Goldenrod

by Peter Gault

  “I can’t wait,” I said.

  Both my parents liked the idea of me being single and free, unfettered by monogamy. They rarely mentioned Elizabeth. Mother once told me that I was the type of man who would be single for a large portion of my life, that it would be hard to find a woman who could keep up to me. I would never settle down in a relationship or marriage that was boring. Women would always be around me, and I was extremely vulnerable to whim, which was dangerous. “Don’t think with your penis,” warned Mother again and again.

  “Did you hear the one about the two baseball players?” asked Dad.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “These two baseball players had known each other for years and were best friends. They made a deal that if one of them died, he must return a message to the other and tell him if there is any baseball in heaven. One of them died and sure enough he came back with a message. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is that you can play baseball as much as you want in heaven. The bad news is that you’re scheduled to pitch tomorrow.”

  “’Bye Dad,” I said, as the elevator doors closed. I wondered if his joke had anything to do with the University of Stockton. Were there women and suntanning in heaven?

  Instead of going down, I pressed the button for the top floor, the direction of heaven. I got an idea and wanted to try a trick my father had taught me. I flicked the “stop” switch, causing the elevator to halt between floors. I turned off the light and sat cross-legged on the floor. This would be my private meditation room, inherited from my father.

  I meditated and the room seemed to become larger, empty and barren. It became The Barren Room which had persistently recurred in my dreams, which had always existed somewhere in the background of my mind. Through a rhythmic kind of chanting, my mind emptied of thought, became vacant, neutral, blandly masculine, gray and hollow, like the inside of a stripped army barrack. I had returned to the source of male consciousness where everything originated, to a world before color, a masculine womb. There were no sisters in my room, no hanging plants, and no girlfriend. No one stirred the blanket of dust on the floor and the plain-looking Venetian blinds were never opened. The lighting was dull, but the visibility unobstructed with a black and white impersonality like a low-class motel.

  My imagination was a utlitarian mechanism disclosing its own bleak atmosphere, an atmosphere of futile loneliness. I willfully banished myself from the land of plenty, indulged in the security of imprisonment. I locked myself in a vault, an austere coffin, where there was nothing to do but breathe, rhythmically. I existed to breathe. I didn’t give the room meaning. I didn’t have the energy or the inclination to give the room meaning. I retreated, descended to the bottom of the pit, as a form of protection and preparation. I did it willfully, but unconscious of my motives. It was instinctive.

  I opened my pants, I was hard. My fist pumped up and down in time with my breathing, thumping consistently like the piston of an engine. I was still in the barren room, alone, no visions of body parts, nothing as concrete as an image. My mind was superfluous, impotent, fruitless, but my body was functioning, breathing, and pumping. I was exploring myself, exploring my male consciousness which I had inherited innocently and which owned me. I was covered in sticky warm fluid. I slept dreamlessly.

  Meditation was supposed to make you feel tranquil and gentle and in harmony with the universe, but it had the opposite effect on me. It made me assertive, aggressive, almost violent. It made me fearless and alert. If a little thing bothered me, I wouldn’t let it pass. I would jump on it. I would pound it into the ground. Consequently, I felt absolutely no hostility. My hostility was expressed, and when it was expressed, it evaporated. I was in tune with myself, expressing exactly what was inside me with appalling honesty, an honesty that grated on middle-class values.

  I arrived home at dusk, poked my head into the basement and commenced an elaborate tirade of barking. Shultz, Whiskey and eventually Tanka came bounding after me into the backyard. I was naked except for my running shoes. We were four jubilant children of nature, jumping and rolling through the towering grass and shrubbery, energetic and free, abandoned to sensuality. It was a celebration. There was no presumption or intellectual abstraction to mar the purity of our love. We soared above mediocrity, heroic in our spontaneous enthusiasm. We were perfection, even pathetic old Tanka, who should have dropped dead years ago. Tanka was incapable of dying. I was panting like a dog, and my heart was pounding and I too felt incapable of dying, immortal.

  Mr. Price made a grave mistake. He started his lawn mower! He revved the machine, warming it up, as if he intended to cut the lawn in the dark. The sun was setting when I jumped the fence and stood in front of Mr. Price, naked and barking wildly, a full session of meditation under my belt. Shultz and Whiskey imitated me, leaping the fence and barking at Price. Poor old Tanka, resolutely refusing to be left out, found a place to squeeze under the metal fence, and joined us with her excited yelps. The savages had fled the jungle and were pillaging civilization. Mr. Price was wide-eyed, frozen to the spot.

  Price must have thought I had gone insane and intended to kill him, but it was actually the lawn mower I was attacking. I felt no malice towards him. I yanked the hideous machine out of his hand and held it over my head. I took a hop, skip, and a jump and heaved the lawn mower into the swimming pool. It landed upright, treaded water for about ten seconds, shooting out spray in a panic-filled struggle for survival. Everyone was soaked, including Mr. Price. It finally sank to the bottom, leaving a surface of bubbles and gasoline. Shultz jumped in the water, swam through the turbulence, and climbed out again. I danced naked at the side of the pool, the happy assailant, barking madly with my three tail-wagging friends. On that note, I left town for the University of Stockton.

  5. The University of Stockton

  The classroom doors were shut and Philosophy 101 was in session. I arrived late and stood outside the class with a piece of paper in hand. It read, “Dr. Sterm, room 109.” That was the professor’s name. I tried the doorknob, but it seemed locked. I was puzzled and rechecked my piece of paper. It was definitely the right room. I didn’t realize the doorknob was ornamental and not meant to be turned, but pulled. I rapped firmly on the windowpane, interrupting the lecture.

  As Dr. Sterm was walking towards me, I figured it out. I simply pulled the door open.

  “Sorry. I got confused about the doors,” I said to the wrinkled brow of the professor.

  “If you get confused over opening a door, you’re going to have a rough time with this course,” said Dr. Sterm.

  I wanted to make up for my blunder, establish an atmosphere of congeniality and a positive rapport with the professor, but compounded the folly by mispronouncing his name. “Are you Dr. Sperm?” I asked with a hopeful smile, trying to make my way to a seat.

  Phuc not Fuck, I thought.

  The class laughed for an unnecessarily long time, which pleased Sterm. He enjoyed my embarrassment, the deepening color in my face. He wrote down my name and handed me a syllabus.

  “We’ve been debating the topic of afterlife. Do you know what I mean by afterlife, Mr. Harrison?” said Dr. Sterm patronizingly, trying to provoke more laughter at my expense.

  “Isn’t that the stuff that drains from a woman after she bears a child, Dr. Sperm?” I said.

  “That’s afterbirth,” said Dr. Sterm redundantly.

  I was the only one who laughed at my joke, and I laughed hysterically. I always laughed at my own jokes. No one enjoyed my jokes as much as me. I could entertain myself for hours with witty comments and humorously perceptive observations of humanity. In this particular instance, however, my perception of what was funny must have been completely altered. I was killing myself with laughter, and everyone else in the room was silent. Sterm had to wait a long time for me to calm down before carrying on with his lecture. Even after regaining control of myself, poorly suppressed snorts of laughter escaped my nose.

  Dr. Sterm
was a tiny man, skinny and short. He had tension in his facial muscles, as if he was in a constant state of irritation. Poor spelling and coffee stains on essays were gradually eroding his sanity. He could espy a grammatical error from twenty paces; he could sense it, taste it, smell its disgusting aroma. It made him want to spit and puke.

  I believed that most intellectuals were frustrated jocks. As an adolescent, their physical ineptitude made them subject to ridicule on a sports field. They couldn’t break into that athletic elite which was in every high school. Consequently, they sought status through other means, through learning big words and having all the answers in class. Sterm was an intellectual Bruno, an intellectual glass cock. He compensated for being short by being smart. The jock and the intellectual were not antithetical in my mind. Their differences were superficial. The underlying mentality was the same.

  “This topic is my specialty,” said Sterm. “My PhD thesis focused on philosophical arguments in favor of and against the existence of an afterlife. There are a number of philosophies we can touch on in this course. For example, the Judeo-Christian belief in heaven and hell. We’ve all been indoctrinated with this belief to some degree, whether or not we believe in it at face value, or metaphorically, or even if we reject it outright. Like it or not, Christian theology is implanted on our consciousness.”

  My consciousness was beginning to do unchristian-like things. My consciousness was dominated by my libido. I had a similar reaction listening to Mr. Baldwin discuss America’s perilous economic situation. I got sexually excited. I converted negative into positive. The thing that struck me most intensely, even before I mispronounced Sterm’s name, while I was in the hallway confounded by the ornamental doorknob, was that philosophy class had a higher proportion of men than women. Philosophy, history, and, to a lesser extent, political science, drew a predominantly male assemblage. I was shopping for a major and needed a subject that appealed more to women. Fate had it that I was brought up in a family of eight women. I needed to be constantly surrounded by the opposite sex to be happy. Fine Arts, English Literature, and Drama had the largest female populations. These were my prime options.

  I preferred to major in “Women,” but no such course was offered. I was fascinated by women and wanted to study them. I was interested in whatever it was that a woman could give a man, that magic ingredient, that strength-giving force which was loosely referred to as love. I didn’t need to sleep with a woman to get power from her. She just needed to be in the same room, the same building, and I could feed off her energy. I wanted to discover that woman inside me, to get closer to that creative core. I didn’t want to learn about afterlife. I’d find out about that when I died. I wanted to learn about women.

  Due to an unfortunate accident to the professor, Dr. Prigs, my creative writing course was cancelled. Prigs walked and talked and acted like a woman. He was more like a woman than any woman I knew. He took short quick steps, spoke with a lisp, and seemed to have no muscles in his wrists. Beneath this effeminate exterior, however, was a man of steel. He had spent most of the first class reminiscing about the Second World War, the trenches, wading through a sea of mud and dead bodies. He was fixated on wartime, and clearly thought of himself as tough and macho. He was a bit of a war hero, he admitted, but even heroes get afraid. I laughed at first, thinking he was kidding, but shut up when I realized he was serious. “It was so scary, I could have shit myself,” said Professor Prigs naughtily, giggling as the naughty word slipped off his naughty little tongue.

  Prigs read grammar books in his spare time—for pleasure! It was the challenge of finding grammatical errors in a grammar book that really aroused Prigs’ enthusiasm, even more than masculine feats of heroism on the battlefield. It was perversity! He boasted of his sordid triumphs: “And on page ninety-seven, I was sure there was a mistake. I wrote the publishers and directed their attention to it. And you’ll never guess. They wrote me back and said that I was correct, that they had made a mistake and would change it for the next edition. Imagine that! A grammatical error in a book that’s supposed to teach students grammar!”

  Prigs kept us in class the whole hour. There was one point that Prigs was adamant and unbending about, that brought the real man out in him. “We are here to study the rules and conventions of language, especially in relation to fiction,” he said firmly. “Under absolutely no condition are you to write anything creative. If such an arrogant liberty is taken, an appropriate penalty against your marks will ensue.”

  I was mystified. I leaned to the guy beside me and asked, “Is this the creative writing course?”

  “Of course,” he said, irritated by the stupidity of my question.

  “A creative writing course where you’re forbidden to be creative?” I asked. I had a feeling it would be like Winfield’s hockey practices.

  It wasn’t my idea to transfer into a novel course. Prigs taught the course in the morning and died of a heart attack in the afternoon. Thus, the deletion of the creative writing course. Prigs’ death was reminiscent of his struggle in the trenches. He was chasing a runaway pussy cat through a wet and muddy football field during the first exhibition game of the University of Stockton. A stadium of spectators watched him charge, bent forward, along the fifty-yard line after a cat, and suddenly fall down and die. The cat got squashed to death by a linebacker in the second half. It was an awful mess. Two deaths and Stockton still lost the game. Stockton never had a successful football team.

  “If you believe in life after death,” said Dr. Sterm, “it will influence the way you behave on a day-to-day basis. An existentialist believes death is the end of existence, that you’re shoved into the ground and decompose into nothing. Life’s passionate and precious because that’s all we’ve got. There’s no prize at the end of the tunnel for being a good boy. Christians more or less believe you put in time until death and don’t start enjoying yourself until you’re in heaven.”

  My Art History class was overflowing with women. It was a gold mine. There were so many attractive women that I became dizzy and disoriented and couldn’t decide where to sit. I was deliriously happy and kept changing my seat. I sat beside the best-looking girl I could find and immediately noticed someone more beautiful a couple of rows up. I excused myself politely, complaining that I couldn’t see the blackboard, and moved to a seat beside her. I saw an even lovelier girl ahead of me. I excused myself again, using the same excuse about not being able to see the blackboard, and moved next to my most recent find. I was preparing to move a third time because I noticed an absolute goddess about two seats ahead of me, but the professor arrived and began his lecture.

  Dr. Ruta was totally unlike my other professors. He was a large man with an intimidating appearance and a forceful way of expressing himself. First impressions can be deceptive. It became apparent that beneath his rough exterior, Ruta was a man of warmth and sensitivity. He generated a lively discussion.

  Each student was asked to name a favorite painting or artist. Someone mentioned Picasso’s ‘Old Man and Guitar,’ which was a safe thing to choose. If you liked Picasso you were considered wise. A couple of illiterate dunces, wilting in their shame, admitted that they didn’t know any painters. One naive young girl unwittingly acknowledged the work of Norman Rockwell. Everyone secretly liked Rockwell of course, but sophisticated people denied it. They were supposed to despise him for his commercialism. The girl beside me liked Marcel Duchamp, which incited a riot of vigorous monologue from Ruta, who also loved Duchamp. The class nodded approvingly, but I suspected they were like me. They had never heard of Marcel Duchamp.

  “I identify with ‘The Great Masturbator’ by Salvador Dali,” I said when it was my turn and broke into laughter. The girl beside me giggled, and the professor smiled, but the remainder of the class was quiet. I was beginning to realize that a university, at least in the classroom, was a humorless place. No one seemed willing to have a mindless, meaningless laugh.

  “Do you masturbate often?” said the girl beside
me, with an amused look on her face. We stood up and moved toward the exit.

  “Not as much as I used to. I used to average three times a day,” I said, smiling back. I motioned to shake hands. “Don’t worry. I wash my hands afterwards. Besides, I usually don’t even use my hands. I do it against a pillow. I’m Ken.”

  “I’m Barb,” she said, shaking my hand. “I can imagine the stains on your pillowcase.”

  “I’m making a sculpture out of my pillow case. It’s going to be a bust of Ronald Reagan as a tribute.”

  Dr. Sterm’s philosophical exposition was ending, and the hour was drawing to a close. There was a guy sitting a few seats away who was staring at me. His eyes were lustful, signaling his homosexual desires. I ignored him, but spread my legs a little more to give him a better look. Winfield was right about me being a cock teaser. It wasn’t until I was halfway out the door, my hand on the ornamental doorknob, that I felt a tug on my belt loop. It was Barb from Art History. She was in the class the whole time, sitting near the back, and I hadn’t noticed her.

  “Do you want to go to the coffee shop?” she asked.

  There was a coffee shop called ‘The Artsie Farsie’ on campus, in the basement of an old dilapidated building. It was frequented by artists, criminals, and drug freaks, students with unconventional interests and sidelines. The place had a bohemian atmosphere, cluttered with a battered set of unmatching tables and chairs, dull lighting, and a low ceiling. Conversation never lagged. You could feel the probing of adventurous minds, young minds discovering the colorful world of the imagination, of literature, exploring the recesses of spiritual and metaphysical reality.

  I felt a surge of excitement and fell in love with that filthy little coffee shop. It was like opening a door and stepping into the dilapidated basement of my mind. It was similar to The Barren Room, but it had a woman’s touch. It was a place to discover yourself. The Artsie Fartsie had a seductive magic about it. It inspired my curiosity, animated my tongue, and gave me a quenchless thirst for mystery. Not the mystery of the spy novel, but the eternal mystery of the heart and mind. I wanted to acquaint myself with the demons and lovers of my soul.