Herewith another excerpt from the memoir in progress. Who says there are no more new frontiers? Oh yeah, it was The Eagles, in “Desperado.” What do they know? The Dude got that right.
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I
Who’s the crazy one here? My mother made me ask that question every day of my adult life, which began at age eight, just after she stopped beating me for fun and right around when she started losing her shit for real, headed for electroshock. I knew it was her until, at the age of fourteen, I was fired from a job as a liquor store stock boy because the owner thought I was crazy. He actually explained his decision on those grounds.
“Jimmy, you work hard, but you’re a little crazy, you know what I mean? You never stop talking, doesn’t matter who’s in front of you, a customer, me, Al over here, and he’s your friend. You worry me. I mean, sometimes you gotta be quiet, do your job, you know? You can’t keep talking. Like I said, you’re a little crazy. So I’m a let you go, I need some peace and quiet in this place. I got a check for you.”
“OK,” I said, and I laughed, not entirely mystified by this kindly lecture. I looked over at Al, my best friend. He shrugged, but he also smiled because he was in on the joke, he shared our employer’s opinion. I suppose I was in on it, too, then as now. I guess a lot of people shared our opinion of me, then and now, but I’ve never quite understood why—I think of myself as a normal person who is slightly more excitable than everybody else. I mean, OK, I grew up to be a drunkard and an adulterer, a thief and a professor, a criminal and a scholar, a likable guy you’d probably regret meeting. But still.
My mother had the same opinion of herself, normal but excitable. We both acted like prisoners who couldn’t explain what kept us confined—we were rebels without a clue. Her rebellion made her crazy, literally and clinically hysterical like the women Sigmund Freud (mis)treated at the end of the 19th century, or like the suburban housewives Betty Friedan described toward the end of the 20th. But before you accuse him or her or me of misogyny, remember that hysteria is a rational response to bondage. Like apathy, or anger.
Bondage to what? That is the question. In my mother’s case, to marriage and family. She never wanted children, she once told me. We were drinking beer on the patio, having cleared the flower beds and planted the garden. It was Spring Break, 1971, and we were talking about Marx because I was in the thrall of a conversion experience to radical politics, having been expelled from college and found another intellectual refuge. She was fascinated by the idea that external, structural constraints on behavior produced social roles that individuals could enthusiastically embrace, for good or ill.
“I never planned on children—I never wanted them,” she exclaimed. She was looking right at me, her second born, the middle child. But I already knew she never wanted me, as a child, or to be a child, so she couldn’t hurt my feelings, not anymore. “I mean, I didn’t think, ‘I want to have children!,’” she said. “It was just what happened when you got married. And everybody got married.” This was a year before the diagnosis of breast cancer and her decision to go back to school to complete her nursing degree. She died five years later at 52, still short of the credits she needed to become a nurse.
My mother’s inarticulate rebellion against marriage and family finally made her crazy. This is not metaphor—she wound up lashed to a gurney with paddles on her temples, arching and screaming and drooling as 450 volts pierced her brain. My rebellion made me sullen, angry, and stupid. I was always holding a gun to my own head, out of regret or guilt, shame or fear. We both suffered from what D. H. Lawrence once called the “slavish malevolence of the domesticated animal”— the malevolence that manifests as spasms of resistance to the captivity we had gladly imposed on ourselves.
I like to think that on that spring day out back she was trying to explain why she was a mother who refused mothering—why she had children she pretty much ignored unless she was angry or drunk, usually both. I like to think that on that day I was learning to let her off the hook, to see those “structural constraints” as more silent, invisible, and insidious than anything I would ever know, or even understand. I hope, for her sake and mine, that I’m right about that day. My hopes rest in part on Carolyn Kay Steedman’s claim that a refusal of mothering is a refusal to reproduce yourself—to perpetuate yourself. So conceived, the most selfless thing you can do is to avoid the opportunity to have children. Deciding to be motherless, or childless, is something like suicide. It’s a way to assert real control of your life, just yours, not anybody else’s.
But marriage and family and mothering—that was just what women did then, even those who had gone to college, like my fatherless mother had. A photograph of her and her sorority sisters taken at Carthage College in 1942 suggests the origins, and perhaps the depths, of her indifference. A dozen women in various states of ill-fitting housewifely costume, wooden spoons and mixing bowls in hand, have gathered on the porch of a dormitory, almost all sporting huge curlers (antlers?) in their hair, most of them laughing. The signs they carry say “In College: Looking for a Husband.” Or “Seeking Position as Housewife.”
They know what the marriage market is, and they know they can’t escape it, not even as privileged students in a private school, and they want the men to know they feel uncowed even though they know they’re being herded toward a deadly pasture. My mother is at the outer edge of that photograph (far right), unsmiling, as if she already hears the suffocating silence of the suburbs that would strand her. The curlers rise six inches above her head, making her look like a modern Medusa. But she’s holding up her pathetic sign.
I never wanted children, either. Or rather, I never decided that becoming a father was a good idea, not after knocking up my high-school sweetheart and then giving the child up for adoption instead of getting married. But I kept getting married, didn’t I, three times in all? What exactly was the point of marrying if not to procreate, reproduce, and otherwise replenish the earth? What was the point except to relive the guilt of illegitimacy?
Got me. I was married for 35 years of my adult life, most of it, and I still don’t know why. My grown-up children—they’re both now thirty-something—won’t speak to me, and my own brother still thinks I’m morally suspect simply because I fled the marriage that produced these people.
I suppose I should have known I wasn’t cut out to be a good father on the eve of departure for my first tenure-track job, as a real professor, at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. My third wife had roused herself at 3:00 AM to breast feed our first-born, a two-week old baby boy who hardly slept. I was leaving at 9:00 AM with the dog, driving it in one day through the Smoky Mountains, and she’d follow by air the next day, child in tow.
I couldn’t sleep with all the commotion, anyway, so I lit a cigarette and joined her in the living room of our apartment on Oakdale off Sheffield in Chicago, five blocks south of Wrigley Field. She asked for a glass of water, so I went to the kitchen, grabbed an Old Style, and lit another cigarette. I was trying to quell the unmistakable symptoms of panic—nausea, sweat, and shakes—with no success.
I brought her the glass of water and put my second cigarette in the ashtray alongside the first while I gulped the beer.
“I can’t do this, I don’t think I can do this,” I said, my voice cracking even at a decibel below normal.
“You can’t do what?”
“This, this waking up every two hours, this not sleeping, I mean, I can’t think anymore, I walk around all day wondering what the fuck I’m doing, where I am. I can’t think. But if I can’t think, I can’t write, and if I can’t write I don’t get tenure, and if I don’t get tenure, we’re fucked, we’re stuck in North Carolina, you know, like, the South, where everything’s on cinder blocks in the front yard, believe me, I was there, it’s fucking terrifying. You know how you make fun of refrigerators on front porches? Well, your neighbors in Charlotte put their appliances right there, it’s like they want to show off, for God’s sake, Beverly fucking Hillbillies without irony.”
“I still don’t know what you can’t do.” She was way too calm, speaking softly, soothingly, as if she were whispering to an unbroken horse or talking a determined suicide off a ledge. My panic intensified. I lit another cigarette, finished off the Old Style, went for another.
“This, this children thing!” I said on my way to the kitchen, where I lit another cigarette with shaking hands. I returned to the living room, inhaling deeply. “I don’t know if I’m ready to sacrifice everything to this little, this little . . . bundle of joy. You know what I mean? I mean, what happens to us? What happens to me? Do our lives take a back seat to this, this child?”
I looked at my son with more alarm than affection.
“Well, of course. We’re parents now.” She said this with the kind of calm, stoic conviction I had hitherto seen only on screen, Gary Cooper in “High Noon” maybe, when the weight of the past determines the entirety of your future, and you accept the burden. At that moment, she had gravitas. I had nothing except another beer and one more cigarette.
“Run,” I heard my mother say, as always—she’d been saying it since I was 17: “Now’s the time, get out.” I had just told her my high-school sweetheart was pregnant. She was looking out the kitchen window, speaking to herself.
As always, I stayed, wondering how to punish myself in her absence, wondering how to love something or someone you hate. How to stay with what contradicts and torments you, knowing that your faith will abide even, perhaps especially, as it is violated? When I couldn’t answer this question, the marriage was over.
That morning, at the very start of parenthood, that was the beginning of the ending. I never figured out how to put my kids before all else because I didn’t want to, and said so. My wife never figured it out, either, which is why she let me raise her kids while she was off carving out a career at New York publishing houses—but at least she wanted to. So we foundered on the reef of our own children. Or rather, I abandoned ship.
That’s a stupid metaphor. I ran away, as always, doing what my mother told me to do. But why? Why can’t I stay? Is it because I’ve always known I won’t last? Or do I? Running from a way of life can turn into a way of life, as Greil Marcus observed in trying to measure the meaning of the unsettled territories for us unbound Americans—old Huck Finn, who was always lightin’ out for ‘em, has got nothing on me.
II
During my three years wasted at a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin—the same one my mother attended—I survived the football team, the fraternity I joined, and the gunfight in Madison. I went there to play football, but I knew I wanted to be a writer, somehow, so I quit the team a week before the first game. (According to the depth chart, I would have started as the right outside linebacker.) Also, I was slightly distracted by the knowledge that my high school girlfriend was pregnant. Meanwhile, I pledged a fraternity.
The fraternity was a locker room writ large, a good way to ease myself into the life of an ex-jock. Everybody got to be exactly the asshole he wanted to be in high school. Me, too. Mainly I wanted to read and sulk and drink some more, like real writers did. I never went to class, but I took the tests, and I filled dozens of notebooks with short stories, sketches, poems, overtures to novels—hundreds of earnest, disposable pages I left in a dumpster on my way out of Wisconsin.
After three years my grade point average was 1.75, and I had 60 hours of credit. (I hadn’t been drafted because my lottery number was 296.) I was a combination of town drunk and court jester—an amiable ironist—except that I kept getting in fights with both townies and fraternity brothers. I put one of the brothers in the hospital by kicking him in the face after I floored him with a lucky right cross. (He had nearly run me over with his car earlier that night, in a panicked flight from a local bar.) Another one of the brothers stopped this assault by choking me like a cop does, until I was unconscious.
Finally the dean of students, a former Air Force pilot whose office bristled with plastic models of jet fighters—of course he barked sentences as if they were orders—expelled me. On this occasion, though, he slowed down and spoke with what I took to be sadness.
“Livingston,” he said, “You don’t belong here. You’re not college material. You just don’t have what it takes.”
I nodded, having heard this before from my high school counselor, Jerry Meyer, who had urged me to pursue a promising future in plumbing or automobile repair. But I moved my ass around on the chair, anyway, and addressed the dean of students, the former pilot: “What does it take, sir? Can you tell me?” Like Holden, I wasn’t being a smartass, I was genuinely curious, totally sincere.
“Get out of my office,” he said.
I left Carthage College for good that day. But this ignominious exit happened after the gunfight in Madison.
My last year at Carthage, I was the rush chairman of the fraternity, which means you recruit pledges in the fall semester, and then shepherd the little bastards through their ordeal—their hazing and initiation—in the spring. It was the last time I took any responsibility in an administrative position until, thirty years later, I became vice-chair of graduate education in the department of History at Rutgers University. Similar responsibilities, recruitment and hand-holding.
One of the wizened traditions my fraternity nurtured was the walk-out, a weekend excursion when the pledges “kidnap” a brother and head out of town, to be followed, maybe, by active members in a pantomime of a medieval carnival, when the peasants turned the world upside down. The kidnapped brother that spring was John Phillips, who would be my best man the first time I got married—to that once-pregnant high school girlfriend—and who, after a career at Johnson Wax which placed him in London for three years as the director of Human Resources, would end his life in an advanced state of dementia, bagging groceries in Racine, Wisconsin. His nickname was “Bubbles.”
I went along for the ride that spring as the rush chairman, but, unlike a chaperone at a bachelor party, I was a participant-observer, an anthropologist avant la lettre. There is nothing to focus the mind so well as a ritualized binge—carefully planned excess turns idiocy into a compact event, what, with hindsight, we can call a celebration. Like a wedding, the fraternity walk-out meets this need for sober retrospect, when you realize that you’ve done something stupid, but in a good cause.
I was in the lead car with Phillips and three pledges (there were four cars and seventeen guys altogether). We pulled into a parking deck in downtown Madison, our destination, and just as we swung into a space, a car full of drunken townies cut us off. A promising start!
We pile out of the car and start mixing it up with these shitheads, but it’s an even match, more like a scrum than a brawl, and nothing like what you’ve seen on screen. In these situations, you tend to square off, back off, and let the really angry guys draw blood. And so it devolved that night. Nobody was much interested in getting bloody, one way or the other.
But then one of them opens the trunk, straps on a holster, pulls out a gun, a real revolver, an old-time six-shooter, and fires a shot in the air.
“Now what, motherfuckers?” he says as the concrete replies with thunderous approval.
We quickly agree that the parking space is theirs. By this time our flotilla of cars has filled out, but not even seventeen drunken frat boys—we had a cooler of beer in each car for the trip from Kenosha—are stupid enough to charge a man with a loaded gun. So we find another parking deck and choose a bar. An hour later we’re laughing about this uncanny event.
A couple of the pledges are from Madison, and they recommend we leave downtown and head for a roadhouse east of town. “They got music, dancing, women, or we could start a fight,” one of them explains.
So we head out on a four-lane highway, Phillips is driving and I’m riding shotgun. We’re still laughing when the shitheads whiz past us. The guy with the gun is waving it out the passenger window as if he’s a cowboy shooting up a cattle town in a bad Western. For some reason, Phillips accelerates and pulls up alongside the other car—he doesn’t yell anything, he just looks over at the guy with the gun, then slows down.
Their driver slows down, too, so we’re neck and neck, and the guy with the gun raises it, points it at us, and smiles. This time Phillips flips him the bird and speeds off. Now it’s a car chase right out of “Bullitt” or “The French Connection,” but we’re by far the faster vehicle and there’s no other traffic.
“Why the fuck did you do that, John, are you fucking crazy?” I scream this over the impossible sound of the engine, a 1965 Chevy Malibu, a four-barrel V8 with 220 horsepower.
He doesn’t respond, he’s concentrating too hard on driving. One of the pledges in the back seat yells ,“Your turn is coming up on the right, you’ll see the sign, it’s like a dirt road!” Phillips cuts the lights.
I look back, no headlights coming over the hill, so as Phillips makes the turn, I’m hoping we’ve lost the shitheads. We careen into the parking lot and scramble out of the car, but here they come, spitting dirt and gravel as they spin past the tall grass that surrounds the place.
I say “Run!”—have I become my mother, already?—and the pledges take off. Phillips and I watch as the guy with the gun gets out of the car and walks toward us, no smile now. We back toward the exterior wall of the bar, our hands instinctively raised, I look over at John and think, “Don’t do anything stupid,” and I realize I’m addressing myself.
The guy says, “I got a gun, don’t you get that? What, you gonna outsmart me, college boys? Gonna outrun the bullet? You think this is a movie?”
Now he’s close. I notice that nobody except him has left the car, and it’s still running. I also notice that he’s pointing the revolver at my forehead, and that the distance between the barrel and my face is approximately 18 inches. That puts him roughly five feet away from me. These are the mundane calculations you make when there’s a gun to your head.
And I notice that Phillips, four feet to my left, is inching away from me. The guy moves the barrel of the gun to John’s forehead and says “Stand still motherfucker, I swear I’ll fucking kill you.”
I take a baby step to my right and the barrel swings back, the guy says, “I’m a kill you too,” and now I’m wondering if he really means it. I think, “Am I going to die here in Madison, Wisconsin, on a field trip with my fraternity brothers? What’s the matter with me? Why am I here?” These are the questions you ask when there’s a gun to your head.
Phillips moves again, and I slump a little as the barrel moves back toward him because now I know we’re both dead, but then John grabs the guy’s wrist and points the gun up, just like in the movies, and, just like at the movies, I watch the scene unfold as if I’m not in it, as if slow motion is real time, then finally I reach out and grab the guy’s other wrist, step backward, start pulling him to his left, swinging him in a close arc, hammer-throw style, just one circuit until his face hits the driver’s side door of the car he came in.
He falls backward, more or less unconscious, into my arms, so I heave him onto the hood of the car face down. I turn around, I’m about to faint, and there’s Phillips twirling the six-shooter like he’s a gunfighter. Nobody in the car has moved.
“What the fuck, John, what the fuck was that? You almost got me killed, man, Jesus fucking Christ, what, are you crazy? This is not the wild fucking West, this is fucking Wisconsin, you understand me?”
“You can have the holster,” Phillips says, “I’m taking the gun.”
The guy on the hood of the car stirs, he turns over onto his back, he moans, he says, “Can I have my gun, man, it’s like an heirloom, you know, it’s been in my family a long time, it’s kind of important to me, you know what I mean?”
I laugh hysterically, I’m still about to faint. I look over at Phillips, and then back at the heir apparent, and I decide to beat the shit out of the guy without the gun. I start, and his face is pulp real quick, but I stop because John says, “Enough, leave him alone, we got the gun.”
I left Wisconsin for good a couple months later. I didn’t see Phillips again until I got married, but we corresponded meanwhile—I still have his letters from Camp Lejeune, where he completed basic infantry training for the Marine Corps, calling it “a teenagers’ race war” organized by the officers in their midst.
After the wedding, though, I never saw him again. I tracked his wife down 30 years later, when I heard from an old fraternity brother that John was dead, of dementia. I talked to her on the phone, mostly exchanging pleasantries until I asked her how it was toward the end.
She said, “It was pretty bad. He didn’t know me. The kids, either. Everybody was a stranger. Even the brothers who visited, David, Tommy. . . . Nothing. He was cheerful, like always, you remember that about him. He didn’t even know he was ‘incapacitated.’ Went to his job at the Kroger every day, just like he went to his job at Johnson Wax. And then he couldn’t find his way home.”
I finally asked about the gun. She said, “Yeah, he kept it all these years. Must’ve told that story a million times . . . He always said he was glad it was you there alongside him, because you were the crazy one.”
Sterling Hayden, John Garfield, Richard Basehart?