The Cathedral and the Calaboose
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Michael A. Faia

Box 8795

327 Richmond Road

College of William & Mary

Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795

mafaia@wm.edu
 
 

PREFACE Page 3 of 100

Mexican Convolutions Page 5 of 100

Lázaro and the Rubberneck Page 18 of 100

Checkride!
A Practical Test
with a Dramaturgical Dimension
Page 23 of 100

What Don't Happen? Page 37 of 100

L'Envoi Page 78 of 100

Top Center Page 80 of 100
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

PREFACE
 

These stories conform, more or less, to the following principles:
 
 

(1) A sociological short story should be written in the first person, and this person should be a sociologist although she doesn't have to let it hang out. The third person is usually considered omniscient; sociologists are not, and the lack of omniscience is a major operating principle. We try to figure it out as we go along. Often, we blow it.
 

(2) Sociological short stories should be based largely on direct "field observations," notes, memos, photos, recordings, etc. The genre is close to what Mailer calls "the non-fiction novel"; but see (5).
 

(3) In writing a sociological short story, the social science literature should be used--minimally. For basic orientation, use a few short epigrams. The story should talk about experiences and events other than reading, although reading inevitably has an impact. And should.
 

(4) The narrator should be an active participant in situations described; this attitude facilitates social experimentation. If the result of this attitude is that the observer has an impact on the observed, then let us make the most of it. Anthropologist Sol Tax's "action anthropology" provides a good model.
 

(5) Feel free to use literary devices, including all known forms of poetic license. Imagery may create insight. Fictionalize experience at will, in the interest of coherence and in order to stimulate the sociological imagination. But don't overdo it. Sociological short stories are qualitative research: García Márquez' "magical realism" goes a little beyond our proper limits.

On the other hand, it fits the theme: Life is heaven and hell combined, and it is therefore perpetual war--so says the happily saddened sociologist of Man's Fate. You are free to love Mexico--the silk the blood the sun the glory, the teriyaki tacos that may never arrive and the despair that never ends and never prevails, the huge struggle of a nation to convince itself and the world that it is indeed, it is first of all a "cosmic race"--and you are likely to get hurt. You are free to love the Roman variation of the pícaro--her hair, her clothing, her few simple props, her sleekness, her stealthiness, her skill, her face all filled with life--and you are likely to see her destroyed. You are free to love airplanes--the way they themselves love the air, the skies far beyond the dullsville terrain, the many charming ways in which they try to tell you when something is treacherously wrong, the immense survival value of anti-commonsensical subtleties, say "pitch controls the airspeed, power controls the altitude," riveted into your brain because they saved your life--and you are still likely to get yourself killed. You are free to love the American university--the way it subverts you with the thought that your mind is not just another leaky spare tire, the way the goddamned place helps you work around its fundamental self-inflicted suffocation, the way it lets you flee the four-faced EGAD! grindstones, Examinations, Grades, Accumulation (all those credits!), Degrees--and you are still likely to be torn down lowly in a highly gingerly fashion (gingerly ain't usually an adverb, fellas). You are free to love the California of the 1800's far beyond the California of the twenty-hundreds and all the glory and all the ordure in the middle--you are free to stand now at the very top of John C. Frémont Peak with its 360-degree view of everything including the future the present the historical human ecologies of population, social organization, this fantastic environment, and all the unbelievable, totally silent mountain-top technologies that tell us why Professor Unabomber got it all wrong. And then, in the late afternoon, you watch the sea sensing that the convection warmth of day has abandoned us and it is now time to roll in stealthily, a sea of fog, a fog of sea, and everything disappears: Monterey, then the valley of Carmel, now Salinas, now Hollister, now the Sacramento. The fog, reaching and wrapping snaking fingers closely over everything the way Kaczinsky wrapped his hands around carefully-crafted bombs, this quintessential killer sea that cannot wait for the ultimate earthquake that tears away our ties and makes us slide forever into the emptiness, and then you see the San Juan Bautista mission barely in the distance where the Mexicans prepared for the slaying of General Frémont who held the high ground before he cleverly and gingerly walked away, and then you realize astounded that you see the peak of Mt. Diablo in the distance, the devil's mountain, the peak whose pinnacle served eventually and still serves as the starting point for the entire California survey, this mountain medium of measurement, a mere 4,000 feet, our message forever, our message forever for whomever the hell he was, the general who commanded the Mexican contingent loitering around God's mission below. And soon it is dark and you contemplate, because you cannot avoid it, the noise rising from an adjacent campsite where you hear the only human sounds of the day, the glorious sounds of the future carried operatically by light winds so that it matters not that the man, the conductor of this grand little opera, the maître de musique, has probably already died in her arms without a whimper--and you are likely to have a dream, a California dream in which a sidewalk chicano poet says to you softly in the night, "je ferai de tes larmes/ un collier de diamantes."
 

"L'envoi," of course, tells us that the most dangerous thing in life is taking a piss.
 
 

The legendary Murphy was wrong. His law, that if anything can go wrong it will, is disproved by almost all post-accident investigations of large disasters. These investigations repeatedly point out that "it was lucky it wasn't worse."

I admit it: The cops, the gendarmerie, the authorities--whatever they properly should be called in Mexico--have scared me a few times, but so far I haven't been sent to jail. Actually, this damned trash thing didn't get me close to jail either, but I suppose it would have if I had gotten much angrier. My wife was no help: She didn't take the matter seriously, and she kept adding to the incriminating character of the family trash long after it had become clear that we had to cinch things up; the trash people, I've always believed, were ready to go after me on far more than one count. At the very least we had to purge our trash of any lingering evidence that might be used to identify us, to link us to it in any way that did not preserve deniability. As J. Edgar Hoover discovered when he became an involuntary subject of a trashology research project back in the 'sixties (he was heavily into Maalox), this is hard to do even when you try. And my observation is that most people, most of the time, don't give a damn whether their trash identifies them or not. Nowadays, I am among the few who care. I once read about a culture in which, if your enemy were to find, say, your hair clippings or some other disposable part of your body, he would be able to perform a few magical rites and would then have the power of life and death over you. As far as I'm concerned, my most wretched refuse creates exactly this sort of vulnerability.

On the whole, I've been unbelievably lucky in my encounters with Mexican law enforcement--and I don't often consider myself a lucky fellow. On the trash matter, though, I nearly came to feel that my luck had ended--that is, I felt that way until my landlord, José Luis Vásquez, more or less came to my rescue. Once in a while, especially in Mexico, my luck has been unbelievably good. For instance, the bus-ticket caper: Perfect timing, placing my trash problems on a back burner at a moment when José Luis needed to mobilize; benign outcome, with the gods for once giving me a small concession.
 
 

One of my summer students had bought a bus ticket to Mexico City, paying a reduced student price, and she had decided at the last minute not to use it. She sold it to me at the same student price--and it was precisely at this instant that, although I didn't even realize it, Mephistopheles had gotten his bloody hooks into me: Big Gringo shows up at bus station with fraudulent discount ticket; Big Gringo, obviously too old and semi-rickety to be a student, gets caught; Big Gringo gets sent away for a long time. Nobody believes BG when he claims that, throughout the criminal act from inception to consummation, he was totally distracted by the raptures of a pair of fish tacos. Hell, nobody even realizes that this is one of Mephistopheles' favorite techniques, heavily relied upon: A huachinango filet with appropriate vegetation and a good measure of cilantro in a spicy, runny red sauce, placed in a soft, pliable, steamed tortilla. As usual, Mephistopheles knows the culture.

So: This was a supernatural setup of first magnitude, and it is plainly a miracle that I escaped. Actually there were several miracles, the most important of which I'll get to in a moment. An important subsidiary miracle, however, was the fact that our good friend Socorro, an MD of some repute and a curandera of substantial talent, had given me a complete rubdown with coyote grease--I had a sore neck--the day before I showed up at the bus station, and I believe that this powerful ritual helped to insulate me for many weeks against the subtle seductive machinations of Mephistopheles, not to mention my wife. I had also recently used the services of a curandero in a little town made famous by a movie called Romancing the Stone--the town's name is Xico, and I recommend it to tourists--and this gentleman had sacrificed his favorite french door by insisting that I hang from it while bobbing up and down.

NB: A badly contorted crash to a tile floor accompanied by a french door is probably a more effective cure for neck pain than name-brand coyote grease, not to mention the traditional egg rub that I had received from Socorro's mother. Incidentally, Socorro had been a straight scientific medical doctor until her dad took her to a witch doctor in Tampico, who helped her get over a boyfriend. Her witch doctor was pioneering an avant-garde therapeutic technique involving a dead chicken--or, at least, a chicken that was strongly encouraged to die, in a bathtub, as a result of the treatment. My chiropractor in San Antonio says that if you can remember all this stuff--especially the part about hanging from a french door or some other suitable appliance--you'll never suffer any back pain, lower, upper, middle, left, or right. A free egg rub to anybody who can prove otherwise.
 
 

What happened at the bus station was an authentic miracle, as I promise to show. By contrast, the great "Grass!" bust was a straightforward process of explaining myself approximately thirteen times until my interrogators were satisfied that I was telling them the truth. I had just arrived, weeks before, at the lovely little town where my wife was running our do-it-yourself Spanish language training school for Gringo grape-strike organizers, and I've always suspected that this particular setup was perpetrated upon me by the Fresno Chamber of Commerce, as opposed to (and by) the supernatural. The C of C point man, whom I'll call Pepito simply because I've forgotten his name, was a guy that I had kindly and thoughtfully sprung from the Baja California territorial prison near Tijuana as a birthday present for one of our teachers, Esperanza, a charming advocate of the old rap-the-knuckles approach to teaching who was pioneering the technique of eating entire meals using nothing more than a single tortilla as her main utensil. (Good preparation for grape strike organizers: Those who are hung up on chopsticks and the hard discipline of the Samurai do not realize that the real challenge comes from Mexico.) As it turned out, Esperanza had disastrous taste in men--she was much better at selecting tortillas--and this young man had cost me $120.00--dollars, not pesos, though this is a good price--plus a legitimate bus ticket. Also, since the little s.o.b. was delivered F.O.B., I had to pop Esperanza a trip to Tijuana, which added considerably to transportation and handling.

So, the guy shows up for a fiesta, along with Esperanza. This party, serving both as a birthday party for Esperanza and as a going-away party for the wife and me, was expected to last a night or two.

After we drink a very large quantity of Presidente brandy and a reasonably large quantity of caña (the Mexican equivalent of "grain"), Pepito starts talking grass. Specifically, he asks whether we want to buy some. Now, my understanding of Mexican etiquette is that one never makes an unequivocal rejection of a friend's, or a friend's friend's, offer of sale, so I cagily said something to the effect that we had no compelling current need for marijuana but that, if a need should ever arise, we surely would keep dear Pepito in mind. This is a most judicious reply according to the grandest traditions, but apparently it is all an informant--even a bargain-basement convict--needs when he goes before the Mexican equivalent of the DEA. Incidentally, the DEA's investigative procedures will not long survive in Mexico if the traditional forms of ritual cordiality are taken to be probable cause. Or perhaps the traditional forms will go, and the American Embassy will claim another victory.

The next morning around 10 a.m., having decided unfortunately to put off my Mexico City trip for a day or two, I walked up to the corner to buy a newspaper, and on returning to our apartment I noticed a middle-class Mexican, big, hatless, about thirty-five, clearly a stranger to our neighborhood, standing out front at our main taco stand, trying to eat a pair of jumbo huachinango tacos while wearing a Hawaiian shirt that tended to flap around in the wind like a flag. One tries not to stare at this sort of phenomenon, but I happened to notice another chap, also middle class in appearance although not in the basic Hawaiian mode, standing on the corner fifteen or twenty feet away from our taco stand; he didn't belong either. I repaired to the apartment and began reading my newspaper, and after a few minutes there came a soft knock at the door. I opened it, and there stood the taco-sauce Hawaiian shirt, looking more or less neighborly. "How are you?" he asked in Spanish. "Do you have any cigarettes for sale?"

This approach, from a neighborly stranger at one's door, does not require cordiality, and I simply replied, "No, no tengo cigarros, no fumo," and began closing the door. He then insistently repeated the same question, about three times, leading me to believe that something must have been wrong with my Spanish. But since the word "no" is more or less universally understood, he decided to modify his approach, so he said "entonces,¿quiere usted comprar cigarros?"--did I wish to buy cigarettes? At this point I knew something was amiss and I was starting to show signs of irritation, but my interrogator still felt compelled to repeat the interesting new question another three or four times. Same answer. At this instant the second chap, the partner, jumps into view from his hiding place in the doorway of the adjacent apartment, and the man in the Hawaiian shirt, simultaneously flashing his identification at me, yells as loud as he can in his best Honolulu English, "Grass, man!" Thank god he didn't yell, "¡Marijuana, hombre!"; it would have ruined my image with the neighbors and, more importantly, with our local taco man.

I did a double take on the identification folder, thinking that it might be a string of joints tied together like the little packets of firecrackers that they sell all over Mexico. He must have thought I was trying to read the damn thing; he tucked it away very quickly, as an expression of extreme anger flashed across his face. Immediately I realized that I had been turned in by our friend of the night before simply because I had not told him to peddle his pot elsewhere, and my interrogators and I entered into a litany in which I affirmed many, many times, that (1) Pepito didn't know what the hell he was talking about--they, of course, allowing that they had never heard of anybody named Pepito; (2) that all they had to do was to look at me, and talk to me for a while (which they were definitely willing to do), and they would see that I was not likely to be caught up in drugs; (3) that I did not even have a car with me this trip--a crucial factor that ultimately worked in my favor, since their assumption seemed to be that big time traffickers usually brought along some form of transportation; (4) that I was on the scene for legitimate purposes having to do with a language school that happened to be only four or five blocks away--they could check it out for themselves if they wished, perhaps improving their English in the bargain. (That is not exactly the way I put it.)

After a long while, they left. Thank god they didn't invite themselves in for a search--in our country, if the cops hover for half an hour or so, we can almost always count on them to try to come in and roost. Our friend Esperanza, the night before, thinking that her freshly beloved Pepito was hinting that he might like to smoke a joint or two rather than sell a shipment, had produced one from some hidden place within her copious undergarments. Because Pepito and I had decided at that moment to repair to the downstairs liquor store, she had inadvertently left her offering on the coffee table, within full view of the Mexican DEA stalwarts.

About twenty-seven minutes later I found Esperanza walking down the street with my wife, and she very quickly lost about a pound for each minute it had taken me to find her. She wasn't very apologetic--her knees never hit the pavement, and my wife had a deplorable way of intervening on her behalf--but on the other hand she was suffering from the infuriating realization that this man too, our sweet Pepito, the glory of the Baja pen, had only tried to use her--not to mention my $120.00. This was definitely chicken-tub time, and I decided to give the poor woman a break.

I heard that she ran into Pepito some months later, and he was definitely not in a position to make offers that she couldn't refuse. I still love to play Cupid, but not if the guy costs more than about a dollar three-eighty. I wish we could have taken Pepito back to prison for a refund. Nobody offered a rebate.
 
 

If the non-search of our apartment was pure luck, the situation at the ADO ("Autobuses of the East") bus terminal turned out incredibly.

It was a lovely, peaceful, cool morning, very early--la madrugada as they say in Spanish--when I began walking toward the ADO bus station. The beautiful streets of our neighborhood were unusually quiet: Within a few hours they would be filled with beat-up old cars, hundreds of thousand-peso taxis of unknown auspices, monstrous trucks dedicated largely to beer and soft drinks and to the rattling of empty bottles, and huge obsolete buses, all these vehicles pouring forth exhaust fumes of the most vile and noxious and high-lead variety, all these vehicles pulsating through every street of the city like an aimless lava flow, all these vehicles surrounded by thousands of smoke-drenched and dust-devastated pedestrians hurrying about their daily routines amid the unbelievable roaring noise.

The wife was getting things ready for our trip to the states, and (in her opinion--mine too, eventually) I had to get out of the house. A few days in Mexico City, I had thought, would be precisely what I needed. The bus station, in contrast to the rest of the city, was already crowded and full of activity. After a short time it was announced that my bus was ready for boarding, and a long line formed near the front of the bus, with our driver checking tickets--very, very carefully. Since bus drivers in Mexico usually do not worry a lot about detail (e.g., tires), I examined my ticket with considerable care, noticing the typical dot-matrix printing showing departure time, destination, price, etc., and it made me feel confident to know that our driver was deeply concerned not to allow anybody to travel with us to Mexico City if his destination happened to be, say, Monterrey or Salsipuedes. When my turn came I suddenly realized, at the very instant in which I was to hand over my ticket for inspection, that the driver was not at all worried about destinations, and that he had the traditional Mexican indifference about the time of day. What my driver was up to was very simple: He was looking for discount bus tickets so that he could flip them over and check the purchaser's signature--which I hadn't even noticed before this moment--against the purchaser's current identification, which I had just produced.

Now this sort of situation, in modern Mexico, especially if you happen to be a big quasi-cute and prosperous Gringo, has every possibility of getting out of hand, of escalating fast. Prayer might have helped, but it never occurs to me to enter into a conversation with the Deity while working in extremis. A Northamerican can bargain for nearly anything he wishes in Mexico, but he cannot pull any shenanigans once a deal has been struck--and what I had fallen into, inadvertently, looked like classic shenanigans. I suspect that the Deity Herself subscribes to this handshakes-all-around tradition--was there a contract with Adam and Eve?--and so do I: My good friend José Luis and I had made any number of agreements founded on a handshake and a litre of Pete Domecq's better or worse, and the concept of default, of reneging for any reason short of actual or imminent death or violent illness of either party to the bargain, was unknown. My bus driver no doubt understood this system as well as anybody, believed in it strongly, and perhaps believed that gringos cannot be trusted--and for a brief, magical moment he may have believed that he was about to catch himself a live one. Lo siento, amigo.

Needless to say, the signature appearing on the back of my ticket was not mine. As the driver held the incriminating, damning documents--a tiny card and a tinier ticket--side by side and contemplated the infinite subtlety and complexity of their relationship or lack thereof, I must have had the agonized appearance of the young man in Midnight Express rotting away in a Turkish prison while occasionally banging his head against the plumbing just to hold down the cobwebs. Then, suddenly, as I peered over the man's shoulder while desperately trying to think of a quick provisional response to his anticipated opening question, my countenance brightened like a dozen exploding pinwheels on the first night of Mardi Gras in The Fabulous and Wondrous City of Veracruz: I quickly read the scrambled, nearly illegible encrypted letters that were to be my salvation. My student--the original ticket purchaser, bless her!--was named Brenda Simmons, and her signature was a mere approximation; my full name for official purposes is Bernie Simpson-Jones--everybody calls me Bern--and my signature was a worse approximation than hers. Immediately it occurred to me that I might have to explain the slightly different styles of sloppiness that characterized the two signatures, but apparently the driver didn't wish to enter into this esoteric inquiry. If I read his mind correctly, and I know I did, the real mystery for him had to do with the deletion of the surname--the anonymous "Jones" that had so endeared my wife to me--for he knew full well that Northamericans do not drop surnames. It occurred to me that a few words in Spanish might convey to him that I was truly into the culture, that I might readily introduce myself either as señor Simpson or señor Jones. I forget exactly what I said to the man, but it must not have done the usual damage.

My few forgotten remarks served as a nifty distraction, and my man motioned for me to board the bus. Mexico City was great! The land of the free, the land of milk and honey and enlightenment!
 
 

The trash bust, on the other hand, reaching its denouement a day before we skipped the country, progressed in a most unenlightening way. I had never had a chance to examine the multa--the citation and proposed fine--on the morning that it showed up at our apartment. José Luis brought it up to me. It must have been nailed to the front door downstairs in the style established by the Inquisition imitating Martin Luther, and I wasn't given to loitering in the downstairs area because of the fact that José Luis usually had a small army of stonemasons and bricklayers and carpenters working there, expanding what was turning into a major apartment complex. (In Mexico, it is entirely possible to live beautifully in the midst of a major condo development that is just getting under way. You may need a little tolerance for noise.) When José Luis showed up at our apartment carrying the multa, he looked terribly depressed, and my initial thought was that there had been some sort of tragedy in his family. He noticed our concern, and quickly showed us the multa and began to explain the significance of it. In essence, he said, it alleged that we had thrown trash into the streets, and that we were to be fined 70,000 pesos. At the time, this was a substantial amount of money, although nowadays it would barely serve to lubricate a minor transaction.

It soon became clear that José Luis was upset primarily because, first, he could not believe that my family and I, unreconstructed hippies and ecology buffs, were throwing trash into the streets; second, he and the workers downstairs had quickly realized that they could have caused the crisis themselves. I had asked them to punch a large window into our upstairs bedroom, which was previously airless because of what PR men for the Mexican lumber and glass industries call the "three little pigs" syndrome, and they had done the task with considerable dispatch. The problem was that another family's roof, made more or less of thatch--these folks had not yet been worked over by the glass-and-timber men--was about twenty feet below our freshly burst window, and we all feared that a series of small masonry missiles could possibly have broken through. But my wife and I knew this family well, and we were sure that if missiles had flown we'd have heard about it long since, from them. Furthermore Don Fidel, our chief missile control officer, assured us all that it was inconceivable that there had been a single accidental launch. This meant that there could not possibly have been more than 147 or so. But in any case, the neighbors would not have turned us in.

This was a very difficult situation, because I had the feeling that José Luis was having trouble believing me when I assured him that I was no more likely to throw trash into the streets than Don Fidel was to launch a deliberate missile attack. But he soon concluded that he could have full confidence in our denials and that, furthermore, he would represent me when I made my appeal downtown--which I fully intended to do, before heading north. José Luis, I believe, had once aspired to go to law school at the national university.

As it turned out, José Luis built up so much confidence in my basic position that he had insisted upon going downtown, the first time, without me--my presence would just complicate matters--to explain to the authorities that it was inconceivable that his wholesome Northamerican tenant would throw trash into the streets, and that the charge must somehow be erroneous. José Luis was willing to risk almost anything on my word, and when he returned a few hours later with what appeared to be incontrovertible proof of my guilt, I began to doubt my own ability to carry out a rational, conscious, deliberate policy regarding what I consider one of life's most fundamental challenges, the control of one's refuse.

The public hygiene department had placed in the hands of my friend a huge manila envelope, stained with bacon grease, that had been filled with my mail and sent to me from the states. My name and address, José Luis said, were clearly typed on the front of it; there was no doubt that it was mine. José Luis was not allowed to take the evidence home with him, but when he described it to me I knew exactly what he was talking about. He said that there was more than just a single envelope, and that the remaining evidence was being held in reserve until later. As I acknowledged my relationship to the damning evidence, José Luis became more and more upset as he realized that he had taken a serious risk to help a Northamerican whose trustworthiness was now open to question; this is not a clever move for a young Mexican businessman. I too became upset because I had no explanation, no way of coming up with an alternative notion as to how my trashy, greasy manila envelope--and God knows what additional items--had fallen into the hands of the powerful public hygiene enforcement division.

By now I knew that I had to go downtown myself; I knew, for the first time in my life, the tortured feelings of Gary Cooper in High Noon. My wife did not forsake me, but for some inexplicable reason she began expressing major concern about how and where one should dump one's bacon grease. I delayed the inevitable day downtown so that José Luis would have time to work through the shock and humiliation of having represented me in a situation in which he was left, as it were, hanging there twisting and turning in the capricious breeze. I knew that, in time, he would be willing to face my horrendous destiny alongside me, that he would never forsake me, but I did not know that in his role as faithful friend of a man whose innocence would be clearly established, he would have to suffer further humiliation.

When we first arrived at the center of town, José Luis was acting very much in the tradition of Grace Kelly, same movie. My recollection is that when the Kelly character first heard that her consort would be forced into a shootout, she reacted in two ways: First, she went into shock; second, she went shopping. I asked José Luis whether he was experiencing el choque, which to me means shock, but he thought I was referring to his recent history of auto accidents, and we both knew that lengthy story all too well. I asked him whether he had ever seen High Noon, and he said something to the effect that he had indeed read many works by our great writer O'Henry, and that he now understood that I was trying to tell him that he was expected at this time to play the Cisco Kid. I told him that most of what I knew about the Cisco Kid came from the old radio version, and that in those ancient days the Cisco Kid had a partner named Pancho, who was a fairly vulnerable sort of fellow and not too bright. Apparently José Luis immediately had me cast as Pancho--this became clear to me during my trial. I tried to get him to tell me the Spanish word for the medical condition of shock, but by this time he was looking around for the appropriate specialty shops, Grace Kelly style. After a fast series of forays in which he added substantially to the burden borne by his illegal Texas credit card, we ended up swinging by a couple of his banks. This was a mistake: By this time we were probably under close surveillance, and it was unwise for us to give any indication that we knew the locations and purposes of financial institutions.

Nonetheless, my self-confidence did not begin to erode seriously until we finally arrived at the central municipal building, which I had never seen. It was near the edge of the town plaza, a huge, dark, crowded fortress built around a beautiful courtyard, and it made me feel as if I had been transported to fifteenth-century Spain and to the days of the Inquisition. After making a few inquiries we found our way to the department occupied by the trash enforcement division, and after being directed through several heavy-timbered portals each of which seemed to remove us further from the tenuous realities of the city outside, we entered what appeared to be the sanctum sanctorum in which there dwelled the woman of whom José Luis had spoken, who was Torquemada. Actually, we had gone full circle, and it turned out that the large room we had just entered was on the side of the building facing the central plaza. As I continued to wilt I noticed that José Luis, a handsome mestizo, was looking more and more like the Cisco Kid.

Now Torquemada was a very tough woman. I prefer to call her "Big Mama" because I realized at the instant of our first encounter that in a world as crazy and twisted and upside down as this, there must be at least one man--perhaps many!--willing to make babies with this woman; as Havelock Ellis always said, anybody can find somebody. Her face, her unforgettable face, had the textures of a blown-out snow tire. Alongside this woman the former unimpeachable military dictator of Panama, Mr. Noriega, whose subjects called him Pineapple Face, would have had the countenance of Cary Grant, or Rock Hudson. Big Mama wore the gay, brightly colored, full-length, sagging guayabera favored by Latin American men in the heat of a Mexican summer, and the lovely intricate lace across the front of it made my guayabera look cheap and understated--good news for me, since I was a candidate for a 70,000 peso fine. Big Mama was seated behind her massive dark wooden desk, glancing at us from time to time with the quick, cold, necrophilic looks of impending damnation. It struck me that perhaps her guayabera was in truth an ecclesiastical robe that extended all the way to the floor. Throughout my trial she never found it necessary to stand, and for this I was grateful.

She was big on hand signals--if she ever wants a gig at the Chicago Board of Trade or decides that she would like to manage the Cubs, I'm prepared to recommend her. Remember: José Luis and I did not have a definite appointment with these sanitation folks, and as far as I know there was no clear basis for anybody's having anticipated our arrival at any particular moment. Yet all Big Mama had to do was to snap her fingers a couple of times and to send out a few additional obscure hand signals that do not occur in mainstream Northamerican gesture language--her eyes never leaving the paperwork on her desk except for a few quick glances when she wished to evaluate the victim--and her office quickly transformed itself into a courtroom with all the essential trappings. I must have had a subliminal sense that the furniture was actually rearranging itself so as to be deployed in a more formal juridical pattern, but the most extraordinary change had to do with personnel: Suddenly there was a man who seemed to be a sort of court reporter, there were bailiffs guarding the entrances and bringing to the bench all sorts of relevant documentation, and there were a couple of young men, whom I thought I recognized as trash collectors from my own neighborhood, who suddenly installed themselves on either side of the bench apparently preparing to give testimony. We had a large audience too, most of whom were seated in the great town plaza that lay in full view outside our large, now open, unscreened windows. Cisco, I now realize, must have anticipated this incredible transformation, because he immediately rose to his feet and prepared to approach the bench and address Her Big Mama Torquemada Honor. As for me, my adrenalin was beginning to flow heavily, and when my adrenalin flows so does my Spanish. If Saint Peter speaks Spanish, if he wears an outrageous cigar-stained guayabera, and if he tends to be a little peremptory in his style of decisionmaking, I'm home free. At least I'll get off a couple of good incisive sermonettes before he dispatches me.

Big Mama was suddenly off the rubber, and she commenced proceedings by slashing José Luis to the quick. It had become clear that José Luis intended to act as my legal representative, and Big Mama, mildly irritated by the prospect that the victim might have adequate counsel, asked José Luis a sort of rhetorical question that I still cannot believe. "Entonces," she said, "¿usted es sirviente del norteamericano?"--so, you are a servant for this American? Needless to say, this insult infuriated José Luis and he began a detailed public counterattack, a denunciation of Big Mama and all her works that became a persistent subsidiary theme developed in endless, tortuous, glaring, glorious detail throughout the hearing. In brief he alleged--shouting, usually from a position close to the open windows--that Big Mama's misfeasance and/or malfeasance and/or incompetence and/or iniquity had permitted "montones"--vast mountains of trash--to accumulate all over our otherwise spiffy town. Soon the sweat was pouring down Big Mama's spacious eroded mudslide cleavage, and José Luis delivered the coup de grace by pointing out that on those few occasions when Big Mama actually had moved "montones" she had neglected to seed the remaining bare soil--this was apparently a part of her job, unknown to all except José Luis. In the meantime Big Mama, having a few weapons of her own, had summoned up the evidence to be used against me, and she was determined to strike back at us forcefully and perhaps maliciously.

I never managed to count the number of exhibits brought together by the prosecution, but each of them came neatly wrapped in a clear plastic folder, tightly sealed and carefully labelled. It seemed as if I were being confronted by every envelope, large and small and medium-sized, that I had ever received during our years in Mexico, but it also seemed obvious to me that even if a recalcitrant envelope or two had slipped from my hands unknowingly into the street, it was inconceivable that all these envelopes could have fallen into the possession of Big Mama and her functionaries unless she had some way of obtaining them that did not depend on my carelessness. That (I think) is exactly what I said to her, and in the general accusatory atmosphere that we had all carefully nurtured, and in her full awareness of the increasingly attentive audience outside, Big Mama went meanly on the offensive and directed one of her witnesses--she was both judge and prosecutor--to explain to the world, in a voice close to a shout, how it had come to pass that vast numbers of my grease-stained mailers had fallen under the control of the city's refuse establishment.

Within a few moments the witness and I were yelling thoughts back and forth regarding the corner to which I had been assigned for purposes of trash deposit, and I was suddenly taken aback by the realization that not only was he conceding that, as far as he knew, my trash had always been duly placed on the appropriate corner, but he also wished to commend me for the high quality of my trashbags: These were a lovely blue plastic, 4 mil, very large, and very carefully tied; only the cleverest dogs could untie them or tear them open. In short, I had deployed some of the finest trashbags ever seen in our town, and for this reason, as far as it went, I was deeply admired by all our friends and neighbors assembled.

After a few quick moments of self-congratulations, my mind began to wander as I tried to remember whether the word esquina referred to an interior corner and rincón to an exterior corner, or vice versa. I knew it was one way or the other (I was leaning toward vice versa), and I believed that this would be an auspicious moment for me to compliment the city on the quality of its trash collection operations. I had almost deluded myself into thinking that José Luis and I had finally turned the corner, as it were, on this particular imbroglio, when it occurred to me that the witness, along with an equally vociferous colleague of his, was now warming up considerably to an entirely new line of analysis that had something to do with el día de los maestros--teachers' day. At first I thought they were proposing me for some sort of special decoration as a teacher and model citizen, but then I remembered vaguely that teachers' day had already occurred, several weeks ago. Also, I noticed that José Luis suddenly was very sad, looking at the floor, shaking his head. And then, in an instant, in an existential flash, it struck me: The witnesses were now proclaiming, for all the world to hear, the vicious, heinous, unspeakable character of my crime: I had placed my unimpeachable trash on the correct corner at the wrong time, for on the day of the teachers there is no trash collection at all and it is "unlawful" to allow one's trash to stand on the corner overnight. Dogs.

The quality of one's trashbags is not an extenuating or mitigating circumstance--I tried it. When I recovered from the immediate shock of this announcement, this revelation, this indictment, I protested vehemently in my most eloquent and sincere Spanish, pointing out that I am a teacher, and that I had no idea that a special day had been set aside in Mexico to honor our glorious profession. I pointed out further that in the United States we surely have a day of the teacher somewhere on the calendar, but that we would never dream of discontinuing major public services simply because we were intent upon honoring those who have charge of our children, those who will determine the ultimate destiny of our children, those who will re-create our great nation for posterity. (These latter points sound more logical in Spanish than in English, at least to me.) I repeated the soliloquy, in essence, four or five times until in my estimation it was starting to take.

My arguments didn't pass muster all around, but Big Sweet Mama of the lilting cleavage did finally see fit to reduce my fine to a mere 25,000 pesos. José Luis and I spent a half hour or so seeking out the appropriate office for paying one's fines, I collected my bright red official receipt, and we walked out free men toward the central plaza where we joined the boisterous crowds celebrating, according to Cisco, el día de los niños--the day of the children. He may have been jesting, but I took him seriously. Along with all the kids, we felt that it was good to be alive.

And Big Mama's kids felt the same way.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

It was not clear to me, at first, why this boy--I assumed he was a boy--would be wearing, over a tight black leotard, the puffy, pleated, colorful short pants, tightly gartered, that one sees mainly among circus performers. Eventually I realized that he was dressed for running, very fast and very far. I suspect that his shoes, probably the most expensive part of his clothing, were the most elaborate Reeboks or whatever brand of high-tech sneakers--pardon, running shoes--they wear in Rome these days. But I'm afraid I didn't really notice the footwear in detail; I spent excessive time studying the face, and its incredible coordination with the body language. Later the carabinieri, as far as I could tell, were not impressed by my description of the fellow despite the fact that it covered nearly everything well except the shoes, which were far too technical for my minimal Italian. The short pants I remembered very clearly, because there was something peculiar about them, something that stayed in my mind without my being aware: The fabric was a print with what was once a fantastically colorful flowered pattern, but the dirt and stains and wear of many months had made the flowers look like a tumbling assortment of dusty artichokes on a hot summer afternoon. If the carabinieri had been willing to move a little faster, or to tip off the regular police or otherwise overcome whatever inhibitions held them frozen to their little spot on the corner, I could have provided them an excellent identification--puffed-up pantelets with tumbling artichokes are a rarity in any city, even those that insist on displaying everything.

It was Saturday morning, soon to be a very hot day, but at the moment nearly everything was covered with a heavy moisture not yet threatened in the least by the slow retreat of long shadows. After far too many days of talking about exports and imports and how they could all flow smoothly were it not for Mrs. Thatcher and her psychic blocks, I wanted to be alone. I had an early breakfast at the dining room of my hotel, and then I walked out to the street and began wandering around the city more or less randomly, intending to do a little window shopping in the neighborhood of the Piazza del Popolo and then perhaps work my way toward the Via Veneto where I could stimulate the lethargic Italian economy with some semi-serious over-priced shopping. I was carrying a quarter of a million lire, and I thought I might try to find a dress or two for my wife. The Via Veneto has little attraction for me: Despite my "immense successes" in what is said to be the free-enterprise world of the ex-im business, if I were an Italian I would no doubt be torn between the socialist party and the communist party--for an American it is an extraordinary experience, and damned heartening, stimulating, and thought-provoking whether one approves or not, to see the hammer and sickle banner displayed nearly everywhere--but this morning was my last chance to explore the Via Veneto and to delude myself that Audrey Hepburn, or even Deneuve, might be sipping a cappucino around the next corner, waiting for me to come up with a weakly plausible reason for sharing her table. Terribly confused thinking for a socialist and/or communist, or a good-old-boy Christian Democrat, or even a plain brown wrapper American Democrat. This sort of behavior, of course, is congenial, or congenital, among Republicans.
 

It is entirely for theoretical reasons, as we MBA's like to say, that I concluded that the youngster accosting me was a boy. "He" could have been a girl. At first, when he approached me in front of the Maria Maggiore church and acted as if he wanted to sell me a newspaper--the single tattered copy held in his right hand, probably weeks old, which in itself should have served as a warning--I thought he was a girl. But now I believe that I was witnessing a cleverly contrived performance, an elegant instance of impression management by a young man of about fourteen or fifteen who was carefully creating the appearance of being a girl. Girls, I suspect, are generally less plausible as pickpockets, and as far as I know there is no longer anything anomalous about female newspaper vendors in Italy. And if a sense of anomaly existed in the minds of intended victims, it would merely serve as an additional distraction--and distraction is a fundamental part of the pickpocket's repertoire. Another aspect of the androgynous ruse was that the boy remained mute throughout our encounter, touching his fingers to his lips while contorting his face in a way that suggested hunger and also suggested, at the appropriate moment, that the newsboy/newsgirl phase had come to a close. Therefore the voice never provided a clue about age or sex. In retrospect, this was a pickpocket worthy of the most talented pícaros of ancient Spanish novels--say, for instance, the hero of Lazarillo de Tormes, an early master of the arts of impression management. Lazarillo's favorite victims were blind men, although they were not at all easy, and I was nearly blinded by a stellar performance.

I am not easily distracted in situations favorable to the pickpocket's science. I usually have my billfold in a front pocket, and often in dangerous situations my hand moves back and forth randomly but often enough, like a sentry, along the upper edge of it. I am convinced that this array, this configuration, is most discouraging to pickpockets. I have always believed, with sociologists, and in fact I continue to believe even after this experience, that pickpockets flourish in situations with large, fast moving, tightly packed, high-anxiety crowds, as at train terminals or subway stations or at soccer stadiums where the home team is expected to lose or has already done so. But on this particular Saturday morning my pícaro and I were almost entirely alone. And yet he/she had the boldness to make a very high-risk play, what is called in Spanish an atentado--an attempt or attack--a word that does not work particularly well in English, or with Italian carabinieri. Once, in Mexico City, a pickpocket made an atentado as I was struggling through (or with, or against, who knows?) an all-male mob--women and children, gracias a Dios, had already been separated from us--that was pushing toward a subway train. I never worry deeply about money, and my never-invoked homeowner's insurance could readily have covered a few hundred thousand pesos, but this very small man, perhaps an Indian, had the misfortune to get part of his clothing or other accoutrement caught on one of the many buttons fixed to the sides of my guayabera, a beautiful new custom-made Yucatan guayabera that actually fit me and that I was not about to have torn even by a class-act pickpocket. I was about twice his size, and what I did to him, more or less on physical impulse without thinking, was precisely the sort of punishment traditionally given to the pícaro by his victims, whenever they had the requisite intelligence or unbelievable good luck to catch him.
 

In general, though, when a careless mark in this situation eventually finds his wallet missing, he never knows what hit him.
 

How, then, does a pickpocket work when he and the victim are alone, in front of a church, on a bright, sunny Saturday morning? Not entirely alone: I had tried one of the side entrances to the church an hour or so earlier--the main entrances were still locked--and before I could step inside a nun had rushed up to me and told me that I had entered a childrens' school and that I had to leave immediately. Confused wanderer. A few tourists, two or three small groups, ambled about on the square in front of the church; from time to time a car would pass along a distant street. As I climbed a series of twenty or thirty steps leading to the main entrance, now perhaps open, the pícaro must have been hidden from my view. There must have been some large structural feature of the church just to one side of the door, and he must have hidden behind it as he watched me climb the stairs slowly, laboriously (for I am not young). In fact I was distracted by the view--this church rests on a high hill from which one sees St. Peter's and other parts of Rome--and the pícaro must have known this, it must have been one of the sucker signs to which he was totally attuned. A tourist is a rubberneck, and a rubberneck is a mark.

A newsvendor, then, in a sudden explosion of energy sparkling brightly in the same way the dew caught the morning sun, materializes in my path. Perhaps he realized that the newsboy tactic was not working well--and, perhaps more likely, that a transformation from dubious newsvendor to plausible beggar would capture my attention, would act as a further distraction. The charming rapscallion, genius of legerdemain, had already caused me to concentrate on a tidy cluster of decoy questions: Was this a boy or a girl? Where had he/she come from? What was the significance of the clothing? Of the very light facial makeup? The bare legs? Why try to sell newspapers in front of a church when hardly anybody is here? Is this boy/girl mainly newsvendor or beggar? Will he actually follow me into the church?

The final question was answered quickly: Again, a most disarming, distracting tactic. As we entered the church, the techniques of begging were becoming mildly aggressive, with an increasing excitement that suggested that we were moving inexorably toward a place of fundamental sacraments; and with the boy's busy right hand tugging at my right arm and the upper part of my shirt. Meanwhile the newspaper must have been tucked under the same hard-working right arm, which had a rhythmic, orchestrated coordination with the pained supplications of the boy's mouth and with the contorted, lightly powdered face. The left hand, by now, was well outside my field of vision and attention, and it too was setting to work. How the left hand knew that it should delve into my right front pocket I don't really know: I don't believe that the young man had seen me from behind or had studied the contours of my rear pockets, unless he had been following me for some time. And, as it turned out, I was carrying in my left front pocket an English-Italian dictionary that was almost exactly the same size as my wallet. It was either a fifty-fifty guess by the pickpocket or else he merely assumed that I would have my wallet on the right side. Lesson #1 for me: Carry the wallet on the left side, and the dictionary on the right. The truth is, I reach for my dictionary, while shopping, far more often than I reach for my wallet; shopkeepers detest this habit. But I'm afraid that the genius slowly levitating my wallet somehow knew that I had not yet arrived at these insights.

If you ever wear khakis in Rome, wear my brand. The pockets must have been engineered with French-style security in mind. The technical beauty of the design lies in this: Wallets, for those who wear these pants, cannot be levitated in a straight upward trajectory. They come up several inches, and then they must be rotated about thirty degrees; from there, it is a straight shot up, out, and away. But arriving at and passing the point of rotation--like an overloaded airplane struggling to leave a runway--there is the rub. This was the one crucial thing that my protagonist did not know: His erudition did not extend to Dickies' design criteria, circa 1985. My wallet was thin: A quarter-million lire in five bills of 50,000 apiece do not make for a fat wallet, but apparently my thighs are very sensitive at those points where my fundamental cards of identity repose, my driver's license, my Visa card, my KOA Kampgrounds membership. I felt the tiny picaresque pressures, and in an instant my right arm, perhaps stimulated and strengthened by the vigorous massage it had just received, came down fast, automatically, heavily, like a guillotine, and 250,000 lire quickly descended into helical twists of my bottomless pocket. I hope and--assuming a god--I pray that the small, skillful hand was not injured. I know that my angry reflex words--"Get out of there!"--were understood, and that my shouted English accusation--pickpocket! pickpocket!--and the Spanish translation thereof--¡cortabolsa! ¡cortabolsa!--were not understood.

Two men, appearing to be tourists, were approaching the church--two thousand years of tradition, the papal and the picaresque--as the young boy/girl and I were slowly filing out, no longer interacting at all except that we were marching side by side as if in a procession. At that moment it occurred to me that the picaro had every right to feel secure, to feel no sense of threat, to feel that whatever protection the universe provides was his as well as mine.

Perhaps the tourists were German: It quickly became clear that they too were unaware of the English or Spanish words for a pickpocket, and that they had little chance of protecting themselves against the acolyte of tumbling artichokes. But why should I protect wealthy German tourists? The picaro can't really hurt them: What's a half million lire in mighty Deutschmarks?

Within a few steps I was covered with sunlight, and within a few minutes I was sipping a cappucino. As always, Deneuve was late.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This narrative is based on field notes prepared immediately after my final oral examination and flight test for the certificate of private pilot, ASEL (Airplane, Single-Engine Land), conferred by the Federal Aviation Administration.¹ Following a brief discussion of the oral segment of the examination, I describe in detail the practical flight test, which now has a strong dramaturgical dimension because of the FAA's insistence that practical tests emphasize the pilot's ability to handle distractions, i.e., to divide his or her attention. Requiring over two hours of flight time, the practical test covered all phases of flying relevant to the certificate; the examiner introduced distractions throughout the process, sometimes intentionally, sometimes inadvertently.
 
 

Numerous studies indicate that many accidents have occurred when the pilot's attention has been distracted during various phases of flight. Many accidents have resulted ... where safe flight was possible if the pilot had used correct control technique and divided attention properly. ... To strengthen this area of pilot training and evaluation, the examiner will provide realistic distractions throughout the practical test. Many distractions will be used ...

Federal Aviation Administration (1987, p. v)
 
 

When we watch a television wrestler gouge, foul, and snarl at his opponent we are quite ready to see that, in spite of the dust, he is, and knows he is, merely playing at being the "heavy," and that in another match he may be given the other role, that of clean-cut wrestler ... We seem less ready to see, however, that while such details as the number and character of the falls may be fixed beforehand, the details of the expressions and movements used do not come from a script but from command of an idiom, a command that is exercised from moment to moment with little calculation or forethought.

The oral portion of my test went well, primarily because I had studied hard and had also done well on the assorted written tests, especially the big one given by the FAA. It is a good idea to try to do well on the writtens: This reduces pressures at a crucial time, the day of one's final checkride. During the oral test the only threatening task, for me, was the preparation of a nav-log (deadline: thirty minutes) for a flight from Newport News, Virginia (PHF--formerly Patrick Henry, or just "Pat" to a few pilots, and now called Newport News/Williamsburg International Airport), to Manassas, to Lunenburg, and back to PHF. This is a tough trip to work out in detail in half an hour, requiring an awkward flip of the appropriate sectional chart and involving restricted military training areas around Manassas and Lunenburg. Straight navigational shots were out, and there were many extra heading changes demanding precious seconds from my thirty-minute allotment.

I presented the trip plans to my pilot examiner, Pierre, and we had a brief era of good feeling. He liked my strategy of approaching Manassas from the CSN (Casanova) VOR,² with the same route outbound. He asked me many questions about how to enter the Washington-Baltimore TCA*, which includes Manassas. One has to be clear, for instance, about where the floors of the TCA are located when one approaches small airports below these floors. Pierre and I were both a little worried about how one would squeak past the Fort A. P. Hill restricted area, about halfway to Manassas. It would have helped my case if I had mentioned (read: noticed) the NDB* at Fort Hill. Pierre told me to drop my planned altitude from 3000 feet to 2,500 feet so that we wouldn't have to worry about penetrating IFR* territory. I suggested that we check the altitude minima on the sectional chart to make sure that a change was okay--this was a good idea, because there is high terrain southwest of Manassas. To avoid the usual clumsy method of chart flipping, Pierre likes the idea of placing two charts alongside each other, even taping them together.

The oral exam ended on my completion of the half-hour navigation problem. It surprised me that there was no detailed questioning about basics such as aircraft weight and balance, or density altitude. A lot of stuff can slip through the cracks this way: Nobody has any real evidence, for instance, that I know a center of gravity from the cedars of Lebanon. Regarding the thirty-minute trip plan, Pierre said that he did not like my practice of summing time in minutes and then translating into hours through division by 60, in order to obtain total flight time. He likes the traditional military method, juggling hours and minutes in an unwieldy, non-decimal fashion. I prefer the decimal method for short general-aviation trips of, say, three legs, because one can add up all ETE's* in minutes, add 40 minutes or so for three departures, climbs, descents, and arrivals, 60 minutes for a fuel-lunch stop, and then divide by 60 for the number of hours to state on a flight plan covering the entire trip. Pierre encouraged (or permitted) me to use a single flight plan for all three legs of my trip, saving crucial minutes. In real life I don't plan to do this: I'll file for each leg. In the current instance we did not file the flight plan with the appropriate FAA facility, for we were not, of course, really travelling to Manassas.
 
 

Out to the airplane, and the preflight check. The preflight went well. I made reference to the checklist as I carefully examined each segment of the aircraft. I showed Pierre a technique I learned in Texas, bumping the plane's nose upward with my shoulder in order to see the operation of the pneumatic shock absorber on the nose gear. In order to make sure that the stall horn was sounding normally, I removed my gum and applied suction to the stall-horn opening on the wing, using a dydee converted to an oil rag as a filter against impurities.

Pierre asked about all the radio antennae under the fuselage, but did not ask about the nav-comm antennae on top. Later, while we were taxiing, he asked about the glide-slope antenna inside the cockpit toward the top of the windscreen--I had flown this airplane several times and, given my VFR* mindset, had never noticed it! The biggest glitch during the preflight--not fatal--occurred when I was explaining how I like to move ailerons and elevator while watching to make sure the yoke is moving in the right direction. (As the checklist says, these control surfaces must be free and correct.) Pierre said something about the trim tab, which I did not understand, and I did not ask him for a clarification. This omission was a mistake, as we shall see in a moment.

Inside the plane, after getting belted down, I began organizing my kneeboard. Pierre asked whether I really wanted to have a kneeboard in place during my takeoff, and I said that I did. A takeoff, after all, is not a striptease. When I placed a few items on the floor behind Pierre's seat--my flight computer, my PHF diagram, my sectional chart--he said that this was not a good practice and that anything I wanted in the cockpit other than the items on my lap I could ask him to hold. The remaining items behind his seat--e.g., my plotter--he wanted me to secure in a seat pocket. He mentioned these practices as good cockpit management.

During the passenger briefing, I went through the seatbelt requirements, asking Pierre to wear the belts at all times although they are required only while taking off and landing. I mentioned the fire extinguisher, explaining where it was and how to use it--word was that he expected this. He reminded me at this point to put on my shoulder harness, which I had forgotten.

My delay in buckling up the shoulder harness could have been a serious error, especially given that I had just briefed Pierre about belts. Instead of scolding, however, he asked whether I could think of anything else that should be a part of the passenger briefing; when I said no, he said that passengers should be told not to panic if a door or window should come open during flight, and that in any case the doors won't open wide against the air pressure. He then opened a window. Within a few moments, I had to ask him to close it.

Pierre had not flipped the fuel shutoff valve out of its proper position, although I was ready for this relatively safe form of sabotage, as were most of my fellow students. While I was testing and setting the brakes I asked Pierre to take a look at the right hydraulic brake line, to make sure that no fluid was leaking; this he did. There were no shenanigans with circuit breakers, another contingency for which we were all well prepared. As I recorded the Hobbs time I noticed that our aircraft, Seven Mike X-ray, had not been flown for about four days, so I pumped in three shots from the fuel primer. The engine started promptly.

I then carried out a preliminary instrument check. Pierre had adjusted the altimeter for local altitude, but he had set it for about 60 feet MSL* so I had to re-adjust it to the local field elevation, 43 feet--was this a test? We had already recorded the ATIS* data, so we both took a look at the altimeter pressure indicator to make sure that it corresponded to that provided by ATIS; no problem. I remembered to lean the fuel before taxiing, although this practice had not been part of my standard (low altitude) operating procedure. As we started to taxi I also remembered to do an immediate brake check: The brakes felt a little grabby and sounded a little squeaky, so I repeated the brake check after we had pulled well out of our parking position. In recent days there had been heavy rain, and I suspected moisture around the brakes; I had noticed water spilling out from inside the elevators when I moved them during the preflight check.

Our taxi instructions were to proceed to taxiway alpha for the runup; taxiway charlie, the usual runup area, was temporarily closed for construction work on a new terminal. The temporary full-runway procedure, made necessary by the construction project, was to cross runway 2-20 and backtaxi on 7, which joins 2-20 again near its threshold. As it turned out, things didn't come off quite this way.

During the runup, the trim-tab glitch caught me by surprise. Working through my checklist, I set the trim tab to what appeared to be the neutral position by observing the pointer on the trim control. Pierre immediately showed considerable irritation, because what he had explained to me earlier, during the preflight, was that the pointer on the trim-tab control may be inaccurate and that one should learn to adjust the tab visually, making sure that it is on the same plane (geometrically!) as the elevator (Kershner, 1979:41). It turned out that the pointer was more than a little high, so this was a good lesson. When I explained to Pierre that I had not understood what he said during the preflight--as if this were an excuse--he said that I should have asked. He said it firmly.

Pierre watches the magneto check, carburetor heat check, etc., very carefully; no incidents here. I was delighted that I had no spark-plug fouling to contend with. I always have trouble persuading spark plugs to clean themselves up.

Pierre helped out considerably on radio settings: My recollection is that he had tuned in the control tower while I was doing the runup. I recorded the time, 1900z on the hour, and called the tower. I told ATC* that I was ready for departure, VFR westbound--I should have said northwest--and that I was requesting a full runway takeoff rather than using the intersection of taxiway alpha and 2-20. The tower said that I should turn right from alpha--directly onto runway 2-20--and that I was clear for takeoff. Since I was accustomed to crossing 2-20 and backtaxiing on the adjacent runway 7, I asked the tower whether they did indeed mean that I should backtaxi on 2 rather than 7. My favorite anonymous controller, a man whom I've always called the "tenor of the tower," a man who is usually very kind to me especially when (unlike today) I identify myself as a student pilot, seemed to become a little impatient, a little piqued, crisply saying "affirmative, turn right, backtaxi on 2." I then said roger and did it. During all these slightly stressful tower interactions Pierre's head was nodding affirmatively although he said nothing; but I think the head movements were an indication that he liked what I was doing. They also tempted me to start feeling very good, very confident, and very competent, and I had to resist doing anything so unwise as that.
 
 

On takeoff I immediately got into a little trouble that would persist throughout the afternoon: Instructors at my flight school had been encouraging us to let the airplane "takeoff itself," which implied to me that one should let up a little on the back pressure usually exerted on the yoke at 55-60 knots. I was still working through a few behavior modifications in this realm when Pierre pointed out that reduced back pressure will cause problems if one gets a nose-gear shimmy, and that a rotation has to be done firmly at 55 knots for a C-152, after which the plane will indeed "lift itself off" nicely. This topic seemed a little fuzzy in my school's curriculum. In any case, a task as elementary as taking off can present problems, even at this late stage.

Airborne and en route toward our first checkpoint, the CIA's Camp Peary, I assumed that since Seven Mike X-ray would require much of the distance to Camp Peary for its climbout on this hot day and with a heavy load, time recording would not begin in earnest until we got there and started flying toward HCM (Harcum) VOR. But Pierre recorded the actual takeoff time--1905z--and started to work out some timing calculations. He asked me for an ETA* for Camp Peary. Following Camp Peary, he wanted an ETA for HCM VOR. The actual arrival times were such that our estimated groundspeed was slow; there must have been a headwind. I settled down into cruise configuration, set the trim, and leaned the fuel. Later, incidentally, I was less than prompt in enriching the fuel mixture for maneuvers, and Pierre aggressively punched in the mixture control, saying nothing.

Pierre asked me whether there was "anything else you can do to make sure we're on course?," which I took to mean that he wanted to see my VOR navigation. I turned the OBS* of NAV-1* to 335 degrees or thereabouts, but got no response from the CDI*. Eventually, we realized that the NAV-1 receiver was not working, so we went to NAV-2 and tuned in the appropriate "to" radial. Near Camp Peary Pierre asked me a few things about where I thought we were on the sectional chart. I could see the Camp Peary runway just to my left, which I told him. I was also aware--as he was--that my course went directly over Camp Peary, so we were a little north of the course, probably because of my climbout from PHF before turning left. Pierre said that he was worried because he couldn't see anything but the York River to his right, but I said that I could see the river banks just below and a little to the left, so I knew we were okay, just a half mile or so to the right of our course and converging on it. I'm reasonably sure that Pierre was not lost: He was just faking it. Anybody knows that if you see a river and its right bank is visible to your right, the left bank is probably somewhere to your left; if not, you need to get out your oceanic charts. Still, Pierre was "bringing pressure to bear."

When I spotted the HCM VOR on the ground, Pierre wanted to know how we could use the NAV radio to get abeam of it, and I did my best but I believe we had not yet fully convinced ourselves that something was wrong with NAV-1. Pierre then went back to NAV-2 to tune in radial 270, and it became clear that we were off that radial because of the VOR's being abeam of us. At this point he looked at the weather ahead, which was authentically threatening, and told me to make a southerly diversion for Wakefield. I placed my little yellow AOPA* plotter on the chart for a quick heading, and Pierre told me to turn first and then use the plotter. I did so.

Once I got the approximate heading for Wakefield, Pierre asked me to draw it on the sectional chart. I then got a more accurate heading of 210 degrees by laying my plotter across the HCM VOR, parallel to the new course. My heading was a little off because of the difficulty of reading the bottom portion of the HCM VOR rose--map clutter; the 210 position on the Hopewell VOR rose is much more clear. While I was working out the navigation, Pierre cautioned me, firmly, to keep my wings level. The haze was so bad that it obscured the horizon, I had rolled a little without realizing it, and I had to keep a close watch on the attitude indicator while getting my navigation set up for the trip to Wakefield. I asked Pierre if I would get my instrument rating out of this flight test; if he appreciated my humor, he didn't show it. He asked me to provide an ETA for Wakefield, and he helped calculate it using the computer and my estimate that with the wind now behind us we had a slight increase over our earlier groundspeed.

I inverted my sectional chart, placing the 210-degree heading at the top of my kneeboard, saw Interstate-64 and U.S. 60 pass beneath us, saw Williamsburg and Jamestown Island to the left, and the James River ahead. I do not like reading maps upside-down simply because I'm travelling in a southerly direction, and I have argued vehemently that our brains carry out flip-flop image analysis all the time, that retinal images are upside-down anyway, that the brain adapts beautifully when the retinal image is inverted, that the best way to use "reverse sensing" on the CDI is to pretend that your airplane is travelling downward on the face of the CDI, etc., but everybody at my flight school, most insistently the chief flight instructor, claims that I'm wrong. To me, this is a lively research topic, although I'm slowly getting accustomed to reading charts with south, east, or west at the top.
 
 

As we crossed the James River Pierre broke off the trip to Wakefield, and we got started with hood work.

Under the hood, I had to hold a heading and altitude for a while, then make standard-rate turns in both directions through arcs up to about 180 degrees. Pierre asked for a 30-degree bank turn under the hood, but no 45-degree bank turns--nice break. He did ask for a climb and descent, allowing me to select airspeeds of 70 KIAS* for the climb and 80 KIAS for the descent. On the descent, one probably should drop the RPM level to the carb-heat range: It seems to be essential in getting down to 80 knots while descending in a C-152. I had a tendency, however, to make my descent too steep, and Pierre suggested that I stabilize things with the attitude indicator, which showed too much nose-down attitude. Surely I knew, he said, that I did not need all the descent dots then showing on the attitude indicator. He did not ask for a constant-rate descent, which would have emphasized the slow-reacting VSI*--another nice break.

The FAA insists on all this instrument work so that pilots will have good survival prospects if we should inadvertently fly into atrocious weather. Opponents of this philosophy fear that such preparation will tempt us to enter bad weather when we would otherwise not consider doing so. I know which side of this question my record is going to support.

Next, MCA--minimum controllable airspeed. Crucial, because a slow-moving aircraft approaching or departing from a runway cannot be allowed to stall, cannot be allowed, in the words of my Webster's, to have "... an airflow breakdown and loss of lift with a tendency to drop" several hundred feet. Devilishly tricky, because MCA requires that an airplane, always a flying seesaw, become a very slow-flying seesaw balanced perfectly along its longitudinal axis so that there is barely enough lift to hold altitude and barely enough tail-down pressure--requiring a light touch of little cat feet on the yoke--to produce this lift at speeds carefully held just above a stall. There are at least three disqualifying mistakes, three ways in which this tightrope act collapses: going too fast, failing to hold one's altitude, or stalling. Pierre and I are now confident that I'll never commit the third of these indiscretions close to the ground; this was a large part of the reason for our being here.

Then we went to another high-altitude maneuver, the actual stalls. First, Pierre asked for a power-on stall, which I did reasonably well except for a slightly asymmetrical wing drop. This is disconcerting, but the Practical Test Standards do not require that the wings be kept level in this maneuver, and if I were a pilot examiner I'd like to see how aspiring pilots handle uneven wing drops during stalls. In brief, the aerodynamics of this maneuver test whether the newly fledged pilot has adequate spin-avoidance or spin-recovery techniques. Next, I did a power-off stall. Then, a power-off stall while turning--and just as I was entering the turn Pierre suddenly took over the aircraft, aborted my stall, and showed that one can turn with very high bank through what seemed to be at least 720 degrees, while descending slightly and not stalling, with the nose high against the onrushing air, and the stall horn screaming steadily. This was a tight spiral, like a spin without a stall, a little disorienting when one is not used to it--perhaps this was Pierre's intention. In the midst of this surprise experience of watching the earth spin below me, Superman-style, I glimpsed the only nearby aircraft of the afternoon, at least during the maneuver phase. We both looked around for a few moments. No joy: We must have scared the other plane away, and it disappeared quickly in the haze.

Next, 360-degree turns with a 45-degree bank; for me, always a tough maneuver. They came off surprisingly well, considering that the horizon was largely obscured by haze; perhaps I'm better off with nothing more than the artificial horizon. I remembered "right-reduce," i.e., reduce back pressure a little while turning right in this maneuver--I forget the principle of aerodynamics involved--and I believe that it was at about this point that Pierre told me to keep a closer eye on the TC* ball. This critique continued, with Pierre saying at one point that I had a heavy left foot, and later that I had a heavy right foot. Probably true both times, although we discussed the possibility of an instrument bias or a problem with the aircraft's rigging. On my later takeoff and landing work at Williamsburg-Jamestown (JGG), however, Pierre felt that I was heavy on left rudder during turns within the traffic pattern.

Pierre suddenly pointed to a large open field about two miles away, and asked me whether I could discern the grass runway there. Eventually I saw it, a private airfield called Melville. He told me to approach it, observe the windsock, descend to 1000 feet AGL, and show him my constant-radius/constant-altitude turns around a fixed point. For my fixed point I made a bad selection: two aircraft parked side by side near the Melville runway. My several turns around this point were somewhat impaired because (1) the Melville windsock would not hold still for an instant, and I never arrived at a good compensation for the wind in banking my turns; (2) both of the aircraft that constituted my "point" decided to start taxiing at the same moment, in opposite directions, and at an unusually high rate of speed.

My advice: Find a silo.

Pierre wanted to see another ground-reference maneuver, S-turns around a straight line with good compensation for the wind. I selected a powerline. (Hypothesis: Powerlines tend to be straighter than highways. Question: Why? Answer: Probably because it doesn't matter how quickly they rise or fall.) As I began my turns I was reminded that Pierre likes S-turns to be very, very tight: tiny loops, with the airplane held level only for an instant in the middle of the S, while crossing the straight line. Compared to the two aircraft that I had used for turns around a point, my powerline seemed to meander very little.

We made two simulated dead-engine emergency approaches to Melville. We got so close to the ground, each time, that I had to ask whether we were landing, and Pierre said "nope, go around." At least our intuitions about decision height corresponded. The emergencies went off nicely: On the first, I had to make a 180 from a fairly high altitude, to get lined up with a headwind. I had plenty of time to go through the entire emergency checklist. However, when I placed the checklist on my kneeboard, Pierre said that one ought to have it memorized. I said that I did have it memorized but that we had been trained to make reference to it anyhow; our instructors think that this is what the FAA wants. Pierre, for one, is no stickler for reading items from the emergency checklist, and I carried it out from memory. The second simulated emergency was just a low-level glide to the same grass field, and it went very nicely especially now that I'm a little more aggressive about high-bank turns on no-power glides. This was no easy accomplishment: A high-bank turn increases lift or G-forces, the stall speed rises with the square root of the lift, and I can feel that square root screaming up toward my backside like an Iraqi surface-air missile.

As it turned out, Pierre was not finished with the 180-degree turning glide with dead engine, and we did another one a while later at JGG in which he demonstrated how a timely and judicious extension of flaps can provide just a little more necessary steam for making a runway.

Our next maneuver, as I recall, involved recoveries from "unusual attitudes." I must have put on the hood, then, for a second time. This phase went well, with a nose-up attitude first and then a few nose-down exercises. On the first nose-down setup, Pierre must have thought I was a little slow in going from power cut, to roll out, to nose up, so he got after me about building up too much diving tendency and had me do the maneuver once or twice again. On both nose-up and nose-down attitudes I start by calling my diagnosis, and then I apply my treatment. But when I opened my eyes, uncovered my ears, looked at the artificial horizon, and said "nose down" Pierre thought that I was telling myself to get the nose down, and I had to explain that "nose down" was my definition of the problem, not my proposed solution. He was then satisfied with my nose-down recovery and the corresponding verbiage, and did not give me the descending-through-the-horizon setup or the sound-and-fury-signifying-nothing setup.

In the latter, of course, the examiner jerks the airplane through all sorts of unusual attitudes, returns to straight-and-level flight, and immediately gives the airplane over to the hooded test-taker who, eyes and ears now open, can usually be counted on to create a most unusual attitude or two of her own. I actually wanted one of these setups: I don't usually flip things around on reflex, and I can usually be counted on to have an automatic default for passivity. At least my wife says so.
 
 

Pierre then told me to head for Williamsburg-Jamestown Airport (JGG), so that I could show him some takeoffs and landings. Having just removed a hood, I first had to figure out where I was. I approached JGG using Jamestown Island and environs for pilotage, and soon saw the beacon tower at the field. Then I made a serious mistake.

As I approached the airport I noticed that Pierre and I were having a tug-of-war on the dual-control yoke, which I could not understand because I had just reset my heading indicator (DG*) and was using it to get myself aligned for a 45-degree entry into the left downwind for runway 31. After a few moments, fortunately, I realized what was going on: My mistake was that, instead of looking at the "30" (or 300-degree) portion of my heading indicator I was looking at the "3" portion of it--digits dropped and added had caused me about 90 degrees of confusion--and fortunately Pierre did not explode with disgust. He may not have realized exactly what I was doing--I didn't tell him--and probably assumed that I was unfamiliar with JGG (not so). Given the misinformation that I was feeding myself from the DG, I wanted to arc sharply to the left and then turn right for a 45-degree entry into the downwind for 31. Luckily I soon saw the actual runway and got lined up properly, without further complications.

Pierre explained that he wanted all landings to be full stop, no touch-and-go, and we got things started with a normal landing. Early on he began emphasizing the importance of taking a look toward one's right while on left base leg, in order to make sure that nobody is approaching on a long final, in which case they have the right of way. At first I was not routinely carrying out this practice--it had not been drilled into us at the tower-controlled airport where I trained--and Pierre got after me once or twice again before I remembered to do it. A quick rightward glance on base (or leftward if appropriate), especially at uncontrolled airports, should be emphasized strongly in training.

Pierre then gave me a choice of specialty takeoffs, telling me that whatever I chose I should execute the corresponding landing. I chose first to do a soft-field takeoff, since this procedure is difficult for me. (The soft-field landing, I find, is relatively easy, although from time to time it decides to be recalcitrant.) Everything went nicely, and I did an unusually good job of remaining in ground effect after lifting off, although Pierre was helping with downward yoke pressure to a degree that I could not discern. He also worked the 10-degree flaps, both ways, for all the specialty takeoffs--perhaps wanting to make sure that these settings were not forgotten. He even did a large part of the radio work at JGG. In brief, we were entering another era of good feeling. But then, suddenly, in a moment of irritation over my high-throttle tendencies on an approach, he decided to make me do my own radio work, and I realized that this general helpfulness, followed by the sudden withdrawal thereof, could very well have been another of his stress inducers, another deliberate high-anxiety distraction.

Throughout my landings I tended to revert to my primitive ways of using too little trim, and this did not help matters although Pierre did not mention it. Word is, he thinks most pilots overuse trim. For one takeoff, maybe two, he placed a nifty little pastie over the airspeed indicator, a real turn-on compared with the Ortho-Novum sticky notes used by my pharmacist-CFI* in Texas. But pasties or pill pads, either way, my landings get better as more instruments are covered up. My Virginia CFI, whenever she wanted to make sure that I would pull off a few good landings, would simply drape her sectional chart over the entire instrument panel. Worked every time.

My first short-field takeoff went well, although I had to start the procedure twice because I forgot, the first time, to set the throttle correctly before releasing the brakes. But the first short-field landing did not go well, primarily because I held too much throttle on the final leg and by the time Pierre and I got squared away on that, it was a sort of dueling throttle-jockeys' final. We did two short-field landings, hitting both times, I thought, at a reasonable distance from the runway numbers, although I recall Pierre's scolding me for having gone 100 feet or so beyond the target. Finally, he set up the 180-degree engine-out turn from downwind to final to touchdown, and showed me how the timely introduction of flaps while holding nose down can provide a little extra lift. (He did, however, have to slip in a little throttle just before adding flaps, to make this demonstration work.) Regarding my radio work he said that, on preparing for takeoff, I should use terminology other than "departing three-one" when I intend to remain in the airport traffic pattern. This phrase implies that one is leaving the area.

As we were preparing to leave JGG, Pierre told me that all I had to do now was to take him back to PHF and execute a no-flaps landing. I took off, making the required left turnout to avoid a nearby school, and entered a heading of 270. I believe I forgot (irony!) to announce our departure from the pattern. Then I made a right turn, headed for Camp Peary, and set up a cruise configuration at about 1700 feet. As I turned toward the southeast, down the York River, and began looking for the Coleman Bridge, Pierre pointed to the NAV-2 indicator, saying nothing (mind-reading test?), but I understood that he wanted me to use it so I tuned the OBS to radial 150, HCM VOR, and tracked it all the way home. On most of the cruise home, Pierre was preoccupied with what I believe was a checklist containing the Practical Test Standards items. I did not try, too hard, to read over his shoulder.

I also believe, now, that this was just another distraction: He wanted me to think that it was all over. It was not.
 
 

The sky was very soupy as we approached PHF, and Pierre was setting a trap--or was he? We could not see PHF, and it was all I could do to get oriented to the Coleman Bridge and the huge smokestack at the Yorktown power plant. As I entered what I thought was a heading for a left downwind for runway 2, assigned by ATC, Pierre began insisting strongly that PHF was to our right, three or four nautical miles west of what I was sure was the actual PHF location, although I still couldn't see the airport. At the time, I really thought Pierre was disoriented. But later, discussing this situation with my flight instructor, Felicity, I realized (rather, she realized) that Pierre was just trying to see if I would take the bait and go off course--this was his best dramaturgical effort of the day! If I had been able to see PHF, I would have realized that he was only acting, trying to tempt me into a bad move. But as Goffman would say, the setting was perfect, and even though I was sure that I was on course relative to the bridge and the smokestack I did not realize that Pierre was just presenting one of his favorite distractions. His performance was so good, his "command of the idiom" so compelling that, even when he reached up and--again saying nothing--called my attention to the ADF, which was pointing directly to my course and to the NDB at Pat Henry, I still believed that he was merely verifying and correcting his own disorientation. He must still be laughing, unless he's busy on the phone lining up deals with Broadway and Hollywood.

If he's not laughing, it is probably because he suspected, as Goffman might say, that I was acting. I'll never tell.

I guess the lesson here for test-takers is to be sure that one knows the major landmarks surrounding one's home airport in case the field itself is not visible. The only times during this flight that I was not deeply concerned about maintaining VFR conditions (due to the haze), I was under the hood with other things to worry about.

When I entered the downwind for runway 2, so indicating to ATC, they gave me immediate clearance to land. All went well until unanticipated traffic showed up from the south, and I was given an extended downwind. I held my downwind cruise configuration nearly to the James River, being careful to stay precisely at 1000-feet altitude, and then ATC gave me an aircraft on final to sight and follow. I told Pierre that I hoped we could see this aircraft, and just then I spotted it. When I called in to say "Seven Mike X-ray, traffic in sight," somebody stepped on me, transmitting over my transmission, so I repeated the call. Felicity said later that she had heard me approaching the airport, and that I sounded pretty good.

As it turned out, the long final approach enabled me to get things lined up smoothly for the no-flaps landing (remember?--Pierre did not remind me), without any need to slip the aircraft for an altitude loss. I love a no-flaps landing with a long final: Everything stays nice, unhurried, easy, and one mainly has to remember to throttle down at an appropriate rate, bleeding off airspeed and altitude while approaching the runway at a reasonable angle. I had plenty of time to study the VASI's* and to call, for Pierre, what I was seeing. I dropped a little into the red-over-red zone, called it for Pierre, and put in enough throttle to get back into red-over-white, you're-lookin'-all-right. Nice slowdown, smooth transition, soft touchdown.

I intend to make future landings with no more than 10-degree flaps, few instruments, and no Pierre. At least, most of the time.

Remembering that it ain't over till it's over, I responded to the tower's request that I continue taxiing on the runway to taxiway delta--not the usual early exit at alpha, now a troublesome intersection where Jaws and his daddy were eagerly waiting to enter the runway. On taxiway delta, I went through the after-landing checklist--Pierre had already tuned the transponder to standby--called "ground point-niner," and was cleared for the parking ramp. I parked at a slight angle to my tie-down area, and Pierre asked if it would be all right with me if he left to go to his car for his ancient typewriter. As he walked away, I had no idea whether I had passed the checkride or not--another mind-reading test? Pierre said that he'd meet me at the flight school office.

Out there on the ramp, all alone, tying down and checking out the airplane, I was so preoccupied that I forgot to record the tach time. I had to return for it later.

Back at the flight school, minutes later, it was only when I--rather, Felicity--saw the color of the typewritten FAA form that Pierre was handing to me for my signature, that I could tell--the way Felicity lighted up!--that the news was not bad. Pierre must love suspense.
 

NOTES:
 

(1) Field methods and informal observational techniques are discussed in Babbie (1992:285), Bainbridge (1992:25,32), Kidder (1981:113), and Neumann (1991:337,357).
 

(2) The many aviation acronyms used in this account are tagged with an asterisk the first time they occur, and are defined in the appendix.
 

REFERENCES:
 

Babbie, Earl. 1992. The Practice of Social Research. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
 

Bainbridge, William S. 1992. Social Research Methods and Statistics: A Computer-Assisted Introduction. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
 

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
 

Kershner, William K. 1979. The Student Pilot's Flight Manual. Ames: Iowa State University Press.
 

Kidder, Louise H. 1981. Selltiz, Wrightsman and Cook's Research Methods in Social Relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
 

Neuman, W. Lawrence. 1991. Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
 

Office of Flight Standards, Federal Aviation Administration. 1987. Private Pilot Practical Test Standards. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Transportation.
 

ABBREVIATIONS:
 

AOPA Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association

ATC Air Traffic Control

ATIS Automatic Terminal Information Service

CDI Course Deviation Indicator

CFI Certified Flight Instructor

DG Directional Gyro

ETA Estimated Time of Arrival

ETE Estimated Time Enroute

FAA Federal Aviation Administration

IFR Instrument Flight Rules

KIAS Indicated airspeed in knots

MSL Mean Sea Level

NAV Navigation radio

NDB Non-directional Radio Beacon

OBS Omni-Bearing Selector

TC Turn Coordinator

TCA Terminal Control Area

VASI Visual Approach Slope Indicator

VFR Visual Flight Rules

VOR VHF Omnidirectional Radio Range

VSI Vertical Speed Indicator
 
 

I consider American higher education to be one of the greatest disasters in the history of the world, just after World War II, the Great Plague of 1348, and the Evelyn Wood speed-reading program.

What the hell is a "dirt farmer"? Who's farming anything other than dirt? Maybe a dirt farmer is just a guy who can't afford fertilizer. But if that's true, then what do we call the guy who can afford fertilizer?

As George Wallace says, we was wrong. We used to go around shouting a slogan about how "you can't trust anybody over thirty." That's a lot of nonsense! Thirty months is a full two and a half years, and anybody that old is already hopelessly messed up. Me and Rousseau are in complete agreement on this point.

If you think this country's a bummer, imagine how it would feel to live in a place where peasant women kill their own babies, and then try to find work as wet nurses for the rich. Of course, we can always wonder whether Ronald Reagan worries very much about this problem.

Around 1969, a guy wrote an article for the Atlantic. He called it "The Faculty is the Heart of the Trouble." He was, of course, entirely right: We are the problem, though not for the reasons this fellow had in mind. The endless series of reports condemning American education say essentially the same thing: Teachers do their customary crap year after year--mainly, talking at students in the grand medieval tradition--and the students don't learn anything. We know, for instance, that most students cannot identify the country in which the Korean War was fought. But they don't give a damn, their keepers don't give a damn, and we don't give a damn.

If we who live by thinking, by our wits, continue forever this abject practice of kissing the backsides of the rich and powerful, we shall place our indelible imprimatur upon a form of academic life that will remain fundamentally, pervasively, and inescapably mickeymouse.

Without a doubt, there were some classical political issues. But still I felt, from the very beginning, that I was doing little more than conducting a simple exercise in social science research: A little demonstration project, a simple "breaching" experiment inspired by the likes of Harold Garfinkel and Paul Goodman and probably other scholars whom I hadn't yet discovered, like Jesus or Abindarráez el Abencerraje. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), said Goodman in a famous essay,
 
 

... is a national craft union, largely of entrenched seniors, that copes with distant crises by dilatory committee work. According to its rules, it will not protect freedom in cases of pragmatic action, but only academic "inquiry" and teaching--but what kind of inquiry is it that is not essentially involved with pragmatic experiment and risk? And it explicitly enjoins against involving the name and strength of the community of scholars in any action that one may take as an "individual." Such limitations would have been unthinkable in the medieval community of scholars.

Or Tonto, ditto.

But Goodman's argument was just a subsidiary of, or derivation from, my main research hypothesis. My main hypothesis also was formulated by Goodman, with inspiration (at least for me) from Garfinkel:
 
 

The AAUP is useful in its code of tenure and academic freedom; but we must remember that it is the pure style of the dominant Organized System to establish status and to transform intellect into conversation, with the proviso that nothing is in danger of being changed.

My method was the classic experiment, and the basic design of the project is quickly conveyed by the following document:
 
 

To: Anthropology Faculty

From: Department Chairman

Subject: Special Department Meeting, Tuesday, March 9, 10:30 a.m.

One of our full-time, regular faculty has announced that he is no longer willing to make "public evaluations" of students and therefore does not intend to give any grade other than S ("pass"). Although the university recently adopted a pass-fail system, S is an illegal grade for most of the students in this case. Furthermore, there is a very real question whether students will receive credit with a grade of S.

I am calling a meeting of the departmental faculty on Tuesday ... to advise me on what we should do to protect the interests of the students.

After all, I had been agonizing over such matters for many years. I saw the student protest movement of the late 'sixties, culminating in a "Dow bust" that had filled many a professorial lung with tear gas. I saw a status-quo oriented, consensus-mongering faculty's non-response to it. I read about the endless antics of a reactionary Board of Regents, a coterie of carefully selected men at least as out of touch as Duke Wayne, or our department chairman, or the national average as established by a number of social surveys--see, for instance, Rodney Hartnett's booklet entitled College and University Trustees. Further, I had read the literature on academic reform and was bitterly aware of the university's immense and increasing hostility toward the sorts of experimentation strongly encouraged by that neglected mass of literature. On the whole, then, the university did not propose to weaken itself at a time when the nation was engaged in war.

So, the chairman had no real choice, and neither did I. After consulting with a number of his trusted advisers and deciding what to do, he called a department meeting "to decide what to do." The meeting consisted of two phases. In phase 1, I announce my concerns and my intentions:
 
 

Gentlemen:

With the end of the current semester, I have completed my first year as a member of the faculty of this university and my seventh year as a professor. My experiences during these years have led me to a number of conclusions about student evaluation and related problems:

First, the responsibility for making public evaluations of students--especially grades, but also such practices as the writing of letters of recommendation, personal contacts with potential employers of students, and so forth--confers on faculty members the power to exert a profound and lasting influence, potentially negative, on the life chances of many students.

Second, such power, now exercised by teachers at virtually all levels of American education, is demonstrably incompatible with the creation of effective learning environments, and it has been especially so in my case. The social, educational, and spiritual costs of maintaining this structure far exceed whatever benefits may derive from making student evaluations available to the various agencies--including, may I remind you, the Selective Service System--that may request or demand them. Apropos of our cooperation with the Selective Service System, I believe with Ben Spock that American education, from the pre-school level to the post-graduate level, is an essential and crucial element of this country's militaristic approach to third-world problems.

Third, while the faculty and administration of this university have a right, indeed a responsibility, to demand that I uphold the high standards of scholarship for which this university is justly renowned, there is no legitimate authority that may impose on me and my students the encumbrances of the grading-rating system. In my view, public evaluations should be made only with the mutual consent of individual professors and individual students.

Fourth, my professional responsibilities compel me to announce that I am no longer willing to exercise any potentially negative power over the life chances of my students, and that I consider the imposition of any such responsibility to be a threat to my academic freedom and to that of my students.

In phase 2 my colleagues, as Mark Twain might say, ambuscade the A-rab. I quote from the official minutes of the aforementioned meeting:
 
 

CONFIDENTIAL!
 

Minutes of the Special March 9 Meeting of the Department of Anthropology

Attending: {c. 50 faculty colleagues, listed in alphabetical order}
 

(1) The Chairman called the meeting to order. He announced that the purpose of the meeting was to consider Mr. de Foliante's intention not to give grades. He asked Mr. de Foliante if he would like to make a preliminary statement.

(2) Mr. de Foliante said that he had informed the Chairman that he would not give grades to his Anthropology 477 class and had announced his intention to the class at its first meeting. Students desiring grades were told that they should drop the course; those willing to continue in the course were told that they could drop at any time, should they change their minds. ... Mr. de Foliante stated that he would soon issue a white paper explaining his views in full and would have preferred to discuss them after it had been issued. ...

(3) Mr. M. demanded that someone else immediately replace Mr. De Foliante in the course.

(4) The Chairman said that such an action could not be taken by the department, in that it could only be done through dismissal proceedings. Dismissal proceedings would have to be instituted by higher administrative authority.

(5) Mr. T. asked about Mr. de Foliante's response to students who wanted grades. Mr. de Foliante said that no one had made such a request. The Chairman, however, said that he had received complaints from students.

(6) Mr. R. said that our primary concern should be for the students now enrolled. He moved that the Chairman provide an alternative evaluation system, in which Mr. de Foliante would have no role, for the students in Anthropology 477. The motion was seconded. ... The motion was voted upon and carried. It was agreed that a special meeting would be held to discuss Professor de Foliante's white paper, when issued. The meeting was then adjourned.

To: Students enrolled in Anthro. 477

From: Chairman, Department of Anthropology

Subject: Grades in Anthropology 477

Professor de Foliante's stated intention to give all students enrolled in Anthro. 477 this semester a grade of S ("pass") is contrary to the rules passed by the university faculty. The faculty of the Department of Anthropology have discussed the issues raised by this situation at a special meeting. To protect the interests of the students, the department faculty have voted to provide an evaluation system for the course under the auspices of the department.

A faculty committee will construct and grade a final examination for the course. The examination will be required of all students. Professor de Foliante has requested that he not be asked to participate in the construction or the grading of the examination. If Professor de Foliante provides grades of S or if he fails to provide any grades for the course, the course grade for each student will be determined by the faculty committee.

My colleagues. My beloved colleagues: Men (and a few women--alas, too few) who had held themselves forth as advocates and exemplars of the open, liberal, free-thinking university, who had built a large reputation for being in a vanguard of those Americans deeply committed to change, who allegedly wished to make the university a mighty instrument of social justice, who had shown a capacity for protesting virtually any injustice brought to their attention--shocking indeed that such men, such honorable men, confronted with an injustice in their own midst and partly of their own contrivance, should choose the most reactionary of all possible solutions. Their action was made more palatable, as usual, by wrapping it in rhetoric about the need for protecting the interests of the disadvantaged and the downtrodden--in this instance, my students. A willingness to hear all sides, just after deciding the issue, was strongly in evidence, as witness the special hearing on my "white paper"--and much of our initial anxiety was sublimated into ritual conversation.
 

(1) The immediate post-experimental environment
 
 

I do strongly agree with what you say, but I shall be frightened to death if you righteously say it.

These early results were not entirely unanticipated: Faculty liberals, famous for their fast willingness to protest injustices far from campus, acquiescing as usual in the most blatant injustices within the cloisters. To this tendency I have given the name huelga syndrome--huelga is Spanish for strike--because I once listened incredulously while a faculty colleague, wearing a huelga button on his lapel, denounced a lovely strike mounted by the graduate assistants: Strikes are all right for those grimy field hands out there I know not where, and may they give the grape growers fits--but these obstreperous whelps hanging around hereabouts had damn well better get back in line!

My decision to commit an overt violation of university regulations, to run a full-blown experiment in breaching, involved me in a highly aberrational form of behavior which, as a social scientist, I should be able to explain--at least in part. Insofar as I understand my own motivations in this matter and remain capable of the usual excesses of motive-mongering that give meaning and depth to American life, it seems to me that the main triggering mechanisms were intellectual curiosity combined with an intense emotional aversion, accumulated over many years, against the authoritarian inflexibility of many faculty members and against the tendency for students to act like Uncle Tom. Furthermore, I had been severely criticized by student radicals for my own hypocrisy in conforming to the contradictory demands of the modern academic system while at the same time harboring large misgivings about what that system does to people, or fails to do for people. At the time, as now, there was little evidence that faculties around the country were interested in any save the most trivial types of reform--or, worse yet, the faculties were openly hostile to reform and, in many cases, even minor innovations. A charming example of this hostility was provided by a department chairman under whom I once languished, who saw fit to send me the following letter by campus mail. Since his office was located eleven short steps from mine, I assume that there must have been some sinister need to make this communication look more or less official:
 
 

Dear Gus:

You are aware from previous departmental deliberations that I think you should not teach 414 as we have conceived of it. I'm sure you do agree that we need another way to enable you to pursue your interest in deviance. I think one way might be for you to share in the teaching of 514--the graduate course in deviance. But I don't want to try that just now. Understandably, R. might be a little upset if you were assigned 514 next fall. So I have scheduled him for it. What I have to say below has no relationship to this problem with the deviance course, not as such ...

Finally, it looks as though quite a number of our majors have avoided your kinship and family courses. Do you feel this is correct? If so, what accounts for it? I have to level with you, Gus, and say that two members of our department have suggested to me in private that you are not pulling your weight. They have not yet complained strongly, but they have commented informally on it. When it becomes necessary to consider a tenure decision, this is exactly the kind of observation that can become critical. At that point, of course, a departmental committee will take action first. Not trying to scare you, Gus. Rather, I want to help you with any problem or misunderstanding that may have arisen in recent months.

Another worry is your practice of permitting students to "explore the library" rather than read a textbook or other required items. A number of students have come to me this semester to borrow books or journals, saying that they are desperate for material. Some say they have searched libraries all over the state and haven't found what they need. Caveat: The library approach is suitable for independent study, graduate seminars, and the like. We have so many students here, though, that we simply cannot proceed as if everybody were a Ph.D. candidate. A few top students will perform as desired, many will flounder or avoid the course, and most of the others will simply cheat. My view, Gus, is that you have not done justice to the course. The only way (caveat) a text can be avoided is to lecture in a highly organized way throughout the term, thus providing a text yourself. Question: Will your teaching be more organized, more thorough, now that you have finally licked your Ph.D. thesis? That's it, Gus, right on the line.

{Signed}

This has always struck me as an extraordinary document. In its own unique way, it is eloquent: I have never seen a clearer representation of what is wrong with higher education in America. It contains a set of assumptions matched in their untenability only by the arrogant fervor with which they are held:
 
 

First, that my courses should be as he, the department, and I conceive of them, not as my students and I conceive of them.

Second, that it is adequate merely to make an empty promise that I may have an opportunity to teach what I wish to teach and am prepared to teach, if it can be arranged--although apparently in this case it could not.

Third, that in the absence of any real evidence it is legitimate, on a conjectural basis, to arrive at important decisions about the effectiveness of a professor's teaching.

Fourth, that it is legitimate under these shabby circumstances to invoke the matter of tenure, and to threaten an unfavorable tenure decision based in part on the "private" innuendoes of a pair of unnamed colleagues. I would soon learn to think of tenure as a fluttering series of spiderwebs carefully placed between me and a Mack truck moving slow in compound low; at the time, however, I didn't realize that a pair of determined colleagues working in concert have a good chance of tearing down these protective devices.

Fifth, that experimental classroom procedures cannot be used if a few students do not approve of them, even if these students are demonstrably incapable of finding information in the world's outstanding Information Society. In other words, experimentation is ruled out if it is true experimentation in the sense that there is a possibility that the usual "successes" will not be achieved, or that new ways of defining success will emerge.

Sixth, that we know definitively and a priori the circumstances under which the "explore-the-library" approach is appropriate, even though our libraries seem to be short on books. Incidentally, I have estimated that the public libraries of the state in question contain at least 70 million volumes.

Seventh, that we know what constitutes "highly organized" knowledge in the social sciences, and that only such knowledge has a place in the college classroom.

Finally, caveats to the contrary notwithstanding, the system is really trying to help me, my students, and probably the entire Third World.

The French philosopher Simone Weil, then, captured perfectly my early educational philosophy when she summed up a large part of her own brief career by saying, "j'ai toujours considéré la révocacion comme la couronnement de ma carrière"--I have always considered my firing to be the crowning glory of my career. I'm a little disappointed, however, that she uses révocacion in the singular. She didn't have enough years to make it plural.

After an inordinate amount of soul-searching it became clear to me that I was caught between the faculty's insistence on maintaining a rigid, repressive status quo and the deplorable willingness of so many students to adopt whatever machinations were deemed necessary to beat the system's pernicious little game. At this moment--so it seemed to me--the scales fell from my eyes and I suddenly came to the further realization that every time I tried to make a thoughtful, stimulating class presentation only to have my efforts rewarded by the inevitable uptight junior asking whether he would be held "responsible" for that particular lecture on some future test--a humiliation that most professors have known scores of times--we were merely creating another instance in which the system exerts a chilling effect on free inquiry. Anything short of outright refusal to cooperate, it seemed to me, would involve an unacceptable compromise of academic freedom--mine, and that of any of my students who gave a damn.

Which brings me to my final self-assessed motivation: I wanted to know whether it is possible in the academic community, in modern America, to act on principle. If you do not have clout among the old boys, do you automatically lose? I do not know whether it was ever possible in the long history of the university for scholars to act on principle in the style of Paul Goodman, and perhaps Goodman's ideas about a "community of scholars" are merely the delirious dream of a poet trying to revive an Arcadian past that never existed. But if it never existed, perhaps we must invent it! My students, even those who were organizing protest activities on my behalf, never fully understood that the reason I refused to consult them or anybody else about the advisability of my actions, and the reason I never actively sought political support for my position even after being "unjustly" fired, was that such consultation and such potential support struck me as being entirely superfluous to a clean test of the Goodman hypothesis--a simple lesson that must be driven home both to students and to faculty colleagues. A breaching experiment must be a simple repudiation of bad faith, not a political exercise.

I had slumbered through any number of interminable faculty meetings called in the midst of crisis, in which the most intransigent professors would make the incredibly self-delusional argument that, after all, they were merely trying to preserve the apolitical character of the university. Such flummery could be quickly dissipated by merely skimming a few random pages of Clark Kerr's classic The Uses of the University. If, as a member of this apolitical sand heap, I had been able to hold forth a credible threat of a major campus uprising or, better yet, if I had been in a position to threaten an important budget, and assuming that the university's second-strike capability could have been effectively deterred or interdicted, I would doubtless have received a hearing, an opportunity to raise an exotic and unusual question of academic freedom. A first-class campus recruiter for the CIA could have raised the issues much more effectively than I did, in my capacity as a mere professor.

What we really find, though, is paradox. I fly into an immediate rage when I am told that I cannot speak directly to the president of my university, that I must speak to my immediate administrative superior. A university is a community of scholars, not a political hierarchy. If the president wishes to attend one of my seminars, or even to make occasional use of the local faculty too-too pottie, he's welcome. We might even stand a chance of learning something.

While it could well be argued that Clark Kerr is an advocate, exemplar, and staunch defender of the liberal's university, it should be recognized that, contrary to popular belief, not all faculty members are liberals--even among the social scientists and humanists. I once wrote an article on this topic, under the title "The myth of the liberal professor." In any case, the indispensable complement of the aforementioned huelga syndrome liberal is the strongly conservative (if not absolutely right-wing) faculty member who would like to see the service-oriented liberal's university--the American university of the postwar era--completely dismantled. I soon discovered that such men and women seem to have a strange affinity for faculty "radicals" (gossamer contact with reality?), although their feelings are almost never reciprocated. Perhaps there is a belief that a true service-oriented university should be able to take care of the needs of Marxists as well as Dowists. Many of the department's thrice-blessed mandarin professors, the high priests of academe, the huelga syndrome complement, individually and privately gave their frank approval--by telephone, brief note, or while breathlessly hanging on my office door--although my "means," to many of these colleagues, were a cause of some consternation. This response, assuming that I interpret it correctly (perhaps these colleagues were merely Judas goats: I know they made me feel like the Paul Newman character in Cool Hand Luke), was a most pleasant surprise, a little like receiving a compliment from a Thoughtful Duke Wayne. Less surprising, but equally entertaining and edifying, were the anonymous notes that began arriving with the appearance of my "white paper"--some friendly, some derisive, but all affirming something about the allegedly benign character of the faculty's traditional role:
 
 

Professor de Foliante:
 

Enclosed is your screed on grading and academic reform, which is doubtless valuable to you but just so much plunder in the eyes of the University faculty, whose mailboxes have been stuffed with it by your student supporters. The sloppy thinking and the over-writing provide ample explanation (to all but the author) why, after seven years as a faculty member, he is still an assistant professor. The fault, of course, lies in the "system." It could be imbedded in the author, who obviously needs further exposure to elementary logic and a good course in freshman composition.

{Unsigned}

And another:
 
 
 

MEMORANDUM

To: Gus de Foliante

Thank you for sending a copy of your position paper on the structure of academic authoritarianism. It is both fascinating and articulate--articulate in a way that I have always admired.

Would it be possible to borrow your mimeograph masters sometime early next fall? I would like to run this paper off and use it as a discussion paper in a number of our courses and in some of our advanced non-credit student faculty seminars.

Thank you.

{Signed}

P.S. By the way, I hope you get this published.

Shortly afterward I talked to some grad student friends who were majoring in mathematics. I told them that I had it on high authority that any sensible person would not take a meaningless degree in mathematics but would merely audit whatever coursework he or she needed, and go on from there. Some of these friends dropped out, while others took their rightful places at the barricades. As we shall see later, I have a real talent for driving folks from the temple.

The lesson was clear: Faculty members are not to be encouraged to learn anything from one another (except, perhaps, from those few who share the same limited and limiting specialty), and the politics of sand-heap solipsism will remain intact. Our more advanced and enthusiastic students will doubtless continue to learn far more than we; but who cares, particularly since we never have to let it hang out?

And then came the long-awaited special convocation on my white paper. Entitled Dunce Cages, Hickory Sticks, and Public Evaluation: The Structure of Academic Authoritarianism, this screedish essay was the result of a month's feverish work. Chiefly because of the catchy title, I suppose, a few colleagues had actually read it--I know for a fact that their mailboxes had been stuffed with it. In any case, this "emergency" (where?) meeting constitutes the first and last meaningful discussion of basic educational policy--as contrasted with the usual trivia--that I have ever had with faculty colleagues at any of several institutions in which I've served over the past thirty years. Although the discussion rarely moved beyond superficialities, it touched upon every major issue that we obstreperous protesters had been trying to raise: the incompatibility of teaching and evaluative roles; the intricately related problems of measurement of student performance, "feedback" on their performance, and evaluation of their performance; the contradictory organizational requisites of the "service-oriented" multiversity; the role of colleges and universities in "status allocation"; admission policies of graduate and professional schools; whether learning must be accompanied by pain, both for students and for teachers.

Throughout the dialogue it became more and more clear that the major impediments to abandoning the grading-rating system were, first, a fear that such a commitment would be the harbinger of a more experimental, innovative, demanding approach to the despised teaching role, and even the small amount of time spent discussing this prospect seemed, to more than a few participants, an exorbitant waste; second, a strong fear that the faculty's traditional control over classroom and curricula would be undermined by students no longer afraid to challenge authority; third, a fear that our responsibility for sorting out students, for determining which of them should be rewarded for their merit or punished for their vices, could not be carried out in the absence of the grade-credit-degree system, and that our employer would have no recourse but to punish us, the entire department, if we rejected the task. Which, incidentally, is precisely what management threatened to do.

We then resolved this "heated and wide-ranging discussion" with a fiery motion to adjourn.

It was all terribly depressing, and I spent the better part of the meeting near a window watching sailboats glide slowly and indifferently across a nearby lake, knowing that I had correctly anticipated that nothing of importance would be or could be accomplished by a group of men so utterly defeated as these. Again, we witnessed a classic instance of Goodman's ritual conversation, conversation as a means of obscuring an intention to continue the same patterns of indifference and acquiescence that had long since transformed our university into an efficient machinery of repression that one adapts to most expeditiously by simply turning off one's brain and joining the blessed battalions of sycophantic organization men or long-forgotten senior faculty vegetables. For the former, ritual conversation becomes a way of life, a way to achieve pissant power on a more than paltry scale; for the latter, involved in an adaptation that I first learned about years ago by listening to faculty T-group confessionals, one hopes that conversation with oneself has a richness rarely found in the empty, moribund convocations of the modern academy.

I did, however, accomplish one thing: A few colleagues adopted my practice of referring to the Examinations Grades Accumulation of credits Degree system as the EGAD! system.

The next day, perhaps not by coincidence, I had the honor of receiving my first direct, personal communication from the dean--in fact, from any dean, if we exclude letters of appointment, recruitment interviews, budgetary quibbles, and other such formalities:
 
 

Dear Professor de Foliante:

I understand from several of your department colleagues that you feel certain questions need to be raised about the grading system in use at this university, as well as other aspects of the undergraduate program.

I should like to point out, first of all, that the grading system is to be reviewed by an appropriate faculty committee this fall. Thus, there will be an opportunity for you and other concerned faculty to raise suggestions for change, including the nature of course requirements, the separation of evaluation from teaching, and many other issues that appear to be of current interest. I am most gratified to learn of your interest in improving undergraduate education at this institution, and I hope you will join your colleagues in this continuing effort.

Until such time as changes have been introduced, I know that you have already been advised that each faculty member is expected to comply with existing regulations (e.g., Fac. Doc. 1403, 13 February 1947; rev. 2 June 1954; rev. 13 September 1954) as a part of his responsibility to the university.
 

Sincerely,

{Signed}

Dear Alexander:

Although I am fully aware of my obligation to the College and University to observe the existing faculty regulations, I believe that I have additional obligations of a professional nature that compel me to refuse to comply. The rationale behind this argument is set forth in detail in my recent "white paper," of which you should have received a copy--you might check your mailbox. Incidentally, the study and research that I have conducted over the past few weeks, in preparing the revised and expanded version of my "white paper," have convinced me even more strongly than before that I have no alternative but to refuse to participate in traditional evaluation processes.

I believe that I would be doing the University a disservice if I were to follow the many strong suggestions that I turn in legal grades, for this action would correctly be interpreted as an example par excellence of a professor caving in under the various pressures that "the system" is able to exert; capitulation would be seen as a sell-out that would mainly sacrifice the interests and concerns of students. Professors and administrators, as you may know, are often seen as being largely indifferent to the interests of students, and some of the feedback I have received on my white paper indicates that students are largely correct in this assessment: Many professors have told me that they don't give a damn what use society makes of grades, credits, and degrees, or what our admission and certification policies may be, so long as the University continues to provide ways in which professors may "insulate" themselves from the burgeoning hordes of undergraduates. ...
 

Sincerely,

{Signed}

Dear Gus:

It would be useful for you and me to discuss the subject of our recent correspondence. I am almost certain to have a free afternoon next week, but if you're away then, as seems likely, perhaps a time can be arranged during the following week. Unfortunately, I'm going to be out of town most of the first week of June.

Please call my office and set a convenient time.

Sincerely,

{Signed}

And note the extraordinary transition! Prior to my receiving the dean's first letter, the cool-out/warning, I had had no direct contact concerning the issues of the day with administrative authorities superior to my department chairman. Apparently this channelwork continues unabated until such time as the bluesuits deem it necessary that a relatively high-level bureaucrat come on with overwhelming formalistic splendor--e.g., a salutation to Professor de Foliante and an impressive recitation of rules and procedures and legalistic references, whereupon the wrong-headed recipient of all this attention is supposed to realize that this vast organization, with its massive resources and all its complex regulations and elegant procedures, is no mere pipe to be played upon. It all reminded me of the last time I was cooled out by an insurance company: An agent nearly convinced me that my household was in excellent shape despite the fact that it had been hit by a tornado-fire-flood, and had also been electrocuted. In any case, I had technical problems. For one thing, the regulations did not provide for electrocution of one's household.

My lengthy conversation with the dean took place a few days later and was the notorious occasion on which he finally conceded, after jawboning aimlessly for perhaps an hour, that a bachelor's degree in the social sciences or humanities tells us next to nothing: It tells us that the recipient is a certified organization man, able to follow instructions, and can probably read if called upon to do so. The dean, I felt, saw nothing particularly distressing about this arrangement, and this attitude more or less turned me off to the man while at the same time helping me, again, to understand why the established practices persist.

Our leaders are charming, skillful, brilliant men and women--who question nothing. They cannot permit themselves to doubt the realities on which their careers are founded, for to do so would be to jeopardize those very careers, perhaps even to jeopardize one's self-esteem. We will never see a university president who will simply not accept the fact that the successful varsity basketball coach-grifter "earns" ten times more than the most brilliant assistant professor. By "not accept," I mean risking his or her career in order to carry out the famous French admonition, écrasez l'infâme!

By this time "the system" had begun deteriorating badly. So badly and so beautifully, in fact, that it became necessary for a nervous chancellor to escalate matters dangerously by seeing to the appointment of a new committee. As reported by a local newspaper:
 
 

A special committee of the faculty will be named to study the grading system at the University.

The faculty's powerful central executive committee said it would appoint a special committee due to the "considerable interest on the part of the students and faculty in a re-evaluation of the traditional grading system."

It added that, during the interim, the "letter and spirit" of the current grading system, adopted by the university faculty in 1954, will prevail.

The action follows a number of proposed changes in the social science departments. At least nine junior faculty members have indicated that they will grade either A or F, eliminating the B, C, and D grades. A few faculty members have said that they will not turn in any grades.

In one case, a class reportedly voted to allow the faculty member to give either the A or F grade. The faculty member had proposed the system and asked for the class vote.

In the psychology department, one professor tentatively was allowed to grade in this manner for the first semester, but the department retained the right to intervene and grade the students in the course itself.

Unhappiness among some faculty members in the government department has also been publicized.

... we may conclude that the present grading system does not result in uniformity among all units of the campus.

Recent Letters and Science figures indicate that there has been a sudden and significant upward shift in grades during the Spring semester in contrast to a relatively stable pattern in the past. Those freshmen in liberal arts courses with a GPA of at least 2.0 now comprise 81 per cent, in contrast to 61 per cent in the previous year. For all undergraduate students, the average GPA has increased from 2.49 last Spring to 3.01 this Spring. Other information indicates that this is more likely to be attributable to changing grading patterns among faculty, rather than to other possibilities including a marked improvement in student effort and accomplishment.

... we feel that the present grading system is not being used with the degree of uniformity and stability that it deserves as a reliable instrument of overall academic evaluation. This need not mean that the system is unworkable, only that, as a minimum, it needs periodic review and adjustment.

All these developments convinced me that the surest and quickest way to undo the grading system and related maladjustments is not for a few faculty crazies--exemplars, in the good old days, of the student moderate position--to take direct action, but rather to bring about mass subversion of the spirit (perhaps not the letter) of the EGAD! system by assigning technically legal grades that are intentionally and demonstrably meaningless. Assign them randomly, assign mass A's, let the students supply their own grades--the latter, granted, may not be entirely meaningless, but within the worldview of the EGAD! system, it surely is. Such an approach, in effect, will dispel the mythology underlying current practices by highlighting their absurdity. Along these lines there are many unique opportunities: If, for instance, we assign grades randomly, using an efficient statistical simulation such as Minitab, there will occur among students whatever variation we wish to write into the program, and I recommend that we form an honor society to pay our respects to those high GPA students who, perhaps destined for Wall Street careers in any case, will thereby have achieved flashy early successes in "casino capitalism." The Nixon draft lottery helped to prepare us mentally and spiritually for these eventualities, as do the contemporary state lotteries.

These suggestions, I think, contain the major implications of this study for future research, which should get under way sometime in the early years of the new millennium--although grant money is likely to be minimal.
 

(2) Veblenian celebrations
 
 

Anybody who becomes a professor, and then tries to retain her adolescent idealism, deserves whatever she gets.

As it became clear that our beloved EGAD! system was under siege, the dean hastily withdrew his affection. When the freshman GPA suddenly spurts from 2.49 to 3.01 with no upper limit in sight (Durkheim!), administrators get very upset--regents, legislators, and alumni begin breathing at the poor chaps. Affection showed signs of dissipating throughout the campus, and our next relevant document appears near the end of what was probably the most consciousness-expanding semester ever experienced by my departmental colleagues, whether faculty or students:
 
 

About 175 university students conducted a sit-in Monday to protest the dismissal, effective in June, of Professor August R. de Foliante, an assistant professor of Anthropology.

De Foliante had refused to assign letter grades to students in his classes.

Eight other professors having the same contract were offered renewals for the next academic year. Several of these professors expressed concern over de Foliante's dismissal.

Professor Edward R. Nurse, chairman of the department, denied that de Foliante's refusal to give grades was the reason for his not being rehired. Nurse has refused to discuss the reasons for the department's decision on the ground that to do so would not be ethical.

Graduate student Thomas Henry, 27, said: "We have no legitimate channels--as the faculty normally defines the term--to express our concerns. Therefore we decided to have a sit-in, or mill-in, to tie up the secretaries and the office for an hour, or perhaps the rest of the week."

Several hundred students have signed a petition asking the Anthropology department to meet with them in order to discuss the de Foliante case, and hiring and promotion generally.

De Foliante plans a protest to the American Association of University Professors, which could put the university on its list of censured administrations. De Foliante said he wanted to dramatize his view that he does not consider it part of his job to perform public-access evaluations of students.

Actually I've forgotten most of what happened in the play, so I can't say much about it. As for the ice cream cone, it was structured in the classic tradition: Aristotelian, top-down, concentric spheres, smooth transitions, divine inspiration. Act I: lemon mousse supreme. Act II: escalope de banane provençal--or something that behaved a hell of a lot like it. Act III: chocolate mint julep. The explosion occurred because I was forced to open the performance with Act III, which was fast melting.

The third de Foliante memorial sit-in--or perhaps the fourth, I lost count--was held a few weeks later at a most inauspicious time when (for largely, although not entirely, separate reasons) the social science building was occupied by an impressive force of seventy or eighty policemen, tucked away in its secret places. The student-power advocates suffered their first real defeat and ultimate humiliation: There would be no concessions by the departmental or administrative power structures, and all past, present, and future firings of faculty, however arbitrary and unjust in the eyes of students, would stand and would be enforced, if necessary, by the local and not-so-local gendarmerie. Thenceforth the dwindling energies of protesting students were sublimated into alienated forms of ritual protest--they had read Goodman faithfully--and with my fancied martyrdom the adoration of the Magi was soon upon us. The annual student-faculty Christmas party, an unusually strained affair that had to be postponed until the arrival of the vernal equinox, culminated in an inspirational gospel reading, a lengthy production from which I'll quote briefly:
 
 

In this season of the year we all gather together for great celebration and merriment. This is as it should be, but all too often we forget the true meaning of this joyous Christmas season.

If I may, I would like to recount for you the miraculous Christmas story which we celebrate on this occasion:

"And so it came to pass that Joseph and Mary came down to the city of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown to undergo analysis. But as there was no room in the small groups laboratory, they prepared their bed in the ping-pong room. Now Mary was heavy with child, and on that night the child was born. They named the child Augustin and laid him in a humble bed of shredded computer printout.

"And it came to pass that the child, Augustin, who had astounded the great priests in the temple of the AAA with his wisdom, had grown into a man, and had come unto the shores of Atod'nem to be baptized. And Augustin, when he was baptized, went up straightaway from the mossy fundament. And lo, a voice came out of the Carillon Tower saying 'This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,' and the tribe of anthropological ecologists bestowed upon him a three-year contract.

"And walking along the shores of Atod'nem, he saw two brethren, Thomas and Paul, casting their minds into great Reports of the Census Bureau, for they were demographers. And he said unto them, 'Come ye away with me, and I will make you students of humanity.' And they straightaway left their Hewlett-Packards and rusting counter-sorters, and followed him. And in such ways Augustin gathered about him a multitude.

"And Augustin went about all the social science buildings, teaching in the classrooms and preaching the word of the kingdom, healing all manner of ignorance and all manner of apathy among the sufferers. And the word went forth to all the campus, and there followed him a great multitude ...

"But then was Augustin led off into the museology lab to be tempted by the executive committee, who bade him to look out into the social science building, and said, 'All of this kingdom shall be yours if you cease your preaching and worship us.' And Augustin said unto them, 'Get behind me, bureaucrats, for it is written that ye shall worship learning and truth, and only learning and truth shall ye serve.'

"And soon the priests and elders were deeply angered by Augustin, and demanded of David, the governor of the land, that Augustin be put to death. But David was much vexed by this man, and so he took Augustin and eight other prisoners before thirty judges so that they might decide upon a punishment. And it came to pass that the judges said, 'Let us have the eight.' And David, the governor, said, 'But what will ye have me do with this man, Augustin?' And they cried out, 'Terminate him!' And so it was done, on the hill called Mocsab, and David the governor washed his hands."

As a matter of fact, my only opportunity to drive money-changers from the temple occurred when, as a kid about the same age as Jesus on that memorable occasion, I discovered the technique of running through the Sunday school classrooms shortly after classes had let out, and scooping up the small change--ultimately intended by mommie and daddy for the silvery collection plates--that had managed to liberate itself from the pockets of the careless, squirming kiddies. At the formal church services a little later it was always entertaining--at a moment in the proceedings when entertainment was sorely needed--to see the children overcome with anxiety at their inability to locate the precious coins. They would rummage their pockets desperately, creating a lovely disturbance, and they occasionally found it necessary to flee--that is, they were driven from the temple! It wasn't all glory, however: I usually had to stick around until the sermon burrowed itself, deeply down, to a halt. Then I would rush to the church gift shop and buy anything that I could find of a non-ecclesiastical nature; even Long Ranger comics I defined as non-ecclesiastical, which of course was ridiculous. Still, I saved enough money that I was able to go into the loan sharking business among the first-year catechism kids. They actually had a much bigger need for diversified financial services than the older kids: Another generational gap.

The gospel production said little about me, for I felt about as martyred as Muhammad Ali when his title was taken from him in the same way that one takes wet from water. But the ritual exercises of our Christmas party said a lot about students and what they appear, at times, to be seeking. The students who created the unrest of the 'sixties and 'seventies, if I understood them correctly, wanted the university to make itself into a sort of church or religious sect--not in terms of the usual doctrinal mumbo-jumbo and boundless bigotry, but in terms of lifestyles, of social structure. It is no accident that a book like Hazel Barnes' The University as the New Church was read by more than a handful of young people. We persuaded ourselves--perhaps deluded ourselves--that the more benign features of religious organizations, especially informal, sect-like organizations, could readily be adopted by colleges and universities: their more open, egalitarian, voluntary character; the fact that they are not highly bound up with the class systems and "manpower channeling" systems of the larger society--we propose to dis-establish the infamous Protestant Establishment; the fact that we the preachers will not be called upon to render public evaluations of our parishioners--I would, however, be willing to grade members of my flock if the grades could be communicated only to them and to the Deity, assuming that She's interested; the fact that church affiliations may be a life-long proposition undertaken voluntarily, not a brief series of trials that end abruptly with a ceremony called commencement; the fact that most religious tribes address themselves to the whole range of emotional, spiritual, and (delusions, again!) intellectual needs, rather than concentrating on the last of these in not-so-splendid isolation. And what we learned from our good friends the Vietcong was that we cannot use religion as an excuse for blowing away neighbors who hold some radical notion. Professors, we believed, were being urged by their students to become secular preachers simply because everybody else--including Richard Nixon ("Nix the Dick"), John Mitchell ("Mitch the John"), and even our beloved Spiro Agnew ("Ted the Fed")--had failed us. We believed, in fact, that we were witnessing an extraordinary historical transformation: the ultimate fulfillment of Auguste Comte's (demented?) dream of a Religion of Humanity, a religion in which the rich would make sacrifices for the poor, and in which eleven o'clock Sunday morning would no longer be the most segregated hour in America.

The bottom line, then, is this: I was not the salvation of anybody, and perhaps I never will be the salvation of anybody despite the fact that I now carry a KOA credit card. I was nothing more than a minor disciple announcing the coming of the revolution. I still announce the revolution, but with one stipulation: The Savior has already arrived, She is hiding inside the heads and hearts of our students, of our young, and when they finally discover Her we shall all stop consuming locusts--perhaps even the chocolate-covered variety!

Our departmental Christmas party ended abruptly when one of the more pious among the faculty, deeply offended by the sacrilege he had just witnessed, undertook a classic aggravated assault against the lead actor of the gospel production. We tried to invoke the standard thirty hours' Christmas truce--but this, remember, was the month of March! The battle was short, swift, non-decisive, and highly injurious to a nearby large bowl. The good news is that the only effective punch thrown during the melee had reposed in that bowl. Actually, that's the bad news.

The student protesters, thoroughly frustrated, soon dispersed. The last I heard, the leadership cadres were living communally in the Napa Valley of California, enjoying sunshine, the juices of grapes, stripped locusts--and "waiting."
 

(3) Post-experimental depth interview
 

If you're a generalist in an American university, you're dead. Ten per cent of the time you're treading on somebody's personal turf, and he concludes that your work is superficial, if not arrogant; then he rejects the ninety per cent that he did not understand.
 

--Anonymous
 

When Big Nurse, our new department chairperson, gave me the news about my being fired, he invited me to stop by his office (pseudo-Gemeinschaft?) in case I should wish any further discussion of the matter. After a delay of several days during which I was preoccupied with the department's annual football banquet--my teammates wanted to honor me for my ability to carry on despite the fact that my body was riddled with undergraduate bone fragments--there took place a dialogue that must be recorded for posterity.

DE FOLIANTE: Well, Big, I got your letter the other day, and I guess I'm a little curious about some of the more obscure reasons for my dismissal. I'm not sure I know what's meant, for instance, by all this stuff about "contribution to the functioning of the department" and by "service to the community." You have to admit, these are vague notions. If this is simply a matter of my research and writing being unsatisfactory--well, hell, I agree! But they're a lot better than most of what comes out of this department. {Unlike Sugar Ray Leonard, I believe in opening strong, carrying the battle to the enemy.}

BIG {defensively}: No, I don't agree with that, Gus. As you know, the department makes a very thorough and systematic effort every year to evaluate all its members--it's a big department, and the annual evaluation is a massive amount of work for all of us that takes up hundreds of man-hours. In your case, I must say that of the many years I've been in this department I have never seen anybody so thoroughly and fairly evaluated as you were. You turned in, as you know, an exceedingly large amount of written work, probably three or four times as much as what we ordinarily receive from junior faculty members, and I think that just about every bit of it was read by most members of the personnel committee. Your case was discussed for the better part of an hour by the committee, and the decision was unanimous. I think the feeling was especially strong on your research and writing, you know, with most members of the committee feeling that, while you're probably a very intelligent guy ...

DE FOLIANTE: Jesus, Big, c'mon. I haven't heard that sort of thing since I got kicked out of junior high school back in '49. Just give me the straight horseshit.

BIG: Well, I think you'll agree that they have a right to their opinion! But the ultimate feeling in any case was that, frankly, you just don't care about establishing truth. You're careless with data, you make all sorts of causal interpretations of things without any real justification, you have a way of combining disparate ideas that don't seem to hang together, you seem to show a sort of pride in your own biases, you get into all sorts of undisciplined speculation and then make no effort to test out your speculations. I think the basic feeling here is that you're not very scientific in your style of work. You turned in a couple of mimeographed papers--for example, your piece on the oedipus complex--and after reading that paper and a few others nobody was able to figure out where you were going substantively, and then suddenly the whole paper seems to degenerate into a technical methodological treatise ...

DE FOLIANTE: Hell, Big, I don't know where the paper's going either! It's very loose and disjointed and experimental--although they loved it in Madrid, ¿verdad?--and what I originally wanted to do is not going to work out. I wanted to make use of some cross-cultural data that simply are not available, and one of my major purposes in the study was to get familiar with cross-cultural methods. I thought about attaching the methodological section for all of fifteen seconds, and I'll bet I can remove the staple faster than that, if that's the major issue. If I had just added the section as an obscure little appendix, single-spaced, nobody would have noticed. I must say, it bothers me to be in a situation where my future turns on a sub-title and a staple. Frankly, Big, I think we should set up a public forum where we can argue out these heavy epistemological issues. Maybe even throw in a couple of alligator clips.

BIG: Well, look Gus, I'm just citing one example among many. The same feeling was even expressed about your published papers--like the one on George Wallace professors. The damn thing is shot through with weaknesses--isn't that the one that was criticized by somebody in a follow-up article in the same journal?

DE FOLIANTE: Yeah, right, I ran a rebuttal. The whole issue, I would say, turned out to be a Mexican stand-off. The critic never really came across what I would consider, now, to be the more basic weaknesses of the paper, although the questions he raised were worth talking about. But how many journal articles elicit any kind of intelligent response or detailed discussion, critical or otherwise?

BIG: But the point is that the department seemed to think that your critic had gotten the better of it--you know {pausing, shifting} there was also some evidence that some of your students were unhappy.

DE FOLIANTE: What I find entertaining here is that the paper on George Wallace professors, with all its problems and shortcomings, was the basis for my being hired in the first place according to the scuttlebutt I've picked up hereabouts--and now you cite it as a basis for my dismissal. So I gather there has been a sort of agonizing reappraisal within this truth-devoted discipline over the last nine months or so, and I guess I somehow missed out on it. Maybe we could have an instant replay, 'cause it sure as hell got past me.

BIG {leaning forward}: Who discussed your hiring with you?

DE FOLIANTE: Hey, Big, word gets around. My sources swore me to secrecy. You can take that as a singular or a plural.

BIG {leaning back, somehow aggressively}: Well, the department made its judgment. You certainly have to recognize the department's right to evaluate the work of its members and to take ...

DE FOLIANTE: Oh, I do, for sure, but I think my colleagues are being fickle if not frivolous. All this business about truth: Give me an example of a significant truth discovered by any member of this department--maybe you could come up with a few, but for every example you give I'll devastate a half dozen articles produced by the same bunch. If the mere existence of effective critics is any criterion, Malinowski should have been canned early on and Margaret Mead should have been zapped at the outset. I think we should reward people for having critics. Most of what's worth a damn in the social sciences comes out of bitter argument. The best thing about many of the journals these days is that they have a little section at the end where people fight it out. A cockfight without end--maybe without spurs either.

BIG: Well, maybe the problem is that you tend to have a conflict orientation in a department where most folks are trying to work together, you know? Surely you agree that this department has a right to select scholars it sees as being congenial ...

DE FOLIANTE: Yeah, congenial. But now you're opening a whole new can of dirty worms. You're saying that I'm losing out in a popularity contest, is that it?

BIG: Maybe. But in a way I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that--although it's impossible to say what went on in the minds of personnel committee members. You know--let me tell you this: It became very clear in meetings of the committee that there were many members of the department, especially the senior faculty, who hardly knew you at all. I mean, you apparently hadn't made much of an effort to meet your colleagues, so perhaps if they had gotten to know you and had had a chance to size up your potential a little better, they might have decided otherwise. It's impossible to say, Gus. But the basic feeling, again, was that you just do not and can not fit in here, that you really have no future here, and as far as I know it's always been the policy of this department, when we decide that a candidate--uh, an assistant professor--has no future with us, that we try to let him know as early as possible. It's not in his interest to stay around here year after year when he has no place to go.

DE FOLIANTE: Well, I don't know, Big, I suspect that I could find a little niche somewhere in this vast multiversity of ours. But, anyhow, what you're telling me is that while I'm a virtual unknown to most of my colleagues, ten months of uncollegiality has been an adequate basis for concluding that I'm not sufficiently devoted to truth, all my written work has been re-assessed, stood on its head and found wanting, and it is not in my interest to hang around and get acquainted--and my students be damned! Is that the general drift?

BIG: But your work is probably much better known--is better known--than that of just about any other member of the department ...

DE FOLIANTE: Oh bullshit, Big.

BIG: ... and most people thought there was a lot of potential there, but that you just didn't have the academic style we were looking for. Frankly, a lot of people around the country would like to have your job, and would be far more congenial to the situation here and perhaps a lot better in terms of departmental needs.

DE FOLIANTE: This gets us into the realm of manpower channeling!

BIG: Well, call it what you will.

DE FOLIANTE: Wait till I turn this over to the draft-resisters' union.

BIG {pausing}: You know, another thing that probably weighed heavily in the department's deliberations--although I don't believe this actually came out in any of our official meetings--is that many members of the department felt that you had seriously stepped out of line on a number of occasions. I know this may seem presumptuous as hell to you, but maybe this is one of the consequences of your never having gotten acquainted with anybody, maybe the real problem is that you need some feedback. You see, it's not just this matter of your getting to know people--I've gotten to know you pretty well and, well, I sort of like you, to be honest. And I think most members of the department would like you too. But what you did on the grading controversy, and the black protest thing, what you did to this department--and then you tried to humiliate some of the most devoted members of the department! It's your attitude, Gus. Do you remember the department meeting last fall where you denounced a proposal made by Professor Anders? Why, he's been more concerned, over the years, with undergraduate education than just about any other member of this department. And you'd been here, what, two months?

DE FOLIANTE: So this is my alleged "contempt" for colleagues?

BIG {shrugging}: Call it what you will, Gus.

DE FOLIANTE: Do we have a similar test for all the folks in the department? What about contempt for students? Or teaching assistants? Or, say, contempt for professors who give a damn about teaching assistants? What about contempt for new ways of looking at the goddamn world?

BIG: Most people around here do not express contempt as openly and blatantly, as brazenly, as you do. And you don't just do this before the departmental faculty: You've gone before the entire university faculty a few times and done things that ... {pausing}. For instance, the meeting last fall of the university faculty where we were called on to enact the regents' new disciplinary code for students. You delivered a very dramatic and drastic speech at that meeting, and a number of us were there--frankly, we were appalled. You may not know this--apparently you don't get much feedback, which I think I mentioned before--but after you made that speech, especially after the local newspapers picked it up and people from other departments heard you repeat the same stuff over the radio ...

DE FOLIANTE: Yeah, that was great, they played excerpts from it on the hour ...

BIG: ... well {smiling}, I started getting a lot of feedback. Some of our friends in other departments, like Mathematics, but actually several other departments, would call me and say things like, "uh, your man de Foliante, can't you sort of reel him in a little bit? Everything he said was right, but we all know what the regents are up to ... Really, it was a good speech, but the way this guy handles himself! What if we all blew our cool like that?" You know, this is pretty much the gist of it.

DE FOLIANTE: What do you mean, blew my cool? I knew exactly what I was doing and why the hell I was doing it. I agree that the speech was pretty eloquent--especially the part where I quoted Becket; that was very cute. All I did was to point out that I resented being brought into a meeting in order to rubber-stamp a chicken-shit regent policy that was pure repression, when I had already done a hell of a lot of homework on what we were told would be a matter of faculty policy. We were supposed to be the legislative body, not the regents.

Talk about your precious man-hours going down the tubes! Also, it's kind of interesting that all these friends of yours seem to resent the fact that here I was spreading truth--I'm supposed to be some sort of obscurantist or a heavy-weather nihilist around here, right? I thought it was damned dishonest, frankly, that after an hour and a half or so nobody thought to mention that we were simply being asked to submit to the usual humiliation by the dear old regents.

BIG: Oh, it wasn't that. Most faculty agreed with you.

DE FOLIANTE: Jesus, Big. If you believe that, you must believe Jane Russell when she says her girdle's as important as her bra. If the faculty agreed with me, then why was my resolution to shoot down the damned regents voted down four to one?

BIG: You don't understand, Gus. It was nothing more than your style of approaching the faculty. These friends of mine in Math and other departments, they're sensitive men. They're among the more liberal members of the faculty, you know, they're thoughtful men and women who support all the causes like Faculty for Peace and all the rest. These people have the right values, just like you and me. But there were many other little things you did, and these people made their own interpretations. I may have thought they were wrong in their interpretations ...

DE FOLIANTE: So, what am I supposed to have done?

BIG: Well, for instance, you refused to stand at the microphone that had been provided for faculty members, and you forced the chancellor not only to give you the rostrum, but to fasten his own microphone around your neck. This was seen as total arrogance! I kind of suspected otherwise: I think you were probably a little nervous because you had never addressed the faculty before and wanted to stand at the rostrum for that reason--but faculty members are only human, don't forget that, and they make their own interpretations.

DE FOLIANTE: Christ, Big, it's only human to be nervous. Did anybody catch the symbolism of the chancellor's placing a noose around the neck of a wild-eyed faculty radical?

BIG: Pardon?

DE FOLIANTE {perplexed}: Look, Big, that damn faculty microphone was practically in a ditch, and there was no rostrum near it. Hell, I had a little stack of papers I had to make reference to during my speech, and I think the chancellor was aware of that, since he cleared away some of his own paraphernalia.

BIG: Well, it was seen as an attempt to humiliate the chancellor.

DE FOLIANTE: Bullshit! I like the chancellor at least as much as you like me--so far. That was only his second faculty meeting, you know. What I resented about the situation, frankly, was that faculty members were expected to address the assemblage from what was literally the lowest place in the whole damned auditorium. Nine hundred professors, bending over to try to hear collegial echoes from the deep! I guess that as an ecological anthropologist of sorts I'm a little sensitive to the ecology of social interaction, and I refuse to stand in a hole, ten feet below the chancellor who's basically harassing us anyway, when I denounce those ignorant regent bastards who should be sitting at our feet trying to learn something for once. This was the problem with our whole damned anti-war movement: We were trying to talk to the country from a ditch.

BIG: I don't see any connection, Gus.

DE FOLIANTE: Well, I guess I'm basically a faculty man. I mean, who really has contempt here ...

BIG {smiling, shrugging}: Well, look, you admit it then. And that's exactly the kind of thing that the average faculty member is going to interpret, right or wrong. I mean, it's simple social psychology, the stuff those boys in sociology like to do, and you can't expect these people to understand every minor symbolic gesture the same way you intended it. Most of the faculty thought we had wrested some pretty important concessions from the regents, like the permanent study committee ...

DE FOLIANTE: If you believe that, Big, that's your problem.

BIG {leaning forward, with solemnity}: Look, Gus, that wasn't all. That's not the end of it. {pausing} You were also chewing gum.

DE FOLIANTE: What?

BIG: Gum, Gus, gum. You were chewing gum when you addressed the faculty. See, there are certain standards of decorum here, and these matters are taken very seriously by people, even faculty. My god, you should know that! I mean, you expect too much from men and women who are all too human. Almost everybody I talked to, in this department and several others, noticed the gum chewing, and frankly they were insulted. As far as I could tell, you were trying to chew inconspicuously, but I know it was noticed--everybody I talked to noticed it--and it was just that sort of thing ...

DE FOLIANTE {dejected}: Well, I'm sorry that happened. Jesus, Big, so much of what you say takes me back to junior high school--this is a very exhilarating experience. You know, when I came to that meeting I had no idea that I was going to make a speech. But after an hour's horseshit, I'd had it. I was aware of the gum--I'll tell you, pal, I'm not totally insensitive. But, look, I could either swallow the goddamn thing, which isn't very healthy, or stick it under my seat, which struck me as infra dig for a professor, or I could stick it behind my ear. But that was out of the question: I haven't had a haircut for the past seven years. I tried to chew unobtrusively, and I appreciate the fact that you noticed that. I'm really sorry people were upset. But I'll tell you, Big, I wonder whether intelligent faculty members should allow themselves to be swayed by such trivia. I mean, I felt that I was bringing out some real issues, and if they actually cast their votes on the basis of some fancied insult ...

BIG: Gus, they're only human ...

DE FOLIANTE: Who has contempt here ... ?

BIG: ... and you have to remember that this is a faculty with its back against the wall, and they are not about to cross the board of regents! When you demanded--literally demanded--a division of the vote on your resolution, I think many faculty members, and probably the chancellor himself, were deeply offended and completely turned off. Basically, you know, if you want to get along with this faculty or any other faculty, and if you want to get anything done, you have to be a team player, and the biggest problem with you and some of the other newer faculty at this university--some of them in this department--is that you look upon your senior colleagues as the enemy. I probably know you as well as anybody else in the department, and I don't think you're really a bad guy. But that's not the image. I suspect you'd probably be a good friend ...

DE FOLIANTE: How can you lay on all this flummery when you've just canned me?

BIG: That was a departmental decision. {pausing} O.K., I'll give you another example. The grading caper itself, all the inflammatory speeches, and all the rest of it might not have been so serious if you hadn't been so insistent on holding to your commitment that you would never again grade your students. Some of the other faculty innovators admitted that they were wrong and even stood up before the department and apologized--and some of these guys, as you know, are not about to take any shit from anybody. Also, Gus, a lot of people were offended when you had your white paper published last month by that damned underground newspaper--what's the name of that thing?

DE FOLIANTE: Incidentally, I want to thank the department for paying our typist--we really needed the money.

BIG: Well, you knew the political complexion of that particular paper and all the other sponsoring student organizations you picked up. You should have known that the mere association would create presumptions. Also, you could have confined your white paper to ideology rather than opening with a detailed account of the actions you took on the grading issue--that was seen, again, as an attempt to humiliate this department, and the department had no choice but to respond to your case as it did.

DE FOLIANTE: Hell, Big, I did it in the interest of accuracy, in the interest of truth. You know, maybe the department deserved to be humiliated. Also, it seemed to me that all my rationale without the action meant nothing, and the action without the rationale would have meant less than nothing. If I actually believed all the crap I'd written, there was no alternative but to refuse to cooperate. Sometimes, if you have your head screwed on straight, there's only one way it's gonna point.

BIG: Well, unfortunately, I don't think anybody shares your definition of academic freedom--the AAUP certainly doesn't.

DE FOLIANTE: Hey, Big, the AAUP is not the alpha and omega on academic freedom. They've only been pushing their definition since World War I. Mine goes back to Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson, and the Bill of Rights, not to mention the Magna Carta. Hell, mine goes back to the little guy in 2001 who's trying to figure out how to get his buddy to stop bashing him over the head with a longbone from the last sonofabitch they dispatched. Everything you're saying supports my decision not to publish ideology separately from action. If I had a definition of academic freedom so far out that none of my colleagues could share it, yet so compelling that it would lead me to toss away my job, then perhaps my colleagues would take it more seriously than if it were merely an ideological matter of no consequence. I'm a Marxist, Big. Ideas don't mean squat to me if they don't have material analogues.

BIG: Well, apparently the department was not convinced. My recollection is that the decision on your case was unanimous.

DE FOLIANTE: Of course, the colleagues are not the alpha and omega either. But tell me, Big, are there any regulations that would prohibit my approaching other senior faculty members for a little additional feedback on my firing? Especially on my research and writing?

BIG: Far be it from me to tell you whom you can talk to, Gus. But as you know, our personnel decisions are made in the strictest confidence, and it's in your interest that they be done that way. Frankly, I think you would be compromising other members of the personnel committee if you approached them, and I suspect that it would just cause embarrassment all around. Actually, it wouldn't be fair to your colleagues.
 

(4) Interpretations and Extrapolations
 
 

... my beloved colleagues: Men and women who, if only I had been an alcoholic or a coke freak or a schizophrenic or a cat burglar or a quadriplegic or a lesbian, would have been immensely helpful, solicitous, supportive, and understanding. In a word, they would have been collegial.

Over the next several months, prudence encouraged me to spend many days sifting through job advertisements, mailing out applications, conducting early negotiations, and making on-site visits. I did, however, find time to put one of my major hypotheses to a definitive test: A lengthy grievance was submitted to the American Association of University Professors, the guardian of academic freedom in America. By and by there came a reply which, to me, provides clear, succinct, and sad support for Paul Goodman's suspicions about that venerable confraternity:
 
 

Dear Professor de Foliante:

I wish to apologize for our delay in acknowledging materials you sent relative to the matter of your dismissal, i.e., the non-renewal of your contract with your present employer. We assume at the moment that matters have not been resolved by your finding new employment.

I personally have studied your documentation in great detail and, while I have a high degree of sympathy for the causes and concerns which you have tried to raise, I am sorry to report that there do not appear to be any grounds for intervention by the Association. The various faculty committees and administrative units deciding your case have indicated that, even though the case has many unique features, an effort was made to render judgment on the basis of traditional criteria; among these, your general contribution to the department and to the university may have been of paramount importance.

It is clear that one could readily argue, as you do along with your supporters, that certain aspects of your performance were not adequately evaluated, or that many extraneous factors were brought into the evaluation. However, the entire burden of establishing that sort of claim--essentially a claim that non-renewal of one's contract was violative of academic freedom--must rest with the probationary faculty member. As you may know, these procedures are very different in cases involving tenure, where the burden of proof is shifted to the institution.

This Association, as you know, has unmasked many instances in which personnel committees and administrations have overtly violated the established principles of academic freedom. The Association takes appropriate action whenever it is feasible to do so.

You will perhaps be pleased to learn that the Association has begun a massive study of the entire issue of grading systems, student evaluations, draft deferments, and related matters. We hope that this investigation will eventually show us some improved ways of handling this most unpleasant business.

Good luck.
 

Cordially,

{Signed}

As predicted, then, the AAUP (American Association for Universal Prolixity) fails to deliver. A vulnerable young professor raises a serious issue of academic freedom, takes a risky stand mandated by accepted principles, and our beloved mentors, our gurus, those whom we admired so much that we tried to create ourselves again in their image, our fathers, our Nestors--these colleagues do not exist. The AAUP's "massive study" is no doubt proceeding apace, but as far as we know it has not yet succeeded in creating a revolutionary situation. Once again, it is most revealing that the EGAD! system is recognized--even before the completion of the forthcoming massive investigation!--as a most unpleasant aspect of American academic life. Yet, nobody seems to insist that this abomination become the topic of debate. It is this fundamental hypocrisy that kills intellectual life in the United States.

A small, fledgling faculty union gave me some support, claiming breach of contract by my department, but they had nothing more than logic and good arguments on their side, and their lack of political power rendered them irrelevant. A large number of junior faculty colleagues supported me on similar grounds, but they too were without power and were therefore ignored. I contacted several attorneys around the area, but none of them was able to get past the basic bugaboo of my deliberate violation of university regulations--one can see why these chaps, unlike assistant professors, so often win political office. As it turns out, then, Paul Goodman was right, and we cannot reject his central theorem: It was all a good toot, replete with pleasant, edifying conversation. But, in the end, it was nothing more than pure ritual.

During its detailed investigation of my grievance, the faculty union uncovered evidence suggesting a strong possibility that I was being slandered. This was a development that Goodman--a stellar Marxist puritan--had not anticipated, and I was more than a little surprised. For the first and last time. I had felt for several weeks that something more or less treacherous was afoot: On one occasion, a small delegation representing the students who had been raising hell on my behalf came to my office and told me that they had received strong hints from unnamed (why?) faculty sources that the departmental oligarchs "had something" on me. They were, I suppose, understandably apprehensive (how conventional!) over the horrendous vision of their champion's having been involved in extensive philandering among innocent undergraduates. They had arrived at the philandering hypothesis through a process of elimination: They knew from clear evidence that I wasn't into drugs, term-paper mills, pimping, embezzlement, or anything else having to do with money, and what else is there for junior faculty members--especially the top jocks of the departmental football team--except being heavily into students? Truth is, I hadn't done anything really wild since the last time I attended a singles church service in Orange County, California. Incredibly, I soon discovered that it is no longer possible for a young male faculty member--faculty women are almost never suspect on these grounds--to convince student radicals that he is not philandering amongst their constituents: Philandering is (or, at least, was) so much a part of emergent post-industrial lifestyles that it is held at once to be totally inevitable and politically suicidal, a sort of Gary Hart syndrome--which is precisely where the Revolution was hung up! It's the old schism of the Cultural Revolution versus the Political Revolution.

The slander, as it turned out, amounted to this: At the time I took the job from which I had just been fired, I had received a second offer from another university, a university of immense reputation. Big Nurse told the union representatives, my only credible source of political support, that it was his belief that I had been lying about receiving this competing offer. To me, this was a shocking disclosure; up to this time, I had been satisfied that most of the real nastiness would remain more or less overt, and that nobody would take the risk of casting himself as a sub rosa slanderer or behind-the-scenes hatchet artist. Big, I felt, had now placed himself at a moral disadvantage, had hit the low ground, and his allegedly powerful case against me would surely be tainted by his enthusiasm for an untrue tale. However, when proof of my veracity in the matter--the original letter of offer--was circulated by my students among members of the departmental personnel committee, the response was twofold: first, a refusal to ascertain whether the slander had gone beyond Big Nurse and the union representatives; second, a firm denial that the slander had gone beyond Big Nurse and the union representatives.

The trouble with slander among academicians is that powerful memories ensure that labels, even arbitrary labels that affix themselves to a lot of nothingness, will endure forever. Our famous academic cat burglar will never be forgotten by those who knew him--but perhaps, of course, this results solely from the fact that his feline phenomenology was a major intellectual breakthrough.

When one tries to change an organization run by organization men, it is impossible to attack the system without appearing to attack the men and women who comprise it. If you tell a colleague, for instance, that he lives in the midst of institutional racism, he is likely to be personally affronted--it does not matter that the concept itself does not imply conspiracy or even large numbers of culprits acting alone. Typically, the men and women of organizations are deeply ego-involved in their system, for this is essentially what it means to be an organization man. Once again we see the imprint of the me generation: If the system has created me in all my splendour, it can't be all bad--it must be, in fact, pretty damn good. It is revealing that such men and women call themselves the Establishment, as if the social structure defined what they are. The Establishment is the antithesis of the Corporate Person, in which the person defines what the structure is. Some of these men and women--the bluesuits and the fluffsuits--have badly inflated egos, a sort of steatopygia of selfhood, and it would be difficult in any case for rebels to tread softly in their midst. In short, if the bluesuits and the fluffsuits do not hate you, you are not living up to the Veblenian standard.

Beyond that, there is a tendency among these colleagues that goes way beyond mere egoism, a tendency best illustrated by an incident that occurred on our campus during the Cambodia/Kent State/Jackson State uprising. A band of trashing students had heaved stones through several large windows of a colleague's office. This colleague, a renowned scholar, responded to the gesture by patching one of the windows with a poster reading more or less as follows: "I have stopped my murderous, war-related research done in complicity with the military-industrial complex, to atone for the slaughter of hordes of innocent women and children for whose destruction I bear a major responsibility." That, my friends, is the earliest whimper of the me generation; it is the voice of a man crying in the organizational wilderness, of a man frightened and alone, of a man who is truly value free. As one who witnessed at close range the nocturnal destruction of vast amounts of public property during the anti-war disturbances, I am able to report that, judging from many similar incidents elsewhere on campus, this colleague's office was selected because (1) his windows were as good a symbol as any other easily destroyed target; (2) helicopter-borne floodlights, supplied by the National Guard, were at the moment supporting mock military attacks elsewhere on campus; (3) some large missiles were close at hand, and these missiles only had a range of about twelve feet.

Despite my colleague's retirement, the same criteria will be in effect next time. Next time, however, we plan to be better prepared: First of all, we'll have a better missile--not the kind one flings, but rather the kind one sings. And we plan to name it the Long Ranger.
 

Note
 

(1) The only important difference between Manual Arts and nearby Garfield high school--the latter made famous by the movie Stand and Deliver--is that we used to regard the Garfield football team as pâté de foie gras, a nice way to get ready for the main killer course, which was Jeff. It is revealing that people who have seen this movie, which is essentially about a very good math teacher, feel the same affection for the teacher as did his calculus students: We love him as they loved him. And why did they love him? Because he broke his heart, literally, to help them get ready, no holds barred, for their future encounters with outside villainy, represented in the movie by the Educational Testing Service. Teaching and evaluation were sharply separated in this story, and nothing was ever said about grading. The teacher regarded the ETS as the enemy--even offering to "kick the shit" out of an ETS official. This is the only appropriate attitude for a teacher and his students--toward the ETS and what it represents, toward the corporate world beyond, and toward the inhabited universe.
 

Part II: Iota
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

"After ten minutes Will's already drunk the beer, and he starts searching through his pockets. Before long he finds a fifty-cent piece that he puts down on top of the table, and without saying anything he acts like he's looking at us through those dark glasses and wants us to see that he'd like to replace the beer. The waitress was having lunch at another table, so Will starts holding up the empty pitcher and motioning toward her, and every time just before he puts it back on the table he puts it to his lips and gets whatever beer might remain. Before long, he wants cousin Chug to take him to the men's room.

"Will and Chug had spent the day together, and Will convinced Chug that he could see just about anything, things he'd experienced many times because he'd been all over town with the Dreedle sisters back when they had their circus, and uncle Winnie had walked with him arm in arm for what must have totalled two or three years when they were boys, up and down streets that Chug thought Will had seen for the first time today. Will knew the place like his own cabin, or his own wife. So when Chug gets Will to the men's room he pushes the swinging door a few inches and sees that there's a urinal or two with a thin partition across the front and a small door in back, leading to the busses. Chug figures everything's all right and pushes Will through the door. Only Chug doesn't realize that Will can't see anything unless it's big and has bright lights all over it, and that when Will has to use a restroom he moves sideways touching surfaces until he comes to a toilet--a real, modern toilet with water in the bowl. He knows that if he can hear the sound, there's nothing to worry about.

"After several seconds Chug gets suspicious because he hears Will shuffling around inside the partition, and he decides that he'd better take a look. What he sees is a toilet all right, and Will is standing there in front of it about to send more than a trickle into what he thinks is clear space. But the trouble was, there was a man already on the toilet who by now had his eyes wide open and his mouth wide open too, and when Chug finally leans in and gets a clear picture of what's going on he doesn't register shock at all but just says to Will softly, 'Will, there's a feller on the toilet.'

"Will was laughing about it like crazy a little later, saying that he was afraid the man might get mad and decide to come after us. He said it hurt so much to stop that he felt like he was full of hot glass marbles, not a gallon of beer, and from that day whenever he went walking with Chug he never faked anything about seeing."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

(1) Harbor
 

"Ah, c'mon man, that's bullshit. You don't have to put both the goddamn heads on at the same time. Just figure it out, man! What if you had to put on a manifold or two? You think you'd have to do them all at the same time, so you wouldn't warp the block? What an asshole!"

Just figure it out, man! Always a deadly line, making it clear that I had already lost whatever argument had developed. It was heard only at those rare times when Donnie had complete certainty, a complete sense of control, a total conviction that his latest claim was absolutely right. Most of the time, in this kind of argument, he was just winging it. But this time he was right: On a flathead '49 Merc V-8, heads removed in order to replace leaky gaskets must be put back on with care, with patience, and with more than the usual amount of hassle, but it was no doubt acceptable to install them one at a time; at least, we never heard any good reason to believe otherwise. (I had just said it to jock the dumb shit out.) The heads had to be tightened to the block with a certain procedure, a certain order for tightening each of the many bolts on both sides of the engine. This procedure we followed very closely, and we did a few things extra that didn't ordinarily occur even to the best mechanics (who didn't have the time anyway), in order to make sure that things would turn out perfectly. In the end, we were convinced that we didn't risk any special distortion of the standard V-8 Mercury block by tightening down the heads independently of each other. So be it.

Frankie decides, then, to remain silent and to enjoy the procedure. (Frankie's me.) For one thing, although Donnie is leaning way in over the engine, nearly off balance, and showing all sorts of readiness to give solicited and mainly unsolicited advice, he has not taken off his special new blue suede jacket, and whatever he's wearing under it looks like something that he will not risk getting dirty either. It'd be funny as hell if he slipped and got a little greased up, although there ain't much grease around this engine. In fact he looks, smells, and acts like he's just gotten out of the shower, so Frankie doesn't really expect any help whatsoever except maybe further advice. Frankie gets back to work: First, all surfaces must be totally clean and dry--Donnie has trouble understanding this concept. Surgically clean, which is the only way in which Frankie is willing to work on an engine, or anything else. Surgically clean, a phrase we'd seen all over the place in Custom Car, telling us that we really are professionals even though we may not look or act like much, that when we slide our fingers over a smooth, cold metal surface in order to make sure that it is properly repaired and prepared, ready to go back into service, we must have the hands and the patience of a real surgeon, we must feel the tissue in all its graininess or all its smoothness or all its hardness or all its flexibility or all its suppleness--or maybe it just feels damn sick--making sure that all tensions, resistances, tolerances, and torques will provide a long life, so the goddamn thing doesn't fall apart again. An engine is a physiology just like an animal, with equal sensitivities, and an even greater prospect of mortality or morbidity, because engines only occasionally fix themselves. (When they do it's great.) If you love to work on engines you don't have to read Albert Ellis on sex, because you already know what sex is all about. But Ellis is a blast even if you know the book. To find out how engine parts or body parts are really supposed to feel, forget about the sex books and listen to Fingers Fraser, Donnie and Frankie's guy for planing all the shit off cars, like door handles. It's funny that Fingers was named for a car that was a total bringdown, although later on I sort of liked Kaisers or Frasers (I can't tell them apart), even though they're ratty like a Citroen or a '49 Ford.

Donnie and I didn't learn any of this in auto shop at Jacob Riis; we discovered it all on our own. But he didn't really know what the hell I was talking about, because he hadn't found the sex books.

First, get one of the heads down on the block, hanging loosely from a single bolt. Run your fingers lightly around the edges of the head, moving it just a little, making sure that all surfaces are nice and plush, and especially making sure that the gasket feels good all the way around the head. If the head and the gasket are lined up right, the rest of the bolts should slip into place easily; grease them up a little bit to make sure; wobble them around before you start turning them, and make sure they are not going down too tight; we want just the right tight. Any resistance in these bolts and we probably have a cross-thread, and if you break the goddamn bolt you'll have one hell of a time. You'll probably have to tap it out, and we don't have a tap set. Start with the top center bolt, and torque it down carefully. Work outward. Use a good torque wrench--rent it out for a couple hours, you cheap bastard--and read the pressure gauge carefully. Follow this same pattern two or three times, tightening all the bolts; you won't believe how the center bolts loosen up after you've worked your way toward the outside bolts. When the center bolts stay torqued down, take a rest, do something else. Come back a half-hour later, and do the whole thing over again. When you finish all this hassle on both sides of the engine, and get everything else hooked up, start up the engine and let it idle for about five minutes. Then torque down the goddamn bolts again; you won't believe how loose they are. After you drive the car around for a little while, just a few minutes, tighten them down again. Use a torque wrench, or you'll fuck up.

We may have been sixteen year old punks, as Donnie liked to say, but we never blew a head gasket if we'd put it in ourselves.

Riis was the shits. But L.A., even in the middle of winter, often gives us a bright, sunny day in which even the smog is not so bad for some reason having to do with something called an inversion layer, and this kind of day was always an inspiration for Donnie and Frankie. Inspiration always arrived suddenly during the long, slow, tortured march through the shop buildings, before 8 o'clock on days when the Merc was running, when the air was still cold and damp but you could see how the day was going to develop. You could see the fabulous brightness outside, drenching the auto shop and the print shop and the electric shop with all sorts of sunlight, and we could see all the white kiss-asses already bored as hell inside, and a few colored guys pitching pennies and having a big fucking argument, with goddamn Jessie Fourbutts looking around for my electric motors so he could tear them up before I had a chance to blow them out myself. (The trouble with goddamn Jessie Fourbutts was that he had no brains.) And then one of us would always utter the magic formula: harbor patrol. Harbor patrol meant everything. First of all, it meant an immediate "about face." Mainly, it meant that all we had to do was to scrounge up a buck--we had bag lunches, so food was not a problem--and we'd be able to pump more than four gallons of gas into the Merc. We could always borrow a buck from the little piggy bank for student fines that was set up by Fred Downing, the drafting teacher, unless he figured we were getting ready to cut out--which he usually did figure, but eventually he didn't give a damn if we cut out or not. It got to the point where we could actually raid Fred's fine bank just stopping by on our way out of town. Half the fines were Frankie's anyway, resulting from a tendency to give too much attention to Sweet Nancy Mill, who nobody else had yet discovered. (Nancy never drafted anything, but god did she have a little ass on her!) Driving carefully, using overdrive with the headerplugs off and the headers blasting hell out of everybody in sight except the fuzz (you had to be ready to take all the torque off the engine, to quiet it down), this meant that we could travel nearly 100 miles, mileage enough to get us just about anywhere. And there was always the possibility of picking up broads who might have a little bread for gas. Ain' nothin' like a broad with bread. Broads loved it when we had the headerplugs off. When you'd go along, say about thirty-five, through the Sepulveda tunnel in second-gear overdrive, no torque on the engine so it's real quiet, those mellow-tone mufflers still echoing even though there's nothin' going through them, and then you'd come up next to a bunch of pedestrians walking through the tunnel, and floor that goddamn Merc and cut the engine out of overdrive into regular second gear, and the headers would let out a bang like a goddamn atomic bomb because the engine really did cut off and backfire if you floored it--well, the broads used to love it. They'd buy gas all day long, if we found any (broads). They'd buy the gas and we'd watch for pedestrians and the fuzz.

So harbor patrol meant that you'd haul ass, you'd haul ass to freedom land with light traffic and no traffic light most of the way. Because this was, say, Monday morning with lots of cars still heading into L.A., but to get out to the harbor you'd head south on Western or Vermont against the traffic which would soon thin out anyway, maybe Crenshaw if you didn't mind getting all screwed up; and at least if you got lost out on Crenshaw, Donnie wouldn't be able to get all that Hunter Hancock crap on the radio, with that Joe Grinder shit. (The song about the riot in cellblock number 9, though, that was OK.) Anybody who'd seen Marlon Brando in the waterfront movie or "The Wild One" wanted to get a job as a longshoreman, and we'd always mess around for a while looking for work or trying to join the goddamn navy, but we still weren't old enough, probably couldn't get a good fake ID anyway, and Donnie's old man would refuse to sign and so would Frankie's old lady. It sure as hell wasn't doing us much good staying at Riis, and the longshoremen had a good union and were making good money. So, this was just a dream, man, that went on forever. Usually Frankie and Donnie would end up doing something else, maybe we'd just turn around and go home after lunch. But one day we just walked into this place and got a job. Construction. I mean, we went to work on this damn building that was under construction or maybe they were tearing it down, I couldn't really tell. Maybe they were remodeling, so that it looked like they were tearing it down and building it up at the same time. But the job lasted only one day, with damn good pay at about two bucks an hour, but I don't think the guys who hired us really knew what the hell they were doing. Or maybe they wanted us to do the messy work, like tearing out old pipes and picking up the trash. Donnie always thought that I had gotten us more or less fired, because the guy who hired us was watching me while I tried to unscrew a goddamn pipe that was hanging down from the ceiling and facing the wrong direction, and I must have gotten things turned around because of the fact that I had to look straight up at the pipe, so instead of unscrewing it I kept on screwing it up tighter in a demonstration of my fantastic strength, so of course I didn't get a whole lot done except that I ended up looking like a jerk and busting the goddamn pipe, must have been a three-inch pipe. Donnie looked at me with a look that told me I was a jerk, and he would have put out all the bullshit about "just figure it out, man," but he knew that the little bastard who gave us the job was right there watching me and that he already thought I was a jerk. Anyway, we ended up working about six hours each, and $24 will buy a hell of a lot of gas, might help on picking up broads too 'cause at least we could get into a drive-in movie without having everybody loaded into the trunk and we wouldn't have to put in the back seat, which is always a big hassle just to hide a few guys in the trunk. Donnie told me later that he didn't understand how such a great mechanic could be so goddamn stupid that he couldn't even take down a pipe, and I told him that I never worked on motors over my head and upside down. For once he shut up and just concentrated on trying to run up his score on the fart contest he was having with Phil Earwig. Phil wasn't even around, since he was working at a grocery store most of the time, but Donnie wanted me to keep count on his best farts anyway; he told me to write 'em down if I couldn't remember them. Sometimes Donnie is a real pain. He also starts bugging me about how my engine's running full re-bore. Real pain.

I didn't have a pencil, so whenever Donnie got off a good fart we'd have to go into the glove compartment and get out one of the spoons we always stole from Teddy's drive-in, and throw it down to the floor. And I got pissed 'cause the damn spoons were starting to tear up my feet whenever I'd step on them without shoes. Takes lots of farts to tear up your feet.

By the way, the Merc was never bored out, and it didn't burn oil. Maybe a quart in a thousand miles, but we changed the oil about every 500 miles.

After the summer when I worked, for a buck-ten an hour, as a wringer operator up on Adams mainly to pay off the Merc--and it turned out that I was damn lucky that I didn't lose any fingers and only wiped out my neck a little on a steam pipe one day--we had money, so we could find some tough things to do when we got out on harbor patrol. Sometimes we didn't go to the harbor at all, we'd split the damn scene and end up somewhere, maybe the L.A. county fair or just cruise San Diego if we had gas money or maybe just get way out into the sticks and do a little midnight auto and get some new moons for the car. We really wanted split moons, which cost money like you wouldn't believe. Once we went down to the harbor to pin the navy recruitment office, and we found out that a guy nearby had a little boat rental place where he'd let you have a boat with a motor for four bucks an hour. We figured that to get your money's worth you'd have to blow it out for the whole hour, and that's what we did. Only it took longer than an hour because we ended up getting lost in the fog. The boat guy knew we'd gotten lost in fog, so he didn't charge us anything extra, but he'd have been pretty pissed off if we'd told him what happened and that we nearly got his boat wiped out, not to mention blowing out his engine. I guess our major problem was that if you run a boat into fog at full speed, and don't know where the hell you are even when it ain't foggy, you have to figure new places to go, and you have to "figure it out man," real fast. And we probably really wanted to end up out there with the navy ships. That's what Froid would say.

We were moving along fast as hell, and it was a lot of fun trying not to hit things that would suddenly pop up out of the goddamn fog. Donnie was doing most of the steering, but when his arm got tired he got me to take over. He moved up to the front of the boat and was looking backwards most of the time, so he didn't really see what happened till it was too late. He didn't remember how to slow down the engine, or maybe he just broke off the little knob, and we nearly turned over when we changed positions; Donnie damn near fell into the water, which would have been a blast. So, anyway, we're out there hauling ass as fast as the boat would go, and Frankie knew that we were getting lost and that we were probably going to wander over to the navy area or the area with big cargo ships. Frankie was more or less going straight since he didn't see anything in front of the boat anyway, and there wasn't so much spray if you went straight; you'd have one hell of a mess whenever you tried to turn at full speed. If something popped up, of course, you'd have to turn. But Frankie knew something was really weird because he kept on hearing a fog horn, and it seemed like the fog horn was moving a lot faster than the little boat was moving, which was fast as hell. Donnie didn't have any idea what was going on, he's not a good listener anyway. This is one of the main reasons why he's probably going to drop out of Riis, now that the stupid bastard's sixteen. And he's already there because he got kicked out of Manual Arts. Anyway, Frankie knows there's some sort of fuck-up out here, but he can't figure it out, can't see anything at all but he knows something's wrong because this fog horn keeps getting closer and louder, too fast. Suddenly the biggest goddamn knife I ever saw comes straight at me out of the fog; at first I couldn't believe what I was seeing and I couldn't believe that Donnie had no idea what was going on, he seemed sort of peaceful, sitting there looking more or less the other way, and I guess I didn't have time to react at all because he said later that he never noticed anything funny about me till I turned the boat as hard as I could. So, this huge knife is coming right at me, and it must have been thirty or forty feet high, or fifty feet high because it's about the same length as my front yard and a fifty foot hose barely reaches the end of it, and it took me a long time to react 'cause I didn't know which way the knife was going, but I turned to my left as fast as I could and barely got out of the way, and as this huge blade came right up next to us I realized that it was a ship, I think it was a navy ship. Donnie damn near fell out of the boat again, yelled some kind of idiot nonsense at me and finally figured out what was going on, and he said later that he thought it was a destroyer and he thought we were dead. I wasn't sure what kind of ship it was, but he said he could see the big guns on the deck as it went by us. He said he also read the name of the guy the ship was named for, but I forget what it was. I don't think I actually paid much attention to the ship itself because I had heard all sorts of things about how big ships can suck little boats and swimmers under and drown hell out of them, so all I wanted to do was split. I nearly panicked when Donnie almost fell out of the boat again; he'd have been dead. I was damn glad we had the boat going full blast; if we had just been sitting there doing nothing, that destroyer would have torn the shit out of us. We tried to relax, but you can't relax when you can't cut your mill. Finally we ran out of gas, and we had to use oars to get back into the boat rental place. We came up with all kinds of jokes about how we didn't dig getting killed by the navy when we were trying to join up.

The funny part of it was that after all this happened we probably wanted to join the navy worse than ever; this guy Froid used to say--at least this is what Bendadick used to say, remember? in u.p.h.--when you see lots of power you want to identify with it, even if it's kicking the shit out of you. U.p.h. is underprivileged homeroom, and that asshole Bendadick used to teach us more than we were learning anyplace else, if he could ever get us to shut up. I'd like to tell him sometime how we nearly got killed, he'd analyze hell out of it, probably tell me where I went wrong. Phil said that old Froid would say we need to get our gun. I couldn't believe Phil knew something about Froid.

I'll tell you, man, he was a hell of an interesting guy, and after he took over u.p.h. I never really tried to get out of the goddamn place. Plus I'd always get an A-U-U in art, so I was stuck anyhow. Plus, if you got out of u.p.h. all it meant was that they'd let you go Friday to watch "Back to Bataan" again, and who wants to see that piece of shit, or have regular P.E. when they'd let us go watch girls' P.E.? Big punishment. And I'd rather talk to Bendadick, or anybody, rather than listen again to that John Wayne shit.

Donnie'd always start with the questions, and Frankie would try to answer them. How the hell can you get an A in art when--what is it?--your work habits and cooperation are unsatisfactory? I don't know, man, but who gives a damn. I have the hots for the teacher, I love that porous, damp skin she has on her cheeks when she sort of mother-talks me, you know, she talks to me like I'm her kid, tells me how smart I am and what a great artist, and she has fantastic knockers and thinks I'm a great artist even though I give her lots of shit. She's more sanitary than sanitary Donna what's-her-name. She'd always get mad when I'd come in with a fake report card trying to make it out of u.p.h., fake 'cause old Bendadick wouldn't waste a new grade form on me, and I'd tell her that I absolutely had to have an A-S-S to get out of u.p.h. You could see her getting mad, but she couldn't do a damn thing about it because that's really what I needed, but I think she must have called Bendadick and told him to keep me from running fake report cards. I doubt that she said anything about the A-S-S bullshit. What could she say? That's what I had to have to get out of u.p.h. If it bugs her, she can always give me an A-E-E. But who'd believe it?

So Donnie says, maybe she wants you to stay in u.p.h. Maybe she thinks Bendadick is good for you.

Right, man, figure it out, ace. Maybe that's why I got the hots for her, her and her goddamn cheeks and her goddamn Bendadick.
 

(2) Lights
 

Donnie and Frankie didn't always ditch Riis. Once in a while something worthwhile turned up, and they would stick around. Even when they would hang around Riis, though, Donnie and Frankie had a special talent for damn near getting themselves killed. They always said they had no luck at all, but actually they were pretty lucky guys when you consider the number of really stupid things they did. The most important thing they ever did was to invent goofyball, but that never got anybody close to getting killed. Just gave 'em a sore ass. Just about everybody except Frankie, who almost never had to go butts-up. But that's another story.

Phil, on the other hand, is probably long since dead. I mean, I think this guy really wanted to commit suicide. The day we took him out to do that stupid bulletbread shit, man, I knew for certain there was something wrong with the guy. But at least for a while the neighbors got a rest from the .22 rifle.

Phil was the sort of guy that you might want to help, because you knew that he was going to fuck up sooner or later and get himself killed. But if you wanted to help Phil you had to hang out with him, and that meant that you could get killed too.

But dear old goddamn Jessie Fourbutts, the only problem he had was that he was unbelievably stupid. (Frankie met his old lady once, and she seemed more or less normal.) He kept on wrecking Frankie's electric motors, for no reason other than stupidity. The rest of the shop guys wanted to have a little fun tearing up Frankie's motors, but not goddamn Jessie Fourbutts. He would take a hammer and crush them, for kicks. He was always going around telling people how he could crush anybody in a "street brawl" if he had to, but Frankie's motors he crushed for the hell of it. (Jessie was big on street brawls because whenever the coach made him put on the gloves with somebody, he would lose due to stupidity, plus he couldn't keep his eyes open. He was always going to Hollywood Friday nights to find somebody on the street to choose off.) Frankie wasn't worried about the work or the time he'd put in on building the motors, and he didn't care if the teacher, old Powers (great name for an electric-shop teacher), had anything to grade or not. Maybe Powers was worried or pissed off, but he never said anything; more likely, he didn't expect anything from Frankie anyway. But even Powers knew that Frankie made the best electric motors around the place, and he had a lot of respect for Frankie even though Frankie hadn't turned in anything for a long time. Frankie wasn't lazy; he just didn't show up very often. But the real problem was that goddamn Jessie Fourbutts was too dumb to realize how much fun it is to blow out an electric motor by running it with Powers' light-panel generator, or whatever it is. Frankie used to blow out all his motors--this is why he never got grades--till the day he nearly electrocuted himself. After that, he didn't diddle around with electricity all that much. Actually, what he did was about as stupid as anything goddamn Jessie Fourbutts ever did.

Frankie never did understand how the light panel worked. You'd plug it in, connect your motor to it, and then start turning on lights, one by one. The more lights you turned on, the more juice went into the motor. This is the part Frankie didn't understand: You'd think that the lights would burn up all the electricity. But anyway, everything would be all lit up about as bright as you could imagine, so you could see clearly everything the motor was doing, keep track of all the smoke and start watching for fire, and soon you would have to get a huge can of oil that for some reason Powers kept around the place, in order to shoot a steady stream of oil into the hottest parts of the motor. This kept them working for a while. Frankie knew the official names of all the parts, and could more or less explain why some of them were a lot hotter than others. Something called the armature was attached to the major spinning shaft of the motor, and as the armature spun around it would touch little metal brushes and keep on creating and breaking electric circuits that would send electricity at the right time to magnets here and there, and make the motor spin like crazy. The friction all around was unbelievable, but the armature was the hot spot due to the fact that the current was switching back and forth so fast, with lots of electrical power--and all the wiring was kind of lightweight, because Powers was cheap. The most exciting part of blowing out motors was that they never burned out slowly, the way a real one would, but would get incredibly hot and start spinning so fast that they exploded, suddenly. Once in a while the parts would fly all over the shop, especially when the light panel was going more or less full blast. For some reason, we never had a flying part blow out any light bulbs the way Phil used to do at home with his .22--but that's another story.

But the reason why Frankie almost got killed was that one day we showed up at school due to the rain, and when Powers was out taking a leak or something Donnie decides that the best way to keep the motor cool would be to take it outside with a couple of extension cords, and run it in the rain. This worked pretty well, and the motor probably lasted a little while longer before it finally blew up--the smoke and steam and flying parts were a blast. Frankie's mistake, which was really Powers' mistake, was that after Powers finished draining a kidney and came back into the shop and raised holy shit about our blowing up motors in the rain, he told Frankie to bring everything back in right now, including the extension cords. So Frankie went out and started winding up the cords, but he had forgotten to unplug them inside the shop; of course, old Powers didn't notice anything, and should have been dead years ago. The connector that held the two extension cords together must have been wet or something, because as soon as Frankie picked it up there was a huge flash and a bang that was about as loud as kicking the Merc out of overdrive with the headerplugs off; louder if you were right next to it, like a sucker pedestrian. Frankie said he didn't feel a damn thing, which was probably true, but his hand was completely black and the black hand went all the way up to his elbow and got on his shirt a little. He wasn't paralyzed, because he immediately threw the wires down. Maybe what saved him was the fact that he was wearing these beat up old tennis shoes that the coaches were making him get rid of because they smelled so bad and were falling apart anyway. (Maybe absolute shit stink is what saved old Frankie.) So, he was damn lucky. He thought Nancy would be all upset when she heard about it, but she only laughed. That bothered Frankie more than nearly getting electrocuted. But even Frankie thought it was pretty funny when Sonny Carter comes up and puts his arm next to Frankie's, and doesn't say anything, just starts shaking his head. Frankie's arm was a lot blacker than Sonny's. So finally Sonny says "black arm's better'n buyin' the farm, man." What the hell did Sonny know about farms?

Sometimes Donnie and Frankie could be about as dumb as Jessie Fourbutts. But we weren't that dumb all the time; there's got to be a difference. But maybe it doesn't make all that big a difference. You only have to be dumb for a few seconds to get yourself killed, which is probably where Jessie is today.
 

(3) Bulletbread
 

So, the amazing thing is that Jessie almost got me killed a few times, but Phil, who was really the dangerous guy, never did. As I said, Phil's probably dead himself by now along with Jessie, but most of the things he did around me were a lot more funny than dangerous. Once on the fourth of July he blew up his hand--he was messing with gunpowder, and for some reason he sets off a huge explosion. It was funny to hear him tell about it, because when it happened he just sat there staring at his blown-up hand and waiting for it to start hurting or bleeding. He said it took forever before anything happened--probably knocked him out so he had no idea what he was talking about. Anyway, he had to take off work and spend a week or so in bed. He must have been taking all sorts of pain killers that made him a crazier bastard than usual. He couldn't get around and all he could do was to stay home and drive his old lady nuts. She had to go to work every day, so she didn't know half the stuff that went on. It's hard to believe that she never even noticed all the bullet holes in Phil's bedroom wall, but most of them were way up near the ceiling and they were more or less covered over by the rifle-range targets that Phil kept sticking onto the wall, one over the other. Phil was smart about things like that. Still, you'd think she'd notice. But Phil's old lady just didn't pay much attention to him, and she probably felt that the best place for him to be was home in bed. Frankie and Donnie tried to tell him that he was going to kill off his neighbors, because at least some of the bullets probably bounced back down toward the ground; we were damn sure that a lot of them were going completely through the side of the house, although we never really checked it out; maybe the old lady was around. But Phil just seemed to think that since he was shooting from his bed upward toward the ceiling, the bullets must have kept going in that same general direction forever. We told him about a thousand times that even if none of the goddamn bullets bounced downward, they had to come down somewhere and they were not going clear out of L.A., but Phil just didn't give a damn. We told him that if the fuzz showed up they were going to look around a hell of a lot more than his mother ever did. But Phil just didn't give a damn. Maybe his old lady didn't either.

After a week or so Phil's ready to get out of bed, and he wants to celebrate by making a big split-trip down to San Diego. He also wants to take along the rifle, so he can hunt coyotes and mountain lions. He stole five bucks from his old lady (he had a week on the installment plan), so by dragging him along we had plenty of gas. All the way to San Diego Donnie and Frankie are trying to explain to the stupid bastard that a .22 rifle doesn't have much of an effect on a big animal like a coyote, and that what we need to do is to get down near San Diego, maybe out around La Mesa, and try to get some cottontail. Phil thought this was a good idea until Frankie explained what you have to do in order to gut a rabbit; you can't just let them flop around in the trunk and stink it up all day long. Then Donnie chimed in, knowing that Phil didn't know anything about how to gut a cottontail, and would have just shot them and left them on the ground, so he gives a big description of what it's like and he tells Phil that he's going to be the one to hold the rabbit upside down by the hind legs while Frankie carves it up and guts it. Or maybe guts three or four of them, if we have any luck. Believe it or not, Phil throws up all over the side of the Merc, out on 101. (He got a couple of other cars, too, they hit the brakes fast.) I mean, this guy has just finished blowing his own goddamn hand apart, he spends months blasting the neighborhood with his .22, he's about two years ahead of Donnie in their fart contest, and he throws up all over the car when you tell him how to gut a cottontail. Phil was totally nuts.

So, he changes his mind about hunting and starts all this bullshit about shooting bread. He said that he got into a big argument with the guy who stocks the bread at the A&P where he works, and that this guy claims that all the put-downs about white bread are just a lot of bullshit because white bread is just as good as any other. He proved this by claiming that if you fire a bullet through a loaf of white bread the long way from one end to the other, the bullet will not go through it. He claimed that this applied even to high-powered rifles. Something about how white bread may seem soft and mushy, but it's really very tough, and as the bullet passes through it the bread has more and more resistance, sort of turns into glue I guess, or snot, and maybe starts building up one slice after another, and if it's the long loaf--and, remember, it has to be sliced!--you should find your bullet about half way through it. (I wanted to do it bad, because I had never found a bullet after it was shot.) Naturally we had to try this out, so we get about ten miles beyond La Mesa out on the highway that runs to Campo and to the Bamboo Inn where we took some broads a year or so before, and we stop at a little grocery store and buy this huge loaf of bread. Phil bought it, but only after we made sure that he had a buck or two left over for gas. We pulled off the highway onto a little dirt road that went everywhere and nowhere, probably ended up in Mexico, and after getting more or less lost and low on gas we got out of the car and started setting things up. I put down the bread the long way on a little pile of rocks, and Phil starts loading his rifle. But just when we get everything ready he sees, believe it or not, two or three coyotes about 300 yards away. Frankie and Donnie would never even have noticed them, but Phil goes totally out of his mind and starts shooting at them as fast as he can. I don't know if he hit the coyotes or not--I hope to hell he didn't--but they just kept on running, and most of the time Phil couldn't even see them because they were down below the high grasses all around them. They would jump up every once in a while as they ran along, looking like porpoises, which was a damn good thing for them because Phil didn't have a clue when they were going to pop up next, and most of the time he fired his gun too late. I mean, this was really mickeymouse. Sometimes Phil was a total bringdown. So Donnie says, c'mon Phil, this is really the shits man, I'm going to barf on the other side of the Merc if you don't cut this shit, let's do your stupid bread thing and bug out. Fortunately Phil's hand started hurting, so he had to give up on the coyotes.

So now Phil was low on ammunition, but it only took one bullet to kill the bread theory. On the way home we ate the whole loaf. The holes didn't bother us because we didn't have anything to put on the bread anyway. What bothered me was that just about every slice, for the first half of the loaf, looked like it had gunpowder scattered all over, mainly because Phil thought he had to hold the end of the rifle right up against the bread--in fact he shoved the tip of the gun a little bit into the bread till Donnie told him that this was cheating unless he used a rubber, which cracked us up--but even when you couldn't see any powder the bread still tasted like powder. Actually it wasn't that bad, but I can't dig eating gunpowder. Maybe we just imagined the funny taste. We all cracked up when Frankie says to Phil: Hey, no shit, Phil, dig it, you were right. The powder stops about half way through the loaf.

Next day I went to Downing's class for a while mainly so I could tell Nancy about the bulletbread. She just laughed till I told her the part about rubbers--I called them Trojans, so at first she didn't know what I was talking about--and then she got a little pissed. I don't see how you can suddenly realize that you have the hots for a girl while you're telling her about something as ridiculous as birth control for bulletbread. (Actually, it wasn't all that sudden.) The whole story made me think about what it would be like to have Nancy at the Bamboo Inn, have a little fried cottontail for lunch--make that dinner--and then take turns pushing each other on the high swing, an unbelievable swing hanging from a tree and, once you really got going, reaching halfway across a little brook. I think that on the other side of that brook was Mexico, and even though it didn't look any different, Mexico made me think about Nancy a lot more. For instance, I'm pretty sure that she could have helped you clean a cottontail without barfing, and if you could watch her eating it, and getting a little grease around her lipstick--. Anyway, going to Mexico, when Frankie got a little older, was a lot like going on harbor patrol. Especially if Nancy came along. I felt free, and Bendadick thinks that's important.
 

(4) Spike
 

Seems to me that I've spent most of my life trying to figure out how not to get killed. This is essential when you hang out with guys like Phil, and Donnie could be a hard case too. Believe it or not, my old lady (and the Cubs) used to make me go to church and sunday school every Sunday, just in case. (I don't think the Cubs gave a damn if I went to hell or not; they just wanted me to get my Webelos--wolf, bear, lion, and SCOUT--and split the scene.) For all the time I spent sitting around in those goddamn wool pants with my pajamas inside listening to sermons, etc., I only learned two things. But these two things were not the usual mickeymouse stuff; they were worth knowing.

Going to sunday school and church was the shits, a total bringdown, so Frankie never said much about it to Donnie or anybody else at Riis. But the best thing about sunday school was that you could actually have friends there who were not dangerous, not trying to commit suicide, and who would not usually scare the shit out of you. The church Frankie went to was some sort of Methodist or Baptist place. His mother was supposed to be a Lutheran, but I guess the best Lutheran church in L.A. was way to hell and gone downtown, at Fourteenth and Oak. Frankie's old lady never figured her car would make it downtown without ratting out someplace where no help would be available (which she couldn't afford anyway), on some busy street like Figueroa, so she figured that she'd better find a church close to home. Why she never took the streetcar I'll never understand; Donnie and I used to go downtown on the five car all the time, till I got the Merc. Right next to "Eastern Columbia, Broadway at ninth" there used to be a great sporting goods store, and we used to hang out there all the time. After I got the Merc we couldn't afford to park downtown. Took too much gas money.

Anyway, one day old Holtz, the biggest bullshitter ever, is teaching sunday school class, and he decides that he wants to prove to us that, once a guy goes bad, there isn't anything you can do to get him to straighten out again. This would have been bad news at this place we'd heard about called Scudder camp or Scuddersville, where they tried to straighten out guys who couldn't even cut it at Riis. We heard that they just stomped the shit out of guys every day, but that couldn't be true, at least not every day. So Holtz brings in his toolkit, and he's got it loaded up with a bunch of stuff like nails, pieces of two-by-four, and about ten or so hammers that he must have borrowed from his buddies. (Maybe he stole them.) Sturdy Stratton and I pin this scene, and the first thing we notice is that he's got a little metal box inside his toolkit that's full of rusted-out crooked nails, big ones that must have been used in framing a house or something. Before long Holtz pulls out this big bunch of nails and he's passing them out to everybody in the class, girls included. Then he tells us that he wants us to take the hammers and try to straighten out the nails. What he didn't know about me--I don't know about Sturdy--was that most of the time if I wanted nails for something big I would have to scrounge up a bunch of them and I'd have to straighten them up before I could use them. I was good at it. Holtz told most of the jerks in the class that they should straighten nails by pounding on them, against a piece of wood. Sturdy and I pounded our nails against a cement step, which seemed to make old Holtz a little nervous. Maybe he knew we were going to screw up his philosophy, which couldn't have been that great because it seemed that old Holtz had never even heard of Froid. So we started going around the side of the church to get away from him, and we found a place where the cement step was covered over with a heavy piece of steel and we were able to get our nails so damn straight that we knew old tight-ass Holtz would have to admit that he was completely full of shit. Our best nail, the one we turned in to him, didn't have any rust on it either.

Believe it or not, all he did was to study our best nail like it was some kind of priceless government treasure from the freedom train, and then he tells us that all our nails are still crooked. We kept on arguing and bugging him, and then he made a big mistake. He said that he had a box of new nails in his toolkit, and he got out one of them so that he could hold it alongside our nail and this was supposed to show us that our nail could not possibly be straight. So, we tell him that we want our nail back so we can work on it a little more. But in the meantime Yancey Crounch sees what's going on, and he knows Holtz is totally full of shit anyway, so Yancey goes into the toolkit while Holtz is not looking and steals three or four brand new nails from Holtz' secret little box. Yancey is sort of a hood anyway, and the only amazing thing is that his old lady makes him go to sunday school even though she never shows up herself, not even at eleven o'clock. (I had to carry the bastard through the confirmation question period or he'd have been on the road to hell if there is such a thing, which there ain't.) So, Sturdy and I go back to the step and pretend to do some more pounding, and Yancey is over there totally cracking up because he knows what we're going to do and I guess he sort of hated Holtz anyway, because Holtz didn't want Yancey in his class or something. Yancey didn't know how to read, and Holtz always tried to get us to read a lot of crap aloud to the class, I guess so we wouldn't start cracking up in the middle of whatever he was trying to do.

So Sturdy and I turn in a brand new nail, and we figured at this junction we had old Holtz by the balls. What Holtz did, though, was totally unbelievable. He took our nail--a perfect, brand new nail, no rust, no nothing--and without really bothering to look at it he tells us that it is still crooked. Then he turns away toward one of the little kids, a little kid still eating up his bullshit, and collects this kid's nail, which was probably more crooked than when he got it. Then he gets to work laying more bullshit on this kid. So, without knowing it old Holtz taught us something as important as Bendadick ever had, except that Bendadick didn't have to lie about things. When I told Donnie what happened, and said that we should be glad that Bendadick at least was not totally full of shit, Donnie tells me that Bendadick could probably straighten nails like you wouldn't believe, and that if you really want to see something great you should watch Bendadick straighten a dick like you. Donnie naturally cracked himself up.

The first nail, the one I straightened out, I kept for a long time. I used it as a bookmark.

The second lesson came out of a sermon--usually a total bore--not out of sunday school. Compared to the nail story, I didn't really dig it all that much. What happens is that a bunch of church members decide to give their pastor a barrel of wine so he can go on vacation. The deal is that for several days they all show up at the pastor's pad, one by one, and each guy is supposed to dump a small bottle of wine into the barrel. Only each guy decides to save a few bucks by dumping in a bottle of Kool-aid instead of wine, figuring that nobody would notice, especially if the Kool-aid was pink. Since everybody does this without knowing that the other guys are doing the same thing, the pastor ends up with a barrel of Kool-aid, which I guess really screws up his vacation. Froid would have loved this sermon--I don't know if he was a Baptist or not--because it tells you a hell of a lot about what life is all about. Froid would have come up with something new, too, like maybe a lot of the guys, outside their conscience, figured that the pastor didn't need to go on vacation all that badly, smashed on their best wine. And maybe the pastor told this sermon 'cause he wanted to split the scene and show the guys what a bunch of peckers they were. Maybe the pastor could get smashed on Kool-aid. That's the part that Froid would dig, 'cause he'd figure you can get smashed on anything. Bendadick said something like that, about getting smashed on anything, the same day he told us about some guy who was lighting a cigarette inside an outhouse and blew himself up with something called methane. (Make up your own jokes, I'm still cracking up over ours.)

Frankie said to Tippy, For Christ's sake, Turner, don't ever tell Phil about methane. So, Phil gets the story within about ten minutes. Every time we heard him repeat the story--many times--he'd say the guy had blown himself up by lighting a cigarette outside an inhouse. It was funny as hell to ask him what an inhouse is. He always had an answer, but it was never the same; never made sense either. We didn't tell him what an outhouse was, 'cause we knew damn well he'd go out and blow himself all to hell. I mean, he'd go in and blow himself all to hell.
 

(5) Goofyball
 

The most important thing Donnie and I ever did for Riis was to discover goofyball, even though the goddamn coaches hated it. They should have thanked us for giving the guys something interesting to do for once, instead of just another homeroom game. Maybe a couple of guys got hurt when we (they) went butts-up, but it hurt a hell of a lot more when you fucked up and the coaches gave you a choice of swats or laps, and you had to take swats because laps were a bringdown. Donnie and I got swats a few times when the coaches were trying to kill off goofyball, and I got swats a few times afterwards. The coaches hated goofyball mainly because it screwed up everything they were trying to do in physical education, especially during lunch period, but it caught on during their regular classes, too. Kids were going ape for goofyball all day long. We couldn't help it; goofyball was a kick in the ass. Even the girls loved it, so we killed their P.E. program along with all the rest of the bullshit. If Frankie hadn't been in u.p.h., goofyball would never have taken over the place; another service of Bendadick and A-U-U grades. Guys in u.p.h. were not allowed to play baseball or football or volleyball or whatever the regular homerooms played during the lunch hour, but when the coaches got their instructions about how to keep us u.p.h. guys from doing anything, they forgot to tell the kid in the equipment room not to check out balls and stuff to us. For some reason there was a ball in the equipment room that was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen. It was brown and very light but very tough and hard, extremely bouncy, too little to be a basketball and too big to be a volleyball or soccerball--we didn't ever play soccer anyway. Maybe it was some sort of kickball or dodgeball like the ones we used to have in grade school, but where it came from and how it got there, I never figured out. One day I got together with Tippy Turner, another u.p.h. guy, and started bouncing this ball off the side of the P.E. building, which was about twenty feet high and made of some sort of hard stucco. The ball bounced like crazy, and before long we noticed that there was an old handball court or something painted into the asphalt alongside the building, but nobody played handball either. So Tippy and I--and by this time Donnie shows up--make a rule that says that the first guy hits the ball down to the asphalt, it has to bounce up and hit the wall, then bounce back, take one bounce on the asphalt inside the sidelines of the handball court or whatever it was, and then the next guy has to repeat the same pattern before the ball hits the ground a second time. You'd go back and forth this way, and whichever guy blew the return lost the game, he had to get out. If you got a low bounce near the wall, and you knew how to run up on the ball and slug it hard as hell, you'd usually win because the other guy would have to shag it way beyond the end of the handball court, which was OK as long as the ball didn't go off to the side. Actually, it could go off to the side as long as the next guy bounced it off the wall inbounds. As it turned out, it was lots of fun charging off to the sides of the court, especially after the girls showed up and started watching. Sometimes we were lucky, and they wouldn't get out of the way.

Before long, other u.p.h. guys wanted to play, and naturally so did Donnie, and that caused the rules to change. First of all, each guy had to know which guy he followed; you'd try to pick somebody who was not a great hitter, and this caused all sorts of hassle. After a few days, Frankie came up with a hell of a good idea: He would try to make a "contract" with the guy he followed, and this guy would then serve up a slow, bouncy return, close to the wall, right in front of Frankie, and Frankie would come charging in with that mighty left arm of his and knock the shit out of the ball. After it hit the wall he'd have to duck to let it go past him, and the guy who set him up had to get out of the way too. The next guy wouldn't have much of a chance, because he'd have to try to return the ball from 75 or 80 feet away; this was especially tough when the crowds started showing up to watch us. If two guys with a contract ended up as the only players left in a game, their contract would automatically break. Some guys would also fink out on their contracts early, or they would set up a contract with the guy before and the guy after. The guy after would get screwed. But the people who really got screwed were the girls who started betting on goofyball games, especially if they made bets against Frankie instead of trying to ace out the penny pitchers, their usual gambling activity.

After a week or two, the best players decided they wanted a few benefits too, so somebody comes up with the idea of making all the losers--maybe fifteen or twenty of them when we really got things going--go butts-up. This meant that each of the losers had to go to the front of the court, bend over and touch his toes, while the winner, standing at the back of the court, would throw the ball at each guy's ass as hard as he could. A couple of girls played a few times and they went butts-up too, but this was probably the main reason why the girls watched instead of playing. They never won, and their ass would get tired if we got good hits. Eventually we started running up and kicking the ball during butts-up: This was not very accurate, but if you hit somebody it hurt like hell. If they "flinched," you got another shot. The coaches hated goofyball, and they really hated butts-up. I guess they felt that only they should be the ones to bust ass on us, using their goddamn drilled-out swat paddles while we touched our toes; they'd also swat you again for flinching. (Girls never got swats, but they sure as hell had to go butts-up when they played goofyball. We didn't believe in all that bullshit about opening doors for them on the Merc either.) Anyway, the best thing about goofyball is that it caused the students to go on strike, like the goddamn United Mineworkers and John L. Lewis. I don't know what Froid would have done with those coalmine bastards. (A lot of them were Baptists too, I s'pose.) But the coaches won out by just ignoring all the kids, which you sure as hell couldn't do with the miners or the longshoremen. So, our strike only lasted about three days. But it was so nice to go for three days without worrying about after-school football, trying to figure who was ahead--the Rams or the Dons or the Bruins or the Trojans. Mickeymouse.

Coach Becker was a red-headed guy with a butch haircut, he was a little on the chubby side for a coach, and Frankie talked to him sometimes the way he talked to Bendadick. Mainly because you could actually learn something. The best thing about Becker, and also guys like Bendadick and a few others at Riis, was that you could make a deal with them and they would stick to it no matter what, even if you were sort of a hood. If they thought you actually had a chance to get your ass in gear, they would do just about anything for you. You could count on them the way you could count on getting gas money from Downing's piggy bank, no matter when you wanted to haul ass. But if you tried to split with a buck or two from Downing's bank, and didn't put in an IOU, he'd bust you. First, he'd make you put in the IOU, plus another IOU to cover a fine, which could be as much as four bits. Then he'd figure he was hot and on a big roll, so he'd auction you off for a swat, with the winner of the auction having to put his bid money into the bank (which was always pretty full), and then the winner would try to kill you with one of Downing's (naturally) drilled-out paddles. This was dangerous as hell, because the winner--who was always the goddamn Buck Trottman, pride of the famous Retail Clerks International Association--would have to get his money's worth. Frankie was always afraid the sonofabitch would go for your backbone, and not necessarily on purpose. Downing would make Nancy leave the room when guys got swats, and she of course never got swats no matter how much she was messing around. (I would have bid the Merc just to give her tail a sweet little paddle blast.) One day, Buck made a high offer and got to swat the shit out of Bernie Snope--Buck was always talking about how he wanted to stomp Bernie's ass, mainly because Bernie was a football player, but Buck was a check stand operator (RCIA) and a little too old for this kind of shit--and he hit Bernie so hard and so high on his ass that the paddle went flying out of his hands and busted the window next to Downing's desk, with old Fred sitting right there. Downing blinked his eyes for about three minutes, and then got totally pissed. Frankie couldn't believe this scene, but Downing knew he couldn't bust anybody; he set up the goddamn system. He decided that Bernie was OK, told him to eat a candy bar both for his ass and for football. Fred forgot to mention Bernie's backbone.

So, Becker was a lot like Downing. He had lots of rules, and you had to stick to them no matter. He might let you help him set up the rules, but still no matter: You had to stick to them. (Actually, I once heard that the drafting guys had set up Downing's bank.) So one day, after Becker and the other coaches had killed off goofyball, Frankie and Tippy discover that the same little bastard in the equipment room with the same fabulous little goofyball was willing to let them have it. They got it, went out, started a game, got busted after about two minutes for ten swats or five laps. This was Becker's way of bringing them down, especially since they would have to run through girls' PE. But ten swats would be like executing you, the way they're going to do with this Carol Chessman asshole, whatever she did. And then maybe old Becker had set us up with the guy in the equipment room, maybe they had a contract. But Frankie knew better, because he knew a few things about Becker. He knew that a guy like Becker would give us all the rope we needed to hang ourselves by the balls, and then he'd hang us himself and save us the trouble.

Frankie knew about Becker because Becker also taught American history, and Frankie showed up for class once in a while especially when Becker was talking about the war, which he did a lot. Becker had been right in the middle of Pearl Harbor back on December seventh, whatever year; he called it Pearl, not Pearl Harbor. He was stationed at a place called Hickman that got shot up and bombed pretty badly, and he told us he was scared shitless but was able to think about what was going on--figure it out, ace!--so that he could avoid getting killed. He wanted to help some of the guys who were shot up or were inside buildings that were bombed and on fire, but he couldn't get close enough to anything for a while, so he concentrated on getting someplace that the japanese didn't want to blow the shit out of, so that he wouldn't get killed. He ran out into trees or something. After the planes left, he said, the situation all around Pearl was a total mess, and he said that you could still get killed because there were all sorts of fires and explosions around the whole damn scene. He told us about guys he dug out of bombed buildings while the buildings were still burning and falling down all over the place, and what a mess these guys were, whether dead or alive. Some of them must have looked like gutted rabbits, and half the girls listening to Becker were ready to puke. He told us about all the government investigations that tried to throw the blame on the army, the navy, President Roosevelt or Truman or whoever had his shit in the drawer at the time, and on everybody else except the japanese. He actually called them japanese, which was a completely new word to me, because all through the war all I had heard was that the United States was fighting against "the japs," along with a real hood out there somewhere called Mussolini, the nips, some guy named Tojo, some guy named Hero Hito, the germans, Hitler the shithook, and some guy named Uncle Joe Stalin. In other words, we had to kick ass on just about everybody, like the worst Friday night you ever had in Hollywood, the night somebody pissed on your Merc. Even though the germans were called just plain germans, they were the toughest sonsabitches around and were harder to beat than the japanese. Becker said that words like jap or nip were more or less a bringdown for the japanese--I mean insulting--that thousands of japanese had lived around L.A. since I don't know how long, and that even with all his reasons for hating japs he still thought it was a good idea to call them japanese. He also said that it would be a good idea to stop calling mexicans zoot suits and rat packs and shit like that. Becker had a sort of kiss-ass attitude toward life, but it never showed up when he was swatting your butt. Becker was the kind of guy you'd like to have for an old man. The only thing wrong with him was that he didn't realize that goofyball was one totally bitchen game. Another funny thing was that he also told Anton Jolst, a guy in the history class and also drafting, that his name was Tony, and that if Anton didn't agree--swats, fines, the whole damn scene. Tony agreed. Why Becker did this, I leave to Froid. Or Bendadick.