(continued from here)

"People are gonna tell you you're no good. Don't listen." -- Jack Kelson to Nick Kelson, American Heart (dir. Martin Bell)

I laughed off Basheer's advice, politely took my institutional ass-reaming at the judicial, waited a day or two, then when summoned went to see the campus dean, Jacqueline Smethurst, to hear the verdict. She told me I was expelled. I stood up to leave.

"Where do you think you're going?" Jacqueline Smethurst exclaimed incredulously. "I'm not done with you.

"Sit down," she ordered.

I sat down.

I wish I didn't but I did. I hesitated a little, I think, but basically when she said sit down I sat down. Bruce Springsteen's "Growin' Up" this isn't.

Many years of sitting down when asked to sit down went by. In 1999, I moved into a cabin in the woods of northern Vermont. The cabin had no electricity, no running water, a small woodstove for heat, and a big plastic lime-coated barrel for my excrement. I'd found an ad for the cabin-for-rent in a laundromat just as I was realizing that the living situation that I'd recently arranged was going to entail sharing space in a very narrow house with a friendless, jobless man who believed a local health food restaurant was trying to poison him and who began to glare at me with the same vengeful resentment he reserved for his suspected poisoners after I declined his creepily doe-eyed offer to take me to a dowsing convention. In other words, I didn't enter into My Year in the Woods with quite the same idealistic purposefulness as Thoreau.

But it did appeal to me. I was a fan of Thoreau, after all, and also I guess I hoped the move might stem the slow erosion of meaning in my life. I wanted to live within an adventure. I wanted to once and for all finally figure out The Answer, to have it crashingly bloom in my mind in a spectacular epiphany, and like all addicts of this illusion of future enlightenment I was drawn to the idea that if I could just get away from all the snares of the world I might be able to finally understand the sound of one hand clapping. Or, to switch koans, when that fucking tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, I'd be there to hear it. I'd be no one, nothing but light, and so I would know whether or not that falling tree makes a sound, and the answer would free me finally to a life of calm, clear-eyed bliss.

My friend Charles sent me off to my year of solitary purity with a gag gift of a battery-powered television about the size of two decks of cards. I ended up going through a lot of batteries that year, the television one of my links to the life I could not let go of. I'm not talking about not being able to let go of a connection to the news of the world or to pop culture, but rather not being able to let go of my vices, those little tics and repetitions and brain-numbings that allow me to cross the expanse of a day.

Another vice I cultivated had to do with a small orange plastic propeller toy, also a gift from Charles. You use both your hands to spin the stem of the propeller and it flies through the air for fifteen or twenty feet. It's the type of thing that a normal person might try a couple times before moving on with their lives, but during my year in the woods I created a golf-like game that involved trying to hit a series of trees around the cabin with the flying propeller in the fewest "strokes" possible. Then, reverting to a practice that devoured huge tracts of empty time in my childhood, I populated the game with an ever-growing catalog of intricately conceived imaginary personalities revered by millions of imaginary fans for their prowess in the hallowed, physically taxing, mentally punishing, spiritually grueling sport of Twirly Propeller.

Instead of writing the novel that ulcerously festered inside me unsaid, or taking assiduous egoless note of the natural phenomena all around me, or resolving to pretzel my stiff, inflexible body into a straight-spined lotus position and chant sutras until the top of my head split open to guzzle nirvana, I enacted Twirly Propeller tournament after Twirly Propeller tournament, each a grueling marathon with several elimination rounds that gradually built to the breathless white-knuckle tension of the Championship Match. I kept in my head the entire history of the sport, all the single-match, yearly, and lifetime records, all the famous rises and falls, all the improbable limping heroic Comebacks from Complete Oblivion. It's all gone now, of course, that world I Godded. I left that cabin a year after I'd arrived, packing out everything I'd packed in except a very full barrel of shit.

But anyway, finally, here is Bob Davis with a big wad of tobacco in his right cheek. My final time-wasting pursuit in the cabin was to occasionally randomly select and study a baseball card from the collection of mine that had been recently unearthed during the emptying of my family's storage unit. This card was one of the first and for some reason among the most haunting of my random selections. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe it's because Bob Davis's expression seems like that of a man who's trying to remain cheerful in spite of the tiny constant ringing noise that's made his sanity into a thin, fraying, tightly stretched rubber band. Or maybe it's because of the clammy gray catacomb-like background, such a stark contrast to the overwhelmingly predominate baseball card backdrop of blue sky as to suggest something about Bob Davis's extremely peripheral, ogre-like isolation on the far fringes of major league baseball. Or maybe it's because of the discovery I made that Bob Davis shares my birthday.

The impact of that last discovery was initially jarring because of the implication that I was in some deep, psychic way connected to the man shown here clinging to the thin pleasure of his tobacco cyst as if the faint buzz it provides is a small fragment of a shipwreck on the wide sea. Such a connection made sense in a lot of ways, really, especially in light of the fact that I probably followed the discovery of Bob Davis's birthday by clinging to one of my own jagged shards of driftwood, maybe authoring some third round Greater Omaha Open Twirly Propeller action, maybe watching insect-sized Jennifer Aniston and insect-sized David Schimmer cavort across my tiny TV screen until that horrible, inevitable moment when the batteries died.

But a secondary impact of the discovery has crept up on me in the following years. I wonder more and more why it took me until I was a thirty-two-old man shitting in a barrel in the woods to find out that there was a Cardboard God who shared my birthday. I'd always believed that as a child I'd spent hour upon hour scrutinizing every detail of every card. But this is obviously not so. Even my baseball cards are strangers. Even my childhood is expelling me.

Maybe life is just a series of expulsions. You get expelled, you start to rise and move onto the next thing, and then something like doubt starts in, a voice aiming to corrode, to diminish.

Where do you think you're going?

Sit down.

I'm not done telling you all the things you don't know, all the many ways you're powerless.

For 38 years I've sat back down. From here on out I say Suck my fucking dick.

I'm standing up.

(continued from here)

Here is Larry Milbourne with a big wad of tobacco in his left cheek. Larry Milbourne had the first game-winning hit in Seattle Mariners history, doubling home pinch-runner Jose Baez in the bottom of the ninth of the team's second game ever.

This career highlight found an oddly discordant, bittersweet echo several years later when Milbourne's career as an itinerant switch-hitting utility infielder came to a close. In the last game of the 1984 season, the aging Milbourne, called on to pinch hit with no outs in the 7th inning of a game the Mariners were losing 4--2, came through just as he had when he'd been younger, lacing a double to centerfield.

Unfortunately, the pinch-runner this time, Darnell Coles, was gunned down at home on the play. Having pinch-hit for the catcher, Milbourne must have known as he stood out there at 2nd base that this was it for him for the year. No taking the field the next inning, no more at-bats later in the game. But I wonder if it occurred to him, loitering with one foot up on the bag between pitches, Spike Owen and Jack Perconte his only hope for prolonging his present moment of baseball life (which is like having a sheet of notebook paper and a mesh tank-top as your only hope against stopping a bullet), that this might be it for good. Not only for the inning, not only for the game, not only for the season, but forever.

My guess is probably not. Though he never did play in another game, the date of an item from the transaction section of Larry Milbourne's page on baseball-reference.com--"August 2, 1985: Released by the Seattle Mariners."--suggests that at the end of 1984 Milbourne probably still had hopes of living a while longer in the blue sky realm of the Cardboard Gods.

I guess it's hard to know when you're doomed. In the spring of 1985, as a new season was getting underway, Milbourne probably still thought he'd get the call one more time. Likewise, during that very same spring, I was thinking I still had a chance to avoid expulsion going into that judicial hearing I mentioned a couple days ago in extremely loose conjunction with Gordy Pladson. I even thought I had a chance after listening politely to the red-faced math teacher's enraged litany of my transgressions. But it was directly before the hearing that it would have really behooved me to realize I was doomed, so as to open myself up to the possibilities that such a realization would have created.

My character witness/stoner friend Matt and I arrived early to the judicial and were standing outside the building in the dark, I guess waiting for the weasel-faced faculty member who had caught me smoking bong hits to finish giving his testimony, and this hulking pock-faced Middle Eastern student, Basheer, whose nickname was Bashit, shambled out of the shadows. I remember thinking that it was a strange time for a student to be walking around. Probably it was "study hours," where you're either supposed to be quietly studying in your room or quietly studying at the library, with no movement from one to the other allowed.

It was not unheard of, of course, to break these rules (in fact it was during study hours that the bong session leading to my bust had occurred), but it was customary to accompany any rule-breaking with a tense, giggly, whispering, hunted sense that rules were being broken, that risks were being taken. If I and not Basheer had been the one to emerge out of the shadows, for example, I would have been moving quickly, shiftily, my eyes darting around and nervous snickering leaking from my clenched teeth like steam from a cracked radiator. But the big foreigner had an air of complete nonchalance as he walked halfway past us and then, noticing with mild pleasure that there were others out and about, sauntered over to us.

"What the fuck are you two shitheads doing here?" he bellowed. He had an accent that made "the" and "shitheads" sound like "thee" and "sheetheads." I probably cringed, rabbit-like, at the volume of his voice. He pulled out and lit a cigarette (another rule broken) as I gravely murmured to him what was going on, that I was about to go into a hearing that would decide my future. He took a long drag, eyeing me, before finally replying.

"Listen to me," he said, his voice still booming. "You must fucking do as I say. You must go in there. You must go in there and tell them. " He took another long drag, his eyes boring into mine.

As I waited to hear more, a nervous prep-school snicker escaped me.

"Tell them what?" I finally asked.

He exhaled slowly and flicked his cigarette butt off into the darkness. He knew Spike Owen and Jack Perconte were not going to keep the inning alive. He knew 1985 wasn't my year. He drew closer.

"You must go in there," he said quietly. "And you must tell them.

"To suck. Your fucking. Dick."

(to be continued)

(continued from here)

I will return soon to my hard-hitting four-part expose on wads of chewing tobacco in the right or left cheeks of journeymen baseballers and the morose tangents of remembered adolescent alienation the images of these brown-spitting baseballers inexplicably inspire, but an email from a friend convinced me that it might not be a bad idea if I take a day or two to . . . "rest." In honor of this decision, I am posting a photo of the harrowing Mitch Cohen album that carries the same title as my friend's email to me. The contents of said email are as follows:

"I must say, Joshua, that your blog is making me a bit uncomfortable lately.

"No, no, it's very interesting. No, the writing is uniformly excellent, and it's quite funny, and consistently entertaining as well.

"We're just all a little worried about y....well, what ever happened to that nice therapist you were starting to go see?

"I never even heard of Grady Paulson [sic]. But this multi-installment updating of 'A Seperate Peace,' or 'Lord of The Flies' or 'Take your pick of ANY disturbing piece of fiction dealing with savage, remorseless, entitled, boarding school students, the institutions themselves, the employees, the "traditions," the behavior of the students, and their travails' (huff-puff) has been leaving me with a nausea-inducing taste of vomit caking the inside of my gullet.

"I think you maybe, uh, could, uh, benefit from maybe, uh, speaking with someone.

"After rambling on about this hellish prep school you also never got back to Grady Paulson [sic], though I guess that's not really such a loss."

"Just a little worried is all, pal."

(continued from here)

Here is Gordy Pladson with a big wad of tobacco in his right cheek. The wad may be contributing to his genial mouth-breather facial expression, which seems to combine with the slightly capitulatory set of his shoulders and the somehow flaccid, Edselesque sound of the words "Gordy Pladson" to create a portrait of a guy born to placidly groove fat pitches and surrender leads.

All I can tell you besides that about Gordy Pladson is that he was Canadian. The first Canadian I met was at the boarding school I started telling you about in conjunction with Bob Bailor. It was this kid in my dorm who told everyone his name was Jason but whose real name, it turned out, was Dirk. Since he'd hidden the real name, it immediately became a means of derision. Hey, Dirk. What's up, Dirk. His Canadianness was also fair game. I wish I could say that since I was primarily an awkward failure at that school that I refrained from making fun of other people's shortcomings and weak spots but in fact it seems the opposite was true. There was a tradition in my dorm, Wilson Hall, of giving good-natured gag gifts to one another at a ceremony near Christmas. The dorm parents, the Schwingles, talked glowingly of past examples of gifts that perfectly fit this bill, such as when the proud Wilson Hallite Buster Olney presented Saul Bellow's son, Dan, with a gift of an elaborate mock "Wide World of Sports" recap, complete with stirring music, simulated crowd noises, and apoplectic fake broadcasters (Buster providing the screams of both the play-by-play announcer and color commentator), of the eccentric Dan's spastic performance at the start of the annual school-wide distance run known as the Pie Race. Sweet gentle teasing from a future nationally known baseball columnist to the son of a world famous author. Perfect. But though this gift only predated my arrival at the school by three years, it seemed to have come from a different time when Wilson Hall was full of famous offspring and bright young men with excellent posture and clear-eyed visions of useful, exciting futures. By contrast, the dorm in my senior year primarily became a place where drug busts occurred. Anyway, one year for the Christmas gift exchange I drew Jason-Dirk and responded by creating a mean-spirited, humorless "Dumb Canadian" joke book, which I read aloud in front of everybody while Jason-Dirk's stiff grin gradually eroded from interior structural damage.

But we were friends, Jason-Dirk and I. I mean, I wasn't always an asshole. We talked, laughed together. I don't know, I guess there was a compulsion at that place to look for weakness and seize on it. It was especially good if the mockery could be done anonymously. There was this one prank invented by two cooler kids in our dorm that my friend Bill and I took over when one of them dropped out of school and the other lost interest. It involved kneeling by the window of our dorm room and waiting for a girl from the neighboring dorm to walk by below. We'd shout at them--"Hey! Hey!!!"--and then as they started to look up, a half-smile of expectation on their face, we'd dive down out of sight and unpause the boombox that we'd set up in the window and Elvis Presley would scream down "You ain't nuthin' but a hound dog!" Jesus Christ, imagine if your daughter had to hear something like that while crossing that intimidating campus? But we screamed with laughter, spasming on the floor like boated fish. Jason-Dirk was a big fan of this prank, I remember.

As it turned out, both Jason-Dirk and one of the hound-dog girls--by coincidence, she actually was sort of pooch-faced--were members of what they called the "judicial" that heard my case after I, while on probation for being plastered on rum at a dance, got caught smoking bong hits in my dorm room. It was up to the judicial to decide if I deserved to stick around a few more weeks until graduation. I'd actually asked Jason-Dirk to be my character witness, and he'd declined, saying he could help more "on the inside," but during the judicial he didn't say a word and didn't ever even look me in the eye. Most of the proceeding was comprised of one of the judicial's faculty members, a red-faced math teacher who was sitting directly to my right, angrily berating me for being a pathetic fuckup, an embarrassment to the school.

"My friends like me," I replied at one point, lamely, as if my relationship with the small group of guys I smoked pot with was going to contribute to the greater glory of the school. I think I also noted that I briefly had a radio show on the campus station.

(to be continued)