Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

“What kind of threat is that?”

  “I don’t exactly know yet, but . . .”

  We continued on with our sex-play life, but I accepted the professorship, even started taking her to concerts and plays, tried to pour a little culture into her. We were almost becoming a couple, beyond the carnal into spiritual coupleness.

  But I still went to Caracas.

  Loved Caracas, in fact. Got an apartment in a fancy area. Third floor. A balcony, all steel and glass, right next to a giant mango tree. And, of course, I had to reach out and get a big not-quite-ripe-ripe mango and munch it down and have a horrible allergic reaction, my whole face swelling up so I could hardly see.

  But I went to the local pharmacy and told the pharmacist what had happened and he gave me some pills, I took them; back to normal. No more green mangos.

  Loved the gang at the U.S. Embassy, met a Jacinto Quirarte at the embassy who was working as the director of the Centro Venezolano-Americano, a kind of embassy-sponsored English language school and gringo-Amerikanski cultural center. But what he really was was an archaeologist. We became great friends.

  I became great friends with my students at the Instituto Pedagogico and Catholic University.

  Like Emilia Rivas-Rivas, who lived just a couple of blocks away from us.

  Or Juana de la Cruz, who lived up in the slums on the hills in one of the projects they’d built for the poor.

  I wrote a book of essays on American culture and self-published it in Spanish (help from the gang at the embassy), wrote my plays (the play that was put on at Loyola, remember?) and it came out in a bi-lingual edition.

  My boss was a guy named Bob Cross, and I was invited to every embassy party imaginable.

  Lucia and I got closer than we’d been for years. She even got pregnant after I’d gone and had special black high-heeled shoes (“zapatos de puta/whore-shoes,” as she put it) made for her, and found a dressmaker who made her a beautiful dress out of sun-flower patterned silk. Plus all kinds of sexy lingerie, black stretch lacey stuff.

  Almost forgot about Connie altogether.

  No affairs with anyone.

  All the parties, I guess.

  I met a Bolivian politician, Mariano Baptista. In exile in Caracas, working for Venezuelan Airlines/Aerolineas Venezolanos. He’d been the right-hand man of this dictator in Bolivia who had just been kicked out, and it was either leave or get strung up.

  I was giving these lectures at the Centro Cultural Venezolano-Americano, and he’d come to one of them, the one on “La Filosofía de John Dewey”/“The Philosophy of John Dewey,” and afterwards had come up to me.

  “Fabuloso! ¿Qué te parece? A mi me gustaría invitarte a tomar un cafe en un lugarcito por aca.” (Fabulous! What do you think? I’d like to invite you to have a coffee at some little place around here.)

  His wife, Carmen, standing next to him, like some goddess who’d just dropped in from ancient India. It turned out she was half Bolivian, half German, a great, great painter who I eventually bought a bunch of pictures from: bullfighters, Bolivian miners inside mines . . .

  Lucia and I went out for coffee. Of course.

  Emilia Rivas Rivas, my student, was home taking care of the kids. No problem.

  The beginning of a great friendship with Mariano and Carmen.

  And there was at least one embassy party a week. I got to know a bunch of people teaching at the Centro Venezolano Americano.

  Even got to know Ramon Diaz Sanchez, one of the great Venezuelan novelists, went to his place a couple of times, and wrote an essay about him. He was director of the National Archives and told me about all the original letters of Simon Bolivar they had. You know, the guy Bolivia is named after. So I went into the national archives and started reading all the Bolivar manuscripts, and wrote a book about him.

  Got to know Juan Liscano, publisher of the snappy, jazzy lit mag, Zona Franca, where I started getting published in every issue.

  I got to know the ambassador so well that one day when Lichtenstein, the great pop-artist, was in town to talk about his work (an exhibit of his stuff at the Centro Cultural Venezolano Americano), he called me up.

  “Listen, Foxy, I’ve got this American artist on my hands and I (we!) don’t know what to do with him. You’re Mr. Artsy, could you entertain him for a day? Maybe take him to the beach, out to dinner? All expenses paid, of course . . .”

  Of course! And of course I said yes.

  Spent the afternoon with Lichtenstein and at the end of the day asked him to sign a lithograph of one of his works, the poster printed for his exhibit.

  “My pleasure.”

  I still have it on the wall at the bottom of the stairway in my old Victorian mansion in downtown Lansing. A huge fist hitting some guy on the back of the head, a bubble with “Sweet dreams, baby!” in it.

  That’s on the wall on the elaborate wood stairway going to the second floor. In the dining room is a huge painting of Carmen Baptista’s of Indians sitting in a tin mine. One wall. And on another wall a picture of a bullfight. A blue bull and a red cape. Very abstract.

  Lucia was in her own juice, in all these fancy apartments and castle-like mansions. El Cuerpo Diplomatico/ The Diplomatic Corps. What we’d both aspired to, I guess: getting up there in the rarefied atmosphere of big power, big money.

  So one night after we got home from a particularly romantic party at La Guaira, on the coast, just over the mountains from Caracas, after barbecue and beer and all sorts of attention from the diplomatic-service gods, it simply happened. Ein, zwei, drei.

  Pregnant. Marcella, our youngest, our little blonde angel, what would the next one look like? I was all set to have ten. That’s what the Church was all about, wasn’t it? Procreation. That’s what we were here for, wasn’t it, to repopulate the earth? So she got pregnant and I couldn’t have been happier.

  But she didn’t want the child, found some Argentinian woman abortionist who came over to the apartment with some sort of wiggle-waggle device (a bunch of balls at the end of a long chain of some sort) that she stuck up in Lucia's uterus and started wiggle-waggling around. Ten minutes. And then she left with a smile as Lucia paid her.

  “Tu vas a ver, siempre da resultado.” (You’ll see, it always works.)

  And it did. I guess. If she was really ever pregnant and hadn’t just had a screwed-up period.

  Whoever it was going to be, he or she was gone.

  Which bothered me a lot.

  Three children: what was that? For an Irish Catholic from Chicago?

  In Dolores Volini’s family there had been ten. Joannie Boyle, one of my old buddies from grammar school, had had ten. There were voices always screaming inside me, INCREASE AND MULTIPLY, THAT IS THE WAY OF THE LORD.

  But, OK. No more kids. Hardly any more sex. I hated rubbers, she wouldn't take pills. But Caracas was enough. Just high enough up to escape from punishing heat, but never cold, never too, too, too hot. And being surrounded by new friends, giving my lectures, teaching my classes, I had never been happier.

  After my two years in Caracas the embassy arranged a lecture tour for me and I toured Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, all through the Andes, up and down the Pacific Coast, over to the Atlantic coast, and then back to Los Angeles and Loyola.

  Lucia got a job teaching Spanish at San Fernando State College (now San Fernando State University).

  We lived within bicycling distance of Loyola, where I worked, and now she would be working way the hell on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains in the San Fernando Valley.

  About forty-five minutes each way.

  She drove it for about a week and then had an accident. Someone was coming out on the freeway, probably into the right lane, not the left lane at all (where she was), but the guy coming in on the ramp as fast as hell scared her, and she swerved off the road into the area that separated her from oncoming traffic coming the other way. If she’d made it all the way across she would have rammed head-on into cars coming the other way and been smashed
to smithereens, but luckily she never made it over into oncoming traffic.

  That was it for her and freeways, though.

  “I want to move out there—period—no more long drives for me!”

  “What about me?” I tried to reason with her, “Then I’ll have to do all the driving—”

  “But you don’t mind, you’re good at it.”

  “Bullshit! I won’t want to go anyplace at night.”

  “You’ll manage . . . you managed to go lots of places at night before we went to Caracas!”

  A reference to Carole, of course. Of course she knew all about it. Mr. Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth. She didn’t care. As long as I left her alone.

  “How about someplace in Santa Monica? Half-way—”

  “No way! The San Fernando Valley or nothing.”

  “Then nothing. We can just stay where we are.”

  “Nunca, nunca, nunca...tu vas a ver!” (Never, never, never...you’re going to see.)

  I saw all right. The next day she went out and got a real estate woman and within a week had found a house in San Fernando Valley.

  Nice place. Ranch. What was to be my bedroom was facing out on hills full of orange groves. Somebody else’s orange groves, but orange groves nevertheless.

  What the hell. I moved; she was going to buy it on her own and just leave me high and dry.

  Carole and I were over. When I’d gone to Caracas she’d gotten pissed as hell, had gone around telling everyone about us. Like Ken Carrero, over in the Office of Development.

  He’d called me, in fact.

  “Listen, Foxy, we’ve gotta talk over coffee,” I met him in the student union, and he put it on the table, “That girl you were fucking around with, man, she’s mad as hell. Wanted you to marry her, and then you went off to Caracas . . . she’s telling everyone. It looks bad.”

  “It wasn’t that bad. She had gifted hands. But I never managed to get it in her . . .”

  “But the Jesuits, you know . . .”

  A word to the wise.

  Only I wasn’t that wise. Ignored Carole when I’d see her on campus. Simply ignored her. And she ignored me back.

  Besides, there were other problems.

  Like salary. I’d reached $10,000 a year and was told by Father O’Brien in administration, “That’s as far as we go, Hugh, our upper limit. So it’s just cost of living raises from now on. The Jesuits, after all, donate their services.”

  Donate, my ass! Free room and board, and whenever they needed a car, it was a phone call away. Whatever pocket money they needed. I would have traded places with them any day.

  But me with three kids, two cars now, much higher payments for the house out on the San Fernando hills; orange grove vistas don’t run cheap.

  Besides, I was having other problems with “The Faith,” as they called it.

  Over the years I’d been reading the Fathers of the Church, not just St. Augustine, but all the minor writers. All the books about the Church councils when they voted in doctrines like Limbo, the Immaculate Conception (the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, born without original sin) . . . x number of votes for, x number against; the majority wins.

  Just thinking about it too much, too.

  I couldn’t believe the universe just happened theories either, that the universe just big banged itself into existence one day. But if nothing was eternal, how could there be an eternal God either? And how could anyone just WILL IT and matter (the universe) would just happen? And where was God now? He was around talking to the ancient Jews full-time, wasn’t He? But what happened to Him now?

  I finally came into a position where I figured that the universe was impossible. It couldn’t be, I couldn’t be, horses and rhinos and mountains and orchids couldn’t be. I walked around in a perpetual state of question-marking everything around me.

  I had joined the Modern Language Society and received a special issue about job openings for English professors, among them an opening for the Department of American Thought and Language (which sounded good, serious) at Michigan State University.

  Openings, too, at Palos Verdes State College and a place way up north past San Francisco. Which I wasn’t too interested in.

  Nothing at San Fernando State College where Lucia was. It would have been easiest to just work at the same place where she worked, n’est pas?

  Palos Verdes was even further away from San Fernando than Loyola, but I wrote to them anyhow, went out and met the dean:

  “I’m trying to get a whole new program started here for diplomats who will be working in Latin America or Spain: a whole curriculum in Spanish. You’d be teaching American Literature in Spanish. Which, I guess, you’ve already done in Mexico and Venezuela.”

  “It would be great. I’m married to a Peruvian. Twenty-four-hour a day Spanish lessons. Even the subjunctive is a snap for me: ‘Si hubiera tenido la oportunidad hubiera quedado en Francia cuando fui alli a los veinte años.’” (If I would have had the opportunity I would have stayed in France when I went there when I was twenty.)

  “Whatever you say. I’ll put you down way at the top of the list . . .”

  An older guy, like a big old gorilla, just on the edge of sliding down his mountain into eternity.

  But the administration gave a big no to his project when it came down to final votes and I got a letter to that effect : “Sorry, you would have been perfect for the job.”

  So I wrote to Michigan State, went for an interview, in Chicago, no less.

  I had a terrible cold. When we’d moved into the house in San Fernando, the first night there had been no heat so we slept in the cold house, everyone fine, them with all the blankets, me with just what was left.

  A cold that wouldn’t go away.

  My boss at Loyola, Ted Erlandson, Mr. Redbeard, took me aside, when I told him what I was doing, he said, “Listen, pal, whether you’re here or in Michigan or at the South Pole, I’m still your pal, will always be your pal, and let me give you a little advice: don’t say a lot. You tend to over-talk, over-explain yourself. Answer the questions as briefly and succinctly as possible. OK?”

  “I’ll try.”

  So, off I went to Chicago.

  Over Christmas vacation.

  You know Chicago over Christmas vacation. It really is polar.

  So I took some cold medicine, something that stopped the coughing but kind of numbed me, put me ‘on hold.’

  I didn’t have to work at under-answering the questions. Staying awake was the best I could do; no chance of my expatiating on who I was, Loyola, Chicago, pre-med, Peruvian wife, all my books of poetry published, articles about Latin American culture. It was just YES, NO, MAYBE, WHATEVER YOU SAY.

  And the guy who was interviewing me, Ben Strandness, liked my minimalist style: I got the job.

  Lucia was furious.

  “How could you do this to me and the kids? I’ve got this great job at a state university, raises, raises and more raises. You could have stopped teaching altogether and just have written novels. Whatever . . . now what?”

  “Well, I’ve taken the job. I start in September . . .”

  To be honest, I was all set to leave her, and the kids . . .

  (Or maybe that’s too strong. I just wanted to leave, take the job in Michigan. Period.)

  Chicagoans always have a romantic view of Michigan anyhow. If you’ve got a little money you always have a summer home in Michigan on the shore of Lake Michigan. We never had one but lots of my father’s friends did, and we’d go up there now and then.

  So, in a sense I was attaching myself (in my own mind) to some sort of sandy, post-glacial paradise; up, up and away. And if Lucia didn’t want to come along, so be it.

  But she found a job in the Spanish department at Michigan State at the last minute and in June we took off in a new Rambler I’d just bought for the trip.

  In April though, something else had happened that was going to totally change my life.

  Lucia had found out about some kind of
“underground” jamboree going on in Berkeley in April, and I’d written to the guy who was organizing the thing, Len Fulton, editor of The Small Press Review who also published The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses.

  Up to then I was mainly mainstream.

  Little mags? Small presses?

  When I was in Caracas I’d gone into a Communist bookstore one day and seen a copy of El Cornu Emplumado, a U.S. little mag that listed other little mags in it, like The Tampa Review, edited by Duane Locke at Tampa University. A great poet in his own right.

  I’d written to him, he’d sent me a big package of old Tampa Reviews with lists of other little mags in the back of each issue: “Magazines Received.”

  I’d written to a lot of the other little mags, had gotten a little stack, did a little anthology (in Spanish) of the stuff I liked the best.

  But nothing ever came of it.

  I was still in awe of The New Yorker and The Paris Review and the university quarterlies like The Northwestern Review, Southwest Review, Harvard Review, you know, prestige, big shot stuff, all that crap.

  I had started my own little mag though: Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry, and Fulton wrote back:

  Dear Hugh Fox:

  Glad you’re coming to our little small press

  get-together. How about being on a panel on publishing little mags? We like to have an

  academic like you on such a panel. Adds a little “weight” to the proceedings.

  OK. So I got on this panel and Lucia and I were off to Berkeley in April of 1968, just before leaving for East Lansing, Michigan, and then off to Providence, Rhode Island where I had that fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

  I couldn’t believe what happened at Berkeley.

  Everyone in the small press/underground poetry world was there.

  It was the apotheosis of the hippy dream. San Francisco was crazy. People sleeping in the parks, everyone bearded and smoking pot, all the girls (women!) in long, flowering dresses made out of hand-printed fabrics from India. Sandals, sandals and more sandals.