As I Like It

July 8, 2003

As I Like It


“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…” (“As You Like It,” Act II, Scene 7). I have read very little Shakespeare and can quote almost nothing he has penned from memory; but this one I know, because some how or other it came to my attention that it was my namesake, Jaques, who uttered it. And like that Jaques, I am something less than I am want to be and a person who can put on a show in excess of his actual talent.

When I was a dozen years old, my dad took me on a couple of day trips on the back of his BSA Victor 500 along the power lines, which is pretty sandy going, as are most corners of Eastern Long Island that are not covered with scrub pine or scrub oak or potato farms, so you can’t let up on the throttle or you get bogged down. We took the back roads, like Deerfield and Noyac and Hands Creek, which were quite free of traffic even in summer back then, on to Montauk for maybe a hot chocolate and some fried clams. We would stop every so often along the way, not for a smoke, since Dad had quit years before, and not for a packed lunch, since he was constitutionally incapable of preparing a meal, but in order to explore lichen splotches, tree stumps, swamps, horseshoe crabs and shark eggs. We would stop to ponder the bay or boats in the bay or the tadpoles or turtles in Trout Pond and to “philosophize.” Dad was a philosophy major at college, which he sometimes used as an answer to why his position, whatever the argument might be, was the correct one. It did not take a genius like me to figure out that “because I was a philosophy major” is no more valid than “because I’m right.”

My dad was smarter (despite his sloppy logic), handsomer, more artistic, and hands-down cooler than anyone else’s. My arms wrapped around his oiled leather jacket, around his strong daddy torso, riding that monster machine on a twenty-mile stretch of power line service road was thrilling; it made me feel secure and adventurous and special. He was threatening to be the greatest father in the world. However, beyond such singular episodes, he has also always been one of the most selfish people I have ever known. Using his time and love and money unnaturally on himself, he has spent his life obsessing over his projects, oblivious to familial responsibilities and other everyday human concerns: crafting a twenty-ton, white quartz mountain to resemble an organic structure that Mother Nature herself might have fashioned, for which he mined the quartz himself, and a stained glass window depicting his journey through the universe, which required the invention of never-before-seen structural and technical innovations due to its exceptional size and design are a couple of typical examples.

I suppose my futile quest for his attention and approval in combination with an admiration for his artistic talent has served as the impetus for some of the things I have done in my life, people and places I have been. Of course he had to suffer an even bigger bastard for a father: the head surgeon of a major New York hospital and founder of a national foundation for the retarded. Grandpa told my dad, “Son, I don’t care what you become when you’re an adult, even a garbage man, so long as long as you’re honest and hardworking.” When this WASPy worldview trickled down to me, it came off more like “Son, I don’t give a shit what you do, so long as I don’t have to pay for it.” And though I’m sure (hopeful) that Dad does care, my older brother Peter and I were never able to squeeze a dime out of him for educational support when we most needed it. When he shared the philosophical insight with me at Trout Pond that “nobody owes you anything,” I thought he was speaking abstractly.

I was a fairly shy kid and, paradoxically, a real wise ass. Dad was quite sarcastic, too, often hurtfully to women – perhaps the model for my own nastiness. I am the not so proud owner of a long, thick scar across my right shoulder – the result of mouthing off to a “big, fat, chicken shit nigger” with a concealed box cutter and enough personal problems, I later learned, to drive him to the breaking point without a yapping ten-year-old brat experimenting on him with maximally hurtful language. I remained a real wise ass for only a few years after the incident, removing only the N word from my arsenal of insults.

When I hit something like eighteen or nineteen, I came upon a copy of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at the Costa Mesa Fair Ground’s swap meet while looking for inexpensive houseplants. The title caught my attention, and it was cheap enough – maybe ten or twenty-five cents. I had never heard of the anglophile or his poetry before, but the blurb on the back cover told me he was to be counted among the world’s great poets. That wasn’t important. That Prufrock was someone I could identify with was. I read “Like a patient etherized upon a table…” and figured, me too: I smoke pot. I read “And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells…” and thought, I can relate: I’m a busboy. I read “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo…” and reasoned, yeah, like those Hamptons idiots buying overpriced crap from the conmen in the Jobs Lane art galleries. I read “And time yet for a hundred indecisions/And for a hundred visions and revisions…” and deduced, me too: I’m a dreamer with no direction. I read “And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin/When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall…” and cringed: me too, as easy to figure out as a pair of ragged claws!

Upon investigation, I hit upon the intriguing insight that in his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent” Eliot “outlines his esthetic ideals and prescribes new ways of writing in terms of content, form, style, and syntax.” …whatever that meant. Also around that time I discovered that Jim Morrison had read a lot of Nietzsche, which seemed to be an important clue. My fast and furious detective work lead me to an aesthetics class at Orange Coast College in which the reading packet contained the above mentioned Eliot essay and a chapter from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Hah, the Holy Grail, the philosophy of art! This Nietzsche fellow really knew his stuff, and he seemed to be affirming my own need to question authority and to want to think big.

Wow, what’s a pretty one like her doing in syntax class? I pondered from the other side of the UC Irvine lecture hall. Self-conscious, curious, conscientious, organized, a master at sewing and manipulating fabrics, frigging stubborn as hell, a perfectionist who can relax with the best of them: Colleen, my wife.

She says: “I thought you were gay. You used to hang out with those theater guys and you wore those goofy clothes.” She could make granola from scratch, didn’t put chemicals on her body, played frisbee, cycled, body-surfed, and read Latin American literature.

“Who was I supposed to hang out with? They were the only ones in the class besides you who seemed like they wouldn’t enjoy living in tract housing.”

Twenty years later she continues to inspire, animate, and irritate me through her example, passions, and attention to detail. There is no doubt that I would not have become a teacher if not on account of her. I found a job announcement this past spring for a position at a college in a postcard-perfect New England town.

“Is there a natural food store in the town?”

“Yeah, two.”

“OK, go for it.”

When I was two-dozen years old, Colleen and I went on a bike trip to and around the Kii Peninsula, which is pretty rough going, as is most of Japan; being 90% mountainous, it provides an abundance of breath-taking vistas and challenges to all caliber of cyclist. One hour uphill, ten minutes down, one hour up, ten minutes down, stop at waterfall for cooling shower, tunnels constructed during a mythological age, mossy bamboo groves, cacophonous cicada and foot-long centipedes, hot humid air as thick as cream cheese and smelling like the Woodland Park Zoo rain forest pavilion, sweat running like open faucets, no need to talk.

We were riding 18-speed high school cruisers which we’d fished out of the weeds at the edge of Lake Sanaruko. They looked to be in better condition than the other bikes there abandoned after the joy rides they provided. The next time the ones we had been using were borrowed without permission was from the bike rack at our apartment building--a palpable introduction to the Buddhist notion of the impermanence of things. That experience approximately marked the moment I had begun to focus on the simple things in life, like air and family and small kindnesses (and always locking my bike). I am now the owner of a long, thin scar which runs down the front of my shoulder – the result of surgery due to an accident at the neighborhood ski park, suffered while trying to catch my sons racing down the hill.