A Moveable Famine (29 page)

I met with Stanley when he came to judge the applications. He said he heard I had a lot of girlfriends. I joked that I loved women.

“You must love poetry more,” he said.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
IX

WORMS—A TEACHING JOB—DUNE PICNIC—LOST AT LAND AND LOST AT LAND’S END

I
n late spring, Provincetown’s forsythia, daffodils, and crocuses came to life and I savored my remaining days by walking frequently from the Bull Ring to land’s end. Getting into the shower one afternoon, I discovered two tiny worms writhing in my crotch. I immediately thought of Cookie and Valley. They had infected me with a disease that was eating me alive. I had turned into a maggot-eaten piece of decaying meat exactly like Maupassant. I didn’t care that I knew the poetry-writing doctor and his nurse. I put the worms in a plastic bag and hurried to the Drop-In Center. I had to give my reason for the visit and I put “VD.” I showed him the bag, and he knocked the worms onto a piece of paper. One had died, but the other moved hump-like across the page.

“These are inchworms,” he said. “They’re falling from the trees this time of year.” He couldn’t stop smiling. “They somehow got into your pants.”

I dressed, relieved not to be being eaten by worms. When I paid the five dollars, the girl at the cashier bit her lip and the nurse came out and made a stupid face.

Ridge finished his year of teaching at McGuire, and the English Department, happy to have a National Book Award nominee, gave him the fall term off. He called one morning and told me I could replace him. Although I hadn’t taught a day, I would be a visiting assistant professor at a salary of $6,250 for the fifteen weeks, an enormous sum compared to the Work Center stipend. He said that if I published a book, a permanent job might open up. He mentioned that with all the competition, a poet didn’t only have to be good, he had to be lucky. I went to the Work Center to share my news. Stanley congratulated me, and Kurt shook my hand in the common room where he was posting the results of the second-year applications. The outside jurors had chosen Barkhausen.

“Not only will the Center be better off for his selection, the town will be as well,” Stanley sang. And it was true. Barkhausen had knitted himself into the community, friends with firemen, cops, and shop owners. He had joined The Beachcombers, the male social club that met every Saturday when one member cooked dinner for all. The year before, I was invited by Vince, but declined because I didn’t want to belong to a club that didn’t allow women. We were in the Fo’c’sle when Vince asked me. Vince then turned to Dugan who said the same thing, but added, “I’m a feminist.” Everyone laughed, thinking a man couldn’t be a feminist, but when Dugan said it again, in that deadly voice, the table fell silent. A man could be a feminist.

Vince got a six-figure advance for his book on Pancho Villa and threw a party in the dunes. Cole Randle, a deaf-mute from Louisiana and the town’s best chef, fashioned huge grills from oil drums for barbecuing. Cole was also the town’s best drunk, once arrested for rubbing out a cigarette on a fire hydrant that turned out to be a sitting black dog. All the barflies in town came, along with bartenders and owners. Even a few tourists arrived which startled Vince, but after mixing a powerful punch, sampling it, adding brandy, sampling and adding, adding and sampling, he mellowed, wading into the surf toward Eddie Bonetti who had descended imaginary stairs into the ocean. His head floated above the waves, and he held a wine glass at each ear as he treaded water. Iron Man sat on the shore wearing a paper hat and spinning his top. He had just gotten out of jail for breaking the wrist of a con artist who sold him a potion that would make stolen objects invisible. Cole dragged a giant aluminum tub of punch between his two grills. Racks of ribs smoked on one; oysters fried in skillets on the other. Barkhausen and I sipped the heady drink and I asked where he was spending the summer. He said he had gotten a good deal from a writer in Truro, Phyllis Sherwood. I said I hoped he liked the work.

Vince rang a triangle and everyone lined up before Cole, who drank and laughed and spat as he slammed plates full of golden oysters and slabs of ribs. After a few bites, it was apparent that the oysters were inedible, mistakenly breaded in salt. Everyone went for the ribs, but Cole had doused the meat, not from the squirt bottles that housed his special barbecue sauce, but with cans of lighter fluid. No one could eat anything except the bags of pretzels and potato chips, which blew across the dunes, now chased by the hungry partygoers.

Barkhausen led the Rescue Squad against the artists and writers in a game of wiffle ball. Fielders lunged at grounders, stumbled around bases and stared at the sky. Some hungry players ate the salty oysters, which caused the punch barrel to be refilled over and over until most couldn’t stand, and those who could soon fell. Women were tackled on the base paths. The centerfielder used his glove for a pillow. The pitcher couldn’t reach the plate, so he moved almost on top of the batter, tossing the ball underhanded, as if to a child, and that child swung blindly, as if at a piñata.

The game ended with only a first baseman, a pitcher, and someone curled behind second in a fetal position. I decided to walk to town with Porter. At the top of the dune, we scanned the ravaged party’s useless grills, empties, magical barrels of punch, torrent of loose napkins, and plastic and paper cups dotting the shoreline. Barkhausen was pitching, exhorting his lifeless crew. Post-Elliot swung hard, missing and corkscrewing into the ground, but he hit the next pitch high above the empty outfield. A white butterfly dipped toward it, following the ball to the sand where it hovered, believing it had found a mate, a lost thing like itself, fluttering over the dunes.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

THE HARVARD OF THE SOUTHWEST—TOY AND FUN—NOWHERE MAN—THE IDEA OF AMERICA—A DINGE, A GUINEA, A KIKE—JACK DANIEL’S PEDAGOGY—THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE—GOGOL

E
veryone in the English Department at McGuire University in Dallas had been fired from Yale except for Jerry Morris, a novelist who raised palominos; the Texas literary historian Ron Tonald, and Grady Waycaster, a folklorist who had been Gene Autry’s chauffeur. I was nervous because I had never taught. I was anxious because I had never been west of Iowa. And I was guilty because I didn’t deserve the job.

Ridge sent me a letter with a scanty map on a napkin. Lemmon Avenue was jotted between two parallel lines, followed by an arrow with the words “Into Area.” This sketch led me to central expressway and its automated billboard tracking the Dow Jones. Where Lemmon crossed Mockingbird, I rented a furnished place from a widow named Toy. I declined weekly maid service offered by Fun, her Asian companion. When I left the grocery store on my first day, a pretty girl in sunglasses leaned against the plate-glass window and asked if I wanted a date. I walked across the street for the
New York Times,
but the shop contained only a few magazines and a back room offering sex toys and pornography. The Tabu Lounge, a strip club next door, upset the local wives, so as a community service, the local paper published the license plate numbers of cars parked there each evening. I had moved into the red light district.

I went to the department secretary for my schedule and stood by Betty’s door, afraid to disturb the elderly woman who was writing, head close to the page, tongue curling from her mouth, almost licking the paper. When she finally looked up, she told me she had just finished printing Hopkins’s poem, “God’s Grandeur,” backward, and was about to check her progress with a mirror.

A memo in my mailbox summoned me to a “post-placement interview luncheon” by the search committee. The formal tone, the McGuire seal on the stationery, the name of the chair of the committee, Worthington Ramsey, all reminded me there had been no search. Unqualified for the job, I was grieved at soul. Ramsey escorted me to the dining hall wearing a bowler and twirling an umbrella bound with rubber bands. He asked where I had been teaching. I said I hadn’t. He said he came from Yale, a colleague of Erich Segal, author of
Love Story.
He chuckled that maybe I recognized him as “The Nowhere Man” in
The Yellow Submarine
where Segal portrayed him as “Jeremy Boob, PhD, a man who lives in the Sea of Nothing.” He pronounced this description with pride. I didn’t connect him to the Beatles movie, but I did recognize him from Ridge’s mentioning the medievalist who spoke as if he had swallowed a monocle. We joined Megan, a composition specialist, the only other committee member. She asked where I had been teaching.

The home economics classes held a fashion show amid the tables of tomato soup and hot dogs. Each time I tried to answer a question, I was interrupted by female students turning and dipping, showing feathery shawls, sundresses and ruffled gowns. At the end of lunch, Megan pointed to the old man who had taken our meal cards with trembling hands. He’d been an air traffic controller at O’Hare for fifty years, had just moved to Dallas and gone back to school. She asked if I could handle such a student, but before I could respond, a huge football player banged his thigh against our table, showing off his handmade kilt.

Jack Myers ate lunch with me every day at Kuby’s delicatessen. A poet, Jack was married with two young boys. Ridge’s offer of a tenure-track position freed Jack from his job selling roofs in Boston. Jack and I traded poems—his about his unhappy marriage, and mine about my unhappy loneliness. At the end of two weeks, he returned to his brown-bag sandwiches. I realized lunch at a restaurant was something he could ill afford, but he was generously orienting me to the alien culture.

Along with my poetry workshop was a composition course called The Idea of America. Fraternity boys in blazers and coiffed, manicured sorority girls comprised the class. They saw me for what I was: the English teacher who alternated two sport coats. Brad Oberding, a football player, wrote a paper arguing that he didn’t plan to see any black people after graduation, so why should he see any now. Ted Shaver said he wanted to graduate to get a Lincoln Mark IV, which had been his brother’s reward. Jorge Garza, a rare minority student, came from a fine local prep school where he had been completely neglected. No one had bothered to teach him to capitalize the days of the week. Two girls wrote about the difficulty of hiring trustworthy domestic help. Imran Manzoor, from Iran, was also rich but isolated by his dark skin.

The text contained a section of bad poetry. One piece described cuddling on a winter night, and used the phrase “the spoon position.” The class turned to me for an explanation. I said “It’s not necessarily sexual. . . . But the two people are holding each other. . . . One grasping the other from behind. . . .” Finally, I went to the board and, to their delight, I drew a reclining couple, back to belly.

We read an excerpt from Dos Passos’s “The Body of an American,” an account of the remains of John Doe killed in France. Dos Passos had written:

Make sure he aint a dinge, boys,

make sure he aint a guinea or a kike.

No one understood it, so I defined the ethnic slurs, and after class, I sat in my office asking myself what I had done.

In the Advanced Poetry Workshop, I kept confusing Anne with Brenda, and Brenda with Anne. After the second week of repeatedly calling on the wrong girl, the students rolled their eyes at my mixing up the two blondes whose large breasts promenaded above the seminar table. I found I could recite hundreds of lines, which I knew by heart without realizing it. I urged the class to read great books, quoting Stephen Spender’s “I Think Continually of Those who were Truly Great”:

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.

Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

A student raised his hand and asked, “Who’s Spender?”

The two best poets were bitter rivals. Gary Beattie’s father made a fortune selling handmade cowboy boots. Gary was wiry and frenetic. When a poem of his was praised, he spun from his chair, crossed his arms, squatted and spurted into a Russian dance, showing off boots of ostrich or elephant skin. Jim Miller, handsome and staid, came from a family of Arkansas farmers. He had no money, but he got the girls. One night we critiqued Jim’s sonnet about making love during a heat wave. Gary mocked it mercilessly, laughing and blaming his uncontrollable hysteria on the poem. His final, breathless verdict was, “It just
sucks
!” Jim, stone-faced, said, “No,
you
suck!” Gary replied that Jim sucked and as Jim reaffirmed his opinion of Gary, the class wondered what I would do, something I was wondering myself. I ordered them to my office. They followed me through the hall and down the stairs. When I told them to sit, they looked around. There were only two chairs: mine behind the desk, which Gary took, and one for a visitor. Gary faced Jim while I, displaced, leaned against the wall, my elbow on the file cabinet. That I did not deserve the job was roundly apparent and, as they looked at me, I wished I had stayed on the Cape working with Phyllis Sherwood. I wished I were walking around New York. I wished I had taught somewhere before so I would know what to do. I wished for class to be over so I could have a drink. At this last wish I remembered a fifth of Jack Daniel’s in my desk drawer, and I handed it to Gary.