Sari Botton | Longreads | March 2015

It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, was first published. And not just because the passage of time, in hindsight, is always kind of baffling, but because I have thought about that book so regularly it seems my brain only just first absorbed it.

I’d almost skipped it because I thought it was YA—which it turns out I’m more interested in at nearly fifty than I was at nearly forty, but that’s another matter. I was thrown off by the white cover illustrated with a pink and green grosgrain ribbon belt straight out of the Preppy Handbook, as well as the first lines of most reviews describing it as a “coming of age novel.”

But then it was the monthly selection for a highbrow book club I’d been somehow invited to join, a mostly Ivy-educated group with more than a few lit majors—like the woman who defended her universally rejected suggestion of choosing Dante and Milton over Zadie Smith by insisting, “We’re talking about art here, and art has its demands.” Well.

Did Prep make the cut because it takes place within a rarified ring of hell familiar to some of the book club’s members—specifically at “Ault,” the sort of elite boarding school they’d attended, and which their kids now did? Did it resonate with me to the degree it did because in a way, in that book group, I—a state school-educated underachiever from a blue collar town—was similar to Lee Fiora, Sittenfeld’s insecure teen social climber, attending Ault on scholarship as a way to escape the averageness imposed on her by growing up in a family of modest means in a Midwestern town? I’ve played that role a few other times in life, too, in exclusive spaces where I gained entrée (at least peripherally) despite a lack of a certain pedigree.

With great humor, Sittenfeld perfectly illustrates the power dynamics that play out between those with status—whether owing to race, class, gender or other factors bestowing privilege—and those seeking it, hoping to have it rub off on them. She’s most incisive about wealthy white male privilege and the confidence that comes with it. It sparks in Lee a kind of envy that she at first confuses for a crush. “The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn’t romantic,” she says in the narration, “but I wasn’t sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people’s time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.”

Lee, an awkward freshman, becomes fascinated not only with the boys at the top of the Ault Pecking order, but the girls, too. She studies all their profiles in the school catalog (at a time before Facebook), and essentially stalks them—which makes her a natural for the game of Assasin, a campus-wide contest to see who can “kill” the greatest number of fellow students by tagging them with orange stickers when they least expect it. “Undeniably,” she says, “the qualities that I usually lamented in myself—my invisibility, my watchfulness of others—now served me well.” Her studies fall to the wayside and her grades plummet as she uses her time pursuing social currency, at one point sitting under a table in the dining room for a while, waiting for her Assassin target, a popular boy from a wealthy family.

Here’s an excerpt from Prep (which totally holds up a decade after its initial release) from the chapter called “Assassin.”

* * *

Assassin

Curtis Sittenfeld | Prep | 2005 | 17 minutes (4,440 words)

Gates was running roll call alone the next morning, but near the end, Henry Thorpe came and stood on the platform. Gates moved aside, and Henry stepped in front of the desk, and even though he hadn’t said a thing, people started laughing—he seemed to be imitating himself running roll call on another day. A lot of times students performed skits as announcements, and occasionally, if the senior class had a big test, they’d filibuster by performing lots and lots of skits, or making joke announcements; once, nearly twenty members of the senior class came up, one by one, to wish Dean Fletcher a happy birthday.

“So I guess that’s it for today,” Henry said. “I’ll just ring the bell now.” With exaggerated gestures, practically in slow motion, he reached to the left side of the desk where the button for the schoolwide bell was, but before he pressed it, a figure stepped forward from the fireplace near the front of the hall. The person was wearing a black robe with a black hood and carrying an oversized water gun, and when he aimed the gun at Henry, an arc of water shot over the heads of all the students sitting at the desks between the fireplace and the platform. The water hit Henry near the heart, soaking his shirt.

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“Ach!” he cried. “I’m down! I’m down! They got me.” He grabbed his chest and staggered around the platform—I looked at Gates, who was standing behind Henry smiling at him like an indulgent older sister—and then Henry stepped forward and fell face-first onto the desk, his arms hanging limply in front of him.

Students cheered wildly. Not so much around me, because I sat in front with the other freshmen, and most of my classmates didn’t seem to know any better than I did what was going on. But the farther back you got in the room, the more loudly people were yelling and clapping. The person in the cloak pulled back his hood—it was Adam Rabinovitz, a senior—then threw his fists in the air. He said, or this was what I thought he said, though it was hard to hear, “Victory is mine.”

I knew three things about Adam Rabinovitz, all of which intrigued me without inspiring any desire ever to speak to him. The first was a bit of lore from two years before I’d gotten to Ault. Often at roll call people made announcements about missing notebooks or lost articles of clothing—I left a green fleece jacket in the library on Monday afternoon—and as a sophomore Adam had come up to the platform one morning, said in a completely normal voice, “Last night, Jimmy Galloway lost his virginity in the music wing, so if you find it, please return it to him,” and then stepped off the platform, while Mr. Byden glowered and students turned to each other in shock and delight. Jimmy was Adam’s roommate, a good-looking blond guy, and I wondered, though this bit of information never got included when the story was told, who the girl had been.

The second thing I knew about Adam also had, in a way, to do with sex. In the fall, a plaster-of-paris display had gone up in the art wing, a joint project by two senior girls who both wore sheer scarves around their necks and silver hoop earrings and lots of black and who probably smoked, or would start when they got to college. They were serious about their art, and that must have been why they were allowed to include in the display a variety of plaster body parts, including a breast and a penis; the breast was never identified, but after great speculation, the dominant theory on campus was that the penis belonged to Adam Rabinovitz. The third thing I knew about him, and this made the other two all the more interesting, was that supposedly he had the highest GPA in his class; at any rate, he was headed to Yale.

On the platform, Henry came back to life, and Adam joined him. “Okay, here’s the deal,” Adam said. “Assassin is starting again, and this is how we’re doing it this year. If you’re a student, we’re assuming you want to play, so if you don’t, cross your name off the class lists in the mail room by noon today. If you’re faculty, we’re assuming you don’t want to play”— here, Dean Fletcher made his own whooping cheer, eliciting laughter— “That means you do want to play, right, Fletchy?” Adam said. “Whoever gets Fletchy, remember: He’s really psyched for the game.”

People laughed more, and Adam continued. “So for you freshmen and freshwomen, I’ll give a rundown. The object of the game is, you kill all your classmates.” Again, there was laughter, laughter that makes this day and this game seem longer ago than it was; at the time, certain teachers and students expressed disapproval of Assassin, but they were viewed as the humorless minority.

“How you kill them is pretty simple,” Adam said. “The game starts at one p.m. tomorrow. Check your mailbox by twelve o’clock, and you’ll find a piece of paper with a name on it and a bunch of orange stickers. The name you get is your target, and that person won’t know that you have them. You have to kill them by putting a sticker on them without anyone seeing. If there’s a witness, you have to wait twenty-four hours before making another attempt. Once your target is dead, you take over their target, and you need to get their stickers. And don’t forget that someone else is targeting you. Any questions?”

“How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” a girl yelled.

“It depends on your tongue,” Adam said. “Is that the best you can do?” “What’s the meaning of life?” someone else shouted.
Mr. Byden, who was standing next to Gates, tapped Henry on the shoulder, and Henry leaned in and whispered something to Adam. Adam nodded. “I’m receiving word from on high that we need to wrap up. So, basically, watch your back and trust no one. And if you have any questions, find me, Galloway, or Thorpe.” He stepped off the platform, and Henry followed him.
“You should have told them whoever wins gets the title grand master assassin,” I heard Henry say as they passed my desk. The next announcement had begun, but I was still watching the two of them.

“Or they get to blow you,” Adam said. “Whichever they choose.” They both snickered, and I smiled, as if the joke had been meant for me, too.

At that point, listening to them, I wasn’t thinking much about Assassin. What the announcement left me with mostly—I couldn’t have articulated it then, and I might not have believed it if someone else had suggested it— was the sense that I wanted to be Adam Rabinovitz. The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn’t romantic, but I wasn’t sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people’s time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.

My first target in Assassin was Devin Billinger, a boy in my class who had, at that time, no particular significance to me. In my mailbox, I found the slip of paper with my name and his name typed on it and, attached by a paper clip, the sheet of round orange stickers. All around me, other students were finding their assignments, talking noisily. It was the beginning of sixth period, and I left the mail room to walk to the dining hall for lunch. I was just outside the stairwell leading from the basement to the first floor when, amazingly, I came face-to-face with Devin himself. Like me, he was alone. We made eye contact and did not say hi, and he turned in to the stairwell.

I was still holding the assignment sheet and the stickers. I peeled off a sticker with my index finger and thumb, keeping it affixed to my fingertip. Immediately, both my hands began to shake. I entered the stairwell. “Devin,” I said.

He stopped a few steps up and looked back. “Huh?”

Without saying anything, I closed the space between us. When we were standing on the same step, I reached out and placed the sticker on the upper part of his left arm. “You’re dead,” I said, and I bit my lip, trying not to smile.

He looked at his arm as if I’d spit on it. “What the fuck is that?”
“It’s for Assassin,” I said. “You’re my target.”
“It hasn’t started yet.”
“Yes, it has.” I held out my wrist to him, so he could read my watch: It was ten after one.
“This is bullshit.” His voice was more than irritated; possibly, though I didn’t know him well enough to be certain, he was furious. He glared at me and turned, as if to continue up the steps.

“Wait,” I said. “You have to give me your target.”
“I don’t have to do anything.”
We looked at each other, and I actually laughed. In theory, pissing off Devin Billinger should have unnerved me. He was one of a group of six or seven guys in our class known as bank boys—most of them were from New York and most of their dads had jobs having to do with investments and brokerage and other money-related matters I had no grasp of. (Technically, a bank boy didn’t have to be from New York or have a banking father—he just had to seem as if he could.) But the reality of Devin’s anger was more ridiculous than scary; he reminded me of a pouting six-year-old. “Are you planning to cheat?” I asked.

“Why are you so righteous? It’s a game.”
“And I’m just playing by the rules.”
Devin glared at me, then shook his head. He reached into his pocket, withdrew some small crumpled bits of paper, and thrust them toward me. “Here. Are you happy?”

“Yeah, I am,” I said. “Thank you.”

On Wednesday, after killing Devin, I’d killed Sage Christensen (she was a sophomore on the lacrosse team), and at dinner I’d killed Allie Wray, a senior. Both exclaimed in surprise when I tagged them, but neither seemed to care particularly. “I’m so bad at these games,” Allie said agreeably as she passed over her stickers and her target.

Yet I, apparently, had an aptitude for Assassin, and I found myself wondering—it was impossible not to wonder—if I had any shot at winning the whole game. What if I surprised everyone? What if all the boys (boys, definitely, were more into it) got so preoccupied killing each other that they forgot about me and I just stuck around, beneath the radar? Because, undeniably, the qualities that I usually lamented in myself—my invisibility, my watchfulness of others—now served me well. Maybe at the end there would come the unlikely inevitability of victory, like when I played hearts with my family and, every so often, shot the moon.

And even if I didn’t win Assassin, I still liked the extra pulse it created in the dining hall and the schoolhouse. Some people would tell you who they had, and some people were secretive—it was like grades—and supposedly a bunch of sophomores had drawn up an enormous chart, like a family tree that circled in on itself, connecting all the players. But of course, such a chart wouldn’t remain current for long, because people’s status changed hourly. I also heard that Mrs. Velle, the registrar, had given out other students’ class schedules to Mundy Keffler and Albert Shuman, who were seniors, but that after more people came by her office asking for schedules, she refused. Waiting in line for breakfast, I was told by Richie Secrest, another freshman, that at least half the student body had been killed in the first twenty-four hours. I wasn’t surprised—both Dede and Sin-Jun had been dead by the previous evening. I was toasting my bagel when I heard Aspeth say to Cross Sugarman, “If I hear another word about that goddamn game, I’ll scream.”

“Yeah, because you’re out already,” Cross said. “Don’t be a bad sport.” (In such proximity to Cross, I stared at the floor, feeling clammy and unattractive from having been outside with Conchita.)

“No,” Aspeth said. “Try because it’s lame. And because there are enough basket cases at this school as it is.”

“Sure,” Cross said. “I completely believe you.”

They were standing about three feet from me, and then their bagels fell down the slide to the front of the toaster, and they were gone. So Cross was still in, I thought, and that was when I had the idea: If I stayed alive, eventually the game would lead me to him. Or it would lead him to me, which would be even better. For Cross to be in possession of a piece of paper with my name on it, for him to travel around campus in search of me, to reach out and place a sticker on my body—the possibility made me almost sad, almost terrified, with hope. For the first time since we’d ridden in the taxi together more than a month before, we’d be forced to talk; he’d have to acknowledge me.

Life is clearest when guided by ulterior motives; walking to chapel, I felt a sense of true purpose. I was on my way to kill McGrath Mills, a junior from Dallas whom I’d inherited from Allie Wray. I’d heard McGrath was good at lacrosse, and I thought that an athlete would probably be harder to kill—there was more of a chance he’d be into the game.

I’d decided the night before that my best bet was in the rush after morning chapel. Therefore, I’d left breakfast early, without Conchita, and I found a seat in chapel near the back. Usually I sat near the front, but I knew the back was the province of drowsy junior and senior boys and of students using chapel time to finish their homework. As the seats around me filled, I kept an eye out for McGrath. At seven fifty-eight, he took a seat two rows in front of me. While Mr. Coker, a chemistry teacher, gave a talk about how he’d developed patience by observing his grandfather during boyhood fishing trips to Wisconsin, I intently watched the back of McGrath’s head.

Though you were free to leave chapel after the hymn, I usually waited until the recessional was over. On this morning, however, before the last notes of “Jerusalem” rang out, I followed McGrath toward the exit. A bottleneck had formed at the doors—this was why normally I waited—and people were pushing each other and joking around. Parker Farrell, a senior, said, “Hey, Dooley, watch your back!” and then another guy shouted, “Quit grabbing my assassin!”

Two people stood between McGrath and me, and I wormed past one, then the other. With my right hand in my pocket, I’d transferred an orange sticker from the sheet to my finger. On the threshold of the chapel, McGrath was only a few inches from me; seeing the weave of his red polo shirt up close was like seeing the pores on another person’s face.

I withdrew my hand from my pocket and placed the sticker on his lower back, and I had not taken my hand away when Max Cobey, a junior standing to my left, said, “I saw that, whatever-your-name-is freshman girl, and you’re so busted. Hey, Mills, look at your back.”

McGrath turned toward Max, and Max pointed at me.
“She just tried to kill you,” Max said.
McGrath turned around. I was looking down, blushing furiously; without raising my chin, I glanced up, and I saw that McGrath was grinning. “You?” he said.

The swarm was moving forward, and the three of us found ourselves outside, in front of the chapel.

“You’re totally busted,” Max said again, quite loudly, and he pointed down at me; he was several inches taller than I was. But he didn’t seem hostile, as Devin had; rather, he was simply enthusiastic. A few other junior guys, friends of either Max’s or McGrath’s, gathered around us.

“What’s your name?” McGrath said. He had a Southern accent, a slight twang, and he’d stuck the orange sticker from his shirt onto the pad of his middle finger.

“My name’s Lee.” 
“Did you try to kill me back there, Lee?”
 I darted glances at the faces of the other boys, then looked back at McGrath. “Kind of,” I said, and they laughed.
 “Here’s what I’m gonna tell you,” McGrath said. “It’s okay to try. But it would be wrong to succeed. You got that?”
 “Tell her,” one of the other guys said.
 “Let’s recap.” McGrath held up his right hand, the hand with the sticker. “Try, all right,” he said. He held up his left hand. “Succeed, wrong.” He shook his head. “Very, very wrong.”

“I’ll see if I can remember.”
 “Ooh,” Max said. “She’s feisty.”
 Already, I felt like I had crushes on both him and McGrath. 
“All right now, Lee,” McGrath said as he turned away. “I’ll be watchin’ you.”
“Me, too,” one of the other boys said, and he mimed like he was holding binoculars in front of his eyes. Then he smiled at me, before catching up with his friends. (Simon Thomworth Allard, Hanover, New Hampshire—that afternoon in the dorm, I studied the school catalog until I’d figured out his identity.)

I knew from the list posted outside Dean Fletcher’s office that McGrath was a server at Ms. Prosek’s table this week, and it was this knowledge that had helped me, as I’d lain awake around four o’clock in the morning, formulate a plan to kill him. Like all servers, McGrath would arrive to set the table twenty minutes before formal dinner started. When he did, I decided (and it was a decision so thrilling, an idea so perfect, that after it came to me, I did not fall asleep again before my alarm clock beeped at six-thirty), I’d be waiting beneath that table to place the sticker on his leg.

After lacrosse practice, I rushed to the dining hall and arrived by five-thirty, ten minutes before McGrath was due. Only five or six students were in the dining hall, including that night’s dining hall prefect, a senior named Oli Kehlmeier. (Being one of the three dining hall prefects was actually desirable—they oversaw the waiters at formal dinner, which meant they could boss around the younger boys and flirt with the girls.) Oli was busy spreading white cloths on the tables—it surprised me to see a dining hall prefect in fact working—and I decided to take a cloth myself from the stack near the doors to the kitchen.

I smoothed the cloth over Ms. Prosek’s table, then scanned the dining hall. No one was paying attention to me. I moved a chair out of the way, crouched, crawled under the table, and pulled the chair in. I was sitting with my heels pressed to my rear end, my knees forward, but that quickly became uncomfortable, and I switched to sitting Indian-style. There wasn’t much room to maneuver. My elbow knocked a chair, and I froze, but I heard nothing from the outside—no proclamation of poltergeist, no face appearing at the level of my own to ask what the hell I was doing— and I relaxed again. A few old-looking globs of gum were stuck to the unfinished underside of the table, I noticed, and I could smell both the table and the floor, though neither of them smelled particularly like wood; they smelled more like shoes, like not-so-dirty running shoes, or a child’s flip-flops.

At twenty of six, I tensed, anticipating McGrath. As more and more servers arrived, I felt certain that every set of approaching footsteps was his. All the tables around Ms. Prosek’s appeared occupied, and surely, I thought, they would see me, surely they’d notice the pale blue fabric of my skirt (was it gross that I was sitting on the floor in my skirt?), or see my sandaled foot. But no one approached. At the table to the right of mine, the server, I could tell by her voice, was Clara O’Hallahan, and she was singing to herself; she was singing the Jim Croce song “I Got a Name.” A little later, I heard a boy say, “Reed was in a bad mood today, huh?” and a girl said, “No worse than usual.” I waited to hear someone mention Assassin, but no one did. Eventually, the voices all became a blended, increasingly noisy hum, punctuated by the clinking of silverware and glasses. It was ten of six. McGrath wouldn’t dare miss formal dinner when he was serving, I thought, or would he? Just for skipping, you got table wipes, but if you were the server, I was pretty sure you got detention.

He arrived at four of six; well before he’d gotten to the table, I heard his cheerful drawl. Someone must have remarked on his lateness because he was saying, as he came closer, “It’s the two-minute method. Watch and learn.” Above my head, he set down what sounded like plates, then silverware. Before I could stick him, he’d left again, and he returned with a tray of glasses. His calves were mere inches from me—he was wearing khaki shorts, his leg hair was blond and thick—and he was whistling.

There were two entirely discrete feelings I had at this moment. The first was a disbelieving glee that I was really about to kill McGrath Mills. When you are accustomed to denial and failure, as maybe I was or maybe I only believed myself to be, success can feel disorienting, it can give you pause. Sometimes I found myself narrating such success, at least in my own head, in order to convince myself of its reality. And not just with major triumphs (of course whether I’d ever experienced a major triumph, apart from getting into Ault in the first place, was debatable) but with tiny ones, with anything I’d been waiting for and anticipating: I am now eating pizza, I am now getting out of the car. (And later: I am kissing this boy, he is lying on top of me.) I did this because it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of the thing than the thing itself.

The second feeling I had at this moment was a sad feeling, an abrupt slackness. I think it was McGrath’s leg hair. Also, his whistling. McGrath was a person. He didn’t want to be killed, he didn’t know I was waiting underneath the table. And it seemed so unfair to catch him by surprise. I didn’t want to win the whole game, I knew suddenly. I wanted admiration, of course, schoolwide recognition, but I couldn’t possibly get through all the little moments it would require, just me and the person I was supposed to kill. With Devin, it had been okay because he’d been such a jerk, and with Sage and Allie, because it hadn’t mattered to them if they remained in the game or not. But McGrath was nice, and he seemed to care at least a little about staying alive, and yet it would have been ridiculous for me not to take him out, with the opportunity quite literally in front of me. And it wasn’t even that I entirely didn’t want to. It was just that it seemed complicated. From now on, I thought, I’d do whatever was necessary to get to Cross. But I wouldn’t be zealous, I wouldn’t think the game itself actually mattered. This was the decision I was making as I extended my arm and placed the sticker on McGrath’s calf—I placed it just to the side of his tibia bone, almost exactly halfway between his ankle and knee. Then I pushed out the chair in front of me and emerged from beneath the table on my hands and knees. Looking up at McGrath from that position, I couldn’t help feeling a little like a dog.

His expression, as I’d feared, was one of naked surprise. I am not even sure he recognized me immediately. I stood, and said, uncertainly, “I just killed you,” and though McGrath broke out laughing, I think it was only because he was a good sport.

“Oh, boy,” he said in his Southern accent. “You nailed me. Man, did you get me good. How long were you under there?”

I shrugged.

“That’s a well-deserved win. Hey, Coles, look who was under my table. I know, she was stakin’ me out!” McGrath turned back to me.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be sorry. What are you sorry for? You got me fair and square. I gotta give you my stickers, right? But you know what?” He felt in the back pocket of his shorts, and in the pockets on both sides of his blazer. “I left ’em in my room,” he said. “Can I give ’em to you later? I’ll come up to your dorm and do a hand-delivery.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Anything’s fine.” (Of course he didn’t have his stickers. The game didn’t really matter to him.)

I knew right away that I had ruined it. Whatever jokiness had existed between us—I had killed the substance of it. McGrath would be friendly to me from now on (and I was right in thinking that, he always was friendly, for the year-plus that remained before he graduated from Ault) but the friendliness would be hollow. In killing him, I had ended the only overlap between our lives. “Assassinate anyone lately?” he would ask, months later, when we passed each other, just the two of us in a corridor of the third floor between fifth and sixth periods. Or, “How are your pillowcases holdin’ up?” I might laugh, or say, “They’re okay”—something short. McGrath didn’t want to talk, of course, it wasn’t as if we had anything to say to each other. I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.

* * *

From the book PREP by Curtis Sittenfeld. Copyright © 2005 by Curtis Sittenfeld. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Scott Porch | Longreads | March 2015 | 14 minutes (3,624 words)

Almost a year ago, former LA Weekly film writer Karina Longworth began producing You Must Remember This, a podcast about the inner worlds of Hollywood icons of the past and present. The characters and stories range from familiar, to unknown, to just plain weird. (Episode 2 is about a Frank Sinatra space opera that you never knew existed.) Longworth, 34, has also written for publications including Grantland about everything from the history of the Super Mario Bros. movie to the stories of Harvey Weinstein’s ruthlessness in the editing room.

We recently talked by phone about her interest in the stories of classic Hollywood, the unique format of podcasting, and how her roles as a journalist, critic, and historian have informed her storytelling.

* * *

Why did you leave LA Weekly ?

There were a lot of reasons. I would say that in general I was really burned out. I had not a clinical breakdown but sort of a stress meltdown. In the middle of 2012, sort of right after the Cannes Film Festival, there was a new editor in chief at LA Weekly, and I basically went to her. I wrote down everything work-related that I did for a week, and it ended up that I had worked 65 hours that week. And I was just like, I can’t do this anymore.

I had been the film editor and the film critic, and her solution to that problem was to demote me [laughs]—to take away some of my editorial responsibilities. I tried that for a few months and found that I was still having a lot of problems feeling enthusiastic about my work. I don’t think I’m cut out to be the type of film critic—and, really, I don’t know how you’d be any other type of film critic—who sees every movie and has an opinion about them. I was seeing on average seven movies a week. As a person who is very interested in contemporary film, there are probably 25 to 30 movies in a year that I am legitimately, personally interested in. And so I was obviously seeing quite a few more films than that.

I found it very overwhelming. And I just wasn’t satisfied. I felt like there had to be different ways to talk about movies—there had to be different ways to get audiences engaged.

Is it still the job of most film critics today to see basically every movie?

I think so. There’s a difference, I guess, between people who are sort of in more traditional, mainstream institutions like newspaper and whatever magazines are left. That’s different than people who are bloggers. The majority of film critics I know at this point sort of cobble together a living by writing for five or six different online outlets, so the demands of the job depend on what you can figure out how to get paid for.

I felt like I was supposed to be seeing everything and that it was expected of me as a film critic at one of the few newspapers that are paid attention to that I had an opinion about everything. And not just movies that were being widely released — all foreign films, documentaries, independent films. I was supposed to go to every film festival, and the film festivals as I got older were something that burned me out as well.

If you’re talking to people who are freelancing at five or six different places and you were burned out from what you were doing at LA Weekly, did you have some concern about going from the frying pan to the fire?

I don’t think I ever really thought that I was going to make a living cobbling together stuff as a freelance critic. The first thing I did was write a book, and before that book had even been released I got an offer to work on another book. I’ve taught. I’ve barely done any freelance work at all over the last two years.

These were the two Phaidon books?

No, one of them was a book published by Phaidon about Meryl Streep [Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor, published Jan. 6, 2014], and then the other one is a book called Hollywood Frame by Frame, which was commissioned by a publisher named ILIX in Britain [published in the UK in June 2014] and it was released in America [in Sept. 2014] by Princeton Architectural Press.

How do you feel about print journalism now with some distance from it?

I feel really good about what I’m doing and I don’t feel any resentment over what I’m not doing, or what I was not able to do as a journalist. If anything, over the past couple of months, editors have reached out to me with interesting ideas and assignments, which I’ve largely turned down because I have my plate full with the podcast, and because the podcast forces me to have my head in the past, which makes it difficult for me to switch gears and think analytically about the present. But that’s my problem, not anyone else’s.

And even a year ago when I was starting the podcast, it was really out of frustration with a teaching job that I was ill-suited for, more than frustration with journalism and the opportunities available for me in that field.

Did you come at the idea for the podcast emulating something else — doing an audio version of a documentary or an audiobook? Where did the idea come from?

Well, it actually goes back a long ways. For college, I went to art school and studied experimental film and video with the idea of making nontraditional, nonfiction films. As much as work can evolve when you’re like 19, 20, 21, my work kind of evolved into making these video diaries, these sort of poetic video diaries about the movies I was watching, the culture I was taking in, and what it meant to me, and incorporating historical information. My thesis film when I graduated was sort of a fictionalized biography of the relationship between Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra.

I was inspired by people like Chris Marker and Mark Rappaport but was also kind of inventing my own style. It was very full of my own voice, most of it with me writing a script and reading it and using found footage for the images. This was like 2002, 2003. It was pre-YouTube. That stuff didn’t really fit into the art world. Because I was using so much stolen material, it wasn’t appropriate for film festivals.

There were a couple of professors who were interested in what I was doing, but for the most part I didn’t have anyone encouraging me. I applied to graduate school with these films—but not to be an artist, to go to graduate school to be an academic. I got into the NYU cinema studies program, and I decided to give up on the creative aspect of it and just become a writer.

Over the past couple of years I’ve become frustrated with the options available for my experience and my skill set. It got to the point earlier [in 2014] that the primary work I was doing was teaching, and I just feeling very frustrated. I decided that I had to do something, so I had a spring break from teaching and decided to make a pilot for something.

I knew I wanted to take advantage of the fact that you can make audio work now as a podcast and that there are channels where people can find it and pay attention to it. So I did what I used to do when I was making videos in college except cutting out the visual element, so I made a pilot in my 10-day spring break. Most of the feedback was positive, so I kept doing it. After a few months, I decided to stop doing anything else.

You called your first episode a pilot, which is interesting. Did you think you would take it to somebody and say, Do you want this? Do you want to pay for 12 more of these?

I wasn’t thinking I was ready for that at the beginning. Certainly for the first few episodes, I was still teaching myself the technology. In fact, the first piece of press I got was when the AV Club wrote about it in their Podmass feature, which is something I had aspired to, but I didn’t think it would happen on the third episode. It was at that point I realized that people were paying attention and I had to take it seriously.

I had long-term aspirations of making a few of these on my own and reaching out to somebody for financial support, but the things that happened along those lines happened way quicker than I thought. I definitely didn’t think that the pilot — that single episode — would be enough to get people to underwrite me.

How did it progress from there?

I started getting some press. There was a little piece in Entertainment Weekly in June, and then some people reached out from American Public Media who were trying to start a podcast network.

[American Public Media launched its podcast network—which is called Infinite Guest—in August 2014.]

How does that work—you own your show and they’re a distributor?

In terms of production, I still do everything myself. They facilitate signing up sponsors, they host the files on their server, and distribute the show on their iTunes channel.

How is the show doing as far as the number of people who listen to it?

We’re often in the top 10 or 20 on iTunes for film and TV podcasts. Serial was kind of a flash point where it was getting these enormous numbers and revealing the world of podcasts to people who had never really thought about them before. I don’t think my show will ever be that big. Old movies are a niche subject, and I’m approaching it with a niche style.

What’s your technical setup?

I record and edit in GarageBand, I have a microphone that goes to an Avid Mbox, and I built a hokey recording booth out of folding screens and foam. I record and edit everything in my house. There’s a possibility in the future—working with American Public Media—that I would start recording in a studio. They have offered that, and I’ve turned it down at this point.

As soon as I finish a script, I want to start recording because the emotional aspect of it is fresh for me. Sometimes that’s at nine in the morning, and sometimes that’s at 10 at night. It would be difficult for me at this point to stick to a weekly recording schedule.

Do you do multiple episodes at a time or take one all the way through before you start another one?

Sometimes I’m researching ahead and have multiple books on my Kindle that I’m reading all at once. But once I sit down to write a script, I’m working on that episode all the way through.

How long do you spend on a typical episode?

The research can vary quite a bit from just a few days to a month. Once I actually start compiling all of my notes and writing a script, the script-writing process usually takes two or three days. The recording takes a couple of hours, and the editing takes about 12 hours over two days.

Are most of the topics things where you have an institutional knowledge and the research is to tack down the details, or are you getting into a lot of new territory?

It varies a lot from topic to topic. Judy Garland is somebody I wrote about as an undergrad and as a graduate student, so when I did an episode about her, I knew already a lot of the information. That episode dealt specifically with her death and the Stonewall riots that happened the night of her funeral, and I didn’t know any of the Stonewall stuff until I sat down to make that podcast episode.

The episode about Raquel Welch came about because I had to do a small amount of research about the poster for One Million Years B.C. for my Hollywood Frame by Frame book, and I realized that she had what I thought was a pretty fascinating life and career. I researched her completely from scratch when I did the podcast episode; I really knew nothing about her besides what I researched about that poster.

Did you decide fairly early that you wanted to have other people do character voices?

Yes. In fact, I wish I could do it more often, but because it’s just me sometimes it’s difficult to find people for the podcast and coordinate getting them over to my house to record in the timeframe that I have. One thing I really want to do is talk about cinema in a cinematic way, and for me that includes dramatizations.

How do you direct the voices? What do you tell people that you want?

It depends. In the Judy Garland episode where somebody is reading from a book, that’s different than when I have somebody do a line-reading that’s a quote from Montgomery Clift. Generally, I have in my head what I think it should sound like, and I try to talk to the actors about where the person is in their life—where they’re at emotionally and in their career and to understand the person in the moment.

Do you arc the episodes to get from beginning to end in a particular way?

I try to. One of the things I try to do when I’m writing the script is to try to create an emotional narrative. One of the things I get frustrated about when I do research is that a lot of the biographies are needlessly comprehensive when what’s interesting to people is the arc of somebody’s life—how they become what it is that we think of them and how that has friction with who they really are.

In the Lena Horne episode, did you decide to use a lot of archival audio because you had it available to use, or was it some reason specific to Lena Horne?

I found some audio that was pretty amazing that I wanted to use, and there have been cases where I have mixed archival audio with either me or somebody else doing an impression of that person. In this case, that didn’t seem like the right thing to do—partially because her voice is so distinctive that any impression would not be very good.

It felt like an interesting challenge to combine what I usually do with the material that I was able to get and see if I could help Lena tell her own story. The episode got really long [an hour vs. the usual 30 minutes], but the feedback I’ve gotten is that people liked hearing her voice and that the archival stuff was well used.

Not having a time slot or edit length to fit to, you have that latitude whenever you want it.

Yeah, I can make episodes as long as I want. It’s one of the great things about having a podcast.

Have you talked to your distributor or NPR about doing a two-minute version or a six-minute version of the show?

I haven’t figured out a way to make that work yet, but I haven’t really taken the time to sit down and craft a two-minute version of an episode. I probably could, but it’s just not something I have tried to do yet.

Have you tinkered any with doing something more like a documentary?

The work I did in art school was basically that, and I’ve thought about doing a live performance of the show and using some kind of slide show of video clips and still photos.

A lot of people are doing that. Jon Mooallem toured his book with a band.

A lot of podcasts are doing live shows. I’ve heard they’re very lucrative! I would need somebody to be a producer and help me figure out how to translate what I do into something that I could do with an audience, and I haven’t found the right person to help me with that because I have no budget.

One of the more emotional episodes was Carole Lombard, and you broke up a little bit in that episode. Why did you decide to keep the version that you recorded?

I didn’t plan to start crying when I was reading the script that I wrote. [Laughs.] There are definitely some stories more than others that I feel a personal connection to. I don’t really know why. There’s something about the idea of Clark Gable, cinema’s icon of masculinity, sitting in a Las Vegas hotel room drinking waiting for someone to confirm what he already knew, which is that his wife was dead. That just kind of destroys me.

I left it in because it felt really honest. I try to walk the line between trying to get as close to the truth as possible and telling it in a cinematic way with my personal stamp on it. It would have been dishonest to cut out the part where my voice broke.

Your voice on the podcast is a little different than the way you talk in conversation. What would you say you’re doing in the podcast?

I try to bring my voice down and make it slower. I’m a Valley Girl. I’ve never enjoyed the sound of my voice—especially when I’ve heard myself on the radio or in a soundbite—so I knew wanted to rein myself in like an unforgiving director of myself.

Are you talking to an audience of people who are interested in classic Hollywood or in tabloid stories? Who do you think is listening?

I haven’t thought about an audience at all. One of the things that I’m pretty specific about is that this is only interesting to me if I’m doing it for myself. One thing that gives me a headache about journalism right now is that all editors think about is how to get more clicks, how will something appeal to the largest number of people. I just can’t think about it. If I did, it wouldn’t be interesting anymore.

Is this sustainable as a way to make a living?

I don’t know yet.

Are you thinking about it as an adjunct to writing books or as the thing you want to spend most of your time on the next few years?

Right now, it’s the thing I spend most of my time on. I would like for it to lead to other things, but I wouldn’t want those other things to eclipse it. I would love to get involved with an organization like Turner Classic Movies. It’s hard for me to get bogged down in the financial potential of it. If I do, I’ll drive myself crazy and lose the enthusiasm for it.

Do you think of what you’re writing for the podcast as doing history or doing film, or is it closer to what you were writing when you were at LA Weekly?

I have consciously tried to refocus my attention away from being a film critic and toward being a film historian. I don’t consider myself a film critic anymore at all. I correct people if they refer to me as a film critic.

What’s in London? You said before the interview that you’re moving there soon.

My boyfriend is writing and directing a movie that’s going to shoot there, and I’m going to go back and forth between London and Los Angeles.

Who is he?

His name is Rian Johnson.

Your boyfriend is Rian Johnson?

Yep. [Laughs.]

[Rian Johnson is writing and directing the second episode in the new Star Wars trilogy. J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, which is the first in the new trilogy, will premiere in December 2015.]

That is something I did not know before now.

It’s not a secret. [Laughs.] I don’t think we’ve ever done an interview about it, but we’re pretty open on social media about being a couple.

Are there things in London that you’ve thought about doing that are related to classic film?

Yeah, I’d like to get involved with the British Film Institute. I know that they have a really good research library. I’ve thought about doing a series of episodes called British Invasion about British people in Hollywood, and that’s definitely something I could research there. I’m also sort of not limited in terms geography because most of the research I do involves books that I can get almost anywhere.

The first 15 or 16 episodes of 2015 are about Hollywood stars in World War II. Even as we move to London while I’m working on those, that’s not going to change.

You’ve moved from journalism to history, and I wonder if you have noticed a difference between those two things that goes beyond subject matter.

I’m pretty new to the idea of thinking of myself as somebody who does history rather than somebody who does journalism, so it’s hard to say. I know how monetize journalism, and I haven’t substantially figured out how to monetize history yet.

 * * *

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

 * * *

Scott Porch is an attorney and writer in Savannah, Ga., and has contributed to The Daily Beast, Salon, Kirkus Reviews, Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, and Huffington Post. He writes about American history, books, politics, and popular culture. Porch is a former reporter and editor for the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Knoxville News-Sentinel. Find him on Twitter: @ScottPorch.

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2015 | 13 minutes (3,199 words)

We docked just past midnight, the sun to the south shining through a thin layer of clouds. It was late June, and the sun hadn’t set for months in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard; it wouldn’t set again until the end of September. For the previous two weeks I’d been on board a ship sailing the perimeter of the arctic archipelago of Svalbard, as part of the artist residency The Arctic Circle, and we’d reached one of our final stops. The dock we tied the boat to was a decayed mass of wood, warped and chewed to the appearance of shredded wheat. To our left, a massive structure for loading coal onto ships. To the right, blocks of buildings without form or purpose or inhabitants. This was Pyramiden, a Soviet-era mining town that’s been abandoned for over 15 years.

The Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920 gave Norway sovereign rights over the archipelago, but all signatories—the U.S., U.K., Japan, Russia among them—were given equal mining rights and access to any of the land’s resources. Only the Soviet Union would ever take advantage of this, and in the years after World War II, it established two coal mines on Spitsbergen: one at Pyramiden, and one at Barentsburg. Barentsburg is everything you’d imagine a Soviet mining town to resemble: bleak and functional, industrial and hopeless. But at Pyramiden, a thriving community was built over the years, and the town evolved into something of a utopian space. Among its amenities were a cultural center with a theater, a library, art and music studios; a sports complex; and a cantina open 24 hours a day. Pyramiden is home to the northernmost statue of Lenin, the northernmost grand piano, and the northernmost swimming pool. It was, in its heyday, unlike anywhere else on the planet.

The vaguely pyramidal mountain after which the town is named disappeared up into the fog, hovering over everything just out of sight. Along one side ran two long tunnels reaching nearly to its apex—one for hauling up men, the other for hauling down coal. Perhaps most eerie on that first night were the lights burning in the distance—area arc lights shining orange in the stillness. What was the point of these lights, illuminating a night that has no darkness, for a town that has no inhabitants?

Abandoned items at the basketball court.

Pyramiden was abandoned in 1998. The town’s population, then somewhere around 300 people, was given four months to leave, and they left behind everything non-essential. Walking through those buildings, it felt as if some vague poisonous gas had swept through and killed everyone in a matter of minutes. There were signs of life everywhere—trays still on tables, rolls of film in the projection booth, musical instruments strewn about—alongside the inescapable fact of decay and abandonment. In the gymnasiums lay sports equipment that would never again be used, books that would never again be read. The world’s northernmost swimming pool is now empty; the world’s northernmost grand piano now badly out of tune. The triumphant gaze of Soviet monuments now look out over nothing but emptiness.

Pyramiden is not the only ruin on Svalbard; the archipelago is a museum of folly and failure. Humans have tried to extract resources and riches out of the barren frozen land up here, to very little success. On the west coast of Spitsbergen, near the research settlement of Ny-Ålesund, is the abandoned marble mine of New London. Built by Ernest Mansfield in 1911, who convinced the Northern Expedition Company to invest in a lavish operation. There is indeed marble, but it’s of such brittle and poor quality due to permafrost that it literally fell apart on the ships bound for England. After two years the NEC fired Mansfield and abandoned the settlement. A hundred years on, the ruins of New London are remarkably well preserved. The ore carts are overturned and rusted, but still intact, resting next to heaps of marble piled up along the cliffs, as if the next ship bound for England will be arriving shortly. The piles of marble—deliberate, definitive remnants of human work—refuse to be reintegrated into the landscape. The Arctic allows New London to linger as a ruin, a testament to how difficult it is to make a quick buck in a place as inhospitable as Svalbard.

* * *

Our guide, Sasha.

Sasha, our Pyramiden guide, met us as we approached. He strode down an empty road in a full-length black coat, rifle slung over his shoulder. Materializing as if out of an Eisenstein film, he welcomed us with a strange charm and led us through the town.

“On the right is the male campus, for single men, and that was called ‘London,’” he told us as we walked towards the cantina. “Over there is the campus for single women, and that was called ‘Paris.’ When you got married and had children, you moved into that building over there. They called it ‘Crazy House.’ They called it this because there were so many children—and especially in winter when the children could not play outside, so they played in the hallways, and it was the Crazy House.” He unlocked the cantina, the swimming hall, and the cultural center, and then went to the boat to negotiate a trade of fish from our boat in exchange for meat or maybe vodka.

The Crazy House is now overrun with gulls, who’ve made their nests in the window sills. A slab rectangle of a building, four stories of brick, straight from Cabrini-Green or Pruitt-Igoe, now given over to gulls in every window. Bird cliffs on Svalbard are usually high up the faces of its many jagged peaks (“Spitsbergen” is Dutch for “pointy mountains”); this one was instead repurposed from humanity’s detritus. The entire day they swirled about, with a ghastly, plaintive call, rising and echoing against the stillness. The Crazy House once more.

The main route between the dock and the town is named “The Street for the 60 Year Jubilee of the Great October”; it’s the central axis around which all the buildings were oriented, both symbolically and literally. This rigorous spatial order in Pyramiden has caused difficulties over the years: as the town expanded north into an active riverbed, a series of dikes and dams had to be established to change the course of the river. Meltwater in Svalbard is unpredictable, as the accumulating snow varies from year to year, and minor fluctuations in summer temperatures can cause unexpected floods. But rather than build Pyramiden to respond to these natural ebbs and flows of the nearby glaciers, Soviet engineers instead altered the flow of the waters in a complicated and expensive engineering project. Additionally, the annual thawing of the permafrost below the town caused issues, creating unstable and temporary mudflows. In order to protect important buildings from sinking into the precarious wet ground in the spring and summer, Pyramiden’s designers installed a series of subterranean Freon-systems around large buildings to keep the ground permanently frozen. The goal of the layout, then, was to emulate the same kind of rigid ideology and order of any Soviet town, to separate out Pyramiden from its actual landscape, to differentiate it from the terrain and glorify an idea over a reality. Thus the paradox of Pyramiden: a place unlike any other, meant to look exactly like any other place.

The failed marble mine at New London was just one of many such ventures at the dawn of the 20th century, when various countries attempted to mine the land for various minerals: coal, gold, oil. Conflicts over claims in what was essentially a lawless and stateless land led to a treaty—the Spitsbergen Treaty (later known as the Svalbard Treaty), signed in 1920, was meant to put an end to this by giving the somewhat neutral Norway control over the archipelago.

The liminal state of Svalbard’s sovereignty has led to odd complications during the Cold War. NATO-member Norway and the USSR kept up a polite pretense of sharing the islands and paid lip service to the treaty’s stipulation that the archipelago never be used for military purposes. But behind the scenes, of course, both nations made subtle appropriations of Svalbard. The Soviet Union long maintained a robust helicopter fleet in Barentsburg, far in excess of what two small mining towns would ever need, and stationed its nuclear submarine fleet at the nearby Kola Peninsula. Norway, for its part, sends a naval cruise to the islands once a year to remind others of its sovereignty—even while the two nations kept up pretenses, hosting winter sports events and other niceties.

The base of the mine shaft.

Among the many subtle fronts on which this war was waged was nomenclature: Only a few years later after the Spitsbergen Treaty was signed, Norway renamed the entire archipelago Svalbard, keeping the name Spitsbergen only for its largest island. The name Svalbard came from an Icelandic epic from 1194, which described how Norse sailors had supposedly reached a land they called Svalbardi, “the Cold Rim,” and which the Norwegian government claimed was proof that theirs was the original claim to the islands. It was of course, impossible to say what those Norse sailors, had they truly existed, had actually reached in the 12th century, but Spitsbergen became Svalbard, a subtle but important linguistic effacement of any other nation’s claim to this land.

Though Norway has attempted to blur the linguistic history of the islands, it still works to protect the various detritus that speaks to failed human intervention through the years. By law, you are not allowed to disturb anything on Svalbard labeled “cultural heritage”: the ruins of the past, be they whale bones, abandoned shacks, even down to loose boards on the beach. Nothing can be taken or molested.

This law applies specifically to anything from before 1946, and so, theoretically, Pyramiden is not cultural heritage. And yet we were forbidden from disturbing its ruin. The confusion about the status of such a new ruin is another great paradox of Pyramiden. In 2006, a photographer and two archeologists—Elin Andreassen, Hein B. Bjerck, Bjørnar Olsen—spent a week in Pyramiden documenting its landscape. In the book that they subsequently published, Persistent Memories, they wrote:

“Pyramiden is a ruin, but hardly fits into the common tropes of heritage…. [I]n the dominant conception ruins are old, they have an ‘age value’ which is imperative to their legal and cultural-historical appreciation. Judged by this criterion, Pyramiden become[s] ambiguous, even anachronistic. In its hybrid or uncanny state it becomes a kind of antonym of the modern and also blurs established cultural categories of purity and dirt; in short, it becomes matter out of place—and out of time. Add to this that Pyramiden is Soviet, industrial and utterly northern, and one knows that it hardly aspires to the ranks of the World Heritage List. Pyramiden is anti-heritage.”

* * *

Pyramiden’s campuses for single men and women: “London” on the left, and “Paris” on the right.

Sasha returned and found us in the plaza just outside the Crazy House—a space I later learned was the town’s cat graveyard—and under the wail of gulls he told us his story and the story of this place. Once a graduate student in geography, he now stayed in the hotel, on the otherwise-abandoned second floor. He loved it—in St. Petersburg he slept on the kitchen floor of his sister’s apartment, and this was the first time, he said, that he had a room to himself.

When they built Pyramiden, the Soviets imported two tankers full of sand, and in that sand were grass seeds that have since taken root and flourished. The day we landed at Pyramiden was beautiful—full of sunshine and temperate after two days of bleak rain and wind—and the warmth combined with the grass—something that doesn’t exist outside of the Svalbard settlements, something other than the hard-scrabble lichen that claws itself alive on the archipelago’s rocks—made it feel as though we were suddenly in far lower latitudes, even though we were still north of the island’s main settlement, Longyearbyen.

When asked about Pyramiden’s abandonment, Sasha gave us four different stories. The Soviet Union, he said, was rich, and could afford a big investment like this. But Russia was quite poor by comparison, and couldn’t afford to maintain it. Second, there was a fire in the mine in the mid-’90s, and it was all but impossible to pump water 500 meters up the side of a hill to put it out. Third, he told us, supposedly the geologic survey was wrong, and there simply wasn’t as much coal in Pyramiden as they’d thought. Lastly, in 1996 a chartered plane of miners and their families had been returning to Longyearbyen from a vacation when it crashed, killing all 141 aboard. That was 1996; the town never fully recovered, and was emptied two years later.

Someone later asked what had happened to the families of Pyramiden—where did they end up? Many went home to Russia, Sasha said, but some now live and work in Barentsburg. Over the years, he said, a few have come back to Pyramiden for a visit, though this is strongly discouraged.

When asked why, Sasha said that it’s too painful for former residents to see what has become of their utopia. On two separate occasions, he told us, former residents had returned for a visit, and had become so distraught that both had suffered heart attacks.

* * *

The coal mine and the mountain.

After lunch we took a small party up near the base of the mine. As Andreassen, Bjerck and Olsen explain, regarding the layout of Pyramiden and its enforced geometry on top of a constantly evolving floodplain, “the bottom line was that Pyramiden developed in a way that demanded constant management and intervention to protect it from the harsh Arctic conditions.” In the 15 short years since it has been abandoned, the ever-shifting meltwater has taken its revenge, wiping out wide swaths of the town. We navigated along uncertain paths as we made our way up towards an almost medieval-looking white building three stories tall that stood next to the two long tunnels that stretched up the mountain. Whatever I had thought of the birds near the Crazy House was dwarfed by this strange landscape—they were everywhere. The gulls had completely overtaken this place: they were in every eave and every window, along the rafters of the tunnels. They were oblivious to our presence no matter how close we came, engaged entirely in their own society.

Sasha came back to our boat to join us for dinner, bringing with him a strange wealth of stories, like how he’d found Pyramiden’s KGB office, behind a steel door, and in there a special stove dedicated to burning secret documents. He hadn’t stayed long, terrified that it was still bugged or rigged with traps, but he did take with him a pad of paper on which each page was stamped “SECRET,” which he now used for letters to his friends; how during World War II the entire town was destroyed so that the Germans couldn’t use it; how men are still dying in the mines of Barentsburg, including one miner who’d died in an accident just a week before.

Later he told us that all the mines on Svalbard are unprofitable, even the Norwegian ones—something I’d already begun to suspect. At Barentsburg, the last operating Russian mine, most of the coal extracted is used to power the plant that serves the town itself. What’s left is of too low quality to be used for fuel and is sold to chemistry labs. When asked why they continue, he replied, “It’s important for Russia to stay. If we leave Barentsburg, we could never come back.” Already, he said, he gets letters every week from Norwegians seeking to buy Pyramiden—or just the hotel, or even just a floor of the hotel. The Norwegians, he claimed, are desperate to claim some wedge of the deserted city, because they know that if they did they could erase any trace of Russian habitation within a few years.

And Pyramiden itself, I asked—was it ever profitable? I thought about the massive investment that the city represented. “No,” Sasha said, “never.” Then he said, “I don’t like to use this word, but Pyramiden was a ‘showcase.’” What mattered to the Soviet Union was that it was there, that it represented to the world an ideal Communist society. And then the Wall fell, and they couldn’t maintain the fiction anymore.

In the wake of the Cold War, the territorial dance between nations in the Arctic has shifted somewhat; often now the disputes are over fishing and shipping rights, as well as seemingly anodyne tourism issues. But beneath this there are still machinations at work. As the Arctic continues to yield its waters to global warming, nations from Canada to China are eager to lay claim to it. And there is little doubt that both Russia and NATO still see Svalbard as a strategic asset.

But all this may miss the larger lesson Svalbard has to offer: beyond the short-term future of nations jockeying for political and military power in the thawing North, Pyramiden reveals how quickly the world will move on without us.

Birds roosting near the mine shaft.

The image of those mining buildings and tunnels overrun by gulls stayed with me for weeks. I don’t know that I’ve ever been in such a place before—a place built by humanity that had been so thoroughly reclaimed by nature as to neither admit nor acknowledge a human presence, where a mine built against the grain of the land itself, to celebrate an ideology, now had all the meaning and purpose of granite cliffs forged by retreating glaciers. If it once made sense to think of Pyramiden as separate from the natural world around it, now the two were one and the same. And all this accomplished in 15 short years.

One gets a sense in Pyramiden of what the world will look like without us, a world in which humans may exist and persevere, but in which human activity is no longer differentiated from nature, where human history has once again joined the deep geologic time of the earth itself. Underneath those gulls screeching and wheeling above our heads, unconcerned with our presence, I thought of the words of the German W. G. Sebald, whose work spiraled around the calamities and horrors of the 20th century—most notably the Holocaust, but also the Allied fire-bombings of cities like Dresden and Hamburg. Writing of those horrors, Sebald asks how can notions of philosophy, ethics, and humanism be maintained in the face of such destruction.

“Is the destruction not, rather, irrefutable proof that the catastrophes which develop, so to speak, in our hands and seem to break out suddenly are a kind of experiment, anticipating the point at which we shall drop out of what we have thought for so long to be our autonomous history and back into the history of nature?”

What I learned in Pyramiden is that one needn’t look to these massive catastrophes for such proof—sometimes all it takes is a plane crash, a fire, and a few irrevocable bureaucratic decisions.

Pyramiden’s collapsed mine shaft.

* * *

Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, and Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith. His work has appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book about haunted houses.

* * *

Edited by Mike Dang. Fact-checked by Kaci Borowski. Photos by Colin Dickey.

Hillel Aron | Slake | July 2011 | 20 minutes (4,888 words)

Hillel Aron’s “The Last Freeway” was published in Slake in 2011 and appeared as a Longreads Member Pick in September 2013. It’s a story about a city (Los Angeles), a freeway interchange (where the 105 meets the 110), and a man (Judge Harry Pregerson). Aron explains:

“Well, my friends Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa had this great quarterly called Slake, and I wanted to write something for them, so we sat down and talked about it… I think maybe I pitched it to them, I can’t remember. I’d was just always fascinated by freeways, growing up in Los Angeles, and I loved that Reyner Banham book, The Architecture of the Four Ecologies. When I was kid, I was completely enchanted by that 105 / 110 interchange, the carpool lane one, which towers above the city. It’s basically like a rollercoaster. Actually it kind of sucks—since I wrote the piece, they’ve turned that carpool lane into a “toll lane,” so normal carpoolers can’t use it anymore without one of those fast pass things. At any rate, I did some research and it turned out that (a) the 105 was the last freeway built in Los Angeles—the end of an era, really. And it was so tough to build that it basically set a precedent of not building freeways anymore. And (b), there was this nutty judge who turned the whole thing into a New Deal-style public works program to benefit the communities that were being bisected by this massive beast of a freeway. And he also ordered them to stick a train in the middle of it, which didn’t quite go to the airport, but that’s a different story…”

***

I have a recurring dream that begins with me driving on the stretch of the 105 Freeway that flows like a giant tributary from LAX toward its convergence with the 110, where commuters offload for the high-rises of downtown Los Angeles. In the dream, I’m driving in the carpool lane on the gentle incline toward the massive interchange and everything is fine. But suddenly the carpool lane rises as the narrow two-lane ramp veers left at the pinnacle and the rest of the 105 drops away. High up in the air, with the city stretched out before me, I fail to make the turn. My car smashes through the barrier and I hurtle off the side of the interchange into the expanse below.

The object of my nightmare had an official name: the Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange. The interchange, with its 130-foot-tall octagonal pillars adorned with art deco–style finishes, stands resolutely against the backdrop of city and mountains—a true monument to L.A.’s passion for movement.

My nightmares weren’t all that original. Even before the first commuter traversed any of the 105’s seventeen miles, the interchange starred in a climactic scene in the film Speed, alongside Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, and a bus that can’t stop. In a heroic twist on my dream, Reeves drives the bus over an unfinished section and lands it safely on the other side. Since this dramatic debut, the Harry Pregerson Interchange has become nearly as iconic as the Hollywood sign.

The Century Freeway, as the 105 is known, opened to great fanfare on the morning of October 15, 1993. Governor Pete Wilson arrived in an open-top, vintage white automobile. The USC Trojan Marching Band played, accompanied, naturally, by the USC Song Girls. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) sponsored a 10K fun run and bicycle race across the freeway for everyone involved in the project.

The festivities followed a difficult twenty-year gestation that managed to absorb many of the social and political conflicts of the time, not to mention $2.2 billion of federal and state funds, a class-action lawsuit, and a federal consent decree. Officially, the freeway was named after Glenn Anderson, the Democratic congressman from San Pedro who fought for the project. But the true architect of the 105 was a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge named Harry Pregerson. He had just turned seventy when the freeway opened, and by then had spent more than two decades supervising the project, sorting through a tangle of competing interests and playing midwife to L.A.’s last freeway.

Although competing theories about urban planning were part of the long battle, it was about more than just the best way to move people through a sprawling megalopolis. The freeway became a focal point for resistance to paternalistic urban renewal, but then, ultimately, an example of socially responsible civil engineering. When the rubber finally hit the road on the 105, Judge Pregerson’s ruling ensured that central planners could no longer impose public-works projects on communities without residents having their say.

As Carlye Hall, one of the lawyers who sued Caltrans over the freeway construction, told the Los Angeles Times, “There has never before been a freeway that had so many social programs attached to it, and this never would have happened without Judge Pregerson.”

***

The language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement … and the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture.
—Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

The automobile didn’t always dominate Los Angeles transportation. The city’s legendary sprawl was created not by car, but by railway. Before the railroad, downtown Los Angeles was little more than a pueblo with a couple markets and a few thousand people. It may never have become much more were it not for a small group of wealthy Angelenos led by the banker Isaias Hellman and the lawyer Henry O’Melveny, who managed to persuade the Southern Pacific Railroad to run its San Francisco–to-Yuma line through Los Angeles—instead of a more direct route through the high desert—before hooking east. Within a couple decades, five railway lines cut through downtown Los Angeles. Banham writes that by 1880, “The railways had outlined the form of the city and sketched in the pattern of movement that was to characterize its peculiar style of life.”

If pieces of the transcontinental railway formed the city’s skeleton, its arteries were the track laid down by the Pacific Electric Railway, a fleet of 1,250 Red Cars spread over 1,164 miles of track. Services ran from Santa Monica to Riverside, from San Fernando to Orange. At its peak in 1925, it was the world’s largest interurban railway system.

But from almost the very beginning, the Red Car competed against the automobile. In 1938, the Automobile Club of Southern California laid out a grand new vision for Los Angeles. It called for more than 400 miles of “the world’s first great Elevated Motorways System” and the gradual phasing out of the railways in favor of bus service.

The first freeways in Los Angeles were built in the early 1940s, the Arroyo Seco Parkway and the Cahuenga Pass Freeway. They converged in the heart of downtown and formed the world’s first stack interchange. Sure, there was traffic. But freeways were seen then as part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Looked at today, Los Angeles’s 1958 General Plan does indeed read like a dystopian vision of concrete and shadows, calling for 1,500 miles of freeways through Greater Los Angeles. Santa Monica Boulevard would have become the Beverly Hills Freeway. Laurel Canyon Boulevard would have turned into the Laurel Canyon Freeway, and continued all the way through the portion of La Cienega Boulevard running toward LAX that still feels like a freeway (the only part of the proposed system that got built). Pacific Coast Highway would now be the Pacific Coast Freeway. And the Santa Monica Mountains would be home to no fewer than six elevated motorways. You were never supposed to be more than four or five miles from a freeway.

A Freeway and Expressway System for Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura Counties, Metropolitan Transportation Engineering Board, June 30, 1958

“There was always a vision of L.A. as big pockets of high activity centers,” says Frank Quon, deputy district director for Caltrans. “You can call it urban sprawl—it’s just a large area with major business-type centers. So that network would tie it all together. And it was a very good vision.”

But it was not to be. Just as the freeways seemed poised to take over the sky and blot out the sun, freeway revolts ignited in San Francisco. A 1964 rally in Golden Gate Park drew some 200,000 people to protest the proposed extension of the Embarcadero Freeway along the waterfront. The folk singer Malvina Reynolds sang her moderately well-known folk song “Little Boxes,” a polemic against suburban development. In New York, a freeway revolt pitted urban theorist Jane Jacobs against Robert Moses, midcentury New York’s master urban planner, often said to have been the most powerful man in New York City. Over the next twenty years, backlash against freeways would spread all over the world: Sydney, Montreal, London, Detroit, and even Los Angeles.

***

In 1971, four young, idealistic lawyers left the luxurious offices of O’Melveny and Myers (founded by the aforementioned Henry O’Melveny in 1885) to form the Center for Law in the Public Interest with the help of a Ford Foundation grant. It was one of the country’s first public-interest law firms. When a San Francisco firm called Public Advocates, which specialized in freeway and housing litigation, found its caseload too heavy, it referred a suit against the planned Century Freeway to the Center for Law in the Public Interest.

“We’d just opened our operation,” says John Phillips, who cofounded the center when he was twenty-eight.

Esther and Ralph Keith, a couple living near the proposed 105-405 interchange, sought an injunction in federal district court against the Century Freeway’s construction. They argued that state and federal agencies had failed to comply with environmental, housing, and civil rights laws. The legal theory was bold for its time: the freeway proposal was discriminatory and didn’t afford residents in the “blighted” neighborhoods the same considerations as better-off neighborhoods. Three other families, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the NAACP, and the city of Hawthorne joined the Keiths.

Keith v. Volpe became the center’s first case. John A. Volpe was the state’s secretary of transportation.

“Caltrans was bullying everybody, paying too little for their property, using strong-arm tactics to get them out,” says Phillips. “Esther and Ralph Keith would not sell.”

***

Had the state of California managed to build the 105 Freeway in the 1960s, it would have encountered little resistance. Unlike, say, Greenwich Village or downtown San Francisco, the residents of Watts and Lynwood had little political clout. They were mostly poor and mostly African American. This, of course, was partly by design—these were the “blighted areas” that AAA wanted to pave over. But Caltrans was slow to act, and by 1971, conditions on the ground, as they say, had changed.

By then, President Nixon had signed two bills into law that would have dire consequences for public-works projects: the latest Federal-Aid Highway Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. The first required the state to provide adequate replacement housing before it bought homes from people to make way for highways. The second required in-depth environmental studies, subject to review, for any public-works project. Government projects would never be the same.

“Congress will pass laws with great fanfare, and then there’s nobody to enforce them,” says the center’s John Phillips. “Who’s gonna sue the U.S. attorney? Who’s gonna sue Caltrans? Well that’s what we did. We didn’t set out to stop the freeway, per se.”

The plaintiffs had two main complaints: that the government was providing inadequate housing to displaced residents and that no environmental-impact study had been performed.

Had any other judge been selected to hear the case, our story would have been different. But as fate would have it, the randomly selected judge was Harry Pregerson.

Judge Harry Pregerson (right) receiving an award from Hershel Gober. Photo by Wikimedia Commons.

Pregerson was and is a practical man, and by all accounts he was driven less by ideology than by the desire to find solutions. He took two months to reach his decision. On July 7, 1972, he issued a preliminary injunction to stop all construction and involuntary selling of property along the Century Freeway corridor, pending environmental-impact reports. It was a bombshell. For the first time, the building of a major freeway had been halted by court order. The L.A. Times reported:

Pregerson went further than many experts, including the center’s lawyers and state officials, expected. James A. More, director of Public Works, parent agency for the Division of Highways, said he was stunned by the ruling.

“It’s very serious … not only with respect to the Century Freeway but also as it might affect others in California.”

The state was forced to hold hearings on noise and air pollution, revise its housing program and consider myriad construction alternatives, including abandonment of the freeway. An unnamed attorney for the Center for Law in the Public Interest was quoted in the L.A. Times as saying, “This may mark the end of the freeway era in the Los Angeles metropolitan region.”

The judge’s ruling on the injunction led to a federal consent decree, which Pregerson oversaw, and for the next seven years both sides battered away at each other in negotiations. Pregerson wrote in a 2007 Southwestern University Law Review essay, “The Freeway with a Heart”:

In consent-decree litigation, these people are going to be with you for the next five, ten, or fifteen years, maybe more. So in addition to being judge, you have to be a psychologist, a diplomat, and, at times, a babysitter.

In the same issue of the law review, Southwestern University law professor Christopher David Ruiz Cameron wrote in his essay “Harry Pregerson, the Real Mayor of Los Angeles”:

Most judges would have avoided the headaches that followed, either by leaving the parties to sort out the environmental issues on their own or by dismissing the lawsuit altogether. But Judge Pregerson saw and seized the opportunity to address the larger social implications of a massive public works project, one that would eventually cost $2.2 billion. Why, he wondered, shouldn’t the freeway corridor in traffic-snarled Los Angeles include a rail line for public transportation? Or a carpool lane to reduce smog? And why shouldn’t some of the lucrative government contracts and high-paying jobs that it would take to build the project go to the people who actually live there? And for that matter, why shouldn’t their children have day care while their parents were at work building the new freeway?

It was this kind of “judicial activism” that would later enrage conservatives. Even mainstream journalists describe Pregerson as a “New Deal liberal,” a title that the judge doesn’t seem to like very much.

“I don’t think of myself as a New Deal–style liberal,” he tells me. “I think being a judge has given me an opportunity to help working people, improve the city.”

***

I sit with Judge Pregerson in the kitchen of his office, an anonymous-looking unit in an anonymous-looking building in Woodland Hills, across the street from one of those enormous Westfield shopping malls. Every half hour or so, one of his clerks comes in and gets a bowl of potato salad or a cup of coffee. The judge talks and talks. For five and a half hours, he talks. When I try to ask questions, he ignores them, or, visibly annoyed, reluctantly answers, as if he were being forced on an inconvenient detour. He talks with his eyes closed, his voice getting softer and softer, and at times it seems like he is drifting off to sleep.

Pregerson has wild, sagebrush eyebrows. He wears a pair of half-moon spectacles, a brown bomber jacket, cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a Stetson, making him look a bit like an old Charlton Heston—only with a BlackBerry clipped to his canvas belt. He has a firm handshake and a serious demeanor. When I mention that he never seems to be smiling in any of his photographs, he deadpans, “I’m a very serious guy.”

He is eighty-seven, or as he says with a wry smile, “four score and seven years old.” His memory is astonishing. He grew up in Boyle Heights and he remembers the name of the Japanese kid he carpooled with to UCLA in the 1930s, though he can’t remember the name of the driver who picked them up in a Model A Coupe. He remembers the city before the freeway, before they pulled out the train tracks. He remembers how the city sounded.

“There was no freeway then. There were trains, and you could hear the trains whistle, you could hear the roosters crow,” he says. “At noon, the gas company downtown blew a whistle. You could hear it all over the city. That was their lunch break. We walked to school. We had the yellow car, but it cost three and a half cents, and why waste three and half cents when you could walk? It took about an hour, but it was fun because I’d walk with my friends.”

Pregerson was the only kid from his graduating class at Roosevelt High School to go to UCLA. He says it wasn’t because he was the smartest, just the only one whose family could afford the $25-per-semester tuition. In college, he joined the ROTC and eventually enlisted in the Marines.

“The worst thing that could happen was for the war to end before I could participate,” he says. “We were all anxious to go. I know it sounds strange. Times were different. There were 10 million people in armed services. Everybody wanted to get involved.

“I took French because I thought I’d go to France like my father did and I could talk to French girls. But I never got to France.”

The judge doesn’t seem to like talking about the war. When I ask how it was, he answers, sarcastically, “It was a great time.”

I persist and finally he shuts the kitchen door and pulls down his pants. On each of his upper thighs there are two small pinpricks, like a needle might make on a sofa cushion. He starts talking.

“We went from Pavuvu to Okinawa. That was April 1, 1945, that was the landing,” he says. “We had a battalion of 1,000 men, and then replacements. People would move in and be dead by five o’clock.

“It was thirty-three days before I got injured. I got hit by a dumdum bullet, an explosive bullet. I’m lucky because of penicillin. … I’m lucky because I lived.”

***

Judges tend to be formal, speaking as if channeling the voice of the almighty. Pregerson is different.

“Some judges really stand on ceremony,” says Felicia Marcus, one of Pregerson’s former law clerks. “If you’re in his court and you have something to add, he’ll let you say it. I swear to god, if the janitor walked by and wanted to say something, he’d let him talk. The focus is always on getting to the right answer.”

Like his hero, the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, Pregerson has always had a knack for consensus building. His skill at bringing together divergent parties—Caltrans, neighborhood residents, and unions—and forging a compromise was the key factor in getting the Century Freeway built. According to the L.A. Times, Pregerson was known to open negotiations early in the morning by telling all parties, “Gentlemen, I just happen to have brought my lunch with me and it could be a long day. I’m not sure yet when you’ll be able to eat.”

The Century Freeway’s final consent decree, filed in 1979, included a housing program, jobs program, jobs training program, affirmative-action program, and a child-care program, all under the guise of a freeway project that somehow also had to have a train running down the middle. Even for a legislative body, these initiatives would have been bold, but for them to come at the behest of a district court judge was unheard of.

The agreement called for 3,000 single-family homes and 1,200 multifamily buildings to be constructed in neighborhoods along the freeway corridor. The 25,000 displaced residents living in the corridor would be able to buy houses at below-market rates. Sixty-five percent of the workers on both the freeway and the housing would be minorities; 10 percent would be women. Nearly 5,000 locals went through an apprenticeship program and were given construction jobs. Perhaps most astonishingly, the consent decree called for the construction of day-care centers for the families of employees.

“That’s why it was an unprecedented decree, that’s why people studied it and have done dissertations on it,” says John Phillips. “This whole panoply of benefits under the guise of a freeway changed and transformed the community.”

What was originally envisioned as a ten-lane freeway would now be eight lanes, and one of them on each side would be reserved for high-occupancy vehicles, the city’s first carpool lanes. And just as the Cahuenga Pass freeway had the Red Car running down its middle, the Century Freeway would have the Green Line, Los Angeles’s first light rail system to be approved in more than thirty years.

“My dream was to have, at every off ramp, a parking lot so people could come here and park their car, and there would be a child-care center,” says Pregerson. “You’d go to work on light rail. We were gonna have all kinds of social services—parent classes, day care, substance abuse, preschool.”

It was a new vision of transportation in Los Angeles, conceived in a court of law.

***

About a month after the consent decree, President Carter nominated Pregerson to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. During the Senate confirmation hearings, Wyoming Republican Alan Simpson asked Pregerson what he’d do if a decision in a case involved an instance of case law or statute that offended his conscience. Pregerson answered:

I was born and raised in this country, and I am steeped in its traditions, its mores, its beliefs, and its philosophies; and if I felt strongly in a situation like that, I feel it would be the product of my very being and upbringing. I would follow my conscience.

Pregerson was eventually confirmed, even though this exchange, as well as some of his later decisions, earned the wrath of conservatives everywhere. Despite his promotion, the judge continued to personally supervise the freeway programs set forth by the consent decree.

Finally, in 1981, construction began on the Century Freeway. First, the remaining homes had to be bought and torn down, including the home of Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson at 3701 West 119th Street. It was the house where the Wilsons recorded their first song, “Surfin’,” and became the Beach Boys. The house of Ralph and Esther Keith was also torn down—unnecessarily so, as it turned out, and so it was eventually replaced by another house. Ralph died in August 1982 and never saw his house torn down. Esther moved to another house a few blocks away. She viewed the final consent decree as a failure, and didn’t attend the freeway’s opening.

Jeff Gates was a photographer who started taking pictures of the torn-down houses in the Century Freeway corridor in the early eighties. When he showed some of his photographs to Esther Keith, one in particular caught her attention. It was a boarded-up house with a sign on it that read “Sorkness Fotos.” It must have been a business with a house in the back, thought Gates.

“When Esther saw that photo, she started to cry,” he says.

The owner of the house, explained Esther Keith, had committed suicide after being forced to move.

“She and her husband had really tried to stop this freeway, and they failed,” says Gates. “Even though there were concessions that were won because of it, she still was bitter about everything they went through.”

Gates moved to the East Coast in the eighties. When he returned to Los Angeles shortly before the 105’s completion, he was struck by its beauty. “From a sculptural vantage point,” he wrote in 1995, “the interchanges of the 105 [with the 110 Freeway] are some of the most amazing pieces of public art I have ever touched.”

Photo by Neil Kremer

The legacy of the Century Freeway is more than just a spectacular interchange and a good way to get to LAX from downtown. It’s more than a movie about a runaway bus, and it’s more than a few thousand houses torn out from the ground.

New freeway construction is now a virtual nonstarter in this city. The Long Beach Freeway, or the 710, was supposed to run all the way north to Pasadena, meeting up with the 210. That project is held up by a tangle of court proceedings, environmental reports, and “meetings with the community.” The judge handling the case just so happens to be Harry Pregerson’s son. There is a small chance the project will go through. One of the ideas being floated is a tunnel under South Pasadena, most likely prohibitively expensive.

“We don’t build brand-new freeways anymore,” says Frank Quon of Caltrans.

In 1980, Los Angeles residents finally voted for public transit with their wallets by approving Proposition A, which added a half-percent sales tax to pay for a rail system. The Blue Line, a light rail system running to Long Beach, opened in 1990. And shortly before the 105 opened, the city’s first two subways began service: the Red Line and the Purple Line.

But the same sort of neighborhood activism, or some would say NIMBYism, proved as good at holding up rapid transit as it was at stalling freeways. Construction of the Red Line was delayed for ten years following protests, not to mention a methane gas explosion and the fact that Hollywood Boulevard was sinking—the ground that the MTA was tunneling through turned out to be soft and powdery, causing it to depress.

It’s a pattern seen over and over again during the past two decades: city proposes plan, community fights plan, city scales back. Before Los Angeles can build its utopian “subway to the sea,” it must first endure hundreds of meetings, reports, public comment periods, alternative plans, reports, votes, protests, and counter protests. Transportation projects in Los Angeles have become obscenely expensive, not to mention tedious.

The social programs set up by Pregerson’s consent decree, meanwhile, have had an unambiguously positive legacy. Take, for instance, the case of Century Housing, the public-private partnership formed to build homes for displaced residents living in the 105’s path. What was supposed to be a temporary company was turned into a permanent nonprofit, after the judge dispatched Allan Kingston, then the CEO of Century Housing, to Washington, D.C.

“We got permission from old man Bush to take all the assets, the buildings, the money, and roll it all over into a nonprofit, rather than selling things off,” Pregerson says.

Today, Century Housing is one of the biggest providers of affordable housing in the United States. Since it was privatized in 1995, it has built or preserved more than 13,000 homes.

Pregerson continued to find opportunities for social progress in public projects. Among the judge’s hallmark achievements was ordering the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant to upgrade after spilling raw sewage into the ocean for years. Completed in 1998 after eleven years and almost $4 billion, it was named one of the top ten public-works projects of the twentieth century by the American Public Works Association, leading Pregerson to become known as the Sludge Judge.

“It’s arguably one of the biggest environmental wins in our nation’s history,” says Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, which helped bring the case to court. “They were one of the worst polluters, just horrible. Now there’s been a 95 percent reduction of sewage solids dumped into Santa Monica Bay.”

On the kitchen table in Pregerson’s office sits a framed photograph of himself as a younger man, looking a bit like Touch of Evil–era Charlton Heston, alongside his best friend, the former Central California Democratic congressman James Corman. The judge notices me looking at the photo.

“One time Corman said, ‘Harry, you’re not a judge, you’re a social worker,'” he says. “I said, ‘Thanks, Jim, that’s a great compliment.’

“Judges can do that if they want to.”

 ***

Nikil Saval | Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace | Doubleday | April 2014 | 31 minutes (8,529 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book Cubed, by Nikil Saval, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils…

—Theodore Roethke, “Dolor”

The torn coat sleeve to the table. The steel pen to the ink. Write! Write! Be it truth or fable. Words! Words! Clerks never think.

—Benjamin Browne Foster, Down East Diary (1849)

They labored in poorly lit, smoky single rooms, attached to merchants and lawyers, to insurance concerns and banks. They had sharp penmanship and bad eyes, extravagant clothes but shrunken, unused bodies, backs cramped from poor posture, fingers callused by constant writing. When they were not thin, angular, and sallow, they were ruddy and soft; their paunches sagged onto their thighs.

Clerks were once a rare subject in literature. Their lives were considered unworthy of comment, their workplaces hemmed in and small, their work indescribably dull. And yet one of the greatest of short stories is about a clerk. In “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), Herman Melville, who had become famous for writing memoirs and novels about spectacular sea voyages to exotic islands—gaining a readership he eventually lost with that strange, long book about a whaling voyage—decided to turn inward, to the snug, suffocating world of the office. The titanic hunt for the white whale was exchanged for the hunt for the right-sized pen. And for finding the right position to sit at a desk: “If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk, then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back.”

Melville himself had worked as a clerk for a merchant in Albany before he—as Ishmael put it—took to the ship. He knew from the inside the peculiar emptiness that office work could often have, its atmosphere of purposeless labor and dead-endedness. Even in Moby-Dick he speaks of the thousands in Manhattan who idle along the Battery, lost in “sea-reverie,” avoiding returning to their work lives “pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” Appropriately, the few windows in the Bartleby office look out onto nothing but more walls. “On one end,” the unnamed narrator writes, the window faced “the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom.” And on the other side, “an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade.” This wall, the narrator adds, wryly, “required no spyglass to bring out its lurking beauties, but, for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed to within ten feet of my window panes.” On two sides, then, two walls: one, the white wall of the light shaft; the other, a soot-black brick wall hemming in vision and light. A walled-in window: a room with no view.

But the office of “Bartleby,” like the Pequod of Ishmael and Ahab, is also a place of male bonding, cheery with camaraderie and bonhomie. The narrator, a lawyer, initially employs three clerks with absurd nicknames—Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut—that he uses affectionately. Each of them behaves with exact predictability the same way every day; for example, Turkey, an old man, always ceases to get work done after his noontime dinner, which he takes with an inordinate quantity of wine, causing his face to “blaze like a grate full of Christmas coals.” But the boss is too kind to do anything Trump-like, and the distempered workers never challenge their boss.

The entire order dissolves, however, when a sudden increase in the volume of business pushes the narrator into hiring a new scrivener—the eponymous Bartleby. He arrives looking “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable,” and, mysteriously enough, “incurably forlorn.” The narrator gives him a desk next to a window, but like the other windows it offers little to look at, “having originally afforded a lateral view of certain grimy backyards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all, though,” the narrator concedes, “it gave some light.”

At first Bartleby works diligently, his thinness inversely proportional to his ravenousness for writing: “As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on, silently, palely, mechanically.” The trouble comes when this routine is interrupted. The lawyer-narrator calls Bartleby in for assistance in comparing two copies of a document. After outlining the duty, the narrator is stunned by Bartleby’s infamous reply—“I would prefer not to.” Repeating the maddening phrase at the narrator’s every spluttering attempt to get him to work, Bartleby plunges the calm predictability of the office into thunderous irregularity. In the end, the lawyer, baffled by Bartleby’s intransigence, his passive resistance, is forced to leave his office altogether; Bartleby himself is taken off to prison, where, bereft of his sustenance of documents, he starves to death.

What “Bartleby” means has been a subject of endless debate. Office workers have always taken it to be a mirror of their condition, with Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” an encapsulation of how the office reduces all titanic conflicts to petty grievances and simmering resentments. But in 1853, when the story was written, the term “office”—and the sort of labor that was performed there—had nowhere near the universal significance it has now. In those tense years before the Civil War, clerks were a small but unusual phenomenon, a subject of anxious scrutiny; their workplaces were at once significant centers of American business and breeding grounds for a kind of work that nobody recognized as work. Clerks were a kind of worker that seemed, like Bartleby, at once harmless and ominous. “Bartleby” was evidence that the office had just begun to blot its inky mark on the consciousness of the world.

* * *

When does the office begin? It’s a question without an easy answer. One can associate the origins with the beginning of paperwork itself—until recently, the most common mental association with office work (think of the derogatory phrase “paper pusher”). In other words, since the invention of writing and the corresponding ability to keep records in a systematic manner, there have always been places that resemble offices: monasteries, libraries, scholars’ studies. Banking furnished an especially large amount of paperwork; the Uffizi, an incomparable gallery of Renaissance art in Florence, was also one of the first office buildings—the bookkeeping offices of the Medici family’s groundbreaking financial operations. Clerks, too, have existed for ages, many of them unclinching themselves from their desks to become quite famous: from Samuel Pepys, the British government diarist who reported on the gossipy world of seventeenth-century England, to Alexander Hamilton, who had cut his teeth as a merchants’ clerk before he became the first secretary of the Treasury of the United States; Benjamin Franklin, paragon of pecuniary restraint and bourgeois self-abnegation, started out as a dry goods clerk in 1727. Perhaps some of the tediousness of Franklin’s own writing was honed in the conditions of his first job: since clerks have had the opportunity to keep diaries, they have bemoaned the sheer boredom of their tasks—the endless copying, the awkward postures, the meaninglessness of their work. When not doing writing for the job, clerks have cultivated the habit of writing about the job—or literally around it, as in the case of some infamous marginalia from medieval scribes. “Writing is excessive drudgery,” one such jotting reads. “It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.” “Oh, my hand,” goes another—even though writing out that sentence would have only magnified the problem it described.

The notion of the office as the quintessential location of alienated work, or simple drudgery, is far from the etymological root of the word. “Office” itself comes from the Latin for “duty.” One of the more famous philosophical works of Cicero, long-winded scold of the latter days of the Roman Republic, is a treatise called De officiis, usually translated as “Of Duty” or “On Duty,” though it might just as well be “Of Office.” For Cicero’s understanding of duty isn’t far from our contemporary sense of “holding office” or the “office of the president”: “office” as connoting a specific set of responsibilities. For Cicero, “office” was what was proper to you, what fitted you as your natural duty. This, too, seems far from any understanding of the office as workplace: few people have ever considered office work to be natural, proper, or fitting.

To find the emergence of the office in history—the workplace that prefigures the offices of today—one has to look at a peculiar confluence of new sorts of buildings, deep economic changes, as well as (most slippery of all) new kinds of feelings and mass awareness of one another among particular strata of the workforce. Industrialization in Britain and America was producing more and more administrative work, and alongside it a need for a rational approach to managing accounts, bills, ledgers: in short, paperwork. Rising to take these positions were clerks, who, looking around, began to see themselves growing in number, and to feel themselves as belonging vaguely to a special group. One finds the evolution of the office coinciding, then, with a change in the position of the clerks themselves—a new restiveness on their part, a new sense of power. They were not quite sure of themselves, but they were no longer isolated. By the middle of the nineteenth century, clerks and their workplaces begin to appear with a new regularity in the literature and journalism. “Bartleby,” with its simultaneously assertive and retiring protagonist, nicely captures this ambivalence in the early world of the office.

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What “Bartleby” also captured, as other descriptions of office life at the time did, was the sense that office work was unnatural. In a world in which shipping and farming, building and assembling, were the order of work, the early clerical worker didn’t seem to fit. The office clerk in America at the high noon of the nineteenth century was a curious creature, an unfamiliar figure, an inexplicable phenomenon. Even by 1880, less than 5 percent of the total workforce, or 186,000 people, was in the clerical profession, but in cities, where the nation’s commentariat was concentrated (who themselves tended to work in office-like places), clerks had become the fastest-growing population.11 In some heavily mercantile cities, such as New York, they had already become ubiquitous: the 1855 census recorded clerks as the city’s third largest occupational group, just behind servants and laborers.

For many, this was a terrible development. Nothing about clerical labor was congenial to the way most Americans thought of work. Clerks didn’t work the land, lay railroad tracks, make ammunitions in factories, let alone hide away in a cabin by a small pond to raise beans and live deep. Unlike farming or factory work, office work didn’t produce anything. At best, it seemed to reproduce things. Clerks copied endlessly, bookkeepers added up numbers to create more numbers, and insurance men literally made more paper. For the tobacco farmer or miner, it barely constituted work at all. He (and at that point it was invariably a he) was a parasite on the work of others, who literally did the heavy lifting. Thus the bodies of real workers were sinewy, tanned by the relentless sun or blackened by smokestack soot; the bodies of clerks were slim, almost feminine in their untested delicacy.

The lively (and unscrupulous) American press occasionally took time to level invectives against the clerk. “We venture the assertion that there is not a more dependent or subservient set of men in this country than are the genteel, dry goods clerks in this and other large cities,” the editors of the American Whig Review held. Meanwhile, the American Phrenological Journal had stronger advice for young men facing the prospect of a clerical career. “Be men, therefore, and with true courage and manliness dash into the wilderness with your axe and make an opening for the sunlight and for an independent home.” Vanity Fair had the strongest language of all: clerks were “vain, mean, selfish, greedy, sensual and sly, talkative and cowardly” and spent all their minimal strength attempting to dress better than “real men who did real work.” Somehow it was never questioned that journalism, also conducted in offices and with pen and paper, constituted “real work.”

Clerks’ attire was a glaring target for the barbs of the press, since the very concept of business attire (not to speak of business casual) came into being with the mass appearance of clerks in American cities. “In the counting-room and the office,” wrote Samuel Wells, the author of a “manual of republican etiquette” from 1856, “gentlemen wear frock coats or sack coats. They need not be of very fine material, and should not be of any garish pattern.” Other fashion advisers pointed to a whole host of “business coats,” “business surtouts,” and “business paletots,” which you could find at new stores like Brooks Brothers. Working-class Americans would be seen in straw hats or green blouses; what distinguished the clerk was his collar: usually bleached an immaculate white and starched into an imposing stiffness. But collared business shirts were expensive, so stores catering to the business customer began to sell collars by themselves, half a dozen collars running to under half of what a cheap shirt would cost. The white collar, detachable and yet an essential status marker, was the perfect symbol of the pseudo-genteel, dual nature of office work.

Brooks Brothers. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The self-regarding clerk in his white collar became a stock subject of satire. Edgar Allan Poe, in his story “The Man of the Crowd,” saw the “tribe of clerks” as being composed entirely of overdressed dandies, imitating aristocratic styles already several years old:

There were the junior clerks of flash houses—young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed deskism for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact fac-simile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of the gentry;—and this, I believe, involves the best definition of the class.

The division of the upper clerks of staunch firms, or of the “steady old fellows,” it was not possible to mistake. These were known by their coats and pantaloons of black or brown, made to sit comfortably, with cravats and waistcoats, broad solid-looking shoes, and thick hose or gaiters.—They all had slightly bald heads, from which the right ears, long used to pen-holding, had an odd habit of standing off on end. I observed that they always removed or settled their hats with both hands, and wore watches, with short gold chains of a substantial and ancient pattern. Theirs was the affectation of respectability;—if indeed there be an affectation so honorable.

It fell to the poet Walt Whitman, bard of the masculine professions—the farmer, the builder, even the loafer and layabout—to establish that clerking was antithetical to manly American democracy. In a journalistic piece called “Broadway,” the poet turns up his nose at a “jaunty” group of “down-town clerks” sauntering down the great avenue toward their cramped rooms in lower Manhattan. “A slender and round-shouldered generation, of minute leg, chalky face, and hollow chest.” Again, what distinguished the clerks was their dandyishness, “trig and prim in great glow of shiny boots, clean shirts—sometimes, just now, of extraordinary patterns, as if overrun with bugs!—tight pantaloons, straps, which seem coming little into fashion again, startling cravats, and hair all soaked and ‘slickery’ with sickening oils.” But their sparkling clothes merely hid the truth of their bodies: “What wretched, spindling, ‘forked radishes’ would they be, and how ridiculously would their natty demeanor appear if suddenly they could all be stript naked!”

But the fantasy of exposing the clerk to his own inadequacy only concealed a deeper fear about the changing world of American business. Under the pressures of growing industrialization in the North of the United States, the Jeffersonian democracy of farmers was heading toward the same fate as the buffalo. More important, the old eighteenth-century world of businessmen who were also craftsmen—white-collar types who worked with their hands—began to suffer a slow decline as merchants and their groups of clerks started to exploit their superior knowledge of distant markets, and industries began to require more and more bookkeepers to maintain their ever more complicated accounts. New York was a case in point: by 1818, a packet line had begun to carry goods from the East River docks and Liverpool (which had one of the highest concentrations of clerks in England); by 1825, the completion of the Erie Canal had connected the city with western New York; importers in lower Manhattan had set up shop to get goods from markets in the Caribbean and Asia as well as from Europe. The growth of manufacturing led to myriad urban retail and wholesale establishments, which in turn required people to do the paperwork. The “Basis of Prosperity,” Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine held in 1839, lay in “the vast modern increase of the facilities for diffusing and obtaining full and correct information on everything pertaining to trade.” The people who handled this were clerks. Cities began to acquire ever more sizable numbers of clerks ambling down their broad avenues for men like Whitman to gawk at and fret over. By 1860, 25 percent of Philadelphians were working in nonmanual occupations; in the brand-new city of San Francisco it was already 36 percent; in Boston it was nearly 40 percent. Not all of these were clerks exactly, but the trend was clear: more and more people had ceased to work with their hands and were now working with their heads. The journals of opinion in the United States might have hated the “wretched, spindling” office worker, but the hatred refracted the intense ambivalence over the nature of business—and the possibility that clerks might be not an aberration but the future.

* * *

Despite the furor over their aggressive unmanliness, clerks, and with them the office, crept silently into the world of nineteenth-century America. Moral philosophers were mostly preoccupied with the clang of industrialization and its satanic mills, and most regarded as negligible the barely audible scratch of pens across ledgers and receipts that characterized the new world of clerical work. It was only a “dry, husky business,” as the narrator of “Bartleby” had it. Yet the expansion of the clerking force heralded a change as great as that of industry, and the humble clerk in the white collar would be as significant a figure as the factory hand in blue.

Part of what made the office so unworthy of notice was the fact that clerks in the mid-nineteenth century seemed to do business in exactly the same way as clerks decades before, in colonial and revolutionary America. The typical structure of a merchants’ firm was still the partnership of two or three people, often in the same family, with the venture secured by a contract. The standard method of accounting, double-entry bookkeeping, had been developed in Italy in the fourteenth century. And the offices, too, resembled the banking and merchants’ offices of Renaissance Italy—called in America, as they had been in the Renaissance, countinghouses. In these office spaces, a door from the street would open into darkness, perhaps graced by a single window streaked with dust from the outside, glommed over on the inside with soot from the potbellied stove in the middle of the room. A high rolltop desk was where one of the partners sat; a higher desk in the corner was reserved for his small staff of clerks. The partners themselves were often absent from this scene, making personal calls to conduct their business transactions while the clerks stayed behind and copied documents, endlessly. The other signal figure of this office was the bookkeeper: the patient, sallow-faced pen-and-ink man regarding the ledger carefully through his pince-nez, whose chief source of pride was his ability to conjure the sum of a column of numbers quickly and efficiently.

A former employee of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company in Pittsburgh in 1869, whose office had all of six men (three of them partners, three others doing bookkeeping and clerical work), recalled the office life at the time some seventy years later: “There were no telephones, stenographers, or typewriters, and business was done face to face. A man would travel hundreds of miles to buy a carload of iron (15 tons), rather than write because he could see all the iron manufacturers, and felt he could more than save his expenses in getting the lowest price. There were probably more callers at our office than there are today . . . Business hours began at seven in the morning and six in the evening was recognized as quitting time only if the day’s work was finished, and it was not unusual to continue work after supper.” Even if the workday was long, the pace of business was almost enviably slow, as one partner’s account of a “busy” day had it. “To rise early in the morning, to get breakfast, to go down town to the counting house of the firm, to open and read letters—to go out and do some business, either at the Custom house, bank or elsewhere, until twelve, then to take a lunch and glass of wine at Delmonico’s; or a few raw oysters at Downing’s; to sign checks and attend to the finances until half past one . . . to return to the counting house, and remain until time to go to dinner, and in the old time, when such things as ‘packet nights’ existed [when packet ships came in], to stay down town until ten or eleven at night, and then go home and go to bed.”

Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The offices themselves were crowded and characterized above all by face-to-face interactions, as was industry in general. One exemplary office, of a New York commission house that sold western and southern produce, was only twenty-five square feet in size but managed to house four partners and six clerical workers, all men. One was an office manager; two clerks handled the major accounts, while a fourth handled the smaller ones. A fifth acted as secretary to the senior partner; a sixth was a receiving and delivery clerk who worked “from early in the morning until eight to ten o’clock at night” handling freight and storage. There was a group of salesmen who went in and out of the office to arrange transactions and a collector who processed bills and handled bank deposits.

But the surface continuities in the lives of office clerks masked a deeper, momentous series of changes in the structure of office work itself, which subtly began to reshape American cities and the working worlds they contained.

One such change was the increasing specialization of business. The previous century had seen a host of mercantile activities united in one figure, the merchant, who was “exporter, wholesaler, importer, retailer, shipowner, banker and insurer” all at once (in the words of the business historian Alfred Chandler). By mid-century, all these tasks were divided. There were banks to handle the money, insurance firms to minimize risk, and shippers to carry goods, while merchants themselves ceased to handle multiple products, focusing on just one or two, and only on one aspect of the business (importing or exporting), while the day-to-day business was increasingly being handled by subordinate staff. In retail, the growth of manufacturing meant that the goods being sold (clothes, say) were made off-site, and stores simply took on the function of selling—again, with a host of underlings to record the day’s transactions. In other words, manual work was being separated from nonmanual work.

The separation of tasks, and the making of things from their selling, crystallized in the development of offices with clerks, sometimes completely separated from the dirty, noisy, and smelly world of “real work.” In city directories of the time, one notices for the first time companies that have factories in or near a city, with a separate listing for an office in what increasingly began to be called, and exclusively in American English, “downtown” (the first usage is recorded in 1836). At the same time, the customary word “countinghouse” began to give way to the word “office.” Even where administrative offices remained on factory property, they were often separated from the shop floor itself so that factory managers and clerks had entrances to their places of work physically distinct from that of the manual workers (and the office entrances were often prettier as well, distinguished by lintels and columns framing the doorway, rather than the warehouse atmosphere of the factory). Office buildings began to acquire their own architectural idiom, a “Greek Revival” style replete with Doric pilasters and large display windows for retail. It was a sign that the work being done within was noble, dignified, and important.

Another, otherwise invisible but significant distinction adhered to the split of income between manual and nonmanual workers. Most married skilled laborers barely earned enough off one job to support their families, with the average running to about $500 a year. Meanwhile, Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine estimated that the average annual expenses of a family of four, living frugally, amounted to $1,500—three times the average income of a manual laborer. While clerks usually faced dismal incomes their first year clerking, with an entry-level salary of about $50, their earning power could rise well above the low ceiling of a manual laborer’s salary, and there are plenty of reports of clerks in their late twenties and early thirties, often single men, earning as much as $1,500 or $2,000. Above all, the income difference lay in how these incomes, whether small or large, were paid out. Manual workers received hourly or piece-rate wages, while nonmanual workers earned annual salaries. What this meant for white-collar workers, in an American economy beset by intense fluctuation in prices and frequent financial panics, was a measure of stability that manual workers never enjoyed. A small shift in power had begun to take place. If people who “worked with their hands” still assumed their possession of the world of things, clerical workers, those working “with their heads,” were now at the heart of capitalism’s growing world of administration and direction—close to power, if not exactly in control of it.

And so unlike “solidarity,” the key word of the European industrial labor movement that had made its way to England and America, the ethic that began to take hold among clerks was that of “self-improvement.” Clerical workers were uprooted from the close-knit world of families and farms, where knowledge was passed down from father to son. Other clerks were merely their competition; they had no one to rely on but themselves. “The man who does not at least propose to himself to be better this year than he was last must be very good or bad indeed,” wrote the merchant’s clerk Edward Tailer in his diary entry on New Year’s Day 1850. There is, he continued, “no such thing as a stationary point in human endeavors; he who is not worse to day than he was yesterday is better; and he who is not better is worse.”

Self-education became a key component separating the office world from the rest of the world of work. Entire schools—a parallel academy for clerks—sprang up in cities everywhere to assist young people with the new knowledge they needed to succeed in business. The loftiest of the heads in the countinghouses of America was the bookkeeper, who was the closest to true knowledge in the white-collar workplace. Accounting courses proliferated—usually $25 a pop, a sum that only more stable families could afford—and some offered to “watch over your work as you advance step by step, from book to book, entry to entry, and transaction to transaction.” Accounting books like S. W. Crittenden’s Elementary Treatise on Book-Keeping became widely known, thanks to their promise to “bring the subject within the grasp of any boy or girl.” Though copy clerks had to acquire their own special skills in these schools, such as the ability to write thirty words in sixty seconds—the measure of good penmanship—bookkeepers were the source of fundamental truth in American business. The numbers, after all, had to add up. So pervasive was the bookkeeping impulse in American life that Thoreau made it a chief object of parody in the “Economy” chapter of Walden, where, in order to argue the superiority of his frugal, simplified life, he ostentatiously added up his food expenses in a ledger.

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Unlike the anonymous, wide, deep, air-conditioned warrens that most workers around the world experience as their offices today, the early offices of the Western world—particularly those of England and America—were intimate, almost suffocatingly cozy spheres, characterized by unctuous male bonding between business partners and their clerks. Because of the close proximity of clerks to their bosses, they were sometimes considered by their bosses, as the great historian of the workplace Harry Braverman had it, “assistant manager, retainer, confidant, management trainee, and prospective son-in-law.” Or, as Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine had it, the merchant’s clerk “is to business what the wife is to the order and success of the home—the genius that gives form and fashion to the materials for prosperity which are furnished by another”—a comparison that could hardly give comfort to those who worried about the “femininity” of American clerical work. At the same time, the closeness belied a deeply competitive streak in the American clerk. Unlike their brothers in the factory, who had begun to see organizing on the shop floors as a way to counter the foul moods and arbitrary whims of their bosses, clerks saw themselves as potential bosses. What appeared to be an exemplary “middle-class” patience, a willingness to endure anything in order to rise to the top, went hand in hand with utter impatience. Indeed, their whininess was proverbial. As America’s finest moralist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote in his canonical essay “Self-Reliance”: “If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.” But the complaint derived from the proximity to power that a seat in an office guaranteed them. Virtually no space separated clerks from their superiors; between their position and that of the partners of their firms lay only time.

Edward Tailer, a New York merchant’s clerk who kept a steady diary throughout his years in business, gives a vivid picture of the working world of clerks. He sounds the proper, Uriah Heep-ish tone for the early white-collar worker as well: humility masking greed, whininess masking confidence. The son of a rich lawyer, in 1848, at age eighteen, Tailer managed, largely through the efforts of his well-connected family, to procure a clerkship in the merchants’ firm of Little, Alden & Co., which was an importer of British, French, and German dry goods. Aside from the partners (Mr. Little and Mr. Alden), the small dark office consisted of a single bookkeeper, Frederick Haynes. When not delivering bills to dry goods houses owing money to Little, Alden & Co. or depositing said money in the bank, Tailer was employed in an endless monotony of filing receipts. In one entry he writes with satisfaction that his day consisted of filing three hundred freight and receipt bills. Highly self-conscious of the stereotypes of spindling weakness associated with members of his profession, Tailer became an exhausting propagandist for regular exercise and wrote several newspaper articles praising the gym he went to. In a piece for the New-York Enquirer in 1848, he wrote, “It is particularly recommended to those of sedentary habits, to undergo the training which is to be found [on Crosby near Bleecker].” As if responding to the satire of people like Walt Whitman, Tailer argued that after regular exercise “narrow and contracted chests are soon turned into broad and expansive ones, and the puny limbs of him who is not accustomed to exercise are soon changed into well developed and finely formed ones, and he imperceptibly finds himself re-established in health and strength.” The idea of a manly, ripped clerk has its contemporary counterpart in the health-crazed office workers of today, whose biceps stiffen and shift like packs through their shirtsleeves, though they rarely lift more than boxes of files or a planter of ferns at their workplace. The office—and the fears of physical degradation it engendered—might in fact have given birth to our modern idea of the gym.

At the same time, the obscurity of the poorly lit office drives him to complain about the worsening of his eyesight: “My eyes felt, when the labors of the day were finished, as if I was to become blind, a cloud appeared to hover over them, which prevented my seeing distinctly those minute objects which would be presented for admission to be portrayed upon the retina. The reason which I assigned to account for this singular occurrence was that they had been strained and sorely tried by the miserable light which finds its way into our counting room.” The darkening of Tailer’s vision might have had less to do with the light and more to do with complaints about his position. Earlier in the same diary entry, Tailer complains that he has yet to hear from his boss over a request he had made, three days earlier, for a raise: “The answer which I have been daily expecting from Mr Alden, whether he will furnish me to draw for one hundred fifty or not, has not yet made its appearance. It strikes me most forcibly as exhibiting a mean trait of character, that a man, who has made thousands of dollars, should refuse the paltry sum to a faithful and hard working clerk, which would make him feel happy and independent, and inwardly bless the bountiful hand which could thus place him above want.” Tailer’s request was for a yearly salary of $150—a raise of $100 from his $50 starting salary, after less than a year of employment. Such was the salary he deserved, he argued, and moreover it was the only salary that would allow him to support himself and relieve his (wealthy) father of the burden. Alden’s response at the time, measured and calm, was that Tailer was asking too much for his position: Boston clerks, he argued, received only $50 their first year, with a $50 raise every subsequent year.

With Alden stalling on the raise month after month, Tailer’s list of affronts began to multiply. In several entries he testifies to the strain on his eyesight. He also complains about the manual labor he is often forced to perform—an affront to his status as a clerk who works with his head: “It often occurs to me, that it is time Little Alden & Co had a young man to carry out bundles and parcels of pattern cards, as I have now been with them over a year, and it is not creditable to myself that this kind of awkward and clumsy work should still devolve upon me.” Tailer, a “young man” himself, didn’t mean that he wanted someone younger; rather, he wanted a porter to do the work, which he would eventually get. The distinction that Tailer drew between clerking and portering was both class based and race based; most porters tended to be immigrants or minorities of some stripe—at least 66 percent in New York City, according to the 1855 census, while 6 percent were African American—giving the work an especially low cast in the minds of clerks. The whiteness of their collars was about more than just attire.

Tailer’s worries over his position were common in a clerking world where the distance between junior clerk and partner was seen as both enormous and easily surmountable. No other profession was so status conscious and anxiety-driven and yet also so straightforward seeming. No matter how dull their work might be at any given moment, there was little doubt that clerks saw themselves, and were seen by their bosses, as apprentice managers—businessmen in training. Few people thought they would languish as clerks, in the way that it became proverbial to imagine people spending their lives in a cubicle, or how for decades becoming a secretary was the highest position a woman office worker could aspire to. Part of the prestige of clerking lay in the vagueness of the job description. The nature of the dry goods business meant that clerks often spent time in the stores where their goods were sold, acting as salesmen and having to be personable to customers. In other words, the duties of clerks were vast enough to allow them to be tasked with anything, which meant that so much of their work depended upon so many unmeasurable factors besides a clerk’s productivity: his attitude, good manners, even his suitability as a future husband for the boss’s daughter. A good clerk besieged his bosses’ emotions the way he did customers—flattering them to the point of obsequiousness, until the bosses were assured that they had a good man on their hands. These personal abilities were part of the skill set of a clerk—something we know today as office politics—and though they couldn’t be notched on a résumé, they were the secret of the supposed illustriousness of business life. The work might dehumanize you, but whatever part of you that remained human was your key to moving up in the job.

This was also the reason clerks felt superior to manual laborers. Young men entering a factory job had no illusions about running the factory, which is why a few of them began to join the nascent American labor movement. But clerks were different from people who “worked with their hands,” and they knew it—a consciousness that Tailer registers when he declares the “awkward and clumsy work” of a porter unworthy of him. Young men who wanted to get into business knew they had to clerk, and they also knew that clerks could and often did eventually become partners in their firms. “Time alone will suffice to place him in the same situation as those his illustrious predecessors now hold!” Tailer wrote in one entry, loftily referring to himself in the third person. But though patience was the signal virtue of clerking—to write on, as Bartleby did, “silently, palely, mechanically”—impatience was its most signal marker. From the shop floor, the top of the Pittsburgh steel mill looked far off indeed. But in the six-person office, it was right next to you, in the demystified person of the fat and mutton-chopped figure asleep at the rolltop desk, ringed with faint wisps of cigar smoke.

Tailer was momentarily gratified when he at last received the raise he asked for—including the potential of a $50 bonus. Then the firm’s profits began to skyrocket, and Tailer, in full possession of the details of these profits (after all, he was the one depositing and withdrawing the checks), began once again to feel agitated over his compensation, the mere hundreds he received compared with the “thousands” pocketed by Alden. Two and a half years later, Tailer found a position with another firm as a salesman; upon leaving, he was told by Alden that his “greatest failing was too strong an anxiety to force myself ahead.” Yet the anxiety paid off. Only a few years later, at age twenty-five, Tailer would count himself a merchant; later in life he would have the money to travel extensively in Cuba and western Europe, and he had meetings with the Mormon pioneer Brigham Young, President Franklin Pierce, and Pope Pius IX.

* * *

The simultaneous impatience and obsequiousness of a figure like Tailer would become a leitmotif of white-collar workers in the century and a half since the clerk first rose to prominence. As such, offices became highly ambiguous spaces in the fast-developing world of American capitalism. Were clerks part of the growing industrial working class, replacing the artisans and small farmers of the old-world economy? Or were they merely stopping points on the way to becoming part of the “ruling class”? The answer appears to be that they were somewhere uncomfortably in between: not “middle class” exactly, or not yet—the phrase was never used, and the concept hadn’t yet sprung up among nineteenth-century Americans—but somehow neither of the working class nor of the elite holders of capital. White-collar workers rarely knew where they were, whom they should identify with. It was an enduring dilemma, rooted in what might be called a class unconsciousness, that would characterize the world of the office worker until the present day.

In one sense, early office workers were definitely part of an elite. For one thing, immigrants were virtually barred from becoming clerks; overt racism of course played a role, but more pertinent was the fact that clerking required an exceptional command of English, and specifically business English, which meant that it was comparatively easier for immigrants to slip into factories or other kinds of manual labor that hardly required speaking or writing at all. In their pay structure, appearance, and style of dress, early office workers seemed to be elite as well. Clerks were salaried, not waged; they often dressed to the nines; and they had the thin wrists and creamily pale complexions of aristocrats unused to hard labor, in a country born in a revolt against an aristocracy.

Politically and culturally, clerks began to form their own caste institutions. While most recoiled from the brutal, backslapping world of mid-century urban politics—with its ward bosses, gangsters, canned soapbox speeches, and blatant corruption, all of which clerks like Tailer dismissed as “electioneering”—they developed their own, semi-genteel spaces in which to pursue political and intellectual questions. They joined debating societies and subscription libraries, forming the core constituencies of lyceums and athenaeums all over the country’s cities. The Mercantile Library Association, a private library formed in 1820, counted among its members a sizable number of clerks, Tailer among them, who argued in his diary that the “cherished institution” was “destined to perform a great deal of infinite good for some of the more unenlightened members of the mercantile community.” This was all part of the dogma of “self-improvement” that young clerks could count as their collective contribution to society.

It also signified a commitment to gentility and honor, when many in the media were contending that young effete clerks were ruining the morals of their customers in retail stores, or, worse, dissipating in brothels and public houses. Some clerks, like Tailer, went out of their way to affirm their own virtuousness. Tramping around the city, as he often did for work and pleasure alike, Tailer would come across scenes like one recorded in his diary, where Broadway “litterally [sic] swarmed with the most depraved of women.” But many other clerks succumbed, with considerably less sanctimony, to the “vices” offered in abundance by the antebellum city. Clerks’ barrooms—called “porterhouses”—often became the preserve of low-level clerks who were about to set out for a “spree” with prostitutes. Magazines with titles like Whip, Rake, and Flash, as well as a host of erotic novels, offered gossip about especially enterprising clerks who exhibited impressive powers of seduction—tales that might have helped clerks manage their own identities in the face of repeated charges against their manliness.

The one collective movement that clerks engaged in might have turned into a confrontation, in which the status of clerks might have been posed in the open and contested (if not resolved), but clerks made every effort to keep it civil and friendly to their employers, leaving things ambiguous—where, it seemed, clerks wanted them to be. This was their movement to regulate the closing hours of the retail stores where their firms sold goods. In the early nineteenth century, these stores had arbitrary hours, and merchants and retailers were thereby able to keep their clerks at the stores late into the night, usually until 10:00—preventing them from the few hours of leisure available to them, in which they could have gone to the gym or the library. By 1841, enough of them had banded together to form a demand to close the stores significantly earlier, at 8:00 p.m. But these demands were couched in the countinghouse language of friendship and bonhomie: they sought a “solicitation” of merchants’ goodwill and argued that a few hours of rest would make more “willingly devoted servants” in the store. They earned the enmity of a few owners and newspaper editors, who muttered imprecations over the moral lassitude of brothel-going clerks in one breath and more deep-seated fears over a labor revolt in another. The clerks responded agilely, arguing in petitions and letters that they merely wanted to devote themselves to study; as for a labor revolt, they had no plans of striking, instead hoping to win over their owners by softly voiced requests.

The powerfully influential editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley, welcomed the movement as a sign that the clerks were at last moving toward becoming true citizens of the Republic. “The ignorance, emptiness and foppery of Clerks have been the theme of popular ridicule long enough,” he wrote in his first editorial. But if the satire were true, he argued, then naturally “means should be taken to improve [the clerks’] condition.” After the passage of the early closing petition in the clerks’ association, the editor wrote again, urging the adoption of the act, arguing that with their new freedom the clerks could take advantage of moral education: “Under the old system the time of the Clerks was so incessantly occupied as to deprive them entirely of that leisure for mental, moral and social improvement which should be enjoyed by every one just entering upon the duties and responsibilities of active life.” He hoped ardently that the newly “emancipated” clerks would take it upon themselves to enjoy their new liberty in hallowed sanctuaries, like the “New-York Lyceum” and other debating and education societies.

But most merchants continued to resist. It didn’t help that the clerks were making requests rather than demands and forming associations rather than unions. A strike would have utterly crippled the commercial life of New York; a petition merely made most of the merchants chuckle. The clerks were determined, however, to minimize any similarities between their meek and courteous requests for more time and the violent means usually employed by striking manual laborers. When unsigned members of the Committee of the Dry Goods Clerks wrote in to the Tribune to threaten a particular merchant who refused to close early (“you had better look out for your glass if you want to save them [sic] from being smashed”), the chairman of the early-closing committee went out of his way to disassociate his body from the more radical sentiments, claiming the letter as sabotage by “some malicious person” attempting to “thwart our measures.” Despite several larger associations, and even a concession to forming an alliance with the Industrial Congress of trade unions, by 1852 the early-closing movement had run out of steam, dissipating in failure.

Did the clerks want to win? Or, in winning, would they have compromised their own position—as junior businessmen rather than workers? By their own lights, clerks were not a threat to anything. In the varied world of American work, they portrayed themselves as baby workers, always on the verge of tears but stunned into passivity at the offer of a symbolic pacifier. “Bartleby,” which exploited the ambiguous nature of clerical work that Melville had known firsthand, is a story of the only kind of resistance a clerk could offer: passive resistance. “You will not?” the fatherly narrator asks. “I prefer not,” Bartleby corrects—stumping his boss by substituting a mild preference for a stubborn desire. One clerk put their situation thus:

The interest which clerks generally feel in the business and success of their employers, is, I believe, estimated too cheaply and that many feel so little, is, perhaps, as often the fault of their employers as their own. The majority of clerks are young men who have hopes and prospects of business before them. They have not yet thrown off that trusting confidence and generous friendship peculiar to youth—they are disposed to think well of themselves and the world, and they feel it deeply when too great a distance is maintained between themselves and their superiors . . .

A good clerk feels that he has an interest in the credit and success of his employer beyond the amount of his salary; and with the close of every successful year, he feels that he too, by his assiduity and fidelity, has added something to his capital—something to his future prospects, and something to his support if overtaken with adversity; and a good merchant encourages and reciprocates all these feelings.

Years before the rise of the clerk, American economists had worried over a growing distinction between producing classes, who did all the work, and consuming classes, who simply enjoyed the products. But from the 1830s to the 1850s, when clerks conducted their inauspicious rise into the lower frequencies of the American imagination, the discourse shifted away from this distinction toward discussing the possibility of a “harmony of interests” between employers and workers. Prompted most obviously by the threats from socialists in Europe and America—people like Charles Fourier and Karl Marx, Robert Owen and Henry George—who proclaimed an irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor, these writers were also describing, perhaps inadvertently, the world that the office world was giving harbor to: one where workers were in harmony with their employers. To be sure, the office, from its earliest days, was rich in antagonisms, petty grievances, and outright hostility. But in the mind of the typical office worker, there never appeared to be a contradiction in pursuing his own interests alongside those of his employer. The Civil War would puncture the national harmony engendered in American workplaces—especially the southern cotton fields that were the most unequal workplaces of all. But the office, which grew to prominence in the years that followed, expanding to rows upon rows of desks and engulfing American cities in skyscrapers, admitted little of the strife clamoring outside its walls. With reformers promising a utopia of one kind, the office promised another, which would prove more enduring: an endless, placid shaking of hands.

* * *

From the book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, by Nikil Saval. Copyright  © 2014 Nikil Saval. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Erika Hayasaki | December 2014 | 2,554 words (10 minutes)

Four years ago, Erika Hayasaki learned about the death of two young men in a corn grain bin accident in the Midwest. Over the next two years, while pregnant and later with her then-six-month-year-old daughter and husband in tow, she left her life in Los Angeles to visit Mount Carroll, Illinois, population 1,700, to capture the story. Her interest, however, wasn’t so much in rehashing the deaths of the two young men, but in telling the story of the survivor, Will Piper, who nearly died trying to save his friends from the deadly pull of the grain bin, and whose life took a surprising turn after the accident. The following is an excerpt from Hayasaki’s story, Drowned By Corn, which describes the lives of the young workers before the accident.

* * *

The sky showed its nerve that July in 2010 in Mount Carroll, Illinois, a blip of a town, home to 1,700, 20 miles east of the Mississippi River and Iowa border. For 33 hours, 10 inches of rain fell in heaves, pushing the Plum and Waukarusa rivers to spill over, swallowing hundreds of acres of corn and soybean fields. The town’s only dugout and baseball diamonds disappeared. The interstate overpass and railroad tracks were engulfed. When the rain finally dissipated, cars and swing sets sat submerged in chin-high water. Parts of Mount Carroll had become a Hennessey-colored lake, with overturned train cars and pieces of fences clinking about like ice cubes. Residents steered motorboats and canoes through washed-out neighborhoods. The chief of police sailed to work. A live cow caught in the current bobbed in the water like a buoy.

But the storm itself did not take any lives, and within a few days its potential for peril had already been lost on some. To Will Piper and Alex “Paco” Pacas, both 19, the swollen rivers dared them to jump from bridges and to ride rubber inner tubes wherever the fast-rushing currents might take them. In the Waukarusa, which snaked behind Will’s parents’ house, Paco lost control and went flying downstream, slamming into a tree limb, and tumbling off his tube. Will jumped in after him, and the two made it to dry ground. They shared a good laugh over the feat. It was not the first time Will had saved his best friend. Once, they got the idea to swim the Mississippi River. Paco started to struggle halfway out. Will had to swim with his arms around him, helping Paco to land.

Living in Mount Carroll was enough to motivate teenagers like them to seek out adventure. Two paved main double-lane roads led in and out of the town—Route 78 and Route 64—lifelines that linked small-towners to bigger cities, like Clinton, Freeport, Rockford, and Chicago. Mount Carroll had one grocery store. The closest mall was an hour-and-a-half drive away. To get to a Walmart, it took forty-five minutes. If Will and Paco wanted to see a movie in a theater, or take their prom dates to a fancy restaurant, they had to plan on traveling the same forty-five minutes, driving behind the semis sometimes lugging oversized tractors; past the milk trucks; through millions of acres of green, beige, and straw-colored land; past the gutted red barns, the spinning windmills, the horses with tails swatting flies; past the signs advertising red or gold mulch for sale, or billboards reading BEEF. IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER, and the churches with letter boards out front with messages like THE KEY TO HEAVEN WAS HUNG ON A NAIL.

Winter would take hold, and with the snowflakes came fables passed down by grandmothers around town of “angels shaking their feathers from the heavens.” Will and Paco took to the remote gravel back roads surrounded by frozen farm fields. That was where they drove their cars like they were stolen, going seventy-five miles an hour on black ice around corners, sometimes balancing on two wheels. Paco drove his family’s high-top twelve-seater. They called it the Paco Van. Fishtailing was an adrenaline rush. In one spot of town, where the railroad tracks sloped about ten feet on both sides, Will and Paco took turns flying over that peak at fifty miles an hour. They got a nice pop up, bottoming out on impact. Once, Paco took the incline at seventy miles, skidding off the road with sparks flying, landing in a snowy ditch.

On summer nights, the guys would return to those back roads with a carton full of mortars—military-inspired fireworks that shot from tubes into the air, before exploding in the sky. With Busch Light on their breath, their friend Jacob “Bump” Bumphrey steered the wheel one night, as Will and Paco lay sprawled on their backs in the bed of the pickup, staring at the stars, taking turns setting the wicks on fire, and shoving them through the tubes. Together, they waited for the ka-boom. With each detonation, Paco squealed like a child at the confetti of sparkles.

Bump got the idea to videotape through the back window. He told his girlfriend, Kelcy, to take the steering wheel. Will let off the next mortar. It erupted, and they all cheered. Seconds later, Will felt the truck swerve, banging and thrashing over rocks and dirt. He struggled to sit up, craning his neck just far enough to see the side of the road. The truck was heading toward a ditch.

“Kelcy!” Will screamed.

She swerved abruptly and jerked the truck back onto the road.

Will looked over at Paco, still flat on his back.

“Dude!” Will told him. “We just almost died.”

Paco looked slightly surprised. “Whoa.”

Death was a flirt, and Will and Paco teased it right back together.

The two had met freshman year at West Carroll High, when the teens from the regional towns of Mount Carroll, Thomson, and Savanna merged on one big campus for the first time. Most of the students had been in small schools with the same kids they had grown up with, but that year they walked into a high school full of strangers, and for the first two weeks, all the kids segregated by towns, especially at lunch. Each town had its own territory: The Savanna tables. The Thomson tables. The Mount Carroll tables.

Paco didn’t belong to a table. His mother was a teacher, and he had been home-schooled by her until then. When Will walked into the cafeteria, he noticed the half-Salvadoran, half-white kid sitting by himself. Paco had thick dark eyebrows and wore his short-cropped hair combed over his forehead.

Will had reddish-blond hair that matched his eyebrows and lashes, and blue-gray eyes. He was over six feet tall, long, and thin-muscled, not particularly graceful. All the clusters of town cliques seemed dumb to him. Why did everyone have to stick to their own? Screw it, Will had told himself that day. He would make his own clique. He struck up a conversation with the new kid. The two boys realized they both had band for their fifth-hour class. Will played trombone. Paco played the trumpet and bass guitar. They walked to band together.

“That was it,” as Will would tell the story years later. “Best friends ever since.”

Will on a childhood trip to Haiti with a local volunteer group. Courtesy of the Piper family

It was this part of him that respected Paco’s resilience too. The oldest of seven siblings, Paco had recently become the man of his house, after his father was sent to jail. Town folks knew that the Pacas family didn’t have much money, especially with a single mother in charge of all those kids alone. Their two-story house on Main Street, with its four bedrooms upstairs and large basement that Paco used as his crash pad and buddy hangout, was soon going to be foreclosed upon. To help his family, Paco knew he needed to work.

Will and Paco graduated from high school in 2009 and saw their futures as endless and intertwined, beyond the borders of Mount Carroll. Will, in particular, had long entertained the idea of leaving this town, in which he had been born, behind forever. He had worked just about every minimum-wage job in the area: at the Dairy Queen, at a factory, and cutting trees.

Will had recently returned from spending nine months in a technical school in Minnesota, where he learned how to repair musical instruments. But he did not complete all of his course work to earn his diploma. He figured he could repair instruments without the degree, as long as he had learned the skills. His drug and alcohol use did not make his motivation to graduate any better. Will had been drinking beer or liquor about three times a week since he was 18, and smoking marijuana almost on a daily basis by the time he graduated from high school. In Minnesota he began abusing Adderall, a drug prescribed to treat attention deficit disorder, which he had been diagnosed with as a child. Adderall was an “upper,” or stimulant, that helped him focus and stay awake. With enough of it, he could skip sleep for three or four days at a time. Sometimes, he would smoke marijuana to come down from the Adderall high. Will returned home with no diploma and no real job prospects.

It took more than a barrel of motivation to get out of Mount Carroll. The town was the kind of place that kept a leg hold on you. The economic crisis had hit the region hard, and lately it felt as if everyone was on the edge of losing their jobs, or their farms, or their family businesses. With so few options, many hovered between barely making it and not making it at all. The leg hold tightened as bills piled up and family debts mounted. By the time boys grew into men in Mount Carroll, reality set in. As much as they might have dreamed of one day pulling themselves out of this town, they didn’t even have the life tools or opportunities to figure out how. It was easier to score a dime bag, or sell one, than to land a job interview.

So it felt like a lucky break when a kindly neighbor, Matt Schaffner, who managed a grain-storage facility in town, mentioned that he might be able to offer Will some part-time temporary work.

Grain bins had been as much a part of the backdrop of Will’s life in Mount Carroll as the stalks of corn that grew to twice his height before the harvest season. For miles upon miles, grain bins pockmarked the landscape, some wide as sheds, others stadium-large. Some called them silos. On gray days, their stainless-steel and aluminum-alloy sides blended into the sky. On sunny days, the ribs of the bins gleamed like jewel facets. Every October, cornhusks were stripped, their kernels removed from each ear and sent to the bins for storage. Altogether, these cylindrical towers protruding across the Illinois landscape stored nearly two billion bushels of shelled corn—a nation’s lifeblood within their giant silver bellies.

“Hell yeah,” Will said to Matt, of course he’d take the job.

Alex “Paco” Pacas. Courtesy of the Pacas family

Eight days later, Will drove both of them to the bins. It was Paco’s second day of work. Will had smoked some weed the night before, like he usually did before falling asleep. By 7 a.m., he was awake and sober.

They headed to the control room to get instructions for the day. They had been hired to load trucks, clean the bins, and sweep the corn. They would also be responsible for “walking down the grain” to keep it from caking along the bin walls, which involved loosening the chunks of corn that choked up a sump hole by hitting the clumps with pickaxes or shovels or by kicking it with their boots. Today, they would be working inside of Bin Number 9.

Matt’s dimple-cheeked 15-year-old daughter, M.J., also worked at the bins, but she stuck mostly to loading the semitrucks, which pulled into the facility daily. She was one of several workers who helped fill up each truck with 80,000 pounds of corn, to be shipped by barge across the Mississippi River.

Each day, M.J. would stand on a platform controlling a pulley system, opening a hopper that would dump in corn until the truck was full. She would close the pulley system and use hand signals to motion to the truck driver to continue on into the “scale house,” a room across from Bin Number 9, with a computer monitor. Another employee would record the truck’s weight. If the truck exceeded 80,000 pounds, workers would unload corn until it hit the right weight. If it was underweight, M.J. would signal to the driver to back up, and she would open the hopper again to fill it with more corn. Other workers had nicknamed M.J. The Beast, because she could operate the machinery and keep things running smoothly and efficiently, despite being so young and small.

M.J. had gone into a bin once, about a month earlier, to walk down the grain like Will and Paco would. It was Bin Number 9. Her father had warned her beforehand to be careful, and to stay away from the corn near the center sump hole. A conveyor belt below carried the kernels out the hole, creating a vacuum-like pressure in the bin. It formed a cone in the corn as it was sucked down. Get caught in the funnel and the moving grain could take her, her dad told her, like quicksand. If she got stuck, she might not come out.

M.J had not entirely understood what he meant until that day she walked down the grain herself in late June. She didn’t like it. The fitful kernels made her uneasy, the way they slithered toward the hole with such force. She told her dad she did not want to do it again. That was the first and last time M.J. walked down the corn.

Excerpted from Drowned by Corn.

* * *

Erika Hayasaki is assistant professor of Literary Journalism at UC Irvine and a journalist who writes about youth, education, health, science, culture, crime, death and urban affairs. She is a former New York-based national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where she spent nine years covering breaking news and writing feature stories. She is the author of The Death Class: A True Story About Life (Simon & Schuster 2014), Drowned by Corn (Kindle Single, 2014) and Dead or Alive ​(Kindle Single, 2012). She has published more than 900 articles in the Los Angeles Times and various other newspapers, and her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Los Angeles magazine and others.

Sabine Heinlein | Longreads | April 2015 | 16 minutes (3,886 words)

One time, when I was in my early twenties, I shared a hospital room with a mother of many. I had a skin infection that wouldn’t respond to oral medication, and the 50-something-year-old woman had severe, inexplicable hives. Our main topic of conversation revolved around neither of our ailments. It was about my not wanting to have children. She was insistent, which seemed ironic considering her hives flared up whenever her family visited her on Sundays. I eventually compromised with the woman. Okay, I said, I will put off my decision until I reach my thirties. “You are starry-eyed,” she huffed. “You young women want it all. But you can’t have it all!” Maybe, I thought, some of us don’t want it all.

In my mid-30s, my sister’s boyfriend sat me down to explain that my preference for a childless life would pass. I thought him presumptuous, particularly since he had only met me once or twice. “At your age,” he explained, “people go through phases. You’ll get over it.” It is true that people change their minds, but that doesn’t make their immediate conviction any less valid. I had not changed my mind since I was a child. I tried to reason with him that it was very unlikely that someone who has never wanted children in almost 20 years would all of a sudden change her mind. To no avail. An argument ensued and I left.

I can’t forget these episodes. They were numerous, in the weeks, months and years of my twenties, my thirties, and my early forties. I would have liked to write about each of them, right when they happened,  but I feared that the general response would have echoed my sister’s boyfriend. As a result, a series of silent defense strategies stewed in my mind for years. If I dared speak up, would readers demand proof in advance that I wouldn’t get pregnant in the future? Or would the trolls scream in all caps NO WONDER SHE DOESN’T HAVE CHILDREN, WHO’D WANT TO FUCK HER? I have never had problems finding someone to fuck, my own little voice would respond. Why the little voice still feels pressured to respond at all is, of course, the important question.

I am not sure about the reproductive state of my 42-year-old ovaries, but I feel like I have more leverage now than I did ten years ago and, more importantly, I care less about what other people think of me. Today, when I talk about cooking and a well-meaning acquaintance predicts that I, too, will order takeout once I have kids, I shrug it off. When my husband and I bought a house, I had to continuously discourage contractors who insisted on installing child-safety features “for the future.” No, I told them, I don’t need the kind of wood floors that can withstand tricycle wheels. And no, I don’t want a railing in the attic to prevent toddlers from tumbling down the stairs. I like open spaces and there won’t be any toddlers. “You never know!” The contractor responded. For the most part, I have stopped engaging with strangers who think they know what’s right for me. A few weeks ago, though, I was caught off guard.

It was 8 o’clock in the morning and I had no milk for my coffee. Still half asleep I put on sweatpants and ran across the street to the Turkish deli. The clerk and I had been friendly for years. He often accepted packages on my behalf. Sometimes we cooed over his bodega cat, whose name translated to “Strong Man.” This morning, though, the conversation quickly veered from a friendly inquiry about Strong Man’s wellbeing to whether my husband and I have any children and oh-my-God, why not? “Because we don’t want to,” I said, hoping that my stern response would end the conversation. But the clerk insisted. But one must—… I have two… The third one is on its way… You should really think about it, because once you get old… and so forth. I fled the store and haven’t gone back since. Recently, when we ran out of milk again, my husband asked sweetly whether it was okay for him to get milk there. “Of course,” I said. “Go right ahead. I doubt that the clerk will ever pressure you into a conversation about why you don’t want to have children. Give my best to Strong Man.”

* * *

Spoiler alert: I don’t have a change of heart at the end of this essay. This is a story about not changing my mind and not having regret. To hives lady, the contractors and all the other bodega owners with cats: I am writing my final no-thank-you note.

* * *

The birth rate in the U.S. has dipped to a record low. There are now only 63 births per 1,000 women between 15 and 44, compared to roughly twice that number in the 1960s. In 2008, 18 percent of women aged 40 to 44 didn’t have children. It is often stated that the steady decrease hinges on the country’s economic distress. But this belies the fact that the more educated a woman is—and, as a result, more capable of securing employment—the less likely she is to have children. While numbers have balanced out slightly since the 1990s, with teenage pregnancies decreasing as well, women without high school diplomas are still almost twice as likely to have children as women with master’s degrees. (I have two master’s degrees, so statistically speaking it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m childless.)

While numbers on (female) fertility rates are easy to track down, it is harder to find reliable data on voluntary childlessness. The Pew Research Center states that six percent of women aged 40-44 are childless by choice, but fails to provide numbers for other age groups. It is telling that not a single one of these studies even mention men—as if they had nothing to do with birth rates.

So why are childless women, despite being on the rise, still considered incomplete? And why are men so rarely questioned about their decision to (not) have children, let alone pressured to justify their choice? And not only that–I have never read an article on voluntary childlessness written by a man. The articles that make it into the paper are written by women, listing excuses, doubts and regrets. Places like The New York Times appear to promote the idea that childlessness is, by nature, a sacrifice women have to come to terms with, not an actual choice, supporting the archaic myth that the lives of childless women are lacking more than those of women with offspring. In her article “Childless, With Regret and Advice: Don’t Wait for the Perfect Picture” author Susan Shapiro explains that she aborted her first two pregnancies because they happened at the wrong time. When Shapiro was ready for children, she was too old. “I wished I had done psychotherapy sooner to heal my head, put genetic therapy to fix the fetus on a layaway payment plan, and stored my eggs as the technology vastly improved,” Shapiro writes, regretfully. Novelist Michelle Huneven’s recent article is misleadingly titled “Childless by Choice.” (Its original title is “Amateurs,” and comes from an admirable new collection by Meghan Daum.) Like Shapiro, she lists the things that had gone wrong in her childhood. She writes, “The one chance at motherhood fate allotted me, I chose not to take.” Huneven, too, had an abortion when she was young and wrestles with guilt after friends warn that abortion will damage her “karma.”

We so rarely hear from those who really choose to be childless, and there are few essays from women who don’t regret having had an abortion, who wouldn’t have been “ready” at a later age, who had the money for IVF and childcare but who chose not to go there. The mainstream conversation is colored by if-arguments, eerily reminiscent of the 1950s, when women without children were pitied (and, possibly, pitied themselves). If I had found the right partner… If I had had enough money… If my childhood hadn’t been so bad… Whatever the reasons, they all suggest that something went wrong.

I don’t have any if-arguments (which doesn’t mean that things don’t go wrong in my life). I simply never wanted to have children. Not when I was 20, not when I was 30 and not today.

* * *

The author and her mother.

This is what I remember: My sister and I are playing in the grass in our suburban yard. I am maybe six, so she must be 12.

My mom had just bought me my first pet rabbit and I couldn’t think of anything better or bigger or more exciting. I tell my sister, who didn’t own a pet at the time, that she could be my bunny’s co-owner. “That’s nice of you,” she says, with the warmth and care only an older sister can endow you with. Years before, my mother had given her a guinea pig. When the guinea pig died, my mother told her that it ran away. “It must have run off to get married and have a family,” my sister said then, her words becoming a recurring family gag. Why else would the guinea pig run away from our family? (I can tell you why, but that’s another story.)

In the yard, my sister and I discuss future professions.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” She asks.

“An animal doctor,” I say. (What else?) “What do YOU want to be when you grow up?” I ask her.

“A gynecologist,” she says. “I want to bring babies into the world.”

“Great,” I say. “Then we can open up an office together!”

Giggling, my sister runs to my parents to tell them, creating yet another kids-say-the-darndest-things moment. Then I didn’t understand what was so funny about it. While my sister would bring babies into the world, I would save animals next door. We would have lunch together every day. We would be inseparable for the rest of our lives.

I didn’t grow up to become “an animal doctor,” mainly because I flunked math and science in high school. My thing was languages. And my sister didn’t become a gynecologist; she took over my father’s company. We both still love animals, though. I have several pets, but bristle when I hear acquaintances and veterinarians refer to them as “[my] babies.” I am a grown woman and can very well distinguish between babies and cats. For starters, cats catch mice and use a litter box. And I don’t know about your cat, but mine doesn’t have a college fund.

Even as a child I preferred animals and adults over children. I never played with dolls. When I wasn’t reading or out in the yard playing hide-and-seek with our 120-lb. Rottweiler—I stuffed my jeans pockets with cold cuts, so he could find me easily—I sat around the table “interviewing” my parents’ friends. My mother was a small-town socialite. If a stranger showed up in the village, he or she would be invited for dinner the next day. I always hoped the stranger wouldn’t bring kids because I had no interest in playing with them. Kids were annoying and difficult. I wanted to be with the adults. I wanted to learn and talk about adult things.

* * *

My husband and I have been together for eleven years and happily married for nine. He doesn’t want to have children either. He never wanted to, and has never gotten a woman pregnant. I don’t remember the exact moment when we talked about not wanting children. It must have been in one of the first love-drunk weeks—or months—that we spent almost entirely in bed. I imagine the conversation went something like this:

“Do you want to have children?”

“No. You?”

“No, never.”

“I’m hungry. Let’s go cook something tasty.”

My husband and I were adults when we met. We both had had several, unsuccessful relationships behind us. We sort of knew what we didn’t want from life and were in the process of figuring out what it was that we did.

Shortly after we met, the “warranty” of my three-year hormone implant was about to run out. I had been on various types of birth control since I was 16. The pill, IUDs, a diaphragm, condoms—you name it. Quite frankly, I had had enough. When I shared my concerns with my then-boyfriend (and now husband), he immediately suggested getting a vasectomy. We knew we wanted to stay together, and I was grateful and proud of him. The procedure took 30 minutes, his insurance paid for it, and he was back at work the next day. One of the many differences between my husband and me is that he has never been forced to justify why he doesn’t want to have children. I, on the other hand, had to prepare my reasons from an early age.

Over the years I tried out various, indisputable explanations: The world is bursting at the seams and there is little hope for the environment. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Earth has lost half of its fauna in the last 40 years alone. The atmosphere is heating up due to greenhouse gases, and we are running out of resources at an alarming speed. Considering these facts, you don’t need an excuse not to have children, you need an excuse to have children! When I mention these statistics to people, they just nod. It’s as if their urge to procreate overrides their knowledge. I realized that having children is a decision based on emotion, not fact, so I began taking a closer look at my own feelings towards children.

* * *

A common assumption is that childless women don’t like children. I can only speak for myself. Some children I like, some I don’t. Children begin to reflect their parents’ behavior from a very early age, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many children are, in fact, unlikable. But however likable a child may be, I find the prospect of spending a whole day—or week or month—with a one-, two-, three-… 12-year-old jarring. (Don’t even mention teenagers.) Of course, this is not entirely the child’s fault. Part of this aversion has to do with the fact that having children forces you to navigate the school system, deal with teachers, principals, and, most of all, other children. In general, I prefer conversations with adults about adult things, like books, immigration, religion and race. I can talk about writing for hours on end. And I love to cook elaborate, super spicy dinners! None of these things indicate that I am more or less incomplete than anyone else.

Still, I wouldn’t say that my decision to remain childless is based on aversion. I particularly like babies before they can walk. I like the way their chubby skin feels, their giggles and the illusion of absolute innocence. I don’t like it when they start walking and pull the books off my shelves, but I appreciate that they give their parents more than anyone else will ever be able to give them. But herein lies the paradox.

People with children have told me that it is virtually impossible to put into words what they gain from their children. “I would be at a loss to describe it in any way other than clichés,” a friend told me. “You can’t know what you are missing until you are on the other side.” Well, I don’t know what it feels like to bungee jump either, yet people don’t try to convince me to hurl myself into a canyon. Besides, I might be able to jump once and then decide that it isn’t for me. With having children this obviously isn’t an option.

* * *

One time, at a prestigious artist colony, a twenty-something poet told me at the dinner table that she thinks people without children are narcissists. She piled on examples of people she knew. I wondered out loud whether it is really children’s responsibility to make us less narcissistic and more mature, adding that making a spitting image of yourself is not the most self-effacing thing to do, either. (Careful, Narcissus, don’t fall in the pond!) I forget, but I might have also mentioned that I know a thing or two about narcissistic mothers. I think we should be concerned about improving ourselves and making a valuable contribution to this world. It seems to me that altruism and self-improvement mean more when self-motivated than when they are responses to demands from a little person tugging on your apron. But why argue? Narcissistic or not, we are all imperfect.

* * *

I was recently walking in Manhattan with my friend Melissa and her little son Henry when we passed a homeless man lying on a bed of cardboard. “What’s this man doing there?” Henry asked, craning his neck to get a better look. “He is sleeping outside, because he is homeless,” Melissa explained. A conversation ensued. This was the first time that Henry, who lives in a small town upstate, had encountered homelessness, and he kept on digging. But why doesn’t the man have a home? Why doesn’t he work? What is mental illness? Where are his parents, his children, his friends? And so it went until Melissa ran out of answers and Henry’s little head was ready to burst. Henry is by far my favorite child; he is only four and has already mastered the art of conversation. (Recently, he asked me if I had ever been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Have you seen their collection of goblets?” He wanted to know.) While I am impressed by Henry’s interest in homelessness and art, two subjects I care about deeply, it is something else that pulls on my heartstrings. It is the intimacy between mother and child, the we-against-the-world that strikes me as unique. When Henry and Melissa talk to each other I feel myself outside of this distinct, cradling bond.

I have always been a sucker for intimacy. As a journalist I often follow my sources for months, sometimes years. I have visited construction sites in scary neighborhoods late at night because I sensed that this would be the place where I would establish a pivotal connection with a subject. Moments like the one between Melissa and Henry—or between me and the man who guarded the construction site—don’t often happen. Even in marriages that are happy and stable these magical “first” moments tend to become less frequent and take a little more effort as time goes by. Sometimes they happen, but more often you have to create them. When you are interacting with your child, however, they seem to happen effortlessly and out of nowhere. Children, it seems, deliver surprises, intimacy and growth on a daily basis without any prompting.

* * *

I sometimes wonder whether the impulse to have children is fueled by our need to create something outside of ourselves. Something that then continues on without prompting, a perpetual motion machine that allows us to always start over and make up for our parents’ and our own shortcomings. But who am I to say why people have children? I can only speak for myself. I can tell you that it is hard to find purpose and surprise just within yourself. As a writer, the question what to do with myself, how to find and keep enthusiasm for a project, particularly in times when everything around me seems to be falling apart, is a struggle. I often wish there were something other than an empty page that would allow me to externalize or, at least, distract me from my fears. On those days, when my attempts to get responses from editors fail and sources refuse to talk, when I am too lazy to conceptualize new ideas and move further into a project, when I am ready to collapse under the burden of the page—on those days, I understand why one might want to push it all aside for the sake of a child. But it seems misguided to devote yourself to someone else instead of dealing with your own struggles.

At this point I might as well admit: I am afraid of dying alone. My husband is older than me, and my big sister lives 4,000 miles away. But what guarantee is there that your child will still be there for you once you get old? Besides, wouldn’t it be the ultimate narcissistic act to have a child to quell your fear of death?

I have always believed that no other human being, no societal rule can fill the gaping hole of existence. “You are free and that is why you are lost,” Franz Kafka wrote. No life decision comes without struggle.

And there is something incredibly gratifying about being able to prompt your own wonders, to know that they are truly yours. I wouldn’t be able to do the kind of reporting and traveling I do if I had to take care of a child. There might be other strong women who can, but my strength lies elsewhere. I cherish the silence that allows me to hear my subjects’ voices when I write, the quiet walks I take where, miraculously, things I have struggled with fall into place. I wouldn’t want a child’s voice to compete with the writerly whisper in my head.

Life’s fulfillment shouldn’t hinge on other human beings—except that it does, of course. But ultimately I want to choose those who surround me and love me and whom I love back. You don’t know what’s right for me, and I don’t know what’s right for you. “Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite,” wrote Simone De Beauvoir, a childless writer I much admire. De Beauvoir, who was born 65 years before me to the day, continued, “And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.”

* * *

Sabine Heinlein is the author of the IPPY Gold Award-winning narrative nonfiction book Among Murderers: Life After Prison and the ebook The Orphan Zoo: Rise and Fall of the Farm at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize.

Saad Hossain | Escape from Baghdad! | Unnamed Press | March 2015 | 23 minutes (6,311 words)

Below are the opening chapters of the novel Escape from Baghdad!, by Saad Hossain, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

A NOTE ON THE GLOSSARY AT THE END

There is a glossary of mostly factual terms and names at the end of the text (“factual” being a relative idea open to loose interpretation (“loose interpretation” meaning we’re aiming for a 50% chance of something on the page tallying with someone else’s verified opinion.)) So, if you find yourself wondering: Who’s Moqtada Al-Sadr again? Or what does JAM stand for? Or, bless you, IED? Just refer to the helpful, mostly factual glossary.

* * *

Chapter 1: South Ghazaliya

“We should kill him,” Kinza said. “But nothing too orthodox.”

Silence then. A kind of scathing, derisive, stifling silence expanding to fill the room, crowding out the detritus of previous conversations, leaving two black-marketeers drinking in a darkened space, in the back of a battered house, with nothing much to say. The room was dark because they had used foil paper to blacken the windows. The lights were off because outside, the JAM militia, known as the Mahdi Army, had just torn through 13^th street, which was rare, because 13^th street in Ghazaliya was a dead end nothing suburban thoroughfare.

“Out of principle alone, it should be done.” Kinza sipped his Jack Daniels, which he had bartered from the US Marine Ted Hoffman for a piece of Chemical Ali’s skull. “Not because I hate this man. It is nothing personal for me. I am merely an agent of fate, like the Count of Monte Cristo.”

Dagr stared at his partner. He had once been a professor of economics, but as it turned out, the wartime shift in profession had been ridiculously easy for him.

* * *

Now the JAM normally preferred 14^th street, as it allowed them access to the northern Shi’a neighborhood of Shulla, but in this excursion they had run into the South Ghazaliya Defense Brigade, sworn to defend South Ghazaliya. The JAM often won these encounters, but recently their firebrand Shi’a patron Moqtada Al-Sadr had cut down their bullet rations, and today the SGD had produced a black-market US army M60 and risen to their youthful promise. All this defense had forced the JAM into Kinza’s street, a hail of smoke and diesel and bullets, AK47s popping. Kinza had brokered the sale of the M60 to the SGD in the first place, provided they fought on 14^th street.

“My friend, we have a moral duty in this situation,” Kinza said.

The situation was indeed demanding of their attention, moral or otherwise. Two days ago, Kinza and Dagr, purveyors of medicine, gossip, diesel, and specialty ammunition, had inherited the living person of Captain Hamid, formerly of the 8^th ‘As Saiqa’ Special Forces Division, of the Republican Guard. He had been the chief savant of interrogators, vigilant against traitors to the party, known specially for his signature style and a certain personal flair to the work—an artistic flourish to the branding, undoubtedly the star striker on the torture pitch, the number 10 of all 10s, the 23 of all 23s. Now this Mother Teresa of Black Holes, this living spit of Torquemada, belonged to them.

This inheritance had come to Kinza and Dagr in a circuitous route. Kinza’s cousin twice removed, Daoud, had been a second lieutenant in the All Martyrs of Anbar Army, an offshoot of retired Republican Guard types who had agreed to shelter the notorious Captain Hamid. This brave battalion had lasted for all of two weeks, before a combined (but wholly coincidental) US and Shi’a pincer attack had fulfilled their dearest wish of martyrdom. Both wounded, Daoud and the Captain had taken refuge with Kinza. The Captain had survived, Daoud had not.

“Morality is for the Aztecs,” Dagr said. “We should sell Hamid to the Americans. We could probably retire on the reward.”

“Was he on the deck of cards?”

“He almost made it,” Dagr said. “I think he was ranked 56^th. There was some talk of putting him in the second round, but I guess he just slipped through the cracks.”

“Funny, I thought he would have ranked higher,” Kinza said. “Not the face cards, maybe, but in the deck, at least.”

“We could just let him go. In Shulla, maybe,” Dagr offered quickly. “Let nature sort it out.”

Kinza made a face. That was not a solution he favored.

“We could sell him to the Mahdi Army,” Dagr scratched his head tiredly. “Sadr might have put him on his deck.”

“Sadr has a deck?”

“I think he made one,” Dagr said. “But he left out the queens and changed the hearts to little crescents.”

“I hate dealing with the Mahdi Army. Last time they made me pray all day and then woke me up at night to pray again,” Kinza murmured.

“You’re a product of your race. Self loathing defeatist.” Dagr scraped back his chair. “You hate everyone. You hate the Sunnis for killing Hassan. You hate the Shi’as for breaking up the Ummah. You hate the Americans for being crass. You hate the Palestinians for being beggars. You hate the Saudis for being cowards. And because of this, you piss on rational self interest.”

“Thank you, Professor.” Kinza saluted him with an empty glass. “Condescending as usual. You still live in a tower. A shitty tower, but a tower nonetheless. Hatred is a physical thing. It comes from the gut. I physically need to kill Hamid.”

“Because he is a torturer.”

“Yes.”

“Then you become a torturer as well, and therefore you deserve a similar death, by virtue of your own logic.”

“Which is why I am hesitating.” Kinza refilled his glass. Next to the bottle was a 38 caliber revolver, police issue, now black-market issue, soon to be Shi’a or Sunni or Coalition issue—so many issues it was impossible to decide. These days, every house in Ghazaliya had a confused gun. “Would it fundamentally alter our relationship, Professor, if I tortured and killed Hamid?”

Dagr smiled sourly. “I am a market parasite. I help corrupt soldiers steal medicine from the Thresher, our friendly neighborhood American military base, so I can sell it at huge profits to needy people who were once my friends. I have shot at a 14-year-old boy who was probably related to me, just for jumping out of an alley. I have…”

“Ok.” Kinza held up a hand. “I am not speaking of you now. I am speaking of the Professorial you. Would the man who taught economics at the Abu Bakr Memorial have a problem with what I want to do?”

“That fool would have shat his pants.”

“Yes, but the problem is, when normalcy returns, then the pant shitters are all back on top, and I would probably have to answer to all of them, for everything I do today to survive. And in that time, my friend, I would hate to have you pointing a great shitty finger at me.”

“Today, I would help you kill Hamid,” Dagr said finally. “Tomorrow I would hate myself for it. The next day, I would hate you for it as well.”

“Then what do you suggest for comrade Hamid?” Kinza asked. “Seriously, I want to know.”

“He should have a trial,” Dagr said.

“A hanging trial or a firing trial?” Kinza asked.

“A fair trial.”

“What the hell is that?”

“I’m not joking.” Dagr shrugged. “Give him a trial. Round up a few dozen people from the neighborhood and try him.”

“I like it, a kangaroo court.”

“A fair trial.”

“How do you give a torturer a fair trial?” Kinza asked. “What possible judge would be predisposed to favor him?”

“He followed orders didn’t he?” Dagr shrugged. “Everyone followed orders.”

“Look, he didn’t shoot a bunch of random Kurds,” Kinza said. “He killed our own people. Academics, professionals, businessmen. People like you, in fact. What if it were your father he had his cigar into? Wouldn’t you like to be the judge then?”

“I agree with you,” Dagr said wearily. “It’s just that in passing judgment, in executing that judgment, you become tainted yourself.”

“So you’re saying pass it on to someone else?”

“Precisely,” Dagr said. “That is why we have professional judges.”

“Difficult to find an impartial judge at this point.”

“Unless we find one from the old days,” Dagr said.

“They’d probably be friends with him,” Kinza said. “Look, let’s at least interrogate him a little bit.”

A bell at the door then, the Ghazaliya bell, they called it, the knock of rifle butts against splintered wood, the three second grace time before boots and flashlights, lasers and automatic rifle barrels. Better than the Mahdi Army, who didn’t bother to knock, and who had never heard of the three-second rule. Dagr surged towards the front of the house, already sweating, thrusting Kinza back. It was his job to face the American door to doors, because he still looked like a professor, soft jawed, harmless, by some chance the exact composite of the innocent Iraqi these farm boys from Minnesota had come to liberate. And Kinza…with his hollow eyed stare, Kinza would never survive these conversations.

He barely got there in time to save the door. Sweaty, palsied fear, as he jerked his head into the sunlight, facing down two of them, and three more in the Humvee behind. They were like big, idiot children in their heavy armor and helmets, capable of kindness or casual violence as the mood took them, unreadable, random, terrifying.

“Door to door, random check sir,” a Captain Fowler said.

“Good morning,” Dagr said. Panic made his voice a croak. Door to door searches…they would find Kinza, and then Hamid, and it would be a rifle butt to the mouth, burst teeth, no Guantanamo for them, just hands tied behind the waist and a bullet to the head, right here…

“Had some violence down here this morning,” Captain Fowler was saying.

“Understand the Mahdi Army came down this road, had a tussle with the boys from the SGD. Know anything about that, sir?”

“I was hiding, lying on the floor here,” Dagr said. He looked desperately from face to face, sunglasses, helmets, flashlights, all hard edges. Where the hell was Hoffman? Kind, innocent Hoffman, who shared cigarettes and jokes and tipped off Kinza about door to door searches…

“You sweating, my man.” Fowler casually shifted his weight, his foot blocking the door open, his gun angled just so, changing everything.

“It’s hot, we have no water,” Dagr said. “No water, nothing in the tank, no flushes working, no electricity either. One fan, and the bastards shot it today…”

“Ok, sir, we’re rigging the electricity back, we’ve had reports of this problem.” Fowler stared at him for a little while. “Sir, who else lives in this house? Are you alone in there?”

“Alone.” Dagr felt his voice give way, “My house. I live here. Do you want it? Take it, take it, just shoot me and take it. No water for three days, toilets blocked up for two months, I have to shit in a bucket, bullet holes in every damn wall…”

“Calm down, sir.” Fowler tapped his gun on the door. “We are looking for one man known to be an arms dealer. We believe he has a safe house somewhere in this grid.”

Dagr sagged against the door, the sweat pouring out of him, his mind a panicky Babel of voices, eyes swiveling from helmet to helmet, trying to find some weakness, some glimmer of the folksy charm they used when they weren’t in the killing mood. Hoffman, where are you for God’s sake?

“You seem to be looking for someone, partner,” Fowler said. “Looking for Sergeant Hoffman, by any chance?”

“Hoffman? I don’t know him. Maybe. He gave me a cigarette once I think. Tall and white? Don’t know any Hoffman, there was a nice black man before…”

“Hoffman ran patrols here,” Fowler said, “He got busted for fooling around with a very bad man. An arms dealer called Kinza. Don’t happen to know him?”

“Kinza? Sounds Japanese. I don’t know, I hardly go out, Mahdi Army shooting up the streets every day, I’ve eaten bread and eggs for the last three days, can’t even get out to the store, its three blocks down on 14^th, not that they have anything there anyway…”

“Alright sir,”

“Please, so rude of me, please come in,” Dagr began to step back, “I have a nice couch, no TV though, got robbed last week, I could hear them from my bedroom, but I just stayed in my blanket. I could make you a cup of tea, no milk or sugar, I’m afraid, but, well…”

Fowler stuck his upper body into the room, swiveling his head around. The flashlight on his helmet cut a tight swathe through the gloom, illuminating the pathetic attempts at normalcy; a faded couch, a table loaded with coffee cups, a radio, a pile of textbooks hugging the floor along one wall. The moment hung on a see saw, Dagr staring at Fowler’s foot, willing it to inch back, dreading the one step forward which would signal the end.

“Alright sir.” Fowler stepped back. “You be careful now. Give us a call if this Kinza is spotted anywhere. You can ask for Captain Fowler at the Thresher.”

“Yes Captain, yes, I will,” Dagr said. “Absolutely. I hope you catch him. He sounds like a bastard Sadr sympathizer. You’re doing a good job. Long live America!”

They left and he sagged against the door, aghast at how weak his legs felt. And then he stumbled back inside, remembering that he had left Kinza and Hamid alone for far too long, Kinza drunk and brooding, a man capable of anything. They were in the bathroom, the Captain fetal in the cracked bathtub, hands and legs bound, a filthy handkerchief choking his mouth, two inches of tepid water sloshing a pink tinge. Kinza had a screwdriver and pliers, and his bottle in the crook of his arm, humming.

“Kinza, they’re gone,” Dagr said, out of breath.

“I think he’s ready to tell me all sorts of things,” Kinza said. He removed the gag.

“Fuck you,” Hamid said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Holding back are you?”

“Fuck you, you haven’t asked me anything yet.”

“Right.” Kinza laughed. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.” He started again with the screwdriver.

“Kinza, stop it,” Dagr said. “The Americans are looking for you. They know your name.”

“Hoffman?”

“Caught, reprimanded, I don’t know,” Dagr said. “Busted. We have to run, Kinza. They know about the guns.”

Hamid started laughing, a whistling sound because he had recently lost a tooth. “You two are the stupidest fuckers alive.”

“No problem.” Kinza put away his tools. “I’ll shoot him and then we’ll go.”

“Where, Kinza?” Dagr asked.

“North, to Shulla.” Kinza shrugged. “I have a friend. Or maybe head over to Baqouba. Start again.”

“Idiots.” Hamid spat out blood. “I know where to go.”

“Where?” Dagr asked.

“Shut up,” said Kinza.

“Take me to Mosul,” Hamid said, “and I will show you the secret bunker of Tareq Aziz.”

“Like a sight seeing tour?” Dagr asked, momentarily puzzled.

“It’s full of gold, you fool! Bullion bars and coins. I am the only living man who knows its location.”

“How?”

“I once served on his personal staff. I’m the only survivor. Everyone else died in peculiar accidents.” Hamid seemed particularly proud of that.

“Do you believe this idiot?” Kinza looked at Dagr.

The insectile head of the American soldier haunted him. “Who cares?” Dagr said. “Let’s go to Mosul.”

* * *

Chapter 2: Barriers

“They’re looking for you, buddy.” Hoffman was smoking a joint, slumped in the rubble of a destroyed house.

“I know.” Kinza took it off him. “You in trouble?”

“Verbal reprimand.” Hoffman shrugged. “All them old boys appreciate how much hash I’ve flowed their way.”

“Not for long.” Kinza threw a small packet to his friend. “We’re off. Make it last.”

“Yo, where you all going?”

“North. Anbar. Mosul maybe. Who knows?” Kinza said. “Want to come? There might be a bunker full of gold. We’ll cut you in.”

“Sure,” Hoffman said. “Professor, you gonna teach me some more math along the way?”

“We need some help, Hoffman.” Dagr had taught him calculus for the past two weeks, at first as a joke. The marine looked deceptively stupid, was stupid in all likelihood; yet he had picked up integration unerringly. “Get us past the checkpoints into Shulla.”

“Sure,” Hoffman said. “Hell, I’d go all the way with you boys, but they’d probably nail me for desertion. Call me when you find that bunker, I’ll fence it for you.”

“Hoffman, you really think there’s a bunker in the desert waiting for us?” Kinza laughed. “Who knows, maybe it’s filled with 72 virgins as well. Stranger things have happened. We can’t stay here anymore, that’s for sure.”

The Iraqi Army 2^nd Cavalry Battalion checkpoint was built into the rubble of no mans land between north and south Ghazaliya, Shi’a and Sunni, the bewildered Iraqi soldiers trying to keep calm and courteous, desperate to still believe the drumming message that there was one Al Qaeda, one insurgency, one enemy. In truth they kept panicky fingers tight on their triggers, wary of women and children, knowing they were the eternal target, nobody’s friend, traitors in every book. Dagr and Hoffman stayed to the front, Hoffman doing the talking. After a desultory search they were through, parting ways with a slap and a casual smile.

“They should put Hoffman in charge of Baghdad.” Dagr said, as they cleared the searchlights into the relieving darkness of evening. “We’d have a lot less tension.”

“Forget it,” Kinza said. “They should give him Rumsfeld’s job.”

“Maybe he’ll be president one day.”

“He could be the joint president of Texas and Iraq.”

“Imperialist lapdog,” Hamid mumbled.

Hamid was not a happy man these days. His face had puffed up to a misshapen Quasimodo lump, where eyes, nose, and mouth were swimming in irregular proximity to each other. A once vain man, he could no longer bear to look at any reflective surfaces, and thus wore dark glasses at all times. He was in constant nagging pain, a condition Kinza was in no hurry to leaven. Too, he had a clearer idea now of the route Kinza planned to take; hopping from bastion to bastion of Shi’a dominance. Not a Saddam sympathizer in sight, his life worth a toothpick in a gunfight in these streets.

In the evening, they walked along a boulevard of garbage and open sewage, traversed by lines of people who looked neither left nor right, hurrying along to their bolt-holes. There were calls for prayer from the mosque nearby, a building wrecked by gunfire and mortar from a desperate battle two weeks ago. They walked in single file, Hamid in the middle, Dagr leading the way, because he was Shi’a, and had once lived in the area, and people trusted him for some reason.

He recognized a few people, but did not hail them as he would have in the old days. It was not certain who was who anymore, which camp, which informant, how many dead in each family, and by whose hand. As night fell, the streets rapidly cleansed themselves of civilians, and took on a wholly different breed of walkers. Men with guns circled each block, Insurgents, or civil guards, or JAM militia, or even men who were bewilderingly all three, Iraqi army during the day and everything else at night.

Men with guns lounged in pools of light, unwilling to leave that hazy, pathetic safety, the fear a palpable fog streaming into Dagr’s eyes and nose, making him stagger along like a marathon runner. The night belonged to the Ghazaliya dogs, bald and mad, shrapnel marked, barking through garbage. Their shadows capered against the walls, three men on a solitary path, marked by the hopeless stoop of their shoulders.

“We are being watched,” Kinza said, as they moved into a wrecked alley. “Be prepared, Dagr.”

A short surge, and two men came out of the rubble, guns out, faces wrapped in checkered scarves. At the same time an old Fiat pulled up behind them.

“Shi’a, Shi’a!” Dagr said, hands raised. “Don’t shoot for God’s sake.”

“Take your hands out of your pockets,” the leading gunman said.

Hamid was already on the floor, shielding his face. Kinza stood still, his jacket zipped to his neck, hands jammed into pockets, every line of his body uncompromising.

“Hand out, you.”

“You don’t want me to do that, friend,” Kinza said softly.

“Get your fucking hands out!”

“Kinza, for God’s sake,” Dagr said, shaking. “Just do as he says.”

Kinza shrugged, raised his hands. There was a grenade in his fist. Dagr could see the tension on his thumb, as it pushed down on the pin. Iraqi army standard shrapnel grenade, used to clear rooms in house to house fighting. Somewhere on the checkpoint was a very careless soldier.

“What the hell?” Dagr felt his voice rising sharply.

“You wouldn’t.” The lead gunman swiveled his pistol from head to head like a metronome, fingers tight and trembling, the gun held lopsided in an amateur grip. Behind him, his partner began to edge back surreptitiously. “You wouldn’t.”

“Come and find out,” Kinza said.

“Let’s all relax.” Dagr tried to soothe the fever out of his voice. “Look, what do you want?”

“We saw you coming past the check-post,” The gunman said, eyes darting wildly from face to face. “With the American.”

“We are just going north, to Shulla,” Dagr said. “We don’t want this trouble.”

“Trouble?” the gunman laughed. “Nobody wants trouble. Trouble comes by itself. Do I want to be like this? We need help. There is no one to help us. You help us, and we’ll take you into Shulla.”

“Funny way to ask for help,” Kinza said. “With guns.”

“Is there any other way?”

“Kinza, let me handle this.” Dagr slowly lowered his arms. “What makes you think we can help you? We’re just ordinary men…I am an economics professor at..”

“You might be normal,” the man said. He pointed a stubby finger at Hamid and Kinza. “But those two are jackals. It’s them we want. We need beasts to hunt a beast. Plus, you are cozy with Americans…”

“Listen, let’s talk like reasonable men. What is your name?”

“My name is Amal.” The gunman unwound his scarf, to reveal an ugly, grizzled face.

“There is a man here, called the Lion of Akkad. He is a murderer. We want you to make him go away.”

“Go away?”

“The American who helped you cross,” Amal said. “Have him deal with it.”

“We cannot do that,” Dagr said.

“Then have your army friends arrest him,” Amal said. “Or you three kill him. We don’t care.”

“I thought the Jaishe Al Mahdi patrol these streets.”

“They have been pulling back,” Amal said. “And recently they were beaten badly in the south, by the SGD. They’re back in Shulla now.”

“So, you have guns,” Kinza said. “Are you cowards?”

“His brother is in the Mahdi Army, they say,” Amal hawked and spat. “If he finds out we did anything, they will kill us all, and our families.”

“And we don’t have families?”

“You do not look like family men.”

“The Lion of Akkad?” Kinza laughed. “What the hell, we’ll do it.”

* * *

Chapter 3: The Lion of Akkad

Amal owned an autoparts shop in the street of Nakaf, in the very heart of the Lion’s territory. He sold tires, rims and filters, as well as an assortment of used and new batteries. Sometimes he had engine oil, depending on supply. The Amal empire had not prospered in the war. He had once been a rich man. He had owned two car show rooms, four spare parts dealerships, and stock in an insurance company. One of the show rooms had been obliterated by tank shells during the American liberation. The second had been mistakenly raided as a bomb factory by the Americans, and subsequently looted. With profits sliding, his hitherto loyal managers had ransacked three of the four spare parts shops, absconding with the revenue and leaving behind a host of unpaid suppliers.

The insurance company, meanwhile, had not paid. Beset by random acts of destruction, outlandish claims, impossible force majeure, they had done the only sensible thing and filed for bankruptcy. The directors had subsequently fled to their villas in Beirut. And so went the bulk of Amal’s stock portfolio. In the end, the man had been reduced to this single shop, which was, incidentally, the one he had first started out with; A piece of circular fate which drove Amal to despair often enough. He lived upstairs, in a one bedroom flat with his son. The room at the back of the store had been converted into his office, where he still kept accounts of his many assets, now mainly fictional, a wistful passing of the time, a fiscal fantasy train set providing both employment and misery.

All of this Dagr soaked up as he sat with Amal, cramped in the back room in a haze of stale smoke, plotting and drinking coffee. Kinza sat in the far corner, half asleep, watching football on a tiny set. There was a static tension in the air, the unease of too many strange men in a small place, desultory conversation, the memories of guns and grenades a palpable white elephant, neither side quite believing they are now allies. Hamid was a sullen, oozing wound in the middle of the office, a black hole which swallowed up all normal forms of bonding, the swapping of war stories and misfortunes, sympathies and secrets.

“You men are young,” Amal was saying, after a paltry lunch. “You two can start again, make something of yourselves.”

Dagr shrugged. His stomach churned slightly with hunger, and he considered breaking out some chocolate, but he did not want to embarrass his host.

“My life is almost over,” Amal continued. “What can I do now, but endure, and hope to die in peace? My entire fortune, my whole history, erased. You know the worst thing? I dream about food every night…the scraps I used to throw away from my table. Never did I think I would go hungry again.”

“Surely you have savings?”

“Savings, yes.” Amal lowered his voice. “But I also have a father with Parkinsons. He used to be in a great nursing home. Fully paid for. Very exclusive. But it went bankrupt after the invasion, and the Americans converted it into a triage. Now I have to keep him in the hospital ward most of the time, not even a private room, and it’s still too expensive.” Amal grasped Dagr’s forearm. “Every day they threaten to throw him out. What can I do? Me and my son live upstairs, in one measly room. We eat the rotten stuff that doesn’t get sold. Every penny I have, I give for medicine. Now this Lion of Akkad haunts us everyday. How can we live?”

“How does anyone live?” Dagr said. “Badly.”

“Too right,” Amal said. “In days like these, who helps a stranger, eh? Who asks help from a stranger?”

“Only the desperate,” Dagr said.

“The bastards are all the same.” Amal shook his head. “Every bastard with a gun walks the same. We used to have lives before, you know? All that taken away…for what?”

“I used to teach economics, at the University,” Dagr said. “My wife taught mathematics. We met there. I had friends, students…hundreds of students. I don’t even know what happened to any of them.”

“There’s no place for people like us,” Amal said. “No place safe. This city belongs to them now.” He lowered his voice. “Men like your friend.”

“He does what he must,” Dagr said softly. “Same as you or I.”

“Not the same,” Amal said. “Not the same. In the alley last night, I believed. I saw his finger on the pin, and I believed, more than in any bastard god, that he would kill us all; that he would rather die than take one step back.”

“Kinza is not suicidal,” Dagr said. “He just wants to see the world end.”

“Then maybe he will be a hero before the end,” Amal said. “And rid us of our enemy.”

“Who is this Lion of Akkad?”

“No one knows. Six months ago he just appeared in the night,” Amal said. “There were random murders, thefts. Some say he works for the Jaish Al Mahdi, here to settle scores and collect debts.”

“The Mahdi Army does not collect rent.”

“We know.” Amal shrugged. “What can we do? Some say that he has a brother in the JAM. Whatever the truth, we asked them for help, and received none.”

“The police?” Dagr said. Even to him that sounded dubious. No one in Iraq went to the police. That was like asking to be extorted.

Amal snorted. “This man is a killer. He strikes suddenly, in the darkness, knocking on your door, holding a knife to your throat, a gun to your head. No one knows where he eats, or sleeps, or anything. In the day, poof! He is gone, like a ghost.”

“He comes only at night?” Kinza, woken up now, joined them with a faint stir of interest.

“Mostly after the evening patrols,” Amal said.

“How often?” Kinza asked. “Once a week?”

“Sometimes more or less.” Amal shrugged. “There is no pattern. In the beginning, some of us tried to ambush him. He took a bullet in the chest and kept on walking. Two days later, he cut a little girl’s throat. Last week he threw my neighbor down the stairs. Broke his legs for no reason…We don’t even know what he wants. I think he’s one of those American serial killers, like they have on TV.”

“Excellent tactics,” Dagr said. “Terror in the night. Random violence. Swift, excessive retribution. Sort of thing the Spartans used to do to the Helots, to keep them in line.”

“You said you shot him?” Kinza asked. “Did he bleed?”

“It was dark,” Amal said. “We couldn’t see. He kind of stumbled, but then kept on coming. We scattered.”

“Kevlar,” Kinza said. “Our boy has body armor. Does he use a gun?”

“He carries a revolver,” Amal said. “But he prefers to use his knife. It’s the size of my arm, almost like a sword. And his fists. He has the strength of ten men.”

“Ten Shi’a’s or ten Americans?” Kinza asked, straight faced.

“What?”

“Just saying,” He said. “It might make a difference. Americans are very strong.”

“Knives are psychologically more frightening than bullets,” Dagr said.

“He wants to stay silent,” Kinza said. “He’s using the darkness, and the fear of these people, the sudden violence, to keep them off balance.”

“No one knows what he looks like?” Dagr asked.

“He wears a hood,” Amal said. “And he’s fast, silent. One minute you’re sleeping peacefully in your bed, and the next you’re on the floor with a knife in your eye.”

“Ok, we’re getting a picture here,” Dagr said. “This Akkadian works alone. He’s well armed, and wears Kevlar. Probably some kind of military training, too.”

“You left out super strength and super speed.”

“You mock us,” Amal said. “But you have not faced him yet.”

“He slinks around at night picking on infants and the elderly,” Dagr continued. “He wears a hood. He wants to protect his identity. This suggests that his position with the JAM is not official, at least.”

“So, Professor, how do we find him?”

“We could always wait,” Dagr said. “Camp out here. He’s bound to come sooner or later.”

“Yeah, maybe in a month,” Kinza said. “Not a good option. Plus he will find out about us soon enough. I’m guessing he lives somewhere in this neighborhood.”

“Then?” Amal asked.

“He hunts at night,” Kinza said. “So must we. We’ll take to the streets. Give us a map of the area he covers, and all your volunteers. There is an old way to hunt wild game. Let’s see if we cross paths with any lions.”

* * *

The darkness in the streets was a smear of tar, a discombobulating colorant turning harmless daylight noises into the snickering of hyenas. Lights were absent, windows bricked or boarded mostly, or shuttered at least against this most deadly hour. The Joint Forces stayed far away in their reinforced boxes; this was not their half of the day, not the time for pretend patrols and breaking down empty fortresses. Nor the time for Mahdi Army men to parade in their black scarves and AK47s, holding aloft their pages of calligraphy. This was the business end of the hour, where the real predators of each side mingled, open season for the ones in the know, springtime for men with guns, when the harmless cowered in their beds and hoped to hear nothing.

It had seemed a fine plan to Dagr, sitting cramped and safe in Amal’s fantasy office two days ago. Now the darkness sucked everything out of him, and he was a walking husk, hands jammed into his jacket pocket, to stop the shaking. Kinza was ahead, surefooted, wolfish, snapping into place like the last piece missing from the jigsaw street. Dagr worried at the ancient gun in his pocket, the snub muzzle poking through the silk lining of his coat, fretting that it would go off and cripple him, that he would shoot the wrong person.

They did not belong here, and their convoy of three was disturbing the routine of the regulars. Dagr felt men shuffle close in the darkness, veering off in tangents after a sniff, split second decisions demarking victims and victimizers. Dagr too fell infected with their mindless aggression, heard whimpers and ragged wet tears from far corners, felt with shame some of the exhilaration of walking the night with a gun.

They were following tiny pinpricks of light, a system Dagr himself had designed. Men and women tired of the depredations had risen up in this meager rebellion. Small lamps hung in high, street facing windows, staggered in a mathematical pattern that Dagr had memorized. The idea was simple. Watchers lined each of these windows. Whoever recognized the Lion of Akkad would put out their light. If he moved away, they would turn their light back on. The blink in the pattern would follow the Akkadian throughout the night, hopefully leading them straight to him.

The first few nights had been unsuccessful. The tracking system had been refined, the watchers reinforced, his probable routes calculated. It worked well on paper, but humans were fallible. Watchers fell asleep, or were too scared to act fast. The advantage of the terrain was also with the Lion, as a myriad routes became available at night, sudden shortcuts that allowed him to cut the pattern in half.

In the hour just before dawn, luck finally favored them. Weary with nerves, they were resting against a shattered streetlamp, when a sliver of light abruptly disappeared from the horizon. Five minutes, and another light blinked off, this time closer, barely half a kilometer away. It was unmistakable. Kinza was on his feet, moving swiftly, a quick word behind him, telling his companions to fan out across the street. Dagr felt every neuron firing simultaneously with something akin to terror. The colossal stupidity of this plan smashed the breath out of his ribs. He fought the urge to slink back, making his legs move forward until he was parallel with his friend. Behind him, to the left, he could hear Hamid make similar, reluctant steps, well back. The torturer had little intention of taking part.

The blinking came closer, closer, until he could imagine the entire street lined up and watching, judging. A few hundred meters more, and he could almost see the Lion of Akkad, a tall man in a dark coat, an indistinct blur, ensconced no doubt in his Kevlar, a one man tank. In spite of himself, Dagr felt his steps faltering, his stride shortening until he was barely mincing along. Kinza broke ahead, slinking along the walls, two, four, then ten meters away. In some glint of moonlight he actually saw the face, hawk like nose jutting out, a black scarf wound around the rest of his features.

Kinza crouched into the hollow of a doorway winking abruptly out of sight, even as Dagr continued edging forward, his mind frozen into a kind of panicky inertia. A flicker of darkness, a slight bend in the street, and suddenly the Akkadian was gone, disappeared in a breath, leaving Dagr standing paralyzed. He began to edge his gun out, and it caught in the lining; a second later he was face to face with the Lion of Akkad, yellow eyes glinting with feral madness.

A blur of motion, and the man was spinning into him, the blade of his knife caught in Dagr’s sleeve, buttons popping, slicing a shallow groove along his forearm. Dagr bulled forward, desperately trying to grapple, his knee giving away even as he heard Hamid’s pus ridden voice shouting ‘Down, down you fool.’ Guns barked in close range, blinding and deafening him. A heavy blow knocked him sidewaysas his hands clawed across the Lion’s greatcoat, and Dagr fell away useless. He saw Kinza leaping out of the darkness, a splinter second of struggle, before he was thrown back, skittering through the street.

Dagr wrenched himself up on one knee. The street was empty, silent once more. Hamid lay curled nearby, cradling a mangled hand, his fingers blown off by a soft revolver shell. The Lion of Akkad was gone.

* * *

GLOSSARY

JAM: Jaish Al Mahdi, or Mahdi Army. Not to be confused with other Mahdi Armies, of which there are many. This particular one was set up by the Shi’a cleric Muqtadr Al Sadr (see later entry), who was active in Baghdad politics during the US occupation of Iraq. The JAM was set up in 2003 as his paramilitary force, and fought in the uprising against US coalition forces, menacing everyone. They were eventually put down in 2008 by the Iraqi national army for being too good at what they did.

M60: A heavy machine gun used by the US armed forces since 1957, copied from German WW2 machine guns. Often used by a team of 3 men, or a single Rambo type soldier. It weighs a lot, and uses belt-fed 7.62 mm ammo which runs out quickly due to the high firing rate.

‘As Saiqa’ Special Forces: Part of the much vaunted Republican Guard of Iraq, which, in the balance of things, did not contest very well against the American regime change.

US Deck of Cards: Shortly after the US invasion of Iraq, the Americans brought out a deck of cards each featuring a high value target. Those narrowly missing the deck were deeply offended.

Tareq Aziz: Saddam-era former deputy prime minister of Iraq, now serving prison term. One of the chief deputies of Saddam. Interestingly, he is a Christian. His employer apparently believed in equal opportunity.

Moqtada Al Sadr: Shi’a cleric active in Iraqi politics during the early days of the occupation. At one point commanded his own private army out of the Sadr city area of Baghdad. A most fearsome man.

IED: Improvised Explosive Device. By all accounts one of the chief weapons used by Insurgents, rebels, bandits and other people bent on violence. These were essentially homemade bombs often cunningly disguised as everyday objects. Most of the casualties suffered by US-Coalition forces during the Insurgency were caused by IEDs.

Shi’a: The party of Ali, the largest minority in the Islamic faith. Said to contain many sects, some of which are wildly divergent from the orthodoxy.

Sunni: The majority, the orthodoxy.

Sunni-Shi’a conflict: The major schism in Islam from early days, the root is essentially political. The Sunni believed that the Caliph—the political and theological head of the Islamic empire—should be from the tribe at large. The Shi’a believed it should be from the family of the prophet, namely, Ali, his son in law. This seemingly innocuous disagreement has degenerated into a rabid hatred of each other, especially in the Middle East, where the doctrinal differences are backed up by racial divides between Arabs and Persians. While the rest of the Muslim world looks on in slight bemusement, these sects have shown a marked preference for killing each other, particularly in Iraq, where everything is up for grabs.

Kurds: A landless ethnic group living on the edges of Turkey, Iraq and Iran, who’ve sneakily managed to steal a country of their own from the clusterfuck that is the Iraq war. Their army is called the Peshmerga.

* * *

From the book Escape from Baghdad!, by Saad Hossain, published by Unnamed Press.

Elissa Schappell | The Paris Review | 1995 | 63 minutes (15,685 words)

  
We’re excited to reprint Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg.” The piece was first featured on the site in 2013 as a Longreads Member Pick, and originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review. It was later anthologized in the Paris Review’s 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community:

Of all the literature classes I have ever taken in my life Allen Ginsberg’s “Craft of Poetry” was not only the most memorable and inspiring, but the most useful to me as a writer.
First thought, best thought.
It’s 1994 and I am getting my MFA in fiction at NYU. I’m sitting in the front row of a dingy classroom with a tape recorder and a notebook. The tape recorder is to record Allen Ginsberg, the big daddy of the Beat’s “Craft of Poetry” lectures for a feature I’m writing for The Paris Review. No. Lectures is the wrong word—Ginsberg’s thought operas, his spontaneous jet streams of brilliance, his earthy Dharma Lion roars—that’s what I’m there to capture. His teaching method is, as he explains it, “to improvise to some extent and it have it real rather than just a rote thing.”
It was very real.
The education Ginsberg provided me exceeds the bounds of the classroom, and far beyond the craft of poetry. Look inward and let go, he said. Pay attention to your world, read everything. For as he put it, “If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”

—Elissa Schappell, 2013

 ***

The news that Allen Ginsberg was going to be teaching at New York University was passed around campus like a joint, making some people giddy and euphoric, others mildly confused, and still others paranoid—teachers and students alike. The waiting list to get into the class was extraordinary not only in length, but for the sheer number of times students eagerly checked to see if they had moved up. As a graduate student in the creative writing program I was given first dibs. I was curious to meet Ginsberg, curious to see how he would commandeer the Craft of Poetry class, which in the past had been taught by Galway Kinnell and William Matthews. The following excerpts were culled from a diary I kept during the semester.

January 25

It’s hard to think of Allen Ginsberg as “Professor Ginsberg.” His work, as well as his ubiquitous persona, breed a kind of familiarity, not only because you may have sat next to him as he ate pierogis at the Veselka Coffee Shop, or seen him at St. Mark’s Bookshop, but because he’s a pop icon and his work (and there’s a lot of it) is classically American.

Ginsberg is smaller and grayer and older than I expected, much more conservative looking, nay professorial in his gray flannel jacket and dark blue knife-creased trousers. His eyeglasses are clear plastic, his salt-and-pepper beard is neatly trimmed. He is wearing what seem to be thick-soled Rockport walking shoes, sensible shoes. Although he is sixty-nine he manifests few overt signs of old age. Perhaps it is the company he keeps—young attractive men who seem to be talismans against aging. I remember someone telling me that when Ginsberg was a mere youth he slept with someone who slept with Walt Whitman, the degree of sexual separation between those two bawdy bards was that dose.

The tiny classroom is cramped—full of people who have dropped in as if it were a coffee house. Those who can’t find a desk sit on the floor. I haven’t seen most of these students anywhere else on campus, not in Victorian Lit. or even the Derrida lectures. There are the ubiquitous poetesses in flowing gauze skirts who write in purple ink and the self-serious poets with their smudgy eyeglasses and ravel-sleeved blazers. There is also a sprinkling of pseudo-Beats in black berets and uniform goattes and kohl-eyed women in black stretch leggings, and though it’s cold outside, Diane Di Prima sandals.

Professor Ginsberg sits behind his wide desk frowning up at the low ceiling as though the harsh fluorescent light were assaulting him. Without further ado he begins to take roll. Somehow I thought it would be a hey, drop-in-drop-out-whenever-the-mood-suits-you kind of arrangement. As he calls off the names, I realize that half of the people crammed into this tiny room aren’t even enrolled in the class. They’re just here to catch a glimpse of Ginsberg, to get some kind of Beat benediction.

Then to confuse those of us who thought this class would be beating on bongos and barking haikus into the ether, he passes out the standard old literature class standby—a syllabus. In fact, there were two, one a “Survey of Historical Poetics from Pre-Literate Oral Traditions to Multiculti Poetics,” the other a “Conversational Syllabus” dated spring 1994, which surprisingly only lists the first seven weeks of classes—only half the classes scheduled. The “Conversational Syllabus” instructs the student to “Read as much as you can of book titles bibliographed above. Consult photocopied anthologies by Allen Ginsberg when you can’t find or finish books. Look up your English language anthologies for authors mentioned in passing. Use your research head for others not so obvious: Kalevala, Cavafy, Sappho, Cavalcanti, Bunting, Catullus, etc. Check out whatever you can, but take it easy. You can’t do everything.”

After passing out the papers Ginsberg lays out the nuts and bolts of the class. We are responsible for either a term paper (“I don’t want no academic jargon, just tell me what’s on your mind.”), plus five pages of our own poetry (“No more or I’ll never get through them.”) a bibliography of outside reading that relates to the class. Eyes flicker hungrily at the suggestion that Ginsberg will actually read our work.

Ginsberg announces his office hours: “My office is over in the English Department. Everyone should sign up for an interview. So, whenever you feel like it come by my office, we can talk poetry, we can rap, we can make love…” at this a few raised eyebrows and titters.

‘So,” he continues, “Gregory Corso will be teaching class on February 22. He is provocative, he might try to push your buttons.” He grins. Someone jokes that Corso, one of Ginsberg’s longtime chums, will try to get us to take our clothes off. Ginsberg enigmatically smiles, then says, “Bone up on Homer, and the Iliad.”

He continues: “Gregory Annuncia Corso…Annuncia or ‘the announcer of the way’ Corso. Poetry is the seeking of the answer….Let’s start with Corso’s theory of oxymorons—the yoking together of opposites. Corso takes very ordinary archetypes and plays with pop-art ideas, takes a one-word title and explores all the kinds of thoughts about it. He uses stereotypes and turns them inside out. He combines disparate ideas to make a little firecracker—he is not one of those high teacup poets.”

Ginsberg then reads aloud some of Corso’s work from The Happy Birthday Of Death. He tells us that the title poem was written from notes Corso took after blacking out from laughing gas. Thanks to a cousin who was a dentist, Ginsberg has also experimented with laughing gas. He then reads a poem he refers to as Corso’s most famous poem, “Marriage.”

Allen Ginsberg reading at NYU, 1995. Photo by Frank Beacham

“In this poem he takes a one word title and explores all the kid thoughts about it, you know—rice, lobby zombies, Niagara Falls—everybody knowing what’s going to happen on the honeymoon. This is a very anthologized poem, it’s an easy poem, it’s cornball, it’s like trenchmouth, one anthology passes it on to the next.”

Class breaks up; half the students file out into the hall. The other half, mostly attractive adolescent boys with wispy suggestions of facial hair, loiter and circle his desk, some in a rather proprietary way. Some hold out books to be signed, others just gaze as Ginsberg politely fields their attentions.

February 15

Tonight class meets in the same squalid little room. The ceiling is poked full of holes where kids have been whipping sharpened pencils up into the cork panels of the ceiling. I’ve brought my tape recorder; a few other students have done the same. Tonight he’s in a blue shirt, red necktie, and a dark blue wool blazer. He looks like a very tidy union organizer, or a podiatrist. There are fewer gawkers.

“Today we’ll continue with Corso and Creeley and more on oxymoronic poems, the notion of poetics as a poet’s magical ability to hypnotize people,” he says. He interrupts himself as a straggler tries to sneak quietly into the back row, “Are you in the class?

“Yes.”

“Are you going to be late often?

“Uh, no.”

“If you can make it, try and be on time. Otherwise there’s this constant interruption of people drifting in late, and I have to find them on the roster.”

He looks up to spot yet another latecomer. “What is your name?” he asks in irritation peering over the top of his glasses.

“Joe”

“Are you in the class?”

“No.”

“Please try and come on time because I constantly have to interrupt the discourse to accommodate your lateness. It’s not like we’ve got that much time, it’s just a measly hour and a half.”

At this grouchy outburst, everyone sits staring down at their notebooks. Ginsberg sounds more like a high school gym teacher than the Dharma Lion.

He hands out a copy of “Mind Writing Slogans.” The subhead is a quote from William Blake, “First thought is best in Art, Second in other matters.” Then comes a wild array of aphorisms:

I. Ground (Situation or Primary Perception) “My writing is a picture of the mind moving.”—Philip Whalen “My mind is open to itself.”—Gelek Rinpoche “Catch yourself thinking.”—AG

II. Path (Method of Recognition) “The natural object is always the adequate symbol.”—Ezra Pound “Show not tell.”—Vernacular “Only emotion objectified endures.”—Louis Zukofsky

III. Fruition (Result of Appreciation) “What’s the face you had before you were born?” “The purpose of art is to stop time.”—Bob Dylan “Alone with the alone”—Plotinus

Ginsberg starts with Corso’s latest work, reminiscing about the notorious 1959 Columbia University poetry reading where Corso, Orlovsky and Ginsberg were put down rather condescendingly in a long essay by Diana Trilling in the Partisan Review. They were invited back sixteen years later, and Corso wrote a poem about it, called “Columbia U Poesy Reading 1975” which Ginsberg describes as “a sort of retrospective of the Beat Generation that presents its own personal and medical history.”

“What a sixteen years it’s been since last sat I here with the Trillings…sixteen years ago we were put down for being filthy beatnick sex commie dope fiends…Well I guess I’ll skip ahead—there is laughter—Bill’s ever Bill even though he stopped drugging…Dopey-poo, it be a poet’s perogative…”

“A lot of Corso’s poems are pieces of mind candy, a jawbreaker; you really can’t figure them out any more than you can figure out Einstein’s theory of relativity—is it inside or outside? Is the external phenomenal world inside or outside? It’s the classic proposition. It goes back thousands of years and is a subject of Buddhist discourse.”

A student pokes her hand up, then seeming to think the gesture too formal, slowly lowers it, her ears pinkening in embarrassment. “So, what is Corso’s method? How does he work?”

“Corso’s method is to write on a typewriter with two fingers, one phrase at a time, breath-stop in the lines, a mental or physical breath. Spontaneous composition, little revision. It makes incremental sense verse to verse, so there are surprises to the reader as well as to him. You can see his mind working line by line. Corso composes out of an idea or a conception turned inside out.”

Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso at NYU, 1995. Photo by Frank Beacham

He goes on, “He stays a lot at home, and thinks. He tends to critique a convention and refine the idea over and over again until he finds exactly the right formulation of it. He had this idea that he worked with for about ten years, ‘I’ll never die, because when I’m dead I won’t know it. Only other people die but I’ll never die.’ It’s built on the paradox of subject-object again, external or internal, phenomenal or whatever. He then works on them, again taking classic abstractions and turning them on their heads like the thing Heracleitus did—‘Everything is flowing. You can’t step in the same river twice.’ Right? Corso altered it to, ‘You can’t step in the same river once.’” He pauses for a moment to let this sink in.

“What Corso tries to do is to bring abstraction down to an idiom comprehensible to the man in the street…living language rather than a literary language. Most contemporary poetry is under the spell of the more elegant—and in some respects inauthentic—living speech of Wallace Stevens rather than William Carlos Williams’s spoken vernacular. So in Corso there’s an element of street wisdom mixed with classical references and philosophy and common sense.”

The door opens and a face peers in briefly. Wrong class.

“There’s an old American tradition from Thoreau saying, Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Well there are millions of poems of quiet desperation and they are all published in The New Yorker.” Ginsberg chuckles derisively. “So, onto Creeley.”

Then out of the blue he says, “Let’s take five breaths.”

What’s this about? Weren’t we all in fact just breathing? One person is even sleeping and actually breathing rather deeply. Ginsberg closes his eyes and instructs us, “Follow your breath from the tip of your nose until it dissolves for five breaths.”

The thought crosses my mind that this deep-breathing exercise is like a metaphysical sorbet, a brain palate cleanser. I shut my eyes, then open them as I hear Ginsberg draw his first deep inhalation through his nose. Most of the class have their eyes shut, the rest are, like me, furtively peeking out from under their lashes, looking away in embarrassment when our eyes meet.

Ginsberg finally breaks the uneasy silence. “Robert Creeley was born in 1926. He was a northeastern poet; his style is kind of minimal, in short verse lines, haltingly slow. He was very much influenced by Miles Davis’s phrasings on the trumpet, early Davis of the forties. He’s from New England so there’s a kind of reticence like in Emily Dickinson, not wanting to overstate his case…minimalism not my bullshit.”

“The other influence on Creeley was Thomas Campion; he was the Bob Dylan of poetry, of the Renaissance. Performing lyric poems on his tortoiseshell lyre, he created a renaissance all over Europe. Lyric poems should be performed with a musical instrument, or else they lose their muscle. They become lax without that kind of exquisite, delicate hovering accent.”

Ginsberg recites some Campion from heart. “All Whitman is ‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself.’ It’s self-empowerment. He’s not scared of his own body there in the midst of nature. Campion does the same thing.”

“There’s an undercurrent of abrasiveness, a kind of turn-the-apple-cart-over in Creeley’s work. Generally he types the figure a phrase at a time, until the next phrase comes to him, so there’s a kind of break in the line or breath stop as he calls it. Like Corso, each line he writes modifies or alters the previous line, so he doesn’t know what he’s going to say until he’s said it. His method, like Kerouac’s, is that of spontaneous composition, and relatively little rearrangement or revision.”

Wrapping up class, Ginsberg reminds us that next week he is reading at the DIA Center downtown and that he’s gotten free tickets for the class. He also reminds us, “If you don’t have, or can’t find any of the writers on the syllabus, or any of these books, let me know and I’ll lend you my own books.” There is a pervading sense that he is a kind of poetry pusher, the intellectual candy man.

The DIA Center Reading

Allen reads a poem that includes a line about getting out of bed after having sex with a young man who has turned his body to face the wall. There are two attractive guys sitting in front of me, neither of whom I’ve ever seen in class. One turns to the other: “Is that Billy he was talking about?”

“No,” the guy proudly replies, “that’s me.”

February 23

Tonight we are liberated from our dinky classroom, upgraded to a small amphitheater in the Main Building. Once again a bunch of odd people have turned up in the class; perhaps they’ve heard through the groovy grapevine that Corso is at the helm tonight. Corso slouches into class with the quick anxious step of the hunted man, a man unhappy to have left his apartment. His long snaggly gray hair is pulled back in a low ponytail. He sits down, and hunching over the desk, nervously tugs and strokes his little beard. He’s wearing a blue denim work shirt, khakis and a ratty black jacket. He looks like a Beat poet. One of the boys perpetually buzzing around Ginsberg passes around an attendance sheet.

By way of introduction Corso begins with a question, “Does anyone know where the Trojan horse is from? The Cassandra myth?”

No one says a word.

“Big big man Mr. Homer. Homer is the daddy of all mythology. You should have read Homer, there is no excuse for it, if you haven’t. No excuse for not embracing Homer. If you haven’t gone through Homer…” he throws up his hands in dismay.

“Homer wrote the Odyssey at the base of Mt. Olympus. He wrote the Iliad right on top. He wrote about the bickering of men, like the bickering of gods. Here was a man who dealt with the gods, who put his own voice in the mouth of gods—quite fantastic. Big big man Mr. Homer. Hindu gods don’t bicker.” Corso strokes his chin and fidgets in his chair. I have the feeling he isn’t accustomed to lecturing. “What do you want to talk about?” he asks, nervously drumming his fingers upon the desktop.

The room is silent.

In a heartbeat he launches back in on Homer. “It is just basic knowledge for a writer; you should all know your Homer.”

No one says a word.

“I find somebody dumb who doesn’t know Homer—that’s how I feel. Check him out; he brought the Greek gods on the scene, that is for sure. But then again I just happened to be reading that book that afternoon when Ginsberg called. We don’t have to be stuck with the Iliad. There are insights in that book that are stupendous.” He rocks in his chair and checks his wrist for a non-existent watch, “How long have I been here?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“That’s a long time man!” he sighs in exasperation, “Let’s get on to something else.”

There is an uneasy silence in the room. Nervous giggling. No one knows what to do, least of all Corso. “Take a look at the Greeks and their hell,” he says desperately. “Their hell was like their weather. Their weather was not too cold, not too warm, it was moderate. Look at the Gilgamesh hell—that was a funny hell. That hell is a desert. Different kinds of hells for different seasons.”

“Where is your hell?” someone calls out from the crowd.

“Right here, believe me,” he laughs uncomfortably. The class laughs along with him.

“I always figured a guy who is a philosopher would never go and tell people he was a philosopher,” he says lighting on a new topic. “Others had to tell him he was a philosopher. But a poet has to tell people he’s a poet. If you don’t, they don’t know. It’s like Anne Waldman, whom I love, who made the mistake once of showing me a poem. She asked, ‘Is this a poem?’ And I said, ‘Hell no.’ She hasn’t forgiven me for 10 years. I don’t want her wrath on me. I never expected poets to be that sensitive,” he says rolling his eyes. “I thought you could screw around with them. My god. I made it worse by trying to apologize. I tried, and oh, I was so embarrassed. I didn’t mean it, really. One day she will see. That shows you how careful you have to be of what you say.

“I think as a poet you have to have certain things under your belt—the Cassandra myth, the Trojan horse. You’ve got to have the essentials in your head; even if they aren’t essential, they’re at least beautiful. I’d rather have a little bit of knowledge than a whole lot of faith. I’d rather have knowledge, an encyclopedic head. Of course to be a poet you don’t have to know nada.”

This seems to cheer the class.

“You’ve said poetry was a saving grace to you, how so?” a student asks.

“Because it educated me. Poetry is a study of the head. You use your head for pondering and worrying, working things out. I was alone. I didn’t have some of the people others have, like parents—so I worked it out for myself. Then poetry came along.”

Corso seems noticeably more at ease answering questions than lecturing.

“When did you realize you were a poet?” someone inquires.

“I realized I was a poet around fourteen, fifteen. I never got a chance to be rejected. I said I was a poet—so I was. First poem I wrote was about my mother. I used to ask people what happened to her. Sometimes they said she had died, other times they told me she was a whore, or that she just disappeared. To this day I don’t know. So I took the disappearance, and figured she went back to Italy, a shepherdess in Calabria, tending sheep around the lemon trees. That was my mother. The poem was called ‘Sea Chanty.’” He recites it, “My mother hates the sea, my sea especially. I warned not to, it was all I could do…Upon the shore I found a strange yet beautiful food, I asked the sea if I could eat it, and the sea said I could…’

Gregory Corso (far left), William Burroughs, and Paul Bowles, 1961. Photo by Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

“You know it would be easier to be a painter,” he laments. “You have to show your ass in writing. It is embarrassing when you have to face people and read poems; they see how you look, they see you—oh my god,” he raises his hand to his cheek in mock horror. “Whereas a painter just puts his stuff in a gallery and walks away.”

“How do you work?”

“I get a certain poem-feeling in my gut. I watched Tennessee Williams once in Greece when I was staying at his house. He’d get up every morning at seven and pull down the shades and play schmaltzy music on tapes he had from America and start typing away. The time I usually work is when people are sleeping; it is always in the middle of the night, the hour of the wolf, while the world is asleep. Not that I do it every night, but I like the dark, I don’t like the bright sunlight. I’d rather be in the shade.”

“How do you feel about rewriting?”

“At the time of writing I don’t rewrite. First thought best thought. We were always into that. You know, first words that are down, best words that are down. The first thought is the purest thought. The purest stuff is spontaneous. But sometimes I do rewrite. Why not make it better? Why not?”

“Do you share work with other writers?”

“I’ve read poems on the phone to Ginsberg. He read me ‘Howl.’ Sharing the work is good. Why hoard your words? Poetry is hard,” he says with a grimace.

“Do you like to read work aloud?” someone in the back calls out.

“You get more out of reading a poem than from hearing it read to you. You get more out of me in print than in a reading, yeah. Because usually I don’t read the heavyweight stuff that I write. I just can’t bear it. It would take too much out of me. So I read the light stuff, the funny stuff. To make them laugh. Oh boy, they love you when you make them laugh. I’ve got to have a couple of drinks before I do it. To face this horde, this is like death, this is the darkest nights of our souls, it is horrific, and then there is Ginsberg up there like it’s a great come-on. Oh boy, he can be like a clown up there.” He pauses, “It diminishes poetry, I think. It diminishes poetry by reading it and playing the clown, or entertainer. But I’ve done it to make money. I prefer the nice quietude of poetry. For me poetry comes from here,” he points to his sternum. “If not, it doesn’t mean anything—it don’t mean nada. You can’t sneak the miracle. There is no way that you’re going to write a better poem just because you want to be remembered for it.

“As a kid I knew when I grew old I’d always have poetry. Old age didn’t bother me because I’d always have poetry to go to—it was a standby. Whenever you have pain, or trouble, or things upsetting you, try to write poetry, it will be your greatest friend. In many ways poetry benefits you, and it could benefit others. It’s a good thing. It doesn’t hurt anybody en masse.”

Having made this proclamation Corso rises to his feet as if to leave. A clock watcher calls out, “Uh, you’ve got forty-five minutes left.”

Corso groans and sinks back in his seat. “I can’t get out of here!”

The class cracks up. No one wants him to stop talking.

An addled-looking blond woman stands up in the back, “Do you ever have anybody else read your poetry out loud?”

“No. I never have, but I bet they have. Why, you wanna read one?”

“Yeah.”

“Which one?”

“I want to do the one about the stains. The stains. I really like the thing about stains, you know that one?”

Corso knits his brow and rubs his forehead in contemplation.

“Do you know the one I’m taking about?”

Corso shrugs. “You don’t know the poem you’re talking about?” He laughs.

“I remember the concept,” she says. “I don’t remember the words. You don’t remember it?”

“I don’t remember my poetry that well, other than that sea chant. Who recites American poetry by memory? No one does that anymore,” he says.

“Do you read criticism of your work?” a man with a shaved head asks, as the blond woman slides, as if in slow motion, back down into her chair.

“I don’t see much of it. The message is either going to be heavily down, or all the way for it. They don’t know how to handle it. But I have no doubts, I mean if I died now, I wouldn’t feel that I wasn’t accomplished.

Gregory Corso (left) with Peter Orlovsky in Tangier, 1961. Photo by  Allen Ginsberg, courtesy ofThomas Fisher Rare Book Library

“I could write a volume of poetry in a week—if it hit me. But I don’t want to throw out poetry like that, one after another. People say, ‘People are going to forget you.’ I don’t give a damn, I’m not a movie star. I’m a poet. Today poets have all got to be famous. It’s all changed, the ball game has changed. It is only a new thing that’s happened with poetry that poets are known while they are alive. Allen Ginsberg got it, nailed it so well. He knows how to handle it and put it to good use. Check it out. The man has been beneficial to people. If I look at history, I can’t see where poets have caused any hurt en masse—I can’t see where a drop of blood’s been spilled, except among themselves. Verlaine with Rimbaud shooting him in the wrist, okay, Villon cutting the priest’s neck because the priest wanted to seduce him, well okay—family quarrels.

“I’m facing old age,” he says gently nodding his head, “I’m sixty-three. I hope poetry will stand by me. Look at Blake. Before he died, he was singing in his bed to his wife Kate, dying and just singing. The years they go like that. I saw my nine year-old kid the other day and I didn’t recognize him.

“Poetry is when you are all alone in a little room and you have to write the fucker down.” He pauses for emphasis. “It’s all there. Remember, it’s a game being a writer; you are taking a gamble there. I really admire people who do it, even hack writers, I admire them, because they can create attitudes, time spans.” He nods. Then, rising to his feet for the last time, he signs off, “I hope I gave you something.”

Corso left the class twenty minutes early. Nobody seemed to notice.

March 1

Tonight’s class is greatly diminished. The regular core plus one or two stalkers. Ginsberg unloads a pile of books from a tote bag. He seems anxious to hear about last week’s class. “Anybody take any notes?” he asks, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “I’d be curious to see what happened. What did he have to say?”

“He spoke about growing old and the Trojan horse,” a student in her seventies says.

“We talked about his craft,” murmurs a kohl-eyed woman in long dangly earrings.

“It was great!” says an eager note-taker in the front row. Ginsberg nods in satisfaction.

“Today I want to talk about Creeley, his growing older, middle-aged poems, and his realization of aging. So, we’ll begin with “Self-Portrait,” his realizations about himself:

He wants to be a brutal old man, an aggressive old man, as dull, as brutal as the emptiness around him.

He doesn’t want compromise nor to be ever nice to anyone. Just mean, and final in his brutal, his total, rejection of it all.

It’s a rare and brutal self-portrait, and it is very much him. It reflects his recollections of his earlier life, when he did drink quite a bit, and was quite mean to people when he got drunk. Some drunken people are very sweet, some are dopey, some are maudlin—some get really really mean. Fortunately, he never turned it on me, but I’ve seen him in that situation. He is actually alcohol-free now, I think.”

“Incrementally, almost monosyllabically, the meaning of a Creeley poem accumulates, changing everything that goes before it. His method of writing is to put paper in the typewriter and begin with whatever phrase or insight he started with, a retroactive small instance of feeling, and then accumulate detail and reach for common ground.”

Robert Creeley. Photo by Mark Christal

Ginsberg reads aloud Creeley’s poem “Memories”:

Hello, duck in yellow

Cloth stuffed from inside out,

Little pillow

“That’s all there is,” he laughs, then reads it aloud again. “It’s very intimate poetry. Some people say its incomprehensible, but I don’t think so. If you look long enough it will make sense. The work couldn’t be more real or concrete. Like the duck—it’s a real baby cloth duck. It is a play of pure language, but there is always some substantive matter there.”

“What do you think when people call him abstract?” someone asks.

“Well, it is abstract. I wouldn’t want to write that way myself, so abstractly, except I really dig it when I read it. I’m almost crying it is so cool.

“‘Go’ is another minimal one,” Ginsberg says, then reads aloud:

Push that little thing up and the other right down. It’ll work.

“It sounds like instructions for a baby toy, doesn’t it? It is also slightly erotic; it might read as some suggestion about the whole process of creation, Push that little thing up.” He laughs uproariously. “It’s so beautiful! It is actually the memory of a child’s toy but it is also parallel to God, or a divine messenger telling man, Push that little thing up, it will work. He trembles with laughter. “It is your generic instructions for existence, or am I reading too much into it? It is there,” he insists. “If anybody here doesn’t get it, it’s all right. It took me forever to get them myself.”

Next we read “Age,” which is from Creeley’s collection Windows. It’s the most explicit poem we’ve read. Ginsberg begins to crack up over the line, “probe into your anus.” He has to stop at “roto-rooter-like device” to catch his breath, and by the time he reaches “like a worn out inner tube” his voice is a high-pitched squeak, and he’s laughing hysterically at the line “to snore not unattractively.” After he wipes the tears from his cheeks he continues, “I guess what I like about his poems is that they are a trip. It’s really the mind laid bare. He may do some tinkering, but I think his method is if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work and he throws it away. This poem is like a mind trap in a way. Creeley’s poems are like jokes that crack themselves.”

After he has composed himself Ginsberg adds, “Creeley takes from Campion the rhythmical subtlety, the musicality characteristic of English song and lyric poetry. The delicate cadence in Creeley comes from Campion. His care for the syllable is like the poets of the Black Mountain School, who composed their work conscious of every syllable and how it fits into the cadence.”

The subject of cadence and rhythm leads us to Sappho, whom Ginsberg refers to as “the first Rimbaud.” We listen to him read some of Sappho’s most famous poems like “Invocation to Aphrodite” and some other fragments.

“Sappho invented a number of stanza forms, like the sapphic stanza,” he says, then begins to chant, “Trochee trochee dactyl trochee trochee.” He waits for a second as if expecting us to jump in, but the class is speechless. The woman next to me whispers, “Is he having some kind of flashback?”

“Okay,” he says in his best patient Cub Scout leader voice, “Let’s do it together!” and leads the whole class in a chorus of sapphic stanza form. At first we are timorous and shy, then after a few rounds our voices become loud, even celebratory. This singing makes class seem more like day camp than a literature class.

“These are dance steps,” Ginsberg tells us. “Ed Sanders and The Fugs use these. These have a cadence so powerful and inevitable that they outlasted Troy—the monuments of marble, brass and iron and the Parthenon—and they’re good for love poetry—good for poems of yearning. They’re not far from the blues in terms of structure. Actually, they’re very similar to twelve-bar blues.”

“For next week,” he calls out as everyone gathers up their books, “I want you to write a sapphic poem!” As we file out of class I can hear people humming trochee trochee dactyl trochee trochee…

March 8

I’m early for class. Ginsberg hasn’t arrived yet. The woman next to me is visibly peeved. She’s riffling through some papers, and sighing in exasperation. I can see that they’re sheaves of poetry which have been corrected in cramped handwriting—I think it’s Ginsberg’s hand. She looks over at me and rolls her eyes.

“Have you had your meeting with him yet?” I ask.

“Oh, yeah…” she says, sucking in her breath and raising her eyebrows. “I got completely clobbered. He hated it. He was so critical—I don’t think he likes women. At least he sure doesn’t like my work, it’s too girly for him.”

I confess to her that I’m nervous about my meeting. She smirks, “You should be. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I know these are good, I’ve workshopped one of them even,” she says, sliding the poems out of my sight and into a purple folder.

One on One with Ginsberg

I sit in the hall outside of Ginsberg’s office, along with several other students. A platinum-haired boy with a black goatee scribbles in his journal. A woman with long black Medusa locks twirls a snake of dark hair around her finger, looking pained as she reads a slender volume of Sappho. I can see, through the crack in the door, a boisterous fellow in cowboy boots sitting in the chair alongside Ginsberg’s desk. He is leaning across the desk jabbing his finger into what I suspect is his poem. In his lap is a large pile of papers, more poems I assume. I can’t hear the conversation, but as I watch I can see the man slowly deflating, his gestures becoming larger as he struggles to explain the intention behind his art. I feel sick. I read over my own poems, stumbling over obvious metaphors and silly turns of phrase. I want to flee. I can hear Ginsberg’s voice, “okay,” he says in a wrapping-it-up voice, “there are other people waiting.” My heart is pounding. The man bounds out of the office.

Ginsberg looks down at his sign-up sheet. “Schappell?” he asks, peering over the rims of his clear plastic glasses. I nod and shut the door tightly behind me, I don’t want anyone to witness my artistic evisceration. He waves me into the chair next to his desk. My heart is pounding as I hand over my work.

He reads silently, tipping back in his chair. Then he leans forward across the desk and smiles. To my surprise he is incredibly generous and complimentary. Perhaps my contemporaries have just worn him down so his critical faculties are muted. Perhaps he’s just in a good mood. He makes insightful comments, and does a quick edit that vastly improves my poem. He suggests a few writers for me to read and asks me questions about my poem, which is about my experiences with olfactory hallucinations. He’s curious about them and nods as I tell him about the strange and unsettling phenomena of smelling smoked meat and alcohol when none are in evidence. He writes down the name of a neurologist who might be interested in my case and suggests I stop by again. I leave his office feeling greatly relieved, and a bit elated.

March 29

When I show up for class, the amphitheater is full of strange faces. Another class has hijacked our room. Ginsberg looks annoyed. Tonight he’s wearing a hand-knitted dark blue, white and red cardigan with chunky hand-wrought silver buttons. It looks like a Tibetan Perry Como sweater.

“Just sit down and let’s get going,” he says in irritation, and gestures at the floor for us to sit down. “We have a lot to do.” At his bidding people sit cross-legged on the floor just outside the open door of the amphitheater as though in peaceful protest. The other class peers out the door at us. Just as Ginsberg starts to take roll, a uniformed security guard appears and sternly informs us that there are too many of us to sit in the hall. We’re a fire hazard. Ginsberg insists he has the paperwork needed for the room, and pats his pockets as though he carries the documents with him. The guard disappears, then reappears a few minutes later saying he has found another room for us. We move en masse to an auditorium on another floor. The new room is a lecture hall for the sciences, its main source of decoration being an enormous periodic table of elements.

Without waiting for the stragglers to find seats, Ginsberg plants himself on the edge of the stage and starts in on John Wieners. “Wieners is the great gay poet of America. He’s in hardly any anthologies, but he’s so emotional and truthful.” Ginsberg reads us “A Poem For Trapped Things” in a voice that is full of intense appreciation.

“Wieners is like Cavafy, a Greek modern poet of the twentieth century who died in the twenties or thirties. His work gives us glimpses into his love life, his homosexual bent…it’s a similar aesthetic to Whitman’s poetry.”

He quotes from Wieners’s tragic American poem “The Acts of Youth”: “I have always seen my life as drama, patterned after those who met with disaster or doom,” then reads the poem in its entirety. Ginsberg compares Wieners with Hart Crane, who he describes as “a doomed powerful poet whose low self-esteem led him to commit suicide.”

Ginsberg reads more Wieners, interjecting comments on his sexual infatuation with Robert Creeley and how this pissed off Creeley’s wife. He tells us of Wieners’s time spent in and out of various asylums, his shock treatments and awful nightmares, and how he experimented with peyote and “loco weed,” which makes you lose your memory and then your mind. “He had been over the abyss before,” Ginsberg says and pauses. “There’s a thread of Marlene Dietrich glamor in Wieners’s poetry.”

He describes Wieners’s trips to New York to do poetry readings. “Sometimes he would just read one,” Ginsberg recalls. “He’d read one, sit down and wait until they applauded and he was called back onto the stage. Then he’d get up and read another, then go sit back down. Sometimes he would read the gossip columns as poetry. He wrote some of his poetry under the nom de plume Jackie O.”

Class ends too soon. “For next week think about Kerouac and vowel delicacy, meditation and poetics,” he cries out.

April 5

Tonight we’re in yet another classroom—a cramped but bright little space with many more charts than students, so people are fanned out all over the room, mostly lingering in the back. This seems to annoy Ginsberg, who insists, “Come closer, come closer, I don’t want to yell.” We pull our chairs up in a circle and surround him like disciples.

“What was the face you had before you were born?” Ginsberg asks. “That question, the theme of a Zen poem, is the heart of Beat poetry. It could be called the ‘golden ash’ school, as Kerouac said, ‘A dream already ended, the golden ash of dream.’”

“Has anyone ever heard of the Paramita Sutra!” he asks. Everyone shakes their head no.

Someone jokes, “Isn’t that like the Kama Sutra?” The class giggles.

“This is the basis of much Eastern thought, particularly in the Buddhist world through Indo-China, Burma, Ceylon, Tibet and China itself. This is a translation by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, a Zen master from San Francisco who was a big deal in the fifties and sixties. It was tinkered with by myself and a Tibetan lama to make it maybe a little clearer. Generally it’s chanted in a monotone, so I’ll chant it.”

Ginsberg chants the Paramita Sutra in a strangely pretty monotone.

“First time I ever heard anything about Buddhism was Kerouac crooning the Buddha refuge vows; he was singing these, crooning them like Frank Sinatra.” Ginsberg, with his eyes downcast sings the refuge vows, repeating them three times.

He describes the four vows of the bodhisattva then chants them for us. This is all to prepare us for Kerouac. Of the books On The Road, Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax, all published in a three-year period, Ginsberg believes that Visions Of Cody contains some of his best writing. “By then he had discovered his method of spontaneous writing. He’d written the huge novel On The Road and had rethought it. He decided he would do it even better and bigger, by going back over the same characters, same plot, not making it a chronological narrative, but according to epiphanous moments. He’d write a series of discrete epiphanous moments, then string them together. Different experiences and moments popping up in whatever order would be the structure of the book. It wouldn’t have the linear quality of a regular novel, with a beginning, middle, end. It would be as the mind sees a cubist painting. Cody Pomeray is Dean Moriarty is Neal Cassady, all based on a real person, all real happenings but fictionalized.

Jack Kerouac in Tangier, 1957. Photo by Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

“His next book, Dr. Sax, was written on marijuana, so it has an elaborate marijuana openness. Dr. Sax was the Shadow, a bogeyman, the shrouded stranger, the figure you see through your window at night who follows you down the street and makes you want to run home fast after it gets dark. He even made a drawing of him, a comic strip. Like science fiction, he emerges out of the dots of the Brooklyn waterfront; he comes up out of the water with his hair long and glistening in a shroudy cape, and goes to the Pyramid club and dances on the bar. So here’s the situation, little Jacky Kerouacky from Lowell, Mass. at the age of twelve or thirteen is befriended by Dr. Sax, the bogeyman. In the daytime he’s a football coach, but at night he puts on his shrouded cape and goes around the city performing miracles, and the big plot of this is that the millennium is approaching, the apocalypse, or Armageddon, and at Snake Hill in Lowell, Mass. the great snake of the world is going to emerge and devour the planet. This is a recording of Jack reading Dr. Sax made in 1961 on an old tape recorder at his house.”

Ginsberg pushes down the play button and Kerouac’s voice booms out of the battered tape recorder as if possessed. Despite the scratchy static his voice is clear and mesmerizing, his nasal New England accent rattling the room, his cackle electric. The whole class is rapt. Ginsberg’s face softens and gets a little dreamy-looking.

“That’s beautiful isn’t it?” He repeats and savors Kerouac’s sentences, biting the consonants and mouthing the vowels, emphasizing the oral qualities and rhythms. “It has a subtlety of both language and ear that comes from a virginal, or rather somewhat youthful marijuana fantasy.”

“The writing of Visions of Cody was influenced by Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Mann, Proust’s madeleine and tea, and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. It has the extended sentences, panoramic awareness and interesting narrative like On the Road.” Ginsberg then reads us bits of Visions of Cody. He thankfully doesn’t try to sound like Kerouac, or read like him.

“These are sort of Whitmanic descriptions aren’t they?” he points out. “This is an experimental, exuberant book. It’s broken down into sections like jazz sessions. It might mean one sentence, or it might mean pages. Each section is written in a session of writing like a jazz musician. It’s like blowing until the energy is gone. Gertrude Stein also did this. She’d write it all out in a focus of attention. Kerouac didn’t always write it all down. It was mostly babbling in bars or under the Brooklyn Bridge. We used to walk under the Brooklyn Bridge and improvise a lot, trading lines, riffing poetry. There are a couple specimens between me and Kerouac and Peter Orlovsky. They’re not all that interesting,” Ginsberg confesses, but he shares them anyway.“‘Oh my baby tip my cup all my thoughts are open, no? all my doors are open.’ Burroughs and Kerouac did a collaborative novel back in the forties, set in the St. Louis zoo. It was called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.”

William S. Burroughs. Photo by Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

This recollection gets Ginsberg on to the subject of Burroughs. “Burroughs thinks in pictures—he spends long sessions just sitting at the typewriter, seeing images moving against the dark. He sits with his hands hovering over the typewriter thinking about hands pulling in nets in the dark like in Interzone. He does cut-ups and revises a lot. He follows his dreams, follows them visually like a movie camera and writes the images down. His material often comes from dreams or visual daydreams, and are filed according to subject matter in manila folders. All writing is spontaneous, you don’t know what the next word is going to be until you write it, unless you’re like the Russians who work it all out in their heads.”

Ginsberg ends class by reading Kerouac’s mea culpa in Visions of Cody. In the middle of it he nearly begins to weep, “I never thought it would be published.”

April 12

Ginsberg is eager to start class today. “We’ll begin with a recording of blues and haiku done by Kerouac in 1959 with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, two vanguard hard bop white saxophonists. Kerouac would pronounce the haiku and they would make up a little saxophone haiku. With the push of a button Kerouac is alive reciting haikus accompanied by slithery sax music that compliments the verse:

In my medicine cabinet

the winter fly

has died of old age.

“Nice huh?” Ginsberg nods appreciatively. “Did you notice his enunciation? It’s like real mature mouthing. I mentioned last week that the master of intonation and enunciation, Frank Sinatra, was actually an influence on Kerouac. Sinatra, I think, learned his technique from Billie Holiday. So the lineage is Billie Holiday through Sinatra to Kerouac.”

Drunk as a hoot owl

writing letters

by thunderstorm.

“I’ve a series of poems of my own, which instead of calling haiku I’ve called ‘American sentences.’” The trouble with most of the traditional haiku is the way they’re synthesized into English; they’re not a complete sentence. They sort of hang in the air. The advantage of ‘In my medicine cabinet the winter fly has died of old age’ is it’s a straightforward active sentence with a subject, verb and object. It just goes tight into your head without that arty sound of translationese.

“The next recording is 1959, a time when Steve Allen, then a popular television personality, somewhat literate, really dug Kerouac and understood that he was a little better than the beatnik image given in the press. He actually made friends with him. He asked him to come into the recording studio. It was lucky that Steve Allen had that intuition because there are not so many recordings of Kerouac. He made some on his own home machine like the Dr. Sax that I played you last week, but that’s quite rare and not issued. There’s another I have of him reading Mexico City Blues, but he’s really completely drunk and the timing is not good, though it’s still him.

“At the time of Mexico City Blues Jack was reading a book called the Buddhist Bible. Did we ever do sitting practice and meditation here?” he suddenly ask us.

“That might be interesting to do that. So you know what Kerouac’s talking about when he talks about Buddhism and meditation and all that crap. So if you will sit forward in your seats with your hands on your knees, sit up straight. The reason I say sit forward is to keep your spine straight so that you’re not slumping over, you’re erect. Okay, top of the head supporting heaven (so to speak), so it’s not quite marine military; the chin is down, somewhat more relaxed, eyeballs relaxed, so you’re not staring at any specific point, but letting the optical field hang outside of your skull, looking through your skull at the outside. We are led to believe a lie when we see with not through the eye, says William Blake, so you’re looking through the eye, with perhaps awareness of the periphery of the optical field.”

“We’re not leaving the world, we’re here; we’re just resting within the phenomenal world and appreciating it. Shoulders relaxed, nose in line with belly button, ears in line with your shoulder blades. Sitting forward actually on the edge of the chair is best, balanced on your feet, hands resting on thighs. Mouth closed, putting the tongue toward the teeth and roof of your mouth, eliminating the air pocket so you won’t be disturbed by an accumulation of saliva forcing you to swallow. Gaze tending toward the horizon, resting in space, or, if it’s too bright, at a forty-five degree angle down in front of you toward the floor. So the basic classical practice is paying attention to the breath leaving the nostril and following the breath until it dissolves, not controlling the breath, just any regular old natural breath that comes along will do. What you are adding is your awareness of the breath rather than any control. On the in breath you can let go of your observation, maybe check your posture, if you’re slumped you will tend to be daydreaming, if you are upright you will tend to be alert. So, let’s try that. Ignore other parts of the mind. When you notice you are thinking, label it thinking and take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts. That is the nature of the mind to think thoughts, but when you become aware of it observe it, acknowledge it, notice it, then return your attention back to the breath, and it will restore your focus.”

We sit on the edge of our seats, hands on our knees. If someone were to peek through the window in the door, they would see what I am sure looks like an army of zombies awaiting instructions. The room hums with silence. A smoker begins to hack, everyone else sits still, drawing deep breaths.

“Okay” Ginsberg says, disturbing our pleasant revery. “Mexico City Blues. In Chorus 63 Kerouac’s commenting on his own poetics, ‘Rather gemmy, Said the King of Literature Sitting on a davenport at afternoon butler’s tea.’” Ginsberg guffaws, the class laughs too. Ginsberg’s reading it in a very funny high-tone sniffy British voice. “Rather gemmy hmmm…always thought these sonnets of mine were rather gemmy as you say, true perfect gems of lucid poetry, poetry being what it is today, rather gemmy…’

“It’s sort of like a midtown intellectual ninny or somebody reading The New Yorker,” he says. “Kerouac was really a master of camp. Very few people realize that a lot of Kerouac is campy voices, or getting into other people’s heads, very common archetypal people like a New Yorker reader, or Burroughs, or W. C. Fields, very often he goes into W. C. Fields mode.”

“Kerouac is often accused of being naive macho but this is very sophisticated camp he’s laying down.” Ginsberg then reads Chorus 74, which he recites in a lockjawed English accent he confesses is Gore Vidal’s.

“I think Jack had slept with Gore Vidal by this time, or so Gore Vidal said. Why, I don’t know. Kerouac wasn’t really gay, but on the other hand I think he dug Vidal as a sort of ultra-sophisticated person and wanted some of it to rub off, or maybe it was just drunken lust, but I think it was more a sort of envious inquisitiveness and curiosity and amusement.”

Jack Kerouac and Peter Orlovsky horsing around on the beach in Tangier, 1957. Photo by Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

Ginsbeg starts the 64th Chorus, “‘I’d rather die than be famous,” he reads, then mutters, under his breath, “fat chance.”

He moves on to another point about Visions of Cody. “The first forty-two pages are a series of little sketches. A friend, Ed White, who studied architecture at Columbia when Kerouac was hanging around there in 1948-1949, told him what he ought to do is go out with a pencil, a sketch pad and make verbal sketches just like painters make sketches, little quick sketches, little salient lines, to capture the motif or subject, to capture the ephemera of the moment…sketch. It’s actually quite a good exercise. Sit in front of a window and sketch what you see within the frame of the window. It ain’t so easy, but it ain’t so hard either. So that’s your homework. Jack died, I believe, sitting in a chair verbally sketching the action on a TV quiz program. Making a little prose poem sketch of what was going on.”

April 19

Despite the overcast gray sky it feels like spring. The consensus is to have class out of doors. This evening there’s a journalist from The New Yorker in our class. She’s doing a piece for their upcoming fiction issue. Like some ragtag tribe following a prophet, we are led outside to the Leonard Stern business building. Ginsberg sits down in the lotus position on the walkway beneath an overhang and takes off his shoes. His socks are dark blue with no holes in the toes or heels. We sit around him on the pavement and grass. A few students try to imitate his pretzel-pose. He is the only one who looks remotely comfortable, especially when it begins to drizzle, forcing us all to huddle under the cement lip of the building where there’s a decidedly dank odor of urine and wet dog.

“This week or next I’d like to lay down the materials for Kerouac’s rules for writing—because that is essential to the writing aspect of the Beat Generation. It is so essential to understand in relation to earlier work like Gertrude Stein’s and see how it reflects back into Shakespeare.”

Ginsberg reads a few of Kerouac’s verses from Mexico City Blues, 104, “I’d rather be thin than famous,” and 110 and 111, which deal with Buddhism. “Is this making sense at all? Or is it gobbledygook? Is there anyone who feels this is totally unclear! I confess I don’t always know what the hell Kerouac is talking about in his poetry.”

“It seems like a totally different attitude than On the Road,” comments a guy in a baseball cap.

Jack Kerouac (left) and Allen Ginsberg read a book together, 1959. Photo by Orionpozo, Flickr

“Well this is five years later. In On the Road you’ll also find moments of perception of the whole phenomenal world as delusion also. In On the Road there’s one point were he’s coming out of Mexico or into Texas and he sees an old lonely shrouded stranger walking the road looking like death or God or a prophet and his prophetic word is, Wow. I am so glad we’re having this class out of the building so I have this vast space to point to—endless space, going beyond the sky, beyond what we can see, beyond the clouds, galaxies….Everybody has already accomplished their existing in vastness, or some form of eternity whether they know it or not; everybody is already a Buddha in infinity, already placed in the infinite, so it’s a question of whether they know they’re in the infinite, or they’re just stuck with their nose in a bank book, or somebody’s cunt or whatever….There’s no attainment because there’s no non-attainment. It’s already happened, it’s already here. The ordinary mind in the place of transcendental mind if you catch on, which is the purpose of sitting and the practice of meditation, to catch on to that. To catch on to the vastness of your own mind, to see that inside space is the same as outside space, so therefore everything is ignorant of it’s emptiness.”

As it continues to rain, Ginsberg discusses meditation at some length. Most of us are a bit befuddled.

“So when you meditate you’re trying not to think?” someone asks shyly.

“No. You’re observing the thought, you observe the breath. Let’s do that for just a moment now. I was going to do it inside, but now that we’ve got the open space….I don’t know how comfortable you can get. It doesn’t require a straight back. Just relax your mind, and maybe focus attention on the out breath, out through the nose if you can, unless you’ve got problems…Follow your breath if you can, then as you find yourself thinking, or conceptualizing, notice it, touch on it, like anger when you notice it; it dissolves, then you’re back here in the space where you are, and then latch onto your out breath again, which should keep your mind here in this space until it drifts again. So it’s a question of observing your thought, rather than stopping it. Trying to stop your thought is only another thought. You can go into an infinite regress of thought. The only way is to actually switch your attention to the breath, become conscious of breath and soon your mind is out there in space. The formula is mixing breath with space, mixing mind with breath, mixing mind with space. Let’s go for four minutes.”

We sit up straight. I remember to think of balancing heaven on the top of my head. We close our eyes, and breathe deeply through our noses, trying to filter out the yipping dogs and the chatter of sorority girls.

We sit and meditate, some of us more deeply than others. The journalist from The New Yorker falls deeply asleep, her mouth hanging gently agape. She doesn’t rouse herself until a good fifteen minutes have passed. Ginsberg looks amused and a little annoyed.

To wrap up Kerouac we look at a handout, composed by Kerouac in his own unique shorthand, perhaps intended as a letter.

Belief Technique For Modern Prose a List of Essentials

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

4. Be in love with yr life

5. Something that you feel will find its own form

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow

8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest

12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time

15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

19. Accept loss forever

20. Believe in the holy contour of life

21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better

23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

29. You’re a Genius all the time

30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

As ever, Jack

April 26

“How many of you write some form of open verse? Most of you. Well, for you kids who want to write it there are some rules and regulations. Now, Robert Frost, he made one notorious comment that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. And I think T. S. Eliot was quoted as saying no verse is totally free. Ezra Pound has endless suggestions for experimenting with verse forms. William Carlos Williams’s effort was to find an ‘American measure’ as he called it, or a variable measure. Nobody seems to know what that is. So at one point or another I began toting up all the different considerations that might be weighted in the balance in laying out your verse lines on the page, and I’d like to go through some of them. Does anybody know Marianne Moore’s method of composition of the stanza? Well, you know her stanzas are kind of cute, like butterfly wings, or very irregular, but they all have some kind of shape when you look at them, like the famous poem ‘Poetry’ which begins, ‘I, too, dislike it….’ Let’s look at that poem.”

It becomes apparent no one in class has a Marianne Moore book with them. A few people are lugging their Norton anthologies of modem poetry, but most of the class is either empty-handed or have brought their Kerouac books. According to our “Survey of Historical Poetics” we are to be looking at Post-literate Oral Tradition: Preacher, Spirituals, Hymns, Blues, Calypso, improvisation; Signifying Monkey, Rap, African-American and Caribbean poetics, Bop. What book should one presume to bring to class for “Signifying Monkey?” The class has been proceeding organically, for want of a better word, growing and evolving along the ecstatic tributaries of Ginsberg’s passions and obsessions. There is no schedule. From week to week we have no idea what he is going to do, this free-associative format can be confusing, but it’s also exciting.

Ginsberg sighs in exasperation, “Oh man, how can I teach if you’re all spaced out.”

“You said this week we were doing Kerouac,” someone offers in our defense.

“We’re not doing Kerouac.”

“We just never know,” says a nervous-looking poet who gnaws his pencils.

“Okay…I just wish you would always bring your fucking books,” he says ruefully, “because I’m trying to improvise to some extent and have it real rather than just a rote thing.”

Allen Ginsberg in Washington D.C., 1970. Photo by Thomas Evans

Ginsberg begins to discuss the ways Marianne Moore constructed her verse and laid it out on the page. “The basic principle is that each verse, stanza to stanza, maintains the same number of syllables, or can be divided arbitrarily into syllables with no particular significance to the count of the syllables line by line except to make an interesting look, like a butterfly’s wing on the page; or there may be some counter rhythm the way the line runs.”

Ginsberg then gives a long explanation of how various poets lay their work out on the page according to syllables, accents, breath stop, units of mouth phrasing and division of mental ideas. In a burst of inspiration Ginsberg springs to his feet and goes to the blackboard.

“You might begin a poem on, uh, hair. Let’s do that. Let’s write a poem on…bald heads.” He turns to the board and begins to compose on the board, improvising aloud. He first writes “Bald Heads.”

My own with a fringe of gray Corso’s mop of salt and pepper Eisenhower’s dome

“Now something just occurred to me relating to Eisenhower, so I’ll put it over here on the board. That will lead on to other skulls,

Alas Poor Yorick Nixon’s skull-to-be

“Do I want Yorick or first thought, best thought, or should I say alas poor Lincoln, or alas poor who?…Alas, poor Warren Harding!” He laughs as he scribbles it on the board. “And his girlfriend’s skull, or mistress. Harding was famous for having a mistress wasn’t he? Remember that? What was her name? I knew it once.”

and his Lilly’s skull Again my own

“You see, one thought comes from another thought, so that this opens up like a telescope along the line. What is the next thought I have? It is that movie star, Johnny Depp, has long hair, so I go back to the margin: Johnny Depp has long hair. You just diagram your thought out. So this is division of mental ideas.”

“No.” He scowls and erases the line about Johnny Depp, “That doesn’t work. Anyway these were the ideas that came to me while I was standing here at the blackboard. So I was laying them out, with a space in between each idea as it arose, maybe making a line. But if I had two thoughts coming together fast like Corso’s mop salt and pepper, I left them on one line. It is like diagramming your mind. But you have to focus your mind on the subject, exhausting all the variations that arise in your mind.” He turns to the board and reads his poem. “Not bad,” he shrugs. “So you can divide the lines the way they are spoken or the way you think them up. Sometimes it’s simultaneous and identical, sometimes it might not be.”

“When you changed Yorick to Warren Harding, do you think that you lost any of the sort of electricity of your natural thought process?” someone asks.

“Maybe, but I think it was an even trade. Yorick, it’s too formulaic…I was on Eisenhower: Nixon and Warren Harding made it more common, universalized it in a way, unexpected. You were fresh from the drama of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Warren Harding is not very dramatic at all; he’s very ordinary, but it brings it back to the ordinary skull; so does his Lilly’s skull, his girlfriend’s skull…it means it’s everybody’s skull and that leads again to my own.”

“So is it a combination of a natural thought process and control?” the student asks.

“Well, it’s a natural thought process and then something quick, shrewd, swift.” Ginsberg laughs. “Spontaneity. I mean how did I get to Warren Harding? He rose up. So it’s sort of a nimble skill during the time of composition in making substitutions and hopping it up a little bit.”

“Is this how it really happens with you?” someone else asks incredulously.

“Yeah. I wouldn’t mind copying that down and having a little poem out of it. Some little magazine asks me for a poem, I could send them that ‘Bald Heads’.” Everyone laughs. “A little meditation on bald heads,” he shrugs and grins. We believe him.

Towards the end of class—after we have discussed the aesthetics of laying work out according to typographical topography, original notation, and pure chance—someone asks about Ginsberg’s punctuation.

“There are some dashes here and there. The first person to get rid of punctuation, the first modern poet was Apollinaire, who went over the proofs of his book which included the poem ‘Zone’ and eliminated all the punctuation to get it a little closer to his stream of thought. I tend not to punctuate too much. One thing I really avoid for some reason or another is being too finicky. I rarely use a semicolon in a poem, sometimes a colon, but a semicolon? I don’t get it. It just sounds like a lot of extra spaghetti. I don’t know exactly what spoken idiom or cadence would require a semicolon in actual speech. That’s my own prejudice. George Bush doesn’t like broccoli, and I don’t like semicolons. Maybe semicolons are good for you. Maybe semicolons help you avoid radiation sickness.

“Another matter we should look into is how to revise poems written in the principle of absolutely spontaneous verse. How do you revise poems? A total contradiction in terms.” Ginsberg chuckles gleefully. He takes out the handout we received the first day. Things are actually coming full circle.

Fourteen Steps for Revising Poetry

1. Conception

2. Composition

3. Review it through several people’s eyes

4. Review it with eye to idiomatic speech

5. Review it with eye to the condensation of syntax (blue pencil and transpose)

6. Check out all articles and prepositions: are they necessary and functional?

7. Review it for abstraction and substitute particular facts for reference (for example: “walking down the avenue” to “walking down 2nd Avenue”)

8. Date the composition

9. Take a phrase from it and make up a title that’s unique or curious or interesting sounding but realistic

10. Put quotations around speeches or referential slang “so to speak” phrases.

11. Review it for weak spots you really don’t like, but just left there for inertial reasons.

12. Check for active versus inactive verbs (for example: “after the subway ride” instead of “after we rode the subway”)

13. Chop it up in lines according to the breath phrasing/ideas or units of thought within one breath, if any

14. Retype

Ginsberg explains, “Well, you have the conception of the poem, then the composition of the poem, which we just had. Then the next thing I generally do is read it through a lot of different people’s eyes. I have a new book out. I spent several times reading it once with Burroughs’s eyes, once with Bob Dylan’s eyes, once through my stepmother’s eyes, various people’s. I see what will hook them into the poems and see what flaws the poems have according to people’s intelligence I am familiar with and which have been imprinted on me. For instance, reading my own poetry through Burroughs’s eyes I get much more cynical and much less tolerant of sentimentality. Reading it through Dylan’s eyes I’m wondering if it’s surprising enough, or if it’s pedestrian. Looking through Corso’s eyes I wonder if it’s condensed enough and tailored interestingly so that I’m not prosaic. Reading it through the eyes of the editorialist at The New York Times, I wonder does it make some political sense….Intuitively I end up reading my work through several hundred people’s skulls. It’s a way of accumulating a lot more intelligence than your own, because what you are doing, to the extent that you are sensitive to other people’s swiftness, and intelligence and sensitivity, is empathizing with them as you’re reading your own poems to improve them and figure out where your poems are weak. Take the highest intelligences you know, the people you most admire and read it through their eyes. The people you really dig, the people you really want to please or communicate to, and then go through it with an eye to could you say this out loud to your mother or your fiend without sounding poetic, or arch, or literary or artificial? and without sounding like you are copping a poetic attitude of some sort. Review the whole thing through idiomatic speech. Can you say it without embarrassment either to an audience, or your best friend or to your mommy? Intense emotionally charged fragments of idiomatic speech people won’t question, but emotionally charged moments that sound highfalutin or literary or hand-me-down literary, people will suspect the genuineness and sincerity of it. So review it with an eye to idiomatic speech and that will correct the whole attitude of the poem. Then the next is condensation of syntax. Let’s look at my poem,” he says hopping up and going back to the blackboard, this time with an eraser. He snuffs out the words “with a” from the first line.

“‘My own gray fringed’—that’s better. I don’t need all those syllables.”

“‘Corso’s mop salt and pepper’ that’s impeccable, ‘Eisenhower’s dome,’ ‘Nixon’s skull to be’ that’s all right, ‘Alas, Poor Warren Harding’ do I need and there? Nah—comma his Lilly’s skull I don’t know that I need again? Maybe dash my own. So I would review it. Do I need all the articles, the conjunctions, connectives, the’s, them’s, of’s….Of particularly, you can often get rid of the of which is more French. You examine every single syllable, especially the small ones, the monosyllables that have no substantive information, and see if you can transpose and reconnect things a little more solidly without the extra articles and particles. Don’t reduce it to Chinese laundry talk where you eliminate all the articles, you don’t want to do that….”

“Next, I generally review for abstraction. Nailing the thing down, grounding the generalizations. Very often generalizations are like a blank in a form that you can fill in.”

“Okay, next week is our last class, we’ll do the other steps. And be prepared to do Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind!’”

Allen Ginsberg in Tangier, 1957. Photo courtesy of Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

May 3

I wondered if class might start off with some acknowledgment that this is our final class, or perhaps some hash brownies and jug wine. Instead class begins in a pedestrian way with Ginsberg passing out copies of open form poems. He takes roll, of course, then launches into the texts.

A guy walks in late. Ginsberg in typical fashion asks the latecomer, “What’s your name? Are you in the class?” The guy has been in the class since the first day.

Ginsberg takes us through the process of how poets such as Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William Carlos Williams lay their poems on the page. He then eagerly passes out copies of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”

“There was one other thing that I wanted to do that we hadn’t done, which was to do a choral recitation of this poem. My suggestion is that we read it together. Pay attention to the punctuation, so that where you have a comma, a colon, a parenthesis, an exclamation point, a period that indicates a pause, you take a pause and breathe so that we will all be doing it at the same time. We’ll do everything at the same time or it will be chaos…with some people stopping and some people going on. The run-on lines, where there’s no punctuation, read as run-on lines. But where there’s punctuation, please observe it as a sign of breath. This poem is about the subject of breath, or wind. He’s asking the west winds to enter him and let the spirit of the west wind be his spirit, meaning the breath of the west wind be his own breath, and that using the breath of that wind and his own breath make the poem immortal, so that other people after he’s dead can chant the same poem using the same periods of breath that he employs in the poem itself. The subject is spirit or breath, (spirit means breathing in Latin), his observation is of his breath, the means of vocalization is breath, and if you do that you can get high, you can get a little buzz out of this poem, quite literally if you follow his breaths. It’s like taking a pill…where you internalize the actual breathing that Shelley has set out for you. All you have to do is follow his notational instructions and you’ll get a hyperventilated buzz.” Ginsberg laughs. “So we’ll just do it all together. One two three…’O wild West wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being….’”

We start off in sync and go in and out of it as the poem progresses. I feel decidedly lightheaded, and a little giddy. It’s not exactly a party trick, but it is a pleasant experience. As soon as we finish people begin clapping.

“Well, I got a buzz!” He laughs. “It’s really a terrific piece. To get to, ‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!’ you have to do some abdominal breathing to get that whole line through, because that’s a long, long breath. How many have read Shelley?” A couple of students grudgingly raise their hands. “Well, how was it?” he asks the way one might ask a first time drug-user how the trip was. Judging by the laughter and murmurs the experiment was a success.

“Better late than never, I guess,” he sighs, “Shelley is supposed to be the acme of romantic expostulation in poetry.”

Seeing how turned on everybody is by the reading he launches in on Hart Crane’s The Bridge, focusing particularly on the “Atlantis” section, which he describes as “one of the great rhapsodies in the English language.” He reads it aloud with gusto. After he finishes, his face is flushed, his eyes gleaming.

Hart Crane, photographed by Walker Evans in 1930. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

“It tends to rise then come to a plateau, then drop a bit in tone, then rise again, then drop a bit in tone, then rise all the way up to a sort of prayer in ecstasy and then kind of come in an orgasmic series of breaths, then a coda, or postcoitus treatise, the end. Basically an iambic pentameter eight verse stanza.”

The class sits in amused shock. Did he say “come?” Perhaps we appear unconvinced or maybe Ginsberg is just enjoying himself, but he rereads what I imagine to be the “come” part with great drama—“white seizures!” he cries out, then says professorially, “So you get some kind of power breath there, like in the ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ It’s one of the best pieces of music of this century, I think, in terms of a machine that begins to levitate and finally take off. I think probably to some extent The Bridge is almost a substitute for Eros in a way…Ultimately, I think, this mouthing is a variety of cocksucking. It’s the same emotional devotional adorational impulse displaced into musical language. Crane was gay and also into sailors (like Genet, sort of), but this is almost the acme of sublimated eros into poetry. When this was published, his good friends, Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, both academic poets, objected that there was no object that could contain his emotions, that it was an idealism that had no location…so much adoration, so much emotion, so much buildup, so much orgasmic mouthing—so to speak—that they denounced the poem as a great failure. It kind of broke Crane’s heart. He found himself not only a pariah, but as a gay in a time when to be gay was to be somewhat of a pariah in those circles of academic poets who were all tending toward Eliotic conservatism and undemonstrative cool poetry. That general rejection of his feelings was one of the elements that I think led him to jump off the rear of an ocean liner and drown himself two years later. I also think the constriction of the form didn’t allow him full play of all of the emotions that he kept in a kind of emotional and mental prison. I think he would have survived better if he had opened up the form and taken in more detail like William Carlos Williams. He certainly was a great ear, a great poet, and I think that The Bridge is one of the great long poems of the century, certainly a big influence on my own work and Kerouac and other writers. One of the most exciting pieces of music in the first fifty to sixty years. Pound’s “Uzura” has some of that excitement, and so do the Cantos, and Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill.” You have to go back to when T. S. Eliot is kidding with ‘OOO, that Shakespeherian Rag—/It’s so elegant/So intelligent’…that has a little bit of the rhythmical excitement in it. You get it in other languages, you might get it in some blues, you might get it in Ma Rainey in that long extended spiritual breath, but it’s rare, and that is what Shelley is noted for particularly. You get it in Kerouac certainly, and I try to imitate it in the “Moloch” section of Howl.”

“It is an aspect of poetry that really people don’t pay too much attention to. Of course the sound poets do. You’ll find it in Dada poetry and in Bob Dylan. Actually “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” has a buildup like that.” Ginsberg recites the song from memory.

“So this is, you know, our last meeting—I had started last time on the fourteen steps for revising and left midway at number seven, and so I’ll just say a few more things about that then leave some time open for conversation.”

“Wherever you find yourself generalizing or in abstraction, you can examine it for generalization. If you can tell the difference between particularity and generalization, if you can tell the difference between minute particulars and vague reference, it might do to check for elements that have no special pictorial value or special sound value, just general moo, moo, moo. Of some suggestion of smell, like Resnikoff’s ‘a pot of fish hissed and bubbled on the stove the smell of the fish filled the basement’ or some sort of tactile, sight, smell, sound, taste, touch anything palpable. You can find a lot of Latinate words that have no sensory suggestion. They’re like blanks in a bureaucratic form to be filled in with particulars. What were you really referring to when you spoke of being lonesome in the city? What city? On the roof? Where in your bedroom? Can you particularize a little?

“I myself date compositions so that I know where the origin was, when I first thought something up; if I work on it a long time, I’ll put a date showing the finish. If it’s your ambition to be a great poet, you’ll want to help your scholars and professors a hundred years from now. They’re all lazy. If you date it yourself, they won’t have to shuffle through all your papers. Dating your work means there’ll be a greater accumulation of term papers on your work, masters theses, graduate theses, which means that you’ll get more attention in the future. So, if you want to be immortal, date your mortality.”

The class laughs, not sure if he really means what he is saying.

“The question of getting a title. Usually I go through a poem and I find two interesting words that combined together might give the gist of the poem. The title actually begins to magnetize or get people into your poem.

“Then one interesting thing, I found really useful is that in reading my work aloud I’ll tend to hasten through parts that are not quite so interesting till I get to the meat of the poem, to the parts I really like. If you can detect that difference, you might examine the weaker parts and perhaps eliminate them altogether. If they bore you, they might bore other people too. It might be a little phrase, a whole sentence, or even a section of the poem that isn’t as good…so why not just eliminate that and get to the point fast? Williams’s phrase for that was ‘one active phrase is more valuable than pages of inert writing.’ Reading aloud is a good bullshit detector. I read poetry aloud a lot. I may read a poem a hundred times before it’s published in a book, and I found after many years that was a really good way of editing. So get rid of the cool parts and leave yourself a hot fragment, like in Sappho. Readers might never get to your great fragment because they got stuck with the first ten lines.

“So now the door is open—does anybody have anything they want to talk about, as we are in our last breaths here?”

“Why would you want to be immortal?” asks one of the boys who periodically shows up in class.

“Remember that line from Zukofsky,” Ginsberg replies. “‘Nothing is better for being eternal nor so white as white that dies in the day.’ Well, if the purpose of your poetry is to assuage your suffering or relieve the sufferings of others, then you want to build a machine which will operate after your death. In a way you could say that Poe did that by liberating consciousness once and for all to experience its own paranoia and feedback, and to experience guilt and conscience, to articulate it so clearly that everybody thereafter would have their minds opened up. What is the purpose of Christ laying down the Golden Rule, or the Sermon on the Mount, of Buddha or Allah? Their function is not so much that they are immortal but that their spirit, their gentility, generosity, openness can be more widespread. Poetry is not an ego trip that preserves your ego in the amber of the poem, but rather that you’ve made your own ego transparent, conquered it. Your battle against selfishness begins with yourself, to enlighten others to the techniques of liberating yourself from your ego.”

“In Yeats’s books it is really interesting to see the progression of his mind from beginning to end, and how he ends up with Crazy Jane and very spare things. His last poem actually turns out to be, ‘How can I…My attention Fix…on Russian or on Spanish politics?…But Oh that I were young again And held her in my arms.’ the final thought that he wanted to leave behind. It’s interesting to know that’s where he concluded and to see how he got there. It’s interesting to know in what part of Keats’s life, what sequence those poems came on, how he developed and at what point he got to that last little poem “This Living Hand.” Do you know that? It’s to Fanny Brawne, his girlfriend, and he knew he was dying. It’s really kind of uncanny. It’s one of Gregory Corso’s favorite poems. Well, when you know it’s the last poem it adds a dramatic flair, as well as a kind of ghoulish presence.”

Someone calls out, “How do you reconcile your mind-writing slogan—first thought best thought—with rewriting?”

“I don’t know. As I get older, I get more schizophrenic about it,” Ginsberg confesses, then quotes Whitman, “‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.’ The answer is embedded in what I said before about dating. If the poem, the original skeleton of the poem, retains it’s integrity, that’s it.”

“Kerouac allows for revision, for certain afterthoughts or mistakes. I don’t feel as sure of myself as Kerouac, and maybe his assurance came from his vow not to return to the poem. So that it pushed him to the limit during the time of writing, but I don’t feel the same absoluteness, or courage, and yet I like it in him. And what is the first thought? The first thought isn’t necessarily the first thought you notice, it’s the first thought you sub-notice. People edit their awareness of what is underneath their minds.”

“I remember when I was a boy in grammar school my brother and I had a chemistry set. One of the mysterious miracles of grammar school chemistry was sodium. If it’s pure, a little fragment of sodium in water fizzes, burns, gives off hydrogen which will pop, or explode if you put a match next to it. We had a whole pound of sodium which we kept in a bucket of kerosene. While cleaning the chemistry set, I got some water in the kerosene. My father had to carry the whole thing steaming and bubbling out of the house just before it exploded. Why that arose in my mind right now, I don’t know. I was looking for a first thought…an early significant thing that I remember at least once a month, maybe three times a month, because it was a moment that I got away with something. I was lucky. I could have blown the house apart.”

“If I wanted to write it as a poem I might want to recall how the water got into the bucket. I think it was some stupid attempt to clean up the whole pantry shelf where we kept all our chemicals. It would pertain to the first thought. Second thought would be, Young kids do foolish things around the house. Third or fourth would be the generalization: Parents are always there to rescue their kids who do foolish things around the house. Or something wittier like, Wise father puts out the son’s fire. First thought does not necessarily mean don’t correct at all, it just means that your model should be the interior form that you glimpse, rather than the superficial level of mind. If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”

With that final pronouncement the semester formally ends. There’s an awkwardness. No one knows what to do—everyone seems to be waiting for something else to happen. Finally someone calls out, “What about our paper, our poetry?”

“Oh yeah, yes,” Ginsberg answers loudly as though he had almost forgotten to collect them. “I’ll take them all now if you have them,” he says clearing a space on the edge of the cluttered desk for the proliferation of colored folders and slim sheaves of cream-colored paper. Students linger around the desk, hands extending books to be signed, notebooks to be autographed.

“Your name again?” Ginsberg asks with a hint of embarrassment, as he signs his name, then doodles inside the flyleaf, a sun and a crying hot dog. A few students dawdle, backs pressed up against the wall like they’re waiting to be asked to dance. Slowly the class filters out, and Ginsberg bundles up his books and papers. As he starts to shuffle out of class, one last student reaches out to touch his elbow.

***

Jessica Gross | Longreads | April 2015 | 18 minutes (4,597 words)

Lizzie Skurnick is a voracious writer, critic and, now, head of a young adult publishing imprint. She began her career as a poet, then wrote young adult novels, a longstanding litblog called “The Old Hag,” and a Jezebel column about YA books that became the memoir Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint of Ig Publishing that launched in 2013, republishes those very books: YA classics from the 1930s through the ‘80s, by writers including Sydney Taylor (my own childhood beacon), Norma Klein, and Lois Duncan.

I met Skurnick at her apartment in Jersey City, where she served me tea and sat across from me in an armchair. The occasion for our conversation was the publication of her new book, That Should Be a Word, a compendium of imaginative neologisms—like “smearch: Google someone in hopes of finding bad news”—drawn from her New York Times Magazine column of the same name. (Disclaimer: the column was published on the Times’ now-defunct “One-Page Magazine,” for which I also wrote.) We spoke for several hours, during which Skurnick jumped up repeatedly to show me family photographs or books she’d written or reprinted (or, at one point, to grab a water bottle that approximated the size of her son, Javier, when he was born). Our conversation ranged from how she goes about creating such inventive new words to what the current backlash against YA literature is all about.

How did your New York Times Magazine column come about?

It was actually a very happy circumstance and coincidence. They asked Maud Newton, who I’ve known since 2003, from our blogging days, “Would you like to do a column on word play?” She said no, but Lizzie Skurnick can do it! [Laughs] It was good, I could really do them—I think because I’m a rhyming poet and I’m always doing loser puns. They came very naturally. It’s not like I was sitting there and being like, “How do I write these words?”

What do you mean, they came naturally? Like a new word will pop into your head as you’re walking down the street?

Yes, I do what my mother always calls “submit the query,” which means I submit the query to my brain. And then in the meantime, it’s like warm-up stuff. I’ll look at rhymes for the word. I’ll look at related words and I’ll go through the thesaurus and I’ll do those rhyming things online. But that’s never the word. It’s never usually even related to the word, but it gets my brain juiced up. And then I take a walk and it usually comes on the walk or in the shower.

I remember when the first word, “smearch,” came to me. And it was in the shower after I’d been grumping around on words that didn’t work. Because there is always the obvious word. And then there’s always the Urban Dictionary word, like “hangry.” They must be the harmonics of our language; they’re the words that everybody comes up with, but in a good way—some natural pairing that we all can find. My words never intersected with Urban Dictionary’s.

I can see that your words and Urban Dictionary’s are different, but I can’t put my finger on exactly how.

Well, my words are not standard portmanteau. And they work visually far more than they work when you hear them. People sometimes like the ones that you hear better. I remember a lot of my friends liked “dramaneering,” because you hear drama and domineering at the same time and you know what it is. In terms of what the column is for—finding a word for a particular thing—it’s a very good word. But less so in terms of being word play, in terms of having seven words in it that all relate to it, like shades of the different words.

Can you pick a word like that and explain it to me?

“Brattle” is my favorite one of those. It means to talk too much about your children. Because it’s rattle and it’s battle, which parents do, and it’s brat and prattle. And rat, if you feel like…

If you’re in a really bad mood.

I did always call my son, when he came out—when babies come out they are like slimy rats. When you give birth you generally remember that moment. And they’re not big, they are only about this size [brandishes medium-sized water bottle]. They’re tiny. And they’re incredibly compressed, and they’re incredibly slimy. And you love them. But when they come out they really are this sponge thing, and they stay like that for a long time. The baby does its origami fold for a very long time.

How long?

Let’s see, how long is your baby origami? It’s a few months.

How did I not know this?

Can I do the position? What’s the position they’re in? [Folds self into a ball] Their legs are like this and their hands are origami somehow and their head is like that. That’s why you swaddle them at first. Javi didn’t like this, he didn’t need to be swaddled, but a lot of babies, when you take them out, they’re like, “Aaaah! I’m used to being swaddled!” Javi was like, “Enough, I don’t need to be swaddled, thanks very much.”

“Gestation was plenty.”

Exactly. But they have all sorts of weird, truly—he used to want to nurse, we would be sleeping and he would be in the bed, and all of a sudden I would hear “hehhhhhh hehhhhh,” like that guy on The Simpsons, Mr. Burns, and he would be edging himself over. He would crab himself over across the bed, like this. [Demonstrates]

That’s cute.

It was annoying, because I would be sleeping and I’d be like, “Ugh, is he crabbing over? He’s crabbing over.” But he was looking for the boob. So probably, when I wrote “brattle,” I was thinking “rat” a little bit. They’re cute as rats.

When you say that you “submit the query,” by the query, you mean the definition of the word?

Yes.

Do you always come up with that first?

Sort of. I’ll give you a good example. I’m starting to write the word column again, now for Dame Magazine, but it’s going to be more like what’s happening this week. And I want to write a word for this kind of public gaffe where you just say something racist and awful in a totally inappropriate setting, like Patricia Arquette or Lemony Snicket or Giuliani or Sean Penn or Guliana Rancic. There’s been this grouping of them. So I want to think of a word for when you say something totally bad and you didn’t mean it to come out that way. But then sometimes the word that comes out is in the neighborhood of the specific definition I’m looking for.

Do you still write poetry?

No. Someone once told me, “I think you’ve done it to leave it behind.” And it was totally true. All through my childhood, all through college—and I went to grad school for poetry—I was always writing poetry, I wrote it all the time. I wrote it in the car. I was a good poet, I won fancy fellowships, I went to Yaddo—it’s not like I was some bunk poet. But it just went away. I mean, maybe I just wrote it out. But I think the words are the poems I’m writing now.

Poems also sort of come automatically. They’re bolts from your subconscious. And that’s also the conceit of formal poetry. I went to Hopkins because it was a place for formal poetry and one of my teachers there, John Irwin, a wonderful poet, said the point of the poetical form is that concentrating on the form frees up your subconscious, that’s what it’s for. Which is the smartest thing ever. It gets you out of the way a hundred percent. A lot of people try to do formal poetry consciously and it’s forced and it’s awful. You have to trust that your brain will find the rhymes. So the words come much more like that. But poetry is a part of my life that’s gone. I don’t know why. Maybe it will return at some point, but I don’t think so.

Does anything not work like that? I feel like with most creative pursuits it’s only when you stop consciously trying to force it that it works.

Oh, yeah, with anything creative, you’ve got to get that conscious mind out of the way, it’s a disaster. And I think that’s why novels are a huge problem, because it’s so long to get your conscious mind out of the way. You have to do it for years and sink into it every day. For the words, it takes me two hours, or sometimes two minutes. But the funny thing about doing things subconsciously is that sometimes your subconscious is so creative and smart, and sometimes it just produces the most boring shit imaginable. There were a few words that I dumped for the book, like “flipocrite.” What does that even mean? That’s not an interesting word.

What does it mean?

It was supposed to mean someone who goes back and forth on an issue.

But that’s just a hypocrite.

I know! I know. People would come up to me about the column and be like, “Well, we can see the weeks where you’re struggling.” And I’m like, “Okay, you try to write a word a week!” And it’s actually not one word, it’s four words, because for the Times column, they each had the little sub-words, too. You had the main word and then those odd drill-downs in different directions—even more recondite things. So the book itself does that now. You have the main word, and then it branches out into related words.

You said “brattle” was your favorite word-play word. But do you have words that are just really close to your heart?

I do, I have a few. “Smearch” is close to my heart. My favorites are not always aligned with everyone else’s. Like “fidgital“—the world was obsessed with fidgital. I didn’t give a shit about that at all. I was sort of like, what? Or “povertunity.” Everyone was like, “That’s so clever!” I was like, “Yeah, kinda…” I’m surprised other people didn’t come up with that one, frankly. But sometimes the things I think are most clever are not other people’s favorites just because they’re not so into that it has seven words. I also love “skinjecture,” where you’re trying to see if someone has had plastic surgery or not. I love it because it has skin, inject, conjecture, sure…

Do you ever use these words in conversation?

No, never. I think I do variation in pitch more. Or I have a cockney that I speak in with one of my friends where—let’s say we’re saying, “That’s beyond.” That will become, “That’s Beyoncé,” which will become, “That is the leading solo artist of the year.” Or I call Javi, my son, “coffee and cream” because he’s always coughing, and that becomes “Mr. Coughie,” to “coffee and cream.” And, oh, in college—and I think this is a ridiculous talent, so I’m not saying this in a self-aggrandizing way—I would say something and people would be like, “That’s such an awesome metaphor, I’m writing it down.” In Javi’s music class, for a while he would do this thing where he would stand up and then just crash upon the floor with his hands because he thought it was fun, and I just said once, “He’s like a whale sounding.” His teacher is like, “I’ve never forgotten that thing you said, it was so accurate.” So in terms of how I talk, I’m much more likely to do something image-related.

Do you remember a really good metaphor from college that people liked?

I just remember this really pretentious girl was once like, “I love that, I’m writing it down.” And I was sort of like, “Well, I don’t want it absorbed into that pretention.”

“You don’t deserve this metaphor.” Well, when I was in college, people would compliment the salads that I made in the dining hall.

I think making salads is really hard. You know who has the best salads? Frankie’s, a restaurant in Brooklyn. I love that place. If I ever get married, I’ll get married there. But it’s very unlikely that I’m going to get married.

Because you’re not sure if you want to?

I don’t know, no. The form has not presented itself, so I don’t know whether I would want to get married. Who knew we were going to have this big philosophical conversation about the form? I don’t know what my subconscious would say if the form presented itself at all. But I do know that people asked me to marry them and I felt like, oh my God, I could not even fake it to the altar. I wouldn’t be able to fake it to even telling people. I wouldn’t be able to fake it through the invitations.

I am as in denial as anybody else about various things, but I don’t have denial about that thing. And it’s always interesting to me the people that do. You know, the people who get married and then get divorced immediately after? Or the people who leave right before the wedding? I’m always like, “How did you hold it together so long before that?”

I feel like some people, more than others, are really committed to their persona.

Totally. I mean, Jackie O—slightly different thing, but Jackie O was very upset when she realized twenty years later how upset she had been by the cheating and how bad a situation she had been put in with both of those men. But it wasn’t until she was with Maurice Tempelsman, who was her nice beau at the end, it wasn’t until then that she started doing her own thing. I mean, she was concerned with marrying the right person and being the First Lady and doing a good job at that. And she did, I think she took that job very responsibly and then it was later that she realized, those guys were not nice to me. And apparently the fact that she had not noticed that earlier was very upsetting to her.

Jane Fonda had a really similar path—I was just listening to an interview with her the other day.

You know, I was once in the elevator with Ted Turner [Fonda’s ex-husband] when I was working at the Time Warner Building for Book of the Month Club, which now doesn’t exist. I was always late, always terribly late. And I’m running in. And no one is late there. By 9 the lobby is empty. And so I think at 9:15 I am running in and there is an open elevator and I don’t look, the doors are closing and I just jump in there. I didn’t even hold open the doors, I just jumped. And then all of a sudden I looked to my left and my right and there are these big tall burly men, and they’re slightly laughing. And then the hair on the back of my neck prickled and I turned around there was Ted Turner. And he was just dying laughing. And he was two feet tall. He looked like he’d been left in the oven too long. Just brown, just like a little apple core.

Wow, that’s the best mental image I’ve had in a while.

See? I’m good at this. I don’t know why. Thank God they pay me for this.

So, to go back to your book: Do you think that English is worse at creating these kinds of words organically than German or Yiddish?

Well, German functions differently from Yiddish in that way. With German, they just pile on five other words. They just add to the cattle car. And Yiddish—I speak a little Yiddish, and the words aren’t onomatopoeia, but the sounds convey an opinion of what the word is about. There is no way a putz is good, there’s no way a schmuck is good, there’s no way a shiksa is good. In German they don’t do word play, they do true portmanteau. They just continue adding the modifier to the word. They’re a very literal people. I want to say something nice about Germans but I’m not going to. But Yiddish is a more playful language.

I was looking back at pictures of myself when I was 12, when I was very, very thin. And I remember my grandma at that time saying very approvingly—and my grandmother hated fat people—”Oh, zaftig.” And I said, “zaftig means fat!” She goes, “It doesn’t mean fat, it means strong.” And very angrily at me. By which I think she meant I was strong now. I was talking about it with my family recently and my dad said that when we say zaftig here we use it as a metaphor for fat. That’s all we do. It just means a chubby girl. It means someone who should lose forty pounds. And my father was like, no, no, no. That’s not zaftig. It means a big woman with a big chest and a great ass. It’s like Queen Latifah when she’s thin but more Amazonian. Or if Michelle Obama had a big rack and even had more musculature. It’s a big, attractive, well-molded lady. But it has a very sexual connotation, my dad said. It’s something men would say. And everybody, my Jewish cousins, all the women were disagreeing. They’re saying it means pillowy, soft. So then eventually we figure out that zaftig means juicy. That’s really what it means. It’s not about fat or thin. It’s about, do you want to grab this person’s ass? There is a magisterial presence that a zaftig person—that’s how you have to say it, zaftig, like it’s powerful. Finally, I realized that my grandma was saying that I was becoming a woman. That’s what she meant. And I was so glad to finally fucking figure that out. So Yiddish is like this in that it has very specific meanings.

So your dad is Jewish, and your mom is black, right?

Yeah, my mom is black and Catholic, although lapsed. Here, I’ll show you a picture of my family. This is when we were younger. And here is one of me with Javi, my mom, my brother and his wife, my dad, and my aunts and nephews.

Aw, Javi is so cute. He’s one?

He’s fifteen months. He is a cute child. And he is from donor sperm. His donor dad, his sperm dad, is Mexican and Colombian and Italian.

Did you want to have a mixed race child?

No. This is what was so strange. I was very, very worried. I was kind of like, I can’t pick black, I can’t pick white, I can’t choose.

Because that would be choosing a parent’s side?

Yes, and also choosing a racial side for myself. And then here was a donor I liked for totally different reasons—and then when I looked down, I thought, “Oh, I never even thought of this, another mixed race person like me.” I was always thinking I would have to choose.

You’ve said that you were drawn to both Jewish-themed and black-themed YA books as a kid, but the books that you’re republishing through Lizzie Skurnick Books seem to be more often Jewish than black in theme. Is that true?

There are more Jewish books because there were more Jewish YA writers than black writers at that time who were published. We’ve published a few, but there’s not a ton of black YA from that time. If there were more, I would publish more.

Based on what I’ve read, it seems that you are really peeved when people say that you’re republishing these books from your childhood as a nostalgic thing.

Yeah.

Why would that be so bad?

Because to only want things out of nostalgia implies that the thing is important because of a time in your life, not because of the thing itself, which is why you might be nostalgic for pop rocks as a 42-year-old. Nostalgia is really about me. But bringing something back, reissuing, is really about the work and the canon. I’m not nostalgic about these books at all. And none of the readers really are, either. I don’t like the nostalgia title because it automatically assumes you wouldn’t have liked it for any other reason.

It seems like it hasn’t been all that challenging to get writers to agree to your reprinting their books.

Oh, it’s never challenging to get a writer to publish something that they wrote that is out of print. If you call up the most famous writer in the world, which many of my writers are, and you say, “I’d like to reprint this book,” they say, “Great, send me the check.” But if you call up an heir, it’s more difficult—they’re like, “Oh, the memory of my parents, we don’t know what choice, we want it to be respectful of their memory.”

Can you talk about the design of these books? They’re beautiful.

It’s all Eric Gordon. He designed “The Old Hag,” my blog, and we worked together for years and years, and then when this came up, I was like, Eric’s got to do it.

In an interview on LSB’s website, Eric described how the covers are meant to evoke old library books, with the colored spine and the LSB seal and the type, which could kind of fit into any decade.

The covers are meant to appeal to nostalgia. You look at them and you know what period the books are from but you also know that they are a reprint, and that they’re being treated seriously. You know a lot of things about this series just from looking at the cover. It’s amazing that he was able to do that.

Can you talk a bit about when YA, as a genre, came into being?

You could put it at Little Women. Obviously you have the Nancy Drews, and then you have these books like Sounder—classic adventure stories. Then you have things like The Bell Jar or I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. All these precursors to YA are written with an adult consciousness. Even though they’re from the point of view of a teen, the plots are complex, and they take teenagerhood with as complex a mental state as Alice Munro does. I very rarely see that in YA today, which is unfortunate. That’s why I’ve tried to bring back that period of YA, which I love. But I am actually not super familiar with the YA today. It has its own gestalt and its own value and complexity. Anyway, back then, these books were considered YA, but there was no YA juggernaut. There was no sense of teens as this major purchaser of really anything, to say nothing of books in particular. And I do think the internet has influenced that.

There is a line of thought that YA, as a genre, lacks complexity, that the characters are simple and the books solely plot-driven, which makes me bristle.

It seems that you get this kind of thing with all genres, and YA is the current focus. It used to be, “Are mysteries literature? Is a thriller literature? Is sci-fi really a book?” And it’s basically just insecurity. There was an episode of Top Chef where one chef tasted McDonald’s and said, “This has great umami, I really respect how they got this flavor out of that.” And I thought, you know, the same goes for writing. Writing is writing and art is art and you want to read it all. It doesn’t mean that you don’t draw distinctions between authors and their artistry, but I think art has much more to do with: Did the writer accomplish what they were intending to, and does this work evoke a feeling and do its job? If you don’t respect how you just cannot fucking put down a Stephen King novel, then you’re a lunatic. That’s a skill; that’s part of storytelling.

Here’s the thing: I certainly think it’s all art and anyone who doesn’t want to know how different kinds of art work is not a true chef. That doesn’t make any sense to me. It means you’re not actually interested in books. Certainly, some artists are greater artists. No one is denying that. But you’re just stupid if you don’t want to assess the points of value in every field and how well an author has distinguished themselves in his or her field or even what the hell they’re doing, how they function.

I love that McDonald’s umami analogy. That’s perfect.

See? I’m good at this. And then you have the people who are like, “I would never eat McDonald’s.” And it’s like, well, you’re not really interested in food then, because most of the world eats McDonald’s and there is a reason for that. There’s a reason.

I would be ashamed to write a piece in which I admitted I hadn’t read something. As a book critic, you’re knocking over your own bucket of milk, you know? I would be ashamed or I would stop calling myself a critic. You’re not a critic if you don’t fucking read the stuff, if you don’t know anything about it. Our entire conversation has been about acclimating oneself to the form, and I think maybe that’s the question: why don’t you want to acclimate yourself to YA? You’ve never even read it.

* * *

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Steven Church | Ultrasonic: Essays | 2014 | 15 minutes (3,655 words)

Imagine this: It’s early in the morning at the Graceland estate, well before dawn on August 16, 1977, just a few hours before the end, and the crickets and cicadas are thrumming in the Memphis heat. The sun is on the rise somewhere in the east, but the light hasn’t yet reached this place. In the distance a small dog barks sharp, rhythmically, and steady. A siren wails and fades. All else is quiet, all except for the strange noise emanating from an outbuilding behind the main house. It’s a cacophonous noise. Unexpected. So you creep up closer. Tiptoeing now like a trespasser, a voyeur into the past. You shouldn’t be here at all. Yet in this lucid dream you press your ear against the locked door and listen, straining to catch the strands of a voice. The voice. His voice. Perhaps you’re hoping that he might be playing a guitar, jamming with his band. But instead you hear unexpected but familiar noise. You hear the sound of a different kind of playing. It’s the squeaking of shoes on hardwood, the pop and twang of a blue rubber ball rocketing off simulated catgut, followed by the resonant crack of it against a wall; and a different sort of music, that telltale pop and pong ringing out as the ball smacks off the back glass. You linger a while, listening to the high-pitched slap of a well-hit shot, and a short volley of forehand smashes going off like firecrackers. Boom, boom, boom. And laughter. Lots of laughter. Because Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll is playing racquetball. And the King loves racquetball. You know this game but not this side of Elvis, not this part of the story. This is your game, your father’s game, a game of noise and speed. And more than anything you wish you could push the door open on that night and join the play.

* * *

Early that August morning, just hours before he died, Elvis Aaron Presley played his last game of racquetball. Wracked with insomnia once again he’d summoned his friends for a game. He’d asked for his favorite racquet, Red Guitar (named such because of the red guitar silhouette painted on the strings); and he asked his best friend, cousin Billy Smith and Billy’s wife to join him and his girlfriend, Ginger for a game.

It’s hard to say for sure what exactly drew Elvis to the court that fateful night or what drew him to the game in the first place. Perhaps like me in my late thirties and early forties when I took up the game again, Elvis was seeking an escape. I like to think he too craved the smash and slam of a simple blue ball, and the way it lets you forget the sludge of life. It is addictive. This leaving. This racquet play. This sideways step into music and sport. Because when the game is good like a hit song, the court takes all the competing noise of the world, all the pressures and pain, and it absorbs them, shatters them and drowns them out in a cleansing blue noise. Every game is a dither, a rattle to your gauges.

Maybe Elvis appreciated such shaking, or maybe he just wanted a good laugh or a good rush before he died. Maybe he just figured all that exercise would help him sleep finally. Elvis had taken up the game after his wife Priscilla left him for her Tae Kwon Do instructor. My own therapist suggested that I take up some regular exercise to help with anxiety and depression. Racquetball, she assured me, would make me happier; and I have to admit that she may have been on to something.

Regardless of the reasons behind Elvis’s final request, it was hard to say no to the King, even at such an ungodly hour. His friends indulged him in a few games and afterward lounged around in the adjacent piano bar for a while. Elvis is said to have sang the last two songs of his life at this piano. Most experts seem to agree that those songs were “Unchained Melody” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” After he finished, Elvis said goodnight to his friends. Feeling tired, he showered and changed out of his workout clothes, choosing a pair of comfortable pajamas. He crawled into bed next to Ginger and sat up reading a book titled A Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus by Frank O Adams.

When Ginger rolled over in bed a while later and cracked an eye, reaching a hand out to Elvis, he was still awake, still reading the Adams book. He told her he was going to the bathroom. Then Elvis got up, the book still clutched in his hand, and Ginger went back to sleep. She would never see Elvis alive again. They found the book on the floor of the bathroom next to his body.

Elvis died reading on the toilet—or at least he died very near the toilet. But according to most sources he died not from the 14 different drugs found in his system but from a fatal arrhythmia, a heart attack; and when I’ve told people that Elvis played racquetball just a short time before he died, many have wondered if racquetball killed Elvis. They wondered if the activity was too much for his addled heart. Mostly I think his death sounds so normal, so ordinary in many ways. He died of a heart attack while reading on the toilet. It could happen to any one of us.

Perhaps Elvis was taken down by the rhythm of racquetball, by a messed up beat or thump or bang in his heart brought on by the noisy ruckus of the game, or by the physical exertion of chasing that blue ball around the court. But I don’t know about any of that, don’t know the medical probabilities and don’t really care. I don’t care if racquetball killed Elvis. Because I’m pretty sure the game also let him live a little longer and a little fuller, if only for a couple of hours.

* * *

By most accounts, Elvis wasn’t terribly good at racquetball. This did not, however, stop him from having his own court built at Graceland shortly after learning the game from the son of his trusted physician, Dr. Nick (George Nichopoulos), a figure just as controversial in many ways as Michael Jackson’s notorious drug-dispensing doctor. But in addition to feeding him a steady diet of prescription narcotics, Dr. Nick was also, paradoxically, someone who’d been able to get Elvis to exercise.

Just as he was contributing to Elvis’s decline he was also undoubtedly prolonging his life. You can’t help getting exercise when you play racquetball, and it’s so fun you hardly notice. The game, even played somewhat halfheartedly, is an incredible workout, combining both cardiovascular and strength training; and probably thanks in large part to Dr. Nick’s prescribed activity, Elvis lost over 20 pounds and may have staved off all-out organ failure for at least a few months near the end of his life. If others are right about the ameliorative effects of regular exercise, it seems clear that the game probably also made the King a little happier.

Racquetball was also social for Elvis, something he shared with his most trusted friends, his posse of family and others known to many as the Memphis Mafia. Along with a love of fireworks and booze, guns, and nice cars, the group also apparently bonded over an appreciation for racquetball. Though the stories seem apocryphal, The King and his crew apparently played regularly around Memphis in the late ’70s. Stories tell of the whole gang showing up en masse at a racquetball club for some fun, followed shortly thereafter by a crush of nearly hysterical fans; and at least part of Elvis’s desire to build his own court at Graceland was due to the public spectacle he and the Mafia caused at such racquetball outings.

Elvis was also said to harbor dreams of building racquetball complexes across the country; and though the Elvis Presley Racquetball and Swim Club, the King’s Courts, or any other Elvis-inspired fitness center that I can dream up never actually materialized, the vision of private, urban, “everyman’s” fitness centers was a dream that would eventually come to fruition in many ways, much of it centered around music city, Memphis, Tennessee, where until 2010, the U.S. National Racquetball championships were held for fourteen consecutive years.

* * *

The truth is I’m more interested in Elvis’s interest in racquetball than I am in the sensational details of his death. I want to take a scalpel to all the details of the Elvis legend that don’t matter so much to me. I want to cut away his troubled personal life, his rocky relationship with Priscilla and other women, or his rumored impotence and paranoia at the end, even his supposed tiff with his girlfriend, Ginger on the night he died. I can appreciate the stories of him giving away Cadillacs and playing with fireworks, but I have to admit that I’m only mildly interested in his music, appreciative of the early work and the occasional sing-along to “Viva Las Vegas” on a road trip. But I want to ignore the long list of drugs in his system when he died. I don’t care whether he died on the toilet or next to the toilet or in front of the toilet, or whether his pajama pants were down or not, in part because I find such discussions humiliating and rather pointless, but also because in death we are all humiliated. Metaphorically speaking, every death is an intimate experience and many of us die with our pants down, vulnerable, face first on the floor in front of the toilet. Hopefully we’re reading better books than Elvis.

What I really care about is Elvis’s decision, just hours before his death, to play racquetball, a game that I love for many reasons, a game I can’t stop thinking about. This means something, I’m sure. This small slice of shared experience. This common space between us, a racquetball court, was the last place Elvis played and, thus, perhaps the last place he was truly alive in his body. Or at least that’s what I like to believe. Though it’s often overlooked, a side note to the more the salacious stories of that evening—such as Elvis going out at midnight for a dentist appointment, wearing a DEA jumpsuit, downing pre-packaged baggies of pills—the King’s choice to play racquetball with his friends intrigues me more than just about any other detail of his life or death.

* * *

Much like rock ‘n’ roll, racquetball is a hybrid invention created and marketed in the ’50s in the United States by a few visionary individuals. Though he didn’t give it its current name, Joe Sobek in Greenwich, Connecticut is widely credited as the inventor and marketer of the game as we know it. Sobek’s goal was to create a faster, easier sport that combined elements of both handball and squash. Handball was hard on the body and squash was hard to master. Racquetball, a uniquely American amalgam of the two, became an instant hit in the YMCA where Sobek worked and at JCC’s (Jewish Community Centers) and other urban gyms across the country.

Racquetball and squash, though related, have very different personalities. In squash there are rules about where on the wall you can hit a shot, what walls you have to hit first, and what walls you can’t hit first. My dad, who had taken up squash later in life, tried to explain the rules to me once and I became as confused as I did when he tried to teach me how to play cribbage.

Racquetball is different. The rules are easy to master because there are relatively few of them. In racquetball every wall is in play. Everything’s fair game. More significantly, however, is the existence in racquetball of the “kill shot.” This shot is the ultimate expression of power and skill. The “kill shot” is an un-returnable shot that hits low on the wall, sometimes right at the crack where wall meets floor, and then dribbles out, impossible to return, effectively “killing” the ball’s momentum and the opponents chances. Racquetball racquets are rated according to their “kill shot power,” and much of the game strategy is focused on setting oneself up for the shot.

In squash there is no kill shot. They are forbidden by the rules of the game. This difference alone defines much of the difference between the two games. To put it in other terms, squash is a strategic dance, a game of finesse and strength, like a waltz competition with a partner. Racquetball is more like competitive slam dancing to speed metal with your opponent. It’s a game that emphasizes individualism, power and force, speed and aggression. The sport is as quintessentially American as rock ‘n’ roll, apple pie, monster trucks . . . and Elvis.

* * *

Elvis played racquetball with his friends, but it’s not clear if his posse really enjoyed the game or just enjoyed being around Elvis. Sport, even causally enjoyed amongst friends can be a test, a tug at the bonds that define your relationship and your identity. We’ve all had those experiences where fun suddenly turns competitive, where one guy takes a game too seriously and the whole dynamic shifts. That guy was usually me.

Elvis was 42 when he started playing the game in the wake of a separation and divorce. I was in my early 40’s when I started playing racquetball again, perhaps as a kind of escape or therapeutic response to my own issues. I played in spurts of activity when I had the time or when I could find someone who would play with me. I wasn’t far from being the crafty old guy at the gym. I have bad knees, at least one messed up shoulder, and I’m Sasquatch-slow. But if there’s a positive, it’s that I’m blessed with simian-like arms and a decent understanding of how that frantic blue ball bounces and moves through space.

I’ve also come to understand the importance of patience. In racquetball, you have to let the ball come to you. You have to watch the ball and not crowd it. You can’t impose your will upon the ball because it will not bounce to your wishes. You can spend all game chasing that thing into corners and it will always move faster than you, always bounce in ways you can’t predict.

If we’re to trust the stories, Elvis’s final game of racquetball wasn’t the display of physical artistry I like to imagine, but instead quickly deteriorated into a free-for-all game of dodgeball where Elvis hit balls at his friends and girlfriend, Ginger, laughing at their discomfort like some kind of bully. It’s possible tempers flared and a racket or two was thrown.

This troubles me. It suggests to me that the game didn’t mean to Elvis what I want it to mean, that racquetball was just something to do, something to help him sleep, or worse a way for him to feel powerful again. Fans and biographers seem, however, to worry more over what songs he sung at the piano bar or what he said to Billy or Ginger or anyone else that night; or they worry about the list of drugs he ingested, the clothes he wore, the book he was reading. Few people seem to worry as much about the King and his racquetball court, this temple of noise and energy, and how he played his last game. Part of me wants to rescue the King from that image of a bully or buffoon on the court. I want to believe he was better than the stories.

* * *

Now imagine this possibility: It’s late at night and the moon is so fat it might croak. You’re back again at the Graceland of your imagination. Listening. Trespassing in the past because such journeys are relatively easy for you, perhaps because up to this point you’ve engaged with Elvis mostly as a pop-culture construct, a caricature only amplified by the other sensation details of the night he died; and because such constructs are malleable as clay, you know you can shape them into your own solipsistic idea, can make them better or at least make them your own in some way. So let’s pretend it’s maybe a day or two before the King kicks the bucket, well outside the penumbra of the spotlight on August 16. Elvis is up again, unable to sleep, and he’s playing to relax and playing for fun. Perhaps this time you’ve found your way inside the court. Perhaps you’ve moved beyond the glass that separates the two of you. Elvis swings at a bouncing blue ball. He’s wearing a white tracksuit with yellow piping and blue stripes stretching down the sleeves and legs. He’s wearing a headband and swinging his Red Guitar racquet. He’s laughing at you in your baggy shorts and your wristbands. You’re playing racquetball with the King, if only for a serve or two.

Though it’s hard for him to hit them with any regularity, Elvis clearly appreciates the focus and precision of a kill shot, hit low to the floor, and the music and geometry of the long, looping shots that strike high and pinball around the upper walls. Sometimes when he can’t get to a shot to return it, he’ll just watch the ball bounce, tracking it like a bird-dog, listening to the sound of it. This is something the two of you can share, this appreciation for the noise and movement of the game.

Elvis smiles a lot when he’s on the court, clearly soothed by the squeak, squeak lullaby of shoes on the hardwood, a slam of soles, even the visceral grunts and barks, the hip crashes against the walls. You can see that Elvis loves the noise of the game just like you do, loves the bwong-snap of a forehand smash, the artillery-like racket of sound, and that special trick of physics that lets you hear the ball hit the wall a split second after you see it.

He’s big enough to seem like a bully but that’s not how Elvis carries himself in his court, not on this night. You don’t want to infantilize him but there is something distinctly childlike and unselfconscious about Elvis in this space. He’s playing, really playing, and perhaps he enjoys your failures a bit too much. Perhaps he laughs when you swing and miss. Maybe he tries to hit you with the ball a couple of times just for kicks. But he’s jamming right along, making some noise with you. He’s not great and wouldn’t have lasted long in a real game with your dad or even with you if you were playing hard; and part of you wants to give him some tips, to teach Elvis a couple of things about the game. You want to talk about patience and focus. You want to talk about discipline and kill shots. You want to save him through the game. And still he’s out there, alive and running around, swinging his Red Guitar and having fun. You can hear his shoes squeaking on the wood. You can hear it all, especially the way the acoustics of the court seem to rescue his voice from the excesses of his life; it booms deep and resonant and new again, and you think you could listen to him play all night long.

* * *

I don’t want to believe that racquetball matters to his legacy simply because it was the King’s last game, just something he did, and important only because it preceded the last songs he sang.

For the sake of argument let’s suppose that in the hours before he died, Elvis choose to play hard and play fair, to compete and try to win, or at least to enjoy a good jam session on the court amongst friends. Let’s assume he chose to surrender some part of himself to the game of racquetball, to let go of his inhibitions and really just play; and let’s imagine that Elvis was at least capable of hitting the ball really hard, if not equally capable of a decent serve. Even if that last game didn’t work out perfectly, does such an image of Elvis change the story of that night? Does his last game, however it was played, make the King’s last breath more or less tragic?

I don’t know. But I do know that for me this fact, his choice, makes the story of that night much more interesting, much deeper and more complicated. The simple fact—Elvis played racquetball shortly before he died—somehow makes him less of a caricature, less pop culture construct, and more real, more honest and human. The choice to play is perhaps more noble and humble than at first it seems, and more complicated than many other choices Elvis made that night. The choice to play is a choice to survive, to thrive and feel the noise of the game.

Though I’ve never visited Graceland and must admit to not feeling a great desire to do so, I would like to see the racquetball court—or what’s left of it. Apparently the King’s court was long ago converted into a museum display of his gold and platinum records. You can’t rent a racquet and ball and hit some shots on the King’s Court. But I suppose a display case could be considered a fitting use for the space. In my imagination it is a kind of temple to the playful creative King, to the inventive, imaginative, and improvisational Elvis, and I like to think I could stand there, surrounded by his records, and hear the ghost noise of his last game still echoing off the walls.

* * *

From the book Ultrasonic: Essays, by Steven Church.

Amelia Gray | Gutshot, Tin House | December 2012 | 15 minutes (3,719 words)

We’re thrilled to share a short story by Amelia Gray, from her new collection, Gutshot. “House Heart” was published in the December 2012 issue of Tin House, and it was our Longreads Member Pick in 2013. Here’s more from Tin House assistant editor Emma Komlos-Hrobsky:

“In Amelia Gray’s ‘House Heart,’ a couple entraps a young woman in their ventilation system in a game equal parts erotic and perverse. ‘We all had our individual function,’ says Gray’s narrator, ‘and hers was to be the life of the house.’ Gray’s own writing does similar eerie work in animating uncomfortable, secret, interior spaces. Something strange and dark and distinctly human moves just beneath the cool deadpan of her authorial voice. I love this story for its wryness and subtlety, but most especially for its willingness to take me where I don’t want to go.”

* * *

The home remains. Even if the house were razed, the foundation scored and broken and the pieces carried away, a spiritual outline of the home in which people cooked dinner or lay down exhausted or looked out the window at the garbage truck rumbling down the road would persist. The story of our home is the story of a city’s shift from industry. The space was once the preparation wing of a garment factory, the room in which material was cooked with chemicals to change its color and character. We found this information in a reference book. Hints to the room’s previous function can be found in the scars on the concrete where machines were once bolted and an industrial ventilation system thick like an artery across the high, open ceiling, feeding veins of air to each white-walled room. The larger warehouse has since been destroyed and replaced with stinking-new lofts, but our home remains as a testament to utility.

My partner and I have lived in this house for many years, though we see ourselves as temporary residents of the space and of the land beneath it. We believe in leaving no trace when we are gone. We bring our own containers to the grocery and our clothes dry in the sun. We are very interested in hemp products. Every object has a purpose, but with care and attention, one can find multiple purposes, a range of functions found in reuse. Once, my partner brought me an old child’s tricycle, the rubber wheels hardened with age, and I scrubbed the rust away and attached a cage to the front handles and turned it into a planter.

It was my idea to purchase the girl. I had decided that would be a fine way to pass an afternoon and my partner agreed. He called a service and asked the receptionist if their business practices included the concept of fair trade. He said it was important to him as a consumer to have a sense of the origin of the products he used. He told her he realized that it was an issue of privilege, but that the least he could do was to utilize his privilege in a way that might benefit others, even in some small way.

The girl came over the next morning. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and rang the bell twice while we took turns admiring her from the peephole. Her hair was blond and ironed straight and she was falsely tanned. She glanced at something written in a pink notebook and took a step back to look up and down the street, shading her eyes with her hand. While we watched her, my partner asked me if we could educate her on the physical dangers of using chemically bleaching products and I said No, none of that.

The girl pounded on our door with her little fist, leaning in so close that we could see her eyes, pale and clear, the sclera like water in a bowl. She looked surprised, shocked even, when my partner unlocked the door and we were both standing there, smiling at her, but she entered our home anyway and put down her notebook and her purse. She said she had just come from class and I asked her what class she was taking and she told me and I said Ah, yes. Her fingers were manicured with a pink polish. She smelled like a bowl of sugar that had been sprayed with disinfectant. She told us her name; even her name sounded processed. My partner held the girl’s shoulders and told her that he was happy she had come. She started to say something but he embraced her and she frowned and put her tanned arms across his back and said Okay, okay. We were all a little nervous.

My partner suggested that the girl change into something comfortable. We led her to the bathroom and she stripped naked before us and we anointed her with oil while she stood on the bath mat. Her muscles were tense under my hands, but I rubbed her feet and legs and back and she began to relax. There seemed to be a thin layer of glowing light just under her skin.

The oil was a jojoba blend to which I had added fresh sage and rosemary. The power in our hands inspired her to relax. I began to feel calmer as well, and was able to hear more of the conversation my partner was having with the girl. He led us all to the hallway and the air-conditioner intake duct. I gave him a screwdriver and he began to remove the duct’s grate. He handed me each small screw and I held them in a cupped palm. He was asking the girl what her goals were and she said that she would like to be a medical assistant and he said that becoming a medical assistant was very much like playing House Heart with someone you trust and she said that she didn’t understand. She stood between us with her arms crossed over her breasts, each hand holding an opposite shoulder. She shivered though it was quite warm. Her skin glistened and the oil made a small pool around her feet. I held her hips and kissed her face and tried to tell her a joke about an elevator repairman but she didn’t laugh. She asked what we were doing in the hallway and I told her that my partner and I have a game we like to play called House Heart and it’s a special game to us, very special, but we had never had a chance to share it with someone else and that was a big goal for us as a couple, and it would mean so much for us to meet that goal. She asked a few obvious questions and was taking a few hesitant steps away, but my partner was prying the grate from its spot and so I hushed the girl and patted her round bottom.

Because our home is a converted industrial space, the duct area is large enough for a crouching man to spend a few productive hours. There would be plenty of space for our small girl. When we kissed her and coaxed her in, she barely had to crouch to get inside and then stood comfortably. There was no room to sit. Her feet were bare, but I had swept out the floor’s grime many times before, and that morning had scrubbed the floor with a vinegar-soaked rag. When my partner started to replace the grate, she made a whine of protest, but we explained that it would help us complete the game, and that we would be so pleased if she would help us finally achieve our goal as a couple, a romantic goal for which she would be well compensated, and finally she was silent and the grate was replaced. I handed my partner the tiny screws quickly and in silence.

For a while, nothing happened. My partner and I stood facing the grate, holding hands. The girl was quiet as well, though after a few minutes we heard her scraping around, feeling the boundaries with her feet and hands. My partner told her that she would find another duct at her head and one at her feet. Those main arterial ducts would branch into smaller openings that would lead to different rooms. One would end up in a vent over the kitchen and another would terminate in the living room, one near the chandelier in the dining room and the other three in the bathroom, bedroom, and office. She would be able to hear us speaking to her at different points of the ductwork, thanks to the happy accidents of design that allow for echoes. In a small voice, the girl asked if we could maybe just let her out, but my partner shushed her and I fed a few dollars through the grate. The money stayed there for a moment before it vanished and we heard her folding it on the other side.

She was crying softly. My partner knocked on the grate and told her to calm herself, that she would earn five times the amount of money than if she had made love to us in a traditional way. He said there was no danger to playing House Heart, that there was a secret way out of the maze if she could find it. Her noises became more frantic as she felt along the corridor.

* * *

We heard her clamber up to the high duct, finding a place for her bare feet in the metal’s niches. I put my eye to the grate and saw her legs dangling before they vanished upward. She stopped crying after a while, the effort of movement distracting her enough to focus on her task. My partner held my hips and we did it right there in the hallway. We licked each other’s faces. We could hear the girl crawling through the vein above us, looking for a way out. At that moment, she was learning that she could crawl on her hands and knees in the main duct, and in the smaller ducts, she would have to slide on her belly, pulling herself forward blindly, arms outstretched. At the system’s narrowest points, the metal would surround and press her body from all angles.

After we were done in the hallway, my partner and I retired to the bed, where he rubbed the oil into my body. He rolled out of bed, arranged a stepladder under the vent, and stretched up to feed money through the slats, folding it so it would stay. He knocked on the grate so she would know there was some activity there. After a few minutes, the money disappeared and we heard her moving backward, her thin body shaking with adrenaline and making the metal shudder above us. I dipped my head down onto my partner’s genital, savoring the girl’s energy as I worked.

* * *

My partner left for work and I practiced with my doors. As I opened and closed the bathroom door, I wondered idly if the girl above had a boyfriend who would be worried about her. She might even be thinking of him at that moment, willing him to take to the streets, to search for her. I knew there would be no value in her fantasies.

For me, no real romantic bond materialized until I began to accept love in a more practical sense. In past relationships, my brain had been diseased with fantasy. I would imagine a shared future, one in which my partner cradled a little boy. My invasive mind settled comfortably into a corner chair, a voyeur into a manifestation. The child so resembled his father in this fantasy that I saw the two of them as a paired image representing the man at varied stages of his life. They were stages of my partner’s life in which it made no sense for me to be present. Of course, the reality of the relationship would ruin the fantasy of it, but I had ruined it from the start by act of the fantasy itself.

True happiness came when I left those dreams behind. Within each moment, I found a struggle to be fully unattached to the past or the future. I needed not only to exist at a point on a vector but also to destroy the vector and inhabit that solitary point, akin to living inside a meteor without knowledge of its movement. Obviously it took some time to gain this ability, but eventually, it was possible to disengage. The image of the fantasy growing old vanished into a haze. Daily tasks were more difficult, but with practice and attention, I couldn’t picture my partner sitting at work or driving a car. I have gotten to the point where I cannot quite describe what he looks like when he has left the room.

With thoughts of him erased from my mind, I became free to attend to my daily practice. After he leaves for work, I throw open the bedroom door and declare what a fine day it is, how the sun is glinting so kindly off available glinting things. Opening the door to the pantry, I speak of the green lawn. I hold my palm up in the bedroom closet and note that it is about to rain. In this way, I have repurposed the home and found new utility in its rooms.

* * *

The girl slept up there each night, turning over every few hours. There was no space for her to curl her legs up to her chest. In the morning, we heard her noises change as she lifted her elbows and slid on her belly. My partner rolled atop me and whispered that the girl was trusting the surfaces she was coming to know. It was very exciting for him, which made it very exciting for me.

He left for work and I opened and closed the pantry door before putting on water for tea. I could hear the girl slide above me in the kitchen. She stopped with her face above the vent. I could feel her eyes on me. She said Could you let me out of here? I told her that the world that had been created for her was out of my control. She said that wasn’t true, that if I could call an authority, everything would be solved.

I wanted to cut the duct open with a knife and plunge that knife into her heart. Instead, I pointed out that she had made all the choices that brought her to that moment, that if she had been forced to do anything in her life, it had not been in our presence and we could not be held accountable. As I spoke, a drop of liquid landed on my shoulder. I told her she would be generously compensated for her lost time. Another drip landed on the stove. She confessed that she wanted to be let out because she didn’t know where to urinate. Pee, she said. Without another word to her, I took my tea into the living room. I was annoyed at her for cheapening our transaction. She banged away for a while but lost interest after a while. A few hours passed and I cleaned the mess up from where it had landed on the kitchen floor.

From then on, the girl made waste in that portion of the duct and we couldn’t convince her otherwise, even when my partner did his best to startle her as she did it. We suspected it was her small idea of insurrection. As he pounded the duct with a broom handle, my partner shouted that she was lucky to be where she was, that the world was a terrifying place for anyone and particularly terrifying for a girl like her, and that when she toughened her softer parts and grew out some more of the hair on her body, she could come out and live with us in strength and power. She continued her daily protest. Without a word to me about it, he rigged up a tarp and bucket under the vent in the kitchen.

* * *

We were sleeping late one morning when the girl began to knock on the duct. The knocking sound grew louder and she cried out without words. My partner got out of bed and left the room for some time. When he returned he spoke to her, saying he had opened the vent over the office and left an expensive watch inside. She stopped knocking and slid away.

It was his father’s watch, I knew. His father was a company man who worked all his life to afford a house for his family. He never cared much for the size of his carbon footprint and would drive the family across the country every few months to observe the passing seasons. They watched turning leaves and local rock formations and various beaches. My partner’s father snapped a picture, then herded the family back into the car. He drank gas station coffee from Styrofoam cups and when he finished the coffee, he would bite into the cup itself, chewing it thoughtfully, usually eating the whole thing before the next destination. On one of his later birthdays, he bought himself a fine watch and enjoyed it for a few years before he died. It was one of those things that my partner had long wanted to get rid of without knowing exactly why.

A scraping noise from the far side of the house meant that the girl had found the watch. I imagined her spreading her fistfuls of cash in front of her, slipping the watch over her thin wrist and tucking the singles into its silver band.

* * *

I could hear her crawling above the bathroom while I washed my hair in the morning. She said she had heard the water running and asked if she could come down for a quick soap scrub. I responded that we use only baking soda and white vinegar to bathe and that I could make her a cup with which to wash in the duct if she liked. She declined but was polite about it. She had become more polite as the days wore on. I suspected she had created a fantasy of winning me over to her side through feminine duplicity.

While she was over the kitchen, I dragged the stepladder into the office and climbed up with a ham sandwich and a handful of radishes from the local harvest box. I said that lunch was served if she could find it and that I had opened a window so she could have a little air. I liked her, this other girl, but I would not be fooled.

* * *

The girl created a method by which she could live with relative order. A few times a day, she would crawl into the standing-room area where she had first entered the system, finding the footholds and lowering herself into the space. She could store her money and empty dishes there, or stand and stretch her legs. A scraping sound when she crawled suggested she was wearing the watch around her wrist or ankle. I discovered her routine while opening and closing the bathroom door, which stood next to the entry portal to the system. My continued practice against fantasy was making it harder to imagine what green grass would look like up close. My best image was of a sea of green like what one finds in a stagnant pond, but this image was fading along with my knowledge of ponds. The work was to convince myself that this was an improvement. The girl and I did not speak to each other most days, and after a while, I noted that the girl had quit speaking entirely. It was a welcome discovery.

My partner arrived home with groceries, and I put them away in their proper places. I fixed dinner and climbed the stepladder to serve the girl after we had eaten our share. Playing her part in the game, the girl ate quickly and then crawled to the standing-room area to store her dish. We all had our individual function and hers was to be the life inside the house, which had begun to smell like a hot scalp.

The girl started her period and a few drops of blood fell onto the floor by our bed. With that action, the ductwork veins of the house became actual veins pushing life through every room. The veins began to expand and contract and the house itself could breathe. Every room of our home was replete with veins.

I felt concerned about the girl’s silence and brought it up to my partner while he was feeding me from a bowl of cottage cheese. He spooned curds into my mouth and said it was only natural that the girl had become comfortable with her surroundings. He reminded me that I had not challenged the boundaries of my own life in many years, nor had he challenged his. Even though we all feel quite free, he remarked, every life has its surrounding wall. He wiped my chin with a napkin and kissed the napkin.

* * *

My partner phoned the girl’s employer, then held the phone to the grate over the bedroom while I was cleaning dishes in the kitchen. Over my noise, I could hear the girl say that she had decided to quit. There was a long silence in the room. At first I stopped my movement and strained to hear, and then I couldn’t avoid the silence and began to hate it. I opened a cabinet to put away the clean dishes. In the back of the cabinet, over the plates, there was a portal through which I could view a wide, dark field. There was no wind.

Later, after my partner and I made love, we lay in bed and I sang a song about loving the world you know. The song encouraged all of us to live within the boundaries that were created for us by the people who love us and care for our safety. I had learned the song long ago and remembered it well. The girl was quiet at first but then we heard her sweet voice rise with the harmony.

* * *

From the new collection Gutshot. Originally published in Tin House, December 2012. 

Tim Zimmermann | Longreads | April 2015 | 25 minutes (6,193 words)

Panama City Beach, Florida is set on the alluring waters of the Gulf Of Mexico, in northwestern Florida. It’s a town of cookie-cutter condos and sprawling outlet malls, built almost entirely on the idea that blazing sun, a cool sea, white sand beaches, and copious amounts of booze are an irresistible formula for human happiness (or at least a pretty damn good time). Everything about the place—from the ubiquitous fast food, to the endless chain stores, to the Brobdingnagian miniature golf courses—is designed to anticipate and then slake the vast and relentless array of human desires.

Prime among the entertainment offerings is Gulf World Marine Park. It sits on Front Beach Road, the main drag that parallels the seafront, and promises sun-addled or bored families a respite from the nearby beach. By day you can swim with dolphins (“guaranteed”) or watch them perform the standard flips and tricks in a show pool, check out the sharks and stingrays, or watch the sea lions act goofy. By night you can watch “Illusionist Of The Year” (it’s not clear who made the designation) Noah Wells unleash his “Maximum Magic.” “It’s Always Showtime At Gulf World” says the marketing department. And that’s true: The entire place shuts down for only two days a year (Thanksgiving and Christmas).

Gulf World is not SeaWorld; it’s much smaller, less expensive, (though a family of four will still fork over $96 just to get past the gate), and there are no killer whales. But it is more typical of the 32 marine parks that keep dolphins and do business in the United States, and it’s these local parks which happen to house the vast majority of the captive dolphins (according to Ceta-Base, which tracks marine parks, there are currently some 509 dolphins at marine parks in the U.S.; about 144 are located at SeaWorld). If SeaWorld is the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey when it comes to marine mammal entertainment, Gulf World is one of the many small, local carnivals that do a pretty decent trade out of the limelight. And Gulf World happens to be where Ashley Guidry—a brassy blonde with minimal experience, and a simple application accompanied by a Polaroid—happened to land a job in April 2001, at the age of 27.

Guidry’s circuitous journey to Gulf World was only slightly unusual, in that she had never been infected by the dolphin trainer virus, which induces an acute fever, especially in young women, that can only be cured by a wetsuit and daily encounters with Flipper. Instead, Guidry earned a B.A. and then a Master of Political Science from the University Of Southern Mississippi, and figured she was headed directly toward law school. It was while sitting atop a rock on the Appalachian Trail that she suddenly realized she didn’t want to become a lawyer. That life-changing epiphany prompted a global odyssey with stops in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Jamaica, among other exotic locales. When she eventually ended up in Panama City and got the call from Gulf World, she thought, “Sweet, this is going to be awesome. Anywhere I can be around animals will be a pretty good gig. It’s outside in the sun. In Florida. With swimming. This might be perfect match for me.” Or, as she puts it now: “Who wouldn’t want to be around dolphins every day?”

Guidry, now 41, is lively and funny, yet thoughtful. She speaks in staccato bursts while waving her hands in the air. She lives with her husband and twin five-year-old boys in a modest Panama City Beach single-family home just a short drive from Gulf World. When she first started working there, she happily scrubbed fish buckets and was eager to learn. She liked that the dolphin show was more about teaching the audience about the dolphins and their intelligence and less about circus tricks. Trainers didn’t ride the animals or jump off their noses. Instead, they blindfolded a dolphin and taught the audience about echolocation, or sent the dolphins on speed runs and talked about how fast they are in the wild. They showed the audience tail slaps and breaches, and other natural behaviors.

Guidry works Sandy, whom she loved for her independent spirit.

After about a year at Gulf World, Guidry got into the water with a dolphin for the first time. As the dolphin, called Cola, swam up to her she was so giddy she felt slightly embarrassed. Over time, her connections with Gulf World’s dolphins deepened into true emotional attachment. She saw baby calves—”so cute and wrinkly”—being born, and watched them grow into young adults. She learned to appreciate the distinctive personalities of each dolphin, and felt the deep satisfaction of developing an especially close bond with a few of them. “They pick and choose who they are going to be friends with. It’s calculated on their part,” Guidry says. “I’ve watched them fuck with people, so when you are one of the chosen ones it is amazing. It is one of the few choices they have and I was honored to be chosen.”

Guidry had a particular affinity for the wild-caught females—like Delphene, Brinnon and Sandy—because they retained a little streak of wildness and independence. Deep down she felt that they were someplace they weren’t meant to be, and she wanted to do everything she could to make up for it. The memory of Delphene swimming over to spend time with her just hours before Delphene died in December 2003 can still bring tears to Guidry’s eyes. “It’s not like a pet at all. It is a mutual respect kind of thing. You try to hook them up while they are there, and they hook you up. They don’t hurt you,” she says. “It has changed who I am to the core of my being.”

The intensity and reward of building those sorts of relationships with an intelligent being felt like a blessing. “I was always joyful back then,” Guidry says. ” ‘Oh my God, I am so sorry you work in a bank,’ I’d think. My job is awesome.”

Still, Guidry wasn’t blissful enough to be totally oblivious to some of the more difficult realities of marine parks. Apart from the knowledge that her favorites had been caught from the wild, in 2002, the year after she was hired, Guidry was confronted by the hard fact that dolphins die or sometimes have to be euthanized. Jasmine, not yet two years old, died of undetermined causes, while Allie, barely three, died of zygomycosis, an infection often caused by common fungi found in soil or decaying vegetation. A third young dolphin called A.J. had to be put down after exhibiting signs of neurological problems.

Guidry was involved in A.J.’s euthanasia, her first. While she didn’t question the need for it, she remembers how emotional it was to separate little A.J. from his mother, Brinnon and pull him to the side of the pool, put him on a stretcher, and stand by while he was injected with a sedative and then a drug. Even the vet was crying, Guidry recalls. “Well, they don’t put that in the trainer handbook,” she thought, heartbroken, as A.J. faded from life and was carried away.

There were other discordant oddities of marine park life, as well, such as the dolphins who would sometimes be found in the mornings on the walkway around the pool, having jumped or been pushed over the wall during the night (mostly they were fine, despite dropping onto concrete; though at least one calf died). Enough dolphins came out of the pool (a number were multiple escapees) that after the calf died Gulf World added a stainless rail at the top of the show pool’s acrylic wall to try to prevent dolphins from coming over the top. There was also a rescued rough-toothed dolphin that died of an infection just before her release. Another rescued dolphin was released with great fanfare and media attention, and was mortally wounded by tiger sharks almost immediately after. “Sharks are a major threat when releasing marine mammals and turtles back into the wild,” says Ron Hardy, 71, one of Gulf World’s longtime co-owners. “They are a major threat when rescuing animals on the beach. We have had stranded animals killed within feet of the rescue team.”

In her early years Guidry found these rude realities—especially the prevalence of illness and death—troubling but not existentially so. Instead, she told herself, she would simply have to learn to cope with the fact that her awesome job had some awesomely painful moments. She felt as if she was helping the animals—some of whom were rescued off Florida’s beaches—learning about their capabilities, and teaching the public to care about them. It wasn’t until she confronted the fact that the dolphin park business, especially the business of breeding the dolphins in captivity to sustain the populations, requires the routine shipping of dolphins in and out of multiple parks, including Gulf World, that her moral compass started to twitch.

A dolphin boosts Guidry on a “rocket ride” during a show.

* * *

In 2006, after Guidry had been at Gulf World for about five years, the trainers started getting word that Lightning, Gulf World’s prime breeder at the time, would be shipped out. Guidry hadn’t experienced a transport from Gulf World yet. As she considered what it would involve, she realized that she didn’t like the prospect. Lightning, she knew, had been captured off Cape San Blas, which lies just to the east of Panama City. All he knew was whatever he remembered from his life in the wild, plus his life at Gulf World. The only dolphins he had relationships with were the females he had been living with at Gulf World, like Sandy and Delphene (who were captured with him off Cape San Blas). Now he was going to be plucked from the pool on a stretcher, dropped into a custom-built transport crate, called a “wet box,” and shipped by truck and plane most of the way across the country to a dolphin pool at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, of all places. He is going to make babies, the trainers were told. And they will ship us one of their boys.

On one level, Guidry understood that to breed dolphins in captivity, and to promote a diverse gene population, the males—like any breeding studs—needed to be taken to new females once their DNA had inundated the population they were with. And because she knew that captive breeding was the industry’s answer to public opposition to wild captures (which she also didn’t like), Guidry tried to view breeding loan transport as a necessary evil. “He’s needed elsewhere,” Guidry told herself, regarding Lightning. “We need to do this. It’s for the good of all marine parks.”

She did her best to see it that way, to force her heart to accept the greater-good logic her mind was peddling. She had seen dolphins separated from the Gulf World group and brought into a side pool or the med pool, put into a stretcher, and craned out of the water before. Some dolphins were accustomed for the process, some not. Either way, she felt, it was a stressful and disorienting experience for animals she cared about. But those removals had always been for medical reasons, and the dolphins had been treated and returned to the Gulf World clan. Now the removal was for business reasons. Instead of a brief extraction followed by a return to familiar waters and familiar animals, to Guidry it was a, “See you later. It’s been a good five years,” followed by a long and alien journey to an unfamiliar environment amidst unfamiliar dolphins. Moreover, when a SeaWorld dolphin called Presley had been brought in to Gulf World in 2004, Guidry had seen what appeared to be deep bruising of his skin when he was removed from the wet box, presumably from banging against the sides and the pressure of his weight against the stretcher he was suspended in. With transport, it was hard for her to not consider things from the dolphin’s point of view, and it was hard not to be troubled by what she imagined it would be like.

SeaWorld’s Presley arriving at Gulf World after a long transport. His extensive bruising gave Guidry qualms about the practice of transporting dolphins between marine parks.

On the day Lightning was to be transported, he was moved into the med pool, and Guidry went poolside to spend a few final moments with him. She felt miserable, and she wasn’t the only one. As the truck with Lightning’s crate started to pull away from the pool area, another trainer couldn’t contain his emotions and had to step aside. “I didn’t like having to say goodbye,” Guidry says. “And I was too sensitive to the idea of him going on a long and distressing journey.”

As soon as Lightning shipped out, a new breeding male, Pablo, arrived from the Mirage. “The terms of the loan are worked out each time between the participating facilities,” Ron Hardy explains. “Usually, if a male comes to our facility and we start producing offspring, we would get the first offspring and owners of the male would get the next, and it keeps alternating.” Guidry’s moral compass continued to twitch.

In 2011, a new manager (and co-owner) arrived at Gulf World. Dan Blasko, 62, had spent years training killer whales and dolphins at SeaWorld in Orlando, before heading off in the 1990s to run the Mirage dolphin pool where Lightning ended up. Guidry liked Blasko. He was knowledgeable and experienced, and seemed like a straight shooter. But she also felt that Blasko’s arrival coincided with a change that was underway at Gulf World, marked by a greater emphasis on revenue and profit. For example, a new pool was recently completed so that Gulf World could ramp up its lucrative dolphin encounter program, in which guests now pay $175 or more to swim with a dolphin. “The past two years have been two of the biggest years we have had,” Gulf World’s Hardy acknowledges. “We are trying to respond to the desires of the public.”

Blasko also supervised the creation of a new dolphin show. It was a far cry from the show of Guidry’s early years, with its emphasis on education and conservation. The new show was a high-energy production, with cranking music, lots of jumps, and trainers riding the dolphins. “The audience freaking loves it,” says Guidry. “And they want to be splashed.” Hardy agrees the new show is more showy, but adds “our education director has greatly increased our education presence since Dan arrived.”

At first, Guidry had been excited to create a new show, because it meant the dolphins would be engaged in new training and new behaviors. But she quickly felt that showmanship and wowing the audience was the priority, rather than educating them. When she was a young trainer she had thought it would be cool to do a “Roman Ride,” a trick where a trainer rides two dolphins in a harness across the pool. When she tried it in preparation for the new show it just felt wrong.

Between the two daily shows, the multiple sessions of swimming with guests throughout the day (up to five a day in the busy summer months), and the lengthy “meet and greet” after each show (in which guests lined up and paid $10 to have their picture taken with a dolphin), Gulf World’s dolphins were working hard to help keep Gulf World’s turnstiles clicking, and its cash registers ringing.

“We come to work knowing we are going to create bonds and memories that will stay in our hearts forever,” a trainer declares during the dolphin show. But the dolphins are also there to help create memories that generate revenue: The upselling during the show for the Meet And Greet session, the Trainer For A Day program, and other fee-generating add-ons, is relentless. “We have plenty of dolphins to accomplish the programs without overworking them,” Hardy says. “Matter of fact we rotate our dolphins and some days some are not used at all in presentations. Gulf World meets all APHIS regulations for interactive programming including monitoring time of participation.”

What really started to bother Guidry was what appeared to be an intensification of the breeding program. Shortly after Blasko arrived, he started to train Gulf World’s staff and dolphins on artificial insemination procedures. Artificial insemination (AI) was a way to produce dolphin calves and diversify the captive dolphin gene pool without going to the trouble and expense of shipping breeding males from park to park. It involved teaching males to give semen (described shortly, but pretty much what you would imagine), which could be frozen and sent to another park. At the right moment, the semen could then be used to try and fertilize a female whose ovulation cycle was being monitored closely.

Gulf World had dabbled in AI previously, extracting semen from Pablo, the breeding male sent from the Mirage after Lightning had been shipped there in 2006 (Blasko had visited Gulf World and helped demonstrate the collection technique). Now, under Blasko’s management it appeared that AI was going to become a more prominent technique in the effort to produce new dolphin calves. “The AI program is not that old. The neat thing about AI is it eliminates the need to transfer animals back and forth,” Hardy says. “And it’s great for diversity.”

According to Hardy, most of the members of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums who hold dolphins (28 U.S. parks belong; 19 have dolphins) are storing sperm from their male dolphins and have agreed that they will share it back and forth. So Gulf World ships its sperm upon request to other parks at no charge, and in return can request sperm to try and impregnate its females. In contrast to the traditional breeding loan, in which calves from an imported male would be allocated between the participating parks, if a park impregnates one or more of its females with imported sperm it gets to keep any calves that are produced. “We all get the better deal, and we have had more and more successes,” Hardy says. “And as we keep moving forward the success rate will be higher and higher.”

Guidry was all for AI and a multi-park “sperm club” in theory, because she hoped it would reduce or eliminate the transports which bothered her so much. But in practice, she found the process a bit creepy and unsettling. When Blasko asked for volunteers to learn how to get semen from Comet, a young male, Guidry politely demurred. But she watched poolside as Blasko talked another female trainer through the process, which involved tapping the area near the genital slit to induce Comet to present his penis, and then stimulating it to ejaculation, catching the semen in a bottle or baggy. Guidry cringed as the trainer had to fish Comet’s penis out, because he was just starting to learn the process. And the coaching that followed got pretty explicit. “To be a fly on the wall for those sessions would make anyone giggle,” Guidry says, adding that the triumphant volunteer started using a photo of Comet’s erect penis as her phone screensaver. “But I felt looked down on that I didn’t jump to jerk Comet off.”

Guidry wasn’t any more comfortable with the procedure to inseminate a female. She was present in 2013 during an attempt to fertilize a young dolphin called Luna, whose mother just happened to be Sandy, Guidry’s favorite dolphin. Early in the morning Luna had been moved to the medical pool, put in a stretcher, and lifted out onto a mat. Her pectoral fins were held against her side to keep her from thrashing. Guidry, who always hated pulling dolphins from the pool because it was stressful for them, was positioned by Luna’s head. With Blasko and a vet supervising, Luna was rolled onto her side. A catheter containing the donor semen was introduced into Luna’s vagina, and with the help of an ultrasound machine was guided into position for the release. The entire procedure took about ten minutes. Guidry was looking straight into Luna’s eye, and there was something about the way Luna was looking back at her that made her feel terrible. “When they are just having sex because they are dolphins that’s fine,” she says. “But it is completely different to see them pull a dolphin out and forcibly do it.”

It is hard to know what Luna was really thinking, but she clearly didn’t like having to give urine samples so her hormonal cycle could be tracked. She could see when trainers were getting ready to collect her urine, and once broke the ribs of a young trainer during the procedure. Guidry also wondered whether Luna was being given any fertility drugs, and asked about it. She was told she wasn’t allowed to know, which made the whole thing feel even more sketchy (asked about this, Hardy replied that Gulf World does not use fertility drugs for AI). “I was kind of offended,” Guidry recalls.

Guidry also didn’t like the policy of forcibly weaning calves from their mothers, which would put the mothers back into the breeding rotation sooner, because once they stopped lactating, their normal ovulation cycle would re-establish itself. A calf might naturally keep nursing two or more years, even after it started to eat fish, meaning the mother might not be ready to breed again for three years. By forcibly weaning the calves after a year and a half–removing them from the main dolphin pools and taking them to a small side pool near the sea lion stadium, or another separate pool—mothers could be ready to start breeding again less than two years after giving birth. Forced weaning sped up the captive breeding process considerably, even if it was harder on the calves and mothers.

“We know the weaning process very well, and we are not weaning animals early,” Hardy says. “Our animals are our most important asset. To do anything that jeopardizes their health would be dumb.” Still, Guidry knew how hard separations could sometimes be, and thought it was especially so for a dolphin mother. And she bridled when she heard female dolphins being referred to as “baby-making machines,” and suggestions that weaning should take place as fast as possible so the baby-making could resume. Though Gulf World’s Hardy insists that “we do not wean offspring any sooner than they would be weaned in the wild,” it didn’t seem that way to Guidry. “It started to feel like a baby mill,” she says.

Brinnon, another of Guidry’s favorites, with a calf.

* * *

In September 2011, a young calf called Chopper was born to Maia, one of Gulf World’s females. The father was Sebastian, a male owned by SeaWorld who had been on loan to Gulfarium, a dolphin park just up the coast from Gulf World in Fort Walton Beach. Sebastian had become a prime Gulf World breeder after Lightning had sowed his seed through most of Gulf World’s females and been shipped off to the Mirage in 2006. Pablo, the male breeder the Mirage sent to Gulf World to replace Lightning, had died about seven months after arriving in Florida. That meant Gulf World needed a new male breeder, and Sebastian had been trucked over to Gulf World from SeaWorld Florida in April 2008, staying through November 2011 (he was then sent to Gulfarium, and returned to Gulf World one more time for a three-month stint in early 2012). It was a productive stay. In addition to siring Chopper, that breeding loan produced two other calves, from Sandy and Brinnon, called Jett and Striker.

About a year and a half after being born Chopper was separated from Maia, so she would stop lactating, and sent over to the auxiliary pool near the sea lion stadium, where he could start learning basic trained behaviors. When he was returned to the main dolphin pools late in 2013 to continue his training, Guidry felt bad for the little guy. He was timid, and got picked on by the other dolphins. None of the other trainers seemed that into working with him. When they did work with Chopper, Guidry felt it was perfunctory and that they weren’t really investing themselves in the relationship. For many trainers, it seemed like Chopper was the unwanted step-child.

Guidry figured no one wanted to bond with Chopper because under the breeding loan, everyone knew he belonged to SeaWorld. What was the point of getting attached to a young dolphin who was going to be shipped out at some point? The trainers would arrive at the poolside to start a training session, set their buckets down, and sort out amongst themselves who was going to work each dolphin. No one was ever eager to pick Chopper. More and more, Guidry was starting to take to heart what the dolphins were experiencing and feeling. She thought it was selfish to not give a dolphin your time and attention, to not build a connection, just because it would be hard to see him ship out, so she took it upon herself to give Chopper some attention and training. He responded enthusiastically, and soon enough, Guidry was touched to see, Chopper started to swim over and pick her for training sessions. “For a young dolphin, he was very attached,” Guidry says. “I really seemed to light him up and of course that thrilled me.”

Guidry threw herself into the work with Chopper, teaching him how to do the basics, like swimming through a gate and how to station in one place with other dolphins around. He was easygoing and engaging, a sweetheart of a dolphin, and the bond between them deepened. “Once I had something with him he wanted to hang out with me and it wasn’t about fish,” she says. “It was like ‘thank you for your time’.”

Guidry showing Chopper the calf some love.

Just as she felt she was really clicking with Chopper, Guidry got word that SeaWorld was going to ship him to Gulfarium. Guidry knew that Gulf World had bought Jett, whose ownership had also gone to SeaWorld as part of the breeding loan. Maybe Gulf World could buy Chopper, too. She went to Blasko, and told him about Chopper’s gentle nature. “If your business relies on [swim-with-dolphin] encounters that are safe, then Chopper is your man,” she advised. Blasko told her he had approached SeaWorld about purchasing Chopper, too, but SeaWorld had declined the offer. When Guidry pressed for a reason, Blasko explained that SeaWorld had been willing to sell Jett because his mother was wild and SeaWorld preferred dolphins that didn’t have a direct, or one-generation, connection to the wild, which could bring criticism and bad PR from animal rights advocates. Chopper, in contrast, came from captive-born parents, and the wild genes in his blood were two generations back. “That makes logical sense,” Hardy says, but in an email later adds, “Both [Jett and Chopper] belonged to SeaWorld and why they chose to keep Chopper and let us keep Jett I do not know.”

Guidry had figured that even if Gulf World couldn’t buy Chopper, he would stay with his mother at Gulf World for a few more years. She was devastated that the sweet little guy she had come to love would be gone within a week, at such a young age, and was surprised at the depth of her emotion and attachment. “Maybe it was a mistake to get to know him,” she says, but you can tell she doesn’t really mean it. She didn’t understand how Gulf World and SeaWorld could be separating him from his mother so young. As much as she hated transports, Chopper was worse because he was just a calf. Guidry had watched mothers freak out as their calves were netted away for medical or other procedures. And she had seen mothers refusing to leave a gate, whistling and vocalizing in distress, after a calf had been sent through to a separate pool. She also worried that Sebastian, Chopper’s father at Gulfarium, might do him harm. Guidry remembered another Gulfarium dolphin, called Zac, whose jaw had been broken by his mother and permanently disfigured (Zac spent most of 2012 at Gulf World before shipping out again, to Marineland Dolphin Adventure near St. Augustine).

Guidry had always been the sort of trainer who voiced her opinions, and she fought hard for Chopper. “I’ve always asked questions, and maybe having my own kids changed what questions I asked with Chopper,” she says. “But to separate moms and babies, I am not okay with that.”

Blasko answered all her questions, told her he understood her feelings, and gave her a hug. But there was little he could do if SeaWorld refused to sell Chopper and wanted to move him to Gulfarium. This was the business. Guidry couldn’t let it go and realized that she simply couldn’t accept this, and that separating Chopper from his mother and moving him to another facility to try and figure out what to do with him next was “breaking her soul” as she put it to one of her colleagues. She saw Chopper as a squeaky, eager, and trusting little dolphin. The industry saw him as a piece in a bigger puzzle to be moved here and there according to the needs of his owner, and the demands of a multi-park captive breeding program. “When I first got the remotest feeling that the dolphins are commodities I thought ‘You are talking about my dolphins,’ ” Guidry says. “I can’t even understand the word commodity.”

Since late 2009, Guidry had been working part-time at Gulf World, because she wanted to spend more time with her young twins. So on the day Chopper was to be shipped to Gulfarium, March 15, 2014, she wasn’t there, to her relief, to see him stretchered from the pool, put in the wet box, and trucked away. Guidry had always been bothered by the many ways in which the welfare of the dolphins would get subordinated to the needs of the business (recently, she had been feuding over the loud power washing equipment used to clean the pool walls, which clearly bothered the sensitive hearing of the dolphins). But Chopper’s departure tipped the balance for her. She didn’t consider herself anti-captivity, but she did consider herself “anti-asshole,” as she put it to a friend. She couldn’t come to grips with the fact that SeaWorld, a company she didn’t work for and had no control over, was taking Chopper away from his mother, and from her, for reasons she felt had nothing to do with Chopper’s well-being. In the end, her love for the dolphins developed into an antipathy for the business. “I refuse to let any of my soul be hardened by a corporation,” she wrote in a journal. “I love what I do. I am proud of what I do. [But] I will not go against my soul. If it doesn’t feel right…I listen.”

Later that week she asked to meet with Blasko and Gulf World’s management team to let them know she would be leaving too. “Do you know why I am here?” she asked. “I think I have a good idea,” Blasko answered. Guidry explained that she was not really a disgruntled employee, but Chopper’s fate had changed everything for her. “If that’s the direction of the business, that’s just not me,” she explained. “It’s just something I have to do.” Gulf World asked her to stay on for a few months to help train some new hires. Guidry agreed. The parting was amicable.

Guidry says her final goodbyes to the dolphins she loves.

Guidry misses Sandy and the other animals at Gulf World so much “it hurts.” She still chokes up when she recalls how special Chopper was, and is fiercely proud of the fact that she stepped up to give him what she could, despite the pain that followed. She also recognizes that Chopper gave her something, too, a different way of seeing and thinking. “Chopper was a huge catalyst for me, and a big change in my moral compass,” she says.

* * *

On a scorching day last July, a few months after Guidry quit Gulf World, we make the one-hour drive to Fort Walton Beach to visit Chopper at Gulfarium. It is a dinky, rust-flaked facility that sits just off the beach. Opened in 1955, Gulfarium’s 2007 Marine Mammal Inventory Report lists dozens of dolphins who died there between 1974 and 2013, from all manner of illness and infection (one dolphin, called Herman, somehow drowned). Gulfarium is notorious within the Florida marine park world for losing three sea lions who separately managed to escape their enclosure, only to be torn up and killed by Gulfarium’s guard dogs. Another sea lion there asphyxiated, and three others died of either heat stroke or hyperthermia. As you walk toward the entrance from the parking lot, which takes you to a bustling and well-appointed gift shop, there is a sandy area on your right. According to dolphin advocate Russ Rector, who used to work in the Florida marine park industry and has been a longtime critic of Gulfarium, more than 100 animals that died at Gulfarium are buried there.

Chopper shares the small, circular show pool, with his father Sebastian, and a SeaWorld dolphin called Cosmo. Cosmo’s life history, in which he has accumulated a lot of frequent flyer miles, may well be a good indicator of how Chopper’s future will unfold. Born in 2003 at SeaWorld’s Florida park, Cosmo was shipped to the Mirage in 2010 and then SeaWorld San Diego in 2013, before being sent back across the country to Gulfarium in May 2014. We clamber up into the stands and watch the three dolphins dutifully perform the usual routine of tail walks, fluke presentations, and jumps. You can see rake marks on their skin, which the announcer says is the result of “dolphin communication” because “they don’t have hands!” The Gulf Of Mexico shimmers in the background, and a group of wild dolphins is cruising past just offshore. “Oh God, this makes me so sad,” Guidry mutters.

After the show, the crowd files out of the stands to wander around the rest of Gulfarium’s exhibits. Chopper, Sebastian, and Cosmo have nowhere to go so they glide around the small, featureless, pool, swimming circle after circle. After a while, some trainers show up and work with the dolphins for about ten minutes. Then they toss some balls into the pool and leave. Chopper gamely tries to amuse himself with a soccer ball, nosing it across the pool. After a few minutes he gives up and goes back to swimming his endless laps. Guidry is at least relieved to see that, despite her fears, Chopper and Sebastian seem to get on okay. She puts her face up against an underwater window and says, “Hi Buddy,” as he glides by. Chopper doesn’t really notice her, and keeps swimming. “This is super-depressing. I can’t look at this anymore,” Guidry says, and we walk away.

At a nearby waterside restaurant, Guidry is subdued and tries to sort through her emotions. “I really thought I was a good person who loved animals and was doing the right thing,” she says. “It never occurred to me that I was part of a huge problem, and that is a tough realization.” Acting on that realization, and walking away from a career, wasn’t easy either. But Guidry talks about her two boys and how she doesn’t feel like she would be able to tell them how to lead an ethical life if she didn’t feel that she had made ethical choices herself.

Guidry also feels indebted to Chopper, Sandy, and the other dolphins she grew to love, because she believes that getting to know them made her a better person, more thoughtful and empathetic. “I know animals like Sandy who make the best of it. She is still able to give of herself to the people who put her where she is,” she explains. “That’s an amazing resilience that I don’t even understand. Her strength makes me want to better myself.”

The hardest part is that to fight for Chopper and Sandy, Guidry had to leave them. She knows she is acting on what she learned from them, telling their stories, and determined to work for change, but they don’t know that. They are still living their captive lives at Gulf World and Gulfarium—performing, breeding, and bringing in tourist dollars—and all they know is that she is no longer there for them. That is something that haunts her. “I wish I could just tell them I am trying, trying to make something I know is wrong right,” she says.

* * *

Tim Zimmermann is a Correspondent at Outside magazine, Associate Producer and Co-Writer of the 2013 documentary Blackfish, and author of The Race. He is a National Magazine Award finalist (for a 2005 Outside story about cave diving), and in recent years he has written and reported extensively on SeaWorld and marine mammal captivity. His work has also appeared in Men’s Journal, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, The Best American Sports Writing, and The Best American Science And Nature Writing. In a previous life he was a Senior Editor and Diplomatic Correspondent at US News & World Report. Tim lives with his wife and two children in Washington, D.C., where he cycles, sails, and struggles to find decent vegan food. He can be found on both Twitter and Facebook.

* * *

Edited by Mike Dang. Fact-checked by Matthew Giles. Photos courtesy Ashley Guidry.

James Grissom | Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog | Knopf | March 2015 | 26 minutes (7,038 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book Follies of God, by James Grissom, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Dana writes:

“James Grissom wrote a letter to Tennessee Williams in 1982, when he was only 20 years old, asking for advice. Tennessee unexpectedly responded, ‘Perhaps you can be of some help to me.’ Ultimately he tasked Grissom with seeking out each of the women (and few men) who had inspired his work—among them Maureen Stapleton, Lillian Gish, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Marlon Brando—so that he could ask them a question: had Tennessee Williams, or his work, ever mattered? This is Grissom’s account of their intense first encounters, in which Tennessee explains his thoughts on writing, writer’s block, and the women he wrote.”

* * *

“Perhaps you can be of some help to me.”

These were the first words Tennessee Williams spoke to me in that initial phone call to my parents’ home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was September of 1982, a fact I noted in a small blue book. The book was new and had been purchased for an upcoming test in World History that I would not be taking because Tennessee invited me to lunch in New Orleans, and I accepted.

I know that pleasantries were exchanged, and he laughed a lot—a deep, guttural, silly theatrical laugh—but the first quotation attributable to Tennessee Williams to me was the one I wrote in my small blue book.

Perhaps you can be of some help to me.

How could I be of help to Tennessee Williams? How, when in fact I had written to him, several months before, seeking his help? From a battered paperback copy of Who’s Who in the American Theatre, I had found the address of his agent (Audrey Wood, c/o International Famous Agency, 1301 Avenue of the Americas), and had written a letter—lengthy and containing a photograph, and, I’m thankful, lost to us forever—asking for his advice on a writing career. I wrote that his work had meant the most to me; that I was considering a career in the theater. I also enclosed two short stories, both written for a class taken at Louisiana State University. It was a time I recall as happy: I was writing, and exploiting the reserves of the school’s library and its liberal sharing policy with other schools. I was poring over books and papers that related to Tennessee and other writers I admired.

Tennessee Williams. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Tennessee (he told me, by the end of that first phone call, to cal him Tenn) was in a horrible “knot of time.” He asked me to imagine a knot of time, but time for me at that point was something from which I was seeking favors, something I was approaching. I did not feel a part of time yet, which can be somewhat attributable to growing up and living in Baton Rouge, a city detached from time, thought, or curiosity. Tenn acknowledged with a laugh that Baton Rouge was a city encased in gelatin.

Tenn, however, could see and feel a literal knot of time and people and places encircling him, choking him, pursuing him. While he told me that he could no longer dream, due to age, a lack of flexibility both glandular and creative, and the “monumental accretion of toxins self-administered,” he was, comically, fully equipped to endure nightmares. His most frequent nightmare, one he had endured the night before he chose to call me, consisted of his slow, painful death by means of a massive knot, bearing the image of an enormous boa constrictor as well as an “artistic representation of a penis,” encircling him and squeezing him into darkness and death. The scales of this boa were faces of people and covers of books and posters of plays (both his and others’), travel brochures of trips planned, taken, aborted. The faces of the people and the blurbs on the books and the posters all posed the same question: Where have you been?

This time knot was for Tenn a threat, an indictment, and a motivator, and he took it as a primarily positive occurrence. “This thing, this horror,” he told me, “may very well allow me to write at my previous level of power, and it appears to be telling me to plunge into my memories, to plunder them. And those that are most vivid to me are in Louisiana.”

Tenn believed that writers, all artists, had several homes. There was the biological place of birth; the home in which one grew up, bore witness, fell apart. There was also the place where the “epiphanies” began—a school, a church, perhaps a bed. Rockets were launched and an identity began to be set. There was the physical location where a writer sat each day and scribbled and hunted and pecked and dreamed and drank and cursed his way into a story or a play or a novel. Most importantly, however, there was the emotional, invisible, self-invented place where work began—what Tenn called his “mental theater,” a cerebral proscenium stage upon which his characters walked and stumbled and remained locked forever in his memory, ready, he felt, to be called into action and help him again.

“I’ve got to get home.”

When Tennessee Williams was young, when he could dream and felt that time was a destination awaiting his arrival, he would repair to this mental theater, a safe place that operated under his management, where he could close his eyes and open the stage curtains and be not only home, but working.

If you’re a writer, you write. If you don’t, you’re dead. You have no home, no reason to be offered a seat at any table, and no reason to live.

No play written by Tennessee Williams, however, got its bearings until a fog rolled across the boards, from which a female form emerged.

“I do not know why this is,” Tenn confessed to me, “but there is a premonitory moment before a woman, an important, powerful woman, enters my subconscious, and this moment is announced by the arrival of fog. Perhaps it is some detritus of my brain belching forth both waste and a woman. I do not know, but it comes with a smell, and it is the crisp, pungent smell of radiators hissing and clanking and rattling in rooms in New Orleans and St. Louis and New York. Rooms in which I wrote and dreamed and starved and fucked and cried and read and prayed, and perhaps all that action and all that steam creates both this fog and this woman.

“I have not seen the fog in years.”

Tenn’s primary activity, he told me, was “faking the fog.” When he closed his eyes and summoned his mental theater, he could see the scuffed boards of the stage, the frayed, slow-moving curtains, smell the dust, and feel the excitement of drama forthcoming.

“When I was young,” Tenn told me, “I never sought out a woman, a character. She came to me. She had a story to tell, urgently, violently, fervently. I listened and I identified, and I became her most ardent supporter and witness. I cannot get a witness for me and I cannot be a witness for anyone! I cannot find a woman who will speak to me on my stage.”

So Tenn sought the women elsewhere, searched for fog in movie theaters, on television screens, and in the pages of magazines, in stacks of photographs. He failed to find fog in literature, because, he explained, “I am a very visual person. I need to have the shape and movement and intent of a woman before me.”

In his homes, in hotel rooms, in lodges and athletic clubs and as a guest of others, Tenn would pull out his typewriter or his pad of paper (which he called the “pale judgment” awaiting his ministrations), move close to a television set, and wait for a woman to speak to him. With friends like Maria St. Just and Jane Smith, whose love for and patience with him were boundless, he would sit in movie theaters for up to three consecutive showings, because a “wisp” of fog was emanating from the screen.

“I have not seen the fog in years,” Tenn repeated. “But your letter made me believe it still existed.”

Writing early in the morning or deep into the night, Tenn kept his television set on, the volume set to low, a radio or a phonograph playing the music of people who had led him to fog-enshrouded stages in the past. An image would come across the screen and catch his eye, the volume would be raised, and a voice would speak to him. Tenn had notes and diagrams and plot outlines scrawled on envelopes, napkins, hotel stationery, menus from restaurants and diners and airport lounges. Once, he delicately constructed a plot outline on a paper tablecloth, which the waiter neatly folded and presented to him along with the check.

He consulted psychics, tarot-card readers, tea-leaf diviners. He placed himself in tubs of warm water and tried to experience rebirth, so that he could emerge from his liquid prison young and alert and full of creative and glandular flexibility, free forever of the impending time knot.

Time and the ever-present pale judgment haunted him, jeered at him, reproached him. In the home of a friend, a fellow writer, he once walked over to a desk holding a ream of white paper and violently pushed it to the floor, then shoved it from view behind a desk. “I will have none of that from you!” he admonished the pile of paper, and went on with his visit.

Where have you been? the scales of the time knot asked him.

“Well, where the hell have you been?” Tenn once yelled out. “I was very loyal to my women, to my plays, to the construct of words. Where are they? Oh, they’re all on tour, baby, and I’m here with silence and clean air and a condemned theater. My heart and eyes are failing, but those gals are doing fine.” In Tennessee’s mind, Amanda and Blanche and Alma and Serafina and the Princess were errant daughters, each of whom who had been carefully listened to and coddled and husbanded by him, their “queer Lear,” and were now on stages telling their stories—the stories that had come to him in the fog—and he was off on his heath, yelling and whining and drinking and fighting off the time knot.

“Sometimes,” he told me during that first phone call, “I think the fog has been replaced by something else. I feel that there is a wind tunnel inside of my head, and inside my head, within my very brain, there are leaves flying about, and each leaf is an idea.”

When I finally met Tenn, he placed two fingers on his forehead, as if pushing against the pressure within, and he told me that the nights were spent scurrying after these leaves, trying to catch and collect them and find some meaning and comfort in them. He had also come to believe that the specks in his eyes, darting and floating, were reflections of these leaves moving across his brain, and if he could only marshal them, calm them down, and make the many dots one whole entity, he would have a character, a play, a woman, an idea.

“I am incapable of containing it,” he told me, “this mulch, this confetti, until I can find some form in which to place it. A shadow box of the cerebellum; a case of curiosities plucked from my subconscious; a brilliantly white page framed in gold that I can approach and admire for its order and cleanness and say to it, in front of it, ‘Yes, I have something to add.’ ”

Because he believed that the spots in his eyes, the floaters in his vitreous humor, were actually reflections of his cerebral leaf storm, Tenn took to staring into white tablecloths, looking upon blank white walls, and facing the sky, blinking and rolling his eyes, hoping to focus and find a connection.

“I’ve heard of connecting the dots,” he laughed, “but this is ridiculous.

“I try to approach the whiteness of the page, the pale judgment, as if I were a neophyte priest, and the paper is the host,” Tenn confessed to me. “I approach it gingerly and ask it to be patient. I see upon it the darting leaves in my brain, and I pray they will alight on the page and have some meaning. Or I touch it gently, a frightened queer faced with his first female breast, a nipple that seeks attention and ministration. ‘Forgive me,’ I say to it, ‘I don’t know my way around these parts.’

“I start with anything—one lone sentence—and I ask the leaves, I ask the page, for the next line, the next phrase.”

Sentence after sentence would follow, and Tenn would write them down, fervently, eagerly. Later, once we had met, once he had decided to trust me, I would write them down for him, and the bits of papers, the pages yanked from journals, and the old bills and envelopes—all littered with words—would pile up.

“I think we can help each other,” Tenn told me in that first phone call.

Tenn admitted that he was repairing to bars, where jukeboxes sat in dusty corners (“I judge a place by the particular pattern of its dust,” he told me: “dust often tells me I can be comfortable . . . or not”), and play, incessantly, songs that gave him something, that took him somewhere, that might ignite the clanking and rattling of radiators and produce a fog. Fumbling for coins in the sparse afternoons of dark, dusty bars, he listened to “If I Didn’t Care,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Bridge over Troubled Water,” “Haunted Heart,” “Our Finest Hour,” “The Long and Winding Road.”

“One should discard immediately from one’s life anyone who does not cry at the sound of these songs,” Tenn told me. “These songs hurt the heart.”

Once, he told me, he was driven to write on a series of napkins a letter to his mother, after hearing the Andrews Sisters sing “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time.”

I think of organza and linen. My nose pressed into her bosom, the slightly singed smell of where the iron pressed into the fabric. My face rubbed raw by the fabric.
Comfort/discomfort.
I am not moving.
Tell me something. Tell me anything.
When did you realize that to survive, you would need to stumble in the dark rooms of reality until you found a door, to a closet perhaps, that, once opened, held a dream, or a memory, and suddenly, Mama, you could face grocery lists and altar-society meetings, and congregation with my father and . . . me?
Tell me, Mama. What did you give to me, and where is it now?

Tenn believed that if he could get back to the intersection of Royal and Conti streets, or Dumaine and Bourbon, he could connect all those floaters in his brain, all those leaves, which he came to believe were memories unacknowledged, unrecognized.

Another night, sleepless, anxious, afraid of a visitation of the time knot, Tenn saw an actress on television and had an idea. He would later relay it to me, and I would write it on the menu of a praline shop.

A young man circles a small Southern town. Everyone has seen him. The older woman, living alone, nurses her memories of the young man she once loved, who died, taking with him her unrequited love, her desire for the surcease provided by the flesh, and a dark secret. Is this man walking about a ghost? He appears to the young man who sits in the public park at night, because he has heard there are assignations among the magnolias, buttocks pressed against the cool bases of the Confederate statues. This young man speaks to the phantom, who never responds, and who never submits to his longing. Is he real? Is he the desire most wanted and never found? The town becomes afraid of the young man. Is he responsible for the vandalisms, the small robberies, the sound of shattering glass in the still night?

Tenn would stare into tablecloths, bare walls, the noonday sky, and remember: “This is the white of the pale judgment which faces me every day. I think of piles of cocaine, beautifully white and pure, like sand on the beaches where I was beautiful and the days were long and fat with purpose. I can look into the cocaine, as I look into a white tablecloth, and I can see the spots that dance in my eyes, and they are like the leaves that whirl in my brain. If I can only connect them. If I can only find a means to use them.

“I pray to the emptiness that is the page,” Tenn said, “and I pray to the emptiness that is my mind, and I ask that I be filled.”

Tenn paused, then continued.

“Now, I can recall a summer in Italy, in a small pensione, simple and rustic, with the most luxurious towels. No grand hotel of Europe ever had such plush towels, as white as this tablecloth, fresh-smelling, nubby. I remember that the shower had a loud, slow drain, and as you began to rub your body down with the towel, you would stand ankle-deep in warm, soapy water. The air was full of the smell of castile soap—those bars that are as large and as heavy as Baptist hymnals—and the sweet smell of onions and peppers slowly cooking in olive oil. When I would begin to dry my face, I would press the towel against my eyes and I would feel—and be—totally blind. There was blackness as stark as this cloth is white, and I was ankle-deep in the water, and I was casting off the poisons of the previous night, so I was not strong or sure on my feet, and the smells were there, and I would suddenly hear a woman’s voice, hear her words, and she was reciting her Rosary, in Italian, a language that was still new to me, so I could only decipher a few words of her prayers, but I could hear, I could feel, her intent, her desire, and I could begin to write. That voice ultimately became the voice of Serafina [the primary character in The Rose Tattoo], and I just followed that voice from prayer to prayer, from room to room, and that woman and I completed that play, on a different evening, in a different setting, on a night that was balmy and smelled of lemons.”

The memory of balmy evenings forced Tenn to reopen, then reclose his eyes, and remember a New Orleans summer, in a room where the shuttered windows were open to the humidity and the noise of the city, burning peanuts, hot chicory, and a blank page in front of him, but fog incoming. “I was poor and I was parched,” Tenn laughed, “and there’s a prayer everyone has memorized, and I took my last coin and I went to a Rexall’s and I bought a lemonade, extra ice, and I drank it fast and hard, and it hurt and it healed, and I could only think Rapture! And Blanche DuBois had entered the picture, danced her way into the blank whiteness, and begun to live.

“Tell me,” Tenn had wondered, “is it that I can’t find the words? Is it that I have nothing more to share or to care deeply about? Or am I husbanding my niggardly treasures because I would rather have them surprise and comfort me in the deep of the night, scribbled on some scrap of paper, rather than fill the vast whiteness?

“I need you to understand three things,” he told me. “Find the memories. Build words from those memories. Trust me, they will come. Finally, recognizing the worth of the words, separate the wheat from the chaff. That is all.”

“That is all?” I asked.

“That is more than enough, baby! That is enough for a lifetime of fog and time knots.”

Plans were made. I was to meet Tenn in Jackson Square, in front of St. Louis Cathedral (“Louie’s Place,” he called it), and we would have lunch, we would talk about writing, I would help him connect the dots that were flying about.

“I need to know that I mattered,” Tenn told me, “and your letter led me to feel that I did. Surely, there must be others who can tell me that I mattered, that I was of some value.” Tenn paused to cite, apparently from memory, two vituperative quotes from theater critics who had come to their separate conclusions that Tennessee Williams had never mattered; his work had been overrated; it was time to reevaluate him or discard him forever.

“One man felt it charitable,” he continued, “to assume that the real Tennessee Williams had died, and all of my later plays, my work of two decades, had been perpetuated by a clever epigone, a paid hack carrying on the industrial entity known as Tennessee Williams!” He laughed and hacked a bit, recovered, and muttered, using a term I hadn’t heard since childhood Sundays in revivals, “Good Lord, can I get a witness?”

“Do you need a witness?” I asked.

“Yes,” Tenn quickly responded, “and I’ll be yours. I’ve read your work and I’ll champion it, and I’ll be your witness.”

He was full of energy now.

“Here is the importance of bearing witness. We do not grow alone, talents do not prosper in a hothouse of ambition and neglect and hungry anger; love does not arrive by horseback or prayer or good intentions. We need the eyes, the arms, and the witness of others to grow, to know that we have existed, that we have mattered, that we have made our mark. And each of us has a distinct mark that colors our surroundings, that flavors the recipe of ‘experience’ in which we find ourselves; but we remain blind, without identity, until someone witnesses us.

“How does the pretty girl know she is pretty? Her witnesses testify to the fact that she is unique, that her peers lack something in pigment or stature. How can we know that we have talent until our words or the manner in which we speak them moves someone? Makes them think outside the puny lines into which they’ve colored themselves? We can’t know that we have the power to break these lines apart with thought until we have our first witness, that person who tells us what we have done.

“So we grow from being watched and felt and we grow from watching others, and we have to fight our way out of the blind alleys that we create by believing that a witness can be snorted from a mirror or can reside on the tip of a syringe or come tumbling from the mouth of a paid witness.

“No,” he uttered, seemingly defeated, “I’m afraid that we can’t continue to run from each other; I’m afraid that only in the company of these people, all of our witnesses, many of whom frighten us, can we learn who we are and what we’ve done.

“Jim, be my witness.”

The following morning I got into a 1977 Chevy Malibu and drove the eighty miles to New Orleans from Baton Rouge with the memory of something Tennessee Williams had said to me.

“Perhaps you can be of some help to me.”

* * *

Here is what I took with me on that trip from Baton Rouge to New Orleans: three small blue exam booklets. Soft-blue covers and lined pages. I took Berol pens. I did not take a tape recorder, because I was not a journalist and this was not a “story” or an “interview.”

I wrote everything down. I am a dutiful student and there have been complaints that I rarely look up and into the face of my subject. I wrote when I was with Tennessee, and I wrote when I was away from him. I researched everything he mentioned or told me to study.

The blue books multiplied, and ultimately more than twenty were filled with notes. The books have long since deteriorated, their staples fallen away, their pages thinned and yellowed. The words from those books were transferred to pages typed on an IBM Selectric, then to pages created through an IBM word processor and on to Compaq and Dell computers. Some of the pages were given to those about whom Tenn spoke.

That day in September was slightly muggy, so I used the air conditioner in my car, and people throughout the Quarter were in shorts and light cotton shirts. There was a lingering feel of summer in the air. Nonetheless, Tenn was wearing an enormous coat of indeterminate fur, a large straw hat, and sunglasses: he seemed ready at any moment to endure a winter storm, imitate Rudy Vallee, or face the firing squad of a Latin American judicial system.

Before I could approach him, he turned, saw me, and smiled. “You must be Jim,” he crooned. “You look utterly confused.”

Tenn had been engaged in conversation with several people huddled in the Square, only a few feet from the bird-infested statue of Andrew Jackson, but he pulled from them quickly, put his arm around my shoulders and began walking toward the Quarter.

“I am most at home in the Quarter,” he spoke to my right ear, but the conversation seemed decidedly one-sided, a monologue for his own edification. “Wonderful things have happened for me on Royal, of course. Nothing of any positive significance ever happens on Rampart. Have you felt that way?”

I explained that I was actually from Baton Rouge, the club-footed cousin to New Orleans, and my time in the Quarter had been solely as a tourist. I could not speak to any deep experience on Rampart Street, or any other street in the city.

“Let’s try to change that while we’re here!” he exulted. “But let’s now eat something. Do you like the Court of Two Sisters?”

I admitted that I had never eaten there before.

“You’ll love it. Wonderful food, courtly service, lovely people, food served in bowls the size of a dog’s head, all the time in the world.”

I was not able to get a look at Tenn’s face until we stood in the dark, brick-lined passageway to the restaurant; a tiny shaft of sunlight streamed from the courtyard, and it fell across his face as if directed by an aging film star. Shadow obscured his prominent chin and neck, and his face held a high pinkness that made me think of Easter hams fresh from the oven. His mustache and beard were both trimmed short but looked askew, as if he had recently been resting flat on his face; there were hairs posing in quizzical fashion, curious as to their whereabouts. His lips were dry and flecked with white, and his tongue darted quickly and constantly across them, but never long enough to provide any moisture or comfort. Tenn’s eyeglasses rested unevenly across the bridge of his nose, which was red, weltlike, as if the glasses had rested too heavily and abraded him. The lenses were coated with fingerprints. His eyes were bright and were confusing in that they could appear blue or green or a combination of the two; the lids were heavy, and he blinked at an alarming slowness. Nonetheless, they were not the eyes of an old or tired man—they appeared to be fighting against the flesh that held them. The host and several waiters flocked around Tenn like bridesmaids cooing over a giddy bride; they were flush with compliments, praise, greetings. They all knew and loved Tenn, so they all loved me. I was embraced and led, a few steps behind Tenn, to a table in a dark corner, away from the bulk of the diners but still within view, our gustatory real estate of value to us and to the restaurant.

Tenn snapped his fingers, then pointed to a pitcher of water. A tall, elegant waiter brought to our table the pitcher and two large goblets and filled them. Tenn quickly and voraciously drank them. “Good God,” he stated, spraying the table with fluid, “I was dying and didn’t even know it.” There was then a long, dramatic pause. “As is my wont.”

I know that the waiter read us the specials and left us with menus. I don’t remember any of what he said, and I know that we failed to order for some time. It was more important for Tenn to drink, and he signaled that he wanted a bottle of liquor left at the table, along with a bucket of ice. I chose iced tea, the house wine of the South.

Every eye and ear in the restaurant was trained on us.

“I would like to talk about prayer,” Tenn said.

Prayer was introduced to me—and to Tenn—as a device to achieve what earthly vendors could not provide. Prayer opened up supernal supermarkets, opportunities; energies were shifted, and people we needed or wanted appeared.

I prayed to be accepted into the kingdom of heaven and I prayed whenever I plugged an appliance into an electrical socket, because I had been shocked at a young age doing so. I prayed to be left alone by school bullies, and I prayed to die young, because I believed that one remained forever at the age at which one died, and I didn’t want to get to heaven and be too old to enjoy myself or to be able to move around with ease. More than anything else, I prayed to get out of Baton Rouge.

Tenn prayed for this same liberation, but his prayers came with a particular consecration: Tenn was raised in the cradle of the Episcopalian Church, his family serving the institution (on retainer to Christ, as he saw it), and his mother finding great strength in having and maintaining a high standing within its social confines. Deluded into thinking that his prayers would hold a higher power because of his connections, Tenn was bitter that they failed to remove him from his unfortunate place of residence.

“I awoke every morning,” he told me, “enraged that I was not in Maine (I fancied Damariscotta, because I thought it might be like the Taj Mahal on the water, with silver maples in the background) or Paris or Los Angeles. I expressed grave disappointment as my mother’s face hovered over me in the bed each morning. It should have been Gloria Swanson or Judith of Bethulia or any number of imaginary women I had conjured in the night. I came to see that my reality was St. Louis and oilcloth on the table and watery eggs and perpetual abuse by my father and other boys, so I found a new means of prayer and a new means of liberation.”

Tenn explained to me that he had and loved a large radio throughout his childhood. The radio reminded him of a photograph he had once seen of a cathedral, and it became for him a holy relic, an object of great adoration, as esteemed as the church that gave him nothing on barren Sunday mornings. Tenn could not recall if the radio was made of cherry, walnut, or oak, but it was the first fine gift he had ever been given, and his first memories of reverence were of polishing this radio with lemon or verbena oil.

Deep in the night of his sleep, Tenn would hold the radio as he might have held a puppy or a stuffed animal, and he would listen to radio dramas, or parties over which band music wafted, and he could imagine other lives, other snatches of dialogue that could remove him from the reality of the life he endured.

“When I was young,” Tenn told me, “and if I was particularly inappropriate, my father would punish me by sending me to bed early, demanding that I sit in my room with no illumination and reflect upon my maledictions. Having no access to my books or drawings, I would turn on the radio that sat by my bed and listen to the dramas that played there. I would hug the radio close to my body, the better to hide what I was doing from ears of enmity that lived around me, and also to better feel the vibrations of the action that was emanating from the radio—to feel the action of the airwaves enter my body. I became engaged to my imagination, and I loved the organ stings, the glissandos, the tiny dramas that used so much, so quickly.

“As I listened to these programs, I also husbanded a deep hatred for my father and for the God who had decided, in an attack of cruel capriciousness, to cast him as my father in our own tiny drama, which deprived me of so much, so quickly.

“I prayed a new prayer as I listened to these dramatic programs. I asked to be released from the prison that was my home, from the meanness that surrounded me. I utter this prayer every day, to this day. You’ll learn,” he explained to me, “that prayers are directed at us, at our souls, our gifts; and I was being released, I was being directed to a new reality.

“When my father was especially angry and fulsome in his rage, when I was especially effeminate or dreamy for his tastes, he would remove my radio from my room, and I was left with nothing but my imagination, my rage, and my pitiful prayer, thrown up to a God who directed, mercifully, my attention to the sounds outside my window—the scattered conversations of my neighbors, the sound of music and dramatic programs emanating from dozens of radios around the neighborhood, cast on spring or summer breezes, or encased in closed-for-winter homes. Faint or forceful, I would listen, and I would imagine the circumstances surrounding the shards of dialogue or music I could hear.

“I believe this was when I came to believe I could write. I believe this was the time when I could imagine that there might be a God.

“As the years have progressed, and as my maledictions have become pronounced and occasionally profitable, I still find myself in the dark, in the silence, listening and waiting, hoping and praying, beseeching that ever-capricious God to show me something, share something with me, cast upon the movie screen that hangs over my bed, or within the radio tubes that reside in my head, a narrative, a woman that I can follow and believe in and dream for and write about to pull me from that St. Louis bed of anger and fear and sadness. God, give me something, anything!”

A pause, a lick of the lips.

“Oil, as you may know, is most often found in our own backyards; euphoria deep within. Aren’t we told that the kingdom of heaven is within us? I’m still looking, and my guides, my fearless and supernal Sherpas, are attempting to keep me on the right paths.

“As I stare into the darkness of my many nights and bad intentions, waiting for my mental proscenium to be lit, or for my above-bed screen to flicker with images, I think instead on those women—and a few men—who have been a constant source of inspiration and illumination; examples and extremes. I can’t always recall the circumstances through which they came to dominate my thoughts and my earliest attempts to communicate, but I can remember their names, and I have created acts of idolatry for them all, an amended Stations of the Cross in which I recall their acts of alchemy, of kindness, of spiritual and imaginative valor. I hold the memory of these people as close to me as I held that radio, lost to me forever.”

Tenn paused and looked into the courtyard, not for human contact, but for a distant spot into which he could stare and think. His eyes were lightly misted, but he brushed away any emotion, and returned his attentions to me.

“A few years ago,” he continued, “a friend in publishing told me of a typeface bearing a most marvelous name: Friz Quadrata. Very bold, very stylish. I was given some samples of this typeface, and they were on a sheet of paper upon which you could press and they would stick to whatever you had devised for a communicative purpose. Pressure letters, they’re called. What a lovely title that is: ‘Pressure Letters.’

“I can waste a good day applying these pressure letters to surfaces of pale judgment that cry out for a story or a woman speaking to us, and I can fool myself that I am writing, that I am praying to that same fucking God again to allow me to hear the distant voices, the distant music, to bring forth words.

“I now imagine the names of my great influences, and I see them in this great and bold typeface, and I focus and I pray and I am not bitter. I am grateful that they have been in my life and continue to be in my life, and I hope to be of use to them again. To matter.

“If there is a God, I think that he realized upon creating the world, upon making the mud and man—the rudiments, the utilities of the world—he needed color and beauty and analysis of what he had made, and he made woman, not from dust of the earth or spit or rain or sweat, but from the bone of a man. Now there’s a title, too: ‘The Bone of a Man.’ ”

Another pause, a slight laugh.

“So God presented us with the follies of God, the great and immortal truth of his humor and comfort and care and taste. And at night, in the dark, without my radio, without my rosary, without a word to place on the pale judgment, I see, without effort, and with great peace, the names of these women in Friz Quadrata type on the screen above my bed or on the lids of my tired eyes. And I can dream, and I can sometimes write, but I can always, always believe again.

“And so, baby, that is proof enough for me that there are higher powers and better stations awaiting us—awaiting you—and a woman will lead us to them.”

Tenn then picked up his menu and handed it to me. He pointed to it and said only one word: “Write.”

Over the next twenty minutes or so, Tenn dictated to me the names of the people he wanted both of us to pray to, dream of, write for.

He called them the follies of God, and I wrote down the names.

The menu was soon covered with names, primarily women, and then Tenn offered me an assignment.

“I would like for you to ask these people if I ever mattered,” he confessed. “I ask you to go to them because these people have mattered to me, and they keep me going—to the pale judgment, to face another day, to care again.”

The tone of the lunch changed abruptly. I was no longer the rube from Baton Rouge seeking advice and counsel; I was his partner in a venture that would bolster us both. I would go to New York and I would go to these people with a message from Tenn, after which the topic of Tenn mattering would be broached. I would then call or write Tenn and let him know what had been said.

“I am keeping the disease of bitterness firmly at bay,” he said. “I’ve been to the bottom of that barrel, and I’m not going there again. I am no longer angry, baby. A little aggrieved, perhaps, but anger is a voracious cancer on the soul and the talent: it cripples the instincts, leaves you open to all manner of bad things.”

Bitterness was kept at bay by a pronounced concentration on those people who had mattered to him, would matter again, and who might be of some value in pouring some fog on his mental proscenium and allowing some women to come forth and begin talking. He had taken an old rosary—given to him more than a decade earlier, when he had converted to Roman Catholicism—and he had renamed the mysteries and each bead along its length. There were no longer mysteries reserved for the crucifixion or the giving of water as the burdensome cross was carried. Instead there were beads bearing the memory and imagined visages of Jessica Tandy, Kim Stanley, Maureen Stapleton, Maria Tucci, Irene Worth, Marian Seldes, William Inge, Elia Kazan, John Guare—far too many names, so the beads had to be rotated, understudies taking over for leads, Beatrice Straight sometimes being called forward to take over the bead reserved for Geraldine Page, her memory caressed, recalled, blessed.

My assignment would be to knock on the doors of these people and relate to them what Tenn felt about them, then tarry and see if the thought was reciprocated, if they believed that Tenn mattered.

“There is very little that I can do well,” he confessed. “I cannot have or care for a child. I cannot prepare a meal satisfactorily—the dishes never emerge at the appropriate times. I cannot even eat a meal when I would like to. Things are falling apart; I lack mental and glandular flexibility. My brain doesn’t produce the creative fog, or words or sentences that share anything but the dusty refuse that resides in my skull. I cannot even be a friend for any sustained period of time, because my boundaries, always gently traced in sand—sands of madness—have been blown away and I can’t retrace them. I cannot, you see, really do anything, can’t relate to anything, but goddammit, I thought once, and I think still, that I can write. Can’t I get a single witness to whom I once delivered pages and deliverance to say that I once mattered?”

I accepted the assignment. I took out my first blue book and began to take the notes, to receive the directions to find my way to the people who had mattered to Tenn.

“One more thing,” Tenn interjected, as I began to write. “I would like to call you Dixie. It seems appropriate.”

I nodded and returned to my blue book and the description of the first folly of God. I wrote her name: Maureen Stapleton.

* * *

From the book Follies of God, by James Grissom, published 2015

Jessica Gross | Longreads | April 2015 | 19 minutes (4,797 words)

In 2011, Kate Bolick charted the sea change in our cultural attitudes toward marriage in her Atlantic piece, “All the Single Ladies.” Interweaving personal experience—she was 39 and single at the time—with reporting, Bolick posited that we are marrying later or not at all, with many women exercising their ability to have children without partners or, again, not at all.

The piece generated a huge response. In Bolick’s new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, she approaches single adulthood from a slightly different angle. The book is part memoir: Bolick describes breaking away from a serious, cohabitating relationship in her late twenties, exploring her ambivalence about partnership, and wholly reconsidering her view of marriage. Along the way, she presents the stories of her five “awakeners,” the historical single women who shaped her thinking. These were the essayist Maeve Brennan, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, the columnist Neith Boyce, the novelist Edith Wharton, and the writer and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. By considering these women’s biographies and cultural contexts, Bolick began to better understand her own.

I’ve been single for most of my twenties—I’m almost thirty now—and I’ve tended to think of it as some kind of flaw. Reading Spinster, I not only saw clearly this underlying belief, which wasn’t totally conscious, but also realized that being single was actually a choice I had made. Does that ring true to you as the heart of what this book is about?

Yes, without a doubt. The book started for me when I was in my late twenties and living with my boyfriend and we moved from Boston to New York so that I could go to graduate school. I started wondering, what does a life look like if you’re not married? I was really struck to realize that there were no positive depictions of single women in popular culture. At that moment in time, in 2000, it was either Carrie Bradshaw or Bridget Jones. You were either frivolous and fabulous or desperate. And either way, you were definitely trying to get yourself coupled. Sex and the City was in a way celebrating singlehood, but it was also singlehood as long as it’s a way station to something else. And so it began that way, with becoming interested in at least learning more about a different way of being that I wasn’t seeing reflected around me anywhere. Yet I knew that culture had given us positive examples in the past, particularly during the second wave of the women’s movement. So where did that go?

It was during that sort of amorphous period of wondering that I came across Neith Boyce, who felt like a profound discovery: I hadn’t even known people were talking about this in the late 1800s. The clarity of her voice at a time that I thought of as being so repressive for women made me see how much we’re shaped by the time in which we live and the assumptions that we grow up with.

So that’s a long way of saying yes, but it was more this kind of internal questioning, and then smacking up against this external example from history.

Can you talk a little bit about the process of how this book came into being in a practical way? You tried to write about these historical examples during a writer’s residency almost 10 years ago, but it didn’t go well. Then there was your 2011 piece in the Atlantic, which tackles this issue from a different angle and which garnered a huge amount of attention. How did you come to weave those two threads together in this book?

When I did that residency in 2006, I was writing about three of the women and the ways in which they had thought about marriage versus not marriage, and what they made me think about. But when I sat down to write it, all I would do is cry because I felt so close to these questions and so afraid still of what my life was going to look like. The material was just too terrifying. It also felt a highly idiosyncratic project, like: who cares? These three forgotten woman, and then I’m some nobody woman, writing about them. It felt like a very indulgent project. I didn’t have anything larger to say than that for some reason these three women had really made an impression on me in the ways in which they thought about and conducted their lives; they’d meant so much to me and had created a conversation inside of me that I was having with myself.  But I see now in retrospect that because I didn’t understand the context in which I was living, I couldn’t create a useful friction between their lives and mine. And so I put that project aside, but I never stopped thinking about them or thinking about the project as a whole: single women as an archetype and the malleability of romantic arrangements and how our times dictate what we think is appropriate.

So that was what I was thinking about as a hobby, you know, for all those years. And then in 2011, Scott Stossel at The Atlantic asked me if I would write a cover story about changing marriage trends, contemporary marriage trends, and specifically how men’s worsening economic prospects were changing the face of dating, marriage and the family. So that was the assignment.

Did he know that you really had been thinking about this in a deep way when he asked you?

No.

Really?

Isn’t that crazy? I mean, we knew each other, and I guess I must have talked about this to some degree over time, but he didn’t know how interested I was in it at all. It was really that he was approaching me as an unmarried woman. At the time I was thirty-eight or thirty-nine and he just thought I would have an interesting perspective or would want to take on this assignment. You know, I should ask him why he asked me to do that specific assignment! Anyway, he wanted me to write it in the first person, drawing on my own experiences as an unmarried woman in her late thirties. And I think that, generally speaking, he intended to personalize and humanize and make more accessible these changing statistics that were taking place and were becoming more apparent because of the recession.

So I started researching and recording it and the whole time I was thinking, how am I possibly going to write this in the first person? Because the reason I am an unmarried woman in her late thirties has nothing to do with men’s worsening economic prospects, which was the gist of the assignment. So I didn’t know what that link-up would be until I came across the statistics around single people, which I hadn’t seen before and at the time weren’t quite as widely publicized as they are now. When I saw those numbers for the first time, my heart started racing. It was that amazing journalistic scoop feeling, when you’re like, “Ah, this is the story.” So I called Scott and told him the story was about single people in America and why we have more of them than ever before. He’s an amazing editor and he said, “Well, if that’s what you think, then go with that.”

As I began researching that reality and looking into recent historical trends about single people, I felt like the women I’d tried to write about before were perched on my shoulder, taking in all of this information with me. And for the first time, I was able to put myself into a contemporary context that I hadn’t understood before. In doing that, I was able to see that each of these women had herself existed within a different contemporary context. And so that’s what really brought the women in that old project back to me.

So the article came out, and I did not anticipate the kind of response it would get. One of the outcomes was that I started getting emails from young women all over the world. It really hit in other places like Australia and the U.K., and they all sounded like me when I was in my twenties. They were asking me questions that I had asked myself. And I realized that I was old enough now to write the book I’d attempted in 2006, that I had enough distance. It sounds so corny, but I really felt that these were all my little sisters and I could be a big sister, I could inhabit the authority of a big sister. And that if these women were asking themselves the questions I had asked myself then, that book that I had wanted then still needed to exist.

It’s interesting that you mention Scott Stossel coming to you with the original assignment because of your own singlehood. Because there’s a line in the book: “Today, nearly every female writer I know has had to decide at some point whether or not she’ll accept an assignment to write about her dating life, a conundrum that is almost never presented to men.” Was there any part of you that bristled at the implication that, in this Atlantic piece, you would need to publicly divulge a lot of information about your dating life?

[Laughs] I know, I definitely recognize the irony. That I had basically not written about my dating life all this time and now, suddenly, I was about to do this cover story for a national magazine was absurd. But I felt, at the same time, that it was a great opportunity because The Atlantic had been initiating and shaping a lot of the public conversation around women today, and I felt glad that I would be given the chance to bring my own point of view. As far as that line that you’re quoting, I’d felt on principle that I did not want to write about my dating life, just because it was something that women were asked to do and men weren’t. But personally, it didn’t bother me at all. And that was because I was walking a very fine line of personal writing in that piece where I was drawing on my own personal experience but I wasn’t being confessional. And so it felt like I was just kind of plucking examples to make points, but I wasn’t revealing anything essential about my soul.

Parts of this book echo Janet Malcolm’s style: Unlike her, your writing is memoiristic, but like her, you tell the story of how you researched and came to understand the biographical material you’re writing about. That is, the content is revealed through the process by which you learned it. Was that a conscious similarity?

Buy the book.

Oh, it was definitely conscious. [Laughs] I only wish I could be like her—I wish I didn’t have to be so personal, but it’s just the way that I am. She is so good at using herself as this guide and narrator, bringing you through a process and through material, without revealing herself. And that’s what I hoped for at the beginning with my book. I wanted to operate in the tradition of Janet Malcolm. But it turns out I can’t. [Laughs] I’m just personally or anecdotally oriented or something. And I also felt that, because I was writing about a topic I felt so attached to and intimate with, and which is so personal, it required that I put as much of myself in as I was comfortable with.

Why do you wish you didn’t need to? Why is there some moral good attached to not writing personally?

I came of age as a writer with a lot of very conflicted ideas around personal writing. In college, I had been a poet and thought that’s what I was going to do. When I stopped writing poetry, I was very drawn to personal essays because I’d written in the first person as a poet and I was very comfortable writing out of my own subjectivity. The personal essay felt like a natural extension of that—just turning poems into prose, basically.

But at the same time—I graduated from college in ’95—there was this memoir boom, and then the memoir backlash. There was so much bad memoir writing and I didn’t want to be part of it and I didn’t like it. And I also felt like there was an implicit danger that I was too young to be writing out of my own personal experience because I didn’t have any perspective on anything. And I felt if I paid too much attention to writing in that vein I wouldn’t actually learn how to become a writer.

So I resisted it for a really long time. I would very occasionally write personal essays because I do love them so much, but I wanted to learn how to do other things. So that has something to do with it.

In the book, you mention the writer Annie Dillard’s concept of the “gregarious recluse,” which I loved. Could you talk about that place in between introversion and extroversion?

When I was applying to graduate school, one of my editors at The Atlantic described me as an extroverted introvert in his recommendation, and I loved that. I had never thought about myself one way or the other in that regard, and that seemed to nail it. The balance between my introversion and extroversion has been really tricky for me. I really had to train myself to stop constantly talking my ideas instead of writing them down. I had to learn how to internalize, how to hold on to stuff more, in order to express it through my writing rather than through a conversation with friends. But then, at the same time, when I’m researching and reading, I need to talk to somebody about my ideas—it helps me shape and develop my ideas, and then writing helps me clarify them and organize them even further.

As far as my experience as a person who moves in and out of romantic relationships, I think some people are absolutely wired to be inside of a couple, to have a primary partner who they’re connected to at all times, just as some people should not be in relationships at all because they’re best left on their own. I’m someone who likes connections but also needs a lot of time by myself, and it has been tricky over the years to find boyfriends who are comfortable with that balance. I tend to be drawn to men who are fairly introverted, because they need their own space as well.

I’m also very social and love spending time with friends, and I can really invest too much time in that and not enough time in my own work or my own writing or, sometimes, my own self. I think I’ve gone through phases where I’ve used friendship as distraction from things that scare me. It’s probably no mistake that it took me this long to write a book. Part of it is that I was just really afraid to, and it was a lot easier to hang out with my friends than to sit down and write something.

Afraid of what exactly?

I just didn’t think I could do it. Oh, my God, I absolutely did not think I could do it. I was scared it would be terrible or that I wouldn’t even be able to get the words out. And for a while it was really hard to get the words out, to get the words inside my head onto the page. It’s such an ugly process.

It also requires tremendous discipline. I was so in love with New York City and experiencing the city, but in order to write the book I really had to remove myself from a lot of the activities that bring me pleasure to be able to get enough sleep to get a workday in. I found, unfortunately, that I write best in 12- to 14-hour jags. And I could only do that by cutting out most everything else.

You write in the book not only about how great and fun it can be to be single, but also how difficult it can be: for one thing, you have an overabundance of time.

As the years went on, I started to feel more deeply how being a single adult is different than being a single young person. In your twenties, everybody’s single and figuring it out at the same time, and I had avoided a lot of that by staying inside of these long-term relationships where I spent all my time with just one person. As I progressed through my thirties, I started to realize that being happy single required more intentions than I had been aware of. You have to really organize your life so that all of your time is productive and sustaining, because otherwise it’s very easy to get lonely. Particularly when you reach that stage of life where so many of your friends are marrying off and beginning to have children, you just have more time than they do. That time alone can be so rewarding and so sustaining but, on the flipside, it’s haunted by the specter of loneliness. It’s really easy to be ambushed by a lonely or scared feeling. The way to protect against that, I found, is to make your life as full as you can and really exercise the right you have to all this time. You have to put thought into it. Once I did that, it my life felt much more stable and enriched.

Which brings up the major theme of learning to cultivate your own judgment as an adult. Opting into set institutions, like marriage, on a predetermined timetable is not only comforting, but it also sort of relieves you of the need to consciously decide that this is something that you really want. Is that right?

Yes, absolutely.

And it’s valid, too, in a way—I mean, cultivating your own sense of judgment is really unpleasant work, I must say!

Yeah, it is—and I think it’s the only way toward maturity and actually growing up, particularly in a time that is so fixated on youth culture and staying forever young. We have so many different options of ways of living, but we tend to choose just a very particular few. In order to remain open to the possibilities available to us, we have to cultivate our own internal moral compass and set of judgments and values, and that is itself the process of maturing in a positive way and creating an adulthood that feels vibrant instead of resigned.

Could you talk a little bit about how you figured out the structure of the book?

I knew all along that the structure would be my own coming of age as an adult. I think of that as a coming of second age, because the classic coming of age is growing from childhood into young adulthood, and this is really my growing from young adulthood into middle adulthood. I knew that that would be the arc, and I wanted an arc because I wanted this to be a work of narrative non-fiction.

Each woman appears in the book as she appeared to me in real life, in that order. I think of them as little romantic plots on their own: I would fall in love with a woman and have a relationship with her and learn all I could, and then the next one would come along. And each woman came with her own arc, so it’s five mini-arcs inside of my one longer arc.

But it took me months to figure out how to actually do it, because the chronology in which these historical women entered my life put them out of chronological order in terms of American history. So I then had to create another chronology of ideas, basically, and determine which woman was going to represent which ideas I wanted to express. I made a huge chart on the wall and mapped it out, which took me months. So Neith Boyce speaks to the theme of work, Edna St. Vincent Millay is sex, Edith Wharton is intentionality of space and how we organize our lives and the home, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman is really bringing all of those themes together and pushing them forward and politicizing them in a way that those other women didn’t. And then Maeve Brennan, whom I put in three chapters interspersed throughout the book, took a long time because she’s such a sad story.

You note in the book multiple times that all of these women are white. Many also happen to have red hair, like you. Do you anticipate there will be a backlash anyway?

Yes, that’s what I expect. When I realized that the book was so white, I thought, “Oh God, this is terrible.” I considered including a woman of color, and I really wrestled with that for a while, but I decided I just couldn’t because I was telling a true story, and this was how it went, and it’s no mistake that I was drawn again and again to white women because their experiences were the ones I could most easily inhabit. I think it’s a necessary flaw of this book. I wish I could have done it a different way, but I didn’t see how I could have. And so in a way I welcome the backlash because we do need to talk in a broader way about the varieties of the single female experience.

In researching this book, you really had to research yourself and your own past, including reading your old journal entries. What was that like?

I couldn’t read the journals for long stretches—I could only handle a few pages at a time. And that was particularly the journals from before my mother had died, because I think of life as a before and after: before she died and after she died. Re-acquainting myself with the self I had been before she died was really hard for me because I was much more hopeful in certain ways. It wasn’t just the innocence of youth, it was just the innocence of not having something bad happen.

She died quickly, we hadn’t seen it coming, and it upended my sense of the world. It took many years to learn how to internalize a lot of the strength that she had given me. In certain ways, her dying was the beginning of my adulthood, but it also knocked my adulthood off course because I spent the rest of my twenties grieving her and feeling very lost and alienated and alone, with a major loss of confidence in myself and my place in the world.

When I see my 21- and 22-year-old self writing in a journal, one of the things that was shocking to me was how consistent my voice is. I was writing sentences that I would write today. It made me sad to think that it took me so many years to regain the confidence to just continue being myself.

At the end of the book, you write, “I grant that a wholesale reclamation of the word spinster is a tall order. My aim is more modest: to offer it up as shorthand for holding on to that in you which is independent and self-sufficient whether you’re single or couple.” Were you being modest in calling your aim modest? Because the way the book is being packaged—you are pictured on the cover, looking like a super-sexy neo-spinster woman—does send the message that it’s a reclamation of the word “spinster.” And I’m not at all opposed to that.

[Laughs] It’s funny, because I wrote that before the book was packaged. I’m in love with the archetype of the spinster and what she represents to me, but I don’t expect that everybody will be. So if people want to reclaim it, I think that would be so cool. But I did feel modest, like I’m not going to make a rallying cry and insist that we all reclaim it.

The dating experiences you chronicle in the book are amazingly varied, and it seems as though you were dating all the time. Were there times that you wanted to be dating but it just wasn’t really happening at that particular moment?

No, I was always dating. It was varying degrees of seriousness, obviously, but I was just meeting people all the time. I’m just so interested in other people and so game and also so invested in giving people a chance. I don’t write people off very easily. Of course there were periods where I was miserable, I was dating and not finding anybody I liked or somebody was breaking my heart or something was confusing and I was really upset and distraught about it. It’s not like it was a big, fun world of dating. It was complicated and rocky and up and down. But I pretty much always had some version of something going on.

You describe at various points fighting your own tendency to merge completely with the people that you dated, and how cultivating boundaries within the confines of a monogamous relationship is difficult to master. What is your current relationship like in that regard?

I think one reason this relationship has been successful and lasted for as long as it has is because we are both very independent people and need a lot of time to ourselves and respect that in the other. All the way through my youth and through my twenties, my way of coupling was full-on merging with the other into a kind of co-dependency. That’s the only way I knew how to do it. And so the only way I could figure out how not to do it was to not have boyfriends. For a while, for many years, I didn’t want boyfriends. I was dating and I wanted to be with men and spend time with men and have romance in my life, but I didn’t want boyfriends. And what I meant by that was I wanted to be experiencing the opposite of that kind of merging codependency that I had known for so long. Over the years, I became able to maintain a sense of separateness, but usually, the other person didn’t like it. One reason my current relationship has worked so well is because he is not a merger at all and so he’s allowed me to find and kind of revert to my natural state of autonomy while also being coupled with him.

Is there anything else you really wanted to talk about?

Well, I was thinking more about structuring the book around the biographies of these five women, by which I mean the actual biographies written about them as well as just the lives themselves and the work that they had done. What I was trying to do in the book was then offer up myself as a biography alongside these five other biographies so that in a sense the book is a replication of an internal conversation I’ve been having with myself for all of my adulthood so far. And I thought, well, if I put my own biography down onto the page, the reader will hopefully have the experience of absorbing the conversation that I’ve been having in my own head, and she’ll have the example of my biography as something to respond to and react to.

Right! As I was reading the book, I became in my own mind an active rather than passive character in my own life.

Yes, excellent.

It worked.

Yeah. So now, when I’m bracing for the negative reactions to come, I feel that it’s just part of this game: I put myself on the page, and people are not going to like me, or they’ll disagree with things I say or did. And that’s what I opened myself up to, so I’ll have to deal with that when it comes.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ken Otterbourg | The New New South | April 2015 | 10 minutes (2,439 words)

After starting in Pittsburgh, the Ohio River heads north and then quickly loops south, as if realizing the error in its ways. It is a place to get lost and to get found. The river bends and twists here with energy, like a snake caught by its tail. There is an optimism in the current, movement and ambition, married with the skeletons of our built world and those worlds that came before that rise out of the fields and hills along the banks. Sometimes in the grace of dawn these structures appear as nearly flesh and blood. But that hope recedes as the sun climbs over the hill, past the chestnuts and maples. Time and gravity wait to do their parts.

It’s hard in these settings not to think about the end of cultures, of species, and of ways of life. Maybe it’s the times we live in, with the polar bears trapped on their shrinking ice floes or the Amazon rain forest slowly succumbing to the chainsaw of development. Hard to say. It’s not just animals, of course. Extinction, the end and the uncertainty and mystery that come with it, covers a lot of ground. You know where it leads, but you are never really quite sure where you are on the journey.

What’s needed is a guidepost, which is both more and less than a mileage marker, meaningful and maybe a little muddy, like the river itself. That is the best way to approach the Grave Creek Mound, which is in the middle of the city of Moundsville, W. Va. It is in the state’s northern panhandle, with Ohio just across the river. Sometimes called the Mammoth Mound, it is the largest conical burial mound in the United States: 69 feet tall and roughly 900 feet in circumference.

Photo via Flickr

Burial mounds are an unusual type of antiquity, beautiful in a way that an engineer can appreciate. By one measurement, Grave Creek contains 55,000 cubic yards of dirt. A standard wheelbarrow holds perhaps a quarter of a cubic yard, so you get the idea that this is a lot of earth that has to first be dug somewhere, then moved somewhere else and not just dumped willy-nilly on the ground but in the right spot at successively higher and more difficult-to-reach places.

These mounds dot the Ohio River valley, and they were among the earliest oddities encountered by explorers traveling the river in the late 1700s. A man named Joseph Tomlinson is said to be the first settler to come upon the Grave Creek Mound. In 1770, Tomlinson had moved from Maryland to the area, which at the time was the westernmost reach of the state of Virginia. He chose some promising land a few miles south of Wheeling and built a small cabin. One day, he was out hunting and shot a deer. His dog tracked the animal and Tomlinson skinned the deer. Heading home, he came to a rise. He walked up the wooded knoll and realized he was atop an enormous conical-shaped mound. Although the mound was only a quarter-mile or so from his cabin, it had been hidden there all along.

The mound quickly became a popular tourist attraction, boosted in part by its frequent mentions in the river atlases of the day that detailed the sights along the trip from Pittsburgh south. Passengers traveling down the river would make day trips. There was widespread speculation of what was inside. Smaller mounds had already been excavated; Most contained a few skeletons and some trinkets. But because of its size, Grave Creek was imagined to hold something of greater magnitude, perhaps thousands of skeletons, some untold treasures.

The Tomlinsons wanted nothing of it. As the mound’s ownership passed between generations, they held firm in keeping the pickaxes off of and out of their hill. But their resistance could only last so long. Much of the struggle is laid out in Moundsville’s Mammoth Mound, written in 1962 by Delf Norona, a founding member of the West Virginia Historical Society. In 1838, an anonymous article appeared in a local newspaper taking the citizens of Moundsville to task for not getting on with the digging. “Men, illustrious for their scientific and philosophical researches,” it said, “have given it as their belief that it is the repository of some mighty race who preceded the supposed aborigines of this country, and that it is a sepulchre in which sleep some of the mighty rulers of the earth.”

The idea that the mounds in Moundsville and elsewhere were the work of a lost race had been in circulation for years. Scientists of the era attributed them to wandering Chinese, Egyptians, Vikings, and Phoenicians. One theory credited the mounds to a lost tribe of Israel, essentially solving two mysteries with one hill.

By March of 1838, the people of Moundsville had raised more than $2,500 to begin the excavation. The Tomlinsons’ plan was to dig a tunnel into the center at about four feet off the ground, then sink a shaft from the top to meet that tunnel, and ultimately charge the curious “a gentle toll” to look inside. But as the tunneling progressed, the diggers discovered that there was actually a smaller mound within the larger mound and that it held a timbered passageway that led to a burial vault. They excavated the vault and found two skeletons, one male and one female. A second tunnel was later dug about halfway up the mound, and a third skeleton was recovered along with some copper bracelets, beads, and a few bits of mica.

During the excavation, one additional item was discovered: a small oblong piece of sandstone about the size of a good skipping stone and covered with characters. It became known as the Grave Creek Tablet.

Photo via Wikipedia Commons

The characters were in three rows, separated by straight lines. On the bottom (or was it the top?) was something that looked a little like a sword. A little. Others suggested it looked like a head on a pike, which had its own gruesome charm. From the beginning, there were scientists who doubted the authenticity of the tablet. But many others accepted its provenance and set out to figure out what the characters meant.

Henry Schoolcraft was one of those. He was the leading expert on American Indians in the early 19th Century, a widely traveled naturalist married to a woman who was half-Ojibwe, which gave him an air of credibility. One of his specialties was naming places. He found the practice of naming American cities and towns for places in Europe – a nation of Manchesters and Springfields – lazy and confusing. Instead, he created Indian-sounding words, including Alcoma, Tuscola, and Oscoda, which all became counties in Michigan. Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi, he coined from the tail end of the Latin “veritas” and the beginning of “Caput.” His tales and travels among the Indians were the basis for Longfellow’s epic poem, “Hiawatha.”

Schoolcraft considered himself a friend and ally of the Indians, but he also embraced the Grave Creek Tablet as authentic, and he visited Moundsville to learn more.

“All other interest becomes subservient to this, since it is the first monument, so far as we know, which appears to bear an alphabetic message from the great unknown void of our aboriginal history, to the present time,” Schoolcraft wrote.

His eagerness aside, Schoolcraft could not crack the code. Some purported to decipher the tablet, though. The first translation appeared in 1857. A Frenchman named Maurice Schwab revealed that the slashes and crazy marks said: “The chief of emigration who reached these places has fixed these statutes forever.” Other translations followed. They include:

Thy orders are laws, thou shinest in thy impetuous elan, and rapid as the chamois.

I pray to Christ his most holy mother, son, Holy Ghost Jesus Christ God.

United States of Egypt, built by states of Western Union.

In 1928, a huckster named Andy Price used Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers as inspiration. In the novel, Mr. Pickwick finds a strange stone with a code that is later found to be the work of a man named Stump. Price said the characters were just distorted English letters and the stone read: “Bil Stumps Stone Oct. 14, 1838.”

That sort of satire would seem to settle things, but it didn’t. The tablet’s most ardent supporters cited the lack of a consistent translation not as proof of fraud but rather simply an inability to figure it all out. It wasn’t until 2008 that the true story of the stone’s origin came to light. The forger was James Clemens, a Wheeling doctor who had helped bankroll the mound’s excavation. Disappointed with the results of the digging, he planted the small stone as a way to keep interest alive. The figures were from a book on ancient Spanish coins. The tablet – although a hoax – did exist. People felt it, rubbed it with their hands. But it has disappeared. All that is left are a photograph and some plaster casts at the Smithsonian Institution.

Although Clemens’ fraud created a long-lasting scientific argument, it failed to provide the marketing oomph the site needed. Visitors were few, and those who paid the 25 cents for admission found the mound’s interior cramped and smelly. It closed in 1846. By 1860, a saloon was on the mound’s summit. During the Civil War, artillery troops were stationed there. This part of Virginia separated from the rest of the state and became West Virginia in 1863, and for many years after the war, Union veterans would haul cannons up the mound and fire away. But patriotism only gets you so far. The mound’s savior would come from an unlikely place: the state prison across the street.

West Virginia State Penitentiary. Photo by Jon Dawson

An imposing, gothic structure surrounded by 30-foot walls, the West Virginia State Penitentiary opened in 1866. It bears the West Virginia motto Montani Semper Liberi, “Mountaineers are always free,” which at a prison can either seem like words of inspiration or a cruel joke. In 1874, a former warden, George McFadden, bought the mound and adjacent property for $1,760. His original plan was to build a water tank on it to supply the prison and surrounding businesses. But the plan never was acted upon, and McFadden spent much of the next 30 years trying to find someone to take the mound off his hands.

McFadden died in 1906, and his son stepped up the campaign to unload the property. He gave a deadline of June 1, 1908 for a buyer to step forward. The Daughters of the American Revolution took out an option as a stalling tactic, and then the state stepped in and took ownership of the mound in 1909.

By this time, the site was in terrible shape. The mound had been neglected, a place for vandals and for assignations. The purchase agreement provided no money for maintenance by the state, but a deal was struck that the inmates would provide free labor for repairs. They filled in the gullies and the dimple on top. They also hauled tons of dirt to the mound, reshaping it in the process into something far more pleasing and regular in appearance.

Eventually, the prison went into decline, too. In its early years it had been held up as a model institution, where inmates made their own clothes and published a monthly magazine called Work and Hope. They held boxing matches and put on a minstrel show. But crowding and age took its toll, and conditions deteriorated. A prisoner sued the state in 1981 claiming that a sentence at the facility constituted cruel and unusual punishment. There was a trial and a consent decree and a vow to improve. That didn’t happen. Experts who toured the prison a few years later found it appalling: The sewer system didn’t work. Rats were everywhere. There was little sanitation. One inmate testified he performed the dual role of cook and janitor, wearing the same clothing for both jobs. West Virginia’s Supreme Court attempted to enforce the decree but in the end, the solution was to close the prison.

That was in 1995. While a closed prison would seem to be the ultimate white elephant, that isn’t always the case. Today, the West Virginia State Penitentiary is its own tourist attraction, offering visitors a glimpse into life behind bars in an era before prisons became known as correctional facilities. It also serves as a training center, including staging the occasional mock prison riot, in which members of the general public can play the part of unruly inmate. All these enterprises are run out of the Moundsville Economic Development Council. It is a way to bring money and attention to a community that is hurting. Since 1960, Moundsville has lost 40 percent of its percent of its population, some 6,000 people.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with reinvention, but the transition from prison to theme park and training center is remarkable. One institution died, and another took its place, unburdened by the sins of the past. It shows how quickly the past can be put in the past. That is perhaps what is most authentic and American about the prison; its refusal to get mired in the problems of yesterday.

Moundsville, West Virginia. Photo by Jon Dawson

Grave Creek is almost the opposite. It is largely unchanged from how it was before all the digging began. The tunnels have been filled, and it remains an oddity, quirky and little else. Part of the mound’s problem is that there are still unanswered questions. The theories of lost races have been discarded, along with the tablet hoax. There is a gap in the historical record. Because we don’t know the first story, we’re unable to create a new story.

It’s like that old saw about every lie beginning with a small truth, a magpie’s nest where fact and fiction are woven together. We don’t know the truth about Grave Creek’s past, and our efforts to cobble together a story — real or invented — can only take us so far.

We are left with our imagination. But we are also left with something more important, which is a reminder that we don’t know everything and that sometimes it is simply better to ask questions than to get answers.

Of course I wonder about the mound builders and why they disappeared. But there’s something more basic, more primal, than the historical record and archaeology. Staring at the big hill before me, the river to my back, what I really want to know is how they knew when the mound was finished and there was no more dirt to move.

Photo by Tim Kiser via Wikimedia Commons

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Ken Otterbourg is a writer living in Winston-Salem, N.C. His articles have appeared in Fortune, The Washington Post Magazine, National Geographic and other publications. You can follow him on Twitter at @otterbourg and read his stories at kenotterbourg.com.

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New New South Editor: Andrew Park; Fact-checker: Brendan O’Connor

Sari Botton | Longreads | April 2015 | 15 minutes (3,752 words)

Sometimes life’s most inconvenient surprise detours ultimately yield great rewards we never could have predicted. For writer George Hodgman—who’s been whisked away indefinitely from his tidily self-contained life in New York City to care for his ailing mother—one of those rewards was a chance to better know and appreciate Betty (now 94) before she’s gone. Another benefit: the conditions he hadn’t even known he needed to finally, at 55, write and publish his first book. The New York Times Bestselling memoir, Bettyville, is the result.

A few years ago, Hodgman, a one-time Vanity Fair editor, traveled to his childhood home in Paris, Missouri to briefly care for his widowed, then 90-year-old mother, Betty, while her regular aide was recovering from surgery. When he learned Betty had had her license revoked after driving into a ditch, Hodgman realized his mother needed full-time, round-the-clock care. Her refusal to move into assisted living or a nursing home meant that he, her only son, had little choice but to stay with her for as long as was needed. More than three years later, he’s still there.

Purchase the book

Hodgman paints an acerbically funny, loving portrait of his singular mother—quick-witted, outspoken, but vain and guarded about her own growing vulnerability. She loves her son fiercely, but is homophobic and intransigent about her disinterest in knowing about his intimate life. Hodgman unflinchingly reveals himself, too—an out-of-work, out-of-shape, middle-aged gay man in recovery, and a mama’s boy through and through, even when Betty is at her most stubborn and challenging.

It’s a beautiful book. Hodgman weaves, movingly and wittily, back and forth between the difficult, unfolding present and various pasts—his small-town Midwestern childhood; both his parents’ deep denial about his sexuality; the height of the AIDS crisis, the heights and depths of his addiction; his highs and lows in publishing. As you follow the ultimately converging threads, and the deepening of the emotional bond, it’s hard not to fall in love with both mother and son.

Recently Hodgman talked with me (in Kingston, New York) by phone (from his native Paris, Missouri). There have been some great interviews with him in other places, like one with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, which have covered a lot of bases. Here, I focused more specifically on the aspects of the book and Hodgman’s experience writing it that have to do with things I’m obsessed with: leaving New York City, after many years for a small town; caring for elderly parents after barely being able to care for just yourself for many years; and the complicated matter of writing about other people.

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Talk to me first about leaving New York, a topic that occupies my mind, to say the least. I know that you initially went down to your hometown of Paris, Missouri, not expecting to stay, and then you realized that your mother really needed full-time help—she needed you. But it also seem as if in some ways maybe you needed her, too. I know that you had lost your job. Was that a good time for you to make that move? Was it sort of good to have a place to land?

Well, this place, my parents’ house, and this town, has always been a wonderful place to have to come to. It’s great to have a home, and have a “somewhere” where you can get away. And I got a little burned out on New York, in some ways. It just seemed like publishing, particularly—well, my last job in publishing was not a particularly happy one. It seemed to me like publishing had become the domain of marketers and sales people. When I started out in publishing it seemed like such a creative thing, and there were a lot of kind of brilliant, eccentric, colorful people. And suddenly it was…I don’t know, maybe it was just the company where I ended up. Because I had a very cheerful experience with the company who published this book. But New York seemed a little to me like a place that was all about people who could pay $12 million for apartments, and also like a place where one would be less likely than ever to want to pay $12 million for an apartment.

Betty Baker Hodgman

That is a conundrum to me. I feel as if New York City just keeps getting both more expensive and more generic. It’s not the reason that people have always gone there—to be surrounded by the generic.

Yeah, except at night. I love New York at night. I love whipping through the streets at night, and the lights. Particularly in the summer, I like to have my windows up and then look out at the street and the lights, and you can hear this kind of whoosh, the sound of the City. And it makes you want to be out there. It’s definitely a different thing here. I don’t miss New York as much as I thought I would, until I come back, and then I do, I do really miss it. But then I walk down the street, and I see some woman who is carrying a purse that looks like it cost $2,000, and then you look at her hair and it looks like that cost $500, the perfect shade, and then you look at the shoes and you think, wow, that’s $1,000, whatever it is, and you know, it is a little bit obscene. And it does seem to me that New York gets more and more about the trappings. That’s not so attractive to me. I’ve always been most interested in artists and creative people.

Obviously, the place is not so hospitable for artists and creative people these days.

And I would encourage artists and creative people to leave New York. Because I know that I never could have written this book in New York. I mean, obviously I couldn’t have had the experience that I write about while in New York, but also if you’re in publishing, and I’ve been in publishing for more years than I care to admit, you hear these voices in your head, “Oh, that’s too small, it’ll never sell, it’s Midwestern, it’s gay, it’s about an old person, it’s about an old person and a fat man,” and all the commercial formulas that New York, on the one hand, pretends to eschew, but also totally lives by. If you can get out of that money head, a lot of times, you can come up with something that is much more successful than if you follow the rules and work inside the genre or according to all those people, those marketing people that say it has to be this, it has to be that, throw in a vampire.

Ha. Throw in a vampire.

So, I’m not unhappy to be away, and I sort of doubt I’ll move back there, except for the fact that I’m really drawn back because of some people who I love. I don’t know that I will stay in Paris, Missouri, but I don’t know that I need to go back to New York. Goodbye to all that. (Laughs.)

How long did you live in New York City before you left?

I moved there in 1983, and I left in 2011. I don’t want to add up how many years. You’re going to have to do that calculus on your own, because I don’t want to know.

Where was the last neighborhood you lived?

On 23rd between 7th and 8th. But my real life, my real New York life was lived on 10th Street between University and Broadway, and that’s the apartment that I had forever, and it was this studio apartment that was in an old attic, and I loved it. I wanted to stay there forever. And it was the scene of many happy times and breakdowns. But I loved that place, and even though I was happy to find the place that I moved to, and was not unhappy there, there was something about leaving that place that kind of was the start of leaving New York.

Why did you move out of it?

Because it was rent controlled. It started out as $700 and I think I was paying $1500 by the time I left, and it was an amazing deal, but they wouldn’t do anything.  And I also couldn’t buy it. And there’s also a certain point where, you know, you’re 45 years old, and you think, “If I do not make the move to a refrigerator that doesn’t live under the counter now, then I never will,” and it was a Murphy bed and a tiny kitchen. But the thing I’ve noticed is the last two times I’ve been back in New York, the conversation seems, all over the City, to turn to the notion of  “Can we afford this? Do we need to leave?”

I find that New York City kind of infantilizes you, because you can’t afford to leave the apartment that really doesn’t make sense for a grown up. In order to leave that apartment, you have to make some grown up choices. And it seems like you had to make a really big grown up choice, ultimately: you had to pull up stakes and go take care of your mother. Do you think you’d ever go back, later on?

You know, I sort of feel like I’ve done a lot of time in New York, and I would rather explore some place new. I don’t necessarily want to stay here, though there’s a little college town called Columbia, about 50 miles from here. I love the look of St. Louis. They have some really great old residential neighborhoods and beautiful, beautiful old houses and architecture. I really have gotten so I love to drive around this area where I live, and the Missouri River is really close. Well, the Mississippi is too. But I love to drive around these roads where the Missouri River runs and there are these really funky little towns. They’re so gorgeous, with these old houses. In the summer there’s this one drive I take, and it looks so completely untouched. The greenery is so thick and ancient, and you know, Missouri is a nice mix of rural and college and urban. Unfortunately, the politics are not…yeah. That’s a problem.

A young George Hodgman.

Were you surprised by the sort of appreciation you’re expressing for Missouri? Was it something that you felt before, or was it something you kind of discovered by way of being down there taking care of your mother?

It was something that I have gradually discovered through the years. Because when I came back, when I started coming back after being in New York, I suddenly thought, hey, this is kind of pretty. Hey, there are two really big rivers here I didn’t notice when I lived here. It’s just been really gradual. I always loved the architecture of St. Louis. When I was a little kid I used to go there to visit my grandmother, and there are so many houses that I Just love. The notion of thinking about this place as an interesting place has kind of evolved through the years. And also, gradually, I have met people here during this stay who are interesting and wonderful in various ways to me. Kind of small town characters who are totally unlike…I mean, we don’t talk about the news, we don’t talk about books. But I like to listen to them, and they’re great.

So, it’s a different culture, but you’ve found a place in it. Even though it’s not New York.

Kansas City is a very hip, friendly place. Some place just named it the Hippest City in the United States. And so I think that I might like to have a small apartment in one of those places, and keep my parents’ house as a kind of summer house. I also think because of global warming you should probably buy property in the Midwest, because, I mean, New York and Florida and California—those people are going to have to move somewhere.

Note to self. So how is it going down there for you right now? How is your mother doing? As you discuss in the book, she has cancer and dementia.

Well right now she just let out a scream and I guess broke something or dropped something, and I’m kind of wondering what’s going on in there.

Do you need to go check on her?

No, it’s all right. Sometimes she just wants my presence. And you know, it’s not a great time for us, health-wise, but we’ve gotten through some of the challenges of cancer, and radiation, etc. etc., and I hope that we have that, at least temporarily, at bay. The winter is the hardest time. She can’t get out. It’s a hard time right now.

What’s it like for you to suddenly have to show up as an adult, for a parent? After living for so many years in New York, not having kids? That’s an aspect of the book that intrigued me particularly, on a personal level. I had an experience a few years ago with my mom. She had to have emergency gastric surgery, and wound up with a colostomy bag. I don’t have children. I don’t have pets. I’m squeamish. I went down to Florida for a few days to help out, and she needed help with everything from sponge bathing to quieting her mind late at night, and I realized how inexperienced I am at caring for someone in that way. And how freaked out I am by it.

Well, I am an anxious, nervous, worried person. I began to worry about this, like, when she was in menopause. Is this the end? I’d wonder. And so I’ve been really kind of obsessed with it in my head, like, what are we going to do? How am I going to handle this? What’s going to come? And before my mother lost her driver’s license, which is what really led to my being here long-term at the beginning, she had a ball. And it’s somehow easier for me to be here than to worry about it from afar. But I also just didn’t know whether I could do it. I didn’t know whether I had it in me. I didn’t know how it was that I was going to get her out of this house and into assisted living or something. I didn’t have anybody to help me with those battles. It was just me, and I also really dreaded all kinds of paperwork, like insurance and figuring out the money, and all that jazz, because I mean, I haven’t balanced a checkbook since the Civil War. It was just this mountain of dread. I think you learn that you have to put a whole lot of your fear up on the shelf, and just take it one situation at a time. That’s all that I’ve been able to come up with. I try not to think very much about what’s going to happen.

No “future tripping,” as they say?

Right. As they say in Hollywood, I like to live in the moment. I try to live in the moment.

I’d like to ask you about your mom and the book.  This is the thing I’m most obsessed with—memoirists writing about people in their life, or writing things that will upset people in their life. I’ve been asking writers about this for a long while now at The Rumpus. How is your mom handling this? Did she know about the book? Did she know you were writing it? Does she know she’s in it? That’s it’s named after her.

She knew I was writing it. I told her about it when I sold it. It was hard to get her to take in a lot of what I was trying to do, and she didn’t want to take it in. She didn’t want to really hear about gay stuff, and she really sort of tuned out of most conversations when I tried to tell her about it. And so one thing that I have tried to stress with her is that I have always had this thing in my life that I’ve wanted to do more than anything; that I’ve always, always, always wanted to write a book, and that being here made that possible, that she made it possible for me to do what I’ve always wanted to do. Although she doesn’t ever say it—she keeps it in denial—I know she has guilt about me giving up my life to be here. So I tried to position the book with her as this gift that she has given me that is something that has been a really good thing that came out of my being here. She really needs to feel that I’m happy here. Now, given my mother’s specific condition, there’s also the problem that you have to kind of explain things again and again. And there’s also my mother’s personality, and my personality, which is that if there’s a problem, if there’s something that’s confusing that we have our ambivalent feelings about, we’re just not going to talk about it and hope that it will go away before we have to deal with it very much. I think the book has been that for her.

Does she know it’s called Bettyville?

Yes. Sometimes, when she deigns to acknowledge it, she calls it “Betty Land.”

Betty

One of my favorite conversations about this was with Vivian Gornick, about how her mother dealt with the publication of Fierce Attachments, Gornick’s memoir about her relationship with her mother. Her mother was really, really upset about it, and they didn’t talk for a while. Then, like a year later, when the book was clearly a success, her mother was autographing copies.

As an editor, I’ve seen people go through this so many times. You have to wait for the world to tell the people around you that it’s okay. As Elizabeth Taylor said, “There’s no deodorant like success.”

The whole business of writing about other people has been a real dilemma for me, and for so many writers. Especially when you haven’t given those people the courtesy of letting them die before you write about them.

I think everybody’s situation with memoir is different, but there’s always so much to deal with. I thought my mother would be dead. Or I thought my mother would not be mentally with us. I started this book as a gift to myself to compensate for the fact that she was not going be here, in a way. So I really didn’t think this was a problem that I was going to have. I’m happy to have it, you know, I’m happy she’s here, but I mean we may have to get some sort of union negotiator in here. It opens so many boxes and it’s not just her, it’s my family.

Are there family members who are upset about what’s in the book?

I mean, my aunt and my cousins. And you kind of have to face the fact if you write a memoir that you are a somewhat aggressive person, that you are appropriating lives, in a way, that aren’t yours. And you put yourself out there and you try to be really generous, and you do what you can to get permission, but a lot of times the permission is meaningless because they have no idea to the extent that you’re going to examine, or what you’re going to say. My mother was like, “Oh you’re writing a book.” And she didn’t say, don’t write it. But she had no way of knowing the places I was going to go with it. So memoir is a total minefield, as you know. It’s best if you write the book and leave the country.

Has anybody in your family come forward and said, “How dare you?” or anything like that?

The last few months have been very, very worrisome because of this. My cousins were very shocked by it. I mean, there is the mention of sex in the book, of my actually being a sexual being, so that went over like a lead balloon. It’s like all of these things that people take for granted when they read books every day about other people—the fact that other people might be presented as complex, as not completely angelic, all these things that people are—they don’t have a problem in their daily reading when it’s about other people, but when it’s about someone they want to protect, then it’s a whole different thing. And they really are not able to see it in a balanced way. But now they seem to have come to the point where they’re glad that I have done something, and they’ve come to see it as something that I needed to do as therapy. They think, “You’ve done this as therapy.”

As if you’ve published your journal.

Yes, and it’s better than if I were upstairs with a loom.

* * *

Sari Botton is a writer living in Kingston, New York. She is the editor of the award-winning anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and the New York Times Bestselling follow-up Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York, and she is Editorial Director of the TMI Project.

Eric Foner | Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad | W. W. Norton & Company | January 2015 | 31 minutes (8,362 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book Gateway to Freedom, by Eric Foner, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

The history of slavery, and of fugitive slaves, in New York City begins in the earliest days of colonial settlement. Under Dutch rule, from 1624 to 1664, the town of New Amsterdam was a tiny outpost of a seaborne empire that stretched across the globe. The Dutch dominated the Atlantic slave trade in the early seventeenth century, and they introduced slaves into their North American colony, New Netherland, as a matter of course. The numbers remained small, but in 1650 New Netherland’s 500 slaves outnumbered those in Virginia and Maryland. The Dutch West India Company, which governed the colony, used slave labor to build fortifications and other buildings, and settlers employed them on family farms and for household and craft labor. Slavery was only loosely codified. Slaves sued and were sued in local courts, drilled in the militia, fought in Indian wars, and married in the Dutch Reformed Church. When the British seized the colony in 1664, New Amsterdam had a population of around 1,500, including 375 slaves.

Under British rule, the city, now called New York, became an important trading center in a slave-based New World empire. In the eighteenth century, the British replaced the Dutch as the world’s leading slave traders, and the city’s unfree population steadily expanded. New York merchants became actively involved in the transatlantic slave trade as well as commerce with the plantations of the Caribbean. Slave auctions took place regularly at a market on Wall Street. Between 1700 and 1774, over 7,000 slaves were imported into New York, most of them destined for sale to surrounding rural areas. This figure was dwarfed by the more than 200,000 brought into the southern colonies in these years. But in 1734, New York’s colonial governor lamented that the “too great importation of . . . Negroes and convicts” had discouraged the immigration of “honest, useful and laborious white people,” who preferred to settle in neighboring colonies like Pennsylvania. By mid-century, slaves represented over one-fifth of the city’s population of around 12,000. Ownership of slaves was widespread. Most worked as domestic laborers, on the docks, in artisan shops, or on small farms in the city’s rural hinterland. In modern-day Brooklyn, then a collection of farms and small villages, one-third of the population in 1771 consisted of slaves.

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New Yorkers later prided themselves on the notion that in contrast to southern slavery, theirs had been a mild and relatively benevolent institution. But New York slavery could be no less brutal than in colonies to the south. “Hard usage” motivated two dozen slaves to stage an uprising in 1712 in which they set fires on the outskirts of the city and murdered the first whites to respond. There followed a series of sadistic public executions, with some conspirators burned to death or broken on the wheel. The colonial Assembly quickly enacted a draconian series of laws governing slavery. These measures established separate courts for slaves and restricted private manumissions by requiring masters to post substantial bonds to cover the cost of public assistance in the event that a freed slave required it. The discovery of a “Great Negro Plot” in 1741, whose contours remain a matter of dispute among historians, led to more executions and further tightening of the laws governing slavery. As a result, few black New Yorkers achieved freedom through legal means before the era of the Revolution. Most censuses in colonial New York did not even count free blacks separately from slaves. On the eve of the War of Independence, the city’s population of 19,000 included nearly 3,000 slaves, and some 20,000 slaves lived within fifty miles of Manhattan island, the largest concentration of unfree laborers north of the Mason-Dixon Line. One visitor to the city noted, “It rather hurts a European eye to see so many Negro slaves upon the streets.”

Image via New York Public Library / Wikimedia Commons.

* * *

As long as slavery has existed, slaves have escaped to freedom. During the colonial era, long before any abolitionist networks offered assistance, New York City became both a site from which fugitives fled bondage and a destination for runaways from the surrounding countryside and other colonies. Black farmsteads on the northern edge of New Amsterdam were notorious for sheltering fugitives. Offering refuge to the slaves of one’s rivals became a common practice in imperial relations, facilitating runaways’ quest for freedom. Connecticut and Maryland, the British colonies nearest to New Netherland, encouraged Dutch slaves to escape and refused to return them. In 1650, Governor Petrus Stuyvesant threatened to offer freedom to Maryland slaves unless that colony stopped sheltering runaways from the Dutch outpost.

As the slave population increased under British rule, so did the number of escapes from the city. Since nearby colonies, controlled by the British, no longer offered safe refuge, slaves often escaped to upstate Indian nations or French Canada. As early as 1679, New York’s colonial Assembly imposed a fine of twenty-five pounds—a considerable sum at the time—for harboring fugitives. In 1702, taking note of the alarming practice of slaves “confederating together in running away,” it banned gatherings of more than three slaves. Three years later the lawmakers mandated the death penalty for any slave found without permission more than forty miles north of Albany. Another law, seeking to reduce fugitives’ mobility, made it illegal for a slave to gallop on horseback. Meanwhile, even as some slaves attempted to escape from New York City, others fled there on foot or arrived hidden on ships. Many found employment on the docks or on the innumerable vessels that entered and left the port. The city’s newspapers carried frequent notices warning captains not to hire runaways. Especially during the eighteenth century’s imperial wars, however, such admonitions were routinely ignored, due to the pressing need for sailors on naval vessels and privateers.

New York City’s colonial newspapers published advertisements for runaways of various kinds—not only slaves, but also indentured servants, apprentices, soldiers, and criminals—and the number increased steadily over the course of the eighteenth century. One study of several hundred fugitive-slave notices in the city’s press found that 255 of the runaways originated in New York City, 259 in nearby New Jersey, 159 in rural New York, and 25 as far away as Virginia and the West Indies. These advertisements conveyed considerable information about the fugitives to assist in their apprehension. One, for example, from the New-York Gazette in 1761 offered a reward of five pounds for the return of the slave Mark Edward:

A well set fellow, near six feet high, talks good English, plays well on a fiddle, calls himself a free fellow, goes commonly with his head shaved, hath two crowns on the top of his head, small black specks or moles in his eyes. . . . Had on when he went away, a good pair of leather breeches, a blue broadcloth jacket, a red jacket under it without sleeves, a good beaver hat.

The vast majority of colonial runaways were young adult men. Because of the small size of slaveholdings, numerous married slaves lived apart from one another, and many fugitives were said to have absconded to join family members. Individuals, white and black, on occasion assisted fugitives, but no organizations existed to do so and most runaways appear to have eventually been recaptured.

Although justices of the peace and other officials sometimes pursued runaway slaves, no law in colonial New York dealt explicitly with their recapture—this generally relied on action by the owner himself, through newspaper ads, letters, and the physical seizure of the fugitive. Such owners were exercising the common-law right of “recaption,” which authorized the reappropriation of stolen property, or lost property capable of locomotion—a stray horse, for example, or a fugitive slave—without any legal process, so long as it was done in an orderly manner and without injury to third parties. (The right also extended to the recapture of runaway indentured servants, apprentices, children, and wives, but, given the subordinate position of women under the common law, not to an aggrieved wife hunting down an absconding husband.) Since the law presumed blacks to be slaves, accused fugitives had a difficult task proving that they were free.

Runaway slave ad, 1765, via Wikimedia Commons

Throughout the colonies, the American Revolution disrupted the system of slavery and seemed to place its future in jeopardy. Nowhere was this more true than in New York City. Before the imperial crisis that led to American independence, chattel slavery had not been a matter of public debate, although colonists spoke frequently of the danger of being reduced to metaphorical slavery because of British taxation. By the early 1770s, however, a number of Methodist and Quaker congregations in the city encouraged members to manumit their slaves. Quakers were particularly prominent in antislavery activity in the late colonial period. Their belief that all human beings, regardless of race, possessed an “inward light,” allowing God to speak personally to each individual, led increasing numbers of Quakers to condemn slavery as an affront to God’s will. Most Quakers, however, disliked political agitation and saw abolition as a process that should take place gradually, with as little social disruption as possible.

During the American Revolution, slavery in New York City experienced profound shocks, from very different directions. One was the rise of a revolutionary ideology centered on individual liberty, which convinced a number of patriot leaders of slavery’s incompatibility with the ideals of the nation they were struggling to create. After an initial reluctance to enlist slaves as soldiers, moreover, New York’s legislature allowed owners to send slaves as replacements for military service, with the reward of freedom. In 1777, the Continental Congress opened the ranks of the revolutionary army to black men, promising freedom to slaves who enrolled. By the end of the war, an estimated 6,000 black men had served in state militias and the Continental Army and Navy. Most were slaves who gained their freedom in this manner, including an unknown number from New York City.

Of more import to New York’s slaves, however, were the actions of British officials who offered freedom to the slaves of patriots in order to weaken the revolutionary cause. The first emancipation proclamation in American history preceded Abraham Lincoln’s by nearly ninety years. Its author was the Earl of Dunmore, the royal governor of colonial Virginia, who in November 1775 promised freedom to “all indentured servants, negroes, or others” belonging to rebels if they enlisted in his army. Several hundred Virginia slaves joined Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, their uniforms, according to legend, emblazoned with the words “Liberty to Slaves.” Unfortunately for their compatriots in bondage, American forces soon drove the governor out of the colony. With the remnants of his army, including its black unit, Dunmore arrived at Staten Island in August 1776. A month later, George Washington’s forces retreated from Manhattan. As British forces occupied New York, many of the inhabitants fled, and a fire destroyed a considerable part of the city.

The British did not leave New York City until the War of Independence had ended. During the occupation the city became “an island of freedom in a sea of slavery,” a haven for fugitive slaves from rural New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, as well as for hundreds of black refugees who had fled to British lines in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The influx reached the point that, for a time, city officials directed Hudson River ferryboats to stop transporting runaway slaves to the city. The fugitives, along with New York slaves who remained when their owners departed, found employment reconstructing the damaged parts of the city and working for the British army as servants, cooks, and laundresses and in other capacities. For the first time in their lives, they received wages and were effectively treated as free, although their ultimate fate remained uncertain. When the British evacuated Philadelphia in 1778, more black refugees arrived, and still more followed in 1781 and 1782 after the British defeat at Yorktown.

Of course, some black New Yorkers identified with the cause of independence. Black men had taken part in the crowd actions of the 1760s and 1770s that protested British measures such as the Stamp Act, including the group that tore down of a statue of George III in 1775. But once the British occupied the city, New York’s slaves and black refugees from other colonies concluded that their freedom depended on Britain winning the war. This belief was reinforced in June 1779 when Sir Henry Clinton, the commander of British forces in North America, issued the Philipsburg Proclamation, which greatly extended Dunmore’s original order by promising freedom to all slaves, except those owned by loyalists, who fled to British lines and embraced the royal cause. “Whoever sells them,” he added, “shall be prosecuted with the utmost severity.” According to the Pennsylvania cleric Henry Mühlenberg, the idea that “slaves will gain their freedom” in the event of a British victory quickly became “universal amongst all the Negroes in America.”

When the War of Independence ended, 60,000 loyalists, including some 4,000 blacks—those formerly enslaved in the city, others who had fled there during the conflict, and slaves brought by loyalist owners—were behind British lines in New York City. One who left a record of his experiences was Boston King, a slave in the South Carolina low country who fled to Charles Town in 1780 when the British invaded the colony. Thanks to them, he later recalled, “I began to feel the happiness of liberty, of which I knew nothing before.” King soon made his way to New York City, where, he wrote, the restoration of peace “diffused universal joy among all parties, except us, who had escaped from slavery.” Rumors spread that fugitive slaves “were to be delivered up to their masters, . . . fill[ing] us all with inexpressible anguish and terror.” Slaveowners appeared in the city, hoping to retrieve their slaves. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 specified that British forces must return to Americans property seized during the war, but Sir Guy Carleton, who had succeeded Clinton as British commander, insisted that this provision did not apply to slaves who had been promised their freedom.

The British had offered liberty to slaves for strategic reasons, not abolitionist sentiments. “Practice determined policy,” writes the historian Christopher Brown, but, he adds, “policy, over time, drifted toward becoming a matter of principle.” When Carleton met with George Washington in May 1783 to implement the peace treaty, the American commander asked about “obtaining the delivery of Negroes and other property.” Washington, in fact, hoped the British would keep a lookout for “some of my own slaves” who had run off during the war. He expressed surprise when Carleton replied that to deprive the slaves of the freedom they had been promised would be a “dishonourable violation of the public faith.”

On Carleton’s orders, when British ships sailed out of New York harbor in 1783, they carried not only tens of thousands of white soldiers, sailors, and loyalists, but over 3,000 blacks, most of whom had been freed in accordance with British proclamations. Carleton kept careful records of most of them and provided Washington with a “Book of Negroes,” listing 1,136 black men, 914 women, and 750 children who left New York City with his forces. The largest number originated in the South, but about 300 were from New York State. They ended up in Nova Scotia, England, and Sierra Leone, a colony established by British abolitionists on the west coast of Africa later in the decade. Thanks to Carleton, Boston King secured his freedom. So did Henry and Deborah Squash, a married couple who had been the property of George Washington. For years, the British decision to remove American slaves and their refusal to compensate the owners remained a sore point in Anglo-American relations.

Image via New York Public Library / Wikimedia Commons.

The question of fugitive slaves also proved contentious within the new republic. During and after the War of Independence, several northern states launched the process of abolition. Vermont, at the time a self-proclaimed independent republic with few if any slaves, was first to act, in 1777 prohibiting slavery in its constitution. Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where slavery ended via court decisions, quickly followed, along with Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, which enacted laws for gradual emancipation. These measures generally provided for the return of fugitive slaves, although Massachusetts offered them asylum.

The Articles of Confederation, the national frame of government from 1781 to 1789, contained no provision relating specifically to runaway slaves, although it did require the return of individuals charged with “treason, felony, or other high misdemeanor.” The first national law relating to fugitive slaves was the Northwest Ordinance of July 1787, which prohibited slavery in federal territories north of the Ohio River but also provided that slaves escaping to the region from places where the institution remained legal “may be lawfully reclaimed.” The following month, as the constitutional convention neared its conclusion, Pierce Butler and Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina proposed a similar provision. With little discussion, the delegates unanimously approved what became Article IV, Section 2:

No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service may be due.

Along with the clause counting three-fifths of the slave population in apportioning congressional representation among the states and the one delaying the abolition of the international slave trade to the United States for at least twenty years, the fugitive slave clause exemplified how the Constitution protected the institution of slavery. As Pinckney boasted to the South Carolina House of Representatives during its debate on ratification, “We have obtained a right to recover our slaves in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before.” A delegate to the Virginia ratifying convention agreed: the Constitution offered “better security than any that now exists.” This should be considered something of an exaggeration, as the return of fugitives across state lines was hardly unknown. Some critics charged that the purpose of the clause was to destroy the “asylum of Massachusetts.”

The fugitive slave clause represented a significant achievement for slaveowners. In the Somerset decision of 1772, Lord Mansfield, the chief justice of England, had freed a slave who sued for his liberty after being brought by his owner from Boston to London. The idea that slavery was “so odious” that a person automatically became free when he or she left a jurisdiction where local law recognized the institution quickly entered the English common law and was embraced by antislavery Americans as the “freedom principle.” But the U.S. Constitution established as a national rule that slaves did not gain their liberty by escaping to free locales, and assumed that the states would cooperate in their return. The fugitive slave clause strongly reinforced the “extraterritoriality” of state laws establishing slavery—their reach into states where the institution did not exist. Nonetheless, as the antebellum era would demonstrate, its ambiguous language left it open to multiple interpretations. On key questions the Constitution remained silent: whether the responsibility for “delivering up” runaway slaves rested with the state or federal governments, and what kind of legal procedures should be required for their rendition. A dispute over these questions soon ensued between Pennsylvania and Virginia, leading in 1793 to the passage of the first national law on the subject of fugitive slaves.

Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation law of 1780 freed the children of slaves born after March 1 of that year and required owners to register living slaves or they would automatically become free. It also recognized the right of out-of-state owners to recover fugitives. A Pennsylvania slave named John Davis gained his freedom because his owner, a Virginian, failed to register him. Nonetheless, the owner brought Davis from Pennsylvania to Virginia. Davis escaped, and the owner hired three Virginians to pursue him. They seized Davis in Pennsylvania and removed him from the state. Thomas Mifflin, Pennsylvania’s governor, requested the extradition of the three men as kidnappers. Virginia’s governor refused, and Mifflin asked George Washington, now president, to have Congress clarify how fugitive slaves were to be recovered. The result was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which remained the only federal law on the subject until 1850.

The brief 1793 enactment consisted of four sections, the first two of which dealt with fugitives from justice. The portion relating to slaves provided that an owner or his agent could seize a runaway and bring him or her before any judge or magistrate with “proof” (the nature unspecified—it could be a written document or simply the word of the claimant) of slave status, whereupon the official would issue a certificate of removal. Any person who interfered with the process became liable to a lawsuit by the owner.

via Wikimedia Commons

The law made rendition essentially a private matter, identifying little role for the state or federal governments. It put the onus on the owner to track down and apprehend the fugitive, frequently a difficult and expensive process. On the other hand, it offered no procedural protections allowing free blacks to avoid being seized as slaves—there was no mention of the accused fugitive having the right to a lawyer or a jury trial, or even to speak on his own behalf. Nothing in its language, however, barred states from establishing their own, more equitable procedures to deal with accused fugitives, and as time went on, more and more northern states would do so. But the law firmly established slavery’s extraterritoriality. A state could abolish slavery but not its obligation to respect the laws of other states establishing the institution. Indeed, as Samuel Nelson, a justice of New York’s Supreme Court and later a member of the U.S. Supreme Court majority in the Dred Scott decision, noted in 1834, because of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, “slavery may be said still to exist in a state” even after it had been abolished.

Meanwhile, as other northern states moved toward abolition, slavery in New York persisted. In 1777, when New York’s Provincial Congress drafted a state constitution, Gouverneur Morris, a patriot who would later be a signer of the federal Constitution and ambassador to France, proposed that the state document include a provision for gradual emancipation, “so that in future ages, every human being who breathes the air of this state, shall enjoy the privileges of a freeman.” Nothing came of the idea, but with the establishment of American independence, the issue became more pressing. Should slavery be strengthened, given the disruptions that had occurred, or should it be abolished? New York City’s Common Council embraced the former approach, enacting a law in 1784 “regulating Negro and mulatto slaves.” The following year, the question of slavery’s future came before the state legislature, where it became embroiled in a debate over the rights of free blacks. The House passed a bill for gradual abolition, coupled with a prohibition on free blacks voting, holding office, or serving on juries. The Senate at first refused to agree to these restrictions, which had no counterpart in the abolition laws of other northern states, but eventually accepted the ban on black suffrage. The state’s Council of Revision then vetoed the bill on the grounds that it violated the revolutionaries’ own principle of no taxation without representation.

Despite this impasse, antislavery sentiment had grown strong enough that the legislature in 1785 moved to loosen the laws regulating private manumission. In the colonial era, such measures had been meant to discourage the practice by demanding that the owner post a large monetary bond. The new law dropped this provision, simply requiring a certificate from the overseers of the poor that the slave was capable of supporting himself or herself (thus prohibiting owners from relieving themselves of responsibility for slaves who could not perform labor, such as small children and elderly and infirm adults). By the time slavery ended in New York, the majority of slaves who became free had done so via manumission.

At the same time, the first organized efforts to abolish slavery in New York made their appearance. In 1785, a group of eighteen leading citizens founded the New York Manumission Society. A majority were Quakers, but the society also included some of the city’s most prominent patriots of other denominations, including Governor George Clinton, Mayor James Duane, and Alexander Hamilton. John Jay served as the organization’s president until he left the city in 1789 to become chief justice of the United States. As suggested by its full name—the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been or May be Liberated—the group assumed the role of guardian of the state’s slaves and freed blacks. Compared to later abolitionist organizations, the Manumission Society was genteel, conservative, and paternalistic. It denied membership to blacks and devoted considerable effort to warning them against “running into practices of immorality or sinking into habits of idleness,” such as hosting “fiddling, dancing,” and other “noisy entertainments” in their homes. Its constitution forthrightly condemned “the odious practice of enslaving our fellow-men.” But it claimed that because blacks were afflicted with poverty and “hostile prejudices,” and “habituated to submission,” abolition must come gradually and whites must take the lead in securing it: “the unhappy Africans are the least able to assert their rights.”

via Wikimedia Commons

The Manumission Society eventually grew to a few hundred members, including merchants, bankers, shipowners, and lawyers. Many were themselves slaveholders, including half the signatories on the society’s first legislative petition, in 1786. John Jay himself owned five slaves while he headed the organization. (Jay later explained that he purchased slaves in order to free them, after “their faithful services shall have afforded a reasonable retribution.”) Nonetheless, the society’s members were the only whites actively campaigning for an end to slavery. They lobbied the legislature, but also did much more. Over the course of its life (it survived until 1848), the Manumission Society offered legal assistance to blacks seeking freedom, worked strenuously to oppose the kidnapping of free blacks and slave catching in the city, brought to court captains engaged illegally in the African slave trade, and sponsored antislavery lectures and literature. It encouraged individuals to manumit their slaves and monitored the fulfillment of promises to do so. It attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade the city’s newspapers to stop printing advertisements for slave auctions and fugitive slaves, which promoted the image of blacks as property rather than persons. And as one of its first actions, it established the African Free School, which became the backbone of black education in the city. Eventually, seven such schools were created, from which emerged leading nineteenth-century black abolitionists, including James McCune Smith and Henry Highland Garnet.

The Manumission Society operated within the law. It did not countenance direct action against those seeking to retrieve fugitives in the city. Although it offered legal assistance to accused runaways, many members pledged to abide by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Nonetheless, the society’s activities encountered strong resistance in a city where slavery remained widespread. For their part, blacks quickly realized that despite its elitism, the society was willing to listen to and act on their grievances. They did not hesitate to seek its help.

In 1788, the Manumission Society persuaded the legislature to enact a law barring the importation of slaves into the state and their removal for sale elsewhere. However, the first federal census, in 1790, revealed that although the Revolution had led to an increase in the free black population, slavery remained well entrenched in New York. Slaves still far outnumbered free African Americans. The state’s population of 340,000 included over 21,000 slaves, along with 4,600 free blacks. The city recorded a black population of 3,100, two-thirds of them slaves. Twenty percent of the city’s households, including merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and sea captains, owned at least one slave. In the immediate rural hinterland, including today’s Brooklyn, the proportion of slaves to the overall population stood at four in ten—the same as in Virginia.

Even though New York City’s free black population more than tripled during the 1790s, reaching 3,500 by 1800, the number of slaves also grew, to nearly 2,900. The buying and selling of slaves continued—a majority of the slaveholders in 1800 had not owned a slave a decade earlier. Bills for abolition came before the legislature several times, but without result. Resistance was strongest among slaveholding Dutch farmers in Brooklyn and elsewhere. “The respect due to property,” a French visitor noted in 1796, constituted the greatest obstacle to abolition. In that year, following John Jay’s election as governor, a legislative committee proposed a plan for gradual emancipation, with owners to be compensated by the state. But most legislators did not wish to burden the government with this expense.

Meanwhile, slaves took matters into their own hands. Now that Pennsylvania and the New England states had provided for abolition, the number of free blacks in those states was increasing, providing more places of refuge. At the same time, the city’s growing population of free blacks, many of whom proved willing to harbor or otherwise assist runaways, made it an attractive destination for slaves from nearby rural areas. The number of fugitive slave ads in New York newspapers had declined sharply in the mid-1780s, possibly because slaves expected action to abolish the institution. When this was not forthcoming, the number rose dramatically. The growing frequency of running away during the 1790s helped to propel a reluctant legislature down the road to abolition. So did the declining economic importance of slavery as the white population expanded and employers of all kinds relied increasingly on free labor.

In 1799, New York’s legislature finally adopted a measure for gradual abolition, becoming the next-to-last northern state to do so (New Jersey delayed until 1804). The law sought to make abolition as orderly as possible. It applied to no living slave. It freed slave children born after July 4, 1799, but only after they had served “apprenticeships” of twenty-eight years for men and twenty-five for women (far longer than traditional apprenticeships, designed to teach a young person a craft), thus compensating owners for the future loss of their property. While the law guaranteed that slavery in New York would eventually come to an end, its death came slowly and not without efforts at evasion. For slaves alive when it was passed, hopes for freedom rested on their ability to escape—and running away soon became “epidemic”—or the voluntary actions of their owners. Immediately after its passage, the Manumission Society noted an alarming rise in the illegal export of blacks from the state. But after 1800, because of manumissions, the number of slaves in New York City fell precipitously. Nonetheless, 1,446 slaves remained in the city in 1810 and 518 as late as 1820.

In 1817, the legislature decreed that all slaves who had been living at the time of the 1799 act would be emancipated on July 4, 1827. On that day, nearly 3,000 persons still held as slaves in the state gained their freedom, and slavery in New York finally came to an end. But the 1817 law also allowed southern owners to bring slaves into the state for up to nine months without their becoming free. In 1841, the legislature repealed this provision and made it illegal to introduce a slave into the state. But many southern owners ignored the new law and local authorities did little to enforce it, so for years after abolition slaves could still be seen on the city’s streets.

While slavery no longer existed, New York City’s prosperity increasingly depended on its relations with the slave South. As the cotton kingdom flourished, so did its economic connections with New York. By the 1830s, cotton had emerged as the nation’s premier export crop, and New York merchants dominated the transatlantic trade in the “white gold.” Dozens of boat companies sprang up in the 1820s and 1830s, their vessels gathering southern cotton from Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans, and other southern ports and bringing it to New York for shipment to Europe. New York banks helped to finance the crop as well as planters’ acquisition of land and slaves; New York insurance companies offered policies that compensated owners upon the death of a slave; New York clothing manufacturers such as Brooks Brothers provided garments to clothe the slaves. New York printers produced stylized images of fugitives for use in notices circulated in the South by owners of runaway slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, J. D. B. De Bow, editor of the era’s premier southern monthly, wrote that New York City was “almost as dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston.” The city’s businessmen advertised in De Bow’s Review, which was actually published in New York. The economy of Brooklyn, which by mid-century had grown to become the nation’s third largest city, was also closely tied to slavery. Warehouses along its waterfront were filled with the products of slave labor—cotton, tobacco, and especially sugar from Louisiana and Cuba. In the 1850s, sugar refining was Brooklyn’s largest industry.

Southern businessmen and tourists became a ubiquitous presence in New York City. One journalist estimated that no fewer than 100,000 southerners, ranging from travelers seeking a cooler climate to planters and country merchants conducting business, visited New York City each summer. Local newspapers regularly praised southern society and carried advertisements by upscale shops directly addressed to southern visitors. Some companies, such as the investment bankers and merchants Brown Brothers and Co., which owned slave plantations in the South, emphasized that they had branches in southern cities. Major hotels, such as the Astor, Fifth Avenue, and Metropolitan, made special efforts to cater to southerners. Many owners brought slaves along on their visits. Hotels provided them with quarters, although they refused accommodations to free black guests.

It was not unknown for a fugitive who had taken up residence in New York to read in a newspaper of his owner’s arrival or even to encounter him on the street. Slave catchers from the South roamed the city; as late as 1840 a group of armed law enforcement officers from Virginia boarded a ship in New York harbor, searched it without a warrant, and removed a fugitive slave. The combination of what one abolitionist called the city’s “selfish and pro-slavery spirit” and the presence of a rapidly growing free black community ready to take to the streets to try to protect fugitive slaves would make New York a key battleground in the national struggle over slavery.

* * *

In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, as the institution of slavery in New York withered and died, the city witnessed the emergence of the North’s largest free black community, a development that made it easier for fugitive slaves to blend into the city. By 1820, nearly 11,000 free blacks lived in New York, and by 1830 nearly 14,000. Very quickly an infrastructure of black institutions emerged—fraternal societies, literary clubs, and ten black churches, representing the major Protestant denominations. New York City replaced Philadelphia as the “capital” of free black America. It was the site of the nation’s first newspaper owned and edited by African Americans, Freedom’s Journal, established in 1827. Others followed during the next fifteen years: The Rights of All, Weekly Advocate, and Colored American.

Despite this burgeoning community life, the living conditions of black New Yorkers deteriorated. Even as gradual abolition proceeded, racism became more entrenched in the city’s culture. Before 1821, non-racial property restrictions determined which men could vote. But in that year, while eliminating property qualifications for whites, the state’s constitutional convention imposed a prohibitive $250 requirement for blacks. By 1826, only sixteen black men in the city were able to cast a ballot. Blacks could not serve on juries or ride on the city’s streetcars. The ferries that carried passengers between New York and Brooklyn barred blacks from the comfortable “ladies” cabin (in which white men and women were allowed to travel). Black institutions became frequent targets of racial hostility. In 1815, a mysterious fire destroyed the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church at 158 Church Street, which housed the city’s largest black congregation. The parishioners quickly raised the money to rebuild.

There was no black “ghetto” in New York City before the Civil War. African Americans could be found living in every ward. But as real estate prices rose in the first decades of the nineteenth century, blacks became concentrated in small apartments in back alleys and basements in poor neighborhoods. Many lived near the docks or in the Five Points (just north of today’s City Hall), a multiethnic neighborhood notorious for crime, overcrowding, and poverty—so notorious, in fact, that it became a tourist destination, attracting visitors as diverse as Charles Dickens, Davy Crockett, and Abraham Lincoln. Black men and women found themselves confined to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, working as domestic servants and unskilled laborers. Ironically, many of the occupations to which blacks were restricted—mariners, dock workers, cooks and waiters at hotels, servants in the homes of wealthy merchants—positioned them to assist fugitive slaves who arrived hidden on ships, or slaves who accompanied their owners on visits to New York and wished to claim their freedom.

Only a tiny number of black New Yorkers were able to achieve middle-class or professional status or launch independent businesses. These, in general, were the men who founded the educational and benevolent societies. Mostly ministers and small shopkeepers, the black elite constituted less a privileged economic class than a self-proclaimed “aristocracy of character,” eager to prove themselves and their people entitled to all the rights of American citizens. Given their tiny numbers and limited economic prospects, they had frequent contact with the far larger number of lower-class black New Yorkers. Nonetheless, the elite disdained the taverns, dance halls, and gambling establishments frequented by the lower classes of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and promoted a strategy of racial uplift based on self-improvement, temperance, education, and mutual relief.

Members of the black elite shared the moral uplift outlook of the Manumission Society, and many worked closely with it. They campaigned incessantly for equal rights, but also felt that one way to achieve recognition from white society was for lower-class blacks to behave in ways that did not reinforce racial stereotypes. African Americans’ responses to the final end of slavery on July 4, 1827, reflected these tensions. A gathering that March decided to celebrate abolition on July 5 so as not to annoy “white citizens,” who had become accustomed to holding their own festivities on Independence Day. Another faction, however, insisted on blacks’ right to a share of public space. In the end, a low-key black event took place on July 4, followed by a black parade along Broadway the next day, with bands, banners, and a public dinner.

Although reliable statistics do not exist, it is clear that New York City in the 1820s remained a destination for fugitive slaves, or a way station as they traveled to upstate New York, New England, and Canada. In 1826, a local newspaper complained bitterly of the “increase of Negroes in this place,” lamenting that the city had become “the point of refuge to all the runaways in the Union.” Most fugitives arrived on their own, without any public recognition. On occasion, however, their exploits were dramatic enough to warrant coverage in the local press, such as in July 1829, when six black men and one woman leaped ashore from an arriving vessel and with “light hearts and nimble feet” disappeared into the city. Sometimes, free blacks took to the streets in spontaneous efforts, generally unsuccessful, to prevent the removal of slaves from the city or the recapture of fugitives. In 1801, twenty-three black New Yorkers were jailed for forcibly attempting to stop a white émigré from the revolution in Saint-Domingue from taking a group of slaves to Virginia. The Manumission Society, which had been seeking to prevent the removal, prohibited under the 1788 state law, condemned the riot. In 1819, 1826, and 1832, angry blacks tried to prevent the departure of fugitives seized by slave catchers. In 1833, a “large collection of blacks” rioted in the Five Points, having “taken umbrage at one of their own color” for providing information that led to the capture of fugitive slaves. Some of those involved in these events engaged in violent altercations with the police.

The Manumission Society had a special committee that offered legal assistance to fugitives. Nonetheless, the situation of runaways in New York remained fraught with danger. A Virginia lawyer residing in the city, F. H. Pettis, in 1838 advertised his services for those seeking “to arrest and secure fugitive slaves,” promising “he or she will soon be had.” (Three years later, to the delight of the Colored American, Pettis found himself before a judge, charged with having “obtained $125 worth of eatables” at a restaurant run by a black New Yorker and not paying the bill.) “Forgetful that they are in a free state,” slaveowners entered black churches during Sabbath services looking for runaways, and broke into blacks’ homes and carried them off without any legal proceeding. Freedom’s Journal advised fugitive slaves to leave the city for “some sequestered country village” or Canada, as “there are many from the South now in daily search of them.” “When I arrived in New York,” Moses Roper, a fugitive from Florida who made his way to the city on a coastal vessel in 1834, later recalled, “I thought I was free; but I learned I was not and could be taken there.” Roper decided to leave for Albany, New England, and eventually London. In New York, the abolitionist Sarah Grimké wrote in 1837, fugitives were “hunted like a partridge on the mountain.”

But the situation of black New Yorkers legally entitled to freedom also proved precarious. As northern slavery ended, an epidemic followed of kidnapping of free blacks, especially children, for sale to the South. New York was hardly alone. Philadelphia, less than two dozen miles from the border with slavery, witnessed frequent abductions. An investigation in 1826 revealed the existence of an interracial gang based in Delaware that had lured nearly fifty black men, women, and children onto ships in Philadelphia and transported them to be sold in the South. As late as 1844, the abolitionist weekly Pennsylvania Freeman, in an article entitled “Kidnappers,” complained, “Our state is infested with them.” Even Boston, far from the South, was not immune to the kidnapping of black residents.

Kidnapping was a problem of long standing for black New Yorkers. In 1784, city authorities rescued a group of free blacks whom “man-stealers” had forced onto a ship, “destined either for Charleston or the Bay of Honduras.” The Manumission Society’s first statement of purposes, in 1785, mentioned prominently “the violent attempts lately made to seize and export for sale, several free Negroes” in the city. Due in part to pressure from the society, New York passed a stringent law against kidnapping in 1808. In 1821, the society expressed the hope that in the “not far distant” future the practice would be “unknown among us.” Instead, it seemed to increase, partly because the end of the slave trade from Africa in 1808 and the spread of cotton cultivation led to a rapid rise in the price of slaves. In the 1820s, a gang known as the Blackbirders operated in the Five Points, seizing both fugitives and free blacks living there. Freedom’s Journal regularly complained about the “acts of kidnapping, not less cruel than those committed on the Coast of Africa,” that took place in New York City.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 established a procedure by which kidnappers could behave in an ostensibly legal manner, by obtaining certificates of removal from unscrupulous public officials. A group of Philadelphia free blacks in 1799 petitioned Congress to take action on the matter, but the committee to which the House referred the issue never submitted a report. Eventually, several northern states enacted laws to offer procedural protection to individuals claimed as fugitive slaves. Pennsylvania, the only northern state to border on three slave states, led the way in 1820 with An Act to Prevent Kidnapping, which limited the authority to issue certificates of removal to state judges, instead of local officials, and offered those accused of being fugitives the opportunity to prove their free status. The law also authorized a prison term of up to twenty-one years for removing a black person from the state without legal process. Six years later, in response to complaints from Maryland that the law had made the rendition of fugitives too difficult, Pennsylvania expanded the number of officials able to issue a certificate. But it also mandated that only a constable, not the owner, could seize an alleged runaway, and required proof in addition to the word of the claimant before a person was deemed a slave. However, the law denied the alleged fugitive the right to a trial by jury, for which blacks had been agitating.

New York followed in 1828 with a similar law prohibiting the private seizure of a fugitive and outlining a recovery process involving state or local courts. In a backdoor manner, it offered an alleged fugitive the opportunity to have his or her status determined by a jury. The accused fugitive could file a writ de homine replegiando (a writ to release a man from prison or from the custody of a private individual). Under this writ, unlike a writ of habeas corpus, a jury, not a judge, adjudicates the claim to freedom. But many officials refused to recognize the legitimacy of such a writ. Some actively conspired to send free blacks into slavery.

Most outrageous were the activities of Richard Riker, the city recorder, who presided over the Court of Special Sessions, New York City’s main criminal court. An attorney and important figure in the local Democratic party, Riker held the office, with brief interruptions, from 1815 until 1838. With a group of accomplices including city constable Tobias Boudinot and the “pimp for slaveholders” Daniel D. Nash, Riker played a pivotal role in what abolitionists called the Kidnapping Club. In accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act, members of the club would bring a black person before Riker, who would quickly issue a certificate of removal before the accused had a chance to bring witnesses to testify that he was actually free. Boudinot boasted that he could “arrest and send any black to the South.”

If kidnapping posed a threat to the freedom of individual black New Yorkers, the rise of the colonization movement placed in jeopardy the entire community’s status and future. The gradual abolition laws of the northern states, including New York’s, said nothing about removing free blacks from the country; it was assumed that they would remain in the United States as a laboring class. But the rapid growth of the free black population in the early republic alarmed believers in a white America. Founded in 1816, the American Colonization Society directed its efforts toward removing from the country blacks already free, but the long-term goal of many members was to abolish slavery and expel the entire black population. In the 1820s, most organized antislavery activity among white Americans took place under this rubric. Upper South planters and political leaders dominated the society, but advocates of colonization were also active in New York City.

The colonization movement made significant progress in the 1820s when it obtained funds from Congress and established Liberia on the west coast of Africa as a refuge for blacks from the United States. Some African Americans shared the society’s perspective. John Russwurm, for a time an editor of Freedom’s Journal, decided in 1829 to move from New York to Liberia, where he worked as a journalist and public official until his death in 1851. Russwurm and other black supporters of colonization believed that racism was so deeply embedded in American life that blacks could never enjoy genuine freedom except by emigrating.

Most black Americans, however, rejected both voluntary emigration and government-sponsored efforts to encourage or coerce them to leave the country. They viewed the rise of the colonization movement with alarm. Beginning with a mass meeting in Philadelphia in January 1817, a month after the founding of the American Colonization Society, northern blacks repudiated the idea. In New York, a new antislavery, anti-colonization black leadership emerged in the 1820s, led by three clergymen: Peter Williams Jr., the pastor of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church on Centre Street, not far from the Five Points; Samuel Cornish, minister of the First Colored (later Shiloh) Presbyterian Church; and Theodore S. Wright, who later succeeded Cornish in his pulpit. The fact that many members of the New York Manumission Society were attracted to colonization soured the organization’s relations with leading black New Yorkers. Freedom’s Journal was founded at a meeting of the city’s black leaders seeking a way to oppose the colonization movement. “Too long,” declared its opening editorial, “others have spoken for us”—a thinly veiled reference to the Manumission Society. The group later forced Russwurm to resign as editor when he embraced colonization.

Asserting their own Americanness, free blacks articulated a vision of the United States as a land of equality before the law, where rights did not depend on color, ancestry, or racial designation. “This Country is Our Only Home,” declared one editorial in the Colored American. “It is our duty and privilege to claim an equal place among the American people.” Through the attack on colonization, the modern idea of equality as something that knows no racial boundaries was born.

The black mobilization against colonization became a key catalyst for the rise of a new, militant abolitionism in the 1830s. Compared to previous antislavery organizations that promoted gradual emancipation and, frequently, colonization, the new abolitionism was different: it was immediatist, interracial, and committed to making the United States a biracial nation of equals.

* * *

Excerpted from Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, by Eric Foner. Copyright © 2015 by Eric Foner. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

“A Ride for Liberty,” by Eastman Johnson (1862).

Jeff Tietz | Harper’s | May 2002 | 35 minutes (8,722 words)

This essay by Jeff Tietz first appeared in the May 2002 issue of Harper’s and was later anthologized in The Best American Crime Writing: 2003 Edition. Tietz has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Livingston Journalism Award. His work has appeared in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Crime Writing, Best American Business Writing, and The CAFO Reader. Our thanks to Tietz for allowing us to reprint it here. For those interested in an update on Darius McCollum’s story, see this 2013 The Wall Street Journal piece (subscription req’d).

***

Before leaving his girlfriend’s apartment in Crown Heights, on the morning of his nineteenth arrest for impersonating and performing the functions of New York City Transit Authority employees, Darius McCollum put on an NYCTA subway conductor’s uniform and reflector vest. Over his feet he pulled transit-issue boots with lace guards and soles designed to withstand third-rail jolts. He took transit-issue work gloves and protective goggles. He put a transit-issue hard hat on his head. In his pockets he carried NYCTA work orders and rerouting schedules and newspaper clippings describing his previous arrests: for driving subway trains and buses and various other vehicles without authorization, possessing stolen property, flagging traffic around NYCTA construction sites, forging documents. He also carried a signed letter on NYCTA letterhead:

To: All Concerned Departments

From: Thomas Calandrella Chief Track Officer

Re: Darius McCollum Effective this date of January 10, 2000, Darius McCollum is a member of a special twelve member Special Study Group; and will analyze the operations of track safety and track operations. SSG will report directly to this office and will be issued all related gear for the respected purposes of this department and will receive assistance of any relating department.

To his belt Darius clipped a flashlight and a key ring the size of a choker. From this ring six smaller rings hung like pendants. Along the curves of the small rings, 139 keys climbed symmetrical and fanlike. Each key granted access to a secure area of the train, bus, or subway system of the New York City Transit Authority. The collection was equivalent to the number of keys an employee would acquire through forty years of steady promotions. Just before he left the apartment, Darius picked up an orange emergency-response lantern.

Six weeks earlier, Darius had been paroled from the Elmira Correctional Facility, near Binghamton, New York, where he had served two years for attempted grand larceny—”attempted” because he had signed out NYCTA vehicles for surface use (extinguishing track fires, supervising maintenance projects) and then signed them back in according to procedure. Darius has never worked for the NYCTA; he has never held a steady job. He is thirty-seven and has spent a third of his adult life in prison for victim-less offenses related to transit systems.

He was at work by 7:20, eating buttered rolls and drinking coffee in a GMC pickup with a small signal crew above the Nostrand Avenue stop on the Number 3 line. The truck was hitched to an emergency generator temporarily powering the station lights; during a repair job Con Edison had spliced into the wrong cable. Traveling through the system three days earlier, Darius had encountered the crew members and told them that he was a track-department employee waiting for his truck to be fixed. In the meantime, he said, his only responsibility was the occasional street-flagging operation. The signal guys were on what they, and therefore Darius, called “a tit job”: babysitting the generator and periodically reporting on the electrical work. Darius sat in the station with the signal guys, surveying the Con Ed work and watching girls.

That slow morning there was a lot of conversation about the transit union. Its president, Willie James, was on his way out. Darius, who is voluble and almost perpetually affable, was deferentially critical of James, who, he said, “came from buses and favored the bus guys.” Darius voiced or echoed complaints about the effects of union inaction: low pay, retirement after twenty-five years instead of twenty, the difficulty of getting basic equipment. For nearly two decades Darius had attended NYCTA workers’ rallies and union meetings. At the meetings he had argued for, among other things, better lighting in tunnels and the right to wear earplugs against ambient noise. He had agreed that positive drug tests should result in mandatory ninety-day suspensions and counseling but objected to withholding salary during that time. He took detailed notes as he traveled through the system so that he could accurately critique management actions.

At noon Darius volunteered to go to his girlfriend’s apartment and bring back lunch for the crew. Darius had met his girlfriend a week earlier, on the subway. It was a snowy night; they were alone in the car. Darius said she looked cold. She nodded and smiled and pointed to his uniform. He told her where he worked in the track department and how he approached various kinds of emergency situations and that he did street flagging and drove heavy equipment. She didn’t understand anything he said because she was from Ecuador and didn’t speak English. Her name was Nelly Rodriguez. She was forty-five and had five children and worked as a seamstress in a garment factory. They exchanged phone numbers; later her sister translated for them.

Within a week Nelly had asked Darius for his Social Security number and invited him to move in. Several months later they would be married, and Darius would confess to Nelly, having fabricated a story about his nineteenth arrest, that he was a lifelong subway impostor, and she would say, through her sister, “If it’s your problem it’s our problem, and I’m not going to tell anybody,” and then successfully inveigle him into signing over the rights to his story to a small Manhattan production company for a relatively tiny sum (several newspapers had covered his arrest). Eventually a lawyer hired by Darius’s parents would void this agreement, and Darius would yield to their unremitting pressure and request a divorce. When he is asked now if he worried about his quick start with Nelly, Darius says, “No, because I had already said a long time ago that I had not planned to get married until I was at least in my thirties… I wanted to get married when I was a little more settled, when I had a little better insight.”

In Nelly’s kitchen, Darius ate a plate of the fish and rice and beans that she had cooked the night before. He sealed the rest in Tupperware and brought it back to the crew. He told the guys to take their time finishing up; he had to check on his truck at fleet operations. Then he left to visit a friend, a token-booth clerk at Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan.

Darius’s friend was at lunch when he arrived, so he let himself into the station’s command tower to wait. The control room had a big signal board that tracked train movement and a tinted picture window with a platform view. The vacant tower had recently been automated, but Darius remembered when the seven empty lockers had been full and when, in the recessed kitchen with its miniature sink and stove, there had been pots in the bottom cabinet and food in the top. He had often stopped by to chat about work, or read the newspaper, or get a doughnut and a cup of coffee.

Darius sat surveilling the lights on the board: a clear-skinned dark black guy of average height in an unusually complete Transit Authority uniform. Darius is only slightly overweight, but everything about him appears tender and fleshy: the heels of his hands and the little underhung bellies of skin between the knuckles of his fingers, his small paunch, the cushions of his cheeks, his chubby iridescent lips. His movements are almost always leisurely—when he’s being chased by transit cops he lopes onerously, counting on his knowledge of the system’s crannies—and he stands slightly stooped, the shallow curve of his back in conformity with all the small padded curves of his body. Darius has big circular eyes that quickly admit delight, a serene form of which he was feeling as he absorbed the scrupulous, luridly represented shuttling of the trains. He can’t explain why, but he is always content in the subway: elementally content, at unrivaled ease, unable to think about anything outside the system.

***

Darius grew up near the 179th Street yard, the terminus of the F train, in Jamaica, Queens. He was a bright, early-talking child. His obsession with the subway manifested itself as soon as he began riding trains with his mother, at age three: his desire to see a train’s headlights materialize in the tunnel black always threatened to propel him over the platform edge. The force of this attraction never diminished. Darius did well in school, but an opaque inwardness isolated him from other children and worried his teachers; he never formed enduring friendships or felt comfortable in class.

Darius spent hundreds of hours watching trains at 179th Street. He estimated the angle of every track intersection in the yard. By the time he was eight, he could visualize the entire New York City subway system. (Later he memorized the architecture of the stations.) Family and friends with subway questions began calling the McCollum household and asking for Darius. In small notebooks he recorded arrival and departure times at various stations, and documented whatever he observed: the shrill, keyed-up atmosphere an emergency stop instantly creates on a platform, the presence of transit police, mechanical problems (“E-train to Canal st 0015 L.C. Delay of train leaving Parson’s Blvd Door Trouble”), passengers riding between cars (“A-train to 81st L.C. 4112—Girl riding in between cars approx. 17 Brown Coat Blue Pants Brown Shoes”). He hasn’t abandoned this note-taking. His logs—

0210 D train 169st N.P.C. Meal

0217 S/B F 169th st L.C. 586

0230 S/B F Woodhaven D train

0311 N/B F 71st F.H. L.C. 1200

0317 N/B E Kew Gardens L.C. 1134 …

—span twenty-five years.

When Darius was eleven, a classmate, unprovoked, stabbed him in the back with a pair of scissors. The scissors punctured a lung and came within an inch of his heart. The boy opened and closed the scissors as he pulled them out, creating a wound in the shape of an irregular star. At the hospital, doctors pumped blood out of Darius’s lung and re-inflated it. He didn’t speak that day or the next: he just stared at his parents with awestruck eyes. At night he paced in his sleep or lay awake. When he went back to school, he would sit only with his back against the wall.

Not long after the stabbing, Darius began disappearing into the subway system for days at a time:

3/30/81 7:30 didn’t go to school, but then I went on the J train up to Chambers st _11:30 I went back on the J train and went to catch the D train to Brighton Beach at approx 12:45. Transf to M train and went to Stillwell a 1:05 and went to the bathroom (no food dur this time) back on the M, return to Brighton and took D train to pacific st (Bklyn) approx 2:00 took the #2 train transfered to the #6 to 28th street to Girls Club at 3:30 pat, angle, rosemary. They gave me a sandwich and milk and then left 3:45….

4/2/81 I lef5 to #6 to Grand Central took # 7 to 5th ave and took F for the rest night, and slept on the F train Balance of night till approx 6:30 am.

Darius counted on certain relatives in Queens and Brooklyn: he would stop by to eat and spend the night and then return to the subway. He often went home for provisions when his parents were asleep or at work. Samuel and Elizabeth McCollum worked long hours, but they tried to stay up later than their son and wake up before him. They tried to lock him in and lock him out; they talked to NYCTA supervisors; they called his school and arranged for morning escorts; they tried different schools; they had him hospitalized for psychiatric treatment. But each remedy had its limit, and ultimately they found that they could only interrupt his journeying. Mrs. McCollum tracked her son’s movements. On one of her calendars, the word “out,” meaning “location unknown,” fills fourteen day-boxes in January of 1981, when Darius was first arrested for driving a train. The four days from the twenty-seventh to the thirtieth read: late for school–in at 10:00 a.m.; home; out–drove train; court.

By this time Darius had cultivated a constellation of admirers at the 179th Street yard. Darius has always been deeply disarming. His charm resides in his peculiar intelligence, his perpetual receptivity to transporting delight, and his strange, self-endangering indifference to the consequences of his enthusiasm. Darius never curses. He has no regionally or culturally recognizable accent. He has a quick-to-appear, caricaturishly resonant laugh, like the laugh ascribed to Santa Claus, and he can appreciate certain comedic aspects of what he does, but he often laughs too long or when things aren’t funny, as when he mentions that he briefly worked on the LIRR route that Colin Ferguson took to slaughter commuters. Darius litters his speech with specialized vocabulary (“BIE incident,” “transverse-cab R-110″) and unusually formal phrases (“what this particular procedure entails,” “the teacher didn’t directly have any set curriculum studies”). He frequently and ingenuously uses the words “gee,” “heck,” “dog-gone,” “gosh,” and “dang.”

It is difficult to find anyone who knows Darius well and does not express an abiding protective affection for him. Cops always refer to him by his first name, and often with wistful amusement, as if he were a wayward godson. In discussing his cases, they have called him “great,” “endearing,” and “fabulous.” They mention his honesty and abnormally good memory. Sergeant Jack Cassidy, a high-ranking transit cop who has, interviewed Darius more often than anyone else in the NYPD, told me, “You’ll be talking to a fantastic person when you talk to Darius, and I hope prison never changes that. Give him my best. But don’t tell him where I am, because he’ll probably come visit me.” (Darius has paid Sergeant Cassidy several friendly, unannounced visits at his office, in full transit gear.)

***

Darius’s apprenticeship began with a motorman he called Uncle Craft, who drove the first train Darius took regularly. When Craft began working at the 179th Street yard, he taught Darius to drive along the generous stretch of track between the yard and the last F stop. Darius learned how to ease a train into a station, aligning it with the markers that match its length, how to read signals while simultaneously observing the track connections the signals predict (he was taught never to assume the infallibility of signals), and how to understand the timers that govern the signals. Darius was an exceptional, methodical student: he learned quickly and thoroughly, building on each skill he acquired and instantly memorizing terminology. Soon he was doing yard maneuvers and taking trains into passenger service, as both a train operator and a conductor. (By the time of his first arrest, he had driven trains dozens of times.)

To broaden his knowledge, Darius visited employees from 179th Street who had taken up new positions elsewhere. He learned to drive garbage trains and de-icer trains and to repair the electrical boxes that control signals. In renovation shops he learned how to dismantle trains and reassemble them. In control towers he learned how to direct traffic: routing trains around obstructions, replacing late trains, switching ABD trains (“abandoned due to malfunction”) out of service. The more he learned the more he volunteered to do, and the easier he made the lives of the people who taught him. By the time he was eighteen, TA employees had begun calling him at home and asking him to pull shifts.

Darius was given his first uniform at fifteen: “I can’t compare that feeling to anything. I felt official. I felt like this is me, like this is where I belong.” Darius discusses his work in the subway with professional pride, generally using the first-person plural (“Sometimes we didn’t feel that management should be doing certain things …”). His vision of himself as an NYCTA worker is officious and uncompromising: “I’m a very good train operator. Even though I drive fast, don’t get me wrong: I believe in coasting, I don’t believe in excessive speeds. Even if you’re late don’t speed, because eventually you’ll catch up. As a conductor, I give a whole announcement before and during stops. . . That’s just me. Sometimes they’ll make part of an announcement: ‘Next stop is Queens Plaza.’ Okay, the next stop is Queens Plaza, but what do we do there?”

The question of how Darius’s immutable sense of belonging has never been damaged by all the skillful impersonation and fakery it depends on is not one that he can answer. I spent almost fifteen hours sitting across a table from him, and I asked this question several times. He looked bemused, his eyes wandered, he half-smiled, he said he just thought of himself as a part of the system, that he felt safer and more content there than anywhere else, that for reasons he doesn’t understand this paradox never occurs to him until he is behind bars for a while. He always stressed that he improved service to the “riding customers” and that, given his ability and care, he would never endanger anyone. (During one of these conversations, he said, “Oh—in the article could you put that my title is Transportation Captain? That’s the title the employees gave me, because I move around the system so well.”)

Eventually Darius began taking the skills tests the NYCTA requires for employment, but by then he was notorious.

***

Reclining in the tranquillity of the Fifty-seventh Street tower, Darius heard the descending scale of a train losing its charge. He sat up and waited. He knew something had tripped the train’s emergency brake, and he knew the operator would reset the brake and try to recharge the train. When the recharge attempt failed, he picked up his helmet, his vest, his gloves, his lantern, and his flashlight. He was thinking only of the train. The first four cars had made it into the station. Darius questioned the train operator and lent him his flashlight so that they could begin the routine debris search. Darius was inspecting the tracks when over the train radio he heard Command Center order an evacuation, so he unhooked the chains between the fourth and fifth cars, climbed up and unlocked the two sets of car doors, made the standard evacuation announcement, and continued down the train this way until the last passengers walked off. (After opening each car, he stood by the doors to make sure everyone got through safely.) When the train was empty, he briefly examined its rear brakes and then resumed his debris search. Two transit cops arrived; Darius hurried back to help explain the situation.

The cops, Officers Cullen and Morales, saw passengers exiting the train in a neat stream, and they saw Darius conscientiously inspecting the track with a flashlight. They had just begun questioning the conductor and train operator when Darius rushed up and co-opted an answer: “Yeah, the train went BIE and we think it caught some debris, so we’re evaluating the track—the rear brakes checked out, the passengers are all clear.” When Darius had gone back to work, the train operator pulled the cops aside and whispered, “This guy’s not one of us. He’s an impostor.”

They found that hard to believe. Everything about Darius—his gear, his carriage, his total comfort with protocol—suggested authenticity. But the train operator had recognized Darius from a Transit Authority wanted poster, and he told the cops to ask for I.D. Darius produced his study-group letter, which essentially convinced them that he was legitimate (they had encountered track-study notices many times before), but the operator was adamant, and they asked Darius to have his supervisor come vouch for him. Darius led Officer Cullen back to the tower, unlocking the door and turning on the lights and telling Officer Cullen to sit down and make himself comfortable. Darius got a drink from a water cooler and sat down at a desk to call a friend. Cullen, short and thick-limbed, with a gelled part in his hair and multiple tattoos and nine years on the force, felt faintly guilty for inconveniencing Darius.

On the phone, Darius asked to speak to someone and then said, “Oh, okay, I’ll try back.” His boss was out to lunch, he said. Cullen said not to worry, they could wait, and apologized for the annoyance. Out the tower window Darius glimpsed an unfriendly superintendent conferring with the train operator. Darius started laughing. He said, “All right, you got me.” Officer Cullen asked him what he was talking about. Darius—now narrowly smiling and incipiently prideful—said, “You got me! I don’t work for the TA. The letter’s a forgery. I stole the letterhead and did the letter myself. The uniform and keys I got from people I know. I’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s actually easy if you know what you’re doing.” Officer Cullen stood silent and staring, suspended in his disbelief. “Here’s some articles about me,” Darius said.

On the way to a formal interview with Assistant District Attorney Michael Dougherty at 100 Centre Street, Darius offered unsolicited, sophisticated descriptions of the NYCTA surface crews the police car passed. Cullen and Morales wondered how he knew so much about the minutiae of surface work; Darius responded with monologues about his mastery of the system. To the officers it seemed that he couldn’t speak fast enough, that his confession had energized him and elevated his self-regard. The sight of the Brooklyn Bridge reminded Darius that he had plans to go to a barbecue the next day on the Manhattan Bridge: it was a Friday tradition of a bridge crew he had been working with. He asked if there was a chance he would get out in time. Officer Cullen said that, whether or not he got out, it might not be such a great idea.

At Centre Street, Darius was interviewed by A.D.A. Dougherty and Detective Martin Mullen. He gave no sign that he knew a transgression had occurred, that there was a permanent divide in the room and that he was alone on one side of it. With a single exception, neither interviewer noted any change in his demeanor, which was one of subdued bliss. According to Detective Mullen, “emotionally Darius was even-keeled the entire time. The fact that he was carrying these articles from his previous arrests—it was almost like he dug the publicity, like there was some prestige in the experience.”

The exception came when A.D.A. Dougherty suggested that Darius might have had something to do with the train’s emergency stop. The absurd, pejorative idea that he would ever com-promise service quality and passenger safety disturbed Darius. “That’s exactly what I’m trained not to do,” he said. He explained that stopping the train would have required both override per-mission from the City Hall control tower and access to the switch room in the back of the Fifty-seventh Street tower. Neither was available to him—though, as he admitted, he probably could have guessed the location of the switch-room key. City Hall later confirmed Darius’s story, and evidence indicated that he had never been in the switch room. His theory of the event—a wheel-detector device had tripped the train’s emergency brake because the train had exceeded the posted speed—was later determined to be the most plausible.

Once it became clear that Darius wouldn’t plead to the charge of reckless endangerment, Dougherty and Mullen decided to let him talk. He talked for two hours and seemed willing to talk indefinitely. He was cagey when it came to identifying collaborators or detailing certain methods whose secrecy was essential to his freedom of movement; otherwise, almost any question elicited long tales of his exploits that gave way episodically to ornate, unnecessary digressions. Once I asked Darius what he was doing at Fifty-seventh Street before his arrest. My question implied that he’d been in the station. His answer began like this: “No, no. I was mainly in the tower, not the station. Now: Towers are for what is known as train-traffic control. The board lights tell you where everything is at. All right? Okay. So every single train from Fifth Avenue, on the N and the R, down to Canal Street. Not only that but there’s a communications box for listening to the crew on every train. You also have what is known as fire watch. I watch the board for anything relating to a fire condition. Now, if it’s something minute, I can hopefully go down and end the problem without having to call the fire department. If it’s close to the third rail, use a dry chemical. If it’s something major, call the fire department, call Command, have the power turned off for that section because otherwise the fire department cannot go on the tracks, that’s part of their protocol. . . . And if need be you can have EMS on standby, just in case. So you always take all necessary precautions. Okay! Now on this particular day, I’m in the tower…”

***

Photo via James Lee (Cropped)

Darius’s obsession has always been concentrated on the subway, but a long interview with him will teach you how far beyond it he has roamed. He may describe his experiences as a substitute engineer on the freight trains of Conrail, Norfolk Southern, Delaware & Hudson, or CSX. (“CSX is definitely my favorite. Every single engine is freshly painted.”) He may tell you how to manipulate the employee-transfer protocol of the metro bus system to get a job as a shifter (cleaning and prepping buses at depots), and how to use that position to take buses out on express routes. He might explain Job 179 (conductor) on the Long Island Railroad: what track you’ll be on (17 or 19), how to let the crew know when you’ve finished preparing the train for departure (two buzzes on the intercom), how you return to Penn Station “as equipment” (without passengers). It is unlikely that Darius will omit the year he spent wearing an NYCTA superintendent’s shield. While he was doing a stint as a conductor, he discovered that he could have a shield made in a jewelry store. He began wearing it on a vest he pulled over his TA-specified shirt and tie. He had a hard hat and pirated 1.D. Darius considered himself a track-department superintendent, so he signed out track-department vehicles and radios and drove around the city, supervising track maintenance and construction projects and responding to emergencies. He was sensitive to the threat of close scrutiny by superiors, but given his high position and network of allies, that was rare. Darius worked regular hours: eight to four from Tuesday to Thursday, seven in the evening to three in the morning on Friday, and three until eleven on Saturday morning. That way he was off from Saturday morning until Tuesday morning. “Because of my title and my position,” Darius told me, “I figured I had the seniority to do it.”

At the end of the Centre Street interview, Darius was facing felony charges to which he had confessed. He had twice been convicted of felonies. He had just dramatically violated his parole, and he had multiple parole and probation violations on his record. But he never asked Detective Mullen or A.D.A. Dougherty about his legal situation. He shook their hands and was led out in handcuffs, his still face showing contentment.

***

On that day Darius’s parents, who had retired from New York to North Carolina, awaited him uncertainly in their house outside Winston-Salem. Since his release, Mr. and Mrs. McCollum had prevailed on him to apply for a parole transfer and recommence his life in North Carolina, where Mrs. McCollum’s nephew had found him a job through a state program for parolees. Darius stayed with them for a few weeks, and then went up to New York for a parole hearing. But weeks had passed; Darius’s aunt, with whom he’d been staying, no longer knew where he was or what he was doing.

What he was doing, while sleeping and eating and showering at Nelly’s or in NYCTA crew rooms, was driving a de-icer train from Coney Island to Prospect Park on the D line; putting out track fires (a train dripping battery acid caused a small explosion at Thirty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, a tossed cigarette butt kindled a small rubbish fire in Brooklyn); investigating a busted water main at 110th Street on the A line; flagging traffic, on weekends, around a transit construction project at Queens Plaza (“The guys from transit that do street flagging, they look as if they’re stiff, and see, when I do it, I look like I’m with DOT, because I make it look so efficient-I know how to do the hand signs”); assisting the track crew he mentioned to Cullen and Morales with inspections of the Manhattan Bridge on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and entirely repainting a crew room after hearing a supervisor say that it would make a good project for someone. This all happened, Darius says, because he ran into some old friends at Queens Plaza soon after he got back to New York, and they invited him to hang out and take some of their shifts, and he thought he could do a few and go back to North Carolina, “but it just kept going, and that was it.”

Elizabeth McCollum is unreserved and accurately judgmental and dresses well and cannot discuss her son without becoming fervent; she retired a decade ago from an administrative job at a textbook company. Samuel McCollum, a former plant supervisor, is bulky and skeptical, has an impulsive falsetto giggle, and tries, when discussing the actions of others, to discover decent motivations that have been obscured by mistakes or cruelties. Like his wife, he has been injured by the experiences of his only child: “Darius won’t open up and talk about anything. He would never elaborate on an answer. That’s all we ever wanted. Now, how do you get somebody like that in touch with himself?” On the day of the final arrest, Mrs. McCollum was still hopeful: “You can’t let negativism cloud you, because with Darius, once that comes in, forget it.” She and Mr. McCollum talked about the life Darius might have in North Carolina, and thought about getting him a driver’s license and a pickup truck, which he had always wanted. They didn’t say it, but they were each thinking that in their house Darius grew restless immediately.

The McCollum house stands at the edge of a rural two-lane, on a four-acre grass lot that runs to a curtain of hard-woods. The neighboring houses, similarly situated, occasionally give way to grazing horses. When I visited, the only thing in one big field down the road was a tethered mule. The problem for Darius was that he couldn’t walk out the front door and easily go anywhere. The McCollums had furnished their house ardently: chiming clocks and porcelain figurines and hand-stitched antimacassars and graven glassware and pictures of sunset-silhouetted African kings left no blank space. Emptied from many rooms in many homes over a lifetime and now tensely converged in this final house, these encroaching objects in their familiarity had become largely invisible to Mr. and Mrs. McCollum, but in an attempt to understand the propensities of her son, Mrs. McCollum had preserved every document—subway notes and journals, school reports, letters from prison—that might explain him, and this expanding collection never entirely disappeared from her or her husband’s awareness. Much was boxed; much lay around, visible and frequently handled; the things that Mrs. McCollum liked to look at every few days remained enshrined in convenient places. One was a letter from prison, dated June 12, 1987:

Its me again saying hello along with a thought … my thought goes like this. There once lived a young man and a very bright man. This young man had … such good parents … they did everything that they saw was good for this guy. . . The guy was actually great until he [got] into his teenage years and started hanging out around trains, trucks and buses, but one day it all caught up with him and this young man was confused. . . This guy is away somewhere to where he can’t runaway from and has to face his problems. He is sorry for everything and wants. to forget about everything he has done. That is the end of that story. This is a beginning step. I am wondering what is going to happen when this young man comes home. .. I’m sure there will be some changes but what I mean is will he be able to find his destiny.

Darius’s call from Rikers Island didn’t surprise Mr. and Mrs. McCollum. They had long since learned how to entertain ambitious plans for him while anticipating legal dilemmas. They replaced his court-appointed attorney with a family friend named Tracey Bloodsaw. Bloodsaw decided on a psychiatric defense and got the access order required for an examination, but corrections officers at Rikers Island, on various bureaucratic pretexts and over a period of months, refused to admit her psychiatrist. Justice Carol Berkman declined to intervene on the psychiatrist’s behalf, and eventually precluded a psychiatric defense, declaring that adequate notice of such a defense had become impossible. Bloodsaw told Berkman what she thought of the ruling, explained to the McCollums that she had become a liability to Darius, and removed herself from the case.

Darius’s next lawyer, Stephen Jackson, accepted a plea, and Justice Berkman scheduled a sentencing hearing. This empowered her to order—as opposed to merely authorizing—a psychiatric examination. A prison psychiatrist, after a cursory evaluation, noted that a neurological disorder called Asperger’s Syndrome might explain Darius’s behavior. Almost simultaneously, Jackson was contacted by members of several Asperger’s support groups. Darius, whose arrests had been covered in newspapers for twenty years, had become well known among Asperger’s experts and activists, and his case had been cited in at least one scholarly work. There was a strong consensus in the Asperger’s community that Darius suffered from the syndrome, and dismay that his treatment had consisted entirely of jail time. Jackson decided to request an adjournment in court so that Darius could be examined and might receive a counseling-based sentence.

***

Stooped and silent at his sentencing, in late March of last year, Darius stood at the very edge of the courtroom, just in front of the holding-cell door through which he had been led. In accordance with the law, he faced Justice Berkman, who sat on a high plinth before a ten-foot mural of the Lady of Justice, between half-furled flags on eagle-tipped poles. The justice had black-gray hair and a squinty, repudiative face. She often listened to the lawyers with her chin on her upturned palms and her incredulous mouth open; she often rolled her eyes with unusual vigor and range, her head following, as if drawn by her eyes, until it almost touched her shoulder. Darius looked around only once, for his mother. Mrs. McCollum, anxious and carrying an accumulation of anger at the legal system, forced herself to smile at him. Darius says he wasn’t thinking about anything: he knew what was going to happen.

I arrived before Darius and watched a few brusque bail hearings. The distant ceiling diminished the few spectators. Then the clerk called Darius’s docket number and the lawyers identified themselves. They had spare tables at the foot of Justice Berkman’s plinth. A.D.A. Dougherty—plain, young, resolute—sat alone. Stephen Jackson sat with Alvin Schlesinger, a former colleague of Justice Berkman’s who had been recruited by the president of an Asperger’s organization. Jackson is tall; every aspect of his appearance had been managed. His manner was measured and grandiloquent: he seemed to take a special pleasure in formality. (When I called him afterward and asked for an interview, he said, “Certainly I would be amenable at some point in time. Would you like to do it telephonically?”) Schlesinger, who had retired to the country, seemed patient in a practiced, almost impervious way; after the sentencing he would drive back to Vermont without stopping, drink a double scotch, and write Justice Berkman a letter he would never send.

Jackson rose. “Your Honor,” he said, “after the Court agreed to provide a plea to satisfy the indictment, I was inundated with information regarding Darius’s possible psychological condition. It is apparent that he may be afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome. . . The Court is aware of the letters that were sent to the Court providing the Court with information regarding the disease, and—”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jackson,” Justice Berkman said, staring hard at various faces in the courtroom, “but perhaps we could bottom-line this … having educated myself on the website and with the DSM and so forth, Mr. McCollum has some characteristics which are very much inconsistent with Asperger’s. He’s got a lot of friends. You told me he has a fiancée, and one of the major signs … is social dysfunction. Not just, gee, his friends think he’s a little strange sometimes but an inability to relate to others. …” Mrs. McCollum started to get up and was pulled back down by the people on either side of her.

“In any event,” Berkman said, “I don’t understand what the point is. …So far as I can tell there’s no treatment for Asperger’s. That is number one…. Number two, Asperger’s would not disable him from knowing that he’s not supposed to form credentials identifying him as an employee of the Transit Authority and go in and take trains or buses or vans or cars or other modes of transportation, which I gather has been his specialty….I don’t see any reason to delay this further, because for some reason the press thinks that, oh, Darius is not responsible. Darius is responsible. … He can stop doing this, if his family and friends would stop telling him, oh, isn’t this amusing. Right?” Mrs. McCollum rose rapidly and was pulled down.

Mr. Schlesinger stood and requested an adjournment so that the defense could have Darius examined and explore treatment options. Many experts felt that Darius had the disorder and to deny treatment was to risk indefinitely perpetuating his past: a limbo in the alternating forms of furtive impersonation and incarceration. Schlesinger had secured a promise from an Asperger’s expert at the Yale Child Study Center to examine Darius and recommend a residential treatment facility. A.D.A. Dougherty stood and opposed the request. Given his history of parole and probation violations, Darius was a bad candidate for any treatment program. Stephen Jackson stood and pointed out the circularity: Darius is not a good candidate for treatment because of his condition, and his condition persists because he’s not a good candidate for treatment.

Resisting several defense attempts to respond, Justice Berkman stabbed out: “Well, now that I’ve been accused of presiding over a travesty of justice and condemning Darius to a life sentence, I suppose there is no way of the Court coming out of this looking anything but monstrous…. This man is a danger…. But in the meantime we’ve made him a poster boy for the system’s lack of compassion for the mentally ill. Well, I have a lot of compassion for the mentally ill. You know, we don’t lock them up anymore. We let them have lives, and most of the mentally ill, I hear from the experts . . . lead law-abiding lives. Darius McCollum does not. That’s too bad. The law says he has to face the consequences of that, because …he has free will, and that’s the nature of humanity, and unless he wants to be treated like an animal … he has to exert his free will for the good … and to say that he is incapable of doing that is to take away his humanity. So all those people out there making faces at me”—Mrs. McCollum was shaking her, head exaggeratedly—”thinking of me as the Wicked Witch of the West, are, in fact, the people who are stealing his humanity from him….”

Mrs. McCollum stood up; before she could be pulled down Berkman had sentenced Darius to five years in prison. When the gavel hit, all the released talk overwhelmed her rapid words.

Jackson immediately appealed, on the ground that Justice Berkman’s failure to grant an adjournment at sentencing was arbitrary. It’s a weak argument: Jackson agreed to a plea and sentencing date and then waited until sentencing to ask for more time; Justice Berkman made no technical mistakes. The D.A.’s office has been disinclined to consider vacating Darius’s plea and changing his sentence if he is diagnosed with Asperger’s. This option, proposed by Alvin Schlesinger, who as a Supreme Court justice developed a relationship with New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, was theoretically available to the defense as soon as Darius was sentenced. Jackson, inexplicably, has yet to have Darius examined.

***

Asperger’s Syndrome, which mainly affects males, is generally considered to be a mild variant of autism, with a prevalence rate several times higher. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders requires five symptoms for a diagnosis: “impairment in social interaction,” including “failure to develop [appropriate] peer relationships” and a “lack of social or emotional reciprocity”; “restricted, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities,” including an “encompassing preoccupation with [an area of] interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus”; “significant impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning”; and “no significant delay in cognitive [4] or language [5] development.”

Among the “encompassing preoccupations” in the literature of Asperger’s: Abbott and Costello, astro-physics, deep-ocean biology, deep-fat fryers, telephone-wire insulators, carnivorous dinosaurs, cows, Wagner, nineteenth-century Russian novels, storm drains, steam trains, transit timetables, Zoroastrianism, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and the genealogy of royalty. Entire lives are brought to bear on one tiny piece of the world. Because abstract thought tends to be very difficult for people with Asperger’s, they satisfy their obsessions by amassing precisely defined units of information: numbers, terms, codes, dates, titles, materials, names, formulas.

Asperger’s precludes normal emotional intuition. Behavioral cues are elusive: winks and shoulder-shrugging and sarcasm are often meaningless. Conversations are one-sided; patients generally deliver long, fact-crowded monologues on their areas of expertise, blind to gestures of boredom or puzzlement. General questions, which can require both speculating abstractly and intuiting a questioner’s intent, are often impossible for people with Asperger’s to answer. Patients may respond with a far-reaching elaboration of a single related fact or experience.

Conventions of interpersonal behavior, if they are not explicit, remain beyond comprehension, as when a small boy, generally affectionate toward his mother, asks her why, given that he can dress and feed himself, she is still necessary, or when a boy endlessly photographs people while telling them that humans are his favorite animal, or when Darius writes to his parents from prison: “Hello There, People of America lets get down and party on as we say hello and what’s going on, cause I know there’s something going on …” and:

I am enclosing a reese’s peanut butter cup coupon to let you read and see if you can win some money. Just read the directions…. I kind of wish that I was a Jeanie so I wouldn’t have to be here’. “Ha-ha.” I’ve got a stiff neck and itching all over and cold feet and runny nose and watery eyes itchy ears o Mom I’m just in poor shape. There’s a rat under my bed and a little green man on my head but there’s a true blue inside of you that keeps stopping me to say that I Love You. In here: It’s like Death of a Salesman with a happy ending I hope. Well you guys I guess I will go to bed to get warm so have fun and keep out of trouble. Give my regards to Broadway …

Explicit rules that make sense socially but aren’t strictly rational seem unconvincing and often go unheeded, as when a boy in junior high asks a female classmate if he can touch her crotch as casually as if he were asking to borrow an eraser. That explicit and logical rules exist along a continuum of seriousness is unappreciated, as when a young man follows a barefoot woman around a supermarket, assiduously trying to conceal her naked feet from employees, and then stands behind her in the express lane, diligently removing one of her purchases each time she turns her head until she is no longer over the ten-item limit.

Speech is oddly formal and often unmarked by accent, as if verbal local color had been filtered out. Specialized phrases are applied in a way that is logical but, from the perspective of conventional usage, awkward or bizarre, as when an English boy describes a hole in his sock as “a temporary loss of knitting.”

For people with Asperger’s, self-identity has little to do with internal life; information constitutes identity. One boy who was asked to draw a self-portrait sketched an ocean liner, cracked and sinking beside an iceberg; the Titanic was his obsession. Another self-portrait accurately represented a tsunami-shadowed tract of California coast; its author was fascinated by plate tectonics. An autobiographical statement:

I am an intelligent, unsociable, but adaptable person. I would like to dispel any untrue rumors about me. I am not edible. I cannot fly. I cannot use telekinesis. My brain is not large enough to destroy the entire world when unfolded. I did not teach my long-haired guinea pig Chronos to eat everything in sight (that is the nature of the long-haired guinea pig).

People with Asperger’s recognize their difference. One patient said he wished he had a micro-brain on his head to process all the intuitive meaning that surrounded and evaded him. Another patient, studying astronomy, told his therapist that he knew how scientists discovered the stars, and what instruments they used to discover the stars, but not how they discovered the names of the stars. He said he felt like a poor computer simulation of a human being, and he invented algebraic formulas to predict human emotion: frustration (z), talent (x), and lack of opportunity (y) give the equation x + y = z.

Darius, explaining that he has never needed to socialize and really only associates with people in transit systems, said to me, “Some people think that I’m different. Okay, fine, I am different, but everybody’s different in their own kind of way. Some people just don’t know how to directly really react to that.” Before Darius’s sentencing hearing, Stephen Jackson sent him a pamphlet on Asperger’s. It was the first Darius had heard of the disorder. When I asked him about the pamphlet, he said, “I’ll put it like this. Out of the twelve things that’s on it I think I can identify myself with at least eight or nine. And all you need is five to have, you know, that type of thing.”

Asperger’s patients choose obsessions the way other people choose interests: personality accounts for the choice. Sometimes, usually when they’re young, patients acquire and discard fixations in swift succession, but eventually a single subject consumes them. They are born to fall down some rabbit hole, from which they never fully emerge.

***

The Clinton Correctional Facility, where I interviewed Darius, is a leviathan relic from 1845, just south of the Canadian border, with granite walls thirty feet high. In the intake center a guard examined the cassette and batteries in my tape recorder. I was escorted across a lawn to the main prison building. The walls leaned in—thirty feet is claustrophobically high. There were long-barreled guns and searchlights in guard towers. I felt as if I might provoke a terrible reaction by accident. We went through the prison lobby, a leaden door, a corridor, another leaden door, and arrived at the interview room, where the guard left me. Except for a table and chairs, the room was as plain as a cell. I sat waiting in a restless institutional quiet. Two guards brought Darius in. In his jumpsuit he looked lumpy and quiescent. We shook hands—Darius’s handshake was bonelessly indifferent—and sat down. The guards left, one whispering to the other, “He’s pretty docile.”

I made a vague little speech: I was writing an article, etc. Darius nodded politely as I talked but gave no indication that he was interested in my aims or motivations or life. When I finished he asked where I was staying and how much it cost and what train I’d come on and how long it had taken. From the time of the trip he guessed that my train hadn’t had an M-10 engine; he wished me luck getting one on the way back. I started asking about his career in transit, and he showed the transporting animation that Detective Mullen had observed. He sketched control panels in the air, he drove trains in mime, he asked for paper and drew the track intersections of subway stations. He often looked away to concentrate on the images he conjured.

Clinton is a maximum-security facility. Darius was there because the Department of Corrections, aware of his impersonation convictions, considered him an escape risk. To keep him safe the DOC had to segregate him from the general population, which meant confining him to his cell for, Darius said, twenty-one hours a day. That morning he had made the guards laugh by wedging a sign in his cell bars that said, “Train Out of Service.” He watched TV and read general-interest magazines; he studied arrangements of facts in several specialty publications he subscribed to: Truckers News, World of Trains, Truck ‘N Trailer; he made lists of various things, like 185 love songs he happened to think of one day; and he wrote a lot of letters requesting information. Unsatisfied by something he saw on TV, he wrote to the Department of Defense, which replied:

Unfortunately, the term “discretionary warfare” is not currently used by the Department of Defense (DoD), so I am uncertain what you mean by it. In addition, there are no 12-man Special Operations units made up of personnel who are at the rank of Colonel or above. There are, however, Special Operations units made up of 12 men: the US Army Special Forces A Teams. The Special Forces A team is made up of two officers, two operations/intelligence sergeants, two weapons sergeants, two communications sergeants, two medics and two engineers—all trained in unconventional warfare and cross-trained in each other’s specialties.

Darius underlined the word “two” every time it appeared.

On May 31 of this year, Darius will have spent 799 days in prison. At his first parole hearing, 912 days into his sentence, the D.A.’s office will present his history of violations. His full sentence comes to 1,825 days. In the interview room of the Clinton Correctional Facility, I asked Darius if he thought he would continue to impersonate transit employees and otherwise break the law. He looked at the ceiling and took a long breath. He seemed to have prepared his answer. “Okay,” he said, “trains are always going to be my greatest love. It’s something that I depend upon because I’ve been knowing how to do it for twenty-five years. So this is like my home, my best friend, my everything. Everything that I need and want is there. But I don’t want to get caught up with that again, and I’m probably going to need a little help. That much I can admit. If I can find—I know there’s no such program as Trains Anonymous, but if I can get some kind of counseling it would be really beneficial towards me.”

Darius doesn’t like prison and complains about its deprivations, but he never expresses despair or outrage at the severity of his punishment. He sees his experience in terms of its daily components, without considering, the entirety of his sentence—the abstract unbroken length of time between the present and his release. “I’ll get out of here sooner or later,” he says. And it doesn’t occur to him to imagine an alternative life for himself: he never wonders what he might have been.

***

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,430 words)

Caroll Spinney has performed Big Bird and Oscar on Sesame Street since the show launched in 1969, almost half a century ago. A new documentary, I Am Big Bird, follows Spinney’s journey from a somewhat difficult childhood—his father had abusive tendencies, and he was picked on in school—to becoming a childhood icon, not to mention a man in an almost absurdly happy marriage. Spinney’s wife, Debra, sat nearby (laughing and interjecting sporadically) as we discussed the film, the physical and emotional reality of playing these characters, and what kind of guy a grouch really is. Big Bird and Oscar made cameo appearances.

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The film features a lot of old footage that you and your wife, Debra, gathered over the years. What was it like to go through all those old tapes?

We didn’t look at any of it, although Deb had categorized it all. We gave the filmmakers many boxes of videotapes, literally hundreds of hours of television, because we’ve been taking videos since 1978. Before that, starting in 1954, I was taking eight millimeter movies, which is that blurry stuff in the film. An eight millimeter picture is just a little more than a quarter inch wide, so you can imagine when that’s blown up a million times it looks pretty soft. But it kinda makes nice footage for the story.

What was it like for you to watch the film after all that time?

It was interesting to see what they had picked out. We first watched it at home on the flat screen. But the next time I watched it, we were in Toronto in a theater with 300 people on a 60-foot-wide screen, and it’s a very different experience to watch it with other people than with just the two of us. You could hear their emotions, and you could tell they were using Kleenex at certain times. There’s about three moments in the thing that are quite emotional, I think partly due to the wonderful music that was composed for it.

Can you tell me what those three moments are?

Jim Henson’s funeral would be one. Brian Henson, Jim’s oldest son, asked if I would sing, as Big Bird, “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” which was Jim’s swan song, his favorite song. And the Sesame Street episode about Mr. Hooper’s death was very moving. And then the part about my father. He was kind of scary when I was a kid. And yet, as an old man, he became a sweet, wonderful old fellow.

Jim Henson and Caroll Spinney. Photo courtesy of Debra Spinney.

Based on the film, it seemed as though, during your childhood, your parents were at opposite ends of a spectrum: you had this supportive, loving mother and this father who had quite angry, abusive tendencies. I saw a parallel there to Big Bird and Oscar, who also seem to be at opposite ends of an emotional spectrum. Does that ring true to you at all?

No, there’s no parallel, really. I do dwell on the past, as my wife Deb points out [Debra laughs in the background], but that’s pretty well a dead issue. Plus, the characters of Big Bird and Oscar were pretty well defined by Jim Henson, who created the puppets. In the early ’60s, when he gave me Big Bird and Oscar, he had decided one was a grouch who lives by himself, and the other was Big Bird.

Big Bird was kind of a goofy guy when they started, but a couple months into the show, I decided that instead of just a dumb, goofy guy, he should be a child, learning. And I think that was a better idea. Then children could identify with Big Bird, which indeed they did and they still do. It’s kind of an unusual situation, since at this point I’m about 74 years older than the character I play.

How did you decide that Big Bird would be six years old, specifically?

When we first decided, I said I thought Big Bird didn’t even recognize what the alphabet was, but he was trying to learn. So I decided he would be four and a half. Of course, kids now pretty well know the alphabet, because of Sesame Street, starting at two and a half or three. But when I went to kindergarten, they never even mentioned the alphabet—they thought kindergartners were too young to learn. And they were quite wrong.

Anyway, a year and a half goes by, and the show slowly evolves. They started writing more things about Big Bird. At one point there was a poem by Big Bird—[in Big Bird’s voice:] “That’s me!” And he would then read it. And I felt that, okay, now he can read, and he has written a poem, which is something I can’t even do. So I decided he had to be six, but that we should stop at six, because we didn’t want him to grow up and have to go to college or anything.

I kind of want to see that—”Big Bird in College.”

[Laughs] Yeah, that would be pretty good, wouldn’t it? You could make some good movies about Big Bird as a teenager, too. [Big Bird’s voice:] “Whatever!”

What do you think he’d be like as a teenager?

Well, I wasn’t a wise guy teenager. I was kind of small and shy. And also, I didn’t want to irritate my father. And I patterned Big Bird a little bit after my own childhood. I think that it’s not easy being a teenager.

No, it certainly isn’t. The film goes into your background a bit, and how you were bullied in high school. You didn’t have the easiest time as a small kid with the name Caroll.

I have very strong memories of my early childhood. A lot of people don’t remember much about being a baby, but I can remember events before I was even three years old.

I was born in the first third of the ’30s. So I remember some of the Depression and the difficulties we had; the factory my father worked in shut down…money and all that. It must have been hard for him. And the pay was pathetic, even though he ran about forty machines that were fully automatic in 1912. They made tiny little screws for watches—some of them were so small they looked like dust. They sold watches no bigger than a dime for women back in the ’20s and ’30s.

That sounds like a really difficult job.

Yeah, maybe that’s why he was such a grouch.

Maybe.

I never identified Oscar the Grouch with my father being a grouch. I never saw that as him. I mean, I knew he was grumpy, I had to live with that. We had only two rooms to live in in the winter, because the house I grew up in was built in the 1700s or 1800s with no insulation whatsoever and no furnace, only the kitchen with the big black stove and a small space heater in the dining room next to the kitchen. Otherwise, all seven other rooms were ice cold. A glass of water would freeze solid overnight beside your bed. I was used to that, and I just thought that’s how everybody lived. A neighbor kid invited me up to his house. I went, and he said, “Do you want to see my bedroom?” We go upstairs and it’s nice and warm. “How come it’s warm?” “Well, the furnace keeps it warm.” I said, “Furnace? What’s a furnace?” [Laughs]

And so, into this context, comes puppeteering. You bought your first puppet, a monkey, for five cents, and put on a show with that and a stuffed green snake. You’ve said you don’t remember the details of the show you put on, but could you tell me how you felt, why it was so magnetizing?

I had seen two different puppet shows when I was younger, and thought it was a wonderful thing that you would tell a story with something on your hand. No, I don’t remember the story. I remember I sang a song, though. There was a song at the time, “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake.” I think I used that song, but made it “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Snake.” Otherwise I don’t remember what it was. But people all clapped at the end, as though it was a real show, and they laughed. I don’t remember a thing about it other than the fact that I loved the applause. And I made thirty-two cents, which was big money in 1942. That could take you to the movies three times.

When I was 12, my English teacher said, “I heard you did puppets. When do you give shows?” I said, “Almost never.” I did only a few shows once in a while. So she said, “Well, I’ll pay you two dollars and I can pick you up in my car. Will the theater fit in my car?” I said, “Yes.” So I gave a puppet show for her niece, and I started doing puppet shows. She got me started. I did that show and I liked the two bucks.

About a month or so ago, we were looking through some things in a spare closet we don’t use much, and I found that monkey puppet. I didn’t know I still had it.

I’d like to talk about the physicality of inhabiting the Big Bird costume. As I understand it, you can’t see out of it and have to wear a video monitor to guide you, plus you have to hold your arm above your head to hold up Big Bird’s head and operate his beak. Then you have your lines taped up inside the costume. It all sounds incredibly physically demanding. So, to start: Is the arm that you hold up much stronger than the arm that you don’t?

There used to be an urban tale that my right arm was twice the size of my left. Although that wasn’t true, I would say it was twice as strong. The bird’s head weighs four and a half pounds, which doesn’t sound heavy until you try to hold it over your head for fifteen minutes. A guy once said, “Well, four and a half pounds, that’s nothing. I could hold a hundred pounds over my head.” I said, “I don’t think so. I bet you can’t hold your empty hand over your head for five minutes, let alone if I put a four and a half pound head in your hand at the same time.” About two and a half minutes into it, he’s going, “Geez…” He never made it to the five minutes. He said, “This is stupid, I’m not doing this.” Well, he was stupid, anyway.

Photo courtesy of Robert Furhing

How hot is it inside that costume? I imagine it’s really, really warm.

Well, feathers make nice warm down comforters. They don’t particularly bother me too much on set unless it’s a long scene and I have to keep doing a physical thing over and over. They keep it very cold in there. The puppeteers like it cold.

Live shows are very definitely the worst. For eight years, I had a long series of conducting symphony orchestras as Big Bird. It was an hour and ten minutes long and I would lose maybe two or three pounds in that hour, just from sweating. That’s the major reason why I stopped doing the concerts. And I was tired of living out of a suitcase.

You’ve said that the first time you conducted the Boston Pops, it was so awesome you nearly dropped the baton.

Arthur Fiedler was the conductor, and he gave me his baton and afterwards he let me keep it. I still have the baton that belonged to Arthur Fiedler! He said, “Bring the baton up, and then bring it down, and they will start.” I did that and, badumm—80 pieces suddenly flash into awesome sound. I thought, “Oh, my God, I started that!”

What about when you’re playing Oscar? Does it hurt your knees to be crouching down like a baseball catcher?

Actually, when I do Oscar, I am sitting in a chair, leaning forward and putting my upper body into an opening at the back of the trashcan. I used to kneel back when we started, when I was only in my thirties. It put me at the right height, and I knelt on a thick pad. But later on, I decided a chair worked just as well, and enabled me to get into and out of position more quickly.

You’ve done not only Sesame Street, but also movies, including Follow That Bird. How do they compare?

It’s very different to make a movie than to do television. With the movie, it would take sometimes as much as an hour and a half to set up the next scene, so it was a lot of time in the Winnebago, waiting. And we would only get about two to three minutes of the film done each day. So it took a couple months to do the movie.

I gather, then, that you prefer TV?

Well, I love the immediacy of it. And it’s very, very exciting to know people will see it by the billions. It’s kinda nice to know you’re doing that, and it’s working.

What is it like to act like a kid, in the case of Big Bird, or really angry, in the case of Oscar? Is there anything cathartic about that for you?

No, I don’t think so. Oscar is irritable, you could certainly put it that way, but there is no real anger involved in him. A grouch is not necessarily a mean person. I have a friend named Günter, who is from Germany. When they were losing the war and we were winning, the food stopped coming, and the people were starving. Günter had a very grouchy neighbor when he was a boy—if your ball went into his yard, you’d never get it back. One day, they were looking through the dump for food, and the grouch guy turned over a big piece of tin and there was a big can of peaches there with the label still on it. Günter was closer to it and he ran to it, but the grouch reached right over and picked it up. But then he looked at Günter and said, “You know what, you probably need this more than I do, you’re just a boy,” and handed the can to him. That’s what I think Oscar would do. He is not cruel.

Photo courtesy of Gary Boynton/Puppeteers of America.

You’re 81 now—could tell me a bit about what it’s like to do such a challenging physical role as you get older?

I don’t necessarily hold Big Bird up as tall every time, although I am conscious of that as far as bringing my arm way back to make him very straight and tall. Matt Vogel [Spinney’s understudy, who will one day take over the role] is my stand-in, at times, if it’s a very awkward or difficult task, like dance. I cannot learn dance steps, so he will do them. But mostly it’s just a bit of a struggle—but it always was. It wasn’t even easy when I was 35.

As Sesame Street progressed, Elmo, who is younger than Big Bird, came onto the scene and started to eclipse Big Bird in some ways. Why do you think the show wanted to skew towards younger viewers?

When we first started, we were aiming at kids four to seven or eight years. Now, it’s two to four; even one-year-olds are learning things from watching the show. The audience is far younger than they ever dreamed the show could work for. Elmo is three and a half, and I think that that just suited their goals better. Big Bird, at six, is an old-timer.

Why is it three and a half years old instead of just three?

Children are growing very fast at that age, and they could be a little more sophisticated at three and a half than they are at just three. But it’s also three and a half because a lot of kids, when you ask how old they are, say something like, “I’m ten and a half.” We try to make it real for the little kids, and I think we’ve succeeded in doing that. The letters I get, from children who identify with Big Bird, are wonderful. “Dear Big Bird, you are my best friend. Why don’t you come over and play? How about next Thursday?” That’s one of them. Another one is, “Guess what? My mom and dad bought me bunk beds. Why don’t you come and stay over? You can have the top.” I said, “Wow, I like the top bed.”

Do you usually reply to these letters?

Yes, I often do. One letter I got from a five-year-old was quite different than all the others because it wasn’t addressed to Big Bird, but to me. “Dear Caroll Spinney, I think you do a wonderful job at being a puppeteer who plays Big Bird.” And he’s five years old.

So I answered the letter and then I got another letter from him about two years later, when he was seven. It was a much more sophisticated letter. He said, “If you want, you can give me a call, here’s my number.” I called him. Ever since then, I have been mentoring him. His name is Weston Long and he’s now a teenager, on the road as a puppeteer, doing a very delightful show about the life of fish. It’s a great comedy, it’s touring the whole country. And his name is so perfect.

Wow, that’s an amazing story. That’s lovely. The last question I wanted to ask was about something that you’ve said in interviews, that puppets can demonstrate more humanity than real people at times. Why? What is it about puppets that can make them more human than humans?

I think it’s because of the audience. They’re little kids, and everybody is a great big grown up to them, whereas Big Bird is another kid they can identify with to a degree—which is kinda funny, since he’s 8’2″. Plus, I think the writing is so good on our show and they put him in a lot of emotional scenes, which are my favorite ones to do. I am extremely emotional; I live in a state of emotion, constantly. The show doesn’t get into the humans’ lives enough to see them frustrated or end up crying. Whereas Big Bird, and even Oscar—one show a few years ago a wild seagull landed by his trash can, and he brought him in and nursed him back to health. And Oscar got to like him very much. One day, he comes back to his trashcan, and the bird is gone. And I had to have him cry his heart out from the depth of his soul. He said, “I thought he was my friend, I thought…” And they had to explain to Oscar he was a wild bird, he had to fly away, you couldn’t make a pet of him. I had never had Oscar cry before, and I was amazed; he sounded like he really had lost his best friend.

Well, I think that’s all my questions. I should say that I grew up watching Sesame Street all the time, so it was a thrill to be able to talk to you.

[In Big Bird’s voice:] “Thank you, Jessie. Hey, Oscar? You want to say something to Jessie?” [In Oscar’s voice:] “I think her name is Jessica, you idiot.” [Big Bird:] “What are you gonna say to Jessica, Oscar?” [Oscar:] “Have a rotten day.”

[Laughs] Well, thanks.

[Oscar:] “What do you expect? I’m a grouch.”

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This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.