In which I Become the Mechanical Husband

It is odd how some memories are very sharp. One of mine is a noon-day crossing of State Street in Chicago with Kathy when we were nearly hit by a Cadillac Eldorado. It was  one of the mid-60's models with knife-edge fenders. I said I would never own a car, that they were an abomination. Had I been telling the truth, I could have joined the little club membered by folks such as Tolkien and Lewis--admittedly a more convenient club in a country with trains--but I did not. Rather I did the car thing as a valiant effort to be a guy.

Truth be told, I was devoted to cars, starting with my first dark green Volvo 144. I lavished it with gauges and special tires, hand-stitching leather binding to heavy wool carpets. Too, my bodily marital devotion was as mechanical as changing the spark plugs or adjusting the valves on the Volvo. The Volvo actually gave me more sensual pleasure. Collecting tools, reading Road & Track, I felt like a real hetero guy.

But, another sharp memory: Kathy had invited one of the members of her anthropology class to come to our apartment to study. I opened the door and fell into the deepest blue eyes I had ever seen. Brian the skier. Brian the gorgeously beautiful. Brian the piercer of illusions. And fortunately, Brian the owner of an English Ford, so we could do guy things together.

The last months of 1969 were busy. I got my pre-induction physical notice, and went to Seattle to see if I might be unfit for service. The idea of being in a room full of hundreds of others guys in underwear was enough to worry me.  I hoped some vague sinusitis symptoms and stomach instabilities might make me unfit. Of course the truth, that I was a homosexual, would have had some effect, but I was doing my best straight act. The draft doctors decided I was A1, and Kathy and I decided we would make one last trip to the states to see the family before staying in Canada for the duration. We drove the Volvo through San Francisco  to visit a good friend from Chicago days, and back to Jonesboro for our last American Christmas. On Christmas Eve, there was a knock on my mother's door, with a telegraphed draft notice. My faithful mother-in-law had tipped the draft board, which would otherwise have sent for me in January, of my presence with a story in the Social Whirligig. In a hasty meeting with the draft board, they explained they would give me an exemption if I returned to the states and finished my degree here, and then teach in a special needs school.

I took their offer because I was too conflicted about Brian to go back to Vancouver. I spent much of that holiday literally in the closet upstairs at a grandmother's house. Ironically, when I flew back to Vancouver to pack up our furniture and such, Brian met me at the airport, and we spent the next few days together. They were the best days I would have for years, even though 'nothing happened'.

For the next twenty years, 'nothing happened'. I led a mechanical life, doing the things one is expected to do. There were certainly some enjoyable parts: gardening, building a pottery studio, running and swimming. But the idea that I could be in control of my life had never really seemed an option. Baptists are Calvinists, and I had left the Baptist Church but it still hadn't left me. There were years of new houses and dogs and children and new cars and new degrees and new jobs, but they all happened to someone who, at the deepest level, was not me. They all happened to the mechanical husband.

the sixties: american folds her wings

The moderately exuberant 1961 Chevrolet was rather a forecast of my life in the 60's. All the parts of the fifties and the beginning of the new decade were there, but folded in on themselves.

1966-1968 would be the time of the big fold for me, as well as for the nation. I would get married and buy a car, and the nation would have rioting against the democrats who had started the decade so hopefully. The seventies would begin with a republican president and national guard troops shooting students.

Marriage just seemed what one did when one was a naive kid from a small southern baptist (you may read Southern Baptist if you wish) town. My mother and my bridg's mother sort of arranged it. Kathy was smart, beautiful, came from a good family: what could go wrong? I had considered going to New York and The New School, but the unacknowledged fear within me told me that in New York I would become too much of what I really was to suppress my cognitive dissonance. While at Louisville, compliments of the CIA, I met a lovely Creole/Cajun/Mulatto boy whom I visited in Chicago, and I decided the second city might be a safe harbor for me. Future bride started college in Ohio, but after a year we were married and living on the south side of Chicago.

It was crazy. I remember the moment I saw our luggage lying together on our honeymoon bed and thinking 'what have I done?'. I had serious crushes on at least two boys in Chicago, but was convinced that the love of a good woman would cure me. Pretension was very popular. My mother-in-law had told the Jonesboro Evening Sun that we had honeymooned on the 'Trans-Canada Express'. We had driven my mother's Mustang to Little Rock for one night at the SamPick. The Johnson administration kept telling us we were winning freedom in Vietnam.

At Roosevelt University I tried to apply Marshall McLuhan's ideas to understanding history, studied art, and could have learned much more than I did if I had not been spending so much time being a family man. By the end of the 1968 semester, I still had not finished my big writings assignments for my BA--the Roosevelt history department was rather demanding--and my major professor suggested I might finish at Simon Fraser in Vancouver, which was then so new there was no moss on its brutal concrete. For the trip to Vancouver, my mother bought us a Volvo 144 as a wedding present, and off I (we) went to Canada. From the quiet seclusion of my prof's Arthur Erikson house on Burrard Inlet, we watched as America elected Richard Nixon.

I was sure the quiet seclusion of Vancouver, with tall firs disappearing in the mist, with 'Hey, Jude' playing magically every time I crossed the Lionsgate Bridge, with a new bride and a new car and a new apartment, would give me some sort of respite from my confusion. But one afternoon I opened the door to look into the bluest eyes I had every seen, and the turmoil returned. If my inner Vietnam war had subsided, now I found myself in Cambodia.

the sixties: then came the war

Mr. Kennedy's administration was a mixed metaphor. Glamour met terror. In February, 1962, I was glued to the television as  uberchic Mrs. Kennedy took Americans on a guided tour of the redecorated White House. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbFt4h3Dkkw ). In October, 1962, I was kept in the football stadium at Annie Camp Junior High because it was declared a safe space if there was a nuclear attack as we listened to a broadcast of events of the Cuban missile crisis over the school intercom. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis ) I was shocked when Mr. Kennedy was shot and many of my fellow students cheered. It was a confusing time.

Back in Jonesboro, little me was given a National Merit Scholarship, and offers came in from schools all over the country. Only now do I realize how naive I was in those days, (and wonder how naive I am in these days).  I could have gone to school anywhere, from Harvard to Stanford, but I chose Memphis State, largely to spite my father, who wanted me to go to Rice. Memphis was the largest city in which I had spent any time, and it seemed a wonderland compared to Jonesboro. Unfortunately, I was much too insecure in who I was to learn much about how anything else was. I was more or less gifted with a beautiful girlfriend, chosen by our parents, who would become my wife, the existence of whom kept self- and general knowledge of my homosexuality at bay. To quote Zorba the Greek, 'the full catastrophe".

Even at Memphis State, however, I was able to draw the attention of the FBI and the CIA, notice which i think began when I had in high school subscribed to Ramparts magazine, and which grew when i radically suggested Memphis citizens might notice what was happening in Viet Nam and let their congressional representatives know their feelings about it. (See how naive.) I had my own little surveillance team in cheap suits and an cheap brown Chevrolet, and of course my phone was tapped. (I simply crawled out the window on the other side of the apartment, climbed down the drain pipe, and made telephone calls at a nearby friend's place.) Although I had never been late at all on a rent payment, and my grade average was about 3.8, and I was the only National Merit Scholar at MSU, my lease was cancelled and my school records were lost, unless I considered transferring.  But, I had been given, at CIA expense, pretending to be funding from the Field Foundation, a summer with the National Student Association agent provocateurs in Louisville and Madison to see how radical I might become. I wrote a learned treatise on the effect of cybernetics on minority jobs in the United States, suggesting that there would be more jobs, but at low pay.

I had my first Serious Crush. My father died. I thought I might transfer to The New School, so I took the GRE. In fact I would not fly so far. It was a confusing time.

the sixties: an introduction

I wasn't ready for the sixties, but then i guess maybe no one was. For me they were prefaced by a replay of the thirty years war on  my great-grandmother's porch as she--protestant--and her sister--catholic--argued about what John F. Kennedy might be like as president. They ended more or less in the ashes and coffins of the war in Vietnam. 'Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.'

The day I listened to Kennedy's inaugural speech was sunny in Jonesboro. The great cold front that kept President Hoover from attending the inauguration had already moved east. I remember listening to the new, young, president, on my Channel Master transistor radio while I worked in jeans and t-shirt on some carpentry project in the back yard, but this is an unreliable memory since 20 January was a Friday. It was a heady time, it seemed, for liberals,which was more or less what I considered myself. Marian Anderson sang 'The Star Spangled Banner', and there was a fanfare written by Leonard Bernstein, and a poem, 'The Gift Outright', by Robert Frost, with the addition of a special 'Preface'. My great-grandmother's fears were fed by Mr. Kennedy's attending a mass in Georgetown before the ceremony, and by Richard Cardinal Cushing's twelve-minute invocation, but there were also prayers by a pastor from Austin, Texas, and by Rabbi Nelson Glueck and an orthodox archbishop.

Despite the feeling that a new era was beginning, Sammy Davis, Jr., was dis-invited because of his marriage to a white Swede, May Britt, which had been postponed until after the election.  Still, many black artists were around for the inauguration and the celebrations afterwards, as well as non-black artists such as Mark Rothko and Diana Vreeland. The contrast between 70-year-old Eisenhower and 43-year-old Kennedy was remarkable. The contrast between Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy was even more remarkable.

The short presidency of John Kennedy, which ended with his wife holding his bleeding head on her pink Chanel knock-off, was called 'Camelot', and seemed much more hopeful than was really justified. The president who had said 'we should never fear to negotiate' would bring us to the brink of war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. The president who would often repeat in his speech 'Let both sides', was able to do little to unite the sides, but his perceived radicalism perhaps made it easier for President Johnson to bring about some real negotiation between 'both sides'.

I have no intention to praise or vilify President Kennedy. The times were beginning to become very complicated. I merely suggest that his presidency is a good symbol for the hope we had for the new decade in 1961 and for the very different ways the decade would work out. It was as if we were all flower children, whether we knew it or not.

1953: test pattern

i was about to jump into the 60's, when it seems everything changed (although i suspect appearances can be deceiving), when i realized i had skipped one of the most important events of the modern age, the second elizabethan period. 1953 saw the coronation of elizabeth the second (please, scots, forgive me.), and it was actually seen around the world. it was the first major event to be broadcast internationally. i watched it in the gymnasium of the jane redman elementary school, on what was probably a 14" screen. fortunately, i had a seat in the first row. because i was young, the revolutionary impact of what was  happening was lost on me at the time. because we were mostly unaware of what real revolution looks like, most of my elders had no clue either. but the ability to see anything anywhere anytime would change our world in more ways than we could imagine. it would make many of the events of the sixties seem revolutionary when actually what was unusual about them was just their visibility. it would allow the sort of coverage of the war in vietnam that the defense department would work strenuously to prevent occurring again.

also that year, the screen arrived in my home. it did seem like a revolutionary event. it came in the form of an crosley television set that was a major piece of furniture. it came in the back of a borrowed pickup truck. it

came from memphis, because televisions were rare in jonesboro. there was only one television station it would receive, wmct, channel 5 in memphis, and that one station was off-air most of the time. when i got home from school, there would be only the test pattern to watch until kate smith began the broadcast day. then there was howdy doody. it was magic, and it seemed magic.

it is hard to remember that awesome newness nowadays. i am typing on a screen in a room in which there are seven other screens. they range in size from about four times as large as the crosley (in area; the tv's about 2' thick, and hangs like any other picture) to the one on my wrist that has reminded me of two friends' birthdays, kept me informed on what music it's playing, and notified me of three e-mails while i've been typing. it is magic, but it no longer seems magic.

the test pattern may have seemed to be testing the success and fidelity of the signal broadcast. but it was also testing whether we would be willing to receive what the screen would send us. we were.

i suspect mr. mcluhan would be amused at the amazing parallels between the two elizabethan periods, both of them being entirely revolutionary. the reign of elizabeth the first would see the ascendancy of the sovereign printed word. the reign of elizabeth the second has seen  the printed word abdicate to the broadcast word. but no longer is it only words that are broadcast. both of the images in this post are broadcast, available on demand. i am listening to a swedish band singing 'blue on blue', also on demand. the sun may set on the british empire, this 61st year of elizabeth's reign. but there is a new empire out there now, which i watched begin sitting on the floor of the west school gym without knowing it.

1959: Snowed in

In 1959 C. P. Snow in the Rede Lecture claimed that the intellectual life of western society was split in two, with a great divide between science and the humanities. Certainly that split was felt in my education, and i was a willing if self-deluded victim of the split in a self-defeating way that plagued me for years.

I was. through the 8th grade, a math and science whiz. In the 7th grade I had been put ahead in my math and science classes because I was so bored by the classes I was in. My only 'C' came in 7th grade math because I just never bothered to turn in the homework. I was taking the U. S. Army's correspondence course in geometry at the time. I was not just a math and science whiz--on all of those stupid tests from mit or wherever in which one filled in little ovals with a #2 pencil, I always scored 99th percentile in both of Mr. Snow's divisions. But it was science that thrilled me. The 'humanities'--paintings and novels and music--seemed amusements, entertainments. But the 8th grade would be a time when I took refuge in the humanities much as the one might take refuge in the three jewels of buddhism, and for the same reason. I sought relief from the passions of life, most particularly from my passion for the dark-haired 9th grade science teacher, Mr. Cook, whose curly chest hair peeked out above his loose necktie, who drove a 56 chevy convertible, and who was a serious distraction from the elemental tables. I was entangled in elemental lust.

The humanities, however, were safe.  Mrs. Horne, the grammarian, was a rather brilliant teacher in a way that probably might not have been too uncomfortable in black leather, and Mrs. Toone was a large bundle of unconditional love who taught english literature and french. I disentangled myself from the excitements of chemistry and physics and began pursuing poetry and Victor Hugo. As a result, after junior high algebra (taught by a raving maniac who was also a basketball coach) and geometry (taught by a boring brown slump of a man whose only attraction was the mystery of his four initials), my science career was over. I was claimed by the humanities, all taught by doting and safe women who encouraged me to be a 'romantic' rather than a 'realist'--Willie Merle Toone's take on Mr. Snow's distinction. 

There were advantages in my proto-fag hag humanities teachers. I was encouraged to explore the poetry of Yeats, who remains one of my favourites, and the philosophy of Spinoza, with whom I felt some sort of inexplicable connection. Edith Shannon would introduce me to Teilhard de Chardin and Marshall McLuhan. I would join literary book clubs and read Henry Miller and Joseph Campbell. 

But the great events that were happening in physics would happen outside of my personal event horizon. The closest I would come to math and science as I majored in History and Philosophy was two course in Boolean Algebra, taught by another black-haired man with a loose tie on whom I was slightly crushed. 

I don't know what happened to Mr. Cook and his Chevrolet. Mrs. Horne and Mrs. Toone and Mrs. Shannon remained friends with me until their deaths. Edith Shannon died too young for her to know of my 'coming out' or of my gratitude for her introducing Teilhard de Chardin and McLuhan. Merle Horne and Willie Merle Toone took my 'coming out' in stride, and remained as supporting as they had been when I was trying to understand why Spinoza was such a challenge to his community. 

Only now in my old age, in my second childhood, am I comfortable in returning to my older passions and exploring physics with its not-subtle-enough connection to the physical. I pursued a career that was more 'spiritual'--a word I really find pretty meaningless. Often  I wish I had had enough self-confidence to ignore my fears and take the scholarship offer I had from Stanford, especially since in retrospect it seems to me that the real revolutionaries of the 60's were not the kids 'protesting' at Berkeley but the kids scribbling algorithms in Palo Alto. But the 60's are a topic for another post.

1957

If you've seen the movie Red Dawn you have a clue about the mindset of many of my friends and me during the 1950's. I had a war surplus tent that i kept erected in the back yard. (The back-back yard, actually, our house having a yard for sitting and walking to the garage and such and a yard beyond the garage that had once upon a time been a garden. Beyond it was the alley where the remains of the old out-house were.) My friends and I called the tent 'Fortress America,' and we built weapons to repel the Russians should they attack. (We were also expecting aliens, and would try flashing morse-code messages at con trails in hopes we might lure little green men to land in our back yard on Jefferson Avenue.) Lengths of pipe with one end capped, a hole drilled through the cap for a cherry bomb fuse, were the basis of our most serious defenses. We also had bb guns and killer rubber band guns, which used sections of old inner tubes for missiles.

We also dabbled in rocket science, using balloons laminated with aluminum foil and rubber cement for our fuel tanks, and metal water pistols filled with denatured alcohol for personal propulsion when we reached space. (Denatured alcohol fortunately burns at a fairly low temperature, so we survived the tests with only minor injuries.)

The Russians beat us to space. Their rockets simply held much more fuel than even the largest balloons we could find at Woolworth's. Imagine--or remember if you're old enough--our disappointment to learn in October of 1957 that they had put a grapefruit-sized satellite in orbit over our backyard, and well out of range of our water-pipe bazookas.

But there were fringe benefits. Sputnik made math and science hot fields of study even in Jonesboro, Arkansas. My geekiness didn't quite make me popular in my school, but it afforded me a certain begrudged respect. I was allowed to 'perform experiments' on school time, and to post a daily weather report on the bulletin board in the front hall by the piano. Even though my predictions were more often correct than the ones published in the local newspaper, a comparison that would be the basis of a science fair project, I don't think the weather predictions were nearly so impressive to my classmates as my ability to compute batting averages.

More important was that sputnik and the other satellites and then manned rockets that followed gave Frank and Gary and Robert and me an optimism about our abilities that convinced us that we could indeed go to the Moon. My relatives who returned from World War II were expected to stay in Jonesboro. My Father, for reasons that escape me, had wanted to move to Fort Worth. His family was horrified. My uncle actually did move to Texas, but that was because he married a girl from El Paso. New York, California, the Moon or Mars seemed equally possible to me in 1957.

I still haven't gone to the Moon, but the amount of rocket science available to me now so far surpasses what was available to me in 1957--mostly the library's Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, the books of Patrick Moore, and my 1946 set of encyclopedia--that I may as be on Mars. I feel much more at home in the universe now. It is discouraging that  Russia is once more going into the burying business and much of the U.S. government is even more reactionary than Senator McCarthy. My friends and I had been ready to defend against the Russians, who had after all recently fought against kids about our age in Poland, but we were also ready to welcome aliens. It is encouraging to me that I still meet kids ready to welcome aliens, and I'm hoping that the Tesla Model R.2 might let those kids looking for aliens make the trip.