Chapter 27: I Am Nailed to the Hull
(Part IV of a Weird and Terrible Saga)
In the poem “The Road Not Taken” Frost cautions us about the foolish tendency we have of looking back on life and pondering how our life may have been different with different choices. (I cringe when I hear people interpret the poem to mean we should chart our own path or some such nonsense – these are the same people who get the title wrong and call it “The Road Less Travelled.” Frost is ambivalent about his attitude toward the other road. The speaker says that they are “worn . . . really about the same” and taking the road he did “has made all the difference.” Such a difference can be for good or ill; the speaker does not say, and neither does the sigh with which he tells it. No, the speaker, as the title implies, is focusing on the road he didn’t take rather than the road he is on. This is always a mistake, Frost is advising us, and potentially fatal if one is driving. Focus on what you’re doing, not on what you didn’t do.) We reach a stage in life, however, when we see the curve of the earth and can see where we are and how we got there. This is not the same as regret; it is a taking stock, a measurement.
If my wife hadn’t been accepted to her first choice for grad school, and we’d moved to Sacramento . . . if I hadn’t screwed around and instead gotten into MPTV . . . if Nasty Edwin had filled out the financial forms and I’d gone to Northwestern . . . if –
To help pay for my fifth undergraduate year, I’d taken a job at Griffith Observatory. Although it was only part time, I kept the job after graduation. I was supposed to need the extra time because I was supposed to not only work on my Master’s, but I was supposed to be working on writing. What actually happened is that I became paralyzed, overcome by stasis. I developed a crippling case of writer’s block. I claimed to want to break into the movie business, but I did nothing toward that end. I alleged that I wanted to be married, but I did everything I could to sabotage the relationship.
A problem I’ve had with Crime and Punishment is that I do not understand Raskolnikov’s friends. Why do they stay loyal to this rude and moody asshole? If I were they, I’d scream at him, “Hey, stop bitching and get off the couch, fucker!” I don’t see enough in him to stay true to him. “Call me if you ever drop the attitude.” Dostoevsky must have got it right, though; my friends refused to abandon me in spite of me. I also carried a bit of Prufrock around. If I never tried to succeed, how could I fail? Can you imagine a more horrific combination than the illegitimate love-child of Raskolnikov and J. Alfred Prufrock? Now imagine being married to it.
I was nothing if not rational. I’m always rational. Except, of course, I wasn’t. I was at the mercy of unresolved conflicts and subconscious fears that controlled my every action. But to stay rational, I rationalized. I explained to my wife why my behavior made sense, why her feelings were wrong, why everything in our lives was actually just swell. Even Raskolnikov’s friends would have abandoned him if the book had gone on for enough years. Finally, despite my attempts to prove her feelings wrong, she’d had enough and was gone.
Story 1
We live in Downey in a one bedroom on a semi-industrial street. Directly opposite the apartment building is a lot surrounded on all sides by a fence topped with razor-wire. Ice cream trucks are kept in this lot overnight. They depart quietly in the morning and return raucous at evening, desperate for a few final customers. It doesn’t take long living there to begin to recognize the music of the different trucks and to learn which trucks carry which desserts. Our neighbors are immigrants – could be Persian (Iranian), could be Armenian. We never speak except when I complain about the plumbing. Our kitchen sinks share a common drain, and when they run their garbage disposal, gray and awful water raises from our drain. It smells bad. I am convinced they do not understand how to properly use a garbage disposal, that they believe any and all garbage that can be crammed into the sink should be disposed of in this way. I cannot be certain of this because there is little but broken English between us. When the song from the right truck is heard, their daughter (I guess about six) and I run noisily over the balcony walkway and down the cement steps calling for it to stop.
The split was protracted. Maybe she was unsure of her own course, maybe there was enough left of the old Raskolnikov who exists in the world before the world of the novel begins to cause her to hesitate, but it was slow slide not a plummet. Eventually, she made it clear that she intended to no longer help me with the rent. I left the Observatory and found a new job at Public Storage, but I still couldn’t afford our old Pasadena apartment on my salary. I moved into a studio in Silver Lake.
I suppose somewhere around here is the nadir of this tale. It is hard to know for sure how many times you bounce, going down, going up, until the ride is completely over. I do know that my funk slowly faded. Although I now regret it, at the time I felt it a healthy move to give up writing my Master’s thesis. I had completed my coursework years earlier and intended to write a thesis on the motif of premature burial in Poe. Professors among whom I had distinguished myself advised me against it. They assumed from my work that I was like them; they were like the gentlemen who try to assist Mr. Hyde in evading the natural consequences of his actions. I had a facility for scholarship, but no relish for it. They assumed I would become a professor; they were thinking of my next step. They advised that no one would take me seriously if I wrote about Poe. So I chose a topic from the only class for which I did not receive an A and chose that professor for my advisor. The title was “From the Trout Stream to the Gulf Stream: Fishing as Ritual in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway.” Nice title, huh? My panel cautioned me that I was looking at a two to three hundred page manuscript combining literary analysis and anthropology, but they felt confident I could handle it. So did I, but the years rolled by with no results. Finally, I just said the hell with it. I said the learning was what was important, not the degree. I said it wasn’t as if I ever planned to teach; I was going to write. I rationalized.
Looking at the curve of the earth, I can see how early trauma led me to this place where Raskolnikov and Prufrock meet, a place where people are pushed away before they have a chance to leave you, where safety and elusiveness are all. In fits and starts I climbed back to the surface from this inner world of old pain reimagined to be relived.
Liz hired me at Public Storage to do data entry. They were in the process of converting their paper trail to digital, and the rental history of each site (about 1,100 in all) needed to be entered quickly to minimize the number of transactions for the site managers to enter when they received their computers. Within a few weeks I was moved to a different department. Each state had unique delinquency procedures, and computer generated letters needed to conform to state laws. It was my job to write those letters, and later to modify the software that generated the proper letter at the proper day. I learned fast, became a master of MS-DOS and the creation of batch files, and could troubleshoot computer hardware. Due to my trainability and the fact that I was less expensive to employ than someone with a computer degree, I survived purge after purge as the project wound down. Eventually, I was given the title Implementation and Support Coordinator, which really meant if they needed something they thought I could do, I now did it. Someone having printing problems? They called me. Someone need new software? They called me. LANs need to be installed at business parks? They sent me.
My former boss Liz and I began dating. When she was caught in one of the final cost cutting purges, it looked she’d have to move back to her hometown in Missouri due to finances. Instead, we moved in together. Like a character from Dickens, I was back among the living.
Story 2
My friend Jim, who is in middle management at Public Storage, and I regularly stop off on the way home from work on Fridays. (Occasionally, it’s a weeknight thing, too.) Sometimes we go to The Big Fish, a rathole whiskey and beer bar where we are looked at in our ties and slacks by the true regulars with a menace we willfully ignore. Sometimes we go to Tony Roma’s where Jim’s buddy, also from New York, is a bartender. His name is Mike Looney, and he gives us free rounds as we watch Monday Night Football. I usually end up getting excited about a play, screaming, and throwing my arms up which shatters the glasses in the rack overhead. We then get a visit from the manager. Feeling bad for Mike, we usually leave. This night we are at Clancy’s in Glendale. We’ve been there for hours. The dinner crowd has left, the dancing crowd as well. On a different night in Clancy’s we have dinner. I misread the menu and mistake the Maine lobster price, which is per pound, for the full price and order the biggest lobster in the tank. When the bill comes, I do not have nearly enough money to cover my share, and Liz has to bail me out. But this night there has been very little food. The manager is asking us to leave, and Jim becomes indignant. He begins raving according to some secret logic that no one else comprehends, and things devolve into pure shouting. I go outside to wait for him. It is a warm night, and the sky is black with no stars. Suddenly Jim is beside me. He searches he pockets for his keys. “Oh, shit,” he says as he realizes the valet parked his car, only now the valet has gone home and he must go back inside to get his keys from the manager.
(Part IV of a Weird and Terrible Saga)
In the poem “The Road Not Taken” Frost cautions us about the foolish tendency we have of looking back on life and pondering how our life may have been different with different choices. (I cringe when I hear people interpret the poem to mean we should chart our own path or some such nonsense – these are the same people who get the title wrong and call it “The Road Less Travelled.” Frost is ambivalent about his attitude toward the other road. The speaker says that they are “worn . . . really about the same” and taking the road he did “has made all the difference.” Such a difference can be for good or ill; the speaker does not say, and neither does the sigh with which he tells it. No, the speaker, as the title implies, is focusing on the road he didn’t take rather than the road he is on. This is always a mistake, Frost is advising us, and potentially fatal if one is driving. Focus on what you’re doing, not on what you didn’t do.) We reach a stage in life, however, when we see the curve of the earth and can see where we are and how we got there. This is not the same as regret; it is a taking stock, a measurement.
If my wife hadn’t been accepted to her first choice for grad school, and we’d moved to Sacramento . . . if I hadn’t screwed around and instead gotten into MPTV . . . if Nasty Edwin had filled out the financial forms and I’d gone to Northwestern . . . if –
To help pay for my fifth undergraduate year, I’d taken a job at Griffith Observatory. Although it was only part time, I kept the job after graduation. I was supposed to need the extra time because I was supposed to not only work on my Master’s, but I was supposed to be working on writing. What actually happened is that I became paralyzed, overcome by stasis. I developed a crippling case of writer’s block. I claimed to want to break into the movie business, but I did nothing toward that end. I alleged that I wanted to be married, but I did everything I could to sabotage the relationship.
A problem I’ve had with Crime and Punishment is that I do not understand Raskolnikov’s friends. Why do they stay loyal to this rude and moody asshole? If I were they, I’d scream at him, “Hey, stop bitching and get off the couch, fucker!” I don’t see enough in him to stay true to him. “Call me if you ever drop the attitude.” Dostoevsky must have got it right, though; my friends refused to abandon me in spite of me. I also carried a bit of Prufrock around. If I never tried to succeed, how could I fail? Can you imagine a more horrific combination than the illegitimate love-child of Raskolnikov and J. Alfred Prufrock? Now imagine being married to it.
I was nothing if not rational. I’m always rational. Except, of course, I wasn’t. I was at the mercy of unresolved conflicts and subconscious fears that controlled my every action. But to stay rational, I rationalized. I explained to my wife why my behavior made sense, why her feelings were wrong, why everything in our lives was actually just swell. Even Raskolnikov’s friends would have abandoned him if the book had gone on for enough years. Finally, despite my attempts to prove her feelings wrong, she’d had enough and was gone.
Story 1
We live in Downey in a one bedroom on a semi-industrial street. Directly opposite the apartment building is a lot surrounded on all sides by a fence topped with razor-wire. Ice cream trucks are kept in this lot overnight. They depart quietly in the morning and return raucous at evening, desperate for a few final customers. It doesn’t take long living there to begin to recognize the music of the different trucks and to learn which trucks carry which desserts. Our neighbors are immigrants – could be Persian (Iranian), could be Armenian. We never speak except when I complain about the plumbing. Our kitchen sinks share a common drain, and when they run their garbage disposal, gray and awful water raises from our drain. It smells bad. I am convinced they do not understand how to properly use a garbage disposal, that they believe any and all garbage that can be crammed into the sink should be disposed of in this way. I cannot be certain of this because there is little but broken English between us. When the song from the right truck is heard, their daughter (I guess about six) and I run noisily over the balcony walkway and down the cement steps calling for it to stop.
The split was protracted. Maybe she was unsure of her own course, maybe there was enough left of the old Raskolnikov who exists in the world before the world of the novel begins to cause her to hesitate, but it was slow slide not a plummet. Eventually, she made it clear that she intended to no longer help me with the rent. I left the Observatory and found a new job at Public Storage, but I still couldn’t afford our old Pasadena apartment on my salary. I moved into a studio in Silver Lake.
I suppose somewhere around here is the nadir of this tale. It is hard to know for sure how many times you bounce, going down, going up, until the ride is completely over. I do know that my funk slowly faded. Although I now regret it, at the time I felt it a healthy move to give up writing my Master’s thesis. I had completed my coursework years earlier and intended to write a thesis on the motif of premature burial in Poe. Professors among whom I had distinguished myself advised me against it. They assumed from my work that I was like them; they were like the gentlemen who try to assist Mr. Hyde in evading the natural consequences of his actions. I had a facility for scholarship, but no relish for it. They assumed I would become a professor; they were thinking of my next step. They advised that no one would take me seriously if I wrote about Poe. So I chose a topic from the only class for which I did not receive an A and chose that professor for my advisor. The title was “From the Trout Stream to the Gulf Stream: Fishing as Ritual in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway.” Nice title, huh? My panel cautioned me that I was looking at a two to three hundred page manuscript combining literary analysis and anthropology, but they felt confident I could handle it. So did I, but the years rolled by with no results. Finally, I just said the hell with it. I said the learning was what was important, not the degree. I said it wasn’t as if I ever planned to teach; I was going to write. I rationalized.
Looking at the curve of the earth, I can see how early trauma led me to this place where Raskolnikov and Prufrock meet, a place where people are pushed away before they have a chance to leave you, where safety and elusiveness are all. In fits and starts I climbed back to the surface from this inner world of old pain reimagined to be relived.
Liz hired me at Public Storage to do data entry. They were in the process of converting their paper trail to digital, and the rental history of each site (about 1,100 in all) needed to be entered quickly to minimize the number of transactions for the site managers to enter when they received their computers. Within a few weeks I was moved to a different department. Each state had unique delinquency procedures, and computer generated letters needed to conform to state laws. It was my job to write those letters, and later to modify the software that generated the proper letter at the proper day. I learned fast, became a master of MS-DOS and the creation of batch files, and could troubleshoot computer hardware. Due to my trainability and the fact that I was less expensive to employ than someone with a computer degree, I survived purge after purge as the project wound down. Eventually, I was given the title Implementation and Support Coordinator, which really meant if they needed something they thought I could do, I now did it. Someone having printing problems? They called me. Someone need new software? They called me. LANs need to be installed at business parks? They sent me.
My former boss Liz and I began dating. When she was caught in one of the final cost cutting purges, it looked she’d have to move back to her hometown in Missouri due to finances. Instead, we moved in together. Like a character from Dickens, I was back among the living.
Story 2
My friend Jim, who is in middle management at Public Storage, and I regularly stop off on the way home from work on Fridays. (Occasionally, it’s a weeknight thing, too.) Sometimes we go to The Big Fish, a rathole whiskey and beer bar where we are looked at in our ties and slacks by the true regulars with a menace we willfully ignore. Sometimes we go to Tony Roma’s where Jim’s buddy, also from New York, is a bartender. His name is Mike Looney, and he gives us free rounds as we watch Monday Night Football. I usually end up getting excited about a play, screaming, and throwing my arms up which shatters the glasses in the rack overhead. We then get a visit from the manager. Feeling bad for Mike, we usually leave. This night we are at Clancy’s in Glendale. We’ve been there for hours. The dinner crowd has left, the dancing crowd as well. On a different night in Clancy’s we have dinner. I misread the menu and mistake the Maine lobster price, which is per pound, for the full price and order the biggest lobster in the tank. When the bill comes, I do not have nearly enough money to cover my share, and Liz has to bail me out. But this night there has been very little food. The manager is asking us to leave, and Jim becomes indignant. He begins raving according to some secret logic that no one else comprehends, and things devolve into pure shouting. I go outside to wait for him. It is a warm night, and the sky is black with no stars. Suddenly Jim is beside me. He searches he pockets for his keys. “Oh, shit,” he says as he realizes the valet parked his car, only now the valet has gone home and he must go back inside to get his keys from the manager.