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SUN october 2 01 1

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Issu e 430

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contributors WRITERS Eric Anderson ’s poetry was recently published at Conte Online. He still doesn’t have a title for his forthcoming collection of poems, and the situation is becoming desperate. He lives in Elyria, Ohio.

Lisa Bellamy ’s writing has appeared in

TriQuarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and Cimarron Review. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at the Writers Studio. When not writing or hiking in the Adirondacks, she dreams up names for the English springer spaniel puppy she will one day bring home.

Alan Craig is the pseudonym of a writer living on the East Coast.

Gillian Kendall is the editor of Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing. She recently sold her house in Australia and is traveling in the Balkans and beyond, seeking work, a life-changing haircut, and a home. (www.gilliankendall .org)

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz ’s first

poetry book is Mosslight. She lives in Fieldbrook, California, with her wildlifebiologist husband and two cats and is the director of planned giving for Humboldt State University. She once hang glided off a cliff near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, but remains leery of high curbs. (www.themosslitpath .blogspot.com).

appeared in Ninth Letter and The Missouri Review, and he is coauthor of Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers.

ington. (www.joshuasage.com)

Lance Jones lives in Ira, Vermont, and has

had his work published in B&W and Photo Life. He says he’s never made more money from his photography than he’s spent on it, so he must do it for love.

James LePore is a photographer and writer

living in South Salem, New York. He is the author of the novel A World I Never Made. (www.nakedeyeimages.com)

Gary Matson once appeared on television

in New Orleans, Louisiana, dancing under the stars, wearing one orange and one yellow sneaker. He lives in Sunnyside, New York. ([email protected])

Barbara Morris was a critical-care nurse

for twelve years and is now a photographer and painter. She lives in Chico, California.

Sandra-Lee Phipps worked as a photographer for The Village Voice for eight years. She now lives in Decatur, Georgia, and creates artwork out of things growing in her yard, including her children. (www .sandraleephipps.com) bubble-gum wrappers and sent them away for her first camera when she was ten. She lives in Lakeville, Minnesota. (www.kelly povo.com)

David Zoby lives in Casper, Wyoming,

where he is the director of the honors program at Casper College. His nonfiction has

Jerry Speier takes photographs for schools, hospitals, nonprofits, and corporations. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. (www .jerryspeier.com)

Mike Voss has been a photographer for more

than thirty years. He lives in Peotone, Illinois, with his wife, his youngest daughter, and three dogs who are clearly running the household. (www.printroom.com/pro /mikevoss)

Lloyd Wolf’s most recent book of photo­ graphs is Jewish Fathers: A Legacy of Love. He is the chief photographer for the Columbia Pike Documentary Project (www.cpdpcolumbiapike.blogspot.com) and lives in Arlington, Virginia. (www .lloydwolf.com)

ON THE COVER Clemens Kalischer was born in Bavaria

and lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he runs the Image Gallery. He took this month’s cover photo “long ago” at the Great Barrington Fairgrounds in Massachusetts. The fairgrounds were abandoned after they suffered a direct hit from a tornado in 1995.

editor and publisher Sy Safransky

Rachel Yoder lives in Iowa City, Iowa. She

recently graduated from the nonfictionwriting program at the University of Iowa and now writes about shoes for Nordstrom. Her piece “Some Really Disgusting Essays about Love” is forthcoming in YOU: An Anthology of Essays in the Second Person.

gan, and works in a group home for disabled people. His photographs have appeared in Detroit’s Metro Times. (grant [email protected])

Joshua Sage lives in Port Townsend, Wash-

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Ann Joslin Williams is an assistant pro- Kelly Povo saved five hundred Bazooka fessor of creative writing at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of The Woman in the Woods, a collection of linked stories that won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, and she was awarded an NEA grant for her first novel, Down from Cascom Mountain. She lives in Lee, New Hampshire.

Grant M. Ryan lives in Marquette, Michi­

managing editor senior editor art director digital-media director manuscript editor editorial associates proofreader

Tim McKee

associate publisher

Andrew Snee

director of finance

Krista Bremer Becky Gee

Robert Graham

circulation assistant

David Mahaffey

Admin­istrative Assistant Holly McKinney

Colleen Donfield Erica Berkeley Rachel J. Elliott Luc Saunders Seth Mirsky

Molly Herboth

with help from Marianne Erhardt, Dave Hart, Paula Jolin, and Gillian Kendall, manuscript reading; Lauren Holder Raab, proofreading; Angela Winter, writing retreats

contents depa rt m e n ts 2 Correspondence 48 Sunbeams

T h e Su n I n t erv i e w 4

Pirate With A Cause Paul Watson’s Crusade To Protect Marine Wildlife gillian kendall

Essays, Memoirs, & true stories 16

Light, Held Together By Water Kimberley Pittman-Schulz

18

Awkward Walks With Unavailable Men Rachel Yoder

24 Speedo david zoby kelly povo

37

Agonizing Grace Alan Craig

F ic t ion

T H E SU N issu e 430 october 2011 What is to give light must endure burning. — Viktor Frankl Where to Write: Send all subscription orders, remittances, and changes of address to The Sun, Subscription Department, P.O. Box 5837, Harlan, IA 51593-1337. If you’re moving, we need six weeks’ notice to ensure uninterrupted service. If you have a problem with your subscription or receive a defective issue, send an e-mail to [email protected] or call (888) 732-6736, 8 am–11 pm EST Mon.–Fri.; 9:30 am– 6 pm EST Sat. To order books or to inquire about a book order, send an e-mail to [email protected] or call (515) 237-3698, 8 am–11 pm EST Mon.–Fri.; 9:30 am– 6 pm EST Sat. Send all inquiries about back issues or requests for submission guidelines (include an SASE) to The Sun, 107 North Roberson Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516 or visit our website: www.thesunmagazine.org. We welcome unsolicited submissions.

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A Note on Photographs: Unless other­w ise indicated, photo­ graphs are independent of writings published in The Sun: photographs do not illustrate incidents, events, or characters depicted by writers; writings are not intended to describe incidents, events, or characters depicted in photo­g raphs. The Small Print: The Sun (ISSN 0744-9666) (USPS 011-778) is published monthly by The Sun Publishing Company, Inc., a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization, 107 North Roberson Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516, (919) 942-5282. Periodical postage paid at Chapel Hill, NC, and at additional mailing offices. Publications Mail Agreement No. 40732000, return undeliverable Canadian addresses to P.O. Box 503, RPO West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Sun, Subscription Department, P.O. Box 5837, Harlan, IA 51593-1337. Copyright © 2011 The Sun The Sun is printed on 30 percent postconsumer recycled paper.

42

View From The Overlook Ann Joslin Williams

Poet ry 13 As A Boy eric anderson 23 The Baby Is Clapping Lisa Bellamy

T h e d o g -e a r ed page 14

from All Men Are Brothers mahatma gandhi

R e a ders W r it e 29

Cheap Thrills

correspondence I applaud Gail Hornstein’s call

for us to understand those labeled “mentally ill” in a more holistic way, on their own terms, “as they understand themselves” [“The Voices inside Their Heads,” interview by Tracy Frisch, July 2011]. Among other things, that means listening to the content of an emotionally distressed person’s “voices.” My fourteen-year-old daughter has been hearing voices for several years, and I have found it appalling that most mental-health professionals coolly avoid asking what these voices actually say, other than to inquire, “Do these voices command you to hurt yourself or others?” Hornstein beautifully articulates the power of peer support groups to relieve voice hearers’ isolation, promote healing through empathy, and teach them better ways to cope with stress. Patricia Stafford Hatboro, Pennsylvania

Gail Hornstein’s interview on

mental illness was a revelation. My husband has obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is difficult to live with him. His illness makes it almost impossible for him to keep a job, have friends, or even maintain a healthy lifestyle. He is brilliant, but the world is unlikely to profit from his genius. What I learned from Hornstein is that my approach to his mental illness is wrong, and perhaps destructive. Whenever we’ve had a problem directly related to my husband’s condition, I have berated him to get medications and seek treatment, telling him that his behavior is ruining our lives. My words have never changed anything, and I now realize that they are not only unhelpful but counterproductive. Carla Y. Tucson, Arizona

As a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, I applaud Gail Hornstein’s openmindedness and attempts to change public perceptions of mental illness. The stigma is strong in these postmodern, big-pharma days. It is shameful that the U.S. is far behind some other countries in understanding the need to elimi­nate that 2

The Sun  October 2011

stigma altogether. My sister once told me that we all have “mind chatter.” We must be taught, with compassion, to listen to only one voice: that of our inner self. And this is no easy proposition, whether we are diagnosed with schizophrenia or not. Jeffrey DeMann Holland, Michigan

As a lifelong self-injurer who has

recently been diagnosed with obsessivecompulsive disorder, related anxiety, and major depression, I was thrilled to read Gail Hornstein’s cogent, empathic argu­ ment for communal story exchange as a viable tool for treating mental illness. I have strong objections — political, theological, artistic, and personal — to the overuse of pharmacology in the field of mental health, but my general physician still pressures me to start a course of anti­depressants every time I am in her office. I have been fortunate enough to find a psychologist who comes closer to sharing my views on this issue, but others are not so lucky. It enrages me to think that many people in the U.S. are unaware of potential alternatives to medication and hierarchical therapy. As both a writer and a mental patient, I applaud Hornstein — and The Sun — for spreading the word about the saving power of shared self-narrative. Tina Louise Blevins Wytheville, Virginia

Though I enjoyed Tracy Frisch’s

interview with Gail Hornstein, I feel the conversation could have included current shifts in public health that emphasize precisely the kind of supportive, holistic recovery methods and peer engagement that Hornstein advocates. The Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) is a nation­ wide peer movement, and TraumaInformed Care is another movement that is growing rapidly. The Affordable Care Act also creates tremendous opportunity to provide integrated, personcentered care. And Mental Health First Aid is a national initiative to educate citi­ zens about emotional or psychological crises so anyone can offer respectful and

compassionate help. I appreciate that the names of these initiatives may sound bureaucratic, and that it takes a while to make lasting change in the messy real world of public and nonprofit agencies, but these efforts represent a paradigm shift. After twenty-five years in this field, I’ve never been more enthusiastic about the possibilities. Jeanne Supin Boone, North Carolina

For Gail Hornstein to describe

children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as just needing more recess time, or to claim that adult ADHD is invented by drug companies, shows how little she knows about the disorder. I have ADHD, as do my youngest brother and my father. Hornstein’s words dismiss the experiences of many people with ADHD who feel relief when they realize they’re not just failures who lack discipline. ADHD can be seen in PET scans and is as inheritable as height. Yet many smart people refuse to believe in its existence. Hornstein might not be a fan of psychiatric medications, but outside of the love of my family and friends, and my bicycle, nothing has improved my quality of life as much as ADHD medications. The first time I took the right dose of the right medication was similar to when I got my first pair of glasses: Is this what If you’re thinking about writing us a letter, give in to the temptation. We love getting mail. (Of course, we reserve the right to edit.) Write to Correspondence, The Sun, 107 North Roberson Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516. E-mail: letters@thesun magazine.org. Fax: (919) 932-3101.

the world looks like to everyone else? April Wiza Portland, Oregon

Gail Hornstein takes issue with

the biological basis of mental illness, a stand that is both unscientific and dangerous. She claims that true diseases such as diabetes can be detected by medical tests, whereas mood disorders cannot. In fact, functional MRI and EEG studies have shown different types of activity in the brains of subjects with depression, anxiety disorders, and mood disorders. And there is abundant, strong evidence for genetic predisposition to mental illnesses. Rejecting the biology of mental illness is not only unsupportable, it brings blame into the equation. Reproach may fall on some abuser or, more diffusely, on society, but failing that, it must fall on the patient. I personally experienced no childhood trauma that would explain my lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression. And if society is at fault, why are other people in my social milieu able to sleep through the night without being jolted awake by panic attacks? If I deny biological factors, I must conclude that I have caused myself to feel this way — a difficult, if not impossible, starting point for recovery. R.K. Upstate New York

As a psychiatrist who has been

prescribing medications for more than thirty years, I am concerned that there are several inaccuracies in Gail Hornstein’s otherwise thoughtful interview. First, I am unaware of any scientific evidence that supports her assertion that “unbearable trauma” is “the most common reason” for hearing voices. Hornstein’s claim that psychiatric medications are “physically addictive” is not only false, but it also ignores the critical distinction between addiction and dependence. Addiction is a pathological state; dependence is a physiological response to taking any medicine for a significant period of time. Hornstein says that in the U.S. “a psychiatric breakdown is just a chemical imbalance in the brain, treatable only with a prescription.” This gross oversimplifica-

tion ignores well-documented evidence that counseling — psychotherapy — can change brain chemistry just as medicines can. Because of this, well-trained mentalhealth practitioners will employ both psychotherapeutic techniques and prescriptions to help their patients. Teaching patients these techniques is a vital part of modern psychiatric care. Also, contrary to the implication in the interview, any thoughtful and conscientious psychiatrist would be gravely concerned — if not downright appalled — that a patient was taking “seven or eight different psychiatric medications.” Only in an exceptionally rare case would this be necessary. Similarly, no good psychia­ trist would be comfortable putting his or her patients in the position of having to choose between being distressed and being able to keep their jobs. And it is inaccurate to state that a psychiatrist would “knock [a patient] out so that he or she can’t do much else.” Finally Hornstein claims that psychia­ trists “have yet to come up with highly effective [treatments]” for their patients’ difficulties. This is simply false. Bipolar disorder, depression, attention-deficit disorder, anxiety, some personality disorders, sleep disturbances, phobias, panic disorder, and even some psychoses respond well to today’s psychiatric therapies. August Piper Seattle, Washington

Gail Hornstein responds: A number of empowering approaches to understanding and coping with serious emotional distress share the Hearing Voices Network’s focus on peer support and trauma-informed care, and Jeanne Supin is right that some are beginning to reshape parts of the public mental-health system. But the U.S. is still far behind the UK and Europe in offering patients and their families a comprehensive range of treatment options. Active efforts are needed if this situation is to change. When medication is effective — as many have testified — it can change lives. But no

one is helped by making it seem as if the astonishingly shaky scientific base upon which biological psychiatry rests is more robust than the data indicate. Psychiatric drugs have very serious physical and cognitive side effects and are ineffective for many patients. The fact that technology now allows us to visualize brain activity does not, unfortunately, mean that we understand more clearly what causes any of us to think, feel, or act as we do. (For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Paolo Legrenzi’s Neuromania: On the Limits of Brain Science, just out from Oxford University Press.) Dr. Piper is right that psychotherapy can change brain chemistry, and so can early-childhood trauma and countless other experiences. But I challenge his claims about current treatment in psychiatry. According to a study published in 2008 in the leading journal Archives of General Psychiatry, only 11 percent of psychiatrists in the U.S. currently provide psychotherapy to their patients; the overwhelming majority rely solely on medication. And, as psychiatrist Daniel Carlat writes in his disturbing book Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry, “when psychiatrists start using what I call neurobabble, beware, because we rarely know what we are talking about. . . . We have convinced ourselves that we have developed cures for mental illnesses, when in fact we know so little about the underlying neurobiology of their causes that our treatments are often a series of trials and errors.” To learn more about these debates in psychiatry, alternative methods such as peer support, and the scientific data supporting the Hearing Voices Network’s approach, visit www.gailhornstein.com.

Sy Safransky’s Notebook is on hia­tus while he finishes work on a book-length collection of Notebook entries. ­— Ed.

The Sun makes its mailing list available to organizations whose work may be of interest to our readers. If you’d like your name left off mailing-list rentals, let us know. In­clude a recent mailing label. Additionally, the Direct Marketing Association (www.dmachoice.org) can place your name on a no-mail list, reducing the amount of unwanted mail you receive by 80 percent.

October 2011  The Sun

3

Pirate With A Cause

Paul Watson’s Crusade To Protect Marine Wildlife Gillian Kendall

W

hile living in Australia in 2010, I heard a good deal about the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society — a group of marine-wildlife activists who were going up against Japanese whaling ships in the Antarctic seas (www.seashepherd.org). They made the news night after night, and the U.S. cable-television channel Animal Planet was filming a series called Whale Wars about the group’s activities. The wind-whipped people on my TV screen looked cold, strong, and resolute as they deliberately went in harm’s way to save whales. I’d sit on the couch eating dinner and cheer them on, wondering if I could ever be so brave. Sea Shepherd’s founder, Paul Watson, believes in taking direct action to save marine wildlife — very direct. With more than two hundred sea voyages undertaken since 1977, the group claims to have saved many thousands of whales, seals, and other sea creatures. In some cases Sea Shepherd has shut down a country’s entire whaling operation. Its small fleet travels the globe with limited funding, no weapons, and no naval or coast-guard protection to stop illegal whaling and fishing. Watson has become notorious for confrontations that result in destruction of property, but he maintains that he is upholding 4

The Sun  October 2011

international law, not violating it. His detractors have said that he has no authority on the seas and denounced him as a “pirate.” Sea Shepherd has embraced the label in its fundraising, using a Jolly Roger–style logo and selling T-shirts and hoodies that list the names of the whaling ships it has sunk or put out of commission. Watson was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1950 and spent most of his childhood in the fishing town of Saint Andrews in New Brunswick. At the age of nine he began removing beaver leg traps from the woods to foil hunters. At eighteen he joined the Canadian Coast Guard and a year later began traveling the world on board merchant ships. After returning, he helped organize a protest against U.S. underground nuclear testing at Amchitka Island in southern Alaska. He was a member of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee and a crewman on board the committee’s vessel the Greenpeace Too, which traveled to Amchitka in a failed attempt to disrupt the tests. A year later the committee renamed itself the Greenpeace Foundation, and Watson was the eighth official member. Watson took part in Greenpeace’s efforts to oppose whaling and was first officer on board the Greenpeace V when it

photo courtesy of sea shepherd

Paul Watson, with the Japanese whaling vessel Nisshin Maru in the background.

took on the Soviet whaling fleet in 1976. After that he and fellow Greenpeace member David Garrick organized a campaign against seal hunting in Canada, during which Watson chained himself to a pile of seal pelts. The seal hunters lifted the pelts into the ship anyway, and Watson was slammed against the hull and dunked in the frigid water until he lost consciousness. When other members of Greenpeace felt Watson was going too far, he left in 1977 to found the Earth Force Society, which soon changed its name to Sea Shepherd. Watson claims that Sea Shepherd is the only organization attempting to enforce the international moratorium on whaling that has been in place since 1986. (The International Whaling Commission [IWC], which declared the ban, does not have the resources to enforce it.) Sea Shepherd also opposes the illegal hunting of sharks for their fins, which are considered a delicacy in China, and such widely banned fishing practices as bottom trawling, in which nets are dragged along the ocean floor, destroying habitat and killing many animals that are not consumed by humans. Watson cofounded Friends of the Wolf to stop wolf hunting in British Columbia, ran for office in the Canadian parlia-

ment on the Green Party ticket, and served for three years on the national board of the Sierra Club. He has published six books, including Earthforce!, Ocean Warrior, and Seal Wars, and was named by Time as one of its environmental heroes of the twentieth century. When not actively involved in an ocean campaign with Sea Shepherd, he makes public-speaking appearances to raise awareness of and funding for his cause. The Sea Shepherd campaign that brought Watson to my attention was called Operation Waltzing Matilda and was aimed at preventing Japanese whaling ships — which the Japanese government calls “research vessels” — from killing endangered whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, an area designated for conservation by the IWC in 1994. As well as using two large ships to hamper the movements of the main whaling vessels, Sea Shepherd also deployed the fast, small Ady Gil to stop the harpoon boats. The Ady Gil was used for only one day before it was rammed by the Japanese ship Shōnan Maru 2. No lives were lost, but the Ady Gil, named for the U.S. businessman who had donated the funds for its purchase, was unsalvageable; it sank. Nevertheless Sea Shepherd reports that Operation Waltzing Matilda stopped the Japanese whalers for at least three October 2011  The Sun

5

A

weeks, preventing the deaths of hundreds of whales and costing the Japanese whaling industry tens of millions of dollars. In the most recent whaling season Sea Shepherd was able to obstruct the Japanese whalers even further. After taking less than 10 percent of its expected catch, the entire fleet was recalled by the Japanese government, ending the hunt for that year and possibly for the foreseeable future. I spoke to Watson in Australia when he was between campaigns. In person he is audacious and imposing. A great story­ teller, he projects bold confidence and a low tolerance for manners and diplomacy. Though some critics might accuse him of self-mythologizing, none questions his courage and ferocious commitment to protecting marine life.

s his head rose up out of the water, I looked into his eye, which was the size of my fist, and what I saw there changed my life: I saw understanding. I think the whale understood what we were trying to do.

Kendall: What’s the primary goal of Sea Shepherd? Watson: I set it up to be an antipoaching organization. We are not a protest group. What we do is intervene against illegal activities. Whenever a vessel or a person is in violation of an international conservation regulation, treaty, or law, we step in. Kendall: How do you stop whalers from killing whales? Watson: We block the harpoon boats’ access to the factory ship. If you kill a whale, you have to process the body within twelve hours. Otherwise the meat is no good. We make it impossible for them to do that by staying right on the tail of the whaling ship. Harpoon boats have tried to push in between us and the whaling ship, but I’ve always stood my ground, even when it caused a collision. Kendall: How did you become involved in this work? Watson: In June 1975 I was part of the first Greenpeace campaign to protect whales. [Greenpeace cofounder] Robert Hunter and I had come up with the idea to get in small, mobile boats and put ourselves between the whales and the harpooners, so they couldn’t harpoon the whales. We tracked down a Russian whaling ship that was chasing eight sperm whales about six miles off Cape Mendocino, California. We immediately got in front so that every time the harpooner tried to get a shot, we would block his aim. This worked until the captain came down the catwalk of the whaling vessel and screamed into the ear of the harpooner. Then he looked at us, smiled, and slid his finger across his throat. A few minutes later the harpoon flew over our bow and just missed our boat. It rammed into the back of one of the female whales in the pod in front of us. She screamed, and it sounded like a woman screaming. It was really quite shocking. Then she rolled over on her side in a fountain of blood, dying. Suddenly the largest whale in the pod disappeared. He swam straight down, right underneath us, and back up so fast that he came out of the water and threw his full body weight onto the harpoon vessel, to protect his pod. They got another harpoon and shot him in the head at point-blank range. He fell back into the water and was rolling in agony on the sur6

The Sun  October 2011

face. Then he dove in a trail of bloody bubbles and came up again, fast. He lifted out of the water at such an angle that he was about to fall straight down on top of us and crush us. As his head rose up out of the water, I looked into his eye, which was the size of my fist, and what I saw there changed my life: I saw understanding. I think the whale understood what we were trying to do, because, with great effort, he pulled himself back so that he would not fall on top of us. He slid slowly backward, and his eye disappeared beneath the surface, and he died. He could have taken our lives but chose not to. I thought about how we’d been waging this war of extinction on the whales for centuries, for all sorts of ridiculous things — oil and umbrellas and skirt hoops. The Russians were using whale oil for high-heat-resistant machine lubricant on intercontinental ballistic missiles. I thought: Here we are destroying this beautiful, intelligent, complex creature for the purpose of making a weapon designed for the annihilation of human beings. That very day I stopped being concerned about working for humanity. My clients are now whales and sharks and seals and other creatures that live in the sea. I don’t give a damn what people have to say about that, because I don’t work for them anymore. Kendall: What’s happening in the Antarctic with the Japanese whalers? Watson: A moratorium on commercial whaling went into effect in 1986. In 1987 Japan set up the Institute of Cetacean Research to continue whaling under the guise of scientific research. That is what we are opposing today. The Japanese are targeting protected and endangered whales, such as humpbacks and fins, in an established international whale sanctuary, in violation of the global moratorium and the Antarctic Treaty. There is no difference between these Japanese whalers and elephant poachers in east Africa, except that poachers are poor and often get shot and the whalers are businessmen and operate with impunity. Kendall: Tell me about your engagement with the Japanese whaling vessel Shōnan Maru 2 and the loss of Sea Shepherd’s Ady Gil. Watson: In 2010 we sent three vessels down to the Antarctic to protect the whales: the Steve Irwin, out of Australia; the Bob Barker, which left from Africa; and the Ady Gil, which came out of New Zealand. The Ady Gil was our fast interceptor

vessel, the first one we had that could keep up with the harpoon boats. The other two vessels had to concentrate on stopping the larger factory ship. The Ady Gil proved very effective in stopping the harpoon boats. Then it came back to the Bob Barker and waited to be refueled. The entire crew was on deck when the Shōnan Maru 2 went steaming by. It’s a “security vessel” — a harpoon boat manned by security personnel. The Shōnan Maru 2 made an abrupt turn right into the Ady Gil, which was unable to get out of the way. It cut the Ady Gil nearly in half and totally destroyed it. There was no way to salvage the boat, though we tried. The crew did manage to remove all the oil. Not a drop spilled. The crash had ripped open the fuel tanks, but fortunately those were empty. We tried to tow the wrecked vessel to the French base on the coast, but it was like towing a bucket through the water: it just kept filling up. So we contacted the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which advised us to give them the location and let it sink. Afterward the Japanese whaling operation put out a press release accusing us of polluting the pristine waters of Antarctica with our abandoned vessel and diesel fuel. It was just propaganda. We didn’t release any fuel, and even if we had, they were the ones who’d cut our boat in half. Our crew did everything it could. Kendall: You referred to the Japanese whaler “ramming” the Ady Gil. I saw the video footage on television, and to my untrained eye it looked as if the Ady Gil had drifted into the side of the whaler. Watson: The Ady Gil was drifting, but the Shōnan Maru 2 was moving at twenty knots and made an abrupt turn into the boat. Pete [the captain of the Ady Gil] was able to start the engine, but he had hardly begun to move before they were hit. It would have been very easy for the Ady Gil to have avoided the collision if it had been moving. You can see on the video that the Shōnan Maru 2 also hit the crew of the Ady Gil with water cannons and sonic weapons called “LRADs” [long-range acoustic devices] that are used for crowd dispersal. Kendall: Was the Ady Gil insured? Watson: No, we can’t insure any of our vessels, because what we do is too dangerous. This was a $2 million ship that was deliberately rammed and sunk by Japanese whalers without any repercussions. I mean, if I had sunk a Japanese ship down there, I guarantee the Australian Navy would have had me under arrest. But these poachers get away with anything they want. The Ady Gil was sunk inside the waters of the Australian Antarctic Territory. There is an ongoing investigation by Maritime New Zealand and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, but Japan refuses to cooperate, so nothing can be done. Kendall: Can you not go to Japan and file charges against the whaling company? Watson: [Laughs.] I guess in theory we could, but the chances we would win are pretty remote. The Japanese protect their own. Kendall: The Australian federal police boarded the Bob Barker and the Steve Irwin when the ships got back to Aus-

tralia, apparently to comply with a request from the Japanese government to investigate whether Sea Shepherd had breached maritime law. Watson: Yes, they came on board, even though [Australian prime minister] Kevin Rudd said he had not sent them. They came at the request of the Japanese. When did the Australian police start taking orders from the Japanese? They accused us of criminal activity, and I asked why they said nothing about the sinking and destruction of the Ady Gil and the attempted murder of six of our crew members. They said we would have to take that up with the Japanese authorities. We won’t hear from them again. I think they were just doing it to show the Japanese they were living up to whatever agreement they have. But I wish they would put us under arrest and charge us in an Australian court. It would be a wonderful opportunity to get this whole matter aired out in public, in a country where 94 percent of the population is against whaling. I think it would expose Japan’s ongoing illegal activities to the world. We have unbelievable support from the people of Australia, but the government is more interested in appeasing the Japanese, as is the New Zealand government, and everybody else, really. Japan is an economic bully and gets what it wants. Kendall: The International Whaling Commission recently proposed a plan whereby Iceland, Norway, and Japan would be allowed to hunt whales for meat, with a reduction in the numbers allowed over the next ten years. Do you oppose that plan? Watson: That’s sort of like saying to a bunch of bank robbers, “We’ll let you rob banks on Mondays if you take only so much money.” You don’t compromise with criminals or poachers. I think that proposal has been rejected anyway. This area where the Japanese are whale hunting is called the “Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.” What is it about the word sanctuary they don’t seem to understand? In a sanctuary you have zero quota, so any hunting is unacceptable. As long as this area is designated under law as a sanctuary, we are going to protect it. Kendall: Do you ever see killing whales for meat as justifiable? Watson: I don’t, personally. I think it is an abomination. But the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not opposed to whaling. It is opposed to illegal whaling. Kendall: Why is it your job to enforce the laws of the oceans? Watson: That’s a good question. I wish the countries that are signatories to the laws would enforce them, but they don’t seem to have the political or economic will to do so. The United Nations World Charter for Nature states in section 21(e) that nongovernmental organizations and individuals are empowered to uphold international conservation law “in areas beyond national jurisdiction.” So we actually have a legal right to intervene. Kendall: Is Sea Shepherd the only enforcer of marineprotection laws? Watson: On the international waters, yes, as far as I know. October 2011  The Sun

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I haven’t come across any other groups doing what we do. Kendall: Do most governments view your actions as legal? Watson: The only government that has put me on trial is Canada’s. Back in 1993 I chased Cuban and Spanish drag trawlers off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. This was outside the two-hundred-mile limit of Canadian jurisdiction, but I was arrested by Canadian authorities anyway and charged with criminal mischief and endangering life and property. It was a four-week trial and cost the government millions of dollars. There were forty-five government witnesses against me. I was the only witness in my defense, but I was still acquitted. My defense was the UN World Charter for Nature and what is called “color of rights,” meaning that I had the right to intervene, or it was my understanding that I had the right to intervene. The only country that would not allow this defense is the United States, because the U.S. did not sign the UN World Charter for Nature. Sea Shepherd answers to only one country, the Netherlands, because we fly the Dutch flag. Japan has made plenty of complaints to the Dutch registry, but there hasn’t been a single investigation, and no violations have been filed against us. The Dutch foreign minister was pressured by Japan to remove our flag, but they could not because we were compliant with all Dutch regulations. So the Dutch tried to introduce special legislation to remove our flag for any action that would upset diplomatic relationships between the Netherlands and another country. It was outrageous, and the Dutch public objected strongly to it. Even if the legislation is eventually proposed, we estimate it will take three to four years for it to pass. In the meantime we have not been charged with a single violation. Kendall: So everything you do is legal according to Dutch law? Watson: I believe it is. In thirty-two years of operations, nobody in Sea Shepherd has been convicted of a felony. We have never been sued, and we have never injured anybody. But still people call us “ecoterrorists,” “pirates,” and so on. When people began calling us “pirates,” we designed our own pirate flag, and it’s proven to be our most successful marketing logo. Of course the whalers are the real outlaws, but sometimes it takes a pirate to stop a pirate. Back in the seventeenth century, when piracy was out of control in the Caribbean, it wasn’t the British Navy that shut it down. In fact, British military officers, merchants, and politicians were all taking bribes from the pirates. Piracy was shut down by the actions of one man, Henry Morgan, a pirate. The British government had to reward him for his success, so it knighted him and made him the deputy governor of Jamaica. In Sea Shepherd we like to look on ourselves as compassionate pirates, not pirates in pursuit of profit. It’s quite a noble legacy. Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Jean Lafitte, and John Paul Jones, the founder of the U.S. Navy, were all pirates. Kendall: So the actions that you take — such as throwing sour milk onto the decks of whaling ships — are legal actions? Watson: They are not illegal. I consider our attacks a nontoxic, biodegradable, organic form of chemical warfare. The 8

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Japanese news says that we throw acid at whalers. Rotten butter is an acid, but it’s less acidic than beer. It’s noncorrosive, non­ irritating, and nontoxic. But it stinks like you wouldn’t believe. Kendall: And it’s slippery. Watson: We make it slippery by adding methyl cellulose to it. That’s a food-grade product used to coat pills and make them easier to swallow. When mixed with water, it becomes super slippery. It’s pretty hard to go about your work when you can’t stand up and everything stinks to high heaven. For this the former premier of Newfoundland called me an “ecoterrorist” and said I wasn’t welcome in Newfoundland. But I am a Canadian and will go any damn place in Newfoundland I choose to go. If the premier thinks I am a criminal, then he can bloody well arrest me. Kendall: You say that Sea Shepherd “adheres to the utilization of nonviolent principles in the course of all actions.” What’s your definition of violence? Watson: My definition is the same as Martin Luther King Jr.’s, Mahatma Gandhi’s, and Nelson Mandela’s. King said you cannot commit an act of violence against a nonsentient object, only against a living being. We have never injured a single person in our entire history, and we are proud of that record. I spent six months in Africa in 1978, tracking elephant poachers with park rangers. The rangers were killing the poachers, but I would not do that. I did destroy their vehicles and their weapons. If you damage property in order to prevent the death of a sentient being — that is, if you damage a harpoon or a gun or a rifle — it’s an act of nonviolence. There is a difference between nonviolence and pacifism. Mahatma Gandhi once said, when somebody called him a pacifist, “I’ve never advocated passive anything.” Pacifism is the act of doing nothing. Nonviolence is a tactic. Clearly it worked against the British, but many have wondered if it would have been as effective against the likes of Hitler or Stalin. You have to choose your strategies according to your enemies. I think nonviolence has been turned into some kind of sacred cause, but people have to use a little common sense in its application. In 1986 I was running for member of parliament with the Green Party of Canada, and they wanted to kick me out of the party for being violent — i.e., sinking ships. So we had a big debate on it at Green Party headquarters. I pointed out that the Green Party is pro-choice, and so am I, but you cannot argue that abortion is not violent; you’re destroying living tissue. They were telling me it’s nonviolent to destroy an unborn baby, but it’s violent to destroy two pieces of metal. Humans are really good at justifying violence when we want to use it. Kendall: You’ve taken responsibility for sinking a great many ships. Watson: Yes, I hunted down the pirate whaler the Sierra in 1979. It had killed thousands of whales illegally and was wanted in numerous countries. It was operating out of Portugal by passing bribes to officials, but we were able to track it down. I rammed it twice and disabled it and didn’t injure anybody. Then, after it was repaired, we sank it in Lisbon Harbor and ended its career.

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hen people began calling us “pirates,” we designed our own pirate flag, and it’s proven to be our most successful marketing logo. Of course the whalers are the real outlaws, but sometimes it takes a pirate to stop a pirate.

To put the pirate whaler Astrid out of commission, we put posters all over the Canary Islands offering twenty-five thousand dollars to anybody who could sink it. The captains didn’t even trust their own crew with that kind of price on the ship’s head, so they retired the vessel. We had the whaling ships Susan and Theresa seized by the South African government because they were linked to the Sierra. It was not contested. The boats were taken out and sunk by the South African Navy. The Spanish ships Ibsa 1 and Ibsa 2 had exceeded their kill quota on fin whales out of Vigo, Spain, so we simply enforced the IWC regulations by sinking them in harbor, and that pretty much ended Spanish whaling operations. So between 1980 and 1986 we shut down basically all the whaling activities in the North Atlantic. In 1986 we sank half of Iceland’s whaling fleet. People said we didn’t accomplish much because the whalers raised those boats, but they’ve never been used again. They are rusted inside and out. In the 1990s we sank a total of four Norwegian whaling vessels. Since Norway had about sixty-five small whaling ships, we couldn’t knock them all out, so our tactic was to sink a boat a year to keep their insurance premiums at an all-time high: a 3,000 percent increase. They also had to pay for twenty-fourhour security. So it was no longer profitable for them to continue what they were doing. Kendall: Are you having an economic impact on the Japanese fleet? Watson: Oh, yes. We’ve cost them their profits for five years in a row. That’s why they are so angry. They have made no money. We have cut their quotas in half. People say Greenpeace’s approach is more responsible than Sea Shepherd’s, because they are trying to educate the Japanese people and convince them not to kill whales. They say the only way to make a difference is to reach the Japanese people. First of all, I think that sort of missionary approach is damned insulting. Who are we to preach to the Japanese about right and wrong? Second of all, I don’t think it makes any difference. The majority of Canadians are against the seal hunt, but the government continues to support it. The one language that everybody understands is profit and loss. As long as we keep their profits from exceeding their losses, we are hurting

them. Kendall: It sounds as if you have rammed and sunk only one vessel. Watson: We’ve actually rammed numerous vessels, but we have never rammed and sunk a vessel on the spot. We rammed the Sierra and disabled it, then sank it six months later. Kendall: When you rammed the Sierra, were there people on board? Watson: Yes, there were people on board, but the ship was at anchor. I could have hit the Sierra out at sea, but I wouldn’t have been able to control the situation there. I have to be able to make sure no-

body’s hurt. First I put my ship in dock and called my crew together. I said, “Look, we are going to go out and ram and disable the Sierra. I can’t guarantee you’re not going to get injured, and I can guarantee that you’re going to go to jail in Portugal. You’ve got ten minutes to decide if you’re with us or not.” Ten minutes later there were seventeen crew members on the dock. The two who stayed with me were my engineers. So the three of us took the ship out and went at the Sierra full speed. We struck it across the bow to damage the harpoon, then turned around and slammed into it at fifteen knots on the port side, splitting it open to the waterline. Here’s the thing about ramming boats: when a thousand tons of floating steel collides with a thousand tons of floating steel, it doesn’t even knock anybody off their feet, because the volume of metal absorbs the impact of the blow. It’s almost like cutting through butter with a hot knife. As long as there is nobody standing at the point of impact or behind the bulkhead, you’re not going to kill anybody. Kendall: How could you know there wasn’t anybody behind the bulkhead? Watson: Because it was a freezer compartment full of whale meat. If there had been somebody in there, that person wouldn’t have lived long due to the extreme cold. Kendall: So, just to be clear, you’re saying it is perfectly legal to destroy property as long as it is being used to commit crimes? Watson: What is “perfectly legal”? If you commit an act with full knowledge by the authorities, you’re either arrested for it or you’re not, and if you’re arrested, you’re either convicted or you’re not. After we hit the Sierra, the Portuguese Navy detained us, and I was brought before the port captain, who threatened to charge me with gross criminal negligence. I told him there was nothing negligent about what we’d done: we’d hit that ship exactly where we’d intended to hit it. He finally decided that, since he couldn’t figure out who owned the ship, he couldn’t bring any charges against me. When we sank Iceland’s whaling fleet and destroyed their whale-processing plant, costing the Icelandic whaling industry $10 million, I flew to Reykjavík, the capital, to demand that charges be brought. I landed at the airport, and the police October 2011  The Sun

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turned out to greet me. They asked if I was admitting to the sinking of the ships, and I said, “Not only are we admitting to it, but we are going to sink the next two at the first opportunity.” And the following morning they took me to the airport and sent me home. They knew that to put me on trial would have been to put Iceland on trial, and they did not want that. Kendall: You have never been responsible for the death of a human being, but would you agree that you have put your own and others’ lives in danger by taking on whaling ships? Watson: Yes, I would agree that we’re taking risks. We make no pretense about that. In fact, I ask all my crew members before they join whether they are willing to risk their lives to protect a whale, and if they say no, then I don’t want them. This is a dangerous business. We are going to the most remote and hostile waters in the world and confronting aggressive opposition. Kendall: Your crew aren’t professionals. Watson: No, and we get criticized for that sometimes, but it doesn’t bother me, because I couldn’t pay professionals to do what these people do. They are volunteers who do this out of passion. When Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton was told that his crew were inexperienced sailors, he said he would rather have people of passion than professionals anytime. I agree. Professionals are a pain in the rear end. Kendall: What would happen if a member of your crew or a Japanese crew were killed in a conflict? Watson: You can’t control everything, but you can take every precaution to ensure that you don’t hurt anybody. Do we do that? Yes. Is it still possible that someone could get hurt? Yes. You could get hit by a car crossing the street, but you don’t stop crossing the street. You take precautions and do it in a responsible manner. We have an unblemished record of never having injured anybody. Kendall: Would you consider it acceptable if a person were seriously injured but a whale’s life were saved? Watson: It’s never acceptable for anybody to be injured. There have been a number of actions over the years that I have decided not to take because they were too dangerous. For instance, we were going after a drift-netter in the north Pacific once, and one of the netter’s crew approached the power block that we were trying to damage. I don’t know why he did it, but once he was there, we had to abort the ramming maneuver because there was a possibility he would be injured. Another example is when we sank the two whaling ships in Iceland. There was a third one there, but a watchman was sleeping on board. We couldn’t guarantee that he would get off safely, so we didn’t sink that vessel. We always give a warning before we ram ships. Kendall: Do you consider human life more valuable than whale life?

fter we hit the Sierra, the Portuguese Navy detained us, and I was brought before the port captain, who threatened to charge me with gross criminal negligence. I told him there was nothing negligent about what we’d done: we’d hit that ship exactly where we’d intended to hit it.

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Watson: I consider the survival of a species to be more important than that of a single individual, but I personally consider all species to be of equal value. Because of the ecological law of interdependence, however, some species can be more valuable to the ecosystem than others. Worms, bees, and certain forms of bacteria, for example, are far more important than humans are to the survival of life on the planet. They can live on the planet without us, but we can’t live on the planet without them. A Japanese reporter once asked me, if I saw a dolphin and a human being both caught in a gill net, which one I would rescue first. I said, “Well, I’m not in Japan to rescue human beings.” That answer actually gained me some respect in Japan, because the Japanese have a strong sense of duty. My duty is to the dolphins. Kendall: Were you drawn to the ocean in childhood? Watson: I was brought up near the beach. A lot of the people where I lived were fishermen, but I didn’t become one. As a child I didn’t see fishermen as very good people. Kendall: What makes the ocean so precious to you? Watson: The ocean is the life of the planet. It controls the weather. It provides half the oxygen we breathe. I don’t think people really understand that the diminishment of the ocean is the diminishment of life on earth, and the death of the ocean will be the death of all of us. If the earth were a spaceship, the biosphere would be the life-support system, the sun would be the engine, and the crew would be creatures like bacteria, insects, fish, and worms. Humans are the passengers; we’re not the crew. We’re destroying the crew. When it comes to maintaining the welfare of the planet, the real work is done by those so-called lower forms of life that are cleaning up messes and pumping out the oxygen. Most people don’t even understand that we have nearly a thousand species that live in and on us. Each human being contains about one kilogram of living bacteria. Kendall: There are a few people who are trying to stop the destruction. Are you optimistic about their chances? Watson: Yes, but I have to be realistic. We’ve got more subscribers to the online video game World of Warcraft than we

have active environmentalists in the world. For the most part we preoccupy ourselves with fantasies such as video games or religion or television and remain oblivious to the very delicate ecosystem that keeps us alive. Kendall: You have said that humans are particularly capable of “living with diminishment.” Can you explain that? Watson: Humans are primates and have primate mannerisms: we have the ability to forget; we do not look too far into the future; and, most important, we have the ability to adapt to diminished conditions. From an evolutionary point of view this used to be a good trait. Fifteen thousand years ago it helped us get by with what we had. But now we are adapting to diminishment that we have caused. We forget how the world used to be, and we don’t look ahead to how it will be. In 1965 if someone had told me that in forty years we’d be buying our water in plastic bottles and paying more for it than gasoline, I would have thought they were insane, but we have adapted to that diminishment. In the same way, we have adapted to eating seafood we would never have considered edible years ago. In my hometown in New Brunswick, Canada, no one would have thought of eating mussels in the 1950s and 1960s. Now they are a main course. Lobster used to be considered the “poor man’s meat.” There was a law in Prince Edward Island against feeding it to your servants; it was seen as an abuse of domestic help. Lobsters were used to fertilize potato fields. But scarcity creates demand. Now you can charge a lot of money for lobster. The thing about lobsters that people don’t take into account is that they live to be well over 150 years old. Many fish in the oceans also live over a century. An orange roughy doesn’t even reach sexual maturity until forty-five and lives to be about two hundred years of age. Some sharks can live more than a hundred years. We are taking these animals out of the sea faster than they can reproduce. That is why commercial fisheries are going out of business. We would never treat a land animal the way we treat fish — well, not never. Bison would be a good example of how we did that, and beavers. Kendall: Why is it that we treat marine animals so much worse than we do land animals? Watson: The ocean is an alien world to most of us. Out of sight, out of mind. And we are a land animal, so we have more appreciation for land animals. But there really is no difference between, say, a bluefin tuna and a cheetah. The bluefin tuna is one of the fastest fish of the ocean and a huge predator, much like a cheetah. But we would not think of treating the cheetah the way we treat the bluefin tuna. We seem to take almost everything in the ocean for granted and deny the feelings of even highly evolved animals like dolphins and whales. The way people kill dolphins and pilot whales would never be tolerated if they were land mammals. No abattoir in the world would take twenty-five minutes to kill a cow. It would be shut down. Kendall: What’s the hardest thing about what you do? Watson: The most difficult thing is the strain it puts on personal relationships. I’m constantly traveling. I spend five or

six months a year at sea. I’ve been married a bunch of times. Kendall: What sustains you? Watson: A sense of satisfaction. We’re getting real results through our interventions. We saved more than five hundred whales in 2010. Over the last six years we have protected a couple of thousand whales. It gives me a good feeling knowing that there are whales out there swimming in the oceans that would otherwise be dead if we hadn’t intervened. Kendall: If Americans are concerned about the destruction of marine environments, what can they do to help stop it? Watson: The first thing is to look at what they are eating, especially seafood, and see where it comes from. There really is no such thing as sustainable seafood. There are simply too many people on the planet to have it. You may go to a supermarket and see “sustainable orange roughy” or “sustainable Patagonian toothfish” for sale, but it’s all a big con. Basically people should not eat fish. If people tell me they were raised on seafood and can’t give it up, I tell them I was too, but I had to give it up, because I don’t want to contribute to the destruction of the oceans. Kendall: But if people catch fewer fish than they leave behind to breed, isn’t that sustainable? Watson: Yes, but I don’t know of any place where that is actually happening. After the legal fisheries get through, the illegal fisheries come in and take what is left. Kendall: Can you say more about why you left Greenpeace? Watson: Because I’m not a protester. I don’t think that protesting gets you very far. It’s such a submissive position to be in: “Please, please, don’t kill the whales.” And then the whalers go ahead and kill them anyway. One of the most satisfying things about my work is that I have not seen a whale die since the day I left Greenpeace, because we are not holding up banners — we are getting in the whalers’ way and shutting them down. You are not going to solve the world’s problems by circulating petitions and hanging banners and going to meetings. I went to the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, and not a single promise made at that conference has been kept. The Kyoto Protocol has failed. The promises of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, have been broken, too. We humans are good at going to meetings and drafting papers and passing laws, but what good are laws if nobody enforces them? Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol; Australia and the U.S. did not. Environmentalists were patting Canada on the back, but per capita greenhouse-gas emissions in Canada are no better than in Australia and the U.S. The only difference is that Canada signed a piece of paper, and the U.S. did not. I was a founding member of Greenpeace. I was never thrown out of the organization, but I was voted off the board after another member accused me of violence and theft. He had seen me go up to a sealer who was about to club a seal pup to death. I took the man’s club away from him and threw it into the ocean. I don’t call that “theft.” I call it a nonviolent means of protecting the baby seal. Kendall: You’ve said that people should support local October 2011  The Sun

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environmental organizations more than international ones. Why? Watson: The strength of the environmental movement has to lie in a diversity of approaches. Local groups probably achieve more than megaorganizations like the World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace, where much of the money just goes into a bureaucratic black hole. All the major achievements in conservation have been made by individuals. Take Dian Fossey, for example. She went out to protect mountain gorillas and was fed peanuts by the World Wildlife Fund and the National Geographic Society. She had to beg for every penny she got. Meanwhile they were making a lot of money off her work. Then, when she got tough with the poachers, the big conservation organizations threatened to cut off her funding altogether. Even now, after she’s dead, they are still making money off her. I think for every dollar that Fossey got, those organizations collected a couple of thousand. Iain Douglas-Hamilton was working with elephants in Africa. The World Wide Fund for Nature had a big fundraising drive for him. I asked him if it was helpful, and he said, “I didn’t see a penny of it.” Kendall: Which large organizations do you think are doing good work? Watson: The Nature Conservancy is one: you give money to buy land, and the land is protected. The Natural Resources Defense Council is taking the U.S. Navy to court over sonar testing that is killing whales and dolphins, so they are doing something. When you see results for your investment, that’s when you know it’s a good organization. Kendall: With all the oceans in the world, how do you decide where to go? Watson: Sea Shepherd gets involved wherever illegal activities are taking place. On top of that, we look at where we can make a difference, and we ask if we can afford it. One of our major projects is in the Galápagos Islands. We decided twelve years ago that if we couldn’t save this isolated, unique environment, what could we save? We have an office there and a full-time patrol boat, and we have our own canine unit that sniffs out shark fin and other contraband items that are being smuggled onto or off the islands. We are working in partnership with the Galápagos park rangers and the Ecua­ dorean federal police. It’s funny, because we are supposed to be this radical organization, but here we are partnered with the police. We’ve busted open shark-fin rings, helped arrest hundreds of individuals, and seized sixty-five vessels. Last year we provided radios to all the police and rangers. This year we are investing a million euros in a system to monitor every single vessel coming in and out of the Galápagos Islands. The protection of the Galápagos Islands is Sea Shepherd’s number-one project, actually, but we’re also involved in many other things. Sea Shepherd Brazil is taking fishing companies to court for overfishing and killing dolphins, and we’re winning. Our next campaign is to take the Steve Irwin to the Mediterranean to protect the bluefin tuna, and we’re also going to be tackling whaling in the North Atlantic again. 12

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This is an international organization now. We are registered in about fifteen different countries. On this last campaign I think we had volunteers from eighteen nations, including Japan. Kendall: Where does most of your funding come from? Watson: The general public in Australia, Europe, and the United States is our major source of support. We survive economically thanks to a handful of big donors. Television personality Bob Barker gave us $5 million for the purchase of the ship that bears his name. Ady Gil gave us $2 million. But we have a very small budget because we spend zero dollars on promotion or direct mail. We are a word-of-mouth organization. Greenpeace spends $70 million a year recruiting members, and the Sierra Club spends a similar amount. If I donate a hundred dollars to an organization, I don’t want a third of it used to recruit more donors. We have kept Sea Shepherd small to avoid that. We could have been a massive group if we had invested in self-promotion. PETA was cofounded by one of my former crew members, Alex Pacheco. He went with direct mail, and that’s why they are so big now. There might be some advantages to that, but the disadvantage is the bureaucracy. Kendall: How many people do you have on salary? Watson: About thirty. Scott West, a former special agent in the criminal-investigation division of the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], is now working for us as our chief investigation officer. He said he has arrested more people while working for Sea Shepherd than he did with the EPA. When we hire people, we usually hire out of the pool of volunteers. Our philosophy is that the best job is the one you’d do if you weren’t getting paid. Kendall: What if an anonymous donor gave Sea Shepherd $50 million? Would you expand then? Watson: If somebody gave us $50 million tomorrow, we’d get a fast ice-breaking vessel with a helicopter on it and expand our fleet. I can guarantee you that not a penny would go into bureaucracy. We’re going to keep our organization small and efficient. We’re so efficient right now that we can decide what we’re going to do and start a campaign in a few hours. We’ve had the opportunity to expand, but we haven’t gone there. We’ve had direct-mail marketers come to us and say, “We can guarantee results, because you guys are actually doing something.” But it involves paying them 70 percent of the money coming in, so we’ve turned them down. Kendall: For an organization, how big is too big? Watson: Actually you can be very big as long as you don’t let the bureaucrats take control of everything. That’s the difference between governments and pirates. Kendall: The IWC’s ban on whaling could be lifted in the future. What will you do if that happens? Become an outlaw? Watson: If it came to that, then it would no longer be a job for Sea Shepherd. It would be a job for covert organizations. Because once democracy and the law are compromised, you’ve got revolution. But that’s not the situation we’re in today. We do have laws right now, and Sea Shepherd plans to uphold them.  n

As A Boy Eric Anderson my two favorite toys were a stuffed rabbit, British grey and glass eyed, and a raggedy monkey I called “Monkum” because my tongue and throat strangled my words. One flu-fevered night I soaked the rabbit in vomit, and I never loved him as much again — no fault of his, just unlucky cuddling. As for Monkum he fell to puppy teeth a year later, though I was done with him by then, partly because I had learned some bright idea of manliness, but mostly because I was embarrassed by the name I had given him. Still, when I saw the stuffing shredded out of him, a shameful urge to cry came over me. Just fluff gone yellow with age. How obvious was the lie that he’d ever been alive. How easily I’d abandoned love. What chance do the small things of the world have? If you heard my voice today, I would sound like everyone else.

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t h e d o g -e a r e d pag e excerpted from

All Men Are Brothers m

mahatma gandhi Mohandas K. Gandhi pioneered nonviolent civil disobedience as a lawyer in South Africa, opposing discriminatory legislation against Indians. In 1915 he returned to India and six years later became the leader of the Indian National Congress, organizing nationwide campaigns to ease poverty, expand women’s rights, end caste discrimination, and ultimately gain independence from British rule. Also known as the Mahatma (“Great Soul”), Gandhi was imprisoned for many years in both South Africa and India, yet he remained committed to his ideals of nonviolence and simple living, making his own clothes, eating a vegetarian diet, and fasting both for self-purification and as social protest. He was shot and killed by a Hindu nationalist in 1948 at the age of seventy-eight. The following are excerpts from All Men Are Brothers by Mahatma Gandhi, © 1958, 1980, by permission of the Navajivan Trust Ahmedabad-14, India.

I have been practicing with scientific precision nonviolence and its possibilities for an unbroken period of over fifty years. I have applied it in every walk of life — domestic, institutional, economic, and political. I know of no single case in which it has failed. Where it has seemed sometimes to have failed, I have ascribed it to my imperfections. I claim no perfection for myself. But I do claim to be a passionate seeker after Truth, which is but another name for God. In the course of that search the discovery of nonviolence came to me. Its spread is my life mission. I have no interest in living except for the prosecution of that mission. No man could be actively nonviolent and not rise against social injustice no matter where it occurred. Man and his deed are two distinct things. It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself. For we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being but with him the whole world. The selections on the Dog-Eared Page come from works that have deepened and broadened our understanding of the human condition. Decades, or even centuries, may have passed since these words first appeared in print, but for us they’re still beacons. 14

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In its positive form, ahimsa [not doing harm] means the largest love, greatest charity. If I am a follower of ahimsa, I must love my enemy. I must apply the same rules to the wrongdoer who is my enemy or a stranger to me as I would to my wrongdoing father or son. This active ahimsa necessarily includes truth and fearlessness. As man cannot deceive the loved one, he does not fear or frighten him or her. The gift of life is the greatest of all gifts; a man who gives it in reality, disarms all hostility. He has paved the way for an honorable understanding. And none who is himself subject to fear can bestow that gift. He must therefore be fearless. A man cannot practice ahimsa and be a coward at the same time. The practice of ahimsa calls forth the greatest courage. Where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence. Hence it was that I took part in the Boer War, the so-called Zulu rebellion, and the late War. Hence also do I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of violence. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor. Perfect nonviolence is impossible so long as we exist physically, for we would want some space at least to occupy. Perfect nonviolence whilst you are inhabiting the body is only a theory like Euclid’s point or straight line, but we have to endeavor every moment of our lives. I must continue to argue till I convert opponents or I own defeat. For my mission is to convert every Indian, even Englishmen and finally the world, to nonviolence for regulating mutual relations whether political, economic, social, or religious. If I am accused of being too ambitious, I should plead guilty. If I If you have a recommendation for the Dog-Eared Page, please send it to The Sun, 107 North Roberson Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516. We’re sorry, but we’re unable to respond personally to your suggestions.

am told that my dream can never materialize, I would answer, “That is possible,” and go my way. I am a seasoned soldier of nonviolence, and I have evidence enough to sustain my faith. Whether, therefore, I have one comrade or more or none, I must continue my experiment.

My imperfections and failures are as much a blessing from God as my successes and my talents, and I lay them both at His feet. Why should He have chosen me, an imperfect instrument, for such a mighty experiment? I think He deliberately did so. He had to serve the poor, dumb, ignorant millions. A perfect man might have been their despair. When they found that one with their failings was marching on towards ahimsa, they too had confidence in their own capacity. We should not have recognized a perfect man if he had come as our leader, and we might have driven him to a cave. Maybe he who follows me will be more perfect and you will be able to receive his message. I am not a visionary. I claim to be a practical idealist. The religion of nonviolence is not meant merely for the rishis and saints. It is meant for the common people as well. Nonviolence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. The spirit lies dormant in the brute, and he knows no law but that of physical might. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law, to the strength of the spirit. I have ventured to place before India the ancient law of self-sacrifice. Satyagraha [truth force] and its offshoots, noncooperation and civil resistance, are nothing but new names for the law of suffering. The rishis, who discovered the law of nonviolence in the midst of violence, were greater geniuses than Newton. They were themselves greater warriors than Wellington. Having themselves known the use of arms, they realized their uselessness and taught a weary world that its salvation lay not through violence but through nonviolence. Passive resistance is an all-sided sword; it can be used anyhow; it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used. Without drawing a drop of blood it produces far-reaching results. It never rusts and cannot be stolen. In my opinion nonviolence is not passivity in any shape or form. Nonviolence, as I understand it, is the most active force in the world. . . . Nonviolence is the supreme law. During my half a century of experience I have not yet come across a situation when I had to say that I was helpless, that I had no remedy in terms of nonviolence. Love is the strongest force the world possesses, and yet it is the humblest imaginable.

Buddha fearlessly carried the war into the enemy’s camp and brought down on its knees an arrogant priesthood. Christ drove out the money-changers from the Temple of Jerusalem and drew down curses from Heaven upon the hypocrites and the Pharisees. Both were for intensely direct action. But even as Buddha and Christ chastised, they showed unmistakable gentleness and love behind every act of theirs. They would not raise a finger against their enemies but would gladly surrender themselves rather than the truth for which they lived. Buddha would have died resisting the priesthood, if the majesty of his love had not proved to be equal to the task of bending the priesthood. Christ died on the cross with a crown of thorns on his head defying the might of a whole empire. And if I raise resistances of a nonviolent character, I simply and humbly follow in the footsteps of the great teachers. Have I that nonviolence of the brave in me? My death alone will show that. If someone killed me and I died with a prayer for the assassin on my lips, and God’s remembrance and consciousness of His living presence in the sanctuary of my heart, then alone would I be said to have had the nonviolence of the brave. I know, too, that I shall never know God if I do not wrestle with and against evil even at the cost of life itself. I am fortified in the belief by my own humble and limited experience. The purer I try to become, the nearer to God I feel myself to be. How much more should I be near to Him when my faith is not a mere apology, as it is today, but has become as immovable as the Himalayas and as white and bright as the snows on their peaks? I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction and, therefore, there must be a higher law than that of destruction. Only under that law would a well-ordered society be intelligible and life worth living. And if that is the law of life, we have to work it out in daily life. Whenever there are wars, wherever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love. In this crude manner I have worked it out in my life. That does not mean that all my difficulties are solved. Only I have found that this law of love has answered as the law of destruction has never done. It is not that I am incapable of anger, for instance, but I succeed on almost all occasions to keep my feelings under control. Whatever may be the result, there is always in me a conscious struggle for following the law of nonviolence deliberately and ceaselessly. Such a struggle leaves one stronger for it. The more I work at this law, the more I feel the delight in my life, the delight in the scheme of the universe. It gives me a peace and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I have no power to describe.  n October 2011  The Sun

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Light, Held Together By Water Kimberley Pittman-Schulz

Sun

seeped through fog that Friday morning, turning all the windows bright gray. I lay in bed, knowing that David, my stepdaughter’s husband, was dying, wondering if he had passed while I was asleep, and considering my hands. Petting one of my cats, I watched my left hand as if it were a separate animal, studied the dry, finely lined skin, the blue ridges of ropy veins. I imagined the bone buried in each finger, my wedding band slipping off but for the thickness of that temporary, flawed skin. These hands will die. The phone rang. Reaching for it, I began to cry. David had died before dawn, around 6:45, family gathered by his side. He’d been unconscious a long time, but they kept touching him. He seemed to know he wasn’t alone. People were talking to him, just in case, voices in conversation, then prayer. I fell back into my pillow. Both cats walked on me, paws kneading my ribs. One yowled for breakfast; the other purred — such a politician. Then they curled between my knees and ankles. Eyes closed, I listened to their fast cat breathing and conjured the details of David’s hands, which were always fussing with something — cigarette, T-shirt hem, cat or dog hair plucked from the upholstered arm of a chair. I could hear his voice, the exact way he spoke my name, and the childlike, highpitched timbre it had after a few glasses of wine. His face was harder to bring into focus: Full, round cheeks flowed down into a thick neck. Dime-store reading glasses sat on his bare scalp. Thin, pale lips curled into a smile. A creasing at the edges of his eyes. For a while he’d worn a stud, the glassy stone flashing at his earlobe. When I thought of his eyes, I couldn’t remember: Were they brown or blue? Green or hazel? I panicked. How can I not know the color of his eyes? I leapt from bed and thumped through the house. I needed a photo of David. They’re blue. I’m sure they’re blue. The cats hunched under the dining-room table, blinking at my harried movements. Actually they’re more hazel, aren’t they? Hazel. Has to be hazel. I opened dresser drawers, kitchen drawers, bathroom drawers, the shallow drawer in the wine rack. Why am I looking here? I felt stupid and self-absorbed, then swore that I wasn’t stupid and self-absorbed. Finally I slumped in a chair and sobbed. To grieve one death is always to grieve two. Impolite to admit, I may have

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been weeping mostly for myself. When I looked up, the room a little murky through my tears, there it was: the Christmas photo that had never been put in an album. David and his wife, Suzy, stared at me from the counter by the phone, grinning. David, you have brown eyes! Had brown eyes. I’m sorry I couldn’t remember your eyes. I do now. David had just turned sixty-one three days earlier, his only birthday gift the graceful drip of morphine. When he’d first arrived at the hospital, everyone had thought, Pneumonia, but, surprise, David’s lung on the X-ray was a gray purse with one large coin. The cancer was thriving elsewhere, too. There was pain, as I suppose there should be when one is literally being eaten alive. Two days later, traveling on business, I felt David’s spirit with me as I drove out of the long shadows of redwood-covered mountains into the open, rolling terrain of Mendocino’s oaks, then the vineyards, and finally the slow shuffle of Bay Area traffic. The world, wherever I looked, was unexpectedly beautiful. I drove through miles of grapevines, their leaves bright flames, letting loose their wild colors. Galileo said, “Wine is light, held together by water.” So are people, I thought. In the surreal yellows, oranges, and magentas of the vineyards was where I felt David with me the most. He’d worked for Korbel Winery for years, married Suzy in view of waiting winter vines. The landscape hummed, and I hummed, too, because I remembered that I could. David had once told me a story about how he’d fallen asleep at a neighbor’s house: stayed too long, drunk too much. When he woke, he was in his own bed, and, lifting his hands to rub his eyes, he discovered his palms were caked with dirt. He remembered dreaming of being a dog, and he wondered if he had crawled home through the row of foxgloves in the dark. This story sprang into my head when I stopped by Suzy’s home to offer my help with David’s memorial. I thought of his dreaming he was a dog. It seemed a happy sort of dream. When I arrived, it was twilight, and the earth near his front door was wet and disturbed. The porch light was on, casting a yellow glow on the stoop. I pressed my hand into the mud, leaving a trace of my visit. Then I opened and closed my hand a few times, gawking at the mud in my palm. I could see my lifeline cutting though the earth’s stain.  n

mike voss

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Men

Rachel Yoder My ambition these days is to want nothing outside myself. I used to have a poet boyfriend who would say things like this and, in between dumpster diving and boxcar hopping, write poems about being unemployed or sticking what little money he did have under the bark of trees. This infuriated me. Why couldn’t he just be normal, with a normal job and a normal income and normal ambitions? But I get him now and wonder: What would it be like to live life without the constant desire for something more? Sometimes I fantasize about shaving off my long hair and retiring to the hermitage in the valley behind my parents’ house. I imagine how serene and cleansing it would be to live in a room with a handmade desk and a bed covered by a quilt and sunlight filtered through stained glass. When I told my parents about my ascetic wishes, my mother replied, “You don’t need to shave your head. That wouldn’t look very pretty.” “That’s the whole point,” I said. I told her how I wanted to give up my vanity, cut through all the superficiality, get back to what’s real. I told her I thought it would be amazing to live in some ashram in India for a while, but maybe I’d settle for the hermitage instead. I could write all day, then come up to the house for dinner. She thought about this for a moment, then said, “Well, I think that’s all fine, but you still don’t need to cut off your hair.” 18

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joshua sage

Aw kward Walks With Unavailable It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when my wanting became a problem. Sometimes I think it was at seventeen, when I was a Mennonite girl from a dead-end dirt lane, determined to leave for the Big City, for college, for a career and money and high-heeled shoes and shorn hair, and to have absolutely nothing more to do with the hilltop Mennonites. Other times I think it began later, after I got Cs in chemistry and dropped out of the pre-med program, sometime during the short-skirts-anddirty-bars era. Usually, though, I think the wanting problem began the summer before my senior year in college, with the nice Jewish boy from Orange County, the shining boy wearing his ironed shirt and smelling of new-car leather and salt and skin. It began with the boy. I fell in love. But then I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t stop the falling or pleading or fighting or loving or wanting — especially wanting — all of him, even if things between us were tortured and wrong, even if getting what I wanted meant giving up everything I had, quitting school and my job, quitting friends and food, quitting my family, quitting getting out of bed. I wanted a shady bedroom where I could stay with him forever. Instead I found myself pale and weak, crouched in a corner. I wanted for him never to leave me, please, I’ll be different and better, I’ll be who you want me to be, don’t leave, I hate you, I love you, and please please please don’t leave, and then we both flew across the country to fix ourselves in pastel-colored treatment centers,

we were addicted to each other, they told us, and I wanted to make myself better, I wanted to be perfect for him, but I couldn’t, and I wasn’t, and then he broke up with me, and I was left there in the burning desert, having wanted my way into poverty in every sense of the word. I had been raised not to want, not to whine for the scrubbed white bathtub when my aunts insisted we all wash our hair in a basin. Some Mennonite practicality dictated that our long hair would clog the bathtub drain, so instead we adjourned to a damp basement room with a large, rusted drain at its middle. There, my aunts removed their head coverings and pulled out pins and dismantled their twists of dark hair, which bounced in long coils down their backs and caught the light like corn silk. They transformed from middle-aged Mennonite women to barefoot girls as their brown hair fell down their backs and fanned out around their faces. It turned black as they poured cupfuls of water over it, shampooed, rinsed, and conditioned. When they were done, they wrapped off-white towels around their heads like bandages. Liz, Leona, Clara — none of them had married. Liz kept house for pay. Leona worked at a day care, Clara at the meat locker. A battery-operated AM/FM radio on the kitchen counter played contemporary Christian hits next to a blue thermos of coffee from which they filled their white cups. They smiled and joked in their gentle way. From time to time they had male “friends” who took them to dinner or called them on the beige wall phone. Clara eventually married at fifty-eight, Leona at sixty-seven. Liz, the matriarch, remains single, a shining woman with hair the color of snow. Lately she’s started asking me questions at Thanksgiving, after she’s had too much coffee: Am I interested in having babies someday, and might I have any “special friends”? She tells me about the men who proposed to her years ago, and I ask why she said no. “Well, I was scared,” she says, as if this should be evident. She wraps her warm hand around my forearm. “I was so young. What did I know then?” No matter how many times I try to write about my wanting, the story never makes sense the way I want it to. Already I feel I’ve failed to mention important parts, like this: That college boyfriend once sent me a postcard, even though I lived just across town. The postcard had a photo of a Japanese tidal wave on it. I taped it to the wall by my bed, and on those nights when I couldn’t be with him, I stared at it. Later, in the dark days of our relationship, I began to dream I was standing on a pebbled beach beneath marbled skies. In the distance a black wave approached, moving steadily toward me. It was so big. It rolled and thundered. It was coming, and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get away. And this: He would be talking to me, telling me something about how messed up my life was, how messed up I was, telling me how much he loved me, how he was the only person in the entire world who really loved me, and I would simply fall asleep. No drifting off. No counting sheep. I was there one minute, and

then I was gone. What did I really want? Why did I stay with him? I don’t know. I don’t know. And then there’s this: For a year — during the months in which I was with the boy, and then in treatment, and then not with the boy — the image I could not escape, the image I drew on paper over and over again, was of a world covered in hard gray asphalt all the way to the horizon. The sun was setting, and a girl stood there, three tiny cracks at her feet with some scraggly weeds growing out of them. Whenever I drew this, I felt panicked, but I couldn’t stop drawing it. When I went to treatment, they diagnosed me with “love addiction.” At the time, those words were two points of perfect sense in a nonsensical world, but now they make me wince and mumble. “Love addiction.” The therapists told me my wanting problems were rooted in my DNA, my neural pathways, the gaps between my synapses, and that the solution to my problems was not pills nor electroshock nor even a brisk slap of common sense. Over and over they said the solution was a spiritual one. For a decade I have been trying to understand this, honestly, but most days it just sounds like touchy-feely hoo-ha. Addiction? Spirituality? Really? I want help, but I don’t want homeopathy or therapeutic exercises involving baking brownies, doing macramé, or painting inspirational words on rocks. I do not want to bang on a pillow and scream at everything I hate. I am not interested in hyperventilating until I sob or in looking for God in a tree. I know this because I’ve tried it all. I’ve also eaten Twizzlers, leafed through piles of celebritygossip magazines, smoked cigarettes, obsessed about my weight, spent hours doing my hair, performed Internet searches for exboyfriends, roamed the mall, turned my skin a carotene orange with the alien light of tanning beds, and given in over and over again to my lust for beautiful, broken men, men my friends refer to as “just assholes, Rachel. It’s not a mystery. They’re assholes.” And yet the question remains: If I know so much, if I can understand chemicals and neurons and stupidity, why am I still doing this? I’ve dated the same guy over and over in a dozen different iterations: That coffee-shop guy who wrote bad stories based on his dreams and who could not spend the night in my bed because it was “too hot” and he felt like he was suffocating. That drunk guy who promised to take me on his yacht if I flew across the country to see him, but when I got there, he locked himself in his bedroom for the weekend and drank and drank and drank. That guy who slept with me and then afterward said, “It’s your world. I’m just passing through.” That guy who painted houses and told uncomfortably dirty jokes and who, long after I stopped dating him, threw himself in front of a car and broke both his legs and became homeless. That boy I wanted to marry when I was twenty. That guy. And now I’m turning thirty and have, again, begun dating that guy, this time named Jack. Honestly I tried not to. I did. When I brushed by him at a crowded party, I purposefully didn’t October 2011  The Sun

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make eye contact. And a couple of weeks later, when he strode into another party like a big cat, sniffing the air, I promptly left. He was tall and bearded, and there were rumors about him: strippers and gambling, an ego, full of himself. Whenever I saw him, he was all lit up like Vegas, white lights outlining his frame, a neon red arrow pointing directly at his head. The closer I got, the more my internal warning system blared, Danger! Lights and bells and a puff of smoke from some circuit that had shorted out. Flashing colors. Bouncing, twirling, whirling things. A sudden handful of silver coins. It begins the way it always begins, so simply: it looks like fun. On the first date Jack tells me point-blank that he is a mess, that he always screws things up with girls, that he hurts people, and that he has a “complicated” relationship with an ex-girlfriend whom he will be going to see in New York the next morning. He chain-smokes. He gambles. He goes to strip clubs. He says, “I just want you to know that there are a lot of girls, and I’d rather you hear this from me than from someone else.” And how do I respond to all this? Great. Let’s date. I call my friend Megan and tell her I have no good reason to be dating this man, that it’s a bad idea, that I’m just going to hang out with him instead — you know, for fun — and not get involved, that I’ll still date other people, that it’s really not a big deal, this Jack guy, because I know what I’m walking into. My eyes are open, wide open. I know what I’m doing. I’m thirty, for God’s sake. It’ll be fine, fine, fine. She sighs. I want to make different choices. I do. I want to develop a capacity to change. I want to be like the Zen meditator who took part in a scientific experiment on insights — those aha moments when a solution to a problem suddenly becomes clear. In order to solve the verbal puzzles presented to him, the meditator had to access his intuition, which meant he had to let go of reason by unfocusing his thinking, the way you unfocus your gaze to see the hidden image in a 3-D poster. The meditator was a very focused person, though. Problem after problem came and went, and he couldn’t solve them — until suddenly he began getting every puzzle correct, one after the other. “[T]he dramatic improvement of the Zen meditator,” says neuroscientist John Kounis in The New Yorker, “came from his paradoxical ability to focus on not being focused. . . . He had the cognitive control to let go. . . . He became an insight machine.” My friend Megan calls this the “free-falling heart of surrender.” She throws her hands up in the air, leans back, and looks toward the sky. “You just have to let go,” she says, “and while you’re falling, you shout, I don’t knooooooooow!” Do I really have to tell you how it goes with Jack? But here are the surprising things: He enjoys baking, particularly cinnamon buns, which we make together on multiple occasions. He has this mutt whose belly he rubs while cooing, “You’re so strong and friendly. Yes, you are.” For a while he calls me every night, and I go over, and we sit in his living room, reading or playing with the puppy or doing some other 20

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boringly domestic thing, and then we get in bed, and he reads me a story until we’re tired, and then we just sleep beside each other. That’s it. In the morning he kisses me goodbye and says, “Be good.” I try to tell myself this more than makes up for the random earrings scattered around his house, the hair bands the dog finds and chews, the fingernail polish in the medicine cabinet. That this makes up for the extended flat eye contact I get from pretty girls at parties, his oddly chipper observation that the room is full of glaring women tonight: “Man, oh, man, do they ever hate me!” That this makes up for the way his voice gets higher when he talks about his ex until he sounds like a fiveyear-old: “Don’t rag on her. None of this is her fault.” One night, over dinner at some sushi place, I say to Jack, “I’m very optimistic, especially about men.” And he says, “That’s what makes you the most beautiful girl in town.” Pause. Chew. “You’re built for pain.” I shove more Crazy Tuna Roll into my mouth, but what I really want to do is jam the chopsticks up my nose. I want to lobotomize myself with these wooden sticks, sloppily and bloodily digging the stupid out of my brain. I want him to like me. When I was little, my grandma Yoder got breast cancer, had a mastectomy, and then decided against chemotherapy. While the hospice people moved a mechanical hospital bed into her room, my aunt Leona disappeared. “Leona?” Liz called, as the men maneuvered a mattress through the kitchen. “Leona?” Clara called, as she took my grandmother by the shoulders and moved her out of the way of the metal bed frame. I was nine and standing in the kitchen, watching the men in their dirty boots, my small grandmother growing smaller. After all the commotion, after the bed had been moved and my grandmother arranged in its folds, Leona emerged at the top of the basement stairs with a towel wrapped around her head. She touched it with one hand. “I had to wash my hair,” she said. I was only a child, but I still understood clearly: Sadness is sometimes too big to stay in the middle of. Sometimes you have to go away and undo yourself. Sometimes all a person can do is baptize herself in an empty room. Jack and I go for a walk after he tells me his ex-girlfriend might be pregnant with his baby, and she’s coming to visit and will be staying with him. In his bed. Come on, Rachel, I say to myself. You knew this would happen. But still. “What’s the problem?” he wants to know. “I told you from the beginning things were complicated.” We pause in front of Mercy Hospital. He lights a cigarette and squares his shoulders to mine and actually says, “Look, I can’t give you what you want,” as if he’s materialized from a therapeutic role-playing exercise. I’m crying. “Don’t be sad,” he says. “I’m not even a catch.” I think: People don’t actually say shit like this in real life.

Only characters in short stories or romantic comedies talk this way. Also, Mercy Hospital is way too ironic a backdrop for this conversation. Maybe I don’t really want a boyfriend. Maybe what I want is a dramatic approximation of real life. We walk. I cry. He tries to crack jokes. I ignore them and say, “You asked me what my shit was, and this is my shit, right here: awkward walks with unavailable men.” “Yeesh,” he says. “I’m glad I’m not you.” You’d think I would move on. But instead I answer the phone when he calls me secretly from the grocery store during his un-ex-girlfriend’s visit. She’s not pregnant, he says, but she’s staying longer. I wish he’d stop talking. I finally leave him a message saying, “Please stop calling,” after which he calls and leaves me a message saying he couldn’t quite understand what I’d said. I turn to books for help. I read about neuroplasticity — the ability of brain cells to change function — and the science of intuition. I read a manifesto about the importance of screwing up, a poem about freedom and falling hearts. I read about a remote Amazonian tribe’s linguistic construct of time and consider how I might make my own past cease to exist. I read that time isn’t real, nor is happiness. I open Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, a book I’ve been carrying with me from move to move for ten years but have never had the nerve to crack. The author, a Buddhist nun, tells me about the six types of loneliness. I don’t want to know about the six types. I don’t want loneliness to be my study, but nevertheless it is. I sit cross-legged on a yellow pillow on the floor and close my eyes and try to focus on one breath after the next, on the steady work of living. I will meditate and control my mind and get better and not feel sad. I will sit on the thin yellow pillow for hours until I forget the outside world. I breathe and breathe and breathe until I can’t anymore, and when I open my eyes, only five minutes have passed, and there I am again, alone in my room. There was a point, deep into the relationship that landed me in treatment for love addiction, when I wanted to die. This wasn’t one of those thoughts that had sometimes passed through my head in one of my more dramatic moments of despair. This was a whole night of staring through a dark doorway in my mind. Before that night, this door had been locked and painted shut, but one particular gray winter evening it swung wide on well-oiled hinges. I needed only to step through, and I would be gone forever. I stared through the doorway into the great nothingness. It was a long night. This was the lowest and darkest place I had ever been — which should have been another clue that the relationship I was in and the love I felt were destructive. I’d reached a place where no worldly thing could have satisfied my yearning: not drugs or alcohol; not the boy I was in love with; not money or food or sex; not working out, watching TV, shopping, cleaning, sleeping, reading, or walking for miles and miles and miles. Nothing. This was the place where I knew I was alone, profoundly

and eternally, forever and ever, amen. The winter has already sunk into my bones. Jack has finally stopped calling. I live in a house with five people I don’t really know, one of those co-op situations that seem like a good idea until you move in. I wake up, make coffee, and then get back in bed because the heat is turned way down to save money, and my feet and hands have hardened into frigid stumps. I spend all my time in my bedroom, which is in the former dining room. The only thing separating me from the kitchen is a thin swinging door. From my bed I hear pots banging and ice being dispensed, someone humming at the sink, a sigh. When I can no longer stand the cold and lack of privacy, I descend the steep basement stairs to the bathroom, lock the door, and turn the shower on as hot as it will go. I sit in the tub and let the water pound me while I sob. I wash my hair once or twice a day. After it dries, it curls up in perfect ringlets that smell like flowers and soap. OK. All this about not wanting anything and shaving my head and sitting contentedly inside my loneliness is bullshit. I don’t want to give up my wanting in the manner of the as­cetics and monks. I really like my hair. Loneliness does not seem spiritual or profound most of the time. It just seems lonely. The loneliness is always the worst around ten at night, when I’m by myself in my bedroom. It’s too late to work, too early to go to sleep, so I start thinking about my past, my failures and missteps, decisions I could have made differently. I worry about the things I said or didn’t say, about the looks on people’s faces. I worry about what I’ll wear the next day. I calculate my total personal debt, adding up credit-card bills, student-loan balances, and money I’ve borrowed from my parents and siblings. I become convinced I have an ovarian tumor and research diseases of the reproductive parts at length on the Internet. I fear I’ve forgotten something important — a deadline or an appointment. I haven’t seen my cat in a couple of hours, and I wonder if he’s dead. I try to read but can’t focus, because I feel I should be writing. I try writing but am overcome by a nagging desire to start a load of laundry. I decide just to turn off the light and go to sleep. But my mind doesn’t turn off so easily. I begin to catalog all the best moments from my many failed romances. I think about the way the brain surgeon led me through his house, making a point to show me the walk-in closet as big as my kitchen. “And this is where you would put your clothes,” he said, spreading his arms. I think about the tall poet cooking in my little cabin: fresh parsley, a ripped loaf of bread, garlic, spoons and bowls strewn all over, the kitchen window open to the pines. I think about the sandwiches and meatballs he made for me, the way he pulled the lavender ribbon from my hair that night on the couch in one long motion. I think about the lawyer walking toward me on Park Avenue in his wool overcoat, the way he smiled; the football player in the elevator, his hands resting on my hips. These are the sweet men I revisit late at night when I’m lonely and can’t sleep. I left them all. Why was that again? Sometimes I think my wanting paired with my loneliness will drive me certifiably crazy. I wonder about the robustness of October 2011  The Sun

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my mental health. Will I lose my mind someday? Might one day of languishing in bed turn into countless years? This fear of losing my mind often causes me to get up, take a shower, and walk down the street to the coffee shop, where I watch people being people and try to figure out how I can become one of them. Thanksgiving comes and goes. Jack calls. He’s sick. The only thing that would make him feel better is if someone would give him a ride to the casino. I take him a grapefruit and a carton of orange juice instead, despite my logical side telling me all the while, Stop. Don’t. Turn around. My actions are no longer mysterious. They are just my own willful idiocy. I understand this. I understand that he does not love me. I still want him. When I get there, he’s smoking in the front yard. He’s wearing sweat pants and has tired eyes. “It’s been a rough day,” he says, and I know he’s referring to some problem or another with his ex-girlfriend, who I knew deep down was his real girlfriend all along. “You probably don’t want to hear about it.” “You’re right,” I say, and again I wonder why I am here on his front lawn, my hands full of groceries to help make him feel better. “Thanks,” he says as he takes the grapefruit, and then he chuckles at the orange juice. “You can keep that.” And for the first time I see how much naked pleasure he takes in being able to reject me. And then I get it. After years and years of dating This Guy, a whole decade of men like him, I get what he’s been saying all along: he can’t give me what I want. If I keep asking for it, this pattern never ends. It just keeps repeating, a story of ruined love, of obsession and heartbreak and passion and regret and horrible loneliness and longing. It just keeps going on and on. So I get in my car and drive away. And that’s the end. Seriously, you guys. Seriously. I try talking to an older woman, a married woman, a woman with kids and grandkids, a woman who is always in possession of freshly baked bread. I want her to give me the solution to my Jack problem, the remedy for all my wanting and desperation, the answers to my unanswerable questions: Why do I want him? Why can’t I stop? What should I do? She sips her tea and bats the air with her hand. “Oh, he’s sexy and exciting. Of course you want to be with him. It’s no riddle. Don’t worry about it.” Really? And then I remember a time, after one of those long nights of dark wanting, when an early-morning flash of clarity appeared out of the exhaustion and sadness and yearning, a single clear moment that faded fast: There is no problem. It hovered there in the darkness of my mind, iridescent. Its wings buzzed. There has never been a problem. And then it flew away, and I drifted to sleep, dreamt, woke up, and forgot I’d ever had any dreams. How can I explain this? There is no problem, and there is no solution. There is only a need for remembering. There is a need for tattoos and banners and notes to myself written in permanent black ink. 22

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One summer morning when I was five, I walked into my grandmother’s bedroom unannounced. She was sitting in her spindle-back chair, looking out the window at the cornfields. She had just taken down her hair. Her hair. My God. You could write a whole bible about that hair. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen: my Mennonite grandmother’s pearl-white hair hanging down her back, unspooled and luminescent, long like a girl’s, with the fire of the sun in it. Before she saw me, I stood there for a moment inside a thin skin of knowing and mystery, inside something I could not comprehend other than to think, Pretty, other than to think, I want. Oh, her silver-white hair. That beauty could be both so old and so innocent, so pure and so pulsing, so urgent it made me want to touch, to look, to feel, and then to run away and hide. That beauty was her hair and the sun and the cornfields but also the bed and her body, her skin and lips. That beauty was my grandmother then, but also my grandmother before, on the day she’d given birth; at her wedding; as a small girl. That beauty would die. That beauty began to slip away the moment she turned and looked at me. I walk to the coffee shop through the Iowa City cold, the kind of weather in which my scarf freezes to my mouth in twenty seconds flat. A homeless guy on the corner holds a sign I don’t read as I pass, and I almost start to cry. At the coffee shop I order two hot chocolates with whipped cream, one for me and one for the homeless man. I worry whether he likes hot chocolate, whether he will drink it. Doesn’t everyone like hot chocolate? The question seems both tragic and beautiful. I look around to see if anyone else is noticing the moment I’m having. Guys in puffy coats and girls on cellphones look at me longer than I’m comfortable with, probably because I’m making meaningful, extended eye contact with each of them. I take the two hot chocolates, slurp the whipped cream from the top of mine, and, as I cross the street, practice in my head what I will say to the man on the corner: Here, or, I got you something, or, Hey, do you want this? When I reach him, I see frost in his beard. “I was wondering if you might like a hot chocolate,” I say, extending the cup, which he balances in his dirty, gloved palm. “Everyone always gets me coffee,” he says. “I don’t even like coffee!” “Warm and sweet,” I mumble, not knowing what else to say as I look at his crooked glasses and fallen face. His cardboard sign dangles from one hand. “Warm and sweet,” he echoes. I turn and walk away, on the verge of tears. For one block the world is completely broken and completely perfect, and I wonder what has happened to me. Why am I buying a homeless man hot chocolate? This isn’t the sort of thing I do. Everything is bright and cold and excruciating and gorgeous. I stop and squeeze my eyes shut. It’s too much, the world rushing in through the cracks. How do people handle this? How do people walk around happy?  n

The Baby Is Clapping Lisa Bellamy Drunk on red wine and pea soup, my first husband and I will grab our wool hats, pull them over each other’s ears, and pretend we are happy Quebecois sailors home from the sea: playacting for the baby. She will giggle in her highchair, pointing at Daddy, who will, after a minute, turn away, light a cigarette; I will hold my breath — will he say, as he’s started to say, that he’s not sure he wants to be married to me? But the baby, swiveling her head from me to her father and back, will clap her tiny primate hands for the first time and watch us for a reaction. She, canny baboon, will know she’s accomplished a spectacular feat. Amazed and relieved, I will smile at her, and so, briefly, will he. I will rock her to sleep singing “Loup Garou.” My husband will say he needs more cigarettes, closing the door behind him. The next morning I will find him reading, dark head bent over Propertius. The baby, miraculously, will sleep late. I will see the Queens Public Library schedule posted on the refrigerator and wonder if I can escape for an hour. I will call my sister in Florida. I will say everything’s fine; the baby is clapping. I will brew coffee and bump drowsily into the spice rack we found two years before at the Punjabi store, where we walked arm in arm through the aisles. I will remember his long hair tangled in my fingers; a spring day under sugar-magnolia trees; walking, blinking, onto the street after a night and a day of yogic, ambitious sex — and through the kitchen window over the sink I will watch the sky redden. I will wonder if I will ever be loved the way I believe I love him. If sparrows or starlings are singing, I will not hear them.

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barbara morris

speedo David Zoby

When the dogwoods bloom overnight and

the oaks wake one morning with a full complement of leaves, spring has come to the Tidewater section of Virginia. Shad roe, orange and milky, appears on ice in the fish markets, and there are rumors of bluefish running out by the third island of the Chesapeake Bay. Men pull their boats from storage and run their outboard motors in barrels of fresh water. The engines sputter the true hymn of spring, sending clouds of smoke waft-

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ing over the neighborhoods, where the children are beginning to emerge from a winter of ice storms. For me, a fourteen-year-old in the spring of 1981, there was another, ominous cloud hanging over Tidewater. Spring also meant that swim season was upon us, and any day now I would be forced into a blue Speedo and directed to swim laps for the Glendale team. My parents believed that any unoccupied time was time ill spent. What better way for a boy to pass the warm afternoons than churning down the lanes in an overchlorinated pool? But I wished to do nothing more than wander Glendale Creek, catching crayfish and skipping stones. There were a few rough boys in the neighborhood who drank sugary drinks and built ramps for their bikes and caught strings of catfish. Each summer it seemed one of them broke his arm and wore the cast like a badge of honor. These boys played peewee baseball but were frequent no-shows. During games they would disappear into the woods, and the coach would find himself with no infield. I wanted to disappear with them, but it wasn’t to be. My brother and sisters swam year-round, getting up in the early-morning dark all winter long to head to the indoor pool. Their hair was damaged and green from chemicals, my sisters’ shoulders so rounded they’d begun to look mannish. I escaped winter swimming by dabbling in football and churchleague basketball, but in the spring and summer I was forced to hit the lanes with the others. When I bitched about it, my mother would say that at the very least I should know how to swim in case I ever fell off a boat. But the only boat in the family belonged to Uncle Gerard, my father’s lawyer brother, who spent the whole year fishing and running the Miss Justice upon the occasional shoal, and I rarely got to ride in it. I loathed swimming. I disliked the androgynous coaches, all named Carol or Kim or Steve. I hated the lane markers and the huge clock set up to measure your times. I hated the different strokes — freestyle (which isn’t free), backstroke, butter­ fly, breast stroke — and the rules that came with each. Most of the other children on the team swam all year long, like my siblings, so when I joined them in late April, I floundered and failed to keep up. After the first practice I would be ill with fatigue. The coaches marched the decks and shouted and were angry all the time, even when we won. I begged to be sent away to summer camp, art camp, Jesus camp, anywhere, but I was told that camps cost too much and offered activities that were suspect, such as hiking, archery, and canoeing. Because I was of no use to the team, I was referred to as a “scrub” and placed in the scrub lane, against the pool wall. I felt as if I were a kidnapping victim held against his will in a vat of chlorine. After a few months of practice there would be the loud summer meets, the starter’s pistol, the cheers, the exhausting interteam dramas that now seem so ridiculous and narcissistic. But what I hated most of all was going to King’s Department Store each spring to buy a blue Speedo bathing suit. The blue Speedo was the regulation uniform for the Glendale Gators. Girls wore the tight-fitting, full-body version; boys wore the tiny, show-all suit that amounted to the bottom half

of a woman’s bikini. The garment left little to the imagination and even less dignity to the wearer. In theory the smaller suit reduces drag and allows you to swim faster, but its elastic leg openings pinched my thighs, and the drawstring closure became unreliable under the pressure of competition. In 1979 Paul Block had lost his suit while anchoring the Glendale Gators in the freestyle relay. People said he’d removed the drawstrings to increase his speed, but I was there that day and saw the perfectly intact blue Speedo floating in the shallow end of the pool while Paul Block cried and covered himself. If you had to use the bathroom, as I always did before an event, you could not escape the humiliating jewel of moisture that spread to gigantic proportions in the Speedo fabric. You would be forced to stand on the block in front of the whole world with a pee stain the size and shape of Maine on your crotch. And the suits were cheap, the pool chemicals gnawing the fabric to threads by August. By the age of fourteen I had a drawer full of old suits all lying in disuse, fraught with weak spots. Going to King’s to buy a new one was painful, and I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. Each year I’d try one on and say, “OK, this is fine,” all the while thinking, God damn you, Mom. I hate everything about swimming and would rather drown fishing with Uncle Gerard than endure another fucking swim season. My mother, who did not know that I had learned to cuss in public school, acted as if she were doing me a great favor as she dug out her checkbook. To make matters worse, my father was the regional swim official in the greater Tidewater region. He spent his weekends striding up and down the edges of regulation-sized swimming pools, disqualifying — or “DQ-ing” — competitors for letting their heads go underwater during the breast stroke or flutter kicking during the butterfly. For these and other infractions, my father would DQ you with a slight raise of his left arm. He’d work one swim meet in Hampton, then climb in his blue Ford Pinto and depart for a meet in Glouster, where he might DQ the county commissioner’s daughter for failing to touch the wall with both hands. He would, I’d learned, even DQ his own son.

On the way to buy the Speedo at King’s that spring, my mother gave my sister Jennifer and me the typical lecture about how fortunate we were and how hard our father worked to provide us with braces, new shoes, and Speedos. “I could save him the trouble,” I said. My sister giggled nervously. “What do you mean?” asked my mother. “I hate swimming. I’ve hated it for years. If I ever get the chance, I am going to drown on purpose.” Jennifer was shocked that I had dared say such a thing. The idea of hating swim practice was new to her. In fact, we were not even allowed to consider it. My mother gripped the steering wheel of our station wagon as if she were killing a snake. “Well,” she said, “we will not have you running free all summer.” And there was the crux of the matter: freedom. I wondered October 2011  The Sun

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why I wasn’t free to make a choice for myself now and again. When we got home, I headed upstairs with my Speedo. My method for breaking in a new suit was to wear it under my jeans in place of underwear for a week. The leg holes on this one were extremely tight. Perhaps I should have spent more time selecting it. I stood in front of my brother’s mirror and gazed at my reflection, a miserable sight: My legs and torso were as white as fish flesh. My bird-chest rippled with each breath. And I had the beginnings of a tiny mustache. How the fuck was I supposed to wear this goddamn thing?

My eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Young, re-

quired us to write a research paper for the final exam that year. You could choose any subject as long as you used the proper research form, complete with quotations and a works-cited page. (Mrs. Young was really into format. If you could master format, she said, the rest of your life would be a “cakewalk.”) I turned in a one-paragraph, handwritten proposal for a short history of the bluefish runs in the Chesapeake Bay. Mrs. Young gave it back with a note: “Sorry, David, but I think you can do better with your topic. See me.” When I approached her after class, Mrs. Young seemed distracted. She had a Graceland snow globe on her desk, and she shook it and watched the fake flakes fall upon a gilded guitar. “Bluefish has been overdone,” she said. We discussed a few possible topics on which I could write my essay. She had recently been on a Tidewater road trip and thought I should embrace local history. We settled on a piece about the Wythe House in Colonial Williamsburg. “I think you can do wonderful things with this topic,” she said. I know now that Mrs. Young was wrong, criminally wrong, but my parents had instilled in me an often misguided trust in teachers. I had been to Colonial Williamsburg a few times on field trips and passed through it on the way to swim meets against our sworn enemies, the Tarpons of Bruton Neighborhood Rec­ reation Center. A collection of historic houses, cobblestone streets, and English gardens, Williamsburg tries to re-create the feel of colonial life — without the dysentery, slavery, and public hangings. People in period costumes make candles, weave shawls on looms, and fire replica muskets into the swamps. They all speak an odd dialect, half Elizabethan and half Tidewaterian: “Hear thee, hear thee, might I get a spot of grog?” The Wythe House was one of the gems of Colonial Williamsburg, for its original owner, George Wythe, was the first Virginian to sign the Declaration of Independence. Was I supposed to write about Wythe the forgotten patriot and his passion for Greek literature and fondness for deer hunting in the Virginia woodlands? Or was I to write about the house itself: the huge windows, the painstaking restoration, the thousands of red bricks? Mrs. Young coyly said that it was up to me, but obviously it wasn’t. If it had been up to me, I’d have written about bluefish, perhaps conducting a field study with my uncle Gerard out by the third island. Frankly, at fourteen, I didn’t care if the Wythe House suddenly burst into flames. I sat in history class that afternoon, my Speedo pinching 26

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my thighs, next to Greg Glover, a fellow scrub. He’d been a reliable third-place finisher his whole life, but this winter he had put in three hard weeks at the Coast Guard pool. His back looked wide, and he reeked of chlorine. Perhaps this summer he would move out of the scrub lane to pursue greatness with the others. When I told him my Speedo was killing me, he nodded knowingly. I asked if he knew anything about George Wythe, the unsung colonial hero of Tidewater. “I don’t know shit about that motherfucker,” said Glover. I’d never learn to curse with such casual ease. That’s the kind of confidence winter swimming could give you.

I arrived at our first swim practice, after school on April 21, wearing my long swim trunks over my Speedo, and I stood on the lip of the pool in the bright, inescapable light of spring and dipped in my toe. The water was so cold I immediately recoiled. Coach Carol was seething because some of the lane markers were kinked, and the interval clock was busted. She paraded along the deck, hollering at shivering sixyear-olds to get their asses in gear. I pulled off my long trunks and felt the cruel Tidewater air snap at my thighs. Then I took a deep breath and jumped in. The pool was frigid, and I came up gasping, too cold even to catch my breath. I stood on the bottom for a moment, my arms hugging my torso. A blue kickboard whizzed by my face. Coach Carol threw kickboards at us as if dealing cards. “Zoby, get going!” she cried. Anger propelled me forward, but after just two laps of freestyle I was tired and shocked at how much strength I’d lost over the winter. You’d think playing chess and wandering the railroad tracks would keep a guy in shape, but swimming has a way of revealing one’s weaknesses. Glover swam by fluidly. I had to stop and hang on to the rim of the pool, aware that at any second Coach Carol could catch me and stand on my fingers — a practice for which she was widely known. “Zoby,” I heard her say, “I’ll be watching you this summer.” This was just the beginning of a long season. I felt trapped. The essay on the Wythe House was due in three weeks. I did not control anything about my life. I began to cry as I swam, but my tears dissolved into the brew of pool chemicals, so no one saw. As I did laps under Coach Carol’s sharklike gaze, I remembered that my father’s secretary worked part time at Colonial Williamsburg. Maybe I could enlist my dad’s aid with the essay. He was enthusiastic about the idea, though he looked a little suspicious, as if I were trying to trick him into writing the paper for me. For ten years he had been the editor for the national journal of rocket propulsion and aerospace engineering. I would see him with yellow legal pads spread before him on Saturdays, scribbling wildly, sighing, and tearing out pages. He earned no money as editor, because his job at NASA forbade him to moonlight. Phone calls would come in from across the country — an engineer-author, perhaps, trying to work out his prose with my father. The conversations sounded like another language to me, but the journal came out each year, my father

listed as editor. He agreed to help me write the essay and would get some materials from his secretary. Two days later Mrs. Young announced that she would be moving to Oregon after the end of the school year to be closer to her family. She fingered the snow globe as she delivered the news. Maybe she would leave sooner, I thought, and I wouldn’t have to write the essay at all. That evening my father came home with a brown grocery bag full of documents and brochures about Colonial Williamsburg. “There’s more in the car,” he grumbled. “Go out and get it.” Horrified, I stooped to look into the Pinto and saw a ream of yellow legal pads, boxes of government-issue ballpoint pens, and more literature about Colonial Williamsburg than I’d thought existed. I was also startled to find Mr. Barker, another aerospace engineer who carpooled with my father, stuffed in the back seat, pamphlets and magazines piled in his lap. “Tell your dad to hurry up,” he said as he handed me a stack of legal pads. “I need to get home to cut the grass.” Back in the house, my father arranged the material on the dining-room table according to relevance. Then he went to take Mr. Barker home, and I found myself alone with thousands of pages on Williamsburg, Jamestown, and various colonial topics. Most of the publications were tourism brochures, but a few were parts of salvaged dissertations written by faculty at William & Mary College, complete with footnotes. I thought to myself that I was probably the only fourteen-year-old boy in America standing before a table of colonial literature and wearing a Speedo under his jeans. Then I sat down and began to read. My father had outdone himself. There was material about colonial foods and architecture, Indian wars, early American government, the founding of William & Mary, colonial churches, Yorktown, George Washington’s war in Virginia, John Smith, the authors of the Declaration of Independence — even affordable timeshares in Williamsburg. I am totally fucked, I thought as the Pinto came gliding back into our driveway. “More materials are on the way,” said my father. He was in gathering mode. “But, Dad, it’s too much.” “That’s not true. You can never have too much information. First read these. Get to know the subject. There’s some good stuff in there. It should last you until Donna gets me the books.” Books? That night I began my journey into the colonial history of America. I looked at the pen-and-ink drawing of the first Virginians planting tobacco with the Indians. The colonists dug small holes and put fish in them to serve as fertilizer while the Indians looked on, seemingly jazzed about the whole operation. Next I read about the organization of the first Virginia governments and the selection of governors. Williamsburg was originally called “Middle Plantation” and played a secondary role to the capital, Jamestown. And I found a sketch of George Wythe, who bore an uncanny likeness to my father’s co-worker Mr. Barker. Wythe was a small guy, with narrow

shoulders, early baldness, and a large cranium. He was a preeminent scholar of the classics and the first law professor in our young country. He was also a wealthy plantation owner and a slave owner. And he had a remarkably close relationship with Thomas Jefferson. They were often seen together, hashing out philosophy, blathering on and on about the Greeks, and speaking a bizarre blend of Latin and frontier English. They wrote each other a series of letters that reveal shockingly bold ideas about liberty. In just a few hours I found myself an armchair expert on George Wythe. The next day at the pool, pulling off my long trunks and exposing my Speedo to the world, I remarked to no one in particular that George Wythe would have thought holding swim practice with obvious thunderstorms in the region was a violation of human dignity. Coach Carol chided me for looking so pale. “Is being pale a crime?” I asked. This stunned her. No one had ever used the Socratic method on Coach Carol. I was sentenced to thirty-two laps. I could hardly swim ten without a break, but Glover did the laps with me, and I found they went by easily. I was thinking of the Wythe House, with a fireplace in every room and great windows that looked out upon the idyllic lawns of Palace Green.

After a week of reading, I sat down with a yellow

legal pad and wrote an introduction for my essay on George Wythe. I gave the dates of his life. I told my reader that Wythe’s only daughter had died in infancy, and that he’d never had any more children. His first wife had died as well. (The guy couldn’t win.) I said something about Wythe being an unappreciated Founding Father. I quoted one of the scholarly articles. It was a one-page intro, and I was happy with it. My father said it was OK but wondered why I had the personal information in there, such as the death of his young daughter. “Is this important? Unless it comes up again in the essay, I don’t see why you’d put this in the introduction,” he said. “And there are an awful lot of misspellings.” Several drafts later I had a flawless introduction. The visage of George Wythe was beginning to form on the paper. I had decided to break the essay into sections, as I’d seen done in some of the research material, and to reveal Wythe’s humanity in a section called “The Good Virginian.” My father approved my work, and the next day I brought my introduction to class to give Mrs. Young a preview. Her face contorted as she read. Glover yawned at his desk, and another student raised his hand and asked if he could use the bathroom. “Of course you can go to the restroom,” I said. “We live in a free country.” Mrs. Young sighed heavily, set my essay aside, and patted it with her hand. “David, I thought we agreed that you would write about the Wythe House, not Wythe himself.” I was puzzled. Why would I write about a house when I had such a charismatic personage before me? It’s George fucking Wythe, I thought, a slave owner who freed his slaves, a man with a brain the size of a melon who was poisoned by a memOctober 2011  The Sun

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ber of his own family, perhaps due to his strong opposition to slavery. Mrs. Young suggested I start over. “But I find him interesting,” I whispered. “Who?” she asked. “Wythe.” I heard the petty laughter of my fellow students. “You can still find him interesting, but this essay needs to be about the Wythe House.” Outside it was overcast, the sky a dull solder gray. I had offered the world the humanities, and in return it had asked me for square footage. I sulked on the bus as it creaked and trundled through suburban neighborhoods. The previous night’s windstorm had knocked branches down, and I saw homeowners dragging oak limbs to the curb. At swim practice Coach Carol paced behind the battery of swim blocks with her arms behind her back, looking like a general lost in morbid thought. She lacked only a pipe and a saber lashed to her belt. At home my father did not commiserate with me for long as I complained about Mrs. Young and the Virginia public schools. He simply sat there and flipped through his utility bills. I told him that when George Wythe strolled the cobblestone streets of Williamsburg, all work ceased, and people came to him with questions: When should we plant tobacco? Is the pass to Charlottesville open? Is the spring upon us? “You’ll just have to start over,” he said. “But Wythe was a man ahead of his time, a true revolutionary.” I couldn’t believe my father was siding with Mrs. Young. How could he turn against the humanities, the foundation of all knowledge? “Relax,” he said. “You do what your teacher wants, you turn it in, and then it’s over. Simple.” “Even if it’s not what I want?” “Even so,” he said. Something in his tone suggested that he had been down this road before. I went back into the dining room and began to write about the Wythe House: the timber and bricks, the dimensions. George Wythe merely haunted the report like an apparition, a fleeting image glancing off one of the many windows, a cool chill in the root cellar. I wrote as if pounding out laps, and in a few hours I had three pages of text and a works-cited page. I left the essay on my father’s desk. I swam recklessly the next day. I would sprint past the better swimmers for ten yards, exhausting myself with brief bursts of speed. But, like oxen, they plodded along in their lanes, never touching the bottom or clinging to the lip. They could go forever, it seemed. And Glover was in there with them, silently stroking his way from one end of the pool to the next. Coach Carol sat in a canvas director’s chair that said Carol on the back, a gift from the previous year’s championship team, and ate a bagel while the sunshine soaked into her face. Of course my new essay on the Wythe House was a complete failure, full of sentence fragments and errors of all types. My father could not understand how I had lost my ability to write with a simple shift in subject. “You are making mistakes that are unthinkable,” he said. 28

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“And you are going to stay home this weekend until you get it right. I don’t care how long it takes.” That night, when the house was quiet, I crept downstairs and sat at the table before a blank yellow notepad. Nothing came to me. Nothing. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine Middle Plantation, the slaves working in the fields, the beasts bellowing from the livery. I heard wind outside, a front coming ashore from the James River. I was wearing only my Speedo. It was broken in now, as comfortable as it would ever be, but I still wore it in place of underwear. Why not? I kept thinking about George Wythe, his lifelong conflict between being a slave owner and an advocate of freedom, this bitter contrast accompanying him as he read alone in his great room or went to the tavern. It must have stung Wythe to know the truth about himself; it must have caused him fits of anguish. And I thought about his scoundrel great-nephew George Wythe Sweeney, who eventually poisoned Wythe and sold the old scholar’s ancient books for pennies. But Wythe’s death was his final victory. In his will he left Sweeney nothing and gave his land and capital to two of his former slaves. Victory: I wanted to know what it was like. With my eyes tightly closed, I felt as if I were floating in the swimming pool. I plugged my ears with my fingers and concentrated on oblivion. I sat like this for a long time. Then I felt someone else’s presence in the room. I opened my eyes and was startled to see my father looking at me. He had gotten up to let the dog out. “Go to bed,” he said. After dozens of attempts I eventually produced a remarkably uninteresting essay on the Wythe House. My father suffered through the entire process with me, agonizing over my works-cited page and rubbing his eyes for weariness. I dreamed of certain passages, I’d revised them so many times. My father taught me what it was to be a writer, and on weekends, as he DQ’d me at the neighborhood pools, I taught him what it was to be a scrub. Mrs. Young, it turned out, never collected the essays, and at the end of the year she made good on her promise and shipped off to Oregon. I swam on the team through the summer, and by August I was tan and wiry. For the last swim meet of the year I was positioned in the slowest lane. My event, the fifty-meter breast stroke, was coming up. I had peed in the restroom, and I went around behind the starting blocks with the telltale urine stain on my Speedo. The other swimmers swung their arms around to loosen up. I didn’t bother. I looked to my side and saw the same boys who had been beating me my whole life. I stood on the blocks before the entire community. I heard my brother call my name. I saw Mr. Barker, a dead ringer for Wythe, in the audience. His daughter was a scrub like me. He called out encouragement, but he knew what was about to happen. My father, the meet official, knew it as he marched along the side of the pool. We all knew. The starter’s pistol popped, and I swam for all I was worth. I swam for Glendale, for Coach Carol, for my brief affair with the humanities. And I smoked all my opponents — for the first twenty meters at least.  n

If you want it bad enough and

know the right people, you can get anything you want in prison — for a price. The currency of choice where I am incarcerated is stamps. For two first-class stamps you can buy a cookie stolen from the kitchen. For five you can have your laundry washed and folded. For a full book of twenty you can get a hand-rolled cigarette made from the used chewing tobacco that the guards spit into the trash. In the prison economy I am lowermiddle-class. I don’t have three or four ex-girlfriends who send me money, but I

do have friends and family who support me, and I earn nearly twenty dollars a month as a chapel orderly. I try not to spend my limited funds too freely. I don’t buy much from the kitchen, but there is one temptation that I can’t resist: cinnamon. At home it is my partner’s favorite spice, and all of the cookies and muffins I baked for him were pungent with it. I would go to a specialty store and purchase cinnamon imported from Vietnam for five dollars an ounce. In here four stamps gets me a full sandwich bag of cheap cinnamon that’s probably packaged in one-pound

gary matson

Re ader s  Wr it e ch e a p th r i ll s

containers, but when stirred into my coffee or my oatmeal, it still makes me think of him. Because you can’t buy it at the commissary, cinnamon is contraband. During a shakedown, if a curious guard should take the time to sniff the contents of that bag in my locker, my stash would be confiscated, and I would have to wash a few windows as punishment. But for the brief thrill that I get when I take that first sip of coffee with cinnamon, it’s worth the risk. Paul J. Stabell Ashland, Kentucky October 2011  The Sun

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I was seventeen. Reed was fifteen

but looked much older. I hadn’t had much sexual experience, just a handful of necking sessions with boys who didn’t seem to know what to do with their tongue once it was in my mouth. Reed was not my usual type. In addition to his being younger and (I thought) less sophisticated than I was, we had different backgrounds and interests. He got in trouble a lot with his parents and at school. He smoked on the sly, ditched classes, and cursed like a truck driver. But he also had wavy hair, perfect teeth, baby-blue eyes, and an ass that looked great in Levi’s. He taught me how to masturbate him to orgasm while he did the same for me, often standing up in the dusty garage of an old, abandoned house. His manner was rough. He might order me to “take off your panties before I rip them off.” He must have known the effect this had on me. I told Reed to keep his mouth shut about our trysts, but his friend Ben smirked every time he saw me, so I think he knew plenty. Reed was a jerk most of the time. He had little respect for anyone, especially authority figures. He wasn’t even that nice to me. My best friend, Pam, the only one I told about Reed and me, thought I was making a big mistake. I knew it was foolish to be infatuated with someone less mature and outside my social circle. (I was a snob in those days.) My brother despised Reed, referring to him as “the uncultured swine from down the street.” Every time Reed and I finished a groping session, I’d tell myself it was the last. But my body betrayed me whenever we got close. If our eyes met on the bus or in the school hallways, and he mouthed the words Meet me tonight, I’d always nod yes. I am now alone and in my forties and haven’t seen Reed in many years. Every now and then at night, before I fall asleep, he crosses my mind, and my hand wanders between my legs in an attempt to re-create the heady sensation of that first thrill. Kathleen San Diego, California

Charlie and I met one Saturday in a park downtown. I went there as a

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volunteer to hand out sandwiches, and he came to eat. After I gave him his sandwich, he pulled a near-empty billfold from his back pocket and produced a coupon for a free turkey. “I want to give something back,” Charlie said. I redeemed the coupon that afternoon and brought the frozen turkey to the soup kitchen. The next time Charlie came there to eat, I took him back to the freezer to show him the bird, which would feed thirty people. I got in the habit of talking to Charlie on Saturdays in the park. He’d once had a good job loading trucks at a fooddistribution company, he told me, but then it had shut down. “I’m depressed,” he said, whiskey on his breath. During the week I started walking through the park on my way to work. I’d often see Charlie on a bench by the goldfish pond. “How’s it going, Charlie?” I’d say. “Hang in there.” One morning, wrestling with my usual angst about my life’s purpose, I sat down

with Charlie. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “I’m depressed,” I said. His eyes widened. “You?” “Yeah,” I said. “When I’m sad, I sit here and watch the pond,” Charlie said. I accepted his invitation. While we sat on the bench, and I became late for work, a great blue heron circled the pond and landed in the shallow water at our feet. “You made my day,” I said to Charlie. He grinned. “Glad I could help.” Amy Malick Hartford, Connecticut

Don’s station wagon was large

enough to fit four teenagers comfortably across the back seat. My parents reluctantly allowed me to ride with him and the other guys, believing that we were just going to the movies. Off we went, six suburban teenage boys relishing our new freedom. Don drove aimlessly while we laughed and

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spoke of school, sports, and girls. As it began to get dark, we found ourselves in a neighborhood that, had we not been so naive, we would have avoided. “Is that a hooker?” someone said. The woman was skinny, sickly looking, and wet, as it had been raining lightly. She stood in front of a run-down house with a collapsed porch a few blocks from the city’s once-thriving downtown. Don pulled up alongside her and asked her how much for a blow job. “Thirty-five dollars,” she said. And before anyone could respond, she was in the car, and Don was driving away. Tim moved to the very back to make room for the woman, who directed us to a dark alley a few blocks away. Once we’d stopped, the prostitute climbed over the rear seat to join Tim. The five of us cheered him on while she pulled down his pants. I remember the confused and frightened look on Tim’s face as this stranger went down on him. When she was done, she asked if anyone else wanted her. Don told her to get out, then handed her only a twenty-dollar bill. The woman screamed and pounded on the car as Don pulled away. I caught a glimpse of Tim’s face in the yellow glare from the streetlights and saw tears in his eyes. There was no laughing or talking as we drove home, just the sound of the car’s tires splashing through puddles in the street. Name Withheld

Not too long after I moved to

Macedonia, my friends introduced me to a local tradition called “proshetanje,” a late-evening stroll through the streets in which most of the townspeople participated. We’d circle the main square two or three times while I practiced my minimal Macedonian and enjoyed watching friends greeting one another, girls gossiping, and teenagers flirting while their parents looked on in disapproval. I thought it was quaint fun, but my roommate, an American like me, failed to see the appeal. She said parents shouldn’t keep their children out till eleven at night, and they walked too slow to get any exercise, and they weren’t drinking, so what was the point? One night when my Macedonian

friends stopped by to pick me up for proshetanje, my roommate expressed her disdain. One of my companions curtly told her, “Look, we’re a poor country. Unemployment is 40 percent. We don’t have the money to eat meat every meal and go to bars every night. This is our cheap thrill.” More than a decade later my boyfriend is a poor full-time student, and most of my salary goes to pay our living expenses and my debts. Our friends frequently invite us to join them for happy hour or a show, but we can rarely afford to go. So we have dinner at home, and afterward we go for a walk through our neighborhood. We talk about what we learned or what we struggled with that week. We pet the neighborhood cats and comment on the landscaping and architecture. We never meet anyone we know. M.C. Portland, Oregon

My sister, Monica, and I grew up

with bare feet and scraped knees. I called her “Moe.” We lived in the country and never went to church, so there wasn’t much need for fancy names, or fancy anything else. Our neighbor Larry across the street worked at the Farmer Jack Grocery Store. Sometimes he’d give us a ride to school when it was too cold for us to wait outside for the bus. (In Michigan that was often the case.) Larry navigated the icy roads with a cigarette in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, and he made us laugh with his insults. “Hey,” he’d say, “did your mom have any kids that lived?” Or, “You kids are pretty funny, but looks aren’t everything.” We always cracked up. It didn’t matter that we’d heard all his jokes ten times before. Once, Larry brought us a big barrel from the Farmer Jack that had been used for mixing cake batter. Moe and I rolled the barrel to the top of the hill between our house and our uncle’s. Then Moe climbed in, and I counted, “One, two, three!” and pushed my sister down the hill inside the barrel. It thumped over grass and rocks until it came to rest in our front yard. I waited anxiously for some sign of Moe. Finally the barrel wobbled, and

she crawled out and walked unsteadily around, laughing. “You gotta do it!” she said. We spent the day rolling each other down the hill in the barrel and getting all greasy until we both smelled like cake. I thought nothing could be better. Kristine Semantel Wheat Ridge, Colorado

Having a large family, my par-

ents couldn’t afford luxury hotels or fine dining. Most of our vacations were spent camping at the beach and touring mini-golf courses. Once in a while we would pile into the station wagon — the kind with the fake wood paneling and the bench seat that flipped up in back — and drive to the Farmer’s Diner for grilled cheese sandwiches, french fries, and clam strips. We would eat our fill and leave with the smell of fried fish clinging to our clothes and hair. When my sister and brothers and I were given any spending money (which was rare), we’d splurge on bags of gummy insects or candy cigarettes that puffed powdered sugar when you blew into them. Sometimes we’d go to the bakery and order mugs of mint hot chocolate and cinnamon-raisin toast drenched in butter. If we saved up our money, we could go to the Golden Dragon, a windowless and smoky restaurant with small booths lit by Chinese lanterns. We’d marvel at the giant paper fans and delicate porcelain dolls, and we’d always order the pu pu platter, because we loved saying “pu pu” and seeing the skewers of meat and many dipping sauces arranged around the hibachi grill. What I enjoyed most was the smell of the other diners’ cigarettes. The scent of a freshly lit cigarette fulfilled some desire in me to be bad and break the rules. I would sit as close to the smokers as I could, waiting for them to strike a match and burn the goodness from me. Lindsey Scott Cabot, Vermont

On cold winter nights when I was

fourteen, some friends and I would loiter in the first-floor hallway of the housingproject unit where I grew up. We’d chew sunflower seeds and spit the shells on the October 2011  The Sun

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sandra-lee phipps

floor like tobacco juice, which led the project guards to kick us out. We nicknamed the meanest one “Joe the Cop.” One night we were standing outside the building when it began to snow, and a girl a few years older than us walked by wearing a pair of brown Girl Scout shoes that looked several sizes too big. All she had on for protection against the weather was a dress and a thin, flowered cardigan. Her face was blank, almost expressionless. “She’s a retard,” one of us whispered. We coaxed her into the hallway, where we tried to impress her in various ways. She said her name was Chrissie, and that she was running away and hadn’t eaten all day. No one asked from where — or from whom — she was running. Suddenly the building door opened, and Joe the Cop screamed, “If I catch you punks inside the lobby tonight, I’m going to report you and your parents to management!” Our parents would then get a warning letter. Three such letters could lead to eviction. Back outside, Berk, the unappointed leader of the group, began whispering 32

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to each of us individually that we should take our new friend somewhere and get as much “titty” from her as we could. We were all virgins. I’m not even sure I wanted to have sex yet. The group decided to take Chrissie to Moose Field, a vacant lot where we played baseball and football. Only Pinhead walked away from the action. He came from a churchgoing family and would have no part of what was about to happen. I was torn between wanting to go home, because I felt sad for Chrissie, and wanting to see what would come next. Berk asked Chrissie if she’d like to go to a beautiful meadow. Chrissie said yes, but also that she was cold and hungry. Someone zipped across the street to his apartment and came back with his sister’s winter jacket. Then we each chipped in a quarter or fifty cents, and we walked to the deli and bought two roast-beef, tomato, and mustard heroes. One sandwich we shared among us, and the other we promised to Chrissie once we got to Moose Field. There were no streetlights around the vacant lot, so we were hidden from

everything but our own consciences. Someone handed Chrissie her sandwich. “You guys are my best friends ever,” she said. While she ate, the guys took turns groping her. They removed her warm coat and worked in pairs, one boy rubbing her breasts while the other stroked her crotch. I watched, ashamed and curious and vaguely aware that it was wrong. Sometimes now, when I sit down to practice lovingkindness meditation, I think of Chrissie and how I sat and witnessed her exploitation. I wish that I could tell her I am sorry. Barry Denny New York, New York

Growing up, I always behaved

well, studied hard, and generally did what I was told. I didn’t drink or do drugs or lie to my mom or sleep around or get bad grades. I worked several jobs to put myself through college and graduated with honors.  After college I took a job as a middleschool teacher in an under-resourced school with underperforming students.

I had no idea how to be an effective teacher. I couldn’t stay organized, and my classroom-management skills were shaky at best. I was proud of the gains some of my students made, but by the end of my fourth year all I could think about was how to get out. I wanted to go someplace far away and forget my students’ slim chances for success in life, the credit-card bills I couldn’t pay, the friends who were getting married or having babies, and most of all my heartbreak over losing the man I’d wanted to marry.  I resigned my position, let go of the lease on my apartment, sold all my furniture, and bought a one-way ticket to Mexico City. I eventually settled on the eastern coast of Mexico, teaching English at a private school there. It was easy work, and for the first time I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted.  It turned out that what I wanted to do was waste time. I had long conversations with taxi drivers and waiters and strangers at cafes. I got high for the first time and after that smoked pot whenever I pleased. I flirted and had one-night stands with the boys who pressed their bodies into mine at discos. I ate sticky pan dulce each morning, to hell with calories. I passed many afternoons napping or curled up in bed reading. I stayed up late into the night dancing and drinking, and the next day I taught while hung over with a wink from my boss, who had been pouring me shots of tequila the night before. I condensed a lifetime of cheap thrills into eight months in Mexico. All those short-lived pleasures taught me to treas­ ure people as they are, not as I want them to be, and to live in the moment without worry. I realized that I could let happiness instead of depression swallow me up, that joy could come as fast and intensely as pain.  Mandie Stout Santa Cruz, California

Eight and a half years ago I began

an affair with a man I had known in high school. He was charming and handsome, and we would rendezvous at cheap motels, drink cheap wine, make love, and talk about how we had finally found our soul mates. I recklessly threw myself into

the relationship, risking the safe life I had created, including a loving husband, a house, two cars, and a secure job. I had always been a “good girl,” but for the first time I was doing something bad, really bad, and only I and the man I was doing it with knew. Sometimes I would listen to my girlfriends complain about their husbands, jobs, and kids, and I would smile to myself and think about my enormous secret. I also lived in fear that someone would find out and my life would be ruined, but that only made the affair more thrilling. I eventually left my husband to marry my lover. We’ve been married for almost seven years, and those motel rooms and bottles of wine are just a memory. We’ve settled into a comfortable existence with a house, two cars, and secure, well-paying jobs. Our marriage is fine, although we rarely use the term “soul mate” anymore, and our fights usually stem from lack of trust. The motels and wine may have been cheap, but I’m paying for them now with my self-esteem. And did I mention the guilt? Name Withheld

Italian is the language of my an-

cestors, but I’d never learned it for a variety of reasons: no time, no patience, no guts. Then, two months ago, in a moment of courage, I signed up for a beginner’s Italian class at a local coffee shop. Tonight is the final session of my class. As I wait for it to start, I say “grazie” over and over under my breath between sips of my (very Italian) cappuccino. I make sure to really exaggerate the r. It sounds beautiful to me. Because the Italian language shouldn’t be whispered, I say “grazie” again, louder this time and with even more emphasis on the r. I look around to see if anyone has heard, and I sort of hope they have. Most of the other students are older women preparing for a trip to Italy. Because of my work schedule I can’t travel, though I long to go and walk the same ground as my relatives and experience firsthand the rich traditions. Each time I come to class, I feel more connected to my mother, who was born in Italy, and to my grandparents. “Buona sera a tutti,” our instructor

greets us as the class starts. For the next hour and a half, with each phrase I speak, I feel sexier, more dramatic, more Italian. For the price of a fifteen-dollar textbook and a three-dollar cappuccino, I’ve traveled to Italy. Jennifer Orlando Grand Ledge, Michigan

I work for a senior engineer who

is fluent in Spanish and has traveled all over South America, including the slums of Lima, Peru. Recently he declared that we, his middle-class co-workers, were all living in a cocoon, and if any of us wanted to see what life was like for others, we should take a trip down Albuquerque’s Central Avenue on the Route 66 bus. I decided to do just that the following Saturday. I admit that I boarded the bus with some trepidation. Every three blocks the age, race, and background of the riders seemed to change: young black and Latina women with their children; middle-aged white men wearing threadbare clothes who limped to their seats, looking much older than their years; old Latino men in cowboy hats and leather jackets. At one stop Asians piled on until the bus was standing room only. People talked freely to strangers and acquaintances alike, and every single person who exited shouted, “Thank you,” to the driver. I got off downtown, where choppers and lowriders cruised the avenue. I saw a billboard in Spanish asking for help to stop human trafficking. I passed the office of A Million Bones, whose sign asked for student activists to help stop genocide worldwide. I heard a down-and-out young woman screaming at her small child to shut up, and I saw people thoughtfully intervene on the child’s behalf. On the bus ride home, the woman seated behind me shouted that she needed to borrow a cellphone, and a craggy, handsome man with a cigarillo hanging from his lip offered his. After she made her call, the woman told the man that she had once been beautiful, but crack had ruined her looks. She mentioned several times how cute he was. The man gave her a few bucks and said that he had already handed out twenty dollars that day. The woman said she didn’t intend to take his last dollar, and he replied, “You think I’d October 2011  The Sun

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give you my last dollar?” They laughed and talked about getting by, and when he exited the bus, she thanked him again. What had I been so afraid of? Eleni Otto Corrales, New Mexico

My ninety-year-old grandmother

always says that nothing comes for free in this world, but she insists that you can still find a bargain. Her one-story bungalow is crammed full of TV-commercial gadgets, Macy’s one-day-sale items, buy-one-getone-free bric-a-brac, and other trinkets and tchotchkes that she has succumbed to purchasing. It’s a thrill for her to see a commercial for a “genuine caquelon” with longnecked forks for a measly $19.95 that she can order right from her La-Z-Boy. Never mind that twenty dollars is too much for a cut-rate tin fondue pot. Perhaps a better deal is the turkey breast for only five cents a pound, which is now buried in her freezer. It wasn’t really bought to be eaten but because it was such a steal, just like the ten-cent nail polish in neon colors, the cardigan with one button missing and half a seam coming out, and the ten-pound box of pickled aspara­ gus. She can describe the moment she purchased each of these items at great length: a mile-long wait at the checkout counter, a last-minute look at the receipt that saved an extra dollar, a double coupon, and, best of all, the item that was mispriced and was therefore free of charge. My grandmother’s love of cheap goods has become a very expensive habit. J.O. Houston, Texas

I was a twenty-four-year-old

single mother when I received my BA in theater. It was immediately clear that my theater stipends and the barista job I’d held while attending college were not going to keep my toddler and me afloat for long, so I got a full-time job as a bank teller. On my first day of work my grand­father died of a heart attack. He had been the strongest male role model in my life, and I was devastated. I flew back to my hometown that same evening. In the days that followed, my family and I comforted one 34

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another and cleaned the inside of Papa’s small trailer home. My bereavement leave at the bank passed quickly, and it was soon time for me to return to my new adult life. On the morning of my departure my grandmother pulled me aside and gave me a twenty-dollar bill, the only money Papa had on him when he died. I studied it hard on the plane ride home, noticing a burn mark in the center and the careful creases where he’d folded it. I wondered if the burn had come from one of his cigarettes and imagined the bill had been tucked away in his wallet for a long time. My days at the bank were tedious and long, and my daughter was not sleeping through the night. I needed something to keep me alert. There was an espresso cart right outside the bank lobby, but I had yet to receive my first paycheck, and the only currency I had, besides a large sum of food stamps, was Papa’s twenty-dollar bill. By the third day I had convinced myself that my grandfather would have considered it his pleasure to take his granddaughter out for coffee one last time. So I headed through the glass doors on my break and ordered that long-anticipated nonfat latte with extra foam. But the moment the barista took the bill from my hand, I felt sick inside. How could I part with my deceased grandfather’s last twenty dollars for an overpriced cup of coffee? I tried to savor my drink in his honor, but all I could taste was shame. I’d been back at my station for just a few minutes when the barista hurried in and walked straight up to my window to ask for change. He handed me five bills, among them Papa’s creased and burnt twenty. I calmly placed it aside in the cash drawer, where it remained for two years until I finally bought it back on my last day at the bank. Twenty years later that bill sits in a tin box atop my dresser, a monument to my grandfather and to the time in my life when a two-dollar latte was not a cheap treat but an expensive indulgence. M’Lissa Hayes Seattle, Washington

I was a nun for twenty years and wore a habit at all times, whether I was

cleaning toilets or lighting candles on the altar. I never minded, except for one day on the city bus when a little boy pointed to me and said, “Mama, is she a real witch?” (This was in Oklahoma, where Catholics were scarce.) I grew hot with embarrassment and felt a fervent desire to be able to move inconspicuously in public. When I told my best friend at the convent what had happened, she suggested we borrow some lay clothes from the donation box at the high school where we both taught, put them on, and go to town. I was hesitant at first but also thrilled by the idea. Two hours before the rising bell on the appointed day, we unlocked the school building, changed into lay clothes in the girls’ bathroom, and studied our unfamiliar reflections in the mirror. At best we looked dowdy. The outfits were ill fitting, and our scissor-cut hair was unstyled. But our legs were bare. We giggled with nervous excitement. In town we walked up and down Main Street, and no one gave us a second glance. We went into an all-night diner and took turns sipping a cup of coffee. How liberated we felt! This was living life on the edge. Judith O’Brien Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

“Can you put these in for me?” my

friend Kellie asked, holding up two earrings. It was easy to push the cubic-zirconia studs into Kellie’s earlobes, as she had no hair to move out of the way. Just twentyone, she was undergoing chemotherapy for bone cancer. But tonight she, my friend Julie, and I were going out for dinner and a movie, and we weren’t going to let a mid-December rain dampen our spirits. At the theater we pulled up to the glass doors and rolled Kellie’s wheelchair down the ramp. In the lobby we bought her popcorn and soda that we knew she wouldn’t eat and went with her into the thea­ter to watch a movie that I cannot remember. Julie and I had known Kellie since she was a child. I’d attended her confirmation and graduation parties. She was a kindhearted girl and more focused on

lance jones

other people than on herself. Anytime I saw her, healthy or sick, she’d ask, “How are you?” Kellie was going to be a social worker like her parents. In high school she’d given up family beach vacations to build housing for the poor in Haiti. Kellie nodded off during the movie, but she kept bouncing back up to try to be normal. She was determined to have fun on this crappy, dreary Sunday. By the time the movie let out, the rain had become a downpour, and we drove to a Mexican restaurant and ordered four unhealthy appetizers, knowing Julie and I would do most of the eating. Halfway through her piña colada, Kellie let her eyes close again. When her head dipped down, I could see the large tumor rising on the top of her head, dusted with blond peach fuzz. As it turned out, that was the last crappy, dreary Sunday I spent with Kellie, the last movie she saw, the last time she ate Mexican food, and the third-tolast Sunday of her life. What I wouldn’t give to do it all over again right now. Best forty bucks I ever spent. Garland Walton Fairfield, Connecticut

When I was in high school, I wasn’t as healthy or fit as my friends. I later learned that my weakness was the

beginning of muscular dystrophy, but then I knew only that they were all stronger and faster than I was. One Friday night my friends and I decided to grab some beers and explore the railroad tunnels near the school, which were said to be a meeting place for devil worshipers. As we arrived at the tunnels, a train came snaking around the bend. “We should hop it!” my friend Kevin said. We all agreed that this was a great idea, never mind that no one knew where the train was heading. Being the slowest of the group, I reached the tracks last. My friends had already jumped aboard, and the train was picking up speed and entering the tunnel. I was running alongside a boxcar, desperately trying to grab the iron handle to the ladder. After two failed attempts (one almost resulting in my decapitation) I pulled myself up right before the boxcar entered the tunnel. I held tight to the ladder, my back inches from the tunnel wall, the wheels sparking on the old rails below me. Then the train rocketed out of the tunnel, and I saw my friends on the ground, screaming for me to jump. So I did. It was like being tossed out of a moving car at fifty miles an hour. After a considerable amount of time my body rolled to a halt. As my friends came running, I rose to

my feet and let out a yell, uninjured except for a few scratches. Their hoots and howls filled the night air. I was happy to be alive, but I was more thrilled to have proven to my friends that I could hop that train with them. Peter J. Gerrity Bayonne, New Jersey

The pigeons came from every direction, their flapping wings drowning out the noise of traffic and crowds. The bright sunlight lit their iridescent feathers as they landed at our feet and on our arms, shoulders, and laps. This was 1963 in downtown San Francisco. My buddy Doug and I had gone to Robinson’s Pet Shop on Maiden Lane, the inspiration for the pet shop in Hitchcock’s thriller The Birds, and bought two fivepound bags of premium birdseed. Then we’d walked to Union Square, found a relatively quiet place to sit, and opened the bags. As the pigeons congregated around us, we laughed and tossed out seed. When we ran out, we decided to go home. Slowly and carefully we tiptoed our way through the mass of birds and walked down Powell Street, not realizing at first that we were leading an army of pigeons. Shocked pedestrians stepped off the sidewalk and into stores to avoid this bizarre parade. October 2011  The Sun

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Even after we saw the pigeons, we pretended not to notice. At the corner of Powell and Market, Doug and I boarded the streetcar to the west side of the city. I heard cooing sounds and saw that Doug had a beautiful grayand-white-speckled pigeon tucked away in his jacket. We got some very strange looks from the other passengers, but we maintained our composure. We set the pigeon free just outside of the west-portal tunnel, and it headed due east, probably back to its flock. Not long after that, we saw signs posted at Union Square: “Do not feed the birds.” Keri Jenson Oakland, California

When my best friend and I were

high-school seniors in 1959, cigarettes were only twenty-five cents a pack. One day we decided to swipe a pack of her mother’s Marlboros and see what smoking was all about. To top it off, we were going to go to a cocktail lounge in the city and order a drink. We dressed to look adult and worldly and took the bus to downtown Seattle, the stolen cigarettes tucked safely into my purse. Sauntering into the Olympic Hotel, we settled into seats in the lounge, ordered drinks, and lit up. As the alcohol rushed into our systems, we attempted to smoke like seductive women, or at least not amateurs. We couldn’t look at each other for fear we’d burst into laughter — or tears, because it tasted so terrible. Try as I might, I couldn’t inhale. But we thought we pulled it off, holding our cigarettes gracefully, smoke circling our heads. The next morning our mouths were dry, and our hair smelled stale and smoky. We weren’t eager to try that again anytime soon. Many years later I watched my father unhook himself from his oxygen tank and go out to his backyard for a smoke. He struggled to take a breath because of emphysema, but he couldn’t kick his nicotine habit. I figure that twenty-fivecent package of Marlboros kept me from a similar fate. Pretty cheap if you think about it. Eileen Hosey Juneau, Alaska 36

The Sun  October 2011

My husband and I sleep in sepa-

rate bedrooms and basically live as roommates. He has withdrawn so far from our family life that I consider myself a single parent. After the kids are in bed and I’ve crawled under my cold covers, the loneliness catches up with me, and I imagine I’m lying beside my college boyfriend. I tuck a pillow against my back and pretend he’s there with his arms around me, stroking my hair. Sometimes I talk to him in my head. He always listens carefully. I hope someday my husband and I can work through our difficulties, but for now spooning with my pillow and remembering my past get me through the night. Name Withheld

My friend Isaac and I are drinking

after work at a Mexican restaurant with John, who is twice our age. We met him a year ago when he led us on a bungeejumping excursion. Since then we have regarded him as our mentor in adventure. Tonight John has a new thrill for us. “It wouldn’t be a big stunt,” he says, “but I’ll bet you it would be scary as hell!” A half-hour and two gin and tonics later I find myself standing on the top beam of a wooden swing set in a vacant park playground. I have a harness strapped around my waist and another around my chest. Both are hooked to approximately six feet of rope that’s been tied to the beam I’m standing on. My balance wavers, and I squint to focus on the wood beneath my feet. John, Isaac, and I measured the rope before I clambered up here and determined that, when I dive off, my head should avoid the ground by about six inches. We also bounced on the wood chips covering the ground and agreed that they were “soft.” Now that I am standing on top of this swing set, however, I don’t find soft wood chips all that reassuring. John and Isaac scramble to find the best camera angles for a photo. Satisfied with his position, John looks up at me and asks, “Are you ready?” I take a moment to evaluate the risks and tug on my rope a couple of times. It seems secure. Fuck it, I think. “I’m ready,” I say, but my voice wobbles with uncertainty.

“Remember, you need to leap straight out so your rope stays tight,” John says. “I know. I’m ready,” I say, with a little more confidence this time. They count down, and the hairs on the back of my neck prick up. “Two . . . one . . . jump!” I leap outward, and the rope stays tight. Just before I make contact with the wood chips, the line whips me away and up toward the other side of the beam. I spin violently at the end of the rope until the swinging and spinning level out, and my body just hangs like a rag doll. I’m completely relaxed from the rush of adrenaline, more present in the moment than I’ve felt in a month. Funny how the closer you come to death, the more alive you feel. Edwin Bobrycki Twain Harte, California

As a (very) young adult in the late

sixties, I was influenced by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and determined to live a life worth writing about. Not that I actually wanted to write, but my life, I believed, should be noteworthy. To that end I made a list of experiences that I thought I should have, including spending time in jail, becoming enlightened (whatever that meant), and parachuting. Then one day I fell from a second-story porch and injured my left kidney and my spleen beyond repair. The organs were removed, and I nearly died. When the doctor sat me down to discharge me, he told me that people live long lives without a spleen and that my remaining kidney would grow to one and a half times its normal size and provide all the filtering I would need, but he cautioned me never to participate in any risky behaviors like sky diving. Relieved, I crossed that experience off the list. Years later I did an internship in a jail and led guided visualizations for the female inmates, which was the closest I came to doing time or finding enlightenment. But I gave up trying to live a remarkable life the day I looked around me and realized that there was not a single person whose life was not worth writing about. Beryl J. Polin Carmel, New York

jerry speier

AGONIZINGGRACE Alan Craig

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“

o you feel you’re a danger to yourself or others?” Dr. Lyman G. Glandy, head psychiatrist at Fairview Psychiatric Hospital, wants to know. He’s interviewing me for the first time since my arrival here three days ago. We’re in my room, a small, Spartan, dimly lit chamber with all the charm of a prison cell. It’s a good question. A few weeks before the drug overdose that got me here, I woke up one early morning in my car outside my favorite bar with a bow and several arrows in my lap and no idea what I was doing with them. I’m a blackout drunk. Of course I’m a danger to myself and others. But I’m not about to admit this to Dr. Glandy. I’ve seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This is a locked ward, and they’ve taken away my shaving equipment. Sure, this is 1983, not the 1950s, but I’m probably going to be here as long as Glandy wants to keep me. Best to say as little as possible. The harder a man tries to convince someone in authority he’s

sane, the loonier he’s going to appear. “What do you think brought you here?” Glandy asks in his annoying monotone after I finally mumble “no” to his question about being a danger. He keeps glancing at his notebook, giving me the impression that he’s reading from a list of questions. He knows as well as I do what brought me here: an overdose of Xanax that I can’t say for sure was an accident. “Overdose,” I say. “Accidental overdose,” I add with too much emphasis. Glandy’s large, lumpy head and bland features put me in mind of a potato. I know what he’s thinking: This guy tried to off himself as sure as we’re sitting here, and I’d better give him a nice long rest. All my adult life I’ve lived in fear of being locked up and at the mercy of cruel and stupid people — “cruel and stupid” being defined as anyone who tries to keep me away from drugs. “Well, let me ask you this,” Glandy says, his washed-out October 2011  The Sun

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brown eyes doing nothing to lessen the potato impression: “How does one take a whole bottle of pills by accident?” I can tell he thinks he’s got me. Would it do more harm than good to try to explain that I’ve been eating Xanax like candy for years now? And I mean that literally, just popping them into my mouth by the handful and chewing them like so many Good & Plenty. With all the booze I was drinking that day, I could have lost track. It could have been an accident. On the other hand, why, if it was an accident, did I wake up on the bathroom floor feeling even more ashamed than usual? Of course the first thing I did after getting off the floor was reach for my Xanax. No matter that I’d just taken enough to kill most people. Finding the bottle empty, and with no prospect of getting any more until my regular psychiatric appointment days later, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: I’d call the fire department. Isn’t that what people generally do when they’ve overdosed? It’s not that I was worried about dying. Since I hadn’t died yet, I figured I probably wasn’t going to. But running out of Xanax — that was a five-alarm emergency. I needed my meds, and for that I needed a doctor. Where better to find one than in a hospital? Naturally I wasn’t thinking clearly, as the last thing any half-sane physician was going to do was give me more pills. After I made the call, I guess I passed out again. All I remember is being carried out of my apartment on a stretcher. They must have gotten my girlfriend Rhonda’s work number from my wallet. She came barging through the doors to the emergency room — where I was busy puking up what was left of the Xanax into a metal basin — and wailed, “Oh, my poor baby!” I was more embarrassed that people would realize this loud, melodramatic woman was my girlfriend than I was about my overdose. “I’m with you right down the line, baby,” she said, sobbing, “right down the line.” I’d like to leave Rhonda. I really would. I often can’t stand being in the same room with her. But I just can’t do it. At times, seeing me waver, she’ll use her tall, skinny body like a weapon, running her purple fingernails up and down her snow-white legs and fondling her tiny breasts while telling me all about the women she’s slept with, how pretty they were and what she did with them. Helpless and half sick with desire and self-hate and the suffocating odor of too much Shalimar perfume, I’ll bury my head in her crotch. But her real power lies in the drugs she’s always bringing home like treats from the bakery: Fiorinal and Darvon for her migraines; Percodan for her chronic jaw pain; Seconal for her insomnia; and, wonder of wonders, tincture of opium for her autoimmune disorder. I slurp down Rhonda’s drugs until I’m a burbling idiot, then sometimes lie on the couch for entire weekends while hallucinating little animals hanging from the ceiling. If I’m lucky, I eventually descend into astonishingly vivid opium dreams, spectacular epics that have all the depth and narrative complexity of Russian novels. Where do they come from, these magnificent dreams? In between trying to figure out a way to leave her, I thank God every day for making Rhonda so unhealthy. 38

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r. Glandy asks me to list all the “illicit substances” I take on a regular basis. I answer truthfully, figuring he already knows anyway from the urine sample I’ve given. The list is long, and Glandy writes as quickly as he can, trying to keep up, his tongue showing between his teeth — as if, when put together, the information might add up to something important. “And how do these drugs make you feel?” Glandy asks when I’m finished. “Feel?” I repeat. “How do you think they make me feel?” “I’m sure I don’t know.” Glandy sniffs. “Why don’t you tell me.” “They make me feel . . .” Even as I start the sentence, I don’t know how I’m going to finish it. It’s like asking how air makes me feel. Without drugs I cannot live. If I ever doubted it, three hellish, Xanax-deprived days at Fairview have settled the issue once and for all. Despite the medication they’re giving me to ease my withdrawal symptoms, I seem to be getting worse by the hour. Every few minutes I get an adrena­ line shock in my chest so powerful it makes me wince. My hands are shaking, and my balance is off. I can’t take more than a few steps without worrying that I’m about to fall over. “Terrible,” I say, assuming that’s what he wants to hear. “The drugs make me feel terrible.” For the first time Glandy gives me a cold little smile of approval. We addicts tend to believe we’re smarter than everyone else, but of course we’re not. Dedicated to the ruinous proposition that feeling good for a little while is more important than our health, our families, our liberty, and our very lives, drug addicts are the stupidest people in existence. And yet, toss a suffering addict like me into the most impossible situation imaginable — say, the locked ward of a mental hospital — and if there’s any conceivable way to obtain his drug of choice, he just might find it. Marshaling what I have left in the way of resources, I admit to Dr. Glandy that I have a drug problem. I see that now. I tell him that I’m grateful, but I’m also prone to anxiety attacks for which I legitimately need Xanax. I honestly don’t see how I could even get to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting without it. I realize this is like asking for more bullets right after I’ve tried to shoot myself in the head, but I want to hear what he has to say. Besides, like every active addict, I’m adept at believing my own bullshit. I do suffer from anxiety. But I also shamelessly abuse the medication for it, taking far more than I’m supposed to, mixing it with other drugs, including alcohol, and even going so far as to crush the pills and snort them for an added jolt. On top of all that, my tolerance is so great by now that I need to take many times the usual dosage to get a noticeable effect. Glandy looks at me with what I take to be incredulous contempt, as if I were some sort of talking insect. But just when I’m certain he’s going to laugh in my face, he says something that fills me with wild hope: “It’s far too early to talk about such things. Let’s see where we are in a couple of weeks.”

I

n my dark and oppressive room at Fairview, my heretofore longsnoozing neurotransmitters, at last freed from the soporific effects of Xanax, are donning party hats and dancing mad jigs. It’s a state of hyperawareness unlike any I’ve ever experienced before. The slightest noise — someone coughing, Glandy’s pen scratching in his notebook — is physically painful. I think too fast. I talk too fast. I have the feeling I’m not controlling my eyes properly. Physical movements like brushing my teeth or reaching for a comb feel abrupt and jerky, as if my limbs were attached to a puppeteer’s strings. Sleep, of course, is impossible. Dr. Glandy stops by every morning. I can’t decide if his obtuseness is genuine or some sort of perverse gambit to infuriate me. He keeps insisting that I’m angry, which I guess I am. (Just what was I doing with that archery equipment?) But his relentless hammering away on the subject serves only to turn any anger I started with into a boiling rage. “So,” Glandy says at one point, his lips parting in a creepy, vaguely sexual way, “do you want to hit me now?”

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hen Rhonda comes to visit, I’ve never seen her looking so good. She’s even washed her hair. I grab her around her waist, suddenly convinced that I love her with all my heart. The life we had together, as sordid as it was, now seems like a paradise. How could I have been so blind? “I’m dying in here, Rhonda,” I say. “I just can’t stand being locked up. Maybe you could find a lawyer to help spring me.” “Do you even have the money for a lawyer?” she asks. “Well, I was hoping maybe you could lend it to me,” I say. She grows strangely distant and tells me that money’s tight. But since I signed myself in, she explains, I can leave anytime. All I have to do is sign myself out “against medical advice.” They could go to court to hold me, but they never do that. (Rhonda’s no dummy. Although she works as a janitor, she’s got a BA in philosophy.) It’s true. I did sign myself in. I was still so high on pills, I’d have signed anything. But I didn’t realize I could just turn around and sign myself back out. For the first time I see that Rhonda’s customary purple nail polish has been replaced by hot pink. “What’s going on, Rhonda?” I ask weakly. She looks at the floor for a long time. “I’ve met someone,” she says. “I’m sorry to tell you about it in here. You know: with you being locked up and in crisis and all.” So much for all that Oh, my sweet baby and I’m with you right down the line. “Met someone? How could you have met someone? I’ve been gone a week.” “I know, I know,” she says. “It seems longer, though.”

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here’s something about being locked up in a mental hospital that induces a man to take stock. One thing’s entirely clear: the way some are born to music or art or mathematics, I was born to addiction. It’s in my DNA, as fixed a part of who I am as my frizzy brown hair and short, fat fingers. By the time I

was nine years old, I was already dreaming about one day taking drugs, trying to imagine how they’d feel, and wondering whether they could ease the loneliness and anxiety I couldn’t recall ever being without. I’m not sure how, at such a young age, I made the connection between taking drugs and the relief of psychic pain, but I did. I loved reading about drugs and drug addicts and watching movies about them. These were often just propaganda intended to scare kids away, but I wasn’t fooled. The scarier they tried to make drugs sound, the more I wanted them. Obviously anything that could cause a man to endure so much trouble must be pretty damn good. Interestingly enough, the way I imagined that drugs would feel — I mean the narcotics that have been my lifelong passion — was mostly accurate. The first time I snorted Demerol (a strong painkiller a friend had stolen from his dying grandmother), it was a kind of vindication. “I knew it,” I said to my friend. “I just knew it would be this good.” But it was more than that. I’d not only known that it would be this good; I’d known that it would be this good in pretty much just this way. My first thought was: Please, God, make this last. The temporary nature of a high is the addict’s essential torment, the existential quandary he can’t outrun. I’ve never had a high, no matter how intense, that I haven’t at least partly ruined by checking my watch: I feel great at this moment, but for how much longer? How long now? How long now?

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t our next session Dr. Glandy informs me that if I want to get out of the locked ward, I’m going to have to earn it by mixing with the other patients. “You can’t hide in your room forever,” he says. I consider asking him whether what Rhonda told me is true: that I can just sign myself out. But it’s beginning to dawn on me that the last thing I want right now is to be released. I can’t even begin to imagine facing life outside without Xanax, and it looks like I don’t even have a place to live. It’s Rhonda’s name on the lease. I tentatively appeal to Dr. Glandy for a little Xanax, just to get me through this. To my horror I start to weep. All my instincts tell me that if I’m to have any hope of getting this man to fork over the goods, I’m going to have to speak to him from a position of calm, reasoned strength. But I can’t help myself. As much as I dislike Glandy, and as much as I loathe having to beg, I’m desperate. Of course he turns me down, but then adds, “If you insist, I can always give you something else to calm you down, but, believe me, you won’t like it.” Maybe it’s my fragile mental state, but his tone seems even more icy than usual. “What do you mean, if I ‘insist’?” I ask, scrutinizing his stony face to discern whether he’s making some sort of veiled threat. And yet, despite my fears about cruel doctors and nurses, I somehow can’t picture Glandy having me tied down and injecting me with a powerful antipsychotic like Thorazine. I’m October 2011  The Sun

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not crazy — at least, not that kind of crazy. Perhaps even more to the point, I’ve never been able to bring myself to accept the possibility that something really bad could ever happen to me as a result of my drug use. True, my current address is the locked ward of a mental hospital. And, true, I did take nearly a hundred Xanax — an act that, if not explicitly suicidal, was certainly desperate. But to my drug addict’s way of thinking, all of this somehow seems not that serious. Even the torments of Xanax withdrawal don’t carry any message beyond the realization that there’s just about nothing I wouldn’t do to make them go away. Sure, if you asked, I’d tell you I’ve no one to blame but myself. I’d even mean it. After years of running away, making bad decisions, and postponing the slightest discomfort till another, more convenient, day, what did I expect? A wife and kids and a house in the suburbs? I’m thirty years old and can’t point to a single thing I’ve ever done that I can be proud of. But it seems obvious to me that this is the result of poor character, not addiction. Above all else perhaps, we active drug addicts tend to be inveterate optimists. The very act of ingesting on a daily basis large quantities of inherently dangerous substances whose purity often cannot be ascertained is, by its nature, wildly optimistic. And no matter how bad life might be at any given moment, we’re always thinking it will soon get better. We don’t know, of course, just what miracle will intervene to make this happen, but we believe in our hearts that it will. After Glandy leaves, I decide I don’t have much of a choice but to do as he asks and get out of my room more. Besides, I’m sick of lying on my bed and staring up at the ceiling. I’ve finished the couple of novels I somehow thought to bring with me, and all I’ve got left is the Alcoholics Anonymous (aa) book Rhonda left on my bedside table when I wasn’t looking. Who does she think she is? She’s almost as much of an addict as I am. So I slowly open the door and venture into the day room, blinking against the harsh fluorescent lights like a man emerging from a cave. I’m dizzy and disoriented, and the air seems strangely thin, as if I’ve been transported to an alien planet. A psychiatric hospital isn’t really a hospital at all but a temporary sanctuary, a place to rest and perhaps heal, out of reach, if desired, of troublesome family and angry employers and maybe even, to some extent, the law. We’re all grievously wounded, and because we know and accept this, we treat one another for the most part with kindness. It doesn’t matter who we were on the outside or what we might have done to get here. My fellow patients include Mike, a man with sad, redveined eyes who drank and gambled away a plumbing-supply business he’d inherited from his father-in-law; Neal, a state trooper who embezzled money to fund his cocaine habit (he says his attempt to hang himself was just a “trick” to help him stay out of jail); and Sarah, an attractive married woman who suffers from bipolar disorder and occasional delusions, although you’d never know it from her friendly, open manner. There’s also a heroin addict named Carl, a tall, confident, chain-smoking black man of perhaps fifty who mostly keeps to himself. Sarah tells me he’s a poet and actor. 40

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Having once had vague dreams of becoming a writer, I find myself watching Carl closely. I admire his poise, and I like that he had the good sense to get addicted to a respectable drug like heroin. (That I’ve been brought low by tranquilizers, of all things, feels pathetic.) If anything, Carl almost seems a little too cool. For someone withdrawing from heroin, he looks awfully comfortable. Feet up, smoking endless Newports with obvious enjoyment, he’s always got a book in hand: Dostoyevsky, Kurt Vonnegut, the Bible. He also has a rather florid way of speaking, tossing out fifty-cent words in this nickel-and-dime environment and using his sonorous voice to good, if unnecessary, effect. But I can’t hold any of that against him. He’s obviously a smart and talented guy with a lot going for him. Watching Carl, I decide my big mistake has been in using drugs as a way to get through life rather than for pleasure. Someone who can’t function without his medication is by definition “sick,” something I desperately do not want to be. Sure, Carl got hooked too. But it’s clear that, once he kicks the habit, he has the capacity to live a good and productive life. For me sobriety means nothing but a bleak, wretched, marginal existence. Of course, now that I think about it, that’s not much different from the life I’ve been leading on drugs.

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y conversations with Dr. Glandy revolve around my release date and what I keep calling the “utter impossibility” of my living without Xanax. Glandy wants me to spend a couple of weeks in the unlocked part of the hospital, where I’d have daily group therapy and go to AA meetings. I keep insisting that I want to go home, but since I’ve apparently no home to go to, this is mostly a pose to salvage my dignity. I’ve been berating myself for letting Glandy see me cry, and I vow never again to look that weak in front of him. It’s OK to tell him that I can’t live without Xanax; that’s just my addict’s pitch, a case of a man doing what he needs to do. But it’s definitely not OK to let him in on my shameful secret: that I’m an inadequate human being with no more ability to live a responsible adult life than a seven-year-old. One day Carl, Sarah, and I are sitting around a table in the day room, eating our lunch of chipped beef on soggy toast from cafeteria trays. I’ve become aware lately that if I’m asked personal questions, I have a tendency to start perspiring. I tell myself not to worry about it, but it keeps happening. “So, Alan,” Sarah says, fixing me with her beautiful brown eyes, “tell us how you’re doing. I’ve noticed you don’t say much.” I see Carl watching me intently, too, clearly curious how I’m going to answer. The pressure of the two sets of eyes is too much, and my face flushes with heat while beads of moisture pop out on my forehead. The fear that Sarah and Carl will notice this only makes me sweat more until the perspiration is streaming down my face. I can barely mumble a reply. I ask Dr. Glandy about my sweating during our next session. I’ve mentioned it before in passing, but now I’m really starting to grow concerned. And yet, if there’s one thing I should have learned by now, it’s that Glandy is not the reas-

suring type. “All I can really suggest,” he says, “is that you try to relax, as this sort of thing can become permanent if you let it.” That’s just great, I think, mentally cataloging my many miseries: At times I’m experiencing almost unbearable anxiety, rolling waves of panic at least several orders of magnitude greater than the anxiety that caused me to seek out Xanax in the first place. The world is looking so glaringly bright that if I don’t maintain a perpetual squint, my eyes begin to water. The adrenaline shocks continue unabated. I’ve still got the same nasty headache I’ve had since I got here. If anything, it’s getting worse. And now I’ve suddenly become a person who sweats when answering simple questions. It’s as if Fairview were a kind of reverse Lourdes, a place one goes to experience great miracles of torment and ill health.

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hen Glandy informs me that I have to either move to the unlocked part of the hospital or go home, I call Rhonda. She answers on the first ring, as if she were waiting for my call — or somebody’s call, anyway. “I’m glad you called, baby,” she says. So we’re back to “baby.” It’s a good sign, though that favorite word of hers makes me uneasy. It always has. She tells me to forget all that about her having met someone. She was confused and scared. “Come home to me,” she says. “I love you, baby.” As much as I need this woman, I just can’t seem to get out the requisite “I love you too.” “Don’t you love me, baby?” I can hear her beginning to sniffle. If she’d just stop calling me “baby” for a few seconds, I might be able to tell her that I do. Something inside me resents the level of intimacy the endearment implies. But then, what have she and I been for the last two years if not intimate? I clearly think I’m better than she is, but on what basis? She cleans the apartment, buys the groceries, cooks the food, and brings home the drugs. What do I contribute? A couple of bucks now and then from my crummy job as a security guard. Rhonda has her share of problems, but she’s an intelligent, loving woman. OK, so she’s not particularly loyal. Why should she be? I’ve given her nothing. I think about the time Rhonda’s autoimmune illness suddenly worsened. While she sat up all night moaning in agony, I never even once got out of bed to comfort her. Two days later she had surgery, and all I could think about was all the great drugs I’d be getting. “Jesus, Rhonda,” I say, “you know I love you.” As I speak the words, I realize I mean them. At the same time I also realize that I can’t go back to her. Not right away, anyway. I tell her that I’m going to stay for another couple of weeks. There’s group therapy and AA meetings. Maybe they can help me. After that, we’ll talk. “Oh, my darling,” Rhonda says, weeping hard now, “I’m so proud. When you’re ready to come back to me, I’ll be here for you.” I hang up feeling guilty and ashamed, but Rhonda’s told

me what I wanted to hear: she will take me back if I need her.

I

’m packing my few belongings into an old duffel bag for my move to the unlocked part of the hospital when I notice Carl standing in the doorway to my room. “All set for the big day, my young friend?” he asks. Carl is moving out of the locked ward today as well. As always, he’s immaculately put together, his hair perfectly coiffed. “Not really,” I answer. Carl assures me that if he can clean up, anyone can. It’s just a question of hitting bottom. I must look skeptical, because he asks, in a tone that implies I’d have to be insane to think otherwise, “You do think you’ve hit bottom, don’t you?” I tell him I’m not sure what “hitting bottom” really means. “For what it’s worth, I can tell you what I think it means,” Carl says. “I think it’s a kind of grace. A kind of painful, agonizing grace.” He must have gotten this line from one of his books. Nobody talks like that. And anyway, Carl looks about as agonized as someone on a Caribbean cruise. “Look, man,” Carl tells me, “if you need a place to stay when we get out of here, why don’t you live with me and my wife for a while. We can go to meetings together. It’s a quiet place, and no one will bother you.” I try to imagine what it might be like to stay with Carl, to go to meetings with him, maybe meet his artist friends. I might even try a little writing. I bet he could help me with that. With Carl and his wife I might have a chance. With Rhonda I’ll be right back where I started. For an instant I feel a surge of hope. But who am I kidding? I’d like to stay with Carl. I would. But I’m too afraid, too full of self-hate, and, in some twisted, self-defeating way, too proud. Before I can think of a respectable-sounding excuse, Carl’s eyes drop to Rhonda’s book, still lying next to my bed where she left it. “Hey, the AA ‘Big Book.’ I’m reading it too. What do you think?” “It’s OK. Some helpful pointers,” I mumble, hoping he’ll leave it at that, since I haven’t read a single word. Carl says it’s just superb, in his opinion. Timeless literature in its way. Lays out the whole AA philosophy beautifully. “Incidentally,” he adds, as if he’s letting me in on some excellent news, “I hear they have a regular meeting right here on the premises.” I half expect Carl to start rubbing his hands together, he seems so happy at the prospect. “Now why don’t we take a walk to the nurses’ station. Maybe we can get someone to unlock that door for us.” Even though I find Carl’s enthusiasm grating, I don’t want to be left alone, so I stumble after him. As we head out the door, I hesitate. Maybe I feel guilty for having lied to Carl, or maybe I feel like a louse for not appreciating Rhonda’s attempts to help. All I know is something makes me go back to get the book. The nurses’ station is on the other side of the ward, and I follow Carl there, down a long, winding corridor that seems to go on forever.   n October 2011  The Sun

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james lepore

View From The Overlook a short story by Ann Joslin Williams

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arge, feathery clusters of snow spiraled toward the windshield. From the passenger seat, Nora could see between the thinning trees to the ravine below, where snowflakes seemed to hover and rise in undulating waves. For a moment she felt content, leaning back in her seat as Gil steered the car up the steep incline. A sign at the turnoff had warned that the unpaved road through the notch, a shortcut over the mountains, wasn’t plowed during winter months. Nora was nervous about the conditions, but Gil didn’t seem concerned. They were head-

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ing home after a weekend in Vermont, and Gil was in a hurry to get to Boston because his teenage sons were flying in from Colorado that night. The snow seemed to be coming down faster; the road could get worse as they went up. Nora wondered if the tires on the Hyundai were any good in snow. “Is it slippery?” she asked. “It’s fine,” Gil said with an edge, perhaps a little unnerved himself. His chin was cocked toward the windshield as he concen-

trated on driving. Lines fanned from the corner of his eye — she’d always thought of them as smile wrinkles, but now, with his lips pressed together, the creases made him look tired, old, and a little mean. She’d been introduced to Gil at a party two years earlier. A professor of art at the same college where she was getting her master’s in literature, he was a good-looking man, in shape, with a full head of curly salt-and-pepper hair. She’d first noticed him from across the room by his laugh, one that signaled confidence and a good nature. She hadn’t been able to guess his age — forty-five, it turned out, fourteen years older than she was. Regarding his divorce, he’d told her days later, he’d been an idiot and slept with a visiting artist. He and his wife had been growing apart long before that; the affair, though, had triggered their separation. After the divorce his wife had moved with the boys to Denver, her hometown. The boys liked Colorado. His wife had remarried quickly. When the tires lost their grip and spun before catching again, she gasped and clutched the dash. Gil shook his head. “OK, so I’m a bit jumpy,” she said. “As we go the way of the Donner party.” “Very funny,” he said. “If it came to that,” she said, “and I die, you have permission to use my body for sustenance. It would be an honor to save you. Just cut off a slice of arm, or better yet . . .” She lifted herself to the side and patted her behind. “That is a distasteful joke,” Gil said. “Ha ha,” she said, and thumped him on the shoulder. He smiled, pleased with her acknowledgement of the pun. She loved that smile, dimples dimpling and the way it lingered, usually blossoming into that robust laugh. His paintings had the same vibrancy. It wasn’t hard to be attracted to his colorful spirit: he liked adventures and always had a plan. They’d scouted new restaurants, explored little towns, hiked mountains, sailed, camped on the coast of Maine. Time had passed in this way, locking them together, creating a past behind them, and pulling them on into the future. Gil urged the car along as they hit a steeper incline. “We’re almost at the top,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get a view,” she said. “Can we stop for a minute?” She knew he was nervous about getting to the airport on time. He first had to drive to New Hampshire to drop her off at her apartment in Nottingham; then he’d go on to the airport in Boston. He hadn’t yet included her in his plans with the boys. Usually he went west or met them for ski trips elsewhere. When they’d come east the previous summer for the first time, he’d hemmed and hawed, then told her he wasn’t ready to introduce a new woman into their lives. The boys, he’d said, were still getting used to him as a part-time dad. She’d spent the week trying to forget that her lover was just across town pretending to his sons that she didn’t exist. The snow seemed to be thinning, and as they came to the crest, the sky brightened, and Nora could just make out the peak that rose on the other side of the ravine. A maroon van was parked in the lookout spot.

“Looks like we’re not alone,” Gil said as he pulled over beside the van. The freezing air stung her nostrils when she stepped out of the car. The van was dented and scratched, rusty around the wheels. Newspapers had been stuck against the windshield from the inside. There were no footprints in the snow around it. Gil sank his hands into his pockets and walked to the edge of the overlook. Nora followed close behind him. There was a narrow gap between the newspapers. Maybe someone was in there watching them. Or maybe the owners had gone off on foot in search of help. A gust swirled the flakes around them. For an instant she saw a span of the fir-tree valley below and the gray ridges beyond. Then it was gone, lost in the foggy white. Icy pellets flew against her face; she shut her eyes, remembering the igloo — a childhood fantasy. She’d told Gil about it yesterday when they were skiing on the trails behind the inn: She’d be driving a dog sled through blasting snow, her two babies swaddled and strapped on board, headed to the igloo. Once there, it would be warm and shimmering inside, the white ice-dome ceiling curving above. A fire roared in the center, but somehow nothing melted. Getting the babies and dogs in safe from the storm was the satisfying part. Over time the igloo grew more and more elaborate: carved-ice furniture and other rooms full of supplies, joined by arched tunnels. “Two kids,” Gil had remarked. “Where was the dad?” She’d shrugged. There was never a father, no husband; maybe dogs and children (who were as easy as dolls) were all she’d wanted then. “Come here, Eskimo woman,” Gil had said, and leaned in to rub his nose against hers. “My ice man,” she’d said giddily, though just as suddenly she’d felt strangely protective of her fantasy. Then, a thrill — a baby suggested somehow? Gil had pulled back, looked away. “Let’s get moving,” he’d said before skiing ahead. Now Gil turned and looked at the van with the news­ paper stuck to the windshield. Why would anyone do that? A makeshift curtain? Maybe someone was camping in there. As she and Gil went back to the car, she peered through the van’s side window. On the dashboard were food wrappers, crumpled maps, a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. “Do you think they broke down?” she asked. It wouldn’t be right to leave without at least checking. “Hello?” she called out, then knocked twice on the door. Nothing. “What are you doing?” Gil asked. “Let’s go.” She hesitated. But then, with the cold cutting at her neck, she hurried back to the car. Gil started the engine and pulled onto the road. After a few yards he braked and put the car into reverse. “What?” she said. “He wants something.” She looked behind to see a man standing in the road, motioning for them to come back. The man wore jeans and an unbuttoned shirt. Perhaps he’d been asleep in the van, bundled in a sleeping bag, and had only just awakened, dressed, and stepped outside in time to catch them. The car whined as they backed up, and the man October 2011  The Sun

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took a few steps forward to meet them. Blond, thin, shoulderlength hair flew around his head, flattening out, then shooting straight up in the wind. He held his eyes wide open almost like an actor feigning mock alarm. Gil rolled the window down, and the man put his hands on top of the car, leaning toward them. “What’s up?” Gil said. “You have a problem?” the man asked at nearly the same time. “Do you need some help?” Gil said. “A ride or —” “Can you tell me where on God’s green earth a person can find a bit of privacy?” Nora drew back in her seat. “Excuse me?” Gil asked. “I said, where can people get left alone?” He spoke slowly, emphasizing each word. “Banging on my door.” “Oh,” Nora said. She tugged the seat belt away from her shoulder so she could lean forward, show him her whole face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We didn’t mean to bother you.” “Staring in my windows.” “Sorry we disturbed you,” Gil said. Nora cringed at Gil’s sarcastic tone. “I apologize,” she said, and presented what she hoped was a sympathetic expression. “This is such a peaceful spot, though, isn’t it?” she added, as if they were all enjoying it together. Then the man slapped the roof of the car, a bit too hard, Nora thought, though it seemed to be a gesture of release as he stepped back. He rubbed his bare hands together. Maybe they stung from the impact or the cold. Then he swung one hand behind his back and tugged his shirt or scratched himself. For one horrifying second Nora imagined he had a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants. But he brought his hand back, empty, and crossed his arms over his chest, as if to indicate he was done with them. Gil began to ease the car forward, zipping the window up. Nora didn’t look back, but she saw Gil glance in the rearview mirror. “Is he still there?” she asked. “He’s going back to the van.” Nora didn’t turn; she didn’t want the man to think they were the least bit fazed by him. Neither she nor Gil spoke until they were down the hill and the man and the van were out of sight. “I don’t know why I backed up,” Gil said. “I could see something wasn’t right about him.” “You thought he needed help. Of course you backed up for him.” “Weird that he stopped us,” he said. “I mean, if he really wanted to be left alone.” “Did you see how he reached around to his back, up under his shirt?” she asked. “I think he might have had a gun.” “Really?” Gil didn’t sound convinced. The snow had stopped, but the road was still covered. “What was with the windows blocked?” “Maybe he’s hiding out from the law,” she said. “What a jerk,” Gil said. “What did he think — we’d tres44

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passed on his private domain?” Gil sped up, and Nora stiffened. “Maybe he thought we saw something,” she said. At a curve she tensed when it seemed they might not make the bend. Her foot hit the floor as if to brake. Gil didn’t slow down or say anything. She wished the road would level out. “You shouldn’t have gotten so close, looking in his windows,” Gil said. “What are you talking about? Now you sound like him.” “And you don’t engage crazy people in conversation, by the way.” “What? I didn’t.” “ ‘It’s such a peaceful spot,’ ” he said, his pitch raised as if to imitate hers. “I wanted him to see that we were there for the same reasons. That we understood,” she said. “Somehow I don’t think he cared about the view.” She thought to say something funny to lighten the mood, though she didn’t know what. Maybe Gil was speaking out of concern for her safety, like a disapproving but well-meaning parent. He patted her knee, his way of apologizing. She saw him glance at the clock. “We could go straight to the airport if you’re worried,” she said. “There’s plenty of time,” Gil said. “When do they get in?” “There’s plenty of time,” he repeated. “You know, I could go with you. We could take them to dinner at that Chinese place on Route 1.” Gil was silent; maybe he was considering her idea. She knew she was pushing him, but it was ridiculous that she hadn’t met his kids. She’d seen them, though. Last summer, during their visit, she’d spied Gil’s car parked near the lake. She pulled over a half mile down the road and took the footpath to the beach. Gil and his sons were at the far end, hoisting the sail on a boat. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the older one, Andy, appeared to ask a question, and Gil smiled and put his arm around the boy’s shoulder, drew him close. The younger one, Jake, said something, and then they all laughed. Now Gil said, “Let’s just get off this mountain first.” “It’s been over two years,” she said. “Three since your divorce.” Gil’s face darkened. “I know how long it’s been,” he said. The road zigzagged, and the car went into a skid. Gil grabbed the steering wheel hand over hand. They spun down the road at an angle, then backward. Tree trunks whizzed by inches from her window. For a second they were straight, once again headed in the right direction, but the tires couldn’t get any traction on the snowy road, and the momentum of the spin sent them off to the right until they slammed into a tree.

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he forest was quiet, muffled under the covering of snow, except for frozen trees that moaned in the cold air. Other than a dented passenger door and a cracked headlight, everything was all right. The car started. The heater worked. The wheels were straight. But they were in a ditch, snow up over the hubcaps.

Nora stood on the road and watched as Gil pumped the gas, trying to rock the car out. She checked her cellphone: no bars. Then she got behind the wheel while he pushed. The tires dug in deeper. Gil opened the driver’s door and motioned her out. He bumped into her in his hurry to get back in, and she knew he was thinking about his sons’ plane coming in. She gazed up the hill. All was gray and white and stark. And then, as if she’d conjured it, the front of the van came into view, its wide tires eating up the snow, enlarging their tracks. Gil got out of the car. They stood off the road as the van neared. “Jesus Christ,” Gil said. He busied himself, kicking at the snow around the back wheel and scraping it away with the side of his boot. The van slowed. Passed. For half a second she felt relief. Then the brake lights came on. The van stopped. Gil bent low, surveying the underside of the car. The man’s shirt was buttoned now, and he wore a grimy canvas jacket over it. He came around the back of the van and looked at them as if amused. “What’s up?” he said. Nora wondered if he was mimicking the way Gil had said this to him earlier. She looked straight at him, refusing to be intimidated. “We’re stuck,” she said. The man reached into his coat pocket, took out a pack of cigarettes, and lit one. “Cigarette?” he said and held the pack toward her. “No, thanks,” she said as brightly as she could, though she considered taking one just to be polite. The man shrugged and tucked the pack into his chest pocket. “Looks like you’re not going anywhere,” he called to Gil, who’d climbed back into the car. The engine roared, and the tires whirled in smooth, icy ruts. Gil got out and tramped to the back of the car to inspect the tires. “Do you think you could help push?” Nora asked the man. “Maybe with the two of you we could get it out.” The man dropped his cigarette and crushed it into the snow with the toe of his boot. Then he stared at Gil and twisted his lips sideways, considering her request. He clearly wasn’t going to do anything unless Gil asked. Nora marched toward the car and slid in behind the wheel. Gil stared at her through the windshield. She raised her eyebrows at him — a pleading look. It scared her to see the worry on his face. Then he turned toward the man and said, “It would be a help. If you wouldn’t mind.” Nora worked the pedals as the two men stood on either side of the bumper, pushing. In the rearview mirror she could see Gil’s face screwed up with concentration and effort. All she could see of the man in the side mirror was his arm and one boot digging into the snow. Suddenly the man’s face filled the mirror. He’d come forward and gripped the handle of her door. For a moment she thought he meant to open it and reach for her, but then she realized he’d repositioned himself for leverage. She could see that Gil had been startled by this move too; he stopped pushing and stood erect. The man kept pushing and grunting as if he could launch the car without their help

at all. If anything, he was lodging the car deeper into the drift. Nora stepped on the gas again, but without Gil’s counterforce the car shuddered in its frame, the wheels skittering. Nora gripped the steering wheel. She wondered if the man meant to be malicious. She turned in her seat to catch Gil’s attention, but he didn’t look her way. He stood off to the side, staring at the man with a look of resignation. She wanted to yell at him to push, but the noise of the engine was too loud. Instead she laid on the horn. Gil jumped at the sound. The man responded by digging in harder. Gil shook his head at her as if the whole world had gone crazy but then came forward to push once more. Nora pressed the gas gingerly, careful not to let the tires spin. The engine labored, chugged, then stalled. The car rolled back. Gil and the man stepped away as she turned the key. The engine wouldn’t turn over. She tried several times before the man leaned toward her window and said, “Flooded it.” “Great,” Gil said. He stomped his feet as if they were frozen. “Try again.” “Not yet,” the man said. He took out a cigarette and lit it. Gil rolled his eyes and kicked at the snow, sending up a spray. The man leaned against the car just behind her window and smoked. The odor bit into her nostrils. Nora turned the key. The engine made a dull groan. The man leaned down a bit, elbow on the edge of her window. “Not just yet, sad eyes.” He grinned, his gray teeth appearing slowly. Nora turned away, then back, determined to look different from whatever it was that he saw. For some reason he laughed. “Hey,” Gil said, “do you have a rope or something? Maybe you could pull us.” “Naw,” the man said. “You don’t have a rope?” “Can’t pull you,” the man said. “Are you sure it’s flooded?” Nora asked. “Or do we need a jump?” The man bent closer, and she resisted the urge to lean in the other direction. She didn’t want to appear frightened. “It is what it is,” the man said. “It ain’t anything else. Flooded.” Nora took a long breath and plunked herself back against the seat. “Doubt me all you want,” he said. “You think I don’t know these little Jap imports? Fourteen years I worked my father’s garage. Took it over when he passed.” “Let’s push again,” Gil said. “You can push all day,” the man said. Gil sucked his upper lip in. “Jesus H.,” he said under his breath. “A curse ain’t going to get you anywhere,” the man said. Gil’s chin went up in defiance. He looked like he was about to say something that he might regret. “The snow’s let up, anyway,” Nora said. “That’s good.” “I didn’t curse,” Gil said. “Lord’s name in vain,” the man said matter-of-factly. “No call for it.” October 2011  The Sun

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grant m. ryan

“We’ve got to get to Boston,” she said. “To the airport. Our sons are flying in.” Our sons. It had just come out of her. She wasn’t sure if Gil had heard. “They’ve been visiting their grandparents in Denver. We thought this would be a shortcut.” She gave a chuckle. “How many boys you got?” the man asked. “Two,” she said. “Andy and Jake. Thirteen and fourteen. Smart kids, but if we aren’t there . . .” She stopped herself from tacking on God knows, afraid any mention of God, benign or not, might set him off. Gil had stopped stomping around in the road and stood still, listening. “They’re good boys. Appreciate the wilderness, mountains, sailing. They love to sail.” She wished she’d said something else, something not so upper crust. “Boats,” she said. “Water.” “I don’t know anything about that,” the man said, looking down at the snow. Behind the man she could see Gil holding his hands out, palms up. She could hear the question in his head: Why are you telling him about my kids? “Try it now,” the man said. “OK,” she said, turning the key. There was a sawing noise, then it caught. She pressed the gas, let the engine warm to it. Gil and the man went to the back of the car. They pushed as she pressed on the gas. To her surprise the car popped right out, and she steered it onto the road and came to a stop behind the van. The two men walked around to the driver’s side. They both 46

The Sun  October 2011

had the same satisfied, slightly proud grin. “Well, that worked,” Gil said to the man. “Thanks.” The man shrugged. “Got to help thy fellow man,” he said, condescension in his tone. Nora leaned out the window. “We appreciate it,” she said, then slid over to the passenger side as Gil got in. The man continued to stand next to the car. “Well,” Nora said, “we better get going so we can pick up our boys.” “Two teens,” the man said. “You don’t look old enough.” Nora summoned up a laugh. “Well, thanks,” she said. “We’re going to be late,” Gil said, pulling his seat belt over his shoulder. “Yes,” Nora said to the man, “and thanks to you we’re on our way.” “I always stop for a lady,” the man said. Then to Gil, “You’re lucky to have such a nice wife. Get her home safe.” Gil adjusted the rearview mirror, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as if he’d just swallowed something.

T

hey were now in the uncomfortable position of having to follow the van down the mountain. Gil pumped the brakes as the van slowed; then the van sped up, and Gil sucked air and shook his head. “What is it with this guy?” he said. She wanted to tell Gil to be patient, that the man was probably just being careful.

“He did help us,” she said. Gil exhaled sharply through his nose. The road turned and opened out into an expanse of snowcovered fields. The van started to move a little faster ahead of them on the flat stretch. They were off the mountain and would soon hit the main road. She turned to look behind them, up to the ridges. The sky was blue now, and sunlight warmed her face. She realized that she wasn’t ready to go home, back to her apartment, to everyday life. “So, about meeting my kids,” Gil said. She looked at him hopefully, but when he turned toward her, she saw his resolve. “It’s unfair,” she said. Her eyes pricked and filled. Gil laid his hand on her leg. “Nora,” he said, “I’ll never be able to make you happy. I just can’t —” Heat rose in her. “It’s not your responsibility to make me happy.” She felt tears slip. Gil’s shoulders sagged, then he nodded in slow determination, as if he’d been trying to bring her to this conclusion all along. He sighed and reeled out what sounded like a speech that had been long in the making: There was college to pay for, ski trips, new computers. Soon the boys would learn to drive, and he dreaded the thought of them behind the wheel. In the beginning, he said, he’d thought he wanted to get married again, have more children. He hadn’t meant to mislead her, but last month, when her period had been late, he’d realized he didn’t want to do it all again. Through her blurred sight she saw the glow of the van’s brake lights. Gil jammed down on the pedal. They slid forward, stopping only inches behind the van. For a moment they sat in shock. Nora realized that Gil had reached across her, his arm like a bar against her chest. Her heart was beating in her ears. Gil put the car in reverse and moved them back several yards. The van’s driver door opened and hung there, no sign of anyone. Then, to their amazement, the passenger door opened too. A woman climbed out. She was short and round, draped in a long overcoat. Limp brown hair hung from under a woolen watch cap. She glanced at the car behind the van and put her finger up as if to say, One minute. Then the woman disappeared in front of the van, but not before Nora realized she was pregnant. The driver got out. Gil rolled down his window, stuck his head out. The man took a few steps toward them. “Taking a piss,” he yelled over. Gil put his window up. What was there to say? There was a woman in the van. She was pregnant, and now she was squatting in front of the van, peeing. “She was in there all this time,” Nora said. It was as if the van itself had given birth. Gil tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, bobbed his head toward the clock. There might not be time for him to drop her off, she realized. He might not have any choice but

to take her with him to the airport. Nora saw Gil look for a way around the van, but the road was narrow, and the snow obscured what could be ditches to either side. “I hate to suggest this,” Gil said, “but to save time, maybe there’s a bus station or —” Later she’d tell her friends that the day she’d ended it with Gil, it had felt as if an avalanche had crashed into her, swept her out of the car. She could sense Gil’s bewilderment as she threw open the door and clomped away, heading for the van. The woman and the man met her at the back. The woman waddled, leading with her large belly. The deal was made, and Nora went back to tell Gil and get her duffel bag. He wasn’t happy with it; they didn’t know anything about these people. He took down the license-plate number and made her promise to call when she got home. It was the pregnant woman, perhaps, that helped him let her go. Now, given the front seat in the van, Nora turned to smile at the woman, who lay on her side in the back on a blue-striped mattress strewn with blankets and pillows. The woman smiled back, a hand on her belly. Nora asked how far along she was. The woman told her seven months. Plenty of time before they made their way to Atlanta, where she had folks. They’d probably settle down there, since they’d lost the garage in the recession. Nora nodded, trying to seem at ease, but her knees bobbed uncontrollably. She pressed her palms against them, noticed that her feet were stepping on empty fast-food wrappers and bags. The man had accepted Nora’s offer without question: fifty bucks to drop her at the bus station in Burlington. Maybe she had given Gil just what he’d wanted — to head off alone without her in tow — but still she felt some sense of retribution. She’d taken the initiative and made a quick, brave plan; she’d get herself home. When the man reached across her toward the dash, she flinched before she realized he was going for a pack of Marlboros. Finding it empty, he crumpled the pack and tossed it on the floor at her feet. He patted his pockets, and soon he had lit a cigarette. Nora thought she might choke as the smoke filled the van. She couldn’t wait for this to be over, to be on the bus, to be home. Dark, wet pavement appeared just beyond a small bank of plowed snow. The driver stepped hard on the gas to push through it. A loud bang, like a gunshot, blasted throughout the van. Nora jumped, her arms flying up. The pregnant woman exclaimed, “Oh!” “Backfire,” the man said, as calm as could be. “Carburetor needs work. But not to worry, ladies. It’ll get us where we need to go.” Nora took hold of the armrest as the van jolted through the slushy drift and out onto the clear highway. She leaned her head against the window to watch in the side mirror as Gil’s car turned east. How on earth did I get here? she wondered, though as the distance between them grew, it didn’t feel so unfamiliar. Soon the car melted into a tiny, glistening drop and vanished around a curve.  n October 2011  The Sun

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sunbeams Find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there. Gary Snyder Activism is my rent for living on this planet.

Alice Walker

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not. Dr. Seuss So exiled have even basic questions of freedom become from the political vocabulary that they sound musty and ridiculous, and vulnerable to the ultimate badge of shame — “That’s so sixties!” — the entire decade having been mocked so effectively that social protest seems outlandish and “so last-century,” just another style excess like love beads and Nehru jackets. Laura Kipnis I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it. Martin Sheen I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it. Mitch Hedberg The question is not “Can you make a difference?” You already do make a difference. It’s just a matter of what kind of difference you want to make during your life on this planet. Julia Butterfly Hill Idealists . . . foolish enough to throw caution to the winds . . . have advanced mankind and enriched the world. Emma Goldman It takes six simpletons and one zealot to start a movement. Anzia Yezierska Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it. Malcolm X WHAT DO WE WANT?! Respectful discourse. WHEN DO WE WANT IT?! Now would be agreeable to me, but I am interested in your opinion. Message on a protest sign

A disturber of the peace, am I? Yes, indeed, of my own peace. Do you call this disturbing the peace that instead of spending my time in frivolous amusements I have visited the plagueinfested and carried out the dead? Katherine Zell Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl. Nellie McClung Dare to do things worthy of imprisonment if you mean to be of consequence.  Juvenal There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will. Hannah Arendt We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. Martin Luther King Jr. There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. Elie Wiesel So often we think we have got to make a difference and be a big dog. Let us just try to be little fleas biting. Enough fleas biting strategically can make a big dog very uncomfortable. Marian Wright Edelman Around the time my mother taught me how to tie my shoes, she also taught me how to protest. Her rules were simple: Look respectable, act respectable, and don’t give the opposition any ammunition. Together we buttoned those top buttons and combed our hair for peace, civil rights, the ERA. You name it, we marched for it. In sensible shoes. Julia King The struggle is eternal. The tribe increases. Somebody else carries on. Ella Baker

Sunbeams are welcome and may be sent to The Sun, 107 North Roberson Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516. We’re sorry, but we’re unable to respond personally to your suggestions. 48

The Sun  October 2011

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