Charlie Among Us!

[Author’s note: The tagline for this website is “Learn and Become What You Are.” This is not some hectoring advice to the reader. It is an admonition to myself about my purpose in life. I wrote this piece a year and a half ago or so, and tried to get it published somewhere. I found no takers, but it’s a piece I’ll stand by. It seems more topical now than it did even a year ago, so I’m putting it out here. Enjoy!]

My father started wearing a Vietnam Vet baseball cap a few years ago. I'm a Gen-Xer raised by and among Vietnam Vets, and I can't put off commenting on that cap any longer. My father bought those caps and had them embroidered with the name of three outfits he served in, and gave one cap to me and each of his grandchildren.

The war was over a long time ago, according to the calendar. Based on my experience with the one who raised me, for many of the six million or so Vietnam Veterans alive still the war won't end as long as they are alive.

Vets coming home from that war had a variety of experiences. Some came home to overt contempt. I wasn't there in 1971 when my father left the Army, but you couldn't live through the 80's without developing the firm notion that every soldier was spat on by a protester in the airport, as if there were a quota system, or it were part of the customs procedures. Daddy said that never happened to him. For the most part to me it seems like they simply came home to a kind of shamed silence from the country at large.

For those who didn't grow up with their own ears still ringing from the machine gun fire that deafened their father, here's the basic rundown, which I'm sure will still strike a wrong chord with many. It has to be told from some perspective, and this is only mine.

Vietnam is a small coastal country in southeast Asia. For much of its recent history other countries have meddled with its affairs. The Chinese treated the place as their property, then the French came and claimed it as a colony. Somewhere I have pictures of tanks and armored personnel carriers rolling through a Michelin rubber plantation installed by the French tire company.

Ho Chi Minh was a young man from a small town. He witnessed the cruelty and oppression of life under occupation and began a lifelong crusade to end it. He searched the international community for anyone who would help the Vietnamese people.

He sought help from the United States and Woodrow Wilson. He did not find it. He did find help in the Soviet Union, and he took it. The situation reminds me of the dynamic that civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin describes Black Americans facing: they needed help and would take it wherever they found it.

But after we rebuffed Ho and he found help in the Communist sphere, the struggle for a free Vietnam became inextricably identified with the struggle for a Communist Vietnam, and at the same time opposition to a Communist Vietnam became support for colonizers.

For the people of Vietnam it was clearly not a simple choice. After open conflict began, Ho Chi Minh and the Communists won control of the northern part of the country, while the official Vietnamese government retained control of the south, heavily influenced by the United States. Ho Chi Minh’s forces in the north had an official army.

In the south, they mounted an insurgent campaign. The fighters on that front were called the Viet Cong, or Vietnamese Communists. They were 'Charlie' to Americans. Charlie might do anything. Charlie was always trying to infiltrate remote US compounds. When he did the cry would go out, "Charlie in the Wire!" That meant "Charlie is among us!"

I do not think we were on the right side; but in my own view we were not on the wrong side either. The right side would have been for the rest of the world to have let the Vietnamese people sort things out for themselves, no matter how well rubber trees grow there and how great it would be for the USSR to have an Asian bulwark against the Chinese.

But the real choice in front of the Vietnamese people was between Trotsky & Mao on one side, and Robespierre & Uncle Sam on the other. I myself cannot agree that the side that helps people resist being subjected to any flavor of totalitarian regime is the wrong side. I think the results after the war ended suggest a great many Vietnamese people felt similarly. The victorious north liberated the south so thoroughly that hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people fled to the open seas on boatsto escape tat liberation and became a diaspora. I wouldn't know how to call anyone a winner.

Draft Dodgers & Babykillers

I spoke about the war very recently with a man of my father's generation who came from the opposite side of the divide. Real hostility rose in me. I felt he spoke from an assumption that all right-thinking people saw the war the way he did. That’s certainly how I spoke of it to him. I cannot read minds, but I felt a very subtle sharpness coming from my friend as well, and perhaps for exactly the same reason.

But I dunno, maybe I bought enough hostility for the both of us. It's happened before. We are almost fifty years after the end of a war that neither of us was in and that I wasn't even alive for and yet there we were, my amygdala all fired up.

That's not a pointless vocabulary word. The amygdala is the part of the brain that tells us 'friend or foe,' 'threat or benefit,' My amygdala told me this man sitting across from me was a threat to me, a foe. Maybe, but he's been my psychoanalyst for years. I have plenty of reasons to be hostile - he pokes and prods and never leaves me alone to just sink deeper and deeper into my own head, the jerk.

But I felt hostility rising at that moment for a different reason. To me, in that moment, I knew what he was. I had a name for it. He was a Draft Dodger. Well, fair enough. I was sitting on the other couch representing the Babykillers, eve though my military service amounted to about six months in the Civil Air Patrol, Wiley Post station.

Those were some of the names people called each other then, and now. Draft Dodgers and Babykillers. People on opposite sides of a divide develop names for each other, big deal, film at eleven.

But what if it were the act of calling names itself that helped steer the complex situation into a much simpler one: a fight between Draft Dodgers and Baby Killers?

When soldiers arrived in Vietnam they learned all about 'Charlie'. Charlie was the enemy. Charlie was the name for any and every Vietnamese who took up arms against our side. Charlie would do anything. I have heard first-hand testimony of the Viet Cong's atrocities against civilians, accounts that would swamp the rest of the essay if I recounted them.

A counterpart coming at the war from the other side would be wise to remind me about “tiger cages” in the Mekong delta and the brutal neglect prisoners taken by the south were subjected to. And that’s before we even get to My Lai.

That would make me look off into the distance for a moment. But then we would argue about whose atrocities were most justified and least atrocious, and which were matters of policy and which were the result of enraged individuals, and we would be perpetuating the whole squalid thing.

Among Us

Among Us has been a hit game in my family for a few years. I like it because it all happens on a little spaceship. In Among Us the crew of the ship has to find an imposter, one who is not really a member of the crew, but only pretending. The 'real' crew members have to get them out before they ruin the whole thing, and the only way is to send them out the airlock.

After the fight breaks out I'd have to pick a side, and so would you, or both sides would fight over who gets to throw us out of which airlock.

This is the revolution, we’d hear, and you can't stand still on a moving train, or the little spaceship. It's just how people do. But soon enough both sides would be indistinguishable, each side feeling the same about the other.

“The war criminals at the other airlock are chucking out freedom fighters, the fools. They're lost in a mob mentality. Over here, though, we have identified the elements that caused all the trouble in the first place, and we are restoring order and freedom.”

The Restorative Justice has pooled up ankle-deep in some places, almost as much of it as the Freedom Fluid that's splattered on the walls.

Bravo Platoon

I can't think of Vietnam and Daddy without thinking of Oliver Stone and Platoon. Oliver Stone was a soldier who like Daddy enlisted in the Army voluntarily. From his life and experience came "Platoon", one of the greatest movies ever. But sometimes it seems like two movies to me. One is is a movie about a young man confronted by love and death and the impossibility of knowing what might have been. The other is the movie that took away the idea Daddy had that he would see his own experience framed in the same heroic light as the World War Two movies I watched with him. Hellcats, Back to Bataan, Flying Leathernecks, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Victory at Sea, on and on.

These were shows that commemorated the great deeds of our fighting men who went off where Uncle Sam sent them, to fight the foes that kept Sam up nights worried. That's about all that fighting men have traditionally known about what it was they were sent off to do. The social contract that I believe many Vets felt applied to them is that when they returned from war, the dead would be honored along with the sacrifice of the living.

They got something different, and I learned that when you want to make a movie about moral complexities and grayness you can set it in Vietnam and everyone will know what's up. If you want to make a movie about heroism you tend to go for World War Two. That's why I'm less excited by Bravo Platoon. What it meant psychologically to my father. I just wanted him to feel honored.

I used to see Oliver Stone as the enemy. As my enemy. His movie hurt my father, the only one I'll ever have. As I think of Oliver Stone now I think he and I would have an enormous amount in common. He's my father's age, he was a soldier, he lived similar experiences. And he turned those experiences into a story that captures something very profound about love and death among men.

There are few people I'd rather have a quiet chat with, about fathers and sons and the war and memory and guilt. Guilt hung heavy on my father, like bandoliers of 7.62mm M60 ammunition he shot from the open door of his Huey.

But the worst of Oliver Stone's sins against me is that he made it impossible for me to go on having my silly biases about Draft Dodgers. The most critical examination of the Vietnam War came from a soldier on team Babykiller.

That's why Oliver Stone throws such a monkey wrench into the whole game of Charlie Among Us. He was on both teams and wasn't an imposter on either. He saw things one way, and then later he saw them differently. For that he gets thrown out the airlock? Hmmm.

Bertrand Russell famously said something very much like, "When I find out the facts have changed I change my mind. What do you do?"

And what should we do? Throw the facts out the airlock immediately, so we can go on not being aware of them?

Oliver Stone's existence undermines the whole premise of the game, namely that there are different kinds of people, Babykillers and Draft Dodgers, the way there are Chimpanzees and Bonobos, and with enough care one could sort them all out into piles. The twentieth century provided us with plenty of piles of humans to sort through in search of the imposters.

Born Again Bosses

I remember when I really started wondering about all this. I've worked a number of Persuader gigs in hospitals. That’s the actual title of the federally defined and regulated job most often called “unionbuster.” I can’t imagine a better job for learning how people really relate to conflict at work.

Nurses run hospitals, that's what I've seen. Operationally, on a day to day basis, they make it go more than any other single group of folks. Relax, Docs, you're still super important, and you can name all the bones and squishy things inside. But the nurses make it go. Most hospitals have a CNO, a Chief Nursing Officer, who marshalls nursing practice. Most floors and units in hospitals have a nurse manager.

Now, on the union side of things we gave all these folks a single name and a single identity: "The Boss." The Boss, well, The Boss is the one we're doing all this against. All the people who are The Boss and therefore headed to the airlock, they were all nurses for most of their career, and therefore on Team Nurse. Then as their careers progressed, some of those nurses wanted to move into leadership or at least management positions and use their experience that way.

That's what made them The Boss?

When did the transition happen, I wondered, as the whole notion of The Boss lost credibility for me. Was it transmitted by spores? Was it reversible? Sometimes The Boss changes jobs and goes back to being a floor nurse. Are they…no longer an imposter? Again? Were we serious with all this? We didn't encourage plans to harass The Boss, we encouraged plans to harass some specific nurse manager somewhere. I don't know why there should be a point in a nurse's career where their attitudes stop being the attitudes of a nurse with a job and start being the attitudes of The Boss.

Looking at the world in terms of The Boss and Workers is not a way of thinking that can survive more than about 30 seconds of analysis, but I held onto it for years. It lets you fight people.

Among Us reminds me of something else. It reminds me of all the talk I grew up with about whether or not you were 'Saved.' We were Born Again Christians. Our branch of the religion was based on the idea of an epiphany experience where you'd be “born again” by asking Jesus to save you and come into your life.

It's the most fashionable of religions to hold in contempt these days, but it's a religious practice like any other. It does have its own weird features, though. We children tormented ourselves about whether we were “really” saved. You said the words…but then some preacher would say it wasn't enough that you said the words, you had to mean them, really mean them.

Well isn't that special. Not just say them, not just mean them, but really mean them.

It's a recipe for self-doubt and worse yet, for self-appointed commissars among us to ask questions and try and see if you were really Saved.

Or are you an Imposter? We're gonna point this airlock straight at the gates of hell before we chuck you out.

Sheep and Goats

It's not until everyone is dead that the real full-contact game of Among Us gets going.

That's when the God I conceived of as a child casts his vote for who is a Babykiller and who is a Draft Dodger. We were taught that at the end of days, that God would have us all line up and tell us the truth about whether we were real crew or imposters.

God calls them Sheep and Goats. God calls the real crew Sheep. The imposter Goats go out the airlock. I'll put my copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book of organizing wisdom in my pocket and go with them.

Organizing goats in hell would be vastly preferable to submitting to anyone that creates them from nothing according to his own specifications and then declares them all damned and sends them away to burn. That God needs to take a good look in a mirror.

But that’s The Boss for you, archetype edition. I'd go full guerilla insurgent on that spaceship. At my house in Vermont I have three goats, and that’s partially why. I’m an ally.

In the dim corners of our minds, though, I'd wager we all sometimes want to sit there on a throne like the God in my tale, deciding for ourselves once and for all whom we would damn, and whom we would spare.

If I make those corners of my mind less dim, I think like that about other people less often. And you know what? I don't find any traitors Among Us when I stop thinking about people as if they are either sheep or goats. They’re just people who see things I don't see. Sometimes I see things they don't see, and I'd rather not be thrown out the airlock for it.

Fog of War

In Errol Morris' documentary The Fog of War, Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert McNamara recounts a message by Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev to President Kennedy at the high-point of a conflict between the US and the USSR over nuclear missiles in Cuba, a country controlled by the USSR and only 90 miles from Florida Man's driveway.

The two sides were at the highest level of alert. Only the actual breakout of nuclear war could have raised the level of threat higher. This was in 1962, and the end of World War Two was about as close in time to them as the election of Barack Obama is to us. The war had not been forgotten by Kruschev. The USSR's experience of the war had defined the term 'bitter.'

McNamara reports the late-night communique from Kruschev to Kennedy went like this:

"We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope [in] which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence."

Kruschev and Kennedy found a way to untie the knot. Each man was a veteran of War and knew the devastation that lay at its bitter end. That's what a sailor would call the frayed end of the rope the two leaders held in their hands. The bitter ends.

Something about the Cuban Missile Crisis let Kennedy and Kruschev see the magnitude of the price they would each pay if they failed to find a peaceful way out. Perhaps the notion of several hundred thousand people vaporized in a few minutes' time penetrated The Fog of War brightly enough to show them how to untie the knot.

It must have been an enormously complex political moment, later as the Vietnam War escalated slowly. It was too slow-moving and too complex for leaders to see that finding a way to untie the knots of war in Vietnam was just as important as finding a way out of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We avoided the Cuban Big Bang but we got the 10,000 Day War and The Wall and Punji Stakes and Doorgunners, Tunnel Rats and The Iron Triangle and Cu Chi and "The famous Marine landing no one's heard of" at Da Nang, and Charlie in the Wire, and we got Hueys, and the distinctive sound of their rotors beating the air into submission.

Instead of one big mushroom cloud, we got millions of individual- and family-sized ones.

It looks to me as if we as a country are just looking for as many knots as we can find, and pulling hard on all of them, without concern for how or if we will ever get them unjammed.

Bayard Rustin: Thrown Out of Two Airlocks

As I thought about Daddy’s Vietnam Vet hat I became uneasy. Why now? And why are so many Vietnam Vets wearing those hats now, and putting Vietnam service ribbon decals on their cars?

I appreciate that my father feels proud of his service now., but something about the whole dynamic unsettles me. It just looks to me like part of why those hats are becoming visible is that the politics of the moment is leading people toward taking what seems like the easy way out and playing a game of Among Us to solve our problems.

I don’t think that’s the easy way out at all. Just the instinctive way: Someone is different, make them go away. It doesn’t matter that much what the difference is; the impulse we have to cleanse our ranks is the same, and so are the results.

We often need more cleansing from what we do to cleanse our ranks than we did in the first place. Then it’s just time for round two: cleanse the cleansers. Among Us is a smash hit because it’s an addictive game, no? It is in real life, for sure.

Kennedy and Kruschchev knew there was no easy way to untie their knot, so they just faced it as something they had to handle with no alternative.

Uncle Ho and President Johnson did not find a way to untie the knot they found in front of them. They pulled on the bitter ends of that rope good and hard and we are still jammed in the knot.

I think I may be sensitized to these dynamics because in my work around organized labor on both sides I’ve more or less been involved in Among Us as a professional player.

It’s what the law and organizing requires: to represent employees you’ve got to take a group of employees from whatever their normal work state of mind is, and move them to an emotional place where each and every one of them chooses a side in an election. They lock in their choice by marking an x on a slip of paper; that simple act makes it harder for each of them to change their minds. It feels like a betrayal of their side.

When I work as a Persuader I live with the label ‘traitor’. I get it. It’s hard.

I came to doubt the whole enterprise of Among Us as a way forward that I myself could push. People make all kinds of decisions for all kinds of reasons, but once you’re in a fight you tend to be more or less seized by your inner primate.

I know the best responses to that line of objections. Organizing, nonviolent resistance, collective action, these are the ways that people have advanced freedom and expanded the notions of human equality. Nothing else works so reliably, and no, it’s not always popular. If the majority didn’t prefer things the way they were there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

Rosa Parks did not just stand up on a bus one day. It was part of a plan. There were goals and a strategy. The overall strategy came out of a group of organizers that included Bayard Rustin as one of the key strategists and thought-leaders. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of him at all, ever. He spent his career strategizing with folks like Martin Luther King Jr. at the highest levels on the most complex issues. He was a lifelong seeker, and a man to be taken very seriously at the highest level.

For me Bayard Rustin has earned a place in the lineage of martyred champions of human dignity and freedom that stretches back to Socrates. He was thrown out the airlock in Athens, Greece in 399 B.C. for refusing to change his thinking to suit the status quo.

If you’ve heard of Rosa Parks, you know Bayard Rustin’s handiwork.

If you haven’t heard of him, it’s because he was a gay black man.

He was thrown out the airlock.

No, he was thrown out of two airlocks, by different teams: one for being black, the other for being gay. The title of his collected works is “Time on Two Crosses.”

Read his words. You’ll encounter a writing voice that rings clear and loud in your mind. It’s the voice of a fellow human who saw injustice and worked hard not only to end it, but to end it in a very specific way: by making the perpetrators encounter him as an equal to them.

Read that again. Bayard Rustin regarded it as a goal to be seen as the same kind of person as the people who were throwing Black Americans off buses, which need no airlocks.

Organizers and activists treated the people who were literally throwing them off buses with the respect those activists demanded for themselves.

As I see it, the most fundamental idea in the mind of the best strategist in the Civil Rights movement was that the way forward was by obliterating the very notion of the game Among Us: there can never be any imposters. My working hypothesis is that there’s not one human being that has ever lived who is one stitch different from me in any meaningful way.

It’s an impossibility, imposters among us. All of us are real crew members. Nothing human can be alien to any of us. So said Maya Angelou. Part of me is aware that as a middle-aged white man from Oklahoma, some might think I have no right to paraphrase Maya Angelou, or invoke Bayard Rustin either one. I am neither Black, nor gay, nor a woman.

But I am afraid that I must respectfully insist, as a fellow human being, on my unfettered right to search for wisdom and light, and to pick them up where I find them. I simply encounter other humans like me when I read the words those two wrote.

My perspective is that of a person who has lived with the charge of being a traitor to my side. I was. I hope I will be again if I find myself in a similar position. I fully support betraying ideas and abstractions in favor of respecting actual human beings. For all I know, some in the union-avoidance world will regard this essay as treasonous. I’m ok with that too. I’ll drink more hemlock if I have to, but my tolerance is off the chart now. As long as it’s not laced with fentanyl I’ll take my chances.

I spent a decade in organized labor, and then I rejected it and went to work on the other side. That started a period of observing the world I knew from the opposite perspective. It also started a period of hiding from myself and denying the life I’d lead in the union.

In my own personal case, I found over time that on the union side I was spending far too much time reassuring myself that the ends justified the means. The ‘ends’ were abstract and in the vague future, but the means were concrete and manipulative to actual living and breathing human beings in the present.

I’m not against unions or companies, certainly, nor even against polarization. Bayard Rustin polarized: people who think Blacks should ride in the backs of buses and people who think they should not occupied opposite poles. Let’s go ahead and find out what’s what.

The trouble is all in what happens after the polarizing.

I’m against dehumanizing opponents to make it easier to throw them out the airlock. And I’m against heaping contempt on them as a way to soften them up first.

Why does this matter to me? Because I know what hard contempt feels like. I’ve thrown shovelfuls of it on others, and I’ve had shovelfuls of it heaped on me, by both sides in my little world. I invited conflict and then was changed by it.

Chagrin is the name for the emotion you feel when you see yourself from another’s perspective and don’t like the view. It’s a hard feeling to tolerate. Sometimes I feel chagrin is the water I swim in, to paraphrase Mao. So is being called a traitor hard to tolerate. Nonetheless, I’d take them both every day of the week and twice on Sundays over playing Among Us any longer.

Respectful Engagement

After the polarizing happens, I’d rather weld the airlocks shut and play a different game: Respectful Engagement.

I invented it for myself while I was doing Persuader gigs. It’s not great as a game, really. There’s no goal beyond playing it, and only two rules: When you’re talking with someone opposite you on some polarizing issue, you just try to discover how they got there, and then try and imagine what kind of circumstances or values it would take for you to come down on that side.

As long as both sides are playing the game, both are winning.

The only way to lose the game is to stop playing.

But start small and develop your skills on easy things, like beer vs. wine. Don’t go straight for the hard stuff.

It feels strange. You might even feel like a traitor. Hemlock is best on the rocks with a basil twist, if it comes to that. You never have to change your mind one little bit, though. Neither does your playmate.

But do it long enough and I’ll bet you both change.

If the Cap Fits

Platoon is on Hulu now. I think I’ll put on my Babykiller cap and watch my favorite Draft Dodger movie.

Here’s one of the outfits Daddy stitched on the caps:

336th Assault Helicopter Company, 25th Infantry Division.

It turns out Oliver Stone and Daddy could be said to have served together.

Oliver Stone was an infantryman in the 25th Infantry Division, in a unit near Cambodia, serviced by the Hueys my father was doorgunning in.

I like to think perhaps Daddy was on a chopper that picked up Private Stone after a patrol. I know helicopter crews regarded nothing in the world as important as getting their comrades out. I imagine Daddy watching the treeline, M60 bouncing on bungee cables while Private Stone clambered into the bird.

I wonder if there might be a picture somewhere with the two of them in it.

That’s fanciful, of course.

But even if such a picture did exist, after all this time it would be hard to tell the two of them apart.

Surprise!

The best thing about putting scripts in contests is that there’s a decent chance you’ll forget you did it and then be pleasantly surprised to place.

I had two feature scripts in the LA International Screenplay Awards and both made semifinalist! I’m especially pleased because both deal with challenging subject matter, and the judges seem not to have choked on it.

The Island of Misfit Toys is a psychological thriller: When the Vatican hires cold-blooded fixer the Mantis and unstable Vermont psychoanalyst Thomas to solve the pedophile priest problem once and for all, Thomas uses his crackpot therapy techniques to usher in a return to the Church's golden age of Inquisitions, but a young altar server's quest to find a missing priest turns everything upside down.

Black Blizzard is a tale of intergenerational trauma and loss: Set in the shadow of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, logic savant and sex-worker Cali has to overcome her crime-boss uncle so she can save her friend before both women's lives are destroyed.

You can take a look at my Coverfly profile here.

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Hey, a little external validation never hurt anyone!

The tagline on the website is “Learn and become what you are.” It’s a line from the Greek Poet Pindar. Genoi hoios essi mathone. That’s an admonition to myself, a kind of personal mission statement. It helps me remember why I write and perform, to find and express myself in a way that connects with my fellow creatures. If I can sell a script or a book, great. If I can sell enough tickets to do my one man show until it’s wired tight and sharp, excellent. It’s just got to come about as a byproduct of learning and becoming what I am.

But hot damn it’s sweet to get some external validation! I’m utterly thrilled. Got this for the first screenplay I wrote, “The Persuaders,” a pilot for a serial drama set in the world of union organizing campaigns.

I spent the last year or so taking my life apart and reassembling it to support my personal mission. They say every writer has 250,000 bad words in them that have to come out first. I hope the number isn’t too far off, because I’ve got it covered. I was casting around trying to find the right way to approach my experience in and around organized labor, and thought I would try writing a screenplay. I loved the format and the demands of the medium. I went through the Vermont Production Collective’s screenplay incubator program, and have two feature scripts in contests this year.

I was away from this site for a bit, and happy to be back!

Excerpt from Fury & Grace

*** This is an excerpt from my memoir Fury & Grace. I wrote the book when I was fresh out of the union. Writing has been a way for me to look for myself under all the grandiosity, narcissism, and self-absorption that shines through in these words. They make me cringe, but I’ll stand by them as a faithful record of what these events were like for me at the time, and what I was like at the time. I hope I’ve grown a bit. ***

Montpelier, February 5-8, 2012

“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the Most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. Psalms 82:6-7 (King James Version)

“After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.” Mr. Spock, Star Trek: The Original Series, “Amok Time,” 1967

It was time for me to start the event. I walked through the back doorway of the Capital Plaza Hotel, just across the street from the gold-domed capital building, and into the banquet room. This was a political fundraiser for the Vermont AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, and as the AFL-CIO president, I was the emcee. I saw the lovely and tempting open bar that I stayed away from and the hors d’oeuvre that I meandered toward. Only some lonely slices of tomato were left. People had eaten the mozzarella cheese slices and the basil leaves. I couldn’t blame them for leaving the tomatoes untouched.

The lights went down, but not so low that I couldn’t see all these people who knew I might soon be labeled “Disgraced former union president.” The political blogs were running with a story that the state Senate president said I had threatened him by slipping a scary piece of paper across his desk in a private meeting. Well, it had been a private meeting, there was a desk, and I had slid a piece of paper across it. But there was nothing scary about it. It was just a brag sheet about all the work the union had done to get him more power. We’d given them out to legislators by the stack. Now he was calling on the state attorney general to investigate me for extorting and intimidating a public official. I felt sick, but it was a performance and so I would say my lines, and people would laugh where they were supposed to laugh.

The plan was that I would first introduce Governor Peter Shumlin and then, after he spoke, I would make a speech about the former governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean before presenting Dean with an award. That was the plan. But the two governors had a different plan. They didn’t want an amateur like me hanging around on the same stage as them. Instead of handing it back over to me, Shumlin introduced Dean with the award speech I was supposed to deliver, and then he presented Dean with the award. They just took over the event and cut me out altogether.

It was so outrageous a hijacking that I admired it. That’s politics; you do whatever you can get away with. When you’re outmatched as I had just been, well, you eat the broken glass and pretend that was always the plan.

When they were done, I dragged myself back on stage to close out the evening. I looked out at the crowd. It was a good turnout. Even the lobbyists who worked against us had shown up. Shumlin and Dean both said from the podium that they supported us. People had happy looks on their faces, or maybe just drunken looks. Either way, they laughed at my little jokes.

I had worked hard to get here. I started in a quiet job as a college librarian and when the union world energized me, I leaped right in. Three years of keeping the books as treasurer taught me how the AFT Vermont union worked. After five years and sixty contentious board meetings squalid with infighting, I finally had what I wanted. I was on a stage, people had voted to put me there, and I had titles. And so I wanted more. At the same time, I was president of that one union, I became president of the Vermont AFL-CIO, a union of unions.

I needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t a useless fat slug. I needed people to write my name down on pieces of paper and vote for me. I needed to see my name in the newspaper. I needed the titles. I needed to defeat people. Half the reason I ran to be president of Vermont AFL-CIO was so I could defeat the woman who ran against me and crush her lifelong ambition to win that office. I relished every second of it. I needed to fight the world until everyone who opposed me lay twitching on the floor. It didn’t matter that much to me that neither she nor anyone else knew they were bit players in my story.

The union world is rough, and I figured those who ventured into it should prepare themselves. I included myself. I needed to pass this bill so I’d get the praise for it. I had to win. I needed to make the patronizing legislators who opposed us eat sand. I suppose I might have had just a bit of rage stored up somewhere inside me.

I looked at the audience in the Capital Plaza Hotel the way I had looked at every crowd I had to address since a long-ago but never forgotten scene on a grade school playground: as a potential lynch mob. My way had been to get the mob on my side by charming them, making them laugh, and finding ways to be smarter. I had a lifetime to develop unconscious instincts for how people act, what moves them, and where they’ll go when they do move. In the union world, all these skills came to the forefront. They became the explicit tools I used and developed. I needed all these people to love me, and I hated them for it.

****

Two days earlier, on Sunday, I had woken up obsessed with the Vicodin I knew I could find in Daddy’s medicine cabinet. My periodic back pain was good for maybe one prescription every few months, and besides, as far as I was concerned, using painkillers to kill pain was a complete waste of their potential. I wanted to feel the first half-hour or so of the subtle onset of warmth when the dope hit my blood until the full dose, well, the full quadrupled dose, made its way through me to my brain. Then the Vicodin would supply only irritability and sleepiness. Not a very good drug, but it was the only one I had access to.

I just wanted to dull my mind and figured that if I didn’t buy dope off the street, I wouldn’t get into trouble. The fatigue from more than a decade in the skin of a quiet librarian and the five years I had already spent wearing the dragon scales of a union boss was too much. It was hot under all those layers of persona. Perhaps it was that extra weight of all that psychological armor that had given me the back pain I needed to qualify for a prescription.

Mama and Daddy would be at church. They lived less than a mile from me. I could slither down the hill, through their front door, into their medicine cabinet, load my pocket with dope they’d never miss, then slink back up the hill to my home and no one would be the wiser.

You’re a crackhead if you do that, a voice in my head told me. Stealing dope from your parents, that’s a definite crackhead move. But, I argued back, it would just be Vicodin. It’s not crack. It’s not meth. It’s just souped-up Tylenol.

I had had two days without alcohol or drugs, and I was still surprised at how bright and clear the world looked through sober eyes, even the snow that Vermont’s political class dirtied as they made their way into the capitol building to get on with whatever mischief filled the legislature’s calendar for the day.

Daddy had sold his childhood home in Oklahoma City so he and Mama could live close to my family with our four kids. It had been almost a month since I had last seen him. He’d caught an infection from a botched knee replacement and was writhing in pain his doctor refused to acknowledge. Mama was frantic not knowing what to do to help him.

Now, Daddy was made of strong stuff. He had been a staff sergeant in the Army and spent three years in Vietnam. He had been an air marshal during the first wave of terrorist attacks on airliners in the 1970s. He had lived forty years with crushed vertebrae from Vietnam. And I had seen him perform his own tooth repair at the kitchen table instead of going to the dentist. Never in my life had I heard him complain. So if he had Vicodin it was because he needed it to function. But so did I.

When I walked into their kitchen, I glanced at the table and saw a clear plastic container of the cherry tomatoes they had never stopped offering me. There in the living room was his place on the couch, festooned with heating pads and cushions. Good, I thought, now he knows what it’s like to suffer. He was full of God’s love, he gave me life, and I thought it was right that he suffered for it. I had wanted them to sell their house and move to Vermont. Now that they had, I couldn’t be anything more than cordial with them. Arm’s length was as close as I could get. When I tried to be friendly, I felt a black rage rise up and stop me.

Somehow I left without stealing the Vicodin.

****

On the day of the fundraiser event, my heart thumped as I pulled into the union’s parking lot about a block down the street from the state capitol building.

We needed Howard Dean to help us out with some legislation, so we had decided to invent a labor award to give him. If you want to lure a politician to an event, give them an award. It’s not fair; they can’t resist. When Dean said yes, Governor Shumlin agreed to speak as well. Those two would, in turn, draw most of the legislators and lobbyists we needed.

I worked on my speech and the little things to say when I introduced tonight’s speakers. I’d think of something clever, write it down in my pocket notebook, say it out loud, realize it wasn’t clever at all, start over, and then copy the whole thing down a few times so I’d remember it. I couldn’t think unless I could pace around the office. Like a lot of offices in Montpelier, the home base for our organizers had been converted from a shabby and rambling house. Maps and charts hung on the walls, cheap printers and cheaper snacks were everywhere. This was no professionalized union office, lush with healthy potted plants. This was a campaign office where people got things done. Our plants were all dead. On the table, I saw a small paper plate with a slice of withered tomato on it. This was my union-boss kingdom.

For the two years I had been president of AFT Vermont, a union of nurses and college professors, I had gotten used to waking up with my glands squeezing adrenaline into my bloodstream, but this week was particularly aggravating.

I was taking a break from procrastinating on my speech when the emails started coming in telling me to stay strong. No one says that unless you’re screwed. That’s how I found out I might be under investigation.

I had picked the worst week in the history of the world to stop drinking. I felt the adrenaline hit my lungs like the meth I used to shoot into my veins. But that was more than twenty years ago, and I was sure that a bit of recreational Vicodin was completely different.

My stomach filled with clay. I had been through one federal Department of Labor investigation when I first became treasurer of the union just a few years earlier. They had been looking into things that had happened before I was elected. Still, I had had to shepherd that investigation until we were cleared. This was different, though. This investigation would be about me personally and the union’s political activity.

We hadn’t done anything illegal and were not guilty of anything worse than being obnoxious, which in the union is what they pay you to be. None of that mattered, though. The threat of an investigation would have a devastating effect on our plans.

Then I remembered today’s event. In about two hours I was going to have to go over to the Capital Plaza and enter a room full of hundreds of people who would have all heard about this paper-sliding fiasco, and I’d have to get in front of them and emcee the whole farce while they were thinking about how I’d look in an orange jumpsuit. That’s what I figured, anyway.

I wanted to Rumpelstiltskin myself into the ground. I couldn’t even have a drink.

I put on my pea coat and slowly made my way down the icy steps. It was going to be like the kids calling me lardass on the playground all over again, except there would be no recess-ending bell to save me. I was going to have to go down there and just do the stupid thing no matter what. What was the alternative? Cancel it? Turn myself in to the FBI? Yes! I did it! I gave a piece of paper to him! It all seemed so ridiculous.

It was stupidly cold for February, but the Cap Plaza was only a couple of blocks away; just far enough to lose a nose to frostbite. I made it into the hotel and back to the banquet room. I looked in just long enough to see that everything was set up and people were starting to arrive. Then I ducked out the back because I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I walked along the tracks and counted railroad ties for a while, thinking of Neal Cassady getting high and dying on tracks just like these. I waited for showtime.

Among Us

(This piece originally appeared as a commentary for VTDigger

I walked into the Statehouse a few weeks ago for the first time in about seven years, and talked to legislators and lobbyists I knew.  It sounded like “We the People” have changed quite a lot in that time. What lobbysists told me about many of the folks they deal with, legislators and advocates and the rank-and-file citizens alike, reminded me of my kids’ favorite videogame, Among Us, where teams throw imposters out of an airlock, into space. 

Let me explain. 

The Statehouse climate bothered me, because it resembles very strongly what I spent about ten years of my life working toward, in unions. 

In labor organizing, we practiced "Change through Conflict" in that world, and with good reason. "Collective action" is the radical force-multiplier that allows those with less power and dignity to get more of both. Sometimes it's totally organic, sometimes it's more or less manufactured, but no matter what, if people are taking action, there is something going on that's real to them. If you don’t believe that, go try and organize collective action around an issue that doesn't connect. 

In the union world, collective action happens with groups of people, and there's a whole legal framework that leads to an election. After leaving the union side, I've spent years working on the management side, in organizing campaigns, as the fellow often called a 'unionbuster.' According to federal regulations, the title is 'Persuader.' 

Neither is apt, but whatever you call it, I've spent thousands of hours talking with employees in high-conflict, highly polarized environmentsenvronments.

The specter of an election date creates a natural escalation of feelings in voters on both sides. The tension in the workplace rises, depending on the voters and the situation. Sometimes it becomes extremely tense. People on both sides of these elections feel the way they feel for their own reasons. 

This is true without regard to what the employer does, or how many attorneys and consultants and persuaders and organizers and unions come around, or what the issues are at the workplace. People just see things differently. There is no pixie dust for either side.

When tensions are very high and the voters are sharply split over real issues, it's hard for the people in those situations to see past the election date to The Day After. People go to work and there are the co-workers who the day before were wearing other colors with other buttons, and even though one side has just won, and one lost, they both have hard feelings, and there they both are, day in, day out. 

In that situation, people on both sides have to live with the consequences of how they treated each other during the campaign, for better or worse. Sometimes relationships are mended, and sometimes they are ruptured permanently. After enough time has passed, a few people on opposite sides sometimes come around to accept that reasonable people looked at the situation and took a different view. That is, in fact, what happens in life all the time, on every issue we care about.

Now we come to Among Us. In the real-life variation, the people you throw out of an airlock just come right back in through a trapdoor and form a team of their own. They are ready to rumble, and they know what the stakes are. 

What you hear in those conversations between people who were on opposites teams during previous organizing campaigns is that pretty often at least one of them really listens to the other person and truly sees where they are coming from and how they came down on the side they did. Sometimes one person says they'd make a different choice if they had it to do over again, and sometimes not.

When I hear these conversations, they happen because two people have already gone through their own Among Us tournament, and neither wants to do it again. I consider the fifteen years I've spent around organized labor campaigns as time with a season pass to the professional Among Us circuit. I, too, have’ve had enough.

I'm moving away from it, and spending my energy working toward a game I think is better: Respectful Engagement. It's a solve-the-mystery game. When you find someone who comes down differently on an issue that matters to you, really try to find out how they got there. Both of you will win, and neither goes out the airlock.

I’ll give you a phrase that works wonders for opening space in a conversation: “I see it differently.” Repeat that until you’re both playing Respectful Engagement. It’s a more rewarding game.

The Elgar Sanction

It says up there at the top of the page ‘Learn and become what you are.’ In a surprise twist I love music, it turns out. I’m following the trail of why I’m so captivated lately by watching classical music performances.

I thought the thirty year hiatus I took from playing music after I quit the saxophone in eighth grade meant music wasn’t for me, but now I know different. I just got scared off. I couldn’t succeed by learning the saxophone the way I could learn everything else: by reading. About 98% of my self-worth as a child came from being able to learn things quickly and memorize things readily. But musical instruments don’t work that way. They reward faithfulness over the long term. You can’t learn about the instrument. You have to learn the instrument itself. And you have to learn it with your whole self. It’s my body that practices the banjo, not the part of my brain that I’ve always relied on. Even the parts of my brain that are involved are more like muscles than anything else. Let these fingers do this thing, repeat.

It wasn’t really the saxophone that did it, if I want to be candid. It was an older memory of a little lip-synch number as a kid. I got my blood up to do it, then just lost my nerve at some belittling remark. Later I bombed out on the saxophone. We had auditions and I was afraid I would fail, so I tanked, and then I decided it must be that I was bad at music and so good riddance. Back to things that only involve my head. My body could go elsewhere and mind its own business.

But there is just no way around it. If you want to work toward learning a musical instrument, the two of you are going to be spending a lot of time together. You can pray for it to work like in The Matrix, where you get a hose plugged into your brain and then you have skills, but I don’t think it’ll work. I can’t sit down and wind up my metronome without thinking of an early memory I have of sitting in my room trying to fill a page with perfect handwritten ‘5’s. My father was a confirmed believer in the power of repetition to produce learning, and I had to get those 5s right before I could play. I didn't like it, and I don’t know now if it was a good or bad, just that it was memorable.

Now that I’m starting to log some time focusing on my practice, it’s changing the way I listen to music.

For one thing, I’ve learned that if I want to listen to music it’s best if I watch it. That’s my favorite way to listen: find a performance on YouTube, and watch the musicians play. That gets to the heart of the thing: it’s a musical performance. I understand the quest for perfection that leads to constructions of perfect performances through splicing and editing, but the performance that occurs all at once, that’s the thing that I love to see.

This clip from the GoYa Quartet takes you to the beginning of the third movement in one of Beethoven’s early string quartets. Number one, in fact. They’re very accessible, with just a little bit of context. I knew that Beethoven was famous for the ‘Scherzos’ that he liked to use for his third movements, and when I watched that performance I saw why.

The word ‘Scherzo’ means ‘joke.’ The piece is four minutes of dancing bows and smiling musicians. I can almost hear their teachers reminding them they are the ones who turn those marks on that page into music. If the music dances, it’s because they made it dance. It’s a joke! Make it laugh! And you can see them remembering they’ve got to play it with a scherzo in their heart. They’re a delight to watch. They are the Scherzo.

I wouldn’t feel the same way about that piece by listening only. I like the performance element; the relentlessness of time. The time alone at the piano with a big monster of a score and a recital date circled in red on a calendar. Time starts, and it’s all just going to happen. I think Anna Federova’s famous recital of Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto has my personal favorite three seconds in the performing arts. The moments when she sits and faces the piano, orchestra just out of frame, audience in the background. She herself starts time by hitting the solo opening chords on the piano, and then it’s like a Saturn V rocket blasting off for the next 48 minutes. Good, bad, or ugly, it’s all fixin’ to happen. Tick tock, tick tock.

I think the tension between the public performance and the very private preparation is compelling to me. And then the immense gulf between the experience she is having and the experience the listener is having. Same room, same sounds, yet no comparing their experiences.

And then there’s this. Jacqueline du Pre playing the Elgar Cello Concerto with her husband Daniel Barenboim conducting. I mostly know her story through its mythic telling in Hilary and Jackie, which I know to be controversial. There is no controversy whatsoever about her genius, and certainly no doubt about it in this performance. The time-stamp link wouldn’t work, but if you want to skip straight to the musical equivalent of a sweet action scene, go to about 9:50 or so. You’ll hear the tail end of a quiet section, then a couple of minutes of stuff you can’t understand how she does. I’m completely transfixed by imagining the journey from reading those passages in the score for the first time to executing them perfectly. If you stay until 12:55 you’ll see the smile musicians give after they made it to the other end of the tightrope.

It’s the tightrope-smile. There. It has a name now, if it didn’t already. It’s my favorite smile to see, though it has a tinge of something else. She did not have an easy life, nor an easy relationship with her cello, I don’t think. Her posture catches the eye. She huddles around the cello as if she needs its warmth to stay alive.

When I see soloists perform, I think I respond because I imagine a recital as a kind of emergence. As a moth comes from a cocoon, the pianist comes from a cabin in Siberia, or maybe New Hampshire, where the winters are worse.

I wonder if I’m not as compelled by the image of a lonely girl in her room trying to write a page full of perfect 5’s as I am by a musician practicing the tricky fingerings of a thorny passage.

I want to see myself in these performers. I want to think I’m doing the same kind of thing when I practice Sugar Hill. Look at the amazing grandiosity inherent in me just talking about myself at all with regard to music and these folks, and dragging my poor banjo into it. Well, on the one hand it’s art, and that’s what we’re talking about.

And on the other hand if there were fine print under the tagline ‘Learn and become what you are’ it would say the joke’s on you if you think you’re going to like everything you find. It’s like the Greek poet Sappho wrote, “If you’re squeamish, don’t turn over rocks.” She meant if you look inward toward self-examination, sooner or later you’re going to find out things about yourself you really wish were different. There is a strong desire to gently lower that rock back down and forget those squirming things under there.

I am very squeamish, but I try and turn over the rocks anyway, when I notice them sitting there. I have a lot of narcissism in my psyche to contend with, and so I don’t like a lot of what I find under those rocks. The grandiosity, that’s just horribly embarrassing. But everyone who knows me already knows what I’m like, so I may as well not be the only one in the dark about it.

Grandiosity as a character trait probably gets its start as a response to feeling worthless, or something like it. That seems like a proposition I’d lay a wager on. If I’m more conscious of that tendency in myself and accept that it’s true whether I like it or not, I have a shot at growing and finding my level.

After I go watch some more music...

My Testimony part 4: Mothax

[Here’s a link to the playlist on YouTube]

“Mothax” is the last installment of My Testimony. I wish ‘Mothax’ were a pretty word, but it’s sort of just not. I love it though. Step-brother, half-breed, one foot in, one foot out. Kind of belongs anywhere, fully belongs nowhere. Yeah, that still feels pretty true.

I feel like I belong in the SS Mothax on my travels. I feel at home when I’m at sea, to put it like that. For me now the call is to stay in my life, in my body, in my surroundings, and also stay on the journey to learn and become what I am.

It’s Easter today, and Easter is about life. I’ll indulge myself by posting a poem that hasn’t stopped being lovely to me since I learned it in third grade.

“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over”

— John Masefield, "Sea Fever"

My Testimony part 3: Vanity

[Here’s a link to the playlist on YouTube]

In episode 3 of My Testimony we go to college and then throw it away to be a crackhead. It’s one of the parts of my life that I really struggle with: my attitude toward the period of time I was in what they call ‘active addiction.’ I want to romanticize it, to make it have been positive. Well, sure, you can get positive things out of most life plot events.

But for me, that desire to romanticize is just a desire to turn away from my actual experience. I got strung out for a while, then dried out and moved on. I didn’t do any rehab or therapy or anything at all to look into what was up and why I would collapse at 21 over breaking up with a girl. Nope, none of that I just turned away from myself and went back to living as a collection of personas. It doesn’t work forever. If it had worked longer or a little better for me, I might have just strung it out for ever and died waiting for my life to start, always figuring things would get easier for me any day now.

They never got easier. They got harder and harder and harder and then I couldn’t do it. That’s when I started to live my own life, even though I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing, or needed to do. That realization took so much longer. Is taking so much longer.

My Testimony part 2: Tony

[Here’s a link to the playlist on YouTube]

Here’s the second of four parts of “My Testimony.” This story has as much juice as it’s possible for a story to have for me. I don’t know whether it means everything, or nothing, or something. I know it means one thing if you’re the 40 year old man in the story and something else if you’re the fifteen year old boy, and something altogether different when you remember it as a 48 year old man with his own fifteen year old son.

Goodbye, Tony. Tony Kissinger. You had a hard hard life. You’ve had rest since 1991 or so. I think you’ve been resting in death longer than you were tortured in life. I remember you and your hat and your sunburn from falling asleep on the men’s fishing trip, the trip when you had friends. The trip my father invited you on. I and the other boys my age, we were afraid of you.

I see you differently, now, Tony. I don’t know the details of your life, but I know they were hard and bad. Too hard and bad for a little boy to have had much chance. I remember your rage and screaming at Daddy, and Daddy telling you about God’s love, and believing it, and you believing it, and me watching the two of you sitting in the car in the driveway. I never prayed, but I prayed for Daddy to be safe, because you were really scary to me. You were big and rough and burly and as unstable as radioactive plutonium. But I know now how you raged because it was so hard just to live. I wish there had been some help for you. I wish there had been some help for Daddy. He wanted to give you the help that he wanted someone to give him, I think. You’ve been in my mind since you walked into our church that day. I was out of town when you died in my living room, but I saw the pellet holes in the door, and the new couch, because your blood soaked the one I sat on nights to watch westerns with Daddy.

Daddy who wanted a gentle life so badly. He wanted a life where he could work quietly on meticulous hobbies, like writing calligraphy on glass. Instead of that, he was mistreated as a child and then became a doorgunner in Vietnam. He dedicated himself to finding peace through his relationship with God.

I come from a different time and place. I had strange experiences with love, and boundaries, and intensity. It’s a weird testimony, but it’s mine. It’s all just how life worked as far as I knew.

It might be part of Tony’s testimony, too. He’ll always be part of my story. I don’t want to die in a rage against myself the way Tony did. Maybe without Tony’s story interesecting with mine I would have missed out on something that stuck in my mind and has helped me try and live a good life for myself.

Or maybe…maybe it’s just hard to hold reality in your hands and let yourself see it without it meaning anything except what it was. Life and death and love and mistakes and grief and things you can’t take back and pain you don’t want and a life you get to live just this one single solitary time.

On this Easter I think of you, Tony, and new life. World without end, Amen.

Secular Sermon: “My Testimony”

I loved sermons. I went to church three times a week for most of my childhood and saw them live. I listened to tapes of sermons that my folks had. Those preachers sermon-ed me to sleep at night. I put their words and thoughts in my ears and in my mind.

And that’s been a lot of the problem for me. I sort of come at the world through a haze of narcissism and defense mechanisms and misbegotten coping strategies and a sometimes overwhelming habit of disappearing inside my own head. Unless someone was making me do something else, for most of my childhood you would have seen me sitting on a couch with a stack of books next to me and body language that screamed “GO AWAY AND TORMENT SOMEONE ELSE. SUFFER THE CONTRARY AT YOUR PERIL”

I saw my folks reading the Bible urgently. Have you seen that? People looking for life in the words of a book? Looking for it like they had to find it. Looking for truth and salvation in those words with intensity. Not with the intensity of a miner looking for gold. No, they looked with the intensity of two drowning psyches looking for the tiniest of air pockets just to stay alive. They read and studied and listened, and they made me read and study and listen. They found God and He changed their lives and saved them, and so they would do the same for me, only right from the start, and without all that pesky choosing and autonomy getting in the way.

And as it turns out there’s quite a lot of difference between finding God on one’s own journey, and having someone else forcibly cram their God down your neck like grain down the gullet of a soon-to-be foie gras goose. I spent a lot of my life binging and purging belief systems like different slugs of grain going down my gullet, then coming back up. Find a belief system, expect it to make me happy, fall in love with it, ravish and devour it, become nauseated by it, get it out to make room for another. Repeat until death.

Now I follow a different philosophical eating plan. No more solid belief systems for me. Only the liquid diet of curiosity and questions and wandering and searching and accepting what I find inside and out, and living my own life in my own body.

And that’s how all this relates to secular sermons and this video series. My life had been slowly coming apart, and I was aware of a growing desire to express myself creatively. At the time, it manifested as little more than an inarticulate primal scream. I wrote things without even beginning to imagine an actual audience outside my head. There was no outside my head as far as I was concerned. Not really.

The idea of doing a sermon burst into my mind. It ultimately turned into this hour-long piece. What I see watching it now is a man who did not think that Ben Johnson could speak in his own direct voice, but instead had to present something different if he wanted to connect. And now I think the opposite is true.

A preacher has a stance to the audience of one who is delivering The Truth. I don’t have that stance now. If I wrote and performed this again the ideas would be the same, but the preacher would be gone, along with the hat.

It is my hat, but it doesn’t really fit me anymore. I still like it, though.

Three Tales of Perseus and Medusa

I’ve posted it over at Wattpad. Enjoy!

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Fury & Grace is out on Audible!

Whatever you’re doing will be better with Fury and Grace ringing in your ears, so head on over to Audible and check it out!

I recorded the narration over at Voice Over Vermont, and learned that sitting in a dark room reading into a microphone is an excellent way to spend a few days. Love it. Except for the several thousand revisions I wanted to make to the book as I read it.

Abram and the Dug Well

A true tale, taken from Fury and Grace, my memoir of love, death, art, politics, and the terror of tomatoes.

In Blount County, Alabama, the sun pushes down from above while the waterlogged air ensures no evaporating sweat will cool you. In 1906, my grandfather Abram’s mind wasn’t on the water in the air but the water under the dirt he was standing on. Of particular interest to him was how far he and his father were going to have to dig before they found that water. He was 15 that year, and the fact that he was only just now in the third grade was not out of the ordinary. At that time and in that county, there were no particular ages associated with different grades. Blount County was subsistence farming country. Children went to school as work allowed; their education simply proceeded along when their need to work in the fields didn’t.

The old well had run dry, giving up only brackish mud now. Abram and his father needed to dig a new one. The procedure was simple: pick up a shovel; start digging; stop when you hit water. Some wells in the area could go down fifty feet. Abram didn’t wonder how many days it would take to dig the well. He knew the answer. It would take one day from start to finish, even if that day had two sunrises and two sunsets. They weren’t going back to the house until they found water. That was his father’s way. They would take turns digging until they got the job done. With a square-point sharpshooter shovel, Abram’s father cut a four-foot circle in the sod.

In Blount County, what we now call the social safety net was family. Easy credit with rational terms was not available. Social Security, WIC, TANF, SSDI, and SSRI had not even been imagined. They paid for their food, furniture, house, and much of the farm equipment with the labor they spent farming. They grew and made for themselves what they could, but some things they had to buy, and that meant they had to grow a cash crop to sell. Their cash crop was cotton.

The first hour of digging a well was not the hardest by a long way, but it was the first hour and it had its own work. Your muscles were fresh, you were digging at the surface, but you were also taking the first discouraging steps on a long journey downward. Abram needed to step out of time as he knew it and step into an eternal now without the minutes that marked nothing except the slow progression as that round patch of grass near the cottonwood trees became a deep black void that ended in water.

When his father began to dig, Abram was surprised and discouraged at his father’s aggressive pace that seemed more angry than impatient. When faced with a job like that, another person might take the long view and settle into a sustainable pace that a man could keep up for many hours. 

A wellhole cannot accommodate two diggers. When they could dig no deeper standing on the grass, Abram’s father stepped down into the hole and continued shoveling. They’d spell each other every half hour, one clamoring up, the other hopping down. When the bottom was almost too far down for his father to throw the dirt up and out, Abram handed him a large tin bucket and line. It took about a minute to haul up the bucket weighing about fifty pounds, empty it and send it down again, which gave the digger a quick break to catch his breath and straighten his back.

At some point after the noon meal they had dug the pit deep enough that Abram had to stand on the overturned bucket in order to reach his father’s hand and climb up out of the wellhole. After that, only his father dug. Abram ran the bucket up and down until it hurt to open and close his fingers and his shoulders felt leaden and stiff. He was amazed that father was still sending up buckets of dirt as fast as Abram could haul them up and empty them. By the time the sun was touching the tops of the cottonwoods behind them, he was pulling up the fifty-pound bucket about fifteen feet to the surface. Once he returned the bucket, looking into the mouth of the pit, all he could see was the blue of father’s shirt when he straightened up and turned with the shovel to load the next fifty pounds of dirt.

“Ready!” his father would shout in an odd, disembodied voice.

“Coming down!” Abram would answer as he sent the bucket back. As he watched his thoughts of supper and sleep disappear with the bucket down that black hole, he recalled as a distant memory that very morning when he had no notion they were going to spend an eternity digging a hole in the ground. That’s the way it was, working with father. They were both engaged in a fierce and wearisome contest against the elements, against mechanical failure, against human frailty, against their own desire to just be done with it. Because he worked with his father all day, six days a week, he knew that only vigilance, back-breaking work and orneriness kept the farm going. 

Abram had been using the scraps of time while his father dug to build a ladder. Among the lumber left from other projects he found a board ten inches wide and several short lengths of lumber in assorted sizes approximately six inches long. He nailed each of the short pieces to the long board. When finished, Abram slid the ladder down the well. It offered only very shallow steps to climb, but it would do. 

The last of the sunlight was fading when Abram’s father sent him to the house for a lantern. When he returned, Abram began pulling the bucket up. It wasn’t full. By its weight, it had only a couple shovelfuls of dirt in it. He quickly made a lark’s head around the lantern’s handle with rope and lowered it into the well. He called out for his father, then screamed for him, then screamed at him, and then just screamed as his father’s slack form appeared in the pool of light, collapsed kneeling at the bottom of the well. 

Abram knew that his father was dead. Yet his father could not be dead. This could not be.

A gap in time began when Abram saw the back of that blue shirt in the lamplight and knew what he refused to know. He plunged down into the well with a coil of rope, looped it under father’s arms and climbed back up out of the well, all seemingly in one swift motion. He did it, he did it numb. He must have done it, but he couldn’t remember doing it. 

He couldn’t pull his father up hand-over-hand; he was just too heavy. The only way he was able to make any progress was to squat about a foot from the edge of the hole and take the line in his hands. He straightened his arms, leaned into the weight with his back straight and strained with his legs. Abram’s stomach turned when, on his second heave, his father’s heels dragged against the bottom of the hole as he pulled the body upright. 

His hands couldn’t hold the line, so he slipped them through the loops he had made earlier for the bucket. Then he balled both hands into fists so they wouldn’t slide out of the loops and he pulled harder. Heave. Each heave brought his father another sixteen inches closer to him. Heave again. Abram had to get him out of that well. Another heave. He would get his father out of that hole. Heave against the weight. He was bringing him up out of that hole. Heave against the sorrowful times to come. 

When the edge of the pit crumbled and Abram lost a couple of feet, it was more than he could take. He knew he was going to drop his father. He knew that he would now have to dig the next well alone. He would now have to do everything alone. He sat stuck, unable to lift anymore yet unwilling to let go.

A cry rose within him. Why not just curl up and quit? Just let go and run for his mother? She would send for help. The cry uncovered and laid bare before him the choice that was his alone to make. No one would blame him. No one could expect him to do it himself. Abram rebelled. No, there was no help to send for. No, he would not quit and let someone else do his job. Yes, he could do this. Abram heaved.

His father’s body appeared. With the last heave, Abram pulled him up and out. He cradled his father’s head to stop it from hitting the ground too hard. Why? He wondered at that. He collapsed kneeling next to his father.

Abram didn't question what to do next. He threw the line and the bucket into the well and went down after them. Digging now wasn’t as easy as it had been before. By himself he filled the bucket, climbed up, pulled the bucket after him. Again and again, he climbed up and down with the bucket. After uncounted bucketfuls, the dirt beneath his feet crumbled and Abram sank to his knees in cold water.

The well was finished. He had done it. They would have water now. The well that had killed his father would keep them alive. 

He spent a long moment alone there by the well. He would have to tell his mother and sisters that father was dead. There was a well to finish with a cover, a winch, and a pail. Father was dead. There was cotton to bring in. Father was dead. There were hogs to tend and butcher. Father was dead, and there was hay to bring in. Father was dead. There was milking to be done. He stood up and took one step towards the house. Left foot, right foot.

The Old Bridge at the South Canadian River