Special Topics in Calamity Physics

I sat down in my assigned seat, given to me by Ronin-Smith, and counted the minutes until the deafening student stampede, all the “What ups” and “How wuz your summers,” the smell of shampoo, toothpaste and new leather shoes, and that scary kinetic energy kids emitted whenever they were in large numbers so floors throbbed, walls buzzed and you thought if only you could figure out how to harness it, get it through a few parallel circuits and straight through a power station, you could safely and economically light up the East Coast.

Dad had never attended a home football game and had no intention of attending one. He considered most contact sports, as well as the hooting and woofing spectators, to be “embarrassing,” “very, very wrong,” “pitiful exhibitions of the Australopithecus within.” “I suppose we all have an inner Australopithecus, but I’d prefer mine to remain deep in his cave, whittling away at Mammoth carcasses with his simple stone tools.”

The phenomenon of Dad interacting with a beautiful woman was always an odd, sort of uninspired chemical experiment. Most of the time there was no reaction. Other times, Dad and the woman might appear to react vigorously, producing heat, light, and gas. But at the end, there was never a functional product like plastics or glassware, only a foul stench.

I’d long decided to hold in contempt all people who believed themselves to be the subject of everyone else’s ESTABLISHING SHOT, BOOM SHOT, REACTION SHOT, CLOSE-UP or CHOKER, probably because I couldn’t imagine myself turning up on anyone’s storyboard, not even my own.

Dad was a man who, due to his underprivileged background perhaps, never hesitated when it came to the verbs to get or to take. He was always getting something off the ground, his act together, his hands dirty, the show on the road, someone’s goat, the message, out more, on with things, lost, laid, away with murder. He was also always taking charge, the bull by the horns, back the night, something in stride, someone to the cleaners, a rain check, an ax to something, Manhattan. And when it came to looking at things, Dad was something of a Compound Microscope, one who viewed life through an adjustable eyepiece lens and thus expected all things to be in focus. He had no tolerance for The Murky, The Blurry, The Hazy or The Soiled.

Every now and then, at night, before I fell asleep, I found myself staring at the ceiling, praying for something real to happen, something that would transform me – and God always took on the personality of the ceiling at which I was staring. If the ceiling was imprinted with moonlight and leaves from the window, He was glamorous and poetic. If there was a slight tilt, He was inclined to listen. If there was a faint water stain in the corner, He’d weathered many a storm and would weather mine too. If there was a smear cutting through the center by the overhead lamp where something with six or eight legs had been exterminated via newspaper or shoe, He was vengeful.

There is a disturbing (and wholly undocumented) Law of Motion involving an object traveling across an American interstate, the sense that, even though one is careening madly forward, nothing is actually happening.

Dad found love letters from a June Bug as monumental as an extraction of aluminum, but for me it was like coming across a vein of gold in quartz. Nowhere in the world was there a nugget of emotion more absolute.

Driving with Dad wasn’t cathartic, mind-freeing driving (see On the Road, Kerouac, 1957). It was mind-taxing driving. It was Sonnet-a-thons. It was One Hundred Miles of Solitude: Attempting to Memorize The Waste Land.

Dad used to joke that in my sleep I could pound out the book Hunting for Godot: Journey to Find a Decent School in America, but he was being unusually harsh. He taught at universities where “Student Center” referred to a deserted room with nothing but a foosball table and a vending machine with a few candy bars bravely tipped toward the glass. I, however, attended sprawling, freshly painted schools with slender corridors and beefy gyms: Schools of Many Teams (football, baseball, spirit, dance) and Schools of Many Lists (attendance, honor, headmaster’s, detention); Schools Full of Newness (new arts center, parking lot, menu) and Schools Full of Oldness (which used the words classic and traditional in their admissions brochures); schools with snarling, sneering mascots, schools with pecking, preening mascots; the School of the Dazzling Library (with books smelling of glue and Mr. Clean); the School of the Bog Library (with books smelling of sweat and rat droppings), the School of Teary-Eyed Teachers; of Runny-Nosed Teachers; of Teachers Never Without Their Lukewarm Coffee Mug; of Teachers Who Cakewalked; of Teachers Who Cared; of Teachers Who Secretly Loathed Every One of the Little Bastards.