Month: June 2006

Five years or so ago, I called a buddy that I had roomed with for a year in college.  I don’t know what came over me, but I knew he was an iron worker in San Francisco.  So I went to the union web page and there he was working for the union.  They gave me his number and I reached him on his cell as he was driving to check out a job.  We exchanged notes, and when I told him I was married, he laughed and said, “So you finally got over your woman problem?”

 35 years later, he still remembered my “woman problem.”  Maybe that was because whenever the subject came up, I said I had a “woman problem.”  People only know what you tell them about yourself.  The “woman problem” was code for a whole bunch of issues, possibly pathological “shyness,” a “complete lack of self-esteem,” a stunted “emotional development,” an utter lack of experience, upon entering college, in the whole general area.

I was not aware of the full extent of the problem until I was attracted at the end of my first year or maybe the start of my second year in college to Elsa.  First, I had never known anybody named Elsa and second she was exotic looking being a generation removed from one of those little countries near Russia, Estonia maybe or Latvia.  For a while I pretended that the attraction was not really there or that it was not mutual.  But one evening I am studying in the stacks, and I look down the long row of books and there she is sitting at the other end.

So I go down and ask her what’s up, and she says she is there to see me.  Oh, yea, I say, and sit cross legged on the floor, and we talk a bit, and somewhere in there, she asks me what qualities I look for in a woman.  I was dumbfounded; I had never gotten to know a woman well enough to know they had particular qualities.  But off the top of my head, I said, intelligence.  That would be number one? She said.  I didn’t know about that but I couldn’t imagine myself being with a woman that wasn’t smart.

Whereupon, she starts to document how intelligent she is.  Her SAT scores were higher than mine; her high school GPA had been higher than mine.  Her IQ, if you could believe those tests, was higher than mine.  OK, so she was intelligent, but that for me was of secondary importance since I was wondering if maybe I had not acquired, while sitting there, a permanent boner and would never be able to stand up again without embarrassing myself.

In a way that boner might stand symbolically for the very backboner of my “woman problem.”  A) I was not comfortable with the natural process of the boner, and B) the fact that she could look at me and I would get one meant she was in control.  A meant I could not relieve myself of the boner by moving deeper as it were into the relationship, and B meant I could not risk moving deeper into the relationship without possibly losing my mind and flunking out of school.

At the time, I didn’t have an inkling of how much my woman problem was related to my mother and my fear of completely disappearing into that place where boners go.

1968 proved a veritable avalanche of confusion.  Martin Luther King was murdered.  McCarthy knocked off LBJ in the Primaries; then LBJ resigned.   Robert Kennedy knocked off McCarthy in the California Primaries and was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan.

By that time my good buddy and I had an apartment over a garage and a little black and white TV hooked up to an outdoor antenna—not just rabbit ears—and so being in the LA basin we could pick up a number of channels.  We got into watching late night horror movies—mostly vampires, and Frankenstein stuff, but especially Mummies—Return of the Mummy; the Mummy’s Return; Mummy Rising; Mummy’s Revenge—there were an unbelievable number of bad black and white mummy movies.  They were all sponsored by this Ralph Williams who had a car dealership and did his own advertisements.

The Mummy movies were all alike.  These stupid people would unearth the Mummy, and wrapped up usually in big bandages, he would start to pursue the Avatar of his long lost love who had been buried with him.  The poor guy must have been as horney as hell and figured that, given his decayed condition, the only person who would accept him was his own true love.  The poor fuck hadn’t learned that you simply can’t repeat the past; especially when the past is like 3000 years ago.  But there he would be on his dumb journey just like all the rest of us in search of true love and looking to get laid.

 I must have identified with the Mummy.  As I said, at first losing the stigma of my virginity was uplifting but then things got as confusing as ever.  At what point did quantity lead to quality; when did repeated copulation convert to the higher state of marriage.  Or did it?  I just didn’t the fuck know.  In the past, getting the girl knocked up had taken care of the decision for a lot of people, but the pill had taken care of that as a sort of inevitability.  And there was this “free love” stuff in the air, though love is never free.  I was as dumb and stupid as the mummy.

So the Mummy rises again, like a long defunct phallus, and wants to possess his Avatar, his female co-conspirator, but one must asked, who here is possessed really?  One must conclude I believe that the Mummy is possessed by the memory of his true love.  He is in the hands of the compulsion to repeat.  But I unlike the mummy did not wish to possess because that meant being possessed.  I felt something breaking up in my chest and felt rising to my lips, like the Mummy, not words but a grim howl.

 So I turn on the TV to see Kennedy gloat about his victory over McCarthy, whom I had wanted to win.  I scorn him in my heart as an craven opportunist and I start to turn the TV off as he left the podium.  But they are talking about something and then they are screaming, “Kennedy has been shot.”

It was like the Mummy was rising again.

For whatever reason, I had not read in my list of 101 Greatest Books of the Western World much stuff that rhymed.  This wouldn’t have made any difference but for the fact that after I got a D+ on my first paper ever for an English major class the stuff I had to write on was poetry.  Aside from Shakespeare I had not read poetry in high school; and really I didn’t consider Shakespeare poetry just hard English.

Shakespeare has a plot too, but the poetry I had to write on didn’t have any plot.  It was more like that stuff by Robert Frost that people have to read in high school, especially the one about having taken the road less traveled by.  Like it was supposed to mean something and on top of that, at least in the class I was in, the way the poem was put together was supposed to be tied into that meaning.  So I not only had to figure out the meaning; I had to figure out how the way the thing was put together went along with the meaning.

Fuck me, if I could understand it. The teacher wasn’t any help.  So I went to the library, partly to figure out how people wrote in the 20^th century since he had said I should try to write as if I lived in the 20^th century.  He gave us some poems to write on that were not discussed in class, and for some unknown reason I chose a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins.  Maybe I chose it because the poem seemed to have all sorts of special effects that I might talk about as things that went along with the meaning whatever that was.

Excuse me, please.  Here’s the poem I tried to write on.  You don’t have to try to figure out what it means:

 Look at this fucker.  Written up by some sort of overwrought religious fanatic.  I mean he dedicates his poetry to Jesus H. Christ for God’s sake. Now that takes some gall.  I am pretty sure it’s about a bird, like that white tailed kite that lived by the Japanese truck farm.  So we have a religious fanatic who dedicates his poetry to Jesus H. Christ, for God’s sake, writ ing about a bird taking a nose dive after its prey.  Though you wouldn’t know it form lines like:  brute, beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle!  I thought maybe this guy was was beating off in his brain and about to come. But I wasn’t about to write that in my paper.

And dig it, but “stirred for a bird,” has got to be one of the worst lines in the English language.

I had to wade through shit like this to get a B+ in that fucking class, and I almost killed myself trying to do it.

I declared myself an English major because I did well on the verbal part of my SATS and had lousy math teachers.  I played it safe because I didn’t want to flunk out, and I figured I would get to read novels and other books on the list of the 101 Greatest Books of the Western World.  So in the last quarter of my first year in college, I took a special introductory English class for English Majors only.

Needless to say, I was thrown into a state of shock, even panic, when I got my first paper ever that I had written as an English major with a D + on it.  What the plus was for I am not sure.  I had tried hard on it, probably overly hard; but was somewhat hampered by the fact that I had no idea what I was supposed to say or not to say about C.P. Snow’s little essay—much read in those days by English majors—called “The Two Cultures” or something like that.  This article said something like the humanity’s way of looking at things—whatever that was; and the scientific way of looking at things—whatever that was, were not opposed or had more in common than they thought they had.

For my part, I had no idea that these two points of view were in some sort of conflict to begin with.  I liked science for my part.  Once, for some unknown reason, I had read a number of books on ghosts and ghostly phenomena in high school.  I was really impressed by the way poltergeists could bite a person and leave actual teeth marks along WITH SILIVA.  That saliva part suggested I should take poltergeists more seriously than I had.

Then I read a book that analyzed different stories on poltergeists and showed the scientific basis for many ghostly phenomenon in unconscious mental processes.  Take for example those guys in India who could do all sorts of amazing things with their bodies, or those cases of hysterical blindness and such.  I found these scientific explanations about as amazing as the supernatural ones.

I read another book that like “proved” people had past lives by the use of regressive hypnosis.  I thought, if this is true, why the hell haven’t I heard anything about this book before? So I went back to the library and checked out a book right next to the one I had read, and it was a whole book, with different articles by different scientists, refuting the book I had read which had been apparently pretty notorious in its day.  This one was also about unconscious processes and the great power of suggestion.

Where’s the conflict here?  I don’t see any conflict.  Had I been a Hindu maybe I would have been upset with the refutation of the idea of past lives.  But I wasn’t a Hindu.  As for ghosts, whether they existed or not really wouldn’t and didn’t get in the way of my enjoying a good ghost story.  Where’s the conflict?

So lacking anything to say really, I tried to impress the teacher by writing humungous Latinate sentences that went on forever.  He wrote a lot of stuff on that paper, but the thing I remember is: “Write as if you lived in the 20^th century.”

 I thought that was gratuitous really; and fuck me! In any case I thought I was doomed.