A Moveable Famine (11 page)

K
im’s only qualification for the position of radio dispatcher for the Iowa City Police Department was a statuesque figure that looked good in uniform. And yet she got the job. We were ecstatic; we needed the money. Our diet was mostly potatoes, and we had become expert at making hash browns, potato pancakes, and baked potatoes with different garnishes. Kim was glad to have something to do outside the university as her classes with Cheyenne Romanelli in the comparative literature department mystified her. Romanelli, a wild-haired Italian who claimed to be part Algonquin, wore shorts through the winter and answered simple questions with cryptic statements like, “The white buffalo, that’s what I’m talking about! The white buffalo!” On another occasion, he held a canto of Dante in one palm, and a can of peas in the other, and said, “Weigh them, weigh them!”

In her new job, Kim warned friends of coming drug raids and complaints about loud music. The night before my first workshop with Lawson, she called to say neighbors of The Vine were upset about more than the usual rowdiness. Frosty the bartender was drunk and selling pitchers of whiskey. Kim said she would hold off telling the police. I told Ridge I didn’t really want to drink, I wanted to be ready for Lawson’s first class the next day, and I was almost relieved to find that when we arrived, the whiskey supply had been depleted. Instead, Frosty poured us half a pitcher of tequila and a pitcher of beer. On this night, the low-life Vine couldn’t get any lower. Several patrons were sitting against walls, legs apart and mouths open. Two guys rose from a booth, butted heads and crashed into tables, sending tumblers, whiskey and other patrons flying. An hour later, the glass with my beer chaser exploded in my hand, and I went behind the bar to get another as Frosty had abandoned his post. Soon that too exploded, as did a third. Our table was covered with glass and Ridge cut his hand wiping away the shards. I looked around trying to understand what had been happening. Ridge explained I was slamming the glass full force when I emptied it, and he shattered his in illustration.

The next day I trudged off to my long awaited workshop with Mitchell Lawson feeling as if someone had twisted a garrote around my temples. McPeak sat next to me, already in a feisty mood because Lawson stood for everything he despised—form, decorum, restraint. McPeak’s motto was, “Whatever you are criticized for, do it twice as much, it is yourself.” He couldn’t recall whether it came from Jean Cocteau or Clint Eastwood. Lawson was for full responsibility in life and art. And on that day when he walked into the chatter and laughter of the seminar room, Monique shushed us and we all fell silent, as in a court of law. Lawson took the head of the table and placed a legal pad in front of him. He called the roll, nodding to those he knew, squinting at the rest. Then he lifted a yellow pencil, and held it vertically in front of us, saying nothing. We focused on that simple object for several seconds, all of us fixed on it, expectant, nearly hypnotized. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a cylinder with a cone attached. A pencil.”

The room’s taut silence, the almost brittle, glass-like atmosphere was shattered by McPeak, who yelled, “Not so fast! Not so fast!” A few laughed, but most were frozen in the tension. Lawson continued, saying that one end was more important than the other—the end with the eraser. He said it was something he expected us to learn, adding, “Including you, Mr. McPeak.”

The first poem was in syllabics and McPeak asked Lawson in a challenging way about the form. Lawson talked passionately about Yvor Winters telling Thom Gunn to write in seven syllable lines. He invited McPeak to stop by and borrow a collection of essays by Winters and a book by Gunn. A few days later, when McPeak went to the office, Lawson had forgotten his offer. He found Gunn but couldn’t locate Winters and said, “I guess I have to give you something.” He lent him an anthology of imagist poems that McPeak said was lousy, but what annoyed McPeak most was the way Lawson answered his door. “He just said
Come.
Just
Come.
Like I was a dog.”

I told him it was probably habit, nothing personal.

“Talk about being stingy with syllables!” McPeak said. “Would it kill him to add
in
?”

Lawson left the Winters book in McPeak’s mailbox the next week and to my surprise McPeak loved it, talking constantly about poetic convention and morality. He also never returned it. He began to change toward Lawson, saying, “There’s something to be learned from the man.” He sat at Lawson’s right hand, paying full attention, unlike his other classes where he leafed through
Downbeat.

One winter afternoon, the power went out in EPB and our classroom was freezing. Lawson seemed particularly cold and his hands shook as he shuffled his papers and expressed his aggravation at the building manager. We sat bundled in coats and hats reading by the sunlit windows. McPeak, who had driven from Illinois, drank coffee from the red lid of a towering plaid thermos. The steam crept toward Lawson’s chin and he glanced over at it several times, which McPeak noticed.

“Would you like some hot coffee, Mitch?”

The offer seemed almost maternal—it was the word
hot
, the way a mother would offer specific comfort and also show her importance. Lawson smiled. “That would be very nice,” he said, shifting in his icy seat.

McPeak went to the dark lounge and returned with a cup. Lawson leaned away from the table as McPeak unscrewed the cap and poured. A spiral of brown liquid snaked toward the Styrofoam and all eyes watched McPeak as he held the thermos vertically in front of our teacher to coax out the coffee but managing only an inch.

“I thought there was more in it,” he said. “I couldn’t tell. It’s heavy even when it’s empty.” He whirled it around in a futile spiral.

Lawson seemed angrier at the half ounce of coffee than at the failed power.

“That’s the problem with this,” McPeak said, continuing to shake the thermos as if motion could refill it.

Lawson looked at McPeak and said what sounded like, “Thank.”

Minutes later he canceled class and said he’d be in his office if anyone wanted to meet him, but no one dared. I walked downtown with McPeak who berated himself as he slapped the thermos against his thigh. He blamed Lawson for not having his own coffee. He blamed his wife for possibly having helped herself to his thermos that morning. He blamed the Thermos company for making such a heavy product and then he blamed himself for offering it at all to such a curmudgeon and then he circled back to blaming the curmudgeon.

We went to Epstein’s used bookshop and McPeak did what he always did when upset. He bought a book by Henry Miller. He had gone through the novels and was on to the essays. He took
The Cosmological Eye
from the shelf, which I thought would put him in a better mood, but as I walked him to his car, he started in on Lawson again.

“You know, John,” he said, “he was mad that he had to depend on someone, the way Ahab was pissed for having to rely on a carpenter for a new leg. I’m the carpenter and he’s the pissed-off Ahab who hates human interdependency.”

The next week a note appeared on the bulletin board:

Students who have borrowed books from me, please return them—not for myself, but for others like you. ML

I was standing next to McPeak and we read it together. McPeak whipped out his pen and wrote
NO
under Lawson’s initials.

The next day, Lawson replied:

Whoever wrote NO please come and see me. ML

McPeak took out his pen again.
NO
.

A full paragraph by Lawson appeared. It was against the coward who wrote
NO,
the one who refused to accept responsibility and, because of his craven and thieving conduct, his refusal to own up to his own words, would never become a poet. ML.

Barkhausen had gotten into mild trouble because a student named Kristen Ward had been murdered in a dormitory, an unsolved crime that set both the town and university on edge. When Barkhausen gave a major exam to his freshmen, they begged and begged for an extra credit question, and he finally agreed. They sat with pens poised as he said, “Who killed Kristen Ward?” The class gasped and a student complained to the Chair.

Ridge said to me, “It’s a shame you never got to teach when a lunatic like Barkhausen runs a class.”

“You should have written shorter lines,” Pryor advised. “Lawson likes short lines. And syllabics. You should have tried syllabics.”

“You guys don’t write like that,” I said.

“We’re different. We came with aid. You had to catch their eye, like Barkhausen did.”

McPeak said, “You know Roman Tedington? He sells poems to the
Christian Science Monitor
for a hundred bucks. He told me it’s the title that counts, you’ve got to call them something spiritual like, “Under the Shadow of a Larger Hand.”

Without speaking, we took out pieces of paper and began writing descriptions of nature with titles like “Always Present” and “Thankful Beings,” but we did not repeat the success we had with
Rolling Stone.

Harvey arrived at our Problems in Modern Poetry class in a bad mood because the
New Yorker
had rejected his poems. He had told Ridge he was certain they’d be taken because they mentioned water, and poems in the
New Yorker
always mentioned water. He couldn’t find a good line in our work, dispiriting us so much that we began to fight among ourselves. One poem featured a black kid swinging on a park’s monkey bars “like an ape.” When criticized, the poet denied comparing the child to an ape, saying, “he was just
swinging
like an ape.” The workshop’s most vociferous feminist wrote a villanelle containing the line, “That’s me, the girl with the mouth full of truth.” McPeak suggested she edit it to “That’s me, the girl with the mouth,” and Ridge recommended “The Girl with the Mouth” as the title of her thesis. She stomped out and three women followed. I was next, and very happy with my poem, “The Sadness of Music,” in three sections, the longest I’d done. Harvey made fun of part one, tore it from the page, walked around the table and handed it to me. He did the same with the other two, laughing the whole time, as if he and I were sharing a tremendous joke. By the time he had shredded the poem, he was in a good mood. I was not upset, just puzzled. At Fairfield, I had a similar experience. I had taped a cartoon from the
Village Voice
to my dormitory room door—Tomi Ungerer’s “Kiss for Peace” which showed the Statue of Liberty bent over and lifting a gown made of the American flag, and a US soldier forcing a scrawny Vietnamese man to kiss the statue’s naked butt. When Father Faye, the hall prefect who spouted Latin phrases, saw it, he tore the square into strips and put them into his pocket. I told him he had vandalized my property.

“Quid nunc
?” he said.

“You had no right to remove that cartoon.”

“Yes, I did. This is my hall.”

“You didn’t have to destroy it.”

“I
could
have given it back to you, maybe I should have,” he said.

“I’ll take it, even if it’s torn,” I said.

“I do it ex gratia,” he said, reaching into his pocket.

“And I believe it cum grano salis.”

He looked surprised, as if I could rival him in Latin, which I couldn’t. I knew only a few phrases. My stark cartoon had changed from a square of newsprint into a banner, a banner I had overly imbued with meaning, but a banner nevertheless, and a banner I wanted to wave, even in shreds, but I didn’t feel the same way about my poem. I was sure it deserved to be destroyed.

When I got home, Kim was still at the library trying to do a writing exercise called “squaring the circle” for Romanelli. Sometimes he made the class read fairy tales starting with the last paragraph and working forward to expose the author’s hidden intention. She had left me a note that began, “Dear Snaggle-Tooth.” It sent me to the mirror. How could I have never noticed my front teeth did not align? Why hadn’t I noticed my poems were deformed as well? I was tired and disgusted because the night before I had worked hard on another poem, and that one, too, in three sections! Harvey was right. I couldn’t sustain a narrative. And he had joked that the length of your poems equaled your sexual duration. That poem revealed too much about me. It should have been torn up, along with everything I’d done. Torn up and thrown away.

I lay on the itchy rust-colored couch and had a dream in which Belinda Schaeffer was visiting New York City in the summer and asked me to show her around. She had never been to the Hamptons, so I promised to take her to a special place for dinner. I looked through the
New York Times,
selected a four-star restaurant with great reviews, and made a reservation. To make sure I wouldn’t get lost, I drove there early in the week, found the address on Main Street and approached its wooden exterior, thick leaded windows and great brass doorknobs. I shielded my eyes from the sunlight and peered in. The tables and chairs were shrouded in sheets, and a tarpaulin covered the bar. Everything not hidden by cloth was coated with dust. I couldn’t understand it, since I had just phoned. It was hot, and I felt dizzy as I stepped into the bright street. I walked to a barbershop where I asked about the restaurant. The barber said, “A beautiful place, but it’s been closed for years. For years.” When I told him I had made a reservation the week before, he looked at me like I was crazy.

I woke with the bewilderment and fatigue that big dreams bring, feeling not only that I had run a long distance, but had fought through a foreign world. When I replayed the events, I recalled the name of the restaurant.
Moi-Meme.
Untranslated in the dream, I had to use my scarce French to puzzle it out.
Myself! Myself!
How could I be so unaware of myself? “The unexamined life is not worth living” and “Know thy self” were two staples from my introductory philosophy courses. Once at Fairfield I passed Professor Lou Berrone on the stairs. I was heading to the second floor for philosophy and he was talking to a student about
Ulysses.
He stopped at the landing, and turned to me, saying, “Take John. He likes dark clothes. Blues and browns. He isn’t fussy—look at his loose tie. He doesn’t polish his shoes and needs a haircut.” Students were rushing, edging and squeezing past. The student looked from Lou to me and back to Lou. “Joyce took note of every fiber in a character’s appearance—
the ineluctable modality of the visible.
” Minutes later, Father Canavan introduced Aquinas’s notion of God as an unmoved mover and, as he spoke, I examined myself more closely than if I stood before a mirror. I wondered about the meaning of my rough shoes, the pilled wool on my sleeves, my miniscule handwriting. Canavan kept proving the existence of God through logic, trumpeting his conclusions with the word
Therefore!
The priest’s high-minded syllogisms punctuated my own servile thoughts. I was proving my existence by choosing not to listen.
Therefore!
Proof of God was simple, but I kept thinking,
What made me like this?
Canavan again boomed
Therefore!
A dreamer dreaming an abstract, wan dream of sex because he never had a girlfriend.
Ergo!
the priest resounded. Awakened on a flight of stairs between Joyce and Aquinas, but to what? To the fact that I existed and I did not exist, like the penis on the underside of the mechanical canary.