Rob avoided shredding my carcass but failed to avoid my own surfboard, which he skewered with that razor fin of his, slicing fibreglass and foam of what was recently a pristine new custom board. The waves swallowed him for his foul deed and I retrieved my board, sulked briefly and remembered old surfing algebra that seemed to factor in standard payments for excellent sessions. Over the years I had replaced the “ding the body not the board” with the reverse anthem. Fibreglass repair used to seem expensive compared to Band-Aids and bruises but times had changed.
The waves of September gave way to airplane wings to New Jersey in October and that reunion with the Class of '69 from Cinnaminson High School. Here were guys I had begun surfing with when I was thirteen, girls I had kissed in kindergarten (I had very early romantic instincts). Ignoring the more formal trappings of the event, I was eager to explore the pains and passions of youth.
Kids who were once picked on by bullies were now designing nuclear power plants. Old chums who used to steal cars were in charge of chemical factories in South America. There were architects and lawyers and investment bankers and some were “into retail.” When one former classmate, a girl (now a woman) with two-storey hair, asked me what I did, I told her I “live in Canada and write books.” Her response was, “No, I mean really.”
Bodies had changed and so had a few souls. I found communion among old allies and enemies and I'm sure I was not the first to admit we had not changed the world significantly. (How could we have failed, this class of 1969?) Nor was I the first to feel overwhelmed by the slippage of time. Tim Stack, former class president, had a photo of himself and his kids on the beach with his old 9v6 Dewey Webber. Old half-true adventures were recounted even as spouses of graduates sat glassy-eyed and removed.
Tim Stack would point across the room to the president of a multinational corporation and say, “We used to make fun of him in school.” Motive enough for success - an American's healthiest form of revenge.
Paramount on my personal agenda that night was a heart-to-heart talk with Cherie Devlin. My ninth grade failed relationship with Cherie was something that had haunted me for decades. And a class reunion is all for naught if it is not the place to spew words of unstated truth buried in the archival vault of the heart.
My first attempt to breach the barricade of years failed. At first I didn't even recognize her. An insult, I suppose. We had the polite drill about jobs and kids and geography. She had two children, did some acting and TV commercial work and lived in Phoenix, Arizona. Soon we were swallowed by the crowd and I kept getting absorbed into conversations with accountants who had once been high school basketball players.
Bobby Carr was there. We'd been friends from the time we were four. Our mothers had revealed to us that we had even been in the same hospital room together after our births, our birthdays a mere two days apart. We had been blood brothers at seven - in those pre-AIDS halcyon days of innocence where we actually cut our fingers with knives and bled into each other's wound. We had drifted apart in high school but now here we were, recounting Tarzan swings, Boy Scout adventures in the Pine Barrens and trying to fill in the three absentee decades with a five-minute synopsis.
I danced with a girl who claimed to have had a crush on me from the first to the fourth grade. But I never knew. I reminisced with cheerleaders who had ignored me through high school. I pretended to remember others who I could not place at all. These things you do at such events.
But it was after midnight and I was working my way back to Cherie. Her husband was tall and mute and looked as uncomfortable as I would have been in such a situation. He was looking forward to getting the hell out of Jersey and home to Arizona, I'm sure.
As the crow flies, New Jersey is only about eight hundred miles from Nova Scotia. Psychologically - for me at least - it's light-years. I was shocked to rediscover how American everybody was. The obvious truth had eluded me: if you are born in the United States, grow up there, go to school there, settle down there and raise kids, work at a job there - you end up being an American. I'm a slow learner in many respects.
It was getting late and I had given up on unfinished business with Cherie. I was waylaid by a high school acquaintance who I would politely refer to as a kid who was once a cruel, masochistic, small-minded son of a bitch. I'll call him Larry. Now he looked like someone who had been knocked around but he also seemed like a rather gentle person. This, after a pair of heart attacks and enough physical therapy to put him back on his feet to attend a high school reunion.
“Was I ever mean to you?” he asked me out of the blue.
Mean would be putting it mildly. “Not really.”
“No, come on. Tell me the truth. Was I ever insulting or nasty?”
In the mid 1960s he had taught me how simple everyday words could be laced with emotional hydrochloric acid. “It was a long time ago,” I said.
“This is important to me,” he insisted. “Did you ever see me go after somebody just to be cruel and rotten?”
I could have kept a logbook. “Don't worry about it.”
“It's okay. Tell the truth. I was rotten to people, wasn't I?”
“Maybe sometimes.”
He looked at me, swallowed hard and said, “I don't know why I was like that back then. I can't understand it.”
“We were kids.”
“I was an asshole.”
“Yeah, well . . . ”
“No, I just wanted to say I'm sorry to you or to anyone else I might have hurt.” He was shouting it now. And I was deeply moved. We were each of us here for a reason. Larry was here to apologize to everyone he'd hurt and I thanked him for that, told him all was forgiven as far as I was concerned. But I'd never been the worst victim. In an odd way, he had even given me strength. We had wrestled each other in gym class. On the street he would have had me face down on the pavement, bloody-nosed, lips kissing oil stains from Ed Gressick's old '57 Pontiac. But in a gym class with rules, I pinned Larry and shocked his friends. One small step for man.
I left Saul on the road to Damascus and headed down the hall to the bar to see who was left. Most of my old classmates had vanished into the same Camden County night air that had allowed them to materialize.
I found Cherie, however, and, after a bit of small talk, I found myself holding out my hands in front of me like a preacher would. Or like they were pages from a book I was reading. I told her that I had really been in love with her in the ninth grade. “I was never able to express it,” I said, “and it's haunted me ever since.”
I would not come out and wallow in telling her what a truly hurting soul I was back then: insecure, awkward, shy and somehow way too self-aware of how inept I was in making contact with the world, especially the world of a girl whom I wanted to be deeply involved with.
“There was that party at Lynn Dunn's, remember?” I said.
“Yes.”
“It was the night that you and I were going to be together, really together for the first time.”
“Everybody knew.”
“You didn't show up. It was just a stupid kids' party. Records on the stereo in Lynn's basement, dancing. Kids showing off, nothing serious.”
“I wanted to be there,” Cherie said.
“The other girls knew why you didn't come but they didn't tell me. They felt sorry for me and some of them danced with me. But I was mad at you. For not showing up.”
“I can understand that.”
“And then I called you,” I said. “I had to stretch the phone line out of the kitchen to sit on the steps to the basement. My hands were sweating. It took me two days to get up the nerve to call. I was really in love with you. But I couldn't understand why you weren't there at that party. I was mad at you.”
“And I really cared for you but . . . ”
I interrupted her, I don't know why. It was my Ancient Mariner thing. This part of the story had to be told by me. “It was really awkward. I know I sounded pissed off. And then you told me on the phone why you weren't
at the party. None of the girls who knew would tell me. Your brother had been killed in Vietnam.”
“It took me a long while to recover.”
“And I didn't know how to deal with it.”
“That's not your fault.”
I had been a Boy Scout in those days and had a merit badge for everything from corn-farming to public safety. But what I was really an expert at was an inability to rise above my own petty self-consciousness and communicate with another human being. Someone I cared deeply for.
“When you came back to school you seemed okay. You were cheerful, friendly. You were always kind to everyone,” I reminded her.
“It was just my way of covering it up.”
“I wish you could have let me know how I could have helped.”
“You seemed to be ignoring me.”
“You were nice to me but you were the type who was nice to everybody. I was afraid I was reading too much into it.”
“I rode my bike past your house,” she told me, “just so that maybe I would see you.”
I had ridden past Cherie's house dozens of times myself for a similar purpose. Two ships in a deadly storm trying to save each other but failing to understand the signals.
We slowly and painfully pieced together the tragic series of errors that kept us apart. It's painfully obvious that I could have been of monumental help to her in the darkest days of her life had I only the most rudimentary ability to communicate, to rise up out of my own silly adolescent insecurity and self-loathing to tell her how much I cared and how I would have done anything to help her.
And she had read my infirmity as a kind of aloof nonchalance.
The death of her brother had powerful consequences on Cherie's life. In many ways, it was also a tragedy for me. I believe that if had achieved that single mutual romantic relationship with a girl back then, it would have changed my life. If Cherie had openly expressed her feelings toward me and if I had found the courage to show real affection back then, and had her brother not been killed in Vietnam, had she been at that party . . . well, I would have evolved as a different person. A less confused kid. A more complete person. Maybe this change would have affected me just through high school. Maybe for the rest of my life.
By the end of our high school days, Cherie had decided to go to college to major in the new field of peace studies, to work at conflict resolution on a global level. But something sidetracked her from that calling along the way.
The death of Cherie's brother was the first awakening for me to the stupidity of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. I went on to actively oppose the war in writing and demonstrations and eagerly confronted riot police in street action from New York to Washington and once even found myself marching into Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in a demonstration led by Jane Fonda, urging army recruits to refuse to participate in the conflict that had killed Cherie's brother.
Somewhere in the early 1970s, I had explored the possibility of escape to Canada should I get drafted. Having the luck of the draw of a high number in the lottery, I avoided the draft, but was trained by Quaker anti-war counsellors to teach others how to make the move to Canada without getting caught if need be to avoid becoming fodder for the war. My own brother came perilously close to being drafted and I had explored an alternative for him: Montreal, maybe Nova Scotia. But he never had to execute the escape plan.
After Cherie and I had unravelled the threads of the failed relationship I embraced her and walked away to my room in the motel stunned by the revelations, angry at myself - or at least that diminutive fourteen-year-old self. I tried to blame adolescence or the times we had lived in for my inability to communicate but I could not. It was like so much else I had learned about history in my research for writing books about the United States and Nova Scotia and Canada. Our lives are shaped by our inabilities at least as much as our abilities. History, personal or otherwise, is the product of ill-informed decisions, wrong-headed action or no action at all.
I wished that I could somehow gather up Cherie's high school pain and suffering with my own ancient anguish of those days and turn it into something of beauty and truth, something more than a haunting echo within both of us.
The lives of our many selves from the past do not disappear as the days cascade into a future which becomes another chapter of the past. But the past is geography as well. There is a small nation that still exists and it is inhabited by Cherie and myself and dozens of other people who were part of my life back there in the sixties. Maybe I am the faulty president of that small, sad commonwealth, and like all of the citizens there, we fumble badly with the information that filters our way. We barely recognize each other and we are forever at war with the belligerent enemy states that surround us.
Amazingly, no one that I knew from my graduating class of 1969 was killed in the war, despite the fact that it raged on and consumed many American young men. It had something to do with us being white and middle class and heading off to colleges of our choosing. Cherie's brother was an anomaly but he was not alone. During my war protest days, I became a great fan of Canada as a haven of draft dodgers and, partly because of this, it would one day loom large as the real estate that would suit me well for my republic of the future. My perfect art of the inarticulate, that great crushing skill that had stifled me back then, made me appear, of all things, to be aloof. It evolved, I suppose, into a mad and chronic desire to communicate, to write, to get it all down on a page. To make sense of the incomprehensible as best I could.
The last time I saw the late great bearded, socially befuddled but brilliant writer, Alden Nowlan, was the day he died. I was not in the hospital room in New Brunswick where he was losing his battle with throat cancer. I was in my garden and Alden appeared to me as an elegant white bird, a cattle egret. It was spring and I was scratching at the ground and planting seeds of chard and kale and spinach. The cattle egret, rare for Nova Scotia, is a stork-like creature with long thin legs and a long pointy beak and a tuft of yellowish feathers on its neck.
The hair stood up on my own neck and, as the egret followed me around the garden in my humble pursuit of planting, I knew that something profoundly significant was going down somewhere. Later, I learned that this event occurred at the very time Alden was dying. I didn't even know he was in the hospital.
After the news of Alden's death arrived, I remembered the poem he had sent me for the magazine I was editing - the one where he took the persona of a large white bird flying through the clouds. Really good poets have a way of making metaphors work, I guess, because there he was in my garden, still kind of shy and awkward, but now a beautiful, graceful white winged creature watching me plant the seeds that would grow into lush green plants as the days grew longer and the sun warmed the rich, dark summer soil.
Hair, Surfing and the Meaning of Life
I like hair, lots of it. Hair on the head, at least. I like long hair on men and women. I'm an enemy of fashion unless the current trend is to endorse long, natural, full-flowing hair.
My interest in hair is long and complex and I have strong opinions on this subject. I think short hair is a disappointment on just about anyone. Baldness is forgivable and if a man grows a beard it's an indication to me that if he could, he'd have a big long wonk of hair on the top of his head too. People have aimed accusations of sexism at me for my disapproval of short hair on women but then I don't seem to have much effect on short hair trends, anyway, so consider me more concerned about the hair issue than gender commentary. I've taken my lumps for my hair opinions already and should know better. For example, I wanted to name my band “Downtown Lesbian Haircut” as a kind of rueful rock and roll statement but I was nearly booted out of the band. So I'm well aware that I'm on shaky ground but some things have to be said.
As far as I can tell, the first significant long hair statement in my life was made by Jesus Christ. Now, I don't have a clue as to what the real Jesus Christ looked like, but at the Palmyra Moravian Church where I went to Sunday sch
ool and sometimes even a tedious but sincere church service, there was this floor-to-ceiling painting of Him on the wall behind the pulpit. There was Jesus H. with a flock of sheep. It had a slightly Maxfield Parrish feel to it, as I reflect upon the image now. Jesus was holding a lamb and his sheep had those really cool ethereal sheep faces that made me have early thoughts on vegetarianism.
I had grown up with that image of Jesus with his flock in what appeared to be the Valley of Darkness from the Lord's Prayer. Jesus had really long, flowing hair. There were, however, no men in the congregation with hair like that, certainly not the minister or my father. At that point in my life - I was twelve, it was 1963 - I'd never even met a man with long hair around Cinnaminson, New Jersey.
My own hair was pretty close to what they call a buzz cut today. It was my mother's idea. She was way ahead of her time. The haircut itself was always perpetrated upon me in our basement beneath fluorescent lights near my mother's African violets. I hated getting my hair cut. I kept asking over and over why it was necessary and there was a veritable concordance of lame answers to this. None of which made the slightest bit of sense.
The litany went something like this. You needed short hair in the summer because long hair was hot. In the winter, well, it was matter of looking neat. Long hair was dirty or it made me you “look like a girl.” That phrase was one of the great emasculators of my day. And definitions of masculinity were pretty narrow in those regimented days of the early 1960s. Guys had short hair. Girls had long. How could such a dictum be questioned by mere youth? Sometimes there were even religious arguments. Aside from a few of my contemporaries who were prone to steal bikes and smoke cigarettes, the only person who was willing to approve of longish hair was my grandmother, Minnie. While my grandfather hated long hair nearly as much as he hated Democrats or the black fungus that grew on his summer corn, Minnie approved of the wildness in appearance that went along with ill-trimmed hair.
Driving Minnie's Piano Page 17