Tell Me a Story

ActorAustin asked me last night why I hadn't written yet about our little adventure at a club in Charlotte called Coyote Joe's, and said he was waiting in suspense to see what dry, witty bit of snark I learned about life via steel-guitar playin' Russians, giant singers with giant-er egos, and the oppressive, dystopic hat restrictions.

It wouldn't be that hard to come up with something, either, because the whole experience was so bizarre (from the standing, snarling grizzly bear in a glass box, to the senior citizens groping each other on the dance floor as the semi-country Rock band chanted "It's Getting Hot In Here, So Take Off All Your Clothes") that very nearly everything in the place had a story. But my heart just hasn't been in it.

What I have been wanting to write about is marriage: specifically, why I think it's freakin' awesome. I suppose this is odd, coming from a guy whose wife left him less than three months ago, but I have a bit of a bone to pick. One of the really bothersome things about the experience of being wife-dumped has been the way a number of my good friends - people whose opinions I generally respect - have just sort of shrugged their shoulders and said, "well, it's a bummer there's a kid in the equation, but I guess sometimes things just don't work out. Hope you find somebody else". I call Bull-Excrement and, shaking my fist, yearn to ascend the soapbox.

When I told ActorAustin this, he demanded that I write a narrative essay - which is to say, a story that hooks the reader into living the narrative with the characters and engaging the idea in a more holistic way, rather than just with that little bit of mind that handles reason and argument. He argued that it will last longer and be more effective than if I try to argue them into my point of view.

He's right, too. Last Wednesday I asked my third period class - the one I have just after chapel - what they thought of the speaker.  There were a whole lot of shrugs and one girl said, "he was all right, I guess."

"What did he talk about?", I asked.

This is typically a pretty chatty class, but no one volunteered an answer. With a little more prompting, one guy said, "Um, I think there was something about light". A few other students agreed - and remember that this response was coming about fifteen minutes after the guy had spoken his last word. Not exactly rousing, memorable oratory, I think you could say.

My third period class is primarily comprised of freshmen. Two weeks ago they all got out of fourth period to hear award-winning young-adult author Gary Schmidt speak over at the middle school. So I asked them what they had thought of his talk. Most of them chimed in with enthusiasm.

"I was expecting it to suck", said one typically un-involved boy, "I thought he'd talk all about how to write paragraphs or something, but it was really interesting."

"What was your favorite part?" I asked.

And at that point, the whole class jumped in, recounting parts and pieces of each of the three stories he had told over a forty-minute period. They had all been engaged. The funny thing was that although they remembered the stories distinctly, they didn't remember being taught anything. His main point had been clear, though, and when I brought it up, they all remembered and relived it. Because he had said it in a story, they had all easily absorbed what Schmidt was trying to teach them

"I guess that's the problem I have with these chapel speakers", I said. "They fail to tell good stories, so they never answer the question 'why should you trust me?' The only people who are going to get anything out of it are the people who already agree with them - and even they won't really remember anything. This is because in order to matter as a speaker to people who don't have an overwhelming pre-existing reason to trust you, you have to tell them a story."

"That was what was cool about Jesus.", I went on, "He didn't provide answers, he just sort of explored the questions with stories, so that as listeners we could place ourselves in those stories and, hopefully, buy into the truths they were meant to convey. Jesus loved people and took care of their practical needs, and therefore had probably earned enough credibility that they would have listened to some dry theological homily. Nonetheless, for the most part he did nothing but tell stories - and look at how long those stories have been remembered, and the number of people they have affected."

My class listened politely, as they usually do. I am, after all, just a teacher - telling them one more time and in one more way what to believe. Maybe some of the things I rant about will sink in, but what they will probably remember a lot more clearly is the stories I tell them - about my failed marriage, or the adventures I had in Peru, or the crazy things I did as a tree planter in Canada. The cumulative effect of those stories and the lessons I have learned from them is bound to have a greater impact on the way these young men and women (or "future slaves of corporate america", as I referred to them this morning) think and act.

ActorAustin listened politely as well as I recounted and re-ranted all this. Then he changed the subject to fear, and how I've been saying we do all sorts of destructive (and sometimes even good) things because of fear. Then I changed the subject and said that I would qualify that we do a lot less destructive things than we otherwise would because of the under-woven influence of love, and then we talked about Russians and movie-making and emotion-manipulating, and about two nights ago when we went to the crazy redneck bar with a couple of friends and sat awkwardly out of place, sanctimoniously laughing and watching the unfortunate implosion of our cultural heritage. ActorAustin and I are like that on the phone - we just blabber on about all sorts of things, weighing out ideas. We do this because we're friends, and are therefore in a story that we both find interesting enough to engage.

For my other friends - the ones I don't see any more who think it's cool to just end a marriage if it doesn't seem to be working out - perhaps I ought to just put the diatribing treatise on the back burner. Perhaps our stories have diverged too much, and they're unlikely to be swayed by any argument I make. In that case, I guess I ought to just keep on keeping on with my "Anatomy of an Effup".

Perhaps if I can share honestly the very humanness of the mistakes and failings that have brought me to this place of brokenness, they can walk with me through it and see as I do with the rose-tinted glasses of hope. If I have told a true enough story, it may be that they will experience through it a glimmer of the grace that I believe has the capacity to transcend the petty failures of all our lives and build of them a beautiful, restored mosaic of relationships.

Anatomy of an Effup: Part Fifteen

Before I could bring myself to leave forever the now-comfortable land of beaver dams and deranged hockey fans, I needed a halfway house where I could gather courage. For me, there was no better place than the Crack Shack.

The Crack Shack was, on the outside, enough of a rat-hole to justify the moniker; but appearances are generally, er, if not deceiving, then at least distracting. Inside, it was a wonderment. Each room was a work of art, and plastered over with more art that showed the personalities of the rag-bag of assorted artists, musicians and philosophers who lived there.

I arrived unannounced as usual and opened the side door of this derelict building, jogging quickly left, then right and up the narrow stairwell over the downstairs apartment of the mustachioed alcoholic tenant who regularly spent the wee hours of the morning making sweet, off-key Eighties love to his karaoke machine. On the left was Flint's room, a deep bloody-red heart-cave (or womb), the color of which I couldn't help musing may have had something to do with the barely-hidden scars that ran across his scalp, relics of childhood brain surgery. Flint was quietly intense, and it seemed to me that within his room and his head throbbed the steady mantra, "Live! Live! Live!" There was very little creative work that Flint didn't do, and although he was generally a laid-back guy, when it came to art he exuded a quiet intensity that was a little intimidating.

On the left past flint's room was the blue room, occupied by none other than Native, who had gone so far in his First Nation pride as to get "Native"- shaped out of canoes and the like - tattooed across his back. In those days, Native was still spending the majority of his time perfecting the art of the chase, but would go on to become very involved in acting, film-making and music.

Neither Flint nor Native was around, so I walked down the narrow hallway with the uninsulated roof that led through successive "doors" made of heavy strips of industrial plastic hung from the ceiling, and back to Chuck's room, a large space with bare, cinder-block walls and a brown-painted concrete floor. In the center of the room sat a bed with white sheets and a white duvet. To one side was a small bookcase and a work desk with a computer, and hanging from the ceiling, about a foot off the ground, was an absolutely intentionally non-functional four-foot-by-four-foot square of white-painted wood. That, and a pile of clothes, was it. But the minimalism of the room belied the brooding, sensual and frenetically active character who lived there. Chuck was one of those fellows you read about in the really high-brow art publications, like ARTnews, because he had the chutzpah to do something nuts and then say it was important.

He and Flint, for example, once rented a moving truck (as a way to bypass the censors) for a Senior Art project. The back wall they covered with a bank of flickering TV screens, and in the middle placed an eerily-lit, water-filled Plexiglas tube, into which Chuck jumped with a breathing tube, naked as the day he was born, and remained there for hours on end as art patrons at our somewhat conservative Christian University parted the black curtain at the back and came in for the peep show. I was simultaneously repelled and attracted by Chuck's bravura, and I think that he, in turn, saw me as a somewhat entertaining, anachronistic puppy dog to be humored and played with, but not fed.

Chuck also was not home, so I headed back down the hall, under the high-propped bunk at the corner where Flint sometimes slept beneath the thwopping of a slow-turning, fluorescent-orange-painted fan, past the kitchen and across the living room to Christopher John's room. Chris, too, was a minimalist, but in his case it seemed less a calculation than a manifestation of the fact that he never paid too close attention to the life he was living. He never had much stuff because there wasn't any point - as soon as he got something new, he'd lose it.

Chris was a beautiful musician, a young man who could pick up a guitar and tap into to the inchoate longings that I felt I could only flirt with in my paintings. There were three guitars on the floor and propped against the wall, and in the middle of the room a single mattress lay directly on the carpet, topped with a couple of rumpled sheets and no blanket. Covering the wall opposite the door was a large, red-and-patterned piece of Moroccan fabric he'd picked up during a semester of travel-study. Apart from a pair of jeans lying in disarray on the floor, everything else (and there wasn't much) had been stuffed into the small closet. But no Chris.

I went into the last room, Jesse's, and heard the faint sound of a guitar over my head, so I pulled down the trap door and the collapsing ladder, hollered, and climbed up through the pigeon-occupied crawl space and into the six-foot square cube-room that poked up out of the top of the flat roof of the Shack. In addition to being the other lead singer/song-writer in Chris's band, Stabilo, Jesse Dryfhout was a skilled carpenter, and had reno-ed this former informal pigeon house into a second bedroom and workspace. He'd painted each wall a different bright, near-neon color, and on one had hung a large board I'd given him that I had painted as one of the set pieces for the Amaze of Grace production. It depicted a tortured-looking ghoul grasping his throat beneath the command, "BREATHE." The idea had occurred to me while sitting behind Chris in European Literature Class as we studied Albert Camus' Plague, and was loosely based off a song Jesse had written called "Breathe a Lot", which seemed to me to be a sort of existential angst at nature's demand that we stay alive.

Jesse was a brilliant musician with an ethereal, bird-like voice who tended to come up with the band's radio hits. At the age of fifteen he wrote a song called "everybody" that everybody apparently loved, because it went on to become the most requested song in the history of one of Canada's largest nationally-syndicated radio stations. In addition to that and the carpentry, he was an expert skier, volleyball player, extreme sport extremist, computer analyst, and a crack-shot with the ladies. In other words, he was a guy it would have been easy to hate, if not for my pre-established pattern of fawning idol-worship.

"Hey, Jesse," I said, "nobody else is here".

"Baaarkeee" he shot back, in that shiny-eyed way of his that always made me feel he had just been hoping I might drop by. Once I had gotten over the uber-coolness, I had realized that Jesse was one of the few people I knew who was always up for some deep-digging conversation, and despite my lop-sided adoration, a brightly-burning friendship had lit up between us over the past year or so.

I always kind of worried, though, that he might at any moment figure out I didn't quite rate - so when we got around other people I'd start to act a bit awkward. This tended to make him a little wary of me when too many of his other, more socially lubricated friends popped in. Alone, however, we slipped easily into the comfortable lazy banter of people who have peered together in wonder at the great mystery of it all.

"I was just thinking, man," I said, "I'm on my way to Nicaragua, but I brought my tool kit and I was thinking maybe I would hang out a while and, y'know, paint a mural on the living room wall or something."

"Yeah, man, that'd be awesome." He paused and thought a moment. "Yeah... cool," he said.

"Cool," I replied. "Well, I'm gonna go down and get my bag." I'll let you get back to practicing."

With that I climbed back down. listening to the plunking of the guitar.

I had met the boys of Stabilo the beginning of my second year at TWU at a kegger. I lie obliquely, though, wanting you to think I might have be a bit edgy, going to a kegger at a Christian school. In truth, it was a root beer kegger. I didn't like root beer and assumed I didn't like beer (I'd never tried it, but I thought it smelled and looked like horse urine), but Wren's brother Austin had talked me into going for the music, which he said would be good. When Chris, Jesse, Nathan the Drummer and the morose-looking bass player with all the face rings (he got the boot shortly thereafter) started to play, I was transfixed. For a Bible-Bubble-Bred-and-Buttered Boy like me, gutsy honest and heartfelt folk-rock music like theirs was not only unheard, it was un-imagined. They were making sounds that just eviscerated me. I whipped out my sketchbook and started to draw one band member after another.

After the show, Austin insisted I go up and show them my drawing, so I picked my favorite - a quick sketch of the blond, dread-headed Chris - and wended my way across the crowded girls-dorm lounge toward the stage.

"Hey, um. I really liked your music." I said to Chris. "I made this drawing of you. You can keep it if you want."

He snatched it out of my hand. "Whoa!" he said, " Hey, Nate... check this out!" Nate was also apparently impressed and that, as they say, was the start of a beautiful friendship. Except, of course, when it was not; because people are complicated. They do weird things and when you hang around them long enough you realize they're not living their lives to please you and they're not like you and they will not fit into the box you have tried so hard to make for them.

Chris, for example, liked to partake of the province's most well-known horticultural achievement, BC-bud. So did Jesse, and Nate and, um, I guess all of them. You can imagine how Bubble Boy dealt with that little bit of trivia. If you've smoked any of the herb yourself you probably don't have to imagine, since you have undoubtedly had to deal from time to time with the sort of self-righteous, fear-of-the-unknown, sanctimonious behavior that I dished out in a passive-aggressive way over the next few years.

Still, I loved the Mutual-Artistic-Admiration society we all formed, and although these boys persisted in doing things my mommy insisted were naughty, the privilege of being the only non-band member hanging out and sketching through practices and jam sessions was heady stuff. I wasn't the only one who loved their music - not by a long shot - but I was one of the few who got to be there for those transient, joy-drenched moments as sounds and silences were thrust together into mystical amalgamations of chaos and meaning. These had been some of the most beautiful moments of my life, so I went to the Crack Shack at the end of that summer not just to avoid the quavering unknown, but also to try to steal if I could a few more glimpses of the orgasmic musical beyond.

I ended up surfing their couch for about a week. I worked on my mural, did dishes, annoyed Chuck, picked up Native after work at a greenhouse, sat in on the practice that finally killed their pet parakeet (apparently they have an in-built decibel limit not covered by the warranty) and hung out on the roof in the late summer sun, shooting the breeze and cars.

Or at least, watching with growing consternation as Chris and Jesse tried to hit the license plates of cars with Jesse's pellet gun. I, of course, was the doing the wise, obnoxious adult thing and making off-handed comments about cops and hurting people and responsibility and blah-blah-blippety-bah, all while thinking deep, deep down that if I was irresponsible enough to take a shot I'd show them what a marksman really was. I, who had taken the head off a butterfly from ten feet away in a shot so bizarre that I never would have thought to remember it if my brother hadn't been there to spread the tale.

I don't know if my nagging took effect or if they just got bored, but eventually Jesse went into his man-cube and down the ladder to get a drink, while Chris and I stayed on the roof and took turns plinking plastic bottles in the back yard.

A little while later, Jesse made the first in a series of Really Bad Decisions. Looking out the kitchen window with his mason jar of water in hand, he noticed a bicycle that one of Flint's friends had left leaning against the chain-link fence surrounding the paved courtyard-esque area below and thought to himself, "I haven't messed around on a bike in a while... I ought to go down there." And so he did.

He was bunny-hopping and wheelie-ing around when he made the further mistake of looking up at the roof, where his good buddy Chris was lazily tracking his movements down the barrel of the pellet gun, which he had pumped maybe three or four times. Jesse's look and widening eyes cemented Chris's attention in earnest, and as he squeezed the gun tightly to his shoulder and squinted his left eye, Jesse made his final mistake:

"Fuck, no!" he yelled, and pedaled frantically towards the underside of the second-story deck, and safety. This was all the excuse Chris needed to zero in and pull the trigger. Jesse threw the bike out from under him in a shower of blue sparks as he cursed the sun, moon, earth and, most of all, Chris. "You fuckin' shot me!" he groaned, gripping his now-bleeding elbow and glaring up at his now-grinning friend, who in his regret and fear started to bring up the barrel as he loaded for a second shot.

"I'm gonna kill you, Chris!" Jesse spat as he ducked under the deck and into the side door, and it was Chris's turn to swear and run for a place to hide the pellet gun before Jesse could catch him.

Now, correct moral choices are sometimes difficult to suss out. Shooting at cars is probably a bad idea, as is shooting at your friends and doing illegal drugs. But not shooting at cars because you're afraid of consequences while simultaneously berating your friends for having the courage to be idiots if they want to is also possibly an even worse idea. Yes, it is better to not do dangerous and stupid things. But my loud exclamations of "I can't believe you just did that, Chris" were a blatant hypocrisy, because not only had I myself once shot a friend in the patoot with a BB gun, I had also been willing Chris to shoot Jesse, just because I wanted to see what would happen. And happen it did. Chris managed to hide the gun under some insulation in the crawl space, and the pleasure I got watching those two guys laughing as they pummeled each other will last much, much longer than the pain in Jesse's elbow.

Making the best possible moral decision every time is impossible, and pretending that it isn't only turns you into a fool who does petty, stupid things and then spends inordinate amounts of energy trying to cover them up. Living a life of burbling joy and gratitude is possible, however, and if I hadn't been so caught up in the unending task of fabricating and then preserving a tidy little, rationally-contained world, I might have had a better chance of really living such a life... my life.

As it was, I was talking far too much to ever hear anything other than the sound of my own voice. There was the evening, for instance, when Jesse was telling me about how earlier that summer he had found a Bible while cleaning out the band's camper van after some lunatic motorcyclist who was ripping up the paved shoulder had t-boned him while he was pulling out from in front of the Crack Shack. The impact had thrown the alignment and the insurance company had written off the vehicle, so he had been cleaning the detritus of their last tour out when he found a Bible lying inside, under a pile of clothes.

"I tell you, Josh," he said, "I saw that thing and wanted to just rip out a bunch of pages and throw it as hard as I could against the wall."

Jesse had been raised in the North American version of the same sort of insular Christian bubble-community as I, but had gradually grown so disgruntled with the hypocrisy and inconsistencies he saw modeled, that after only one semester at TWU (where he had free tuition because his mom was on staff) he dropped out and never looked back.

It never occurred to me how patronizing it sounded when I responded to his story about wanting to destroy that Bible by saying, "Now you know why you wanted to do that, don't you Jesse?" with the implication being that I knew why, and that it had something to do with evil forces that were obviously at war for his soul. The truth is, though, that I really did not know why, any more than I really knew why a flower was so beautiful, or why a pogrom could exist in a world made by a good God, or why I said any number of the inane things that I said or did the stupid, selfish, arrogant things I did. I did not know why, nor did I really bother to try to find out. Instead, I pronounced my opinion upon him and then assumed the wry smile he gave me meant that he understood and agreed with my basic premise.

The truth was that I envied Jesse, with his multiplicity of talents and devil-may-care-but-I-sure-as-hell-don't attitude towards life in general and women in particular. It seemed to be working for him, in a sense, and I spoke and believed the way I did around him because I thought it meant that I was privy to his tumultuous inner world and could thereby leech some Coolness by Association from his oh-so-suave exterior world.

At the end of my week at the Crack Shack, Jesse asked if I wanted to go with him to church in White Rock. This was surprising; but he explained that his girlfriend Melanie had been bugging him about it, so we would meet up with her there and then head out for lunch by the White Rock pier afterward.

We arrived early at one of those hip, edgy churches where the pastor wears a skate t-shirt and the band is theoretically "cool", so the whole thing ends up being a hot dating site for young, good-looking, urban mainline protestants. Melanie wasn't there yet, so we sat against the back wall and made snide remarks. I had been a few times before in the last couple of years, so I pointed out a girl chatting with the pastor at the front.

"Check that girl out, Jesse," I said, "The one with the wavy brown hair and low-slung jeans with the frayed top. Every time I come here, I can't help staring at her the whole time - even in this crowd, she's a ten."

"Who, Nicole?" he said (of course). "Oh, yeah. She and I had a little fling a while back. We should go up there... I could introduce you to her if you want."

I went into instant-panic-overdrive. How could I possibly hide my terror at this woman while maintaining my paper-thin veneer of cool? I mean, this was a girl who's face could launch some serious naval-gazing. How could I keep Jesse from finding out the truth I suspected he already knew - that he and I lived in drastically different worlds?

"Nah, that's okay", I shot back, "She's not really my type... I mean, look at that designer coffee she's holding - I'm more of a hippie loose-leaf tea kind of a guy."

"Whatever you want", Jesse shrugged - pretending he didn't know I was so full of poop my eyes were turning brown, "You're right, though. She's totally hot. Like, her car got written off last year and she heard that Hawaiian Tropic Lotion was throwing a bikini contest with a truck as first prize, so she entered on a whim and got... that was that truck with all the writing on it we saw outside... and... oh, Shit!"

Jesse's girlfriend had just come in and made a beeline for Nicole, whom she was now enthusiastically hugging.

"I didn't know they knew each other" he said, as he moved to break up the pow-wow. We ended up sitting in the very back, as far as possible from Nicole, but after the service Melanie disappeared and when we found her the two girls were at it again, sitting out in Nicole's truck. Jesse and I drove up next to them to try to tear Melanie away.

"Just go ahead without me. I'll meet you guys there." she said, with just a hint of annoyance creeping into her voice.

As we drove away, Jesse vented some serious anxiety and I started to wonder if maybe something was just a tiny bit rotten in the state of Dryfhout. Still, he had had a thing with Nicole, who a couple of years later changed her name to Evangeline, moved to Hollywood, and landed one of the lead roles in the hit TV show, "Lost". The glamour was there, and I couldn't bring myself to believe that underneath it all Jesse was just another guy like me, trying to get along, get by, and get love.

go to jail

Since we hate to read things that are not short, clever or entertaining, I will merely link you to an article that shows how totally messed up the American prison system is. I submit that if you still think everything is hunky-dory, you should consider reading this.

(thanks, Ben)

making time

When I told Mark* about the time my ancestor shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head with a derringer, he laughed and said, "and how many people have you told that story to who believed you?"

I stammered something incoherent and then insisted it was true. I mean, why wouldn't it be? Who would want to frivolously claim something like that? Well, according to the internet... lots of people. Apparently it's an exciting connection, and in our irreverent era it is cool to have any link whatsoever to someone famous - even the nefarious John Wilkes Booth. My grandmother lived in a different time: before various angry young men performing an unnameable genre of "music" made it good, culturally speaking, to be really, really bad. Which I guess is why she was embarrassed by the whole thing and none too willing to admit it.

The truth is, even though I really wasn't raised in this culture, ever since I heard the tale I kind of liked the story about this theoretical ancestor of mine - whether or not it was actually true. Perhaps someday I will bother to track it down and see if it's for real. For now, though, there is the watch.

My grandmother gave me the watch in a small, spring-hinged white box. With it, written on a yellowed 3"x5" card were penciled the words: "This watch was presented to Edward Booth on his twenty-first birthday in 1877 by his mother. It kept perfect time until 1931, when it was pitched from his pocket onto the pavement in an automobile accident. It has never worked since."

With it, there was a small paper sleeve, about one-by-one-and-a-half inches. Written on it in flowing handwriting with what looks to have been a quill pen are the words, "PICTURE OF DR M.A. BOOTH, ACTING ASST SURGEON, U.S.A." On the sleeve is an obviously hand-cut stamp of the numbers "66", and inside is the above-pictured portrait - a really, really old daguerreotype (probably) with an ornate copper frame. I am not sure why my grandmother threw that picture in, or what the relationship was between M.A. Booth and Edward Booth, but the combination of the watch and picture produces in me a peculiar sensation of both pride and nostalgia - two sentiments I generally try to avoid.

Perhaps the main reason for these sensations is the physical presence of the watch itself. It is just so old, and so beautiful, and so heavy. Several years ago, in a fit of mechanical delusion, I decided to try to take the thing apart to see what I could do with it, with the inevitable result that it ended up in a slightly larger box, in pieces. So last summer I took the watch into a clock repair place down the street, where a gypsy-looking woman in a brown skirt and black top told me she would "heff to esk the cloakmekah", a man who turned out to be an ancient, bleary-eyed Paraguayan with nicotine stains on his fingers.

As it turned out, he said he could fix it - but for two hundred dollars - so it took me until a few weeks ago to finally overcome my better convictions and say, "No, goshdangbmit! That watch-in-a-box is a tragedy that must be redressed!" I took it in and he re-assembled the thing, with the end result that if you look at the picture on the right of the mechanics of it, you can see that it is actually spinning away all tickety-boo.

I am aware that this was a ridiculous way to spend two hundred dollars and trust me, I feel bad about it. But I decided that it was worth it, because I wanted to be able to someday give it to my son and say, "Look, see - you come from somewhere. You come from a time and place where stuff was made with a bottom line that was as much about beauty and quality as it was about earning a profit and making a living. This plastic world of planned obsolescence in which you live is not the only possible reality, and if you are willing to sacrifice convenience and wealth for something beautiful and well-crafted, you can live in that sort of reality again. It will never be the same. You can't go back, but you can move forward with purpose to a better, less destructive future."

He'll look up at me in wonder with those wide, twelve-year-old eyes and say, "Dad, you sure talk a lot."


---

*Yes, that Mark.

Anatomy of an Effup: Part Fourteen

The term "hootenanny" came into the broader North American popular consciousness in the sixties as a way to describe a sort of a wild musical party. At our school it was officially a musical variety night, but although there were always a few misguided souls who actually tried to pull off the serious singer/songwriter showcase, for the most part the event stayed true to its wild and crazy, vaudvillianesque roots.

There was, for example, "The Lord of the Dance", with the Lord Himself played by none other than the outrageous Matty Easterbanks, a medieval-looking fellow under five feet tall, with a nifty goatee and an outrageous, frizzy Richard Simmons white-boy 'fro. It was easy to imagine him clad in stripes and juggling weasels in some fourteenth century fair. No one, having been there, could ever forget the sight of Matty in a lovely little Tutu (frills and everything) being tossed high into the air, arms in a perfect S-curve and toes pointed down into a whirlstrom of color and motion.

Or there was "Ode to William", an act comprised of lead singers, a full band, chorus line, and a beat poet with illustrated flashcards, all tightly choreographed to pay tribute to William the Goldfish, the unfortunate victim of a prank war.

I had previously entered and performed the "Nations of the World" Song (of Animaniacs fame) and my rendition of that dizzying number had earned me a third-place finish, so I had tried again with the lesser known "The Elements", by Tom Lehrer, a musical rendition of the periodic table set to the tune of "The Modern Major-General" song from "The Pirates of Penzance". This had netted me second place, and the pressure was on for my final chance at top prize: Spring Hootenanny, Senior year.

Competition would be fierce. Matty&Patty, the Irish Drinkers, were having another round. Even worse, I'd heard that alumni Langdon Loze was planning on pulling a cameo -and his spot-on anti-girl parodies were legendary/notorious, depending on your gender. My favorite, I think, was "No Girls in Heaven", with apologies to Eric Clapton.

A regurgitated cartoon song - no matter how fast I sang it - would not suffice. I needed original, sterling material. I decided to write my own parody, a take-off of the Counting Crows song, "A Long December". I would call it "A Long Semester" and it would be all about being a loser Senior who couldn't for the life of him get a girl to let him smooch her. As Homer Simpson famously said, "it's funny 'cause it's true". I recruited a four-piece band, got them learning the original, and then gathered everybody into one of the practice rooms to rehearse: a highly skilled pianist, electric guitarist, cellist, percussionist and me.

The big night came and we stepped out onto stage. The band set up while my brother Jo-Ben made sure the lyric slides were ready to go on the projector, because it was essential that everybody knew what I was talking about. I stood there in my Adidas tear-a-way pants and a white t-shirt, making small talk to a crowd of about two thousand.

Now, I know what you're thinking - these do not sound like the actions of the fear-driven little nanny goat I've been describing so far. Getting up on stage in front of a large group of people is consistently ranked towards the top of North American's "List of Fears" - right up there near "finding a cobra in your underpants". You need to remember, however, that fear wears many faces.

I was raised as a missionary kid - and there is no better mission fund-raising tool than cute, full-voiced little kid with a microphone singing his lungs out. Furthermore, my ever-emotive mother was the perpetual choir and play director for our little community in Peru, and you can guess who got to fill in the gaps when volunteers were inevitably in short supply. I was used to being on stage, and even though it always made my little chicken legs shake my knees together like castanets, the inevitable gushing praise I got afterwards from the entertainment-starved missionaries made all that terror and involuntary depilation worthwhile. As soon as I got a bit of affirmation for a performance, I began to identify myself as a performer and to become afraid that if I stopped performing, I would stop being myself. Or at least, a self worthy of affection.

The house lights went down. The spot came up. The band began to play and the crowd stilled with anticipation. After a short, faltering note, I found my groove and began belting it out:

A Long Semester, there's no reason to believe This year's freshmen will be better than the last.
I can't remember, oh, the last date that I had where I got action.
Now the days go by so fast.

And it's one more day in Senior Housing,
Yeah it's one more night of brotherhood.
If you think that you would like to call me... wish you would.

As I launched into the first round of "na-na-na"s my brother repeatedly flashed my phone number across the wall of the gym.

The smell of perfume in winter,
And the feeling that I've got a big old booger on my nose -
Either that or for some strange and unknown reason,
Girls hate guys who like to wear black pantyhose.

At that last word I reached down with both hands and in one swift, clean motion jerked off my tearaways and tossed them behind me. Arms wide out, with fingers splayed in all directions, I sang out the chorus again; and although the school-appointed censor had insisted that I wear some sort of shorts over them (for which, I admit, I was grateful), the pantyhose sent the crowd into conniptions.

Two thousand people screamed, and I knew in that moment what my musician friends meant when they talked about playing to the energy of the crowd. It came at me in a monstrous liquid wall, wrapping me up above, behind and all over, all at once and with an irresistible force. The enthusiasm picked me up and I felt it carrying me on its massive shoulders out into the crisp night air. As I sang the chorus, I knew... knew that I had done it, and that popularity was mine at last. I sang...

And it's one more day in Senior Housing,
Yeah it's one more night of brotherhood.
If you think you'd like to come to my room... wish you would.

The response to that line was palpable this time.

Drove up to Trinity Western sometime back in ninety-eight
Thought I'd wait a while for Mrs. Right.
I guess the winters made me move a little slower -
Set my sights a little lower for any girl so I could show her
That it's been a dry semester and there's no reason to believe
This year's freshmen will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself'
To grab one - but I didn't, and they walked past.

So it's one more day in Senior Housing,
And it's one more night of brotherhood.
It's been so long since I kissed a girl, man... I wish I could.

I had done it. I had. After accepting my first place prize and running around with some buddies in celebration, I went back to the apartment to find a note slipped under the door and six messages on my answering machine. I will admit that there were the possibly-not-entirely-serious two minutes of heavy breathing and someone singing a few verses of "you are my sunshine" - but the rest were authentic attempts to make a connection. Jesse left a message, saying how lame it was that we hadn't hung out in a while, as did Emma. The note was from "The quiet girl who sometimes hung out with Tyson in your dorm last year", and she invited me out for coffee. The next day and for a week after that, every time I went into the cafeteria (or, really, any other room around campus with people in it) I got a teaser-taste of what it must feel like to be a celebrity. Eyes would turn and the tone and volume of conversation would shift. One girl started screaming out, "Nice Legs, Josh!" every time she saw me on campus. It was awkward, and weird, and awesome.

But even as the last echoing "na-na-na" had squeezed between the furthest dusty cracks of the gymnasium and out towards the freedom of infinity, I had realized something else. That was it. My quest for popularity at University had reached a pinnacle and had nowhere to go but down. Gradually this realization grew, until I started to say to myself, "um, that was it?!?"

I did what I could to hold on to this moment as it passed - telling anyone who'd listen about the six messages, rolling my eyes and saying, "didn't they get that it was a joke?" It was a joke - but barely. My fifteen minutes had come and gone and all that was left was vague sense that the cavernous unknown was looming on the fast-diminishing horizon.

Except... except Jennika called, too. A few days after Hootenanny she left her own message on my machine and we started to spend a bunch of time together. By then she had snagged summer employment treeplanting with Mark, but that hardly mattered. She had known my boss didn't like to hire girls, I reasoned, and Mark was by this time claiming that he wasn't that interested in her. Jennika and I talked on the phone. We met for late-night snacks in the lower cafeteria. We drove down to Fort Langley, quaint little "Birthplace of British Columbia", and lay on our backs on the roof of the antique train - watching the clouds and talking about the future. We talked about life, death, art and marriage. We talked about how cool it would be to get wedding band tattoos. We talked about planting. I was in heaven, floating around with my little golden harp and, against all reason, playing it like a virtuoso.

This was not a fairy tale, however, of the sort with lacy wings and pixie dust. Jennika was an elf - wild, mysterious and free. As I blathered on about anything but what I was really feeling and thinking, she was believing somewhere deep down inside that a cage would be the end of her. My words were cages, and as we spent more and more time together winter gasped one last time, exhaling a boding chill into this seemingly budding spring.

I asked her to attend a sixth grade production of the Biblical Story of Nebuchadnezzar, in which my little brother had the title role. We rode with my older brother and younger sister, and the lot of us weren't getting along those days. Was that what did it - Ugly, petty, long-since-forgotten sibling rivalries?

A little while later I was sitting in the cafeteria with two of my best friends, Chris and Aren. They were doing what best friends do and mocking me mercilessly for what they justifiably termed my "girl-mad senior year". It may have been true - after Jennika I took to writing a "crush of the week" on the whiteboard in my room - but it was the sort of thing my artificially thin-stretched ego had some trouble with. To make it much, much worse, while they were doing it who should come bouncing brightly towards our table from behind Aren and Chris but Jennika herself. I desperately tried to get them to stop, but it was too late. I saw her face change as she heard what they were saying. Was that what did it - the well-deserved mockery of friends?

Did anything do it? Or was it, rather, just the way it was: a girl who didn't know what she wanted, glancing for a brief moment into and off of a guy who didn't know who he was.

I do not know. First, because I don't believe I will ever understand the mysterious compendium of events that forms the tapestries of our relational lives; but second (and more importantly) because I did not ask.

After the misfortune of that cafeteria conversation, things got a little strange between us; until one night when she was supposed to call me so we could meet up after she got back from a trip into Vancouver. She never called. I phoned the next day and she brushed me off, so I did what I always did in situations I could not understand and chose a path of indirection. I went to my bookshelf and took down the tattered, taped-up copy of John Steinbeck's "The Pearl" that I had brought back on that last trip to Peru from the mission's soon-to-be dismantled library. I wrote something that I probably intended to have a double meaning inside the cover and wrapped it up to give it to her.

I called Jennika up and this time she answered, so I told her I had a present for her. She tried to turn it down, but I kept insisting so she told me she would be in the parking lot of her dorm, packing up with her mom. I shoved the book into my pocket and walked over, awkwardly introduced myself, and offered assistance. I could tell she didn't really want it, but the three of us walked back into her dorm room and while her mom grabbed something in the bathroom I took out the book.

"Go ahead, open it", I said, shoving it into her hands.

She did, and laughed her golden laugh. "Pearl" is her middle name.

"Thanks, Josh", she said, and that was it. I carried a box down to their van and then, mission accomplished, I walked away. I wondered if she would read it... and understand. "The Pearl" describes the story of a poor Mexican diver named Kino who finds a perfect pearl the size of a sea gull's egg. In its beautiful depths, he sees the solution to all his problems. But there are forces at work larger than he, and in the end all Kino sees when he looks at it is pain, so he casts it back into the sea from whence it came. Obvious? Possibly. Melodramatic? Definitely. But melodrama is the lazy, fearful man's misguided shortcut to truth, and I was barreling down it.

We each drove north to our respective corners of the vast, ravaged wilderness. Earlier, I had given her my company address and we'd exchanged emails, promising to write. A summer of waiting began. I wrote three more Jennika poems - bits of over-emotive drivel that filled up with cracked earth desert imagery as the summer grew longer and hotter.

Jennika had given me her picture - a portrait from high school. In it she wore that brilliant, flashing smile and had daisies strewn through her wild, jumbled-grass hair. I took it out from time to time and looked at it - showed it to some of my planting buddies. On the back she had written, "I will miss you, Josh", and then "Jennika". If I squinted just right, I could believe that the dot above the "I" in her name was not a bubble, but a heart. It didn't fit with the reality of who she was, but it sure kept the chill away from my toes.

The last poem I wrote for her ended with an admission that perhaps Jennika, as I had conceived her, did not exist. Perhaps there were no elves, no love-children of angels and of men. Perhaps there were only people: mysterious, conflicted and tragic - lonely and material, wailing in an immaterial fog.

I waited and waited for her to write, but not a word did I hear until the very end of the planting season. On a day off in the small town of Chetwynd, BC, I went into the public library to check my email. I signed up for a station, sat down, entered the code, browsed to my hotmail and opened my inbox. There it was, with the subject "news!" I got that lurching, tightening feeling in the pit of my duodenum that always comes with the arrival of a long-anticipated letter. I ignored the pressing urge to delete it and instead clicked ahead.

"Hey, Josh", it said, "Lots of changes in my life. I've cut off all my hair and I'm getting married!"

She went on to say that she and Mark had just decided at the end of the summer that they could either go their separate ways and probably never see each other again, or they could get married. They were going to have a really teeny-tiny ceremony in the woods back home, with their families, but I was invited to come to a larger wedding reception in Vancouver, details to follow.

And that was it.

I finished out my final week of planting, packed my aging Jetta, duct-taped the hood down, and drove south over a deeply rutted and cracked road in the pouring rain.

Elizabeth Gilbert

I went last night to Davidson College to hear Elizabeth Gilbert - the woman who wrote that book I talked about way back in April in my post "Gift-Wrapped Tapestries" - do a talk with her sister, Catherine Gilbert Murdock (also a writer). To get there I had had to weasel my friend Austin into driving the half-hour north from his house to pick up our free tickets three weeks ago. Then yesterday I had to teach a full day of classes, ride my bike home, borrow a car, pick up my son from his Uncle's house, take him home, hand him off to my dad with instructions and a meal, and finally ride my bike the one hour back up past my school to where Austin lives so I could hitch a ride with him up to the college.

This was all a horrible, grinding affront to my natural, comfortable Self. I am a homebody. I like to do homebody things like reading, writing, pulling weeds in the garden, horsing around with the kid and learning to play my ukulele. I do not like traffic, or driving, or planning ahead. I did it all anyway, though, because it was that book that overflowed my bucket and convinced me that I could and should attempt to write the truth of my life, an endeavor that has become my "Anatomy of an Effup" series. Her writing is conversational, relaxed and personal, and although I do not claim to be a great writer, I am good enough at being myself. Reading her work convinced me that that was enough, as long as I was willing to tell the truth.

The upshot is that I have been able to say, publicly, things that I have hidden even from myself for years. Things in the dark have been brought to light, and I have been freed to breathe the clean air of a well-dusted environment. The hope I held as I began this sometimes painful work was that rooting down to the bodkin of my story would help others search out the hidden truths of their own lives, and the responses I have gotten thus far - even with such a rough draft as I have been sharing - have been amazing. I wasn't going to the lecture to fawn, therefore, but to listen and then give her a little note of thanks I had written.

As Austin and I approached the building where the lecture was to occur, I turned to him and said, "Look, dude, I gotta warn you... my guess is that this thing is probably gonna be mostly middle-aged women." We walked in and got in the extraordinarily long line, which (surprise, surprise) was mostly middle-aged women, all gibbering excitedly and pointing out lines to each other in their well-thumbed copies of her book, "Eat, Pray, Love".

Eventually they let us in; and after some guy in a suit told us how prestigious this lecture series was and some woman from the English Department played some embarrassing childhood recording of the lot of them pretending to be celebrity interviewers and proving that she and the lecturers were, in fact, Best Friends Forever, Elizabeth Gilbert and her sister came out onto the stage and sat down on a pair of red and blue armchairs.

When we had come in Austin, who is a professional actor and filmmaker, had informed me that the theater's backdrop, a modernist wood-frame set for Moliere's "Tartuffe", was in his opinion odd and misguided, and as they began to talk I found myself thinking of how deeply weird the whole situation was, with a couple of guys like us at this gathering of so many women. We had marched down front and center, one row back from the four mom-aged women who'd been valiant enough to sit in the spit pit. They turned when we sat, and one of them said, "Getting in touch with your feminine side? Or... I suppose you have to be here for your class?"

To which I replied, "Nope. Read the book and liked it, and Austin here saw the TED thing* on creativity."

They seemed genuinely shocked, but I suppose that had something to do with the fact that although I am thirty, I look like an eighteen year old mallrat. It is odd that someone of that sort would read Gilbert's book, and even odder that they'd like it. Nonetheless, we sat there and enjoyed her often witty and inspiring talk as hundreds of fawning women behind and in front of us gushed their approval at every little word and mannerism.

"Woo-Hoo!" Austin said a little too loudly, with a fist pump: "Welcome to the feminist rally!"

After it was over, I waylaid her on the way to the autograph table, bypassing the line in that obnoxious, chauvinist manner of all men, everywhere, and gave her the little note I'd pre-written, thanking her for her book and what it had done for me. I walked away, then, shoulder checking to make sure she hadn't tossed it in the round filing cabinet by the desk.

Who knows? Maybe she'll read it. And maybe, out of curiosity, she'll follow the link on the card I shamelessly stapled in and read this post and feel that weird sensation you get when you live one of your own experiences through someone else's eyes. Maybe she'll write me an impassioned letter, encouraging me in my art, and maybe we'll become, as Anne of Green Gables would say, "bosom friends".

Given the hundreds of gushing women at that lecture and the millions worldwide who probably also stalk this woman it is highly unlikely - and probably not something I would even benefit all that much from. I already suffer far too much from our cultural malady of celebrititis. Elizabeth Gilbert made the distinction during her talk between "fans" and "readers", and I hope that I am more the latter. It was good to be there, though, with my sardonic friend and all those women, and to say a word of thanks to one of the many, many writers from whom I've stolen a tiny bit of inspiration.

_ _ _


*In which she was wearing the same shoes as she did last night, I'll have you know.

All Hallows Eve

In the interests of brevity (the words in my posts seem to be breeding behind my back) and of annoying people who have a problem with All Hallows Eve because it's evil, I present my pumpkin.