The majority of men in the class were not outdoorsy, and the two other women didn’t even go outside of the farmhouse. Professor Coburn and I took long walks, as we were both early risers. It was during these long walks that I realized what she’d been through and what a tough bird she was on so many levels.
She was from a poor vicar’s family and she never once thought of being anything other than an academic. She was one of the few women in her undergraduate classes and, as valedictorian, got herself to Oxford. She was wise enough to make the right social connections with the Coleridge family and had the chutzpah to ask the wealthy family if she could go through their closets. Professor Coburn devoted her life to the notebooks and letters she unearthed and began a race against time to get them edited and published. She dashed all around the world collecting and verifying information. Coleridge’s handwriting was nearly indecipherable, and she told me she had to stand where Coleridge had stood when he was describing the landscape in order to make sense of his screed.
There is no doubt she had guts and dedication. She was desperate for the money to buy the papers and had to go up against the Ivy League schools and their deep-pocketed donors. She had to ward off the villainous and frightening men who traded in these papers, marking up the prices and then selling them to private holders around the world. Wanting the papers for Victoria College at the University of Toronto, she was undaunted by the competition and borrowed the money from a former prime minister to buy the papers until finding a private donor. Professor Coburn was threatened, followed, intimidated and offered huge bribes for the material. She worked in secret at an island cottage on Georgian Bay so she could not be found. Only two Ojibway guides who led her through rough waters knew where she was. I loved hearing these suspenseful stories and always made her repeat all the fine details. Of course this is about as exciting as academia ever gets and Kathleen Coburn, a Canadian scholar, made it happen.
I was not the only one who found this an exciting tale. The novelist A.S. Byatt used to talk to Kathleen Coburn in the British Library where they were both researching. Eventually Byatt modelled Possession, her novel about twentieth-century research into a nineteenth-century poet, on Kathleen Coburn’s search for Coleridge. Even the name of one of the characters in the book, Christabel, is the same as Coleridge’s poem of the same name. When I ran into Deepti Mukherjee years later, she said that she believed that A.S. Byatt named the novel Possession because she was aware of how possessed Professor Coburn was by the dead Coleridge, and also how possessive she was of his works. Professor Coburn was not only the researcher in the novel, but also the lover.
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After a long winter, Professor Coburn invited us again to her farm. Only this time, she only invited Deepti, Toady and me. I’d made it to the semifinals. Then in the spring, I alone was invited to the farm. When Toady found out I was selected, he said over a beer in the graduate pub, “You’re it, Miss McClure. You’ve made it. I only hope you don’t marry and throw it all away. You should think long and hard about that before you take the job from a man who would use it to support his family.”
“Is this a proposal?” I asked, and the bartender and I killed ourselves laughing.
On my visit alone with Professor Coburn at the beloved farm, we talked about nature. We collected wildflowers and made bouquets for each room. The day before I was to leave, she said to me, “Miss McClure, I would like to go for a long walk and discuss your future.” My heart was pounding, and as I put on my hiking boots, I pictured telling my mother that today I had a prestigious fellowship, doctorate, and post-doc lined up.
Once we reached the highest point of the property and could look down at a view that resembled a stark Wyeth painting with a brick house, a red barn and a stone milking shed, she said,“It may be none of my business, but I have some advice that I hope you will heed. In terms of a career, I think you should become a comedy writer.”
A comedy writer? Was she serious? Did she mean comedy on the side? As a hobby while I am editing the Coleridge letters?
I was stunned into silence as she blathered on, unaware that she was shattering my dreams and making me look like an idiot to all of Victoria College, which was abuzz with my new appointment. “It wouldn’t be easy but I really believe you have the tenacity required for performance with that miraculous timing of yours and your gift for the written form.”
She was having me up to her farm to suggest the most plebeian, non-academic job in the world. I was mortified. How could I have been so grandiose? I could hear Roy quoting Yogi Berra: “It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.”
Now when I look back on this incident, I realize that I had done what I often do in life — fantasize myself at the hub. I was never a poet, a critic or remotely suited for the job. I got to Oxford based on one poem written while on some strange amphetamine. I got to the University of Toronto more legitimately, but I was never cut out for bibliographic research.
Professor Coburn had simply lanced my delusional boil. What I had taken as an insult was, in fact, kind and flattering. At that time, I still felt like the Catholic schoolgirl who had been told all her childhood years to stop being a comedian. The nuns said, “Catherine, you will soon learn that life is no joke.” As Mother Agnese used to say to me, “Many souls were laughing until their smiles were licked away by the flames of hell.”
My father and Roy used to say that I should be a comedian, but I didn’t pay either of them any heed. Traits that come naturally are rarely valued. I wanted to be important, which meant being what I wasn’t.
The man who had always encouraged my inner comedian was now, after years of pain that he never once complained of, dying. My mother called me in Toronto to say that he had nothing left but was still breathing. She said he’d forgotten how to walk so he was stuck in a bed, and then he forgot how to breathe and was placed on a respirator. He had lost his ability to swallow and was fed by a tube.
As I waited in my car to cross the bridge from Canada into the U.S., I thought of the fun my father and I had had playing practical jokes, laughing at my imitations of people, especially when I was Cassius Clay and he was Howard Cosell. Our hijinks were our bond. All of it was done while working hard — many times until midnight.
When I reached the hospital in Buffalo where he now lived, or I should say was “plugged in,” I saw the six-foot-one former tennis champion of Buffalo, who now weighed ninety-seven pounds. His porcelain-thin white skin, so much like my own, appeared like a finely woven translucent cocoon and the veins looked like caterpillars writhing underneath. Aside from a brain tumour and lung cancer, he had thrush, an impacted bowel, skin cancer, bedsores and innumerable thrombosed veins. Yet his heart continued to beat. The doctors said his brain was an empty honeycomb.
I suggested we call the fight, as he’d gone way past the ninth round and was taking an unnecessary beating. My devoutly Catholic mother said that she was not going head to head with God in deciding when to end my father’s life. I said I would take the responsibility for the decision to end his life, and she could stay at home. All she said on her way out of his hospital room was she hoped God knew my voice from hers.
I was alone with my dad when they unplugged the respirator. As the air left his body, his cheeks slackened and it looked exactly as though he was smiling — the same warm smile he reserved for me when we’d worked side by side at the drugstore. I could almost hear him say, “Great work, Peaches.”
CHAPTER 17
ginger crab
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
I’d had little to do with Rochdale during the school year. With courses to finish and papers to write, I had scant free time since I was determined to finish my M.A. in one year. Rochdale was ideally located a block from the library where I had a carrel, so I usually left early in the morning and didn’t get home until near midnight. I had the
reverse schedule from the other Rochdale residents, which gave me the run of the place in the daytime. I never had to photocopy at the library; I could just nip home in five minutes and use the general office at Rochdale. Spencer left it open and anyone could use whatever he or she wanted. Since I was the only one who needed office supplies, I was usually alone except for the occasional stoner that came in to photocopy his face or his rear end for posterity.
Not surprisingly, Ginger turned out to be one of Canada’s biggest dope dealers. He said his rule was to never leave the apartment. Actually, he said what my father had said years earlier, “If you want to have a successful business, you have to be on the premises and have the respect of your employees.” Ginger sold only large quantities of dope and acid, as he said, “to avoid the dime-bag riff-raff.”
My friend Leora came to visit me from Chicago, where she was in graduate school. She was fairly shocked by Ginger with his mountains of dope, the security system of bikers, the flunkies, the dogs and his tattoos. (This was back when tattoos were mostly seen in circus sideshows and on sailors.) She studied the cherries up and down his arm and the tattoo across his chest, which read, I am a cherry picker, complete with a large cherry picker truck done in three colours. It was easy to study all of his tattoos because on laundry day Ginger stripped to his underwear and put his clothes in the washing machine on the eighteenth floor and sauntered around in his briefs until they came out of the dryer. He changed his T-shirt every day; however, on top he always wore the same bright orange flannel shirt littered with burn holes from cascading spliff sparks. He referred to that shirt as his “work uniform.” Leora marvelled that Ginger had work clothing and had to stay inside to avoid the “riff-raff.”
When I would see him in the gargantuan ashram apartment, he was usually sorting through a bundle of dope that was as large as a bale of hay. It was brought in by truck, unloaded in the underground parking garage, brought up the freight elevator and then rolled to our ashram right beside the elevator. When the police caught onto the basement gig, the dope started to come in food crates that were delivered to Etherea, the connecting restaurant. Then it was sent over to Rochdale through the dumbwaiter.
When there was a police raid, the “security” set off the fire alarms, then froze the elevators, giving the dealers enough time to relocate the dope to another unrented apartment. Over time I learned that I had been placed into Ginger’s ashram as a cover. Ginger paid for the whole unit; however, he had fake names on all of the dope storage rooms so that if there was a raid, he could say he didn’t rent the rooms where the dope was and the “management” would produce rental agreements for fake people. Ginger wanted a real student with books instead of dope, so that the place would look like a student co-op apartment instead of “the largest drug supermarket in North America,” as it was later labelled in the Toronto Star. I came along at just the right moment to get free rent.
I learned a bit more about Ginger as the year wore on. He hated surprises of any sort. (He said he’d never had a good one.) He also didn’t like people he didn’t know. Meanwhile, I had something that Ginger longed for more than anything in the world: a vacuum cleaner. Ginger and I were both highly allergic to cats. When Sara and I lived together in Cleveland, she had left an amazing small vacuum that you could wear on your back. Whenever I started sneezing, which was often since the whole building was overrun with cats, I vacuumed and that usually did the trick. This vacuum had disposable bags, which allowed us to get rid of all of the cat hair. If it stayed in the vacuum, it would make me sneeze, but it would make the tall, muscular Ginger turn into an asthmatic wreck and he had to resort to an inhaler.
I witnessed Ginger’s feelings about cats one evening when I was in the living room using the communal phone. I never had any idea who paid the phone bill; Ginger said it was “on Ma Bell.” Ginger was busy with his flunkies, weighing dope on a large stainless steel scale, when his quasi-girlfriend — a sort of dope dealer–groupie, appropriately named Crystal, who had been pregnant for the entire duration of my M.A. (Leora said she must be giving birth to an elephant) — came in with a tiny tabby kitty. She sneaked up behind Ginger, put it on the back of his neck and started giggling. Ginger wheeled around and swatted the cat off his neck with such ferocity that it splatted on the wall and fell to the floor, looking like a miniature bear rug. She sobbed, collapsed to her knees and cradled the dead kitten. He yelled, “Shut up. I’m counting.” But she kept sobbing, so he got up and started toward her.
I had to hang up the phone (my mother thought the screaming was from a TV crime show). Intervening, I stood between Crystal and Ginger. He kept advancing toward her with clenched fists, so I sent Crystal out of the apartment and he yelled after her, “That baby is not mine. You better take care of it or it’s going the way of the cat.” Crystal slammed the door. Ginger stood for a minute looking down at his hands, which were in tight fists, and then said, “I need a strong ol’ lady like you.”
“Yeah, well if I see another scene like that, I’m moving out and taking the vacuum with me.” When I thought of what some women had to put out to get free rent — from making dinner, marriage and much more — I was relieved that all I had put out was a vacuum cleaner.
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One morning I came out to the kitchen to get a coffee. I was in a really expansive mood since I was actually going to finish my M.A. within the next few weeks and I was on the conclusion of my last paper for my course on the Victorians. I had no one to tell, so I told Ginger. He looked up from his scale, smiled and said, “Congratulations.”
Later that night, I was quite surprised when Ginger knocked on my door and presented me with a cake-sized box containing a giant cookie that said Fuckin’ A.
A week later, I’d officially earned the cookie, having just finished the last line of the last paper for my M.A. I emerged from my room at 1:30 a.m. and told Ginger I was on my way to drop it off at Victoria College.
“You shouldn’t be walking over to the university so late.”
No one as scary looking as Ginger could ever accost me on the street. I replied, “It’s a few blocks away. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll walk with you — if, and only if, you’ll have a joint with me.” I looked dubious, so he added, in a demanding grouchy tone, “Come on … for once be a human being instead of an iron maiden.”
I did need to celebrate my M.A. and I knew that I shouldn’t walk alone, so I agreed. I packed up my paper on Browning’s poem “Fra Lippo Lippi” and parked myself beside Ginger on the couch in front of his huge fish tank. (He’d had his piranhas for twelve years — his longest relationship to date.) We smoked our joint, something I hadn’t done for the duration of my M.A., and had a cigarette chaser. Then we began laughing and imitating the piranhas that had actually taken on human qualities. They showed their tiny rows of teeth when they saw the Fuckin’ A cookie, so we shared with the fish, who were rather tragically named Mom and Dad.
It was spring, and we cut through Philosopher’s Walk, a winding path that went through greenery behind the university. We smelled the lilacs at the law school and watched the butterscotch forsythia glow in the dark night.
Ginger asked me what the paper was about and I said it was an explication of Robert Browning’s poem about a fifteenth-century Florentine monk, Fra Lippo Lippi, who didn’t believe in the laws of the Church anymore; although he’d lost his faith and had relations with women, he felt guilty when he “sinned” against the Church. The laws he no longer believed in, as Browning said, fettered the monk.
“I know how that Fra Lipshit guy felt,” Ginger said. “My father took me by surprise, burned the back of my neck with cigarettes, beat the hell out of me every chance he got, even broke bones in my body, but I still feel guilty when it’s Father’s Day and I don’t visit him in Millhaven.”
When I told Ginger that I had really liked Professor Enright because he was passionate about ideas and c
ould jump out of his chair over a new interpretation, he suggested we leave a big joint rolled up for him in the manila envelope that contained my paper. I told Ginger that Professor Enright, who always wore a tweed jacket, once had our class come to his house. His wife showed us her Hummel collection, which consisted of shelf after shelf of strange little statues of Bavarian children in lederhosen and little green felt hats with feathers in them.
After I explained in detail that the ancient professor and Mrs. Enright were clearly not the countercultural dope-smoking types, Ginger said, “Hey, this stuff is Colombian. No one turns that down.” I explained that the professor called me “Miss McClure” and his wife wore sensible wool skirts and boiled-wool jackets bought at Petra Karthaus: Maker of Fine Bavarian Clothing.
I slipped the paper into Professor Enright’s mailbox and confiscated the joint Ginger had rolled on the spot. I realized at that point how out of touch Ginger was and how addled his brain must have become. He lived in Rochdale, a place where everyone smoked dope, and there he was the big cheese. He had no idea how little cachet dope dealers held with Victorian literature professors and their Hummel-collecting wives.
On our way back to Rochdale, Ginger said we got along so well because we were both workaholics. Then Ginger explained that he had the busiest workweek of his life ahead of him. Next Saturday there was a Maharishi coming in the afternoon to pray and bless us and do whatever Mararishis did, followed by a music festival of sorts with oodles of bands booked to play during the day and into the night. Thousands of American attendees couldn’t clear customs with dope, so it was all coming from Ginger and associates: “We’re selling it from a gas station in Fort Erie and all the way up the Queen Elizabeth Way.” Everyone would be dropping acid because, after all, it was acid rock music; he had a lot of work to do. He said, “You know, I never thought I’d be the type of guy to have employees. But hey, I’ve got fifteen guys working for me. If my ol’ man heard that, he wouldn’t believe it.” I realized that Ginger thought of himself as a success and, in his world, he was.
Coming Ashore Page 23