"They’re right at your feet."

"Oh, yeah, these?"

They were the same rocks that had failed to support the pole when the storm had struck. Each of them weighed a couple of hundred pounds. I was now supposed to roll (not lift) them to the base of the pole, one by one, until Bill could release his stabilizing grip and help me position the other rocks.

I had never moved so much as half this weight alone before. My general idea in life, then and now, is to get as many people involved in the action as possible. "Many hands make light work" is my motto. It only makes good sense.

However, there was nobody but Bill and me to rock in that pole, much as I’d like to have another or two. And he was obviously preoccupied. That left me. So I started moving rocks. And you know something? They can be moved alone. If there is no way to get out of doing it, you can do it, but it may take a while.

I used muscles I didn’t know I had, though I now knew, for I continued to ache in those muscles from the jolt of electricity yesterday. Once stirred into life , they proved capable of extraordinary brief effort. While emergency outages such as the line blowing down sometimes happened, they didn’t occur very often, thank goodness, so my life normally ran tranquil and even keeled

One day the major called up.

"Arnold, you lucky dog," he told me. I wondered what new horror he had in mind?.

"Hi, Major. How you doing, sir?"

"You sent in those papers and you didn’t even tell me. Shame."

"You mean, I’m going home?"

"You’re going back to college, you dumb shit. Haven’t you had enough of that place? I thought you’d decided on an Army career. And now I’ve got to train a man to replace you in—what?—the course of three days. How am I going to do that?"

"It’s easy, sir. Why. there’s practically nothing to the job. It’s a snap. You said so yourself. I’ll take him through the ropes—like Dave did me—in three hours. Maybe four, if I have to give him a tour of the island and it includes the canteen."

"Arnold. Quit testing me. You are still Army property."

"Never doubted it for a minute, sir. Who did you find to replace me? Another Renaissance Man? Did you subject him to the usual battery of aptitude tests? Did he have to be able to walk and talk, wiggle his ears, stand up to electric shock treatments? Can he hold his liquor?"

"I did the best I could."

"I see. First man to walk in the door, that day?"

"You come pretty close."

I was packed that very afternoon. The guy flew over and offered me his hand to shake. He was evidently a college man; only they will do this to you. The major could really pick them out. Another Army misfit. Suddenly I realized that Dave and I had both been misfits. This clearly was a job for those like us, men unsuited to the Army. Freelancers, oddballs. Three in a row, three of a kind. Us. Brothers.

The chief ticket agent for Pan Am, whose plane I was to fly me out was Snyder. I forget his first name. He was red-headed, pudgy, mean. We didn’t get along well. He lived in a company house with a wife and three daughters. Living with four females does something odd to a man. It makes him bitter and secretive. He finds he has to get away from such overpowering femaleness but there is no place to hide. Often such a man will go to the basement and to where he’d hidden a bottle. In Alaska, there are no basements in which to hide—the ground is either too hard or too soft. So Snyder had no outlet. But he had a wicked sense of revenge.

We had one of those surface-friendly, deeply barbed relationships that might pass as a friendship among people who do not know the parties well, or the mutual contempt involved. But you have to get along for you must work together daily. He was, as I said, the head ticket agent. He who arranged the seating on my flight out of there. Do you think he’d give me so much as a window seat? Think again. I kept hinting at being seated next to some luscious divorcee who would know just what I needed, this horny soldier returning to civilian life. Ha. Or perhaps some young babe, who evidenced an unmistakable licentiousness.

Snyder knew better.

The back of a DC-7 has a long single seat running the full width of the plane. A bus has just such a seat, too. It will accommodate about seven people. Snyder put me in the seat one away from a window. On each side was a woman of advanced middle age who weighted about twice what she ought to. Neither knew the other, but they might have been sisters. I could just picture Snyder planning it out, his seating arrangement, and snortling as I boarded and hunted for my seat. Then the look on my face when I found it.

Both women were talkers. They had no interest in me, but quickly found much in common. So they discoursed across me, each of them eagerly leaning forward to be heard over the engines’ drone and pressing into me. Ah, Snyder. A master’s touch. All these years, I’ve longed to pay you back. But there never is the opportunity, is there?

11

The Army and I had a week left together left. It was nearing Christmas week when that week began, the year ending. Like so much of my time spent in the Army, I was left to my own devices to amuse myself, evenings and nights, having only to report to my duty station by eight the next morning. I was stationed at temporary barracks at Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, which is not very far from Seattle. An Army buddy who had been separated from active service a few months early met me at the base; this was Jerry Courtier. He had a car, was in fact a State Highway Patrolman. He’d merely exchanged one uniform for another, in my opinion, but I was glad to see him. He drove me into Seattle, to my parents’ house, where I would sleep and obtain a car of my own, a loaner, but in the meanwhile we drank. We drank as civilians, which is not a whole lot different from drinking as soldiers, only a certain restraint is sometimes in evidence. But not always, not in this instance.

The Army held formations each morning for all of us short-timers assigned to the temporary barracks. Roll was quickly called, after which we were free to light ‘em up and go to a dayroom and await announcement of the next step in our terminal processing. We were all old soldiers and the Army knew better than to ask anything much of us. We performed parade inspection of the grounds, which consisted of walking in extended formation its full width, picking up cigarette butts, tinfoil, clover, chewing gum, and whatever other unsightly objects we found deposited there. Meanwhile a thin dry snow fell and over our heads was blasting horrible deranged Christmas carols from a sound-system designed solely for voice. Its Hertz range must have been between three and four hundred, at a decibel level cutting off above ninety.

I drew KP the day before Christmas, but bought my way out of it for $20, thanks to a guy from Kentucky, who had no chance of returning home by then and no better use of his time. He needed the money, too.

I was pre-registered at the University of Washington to finish up a quarter or two on my masters. It was a tedious chore, but only more of what I was used to, and certainly better than the Army, so I looked forward to it greatly. What could be better than college life again—girls, books, and beer? I was used to the best of each. I had applied for the Ph.D. program at Berkeley and Stanford. The Poet Richard Eberhart had written me a letter of recommendation so superlative that I did not recognize myself. He said I was a promising young poet and either school should be glad to have me.

He was a really nice guy who knew how to stretch the truth as though it were elastic, if it would help somebody academically. And it did, enormously.

Stanford turned me down cold. But Berkeley offered me a scholarship.

12

The course is devious, if you haven’t noticed. Nothing in life proceeds in a straight line, except maybe a line drive in baseball or an undeflected forward pass in football. Even a slam-jam in basketball proscribes a downward arc. As a matter of fact, nothing flies perfectly straight. There is always a slight bend to its course. Knowing so much, there is no good reason why I should strive to be linear. So now we go back, back in time. We travel a long way in time, time past. It is nearly to my beginnings, at least from the standpoint of accomplishing what might be called useful work (though little of it really is). Dig?

My father wanted me to set my goal to be the best grasscutter in the world. To be satisfied with nothing short of the absolute top—as though all of us were ceded and they held contests or meets for this type of competition and one boy won out over another, in a kind of round-robin lottery, with the winner emerging slightly scarred to take on the next opponent on the higher rung of the ladder.

"You’ve got to be kidding?"

He wasn’t and I wasn’t supposed to be, either.

So, applying what I’d learned at home, I was to go out into the world—the neighborhood—and solicit jobs. A few "No’ should not deter me. I was in effect making cold calls. This is what it is called in business when nobody wants to hear from you but you contact them, all the same.

You either soon stop doing this or you develop what is called guts. Guts is nothing more, you learn, that the ability to keep going foolishly, when every fiber in you being says to quit. You teach yourself to disregard these warnings.

Another name for it is tough skin. The only reason to develop it is for money. But money is never enough reason, though at the time it may seem to be. To learn this valuable lesson (and what else is life?), takes a lifetime. When you’ve learned enough, all that is available to you, you are old and soon die. You take all of that hoarded information to the next place, which may be no place at all. In which case it is the grandest of jokes. You are its butt or its recipient. Take your pick. They are the same.

So I trotted around the neighborhood, Carleton Park, and knocked on doors, especially those that were preceded with tall grass, and asked for work, as I had once asked if anybody wanted to subscribe to one my magazines, which would be delivered to your backdoor, every Thursday afternoon of my young life. And you know what? People hired me to cut their lawns. Generally they were women. It was then I learned that women make all the key decisions in life. Men—men associated with these women—are given the delusion that they make them, and without the delusion would never agree to the perpetuation of such a farce. They’d kill it dead in its tracks.

Never fear.

I usually had my push-mower (the only kind I’ve ever used, more than once, with the various other powered kind) with me, and I think this helped some, helped me to get the job, because the sight of an eleven-year-old, skinny, bespectacled lad in short pants, sans shirt, sandy hair aswim on top of his head, is enough to pluck the heartstrings of most women. I wasn’t cute, I was pathetic, and never underestimate pathos. It is a killer.

I charged a dollar, dollar and a half, I think. It is hard to remember these things, and all the years of inflation that stretch between then and now. It isn’t much, but things didn’t cost much, so it evened out. I was still addicted to comic books, but hadn’t yet learned the thrifty collector’s trick of buying outdated and damaged ones from certain stores; they tore the covers off and sold them, the dime ones, three for a dime. My quick young mind would have computed this at one-third cost. Mine were a dime, three for a quarter, or was that adult bus tokens? It is all a jumbles, the past is, beyond complete recall and comprehension, as well it should be. Somethings must be finally let go.

I suppose I bought candy bars, for this was in a period before my crooked teeth required an orthodontist’s close attention, and also his admonition that if I ate more than an occasional mite of sugar, my teeth would rot beneath my braces, and he would several years hence remove them, the braces (not the teeth), and they would be nothing but cavities. So comic books, candy bars, and probably soft drinks. These comprise a boy’s extravagant world, until he develops superior vices in time.

I continued desultorily soliciting and mowing, edging and trimming, carting away soggy cuttings in cardboard boxes to neighborhood dumpsites, which were vacant lots with built-in screenings of weed and Himalayan blackberry. Here and elsewhere, the latter provides a convenient hedgerow or barbed thicket baring entrance. It is a perfect place to hide a body. Not that I had any to hide, other than my own frail, arm-weary one, one rendered in that condition from prolonged pushing of a mower uphill.

The lawns were either uphill or downhill; rarely was any flat for long. The best parts of town are always hilly. If so, then this was a fine one, indeed. Seldom was the ground flat for long. It was almost as though the earth itself dreaded the horizontal plane and found ways of negating it with indecisive actions, either away or toward an invisible center. The grass, of course, followed course. It had no will of its own and could only dumbly do what the earth dictated. And I, neither. My mower went skyward, or toward the depths, depending upon what the ground did. Form it I learned a valuable lesson.

Downhill is greatly to be preferred, but there is a law having to do with the conservation of energy, and with its expenditure, that goes, For every downhill run there is a corresponding and equal (though seemingly at the time twice as long) uphill run soon to be navigated. It cannot be escaped. So you are only deluding yourself, Boy, when you rejoice at having discovered a stretch in which you can coast. Soon there will be the terrible comeuppance.

Once I thought I had beat it, the law of the expenditure of energy, and this could be accomplished by pulling the mower back up the hill which it had just come down, an action which requires about a third the expense as pushing it there, with the blades thickly whirling. But then what about the cutting? It still has to be cut, doesn’t it, and the wheels have pressed flat the grass in twin tracks ; these, if not let standing in order to be cut at the same height as the rest of the blades, will suffer from impression but overnight rise again and reveal the shortcut taken.

Of course you can drag the mower backwards over the adjacent strip just cut and ameliorate the tracking situation, and this I did, for a while at least. But a dragged mower with grass catcher attached trips over its toes, so to speak, and the fasteners come off the twin catches, and the hook that secures it to the mower handle (if yours is anything like mine) spins off, and the flexible bottom of the catcher flexes and, lo—the cut grass spills all over the landscape. You either leave it there or are forced to gather it up in cupped hands and place it within the sprawling catcher and hope that the catcher does not trip and spill again before it is normal time to empty it.

And where do we empty it, Class? In one of the cardboard boxes that are periodically hauled to the vacant lot, behind the prickly hedgerow. Accomplished lawn cutters (this does not include me, alas) spread out a heavy canvas sheet on an already cut portion of the lawn and empty their catcher contents into it. Then, when all the grass has been rendered a uniform short length and there is no more to be found to cut, the sheet is gathered up by its four corners, approximately, a bag is formed, and looking like one of Santa’s helpers, the bag is shouldered and trudged to the same dumpsite and empties in a big, sprawling fresh green heap. Not I. Boxes.

I’d always dreaded the trimming part. I suppose it goes back to my father’s field inspections and the trauma of him always finding me deficient in some small (though at the time, large) respect. I’d cut a corner, so to speak, by not cutting a corner that needed, etc. But I was of a divided mind on the subject. When you get to trimming, the heavy work is all done, if I exclude edging with a long-handled tool with a round, toothed blade on the end, one that goes round in an endless circle, like a squirrel on a wheel, but not so smoothly. The cutter’s wheel requires considerable leverage and applied strength. Even then it sometimes cuts poorly or fails to cut at all. Then tufted grass is left protruding over the sidewalk like a bad afterthought. You either have to apply the wheel again or go after it soon with the hand clippers.

I sometimes used the hand clippers for sidewalks because it was easier, neater, and took longer. Time was relative, but hard work was not. My mind was divided because I could sit down half or more of the remaining time. You sit on your butt, often in the shade, and scoot along the damp ground (this is Seattle, remember), snipping the tall clusters of blades at the lowest convenient reachable level, letting them fall where they may. (My father was always after me for not picking them up, at least at home, so I measured my occasions of employment according to whether or not I could get away with leaving them, green still, and not picking them up, knowing that it would take a few days and I had already been paid for the job before they would turn olive, then brown, and be noticed. I hoped they would be forgotten by the time I returned for the next cutting, which was often a week or ten days away, depending. Depending on how fast the grass grew at the particular time of the year.

I won’t name all of the contributing factors.

I cut grass primarily and supplemented my gross income with little apprentice jobs of delivering newspapers once a week. This was in the era of weekly newspapers and they dominated; they cost nothing and everybody was entitled to at least one and read the damn thing, for it is where local grocery sales were announced. The big daily downtown newspapers (which I was to get deeply acquainted with in certain widely separated periods of time in my life) did not carry these. So house wives (remember those?) learned about them through the cheap flyers hand-delivered to their stoop, on Thursdays I believe. It was the same day my weekly magazines were delivered, in their time, in bulk, to my parents’ house. A day to be dreaded by boys small and not so small.

I never thought I had moved up in the world and in the realms of employment by graduating from magazines to newspapers and don’t think I did. The former were no longer available to me, but the latter certainly were, for boys were always being propelled early by parents like mine who were anxious to develop characteristics of thrift and industry in little personalities in which they were lacking. And since parents pressed early for routes, long before Responsibility and Determination were formed, boys were always quitting them, sometimes on the very delivery day itself, and substitutes or new carriers were being sought.

A boy can be a virgin carrier only once. After that he is knowledgeable and worldly wise. He cannot be easily fooled again. But he can be coerced. What is a boy but malleable material, with the right stuffing, for itinerant entrepreneurs with a persuasive bent and a passing need? And to support them there is always a principled parent who believes such labor builds character.

School, as usual, was a conspicuous bore and daily trauma. Work, though much the same thing, was different in scope and territory. A boy is daily filled with dread. There is the hopelessness of school to be suffered through, followed by a cheerless succession of tasks to be performed alone, or in concert, on Thursdays and other days of the week and especially on Saturdays. Saturdays were as much a day for hard labor as Sunday wasn’t.

There were the Shopping News and the Magnolia/Queen Anne News. In my time I delivered both. Both were skinny, sad substitutes for newspapers, and each expressed the owner’s sentiment on a host of issues in which he had strong feelings on page two, which was the verso. School bond issues (for), state and national tax increases (against). How pocked streets and pitted sidewalks were a neighborhood disgrace but it was the niggardly city that was at fault. And so on. Meanwhile local grocers, and the new chains, A&P and Safeway, ran adds for produce in season and specials on tinned goods nobody much wanted or bought, even on sale.

The classified ads were few and pitiful.

The papers were both so thin that we boys developed special ways so that they could be folded and tossed in the general direction of front porches, or else would come variably close. There was the tight round fold, but my favorite was the flat square fold because it would sail. O how it would sail, sometimes even in a straight course. Often it proscribed a boomerang’s crazy twist and would seem to turn on a wingtip and start to come back at you. But then it would fail and fall to the ground, about halfway to where you wanted it to land. Depending on whether or not it was raining, you either retrieved it for another, nearer throw, or left it lying where it fell, like a despised enemy soldier.

I’d previously used my bike—the red and white Schwinn—for my deliveries, in Highland Park, Illinois, but here the distances were so short, the papers so thin and light, that I could easily carry them in my canvas bag’s two giant pockets, the one in front, like a papoose, the other in back, like a bona fide Boy Scout pack. I was not yet twelve and aspired greatly to join that group of quasi-delinquents. Thus burdened, fore and aft, with my days consignment, wide and flat as they had come to me, I set off on foot, folding along the way. Soon my front sack was full of little square numbers, all packed in neat tight rows. When the front sack was filled to capacity, I turned the bag around with a quick twist in my shoes, flipping the bag up and ducking my shoulders down, giving the balanced sacks a neat twirl. Lo, and I had in front the remainder of the load, each paper flat and wide again, awaiting its fold. My thumb and first finger on each hand grew progressively sore and rubbed nearly raw.

This activity was repeated weekly, into a dim future. I was paid a small amount—I can’t remember exactly what. A dollar or two. Just enough to keep me at it and not enough to make any real money for doing it. But then, what we my choices? I was one of a legion of boys hired as cheap labor, none cheaper, a never-ending supply of them coming of age and growing out of it, often graduating on to the Real Number, a daily-and-Sunday route with one of the big downtown newspapers. So this was a nether time, a proving ground, another competency test in growing up only slightly burdened and traumatized. Of course I exaggerate. Hyperbole is my method. But sometimes hyperbole is close to the truth of the situation.

Before I was deemed old enough and sufficiently responsible for such a job, there was a brief directionless interval. It was across one summer. I think I was twelve or thirteen. Where I heard about the job, I have no idea. I don’t think my father fed it to me. And I don’t remember reading the classified Help Wanted ads in the daily paper, but perhaps it was there. It seems likely. There or posted on some bulletin board in the grocery store. I interviewed for it and was instantly hired. It was as a gasoline station attendant. I always thought of the job as Richfield. Richfield it is and was to me.

The war was on, a year or two. It changed things immensely, especially economic conditions and the labor market. While women took men’s jobs, so did boys; women’s work had been confined to the office, and there were still some grimy tasks they were not thought capable of performing. Mine was one. The guy who owned the station and worked at it days was Mike Garrison. He was a fat old drunk, and none too honest—to put it charitably. He ran a blackmarket in gasoline and tires. I’d say he was a case and a half. Mostly he was in the back room, cooking up deals. My job was to wash the windshield and other glass area, check the water and oil, and put the gauge on the tires and inflate them if necessary. This I was to accomplish by the time he pumped all the gas in. Since there was rationing, nobody bought more than a few precious gallons; what saved my hide was the incredible slowness of the pumps. The fractions of a gallon would creep round, measured I think in tenths, as I raced round the vehicle, dipping this, wiping that, pumping something else, and wooshing air into the tires one by one with a tiny nozzle that kept slipping off the valve and shooting air at a crooked stream off to the musty side. Sometimes I let out more than I pumped in. And if the timing was close, the poor car limped off flat footed, so to speak.

All this with a smile, as the rain streaked down.

Mike explained, "It is important to smile, even though it may hurt. Hurt your face." He himself rarely smiled and was a self-styled exception, being the owner of the station. It must have been a franchise. He had a frowning, pickle expression, I’d call it. Perhaps it is what you develop when you expect arrest at an moment. I never knew, or wanted to know, the nature of his transactions. There were all these tiny white stamps torn off of ration cards labeled A, B, C, and maybe D, and each measured a customer’s allotment of gasoline according to his need. But everybody had need. I mean, how does a guy go anywhere, without gasoline? Well, he doesn’t. He sits at home, idle, fretting away. He’s a prisoner. His car squats in the garage, hunched down on its tires, raring to go, but lacking the wherewithal.

Tires—mostly retreads—were scattered out in back. Most were mismatches. Now, with rubber gone to war, along with most everything else of negotiable value, the baldest of tires had great value. And a tire with discernible tread, even retread, was worth a lot of money. Try to find one, though. Mike had them. Where they came from, I’ll never know. At night a truck would appear and offload its contents—six or eight beatup numbers, dusty from storage in somebody’s vault. Mike’d throw a tarp over them, and on top of the tarp he’d stack old cardboard boxes full of used oil cans, broken fuel pumps, whatever he had as a disguise. Then when a needy customer arrived and they went through their hunker-down negotiations and had agreed on a price for a tire, unseen, he’d lead the poor guy out back and unveil the prize. If nobody but me was looking, the guy’d throw it in back and drive off fast.

Gasoline was another matter. Since I didn’t handle the pump, wasn’t authorized to, it was strictly Mike and the driver. Sometimes he got paid before he pumped, if you know what I mean. Mike would lean low over the driver’s window, some words would get mumbled, the man would peels some stamps out of a booklet he kept close to the vest, so to speak, pass them over, there’d be a pause, and the stamps and pause would be followed by some money, always loose bills, never any change. I noted all this amid my scurrying activity. Mike would pocket the bills on the right side of his gray, grimy coveralls, not looking at it or counting it or bothering to straighten out the bills, or separate the ones from the fives or larger. Then he’d whirl, wipe the back of the same hand under his nose, where I presume it accumulated something; then he’d lay the back of that hand against his black hair, with a sideways motions, and a moment later he’d lace his fingers through the hair and sweep it back with a combing motion. It is, I thought, what kept his hair shiny and laid flat to his head. That and the rain that seemed always to be falling, so that as soon as I had the windshield squeegged dry, it would start to grow its perspiration of tiny drops.

In that and in many other ways my job was a losing proposition.

The station was on Seattle’s waterfront, on the water side of a street called Alaskan Way. I presumed that this was because if you followed it North long enough, it would lead you to that territory, not yet a state, not for many years, and those long after I’d left there as a soldier. I knew better, of course. Alaskan Way took a jog and became, briefly, Denny Way, then Elliot Way. Every street was one Way or another. To get to work I’d ride the Number 19, Carleton Park bus across the Garfield Street Bridge and, in reverse order of the above, ride down Elliot to Denny to Alaskan, much like a ground ball double-play, five-three-one. I’d get off on the edge of Denny, then walk the longish distance to Richfield and my job, my lunchpail under my arm, almost as though I were a youthful version of organized labor. And I guess I was.

Today the Edgewater Inn sits on the site. It is where the flush go to stay, if they have a water bent. Then, the waterfront was a dump, a habitat of bums and seafarers, who have now moved to Pioneer Square, where they terrorize or try to tourists and denizens alike. I used to wend my way among them, thinking them harmless and much unlike me. I think I was lucky. Probably it was because it was evident I had nothing much to steal. People used to have to have a reason to attack you, not shoot or stick you with a knife just because they were bored and to do so might relieve their tedium. Or because it might be fun.

Cops liked Mike’s Richfield and used to hang out there. He knew how to treat them right. They in turn treated him right, whatever that meant. He kept a bottle or two around and would drink with them, and they’d roar at Irish jokes, ethnic jokes, dirty jokes, whatever was going round. Then Mike leavened some. It was like he had an off/on switch. There is something about the Irish and police work that is exclusive and possessive. As for me, I was invisible to them. You talk about your Invisible Man. Well, once he was a boy. You might not see him, but he sure saw you.

Things have changed some and Seattle police are now longer a bunch of drunks with their hands held out for a gratuity. I have been assured this and believe it to be a fact. Often there was a cop or two, sleeping it off in back, among the tarp-covered tires and used parts. Some rode motorcycles and others squad cars that were parked off to the side, as though they were awaiting repair. This no longer happens, I’ve been told. Nor do they ask for free stuff, such as money, booze, cartons of cigarettes, gasoline. But back then it was endemic.

There were other duties for me to perform, in between cars with dirty windshields. I had to clean up the two bays of the garage. All that dripped oil. There was a keg of some stuff called Grease Wheat, and I would sprinkle it on the floor in good quantity, then sweep it up—grease and all—with a pushbroom. Or so was the theory behind the sale of the stuff. Actually, it worked pretty well. It soaked up, slopped up, much of the oil that was still liquid. The wheat was stained black and tended to sling to itself, its grains or kernels. It became sticky and caused me to have to bear down on the broom handle. The stuff then slid, rather than be pushed. When I got a big pile, I scooped it up in a regulation dust pan. This I carted to a huge garbage can that contained only used grease wheat. It was important, Mike told me, to do this at the end of each day, or else one of the two mechanics (they were never on duty at the same time) might slip and hurt himself. He might go caroming into one of the bays and meet his bitter end.

I could see how this might be. The bays were sunken pits, and when it came time to drain the crankcase oil out of a car, the mechanic would descent (like the steps of Hell, I thought) until he came under the car or truck. It was possible for him to standup, stand tall, and use his wrench to loosen the nut that held the oil in the pan. Out it would come gushing. He’d catch it in a big pan, but some always spilled out. And since most cars were old, there being no new ones manufactured in time of war, most leaked oil as they drove in and drove out. So the front of the garage was always a slimy mess. My job was to make it a little less so.

I didn’t mind. It was messy but necessary work. I could see the end result and it was good. I was less successful in psyching myself up for cleaning the restroom. Phew. There was only one, and we all used it, along with the customers who came into Mike’s Richfield expressly for that purpose. He tried to deter them, but often couldn’t. What were they to do—do it in their pants?

Mike would lie to them. "It’s shut down," he’d say. "The plumbing is broken. Sorry." "We don’t have one." This nobody believed, so he didn’t exercise it often. "Out of order" was the best he could do. But if the poor guy looked him in the eye and the eye doing the looking was pained, Mike would give in. He had a heart, albeit not large. "Oh, go ahead. But try not to leave it a mess, will you?" He was thinking of me, I suppose, and I ought to be grateful. I guess I was.

What a foul place it was. Often people couldn’t get to the toilet on time. They’d pee on the floor, approaching. Or they’d shit on the edge of the toilet seat, just a little smear, a present for me, the kid. Or they wouldn’t flush. What did they want, me to examine their leavings? It was too much trouble to pull the handle, I guess, or maybe they figured the handle was dirty (it was) and they’d soil their hands, hands that had just touched their private parts and what came out of them. They’d want to keep those hands to themselves and not sully them with what might have been on somebody else’s.

So I would flush for them. I’d clean the toilet bowl with a little brush and some liquid, swirling it around and around, flushing time and again until the bowl looked clean. I’d wipe down the toilet seat and dry it with paper towels, of which we had a bundle. I’d fill my pail with hot sudsy water and get the mop and wash down the floor, not wringing hard at first and letting the soapy water stand in puddles. I’d swirl it around and around. Then I’d go get some clean hot water, wash out my mop, go over the area (not large) time and again, progressively wringing my mop dryer and dryer. Then I’d finally pronounce my floor done. It didn’t exactly sparkle, nor did the garage, but to me it seemed a good job. A word of mild praise from Mike would have gone a long ways. There was none. Next day the place was a mess again. Once more I’d tackle it with reluctance, but soon have it close to shining. I began to think of it as comprising the shape of my life, both present and for time to come. I was—what?--thirteen, fourteen?

I came to hate the job, as I did most jobs, in their time. It was not the extent of the corruption that did it, in this case, but the grueling race to complete my assigned tasks before the guy started his motor, gunned it, and drove off, as I was fitting the nozzle, say, to the third tire. This was a trifle dismaying. It was doubly so because Mike would always point out to me how I’d failed to accomplish my tasks. And he would brook no explanations. Most were obvious or self-evident. Perhaps I just wasn’t fast enough.

The corruption seemed to be the ordinary state of affairs, either good nor bad, simply how things were. It was how business was conducted, I concluded—in whispered asides, money surreptitiously changing hands, goods delivered out of the back room, cops hanging around, bottles of whiskey making their appearance. And is this awfully different from today, I wonder? Most dishonesty is a matter of degree, I’ve found, and a little corruption may be a good thing, but too much hurts business and drives away customers. Business is really a matter of attracting customers and inducing them to buy things from you. You make as much money as you can. This is called markup. You buy low and sell high, and grow rich. That’s all there is to it. This I’ve learned from Mike’s Richfield. It has stood me good stead ever since. And perhaps it may explain how I never did very good at business.

I may have gotten some of it wrong. It’s important to give all experience, including work ones, a fair shake. It may be my fault that I didn’t. That would explain my failure.

12

There were other jobs, seasonal summer ones. I don’t know where I heard of them. I think my father spotted them and pointed them out to me, knowing I wasn’t any too perspicacious in that department. Small boxed ads in the Sunday newspaper. Or else they were posted on bulletin boards, the usual source. Berry picking was one. And the two kinds of beans, the ones you had to stoop to pick, entirely, and the other kind, pole beans, where you stooped some, too, but much of the work was at waist-level and even (delightfully) higher. Waxed, yellow, string.

Berries are the pits, you know. Even though they don’t have any. They ran special buses from various Seattle locations out to the farms. They left, as I recall, at seven in the morning. They came back at around six. The ride was less than an hour. The rest of the time we picked whatever they had that was ripe or ready. We were kids, mostly, plus a few large girls that had breasts but were not yet what you’d call women. The boys were the kind that you never saw before, even at school. Come to think of it, the girls were, too. Where they found them I have no idea. They answered the ad for pickers, just like I had. But I think they were propelled by other motives. Me, I came from a home in which there was money, but I was out to learn valuable little lessons that would serve me well, when the time came for me to go out seriously into the world. Thus, this was serious work.

For them, the other kids and the large girls, it was. The money was desperately needed at home. Oh, there were a few guys, a few girls, who were out for pocket money, but stoop labor is a terrible way to earn it. And you soon learn that you are not constitutionally or temperamentally suited to it. This is another way of saying that most of were spoiled rotten. That is another of my father’s phrases. Perhaps you have gathered that.

Though I was spoiled rotten by my own father’s standards, I am sure, I was not supposed to be, and to unspoil me was his best intention. Somehow he had failed in raising me, though God knows he had tried hard. But to try hard is not enough. You have to succeed at what you set out to do. And we had not. The failure was both of ours. He had failed as a father, I as a son. A certain amount of penance under the strong son might bake some of the failure out of me. As for his failure, his penance, he could only wait. Our redemption was solely on my thin shoulders.

Of course I exaggerate. Don’t I always? But exaggeration is a means of reaching the emotional heart of a given situation. The surface events do not justify the hyperbole, but what lies underneath it—the abject emotions—are true enough. The sense of failure that I had was in excess of what the events themselves could merit. Yet I felt them powerfully and believed what my emotions told me.

Do all fathers do this, instill in ordinary sons a sense of guilt at falling short of various marks set (without consultation) for them? I reckon so. It is a terrible thing for them to do. They deserve some appropriate punishment. That they are often loved, even loved excessively, is probably punishment enough. For there is a sort of reverse order of things in which guilt is assuaged and turned into its direct opposite. It leaves the unearned recipient astonished, dumbfounded, and full of fury. That is all to the good.

We are so individually wracked, men and women, that the only way we can set ourselves free is to recreate the failure, the young traumatic event, in our progeny and follow closely their progress, these pilgrims, through a similar close-combat course or minefield. If the second generation, girls and boys, survive it, escape with only a few lacerated veins, not arteries, we are reborn into completeness, guilt-free. Is this too much to ask?

Yes.

First come strawberries, followed by raspberries, and finally blackberries, for which there is not commercial market. In vegetables, asparagus precedes peas, and corn is much later. Beans come somewhere in between and are normally picked by hand. The Mexicans do this well. Anglos are comparative failures at stoop labor. It may be hereditary, it may be the result of conditioning. The results are the same. Try, for instance, standing along side an eight-year-old Mexican kid and pick bean for bean, you with your adult height and strength. In minutes the kid will show you up for the slothy toad that you are. Or that I am. For it is what happened when I did it. Over and over.

You do not tell your dad this. It is your deep, dire secret, and only the grave will claim it. (Or your memoirs.) You take the sad new home with you at night to the family dining table, at which there is nightly a kind of round-robin review or confessional of the day’s activities, and you tell them everything but the truth. You skim the surface events and relate the rest in outline form. You kit a highlight or two and try to turn the attention away from yourself. You talk about others and sometimes project onto them something funny and sad that happened to you, but that you don’t want to admit. In short, you learn how to be a story-teller. Perhaps it starts here. Or rather there.

13

I moved on to a full-sized paper route of my own. Daily and Sunday. Never a day off. It started out at about 80 papers. Over time, it fluctuated in both directions. Never did it exceed 100 papers. That is plenty.

Delivering newspapers every day is a life of its own. There is school, there is home, there is the time spent in transportation. Nobody studied at home more than a quick little math. Delivering took up all the free hours between school and dinner, not to mention to what it did to your Sunday mornings and the lurking terror of what was to come, Saturday night.

Often the paper-delivery truck was late. We waited at the shack, an assortment of route boys. No girls in our number. There was, thank goodness, a basketball hoop bolted to a telephone pole, with a naked bulb light overhead, topped by a reflector that resembled a pie plate tipped at a cocked angle like a hat. We hurried out our waiting time by shooting baskets and in time got good at various aspects of the games of Horse and Twenty-one. The street was too narrow for a half-court game, and the best it had to offer was two on two, or a crowded three on three, where you were always tripping over the curb or some guy cutting to the basket. In time we fielded our own team for the newspaper’s intramural league. I played one of the centers, yes. We had a double-post alignment that was ludicrous. Well, I had a hook shot, could in fact shoot it about equally badly with either hand and arm.

Horse was our mainstay, though. We played it in the sun, in drenching rain, even at early winter dark, under that crooked streetlight. I remember shooting baskets when some powdery snowflakes were descending in a cone of yellow light, all very pretty and dry. Most of us got good at garbage shots, which are those shots that take place under or very near the basket and are dependent on English or spin. If you have a left hand almost as strong as your right one, you have a big advantage, for you can make garbage baskets ambidextrously, maddeningly so, and put away you opponent quickly. Those dispatched in this matter tend to be sullen, sarcastic, and resentful. They say awful things about the one who beat them.

Don’t misunderstand, I wasn’t really very good. From a distance, my shots would bounce high and go rimming off, not hang close to the hoop, where they might be easily tipped in by somebody taller. And I made a small proportion of my jumpers, which meant I was always losing a game of Twenty-One, which is dependent on making the first, long shot. So Horse was my game, if any game was said to me mine,. And my specialty was garbage.

Thursdays the paper was huge, choked full of advertising inserts and colorful flyers. Often the truck was late, so we had more time for basketball, true, but the work that followed into the dark was harder and compressed into a shorter time frame. And customers would be irate and blame us, the delivery boy, for matters that were his, or rather my, fault. Sometimes I’d encounter a guy standing in his lighted doorway, waiting for his paper, a scowl on his face. He’d brook no explanation, either. So after trying one or two, I never did again. I’d carry the blame on my own two skinny shoulders.

Saturdays were a kind of preview of Sundays, only teasingly light. They might have as well dispensed with the Saturday paper, it was so slight, its news so insignificant. Instead, they delivered it early in the morning and made you rise early, earlier than is healthy for a growing boy, and show up at the paper shack while it was still dark. I was young enough, all of us were, so that we had no social life (read: sexual) to be interrupted or destroyed by such an early rising, but it pretty much ruined the weekend, followed as it was by Sunday, and its massive load of newsprint.

What you wanted to avoid, if you could, was going so short on sleep that you went back to bed, once your load of papers was distributed to the neighborhood doorstep. But it was hard not to, not to be come dependent on doing so, for after a week of school, who wants to turn in early on Friday night, when the whole luxurious weekend was upon you? Surely not the paper boy. Thus weekends became a kind of nightmare. You made it through Saturday morning, sure, but you were held in the iron grip of knowing what lay ahead. Sundays were traumatic. In my case, my father helped me out.

He’d rise and breakfast with me, which was kind of fun. Then we’d set out in the family car for the shack. It was the route boy’s job to put the bright thick inserts in the center of the already plump newspaper, one after another, for they came widely separated, the inserts printed way ahead of time, the paper itself late last night in order to incorporate most of the late sporting scores. What we did was marry the two. Then we took the porcine paper and stacked them, one atop the other, and when the single stack got tall enough, so heavy, we took turns carting them out to the car. First we filled the trunk (commodious, for it was a Buick), then the backseat. That usually did it, but if not there was some more room in front, alongside the passenger, namely me. He’d drive me to the start of my route, then sidle alongside me, the motor idling and heating to the point when soon the cooling fan kicked in in order to bright down the temperature in the radiator, which was nearing the boiling point.

Dad would cruise along, stop, wait, while I grabbed a paper under one arm, another under the opposing one, and one in my hand, half folded (half because the damn thing was so fat it would not more than bend), and dash from door to door, laying my bundle flat again on each stoop, taking care to put it under shelter, any way that I could. For it was generally drizzling. At some houses I jammed the paper between screen door and front door, and often the screen wouldn’t close because of the paper’s size. So I’d wedge the door mat up against the bottom of the screen and say a little prayer that the screen now swing wide and let the contends spill out and become sodden.

Wind was a factor, as well. Wind could distribute the guts of your paper—especially the inserts—across the lawn, sidewalk, and into the street. This made a colorful display. So you would half-fold your paper and encircle it with a narrow rubberband, hoping it would hold, or else the earlier scenario would prevail. Sometimes you would use two rubberbands, circling high, circling low, but still the paper would tend to spill its guts in a sideways manner, or else one or both of the bands would snap under the strain, and the results would be the same as above. So it was hard to win, hard to know what the right thing to do was and do it.

I suppose each of those Sunday papers might way six or seven pounds. I don’t know because I never bothered to weigh one of them; there wasn’t time. Besides, it weighed what it weighed, so what did it matter? Each had to be hand-preped, half-folded, banded, loaded, off-loaded, trundles to the door, and left securely. But say it weighed in at the upper limit, and there were eighty of them (often there were more), this would put their gross weight at over five-hundred pounds. A quarter of a ton. It is not something you transport in your little red wagon. No, it is a sizable amount, and one that requires adult assistant.

They had carts, special carts, which you could buy from the Times and they would transport eighty or ninety pounds of papers, all stacked up neat and tall, but even if you had one, bought one (they would buy it back, when you quit), it would not carry your entire load, and you would have to circle back to the shack, your cart empty, for the next load, and then it would be back over the considerable distance again to the point where your deliveries ended because you ran out of papers. Multiply this times four or five and you have a pretty good idea of the independent boy’s Sunday morning. And you were supposed to have them all delivered by seven in the morning. Ha.

So parents were called in for assistance and most dutifully answered, if not awfully cheerfully. Mine did. Rising any hour before ten in the morning was my mother’s idea of hell, but I remember some few mornings on Sunday when she would stagger to her feet, drink her orange juice and freshly brewed coffee (time for only a two-thirds cup), and follow us out to the garage, where the car was already warming its engine, which my father insisted on doing, for it reduced the chances of it eventually needing a ring job.

When your parents rise early to help you with your route, you know you are loved. You know and they know, you couldn’t have done it without them.

And I probably wouldn’t have wanted to do it without them. I didn’t really need the money, but it was considered unmanly for this boy not to be gainfully employed, ever. Where such an idea came from I had no idea until years later I read some family documents going back into the previous century and got a sense of what the Puritan ethic really was—was like, as in like to live under. I mean, the general idea was to get up early in the morning (something Mother and I disliked about as much as avocado) and work hard, unremittingly, until sufficiently late in the day that it was time to brush your teeth and turn in. Behind it was a staunch religious ethos best exemplified in sayings like, "Idle hands make . . . ." You can supply your own predicate. Whatever it is, it isn’t good.

I come from a family of ministers and teachers. The difference didn’t used to be much, only one of degree. What was taught was the same as what was preached. If you were busy enough, toiled hard enough, you would stay out of trouble. It was more important to stay out of trouble (with God) than to make a lot of money, but money gainfully earned (hard work again) was good, was the fruit of labor. This is all an old stew, reheated over and over. Nobody wants to eat it, but there it is. What do you do with it? You can’t exactly throw it out because it is part and parcel of what motivates you and comprises the core of your very life.

You throw it out, you throw out yourself, too.

There were counter forces at work, of course. Natural man, or natural boy, is slothful. And sloth runs as an undercurrent to the industrious life. A teacher, a scholar, must spend idle time. . . reading. What is lazier, more unproductive, than to sit all day with your face in a book? Or writing one—when you could be building a house, for instance, or organizing some group that will manifest itself, its soul, in a useful collective activity.

I was naturally indolent, still am. My dictionary defines indolent as: "disinclined to exert oneself, conducive to inactivity or laziness, languorous." There you are, you got me, encapsulated in a nutshell. C’est moi.

You have here a prescription for a personality disorder known as schizophrenia. Oh, maybe not the real advanced, textbook variety, by the garden type, one diluted by a tendency toward the norm, not away from it. One of those situations that leaves you muttering, "There but for the grace of a whole number of things go I." And if you think you have lucky stars, you thank them.

I do not think myself unique. No, the situation I describe is cultural and widely diffused, disseminated. We all of us suffer from it to a greater or lesser extent. It is nearly universal and might be described as the general plight or malaise. Collectively our egos and ids dominate us still, while out super-egos remain embryonic, show no signs of developing. We are locked in ourselves and our sloth. We wish for a key to let us out, but there is none, not unless it can be manufactured out of our suffering. Fat chance.

A job delivering newspapers wears on you. You have no day off. When you are sick you deliver, as you do when you are well or have some fascinating competing activity. And this is how you learn another of life’s little lessons, namely, there is no respite save severe illness. And this tempts you to either acquire some nearly fatal disease or else fake it. But there is always a doctor to keep you honest and to point out to your parents that, no, you aren’t exactly faking it, but the problem lies mainly in your head.

To my father this translated, "He only thinks he’s sick." To this day I do not know what the difference is.

Lying around sick, reading, or lying around well, reading, all produce the same results: tepid scholarship. I mean, how else do you learn things, those subjects that aren’t taught in school? It requires idleness and languor is the enemy of good deeds and fair intentions. I was in the enemy’s camp. My very bones protested what was asked of me by my ancestors, those venerable teachers and proselytizers of religion, Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians, and a whole lot of bastard (excuse me) sects no longer existent. What an odd world it is, this one of ours, with good people pulling you one way and others greatly admired telling you, no, you should head in the opposite direction.

At the shack, hauling newspapers daily, was a host of people who I guess comprised my friends. If not them, certainly my peers. There was the handsome Bob Stratton, who introduced me (literally) to girls. Girls liked Bob—not this one, but the other, with his fine blond hair combed back in Pachuka locks and heavily slicked down. He was as skinny as I, and the paper shack was right down the street from his parents’ house, so it was an easy matter to go over to his house and wait for the black Times struck (like death’s chariot) to hove into sight, with our daily prescription of work.

He shot baskets too while awaiting our daily consignment of paper, newspapers one day away from being discarded or used for other purposes than people’s reading. What waste, what misuse of resources. Of course it is still going on, trees being murdered so we can have our daily fix of advertisements sprinkled in with news, news of which very little affected our lives, let alone impacted it. But don’t get me wrong. The daily newspaper was our mainstay and there was yet no TV to bring us our nightly news fix. In my time I went to work in the newsroom of both papers, the good gray Times and the meretricious Post-Intelligencer, thought by conservatives to publish something less than the full truth. And was duly fired from both. But that belongs to another time.

Wally Ord, of whom I can bring back no more than a fleeting laconic image, dour and reflective, was another route boy, and so was one of the Hennes twins, I never knew which, never was able to identify each of them correctly, even guessing, which gave me a 50/50 chance. Given such odds, how could I four times out of four be wrong? Well, I was, and it persisted late into life, when we were all grown pudgy and (them) balding. And for a while the infamous George Trick, who lived up to his name by being a life-risking trickster, famed for climbing high and out over a tree hanging two-hundred feet above the beach on Perkins Lane, never hesitating, never faltering. One slip and he could have become a B-section headline on one of the newspapers awaiting him in our shack. But he was lucky, he was blessed. I suspect he turned staid as he aged, never attended or if he did finished college, and went into his father’s lucrative business, which was stationary.

I don’t mean that it didn’t move, only that it had the corner on office supplies.

All of us shooting lethargic baskets with uneven skill and stopping when the black-as-doom truck arrived, its back door rolled up, and our individual bundles dumped out into the street, which was really an alley, in front of the shack, which was really a family garage. How often one thing is really another.

We lugged our bundle into the shack and hoisted it up on one of the shack tables that was mostly used for stuffs, and then we counted out our papers to ensure the count was right. It often wasn’t. This was called a short. If you had a short, you had to borrow from somebody who had an extra, and there was some bookkeeping that followed. We had a shack manager, sometimes a mom, and the news had to go into the supervisor or district manager, and the record made straight, for otherwise you were billed for an extra paper or for one you didn’t get. Similarly starts and stops from customers were sent in and your count adjusted on a daily basis; then, when it was time to collect from your customers, you had the unenviable chore of arguing with them about when they put in their start and their stop, and they always thought you were charging them for extra papers, papers they never wanted, never got.

Some of them were chiselers, no matter how much money they made, and this was a very affluent neighborhood. It is a wonder how the wealthiest people will try the hardest to cheat a boy out of his hard-earned money. I guess it comes down to the idea: the less I pay you, the more I have for myself. And: it all adds up, if I keep it.

Picture this: a scrawny fourteen year old boy has just finished delivering his load of Thursday papers on a late afternoon in November; it is as dark, though, as if it were midnight. The familiar Seattle rain is falling at its usual wind-driven slant; when walking South or West, it strikes you in the face and will come under the brim of any hat made. Gradually the boy’s shoulders become dark with wetness and so do the fronts of his jeans-clad legs. Hours ago his low shoes were soaked and sloshing internally.

Do not give this boy much pity. It is his usual condition and is undeserving. Save your tears for what comes later. On the heels of his delivery he reversed course and begins to make his month’s collection. A word in the form a of a digression is necessary here. At the end of each month, The Seattle Times Newspaper issues each of its carriers a collection book. In it are recorded his route number, draw, and list of customers, with addresses. This is all preprinted. If they are daily, daily and Sunday, Sunday only, etc., this is included. Now the boy and every carrier buys his papers from the newspaper at a discount. I forget precisely what this is, but let us say at 60 percent of retail, which is or was rather standard. Thus a daily paper might cost him three cents and he charges the customer a nickel. Remember, the year is 1944. Things were cheap then, but only relatively so. A nickel would buy you a whole lot of different small things, a newspaper being one of them.

The Sunday paper was more of course. A great thick thing full of colorful comics and inserts, plus expanded sections of a host of local topics, it might have sold for thirty cents. Fifty cents? Whatever, the boy bought the fat paper from the company for eighteen cents, or thirty cents, depending. Then he marked it up forty percent, and when it came time to collect for it, he made a pretty good profit on each item, though the downside is that his load weighed a large fraction of a ton and required parental assistance to load and deliver.

So now it is time to collect and make his profit. His little book has a Customer’s Copy and File Copy, the latter yellow. It is the route boy’s record that he has been paid and what he wants to see is a whole book full of yellow pages, which means that everybody has paid. Ha. Double ha.

Carleton Park is a residential section of Magnolia Bluff, and most of the houses—and certainly all of the ones with water views of Puget Sound—are impressive. They are owned, can only be owned, by people of affluence. You might say they were rich, if you had little money yourself. Men did not cut their own lawns but employed little independent laborers such as myself to do it, but we lost out in time, before and after the war, to an industry of second-generation immigrants, generally Japanese or Italian. But this is another matter and has been discussed earlier. What I’m getting at is the men had no need or inclination to cut their own grass. They employed others to do it. Likewise their wives had women who came to their houses on buses and did the cleaning, including in some instances windows. They worked for half days or full days, either departing by self-same buses headed in opposite directions at either noon or five P.M. Most were either black or brown.

The boy approaches house number one in the reversal order of delivery and sees the neatly furled paper lying in the shelter area of the porch where he just flung it. He rings the doorbell and waits. The front of the house is dark. People are no doubt in the nether part of the house where the kitchen is and the formal dining room. It is early dinner time. This is the ideal time to make collections, the newspaper tells the carriers, because people are most apt to be home. What The Times doesn’t tell you is that families hate being interrupted at meal time and can be vicious.

A light pops on, then another. Sometimes the porchlight follows, but often it doesn’t and the door is opened to darkness. "Yes?" asks a voice, generally male, for women are hesitant about opening doors unto darkness.

"Collect for The Times," the boys calls out. Now that is about as succinct a statement of intent as is possible to manufacturer for the occasion.

"How much is it?" the voice calls out. It is a reasonable question and frequently a misleading one, for the boy is tricked into believing he is about to be paid.

He calls out the cost.

The replies are various and original, at least, up to a point. They may run like this:

"Do you have change for a fifty?"

Fat chance.

In fact, you start out with a pocketful of bills and a ton of loose change borrowed from your family or retained from last month’s collection, for just this purpose. You don’t want to, you see, contribute to your own downfall by being without. But the bills and spare change get eaten up fast and soon all you have is large denominations.

If you have change for a fifty—a lot of money then—they often try you next time with change for a hundred. You aren’t Rockerfeller, you want to tell them, but it is counterproductive, wit is, even when it is funny, which this isn’t.

More often they simply call out, "Don’t have it. Come back in a day or two."

This may seem a simple statement of economic conditions, true or not, and nothing to be despised. It is a statement of fact, as well. Unless it is a lie. Now, why would affluent (I avoid the use of the term wealthy because it has connotations that might make me seem to be manipulating my audience in the direction of undeserved sympathy, which is not my intention) people who have the wherewithal in their pockets say they didn’t have? It goes back to my earlier maxim. If I give it to you, then I don’t have it for myself, and that will never do.

A boy forms some unsubstantiated general conclusions. People are cheap, people are mean, people are resentful (of being interrupted during or just before dinner, or are resentful in general?), people who can say Yes enjoy more saying No, etc., into the night. "Go away. Come back some other time." What time would be good, you don’t ask, because you know the true answer is "Never."

There are only a small number of people like this, truthfully, but they stand out and loom large over time because of the damage they can do to a young man’s finances. For if you don’t pay for your paper, I must. And if I must return, time after time, to collect from you (though it is right on my route, admittedly, and only delays my return home for my own tepid dinner), then the profit I make for my time and labor becomes hugely diluted and diffuse. And while I can compute the math into an hourly wage now rapidly descending, I don’t. There is some bad news you don’t want to know, whatever the price, whatever the discomfort it may bring.

And then there are those who skip out on you. Why pay the boy is you are going to move and will never see him again? It is admittedly a small economy, but these add up. Enough small economies effected and it is the same as medium sized moneys coming in. It only stands to reason. Rich persons are not cheapskates, they only seem to be. And if nine out of ten are not, then the one out of that number rises unforgettably in one’s mind and memory.

It is enough to make a boy a Marxist.

I didn’t become a Marxist, however, until two years later, and it was the result of reading Das Kapital. The chapters on surplus value are highly recommended. There you learn that the one who makes the item receives very little of what it costs to purchase. There are many, many hands reaching out along the route to the consumer, and each hand’s fingers take a bit of the price in terms of profit. Their contribution to the produce is minimal. In this sense, as a delivery boy and collector of bills due, I am among the scourges of capitalistic society. I neither made the newspaper or wrote its news stories. But to a few in my posh neighborhood I was the focal point, the only place where they could truly effect economies.

Thus I was instrumental in what is termed historical materialism and served as an undistributed middle term in that terrifying process called dialectical materialism. Though of course I did not know it at the time and only came to realize it a couple of years later.

14

Newspapers aside—and they all should promptly be put there—my next serious labors involved food preparation. I was not in high school proper (there is no proper high school, by the way), only the matriculated eighth grade, which in the absence of junior highs at the time or middle schools became a kind of loose attachment of high schools themselves and the lowest rung on their ladder.

We went through some kind of unmemorable graduation exercises at Magnolia Grade, then were rewarded by a daily long bus ride to and from Queen Anne High School, which occupied a hilltop five miles or so away, but could not be reached (at least not by busline) in a straight line by required because of the steepness of the hill involved, I guess, a pronged or forked approach, veering far to the South, only to return abruptly to the North again, doubling up the distance of the bus route and resulting need to be traveled, in order to escape circumnavigating the hill itself and approaching it, as it were, head on by means of a mechanical device called a counterbalance.

A counterbalance is a heavy load that counters or balances the one of a electric trolley propelled up a slope in excess of six degrees and impossible for its powertrain to accommodate; it has to be assisted in this Herculean task by a system of levers and weights designed to neutralize it tendency to collapse back upon itself and slide back down the short distance it has managed to achieve. The weights do this. They in effect descend the hill slowly, thereby enabling the trolley bus to ascend equally slowly, until be degrees it has triumphed over the grade and now finds itself delightfully at the top of the hill or counterbalance. And that is how—Children—each day we went to the towering school and were returned from it. All by a system of weights and levers. Just think. Miraculous, isn’t it?

It didn’t seem so to me. High school—no matter how approached, had still to be entered—was a nightmare made manifest. I had to have new clothes to accommodate what was in style, see to it that my hair was cut a certain way and no other, and walk and behave in a manner that seemed aloof, though under its veneer could be seen to be trembling with trepidation and terror. The word "cool" had not yet come into use but was on the edge of doing so. Hip and hep were not carefully differentiated, but usage favored the latter, by only a slight amount. And the fact that we transferees were all on the bottom rung of a ladder previously deemed to have but four steps (for we were the first class to matriculate as the eighth grade), we were worse than the absolute bottom. We were beneath that, beneath contempt. As for me, I hardly noticed any difference.

My father was always on the outlook for work for me, namely, a job. He had worked steadily his whole life, beginning at about age four, and so should I. (If he were still alive, I’d ask him now what about the years zero though three—did he just lie around the house, devouring food, listening to his crystal radio, playing with his jacks set?) So the job slinging hamburgers at the Grizzly Inn must have come as a result of my own initiative, though not without prodding. And the grand sum of sixty-five cents an hour pops into mind, though it could not have been so much. It is an unlikely amount. Five or more years later I was working as a copyboy at The Seattle Times (no less) for the magnificent hourly wage of fifty-five cents an hour, and all of us to be qualified were college students with at least three solid years of distinguished work behind us. A major in journalism was necessary and the jobs so coveted that we formed a queue. I got mine honestly, fairly, because my father rode to work in a carpool with the paper’s advertising manager.

To sling hamburgers at the Inn immediately raised the slinger to status nearly equal to but a bit shy of being a substitute on the third team of any school sport. Instantly I went from being a dork with tax tokens dangling from the cinch cords of his oilskin slicker (de rigeur) and cute sayings spelled out in white adhesive tape (there being no other kinds of tape on the market yet, let along any company to be named 3M on the horizon to be formed) all over its back to a person with a recognizable identity signified by a raised eyebrow or two, accompanied by a slight lift of one corner of one’s upper lip.

The Grizzly Inn was owned and operated by a middle-aged curmudgeon who had an eye for blossoming high school girls but knew enough to let it go at that and hired boys for all his counter work. Boys he understood and could boss around in a way that they understood. They cold be hired and fired at whim. Girls were complicated and confusing, sexual and unsexual, preoccupied with boys who were still children, while they themselves were on the cusp of licentiousness. Boys then. Only boys. But one couldn’t help but admire. . . .

Nor could I. I was in a power situation. Boys and girls alike would cue up to buy burgers from one of us three slingers at each lunch period. There were three. We would democratically dispense our wares, theoretically, but in actual practice we served our friends first, and were known to each other and the world according to who those friends were. And if they were somebody, or Somebodies, and we served them first or even early, we were adjudged to be on the same plane of existence as them and partook of the glory, or whatever it was.

Our grades had to be good enough to be excused from one studyhall and it had to be fore or aft of the lunch hour. We normally had a half hour. But if you worked, you could add a studyhall hour to it and cover all three lunch periods. Each tailed off at the end of the half hour and gave you a little free time to chat with your buddies, who were all happy to be seen chatting with somebody who was a slinger, or rather Slinger. And it was then we got to eat our own lunch.

We made our own burgers and they were the envy. Was it here—the Grizzly Inn—that the double meat, double cheese, was born? If not, it was one of those steps in evolution that took place, like geology, all over the earth at about the same time, at the same rough moment in evolutionary time, born over and over, in diners and full-fledge restaurants and inns and luncheonettes, in America (first of all), then in Britain, Europe and in decades to follow, eventually South America, Asia, India, Australia, and whatever slow to evolve, tardy nations that eventually became sophisticated.

George Lamerieux owned the Grizzly Inn and was a bit grizzly himself, over the ears and along the back of his head, where his gray hair was receding fast. He wore little gold-rimmed eyeglasses long before they became fashionable again. In this sense he could be said to be a style leader. He had no more paunch than any ordinary man of forty-five and smoked like a forest fire. He could work with both hands above his foul apron and the ash from his cigarette would follow him but not drop until he intended it to, always to an innocent portion of the floor and not into somebody’s food. Early in the day he would receive delivery of the ground beef, then regrind it finer himself and add to it a host of neutral ingredients, a dominant one of which was oats.

Oats bound the fatty meat together and kept the thin burgers from fragmenting and ending up on the griddle as crisp islands of hamburger bits. This was greatly to be avoided and George did so. He dipped into the vast vat of bound hamburger raw material with an ice cream scoop and produced a ball of clingy pink substance. A moment later this was flattened with a hand roller into a perfectly round potential burger that looked much like a pancake. These were stacked, with a square of waxed paper between each. When it came time to cook them, we took turns being the cook and laying them out, all in a close row, on the griddle, waiting a few moments, and then beginning to turn them in the same order we had laid them down. So thin, they took only a minute or two to turn leaden gray and ready for a flip. And, no, we didn’t toss them high into the air and watch them fall, cooked side down, back to the iron, no matter how pretty the girl was who was watching us. George wouldn’t tolerated it. We knew how many competent guys were on the waiting list. They would do anything short of murder for our jobs.

I found it fun to watch the meat shrink back upon itself. A patty started out impressively large in diameter, though alarmingly thin. As it cooked it became a veritable water drop falling on parched earth. We were warned not to over cook the meat. George measured them all precisely. Cooked quickly, there was not much fat lost, nor size, and the resulting product just matched the size of the bun. It was a perfect marriage.

You could have cheese on yours for a nickel more. Most did. The cheese was processed American and had a low melting point. This George prepared in neat squares the same morning, along with the canisters of condiments—sliced dill pickle, mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce, relish. You could drop a square of cheese on an already turned paddy, turn around, count to ten, and it would be softened slightly but not yet runny and just right to lay down on a bun. We had a clever way of handling these. They came from a local baker, newly baked and already sliced in half for us, on trays in racks, each bun leaning up slightly against its neighbor. We reached for these as the burgers shall we say matured? The bottom of the bun was placed on the newly turned paddy and the top of the bun on top of that. This warmed the buns and gave the bottom one a nice sogginess. Then the top bun we removed and dressed according to prescription, with "Everything" or some lesser combination of condiments. The meat and bottom bun were lifted off the griddle, matched to the preped upper bun, and brought harmoniously together. Voila, une burger.

The competed item was folded into a paper napkin, covering its lower half, which additionally caught its drips and juices, and given to the customer, who was all the while salivating. Money changed hands. There were no potato fries, though George was French enough to have thought of it. We served a limited fare. Perhaps he thought there was not enough profit in it. Men have their reasons. They are not always rational.

Up front, across the street side of the Inn and facing the school, was what might be called the drink concession. There were high-backed booths to accommodate the boys and girls who wanted to sit there and drink malteds, milkshakes, or the house favorite, the phosphate. Otherwise, kids ganged in back at picnic tables ranged across a cement floor, with low-backed booths circling the room, a large one, one in which you could hold a dance, though George never did, in my time, not that I heard of. Everybody in back ate burgers, though most were washed down with drinks brought from the front of the Inn.

You could bring your burger forward and sit eating it in one of the booths, and you did this if you were with a girl, which I never was, or in a party that included girls, which I rarely was, or perhaps wasn’t ever. In back kids voluntarily segregated themselves by sex. That is another way of saying boys sat with boys, girls with girls, and never the twain, etc., or rarely, and then only in front. Or mostly in front. Or in front, if ever.

You could buy a phosphate large or small, and I believe it was girls who were employed to mix and serve them. Thus phosphates were loosely considered girls’ drinks, though I loved them. And I do remember drinking them, a few years later, with girls, up front. There were lemon phosphates, cherry phosphates, pink lady phosphates (which were a blend of the two former ones, with the cherry in much lesser proportion. For the bold there were vanilla phosphates, for if vanilla is so good in shakes and malts, in only follows that it can’t help but be good in the world of phosphates, or can it? Try one and see. Mediocre, I’d say. And for those even more bold, chocolate phosphate, which looked ugly and tasted even worse. Yet I knew kids—girls, usually—who drank them regularly.

There were spigots whose recesses contained flavors mundane and exotic, plus jars with pouring spouts that held even more foreign tastes, a few drops of which added to your clear, sparkling tasteless drink produced a brief new order of being. A phosphate bit at your tongue and its cold left an aching aftertaste deep in your mouth. It was lovely. And after a burger, it cleansed your palate, as the gourmets were in wont of doing. If you were a new smoker, it cut through the accumulation of tars and nicotine, and left you and you hope your breath refreshed, newly treated.

I learned to smoke at an early age, back behind the Grizzly Inn, and did not regret it until many years later. A sophomore girls, seeing me puff on an early Chesterfield, sighed snidely, "How blasé." I had to look up the word, having much difficulty in spelling it correctly, and when I was sure of its meaning, felt a surge of pride at my accomplishment, though I knew for sure she meant the remark with utmost sarcasm.

I decided to treat it as keen insight on her part. Other than this remark, she would not consent to speak to me, this blond beauty, who already could French inhale and probably (I dared to wonder) kiss accordingly.

I was still pretty much a joke to the world, especially its female half.

15

In my senior year of high school, with my first full-blown affair underway, I had a serious need of making money, though I did not want work to take me away from my natural inclination toward idleness and play. Fortunately my love of fishing, and flyfishing in particular, provided the unexpected means to making enough money to keep functioning, especially in regards to paying the expenses of having a regular girl friend. 

in shakes and malts, in only follows that it can’t help but be good in the world of phosphates, or can it? Try one and see. Mediocre, I’d say. And for those even more bold, chocolate phosphate, which looked ugly and tasted even worse. Yet I knew kids—girls, usually—who drank them regularly.

There were spigots whose recesses contained flavors mundane and exotic, plus jars with pouring spouts that held even more foreign tastes, a few drops of which added to your clear, sparkling tasteless drink produced a brief new order of being. A phosphate bit at your tongue and its cold left an aching aftertaste deep in your mouth. It was lovely. And after a burger, it cleansed your palate, as the gourmets were in wont of doing. If you were a new smoker, it cut through the accumulation of tars and nicotine, and left you and you hope your breath refreshed, newly treated.

I learned to smoke at an early age, back behind the Grizzly Inn, and did not regret it until many years later. A sophomore girls, seeing me puff on an early Chesterfield, sighed snidely, "How blasé." I had to look up the word, having much difficulty in spelling it correctly, and when I was sure of its meaning, felt a surge of pride at my accomplishment, though I knew for sure she meant the remark with utmost sarcasm.

I decided to treat it as keen insight on her part. Other than this remark, she would not consent to speak to me, this blond beauty, who already could French inhale and probably (I dared to wonder) kiss accordingly.

I was still pretty much a joke to the world, especially its female half.

15

In my senior year of high school, with my first full-blown affair underway, I had a serious need of making money, though I did not want a job to take me away from my natural inclination toward idleness and play. Fortunately my love of fishing, and flyfishing in particular, provided the unexpected means to making enough money to keep functioning, especially in regards to paying the cost of having a regular girl friend, who needed to be taken places. Girls expect this (though there is nothing I like more than staying, if you know what I mean). So I looked around—studied my horizons, you might say—and saw a possible way. It involved tying flies, but in order to do so an make any money a number of fortunate situations had to occur. My stars had to be in just the right conjunction.

They were. The war shortly over, there was a pent-up demand for all kinds of things. Things were just getting back to normalcy. Good hooks were arriving on the market from England and Norway again. And along the Pacific Coast of America, anglers were finding that salmon would take big shiny flies fished near the surface. Coho salmon were particularly prone to this lure. The flies were flashy and incorporated polar bear hair in their wings. Natural white was good, but it required a topping of brightly dyed colored polar bear. Now, polar bears did not exactly give up their thick lustrous coats so we could tie flies; no, they had to be hunted down and, well, killed. There were no environmental safeguards in place yet, only the great difficulty of getting to where the bears were, shooting them, getting their carcasses back to civilization. And the demand for polar bear rugs was not extreme.

Scraps left over from rugs were ideal for such flies. My father was in the fur business. There was no demand for polar bear coats, but the fur was utilized in hats and muffs. If you were in the fur business, you knew everybody who was at the center of the trade, and polar bear trimmings could be found. Dad went on regular buying trips for his store, Frederick and Nelson, a West Coast subsidiary of Marshall Field, every June. I pleaded with him to bring me back some scraps, however small, however few. He surprised me by bringing back a whole lot. Of course it was all white.

To get the colored stuff I had to find somebody who dyed furs and needed white. This was Roy Patrick, who ran about the only flytying store in the state of Washington and as far South as Eugene, Oregon, where there was another solitary store. So Roy and I got together. I swapped white for the principal colors—red, olive, royal blue, green/gray, yellow. It was a wonderful arrangement. Mine, of course, had cost me nothing. I had nothing to lose.

But I had plenty to make. I found three stores who would buy all the flies I could tie. Through collusion they offered forty-seven and a half cents a piece. This they would double to sell my flies at retail for ninety-five. Today this would be about four or five dollars each. It was a princely sum. I certainly wouldn’t, or couldn’t pay it, if I fished for these fish, but I didn’t. So the matter was moot. All I had to do was tie them. I don’t know how much money I made, for I never kept track of my sales. I’d simply tie up a bunch, trot down to one of my stores, lay my wares on the glass counter top, and collect my money. What a racket. Of course I had contempt for them and no special pride in my product, because the money came in so effortlessly.

Not that it was easy to tie such flies. It was hard work, for the materials didn’t behave well. Polar bear hair is bulky and resists being lashed to a hook; unless you use very heavy thread, it keeps breaking and your wing flies into the air and is lost, or else you salvage it as best you can, whip on some more thread, and try again. And again, if necessary, until you have a fly that is halfway secure.

Mine were never all the way secure. This means that if you tugged on the wing very hard, or fished the fly under difficult conditions, the wing would probably come off. I wouldn’t bet that it wouldn’t. If it did, none of my stores ever reported the bad news to me or asked for a replacement fly for their customer. The customer probably ate the difference.

I was not enough of a businessman at that age, 17, to sit down and figure out how long it took me to tie a single fly. It was no doubt longer than I think it was, today. But if my polar bear hair was free—both to barter for colored and to tie my underwing with—the hook perhaps cost me a penny. Thread and tinsel were fairly small expenses. If I cleared only forty cents a fly, that was doing pretty well. I think it was more than that.

And what did I do with all my money? I blew it. Cary, my girl, was not extravagant in her demands of me. I had occasional use of my father’s Buick, but most often we used her father’s DeSoto, and for both I had to buy gas. That was great. And there were movies to pay for, hamburgers and milk shakes, phonograph records, Modern Library books, for I was fashioning myself as some sort of intellectual, expressly what kind I was a long time in concluding. I remember, that lovely long summer of piece-rate goods, reading Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. A little of each. I mean, these were thick books, serious stuff, deadly dull, and I’m afraid I didn’t do any of them but Freud justice. He was choked full of sexual metaphor. And some of it wasn’t metaphor.

I took my good luck for granted, both girl and work. The following summer, after I had completed a year of college, things had changed mightily. The girl was gone, lost to let us call it attrition. And when I went back to my stores to ask about orders for the polar-bear coho flies, I found a man, George McLeod, who was a professional, had moved in and got all the orders that I had lucked into, the year before. He tied a much more secure product than I did, and its wings would not come off, no matter how much you tortured the fly. He also packaged them neatly, cleverly, more businesslike. Each went into a cellophane envelop, and the envelopes were attractively stacked, one fly atop another, in three tall rows on a preprinted card.

Try the buslines, I was told. It is what they told everybody. The first opening was on a milkrun, the expresses all filled for more than a week. At another time, I might have liked the idea of seeing America up close, at my leisure, but not today. I had work pending, and every day I lost from writing those papers was a day of productivity lost. My doom was drawing nearer: that is how I looked at it. It is not a healthy way at all.

So I rode my bus and experienced many small Washington and Oregon and Northern California towns more extensively than I would like. the bus would draw in to some place like Centralia or Weed, belch, hiss its doors open, sigh sadly, and so would I. I would get out and walk around in the December dark, often in rain, once in light wet snow, go into the lunch counter, find that my appetite was gone again, order something, leave most of it behind, board the bus, groan, and endure a thirty mile ride to the next burg, where the scenario would repeat.

And all the while the imminent fear of throwing up.

By the time I arrived in Berkeley and phoned Norma to meet me at the terminal I was badly in need of a solid eight hours sleep and some gentle food. For me, scrambled eggs has always done it. For others, I understand, it is the worst thing you could eat. To each his own. Ritz crackers, process cheese, bread or toast, etc. These are all easily digestible and bring with them a sense of ease and restoration.

School began, with more of the same torment that had gotten me in this situation in the first place. Each day, each day that I had classes, I had to up and face it. A kind of stupor possessed me, as if I’d been dipped in modeling clay. I’d eat, by rote, the same old breakfast food as always, alternating Cheerios with Rice Chex, gobble some toast, a cup of warmed up coffee from Norma’s breakfast, an hour earlier, and trot with my bookbag up Dwight Way at a healthy, lower campus stride, my ears straining for the usual melodious polyglot. Always it would drift my way, the only thing in my life that was never-failing. I’d pass Robbie’s, never in time for a cup of boiled coffee, and pass through the sally port of South Sather Gate. A couple of minutes later, I’d meet my freshman comp class, never quite sure of my introductory remarks. Maybe I’d try to wow them with a joke or some not too obscure literary reference, not one that might sail over their heads. Then it was down to Burke, the royal bastard. Trouble was, I rather liked the old guy. Maybe it was because he and my father shared the same peculiar first names. Or perhaps it was the soundness of his reasoning.

It’s hard to refute old Burke, even though he was a Nazi in the making.

Mickey Spillane was big stuff then. Everybody read him, whether or not one owned up to it. And it was about the time they were linking smoking and cancer, the first true hard facts coming from subjecting innocent mice to the chemical components of cigarettes and smoke. So I’d try to make a little joke, trying to set their minds at ease, hoping that they might like me (like your teacher, fat chance) or weaken their ridicule a few notches. I found it odd to be standing in a position of authority, when I was so unsure of everything. Couldn’t they see my uncertainty in my eyes, hear it in every other word, in spite of all my intellectual bluster?

For if I had scorn for my teachers (Sledd, McNulty, Renoir), wouldn’t I be deserving of my own students’ contempt and slightly veiled wrath? How could I escape it?

And what if I barffed in front of them, right on my shoes or, slightly better, on the worn linoleum of the portable building in which my class was held? How could I go back to face them all, two days later, knowing what I’d done? Well, I couldn’t. Tell me, can a teacher take an incomplete in his own class? Cop out, drop out, simply disappear? The though tempted me and provided an easy out, one too easy, I’m afraid, to take. Instead I toughed it out, or so I thought of it. To them, my students, I was probably just continuing to mumble my way through the fifty-minute hour in my usual incoherent fashion. After which there would be my own classes to struggle through from the student’s point of view, sarcastic and unyielding. I’d deliver to my own profs what I thought my students were preparing for me. And on and on.

It is important to keep them in line and feeling unsure. Pop quizzes are one way, and help ensure attendance. Nothing bothers a teacher more than a student who never shows up for lectures, especially if he is guilty of the same crime himself, in the guise of his other self. Sure, I used to cut a lot. It was the only way I could hold myself together. I’d call it morning rest, when I slept through one of those classes, and then look askance when my own students showed up, after an unauthorized absence and no proffer of an explanation.

Schizoid, you say? I say so, too.

You crack but you don’t break entirely in half, the way Brown did in the Army. Maybe he had the right idea—get it all over at once and start the healing process. Suffer the specific trauma, start to crack, split down a seam, break wide open, fall in halves, but start immediately to heal, after your bad time. Instead I fractured undefinably and went on with my life, cracked and tottering. People were mildly surprised, I suppose, at some of my untoward behavior, but none of it was outrageous enough to send one of them to the telephone for the ambulance, like they did for poor old Soldier Brown.

In McNulty’s class, for instance, I had already written and read aloud, like some idiot learning a foreign language through extended translation, two of my three papers on, for God’s sake, Edmund (that name again) Spenser. I’d never thought of it but I was surrounded by Edmunds and they were pressing on me, for my father had expectations of me, now that the Army had cut me loose and I was back in school, instead of our working, like a decent son would do. And then there was Burke, the admirable fascist. And now the pre-Shakespearean sonnet writer and creator of that enormously tedious, The Fairy Queen. They pushed on me, my Edmunds did, from all three sides, and I felt squoze, like an orange. Inside I was all mushy orange pulp and seeds.

I settled down to read my third and final paper in the tight little seminar room in Dwinnell Hall, on the second storey, next to the courtyard, feeling like a condemned prisoner, hunched over the long oak table, my cigarettes next to me, my lighter, too, like some professor himself, my papers spread out around me, as if for comfort but not comfortingly. They are what stood between me and disaster. Without them, I’d be dead. But even with them, there was a good chance that something other than words would come spewing out of my mouth.

As with writing, you put down the first word and the rest invariable follow. Start with "the." It never fails. Ploddingly, in a near whisper, I began. Some version of pastoral was a current hot topic and I had found a way of twisting Virgil until it came out Spenser. It was a clever idea, not too original (it doesn’t pay to be very original, in graduate school), and somewhat to McNulty’s liking. In face, he liked me period. Perhaps he saw something of himself in my faltering approach to scholarship. It’s hard to explain these things. They are largely chemical. Anyway I had an A cinched since I’d walked in the door. In such a case, you have to really goof up to lower your grade. Often it takes dynamite.

In Renoir’s class in Chaucer I wasn’t doing so well. (We say, "doing so good," but we write, "doing so well"; wonder why?) There were a lot of smart undergraduates in the huge lecture room and of course there was the faux pas of having carried a Harvard bookbag without knowing it and trapping Renoir into saluting me aloud as an academic colleague, a confrere, when I was no such thing and had to tell him so, in front of everybody. Who was the butt of the gaffe? Well, it was me, but there was the possibility he thought he was, and that would never do, not when a grade was at stake. He never gave me more than a B+ on any of my papers, three of them, and on the final one I had misspelled the word, yeoman. I had simply transposed two vowels, but to give me credit where credit is due had done it consistently throughout the paper, which ought to count for something. Or so I argued.

He looked at me as the fool I was, in his opinion. He almost convinced me.

A B there, and in Sledd’s class, Old English, I was borderline, going into the final. I studied for it as though I were going into the priesthood, which perhaps I was, and never knew how I did. The questions on the test were what I had expected, but in the cold light of finals morning each wore a suspicious cast and caused me to doubt what I knew, or thought I knew. A cold chill passed down my frame, followed by a sweat that started at my part and spread down to my ears, chin, neck, and points South.

But he gave me an A for the course, which means that I couldn’t have fucked up too badly. Or else it was that Adlai Stevenson button I wore. It meant I had a soul and shouldn’t be held back, not when the Eisenhower others were surging on.

My own students I graded, of course, most severely. One A, three Bs, many many Cs, twice as many Ds as As and Bs totaled, and a few Fs, but they were entirely self-earned and usually the student had disappeared from class long ago and could not be remembered specifically, with only his grade card to bring him back to life.

Never take a course from a grad student; hyper-critical of himself and all others, he will grade you without mercy. Now a graduate reader, he may show a little filial benevolence. It is not guaranteed. Only that a student teacher will exercise his right to what he will never admit is revenge. Everything but that.

Meanwhile my stomach and I continued a nervous alliance. I’d have flunked it if I could, but unfortunately it remained attached to me, inseparable. It followed me around and frequently made comment on what it thought of what was going on. I would suck in great quantities of air, then belch it back out. My head ached and my sinuses continually ran. Rather than swallow the awful stuff, and get even sicker, I would spit the stuff into Kleenexes and surreptitiously dispose of them. Sometimes not so stealthily, either.

I slept poorly and began to lose weight. Textbooks will state that this is often the case. I did not begin to suspect that I had enemies out there that wanted to see me crash and burn; I knew that I had. But my paranoia was kept within bounds and, in long retrospect, does not seem excessive. I knew who the real villain was. He was always right at hand and within reach. It was as though myself had cleaved and the two halves were at continual war. There was no respite asked or offered. What do they say about someone? "He is his own worst enemy." It is I of whom they were speaking. Me, myself, and I.

To win the war, it is important to identify the enemy and not confuse him with some other. In the instance of oneself, the war is seldom won. The most one can hope for is a draw. This makes it like those chess games among champions (or, for that matter, the worst losers) that ends every time in a draw. The players often go on and on, often conceding the game or the draw, out of a common despair, and wait for the time when the other guy suggests that they agree to give it up. Then, feigning unwillingness, they reluctantly, sadly agree. Secretly they are relieved. Hell, they are triumphant.

Gladly would I have agreed to a draw, but my stomach, mind, and sinuses would not offer one. They churned on, each in its own indescribable, undefined way. I would sit in a chair, tied in knots, reading or trying to read, while my stomach made continual comment on the state of things, life, the human condition. It was embarrassing. My kind wife never said anything, but she knew something was pathetically amiss. She waited for me to come out of it. It was a long interval. Years, perhaps.

Meanwhile, she learned how to cut my hair. Going to a barbershop was a terror that I could not face and my hair grew long, longer, longest. Finally., something had to be done. It was an ongoing, learning process. Ship here, whack there; listen to my complaints, which as always were many. Then, with shards from my scalp lying limp on the floor, she was done. She looked at me apprehensively. I smiled my gratitude. What did it matter, how I looked, for I intended to see as few people as humanly possible.

All my papers turned in, I went to finals in each course and filled bluebooks until I had nothing more to say on the topic, or else the bell rang, announcing the end of the grilling. Then there was a brief respite between semesters and the publication of grades. I tried to relax but couldn’t. The grades were posted, that is, recorded on our transcripts, and they were made available to each of us. Sledd, bless him and his political sympathies, gave me an unreserved A. It was almost deserved, but not quite. My passion (in the sense of St. Matthew) for The Battle of Maldon is probably what did it. What an epic, what a vital event. I’d translated it and in the process learned a thing or two about my native language, not to mention warrior customs.

McNulty, too, even with his "I’m from Columbia and you’re not" attitude, gave me my due, an A-minus. It was fair enough. The minus indicated reservation and served as a hedge against some later calamity, when I might embarrass us both. But Renoir, the bastard, gave me a straight B, an undergraduate grade and deadly to someone going for the Ph.D. I blamed in on the green bookbag, and all it didn’t stand for, when it no doubt reflected my only ordinary comprehension of that great, Chaucer and the high degree of competition from the best undergraduate students. So the grade was deserved, but I had hoped for and badly needed something better.

If you divide it out, the credits and hours and grades, it comes up a munificent 3.33, ad infinitum. It could have been worse, it might have been better, but it was the best that I could do, under the circumstances, and they were that I was having a nervous breakdown—a term, incidentally, that medically doesn’t mean a damn thing. Once it did: it was something just short of being labeled psychotic, or neurotic to a dangerous (for others) degree. Today it was much like the flu. I mean, people did get the flu, one of several rampant viruses, but they also used the word to cover a host of major and minor infirmities, including hangovers and simply feeling lousy.

Likewise a nervous breakdown (I never used the word myself, not up until now) is a catch basin for a world of dysfunctional complaints. It may describe a general malaise. I like that—what’s your problem, Bob? I’m suffering from general malaise. Sounds like melancholy. It is, but much worse. It is melancholy raised to the third power.

Classes began again, and things were highly different. Only the scene of the crime remained the same. Berkeley—I love it, I hate it. I’m proud to say I belonged, but never quite did. The place provided a dichotomy of which Descartes would have been proud. There was academe, of course, which seemingly dominated, with its professors vying for tenure and rank, its multitudinous undergraduates, and its poor suffering graduate students, such as I. Then there was the street. I mean, The Street. Berkeley is and was as much The Street as anything else. Talk about your den of opposites, your anodynes. Straight-laced and staid, the University walked a narrow path, proud and disdainful. There was money there, however, for scholarships, grants, contracts, salaries. They issued degrees that marked nebulous attainments but could be translated into jobs, careers. The Street, however, offered joy, release, camaraderie, sloth. Always it beckoned and held itself up as what we today might call a viable alternative. You could get drunk, high, laid, and you could read things that were really interesting.

I used to think of it as being adrift in a sea of sharks. Which, please? Why The Street contained the sharks, or did it? Maybe it was Academe that slashed through the schools of baitfish and gobbled them up in bloody slobber. Things had a disconcerting habit of changing into their opposite in a wink. How could you know which end was up when your head was pointed always down? Well, you couldn’t; you could only try. If you tried, you generally failed. This was the message of Academe.

The Street said there was no such thing as failure. To put it another way, failure reigned. Nobody issued you a failing grade—or a passing one that was in disguise one that would flunk you. Instead, there was the constant promise of pleasure. There was freedom, or the illusion of freedom, which is much the same thing, for freedom is a state of mind. If you think you’re free, you are, no matter how tight your prison.

I did not drop out and take up The Street, though it was always there, holding out its dubious promise. Instead, I retreated inside my painful self. I had no class of my own to teach, for it was an emergency, one-time appointment. I had acquitted myself adequately and this was recognized by the English Department by offering me an assistantship. Comp classes were invariably taught by regular faculty, professors all, but they were assisted by worthy graduate students and paid well (by contemporary standards) for it. So, financially this was a triumph and paid even better, no worse, than my acting instructorship in Extension, but it was a step downward, as far as I was concerned.

Yet there were fellow graduate students who would have killed for the appointment, and I’m not speaking figuratively.

My own classes I don’t remember; I don’t remember them because I only went to one or two classes before I dropped out. There was a course in Pope and Dryden by a famous visiting scholar from Yale, who was publishing widely. There was a course in the modern American novel, which I could have cooled, but I was in no shape to do it. Quel domage, or whatever. My head hurt, my stomach was tied in knots (bowlines, grannies, even the infamous half-hitch, which does not hold), my heart thumped erratically, my bowels growled and rumbled, all my muscle groups ached endlessly. In short, I was a mess.

I tried the campus infirmary, but they issued me a handful of vitamins, some aspirins, and told me not to drink so much. Thanks a lot. Finally I went to see a doctor. He ran a battery of tests that in themselves will make a man sick and, looking serious as he read the reports, pronounced me fit and his receptionist blocked the door to the outside and demanded an immediate payment. When I offered a check, she looked at me as though I were dirt, sick dirt, but accepted it, looking at it as though it might be written in disappearing ink.

Wished I’d thought of it ahead of time. You can buy the stuff in a trick store.

None of the obvious things were wrong with me. Liver, fine; heart, strong and steady; lungs full of cigarette crud but otherwise functioning fine. I swallowed a tube and had the contents of my stomach pumped out and analyzed, something I recommend everybody avoid doing, if they possibly can. I had a man peer up my ass with a flashlight on a cable and he could find nothing unusual.

Today they would prescribe Librium or Prozac, depending on the doctor you handpicked ahead of time. Or would they? Aren’t doctors pretty much the same, regardless of the decade, the century? Since I had lost a lot of weight as a result of not eating, not being able to swallow much, the doctor gave me a prescription for what he called a tonic. I never filled it.

Rest is what I needed; I prescribed it for myself and decided to follow a regime of my own devise. Go to bed with a book (Milton, in my case) and do not emerge from the covers until you’ve finished the first book, the one about losing paradise. Do not go outside your front door unless it is dark, plenty dark. Night. Avoid the daylight. It was the daylight hours, after all, that had caused all this trouble. School. Ever notice how almost all the good classes are taught in the daytime? It’s no coincidence. It’s all part of the vast plot.

The professor who taught Freshman Comp Two, well, I never met him, though I was his assistant. It was because I never showed up. After a couple of class sessions, I suppose, he reported my absence to the English Department and they found him another stooge. It must have operated much like at the start of the previous semester, when the instructor grabbed the job at USF and created the last-minute vacancy they filled with me. So . . . fair enough, quid pro quo, tit for tat, and so forth. This is my way of rationalizing the terrible thing I did. I bugged out. I simply disappeared without so much as a word. Oh, I think I phoned the office and told them I was sick and couldn’t come in. I said I didn’t know when I would be back. They’d better find me a substitute. And this is how it worked with the classes in which I was a graduate student. From their standpoint I vanished from the face of the earth, which was the Berkeley English Department.

It happens. There must have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of instances like mine, where a student opts out, finding the load, the demands, too much for himself and his tender psyche. Universities have no conscience when it comes to dropouts and failures. They are part of the funneling process. It is an inverted pyramid, the funnel is, and people are squeezed out as they advance. There used to be a TV commercial for The Wall Street Journal, where all these dudes in suits and briefcases, with the WSJ rolled up under their arm (like an English brolly) stand on a checkerboard, some of them advancing, others simply disappearing without a puff of smoke until there are one or two left, the survivors.

It is a little like that.

Have no interest and no concern for the welfare of those who are funneled out. Their regard is centered on those who are on an upward course, and justly so. It is part of the process, a vital element, the winnowing, and God bless all who are not selected out, who move up a peg or a checkerboard square. They are the elect. They are the next generation of assistant profs. They will inherit, if not the earth, the multitudes in search of what is popularly called an education, that is, a degree. Congratulations. You have succeeded.

And then there is The street. I visited some of it regularly, in my ambling days, before I was self-interred. It held promise. I mean, here were people who actually did something, not just studied what others had done and accomplished. The Street had poets, some of them good ones. This was about the time Ginsberg was considering an academic career. What that might have led to is a depressing thought. He’d be another assistant Berkeley professor on the make, measuring out his life with crafty teaspoons, making no mistakes that would send his career awry. Already he looked like one, Ginsberg did. How easily he could have become another Brooks Bother Suit. But Kerouac took him literally in hand and showed him how none of this was possible if he wanted to stay alive. I mean, Alive.

If this sounds a bit disjointed, remember, I was at odds with myself. I was myself disjointed. I was lost, rambling, wondering, wandering in my mind. I could not function and, instead, lay back and rested, waiting for the light. I mean, The Light. Who would read Milton, for instance, if he was in his right mind? I felt he represented a gap, a lacuna, and I needed filling in this particular department, poetic theology. And I was badly in need of writing myself but, what would I say? What did I have to communicate to anyone but my own confusion? Then tell them that.

I was having my own bad time. My own teacher, Roethke, wrote about it, but how different it was, when one was experiencing it at first hand, instead of reading about somebody else’s psychic loss, the lost son. My God, no wonder they periodically had to cart him off to the funny farm. It wasn’t funny, a breakdown, whether it be like the constellations, major or minor. It meant you could no longer function. You might even be a risk to others. Nobody knew what you would do next.

You were of no help to them in offering explanations. You couldn’t provide them even to your own sore self.

29

We returned to Seattle in February or March, I don’t remember which, leaving an unsettled mess in our wake. Piling everything worth salvaging in the trunk or backseat of old Chevy convertible, we filled the tank at the neighborhood Shell and pointed ourselves North on the major interstate. Now, there is a certain sense of elation, either leaving California or arriving there. They are not very different and, hence, may only indicate the joyful experience and hope provided by change. It is the natural buoyancy of the road. Like the rising tide, it lifts all boats and souls.

"O unreal city, wet, dark, smoldering in your hated crime." I was writing shit like this, scribbling it down in little schoolboy wide-lined notebooks with red or yellow covers. Naturally, I did not think it necessary to describe the crime of which my city, Seattle, was guilty, in my book, or why the crime was hated so. The words carried mystic weight, and that was enough for me. I still considered myself a poet, or rather, Poet, writer of poesy, and had not fallen victim yet of that more infamous genre, fiction. I mean, Fiction. How much more baggage a line carries when its Proper Nouns (you see?) are capitalized. That much the Eighteenth Century taught me, in my cursory study of it. And—lads—always capitalize Nature. It tells folks you are serious about your craft or sodden art.

By all means name your children Dylan or Moira. Your folly will follow them throughout life and they will curse you myriad times. And what other purpose in life than to earn the hatred of your offspring?

Real or Unreal, welcoming or not, Seattle received my return with its usual gray oblivion. No horns went off, no police sirens in dire pursuit. I was simply absorbed into its dreary March milieu. What a lot I had learned in Berkeley. For instance, there is a big word for every little word, and if you choose it, or it chooses you, everybody within shouting distance will know that you are an intellectual, and not pseudo-. And, in time, the word you thought large, Boobie, will prove itself but medium size, and you will find an ever larger one with which to impress folks.

This is what a writer learns and must never forget. What are you if you are not your vocabulary, writ large? It’s what we and all other graffitists know.

I registered for classes for the spring quarter. I did so solely so that the GI Bill would continue to pay me my monthly stipend. A couple of friendly professors were privy to what I was up to. They offered me conference classes for graduate credit, a certain amount of which you were allowed. I had already exceeded its limits but, what the hell. One was with Wayne Burns, an old softy, whose classes and seminars were an automatic A for almost everybody. He was a canonized sex field, a friend of Alex Comfort, an authority on D. H. Lawrence who, despite a proclivity for flowers, was a pretty fine writer. A boy (meself) could go a lot farther afield than to study Lawrence at close range. Henry Miller and Anais Nin (two lodestars of my later development) were two who did and benefited. To me, a generation or two later, Lawrence seemed mostly silly, but he could write a novel like few others, and his characterization and plotting were second only to, possibly, Thomas Hardy.

I liked Lawrence, clear down to his poetry, and so did Wayne, my mentor. He knew a lot of pretty girls who gravitated to his force field and tended to stay there, even take shelter under his roof. He was believed to be safe. I did not know for sure what this meant. He was not gay—the word then was the abomination, Queer. Perhaps bi-sexual. He lived with a woman. Somehow, he had made full professor. It was mostly politics and his passionate student following, for he published next to nothing. So I read Lawrence and met with him bi-weekly, when we discussed everything but Lawrence. A neat arrangement. And I got on his party list again. When I went into the cursed Army, I somehow got removed from it.

He probably didn’t know I was in the Army, or even what the Army was and that a war was—not raging but merely petering out. My other course to make up a full load and receive full GI benefits was a conference in writing. Since Roethke was again in the nut house, Richard Eberhardt took over his classes and accepted me as one of his special students. He was, after all, the guy who was responsible for me getting out early to go back to college and had written a letter of recommendation to both Berkeley and Stanford in which I did not find myself recognizable. No doubt he had somebody else in mind.

A professor of American Lit offered me a readership in two courses, Mark Twain/Henry James and one in Emerson/Thoreau. I snapped it up. I had read just enough to qualify and managed to keep one step ahead of my students, who consisted mainly of sorority girls who were department majors or else intended to go into more serious subjects, such as Sociology. It was like being turned lose in a field of wild flowers. Constantly I had to remind myself that I was married.

Also (and I didn’t have to remind myself of this, it was so omnipresent and obvious) I was sick. Illness is antithetical to concupiscence, if you haven’t noticed. Well, this put me in the greenhouse, rather than out in the field. It’s not so bad there. It abets the healing process. In my case it was a long one. So I had money, a little, money coming in each month, and Norma was soon back at the library, which welcomed her, for she is a natural. We settled into an apartment with friends, fellow graduate students, lodged nearby. These were the Macleans and the Leahys. They were our peers. Both went on to obscure professorships and sometimes writing. Me, I was going to be a writer full time. Little did I know that this would include editing. If you heap the two together and count them as one, it is what I did, after a fashion. It seemed to me then and now a piecemeal existence. I would not recommend it to another. Not if he or she has any hope or self-respect.

If I had any of either qualities, they lay deeply buried. What I was trying to do was exist. (I mean, Exist.) I was trying to hold myself together until my compass needle stopped spinning and pointed in some coherent direction. In the meanwhile, I would hold jobs. Jobs. It is what a writer does until something substantial comes along. If it ever does. In the meanwhile, like the actor, he prepares. And waits.

Famous people have a nasty way of looking back at their early days and reflecting on the wealth of terrible jobs they had to take before they were discovered and grew rich. On talk shows, they have an ugly way of looking up, as if at some presiding deity just out of camera range, and smiling sweetly off camera, as they describe jobs that I envy and would consider blessed, if they had come my way. Never did these celebrities, say, have to measure grubby men and boys for rental tuxedoes, jamming a tapemeasure up their crotch in order to get the length of the pants right, and later receive back the soiled garments, stiff with dried cum and spilled liquor and food, and search the pockets for forgotten items, before they were sent to the cleaners. Or if they did—the Robert Redfords, Tennessee Williams, Phyllis Diller and all the other giants—they kept the information to themselves. This seems a wise and charitable act. But none of that for me.

That was one job I held while I continued on with graduate school, lost, seeking. More and more an academic career seemed foolish, unsuitable, for if teaching was a wrenching, grueling experience for me, what sense did it make to continue on preparing to be college prof with a Ph.D.? I had, in fact, met men who had jobs, tenured teaching positions here at UW, who hated what they did, must do, each day. One was Del Skeels. Before each class, he was tied up in knots and often went into the men’s room to throw up to try to release the tension. How was that for a life? It wasn’t so bad with me, yet bad enough. And it made me wonder, how did I get in this dreadful state?

Like many other dissimilar things, you are seduced into belief by slow degrees. An undergraduate dreams of the status of graduate school, what with small seminars and professors who will know you by name. You and your work will be valued, as opposed to being lumped in with dozens or hundreds of other students and your tests and papers read by ignorant readers or teaching assistants like myself. And who should know better their veniality?

Then, finally in graduate school itself, everybody is striving for a comp teaching job or some kind of assistant to a professor, not only for the modest money that will come but for the undeniable status the job brings. So, impoverished, you long for something you may not want because it signifies much more—acceptance , recognition, advancement. And what does a graduate student plan to do with his life? Why, advance learning, and that is done through teaching; never mind that as a student he loathed being taught and even the dusty environment of the classroom and library. Thus by stages is he or she corrupted into believing the opposite of what his intentions might be.

Of course such reasoning may be specious, self-excusing, no more than a lengthy rationalization for failing, for the winnowing process continues. Many of my friends sincerely enjoyed teaching and were most at home in the classroom. For me it was always torture, a special form of torment. Battered and sickened by it long enough, there is a tendency to excuse your tormentor and the instruments of your harassment. You come to think you love them. And you are deadly wrong.

I knew as much, in my deep heart’s core, but I went on, for the GI Bill is a ready source of funds, if you will only go through the motions of learning. If you do, you will learn many things, in spite of yourself. Grading papers for this particular professor was a revelation, much different from Good Old Joe Harrison, an honorable soul. For instance, after tracking down potential sources for a paper I thought might be plagiarized, I learned from friends that the undergraduate student just happened to be brilliant and this fact was widely acknowledged by all who knew him, including Ted Roethke, who used him as a kind of human encyclopedia in the classroom for esoteric poetic references. Joe, I think he was, would recite chapter and verse, while Ted beamed approval. So I grudgingly told my professor that I believed the paper to be original and deserved the highest mark, an A+.

"Give him a C+," the professor told me.

"No, you don’t understand. He wrote it himself. It is brilliant, the best thing on the subject that’s been written. Everybody knows him to be some sort of genius."

"C+," the man repeated.

"But why?"

"Because he’s obviously a homosexual and we don’t want those to continue on into the teaching profession."

"How do you know that?"

"All you have to do is look at the lad."

I had to admit, Joe was a bit strange. For one thing, he was a near albino. He had white hair, pale blue eyes, and was slender; none of these things in themselves made him gay, of course.

Though this may sound like a trumped-up case, I assure you, it is not. Things of this sort routinely happened in some dark corners of academe and went unpunished. I would like to say that I stood up (on my hind legs, so to speak) and said I wouldn’t, that I would not be a party to such a scornful action, I did no such thing. I did what I was told—and have been sorry ever since. But I saw to it that Joe got a B+ for the course—unless, of course, the prof saw the grade and overrode me, which I have to way of knowing or checking up on.

Happenings of this sort, both personally experienced or heard about, have a depressing effect on a young person. Or on an old one, for that matter, unless he is hopeless case and has been long numbed by such situations, no longer responsive to them and the injustices contained within. I came to believe that an English Department is one of the most vicious institutions on the planet, and none of them differ widely from the others. It is the people in them that make them this way, and the people get their training as graduate students. It is the crucible.

I began to take makeshift jobs out of the department and found in their great variety a sense of refreshment. Of course I was ailing still. The next few years were ones of diminished capability with me. I could barely function. I was like some small wounded creature turned in on itself, seeking darkness in which to heal, or else die. Die I would not. Life was too rich, I knew, to seek to turn it off early.

The very good local poet, Robert Sund, had a job in auto-freight which he was anxious to leave, and I did not know why, not until they accepted his referral and hired me. It was only half-time, but the hours were wonderful—six to ten P.M. I could sandwich this small amount of time into my daily schedule without disruption. In fact, the hours spent away from school and study were a respite. And it was good to be earning money.

The business was governed by a Teamsters’ contract, and the company had been paying its part-time help less than the hourly wage required under the contracts provisions. This was a violation. Sund did not know about it, nor did I, not until the job ended after the Christmas rush, when I was suddenly laid off. I turned to the Teamsters for help, but I was uninitiated and had not been paying dues to them and they declined any help in obtaining back pay for me, which would have been considerable. Several thousand dollars.

It served me right, and my efforts at obtaining redress were only half-hearted. Since my pay had not been docked with paying dues, the amount I was out was much less than it would have been, had I been a member. The worst part was the surprise, at the first of the year, at being let go. I had not seen it coming, though everybody who worked there knew it was how it operated, and looking back and can certainly see how it was a necessity, for the volume of freight dropped off markedly, once the buying season was over and business returned to normal.

It was a great job in one respect and Sund and I valued it for expressly that. You could read or study or write all day long, and when you were about full, full up with it, go off to a short-term change of pace. Then, not too late in the evening, you got off work, knowing you had earned some money, and much of the evening still lay ahead. It was just the right time to commence the day’s drinking.

I worked closely with a woman named Nancy, who was raising a child alone. This was rather novel then and I never quite knew whether she had been married or not. She left the matter intentionally obscure and I accepted the fact that there was no man currently in her life and she wished that there were. She was often graphic about the nature of what was missing and how badly she longed for it. I’m sure she was not offering me an invitation to help ease her spirit, or whatever was troubling her, but I can’t be absolutely sure. Even if I hadn’t been married, Nancy wouldn’t have appealed to me. For one thing, all she could do was talk about her kid. Everything she had to say about her seemed ordinary beyond outside interest. I guess you have to be a mother to appreciate the appeal that kids with colds, etc., have.

When the kid was sick, she phoned in and I had to do her work, which was fine by me, for there really wasn’t enough billing for both of us, and I think I was there because of potential overflow. Nancy and I were in a little room off by ourselves, with the rest of the office in a large room, with glassed-in office running along two of its three walls. These were for the company officers—controller, vice-president for marketing, etc.—who never seemed to be in evidence. Of course it was late in the day by the time I arrived and most of the employees had either left or were preparing to depart.

The controller, though, often stayed late. His office reeked of cold cigar smoke and whiskey. I think he drank on the job. If so, his work with numbers and ledgers easily accommodated a bit of on-the-job drunkenness and it went unnoticed, or if noticed not to be spoken about. He was a morose old soul and very lonely. Occasionally he would call me into his office and want to talk. He had a pretty good idea of just how busy I was. And of course, unknown to me, I would soon be leaving, a big surprise.

The job was great from one standpoint. My classes were all late morning, and afternoons I was writing my first novel, so I could be assured of four or five solid hours of work at the typewriter before it was time to walk away from it and escape into a far different life. A writer needs this, the routine and the steadiness. It makes him plan his time and budget his effort. Over time, he can produce a large volume of work, regardless of its value. In my case, it proved of low value. But we must all learn through doing.

The writer prepares all of his life to write, and part of the preparation is by daily, or near daily, writing. There is no substitute for the daily grind. In fact, the daily grind is largely what writing consists of. Strangers picture the writer’s life as romantic and envy him what seems to be his leisure. It is merely the leisure to work hard and long. It is in no way enviable. Perhaps he should be pitied. I often find myself pitying myself, there being nobody else handy to do it for me. Surely not my wife.

All writers should have wives, including female writers. I don’t know what you would call them. (Yes I do.) This person, regardless of sex, is of a nurturing nature and knows when to leave you alone. He or she is generally a good cook and enjoys preparing meals. If that person has a job and can earn money, it will always come in handy. There is nothing like having money, I learned. It is difficult being poor, which the chronically poor can testify to. And what is easier than spending money, especially if you have some. The trouble is, besides being difficult, it is hard being poor. So many things cry out to be bought, to add to life’s bounty. I am speaking facetiously, of course, but I am speaking truthfully, as well. My chief expenditures before and after marriage were (1) beer, which I’ve always considered a food, (2) music (records, then tapes, and finally CDs), (3) books. It was so then, it is so now.

More an more school seemed folly, a purposeless pursuit. If I didn’t want to teach, what point was there to chase the elusive Ph.D.? Well, you could argue a case for personal satisfaction, I suppose, and people pursue the degree for just this reason sometimes. But a writer finds his education in other ways, such as staying up all night reading the works of writers who are in the canon. Joyce (not Carol Oates, but Jimmy), Faulkner, Conrad; Bellow and Updike, Proust, Mann, Kafka, Camus. You not only read their chief work, you read all their work. At first it seems a never ending job, but then, by degrees, the writers become more and more accessible. Yes, there should be a book about what a writer read and how he does it, the constant mad pursuit, the lifetime preoccupation with what has been best written and in print said. But this is not it, the book.

You find yourself on a divergent course with the one proffered by academe. I guess another way of putting this is to suggest that the purpose of an education is to learn how to learn, and after this is accomplished, external guidance and direction is not only superfluous, it is wrong. It is a case of the patient knowing best what will cure him. The doctor—the whole medical profession—is only a means to an end, that end being the general health of the patient, in this instance, the budding writer.

I had finished my first novel under the guidance (wrong word) of an instructor of a birdlike woman, Florence Gould. (She would be the first to point out the triteness of such characterization, and the fact that she had small bones and a scurrying way of moving from point A to point B might more resemble a woodchuck, but this is a terrible way to describe somebody, a poor shortcut, and should be discarded.) She and I were on divergent course since the first day of our conference course. She handed me a thick Nabakovian stack of 3X5 index cards, after my submission (wrong word again) of the first three chapters, and wanted me to go back and reword, rewrite, what I had done in terms of her notes. This I did not want to do and was not my way of working. (Still isn’t.) What I wanted to do was press on until I came to the bloody end and then decide if the effort of revision was worth it.

She sighed and hove to. She was a wise, intense woman who no doubt had a minor tragedy lingering back in her personal life, one I was too self-absorbed to look into, which was probably just as well. What could be a worse fate for a serious writer than to have to read the sadly limited offerings of students, term after term? It would kill all creative effort and substitute for it a tedious, miserable, deadly activity. And yet how often it happens.

Flo was a good woman, conscientious and demanding of herself and others. She was of course doomed to academic failure and the permanent status as assistant professor, if that. She was an instructor when we worked together, paid pitifully, and had published a short story or two in some obscure literary journal; hence her credentials. Of course the axiom, those who can do, those who can’t teach, applies, along with its auxiliary, those who can’t teach teach creative writing. But this is not always the case.

I reached the end of the novel, "Some Ancient Grief," which was about a turncoat from the Korean War who lived with and married a Chinese girl, and decided it was not worth reworking. It was the book to learn on, I believed. It was badly overwritten and very long. Already another was budding in my mind. It was about a basketball player, one like Bob Houbregs, who could do not much of anything else but sink a hookshot and was a failure in all his personal relationships, who came under the Iago-like tutelage of a point guard who knew his own limitations like the back of his hand and saw what could be done with the tall forward. It was the tragedy of the idiot savant.

I had been reading Faulkner and, whatever his value, he is a killer when it comes to a young writer trying to forge a style of his own out of his accumulated reading and natural talent. I think I sited the book in Tennessee, a place I had no knowledge of, and my sentences were torturous and went on for pages, their subjects long lost in a whirl of words, the style and the vocabulary not my own.

Concurrently it became necessary for me to wean myself away from the GI Bill and the stipend paid me by the University to read and grade papers, all of which were becoming the same to me, one endless redundant tiresome undergraduate screed on philistinism. This meant taking a job that resembled a real job, one out in the real world, as we called, not exactly realizing that Academe is indeed the real world, as real as anything else.

Still I needed something else. I soon found it. It was both far away and near at hand. It was different yet oddly the same. For one who was seriously engaged in reading and writing books, it was most appropriate. It was, at the time, and for the time being, about the only place where I would fit in and not be immediately banished.

30

Bill Kimball managed Hartman’s Bookstore and I knew him slightly from an earlier incarnation of his, when he was head of Lectures and Concerts for the University. The store stood directly across the street from the University Bookstore, then and now a megalithic enterprise that is capable of destroying all opposition. In fact, five years later it bought away Bill as its general manager; from there he went to Stanford, doing exactly the same thing. It is called professional advancement, a perfectly normal activity, and to be expected in the world of business. The funny thing was, Bill did not seem to be a businessman. The best of them don’t. The excel because of how they related to people. They are able to assemble a first-rate staff, and that happens to be their first and most important responsibility. After that, everything else is auxiliary.

Bill hired me immediately. I came well recommended. His staff was fifty percent made up of people I already knew and the other half was comprised of people I should know and soon got to know well. There was my old frat bro and compeer from railroading days (much like Kerouac and Cassady, I now realize), Jack Leahy. There was Liz Patterson, from short-story writing days. She deserves more than a word in passing, and this is the best place to give it to her.

Liz was English, I guess, or so much English that she could pass for a native, and had spent much of her life in India with her husband, probably a colonel, but I don’t know, for she had long been a widow when I first met her. She had money from somewhere, way back, and lived in a book-lined cottage in Laurelhurst, a tony part of town on Lake Washington. (It is where Bill Gates lives, while they finish his fortress across the lake in Medina.) And she threw parties. What parties. After our short-story class (there was a bevy of instructors, including Grant Redford, Markham Harris, and this one, Will Stevens), we used to adjourn to Howard’s Restaurant for coffee, and Liz fortified us with rum chocolate candies from her oven. I don’t know if it was the rum that made us tipsy, or the charged intellectual atmosphere remaining from the class, but everything was new and bright for us, even so early in the morning, and we were all eager to read the new and important writers, such as Truman Capote.

So wonderful Liz was on the staff, and Maggie Hawthorne, a jazz singer of no special or great talent, who later went on to become the entertainment writer for the morning daily paper, the P-I. This she was good at and we all used to read her proudly and comment to ourselves on how clearly she saw things that we might have missed, and that the writer for the evening daily paper, The Times, did not see, he was so dense. Occasionally Maggie would perform a gig in some local nightclub and we would descend on it and bop and cheer wildly.

She was to die early, of I suppose cancer, always waiting in the wings for the talented who must of necessity bloom early or not bloom at all.

Already we had a stockboy doomed with the disease, who would disappear to the hospital for bouts of chemo and return to us, pale and smiling, his weight rapidly diminishing, and we would greet him gaily and in secret roll our eyes at each other in common recognition of his approaching fate. We wished we could derail it, that train, and turn his doom onto a side track, at the very least. Then one day—I cannot even honor this bright soul by remembering his name, God damn it—he went into the ambulance and away, never to return. About half of us, those who could bear it, went to his funeral.

There was Connie Norton, nee Gebracht, married to my good friend Dave, whose doom was not yet apparent and who only seemed ordinarily confused, not yet defeated by life. Connie was—there is not other word for it, gang—fat. Fat and jolly as often such people are, as a means of disguising the deep disturbances that lie under all that excess baggage they must cart around. She and Dave had a strange relationship, strange to me, anyhow. In the war Dave had been 4-F for psychiatric reasons. I know now he was subject to deep depressions, serious questions about his sexuality (typical of that time, boys who liked boys tried to maintain relationships with girls, often marrying them, in order to seem normal, but were not so secretly tormented), his already apparent alcoholism and I suppose surreptitious use of prescription drugs, and general ongoing malaise.

Dave was one of the brightest people I knew, yet could do nothing constructive with it. You put him up against anybody on an IQ test, and I would put money, cold cash, on his winning. He could beat Roethke at tennis, anybody but the professional Chinese at table tennis, and would spot me three or four Horses and beat me at basketball. He was the only one I knew who could—nearly every time—catch flies in the air with his open hand, making it quickly into a fist.

His later suicide was no surprise and could not be prevented, though there must have been half a dozen of us who tried.

Connie co-managed the used book department, along with a woman named Rae Something, soon to be divorced and married to the composer, Paul Tufts. I remember her only as Rae Tufts. I had met her then-husband, also Paul’s then-wife, Ann London, who must have for a while been Ann Tufts. (Later she took back he maiden name, went on to head the fledgling women’s organization, NOW, and became momentarily famous for debating William Buckley on TV, where she beat his pants off, figuratively speaking. No matter now.) Rae and Connie worked closely together, one or the other of them always present in the store during working hours, but not evenings, when Leahy and alternated shifts. We worked in the daytime, too, and often the women were out, buying books from dissolute souls or widows or people about to move.

We shared the upstairs, the loft, with the record department, and there was always music playing softly in the background, classical or (for Maggie) jazz, but never the new rock and roll, which remained suspect until the Beatles salvaged it from disrespect. It was a wonderful place to be, especially around Christmas time, when the store literally jumped. Now, who would give a used book as a Christmas present? The answer must have been, plenty of us. We even had special gold wrapping paper and gloss brown bows.

The two women had a code, which they used to mark the buying price of the books we sold. It was widely thought that stores paid about fifty percent of what they sold the used books for, but this wasn’t true. Usually they paid much less. I learned this by cracking the code, an accomplishment of which I am still quite proud. I did it this way:

Each letter represented a number, and one could guess from the marked price in the book what its purchase price might be, for often it was a dollar or less. Of course three letter would indicate, first, the dollar amount, and the next two numbers how many cents. If there were only two letters, they indicated that less than a dollar was paid. So the matter was, what numbers do the letters stand for? As in cracking codes where letters stand for letters, the matter of frequency or repetition is the key. Just as the letter "e" shows up most often in letter-based codes, so the number "one" does, too. This happened to be "O," the letter, not the symbol for zero.

Since there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, but only ten are used and repeat, with varying frequency, the difficulty in cracking is considerably reduced. Also, the code most likely spells out a word or two words that may be joined. There are existing codes which help guide the decoder in his work. For instance, a common one is BLACKHORSE. B is a one, L is a two, and so forth. This is used by many stores and can surprisingly be found in the oddest of places, such as your large department stores.

Another code (and I cracked this one, too) is CHARLESTON. The local Pay and Save chain of drugstores used it, along with a simple letter and number to indicate year and quarter year. I thought for a while the code was CHARLES FOX, a man’s name, and since the store sold me my Hardy fishing tackle at deep discount, I thought for quite a while that it was the name of a famous flyfisher, Charlie Fox. No, the assistant manger assured me, that was not right, but I was not far wrong. I puzzled it around some more, noticing that there were some letters that when added up totaled more than ten.

Then it dawned on me—they were blanks. The Xs and Ys and Zs were all ways of signifying "zero." Thus I came to Charleston. The assistant manager smiled at me. I had won.

What had I won, thought? Well, I knew the chainstore’s markup on all merchandise and could quickly determine whether a sale item was really one or a special purchase at discount. And what good is this, one might ask? It may only serve to make one unhappy and disappointed. But it may also protect one from believing he is making a real bargain. Besides, all learning is predicated on the belief that knowing is better than continuing on in a state of relative ignorance. Only knowledge can save us.

Save us from what?

Oh, there is a host of things one needs saving from.

It was handy, plus satisfying, to know what the code for Hartman’s used books was, and I had trouble keeping it to myself for long, for such knowledge is a form of power, and power does not want to foolishly relinquish or dilute itself. No, power wants to be clutched to the bosom and hoarded. Power is secret knowledge. If you give it away, you no longer have it. The power is dispelled.

What is it? Oh, yes. OURSWINDLE. I think it is clever the way they came up with it. I can picture the two women putting their heads together and puzzling it out. They chortled with delight when they produced it, for it not only worked, worked as a code, but contained a clue as to what they were up to. No, they didn’t swindle the store and Good Bill Kimball. They only put one over on the people who sold them books. The idea was, to get them at the lowest possible price. These are words to live by, words to guide the individual in his search for knowledge and, incidentally, building his own library. This is what Jack Leahy and I quietly began doing. For often people would come into the store with an armload of books for sale. If Connie or Rae were out, or not on duty, it was up to either Jack or me to buy the books that we wanted.

Of course neither Rae nor Connie would delegate to Jack or me the authority to do so. We understood: power shared is not really power but something else, an inferior product. So we looked the seller straight in the eye, separated out the wheat, so to speak, from the literary chaff, and made out offer. The cash came out of our own pockets.

It was OURSWINDLE carried to another level.

We were entitled to buy new or used books at fifteen percent discount, which is routine in the retail business, if you are nobody special and can’t buy at wholesale. I can’t speak for Jack, only myself, but I think we generally just took the fifteen percent on the store’s used books and art prints. However, knowing what the two managers had paid for them, often much less than half, there were probably times when we took more.

What we bought for ourselves, over the counter, were usually first editions. Jack collected Henry James—I don’t know what the hell for, since neither of us liked him. We fought over (not literally) the William Faulkners and Ernest Hemingways that came in. Since our field was modern American lit, and it is what there is the most of around, in a university city, a fair number of such books routinely came our way. Slowly our personal collections grew.

Jack, who was known to drink a bit, once got drunk and full of self-loathing. In a fit, he ripped all the covers off of Henry James. I don’t know why he picked him. Perhaps it was what he had the most of, or else James was most handy. Of course the next morning, when he looked up off the rug and saw what he had done, he was full of remorse and shame.

There is probably a buried message here. If you have to destroy something in a private first-edition collection, Henry James will come forward and masochistically offer himself in such a way that he cannot be disregarded. And perhaps the fact that he is most deserving.

31

Somewhere in a book like this, having to do with work experiences, or sorties into the mysterious unknown where one is often paid, but not always, and never much, one ought to stop and describe what is loosely called his campus activities. Usually such work is professionally beneficial in an oblique sense. At the time, or even later, it may seem of doubtful value, or of no value at all. It may only provide a few fond recollections. Or else one might feel badly duped, to some degree put upon.

I avoided campus activities for the most part and went into them only when goaded to do so. At first this was by my cursed fraternity, but later I managed to do it foolishly all by myself. For this I deserve no reward, no honor, no singling out. Since I aimed for a career in journalism, at first I could not tell the difference between good solid reporting and advertising, between advertising and public relations, advertising’s heinous spinoff and heir. So, for the Sophomore Prom, someone was needed for publicity chairman. When I modestly accepted the job and the title that went along with it, I did not notice any immediate elevation of myself in the eyes of my classmates or fraternity brothers, even when I managed to draw attention to myself and what I was doing. It wasn’t much. I take some pride in a placard I wrote and arranged to have printed with my very small budget. It was to be put up in men’s rooms all over campus, in every building, on every floor, and urged all of my peers to come to the dance and to bring a girl.

It read, "Don’t just stand there, go get a date for the Sophomore Prom." Droll, I thought. Clever and highly inventive. Others were less impressed. Those were the ones with weak kidneys, I suppose, who saw it too often.

Black field, with I believe orange type in what is called a reverse. Then some white type, or the absence of blackness, where specific information about the dance and where it was to be held and the date were reproduced in practically unreadable small caps.

For about a day I was famous, at least among sophomore men who had to relieve themselves. One by one the signs were torn down, removed from the restrooms. I thought it was the faculty and administration who thought I had gone too far. No, it was simply guys wanted them as souvenirs. From this I learned the power of the written word. A few of them strung together and posted in the right place could lead to action, even if the action was negative and of no consequence.

Luckily I had plenty of spare signs. All afternoon I went around, checking on the damage, and reposting when necessary.

Very briefly I wrote for the campus newspaper, The Daily, then as now, held in scorn by faculty and students alike, and subject to constant ridicule. Yet everybody read it, or a portion of it. I had a beat in health sciences, a vast division of the University that existed unto itself, separately funded and nearly independent. I reported on an important upcoming conference, but got the date wrong, a week early, and the editor correctly placed it in the second most prominent position on the front page, top left. Nobody caught the timing error before or afterwards, and since I overwrote as usual, and had a lot of names in the story, I got a byline. How proud I was of myself, deciding to keep the error to myself and not attempting to rectify it.

I wonder how many people showed up a week early, at eight in the morning, for the conference?

A front page byline on a daily paper is something journalist work for, work towards, often for years. And here I had gotten one, my first time out of the gate. I envisioned a career built out of just such reporting and reward, even though I knew from earlier newswriting classes that it was grounds for dismissal. I mean, how can they fire you, if you aren’t really a paid reporter?

My main interests were in literature. Read it and write it, in turn. It seemed a good life, with plenty of leisure attached. I wouldn’t teach, which turned my stomach and probably the stomachs of my students, nor would I publish those godawful little scholarly papers, mostly quotations from obscure sources and professors lusting after promotion. They were beneath me, even though I probably couldn’t successfully write a good one, not if I set my heart on it.

So I began submitting poems and short stories to the campus literary magazine, which had for years been called Month’s Best, which pretty accurately sums up its intellectual attainment. These efforts were largely ignored and eventually returned to me. The mimeographed magazine longed to be a quarterly, and the title was hardly fitting for that and, besides, lacked any distinction or redeeming qualities. The idea of publishing it much less often than monthly, in fact, three times as less frequently, appealed to the faculty oversight committee, a committee of one, as I remember. He was the student advisor in such matters, and when a professor (usually an assistant one) was assigned by the department chairman, the person always whined about overwork and heavy teaching load and in all other ways tried to get out of it, to no avail.

I think Markham Harris was advisor for many years, but finally managed to beg off with the excuse of illness. Richard Eberhart became advisor, when Roethke (who always cleverly managed to avoid this assignment) was off having his mind and emotions professionally reconstructed in a sanitarium. The magazine was renamed Assay, perhaps by a faculty member who taught Chaucer, from who the title came—something about life being so short, the "assay" or effort being so long. Of course this was ironic, for none of us was much over 25 and had not worked very long at anything we had written. Most of the faculty were twice our age and had written hard for years, whereas most of our submissions were the result of class assignments we had stayed up all night, or several nights, to complete. Then we had turned them in as the finished article. This usually turns out shit, but in the instance of the double issue I edited in its new format, a handsome product if I do say so myself.

Of course you could take the editorial board listing on the verso of the title page and pretty much superimpose it over the contents page. We saw nothing wrong in publishing ourselves, no lack of intellectual integrity. Eberhart was advisor to this issue and responsible for it being better than it might have been, if I’d been left to exercising my own best judgment. For instance there was a poem by James Wright that found its way into his first book, The Green Bough. It took place at an elevated beach and had to do, I remember, with throwing some beer cans down among the rocks. This offended me, an early environmentalist, but Dick urged me to print it, and I did. I wasn’t sorry, long afterwards. My friend, Mel LaFollete, a good lyric poet, submitted a poem, "Ballad of Red Fox," and I was happy to print it. He and I studied Old English at Berkeley together. The poem was included in his first book, too, and he sent me a warmly inscribed copy. Never heard what happened to him, or if he got his Ph.D. and went on to teach.

Similarly Wes Wehr offered a poem, very short, about how somebody’s words "came back and fit like a terrible glove." I didn’t want to publish it, but again Dick urged me to and I followed his suggestion. Wes latter became a minimalist painter, after collecting paintings by his friend, Mark Toby, paintings that soon appreciated greatly and made Wes, if he sold any of them, a rich man. He became known as a regional painter in his own right, but, I think, soon stopped writing verse, or if he did, kept it well hidden. As did I. In my case, it was because of a lack of talent.

Fiction, too. Archie Tegland and Janet Keller both submitted and published short stories. They were later to marry, have three children, two of them twins, and divorce. Each became famous, famous, that is, in an ephemeral, not widely recognized sense. Archie wrote many screenplays for television, most notably (or infamously) for Pallidin: Have Gun, Will Travel, a series or serial. Janet became a top editor, but at TV Guide, for its San Francisco edition. Where they went respectively from there is anybody’s guess. None of my friends know.

Les MacIntosh, who never wrote anything that anybody saw or can remember, was always on the editorial board, along with Ursula Speir, who I remember because she introduced me to Billy Strayhorn, the jazz composer and performer with Duke Ellington. We were all drinking together, some of us dating (an euphemism, to be sure) each other, writing hotly and at length, living the typical mixed-up life of students who have stayed in school too long, far into their dubious maturity. This was our mid- to late-twenties. In a way it was a stall. It is the time when one begins to sort out one’s components—all the twisted parts— and look forward to some years of productivity without the usual torment. It is what I would wish for each of us, in turn.

For instance, there was Levi Thompson. (Just remembered him, in fact.) He was older, shorter, heavier, quieter, balding in front. Probably he was a veteran of World War II; it had a way of making people more stolid. Must have met him in a writing class. All at once, he was at our after-class table at Howard’s. So he must have been writing something. There were those of us who held back our writing from the hard scrutiny of each other, properly fearing mockery and ridicule, which abounded. In fact, it was hard to sit up straight, light up, and read your story to the class, when the prof directed you to. Every word seemed the wrong word, and in the wrong place, as well. To hear your wooden dialogue ring out was nearly as bad as hearing your inflated prose falling flat on the seminar table. And, as we were doing ourselves, in real life (as we called it), we

were always having our characters lighting cigarettes, when we couldn’t find something better for them to do—such as advancing the dramatic action.

This was the legacy of S. D. Salinger: every character had to be smoking continuously. It was a hard thing to work away from, both in one’s writing and in one’s private light. Life was one large cloud of smoke, laden with nicotine and tars. Levi Thompson didn’t smoke and it must have been hell for him to sit with us, smoking issuing forth as from a bonfire, and listen to all the childish prattle. We were all name-droppers. We talked about books we hadn’t read and justified it to ourselves, for we fully intended to do so, only, we were all so busy.

Busy? Doing what?

Drinking, talking, moping, arguing, pretending. And above all, reading. College life, plus its extension, graduate school, is good for one thing, and it is important. It provides the leisure over several years to read extensively. This we all did. It is something that cannot be shunned or faked. It is vital, and we all did it. We became—if nothing else—extremely well read. It is a habit that has followed us through life.

There was Jim Lewis, who wrote nothing that I ever heard of and was destined for questionable academic life. He was widely disliked and though pretentious because he had gone to Yale and had what we all presumed to be an English accident. So did Richard Selig, who it turned out was from Colorado, for Christ’s sake. Lewis was a fisher at a time when I had stopped in my tracks fishing for anything except a few trout. Summers he fished steelhead on the North Fork of the Stilly, which after he moved away became my right of eminent domain, if I’ve got the phrase right. He and Art Smith, who had married a German girl after World War II, and returned to American a Germanophile, studying that country’s literature and speaking the language at every opportunity. Little did I know he was in the German Department and responsible for grading the graduate reading exam, or I might have taken it cold, not knowing the language one iota, and passed it. Instead, I fumbled over French, failed the exam, took it again on my return from Berkeley without looking at my flashcards, and passed it nicely.

Art would have passed me, even if I’d failed. We were like that with each other. Corrupt. Mutually self-seeking. Helpful. Critical. Advancing.

Somehow some students from drama got to know us and started sitting at the window table we held throughout the day, spending just enough money for coffee and snacks to keep Mary or Howard, the owners, from ejecting us. These were mostly girls. One who was Cheryl, who became my great love of the period. Another was a guy named Tony, who acted some, but was one of the first flagrant gays (the word then was queer, highly derogatory) any of us had ever seen. His role model, I think, was Tallula Bankhead.

"When I grow up, I want to be just like her," is something he might have said. I don’t remember specifically, but he was delightfully outrageous. Every small group before and ever since had its Tony, and provided an audience for his extravagances. Ours wanted to be a male nurse—long before there were any of the species to be found or it had become common, nearly a custom. He showed his literary acumen by a profusion of affection for Walt Whitman. Tony wanted to serve our injured boys in field hospitals, sprinkling sulfa drugs on war wounds and in all other ways administering sympathy and affection. He would dwell on this overly long, I thought. Of course it was a marvelous put-on, but none of us was sophisticated enough to recognize it for what it was.

Drama and English are natural soul mates and are often found in bed together. So it was an interesting mixture, the flow of odd individuals around our table. The phrase often used to describe some obnoxious characters was, "he is trying to find himself, poor guy." It was a prevailing excuse that carried little meaning, much like a leaking pail. To say that somebody was doing this implied that there had been a self to lose and that it could be found, located again, a doubtful proposition, for many of us were hopelessly lost.

I say "us" but I do not include myself. Some of us may be momentarily disoriented but I never was so far lost that I had to find myself—whatever that self was or was in the process of becoming. Some of us knew full well who we were and were enjoying a respite from responsibility, that’s all. At the core of our being we were solid enough. Our main concern was with what we were going to do with ourselves, for the rest of our natural lives.

Now in her private life, that is, marriage, she was not s feminist; it had not even been invented yet, its first rules of behavior and reaction codified, but she was keen to injustice in the marketplace, especially in regard to women. All the forms analysts in forms were male, had penises (I’m guessing at this), and all the women in files had the equivalent moist organ (again I’m guessing), but this comprised a minor travesty to her and not the principal one. What she deeply and correctly resented that she was hired and rated as a typist, when she was capable of doing so much more. The company simply didn’t care. Type or die, you might say they said. So Verna typed.

She typed hard and long and made plenty of mistakes, but that was okay; everybody did. To err is human, we all know, and who is more human than a typist who doesn’t have time to paint her nails and must keep them short, anyway, or make even more mistakes. This is why so many typists have long red or purple nails; it is to mock the company that pays them for work so far below their ability. Or pay them so poorly, in comparison with what others are paid, who do much less and more badly.

I would trot over to Bill Rule’s office after having coffee break, that duty out of the way and my not wanting it to interfere with my private life, the one of visiting friends and chatting about anything but work, or having them drop in on me for about the same reason, coffee break being sacrosanct, inviolate. Each of us involved in personal relationships, including those supervisors with consulting or other businesses on the side, would suspend our activities when the bell rang, and talk for three or four or five minutes about something else, a different thing, until the bell tolled again, when we’d pick up our other personal business, our consulting, our visit with friends, and we would pursue that until it was time for early lunch, which was eleven-forty for us, on the edge of the factory. Then we’d whip out lunch sacks or pails, and dive right in, refusing to discuss our real work with anybody, no matter how vital the need.

I had begun to carry a black lunch pail, at first as a tribute to the god of irony, then because it fit in so well in our environment, for the factory was just outside our door, clanging along loudly at every moment, making it unable for us to forget where we were and why. And then I found that my sandwich and little carton of applesauce or potato salad never got crushed or spilled out of the side of its loose little lid in a lunch pail. When I became a supervisor, my colleagues tried to talk me out of the lunch pail, often by inviting me out to lunch with them, in the company cafeteria, which I was quite willing to do, but not to the extent that I would obey them when they said, "Oh, leave that lunch pail behind, will you? I’ll pay for your meal."

I would kindly refuse and usually no further lunch invitation would ensue.

Lunch in the cafeteria, by the way, was hideous. The supers all sat at the same table, usually arranged by rank, us bottom liners all together, and the talk was always of work, or else it was about whether or not any of us was preparing to buy a T-bird or, those that already had, they were ready to turn theirs in on a newer model. And there was some talk about boats. Everybody had a boat or was intending to buy one. A dingy like mine didn’t count and I soon learned not to try to introduce it into the conversation. Nobody admitted to a yacht but everybody aspired to one, usually by degrees. Eighteen footers wanted to be twenty-one footers, and so forth. The longer they got, the more desperate their owners for additional length.

It was awful to listen to and I soon found ways to avoid it.

They also talked about children, those who had them and those who had them who were married and wanted to talk about them. One man with a bastard son spoke of him often, but not the others. And houses. Always a house was being put on the market and another one bought, generally in the reverse order, which is more common. Mortgage rates, to be sure, car loans, ways of landscaping your yard, schools private and otherwise, lawyers who would protect your interests and hopefully more, part-time jobs that were going begging and in particular ones with flexible hours that would not interfere with your existing job.

I usually ate at my desk, or somebody else’s, and we talked about how we hated the company that paid us so embarrassingly well and gave us nothing intelligent or vaguely useful to do.

When I worked (seldom), I was always dashing off to manufacturing to see Losey about our pilot program, how it was progressing, or to engineering, where all aerospace division functions were duplicated on a microscale so that, I guessed, engineers could relate to them, since only engineers could man them. thus, engineering had its own finance department, called something else, and a vast area of needless employment called engineering costs and schedules, which was a catchall for everything else. It was here in engineering that the best audio-visual and graphics people were employed, and I tended to identify with them, for they were artists and writers.

It was here the badgered poet, Richard Hugo, worked, and we all knew it. He headed a group comprised of one man, namely himself, called oral coaching, and I’m sure he was multiply aware of other meanings it evoked. I suppose Boeing’s reasoning went something like this: Here we have this poet working for us. What can we find for him to do that in any way resembles what he might be doing if he wasn’t working for us? What do poets do? They write poetry, sure, but don’t they exclaim poetry, that is, read it aloud? They sure as shit do. Then they must be experts at reading aloud. It only stands to reasons. Then why can’t they teach others to read aloud, too? You mean, read poetry? No, you dumbhead, to read other things, reports and so forth? Why, they can, and don’t call me dumbhead. Why not, dumbhead? And so forth.

People were always asking Hugo, I am sure, if he taught the steno pool how to give blowjobs.

He had a naturally defensive mien, as if expecting a flanking attack at any moment from a small army of ant-like men armed with tiny spears. Or else children might start bombarding him with cans of pears. Or some very loud music of an annoying kind might be piped through funnels into each of his ears.

I never talked to Hugo, never dare, he was so aloof and defensive, a large, fat man, sagging in his chair, at the same time looking as if he were ready for a fistfight. This kept you away, as it was intended to do. He looked very much like his mentor, Ted Roethke, and if you had told him this, I’m sure he would have brightened and thanked you, perhaps even licking your hand. But in all other instances he wanted you to go away, fast.

One day I braved the man. I strode up to him, my hand extended, announced my name, and told him I liked his poetry. Which was true. The man could really write a poem. He regarded me much as a ceramic frog regards you from a garden pond. Fixed, stony. Hating, loathing, as well? It certainly appeared so. I said I never talked to him, but that is wrong. I never quite made the grade but I tried. That day, approaching his desk, looking down, as he looked up, loathsome, loathingly, I spoke out shyly, stating my name, asking if I had come to the right desk for Richard Hugo. He quailed, he trembled, he collapsed in upon himself, he began to sweat, a frown rolled down his considerable face, his jowls sagged, his shoulders drew in upon themselves, he hunched, he shrank, he did everything except get up and run.

So I did.

I whirled on my heel and made away. I commenced a retreat while facing away from him, that terrible face, for I could not stand to see it any longer, its consternation, its putuponness, its utter abandon to the rigors of ordinary discourse. I beat a retreat hasty, even as I advanced to the rear, myself now atremble, wondering what it was I did or said, in so brief a moment, that tormented him so. "Nice day? How’s the weather?" Anything might have lit his fuse. If you are tinder-dry, the slightest daily spark would have done it.

Later I would see him at parties. For instance, he was a friend of friends, and there would be a party scheduled for, say, a Friday night, and he would be off playing softball for some local team, perhaps one of Boeings, batting this big softball all over some lot till nine innings were completed and a night’s winner announced, then would trudge home, not far away from the party, and would amble over with his slender quiet wife, perhaps with his baseball glove tucked into his wide pants pocket, and join us in a beer. Or had he been drinking all the while he had played? Some do. Softball games are often like this, and now I understand girls and women make up something approaching less than half the team. But not then.

If he recognized me from the afternoon of the mild company assault, he never showed it. He never looked my way, the big snob. I mean, who the fuck was he? True, he could write poetry like the very devil, a tense taut line, whole poems of grand exploding meaning, poems I admired him for, envied him the ability to write, but we all lived in the here-and-now, the quotidian present, and we did not affect airs, not unless we were tormented, driven.

Hugo clearly was. It was the price he paid for his large talent. This I did not envy him. The extracting price.

Most of the other people in the graphics group were down to earth craftsmen and artists, hard up for money, locked into a job they too considered beneath them. This provides for a strange camaraderie. It is much like prison. "What are you in for?" one of us might as well have asked, for the other would instantly know the allusion. "Life, et vous?"

"Oh, just the bucks. It isn’t for long. Just until I get ahead a bit. Another three or four months."

"Spoken like a true junkie."

42

Gordy Anderson had been a frat bro of Bill Rule and myself and had effected an evacuation about the same time. He was an artist—a sculptor, but had so much talent in so many fields that to call him simply a sculptor would be mammothly unfair, unjust. He could write, and did, vignettes and things most short-story like. He could paint, but was best known for his cartooning. The Blue Moon Tavern provided walls for his work, as did the Northlake Tavern. Years later, they were carefully preserved when the rest of the building was patched up and repainted, or refurbished in major other ways.

Gordy had migrated to Boeing for the same reason the rest of us had. Money, money, money. The line is from Roethke, but appropriated for the title of a novel by David Wagoner. Thus used and reused, it belongs to all of us, of that and every other time. I believe Christopher Isherwood and Jan van Dreuten pickpocketed it for Joel Grey, in his role in Cabaret. Thus it becomes international in scope, but meaningful to us all. I don’t know where Gordy was assigned, but I used to see him wandering around the hallways of Plant II, a thick paperbound book in his hand. He always claimed he read in the toilet. This is a terrible place to do much of anything, including taking a crap. Gordy would find himself an empty booth and go in, close and lock the door, and begin to read. Usually it was some kind of trash, for he disliked books that pretended to be anything else.

This is how he looked at himself and the world. He hated pretension. It may be his tragic flaw, for, if nothing is worth being, or pretending to be, nothing is all there is and all else is . . . pretense? Gordy could play every known musical instrument and then some. He could probably pick up a twig or a leaf or a blade of grass and make it produce recognizable harmonies. He as incredible. They never laughed when he sat down to play the piano, though he’d had no instruction, not unless there was a mother far back who had pulled him up to her knee when he was barely able to stand and showed him a few things about keys and scales and tones. So he would simply sidle up to the keys, pick out a melody with his right hand, using no more than his first finger, join some chords to it with h is left, tentatively, then as his confidence grew, expand the fingers of both hands, and pretty quick he had the tune mastered, adding runs and trills and a great rollicking bass. Or else he’d pick up some wind instrument, feel for the valves and key holes, blow into it, try a note or two, figure out the relationship of notes to one another, pick out of him mind a simple ditty, play a bar or two, make a mistake, back up, try again, never making the same mistake twice, and pretty soon he have it doing what he wanted, issuing forth a melody that in a moment would be a complete song or tune.

It bored him. Everything did. I think he was an early nihilist or existentialist, one without a cause or hope of redemption. Since he could do everything, nearly everything, nothing was worth the doing. It is the curse of talent, which is unselective, non-critical. In a way it is a burden, perhaps even a curse. All the possible choices lead one to despair. A black curtain descends. What to do—today, any day? Gloom, depression, follow.

I wish I had a fraction the talent Gordy had, in any one of his departments. Say, writing. Why, I’d write all the great novels the world has been waiting for, holding its long breath in the meanwhile. Or even a great poem, like "The Wasteland." "The Cantos"—even the "Pisan Cantos"—would be duck soup for the guy. He’d dash them out between coffee and lunch. But I don’t think even Gordy was able to write at Boeing. As I said, he went to the john often to read and would admit that was about all he was capable of doing.

He had one of those nebulous jobs—a typical Gordy job. It was much like his life. There is a way that jobs find the best person to do them, no matter how long it takes and how many ill-suited persons must hold them, first. He was assigned to some unit that remained unclear in its purpose and was vaguely connected to graphics, for his talent preceded him and was well known. He did drawings and saw to the preparation of presentations, when required. But both of these were few and far between. Most of the time, like the rest of us, he killed time. It was as though time were the common enemy and each of us was pledged, dedicated, to its daily destruction. So he carried around thick tomes, usually used paperbacks that he bought in some shabby bookstore on The Ave, and kept his nose stuck in them most of the day, traveling from one men’s room to another, all around the plant, so that no one area would be disaccomodated by having one of its stalls closed and locked from within.

He didn’t much care what he read. All books were pretty much the same to him—words, strung out, repeated over and over. Serious fiction, romance, biography, history, how-to-do-it (most of which he disagreed with), cookbooks, travels (not much, for he rarely got far from a series of waterfront homes he lived in on tony Lake Washington), textbooks on arcane subjects, even the Bible. Once he told me, "You know, the Bible is a pretty good book. It’s full of stories—I never knew where they came from before. And it’s pretty dirty, too, if you like that kind of thing." He grinned. I suppose most of his sex came from books and, of course, pictures. He was never much for relationships with women. Or with men, for that matter.

Gordy and girls. It would be a short story. Girls loved him. They were attracted to so much ambulating talent. It practically dripped from it. It was magnetic, supra-sexual. That’s what drew him to them, at least at first, at least for a short time. It can easily be mistaken for the real thing—potential great sex. But it is fraudulent. It holds out a promise it can never fulfill. I remember one woman, Fern, with big knockers, as he called them. Big knockers were important to Gordy, I don’t know why. Perhaps all his ideas about women came from Playboy. Later, it might be Penthouse, then Hustler. Which is to say, unreal. Unrealizable.

Anyway Fern had the requisite big knockers, and did nothing much to hide them. Those that has them generally don’t. She also had a big nose. It was pretty monstrous, hard to hide, since it always went in front of the parade. Now they may say a man’s hands—his fingers, primarily—are an indication of the size of his penis. It’s not true, but people say it and will say it forever. So it may be extrapolated to women that nose size and breast size have something to do with each other. Don’t believe it. But in Fern’s case it was obviously true. So Gordy cold overlook Fern’s nose because of what followed. But I think the whole thing was largely visual. He was a visual person, after all, sculpting, cartooning, and even going so far as to produce for a period paintings of landscapes that were, of course, pretty good.

Were they good enough? It’s not for me to say

So it was how Fern looked that mostly mattered. To the world. Gordy wanted to be judged by how Fern looked. He was extremely conscious of other people’s opinions of him and how he was doing. Was Fern an asset? He had to know. So he asked me.

Naturally I was honored. I mean, Fern loved him. No, Fern was in love with him She couldn’t tell the difference between supra-sexual and the real lunging thing. She wanted to seduce him, get him dependent on her and the regularity of delivered sex, then lull him into a relaxed state and . . . marry him. I know, I know, it was a terrible idea, but women get these ideas and act upon them, using their bodies as metaphor. They’ll trick you into bed, then try to make the bed a permanent arrangement, one protected by law.

Gordy had no fear because Fern had no chance. Marriage? It was a joke. There was about as much chance of him getting married as there was a pig receiving clearance from the tower, propelling itself down the runway, achieving liftoff, managing a few Immelmanns, going into a descending glide, and making smooth contact with the runway again. If anybody’s sheer boy language spelled out bachelorhood, it was Gordy’s.

She knew a lot, Fern did, but not this much. She knew the way to a man’s heart was via the bed. I’m not sure whether Gordy ever fucked her. For a while it was a prospect, at least from Fern’s point of view. She could see that he was thinking it over. Those huge breasts promised a fond field to frolic in. Bliss. And those eyes said there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that she wouldn’t do for him, to him, under him, on top of him, whatever. He believed her. As I said, he was busily thinking it over.

It was a tough decision to have to make. What, whether or not to marry Fern? No, whether or not to go to bed with her.

Surely you’re kidding?

Surely I’m not.

Sexual ambivalence is a social disease, and much of the world is afflicted by it. There is no real cure. Its cause lies deep in the human psyche. Whatever its cause, it goes way back, into the snares of childhood, perhaps further. It may take place in the womb itself. If you are a born nihilist, nothing is worth doing, including sex. Sex is—among other things—a lot of work for both parties. The loins ask commitment. The mind prefers to think things over for a decade or two. No, I doubt if Gordy and Fern ever had what is known as outright sex. But I can picture Fern tempting him with an a la carte menu, and him sardonically (he was always sardonic) thinking each one over, a half-grin on his face.

Each one he would eventually shake off, like a pitcher a catcher’s wrong, unknowing suggestion. Thoughtfully for a second, then with short annoyed frustration.

Gordy preferred his own company, always. I don’t think he especially liked it, but it was what he was used to, and as he aged he got more and more used to it, not knowing or seeking any other. There must have been a multiplicity of Fern’s, over the years. Each in turn submitted her bill of particulars, each was listened to politely, with mild carnal curiosity, each was rejected in what Gordy thought of as a kindly manner but was probably about as cruel as you can get.

He declined to sample the goods. Much worse than having sampled declining the product and services.

Did he like men, then? I don’t think so. He may have been approached and listened to their suggestions, half-heartedly, giving them too polite consideration, for in a way they offered the same product and services, but from a more familiar source, one perhaps adjudged more dependable and friendly. He might have thought, No, I can continue to do this by myself, exactly when I want to do it, with a rhythm and a degree of lightness or strength determined solely by myself.

I envied him Fern, and if she wasn’t so crazy about him, I’d have made a play for her myself, even though I was married. And he knew it. I think he really enjoyed having made wantonly available to him what nearly everybody else wanted. For Fern was wanton. She broadcast the fact. She had a twinkling eye and a knowing manner. She threw her body around, as if to say, What am I offered? No, it was more as if to say, Who is going to be the lucky guy? Is it you?

But it was Gordy, at least for a while.

Have you ever noticed how a great beauty is often marred by some small grotesque feature and can’t quite make the grade? This was Fern’s nose. It wasn’t badly proportioned. It would have been just right on somebody twice her height and width. It was nicely shaped. It wasn’t hooked or drooping; it didn’t have gigantic nostrils. It wasn’t hogbacked, slanting, slight askew. It was just huge. Most of the time you didn’t quite notice it, since she made up her pretty eyes with lots of shadow and liner, and her mouth was drawn oversized and very red. This was to balance out the nose and give it similar proportions. Fern was clever. She was clearly a winner at life. She would go on to be successful, I am sure, and married well, probably a doctor. Had lots of kids. Perhaps she even had her nose minimized through surgery. There are certain techniques. . . .

Wouldn’t it be funny (not really) if, during cosmetic surgery, they got their proportions mixed up, and she ended up with a nose half the size they intended? One a quarter of the existing one? Does it happen? How often?

So he developed—was already evolving, during our Boeing years—into a classical bachelor. The signs are always there early, if anyone wants to see, and nobody much does. A life becomes a lifestyle, and they begin to have specific things in common. A tendency to eat in cheap restaurants, or else to depend on what comes out of tin cans. (Later, this became microwavable dinners, such as the budget gourmet ones.) Beer drinking nightly. Back then, we all drank a lot, beer most often, tap beer up at the bar in certified taverns, such as the Moon and the Northlake, which was commonly referred to as The Library, for obvious reasons. In time, as they began to poke up out of the downtown duff, blue movie houses. To some bachelors, they became a way of life, and if a guy could afford it he went nightly, then, made nervous by what he saw, he’d go out to drink in topless clubs, continuing to see what to him was unapproachable but obsessive.

It was hard for a chronic bachelor to visualize what a real woman was like and what living with her involved. I mean, she was a goddess or a slut, either/or, an unbelievable combination. If you saw her spreadeagled pink on the pages of special magazines, then watched her perform unreal fellatio in a movie, then shinny up a pole without her brassier in an after-hours club, what chance did you have of making small conversation with her pedestrian version and being accepted by shy degrees into a world of intimacy? You simply couldn’t.

Gordy probably had already developed those fastidious characteristics of someone who lives alone and likes it. Monday evenings, before answering the tavern’s call, he would do his laundry, the next night at the same time he would iron what needed ironing. He ate out to avoid hand-washing his dishes, though he had a machine; it was too much trouble loading and unloading it afterwards, and there never was powered soap because he forgot to write it on the shopping list before going to the store. It began to disturb him if some things were not in their accustomed place. Of course it was his job to put them there. If they were missing—worse, lost—it annoyed him to the point where he couldn’t sleep until matters were made right. So, still drunk from the tavern, remembering, he’d rise and search for what wasn’t there and put it in exactly the right place. Then his mind would relax and he would be able to sleep.

You sure he wasn’t gay? No, I ‘m not, but in the case of friends, not knowing for sure, I prefer to think they were not. For he and I came out of the same middle-class background and it is what makes it so hard for aging homosexuals to come out of the closet. They despise themselves for what they must do, however infrequently. The only difference with us straights, us heteros, is that we don’t do it. We despise it, what they do, and know in detail, for one must know the world in all its falsity and shame, or forever be stupid. And the closeted gay hates first of all himself. As he ages, he becomes content to withdraw into privacy and the sex act, alone mostly, rarely with another, recedes into history. And with it the attendant shame.

There was a term, popular at the time: "latent homosexual," sometimes called "passive," which does not mean he is solely on the receiving end, that is, the bottom in the performance, but that the poor sap doesn’t know what he is, his basic orientation. So he goes through life, neither/nor, always wondering. The term has considerable validity. It belongs to the uncommitted. They go through a life, sometimes a long one, being of male gender but expressing their needs in disguised form.

Would Gordy ever have a boy in? Perhaps. Our generation was so full of guilt and shame that it would never admit even to its closest friend what it did, in the dark of the night. Or even on a languid rainy afternoon, if the chances were right. I can picture Gordy as he was in public with Fern, with her calling him out, so to speak, and he lying back, enjoying it all, relishing in being sought after and not choosing, for to choose would invalidate the nihilist’s creed that nothing is worth doing, including all politics and social interaction, all business endeavors, in fact, all art.

It might as well never have existed, for all the good it did or was capable of doing.

42

Gordy, I now realize, was a loser. His talent, multiple, canceled each other out and resulted in a net loss in life. But he was given one redeeming gift. He made money.

I don’t think he knew how to make money, he simply did it, as another might whistle or be able to draw. (Both of these things, by the way, he could do very well.) I remember vaguely how it was money started coming to him. This requires going back a little in time.

We were all in the military, at one time or another.

Jack Leahy was in the navy when I met him, being released from active duty shortly after the end of the second big war in order to go back to school. It was a peculiar arrangement and one only for that time. He went into the reserve for a long period of time, and when the Korean War began, all they had to do was blow a whistle and he was theirs again. He had never stopped being. (Later, they let him back out, and he returned to school, while the rest of us were still on active duty. We thought it strange.)

Gordy and I went into the military about the same time. Back when we were undergraduates, two years of PE and two of ROTC were mandatory. It is a hard world to imagine, if you haven’t lived through it.) Anyway, I stupidly opted out, once the requirement was over, but many of my friends continued for two more years, receiving a nice monthly check. For this help with their education, they were pledged .to attend at least one summer camp and to serve on active duty after graduation for a fixed period of time, generally two years.

Gordy went into the Air Force about the same time I went into the Army. He was an officer, though. With his genial, off-hand manner he went through additional training and at the time I was finishing my basic he was in charge of the officers club at a nearby Air Force base in central California. I think it was Lackland. I can’t be sure.

He was from the tiny town of Puyallup, a suburb of Tacoma. He already owned some property there and afterwards bought more. I think he lucked into some land, perhaps inheriting it, perhaps swapping some work for it, for he was known as a pretty good sculptor. And then he parlayed his investment into more. He collected vintage cars and sometimes had them restored; he probably was good at swapping them for others of greater value. And he acquired stock over the years, including Microsoft when it was low, just starting out, renting its space. He paid it no attention, letting it split and soar.

Once, long ago, I ran into him at a grocery store, long gone and the space built over by a bank. He wanted to know where there was a "good" bank. (I should have said, Just stand here and wait.) He had $10,000 in one bank and had just learned that no accounts were insured in excess of that. It was a lot of money then. Soon he had many times as much, secreting it here and there, some in banks, some in cars, some in various commodities. He lived then in a small house perched on a bank on the lake, in the heart of the city. What was expensive then is astronomical now. He traded up on the house, still living on the lake. He must be worth millions now. He hasn’t worked for anybody since Boeing.

I used to run into him regularly, usually after ten in the evening, out drinking. When I stopped pubic drinking, I stopped running into Gordy. I think drinking in taverns, but not before mid-evening, was part of his way of life, a portion of that bachelorhood that codifies itself over time and becomes concrete. I don’t think we ever planned on anything together or got together according to a prearranged schedule. He didn’t like planned events and neither did I. So we would happened into each other, if we met at all, and he would cock his crooked grin and we would go through all the rigmarole and pantomime that long acquaintances do, pretending disbelief, astonishment, all that dumb show that masks distress at seeing each other again and having to make conversation.

Can you be a loser, and rich? Aren’t the terms mutually exclusive? Aren’t all rich people by definition winners? If so, Gordy is one.

43

My wife gave birth to a boy, a son. I nearly had a breakdown when she came back from one of her regular trips to the obstetrician, reporting, "It could be any day now, he says."

I freaked out. Up till then, childbirth was a distant event; she would go to the hospital sometime and sometime there would be a baby. That time remained in the distance, like a hour or so scheduled with the dentist for a big procedure. Now it was imminent. I felt as wired as if I had gulped a mouthful of Benzedrine tablets. And, just as if I had, I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie in bed for seeming hours on end, my eyes held closed but not sleeping for a minute. Also, my stomach was in a state of permanent clutch. My large intestine was tied in a carrick bend. I won’t even try to describe what happened to the small one. At work I wasn’t much good, but then I hadn’t been much good before, wasn’t required to do much, and so nobody much noticed my distress. Like a good little boy, I kept it to myself as much as possible.

When I was working at Boeing, we were paid every two weeks, on a Thursday. I don’t know about everybody else, only some of us, but at four-thirty quitting time I headed for a tavern on my way home, in order to celebrate making it through another ten days of what passed for hard labor. It was what I was sentenced to, with a pregnant wife. Every pay period Norma seemed to increase the width of her abdomen by a couple of inches. She had quit work, as was required by law, at this point, and waited at home uncomfortably for the last few weeks to pass. And now she knew it might be sooner than we’d expected. To complicate things, she had a nervous husband to deal with.

I went to the doctor, of course, for I seemed to be dying. He was a surgeon, and hoped to operate., but could find nothing to remotely justify so much as exploratory surgery. He had some tests run, including a delightful one in which I had to arrive at a lab early, without breakfast, not even a cup of coffee, and swallow a tube and hold it uncomfortably there, while they pumped liquids in and out of my miserable stomach. My acid level was normal. Hell, I could have told them as much. I was sick from having a baby. And this the doctor finally discerned through a series of questions. When he learned about my condition, he immediately lost interest in my case. He prescribed a tonic (largely alcohol) and sent me away. I cursed him but was relieved to learn that I was only normal, though I still believed I was dying. I would show him. What would he say when they delivered him my body?

All of which is to put it facetiously. I was miserable. I didn’t even bother to get the prescription for the tonic filled, but went to have my eyes tested, believing that maybe my vision was causing my stomach and guts to weave themselves into tangled web. In time the waterbag broke and my wife softly shook me from early slumber, saying, like Eliot, "Hurry up, it’s time."

I drove us to the hospital at a steady thirty miles per hour, not stopping for red lights and not hitting anybody as I tooted my horn, for it was three in the morning and there was no traffic. She went into the labor room and began counting. I helped. Finally the nurse told me, "Perhaps you ‘d be more comfortable, Mr. Arnold, if you waited outside. You’re making your wife nervous."

I licked her hand and fled, but only to the room outside, where I hid behind a paperback copy of Great Expectations and pretended to read. Around six in the morning, since nothing was happening, I received permission to go home and sleep an hour or so. The baby was born around eleven. I was still in the sack. The phone rang, and either I didn’t hear it or else I did and went back to sleep, figuring nothing could harm her now, not in a hospital, and I would clearly be of no use. Later I rose and breakfasted and drove leisurely over to the hospital to see the new son they had told me about over the phone. It was too late in the day to clock in at work.

I was not a supervisor yet. This was early October and I would have to wait until Christmas Eve Day for that to happen. Big Paul had arranged it, moving me up on the list ranking the general service employees with a special dispensation, because it was entirely supervisors I had to deal with in this new program, reports management. At noon, an hour before we would shut down for the holiday, he called me into his office, and with a little preamble between him and Delores, my buddy, they awarded me the mild little button that signified so much.

I went home and hung it on the Christmas tree.

My son was two months old. He had weighed in at eight pounds and I was trying to catch a winter steelhead that outweighed him, but kept falling a few ounces short, as he increased his weight rapidly and was now about ten pounds. Just as I measured my indenture at Boeing by my son’s age, or rather my wife’s pregnancy, I presently checked his weight against that of a fish I was seeking, and did not exceed his weight until March, the following year. This was a fifteen pounder. And when I left Boeing, he was a year old and I was at home to receive, or catch, his first true step, when he let go of the edge of a travertine coffee table and, after much coaxing, aimed himself at me.

I recovered pretty fast, after he was born. It proved a new life, very different from the past, with a baby in the house, diapers to be changed (I changed very few), bottles to be heated, followed by special mushy foods, then bits of our own, cut up fine. Money was required, and Boeing was good for that, and not much else. I hated my job, in spite of public testimony that it was a good one, by Boeing standards. But what were those but ones foreign to me and us?

The T-bird was the vehicle of choice there. I was happy with our old Ford station wagon, light blue, with the rest spots along the chrome side strips, and the tail pipe and muffler jacked up to the frame with picture wire. And every second Thursday of my life, the stop off for a few schooners of beer and a public cursing of where I worked and the good people who paid me.

When you don’t work very hard, or do very much work, day after day, and not by choice, either, contempt naturally follows, unless there is something very wrong with you. There was nothing wrong with me that I could determine except that I was bored, frustrated. Yet nobody around me seemed to be suffering from the same malaise, not unless it was Gordy, and we did not meet often. We seemed to inhabit parallel universes, drifting in and out of each other’s orbits, surprised to run into each other, for neither of us thought of the other until we encountered each other again. Then we’d stop, chat desultorily for a very moments, move on.

Or else I’d see him out drinking and, with a grin, we’d slurp together for a few minutes in a noisy environ, then turn away, when something more interesting popped up.

I think Gordy did most of the turning.

Likewise it was only at work and usually in passing that I saw either Verna or Bill. Poor Bill; he was increasingly absent from work, as his illness progressed. He was reluctant to mention it to any of us until it was next to too late. He was undergoing radiation treatments, perhaps chemo as well, and his already thin blond hair was falling out. He had been a swimmer and the chlorine has a devastating effect on a person’s hair anyway, and now there was this. He was nearly bald and embarrassed by it. Finally he told me about it. He was going on extended medical leave. It was a brain tumor, inoperable. He hoped he’d be back but he doubted it. Gone where his plans for a quiet carrel, with a desk full of magazines and journals to read, and perhaps with a little good luck and splendid isolation he might be able to write his short stories. Now all he hoped to do was stay alive.

It didn’t happen.

Meanwhile Verna and I continued to meet and chat. She was pretty much chained to her desk, so it was I who managed to come by and linger for a short exchange, sometimes at breaktime. Or else we met in the cafeteria and ate our sack lunches together, while I did my best to make the curious believe something romantic (if that is the right word, and it isn’t) was going on. To Verna’s eternal consternation.

Always, near at hand, she had a book. So did I. We all did, all of us who mattered.

44

Time passed, my son grew, I inched along in my daily disenchantment. The Boeing underground helped sustain me, as did much beer, ever other Thursday night, when I celebrated, or grieved, or whatever it was. Funny, but it was an oddly intellectually stimulating place, this place, the factory, and my few friends. It’s not that we actually discussed weighty matters and acted together in some concerted effort that bound us. What bound us were chains and the knowledge that we were prisoners together. In a way it was like being in the Army, only in the Army there wasn’t ever an underground. Let me correct that. There was, briefly, while a handful of us college types went through our basic training. Then we dispersed and the tenuous unity we had formed of necessity went with it and us. Nevermore to be heard from or recaptured.

We had known each other ten or twelve years now. We had met at various times as undergraduates. Some of us followed the same path into graduate school. It further cemented us. Before and after, those of us together then at Boeing, managed to stay in contact. Often it was through somebody else, some person on the edge of our group from school, a peripheral person who reported back what the others were doing. Usually it was bad news. Bill’s death, for instance, I learned from Gordy. Neither of us went to his funeral. One reason was, we weren’t invited. Each of us had multiple existences and there was a basic core life each of us had that the others were not part of. This was natural, understandable. None of us would have wanted it any other way. (Of course it wouldn’t have been possible to have it differently, so what was the point of wanting it to be so?)

In a world where everybody is disenchanted, one more instance is hardly noticeable, and I think my galloping dismay was not evident. Or else one’s quiet bitching was thought of as a character trait and perceived as amusing. You complained on only a certain stratum, though. It was the bottom tier. A supervisor now, I wasn’t expected to bite the hand that had promoted and nourished me, but I did. So did a few others. One was John Shotwell, now a second-line supervisor. He too had a little business on the side, but I don’t remember what it was, only that it was what kept him going. A certain small insanity is what keeps most of us sane.

I don’t really know how to express the depression the job gave me. In the Army, for instance, I was only mildly unhappy and negative. Here, back in civilian life, where so much was possible, all, in fact, to be so circumscribed brought on a colossal gloom. I felt as if I had been short-changed. I lived for the day when I could tell the Kite Factory what to do with itself. It would be in the nature of an extensive rectal exam. So I saved my money and even nursed those Thursday night beers—which hadn’t made me very drunk, anyway. Of course with my wife not working, staying home and playing the motherhood game, there was not so much money coming in, but my promotion helped some. In fact, my promotion made my leaving possible. Rather than blow the new money on a T-bird, and join the Boeing supervisors’ club this way, I ratholed it. My wife’s inherent frugality helped a lot. Plus the fact that she didn’t get out much to the stores anymore.

At work the pilot study droned on and manufacturing department became enamored of it, in a typically Boeing fashion. (They were to claim ten-million dollars worth of cost savings, the following year, and nobody blinked.) The copies of reports coming into my office tapered off and finally stopped, thanks to my tracking them back to their source and saying, "No more." When the program went division-wide, thanks to Big Paul and his flipcharts, which were received by the regulars with enthusiasm and even cheers, I gave them my notice. They were greatly surprised. I think they thought I had been searching for a sinecure and had found it here. Which is to say, nobody knew me very well, and I was thankful for it. I had tried hard to keep my true feelings disguised. Nobody knew but Delores, John Shotwell, Jeanne, and of course my old gang from college. We all felt pretty much the same about worldly employment. We hated it. What we wanted was to read, write, and be left to our pathetic selves.

I came to Boeing desperate when my wife was three months pregnant; I left when my son was a year old and ready to take his first unaided step. It was a good time to be home and observing the growth of what would be our only child. They are unrecoverable years, and if you miss them, you miss it all.

I didn’t miss them. I went on unemployment compensation, discovered we were eligible for surplus food (not food stamps, which came later), took over some domestic duties (but not many), and began to write in earnest. I even found myself an agent, then another. Neither proved to be of much help. But desperately listing Paul Reynolds, and his Madison Avenue address on my next resume led directly to my next serious job.

My two prospective bosses, reading it, thought I had extensive experience with a New York City advertising firm and because of it made me a job offer. This was several frantic years later and needless to say I snapped up the job.

45

Hunting for a job can make you feel like a worthless piece of shit. The search goes on and on, and nobody seems to notice you, not in the hopeful manner that you need. You complete endless long questionnaires, revealing intimate things you would rather keep to yourself, but if you do, you will have absolutely no chance of getting the interview that may, just might, lead to being hired. And this embarrassing information you write down in legible fashion, over and over. But you meet some interesting people down on their luck, in the same straits as you. You get to share some of the horror. It makes you feel for a moment not so all alone. One girl I encountered was from Bennington. Just like me had a worthless M.A. in that damning, exclusionary subject, English.

She was bitter as a penny that had been carried in a pocket for a week. Or had lain in a flower bed for most of the winter.

"Why didn’t anybody tell us?" she whined. "Isn’t there supposed to be some advisor who will warn you about the facts of life? My God, I thought it would be a picnic. Everybody would want us, offer us great jobs—editors of this or that. Instead, it’s worse than if we had no education at all."

My words exactly. There were no other ones I could offer her as consolation, commiseration. Maybe I had put them all down on employment forms and was temporarily at a loss. Or else I had choked on them. Finally, tootling down The Ave., I stopped by one of my regular sources of jobs looking for people to fill them—the University employment off ice. There they had all these listings posted on bulletin boards according to king, the freshest ones on top. Naturally, there was a rush to fill these, before the competition stiffened through repeated exposure. I had read them regularly, but all had seemed out of reach, requiring knowledge, training, or experience nowhere near mine.

A listing for publications editor leaped out. In fact, there were two. The requirements were identical. I could picture a fit, remote as it might seem to others. In other words, I could make a case for myself, given a chance. Half a chance. A quarter of one. A degree in English or Journalism was required, and there was a strong hint that an advanced degree wouldn’t do any harm, either. In fact, it is what was used to thin down the list of applicants up to the point in time that affirmative action edged in, when it was waived for "suitable equivalent experience." Of course there is none. The University was going against itself, negating the importance of the advanced degree (sometimes even the bachelors degree, as well) that I had told us was so important in life. It now argued that a number of things could be substituted for it, such as editing minority newsletters and passing out leaflets on a street corner. But not yet. For now the old rules applied. They were looking for people who had earned their own degrees. It was largely an in-house game. English majors had infiltrated the administrative ranks and were eager to give employment to others like themselves. I understood perfectly. They were lonely, set off and without intellectual stimulation, just as my group and I had been at Boeing. So I was welcomed, sort of. I had some questions myself.

What does a publications editor do? He (or she, the word still standing for both genders, at the time) receives, reviews, requests, arranges. Oh, yeah. He checks for accuracy of standard English—whatever that may be. I knew well enough. Evidently, even around a university, this University, people still made errors in grammar, not to mention ones in spelling and usage. What can a compulsive reader have to offer but extensive experience in just this—close reading? But I wanted to write. Didn’t they have jobs for writers? The personnel interviewer looked at me oddly. "Another one of these," is what her look said. Probably an English major herself. One who had survived a progression of debilitating disenchantments and now was able to function as if never tainted by them. In short an ordinary cynical grad. A product (as I was) of this very same place.

It cranks them out, then employs them. Or so I hoped.

I made it to my first interview. It was to a department of Arts and Sciences, I forget which, but they didn’t like me and I didn’t like them, so it was a simple matter of going through the formalities. "We’ll call you," they said, not meaning it, and I insincerely replied, "I’ll be waiting for it."

Was that grammatical? Would they understand that the "it" referred to a noun not stated but implied, inferred? They had better. But what did I care?

The second interview was with some people in an office called publications services. I liked the title; it sounded vague and nebulous enough to include me. My kind of place, among people equally mysterious and distant. It was a little like my Boeing job, promising to help people with work that pretty much took care of itself. Work that didn’t need help. Work that remained on the horizon. Work, I hoped, that never quite arrived.

I was interviewed by two men, both of whom might be my boss or bosses. Only two? Again I was well prepared by past experience for ambiguity of purpose and function. I looked over the room carefully. No work stood around, piled up, waiting to be done. My bosses had clean desks. Oh, there might be a phone message on one—here a pink slip. And there were books on the shelves that seemed hastily put there and eager for their spines to be read. The Chicago Manual of Style, Some Elements of Style by Strunk and White, several dogeared dictionaries of medium size. I even spotted the bold Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot.

Old Tough Shit was here? I was at home.

This was Bob Dodge’s office. Later, when talking about the showcase books his shelf proffered (the other three shelves held the General Catalog, but were otherwise bare, waiting), he picked up Strunk and looked at it as though it were Yorick’s skull. He said, "I should send a copy of this to my ex."

It was pretty funny. We spoke the same language. Others might think it was gibberish. Probably they did.

He was an odd bird, a poet. He confessed he was just biding his time here. He was full of contradictions, as any interesting intelligent person must be, or else he’s not. Thin sandy hair, balding, he was about my age, thirty, or a couple of year younger. He wore a hard-finished business suit, starched white shirt, rep-striped tie. Often his face was flushed, I later learned from last night’s drinking. He was a problem drunk and was at the time hiding it very well, carrying it off without a hitch, or this would be his opinion of it. I was convinced for a few days, but there is always a giveaway, often a dead giveaway. He was having trouble making it to work in the morning, and often strode in as though having been to an important meeting first. Then he’d make a series of phonecalls, usually to friends, buddies, people like himself at mid-administrative level, and they’d be out. He’d know they’d be out, or else he wouldn’t have called them. Comprende? If they did, it didn’t matter if I did, or the other editors.

Bob would look quickly around the room, with a look of intense preoccupation on his face. It probably read, "God I need a drink." Then he’d pop to his feet, bark an order at the woman who was secretary to both him and Howard Miller, my co-boss, and stride out of the room. He was headed for coffee. It wasn’t the same as bourbon, but it would have to do until noon.

As soon as he was gone, his phone would start ringing. It was buddies returning his phone calls of a moment earlier. Diane, the secretary, began to write them down hurriedly. The phone had several lines coming in, so one would ring, while another was being answered, and often about now—a quarter to ten—she would be writing down one message for Bob, while another caller was queued up, waiting for her to do the same. And then the third line would begin to blink its tiny light.

I had to admire the guy. We all did. It was a matter of style and timing. These were the qualities he tacitly said were lacking in his first wife. He had a girl friend, a beautiful little number about ten years younger than he, obviously in love, and she would come by the office and hang around, waiting for Bob to appear, or reappear, talking to us. This was Joanne. All she could talk about was Bob. By now we’d had enough of him for the day. His was a will-of-the-wisp existence. He’d light, he’d look around, he’d grab the phone and broadcast into it, he’d be instantly gone. Day after day.

He was—dig this—the University Editor. I capitalize it because the name alone carried great weight. His responsibility was the production of all printed work at the university that was not academic in nature. This included catalogs, brochures, broadsides, pamphlets—stuff mainly aimed at students and intended to separate them from their tuition money. But there was a great area of overlap with what the colleges and departments produced that advertised themselves in the specific nature of what they did, their work. Sometimes this fell into our area, sometimes not. It was up to them to tell us when we exceeded our authority or expertise. Believe me, they did.

So Bob’s job was burdensome. No wonder he fled from it and for days could not be found to answer questions having to do with it. Naturally we covered as best we could. He dealt with each of us, his staff, on a personal level. He liked it if we would drink with him in the evening, but if we didn’t want to, hey, that was okay, too. We could have coffee with him in the student union (HUB) and discuss work by the hour in what in our writing we would term "a genial atmosphere."

For we wrote, too. Anybody can edit, anybody who can tell an adjective from an adverb, and many who can’t. It is handy to know what a proper noun is but not imperative to know the difference between it and an improper noun, or even a run-of-the-mill, garden variety noun, one whose conduct is marginal. We had been hired for our writing potential and experience. As soon as Bob knew I wrote poetry, however bad, he wanted to add me to his staff, much as though he were assembling a bouquet. In fact, he much preferred a girl to a boy, as an editor, but girls were problematic and he kept ending up in bed with them, and matters got worse.

Did I understand?

I did, and this was half the job, as it turned out.

Mary was the name of his sweety, and she worked for the University. Everybody in the world did. We had all graduated from being students to being employees, some of us not coming back to the womb, as it were, for six or eight years away. Others, wiser than we, went directly to work, even before graduation, for there were part-time jobs involving typewriters and filing cabinets, and policy was to look hard at your good students before filling them from what was termed "outside," meaning the great world.

Wasn’t that Samuel Butler’s word for it? Cervantes then? Maybe Voltaire? Truthfully, I get them all mixed up, now that some time has gone by. Besides, aren’t they dead, which makes what they have to say irrelevant.

There is a side of the active mind that believes nothing and knows it is all for the good. I looked around me, in my new job, and saw a bunch of largely delectable people sitting at old oak desks, with nothing much to do. Was this the normal state of affairs in business—not enough work to go around? People trying hard to amuse themselves? Now, that was hard work. It’s what will send you home, bone-weary, at the end of the long day.

I was still in the office with Bob Dodge, as he smoked one cigarette after another and began to tell me about his life. Mostly it was his love life, his tribulations with Joanne, how she was smothering him. And her sexual demands of him—superhuman. He’d grin. This went on so long that I presumed, correctly, I’d been hired, baring only Howard Miller’s disapproval. I was anxious to meet him, my other boss, and finally Bob Dodge took me next door, where he was waiting for us.

Howard was dark, slender to the point of emaciation, a distant runner. He rarely used a car and simply trotted to wherever he was headed. Since he lived on tony Mercer Island, in a fine home, he ran to work each morning. It was about fifteen miles. His day completed, the sedentary life behind him, he ran home through traffic, dashing right past jams of cars lined up on the floating bridge. They’d often honk derision at him, recognizing him, knowing he’d be enjoying a highball and a hottub while they were still hotly queued up in their cars.

Howard’s job was to ensure quality control of whatever the University printed and went out to the public, namely, prospective students or students already enrolled in a college, school, department, or some interdisciplinary unit. So, in a way, he was in charge of printing, only another guy, Bert Haag, ran printing. He was of the old school, Howard of the new, and there was a huge, inevitable conflict, because one guy (Bert) was in charge of getting the work done, but the other guy (Howard) was in charge of how it looked to the world and any criticism (and around a university there is plenty, everybody being a scholarly critic of everybody else) that might bounce back and be embarrassing.

Naturally the two didn’t get along very well, nor their two departments, and there was a lot of rivalry. Howard wanted Bert’s job, along with his own, and it seemed to him only reasonable to get it. This he was waiting for. In the meantime, he ran, ran and tried to raise the quality of the work issuing forth from the printing presses. He worked on the quality aspect by hiring an art director, then a famous (locally, anyway) designer as a consultant. Knowingly or not, he was creating the same problem he had in his own life, that of similar responsibilities being assigned to two different persons. For how could you have two men in charge of printing and two in charge of design? Well, you couldn’t, but that was the situation, and seen again from a slightly different angle, Bob and Howard’s jobs overlapped considerably as well. To complicate the duplication, they had different bosses, ones very differently aligned. Bob reported directly to the Provost and thus had an academic alignment; Howard reported to the vice-president for university relations, meaning relations outside the university, though this wasn’t immediately apparent. The good news was, Bob and Howard got along well and could cooperate well within the dual reporting relationships. At least they could for quite a while. And when it turned out they no longer could, the result was less than explosive.

For now all was calm. Morale seemed high. We were a dissimilar lot, coming from all different kinds of backgrounds but bound together by a common goal, that of getting all the publications printed in a timely and orderly and attractive manner. It was not all that difficult, no job is, not unless there are persons and factors directly determined to thwart the common task. Ours were no worse than normal, ordinary happenings in a close world in which many dissimilar people must continually interact.

So alike, so different. There was Jack Hollenback, for instance. All of his life he had worked in printing. He had developed a drinking problem that probably led to his losing a series of jobs around the city, and so had been a natural for publications services. He was older than any of us by a decade or more, all except for Norma Schropell, who was pretty close to being a contemporary. Jack had served in the Army in the Second World War, and I at first though this would be a bond between us, our Army service, but it was a different Army, and Jack was reluctant to talk about it. Somewhere I learned that he had been in the infantry in Europe and had killed a number of German soldiers. So he might well have cause to drink in order to forget. Yet, whether or not you have good cause of routine drunkenness, or drinking on the job, it is not a condition well-tolerated in the business world. And life at the University, I soon learned, was no different from the world of business. It was very much a part of it.

Norma liked Jack and tolerated his behavior because he knew printing backwards and forwards, and none of us did. All of us, except Norma, were college graduates, and she resented this. Naturally she was editor-in-chief. I had to give her credit, she was a close reader and did a good job, but had no room for tolerance and no style. (Bob could well have given her his Strunk, but she already had a copy, and it would only be me, in sad imitation of Bob, who would complain that she had obviously not read it.) But she knew all she needed to obtain clean copy, as it was called, and proofs that were not marred by typos and the like.

Between the daily behavior of Bob Dodge and Jack Hollenback, we had an object lesson in the pitfalls of drink, had we wanted one, and we didn’t because we each drank often but were able to achieve moderation. Or else the demon didn’t bite us as deeply as some. Jack would often arrive at work a little early, with a snoot full already, and he would be angry and wired over some little thing involving the printing plant, and would be raving when we trickled in, somewhere between eight-ten and eight-forty. We knew what time Bob Dodge would arrive, if he did arrive, and this time frame would have us all at our desks and looking industrious when he blasted in. If he did blast in. So the one was obstreperously early, while the other was boisterously late. We our simple selves were somewhere in between.

Meanwhile Howard, his office door closed to all that was happening, was holding a staff meeting of the design consultant and head designer. A word or more about those.

His job was quality control, but quality in publications is determined long before a job goes to the press. It lies in its design and layout, the taste with which it is conceived, and the quality of mind of the designer. Though Rod was our chief designer and received the pay of what might be termed its director, Howard did not entirely trust him, his taste, his judgment, which was a terrible situation for Rod to be in, since he was a skilled, capable publications designer, with lots of experience. He was in fact being undermined through Howard’s nervous distrust. And this stemmed from the recent past.

The University’s publications used to look just awful. They were nothing to lead us into the Twenty-first Century, to borrow from terminology of public relations, of which we were a part, integral or not. The look of our material could be described as Spartan; this did not mean lean and austere, self-disciplined, but rather resembling the type face of that name, which was ugly, old-fashioned, and pedestrian. It was an embarrassment among universities and a sign that we had no competitive status.

The president, Charles Odegaard, knew something was wrong, but being an administrator and an historian, did not know the nature of what was at fault. So he wisely turned to underlings, staff professionals in public relations, and told them to define the problem and to come up with a solution. As usual, when something like this happens at the top level, there is confusion and consternation in the ranks below, and everybody is made to jump, in fear of losing his job. The vice-president for university relations called his staff together on a Monday morning to address the particulars of the problem. Those who were closest to where publications got put together, namely, the head of printing (Bert), the University Editor (Bob), and the head of publications (Howard) all were asked to located the source of the problem. I wasn’t there, but can imagine each of them pointing indelicately at the others. Two of the fingers were aimed at Bert. Trouble was, Bert didn’t report to this vice-president but another, the one for business.

So the need for corrective action hung in the air for a few weeks, long before I hove on the scene and could add my two-bits. Howard won the moral argument, the one involving suasion, and asked to hire a design consultant, a special one, a guy named Fred Walsh, who was famous around town, in tiny circles, for what he had done to a local start-up magazine, Seattle. Rod, the designer, didn’t like the idea one bit. He was told to masticate it some more.

He did, but it only produced more bile. Rod was a Canadian, had worked unhappily at Boeing (had everybody?), and was a good designer in his own right. He was also very short. Hell, all my bosses historically have been short. Howard was about five-seven, Bob about five-six, and poor Rod, only five-two or three. There was a widely whispered joke about a staff meeting involving a difficult design concept, and Bob and Howard putting their heads together and deciding to "give it to the little guy."

All things being relative, I guess.

Walsh, I think, had a drinking problem, which should have made him feel right at home. He had it under firm control, however. He was what you might call a compartmental drinker. He would drink weekly at certain hours, heavily, irregularly, depending on his schedule, and drink until he passed out. He was well organized and already had planned for them what to do with his corpse, so to speak. Waiter, bartender, friend, cabby, Fred would get carted home and put into bed along side his wife. Next morning, he’d be clear-headed and raring to go. There are some drinkers like this. They are able to function without severe dislocation for years, decades, their whole professional careers, for instance. It is quite a marvel, and all the others would like to be just like them, but fail—fail dismally and often fatally.

Eight every morning, four days a week, Fred would meet with Howard in his office and they would go over what they called "design elements" in a conspiratorial fashion. Since Rod drank, too, but did not have it under suck good control, he’d arrive towards eight-thirty (early by office standard) and join them, in a huff already, muttering under his breath. Besides being noticeably small, short, he was overweight and under-exercised and looked very British, with a clipped mustache and hairline advancing rapidly in the wrong direction. He’d be sweating lightly along his rather large scalp and his skin had a pallor, almost as though his bones were too small to support him. Maybe he’d had a drink to fortify him in the car in the parking lot.

I know for a fact that he had a hyperventilation problem because he often extracted a brown paper bag from his bottom desk drawer and began breathing rapidly into it. First time I saw him do this I was certain it was a habit he picked up on an airline and was in the process of throwing up.

Sometimes those of us at nearby desks were beckoned for and asked to assist him. When he had calmed some, his breathing restored to near-normal, he’d look up at us calmly, and soon be on his way home in his car. Occasionally his wife was phoned to come in and drive him home. She always arrived dramatically in a cab, in the back of the Communications Building.

"She’s here," we’d signal Rod.

He’d rise shakily to his feet, wave off our offer of help, and descend the back to flights of stairway, clutching the metal handrail. A moment later she’d be helping him into the passenger side. Then she’d tool off, some idle students watching, for it was a dramatic event. And, no, I don’t think he was faking it.

Those morning meetings must have been hell. He was responsible for bringing to them rough designs—called comps or mockups—of projects still in the formative stage, and Howard and Fred would look them over closely and try to remember the particulars, sometimes having to consult the file folder of the printing request for what was involved. Rod had this and had to go to his office and fetch, like an obedient dog.

"What do you think, Fred?" Howard would ask. And Rod would begin to tremble and hyperventilate. Fred had a heavy Semitic face, with a huge nose, heavy bloodhound jowls, a down-turned dismal countenance. Fred would be thinking it over. Then he’d wave a finger or two in the direction of the sketch and make—always in a kindly mild tone—a suggestion or two.

These completely unmanned Rod.

Did the two men know what they were doing to him, I’ve always wondered? The unremitting anguish he was going through, four days a week, week after week? He was of course in large debt. Wasn’t everybody? Kids, mortgage, a lot of life’s necessities stacked up on credit cards, perhaps a wife who had some kind of fond indulgence. He had left Boeing because of temperamental differences. Were artist permitted to be temperamental, anywhere in this world? How else did they manufacture the pearl that was expected of them?

Fred Walsh certainly had his indulgences and they were broadly tolerated. He’d be there an eight and, forty minutes or at the latest fifty, he’d be gone, some new jobs crammed in the huge leather briefcase he carried, held together by only one of its straps being buckled. Inside were new work, old work, work being redone, work of Rod’s that could use some small improvement. And Howard always treated him as though he were the crown prince. Rod, well, he was just another one of us workers.

Of course he took it out on us, the minions. He’d bark orders at us, interrogate us about jobs of his now in production, and when we brought him clients to discuss design elements on jobs he’d designed, he’d be haughty as a housecat, proud as a peacock. We’d try to mediate between departmental client (often a professor) and Rod, but he lay in waiting for some kind of revenge. It never works. Because he was terrible with us, even though we knew the reason why, we’d be tempted to side with our client. And so Rod got battered from both sides. Poor guy, no way he could win even a truce in his long battle.

Eventually he cracked up and resigned. Maybe Howard wanted him gone, all the while, and this was his kind way of achieving that end. If so, it was the most cruel. Or else Howard simply figured that Rod was being paid good money and was not producing high quality results. He was one of the chips then that may fall as they may.

Always it is at the side of the road, bowed and bloody.

When I got there, Rod was waning. We were all told an apocryphal tale (one which just might be true, but not in all of its particulars) about Fred Walsh, in the company of Howard, his boss, Bob Waldo, the v.p., and Fred, all making a presentation before the University president. Fred went through his act, showing comps and mockups of what he’d do in terms of redesigning the University’s major publications, and showing some of them the size of flipcharts, big, colorful. And the President listened heavily, then shook his head, no.

Fred then said, or was widely reported to say, "I don’t think you understand what I’m driving at, Dr. Odegaard." And went through his presentation substantially as he had done the first time, with nary a change of trill. This time, the President said, thoughtfully, "Oh, yes. Well, okay." Or words to that effect. I mean, he bought it, the whole proposal for redesign, after having summarily turned it down.

Perhaps the guy was having a bad day, maybe his mind was in neutral, or else he was considering some chore of much more weight, and something to this effect showed in his face. Walsh seized upon it. He worked it and made his version . . . prevail. We had all heard the story and believed it. It is wonderful to enter a scene with such a story preceding you. It paves the way, parts the waves, commands rapt attention.

Walsh was a good designer. He was paid well out of a special budget created for just that purpose. He’d give the institution up to four hours a week, plus countless hours of preparation in his office for all its major publications. And for this, would receive about 2.5 times as much money as Rod, ostensibly the chief designer.

Fred never rubbed Rod’s nose in it. He didn’t have to. There it was, for everybody to know and speculate about, plus daily Howard’s deep subservience. With Fred Howard was a complete toady. Once I saw him hold Fred’s coat so he could slip his arms first into the left sleeve, then the right, like some lovely. Then this dumpy man picked up his briefcase and shuffled out like a street person, while Howard watched lovingly.

I suppose whatever success Howard had was made possible by Fred Walsh, who knew it. Gratitude wears a number of hats.

There was the assistant designer, Allen Auvil, and a bevy of others who worked for the Printing Plant and did mainly pasteup, but were capable of much more, they believed, as weren’t we all? Each had to execute the work of Rod or Fred. In fact, Rod often had to take jobs designed by Fred to this crew and ask for them to be put together. He treated them as though they were his own designs, quietly accepting credit when they oohed and aahed over the mockups, or listening quietly to their objections, when they didn’t like what they saw.

"Just do it," he told them then, individually. Naturally they hated him for it, but then they hated everybody. What a motley crew they were. Almost as though to punish them for some past transgression, they were stuffed into a single room, four of them, at drafting tables that were touching, perched on backless tools, a radio playing popular music in the background, the sole evidence that they were in some way out of the ordinary. Artistic. Aesthetically superior.

Some supervisor no doubt once said, "Let them have their radio, so long as they don’t want any more money."

There was Anita, a surly apple-cheeked old maid, who would greet you with an artificial smile, anybody, and the moment you were past her facade, begin to dismantle your personality with a sharp knife. She was not very smart and, hence, not very good at this, but she made up in intensity what she lacked in skill, and was to be feared. She could never understand, and would say so, when you made large circles around her, at her desk or elsewhere. She kept a notebook, a kind of log, at her desk and filled it up, like a diary, with slights real and imagined, and other job difficulties that might come to light later and for which she believed she might need ammunition or vindication. In it she went on and on about what had happened in he said, she said, fashion, distorting language and action in order to make herself seem blameless.

How do I know this? Well, I was on the receiving end of a couple such barrages. I was truly amazed to see the Xeroxes of her log introduced in a dispute gone public as "evidence." I could not imagine the historical vindictiveness of the woman. She lived with a house full of poodles and her mother, until her other died. This gave her some semblance of normality. When her mother died, she snapped. She quit her job when her inheritance came through, continued living in the house in a progressive state of filth and disorder, and developed a small business of bathing and grooming poodles. She would travel to your house to do it.

Ann Downs was less neurotic and more agreeable, at least on the surface. She had married late a man who was a house painter and worked for the University’s physical plant, I guess running around and laying paint to its external woodwork, and the rest of the time drinking heavily. They had a son when Ann was about forty and then, as though his mission in life were suddenly fulfilled, he quickly sickened and died. Ann had graduated from the Burnley School of Art (now Seattle Academy) and was a pretty adequate designer in her own right, only her own right was never called into sharp focus until late in life, when she thought she had developed enough outside jobs to sustain her if she quit.

She was wrong.

She was always fairly easy to work with, though a bit unctuous, which masked a supercilious attitude, I believed; there are worse social crimes to be encountered in a business environment and I was thankful that she was as mild as she was. Her designs were the best of the lot, and when I left the University for the great world again, as it is called, I had occasion to call on her for some free-lance work. It was always good and reliable.

Another one from the design group was Bruce Moberg. He was a fine-arts artist, or so they call them in the business world, to separate them from other kinds of artists, who like to go by this grand title. It means they paint paintings on the side, or else primarily. Usually it is their prime concern, their major calling, and their daily job is only something to make the former possible and keep them, the artist, alive. This was the case with Bruce. He, like my friend Gordy Anderson, was also a cartoonist. It was funny how somebody in the arts had all these sidelines and how well they could perform in some of them. The University had no use for cartooning, so it was never called for, though Bruce did it well, and in a later incarnation, when I had occasion to hired Ann, I at other times found word for Bruce and his cartoons, but never for his paintings.

They were gross, not in size but in content. I think Hieronymus Bosch was his role model. There are others perhaps more suitable, less fantastical, less possessed of the devil and ugliness. Bruce loved the bizarre, or else it so occupied his artistic spirit that I kept leaping forward not even slightly disguised, grotesque and eschatological. Dwarfs, cripples, those reduced by deformities, the blind, the lame—all were fit subjects for Bruce’s paintings. The plain, the ordinary, the mundane, the normal, these were not fit subjects.

Otherwise he was pretty normal. He seemed to me a notch superior to the others in the crowded office. Of course they were all women.

He once told me, "If I don’t get out of here pretty soon, I’m going to start wearing a skirt."

This was back in the days, you understand, when women wore skirts to the office, and the black symbol on the doors of restrooms could not be thought confusing by those of us accustomed to seeing women wearing pants. (Or, I suppose, the outline of a man wearing kilts.)

Bruce did get out of there, eventually. He took a job with the University’s audio-visual services, and they assigned him a windowless cell in the deep interior of one of the new cement buildings. There he worked alone and made backdrops for the campus television station long before it affiliated with PBS. Finally, a few years later, distraught, lonely, confused, he quit in despair, withdrew his retirement money, lived off of it for as long as he could, painted desperately (does anyone ever paint in any other manner than in desperation?), had a show or two that was entirely ignored and went unsold, became a pauper, went into a charity home, and I suppose died there.

I remember that he had been in the Navy and during inclement weather still wore his old white cap, its brim turned down all around. He had married once, briefly, sired on his wife two children who then as now rarely acknowledged his existence. She dumped him. She was some kind of writer and fled to an entirely different life. People I knew knew her and liked her. I can only imagine what she must be like.

A writer, she probably found Bruce not complicated enough. Or not enough of a breadwinner. And all this would translate into inadequate in bed. A writer, she was undoubtedly a reader, too, and went off in search of somebody literature promised her would make her life an adventure, not recognizing that this was in the nature of an ancient Chinese curse.

light later and for which she believed she might need ammunition or vindication. In it she went on and on about what had happened in he said, she said, fashion, distorting language and action in order to make herself seem blameless.

How do I know this? Well, I was on the receiving end of a couple such barrages. I was truly amazed to see the Xeroxes of her log introduced in a dispute gone public as "evidence." I could not imagine the historical vindictiveness of the woman. She lived with a house full of poodles and her mother, until her mother died. This gave her some semblance of normality. When her mother died, she snapped. She quit her job when her inheritance came through, continued living in the house in a progressive state of filth and disorder, and developed a small business of bathing and grooming poodles. She would travel to your house to do it.

Ann Downs was less neurotic and more agreeable, at least on the surface. She had married late a man who was a house painter and worked for the University’s physical plant, I guess running around and laying paint to its external woodwork, and the rest of the time drinking heavily. They had a son when Ann was about forty and then, as though his mission in life were suddenly fulfilled, he quickly sickened and died. Ann had graduated from the Burnley School of Art (now Seattle Academy) and was a pretty adequate designer in her own right, only her own right was never called into sharp focus until late in life, when she thought she had developed enough outside jobs to sustain her if she quit.

She was wrong.

She was always fairly easy to work with, though a bit unctuous, which masked a supercilious attitude, I believed; there are worse social crimes to be encountered in a business environment and I was thankful that she was as mild as she was. Her designs were the best of the lot, and when I left the University for the great world again, as it is called, I had occasion to call on her for some free-lance work. It was always good and reliable.

Another one from the design group was Bruce Moberg. He was a fine-arts artist, or so they call them in the business world, to separate them from other kinds of artists, who like to go by this grand title. It means they paint paintings on the side, or else primarily. Usually it is their prime concern, their major calling, and their daily job is only something to make the former possible and keep them, the artist, alive. This was the case with Bruce. He, like my friend Gordy Anderson, was also a cartoonist. It was funny how somebody in the arts had all these sidelines and how well they could perform in some of them. The University had no use for cartooning, so it was never called for, though Bruce did it well, and in a later incarnation, when I had occasion to hired Ann, I at other times found word for Bruce and his cartoons, but never for his paintings.

They were gross, not in size but in content. I think Hieronymus Bosch was his role model. There are others perhaps more suitable, less fantastical, less possessed of the devil and ugliness. Bruce loved the bizarre, or else it so occupied his artistic spirit that I kept leaping forward not even slightly disguised, grotesque and eschatological. Dwarfs, cripples, those reduced by deformities, the blind, the lame—all were fit subjects for Bruce’s paintings. The plain, the ordinary, the mundane, the normal, these were not fit subjects.

Otherwise he was pretty normal. He seemed to me a notch superior to the others in the crowded office. Of course they were all women.

He once told me, "If I don’t get out of here pretty soon, I’m going to start wearing a skirt."

This was back in the days, you understand, when women wore skirts to the office, and the black symbol on the doors of restrooms could not be thought confusing by those of us accustomed to seeing women wearing pants. (Or, I suppose, the outline of a man wearing kilts.)

Bruce did get out of there, eventually. He took a job with the University’s audio-visual services, and they assigned him a windowless cell in the deep interior of one of the new cement buildings. There he worked alone and made backdrops for the campus television station long before it affiliated with PBS. Finally, a few years later, distraught, lonely, confused, he quit in despair, withdrew his retirement money, lived off of it for as long as he could, painted desperately (does anyone ever paint in any other manner than in desperation?), had a show or two that was entirely ignored and went unsold, became a pauper, went into a charity home, and I suppose died there.

I remember that he had been in the Navy and during inclement weather still wore his old white cap, its brim turned down all around. He had married once, briefly, sired on his wife two children who then as now rarely acknowledged his existence. She dumped him. She was some kind of writer and fled to an entirely different life. People I knew knew her and liked her. I can only imagine what she must be like.

A writer, she probably found Bruce not complicated enough. Or not enough of a breadwinner. And all this would translate into inadequate in bed. A writer, she was undoubtedly a reader, too, and went off in search of somebody literature promised her would make her life an adventure, not recognizing that this was in the nature of an ancient Chinese curse—the one that goes, "May you live in ‘interesting’ times."

He was a nice guy, pleasant to encounter, and encounter him I did, many times over the year. In spite of a black cloud that seemed to follow him, and what I suspected to be chronic depression, I always liked him and wished for him the best. For a while, much later, he lived across the street from me, at Ann Downs, of all places, and most of that time he painted like crazy. He was a fine draftsman and knew his materials well. You’d like his paintings, that is, if you liked Bosch. Otherwise, they might make you want to flee the scene, the interior of his paintings. For they were deadly.

And there was Inga, always quiet, steadily plotting. I think she was one of the first feminists I’ve encountered—long before there was a word for (let us call it) her attitude. If I haven’t made it clear so far, let me add that all of the "artists" in the design group attached to the printing plant were also "artistes." They fashioned themselves several cuts above the average worker. Daily the radio playing current nonsense enhanced their sense of things and their status. Of course it was all fraudulent. They were being humored, not honored (in spite of the words sounding so much alike.) So Anita, the dog-lady, and Ann, the principal and tasteful designer I liked to work with, and Bruce, the Boschite, and later Roz, who was more temperamental than any of them, but went on to work for some commercial printers who had a halfway decent product, some trade magazine, occupied the room each day that Bruce confided was driving him in the direction PMS himself.

Now Igna. Her name was a dead giveaway. What branch of Scandanavia she subscribed to I’m not certain. Norse, perhaps. And then there was a strong strain of Strinberg’s women running through her. Her quietness veiled aloofness, her plodding design work the message that she was truly above all such menial work. She was capable of great thing, her mien told you, but there were no great things aching to be accomplished. In another situation, beware. She would do work that would astonish your shoes off you. She was a princess, a Nordic goddess, in thin disguise. Hence the shabby clothes she wore to the office. For the time being she was traveling, as you might say, incognito.

Soon she would burst out of her drab cocoon.

This happened after a small series of incidents. First, Rod resigned, under the guise of illness, which was three-quarters true, poor guy. He’d hyperventilated down to the bone. Walsh shed crocodile tears, and so did Howard. A vacancy occurred and they did not want to lose the money for it. So they elevated Allen Auvil, who was Rod’s assistant, but not very far. There was a token raise of about forty dollars a month, not much even then, and a title that fooled nobody: first designer. What was this? It was nothing. Allen was moved down to the intersanctum, with the radio blaring all day. Bruce moved out on a lateral transfer to audio-visual and his interior prison, making room. And now Allen, instead of Rod, attended the morning design meetings with Fred Walsh in Howard’s office, which turned out well, for Allen was a bit compulsive and arrived at work at about forty seconds before eight each morning.

After that he often did nothing else except arrange his pencils and pads, his colored chalks, his file drawers, until it was time for morning coffebreak. But he could turn out acceptable mediocre work, if you gave him enough time. He was of the type one should not crowd or issue close deadlines to.

Inga had worked for the U since time immemorial, always in a self-effacing capacity that did not reveal her true feelings, either about herself or about the people she must associate with, in the course of a day’s activity. This ice princess. This one who would be queen.

We thought it a pose and paid it no attention.

Suddenly there was a law suit. What? This was unheard. Howard was not the plaintiff, Bob Waldo was. What business did she have suing the vice-president of university relations? None of us could figure it out, including him. Her lawyer, Scandinavian, too, probably figured he might as well make his cut as high on the hog as possible. It only held to reason that the award would be higher. That must be it.

She wanted Allen’s job and title. She wanted back pay, too. I don’t know how far back she wanted it because I wasn’t privy to the proceedings and only heard what trickled down to us peasants. At first there were many meetings. I have to imagine them. Waldo asking, "What is this shit, Howard?" And Howard, furious, trying to explain something he didn’t yet understand. This might be described as a woman scorn nurtured for years the way a spark is, a spark that finally causes a forest fire.

And she had always been so polite, passing in the hallway, or when Howard asked her to bring a sketch or a comp to his office. Here he had thought she was enjoying the privilege of trotting upstairs, when she really thought of it as another indignity. She had kept a log of just such episodes or transgressions, as she must have thought of them. Doubtless the idea came from Anita, the really great hoarder of grudges. So she filled a looseleaf notebook with slights and examples of being asked to work not in her job description, work demeaning, work far beneath her capacity. She also had a long list of jobs she was asked to perform that were above her station and pay grade, work for which a chief designer or certainly an assistant chief designer might be assigned, along with samples of printing from such jobs to illustrate that she not only was capable of such work but had on many occasions performed it.

And she had been employed for about ten years longer than Allen. This was the basis of her suit and pretty solid. You can’t dispute the passage of years or what is commonly called seniority. She had been employed by the University in design work longer than anybody, as a matter of fact. She was a graduate of Burnley; so was Allen. Then, how come, he got the job? Because he had a penis? How can a penis be of help in designing brochures. I mean, you can’t wield it, as you would a pencil or inking pen. And I’m sure Howard or Bob or some other wag, but not me, would point out, with ruthless misapplied logic, that neither can you pee out of a pencil or pen. For whatever that is worth.

The meetings were held daily at first, then became a leading topic of Bob’s staff meeting, which of course I did not attend, being a peon. But I can imagine them. Howard had to explain, whatever the frequency, all that had taken place since the previous meeting. Often this was nothing, but Bob wanted to hear a recap, anyway. And Bob Dodge would add a word or two. He was always funny, drunk or sober, and it wasn’t hard to tell from surface evidence which it was, at a given minute, for he only thought he was carrying his liquor well.

Both he and Jack Hollenback were victims of this illusion. You might call it the pathetic fallacy, if that term wasn’t already reserved for something far different, for it is a fallacy that you appear sober and pathetic that you think so.

And Waldo, a nice guy, would sigh, like Job, and shake his head sadly. The attorney for the U. told him he had nothing to worry about. He believe the man because he knew what he was being paid. So when after a couple of years it went to trial, nobody believed the University would lose.

Meanwhile, Inga took vacation, used up most of her accrued sick leave (she being the type that is never ill), and went on unpaid leave of absence for quite a while. Then abruptly one day, long before the trial, she returned to work, quite chipper, smiling in all directions, with a confidence and aplomb she had never shown before. In the design group she was quite a hero, or rather heroine, or so Bruce told me. He was an outsider in many matters there because he too had a penis. It was the reverse of envy. It was more like scorn. Early feminists had no rule book and pretty much had to make up what was what as they went along.

The judge ruled in Inga’s favor. She was awarded a fistful of back pay and damages. She was to be offered Allen’s job. But in the meantime, the job had been eliminated, Allen transferred out. There was no job to fill. It was a crafty ploy and avoided the situation where a smugly smiling Inga had to attend Howard and Fred’s morning meeting and she awaited being assigned the details to do, like Allen did.

The money was about twenty-five thousand dollars. At the time it was a fortune. But since there was no better job to claim, she returned to the old one. She had an unmistakable diamond on her right hand and a suit that came from I. Magnin. Shoes of lizard, etc. The women all loved her and deferred in a way not previously seen on campus. The Ice Princess reigned, albeit from a hardwood stool above her old drafting table and box of pastels.

Many others stated considering the possibility of law suits but lacked Inga’s temerity. I, for one, considered going after Bob Dodge’s job. I had a masters degree, while he only had a bachelors. I was daily sober. I’d stack up my poetry against his, any day, and as far as prose went could beat him hands down. I liked the idea of his $10,000 a year; it was big money. My own salary was but sixty percent of that. These are 1966 figures, of course. But I decided against it.

46

Bob Dodge would make an interesting character but, alas, he was a person, and his personality was befuddling, probably because he himself was usually befuddled. Drunk he was one kind of person, sober quite another, and in between a little of both but quite a lot of neither. He was a poet who believed he had a future. True, he had published one or two nice little lyrics, but this was five years ago, and as in any sport you have to keep in shape and continue producing. He was always working on something, but nothing came out of it that anybody could see. When he was in his office, with nothing more to do that rewrite our tepid prose for some department desperately in need of more students in order to keep its doors open, or some high and mighty flyer intended to convince prospective students to come here and not go to, say, Berkeley or USC or even Washington State, when not turning his attention to these mighty efforts, he was writing poetry that nobody ever got to see. And since we were all writers, some of us producing, we began to doubt his efforts, if not Bob himself. If there was a doubt to give somebody the benefit of, we did not yield it. We were selfish, critical, demanding of proof, snide, catty, vicious, cruel.

In short, we all had Thesauruses and knew how to use them. As writers, we were hesitant to call ourselves writers in mixed company, or any other, and as for appending the name, poet, to ourselves, we would have dire reservations. He, none.

How easy it is to be despised, especially when one wants mostly to be loved and admired. Ah, it is that admiring part that leads good men and women astray. What any of us wouldn’t give to be blindly worshipped. It needn’t be by many. One or two would do. Of course, of more than that tiny number wanted to come forward and fill the gap, we’d be only too happy to have them.

Bob, drinking. I wish I could write a poem to that, but can only lift my glass, instead, and take a sip in commensuration. He made the occasion an art form. Others drank and got drunk; Bob drank and soared. He filled the room, however big, and often he got thrown out of the room, whatever bar, by a bouncer or burly bartender who had had simply enough. For Bob put on a show. Whatever show he decided to do, it was epic. He was a drunk to end all drunks. I’m sure he made numerous people swear off. They were frightened by the prospect of ending up like him. And others did not want to start out that way, either.

Various women told me he was all hands. At first I didn’t know what they mean, Diane and Cherrie. I should have. Les McIntosh had been that way, back as undergraduates, but because he was black nobody said anything about it. But when he started doing it in public, guys noticing it, and commenting on it to each other, and then to the women involved. Of course he was exploiting them and the fact that because he was black they would let him get away with it. Hell, maybe even some of them liked it; we never knew, we guys. But the women who didn’t were, upon prodding, vocal about their dislike.

Now another set of women, in a different environ, were vocal, too. We’d all go out for a drink on Friday afternoon, usually starting at lunch, and most of us returned by the o’clock bell, or dribbled in half an hour later. But some—Jack, Bob—had a habit of disappearing. Soon Friday became some other day in the week. You could make a good excuse for drinking your lunch, say, on Monday, because it was the first day back and consequently special. It needed extra consideration, for there had been the weekend so recently past that required a transition. Tuesday was right next to it in the progression of days of the week, and whatever you could say in favor of drinking held true, but half diminished in value, for the day following. And Wednesday split the week in half exactly, and that was cause for celebration; why not start at lunch? By Thursday you were halfway home, hooray, the weekend being but a day away. And this brought you to Friday again, the day which everybody looks forward to because it marks the end of the week and the start of Saturday’s licentiousness.

If you are single (and even if you’re not), Friday has great significance. It brings the night on which you must get laid, if you aren’t some kind of miserable cretin. The air rings, the earth trembles, and all over the vast land women are putting on special underwear and drawing on a red mouth above eyes painted to look battered.

There comes a time in the affairs of men who are heavy drinkers when a misty oblivion settles down on the earth and the air grows hushed. Small animals scurry away to their dens and lie curled, trembling. Men and women are drawn to each other, grope, and embrace. Children are conceived in the hours that follow. Also, dubious figures are shot dead. If there is a moon, pale clouds scud across its surface. This is accompanied by the trees all leaning in one direction.

The cigarette in Bob Dodge’s mouth, which I lit for him a few minutes ago because it had sat there, unattended, needing fire, has now burned itself nearly to his lips and its soft curl of ash has once, twice, spilled into his lap, as he has continued to breathe around the greatly shortened tube. Now I watch, fascinated, as the butt smolders and actually burns itself out on the edge of his mouth, back towards the corner on the right side. Is this a trick to rivet my attention? No, it’s simply a fact of life. Doesn’t it hurt? It must. Has he grown so insensitive to pain that he can and will permit this to happen? It is the only answer my mind will entertain.

He has finished telling me (again) about his experiences as a fighter pilot from off an aircraft carrier during the Korean War, my war, as well. I still believe him because I have not been wised up by others that this is all fraud. Actually he was an enlisted man in some remote area of the ship, such as supply, who watched enviously. Now it is he taking off, swooping, looking for "bandits"—MIGs coming in from eleven o’clock, rat-tat-tat. Now he dives, coming up fast, veering off sharply, trying to shake the guy on his tail. I look at the Bob Dodge of today, tonight, and see his glazed, drunken look. There is no doubt that, at least in his mind, he is there at the controls, sweating it out. And here, the cigarette with the long curved ash, burning towards the epidermis still, the brow beaded, the tie pulled back from the collar, the top button of the stiff blue shirt undone—himself undone. Sure I believe it; who could doubt such sincerity, such a delivery?

One twilight hour, he took Cherrie out for a drink, never minding Joanne. He had a project he wanted to discuss with her. Oh, sure. She didn’t believe it either, but he was buying. Did I say she was an editor, a high-strung filly, a beauty? So I did, but it bears repeating. They went to The Blind Turtle or The Yellow Onion or The Blue Garden, one of those places, two names, with a dark ambiance, and Bob started telling her his troubles, all hands across and under the table, and Cherrie, who could catch like a fielder, kept returning his fumbling passes to him, deftly, smiling all the while, and trying to get him to talk about business, the new project, etc.

She was one who would put up with a certain amount of nonsense, stuff like this, in the course of a day, or a day’s drinking, or rather an early evening’s, and shake it off. But enough is enough. Her own preferences were specifically nautical. She liked sailors. Dark and sleek herself, she liked men who were, too, including a certain Greek first-mate on a liner, who hove into port either here or in Vancouver, Canada, about twice a year; for two weeks previous to his announced arrival she would experience a heightened state of sexual anticipation. It was all she could do to get herself to work each morning and through the day. I don’t think she accomplished any editing. She looked and acted like somebody in a not very good movie. Someone being stalked, for instance. The murder was not very far away. then when the ship arrived, she went on sick leave (probably true enough) or accrued vacation, and we didn’t see her for the week or two days he was here. We had to imagine the scene and easily did. It took place among brocaded pillows and flung silk garments, little low lights with special colored bulbs in the, with perhaps a scarf flung over the shade to dim them even more. A bottle of Metaskca brandy. Filthy glasses, reused, over and over. Cartons of Chinese food, with chopsticks or plastic forks left sticking out of the top, slowly spoiling, among all the other natural smells.

Some times Cherrie would go out hunting, when the Greek had long been gone, and it was always sailors she found at the end of her quest, often enlisted men, it didn’t much matter, so long as the guy wore dark blue and had his sea legs. If you were ex-Navy, like Bob Dodge, it probably counted for something with her, but if he told his fighter pilot stores (try and stop him) she would discount him most of his naval points.

So that night, when the heavy fingers kept coming, with the moist palms right behind them, Cherrie eventually tired and—no, she didn’t give in. If you that is how she was, I have not stated her case correctly. She either gave herself to you and the sea, or she was reserved indefinitely and you had failed. There was no overcoming her shy resistance because she had none. She threw herself at you, all arms and legs, all the rest, or else she was impossible, and Bob Dodge simply didn’t understand, or if he did thought she would behave like other girls, given half a dozen stiff drinks. Persistence usually won out.

So she tried gently, she tried firmly, she tried insistent, strong wristed, and then she lifted her heavy purse. About that purse: I remember it. It was tooled brown leather, with nail heads, rounded, all around its perimeter, quite expensive, probably much more expensive than I knew, I. Magnins merchandise, and she gave Bob a bop on the forehead with it. It was not a love tap. He went down like a struck steer, but then he was in the process of going down (I speak figuratively, you understand) anyway. It took two waiters to get him to his feet, five minutes later, and they called a taxi for him, as they were used to doing, for while he could still fly a fighter plane, he could not drive a car. Cherrie was long gone. We heard the story the next Monday morning. We heard it from Cherrie herself for, because he tried to violate her in public, he now was no longer inviolate from violation himself. It was the consequence, and also the punishment.

So Bob Dodge dragged into work at five minutes to nine. This was twenty minutes later than even I, skilled at just what we could get away with, dared arrive. He looked particularly grim and businesslike. He beckoned me immediately into his office for a conference. This was his usual way.

I sat down. He had a cigarette going—in his ashtray, not his face. His face was gloomily lowered over some papers, a new editing job Howard had given him that needed some work before it went to markup and typesetting. Then he looked up. The first thing I saw was his large blond forehead, where his hair was receding. Faintly but terrible in its regularity, its spacing, were the rounded nailheads from Cherries bag. I couldn’t help myself, I broke out laughing, an awful case of the giggles. Bob looked at me, grimly perplexed. I giggled again, actually more of a suppressed titter.

"What’s the problem?" he asked.

I could only shake my head and clamp my lips shut.

"Well, when you’re done with whatever it is, let me know and we’ll go on."

47

What is editing? Glad you asked. It is not Maxwell Perkins, deep in a leather chair, in a room slatted with light, books up to the ceiling, all with their dustjackets on, all his, some yours, saying, "Damn it all, Scott. . . .". Editing is much more mundane. It is pedantic, exacting dull as cornflakes sat in their milk for an hour. It offers about as much room for self-expression as a straightjacket.

Nor is it the man in the slot at some big-city newspaper, bellowing without looking up from his fistful of newsprint copy, "Boy," and a girl comes scurrying from where the copyaides (as they are called now) sit at a table to fetch and carry, and perhaps be secretly thrilled that someone, at last, has called her that. And the copy editor hunched over his stylesheet, writing a headline with one of those fat number one pencils, with no eraser at its distant end, does not do it, either, though he may think he does, even now on the monitor of his word processor, as he watches the pixels sort themselves out and microscopically change.

And it is not like the writer, alone at his desk, unhappy with the earlier word but finding the right one still elusive, even more distant than before, originally, and fidgets and curses and exclaims and bites his lip, whether on paper or on the illuminated screen; if the latter, highlighted and able to disappear at a blink by a stroke of the delete button, and when he changes his mind (as he will do) reappear at a stroke of another button, this one on a pulldown menu and called "Undo," or "Clear."

What we editors did in publications services was drop everything when it was time to do The General Catalog and gather round it, as it came in in galleys then page proofs, all out of order, and proof it, writing queries circled to the "author," some departmental secretary, when the mean was definitely clouded or nonsensical, and check for typos, misspellings, comma splices left blowing in the wind, restrictive and non-restrictive clauses (though many of us could not really tell them apart or which was which), and all other dubious points of grammar that might have been unknowingly violated and which would be unseemly to be advertised to the world, be it only the world predominantly of undergraduates, that the institution be so ignorant. Because if we were, so would it be known.

We read—we actually read—the whole fucking catalog aloud to each other. There were some days when our room full of editors did nothing but scrunch down and do it. We paired up, as if for some dance, or for sex, two to a desk, one the desk’s owner, the other the day’s visitor, and one would hold one set of galleys and the other the other set, with a pen (red, like Jesus) poised, ready to insert the query or correction. Queries were circled so that the typesetter (lino still for a while longer, then computer comp) would not inadvertently set it, or else not, which meant it was okay, permissible, to set it in hot type and carry it over to the next set of galleys or page proofs as so marked.

All around the great room you could hear girls reading to girls, girls reading to boys, boys reading to girls, etc., in muffled cadence, softly, as though lovers in the night, such things as, "Anthro 101 dot underline Students seeking to fulfill degree requirements are seriously urged to complete this sequence during the freshman year comma or no later than the sophomore should we insert year or is it generally understood?"

"Is that part about should we insert year part of the text or is that you comma talking?"

"It’s just me."

"Well, I’d say understood but it wouldn’t do any hard, I suppose, if we spelled it out for the simple bastards."

"I should change it then."

"No, you might query them, it seems to me on second thought, comma, and see if they won’t go for it, because, otherwise, they are apt to come storming in here, demanding to know, ‘Who the fuck is it who is changing my copy? Show me that person’" Or worse going to Bob or Howard."

"Do they do that?"

"Do what?"

"Storm in here. Go to Bob or Howard?"

"You be they do. Hey, what comes next?"

"You wanna hear the rest of Anthro underline one-oh-one dot?"

"No, let’s go to coffee and leave it till later."

And off that person would go, the papers on the desk spilling onto the floor in the meanwhile and lying there half-curled like the jib sail of a becalmed barque.

You read slowly, softly, because your voice had to last, or else you were in for real punishment. This is what gave the effort the air of conspiracy, one with perhaps sexual overtones. I say perhaps because there was no sex in the office, but quite a bit outside of it, for we were mostly young and seeking, and often we found. What we found was rarely each other but often what lay not far outside. To reserve the tern "the sexually active" to the very young is a mistake. It describes well those of us in our early thirties.

We could not understand how Bob Dodge could treat Joanne the way he did and she would keep coming round. She worked on campus somewhere, I never knew, doing clerical work and light typing, not far away, and she was always coming over to our offices on the second floor of the Communications Building, ostensibly for a friendly visit with all of us, but really to check on Bob and to see if he just happened to be there. He rarely was, and when indeed he just happened to be, he always seemed taken back and slightly annoyed. She seemed to him to be an afterthought, even though they lived together, sort of together, she at his place, even though he was never home. It was much as it was in the office. When you wanted him, he was never there; when he was there, you didn’t want him.

I don’t know what he did, really. He delegated everything. Howard gave him jobs after they had gone through their preliminary design phase, and he got rid of them really fast, passing them on to one of us editors disdainfully, as though they were soiled garments. He did not want to have them around any longer than necessary and often set speed records in dispersing them. They would barely light from Howard’s first thing in the morning design meeting, rest on Bob’s desk, and he would beckon one of us into his office—whose door was almost always open, except when some attractive woman from one of the departments wanted to discuss a job, and then it would discretely close and all of us would perk an ear and listen for clues to the murmur inside—and get rid of it with a word or two.

I generally got the choice jobs, probably because Bob still thought I had worked for a big Manhattan advertising firm, though I had told him this wasn’t true, over and over. Then I had despaired. Tell me, how many times do you have to correct somebody misconception before you are guilty of misleading him by simply remaining silent while he presses on? Five, ten, twenty? I believe I did, six or eight, before giving up on it.

Joanne was sweet and lovely. She was so vulnerable that there was something dead wrong about her dedication to a lout like Bob Dodge. There is something about the quality of loyalty that almost demands that it be misplaced. She contributed to his delinquency, for without her, what would he be delinquent . . . from? He would just be playing around. It is called playing the field, but it isn’t supposed to happen, once the field of game gets narrowed nicely. We all liked Joanne and I think the guys in the office, all of them straight at the present time, might have tried their luck, except she was so obviously dedicated to Bob, that it was all we could do to be friendly and not cover up for him too much.

It didn’t help any. The worse he got in terms of outright, roaring promiscuousness, the more she openly loved him. And when he crashed—it is a military term, I believe, associated with aircraft, which is only appropriate, short for "crash and burn"—and crash he did, not long from now, she stuck by him, and when he went off to greener pastures, ones where they did not know him and where his record could not precisely follow, she went with him. Boston, we heard, and some kind of fund-raising activity, perhaps for the lung association, yes, that, if you like irony. And even if you don’t.

We would read The General Catalog to each other, softly, at though it were pornography on company time, over and over, course description by course description, until we fairly had them memorized. You don’t really memorize drivel like that, only have it stick in you mind through endless, senseless repetition, for whoever would read it like that, dot, comma, semi-colon, unless he was being paid for it, unless he was completely mad? No eager student would, I assure you. It was exhausting and each day spent doing it counted for naught, when it could be better spent doing practically anything.

Norma Schropell had done it for years and was immune to its tedium. There are some things never too tedious for some women, and generally they are mothers. It beats dirty diapers, though to me it is very much like them, and I never got too close to either. Proofs arrived like a truckload of hay. Norma dealt them out, as though we were playing Hearts. (There is something about reading proofs that inspires simile, never metaphor.) We each got a batch on the exchange and when we were done with them, carefully annotated in red, like blood, we took them back to the proof room, where they had already been read once by persons even more dull than we, looked over, and sent back to composing. It was here they were corrected in lead until they were "clean," as we called them, and they went to the customer, namely the person in the department, school, or college who had been unsuccessful in avoiding having this responsibility hung on him or her, almost like a shirt on a doorknob. You see?

It was vital, critical, to avoid to avoid direct responsibility for corrected clean proofs, if you could, for there was always a price to be paid for mistakes, especially those that appeared in print, particularly those that required reprinting of a signature or, worse, the whole document, because of some error that couldn’t be overlooked, for it would embarrass the entire University community. For this, to avoid this responsibility being hung on any of us, we had devised a rubber stamp and collected initials, almost like a kid autographs, of those people out in the academic environs who had originated the sections or entries in The General Catalog. At each point in the proof’s evolution we made them sign off. It is an old custom and a good one, though highly chicken shit. Thus editing work is largely chicken shit, pass the buck, if the truth be known, and anyone who has done it for more than fifteen minutes knows it for what it is

Betty Healy was an editor, a slight, dark, Irish woman, married to a drunk (how they seem to abound) and the mother of four or five closely spaced children, in the Catholic manner. She was being pursued by a huge blond dike of a woman, who would not take "no" for an answer. Funny how persistent lust is, whatever its source, whatever its kind. Priscilla Case looked to be the kind that sings Schubert lieder. She must have weighed about twice what Betty did. She was a source of acute embarrassment to Betty, and to us all, and Betty for a long time did not know what was wrong. She was so prim, so sweetly old-fashioned, so maternal, that none of us could point out to her the true reason why Priscilla Case spent so much time at Betty’s desk, moseying close, bringing her big fat head near Betty’s small dark one, breathing the same air, softly discussing proofs. Increasingly Betty became nervous and after the meeting ended distraught.

"Really, I can’t understand what’s wrong with that woman," she would exclaim. "Is she dense, or what? What do I have to do to make her understand what I’m telling her? Proofing doesn’t have to be so difficult. Doesn’t she understand English?"

My desk was right behind Betty’s and I was witness, repeatedly, to the whole scene. People told me it was my job, consequently, to explain the matter to Betty, what was involved, but I never could. So somebody else did, perhaps the other Bette, who was fifteen years younger and spelled her name differently, affectedly. And when, Bette to Berry, so to speak, she had, Betty came running to me.

"You’re kidding?" she exclaimed. My, how the Irish have high coloring, when they are aroused or upset. I presumed the latter.

"No, I’m afraid not."

"I had heard, of course, there were such people, but not around here. My goodness, this is a university. What do they call them?"

"Lesbians. Dikes."

"You know all about them, don’t you?"

"We all know more than you, Betty. I don’t know very much. They don’t confide in men. But I think I know what they do."

"What?"

"I’m not going to tell you. Ask Priscilla to explain. I’m sure she will."

"I’m not going to do that."

"Betty, I’m not really suggesting that you do. It was just a joke."

"Well, it was a bad joke."

"I’m sure it was."

Years later, her children grown and gone, Betty divorced her husband Nick, quit the job, make a small name for herself in the world of poetry, moved to California, married a rich man much older than herself, returned to Seattle in muffled triumph. She lived in my old neighborhood for several years, in one of its finest houses, filled its interior with original works of art, then, as her husband grew infirm and could not longer negotiate all the house’s stairs, they sold the house and moved away, I know not where. We used to be fairly good friends, coffee-break friends, I’d say, but when she returned, having found a new life, would have nothing to do with any of us, not realizing we all had new lives, too, and they were very different from the old ones, even though on the surface—about the face and jowls, as it were—we might look about the same.

48

Bette, not Betty, was a graduate of Reed, a small college in Northern Oregon that specialized in the liberal arts, and was named after that liberal, nay, radical, John Reed, whom Warren Beatty lionized so well in his excellent, long film, Reds. She was an English major as, alas, were most of us, most who go into this desultory line of work, which does not exactly elevate the spirit. So it is a bit odd that one of us should look down upon the others, when there is nothing special to distinguish that person, and may well be all the others so despised.

She did not last long. Since she was one of the few not troubled by alcohol her departure was voluntary. I think her husband finally found work, which enabled her to tell all of us what she thought of us. She went round the room, not mincing her words, and was repeated told to go fuck herself, in return. It was rewarding to see that everybody chose this precise phrase, even those who had never used it before, in all of their lives. Women primarily.

She was replaced by Carolyn Harris, formerly of Boston, most recently a barmaid in San Fransciso’s Haight district.

Carolyn had not a pretty face, but she had good bones and huge breasts, long legs, a small waist, and could really sling it around when she wanted to, when she walked. She wore large floppy sandals, no stockings, short skirts, and we all firmly believed no underpants, and while we came close to knowing explicitly were never quite affirmed in our speculation. Around the office she consented to wearing a bra, after Howard took her aside and spoke quietly about the need.

"Sure," she quickly agreed. "I only thought you guys might enjoy it."

Howard probably mumbled something about enjoying it too much.

She had been interviewed, as we all had been, by both Howard and Bob Dodge. Bob had his tongue out, from the beginning, and verbally urged Howard to give her the job, please, right on the spot. Carolyn beamed and gave him the equivalent of the high five. He was in her corner, she knew. And when the badgered Howard made in tentatively clear (if there is any such thing) that the job was hers, if she wanted it, she said she did, then slumped in her chair, lighted up a cigarette without asking permission, and asked, "Okay, you guys. What’s this place really like? Looks to me like you got yourselves a real racket."

It had looked that way to each of us in turn, but none of had dared say as much, not for weeks, and then only to each other.

Bob Dodge looked at Howard, they paused, then both broke out laughing.

"You could describe it that way, I guess," Howard finally said, still guardedly.

Dodge probably grinned and asked where she was drinking lunch. Then urged that it be with him. She agreed.

Later, much later, they returned to work. Bob Dodge went into his office, turned on his heel, walked out again and out the door to our editorial office. It was as though he had a meeting he was a couple of minutes late to, and had no time to dawdle; point of fact, he was probably headed off campus and to another bar.

Carolyn sidled over to what was now her desk and asked the air above it, "What’s with these clowns? Do they think I’m naive? This place looks to me like a fucking country club. Tell me I’m wrong."

I couldn’t. Nobody could.

Norma Schropell of course didn’t like Carolyn, not knowing that all sluts are not sluts, taking all of us at face value, which is sometimes a mistake. Carolyn had a keen intelligence and was wild, almost feral. She was married to Jaime—probably a James who had changed his name for obvious reasons. He especially was in the drug trade, and had worked his way up through the ranks to becoming a heroin user. He lived in the British manor, almost like a rock star, only he had no musical talent. He was slight and emaciated, and to enhance the effect, which was highly fashionable, used to wear Carolyn’s frilly blouses. They were pretty well stretched out in the bosom, but narrow in the shoulders, and if he remembered to button them up anywhere near to the collar, would spontaneously burst them out at the shoulders, doing some minor masculine motion, like preparing to shoot up.

Sometimes this split them down the back, instead.

He was a case, she another one. Needless to add, we became close friends. She and I, not she, I, and Jaime, who I couldn’t like and wanted to avoid. "Hey, that’s okay," Carolyn told me. "I understand. Nobody likes him but me, and I often think I don’t like him, either. I don’t know why I keep him around. Probably love him, the poor asshole. Need somebody to worry over, you know, me being a woman and all that shit." Big grin.

Her teeth were not very good, I noticed, and needed thousands of dollars work.

If I had pointed this out to her in my capacity of friend, I’m sure she would have said, "Gonna lose my teeth, is that it? Jaime and you guys, you’d all like me even better, that way, wouldn’t you?" And she would stop there and explain no further, for though Carolyn was outspoken, she was not totally obvious, or oblivious.

She would have been a good one to explain to Betty Healy what Priscilla Case was really after, though that situation hadn’t arrived yet and Betty and Carolyn had a cool, formal relationship, with little or nothing confided. They understood each other well enough and early. It is often like this in offices and makes for harmony and decorum, or at least the appearance of both qualities. Certain boats tolerate less rocking than others. Ours could take a fair amount of storm without a need for battening down its hatches.

I think Bob Dodge was scared to death of Carolyn Harris but felt he needed to make his play or his manhood would be widely questioned. And she probably went out and drank with him and watched him soon slide slowly under the table. They were not each other’s type in any way, but Bob didn’t know it, or wouldn’t acknowledge that any woman wasn’t, wasn’t fair game to spear, and Carolyn would go along with a gag, especially if it meant free drinks. She might have even tried to turn him on to marijuana, since both were heavy cigarette smokers, and they are they first to want to inhale some new promising substance, but like a lot of heavy drinkers of the time were terrified of pot and wrongly believed it would lead them to a life behind bars. Ordinary drunkenness was something they understood and it held no terrors for them.

Puff the magic dragon spelled jail. The world of heroin was as far off in their imaginations as Timbuktu. We had none of it in America, thank goodness. Not unless you were black, or like Frank Sinatra in The Man With The Golden Arm. All of it mysterious, unreal.

Meanwhile Jaime took Carolyn’s paycheck, went off and refurbished his supply, rolled up his sleeve, tied off, shot up.

"The bastard used to do it in front of me," she told me. "They’re awful, have no sense of shame. They want everybody to be a junky, too, so they aren’t so much alone. I’ve tried it. I’m of the kind who can do it occasionally and not have it get to you, you know, become dependent on it." I wondered about this, still do. "It’s a nice high. You’ll just have to take my word for it. It’s wonderful, going up, and not too bad, coming down. I’ve done it exactly twice in my life. Two of us in the family, well, it’s too much. A simple matter of economics. Him, he’s bad enough, in every other way--ruining my blouses, the fuck, just so he’ll look good to his buddies. Stealing small things. Toasters, VCRs, a car or two. Pretty soon he’ll be aiming higher. An airplane, maybe." Laughs. "You’ve seen him, my Jaime. Can you picture him, a jewel thief? Scaling a building, going in a window, cracking a safe? What a fucking laugh. He’d fall to his death, first try. That guy, he’s a bundle of bad luck."
I knew better than to ask why she stuck with him. She would only say, "He’s fun, most of the time. Not like your ordinary schmucks. Dumb fucks. And he used to be a real good lay. Of course, it’s good if you think it is. Now, he’s far to wasted to ever get it up. I tease him, but it’s no help. Pathetic. He lives from fix to fix. He’s a toad."

It was one of those conversations where the second party remains silent and tries to look non-judgmental. I don’t practice it often, but am good at it, when it counts, and for a while forget how much I like to talk and dominate a conversation.

Carolyn had the rare confidence to say whatever came into her head and know she could get away with it, nearly anywhere. And when she knew she couldn’t, she didn’t. She was from, I suspect, a good family, one where your parents pay attention to you, growing up, and just don’t turn on the tube whenever you have something you want to say. It makes a huge difference. It will carry you a long way, when the others have sagged in their shoes and are awaiting a taxi, or worse are standing in the rain, trying to hail a bus.

Mother and father living in the same house. You call them in your need and one or the other always picks up the phone. The voice remains ever the same. "Hello?" they ask, and it is an open door. A fire is going, there’s money in the bank, an airline ticket waiting. Do such people ever say no to a loved one? I came from such a family and thus, no matter what has happened since, people from similar backgrounds can meet and talk to each other easily, no matter how much the words have changed since then. In one half of your mind, the words are the same. They are immediately recognizable as negotiable counters. They provide the daily commerce we all need.

You can lend such a person a small amount of money in the assurance that it will be paid back, maybe not right away, but eventually.

"Unless," Carolyn would add, "there is a junky in the family. Then all bets are off. The money goes in the arm."

She eventually left the office, on short notice, probably because Jaime wanted her to do, and as she would say, she was a fool for him. He kept finding fresh horizons for them, ones that never panned out. Instead they petered. We were a way station between stops, San Francisco and Boston, where she was from. I think it was the sound of Boston in her voice that had impressed Howard and Bob Dodge. It was an echo of the Kennedys, elegant, circumspect. But this too was illusionary. She was the exact opposite. Shouldn’t those bare, long legs have told them as much? Or didn’t they really want to see?

None of us offered much permanence, except Howard Miller and, oddly, Allen Auvil. It didn’t seem so at the time. Take Allen. He had deep personal problems different from the rest of us. His father was a millionaire fruit farmer. He had three sons and wanted all of them to go into the business he had carefully built up, over the years of his life. Allen wanted to make it on his own, so to speak. He studied design (Burley) because he’d always loved to draw. It was an art he was only average at. His father understood his need but worked quietly to undermine his ability to fulfill it. How could he, the father, manage to do it, from so far a distance—a couple of hundred miles away? Why, with money.

Grady Auvil kept giving him money. First a car, then a house. I never knew how much else. Allen married a woman whose parents were similarly well off. They lived in Bellevue’s Clyde Hill, a rather posh neighborhood. Her parents gave them the vacant lot next door to their home, shortly after their marriage and after two of their three children were born. Grady followed suit by building them a house on the gift lot. I doubt whether Allen, on his salary, could afford the taxes even. The property-tax money probably arrived each year as a special gift, a dispensation.

They were hooked, a claw on each side, and could never escape. The bait was luxury and opulence. Already unsure of himself in every department, the money gifts, or gifts in kind, increased his dependence and boiling resentment. He developed a little stammer. His compulsion for neatness increased to a noticeable point. He began to arrange and rearrange things, the pencils on his desk, his chalks, his sketch pads, the telephone messages that said in multicolored squares that somebody had called while you were out. Over and over. They had to be just right. Trouble was, once arranged, each time they proved to be wrong and needed adjustments. Perfection continued to be evasive.

Sometimes Allen got so mad he couldn’t speak. His face got red, his cheeks puffed out. It was horrible to watch. It must have been more horrible to have happen to you. It was not what Grady wanted for his son. But it was what happened to Grady’s son.

What Allen wanted most was independence. To show that he had already met this goal, sort of, he would never wear a necktie. It was a sign to the world. A sign of what, that he would never wear a necktie? Precisely. Only of that.

He was right out of Dostoyevsky, that lad. We were friends; we had one of those limited friendships that business brings, and when the business is over, poof, it is gone. He would have been tragic, only nothing tragic happened to him. His life ran on, like a spool. There are tragedies like this, too. Nothing great happens to set them off from the others, to mark them indelibly, to ennoble them with some major event, bloody perhaps, to lift them onto another plane. No, they drone on, the children grow up and depart the nest, vaguely sensing something small but important has always been wrong. Husband and wife look at each other but are pledged never to ferret the truth and speak it. The years pass, the sense of doom increases by tiny increments. At the end the soul sighs, "Why? What happened? Why me?"

There is no answer.

Could Allen have avoided it—the slow downward slide of the psyche—by returning to the farm and growing apples? I think it is a loser’s game. You are cursed if you go home, you remain cursed if you don’t. A lot of American families are like this. The remain uncompleted. There is a vague doubt that becomes a mountain, over the decades. It cannot be scaled, a steep face like that, and you know it. It remains on your horizon, looking down in all kinds of weather, mocking you and your endeavors.

49

Tilden Manzer was another of us and so was Joan Plover. The place was a veritable revolving door for struggling writer and editor types. Joan was there when I was hired. She sat at her desk each morning, with a small beatific smile on her face. At the time, before the last rearrangement, we were all facing the same way, schoolroom fashion, or, better yet, as though on the deck of some mighty oceanliner, all with our heads pointed at the sea. There were three rows, and Joan’s desk was way over on the left, near the three glass-paneled offices, Howard’s at the front, nearest to the teacher, or the ship’s rail, Bob’s just behind him, in the middle, and Rod’s at the very end. Perhaps they were assigned in order of height, instead. It would work out the very same way. But I think it was a coincidence, and I am making a case for it because of the tiny bit of oblique humor doing so might contain.

Joan was unmarried, in her late thirties, perhaps, the type that dated hardly ever and stayed home Saturday nights, washing her hair in a kind of quiet despair that would not answer to that name and always picked up a book when such a thought might cross her brow. She read omnivorously, trash. I’d call mysteries trash, anyway. Another word to describe her is pretty/plane, meaning she had regular enough features, if you were to set up some sort of template, but none of them exceeded the norm and the sum was unstriking. Her hair was always clean and she had remnants of lipstick on her lips. Her hair was brushed hard at night before bed and again, but only for a quarter as many strokes, in the morning before she left for work. She rode the bus. She was punctual. And she was probably our best editor, being a writer herself. She had published, here and there, in obscure magazines and for the young adult trade. I did not scoff at it, this market, for it required the ability to write exactly and with care.

She was better than Norma Shropell, anyway, who was our chief editor, or editor in chief. She was the one who got the jobs from Howard or Bob and, after looking them over, dealt them out to us like so many playing cards. For all the printing jobs at the University went through us. It was a ploy Howard and VP Bob Waldo had engineered, in order to assure their quality. How else could such a worthy goal be achieve than if we saw everything coming in before it turned in to everything going out? Well, it couldn’t. Many of the jobs were routine, no more than reprinting with here a tiny change, there another one. But it offered a control point and a chance at redesign, when needed, for hadn’t the University become the subject of criticism for its outdated publications program? And hadn’t the mighty Fred Walsh, the second time through his spiel, convinced President Odegaard that he could lift their image up by its bootstraps through a coordinated design program? Thus everything must look the same, though prettily different.

Naturally Bert Haag, the director of the printing plant, was furious. He had previously seen to it that things got printed exactly as the client wanted, with design help only when requested and that by his room full of women, plus Bruce, with the radio playing popular tunes, while the colored pencils flew feverishly.

What is more, Howard Miller stole Norma Schropell from him, without so much as a salary increase. He told his boss he needed some such shop steward and it was arranged for him. Bert’s boss, a different vice president, was told the news, probably squirmed in his chair and said, "Thanks a lot. Now if you’ll tell Bert for me, I’d greatly appreciate it."

"No, that’s your job."

"He’ll explode."

"Pick up the pieces."

In time Howard annexed practically every auxiliary function that Bert had except for composition, camera, litho, and the presses themselves. This about halved his printing empire. But the worst part was having all the requests for printing going to Howard. Of course some face saving was allowed. They still went to Bert first, but they were rushed on the same day upstairs to Howard. Untouched.

There were two floors between us, separated by long steep staircases of cement, and we editors were always dashing down and dashing up to get out work done. The two departments were in constant touch and some of it grew heated. To us the staff of the printing plant was a bunch of insensitive clods, union members mostly, uneducated, hard to deal with, rough, crass, dull, stupid. Now for their bad points. . . . We must have seem to them a bunch of arrogant snobs. We would have owned up to as much and more. We had dissimilar backgrounds, but all were college grads and more than half of us had advanced degrees. Once hired a Ph.D. in English, a guy down on his luck, a real marginal character, just to be able to say he had such people on his staff.

As it was, Howard was always planning on going back to school and getting his masters. He knew I had one and once called me into his office, closed the door, and asked me if I thought he could get into graduate school. Ten years had passed since he had gotten his bachelors and this necessitated petitioning them and asking for special consideration. His grade transcript would be especially important, since the faculty would have all forgot him by then. He showed me his. I whistled. It was nearly perfect. He was a Phi Beta Kappa. There was maybe one B in a field of As.

I was glad he didn’t ask in that game of little boys for me to show him mine.

I told him there was absolutely no doubt they would admit him. How could they not? It was a done deal, as they say. But I don’t think he ever got around to applying. It was always something he was going to do, but something else had to happen first, or two such things, or three. Years later, when I returned to the University in another department, an academic college, Howard and I used to have coffee occasionally. By then he was looking forward eagerly to retirement.

"But, Howard, you have ten years left."

"Ten years of what?" he asked coldly. Of running his fifteen miles to work and fifteen miles home daily? Well, he could drive his little used Porsche, if he didn’t like that, as he did very rarely, when he was in a great hurry for a meeting with somebody high in the administration. He had some family money and it, more than his adequate salary, allowed him to live in a waterfront home on Mercer Island. I think his father, or his grandfather, invented the cherry picker. It is a basket that rise hydraulically on a kind of folding girder and allows workers to do all kinds of elevated work. For each one sold, Howard receives a patent royalty. It adds up nicely.

In a way, it was much like his unnamed assistant, Allen Auvil, who would never receive the title of art director. Both had money coming in from relatives alive and dead. And because Howard never thought Allen could really hack it, or his design was anything better than imitative, second-rate, the title would be an embarrassment. To Howard. To the University. So Allen plodded on, year after year, and the two men looked forward to retirement. Howard’s hair, thin, black, became thinner and he had recourse to paint it black again. Allen grew a beard over the collar that would never, never, wear a necktie, and his hair became longer. Hair and beard became gray surprisingly early; when hair does this, uniformly and barely streaked, it portends it will soon grow white, or nearly so. This I did not see because by then I was gone, gone from even my second incarnation with the University.

At the time Allen was raising his family, I mine. We had others come through the revolving door. One was Bernice Schwartz. She wrote poetry and I think Bob Dodge hired her because he had a vision of them comparing tropes during the long winter afternoons. Such things never get around to happening. She was dark, over-weight, recently divorced, raising a small son by herself. Her complexion was bumpy. She had good teeth, a lot of wit, long stringy black hair that she tied back in a ponytail, and affected the bohemian manner of dress. She was clearly Jewish without ever mentioning a thing Jewish in itself. She had a masters in anthropology, I think. It was at the time when Howard, mustering his defenses, which were always thin, was hiring anybody with a masters, in competition with forces that might possibly want to unseat him. What and who these would be I could not fathom. Possibly Bert Haag, who was really not a treat.

Bert would retired from his greatly reduced position a bitter man. He once took me to lunch at the Swedish Club. This is where he dined daily at noon. I was supposed to be impressed with all the linen and crystal; I was. During our long meal, Bert once referred to some day off in an impossible future "when you have your own printing plant."

"What?" I asked, thinking I hadn’t heard him clearly.

He repeated the remark. I looked at him blankly, bewildered; then it dawned on me what he meant. In his world of values, everybody in publications and aligned services aspired to managing a printing plant. Only a few could achieve this honor. The others fell by the side of the pyramid, one by one, as the great winner moved toward the top.

"Sure," I said, knowing that it was uncertain what I had agreed to aspire to.

Our worlds were as different, say, as lunch daily in the opulence of the Swedish Club and my usual sandwich, etc., brought in a brown paper bag. It wasn’t exactly that I didn’t aspire, it was only that my target lay in an opposite direction. I wanted somebody else, he who owned a printing plant, to publish what I had written—books, maybe, or at the least magazine articles. Fiction, poetry, whatever I happened to feel like writing. I think all of us in publication services felt this way. We were all serious writers, biding our time.

Bernice became a friend. She was extremely well read. She lived in a marvelous house, all glass and cedar, its walls lined with books wherever there wasn’t glass to look out at vine maples and cedars.

She rented it. Well, so what? She had innate good taste. She’d had a variety of good jobs, some in editing, and a lot of bad luck lately. It kept popping up. She shrugged. What is a girl to do? The latest was her ex wanted full custody of their little boy and was going to get it. I couldn’t think of any way in which Bernice might have a case trumped up against her that she was a bad mother. I met the kid once or twice, before he was permanently whisked away, and he seemed a nice, quiet boy, but then troubled kids often appear that way whenever adults are around. They learn to do it to minimize the already considerable difficulties in their lives, ones caused by squabbling adults. Parents.

When they took her kid away, Bernice started drinking. It was different from how Bob Dodge and Rod and Jack Hollenback, who had killed Germans, drank. A desperate woman drinks in another manner. She slurps down the stuff as if believing it were poison. Talk about your Emma Bovary and arsenic. Bernice drank the way no man would drink. She ingested liquor, no matter what it was. She sought oblivion. Slowly she built up a tolerance to the stuff, the way an accomplished drink does, but she wasn’t accomplished. She’d drink conspicuously and then she’d crash with a roar. But at work she was always depressingly cold sober. She was waiting and it showed. There was a kind of horror to it. It even frightened Jack Hollenback, who killed Germans but never mentioned it, not even when dead drunk, and Bob Dodge, who flew fighter planes against invisible MIGs, when he had a load on.

Suddenly Bernice announced she was leaving publication services. She had a new job, she said, but we all knew it was a lie. She hung around, smiling all the time, her terrible eyes shining moistly, until her replacement arrived and was trained. She did the training in a most efficient manner. The woman’s name was Sandy Rosenthal. I remember nothing about her, not even the space she occupied for a few months before she too got fed up and vanished.

Bernice killed herself a month later. I do not know exactly how. I did not want to know. I do not want to know. I was surprised at hearing the news. No, I wasn’t surprised at all.

Death is full of contradictions. It is to be expected. If there are no conflicts in the data coming in, you can be sure there is something wrong with the information and the death. Unknown people are holding things back for reasons you will never know. No amount of ferreting will put your uneasy mind at rest. You will go on with your life with a little void in the back of your mind. It is destined never to be satisfied.

Joan Plover quickly became the close friend of Tilden Manzer, whom we hired, Bob and Howard did, because he had extensive newspaper experience. At the moment this was deemed necessary by the Bobsy Twins, as we called them, in moments of derision that were becoming more frequent. Everything seemed to be falling apart. Bob was always gone, or when he was present, well on the way to a monumental drunk, it just getting underway, and Howard has lost Rod, who didn’t amount to much socially or as a friend, but filled up a space, the third office back, that was now vacant. Our own staff was revolving fast. People came and went with great rapidity. One new hire was Alex Favor.

Alex came to us from Boeing, most recently. He had batted around a great deal. He was our Fonz; he had a Fonzlike personality, with black hair slicked back, California style, and wore business suits with sharp lapels, wide neckties, or else shirts open wide at the collar, the points ironed back flatly, chestal hair revealed distastefully, and a gold chain in evidence, long before athletes primarily wore these. It was all new to us and slightly unnerving. Bob Dodge hired him and they often drank together. I think Alex was immune to a drinking problem and could drink and get drunk without it taking over his life. He took pills, too, and smoked marijuana by his own admission, but I think whiskey was his choice of poison.

He was married to Mardis. I think that was her name, though I cannot remember any other woman of that name and may be wrong; it is how it was pronounced, anyway, and I’ve never seen it written down. She was a slight, pretty woman just over thirty-five, had given birth to two children, and was astonished to learn that she was starting to go through the menopause. "What, me?" she roared, when the doctor told her this was the reason for her hot flashes and great emotional swings. For a moment she had thought she was pregnant again. Then she knew this was wrong. She and Alex had been taking precautions. Two were plenty children and somewhat cramped their life styles. She thought it over.

"No more condoms, Alex," she told him. "No more birth-control pills. Think of it as a blessing."

He did, but she was never able to, for the menopause marked the end of her being able to conceive and, therefore, she was not really a woman. It was true only from a certain standpoint but, unfortunately, it was one she believed strongly. Sex without the fear of pregnancy took away some vital element and made it less exciting. Now it seemed like some daily task—not quite as bad as washing the dishes, but a thing moving in that direction. More like exercise—those senseless aerobics people performed to get rid of their love-handles.

Alex thought it over, too, and for a month or two it seemed to him an invitation to licentiousness. After all, wasn’t this their dream—to be able to fuck like crazy, without the attendant fear of getting pregnant? He had thought so, she had thought so. But it was all different with the menopause. For one thing she didn’t think of the prospect, first, as often was the case. And when he did, she was cool, indifferent, not feeling well. To be fair to her, he thought, she never told him she had a headache. She didn’t have to because he was always quick to turn off. A word would do it, especially the wrong word.

Alex and I often had coffee in the morning, just having gotten to work and not finding much of any urgency to do. He had been an editor at Boeing in the infamous aerospace engineering audio-visual group, the one that had prepared Paul’s and my flipchart series, and we knew many people in common, though we had never worked together on a project and, try as we might, didn’t remember each other from our earlier times.

He kept current ties with his old group and had left there, as he left us, under good conditions. They were always calling him up, or him them, and they would chat about this or that, often work, while on company time at the U., which was what everybody else did and no cause for fear or alarm. He frequently came to work with us in the morning exhausted from a night of free-lance work for Boeing. The company—engineering, particularly—had a policy of calling in the free lancers in a crunch situation because it was cheaper than keeping people on the payroll with nothing to do. Which happened often enough already. So when a crisis called for an editing or printing job to be done yesterday, as they put it, they called on a bunch of temporaries, and Alex was one of them. It paid awfully well and we were envious.

One day Alex, smoking one of those thin cigarettes of his that was really a cigar shot down to forty percent, was called about a rush job that required extra editorial help, more than he and the usual team could handle. He looked round the room and said in a louder than usual voice, "I’ll see what I can come up with. Call you back." And banged down his receiver.

Rather than make the general announcement we all expected, he queried us individual and made up a team of four, including himself. It included myself, Norma Schropell, and Tilden Manzer, who had worked there once, as well as at the Seattle Times newspaper. Naturally we all agreed to go. The pay was twenty-five dollars an hour, and we were each guaranteed full day, or rather night’s, work. Tonight, in fact.

It came to two-hundred dollars each. It was kind of hilarious, the way it turned out. We each went to the Developmental Center independently, were issued a special parking pass, were met by Alec at the gate (he was already drawing company pay on company time) and admitted. We had to work in a confined area, since we had no badges, were not company employees, had no security clearances, and the like. This was customary practice and no hindrance. We went into an interior conference room, one without windows, all beige and silver, and sat down at a table to await the work assignment.

Two hours later we were still there, waiting.

There had been a delay, Alex told us. It was no surprise and he was used to it. We were there "just in case."

"Just in case what?" I asked

"Just in case some work shows up," he explained. "They don’t want to be caught short-handed."

It was the same old Boeing I remembered, only, with a slightly different twist.

Norma was reading a dictionary and trying to find it interesting. Alex had wisely brought a paperback mystery with him. Now why hadn’t I thought of it? Tilden and I, old Boeing employees, were caught off guard.

"We should have known better," I said.

TiIden smiled. He had been there before. He was quiet, cool, able to sit looking straight ahead, with a quizzical little smile, without any material to divert him. Almost a Buddha.

I said to Norma Schropell, "Can I have the dictionary, when you’re done?"

"I won’t be done."

I began to look forward to when I could eat my lunch. Actually I could eat it at any time. Pride, forbearance, forbid me to start to eat ii until at least three hours had passed. Alex drummed his fingers, reading intensely. "Be patient," he hummed, without looking up.

"You could tear it in half and give me the first part, since you’ve already read it."

"There’s an idea, he said, and began gripping the book, front and back, and flexing his upper arms.

"Just kidding," I interjected quickly, but I was too late. Already the book was ripped asunder. He handed me the first part, roughly half. All the pages were loose. Along what had been the spine I could see the thin line of yellow crud where, a moment earlier, they had been glued.

"Thanks," I offered.

He waved my thanks away with an open hand, again not looking up.

Midnight came, our noon, and nothing still. We ate. Alex said mysteriously, "I think I’ll go out and see what I can find."

I expected him to turn right and go down the long corridor where we expected our work to come, but instead he opened the heavy door beneath the light and went out into the night.

"Where’s he headed?" asked Norma Schropell.

"I expected he’s going to sleep in his car," said Tilden.

"You’re kidding?" I asked, knowing he was not. It seemed true enough. What the word "verisimilitude" meant, if taken literally.

When he returned, just before dawn, yawning, he explained, "Either the work arrives before midnight, when we eat, or there is no work to arrive." Tilden had agreed, unknown to me, to go out to Alex’s car and shake him awake, if anybody came looking for him, Alex. The chance was about one in ten-thousand. He could always say he went out to fetch his sandwich. It was literally true, since he ate there usually and what matter if he took a little nap, all the while?

Three hours long? I decided not to give voice to my wonder.

Finally the long night ended. Outside our windowless room dawn had crept up the far horizon. The clock neared the zenith hour of our departure. A man came down the hall at precisely eight A.M. and said to us as an entity, "That’s it, you guys. Thanks."

"You learn anything?" I asked Norma Schropell.

"Some interesting words."

"Well, that’s good then."

At the door, before heading for our cars and work at the U., Norma asked Alex: "When can we do this again?"

The checks came in the mail exactly two weeks later. I noticed that they hadn’t bothered to take out the income tax. So mine was for a full two-hundred dollars.

I too wondered when we might be asked again.

Alex was, but none of us were. I gathered it was often like this for him. Only once had he found a way to share the booty.

50

Mardis and Alex loved to party. Often their partners were Bob Dodge and his Joanne. I attended one party alone because my wife knew enough not to go and, besides, had our young son home to attend to. A publications services party was not one worth hiring a sitter for, besides. The only time we ever did was when Howard Miller threw one for his staff, when Bob had been gone four or five month, to celebrate his new hottub. His wife had hired a caterer and we were all to sample his home-made wine, ugh. So it was a special occasion and not like this one, which was dishwater ordinary.

Bob threw it and his editors all were invited. Bernice had not yet committed suicide and was there. Howard begged off. Norma Schropell wore something entirely out of character, with a plunging neckline, so we could continually glimpse her aging breasts, or the tops of them, and see how heavily freckled they were, almost as though somebody had flung paprika at her and them from about six feet away. Depending on what did it for you, she either looked pretty good or pretty bad. The latter, for me. She already had half or more of a load on. That old girl really loved to party. Her personality changed completely. Often, I’ve learned, it is this way with people in the editorial profession. And with English professors and graduate students. It is almost as though some kind soul took the lid off a boiling kettle.

Most people used glasses, while a few dispensed with them entirely. Ice was there for those who wanted it. I sipped on a beer and tried to regard the world of this small Northgate apartment with some objectivity, even though I couldn’t quite make the grade. It seemed ratty. I settled on a look of evenly applied nonchalance, if I could achieve it. I made my face look beatific.

"You feel okay, Bob?" I was asked.

I decided to resume my old worried expression.

"Fine."

Tilden and Joan were now living together, but nobody knew it, not for a while. This was absolutely incredible. She resided with her mother and he with his. Somehow, the two old crones got ditched. Joan suddenly got an apartment and, a moment later, Tilden moved in. They were not circumspect, only quiet each, and so we first noticed them coming to work together, entering together, going to their desks together, leaving for coffee together, etc. It slowly dawned on us that maybe, just maybe, they were doing other things together, in spite of their age. We tried to imagine it, we who were a decade or so younger, and it seemed at first improbable, then after becoming a possibility hideous. We believed that all people, when they had reached a certain age, say forty-five, ought to stop having sex. They should simple stop doing it, in the name of human decency.

I guess I could picture them getting into the same bed at night, kissing even more than chastely, but not much more, each turning is his separate direction, and entering slumber. But to rut like beasts was unacceptable behavior, even if they kept the act to themselves and pretended in the daylight that it never happened. And to be fair to them, they never betrayed their lust with any public sign other than a tender smile. Discreet they were, and thus we could find no grounds on which to fault them, in spite of what we knew they did when left alone to their own devices, later in a given evening.

There is a point—I always watch for it but very rarely am able to see it arrive—when social discourse becomes rowdy and ultimately sexual. Usually the sex doesn’t manifest itself in irresistible form until the others have either departed or passed hopelessly out. A crossing-over point is reached and exceeded, and all grows raucous. That night I missed it again. Either I had departed for my own home, after two or three beers, which is most likely, or else it happened while I was still present in the apartment and I was too distracted by some inane conversation to observe, which is my chief sport at parties, since I am resolved not to get drunk as a pig. So what I learned about the party’s denouement is second hand. But I do not doubt it for being that. In fact, I believe it even more.

Bob Dodge awakened in the morning and reached for a cigarette. One was very handy, having burned itself out (again) at the edge of his mouth, but there was not enough left to light, so he hunted for a pack or what was left of a pack. Finding none, he went on a search for ashtrays that might contain one that had been snuffed out early, with a large amount of its combustible matter left. He located one, extracted it from the others, then went off to find a match. On the way he found some Scotch in a glass and took a deep drink. Feeling better, or thinking he was, he torched the shortened cigarette, drew heavily on it, and returned to bed.

There was a woman in it. It was not Joanne. It was Mardis. For a moment he thought she was dead. He prodded her and she moaned, moving a little. He poked her again. The idea was to induce her to move enough so that he could see if she was wearing anything. He determined that her top half was bare. Good enough. Suddenly she wakened. She looked up at him out of koal-black eyes.

"What do you want?" she hissed.

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing."

"Why are you so rough about it?"

"About what?"

"About not wanting anything?"

He did not know what to reply. Instead he asked, "Where is Joanne?"

"Beats me. Have you looked in the bedroom?"

"Hadn’t thought of that."

He turned away.

"Wait, I’ll go with you."

"I don’t need any help."

"I know you don’t need any help. But I’ve got a hunch what I’ll find there, when you locate Joanne."

"Alex?"

"Now you’re cooking."

He was surprised, delighted, to see that she was not wearing a stitch.

"You’re naked."

"I have no clothes on, true," she said. "But that’s not the same thing as being naked."

"What is?"

"You are so obtuse. Look at my rings, my watch. Come, let’s see."

They went into the bedroom. Joanne and Alex were in the fold-out spare in the space that Bob used ostentatiously as his study. It is where he wrote the poetry he was not writing. They were lightly twined. From where he stood, they looked like an old married couple. Which they were, but not to each other.

"Cute," said Mardis.

Bob studied them as though they were a couple he had never seen before, neither separately nor together. Foreigners. Perhaps in a movie.

"I wonder if he fucked her," Bob Dodge said softly.

"Why don’t you ask her? I’m dying to know myself."

Instead they tiptoed out the room and shut the door. It latched with a soft click.

"What about you?" he asked meaninglessly.

"What about me what?" she replied.

"What about some breakfast?"

"All right."

"You want to cook it?"

"I’d rather cook it than eat the breakfast you’d prepared."

"I’d hoped so."

While Mardis scrambled eggs and made coffee, Bob having to tell her where everything was, and being wrong about half the time, he watched her move. She had put on some of her clothes but not all of them.
"You’re a good-looking woman," he told her.

"Thank you."

"I don’t remember too much about last night. I’m susceptible to these blackouts."

"The way you drink I can hardly see how you’d avoid them."

"What I’m wondering is, we woke up in the same bed. Right?"
"Yes."

"Did we, you know?"

"Did we have sex, you mean?"

"In a word, yes."

"You don’t remember? Jesus, Bob. You really know how to hurt a woman. Don’t you realize, it is the most private, the most intimate, the most human thing a man and a woman can do together. There is nothing more personal, more wonderful, more. . . ." Here she ran out of words.

"I’m sorry."

"And you don’t even fucking remember? Fucking me?"

"I said I was sorry.?"

"And you want me to tell you? Is that it? I, who am insulted to a point beyond belief? More coffee?"

"Yes, thanks, just half a cup."

‘You don’t remember?"

"No."

"I don’t either."

Both began to laugh.

51

Bob Dodge was the most interesting character we had in the office, and the funniest. He had the most to gain, the most to lose. Wit and charm will carry you a long way, but in the end they turn out to be vapors. The vapors will desert you. They did him.

He became unhappy in his job and used to complain about it to me. It seemed idyllic and I wished it were mine. He had nothing to do. I didn’t realize because I wasn’t there yet that the good jobs, the really top jobs, are those without daily work requirements and you are allowed to float deliciously, week to week, with nothing specifically assigned except going to a few meetings, about half of them imperative, critical, if you want to keep the job that is so cushy and full of ease. But all the while there are massive responsibilities hanging over your head like a curved sword on a thread, and it is apt to descend swiftly to your level at less than a moment’s notice.

His didn’t seem to me like that but to him they did. If he was looking for commiseration from me, he had opened the wrong door. Envy was more like it. But I tried hard to mask it and think I succeeded for the most part. He confided to me. He had got the job because of a buddy, Glenn Leggett, the man with three double consonants in his name, had appointed him it. It was called University Editor. He was responsible for everything and for nothing. This particularly delighted Leggett, who went on from there to become president of Grinnell University. It picked him, he picked it, because of the multiple-consonant situation, I suppose.

Once, when Bob Dodge thought he was unduly burdened by responsibilities and an accounting for his actions incommensurate with those responsibilities and wanted out, he talked to Fred Thieme, who was VP for business and finance. They two were friendly and on a first name basis, as was almost everybody except President Odegaard, who remained just that, perhaps even to his wife. (We had jokes about the two of them in bed, and she exclaiming, "Oh, President Odegaard, that was so good!")

Fred Thieme told Bob Dodge, in exactly these words, "You can take your fucking here, Bob, or you can take it somewhere else." Words to live by, for all of us.

Anyway, Bob had about one sport, aside from drinking. It was street fighting. He had a companion in this activity, a man named Carl Young, who was registrar. It was not the great psychologist, who spells his name differently and is, was, much older and not so inclined (not unless it is with Sigmund Freud, but in either case I am sure is long over with), and the two of them, the University Editor and the University Registrar used to go off drinking together and looking for suitable opponents. Usually they found them

I had experienced the breed before, but not since the Army, when I was overseas in Alaska, doing heavy construction work. I don’t know whether it is a disease, a habit, or simply repeated bad luck. We were out on the Richardson Highway, building a telephone pole line through Thompson Pass, on the road to the old Valdez, since destroyed by a tidal wave and prettily rebuilt. Because of my advanced degree, I was assigned to the crew that dug the holes in the permafrost for the poles. All of us college types quickly matriculated there because the Army noncom nincompoops put us there, out of envy and spite. But we had some hardcore types, as well. One of these guys had his wife along with him; they lived in a small trailer without the benefits of water or lights. Each day she—pregnant to the eighth month—had to haul water in buckets about three- hundred yards from a tiny creek. Anyway, her husband was one of the breed. I, living a sheltered college life, had never seen them before, and quickly learned that you cannot recognize them always by outward signs. Her husband, in short, was a mean son of a bitch. Not getting any sex made him worse. Now, a lot of us weren’t getting any sex, mostly because there were few women around, and all who were were married to soldiers, and either pregnant or already with small children.

This guy—we’ll call him Lance—would go out on our crew and pick an argument with one of us. He usually chose somebody who looked tough and as though he could fight. Lance would escalate the argument into a heated contest—you know, the kind where guys stick their chests out and ask you to knock off some invisible chip. Then they start circling, like animals, lifting their hands and making them into fists. Lance and his opponent did this. What happens is different from what you and I, normal animals, might imagine.

Lance always landed the first punch. None of this, you go first, Alphonso, and I will counter. No, he came slamming in with a wicked right chop and hit the guy on the nose. Fini. You don’t fight with a broken nose, or you don’t fight well. You can’t defend yourself. What you fear is another punch right in the same place. If you got one, you’d die, you firmly believe. It makes you super-cautious. You become suddenly gutless.

Then it is up to the other guy, to Lance and his ilk. He may chose to chop you down with a series of crafted punches—belly, kidneys, back of the neck, full face. Or he may leave you alone, having done major damage and won. For winning is all. To win you will sustain great damage. Often street fighters end up in the hospital. They grin drunkenly, as the doctor or emergency room medic sews them up, with a series of numerous stitches.

Lance always won. He won because he started the fight and knew when to get the first, winning punch in. Later, when the Army had reassigned me to Ketchikan, I used to see street fights materialize. It took a weird chemistry. Late at night, everybody had been drinking, and the street-fighter types were primed for each other. Some had special rings they wore, rings designed for slashing and deep imprinting. Talk about your Borgias.

The Coast Guard was in attendance in Ketchikan. Also they were the dominant body of men. Loggers and fishers came into town, looking for booze, sex, and disorder. A good two out of three was considered successful for such an outing. Street fighters know how to find each other. It starts at a tavern or bar, may form inside, but quickly moves outside. Fighters pair off, begin to circle. The numbers involved varies. Some fight in pairs, others are loners, and some consist of gangs. They line up, however evenly, often roughly so, not much caring about corresponding equal numbers, and then they mix. It is horrible, to a normal, civilized being like myself. Why do they do it? Somebody is going to get hurt. Badly hurt. Usually more than one somebody. There are nights when all participants end up at the hospital, peaceful now, sitting on adjacent admitting benches, glancing surreptitiously at each other, often grinning with commiseration when they catch the other’s eye. The cuts and stitches they proudly bear to work the following Monday are loud and awesome.

Not for me, but evidently just the thing for Bob Dodge and his buddy, Carl. I describe what I do above because I never saw the pair in action and must extrapolate from my earlier experience, but do not think I am much wrong. And I would see the cuts and bruises at the start of the next workweek, at least on Bob, and easily picture what had caused them. But I think—unlike Lance, of Army days—Bob was a loser.

A loser in a street fighting is a pathetic person. Something deep-seated in them makes them seek out such punishment. They are different from you and me, and we should want in no way to resemble them. True, they bear their wounds proudly. But if they tell you that you ought to look at the other guy, you shouldn’t, for there will be nothing much to see. They will be nearly unmarked. Oh, an early lucky punch might raise a welt. There might be a tiny cut, usually the kind that the doctor says doesn’t require a stitch. But the loser, wow. It happens because (1) the loser can’t help but want to fight, (2) the loser is by popular consensus an asshole. If not one to start with, when sober, he quickly becomes one after a few drinks. He is loud, obnoxious, disgusting, disruptive, not because he doesn’t know any better but because he does. Such behavior is the best way to ensure getting somebody’s ire and having him punch you out. And there are those, quasi-street fighters, who like to come up to a rowdy drunk and deck him with one or two unsuspecting blows.

Carl Young did often come to work at the registrar’s office marked with adhesive patches and raw crooked wounds stitched together with black sutures. Bob Dodge didn’t so much, probably because he often went down at the first thrown punch. He was halfway to becoming passed out, anyway. The obligating punch merely hastened the event. It marked the end of a short perfect evening.

You may ask, how can it be that at a big university, its editor and registrar can get away with such infamous behavior, week after week, year after year, in an area tightly proscribed by geography and neighborhood? I shall answer, easily. It happens. And while it is odd, peculiar, it is by no means unusual. I think it happens because a university is a special place. It is business-like but not a business truly. It’s employees are either academic or academic manqué. They are not your ordinary business types because they prove unsuitable, often unskilled, in those particular skills. They gravitate to the university environment they loved so and were loath to leave, and new homes are offered them, ones that are or seem nurturing and loving.

When Bob Dodge was fired, we all knew it was going to happen; the only question was when. It took longer than anybody expected. His absences piled up, dragged on. Howard covered for him for a long time but then, when his own job seemed threatened by doing so, stopped. He let him dangle in the wind, so to speak, by his own slender thread. He missed meetings with his superiors because he was sleeping off the previous night’s debauch. One you can get away with, maybe two. And if the people above you love you, you can inch into higher brackets. But eventually something will be required of you, something special, and it will not be forthcoming, you will not be there to provide it, or if you are you do not have it with you, or in you, and you will fail in their diminished expectations of you. And then the damage is irreversible.

You know it is coming and you hasten on your semi-tragic event through more of the same, untoward behavior that got you in this predicament in the first place. This does not, at this point, really speed on the event, as you may have wished, for dismissals have a life and time-span of their own, and their pace is slow but irrevocable, and you must wait. Everybody must wait. And then one day he is gone. Bob Dodge is gone. He is not merely absent again, soon to pop in, with serious pomposity, to make all those phone calls and dash out again, so that he is not there when the return calls impressively arrive. He is gone for good. The usual absence is explained through rumor in an undeniable way. And you sigh with relief at the fait accompli. Done, over.

Bob Dodge’s replacement was Dave Becker. He, like Alex, now gone, by the way, was from Boeing. Howard wanted an entirely different type and got one. I think he consulted with Norma Schropell and she approved. Bob’s anti-self. At the time she would have approved of almost anybody, but might have preferred somebody out of the printing plant, a person who was familiar to her and not some unknown quantity. But she would settle for him. Which is not to say that she didn’t like Bob Dodge. We all liked him. Norma had a side that liked to party, when she changed personality entirely. She became an aging vamp, a leathery sex pot, a wanton who flirted, but she could hold her liquor better than anybody in the room And nobody ever bedded her, primarily because nobody tried. It seemed so impossible to any of us. And we were all twenty years younger. Doubtless it was all a pose and she wouldn’t have gone for it. It became a kind of joke. Instead of telling somebody, some other guy, to go fuck off, it was suggested that he might take a poke at Norma Schropell. A poke not in the Bob Dodge sense of the word but how the English mean it, for we were nearly all of us English majors.

Bob Dodge used booze and perhaps sucked on a reefer every once in a while. Dave Becker’s poison was LSD. He came from a harsh environment—not Boeing, I mean, but home—and was entitled to his small, regular escape from reality. He and his wife (we never met her because neither Dave not his wife came to any office parties, including the occasional one thrown by Howard Miller, who was now clearly the boss) had three children, one of them a victim of Downs syndrome. It is a terrible thing to happen to anyone, any family, and warps them irrevocably. Often the married couple divorces—the high incident is nearly absolute, the strain on both parties in so great. So this is the excuse in my mind for Dave Becker driving home from his demanding editorial job at either Boeing or the U., descending to his psychedelic room, plugging his earphones into whatever he played on his stereo, and turning on. He was a brown rice addict and a fitness freak, doing a hundred situps upon arising, followed by the same number of pushups, the fiend. As for girls, well, he had a twisted taste. Once we saw a crippled girl, lumbering along, on a single crutch, and he nudged me, saying, "Boy, I’d like to bang that." That, not her, note.

He’d had his tubes tied off so he would father no more children like this one, in spite of two relative successes before the final failure. I don’t think Dave ever referred to their little boy by name, but he referred to him often, unforgettably, scathingly. I don’t know if it was just me he talked to or if he talked to each of his editors in turn with the same degree of familiarity, confiding things I never would, then turning on that person harshly and criticizing his editing job severely. And the turn or turning point could take place in a wink of the eye.

Dave Becker always knew it was coming. I think he would try (and succeed) into tricking you into a false sense of security through these horrible admissions. Then he’d drop his bomb and watch you cringe in panic.

Once he told me, "I was driving my kid to the hospital because he was having one of his attacks, you know, wheezing, having great trouble breathing. When this happens, there is nothing we can do, and it is why we live in this shitty house, so near a hospital. So the little guy was lying beside me on the passenger seat, rasping this terrible sound, hardly breathing, and I came to the first stop light. It was just turning red but I could have driven through it but didn’t. I sat there, waiting for the green, thinking, since there was no car behind me, that if I waited for one more change of light, the little guy might just choke to death, and we’d be free of the little bastard. But, no, I pushed down on the gas, and pretty soon we were at Emergency, a familiar place, and I rushed him in, and they hurried him into one of those treatment rooms, and they pumped him, and they gave him oxygen, and pretty soon he stopped rasping, he settled down, his breathing became normal. They suggested I leave him there for the rest of the day, until his signs had all returned to normal, ha, normal for him, and I agreed, and here I am, at work. I got to pick the little rascal up after work and drive him all the way home. Luckily we got a health-care plan left over from Boeing that will take care of it. Without that, we’d be SOL. As it is, though, we got to be prepared for the next attack. I tell you, I’m tempted to stuff him down the toilet."

And he’d tell you in unminced graphic terms just what life was like living with a Mongoloid, describing his son as though he were a clinical specimen from a horror movie, which perhaps he was, but he was Dave Becker’s son. I suppose if I had to live with such a son I’d become a monster, too, but I’d like to think it would be a kinder, nicer monster. I may only be kidding myself, though.

Then, bang, he’d look down on the surface of his desk at where the papers were lying neatly piled in little geometrical stacks, and he’[d pick up one of them, one that was vaguely familiar, and he’d say, "Bob," and I knew what was coming. His chief tactic was to shame you, citing chapter and verse from a book of grammar, which he had memorized, referring to restrictive and non-restrictive clauses (or was it phrases, those shorter things?), prepositional ones, the use of the subjunctive, the gerund, and a whole bunch of things we writers had never heard of, or if we had it was a long time ago. So—if only in self-defense—a few of us became skilled in grammatical reference, the right terms, even if we didn’t know what they really meant. And we got deft in using them in conversations.

But you couldn’t bluff Becker. He’d call you out and read you the riot act when you were wrong. So you had to be careful. If he saw that you had learned something, sometimes he’d back off a notch. But he could be vindictive. It was the same kind of thing that would have him confiding too you one moment, chewing you out the next. He could turn on you, turn on a dime, with no motivation that you could locate, search your mind as you might. It was whimsical, this guy who was always arguing that everything you did must have a reason, and the reason be grounded in a rule.

Once, pissed off, because he had told something I had told him in confidence (nothing much; it had to do with a guy who was hard to work with) and he had told it to the superintendent of the printing plant, a person who scheduled our jobs and determined the priority with which they would be run on the big Heidelberg presses. This was Ruben Davis, a casual friend, a guy anyway who I used to exchange fishing stories with, since he was a big bowhunter. And Ruben, in an argument over why one of my jobs was late and I had an angry client on my hands, had countered my statement with what Becker had told him I had said.

I left a note on Becker’s desk. It consisted of one word. "Perfidy," it said. He knew full well what it meant and what had provoked it.

You have to hold your own, but be prepared to give in a bit. Isn’t this always the case, in much of everything? You have to let them know you have principles, pride, while at the same time be accommodating and friendly. The fact that this puts you at cross purposes with yourself and often with your work does not matter. It is a course in self-survival.

Meanwhile, Jack Hollenback got fired for conspicuous drunkenness while on the job. It only followed. One two many double Thunderbirds at afternoon break, when the most any of us had was a single beer, and usually we chose coffee. Jack would return to the office, or the printing plant, red-faced, belligerent. (How many Germans had bit the dust, that long ago day?) His behavior was impermissible. Eventually Howard Miller got together with personnel, cleared it with his boss, the VP, and documentation began to take place. The idea was, you issued said employee a couple of meeting notices to discuss his behavior, and wrote down exactly what you told him and what he replied, each time. By then it was already too late. There was no response, no promise, that would make any difference, and you tried to tell him so, in so many words, but he wasn’t listening, perhaps because he had braced himself ahead of time, in fear of what was coming.

Too late, way too late. A second meeting was scheduled, and if the first had gone badly, you had your boss sit in, the VP, and he mainly listened and what they called observed, and it was good-bye, see you later, no matter what the poor guy said, for the results were preordained. So Jack went, and we were all sad to see it because we liked him, but knew it was inevitable, and because at fifty-five it might well be his last job. We heard he went into a veterans hospital and died, not long after.

Bob Dodge gone, and now Jack, attrition was reaching its high point. I had plans to leave, too, but not yet. Didn’t have enough money stashed away so that I could have a year, maybe longer, free to write. So I was biding, so to speak. Meanwhile Joan Plover and Tilden Manzer got married. What? Did people do this any more? Guess so. He had a couple of grown kids by an earlier marriage and of course for Joanne it was her first, but they had been living together for three months now. It is your standard time for these things to last and, if you don’t get married by the end of that period, things are apt to turn nasty and you break up with acrimony. It’s either marry or die, as an entity. Nobody from the office was asked to attend and I suspect that only their respective mothers were there. Both were sweet, slightly sardonic persons, quiet as cats. I could detect no difference in either of them after they were married. My wife and I used to have them over in the evening to eat smoked steelhead (he was Norwegian and loved it) and drink the home brew we were now bottling as an economy measure.

It was, to be sure, a slightly one-sided relationship, with us on the giving end, and we were slightly miffed not to be invited to the wedding, though if we had it might have been seen as an unwanted obligation and we wouldn’t have gone. So it was a neither/nor kind of situation, a no-win situation, a situation without a happy outcome, and we drifted away shortly after the marriage because Tilden quit to go off and do something entirely different, manage a marina, I think, while Joanne took a job at the University Press, doing what she told us was to be "real editing" but turned out to be like most things enormously disappointing, since all she was allowed to do was rearrange an author’s punctuation and the decision about accepting manuscripts had already been made, as all were throughout the University, by a faculty committee. It was answerable it only to itself.

The University was a great place to be if you were faculty. It exists for its faculty—for its betterment and ease. This generally came down to more money and fewer hours of teaching in the classroom or serving on committee each week. They were supposed to meet with students regularly but never did. Students were to be avoided like the plague. I know that is a cliché phrase, but if you look at it closely and try to take it literally, you come near to the truth of the situation. Students were vermin. Sometimes a cliché is enlightening, in spite of how tired it is and how meaning leaks out as from a rusty bucket.

52

It’s too bad that companies don’t publish annuals like high school classes do, or universities, so you can look back at your years in harness and see mugshots of everybody arrayed alphabetically, looking to the right or to the left or, in a few instances, straight ahead and only slightly off kilter.

Off kilter is how I see them in my mind, after so many years have passed, and it has been a difficult job bringing them all back from a sea of faces and a muddled pool of events and incidents. There are certain tricks you can use to goad your memory and to wrench back a name from out of the unsorted past. You can try any of several approaches. The direct one—who was that?--usually fails. You keep circling back, worrying the bone of memory, sifting the flour of time, rattling the gourd of the past, etc., and the harder you press the more your short history recedes. It is most frustrating.

Instead, you try the trick of putting the matter out of mind and, perhaps after you have slept a full night and are lying abed refreshed, you surprise yourself with abruptness, asking, Just who was the person I’ve been having trouble recalling, and, pop, the name comes to you, just like that, along with details of physiognomy you’d long forgotten, perhaps half a face, and as a writer you are refreshed, much in the sense that a computer screen is refreshed when you tap a key and its pixels and stored data are rewritten. Writ anew. What you want to do is tap the screen before it fades. So you make a note or two for the morning’s effort, and hope the vision doesn’t fade over orange juice and cereal.

Below us two storeys was the printing plant, a vast enterprise, where nearly all of the University’s expendable garbage got reproduced voluminously. It was Bert Haag’s domain, but it was Howard and his boss who defined the visual impact of all publications. Hence, publications services and the office of publications, our territory. Turf battles are feudal territory and the land is staunchly defended by men not in armor but dedicated—to put a point on it—to the eradication of each other. Thus employees aligned with either camp gird for daily battle and sometimes or often minor skirmishes take place.

Bad image and it is being pushed too far, I fear. We were all ostensibly friends, friendly, only some of us more so than others, and there was a lot of sorting out of allies and allegiances that was always taking place. Bert’s secretary was Rose, for instance, and she was one of us, one of the party of morning coffee-break persons that could be depended upon. She hated the old man, Bert, but had to maintain a certain decorous loyalty and did, but believed it to be foolish to carry it too far, and could always be counted on, if pressed, to reveal a thing or two that we might need for ammunition.

She hated him simply because he treated her like a machine, perhaps one of the Linotypes that set our copy in lead slugs that got stacked up in galleys, that is, until computer composition made irreversible inroads and displaced hot metal, and all became clean and neat and unexciting. The men and women compositors who could not make the transition—and all were given a chance—fell by the roadside like bison. Or those small dinosaurs that couldn’t run fast to escape time.

Rose and Allen Auvil and Betty Healy and I, and anybody else who was handy, for we were democratic to a fault, used to share a table at the HUB, the student union building, and the conversation ranged far, but often would alight on sexual matters, for it was the common denominator that most interested us, for we were young. We hardly had any other sport, not unless it was to gang up and "do" somebody, which was always horrible and made you feel awful afterwards. Bert, Howard, Dave Becker—all received their comeuppance in turn, and a bit more.

The big thing then was the movie "Deep Throat." It was the topic of our morning conversation and for a while all allusions must be made to it and what went on in it, which was not limited to the obvious. We quickly sorted ourselves out to those who had seen it and those who had not. It was almost like those days back in high school when the subject was who had done it—have simple sex, I mean. No longer was there such a thing as simple sex. It had been transcended, made complicated. Now there was this new element. One by one each of snuck away, paid our five dollars, and went into the Winter Garden Theater to see what specifically it was Linda Lovelace did.

Oh, that, was our conclusion.

Quickly we sorted ourselves out into two more Descartian groups. One had some first-hand familiarity with the matter under discussion and the other pretended to. Nobody but Betty Healy, in her first incarnation, a mother of three or four, the woman not knowing what a Lesbian was or did even while hotly pursued by one, at least for a while. If she couldn’t fathom that particular inclination or preference, how could she comprehend this other?

Finally I had to dash off and see it myself, one rainy February afternoon, or always remain ignorant and on the outside of the conversation, never being able to make allusion, or if I tried to be made ludicrous by my lack of exact knowledge. For by then everybody alive knew what Linda did. What they didn’t understand was (1) why she did it, (2) how she did it, and (3) was such a thing really humanly possible. After I saw the show I would supply the answers to the above questions thus: (1) for money, (2) with her mouth, specifically her throat, (3) yes, but it required special preparatory exercises, or much practice on a handy object of extraordinary dimensions. And I came away wondering, Why does she smile all the time—before, during, and after? Could it be because they paid her to and it was the director’s wish that she do so? For the key to the puzzle was the conceit, the object of her pleasure was located not in her groin but near her tonsils. You had to know this and suspend your disbelief—as in Restoration Comedy, which this is a descendant of—in order to go along with the gag. And gag is probably the exact word.

I left the movie feeling shaky. It is impossible not to encounter pornography in any of its guises if you do not live in a tent in the tundra, or an igloo farther to the North, or a mud hut in the Congo. Everywhere else it abounds. Perhaps there, too. Thinly disguised, it is hinted at in every TV sit com, soap opera, and movie thrown at us. In some families, children by the age of three are overly familiar with Daddy getting did, or Mommie on the receiving end. It will soon be as common as a bowl of cornflakes.

I felt queasy, as well, walking out into the relative smallness and dimness of a street wet with rain and ringed with haloed streetlights, for everybody I had been with for the past hour and a half was oversize, including their sex organs. At the start, Linda’s guide and benefactor experienced a lengthy large screen version of cunnilingus. If you didn’t know before hand what it consisted of, you had no questions now, though veteran film viewers might wonder if it was a case of overacting on both their parts. This was followed by the introduction of our heroine, a kind of Little Orphan Annie in a world of male monsters, each with a gross penis. (Where do they grow them so large? Is a special fertilizer required?) Linda had a nice naiveté. She was ashamed of the small size of her breasts, for instance, and the inferiority feeling she was trying to compensate for, and this was why she wore a male undershirt or blouse for most of the movie. But she more than made up for her reticence to appear naked above the waist with a total lack of shame below, and evidenced great enthusiasm over what was asked of her and what she was so willing to deliver.

It was almost as though she were at the doctor’s office (I believe she was, in one sequence) and the doctor said, "You must drink this whole glass full of medicine before you leave," and she said, "But I can’t, doctor, not possibly," and he said "You must, your life depends on it," and she says, "In that case I’ll try." He tells her she is a good girl to agree. So she swallows some of the portion, pauses, almost gags, and he encourages her further, giving her a friendly pat on the shoulder, and she smiles, smiles around it, her drink, as it were, and tries again, and manages to swallow some more, and so on, until, by golly, she has drunk the whole glass full. And then, so proud of herself, she smiles--actually smiles around the gigantic instrument, and we all smile with her. Good girl, we cry out in our soul, or the masculine part of the audience does.

Where they found the guys I shall never know. Did they advertise for them with an ad in the papers? Now, of course, it has become an industry, and guys have resumes and photos of themselves below the belt, are known by pseudonyms and nicknames, often of veiled obscenity or doubtful authenticity. The director will screen most of them out as pretenders, or undersized, keeping for the final selection only the largest, and when Linda is introduced to them, one by one, and smiles up at them in her usual friendly, unpresuming, lovable way, and says, "I can’t possibly. No, not that, not that one."

And the director says, "Yes you can. Remember, my sweet, we all love you here. All we ask is that you give it the old college try. Ready? Roll ‘em."

And game little creature that she is, she tries, and, lo, she succeeds, and a movie is born, and everybody goes to see it, and everybody connected with it gets rich except, get this, Linda, who only get what she was originally paid for the gig.

"I want more," she cries. "After all, it was I who made your darn movie possible."

"Think of the pleasure you had," the director says. He was also the producer and had bankrolled the film.

"Pleasure, hell. My mouth, my throat, will never be the same again. Not to mention my cunt, my ass."

"Nobody will believe you," he said. "Nobody who ever saw you smile."

54

So now I knew, too. A whole new world opened up to us, all of us who paid our five dollars and had our understanding expanded, not that we didn’t know this sort of thing often happened, often right at home, but not that it was fit material for movies. And other flicks would quickly follow. None would have the same impact as "Deep Throat." For most everybody it was the original (though it had multiple predecessors). It made what was involved, featured, a household world. Quickly knowledge of it spread through all levels of society. High school girls were prompted to do it. Girls even younger now knew it was the key to popularity. Rapidly it became the universal currency.

Discussions of techniques were frequent among pubescent girls. They developed reputations according to their willingness, their skills, their aptitude, their enthusiasm. A form of word-of-mouth advertising preceded them. The competition was great. A few became famous. World famous, that is, around the block.

Meanwhile, back at the office, life went on. Coffee breaks punctuated the day, not to mention the full stop called lunch. Work somehow got accomplished. The big presses in the basement roared and brochures rolled out the other end, once the bindery was through with them, which seemed to take forever. Each of us editors was seen frequently wandering through the printing plant, Bert’s domain, checking on the progress of jobs. Almost always they were late, overdue. Clients were pissed. They treated us editors as incompetents. In a few cases they were right. Usually they were merely justifiably angry. It wasn’t our fault.

Often one of the designers and I, an editor, made a color check when a job was on one of the big Heidelbergs, waiting to be run. "Hold the presses" is an axiom of the trade, sometimes literally true. The plant was hushed, the big offset rollers still, the ink laid down, occasionally four colors. Then we would look at the sheet and sometimes compare it to the art comp, other times to the color proof that had come from Camera in the form of a color key, one done in process colors, untrue, but a good clue to what the real product would look like. And sometimes the designer would ask for a tiny adjustment in one of the colors on the press, and the pressman would get a look of disgust on his face but do what he was bid.

Earlier battles took place while proofing the job. First there was the client, who had generally written the copy but sometimes had taken it to one of us to do, as a sign of his or her general incompetence or foolhardiness. Once I had written a blurb for the oceanography department, in which (bored to tears daily) I had facetiously written, "As students advance in their understanding of the field, they become more and more immersed in their studies." The department had approved the copy and it had twice gone through proofing. Howard Miller glanced over it as the page proof passed across his desk, came to the door, crooked a finger in my direction.

"Nice try," was all he said.

Of course it came out. It was good it did before it got printed and somebody in administration spotted it. Then word would come down like thunder, and it wouldn’t be me who got it in the neck but Bob or Howard. Since Bob Dodge was out the door, and Dave Becker not yet hired, that left Howard as sole target, and he was not about to be it. But he recognized the puny wit involved and paid it dim acknowledgment. With that I had to be satisfied.

A couple of years into the job I started getting the choice assignments. It was largely a matter of attrition: better editors were leaving in droves and often we were understaffed. One of the choice assignments was the University annual report, or actually the bi-annual report, since it was hinged to our budget, which was for two years. It was a quality job, and since Bert and his boys couldn’t be trusted, went outside to one of the city’s larger presses, generally Craftsman. So I got a lot of commute time and, throughout the winter, overtime, which I translated during slack periods as comp time in which to go fishing for winter steelhead, my new obsession. It was a good deal all around and I valued the assignment and worked hard to make the report look good and error-free.

I worked with Harvey Manning, later with Alice Kling, both writers, and good editors in their own stead, as writers usually are. So, though both tended to get a bit snippy at crunch time, or resisted the wonderful editing changes I only suggested for their copy, we got along well and were mutually concerned with the product, a good-looking, coherent report. We got one.

Yet certain things bothered me. For instance, we were always stating what a "great" university we were, or how we were a "major" university. This type of self-proclamation rankled me. I used to argue (to no avail) that it was up to others to call us that, and if we did we only underscored a persistent mediocrity. Naturally this didn’t go over well. It was impossible, too, to get others to call us this without paying them outright bribes. The way it is usually accomplished is by having a winning football team. If a Pac Ten team goes to the Rose Bowl, year after year, everybody just knows it is great or major, regardless of the reputation of its academic programs. I don’t want to belabor this point, only simply state it and move on. I think the fact that the federal government started giving the U. more an more research money helped immensely. Soon we got more than anybody, including the big, famous private schools. I don’t know how this happened, but pretty soon it began to rankle me less and less, having to state and restate our greatness.

Why couldn’t we settle for pretty good? Who wants to be the number two ranked heavy-weight champion of anything? There’s your answer.

It was not a bad life, all in all, working at a large university. The coeds were gorgeous, especially in the spring, when they and the rhododendrons and azaleas came into full bloom; as the blossoms fades, the weather warming, the girls wore less and less, and it was disconcerting to a thirty-year-old, happily married man. The fact that the girls saw straight through me, literally, helped some. I mean, they saw me not at all. I was transparent matter to them, and I not very old myself.

Daily I would respond to the telephone call, screened by Diane Grant—who had a way of puckering up her face when it was a client on the line who tended to be testy and to smile broadly and wink when the client was no threat. It was sort of sweet to have one’s called announced this way, though it tended to take away surprises. Diane was divorced, raising a couple of kids, and her manner in the office was directly linked to how her love life was going in private. Thus, when she was being satisfied, she satisfied us, all sweetness and light, but when it was going badly, heaven help us. A former Kappa, she let us know that she was used to only the best and was working here temporarily, beneath her proper station in life, only because of reduced circumstances. She expected these to end very soon, and so they did, but I never learned the particulars.

She was quite pretty and elegant, and had a way of wrinkling up her nose in mild disgust to express an opinion she didn’t want to go so far as stating, be it of a person (usually), an idea, a situation. I think she might have made an excellent mistress for some industrial tycoon, few of which we had around here. Or a lawyer’s wife, or the wife of a stockbroker. She had a terrible way of humoring all of us, though finding herself in an airport, with a long wait, and having to do the best she could manage, under adverse circumstances.

Howard adored her and spoke often of their excellent working relationship and how symbiotic they were. Is that the right word? I think not. How copacetic their relationship was, almost intuitive. He’d think or want something, she’d know what it was and do it or get it, bing. But from her point of view it was anything but. She told us repeatedly how she detested him, how all of his mannerisms grated on her, how what he asked her to do, with a big, condescending smile, were stupid, futile tasks, but she had to do them. What a grand difference it was. It tended to bother us and make us ill at easy daily, for Howard was not all that bad, only a bit obtuse and self-preoccupied, while Diane was, well, a royal bitch, I guess you’d say.

Finally she met Mr. Right, as he was called then, all of them, the guy who would take her away and make everything wonderful, and this included financially. He would take care of her and her kids. We presumed this included marriage—soon, if not just at first. So she was gone and Valerie arrived.

What is it about executive secretaries that make them feel they are executives, too? You move from one prima donna to another, and this keeps occurring if you demand 140 words a minute shorthand. And what need have you for fast typing and somebody to take down your words, fast, if you write everything out first in longhand?

Valerie was putting a guy, her husband, through school, and it would take a long time, for it was a Ph.D. he was headed for and he was still an undergraduate. Meanwhile they were having kids. All I remember about the guy was that he occasionally popped into the office between classes and carried a little leather case that housed a poolcue that screwed together at mid-length. I think he contributed his share of their income by beating the socks off unassuming male students at various games of pool. In short, he was a shark, a professional. Aside from this odd trait, he was very bright, aloof, and finally got his advanced degree in something like physical psychology or physiology or quantum physics, or some hybrid field, of which there are many.

She was ritzy, too, and a tad haughty, though she would descend to our level once in a while and admit to some personal opinion, which turned out to be perfectly ordinary. Isn’t this frequently the case? Those who are the most snooty have the least to be snooty about. They lived in a cheap little apartment and slept in the same room as their kids, ate a lot of tunafish casseroles, but then we all did. We had two kinds in that office. Those who admitted to being poor and those who were poor but wouldn’t admit to it. In the latter case, unless they were very clever, it showed in so many ways that deny it all you could it fairly screamed its condition.

The thing that was outstanding about Valerie was her breasts. They were rather formidable and proceeded her in all things as though she were carrying a wheelbarrow full of something heavy but imminently worthy of being always lugged around. Such as gold bullion. I had to admit that expensive underwear will do wonders for an endowed young woman if she remembers always to throw her shoulders back and look down her nose past them and at the more distant view. Aside from them, her legs were columns, her ass shaped into a sack of cement by a girdle (they used them to hold up stockings, then), and arms that contained good bones and thus were shapely but implying that they were very strong.

She liked having a lot of work to do, which was too bad because usually there wasn’t any and she tended to pout and get cross, which allowed her little form of self-expression since she didn’t like to talk to any of us but had to. It was then we all learned how her world consisted entirely of those children, two then, and the rigors of shopping, cooking, and cleaning. She could talk about these activities seemingly forever, once started. So we were happy to see her kept busy and often gave her typing of our own, which she was happy enough to do, her fingers flying.

We lost editors and new ones were hired, more than I ever recalled. I have mentioned how names and faces came slowly back to me while I lay abed in the morning, my mind a near blank and in close connection still with what has been termed our unconscious. And how I longed for an annual publication with our pictures, all arranged like blocks of postage stamps, our names nearby, by which memory can be triggered and names connected to faces hopelessly aged since then and hence unrecognizable in real life, if these people continued to exist in real life. But there are other ways than these and a teacake to bring the past back in a rush. Today I took a shower and as I reached for the soap I suddenly pictured and recalled in a flood of detail two more, Bob Major and Maria Elezeki.

Major was a career enlisted man and had retired some kind of high sergeant, perhaps even Sergeant-Major Major, a name that would surely delight Joseph Heller. A life-long bachelor he came into our office when we had no vacancy and announced that this is where he wanted to work and no other place. He would wait. It impressed us all, this plus the fact that he was six-feet four or five. WE had already lost two out of three of our dwarf component, and so only the tallest of them was left, Howard, who tolerated Major’s wish, as he looked upward and developed a crook in his neck, no doubt.

Often a woman has won a man simply by singling him out and saying, "You. You are the one I am going to marry. Tell me, what is it I have to do to claim you? Any special sexual peccadilloes you’d care to inform me about? I’m sure they can be accommodated." Similarly an occasion job is landed by use of the same technique. And so it worked. It took six months. I don’t know what he did in the meantime, but he always had his Army pension, and it tided him over nicely, until he could supplement it with a real job. He was about forty-five.

preoccupied, while Diane was, well, a royal bitch, I guess you’d say.

Finally she met Mr. Right, as he was called then, all of them, the guy who would take her away and make everything wonderful, and this included financially. He would take care of her and her kids. We presumed this included marriage—soon, if not just at first. So she was gone and Valerie arrived.

What is it about executive secretaries that make them feel they are executives, too? You move from one prima donna to another, and this keeps occurring if you demand 140 words a minute shorthand. And what need have you for fast typing and somebody to take down your words, fast, if you write everything out first in longhand?

Valerie was putting a guy, her husband, through school, and it would take a long time, for it was a Ph.D. he was headed for and he was still an undergraduate. Meanwhile they were having kids. All I remember about the guy was that he occasionally popped into the office between classes and carried a little leather case that housed a poolcue that screwed together at mid-length. I think he contributed his share of their income by beating the socks off unassuming male students at various games of pool. In short, he was a shark, a professional. Aside from this odd trait, he was very bright, aloof, and finally got his advanced degree in something like physical psychology or physiology or quantum physics, or some hybrid field, of which there are many.

She was ritzy, too, and a tad haughty, though she would descend to our level once in a while and admit to some personal opinion, which turned out to be perfectly ordinary. Isn’t this frequently the case? Those who are the most snooty have the least to be snooty about. They lived in a cheap little apartment and slept in the same room as their kids, ate a lot of tunafish casseroles, but then we all did. We had two kinds in that office. Those who admitted to being poor and those who were poor but wouldn’t admit to it. In the latter case, unless they were very clever, it showed in so many ways that deny it all you could it fairly screamed its condition.

The thing that was outstanding about Valerie was her breasts. They were rather formidable and proceeded her in all things as though she were carrying a wheelbarrow full of something heavy but imminently worthy of being always lugged around. Such as gold bullion. I had to admit that expensive underwear will do wonders for an endowed young woman if she remembers always to throw her shoulders back and look down her nose past them and at the more distant view. Aside from them, her legs were columns, her ass shaped into a sack of cement by a girdle (they used them to hold up stockings, then), and arms that contained good bones and thus were shapely but implying that they were very strong.

She liked having a lot of work to do, which was too bad because usually there wasn’t any and she tended to pout and get cross, which allowed her little form of self-expression since she didn’t like to talk to any of us but had to. It was then we all learned how her world consisted entirely of those children, two then, and the rigors of shopping, cooking, and cleaning. She could talk about these activities seemingly forever, once started. So we were happy to see her kept busy and often gave her typing of our own, which she was happy enough to do, her fingers flying.

We lost editors and new ones were hired, more than I ever recalled. I have mentioned how names and faces came slowly back to me while I lay abed in the morning, my mind a near blank and in close connection still with what has been termed our unconscious. And how I longed for an annual publication with our pictures, all arranged like blocks of postage stamps, our names nearby, by which memory can be triggered and names connected to faces hopelessly aged since then and hence unrecognizable in real life, if these people continued to exist in real life. But there are other ways than these and a

teacake to bring the past back in a rush. Today I took a shower and as I reached for the soap I suddenly pictured and recalled in a flood of detail two more, Bob Major and Maria Elezeki.

Major was a career enlisted man and had retired some kind of high sergeant, perhaps even Sergeant-Major Major, a name that would surely delight Joseph Heller. A life-long bachelor he came into our office when we had no vacancy and announced that this is where he wanted to work and no other place. He would wait. It impressed us all, this plus the fact that he was six-feet four or five. WE had already lost two out of three of our dwarf component, and so only the tallest of them was left, Howard, who tolerated Major’s wish, as he looked upward and developed a crook in his neck, no doubt.

Often a woman has won a man simply by singling him out and saying, "You. You are the one I am going to marry. Tell me, what is it I have to do to claim you? Any special sexual peccadilloes you’d care to inform me about? I’m sure they can be accommodated." Similarly an occasion job is landed by use of the same technique. And so it worked. It took six months. I don’t know what he did in the meantime, but he always had his Army pension, and it tided him over nicely, until he could supplement it with a real job. He was about forty-five, a life-time bachelor, one with acquired tastes. These did not include women in the ordinary sense. I had mention the advent of the movie Deep Throat and what it portended. Well, there has always been a small pornographic element in American life, but it had been of necessity kept small, circumspect, underground. Suddenly it blossomed. It became an industry. Major had probably always sought it out. Now it was everywhere, a topic of daily polite conversation. He felt as though his private preserve had been invaded. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to say because he was used to saying nothing about it, he was so ashamed of this aspect of his life. Now even the secretaries were alluding to, if not outright defining, describing, what it was Linda Lovelace did. It made him not a little bit angry.

Nightly he had gone to porno theaters and watched contented. Well, contented is not the right word, admittedly, but he had watched routinely and satisfyingly in that unsatisfied way of his. Pornography if it is anything is habit-forming, habitual. It was a part of his life. It filled a void, a space in time, generally mid-evening. It was superior to magazines like Hustler because its pictures moved. This made it more like the real thing, in his humble opinion. Through repetition it became the real world. This—just like this—is what men and women did, when alone, when left alone to their own peculiar devises.

Which is true and untrue, the emphases being what makes it different from life as it is lived, or so it seems to me. If you base your whole interpretation of sexual life on what porn serves on its platter, you will be right, but you will be dead wrong at the same time in your perception and perspective. And this is what is corrupting. You become reinforced in your prejudices of what you see. For if women are like that, going after men’s sex organ as though crocodiles, hungry for blood lust, no sensible man would want to have anything to do with them, the vipers. It is funny, under their sweet cloying exteriors, what lurks. It is frightening, at the same time it is excitingly attractive, compelling. Best to stay away from them.

He was a good editor, but then we all were and we weren’t called on for much beside the ordinary—a sense of style, competed sentences, some vague grammar, an eye for the wrong detail and how to make it right. Otherwise what we did was amassed busywork. Most jobs are like this. Aside from daily watching porn and whatever it led to, masturbation and shame, probably, he was a most ordinary guy. When everybody took up the outdoors, namely, hiking and backpacking, he was as eager as anyone, and the dark interior of a movie theater was put aside as one of those lingering negative elements of civilization that could and should be dispensed with. So on weekends everybody (but me) piled into cars and took off for wilderness areas.

One of his favorite companions on such a trip was Maria. She was a new editor, Maria Elezechi, who was Filipina; she had married a man named Berg, harsh, demanding, and while she was fairly submissive by upbringing what he wanted was too much, so they had divorced, and since she was Catholic, very close to her mother, her father, it had been a severe shock to all of them, especially since she was not exactly a girl when she had succumbed to marriage, and now it was over, six month later.

She came to us from another department and her work brought her into our office frequently, and we all l iked her. Like Bob Major, she let us know that if an opening appeared she would like a chance to be interviewed to fill it. And one had, shortly before Bob came on board. But they had turned her down. This was in the Bob Dodge days, and I think he had found her frumpy, not to his taste, which had a lot to do with who he wanted to hire. I think he pictured the office as a collection of hotshots, the men all poets and heavy drinkers, smooth, cool, and the women fiery and beautiful, the whole scene very Gatsbyish. But now he was gone and frump reigned.

Maria fit the bill. She was very personable, not very attractive, and a lot of fun to kid around with. I liked her and often we went over to the student union for coffee in the afternoon. There I had a strange experience. Obviously Maria was a minority woman, small and darkish, with a pug nose, inky hair, spotted complexion, and very good teeth. Since I was male, she female, we fit a common sexual template, and people—I suppose they couldn’t help themselves, human nature being what it is—looked at us from a predisposed point of view. Are they doing it? Fucking? And all at once I got a blinding insight into another world, a world of racism and sexual innuendo.

"Maria," I said, "people are looking at us as though, you know, they are wondering if we are having a sexual relationship." I put it just this way because, though recently married and divorced, there was something still virginal about her, and this required special treatment.

"Does this bother you?" she asked.

"No, not exactly. I mean it doesn’t bother me that they should think we are. . . . Let me rephrase that. We aren’t, we don’t intend to, we are friends. That’s all. Why do they presume otherwise?"

She smiled. "It does bother you."

"It bothers me only in the sense that they are wrong and that they presume a hell of a lot."

"Doesn’t this happen if you go out to coffee with some other woman, you know, an Anglo?"

"I’ve never noticed it."

"Then maybe it’s because we are other races?"

"Yes, does this happen often with you?"

"All the time. I think it was an important element in my relationship with Frank." This was Berg’s first name and the first time I’d heard it. "I think it was our chief attraction to each other."

"What, you mean the way people looked at you two?"

"How they treated us, anyway. Have you ever gone anywhere with a black?"

I could think only of Les McIntosh and said so.

"I mean a black woman?"
"No. This is the first time."

"I’m not a black woman.

"Jesus, I didn’t mean that you were."

She laughed delightedly and showed her excellent small white teeth.

"You are beginning to know what it is like. But you know, will know, practically nothing. It is always to be limited, your knowledge. You will always have to guess. And you will be wrong."

"Doesn’t it bother you?"

"What bother me?"

"That people think we are, you know, doing it?"

"Does it bother you?"

"No."
"It doesn’t bother me, either. I’m pretty much used to it. There aren’t very many Filipino men around and, frankly, I don’t like them much. Too macho. Wanted to be waited on, hand and foot, like princes, and they expect sex whenever they feel like it."

"All men do."

She laughed. "People think the worst of other people. It’s human nature. Because I’m small, dark, tend to defer, they think I’m a sexual object, and can be had with a single kind word, or a word not so kind. You’d be surprised what they call out to you, to me, on the street. An open invitation, no words minced."

"Who do?"
"Everybody. Men."

"What men?"

"Some of them. Mostly black, though. And my own people. They think women are either sluts or goddesses. But they expect their goddesses to have a hot meal on the table for them and not have any sexual pleasure themselves in bed. They want them to be their mother, in short."

"Maybe we shouldn’t have coffee together very often," I said.

"Scaredy cat. Too tough a world?"

I laughed too.

I said, "I supposed I should be honored."

"No, not that, but certainly aware of what is going on."

"For that I thank you."

"It’s late, I think we should head back."

From then on I asked Maria to coffee once a week, religiously, and she went, and we never talked about this aspect of life ever again, nor even alluded to it. But she could see from my eyes that I was uneasy, uncomfortable in my presumed role of white stud with dark women, and I tried to revel in the role but never could, for often I felt challenged, and as though I might be called on at any moment to defend myself from charges that I was not guilty of and had no urge to explain myself, or my conduct. It was way too complicated, and I wondered if other people had the same problem and many easy friendships had ended accordingly.

She had a wonderful quiet dignity about her, quasi-virginal, and none of the conversations about Deep Throat ever took place when she was in the group, drinking public coffee. Gradually they petered out, so to speak, for they grew boring and we soon learned, once the first titillation was over, there was not much to say on the subject. It had run its course and been replaced by back packing, of all things.

To me it seemed a reasonable substitute, but much more tiring. Especially if you were on the receiving end of the former activity.

55

I was filled with great uncertainty when I left and went not again into the great world but into one even smaller than this one, the world where a writer faces the blank sheet every day and tries to make sense of what is to be written. There he sees no one, unless it is his wife slipping him a sandwich near noon and calling him away from his writing machine when it is time for dinner.

He finds that, late in the day, he has to guard himself from the falling into the trap of writing about food and describing scrumptious soups, roasts, and bread coming out of the oven. And sex, of course, which has a similar effect, but a different object of attainment as its goal.

I wrote like a demon but practically none of it reached print. It is often like this. Then you tell yourself that writing is its own reward. But you never quite believe it. You keep on grinding out pages, chortling to yourself whenever something amusing strikes a chord, which on a good day is often. On a bad day, finding words is much like sweeping up dust whorls in a breezy room. Just as you near one, it whooshes away from you. But on a good day, the words lie down obediently, like little lead soldiers, but hopefully more lifelike and inspiring than that.

While working at the U. I had written a book, "Driving To The Green," not about golf, as it might sound, but about steelhead fishing, the Green being the Green River in the vicinity of Auburn, where I repeatedly went on Wednesday afternoons (comp time) and on weekends, in search of the elusive steelhead, and sometimes finding one. The Ms. was illustrated by terrible snapshots of m e and fish and scenery. I first sent it to Joan Plover, now at U. Press, and she send back pages of suggestions on making changes I had already considered and decided against, but for a brief and shining moment I had thought the Press was interested in publishing my book. No, indeed, they were not, and Joan was only trying to help. The Presses stuff remained scholarly.

Then I sent it off to New York City and there it had a curious circulation. It ended up on the desk of Angus Cameron at Knopf, who quickly decided against it, but sent it on to Arnold Gingrich at Esquire, who was very warm and friendly and simpatico. He wrote back and I wrote back and he wrote back, and there the correspondence ended, but he sent the Ms. on to Clare Connelly at Field and Stream, in case that editor could use any of it. He couldn’t. And there the circuit ended. Looking back on the episode, I can only thank these men for their kindness. It was a terrible book, but an honest one, though honesty in books is not a redeeming feature. All three were fishing nuts and would at least give brief attention to any writing on the subject, especially if it involved flyfishing.

Gingrich was the nicest. He drew parallels between my writing and that of Roderick Haig-Brown, which I now know where thematic and involving our common fish, the steelhead, and the Pacific Northwest. He encouraged me to keep writing, and ultimately I sold a short story (whose subject was flyfishing) to the magazine, but long after he had retired as editor and was no longer alive to read it. The book for all practical purposes was dead. It should, and did, rest in peace.

But I had other books to write. It is hard to discourage a writer who is driven, though many will try and the massive indifference of New York City to his efforts eventually takes its dim toll. So he write on, blindly, dumbly, compulsively, not knowing where he is going, only following the dictates of his particular story or book, living with it, pushing it on when it falters, riding along with it when it has a life and determination of its own, until he comes to the end, when he sighs and feels an enormous flood of relief that soon passes into its near opposite, a sense of depression and defeat.

It is a happy routine, that of writing hard nearly daily, then giving oneself a respite in the form of an afternoon out of doors, standing in some cold river, casting slightly upstream and following the drift as it comes opposite, extends itself, swings round, and comes to rest directly below him, only to be repeated nearly exactly as the angler moves a few yards downstream. Then it is back to the warmth and comfort of home, a hot meal, a warm bed, the respite of TV, and the next day the writing machine hungrily waiting again, never satisfied. The days pass in such a manner, the weeks, the months, and finally the years. The work piles up, is rewritten, heavily edited, retyped, corrected. And naught or very little comes of it.

Why? I’ the wrong one to ask this question.

I wrote a novel, "Waiting For Marion," another called, "A Little Bit Famous," another entitled "On Common Ground." Nobody wanted them. I grew broke. You could call us poor. As the economic pressures grew, I began frantically looking around for a job. It was hard to even get an interview. Finally I went to an employment agency. These are the world’s worst places to go, especially if they are ones where the prospective employee must pay the fees, or most of them. It is pretty much like the unemployment line, but worse. You are considered one of the dregs of humanity. Repeated often enough, you begin to believe your are.

A woman looked over my employment application, handling it as though it might soil her fingers, and asked, "Have you tried Safeco?"

"They sell insurance?"

"Among other things. Tell them we sent you and are interested in a job in their marketing department."

"Marketing?"

"Yes, they have an opening for a writer. Somebody who can write advertising copy and general information they send out to their agents and the independent agencies who sell their insurance. Tell them you want to talk to Doug Woodward."

I did this and things went surprisingly well. I was steered to a personnel office, and met a snippy little guy in white shirt and dark blue suit who looked over my papers and in spite of their great inaccuracies seemed to think they were in order, much as though he were a customs inspector reviewing what I had declared, and in a way this was literally true, for what I had declared was much about myself and what I had done. It was all written in that fraudulent language used by personnel departments and that has no real correspondence in life elsewhere. He passed me on.

Doug Woodward was affable, and I had the idea right off that he would be somebody I could work for about as happily as anybody. He treated me as somebody who had nothing to be ashamed over and the huge gaps in my employment record were just things any writer had. They were normal and I was normal. This was not how I was used to thinking of myself and came as an enormous relief.

You mean, there are other people like me? If so, I soon discovered, they didn’t work for Safeco, which was an unusual place. For one thing, you had to wear a white shirt to work—every day, without exception. Your hair had to have been recently cut and no facial hair of any kind was allowed, no matter how neatly cut and limited in scope. The only place any latitude was tolerated was in the matter of sideburns. This was at a time when sideburns had become a means of self-expression and many men grew long hooking sidebars down below their ears. In long retrospect it seems a silly fad, and pictures of people from that era sadly date them, the people, and make them look silly and dated. Historically it is an embarrassment, but at the time sideburns seemed to stand for something significant. If you had pressed anyone, they wouldn’t have been able to say what, however. Sideburns were an expression of style, and the style was that everybody must look much like everybody else, in this and in other aspects of style.

Of course as soon as I learned that my shirt must be white, I wanted it to be something else. And it must be a suit I wore daily, not a sports jacket and slacks. Above and below you must match in color and fabric. Neckties were supposed to be modest but tended to be ill-defined in what that consisted of, and some where flamboyant. This went generally ignored, unless pink or purple were predominant, in which case some superior might take you aside and mention it to you. It did not bear repeating. In other words, you ran a risk if you did it again.

The Safeco Building nearly nudged the University campus, divided by The Ave., and I came to realize that this area pretty much encompassed my life. For years I had lived near here and my life had prescribed a circuit in and among its cloistered streets and crowded buildings. Most of those were no more than three storeys high. University Towers (formerly the Edmond Meany Hotel) was taller, with rounded turret-like windows, no side square. And across from it the multi-storyed office building, occupied by Safeco, with a couple of upper floors the domain of dentists and lawyers. (Years later, Safeco would build its mammoth tower on the same spot, and it would rise on end like a brick. The University, on the other hand, spread out its buildings over a vast acreage and they sprung form it like mushrooms, some of them overnight, too, during one or another of the extensive building programs financed by the state legislature and its treasury.

No two institutions were more unalike. Working there was highly dissimilar, as well. First as a student, then as a writer/editor type, I had moved back and forth between the two, familiarly, semi-confidently, retracing the paths of my student days. Why, here were the three movie theaters of The Ave. where I had taken my dates from Roosevelt High School, and afterwards out for a snack. The little hole-in-the-wall restaurants had all changed owners, over the years, along with names and decor. Clark’s, down Northeast 45^th, where we used to go for strawberry waffles, had gone through several transformations and now was in the midst of one of its ethnic reincarnations, presently East Indian. Cherbourgs had become a men’s clothing store. My old literary hangout, Howard’s Restaurant, had become a copy center, owned and staffed by Arabs. Only the University Bookstore, proud and disdainful, had remained the same, but even it had expanded grandly, with the times.
Drugs were sold on the street—not openly, but not very seriously disguised, either. This was the Counter-Culture craze, the era of Hippies, the war in Viet Nam raging and opposed mightily. The Ave. seethed with conflict and discontent. It was not a good place to be if you were seeking a quiet place to shop or dine. Young panhandlers were everywhere asking for "spare change." You gave partly according to your political inclination.

There were rallies, there were marches, at night sometimes there were riots in the street, with garbage cans overturned and ignited. It was the "interesting times" of ancient Chinese curses. It was frightening and exciting. Safeco saw the protests as the work of criminals and took precautions. At the first-floor entrance, where the corporate receptionist sat behind a counter, presumably welcoming people and directing them to a floor, there was also the station where the telephone operators sat, all in a row, headsets over their crowns and little curved mouthpieces before their mouths. The operators were frightened and said so. So vulnerable, so exposed, The Ave just outside the class door and so many tall windows. So Safeco made the place a small fortress. They installed bulletproof, shatterpoof glass. Around the operators they erected a steel-and-plastic enclosure; though flimsy, it provided the illusion of protection and, more important, put the women out of sight. The street was thus out of mind, as well. If you did not see it and it did not see you, it did not exist.

There was another way to exit the building than to the street and this was by means of the parking garage. The operators, once their shift was done, scurried through the building and rode an interior elevator down to the garage. When they drove their cars out to the entrance, the vehicle triggered an electric eye which opened up the door. They drove up a ramp and safely away.

I did not worry much about danger from The Ave and laughed at all the fuss and expense Safeco went to to protect themselves from what (in my opinion, at least) was not a threat. Even I my Safeco garb—gray sharkskin suit, white shirt, rep tie—I moved freely to and fro, partaking of both worlds and trying by manner to indicate that I belonged to the nether world, the world of the street. I must have convinced nobody. We are what we appear to be, at least to those who do not know us.

But there was no real danger, I insist. Unruly students were exploiting the rest of us, I was certain. They had claimed the street and said it was theirs. Let nobody dare to take it back from them. The message was generally benign, but at times of demonstrations and at night what was called "trashing," it changed and became openly hostile. The street, The Ave, belonged to them. Try to take it back. Well, you didn’t dare.

I remember one night of riots. I had worked late—unusual for me. It was dark when I went outside. I could hear the sound of a mob coming from a block away; we were situated on Brooklyn Street and University Way (The Ave proper) was but one narrow block away. Demonstrators had set some debris fires along the curb. Garbage cans had been overturned, their lids made into impromptu medieval shields. I did not know at first what these were for—why anybody should want to carry a shield unless it was a form of bravado. And then I saw the riot police.

They had arrived in armored vans. Each man had a helmet, baton, and . . . shield. The top part of each shield was of clear plastic of the type that would not shatter. You could fire a bullet at it, for instance, and it might pit, dent, but it would not break apart into a million pieces that might harm you. The students—the demonstrators were often loosely called students, though they were a diverse sort, including bums, resident Hippies or Counter-Culture types, young employed people who were sympathetic to the cause, older bearded radicals from a checkered past, etc.—wanted to carry shields, too. It was a form of equalized combat gear, though such lids offered no real protection. It was more a tit for tat arrangement. If the cops had them, the protesters wanted them, too, unreasonable as it might be and seem.

That night, hearing the noise, the shouting, the sound of a baseball bat beating on a garbage can, glass in shop windows being broken with a crash, I decided the best thing to do was get out of there. In my Safeco suit, I might be mistaken for the enemy and harmed. There would be no time to protest my sympathy for their cause, not if some druggie decided to bop me with his cudgel. So I beat a cowardly retreat to my car, parked on the street but in an opposite direction. The noise diminished as I moved away from it. The next day I read about it in the papers. There had been multiple arrests and beatings. The protesters had not gone into the patrol wagons willingly but had to be subdued with nightsticks first. Ambulances had to be called. Among them a bleeding and broken crown was a sign of courage. It meant they believed in their cause and would fight for it. By such badges did they recognize and come to admire each other.

I envied them, but only a little. I wished I believed in anything so much as to risk getting my head smashed in for it. I was against the war and thought it ill-conceived, ill-advised, a poor decision. But I expressed my opinion only among people I knew to be of a similar mind. Few of these worked for Safeco. There I had to be circumspect. I had to bite my tongue and be silent. Out on the street, my work costume meant I was one of the enemy. It could not be denied. Our two worlds could not be more clearly demarcated than by how we dressed. It defined, described, who we were.

I felt I was nobody.

56

My first writing job was to produce copy for a brochure describing snowmobile insurance. Doug considered it a fun job and one in which a writer could express himself cleverly. For me it was hard. I was never much good at writing smart advertising copy and now here I was expected to do it daily. How long would it take, I wondered, to catch on to me?

I was a fraud and wondered how I had landed here? On top of it all, I had to pay the employment agency a huge sum—the equivalent of more than a month’s pay, stretched out over several—for pointing me in the right direction and sending me out to the job. While I knew I wouldn’t have had it without them, and the magic word, Safeco, plus the name of my new boss, Doug Woodward, which they gave me, I was bitter, and believed myself to be understandably so. I had tried to get the company to pick up the tab and they had quietly, patiently, explained how it wasn’t their policy. "Policy" was an important word in their vocabulary. Accordingly, it became one in mine.

I’ve never felt less at home. If it wasn’t for Doug, I might have left immediately. But of course I was here because I needed the money so badly. So I turned out copy and showed it to him and he shook his head sadly, and I felt terrible because I kept disappointing him. Used to writing long, solely for myself, now I only had to write short, for others, and this was most difficult. Call myself a writer? I had better not. A writer is one who produces, and here I was, at a loss for words.

Snowmobiles are considered happy vehicles, with joyful young men and women riding around in them, carefree, with abandon. Never mind the noise the little bastards make, or how they fill the air with fumes. I tried this tack, I tried this, but all of them failed; if they fell on their faces in my opinion, how must they seem to Doug, who had such a flair for these things? So I vetoed my best work before I showed it to him and consequently had not much going by way of work I had produced. Finally, because he was a kind man and liked me, he took my copy, threw in a few choice phrases of his own, retained a minimum of what I had written, corrected a bit of the long factual material I had assembled about coverage, and said I was done. I could take it to the responsible department, Personal Lines, and see how they liked it.

Personal Lines was a group of company underwriters whose job it was to produce policies for the public that would ensure that Safeco made a lot of money on the premiums. To sell the insurance, they had to first sell the independent agents on the policies. The brochure, which they were to put in ready-made dispensers on counter tops, were the key selling aid. So it was important to them and the business they sought that the brochures were attractive. This turned out to be more a matter of how they looked than what they said. They were to catch the eye first of the agent then of the client.

They seemed lukewarm to what I had written and masticated it for weeks, passing it back and forth among them, writing things in, striking things out, quarreling politely among themselves, arguing vehemently now, compromising, asking themselves the questions they imagined men—the market was largely men—might ask, if they were thinking of buying a snowmobile, or else insuring one they already owned. And at last the copy came back to me. It didn’t look awfully different from what I had sent them.

Fortunately during this interval I had other jobs I was working on, small ones, ongoing ones, ones involving routine printing and updating. So it wasn’t that I was not busy. In fact, I had a number of projects awaiting my attention, all of them equally onerous. But it was snowmobiles that mostly occupied my mind. I found that I hated them and would never, never, own one myself, no matter how far I had to go or how deep the snow was. I’d rather go there on snowshoes, thank you.

Finally the copy was approved enough so that I could find a designer to make a colorful brochure out of my oft-mangled words. This was the fun part of the job. Safeco employed no designers of its own, believing that it was a better value to farm out such work. They avoided paying overhead benefits and overtime, not to mention unproductive vacation time and sick leave. It was a businesses decision worked out with pencil and paper, long ago, and ostensibly sound. The worst thing for a company was to have people sitting at desks with nothing to do. I had to admit there was probably a lot of down time if you had your own art staff, as we had at the U. Still, nobody there seemed to be sitting on his hands, and overtime in the form of comp time was a regular work item, indicating that work that arrived in bunches could be well handled by paid staff.

Safeco felt differently. So I went out into the broad world in search of a designer who could execute an attractive brochure that featured my words, or rather, Doug’s, for the best part of the writing I had to admit was his. He had given me a list of art directors and publications designers that had worked successfully for the company in the past, but I was free to chose others and was encouraged to, for otherwise how could new blood (as it was called) be brought into the fold? But behind his urging I thought I detected a cautionary element and decided to pick somebody from the list, at least for the first time.

There were several who seemed to get most of Safeco’s business. One was Jim Richardson, another Bill Werbach. The underwriters liked what they had produced in the past and would be inclined to favor what they did in the future. This I inferred from Doug’s body language. It was better to be cautious than wrong, I decided. So I phoned Bill and made an appointment to meet with him. I didn’t have to wait long.

His offices were impressive. Bright and airy, open and colorful, it was a suite of rooms that opened to the East, six storeys up, in a downtown office building. The rent must have been something. His secretary looked up from her typewriter (they still had these, then) and gave me a big smile. Her lashes were starred, black, drawn out to points like the tines on a rake. Teeth next to perfect, lips cherry red, etc.

Life in a professional work environment, dependent on what the public brought in the door, made people keen and competitive, the women dressed fetchingly, the men sharp and stylish. Bill came forward to greet me, his hand outstretched. He was wearing an alarming striped shirt—alarming because already Safeco had programmed me to its archaic standards. How I envied that shirt and the freedom to wear it. He was a moon-faced man with a big smile, wide of girth, fairly tall. He had the manner of a man far behind in his work who is interrupted with necessary human contact (for such is business) and every minute away from the drafting table where he did his design, often into the night, made him further behind, but there was no escaping it, it was his business, it was his life.

We sat down at a conference table and Billy, the receptionist, brought us coffee. I declined cream and sugar. Bill took a sip of his and let it cool. It was a social nicety. All during my informal presentation I sipped from mine until it was gone. Bill listened closely, nodding from time to time. It was always up and down. I found myself offering a dual perspective, mine and the company’s. In other words, some of the stuff I was after was clearly mine and I was not ashamed of it. But some of the other stuff belonged to various people in Personal Lines and I did not necessarily agree with them, might strongly disagree, as a matter of fact, but what was involved still had to be done, I was powerless to change it. Here Bill nodded most strenuously up and down. I gathered that he had heard as much, time after time. He and Doug had done a lot of jobs together. I don’t think Doug expresses select reservations about an aspect of a job, but then he might have. They were fairly good friends away from work.

"I’ll have something to show you on Monday," he promised.

And he did. I signed out a company car, drove it downtown early in the morning, found myself a parkinglot nearby, circled up to the lowest available slot, put half my ticket under the windshield wiper on the driver’s side, and rode the elevator down to ground floor. I hurried down the street, rain softly falling at a wind-driven angle, and ducked into Bill’s office building. I rode the elevator up, strode down the hall, and entered the suite. The receptionist waved me ahead with half a look and a wan smile. Busy, busy.

He prefaced his presentation with a few words, half apologetic, but I knew he was proud of his work and not belittling it in any way. Again the coffee arrived without a word, mine a big white China mug with a picture of a frog on it. His was his customary one. It had a cartoon on it, one I had seen before, one he had done. It was familiar around town. Then he unveiled the comprehensive. He did it smoothly, unostentatiously, with still with a little flourish.

I can’t say I was entirely happy with it, but then who was I to be happy or otherwise? It was a good response to the job at hand. And here we get into matters of taste. Bill’s stuff was hopelessly old-fashioned. Well, old-fashioned is sometimes back in style. It was at this time. The Superman look was in, you know, the stuff with shadowed block lettering and bold process colors. It is sometimes called cartoon style, and Roy Lichtenstein introduced it into the world of modern art. From here it was quickly adapted by commercial artists, many of whom did cartooning as a sideline. Still it was not what I had in mind. If ruthlessly interrogated, I could not have said what it was I expected. So I accepted it. I murmured vague words of approval and tried to sound convincing, but I’m afraid I wasn’t very. Bill looked at me a little wounded, I thought. I was instantly sorry.

"It’s good," I said. "It’s very good."

"But it’s not what you wanted." How perceptive he was. As a writer who had been rejected many times, I did not want to be in this position. It was already too familiar.

"Let’s see what our client says," I offered.

The client, in short, liked it. No, I think his attitude was, if I brought it back, it must be good and he should like it, too, and of course, we had both approved the copy earlier, so it was just the design that was up for grabs. Now that was handily approved by Personal Lines. I phoned Bill. "They went for it. Great. Let’s go into production."

There were many jobs that proceeded about like this, with neither great enthusiasm coming from me or downright disapproval. A few I truly liked. And perhaps some of the dismay I felt was over the copy I had written. None of it was very good, I knew. But all of it would do the job, since the job was pretty crass and not discriminating. We were, after all, just trying to flag someone’s attention—first the agent, then the guy who would believe he couldn’t get along without our insurance—long enough to buy. A colorful, old-fashioned cartoon did the job nicely.

It wasn’t art, only business.

A typical day would go like this: arrive in the office, breathless, at four minutes after eight. This was incredibly early for me and it only took me a couple of days on the job to figure out precisely what the grace period was. It was less than five minutes. Eight o’clock arrival was mandatory, for everybody up to the top. And as with many companies that hold their employees to such a standard, if you got to work five or ten minutes early, you got to watch all the others trickle in with a superior attitude. Your reward was that you didn’t have to a stitch of work until long after the morning coffee break.

Here Safeco was efficient. I didn’t quite get the picture. If you wanted coffee, you had to bring it from home, or else go to the cafeteria, which was impossible to do, for you had only five minutes. I don’t think there is anybody in the world who can drink a cup of hot coffee in under five minutes.

So I got the bright idea of catered coffee. There were small firms in the neighborhood who made a scant living by arriving right on the dot with a coffee cart, and they would sell enough in the next few minutes to pay for their effort, even at a dime or fifteen cents a cup. (Today I suppose it would be more like eighty cents or a dollar.) So I arranged for one of the companies I knew of to come to Safeco for a presentation. To me it was the ideal solution to a problem that seemed to bother everyone, judging by the complaints I was hearing.

Only Safeco had a policy against catered coffee. It had been established and verified long ago. It was only I who hadn’t known. Poor Doug—he had to make public apology for me. He had to tell the brass—the assistant VP for marketing—that this stupid new-hire had asked the guys to come in and pass out their literature. No, it wasn’t a put-on. Nobody was tacitly criticizing their policy. It was just that the new guy, namely me, didn’t know any better. I think people have been fired for less. Instead, due to Doug’s intervention, they all saw it as a well-intended joke. For a while, anyway, I was known as the guy who hadn’t quite perpetrated a hoax. I was looked at almost as an entrepreneur. That was laudatory, in their book. All the same, the policy was immutable.

So Doug and I used to go out for coffee, presumably on the way to somewhere or another. He used to go on down The Ave. to a commercial firm, University Printing (no relationship to the U. or its own printing plant) and a designer he knew there who did jobs for Safeco and with whom he had a free-lance relationship. That is, they did outside jobs on the side. Doug and I would stop at the Donut Shop. That was really its name. We wouldn’t exactly linger, but we’d take our time, for it was a good place to discuss work, away from the Safeco environment which was deadly and seemed to kill all creative energy and initiative.

It was peculiar, odd, being out on the street in Safeco garb, after so recent an internment at the U. itself, where staff and faculty ape the garb of students and, if young enough, can pass for students themselves. So here I was, gone over to the enemy camp. I wanted to strip off my white shirt and tie, my suit coat, revealing my true nature beneath, that of liberal. Of course to the revolutionaries on The Ave., liberal was a curse word, often followed by the one implying a sexual relationship with your mother. In my book, always, liberal, or Liberal, was a compliment, a telling appellation, one to be proud of. I mean I had worked hard to be an intellectual (even if only a pseudo-), and it was nothing to be easily thrown away.

But they had no use for me, and I don’t blame them, and if I had been a drug user, as Dave Becker was, I would have had trouble scoring, because dressed as I was, and as Becker was every day at the U., we looked like narcs, and nobody would have anything to do with us. Which in my case made no difference. But I wouldn’t have minded a little camaraderie. This was singularly missing in my life at Safeco. I had to seek it elsewhere, and usually was unsuccessful. I hoped to find a few islanded pockets of resistance, as I had at Boeing, but failed, right up until the end, and then at the end, or near it, I did find a friend or two.

The dress code for men was rigid and bespoke worlds of conservatism; hence, there were few or none of the counter-culture men working there. Ah, but women, it was a far different matter. Since all the rules were made by men, and women only had a supportive role at Safeco, the code broke down. The fact that a young woman wore a very short skirt only meant she was fashionable. Besides, they Safeco men liked the sight. And if they caught their hair up in some wild scarf, the women seemed to be following some dress code determined by women, for women, and understood only by women. So whatever they wore, it served as a disguise. You never knew the political orientation of any of them by how they appeared. Which was just as well, for many of them were either married or living with radicals.

All it took was a minor alteration in their dress to effect the transformation.

I knew a few of them and had met their men. The living area around a university is often a hotbed and home to many hanger-oners of a determinedly practicing nature. And the world of the street, The Ave., merged invisibly with the world of the academic University seamlessly. You couldn’t tell from looking at a guy, for instance, whether he made bombs in the evening or studied for his general exams.

To hold a job at Safeco, I had to look a certain way, and hold it, and this was the same look that proclaimed me as enemy to the people of The Ave., or worse, a total non-entity. They had a way of not seeing me at all, especially the young women. What was I, thirty-five? That isn’t old. But as far as the street people went it was ancient. And even when I could mix with them and get away with it, I was beginning to feel like a senior citizen. I mean, I didn’t feel that way, not even when treated that way, but none the less felt much like an insider, even when supposedly accepted by them, such as in my old haunts.

Safeco people drank in cocktail lounges, often having martinis at lunch, something I could never abide, while the street people drank in seedy taverns that had jars full of pepperoni and hard-boiled eggs on the counter where glasses swam and skidded in spilled beer. I felt at home in neither place. Each preempted the other and made it impossible.

I was truly the outsider.

57

My day, is it? Okay, I’ve straggled in , just under the wire, and goofed off until coffee break, which I’ve taken outside the company, ostensibly to have a little meeting with Doug over steaming mugs and deep-fried donuts, his with sprinkles on them, mine plain as dirt, after which we’ve parted. I drift back to the Safeco Building, where I’ve reserved a car for a trip downtown to see a designer. I truck on down to the motor pool and claim my Ford Fairlane sedan, either pale blue or beige, but definitely non-descript and perfectly Safeco in its bland functionality.

By my side is my looks-like-leather slim briefcase, faux-pigskin, bearing the logo of Conference of Champions stamped in gold, stuffed with working papers and my ham-and-cheese sandwich. I gun the motor experimentally, if only to prove to myself that it will accelerate smoothly and not falter and leave me stranded in freeway traffic, sputtering and fuming, and pronounce it adequate to my mission. I ease my way out when an electric-eye beam is activated by my arrival and the door slides up exactly that on a rolltop desk, permitting me. The street, Brooklyn, is already streaming with traffic and I part it knowingly and merge right in. I don’t know about you, but driving a company car, especially one owned by an insurance company, gives me a sense of confidence I don’t ordinarily have, and I tend to speed up and dart heedlessly in and out of traffic, just taking the lane I want and daring somebody to hit me.

You’ve got Safeco to contend with, buddy, so you’d better back off. Whatever it is, it seems to work. (Conversely, tonight, in my own car, after work, I become cautious to a fault and often drawn honks of derision. Nobody knows what I intend to do next and has to drive with double caution.) Soon I’m on the freeway, I-5, headed downtown, which is only a few miles off. Five to be exact. And then I’m lucky, for I usually can find a place to park by a meter along the street and don’t have to check into a parking garage and, in my case, risk scraping a fender making one of those dizzyingly tight turns as you spiral up the ramp, passing all those floors that are already full. So my pockets are full of loose change in preparation. Naturally I will keep track of the loose coin I spend and put it down on my expense account.

You have an expense account? Gee whiz and golly. Yes I do, and I have to account for every nickel to some Scrooge who won’t wait until Christmas. He is an assistant vice-president in Marketing, a chain-smoker, a constant worrier, a man who I will soon be handling projects for and who simply will not delegate or acknowledge that I, or anybody else, am capable of carrying out a number of detailed jobs without constant supervision, even if I keep affirming that I can.

He will be dead of a heart attack by age 42. A nice guy at heart, everybody could see it happening, and its impact will not be diluted any by the fact that his death takes place at two P.M. on a Wednesday afternoon, on a golf course, not in his office, while he is approaching the seventh tee with a partner who is the company’s legal counsel. It is simply more of the business he could never get away from, even in his sleep.

At Safeco they were all chain smokers, back then, and many died of heart attack. Forty was a favorite age. If not then, somewhere near fifty. It was too young for lung cancer and stroke. Some I think courted it, for often it was a quick death. All of them were heavily over-insured. They knew the company would pay off. It didn’t bat an eye and did. With a nestegg like that, the widows, even with children, were young and attractive enough quickly to find new husbands. And the guys were finally rid of the vise-like trip of Safeco that if it didn’t crush your heart made mincemeat of your nuts.

I’d storm into the office of the designer, who knew I was coming, and perhaps even dreaded my arrival, while he needed and looked forward to it, for I brought business with me. I had reviews and approves authority, I knew, but had rather be valued for the cleverness of what I had written. There are not too many jobs in the world, I suspect, where you write something, then go out and find a designer to style a brochure or flyer around it, then arrange for it to be printed in some astronomical number. Once I wrote a Personal Lines stuffer about extended coverage, dull as yesterday’s beer, that the company had printed a million of, and they went out with everybody’s bill for two months.

Does that make you proud or proud? It made me miserable, after I had past the initial thrill presented by large numbers. A million. . . what? A tedious little piece of crap, and I had written it.

John Van Dyke was a designer I got along with quite well. He was good at what he did but hated it and longed to pack up and move to Montana or the UP of Michigan, where he would run a ski lodge or a trapline or some such business. In the meanwhile, he designed brochures for our agents that would knock your eye out. Together we planned our escape. His came first.

On a morning of my typical day I might visit John at his Post Street studio nearing mid-day and we would talk for a while, looking out the huge dormer windows at the activity in the street below, where trucks unloaded merchandise for stores and shops on First Avenue, only a block away. We were only a couple of storeys up, so the sight was taking place always near to eye level, so that it seemed we were personally involved in the commerce going on, the dollies being slipped under tall crates, pulled back, shuffled to the rear of the compartment, put on the lift (a kind of elevator affair) and lowered to the brick street, where it was wheeled away.

Now John saw it all day long, but he seemed as riveted as I, or else he was just being politely accommodating because I had to watch so. We faced the street, conducting our conversations as though riding sideways on one of those busseats just back of the driver, where you ride counter to everyone else. And John, as it were, was in the opposite sideways seat, parallel to me, again contrary to the rest of the world. Thus we discussed the fine points of the job I was giving him—perhaps a coordinated series of passouts and flyers for something called The Conference of Champions (I shit you not), held semi-annually in some wonderful semi-exotic setting, such as Maui or Acapulco.

Doug occasionally got to go to one, ostensibly to take pictures required for future conferences but also as a kind of reward for how well he ran things, including the annual report. This he wrote, all by his lonesome, and it was yearly testimony to Safeco acknowledging his talent, skill, and knowledge of the company, so his salary was not all that grand, though considerably above that of us peons. None of us begrudged him it, though to many of us it would be kind of nice to take a two-week winter vacation in the tropics. He had earned the trip.

So I had written material for the next upcoming conference and Doug had made his usual subtle, kindly revisions, and I had okayed it with Safeco Life, a company within the company, headed by Kelly Waller, an ex-Texan who was just about what you might expect, my having said that, and when you met him, tall, lanky, and aging, you tended to look around nearby for where he might have parked his horse. If his drawl had a tendency to dissipate after so many years away from its source, he had managed to bring it back or strengthen it, I know not how.

Is there such a thing as Texas lessons?

So John and I, riding sideways, on the same bus or on different horses, discussed the pros and cons of this or that, all having to do with dressing up my lame copy and making it so attractively presented that nobody would notice how vapid it was. I trusted John. He had wonderful taste. There are people, and he was one of them, whose judgment in aesthetic or artistic matters never falters. They can be depended on.

But as I said he was restless. Even having his own business, and doing what he was good at, did not quell his thirst for change, variety. He had an idea, he mentioned.

"Tell you about it at lunch, okay? Lunch is on me."

This was the usual route at Safeco. The client, the artist, whomever, often bought you lunch. It was part of the package, part of the deal, but this bothered me. It bothered me greatly.

"Only if we go Dutch," I countered.

"You’re kidding?"

"No, I‘m not."

"I can write it off. A business expense."

"All the same."

"Okay, okay."

So we went down the street and around the corner to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant I used to eat in when I was stationed here in the Army, the Federal Office Building then being located practically next door to John’s studio, which used to give me a weird feeling of living my life all over again, and it had excellent home-made soup, different daily, and you could order a cup, with a full sandwich, or a bowl with half a sandwich, a practice which is pretty common, everywhere in the world. Today was minestrone, but minestrone with a twist. I never figured out what the twist was, but it was delicious.

John told me how a ski resort had flown him back to its headquarters in the UP in order to discuss a series of promotionals, including what they had to offer during the summer (mostly trout fishing in nearby streams), and he had been fascinated by the place. It was a dilemma I was familiar with and was experiencing myself. You had your city, with all its creature comforts, but its traffic and human congestion and noise, and then there was the country, actually the deep woods, where all was tranquil and beautiful, but there was not much business. Yet if he could build up a base of clients, one of which was this ski lodge, he wouldn’t need many in order to survive on a greatly reduced scale, but then he had always been able to live modestly. Why, this studio here cost him nearly a thousand dollars a month, etc.

I listened and chewed my ham sandwich. I could certainly understand the appeal of the place and longed in a way to go there myself, even though I had now rented my cabin at Deer Creek on the Stilly and fished there whenever I could, which was often. Not so often, I had to admit, as when I was at the U., but pretty frequently, all the same. My wife and I went there many weekends out of the year, mostly in summer. In the winter, I went fishing there alone on day trips, except when cold, clear weather prevailed, when she would come along with me and shiver. The wood stove in the cabin cooked you on one side and left you freezing on the other.

John showed me pictures they had sent him, plus pictures he had taken during his sojourn. I had to admit, it was a pretty place. John was a bachelor, a true bachelor, not just a guy of indeterminate sexuality who usually found himself doing something with the guys, and only mooned about girls, or worse, a guy who knew he liked guys but wasn’t ready (no one was) to admit this to the world and so lived a separate, clandestine life away from work. The snow bunnies he saw opened up a world of opportunity. He grinned. His only competition was the ski instructors. These, he felt, he could handle.

We returned to his office and finished off defining the specifications of the project. We shook hands on the deal. Seventy-five percent of what we had talked about, both in and out of his studio, was about a choice of personal life styles. The business part was quickly agreed to and dispensed with. Two people who work well together can do this. Their relationship is simpatico, tacit, instinctive. Soon John pulled up stakes and went East. In spite of how closely and well we could work together, neither of us has heard from the other in, let me see, thirty-five years. Wherever you are John, I wish you the best.

I returned to the office just as the mail arrived. This was company mail, but included stuff from the postal service, so it was a mix. At a given time I might have a dozen different jobs going and in various stages of completion; completion meant being printed and going off into the world. Some I would be writing, some out to the client for approval (or drastic revision, or something in between), to a designer, back to a designer after changes at Safeco from (1) me, (2) Doug, (3) the client, (4) the client’s boss, namely Kelly Waller, the slick Texan. I was working more and more in his company and less with Personal Lines; I was also assigned to help develop written material for the fledgling organization, Safeco Securities, which was their entry in the mutual fund field.

Oops, wrote "mutual fun" field there, and had to go back and add a "d." Truthfully, it wasn’t much fun. No fund is.

So I’d go through my mail and separate out a pile of work that needed immediate attention. Often it bore a sticker saying just that, in flaming red. The other stuff could go to the side and pile up, with stuff much like it being added after each mail deliver or sometimes arriving in someone’s hand. I’d begin to bear down on some writing task, which is not always easy to do; people interrupt you, the telephone rings insistently, somebody drops by and wants to chat because you are "only writing," etc. It is why so many people take work home at night. It can’t get done during the regular business hours. People keep getting in the way.

Soon it would be coffee break. I remembered the immortal words of the head of Boeing personnel at his retirement party. He proudly announced, in all his twenty or thirty years of working there, he had never missed a coffee break. It brought down the house. I, in turn, had made a similar pledge to myself, but already I had broken it. Perhaps the Boeing guy was speaking metaphorically. Instead of never he meant rarely. That would be more like it.

There were numerous coffee shops around The Ave., and the Donut Shop was perhaps the poorest. Right across the street was the hotel my parents and I had stayed at upon our arrival in Seattle in January, 1942, the Edmond Meany, but it was now the landmark University Towers, in my opinion a humbler name. It had a formal dining room, a coffeeshop (same place where as a boy of eleven I was permitted to go down to and order my own breakfast, while my mother slept in), and now I was going over there for my escape break and for an occasional lunch. The old association was never entirely obliterated. The place also had a cocktail lounge. It was a favorite Safeco hangout, and usually after work there were the old standby dependables ensconced in its deep green synthetic leather booths or at the trim tables in the center of the room, while waitresses in decorous black and white scurried back and forth filling orders.

Jim Richardson was one of our favorite designers, and he preferred coming to our offices, rather than us coming to his, which were in Pioneer Square and quite nice. Parking was not yet a severe problem either place. I think it was more that he enjoyed a visit to Straight City, as it might be called. Of all the uptight places in Seattle, Safeco sanctimoniously deserved and claimed the title. He wasn’t exactly a counter-culture type, though. He had a slick chameleon personality and could fit in almost anywhere, for artists and designers are not business types, in any sense of the words, but nonetheless are in business and must ape those who are or suffer the consequences, which are no work arriving on your doorstep. So they had to pretend. (We all did.) Some did a more convincing job than others.

Jim was good and funny. It is hard to tell another how somebody is funny and make it convincing, but let me try (and fail). This was back in the days when homosexuals stayed hidden and it was commercial death to let people know you were one, unless you had incredible redeeming talent. Few did. Most were poor guys trying to stay alive. And then homosexuals were believed to be effeminate; the more effeminate a man was the surer the world was that he was homosexual. The word gay hadn’t been invented yet and if used in this context would have been entirely mislead. But queer, fairy, and homo were in common parlance. All were derogatory. There were no neutral words.

We all subscribed to this behavior while at the same time we knew it wasn’t true to life. It was unreal, but then advertising deals with what is commonly held to be true and the world of stereotypes and clichés. It is what we all dealt with at Safeco and elsewhere. So to make allusion to it, the world of homosexuals, or how homosexuals were perceived to be, was ordinary and, naturally, they were humorous. We didn’t know precisely what they did when in each other’s sexual company (this was yet to come), but we knew that it had something to do with wanting to be women and on the bottom, instead of ramming it in on top.

So Jim, who was straight as a board, but who worked with homosexuals, as did we all, and with men who were decidedly effeminate, had a way of mimicking the behavior of someone who was extremely effeminate. This he would do in a kind of you-and-me private consortium as a kind of running gag, and it was very effective on me. Jim would lift an eyebrow or bat his long eyelashes, or lift his hand with an excess of wrist in the motion, and it would simply break me up. This is shameful for me to relate, but it is necessary, for it pretty much sums up my remembrance of Jim as a very funny fellow. His design work was excellent and Doug often chose him for some of the tougher jobs. Then, across the crowded room in which we all worked, Jim would cast me a private look, one of the above, and I would dissolve into the giggles.

Such power. I think my co-workers believed I was having a breakdown. Nothing funny was going on in the room. Quite the opposite. Safeco is not known as a hilarious place. But for a short moment or two Jim Richardson could make it one, at least for me.

He had the contract to design and layout the magazine, Safeco Agent. This was the things true name, and without his design to lift it up out of the mire it would have been quickly seen for what it was, a dreary company product to woo agents and feed them a line of dire propaganda. It was edited by Bob Sincock, who had previously edited a farm journal and who was deadly sincere. He had a drinking problem. Hell, he had a lot of problems, one of which was that he lived in the Nineteenth Century. His mind was still on the farm. This was not as much a handicap to the magazine’s editor as one might think. It probably served him well.

He was a pleasant, well-meaning guy, a bit naive and foolish. Safeco was on to his case. They urged him to find work elsewhere, but did not fire him, though they could have, since there were no laws to prevent them from; quite the contrary. They were known to give a person his final check on a Friday afternoon as a big surprise. Thus, Friday afternoons—elsewhere an occasion for light-heartedness, what with the weekend at hand—was a time for dread at Safeco. You were apt to receive an unannounced visit from your boss, or your boss’s boss. Often the guy thoughtfully brought a cardboard box for you to loan your personal possessions into. How kind, how generous. You didn’t have to return the box. It was a gift. And all your accrued vacation time was totaled in on your final check.

There was no problem about accumulated sick leave because there was no sick leave.

Instead of this, the Friday afternoon visit, Bob Sincock was kept on without hope of a pay increase, in this a time of mounting inflation. It was their message to him: starve to death and see if we care. Bob hung on, month after month, year after year; already he was nearing retirement. Finally, when he was just over a year away from sixty-five, they gave him the old heave-ho.

When it came down to it, retirement benefits the company would have to pay if he was fully vested outweighed his marginal usefulness. I didn’t get to see this, luckily, for by then I was long gone myself and off to a new sortie.

58

We were—and I’m not kidding—the Creative Department, branch of Marketing, and I’m capitalizing the names now to try to lift them up and enhance them some. Besides Doug, there was Mary Smiley, who appropriately was never be caught with other than a dour expression on her sad little face. She had a complexion problem as well. She was in charge of my training, when I arrived, but it was actually Doug who ended up doing most of it, in addition to practically everything else. Mary was a dependable writer and could turn out a volume of work. I think she often carried the whole department, in its daily grind of sales aids aimed at the independent insurance agencies that sold our products. They were our customer, rather than all the people who ended up buying Safeco insurance in a very competitive market.

We wooed them, these independent agents, catering to their whims and proudly assisting them in what was deemed most important to them, their independence. Therefore the Conference of Champions. No, these guys (very few of them were women) didn’t have to sell a million dollars worth of our product each year in order to go on company-paid junket, but they had to reach certain monetary goals, which varied, depending on what kind of insurance or mutual fund it was.

Mary was good at this particular kind of writing. It took a particular talent, and Doug knew this. Mary didn’t much like me, a smart-ass, who was being paid a lot more than she was and couldn’t produce decent copy, not for a long time, and even then it was not very good. She tried to have as little to do with me as possible. I cooperated fully. She lived with her mother and, I suspected, always would. It was a deeply closeted life, in the old fashioned sense of the word. If guys ever looked at Mary it was in terms of a sister. This may give a woman male friends, but none of the kind she is seeking, and pretty soon she gives up. Expectations have to have some chance of being fulfilled or else they become something else. Its name is doom.

Barry Harem also held a desk in the creative department. (Note now how I do not capitalize it, treating it downstyle, as it were, because I only once so indulged myself and, frankly, the words looked silly, with the large initial cap starting them out. Besides, it is what others called us, not what we called ourselves—we who were word-conscious and knew we were not more than company hacks, call us what you will. If Mary was closeted in the old-fashioned sense of the word, poor Barry was in the modern sense. He was young and boyish, and when you are in your twenties both these qualities are prevalent in people your age and do not stand out as special; when you get older, old, they are not natural and seem either contrived or oddly out of place. People may think you strange in any of the various senses of the word. At the present (I did not see him age) Barry was sandy-haired, slender, and, well, graceful.

A man does not like to be called graceful. It smacks of effeminacy. Barry was this, but only slightly. He walked a fine line. At work he got along well with the women. They always seemed to be chatting, laughing, at this or at that. With men he was a big aloof. With men this is okay. Men are not naturally chummy, and develop and maintain a jocularity that holds one another at a distance, while seemingly sharing a whole world. Do not believe it. We learn to talk the nuances of sports in seasons as a convention, never quite believing in it or that it has substance, but exchange sports scores and fishing stories as another means of seeming to draw closer even while we hold the others at arm’s length.

Much as the designer, Jim Richardson, could break me up with visual gags having to do with his mistakable effeminacy, Barry Harem could be broken up by me with insights into an imaginary life I led that was stranger than strange. We used to eat our sack lunches together at our desks in the echo, rattling great room we all shared during the day, everybody else gone off to a restaurant and, I suppose, a couple of drinks. To get along well at Safeco all you had to do was drink and smoke cigarettes and talk about lawn care and your golf game. Since Barry and I did none of these things, we were pretty much alienated from the mainstream. I mean, we smoked, or he did, and we drank, but it was only beer, and beer was not the beverage of choice in Safeco business circles. It marked you as a Democrat, at the ever least, and perhaps even working class.

True enough.

Once, while we were preparing to roll out bologna sandwiches from our sacks, a group drifted by and urged us to go out and eat with them. We both declined. For some reason, the group hovered over me, trying to convince me to sack the sack and join them. I kept declining, and when they had left, told Barry, "You see, nobody has ever seen me eat."

Not funny, I know, in context it was just right, and it broke him up. In a moment he was giggling uncontrollably. We used to clown around a lot. I was undergoing some unpleasant dentistry at the moment and my mind was clogged with thoughts of more and how much it cost, how unpleasant it was, etc., and since we were always talking about the books we never wrote and what they would be about, my current project was a book about Hollywood. It would sell well because of its unique prospective. "It was entitled "Dentist to the Stars." It would detail the lives of famous actors and actresses solely from the standpoint of their teeth. It could even contain such gems as what Bette Davis said while under anesthesia while having a root canal. Silly stuff like this.

Barry was free-lancing at the time, writing articles for the posh local mag, Seattle, and occasionally they would accept one. All the good local writers, usually employed on one of the two daily newspapers, published in it as often as they could and competition was keen. This was back before my free-lancing days and perhaps Barry’s experience with this kind of writing led me to trying it myself, but not now. For now I wanted to write nothing. The job was difficult enough for me. I was no natural.

Then Hal was hired. They brought him on to fill my regular slot, since I was now assigned full-time to life and mutual funds. It was a natural matriculation, and as the departments expanded they wanted more and more sales aids. My efforts went from part time to most of my time to nearly all of my time. Meanwhile the stuff I handled for personal lines didn’t get done. Hence, Hal. He was recruited from Blue Cross, where he had done much the same sort of thing. Work for one insurer is presumed qualification for employment with another, no matter how unalike they are, and this is correct, for the skills are easily transferable.

Hal Cohen was good. There are some people who are naturals, and he was one. He wrote good, funny advertising copy, right off the bat. How I envied him. Envying him so, we could not become friends. It is doubtful we could have been, even otherwise. We got along well enough, and I did not begrudge him anything but rather saluted him and his talent. I told myself that Hal was in just the right slot. He could do this well, but perhaps nothing else. But here at Safeco you didn’t need to do anything else, or want to. And I still had hopes of being a good writer at something else, some day. With this Barry Harem and I had more in common. As it turned out, when I left, Hal slid easily into my slot and both the life and mutual fund departments welcomed him. I’m sure he acquitted himself well. I know they did, because if they had been satisfied with me, and they were, think how much better it would be if they had somebody who knew what he was doing, rather than groping his way along from day to day.

The days passed. It’s funny how you pass from feeling entirely out of place to being loosely accepted to being oddly at ease in your work. It is a process of seduction. But always there was this strong feeling of alienation. It was not as bad as the Army, of course, or even as bad as Boeing, which wasn’t so bad because of the underground that sustained us, or gave us the illusion it was. It was like being in a foreign country whose language you had learned how to speak by a rigorous application of learning tapes, so that now you could speak and be vaguely comprehended, and they could speak, speak slowly, and you had some good idea of what they had said, though you had missed all nuances. In fact, I could speak Insurance, and all the words seemed to be in the right places and make sense, right up until the time you examined them closely, at which point everything I said (or wrote) fell apart. When it did it made absolutely no sense.

Doug knew, I was certain.

Meanwhile, time passed. We entered the month marked by Thanksgiving. One of the pleasant jobs of the creative department was to write slogans for the Safeco readerboard. It was a circle of lights spelling out messages that ran around the top of the old Safeco building and announced to the world, or at least the world of the University District, whatever the management wanted it to. We all competed in writing monthly slogans and it was a feather in your cap for the ensuing month when one of yours was chosen.

Never was one of mine. True, I seldom submitted one. This month I did. It was, "Take your turkey and stuff it." Naturally it was deemed funny as hell. Everybody—Doug especially—gave me a pat on the back and a chuckle. Nobody took me seriously. I had meant it seriously. Why couldn’t Safeco show it had a sense of humor, or whatever it was, if they had chosen to run my words as a banner? My co-workers saw this insistence as more of the useless humor I was so keen at creating—to use a popular word for it?

That was me, funny and useless.

I have mentioned that all around, outside the Safeco building, a war was waging. It was not just the war in Viet Nam but the internal war, the Second American Civil, it might well become known as and go down in the history books as. The country was crucially divided, ripped right down the middle, and there was rioting in the streets, at least in university towns, and this was one of them. The wives and girl friends of male radicals were employed at Safeco and indistinguishable, dresswise, from other young women who strove to be fashionable, and Safeco’s dress code, so rigid for men, was of absolutely not useful application for them. Blithely these young women typed at desks, filled out forms, served as claims agents, answered telephones, while half a mile off their male friends took drugs, silkscreened revolutionary posters, and perhaps even built Molotov cocktails.

I remember a discussion I had with a very conservative woman in the forms control department, where out printing requests originated. She said everybody argued against the war, sure, but nobody would do anything about it, if given the opportunity, and I was no exception. What, for example, would I give up, to have to war ended and "our boys" brought home?

"Everything I own," I said simply, sincerely. Of course I didn’t possess much.

She would not accept my answer as genuine, so I shrugged and walked away. A couple of desks away was a pretty young woman I knew fairly well; she spent most of her free time in protest activities and her husband was one of the more militant guys around. Not for this reason but because her work was not very good, Safeco was on the edge of firing her. I had hoped they wouldn’t, but knew there was nothing I could do to prevent it from happening. The only question was when.

I suppose it was hypocritical of me not to mention this to her. But what if the grapevine was wrong? And wouldn’t I be giving her unnecessary worries ahead of time? Isn’t it better, in such a situation, to be suddenly surprised by Safeco (and life) than to be forewarned? From the standpoint of strife I’m sure it is.

A package arrived for me in the company mail. It was one of those large manila envelopes, with lines for addressees up and down the front and on the back a little wheel that can close the flap by wrapping a piece of string round and round it, till only the tag is left. The contents were bulky. There was no place for a return address on the front because it is what is called a forwarding envelope. Next time it is used, you simply cross off the previous recipient, which is always yourself. Rather than dumping the contents out on my desktop, as I usually do, I peered inside instead. I saw two loosely rolled joints of marijuana and a roachclip on a beaded thong.

I raced off with my envelope and dumped the joints in the men’s room toiled. The clip I pocketed. It was innocuous in itself and could be mistaken for a trinket of many kinds. A talisman, a key chain, a good-luck charm. A few days later I got a routine call from a woman in forms control. Did I know that Suzanne had been fired? No, I hadn’t. True, I’d suspected it would happen, but thought I might hear some further word before the dire event happened. I rushed up to the department, looking wildly, right and left. Her desk was bare as a stone. The woman who had phoned me shrugged both shoulders. I asked her if she knew where Suzanne lived? No, she didn’t, but it was somewhere handy, since Suzanne had walked to work. And then I asked, sheepishly, what was her last name, for I had never known it; this is how it is with some people, even if you have grown relatively close, close that is for a business relationship.

"Walker."

I found it in the phone book, or rather several, and started calling them at random, on company time. Fuck the company. No, no, yes. It was Suzanne herself.

"I’m terribly sorry," I started.

"Oh, that’s okay," she said cheerfully. "I was expecting it. Were you?"

"I’d heard something, but didn’t want to mention it, in case I was wrong."

"Yes, but still I wish you had said something."

"Sorry," I said again.

"Did you get your Christmas present?"

"Is that what it was? Yes, thanks."

"Have you smoked it?"
"I’m not much of one for grass. Not since the U.S. Army, anyway."

"It was primo stuff. You’d have liked it. Give it to a friend. It’ll help you get through a Safeco day."

"Look, I want to come over."

"Okay."

"Four-thirty?"

"Sure."

It was normal quitting time, the people fleeing through doors, abandoning the ship. But Suzanne and I didn’t have much to say, as might be expected. I wanted our parting, our former friendship, to end on a more personal note than word-of-mouth or, a bit better, the telephone.

"What will you do?" she asked, over Earl Grey tea. I declined a brownie because I feared it might be loaded.

"Hand around a while longer, I suppose, and look for another job."

"Where?"

"Beats the shit out of me. There must be one, somewhere." I hadn’t forgotten how desperate I was to land this one and how I had been forced to hired an employment service and pay them grandly.

I soon left, feeling better than despondent.

We had another Friday termination, one right in our department. The creative group (we were less than a department) was part of marketing, as I said, and there were two marketing guys who were operational research types, very straight-collar and pointed lapels. One was Dave Barnes, an MBA from the University and the other Russ Miller, whose degree was from Berkeley. Since I had gone to graduate school there, this drew us together or seemingly did so. Russ was an odd-ball; perhaps too much of riotous Telegraph Avenue had rubbed off on him to leave him truly a businessman. And there was something a bit perverse, even masochistic, about him. For instance, he was always heavily at work by the time I checked in, at the last possible moment. Word was, he arrived around seven, supped from his thermos, attacked his spread sheets and calculator (this was before pocket devices were so prevalent), and had made a great advance on the day. He was trying to demonstrate to everyone in marketing what a superior talent he was and how he should have the job (and office) that his boss had. But it was transparent and was working conversely. It was Russ who looked odd, peculiar.

And when it was quitting time, Russ hung in there. He’d work nightly until around six. Rather than prove his dedication, it indicated that he was chronically behind in his work and that there must be something wrong. Work was sometimes, often, taken home in a briefcase (and brought back the next morning, untouched), but rarely attended to after office hours. Russ was drawing attention to himself.

At first people—the assistant VP for marketing, the advertising director, Doug—thought he was being overworked and kidded Dave about it. Dave replied that he had only a normal workload and might be drawing it out for some obtuse reason. When the kidding persisted, he thought people might not believe him and cut back some of Russ’s load. The hours, after-hours, remained the same.

Russ started to make mistakes, as well, almost as though he did his work once, correctly, then went back to undo it. Dave kindly pointed out his errors to him and when they persisted pointed them out not so kindly. Russ looked up with a hangdog expression. There was something wrong here, we all knew. It was either Russ or Dave, and a tie goes to the higher ranking individual. We never saw or heard it specifically but Dave began to wear a grim look on his face, whenever he was in the office. This wasn’t all the time, but often enough. Something had to give. It did, on one of those dreaded Friday afternoons, most of the supervisor well oiled from a long lunch. Dave, too.

He handed Russ his personal effects in a box.

"Here’s your check," he said. "Russ, I’m sorry it happened this way. It just isn’t working out. Best of luck."

"I want to tell everybody good-bye. I need a few hours, you know, to get my stuff together."

"I’m sorry, Russ, but you don’t have the time. This way is for the best. If we find anything of yours, I’ll have it mailed to your address."

"You can’t do this to me." By now Russ was in tears. Since he had a desk in the open area and Dave had one of the small offices, with a desk that wore an overhang, as did Doug’s, indicating rank, none of this was even thinly disguised.

"Come inside and we’ll talk," Dave said.

"I won’t," Russ replied hotly.

"Then just go. Be a man about it."

"What would you know about being a man, you rat?"

Dave walked off, into his office, and closed the door behind him, something that wasn’t usually done during business hours, not unless an important meeting took place, one involving personnel matters (which this clearly was), and was so unusual as to have a pronounced effect on everybody in the bay. Today, however, it is what separated him from the newly terminated employee who was being difficult. Dave had been driven into hiding, or something that might briefly pass for hiding. It wouldn’t be for long or amount to much.

Russ looked up from his desk, now cleared of all work except for his cardboard box, which wasn’t really work, only the residue of work, or what was left over when all work was gone. His eyes searched out each of us. One by one, as his gaze circled the large room, we each looked aside. We couldn’t meet his eyes. We couldn’t even summons, among us, a look of true commiseration. What we wanted was him gone.

It was a little like being at a funeral, I suppose. More than half the feeling of excitement and suppressed joy is from the simply fact that you are alive, while the other poor slob is in his coffin. Nobody wants to admit it, but it is where the thrill comes from. And my eyes were no exception.

59

We from the creative group were called into the auditorium whenever the advertising department, two guys, had a presentation from the agency that had the Safeco contract. I think they wanted to swell their numbers. Also the VP for marketing, who we rarely saw otherwise, and the assistant, Howie, who was to die so early of a heart attack on the golf links, were there.

Seated in plush theatrical seats in a mini-amphitheater, we settled back and waited for the show to start. It was usually pretty spectacular, coming as it did from NYC, where everything done was done big and set a standard around the country for display.

Because I was known to be critical and outspoken, I was warned each time ahead of the presentation to speak kindly to these guys, who were sensitive types, and not mock their ideas, or ridicule them, but to try to treat them as the serious efforts they were.

"You’re kidding?" I asked.

"No, we’re not," said Doug.

"Okay, I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise anything. You know me, how I am."

"That’s why we’re talking to you this way ahead of time."

"Look, they won’t exactly turn us down. It doesn’t work this way."

"No, we know it doesn’t work this way, but at the same time we don’t want them to think we’re a bunch of flakes."

"Are you saying that I can make you all look like a bunch of flakes? Boy, I never realized I had such power."

"Just try to be nice."

"I shall."

The idea this year was to haul in the Pink Panther from Walt Disney, or wherever, and have him represent the company (now a corporation) in its print and television advertising. Print was mainly newspapers and TV was during the news programs or sporting events, because it was mostly men (99 percent) who bought insurance and men like (1) news), (2) sports. These principles were sacrosanct.

"You got to be kidding? The Pink Panther? He’s for kids, isn’t he? Didn’t Peter Sellers do some kind of movie evoking him? A mystery? Where’s the connection? I mean, with insurance?"

I think all the Safeco people were a little miffed at me for, in my first year there, and it was barely past, I had suggested they take on their chief competitor, Allstate, by directly going after Allstate’s famed advertising program, calling themselves "The Good Hands People." I suggested we might adapted a direct frontal assault on this with something I called, "Ooops."

It’s what happens when The Good Hands People muff the catch and drop the ball, the ball being either coverage or the insured’s satisfaction with his settlement. To me it was a keen idea and one worth about forty thousand dollars a year.

Safeco thought differently. I think they thought Allstate might get really miffed and crush them.

So I listened while grown men and a couple of women sat around and saw sketches of how the famous Pink Panther (who was available by lease, very expensive) might be used to introduce a string of personal-lines insurance, including my very own snowmobile policy. This I could see, the goofy elongated cat riding around on one, emitting explicatives and nutty exclamations. But in all other areas I thought he would be demeaning and make insurance (always a serious subject among men, for it usually only paid off when you had died) seem foolish. And I had to say as much, even though each time the Pink Panther had appeared in a flipchart or overhead projection, I’d heard a happy murmur go round the room. It was the sound of group approval.

Once again I was a candidate for a Friday Afternoon Surprise. Once more I had narrowly averted one. Doug or someone might have seen my redeeming value. Pity I couldn’t see it myself.

When Christmas came round, naturally there was a Christmas tree in every department, or rather unnaturally, and everybody was in a festive mood. Our designers sent us each presents and I was perplexed, for they were expensive and often embarrassing in their inappropriateness. So I called my father, who was still active in business and an executive, and asked him how he handled such gifts, for I had remembered them arriving at this time throughout the years of my boyhood. The Esquires I had cut my sexual eyeteeth on all had been presents from various wholesalers or manufacturers. I was also aware that he had sent back many presents but not the bottles of Scotch. I asked him, what are the rules, or are there any?

He told me that if it was something you could eat or drink, he’d accept it. Generally it shouldn’t cost more than $10—the old ten dollars, which would be worth about forty or fifty now. Otherwise, back it went, with a card of acknowledgment and his regrets. This was before Hubert Humphries famed, Anything you can’t eat or drink in forty-eight hours. Or was it Walter Mondale?

So I started returning things. Everybody thought I was nuts. What you did was smile when you opened it, put it aside as being slightly beneath you, then spirit it home in your briefcase or in its original wraps at quitting time.

I asked my father about this and he said, "Ask yourself if they would be sending you these gifts"—pen and pencil sets, a wristwatch, a cashmere neck scarf—"if you didn’t work for Safeco. That’s always a good test." In every case, the answer was a definite no. And a redeeming fact that kept me from being too self-righteous was that I desired and had no use for any of this stuff.

Which brings us to the Artists’ Ball. It was a great party held in the week just before Christmas and all the designers and printers and illustrators all chipped in to throw it for their clients, which included Safeco. Originally it had just included Doug, but now the invitations were extended to all of us, plus the two in advertising. We all generated a lot of revenue to them and the individual good opinion of each of us was worth real money in the coming year.

It was also a good occasion to see what real artists did in their off-hours. What a surprise. Not a Safeco Friday Afternoon Surprise, no, but something of a shock to see what life must be like in the closet. These were spirited people, flamboyant, wild. Of course many of them were gay, but that word wasn’t in current use. "Queer" is how me might have phrased it to ourselves, and it was not until right now, using it, that I became aware of its terrible, hateful characteristics. I think it ought to be put away for all time, and a host of synonyms used in its place.

All would be kinder, less exact.

had cut my sexual eyeteeth on all had been presents from various wholesalers or manufacturers. I was also aware that he had sent back many presents but not the bottles of Scotch. I asked him, what are the rules, or are there any?

He told me that if it was something you could eat or drink, he’d accept it. Generally it shouldn’t cost more than $10—the old ten dollars, which would be worth about forty or fifty now. Otherwise, back it went, with a card of acknowledgment and his regrets. This was before Hubert Humphries famed, Anything you can’t eat or drink in forty-eight hours. Or was it Walter Mondale?

So I started returning things. Everybody thought I was nuts. What you did was smile when you opened it, put it aside as being slightly beneath you, then spirit it home in your briefcase or in its original wraps at quitting time.

I asked my father about this and he said, "Ask yourself if they would be sending you these gifts"—pen and pencil sets, a wristwatch, a cashmere neck scarf—"if you didn’t work for Safeco. That’s always a good test." In every case, the answer was a definite no. And a redeeming fact that kept me from being too self-righteous was that I desired and had no use for any of this stuff.

Which brings us to the Artists’ Ball. It was a great party held in the week just before Christmas and all the designers and printers and illustrators all chipped in to throw it for their clients, which included Safeco. Originally it had just included Doug, but now the invitations were extended to all of us, plus the two in advertising. We all generated a lot of revenue to them and the individual good opinion of each of us was worth real money in the coming year.

It was also a good occasion to see what real artists did in their off-hours. What a surprise. Not a Safeco Friday Afternoon Surprise, no, but something of a shock to see what life must be like in the closet. These were spirited people, flamboyant, wild. Of course many of them were gay, but that word wasn’t in current use. "Queer" is how me might have phrased it to ourselves, and it was not until right now, using it, that I became aware of its terrible, hateful characteristics. I think it ought to be put away for all time, and a host of synonyms used in its place.

All would be kinder, more useful, less cruel.

The ball was held on a Thursday night, a terrible time. It was a costume event. I am not a costume-type person. I have enough trouble being myself at all times without resorting to impersonation, though I admit it is tempting to try for a few hours to escape myself and all the attendant baggage. But it is next to impossible.

"Couldn’t I just wear a black mask over my eyes and let it go at that?" I asked plaintively.

It would be a form of copout, I was informed. We were the creative department. A lot was expected of us. Weren’t we the imaginary types? I had previously thought so. Now I believe it was all a fraud. We were less creative than any other people employed by Safeco. We were all frauds. Over in the staid insurance company (a series of companies small and large now all comprising a corporation) were a bunch of ordinary people, most of them guys, just dying for an opportunity to dress up like somebody else, usually women.

"You’re kidding?" I asked; it was getting to be my favorite form of expression. Often it is, for someone who is constantly kidding and can’t recognize the creature when it springs on him from another direction, that is, somebody else.

Doug asked, "Doesn’t your wife have some spare clothes you could wear?"

"To tell the truth, I’ve always wanted to slip into a pair of her high heels."

"Now your talking."

I don’t know whether it was too many Conferences of Champions or lunches out with art directors or what, but Doug had put on many pounds since I had met him, in spite of heavy smoking and a taxing schedule. Perhaps he was one to eat his way through difficulties. His wife had let out the waistband of his trousers not once but twice. He had tried quitting smoking, cutting down on meals or proportions, but nothing had helped. The smoking actually had helped hold down his weight. So he went back on cigarettes, his moods and temperament improved, but his weight did not drop. He was very sensitive about it.

Safeco had a big Christmas dinner a few days before the artists’ ball and we all went to it in the company cafeteria, which was decorated specially and an occasion on which to bring out the linen, as they only did for an in-house meal for the Conference of Champions. The meal was turkey, with all the trimmings, and it was not free, though Safeco had greatly reduced its price. Some Christmas present—you had to pay for your own company dinner. But it was a good meal. Doug was late in arriving and we held a place for him. We were not official seated by department but most people had chosen to arrange themselves that way.

Doug had been with a client, a vendor, an artist, and I think they had imbibed a bit across the street at University Towers. I saw him come shuffling in, just as we pushed aside the soup plates and announced we were ready for the bird and all the rest. Extra chairs were fetched from across the way for him and there soon was a surplus. He stood hesitantly.

"Pull up a couple of chairs and sit down," I said smartly.

He looked startled for a moment, then began to laugh. Everybody laughed with him. I was a funny guy, there for a moment. Another time it might have landed flat as a bomb. Today it was just right.

Finally Thursday rolled round and all the talk in our group was on what they were going to wear tonight. Norma, my wife, announced that she was not going. Among other absurdities, it would require hiring a baby sitter. As for me, I hung undecided. It was a business occasion and I really should go.

"Then go," she told me. "Just stop talking about whether you are going to go or not."

"But what will I wear?" I asked lamely.

She did not say, and I thank her for this, is, Why not go out and buy yourself a new dress. Since you don’t fit into any of mine. Instead I wore my son’s old black Halloween mask, the kind you wear when you want everybody to know exactly who you are but want to appear as if you are going along with a gag you aren’t going along with. If you know what I mean.

They had hired a whole restaurant for the occasion, then moved out about half the tables so there would be more room to maneuver and for the bandstand, on which a variety of entertainment would take place, across the course of the evening. I got there late and found everybody drunk. Well, that is what happens when you go late to a party and have been dry yourself. It is the price you must pay. Many people hurry to catch up with the drinking crowd. I do not and suffer the consequences, which is debilitating sobriety.

What a mad event it is. I arrive more than fashionably late, attired in a sport jacket and slacks, my shirt open at the collar. It is most unSafecolike; that’s my disguise. But everybody is dressed as his or her most extreme wish fulfillment. Funny how many guys secretly want to look like girls. I mean, now this stuff is cliché, but then it was, well, unusual. And the women dressed like men, even to the point of penciling on little Pierre mustaches with eyebrow sticks. Clear lipstick and already short hair slicked down with goop. Of course there are people in normal costume garb—girls as princesses, if they are young enough to get away with it, guys as cowboys, complete with chaps, etc., etc., far into the night. Me, when I’m asked, I tell them my costume is not to be from Safeco, which only confirms that I am.

In my hand is a well-watered scotch. I asked the humongous black bartender for it this way and, without batting an eye, he handed me an amber drink that was his idea of same, so I grabbed the pitcher of ice water and spilled some more into it. My plan, see, is to observed clearly, in case many years later I want to recreate the event from memory. But when time has inexorably passed, and finally the task is at hand, I find the fine details have fled and are unrecoverable. But then this sets me off on thoughts of how this is good, isn’t it, or else our minds will have their drains clogged with all sorts of useless jetsam, and where will all the important stuff be stored? In nowhere land, that’s where.

I dimly recall two bands, playing alternately, in this huge room, and some program that you had to be drunk to understand, otherwise it was all gibberish and confusion, with a guy in a tux, a woman in a ball gown, laughing into microphones already amplified to the point of pain, so that whatever it was they had to say, laughing like mad, was only more cacophony. And bodies bumping on the dance floor, for few were dancing and it was where all the traffic was melding and mixing. The floor was thinly coated with everybody’s spilled drink.

I saw John Van Dyke and met his wife, a beauty, as might be expected. They were dressed as a pair of rabbits, and so it was hard to recognize them; in fact, it was they who recognized me. "Almost didn’t spot you without your white shirt and tie," he said, for it was a household joke, one the company was proud of, how easily we were separated from the herd and how ashamed some of us were at how we stood out. I mean, if you want to pass incognito, how on earth can you in a monkey suit?

The bunny outfit was a gag, too, for Marlene was pregnant. It was to be their first, born on the UP. They had pretty much made up their mind to go. He was waiting for the lease on his loft to run out. And then there was Dub Price, an artist and fellow fly fisher, who I had heard was in the business now, but had not managed to track down, and now here he was; I asked him for a card and got it, after a long discussion of the fishing season now past. He had knocked them dead on searun cutthroat, but had no steelhead to report, while I had the exact opposite luck, all on the same mysterious river.

Dub was in partnership with a designer and I got his business card. Later I threw them some business. The guy was Fred Lloyd and our first project didn’t work out too well. I had thought Dub would do the art work, but he didn’t, busy on another job, and Fred had taken some liberties that weren’t appreciated by me and by Safeco, and required a lot of rework, which is unproductive and unpleasant. Fred Lloyd, it turned out, wasn’t happy in this line of work, either, and later went to Montana where he—get this—ranched sheep. Dub told me Fred was really happy. As for himself, Dub had the Pay and Save account, before they went under, absorbed by Payless Drugs, and it was steady and lucrative. What he did mostly was produce line drawings of cosmetic products and small appliances.

There was a table full of canapés and I helped myself largely, bored, biding my time. A woman sloshed against me and spilled her drink down my leg, passing on without a word. A moment later I saw her lift the glass to her lips and her bewilderment to find there wasn’t any liquid in it. Her puzzled look comes back. Wonderful. I met Bill Werbach’s wife, Jim Richardson’s. In the john a couple of guys were starting to romance each other and didn’t look away as I relieved myself. To me, this was the shock of the night.

I shook a couple more hands, saw Doug briefly, Hal, Barry. Mary didn’t come, perhaps because she didn’t have a date. There was Marv, our advertising manager. Appropriately he came as a clown. I wondered if it was his idea or he had to go to the agency for a suggestion. But most of the people I didn’t recognize. They were engaged in other arms of commerce locally and I could only guess what they might be—paste-up people from printers, fine-arts artists, that is, those not engaged in commerce but like me lonely in their exile, illustrators, cartoonists (which everybody in the business seemed to be able to do on the side and had his own individual style, all alike, all noticeably different in their particulars.

Finally I had more than enough and fled through a heavy side door with one of those theatrical latches you hand to lean down hard on before it would open. Open it did and I was admitted to the cold night air, a relief. I glanced at my watch under a haloed streetlight. A few minutes after ten. Is that all? I would have guessed nearer to midnight. Time doesn’t speed by when you’re not having fun.

In the morning, at the office, everybody complained about their headache, their hangover. Me, I decided to go along with the crowd, especially since it meant slipping out early to the coffeeshop in the hotel across the street.

Doug bought the pastries that served many for breakfast.

60

I had been there eighteen months and had received a ten percent (considered grand, unheard of) pay increase just before the end of my first year, thanks to Doug, who I think liked my company more than he did my production, which was of uniform poor quality. I was working closely with two guys who headed the new mutual department, which was aligned under the life insurance company headed by Kelly Waller. While I didn’t have a desk in their department, I was down there much of the time, and used whatever space I could find free, generally a conference room with a long table and lots of stiff-backed chairs. I was there one day, pencil applied to paper pad, when Kelly Waller stuck his head in.

"I see," he said, "you have a company car reserved for ten o’clock. Where are you headed?"

"Fifth and Pine."

"Good. You can give me a lift."

He was notorious for saving the company a few pennies, while he spent lavishly tens of thousands of dollars. This was one of his popular economies. It was a ride like I had never experienced. He not only told me which turns to go but at what speed to travel. This was much faster than I usually drove. But the route he chose was better, faster, than the one I normally followed. It involved the express lanes, which in the late morning were still pointed downtown and not away from it, and driving about sixty-five miles an hour. The limit was fifty, at the end but thirty-five.

"Never you mind," he told me. "I’ll pay for any tickets you get." We got none, of course.

"Are you late for something?" I asked, my hands gripping the steering wheel of the fleet Ford hard and in my own opinion close to ripping it off of the column.

"No, I just don’t like to poke around."

I almost asked him if he would rather drive himself, but this clearly would be considered impertinent. What he wanted was for me to drive, but drive according to how he told me to do it, which was exactly how I was doing it. In such a situation there is nothing else to do but obey precisely. And truthfully it was really not myself driving but some automaton.

We pulled into the parking garage and I looked at my watch.

"Eleven minutes," I said.

"Not bad. Eight and one-half is the record."

I looked at him to see if he was kidding. He was not. He jumped out of the car and disappeared up the echoing cement stairwell. I didn’t need to ask why. It was faster than waiting for the elevator, as I always did.

I usually parked on the street, finding impossible parking spaces being one of my very few dependable talents, and fed the meter coins I had carefully provided myself with at coffee, earlier in the day. The company cars were Ford sedans, either beige or light blue, a few of them one or two years earlier in make, but all looking and driving pretty much the same. One day I went downtown and parked only a few places away from the entrance to the Cobb building. After I was done with my particular business, I used to kill a few minutes hurrying through one of the two nearby department stores, Frederick and Nelson or the Bon Marche. Back then both had fishing tackle departments. And I might make a quick pass through the budget men’s clothing department, nearly at a run and not stopping unless something grabbed my eye and halted my in my shoes.

I came back to where I had parked the car and inserted my key in the lock and started to get in. A hand grasped me by the shoulder but not roughly.

"Where do you think you are going in my car?" said a burly guy.

"It’s not your car, it’s mine. My company’s car."

Not believing me, he said, "And where did you get a key? You don’t look like an ordinary car thief." I was in my usual Safeco mufti.

I tried to explain how I had parked here a couple of hours ago and was now returning. I repeated that it was a company car.

"Try again."

He took a key out of his pocket, then locked and unlocked the door again.

"You see? Mine."

I walked around in back and he followed closely, afraid that I might flee. I looked at the rear license plate and saw it was not one of the ones in the Safeco series. That is, it wasn’t part of the fleet. It was blue and mine was blue, I think. I stepped back and looked up and down the street. There was another Ford, beige, a couple of cars up the street. I could see from the back that it had the right kind of license plate number.

"Come with me," I said.

"Damn right."

We walked alongside the car.

"Try your key on it."

"But it isn’t mine."

"I know, try it anyway."

He did and the door opened.

"How in the . . . ?"

"If mine opened yours, yours would open mine. It only holds to reason."

"You mean. . . ?"

"Ford evidently makes only so many locks and keys."
"You’d think that out of all the combinations," he began.

"I would think that, too. Look, this is my car, my company’s car, and I’m awfully sorry. As soon as I had gotten inside I’m sure I would have seen that things aren’t exactly the same. My sack lunch would have been missing, my briefcase."

"I understand," he said, just beginning to. "I’m sorry."

"I’m only glad you didn’t hit me."

"I may be big," he said with a smile, "but I’m not violent."

"A good thing, too."

My dissatisfaction with the job, large to begin with, starting with the employment agency, had grown insurmountable, and during my lunch hour I used to walk down to University Employment occasionally and read the postings. Usually there was nothing interesting. I noted that the office of publications was looking for editors again. No, thanks; I had already gone that route. It would be like returning to a death camp, where everybody is interred, doing the same thing, over and over, for the rest of his life. Yet the University was a pleasant enough place to work. Any university is. And this one’s grounds were very pretty, with the rhododendrons and azaleas brightening the walks every spring and big colorful leaves from the deciduous trees every fall.

The bulletin board offered up nothing hopeful over a period of time, though I met some interesting down-on-their-luck people, often distraught English majors angry at the world and their teachers for evidently misleading them about job opportunities. These were people like myself who didn’t want to teach, or else had tried it and found it unsuitable. Even with experience it was hard enough to find work. Without it, as many of the searchers were, it was practically impossible.

A girl told me, "Somebody might have said something, goddam it." English majors have a way of quickly finding each other out; perhaps we emit an odor. If so it is a special one, one recognizable only with a special nose.

"Perhaps they didn’t know themselves," I said softly. "Maybe they aren’t to blame. In academe you don’t have to know much. Only your field."

"Well, fuck that. It seems to me they have a responsibility to their students. They have to know something other than the names of the plays Shakespeare wrote."

"It seems to me that way, too."

We shared, we English majors, but only knowledge of those jobs we were certain we didn’t want for ourselves. And I would like to say that I was tipped on my next job by one of the people I met, an English major, as to something that person was not qualified. But that’s not how it happened.

I found it reading the classifieds in the voluminous Sunday paper, tucked deep in the center of the second page, under E, just before the myriad listings for various engineers. It read something like this:

"Editor, engineering publications. International quarterly journal of technical and scholarly work in a variety of engineering fields. Bachelors or masters degree in English, Journalism, or related fields, plus five or more years progressive experience. Magazine or newspaper work a plus. Must know printing production. Submit resume and complete employment application. References may be requested. Salary negotiable."

That comes pretty close. My ears perked up. I won’t say a thrill ran down my spine, but something pretty close happened. I had the feeling that—if I didn’t goof badly—the job was mine. I’d never had that feeling in my life before. Rock solid. The disappointment would have been colossal, of course, if I was wrong. But I wasn’t.

University personnel had lost my application. Of course: isn’t this always the case? Three months ago I had filled out one, just in case. I takes about forty minutes to do. I think they throw them out after three days because they clutter up the place. There is always a stream applying. Everybody wants to work for a university. It is considered an elite place to be, and only people who have worked there a while come to realize that the university exploits this about as far as they can. It is called the Mt. Rainier Factor. Skiing isn’t very far away, nor is boating, camping, fishing, hunting. The factor is useful in recruiting faculty, too. But it doesn’t always serve in the place of salary. Cold cash wins out with those who are experienced. (I am speaking in Jimmi Hendrix’s sense of the word.) This factor is called You Can’t Eat Mt. Rainier. The second factor is used to counter objections to the first factor. I knew better than to try to utilize either of them and pretended that neither existed. This might be seen as naïve, but then it is really the second factor raised to another power. It might be called the third factor.

I filled out another employment application, I say, and they lost it, too, but when I started to raise a stink they managed to find it and I was admitted to the first screen or filter, which I passed through, my particles evidently too fine to separate me out. It is after that interview that the employment people begin to treat you as a human being, rather than just another piece of meat.

The fact that I had worked there formerly and did not have DO NOT REHIRE stamped on my record helped considerably. It had been for five years, too, which is not a lifetime, but in this transitory world counts for something. The next interview was with a personnel rep, Irv Howard, with whom I would work off and on for years. Quickly he sped me on to the associate dean of the college who was in charge of hiring exempt staff. It meant we would be free of working regular hours and being part of the classified staff and its regular pay raises. Ours, mine, would be tied to whatever the faculty got. This sounds superior but is not. You are without most standard working benefits, including overtime and sick leave. But it takes a while before you learn all these things. I mean, what is a new job for, if not to provide another learning experience.

No, it’s not always just another way of getting screwed.

The dean, my dean, was Vern Hammer, a big nice easy going guy, a civil engineer, personally civil, as well, and head of the department of general engineering, which meant nothing to me at the time, and later didn’t mean much more, for it was a mock department and one that existed largely on paper, for it was where freshman students were processed and taught such things as how to use a slide rule and transit. Otherwise, students received their academic training in a particular department. There were several of these, and each was tied directly to a field of engineering. Civil, electrical, mechanical, ceramic, metallurgical, mineral, aeronautical (and astronautical), chemical, and nuclear. Some of the smaller departments were joined together as one, as in the case of the last two and ceramic, metallurgical, and mineral, all of which make frequent use of the skills of each other.

I liked Vern, right off the bat. Everybody did. He was down-home and highly personable. His beard was speckled with gray, his forehead slowly receding, his manner deliberate and thoughtful—you could almost say plodding. But he was smart enough in ways engineering and scientific. He liked to sail, I soon learned, and maintained a boat at Shilshoe Marina. So did many of the engineering faculty, I soon learned. The fact that I had worked for the University earlier impressed him, also that I was working for Safeco. The University District comprises a small world and its larger counters are all knows and recognized by each other; this provides a kind of bond which, once you are inside of it, is relatively safe, but if you are outside is hard to break in. I was not only in, I was at home here. I mean, you wouldn’t have to tell me where everything was—the johns, where to go to get something to eat, the names of the buildings and what departments were inside, etc. If I was a horse, you could say I was broken to the saddle. Broken, broken in, but not broken down.

We knew a lot of people in common. Vern had been at the U. for years and had done his undergraduate work here; so had I. We knew people going way back. We played the game they played at cocktail parties, you know, do you know X, do you know Y, do you remember Z. It goes on until one of the parties gets tired of it (usually not) or somebody gets called away for something believed to be more important but rarely turns out to be.

One of the people we knew in common was Jack Leahy. I think that, if there was any doubt I was suitable, knowing Jack for so many years tipped the scales heavily in my favor. But I don’t think there was any real competition. The job was mine. But Vern didn’t offer it to me yet. He took me on a walking tour of where I would be working. I had a suite of offices, a secretary, who coldly looked up when Vern led me in and introduced me, and then took me into what would be my own private office, commodious, outfitted with the dean’s castoff green leather furniture. The slatted blinds opened out on a parking lot but, hey, that was okay.

I met the man I would be replacing, if everything went right. This was Hal Kelly. He had been editing the magazine for ten years now and had just hit 65. He was slender, with white hair and clipped military mustache and a gentle manner. I liked him immediately. We shook hands, exchanged a few pleasantries. He said he thought he remembered me from the printing plant, the office of publications, where he took his magazine to get printed, four times a year. I did not remember him and had never handled the printing job; various jobs kept being reassigned to the same people, almost as though you had a beat. In fact, I had never seen the journal, and I said as much. So Hal gave me a copy. I took it with me when Vern and I left a moment later. Hal and I shook hands. The secretary, Andrea Jarvela, didn’t look up.

And still he didn’t offer me the job. He knew I expected him to. He grinned. "I want to talk to a couple of people," he told me. Jack, I thought. "I’ll be in touch."

And then it was back to my dungeon at Safeco. Never had the place looked so dismal and dreary. My desk and chair awaited like some medieval instruments of torture. Only now did I realize how desperately I wanted to get away. My life was in limbo.

BOOK EIGHT

61

Vern called and offered me the job. I immediately accepted. But I had read several issues of the magazine, The Trend in Engineering (tricky, tricky), and it seemed to me not a full-time job. Why not let me edit it on a personal-services contract instead? I figured it might be half-time, or even less, with the experience I already had.

No, he replied; the only job was the full-time one. But additional responsibilities would be added, perhaps very soon. There was a faculty committee that oversaw the publications program (of course there was), and while presently the only publication was the quarterly, there soon would be a "family" of engineering publications. The full extent and particularity of them was yet to be determined; my input would be valuable to them in choosing what these might be.

It seemed interesting, challenging, while at the same time it sounded like the same old bullshit.

Okay, I said, I understand. If it was not full-time, not really, but soon would be, in the meantime I could amuse myself, an activity I thought myself skilled at. Soon the publications program would be expanded, vast, and I would have more than I could handle. I might need an assistant, two of them. Did I tell myself this, or did Vern? Afterwards I was not exactly sure, but certainly he did not dissuade me in coming to this conclusion.

The college of engineering had lots of needs. Intelligent publications was one of them. It ranked high on the ladder of priorities. Yes, I said again. There was the matter of salary. They offered ten percent over what Safeco was paying me. Shamefully I admit this was only eleven thousand a year, but hasten to add that, in 1970, it wasn’t bad money. And when the faculty got increases, I would, too. Vern explained this to me. When could I start?

Well, first I would have to tell Doug, and I dreaded it, because he had hired me and I liked the guy and felt like I would be letting him down, poor as I was at the job he had given me. Feeling no loyalty at all for Safeco (sorry, guys), I had to place a modicum of fidelity somewhere, and he was it. Today was Thursday. "How about three weeks from Monday?" I asked. It would be the end of the month. Three-plus weeks notice wasn’t grand, wasn’t especially considerate, but it would do; it was more than the widely acknowledged two weeks. Besides, wasn’t it Safeco who was famous for its Friday Afternoon Surprises?

Vern told me that would be fine; I could have a bit more time, if the touchy situation warranted it, because Hal Kelly was retiring just after the next issue would be delivered to the printer, its proofs all signed off. He would be then two weeks past sixty-five. Vern wanted me to have a week with Hal on the job, walking around campus, meeting people in each of the departments of the college, plus those outside the college with whom they had obscure relationships. It sounded delightful. Now all I had to do was tell Doug.

I don’t remember where or when it was. Either the same day or more likely the morning of the next. I had hoped it might be at the Donut Shop, where I might idly mention, By the way, Doug, I’m leaving. I’ve been offered a job back at the University and it is too good to turn down. Then I would have to explain how I’d been offered it. Such jobs do not exactly go out seeking specific persons. No, you have to go after them, and I would have to admit to this.

So what’s the problem? None, really.

I think it was the next morning, during a lull in the day’s activities, after the five-minute company coffee break which we all circumvented by going outside, most of the time, when I sidled into Doug’s office and stood hesitantly at his desk until he looked up from his cigarette and pencil.

"Yes?" he said softly. His capacity for work was absolute and he thought of the office as a place to accomplish it, not kill time.

"Something I want to talk to you about, old buddy." It was my usual form of address and nothing to alarm him. But he guessed it was something semi-serious at least. He gestured at a stiff-backed chair, the kind that my its degree of uncomfortableness ensures that the visitor won’t stay any longer than necessary. I plopped in.

‘I’ll be leaving," I started, and he looked up suddenly, with a big smile.

"I’ve been wondering when."

"You’re not surprised?"

"No, not really. You really aren’t cut out for Safeco. It’s a sore point with you, ever since you were hired."

"Yes, but. . . ."

"Of course, nobody is cut out for Safeco, really, but for some of us, let’s say we’re more easily accommodated, or is it less easily disaccommodated? Whichever. You don’t belong here and I’m glad to hear you’re leaving."

"Aren’t we buddies?" Did I say this? Well, I had expected a protest at my announcement, not this joyous immediate acceptance. Or—worse—this knowing that it was coming and full lack of surprise.

"Of course." He grinned. "When?"

"When do you want?"

"Well, I’d like some time. I have to go back to the employment agency—you remember them, don’t you?--and reactivate my request, and they have to do whatever they do, seine the streets, I suppose. And it takes a while for all the paperwork—mine, yours—to move through the company mail, those little guys with the carts. Can you give me two weeks?"

"I can give you three, or a bit more."

"Don’t feel you have to stay."

"You want it to be shorter?"

"No, no."

"How much time did you give them before you report? And who the hell are they? Who artfully won you away from us?"

I told him.

"Well, you liked it there, didn’t you? It’s supposed to be a pleasant place to work." He’d gone to WSU, but all campuses are pretty much the same, differing only in their physical plant, as it is called. Everywhere the girls are young, some of them pretty. The pretty ones are truly pretty, while the others are plain as doorknobs, or worse. It is presumed that when a man returns to a university in which to work thoughts of all the pretty flowers dance through his head like sugarplums, plus the prospect of gathering. Even when he is forty, as I was then, or nearly so.

"Yeah, I always thought of returning triumphant. Like MacArthur."

"And are you?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"How much are they paying you? Just curious. You don’t have to tell me."

I told him. It was funny, but I was nearly in tears. And I hated Safeco. Even to look round this giant room was poisonous to me.

"I couldn’t get you another ten percent for a year or two. I practically wracked my butt getting you that eleven, what was it, about eight months ago?"

"Yeah, and I’m grateful for it."

"Well, you ought to be. Safeco doesn’t exactly go around handing out raises. Each has to be justified, argued for, believe me."
"And I was marginal, all along."

"I guess you were. Your best work, Bob, was nothing we could use. That turkey business and the oops gimmick. And that bit about me needing two chairs to sit down on."
"Sorry. It was pretty tasteless."

"But it was funny. Now, if you only harness that wit, that effort, and channel it into a Safeco product, you might have really been something."

"I know, I know. Doug, it’s pretty awful to try at writing and to fail so dismally. How I envy you and Mary.’
"It’s a knack. Either you have a knack or you do without."

"It’s largely a gift."

"I think now maybe it is."

"Like writing sonnets."

"Like writing sonnets, but nowhere so beautiful. Tell me, what will you be doing?"

"Editing a magazine. Actually, an engineering journal, a quarterly."

He looked singularly unimpressed.

"I’m not looking for excitement. I think I can do things with the magazine. Dress it up, make it more readable to people who aren’t engineers."

"Yes."

And that was it. No acrimony, no insults, no anger at my betrayal. As I said, he was a nice guy, a great boss, and he wasn’t surprised. I think he was glad for me, in spite of all the additional work my leaving would cause him—all those interviews scheduled throughout the day, day after day. But then maybe I am exaggerating my importance in the Safeco scheme of things. Maybe he hired the first or the second guy through the door. Perhaps he had done so with me, and all the thin glory and prestige I had heaped on myself and my job was illusory. It could be done by practically anybody off the street. You had to be able to walk and talk. The rest was a heap of meaningless busywork.

Those last couple of weeks were like living under water. As soon as people know you are leaving they isolate themselves from you and you belong to history. The only new jobs assigned to me were ones that could be completed in so short a period, or else were highly routine and could be completed by those in forms control, where all our jobs passed through for paperwork purposes. So as my old jobs left me and went on the printing press, either at Safeco or to some outside local vendor, my desk became increasingly bare. I kept waiting for my replacement to arrive. My eyes was on Doug and his day, for the new guy might pass through his office and be introduced around the room. I saw nobody special, nobody unfamiliar. Of course interviewing went on in a conference room on a different floor. And Doug was always scurrying off to one meeting or another, generally with bigshots, the company VPs, its legal counsel, Kelly Waller, or even the president himself. I mean the president of Safeco, not the president of the United States. In case you might mistake me.

On my break and at other times I drifted over to the U. and reacquainted myself with the campus. Not very far away, it had been the site of frequent noontime walks. But now I had a different feeling. The campus was mine again. It was mine more so than as a student or as an employee of the office of publication services. No longer would I be "an" editor; I was "the" editor, at least as far as the quarterly was concerned and the college of engineering.

I once saw a scrap of paper on the edge of a lawn (there were many of them, actually) and carried it over to a waste receptacle. Being on the exempt payroll and not general salaried made such a difference. It was a little like being a professor. No, it was nothing like being one. I tried to sort through my mind what it was like and decided it was like nothing I had experienced, at least here, before. And that is what was good about it. It was new, while containing large elements of what had gone before and had been worthwhile, mildly exciting. I could not wait to be back, and not on another one of my walking tours. In the meanwhile, there was Safeco.

A funny thing happens, when you leave a company. At first, everybody is oohing and aahing in such a manner that you can’t discern their true feelings. A bit of it, no doubt, is genuine sorry-to-see-you-go. And some of the bright smiles are envy, pure and not so simple. But after while a new attitude seems to permeate everything. It is as though you are a traitor to the cause. The company—in this instance, Safeco—is so wonderful; it must be wonderful, or why else are we all working here, slaving away for the rest of our natural lives, or at least until retirement day. A wonderful, delightful place to work. Then why is this person leaving? Clearly, there is something wrong with him. (Hope it isn’t catching.) So, if he wants to leave, there is something seriously at fault in him. Maybe he is mentally ill. That must be it. (Is mental illness catching, as well?) Had better then stay away from him, just in case. Besides, if not sick or mentally ill, he must know something we don’t. What can it be? It was hard enough getting this damn job in the first place. And even shitty jobs like this don’t grow on trees.

So you become shunned. It is more likely you are a traitor. You are deserting the cause, it being to make this, Safeco, a bigger and stronger fortresses against the world. And since the nation, the city, everything and everybody, is sorely divided into the pro-war and anti-war camps, and it is plain to all of us here that the nation’s weal lies in defeating the enemy, the Cong, and the enemy at home, namely the counter-culture, then your going over to the University, a known hotbed of radicals (in spite of the fact that most of us graduated from there) is a sign of disloyalty, not only to the company (now a corporation but still broadly and loosely called the company) but to America itself. And so forth.

I was shunned and, believe me, there is a difference between it and ordinary daily disdain. It is a difference in amplitude and volume. It is thicker in a room than cigarette smoke. Oh, people are on the surface polite, even though it now seems to be coming from such a distance, miles away, and is cool, containing a frosty pseudo-warmth. Again the difference is noticeable and remarkable. I began to count off the days.

They had a little party for me. No gifts. In the company cafeteria and I stood, beaming like a bride, accepting handshakes from both the men and the women. A sweet little cake, with coconut icing (it turned my stomach and I couldn’t swallow even the first bite) and coffee left over from lunch in one of those columnar aluminum urns. So what if it was cold?

Was Doug relieved to see me go? His manner was same as ever—a bit removed but funny and sweet. A couple years later he left the company and started a publications group of his own with Bob Bachert from University Printing, the commercial company that had no affiliation with the U. itself, only that it was on The Ave., University Avenue. Their small offices were not far away. On my way back from a trip to the dentist, I dropped in without a phonecall first. Usually this is a big mistake. Doug looked up from his desk. I saw that he had grayed some. Well, I had too. His eyes batted a couple of times. Slowly he smiled. He stood, offered me his hand.

If he remembered my name, he didn’t voice it.

62

I arrived at work the first day at three minutes to eight. I checked my watch, just to make sure I was on time. Hal Kelly wasn’t there yet. And Andrea wasn’t to come in until one, since she worked only half-time and it was the latter half of the day. But the two draftspersons were already at their tables. Ostensibly they would report to me, but only because everybody has to report to somebody. They worked for the associate dean for research. He was one of my bosses, too. As always, I had two of them, and no cause for constern. (That word is a cross between concern and consternation, and you won’t find it in your dictionary or word processor.)

Both draftspersons were students. Jerry was in engineering, a full-time employee, which entitled him to five credits worth of classes per quarter. Free. And this is how he was going through school, no more no less. I soon learned that the college had contempt for this because it removed him from the daily competition among engineering students and permitted him to study only one subject at a time, giving it his full attention.

The world wasn’t like this. Jerry was determined to make it so and to slow it to his plodding pace.

The other person was Trina. She was a pretty young redhead, so young. Not my type. She worked hourly, up to four hours per day, and took care of Jerry’s overflow. They both reported to Myron Swarm, a professor of electrical engineering and the associate dean. Like Vern, he was deeply into boats and had a big one. He didn’t like having people to report to him, and so they were my day-to-day responsibility. Vern had told me to play them loose, meaning loosely, and let them do the work that came in over the counter, so to speak. It was sound advise.

So Hal Kelly trickled in shortly before eight-thirty. He rode a ferry to work, followed by a bus, and had a choice between a ferry that would bring him to work ten minutes early (which he normally did) or one that was half an hour later. Now that he was retiring, for the last month he was indulging himself, and everybody fondly understood. He hoped I would, too, he said, with his usual shy smile and self-depreciating manner. I sure did.

I had a lot of questions and had begun asking them earlier, during my noontime sorties, during which I could depend on catching Hal in his office if I came early enough and did not delay my visit until he had (1) gone for a stroll, (2) had a post-prandial nap, for he always ate his sack lunch in the office. Which activity he indulged himself in varied from day to day.

One of my questions was about whether there really was enough work to occupy one and a half (Andrea) people full time. He tried to avoid a direct answer, which told me, no, there wasn’t. He didn’t want to say it and I let him off the hook when he told me about proofing and how one could never read over the copy, the galleys, the page proofs, even the blueline (did I know what that was? Indeed I did) enough times to catch the last elusive typo.

I took this as a dullard’s answer and an illustration of the Peter’s Principle that work expands according to the time available to accomplish it. And as proof, Hal showed me the errata column he published as a mea culpa in the following issue of the quarterly, every time there was a reported goof. These usually arrived in the form of a letter to the editor from some engineering pedant. There were plenty of those. It seemed some engineers had nothing better to do with their time—probably company time—that read a magazine for typos.

I vowed I would never publish errata, even if there were plenty. You did your best, in the time you accorded to the project, a given issue, of which there were only four in a year, then looked aside and went on with your life. And what was Andrea Jarvela for, if not to catch typos? I couldn’t imagine a volume of correspondence for her to type. And the filing, well, I could pretty much take care of it, if there was any. Perhaps her job was padding. Maybe my own was, too.

I liked Kelly. He was old-fashioned in the very best sense of the word (in contrast to Bob Sincock at Safeco). Slender and not as tall as I, who am not tall, he gave an impression of fragility. I don’t think he was sick, or else he would have told me so. With his great shock of straight white hair, he probably looked more ruddy and robust than he was. Like Vern Hammer, he had a proclivity for corduroy jackets; both had camel-colored ones and, by God, so did I, hardly worn at all, since Safeco could not tolerate them. My mind sprang free. What if Vern, Hal (while he was with us, so it had better be quick), and I all wore the same essential jacket on the same day . . . and all went somewhere together, say, out to lunch. What would the mathematical chances of that happening be? Fairly high, I thought. And wouldn’t we all look like we belonged to the same shabby club? All that would be lacking was some insignia over the breast.

When you have a job where your thoughts turn to subjects such as this, you’ve got it knocked. It means only good things can come to you.

I was home.

Andrea had drifted in while Hal and I were on our walk around campus. He had told me she would and she did. She was hunched over her desk, a young Finnish blond, and I found her attractive. General background was filled in over the next few weeks, partly by her, some of it by other people, including Vern, probably my boss, if the other dean, Myron Swarm, wasn’t. It was a wonderful ambiguous relationship and I liked it well.

Vern thought of Andrea, I learned, as a loose woman. True, she was unmarried and had a child, a little boy of two or three named Michael, who she left in campus daycare. All this was new to the world, new to Vern and me. We were used to girls, women, becoming pregnant, but in our older world they either got married and had the kid or went to California and had an abortion. There were plenty of marriages to women already pregnant in both our families. But to brazenly (it is the word that pops quickly to mind and is hard to dispense with) bear the child alone, then raise it, does not smack of bravery and tragedy, but only of what is unusual and not socially approved of. But we had to admit that there was a lot of it going around, nowadays.

The campus daycare center was largely populated by children of unmarried women, I gathered, and had several occasions to use their facilities myself, when my wife could not stay at home for some vital reason with our son, and neither could I. We didn’t like the place, and after an initial couple of instances, managed to avoid it. But for Michael, it was home for much of the day. I think the cost to Andrea was very low.

Its only major drawback was that it seemed to be germ-ridden and a home to every passing virus. Our son came home with a cold after his initial encounter and Michael was always coming down with one thing or another. Naturally Andrea used her sick leave for him and came to work when she herself was sick as a dog from the same thing. Often then I got it. Being halfway a hypochondriac, I thought it might be off of typed copy or from the proofs, which she often read first, and so I became something of a fetishist about cleanliness and washing my hands. One way or another I think I caught everything she did except the bout of stomach flu she had over our first Thanksgiving. Thank goodness.

She had straight blond hair, rather lank, a bit oily looking, of a brownish tone, so that in certain light it was not blond at all but some neutral shade. High cheekbones and a rather pointed chin. Small breasts, legs that were a bit thick and squat, as from a lot of dancing. And she could dance, it turned out, with a fury, a kind of rock and roll or jitterbug, it didn’t much matter, so long as it was fast. Pale skin, a few pimples of no magnitude.

Mine.

Not really. Only mine daily, for a number of years. I think I had a kind of middle-aged crush on her. Of course she immediately knew it. She humored me in it. It probably amused her. Perhaps she used me as a joke among her friends. If I’d ever heard that she mocked me, or imitated me in her usual liberated, scurrilous manner, it would break my heart. But I asked for it. I was myself and held little back. This is not the best way to get along with the hired help. It was because I was immensely lonely. It turned out to be the best, loneliest job I ever had. It lasted just over five years. Then everything changed. Jobs have a way of doing this. Overnight—actually, over many days and nights—it goes from being the best in the world to the job from hell.

All was new (though familiar) and rosy. I was, for all practical purpose, my own boss, for when you have two or more, you have none at all. Besides, in the publications and editing business, nobody knows what you do, not really. Like the silkworm, over a period of time you make a product and everybody marvels at it and your ability to bring everything together. It isn’t necessarily a silken ballgown, but may pass for one by those who do not know any better, such as engineers or doctors or merchandisers, who do not know how their product is made, only that it is necessary, in some cases (point of sale, for instance) vital.

My office, my suite of offices, was in the basement of Lowe Hall. I couldn’t have placed it more perfectly, more advantageously to my own purposes, had they given me free reign. It was a beautiful new brick building, the larger half of a mini-campus designed by Fred Bassetti, a local architect of national, perhaps even international, rank. The other building was the two-storey engineering library next door. It was headed by Hal (everybody here was named Hal, if only briefly) Wiren, whom I knew vaguely from the past, perhaps Boeing. He was pudgy, slightly effeminate, a man who married because it was expected of him in business (librarianship being a business, like any other) and then sticking to the pact, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and going so far as to have a pair of confirming children. "You see? I am not gay. Here is the proof. Say hello to the nice man, Janey and Billy," or whatever their names. And he had found a sinecure here, serving engineering students and faculty. I only hoped that I had, as well.

My fishing friend, Ed Weinstein, used to drop by, when he was in the area. He led me into photography, in a way, though the job required that I develop some skills, but not so many as evolved, partly out of necessity, but mostly out of that mad pursuit of something technical and new and exciting. But that in due course. Ed was a librarian, too, and I think envied the university environment that all of us came out of and probably longed to reenter, like some well-upholstered womb. He knew Wiren from somewhere (Boeing again?), perhaps from school, for they were about the same age, and since Ed worked for Boeing’s famous Scientific and Research Laboratories and headed its library, it was necessary for him to visit campus from time to time and coordinate joint activities, or whatever they called it. Naturally we would have coffee and goof off in other outstanding ways.

I don’t think he ever went into the photo lab I eventually built in the janitor’s closet down the hall from my office, or only long enough to pronounce it just adequate to my purposes. But we exchanged prints—7"X9" full-frame prints on 8"X10" printout paper, complete with rough black borders, testifying that we had used every millimeter of the tiny 35mm. Negative on which to crowd visual information. But all of this was to come.

In the basement, mind you, of Lowe, with casement windows that actually looked up, never mind if it was only on a tiny parkinglot for half-hour visitors and served our building and Mechanical Engineering, just across the windy and rain-swept macadam. The walls were of freshly whitewashed cement brick, huge blocks, repainted a good neutral medicinal beige. The main room, huge, housed Andrea, Jerry, and Trina, file cabinets, and a windowless archival storage room that contained on flat metal shelves stacks of back issues of the journal, The Trend in Engineering.

A word about that title. Ryland Hill purportedly named it, some twenty-odd years ago. The word "trend" was also a packaged soap for washing machines, very much like Duz (as in "Duz does everything). Trend, even then, was trendy. It would indicated directions engineering was headed in. Very catchy and modern. But the quarterly was actually pretty technical in orientation, filled as it was with formulae and graphs and tables and charts, all painstakingly handset in type for letterpress reproduction. When I heard the story about the name’s derivation, I first got the idea of making it a general engineering magazine. It would report new findings (if any; often they were scarce) and directions. And the articles would be written in easily intelligible English. This was not well received at first. Engineers hate to write in the vernacular. They have evolved a special language—actually a whole series of languages, each to its specialty and often within its specialty—by which it sets itself off from the others and makes it special. To have to return to ordinary speech, street language, was to give up all the so-called progress made in the field, which was reflected in its esoteric vocabulary. So mine, and Trend’s, was not always a popular cause. But it was a worthwhile one.

Okay, so there was the great room, with its beige walls and brown square tiled floors, waxed every so often (and surprisingly to have found happened) by the janitorial staff, so that you sent flying across the shining floor, halted only when you came to a door frame or a wall. And opening off of it to the right, my office. How impressive it was, even with Hal Kelly still behind the desk. He kept offering me it and I kept refusing. Lots of time lay ahead in which I could settle down and, well, vegetate, if such was the case.

In a way it was, in another way it wasn’t.

Hal told me that the metal Steelcase desk would soon be replaced, as would be the swivel chair. This was indifferent information to me, but I could see that in a way Hal kind of wished to stick around to see the new walnut-finished furniture arrive. It was an item he had madly inserted on the Dean’s post-Christmas shopping list—the kind of wild activity indulged in just before the new biennial budget is submitted to the University and then to the state legislature. If any money appears to be left over from the old budget, department heads are requested to submit "wish lists," which have a very good chance of coming true, since nobody wants to end the year or the biennium with money left over. For one thing, it is lost and for another it will aversely effect the chances of getting any budget increase for the following biennium.

The mad scheme of new furniture had come true, along with an IBM typewriter for Andrea, one with interchangeable balls. I can imagine what fun she had playing around with the interchangeable balls aspect, being something of a language nuts like myself. And she had a new desk coming, too, along with a special little stand-alone table for the new electric typewriter to stand on. Spread the wealth, you might say. Or else the trickle-down theory applied to office furniture. How else had I deserved the Dean’s old real leather sofa unless he had gotten a new one as a benefit of his wish list, though Ryland was probably in charge of such things as associate dean for academic matters, the highest ranking of the Dean’s several assistants and second in charge. In due course he would become dean. I can just picture Ryland urging him to ask for one, and like Caesar him refusing two or three times before finally accepting the laurel.

This was Dean Norris. His first name was Chuck, but I nearly forgot it because I never called him it, though I could have, was urged to, but knew my station well enough. With everybody else it was a first-name business, certainly the associate and assistant deans, and some of the department chairmen, as I came to get to know them and work with them on special projects. And there were some who I never did and who remained Dr. so-and-so or professor-so-and-so. All of which is patent chickenshit, of course, but is how the world operates, and this (though called academe) was very much the world, the real world. As if there is any other.

One by one I met them all, as Hal Kelly routinely took me around to all the different buildings, one or two to an engineering department, and introduced me to everybody on down to the lowest file clerk. The college and its departments were still small enough that I could know them all, the personnel, the teaching faculty, the research faculty, and many of the graduate assistants, and know by heart nearly everybody’s name within a short while.

For we were a family. We were a family if you will first accept the notion that American families are highly dysfunctional and rife with internal conflict. "Every American family is a Russian novel," somebody once said, but not Dostoyevsky, who very well could have, but chose not to, in all the millions of words he wrote. (Nor did he think to say that every Russian family is an American novel.) No, he wisely left the matter alone, even when they hied him off to Siberia and brought him back to Russia shredded like a document.

You are a family if you believe you are one, but when pathology is prevalent you gradually become accustomed to stormy disorder. And yet it wasn’t so bad. Surely not so bad as an English department, whose strife is epic and where nobody’s back is ever safe from assault with a blunt or pointed instrument. Engineers either have a code of honor, or else are so preoccupied with their specialty that they will not see an elephant placed before them, not even if it steps on their feet. This makes it an ideal place to work, since their own work is so specialized that they automatically grant to you the same degree of obscurity and happily accept the fact that they do not know (or care to know) what specifically you do or make, only that you must know something in order to make or do it.

63

Hal left for retirement to his summer cabin on the Hoh river, on the Olympic Peninsula, in evident good health and without any obvious reservations about me or what would follow. He was such a fine old gentleman. As a going-away present I have him a Pfleuger Medalist fly reel, a practically new one of mine and one which I had no use for, for I had graduated on to Hardys. It was good, shiny, serviceable, and I had included two lines, one sinking, one floating. He was clearly touched, I could tell. Well, I really liked the guy and wished him well, along with frequent messes of trout, steelhead, and salmon.

But he was really not a fisherman, down deep, and so my wish was amended to an occasion individual from those categories of fish, every now and then. It is what keeps most of us content in our sorties to the great outdoors. I could well imagine what his life there might be like, what with coastal fog and rain, the smoke from the woodstove held low and the chimney not drawing well (much like my own, in my Oso rental cabin) and the smoke flooding back into the room, leaving you with burning eyes and a nose that continuously ran. I hoped he maintained a retreat in a comfortable city or town, as well. I mean, there is the romance, and then there is the reality.

So I came to work the following Monday feeling delightfully alone and in charge. No Hal. In a way I missed him, for he was a good sort, a fine companion, and already I could sense that the job would be lonely. But after a few too many people surrounding me at Safeco, a sense of isolation was deeply to be valued. And there would always be Andrea to keep me company for half a day. In the meanwhile, I had the morning paper to read; I’d brought it from home and was do exactly this each day of the week. On my first, having no parking permit, I pulled my clunker into the half-hour delivery slot behind the building, and when I went back to it around noon found I had been ticketed. Of course; why hadn’t I remembered the campus police and their keen attention to details such as this? I pocked the scrap of yellow paper and later tucked into a desk drawer, where it stayed until they reminded me of it and told me the grace period had passed and the fine was now doubled.

First order of business was to negotiate the best parking deal I could for a favored place near the building. I found that, not being faculty, I was sadly limited in what was available to me and would be assigned to a lot half a mile away, uncovered, where the February rain would lash me for a third of a mile walk to my office. This was not entirely unexpected. There are a huge number of staff at a large university and in good times they proliferate. Not all of them can have choice parking. It is the faculty, after all, that the university exists for, and there are constant reminders of their rank and privilege. It is only the full professors who get to park cozy to their buildings. And the students, not at all. I soon learned that Vern, one of my bosses, was on a long-term study of the parking problem, along with a wide distribution of faculty from other colleges and departments, and all of them were department heads or full professors; their ultimate recommendation was that all the others ride buses. To encourage this, parking permits were planned to be raised to quadruple their current price. This would "encourage" the rest of us to use the shuttle, while their own parking would remain as before, and there would be a few more slots created for the next in line, the associate professors.

Of course, of course.

I paid for my permit and returned to the office in a light drizzle. How pretty the campus was, seen through the mist, the hardwoods bereft of leaves, the evergreens gleaming dully. It has always been a pretty place, among the world’s most beautiful campuses, and this is one of the perks of working here and the equivalent of several thousand dollars more in salary, even though it continues to be true, "You can’t eat Mt. Rainier." No, but you can pretend to. It is not very nourishing.

The winter issue of the quarterly was coming off the press and now it was up to me to plan for the spring issue. Hal had said you sat back and waited for submissions to trickle in. But that seemed to me too passive. I decided to go out into the departments and hang out, asking questions, orientating myself, meeting new people, trying to find out what faculty and students did in all the vast labs tucked away in various distant buildings.

One was the Aerospace Research Lab, an adjunct to the Aerospace and Aeronautics Department, whose offices were in Guggenheim, only a rainy day sprint away. The Lab was new and large, built under contract with NASA, a hot property now, with lots of money to spend on lavish projects; the architecture was more modern, but in keeping with the old Tudor-Gothic Modified, as it was jokingly called, making use of red brick and cream-colored turreted trim. I met Abe Hertzberg, its director and a professor in the associated department next door, a highly personable guy, well-liked, who lodges in my memory for a chance remark he made, one day, in passing: "I’m so busy I haven’t had time to fart." He could tell it better than I.

Most of the Lab was comprised of research faulty. These were guys (no women in the Lab except for typists and file clerks, a very macho arrangement) who had no courses to teach, not tenure, but rates of pay comparable to what they would earn in industry. Generally they wore chinos and rode French bicycles. They behaved more like students and often were mistaken for them. Several of them, including George Tsongas, became friends. He was interested in photography, as I was soon to be, and his worked involved ruby lasers and holography, which is a kind of three-dimensional photography, very weird and interesting.

In fact the entire building was a fascinating place. So new, it struck me as curious how the huge laboratory vaults became old looking, cluttered, echoing, full of broken or dilapidated or discarded equipment, almost overnight. If anybody ever cleaned the labs, all they did was push a broom across the center, leaving the edges jammed with refuse gathering dust. Here and there were nearly empty coffee mugs (most with an esoteric cartoon on the side or some obscure emblem), often with a coating of moldy slime in their centers, indicating long disuse. And empty pizza containers and, gasp, even paper plates with some dried pie-shaped wedges left, curled and shrunken and with fungus grown on them. No, it was no experiment, in no way a cultured petri dish.

Ah, but the lasers—how magnificent. Each machine held a bevy of tiny mirrors, I soon understood used to control and finely focus the beam, famous for its accuracy. Most were rubies, so low powered that you could pass your hand in front of them and risk no damage, no incision, no burn. They started out at the source at pinpoint width and arrived at their target, their destination, no wider. Why, you could aim them at the moon and they would get there almost as tiny as at the beginning. It made you full of wonder. You had to start thinking in cosmic terms.

It wasn’t long before I got the idea, why not do a full issue of the magazine on the Lab alone? The difficulty would be to get these guys to talk openly about what they did and why. Of course some of it was classified information. The space program, along with aerospace, was highly competitive and the Russians were hastening along in their developments, as well, so that the work bore a strong resemblance to the defense industry. You refer to or publish some innocent-seeming work and you violate some contractual element, or worse one that effects the national security. Then you and the others go to jail.

The whole things was hush-hush, while at the same time out in the open, being at a university, so I could go anywhere I wanted, anybody could, and there were no gates, no locked doors, so security badges required. But nobody talked much about his work. In many instances it was because there was nothing to talk about. Progress was slow, breakthroughs rare, or so I was led to believe. The idea of a future issue dedicated to the Lab would have to wait. It would wait until I understood more about what was going on and what could be said, what couldn’t. That was okay. I was new to the job. All the same, I had to plan and get out an issue.

Another area that interested me was civil engineering, a field that broke itself up into all sorts of different areas of specialty. One was the air and water division. Air, now, involved us all, for we breathed the stuff, albeit free, and water, well, it was becoming my specialty, and here were people who studied it and performed laboratory experiments in it, wrote scholarly papers on it and its hydraulics (fascinating, fascinating) and found ways to treat it when it became contaminated though unwise human use (toilets, industrial pollution, agricultural runoff) and made it fresh and usable again. Transportation and structures were two other areas, but they did not interest me as much as water, preferably water that ran, especially if it ran in a stream bed. That was for me.

One afternoon shortly after I was hired (it is called, everywhere, "coming on board), I was wandering around the second floor of the civil engineering building, looking for a story, some lab that had people in it (for most were usually unoccupied) when I came across an opaque glass-topped door bearing a pasteup sign, "Flyfishers Only May Enter Here." Naturally I flung it open and hastened inside. It was the habitat of a bunch of graduate students in water resources. Nobody was at home, so I had to go away and come back again soon, looking for occupants. On one of the wall’s several bulletin boards were some snapshots fixed there with pushpins or thumbtacks. In one a guy was holding up a steelhead. Wow. Never had I felt so much at home. Even though the place was bereft of human occupation.

I came back the next morning and found Bob Barnes hovering over a desk which I presumed was his. Actually he shared it with two others. He looked up through a frown.

"Where do you fish?" I asked.

"North Stilly."

"So do I."

There was an instant bond. It was funny, we both marveled, that we hadn’t met before on some drift of the river. Funny especially since, after that meeting, we used to run into each other all the time, both on the river and around campus. And I am happy to state that he and some of the other occupants of the lab would drop into my office and talk fishing, not to mention relieving my boredom.

For the job was boring. There are roughly two kinds of jobs in this world, the ones that routinely overwork you and leave you gasping, and the ones that don’t and leave you with great amounts of time on your hands to fill up meaningfully, and if you think the former is the worst kind you may be wrong. It takes a fairly mature person to learn how to handle the latter and not go absolute bonkers, either cracking up or getting desperately mad and quitting in disgust. I vowed not to do either.

Articles did have a way of trickling in and it was presumed that I would publish all and everything, for so it had been in the past, under Hal Kelly and his predecessor, Isabel Hemenway, a wonderful old lady I was to meet a few years later, when we published our commemorative twenty-fifth year issue. But I was wary, having read more than a few back issues and seeing how dull and tedious they were, almost without exception. True, I hadn’t been hired to spice them up, but I knew I wouldn’t last long in the job (as Kelly had) unless there was the immediate prospect to do so. It didn’t occur to me that the effort might not be well received and that many of the engineering temperament would prefer to see things plod along as usual. Fortunately none were my bosses.

When you work for a large organization (and the college was one), you will find a range of personalities and temperaments. On your good days you will bless the multiplicity of view points provided, but on your bad ones you will wish they be fewer in number and more akin to your own. I had both kinds.

My first issue was to be April 1970. It was a little more than two months off. So far I had one article. It had come to me in the mail from a man at MIT. I automatically presumed he could not place it in a more prestigious place and its submission process had come all the way down to Trend and me. This was not automatically the case. It was on demand-activated transit. Not a bad idea. I asked around. Henry W. Bruck had come to the University to address a conference on mass transportation, something one of the department of civil engineering’s division was best known for. Bruck had delivered the keynote address and been subjected to a question-and-answer period afterwards. The whole proceeding was deemed serious enough to have been taped and was now in the process of transcription. Would I, as editor, be interested?

I sure would be. I had no idea where material for the issue would come from and was ready to clutch at any straw. The one of mass transportation was a good one; it concerned nearly everybody, everybody but one of those department heads or full professors to whom it was not a personal problem, as with Vern, but who could look upon it as one mildly interesting, even though highly abstract. So departmental secretaries donned headphones and began typing up what they thought they heard off the scratchy tapes and submitting the results to me. In some instances I could not believe what I read and had to go and get the tapes and try to puzzle out what the guy was saying. In many cases it was still not clear, and I ran back the tape, time and again, and listen another time, and still the words were not clear.

Then I would meet with the department’s office staff, who had done the original transcribing, and we would put our heads together and worry the bone of what was said. And then, delightfully alone again, the collaboration over, I would take a wild guess and plunge on.

What fun. And this, gang, is what editing is all about. I wouldn’t of thunk it.

It was a good issue. Every issue was a good issue, in its own right, if I handled it correctly. Research was breaking out of strict compartmental boundaries and involving two or more departments, often ones aligned under quite distant and surprising schools or colleges. Thus transportation issues involved civil engineering but they also concerned other disciplines, such as urban planning. Practically any other field—geography, sociology, to name but two—might also be brought in without the connection being stretched too thin. In fact, the two principle investigators of the government grant funding the program, the study, were from just these two departments. And they were most useful in helping me organize the material going into the issue, and when I had made one of my wild guesses as to meaning and was dead wrong kindly corrected my perception. In fact the issue had both depth and breadth, since it involved two universities, plus faculty investigators from two different colleges (engineering and architecture) and undergraduate and graduate students in the mass-transportation field.

Ed Horwood was the professor from engineering. He was a crusty individual, with a receding hairline and great droopy mustaches. He was a full professor and director of the urban data center. He was also in charge of the transportation, materials, and construction. This was a division within a division. It was not the contradiction in terms it might at first seem. I think it was more an indication of loosely organized things were within a university. As long as the people doing the research knew who was who and what was what, everything worked smoothly. And as far as outsiders went, forget them. They have no relevance.

Jerry Schneider was the co-investigator. They had gone after the grant together and had gotten it. Both knew each other from Pennsylvania, where they had obtained their Ph.D. degrees in different fields. They worked together easily. I got to know Schneider only slightly. My main contact was Horwood. He was an interesting man, a bon vivant, and we got along well, in spite of the fact that I was not. We would break each other up as we worked together assembling the issue. He and Schneider wrote an introduction. They wanted the issue to reflect mostly student work. That was okay with me, so long as it was of good quality.

"You’ll have to trust us there," Horwood told me.

I said that I did. Privately, though, I knew I could read, and it was important that the stuff the students produced made general good sense. Most of it was so full of data that they thought spoke for itself that I had to keep going back to them, the students, and ask, "Okay, now what does this mean? Put it into English."

And they did, if I kept after them hard enough and they got mad enough to say, "Look, can’t you read? It means . . . ." And then they would say it in basic English.

"Fine," I would say with a grin. "Now say it that way—exactly the way you said it to me. You don’t have to take the charts out. You just have to translate it along side."

And then they saw what I was after. This was a general purpose (though unmistakably engineering-oriented) magazine and it had to be readable by anybody who would patiently put in the time. It could be left lying around the house and, I hoped, be read by anybody who picked it up. Though this was novel, unheard of, the engineering faculty went along with me. The two approaches were not, I maintained, mutually exclusive and one (the technical one) was not demeaned by the other. They would not quite admit that the second enhanced the first, but I was gaining ground.

The magazine was printed on slick paper and generally ran 28 pages; in the center was a blue-page insert or signature of four pages, included in the page numbering system. It included photographs of the authors, as the writers were called. I didn’t try to change this, though I believed you were entitled to be called an author until you had produced and published a book. Photographs were required. I was no photographer. So I went to the photography department. This was aligned with printing but reported to the VP for public and university relations. It was the familiar dual reporting scheme I was already familiar with. Reporting to both, the manager in effect reported to neither. He in effect reported to no one.

This was Jim Sneddon. I asked him if he would please take the pictures, the portraits, for my next issue. He said, "Take them yourself, I’m busy." And he handed me an old Rolleflex, one nearly as old as he. I noted that he used a modern Nikon. It had a plethora of lenses, one for every occasion.

He would, however, develop my film for me, or rather his assistant, Johnny Moore would.

"Can’t Johnny shoot my pictures for me?" I asked plaintively.

"Johnny’s busy, too."

"You weren’t too busy for Hal Kelly."

"No, but we are for you. Look, Bob, you’ve been in the publications business a while. We remember you from your days downstairs." Would those days ever be forgotten by any of us? "You might as well learn how now. It’s easy."

Easy it was to do it marginally, I found it hard to do it well, but then the pictures I saw of Sneddon’s were, well, pretty mediocre. Johnny Moore’s were much more to my liking. The idea was to learn photography fast and be my own photographer.

I found I rather liked the idea.

I decided to talk it over with Vern. He seemed the more sympathetic of my two immediate bosses and was, after all, the one who had hired me. To him belongs one’s first loyalty—perhaps one’s only loyalty, if it is ever to be tested. Usually it is.

"Well, okay, go for it," he said, or the equivalent. And when the time came a couple of months later to invest in some darkroom equipment and supplies he told me that as long as my publications budget wasn’t exceeded to go ahead and charge things. It wasn’t as though the film development and printing wasn’t charged against my budget already, for I soon learned that it was. It was no bargain. With the borrowed 2-1/4-inch camera I was able to take marginally passable pictures for the very first issue. And there was a feeling of vague satisfaction to see my work, bad as it was, in print, along with the various things I had written before, during, and after that time. It was all part of the same parcel, items in a closely associated package.

I had trouble, however, getting people to pose for me. Generally I pointed the old double-lens reflex camera at them, trying to square them away in the tricky viewfinder (which like the control on an outboard motor and a boat works exactly the opposite of normal things) and pull the trigger. It’s called the shutter, I know; I knew it even then. But I pulled it desperately, as though it were a trigger. And I shot them (dead) right on the spot. When I look back at those pictures I am filled with a sense of sadness. I got them, all right, and in an engineering organization they will pass for adequate. Besides, when the reproduction was muddy, it was more the fault of the film processing, the photographic printing, the inking and screens used on the press.

Each could be improved, once I learned how.

64

Photography became my passion. I used it to fill up my spare time, which was abundant, oppressive. The Rolleflex had no light meter, so at first I guessed at what the exposure might be. I was using Tri-X film, which was about as fast as was obtainable and rated at ASA400, but it could be pushed one full f-stop, which is ASA (or ratter EI) 800, or even one more, EI 1200, but when it is left so long in the developing bath (you see, I have even picked up the terminology!) the film gets grainy and the print is contrasty, with a lot of ugly grain dots, which you don’t want, not if you’re striving for quality.

I was, believe me.

I soon realized that the reason Sneddon gave me the old camera was because it had a soft, slow lens that only opened up (as we say) to f3.2. So if you took picture indoors, as I did with my portraits, the lens had to be used at its maximum full aperture (which was minimal) and the shutter speed was so slow that the camera wobbled, producing a blurred picture. But since I was interested in photographing things and people (two categories that between them comprise practically everything) I decided to buy my own camera. But first I had to start buying camera magazines and trying to learn what was good, what was not.

I soon learned that Sneddon’s and Johnny’s Nikons were excellent, but expensive. I didn’t dare to ask the college to buy me one; budgets were tight for such items, while supplies and materials could be bought from central stores or medical stores on my operating budget. A good camera would be a nice addition to the family. I’d been taking fuzzy pictures of my son and wife ever since he was born, and the prospect of better snaps was enticing. I sprung for a new camera with my first paycheck. It was a Canon TL. The line had good lenses and the camera was at the bottom of the SLR line. It cost about two-thirds of what a comparable Nikon would and, authorities told me, was just as good, though at present it didn’t’ offer such a range of lenses. More lenses seemed far off, since I intended to do all my work with what came on the camera as basic, a normal or 50mm. lens. It comes close to reproducing what the eye sees at a convenient distant.

When you want to see otherwise, you can buy special lenses to get a different effect, such as up close, wider, or off at a distance. Or else you can use your legs to accomplish most of the same effects. Up very close doesn’t have much application, not unless you are in the insect business.

There was a darkroom over in Chemical Engineering, across the way, a visit which skirted the Drumhueller Fountain, a huge, round pond surrounded by a cement promontory, itself ringed with rose bushes that bloomed pink during every season but winter. I was urged to avoid using the darkroom during the daylight hours, when students might be using it (this proved to be rarely, however) but evenings it would be free. I started out evenings, but soon moved to afternoons, and usually the place was mine. In time I found a janitor’s closet down in the basement of Lowe Hall that was abandoned until midnight, when the cleanup staff came on duty; it had no windows and running water for the mop brigade, so it was nearly perfect for my purposes. It’s only drawback proved to be that the janitors kept opening the boxes of my photographic paper, exposing it to light and totally ruining it—despite the many signs I posted not to do this, that there was nothing of value or interest inside. This only drew further attention to the bright yellow Kodak boxes.

I started keeping them in my office but, you know, they kept getting exposed. It is a wonder the life of an office building, when the regular employees have gone home and the janitors take over, roaming free and doing whatever they like, normally undetected. It is not enough to sit in your chair to eat their lunch or use your telephone. They go through your doors and read—those who can read—your correspondence files. And they open every box. What are they looking for? Sweets, drugs, dirty pictures?

I found that a normal lens took normal pictures. A great discovery, what? People look better in pictures taken with a little longer lens—85 to 105mm., for instance—and the faster they are the more you can kill the background objects and isolate them in blurry space. This is all to the good, for the perspective is flattering to nearly everyone. Without it, with only a normal lens, what you have to do is take pictures largely from the waist up, then crop them down, either on the enlarger or afterwards, when you mark the print for reproduction. But the attractive perspective is not quite the same. What you are after is to make people look their very best, even when there is not much to work with.

In time I graduated to a Canon FT, then a Leica M-4, but this took me several years. By then I was pretty good, knew ahead of time what I wanted in a picture and how to get it without some sudden sad surprise. I photographed everything. In order to do anything original, you have to commit every cliché shot in the book, see it for what it is, discard it as trite and boring. This uses up lots of film, chemicals, printing paper. There is a time in the modern history of photography when the notorious Hunt brothers cornered the market on silver, created a shortage, ran the price way up, took their profits, and let the price descend to normal again. It took nearly half a year. In the interval Kodak and the other giants marked up their products astronomically. Film, paper, especially. When the market price of silver returned to normal, the price of photographic products stayed high. The profits soared. Many of us could no longer afford photography as an inexpensive hobby.

I learned photography before this took place, thank goodness. The only way to produce a good print is to make hundreds, thousands, of photographic prints. It is like practicing musical scales. You do them over and over until you can do them perfectly, but if you can’t you keep practicing. This I did. I would go into the darkroom and not come out until I could not longer stand, the night well advanced into morning, by lungs and head clogged to the point of sickness with breathing in thick chemical odors. In my hand would be six or seven prints of what I hoped to be high quality. In the morning light, the sun streaming in my basement casement, I would examine them critically. Always they needed spotting with a brush and diluted black coloring. This was the antidote for dust in the darkroom that dries on your negatives. It is the poor man’s substitute for cleanliness of environment.

Around campus there is plenty to photograph, always. There is an abundance of pretty girls and if you aren’t a complete asshole or up to obvious carnal purposes (and even if you are) they are willing to smile and pose for you, their long hair falling nicely across their shoulders and their breasts on continual display. But there are many other things as well: the war on, these were riotous times. The campus held many demonstrations, sometimes daily. There were musical groups performing on the quad at noontime in fair weather. There were mimes and jugglers, dance troupes, radicals and conservatives hotly debating each other. And there was the splendid array of the seasons. Here we have four and they merge slowly into one another, each shading off delicately. The camera eye is keen to such nuances and captures them unmistakably, irrevocably. Of course little of this had much to do with engineering, and that little is not very appropriate. You have to stretch a point or two for the sake of relevance. I was able (at least to myself) to stretch it far.

If you came into my office, in those days, you usually got your picture taken. If you worked for the college in any way, I would usually find a way to work the picture in, if it was in my less than humble opinion any good. And even if it wasn’t but was dimly related to engineering life or activity you might be surprised to find it reproduced. Then you might come to me for extra copies (gladly given) or even a print to take home to your friends and family. Courtesy Trend.

God, that name. What I was after was anything but trendy. The college, too. Talk about your misnomers. I tried hard to live it down. It was something you hoped to shrug off. It was a millstone, an albatross. At the same time, it was kind of cute, cute if you liked that kind of thing. So I had to live with it and live around it.

The second issue of the magazine I published that first year had much better pictures. I took every one of them, including the ones of buildings, complimenting myself on their composition, sense of structure, cross-lighting, full tonal range of printing, etc. Looking back on them, I can see that I had bought a wide-angle lens—a 35mm. The portrait lens was yet to come. I see some use of isolation and selective focus, the latter of which is no more than intelligently throwing out of focus everything that you don’t want the eye to see. It concentrates the viewer on one important area, and it may be small, slight. To do so other than accidentally requires a thorough knowledge of the laws of optics, perspective, depth of field and focus (not the same things but close). To achieve this I went through a comprehensive study of the techniques and aesthetics of modern photography. A life-long autodidact, I am happy to say the course was almost entirely self-taught.

I read books and I subscribed to magazines. I became familiar with the works of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Thought their cameras were larger than mine, their lessons were not entirely wasted on us small camera freaks. I spent hours poring over the work of Eugene Smith and Robert Frank. Then I went out and tried to do likewise. Ha. There is a lesson in humility. What Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz accomplished makes everybody else’s efforts seem puny. Yet you learn. You discover what the negative is and, in the case of the 35mm. frame, only 24 by 36mm. in size, what it can be forced to contain. Worlds. The universe on the fat part of a pin. And then you go out and try to do likewise.

You see as if you’ve just been born into the world of sight and everything is washed, new. It sparkles. It is brilliant and cries out to be captured, if only on film. You want to do nothing but oblige.

65

I continued to take noontime walks over to The Ave., but now the perspective was different. I wasn’t a Safeco Suit, or anything like them. I wore a tweed jacket and slacks, true, but my shirt was generally colored (when not, I had to use up those expensive white shirts, didn’t I, and felt no betrayal in doing so) and open at the collar. I affected a salt-and-pepper cap of the old-fashioned kind and—get this—I was growing a beard.

Take that, Safeco, and may you choke on it.

When I passed some Safeco employee on our common street, more mine than theirs, truly, each seemed to stand out as an anachronism and, oddly, I was invisible to them. Of course we connected to the University greatly outnumbered them, but it was more than this. They saw us as part of a huge irrelevant impersonal world. We hardly existed to them. No, our existence was peripheral, marginal, of no importance. It was they who controlled things, destiny. They paid off, but usually only after you were dead.

It seemed a terrible way to live and operate. I wanted no part of it and was heartily ashamed of once having lived and worked there. And—think of it!--they didn’t even recognize me, only a few weeks gone and with but a stubble on the same scratchy face. Hey, I wanted to shout, it’s me, Bob. No I didn’t. I was home, home again, intellectually incognito. The recent past was a shamefully shut door.

On my shoulder was my camera, the beginner’s Canon, with its ordinary lens, the 50mm. f1.8. It is slower than a speeding bullet but fast enough for one’s daily purposes. I wanted to do what is deemed "streetwork," but such a lens is not adequate for this and what is needed is something with a wider angle. Hence the apprentice’s 35mm. f2.8 or 3.5. The former, I think it was. I soon bought one, used.

Now I could capture (it is the correct word) life on the street, in all its disharmony and friction. I’d walk along, see something noteworthy, up would come the camera in a wink, and I’d trip the shutter, the lens aperture already preset to a small setting that would capture the depth of field necessary to include the subject and freeze it. Usually this was some person or group of people, for life on the street, The Ave., is a kaleidoscope and is every changing, forming new patterns and juxtapositions, never exactly the same twice. And then there were the vagaries of light and its associate, the weather. A gray day was best, one with no shadows, but no rain, either. Luckily the Pacific Northwest had many such days.

I was out on most of them, camera at the ready, my eye decisive, my shutter finger quick. I exposed a lot of cheap film, which I had bulk-loaded from a special device with a light-tight chamber. But drying the film after developing it, two or three rolls at a time, in the windowless room I shared with the building’s janitors, I always had a dust problem. Dust in the air dries on the film permanently and causes irregular light spots on the print. Dust in the air later descends on everything—negatives, enlarger lens, and anti-Newton ring glass, producing much the same thing, but it can be removed ahead of printing time with anti-static cloth or an ion-changing brush. Everybody who had spent much time in a darkroom knows all this and the areas in which difficulties arise.

There were also the intricacies of black-and-white printing to be, well, mastered. You either hold back light from the enlarger bulb in order to lighten a shadow area or you increase it with a larger aperture or longer printing time, depending on the effect you are after, using your hands and fingers in the latter instance to produce a mask or holes in a mask to admit light. This is called burning in or dodging, depending.

What you do is this: you plop a negative you have selected in the enlarger, being careful to center it in the holding mask and fighting against the natural tendency for the tiny negative to curl with the emulsion side up and produce an area of the forthcoming print that is out of focus. And since you want as much information as possible on the print from the negative you were so careful to frame in the view finder, you have opened up the frame of the negative holder with a file, working very carefully and slowly, and afterwards coating the fresh aluminum with flat black paint to ward off internal reflections. You end up with a professional-looking black mask on each of your full-frame prints which is the envy of all other photographers working in this medium and shows them that you are indeed a true professional.

All this is a point, or multiple points, involving pride and craftsmanship. These qualities I would like to think spilled over into my work as editor. But for that first issue, I relied much on the photographs of others, running down leads, going to departmental photo files (what could be duller, the work less inspired?), and even over to the state department of transportation to see what they had on hand. And I came up with what I needed, which was pictures of the great new metro systems from Washington D.C., New York City, and San Francisco’s BART. I borrowed what I needed and was scrupulous about returning what had been generously lent me. Thus for the first time Trend received a visual boost.

In future issues, in addition to my own improving photographic efforts, I used line drawings and even cartooning, resorting to illustrators I knew from my Safeco days, not long past.

Gradually the magazine took shape. The cover remained hideous, although redesigned not long ago by the locally famous, Fred Walsh, who I knew from my office of publications day. So at the end of the first year, I hied myself over to my old office and had a long talk with Howard Miller and Fred, who seemed to welcome me back as a client, and I began to see things from a different point of view. I was not a captive client, either, for I could go outside to get what I wanted and needed, as with art and photography. But I had rather work with people whom I knew, people who I respected. I told Fred I wanted a new cover but one based on his earlier design concept, which utilized a couple of concentric circles than ran off the page. Whereas in the past, all covers had been preprinted on colored stock, using only black ink and typography, I now wanted a glossy white cover, but each year would have its own special color, and the lower half of the page, the half with the bottom concentric circle, would contain a photograph.

It would either be mine or somebody else’s, if I thought it a better solution to the problem, which was to attractively illustrate the theme of the contents. In the future the contents revolved around a theme or a specialized area of engineering activity, often interdisciplinary in scope. There were a great many of these, including fields that were just emerging. So the future of the magazine (and myself) was nearly unlimited in terms of what we might do.

It was a great job and the one I enjoyed most, in all my working days, and I wished it would go on forever. My two predecessors, Hal Kelly and Isabel Hemenway, had retired out of their respective editorships. I hoped to do the same, at least I did at first. The quarterly had begun in December 1948. Wow. I was a freshman then, not yet initiated into a fraternity, fumbling my way across campus and lost in my gigantic classes, made that way from the post-World War II explosion of returning veterans on the GI Bill. Kelly had taken over in 1960. And now there was I. It seemed a long tradition, beginning about the same time as I had entered college, and I could look ahead and see myself at sixty or sixty-five, like Kelly and Hemenway, retiring, my new beard now white and long, myself perhaps a little stooped by age. My replacement would come on board and I would take him around and introduce him (or her) to the faculty and departmental chairmen, who would of course all be much younger than I but more kindly and friendly than the ones I had met only recently as a result of long association and many happy times together spent solving problems and producing outstanding issues of the quarterly. And on and on.

It was not to be, though at times it seemed as though I were coming close.

66

Photography can be an extroverted affair and often is. I made friends in photography. I’m not quite sure how it happens. You go out, looking, with a camera either in your hand or slung over your shoulder, and pretty soon you run into another guy in the same mode, as it were, and you begin talking. Often there is something going on—a news event, a happening, a parade, a guy with a bullhorn arguing against the war. On campus there is always something. It is a very public place. There are people everywhere. I was forty now. Each year the girls kept getting younger. They scarcely saw me, even though there was not yet any gray in my beard. Well, not much, and it was only in a couple of devilish streaks that ran down the front of my chin (like elephantine Draculaish canines).

One friend was Ari Cowan, another Egil Gustafson. Both were professional photographers, and I learned from both of them. Egil came into my office, following Trina. He was enamored of her, but then he was continually finding new sources of female inspiration and worked each of them ruthlessly, until you might say the lode ran out. And I had to admit that Trina was pretty in wonderfully abstract sense, while my own taste ran much more in the direction of my assistant, Andrea. To each his own.

Egil was big and Norwegian. They are an odd breed and tend to be dangerous when crossed, like certain animals including barely domesticated dogs. He was a little like a Doberman, in fact, though larger boned and with a wide smile that meant to put you at your ease but at least in my case made me cautious, nervous. He came bounding into the room on Trina’s slim heels and literally whirled on his own when he saw hanging on my cementblock walls some of my own recent black and white work.

"Who’s the photographer?" he asked, briefly averted.

I saw him through the open door of my office (who could not?) and acknowledged that I was, sort of. He immediately entered and plopped into the ringbacked chair that awaited my visitors and overflowed it. God, he was huge. A great shock of black hair hung down from his forehead and his teeth (great to start with but now neglected for years) gleamed widely. He was wearing a thick Nordic ski sweater and trenchcoat over his arm, and knowing him I suppose a couple of Nikons dangled from his broad shoulders, though I soon learned he had a penchant for Hasselblad. Of course: they came from neighboring Sweden. This would give them the ethnic deciding edge.

Egil could expand to fill whatever space was available, even if it was considerable. He didn’t exactly bully you, but he communicated a kind of ruthlessness large in scope that immediately put a man on his defensive. I suppose there was the hint of a temper, there in his eyes. At the same time he could be charming, engaging. He was clearly European, and often European men are like this. They treat the available world (a world that is available to them as light is said to be available, in photography) as though it was infinitely manipulable and existed solely for their purposes. And perhaps it did, though it was more likely that women would subscribe to this theory than would men.

Turned it off and on rather like a faucet, I thought that first day, during our visit, and though again through the following years of our acquaintanceship. I hesitate to call it friendship, but it could easily be called that as well. I saw a lot of him when he was in town, but long intervals would pass when he was gone, either out of town or in town on some mysterious mission that had no need of me, Trina, the University milieu, or anything resembling any of us. I sometimes wondered what this might be—where he might go and what he might do. But I was never able to picture it even roughly for myself. He simply disappeared into another life, sometimes for months on end. Once for more than a year. Then he would suddenly reappear, grinning, wanting to be asked about where he had been, alluding to places with a broad brush, and often producing photographs from his portfolio case to back himself up.

Tibet, Kenya, Tokyo, Rio.

How he funded these photographic junkets was another one of his mysteries, for whenever I or my friends saw him he was always broke and borrowing money. Only once did I lend it to him. He told me he was married (big news) and his wife was filing for divorce. No wonder, with all the screwing around he did on campus, including his flirtation or whatever it was with my (I speak broadly here) totally beguiled Trina.

"You haven’t met my wife, have you, Bob?"

"I haven’t every heard you mention her."

"That is because we are having problems. The problems have gone on for some time, Bob."

Have you ever known somebody who keeps calling you by your first name? Over and over? As if you yourself might have forgotten it? Isn’t it maddening? I always think it is because this person has read in some book, or has taken some course (by correspondence?) that says the way to a man (or woman’s) heart and pocketbook is accomplished by letting that person hear his or her name said often. It lulls them into liking you. I don’t know who peddles this bullshit and thinks people might fall for it, believe it, but I automatically despise such a person and try to fend him off. It is a form of mawkish flattery and unctionness that can’t help but backfire. At least it does with me.

But how can you escape from somebody sitting in your own office, regaling you with undeniable exploits in the field of photography and showing you the proof? Or who seems—on every one of his surfaces, which are many—so full of apparent good will? Well, you simply can’t. You can’t run out of your own office and go screaming down the hall, where all the open doors will see you. It simply isn’t done. Besides, don’t you rule here? It would seem not.

Wherever Egil goes, he is the center of attention and all eyes gravitate to him and cling there.

For one thing, he must be six feet five. Say he weighs only two-hundred and thirty pounds. It is hard to be inconspicuous. Especially hard if you don’t want to be.

I used to go out to coffee with him, and else where, and watch the female eyes turn in his direction, all of them, whatever their age. And he would acknowledge absolutely all of them with a wink and a smile. He was the only man I knew who could wink at women, woman after woman, and have the act well received. They loved it, all of them. I have no idea what it meant or portended.

If I had done it, they would have laughed in my face. Or the other ones had me arrested. But then I was not, or am not, certifiably European. And he was, he was. I’ve only known one other man like him and he was Norwegian, too, but diminutive. They had a similar expressive manner. I would call it B-Movie and it is often found in the gangster you keep expecting to be shot down but is still wonderfully alive at film’s end.

This other guy was named Lars and he lived in Ketchikan with a beautiful woman named Sonja. It was a B-Movie landscape. He owned a bar and was deeply in debt. He moved across my scene as though hired to do so, grandly, magnificently, and so did she, always dressed to the teeth. A Garbo type, but in no way shy or reclusive. Lars was always checking up on her. It was plain, he didn’t trust her. And she liked men. All men. I remember (I was in the Army, doing heavy construction in a civilian city) riding along in the back of a duce-and-a-half truck with a bunch of greasy, dirty guys, all attired in fatigues, and the pack of us wolf-whistling at Sonja, in her high heels and form-fitting dress coat. She turned and smiled at us, us all, over her shoulder.

If you’ve seen the movie, you can see the smile.

Veronica Lake had such a smile. Also Ida Lupino.

This was, you understand, during my bad days. I was lonely and drank too much. I was miserable. I hadn’t had a woman in months, even though I went out looking nightly and there was a small number of them around. Sonja, she was ambiguous—is that the word? Was she Lars’s, or was she her own, leading whatever kind of life she chose, including one of high licentiousness? They lived in my apartment building. I always used to see them coming and going, as though being chased by the police. Like having lost something of colossal importance and value. Like the end of the world would arrive momentarily and they did not want to waste a moment until then but did not know precisely what to do next.

Anyway, one day late in the afternoon I was called back to my apartment from work, and there I was, all grubby and grungy, and it so happened that Sonja without her Lars rode the same elevator to our respective floors. Naturally she smiled at me when she saw me. I was a man, however disreputable. Men could only be so disreputable, in her book, her look seemed to say. It also seemed to say I am approachable. Try me and see.

So I propositioned her, right there in the elevator, as our encasement, or brief prison, crept between floors two and three. I did. I said something about coming to my apartment and specifically what I had in mind. No, I didn’t make the universal gesture of copulation with a looped finger on one hand and an extended finger on the other; it wasn’t necessary. She had a heavy accent, I noticed, but she understood English well enough, though still had trouble sometimes speaking it. This wasn’t one of those times.

She smiled sweetly, Sonja did, and sweetly declined. She actually made an excuse why she couldn’t. A previous commitment. A scheduling conflict. She was sorry, but she simply couldn’t, not right now. But she kept the door open. What? Yes, her manner indicated that it might be an immediate impossibility, but I wasn’t to think harshly of her. What, me? She smiled again, shyly it seemed. There was the future, it seemed to say. Then, as the door to her floor opened, she smiled again. Not so shyly. Then she was gone. The elevator descended to my floor, which we had already passed. The door snapped open and I exited. Whew, I noticed; I really needed a shower. But that wasn’t my problem.

A few weeks later Lars’s bar and restaurant burned to the ground. This was always happening in overheated Alaska. When it did, the amount of insurance the building carried always made you wolf-whistle. It is a wonder how the insurance companies ever agreed to such a figure or that they poor sap could ever pay the premium. Naturally they refused to pay off. Meanwhile Lars had disappeared. Sonja soon followed. Men is suits—either insurance investigators or plain-clothes policemen—went up and down the hallways of our vast apartment building, knocking on doors and asking questions. Everybody recognized them, but nobody knew them. When they came to me I did not tell them my story about propositioning Sonja in the elevator and how her refusal did not offend me but rather was wrapped in a vague promise.

Try me again.

I don’t know why Egil Gustafson reminded of Lars and even of Sonja. But he did. They would have been at home with each other. They could have drunk vodka and exchanged lies into a night in which the sun never sets and nobody passes out, even though there are silences that last for an hour.

67

One morning Egil popped into my office, a wreck. He was having a hard time, a bad one, and the center no longer held for him, if there ever had been one. the week before, parked back of Lowe Hall where I collected my tickets, somebody had broken into the trunk of his old huge Pontiac and stolen a Nikon and two lenses.

Now his wife, the wife I had never heard of, let alone met (or Trina, either), wanted to divorce him. I never bothered to ask, Why? I accepted it as fact and also as fact that she had multiple good reasons. But it was Egil who did not want a divorce. I didn’t question this statement either. A marriage was worth saving, we both agreed. She wanted to try counseling. Slowly I was drawn into acceptance that counseling would be worthwhile, under the circumstances. There was only one problem, one hitch. What was that? The counselor needed to be paid in advance. This I could understand, for counselors must be very much like those sad souls who give music lessons. If you don’t pay up front, those poor, honorable guys don’t get paid at all. So it is a case of no money, no lesson.

It all sounded reasonable to me but what was the point?

Could I lend him twenty dollars?

My wallet was out before I could think. Now, today, twenty dollars isn’t much. It wasn’t then, either. It would buy three or four new books, a dinner out for two, a couple bottles of whiskey.

Egil was out the door like my chair contained one of those steel springs. I didn’t seem him again for ten years.

But before these unseemly events I saw him often and was always glad to have him visit, even though there were times when even I was busy and had an issue to get out or proofs to return to the printing plant in order to make a press deadline. Even so I made time for Egil. And it was because of his assertiveness with people in the business, the world of art and photography, that I was included in at least three showings. It was Egil’s idea, Egil’s alone, Egil’s foremost. And I have always been grateful.

Twenty bucks is a pretty small price to pay.

There is a picture of me he took with m y own camera and new 85mm. portrait lens, while we were having coffee, that I shall always prize, even though the print is long gone and exists only in a magazine reproduction of one of the four special issues I produced to celebrate the quarterly’s twenty-fifth year of existence.

My beard is new and speckled; my horn-rimmed glasses give me a professorial look that I might have cultivated if it hadn’t seemed perfectly environmentally natural, doing what I did where I did it. My tweed jacket is from Albert’s, my tie a silk rep, and I am seated at a little table, looking serious but not pompous, as I sometimes am. Across the room and delightfully out of focus but still recognizable as such is a pretty coed with long brown hair seated at a table not far away. He face is obscured with what is technically called circles of confusion. It is no accident that she is there or that the focus does not fall on her but is delightfully off. She is delicately balanced over my shoulder, as I said, and the composition is simple but, well, exquisite. There is no question in my mind that everything in the picture is intended.

Egil was good, no doubt about it, though highly calculating and manipulative. How that word keeps recurring when I think and write about him. He would use people—but then don’t we all? Let me give another example. I once showed him some small-format work I had done while on a fishing trip outside of Auburn. An Indian lived there in a rundown old mansion, absolutely no paint left on its boards and a wonderful old picket fence running around it. He liked stuff like this and sought it out, while to my eye it happened only incidentally. I didn’t photograph the old Indian, only his abode, but I mentioned him to Egil, whose eyes widened with guile. I think I mentioned where the place was but no exactly.

Two weeks later Egil showed up in my office with a slew of photos, all beautifully flat and dried glossy on a machine with a platen. Here was the building, the fence, and—by God—the old Indian. Egil had gotten the guy to pose for him.

"Did you pay him?" I asked.

"No, never. You never pay somebody. You offer to give him"—or her, I thought—"some prints. You can even charge for them"—and here it came—"Bob." My shoulders shriveled at the sound of my own name. He had a way of speaking to me as though I were a beginner, not at photography but at life. And perhaps I was. All of us native-born Americans were.

"It is important," he continued, "that you always offer to give them a print or two. It is in form of payment, Bob." I shuddered. Did he see it? "You must not forget it. You must stick by your promise."

I nodded thoughtfully. Lesson learned.

A year later I returned to the Green River and my steelhead fishing. I parked off to the side of the bridge and saw across the road the old Indian pottering around his fence line. On a whim, I walked over and engaged him in conversation. He was taciturn but not unfriendly.

"A friend of mine took your picture, oh, about ten months or a year ago. He showed them to me. Very good." The man listened to me without expression. So far so good. "They were excellent pictures. I recognized you from them. In fact, I photographed your place before he did. I saw you off at a distance, but didn’t want to bother you. Do you remember this guy, my friend?"

He nodded.

"He took my picture," he said.

"Right. Did he stop by to give you a print, you know, a copy of his work? Did he say he would?" For I had a lingering doubt, for no good reason.

"Never saw him again," the Indian said. And I was confirmed.

I remained grateful, all the same. I think for a while he wanted me to buy prints for my magazine, but this was out of the question for his work fell in the category of art and my need for pictures was pedestrian. Once I tried to explain this to him and I think I offended him. He shook off my remarks impatiently as wrong and ill-conceived. I was immediately sorry. The fault was mine, clearly. I wanted to make it up to him, but how? The only way I could was by buying the prints that I had no need for and couldn’t use. I decided against it. And I wouldn’t buy them for my own use for there is a dictum in photography that you don’t buy each other’s prints but give them reciprocally, kindly. I almost said lovingly. Now I’ve said it.

For he was good, as I said. I mean, he had stuff in National Geographic. He showed it to me. I never thought until this very moment that he might be lying. It might have been somebody else’s work that he identified as his own. And since the magazine was his, not mine, there was no opportunity to look in back at my leisure and sort out the extensive picture credits and see if he was listed.

A confirmed liar knows these things and how to slip the noose. But I would prefer to think that he always spoke the truth in regard to certain things, including the nature and scope of his work.

Egil included me in a show with four of us in a little gallery on Whidbey Island. I wasn’t able to go to the opening. I had six prints in it and Egil selected them all. I had to buy chrome frames and glass for each, but he got me his professional discount at Seattle Art and a good deal on somebody to mount and mat them. I sold one. It was to a Betty Boeing, a scion of the pioneer airplane family and a photographer herself. It was a picture of, well, five urinals. They were in the basement of my office building and I saw them daily. One time I decided to photograph them with an extreme wide-angled lens, and the light sparkled on their newly washed enamel as though they had just been born. Evidently somebody else liked them, though I never could figure out why a woman would choose a picture of urinals. Or a man, either.

The rest of the frames I have left over. From year to year I stuff new prints in them and regal myself by hanging them on various walls. They have been good companions, even though my interest in doing photography has long since fled I now take point-and-shoot snaps, just like the rest of the world.

somebody else’s work that he identified as his own. And since the magazine was his, not mine, there was no opportunity to look in back at my leisure and sort out the extensive picture credits and see if he was listed.

A confirmed liar knows these things and how to slip the noose. But I would prefer to think that he always spoke the truth in regard to certain things, including the nature and scope of his work.

Egil included me in a show with four of us in a little gallery on Whidbey Island. I wasn’t able to go to the opening. I had six prints in it and Egil selected them all. I had to buy chrome frames and glass for each, but he got me his professional discount at Seattle Art and a good deal on somebody to mount and mat them. I sold one. It was to a Betty Boeing, a scion of the pioneer airplane family and a photographer herself. It was a picture of, well, five urinals. They were in the basement of my office building and I saw them daily. One time I decided to photograph them with an extreme wide-angled lens, and the light sparkled on their newly washed enamel as though they had just been born. Evidently somebody else liked them, though I never could figure out why a woman would choose a picture of urinals. Or a man, either.

The rest of the frames I have left over. From year to year I stuff new prints in them and regal myself with the effects of hanging them on various walls. They have been good companions through the years, even though my interest in doing photography has long since fled I now take point-and-shoot snaps, just like the rest of the world. And they prove to be most ordinary.

Egil got me a one-man show at the Suzzallo Library on campus. This was somewhat prestigious. He did the selecting from a host of loose prints, then insisted I mount and mat them carefully, all alike. It took many hours, but was well worth it. The curator, Bob Monroe, was a casual friend, so perhaps politics had something to do with my getting the show. For a month my prints lay flat in glass cases, all lit as though they were art works (which they were far from being) and protected from anything but the eyes of strolling students on their way across the echoing marble to the general reading room.

I visited them many times myself in those thirty days. Talk about your vainglorious occasion. I liked the hushed atmosphere and believed it appropriate to my serious work. What ego! I liked watching students and faculty pause to review my work and treat it as the welcome diversion that it was. And those four-plus weeks passed all too quickly. Don’t came the prints, one by one, and they were carefully stacked and I lugged them away, almost as though it were an instance of infamy. But I will say one thing in my favor. I had learned how to pull (as it is called) a print through diligence and hundreds of hours of application. All had deep blacks, bright whites, and a multitude of middle gray tones.

The true colors of photography are indisputably black and white.

I have a lot to thank Egil Gustafson for, I know. Yet he was never truly a friend. As with a lot of people, Egil carefully maintained relations with them and used them at his convenience. He never had a telephone that I knew of or even a residence. It was impossible to give him a call, consequently. I think he lived with others for as long as he could get away with it, his photographic equipment either in paid storage or stored in the trunk of his old Pontiac that could barely run. When I saw him, he always popped into my office—never mind what I was doing at the time. Like a child, he demanded instant gratification. I usually dropped everything. I mean, he was possessed of such intensity that you had better have a pretty good reason. And there was always his temper to take under consideration, not that he ever threatened me. So big, he didn’t have to. I would see his eyes narrow when there was the possibility he might be denied something, even a minor thing. Then that big face would brighten, the smile with the large white teeth come out from behind its clouds, disarmingly, and the storm would seemingly have passed. He’d laugh his contagious laugh. I’d laugh too—at about half his intensity. The subject would pass on to some other matter. Generally it was photography. If not, unspecifically girls. Or specifically girls. There was always one around he had his sights set on. He would indicate as much through a nod or some throwaway gesture; it was unmistakable in content.

I presumed Egil had all the girls he wanted. He merely had to nod his head or beckon. And it was evident from his manner. Whenever I went anywhere with him, say, to the student union for coffee, they were always looking his way. He could elicit a smile always. The smile was not offputting. The smile was an open invitation, or so I took it as being. Never, never, did I receive such a smile, either alone or with him. He was its sole recipient. I took it this was always the case. It was his sole property and he was deserving of it. How disappointed he would have been if none was forthcoming. But it always was. I always wondered what specifically it was to engender it. A host of small things, none in itself enough but all together more than adequate.

I’ll tell you, it made me feel inferior.

He could have walked up to any one of them and picked them like a flower. Occasionally he would, as if to prove it to me, not himself. He would walk away with her, myself forgotten, the cup of coffee we were on our way to, and he would cast me a helpless look over his shoulder. "What am I to do?" it said. "I can’t help myself."

The carnality that would follow was only to be alluded to. This was very European of him. He’d roll his black eyes and that would signify worlds of what had happened—whether or not it really had. It was good enough to convince me.

And then one day Egil was gone. He had erased us from his life, evidently. Some farther world had beckoned. When he returned, one, two years later, he had contact sheets and color transparencies of where he had been, indisputable evidence.

Bangkok, Delhi, Sri Lanka.

68

My first show of photographs predated my meeting of Egil. There was an art supply store on The Ave. and it was called Michael, though there was no Michael in attendance and it later proved he lived in Los Angeles and had several such stores. I later met his ex-mistress and she became a friend and sometimes model. This was Roberta, called Bobbi by everybody but me, who was also proprietor of that awful name, at least when I was a little boy, and detested it. So I called her the other, but nobody else did.

There I met Pam Rassmussen. She was my first model and my very best. Pam could not be duplicated; I know, for later on I tried. How special she was, how the camera (as they say) loved her. A photographer and his model must be absolutely Platonic, or else what is going on between them is something else, something not wholly artistic. For instance, I can tell just from looking that them, looking at her, so many of them, that the relationship between Andrew Wyeth and his Helga was of this nature. She liked to take her clothes off and have her body looked at. He liked looking, painting, and observing the vagaries of light on her pale flesh and excellent bone structure. If not, I am absolutely wrong about everything that is important in life and deserve to be ignored in this and all my other passing remarks.

She was working behind the counter at Michael’s and looked to be nothing special. She was young, slim, and only ordinarily pretty. The store was dark, with windows only across the front and those usually in shadow, the interior lit only with spots that originate in a pinpoint and throw invisible cones of light that fall in pale yellow circles on whatever is beneath—countertops, tables, the cashregister, the bins where mats are stored vertically. He was very friendly and helpful. They had a huge table where you could cut your matting boards to size with a long, wicked knife that swung from a fixed point on a kind of lever, making a thick whisking sound when it met the material. There was a bin where you put your scraps and I think I met her when I was discarding mine, or rather at the moment she came over to help gather up my waste and drop it into the bin. A certain slant of light fell across her cheeks and I saw the concave planes that formed beneath her bones, that these hollows struck me.

"Would you mind if I took your picture?" I asked shyly. Shyly because such a request can easily be mistaken for something else, a line, a prelude to a proposition. But she took it as neither and was already acquiescing when I hurriedly added, "I mean, now, right here? It will only take a moment."

She nodded ascent. "Where do you want me?"

The place was dim and my eyes sought for one of those cones of light to stand her under, and when I found one it turned out that she was lit solely from the top, which is not becoming, is deadly, in fact. And the front windows—the photographer’s best source of light and no secret—was of no help here, for nothing was being issued from the street, The Ave., except a vague darkness. I would have to do best as I could.

"It’s all terrible, the light, there isn’t any," I protested. "Oh, let’s try a couple at the counter. I don’t expect much, but it will give me some idea." Nothing I said made much sense and for a moment I was afraid I offended her by making her think she was at fault and not the light. But her manner seemed to be nonplused, cooperative.

My camera that day was a rangefinder, one suitable for streetwork, and with a rangefinder you can not see what the lens sees, only what a parallel correction eyepiece sees, which in only the field of vision. I brought the camera up and snapped off a couple of frames, shrugged my shoulders, saying, "thanks a lot. We’ll see. We’ll have to wait and see." My words were not complimentary and I was keenly aware that I was saying all the wrong things.

No, I did not hurry back to my Lowe Hall darkroom and process the film. The roll was near the end of the exposures but not at them, and I dawdled finishing it off. I processed it several days later (I was processing a lot of film, those days, several rolls at a time, excitedly) and saw nothing special in the two frames that she was on. A wide-angled lens suitable for streetwork is not flattering to the human face, be it male or female. It makes people look long and skinny, the portion of them closest to the camera a bit thickened. Such as noses. And if I were to look back at those postage-stamp sized contact prints I am sure I would see nothing special. Yet there was something that encouraged me. Perhaps it was the fact that I had no willing model, nobody to shoot film on experimentally. And I was experimenting widely, wildly, in those days, trying to learn my craft and what various lenses would do under a range of circumstances.

There must have been something other than she was available on my noontime walks and so friendly. I cannot put the finger of my mind on it, however.

She had a nice calm and quietude about her. She had a way of coming up to me and standing there, mine, or mine absolutely for the moment. And there are supra-sexual elements at work in all photography sessions, be they between members of the same sex or, as usually takes place, the opposite. It is an intimate moment. It simulates the instant that precedes coupling, yet is nothing like it, except in intensity and concentration. The moment then becomes next in sequence, much more common, of two people working together to accomplish a common goal, which is the taking of the first picture, then the second. And so on. It is an instance of high cooperation.

I don’t believe I even showed her those first shots. Anyway I don’t remember carrying the contact sheet over to Michael’s at noon and laying it out before her. Rather I must have alluded to it, with a shrug of my shoulders, and made some offhand comment, repeating that the light was terrible here.

"Why don’t you come over to my place some morning?" she asked. "My little house faces to the East and gets the light then. And I don’t have to be to work until one on Friday."

As I said, and shall say, there are certain unavoidable parallels to sex, including assignations. Was she suggesting a tryst? Not Pam. She was what she was and not something else; if it had been a tryst, she would have made it unmistakable, right down to the language defining it.

"Aren’t you afraid?" I asked. "I mean, I am a virtual stranger."

She laughed. "No," she said. And then I realized with a shock that we were of different generations, and if such an invitation coming from me to one of my own proper time, it would have been clear what was involved, even if I hadn’t intended it. In other words, the woman would have thought I had sex in mind, and I would have had sex in mind, and if anything other than sex took place, such as photography, it would have come as a big surprise to either or both of us. This was Egil’s world, as well. But he and I, of roughly the same generation but different nationalities, had moral frameworks most unalike. He would have banged his Helga, while I wouldn’t, or so I thought. Or he would have photographed Helga, undressing her by degrees (they like this), and then brought out an instrument different from a camera and completed the job. And then perhaps photographed her again, from a different perspective, photographed her after the fact, so to speak. The "had" woman. A memento. Perhaps a memento-mori, if he decided not to see her again, for there were many flowers for his picking.

Pam wanted the experience of a camera, a man looking at her through a camera lens. She enjoyed the feeling of light upon her skin and had an instinctive feeling for it and how it enhanced her. She was not always running over to a mirror to see how she looked. She knew. She needed no confirmation. And as for me—about twenty years older than she—I was from a different generation, and much had happened to separate the first from the next. There was the war, for instance, drugs, and the counterculture. They divided us irrevocably and enhanced our differences. But the differences were complimentary. This she knew better than I did.

She was not afraid of me, clearly. In some quarters a man might deem that an insult. Egil’s, for instance. There are men who operate in an atmosphere of fear and know how it stimulates some women and is an inherent part of sex. Such women are called masochists, of course, and their men sadists. So trite, the words, the situations are endlessly created and recreated between men and women, often unknowingly, other times quite calculatedly. So Pam trusted me. More, she trusted her own ability to survive. There are dead women on every evening’s eleven o’clock news who believed this and had the truth finally proved to them and at the last gasp knew themselves to be wrong. Dead wrong. But up until that last minute they reveled in the excitement and terror of sudden encounters involving the opposite sex and drew emotional sustenance from them.

Not Pam. She was rock solid in all her apparent fragility. I had to admire her, while admitting I was not that way. How lucky she was that I was somebody trustworthy, or was it luck? Did she "read" me, did all women read men, and make initial determinations not involving sexual suitability but whether they would be safe to be with, which is an even more important consideration?

I would need a woman to tell me, and one is not handy, and even if she was, I’m not sure she would consciously know or what she told me about it would be truthful, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Boy, the world is complicated, or grows so, when you examine it closely.

I arrived at Pam’s house about ten, checking myself out of work with a load of cameras and a nod to Andrea. "Be back around one," I told her. I was always telling her such things and disappearing, and she was cool enough not to question me much and to cover for me, even though there was hardly ever any need for cover. Pam lived in a modest area away from Lake Washington and not in sight of it but in its general direction. "A charming cottage," is how I thought of it, as I made my way to her font door. I might have said cheap, as well, or dilapidated. Rental. But there were roses growing at the gate and again at the front door. The gate was held in place by one workable hinge; the other dangled uselessly. There was both a bell and a knocker. When there was no noise from within or no response I tried the knocker and Pam instantly appeared. She was wearing a housecoat, no makeup.

The morning sun caught her and she was lovely. Yet the feeling was not a sexual one. I don’t know what exactly what it was. If I said photographic, one might laugh. But that pretty much describes it. And if it was anything more, I chose to disregarded it. All I wanted to do was circle her with my camera, up close, trapping the light and exploiting it, as she turned to it and it caught her skin and bones. The purpose? Beautiful pictures.

And they were. We were alone. The cottage shone with diffuse window light. Every shot I foresaw, previsualized, and it was nearly perfect. My shutter clicked away, the frames advancing. She moved to the camera as though it (not I) were alive and admiring. As a man may be said to be the camera’s adjunct, so I was the camera’s, simply an instrument to say, now, okay, and trip the shutter release. I did not even get to select the moment. The camera did, or rather she did. When it was just right, the light, the angle, the planes of her face, she simply held the pose for a fractional second and my finger moved to obey. I stopped only when the film grew taut in its plane, its tracks across the camera’s aperture, and I knew the last frame had been exposed. There would be no more, not until I halted and reloaded, a tedious process and disruptive. It is why so many pros carry preloaded extra camera bodies. All they need to do is snap on a fresh lens.

She had mirrors in the cottage and they caught the light, diffused it more, magnified it, condensed it, gathered it; whatever was needed for the photographic purpose.

"Tired?" I asked her.

She nodded no.

I was lightly bathed in sweat.

"Hey," I said, "this is great. Everything I’ve taken so far is great. I see it. Absolutely wonderful. But I’m running out of ideas. Do you have any?"

She did. She was wearing a leotard, with flared skirt. When I arrived her hair was up in huge curlers; I can see today in prints that remain how those rollers have her naturally straight hair those long waves. Her hair (I never knew its true color, it changing according to the quantity and quality of available light) was parted in the center and was a little longer than shoulder length. Where the light hit it, it proved to be blond (though the pictures are black and white, so there is only blond and black to work from, and what is not black, or nearly so, must be the opposite, photographic blond). And because with that name she must have been Scandinavian, her hair must have been nearly straight to begin with and could only be persuaded briefly to hold a wave, a curl. By degrees, then, the wave would disappear from it and it would take on an entirely different look, the appearance of mutability.

Her suggestion was that she might take off some of her clothes. I might, took, since it was evident I was streaming hot, there in the morning May sunshine. I declined removing mine and she smiled, almost as though she knew I would but had to hear the halting confirmation. Off came the black leotard top. It is interesting how a woman does this. It snaps at the crotch, and she had to first remove her full flared flowered shirt. There was no modesty or immodesty involved; there rarely is, when a woman undresses for you, whatever her purpose. She had kicked off her sandals much earlier so that she could move around the place deftly, flatfooted, silently, for she was home, at home. Now the circled skirt rose and fell, lying on the bare-board floor as ordinary limp cloth, perhaps a sheet or thin blanket. And now she reached down to her secret place and undid the leotard’s two snaps, and the coarse garment instant relaxed its hold on her person and crept or was drawn upward from its own inherent tension. She drew it up, progressively shapelessly, and soon it was at her neck and the site of all that flowing hair, which it encompassed surroundingly. She dipped her head, drew the hair all together in a wad, and pulled the inert material over her head. Off.

The leotard was now no more than a hand towel in size and substance. She discarded it to a table or floor; I did not notice which, for it had become nothing. Then she was all flesh, asking in its nakedness to be admired. And since I was a camera, so to speak, I looked shamelessly. What I saw surprised me.

She had stretch marks on the tops of both breasts. She remarked upon them instantly, seeing I suppose what I saw and offering what were only bland explanations. "I grew too quickly," she said. "My breasts are not large, but, remember, I didn’t have any, and then I did. It is the way some things happen. Some women have stretch marks on their belly from the baby’s growth. Me, my tits. Sorry."

"No reason to be sorry. It’s how it is."

"Will the camera see them?"

"I see what the camera sees first," I said, "and I’ll try to minimize them. Though they don’t bother me in the least. What I’m trying to do is capture what is there. It’s great. But I think I can avoid them—the shadows—if I am aware and work more carefully."

"Thanks. About the appendix scar, it happened when I was thirteen. It nearly ruptured and I nearly died."

"It’s not an area that gets naturally photographed, so I think I can avoid it. You are lovely."

It was the kind of remark that is issued spontaneously, unthought. She smiled, as if to say, Yes I am. I’m glad you find me so. It matters a lot. You see, I am lonely. A woman needs a man to tell her she is lovely, even only if it is some stranger with a camera. And though she didn’t actually say it, I knew it, and responded as though I had hear her words.

"Yes, I understand."

She smiled again.

She told me about David, her lover. He was in jail in Monroe for a drug bust. They were going to be married, but he had screwed up and they had caught him with some simple marijuana. It wasn’t even his. He was holding it for a friend, really. They smoked, sure, from time to time, but it was no big-time operation. The way the police acted, they thought he was a dealer. It was only a few ounces—just over the dividing line. They wanted to make a case and they did. He was the victim, etc. On and on. It was an old, old story, while at the same time often a true one. They had caught him one night outside one of those delicatessens, open twenty-four hours, after buying some beer. He was twenty-one, but they had the right to search him, see his identification, then poke around inside his vehicle. Sure enough, they found what they were after. Such a tiny amount. Why didn’t they go after the real criminals—heroin dealers, thieves, the guys who stole and stripped cars?

I listened; you might say I listened dutifully. I heard her as one generation attends to and accepts information given it by the next generation, which is provisionally, courteously, with an open countenance. I both believed it and didn’t. As far as the pictures went, the copies I had promised her were for David. They would brighten up his cell and give him something to be proud of, her, and he could tell the other guys she was his. Did I understand? You bet I did. We all have to have personal motivations for what we do. Mine was to produce first-rate full-toned prints. Hers was, too, even though hers would go elsewhere. To illuminate a prison.

How easily a woman moves around a room with no clothes on and how quickly a man grows used to it. She was simply naked, which is different from a woman with clothes removed for love. There is no kinetic involved, no speedy purpose, no destination. Was I aroused? Well, half so, as one often is for purposes other than making love and, sometimes, for love itself, until stirred further. And one might just as easily ask impertinently, was she wet? How should I know? A man does not experience the intricacies of a woman’s interest and arousal unless he is intimate with her. then he knows what he thinks is everything but is in reality very little. It is only the climatology of the event. And what he is really after is her internal psychology and chemistry. It will be ever held from him.

Pam held little back from me, at the same time that she held everything back. Fair enough. We were playing a game of low stakes. She posed for me in front of one of the many oval mirrors she had scattered throughout the cottage, their purpose to capture light and bounced it back in increased candlepower, all the dim daylight hours. So, for the price of one, one frame exposure, I had two women, literally speaking the mirror images of each other. In one she was facing the glass, the camera, and the other woman, also her, was shown in backview, also lovely, often lovelier. You could have her, coming and going, but not have her really, not in the carnal sense of the word. Which was just perfect for the two of us, not lovers, not quite friends. An artist (ahem, me) and his model. Would could be more closer than that? Ask Picasso, ask Degas.

I photographed her through a window, with the weather tracks and insect smears and in one instance bird droppings enhancing rather than detracting from her. She had a kitten, and wanted to pose with it—hers and David’s kitten, their starter family. It would personalize the cold cement of his cell. The cat was a ball of fuzz, small and quite crawly, and tried to keep climbing up her bare skin, leaving minute white tracks that a moment later turned pink but never bled. "Naughty kitty," she said, lovingly, but that was as far as Pam would go in terms of reprimand for marring her fair skin. I then though of how she might reprimand a man for leaving his finger marks on her arms or legs or breasts or buttocks, and for the first time today felt a mild tingle in my loins.

"I’d like to shoot you in color," I said, when it was time to part. I had used up four rolls of thirty-six exposures each and felt as I never had before that many of them duplicated each other to no useful purpose.

"Any time," she said.

I spent the afternoon in the darkroom, processing film, having instructed Andrea to hold all my calls. After all, getting out the magazine was my first priority and everybody understood that, including my various bosses. Soon the long black strips of developed negatives were hanging in the air, drying, with a clip on the bottom end to help take out the curl and eliminate future problems I would have inserting them in the negative carrier. You can see early whether or not you have the correct exposure: film too clear lacks detail and indicates under-exposure; film appearing too dark will be all shadows in the printing and indicates over-exposure. You can leave the enlarger light on a wide aperture of the enlarging lens and wait until Christmas, but you will have little or nothing show up on the print. Yet this is better than exposing too little and not recording any significant detail on the film.

Mine, as I said, were just right in density. I could not testify to their sharpness of focus until they were dry and I could examine them under a magnifying lens, frame by frame, prior to contact printing them to a sheet of paper. So I went back to the office, said something to Andrea (who was rarely fooled about anything I was up to) and returned a few phone calls. Then I tiptoed into the darkroom, being careful not to stir up any of the residual dust that can’t really be removed, not matter what precautions you repeatedly take, and looked at the negatives. Wonderful. Not only was each frame full of information, as we call it, but the subject, namely Pam, was artfully arranged in each tiny picture, its color values exactly reversed, so that what would print white was now black, what would be various shades of gray, not deeper densities of white.

The only thing I couldn’t be sure of was Pam—how she would look. I knew only how she had looked to me at the determined instant that I had released the shutter. The lens had seen her as beautiful. Now, at the enlarger, it was up to me to make her so. But she hardly required any help. The negatives were perfectly exposed and could be printed at a set time—seven seconds, I think—under the enlarger light. A tiny bit of burning in along the bottom and at the top edges and there was a first-rate print. I printed like crazy and went home for dinner an hour late. Afterwards I returned to my campus darkroom and printed until nearly midnight.

If anyone should think there was anything untoward about me or my actions, let me point out that I showed the pictures to Norma the very same evening, two of each. (The slightly inferior ones were for Pam, who would not notice any difference, not having seen the better one.) She agreed, they were excellent. Of course what she really thought—what a woman thinks about such things—will never be known by a man the likes of me.

We had two more photo sessions before we were through. The next was color. I shot a special negative film from which a contact positive could be made from a companion reversal film, so I ended up with both a transparency and orange-masked color negatives. They would have to wait two years for printing with my new tubes and diachromaic color enlarger. Though the colors were intense, contrasty, resembling poster colors, they were startling, very good. The roses from the cottage were brilliant red, but Pam had more pink in her cheeks and other skin tones that in real life—the results of a magenta shift in the developing and uncompensated for cyan in the enlarger’s masking. Still, in the realm of the permissible, pretty good.

Until then I had the slides and projected them until I felt silly from so much looking.

And our last shoot was something special for David, whose birthday was coming up, in prison. They were mostly head shots, glamour stuff, things she wanted for him and whose ideas lodged mainly in her mind. At first I thought the pictures she wanted might be erotic, slightly pornographic, but that wasn’t what she wanted. She explained.

"Those first pictures, the ones you so nicely mounted for David. I haven’t wanted to tell you this, Bob, but the guards tore them all apart. I think they thought I was smuggling in LSD or something to him, between the print paper and the mounting board. So, before they gave them to him, they ripped them off the backing."

"What?" I was incensed. "This would ruin them."

"It did. Entirely. It is why I was so hesitant about reporting back what had happened. Totally destroyed them. Oh, there were some pieces of each picture that were left, all ripped and curled, a bit of me here and there, half a face, some legs, a breast, top of my head. Nothing was as it was. David was furious. He could see how good you were, how good we were together. Ruined, absolutely.

"Now, here’s what I have in mind. Head shots entirely. And don’t mount them afterwards. Just give them to be flat. I know they will curl slightly, but we’ll just have to live with that. I’m sorry. But, you see, the guards will leave them alone, this way. They’ll be just what they appear to be, with no hidden possibilities to lead to their dismantling. Nothing beautiful to destroy.

"Will you, please?"

Of course. I had to. Wasn’t she my accomplice in photography? Without her, what would I have? Some interior architecture, that’s all.

But having shot her to exhaustion, one might say, I had nothing left to envision. That was okay. She had her own ideas, this time. Of course they were trite. Again I was the camera, but this time I could see the difference in what I brought to the process and it was considerable. I had contributed a sensibility. Now that was gone. I was just some hack in a studio, working by the hour, trying to produce a product that would be acceptable to the customer, who would then pay for the prints. Otherwise, he or she would not. So I followed her around the cottage, snapping away, always able to see what the picture would look like and finding it in my mind’s eye mediocre.

I wanted to call out, Stop. Let’s halt this. It is a travesty of what has gone before—what we were. This is junk, crap. It’s not worthy of either of us, let alone both of us.

For there is in photography, male and female, great correspondences to sex. Forget what I said to the contrary before. It is highly charged and, if you will, sexual. And now we were engaged in this lesser thing. It was like sex performed when neither of you love each other any longer and only seek sex, release. You may go about it skillfully, professionally, but both know in your former hearts that you are only trying to get yourselves off, never mind the other, and the results are dim, mechanical, worthless. It is an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, as the great man said. If I’ve got it right.

And then a peculiar thing happened, just as we drew to the end of our final shoot. Pam was lonely. It would have taken a blind man not to know it and see its symptoms. I mean, her man was in the tank and had been for more than six months and would be for six months more, and she loved him, and he was always in her thoughts, and she worked and saved money for their future, and spent her evenings and long nights in the cottage, alone. She was twenty and used to a full sex life. It had been taken away from her. And she liked me. I was male, appreciated her, and had a sex organ. No matter what women may say or do, or act like, they are always aware that there is a penis lurking in your pants, and it is something they don’t have, an item necessary for their completion and full relaxation.

So she suggested that we might consider having sex together. Only once. Right now.

Prude that I was, old married man with an innocent camera in his hand and less than half aroused, a bit bored by this lesser task, I responded stupidly. I did so because I was trying to save her feelings and incidentally my own. I was flattered, of course. I was forty, she was half my age, and we were united in hating the war (David was also a conscientious objector), but we had a wall of discomprehension between us. My war was another war, forgotten. Hers was this one in which I played, because of age, no active part.

I said stupidly, "You mean, sex is like tennis? You pick a partner, and go out and play a game?" I was not tennis player, had not played it since I was fourteen and a poor game with my father, even then, so it was the least apt of analogies and only indicates how badly I wanted to save her feelings and pretend I had heard something else. For I didn’t want to sleep with her. I too could see sex as simply that, a physical act of release for both parties and not always the product of love, even for those who know or knew real love. I could see it, but I couldn’t do it.

Perhaps I had thought of sex as a continual possibility with somebody like Pam, continual so long as it was never exercised. Something like money in the bank. It is not to be spent but has importance only in terms of its potential, which is that only because it must go unexercised. So I tried to shrug off the invitation by intellectualizing it and making it into a little joke, a piece of sophistry or sophistication. If so, I failed miserably.

But we were beautifully attuned. She saw at once what I was doing, trying to do, and abruptly withdrew the invitation, if that is what it was. She had offered herself to me—then and there—only as a jest. She was flirting with me. And so we began to talk in the abstract about sex and choosing partners—a subject that hand never occurred between the prim pair of us, even when she had her clothes off and I was sweating heavily in mine and she had coolly suggested that I disrobe, too.

And the moment passed.

Have I regretted it? No, as an old married man, even then, I think I was sweetly flattered. Girls and women recently, at least around the University, had developed the habit of looking straight through me and I knew I must be sexually unacceptable. Now I wasn’t, not at the moment, not with this lovely young woman, who I liked, found attractive, but did not in the slightest want to fuck.

All I wanted was great pictures. She knew this. And we got them. It is something to be proud of.

I learned that much later she married David. They bought or rented a house. I stopped by once, but nobody was at home. A year later I tried again. Different people were in the house. They didn’t know Pam and David, who had moved a way. No, they did not know where.

All that remains is the pictures. A young woman, taken by a middle-aged man. If you fix the prints correctly and keep them out of direct sunlight, they will last nearly forever. Mine have.

69

Ari Cowan was another photographer who dropped by my office. He was a true free-lance and worked for Johnny Moore briefly, who was the assistant to Jim Sneddon, who had given me my first camera.

Johnny was always the superior photographer, in my opinion, and had done a photo essay on lasers that I was proud to publish, since it was better at the time than any work I was capable of doing. But Sneddon, the supervisor, had been given a new nearly full-time assignment; I think it was in video, which was just coming in and it was important to the faculty that some important lectures and addresses be preserved, immortalized. So off went Sneddon, and Johnny was in charge of still photography, as it is called, though you move around a lot, and he was told to hire an hourly assistant. The job had to be advertised and hundreds applied. Ari won out.

He was young and wild and talented, a big guy; his displacement (if you should submerge him in water) would be about what Egil Gustafson’s was. They build their photographers large, around here. (This is not true; Johnny and I are not huge, nor is Sneddon, who is thin as a railing and looked much like a Sneddon might, slightly heron like, with a Dickensian walk and snideness.) Since we both shot Canons, it was natural that we get together and talk about cameras. Some wag once said that painters never got together to talk about brushes, so why is it that photographers are constantly in discussion about what is the best camera, when like brushes they are pretty much all alike? I have no answer other than it is what happens.

His hair was sandy and he was young, uneducated. You take someone who hasn’t been to college and give him a job around one and he becomes badly disoriented. He doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. He doesn’t even know what is going on, not when it happens right before his eyes and he must photograph it. He might well say about it, Is this all? Is this all that is going on? People meeting, talking? Students, teachers? Going into the classroom, sitting down, lecturing, listening, then going back out the same door? Day after day?

What the fuck for?

It is something I might ask too, if I but changed my mental perspective two or three degrees to starboard. But I never do, never have, for the bread of my livelihood has been buttered on that side for nearly ten years, not counting the buttering I myself have participated in for half a dozen collegiate years previously.

To Ari it was a strange world, oddly attractive, foreign, unreal. He both liked being here and wanted badly to be elsewhere, say at a daily paper. And I think it is where he ended up. A weekly, at first, perhaps in the country. Then one in the city. Finally a daily. The morning one would be more hospitable to him, I think. They like wild men best.

For the life of me I can think of nothing wild about him, only that a sense of this radiated from him, softly, perhaps wrongly. No doubt the wildness was all in my head. I tried to use Ari for some choice assignments in engineering. He had a wonderful heterosexual knack for coming back with numerous full-face and backlit portraits of the only good looking female students in engineering. There were no many. How he had tracked them down and got them to pose (pensive with sliderule, say) was an exercise Egil would envy.

Of course the pictures were utterly useless. It was not the message "we" in engineering were trying to convey. The college wasn’t a training ground for Playboy bunnies. It was a serious enterprise and the best of the females students were from this peculiar standpoint, at best, pretty/plain. Most were homely. They would make good engineers. We wanted more of them. We wanted to attract them as a magnet does iron filings. It was our publications—namely Trend—that was to be the electro-magnet. Did Ari understand?

He did not. Why can’t you do both? His question, not mine. Because, I tried to explain, if you do the one (treat them as lovelies) you denied the other. He did not see the point. Didn’t engineering ladies (as he called them) like men and want to have fun with them? He meant be fucked by them. Yes, I said, of course. But the college of engineering wasn’t interested in the sexual satisfaction of its women students.

What was the college interested in?

Training them.

In what?

God, this was elemental. In engineering. Oh, that, Ari as much said. It bored him. He was married, the father of two young children. The women he knew (namely his wife) were interested in making a home, having children, cooking food, shopping, doing the laundry, planting flowers, and sex. In about that order. Were female engineering students any different? Well, no, but yes. They were here to study and learn what budding engineers must know. What is that? Don’t ask me, I‘m not an engineer. Then, if not, how can you pretend to know what they are truly interested in?

Because people tell me.

Do you ever ask the girl herself?

What girl herself?

One of the engineering students.

Ask her what?

Does she want a husband and family? Sex? Money in the bank? Other things?

It’s not my job to ask them. Ask one.

But you say you don’t know.

I don’t know specifically, but I know generally enough.

How do you know this?

On and on. I couldn’t reach him. He wasn’t stupid, only dense, one tracked. For him to see things differently he would have to acquire an education, something he was not about to do. And you couldn’t reach him by way of ordinary reason. What he really wanted to do, and only this, was take pictures.

I understood fully. It was this and only this we had in common. It made for a sort of relationship, one that was not long lasting, for we were different in every area that was important. It was only the unimportant ones that we ever discussed, and that near endlessly. After a short while I found myself actively avoiding him. No, I didn’t find myself doing this; I set out to do it quite consciously.

He was a great big boy and instantly lovable. But we did not need boys, no matter how sweetly likable. We sought engineers, engineering types, both male and female, very much like the Army wants boys and girls who will soldier.

Ari began to work mostly for the college of arts and sciences. His efforts were very much to their liking. Pretty sociology students of each sex would attract their sexual opposite (or sexual same, in some cases) in burgeoning numbers, or so it was widely believed. Administrative types in various departments were surprised at how beautiful their students were. It was a wonder they never showed up in that professor’s class.

"You sure these are students in math? Psychology?"

Ari would merely smile.

"Beautiful wonderful. Let’s go print the brochure. I’ve never seen anything better. Thank you, thank you very much."

It was the best thing this side of a newspaper, with fires and automobile accidents and bodies circled in chalk on the sidewalk. The future would wait for Ari.

I’ve always wondered what happened to him, after he stopped shooting for us. Never heard a word.

70

Meanwhile the magazine flourished under my care—or so I would like to think. It certainly became different. There must be those who didn’t like what I did to it. Did I detect a chilly atmosphere when I passed by some faculty groups at some meeting I was invited to attend? Or was I imagining it? (I’ve been periodically visited by small bouts of paranoia, throughout my life.)

The second issue was a without a theme, intentionally, but about half was dedicated to two articles on technical writing, a subject I was extremely suspicious of being taught, for I had made my living doing it in the past, and the two dudes who wrote the articles were full professors in the college’s department of humanistic social studies. The department’s name alone was cause for doubt and alarm.

"Humanistic social studies?" What was it? Some hybrid creature, neither this thing nor that? Engineering students were famous for having difficulty in the arts and sciences, or for that matter anything taught my non-engineers. Often they failed courses in these departments, or nearly did so. Sometimes nearly perfect little engineers, ones with four-point averages in their specialty fields, routinely drew Cs and Ds in English, history, psychology, and all foreign languages. It was almost as though they had over-developed certain technical skills and this had left them practically crippled in general subjects. And perhaps professors in the arts and sciences enviously punished students of engineering because they, the professors, knew down to the decimal how much money they would be paid at starting salaries. Usually this was more than the poor sap of a humanities teacher was making after half a dozen years and one professional advancement to the status of associate professor.

So they exacted a revenge early. Or so it was maintained by the engineering faculty, whose collective job was to graduate large numbers of budding engineers in various specialties. This situation had existed since the beginning of academic time. So what engineering did was this: they duplicated the key points of the humanities in their own special department and taught their own courses, for which they gave engineering credit. And the University administration had to give them class credits in these parallel classes that counted toward graduation. This happened all over the country. Quickly one institution imitated another.

Thus humanistic social studies was born. Jesus, what a name. You could not even decently put a hyphen in the title without making it mean something else. Just try. Humanistic-social studies would be the ordinary compound modifier, but it makes even less sense than without the hyphen. And humanistic social-sciences, as the English often indicate their compound nouns, is more apt, more correct, even though it is anti-American in construction, yet this implies that it is the social sciences being taught. If so, where is soc., pych., anthro? Well, there isn’t any. What is being sadly mimicked is the arts section of the college of arts and science—precisely those fields in which engineering students traditionally fail.

Then why not call it that? The arts for engineers? Because it has a fruity connotation. What, engineers becoming little painters and sculptors? Studying the history of the periods of fine arts? To what practical purpose? Why, in order to graduate. Why else?

So it was done, accomplished. Faculty were hired to staff the new departments, nation-wide. These generally were misfits and poor scholars, those who had themselves nearly failed in the subjects they were now hired to teach and were shunned by their subject departments around the country. If they were merely true oddballs, it would have been wonderful and young engineers would have benefited immensely. But they weren’t. They were the bottom of the academic barrel. If an apple barrel, they were the wormy residue.

All of these guys in a way became friends of mine. In an engineering organization, you are grateful to find anybody with an interest in literature and the arts. You make your friends where you find them.

There was Myron White, the department head. His field was English and he wrote his Ph.D. thesis here on D. H. Lawrence. Well, I knew a thing or two about Lawrence and his Freida, having read all of his work, including some obscure items White hadn’t, but didn’t want to admit to. Mike (as he was known) had a picture of Lawrence on his desk, in one of those little standup 5 X 7 frames. At first I did a double take, expecting to see his wife and kiddies. Lawrence—in prominent desktop display? It seemed a bit faggoty. I tried to picture my own desk at home with a portrait of, say, Henry Miller or V. Nabokov or William Faulkner, but there images there refused to come into sharp focus, and so I dismissed them, one after the other. Sorry, guys.

Perhaps because Mike’s dissertation was on Lawrence he resisted early discussions of the writer with me, or else dismissed my remarks haughtily, as though I were one of his fucking students. This led to a general barricade being erected between us on this and other subjects. I wondered what he must be like in the classroom and how intolerant he might have been about innocent queries or fresh insights. For instance I had just finished reading Kangaroo and was excited by it and its political aspects. White dismissed the book as "a minor effort" and would talk no more about it. Sure, it was minor, in the canon, but Lawrence was so insightful and brilliant, his political assessment of the situation so acute, his reading of the social climate so certain, that the book had great value, even if that was only historical.

"Minor," and that was that.

He rarely got to teach a literature course for little engineers and mostly it was technical writing that he and James Souther collaborated in. I wondered from my distance how either of them could teach it, since neither had any experience doing it, or making a living from it, though I soon learned that both had worked part-time summers at Boeing conducting writing workshops and performing various odd jobs. This constituted professional experience, evidently. And of course most subjects, including this one, could be taught right out of a textbook. The one they used was written by the pair of them. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, I concluded.

But if you are conducting classes is seeing for the blind, you only needed to be half-sighted to be able to tell your class what the visible world was like. How could they dispute you? And when they went out into that sighted world, they hardly came back to campus to dispute you and your vision of that world. It was hardly worth the effort, no matter how much you had been led astray.

I am perhaps too hard on them. Much of academe is hermetically sealed and bears but vague resemblance to what is tritely called the real world. Academe offers a learning experience not directly related to life, then, but with significant correspondents to it, and this is ultimately redeeming. Notice how I use string of big words to try to justify what is unjustifiable. I am just as bad as they.

There was Higby (I do not quickly make up such Dickensian names and rush to assure you, this was indeed his real name, Jay being his first; Jay as in Gatsby), who taught a modified version of history, which was mainly a heightened awareness of contemporary news events gained from reading the daily newspapers religiously, plus one other weekly "news source," such as Time of Newsweek. I do not make this stuff up. I guess engineers need to be led in a perception of what is going on the world and could be easily overlooked by work involving stress of fractionable materials, not life.

Jay was always saving in order to clip someday back issues of the New York Times, the only newspaper he considered reliable. The two local dailies, both of whom I had worked for or soon would in their newsrooms, were considered untrustworthy, an attitude I tended to agree with, though I wondered how he could come to this conclusion without having something more infallible to compare them to. Or perhaps it was merely a deep-seated feeling without definite sources that might be footnoted, when and if he should ever be challenged. No problem there. His students were no doubt bored with the subject, either because they were too dim-witted to know what he was talking about or so bright that they did and found his conclusions faulty.

There was Jeff Douthwaite, who taught contemporary politics, ones concentrated on the local level and who proved his sincerity and genuineness by actually running for the state legislature and getting elected, at least for one term. Rather than being defeated in the next election he chose not to run again, in a way confirming his students’ suspicion that the whole effort was rife with falsity and insincerity and not worth his time.

Then why study it? His job was to convince them—despite personal example—that they were wrong and politics was ultimately worthwhile. The why was he back in the classroom? Two reasons. Politics in this state was considered a part-time job and the concept of the businessman/politician was viable. The second was, how else could somebody fresh with experience convey the reality of the political experience, its pros and cons, unless he returned to the classroom to explain it? both reasons, spurious as they were, held water and were widely accepted. Even I did not dispute them.

And then there was my old friend, Jack Leahy. He was a born teacher, and who knew it better than me, who was not? He had been strongly influenced by Professor Chittick, a Harvard contemporary of Tough Shit Eliot, and a dynamic classroom performer, who once, to prove a point, kicked one of those olive-colored metal wastebaskets through the window of 101 Parrington Hall. It was an awesome performance, according to Jack, and in a lightning flash of recognition akin to inspiration decided Jack to go himself into teaching. (My own inspiration had been Professor Joe Harrison, of about the same vintage, who had by example led me to conclude I was not cut out for teaching and to do something else.)

Jack was a natural, and his students were always coming up to me (he must have mentioned me to them, but in what context, I couldn’t help but wonder) and telling me what a great guy he was. I agreed, and told them unnerving anecdotes from our undergraduate days, some of which I would make up on the spot. I only hoped that they played these back to Jack and he paled and properly appreciated my inventions.

He had gotten me the job, or rather, had made sure nobody else had gotten it, by whispering sweet words in the ears of Vern Hammer, the Dean, and whomever else would stand still long enough to listen. A few years down the pike I returned the favor when the college tenure committee, eighty percent of which I had morning coffee with at the student union, asked my professional opinion of Jack’s work, and I made him out to be practically a candidate for the Nobel, his having published with Alfred Knopf, no less, a children’s book about Indian life at LaPush, a coastal village that Alfred had just happened to visit the year previous on vacation. And I pointed out that Jack had also published wonderful short stories in several literary magazines and had appeared in the Foley collection of the year’s best for, I believe it was, 1952. Plus the fact that he was occasionally writing drama reviews for The Argus, a local business and arts weekly, one I would soon be doing art reviews for, before and after I left this job.

The committee included Doug Polonais, head of ceramic engineering, Ray Taggard, a professor of mechanical, Kermit Garlid, a professor of chemical and nuclear, and a couple of guys from electrical, whose names escape me. They had a lot of trouble evaluating somebody in so different a field as Jack’s (and mine) and in the absence of peer review I had the deciding vote. I paid back a debt with interest, and the next year Jack was promoted to full professor, a rank he in no way deserved, having only an MA like mine. But as a teacher he stood head and shoulders above the others in the bastard department and deserved it as much as any of them and more surely than Souther or White. So in the overall scheme of things justice was induced to prevail.

Even though I told Jack that I got it for him, for old time’s sake, I doubt if he really believe me. This is the normal route taken by those who expect gratitude and can lead to bitterness, if they are not wonderful people like me.

The issue (my subject) contained an article by Souther entitled "Invert to Communicate," which I took to mean by its cute title that the writer ought to stand on his head, or that all public speakers should. And I enlisted my friend Frank Renlie, from Safeco days, to illustrate it cleverly. White’s article was also cutely entitled, "The Care and Handling of Young Technical Writers," which Renlie also treated smartly and well. I didn’t like the title, which was typical of White’s condescending manner, I thought, but correctly treated them like the animals they often happened to be. The word, handling, smacked of the same sort of thing White evoked with the picture of Lawrence on his desk, in place of the wife and kids I knew him to have. There is the Freudian category of latent homosexual this type of behavior illustrates well, unbeknownst to its perpetrator, who would most strenuously deny it and argue vehemently against it being applicable, which I would have to agree with and perhaps apologize for suggesting, if my classification ever got widely known or, forbid it, published. So I will not carry the matter any farther.

Both articles involved bad logic. To invert meant, the article revealed, to put your summary and conclusions first, rather than at the end, where they might have nicely led the reader, step by step. Since nobody has time to read, or read carefully, people were not going to read what you’d written anyway, so why not catch them early, before their attention had flagged, and give them the meat, rather make them wait until time for desert? It had a ruthlessness that was attractive, I had to admit. Behind all the words lay an existential or nihilistic assumption that nothing was worth doing, anyway, such as writing, and we would all be better off if we had stood in bed.

With White’s article on care and handling, I saw a department head’s heavy hand at work, smudging ink, smearing some of it on the cuff of his white shirt, dipping his necktie in the inkwell, using an eraser where an eradicator solution was called for, and general meaningless scribbling taking place all over the page. It was impossible to discern what was meant at any single place on the page. I tried editing it for meaning (since it was grammatically without fault) but gave up in five minutes. Like a lot of great writing it had its own integrity. But the writer did not know that this was also true of writing entirely without merit, such as his own. I have to give him credit, though. There was not a misspelled word in the whole article. Of course he had a secretary and I am sure she did this, when she wasn’t doing her nails.

Okay, so I am being bitchy. I know what these frauds were being paid and I was sorely envious. They were making roughly twice what I was. And what did they do for it? They spent about ten hours in the classroom per week, plus one open-door student hour, and a few more hours monthly in meetings. And they talked all day, short days though, in front of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds who did not know jack shit about writing. Which was okay, but at the course’s dreary end, they would know no more than when they had started out. They would, in fact, know less, as though during their eleven quarter weeks of classroom work previous knowledge were being sucked out of their collective head and replaced with sawdust.

Another article was Paradigms in Structural Design, by Colin Brown, a crusty Englishman. I had to look up paradigm and am eternally grateful to Colin for introducing me to it. This is the first opportunity for me to use it since then, but, Colin, I want you to know it is frequently in mind and waiting with drawn breath for its next use. I know full well what it means.

The article itself was totally incomprehensible. This was entirely to my liking and just the kind of thing I sought in terms of contributions. Keep up the good work, gang.

The final article is one I am proud of, though I had nothing to do with it, aside from getting to know some of the gang at the Aerospace Research Lab and encouraging them to give me something about what the did that the whole pedestrian world (including engineers) would understand. It resulted in "Laser Heating of Plasmas for the Production of Controlled Thermonuclear Reactions." Wow. It had everything. Laser was cool, plasmas was even better than paradigm, thermonuclear was about as great as you could get, but might frighten folks, especially women, and so we introduced the key word controlled to modify it and tame things down, before they got out of "control," so to speak. And reactions was hip, suggesting what went on when you added dissimilar liquids, gases, and solids together unexpectedly and got a big bang or a lot of smoke or a bad smell. Sometimes fire.

This articles was fathered by four characters I got to know fairly well: H. G. Ahlstrom, N. A. Amherd, L. C. Steinhauer, and my buddy in photography who never took it any farther than developing his own film, George Vlases. He was a hell of a shortstop and served a great buffet one spring, at his farm outside of Duvall, with cows off in the distance, mocking us while we ate with their big dumb stare that only pretended they didn’t know what was going on opposite.

Four authors. I never asked, I do not ask now, how four dudes can sit down at a conference table (it would take much more than a simple desk) and produced a joint paper. No, one of them undoubtedly did it, all by his lonesome. I suspect it was Amherd—slender, dark-skinned, black-haired, probably an East Indian, industrious, quiet, a graduate student, needy, desperate, lonely, by himself in the lab, blasting ruby laser beams back and forth, frail spider beams of light, into the dawn, scribbling down his test results, tuning his tiny mirrors, eating cold pizza and Pepsi, then in frail morning light hopping on his Peugeot bike and peddling home to student housing for two hours sleep prior to his ten o’clock class, where either Ahlstrom or Steinhauer (another grad student) would review his work and pencil in changes, notations, disagreements, while he would nod at his desk. On and on, back and forth, up and down, until the research was finely adjusted, the article done in a frenzy and delivered to me just under the deadline and I would publish it.

Such power.

Angstrom I remember as a slick Scandinavian-type, with a receding hairline; he remind me of a stockbroker. Perhaps when NASA funding dried up, he went off an assumed his correct destiny and is now a millionaire Microsoft stockholder, living in Antibes, on a cliff above the Riviera. All these guys held research or academic appointments in A&A, as well, and it soon became even deader, its chairman, Bollard (an Englishman with three initials preceding his name, as they all have, if they are any good) watching his department collapse and accepting a joint appointment in some remote field such as astronomy until he could be unceremoniously retired, five years hence.

But this was the heyday of space, with lots of money going round and Abe Hertzberg (he was too busy to even pass wind) heading this crew of hotshots and enjoying it immensely. I did, too. They were all wild men, experimental in attitude, unconventional, bright, some of them brilliant. All were young, many starting to raise families. So was I. For my five-year tenure at least, they were my buddies. Up to a point.

They were hungry for publication, the key to advancement, or one of the keys. And I needed material, for how else could I publish? My issues would all be blank pages and I would be discovered to be the fraud I knew myself to be. It had best remain my secret.

71

For the third issue of my quarterly we tackled the environment. It didn’t mean the same thing as it does today. It was a sub-division of civil, encompassing air, water, noise, garbage, wastewater, point-source pollution. Since this time, each of these fields has come into national focus and even children are well versed in what is at stake. Today companies vie and spend millions to imply that they are environmental good citizens, even if they’re not. But back then it was a beginning science and its extensive vocabulary was still in its formative stage. All we knew was that the water was dirty, unfit to drink, the sky was clouded with smoke and fog, the streets and highways were so loud that we had to shout, and if the garbage collector didn’t come round every week we had a big problem with the stuff piling up and spilling out on the ground.

My camerawork was getting better, along with my print making. I remember taking a picture of a student from India (there were many; soon whole nation would be populated by young engineers building things) working away at a blackboard equation. He wore a white shirt, I remembered. When it came time to pull the print the contrasty negative showed his shirt and trousers, but he had disappeared. He had dissolved into his work. I looked again—which is the literal meaning of research, incidentally. He showed up on the negative, although dimly. I tried to make the print again, this time holding back light from where I suspected he would be, using my open hand as a blocking device. I had to print a third time before he emerged from the blackboard as the intense, slender young student I knew him to be. And I learned a lot of print density, exposure in the camera and outside of it, how black a man can be without being a Negro.

I printed the picture in the issue, if only to prove to myself I had learned something. I was to do this fairly frequently and now, looking back from the perspective of twenty-some years, can see how I indulged myself and my photography. But editors are permitted to do this within reason. Often I stepped out of the bounds of reason. I was lucky nobody called me on it. I wouldn’t have been able to justify myself. I chalked up the effort to aesthetics and variety. I wanted a publication people would look forward to getting and reading, if only to look at the pictures. And this I got.

The issue was a strong one. Themes will do this for a publication, providing a unity not otherwise forthcoming or apparent. This one was environmental engineering, long before the word had become hip and everybody had identified with it, claiming long association. For now it was simply a subject specialty, one tied to civil engineering. Bob Sylvester wrote the introduction. This was R. O. Sylvester, head of the air and water division. No glamour there. He defined the environment as "the aggregate of all the external conditions—physical, chemical, and biological—that affect the life, development, and behavior of the individual as well as society." Wow. Isn’t this just everything? Seemed to me it was. Thus it was like art, philosophy, the humanities, the veritable universe itself, in that it included everything. Nothing was outside of its domain. It encompassed the world and all of its processes.

At the same time it was sorely limited. The quality of air and water were its proper domain. These were large enough entities each to include small worlds. Where were humans? Well, they were outside each of the realms, but directly effected (or affected) by what went on in each of the four elements, which you will remember included besides water and air, fire and earth, earth being the veritable strata of soils, etc., clear down to the magma and the soft, molten core. What else was there? Well, none of this mattered except to man. Each of the elements impacted man to a high degree. Each was controllable, or so engineering believed. I had to go along with them.

As a photographer I too could encompass all, or nearly everything. So I roamed the environment (a wonderful new word to me, a sort of open Sesame) with my trusty Canon SLR, snapping pictures of garbage dumps (seagulls hungrily circling), mountains of old tires, pulp mills spewing noxious rotten-egg smells to the heavens, refineries with their black/gray plumes, traffic braying in freeway densities, logging camps, car-wrecking yards with their smashers and their mashers, roadside litter sites, leaf-littered ponds, and my favorite free-running mountain that streams that suggested (at least to me) what the primordial world was like before mankind had sullied it. I brought back my exposed film and processed it. Then I set off again. I ended up my trek in the labs of civil engineering where industrious students mixed up beakers of something-or-other, heated them, distilled them, reduced them, and wrote down in little ringed notebooks their results. These were mysterious to me, but contained the stuff for the articles in my quarterly, when deciphered and translated into an English that resembled what we ordinary folk wrote and spoke each day but upon closer examination seemed to yield . . . nothing intelligible. Just a bunch of numbers, graphs, equations, and bar charts.

This was the stuff of engineering. My job was to make it interesting and understandable. Photos helped. But good clear English was even more useful.

I began to get a mental picture of what was at stake. Here we were, the earth’s population, doing our best to exist in communities, some of them large, cities. We needed food, shelter, warmth, daily occupation, and something to occupy and feed our minds. The more of us there were, the more difficult the multiple tasks became and the greater the need for interdependence. As we pooled together in greater densities, infrastructure problems increased geometrically, and soon we were inundated in the waste products of what made life livable. If something wasn’t done about it, and soon, we would be buried in our waste. It was smother us, fill our ears with cacophony, poison us. Only engineering could save us.

Of course it engineering that had brought us all of the benefits in the first place. A curve best described what had happened, and the moving line soared as our life got better; now it was on a downward slope. It was falling rapidly and unless something was done by interdisciplinary task forces (the problems being too great for any single discipline to solve) we would all die. The fanciful stories of science fiction would come true, but it would be too late in humanity’s evolution to slip the noose and go on with our lives. Our death would be horrible. It would take place by the millions.

It was not yet too late, engineering told us. There was a glimmer of home. It would take billions and the concerted efforts of everybody, lay person and scientist alike. The interdisciplinary task force was our only hope. For instance, in the field of water and it pollution, a pool of talents from academic subjects such as chemistry, zoology (limnology), biochemistry, oceanography, forest resources, and of course multiple fields of engineering would work together to solve environmental problems previously thought insoluble. There would be breakthroughs. Breakthroughs required money. People had to be paid. Thus an important part of solving environmental problems involved economics on a macro scale.

Nothing was too small (measured in parts per million) to be measured or be deemed significant, yet some of the objects that produced pollution were massive, too large to be measured, let alone encompassed. The solution to industrial problems were themselves industrial in nature. Massive problems took massive solutions, ones involving multiple government agencies and the participation (i.e., funding) of many sources. Big business and big government were what was called for. In research alone lay our potential solutions. Universities such as this one provided research facilities and students on both the undergraduate and graduate levels necessary for interdisciplinary teams which were our only hope. And so it went. On and on.

I half believed the hype. It was self-serving, sure, but it was also mutually advancing. If you don’t believe it, too, and see it as specious, dangerous, let me ask you this.

What is the alternative?

The issue was one of my best. Of course the subject matter lent itself visual expression. Anything was fair game. Roadside litter after a picnic, the seashore, clouds and sky, still and running water. I had a field day.

For my fourth issue, winter of the following year, I featured my friends in the Aerospace Research Lab, which was a pretty independent entity, itself and its new modern brick building funded by NASA. Naturally other departments were envious. When the building had been dedicated, the University president had spoken gratefully and the associate administrator for space science and applications of NASA delivered the keynote address. The board of regents was in attendance, plus the full faculty of the college of engineering and many others from other colleges, schools, and departments. Alas, I was not on board yet, so I missed it all personally. But the occasion was fully documented and photographed. Abe Hertzberg lend me the audio tapes and Rose, a lab secretary, spent hours transcribing for me what everybody had said into the microphone. And then I edited it for coherence and emphasis. Often Rose and I had to put our heads together to decipher what was said. This was not unpleasant, for she was pretty and smelled nice. And Andrea helped us out, as well.

The climax of the dedication event was a round-robin panel discussion on the subject, "Dr. Strangelove and The Anti-technology." Actually I gave it that title. Its formal name was "Relevant Relationships Between Industry, NASA, and the University." A free-ranging discussion of bright people will often determine its own direction and not be steered into a safe channel. This was the case. Participants were: John E. Naugle, from NASA, Abe, who headed the University’s new lab, Courtland Perkins, Chairman of the School of Engineering at Princeton, H. Guyford Stever, President of Carnegie Mellon, and George Stoner, head of research at Boeing. An impressive panel.

I wrote, as editor: "The topic of the afternoon panel discussion was" . . . "but that was not meant to be. A gathering of first-rate minds will not be easily steered onto a predetermined dialectical course. Like an independent being, the panel developed a will and a way of its own. Its interest had been stimulated in the morning by the presentation of the Stever and Perkins papers." These I published in the preceding pages. "Dr. Stever had talked about open-ended technological systems and the environment, and had pointed out the need to develop closed systems, in which man’s waste would be recycled and reused. The passing of the golden age of research and its funding by an uncritical public had been commented on and lamented by Dr. Perkins. Whence now? Dr. Naugle suggested at noon one probable direction during his dedication address—towards rescuing the planet. Basic research, he cautioned, would not have an easy time in the future. Congress had cut appropriations in al areas of scientific inquiry in response to a public that had recently indicated displeasure with science and engineering even as concepts. So it was to this vital concern that the panel redirected itself in mid-afternoon. Dr. Hertzberg was quick to sense the mood and made no attempt to steer the panel back to its assigned subject." I signed the introduction, "Ed."

Abe started it out with the remark, "it was with a faint sense of shock that I learned people today sometimes regard technologists as Dr. Strangeloves." A moment later he told a joke about a dinner party he had with some non-science types, businessmen, etc., and how he had talked about "the engineering of the future and a plan I had. Well, jokingly, I called it the Lake Erie Plan, an idea of mine for dealing with thermal pollution by putting a nuclear-power plant in the middle of the lake in an area which is already condemned as being over-polluted. My idea was to try to reform and integrate the ecology of the lake with this whole-power complex. And for that I was suddenly called a Dr. Strangelove."

He went on to tell how surprised he was at the group’s response. They did not want anything changed. Also, they wanted people to use less power, not more. People should cut back and live more simply. This is the antithesis of science and engineering, he continued, for what they are trying to do is make life richer, more complex and enjoyable. Or were they? Abe had thought so. What did the panel think?

George Stoner spoke first. I won’t relate what he said, only that he had had much the same experience as Abe. What amazed me, hearing the tapes, then reading them, was the ability of these brilliant men to integrate so much dissimilar information and make any sense out of it. Of course they lived in the same world as everybody else and had similar daily experiences, such as clogged arterials, noise (or "high decibel level content," one might call it facetiously ), fear of science and the Bomb, envy of government spending on science and technology, distrust of the unknown, problems in public relations, etc. My ears perked up at this last named. I saw how publishing the findings of such a discussion and the papers presented at it might very well lead to increased understanding of the role of science, engineering, and technology, and the benefits it could bring to us all, if only these guys were listened to and understood. And it ought to happen, for they spoke ordinary English like the rest of us—what Dante called the vernacular. It is to be spoken and written, if you want people to know what you are talking about.

They did and so did I. We were in perfect agreement. I was happy with what they had done and my good judgment in bringing forth an issue that presented it to a larger audience. Trend at that time was printed in a quantity of five thousand. It went to engineering schools, labs, and libraries all over the world. In return the college and I received complementary publications, many of them in languages I couldn’t recognize, let alone read. The reciprocal nature of the exchange had gone on for more than twenty years. Soon it would be twenty-five, a special occasion and one worth celebrating. For that we had our new cover with an intriguing photo on it, generally mine, and a special preprinted color for the year’s four issues.

For this one it would be silver.

72

There were two years until then, and much to do. I wanted to be fair, but to show the college in the best light, without creating a false sense of great creativity, for such things normally do not take place in academe, whose first function is educating students and graduate students in the routines of investigation, lab work, and tried and true experimentation—efforts that can be easily duplicated. But occasionally there are happy breakthroughs. Usually they are of a minor nature and of interest only to the people they happen to. What they do is carry on what is called the state of the art and perhaps illuminate or amplify it a little. This is valuable, though it doesn’t make headlines.

In the interdisciplinary field of bioengineering it is more apt to be exciting and sometimes goes so far as to save lives—if not at the moment, surely a bit down the line. One such instance was the invention of the artificial kidney, a development that involved a medical doctor and a professor of chemical engineering who had gone into the emerging field of nuclear engineering and now headed the new department. When people have their lives saved through developments that take over the function of failing kidneys that previously have led to slow death, you are getting into serious matters, and the whole world queues up to pay attention and respect. And dolt editors like me trot along and record the transactions and try to make sure that as many people as possible thrill with the news that so excited the editors in the first place

The articles on the artificial kidney thrilled me then and thrills me still, so many years later. Hill Williams science editor for The Seattle Times, wrote them both. The first, "The First Artificial Kidney Patient: Eleven More Years of Life," tells in non-technical terms about how Dr. Belding Scribner, a professor of medicine, met Clyde Shields, a patient dying of kidney failure. He had only a few weeks of life left, with nothing to lose. He agreed to an experiment in which his blood would be taken from his body through a plastic shunt attached permanently to his arm, the blood scrubbed clean of impurities the kidneys could no longer remove, and then the blood would be returned to his body through a vein attached to the same shunt. When chemical dialysis was completed, the artery and vein could be reconnected through the U-shaped shunt, and life would go on as usual.

When the first treatment was completed, Shields said he felt like a new man. He said his experience was "like turning on the light from darkness." Dr. Scribner, his associates, Dr. David Dillard and an engineer, Wayne Quinton, were delighted. They did not know how long such a process could be repeated, but helped set up a routine for further treatments. These went on for eleven years. Shields resumed work and lived to enjoy his grandchildren. There were complications along the way, including a toxin build up that caused the start of paralysis in his lower legs.

He was specially articulate about describing his problems to his doctors and they increased the frequency of treatment, which caused the paralysis to stop. And other troubles occurred, including inflexibility of the material in the shunt and the shunt tending to work its way out of the artery and vein. This the team corrected. Shields also developed "five or six" diseases related to inadequate cleansing of his blood and the team was able to treat them all successfully. In the future, others benefited from what the doctors had learned from Shields’s illnesses.

All this happened in 1960. In the years to come, it became imperative to develop a smaller, portable dialysis machine that could be used to treat patients in their own homes. Dr. Scribner went to Less Babb, head of the department of nuclear engineering and a friend, and asked him if his staff could develop such a machine, and in a short time, for the cost of keeping a patient alive at the new artificial kidney center was $40,000 a year, and few could afford it. There was a girl, Carolyn Helm, who, at sixteen, was too young to be eligible for treatment at the UW Hospital’s kidney center. She would die without their help. She was an honors student at Franklin High and, as it turned out, Babb knew her father. Babb hesitated, then agreed to ask his staff if they would take on the project. They agreed. The machine they developed four months later cost one-tenth as much money. It never malfunctioned and saved the girl’s life. It was the prototype of the portable machines to come.

Shields lived to participate in a group birthday party for himself and several other surviving patients of early dialysis. I ran a picture of them cutting the cake, while one was attached to a machine, having his blood cleaned. Then shortly afterwards, while hooked up to the monitor and its fail/safe warning system, Shields had a heart attack not related to his chronic kidney problem. The monitor began to blare that there was a misfunction and he had no blood pressure. His family awakened in the night and called Medic One. But by the time he was rushed to the hospital he was already dead. He had died quietly in his sleep. Only the monitor knew it.

The second article was also by Hill and a follow-on. It was about how Les Babb and his team worked successfully with Dr. Scribner to produce the smaller portable unit. First they had to understand the basic principles of how the blood was cleansed. It had to do with passing the blood through a series of membranes that resembled cellophane and treating it with chemicals called dialysate. It was the patient’s heart that pumped his blood, but it was a machine the pumped the dialysate mechanically. In the hospital each patient had a 100-gallon tank of the stuff beside his bed. It was used over and over, but refrigerated all the while to guard against infection. Before it could be used, it had to be warmed to body temperature. Clearly some changes in the process would have to be made for it to become of portable size.

The hospital machines were pumping about half a gallon of dialysate a minute through the patient’s body. Why so much, the engineers asked. The medical part of the team didn’t know. It’s what they did. How much did the human body require? They didn’t know this either. The engineers hoped that a quarter as much would do the job. Also, the questioned whether the reuse and refrigeration were in the patient’s best interests. From a cost and size standpoint they were not. The engineers a once-through use of the dialysate and using it initially at body temperature. This would reduce the size of the storage tank and the need for refrigeration and rewarming. These were big, practical economies.

It was necessary to come up with a method for producing dialysate in large quantities at a lower cost. This they developed through the creation of a monster mixing and pumping station. It could produce as much solution as fifteen patients needed and reduced the size of the storage tanks needed to hold so much fluid. Moreover, it cut the treatment cost in half. This was in 1963. The following year they reduced the size of the monster, calling it the mini-monster. This brought the cost down to $4000 per patient per year. It was still a lot, but it was more affordable.

Meanwhile side effects of treatment continued to plague patients, grateful to be still alive. The poison deemed most important to remove by means of dialysis was urea, but it was growing clear that there were other toxins in the blood that real kidneys took care of and the artificial ones did not. Efforts to identify them in the lab had been non-productive. The effects of these toxins, however, were readily apparent, including paralysis of both arms and legs. The engineers, whose specialty had been chemical before it had become nuclear, were most interested in controlling what was trapped by the membrane and the dialysate, and what was not. They decided to try to trap the larger molecules, including those of urea, and letting the level of the smaller molecules remain in the blood.

The results were a surprise to all. The patients did not get sick, as was supposed, but continued to get better, while their nerve function and blood-clotting time improved, coming close to normal. The team’s conclusion was that the larger molecules of urea were harmful, but the smaller ones might have some function that was not understood and was beneficial.

They also learned that the size of the membrane and the flow rate of the blood through it determined the capture rate of the large molecules of urea and other toxins. This became known as the "square meter/hour hypothesis." They began looking into the prospects of lowering the flow rate of both the blood and the dialysate. This would permit the use of smaller needles and tubes and less dialysate; in turn, this would lower the cost of treatment by up to $500 per year, in terms of the solution alone. And if they could use an artificial kidney with three times the surface area of membrane as earlier ones, they might speed up the time necessary for dialysis, reducing it from 25 or 30 hours a week to seven or eight.

Instead of using the new portable units, a patient might be able to drop into a less expensive center and be on dialysis for just an hour per day. In fact, as he did at home, he might be able to treat himself on one of the units. This would reduce treatment costs still further.

73

One of the guys who taught in humanistic social studies (for budding engineers) were science-fiction buffs. One was my friend, Jack Leahy, who was terrifically well read. The other was Dell Skeels, who had a Ph.D. in English. At the time it was thought to be escapist fare. Many today think it is still. But since the word science is paramount in the genre’s name, it can mask itself under the banner of true science and pass itself off in a crowd, particularly a mixed crowd. It has since become respectable, or semi-respectable, and some of its best stuff is considered literature. Of course there is a crossover line, where futuristic literature of the first order rubs shoulders with science-fiction of the mid- to bottom order, and the genres become hopelessly confused. Until it is all sorted out and permanently codified, a happy confusion reigns.

Long may it.

In the same issue as the science-for-laymen articles on the artificial kidney, I published two on science-fiction. Skeels treated it as myth, Leahy as an important emerging field that was moving from "space opera," as he called it, to imaginative literature. He hauled in all sorts of esoteric examples to prove his point of high seriousness, including Walker Percy, Doris Lessing, and Mary McCarthy, from conventional literature, as we might call it, to Samuel Delany, Roger Zelanzny, Joanna Russ, and Harlan Ellison. I used a photo of Frank Herbert’s Dune and Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as illustration—two of my and other’s favorites. Leahy closed his argument with a quote from Norman Mailer that we live by metaphor, not measure. The allusion is to the world of science proper and engineering, who measure and weigh the physical world, the statement can be taken as a jab, perhaps a gibe, at the college that paid our salaries. I’m not sure that many got it, but I sure did. At the same time both articles were a respectable effort in the direction of a meld.

What do you photograph to illustrate articles on science fiction, or science fiction itself? I reached deep into my bag of tricks and desperately came up with what I could find. It wasn’t very good, but it was the best that I could—spooky, out of focus, abstract stuff, full of what is called circles of confusion.

I was enjoying myself, now in my second year of the best job I ever had, though I had to admit I had plenty of time on my hands and not so much to do with it as my bosses thought I needed. Learning photography had taken up a lot of my first year, and refining my techniques with the camera and in the darkroom carried me well into the second. And then there were pretty girls to fix in my viewfinder and later to bring into sharp granular focus on my enlarger and see (fascinated) emerge into beings on the printout paper in my developer.

Quick, a fast dip in the stop bath and into the fixer. A minute later the overhead light can be turned on and the print judged to be either acceptable or in sad need of a remake. Over and over.

Andrea was always handy, afternoons anyway, for a portrait taken on the run, in order to test a new lens or lighting source, a developer I hadn’t tried or some new printing paper. In this she humored me. She was getting paid and it was easier than typing or proof reading. I liked her bones and her fair hair and the slope of her breasts in their knit jerseys. Under my direction, ahem, she was learning photography, too, and came back to the office after a long weekend with a roll of pictures to develop of outings with her little boy, Michael. She bought my old Canon TL and I used to lend her lenses longer than the normal one that came with the camera. I’d say her stuff was mediocre, but I was encouraging and I tried to use what she shot on company time in the magazine. She only made it once or twice.

A ran an ad in the Daily for a used Leica and I phoned him. He came by the office and let me use it overnight, which was long enough to shoot up one roll of thirty-six exposures with its fast wide--angled lens. I printed up the results that night and whistled at the results. I simply had to have the camera. Besides, my fishing friend Ed Weinstein had one and said it had better resolution. He had switched from Canon and urged me to do so. I hesitated, but when the Leica black M-4 came along, I simply had to have it. The results justified it. In time I bought a supplement of lenses. It was the camera I had when I photographed Pam Rassmussen, about this time.

The next issue of the magazine I had planned was an important one, the first (and last) of a kind. It was to be double-size, sixty-four pages, and encompass the range of research done on campus. Everybody would report his or hers, and describe it in ordinary language, so that somebody in another field, or even outside of science and engineering, would know roughly what that person was doing and be able to appreciate it.

Oh, yes, what a fine idea. And how hard it was to bring it into fruition. I said I was underworked? That was in the past. Now I was swamped, for every professor reported all of his students activities in the lab or the field. Not to mention his own, which was done under a grant or a contract. It seemed that everybody was up to his ears in research. Research is what engineers do. It is also how they learn—they learn by doing. It is how they teach, as well. Only I did not know this, or if I did found it easy to forget it.

It is why my bosses were so tolerant of me in the darkroom, no matter what I was printing on my enlarger. So what if it was pretty girls, with half or fewer of their clothing on? I was doing lab work, research into the nature of chemistry and reproduction. I was one of them. They understood fully. Only I didn’t. It was okay, Bob.

The issue was a wonderful one. Have I mentioned that in previous years, I was obliged to publish a list of faculty publications for the year in the back pages of Trend. Not my idea at all, it was a kind of administrative blackmail the purpose of which was to make them feel shamed if they had nothing to report, and envious if what they reported was scant and lacked the bulk of some associate vying for promotion, as they all were, all who were not full professor already.

But to turn everybody’s attention specifically to what they were doing under the guise of research, ah, that was more productive, more beneficial. The deans, my bosses, were a little bit unenthusiastic when I suggested the issue at one of our monthly publications board meetings, in which I was expected to provide the entertainment. It was where I got my approval for each issue and also got policy matters straightened out ahead of time, before I could make a major blunder. This they always feared, since I was neither faculty (and part of its hierarchy) nor engineer, but some kind of mutant species whose functioning was dimly understood and must be guarded against.

This is both a good situation to work in and a bad one, depending. I always dreaded the meetings, which were not greatly demanding of me. I was expected to answer any idle question thrown at me, off the top of my head—something generally I could do with ease. But I never knew what it would be or what it might lead to. For instance, my candid answer might lead to some terrible new work requirement. They were always asking me to come to the next meeting with information about some strange thing that required lots of effort, then forgetting they had asked it and never remembering before the meeting was over. But let me forget what had been asked, and for absolute certainty I would be interrogated on that subject as though it were my Ph.D. orals. None of this was done—mind you—cruelly, ruthlessly. It took place idly, whimsically.

Myron Swarm, the associate dean for research, was the best at doing this to me. He had an active mind and no sense of what was involved in what he wanted to know; he instantly forgot it, but not always. "Mercurial Myron," I called him, in my mind and to my confidant, Andrea. For often she got assigned the brunt of the effort in finding out what he thought he might want to know but really didn’t. The idea would pass in a wink. "Oh, that," he might ask, when either of us might come back to him with a question or, rarely, the answer. "You didn’t take me seriously, did you?" ‘fraid I did. "Well, okay, what did you find out?" And he would listen with half a mind, his thoughts drifting off to what was more important to him, which was practically everything. I think he was composing a grocery shopping list of things his wife phoned for him to bring home.

Meetings (once I had got past the initial terror of them) were hilarious. I have mentioned how everybody had a boat and at the start of our sessions people often discussed for lengthy periods their particular boat, problems they were having with them, need to paint them or refinish their teak (constant), rid their hull of barnacles, etc. I refrained from bringing into discussion my eight-foot pram cartopper, designed for lake fishing, which was not the kind of boat they were interested in, being way too short and unmotored. It had not even a sail. So I bit my tongue and listened. I can’t say that I learned a lot.

Men are funny in how they conduct meetings. Almost ashamed, they will talk about nearly anything to avoid starting one and then, when they have stalled for an unconscionable length of time, apologetically mention the need to start. At one meeting we all discussed wristwatches for about forty minutes before we dared begin. Each man—full professors all, and several of them assistant and associate deans—took turns describing his own particular watch, often pointing desultorily at it, on his wrist and at length delineating its troubles. Slowly the brands of watches narrowed themselves down to but two: Rolexes and Timexes. Everything else was summarily dismissed as irrelevant.

Rolexes were usually bought in a duty-free store, on the way back from a conference in Europe or, more likely, the Far East. They were a devil to get serviced, which had to be done yearly, though it cost nothing or next to nothing, subsidized by the company. And there were cheap imitations to beware of. You could get stung in Hong Kong, as well as get a great deal there. They talked for a while about how to tell a "real" Rolex from a phony one. It was not easy, they agreed. There were certain tiny clues, but they could not be depended on. Now, with Timex, you could always count on the company, an American one, or was it? More discussion followed. Generally a Timex gained time on you, which wasn’t so bad, for you were never late, that way. A watch that ran slow, progressively slower, was a hindrance and could let you down, when you most needed to be on time. On and on.

I listened, fascinated. How long could this go on? I tried to reckon their salary, one by one, and how much they made a minute, then total the number of expensive, wasted minutes than transpired while we inanely talked about watches. Talk about your losing time—whether it was real time, academic time, meeting time, or theoretical time involving imaginary watches! And then the meeting would somehow begin., with a shrug of our collective shoulder and a glance by each at his watch and the general circulating question, "Just what time is it, anyway?" And they would mildly argue and disagree with themselves as to what time it was, exactly, or closely, and how much time there remained until they had go dashing off to class or, gasp, another such meeting, often with the same people and the same or similar topics of discussion.

I had to go once a month, I say, and dreaded it, though often the meeting was called off for reasons not explained to me, before or after. And sometimes I would show up for the meeting in the Dean’s large, imposing conference room, and be the only person present. People always arrived late, so it would take me five or ten minutes of wising up before I realized that nobody else was coming. I’d ask the dean’s secretary, or Myron’s., about the meeting, and they would inform me it had been called off.

"Didn’t anybody phone you?"

It was all news to me, I said. And they would laugh. You can bet none of the deans and department heads were forgotten when notices went out, either by mail or by phone. But me, well, I was relatively unimportant in the scheme of things and I knew it. So before a meeting I began inquiring whether the meeting (really) was going to be held, and was assured that it was, even when it was not. Or else somebody late leaked the word to me that it was not, and I didn’t show up, along with the rest of them. And then there was no joke.

No, I don’t think it was a set-up. It was just one of those things that happened. I felt relieved, at the same time I knew that whatever I was responsible for reporting back to them about was merely put off and I would have to prepare myself again or anew in time for the next meeting. Aside for this one meeting, and a few others which I could attend, ex officio, I was free to amuse myself, which I had become skilled at doing.

The research issue took a lot of time and the proof reading alone could go on until Andrea and I dropped in our tracks and still not be done with. I played a little game with her, as editors will do: I told her I was depending on her to catch the last of the typos before we went to press. This was not sadistic because she prided herself in this kind of detail work and also because I had put her in for a job reclassification; it seemed to me, but nobody else, that the work she did was editorial much more than secretarial, and she should be paid for it at a higher rate. I was successful at putting this through and surprised her with her advancement and new salary, though the work remained exactly the same. But now I could tell her to do what I did with a clear conscience. She was an editor, just like me, or rather not at all like me.

I told her with each issue that I was depending on her to catch the typos and other such glitches. My secret was that, having told her this, I could not depend on her or anybody else to do this and could only count on myself. So with each issue I read far into the night the very last thing that stood between proofing and printing. This was the blueline, which is a print made directly from the negatives that make the plates. Small things can still be changed in what they call stripping, on the negs, but it is expensive. It is a lot cheaper than reprinting the entire publication because some error is deemed major and insupportable.

The earlier you can catch your errors, you think, the lower the chance of them perpetuating themselves farther into the work schedule and escaping your final vital scrutiny. Or so is the theory. In practice, an error is an error and can take place anywhere along the line and be missed, skipped over, at every step in the process, right up to the last. And then you kick yourself, sometimes hard, for looking over it so many different times. It is why editors have come up with the trick of reading the last proof backwards. They read it line for line, but in reverse order. Of course it makes absolutely no sense, read this way. But this is what your are after, don’t you see? You want to see the line upon the white page clearly, with no distractions. Meaning, sense, grammar, spelling—these all are things that make linear sense, and you want to free yourself from their constraints. Hence, backwards.

Looking back on the fat issue, I can see that my photography has reached a high level of accomplishment and is nothing to be ashamed of, which is another way of saying it is something I am proud of. I was then, I am now. And there are very few errors in the issue. Part of the reason is diligence, part simple good luck. The production droned on, myself and Andrea along with it. Daily we buzzed like bees under glass, hardly looking up. The pictures I printed again and again, until the blacks were jet, the whites brilliant. I did all the page layouts myself. The text was Times Roman, the heads in Gothic Light Extended, and I used italic intelligently, caps and small caps in the body of either font tastefully. It was an artistic job.

The work had its silly, hilarious side, at least to me. I had acquired my river property and had purchased and hauled in a sixteen foot travel trailer. From one tiny window I could see the river, if I scrunched up my eyes and pressed my head into a corner. I had neither running water (the river was not fit to drink) or electricity. For light, when night crashed down, I had a two-burner Coleman lantern. I did not know how to operated it exactly, even though I had used one years ago while in Alaska, living under similar conditions. I mean, if I had known, I had forgotten.

My wife used to work at the library on some Saturdays, and knowing that she was not at home I used to go up to my new camp and stay overnight, fish some, and edit late into the night, or rather into the early morning hours. I had a battery-powered radio to keep me company, but the reception was iffy and often bad. I’d carefully fill my lantern outside, pump it up hard, open up the mantle’s generator (a kind of gas valve), and apply a match to the opening in the glass. The whole thing would become a torch briefly (hence the operation out-of-doors) but would soon quiet down to a hissing roar of blue light and no flame. It was then you could turn the valve down and watch the twin silk mantles take on a gradual white light. When the flames were entirely gone, you could open up the valve and watch the lantern emit a brilliant white light.

I had forgotten about the need to pump up the lantern to keep the flame bright.

I took the lantern inside and set to work. I hunched over my proofs, pencil poised, eyes squinting through my reading glasses, tackling the proofs systematically, page by page. We were near to the end of the production process and would soon go into blueline. Andrea had read these first and now I must find whatever she had missed—generally not much but often something. And with so thick an issue, the chance for error had increased as they say exponentially. (What they really mean is geometrically.)

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the light began to fail. I hunched closer. Was I going blind? I blinked my eyes to clear them of the tears of incomprehension, bewilderment. I wiped away the tears, but more quickly formed. It was a cool evening and the heat of the lantern was welcome. It was all that kept me from freezing.

Finally, unable to see anymore, but the evening early, I dozed off. When I awoke the lantern was out. I crawled into my sleeping bag and entered a dark night, one full of the noise of the rising river and various distant sounds, such as the German Shepherd down the road barking at something he did not understand. How like me, I thought. And slept.

In the morning I took the lantern outside and tried to figure out the trouble. It didn’t take long to experiment a bit and find out that the lantern needed to be repeatedly pumped up to produce a white light suitable for any indoor activity, such as reading. And there was no danger in pumping up the lantern indoors, so long as its mantles were lit and glowing and no longer aflame. In fact, this is what you had to do, to keep the lantern from dying out in a little blue gasp, as mine had done.

So I ate, washed my dishes, and began again to edit the issue under the thin, tree-shrouded light of day, winter, while the rain fell on the trees and my noisy aluminum roof. Hours passed. As the day drew dim, dimmer, I neared the end of my proofing. When I rose, my head swam and I staggered dizzily. I did not fish but loaded up the car and drove home, the finished proofs tucked away safely in my old college book bag. There they remained until Monday morning. Again I told Andrea I was depending on her. Two days later the issue went to press. If there was a typo or two in it, and I am sure there was, nobody ever pointed it out to me. I sure didn’t read it hard enough ever to find one.

I wonder if anybody ever read it all, except for Andrea and me?

Perhaps the dean, Charles Norris, who was in the hospital having his cancerous prostate removed.

74

I was getting bolder, more imaginative. You build on successes, or what you think are successes, and when nobody takes you to task, you press ahead, looking for more windmills to slay. I think the college was divided into two camps, and my first boss, Vern, who had hired me, was rather impressed with what the publication looked like, though it didn’t resemble anything he had seen previously in the field of engineering but more like the magazines his wife might have brought home from the store. although lacking in color.

Once I approached the publications board about doing an issue in color, but when presented with the cost estimates that I had prepared myself with ahead of time they looked at me as if I were mad, rather than just weirdly unusual. One issue in color would have taken my entire annual budget, including Andrea’s half-time salary (but not mine). I quickly forgot about it.

And then there was the other faction, the old fogies, the engineering reactionaries, who were only comfortable with the publication as it had been, dry as toast, dull as used nails. And they must have resented me and wished to see me gone. This may have been a majority of faculty but, fortunately, not an influential one, or else one whose power was so widely distributed, so diffuse, so as to be no power base and highly uninfluential. In this I was lucky.

For my last issue this second year I obtained permission to reprint an address of Brian Mar, expanded and reworked considerably from an address he presented at the Symposium on Puget Sound Water Quality held at the Pacific Science Center, May 18 and 19, 1972. It was barely over when I seized it and planned an issue around it. I began it with the catchy title, "Who Owns Puget Sound?" then I answered my own question—a little bit of sophistry with which everybody (at least in the line of writing publications) is familiar. "We all do." New paragraph. "But who is responsible for it?" New paragraph. "As things presently stand, nobody!" The editor allowed himself the extravagance of an exclamation point.

He (I) went on: "This fall a front-page headline in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer startled morning readers hunched over their coffee cups: "REPORT ON SOUND’S POLLUTION RIPS EPA." The article that followed was based on the House Committee on Government Operations report, ‘Protecting America’s Estuaries: Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca.’ Included was testimony from hearings held in Seattle the past winter. The charge was that EPA had taken no action against any polluters of Puget Sound, mainly the pulp and paper mills, and had weakly allowed the State of Washington to grant extensions past the 1972 deadlines for compliance, most of which were established in 1968.

"A few days later, EPA administrators responded that their hands had been tied—the courts had made them powerless to act except in matters between two or more states. Within a given state, such as Washington, they had no jurisdiction.

"If they did not have, then who did? Traditionally, state and local governments had looked the other way.

"There the matter rests. But the pollution of the Sound continues."

And spread across three of the four columns was a huge picture my wife had taken of a family digging clams at low tide on a Puget Sound beach. In the background were others wielding shovels, and some old piers decaying in the bright morning sunshine.

The first article was Brian Mar’s address, considerably reworked for a general audience. It was enhanced by more photography, this time mine, carefully printed in order to produce rich blacks. The Leitz lenses helped some, too, plus the fact that sea and sky are inherently dramatic. The article was followed by "The Impact of Alaskan Oil Transport on Puget Sound," by Steven Flajser, a research associate in engineering, and Edward Wenk, Jr., Professor of Engineering and Public Affairs. Wenk had come to us from the federal government’s office of science and technology, established under Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. He (Wenk) was something of an iconoclast, a gadfly, an unusual personage in an engineering college, in spite of having his Ph.D. in civil. He had made a career out of taking on the big boys—government, industry; he didn’t care—over pollution matters. Later he went on to head the fledgling interdisciplinary program for the management of technology at the UW, a controversial area that many of the college’s faculty disagreed with. They thought technology should be left alone and not interfered with, especially by those who were not experts in the fields they wanted to "manage."

Wenk was a visionary and many of the fears he had about untrammeled technology came to pass in the coming years, including oil spills in Puget Sound and throughout the world. Decades later, when the Exxon Valdez dumped its unrefined cargo into Prince William Inlet near Valdez, Alaska, it was just the kind of thing that Wenk had warned about. Double-hulled cargo ships would have helped reduce the chance of so serious a spill, and this is just what he and others had recommended. Alas, those two old bugaboos—cost and politics—had prevented this form of protection from being implemented, and the damage was humongous. The price for the damage to the saltwater environment and the less than complete cleanup is still being determined.

My use of photography for this issue was extensive and, looking back on it, remains strong. It helped lift the quarterly by its bootstraps, so to speak. Additionally, there was a photoessay on lasers by Johnny Moore, Sneddon’s assistant and a very good photographer in his own right—a kind of classic news photographer right out of B-type movies, with a cliché cigarette always dangling out of one side of his mouth and a couple of heavy Nikons banging their finish off, strung around his neck. He had a good eye and was skilled in the darkroom. I gave him his head on the photo assignment and he excelled. I can only take credit in knowing what he was capable of and pointing him in the right direction. It was a strong issue.

Trend was coming into its own. The next year would be its twenty-fifth. I had some ideas in mind on how me might celebrate the occasion.

75

My budget had increased only slightly over the past two years, not nearly so much as production costs, and in order to print the fat research issue, twice the normal size, I had to do one of two things: either divide the issue in half and publish it separately as October and January, or else do it as one, as I decided to do, and give up an issue, which is a bad thing to do with a quarterly and makes librarians all over the world think they missed receiving an issue. And then there is a world of explaining you have to do, literally.

The magazine was funded by the state in a special small category of state-funded research, an outgrowth of the classic engineering experiment station concept, which I believe was part of the original funding for land-grant colleges throughout the country. Whatever, the state cut its support by a whopping 39 percent the first year of my employment. The college had to cut its funding accordingly and the problem was where. It did not (correctly) want to reduce the number of graduate students it supported, which was the main reason for the program funds in the first place. So it eliminated the position of assistant director for research, a staff job, headed by a really nice guy, a retired army colonel, who had a MS in engineering from MIT.

It was largely a ceremonial job, as are many who have both directors and assistant. The mercurial Myron Swarm, a full professor of electrical, was the director and the associate dean, but he also taught a reduced number of courses and was involved in a lot of administrative work for both the college and the University. So the assistant, Erik Jorhdan, was let go. His main function was to oversee the scholarship program and meet with the interdepartmental committee that decided what students would receive the largess. The rest of the time he had little to do. And old time Army officer, he knew how to use up time without disturbing his superiors or causing any trouble. He was a nice guy and I liked him. We were roughly equals in rank and he was part of one of my coffee klatches. It was a shame to see him go. Everybody said this and meant it. But the general feeling was, Better him than me. It was how I looked at it, too.

But still we had hard times and a publication is always suspect. It eats up a lot of money that might well go elsewhere. It’s benefits were hard to measure. Certainly people around the world knew of the college of engineering mainly through its publication and the published writings of its faculty in various professional journals. But with such a budget cut, each year the magazine had to be reexamined in terms of whether it was really necessary. I knew this. It would seem that it was living on borrowed time. And I, its editor, as well.

So each year of its continued existence in such hard times was indeed a blessing. I awaited news of whether or not my budget would be approved and our lease on life extended. Reaching its twenty-fifth year was clearly a milestone. It would be nice to have celebrated it with some special expenditure, but that was out of the question. Instead I had to do the best that I could, under the circumstances. That was no more money in its operating budget and, in fact, a tiny cutback that was token. It was to show the legislature that, hey, look, we are trying. My own salary came out of a different fund, thankfully, and I received a flat percentage increase whenever the faculty did. They got raises depending on productivity, the department chairmen dividing up the sum according to politics and whatever private necromancy they use to make such determinations.

In my case, since nobody knew exactly what it was I did, and I had to peers to be compared with, the dean gave me whatever the across-the-board sum the faculty got, flat, with no incentive built in for either politics or performance. Thus I got paid whatever the legislature laid out for everybody and there was no compensation for doing a good job or, for that matter, a bad one, if that had been the case. This was a bit rankling, but I understood what lay behind it. In order to pay me more, they would have to dock some other person on the exempt staff who was doing an entirely different kind of work, work that didn’t really compare. So I understood, in several sense of the word. But I liked my job and wanted it to continue. For this year it did, but Trend took on a different look. The publications committee decided on some major changes.

For one thing, the magazine would be published only twice a year. What? How could it be a quarterly? Well, it couldn’t, but then it had to be, for postal mailing purposes. The committee decided we should publish a newsletter. It would be a tabloid, run on a giant web press, and the contract would go out for bids. It would go to the same people who received the slick magazine, which—let’s face it—was expensive to produce, and it would go to a host more, besides, each copy being relatively cheap, after the initial layout had been prepared. The magazine would come out in April and October, the tabloid newsletter in January and July. Since the newsletter edition was not a series of technical articles or papers presented at symposia, but a compendium of information about the college, it need be written. My job was to write it. Andrea would help.

Hmmm. The job parameters had changed greatly. I had greatly liked being editor of a slick magazine, even though its subject was engineering. Now I was to edit a measly tabloid. I was coming down in the world clearly. At the same time I was challenged. After all, wasn’t I a writer, first? This would give me a chance to see what I could do in what it was I believed I was best at. For anybody can edit (if there truth were known), but how many of us could write, and write well? We would soon see.

Andrea had a new boy friend, and he used to stop by the office to talk to her, take her out to coffee, and rush her off to an assignation after work. It was pretty plain what was going on. This was her business, not mine. I disliked the guy and considered him a scumbag, greaser, bum. I suppose it showed in my attitude. Andrea liked him a lot and could not wait to be alone with him. Naturally I vividly imagined what they did, a few minutes later. And I suppose there was a bit of envy mingled with my disgust. For as I said, I found her attractive. And somebody else’s sex life is always indecent and highly obscene.

The epicene women’s movement was strong on campus, with its overtones of Lesbianism, and it had made its inroads in my Andrea’s direction. She was of mixed mind about the whole thing, being angry because she was raising a child alone, Michael’s father belonging to the long-ago past and another part of the country, Alaska, and was developing a butch appearance and a lot of slovenly women friends. So the arrival of a guy, this Dan, was a positive sign, an indication that she might be straightening out, but not necessarily. He may only be an interlude, a diversion, a temporary aberration. Only time would tell. I had plenty of it to watch from my accustomed distance.

It was an interesting time, the early and mid-Seventies, interesting anyway if you like dissension. The war raged on and resistance to it had increased. Now people would say, "Oh, let’s just end it and bring everybody home." The only question was how to accomplish this goal. "Nuke them!" was some people’s response. Jane Fonda went to Hanoi and met with the enemy, whom we had failed to bomb to submission. Many people hated Jane, but not everybody. Here and there, especially around the universities, she had a following.

There were noisy peace marches; many of them started on campus, following an hour or two of speeches and demonstrations. These frightened a lot of people, including most of the faculty, especially those in engineering. At noon, when there were demonstrations and often what followed, called "run throughs" of campus buildings, the dean and his staff barricaded themselves in their office suite or third-floor rotunda. The glass door was double locked from the inside and the administrators and female staff looked down on the brick courtyard below on the activity. And then the mob would enter a building and "occupy" it briefly.

It sounds awful, but really wasn’t so bad. Most of the mob were students, and those who were not, were outsiders, were often former students and young people of about the same age. Most were men. Women numbered twenty percent or less. Some carried signs. Here and there was a bullhorn. There was a lot of aimless milling until, almost like a thing alive, a new direction was determined by some internal, hard-to-discern process, after which they all went charging off. To run through a building was a harmless discharge of energy, I thought, and behaved accordingly. I was in my early forties and might easily be mistaken for faculty; around a university you either strive to look like a student or age pushes you more in the direction of those others, and you can’t help but emulate them, not unless you want to be accused of chronic immaturity or juvenilia. And when you were my age, it seemed to me the more serious crime. It is a crime against yourself—what you really are, biologically, chronologically.

I repeat, I had no fear of the young people having their run-through, and perhaps I was wrong about my safety but—look—I suffered no harm at their hands. In fact, when they entered my office building, with a roar and a loud stamping of feet, I moved between floors along with them. It would be a mistake to try to go in a contrary direction. Also, it was considered unwise to use the elevator, when they were about, conducting their spurious business. But to move along with them entailed no danger, and so I often went along with them, on whatever business I had, so far as they were headed my way.

On the third floor of Lowe, besides the dean’s suite, were the offices of career employment. It was the logical place to have it, since about the only jobs available for graduating students were in engineering, but the office catered imperfectly to other kinds of students and provided them with career counseling and job interviews, as they came up. It is also where various industries engaged in defense work had representatives, from time to time, and the angry protesters targeted them specifically. Also the US Marine Corps had a sergeant at a table during business hours and the protesters were of a mixed mind about him and his.

What they really wanted to do was recruit the recruiter to their cause, which was to wage war against the war. At the same time they wanted to move him off campus, because they believed the University was abetting the war by offering its facilities to recruiting. Looked at a certain way, it made good sense. But looked at another, it was absurd.

To complicate matters more, the man who headed the student counseling and employment facility was a member of the engineering faculty, namely, a professor of the nefarious humanistic social sciences department. This was Jim Souther, the technical writing instructor and one of the science-fiction buffs. So the college had a dual reason in securing and maintaining (as the military would put it) the third floor of Lowe. It housed the college’s office and it was home to one of its professors in his dual role as a University administrator. The fact that the office was instrumental in finding graduating engineers beginning jobs at good salaries only helped its case.

Engineers, like doctors and many lawyers, are conservative. They tend to vote Republican and to resist mightily what they consider to be liberal inroads into the culture. So the sight of so many grubby students and others rushing through the engineering building incensed them. They wanted the demonstrations to end, fast. If it took the Seattle police to do the job, fine. Call in the clowns. I mean, the cops. And I believe it was a professor of mechanical engineering who made the initial call. It was done not out of fear but anger and exasperation. But perhaps some fear, too.

The windowless vehicles were painted black and had a sinister aspect; when they opened their rear doors, and helmeted, visored cops poured out, with shields and batons, there arrived the first real threat of violence on campus. Previously the protesters had set afire some garbage cans filled with refuse and had detonated (alarmingly) some cherry bombs left over from July. But what had frightened the University people most was the building run-throughs, plus all the noise. There are worse things than noise. And one of these soon happened.

The cops began to chase down and batter the protesters. Why else had they been called in except to restore order? Heads got bloodied and ambulances were called, their sirens adding to the ambient roar and clatter. And still, I felt, there was nothing to be worried about. What I feared were the police.

One noon I was out walking on my break and cutting through the outer edge of the demonstrators, keeping half an ear open for what the bullhorns said, stretching my legs, when I neared upper campus and Miller Hall. I spotted my old friend Verna Maclean, who was on her way to pick up her youngest son, David, who was six, where he had been tested for school placement. The testing office was on the third floor. She was just approaching the building to retrieve him, when we spotted each other. A group of protesters was rushing towards the building, which they intended to occupy.

"I’ll go with you to get David," I told her.

"I appreciate that."

"No reason to be worried," I assured her.

"Right," she said, but she looked uneasy. Perhaps I did, too. You never know what will come next, though usually it is only more of what has gone before, which is noise and confusion.

We came to the elevators and I cautioned, "Best use the stairs, I think."

She agreed. We mounted the stairs, just as the phalanx of students came at us; they brushed on by, moving much faster than we were. Their goal, I presumed, was to enter rooms where classes were being taught and totally disrupt them; they would occupy the room, claim the podium, and use the class to which to expound their arguments against the war. Generally they were politely listened to. In some cases, students who had heard it all before, or ones who were not even mildly sympathetic, simply got up and left.

We followed the protesters up two flights of stairs and arrived at the testing office. David was waiting for his mother. She picked him up and hugged him. Then she put him down again. We turned to leave and descend our two flights of stairs. This we did, with no trouble. Soon we were out on the street again. Some more protesters entered the building at the far entrance, while others left by the adjacent door. Except for the speed with which this was done, it was exactly like when classes changed over at the sound of the hourly bell.

At Lowe hall on another day, I had to pound on the thick glass of the door in order to rouse anybody. They had something I needed and the lunch hour was nearly over. Finally the Dean’s secretary came to the door. She was about the same vintage as he. Her face was chalk white. She would not open the door, even though she recognized me. I had to come back later in the day. The protesters had gone an hour or more earlier. The staff, including an assistant and an associate dean, were all talking about the event. It had been close, they agreed. The secretary was no longer white. The younger ones, typists mostly, were all chatting happily. I don’t think any work got done for the remainder of the day. People were too strung up, too hyper. I knew better than to make any statement about there not having been any risk. They knew better. And so did I.

This was at the time when young people were starting to shake hands in a peculiar manner, the way blacks did among themselves, only now that the method had grown popular among white, it had been changed two or three times, but the whites who wanted to be adjudged him did not know this and continued in their quaint, outdated way. I, of course, practiced it diligently and tried to become smooth at doing it. It involved interlocking thumbs, and sometimes you grabbed the other guy’s elbow, in passing. Soon it moved on to interlocking fingertips, but not thumbs, then reversing the grip and using only thumbs again, followed by some kind of shoulder slap, but not always. Andrea had done it with her friends, all female, for some time, and I had studied them, wondering if they had it right or were perpetuating something wrong. A few guys I knew did it, and we found occasions to shake and slap—more often than past circumstances had dictated. We desperately wanted to be right and knew the only way to avoid this was to practice.

In this we could only be further wrong.

Also the word gay had newly come into being. To me, a writer and editor, I was angry at the homosexual word for usurping a perfectly good word and making it into something else, thereby destroying it. Posters began to appear on bulletin boards around campus announcing gay meetings. I had a new boss, a woman engineer, one of a rare breed, one of Mercurial Myron[‘s protégées in electrical. Her name was Irene Peden. We did not get along well. We did not get along, in fact, at all.

She was, and saw herself clearly, as a role model for young women who might be steered into careers in engineering. She was right in this and they were badly needed—students and role models both. She either fawned around the male full professors in electrical and the other deans, or else she was harsh and dictatorial, treating everybody else as underlings. This included me. She treated me as a kind of male secretary and I was expected to obey. At the same time she exuded a lot of powder and perfume, and waited to have doors opened for her. I didn’t mind this as much as I might have, the doors being inordinately heavy for male and female alike; but she made me feel like a doorman in a restaurant. Which would have been okay if she would tip.

She was married to a lawyer who advertised that he took on contingency cases, especially those involving automobile accidents. At that time lawyers didn’t (1) advertise in weekly neighborhood newspapers, (2) chase ambulances, at least not publicly. So there was no doubt about her sexual orientation. She was straight as a board. It was mostly that she made pendulum swings between being obsequious and dictatorial. There was no happy ground in the middle. If so, I would have been delighted to occupy it.

I made a joke one time, passing by a bulletin board and our stopping together to peruse it, about not going to the gay meeting advertised there because "I was not gay, not even cheerful." I had thought this was one of those self-castigating remarks she might like best, seeing who its subject was. Not a smirk. Wrong again. So any reference to Shakespeare and his use of the word in commonly known plays would not fall on deaf ears; it would fall on hostile ones. I knew when to leave something alone.

A conference was held on women in engineering, a sort of recruiting effort, and the pages of the Trend newsletter was to be used to advertise the conference and make it seem interesting. This seemed to me a legitimate use of the medium and I strove to do what I was bid. My friend, Ari Cowan, was contracted with to do the photography. Dean Peden cautioned me. "Don’t just take pictures of the pretty ones." She had read the minds of both of us correctly. I passed the word on to Ari.

"She wants me to photograph just the ugly ones, right?"

"Not exactly that, either."

He continued, not hearing me, as he did, when he didn’t want to, "That shouldn’t be hard to do."

"Find some intelligent-looking ones."

"Can they have big boobs?"

"Only if they are intelligent-looking boobs and not too obviously big."

"Gotcha."

He did a fine job, and Peden’s warning was appropriate and insightful. When the conference took place, in the student union’s largest auditorium, Ari and I took turns photographing the speakers, lit by overhead floods, and using each other’s fast short telephoto lens. The pictures were great and I used the best in the next issue of the tabloid.

The trouble with Peden was, when you did a good job, a great one, she took it for granted, but when circumstances made it less than great, or for some reason there was a glitch, or things didn’t go right, and things were less than perfect, you could feel on your very skin her plotting against you. Or else I imagined it all. But I don’t think so.

Engineers don’t understand the rest of the world and have a hard time living in it. Fortunately, most of the time they can associate with each other and avoid conflicts that jar the mind and temperament. Vern was off heading some kind of taskforce and Kermit Garlid, who was an associate dean on the publications committee, would have been my choice of bosses, for we got along well, but this was not to be, though I tried to engineer (excuse the word) such a switch. I must live with Peden and suffer her ire, or whatever it was.

Most of the time she left me alone. I felt like a man again, rather than like a cretin. I tried to imagine what her life was like, married to a contingency lawyer who took civil cases, and her daughter’s, whom the mother treated like a robot, the few times I saw them together. She taught some courses in electrical engineering—power transmission was her specialty, I believe. It was an appropriate field. But power was something not to be transmitted or delegated outside of her chosen field. Only when it came to towers and transformers.

The University was conducting a survey of exempt staff and its salaries. Good. It was done by outside consultants and they were paid an enormous sum of money for it. This activity normally led to more money, if you were doing your job. I was told to prepare a job description. I did, writing it up about as honestly as such things are done, even by people who know how to write. I submitted it to Peden and she marked it up and sent it back for a rewrite. Okay. I did one. I heard no more about it. It went in to the consultants. A couple of months passed, which is normal for such situations. I was scheduled for routine interview with the consultants. The day arrived and I showed up for the meeting. Peden was there. A copy of my revised job description was handed to me.

I didn’t recognize it. How short it was. Where were my responsibilities? All I did was ensure the two different issues got printed. Who wrote them? Who determined content? Who was in charge of accuracy, the photography, the layouts, the scheduling?

"I am," said Irene Peden.

"But I rarely see you. I do all this."

"You may do this," she said, sarcastically underscoring the word, "but I am responsible for it."

"The writing?"

"Yes."

"Determining the content?"
"Yes."

"But why then don’t we ever meet and talk about it?"

"We do."

"When?"

"All the time."

"Why don’t I remember it?"

"You must be forgetting."

And then it dawned on me. Since she had nothing to do with either the magazine or the tabloid newsletter, not until after it got printed and was post-mortumed, she really had no responsibilities, but presumed she did because I did, and everything I did she really did, though she couldn’t tell a pica from a point, a blueline from a galley, an adjective from an adverb, the keen use of a word from a trite one. In fact, she had no job description other than supervising mine and whatever it was she did in her role of recruiting female engineers and speaking to high school classes about the romance of engineering. This was legitimate activity and she was the right one to do it. Why then did she covet what I did? I think she truly believed that she did all these things, though she never even saw them being done, not until they were an accomplishment, the job printed. I believe that she believed it, truly, for no one could be so duplicitous.

The consultants told me that I was being grossly overpaid for what I was doing, according to my edited job description, and my salary would be frozen until salaries throughout the University were incrementally nudged upwards to where mine was. There guidelines were that no salaries were to be cut, but many had to be brought into line. Very few were to be increased and these only according to the number of people who might be supervised. I actually supervised nobody. What about Andrea and Jerry? What about Tina?

"Dean Peden supervises them."

"She doesn’t even know them. I fill out their performance evaluations."

"You may initiate them, but Dean Peden reviews them and implements them."

"She doesn’t meet with them, go over their work with them."

"She does if she feels it is necessary."

I couldn’t win.

By now she had left the room and I was alone with the two consultants. They were both young and lean, and resembled accountants. Perhaps they had started out this way, before they had been ruined by this line of work.

"Do you by any chance have Dean Peden’s job description?" I asked.

"Yes."

"May I see it?"

They didn’t know if I should be shown it. This led to a short conference. I mean, I really had to know who did the work, if I did not do it. It was done by somebody and it was imperative to me to locate that person, for when I did, obviously I could stop doing it. I felt as though I were in an early novel by Joseph Heller, but announcing this insight would do my case no good, I knew.

They decided to let me see it.

And there they were, all my duties, all in my own words. It was simply unbelievably incredible. There is being screwed and being Screwed. I had been done both. I had to take my hat off to her, Peden. It was thorough. It was concise. I don’t think it was even done with malice of foreplay, as it might be called. I think she truly believed that she did all these things and I did not. She had formed this opinion of the world not in college but working summers as a consultant at Boeing. There and perhaps elsewhere you are the sum of everybody working beneath you. And what does a manager do but manage?

At first you feel outrage. Then you feel you are the butt of some enormous cosmic joke. It is so untrue, what has happened, that it cannot be believed. For example, what would happen if I simply disappeared for a period of time, without explanation? I was tempted. Could Peden conceive and get out an issue? Could I wire up a complex project or design a power transformation and transmission facility? Of course not. But could she, really? Or could she only manage such a project?

If so, what did managers really do?

I know they meet and keep minutes; I’d worked at Boeing myself. I’d been a first-line supervisor. Perhaps if I’d been a faculty consultant I’d know better how things really worked. I wouldn’t have fooled myself, wasted so many hours. And as for Trend went, it now seemed a wasted, worthless activity, my writing its newsletter and seeing that its issues got edited and printed as handsomely as I knew how.

It wasn’t just the money and having my salary locked up tight into an indefinite future. It was the shattering ignominy of the situation. What was I doing with my life? How had I deluded myself so? And if I complained (as I am able to do, mightily) would anybody in engineering know what I was talking about or see the injustice of the situation? I doubted it. So what was I to do?

77

You try to keep a stiff upper lip and a sphincter to match. You go to work each day, but it has become a kind of horrorshow and you dread it. You awaken each night at three A.M. and study the blur of the digital clock’s red numbers. You do your job, because you are a professional, and you avoid mouthing off to colleagues about injustice because it is unmanly, unbecoming. You rehearse revenge fantasies you know you have less than a ghost of a chance of enacting. And you try to figure out the soonest that you will be able to get the hell out of there. But it is never so neat nor so pretty. And the days pass.

You make the people around you miserable.

When I got Andrea reclassified as editor (I should have done it for myself), I knew I was making her available to others, for she was now at the bottom of the list and in its lowest category, and jobs becoming available would all be attractive to her, as well as she to whoever was in charge of hiring. I knew this and calmly accepted it because it is how thing ought to operate in the world of business, which incidentally includes academe. I, in fact, wanted her to get a good job, a better job, one that paid more money, even it meant her going away from Trend (such as it was, such as it remained) and me. This was healthy and good.

And go she did, with my blessing. She had graduated, finally, and in English, and I had recommended her for a job working for a sister (as she would then put it) down in Marine Affairs, which did not mean that you had sexual relationships with fish and whales, but that you edited publications having to do with that watery world. It was a notch higher and in the same classification as mine, when I had come to work for the University in my earlier incarnation, in the office of publications. I knew what it paid and that I could never get that much money for her. and she was worth it. I took pride in my bringing her along, so to speak, reclassifying her, teaching her how to edit, though it is not all that complex and Hal Kelly had taken her in that direction without her exactly knowing it. For secretarial work and the early stages of editing are not all that different. It is one of the small truths we do not usually speak. For it would upset the balance so.

She was now situated on the edge of lower campus and often had occasion to come up to where her old office was and to drop in, usually unannounced, and visit for a while. She correctly presumed I had nothing better to do, and this was generally true. We even went out for hour-long coffee breaks, like we used to do. Things were much the same as before, only now we were colleagues, conspirators, equals. Only, of course, I continued to know more about our common business and this gave me the edge I did not want to let go of. Nor did she want me to let go, I am sure.

I had to hire a new assistant editor. (Andrea I had inherited, a lucky chance.) It turned out to be a highly nervous dark-haired young woman who was also an English major. The world was choked with them and they sprouted at every corner. She was Nancy Davis. It was the exact same name of a woman I went to college with, years before, and who I would soon casually meet again, which gives credibility to the notion that there are only so many names to go around and a fixed number of faces to go with them, so they tend to repeat, over and over. Thus you will meet someone who looks exactly like someone you used to know, and unless you can arrange to put them together, side by side, you will not be able to see the difference. (And then—impossible to have happen though—the difference will be enormous and you will slam your hand to your forehead because you will know how wrong you were.) But it never happens.

Nancy was married to a guy named David. Hence the Davis and repetition. She was born something else. David too was in English. (Help us escape!) He was legally blind, though he seemed to be able to see well enough, and I once ended up reading unknowingly into a tape machine for him because he claimed to not be able to read the book that was required for the class, which just happened to be on I had read for, year ago. Small tight world. He was working for a Ph.D. that would never be given him because he was deemed too obnoxious. To me he seemed all right, and not to have hired Nancy would have been to deny the rights of English majors throughout the world and deny their cause.

It soon proved a big mistake. Give me back my Andrea again. Sorry, dude, she’s taken.

Nancy came in my bad time and me in hers. She and David were early in the long, slow process of deciding to get divorced, but did not yet know this, nor could I. I sensed the turmoil and felt right at home with it, for I had my own now. This made us a pair. Naturally we did not like each other. In my mind I was preparing to leave. I did not yet know this. And it took an inordinate length of time to accomplish. A year and a half.

Meanwhile my preparations for Trend’s twenty-fifth year continued. For the first issue, I wanted it to have a strong aspect of normality, that is, its content would look much like issued out of the past. (This element I would enhance greatly in the second issue, to be published in the fall, for we were down to two, remember, for the magazine. It was really all I was concerned with. The tabloid was a throw-away in my and everybody else’s opinion.)

The first article was in the same line as my earlier issue that stressed the artificial kidney. It was "Engineering Parameters" good, hip word "for Artificial Internal Organs," by William Leith, a research associate in nuclear; the lab—research—was where all the valuable work got done. The rest was but classroom exercise, albeit the heart of the educational program.

They had a parallel universe, these research performers, with ranks and salaries the equal of the faculty, only they didn’t have to teach. They all had advanced degrees in recognized fields, with pay scales commensurate. Leith was equal to a full professor. The students he worked with were primarily candidates for the Ph.D. They were expected to do significant work. Well, what was more important that developing artificial organs for patients who would die without them?

The bioengineering field had great public appeal, whereas much of engineering did not, was dry and of interest only to people doing the work. And people doing these unheralded efforts were envious of those whose work was more impressive, widely interesting. So by emphasizing the college’s efforts in certain fields—nuclear, space, bio, environment—I ran the risk of offending by neglect most of the others, who existed in dominant numbers. They made up the bulk of the engineering faculty. Yet what was I to do? Was I to draw attention, as in the past under my predecessors, to what the world already thought about engineering—that it was dull and of no general significance?

So I stuck to the mildly spectacular.

My job, as I had defined it (in the absence of anybody else being able to, short of "edit a quarterly") was to bring public attention to the range of work being done by the college and to point an intelligent finger at what was significant, i.e. of most benefit to mankind. It might have been defined by some others—faculty committees, the publications board, the department chairmen, vying—as something else. "Me, me, me," is often the pathetic cry. But, look, if you are breaking concrete for the umpteenth time, who is interested, besides yourself and your students, who will go off into industry and bust concrete until they are retired, increasing the stress rate and lowering the fracture rate infinitesimally.

The engineering drawings for Trend and other needs in the college were done in my office, not by Jerry anymore, who had gotten his degree in civil after some ten years of employment, taking one class at a time, but by his replacement, Lois. She had come to us as a draftsperson from Arts and Science’s sociology. Never mind asking what they did that required drafting; I never got a straight answer at the time. She "claimed" the job, when the listing got posted by personnel, for she had been working at reduced hours and at a lower rate, due to cutbacks in A&S and the simple fact that they did not like her and were trying, anyway that worked, to get rid of her. She was red-headed and contentious. Aside from those matters, she was a good worker, turned out a good product, was rarely sick or absent, and came to work on time.

We got along fine. She had a grudge against the University and was always litigating it through the staff association and the union. (I went to work for them briefly, a few years later.) So there was always some action pending. The college accepted her reluctantly, knowing her history, and I was warned about saying or doing anything that might lead to more law suits. No worry. Technically she reported to Mercurial Myron, then to his successor (and protégée) Irene Peden, my boss and nemesis. Swarm kept buffers between him and her, while Peden, bless her, totally ignored her. (First, no doubt, she abstracted the draftsperson’s duties from her job description and put them in her own, Peden’s. Just kidding.)

The second article for that issue was also full of nifty drawings done for John Concord, a professor of civil engineering, by Lois: "Remote Sensing and Photointerpetation." It also included some of his infrared aerial photographs. It was an old-fashioned engineering article, and its abstract best indicates what it was about, for it was highly technical and not of interest to most. Then why did I include it? Well, I liked John Concord, an Englishman, and the subject was, after all, photography, even though it was nothing like mine. The abstract states: "This paper is intended to give an overview of the field of remote sensing to the engineer. It considers the problems of source, atmospheric attenuation, lens/filter/film or sensor sensitivity, reflectance of targets, and the presentation of data. The discussion covers visual wavelengths, black and white and color photography, the photographic or solar IR region, heat IR, and microwave imagery. Utilization of photo and other sensors for interpretation is considered, showing current trends and the potential of satellite systems such as the ERTS-A."

You see what I was up against?

What this really means is, when you take pictures from on high, there are a number of problems. First, there are clouds and haze. There is heat and the effects of sunlight. And then there is the reflection off of what you want to record. To reduce the problems, you can use special film, sensors, and filters. These are only partly successful. How you read the pictures and interpret what’s in them is still difficult. Maybe bouncing beams off of satellites will help some day, but don’t count on it.

But engineers can’t write like this, and if they did, they’d be drummed out of their profession. They’ve developed a special language and it can only be understood by people trained in its vocabulary and esoteric meaning. In this instance, cameras see differently from people. This involves parallax correction of lenses and how two-eyed people (most of us) see. On and on. But what it’s all about is interesting. It has to do with how we see and perceive what engineers call data. It also is concerned with language and the words we choose to try to communicated, always imperfectly, with each other.

The second article goes into language closely and challenges some of the assumptions we and eager engineers use to convey meaning to each other. It is titled, "Presupposition and Technical Rhetoric." Pretty neat, eh? Also it is funny. To illustrate it, I chose a cartoonist; the stuff isn’t signed but looks to me to be Frank Renie, who I worked with at Safeco. He was the same one who did "Invert to Communicate." Let me quote briefly from the article to show what it was like and the points it wanted to make:

"A declarative sentence asserts something. It can be true or false. But we may distinguish what a sentence asserts from what it presupposes. Whenever a sentence is used, some information may be assumed to be already "in the air," information without which the sentence would simply not make sense, would have no truth value at all. This information in the air we call ‘presupposition.’ For example sentence 1:

"l. Orally administered ⁸⁵Sr was not retained on the teeth of healthy miniature swine."

I said this stuff was funny, didn’t I?

"presupposes that miniature swine exist, that someone administered to them, that miniature swine have teeth, etc. The sentence asserts that the 85Sr was not retained. The distinction between presupposition and assertion, which is often difficult to pin down exactly, has been treated elsewhere." And beaucoup footnotes precede and follow.

The article goes on to analyze most closely what is involved in technical writing and the precepts that get violated almost daily. It is well-written, concise, witty, informative, and useful. I sought it out, solicited it, and brought it forward into more light than it originally had, as Progress Report No. 5 in Working Papers in English for Science and Technology, 1972. I stated, "It is published in Trend because "we" hope it will be of benefit to engineering practitioners and teachers who are involved in written communication." Then I gave the location where the full proceedings might be found and read. The "we" is myself, of course. Who else?

The paper had three authors, which normally makes one suspicious, for how can there be more than one, but in engineering and technical-writing circles is often the case, because others are involved in research and studies, and need to be given acknowledge and, often, promotion based on such efforts. The writers were: Larry Selinker, an assistant professor of linguistics, and a nut; Louis Trimble, an associate professor of the college’s department of humanistic social studies, and a man with a lucrative sideline of writing paperback Westerns, and Robert Vroman, described as "visiting lecturer, faculty of philology, Babas-Boyai University, Cluf, Romania," long gone from the scene and seemingly a made-up name. He may have been a vampire or other kind of restless spirit not yet put to rest. Perhaps he didn’t exist and was a figment of Selinker and Trimble’s fictive imaginations. But I hope not.

Deep in the article emerges another supposition: the use of idiom and the difficulty of its communicating meaning to people not used to speaking and reading the language, that is, students from other countries. Many engineering students were from other nations, especially the Near East, and when more students from the Far East began to arrive, a separate field of study and training was developed. This was English As a Second Language. So the series of articles itself presupposed an unfamiliarity with American idiom, which often unknowingly appears in technical papers and can be misunderstood, especially if it is only referred to and not each time definitely stated. But the article, and ones like it, are helpful to those of us writing in the language we grew up with and reexamining where our basic tenets came from, and how we may be wrongly relying on them when writing and speaking every day.

I finished off the issue with a photoessay on the University’s libraries, of which there were several, if not many, for most colleges, schools, and a number of departments all had them, separated from the central library system itself. It was comprised of the undergraduate library and the main or Suzzallo Library. These I photographed extensively, trying to give the pictures I was to use a sense of excitement and vibrant life. The architecture, most of it new or newly revamped, lent itself to this form of expression, as did my new Leitz wide-angled lenses. My sense of composition was improving rapidly, I can see now, from looking back at the results. (When I left, the University’s printing plant gave me a set of the issues I edited, bound in red leather. It is this I refer to, when so much time has passed that the individual issues, let a lone the body of them, have fuzzed indefinably in my brain.)

I thought the photoessay might portray the University itself as an attractive place to be and at which to study and learn. I supplemented it with documentary text testifying to its size and comprehensiveness. I also named its special collections, its media center, and language-learning laboratories. Looking at the pictures now, it still seems to be a good place to go and to be working in.

This was the April 1973 issue; for the final one, October, I decided to salute the past, its previous two editors, some contributions from the past, plus more on water quality, since it was a topic of growing national interest. Naturally I included a photoessay on clean water. The work was all mine.

I wrote a short lead-in or introduction to the issue, calling it, "The Water Resource," and pointing out that there was a great water shortage taking place in the West and the great Columbia river was currently running at 105,000 cfs, compared to a previous low of 107,500 in 1926. The state legislature (our funding source through its powers of taxation) had declared an emergency and asked that a number of energy-conservation measures be put into effect including electrical "brownouts" and water-reduction devices in water-using facilities, such as drinking fountains and toilets. I dryly noted that the adage, "It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness," might soon become a fact of life.

Also, I decided to salute Trend’s previous editors, Isabela Hemenway and Hal Kelly, and indirectly myself. I had a hunch that the quarterly, its slick magazine version reduced to two issues per year, might be on its way out, for another budget crunch was on the horizon. University-wide all publications were being scrutinized and were vulnerable to a legislature looking critically at lavish expenditures. What was more visible and obviously expensive than a magazine filled with good pictures, never mind the fact that they were all taken by the editor, who was on annual salary? It is where an immediate savings could be implemented and observed by all? You could hold up a magazine, even one no longer printed, and say, Look here. This is no more, and look at all the money we saved.

To celebrate the quarterly and its two previous editors, I had to learn more about them. This led me on a pleasant search for the whereabouts of Mrs. Hemenway, who, it turned out, lived not far away. I found her in the phonebook and called her up. She immediately invited me over for tea. From this I deduced she was a former English major.

She was eighty-four, but active and vital. We liked each other at once. Well, English majors usually do; they speak the same fruited language and have read the same ripe books, namely the world’s literature. She was long widowed in lived in a little storybook house at the end of what we all knew as Candycane Lane. They were adjacent to the University and put on elaborate Christmas light displays.

Born in 1889 in Kentucky, she had a BA from Nebraska, a MA from Chicago in 1912. She studied the classics, but it included language and literature studies in Greek and Latin. (So had my paternal grandmother, in Chicago, too.) She later taught English, journalism, and short-story writing in her home state for many years. He husband was a university professor and botanist. They raised a family and she helped him with his work, which included editing a technical publication. This made her a natural for the new job, when she came to Seattle at the age of 56.

There had always been a publications board, I was distressed to learn. Professor Burt Farquharson was its chairman and director of the engineering experiment station, now the office of engineering research, and recipient of the state funding that had been severely curtailed once and would soon be again. He was authorized to hire an assistant and this was Isabel. The quarterly started in December 1948 and the first issue was published then. By God, I was a freshman, alternating between living at home with my parents and in the fraternity, where I spent so much time. My major was journalism, though I was uncertain about it and would soon change it. I had just turned eighteen.

I sat drinking Earl Grey tea and listening to Mrs. Hemenway talk. What a grand old girl she was and how much I liked her. I felt an instant bond and, knowing Hal Kelley and his background, a strong sense of tradition and linkage to a common past. Though she was suffering from many ailments, she was chipper and cheerful, hospitable, friendly, full of good chatter and information necessary to me and my purpose. Both hips had been broken and each had undergone two corrective surgeries. Additionally she had bad arthritis. She lived alone, a widow for some thirty years. The bookmobile regularly stopped at her front door and she loaded up for another stint.

She was listed as editorial associate to Farquharson for the next three years, but did of course all the work on each issue, I knew. Somethings don’t change. (Did Farquharson put down her duties on his job description, too; was it a decades-old practice in engineering, like multiple authorship?) In the middle of 1951, somewhere between issues, she became its editor. I wondered if she got a pay raise? She frequently wrote for the quarterly and her topics often included some effort to related engineering and engineering education to the classics. It was a long stretch. A shorter one was to ask the question, What about women engineers? They were a rarity then. She often wrote biographies of some of the engineers and scientists who came to the University to speak and to attend symposia. She was, I thought, sipping her tea, a light in the darkness. I took her picture by available light on her porch, late in the day, and left. I saw her only once again before she was rushed to the hospital by her daughter and died. I instantly wished it had been more often.

She was succeeded by Hal Kelly in January 1961. I had a picture I had taken of him with Jim Sneddon’s borrowed Rolleflex, sitting at the desk he was soon to turn over to me, on that last day; already a favorite picture of some Redon flowers was stuck on the wall by me in anticipation of taking over. It occupied the same slightly out of focus complement that Egil Gustafson’s picture of me, also run in the next issue, contained. I thought they made a nice pair, along with my fine picture of Mrs. Hemenway.

Hal, according to one of those short biographical sketches begun my her and continued by me, also had an MA in English, his from Colorado; his bachelors was from Kansas State. It seemed to be prerequisite for the job and the first so-trained person who came forward and fit the template probably got the job, though there may have been more competition for it than I imagined. Hal (he was H. Hal Kelly, though I never knew what the initial H. was for, and could only guess) had been associate professor and editor at the ordnance research laboratory at Penn State. He like her maintained a correspondence with individuals, universities, and libraries throughout the world. So did I, especially while the magazine was being threatened. It seemed more important than ever to keep our traditions and long associations going.

Hal often solicited material from outside the college, which was daring. Once he ran an article from a favorite magazine, The Saturday Review. He began to incorporate informational bits about the college, advancing its faculty and programs, in a special section called News and Notices. This, expanded, became the basis of the tabloid edition of Trend, and was thought to further the college’s public-relations needs. He also accepted a number of contributions from engineers and engineering students outside the University. Often they were from companionate publications received in exchange for copies of Trend. At various times the college’s newsletter was published separately. Doing so seemed to wax and wane with the college’s financial good times.

I see from rereading this issue that Hal and I had a full month together before he retired. The deans had a tea for him, complete with purchased cake, and I dimly remember attending it and the horrible feeling that someday I might be retiring at age sixty-five, as he was presently doing. What had happened to my life, I would wonder, in this grim scenario? At the same time it was a not unpleasant one. Most people passed their lives in some continuous line of employment, at least back then they did, and to do so was not really so horrible, not if it gave you a comfortable living and something reasonable interesting to do.

Did this?

Hal was a gardening, this issue tells me, and lived on Bainbridge Island, where he had commuted by ferry for—let me see—for ten years. He was also a handyman, the text reminds me (for I wrote it), and an avid reader. He had a summer home on the Hoh river and planned to spend more time there than in the past. I hoped he would continue fishing and enjoy the fly reel I spontaneously and surprisingly gave him, as a parting gift, after our full month of association and goofing off.

I then went on to relate similar material about myself, putting it in the same tone and suddenly realizing that I had a lot to be modest about, or rather not a whole lot to say. My accomplishments had been few, compared to theirs. But there was a clear line of descent and it encouraged me to do good work. I think my photographic emphasis was needed, and my layouts were clean and crisp. I had been happy editing it, planning the issues, seeming them executed, taking my pictures, pulling rich prints, seeing them screened and reproduced not in continuous tone but with 150-dot line screens, carefully checking the inking of each issue while on the press to make sure that they did not scrimp and my loving photos wash out.

Generally they did not.

78

That was a great year, perhaps Trend’s best ever, and I am glad it was mine and belonged to me. A magazine is whatever its editor’s vision of it is, and this year’s was mine, not to say that they others weren’t but that this one was special. It featured several things, one of which was the lead article, Our Water Resources and Environmental Quality," hip words then and used to distraction by today. It was by Gerard Rohlich, Walker-Ames lecturer in engineering, who was visiting from Berkeley at the University for a month and delivering three handsomely paid lectures to engineers and the general public. I was lucky to get to publish them and scooped the government printing office, who came out with them much later and resorted to my text, carefully prepared by a gang of transcribing steno pool typists under my orchestration.

I photographed Rohlich by window light, there in the ARL building, with my Leica, and the picture was terrific, for he was a handsome, burly man, who had held faculty positions in Finland, Wisconsin, Penn State, and Carnegie Tech. I attended all lectures and listened enthusiastically. This was my favorite topic. I had been working hard to photograph it and my favorite river, the Stillaguamish. I had an idea, perhaps based on a book published by my friend, Ralph Wahl, who had used his fine photos of the Skagit, along with quotations from Roderick Haig-Brown, a favorite fishing writer of all of us and one who had transcended the limitations of his subject. He was considered a classic.

Why not my own photos, I wondered, and text from Henry Thoreau? He had lived by Walden Pond while it was still clean, potable. And my Stilly still ran clear and fast, with a discernible pool-riffle configuration, at least for a while longer. I had caught it at its best and recorded the evidence of a healthy stream that exemplified the best of what was meant by the term, water quality.

It went on, page after page, a terrible self-indulgence. But what are editors for, if not things like this? They are visionary—editors and photographers. Who else could picture in his mind what would so illustrate for others what was meant by the concept of clean water? Only a fisher and water freak. I was both.

And of course I had Thoreau to back me up. How rich he is, and how varied. And how much he has written; so much to wade through looking for quotes that might be appropriate, then wracking your head and having to stretch a point to make something short of a perfect fit. But what a joy to lay out such an issue, printing and reprinting the photos, demanding rich blacks, whites that shone luminously on the coated stock, and then to see it come into being—that what had only been an idea, then a page layout, none of it finally coming together until it was on the press, too late to change anything.

I am sure there were faculty and staff who wondered what the hell I was doing--what did this have to do with engineering? I anticipated such a response and what I would say to them all, when they came to me amassed for action, perhaps doing a run-through of the building in numbers, carrying placards and bullhorns, demanding action in the form of my ouster. But I heard nothing directly. I heard nothing much indirectly, either. To get a response, you have to solicit an opinion, which always produces (as we say) a false positive. It is like a woman asking, "Am I pretty tonight?" There is only one acceptable answer.

I tempered my extravagance by some serious stuff that was indisputable engineering and local, including an article by Charles Gibbs, a cum laude graduate of the college in civil and presently director of Metro, the city’s municipal water and transportation facility. He was about my age, successful beyond doubt, and had an advanced degree from the college. It was engineering for engineers, one of their own. He had, with others, effected a mammoth clean-up of Lake Washington, previously filthy, and everybody now knew you could see bottom nearly anywhere, up to respectable depths, though you still would not want to drink it. It was called, "Maintaining Water Quality; A Community Challenge." I did not even bother to replace his semi-colon with a full colon, something editors are known to boldly do. It was a good piece.

To finish off the commemorative issue, I included a short article by Mrs. Hemenway on women engineers and Hal’s reprint of "What Is The Price of Information Unlimited?" My own written contributions were descriptive and illustrative. I quoted Farquharson’s long, dull history of the engineering experiment station and his story about how Trend got its name. The professor who had been instrumental in its creation, Bob Hennes, was at a loss as to what to call it. He came to the meeting of the publications board the next morning with an empty carton of a new detergent in hand. It was called "Trend."

The board agreed that it was a keen name. When I came to write about it, I could not help but add, in my role of editor that "the college was indeed fortunate that the empty carton contained that specific detergent and not another" current one. Else the quarterly might have been named The "Joy" of Engineering, or something derived from "Duz" or "Tide."

Yeah, even twenty years later, it sounds like me.

79

My new assistant editor, Nancy Davis, was not much help. She was going through too much. The divorce was pending and I think she was taking drugs to calm her down, to quiet her nerves. They didn’t help much. She would show up for her afternoon tour of duty, light up, and immediately start chatting on the telephone with a number of some bodies, a couple of which were lawyers. This would go on for an hour, after which she was ready for coffee. Often she looked to me, questioningly, wondering if I wanted to go along, for it was my habit in the afternoon, and had started with Andrea, with whom it was a pleasure. With Nancy it was something less than that, and she too had noticed it, our discrepancy, you might call it, and had started making other plans for her coffee. Which was fine by me, but it signified something, a deepening of the rift.

I could count on her for some typing but not for careful proofreading, which was essential. The typed pages were full of lumps of Snopake. When an important letter had to go out, I turned to my boss’s typist, Muriel, upstairs. It meant a lot of running around Lowe Hall, but that was part of my job. Besides it meant I could see people and not be bottled up in my basement office, surrounded by its cement-block walls, even though they were painted a tolerable beige and I had the place decorated with pictures (mine) and ferns (mine also). It was still a boy’s room, or more accurately a prison cell.

Hal had begun the practice of devoting each issue to a general subject, often a university subject area or specialty. Since this was an interdisciplinary era, or the start of one, it was logical to search around and try to find one that was novel, interesting, or relatively unexplored. I had already done some articles from the program in the social management of technology. I knew there would be more resistance from the traditional fields, for there had been before. But it was important, emerging, and contained worlds. It was the only one of the bastard engineering fields I could hold my own in and, perhaps, even teach, with the kind of background I had. Unless it was that other specious subject, humanistic social studies, which was already well codified, all of its embattled positions entrenched, well defended.

So I worked with Wenk, formerly from President Johnson’s office, and soon was inundated with student papers on all kinds of interesting and non-interesting subjects. Looked at a certain way, it might appear to be a terrific lot of busywork. Yet this was the future. What, a future consisting mostly of busywork? ‘Fraid so. Or call it scholarship. It was a hybrid field of people from various subjects, most of them in Arts and Sciences, who were looking intently at our society and trying to assess it in terms of the impact of technology. Anything and everything was fair game. It was most ambitious.

Hertzberg and his impressive colleagues had seriously addressed the Dr. Strangelove phenomenon at the dedication of the ARL, a short time earlier. What this indicated was that all serious thinkers today, on many levels, saw technology as a threat, or even if they didn’t, they knew that society did and were taking defensive steps. This group included the scientists themselves. They were keenly aware of society’s attitude and their fear. These had to be countered, or allayed, but how? The issue would address some aspects.

It turned out to be an expensive double issue, one of fifty-six pages. To make up for it, and my dwindling budged, the October issue had to be cut back. I was willing to do this. All of the other material seemed so important, so timely, so relevant, I could not honestly exclude any of it. The future had to pay the price.

Ed Wenk started out the issue with one of his patent introductions. Gad, how that man could go, both in written and spoken words. But isn’t this what a professor is supposed to do? Profess something? He could address a telephone pole until it wilted. Flowers would flee, a river part in his path. Yet I always found him interesting. It takes a certain kind of mind, one not often found in science and engineering, to bring so much learning, from so many distant sources, together and form a meaningful synthesis. Listen to this (it is vintage Wenk, no less): So many recent books have reported on the phenomenon of the exponential growth curve that a new doomsday book has been presented. "The issue they raise concerns a heightened recognition that scientific discovery and technological innovation, intended to improve the human condition and to protect man from the harshness and caprice of his natural environment, now require us to protect the environment from man. And man from himself."

Wow.

He goes on to summarize some of the mammoth problems facing us: "a population outeating its food supply; urban congestion and conflict; chemical, acoustical, and aesthetic pollution; a g rowing disparity in economic vitality between the developed and the developing nations; a continuing number of wars generated by economic and political stability; and the dehumanization of the individual personality through increasing controls and the loss of privacy." In short, people are unhappy with their situation. And as Abe Hertzberg had noted before at the dedication of the ARL, there was a fear of Dr. Strangelove and a resulting movement to "turn off technology."

Wenk then asked, "The question we must ask is how do we match the technical prowess to manipulate the environment with the political wisdom to social responsibility?" It is a question we are still asking, some twenty-five years later. No satisfactory answer or answers have been forthcoming. The problem only worsens.

True, this is doomsday thinking, and can easily slide into nihilism and apathy. Served up to an audience of young people, it is apt to be more than they can handle emotionally and intellectually. Yet the search for solutions is appealing to serious students from many fields. And leading thinkers and writers from the all over the University and elsewhere. One was Hazel Henderson, described as "a writer, lecturer, economist, environmentalist, consumer advocate, and adviser to the Office of Technology Assessment—where Wenk was recently from. She presented the second paper in the issue, "Technology Assessment and The Citizen." It was a long think piece, and I lifted the following pull-quote from deep within it: "We share a small planet, which orbits a small star in an undistinguished galaxy. Our morality has become pragmatism." There were a lot of viable chestnuts in the piece. She foresaw the need for decentralization of industry and communications, which would relieve traffic congestion and pollution of urban environments. She suggested that people might walk, instead of driving, and recycle their waste products, including their garbage. Many of her suggestions were in the air, at the moment, and the subject of intense conversations everywhere. The concept of the global village lay behind many of her considerations. And much of what she had to say has come to pass.

Two members of the program, Steven Flajser, a research assistant professor, and Alan Porter, a research associate, both evidently graduate students or else untenured research faculty, wrote the next paper, "Toward A Science for Technology Assessment." I thought the key word should be "towards," but let it go. It involved feedback systems, often called servo systems, to first measure consequences of an ongoing activity or a planned activity and then to let it correct itself as it advanced through information it gathered along its route. It was an early-warning system and involved "neutral" interdisciplinary teams. It foreshadowed the methodology of many future technological programs that were badly needed but experimental in nature—the response to a quick fix for a pressing problem

As an example, they applied their assessment approach to the Trans-Alaska-Pipeline System currently being constructed. The list of proposed participants—that is, those who would be affected—was enormous and resembled the United Nations structure. There was hardly anybody or any tier of government or neighboring nation that might not have grounds for representation. Yet it was a noble effort, and in all its complexity serve as a model for lesser systems of assessment.

The third paper involved Allan Porter, too, along with James J. Best, who was an associate professor of political science at Kent State. It was called, "Technology Policy Assessment: Research in the Social Management of Technology." The key word was policy. Its real intent was to form a basis for seeking students in the social management of technology and to determine which of many fields they were to be drawn from, and who had the best aptitude. To do this, five test cases were drawn for closer examination of public policy. All were current and vital. Teams approached them and established a suitable methodology for each. The test cases corresponded closely to the academic and professional interests of the team members; or else the cases were chosen on the basis of social and political urgency, and team members drawn from fields already interested in them. The former, I think.

They were: (1) The Interstate Highway System. Five team members, including Wenk, whose specialty was transportation systems. (2) The Development of Commercial Nuclear Power and Nuclear-Power-Plant Siting. Five team members, none of whom I knew but presume were from the aligned department of engineering. (3) Institutional-Based Health Care. Four team members, drawn from the health sciences and, it would appear, mechanical and electrical engineering (4) Petroleum Production, Consumption, and the Marine Environment. Five members, drawn from economics, oceanography, political science, among others. (5) Weather Modification in the Public Interest. Oceanography, civil engineering, and political science, but I’m guessing.

The papers proliferated and I kept coming across ones that seemed important to me. How could I turn them down? The issue was already bigger than I was budgeted for. I changed my layout from two to three columns (nice; I liked it) and reduced the type size and leading by a point or two each. I got rid of as much white space as I could, even discarding the choicest photographs (mine).

The graduate students in the social management of technology program were housed right down the hall from me in Lowe and I knew many of them personally. Some were friends; all were friendly. How could I decline good work when I saw it? I had published—to be truthful—so much work that was less than good in the past that to pass these guys over seemed a crime, even though most of them weren’t engineering students. Traditional fields were breaking down and new ones emerging; new academic alliances in dissimilar fields were taking place daily. It was hard to tell what were the new disciplines and where the alliances were headed.

Thomas Kuehn wrote a good paper on technological innovation and public policy. It had to do with how the government decided to spend its money and on what kind of projects. In order to do this the researcher had to study where the money went in earlier years and try to predict where it would go in the future, and find out if there were any guiding principles involved. I mean (or rather Kuehn did), who got what and why? What were the rules, if any? And he came up with some good terms, which he called technology-push innovations and demand-pull innovations. And he set a record for the number of footnotes for such a relatively short paper: 22.

Kai Lee was a research assistant professor, with a dual appointment, as I recall, in political science, who addressed the ideas raised in the book, The Limits to Growth, currently making the rounds in intellectual circles. At the risk of grossly over-simplifying it, let me state that its these was, to put it plainly, that we lived in a finite universe and at the rate we were going we would soon run out of everything. This mean doom. Lee—who would later go on to a distinguished career in public-policy formation and serve on both technical and policy boards, state and federal—pointed out that we had much better assessment systems with built-in corrective devices for technology than we had for the social sciences. His footnotes numbered 27, beating Flajser’s record a moment ago by, if I can count right, by an impressive five. I believe Flasjer was a student of Lee’s, and Lee was not about to be outdone by him.

I included an article by a husband/wife team, Allan Hoffman and Susan, and Fred Stegall, a physician and resident psychiatrist at the local VA hospital. The male Hoffman was a young full professor in chemical engineering and assistant director of the Center for Bioengineering. Stegall was formerly its assistant director. And Allan’s wife was a graduate student and an artist. She did the illustrations for the issue. Gratis. I figured that any activity that brought three so dissimilar and accomplished individuals together couldn’t be ill-thought out. And the title, "Innovation—The Individual and The University Environment," was surely provocative and would interest an audience like mine. The subject really was creativity and how it can be either spurned or encouraged in academe, depending on circumstances. These included politics. The work had been funded by the Battelle Research Center, who had lent its facilities in Seattle. I was happy for a chance to publish the paper in my crowded issue. And for the free art, which turned out to be mediocre.

Such often is the result of collaboration among greatly dissimilar individuals and fields.

I also included what turned out to be a recruiting pamphlet for the program in the social management of technology. Well, what the hell, it pretty well defined what they were all about and what topics were under current study. Like Dracula, the program continually needed new blood, fresh subjects. It included its course prospectus, those courses unique to the program and ones unable to be found elsewhere, or even suitable equivalents. All were undergraduate. There was no advanced degree program, though a certificate could be earned that might be helpful in getting a public-policy job.

And then, because I was so far in over my head and the issue was already nearly 50 pages long and I feared there might not be another one, or future opportunity, I decided to include three seminar papers that seemed to me interesting. One had to do with cable technology, meaning cable TV, and how it might be used and managed to the best public interest.. The second had to do with the state regulation automobile emissions, which soon came to pass about as described. The third had to do with planning and regulation of the state’s marine waterways, including its harbors and port districts. Each paper involved a good, solid analysis of the existing problems and presented a list of recommended solutions. Many of these were acted upon in the near future.

For my final issue that year, 1974, I prepared a short issue of mixed articles, ones on a range of subjects and reflecting a wide number of editorial approaches. It contained a profile of Albert Drui, an industrial engineer, and what he does, as stated in layman’s terms. It began: "The following article is a little unusual. It is the result of what happens when an editor asks a certain type of engineer to write, not the usual technical article—shorn up with charts, graphs, and tables of data—but an article in which the techniques of work analysis and work simplification are applied to the act of writing itself.

"Trend asked Professor Drui to tell us what it’s really like when an industrial engineer goes out into the field and meets head on the chaos and confusion that makes up so much of the working day. What is more, Trend asked him to tell his story chronologically in something that might be called basic English, with only one scant table allowed.

"However, for those who might prefer the more conventional technical article on work measurement and the Medex Program, Trend draws the reader’s attention to the October 1974 issue of Industrial Engineering, where the complement of this article is printed, with substantial support data—all anybody could desire.

"The two articles together, Trend feels, provide a realistic assessment of what it is like to do industrial engineering today in an area in which the human factors are more dominant than the technical considerations.

"But perhaps that is the Trend in modern engineering."

A bit cutsey, I think. I did so then, as well. This might be an example of the isolation I was experiencing, neither an engineer nor a professor, but some kind of outsider sentence to a period of time in this purgatory, without much intellectual stimulation and little feedback. Also, I think I am bucking the trend, excuse me, or rather the writing of the traditional technical article that has to be read and reread in order to be understood by most people, people not in that precise field or even one near to it.

The Medex program, I might add, was an effort to provide medical practitioners in areas where there were not enough doctors or nurses but the need for them was great. It made use of men and women (men mostly) trained in the military to perform vital health-care services designed to save or prolong lives. The program has ended, but the principles involved live on, and the use of nurse practitioners to take the load off medical doctors are in use nearly everywhere today. Professor Drui’s efforts were to make the fledgling program more efficient and useful. He was successful.

My next article was a general one by a biologist and civil engineer, Eugene Welch, "Problems in Reversing Eutrophication in Lakes by Nutrient Control." In other words, how to clean up lakes that had been inundated by phosphorous and nitrogen, and had filled up with algae and weeds. The work was experimental and local in scope, though the problem was world-wide and studies in Sweden had produced some useful and confusing results. Locally, Lake Washington has cleaned up nicely and was a model; but Lake Sammamish near by continued to be near eutrophic, even though its sewage input had been halted, too, and the lake treated with phosphorus-binding chemicals, namely alum.

Welch discussed how the two lakes were different, though seemingly not so, and how the differences were critical in attempts to reverse the pollution process. Several of my flyfishing friends were involved in this work, including Rick Stoll. What the students learned while working toward a master’s in science was fundamental as far as future treatment of lakes in Washington state and elsewhere. The work has continued for more than twenty years since then and interests me greatly at present, for I live on a lake with a severe pollution problem, and it is Gene’s work, and the work of his students, that hold out whatever hope there is for reversing the process in Lake Ketchum by what he called nutrient control. Then and now it is an iffy, pragmatic process, and results can only be guessed at ahead of time, not known for certain until sometime after chemicals have been applied in hopes of greatly reducing or eliminating the problem. And even then it is highly pragmatic.

This often means the best thought-out plans do not work for reasons unknown.

I rounded out the short issue with a three-page photoessay on Suzzallo Quad, home to the arts and sciences, upper campus classes, and clearly not an engineering situation. I was getting bolder, more bored, and self-indulgent, I am afraid. If the photos were good, and they even dimly related to my topic, my field, I want to see them in print. Some of these were taken on a foggy morning and are, to my way of thinking, quite beautiful. They enhance the campus and student life. They have absolutely nothing to do with science or engineering. They simply say, "The University is an attractive place."

I could have been fired for this but unfortunately wasn’t. Was I flirting with it? From this distance of time it would seem so.

The last article was an interview with my friend, Abe Hertzberg, who had just come back from a summer in Russia. The interview is rambling, like an ordinary conversation, or what is flipped back and forth at a cocktail party. But Abe was frank and answered some of my tough questions with surprising honesty. There was nothing to be ashamed of where his lab’s money came from, and he spoke disarmingly of his policy in soliciting funds.

I had said that his building was a gift of NASA, then asked if all of his grants and contracts came from them, too, and whether this caused a problem. He knew what I meant.

"My deliberate policy,’ he said, "is to keep reasonably honest and not be owned by any one group. I probably have very few grants in excess of $100,000 but we have half a million, roughly, cycled through the lab annually in grants. This way, I take my money from NASA, yes; NSF, yes; the AEC, yes; and DOD, yes. This gives me the maximum amount of freedom and stability in a very unstable world. And it is a very unstable world, technically speaking. So if I had one very large grant and I was threatened with a severe cutback, I couldn’t shift things around and retain my flexibility. This has been my very philosophy since the beginning—to ensure that no one agency owns the lab."

A bit later, after asking if much of his work was classified, and he had said none was, I asked about how closely his (government) contracts coincided with the kind of work he’d be doing if left on his own?

"They coincide exactly," he replied. "That is the only rule under which I’ll take a contract. Our attitude is that, if the work we propose to do for any group is such that there already is a request for proposal out, then we’re too late. We try to be competitive by being advanced enough so that the work we propose is original and is what is called ‘sole source.’ It cannot be put out on competitive bid. . . ."

On and one we went, kicking it around. We weren’t quite friends, but we were friendly. And he was highly personable, which means he doesn’t condescend. He has a nice way of talking to people, shoulder to shoulder, you might say. He credits you with some initial intelligence and you respond intelligently, accordingly. No wonder he was full professor (aeronautics, gas dynamics, gas physics) and lab director. He had seen the future of the laser and staked it out, at least at the University, and attracted a large number of graduate students from other leading universities to come here and work for advanced degrees under him. And of course under the umbrella of his funding.

80

My last year dawned, but I did not know this yet, and prepared my first issue of the quarterly (can’t call it that anymore, you know) for the press. It color was blood red, not yet indicative of anything, and the April issue featured a cover picture of a fiberoptic laser, its business end gleaming with laser light.

The first article was "Recent Accomplishments in Laser Control of Gastric Bleeding." It was more in one of my several favorite interdisciplinary fields, bioengineering. David Auth, the author, was the engineer involved, and with the others comprised a medical team of gastroenterologists. Auth was a nice guy, smart, personable, but he couldn’t write, so I did the job mainly, as I was having to do, more and more, to make his important work intelligible to others. But first I had to understand myself what was involved, right down to the finest point.

Experiments mostly were done on dogs. (Poor Bowzer; it was often the case. Not all died afterwards. Some lived on and were subject to many more harsh experiments involving tubes being stuff down their throats or in that opposite place.) Dave had a lot of nifty drawings and photos, including schematics (which I’ve always loved). We worked together trying to make narrative sense out of the material and frame it chronologically. This was difficult for him, for he was right in the middle of performing it.

It proved a good article and took a lot of work and rework from both of us. We saw each other nearly daily, at one point. Both of us seemed to think the association worthwhile. Whenever Dave had a trouble expressing himself, I told him, "Just imagine yourself telling your wife about your work, or her friends, or, say, the women’s faculty club. How would you say it?" And the right words simply rolled out. It was a trick I had devised and it worked excellently, no matter who with.

Again the laser was involved, but this time it was run by fiberoptics up a catheter and used to cauterize internal bleeding in ulcer patients. Dave was one and had suffered from ulcers for years. In the near future he was to serve as a guinea pig for a medical experiment involving just this device, and it helped him considerably, while making use of what was called a "non-invasive" procedure. This meant that they did not have to cut into you, causing more damage and additional bleeding. They could simply put the tube down your stomach, look around, find the problem area, and zap it with the laser. The bleeding stopped. This was the endoscope’s infancy.

Bioengineering is interesting. People get sick and die, and only advances in this field are apt to stand between the deeply ailing and a hole in the ground. Sooner or later, some engineering device that comes into being via collaboration with a person in medicine, is going to save your life and, Jack, you are going to be most grateful. It did mine, twenty years later. A fiberoptic endoscope was stuck up my butt, so to speak, and was so advanced that a laser, a tiny surgical knife, a still camera capable of producing instant colored Polaroid prints, a video camera, or whatever else they needed that was small and suitable for being inserted in a tiny tube could be accommodated there. It was fast, neat, complete, and final. They found a bleeding polyp far up in my colon that had been troubling me, identified it, photographed it, snipped it off, retrieved it, and stopped the bleeding; they sent me home an hour later, a bit groggy, true. The same evening, I was sitting up in my usual chair, eating heartily and watching television.) Wonderful, and it all stemmed from David Auth’s work and the efforts of scientists like him. How grateful I am.

The second article was a sly one. It was short and I wrote it myself, not even giving myself a byline, or perhaps hiding behind its anonymity. It was titled, "A Legacy of Foul and Noxious Air," and grew out of an interest of mine in air pollution, as a result of the earlier air and water issue. But since scientists and engineers can only define and describe situations, not take a political bent, I decided I would, as I increasingly was wont to do. There was a smelter in Tacoma, and it probably employed our graduates in chemical and civil engineering, but it had an enormous smoke stack and poured "foul and noxious" gases into the air, and had done so unimpeded for decades. But now it was being investigated by a man who held a joint appointment in the University’s department of epidemiology and internal health and the state’s huge department of social and health services. He was a medical doctor, not one of ours, and a crusader. I agreed with what he was doing and what it might lead to, which was shutting the smelter down and dismantling it. It took another ten years to accomplish this. I had to admit, it was a bandwagon I was hopping on, but there were few of us riders, and each of our journeys was precarious.

Publicity like mine and others eventually led to the creation of the Puget Sound air pollution agency by the state legislature, with the power to levy fines and shut down operations, though it was never very effective, all by itself. First, however, basic information had to be made public; the daily newspapers were not exactly eager to publish information negative to industries that employed people, and this one did—around 700. There was some evidence lately that they had a higher cancer rate and that breathing asbestos caused lung cancer among them. The doctor, Samuel Milham, was reviewing new evidence that people living in out-lying areas also had a higher incidence of cancer, especially that of the lung. And even those who didn’t, had breathing difficulties and chronic congestion of the air passages. This was verified by blood and urine samples taken of school children in the area.

I concluded my unsigned article by saying, "The tradeoff seems to be the livelihood of 700 smelter workers versus the quality of life for the hundreds of thousands" of the people who lived nearby and must breathe the polluted air. "The choice does not seem awfully difficult—provided you are not a smelter worker." I photographed the site extensively, for the smoke stack was dramatic and evil-looking. Barbed wire topped cyclone fencing prevented me from getting very close, but I didn’t need to. There it loomed, for all to see for miles around. Years later, when it came down as a result of the wrecking ball, and I watched with others on TV, there was no deep satisfaction, only the feeling that it had happened, at last.

Short as it was, I needed more supporting evidence than my photography and editorial. This came in the form of a follow-on article by A. T. Rossano, a professor of air resources engineering and one of his graduate students, Herbert McClannan: "Arsenic and Lead Exposures in the Vicinity of The Tacoma Smelter—A preliminary Report." It was coldly scathing.

The smelter was the largest in the United States, if smeltering refineries were included, processing 500,000 tons of ore per year and producing 150,000 tons of copper. This was one-tenth of what the country needed. Additionally it produced gold, silver, arsenic, nickel sulfate, and sulfuring acid. But what it put into the air did not make up for its benefits to society. Two plumes were emitted from its tall stack: the first was easily discernible; but "a looping condition" produce a second plume, one closer to the ground, and took place from two to six miles away. It was of equal density. The amounts of arsenic and lead put into the air (and into the ground) were awesome. The pollution contamination had taken place for decades.

The college’s study consisted of ten particulate sampling stations established in the vicinity of the smelter. They collected samples for a total of 18 days. Additionally, house dust was collected from homes nearby. A strike of workers took place, creating a static situation for fourteen days in which the air could be sampled while the smelter was shut down. When its started up again, the air was measured for the next four days. Of course the particulate matter increased greatly. Occasionally the concentrations of arsenic in the air exceeded the safety level to the point where the average person should be required to wear to wear a respirator. The young, the sick, and the elderly were greatly at risk. A warning system to alert residents of the area when arsenic emissions exceeded 2 micrograms per cubic meter was recommended. When the levels reached of 4 micrograms was reached, the situation became a serious health hazard and required wearing respirators. The study team wanly concluded that governmental agencies should pay particular attention to arsenic- and lead-laden dust and dirt stirred up by vehicular traffic around the area, and also low level sources of what they called fugitive dust within the plant.

The editor of Trend suggested that the fugitives should be rounded up and the plant shut down.

The next article was more positive, more beneficial, and had to do with "Conversion of Seattle’s Solid Waste to Methanol or Ammonia." These were two useful byproducts of garbage and whose production depended on how the garbage was to be processed. The main purpose of the process was to get rid of the garbage and other solid waste. If useful products could be manufactured along the way, fine, but this was not the goal. The price of ammonia was low, but had varied widely over the past decade; similarly methanol. Break-even points were established for the commercial sale of these byproducts. The use of methanol as a fuel for the city’s vehicles was looked into, but nothing ever came of it. Nor was the recovery of non-precious metals that could be found through a process of pyrolysis. This did not prove economically feasible, either.

The study was interesting in how it analyzed the components of solid-waste disposal and looked forward to recycling of plastics, glass, and metals. These are activities in wide use around the country today.

My third article was on emission controls and was sub-titled "What Is The Future of The Internal Combustion Engine?" It was the collaboration between Jeff Douthwaite, a professor of humanistic social studies (who rode a bicycle to work) and soon a state legislator espousing environmental causes, and a student from mechanical, Doug Serrill. It looked into state testing for engines not meeting certain air-pollution emission standards and the use of catalytic converters and smaller cars that burned less fuel. Each of these recommendations soon came into fruition. The study sadly concluded that Americans are wedded to their automobiles and the internal-combustion engine. The situation is not apt to change in the future. They were right.

My boss, the duties-usurping associate dean, Irene Peden, submitted a dreary, inappropriate article on tips for recruiting women faculty, which was not exactly appropriate for the magazine, because the real problem was getting female students to overcome conditioning and shyness and to study engineering in the first place. This is really what Peden was after and what she was currently doing well. The women engineers with sufficient degrees to make them eligible for college-level teaching was small and fixed, and no more of them would come out of the pipeline for years—perhaps another decade. So competition among good universities for these few superbly qualified engineers (including Peden herself) was keen, and they could usually pick their own institution. The salaries they could command often comprised an auction.

The article made use of much study data and went on to prove that men made much more money than women professors and out-numbered them greatly. This was not exactly news. The article was aimed at deans at other colleges and how they might go about recruiting women engineers. It talked down to them, while seeming to talk across the table, and often spoke insultingly, saying things like, "You don’t concern yourself with the personnel turnover among stockroom clerks or mail clerks when a male candidate for your department is up for discussion, do you? Well, you shouldn’t with a comparable woman, either?" Neither should they worry about a woman faculty woman being lured away with more money. You can lose a male member exactly the same way.

It did not much matter to her or to her argument that scarcity was the commanding principle. There were many more men to choose from, if salaries were to be auctioned, than there were women, who were at a premium, but she didn’t go into this. On and on the article went, chatty, condescending, dully, stupidly. I should have rejected it and wanted to. But she was my boss, and I didn’t know how long I’d be working for her. It was not to be long. If I had rejected it, the time would have been much shorter. It would have been a form of suicide.

I had taken great pride in my author photos, taking all of them myself since the early days and using either a Canon 85mm. 1.8 lens or else the Leitz slower 90mm. which only opens up to 2.8. I’d choose window light, usually the victim’s office window, and if there was a light-colored wall opposite that caught some of the extra light and spilled it back on his face, so much the better. I’d choose a level a bit lower than of my victim’s and the perspective was always about the same. Usually my author was caught by the lens disarmingly and had a nice expression on his or her face, never looking stiff or posed. I sought this and usually got it and was happy with the results. But in the case of my boss, Irene Peden, she did not want me to take her picture (just as she had earlier feared both Ari and I taking pictures of only pretty female engineering students for our recruitment brochures), perhaps thinking I would catch her in some silly, ridiculous pose. The thought had entered my mind, I must admit, but was quickly rejected because I am, after all, ahem, a pro. Instead, she submitted a print already purchased from a studio.

I was astonished. It was from a 4X5 camera, and the negative was carefully retouched to eliminate all wrinkles and facial fat, warts, blemishes, etc. Peden looked like she must have at twenty or twenty five (except for certain telltale signs, quite subtle) and here she was a woman of fifty-five, at least. The expression on her face was one of supreme self-confidence. Talk about your cat having eaten the canary. I had to admit mine wouldn’t have been nearly so fine. It would have done its best to flatter her, but I suppose fail. I mean, it would have looked like her, at her current daily best. Which I must admit wasn’t so hot.

Of course I used the studio’s print. The other author photos were mine and looked great.

To complete the issue, I indulged myself in another three-page photoessay that was in no way relevant. Under the guise that we were trying to recruit both students and faculty (see Peden above) I thought any small effort on my part to make the region, city, and University attractive could be rationalized, if necessary. So I stretched another point and ran a nightscape of the Seattle Center, a slow-shutter speed experiment with my Leica, alternately catching people in mid-task or else allowing them to become blurs, along with speeding light sources or these sources caught delightfully out of focus. It was a terrible self-indulgence but pretty good photography. I think I knew my time was short. They would either catch me out, or I would quit in huff. I was not sleeping well and found myself mentally enacting final scenarios and revenge fantasies.

I had one issue to go, but didn’t know it.

81

Decisions nearly everywhere are made at the top. The idea that they are made by committee or even small groups of administrators or leaders is fallacious. In my case it was the Dean, now Ryland Hill, who made it, and I understand not quite fully but pretty well. Dean Norris had retired, his cancerous prostate sickening him and his lifelong habit of smoking cigarettes giving him at first a barrel-chested robust look that soon proved to be emphysema. He moved to Arizona for its clean air, where he died not long after.

Hill though not a Ph.D. and a local product was a good classroom teacher and a fine, personable administrator. He was a mountain climber and we shared an interest in photography. He had helped name Trend and see it come into being, over twenty-five years ago. And he was the one to give it its coup d’ grace.

It was inevitable. First the huge budget cut in state-sponsored research funds in my first year as editor, to be followed soon by other cuts in overall budgets for the University, for it was under keen scrutiny by a legislature suspicious of a faculty constantly lobbying (and receiving) salary increases to make them competitive with other leading universities, while spending less and less time in the classroom and spending funds designated for specific programs on other matters. It was a time of strong anti-university feeling, what with the miserable war still underway, the country sorely divided still, and many conservatives believing that universities nurtured revolt and coddled young radicals and gave them unbridled expression. All this drew out the war and encouraged the enemy.

Publications is one highly visible area. In the past, we sent out magazine to the legislature to show them the good work we were doing; the entire University did this, too, and it was seen as largely beneficial. Now it was seen as a sign of waste. If the institution, or its colleges and departments, could produce lavish public-relations magazines, brochures, and booklets like these, then they didn’t need more money, not until they had proved they had effected basic economies at home. This often was demonstrated by highly visible cutbacks in the production and design of the publication itself.

The Trend in Engineering tabloid edition was just one of these. It looked cheap, even if it wasn’t and was printed in twice, thrice, the quantity of the magazine. The University cut back itself on its biennial report, which I used to edit in my earlier incarnation, and printed it now in living black and white (as we called it) and on paper suitable for the toilet. The important thing was to look cheap. I had experienced much the same thing fifteen years ago at Boeing, whose funding source was the Department of Defense. It was little different here. The signs were identical.

So the Dean, Ryland, met with his associate deans; then he met with the publications committee. I misunderstood and thought the decision hadn’t been made yet and I stood a good chance of talking them out of it and effecting their economies elsewhere—I could suggest a lot of places. But the decision was final. They were just formally (or was it informally?) explaining it to me. So I took the floor and argued persuasively against it. I marshaled a lot of evidence to indicate that it was a bad idea and the college would suffer.

They heard me out; they heard me out fondly. They had kind, thoughtful expressions on their faces—Ryland, Peden, Garlid. They were impressed with my arguments, my verve, my eloquence. When I was done, they nearly applauded. What a grand show. What a fine debate—really only a monologue. And still I did not know that the decision was final. They weren’t asking me for my opinion. They were announcing how it was going to be.

And then it dawned on me, the truth.

"You’re going to cut it out . . . entirely?"

A nod, up and down. Several of them.

"And I can’t talk you out of it?"

"’Fraid not. But we’re going to keep the tabloid. Both issues. It’s only the magazine we’re eliminating. God knows we don’t want to."

Ryland spoke, "Remember, I was in on the birth of Trend. I helped name it. Nobody wants it to go less than me. Not unless it is you, Bob. But it is a simple matter of economics." Why are matters of economic always "simple?" They’re not to me. It is a case of cutting what can be most easily dispensed with. People come last. My job was safe. (Of course I had my salary frozen into an indefinite future by Peden’s machinations.) I would edit the tabloid. They had liked what I did with the magazine, though they had not always understood my reasons for what I did. But I was a professional and knew what was best—what I was doing.

This I doubted, but it was the proverbial kind words being issued without truly meaning them.

I said, "Look, I came here to edit a magazine. First it was four issues, a quarterly. Then it was two. Now it is none. I’m going to leave."

"There is still the tabloid. Everybody likes it. It isn’t under scrutiny. It does a good job, it looks good, you’ve done a good job with it. We’ll need an editor. In the future, there will be other opportunities. We were talking about a director of publications, with many other duties. Teaching, television, a head of research, like Erik."
"I quit."

And a tremendous weight was lifted with those words from my shoulders. I literally soared. I nearly drifted out of the room. My headache began to disperse. When something final has happened there is a wonderful feeling of elation that precedes the collapsing despair.

But I had one more issue of the magazine to edit before I could leave, and a short period in which for them to advertise and search for someone to take my place. They wanted two months notice. Lois, the draftsperson who had taken Jerry’s place when he graduated, had just been let go with two weeks notice and she had, true to character and most admirably, sued the University. I wanted to give them back the two weeks they had given Lois, which was all that was required by law, by staff personnel. But it would take me three or more before I could assemble the final issue and see it through production.

"That isn’t very much time," Dean Peden told me.

"That’s all you gave Lois," I responded.

"But we need two months to replace you. We would have given you more than we gave her."

"Why would you have?"

"She is but classified staff."

"I’m just staff."

"You’re exempt staff."

"Yeah, exempt from rules and benefits." Which was true.

"We would have given you longer."

"How am I to know that?"

So I had one more issue to go, and that would be it. It was late in the year, the new school year begun, leaves falling off the trees and a general funereal air abounding, at least in my office. Nancy was separated from her husband, David, and the divorce was underway and was acrimonious. She was mad at the entire male population, including me, and I was none too happy myself. She was talking about quitting and moving to California. I was encouraging her to do so. It was a time of Sturm und Drang.

I still believed, you see, that it might be possible to save the magazine. The Dean’s word wasn’t final. (If it wasn’t, I don’t know what is.) So I wrote an editorial, "Say Goodnight, Trend." Sounds final enough, doesn’t it? But I still had my outside hope to contend with. I said some horrible, horrendous things. I said that the magazine (I could no longer call it a quarterly, not in its slick magazine format, because we only published twice a year; I set aside the tabloid as ephemeral, nearly worthless, though it was a lot of work to prepare and was actually quite interesting) had gone out for twenty-seven years to nearly five thousand people and institutions, worldwide, and it had cost them nothing. We didn’t have a lot of feedback from our recipients but we had some, got some kindly letter, and received a host of publications in return. These went to the library and we read by students from those countries and whomever else could handle the language. I admitted that I thought most of the articles were more interesting than they really were and this was perhaps the editor’s disease. Then I suggested that if any of our readers was really passionate about the value of the magazine, they should write me and I would pass the letter, or sheath of letters, on to the Dean and to the new Dean, for Ryland was retiring. Then I added on a highly personal note the following:

I had been discussing the critical situation with my counterpart at another university, one whose engineering publication was not yet doomed but might soon be, and said I hated to see mine die, and so did its two previous editors, both of whom were living and with whom I was in infrequent contact, so they knew the score. I felt like I had betrayed them, their work, their very lives, by not keeping the magazine going, in spite of the odds against it.

"I added that I loved editing a magazine but only liked editing a newsletter.

"’Sure,’ my colleague replied. ‘People read newsletters and then throw them away. But they save magazines.’

"I wondered why that was so."

And I illustrated the two-page editorial with a couple of pictures of the University printer inspecting the offset plates for Trend and somebody else watching the great Miller presses grinding out the issue. I figured these dependable guys needed their moment in the sun, even if it was only their last one. They were good craftsmen and tried to make the magazine as handsome as I wanted it to, with my close attention to detail.

Then I continued my practice of an interview with a leading engineering scholar/administrator, this one with Bob Sylvester, who headed the University’s Institute for Environmental Affairs. Until its formation he had run the water and air resources division of civil engineering and was a full professor there. He was highly personable, as was Abe Hertzberg, and while we didn’t party together, we had an affable relationship based on the feeling we were on the same side.

The President of the United States, Gerald Ford, had come to Seattle only a week previously and Sylvester had been invited to attend some meetings with him, not all of which were fund-raisers. It was the first time a sitting President had come to the city since John Kennedy, sixteen years previously, for the inauguration of UW President Charles Odegaard. So it was a true occasion and I was curious about Sylvester’s impressions and how the conference on domestic and economic affairs had progressed. Had he, I asked, noticed any improvements in the executive branch’s concern for the environment?

I had read up on what happened while it was happening and was able to ask some intelligent questions. Sylvester’s response was thoughtful and (again, like Abe’s) he pulled no punches. I thought it might be useful for people—Trend’s audience—to be able to read about the political side of ecology and how it was to be funded in the near future. When I mentioned the truism that Gerald Ford "was no John Kennedy," Sylvester replied tellingly that Ford "seemed real, common, as though I would have no trouble going up and chatting with him. He has a certain commonness and warmth. Harry Truman had it also."

On and on we went. The conference and Bob’s reading of it seemed important. It was like an ordinary conversation. I let it run on and on, keeping to this subject and not turning it to the subject of the establishment of the institute until near the end. And then I asked specifically about it. He elucidated. The development had come from the top down. It was a University-wide organization. From years it had only been a study initiated by the University president. The study was headed by Russ Chrisman, a professor in civil’s water and air resources, who was appointed special assistant to the president and whose classroom time had been reduced in half for two years.

There was also a faculty committee appointed by the board of deans. It numbered an unwieldy sixty-eighty, but seventeen of them became active. They had about six months to come up with recommendations and told to make them positive, firm. Sylvester was chairman of this group. He had remained close to it ever since, as had Chrisman. They asked that the institute be formed and that it report to a board of deans numbering eleven. The dean of arts and sciences would head it. There was practically no budget, only enough for a skeleton office staff.

Faculty would be freed up, as they put it, by making time available from various colleges and relevant departments, briefly reducing the involved faculty’s teaching load and freeing them from other administrative duties. As for the next biennium, a small amount of additional money was requested, and it was pointed out that there had been exactly none previously. They were encouraged to go after grants and contracts. Grants primarily, as with Hertzberg. And so they did.

They hired a public services coordinator. That person was to plan conferences and sponsor workshops, often with departments such as Law (a school, really), geography, engineering, biology, etc., plus outside organizations, such as the state department of ecology. School superintendents and directors were to be involved directly.

I ended on a more personal note, since it was important to me to show the world—the world of Trend, at least—that our faculty was very much of the real world and interacted with people throughout the community; they were not special, isolated, individuals but real people, one with hobbies, outside interests, children, homes, etc. I asked him about his boat. I knew he had one; most of the engineering faculty were avid boaters.

How long is it, I queried.

Forty-two feet.

I express enthusiasm, as I had at meetings of the publications board, half-real, half-feigned, for all I had to talk about, and I didn’t, was my eight-foot pram.

I asked if his had power. It was a sail boat, he said, but it had an auxiliary engine. He raced the boat on weekends. They had a crew. Everybody tried to keep in shape. Racing was hard work. Next week they had an overnight race. I wished him good luck. He didn’t win it, but he placed well. He did in most things.

I indulged myself further with a photoessay in which I stretched another point. Since my overall theme was the environment, I contrasted two of my favorite river valleys and the ecology they comprised seasonally. This was also in keeping with my choosing to feature the Pacific Northwest as a good place to teach, attend school, work, and recreate. The valleys were the Skagit and Stillaguamish, and somewhat prophetic, since I presently live on a lake that borders both watersheds, and it is only a short walk until I can see the mouths of both rivers.

The photos were some of my best work. They numbered fifteen and each was enclosed with a narrow black border that simulated the opened border of the 35mm. negative frame, though this wasn’t true and many of them were cropped and of an odd size. The tonal values were full range, with rich blacks and the bright white of the stock showing through. I haven’t counted out the mid-tone grays, but there were plenty. The pictures still look good to me today (though when I look back at any of my pictures, they seem boring to me, perhaps because my interest in them stops the moment I pull a satisfactory print, and am ready to go on to something new and challenging).

And then because I believed in it so and thought I saw it coming, in my role of doomsday prophet, I wrote the final article, "Hard Times For College Grads: Some Problems Facing Higher Education in the Humanities—and Engineering Incidentally." That "incidentally" was my hedge against that not happening what I suspected would, namely that engineering students would be subject to the same laws of supply and demand that those of us in the humanities were suffering from. It was called oversupply. It did not happen. Colleges like ours kept graduating young engineers and they kept being absorbed by industry. Salaries for grads in the humanities kept falling off (and I had a chart to show this) but ones, so far as I knew, for engineers continued to spiral upward. I quoted fully from several sources, but primarily from "The Declining Value of College Going," in Change magazine, a journal for higher education. (If you could have a Trend, why not a Change? Exactly.) The authors were Richard Freeman, an associate professor of economics at Harvard, J. Herbert Holloman, a professor of engineering at MIT, and formerly president of the University of Oklahoma.

You can always find notable authorities to back up a position of yours that is precarious and blame the failure on them. After all, it is their scholarship that is at stake. You have only passed on their conclusions.

And there it was, for what it was worth, my final issue. I only had to wait until it was off the press. Then my duties would be over and I could walk calmly out the door and get on to whatever came next. The rest of my natural life.

The Dean had a little tea for me. I was feeling bitter and almost went, only I realized that I would hardly be missed and the cake, ice cream, and coffee would be gobbled down by people who hardly knew what the occasion was, or for whom, and it was all to be paid for out of the Dean’s slush fund. So why not go? Why be a worse SOB than they already thought I was? You don’t want to give the enemy—in this instance, the assembled deans—ammunition to shoot at you with. You want to disarm them to the extent that you can. Who know, you sure don’t think so, but you may need them for a reference, some day far or soon.

And it was very pleasant. We sipped and nibbled together, and Ryland showed the style and verve he was famous for. I remembered his open house, held each spring at his vast Richmond Beach acreage, and how his rhododendrons were always at the peak of their bloom. Ryland would walk among them, these towering shrubs the size of trees, and break off sizable boughs laden with blooms for the female members of his entourage. And I recalled the home terrific movies he brought back from India, Africa, the Far East, the Cascade Crest Trail, all carefully cut and edited. He was quite a talented guy, but he couldn’t save my magazine.

I liked him. Everybody did. He used to be a Leica freak and oversaw my hot pursuit of still photography warmly. But now he was old and retiring. The magazine—a political creation in lush times—was now treading water in a time of political austerity. It had outlived its appeal and value.

Everybody is subject to the whims of somebody else, often a governmental body that determines its budget or decides whether it is sink or swim. It was better for the college to use its reduced funds to further undergraduate scholarships than to brag to the world about its dubious accomplishments in its labs. I would have to agree with this policy, too.

But I was a writer, an editor, and we need to have something in which to publish our work and to show off our talents with typewriter and camera. Such a person is always extraneous to the goals of the organization employing him. I knew this and could understand it. But the college no longer had what I wanted, my quarterly, now a semi-annual magazine. It was going, going, gone.

I did not know until more than a year afterwards, when talking with someone from the printing plant, that my final issue never got distributed. Evidently Dean Peden and Mike White, colleagues on the publications board, looked it over and decided that to publicly beg for letters asking that the magazine be retained and funding sought was not seemly, or else one of the other indulgences of the editor, of several of them together, was simply too much.

They had the issue shredded.

It was a waste of several thousand dollars, but then what else is new? And it was a beautiful job, a handsome issue, but probably that only matters to the editor whose vision it was.

Magazines, no matter how gorgeous, like newsletters, get thrown away, or so I concluded. They only last for a marginal time longer. And then they become—in engineering parlance—more solid waste to be disposed of.

But a thoughtful pressman in the University’s printing department held back a half dozen copies of the issue and sent them covertly to me, so I could see what they had done.

Beautiful then, beautiful twenty-five years later, and nothing to be ashamed of. And my photography has never been better. Perhaps because I’ve never cared so much about anything since.

But nobody to see it but me. A magazine published for an audience of one, its editor. It was, is, the perfect work of art. No utilitarian motive here. It was art for art’s sake entirely, the premier act of creation, with no possible audience other than its editor, the act itself forming the closed loop of undistracted completion, with no critical foreign intruder to ruin the loop or its perfection.

And never to be repeated, never lessened.

82

I walked away from there to what was to be the remainder of my life. I was forty-five. Never since then have I worked for anybody, any institutions, unless it was for a fixed short time, and then not very often. Somehow I made it, one way or another. And just for the record, and so that the rest does not sound like idle bombast or, worse, an outright lie, I am worth more than a million dollars. Of course today, record numbers of people are, so it doesn’t mean so much. But it still counts for something.

And this particular volume of my memoirs, my life, is over. While writing it, I’ve decided (at least for the moment) that the whole thing, all four volumes now, ought to be entitled, "A Mundane Life." I won’t explain my reason. I think it speaks for itself. And if there is some irony involved—meant, discovered, intended—good. If it was truly mundane, totally ordinary, it wouldn’t have been worth writing about. And I should have been smart enough to have spotted it and spent all this time doing something else. Probably fishing, as my friends in this pursuit or sport have urged.

A college friend, Worth Hedrick, who was a writer, was working for the State Association of City, Municipal, and State Employees, editing a newsletter and serving as director of publications (of which there was exactly one, it). He was (correctly) fascinated with the life of a young woman who had recently died atop a mountain in the Himalayas, Devi Unsoeld, who had been named by her father, Willi, after the exact same mountain she had died climbing on. She was in her early twenties.

Worth saw something magnificent and tragic in the event. He was right. He wanted to write about it. For this he needed time off work. He had saved his pennies and could tough it out for a couple of months. After clearing things with his boss and learning that such a thing would be possible, he asked me if I would sit in for him. It meant two weeks pay, though I would have to commute sixty miles to work each day over icy freeway. I said okay. Less than enthusiastic I needed some money; this would not compromise my principles, for I was only freelancing, which is a spurious activity and one that brings in only enough money to specially treat yourself and you family with and not nearly enough to live on, not even if you are a snail. I wanted my friend, Worth, to have a fair chance of finishing the job he had begun and become swamped with. It was an important subject—both to him and, I believed, the rest of the world.

She was blond, buxom, and pretty, very Germanic. Very tall. Her father, Willi, taught courses in the humanities at the Evergreen State College, philosophy his specialty, a place that was super-liberal and permissive to a criminal extent. It was, in my opinion, then and now, a wonderful place to waste two to four years of your life coming to grips with who you are and what you want to be. Fortunately I was many years past such a need, and had filled my own otherwise, in a different college atmosphere, to the extent that it ever gets fulfilled, long ago. But everybody knew of Willi and his courses, and how he climbed mountains, and would drop everything to travel far off and try to scale yet another one. His beautiful daughter, too.

I don’t remember the particulars. I never met her and only knew her from photographs, grinning widely with the family teeth, huge, white, perfect, in the center of some winter landscape. She was the snow queen, a goddess, unpossessable (though I suppose, at her age, possessed many times by boisterous boys just off of skis, in a hut or lodge, a fire crackling long side, a heap of parkas under them in lieu of a mattress). Or so I should hope for her, before she expired of pulmonary edema, high on the mountain bearing her name, Devi.

It is very romantic. The mountains are like that. You love them, even while they claim you, and it is a painful death. Willi himself was to die on a mountain, Rainier, many years later. It was almost as though it were preordained; it was only a matter of time until the unpaid bill was due. And Devi’s mother, once a strong environmentalist, with a leftover life to live, ran for the US House of Representatives and won a term. Later she was defeated by a candidate from the right, even though she made a provisionary alliance with the National Rifle Association, which surprised everybody.

We knew none of this at the time. The Unsoelds were a well-known mountaineering family and Willi had scaled nothing less than Everest. He was making his way up enormous, less famous peaks, one by one. Devi had been one of his difficult ascents, and he had named his only daughter after this beautiful rock of snow. She too had felt its appeal, growing up, at home in the mountains, near and far. As a girl she felt a deep need to climb her own mountain. There is always a good chance of death so high up, so far from home, in so hostile an environment. I mean, man (not to mention woman) was not biologically constructed for such feats, yet both now felt the irresistible call, Scale me.

Worth was a friend from college. He hailed from Longview and joined a certain fraternity; my high school friends who had matriculated such a short distance to this University had split exactly in two. Half went to this one, Worth’s fraternity, the others to mine. And the boys from Longview had split similarly. So we were comprised of halves, both of us and our living groups, and made new friends (friends of friends) and retained reduced relationships with old ones. The fact that he and I were students in most impractical English drew us together. We wanted to be writers; both of us were confused about the line between journalism and literature. An article cold be both; so could a book.

I sold Worth’s first article for him a few years earlier when I was in Ketchikan, Alaska, housed only a block away from The Alaskan Sportsman, a regionally popular publication and not all that easy to get into. They had sat on an article of his for more than a year. I was in the Army and I think he was, too, off somewhere distant, or perhaps he was doing newspaper work during the last years of the war in Korea. And he had come to Cordova in the summer of the previous year to climb a mountain (of course; why else?), while I was helping to put in a telephone pole line only fifty miles away. In Alaska you can almost spit fifty miles, if you are high enough. We missed each other by half a day, and I left a message scrawled in the deep dust of their truck parked at the trailhead, where a charted helicopter had picked them up and flown them to a hinterland high destination.

When they returned, they read my message. There had been bad trouble on both ends. They had lost a man under a rock slide and another had been badly hurt and flown out. On my end of things there had been an automobile accident near dawn just before I had arrived at my new duty station, and two of the three drunk soldiers had been badly bunged and taken to a hospital in Anchorage, nearly 300 miles away. Worth heard that I was among the injured and made a quick diversionary visit to what he imagined was my sick bed, for he thought I was dying. Not only wasn’t I, it wasn’t even me. And then he had rejoined his climbing friends and driven away. I was then but thirty-five miles away, digging my holes for telephone poles.

So when he asked me, a few years later, to fill in for him, please, huh, Bob, I could hardly say no. I had worked with the editor of The Alaska Sportsman in Worth’s stead, agreeing to this change, resisting that one, writing new copy by guess and by golly, until we had it where the editor wanted it, which was not quite right but would do. And then it had been published. Was I a better editor than writer, I wondered? I answered myself, No, but was not sure, then or now. But I still believe than nearly anyone can edit, while only a few can write passably well, and it is a lifetime’s effort to improve that passably a notch or two.

You never ask yourself if it is worth doing, the notch business. .You simply do it, day by day, and let matters proceed. And then you find your life has passed by and it is too late to do anything else, anything you might be better at, but that is okay, for there is hardly anything other than you might have done even this well.

Worth and I used to get together for lunch, or he would swing by the ASCFME offices, where he was popular, and we would chat and he would visit with old coworkers and me, or I’d stop by his house for an hour or two, or, if the winter weather was bad, icy, I might stay overnight with him instead of in a motel and be available for work the next morning. Meanwhile Worth worked on his book and learned, among other things, what a lonely miserable activity writing is, especially when you live alone in a house that formerly contained not only your wife but your couple of kids.

He was divorced now several years and had given up drinking, with help, and was no longer Mr. Hyde, who could not say no to another after the first, or even the first thought of the first drink.

For a mountain climber (he had set a record for the number of ascents of nearby Mt. St. Helens, a steep snowfield, and had helped bring down several bodies from its great blue invisible crevasses. He was in terrible shape. He stank of nicotine, tars, and stale smoke. As soon as one cigarette left his mouth, another appeared, begging for a light. He went through at least three packs each day. As much as I loved him, I could not stand being around him at close quarters, such as in his house for more than five minutes at a time. It would send me reeling for the door and the great outside. And being in a closed car with him was death itself.

Still he would climb mountains. I bit on the Mt. St. Helens climb one day while in the Army, just before they sent me to Alaska, perhaps because I knew I was going there and had only a short while left of a life than resembled a civilian’s. We took two girls along, spent the night chastely in the climbing hut at timberline, rose early, and made the summit by noon, breaking out into bright sunlight, parched. We split among us four tiny cans of tomato juice and two oranges. I would have given five dollars for another of either. And then we started down on wobbly legs still weak from so steep a climb. Worth warned us of each approaching crevasse so that we could skirt it. There was a time to glissade, he told us, and a time to pick your way carefully with your ice ax as probe and as crutch. He knew which was which and we obey religiously, for we had heard his horror tales on the way up this so-called easy mountain.

We were trying out some new sunblock for a company whose founder Worth knew, and the damn stuff proved no good. One of the girls went the hospital with severe sunburn, while the rest of us simply burned badly and two weeks later began to peel in thick layers. By then I was in Alaska, looking as though I had leprosy.

I began my commute to Olympia where ASFMSE was headquartered at six-thirty in the morning in order to arrive there at eight. But soon I was stretching time unsuccessfully and getting there ten, fifteen, twenty minutes late. Each time I entered I looked carefully at everybody out of the corner of my eyes, judging whether or not I could get away with this. I could. It was as though I were invisible to them. Part-time jobs are often like this. You are not really part of the flow. When you are absent, the work gets done around you. And for temporary workers the estrangement is even worse. You are there daily, sure enough, but soon you will be gone, and the known entity (Worth) will resume his duties, and it will soon be as though you never existed. And this attitude is inherent in everybody’s attitude and treatment of you all the while you are there in your daily diminished capacity.

Yet you must still go through the motions. And that is all they are. Only a little work gets done. It is because you won’t see the rest of it to completion. You yourself go unfulfilled. It is about as much fun as dancing with yourself. Or making love on cement.

Ostensibly I was to edit a newsletter that went out to all governmental employees in the state—those anyway who had opted to joint, since joining wasn’t mandatory. It would show the union members what a lot of good work the staff was doing to advance their cause. This was generally higher wages and more comprehensive fringe benefits. But since pay raises were largely dependent on the largess of the state legislature, it was a political lobbying process; hence the location of the union’s headquarters in Olympia where, every two years, the legislature began to meet in near continuous sessions and sometimes, after the biennial session had ended inconclusively, around the clock until all their business got settled.

To put it another way, the union’s job was to lobby the legislature, one and all, as hard as it could for more money. The newsletter to members, though necessary to keep membership up, came in a far second, as well it should. My job, or rather Worth’s, was to show off this mound of activity in the most favorable light. To do so required legerdemain, or to call it by its true name mounting deceit. I was not totally inexperienced in this arena.

Two months of commuting at a not-bad salary, Worth’s. In this amount of time I produced one newsletter. It was printed in Longview, sixty miles down the interstate, by a newspaper that had a web press and had won the bid, presumed to be competitive. But I wondered, since Worth was from Longview and had worked for the newspaper there. Well, it was not my concern, as were not many other things the union and its representatives performed in the name of the workers.

It was quite complicated, what went on, and involved feting legislators, mostly Democrats, but a few liberal Republicans, who knew how to eat. And to drink. Various union shops had their paid representatives at AFSCME, and they were always off at where their employees worked, collecting grievances, or else off wooing a legislator hoped to look favorably on the employees’ cause. The ones known to do so required less romance and could be jollied along at less cost and at larger gatherings. A token effort to indicate they were still loved by rafts of constituents was all that they needed.

I speak cynically because it is a cynical business, and what are little writers and editors but professional idealists dedicated to having their idealism violated, time and again. Thus Worth was already numb to the union’s range of efforts, while they were mostly new to me, even though I had worked for the state and had watched from afar (but not belonged) the union’s machinations.

Oh, they weren’t all that bad, I suppose. Politics is a messy business. Worth had a good friend who was a reporter for the Seattle P-I, Mike Layon. State government and, particularly, now, the legislature. He knew it backwards and forwards. He and I were acquainted; Worth saw to it on my first day’s tour of the legislative assembly building, an impressive domed structure, full of echoing marble and tiny nooks and corridors where the daily business is done.

Mike and I had both written freelance articles for the same publication, View Northwest, which was rumored to pay well, when it paid at all, and both of us were owed money for articles. One of mine, oddly, appropriately, was titled, "Whither The P-I?" It had to do with the prospects of the newspaper going into receivership or else working out a joint operating agreement with its rival, The Seattle Times. The latter proved to be the case, but at the time it was all literally news. Additionally I critically compared various writers for both the Times and P-I and ranked them competitively. This made me a few friends and many enemies.

Reporters really hate to be treated by outside writers in much the same manner as they treat the rest of the accessible world. When they are so treated, they react much the same way as all the others, only more vehemently so, and often in print themselves. Anyway I had managed to get myself paid through eternal lobbying of my case, and while I was at it I managed to get Mike Layton paid what he was owed for a much longer period of time than I was. When the magazine was put on the block and sold, the list of writers who were owed various sums of money read like a who’s who of local journalism. Mine was a pittance and I never got even a bit of it. Some—Emmett Watson, a fairly trusting soul—were owed a lot of money. They were ranked for purposes of liquidation of assets. Nobody got anything except, I suppose, the lawyers.

Soon Worth left me to my own devices, as they say. I didn’t know quite what these were and at first wandered around the hall of government, the agencies, and other arms of other branches, poking my nose into corridors and glass-partitioned doors, making a general nuisance of myself. On a new job you can take liberties you won’t be able to, after a while, when people get to know you and you them, and the doors start to close. Also you know what your job is, which is another way of saying you recognize at last what it isn’t and learn to behave accordingly. I wasn’t there long enough to make this distinction.

There was a lot of activity in restaurants and bars. This is the true environment of government. I remember an endless lunch at Red Kelley’s near Tumwater, which was just far enough away to be spiritually liberating, while permitting a quick return to the marble halls or to our offices, when duty called. When the legislature was in session, this was fairly often. But you could eat and drink, preferably with a legislator or two in tow, and it was surely business. It showed up on your expense account, if you had one. I did not.

Hey, that’s okay. Somebody with you was always picking up the check.

There were fund raisers being held to the left and to the right. Every evening could be booked up, if you wanted, but I didn’t. I dreaded the icy dark drive home to Seattle. sixty miles away, and I dreaded again my return in the morning. And my bosses (everybody was my boss; just try to get his name and have him call me!) were gone off to the far corners of the state, meeting with locals and local legislators who had returned home to visit with their constituents. So hardly ever was anybody in the office.

Part of my job was photography. I was expected to take all the pictures for the next issue and get them printed. I no longer had a darkroom, so I used a commercial firm in Olympia. They did terrible work but what else was I to do? I had my full complement of lenses still, including most of my beloved Leicas. So I ran around, exposing film, having to drive or ride with others to union meetings and capture them, all their officers and sometimes shop stewards on film. And they just loved having their pictures taken, beaming. The staff expected to see their photos appearing all over the pages in every issue, for Worth had spoiled them badly. Evidently his job (now mine) was to do so. I began to comprehend what was involved. It was largely sham. Sham again.

Nobody brought his lunch in a sack, as I did, the first couple of days, for lunchtime was a business occasion and generally took place in some posh restaurant. Red Kelly’s was a favorite. Good local jazz played while everybody milled around, politicos mixing with PACs, the air buzzing with whispers, laughter, intrigue. It is the game American pols play and I was glimpsing it for the first time. Scantily clad waitresses moved between tables balancing huge trays laden with hot roast beef sandwiches, crab salads, plates of Stroganoff, or else with smaller pewter trays bearing fresh drinks. There was the constant tinkle of merriment, the roar of group laughter. It was a wonderful place, if you could only figure out what was going on and join right in. But I couldn’t. Always the outsider, I wondered if my distaste was simply from not being included in the ongoing joke or whether it was based on some true perception of the essential horror of the situation. For votes were being courted, bought.

The check was never brought round. You ate and some mysterious somebody paid for the meal. Then people drifted off, presumably back to the office, or else to other meetings in other cocktail lounges. Was this how the political business of America was conducted, nationwide? I had to gather that it was.

When an important legislative committee or sub-committee had scheduled a meeting, or the whole body was assembled for a vote, there would be a scurry for the door of the restaurant and they would depart together. That is how I could tell the members of the legislature from all the others. That and how impeccably they were groomed and dressed. The rest of us were a slovenly crew. And this was but a part-time legislature, its members still paid a pittance. I wondered then, I wonder now, where the real money came from and how it was transferred to them so that they could look and act this way.

They moved like princes recently returned from banishment. They moved like bucks among the roes. They moved like each was the king of all alley cats. Oh, how they strutted, preened, paraded, pranced, patrolling the halls of government. On some special days they wore in their buttonhole a rose, for Christ’s sake, or a sprig of lily of the valley. Some were newly returned from Hawaii, or else had a pretty good imitation of a tan produced by a sun lamp. And razor cut hair. Event he most wasted, sallow, ruined of the bunch was enhanced by such a haircut. How I longed for one. (No, I didn’t.)

I was uncomfortable here, in such a seamy milieu. All were strangers intent on staying that way. And I could not truthfully say we had anything in common, legislators, union representatives, heads of political action committees with their pockets full of dollars. I felt sheepish, apologetic, out of place. Each morning I rose early and drove slick streets to the freeway and along it my sixty miles to the turnoff marked Olympia. There I entered a world in which nobody spoke my language, a particular dialect of English. Nearly the same words came out of their mouths, all these pols, but the accents were different and the attached meaning nothing I could fathom. I was a babe, bewildered. I could not get out of their fast enough.

Each night shortly after early winter dusk I hit the interstate. Often fog pocketed its dips and its bridges and ridges were glassy with ice. It was imperative to avoid accelerating; also hitting the brakes. So what you did was drive at an even pace and stay clear of the others until you were certain the ice was gone and the shiny spots were only wet with water. Then you resumed normal travel speed.

I became a little weird in such a hurry-up environment. It was the result of all the coming and going, coupled to what went on when I was there, with nothing much to do but hold a mirror, as it were, up to the daily activity. One week we had an important meeting with the employees of Western Washington State University in far-off Bellingham, nearly 150 miles away from where we all worked. Rather than drive my daily sixty miles to Olympia, sixty miles back to Seattle, all within say six hours, I decided to go directly and shave 120 miles of circular time off my journey; it would still involved about 90 miles of driving each way. And since my presence and that of my trusty camera was not required until six in the evening I decided, what the hell, why not go fishing on my way?

The river and the weather conditions were just right. I traveled to the North Fork and quickly caught a pair of bright eight pounders. I left while it was still light, this December day, and made my way to Bellingham, old snow and ice crunching under my tires, for the road had been recently cleared and offered nothing to worry about. I reached the hotel ahead of everybody in my party and killed an hour walking the streets of this pretty little berg in a circular pattern, blowing frosty rings every time I pursed my lips and exhaled.

One by one the cars arrived and filed into the parking lot. George Matsen, our leader, had been newly released from the hospital after an emergency gallstone operation and decided to make the trip, though warned not to by his doctors. Mark Brown, his adjutant, drove, and through my glass watched them get out of the company car, George disdaining the cane he was offered. He looked a little wobbly, but refused Mark’s arm, additionally.

Leaders (by definition) have guts, and he was proving it to us. He did not collapse and made the major address of the evening to about a hundred assembled union workers, as we finished our broiled salmon and awaited the desert course, which was some fruity ice cream served in a glass cup. The meeting then began and droned on, in the nature of such meetings, people rising to their feet and saying insincere nice things about the one who preceded him.

Union people speak with a lot of dees and dems. It is required, and even if their daily speech normally does not involve these words, or these pronunciations; and the word ain’t, I gathered, was greatly preferred and made you known as one of the boys, a worker, ordinary, not educated. Which was funny, in a way, for these employees all worked for a sizable university and were not know to speak this way themselves, not until they came to a union meeting, where it was de rigueur. To me it seemed an exercise right out of Damon Runyon. Me, I wanted to play the part of Nathan Detroit. The winner was the guy who sounded the toughest.

George Matsen clearly won. This he was good at. I expected him to go a long way. The state was too small for his talents. They were part of a large national organization, and the politics played back in Washington DC, where they were headquartered, was complex. Occasionally somebody from our state, but usually San Francisco or Los Angeles won the nod and was appointed to the board. You were halfway home, in this case. You bided your time and played the only game you knew, politics. You ingratiated yourself wherever it was necessary and were careful not to offend anybody who might do you harm, or in the future could, which was practically everybody. You learned the names of all the players and used tricks to fix them in your memory, able to call them up instantly at will. You had a smile for everybody, a quick handshake, a parting slap on the shoulder. It was important not to stay in any one place too long. You didn’t want to provide a target. At the same time it was a good idea not to rush through things or slight anybody. But if you were sure that a person was truly an underling, and would stay that way, with nothing for you to lose in the process, why, you might crush him. You might slash him with your words, your disdain, your scorn. In all fairness, though we did not like each other very much, George Matsen did not bother to crush me. What he did instead was very clever. He totally avoided him.

I understood perfectly. If the situation where reversed, it might be what I would have done to him. But it made it hard for me to do my job right. I didn’t know what he wanted from me, other than what I already understood, largely from Worth, and he wouldn’t tell me. So I operated pretty much in a vacuum. Ordinarily I would have liked it. In this case, I needed to know so much and the information wasn’t forthcoming. Either it was because George didn’t have the time, or didn’t want to bother. And he psyched me out. He made me feel as if I shouldn’t approach him. He did this by—the few times I foolishly had early in my employment—answering me curtly and (get this) reaching for the telephone about the time my question was forming on my lips. And, no, there wasn’t anybody already on the line, the instrument ringing. It was a call that he was initiating, the bastard.

I should have appreciated it more. It was clever, a stratagem I had never seen before or had exercised in my direction. It worked perfectly. I began to avoid him and even ordinary daily eye contact. It was what he wanted and so I gave it to him. But I began to wonder if there would be an edition of the newsletter while I was there and if it would have any content.

Back in the parking lot of the hotel in Bellingham, I returned to my car and found I had a flat tire. So far from home, so late at night. George and Mark came out of the hotel and saw me standing by my car, staring at the slushy ground.

"You okay?" Mark asked.

I was worried about them seeing the two dead steelhead shining in back.

I nodded.

"You need a hand?" asked George.

He was right out of the hospital and it was a long way home to Olympia, nearly midnight.

"I’m fine," I called out.

I watched them drive off. Everybody else was gone. The lot was full of mounds of wet snow, slush, and little rivers of black running water. By the time I got the jack positioned and the frame of the car raised off the ground, I was wet to the waist. I worked the lug nuts off, with great difficulty, sweating under my suit coat, even while I shivered from the cold. The tire squiggled back on to the wheel’s bolts, I twisted on the lug nuts and tightened them slowly, using the crosswise method that ensures an even, tight fit. Then, not bothering with the hub cap and tossing it in back with the fish, I drove off.

It was while on the way home that I decided to quit. Tomorrow.

They were not even surprised to hear I was leaving and suddenly, too. It continued to be as though I never existed. I decided to ask Worth about it. He told me it had been like that with him, too, but after a while, numerous parties, long trips together in a closed cars, lunches that pressed into the late afternoon, they had come around. They had loosened their haughtiness and admitted him, but only so far. He was accepted, while at the same time he was not part of the inner circle. Who was, I asked?

He named some names. Half I knew.

"It’s too complicated for me," I confessed. "And how’s your book coming?"

He told me it was a mess. He wouldn’t be able to finish it in the two months he had asked for. He didn’t know how long it would take him. There were complications. The family, the Unsoelds, whom he had know for decades, suddenly were not cooperating. They were barely speaking to him, in fact. He had heard, via the Olympia grapevine, that a New York publisher had contacted them about Devi’s story. Either Willi would write it, or some ghost writer. A contract was imminent. There would be some money.

"Would they?" I asked. "Sell you out? Sell out their own daughter?"

Worth shrugged. It was possible. People were strange. You thought you knew them, but you didn’t. And the fact that it was their own daughter was understandable to him, even though money would be forthcoming, because they loved her, wanted to see her story told right, said straight, and they had a proprietary interest in her, and it was more important than whatever money might ensue. Of course, money was nice, too. Willi’s salary at Evergreen State was not all that great, even though he was full professor. On and on.

He might not be being screwed, but something close to it was taking place, yet he knew all these people, the family, all the pols, the political action people, the reporters, the union members. It was a vast family and he was part of it, not the most essential member but a tangentially important one, perhaps a first cousin of the principals. I could simply not understand it and said so.

"You have to live here for it to make sense to you." He grinned. "I have, all my life, except for college and the army, and to be honest I don’t really understand it either, but I know how it works. That’s nearly as good. Or maybe it’s better. You see it coming, rather than having whatever it is arriving as a big sad surprise."

"So how badly will I be lousing you up if I quit?:

"Not at all."

"You sure?"

"Look, I’m bogged down. I’m all confused about Devi, as well. Was she a saint? Was she some sort of poor misguided daughter? Did she screw around?"

"Were you in love with her?"

"Good question. I was, oh, ten, twelve, years older than she. But I could have been in love with her. I knew here since she was a little girl. I watched her grow up. And, as you know, I’ve had certain woman problems in my life. She always seemed so austere, so beautiful, so far away. There was a time in my life I saw her nearly every day. Willi and I have always been climbing buddies. I was nearly part of the family. In and out of their house, all the time, taking meals with them without thinking about it

"Once I kissed her. She didn’t pull away. She kissed back, but just a little. It left me sitting there, not knowing how I stood. With Devi, the whole family. She was about seventeen. You know, old enough to kiss, not old enough to make love to, not in my book. You know what she did after I finished kissing her? Smiled at me. Jesus, it was like I had given her a birthday card. She had been expecting maybe, oh, a cashmere sweater. But it wasn’t sexual. I mean, it was sexual, but it really wasn’t.

"She’s got you all fucked up, buddy," I told him.

"Don’t I know it. Anyway, I don’t think I can finish this book. I’m all bogged down. You’d be surprised how little I’ve written. So you won’t be doing me any harm, buddy. I’m running out of cash. A boy’s got to eat. Actually you’ll be doing me a favor."

"I don’t have the issue done. I’ve got all the pictures assembled, true, but I haven’t decided on what all the articles will be, or who will write them. I can’t corner George. The guy avoids me."

"That’s George. He isn’t avoiding you. He’s well busy."

"Bull shit."

"Okay, he’s avoiding you."

"Why?"

"He considers you temporary."

"Well, I am temporary. But I’ve got work to do."

"No you don’t."

"What do you mean, I don’t?"

"I’ll do it."

"Is that what the plan was, all along?"

"Sort of. You see, they are budgeted for my salary and can’t exactly pay me if I’m not there and doing the job, now can they? And if they take me off the payroll, what happens to the money?"

"Tell me."

"They can’t do it. They may lose it."

"So I take your job, to keep it open, to use up the salary for the sake of the budget, which must all be spent, but nothing I do matters. It will have to be undone."

"Sort of."

"Tell me where I’m wrong."

"Your not exactly wrong, it’s more like there are some missing pieces. You aren’t aware of them. You needn’t be. Anyway, they’re expecting me to come back and make things right.’

"And I can’t do that?"

"Not to their satisfaction."

"Jesus."

"Yes, it’s like that. It’s not your fault. Nobody could have done it to their satisfaction except you."

"Oh, they don’t much like the way I do it, but they’re used to me. I give them what they want, which is a lot of flattery."

"There is no substance to any of this," I shouted out.

"That’s a good way of putting it." His grin was almost a leer. "It’s tough on me, but I’m used to it. We are both used to each other."

"So you’ll go back?"

"Monday, if you want me to."

"And they know all this?"

He nodded, saying, "It won’t be a surprise. I think they’ve been expecting you to quit. What has it been, two months?"
"Nearly."

"You’ll get a full check. You’re entitled to a day or two of sick leave. Have you taken any?"

"No."

"They’ll count it. It’ll be okay. Yeah, I’m thoroughly fucked up on the book. It went no where. I’ve got a heap of notes, all I should need, but I can’t pull all the disparate parts together. Maybe she was some kind of whore. There were rumors for years. She wasn’t really the ice princesses. Down here, Olympia, everybody’s got his hype. Nothing is exactly what it seems. Hell, it rarely comes close."

"Then it’s not just me?"

"Its everybody who comes here. Look, I was raised in Olympia. This is second nature to me. At the same time, most mysterious. I’d like to get out, finish my book, but in a way this is all I know. I’m really at home here."

So I told them I was leaving, told them the very next day, in the morning. I barged into George Matsen’s office and blurted it out.

"Okay," he said.

No protest, no nothing. I might as well have said, "It’s nine thirty-two." And he hadn’t even asked the time, or wanted to know it. Or I could have said, "The sun is shining." Which it wasn’t. Even if it wasn’t.

I had to return the next day for my check. I dragged in at any old time, stopping for coffee at a favorite lunch counter to tell some people I knew goodbye. Worth was there. I waved but we didn’t talk. He knew what was what. He always had. I left Olympia, almost for good. My return visits were short and inconsequential. Both were on the outskirts of town. Lacy, Tumwater.

Worth died two years later. The book had died earlier. The Unsoelds, so far as I knew, never wrote or authorized on about their daughter. He died of a massive heart attack. He was dead long before they got him to the hospital, which was not far away. He was forty-eight. I never knew somebody could die so young, so early, without being shot or involved in an automobile accident.

Once more I was wrong.

83

I held only one more regular job among my sorties, my paid adventures into the working world. It was on the copy desk of the morning paper, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I don’t know where I heard about the listing, or why I went after it; evidently I needed the money. I’d been free lancing for a year or more, and not making much in return for it. My long article, complete with pictures, "Whither The P-I?" for View Northwest had made me known to them. And the fact that I had compared beat reporters and columnists for their paper to those for its stronger competition, The Seattle Times, and generally found the P-I’s superior, did my case no harm. Generally believing themselves far superior to mere free lancers, who got paid only by the job and were not on good salaries, they had great disdain for the small army of us, but there is no group more self-conscious and critical than they, and if somebody, especially some outsider, were to write about them, you could bet they would find a way to read it. And after conducting a few interviews with them to supplement my own daily critical reading, I had made acquaintances, if not friends. A few had written me letters after the article was published, mostly favorable (though still quite condescending).

The assistant managing editor for news had worked on the same floor of the Communications Building as I had, with a faculty appointment, years ago, and Bill and I were on a smile and nod basis, even then. He was in charge of hiring and it was with him that I had my perfunctory interview. I don’t think I was listening closely when he told me they would give me a try on the copy desk.

I knew what a copy desk was, indeed, and it was not where I wanted to start as a writer and former editor. But Bill explained the copy desk was where everybody started. This was not exactly true. I knew that if you came to work for them from another newspaper, and you were a reporter or editor, you would start as a journeyman reporter. I’m not sure I wanted that but I knew I didn’t want a tour of duty on the desk, even though it was touted as a starting point and in a few cases it was; mostly it was a lifelong deadend.

Give me a try meant exactly that, as I was to learn. What I thought it indicated was that, if all went well, I’d swiftly become a reporter, or better yet an editor, with reporters working for me, though I’d had little actual newspaper experience. I’d been mum about working as a copyboy at the Times when I was nineteen and having been fired for coming to work on Saturdays late and hungover.

You don’t come to work for a morning paper early in the morning. Rather it is late in the day, later than even banker’s hours, which was fine by me, for I have always been an evening person. The P-I building was located at Sixth and Vine, or one of those arboreal cross streets running East and West, none of them going very far. It had a huge blue globe on top that rotated slowly, or, as the employees liked to think of it, spun. It was lit from within and had the P-I banner rather pompously spread across its girth as would a beauty contestant. The building itself was about three storeys, with a sizable basement at ground level on one side, where the paper was printed and where it was bundled and distributed by waiting trucks. I remembered how I had hustled over there from the Times in order to pick up the afternoon edition, back when they had started one, in order to steal a few customers from us, the Times. We wanted to know when and where they had scooped us. So this was not entirely unfamiliar territory.

It was Thirties Modern, sculpted, with an airy feeling until you got to the newsroom, which was crowded and seedy, as newsrooms are meant to be. They had just gone over to computer composition and a reporter was supposed to be able to produce camera-ready copy that an editor could give a quick scan and pass on to the copy desk. There it was briefly edited for style and consistency, capitalization, spelling, etc., but the main job was to have a headline written for it. This is what I was supposed to do, and this only. It was something I had not been good at, back in journalism school, and had come just short of failing the course. When I had my own magazine, and even before that when I edited others in the office of publications, I had solved the difficult-for-me problem of copy fitting by simply writing what I wanted for a head, then having it shot down to size in camera or litho. I always gave them the percentage of reduction or enlargement, and it always filled the designated spot exactly.

Newspapers worked according to type size and exact fit according to the width of letters, some of which—W and M, for instance—counted about one and one-half the width of other smaller, more discrete capital letters, I remembered. And this was about all I remembered from back then.

The copy desk is presided over by what is called The-Man-in-The-Slot. He might as well have been the man in the moon, for all I cared. This particular one was named Nick, and he had been there since the beginning of time. Tom Robbins and Darrel Bob Huston had both worked for him, briefly, along with a number of other local luminaries. Most had gone on to lives of considerable obscurity.

Nick was old and fat and smelled. He smoked cigars. He had spotted hands and face. He drank, but then everybody drank: it was part of being a newsman. If you didn’t drink you were considered some kind of faggot. So even the faggots drank. It was a form of self-defense, or self-denial. It time it got to be a habit. A person who drinks often and from habit often becomes an alcoholic. Here you didn’t have to get to work early in the morning, so you had nothing to prove in the way of handling a drinking problem.

Nick put me to work the first day following around the assistant medical reporter and learning how the company’s computer work. I would need this knowledge to effectively edit copy, even though a paper product is what would come to me and would leave my location on the outer periphery of the copy desk, when it was dealt me like a playing card by the man-in-the-slot, namely Nick.

Now there is a string of conventions having to do with headline writing and they are unique, esoteric. The rest of the world comes to get to know and accept them through the daily reading of newspapers. Usually they are clichés. They exist to be used and reused by news men. Now, serious writers (like myself) try to avoid clichés, or else give them a new twist and make them into new, bright sayings, sayings that if they are any good get passed around and become clichés themselves in time.

One headline cliché I remember well involves an electrical analogy. Now I’ve had some experience with things electrical, so you might say this one bothered me because of its wrongness. It goes like this: you have an electrical connection with something, say, a TV or a toaster, and you want to turn it off. You "pull the plug" on it, according to the convention. You don’t go to its off/on switch and turn it the other way. You "pull the plug."

Similarly, if the bathtub is full of water, there is a plug to pull in order to drain the tub. One usually does this before stepping out of the water and the tub. One literally "pulls the plug" in this instance. There is no off/on switch to do it, or if there is, in certain modern bathtubs, the switch is what pulls the plug. So, either way, you pull the plug to get rid of the bath water; you throw the switch to get rid of the electrical connection.

But not in newspaperese. There you pull the plug to stop the electrical current, almost as though it were a watery current. It is the only place this happens, or is thought to happen. It is a copy desk cliché, one true only unto itself. And because it is so tired and so wrong, I patently refuse to use it.

Nick threw me a story dying to have its plug pulled, for it has to do with a meeting of governmental authorities and power executives having to do with electrical transmission and how they had reached stalemate again. The situation was literally crying for someone to write that they had pulled the plug. I could see Nick, slavering in his slot, a cold cigar in his mouth, watching me, waiting for it. He was nearly drooling. And it would have been so easy to give it to him, literally wrong as it was. But I refused to do it.

And it cost me my job.

The newsprint story had a head written by me that said something else and, to make my matters worse, it didn’t exactly copy-fit the space. I think it went half a character over. This was clearly my fault. I had not expected to write heads, this day, and had no guide. None was issued me. It is like the basic alphabet. You are presumed by a certain station in life to have mastered it. But headline writing, I maintain, is not an acquired skill like swimming or bicycle riding (or sex), never forgotten after having once learned how. It is formulaic, peculiar, unusual, and highly forgettable. Don’t you do it for a while and it fades like early snow. It did for me, it does for everybody except, I suppose, a career copy desk employee.

It was my big test and I failed it. Back came the copy with Nick’s scrawl across the top, Xing out my poor head and one with "pulled the plug" inserted in its place. When I looked up, he had his head down, back doing something more important than being looked at, poor bastard.

He was a lifelong bachelor, lived by himself in a crammed apartment near the P-I, walked to work, and daily drank himself into oblivion. He could, and did, do his work with a full load abuilding. Oh, how he loved a dirty joke. But at the desk he was all work, his demeanor glaring and hard. He was totally in charge. His word was law. People vied for his good graces, a kind word. Away from work, even with me, he was good-hearted cheer and, well, silliness.

Across the street from the building was Grovener House. It was a residential hotel, very nice, expensive, with a restaurant in its basement and a dark bar there. This is where the newsroom employees adjourned at every opportunity. They drank and they gossiped viciously. And during the dinner hour and after the edition was put to bed, it was were Nick reigned. Did he, I wonder, do anything but reign? Yes, I suppose, when he went home alone and picked up a book or snapped on the TV to watch old Westerns into the night. And when his little beady eyes kept closing, rise to his sleepy feet and pull the plug on the set.

84

It was Nick who handed me my check, two days later, at the end of the shift, and told me I was through. Even though some things come as a surprise, they are not really a surprise. Does that make sense? You know they are coming (like death?), but the hope is always that it is not yet. So what is supposed to be a surprise is an astonishment. Or a gross surprise.

Funny thing was, at dinner, a couple of hours ago, though he already had my terminal check in his pocket, Nick was most jolly, friendly, hospitable. He bought a round, including me, though I barely touched my drink and kept sipping from the cup of coffee that only I was drinking. How innocent it all seemed, how innocuous. I was clearly one of them, having passed my initial tests, even the stiff one involving plug pulling. I waited my turn, then told my little anecdote with its light touch and funny ending. All laughed just right. Neither disarmingly too hard, or politely too little.

For the rest of the workshift I was given busywork. Well, the night’s load was light and the edition was nearly done, or put to bed. When the time came, everybody sprung to his feet, as per usual, eager to clear the hell out. Nick wagged a finger at me. It meant stay. Perhaps, thought I, if I wasn’t good at writing the anticipated headlines, there was a job waiting in reporting. But it was not to be. Instead, had been set up for the sucker punch. Or I had set myself up for it, which is more likely the case.

He handed me my check, mumbling something. It had not worked out. Obvious to even me, it hadn’t. But couldn’t somebody have helped me? Given me a useful word or two that would help me course-correct myself and be of good service? No, this is what Bill had meant by giving me a try. The try hadn’t worked out. I thought back to about twenty-seven years ago, when the Times had fired me for chronic tardiness. It had taken a full year. With the P-I, it was but two days. How many writers had been fired from both papers? I had a hunch it was more than myself.

But did any of them last only two days at one?

And that pretty much sums up my working experience, Boss. If my checkered career was a board game, you might king me, you know, knight me with a double crown, so that I could move front and back, right to left, at will, seizing my opponents checkers like a bird picking up birdseed, until the board was cleared of the opposing color and it was clear to the world that I had won.

Won what? Why, won all!

I was forty-six or seven. It doesn’t much matter which. From then on out I was a writer, pure and simple. Or do those two words refer only to me? I no longer had to write for the Man, only for myself. And, I vowed, I would write what I wanted to—though in all fairness I must add that almost all of my free lance topics, before and after then, were of my own choosing. When they were not, they right down the same line. They were kindred subjects and topics.

Most of them paid very little. For years, the most I made off a story was $650. When I was fifty, I was paid $900 by Esquire, who knew I did not have an agent to take his ten percent, but paid me as though I did have. This was at a time when the magazine was routinely screwing some very fine writers, like Paul Theroux, Richard Ford, etc. They had agents, I did not. To me it was a milestone. Never mind that I was nearly fifty, the year 1980.

I piddled along in my usual desultory manner. I wrote nearly every day but sold very little of what came off my machine. One way or another (most the other) my money added up. I did not publish a book until I was in my early sixties. My second book came two years later. Neither sold very well. I do not expect future books to sell well, if at all. I am entertaining the idea of self-publishing for the first time in my life. It is not so bad an idea as I have thought for so long.

Publishing a book is a life experience. Not all of it goes well. There are high points and low ones. The writer gives, the publisher takes. This is the way of the world. All books are a compromise, but it is not so well known that the writer does the compromising, straight down the line. Alas and alack.

Writing is a parallel life, one running down a separate track. It will require another book. This book, "Sorties Into The Fray," is number four. The writing life (or whatever it is called) will not be number five in this mundane autobiography, I am pretty sure. In fact I may never get to it.

Others are pressing. "A Year at the Lake" demands to be writ, and I almost always yield to my internal prompting. And I’ve been looking forward to, and dreading, a book about the intellectual life and college days—a kind of This Side of Paradise with fangs.

Life is good and it remains interesting. Right now the lake calls. It lives just outside my writing window, presently a silver corrugation, its bright ripples moving ever to my right, West, like a river, like whirling snow.

The sky is dark and ominous. (Or is that the start of a bad novel?) It is just as I like it. Winter now.

Perfect.

The End

November 29, 1997

3:10 PM

Lake Ketchum