Thank you, Betsy, and thanks for supper.
And thanks to Aurelie and everyone who's invited us here
and made us feel comfortable.
Can you hear me OK?
I want to tell a quick story.
I went here as an undergraduate and as a graduate student,
and my first fiction workshop ever was here
when I was a sophomore.
And I had Robert Downs, who used to be the head of the MFA
program many years ago.
And my first story--
I was a very earnest student, and very serious and ambitious.
And so, for my first story, I took
on the modest topic of slavery.
I wrote from the point of view of a slave,
and so, where to start?
I started in Africa, when he was kidnapped and put on a boat.
It was an arduous trip across the ocean.
People died.
He got to Georgia, I believe.
And things weren't good on the plantation,
and after many bad events, he decided to leave.
And he escaped, and then there was death by wildlife.
The story was eight pages.
I got a C in my first creative writing class.
It was completely earned.
So the next time any you--
hi-- the next time any of you hear that old controversy
about, can writing be taught?
Yes, it can.
I learned.
And so I want to dedicate this reading to my teachers.
And some of them are here.
Steve Orlen, and Buzz Poverman, and Bob Houston.
And there are many other teachers that are in my mind.
They're here in that way, at least.
So I'm grateful to all of you.
I'm going to read the first part of the title story,
"The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards."
And it has 10 parts.
It's a long story, and I hope it's funny.
So I want to give you permission to laugh.
That's pleading, in a way.
OK, "The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards,
assignment 1, Happier Time."
"As much as anything really happens, this really did.
It was late spring.
I was in that drifting age between the end of college,
sophomore year, and the beginning of settling down,
the penitentiary.
And I had taken to the mountains where my friend Clete said
the air was so thin you could skip the huffing
and absorb it directly through your pores.
Clete was living out of a green VW
van that had broken down at a scenic overlook a few miles
outside the Colorado ski town of Apex.
He had taken the tires off the van
to keep it from being towed.
Perched on the cliff, it looked primitive and vaguely
prehistoric.
The Greyhound driver pulled over for me.
'Don't get too close to the ledge,' he warned.
Evidently, I hadn't concealed the fact that I was stoned.
Clete set on the metal railing, eating
a combination of trail mix and Alpha-Bits
from a plastic pouch.
He was a big guy with brown hair and bangs across his forehead,
a ponytail in the back.
His body had an imposing quality, not just because
of his size, but owing to the confident way
he moved through the world.
'I've got a kilo of shrooms,' he said by way of greeting,
leading me across the highway and up a muddy path.
In the shade of pines, he moved a fallen branch
and dug up a bag of psychedelic mushrooms.
He kept them separate from the van in case
some law officer decided to search his home.
I spread my coat over the grass.
The coat was blue and bulky, but light, insulated by air.
Made of a petroleum product impossible to stain.
It had so many pockets I'd forget about some
for months at a time, only to discover an old joint,
a dime bag, a novel I was halfway through.
The coat dated back to my last visit home.
I got distracted on the way, a six hour drive
from the university, and arrived three months late.
My parents still had my Christmas presents wrapped
in elf and reindeer paper.
The whole time I was there, they complained
about their lousy holiday.
As you know, I haven't seen them since.
A person can only apologize so much.
The coat was one of my presents.
A man could cross the Arctic in such a coat.
It had become my organizing principle,
and it was all the luggage I had.
Clete and I plopped our butts on it.
'I recommend this much,' he said,
and passed me a handful of mushrooms.
It was a hot day, and we stretched out in the shade.
Through the trees, we had a view of the highway,
the beached van, and the green gorge beyond the railing.
Clete and I have been friends for decades.
We first met when we were seventh graders.
My mother had grown tired of driving me to school
when the bus stop was just down the street.
Clete was on one knee when I arrived, his chin in his hand.
'Spermatozoa are living creatures,' he said,
'and we make them.'
I did not know his name, and he didn't know mine.
We'd seen each other at school, but we'd never spoken.
'They swim,' he said.
'They wriggle, they seek.'
'Is this where we catch the bus?'
I said.
'That means we have some sense of God in us,' Clete said.
'I feel it.' He put his hand over his crotch.
'It's like a bright, tickling light.'
We've been friends ever since.
'They're kind of gritty,' I said,
referring to the mushrooms.
Clete shrugged.
He had spent the morning in a wildlife center,
watching a film on lions.
'One,' he counted with his fingers.
'They sleep 20 hours a day.
Two, the females do the hunting while the males snooze.
Three, when pursuing prey, they attack the smallest and slowest
in a herd.
The baby wildebeest, retarded zebra, gimpy antelope.
Given this evidence, what do you think the movie was called?'
I pointed to a couple of girls in short pants bicycling
past the lookout point, but Clete couldn't be discouraged.
When he got philosophical, there was no stopping him.
'Lion, the Noble Beast.'
He paused to let the irony sink in.
'Then I got to thinking how kings just
lie around on their royal furniture and tax the peasants.
Maybe lions are nobility after all.'
Clete had never been what anyone would call a good student,
but he could be specific in ways most of us couldn't.
'Take lime popsicles,' he continued.
'Do they taste anything like actual limes?'
'Have you been eating these all day?'
'I sampled while I was harvesting.'
'You picked these?'
'They grow,' he said, 'right out of the ground.'
'Mushrooms can be poisonous, you know.'
I studied the remaining mushrooms
in my hand, torn between the idea of a bargain high
and the possibility of dying.
'I took a library book with me,' Clete assured me.
'They're perfectly safe.'
'So,' I said, eating another, but chewing more slowly.
'You've got a library card.'
'Everything we have, even the rain,
comes from the Earth,' he replied.
'Except for meteorites and certain toxic gases.'
He returned the bag to the hole and used the branch
like a broom to disguise the topsoil.
'I know where there's a party,' he said.
We hiked down to the VW.
The van had no side windows or seats
in the back, just a long floorboard he
had covered with foam rubber and shag carpet.
I tossed in my coat, Clete locked up,
and we headed toward town on foot.
'Where are the tires?'
I asked.
'Hidden.'
He needed $600 to rebuild the engine.
He didn't have a job, but was saving money anyway.
'Walking back and forth to town is good exercise,' he said,
'which saves on doctor bills and money that would have gone
toward gas if the van was running.'
'We're making a profit just walking along,' I said.
'Picking mushrooms saves on drugs and groceries.'
How much actual cash do you have?'
He stuck his hand in his pocket and counted the small wad
of bills, plus a few coins.
'$12.48, but this is a Buffalo nickel.
I'm saving it.'
'$12.43,' I said.
I felt the most inside our friendship
when we walked together as we did that afternoon, making
plans and bumping shoulders.
Eating magic mushrooms from our fists, hoping we
wouldn't get poisoned.
'I've got about $50,' I told him.
'I'd have more, but I gave this woman a necklace
when I broke up with her.
The one with the parrot?
How was I supposed to know it wouldn't come when
it's called?'
'Parrots don't know what they're saying,' Clete said.
'They just copy sounds.
Humans are the same.
We talk in the vague hope of finding out what we mean.'
When we reached Apex, he showed me
the library, and a bakery that set out
day old pastries in the alley.
'Fires are good for forests,' he said.
I smelled the smoke then.
The flames were 50 miles away, but the box canyon
that held the town had a roof of smoke.
It had a purifying odor.
I began to feel tall and rubbery, and ready
for the next thing.
We walked a long distance.
At some point, it turned out to be evening.
Stars swelled from this dark center of the sky
to the toothed ridges of the mountains.
All the heat fled the air, and I thought to ask,
'Where are we going?'
Clete pointed to a dark house up the hill.
A girl named Val was dog sitting for a family spending
the summer in Scotland.
It was her party.
The house had a peaked roof and plank porch.
The windows showed a waffling brightness,
like the memory of actual light.
Some kind of Mary Chapin Carpenter warbled inside,
and I had a momentary fear of live music.
Clete didn't knock.
The front room held maybe 20 candles.
A boombox sat on a high table, its cord connected
to an extension that trailed along the floor, out a window,
and across the lawn to a neighbor's outlet.
Clete ejected the tape, which drew applause
from the guys lounging on the furniture.
'I have Texas Flood in my coat,' I said.
'You're not wearing your coat.'
Clete lifted tapes from the scatter on the table
and held them next to the candle to read.
I wandered into the kitchen.
A bone thin woman who turned out to be Val the dog sitter
and hostess was mixing a drink by flashlight.
'Thirsty?'
She handed me the drink she was making.
'Whiskey and ice is my specialty,
and it's all we've got.'
She dipped into a plastic cooler for more ice.
'These glasses are real crystal,' she added,
'but they're monogrammed.
I'm afraid to sell them.
It's a small town.'
'I could sell them for you,' I said. 'Nobody knows me.'
'That's so sweet,' she said.
She'd spent the upkeep money the family had left on dope.
When the electricity was cut off, she sold the appliances.
She was down to the blender and Toast-R-Oven.
'I have to keep the phone on for when they call from
Dundee,' she said.
She had trained the dogs to bark into the receiver.
'I got screwed on the refrigerator.'
She had traded it to a guy at the bakery
for a cooler of sandwiches.
'Never do business when you're hungry,' she advised.
Her mouth was small and almost circular,
like a split cantaloupe.
She noticed me studying her mouth and kissed me.
'Who are you, anyway?'
I told her I was Clete's friend.
'Thank goodness,' she said. 'I need his help.'
She took another crystal tumbler from the cupboard
and filled it with whiskey.
'Clete doesn't take ice for some reason.'
'He doesn't want to get spoiled,' I said.
She took the glass to Clete and grabbed his arm,
leading us to a room with wood paneling, leather furniture,
and no windows.
A den.
People sat around in candlelight,
studying a guy in a big chair, who was staring out
of eyes as distant and hollow as those tunnels that
go under bodies of water.
Val shone a flashlight on him.
He didn't blink.
'What do we have here?'
Clete asked.
He knew the guy, whose name was Stu.
A bunch of them had snorted PCP, but Stu had done twice as much
as anyone else.
Now, he wasn't moving.
'Someone egged him on,' Val said.
She turned a nasty gaze on a guy sitting
cross legged on the couch.
His head was narrow in the middle,
like a partially imploded can.
He spoke.
'From now on, he's not Stu, he's stewed.'
His laughter was sniggering and ratchet like.
Clete asked Val for the name of the laughing man,
as if he weren't right there.
She answered with a single word, 'Barnett.'
Clete leaned in next to me, but spoke loud enough for everyone
to hear.
'We may have to teach that one a lesson,' he said.
Barnett quit laughing and drank from a tall glass
of something green.
Clete addressed the entire room.
'Who, if anyone, knows what PCP is?
A guy with a headband said he thought
the active ingredient had something
to do with the manufacture of fluorocarbons.
None of us liked the sound of that.
Clete wanted the full list of Stu's symptoms.
'He's grown really quiet,' the headband said.
'Pensive, I'd say.
And he doesn't move.'
They all looked at Stu, but didn't
know what they were seeing, as if they had entered a cult
and weren't permitted to understand what
was staring them in the face.
An unconscious man with his eyes open, sitting upright and rigid
in an armchair.
Clete wanted to know how long he'd been like this.
Val checked her watch.
'Oh,' she said.
'Can it really be 10:00 PM?'
'It's 10 to 12:00,' I said, showing her.
She had confused the hands on her watch.
A murmur made its way around the room.
Several people counted with their fingers.
Stu had been comatose for six to nine hours,
depending on which of his fellow travelers you trusted.
Knowing the time earned me credibility in that crowd.
But it made me wonder how long Clete and I had walked.
I was certain the sun had been up when we started.
Then I asked, 'Is there any of that stuff left?'
Barnett answered.
'Stewed sucked up the last of it and licked the tray.'
'He doesn't smell so good,' Clete noted.
'Is there a hospital in this town?'
I asked, adding, 'I'm new.'
'There's an on call doctor,' Val said.
'He doesn't like this kind of thing, though.'
Clete held a stubby candle right up to Stu's face,
staring hard into the wanky eyes.
Clete said, 'Wilt thou be made whole?'
It got the rachetty laugh from Barnett,
but Clete was dead serious.
One time in Oregon, he asked a highway patrolman
who had pulled us over for driving
without lights whether he didn't relish the dark world.
We spent what they called a cautionary night in jail,
but everyone was very nice to us.
Stu made a sudden, shuddering movement
with the top half of his body.
He raised one arm from the chair and held it aloft,
pointing to our hostess.
He said, 'vvvv.'
Val, as if to encourage him, tugged on her short skirt,
wriggling her butt against the leather chair.
The place had great furniture.
A tremor passed through Stu's arm
and made his hand dance, as if he
had discovered something miraculous, or gotten
electrocuted.
His face contorted with the effort of speaking.
'V-v- Val,' he said at last.
His eyes settled on Clete.
'Cluh-- cluh--
Clete.'
'Cluck like a chicken,' Barnett-- yelled.
Clete turn to him.
'You should get down on your knees,' he said.
A girl in a tube top and cutoffs called out,
'You insensitive bastards.'
We waited for her to follow up, but she just crossed her arms
and pulled her feet up onto the couch.
'She can't mean us,' I said to Clete.
Stu's trembling finger indicated one person after another,
moving around the room, naming the witnesses.
He included the dogs.
The big blond retriever, Rough, and the yappy white terrier,
Ready.
When he came to me, who he didn't know from Adam, he said,
K-k-k- Keane.'
That's how I got this name I still use.
To call it an alias is only technically correct.
Eventually, I went off to explore.
The candlelit house had wild, watery shadows
on its walls, a fickle stream of bouncing
light, and insistent waves of dark, like scales of light
on an actual stream.
A breeze would agitate the candles,
and the walls would become the wide, chopping sea.
Human forms at the base of the wall,
their heads upturned to watch the dreamy business,
seemed to be praying.
Some of them touched my shoulder, or the soft places
above my hips, and said forgettable things
about the brilliant, rocking light.
Later, I got hungry and found a jar of maraschino cherries
in the cupboard.
I filled my mouth, sweetness trickling down my throat.
I thought I might hunt down a bed.
In the stairway, I came across the body of a dead girl
and swallowed one of the cherries whole.
She lay on her back, her head higher than her feet,
staring through an open skylight.
There were no candles on the stairs.
I had to let my eyes adjust.
She was dressed in a green tube top and nothing else,
but the body seemed innocent, her skin
as soft as the cherries that pressed against my tongue.
The soles of her feet were black, and a trickle of blood
ran over one pale thigh.
I couldn't decide whether she had fallen down the stairs
or given up on the climb and taken a seat,
only to die in the process.
Her face may have been in moonlight,
as it was impossibly white.
One thing was clear.
She was not supposed to be looked at like this.
I unbuttoned my shirt and draped it over her.
'Thanks,' she said.
I jumped back and tumbled down the stairs to the landing,
hitting the back of my head.
When I came to, she was gone, and Clete
was kneeling beside me.
Other people were stepping over my torso
to go upstairs or come down.
'These creatures have strangely human qualities,' Clete said.
'Like recuperating ghosts.'
He lifted his eyes to follow their movement.
Even in this situation, he and I thought of these house
squatters with a combination of condescension and ironic pride,
owing to the van and our independent living skills.
'How many people are at this shindig?'
I asked.
Clete didn't answer.
He waited for the landing to clear,
then he leaned close and whispered,
'Wilt thou be made whole?'
It was time to go home.
Coming down from the mushrooms, I realized how high we had been
and how long it would be before we were fully grounded.
Along with that came the tedious desire
to have never taken the stuff.
With psychedelics, there was always a lingering dissent,
during which time you were not high,
but could not sleep or relax.
Like a hangover that begins while you're still drinking
and spoils the whole evening.
It comes with a bottoming out feeling.
The designs you'd imagined and the new lights
that you'd shed on your life grow dim and dull
and disappear as you nosedive.
Your mind strains to retain some sense of what
it was that had you smiling and optimistic,
but you can't touch it.
The dream of the high, as well as the high
itself, vanishes, and the asphalt cracks
remind you that you're no kid, and less young
with every plodding step.
Hallucinating has taken you no closer
to understanding what it is you mean to do with your life.
Clete and I marched down the wide street
to the heart of the little town, the bare streets
and dark houses clucking disparagingly at us.
In one window, beyond gauze curtains,
an orange light licked at the dark world,
and dim figures crossed and recrossed the floor.
A cold wind taunted the domestic bushes along the street
and made my skin prickle and bump.
I had lost my shirt to the approximately dead girl
and longed for shelter, my nipples turning
to squat little stones.
'I should have brought my coat,' I said, maybe a hundred times.
'We're at 10,000 feet,' Clete said,
removing his shirt and handing it to me.
'The nights are always cold,' He was wearing a wife beater
underneath.
I buttoned up the shirt, which was several times
too large for me.
When we turned on Main to head out of town,
the sleeves rippled like a swath of skin
separating from my body.
Morning arrived.
The sun should have heated me up,
but my body held tenaciously to the cold.
We stopped at a diner on the highway and ate eggs.
Clete told me about the party as if I hadn't been there.
Stu had come around enough to have several drinks
and pass out.
'His essential movement is to seek unconsciousness,' Clete
said.
Our booth had bad springs which put our heads
close to our eggs, a handy convenience this morning.
A scrambled bit of eggs escaped my mouth and hit the plate.
Its brief contact with my palate had
turned it an unnatural red, the color of maraschino cherries.
'Do I look funny?'
I asked Clete.
Clete shrugged.
'I've known you too long to say.'
The food sated something in me deeper than hunger.
Three walls of the diner were made
of plate glass that needed cleaning,
and we spent a long time watching a smeary light shift
over the pines, and aspen, and wide stretches of high grass.
The waitress had big eyes and narrow shoulders.
Her name tag read 'Kale.'
She knew Clete, and would only talk in his ear, which
made me a little paranoid.
'I'd introduce you,' he said, 'but she doesn't like talking
to strangers.'
'Is this really the right line of work for her?'
I asked.
She went from table to table, listening and nodding,
pointing to the menu.
She'd whisper to one person who'd speak to the others.
'Her legs are nice,' I said.
'Every man in here is half or more in love with her,' Clete
said.
He got her to scrape leftover eggs onto our plates.
'This guy's omelet has a weird spice,' I said.
Clete forked a bit and savored it a moment.
'Cigarette ash,' he said.
We stayed in the diner until the eggs and coffee
had worn down my chill.
Clete paid the shy waitress, and we hit the pavement again,
happy for the heat of the sun.
He carried a white bag bearing the diner's logo, a possibly
cross eyed elk.
Inside were packets of salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard,
and nondairy creamer.
20 minutes down the road, the peak
of a tall, black construction crane appeared.
We watched it a long time before we got
close enough to see the van.
At the end of the crane's long, metal wire
was a big, round magnet which snapped onto the van's roof.
Tireless and thoroughly defeated, the van
rose up into the air.
We joined the others.
A crowd had gathered.
And applause when it was set down on a flatbed truck.
This was a terrible loss for us, but it was a great spectacle.
'We can kiss that one goodbye,' Clete said.
'My worldly possession is in there,' I said.
There was nothing to do but get the bag of mushrooms and hike
back to Val's.
This series of events--
losing my coat, and the drugs, and other secrets and luxuries
of my life, along with being given a new name by someone
mumbling out of a coma, and encountering
the not quite naked or dead girl to whom
I gave the shirt off my back--
combined in an almost scientific way to make me swear off drugs.
I was 29 years old, and wanted to change before I hit 30.
Clete and I developed a plan for me as we ambled back.
A plan that would work all that summer and beyond.
Even after I left the mountain, it stuck.
The plan had four parts.
One, I would not get a job.
There's always some guy with a goatee
and great weed to turn you on during a break,
or some friendly, braless girl tired of washing dishes
or mowing the graveyard or sweeping up the pencil
shavings in Rosa Parks elementary school who
lights a joint or drops a line and offers to share.
Work was a haven for drug users, and I couldn't risk it.
Two, I'd use willpower and the help of friends who,
even if high themselves, would discourage me
from joining them.
Three, the mushrooms, being organic and free, didn't count.
Four, in order to be realistic and give the plan
half a chance of working, I would
stay drunk as much as possible.
A few people, including you and the therapist
they assigned me when you had the flu,
have since pointed out that as many people are done in
by booze as by any drug or family of drugs.
But Clete and I saw it differently.
Being drunk was a momentary lapse into happiness,
like drifting off while listening to a song about sex,
whereas the drugs I craved were symphonies.
They played at that low level just
below the timbre of thought.
A mattress of sound you could sleep on
for days, or a lifetime.
Liquor relaxes the brain and lets the fool in you
rise up, while the drugs I loved kept me still inside myself,
permitting me to reside there in something like peace.
That's a hard thing to give up, and it's easier
if you're drunk.
We moved in with Val and lived in the dog sitting
house three months.
Without rehab or an arrest to keep me in line, I became keen
and did no drugs.
You asked for a happier time.
That was it."
Thank you.