The Great Good Thing (12 page)

When I was seventeen, I took a job at a gas station. I had just finished school and I wanted to earn money for my first road trip across the country. In those days before self-service pumps, an attendant used to fill your car, check your oil and tire pressure, and clean off your windshield with a squeegee and a rag. I was that guy. Six days a week, eleven hours a day, I ran to answer the bell that rang whenever a car drove into the station. I worked such long hours that at night, when I went to bed, I would hear the bell in my dreams and leap out from beneath the covers only to find myself standing in my bedroom, dazed. And every day, all day long, the radio in the gas station garage played that song, the season's big hit, “So Far Away.” The wistful melody made me yearn for the highway with the force of erotic desire. For twenty years afterward, whenever I heard the opening bars, I could still smell gasoline—and I still hungered to be travelin' on.

Experience. That was the stuff of life and literature to me. A classical education was the last thing I wanted.

This was what my father and I fought about, more than anything. I had declared I would not go to college. Ironically, my father was panicked and enraged. All the years of my youth, he had denigrated teachers and intellectuals. Now I wanted no more part of them—and he was absolutely aghast. How would
I get a good job without that “piece of paper”? How would I get along in the world—that place he always called “reality”? But he didn't understand: I didn't want a good job. I was going to be a writer! I didn't need an education. I needed Experience.

In any case, I hated school too much to keep on going. I can't begin to describe my feverish contempt for the place. I despised classrooms. Sitting and sitting there, smothered by stopped time. I hated the fools and failures in authority. All the meaningless knowledge they wanted to saddle me with. I yearned for the world of Experience beyond the walls.

To put myself out of my misery, I volunteered for an experimental program. Students were allowed to fulfill the requirements of senior year with a mere eight weeks in summer school. I think the program was designed to clear the high school halls of juvenile delinquents. As I remember it, that's who showed up for the classes mostly: thugs, bullies, bad girls, and me. Spending the summer in school was excruciating. But then it was over. I was seventeen and I was free.

So I hit the road. For the next two or three years, off and on, I wandered. Back and forth across the country by car and Greyhound bus. Sometimes with a friend, often alone. Through wild storms and desolate summers. Through every state on the continent with the exception of North Dakota—I figured South Dakota stood in for both. I slept in hobo camps; in campgrounds; in public parks; in cheap, bug-ridden motels; and on a city sidewalk once or twice. I met people from the deep country, north and south, and from all the towns and cities along the way. Occasionally I had the sort of adventures I
hungered for. A mudslide in Montana nearly hurled me and my car over a cliff. A blinding blizzard outside of Denver left me stranded and nearly frozen in a vast white wilderness off-road. A few times, I even met a girl here and there who let me live out some version of my pop-song fantasy: a brief, intense, meltingly romantic relationship and then, don't look twice, I was gone.

At some point during this first year of traveling, I did send out one college application. I don't remember why. Maybe I got bored between excursions. In any case, it was a careless, dashed-off thing. A quickly filled-in form. A quickly scribbled essay. I sent it to the University of California at Berkeley. It was the only college I thought I might enjoy. For one thing, it was as far away from home as I could get. If there had been a school floating out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I would have applied to that one too. But for another thing, Berkeley was where a lot of the riots took place during the sixties. Not just riots but drug use and wild sex too. That sounded like just the curriculum for me.

I didn't expect to get accepted. I didn't really care whether I got accepted or not. When I didn't hear anything back from the school, I assumed they had rejected me. But one day, in the midst of my ramblings, I found myself in San Francisco. Out of curiosity, I drove across the bay to the campus. I went into the admissions office and asked about my application. The lady there told me I had been accepted to the school, but they couldn't mail out my acceptance letter because I had not returned the padlock to my high school locker and would not officially graduate until I paid the high school a four-dollar fine!

This amused me no end. Not just the locker lock but the whole business, start to finish. Berkeley was considered one of the best universities in the country. Somehow, I had managed to fake my way into a top-flight school.

I decided, well, I would go.

I
arrived in Berkeley and promptly fell into a pathological depression. Away from the endless arguments with my father, away from the mindless freedom of the open road, all that rage inside me turned in on itself.

I had talked my parents into paying for a tiny apartment on the city's north side. I didn't want to live in a dorm. I wanted privacy so I could go on writing four hours a day. I hated sitting in lecture halls, so I scheduled all my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Even so, I rarely went to any of them. As a result, I was often isolated, cut off from much of college life.

The city itself was a disappointment to me. The radical years there were over. The riots and mayhem I'd been hoping to see had passed like a storm. The revolution of the sixties was supposed to have ushered in a new “Age of Aquarius” when all would be peace and love everywhere. Big surprise: it never happened. Instead, the college town's streets were littered
with the detritus of the hoped-for millennium. Scruffy street people begged and sold drugs along the sidewalks of the main drag, Telegraph Avenue. Self-serious radicals hawked their failed philosophies with pamphlets and grandiose speeches in Sproul Plaza, the university quad.

Myself, I drank. I slept long hours, sometimes twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day. I caught colds that lasted for weeks and weeks. I haunted restaurants and bars, glum and beetle-browed, barely able to speak to strangers yet always looking to pick up girls. The few relationships I had with women were brief and reckless. When they were over, I would hole up in my room for days, tormented by hypochondriacal fears that I had contracted a sexual disease.

Late at night, through the night, I would write in a kind of fever. I would sit at the table by the window in my little kitchen. Week-old dirty dishes filled the sink beside me, the food on them turning green. I would scribble in my notebooks hour after hour without lifting my eyes. With a sort of mad discipline, I taught myself my trade. I would spend an entire night writing and rewriting a single sentence. Then I would spend the next night expanding the sentence into a paragraph and rewriting that. Then, during the next two nights, I would turn the paragraph into a page, writing and rewriting every word until it sang to me, enlarging that first line until I had a full scene or even a short story. When I was finished, I would stumble pale and grey into the pale, grey light of dawn. Dressed in a ratty trench coat, unshaven, hollow-eyed, I would wander down to the local doughnut shop to watch them make
the first doughnuts of the day. I would carry a hot one home and devour it in a bite or two. Then I would crawl into bed and sleep and sleep until well into the afternoon.

After a couple of months like this, I finally realized something was wrong with me. I willed myself to get out of bed earlier and to get out of the apartment more. I joined the campus radio station as a news reader, just to meet people. I had an old friend from Great Neck in one of the dorms and he brought me into his weekly poker game. The worst of my depression started to lift, though a heavy sadness lingered in me still. I felt lost.

In class—when I did go to class—I went through all the usual razzle-dazzle shenanigans: bluff and fakery. I read none of the books. I conned and wrote my way to passing grades. I remember once in particular taking an essay test on William Blake's “Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” It's a great poem—now one of my favorites of his—but I hadn't read a word of it at the time. Funnier still: Blake was both a poet and an engraver and the subject of the course was the interplay between the visual and written arts, so not only did I not know what “Visions” was about, I didn't even know whether it was a poem or a picture. I had to write the entire essay using the vaguest words I could think of so as not to give my ignorance away. “This work—if work is the word I want—draws a picture, so to speak, of Blake's internal world . . .” It was the utterest of utter nonsense. What poem or engraving doesn't draw a picture, so to speak, of the poet or artist's internal world? I laughed out loud when I received a grade of B-minus on the test. B-minus was fine with me. I just wanted to get by.

I should mention—for lovers of earthly justice—that I did get caught at this flim-flam once. It was incredibly humiliating. I took a seminar on the novels of William Faulkner, a small discussion group of maybe ten or twelve students. I was the star of the class. I had opinions on everything Faulkner had ever written. I would hold forth eloquently at almost every session. It was just the sort of bloviation with which I'd always hidden my ignorance, just the trick to avoid any sober fact-based discussion that might queer my con.

One day, however, the teacher sprang a short-answer quiz on us. She had warned us she would, and I tried to avoid it, but I mistook the schedule and got caught. It was awful. Here I'd been mouthing off about these books for weeks and I couldn't answer the simplest questions about their plots or characters—because, of course, I hadn't read them. I received an F on the test, and my fakery was revealed. Even worse, I had to go to the professor's office to pick up the test booklet personally. She was a smart, attractive woman whom I liked and respected. It was terrible to have to look her in the eye as she handed me the booklet, both of us knowing what a fraud I was. But if ever a son of Adam deserved his fate, I was that man!

By late winter of my first year in school, I felt as if I was strangling on my own wanderlust. Mardi Gras was coming to New Orleans. Now, there was a party town I'd always loved whenever I'd passed through it, all Dixieland, hookers, and booze. I bought a round-trip bus ticket. I put a hundred dollars cash in my pocket. I lighted out for the territory.

At first, it was spectacular. Mardi Gras was everything I
could have wished for. Even on the Greyhound down, a wild country girl in the seat beside me threw a blanket over us both and came into my arms in the deep shadows of the night. When I reached the city, I saw a full-blown Feast of Fools. Beneath the wrought-iron railings and lantern-style streetlights of the French Quarter, the people flowed and frolicked and danced. The crowds were so dense they carried me with them like a riptide. There were cold drinks and hot jazz, both of which I loved. There were grotesque floats carrying giant pagan gods made of papier-mâché. Half-naked men and women, their breasts draped with bead necklaces, their faces hidden behind masks, gamboled around the idols in an all-day Bacchanal. Local girls took me to their apartments. Drifter girls took me into their sleeping bags. I felt alive for the first time in half a year.

But by the third day, my money ran out. I had no credit cards. This was before ATMs. I had assumed I'd be able to cash a check, but no one would accept my identification. I had nowhere to stay, nowhere to clean up, not even a bag to sleep in. I spent one night in the basement of the stadium at Tulane University. The city had set the space aside to handle the influx of homeless wanderers. I slept on the concrete floor wrapped in my thin trench coat. When I woke up, my whole body was rigid and thrumming with cold. Another day, as I was swept along in the vast, roiling mob, I saw a girl lose her footing just ahead of me. I caught her arm to steady her. By some insane chance or providence, she turned out to be a girl from my high school! Reluctantly, she and her boyfriend let me sleep for a few hours on the spare bed in his dorm room.

After that, though, I was on the streets. The rains began, heavy tropical rains. I became as filthy and disheveled as all the other homeless drifters in the city. I had enough loose change in my pockets to buy rolls and doughnuts, but I was getting hungry too. When I tried to take shelter in the bus station for the night, the policeman there kept rapping me with his billy club whenever I dozed off. When I went out in the rain-drenched streets and curled up in a doorway, another cop dragged me to my feet and chased me away, threatening to put me in jail.

By the time the party ended, I was burning hot with fever. My vision was blurred. My mind was muddy. I staggered when I walked. All I had left in my pockets now was my ticket home. It took days to get a seat on one of the crowded buses out of town but I finally did it. I leaned my steaming forehead against the cool bus window and lapsed into semiconsciousness.

The bus rolled out. I grew sicker by the minute, by the mile. I coughed and shuddered and began to shiver uncontrollably. At a stop in Texas somewhere, an ancient-looking black man boarded the bus and sat down beside me. I was hallucinating by then, wandering lost in hazy dreams, but I'm pretty sure the guy was real. He saw me trembling next to him. He leaned over and felt my forehead. He took off his heavy overcoat and wrapped it around me, tucking it in behind my back and buttoning it closed under my chin. As the bus rolled on, he hand-fed me aspirins. He held a cup of water to my lips and steadied my head with his hand so I could drink. After I-don't-know-how-many hours of this treatment, my fever broke. I started pouring sweat.
“You'll be all right now, son,” the man said to me. I fell into a deep sleep. When I woke up, I felt better—and the old man was gone. I was half-convinced he was an angel. If he wasn't then, he is now.

I made it back to school, but by the end of that academic year, I had had enough of it. I dropped out. I wandered around the country some more, then returned to Berkeley, where my friends were. I landed a job in the news department of a small radio station out by the bay. It was an ironic triumph. I went there to do a voice audition. I sat in the news director's office and read some news copy out loud. I'd never had a professional audition before. I was nervous. My reading was terrible and I knew it. I was sure I wouldn't get the job. As I came to the end of the copy, I glanced up. To my surprise, I saw a small picture of my father on the wall. It was a promotional football card with my father posing as a football player. Startled, I blurted out, “Hey, that's my dad!” The news director was from back east. He was a big Klavan and Finch fan. He hired me on the spot.

More Experience. Not long after I joined the station's small news team as a reporter, the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by a gang of radicals. It was the crime of the decade. At nineteen, I found myself moving in a pack with the most famous reporters in the country. It was like some kind of crazy circus with journalists as the clowns. I saw sophisticated national newsmen get into fistfights at press conferences over who would put his camera where. I joined celebrity reporters in sneaking past watchful guards to get into crime scenes. I learned to steal
documents off officials' desks like they did. At one point, a five-foot-nothing woman from some local newspaper somewhere taught me an excellent trick. As we walked together to a one-on-one interview with a police spokesman, she elbowed me in the solar plexus so hard she knocked me into a wall—just to make sure she got the interview first.

Meanwhile, the Patty Hearst story got curiouser and more deadly. Soon the missing heiress was issuing tape recordings announcing she had joined her kidnappers' radical army. She had herself photographed holding a machine gun during a bank robbery committed by her captors. Later, she claimed she had been brainwashed by them, but that didn't save her from doing time. It all climaxed down in Los Angeles with the radicals holed up in a house, shooting it out with the LAPD. The house caught fire and most of the radicals burned to death. So much for the Age of Aquarius.

By the time that final gunfight exploded, though, I had left the radio station and returned to university. I hadn't had a change of heart about school, not exactly. But a faint—the faintest—glimmer of understanding had begun to filter through the darkness of my angry and egotistical ignorance. It was beginning to seem to me just possible—just barely possible—that I did not know as much as I thought I did. It was beginning to occur to me that I might not learn what a really good writer needed to learn by staying out here in the working world. Experience was fine. Experience was fun. But no matter how much of it you got, you could only really experience the territory right around you, a vanishing arc of space
and time. Not only that. Your personality shaped your perceptions of whatever you saw. Your upbringing, your culture, your little moment of history hemmed your vision round. In the words of my old pal William Blake—whom I still hadn't read yet—“The eye altering alters all.”

But what if you could see what other men saw—“men and women too,” as Blake would hurry to say? What if you could enter other minds? Not just those minds that shared your point of view, but also those that saw life differently, had other personalities, other upbringings in eras other than your own? What if you could become not just a Huckleberry rambler through the country you were given, not just a seeker of Experience in your accidental age but also, in Blake's mighty phrase, “a Mental Traveller” through a vast universe of deep and sometimes contradictory ideas?

Given my anger, given my egotism, given my ignorance, I'm not sure how such a notion had even begun to occur to me. But I think it had been suggested to my mind during that miserable first year in college by another old friend of mine: William Faulkner.

Here was an odd thing. Though I rarely read any of the work assigned in class, though I hardly ever studied for tests, I always bought every book that was listed on the syllabus and I never threw any of the books away. I was very conscientious about this. If the campus bookstore was missing a volume on my list, I would hunt it down elsewhere or order it and return to the store to pick it up when it arrived. Whatever books the school assigned, I bought them and kept them, completely
unread. It was a strange thing to do, not like me at all. My little studio soon became lined, stacked, and littered with the many books I was ignoring.