The Other (26 page)

That fall, while I was taking Introduction to Pedagogy, Developing Curriculum, and Strategies in Evaluation, John William was—for example—approximating soap out of fire-pit ash, grease reserved from a salami I’d brought him, rainwater, and salt. I remember pulling into his camp on a Saturday and finding him at this effort. He said it was his third try; rodents and insects had gotten one batch, and his recipe had been off for another. His beard was full of ash as he leaned over the fire, hair falling dangerously close to the flames, and measured out grease and lye water. On a flat rock nearby were lined up empty cans, into which he planned to pour his mixture.

In his second winter in the woods, my friend got chilblains and a toenail fungus. I brought him a half-dozen pairs of fresh socks, a bottle of Benadryl, new felt-lined pac boots, and a vial of anti-fungal cream. Bearing these interventions on a day of deep snow, I found him with his hair cut down to the nubs; his scalp itched, and he’d thought a close clipping might help. Did he have ringworm? I wasn’t sure, looking at the little bald patches and red, irritated areas on his skull, but since it couldn’t hurt, I suggested he try some of the anti-fungal cream I’d brought for his toenails. I had it in me to play doctor, I guess, though my aptitude was limited to pulling splinters and delivering specious diagnoses, two services I provided to John William. He benefited also from my pharmaceutical-supply service, which included codeine, ibuprofen, cortisone, some amoxicillin I’d been prescribed for an infection but didn’t use, dandruff shampoo, mercurochrome, and psilocybin.

That’s right—we tripped up there. Psilocybin mushrooms are so ubiquitous in Seattle that you can pluck them from the grass in the shade of trees at Ravenna Park, for example. Roosevelt students used to do exactly that, and probably still do. We could be deliriously stoned and still ID ’shrooms because of the way their stems turned definitively blue about a minute after they were picked. It was best to be selective and take the richly hued ones with veils breaking loose if you wanted a potent trip. Psilocybin not only froze well in baggies, it was also prized as a trade commodity by users too clueless to pick their own but flush with bud, coke, or hash. Do I sound like an expert? I am one. That old guy at the front of the class, pointing at the word “synecdoche” on the blackboard while wearing orthopedic Birkenstocks: you should probably suspect that he used to trip, because, no matter what he looks like today, he probably did.

John William’s mushroom trip was cousin to his acid nightmare. He got the shakes, got sick, turned green, and started panting, and then crawled into his sleeping bag and tried to ride it out by keeping his head covered and mumbling to himself. As for me, everything was funny. I’d try not to laugh at nothing, but it couldn’t be done. Later, I got deeply into the weave of my friend’s mats. Next, I put the ladder down and wandered through the forest, looking at trees. The long branches of the cedars with their voluptuous greens were the spirit of the Miss December who enjoyed hunting in a thong. I lay in moss, emitting foghorn notes. Creeped out by lichen where it hung like fake cobwebs, I wove my way through it in a delicate dance, thinking that made me invisible to spirits. Finally, I went back and checked on John William, first by poking him with a stick through his sleeping bag, then by manipulating his head from left to right and right to left while pulling on his beard. Feeling him move, I decided he wasn’t dead. Next, I mopped up his vomit with the remains of a sweater and flung it out of the cave. For a while, I sat with my knees up and my back against a wall, making those foghorn notes I’d made in the forest but with an interest now in the cave’s sonic architecture, its tomblike acoustics, listening to my reverb, and remembering the Roman catacombs I’d visited the summer I met Jamie. I’d been chanting for a while when John William said, between notes, “Please stop.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m dying, Neil.”

“You want water while you’re dying?”

“Just stop that weird noise.”

I got a canteen and put it by his head, but he didn’t drink, so I had to uncork the canteen, pull him upright by the beard, and pour water between his lips as best I could. A lot spilled. His face and hair got wet. When I dropped him again, I said, “Try to go with it or something.”

“Never again—they’re punishing me.”

“Right.”

“I’m seeing too clearly,” John William mumbled. “I don’t want to see this clearly.”

“Okay.”

“Jehovah,” he wept. “Jehovah’s got me.”

I
DID MY STUDENT TEACHING
at Garfield High (the Bulldogs), which I knew, mostly, as the school Hendrix never graduated from. For some reason, I was assigned to teach English as a Second Language to kids newly arrived from “Indochina,” even though I had no idea how to do this. On my first day, in a sweltering portable, I stood at the front of my class and, with ten fingers against my chest, said “Teacher,” and then wrote “teacher” on the board and repeated it, and next went up and down the rows making these kids point at me and say “Teacher,” and as they did I shook hands with each and looked each in the eye and smiled, thinking this was the right thing to do. As it turned out, all of them knew what “teacher” meant, not to mention a lot of other words, even whole sentences, and so they rightly felt what we were doing was a waste of time. I found out about this at the end of my third day as “teacher,” when a group of girls, maybe six or seven, pushed a student named Quyen in my direction and stood behind her, looking at the floor or peeking at me from behind Quyen’s shoulders, while Quyen said, as boldly as she could, “Mr. Countryman, you teach
harder.
”

One day, one of my students said, “Mr. Countryman, why bad scar on your hand?” and I told the class I’d made a blood pact when I was younger, and tried to describe a blood pact in simple language, the cutting of the palms and the mingling of blood, the solemnity surrounding this masochistic ritual, but it didn’t seem to me that the concept was understood, and the only comment I got from a student was “Dangerous—you get hepatitis.” After Thanksgiving, I decided that they should memorize poems and recite them in class, and that by this means we could work on the cadences of English and the subtleties of its American inflection, because these were sticking points for them. So as not to overwhelm anybody, I started with haiku, which, I had to explain, was a Japanese word, but that only caused new layers of confusion. Discombobulated, I tried to define scansion, but this was obviously completely off the subject and prompted Quyen to observe, using a word I hadn’t taught her, “You intellectual today, Mr. Countryman.” “Year after year / on the monkey’s face / a monkey face,” I said, getting deeper into scansion, but of course that left them more stumped. I gave up on haiku and tried hitting them with quatrains—“In Canada’s North / It is very cold / Eskimos go forth / But there is no mold”—before giving up on poems and turning instead to movies. We would watch a short scene three or four times in succession, from
The Christmas Coal Mine Miracle
or
The Adventures of the Wilderness Family,
and then I would hand out mimeographed scripts and, after pairing up students, force them to re-enact. Mimicry ensued.

One night, Jamie suggested Dick’s Drive-In in Wallingford for French fries and tartar sauce. We sat in the Datsun lobbing fries onto the hood for combative pigeons while listening to AM radio and watching the Dick’s crew, in white paper hats, orange company T-shirts, and grease-fouled aprons, work madly behind glass to meet the burger demand. In short: hamburger world. The parking lot smelled like a deep-fryer. It was summer, eleven-thirty on a Friday, and there were a lot of stoned teen-agers lined up at the windows. I went to get some extra napkins, and while I tried to work them free of their dispenser, a Sid Vicious look-alike leaned down and sideways, so as to be heard more clearly through the half-oval pass-through. Over a microphone, his order was succinctly repeated, and when he tipped his head in confirmation I heard, “Two chee fry Coke!” in a female voice, and then “Two chee fry Coke!” repeated by a male. I got in the car and told Jamie about this, that I thought “Two chee fry Coke!” was high comedy, and she said, while finishing her fries, “Guess what? I’m pregnant,” and wiped her fingers on my jeans.

Our funds were consolidated. We started going to open houses, learned real-estate lingo, took cards, but avoided agents. The search for the right home always left me with bad feelings. I would read the literature handed out at an open house and feel antagonized. “Quiet, woodsy setting.” “Spacious slate entry.” “Custom upgrades.” “Designer touches.” If we asked enough questions, a listing agent might say, looking us over as we stood in a foyer, “Do you think you qualify for financing?” Then, in the car, I would complain to Jamie—“Do you think you qualify for financing? What’s with that?”—and we’d move on to the next house, me disdainfully, Jamie with either morning sickness or a yearning for fries. In this mode, we discovered our bungalow. “Bungalow” sounds Raj, or British Civil Service, like iced tea on the veranda while a Punjabi domestic in baggy white cotton waves a palm leaf and calls you “sahib.” Our bungalow, though, has horizontal siding and no frills. When we came on it in 1979, the sellers had recently added a ranch-house carport that was already so mildewed their agent wrote “Could easily be turned into a full garage” on the promotional circular. The house had been rehabbed in the mid-sixties with some “Colonial Revival” modifications, mainly a second floor and a gambrel roof, but still, in character, it remained a bungalow—that is, unadorned, maybe even homely. What made us buy such a motley excuse for architecture? We bought it because we could buy it outright with a little left over for property taxes, and because we fancied ourselves capable of converting this “promising fixer-upper” into something wonderful—or, as they say in home decorating, “It had good bones.” Plus, we were suckers. “Our” bungalow—it was ours before we bought it—had a modest veranda we thought of as charming. We could imagine sitting there in rocking chairs after dinner while passing the baby between us. It usually doesn’t take any more than that to sell a house. One matching myth and you’re ready for escrow. Everything else can be rationalized later. That’s what we did.

On the Wednesday morning after Labor Day in 1979, I walked out the door of our bungalow at seven, unlocked my new ten-speed from where it was cable-locked to a veranda support, and rode to school in my dress shoes and sweater vest with a hulking briefcase from Value Village strapped to the rat-trap by a bungee cord. Thirty minutes later, I took over Room 104 from a teacher named Janet West, an Elizabethan specialist who’d been good enough to leave behind her files, and who sent me postcards that fall—delivered to my teacher’s box—from Aruba, Reykjavík, and Ulan Bator, the capital of Outer Mongolia. On each she wrote, “Wish you were here,” followed by, successively, “Aspirin is our friend,” “Have you tried Scream Therapy?” and, finally, “Are we all happy in our chosen profession?”

I had to miss school on the day in April when our son was born, but other than that I never needed a substitute, and garnered a reputation as an eager beaver who started when the bell rang and wouldn’t allow bathroom trips. Someone would say, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and my answer would be, “I do, too,” and, without further ado, I’d return smugly to Melville. Then, one day, a girl shot back, “You don’t get it, C. I really have to go. It’s a girl thing,” and walked out. A few minutes later, a boy raised his hand and said, “C, I got this boy thing,” and walked out, too, and after that I decided not to have such a hard-and-fast policy about bathroom trips.

My second semester, I taught Modern English Literature, a class I’ve mentioned already. I was supposed to start with Hopkins and teach through Pinter, but there was some room, in between, for a few narrow choices—Sassoon or Owen, for example, or Kipling or Conrad, because there wasn’t time for both. My preference was for Conrad, but when I read the Kipling story in
England in Literature
—“The Miracle of Purun Bhagat”—I changed my thinking. A Brahmin of no small accomplishment and acclaim drops everything, takes up a begging bowl, and wanders into the Himalaya, where he inhabits a deserted shrine to the goddess Kali, who, a footnote in
England in Literature
explains, is “malignant…the black one, garlanded with skulls.” He’s fed corn, rice, red pepper, fish, bannocks, ginger, and honey by villagers, until he dies, cross-legged, with his back against a tree, and then these villagers build a temple and bring offerings, “but they do not know,” Kipling concludes, “that the saint of their worship is the late Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., D.C.L., Ph.D., etc., once prime minister of the progressive and enlightened state of Mohiniwala, and honorary or corresponding member of more learned and scientific societies than will ever do any good in this world or the next.”

Was this fair of me? I had my own reasons for choosing Kipling over Conrad, but no one knew this, and I could discuss “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” with my students as if our discussion was an exercise in literary history, instead of a veiled way for me to ask myself if John William made sense. I taught Kipling every year for two decades.