Category Archives: Seven Years in the Hole

While I was living for those 7 years in my parents’ basement, I took evening classes off and on at the local state college.  I had heard that, if you could get an MA, you could teach in community college, so that’s what I was aiming for in the long run.  I took a class on Henry James because my favorite teacher in college had lectured on The Ambassadors, and while I had just the weekend before read the book (or tried to), the book she lectured on didn’t seem like the book I had read at all.

That wasn’t the first time that had happened.  Sometimes I thought maybe they were just pulling this stuff out of a hat.  In my attempt to read all of the 101 greatest books of the western world, I had set myself to getting through James Joyce’s Ulysses the summer before I went off to college.  I could not make heads or tails of that thing.  Some parts were interesting.  For example, the main character, Bloom, at one point fries up a kidney.  That was interesting because I didn’t know people ate kidneys or even that they were eatable for that matter.

When I heard a lecture on the book in my first year of college, I thought maybe the Professor was on acid (some of them were on acid) because I swear and be damned if I could figure out how Bloom walking up the steps of the Dublin Library was passing through the straits of Scylla’s and Crebedis.  I guess it might have helped had I read the Odyssey, but I hadn’t at that point.

I figured Joyce must have written the book for your worst kind of English major, the kind who thinks they are smart because they know what something “really means.”   Who else would read such a thing?  Like that poem, the Waste Land, that had like 5 foreign languages in it including Sanskrit.  I couldn’t see any reason for writing this stuff unless you were trying to prove how smart you were or to make other people feel stupid.

But The Ambassadors was different.  Stuff wasn’t hidden in it; I just hadn’t got it.  Also, at UCLA, my good buddy, who was drafted later and became catatonic, had made an observation about The Ambassadors in one of the classes, and the fucking Professor had gone out of his way to insult the guy.  I could still see him blushing.  So I signed up for a class on James at the State college to rectify my ignorance and to get some sort of metaphysical revenge on the guy who insulted my buddy.

I took my one and only ever incomplete for that class.  I don’t know why but I wasn’t working for a while and while I wasn’t I read that damn book over and over, and drew like diagrams and charts and all sorts of visual aids to figure out what this guy was going on about.  Finally, I turned in like a 50 page paper and the Professor said, should I wish to get an MA he would happy to work with me since I had already written most of a dissertation.

Life is just fucking contingency like Sartre says.  There’s this, then that, and so on.  Fate has nothing to do with it.  When you are walking through shit, you are just walking through shit, and there’s no hidden meaning to it.

Having arrived in CA in the mid-50s my family witnessed the great boom in development.  Things were relatively stable in Casa De Ora till the mid-sixties.  A small tract went up on our hill.  And in the 70’s the truck farmer out back sold his land for a fortune and houses went in there too.

The top soil in that area varied from about six inches in depth to, depending on the spot, a couple of feet.  Below the topsoil were rock and that stuff we called leche, meaning white like milk, a kind of soil left over from when the whole area had been under water.  You couldn’t grow anything in that stuff.  The developers came in and would terrace the land for their houses and in one afternoon clear off the top soil that had taken maybe a couple thousand years to get there.  And then they would truck in topsoil and put it around the houses so people could grow insane lawns.

One year, during my time in the basement, a white tailed kite, a kind of hawk, showed up towards spring and settled in on one particular branch of one particular tree in a gulley down back.  I guess they called it a kite because it would fly up, face into the wind, and hang there like a kite especially towards evening.  When it spotted something, it would fold its wings and drop like a damn stone and disappear in the weeds.  And then it would pop back up out of the weeds sometimes with a mouse and sometimes with nothing.  Had it not been for that bird I would have had no idea how many mice were in those weeds.

Then it would go to its particular spot on the particular branch of its particular tree.  I observed this spot through a telescope.  It was stained from the bird’s kill.  I don’t really know how the damn bird did it, but having settled in with its prey it would gut the mouse and start to pecking at the entrails almost immediately.

When fall started to settle in, the bird left and went lord knows where; and amazingly it came back to that particular spot and that particular tree and that particular branch for five years in a row.  In the second or third year, I started waiting for the bird in the spring, wondering where it was and would it show up.  And when it did show up, I felt satisfaction.

But one summer, the developers came and with their bulldozers starting filling in the gulley area where the bird had its tree.  I watched as the dirt piled up and up and finally toppled the bird’s tree.  It had been off hunting and I swear, when it came back, that it flew exactly in SPACE to the spot where that tree had been and was no more.  It tried to land in SPACE and began to fly in a troubled manner looking for its tree that lay on its side maybe 15 feet below the spot now in space where the bird always landed.

I don’t know why but I found the whole thing fucking heartbreaking.  I wanted to say, stupid bird, stupid bird, go away.  Your tree is not there.  But it kept trying to find the tree and finally it did.  It even went to its particular spot on its particular branch.  But now it was way too close to the ground.  That day it left and never returned.

I wrote a short story about the incident trying partly to explain to myself why it had affected me so.  I mailed it off and the editor wrote back that it was one of the most overdrawn and hysterical (in the unfunny sense) story he had ever read.  Obviously, I had taken some creative writing courses—which I hadn’t—and had taken from them the worst possible lessons.  And as a final gratuitous insult, said I had the worst pseudonym he had ever seen.