The Professor and Other Writings (23 page)

They were right to be worried, though not in the way one might have expected. A day or two before the event, my interviewer, a humanities professor at one of the regional state universities, phoned
me to arrange logistical details. His name was Keith, he said, and he was responsible for meeting with all the Dog Food Fellowship candidates of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Montana over the next week—hence the evening date at Sea-Tac. Having decided where we would wait for one another, he asked me what I'd be wearing so he would recognize me. I made some remark about our conversation being like that of two spies arranging an exchange of secret dossiers. We both laughed. Already I liked him. He would be in a blue work shirt, corduroy pants, and cowboy boots, he said: such informality suited him. I responded by saying I'd probably be wearing an Indian cotton ethnic-looking turquoise dress. The latter garment was in fact the only dress I owned, and while hardly appropriate by present-day standards, was the only thing I had that remotely approximated an interview outfit. Although so short, hemline-wise, one had to wonder if it was really meant to be some sort of tunic or long shirt (a peplum, perhaps?)—it had, nonetheless, a certain Pier One Imports
je ne sais quoi
. I used to wear it with a pair of baggy-kneed mushroom-colored tights I'd bought under Phoebe's tutelage, and thus arrayed, imagined myself the very cynosure of hippy-chick chic. (If one
had
to be female, after all, one might as well be Janis Joplin.) On the afternoon before the interview I made an unusual concession to decorum by deciding
not
to wear my usual red print bandanna tied around my brow Apache-style, a countercultural fashion I had recently adopted with enthusiasm.

Karen drove me up to Sea-Tac in her rusty yellow Datsun: the plan was for her to pass the time reading in the airport while I had the interview, then we'd drive back. Keith, my interviewer, turned out to be instantly spottable: he was in his early forties, loose and lanky and boyishly handsome, with wavy brown hair and airy blue eyes that matched his work shirt. Unlike most professors I'd ever seen, he seemed vital, friendly, up-to-date. Had the hair been a little bit longer or less kempt, he might indeed have passed as an unusually good-looking member of a rock group—someone in Creedence Clearwa
ter Revival, say, or maybe Country Joe and the Fish. And now that I think about him again, thirty years later, I realize he also bore some resemblance to George Plimpton: the same lazy-eyed, WASPy, good-sport affability. He was popping gum and smiling whimsically at everyone around him. Later on he would smoke a yellow corncob pipe. Once I'd identified myself to him, Karen wandered off—looking slightly ill at ease, I descried—and he and I sat down for our interview in one of the airport's spiffy new lounge areas.

For reasons that will become clear in a moment, it is difficult for me to remember much of this first phase of the evening. Keith's opening gambit has stayed with me, nonetheless, for three decades. The Dog Food people had asked that fellowship candidates give evidence of a religious/ethical commitment of one sort or another—not necessarily Christian, but something to indicate a thoughtful engagement with the spiritual life. I must have concocted some suitable white noise on the subject for my application essay—but whether I had declared myself a Taoist, a Gnostic, or a worshipper of Kali the Destroyer, I can't recollect. Keith, however, went straight to it—my personal cosmology. Subjects more numinous than Ph.D. programs and research projects, it seemed, were to be our focus.

Keith prefaced everything by saying that he was going to ask me some “odd” questions about my life and beliefs, but that if any query troubled me, I might
choose not to go down that road
. He gave me a glowing look when he said this last; he didn't want to be “oppressive,” he assured me, or take advantage of his apparent position of power and authority. Nor would he get too far into my “personal head space” if I didn't want him to. That said, his first question was still ultrabizarre. It took the form of a Sufi parable to which I was to respond, as if on the analyst's couch, with “whatever came to mind.”

Now it's true, under normal circumstances, being asked to embellish (“without censorship”) on a kooky little wisdom-tale like this one should have been right up my alley. (
Ooh…yeah…I get it…Wow. The
LIGHT
is better
here……) But I was dumbstruck. All I could think of was that Keith, still smiling beatifically at me, was amazing—warm, trippy, charming, colloquial, nothing like the person I had imagined or (
hah
) that my evil, square, and desiccated team of mock-interviewers had prepared me for. A Sufi parable? The real riddle, perhaps, was who was the stunning “Keith”? A shaman? A helper from another realm? Some sort of magus figure—like the one in the John Fowles novel or Hesse's
Glass Bead Game
? He obviously possessed some refined and uncanny magic. For a man of his age, I noted, he had smooth well-preserved skin and fantastic wet dark eyelashes. I was frankly astonished, yet at the same time felt
relaxed
with him, in an almost metaphysical sense. As he continued looking deeply into my eyes I experienced a hot rush of gratitude: he acted as if he
knew
me—down to the squalid core—and was nonetheless prepared to cherish everything about me.

Granted, when it came, my answer was girlish and muzzy—some not very good made-up thing about how the light was “like life” and the house was “death.” I was trying to sound spiritual and deep. No doubt he sensed the spuriousness, however, for with what I immediately took to be yogic omniscience he told me that I had not yet brought all of my intuitive “power” to bear on the situation—I wasn't really opening up to him. My psychic energy, usually febrile, was somehow
blocked
.

Me? Not using my intuitive power? Not opening up?
Blocked?
However gently proffered, this criticism of my visionary faculties
could not go unmet. Though dimly aware I still wasn't exactly responding to the Sufi thing, I began blathering away fairly wildly on the theme of “blockage” itself—how it reminded me of the radical psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich's concept of
armoring
: the harmful binding of orgasm energy—“orgone,” in Reichian lingo—that modern society supposedly produced in human beings, resulting in war, destruction, neurosis, and Having-a-Pole-Up-One's-Ass on a global scale. I had recently seen
WR: Mysteries of the Organism
, Dusan Makaveyev's X-rated 1970 documentary about Reich, and had been much impressed. As far as I was concerned, WR was a martyr in the struggle for sexual enlightenment. (
The Food and Drug Administration imprisoned him for quackery in 1956! He died in prison! How grotesque! How sadly typical of our fucked-up country!
) To channel the precious orgone in a healthful manner (or so I seemed to recall from several eye-popping scenes in the movie), you either had to sit in the nude in an orgone box—a sort of copper-lined Porta-Potty that somehow attracted cosmic rays—or else set off cascading multiple orgasms in yourself by lying supine, arching your back, and hyperventilating with the aid of a half-undressed Reichian massage therapist.

Yet these disjoint comments were all it took. In what was clearly a mind-boggling instance of Jungian synchronicity, it turned out that Keith—who had been listening to my WR divagation with a wry little buddha-grin on his face—knew all about orgone boxes: he had even
sat in one
while undergoing a course of Reichian therapy with his “lover, Jan.” (No one said
partner
in those days, but his frank word for her was still startling.) I must have seemed curious or else simply gaped in amazement, for he then began to elaborate in increasingly vivid terms. He enthused about the liberated Jan; their relationship, he said, just like those Wilhelm Reich advocated, was at once open, free, and deeply erotic. He was missing her greatly while he was on the road. No, they weren't into sexual possessiveness, he said; the best relationships were uncoercive—self-actualizing for both
members of the couple. Both he and Jan had other lovers. Yet thanks to the orgone therapy and similar ventures he and Jan were now sexual “equals.” He especially had evolved under the aegis of feminism and realized that the clitoris was as important, “spiritually and every other way,” as the penis. He had become far more nurturing. In several respects, he noted winsomely, he was now even more “female” than Jan was.

Needless to say, the Sufi parable—not to mention the Dog Food Fellowship—had been forgotten. But Keith now wanted to know more of
my
thoughts—on eros, feminism, penises, and the like—and I in turn, animated by his example, had become as eager to reveal myself as any boa-shedding exhibitionist. It was as if, beautiful eyelashes fluttering, he had given me a vial of truth serum.

While ponderous, elliptical, and half-mad, the epic journal entry I composed the day after our meeting shows frame-by-frame, Zapruder-style, how bad things quickly became. I began it with a blowsy endorsement of my companion, followed by some woozy metaphysical speculation and the obligatory I Chingiana:

(No answer possible to these last, self-posed rhetorical queries, I guess—so on to a description of some of Keith's other questions.)

(I can't recall why this bizarre question came up; nor—to Blakey's exasperation—what I said in reply. B. remains curious: What if she wants to take early retirement and live out her days at a spa-ranch in Arizona? Do I promise to
shell out?
)

If I'd had any residual doubts about Keith's bona fides, I suppressed them forthwith.

Plus, one had to admit it: for a man, he was flattering and supernice:

The reference here to a “drawbridge” and getting stoned? A key part of the evening, I'm afraid. At a certain point any pretence we were having an interview dissolved and with a disarming giggle Keith asked me if I would like to go smoke hashish with him. I assented as if in a trance and the next thing I knew found myself drifting out with him, like the eponymous heroine of
La Sonnambula,
onto the pedestrian bridge that connected the terminal with the upper level of the new multistory airport parking lot. (All this took place, of course, in those long-lost innocent days before antiterrorist bollards, no-go zones, closed-circuit video cameras, and endless security checks.) Once we'd found a secluded spot, behind a massive concrete pillar, Keith brought out a honking great spliff, stogie-sized in fact, which we then proceeded to smoke, furtively, right down to the roach.

The effects were instantaneous and phantasmagoric. Already, on our way back into the terminal, we were goofing happily: he looked at me with puckish pride and said,
I perceive that your mind is somewhat blown.
I found this hilarious, a
bon mot
worthy of Voltaire. He seemed delighted by the way everything was working out and asked me to join him for a delicious dope-enhanced supper in the airport VIP restaurant, courtesy of the Dog Food Foundation. This invitation too I dreamily accepted. (I had forgotten all about Karen and the drive back; she might as well have been sucked flailing and screaming into a black hole.) She later said she'd seen us, an hour or so after the interview was supposed to have ended, walking apparently aimlessly around the airport together, looking flushed and dazed.