22 Grade

In 1965 I earned my bachelor's degree in English from Iowa State and thanks to my nearly straight-A record in the study of the language and literature of English I won a National Defense Title IV fellowship to study English at Indiana University in Bloomington, where my boat to the Doctor of Philosophy sprang its first leak, my instruction in English there so different from Iowa State where I had risen like a meteor and felt like a star. In my two years at Indiana I could inspire not a single teacher to take any personal interest in me. Sobered and dragging a C bitterly behind me I swam off a Master of Arts and counted myself lucky. Then, from the fall of 1967 through the spring of 1970, I taught English at little Friend College in Reunion, Iowa, where the desperate young men in my classes needed passing grades to maintain their student deferments and avoid the draft.

Competition was fierce.

Intense.

Literally a matter of life and death.

War.

One afternoon of finals week I dropped by the office of a friend and colleague in the business department to ask if he wanted to stop for a beer at the local tavern before we called it a day and headed home. When I arrived, Mr. Good—his real name—was standing in the hall just outside his office, his arms folded across his chest, where he listened impassively to the pleas of a young man who had just learned that he had failed his course in business. In those days it was customary to post student scores on the final examination and final grades for the course on the wall beside the door of a faculty member's office. Most professors protected student identities by using last, first, and middle initials or the last four digits of social security numbers, but more than a few faculty—of whom I was one—simply posted grades beside the full names of students for all to see. Mr. Good, like me a young instructor only two or three years older than the seniors we taught, employed an elaborate grading system by which students received points for attendance, for class participation, for homework assignments, for collateral reading, for short papers, for pop quizzes, for a term paper, for four or five major examinations, for the midterm examination, for the comprehensive final examination, and for any number of extra credit activities besides. A total of two thousand points were possible, I realized as I waited, and the young man pleading with Mr. Good had earned 1199 points, one point short of a D, a mere .05 percent of the total possible, and had failed the course. Already on academic probation and struggling this semester in his three other classes as well, the young man literally begged Mr. Good to relent, to give him the benefit of the doubt, to award him just one extra unearned point, and to pass him with a D. Otherwise, the student explained, oblivious of my presence at the scene, he was certain he would flunk out and be drafted and sent to Vietnam to kill communists.

"No."

Mr. Good remained adamant.

"No."

Suddenly, to my astonishment, the student dropped to knees on the hard marble floor and, kneeling before his instructor, he folded his hands and fingers together in the attitude of prayer, his eyes wet with tears, he looked up at Mr. Good to beseech him, and he implored.

"Only one point!"

He wailed.

No.

Unmoved, Mr. Good shook his head no.

No.

"One point, Mr. Good, please, I beg you!"

No.

"Just one lousy point out of two thousand, I beg you, sir, please!"

No.

"Why?" the boy whined.

"I never change a grade," declared Mr. Good.

No.

The young man stopped his entreaty as if he had been slapped. He rose to his feet, turned, and left without a word. My friend tidied his desk and he and I walked the three blocks to the bar to share a cold beer or two. I didn't blame him at all. Many times I had been equally ruthless and cold. We young male faculty, safe from the draft and in only our first year or two of college teaching, prided ourselves on what we believed were our high standards and on what we called academic rigor. In retrospect, I look blind, arrogant, and stupid. I learned to hate the war and the two persons I thought primarily responsible for it—Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—with a passion. It seemed only a few months later that my colleague Mr. Good received a postcard from Vietnam. On it there had been no message, no note, just the signature of the young man who had knelt and begged for one point.

Drafted.

War.

21 Intelligence

In 1965 John called me—in a panic—and informed me that he had received notice from the Selective Service that he was to report for induction into the armed forces. But before he did so John was to fill out and return a form one question of which asked if John knew of any reason he felt he could not serve in the army.

John did.

"I refuse to take part in the civil wars of Vietnam and the Dominican Republic," John had written in reply to the question, "or in the suppression of the civil insurrection in Watts."

Jesus!

Simply astonished by his commitment, I was utterly stunned by his courage, and I had at the time not an inkling that this would be but the first of many times that the actions of my friend John would so affect me.

A few weeks later two men who identified themselves as lawyers with Army Intelligence knocked on the door of John's one-room apartment in Iowa City and told him that he was free to decline but that it would be best for him if he did as they asked.

John agreed to go with them.

They escorted him to their hotel room and interrogated him for eight hours. At the end of their questions the men asked John to read, correct, approve, and sign a transcript of their exchange. There were many minor discrepancies, John told me, and at first he had asked that these errors be corrected, but exhausted by the tension of his ordeal and eager to be allowed to go home, John had let them pass and had approved the text of the transcript and signed.

To me John emphasized that the two men definitely were no dumb Army bureaucrats. Dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and ties, and carrying black briefcases, they had impressed John as principled, highly intelligent, committed, learned, and informed. The whole experience, he said, had been intimidating, intense, and just plain scary. John had received a carbon copy of the final transcript and he let me read it. It was more than twenty pages long, as I remember, maybe thirty, single-spaced. I felt deep respect and admiration for my friend—for his integrity, his intelligence, his courage, and his wit. 

"Is there anything you do like about this country?" the men asked John near the end of his interrogation.

"I like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution," John replied.

Months passed.

Then in the mail a second time John received the identical notice of induction and order to report that he had received the first time and—without any mention of his three objections to military service or of his interrogation by agents of Army Intelligence—a request that he fill out and return the very same form.

John was distraught.

Now his girlfriend was pregnant. He did not know what to do. For lack of any better idea he got married and informed the draft board that his wife was going to have a baby. The rest was a formality.

John was deferred.

Like me.

20 Kramden

            Twice I struck my wife.

"A man never hits a woman no matter what."

Never.

I heard my father say that more than once as I was growing up.

It made sense to me.

As a teenager I accepted without question the prevailing double standard of the time and I considered any woman by definition and by nature both a biological inferior and a second-class citizen—indeed I related to my girlfriend that way as did many if not all of my friends—yet I would have been both shocked and disgusted to learn that one of my friends or that any man had physically abused a woman.

"One average man can whip two average women," my father declared as if it were a fact of biology.

That belief, too, I shared.

Nevertheless—

The first time was in our tiny basement apartment in Ames only a month or so after our daughter Donna was born. At seven in the morning I walked the two blocks to the bus stop in Ames and waited to ride the city bus to campus where—with one hour off for lunch—I attended classes back to back from 8:00 a.m. till 6:00 p.m. and then caught the city bus back home. Cold and wet from my short walk in the snow and discouraged and depressed by my lack of success in my courses in math and science, I walked into our apartment one night totally oblivious to what the lives of my wife and newborn daughter might be like and demanded my dinner. Standing in the kitchen Leigh cradled in her arms our baby Donna just six weeks old and fast asleep and swaddled in a baby blanket like a papoose.

"It's not ready."

"Why not?" I wanted to know.

My wife did not respond to my question and for some reason her silence seemed defiant and this annoyed me. I made a look of disgust, took two steps forward, and extended my right arm and hand to her face. Then with the tips of my three middle fingers I tapped my wife lightly once across the mouth. Never before had I been physically violent with Leigh nor had I ever even threatened her with physical violence. In the two and a half years of our relationship—first as girlfriend and boyfriend and then as newlyweds and as teen parents—the idea of using force or violence against Leigh had never entered my head. To this day I do not know the origin of the impulse to slap her. I think perhaps I was imitating something I had seen in the movies or maybe on television—that is my best guess. I did not hit Leigh hard. I didn't swing my arm or hand. It was no more than a little wave of my three fingers—they moved no more than an inch—and I'd not intended to cause her any physical pain. But still it was, I know, an unambiguous gesture of arrogance and contempt, a gratuitous insult, and Leigh knew it. First her eyes widened in surprise and then Leigh took two quick steps backward until she stood five feet from me perhaps to prevent me from slapping her again. Enraged, Leigh set her jaw, clamped her lips together so tightly they turned white, I remember, and then from across the room in an underhand motion totally without warning she tossed our baby at me.

Wha—!

I caught Donna in the crook of my elbows. I could hardly believe what had just happened. I trembled in astonishment and alarm. My knees felt so wobbly and weak I thought they might buckle.

"What are you doing!" I exclaimed.

Leigh said nothing.

She just glared at me with hate in her eyes.

Unrepentant.

Defiant.

It scared me.

Leigh had shown me of what she was capable and it was a lesson I needed.

I was stupid.

Vain.

Mean.

It was twelve years before I made the same mistake again. On this second occasion I had stopped at the tavern on my way home from work and drunk a couple of beers. When I got home I kicked off my sandals just inside the door. In summer shorts, her legs crossed, her arms folded across her chest, Leigh was sitting on the couch, sullen and pissed that as usual I had again walked in with a beer buzz.

"So what's for dinner?" I asked.

I stepped over to where she sat and with the ball of my bare foot I kicked her slightly—no more than a nudge really or so I imagined at the time—in the calf of her bare leg.

Leigh acted as if it had been a jolt.

"Ow."

I laughed—scoffed.

Without a word Leigh stood up from the couch and walked to the kitchen where she busied herself until she called me to dinner. The next morning I slept late and when I finally came down the stairs to fix my coffee Leigh was sitting on the couch right where she had been when I walked in the door the previous evening.

"Good morning," I said on my way to the kitchen.

Nothing.

Hm.

From my point of view the minor incident the night before had been so insignificant that I had no memory of it. Leigh let me prepare my coffee before she called to me from the living room and asked me to join her there.

"I want to show you something," she said.

I walked over.

I waited.

"What?" I asked.

"Look."

Leigh pointed to her calf.

From just below her knee to just above her ankle it was black and blue.

"That's what you did to me," Leigh said calmly.

I was stunned.

"Oh my god!" I said.

I tell this story often in my classes and, when I do, I act it out.

I select a woman in the front row and warn her that I am going to nudge her in the calf, softly, only as hard as I imagined I had nudged my wife that afternoon. I want to demonstrate for my students just how warped and unreliable our perceptions of our own conduct can be and just how grossly distorted had been my own estimation of the force of my kick. I had kicked my wife hard, of course, much harder than I had intended and remembered. No mere nudge could have caused the white and blue bruising I watched turn purple, yellow, and green over the next several days.

"One of these days, Alice!" Kramden warns his wife.

He makes a fist.

"Pow!" he shouts. "Right in the kisser!"

Again—

"One of these days, Alice!" he warns.

He shakes it.

"Straight to the moon!"

19 Molly

It was around this same time that I met and fell in love with Molly, who had, like my wife Leigh, married her high school sweetheart when she became pregnant. The same age as I and the mother of two children the same ages as mine, Molly was studying English while her husband, a trucker, was on the road. Molly and I seemed to exist in parallel universes, and our relationship of a year and a half was the first and the longest of my eleven affairs over the next eleven years. I loved Molly and, had I known how, I would have divorced my wife Leigh and married her, but at that time I was still so immature and stupid and selfish and vain that I had no idea how even to begin to extricate myself from a predicament so complex. Late one night our senior year when Molly and I had fallen asleep in her bed we were jolted awake by a driver repeatedly honking the horn of a car right outside her tiny apartment in married student housing. Sleepy, confused, we lay in bed and just listened for more than several seconds trying to make sense of the situation.

Molly finally solved the riddle and sat up in bed.

"It's your wife!" she exclaimed.

No.

I dressed, hurried outside, and lied.

I lied.

When our first child had been born in mid-January of 1962, Leigh had changed from girl to woman, wife, and mother overnight, it seemed, while I had remained an irresponsible and silly boy. I often tell my students that I remained sixteen years old for sixteen years. Leigh chose to believe the fiction I invented, whatever it was, or to pretend that she did.

What choice did she have really?

Though as husband and father I was worthless, in 1965 it would have appeared almost impossible to survive, let alone succeed, as a divorced mother of two small children. Leigh loved me, and I learned to love her, and thanks almost entirely to Leigh we were loving companions and loving parents for fourteen years despite my multiple infidelities and the almost totally separate and secret social and intellectual life I led outside our home. This college pattern set in my junior and senior years at Iowa State defined our marriage.

18 Diamond

I had been unable to study the problems in my math and physics textbooks for just two hours or three, but now I found myself reading philosophy and literature late into the night and early morning. In addition to the texts required by my professors I tackled on my own the classics I had been told any educated person should read. I stayed up all night to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce and I kept Crime and Punishment beside my bed and read one chapter a night until I finished it. Soon my entire understanding of life and I had been transformed through the study of art, literature, philosophy, history, psychology, the social sciences and the humanities. Though only slowly and sporadically at first, I did begin to consider nonviolence from the point of view of the literatus, the intellectual, the nihilist, the esthete. For me neither a religion nor a philosophy it was rather a kind of contempt for violence.

Joyce:

You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.

Over the years I came to see this passage as almost a translation of my favorite injunction of Jesus:

"Behold! I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves."

Literature.

Art.

Education.

The International Pacifist Conspiracy.

School.

On June 11, 1963, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sat down at a busy intersection of downtown Saigon, he crossed his legs in the full lotus meditation posture, and with the help of his fellow monks he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire to call attention to the oppression and suffering of the Vietnamese people. Though I had been puzzled and awed by the eerie photograph of his self-immolation—a ragged, flapping flag of flame unfurling from his form, his spine erect, his legs crossed, his hands resting in his lap—at that time I knew almost nothing of either Vietnam or Buddhism.

In November of the same year just four hours after my son Devon had been born, John F. Kennedy was assassinated—his murder a red bloody mist in one frozen frame of the Zapruder film. Within just a few months, it seemed, several hundred thousand American soldiers were engaged in the war in Vietnam. Of my acquaintances John was the first to oppose it. I did not—mainly because it did not touch me personally. Though by this time I detested war and violence, I was what might be called an apolitical liberal, no coward but at best only well-intentioned and lost. One morning of my junior year at Iowa State I climbed the dark, dusty stairs to my friend Larry Reed's one-room apartment in campus town. There Larry and John and our friend John Magnuson, whom we called Soon, were all listening to a recording of the strangest song I had ever heard—by Bob Dylan:

O what did you see—

My blue-eyed son?

And what did you see—

My darlin young one?

I saw a newborn baby

Wild wolves all around it

A highway of diamonds

With nobody on it

I saw a black branch

With blood that kept drippin

I saw a room full of men

Their hammers a-bleedin

I saw a white ladder

All covered with water

I saw ten thousand talkers

Whose tongues were all broken

I saw guns and sharp swords

In the hands of young children

And it's a hard

It's a hard

It's a hard

And it's a hard

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

17 College

In 1961, the year I graduated, the only war going on was the Cold War and at eighteen I registered for the military draft. Had I been drafted and inducted I would have served without a second thought. Though I considered myself like my parents an Eisenhower and Nixon Republican, the truth is that I had of my own not a single political idea in my head. I believed that the progress of the world depended upon its becoming exactly like the United States of America, prosperous and free, indeed I thought such a transformation was inevitable, and I can remember even fantasizing privately, wildly, about the possibility of the United States' simply annihilating all the people whom I considered the primary obstacles to this utopia, our enemies the Communists of the Soviet Union and Red China, by raining down upon their alien urban populations our entire arsenal of atomic and nuclear bombs. Why not just kill them all, I wondered, and be done with it? Utterly mindless, I recognized no connection between my idle fantasy and the Final Solution of Auschwitz and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nor any contradiction.  

All through elementary school, junior high, and high school I had been straight A.

Ha!

Straight A stupid.

In the spring of our senior year my girlfriend Leigh got pregnant.

No!

In the summer we married.

Oof!

In the fall I registered at ISU and we moved to Ames.

The draft?

Enrolled in college, married, baby on the way—

I was deferred.

At Iowa State University in 1961 I met John Ward and, after I had collected a number of Cs and Ds and I think even an F or two in my naive and half-hearted endeavor to become the mechanical engineer I knew my father hoped I would be, halfway through my second year I gave up. Nearly a straight-A student in public school grades 1 through 12, now after four full quarters of college math and science I was dragging behind me a cumulative grade point average of 2.32, a C minus. I switched my major from engineering to English, the only department in which I had so far seemed able to earn an A.

The path of least resistance.

Instead of physics, chemistry, calculus, and orientation to engineering I was now enrolled in the first half of the survey of American literature, in the first third of the survey of western civilization, and in introductory courses in sociology and philosophy. It was in the introduction to philosophy that I encountered the young doctoral candidate and instructor Richard Van Iten, for whom I read selections from the pre-Socratic philosophers, the Meno of Plato, Discourse on Method by Descartes, and the Dialogues of Berkeley. The subject of his doctoral dissertation, Van Iten told us, was whether or not the stain on his kitchen tablecloth really existed. Like Remmes, Van Iten strode back and forth in front of his class of forty students as he speculated on mind, reality, and morality, always interesting, stimulating, provocative.

One day he lectured on Socrates, Plato, and justice and then paused to entertain questions.

A young man sitting not far from me raised his hand.

"Yes?"

"I believe justice belongs only to God," said the boy.

Van Iten's reaction was instantaneous.

He took two steps to his chair, stepped onto it with both feet, and then leaped onto his desk and stood. He raised both of his arms above his head and shook his fists as he bellowed.

"Yes, damn it, but God is too slow!"

16 Teacher

At sixteen, for the first time I called myself a pacifist, I don't know why. I had absolutely no understanding of the full ramifications of what I was saying. In high school I had exceptional teachers, Mr. Gorman for Latin and Mr. Remmes for American history, to name only two, and by their fine personal example they showed me an alternative to the models presented by the local coaches, ministers, farmers, laborers, clerks, retailers, and mechanics like my father and most of his friends.

Remmes was incomparable, peerless, to my mind without a doubt the greatest teacher in the history of Shenandoah High School. I met him first when I was a sophomore. We exchanged greetings but didn't talk. Sandy Overbey, two grades ahead of me, was in American History and basically just wanted me to take a look at this guy Mr. Remmes who in a year or two had taken the school by storm. What went on in his classes eventually became for me the most important academic news of every academic day. Good-looking, athletic, and slender with thinning blond hair and piercing blue eyes that fixed you in a glance and held it, he paced up and down in front of the class, thinking out loud to himself about war, slavery, revolution, economics, government, and religion, Catholicism specifically and without apology. Mr. R.W. Remmes exuded academic competition. He was arrogant, a word he relished just pronouncing and applied often to himself, supremely confident, even egotistical, proud of it, and he dared censure, defying authority every day it seemed, promoting mind, reason, tolerance, awareness, intellectual conversation. He loved language, he loved talking, he loved words. I remember he loved especially the words "bedlam," "chaos," "anarchy," "nihilism," the words "god," "angel," "intellect," the words "creation" and "procreation." I remember vividly a time he digressed at length to explain what he considered the important distinction between the words "immoral" and "amoral." He liked pronouncing words, he like pronouncing, period. Mr. Remmes had an unusual, curious, brilliant, restless, searching mind, a resonant voice—and principles. He wanted us to be skeptical, curious, smart, brave, and good.

After reading an abridgement of Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott and writing an English class book report for extra credit, I thought I was unexpectedly prepared when Mr. Remmes, disgusted with the level of reading by his own students in his history and economics classes, interrupted his lecture.

"I'll give an A to the person who last read a great book," he offered.

I raised my hand.

"Yes?"

"Ivanhoe."

Remmes thought for only a second.

"No, that's not a great book," he ruled.

Each day he walked about the front of the room, stopping to direct a question or coming down an aisle to get in someone's face. I saw no films in his classes. There were no nonacademic amusements or study periods. We were there to listen, to think, to ask and to answer questions, and to take tests. Often he began class with remarks on current events. He read aloud from news magazines, and he paced about the room, engaging our attention by looking directly into our eyes and asking a question about right and wrong, good and evil, faith in god, ethics, world affairs, or sex. He didn't try to be an entertainer either. He did not titillate or sensationalize. Nor did discussion ever descend to gossip and bs. He simply wouldn't let it. Remmes was no character, no eccentric. A single man in his early thirties, he told us boys that his weaknesses were women and drink, but around students his conduct was impeccable and circumspect. He ran a tight ship and let no one get out of line.

Fascinated, I did not simply admire the man.

I loved him.

In the late afternoon Mr. Remmes would sometimes have dinner at Berning's Cafe and, if friends and I didn't have sports, he might invite three or four of us to join him in the large corner booth where class and conversation would resume until the waitress brought him his coffee and then his dinner. One afternoon four of my friends and I were present at Mr. Remmes' table when he confronted a chemistry teacher who had asked if he might sit down and join us, a young man in just his first year of teaching who had been buying some of us boys liquor for our weekend parties. Smiling, he had only just sat down when Remmes stopped and fixed the young man's eyes with his own icy stare and sternly stated:

"I hope what I've heard isn't true and you're not buying booze for these kids!"

Exposed.

"No," the man lied. "I'm not."

Exposed.

Silent, Remmes just stared.

Exposed.

The younger man melted and shriveled to nothing right before our eyes.

Oz.

I was astonished.

Awed.

Mr. Remmes was my inspiration, the first true intellectual I had ever witnessed.

Thinker.

The reason I became a teacher.

My idol.