WriteOutLoud

Blindsided:

Once again, I was thrilled when my Weekend College student brought her three little kids to class.  None of them won any literary prizes this week though, so they just sat at their desks, perfectly behaved, little brown heads bent over their reading or coloring (the little one in her mama's lap again) for about the first half hour of class.  Then, in the middle of a discussion of Hamlet, she took them away.

"Whoa, [her name]!" I said at the break.  "Where'd the babies go?  I didn't see their handsome daddy come get them like last week."

Her answer:  "We got divorced!"

"WHAT?"  I gripped her arm, looked into her eyes.  "You DID?"

"Yeah, Thursday!  Yesterday, actually--it was final!"  She seemed jubilant; I was stricken.  Some other students were standing around us; she pointed at me and said to them, "Look at her--she's WORRIED!"  And they all laughed.

Ashamed, I said, "I guess I just wanted to believe there's such a thing as true love.  And that it would produce such children."

"Sure there is," she laughed.  "Just not this one."

Mystified . . .

After months of friends yelping at me, "WHAT?  You haven't seen Sideways yet?  You should--you'll love it!--it's great!" I finally watched it last night.

I got a big kick out of Sandra Oh breaking Thomas Haden-Church's nose with her motorcycle helmet, but other than that, it appears to be a documentary about why I left Northern California (even though it was filmed in Southern California).  Could someone please tell me what is so great about this movie? 

Thank you.

--A Former Pour Girl

JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU'VE SEEN IT ALL--

I had my head down at my desk at the front of the class before it began, filling out forms.  Class was due to start in 10 minutes, but only three students had arrived, so I was on the verge of panic--had I scared them so badly last week that they'd all bailed out?  So I was hiding my head, hoping for a miracle, when I heard a voice in front of me say, "I have three temporary guests this evening."  I looked up to see a fourth student smiling down at me.  "Oh, how nice!" I said, and peered around her to see who those guests might be.

I had to look twice to find the three little heads just barely clearing the desktops in the back of the room.  "Their daddy's going to come get them in half an hour," she explained.  "That's fine," I said, slightly dazed because in all my years of teaching, not one student has ever brought a child to class.  Of course, I immediately went back to meet each of them, shake their hands, and welcome them to what I assumed was their first college classroom:  two boys, 8 and 10, and their little sister, 6.  The 8-year-old had already had a big day: a poem he wrote got the top school prize for his age group, and there will be a Literary Tea for the winners next month; his mama was just barely able to keep it together, she was so beside herself with pride. 

I invited her son to read his poem to the class, but that was--unsurprisingly--too much even for this little guy (you never know!--gotta give the kid a chance!), so his mama read it to us.  Not only was it amazing for an 8-year-old, it was amazing for anybody!  It was GOOD.   Dazzling, even. (And I'm picky about poetry.)  As 15 grownups burst into applause, I watched Mr. Cool back there lose his expression of no-expression, light up like a bonfire, and pump both fists in the air.  Twice.  Our eyes met, and I pumped right back at him, both of us flashing triumph.

I wonder what his older brother thought.  His little sister probably didn't notice because by this time, she was sitting on her mama's lap, sucking her thumb.  When their daddy came to pick them up, I was sorry to see them go.         

The Only Job in the World--?

--for which the chief qualifications are (1) a firm resolve to change nothing in a corporation in which practically everything needs to change if it is ever to serve its people rather than itself, and (2) age so advanced that one is not likely to be around very long. 

DEADWOOD: Why It's So Good

(The western series on HBO, that is.)

In short: David Milch and his writers have solved a problem I’ve been struggling with for years in direct defiance of Larry McMurtry, who claims (and who would know better?) that it’s impossible to write a realistic Western.

Although the rest of us think Lonesome Dove is McMurtry's masterpiece—would be anybody’s masterpiece—and apparently the Pulitzer Committee agreed—he always brushes us off because, according to him, he failed: he wanted Lonesome Dove to be realistic, but he couldn’t pull it off. He has repeatedly asserted that once you start writing a Western, the Myth rises up and consumes your story: you end up with bad guys in black hats, Indians who are unequivocally worse than the black hats, good guys in white hats (often sporting sheriffs’ or marshals’ stars on their waistcoats), frontier doctors who are also philosophers, and helpless whores with hearts of gold. Ho-HUM:  you keep writing Gunsmoke, no matter what. The Western I’ve been trying to write for oh, the last ten years, keeps turning into Gunsmoke, which is why I keep giving it up. But my gritty, nasty, weird little story keeps eating at me, begging me to tell it right.

Maybe I never will, but Milch & Co. have broken up my little logjam and are making me think just maybe I could. . . .

When Pica was here about a month ago, we rented Episodes 3 & 4 by accident, thinking we were getting in on the beginning of the series.  She’s no sissy when it comes to Westerns and has been sweating mine with me since its inception (in the unlikely setting of the Schlesinger Library).

Though the two of us liked the funky, sepia look of Deadwood, we were annoyed, distracted and grossed out by language we’d never heard or thought possible in Western context, so we assumed it was gratuitous: "f*ck," "f*cked," "f*cking" (I’m not being coy here, just trying to dodge spammers), "motherf*cker," "c*cks*cker," "c*nt" plus all their adumbrations and every other imaginable expletive plus a few we’d never imagined—Deadwood was a barrage. "Oh, that’s too bad," one of us said to the other (I can’t remember which), "they really f*cked up their chances, there!"

Before Pica left, though, she encouraged me to rent the rest—specifically, to go back and see the first installments and then see what followed the assassination of Wild Bill Hickok at the end of the fourth episode--history I know only too well. Last weekend, I got around to it.

And I am mesmerized! because I know (as does anyone who consults the OED) that English hasn’t changed that much in the last 150 (or 500) years. Folks who crawl around on the bottom of the tank still talk that way, so why wouldn’t they have done so in Deadwood? It wasn’t a cow town; it was a gold town. There was no law. How many of us ever have been in environments where there is no law? I have, so I see the truth in Deadwood: when there is no law, the only law that operates is that of fundamental human decency, which is either born in you, or it isn’t. Either you have a conscience, or you don’t. And that having or not having determines your behavior, as to whether you’ll murder someone for their shoes, use "f*ck" as an all-purpose intensifier, think creatively about "justice," or tip your hat to a lady. Those behaviors go hand in hand today, so why wouldn’t they have done so in 1876?

Language is action; action reveals character.  I can be as much of a pottymouth as anybody, but I can also choose my moment. I can express myself without "profanity," but when nothing else will do, I can peel the paint off the wall. So I recognize my kind when I hear them; and I recognize the other kind, who have no other way of expressing themselves, too—in 1876 just as well as now.  That's why Deadwood does what nothing else ever has:  it gives us some realistic sense of how the Wild West might have been.

An Open Letter to Sting:

Dear Sting,

Please please oh please come to my college class like you just came to this one.  OK, so mine is not a music class, but you could lecture about (and oh my yes, demonstrate!) the narrative power of music, like for instance the backstories behind songs like "Every Breath You Take" and "Midnight in the Sahara" and "If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free," and oh yes especially, "Desert Rose."  That one would go over especially well in my classroom, for it is in a desert, you see.  But only geographically.

Alternatively, if you feel like something potentially friskier, you could visit my Shakespeare class at the fine-arts prep school up in the mountains right behind my desert here.  Having been a high school English teacher yourself, you'd feel right at home, and we'd get some of the other kids, the music students--many of them the best in their age range in the world--to come and jam with you.  How can you possibly resist?  Please don't.  I promise I won't burst into tears or wet my pants or try to sing along or anything if only you will please please please just DO THIS FOR ME!

Your fan nonstop for 22 years if not more,

Doc Rock

Another "Car" Moment:

About an hour or so ago, I suddenly realized I had no butter to go with the monster artichoke I've been looking forward to all day (in the course of which I successfully taught my 1B course for five hours, and nobody died), so I hopped into my jalopy and rumbled off down the hill to the market.

This downhill stretch is interesting at 7PM on a Saturday because although I live in comparative squalor, I'm right below the fanciest/snarkiest "development" in the desert.  During the season, fancy cars parade in and out of there more or less nonstop; on weekend evenings, they're all going out to dinner. 

Instead of the usual stream of Bentleys, though, tonight I found myself behind a 1962 Jaguar XKE convertible, top down, British Racing Green.  Like original VW Beetles (and my 1965 Cobra the other day), these cars once were everywhere but now are nowhere; you never see them.  They're famous for needing tuneups about every 20 minutes, even back when they were new, when Joan Baez--barefoot at the time--pulled $20,000 cash out of her bag for one off the showroom floor in San Francisco.  Now they're over $100,000.  Stupid, I know, but still it's a hell of a car.

And this one was being compentently driven by a nice-looking, late-middle-aged guy with a blonde in the passenger seat.  "Who do you have to BE," I wondered as I do so often, "to ride around in a car like that in the warm desert night with the top down?  Obviously not ME!  So--who?"  Several elaborate traffic maneuvers later, I was able to pull up next to the gorgeous thing at a stop sign and scrutinize its occupants.  Here's the blonde:

Not "sort of" -- it was absolutely Jennifer Aniston, chewing a thumbnail, staring off into the distance, and looking miserable.  I think the driver was her dad, John, the tv/movie director.

"Oh,"  I thought.  "I get it!  OK.  Not me.  Not even close.  And don't wanna be.  Oh poor thing. . . " etc.  She recently dumped Brad Pitt, the Cheating Bastard. I would have shouted, "You GO, Girl!"  But she was with her daddy so didn't need my help.

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD:

the answer to this question:  Who in their right mind would spend three hours every Friday night and five hours the next morning (starting at 8:00!) for six weeks, taking a course in English composition and literature?

I've puzzled over this ever since I agreed to teach the class.  It's a first.  No professor at this community college has ever tried to cram 16 weeks into six.  "We need the SWAT team," said the Dean who knows I'm susceptible to flattery not to mention desperate for work, "so that's why we're calling you."

I festered about how to structure the course--an introduction to fiction, poetry and drama--three genres, six weeks . . . two weeks on each?  Logical, I guess, but the more I thought about it, the surer I was that I would rather drive carpet tacks into my gums (David Sedaris's image, not mine) than take--let alone teach!--a course that plodded along so predictably.  I mulled and contemplated; I tossed and turned.  Then somehow, last Monday morning, I woke up with The Answer:  do all three genres at once!  At each class meeting, a chunk of poetry, a chunk of drama, a chunk of fiction (interrelated if I can manage it)--the time will fly!

I've been feeling brilliant about this all week except for worrying about whether the students would be able to handle it.  Whoooooooo would they beeeeeee?

I needn't have worried.  They are smart, supermotivated adults, most of whom plan to enter the helping professions--teaching and health care, mainly.   The one who wants to go to law school wants to do criminal defense.  A brother and sister team are teachers married to teachers, and are themselves the offspring and siblings of teachers (it's a teaching dynasty!).  A librarian at a continuation school.  An EMT (always handy to have in the classroom!)  Half are parents of young children; almost all work full-time.

Culturally, they are a poster class for diversity:  of 15 students, maybe a third are Hispanic, plus a fullblooded Native American woman from one of the local reservations, an African-American woman, a Pilipina, and a scant handful of Caucasian women.   Everyone settled in immediately, got right down to business, worked with each other, worked with me, and never let up for three solid hours except for the 15-minute break we took to go to the bookstore and load up on supplies. 

Many of them who are parents are in school for their children's sake, because they want to give their kids the best lives they can by being, themselves, as educated as possible.  This chokes me up.  Is there hope for the world, after all? I wonder.

I can barely wait to see them again, ten or so hours from now. 

And so--good night!

Stupid Questions, Guilty Pleasures

Every time I teach a new course, as I am about to do starting tomorrow night at the local community college, or a version of the same course in a new place, as I have recently done at the fine-arts prep school up the mountain, I have to invent the wheel all over again.  And every time I catch myself doing it, I'm surprised.

I root around in my files and pull out notes from former students--"Thank you for letting me love to read again"  "Thank you for being funny"  "Thank you for being strict"  "Thank you for not letting those stupid boys run the class"  "Thank you for noticing me"--they're all love letters, in one form or another.  I have hundreds of them, and each one reminds me that I really AM--by anyone's measure--a teacher.  All pumped up, I then fearlessly design the new course or redesign the old course in a new place, and I make a syllabus that says, somewhere, "There is no such thing as a stupid question.  The only stupid question is the one you don't ask."

I'm lying, and I know it, because once--just once--in 20-plus years of teaching, somebody asked me a stupid question.  Not about something I'd covered ten minutes earlier, while his brain was napping--that's not a stupid question, just an invitation to repeat myself--but a truly deeply stupid question so stupid I nearly choked.  Here it is:

"Um, Doc, here's something I've always wondered about, and I hope you can answer it for me because it bothers me a lot:  is the word 'cheese' singular or plural?"

This was at the big red school back East, in a night class populated by working adults.  I realized this person had something wrong with him long before he asked this unbelievably dumbass question, but you always get a few weirdos in night classes, so I hadn't thought much about him beyond noticing he was an obviously gender-conflicted flight attendant, deeply invested in advertising his affiliation with the big red school; he had founded something called the Harvard Skydiving Association and had a shiny satin jacket advertising same.  I often thought how readily I would jump off the Eiffel Tower without a parachute rather than even go up in a plane with this guy.  And now he's asking me if "cheese" is plural.

With one eye on the class epileptic, who is inclined to have fits whenever the going gets rough, I reply, "What."

"I mean, Professor, ah . . . um. . . people are always asking me to serve them 'cheese,' and we have all these little pieces on the trays, and I wonder whether each one is a 'chee,' or what.  Can you help me?"

I survey the sea of adults before me and discover the ceiling is paved with their eyebrows.  Even our epileptic is horrified and looking at me to see what I will do next.  Oh fuck oh dear, I think, this is even worse than that time I fainted in class back in San Francisco and had to drop the chalk so I could stoop over and pick it up.  "Well-l-l-l-l," I say as if I'm actually thinking.  "Um.  Ah.  Yes."  I decide to play it straight.  "Actually, no. . . ah , no, there is no such thing as a 'chee.'  A piece or the whole thing, it's all 'cheese.'"

"Thank you, Professor!" he says brightly.  The rest of us blow big sighs of relief, and we move on. 

Nothing this bad could happen in the class I'm about to start teaching tonight.  Right?

At least in part because I am a girl with a guilty secret that reared its snarky little head yesterday.  As I was about to turn the corner from a heavily-traveled main road onto a relatively remote stretch of desert nothingness, I happened to notice a 1965 Ford Cobra 427 in my rearview mirror, gearing down.  I haven't seen one of these cars in years.  "[Gasp!]  Oh please oh please," I prayed, "PLEASE take the corner with me.  That's all I ask.  Oh PLEEEEZE--"

And he did!  He rounded the corner behind my jalopy, then immediately stuck his foot in it and passed me.  I ran down my window just to hear the Cobra moving through its gear changes.  I waved and hollered "Woo-HOO!" but the driver never noticed.  Or maybe he did; who cares? because he was hitting about 85 within five or six seconds.  "R65 SNAKE" said his license plate.  I emoted in response, I bounced in my seat, I levitated.

It's a sickness with me, this car thing.  It's visceral.  I've always had it.  Don't know what it's about.  Not just speed:  I couldn't care less about motorcycles, think NASCAR is for morons.  But really fast cars on the street--not lowriders, not dragsters--just cars that pass for Just Cars but can actually pin your ears back whenever they like . . . oh dear.  We have History, those cars and I:

A purple '59 427 Chevy, flat out on the dirt roads in the walnut orchards of the East Bay, no lights, me at the wheel--

A '65 Shelby Mustang, no speedometer, just a tach, me burying the needle in the red in all five gears, alone in the dark in the desert--

A '63 XKE convertible, me in a bikini driving fast one hot summer night southbound on Farrell Drive in Palm Springs, double-clutching the curve by instinct, pulling it out just in time--

And rumbling across the Golden Gate Bridge one 3AM, hearing a mosquito-like noise behind me, running down the window of my '67 Mustang just barely in time to watch a Lamborghini pass me "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE---nyyyaowwwww!" at about 150 mph.

I don't know, I just like that stuff.  I like the edge, wherever it is.

   

Mrs. Bradley's Stuff--Not a Pretty Story

Sunday morning, fed up with festering about the Charles and Camilla festivities, I went to an estate auction.  I love auctions; I love to have permission to poke around in other people's stuff, see what stories it tells, how it gets my imagination going, makes me feel people's lives.  Especially if it's still in place, still in the house where it and its owners lived.

I had high hopes for this particular auction, the Estate of Kitty Kuhlman Bradley, widow of Omar Bradley, the last five-star general.  (The rank was retired when he died in 1981, so there won't be any more.  The creation of the rank during WWII is a ripping yarn in itself, but I don't know all the details yet so can't tell it properly.) 

Born Esther Kuhlman in New York City in 1922, Kitty was quite the gal.  She had a thriving Hollywood career as a writer for TV and movies; we have her to thank for many episodes of Father Knows Best andThe Untouchables, among other titles long forgotten.  She was 43 and twice divorced when she and the General, then 73, met in 1965, just after the death of his wife of 50 years; they were married nine months later.  Nobody would think twice about their age difference now, but back then, before the Sixties really got going, they were gossip material.

I wonder what he thought about that.  He didn't look like a five-star general, he looked like the shy Missouri farm boy he was.  I saw him once when I just a kid.  Right around the time he and Kitty were married, he came into my grandmother's restaurant for dinner, and everybody went into a tizzy, pointing and whispering about "the great General."  I'd seen Eisenhower in person, and pictures of MacArthur with his lantern jaw and corncob pipe, but this shrivelled little guy didn't look anything like them, so I just shrugged him off. 

But now, all these years later, here I am, walking into his widow's house, looking for I-don't-know-what, but all my radar on full blast just in case.  The general never lived here--she bought the place after he died--but he's everywhere anyway:  giant monogram "O N B" worked into the doormat, lifesize statue of his favorite Doberman next to it, big portrait of the couple over the fireplace, photos of the two of them with assorted celebrities (she's petite, sparky, adorable in that 50s Doris Day way), bits and bobs of his minor belongings in display cases around the house--but actually not much, I realize on closer inspection:  no medals, no uniforms, no boots, no guns (other than a couple of unremarkable .38 revolvers), no maps or papers.  Just a couple of cigarette lighters, some business cards, a lot of insignia items.  "What's the deal?" I ask the head security guard.  "Where's all the juicy stuff?"

"Oh.  Yeah.  The War Department came and took a lot of stuff."  I didn't bother to point out that it's been called (eupehmistically) the Department of Defense since 1947.  "The War Department" sounded just right in Omar Bradley's widow's house.

So what was there?  A lot of atrocious 70s furniture, the usual Republican lack of taste (but she was a nice Jewish girl from New York! she should know better--what happened?).  A couple of good rugs--a nice Aubusson in the living room, some good china--Spode, Wedgwood, Haviland--but no complete sets.  Stacks of her bound scripts of 50s TV shows.  On an easel in front of the fireplace, a big album containing the original New York Times from the day she was born, July 23, 1922, my own mother's first birthday.  Front-page stories included the Ku Klux Klan agreeing not to wear their hoods in public, in return for the governor of Georgia not investigating "allegations of violence"; a plane crash in a pond near Framingham, Mass., in which a doctor from Pasadena "probably was fatally injured" ["probably"-?!?!]; a pair of newlyweds electrocuted in a bathtub in the Bronx; a gunfight in Brooklyn, where "Liverpool Jack" managed to kill four cops, one of them a WWI hero; and President Harding was made an honorary member of the Flathead Indian tribe--all on the front page, the day adorable Kitty was born.  A lively gal for a lively time.

She's here, too--in the portrait over the fireplace, gazing adoringly at her husband, who beams shyly down at her; in her office, set up for a writer; in her closets--a separate one just for shoes--full of designer clothes, furs, beaded gowns size 8.  And 6.  And 4.  Down to practically nothing.  This is the end of a woman's life, I realize.  When did she stop writing?  Did she keep it up after they were married?  There's a photo of her on a set with Francis Ford Coppola, looks like late '70s--did she keep her hand in?  Or when she married, did she just turn into Mrs. Him?

Out in the garage is the rest of her story, all for sale:  besides the dusty sets of matched luggage and a lot of kitchen appliances, a shiny, horrifying array of canes, walkers, adult diapers, cases of enemas, and eight potty chairs.  EIGHT. 

I've seen enough.  Driving away, and ever since, I'm not thinking about the General or where the rest of his stuff is, I'm wondering where the rest of her went?  Stacks of scripts, racks of dresses, a few pieces of expensive but downright ugly jewelry--she never had children--everything else in this house is about him even though he was never there.

But those damn potty chairs.  Those were hers.  Eventually--way eventually, like late the next day, it hits me:  one for every room in the house.  Oh jesus . . . that's what it came down to for her, all the adventure and accomplishment and World War II and Father Knows Best and diamonds and Dobermans and Hollywood, all dwindled down into the contents of that garage. 

Memento Mori, indeed. 

Carpe diem never meant more to me than it does now.  I'll be trying to outrun those potty chairs for the rest of my life.