Paper Covers Rock (8 page)

Glenn Albright Everson, III, Class of 1984

Achilles in the flesh. If you were a casting agent and were looking for someone to play the legendary Greek hero, Glenn would be your man. Two years ago, I wanted to be Glenn. I wanted his blond curly hair; I wanted his brain. I wanted his walk, his athleticism, his easy way with other guys. It wasn’t lust. I wanted his house on the golf course, his happy-looking
family, his girlfriend with the thick brown hair. I wanted his whole entire history.

Our first year at Birch, he invited me to his house for Thanksgiving. He had overheard me say that I was supposed to spend it with my mom and didn’t want to. So I told my mom that she and Victor could go on to Aspen without me (which I knew they wanted to do anyway), and I rode down to Charlotte with Glenn on the bus. The room I stayed in had a fireplace. Glenn let his dog, Bailey, an old black lab, sleep with me because he knew I missed my own dog. At Thanksgiving dinner, Mrs. Everson poured me a small glass of wine, and when I drank that, she poured me a second one, no questions asked. The Eversons ate by candlelight, even though it was only four o’clock. Afterward, everyone gathered in the living room, and we had to say one thing we were thankful for. I said I was thankful to have a friend like Glenn. Then they told family stories, and I listened and laughed. Glenn’s big sister, a junior in college, told me that I was an old soul. She said I had a great smile. That night, Glenn’s dad lit the logs in the fireplace in my room, and I slept like a baby, Bailey at my feet. In the morning, when I woke, I hugged Bailey to me as I watched the last orange ember burn itself out.

For the rest of the school year, Glenn and I played cards together on dorm and tossed the football around outside in the quad. Glenn showed me that I had interesting things to say because he encouraged me to say them; all the other guys I knew would rather hear themselves talk. One day Glenn asked me what I thought happened when we die, and I told him, “Nothing. We rot in the earth.” I told him that the idea of coming from dust and returning to dust was the one
believable thing in the Bible, and he looked at me, wide-eyed, like I was some kind of prophet.

But he was the teacher, not me. When the weather grew warmer, he taught me the basics of lacrosse, a game I had barely even heard of before I came to Birch, but I wasn’t very coordinated and got cut from the first round of the freshman team tryouts. He was the only freshman who made the varsity squad, and I couldn’t help but wonder, out of all the guys in the class, why Glenn had chosen me.

And then, at the end of our sophomore year, Glenn didn’t ask me to be his roommate, and he turned into someone I didn’t know as well as I thought I did. I honestly believe that if Glenn hadn’t roomed with Thomas, Thomas would still be alive.

Is Male, No Middle Name, No Roman Numerals, Class of 1984

Once a blank slate; now an above-average student from a broken family. Lives with father, son of German immigrants, in a town you’ve never heard of (Black Mountain) in an A-frame house hidden from the road. Will attend a state-supported university (but probably not the one where his father teaches) and will be considered a man of mystery by the coeds because of his seldom-seen dimple. Will go down in the record books as agreeing to The Plan because friendship is more important than romance. Will go down in the record books as being responsible for his friend Thomas Broughton’s death. Is Male could have saved Thomas, maybe, if Is Male hadn’t been goofing around in the water. Is Male had worked as a lifeguard the summer before at a camp, where he’d earned extra
money by cleaning the mess hall and the bathrooms. Is Male was a janitor.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 16, 7:13 A.M
.

Poetry Is All Metaphor

Thomas doesn’t come to me in dreams. He comes to me just before that, when I’m trying to sleep. I write poems when I can’t sleep. I write them in my head and memorize them for the morning, when I can record them in the light of day.

When I was in the third form, a starling got caught in some electrical wire hanging from the high ceiling of our dorm’s porch. Thomas stood there with me, watching it. Helpless together, we were near tears because the bird was going to tear its wing off trying to escape, and we decided the humane thing to do was to put it out of its misery. The whole incident has been burning inside me for almost two years, so I figure I might as well write a poem about it. Here it is.

(Starlings are birds that push native birds out of their nests; in other words, they’re not the nicest birds in the world. So I changed it to a sparrow.)

(Made-up names to protect the innocent)

(In case you were wondering, I never owned a parakeet—more poetic license.)

Writing is about making choices, Miss Dovecott says. One word or phrase or title over another. So many options that they’re almost overwhelming. Which is why it is sometimes so easy to grab the cliché, to reach out to what is familiar. But don’t. Because metaphor is all about the comparison of two unfamiliar, unlike things.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 7:29 P.M
.

I’m getting the distinct feeling that Moby-Dick is a symbol. If he were just a regular black whale, he wouldn’t be. So Melville made him white, like a ghost. White is innocent. A month ago, so was I. Miss Dovecott believes that “loss of innocence” is the “overarching theme of Western literature.” Maybe; I haven’t read enough of it to say. But her definition is deficient.
Loss of innocence
is not the small and/or giant steps that lead to the gray areas, the complexities, that are the substance of adulthood.
Loss of innocence
is the knowledge that your brain, no matter how much you cajole it, can never make your heart pure. My brain has been so unfaithful. It has tricked me into alliances I didn’t even know I’d formed.

Lovely in Her Bones

First thing Monday morning (yesterday), Miss Dovecott asks us to get out our syllabi; we are going to make a change
because we need more in-depth work with the concept of metaphor.

Syllabi. All of our teachers must have taken Latin. I take Latin, too, but I’m not in the honors section. Does Miss Dovecott have ulterior motives for replacing the innocuous “The Author to Her Book,” by Anne Bradstreet—which, for the record, is rife with implied comparison—with “I Knew a Woman,” by Theodore Roethke? Glenn is certain that she does, and I have to admit, he might have a point. For homework, we are to track, through all four stanzas, the poem’s use of metaphor. It’s the dirtiest poem I’ve read in my entire life.

(X-Rated) Homework

“That woman in the poem must have been hot,” Ben Wilson says to me this morning as I sling my backpack onto my desk to retrieve my homework. I look at Miss Dovecott to see if she has heard. She is smiling, pulling at the tip of her ponytail. I would like to take a bath with her and undo that ponytail, see her hair fan out in the water like a mermaid’s.

“Teddy Row-Whoever was p-whipped,” says Jovan Davis.

“Yep,” says Ben.

Joe Bonnin says to Miss Dovecott as we’re settling in, “I can’t believe that poem was in our book. You finally assigned us something I didn’t mind reading.”

We are paying attention now, watching to see how she will wade through the sexy imagery in the poem, and I wonder whatever happened with the penis drawing, and though Glenn has refused to own up to it, I am pretty darn sure it
was part of The Plan. “Well,” she says, “let’s first try to surmise what Roethke might ultimately be trying to say. If he is speaking to you, what is he telling you? Bailey?”

“Um, maybe he’s saying that a woman can change your life.”

“Good, good. Change it how?”

More hands go up. She lets Bailey Richards continue. “Maybe change the way you view time?”

“Right. Well done. So, Ben, how does the speaker view time differently?”

“Um, I’m not sure.”

“Look at the poem,” she says, “and see what you can find. Maybe in the last stanza.”

“ ‘I measure time by how a body sways,’ ” says Jovan.

“Right, Jovan. So what do you think that’s all about?”

“I guess it has something to do with, you know, boom-chicka-boom?”

Most guys are laughing. “Jovan,” Miss Dovecott says, “let’s try to look beyond that aspect of the poem for just a minute.”

“I don’t know if I can,” says Jovan. “I mean, I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but if it’s right there in front of you, you’re gonna look at it.”

The whole class is laughing now, and when Miss Dovecott raises her hand to calm us down, we quiet, but our eyes are all over one another’s, trying to measure who will pick up where Jovan left off.

“Glenn,” she says. “What do you think about the poem’s last line?”

“To be honest, I don’t think much of it. The poem would have been better without it. I think the line that comes before it is much stronger. Because isn’t the message of the poem that he learns from the woman? He
lives
to learn from her, he says. Time has nothing to do with it. He doesn’t care about time.”

“Yeah, the last line kind of diminishes the rest of the poem, especially with those parentheses,” I say, wondering if this is somehow part of The Plan or if Glenn really does believe this.

“Do you think men and women might read this poem differently?” she asks.

Joe Bonnin laughs. “I don’t know a single girl who would understand this poem.”

“I believe
that
,” says Jovan.

Glenn catches my eye before he speaks. “Miss Dovecott, I have to read it like a guy would. There’s no other way I can read it.”

She does not call on Glenn again even though he is clearly the best reader in the class. When she asks me what I’ve taken away from the poem, I read aloud from my homework, and I quote: “Roethke is saying that making love to an older woman is as transformative as poetry itself.”

I am too embarrassed to look at her, but Glenn tells me later that he watched the blush rise from the triangle of skin beneath her throat.

Elegy for Jane

This afternoon before practice, I look up Roethke poems in the library. There is one I like, “Elegy for Jane.” Roethke
knew Jane—she was his student—and he wrote a poem for her after she died by being thrown from a horse.

There is nothing sexual about this poem (unfortunately), but there is lots of metaphor: Jane is compared to a fish, a fern, and birds. Maybe she liked nature; maybe, to Roethke, she
was
nature, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. It is a sad and lonely poem, stuck here in this book, which will go back on this shelf when I’m through with it. No one will remember Jane unless they find her poem. Someday, no one will remember me.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 7:04 A.M
.

While I Was Writing My Elegy

This is where I start to doubt my good friend Golden Boy. This is where the ground between us begins to split. According to G.B., this is what supposedly happened.

At nine o’clock p.m., he walked into Miss Dovecott’s classroom, where she said she would be between eight and nine. He didn’t need help with his homework, a poem to be written in the form and rhyme scheme of Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” but he pretended to need it.

“She gave me her cool look,” Glenn tells me later in my room, “and I gave her mine right back, but she said she’d be glad to help and asked me to tell her how far I’d gotten.”

He said to her the same thing I’d been struggling with all evening: “It’s hard not to want to use Roethke’s words.”

“I understand,” Miss Dovecott answered. “They stick in your head because of the waltz rhythm.”

“Yeah,” Glenn agreed, laying a crumpled sheet of notebook paper on her desk. “It’s like I’m singing this song in my brain, and I can’t get beyond it to find my own song.”