Freshman English Papers

Looking back on my freshman college year, you know what’s better about today? I don’t have to turn these posts in for a grade! No grim faced professor is allowed to scratch pencil marks around the edges of each little essay. Just think – I can write a whole blog full of fragmentary sentences and there’s not one thing they can do about it!

And I do write them. Hither and thither. Sometimes you just have to go with the way the words sound. That’s how I felt then and that’s how I feel now.

On my desktop I keep a list of Jack Kerouac’s thirty axioms for modern prose. They’re pretty good and I recommend you immediately go over here and study them. You’ll notice Number 13 suggests “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.” He doesn’t say we don’t need to understand grammar or syntax – but don’t let them get in your way. Try to get the picture clear in your mind and go straight for it. I keep Jack’s list at hand for inspiration and to remind myself that anytime I put words to paper (so to speak), I’m part of a long line of guys who struggled their whole lives to learn how to write out of the box, how to keep their idea line as free of crap as if Keith Jarrett (a piano player I like) was writing it.

The only difference is I’m a pig. It’s hard for me to tell where my inspiration leaves off and the crap begins. Jack’s axiom #1 is the whole key, for me anyway: “Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.” And if I make myself laugh as I type, then I figure I’m heading in the right direction.

Those professors at San Jose State in 1959 wanted me to write clean, clear prose. Like this: A plus B = C. Start with your introductory paragraph (which itself has to start with a grabber sentence), add body, then concluding paragraph. All nice and neat and when you’re done your reader thinks, “Aha – I see. Cats eat rats! Very interesting.”

Sorry, Dr. Smith. I already heard all this already in high school. Next you’ll want me to turn in my outline.

The more they tried to whip me into shape (of a square) the more I wriggled and jiggled and wandered off in four directions. It became a game. I was sublimely confident in my ability. I was convinced my English Comp professor wouldn’t know good writing if Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti broke into the classroom with their guns leveled straight at him.

I knew exactly what I was doing. I just wasn’t very good at it. Needed more practice. Still do.

I always felt when they wrote ’spelling’ in the margin they really meant “Why can’t you be more like a girl? They check their spelling! They’re nice! They smell good! No – you’re sloppy and improvisational and you should shave off that scruffy beard if you think you’re going to get a decent grade in here.

“And what’s this? Horrors! Slang! You’ve used slang in a college-level essay! And just look at this illogical and non-parallel series of clauses and phrases. How can anyone possibly understand this beatnik prose? Why don’t you write like Ernest Hemingway? Mr. Pig, you are MUCH TOO SELF-INDULGENT! You must write to communicate, not for your own private pleasure…Tsk tsk tsk..”

And on and on. Next I was accused of ‘rambling’. What’s wrong with ‘rambling’ anyway? I’ve spent my life rambling round this country, and I’ve met a lot of funny men. Some robbed me with a six gun, others with a fountain pen. Woody Guthrie said that. There! I used an eminent authority to emphasize my point. Are you happy now?

Whatever I was doing in college, I was not here to learn how to write a simple, clear, direct essay. That was for sissies. Sissies, drones, English professors, and other bores. Funny, in later life I have come to admire that approach. I usually write to capture a feeling or a moment of time, or possibly make you laugh if I can, but if someone is writing to communicate an idea, and I can actually understand what they are trying to say – I love it! That’s the whole idea.

Don’t know quite why I rambled down this path this morning. I really meant to tell you about my beatnik-lefty-socialist seventeen year old pal Bob Gill. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t write out your outline ahead of time. By now, you’d be up to the demonstration and kids getting washed down the stairs with fire hoses and it would be really exciting. Instead I’m still sitting up in my attic room in the boarding house writing a paper I have to turn in in the morning. Wonder what he’ll say this time! I know. “You use too many exclamation marks! This reads like a comic book!”

Baby Beatniks Go To College

In September 1959 it was still hot in San Jose, like it is everywhere across California that time of year. I was eating lunch at Walgreen’s Drugs with Louise Picchi, a luscious brunette from San Mateo High, same as me (I was from San Mateo High, not a luscious brunette. Thought I should make that clear). In those late days of summer all the freshmen kids from San Mateo huddled together for a few weeks, like polliwogs in an eddy of the creek that ran through the culvert. Louie was going to be a drama major and I knew her through my actor pal Ricky Shapero. We had almost nothing in common except familiarity and comfort, and that was plenty. Besides, from my side, she was a major fox. Normally not in my baby faced league.

Hey Louie. I can see your face so clear. Are you still eighteen somewhere in this universe? Still so killer beautiful, still so full of high spirits and joy?

We sat side by side at Walgreen’s steaming lunch counter perspiring and laughing about our horrible registration experiences. Root beer in Coke glasses with two straws and tuna fish sandwiches with a little scoop of potato salad on half a lettuce leaf. I wasn’t feeling beat today, I was trying out Joe College.

San Jose State was great for trying out that role. It had its share of concrete buildings designed by the Corps of Engineers for maximum boxy cheapness, but it also had, so unusual for a California state college campus – Tower Hall, a vine encrusted brick building from seventy years before. It was right out of a nineteen thirties hubba hubba college movie. To my eager young eyes it breathed a perfume of another world I wanted to be a part of. Poetry and great novels and people devoting their minds to thinking about big important things. You could walk down the ivy crawling cloister in the heat and hear droning professor flies lecturing on aerodynamics or Virgil or bonehead English grammar like it was still the 1920s and I could be wearing a tight sweater and bell-bottom pants and be the cat’s meow. That was me, creating the universe around me as I walked through it, but most guys preferred to wear Butchwax flattops, chinos, little plastic pocket protectors in their madras shirts and slide rules in their pocket protectors and walk down Seventh Street to the cafeteria in tough engineering student gangs.

It was a different time, the fall of 1959 – for one thing, girls still went to college to get their MRS degree. They didn’t think it was a joke. They majored in Home Ec or PE or possibly Elementary Ed and waited for the magic to happen and good luck and God bless ‘em.

There’s a gaggle of college girls coming now. Note their tight plaid skirts and white blouses, and one is wearing a sleeveless dress with petticoats underneath in spite of the heat. Actually, they’re kind of cute. And is their lipstick red! They’re on their way to the cafeteria to listen to ‘Running Bear loved little White Dove’ on the juke box. Then Paul Anka is going to sing ‘Hold me in your arms Bay-bey Maybe you and I will fall in love.’ Or some other song that would send me running for the door.

The cafeteria was much better about 4:00 PM when it was nearly empty. Then I could put on Oscar Peterson playing ‘Round About Midnight. Yes, one cool thing about 1959 was that jazz and rock and roll could share the jukebox comfortably together. Like inside my head. And I could drink coffee and read poetry and feel cool.

Louie wasn’t a gumsnapper like those girls walking down the street. She was my friend and those other girls weren’t, so even if she didn’t really like jazz or know anything about Jack Kerouac, she was still cool.

Yesterday we both stood in snaky lines in the headache sun for hours waiting to get our registration packets after all the sophomores, juniors and seniors were handed theirs. They were already inside the gym having fun racing from table to table signing up for classes. Once all the classes were full, then they let the freshmen in.

But we had won out in the end. We had some classes, even if they were not exactly what we had in mind. I had even got into English Comp 3A, required of and dreaded by freshman English majors. We were registered college students.

We had new homes too. Louie moved into the girl’s dorms and I checked into a boarding house on South Twelfth. Of course we would never see each other’s rooms. She could welcome me into her dorm lobby with all the other girls and their dates but not one step further. And Mrs. O’Reilly would have had a heart attack if a girl had knocked on her front door asking to see one of the guys. Unheard of. The adult world knew what young people would get up to if they ever had a chance to be alone and they were going to make damn sure they never were!

Of course no one considered what two guys might get up to if left alone in their rooms. This was 1959! ‘Gay’ meant ‘cheerful’. Of course there were homos and queers out there somewhere, but they didn’t go to San Jose State. I thought they were probably all middle aged guys who lived in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch.

My roomie was a big older guy who was majoring in Police Science. He didn’t smile much. His Dad was chief of police of one of the San Joaquin Valley farm towns. I might creep back at three a.m. from some horrible drunken debauch to find him still up studying. We didn’t have much to talk about but one Sunday he invited me to go with him to a Baptist church he attended way out in Los Gatos. And I, with great nonchalance, thought “what the hell…”

I didn’t know what to expect. My parents, when they went to church at all, were more of the polite and proper Episcopal persuasion. For me, church happened in gothic stone buildings that should be in an Agatha Christie mystery, with bald guys in white surplices who handed out the communion wafer at the altar rail with real wine in a little shot glass, and it was all steeped in a thousand years of ritual and was peaceful and soothing and kind of spiritual in a funny way. I’d never been to a Baptist church.

Not that I wasn’t worldly. By seventeen I was pretty damn sophisticated. I knew the score, man. Why, in high school I had written a poem that began:

Man is lost on a moor
Blind and deaf and lost on a moor.

ha ha! Let us laugh and be gay in the face of this bitter, tragic joke of life! Then I would light my pipe and stride gloomily into the mist. Keeping careful watch out for the Hound of the Baskervilles.

But I’d never been to a Baptist church. So we drove out to Los Gatos and before I knew it the preacher had launched into his sermon about why Caryl Chessman should be executed. This was a major case at the time and awareness of it had even dribbled down to apolitical seventeen year old kids like me. Chessman was supposedly the notorious “Red Light Bandit” who had robbed and raped women in LA many years before. After eleven years, he was still on Death Row in San Quentin but time was running out for him. Even for proponents of capital punishment the case was unsettling because Chessman hadn’t actually killed anyone. Read the Wikipedia article here if you’re interested.

I gathered that the preacher thought Chessman should be executed because he had violated God’s law and God was a real stickler for punishing anybody who disobeyed him. The pastor went right through the Old Testament pointing our how this kind of miscreant was stoned and this other kind was supposed to be because she helped her husband in a fight by grabbing the bad guy’s balls and squeezing real hard. Well, maybe he didn’t actually mention that one. Not proper. Even young guys like me who disobeyed their parents were stoned and pretty soon my blood was running cold and I was getting mad. What kind of God did these people believe in? And how can I get out of here without causing a scene?

I figured, “Well this guy is a preacher so he must know what he’s talking about. But if the Bible really says things like that than it’s just one more proof that God isn’t real because if there really is a God no way would he say things like that.”

We drove home in cool silence.

It didn’t take too long for the Joe College thing to wear off. The kids I was meeting were so square! There must be some cool people here somewhere! At breakfast in the boarding house I shared the table with a history major who smoked a pipe, an accounting guy who took electric guitar lessons, an engineering major who made jokes about the way I ate my fried egg, a business guy who was pledging a frat, and, one bright light — a coolguy from the San Fernando Valley who just wanted to get back to LA as soon as he could and marry his girl friend.

Dick would tell us hilarious stories about his high school scene at San Fernando Valley High and how he had taken Annette Funicello to his prom and I never could tell what was true and what he was making up but he made me laugh my head off and, unfortunately, that has always been my key criteria for people I want to hang out with.

Dick was from a show business family. His father wrote “You Never Miss Your Water Till The Well Runs Dry”. He said it as if I should be impressed. He was engaged to a honey blonde he talked to in the phone booth up at the corner every night. I used to walk up with him and watch him through the glass and wish I had a girl friend.

Once afterwards we walked downtown to see the new Sandra Dee flick “Gidget.” Dick claimed he knew most of the surfer actors in the flick, and maybe he did. Dick wasn’t a pathological liar – he was a great story-teller and he never let truth get in the way of a good story. I learned a lot from him! And besides, what did I care if he knew all those guys. I knew Moondoggie himself. (For anybody younger than 64 – Moondoggie was the surfer dude that Gidget falls in love with in the movie of the same name.) He was played by Jimmy Darren and Jimmy Darren had performed at San Mateo High’s 1959 Grad Night. And I’d said “Hi Jimmy!” So there.

Dick lasted one semester. He just wanted to get home to that honey babe as fast as he could. Sometimes I wonder if he got into show business like his father. I looked his name up on IMDB the other day. There is a guy with his name who directed porn movies in the seventies. Could it be him? Did he stay married to the beautiful honey blonde girl he was so in love with? Did they live in a big house in the San Fernando Valley and did he go off to work directing hot sex scenes all day? Then come home and read his kids a bedtime story? It’s slightly possible.

The Bus Ride Home

In September 1959, seventeen years old, I said goodbye to Ma and my beatnik friends back home and left San Mateo for the carefree life of an English major at San Jose State College. I was going to be a writer when I grew up. A novelist, like Jack Kerouac. My plan was to hitchhike everywhere, love all the longhaired beatnik girls, grow up, live in Greenwich Village and write about everything that happened to me. You must admit it’s not a bad plan. I’d do what I wanted to do anyway and make a living from my pen.

I never wondered if I’d be happy. Happiness was impossible. Not part of the equation.

One cold night on the Greyhound heading back up the Peninsula to San Mateo for the weekend, I was thinking about my friend Way Out Willy, who was sleeping in Bear Mattson’s car because he got into a shouting match with his parents and they threw him out.

I wanted to write about stuff like that too. Where is the love? What if I was on a long bus journey – like this creeping thirty miles up the El Camino to San Mateo, but I’d been on the road for weeks and weeks and I was burnt out, gone, exhausted in heart and soul. What if I was dragging my weary ass back to my home town even though my parents were dead or something, but a heartsick homesickness compelled me across the snowy continent. I knew when I got to my best friend Way Out’s house (hmm, I’d have to call him something else) I would be welcomed like a son, received into the warmth of his family, be fed and a have real bed to sleep in. I’d be home again and safe to heal.

So, in my story dream the Greyhound grumbled to a stop at the little B Street bus depot on that rainy Christmas night and I limped through darkened and shuttered downtown streets. Just the odd Santa Claus statuette in a shop window illuminating my backpack and my worn beat seventeen year old face. I stumbled up through the shuttered mansions of Hillsborough and on into the redwood subdivisions high on the jolly Christmas rainy hillside. And there were the diamond pinpoints of the Peninsula below. I hobbled up Crestview Drive and just as I approached, still hidden by the night, I hear angry voices. There’s Way Out’s father at the front door and he’s shouting at Willy and Willy is just standing there taking it. He heaves Willy’s paintings and sculptures into the rain and keeps shouting and there they lie in the wet grass with little drips from the acacia tree onto his portrait of our friend Gypsy Girl. Little rain drips on her dark cheeks. The door slams shut, leaving Way Out standing in the rain in his Levis and red windbreaker. In the rain night ice night Rebel Without A Cause night star-filled air.

“Hey man.”

“Hey Pig.”

That was the real truth. I had to tell that story. Just the kids. Lost and loose on the suburban sorrowful Crestview Drive of time. I thought I could write stories like that.

************************************************************************

The only trouble with writing was you had to sit at a typewriter for a long time every day. How fun is that? And then you had to sweat and sweat until you got an idea. And then you actually had to write sentences that communicated something more than ‘cats ate rats’. And then words on the page sounded stupid when you read it to yourself out loud and you had to throw the whole thing out and start over. All that work for nothing.

I wasn’t really reconciled to it. Then there was the part where you walked around and wouldn’t talk to anybody and people thought you were sulking but you were just trying to get it together in your mind. The right place in my head. Where is it? It was there yesterday!

Writing is still like that. When the spirit is in me, writing is the funnest thing. I make myself laugh and I work myself up into fits and I am amazed to see little scenes come to life. Wow! And then there’s the part where you groan and have to chain yourself to the seat because nothing will come. At least in the days of typewriters you had to work for your distractions. Now the whole Internet is out there to distract us hapless writers.

But you know what? For better or worse, I was made and molded and formed to do this. It’s in my blood. Funny. Now I’m 64. And this is still what I want to do when I grow up. I hope I get to.