PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

 Between Wednesday, September 1st and Friday the 9th of 1977, just prior to the beginning my sophomore undergraduate year, I returned to my high school to assist my Mentor, the chairman of the English department in the same way that I had during my senior year of high school (1975-76).  During that time, a student teacher had been assigned to the classroom to observe; and during our conversations, having found out that both of us enjoyed horror and science fiction, she recommended that I read Stephen King's novel, Salem's Light.  You, F-L, were customarily dismissive of her; and, I think that because you were due to travel up to my college on Thursday the 8th for Freshman Orientation week, you were a bit jealous.  I would be making that same one hour journey on Sunday afternoon, the 11th, so I was able to enjoy a few days outside your inquisitve scrutiny (which was not yet the inquisition it would become).  On Tuesday, the 6th, our last full date before our temporary parting, we stopped by our local mall's bookstore to pick up a paperback copy of the recommended novel.

On the 7th, after my tasks were completed for my high school Mentor, and not being able to see my then companion until much later that evening, I took my copy of the novel---which I had not yet opened---and drove five minutes across our village to its only real restaurant, part of a state-wide chain that had done very well in our area.  During the summer and through the end of September, they offered a bottomless glass of iced tea, of which, with my coworkers on the survey crew during my summer assignment (Monday, June 13th to Thursday, August 26th), I took advantage after we "knocked off" each afternoon, usually forty-five minutes to an hour before we were expected to do so.  

The lunch rush had dissipated, and the dinner rush had not yet began when I arrived at the restaurant about 2:30pm on the 7th.  I ordered the bottomless iced tea (unsweetened, with lemon), and a slice of fudge cake (chocolate cake, with a slab of ice cream, and smothered with hot fudge) and began to read.  I was only familiar with King's work through his novel, Carrie; at that time, I found more in his work to like than dislike (a condition which would change with those volumes that followed The Shining and Night Shift (which I read in the spring of 1978, and the summer of 1979, respectively).  The restaurant was relatively quiet and, with the iced tea and that generous slab of ice cream on my fudge cake, the atmosphere seemed rather cold, appropriately, as I began to read.  I began the novel knowing only that it was said to be (in those days) a respectful and elaborate imitation of Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula.  In some ways, King streamlined the progress of his story, one of Stoker's great failings; and, in another way, King omitted, or deliberately deleted, any sense of hope---which Stoker at least retained, although stating it somewhat gingerly.

At that time, and until and through completing my readings of the two volumes in 1978 and 1979, I believed King's prose was vigorous and athletic, achieving, at some points, the transcendence of prose poetry.  I will also say, candidly, that I have not seen a demonstration of that in any of his writings that I have read (and, now, I studiously avoid any of his stuff other than the four volumes mentioned here)---although this may be a simply subjective response.

What I did not realize, at the time, was that I was being prepared to become aware of the way an ordinary day could become haunted very rapidly; as shown very early in the novel's narrative, and in my response to it as I read further.  Sitting in that dining room, with a view to my village's main street, and a most satisfactory summer nearly completed (along with prospects of a very intimate autumn with you, F-L, at my college, our dormitory buildings being conveniently adjacent in the northeast corner of the campus), I was somewhat disturbed to realize that the sense of bleakness derived from my reading of King's novel seemed to spill out into the view of our village in front of me.  The light was the same as usual---a late summer day, cloudless and balmy, typical for our region.  Yet, something was a little off.

I knew my parents planned dinner to be served at 5pm sharp, and, because I still lived in their house, I was expected to attend on time.  So I departed the restaurant at 4:45pm, and in five minutes arrived home.  The drive was not pleasant in the way it routinely was; something seemed . . . off.  I was due to visit you, F-L, at your parents' house at 9pm that night, just before you turned in for the night in prospect of your journey to the campus the next day.  After dinner at my house was over, I retreated to my bedroom, sprawled out on my bed (with another glass of iced tea---instant, this time, made by my mother), and continued to read King's novel.  I do not believe that a mere coincidence caused the sunset to be accomplished, a few minutes before 8pm, just as I was entering the climactic conclusion of the novel.  

I completed my reading a little before 8:45, the time I was to leave for your home, outside the village on one of the rural roads of our rather large, and mostly agrarian, township.  (On those roads, just a year before, J-Wave and I had spent so much joyous, and very private, time on weekend night, driving around so that we could listen to, and talk on, our c.v. radio, which only operated in my car.)  I felt very unsettled when I left my parents' house.  The c.b. radio was full of silence, even on channel 22, our home channel, little if any verbal traffic was taking place.  The few moments your parents permitted us seemed awkward, stale, and difficult.  The lane from the township road to your parents' ostentatious ranch style house was about an the length of my residential, dead end-street.  Halfway from the township road, the lane passed a pioneer cemetery, all of the gravestones toppled.  The township no longer maintained it, and your parents---tightfisted (and notorious for it in our vicinity, although they had not needed to be)---contributed neither time, money, nor effort to keep it up.  After we said our final good-bye, for a separation of three and a half days (the longest we had been apart since I returned home in June), I drove away feeling even more bleak.  Passing by the abandoned cemetery, I thought of it as a metaphor of your family's attitude; their human compassion and acceptance of anyone not like them was as dead and rotten as those pioneer corpses in that barren plot of ground.  The bleakness stirred up by the novel had followed me to your home, and then back to mine.

The next morning, however, I returned to the high school, to assist my Mentor, and to enjoy the company of the student teacher (whose humor was much like mine; and whose knowledge of literary science fiction was fascinatingly vast).  The bleakness did not follow me here directly, not in the way it had been present in the restaurant the day before, and that evening at your house.  Having finished the novel, I did not open it again; I did not take it with me to college when I returned there on the 11th.

I now realize that I was being warned---shown---what to expect in a future far too immediate.  Just as the vampire in King's novel had brought a sense of bleak hopelessness to the village he had chosen to invade, so, my Autumn term of 1977-78 was proven to be as bleak and gray as possible, despite a record number of sunny days and balmy temperatures.  The private remarks and "codes" we had shared this summer had become, on campus, meaningless.  The closeness that we had hoped, and expected, to increase failed miserably in that aspect.  And I always had to ask you to take your shoes off---you seemed to have lost the volition to do so, although during our summer, it had been quite active and eager.  

One Thursday evening, in the middle of the term, I stopped by your room on the third floor of your room.  I found you wrestling on the floor with one of the college's varsity football players, whose c.b. handle had been Satellite Mansion.  And, the bitter surprise of this shock was immediately followed by the sight of your stripey socks---your shoeless stripey socks.  These changes in behavior had been predicted, metaphorically, in King's novel; I missed that the first time around,  but remembered it shortly after this incident.  I did not then know how, and hoped very much for an opportunity, to be avenged on Satellite Mansion.

I did not realize that this bleakness would spill over on to our Christmas Holiday, which would last from the day before Thanksgiving to Monday, January 2nd, 1978; that your parents would first attempt to draw me into their religious faith and then, for reasons unknown to me, attempt to turn me away.  Our Christmas Eve celebration---just the two of us---was so very different than it has been just a year before that I seemingly doubted that we were the same people; more like puppets performing in some grotesque theater.

Nothing prepared me for your sudden departure from the campus in the middle of the night on Friday, January 6th, 1978---two days after the thirteenth anniversary of the death of the great Poet, T. S. Eliot, a date you no longer found significant.  I had to learn of it from your roommate, who was clearly telling me less than she knew.  Your return, late on Sunday evening the 8th, was also equally unexplained; you did not even call to tell me you had returned, but answered my phone call when I made it about 11pm. 

And then came the supreme cruelty which I will always believe had been planned---not only by you, but also by your parents and siblings during your unexpected return visit that weekend.  At lunch time, on Monday the 9th, in the presence of our customary lunch companions, you announced to me---so that all could hear---that our relationship was over. Silence fell over our table like a pall.  Before I could think of anything to say, you excused yourself and hurried from the dining hall.  We never again sat down to a meal.

Although the worst year of my life, 1981, was still future, this time---which would extend from January 9th through October 20th, 1978---was a close and almost parallel second to it.  Although it stopped hurting in 1992, the scars are still upon me; I am still well aware of them, and I sometimes have nightmares about that time.

EPILOGUE:

The epilogue to all this is brief.  I wrote two collections of poetry about you:  Fragments Of A Universe, and The Galaxies Are Moving; and, in them, poem after poem struggled, and sometimes succeeded, to find some kind of metaphor to describe the spiritual and emotional agony, in its bleakest form, that had descended upon me from that date.  I could not know them, and would not know for more than a decade, that on another January 9th, of 1994, God sanctified that date forever more by calling me to become a Christian.  (It is one of the strands of meaning in my screen name, J-Called, because I was, indeed, called to come to saving Faith in a Baptist chapel on the evening of that day.)

In the Autumn term of 1978, approximately nine months after we broke up, I was appointed to the powerful and very active Library Committee of the College Council.  That Comittee was very important---both because the Library was one of the largest campus operations; and because the University's Board had decided to build a new facility to enclose and expand the existing one, and had tasked us with reviewing and selecting even the smallest details presented by architects, interior designers, and vendors of all sorts of interior fixtures.  (The contribution of which I am proudest was the insistence that the floors be carpeted.  During my four years at that college, I had always admired and enjoyed the sight of the student-employees of the library shelving books, mostly shoeless, on all three floors.  Barefoot or sock-sheathed, their footsteps always brought joy into my day, and so carpeting, rather than linoleum floors, seemed to be a better choice.  Revising the library a quater of a century later, I was quite pleased to see that the carpets were being taken advantage of---in that way---by student employees, and by students who were studying there.)  Prior to my membership on the Committee, I had become friends with both the Professor who chaired the Library committee (although I did not know it then) and also with the Library Director (whom I saw so often, F-L, because the Library provided a daily escape from you, as you rarely went there).  Along with two other student reps on the Committee, we formed a solid voting block that, for two years, controlled the operation and decisions of the Committee with the same ironfisted control the Communist party was then wielding over the Soviet Union.

Several months after my appointment to the Committee, I happened to walk by the main checkout desk, centrally located in the Library complex, where Satellite Mansion was then the senior student employee on duty.  While I casually observed from the card catalogue, I watched him accost, and inappropriately touch, one of the female employees.  The next morning I reported this to the Library Director, who immediately assured me that he would be transferred.  I casually mentioned to the Director that this same person had accosted you, F-L, with full knowledge that you and I had been a couple, and that his advances should not have been demonstrated.  The Director smiled, winked, and assured me that such unconscionable behavior definitely deserve a penalty of some sort.  A week later, passing by the back end of the main Dining Hall, I saw, through an open door, the athletic Satellite Mansion, clad in an apron and plastic gloves, scraping food from dishes and loading them into an industrial size washing device.

J-Called