Backpack Jack

The outlet mall at Flatwoods, WV isn’t very exciting.  The stores aren’t great—Tommy Hilfiger, whose clothes I won’t buy, is the only designer with a presence.  It is a good place to look for Christmas presents for newly apartmented, college freshman nieces and gadget-addicted (I’m sorry, I mean tool and I don’t mean addicted) husbands.  Plus, there is one of those Amish Bulk Foods stores that, I don’t think, have much to do with the Amish but do have lots of wonderful, bad-for-you sorts of things like bread-and-butter pickled beets and caramel-covered marshmallows.  So, I stopped yesterday on my way home from Thanksgiving in Huntington.

 

I got out of my car and heard someone barking at the top of his lungs, “…and all you God-damned Republicans are going to get what’s coming to you, all you fat fuck Jesus-freaks with your jacked-up pick-up trucks and…” Shit, I thought.  This is going to be someone I know. 

 

And it was.  Backpack Jack, who I met the first night I worked at Bartlett House back in the late 80s and who has been wandering in and out of my life ever since.  But then again, that’s what he does.  He wanders.  He labels himself a hobo and, if there is anything noble left in the call, he embodies it.

 

It seemed a civic duty to offer Jack a ride back to Morgantown; I’m a big fan of free speech, but I also think people should be able to bring their children to public places without being confronted by someone yelling obscenities.  Jack isn’t crazy, just bored and a little too in love with the idea of himself as an outlaw.  And, he told me, he had figured he wouldn’t get a ride to Morgantown that day and thought he’d just stand there yelling until the cops offered him a free place to spend the night.  Flatwoods doesn’t have a homeless shelter, and Jack says he prefers jail—fewer rules and no one who thinks they can save you.

 

The hour-and-a-half trip was like the world’s longest panhandle.  I guess Jack’s shtick is all he has left, because he kept it up long after I’d given him the five bucks he’d asked for and made it clear he wasn’t getting any more out of me.  That makes me sad.  Jack used to be more interesting.

 

We reminisced a little about his old running gang:  Cat Eyes, Big Al, and Steve who never did get a colorful nickname.  They’re all still on the road, although Jack says Steve was married for a while and is only just now de-trailered and single again.  We talked about the winter I had to cut through the duct-tape Cat Eyes used to keep his boots on to check for frostbite, and how sad it was that Big Al had ripped off a local shop-owner who is usually kind to the homeless and, as a result, wasn’t welcome in town by anyone these days.  It was a little like running into an old friend and a little like going back to a job I was no longer suited for, but mostly it made my car smell like unwashed man and wood smoke.

 

Still, it’s nice to live in a world small enough that I know the hobos on the road; when to stop, and when to keep driving.  The alternative—to always have to keep driving—seems both lonely and wrong.  I may be done letting homeless men live in my basement, but hopefully I will never have to stop offering them rides back to town.

Wordle…

I’m addicted to Wordle.  I think every writer should play with it now and again… it is a surprising and effective exercise to the see the “word clouds” that are generated.

Also, it’s one of those great writing-but-not-writing time sinks… for those days when I want to feel like I’m accomplishing something but, really, I’m lucky to have managed to get out of bed and down to the computer at all.

My Pet Dead Rat…

I saw it, dying, for the first time a month ago.  It had curled itself into a ball against a neighbor’s stone wall.  The dogs and I passed within inches of it, but the animals did not pay each other any mind.  The way it looked in the rain, cowered against the wall, was more o’possum than rat.  I thought then that is what it was, but I don’t remember thinking about it much at the time.  Only seeing it, thinking that it did not belong there no matter what it was, and hoping it would be gone the next time we walked this patch of sidewalk.

I saw it again a few days later; stiff and swollen with death in the little patch of grass between sidewalk and curb in front of a neighbor’s house.  This time the dogs noticed it alright, pulling hard towards the stench so they could roll around in it.  It was an effort to drag them across the street.  We walked only on the other side for a week.

Now it comes and goes, disappearing into tall grass and dead leaves for a few days and then somehow back on the sidewalk again.  I almost always notice it before the dogs get too close, although today Max was about to chomp off its head before I realized I needed to reign him in. 

I think about this rat a lot right now.  About how it must mean something, although I can’t think of what.  The dead rat has too much physicality to disappear into language.  Maybe next month, when the last of its fur is gone and it’s only bone chip and tooth, it will give itself up to metaphor.  But for now it stubbornly insists on its own right to be literal.  Real.

I know I should go and get the corpse and throw it somewhere that the dogs can’t get at it–but where?  Not in the garbage, certainly… the smell is still too strong and the garbagemen came yesterday, so it would fester for a week.  (How can so little flesh left on such dry bones still stink that way?)  Not in the garden, because it is a rat.  Had it been the possum I first took it to be, I’d have dumped it in the compost heap weeks ago. 

Poor rat.  Too much a pariah even to be fertilizer.  Too real for metaphor.

I have named him Habakkuk.

Dinty W. Moore on Blake Butler on Literary Citizenship

Dinty Moore, nonfictionist, blogged about Blake Butler, fictionist, havng blogged ”in a most excellent fashion recently about the need to be a positive karmic force in the world of literary citizenship.”  So, in the spirit of the ethic of spreading the literary love,* I am sending you first to Brevity’s Creative Nonfiction Blog and hoping that you will go from there to Blake Bulter’s to read the original post in full.**

So, to continue the love chain even further, I’ll borrow from Bulter and post three things I’ve read in the last few days that I really enjoyed (it’s morning, I haven’t read three things yet today):

Tell Me Something by Michelle Cacho-Negrete in the latest edition of The Sun.

This Is Not Warm and Fuzzy by Noel Dunn in the latest edition of Fringe.

My Darlings by Renee K. Nicholson at The Cerebral Catalyst.

Pass it on!

 

*Yep, they are letting me teach Freshman English despite my twisty grammar and utter disregard for the conventions of rhetoric. 

**Okay, it’s also true that I am unable, as one of Lucy’s many parents, for force myself to link to Blake Butler’s blog post because of the title.  Be a good literary citizen, go there, and you’ll see why.  I know it doesn’t refer to MY Lucy, but still…

Wait, I’ve Made a Terrible Mistake…

I’m halfway through the two-week seminar that is supposed to make me ready to teach English 101.  I am not halfway ready.  In fact, I am much less ready than I was before I started this process in a room full of people almost all of whom seem young beyond my imagining and they have a good five to fifteen years on the freshman who will be walking into my classroom in exactly two weeks and one day.  See, I am reduced to panicky, run-on sentences and on the verge of paranoia.

I spend a lot of time on the couch, imagining what I will say on that first day.  I see myself as a frousy-haired, rumpled but kindly old woman who will remind them of their mothers–or, God forbid, their grandmothers–and win them over with lots of corny encouragement and sometimes homemade cookies because they are, after all, college freshman and so by definition broke and hungry.  Or maybe I’m the funky old lady who has been there and done that and wins them over by not being shocked when they forget to come to class because they’ve fallen in love for the first time since leaving home and couldn’t force themselves to crawl out of bed to make it to class for almost an entire week.  But probably I am not.  Probably I will just be some alien with a gradebook and a frown that they have to suffer in order to become physical therapists and computer engineers and novelists who will dedicate their first books to some other, better English professor they will have down the road.

English teachers are supposed to be cool, and I am so not cool any longer.  (If I ever was.)  I think I have made a horrible mistake.  Now excuse me while I go stand in front of the mirror and practice asking if you’d like fries with that.

Learning to Read…

 

We were playing Hide and Seek and I was under the porch.  No one ever hid under the porch because there were spiders and roly-poly bugs and I felt very brave as I rolled myself into a little ball and crammed my body behind the cement steps.  I heard the other kids get found or make it safely back to base.  The call went out, “Olly olly ox in free!”   I had won, which never happened, and usually the other kids wouldn’t even let me play because I was only five and still, they said, pretty much a baby.  I crawled out and marched over to Home Base, triumphant.

            Jennifer, who had been It and was the oldest, coolest kid any of us knew, looked at me and shrieked, “You are covered in cat shit!”

            “In what?”  I had no idea what shit was. 

            “Cat poop.  You have cat poop all over your jeans.”  Jennifer flipped her Marsha Brady hair over her shoulder and wrinkled her nose.  “No one hides under the porch because your cats use it as a litter box, you idiot.”

            I ran crying into the house.  “Mommy, Mommy, I am covered in cat shit!”

            “What did you say, young lady?”

            “I’m covered in cat shit!”

            My mother grabbed me under the arms, holding me as far away from herself as possible, and carried me into the laundry room.  As she stripped me, she scolded, “Don’t ever say that word again.  Where in the world did you learn a word like that?”  She gave me her Scary Mom look.  “Did one of the big kids teach you that word?”

            I knew my mother didn’t like Jennifer, who was in fourth grade and wore mini-skirts and had to live with her mean old grandmother because her father was a no-good-drunken-bum-who-doesn’t-seem-to-care-about-his-children-at-all.  So I sacrificed my father, who sometimes said bad words when he was on the phone talking business and anyway she couldn’t tell me I wasn’t allowed to play with my own father any more.  “Daddy says it.”

            “Well, it’s a grown-up word and little girls shouldn’t say grown-up words.”  She tugged a clean t-shirt roughly over my head and sent me back outside. 

            The game of Hide and Seek was over and everyone was standing around a dead baby bird they had found under the big elm tree in front of Jennifer’s house, poking it with sticks.  I walked over to Jennifer and kicked her.  “You almost got me in trouble.  You didn’t tell me shit was a bad word?”

            She looked at me like I was the stupidest, littlest kid in the whole world.  “Everybody knows shit is a bad word.  If you want to say it in front of grown-ups, you have to say it Op.”

            “In what?” 

            “Op.  It’s like a code.  You spell the word instead of saying it, but you don’t say the consonants, you make their sound and add –op afterwards.”

            Jennifer then studiously set about teaching me the difference between consonants and vowels, the sounds each letter made, and the curious “tch” at the end of the word bitch. 

            My mother had positively forbidden me to learn to read because, she said, children who learned to read before first grade became bored and didn’t learn good study habits.  She read a lot of parenting books; she was really afraid of screwing us all up and being stuck with a house full of idiot children who would drive her to a nervous breakdown.  But I didn’t know I was learning to read.  I thought I was learning to cuss without getting sent to my room to wait-until-my-father-got-home.

            I memorized how to say all the best words in Op.  Sop-hop-i-top.  Fop-u-cop-kop.  Bop-i-top-cop-hop.  My favorite was the melodious a-sop-sop-hop-o-lop-e.  It sounded like jalopy, which was what my mother called my father’s little purple MGB that was only big enough for one kid at a time and was the most glamorous thing anyone in our neighborhood owned.  I practiced alone in my room at night and used my copy Richard Scarry’s The Best Word Book Ever to reverse-engineer the way letters became words became stories.  In a week, I was reading Never Tease a Weasel to myself in secret.  By the end of the summer, I had chapter books hidden under my mattress and a notebook filled with my first attempts at writing.

            I was, indeed, a bored first grader who never learned good study habits.  I sat next to Cathy Wagner, who had also taught herself to read and was also bored.  Mrs. Goheen refused to call on either of us once she realized what was up.  “Well,” she’d say if we raised our hands, “we already know you girls know the answer.  Why don’t we let the kids who are just learning to read answer this question,” and then she’d call on somebody who would just sniffle and shift around uncomfortably. 

            “A-sop-sop-hop-o-lop-e,” I would whisper to Cathy. 

“Bop-i-top-cop-hop,” she’d answer.  We’d giggle behind our Big Chief tablets and roll our eyes, already in love with the transgressive nature of language.

Dinner Times

The homeless man in our basement sneaks upstairs once he’s sure we’ve gone to bed and microwaves a half-dozen Jimmy Dean Griddlecakes Sandwiches for his dinner.  The dogs jump off the bed and scratch at the bedroom door as soon as they hear him in the kitchen and they whine until the stench of cheap microwaved sausage has faded into a sort of damp, mildewy smell and he has gone back downstairs.

Kevin said, “If he lives in your basement then he isnt’ really homeless, is he?”

I think about this for a long time; months.  He is homeless because, if he is not, then my home is also his home and not just a place for him to stay while he goes through the SSI odessy.  And if this is his home, I can never say, “Okay, you got your first SSI check, time for you to move out now.  Good luck.  Take care.”  And I need to know that some day I will be able to say that, or I will come running down the stairs one night, no longer able to take the reek of his Stouffer’s Family Sized Meatloaf that will linger until the smell of the morning coffee overpowers it.

*   *   *

For our dinner tonight, I made a sort of cheap and dirty cassoulet.  White beans in a rich duck broth with ham from Mike and Donna Eisenstat’s farm, potatoes, leeks, and carrots from Reed and Kathy Evans, herbs from my garden and the one next door, and an artisnal sherry that my father gave us last year.  We ate it with a baguette from A New Day Bakery and Bûche Noire from Firefly Farms.  There was more than enough.  I could have, probably should have, invited the homeless man in the basement to join us.  For the first year he lived here, I often did.  But the quality of mercy has grown strain’d. 

It is one thing never to take responsibility for something.  It is something entirely different to put it aside once it becomes burdensome.  I am not generous enough to invite the man in the basement to join us at the dinner table, but I am also not so stingy that I would throw him back onto the streets.  It could take another few years for his SSI to come through.  We all know this now, though none of us did when this arrangement was first conceived. Until then, we are all just trying to hold on to the moral middle ground.  We gave up trying to walk the high road a long time ago.

Remembrance

I am still thinking about the WVWW, and about the woman whose essay caught us all so off guard with its racism.  In particular, I am thinking of her defense.  “But,” she said, “that’s exactly what happened.”  She defended the use of cartoonish vernacular by saying, “But that’s really what she said,” and even defended a different problem with racism in another person’s work–where race, poverty, and single parenting were conflated with stupidity–by asking, “But what if that’s really the way they are?”

All this thinking has, of course, got me completely muddled.  My first thought is that this seems often to be the defense of the new writer–That’s What Really Happened.  I can remember using it myself when Pinckney Benedict told me something I wrote for his class wasn’t believable.  This was, of course, before age and experience taught me to understand remembrance as subjective.  What I wrote wasn’t what really happened–it was what I, with my flawed memory and singular take on things–remember to have happened, and there is a world of difference between the two things.

I think that’s been the hardest lesson to learn (and for those of you thinking that I’m having a harder time learning to manage my commas, I mean a different sort of difficulty); that I only think things are true, I do not know they are.  Now everything I write about becomes less, not more, concrete.  This is why my husband fades into the background of my writing; I do not want to toss my love–which is, after all, made up mostly of memory and then a little of looking forward–into the washwater.  It would be a horrible thing to have our history stripped of the patina of memory and laid bare. 

And, in the end, I think we are obligated to do that, at least with the facts.  I think that before I say, “My father made Eggs in a Cloud and blueberry muffins, which he laid on a table set with the ridiculous gold-leaf china that no one has used since…” I better write him and make damned sure I’m remembering that correctly.  That the only things I can say without fact-checking them are “… by that late in the evening, I hated my date and my silly dress…” and “…I felt loved after all.”

David Carr–The Anti-Frey?

I’ve long held that those who were shocked to discover James Frey had embellished a good deal of his memoir A Million Little Pieces are either being intentionally naive or a little disingenuous.  Junkies lie for the hell of it; it’s how they bridge the gap between who they are and who they need us to believe them to be.  And so it is with great surprise that I find myself admiring the latest addiction narrative to hit the bookstands; David Carr’s The Night of the Gun.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but I have just read the wonderful piece he wrote about the book for The New York Times.  “Me and My Girls” is deep, compelling look into the process of writing a memoir of addiction; it outlines the careful research Carr undertook in order rebuild a truthful memory of himself at a time when his own memory was faulty and tenuous. 

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs — you need, actually — to keep them at a remove. Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more opportunity to get high.

Carr looked up people who could not have been particularly glad to hear from him and asked them difficult questions it can not have been easy to have answered.  He collected records of all sort covering that time in his life.  He presents his own memory and then corrects it, letting the reader in on the subjectivity of rememberance rather than claiming authority over the story he tells. 

He may just be the Anti-Frey; the one junkie whose story we can trust and, in turn, use to create a reasonable sort of hope for those we love walking this same treacherous path.  Frey gave us the-junkie-as-hero.  Carr gives us the far more complicated, more true story of junkie-as-aspiring-Everyman.

Workshopping…

This weekend I joined a group of other writers–some of them fellow WVU MFA students, but most of them simply writers from around the country–at the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.  It’s always a wonderful (and humbling) experience to get to see so much talent in one place, and it’s a real honor to participate in the work of other people as part of the workshop process.

That said, it is not always easy.

A well-meaning, myopic woman gave us an essay about a simple trip to the local courthouse that became an Odyssey into parts of town she rarely visits.  A wrong turn leads her into an economically depressed area, where she sees an unconscious woman tossed from a car into the road but–seeing the woman eventually rise and stumble into the neighborhood–does not call 911 or offer any assistance.  She asks directions from the Hispanic folk who live in this part of town and is a little put out that “no one speaks English any more.”  She finally makes it to the courthouse, and she recounts for us a long anecdote shared by another woman waiting for her hearing… and, in order to catch the “flavor” of this woman, she writes in a very Joel Chandler Harris sort of high dialect, all “axe” for ask and “dem” for them.  The anecdote eventually winds its way around to why the woman is in the courthouse; by the end of the essay, she is going to jail for a few years.  All of this, the author wants us to know, is very funny.

Only, of course, it’s not funny. 

This woman is not a bigot, although there can be no doubt at all that she is a racist.  (We tried to explain the difference, but I think by that point she’d gone past listening.)  There wasn’t any malice in her writing, only a world-view so myopic that it is impossible to imagine her functioning in the day-to-day world.

We tried, as a group, to be respectful without giving up the point.  She felt attacked, that was clear.  We were surprised when she continued to show up for the workshop, but she did, and I suppose that was brave.

But the young black woman who was also a participant, the one who said that this was the one piece she didn’t have time to read and so did not want to comment, did not return for the final session.  Maybe she had other things to do.  Or maybe she could see that, any minute, this woman was going to turn to her and say, “You don’t think I’m racist, do you?” and just didn’t want to be put in the position of mouth-piece.  Either way, it was a damned shame.  We never got to review her piece, and it was a good piece, too.  One that we could have talked about for a long time, and that had a strong voice and a story to tell that had truths in it.  One that I hope she’ll tell again to people who will be better ready to listen to it.