Life / My Generation
Exile and Exploration
Getting Serious
Youth - A Recap
by Robert St. John Gray
All things are possible to the brash youth in his first foray into the world, once he gets his feet wet. Now he knows the ropes, and feels comfortable hobnobbing with the great and powerful, or with the lowly and streetwise. He walks with angels and demons, matching them stride for stride.
With psychic powers turned up high, he converses by night with Nixon, Hitler, Lucifer himself. Accosted by Steppenwolf in the guise of a Frisco wharf rat, he maintains his innocent smile. Drives Nate Thurman's Rolls, barely managing to reach the pedals; sleeps with the boss's daughter. Buys a hot little sportscar convertible, spins out on a mountain road between cliff and cliff, dances in the streets of Hollywood. An avant-garde artiste and darling of the new theatre, he appears on cable TV and wows the old ladies of the Mt. Davidson Easter Sunrise Society. He takes a breather in the Nevada desert, the Yosemite snow-swept wilds, the Tahoe ski-hills.
Oil embargo! - Step right up, he'll fill your quota of gas today. Hearst kidnapped! - he'll read it hot from the Berkeley newstand. Watergate! - he'll check out the testimony live from his air freight office, between pages of Jung and The Last Temptation of Christ.
He can apply to sell ingots for the Kaiser Steel empire, and then volunteer in the dusty courtyard of the free school to teach children arts. He can paint your bathroom or exterior siding, service your airplane or send your car through the speed-wash. When he loses his new job he can go back to his old one, find free housing with old friends.
He can spend a chill night on a wilderness ridge among lions and wolves; take the part of the police lieutenant in Arsenic and Old Lace. Truly, all things are possible . . .
This footloose felix is you; you are he; so to you I say, explore, young man, while you're in the West! Glory in the expansiveness of your condition, your culture and stage of life, the era in which you live. Write your poems and have a class of dancers perform them to your taste; direct the gifted generation-to-come, in ritual dramas of your selection. Dream of Allen Ginsberg, and the next day walk beside him to his poetry reading in your neighborhood. Accept the gift of stolen drugs, pop a few shamelessly, and watch as nothing happens.
Fall asleep while driving the Bay Bridge in the middle of the night - see if God cares. He does, it turns out. Why? You don't know. You spin the roulette wheel, calling 4. 4 comes up. Delighted, you try 5. 5 arrives. Pushing your luck, you call 6 - why not? And by now more delighted than shocked with the ease of it all, you watch the ball wobble and bounce, and land - in 6. Appalled with the possibilities, you go to Reno where your buddy works, and try the wheel. The cards. The dice. Nothing's going your way. Down to your last nickel, you drop it in the slot, pull the long greasy handle. It chinks through its gears, clunks home; the little pictures whirr: and you see fifteen bucks worth of change come tumbling out at your feet. Okay, a new stake. Back to the crap table, and with three throws you walk away eighty dollars richer, in a mood to use the last of those free drink tickets.
You've come from Baltimore to Oakland: and so does the American league baseball crown. You go to watch them meet in the playoffs, predict correctly the game-winning hitter and pitcher, then in the parking lot after the game, stand in mad passionate rapture with your date, while the crowd walks past in another world.
It's all very nice with her for a while, but not going anywhere because you've already made plans to move on. Thing is, the traffic's got to be a bit too much. You're tired of pumping gas, of teaching kids for the love of art. You've had your days of revelation on the foggy cliffs beside the Golden Gate. You've trod the distant mountains now, and their call is under your skin . . .
And so he retreats to the still pellucid grove of academe, where his jarred senses and world-honed ego can be soothed once more in the dreamy tones of poesy, the abstract ruminations of finer-tuned souls. Here he can escape the rat race of the city, the traffic jams, the singles bars, the hucksters and mad-eyed preachers of the streets, the jive and the hustle and the double-cross.
He can find his mushrooms wild here, in the tangled Canadian bush: no matter that he still doesn't have positive identification; they pass through him without effect. Again, he is lucky; no further ahead, but neither behind. Another day passes, another year, another phase of his life. When he meets somebody this time, he begins to think it may be time to get serious. Not that she's Miss Perfect, but maybe she'll do - maybe she's good enough. Maybe good enough is good enough. Who knows, unless you try?
Getting Serious
Culture took a dive after the heady days of the sixties. With the seventies it came down to Elton John and Burt Reynolds, sideburns and early disco. I gave up pop culture and decided to hit the books for real.
Giving up was becoming a habit: I’d tried city life and gave up;
tried country life and gave up; tried cocaine and gave it up; tried to give
up marijuana and gave up
trying; tried to learn to play music and gave up; dreamed I might live without
a conventional (e.g., academic) job and finally gave up. Once back in university
I faced the final test, my singlehood. It was only a matter of time.
There were two young women in my poetry classes that had caught my interest. One was named Joan, the other Joanne. Both wrote poetry on the side - instant common ground with me. Both liked to go for coffee and cinnamon buns after class, or for the odd beer in the evening. Both were more or less local - Joan from Sooke, and Joanne from a Victoria neighborhood. I flirted with both (not usually together), trading off at a whim, going first to a movie with Joan, then a concert with Joanne, then to dinner at Joan's, then for a hike with Joanne . . .
Joanne had the edge because she shared both the undergraduate courses with me. She had a quick mind, a razor wit. I appreciated that she brought out the worldly, social being in me; always talking politics or literary forms or financial investments. On the other hand, she seemed less intent on my affections. Unless she was playing hard to get, which I thought possible.
Joan was stockier, plumper, wore glasses. She had a softer, more rounded appearance and effect on me. I felt I connected with her more closely on a poetic level. She served me excellent coq-au-vin, with more white wine to follow and we ended up, one evening, grappling passionately on the floor at the head of the stairs in her Victoria apartment.
A couple of days afterward I found myself confronted by a determined Joanne in the SUB-pub, each of us with beer in hand. She asked me how I'd spent my Saturday night. I told her. She drew the whole truth out of me, as one would boat a large, sluggish fish. She glared at me with steel-blue eyes - Prussian blue, taking her genealogy into account. Up till this time she'd played me at a distance. You couldn't tell who was playing whom, for that matter, who was the fisher and who was the fish. But now she laid her cards on the table, and called my hand.
I trotted out my usual lines about liking both of them. Each had qualities I enjoyed, that I hoped to continue enjoying . . .
"No, William. A menage-a-trois will just not work. Not with me, anyhow."
Joanne had a double major, English and French.
"What's a menage-a-trois?"
"Guess."
"Uh, something about the three of us, I presume."
"Very good, for a graduate student. I was beginning to think you know-it-all Americans had never heard of French."
I knew she was baiting me again. I was used to it; that was part of her charm. That scathing wit, in fact, was one of Joanne's most attractive qualities. Her ironic perversity of spirit was, like the nature here, so distinctively Canadian. Joan was more American in spirit - more one-dimensionally romantic.
The developing choice was complicated by Joanne's flirtatious nature. For a while she had kept dropping hints about "hustling Circe": a small, quick-minded young scholar in one of our classes, so named because of a report on the Aeniad he'd impressed her with in a previous course. The notion that he might have more on the ball academically than me - he seemed cut out for the role I was playing - only spurred my competitive urges. Like a dog with something in his teeth, I didn't want to let Joanne go to him. It would have made my self-image pale by implication.
Joan, meanwhile, was ripe for the taking, as our wine-soaked kisses after the coq-au-vin at her apartment testified. But she was, like the Filipino slut, almost too easy. As a poet and sensitive soul like I felt myself to be deep down, she was perhaps too much like me, or would reinforce that side of me that wanted to withdraw from the world into a cave, a remote inlet, a poet's cottage. Together in a life like that, we would rot together into a heady compost.
If I had to choose one or the other, then I could see life with Joanne would definitely be more stressful . . . but also more interesting. I took the bait.
The next night I took her to see Lady Sings the Blues, and afterwards in the snow she looked triumphant; though my mind was on Joan, and on Billie Holliday's tragedy.
For a Christmas journey home I began with a train trip across snowy Canada. Thousands of miles of shaggy conifers with stars above the skylight of the club car, and the guys playing guitar and smoking joints there, while the conductor comes up, sniffs the air and shakes his head, and disappears again. I tried to hitchhike on the highway out of Montreal in a blizzard at midnight without success, gave up and took refuge in a jazz club for a while, and then slept in the bus station before the final leg to Baltimore.
While at home I received a Christmas card from Joanne which ended thusly: "You won't be back before the end of the first week, will you? I mean, I want that time to try my hand at hustling Circe (HA HA). I know, it wouldn't bother you anyway. Bye for now."
My first weekend back at Rainbow St., I spent a day out in the fields helping Old MacDonald look for a missing cow. In the end we gave up and went ahead loading the other 34, one by one, lasso on the neck, dragging each unwilling beast up the ramp of the truck to be piled in, eight to a load. We didn't finish until ten o'clock, but I did get a good beef dinner afterwards.
It wasn't until the following weekend that Joe finally located the wandering cow in a neighboring pasture. This time it took us all day to drag it back home. That cow was crazy wild, like a mad bull or rhino, so I stook guard while she stood tied to a tree in the woods, and Joe came back and forth with grain, extra ropes, tranquilizer, a more friendly cow, finally coffee for me, and some extra help. By dark we finally had her.
In the spring came a more upsetting episode, when another cow was due to give birth, and I was told to keep an eye on her. I went about my daily chores as usual, not really paying much attention to the individual cows, as I had an upcoming thesis topic to decide on, and various meaningless but recurring squabbles with Joanne nagging at me.
Then one afternoon after classes, Joe called to me from the lower corner of the field where the pregnant cow was in labor. His arms were in the cow up to his biceps, as he tried to help the calf out. Apparently the calf was dead - stillborn, though not yet born. And it was not budging much. After an hour of anguished tugging, the calf finally came out, but trailing the bawling mother cow's guts with it. Joe had to put the cow out of her misery with a shot to the head; he dug a huge hole with the tractor in the field and buried her in it.
The city of Victoria, they say, is home to the "newly wed and nearly dead." I had a vision one day on a downtown street corner, where I was surrounded by crowds of people three times my age, of what it must be like to live in heaven.
Usually I stuck to the environs of the university and its nearby Rainbow Street farm. When I'd had my fill of the tobacco-reeking seminar rooms or tiny study carrels in the library, I would gladly take refuge in the thick undergrowth of the wild woods, where I would follow faint animal trails and immerse myself in thoughtless desolation.
The problem of the thesis was partially resolved with the awarding of a grant for a second year's study, allowing me to avoid cramming the whole master's degree into a single year. Still, I had to come up with a topic.
It was a fairly clear choice to settle on BC's own poet of nature, Earle Birney. Birney had begun his long career with a well-known poem about a tragic mountain climbing accident, and had gone on to increasingly ironic and complex treatments of my favorite theme, man and nature. As for a good focus of study, I was stumped until one night I realized I could turn to my old friend Dr. Ching.
Of course, such a consultation was still essentially subjective, but the hexagram I threw, describing "Nourishment," directly suggested the topic that Canadian writer and critic Margaret Atwood had recently popularized with her study of the national literature - Survival. To that basic angle I added my pet interests in literary criticism, the study of irony, arriving at the final title, Ironic Survival.
As in my literary studies, so in my life. Balancing out my indulgence in such "abstract crap," as Joanne scornfully referred to it, I took care of the business of my own survival when summer arrived, by doing landscape work for a professor of military history. Otherwise at risk of riding too high on the wordy ideals of a past generation of romantic thinkers, or more contemporary poetic fancies and fanciers, I set to work mucking out the creek bed, weeding flowerbeds, raking leaves.
This earthy labor replaced my farm chores, as I moved on from the farm to a basement apartment in a suburban neighborhood. Meanwhile I supplemented my academic work with extra-curricular summer school courses in Spanish and Native American literature.
And I took every opportunity to immerse myself in the wider world of British Columbia's natural landscape. Joanne and I hiked around Christmas Hill in my old neighborhood, or along the Gorge waterway near where she lived in her parents' house. Or I drove out on my own to Sooke and explored the rocky shores of Point No Point.
One weekend I decided to go up to Cowichan Lake, with a hit of acid that had come my way - for old time's sake. Driving the logging roads that wound around the lake, through clearcuts that went on forever, took me back to my drive in Oregon trying to find where the potters lived. In this case my problem turned out to be, not so much the mildly elevating acid, but running low on gas as I negotiated the labyrinth of logging roads that all looked the same. In this respect I also recalled my last adventure with peyote in the Oregon mountains, tracked by the cougar. And once more, miraculously I found my way back out to the highway, just before dark and running on empty. It was my last acid trip.
In September I began my masters work in earnest, with thesis research along with more courses in Canadian and American literature. At this time I also heard from my old friend Fred, corresponding from the East Coast:
In boston I got on TV, was accosted amidst 100 degree temps. in harvard square & asked before cameras if I thought an athlete should get paid 100 grand a yr - I gave a pseudo-intellectual rap off the top of my head, quoted Spinoza's "under the aspect of eternity," concluded by saying I didn't know & didn't care - four hours later we watched this film on TV in a boston bar - cheap thrills -
My own claim to fame came shortly thereafter, when Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Ed Broadbent spoke to a packed UVic auditorium, during an election campaign. The NDP was popular then on campus, and the Federal party had some progressive (sometimes called "socialist") policies worth supporting. For some reason - maybe a random news report on the radio, or some bug in my bonnet left over from the days of hearing in my Dartmouth American History course about massacres of Indians - I was concerned with a current topic about BC aboriginal land claims, and at question time was able to ask big Ed what the NDP was doing (or why they weren't doing anything, or in fact what their policy was) about native land claims in BC. When he tried the usual politician's waffling I interrupted to ask it again and he tried the same bullshit and I tried again and he finally went on to another questioner instead, and I sat down hotheaded and frustrated and proud I'd at least made a point. Though I suppose to him, and possibly to the rest of the audience, it was just another point-no-point.
At the end of September I went to visit my high school buddy Steve, who was now studying law in Missoula, Montana. We attempted to revive some of our old classic Mickey Mouse baseball game rivalry, but it wasn't the same with a live-in partner around, his wife Julie. On my return to Victoria I wrote him of the adventures that transpired on the trip home . . .
The Girls on the Bus
On the way back I hitchhiked across the border with some young native guys who were drinking beer and stopped for more in Cranbrook when we got across. The second day got me to Nelson, across long Kootenay Lake on a night ferry and to town riding with a real nice superbly freaky lady and little kid. She put me up for the night, and up, and up . . .
I was off the next day still farther in mountains, over dry valleys to camp again. Desert was beautiful (BC has everything) even standing 2 hours for a ride - which took me straight to downtown Vancouver and the bus to the ferry.
Freaks, drunks, Indians, farmers, knowledgeable people out of school, nice people out of church, good people all over, and my spirits were really high. Then who should sit next to me on the bus but a pretty nice looking girl, acting curiously both old and young. A girlfriend was with her in a seat in front of us. Then on the ferry I went up to the third deck to look for a place to sit down to smoke a joint laid on me by my last ride, and sat next to a similar freak alone. At nightfall on the outside deck we toked in dim view of the old ladies in the restaurant at our backs, and I could tell right away from his accent that he was from "Phiwwy" - enroute round the world. Anyway, it got cold so we wandered inside to sit down, and found our way into a hallway inhabited by the two girls from the bus. So we sat down on the carpet with them, blocking the passage of waiters and captains, and found in an hour's conversation that these girls were no less than the daughters of the Premier of the province and his Minister of Rehabilitation. Not sure whether to believe, we continued as if nothing was strange, but knew from their patrician personalities and natural grace for their age (10th grade) that this was the real thing.
I'm still freaked by that chance meeting, especially considering a dream I had about 2-3 weeks ago whereby I met Premier Barrett and was accepted into his confidence, then his "kitchen cabinet." Which brings up another point by this guy Jay, that the psychics say a major movement of consciousness (upward, outward) is due this year and next, especially in September. Which agrees with these incredible people I met in my travels, anyway - and reminds me, by contrast, of the guy who drove me the 5 miles to the border point in Montana, a lawyer who clings to his isolated condition and smirked pretty loudly when I offered your services to the region of his sacred territory.
Jay was way out there with his own psychic aura. He plays with a jazz group in "Phiwwy" - I asked him what instrument and he just said "voice," demonstrating all kinds of cool licks. Sitting with him in face-to-face meditation at one point in his white van parked outside my residence, his eyes looked right through me and I asked him what he was seeing, and he said other planets where music extends from one to the other like jazz, player to player and note to note, and in frequencies of rhythm.
So I haven't done any work except one day since I've been back, between bullshit academic and domestic errands and "entertaining" Jay, who started with a one-day visit and stayed four. As it happened, he fell in love with an amazing 16-year-old chick he met downtown twice, brought here for dinner one night, and invited me to visit with him at her house . . . that was a scene. Mama comes home, sees us "men," hippies at least, blows her stack about contributions to delinquency, threatens to call the cops, at least, demands our names and addresses (refused on the grounds . . .) and takes my license number as we drive off with her daughter into the sunset of her paranoid morality. Well, they did arrange a couple of hours in my bed while I was at school. As it turns out, Jay (24) is on his way to SF and then Europe, but plans to come back for her when she's legal. Can't really blame him. I could have sworn she was 22-23.
Anyway, Joanne's parents happened to arrive in town from Yuma Arizona (with 3 days notice - whew!) to settle some insurance claim. They plan to stay a month; and we are in the dilemma of no longer being able to quasi-live-together. The question is to lie low for a month or to blow our cover and go from there (probably out into the cold world together, homeless, penniless, motherless children).
Well that's about what's happening here. Creative and critical pursuits per se have given way to "life" in the raw, the mysterious way, the daylight whirl that colors the night of the usual mind. And it's pretty nice . . . but here comes the ritually ceremonious quotidian "WHEAT" of Woody Allen's perfectly distorted imagination, otherwise known as "reality" (Go see "Love and Death").
After Jay's departure, I was left to my own academic devices. Gone was the inspiration from East Coast homeland and cosmic spaces, the tales of Django Reinhardt and visions of Jay's 16-year-old gypsy twirling in free dance on the beach.
I was granted another small vision, one golden fall day, walking between classes in the forest surrounding the campus. Through tangled underbrush, thick entwining growth now dying, I squirrel my way through tunnels of thorns, winding wood . . . and find on the path before my feet, mushrooms. I've heard the local psylocybin mushrooms described before, tan caps that turn purple at the stem when pinched off. I pinch one off. The stem is . . . maybe purple, it's hard to tell. The caps are definitely brownish, call it tan. I gather a bunch and put them in a baggie I've stowed in my pocket from an earlier snack of trail mix.
Later I decided to give them a try - a risk reminiscent of the stolen horse caps given to me in Oakand, that I popped with no effect. My personal brand of good/bad luck (depending on one's perspective), repeated itself with this experiment.
April 1976, graduation loomed with the completion of the thesis, and the "real world" beyond the cozy gates of academia once again threatened with its chaos of economic imperatives.
I dreamed, one night, my recurrent nightmare of having a term paper overdue, a math exam missed with no studying done, and all my days tumbling down like the fires of the gone sun under the blotted horizon of a steely sky.
I awoke with the palpable realization that the time was near to jettison my paltry self out of the pillars of pride and artifice into the wide, wide, flat and unredemptive world, the world of life not art, of money unbeautiful, of deadly jobs and meaningless games, of tortuous "vacations" and hobbling amusements the masses pushed and pulled out of their hats while muttering curses to a God reluctant to speak on their behalf . . . and there I would be dragged down, down into the hard-baked plains of famine and industrial decay, where my spirit would perish like the ashes of so many burned books.
Hard on this dream of desolation came another nightmare vision of the following shape and substance.
THE DESERTED PLAYGROUND
Under the swings, the dust blew in playful swirls. We rode by in our old black Chevy, wondering why we never saw anyone there, in such a nice park by the sea. The oyster shells grew in great sprawling heaps, but we never say anyone digging or even wandering along that shore. There was an old ship that looked like it was turned into a restaurant, beached up near the road, but no lights shone from it at night and today the sun gleamed from its dull gray paint.
Mom and Dad were home playing bridge with the Robinsons, and we were just out for a joyride. They’d said be back at six for dinner, and the shadows and the orange sun said it was probably about seven, but this was a nice drive and the road went on forever. I couldn’t remember ever playing on those swings, but we must have because that was always the nearest playground and I do remember Mom and Dad telling us, as kids, directions for walking there.
I’d had old dreams again the previous night, dreams about a six-foot cockroach who wore sunglasses and drank ice-tea outside my window. As soon as I closed my eyes he climbed in and stood there, shuffling a pack of battered cards. I said go away, we don’t want any, trying to be funny, but he just grinned through his black teeth. I wondered where he got those sunglasses; I’d never seen gold ones before. Then he sat against the wall opposite my bed, spread his legs in front of him, and started playing solitaire.
Out on the rough road that turned into dirt as it curved away inland, we saw a fat possum waddling out of our way, and we leaned out and jeered at it. It just turned its head back for a quick glance but in that look was spiteful anger. He must not have realized who built this road, our tax dollars! Well, Mom’s and Dad’s, anyway.
Judy said look at the trees, and we saw that their arms were waving at us, and their eyes sparkled through the leaves. Jack shifted down for a sharp upward curve and we saw the tops of the trees bristling under a bird’s-egg-blue sky. Clouds were growing pink in the east, and my stomach rumbled.Back home they were probably cleaning up the bridge table, wiping up drink rings and bickering about the last lead that lost the rubber and who wasn’t going to get dessert if they ever made it home for dinner. In front of us opening in a great plain were millions of stumps. Jack stopped the car so we could get out and play.
The game was simple. First you plant your electroplosive at the base of the stump, then run to the next one and stand on top of it and say NINE! before the stump collapses. When that happens you can jump down into the hole--but if you don’t make it fast enough you lose three points. If you jump in the hole and can hide all the way down in it then you get six points, and if just your head sticks out you get four. The thing is to get up on the second stump fast, and to get down in the hole from the first stump fast. Caught in between either way, you lose three points, and they’ll know because the green wind will sting you.
I don’t know why the green wind doesn’t like stumps or stump-holes--it just won’t go near them. They taught us in school that the green wind used to like trees, but it must be mad now that the trees are gone. Mom and Dad said they had a picnic under one once, before they were married, but ants came out from the trunk and crawled all over their food so they got up and Dad took out his axe and hacked that tree down. He said he wished they’d had electroplosives in those days.
Anyway, the green wind doesn’t hurt, but it does make your skin get cold and yellowy, so everyone knows you lose three points. When the yellow fades it just leaves a spot each time so you can keep track. If it gets your hair with your head sticking out of a hole it’ll go all stiff and wiry, and you look kind of funny. But that’s not too bad so you still get four points. They way you keep track of positive points is not really up to you, but the green wind knows and they say someday the more credits you have the better off you’ll be in the end. The only trouble is, no one knows when the end is either, and you just have to trust the green wind. But I do know if you go yellow all over, you don’t even get to play any more, and they keep you in your room.
Dad went to a baseball game one time and my Mom stayed home and watched it on TV, so she could see him. But there were so many people in the crowd, all she could see was a blur of tiny dots, and she wondered what they did to Dad. He came back that night and said it was strange, he was the only one there, and they played anyway, and he cheered for the home team, and booed the visitors and the umps, and his voice echoed alone in the shadows of the huge stadium. After the game the visiting pitcher tipped his hat to my dad and disappeared into the dugout. The players showered and went home, and Dad stayed and waited in his seat. Finally he got tired of waiting and walked down the ramps to his car, and all these other cars full of yellow faces were coming into the parking lot, but it was late so he kept driving away and came home. Then my mom said oh my God, and covered her face in her hands, and Dad looked into a yellow mirror, and Mom cried into her hands, and they were yellow, and I came down and turned off the yellow TV. Outside the wind was blowing through the power lines, like singing.
We kids were lucky when they came out with electroplosives, because we were starting to get scared when all the grownups were going all yellow. Someone figured out that it had something to do with the green wind, and the old trees, and axes, so they invented a point-system and turned it into a game and gave us kids electroplosives so we could play outside without going yellow. Really I think they just wanted to get rid of all the trees and didn’t want to do it themselves, because they were scared.
Those of us who waited until the second round were luckier than the ones who played the first, because they had to take care of the full-sized trees, and didn’t really know how to go about it. At first they just told them, well, you’d get extra points the higher you climbed on the trees to plant your electroplosives. I guess they thought they could get away with blowing off the tops of the trees, satisfying the green wind, and still have the trees grow back. But the kids should have figured out something was fishy when they didn’t even tell them how many extra points you would get, or how high you had to climb.
The green wind just froze those guys right to the trunks, with no warning. Then some kids got smart and thought they didn’t need all those extra points anyway, so they just blew the trees off near the ground. When the trees came down, the kids who were stuck on them shattered into sandy-like sawdust. The green wind blew it all away during the night, and between rounds somebody came by to electro-plode the dead trees. Those guys got collapsed, too, when the green wind touched off the electroplosives left in their pockets. That’s why we carry them now on golden chains, that swing in the wind.
When it was getting dark we got back in the car and headed home. As we came down towards the deserted playground by the sea, we heard oyster shells rustling, but there didn’t seem to be anyone around, and the wind wasn’t even blowing. Then this old possum waddled out from under a heap of shells, and that big black cockroach crawled away from behind a stump and skittered down toward the swings. The possum stopped in the sandbox to look for snails, but there weren’t any so he yelled over to the cockroach to race him to the slide. The cockroach said no thanks, I’m not falling for that slide trick again, you know I’m too slick, now, I’m too slick for you, you old possum.
The possum stuck his long red tongue out and gave the cockroach the raspberries, walked over to the slide himself, climbed up the steps and stood at the top. The cockroach went on down to the swings, settled on one of the seats, facing out to sea, and swung slowly. By this time a green wind was coming up--you could see the waves rippling and the possum’s fur, too, and they looked out to sea. Jack had opened the door quietly and walked over across the road from where we were stopped, and was about to throw an oyster shell at the possum when he saw the wind coming up again and turned to run back. We yelled out--NO! You don’t have time; get to the stump!--But there was only one stump. The cockroach turned around, took off his sunglasses, and grinned through those black teeth.
We forgot that there had to be two stumps so you could make a hole to jump into; Jack just stood there when the green wind came. He turned yellow and looked sad and walked slowly back to the car when the wind died down. I took the wheel, we drove Jack home…and I think that cockroach is still laughing.
Was this a true vision of the world I was walking into? Or just another childish fantasy? Maybe the correct term was one I coined to describe Earle Birney's darkening vision of human prospects during the course of his career which had spanned my lifetime: "justified paranoia."
At graduation (my two-year program ended simultaneously with Joanne's four-year program) we faced a dilemma. Without teaching certificates, we had to search the country for jobs in private schools and community colleges. Each of us sent out some five hundred applications and we awaited the responses, thinking to choose whichever offers overlapped. None did. In fact I had only a couple of favorable replies, which when followed up, proved dead ends. Being still American, with my student visa running out in the summer and no work visa to replace it, didn't help. To get one I'd need a firm job offer; but it seemed that to land a job would require a visa. Catch-22. The one way around it was to get "landed immigrant" status. And that was most likely accomplished by marrying a Canadian.
But Joanne would have none of that. It was too transparent - a threat to her insecurity about how much I loved her for who she was, independent of her citizenship. I'd have to prove my genuine personal loyalty to her first. But how, if I couldn't support myself to stay in the country?
She'd got a couple of job offers in BC and Saskatchewan, but really wanted to be in Quebec, where she'd spent a couple of summers working in shops. If a teaching job failed to materialize there, she could always get by with a salesclerk or chambermaid job again. And in fact by the time the summer started, she'd arranged to work in Quebec City at least during the month of August while continuing to pursue teaching jobs.
Meanwhile I had to pursue some viable alternatives, so I'd applied to a couple of PhD programs, including one in Toronto and one in Washington State. But the Toronto option fell through, and I was left with WSU, in Pullman at the southeast corner of the state. So close to Idaho, I felt it had to be in a place of natural beauty and that, at least, was some consolation with the prospect of two to four more years of study in the stacks. The key factor, of course, was money: I could earn seven thousand dollars with a teaching assistantship.
"If you get accepted," Joanne urged me, "you should go for it," - though it meant I'd have to leave her on her own in Quebec.
Our future - either separately or together - was up in the air, but we set out anyway on a cross-country migration in Joanne's brand-new red VW Rabbit, a gift from her parents. We thought it prudent to keep them in the dark about our cohabiting ways, however, so I made an initial detour up island in my old Chevy, deposited it in the care of Joanne's friend Merrilee, and then proceeded to rendezvous with Joanne in Vancouver for the rest of the journey east.
Our first night out of Vancouver we paid a visit to my fellow master's graduate Peter Russell and his young wife, in the rural suburb of Cultus Lake where they had just taken up residence. Peter, in his sixties and with a flowing crop of silver-white hair and beard, was an eccentric and entertaining genius. Besides being an associate of Ezra Pound in Italy, he was an erudite and passionate poet in his own right, who, fueled by copious quantities of cheap red wine and poisonous Gauloise cigarettes, wept over his own poems . . . tossing his long white hair and beard and looking at us (the wife who had heard it all before, no doubt numerous times, had long since retired) over tortoise-shell glasses with his liquid blue eyes.
He was a gracious host who had served us ham and wine and then sat up with us half the night talking poetry and aesthetic philosophy and tales of Ezra and firsthand stories also of digging wooly mammoths in Siberia, and classical interpretations of roses, and on and on . . . while the cat gnawed at the ham left out on the counter. Joanne and I sat listening, sipping wine, drinking in as much of the great man's words as we could manage, and letting the rest sail like exotic music over our heads.
As it happened, the study of Pound's masterwork, The Cantos, was a prime choice of mine for further study in the scenario of continuing with the PhD program ("Pound's Cantos as Prophecy: Apocalypse or Revelation?"). Alternative topics I was considering included such diverse themes as . . .
- 20th Century Shelley Criticism: Transcendence or Despair?
- Fiction and Drama of e e cummings: Poetry or Prose?
- Stevens's War Poetry: Commitment or Escape?
- Modern Utopian Literature: Does it exist?
- The Great American Pastime: The Baseball Book
Last but not least, I was drifting back (in Literature or Life?) to where I had begun in my journey north to Canada two years previously: to Jack Kerouac and his ever-quixotic spirit . . . On the Road.
