Imperiled

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me,’ and when you have found that attitude, follow it.

~ William James

I’ve recently felt the desire to once again dabble in writing fiction. I’ve written some short stories in the past, culled from scribblings upon the backs of envelopes or the scrawls upon Post-It notes, and I remember with great joy the feeling of accomplishment. Some of my characters are memorable to me, for all their idiosyncrasies and wanton altruism – a sort of incongruous harmony, if you please.

The sort of characters that just might – I fancy, in my more congratulatory moments – make Andre Dubus proud.

The short stories of Andre Dubus have inspired me for over a decade, ever since I first picked up his Selected Stories and devoured it like a kid does Gummi worms or sugar-coated breakfast cereal. I relate particularly well with the father figures created in “A Father’s Story” or “Killings,” which became the 2001 movie In the Bedroom. Their tenacious ambiguity, in the name of devotion, strike me as genuine. Authentic. Each walks a path that rings true, even if far from ordinary or acceptable.

So I plucked it from my shelf, intent on reading it again. To inspire me.

As I did so, I also took notice of the adjacent book, a collection of essays titled Meditations from a Movable Chair, penned by Dubus before his death in 1999. This one, I hadn’t read as thoroughly, instead having only skimmed through it on occasion.

Big mistake, for here is the motivation behind the man and his work. The frustrations and joys of being real, of doing what he loved even when no one noticed. The stuff that shaped the stories. And one essay, titled “Imperiled Men,” struck me as particularly timely.

In the essay, he recounted his days as a marine lieutenant aboard a US aircraft carrier in the western Pacific during the early part of the 1960s, where he and his men were assigned the task of guarding the ship’s cache of nuclear weapons. At the heart of the essay is his recollections of a man known only by the acronym CAG, a commander with an Air Group assigned to the carrier to run training missions in preparation for bombing raids over Moscow. CAG was a decorated pilot, having flown missions during WWII, and Dubus shares how excited he felt when, during a stop at Iwakuni, he would have a chance to walk with him through the Hiroshima memorial and pick his ear, how “I would walk with him, and look at him, and his seasoned eyes and steps would steady mine.” But CAG had been called back aboard the carrier and missed the trip. Only later did he learn what had prompted CAG’s detainment . . .

That night I . . . climbed to my upper bunk, and slept for only a while, till the quiet voice of my roommate woke me: “The body will be flown to Okinawa.”

I looked at him standing at his desk and speaking into the telephone.

“Yes. A thirty-eight in the temple. Yes.”

I turned on my reading lamp and watched him put the phone down. He was sad, and he looked at me. I said: “Did someone commit suicide?”

“CAG.”

“CAG?”

I sat up.

“The ONI investigated him.”

Then I knew what I had not known I knew, and I said: “Was he a homosexual?”

“Yes.”

He told me two investigators from the Office of Naval Intelligence had come aboard that morning and had given the captain their report. The investigators were with the executive officer when he summoned CAG to his office and showed him the report and told him that he could either resign or face a general court-martial. Then CAG went to his room. Fifteen minutes later, the executive officer phoned him; when he did not answer, the executive officer and the investigators ran to his room. He was on his bunk, shot in the right temple, his revolver in his hand. His eyelids fluttered; he was unconscious but still alive, and he died from bleeding.

“They ran?” I said. “They ran to his room?”

Ten years later, one of my shipmates came to visit me in Massachusetts; we had been civilians for a long time. In my kitchen, we were drinking beer, and he said: “I couldn’t tell you this aboard ship, because I worked in the legal office. They called CAG back from that boat you were on, because he knew the ONI was onboard. His plane was on the ground in Iwakuni. They were afraid he was going to fly it and crash into the sea and they’d lose the plane.”

All thirty-five hundred men of the ship’s crew did not mourn. Not every one of the hundreds of men in the Air Group mourned. But the shock was general and hundreds of men did mourn, and each morning we woke to it, and it was in our talk in the wardroom and in the passageways. In the closed air of the ship, it touched us, and it lived above us on the flight deck, and in the sky. One night at sea, a young pilot came to my room; his face was sunburned and sad. We sat in desk chairs, and he said: “The morale is very bad now. The whole Group. It’s just shot.”

“Did y’all know about him?”

“We all knew. We didn’t care. We would have followed him to hell.”

Timely?

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is in the news once again, though you might have missed it with that slick in the Gulf perhaps justifiably dominating the headlines. A few years ago, I had no idea what Don’t Ask Don’t Tell meant, nor could I have spelled out the havoc this ambiguous amalgamation of policy and law has reeked upon so many willing and able-bodied individuals. I’m changing that. Amidst my weak attempts at fiction, and once again devouring Andre Dubus, I am also reading Nathaniel Frank’s Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, and Steve Estes’ Ask & Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out. In the former, Frank sums things up in a way that makes sense:

By defining conduct as including a statement of status, and defining a statement of status to include any indication that one may have a “propensity” to engage in homosexual conduct, the military was able to get around the legal objection that they were targeting people for who they were and thus violating the constitutional rights of gays and lesbians. And by insisting that the policy does not punish people for being homosexual, only for engaging in homosexual conduct, the government implies that anyone who is fired under the policy has willingly chosen to break the rules. In reality, the policy targets same-sex desire itself, and bans what gay people, by definition, do, while allowing straight people who engage in occasional gay fun to go right on serving. It is no more conduct-based than a rule that bars people from praying to Jesus – this is what Christians do, just as having sexual relations with people of the same sex is what gays do. Is banning people for praying to Jesus any different from banning Christians? Is a restaurant that bans creatures who bark not a restaurant that bars dogs? Is a policy that bars people who engage in homosexual behavior not a policy that bars homosexuals?

I’ve also found this to be interesting reading. It states that “Success in combat requires military units that are characterized by high morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion.” I can buy that. However, it also states that “The presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.”

In this day and age, how are these two statements compatible? Are we, as a nation, no longer willing to grant people the benefit of their integrity? Maybe I’m naïve, but it seems to me that a great majority of those who sign up and qualify for military service, are ready to die for This Great Nation of ours – for you, and me – are also willing to not let their “propensity” for certain sexual activities, whether of the straight or gay nature, get in the way of achieving the goal they’ve set for themselves. Show me the instances where those in the military have failed to do so, and I’ll be willing to bet that the sexual activities engaged in run the gamut of experiences, not just those of a homosexual nature.

To be clear, I’m not saying that conduct unbecoming should not be punished. If harm has been done, then let the consequences be meted out. But the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy is something altogether different, for how can one be justifiably punished for simply being who they are? Normal people. With normal desires and affections. I know a few homosexuals. And, trust me, they are normal. Not in a boring sense of the word, but in a one of us kind of way. And I trust them. They have my back, in more ways than can be imagined. They might even take a bullet for me.

On this Memorial Day, we are asked to remember those who have served. Not only those who are currently serving, but also those who have lost their lives, their limbs, and their livelihood. In doing so, let’s not forget those who have had distinguished military careers derailed as a result of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. And those like CAG, who even before such a policy existed were called back aboard the ship and given a choice no one in our military should have to make.

It’s time . . .

A Thousand Words II

This book is either really good or really bad. You decide . . .

The Wild Rumpus

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

~ Erma Bombeck

Back in the day, when that cruel taskmaster Time doled itself out in the intervals between diaper changes, snack times, stints at the office, and early-evening stroller rides around the neighborhood, when the house was a second-story loft apartment with one air conditioner in the master bedroom window, it was Will Smith as J, dressed in black and gettin’ jiggy with that slimy alien Mikey, that got the rumpus started.

Go ahead. Make your neck work. You know you want to . . .

Felt good, right? Damn straight it did. We’d jump on the bed, a tangled and bouncing mess of diapers and runny noses, a ganglion of giggles and squeals of delight. No pressure to get the moves right. Just wild abandon on a mattress that now, a decade and a mortgage later, sags in the middle.

As the years have passed, adding more and bigger kids to the mix, the rumpuses have moved from the bedroom into other arenas. There have been ball pits, parks with hunter-green plastic slides and cherry-red swings, fast food Playlands, bowling alleys with gutter bumpers and neon lights, glow-in-the-dark, indoor miniature golf courses, back yards cluttered with ruts, walnuts, and barbeque grills, and forest pathways lined with one-hundred-year-old oak trees, the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot. And water puddles, the kind that shimmer in the sun, their calm surfaces broken and sent skyward drop after drop by the intrusion of defrocked feet, leaving shins and calves sporting driblets of dried mud, the happy tears of a well-spent moment.

And movie theaters, for not all rumpuses need be raucous affairs. Not much beats the semiannual sharing of buttered and seasoned popcorn in buckets bigger than your head, sodas served by the gallon, chocolate covered raisins, and sticky red strands of Twizzlers. And then the refills, because that’s what The Wild Things would do, they would live it up while the living is easy.

Because, as Maurice Sendak reminded us a long time ago, and reminds us anew each day we are willing to remember, life is hard and rumpuses are rare and must be embraced with gusto, with hands weary from the toil and hearts weighed down and weakened by the strain of the stuff of life between the rumpuses. All of it is what makes us tick, and rumpuses lighten the load, each passing second a stone added to the lighter side of the scale. It’s a delicate balance, and it takes eyes and attitudes attuned to the deeper meaning of it all to keep things even.

So go ahead.  Rediscover the bond.  Unearth the thing that makes your neck work.  Find the time to let your own rumpus start.  Dinner will be warm and waiting . . .

[photo credit]

The Materials of Solitude

By pretending to have friends, maybe I could invent some.

~ Michael Chabon

I have myopia. Either my eyeballs are too long or my corneas are too steep. Maybe both; no one has ever really spelled out the specifics. Regardless, for several years now I have worn glasses when driving or watching television.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of both lately, lapping up Mad Men on DVD – much like my cat Meepo when he first discovered that he really liked the leftover mauve-colored milk from my morning bowl of Fruity Pebbles – in a mad-dash effort to get up-to-speed on all things Don Draper, and making the 6.8 mile trip up Homestead Road every afternoon to pick up my son from play practice. He landed the role of Ho-Jon in his high school’s staging of M*A*S*H. My son has long red hair, pimples, and mumbles in a very nasally, very Midwestern accent which, they’ll tell you if you bring it up, really isn’t much of an accent after all. He’s every kid. And he’s playing a Korean houseboy in less than a month. And I still have the third season to go.

So I’m going to need my glasses.

Only I took them off Saturday night in my garage, after watching the episode in which Peggy Olson finally gets her own office (prediction: she will be running Sterling Cooper before this thing wraps), and sat them down on the trunk of the car. Sunday morning, my wife ran to the store to pick up stuff to make potato soup. My glasses made it nearly two blocks before sliding off. This morning, we found the lenses along the side of the road, pockmarked and caked with Indiana clay. And in the “Wouldn’t You Know It” department, my script expired in 2005. “No, Mr. Thomas, we can’t just make you a new pair.” Curses!

Thankfully, I can handle reading. I’m in the middle of the fall semester and both of my classes are, for the first time in my academic career, online. For the record, this is a recipe for disaster for those of us who are chronic procrastinators. No weekly agenda. No lectures to attend. No hobnobbing face to face with the professor or my classmates. Instead, there is me, a pile of books, some documentaries on YouTube and PBS, Blackboard access, and tons of writing, with a journal entry here, an essay there, and midterms. Having pounded most of that out over the past couple of weeks, I now have the next few days to read and write about Richard Rubenstein’s When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ’s Divinity in the Last Days of Rome. With heads bowed and eyes closed, an altar call . . . Who wants to join me?! Anyone . . . ?

What if I throw in something a little less mind-numbing? In the mix, between the bickering and blathering of Arius and Athanasius and their myriad men-behaving-badly minions, I’ve been dipping my toes into purer waters – the consistently stunning prose of Michael Chabon’s latest book, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. Few authors turn my crank as effortlessly as Chabon, whose Wonder Boys, Summerland, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay are staples down the middle of my list of books that should be reread just for the sheer pleasure of doing so. In this book, his “first sustained work of personal writing,” Chabon doesn’t just share a story, he becomes the story. And, as should be the case with all meaningful memoirs, his essays dovetail with my own experiences, leading me to set the book aside occasionally and reflect on the connections we share. For example, in the very first chapter, titled “The Secret Handshake,” Chabon writes about his attempt, at the tender age of ten, to start his own comic book club. He fashioned a newsletter echoing the style of his hero Stan Lee, the brains, brawn, and balls behind the modern incarnation of Marvel comics, and, with the help of his mother, rented a room at the local community center, set up a table and some chairs, and hung up a hand-painted sign inviting one and all to join the club for the price of one dollar. One kid showed up, got freaked out by all those empty chairs, and left. He writes:

This is the point, to me, where art and fandom coincide. Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever as one but which maintains chapters in every city – in every cranium – in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

And of course, as seems to be the case more than usual lately, especially during an online hiatus of sorts, I got to thinking about all this as it relates to blogging. We live our lives, experiencing the joys and sorrows, the ups and the downs, the times of plenty and times of need, the crowds and the quiet benches, and then eventually we sit down alone at our desks or on my our porch and craft these posts. We take what we see as we gaze at and engage with the grand panorama of life, and then pull our focus up close. Blogs like mine are the materials of solitude. And those of us who do this with no hope for immediate monetary gain become deliberately myopic, choosing not to focus on how far the words reach or on how broadly the ripples may spread, but instead are content with the nearness of the task at hand, the crafting of these invitations that we hang on our digital doorposts.

I admit that I often feel like that kid, sitting alone in the empty room, waiting for someone to come along, pull up a chair, and join me in dunking the cookies of fellowship. And into my little room you have come. This club is small, but it’s mine. I’m glad you’re here. And you can keep your dollar . . .

[top photo credit]

Rubbing Shoulders with Doom, What My Tattoo Really Means, and a Poll

The follies which a man regrets most in his life, are those which he didn’t commit when he had the opportunity.

~ Helen Rowland

When I think of crazy, I think of Chris McCandless. He would be almost nine months older than me, and alive, had he been not a little less crazy but a bit more prepared. Instead, he walked into the Denali National Park and Preserve without a compass, without a map, and with a plan incomprehensible to anyone but himself. I can appreciate his passion, the way he made the deliberate choice to abandon the upside of advantage and hit the road in pursuit of something besides what others envisioned for him. But in attaining the rewards that accompany the follies of youth, he paid the ultimate price.

I first encountered his story within the pages of writer and mountaineer Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book Into the Wild. Still in my 20s and on the verge of major changes both professionally and familial, the story of Chris McCandless struck a tender nerve. Perhaps it was because at that point I knew my chances of experiencing a personal hiatus of the sorts he chose were slim to none. I had a kid and a wife. Doors were opening for the career change that I’d been anticipating. And people in my position didn’t just drop everything and go on a walkabout looking for inspiration. I’d never had the mental and physical resources for that sort of adventure anyway. But a part of me secretly wished that an opportunity to do what Chris did had come along. Without the tragic ending.

The best part of Krakauer’s book, however, is his own account of climbing the Devils Thumb. These two chapters, sandwiched between episodes of Chris McCandless’ unfolding journey, spoke to me for the simple reason that he had survived, and come off the mountain wiser about our primordial hunger for all-things-crazy. Krakauer writes . . .

All that held me to the mountainside, all that held me to the world, were two thin spikes of chrome molybdenum stuck half an inch into a smear of frozen water, yet the higher I climbed, the more comfortable I became. Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control . . .

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.

Do I regret that I have no such story to share? That I never went skydiving? Never sang before Ed McMahon? Am I sad that most of the crazy things I’ve done occurred vicariously – adventures lived through the lives of others? Maybe just a little. But unlike Chris McCandless, I have lived to tell my tale. If you’re reading these words, then so have you. Crazy is as crazy does. And though my crazy is not terribly exciting, it is my crazy. These are my hands and feet, clinging to the slippery slopes of my pathway up the mountain of life, and yet this mountain doesn’t define me. It’s what I’ve learned along the ascent that matters . . .

*****

Remember my tattoo? Well, I am sad, though not completely surprised, to report that it doesn’t mean what was intended. I did some digging online and came across a Chinese forum with an entire section devoted to translating tattoos. I posted a photo of my tattoo and the moderator very kindly wrote, “Sorry, you’re a victim of the gibberish Chinese font. Interestingly enough, the first two characters (i.e. those corresponding to GJ) are 武術 (wushu) which is a word, and means martial art. Unfortunately though they are badly drawn. The third ‘character’ 氵is actually not a character in its own right, rather it is what is called a radical (a common part of many characters). The radical is known as “three drops of water” and if a character contains this radical, it usually is related to water in some way.“

So I have a poorly-drawn tattoo that means, literally, martial art, hydro-.  Sweet!

He continues, “It looks like they were going to write a word related to water like perhaps hydroelectic or hydroponic or hydrate, but then stopped before they finished. And then imagine that maybe all the t‘s were written backwards, or the rt of ‘martial’ was combined into one letter that looked more like a backwards h rather than two separate letters rt, and that the l in martial looked more like a backslash \ than an l. That’s kind of what you’ve got tattooed.” So I think a new tattoo, one that actually means something, may be in order . . .

*****

My heartfelt thanks to Pamela, Sally, Travis, Christine, Ed and Erika for their contributions to the “Just A Little Crazy” series. I hope you enjoyed reading their posts as much as I did, and that you took the opportunity to contemplate your own craziness. So, a question: Would you enjoy reading more Crazy posts? I’m thinking about making this a by-weekly thing and inviting a few more folks to contribute. Let me know what you think by registering your vote below. And if you feel led, leave a comment or send me an email to share further thoughts about the series. In the meantime, have a great day . . .

[photo credit]