This is a story from a novel called “THE TRIPLE FOOL” or alternately simply “HARRY” from John Donne’s poem:
The title was also influenced by Shakespeare’s KING HENRY IV, where rebellious Hotspur suggests the play is “told by an idiot, signifying nothing,” implying the play is the equivalent of a theological Summa.
Shakespeare appears to be telling us that if you choose to ignore the negatives to life they inadvertently cancel out the epiphanies, missing the essence of Hotspur’s casual summary of the epistemology and ethics of his theology.
Shakespeare has Hotspur say, “But thought's the slave of life, and life’s time’s feel and time that takes a survey of all the world must have a stop.”
You may know that “STOP-TIME” (1967) by Frank Conroy was a popular memoir written shortly before I conceived and wrote this story/novel. Harry’s “stop-time” is different than Conroy’s but his influence is nonetheless apparent.
This novel was written in 1969 and deals with the abandonment of our individual and collective immortal souls now subsumed under science, technology and material progress which has reduced words to empty vehicles and blighted our conscious understanding. Neither this story nor the novel was ever published.
THE ORIGIN OF THE TITLE OF THIS STORY Two young men full of piss and vinegar seeing the world as their oyster to conquer have entered academia of university life, displaying the arrogance and immaturity of that time in life while unaware of the emotional and intellectual baggage they carry that prevents them from seeing anything much less understanding themselves as they are.
University life is an insulated culture and impediment to self-understanding as knowledge is the game and self-awareness has no place in the curriculum. Conceptual knowledge (i.e., sacrosanct words and ideas) is a barrier rather than a vehicle to self-understanding, and maturity. Consequently, the student is frozen in immaturity until released from this environment be it four, six, or more years of matriculation to finally face the reality of experience at the age of 22, 24, 26, or older with the mindset of an 18-year-old.
The exception is students who live off-campus or go to university part-time and live on their own, not with their parents. It is students immersed in university life, as are the faculty who think they see life clearly and can pontificate liberal or righteous theories about existence when what they experience is hardly that.
A wise man once said, “Forget everything that you have been taught (at the university), and you will be on your way to understanding.”
The perplexed student aghast, “But why have I spent six years here developing my professional credentials?”
The wise man replied, “Because that knowledge will surface when you face the problems of your professional life thinking as an adult. The knowledge is there. It is in the reservoir of your understanding.”
The wise man paused and studied the young man. “There is a Law of Reversed Effort, the harder you try to do something the less you succeed; the more you attempt to relax the tenser you become; the more you concentrate the less you see clearly what is right before your eyes. Let go of your mind, trust it for the understanding that will come to you. The knowledge needed is in the toolkit of your subconscious. Relax, let the mind slow down, take a pause. Quit thinking about what worked before, what you have been taught. The then is dead to the now. Concentration is an enemy to comprehension as it represents an exercise of the hypnotic mind.
“To treat knowledge and learning as the same as understanding is like beating a drum in search of a fugitive, with you the fugitive seeking identity as a captive mind to the cultural demands of synthetic existence, which is impotent to the point of helplessness.” Dirk and Harry personify this world.
THE STORY: BEATING A DRUM IN SEARCH OF A FUGITIVE Telamonian Ajax, or “Ajax the Great was a Greek hero in the Trojan War who rescued the body of Achilles and killed himself out of jealousy and despair when Odysseus was awarded the armor of Achilles. This represents one of the first, if not the first, recorded suicides in Western literature in classical Greek mythology.
Dirk Hamilton Edwards is a friend of Harry’s who has been ruled to have committed suicide. Dirk at the time of this tragedy was a classmate of Harry’s at the University of Iowa. Harry is having difficulty dealing with this and the reality of mortality. As is Harry’s custom, he retreats into the mystical world of his soul and in the company of his ancient favorites, Ajax, whenever he has difficulty coping.
My mind will not quit this day. It is inextricably anchored to the darkness to this night. Restful beautiful delicious sleep taunts me nonetheless.
Black Angel, why do you haunt me so? Why do you mock me to scorn with images of deceptive pleasure while my soul burns in your cold and isolated hell? Be off with you or do your dastardly deed! Make quick of it! Let me sleep, at any price, let me think no more.
For the past several nights, I have had the same agonizing dream. Why this dream now so removed from the demise of my friend, I do not know, God knows.
I see myself in mid-ocean, alone, in a small boat, being tossed about by an angry sea with death staring at me. I feel cold, wet, clammy sweat clings to my rotting flesh. Then as death draws nearer, horrified, I see not my face but that of my friend, Dirk, long dead now, smiling death’s smile.
The shock of this brings not relief only more punishing despair. Incredulously, I stare at my friend, transfixed, not moving as I watch him put out his hand as if for assistance, pressing his free hand to his temple blowing his head off.
Meanwhile, I am captive of my own ship imprisoned in my cabin by a mutinous crew, helpless. As I attempt to fathom this, my friend’s head, locked in a derisive smile drifts by.
Pardon me, dear Ajax, but I cannot but speculate on this disquieting moment. Better my friend dying at his own hand than be a high priest to this life. Dreary is these punishing years of toil up the steep terrain of time. Far better to have never been at all. Over and over I hear the didactic decibels ring out:
Pay, pay, pay, me lad!
Your debt is overdue,
Please remit before you exit,
As I shall pursue you, true.
Is there no sanctuary from this night, no shelter from this day? Let me have a moment’s respite, I pray by the gods you do. Why must I search this darkness for what, I do not know, ever seized by this tormenting dream? Lucky was my friend whom DEATH compelled him to mount his cross prematurely. Ample his good sense to recognize darkness as light and light as oblivion.
I tremble, most patient Ajax, on the verge of total madness for The Great Reaper waits for me at dusk. Twilight oppresses me. But my eyes are dry my pillow gone I am nothing awaiting nothingness.
Hours pass into days with the sameness of unanswered prayers. Must I endure this frivolous parade called life? Must I chase this phantom? Life, why have you not let me capture things as they are? Must I retire from this counterfeit world like Noah’s dove, homeless bound seeing no resting place in the universe? Will life’s promised tomorrow elude me to the end?
The paradox I surmise is that I am already extinct though my friend long dead now, is alive in me. He knows what he knows. He has beaten this game of life. No guilt no sense of duty has he. Bankrupt am I obliged to carry his debt while debt-free is my friend.
Why, then, do I grieve? If not for him, for whom? For me? I cannot accept that. Though I know only this cold and isolated hell, this solitary confinement, he is not me nor am I him. Catholic nonsense that. I am stained with St. Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, the madness of perfect love.
Gentle Ajax, I am not in search of pity but reason. After all these years, I have resurrected my friend from his bed of worms why I do not know. Can you sense my dilemma? Either in the body or out of the body, I am anachronistic. I am of this time but cut off from life. My other self is dead. I am dying while he is dead. The accident of birth existing without living than dying in God’s time is suddenly upon me. Mockery hides in such justice. So, I quake in confusion, maligned Ajax, perhaps it is because my connection with you is more real than life.
Try as I might I cannot understand why death is such a stranger to me. Against my reason, I have never fully accepted death. Nor has life been precious to me for I have been too busy taking it for granted. Death has held a peculiar fascination to me, until now.
Somehow I have felt immune to death the way television viewers feel watching death on the tube from the security of their living room. This detachment found me at nine eating an ice cream cone while rescuers removed the bloated remains of a nineteen-year-old boy from the Mississippi River who had drowned the week before.
Or at eleven, I could study the rising purpling of the bald pate of the drunken Mercy Hospital custodian who had tripped over the uneven cement sidewalk in front of my house and had fallen backward slamming his head hard on the concrete.
Or at twenty, a college sophomore at the University of Iowa, I marveled one moment at the consummate gymnastic skill of a classmate working on the trampoline in the university’s Fieldhouse, then the next moment witness the serenity of his face as he lay on the gym floor at my feet dead of a broken neck.
Still later, as a United States Navy hospital corpsman, charred carcasses and dying members of a once crack gun mount crew of a US Navy destroyer escort, victims of hang fire during military exercises, were brought to the medical hospital of my ship, the USS Salem (CA 139), the Flag Ship of the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean Sea. I could tag the corpses and medically assist the ship’s surgeon with those badly burned but still alive with quiet proficiency whereas doctors brought aboard the Salem from other ships were wholly incapable of assisting seemingly traumatized by the stench of death to do anything.
Or finally, I could pump morphine into the agony that once was my father, while cancer cells feasted on his born marrow, and wipe dry eyes.
Always before, I was involved yet separated. Oh, I played the game of pretend to care with industry if not conviction able to manage this because not only was I detached from others but myself as well. It was as if I was looking down at death looking down at myself. That is until my friend did away with himself those many years ago. Now he haunts me from his nether world. Dear Ajax, you who were misled by Frenzy’s impulse wild, I sense the evil net you experienced.
Only my friend knew how I abhorred control be it God, my church, my work or life, or whatever. Yet, as the green line grows finer and the other side becomes this side this becomes that here becomes there now becomes then somewhere becomes nowhere everything becomes nothing, I whirl from the anguish of reality. The future is a retreating mirage with me becoming my friend. Dirk has bested the gods and now he tests my mettle. Gentle Ajax, betrayed on the plains of Troy, do you sense my dilemma?
Oh, how my friend shatters my reason. Joyous his courage to set himself free of sorrow and doubt with his guilt the lasting blessing upon my head. My friend died on the Cross of Life at his time, not God’s. Would it have been better for me, his murderer, had he not been born? Unfortunate the condemned whom Death compels to wait. Great the good fortune to die precipitately. Better to have ridden Life’s High Road into Netherland pulled by a chariot of Roman stallions. Glad would he have been marked for death between the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis.
Where is that pink translucent face with spectacled owlish eyes smiling now? My mind’s eye can see his long ambling frame jauntily walking across the sky head topped with a baldachin halo of steel-gray hair. Dirk Hamilton Edward is no more.
* * *
Only yesterday we competed in the high school oratorical contest which he won. Only yesterday he was class president at the University of Iowa and I vice president. Only yesterday he made love to a girl named Tanya that marked the beginning of his end.
His prudish nature melted into hers. We were no longer college roommates in the men’s dormitory at Hillcrest as he now was an off-campus student.
Occasionally, he would thunder into my room at all hours and fill the air with innocent profanities then collapse into the only chair in my small dorm room to pontificate for hours on whatever possessed his mind. It was his way of preparing for what he wanted to say.
Like a child recalling the ecstasy of his first circus, the night he made love to Tanya was such an occasion. It was 1:30 in the morning and I had a 7:30 final so I was less than cordial. At first, I tried to ignore his hopping around the room smallest as it was hoping he would sense I wasn’t interested and leave. When that didn’t take, I wondered if he had been drinking, Dirk the clear thinking clean-living teetotaler, the original model for Norman Rockwell’s all-American boy, who not only didn’t drink didn’t smoke, didn’t eat processed foods. Friends would josh with him declaring a cigarette stiff drink and a piece of ass would either kill him or make him human.
He would take the ribbing for a while, then suddenly his massive shoulders on his six-five frame would flare out like the wings of an albatross his face turning a vivid red, his booming voice rising from his diaphragm like thunder,
“Enough already, okay?” With that, the kidding stopped. None of us were anxious to feel the sting of his big fists. Picture a caricature of Clark Kent as Superman and you have Dirk without the fake pecs. He was like a walking time bomb with all of us sensing there was a superman locked in his controlled façade. You could feel the heat of his personality straining to explode into the world. Yet none of us believed this repressed energy would escape his control. Dirk was what we all thought we were supposed to be but couldn’t or wouldn’t be if we could.
“Harry,” he said, with rising excitement in his voice, “we’ve been wasting our time in school. The hell with the books! The hell with a 4-point. The only guys who know anything about life are having a ball on their way to flunking out. Bully for them! Not being derogatory (he loved big words), but Harry, look at you!” He threw his hands into the air in mock disgust.
I was buried in my physical chemistry textbook with notes in my lap and Post-its on many pages of the text.
“You are a paper junky while people out there are living not obsessed with dead authors but living in the flesh. Harry, I tell you, living in the flesh,” he repeated.
Dirk kicked off his shoes sending them across the room then collapsed again into the chair only to jump up and stall about painting the air as if a blackboard to emphasize each point, waxing into redundancy with school a bust, obsolete, counterproductive, stifling to creative intelligence. I had heard this harangue so many times before that I wanted to call him
“Pete and Repeat” but never mustered up the nerve.
Semester finals bored him as he never had to study for them, which always unnerved me. But somehow this seemed different. That is why it was strangely amusing if disquieting. He claimed we are never educated beyond our complexes; that once our complexes surface we play hell to justify them to live with ourselves. With Dirk, the self was a holy war seeded by Philistinian guilt which I knew well as a Catholic.
The guilt he rationalized had violated the purity of love. Making love to Tanya at age twenty he discovered he had a set of balls that had a mind of their own. His real complaint was not with education but in discovering the pleasure and pain of need.
“You’ve been out with Tanya again,” I said flatly.
“How did you know?” he snapped surprised.
“It’s written all over your ugly face.” I stopped as my eyes noticed dark brown stains on his light trousers. No, say it isn’t so, dear God. No sleep tonight. There goes my final! Godammit! Why me? Why does it always have to happen to me? Shit!
He placed his large hands on my shoulders and looked hard into my eyes. “Tanya, did she call?”
“Tanya call here? Why the hell would she call me? I hardly know her. Get hold of yourself. Think! It’s two in the morning. Remember?”
“I’m sorry, Harry. I don’t know what’s what. I talk about you. I thought she would be trying to get hold of me here. She may be worried, or scared, or mad.” Dirk was not himself. He even looked smaller as he bobbed and weaved around the room. “I don’t know, I just don’t know.”
“Don’t tell me you beat the hell out of her?” I asked mockingly.
“It’s much worse than that, Harry,” he replied with dead seriousness. “I want you to know that.” He again grabbed my shoulders and looked deep into my eyes. “It’s unforgivable,” he continued. My shoulders ached due to the pressure of his hands. I could see my reflection in his glasses. My face appeared curiously distorted. “I made love to Tanya tonight,” he said solemnly moving to the other side of the room. His head was bent low his back to me. I thought of a dying rogue’s last confession before being hanged.
“Congratulations,” I said with nervous relief, “welcome to the club!” I was too damned weary to be kind. “So what else is new?”
“Dammit, Harry, didn’t you hear me? I violated Tanya!”
That was too much. He violated Tanya! I’ll be damned if I’ll ever understand that one. Who’s kidding whom? Examine the Madonna closely and you’ll see she has her foot, not on the head of the snake, but man. Dirk violated Tanya the way a chicken violated me when I ate it for lunch yesterday.
“She bled all over the place,” he said sorrowfully, waving his long arms frantically. “All over the car, everything.” He looked down at his pants. “She asked me to stop. She even cried.” Dirk was now whimpering as if his adolescent tears would absolve him. “I ripped that poor girl apart,” he paused with his head in his chest, “as if I was an animal. An animal, Harry,” he repeated incredulously.
Thirty years ago I watched Dirk in smug silence. Only the memory of it now makes my heart ache with the pain perspective gives. Could I have helped him if I had known what I know now? I doubt it. Minds seldom meet in life under the best of circumstances. Yet, I wonder. Was either of us to have understood that crisis in our youth, what might have been?
Dirk wanted to be king. His brain was big the power of his will bigger and his whole being was ready to explode into the universe to let eternity know he existed. I remember returning from the University of Iowa Library with him one piercing cold winter’s night. The dorm and library were separated by an icy stream generously known as the Iowa River. Both of us were filled with the euphoria of fledgling scholars.
He stood first in our glass of 3,000 men and I twelfth as recorded by the Selective Service Draft Board protecting us from being called up for service in the Korean War. He stopped suddenly near the center of the bridge and like Gilgamesh stood there, gesturing magnificently. “Imagine, Dirk,” he said tersely, “what they would say tomorrow if we ended it all tonight and were no more.”
Being swallowed by this icy god quickened my pulse. For a moment I felt unconscious of the cold. Sandon, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Zagreus, Dionysus, Gilgamesh, Jesus, and yes, you dear Ajax flashed through my mind. “They would say,” he continued solemnly, “think what they might have been!”
The chilled air was momentarily eclipsed with my sorrow at the departure of these young gods, Hosanna in Excelsis Deus! But there is no such cry ever. Dirk, why have you done this to me? To yourself?
“For Christ’s sake, Dirk, get hold of yourself. Make some sense.” I said with mocked bitterness. I wanted so badly to say ‘what makes you think Tanya didn’t tease the living seed right out of you?’
Teasers like Tanya were nothing if not predatory creatures. Dirk was natural bait. In those days, dear Ajax, I puzzled over the mystique of women as you must have after Tecmessa. So soft and sure, they understand everything incomprehensible to us, so attuned to life. No matter how inept in the classroom the advantage is always theirs. God, how they could torment us then, making it hard to study for the twitching in our loins. Now? Now I accept their superiority but without affection.
That dun-colored morning my concern was only for my friend, the canary in the cave, seeing him dangling from the carnivorous lips of Miss Desire in Tanya. The fact that he saw the situation as the reverse of this only deepened my resentment. Somehow I managed to say, “I’m sure Tanya is fine. Right now it’s you I’m worried about.”
That was true. It was apparent that Dirk was going through Christian-Judaic guilt that came with its mythic hold and promise. Tonight he ran into the reality of his libido falling into no man’s land where conscience surrenders to instinct. At that moment when everything was supposed to come together from darkness to light self-reproach intercedes and the natural becomes perverted.
My most discerning Ajax, if you sense life has been cleansed of its magic for me, you are correct. The kernel of life has been bleached out of my soul and repackaged and promulgated as Christianity. Man is not captive to nature but the Word. Dirk has lived by the Word and now sees himself in its bondage. Is it any wonder he is confused? The Word is more real to him than life: In the beginning, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Dirk made the Word, God, and God the Word. Do I hear Calchas castigating you, Ajax, for thoughts not becoming you? Do I feel the whispered moralizing of Athena?
Dare not thou to breathe high words of swollen pride against the gods; nor boast presumptuous, if in martial deeds or treasured wealth thou pass thy fellow man; a day o’erthrows, a day to light restores all mortal things; and still, the heavenly powers regard the lowly, while they loathe the proud.
Though my senses have been dulled by religion, I feel nature’s ozone returns the invigorating balance. That nature permeates the Word that nature restores the fruits of instinct and fills our virgin minds with misplaced magic. You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, warned Horace, but she will always come back.
Dirk sat there waiting for me to unscramble the riddle of his incorrigible conscience. I was being asked for help, me! What could be more ludicrous? All he wanted was to will Tanya virgin again and him happily innocent of any wrongdoing. But how? Couldn’t he see I was contaminated with the same Christian conscience? Oh, if I had known then the skill with which Christian Judaic culture castrates desire; if only I had understood St. Paul’s absurdity to the Romans:
What, then, shall we say? Is the Law sin? Indeed, no! But I would never have known sin except through the Law; for I would not have recognized lust unless the Law had said, ‘You shall not lust.’ But sin made this precept an occasion to bring out in me every kind of lust, for without the Law sin was dead. Once I was alive without the Law but with the coming of the precept sin revived, and I died and discovered that the precept of life brought death. For sin, through the precept deceived and slew me. Yet for this very reason, the Law is holy and the precept is holy, and just and good.
This makes hypocrites of us all. Our nature which we did not invent whispers in our ear and our flesh tingles obediently. Christianity finds instinct becoming compulsion and desire becoming depravity. What are saints if not obsessed with sin? What is more grievous than the sin of pride? What greater sin of pride than spiritual withdrawal from life.
To admire oneself in quest of selfless love is nothing if not the absurdity of selflessness. Dear Ajax, if I had only known then what is natural and right, what it is to be selfish in a loving manner, perhaps I could have given Dirk more of myself. Perhaps I could have saved him and saved myself. But I was caught in the same vicious double bind as he. Ironically, we both thought I had escaped. We both agreed he needed help and I was the right person to give such succor.
Dirk confessed in a somber voice that they had parked in the cemetery overlooking the Mississippi River. At that admission, my mind raced on . . .
Death, decay, dust
Must abdicate to lust
Birth of need
Death of seed
In the shadow of Terminus
Fulfills the Rites of Maritus
The joy of dying to go on living embraces the world. The pain of pleasure and the pleasure of pain concatenate to form a garland of Rosa rugosa thorns across our immortal balls. If not for these precious jewels, friend Ajax, there would be neither delight nor ecstasy nor repentance because we would be no more. Our incorrigible penis is a talisman deified by religion. The horny soul of Paul gave birth to a faith bent on castration.
“Somehow I found my hand on her . . .” Dirk hesitated unable to form the words his anguish palpable. He removed his glasses and cleaned the lenses with his handkerchief. I refused to intercede with understanding and instead waited. The big clod was out of his element. “On . . . on her, you know, her muff,” he continued self-consciously. God, it drove me crazy!” He was again pacing the room like a wound-up toy. “I swear, Harry, it just happened . . . it just happened I swear,” he repeated weakly, wiping beads of perspiration off his forehead with his hanky still in his hand.
Whether precipitated by the thought of my final or simply being tired, I felt revulsion with his display of intimacy, a revulsion that became etched in a fine madness.
“She squirmed,” he continued with clinical precision as if I was his therapist, “then kisses me so hard I could taste blood. Next thing I knew I had ripped her sweater and bra from her.” He stopped suddenly. His face was frozen in agony. “Harry, my God, you wouldn’t believe how beautiful she is, her breasts,” pausing then detailing his awakening to my nausea.
Dirk the possessor became the possessed for the rest of his short life. The natural was perverted to a holy ritual. Small wonder Dirk was finessed by his conscience.
Dirk’s litany was now a moan. “Something came over me. I tried to ram myself through her panties. God, did she scream!” The wound-up toy boy now moved more quickly. “Harry,” he cried, searching my face for support if not understanding, “can you imagine how terrible it was? The poor girl was terrified. I thought she was choking to death. For a long time, she didn’t seem to be breathing. She tried to scream once but that only turned me on more. Even the fact that it was her period didn’t matter to me.”
“Her what?” I yelled. Suddenly I was in a state of shock. “Jesus Christ! I hope I didn’t hear you right!” My eyes returned to his blood-spattered trousers. No, no, not that! I got up throwing my chemistry books against the wall. I wanted desperately to be elsewhere. I was slowly dying in mythic Catholic shame. After all, the Jewish custom of niddah was also that of my Roman Catholicism. My sainted mother had driven the sacrilege of a woman’s menstruation into my delicate psyche.
“I couldn’t help myself . . . I couldn’t,” he continued. “The two of us were oceans apart. It was an absurd situation.” I turned my back on him retreating into myself. Meanwhile, he railed and flailed the air like a chicken about to go on the block.
My mind flashed to my First Communion Confession when I was seven years old:
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned (repeating what Sister Mary Julianne had taught us to say), this is my First Confession.”
At this point, for some reason, my mind went blank and I became mute. A voice both old and stern impatiently scolded me from behind the black lattice wooden curtain of the confessional. In a harsh and terrifying whisper, my silence was disturbed.
“My child, did you hear me?” Then the taking of a deep breath beyond the curtain.
“Come-come my child now have you not sinned?” I could not answer.
“Did you hear me?” “Yes, Father.” Then without preamble, the priest asked harshly,
“Have you lied to your mother?”
“Yes, Father.” “Have you said bad words?” “Bad words, Father? I don’t understand.” “Yes, yes, bad words.” It was clear he expected obedience the way my da did.
“Yes, Father,” I repeated automatically still having no idea what he meant.
“Yes, Father” became my response through a series of questions that this voice assumed a seven-year-old might commit. But then the voice changed. It was less harsh but somehow strange.
“Do you have a little brother or little sister?” “Yes, Father.” There was then another frightening pause.
“I have a little brother and little sister.”
“Have you ever touched them?” Now I was more confused than ever.
“Ever touched them, Father?” His breathing was now weird, scary.
“Yes, yes, touch them in their private parts?”
“Private parts, Father? I don’t understand Father.” I started to cry.
“Now get ahold of yourself. This will not do.” “Yes, Father,” I whimpered.
“Do you have bad thoughts?” “Yes, Father,” I answered with relief.
“I had a terrible dream that my mother died who is often sick.” “How many times have you had this dream?”
“Often whenever she is sick,” I answered failing to add,
“Father,” as Sister Mary Julianne had instructed.
“Do you think of your body as unclean?” “Unclean, Father? I often get dirty am scolded for that. Is that what you mean, Father?” Sensing that it wasn’t tears again rolled down my cheeks.
“Enough, enough! The nuns have poorly prepared you for this confession. You have made a bad confession.” The priest unmoved said mechanically, “Your holy penances are six Hail Marys and six Our Fathers, now make a good Act of Contrition.”
Stunned, I tearfully repeated.
Oh, My God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and am sorry for these and all my sins, because of the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen. BAD CONFESSION! The words burned into my soul and would stay with me all my life. I never left that innocent morning or that confessional behind me nor could I now leave Dirk.
I was coming apart. THIS I had not done. NEVER! The menstrual period was sacred. Sure, I had been tempted. Yet how my blood would boil with hatred when a girl played that trick on me. It was against nature.
Life has breathed some tolerance into my mental fixation if not relief. It was my terminus. To see Dirk distraught is one thing; to see him as the destroyer was another. I hated and envied him at once.
Tanya? Suddenly I thought of her. How must she feel? Violated? Ecstatic? Secret longings welled up in me for the beautiful Tanya in menstruation. How could I think such thoughts? Could she be bleeding to death? What have I left myself into . . .
“Dirk, for Christ’s sake how could you? You are an asshole! You’re a goddamned asshole!”
For the next five minutes, I emptied my spleen of contempt for him. Then exhausted, I slumped on the bed in silence. Dirk was beaten. So was I.
“Do you think she will ever speak to me again?” He asked looking like a ragdoll dangling from the chair. He was a pathetic sight.
“Yes,” I said not knowing why.
“Tell her you love her. Now leave me so I can go to bed.” At this point, I couldn’t care what he did. I had had it. My final in p-chem was less than three hours away.
“Scram! Beat it! I’ve got to get some sleep!” To my surprise without a word he moved to open the door to my room.
“Thanks, Harry,” he said with feeling.
“Thanks for listening.” Nursing a migraine, I braved the final in chemistry, the last final of the year. I didn’t stick around. What Dirk had shared with me in the light of a new day made little difference to me now. It was his problem as all our problems belong only to us and no one else. Our friendship however would never be the same.
Summer meant working at the industrial chemical food processing manufacturer plant in town and playing baseball in the men’s Industrial Baseball League for the company’s team. I caught for this team loaded with other college players. It wasn’t until the following fall’s registration for classes at the university that I ran into Dirk. He looked older, thinner with his 6’4” frame reminding you of a scarecrow in a cornfield. He also looked wasted like a drinker. In that instant, Tanya crossed my mind. Had she done this to him?
Dirk and I were what you might call school friends. Outside of school, we had little in common. He was blind as a bat and couldn’t see much less hit a baseball but the truth be known he would never be so inclined. We lived in different worlds although coming from the same small industrial Iowa city of 33,000. He lived in the most prestigious section while I lived in the shadow of the county courthouse near the railroad tracks and close to the community baseball stadium. His father was a prominent attorney in the county and my da was a brakeman on the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad. He was considered a brain while I was known primarily as a jock. Then too I was Irish Roman Catholic and he was a member of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, the dominant denomination in the community.
What truly separated us was attitude. Dirk was comfortable about things and I was uncomfortable with everything. I was aware of the bias against Catholics which was a constant thorn in my side. My Catholicism got in the way of my life because I took it too seriously. Dirk was a WASP in a community of WASPs anchored in the security of his middle-class world while I nursed a constant Catholic and working-class chip on my shoulder. Five degrees and three successful careers failed to change this. Is there no escape no purpose to life? Lao-Tzu tells us:
Other people seem to have everything,
I alone am lacking,
For I have the mind of a fool
And am all muddled and vague.
The people are so smart and bright,
While I am just dull and confused,
Whereas I am stupid,
Careless as the sea
Drifting without aim. I’m sure Dirk never knew much less read this Eastern prophet. Dirk and Tanya as it turned out had spent the entire summer together. Tanya was not an acceptable partner for Dirk as far as his mother was concerned as she was too working class. She was also from Tama where the Tama Indian Reservation was located and Mrs. Edwards suspected she was part Indian. Over the past two years, he had spent a lot of time in Tama claiming he was studying the Mesquakie Indians for Senior Honors at the university. Mrs. Edwards believed this because she wanted to. However, she rebuked me later for not informing her as to what her son was doing. The fact that my summers were otherwise occupied was irrelevant to her. I knew and that was enough.
About mid-term the following fall, I received a surprise visit from Dirk to have lunch with him at Joe’s Place on campus. This popular hangout was usually so crowded at lunchtime that you could eat the noise, and so thick with cigarette smoke it was hard to breathe putting me in the mind of hell. Dirk was already there when I arrived looking gaunt and bedraggled but still with that typical swagger and intensity.
“Harry, you old sonofabitch!” he shouted over the glorious bedlam stretching out his long arm to grasp my hand.
“Great to see you. I’ve missed that serious puss of yours.” Then looking around, adding with a broad smile,
“Isn’t this some place?” “Terrific,” I replied sarcastically as I hated the place,
“If you’re into masochism.” “Really?” pleading oblivious to my discomfort. He knew how I felt about Joe’s Place. So, why choose it? I was immediately suspicious of his intent.
“Do you have a booth for us?” I implored desperately seeking to extricate myself from the crush of the door-jammed of people still coming in.
“Yeah . . . over here,” he pointed to a corner booth already occupied by a couple sharing a schooner of beer and each other’s spit. Looking at them and smiling, Dirk added,
“I’m sure they won’t mind.”
I felt trapped. It was not enough to be sharing a booth I had to be backed up into the corner with Dirk towering over me for whatever ulterior motive I could only speculate. Four beers and two grilled cheese sandwiches later, all consumed by Dirk while I pleaded not being hungry, the place had thinned out including the previous occupants of our booth.
“What’s up?” I said finally having run out of small talk.
He studied my face. The pretense that this was a casual meeting rose with the ambiguity of the cigarette smoke that rose to the ceiling of the place cutting off our oxygen supply.
“Tanya is pregnant,” he declared flatly studying my face for a reaction.
His eyes felt like hot coals. A thousand thoughts rushed through my mind. Rituals, Rites of Passage, religion, taboo, last summer, friendship, life . . . the myth of Adam and Eve, everything and yet nothing. Harry thought of how God treated this whole damned mess of human nature then compounded the chaos HE introduced by banishing man’s loneliness by creating a woman for Adam from the same earth He had created Adam and called her Lilith.
Since she was created from the same clay as was Adam, she claimed to be Adam’s equal and refused to submit to his demands, thus becoming the world’s first woman’s libber. Lilith remained with Adam only long enough to give him a migraine. She flew from Adam vanishing into the thin air only to hex the unborn.
If that were not enough, Adam beseeched God to bring her back. When she refused to return to Adam in servitude, God set to punish her by destroying a hundred of her demon children daily which didn’t resolve the issue of Adam’s loneliness. This punishment found Lilith taking her revenge by injuring babes at birth or killing them and their mothers. Once again the innocent suffer from the folly of those anointed.
Adam then was appeased by God taking one of his ribs and creating Eve. Adam being formed from the dust of the earth and Eve from the bone, Adam thought he had found bliss. He was wrong again. A few drops of water had sufficed to soften a clod of the earth turning it into Adam, but not so of a bone. A woman is hard, calculating, manipulative, and far superior in survival acumen than a man.
Man is soft and simple but most damaging of all, pretentious. He buys the myths of his superiority. Woman is trouble as she is personalized in the craftiness of Mammon. Man is a fool who prefers to see himself as an angel of the spirit whereas he is everywhere and nowhere muddling into one tragedy after another treating his inventions as reality while confounded by the actual reality of existence. Not woman. She is content to be less obvious driven as she is by the less spectacular horizontal in the spirit of survival while man is obsessed with the perpendicular. Women have their two feet planted firmly on the earth while men prefer to see themselves soaring like a bird.
Lilith and then Eve had to bring sin self-consciously down on Adam’s head in violation of God’s Law of Paradise by enticing him to eat the forbidden fruit bringing death, disease, and work on Adam and his children to live anxious lives with the haunting reality of mortality.
Tanya, beautiful, soft, warm, slick Tanya had extinguished the light of Dirk’s soul and my sanity with that indictment, “I am pregnant!” Hate, disgust, despair, and cynicism welled up in me as I said sarcastically,
“Who is the father?” That is all I remember. When I awoke, I found myself in the ICU of the university’s hospital, unable to talk or move. Dirk had broken my jaw, shattered it would be more precise. I had also suffered a concussion with a four inched laceration across the back of my skull having fallen against some immovable object.
Eyewitnesses said they saw only one punch that lifted me out of the booth throwing my hundred and ninety-pound body against the wall. The punch that I never saw was the first perhaps the only punch ever thrown by Dirk.
The police interviewed me with having to answer them by writing my answers. They wanted to know if I intended to press charges. I did but didn’t. I had provoked him.
Later, I was transferred from the Emergency Room to Orthopedic Surgery where my jaw was reset with three subsequent surgical operations to follow including plastic surgery. Even with this reconstructive surgery, I was left with a sardonic crooked smile that was to remain a permanent scar. It was as if the gods had painted my face to reflect my tainted soul. My life was changed in an instant by that stupid comment followed by that crushing blow.
I never saw Dirk again therefore not knowing that his life had changed as well. Just before Christmas, I was released from the hospital. I learned Dirk and Tanya were living together which was scandalous in those days. Dirk had dropped out of school giving up his study of law. Tanya, too, had left school and was working at the A&P Supermarket as a checker. I wandered by her store one day curious to see her pregnant. Her fierce green eyes caught sight of me flashing hatred confirming Dirk had made me the heavy. Pregnant she looked even more beautiful. Pregnancy agreed with her.
I hate control. Yet I hate waste even more. Dirk was an out-of-control waste. It destroyed me to see the most brilliant guy I had ever known lose it all to a little cunt like Tanya. Why didn’t she have the baby somewhere else? Why did she have to wreck his life, and in wrecking his, wreck mine? Goddammit, the more I thought about it the madder I got. I wanted to hurt her to hurt him the way they both hurt me. I knew how this could be done. If I couldn’t hurt him through one woman I could through another. So I wrote to his mother.
May 11, 1953
Iowa City, Iowa
Dear Mrs. Edwards,
Last summer you rebuked me for not keeping you apprised of Dirk’s romantic attachment to Tanya. I fear your apprehensions have materialized as Tanya is with child and she and Dirk are living openly in Tama. Both have dropped out of school. As you may or may not know, Dirk and I are no longer on speaking terms since he broke my jaw last year as you may or may not know. This pains me to write as I look upon him as a brother. Friends tell me that Dirk has kept the matter of Tanya from you. If so, this note will pain you greatly but I saw no other recourse.
Expecting you will protect my confidence, I remain yours truly in compassion,
Harry My dear Ajax, cowardly was this letter. But can I not take comfort in being young and foolish? I did not know a mother’s scorn could match that of mine, but alas all women must have that fatal flaw of Minerva to mask their modification. Dirk learned that night that maternal love was a two-edged blade. Within a week, I now lament a mother's tranquility and a son’s love was destroyed. Dirk would never forgive his mother nor ever trust her again. The pen proved mightier than the fist.
While information proved sketchy, it was reported his mother stormed into the university apartment complex where Dirk and Tanya lived one hot muggy night waking up the whole building with her hell. She suspended her conventional decorum calling Tanya a fucking bitch, language thought unfamiliar to such a lady while confirming my letter, and the ugly suspicions of the tenants that they weren't Mr. & Mrs. Jones.
When Mrs. Edwards left, the break was complete. Dirk lost his fraternal connection with me, his Iago friend, and the maternal connection with his mother. He was a freeman with a beautiful creature beside him. But for this atavistic Adam, the break only made his dependence on nonexistent things more real. Free to choose between life and death how was I to know he would choose death? Was it love, envy, jealousy, hate, or the aching sense of lost control over this sweet creature beside him? Dirk was more of a control freak than I was and that took some doing.
No one knows, God knows. How could I explain to him we don’t have to choose either to love or hate or to suffer the insanity of control as it has little to do with our immortal soul?
We are no more the servants of our passions and biological urges than we are of our rational minds. We are psychophysiological machines incessantly grinding away to throw us into selective unconsciousness processing permutations and combinations at random that make no functioning sense. Most of us go robotically through life bouncing between our passions and cogent expectations. We are fools who choose to live by words that are our inventions. Words nullify the reality of our conscious minds hiding in the cabinet of the unconscious.
Meister Eckhart:
