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Just a story. ...

They were in a rental car headed to a conference in Charlottesville. The driver, in her early 30s, was an assistant professor; he, about the same age, was her student. When it was learned that both had had their papers accepted for presentation, they agreed to share the expense of the rental car. The drive would take most of the hot day, and the air conditioner labored to keep the car cool. Where the sun struck his face and neck, it burned.

She was agitated for reasons he didn't understand. Or rather, he knew plenty of reasons but not which applied, now. She drove fast, aggressively, one handed, the other rubbing her neck. He had to fight the urge to push his hands forward when she tailgated or braked at the last instant to avoid hitting a car driving at the speed limit. If he thrust his arms up, she would take it as a criticism, and he didn't want the gestures he’d have to make to defuse the moment, or, rather, to get it filed away as another injustice.

"Fuck," she yelled, pounding on the steering wheel. He looked at her, a short, stocky woman with blonde hair cut in severe lines just under her ears. She was glaring at the rear view mirror, and when he twisted to see behind the car, he saw the flashing lights of the highway patrol. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

She lurched the car, doing 85, onto the shoulder, and hit the brakes, hard. Now he did say, "Gently, don't make him have to slam on the brakes." As they came to a stop, he pulled out his wallet and got his driver's license. Then he opened the glove compartment and located the rental papers and insurance card. She sat rigid, her hands gripping the steering wheel so hard her fingers had turned white. She didn't move until the patrolman rapped on her window. Muttering, she jerked a hand toward the window crank, prepared to turn it with the quick stabbing motions he’d seen her use in her own car. But the rented car had power windows and she had to sit there, rigid once again, while her index finger held down the button. That would be funny, he thought, if humor were allowed. Maybe later, with friends at the pub, and he could imagine himself telling the story, mimicking her gestures, working his face into a paroxysm of rage. He was quite good at that sort of thing, and he knew his friends would be appreciative. He pushed the thought away.

When the window was down, she continued to sit, staring straight ahead until the patrolman asked for her driver's license. She impatiently thrust a hand toward the student, and he leaned against the shoulder strap and retrieved her purse from the floorboard. He wished he wasn't there. Why had he agreed to travel with her? But he had had little choice. When in the department mailroom she asked if his paper was accepted, he nodded, knowing what was coming.

During the three weeks before the conference, he'd done his best to avoid her. If he saw her down a hallway, he darted into mailrooms, down other hallways, even into empty classrooms. It wasn't easy; twice a week he was in her seminar, and once the class met at her house. The topic had switched, somehow, from the subject of the course to feminism. The guys sat back and carefully avoided glancing at each other. The women leaned forward. After one of the students, a gentle and bright woman with whom most of the guys were a bit in love, made a point about how women had been silenced, the assistant professor said, "Yes, and now it's time for the men to shut up and listen." The men hadn’t said much anyway; they hadn’t the entire course. Now their silence was hostile. The student heard what they were not saying, what they would say to each other as they drove home. He was embarrassed for her, for himself.

Before the seminar, during the Christmas break, she had asked him to house sit while she went to Paris with her fiancé. He agreed out of reflex. Later, it occurred to him that he might get paid, and even a few bucks would make the effort worthwhile. For ten days he stayed in the small house she rented, far from his haunts near campus. He used her computer, made meals in her kitchen, slept in her bed. When he masturbated, he used a tissue to avoid staining her sheets. The only mishap: he almost scalded himself in her shower, she had the water heater set so high.

His only instruction concerned the cat: he was to open one of the many varieties of canned cat food she had in her shelves; if the cat didn't like what was offered, he was to open another. This was to continue until the cat ate.

He'd opened a can of Salmon Delight and placed it before the cat, a Persian named Winnie. The cat sniffed at the food, made a moue, and sat down a few feet away. It didn't look at him. He got down on the floor, moved the bowl closer to the cat, and, looking directly in its eyes, said, "That's dinner." The cat looked back, not moving. Enraged in a way he knew was unreasonable, he said, "Fine." And left. The cat did not eat the food, and that night, he threw it out. The cat, watching out of the corner of its eye as it groomed itself, sat and waited. He just stood there. Finally he went into the living room and read a book. On the second day, he opened a can of White Chicken Gourmet, left it in a bowl. He didn't wait to see if the cat ate it. That evening, he noticed half of the cat's dinner was gone. He left the rest until late that night, and then threw it out. This continued. He never gave the cat a choice. By the fifth day it was eating all of what was offered. He stroked the cat and said, "Good kitty."

The night before the assistant professor was to return, he put half of the remaining cans of cat food in a paper sack, walked a few dozen yards down the alley running behind the house, and threw the sack into an empty dumpster.

When she got back her eyes were red and her round cheeks were flushed. There'd been an argument; her fiancé left her luggage on the driveway and without a word got into his pick up and squealed out of the driveway. She ran back outside, crying, and looked down the road as her lover flashed his turn signal, came to a precise stop, and turned away. He followed her and stood by her, helpless. All his instincts told him to hug her, cradle her. He picked up some of her luggage and carried it inside. The cat sat next to its dinner bowl. She came in, struggling with armfuls of luggage and packages. She couldn't get the door opened. He opened it and took some of the packages. She let the rest drop onto the kitchen floor. Startled, the cat sprang away.

He didn't know what to do, so he picked up the packages and placed them on the kitchen counter. The luggage he took into the bedroom and placed on the bed. When he returned to the kitchen, she held a small box, wrapped in gold foil. She gave it to him. The sun shining through the window reflected off the foil into his eyes. He realized, I'm not going to be paid. She said, "Thanks for watching Winnie," and he said, "It was no trouble. You didn't have to ..." and he made a small gesture with the box. She said, "Open it," and a sob escaped from her chest, like a cough or hiccup.

He carefully unwrapped the gold foil. It was a box of expensive chocolates. A fleur-des-lis was stamped onto each one.

She sank to the linoleum and leaned against the front of the oven. She looked at him. She looked exhausted. He wanted to go home, but he had no car, and the bus didn't run on the weekend. He sat down beside her and said, "I'm sorry." She nodded and leaned her head against his shoulder. He put his arm around her, and she began to talk about the trip, what had gone wrong, the arguments they'd had, their conflicting expectations. Her fiancé, a muscular and handsome man, had flirted with a waitress at a cafe. One night he left the hotel and did not return until morning. Frantic with worry and jealousy, she had stayed up all night, and when he returned, stood with her hands on her hips and accused him of a litany of charges and failures. The student said nothing but stroked her shoulder.

He listened to her that day and evening, occasionally saying soothing words. She tried to call her fiancé -- or "ex-fiancé," as she referred to him once or twice, with bitterness. That night, realizing that she wasn't going to take him to his apartment, he offered to spend the night on the couch, so that she wouldn't have to drive in the dark. She agreed, and smiled at him, and he thought, good lord. She left him to take a hot bath, which she said was all that helped relieve her fibromyalgia, a condition she described in detail. It seemed to amount to joint and muscle aches with a bit of depression tossed in for good measure.

That night on the couch he woke from a dream about an unavailable woman he longed to pursue. The assistant professor was sitting on the floor beside him. "Is everything all right?" he asked, and she said, "Please hold me." He slid off the couch, pulling the blanket with him, and sat beside her, and she leaned against him, and placed her hand on his semi-erect cock. He was so shocked he didn’t react, even when she pulled the blanket off him and leaned over his lap.

Afterwards, he avoided her. When he did look into her eyes, they were cold and challenging. But when he heard that her mother had died, he mailed her a sympathy card. He didn’t want to take her seminar, but his other professors said he must. It was devoted to his particular field. Not to do so, they said, would be a slap in the face, and she had connections, sat on editorial boards. Only a few students were expected to take the seminar; she wasn’t a popular teacher and her field was rather esoteric. Don’t burn bridges, they said; don’t rock the boat. He felt sick. He was disappointed that his professors talked that way. His friends took another line. “She’s a stone cold bitch,” one said while they were getting drunk at a campus hangout. “No, she’s not,” he said. “She’s just scared and pissed. She might not get tenure. Besides, her fiancé fucked a waitress. Her mother just died. No one likes her.” His friend laughed: “But you like her.” He didn’t reply for awhile. The heavy metal over the loudspeakers hurt his head. “No,” he said, finally. “I really don’t.”

She gave her driver’s license to the patrolman. “I hope you made your quota,” she said. Her entire body was clenched. The patrolman looked at her driver’s license, then at her. Then he looked at the student. Finally, he took off his mirrored sunglasses and put them in his front shirt pocket. He grasped the window seal with both hands. His long fingers dangled inside the car. He leaned toward the assistant professor and said, with a cold sneer: “We don’t have quotas anymore. We can write as many tickets as we want.”

“You fucking asshole,” she screamed, and tried to slap the patrolman, but the student grabbed her arm. “Cool it!” he yelled at her. The patrolman backed away, one hand on his gun. He said to the patrolman, “It’s ok, it’s ok” but the patrolman was already yelling, “Get out of the car, now!” With her free hand, she pushed the button to roll up the window, but the patrolman reached inside, deftly unlocked the door, and yanked it open. “Get out, now!” he commanded. Holding the door open, he toggled the radio attached to his shirt and requested backup. The student yelled, “Calm down, just get out of the goddamn car and calm down.”

She was booked for resisting arrest. It was night by the time bail and been set and her parents had wired money. On his way back to the jail he stopped at a motel and rented a room. If they left early, they would arrive in Charlottesville in time to present their papers. When she came out of the holding area, she was trembling with anger. He followed her to car. “All I want,” she said, “is a hot bath.”

Rusted cars, dishwashers, refrigerators and other debris lay scattered on the other side of the old chain link fence that separated the motel and its parking lot from the junkyard beside it. The motel, a single-story strip of cracked cinderblock, had been painted bright rose, but time and weather had reduced it to a weak pink. The headlights of the rented car revealed these details, and he looked anxiously at her to see if she noticed. She had not. She had reclined the passenger seat as far as it would go, and leaned her head stiffly against the head rest. She kept her eyes closed through an effort of will, he thought, just as she clinched her thin lips. He pulled into a space in front of the room he had rented and quickly turned off the headlights.

“We’re here,” he said, softly, turning off the engine and unfastening his seatbelt. Her seatbelt, not having been drawn out far enough before she wrapped it around her chest and fastened it, bit into the flesh at her waist and just under her breasts. The vein on her temple was throbbing, her hair was a mess, and her left cheek was smudged with dirt. She didn’t open her eyes, so he continued looking at her. Now she reached up and massaged her neck. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and her movement revealed a nipple inside her low-cut blouse. He quickly got out and retrieved their luggage from the trunk, which he set on the asphalt. He adjusted his erection before he slammed shut the trunk. She had gotten out of the car and was looking at the motel. He expected her to say it was a dump, but instead she picked up her luggage.

Inside were two beds, a double and a single, separated by a small table with a phone on top. Above the beds and table was a large seascape. The cream-colored walls had been freshly painted; the room looked better than he expected. He quickly set his luggage on the single bed, and reached for hers to set on the other, but she was already swinging her luggage onto the single. Then she turned and faced him.

“Thanks,” she said, “for …”

“It’s ok,” he said.

She quickly moved forward, pulled him into an embrace, and kissed him under his right ear. He reflexively returned the hug, gently, and began to release, but realized she was not finished. “I don’t know what I would have done without you,” she whispered. He continued the embrace, but lightly, his arms exerting the gentlest pressure he could manage. He discovered himself becoming aroused again, and was appalled at his body’s betrayal.

“Take a bath,” he said. “You’ve had a hard day.” He put his hands on her shoulders and gently pushed her away. He was angry because he felt trapped by his own desire. He knew his passivity was mistaken for acceptance. He didn’t think he was a coward, exactly, but he was afraid … of what? He wasn’t certain. She sat down on the double bed, the hopeful enquiry of a hesitant smile and upturned eyes struggling with the sudden suspicion of a contracted brow. He looked away.

“You go ahead and take a quick shower,” she said. “I want to find my girly bath things.”

The pulsating water overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes and let it pound his face. He felt far from himself; the forceful but tingling sensation, the warm sensual massage, so immediate, somehow un-tethered him. Tension cascaded down his body, pooled at the drain, and swirled away. He thought of nothing. It was like deep sleep, a sleep without pestering dreams, a sleep without distorted and malevolent faces peering at him from the distance. When he returned to himself, he felt peaceful, and idly thought of her. She wasn’t bad looking. Now he rehearsed some fantasies. He would tell her they were friends, but he couldn’t be bounded, he was a free agent. Friends with benefits, he’d say, and in the shower he smirked. They’d make love and then he’d pat her on the cheek and roll over. Or he’d take her hard whenever he wanted, no rules, no restrictions, no tolerance for any of her nonsense. He wouldn’t be cruel, no, not cruel, but he wouldn’t take any crap either.

Finally, thoroughly relaxed, he scrubbed himself and washed his hair. After he dried off, he wrapped himself in a terry cloth bathrobe. Reaching for the doorknob, he realized, with a jolt of adrenaline, I used up all the hot water!

The doorknob glistened with condensation. He sensed her, in the bedroom, eyes fixed on the door, seething with rage.

He stood, paralyzed, his hand outstretched.

There's a rainforest in my backyard. That's what I call it, anyway. Bounded by uncut railroad ties, it's approximately 60 feet by 40 feet. Smack dab in the middle of the backyard. My wife, when she was my wife, once cleared it for a garden. She wanted to remove the railroad ties, but I liked them. However, the thick railroad spikes that secured them in place had begun to work their way out. If I wanted to keep the ties, I had to take care of the protruding spikes. I bought the heaviest sledge hammer I could find and spend hours pounding them back in. Somehow there was no injury.

That was the extent of my effort. I'm not one for mucking in the dirt. The times I've been pressed into gardening I've hated it, usually, and the times I haven't I was lost in thought and not gardening, unless kneeling motionless in the dirt with a spade in hand counts as gardening.

The garden project went the way such projects often do. And the wife went the way spouses often do. The plot's wildly abundant, extravagantly overgrown. At first, the wildflowers she planted ran amok, but since then, vines, bushes, and trees have taken over. You can't walk through it, it's so dense. I know it contains poison oak.

I like it. It blocks the view of the house further up the hill, and I can sit at my kitchen table looking out the window without my neighbors spying on me. I can't see them, either; that's a blessing. The man of the uphill house is often outside mowing and pruning his bit of yard, and he radiates disapproval of me and my careless ways. His yard is tame, bent into something nice and safe, something that comforts the neighbors, makes them think, There is no danger here.

The backyard rainforest is a habitat for many critters. Birds and squirrels, mostly, but I've seen skunk slink about, and deer place their hooves on the ties and lean over to munch. At night it creeps me out; I can hear strange things scurrying. That's ok. We need strange things.

She was either a high school student or a very young teacher. She was precise in every part, as if professonals had dressed her and applied her comestics. Everything sharp and crisp, every accessory perfectly color coordinated, every hair exactly placed, even the wisps that dangled with studied carelessness. Her base was smooth and natural; her lip and eye make-up perfect. If high schools had sororities, she would have been the leader of her chapter. The colors she wore on her face and body didn't matter; on another day other colors would have been as expertly marshalled.

Perched on a stool with a phone to her ear, she stopped talking when I walked into the copy room. She gave me a perfunctory smile, and turned away. I smiled a genuine smile to myself but stifled a chuckle. Someday she might grace the cover of a magazine I'd not buy. As I copied the handout I had prepared for class, she resumed talking with great animation. Over the rhythmic cha-chung, cha-chung of the machine, I heard the following:

"Yeah, can you believe it? He seemed like such a normal guy! But his father always was a perv! I know! Remember how he'd look at us when we went over? Ok, talk to you later!"

She hung up the phone and quickly dialed another number.

"Christy! Have you heard!?! Robbie got arrested for being a peeping Tom! Yeah! No, I'm not kidding. He put a ladder up against the Kinison's bathroom window and was watching Mrs. Kinison take a shower! I know! Who would have thought! He seemed like such a normal guy! The only clue -- remember his father? What a perv he was? How'd he check us out in our bathing suits? Yeah, I know! Must run in the family! Ok, see you later, bye!"

My task was done, but I couldn't resist making 50 more copies. She quickly dialed another number.

"Angie! Have you heard!?! ..." But now I couldn't help it. I started laughing. Not little chuckles but great guffaws. I had to lean against the copier, I was laughing so hard. She stopped talking and looked at me. I looked back and laughed. Flustered, she slammed down the phone and stormed out, her sharp movements breaking her precise lines. I liked her best, then.

Later, in my classes, I got a lot of mileage out of the incident.

Three times a week I drive to a high school in a small Tennessee town. There I teach a couple of classes, one in a trailer with no clock. Clocks are not needed. Loud clanging bells punctuate the day: when class is about to start, when it starts, and when it ends. These bells jar your whole spine, like a running kid with a stick rat-a-tatting a picket fence. If you haven't completed a lecture before the bell, you never will, because students dart for the door and plunge into the hall looking for the current that will get them to their next class before another spine-jarring bell.

We selected the parking lot for its smooth and flat asphalt. A couple of days before she'd gotten her bike, a purple and grey beauty with knobby tires and a padded top bar that read "Glamour Girl." That, the color, and the purple tassels hanging off the ends of the handlebars clinched the deal; she wanted it as soon as she saw it.

I bought it for her out of guilt, mostly. We live on a hill in a neighborhood with no sidewalks, and burned into my brain was the image of her racing down our steep driveway onto a road in front of a speeding car driven by carousing teens or adults who know better. I'd avoided getting her a bike out of fear.

But she is nine, now. All the kids in her class have bikes. I had a bike when I was five or six and rode it everywhere without supervision. The world has changed. I roamed the neighborhood, walked fences past snarling dogs, snuck out of my window at night, and skipped school. How could a kid in first grade skip school nowadays? For us, it was as simple as running to the plowed fields during recess and lying in a furrow until all the kids went back inside. Then we'd explore, wiggle through gaps in barbed wire fences, search for arrow heads. If a kid snuck away from school now, there'd be conferences with principals, letters from superintendents, threats of legal action.

But it's me, too. Out of fear I keep her close, keep in close contact with her teachers, keep my eyes open when she plays in the yard or park, and keep in the forefront anxieties of injury and abduction. Life is loss, and what is passes, and even what we consider verities reveal themselves as delusions. We try to hold on for as long as we can, as we held on to monkey bars until they slid from our grasps.

She's starting without help now, awkwardly, sometimes falling, but she waves me away. Place one foot on the high pedal, push off and press down, swing the other foot onto the other pedal, and wobble off. I capture it on camera. Soon the image will be framed and hanging on a wall with all the other images -- first steps, first day of school, first awards.

I stand by my car, open, camera in hand, as she rides off.

One day he stopped. Those behind him in the line waited, as one waits while on hold. They coughed and grumbled and nudged him. Some got out of line and found a place at the back of another line. Others continued to wait, not patiently. They pleaded with him, cajoled him, spoke of picking up the kids and making dinner, of appointments and schedules, of hot dates with dashing men with perfect teeth and dark-haired women with deep eyes, of television shows starting in ten minutes and bug bombs that went off hours ago but the air should be clear now.

"I'm sorry to inconvenience you," he said.

They asked what was the matter, how could they help? Have your feet stepped their quota? Was it a war injury? Did shrapnel hit them as you dodged an IED or did they catch the brunt as you leapt from an enemy grenade? Perhaps they don't want to go where you must go? Is it a disaster? Your home swept away by tornadoes or floods or perhaps crushed by trees or meteors? Your street curled by the blistering sun?

He did not answer. He looked at his feet. They were ordinary feet, wearing ordinary shoes. They were size ten and half. Perhaps they were slightly wider than usual; he always had to buy slightly wider than usual shoes. If he took off his shoes the people in line could see that his second toe was longer than his big toe just like on classicial statues. Just like on the Statue of Liberty.

Maybe it's not your feet, they said. Maybe it's your knees. Did you injure your knees? Did you find yourself beneath a fourth story window when a desperate woman flung her baby out of a burning house? And when you caught the child, did you drop to the ground and hurt your knees? We can wait for a hero; you must be heroic to save a baby flung from a burning house. Or maybe it's arthritis. Maybe all those years hefting boxes out of grocery trucks injured your knees. Such a sacrifice so that we all may push our carts through clean, brightly lit stores and grab cans of corn or bags of frozen stir fry vegetables so that we may feed ourselves and our families.

He looked at his knees. They were covered by trousers. He couldn't remember what they looked like but he thought they were just ordinary knees. He could remember his feet but not his knees.

He deserves a medal, they said. He has given his feet and his knees and his home so that we can win the war, so that our children can be safe, so that we can eat, so that when we miss our appointments and dates, when we have to re-arrange our schedules, we will remember and realize something and be thankful that our feet and our knees are healthy and functioning and that we have nice homes and nice streets, but oh the cost, we're sorry for the cost, for his feet and knees have paid the price. They clapped him on the back and someone rushed off and brought back foot powder and someone a knee brace and there was talk of setting aside a special day and lighting candles and maybe even a parade.

Way back when, there were these silly Bud Light commercials. You know, some guy would be fumbling in the dark and he'd ask for a light and someone would hand him a flashlight and he'd say, "No, Bud Light."

I had an idea for a Bud Light commercial that could've made someone millions or at least been a juicy item on some ad exec's resume. Or hell, maybe it'd've led to boycotts. It starts with just a black screen, but you'd hear a heavenly choir slowly get louder and louder. Finally, when it crescendoed, a bright light would appear, explode in a blinding flash, and resolve into a large star. Then a God-voice would rumble, "No, Bud Light."

Irreverent, yeah, but I hate Bud Light, so there you go.

At the used bookstore a couple of days ago, I saw an attractive brunette dressed in some sort of stretchy black top and a black skirt with big white polka dots. She reminded me of Audrey Hepburn, a bit, though not so skinny. We made eye contact, smiled, and went back to looking at books. She wandered off, so after a bit, I wandered in her direction, pretending to check out the best sellers. Finally I wandered off to revisit ancient history, and she wandered by. More eye contact. Then I wandered a bit looking for her and saw her at modern classics, so I squeezed by to see if any Rushdie's were in stock. Finally she paid for her books, and left, and I wondered, if, you know, and how do you know, and what the hell do I know, like that. I paid for my books, walked out the door, and saw her looking through the books on one of the cheap racks that'd been rolled outside. So I looked at some books on a nearby cheap rack. Then she headed to her car. It was in the same direction as mine, so I followed. She got into a little Toyota and drove off. I got in my car and followed, which isn't as weird as it sounds because there was only one exit from the parking lot. When I got closer, I saw a fish symbol on her bumper.

Pure fiction, this is.

Of the many romantic misadventures through which I’ve careened, none is as compressed as my infatuation with Doodle. Doodle! I never knew her real name; everyone on Fry Street simply called her Doodle, often as part of a phrase uttered after a deep sigh: “I’d love to diddle Doodle.”

In a town of fantastic musicians, Doodle’s folksy singing and guitar strumming didn’t excite us. Agents didn’t hear her demo and rush to sign her. It wasn’t her music that made Doodle special.

Doodle had an aura, a presence, that made men stammer and women glower.

***

We first saw her as we were walking back from Mr. Chopsticks. Troy prepped food, cleared tables, scrubbed woks at the small Chinese restaurant a few yards from Fry Street. I don’t remember what we were talking about, perhaps books, music, or girls, but suddenly we nudged each other. A couple, a tall lanky woman and a fit, muscular guy with natty dreads, was headed in our direction. We noticed the dreads later; our attention was fixed on the woman.

It is impossible for a description to do her justice. She had long dark hair, long limbs, a shy smile, vulnerable dark eyes; she was wearing frayed jeans and a holey but clean tie-dyed T-shirt. Through the holes you caught tantalizing glimpses of her breasts. She wore no makeup, no bra; in truth she was one of those natural beauties whom artificial enhancements only cheapen. More than all this, though, she glowed with something kind and warm and a bit crazy.

I glanced at Troy. His eyes were shining. Troy’s eyes always shine when he sees an attractive woman. His face lights up, he positively glows, and his voice thickens. It’s not something he does deliberately; there is no deception here. Beautiful women are gateways.

Sometime ago, Troy asked me to write a script based on Denton adventures. I got distracted by bills, teaching, other misadventures, but did scrawl down this:

In slow motion DOODLE walks toward us. She is knock-out beautiful, a natural beauty, no make up, a smile on her face; she is tall and lanky, her hair dark and long. She glows. She is dressed in old jeans and a holey T-shirt. Flashes of skin, of breasts. She is not wearing a bra. Walking next to her is her husband, MARK, also dressed in old jeans and T-shirt. MARK’s blond hair is in dreadlocks. He is fit and muscular, but not overly so. They look happy.

FADE

We considered ourselves connoisseurs of women. Not because we were Casanovas or Don Juans; we weren’t lady killers though a few had done a number on us. But from the balcony of the big white house on Fry we had idled many hours watching the co-eds head to and from class. We’d roll up a big fatty, position our lawn chairs far enough from the edge that we probably wouldn’t fall over, light up, and engage in fantastic discussions of philosophy, literature, music, discussions punctuated by pauses and trenchant comment whenever walked by a particularly noteworthy co-ed. Enclosed by a profusion of oak leaves, we had a clear view of the street below, but no one looking up was likely to see us through the green abundance. We were the lords of Fry.

Summers in Texas are hot, humid, and the one old air-conditioner in the apartment I shared with an avant-garde artist in the big white house barely cooled one room, let alone mine. So we threw open the windows, pinned the sheets that served as curtains to one side, and draped wet towels on makeshift supports before fans. We sweated, got stoned, cranked loud reggae and Frank Zappa, Ten Hands and Red Hot Chili Peppers. When it got too hot, we took refuge in Jim’s Diner across the street, read books and newspapers, played chess, had our long hair braided by hippie chicks in peasant dresses.

It didn’t take long for the word to get out. “Have you seen …” the guys would start to ask; “Yes,” we’d interrupt, and sigh. Jim’s Diner, smack dab in the middle of the street scene, was information central. Two doors down the used book store hosted weekly poetry readings, a few doors up The Corkscrew supplied alcohol and soda, across the street the Delta’s hosted live bands in their back yard. Nothing happened without word going through Jim’s, and Doodle was a happening.

A day or two later, while sitting on the verandah of the big white house, Troy and I saw her again – and the effect on the street was immediate. Heads turned as she strolled by, she was a ship breaking water, waves spread out behind her as she moved; it would have been comical to us, sitting above it all, watching her and her effect on those around her, if we weren’t also affected. We didn’t say a word until she turned the corner and left our sight. “Good god,” I said. “Amen,” Troy said. And we sat, silently, for awhile.

To be continued.

Usually we head to the row where sit Cam Jansen and Junie B. Jones, Zoe's old favorites. But we've exhausted the girl detective, and the exuberant kindergartener has graduated to first grade and has lost some of her charm. It's curious, but for my daughter's birthday a couple of weeks ago, she was given books she had outgrown years ago. My First Dictionary is at least three years too late, and of the entries in it, she learned only one new word: magician. So after quickly dispensing with the dictionary, I read The Hobbit to her.

At night it's fun to sneak up to her door and peek in. She has a bedtime, which she mostly ignores unless she's up to something sneaky, such as reading in bed. Then she closes her door most of the way, turns off the overhead light, and with a flashlight reads whatever fascinates her. I remember doing the same, and of course I pretend not to know.

She's seven now, brown, lithe, supremely self-confident, more than a little bossy. During one of the weekly poker games, the lawyer and I talked about our kids, and after learning my child's age, he said, "That's a good age; they still love you at that age." He's been divorced twice; sometimes during the game his current girlfriend calls and he whispers endearments into his cell phone. He's a nice guy, gave me some free advice about my own divorce, but obese and out of breath. Despite his previous disasters, despite the ugliness he sees professionally, he still has meek hope.

After the calls, he smiles wanely and shrugs apologetically, but not for the interruption.

Please read Jamaica I first.

I call the Jamaicans natives, but that’s not strictly true. Most are descendents of slaves imported by the British. The original inhabitants, the Arawak Amerindians, were killed off by the Spanish, who introduced slavery, hard labor, and European diseases. By the end of the 16th Century, the Arawaks were dead. In the middle of the 17th Century, a British expedition, having failed to take present day Haiti and the Dominican Republic, descended on Jamaica. Slaves were imported to work the sugar, coffee, and cocoa plantations. A bloody series of slave rebellions finally culminated in the 1831 Christmas rebellion, in which up to 20,000 slaves razed plantations and killed planters. Tricked into laying down arms by promises of abolition, 400 slaves were publicly hanged and many hundreds more publicly whipped. The Jamaican Parliament finally abolished slavery in 1834. In 1962, Jamaica received full independence from the British Commonwealth, but of course that was not the end of Jamaica’s troubles.

Anyway, as we sat on the beach frying in the sun, Jamaicans would approach carrying baskets of Red Stripe – one dollar, and a Jamaican one at that, would get you a warm beer. I drank several.

By the time we left, I was in real pain. My back was on fire, the very weight of the cotton shirt I wore was excruciating. Celia rubbed lotion on me, which helped, but it still hurt like hell, the worse sunburn I’d ever had. Still, there was nothing for it, and after I carefully put on another shirt, we set out to meet my young Jamaican contact at the beachfront restaurant.

He said to meet him as the sun went down, but I had been on the island long enough to learn that the Jamaican concept of time bore little resemblance to the American. If a Jamaican says he will meet you in an hour, he really means in two or three. He will show up, eventually; it’s a code of honor or something, but if you have a bent for punctuality, Jamaica will drive you nuts. Time runs slower, no one rushes, things get done, but later. Relax.

The sun had set by the time we arrived and ordered our drinks. We sat on a deck a few feet above the surf. A cool breeze ruffled the palm fronds above us. After a while, the young Jamaican arrived and launched into his pitch. An entrepreneur, he proposed an arrangement by which I would send him several hundred dollars a month and he would mail me shipments of ganja. He insisted that he was going somewhere, that he was going to get an education; he planned to go to university in the States. All ganja profits for a noble cause. Of course, there was no way I was going to agree to any such thing, and I raised the usual objections, not the least of which was that I didn’t want to go to jail. Then I asked about the quality.

He pulled from his pants an enormous plastic bag, one of those industrial-sized things suited for haunches of frozen meat. Inside the bag was a branch of ganja, the largest I’ve seen to this day, very pungent, covered with red hairs, worthy of a High Times centerfold. It made me forget my sunburn. My eyes widened and I gasped. “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I said; I remember the incident vividly. I got reflective. “How can this be mailed safely?”

“No problem,” he said, and then described the process by which ganja is woven into the baskets many tourists buy and take home. I remembered the custom agents at the Kingston airport closely examining baskets, and gave up on the idea. But the ganja was so beautiful. What could I get for $5?

From the branch he broke off a twig, perhaps two fingers in width, and handed it to me. I apologized, sincerely, for resisting his scheme, and he shrugged, pushed the ganja down his pants, and left. We paid our bill and I headed back to the room, practically dragging Celia in my wake. Along the way we passed a young Anglo couple embracing in the street. “How nice,” Celia said, “to be in Jamaica with a lover.” “Yeah,” I said, thinking longingly of the red-haired beauty in my pocket. My sunburn still hurt like hell, and I’d learned to keep my back straight as possible to prevent my shirt from rubbing unduly.

Back in the room, I got out my tiny bong, loaded up a hit, and took a long drag. Halfway through the hit, I realized that I was in for it, that I was already as stoned as I’d ever been in my life. Later in the '80s I’d encounter some weed as good, but that was several years off. After I finished the hit, I realized my sunburn didn’t hurt anymore. Stretching my arms, I could feel my damaged skin tighten and resist, but there was no pain. It was the first time I experienced the anesthetic qualities of good marijuana.

I could barely stand, and fell back on my bed and closed my eyes. “Is that it?” Celia screamed, furious. Through the fog, I asked her if she wanted a hit, too, but I knew that what she wanted couldn’t be burned in a bong. She jumped onto the bed, cursing. I suppose it may be my Southern Baptist upbringing, but I hesitate to describe what occurred next. It was surreal. I was so stoned I could barely think. I remember making at least one feeble gesture of resistance, but I also remember thinking, all I have to do is just lie here and not move. During the entire sad and pathetic encounter she bitterly berated me, asking variations of “Why the hell did you think I invited you on this trip?”

Honestly, I hadn’t thought much of it; I just thought she wanted some company. In retrospect I know I was terribly naïve, but a certain type of guy learns through hard experience the perils of interpreting what may or may not be flirtation, and most of my previous encounters had literally consisted of being grabbed, shoved into a car, and taken home. Anything less than that, I just couldn’t be sure. It sounds comedic, and it is, but it’s also the sad truth.

When it was over, I sat stunned on the edge of the bed, overwhelmed and more than a little frightened. I hadn’t seen her so angry before, so fatalistically aggressive, and frankly I was at a loss for words. Finally she got up and lay down on her own bed. I fell back into sleep. What I dreamed I don’t remember.

Obviously, the nature of the trip changed, and I counted the days until the return home. We’d been there a week and were leaving in three days. After waking up and seeing her watching me, I felt a surge of … I don’t know. I hate to call it pity, but it was something like that. I didn’t love her, I wasn’t attracted to her, my heart belonged to another back in the States, but I hated to see her suffer, I wanted to comfort her. I can’t really explain it except to say that people get involved with each other for a host of reasons, only a couple of which are love and desire. There was only one way I could make her feel better, and I won’t deny that part of the calculation involved selfishness, but mostly my heart was breaking for the sadness of it all. I decided to go along with it, for now.

That morning we said goodbye to Mama and hopped on a bus to Montego Bay, or Mo Bay. One couple planned to fly out that day, and they offered me a considerable bag of pot. I looked at it, shrugged, and said no thanks. On an island of great pot, good pot is just weed. I was to turn down several other offers from departing tourists. When I left, I gave what remained of my pot away, but only after I was assured the lucky recipient appreciated the gift. In Mo Bay we met Danny, who had found inexpensive lodgings for us not far from the beach. Whitewashed arches separated the rooms of the boarding house, and a basket of fruit sat on a table before a mirror. In Kingston we had seen a few Rastafarians in with their distinct dreadlocks and clothing, but not to the extent we saw in Mo Bay. As we’d walk down a street, close behind some young women, a Rastafarian or two would walk on the other side of the road, a few paces back. Danny said they were just keeping everything cool.

Although there is much to admire in Jamaica, it does have a chauvinistic culture. It led the Rastafarians to be protective of their women when foreigners were around, but it also relegated women to second-class status. Women typically walked a few paces behind their men. When we had first arrived, Danny warned us that I should do most of the dealing with Jamaicans, that although tourist women were given greater latitude than Jamaican women, it was prudent to be respectful of Jamaican customs.

At some point after arriving in Mo Bay, Celia and Danny went off and left me in a small bar drinking Red Stripes. In another room, a reggae band played Peter Tosh tunes, and behind the counter the barkeep rolled a huge spiff. The cultivation and use of marijuana was and is illegal in Jamaica, but ganja is such a part of the culture that open smoking was common. Near Negril I had seen two Jamaican cops sitting in a car, passing a joint. Danny said that occasionally a grower or seller might get busted but that tourists were safe. No one wanted to drive away the money.

After a bit, Danny came back by himself and ordered a beer. He said little, and when I made an innocuous observation, he rolled his eyes and said, “Of course.” I knew he had expected to sleep with Celia before we left, and now he was disappointed. He was a few years older than me, and I knew he didn’t care in any meaningful way for Celia, so I shrugged it off. It was awkward, so eventually I headed back to the room. Celia was there, eyes shining, and launched into an account of her discussion with Danny, who, she said, thought I was a good guy for her, that we made a good couple.

I was noncommittal and loaded up the bong. Celia was desperately amorous; the kind of desperation that comes when you know what you have could be gone in a flash. The next few days were eventful – we danced in open air halls to island music, often punctuated with the dulcimer-tones of steel drums made from old U.S. supply barrels. We sat in little shacks up in the jungle and drank Red Stripe and watched hard-fought domino games. Danny left the day after we arrived in Mo Bay. He managed to be gracious but clearly was pissed. There was nothing I could say, so I didn’t even try.

We arrived in Jamaica with little money. Staying out of tourist areas saved some money, but by the last day we were broke. I traded the touring cap I had worn most of my stay, a silly little corduroy cap I bought to tool around in my parent’s MG Midget, for a ride to the airport. Danny had said that if we ran out of cash, offer T-shirts, jeans, any clothing, and someone would gladly barter with us. The cab driver clearly thought he got the best of it, and proudly donned the cap the instant I gave it to him.

At the airport, custom agents thoroughly examined our luggage, and, again, I saw agents intently fingering the fiber in the baskets many tourists were taking home. I may be clueless in many ways, but I knew better than to take ganja out of Jamaica. I was sad to go. The island and its people had a huge effect on me. It was a paradise, but one which was becoming corrupted. For the most part, Celia and I had lived among the Jamaicans, but really the island, even then, was torn in two. Huge resorts line the beaches, and most Jamaicans, it seemed, relied on the tourism industry to feed themselves and their families. And the violence that erupted on the island leading up to the 1980 elections, the remnants of which I’d seen in the political graffiti in Kingston, lay just under the surface. Although I saw no violence, and was never threatened, I could feel the hostility, the class warfare, bubbling underneath. It’s no accident that reggae is the music of rebellion. For all that, though, there is love and warmth, generosity and kindness on the island. The people seemed to me to be inherently peaceful, and in a perfect world, the CIA wouldn’t try to topple its government, the corrupt rich wouldn’t exploit their labor, Americans and Europeans wouldn’t use their land and bodies as a vacation pastime, they wouldn’t be the descendents of slaves.

The thing with Celia lasted a few more weeks. Both of us wanted to keep the affair quiet. She was a graduate assistant concerned about her reputation, and I didn’t want the woman I loved to know what I’d done and was doing. My Nifty colleague says I’m the only guy he knows who can feel guilty for “cheating” on someone he’s not dating. Whatever. The truth is, I was embarrassed by the whole sorry mess. I finally ended it in a terrible way. I vanished, ignored the notes shoved through the letter slot, avoided situations where I might see her. A few months later she was married.

Epilogue. My world-traveling friend says she’s heard from fellow travelers that Jamaica isn’t what it used to be. Tourists now stay within resorts bounded by concertina wire; they must be protected from the island’s inhabitants. I hear on National Public Radio that American rap has influenced reggae; that instead of “one world” or “stand up for your rights,” now the lyrics boast of killing homosexuals and beating women. According to the CIA World Fact Book, civil unrest and gang violence are on the rise.

A friend recently visited Costa Rica and wrote me of her impressions. It reminded me in some ways of a trip to Jamaica I took more than 20 years ago. It's a story I've never told completely, but one worth the telling, I think. Anyway, treat this as a fictional account.

I thought afterwards that I should write something for the travel section of The Dallas Morning News or The Dallas Times-Herald (now defunct, alas), but the real story is not suited for a standard newspaper or magazine article. In 1983 I was an editorial page editor on the NTSU campus newspaper (and would be editor of the paper in fall 1984). One of the journalism graduate assistants was planning a trip to Jamaica before the fall semester and asked if I wanted to go. For some reason the airline ticket was very cheap, and I guess we didn't have to have a visa -- anyway, I somehow had the cash, maybe student loan money. So I agreed to go.

She had a friend in the Peace Corps stationed in Jamaica; he was going to see that we got cheap lodgings. I can't remember his name, though I still have a picture of him. I'm going to call him Danny and the graduate assistant Celia; years later I would play correspondence chess with her husband, whom she met and married shortly after the trip. She was an acquaintance, had a bit of a temper, but frankly wasn't my type. I mention that only because it's relevant to the story.

Anyway, we landed at Kingston and were met at the airport by her Peace Corps friend. I remember watching custom agents closely examine a bunch of baskets someone was trying to take out of the country. We got on a rickety bus and headed into Kingston. I remember driving by lots of really depressing slums, the buildings of which were covered with political graffiti. I was assured, though, that there shouldn't be any trouble because it was an off year, electionwise, but also was told that we shouldn't remain in Kingston long, that if there was a dangerous area on the island, Kingston was it.

Danny had arranged with the former mayor of Kingston to let us have his apartment for the night in return for letting him exchange our American currency for Jamaican (he gave us a better rate than the banks but not as good as we could get on the streets). Anyway, it was a nice apartment -- nothing really fancy and a bit small, but clean and attractive. After the ex-mayor left, Danny pulled out some weed, apologizing for the quality. Back then I was sooooooooo much different than now, and eagerly got stoned.

Then he took us out into Kingston to have a couple of beers -- I'm guessing he didn't take us to the real slums, but it was a section of town with clapboard little shacks. We went into one, passed a bunch of old Jamaican men sitting at a table, and into another room. Everything was of wood and in disrepair, gaps in the walls and all that. Anyway, we sat at a small table and drank warm Red Stripes (I was to learn that many "establishments" in Jamaica didn't have electricity). I think lighting was provided by a kerosene lamp. By this time -- what with the weed and the beer -- I was pretty blasted. Then I started hearing these loud, sharp reports, and I knew it was gunfire. I felt very far from civilization, wondering how the hell I ever got into this situation.

I realized that all I could do was remain cool and hope someone didn't break in and shoot us all. The gunfire continued the entire time we were in the room. When we left, we passed the old men again, who now were playing dominoes. Whenever one of them had a good play, he'd jump out of his chair, do a little jig, and slam the domino on the table. Of course, that was the loud sharp report I'd mistaken for gunfire. I was to learn that dominoes are a national pastime.

Celia and I shared a bedroom in the ex-mayor's apartment. It had bunk beds, and before I passed out from the weed and Red Stripes and nervous exhaustion, I remember her crawling down off the top bunk and sitting on the edge of my bed (it only occurred to me now why she insisted I take the bottom bunk).

In the morning I was woken by a street vendor selling coconuts and tropical fruit (he had some short expression he'd yell as he pushed his cart down the street -- I wish I could remember what it was). We stayed in Kingston a couple of days, saw the government buildings, ate the local cuisine -- lots of West Indies spices, lots of curry, plain rice supplementing every meal. I loved the food, for the most part. Encircling part of Kingston are large hills upon which are the beautiful and elegant homes of the wealthy or politically connected. Down below, of course, was much poverty. It reminds me now of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low. Somehow Danny got us invited to a party in one of these houses. It was beautiful -- gorgeous white-washed little villas on a tropical mountain overlooking Kingston and the ocean. It was there I encountered my first Euro-trash, vapid, wealthy beautiful people disadvantaged by having the spoils handed to them. There were other cool people -- ah now I remember, it was a party for Peace Corps volunteers, so in addition to the Euro-trash there were lot of young idealistic people. I wish I remembered more details.

From Kingston we took an old battered bus up into the mountains, where Danny taught at a boys’ school. Along the way we picked up lots of people, most carrying something: chickens in wire cages, bushels of fruit, whatever. Soon the bus was packed. Small boards folded down from the right side of all the seats; these allowed passengers to sit in the aisle. So there were five people sitting shoulder to shoulder on each row of the bus. It was sweltering humanity, an assault on the senses and American notions of personal space. Behind everything was the music – reggae, usually – blaring over the radio, over radios across the island. It wasn’t all island music, though – whenever Men at Work’s “The Land Down Under” played, the passengers would yell, “Turn it up.” I guess they liked the notion that an Australian pop band was using reggae beats.

Whenever the bus approached a shack or two, people would run out with baskets of fruit to sell to the passengers through the window. The bus practically careened around the sudden turns of the mountain road, which had patches of asphalt but was mostly packed dirt. As he barreled around the turns, the driver would honk his horn, warning anyone coming to get out the way. There wasn’t much way to go; the road was just large enough for one vehicle; two could squeeze by, I guess, if the drivers were careful. Anyway, I was glad when we got to the school. Every bus trip we took in Jamaica was much the same.

The school was in center Jamaica, both in width and breadth. We had a little guest house; Danny had a room in the dorm. All the boys wore uniforms, white shirts with black slacks and ties. If I had to guess, I’d say they ranged in age from 8-9 to 14-15. While there, I spoke in front of a class about American journalism. (I have a picture of that, somewhere.) I’d like to describe the school a bit more, but in the 20 years my memory has faded a bit. Here are some impressions: white walls, courtyard laid with large stones, wooden construction, jungle intruding everywhere. Everything was very clean, and though you could tell the people were poor, no one was starving. (This was true of the entire island – lots of poverty, no starvation and little malnutrition – when you can just reach up and grab fruit off the trees, no one goes hungry.) We stayed for several days. At lunch, I remember we ate along with the boys and teachers curried ox tail. It wasn’t bad.

The evening we arrived, Danny took us down a little dirt road to a single shack. Off to the side was a slab of concrete, jutting straight out of the ground. I eventually figured out it was the urinal. It was a "rum shack," and similar ones were scattered all across the island. You could get warm Red Stripe or rum; you set your drink on a board running across three walls of the tiny shack. Everyone stood; there were no chairs. There were no women except for Celia. In this shack, Danny took out his guitar and played a reggae version of “The Green, Green Grass of Home,” except he changed the lyrics throughout; the chorus was “The green, green home of grass.” They loved it, and when a Jamaican loves a new song, he will stop the musician and make him start over, sometimes many times. Of course they were learning the song. All during my stay I heard reggae – everything was reggae-fied, Broadway show tunes, pop songs, Roger Miller’s “King of the Road."

The guest house had two bedrooms separated by a short wide hall. Lots of jungle flowers and vines everywhere. The first night, Celia spent with Danny, which was fine with me because I’d started to have a nagging suspicion. Afterwards she slept in one of the guest house bedrooms, and again sat on the edge of my bed after I had blasted myself with fine Jamaican weed. For two or three days we lived at the school, met the teachers and boys, shared meals, explored the area. Then Celia and I hopped on a bus and headed to Negril. Danny had given us the name and “address” of “Mama,” who ran a little guesthouse up in the hills above the beach, a good distance from any resorts. The address and directions we got from Danny were 1) get off the bus, and 2) ask for Mama’s place. He also gave us a baggie of pot, again apologizing for the quality, some papers, and a small bong. I thought he was being modest about the pot.

After careening through more sharp mountain turns, we arrived in Negril, or at least a small village near by. During the trip, I talked with older, silver-haired women from America who had lived in Jamaica for years. She pointed to a group of young Jamaicans playing cricket and said, “Aren’t those picknies cute?”

The small village was off the general tourist path, but we started to see more Americans, usually young people carrying backpacks. We asked for Mama and were pointed to a small dirt road heading up into the hills. The market of the village was busy, and here we exchanged the rest of our American currency for Jamaican. Jamaican men would stand in the market carrying thick wads of Jamaican bills. Whenever they’d see a foreigner, they approach and offer an exchange rate, usually much much better than you could get from the banks. The natives offered much more, besides. A young boy approached me and asked, “Coke?” I shook my head and held up the drink in my hand. The boy laughed and pulled out a small tin foil pouch – I got it then, and shook my head. I was offered weed many times, but I always declined because Danny had plenty. Now I was curious, and eventually a teen-age young man persuaded me to meet him at a small restaurant on the beach that evening.

The whole time I was in Jamaica I never heard an angry word uttered at a foreigner, except once. Whenever you’d walk through a market, the natives, sitting on small rugs and surrounded by whatever knick-knacks they were selling – often sea shells, baskets, fruit, would call at you, trying to get your attention. One large, burly Jamaican said, “Hey whitey!” That was the only offensive term I heard directed at foreigners, if the term could be said to be offensive. Something else interesting – I had been hesitant about exchanging money outside of a bank, but Danny assured me that Jamaicans were honest. If anyone ever did steal anything from me, all I had to do, he said, was yell “Teeth!” and everyone in the village would chase the thief down and beat him with clubs. Honesty, like reggae and dominoes and cricket, seemed to be part of the national psyche.

Mama’s place was a clean, long, whitewashed building cut into various rooms. Mama was a small, elderly, very kind woman who knew Danny and was pleased by his reference. She gave us some business cards, which I believe I still have, buried somewhere. The room really was just a room, not large, not small, with two beds and a tiny closet containing a toilet and shower. Indoor plumping indicated Mama was doing all right. Everything was going fine, though for some reason Celia was becoming more and more surly, dropping cryptic and embittered comments all the time. I was 90 percent puzzled and 10 percent anxious.

After we checked in, we changed into swimming clothes and headed to the beach. White and blue, white sand and a few fluffy white clouds, blue ocean and sky -- postcard beautiful, cliche pretty. Because of my Scottish heritage, I have pale skin, lots of freckles, and a low tolerance for the sun. The August Jamaican sun is furious in its intensity; its rays hit you with physical force. Until now, I kept covered up fearing sun burns. But now I was in swim trunks and playing in the surf. Celia kept applying sunscreen to my shoulders and back, but I couldn't sit still longer than a few minutes before I'd head back in the water and wash all the lotion off.

Further up the beach was a resort. We could see Anglos frolicking in the water; on the beach were thatched huts, wicker tables, servants carrying drinks. On the shoulders of one balding, fat, middle-age guy was a beautiful, young, topless Jamaican girl. It wasn't the first time I'd seen tourists frolicking with the natives. The day before I saw a dumpy, older American woman locked in an embrace with a young, muscled, classically proportioned Jamaican male. It disturbed me; not because, I think, of any moral reasons, but because of the economic straits that lead some into prostitution and the caving in to desire that leads others to exploitation. It's substituting the forms of love for love itself. The thought occurs to me as I write this, and I remember now it occurred to me then, that the tourist industry is not far from prostitution. I'm sure if they had their way, the natives would like to keep their island to themselves, and not cater to the rich tourists who treat their land as a playground.

Continued in Jamaica II.

As Chiefs of The Royal Midgard Explorer's Society, we took our responsibilities seriously. We ran recruiting drives, Marge first started to run her amazing quests, we mapped out areas (one of our primary missions as Explorers), and we began plotting ways to further enhance the reputation and status of our Clan.

At the time, the most powerful god on MadROM was Etaine, a funny, irreverent goddess with a penchant for witty one-liners and practical jokes. Marge and I got to know her a bit by talking to her when she'd slum in mortal areas. Going to her place was impossible -- the gods do not often grant mere mortals entrance to their divinely protected lands. We mortals would exchange hearsay and speculation about these lands, but few of us could speak from direct experience. The gods were mysterious, dangerous, and often a bit psycho. Etaine, however, was just cool.

Crash was another powerful god; he served as the MUD's Questmaster during our time on MadROM, and Marge got to know him very well through her efforts to sponsor MUD-wide RMES quests. Ozymandias was high in the divine hierarchy, too. Although a bit capricious and sometimes abrupt, Ozy wrote the coolest areas on MadROM, including the awesome Hades, which served as partial inspiration for a massive project Marge and I undertook later, on a different MUD.

As you can see, when Marge ... er, Keith ... and I fell into MUDding, we did it in a big way. Why? It's not as if we didn't have enough real-life demands on our time. We were both doctoral students in the English department of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. We had classes to attend, papers to write, prelims to take. Keith will have to give his own reasons, but for my part, I was a bit insane at the time -- and, of course, that means there was a woman involved. Thwarted love, agony, watching your desire walk off with another guy, crazy treks across half of Knoxville to deliver heartfelt statements, scads of verse written and then buried, never to be seen by anyone -- it's all damned pathetic and embarassing. What's more, the affection persisted, became part of who I am today. Anyway, MUDding was a diversion, an escape more encompassing than chess, a way to have some control, albeit virtual.

It's difficult to explain to an outsider how addictive a MUD can be. When we eventually decided on what direction the future expansion of RMES would take, we devoted our energies to it with a passion we rarely devoted to our scholarly papers, even the papers we published.

This obsession of mine and Marge's soon led to our greatest triumph on MadROM.

More to come. ...

Keith and I had a blast on MadROM. It was all new, exciting. We were progressing through the levels, establishing ourselves as personalities, learning strategies to take out mobs (short for mobiles, computer-driven opponents), and getting more savvy all the time.

As an elf mage, I burned at a furious rate mana, that magical but limited substance that fueled my increasingly powerful spells. Keith, playing as the dwarven warrior Marge, had hit points like nobody's business. We learned to team together -- Marge would serve as the tank, the player who could take the most punishment, and I would serve as a spell-casting platform. Marge would go toe-to-toe with a sultan's guard, and I'd hang back, lobbing fireballs from a safe distance. It was a good system, and we progressed at a steady pace.

MadROM had 91 mortal levels and nine immortal levels. Now, the most any particular player could hope to achieve was 91 levels, which put you in the mortal elite. In time, both of us made it. Because of frequent deaths due to my elven fraility, it took me 976 hours to achieve 91 levels, or hero status. Marge did it in much fewer.

After you tap out the available levels, the game changes. No longer are you searching the vast lands looking for a mob strong enough to make fighting it for experience worthwhile, but weak enough that you could actually beat it. Now you had to find different things to do.

MadROM, like many MUDs, had a tribe or clan system. Mortals would band together to fight evil, promote evil, save the lands from the scourge of the demigorgon, or whatever. It looked cool, so Marge and I looked around, found a fledging clan -- The Guardian Knights, or GK -- that could use our services, and signed up for the noble cause of ... heck, can't remember and it doesn't matter; it was a noble cause, though, of that I'm certain.

Our experience in GK was less than satisfactory. The Clan had about four members, including our grand leader, whom we rarely saw and even more rarely spoke to. We had one room. It got a bit ... boring, sitting there, doing nothing, waiting for directives. To entertain ourselves, Marge and I set up shop outside our Clan headquarters; I'd offer spells such as "remove curse" or "enchant weapon" for a price, and Marge would hire herself out as a corpse retriever. In the world of MadROM, as on many MUDs, when you died, your spirit was drawn to some temple or altar but your corpse -- and all your hard won items -- lay where you fell. You had to go get your corpse, loot it, and then sacrifice it to the gods. The problem is, when you are reborn, you are naked and weaponless and not likely to survive long in the harsh world. Thus, players would perform "CRs," which meant they found your corpse and "summoned" you to the location. If the CRer, so to speak, did not have the spell "summon," then the CR was much more difficult. You had to literally walk the poor sap back to his corpse, clearing out baddies from room to room.

Marge did not have "summon," and had many CR adventures, but those tales are for her to tell.

At any rate, we floundered a bit in GK. It was possible for mortals to improve their clans by negotiating with the gods, but Marge and I were not the leaders of the Clan, and thus had no access to those divine beings (at this stage, these gods were mysterious, uber powerful, inscrutable, capricious, and best approached cautiously). Thus our Clan was weak, puny, barely alive, and there wasn't much Marge and I could do about it.

After two or three weeks in GK, a delegation from The Royal Midgard Explorer's Society, or RMES, secretly visited Marge and me. The three -- Ringoshin, Mithras, and Deilon -- were Chiefs of their Clan, one of the most vibrant and engaged Clans on the MUD. They had heard through backdoor channels that they were going to undergo apotheosis -- they would be gods. Naturally, they didn't want to leave their Clan leaderless, and turned to us.

We wasted no time in severing our GK ties, though we had to endure a painful and awkward session with our alleged leader, in which it seemed he was more interested in some real-life video game than us. Then we hightailed it across the lands to RMES, where we were welcomed with much high-fiving. RMES had cool headquarters -- four or five rooms, maps of the surrounding areas, and Marvin, a robot who uttered cryptic comments and served as a drink dispenser.

In short order, Marge and I became Chiefs of RMES. Our headquarters was expansive, our influence over the MUD impressive. Our portraits were placed in the foyer of RMES headquarters. As leaders of the most prestigious Clan on MadROM, we had come a long way.

Best of all, now we could deal directly with the gods.

More to come. ...

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
       -- John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

This is an unlikely tale, full of all sorts of unlikely things. It's a tale of serendipity, coincidence, unbridled power, near omniscience, lust and love, and unfettered creativity used for grand and sometimes bizarre purposes. But I mislead -- it is not a single tale, but many, and for the most part they all occurred while I was sitting alone in grungy apartments and dilapidated houses.

Sometime in 1994, Keith and I sat in his apartment using Gopher to cruise the internet. For those not born before the the first moon landing, the internet back then was shiny, new, geeky -- and, for the most part, text based. Oh sure, even then, for a few bucks a month, we university students could get something called a SLIP account that would allow us to cruise the spanky just-out-of-the-packaging graphics-oriented WEB, but -- well, you know, we were snobs. Words not pictures, don't you know.

As a diversion from love gone bad and as an alternative to dark corner, fetal-position whimpering, I had gone to visit Keith and to imbibe in various freely available intoxicants. I recall we used a 161 gram Frisbee, that marvelous invention that served more than one of our recreational pursuits. It was around the same period that Keith acquired from some hot-to-go student a fucking incredible video of Bill Hicks, who could in one deeply funny line speak truth about God, sex, and drugs.

Anyway, somehow or other Keith had a laptop, so we entertained ourselves by poking into the hidden backwaters of the internet. At some point we came across a Gopher listing for MUDs, with hundreds of sublistings with strange names such as Rivers of MUD, Twisted Realms, and Blue Facial Mud. We randomly clicked one, got a telnet screen asking for login information, and, after making up some goofy name, got dumped onto a bizarre, continually scrolling screen.

Eventually, we figured out that we had created a character and were in a text room with lots of other characters, all chatting and moving and brandishing weapons in a blur of rapidly scrolling text. We were too nervous to do much, though I think we figured out how to move into another room with more rapidly scrolling text. Finally, we logged off and got out the Frisbee and panned for more gold.

That was our first, inauspicious encounter with a MUD, which we eventually learned stood for Multi-User Dungeon or Multi-User Dimension, depending upon whom you asked.

We didn't know, then, what we had gotten into. ...

Asses, fools, dolts! chaff and bran, chaff and bran!
porridge after meat! I could live and die in the eyes of Troilus.
Ne'er look, ne'er look; the eagles are gone. Crows and daws,
crows and daws! I had rather be such a man as Troilus than
Agamemnon and all Greece.
             --Pandarus, Troilus and Cressida, I.i.

David Taylor, romantic disasters -- after Keith's catty story, I can't help telling the tale of how Dave set in motion a series of events that had me formulating opinions on flatware, eating half boxes of macaroni and cheese, selling my comics, and listening to his tiny cheap-ass coffee grinder at 6 a.m. every morning.

Dave and I went through the English masters program at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, and even then, his love for 1) the lyric and 2) the gross consumed him. Someday he will write the definitive poem on dingle berries.

We shared lots of adventures, late-night boozy talk, and staggering-home confessionals. And though his constant encouragements of “just one more” caused me to risk alcoholism and did subject me to a horribly embarrassing stint as a mumble-mouthed reciter at a “spelling-bee,” he was a good friend. For his part, he thought I was one of the few who understood his poetry, a belief he held with fierce faith because once or twice I said put the comma here and not there.

Well, in 1989, Dave got his masters and went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville to pursue a doctorate. By dint of running out of courses to take, I got my masters too, a year later. I didn't know what to do next, but knew I was unsuitable for a regular job, so when Dave during a phone call asked, "Why not apply at Tennessee?" I went ahead and did. It was the only place I applied because most doctoral programs required a $25 application fee, and I was, you know, cheap. I applied to Tennessee way past the deadline and, in my ignorance, suggested I start in the spring term. To my shock, I was accepted and told to report for the fall term, barely three months away.

After he heard that I was, indeed, coming to Tennessee, Dave bopped around the English department telling his friends that I was on my way, that I was Apollo come to walk the earth, that the sun never set without my say-so, and that whole discourses were founded on my chance utterances. You see, the thing about Dave is, his enthusiasms overwhelm everything, and force into service all his rhetorical abilities. He had talked up Keith to me, and when I was finally introduced to him, I half expected to be in the presence of Homer, Longinus, and Keats all rolled into one.

Unbeknownst to me, he was especially assiduous in singing my praises to one particular woman.

In due course, I arrived in Knoxville, found an apartment in the student slums, and went to the doctoral student orientation session. There, while sitting next to Dave and attempting to ignore his scatalogical descriptions of various professors, a vivacious dark-haired, black-and-purple clad woman entered and sat down. I was enthralled, and when I heard her voice and the things she said, my life turned.

During a break in the orientation, I screwed up my courage and invited her to Sam & Andy's with Dave and me and other grad students. I remember a day or two later her driving me home, but politely declining my invitation inside. At a party that night or a night later, I remember saying, in front of her out-of-town boyfriend, "We'll talk later; we have lots of time." Yes, I said that.

Unfortunately, this was not the woman to whom Dave had praised my virtues. The woman who, it turned out, had created out of Dave's hyperbole, before she even met me, numerous scenarios each inevitably ending in matrimony. The woman who, it must be said, had a single-mindedness of purpose to put Agamemnon to shame.

The woman who swept into my life and bed with a fury I was incapable of resisting. Now, I was no beautiful Troilus, no Casanova, no heart-prize. In fact, I was still recovering from a failed relationship from six or seven years before, and had serious self-doubts about my desirability. Like Tess, at certain critical moments I'm passive and let the winds push me where they may. Besides, she was cute and smart and liked me, or liked what she thought was me. It's possible, also, that I was despondent over the dark-haired woman with the boyfriend and who was I kidding, anyway?

Within two or three weeks of moving to Knoxville, I was living with this woman, a 19th Century literature scholar. Within two months, we were engaged. To buy the ring, we scraped together our resources, and I sold nearly all of my quite extensive collection of comic books. To improve her catch, she put me on a diet (no more full boxes of macaroni and cheese), oversaw my grooming, and introduced me to the necessity of acquiring elegant flatware and Royal Doulton china.

It ... was not a match made in heaven. We were as different as two random people could be. I was a desultory student, at best, merely following my passions, and she was a highly intelligent career-minded woman looking forward to climbing the social ladder, hosting elegant parties, and impressing the power elite with witty bon mots. I just wanted to hang with my grungy but brilliant friends and talk literature. To make matters worse, she somehow sensed my attraction for the dark-haired woman, and gave me no end of grief.

As time passed, we began arguing about everything: capital punishment (I was against it), the poor (she thought they needed to get off their asses and get a job), and even our Scrabble games. I'd never played Scrabble, she loved it, and for a time she beat me pretty good. Then I got the hang of the strategy, learned that thwarting her long words like "sangfroid" with "cat" made perfect sense, and started winning consistently. Big mistake, and to my shame, I learned to throw a game or two to keep the peace.

It couldn't last. One night she took off her engagement ring, announced it was over, and, a day or two later, informed me that she was cutting deals to get me into student housing, that she was going to her parents for a bit, and, that, in the meantime, I should move out and move in with Dave, with whom she had already made arrangements. To her mind, it was the least Dave could do after selling her a bill of goods. The same single-minded dedication she exhibited in claiming me she now employed in getting me out of her life.

I was crushed, for a time, but even before the breakup, I knew that plunging into marriage with her would be nightmarish. Ashen-faced, I wandered the halls of the English department like a ghost, and at night slept on the couch in the tiny living room of Dave and his wife. Now, Dave was famously exuberant, gross, excited, passionate. His wife was the most prim and proper woman I've ever known. Those two weeks at his house were torture. Dave would tell one of his shit stories and I'd wince while his wife looked on disapprovingly.

Every morning, the two would get up obscenely early, grind coffee in their little kitchen that was really just on the other side of the tiny living room where I slept, and get ready for the day. Those two weeks had a surreal quality, but the fact was, I needed someone to structure my life, then, and I will always be grateful to Dave and his wife for taking me in.

In short order, my ex-fiance had pulled the necessary strings to get me into student housing, bought a shower curtain, some towels, and other household items, and washed her hands of the mess. Except for one little detail -- the wedding ring. She found a buyer, got the cash, and came over one night with a friend to give me half of the loot. Now, her friend had more or less been displaced by me, though she never to his great regret showed romantic interest in him. Now he was re-instated, and had been dragged along to give me the cash. Well and good, I suppose. But after handing me some bills, she announced that she and her friend were using her share to go overseas for a short trip.

It's embarassing now, and probably was then, but I took the news badly, and after she'd left, ripped down the shower curtain, dug the towels out of the laundry, grabbed the cheap dishes and threw everything into a box, which I then left on her doorstep. (As should be obvious, I have some sympathy for an ex of Keith's who recently dumped a pile of stuff on his doorstep.)

Anyway, the worst of the emotional storm passed fairly quickly, and within a month my equilibrium had been restored. I was actually grateful that she had called a halt to the wedding because we obviously were not suited for each other, and, to my shame, I didn't have the strength to call if off myself. She was a good woman, but not the one for me. A year or two later, we became casual friends again and laughed about our romantic misadventure.

That was later, though; earlier in the breakup days I was still somewhat bitter, if mostly restored.

Now, I don't remember how it happened, but for some reason the dark-haired woman was in my new apartment one night, shortly after I'd moved in. It's possible we had met for a study session, or she came by to drop off some class notes, or whatnot, but one night she was sitting on my couch when the phone rang.

It was my ex-fiance. She had found some stuff of mine she wanted to return and could she come over. Sure, I said. I told the dark-haired woman that the ex was on her way, and asked if she wanted to hide out in the bedroom. No, she said, it's cool.

Sometimes the gods smile and grant tiny pleasures, petty though they may be. When the ex came over, she and the dark-haired woman chatted pleasantly as can only two women who dislike each other. At the first pause, the ex made her exit.

I looked at my friend, she looked at me, I said, "You don't know what--," she said, "Yes, I do," and we laughed and laughed.

Petty? Yes. Triumphant? Oh yes.

And Dave? Dave approved of the breakup because, you know, now we could drink more beer. He felt no guilt over his involvement: "Hey," he said. "I set 'em up; it's up to you to knock 'em down." Keith? I had met him earlier at a Writing Center party, we shook hands, he cocked an eyebrow at the woman on my arm, and said nothing. Shortly after the breakup, I found myself dragged by Dave to Keith's ratty little apartment. Keith opened the door, saw me, evaluated the situation, and said, "Welcome back."

The dark-haired woman? My instincts at the beginning were right; she was a turn in my life. We had our own adventures, both glorious and catastrophic, but today we're good and dear friends.

The moral? I don't know. But it has something to do with macaroni and cheese.

Last night, in the midst of an evening of snifters and self-examination, my co-author and I launched into a longish discussion of the gender politics noted in an entry below.

One subject we delved into was whether emotional pain, or the vestiges thereof, plays any part in a bloke's gender politics—or, in other terms, whether successive relationship wreckage leads to a testosterone-driven entrenchment of sexual dimorphism—whether successive dumping and getting dumped has any long-term effect on how one not only sees but also talks about, writes about, treats the opposite (other) sex. Whichever suits.

That was all fine and high minded (for the most part). And of course the answer is yes. Which we got 'round to in short order. Which left an opening for a perhaps ill-advised move on my part into a discussion of the sexual politics of physical pain. And a story.

A story I'd nearly to my credit forgotten, which involves, in this order, a restaurant, a waitress, a book, two bottles of Shiraz, a loathsome screen print, and a full set of fingernails.

She worked in Sam & Andy's, a bar and grill, a fixture on the Cumberland Ave. strip and a haunt of mine for seven years or so before it was knocked down to provide room for some bland chain sandwich place. Now, Sam & Andy's had provided no small amount of entertainment and diversion over the years, not the least of which was found in a goodly amount of cheap beer and the anecdotes of one David Taylor, whose stories ran to the scatalogically grotesque, especially in the company of those of more delicate sensibilities.

One feature of most of the women who tended bar or waited tables in that joint was a thick skin. They could dish it out and take it and go blow for blow with David on whatever subject. From time to time I found myself out on some high adventure with one or more of these women, often with Mr. Taylor, sometimes with Mr. Eades, sometimes, even, with odd combinations of University faculty, graduate students, and construction workers.

One particular evening found several current and ex Sam & Andy's waitresses, several construction workers (some of them current or past lovers of one or more of the girls), and various other party-goers and hangers-on, all packed into a tiny one-bedroom apartment, one building over from mine. As I arrived, an ex-lover of mine, nicely pickled, stumbled onto the small patch of lawn and, just out of earshot of the young man rag-tagging along behind, informed me that she'd be up later. She didn't of course, but it was that kind of night.

I arrived with a bottle of Shiraz and a book in hand, seeing as how one of the more bawdy waitresses had expressed some interest in Oscar Wilde after young Mr. Taylor had given a brief barroom lecture on the condition of Wilde's sheets so prominently featured at his trial. And I just happened to have in my apartment the Ellman biography. Yes, yes, I know. But what are such books for, one asks, after one has read them? The night had a certain horrifying promise to it.

In brief, the bottle of Shiraz and other delicacies consumed, the young woman and I found time to linger a bit and chat up the subject of Wilde, getting as far as the pictures before we passed out, tangled on a pile of dirty laundry.

When I answered my phone early the following afternoon, I found that I had promised to meet her at the bar and look over some of her screen prints. And more: I had also promised dinner and further discussion that evening at my apartment.

The prints were awful—giant smudges of black and brown and orange. I loved them. I said so. And paid $75 for one of them. You get the point. Trent gave me years of grief over the print, which I insisted on hanging (and making apology for) simply because I had dropped good money.

She and the evening arrived, and even then I took some pride in my ability to whip up a dinner. We were both happy and chatty when we sat down on my couch to finish off the second half of the bottle of Shiraz she'd brought over.

We can brush past the details of play fore and aft and get right to the moment, which found us in a familiar tangle, somewhat more stable of mind and on somewhat more stable a surface than the night before. And it was good.

For about three minutes. After which she began using a healthy set of fingernails to carve canals into my back. There was blood and a good deal of unmanly shrieking on my part. Pleasure-pain principles aside, I found the experience a trial. We had a confrontation, followed by my promptly and physically tossing her and the dregs of the Shiraz out of my apartment, along, sadly I found later, with the Ellman biography.

And so physical pain has had a lasting impression on me and has influenced my sexual politics. I find myself unable to shake the following prejudice: girls, trim your nails to the nub. I'm happy to have you rake your fingerprints across my back, but let's leave it at that. Claws belong on a proper kitten.

Oh yes, and one should know that the horrible print was, after some time and much heckling from my good friend, replaced by a Velvet Yoda I pulled out of a dumpster on campus. The feet are especially well crafted in a shade of green known only to invading aliens. With yellow toenails. What that piece of information says about my proclivities I'll leave to the experts.

After wading through the thousands of emails from across the world that this site has generated, I see that one question recurs: "Where did the name 'Bit o' Nifty' come from?"

Well, it's quite a story, a tale involving scholarly investigation, literary history, and good ol' fashioned legwork.

In 1995, I had been invited to Edinburgh, Scotland to present a paper on Plato's theory and practice of rhetoric. At the time, I was swimming against the scholarly tide; the standard reading of Plato presented him as a hostile enemy of rhetoric, a diehard foundationalist who, in the 2500-year rhetoric vs. philosophy debate, came down firmly on the side of philosophy. After all, didn't he ridicule rhetoric in the Gorgias, didn't he establish a "true art" of rhetoric in the Phaedrus that was impossible to achieve on earth and was more closely related to philosophy, didn't he hate the sophists, those itinerant, immoral teachers who roamed Greece claiming to teach the ability to persuade anyone of anything? I argued that students of rhetoric got Plato all wrong, that Plato was both a master and friend of rhetoric, that one should interpret his dialogues as philosophical dramas, that the speculative claims of a character can not be said to represent unproblematically Plato's true beliefs.

It was a tough case to make, but I had the actual text on my side, and to this day I believe the standard reading of the history of rhetoric to be deeply flawed.

However, before arriving in Edinburgh, I and fellow students of rhetoric stayed a few days in London, where our flight had landed. After visiting the British Museum and seeing manuscript pages of Beowulf, we walked toward the Tate Gallery because I had a burning desire to see John Everett Millais' "Ophelia" and John William Waterhouse's "The Lady of Shalott," two pre-Raphaelite paintings that had always deeply moved me. (I must also confess to a guilty pleasure in Joshua Reynolds' and Thomas Gainsborough's "Grand Style" of portraiture; I offer no apologies, we all have our quirks in taste.)

London, of course, is rich in history and looks every bit the former center of a vast empire. But history lives in the smaller details, too. On many street corners were constant reminders that the Puritans had fled England for the new world. I could say I was shocked, but I knew too much history, was too involved in rhetoric in its many guises, and besides, who was I to say what was valid text (the vestiges of post-structuralism live on, after all).

Often on these street corners were news stands, and every news stand contained publications of a less than virtuous flavor, and one of these publications, so prominently displayed, was Mayfair, a magazine purported to address men's interests.

On the cover of the then current issue was a photograph of a charming lass in a startling state of undress. In a effort to learn more about English culture and rhetorical presentation, I perused the publication, and found, across a two-page spread, in a large font and in bold color, the phrase "Another bit o' nifty!"

Before you read this, read Streets of Dallas: Part I.

So we had a plan. We'd sneak out of town, drive down to Dallas in Carol's little red Ford Escort, hobnob with the homeless, spend the night somehow somewhere, head back the evening of the next day, and write our stories. I don't remember the day we left, but it must have been Friday, because we would have had to be free and clear of our Daily duties, and I can't see Carol waiting until Saturday. (Regular classroom or homework duties never entered my mind, then.)

But before we left, we had to get in character. I wish that meant that I'd have to dress down, but, poor college student that I was, I was already there. I do remember not shaving for a day or two beforehand, but that means little, since I often forgot to shave anyway. I wore a threadbare flannel shirt with missing button or two that Carol had given me out of ... pity? maternal instinct? ... sometime before, and a pair of cruddy 501's I found buried in the laundry. I rumpled my already rumpled hair and was good to go.

The thing is, living on the $200 a month The Daily paid, I wasn't far from homeless myself. I did have one insight, though -- get some cigarettes. I knew that if I had a pack of cigs, I wouldn't have to approach the street people to get their stories; they'd approach me.

Carol and Luann, what did they wear? Most likely patched jeans and a T-shirt for Carol; and jeans, one of her flowing hippie shirts, and an old ratty sweater for Luann. It was more than 20 years ago, and I can't be sure, but by the time we were ready, we looked homeless, as if we'd just survived a 20-hour bus ride snacking on soda crackers and slices of processed cheese food. What did I care? Two of my favorite women and I were heading out for a grand night with the homeless on the streets of Dallas, the streets where the homeless got shot, rolled, murdered, raped. Big shiny skyscrapers, a gleaming mecca of money, good old Dallas that barely noticed the poverty and despair that shuffled through its streets ... OK, I cared.

I was scared. I know, now, that Luann was too.

It was god damned stupid, arrogant, condescending. Spend a night among the homeless, get terrific insight? We just wanted colorful stories, and if we could stroke our liberal egos too, all the better. But back then, I didn't think about motivation much. All I knew was that I was in unrequited love and no rivals were in sight and we were going to get good stories and win prizes and be the envy of the Daily staff.

But that's a bit too harsh, too much. We did want to make a difference, in our young, foolish, idealistic ways. This was the era of Reagan greed and corporate excess, of turning the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the streets, of depicting those on welfare as cheaters and crooks driving Cadillacs and snorting coke. America then, as it has now, had turned its back on the poor while patting its fat belly and belching and feeling mighty pleased. But in our minds, journalists could change the world by giving it the truth. The word was all. The cynical and, eventually, realistic understandings came later.

Clothed in old laundry, unshowered, uncombed, we piled into Carol's car, pushed the papers and trash into the floorboards, and set off down I-35 to Dallas.

To be continued.

This could be a long story, so I've decided to write bits and pieces of it as the mood strikes me.

When I was a junior at North Texas State University (now The University of North Texas) in Denton, Texas, I worked on The North Texas Daily, the campus newspaper. Young, passionate, idealistic, we staffers gave our all for that paper and for our faculty advisor, Dr. Richard Wells, who instilled the journalistic virtues of humanity, fairness, and accuracy. The influence Dr. Wells had on our lives can't be overstated -- a true believer guiding other true believers, tough but compassionate, steadfast in his support, he was just what we needed. But he's a story for another day. For now, let it be said he wasn't above egging us on, but we knew he couldn't approve of one adventure conceived by our wild, impetuous, and gifted editor, Carol.

Luann and I were the editorial page editors, which meant we wrote editorials and columns, got other people to write editorials and columns, designed the pages, wrote the headlines, and did everything else necessary to get our section of the paper out. Every Friday we ran a feature called Outlook in which we took one topic, wrote two or three pieces about it, got one of the Daily cartoonists to whip us up some art, and presented it all as a package. Outlooks were cool, and we tackled a wide variety of issues, writing with freedom, passion, and righteousness.

Carol, who loved to push the limits in everything she did, got the idea of devoting an Outlook to the homeless in Dallas, that shiny testament to Texas wealth located about 30 miles south. And, naturally, to write our stories well, we'd have to go spend a night among the Dallas homeless. It was nutty, dangerous, but back then we'd have done anything for Carol. More than anyone, except perhaps Dr. Wells, Carol had taught, encouraged, and inspired us to report what was important with the best writing we could muster. She had handpicked Luann and me for the editorial page while we were still sophomores, a real honor; traditionally, editorial page duties were given to established Daily staffers.

I thought the idea bordered on lunacy, but Carol and Luann were gung-ho, and how could I chicken out? Besides, I admired and delighted in their obvious gifts for language, and I was not unaffected by their charms. (That's litotes, for those interested.) They were hot, funky, hippie chicks trying to save the world, and I was an idealistic, hormone-driven 20-year-old in love with words and ideas and everything else young men find so compelling. Of course I agreed to go.

I had met Luann two semesters before in a required sophomore news writing class. Not only did she share my enthusiasm for words, but also she was the coolest girl I'd ever met. We'd spend hours talking beat writers and '60s idealism; she turned me onto Neil Young and Crosby, Stills, and Nash and to cool sandwiches made with spinach and sprouts and other (to my mind) exotic vegetables. We drank beer, danced in crowded clubs to awesome bands, staggered home under the stars. For a bookish loner outcast who grew up on sweetened ice tea and baloney-and-white-bread sandwiches, it was revelatory.

What a rush it all was! Spending a night with the homeless in Dallas might be crazy, but, in those days, what wasn't?

Continued in Streets of Dallas: Part II.

Background: from the age of 10, when I first came across a stack of old comics at “Junky Joe’s,” a junkyard shop outside of Great Falls, Montana that sold an amazing and eclectic assortment of stuff (rusty gadgets, machines, and auto parts; kitchen utensils; magazines; books – any junkyard junk “Joe” thought he could convert into cash), I devoured comic books like movie candy. “Junky Joe’s” was my mom’s name for the old dilapidated building at the end of a dirt road. She went there to buy her romances; once she bought 70 Harlequins and carefully placed them on her bedside bookcase in reading order. “Junky Joe’s” had the cheapest books around, and for someone as hungry for Harlequins as my mom, that was important. I went for the comics and science fiction. I read books, too, of course, but not like candy.

I first encountered Harvey comics: Hot Stuff, The Little Devil; Caspar, The Friendly Ghost; Spooky, The Tuff Little Ghost; Wendy, The Good Little Witch; Sad Sack; Richie Rich, The Poor Little Rich Boy; Little Audrey; others. Eventually, I graduated to superhero comics: Superman, Batman, The Flash, The Fantastic Four, Dial H for Hero, Dr. Solaris, The Uncanny X-Men, The Mighty Thor, The Incredible Hulk. I’d hunch hours over a stack of comics, constantly pushing my cruddy glasses back on my nose, oblivious to all around me.

Best of all was The Amazing Spider-Man. This bright but geeky kid, picked on by bullies, ignored by the girls he helplessly adores, suddenly gets superhero powers – impossibly compelling for a bookish glasses-wearing maladroit who never, not once, dared in fifth grade to approach the cute redhead with green eyes invading all his thoughts and fantasies sitting one row up and over. (R. Crumb’s Id-driven doodlings, Woody Allen’s neurotic films, every juvenile story of a loser revealed as a hero – it’s all the same genre, it’s all about Piggy prevailing and getting the girl instead of being slain by the feral and ruthless.) You couldn’t really identify with the grown physicists, big-city journalists, wealthy playboys, and Asgardian gods who were the heroes of the other comics; but a brainy, klutzy kid suffering the torments of high school? You bet. This stuff embedded itself deep long before I developed the experience and critical faculty to resist.

Fast forward 30 years: Spider-Man was heady stuff for unhappy kids. It’s the archetypal wish-fulfillment fantasy for millions of guys, and the reason the premiere of a new Spider-Man movie two summers ago in 2002 generated genuine excitement. My buddy Keith, a hip, taciturn poet on the faculty of a local college who’d endured his own grade school torments, felt the same – in a way, it was like the enthusiasm we felt for the Lord of the Rings movies: the iconic stuff of our formative years suddenly thrown on the big screen. We wanted the movies to be good but feared they’d suck. In 1978, Ralph Bakshi transformed J.R.R. Tolkien’s work into unwatchable animation, and we couldn’t forget the god awful 1977 Spider-Man TV movie. Still, Peter Jackson had pulled off the first two Rings, and the buzz on the new Sam Raimi Spider-Man was positive. Our hopes were high.

In preparation for the premiere and in accordance with our long-standing summer movie policy, we got high, too. I had called in sick that morning because it seemed the polite thing to do. Bearing the tickets we had bought the week before and our Styrofoam cups of coffee, we got to Tinseltown in time to claim the honor of first in line. Even the fanatic costumed as our colorful hero had to wait behind us. The losers just now buying their tickets were beneath our contempt; a group of them were burly, Aryan jock types – what right did they have to see our movie?

Finally we got in and staked out the perfect seats in the stadium theater. It was around 11:30 a.m., the movie started at noon, and already the seats were filling up. Soon it got to the point at which new arrivals, standing at the bottom row, would peer upwards before heading for the aisle stairs, scanning for an empty seat. I felt fortunate that, for some reason, the seat to my left remained empty, which I and my left elbow thought was just fine.

Meanwhile, Keith and I entertained ourselves by “dividing the world between us,” our code for a long-running game in which we sit on our thrones, watch attractive women walk by, and decide whose half of the world gets which girl. (A harmless but endlessly entertaining game, it can be played anywhere there are lots of people. A bucket of Pacificos with wedges of lime adds to the fun.) As a girl one or the other of us fancied entered the theater, and peered up for a seat, we assigned her to one of the two halves of the world. Surprisingly, we’ve had few territorial disputes, which, I dryly note, no doubt has contributed to our continued friendship.

And then entered a girl I thought for a few heart thuds I recognized, an outrageously beautiful, gentle, artistic, mysterious woman who’d always had a devastating effect on me. She had long straight dark hair, dark questioning eyes, red lipstick; she wore blue overalls, a bright red shirt, and snug black leather boots. I couldn’t take my eyes off her; was it or wasn’t it her? Just as I realized that the girl, standing 15 rows below (I know, I counted), wasn’t her, she turned and, for a heart pounding or two, looked directly into my eyes. The physiological effect was instantaneous and uncontrollable: adrenaline pumped through my body, my vision narrowed and intensified, sound retreated to a background blur. I felt I was leaving my body. Over the years, for different reasons, I’ve had this experience –once it occurred when I was about 12 and gazing at blindingly bright stars one midnight while camping in the Bob Marshall wilderness; another time it happened while looking down the face of Hoover Dam; once watching a belly dancer spinning with bright scarves at a nightclub in San Diego; in 1991 it happened on the 12th floor of McClung Tower. Reading the literature of the sublime was revelatory; it gave me a secular language and taxonomy for these kinds of transcendent, all-encompassing experiences. At the moment, though, staring at the vision below, I couldn’t speak, but I nudged Keith and tilted my head toward the girl, who was heading to the aisle stairway. He looked, said instantly, “Your half,” and then, understanding (we have been friends for a long time), said, “Oh shit.” I think I managed to croak, “Yeah.”

Captivated, I watched her climb the aisle stairs. Keith said, “Oh, man, dude” and started to chuckle. I felt very Peter Parkerish. When she was halfway up the aisle, I blurted in sudden realization: “Omigod, she’s going for the seat next to me.” Keith said, “No way, that’s too much, too perfect,” but as she got closer and closer to our row, it became more and more apparent. I found myself in a weird state of paralysis. Inside, everything churned, god-knows-what chemicals coursed through my blood, one part of my mind retreated waaaaaaaaaay back and with painful clarity watched the rest of my mind madly spin in circles. On the outside I was frozen. Some buttons, once pushed, get stuck. It’s like the adrenal surge you’d get when a teacher, to your great dread, says the first consonant of your name. The pronunciation of the rest of word may spare you from having to answer the question, but it comes too late to stop the chemicals, the hormones, the toxins dumped into your bloodstream.

Meanwhile, Keith can’t stop laughing.

Sure enough, she reached our aisle and started scooting sideways past protruding knees toward the seat beside me. Now that she was closer, I knew she was younger than I thought – maybe only 16 or 17, like the princess Audrey Hepburn played in Roman Holiday. Good god, what was happening, I was married, had a kid, and even if I weren’t or didn’t wouldn’t risk jail. It was absurd. The entire left side of my body alternatively tingled and went numb; my eyes froze in a fixed stare straight ahead. If I had first seen her up close, none of this would have happened, or at least not as terribly, but the subconscious makes its own associations. Mind and body conspire. Once, when her arm brushed against mine, I jumped from the shock.

The next two hours were torture. Every now and then, Keith would snicker and, sotto voce, utter a cryptic comment: “Write a poem,” “Pop in ‘Night on Earth’,” or, simply, “Moondance.” All this referred to the art of seduction, a set of procedures and practices we had codified to try to make manageable something deeply mysterious and perilous. If you’re clueless, you can take great refuge knowing that chopped scallions sprinkled in a bowl of tomato soup looks pretty goddamned sophisticated. To Keith’s jabs I could manage only, though clenched teeth, the occasional “Shut up!”

To make matters worse, my identification with Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker, who, when dealing with Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane, finds himself paralyzed, was immediate and complete; my private intensity projected on the stadium screen while the burly jocks a few rows down guffawed at the depiction of one of their victims. This all seems like hyperbole, I know, but if anything I’m understating. It was excruciating. When Peter finally kicks jock ass, it was too late; I’d been transported back to the terrible days when masking tape held my glasses together and recess meant the library, where I’d pore over science fiction and hide from the alpha males. Three decades of growth, experience, understanding, even triumph – gone. The cute girl from fifth grade remained forever out of reach.

When, mercifully, the movie ended, and the credits began to roll, and people started to filter out of the theater, and finally she got up and wandered down the aisle and out of sight, I relaxed and started laughing. “Jesus Christ, who would’ve thought that shit could happen at my age?” I asked. Keith said, “That was just too fuckin’ much to be true.” We shook our heads, left the theater, and while heading to the car, recited a litany of details, laughing in wonder. At the heart of it was a genuinely moving experience, one that touched a deep place still tender, but it was so ridiculous, so juvenile, that I had to laugh.

We talked about it for days. It was as painfully funny as Keith’s repeated moves – sometimes many miles out of Knoxville – to be as close as possible to a girlfriend who just kept retreating from sight. As terrible as the story I tell about hiding out from an ex in my apartment, not daring to turn on the lights or radio, hearing plaintive knocking on my door at all hours and finding notes constantly wedged in my doorjamb. Because they hurt, they’re stuff for stories. The Spider-Man incident was another tale to add to the repertoire.

And that I thought was that.

The trouble with true life is that it’s often unbelievable. It’s why the Attic trial lawyers stressed the probable over the actual: better to give the jury a likely falsehood than an unlikely truth. The story should have ended there, but life, the cosmic forces, dumb coincidence, whatever, added a coda, one that makes the story so pat I couldn’t write it down for two years. Here goes.

A few days or maybe a week later, Keith and his current girlfriend, Sam, dragged me out to Sundown in the City, a weekly summer open-air gathering, complete with bands and concessions, designed to increase commerce in downtown Knoxville. We bought expensive beer in plastic cups, wandered a bit, found one of Sam’s friends, started talking. After a while, Keith brought up the Spider-Man story, saying I had to tell it. So I did, with as much color, context, and pathos as possible, since that’s what oral story telling is. The moment – the exact moment – I described the girl wearing blue overalls and a red shirt that I thought I recognized at the theater, she tapped my shoulder and said, “Hi.” Or maybe she didn’t tap my shoulder and didn’t say “Hi” but just appeared. It’s hazy to me, and Keith remembers it slightly differently, but we agree she interrupted the story at the precise moment I described her. She was wearing blue overalls and a red shirt.

I hadn’t seen her in five years. Our history had the usual stuff – tenderness, pain, desperate dialings late at night, poetry, anger, sublimity -- but also something else: I think we just really liked each other, despite it all. I shan’t describe the encounter in terms of physiology; it’s enough to say I was staggered and couldn’t manage more than a few words. I will say that after I got home and thought half the night, I realized I was happy.

As far as the story goes, the last part kills it, unless you really go out of your way to sell it to willing listeners.

While my Bit o' Nifty colleague and I were downing India Pale Ale at an Old City pub, a bouncy little brunette, a bundle of fun, came up and hugged Keith. After she bounced away, Keith, in response to my raised eyebrow, said he knew her from somewhere or other. Then he took a pen, wrote something on a napkin, and folded it.

A few minutes later, the hoppy happy little bird came back. Keith handed her the napkin and said, “Check this out; it’s a website my friend and I’ve made.”

She snatched it and stuck it down her shirt, over her left breast. Then she cupped her breasts and asked, “Does it make one look bigger than the other?”

I think our little project is going to work out juuuuust fine.

One of my friends, a self-described psychic post-modern gypsy, just sent me this:

Love, Jeena Darjeeling

The love affair started during a history of film class in 1984 at North Texas State University in Denton, TX.

After learning from the unbearably slow and silent Potemkin that bad meat sparked the Bolshevik revolution, and after delighting in the iconic Stagecoach that featured the rifle-propped-against-cocked-hip first film appearance of John Wayne, we settled in to watch the strangely titled Rashomon, the subtitled 1951 film by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

I was prepared for another bit of Potemkin-esque agony, one of those experiences we’ve all had suffering uninspired sermons, enduring droning lectures, or, because you want to get laid, stomaching insipid chick flicks that go on and on and on about finding, 50 years too late, misplaced love letters, when all the guys in the theater just want the stupid old geezers on the screen to hurry up and for god's sakes die.

How was I to know, then? The lights dimmed, the students sank back into their seats, and, sometime during the next 88 minutes, I fell in love.

Rashomon, the movie that made Kurosawa an international figure and pushed Japanese cinema into the world's spotlight, is a tale of love, murder, rape, betrayal, all told from four different irreconcilable points of view. In one sense, it's classic courtroom drama; in another, larger, it's philosophical meditation on truth and humanity. Oh, how I tried to make the varying accounts of the crimes fit together. My friends and I spent hours trying to work it out. In the end, though, that exercise was not only fruitless but also pointless. Kurosawa wasn't about to cheapen his movie by making it a detective thriller an observant audience could piece together.

After that, I was mad for Kurosawa. Fortunately, Denton had a funky old video tape store on The Square, and I found quite a few of the master's movies: The Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Dodes'ka-den, Kagemusha, Ran, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams.

Sometime in the late 1980s, I invited friends over to a little trailer shack where I was living just behind the big white house on Fry Street where I had lived before. Five us crammed together on my dinky bed and watched, on an itty bitty television, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, a collection of eight hypnotically beautiful stories, all presented in exquisite, bold color. (When Kurosawa finally went color in Dodes'ka-den, he did it in a big way.) For two hours we sat on each other's laps mesmerized. When it was over, my friend Brendan said, "That was the best fucking movie I've ever seen." While I didn't share that opinion, I understood the sentiment.

Not all my attempts to share Kurosawa were fruitful. Years later, while teaching freshman English students at The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, I showed The Hidden Fortress, the classic black-and-white adventure that inspired George Lucas' Star Wars. But the 139-minute movie, edited with an aesthetic far different than the fast-cut MTV video-style editing so prevalent today, tortured the students beyond their endurance. Two of my friends and fellow teachers came at my invitation to see this fabulous movie, and we watched as, one by one, the students slipped out. Finally, only one poor soul remained, squirming in agony, until with a jerk he stood up, muttered something about a frat party, and rushed past us and out the door. We teachers glanced at each other, one of us snickered, and then we all roared with laughter, not recovering for minutes. I had stumbled across my students' Potemkin.

Over time, I've managed to see most of Kurosawa's films, though a few still elude me. It's been almost 20 years now, but sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet and even the cat is asleep, I pop in my dusty videotape of Rashomon and experience again my first real cinematic love.

It was a mattress on a floor in a three room garret walk up in the student ghetto in Fort Sanders, a little piece of Knoxville sliced between the University and the railroad tracks.

I was in early love, when the sex was good and the conversation better. On a mattress with the smell-memory of love, on the phone with her and talking politics and hope-knowing that our man was going to win the White House and the years in college and graduate school, part of the twelve years of something other than what we wanted and that we blamed for much of our directionless or at least baffling and stumbling lives, would be redeemed by a leader who was someone we wanted and something we needed.

And what we needed was a reason that sounded and felt and moved beyond the move from book to book, and love to love, and ache to gasp. We'd been against something for so long it's all we knew.

Much later we'd find that sex drove late when time bent late on car trips home--it's simple but true but all we knew when new was now was need and love when else was need and need was now.

And a room was small and dormer was full with bookshelf and window and wall with couch and door and floor with mattress and phone with hope and line with love and minds were mixed and busy and heady with next.

And Kate was young and spry and chased mice and lived on the topmost furniture and voted democrat.

And things of course became awful in long but superb in short and several months were political and full of sex and kerosene because she smelled like kerosene and dogs and curls and god I can't smell any of it without thinking of what we hoped for in the early fall of 1992.

And our man would be in office and our tears would fall on pillows and a flood of past would pass and there were dogs and love and love and love and worlds would mend themselves.

When all we needed was a reason and the reason was our need.

Moving's such a chore. Wrestling the beat-up mattress on top of the car, cramming boxes of books into the backseat, drugging the cat and shoehorning it into the glove box -- no wonder the less adventurous spend years in the same hovel.

I've got about half my blogs moved out of my previous free site and into this spacious loft overlooking ... well, it's a parking lot, but a nice one. And then, I get to decorate! Thumbtack up the tie-dyed sheet that's served as my curtain for years, unroll and pin-up my Peter Max Woodstock poster, toss my books onto the cinder block and plywood shelves, all that stuff. It's not easy having taste.

But, sooner or later, everything will be in its place. The stacks of girlie mags will be strategically hidden behind the Michel Foucault and poker books, the mountain bike hung from the butcher's hook in the corner, the music tapes and CDs categorized by rhetorical purpose.

For now, though, the task ahead looks daunting. The things we do for fame and fortune.

During the guys' night out last Friday, the technogeek aka Toadking aka AJ pushed the poet and me to get our own domain hosted on one of the servers scattered about his house like peanut shells on a tavern floor.

"Fame and fortune," he insisted, leaning across the table, peering intently at us. At first we thought the intense gaze meant he had spotted another nifty bit of eye candy he intended to claim for his third of the world. But a quick survey assured us this was not the case.

"Fame?" the poet asked.

"Fortune?" I asked.

Leaning back on his bar stool, an action that almost caused him to topple over, the Toadking allowed himself a smirk. "Fame and fortune."

The poet and I exchanged a quick glance. This was something new. We were suspicious. Yet another attempt to get us back for pressing the incredibly crappy Master of the Five Magics on him years before? It was possibly the worst novel ever written, but we'd taken great delight in praising it to high heaven when presenting him a copy.

The poet lit up a Winston, took a long drag, and pondered. That seemed the appropriate response, so I did the same. "Well, now," the poet said.

I waited for the follow up, but he said nothing. Some poet.

The Toadking looked leisurely around the pub. He took a sip from his beer and grabbed a salty pretzel.

I couldn't resist. "How can getting our own web site bring us fame and fortune?" I asked. "You got one and you aren't exactly rolling in the babes and bucks."

He just smiled and made a throaty sound: Vroooom. His new motorcycle! A cream and green Honda Shadow, a bit of heaven the poet and I had lusted over as soon as we'd seen it. Maybe there was something to the fortune part, if not the fame.

We were hooked. Sighing, the poet said, "OK, let's hear it."

And he told us.

My musical friend, a longtime resident of Denton, sends the following information about Richard (see Crazy Richard):

Richard Earnhart
Yeah, he did live with his mom. She was alive and well in '87, and attended some of the poetry readings. She had osteoporosis pretty bad, and had no car, so she had to use the city-supplied transport (Span) to get around.

After his mom died, the bums moved into the house and occupied the back yard. Charlie McCormick lived next door in an apartment and was all aware of what they were up to. Some of these guys were Vietnam vets and some lied about having been there. Remember Runner and his chess games? He was good until he'd had a few. If you got him early enough in the day he was quite competitive. Anyway, later I heard that some people were doing heroin in the back yard (unconfirmed).

[Paragraph deleted because the principals are still active.]

Richard spoke seven languages: Esperanto, English, French, Swedish, and maybe Latin, among others. His accent in French wasn't good, and it was a little halting, but accurate. He had pen pals from all over the world, and I'm sure they got a big surprise when they came to Denton, to see this shambling hulk of a guy, with an unbelievable stench.

The house has been sold, fixed up, and the bums thrown out. Now with panhandling illegal, there's no place for them. One of them I know died of cirrhosis of the liver.

A few minutes later, he sent an additional email:

One more thing (well, two)
Richard never bathed, but on his birthday his family would rent a motel room, and they would put him in the bathroom and not let him out 'till he had bathed. You can imagine the condition of the bathroom once he was done! Anyway, he would then put on the same smelly clothes that he never washed, so he would still stink.

Fate.

In 1985, while an undergraduate in the journalism department of North Texas State University (now The University of North Texas ) in Denton, TX, I worked on the copy desk of The Denton Record-Chronicle. I had applied for and been offered the job after serving as editor of The North Texas Daily, the NTSU campus newspaper. It was a great part-time job for a student -- all I had to do was edit copy and lay out pages. I occasionally picked up the cop beat when the regular beat reporter was out, and I could write any features I wanted.

Of course, the first feature I wrote was about Fry Street. Every Friday night, Fry Street was hopping. At one end of the street were the bohemian poets, artists, and musicians hanging around the used bookstore and the coffee house; at the other were the young frats and sorority girls hanging out at The Underground, a slimy dive of a night club if you ever saw one. The story, complete with photos of street denizens, took the front page of the Chronicle's features section, and made me a very minor celebrity on the street.

However, one of the true celebrities of Fry Street, and perhaps its most notorious denizen, was Crazy Richard (unbelievably, I just found a story about Crazy Richard, though the writer calls him Weird Richard, published by The Red Cedar Review). Crazy Richard was an old, big, shambling guy who never bathed or washed his clothes and who had a penchant for pinching girl's butts. My photographer friend Sal Sessa took a sequence of photos showing Richard setting up a pinch, performing the act, and then shambling off, while the startled girl with the pinched butt looks the opposite direction. No doubt, while shambling away, Richard was muttering his trademark heh, heh, heh. I'd give anything for copies of those photos.

He also composed verse about his love obsessions on band flyers ripped off telephone and light poles. They were surprisingly funny and accomplished, a fact that adds credence to the legend that years before he was a brilliant foreign language student until something made him go nuts. I wish I had some of these compositions, but they are lost, and all I remember are a few lines:

"What I lack
is Monica in the sack."

and

"Monica Antonelli,
come lie on my belly."

My friend David Taylor tells the story of Crazy Richard attending Victorian literature lectures conducted for the community by one of NTSU's English professors. Little old ladies, all prim and proper, would attend to revel in the wit and wisdom that was the professor's, who was a gnomish, funny, lecherous man always wearing a vest and a bow tie. When Crazy Richard showed up, they'd hold their index fingers under their noses and wave litte fans, trying in vain to block the stench that surrounded Richard like a cloud of flies.

Crazy Richard lived in a house on the north end of Fry Street, not far from Flow Hospital, where I was born. Legend has it that it was his mother's house. After she died, he continued living there, but neglected to pay utility bills or perform basic maintenance. In the summer, when Denton got very hot, he'd sleep on an old mattress lying on his porch. Street bums also called the delapidated structure home.

Crazy Richard was a fixture of Fry Street for decades. My late grandfather, who attended NTSU and later delivered mail in the area, used to tell Crazy Richard stories. I moved away from Denton in 1990, but I understand he remained in the area for several years afterward. I don't know what became of him, but I think I heard he died. Perhaps my musical friend in Denton can add some details -- if so, I'll post them.

I don't have any photos of Crazy Richard, but I do have a copy of an underground newspaper with an incredibly accurate depiction of Richard shambling past Jim's Diner. Someday I'll scan the cover and post it.

None of us begrudged Crazy Richard, though he stank, pinched butts, mumbled incoherently, and ripped band flyers off poles for stationary. He was there long before we.

Update: I've contacted and exchanged emails with the writer of the "Weird Richard" story I mentioned above. He'd like to hear any comments anyone has about his story, which I consider a well-written, evocative, and soul-searching piece that captures a time on Fry and the surrounding area slightly before mine. I don't want to post his email address here without his say-so, but I can forward any comments you have.

Now that I think about it, I believe I have heard Crazy Richard referred to as Weird Richard -- any confirmation?

Next to the big white house was The Zebra, a black-and-white striped building formerly known as Texas' Original Headshop, the first headshop in Texas. When I was in my 20s, I'd take and teach my classes, amble home, and then grab a stool behind the Zebra's counter. I'd sell Elvis and guitar bongs to students with whom I'd just discussed Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars. On slow days, Dave and I would sit in lawn chairs in front of the shop, drinking beer, watching girls, talking words and ideas. And girls. Always the girls.

A few hours ago, one of my poet friends, my motorcycle riding friend, and I sat on my deck shooting the shit, telling stories. That made me think, I should write down the tale of Dave, my Victorian novels professor, and the task at which I was helplessly inept. I've started it here but quickly realized it was a full-fledged story, and too long for a blog. I preserve what I started with, just because I thought it might be interesting to see the raw jottings that eventually will take shape as a story.

-----

I'll tell you the moral of this story right up front. Beer and the Brontes don't mix,

The only guy I knew who really got off on John Smith, the xxx and axxx, was my beer-drinking, poet friend David. I'd witness passionate arguments he'd have with a narrative poet. Dave, of course, was on the side of the lyric. This furnished opportunity for much diversion. Guy conversations, pinball and space harrier, glossy wooden tables in a farmloft setting. Pretty waitresses. Cheap beer. Of course we there all the time.

Dave was a character. Serious, solemn, crude, inventive of scatalogical expression, late-in-the evening emotionally engaged confessional and truth telling. One day, around noon, I dropped in the Flying Tomato, which anchored the intersections of Fry and Elm?, just across the street and a few doors down from the house in which I had one fourth claim. I just wanted a slice of pizza and coke before class, a Victorian novel seminar taught my a wiry, funny, profane, natty professor wearing a, I swear to god, bowtie who lived in a Victorian-style house, complete with period furniture and settings and a neurotic wife. (Once I was invited there for a luncheon, a serious and formal business hosted by his ethereal and emotionally enigmatic wife that made me want to rip to shreds all of the Jane Austin on my book shelves. But that's another tale.)

Like I said, I just wanted a slice of pizza and a coke. David, though, laying in wait for me at one of the recessed tables alongside the huge panes of glass overlooking Fry, had other ideas. There's enough time for a pitcher before class, he insisted, as I plopped down with my greasy pizza and watery coke.

My six-year-old daughter, standing at my elbow, just said, "I know who the president is; it's George Bush." I said, "That's right." She said, "But he's not a good man." Surprised, I asked, "Because he got us into an unjustified war?" She said, "Yeah, and because he tried to trick the people into thinking he was George Washington."

Note: this happened four hours earlier. Despite her best efforts, my daughter does not stay up this late on a school night.

A meme is a thought virus that passes from mind to mind, a contagious notion that can spread across a population like wildfire. Icons, fashion, phrases, melodies -- all can be memes. There must be something to this; after all, it's a field of study.

Anyway.

I've long tried to introduce to my daughter words, phrases, and songs beyond the kindergarten and first grade level, mostly out of idle curiosity to see what would happen. When she was four, I taught her to respond to (preschool) teacher criticism with "You're going to give me a complex!" Somehow, the thought of a four-year-old saying such a thing amuses me. Instead of saying "silly," which was one of her favorite words ("Daddy, you're so silly!"), I taught her to say "ludicrous." The other day, while I surrounded by a pile of comics in the midst of "research," she said, "That's loo-dee-cruz. They're just comic books." She didn't pick up that attitude from me. Obviously, something could be said about the declining quality of education. Last week, while I was driving her home from school, she leaned back in her booster seat, put her hands behind her head, and said, "Ah, this is the life!" I have no idea where she got that, but I wish it were from me.

There are some things I won't do. I won't, for example, teach her Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" or cynical phrases such as "compassionate conservatism," but I have taught her some Rolling Stones songs, and I'm working on the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine." I'm hoping that one day when I pick her up from afterschool daycare, I'll hear the entire group singing '60s pop tunes.