Sunday, March 18, 2012


March 17 2012

No occasion to savor. That’s how Charlotte saw this inevitable mess of teen-age sex.  If Darlene was popular, a cheerleader, petite, perky, Charlotte was quite, desperate, unlovely. All they had in common was that they were both Mormons; they didn’t even know each other. Charlotte went to the other white public high school in town (there was also a black public high school, a Catholic boy’s high school, and one for Catholic girls), so my meeting her was really by chance as the town was divided not only along racial lines but by class. My high school was in the working class part of town and the other school, Byrd, was over where dads wore ties to work and moms belonged to clubs. Charlotte and I met at KJOE, one of the radio stations in town that courted a teen-aged audience. KJOE played popular music of the day, including rock and roll, and on Saturday mornings offered a show “hosted” by two teenagers, each from a different high school. On the Saturday in question, I was the boy from my school, Fair Park, and Charlotte was the girl, from Byrd.

Charlotte’s father ran a record distributing company, so she and her younger sister got all of the latest releases before any of us heard them; it may have been that the knowledge of pop music that proceeded from her inside track had led the radio show’s producer to pick her from all those teeny-boppers who applied to be guest disc jockeys. It may have also helped that the record distributing business in Shreveport, like my dad’s dice game, was a bit on the margins of the law and had, whether it was Charlotte’s dad’s choice or not, ties to organized crime, no small influence in radio at the time. (KJOE was not the biggest station on the air in Shreveport in those days, so they tried hard to capture as much of the high-school audience as they could. They even went so far as to hire a part-time afternoon “personality” for Saturdays, a young airman from the local base over in Bossier City who had auditioned as soon as he got to town. He didn’t know a lot about music but he had created a stable of on-air characters that got your attention. My favorite was AL Sleet, the Hippy Dippy Weatherman. George Carlin—who knew! I think KJOE was his model for the “Wonderful World of W-I-N-O” routine.)

Charlotte and I only did one show together but we hit it off pretty well and I spent more and more time driving over to her side of town. We dated and went to a few drive-in movies but Charlotte was as inhibited as Darlene was not, so we saw a lot of monster movies. I always took my old Plymouth, not the Rambler. Over time, we considered ourselves “going steady;” the problem was that she didn’t know about Darlene and Darlene didn’t know about her. Back then the irony of going steady with two Mormon girls was lost on me; I was just caught up in the unfolding possibilities of romance and the peculiar force of custom. I made the best adjustment I could.

But this part of the long explanation of my inexperience and my reluctance to take Louise up on her patio invitation has nothing really to do with that last year in high school. Charlotte and I “broke up,” for reasons that made little sense to either of us since we weren’t angry or hurt by the other; we just sort of lost interest. Then Darlene and I broke up for real reasons, mostly that we couldn’t stand each other, and events just swept me along through graduation, that next summer, and then off to college. In November, I came home for Thanksgiving and hadn’t been home more than a couple of hours before I got a call from Charlotte. She wanted to go to a party in town but didn’t want to go without a date; would I take her and we could catch up on things? I have no memory of the party, over in Byrd territory, but boy, do I remember what happened later. I drove over to a spot by the river and parked, just to talk. Charlotte was a year behind me, so she was very much caught up in matters that I by then considered pretty juvenile, and I listened to a long list of parental and school issues. Then, suddenly, she offered herself to me, offered with such directness and desperation that she scared the hell out of me. Had she been less desperate, or seemed less so, matters might have taken a different turn but something about the moment seemed wrong. Not morally wrong but emotionally. All the time we had gone together I had never succeeded in convincing Charlotte about sex, anything about sex, especially sex, and I wasn’t quite dumb enough to think that because now I was a college man I was suddenly more attractive than I had been nine months ago.

It took a few minutes but I convinced her that we weren’t going to have sex. She sat there and then began to cry and apologize at the same time. At first I thought she was embarrassed, caught up in some unfathomable wave of desire or illusion or something. But that was not it. Charlotte was pregnant by a guy whose rich parents had sent him away to military school and she didn’t know what to do. Her plan, such as it was, was to have sex with me and then somehow convince me that I was the father. Her sense of me, probably correct, was that I was a much nicer guy than Ben-whose-last-name-I-forget, and that I would marry her. What I am about to say sounds absurd, even to me, but to that moment I had never actually, realistically associated sex with paternity. I mean, I understood about sex and babies, but had no real notion of paternity, what it meant, how it proceeded from this act, that decision, those compromises. Well, it all came startlingly clear to me, in an instant. The moment was one as if I had just cheated death, had seen the bullet in slow motion as it slid past my ear, had watched the car on ice turn and turn only to find itself on the right side of the road headed in the right direction.

So, on the patio at the Shreve’s Landing Club three years later, with, truth be told, not much more experience than Darlene’s gift, Louise’s offer pulled up images of a tearful Charlotte and the fate I had escaped. Had I been as sophisticated as I thought I wanted to be, I would have accepted Louise’s rides and would have then, only a few months later, understood immediately what Marie meant. As it was, it only hit me as I was walking down the street from Marie’s toward my parents’ house. While the understanding lacked the immediacy of the revelation of mortality that Charlotte’s unveiling of her plot brought with it, it was every bit as transformative. I have, in all my physical relations since that day, kept my weight on my elbows. Even more, I have tried to be the kind of man who keeps his weight on his elbows in every occasion. I mean, it seemed to me, right then, that I wanted to be the kind of man who was both in and yet sympathetically apart from every moment. By sympathetically, I mean not detached coldly but watchful, aware of the reality that the other or others in the moment are experiencing. I confess that the temptation is to hold myself away more icily, as that is actually easier than what I consider the morally responsible thing to do, to be constantly careful of the presence of others without giving oneself over to abandonment in their presence, whether in sex or any other discourse. Cold detachment leads to a kind of formalism in which one can only claim to be present, without offering any proof. There is a line from e. e. cummings that tells the consequence of that kind of detachment:

since feeling is first
who pays attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

Over the years my goal has been to be aware of the syntax of things without “paying attention” to it. I want to be in the moment without being “of” it, I suppose. I heard a chaplain at Dartmouth College examine “moral imagination” in a way that suits me. He said moral imagination is not just the ability to understand another’s point of view or even feel another’s pain, one of which is reachable logically and the other is observable. For me, the trick is to imagine the other’s moral conflict, the contradictions he feels when caught between his ideals and necessity, between justice and mercy. One cannot do this if one gives over wholly to the kiss. The best way is to keep one’s weight on one’s elbows, a slight remove, enough to be able to see into the other’s center, with care.

I have not always been able to do this, of course; once when I did not should be talked about later. I have, however, always tried and always been aware when I have failed. The failures, in some instances, meant more to me than to the others, who felt the weight but that is to be expected. It is hard to give a useful answer at three in the morning to the question, “What are you doing up there on your elbows?” At that moment I always wonder, myself.


[Tomorrow my wife and I start a three-week trip to Hong Kong and Vietnam and I am not sure how often I can post to this spot. I was last in Vietnam during the Southeast Asian War and I assume I will have some feelings about this return. If I can, I will write.]

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