Writers Group Misfit

Belonging to a writers group can bring many surprises. I'll never forget the day, for example, that I brought in a story about my debauched college years. Once I finished reading it aloud, one of the members  passed around a bottle of Tums from which the other members dug in for multiple helpings. Why, I could induce massive indigestion. I wasn't expecting that.

I've attended the Old Town Writers Group in Traverse City for quite a while now. About seven years ago I met these folks when I responded to a notice that the group was accepting newcomers and would be holding a "mixer" at a downtown bookstore. I was nervous and didn't know what to expect. I remembered that a mixer used to be a term for a high school dance, at least back in the 1960s when I lived in Indiana. I supposed that a throng of people would gather at the bookstore's multi-purpose room as popular oldies played while wannabe writers did the fox trot.

No throngs. No multi-purpose room. No oldies. Instead, a group of five pleasant women sat at a table and welcomed me and another gentleman to join them. They introduced us to their writers group approach, how often they met, and other guidelines they followed. It sounded promising. I had always fancied myself as an untapped font of creative writing juices and pledged to make an appearance at their next meeting. If I had a group to attend, I told myself, it would force me to produce. What, exactly, I might produce I wasn't sure about.

The other gentleman seemed to have a more specific agenda. He wanted to know if he could use profanity in his writing - most notably the word "fuck". The others were a bit taken aback by the question, but in true diplomatic form, responded that if the language helped advance the story, then by all means.

I wasn't able to attend the first meeting, but the other gentleman did. I heard all about it. Apparently, he had been referred by his sex therapist who felt the gentleman needed an "outlet" to  express his feelings. Problem was, the gentleman struggled with compulsive masturbation. He wrote all about it and shared the hyper-graphic details in his reading. I don't know how "therapeutic" the experience was for him (poor guy), but the ladies in the writers group either felt ill or ill-equipped to make their organization an extension of sex therapy. They told him so and I guess he accepted that.

But I have lingered in their midst for these long years. There are six of us. I mainly have steered away from writing about my own humiliations, although in one essay I did admit that I have developed minor relationships with two skin tags in my left armpit, relationships to the extent that I went ahead and gave them names: Pierre and Fatso. I say hello whenever I shower. I also wrote a story about a sweet-natured grandfather who chases his toddler grandson around the house to capture the child in order to change his stinky diaper. It was meant to be funny, but truth be told, it was the first time I noticed a roll of antacids make an appearance at the table.

Armpit skin tags and stinky diapers are my ways to illustrate that this writers group is willing to put up with a lot, compulsive masturbation notwithstanding. These people, good writers all with their own projects, want to help each other maximize their best work. But sometimes my heart goes out to them. I have made them listen to dozens and dozens of strange essays and memoirs that depict the madcap foibles of a lost soul. More often than not, right after reading my final sentences, their initial reactions have been, well... awkward smiles with pregnant seconds of stone, cold silence. But who can blame them, bless their hearts.

However, one member may have turned on me. About a year ago, I shared a harrowing and true tale about getting thrown into a Turkish jail when I was a young man. The tension rises as my fellow inmates suffered horrible beatings from the jail guards. When it came time for me to receive the same beating, the guards seized up - they would not brutalize this young American - and I escaped the torture unscathed. It was then in my reading that I glanced over at the member in question. There was no mistaking the look on her face: disappointment. 

Some of the other members have gone on to publish books and articles, have held signings, and labor away regularly at their work. I envy them. Oh, I have sent my work around only to be rejected or to be dealt the familiar stone, cold non-reply. Sometimes, I guess, a rejection letter simply isn't worth the effort. However, I did get an article published in an obscure magazine called, All About Labs. My piece was a eulogy to Darla, our beloved labrador retriever. How dog lovers resist a eulogy to a lab? When I read the story to the group, some eyes moistened. I was able to bring Darla back to life for them.

Another surprise came when I received sharp criticism for my political essay, "The ABCs of a Disemboweled Liberal." The members didn't shoot down my writing, per se, but some took sharp exception to my political views therein. This hurt my feelings. I had misjudged them. Surely, these creative types, like all properly minded people, must share my radical leftist views. Not so. 

Our group exists to help writers become better writers, not to unkink the knots of those with emotional malfunctions. The need for approval, that yearning for acceptance, the siren call of an unrequited ego -- if these struggles raise their ugly little heads, they're best dealt with on the long ride home. It is then that you counsel yourself: separate the work from the self, separate the work from the self. After all, they're just words. There's no blood in them.

I've churned out dozens of essays and memoirs. I even wrote some fiction. Most pieces are peculiar and silly; two or three longer ones might have merit. And thanks to my fellows at the Old Town Writers Group, I've learned a lot. The most important lesson is this: the crucial thing all writers do... wait for it... they write.

This is where I flounder. I don't write much. A day or two before a scheduled group meeting, I get my ass in gear and vomit forth words and sentences that just might form mental bubbles based usually on a funny idea. Funny, at least, to me. It's all last minute. And that's what this is, this series of paragraphs right here. I got a text message yesterday that our group was meeting today. Oops. I completely forgot. I scrambled to come up with something and... you're reading it. I confess: I don't really write. I cram for a final exam.

My fellow group members will be listening to this in a few hours. They will be kind. I expect, as usual, long seconds of silence right here and probably a few awkward smiles. And I wouldn't be surprised if there erupts a frenzy of Tums. 

Jimmy Did It

On a Saturday morning in the summer of 1966, I sat in the living room of Mr. and Mrs. William Bliss who lived in a grand old house on Kussuth Street in Lafayette, Indiana. I was alone with Mrs. and she wanted to know if I was the one who "did it." I told the truth. No, I had not done it. It was Jimmy who "did it." The gig was up. I was falling into deep shit. Jimmy Quick, no thanks to me, was to fall even deeper. There was no way out. The Blisses had the evidence.

I was fourteen. My parents, older brother, and younger sister lived at the end of a pleasant cul-de-sac on Mary Hill about a mile from the Blisses’ house. My dad worked across the Wabash River at Purdue in West Lafayette. That summer I was between the eighth and ninth grades at Tecumseh Junior High.

Mary Hill backed up to a working class neighborhood on 15th Street where the Selleck boys lived. From my house with a short jump over their fence, you were in their backyard. That's where we built a fort with cinder blocks, scrap plywood, and a tarp on the top. With an adjoining pup tent, there was plenty of room for six of us to sleep. But we didn't sleep much. Three or four nights a week we headquartered from there to prowl dark streets and alleys and perhaps toss metal garbage cans on the pavement. We ran like escape artists as house lights came on. We might tap on the bedroom windows of sleeping friends and invite them to join our midnight meanderings. But mainly we just walked around neighborhoods, owning the deserted hours under the starry Indiana sky.

A few times a friend would bring a beer or two swiped from a refrigerator, but there was never enough to feel it when split five or six ways. Back at the fort we chain-smoked Kools and I might read aloud a smutty novel as my pubescent peers stared enrapt through the thick, blue smoke. My friends called me "professor" because I was good at reading. Our conversations were peppered with cuss words and our topics ran from one cute girl to the next, girls none of us had any courage to call. 

Jimmy Quick brought his sleeping bag a few times. But he was an odd and mostly solitary boy. He was known for talking tough and once challenged the legendary Matt Farrell to a fight at the fairgrounds. At school two boys might get into a heated argument and word would spread like wildfire that a fight would be had at the fairgrounds adjacent to Tecumseh. School would let out and some one hundred junior high kids would encircle the two which often included the undefeated Matt Farrell. The boys would throw vicious punches for half a minute until at last the loser's face ran blood and short-lived reputations were made.

One afternoon as appointed, the short and wiry Jimmy and the short and muscular Matt came face to face. I witnessed as Jimmy lurched toward Matt with his fists and arms flailing like a drowning swimmer. Matt reached back and punched Jimmy in the mouth, sending him to the ground and a face coated with dirt and blood. Jimmy got up, tilted out of balance, and screamed, "You're a coward! You're a coward, Farrell!" Matt, whom I liked, looked saddened. That was it. Jimmy walked away claiming victory then and in the days that followed. Win or lose - he clearly lost - he loved the attention.

That summer, Jimmy and I were sitting on his patio when his sister happened to bring out a copy of Mad Magazine. "Oh cool, I love Mad Magazine," I said.

Jimmy howled, "Oh my God! You LOVE Mad Magazine! You just LOVE Mad Magazine! Bohnhorst LOVES Mad Magazine!" He lost control. He couldn't stop laughing at me. "LOVE Mad Magazine! Oh my God!"

That day he would tell Billy Bliss, "Get this. Bohnhorst just LOVES Mad Magazine!" While Jimmy withdrew into odd cackles, Billy just sat there, couldn't grasp the humor. Nor could I. I guess Jimmy felt the concept of love to be a ridiculous and foreign thing.

I don't remember why I hung around with Jimmy. He could be sullen and was always awkward in the presence of adults. From out of the blue, he would laugh at the ordinary. Maybe he was a budding sociopath. But then again, I do recall an easier, gentler side. I don't know. Maybe he liked me, or better, tolerated me, because I was willing to be his friend. We found common ground in the ways boys find adventure.

Jimmy and I shared many pursuits that summer. One was to get a mini-bike running. We succeeded in roaring around neighborhoods before the mini-bike died a week later. We jumped onto the side ladders of freight cars as they slow-moved through town, then jumped off like fugitives once the train sped up. We started to build a raft to embark like Huckleberry Finns for a runaway trip down the Wabash. That project failed in less than a day.

But we did devise and follow through with a brilliant and foolproof scheme: we would invade the Blisses. That summer they installed a raised swimming pool in their backyard, equipped with an encircling redwood deck and a diving board, the envy of the neighborhood. Trouble was, our friend, the arrogant Billy, never invited Jimmy or me over for a swim. For a reason I can’t recall, we were on the outs with him that summer. Other friends were invited. Others were prized. We had been scorned. Well, by God, we would swim in his goddamn pool, invited or not.

While the other boys on this Friday night were encamped and smoking cigarettes over at the Sellecks’ fort, Jimmy and I stayed back and pitched a tent in my backyard. My parents permitted all this "sleeping out", I suppose, as a normal inclination of their young teenager. But they never could have imagined what Jimmy and I had in mind that night.

The Blisses lived next door to Lafayette’s mayor, John Gettings, the Gettings’ house also a stately home on that block of Kussuth Street. Our reconnaissance indicated the Gettings were out of town, at least they had been for several days prior to our planned trespass. As luck would have it, the Gettings kids had set up a pup tent in their backyard. This would give us cover and headquarters while we prepped for our assault on the Bliss pool next door.

Here was our plan of attack:

1. Depart the tent in my backyard at 1:00 a.m. and walk to Kussuth Street.

2. Jump the Gettings’ back fence and enter the pup tent in their backyard at 1:15.

3. Strip down to our underpants and wait in the tent for 45 minutes to ensure the Blisses were asleep. 

4. At 2:00, jump the fence over to the Blisses’ backyard.

5. Swim for 15 minutes.

6. Return to the Gettings tent, dry off with the towels we brought, and get dressed.

7. Wait in the tent for 15 minutes to ensure the coast was clear.

8. Walk back to my house and arrive by 3:00 a.m. 

Things didn’t go quite as scheduled. Fourteen year-olds in general, and Jimmy Quick in particular, lack a penchant for patience. So instead of leaving my backyard at 1:00 a.m., we left at 11:30. Jimmy was in hyper-kinetic mode, as though we were about to commit the crime of the century. He jabbered and gyrated along the dark back streets en route even though I kept reminding him to whisper and keep his cool.

The Bliss and Gettings houses were both dark and quiet. It was clear the Gettings were still away as there were no cars in their driveway or garage. We scampered into the Gettings’ empty pup tent and removed our shorts, t-shirts, shoes and socks. We had brought a flashlight that lit up our tight, two-man space and a couple of boys naked down to their skivvies. It was another warm, still, humid Indiana night, but Jimmy seemed to shiver with adrenaline. We had scheduled a forty-five minute pause before our invasion but Jimmy would have none of it. “Come on! Fuck! Let’s go! Let’s go! Goddammit!” he demanded.

What was the point of waiting? The coast was clear. The neighborhood was asleep. A short wooden fence separated the properties and in a second we were in the Blisses’ backyard and up on the raised deck that surrounded the pool. We eased into the cool water and remained true to our vow of silence. I swam the length underwater and when I came up for air, I felt a winning satisfaction. Victory was ours. I noticed Jimmy holding onto the side across from me. He was not a good swimmer.

Again I swam and rode across the bottom before coming up on the deeper end. But when I emerged, Jimmy was dog paddling wildly towards me, cackling in his way, and choking on inhaled water. Our vow of silence was in supreme violation.

“I did it!” he laughed.

“Keep it down!” I pleaded. “What the fuck did you do?”

And in his commotion of splashing and gasping, Jimmy proclaimed, “I took a shit! I took a shit! I took a fucking shit!”

I shot out of the water like a rocket. Jimmy climbed out and stood next to me, his shaking body bent over, his face contorted in the moonlight into something like silent, triumphant hysteria. I scanned the Bliss house and all remained dark and quiet. It was time to get the hell out of there.

Jimmy and I dried off next door. Our plan hadn’t accounted for the wet underpants, so we tossed them into the corner of the tent. We got dressed and moved quietly back into the streets. We got back to my house before 1:00, crawled into our sleeping bags, and fell right asleep. I hadn’t been disgusted exactly by Jimmy doing what Jimmy did. It was kind of funny at the time. That’s who Jimmy was and that’s a thing Jimmy would do - like picking a fight with the toughest kid in school, receiving a bloody beatdown, and then declaring victory. Par for the weird course he was on.

So it was that our phone rang the next morning. My mother called me and said that Billy’s mother, Mrs. Bliss, wanted to talk to me. Without breath, I took the receiver. Mrs. Bliss said I should come right over if I knew what was good for me. I must have turned white. Biking over to Kussuth Street, my heart raced and bounced with cracks in the pavement. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss had always liked me, I thought, but now I would be reduced to a cockroach.

Mrs. Bliss sat me down in their ornate dining room and joined me after equipping herself with coffee, cigarettes, and ashtray. She was subdued, not outwardly angry, and started by saying how sad she was that Billy and I had drifted apart as friends. She said she had always liked me. The table was set and she delivered the goods: The family always slept with their windows wide open on those warm summer nights, she told me, and you can hear every crackle in that still, damp air. They first heard Jimmy and me when we were talking in the Gettings tent before the swim. She and Mr. Bliss kept the lights off, crept out to their second-floor screened-in porch overlooking the backyard, and heard every word we said, heard us splashing around, heard us as we dried off and dressed. Mrs. Bliss said she was disappointed in me, especially disappointed with my filthy language. “I’m sure your mother has never heard you use words like that,” she said. That was true - my mother hadn’t. So, she wanted to know, was I the one who had, well, you know, done it? She wasn’t surprised to hear my answer. Jimmy did it. She grew dark. She said she always wondered about that boy. 

Mrs. Bliss then made me an offer: if Jimmy and I came back later that day at five o’clock, Mr. Bliss would like to have a meeting with Jimmy and me. We would have to admit to trespassing, Jimmy would have to admit that he did it, and we would have to apologize to them. If we failed to comply, she would call our parents and relate the whole sordid story. Besides, Mrs. Bliss claimed, her husband had tape recorded the whole episode including every last cuss word.

I biked over to Jimmy’s who had gone home earlier that morning. He was outraged. He was incensed with me. How could I admit that it was us, he demanded. How could I be so fucking stupid! Dumb ass, he called me. He paced back and forth on his patio, shaking his head and penetrating me with the stare of a cornered rat. Back and forth he paced. But they had us and he knew it. It was the humiliation of facing Billy Bliss’s parents versus the consequences of his parents finding out. Jimmy finally relented. I called Mrs. Bliss and told her we would be there at five o’clock.

At the appointed time, I was surprised that it was Billy who opened the door for Jimmy and me. With his obvious smirk and overly polite greeting, I could tell he was savoring every moment. Billy was such a little saint in his parents’ eyes. They seemed to know nothing of his bullying and lying and manipulations. First you were his best friend and then you were an outcast.

Jimmy and I sat on the living room couch as directed, Mrs. Bliss took a chair to the side, and Billy stood away by a wall and watched. Mr. Bliss walked in, a short, stocky, and balding man. He stood before us and commanded the room. First, and not unkindly, he addressed me: “Tom, I’m disappointed in you. You had always been a good friend of Billy’s. What I want to know is, why? Why would you come onto our property in the middle of the night?”

I was prepared for the question. “I guess we were jealous of Billy having a new pool, Mr. Bliss,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Jealous? All you had to do was ask, and you’d be welcome to come over,” he said. I looked over at Billy and that smirk still glued on his face. Mr. Bliss said these words so matter-of-factly and so warmly, I felt this meeting would end up just fine. And that was all the man had to say to me.

But when he turned his gaze upon Jimmy, a storm came roaring. “And you, Jimmy! What do you have to say?” he implored. Jimmy had been slumped there on the couch, chin on chest. Now he turned his head to the side and closed his eyes.

“Sit up! Look at me!” he thundered. Jimmy shifted his weight and barely looked up.

“SIT UP!” Jimmy sat up.

“I have a really nice swimming pool, here, Jimmy. Brand new! Crystal clear! Do you know why it’s clean now, Jimmy? Do you? LOOK AT ME!” Jimmy trembled and barely offered a glance. He shook his head no.

“Okay, I’ll tell you why I have a clean swimming pool! After your little visit last night, with THE FILTHIEST LANGUAGE I’VE EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE...Where did you ever learn to talk like that? Did you grow up in a sewer? LOOK AT ME!” Jimmy glanced up at him again. “After your little visit, we inspected the swimming pool this morning for damage. And do you know what we saw lying on the bottom? DO YOU? Of course you do! ONE ENORMOUS TURD floating at the bottom of my pool. Billy volunteered to fish it out with a net. DISGUSTING! How big was it, Billy?”

We all looked over at Billy who held his forefingers about ten inches apart.

“SEE?” roared Mr. Bliss. “Enormous! You should have been the one to clean that up, Jimmy! Because I know it was you! Admit you did it, Jimmy!”

Jimmy sank lower into his slump and stared down with half-open eyes. Seconds passed.

“ADMIT IT!” shouted Mr. Bliss. Jimmy allowed a slight and stark nod.

“Well, we couldn’t just wait around for you to come back and clean up your mess, now could we. So poor Billy volunteered to fetch it out. Do you think he enjoyed that? DISGUSTING! Do you have anything to say to Billy for cleaning up after you?”

Jimmy closed his downcast eyes. He whispered something unheard.

“WHAT!!!” demanded Mr. Bliss.

“Sorry,” whispered Jimmy. 

“All right, young man, you should be. Now, I have just one more question,” Mr. Bliss said. His volume dropped and a kind of plea was heard. He took a few steps toward Jimmy and looked down at him. “Why, Jimmy? Why would you ever do something like that? Help me understand. Why would you want to foul our property with your filth? That’s what I really want to know.”

It’s hard to say, but I suppose at this point most children would have started to cry. But I had never seen Jimmy cry before and he didn’t cry then. Jimmy in silence sat for several long moments. What could he say? He shrugged his shoulders. Mr. Bliss could have stood over Jimmy all night pelting him with abuse and impossible questions, but it was no use. Jimmy could feel no shame.

“All right,” Mr. Bliss said. “Go home. And, Jimmy, if you ever come back to my property, not only will I call your parents about what you did, I will call the police.” 

We had met our obligations, Jimmy and I. We had arrived at the scheduled time and given our required admissions and apologies. Once outside and walking our bikes down the sidewalk, Jimmy’s cockiness snapped back fast. “What a bunch of assholes,” Jimmy laughed, unfazed. He hopped on his bike and pedaled homeward as though in his mind he had just defeated Matt Farrell.

On my ride home, I felt tremendous relief, of course. There would be the continued tension with Billy Bliss and the short-term damage his gossip would cause. His gossip always caused me short-term damage. I mostly was in the clear. And for now, I was on time for our six o’clock dinner, my parents none the wiser. But when I walked in the front door, my father greeted me with these words: “Son, I just got a phone call from Mayor Gettings. He’s coming over this evening to talk to us. What’s this all about?”

Just when you think you’re out of the woods. I told him the tale without a crucial detail. The matter of a certain bowel movement was left in the vault. My father wasn’t a strict disciplinarian or an intimidating presence. He listened like a juror to his son, the defendant, and said simply, “We’ll see what the man has to say.”

The mayor arrived at seven o’clock and was invited to join Dad and me on the back patio. Mr. Gettings was a friendly sort, graciously accepted a glass of iced tea, and got right to the point. He shared that he and his family had returned from a vacation that afternoon after which his ten year-old son had discovered two pairs of wet underpants in his pup tent. This mystified the mayor but noticed the Blisses out back adding chemicals to their swimming pool. He asked them if they had any idea how the wet underwear had come to reside in the pup tent. It was then that the mayor got the detailed description of events the previous night. The Blisses had told the mayor that if Jimmy and I fessed up and apologized, they would not inform our families.

The mayor, I suppose, was a conscientious sort who felt that, in spite of side agreements, it was proper for parents to learn if their children trespassed into other people’s yards at all hours of the night. It was thus that Mayor Gettings was motivated to sit down with my father and me. “And not only that,” the mayor added, “either Tom or the other boy defecated in the pool.”

Dad’s eyebrows shot up. “I beg your pardon,” he said.

Yes, yes, that was the case, explained the mayor, and he went on to sermonize about the value of selecting the right friends and the need to respect other people’s property and he didn’t think it was his place to talk about how un-Christian vulgar language was… he would leave that to family. As I said, the mayor was a friendly and diplomatic sort, and before he departed twenty after he arrived, we shook hands. He said he was glad to see that I appeared to learn important lessons from my poor choices. 

Dad and I went back to the patio and sat down. For a long while he looked off into the distance shaking his head. But then, he ruptured. My father blew a gasket. He howled and howled and sobbed with laughs. He grabbed his handkerchief to dry his eyes. “He crapped in the pool!” he cried. “Great God Almighty, the boy crapped in the goddamn pool! Oh, my soul… oh, my soul.” I had never seen such a thing, my howling father, his red face, and his handkerchief. And with this, his treasured tale, Dad would regale others for years to come.

I continued that summer to sleep out with the Sellecks and other neighborhood boys. We roamed Lafayette’s dark streets in the wee hours and smoked Kools. To my surprise, the trespassing story and Jimmy’s infamous turd never came back to haunt us. I guess if others found out, they didn’t much care. I never again became good friends with Billy and never again swam in his pool. After a while, Jimmy and I went our separate ways. His family moved away from Lafayette about a year later and I never heard from him again.

Mr. Gettings never did make a call on Jimmy’s parents. Perhaps the crude nature of Jimmy’s delinquency was more than the mayor could handle.

Season's Bleatings -- 2019

Oliver Rhoads Bohnhorst was born March 10, 2019, to Brendan and Jodi in Grand Rapids, of Michigan, of America, of Planet Earth, of the Solar System, of the Milky Way... he, the babe in arms, a mere microscopic mote drifting through The Universe. But if you get close, Ollie impresses as anything but mere. Behold the grabby hands that slap at a puddle of dripped, pureed peas. Behold the triumphant proclamations: "Buh! Buh! Buh!" Behold the bib drenched in teething drool and how he teeters upright verging on first steps. And behold how he's babbled his way deep into our grandparental hearts. Forever and ever, Amen. The opposite of anything mere, the whole of The Universe in and of himself.

Oliver's skin is as soft as a rabbit's underbelly except for around the nostrils. They get encrusted with dried snot. Elizabeth's skin is just as smooth in spite of her advanced age of 34. Her partner, Andrew, for the record, hides a mysterious complexion under beard. They have festooned their house with a jungle of plants and through their bay window the greenery filters a lovely view over white Grand Traverse countryside. Elizabeth has just gotten a job in a shelter to support homeless adolescents. Those kids have the very best person in their corner.

This fall Brendan and Jodi sold their four-level, in-city house and bought an expansive, one-level in the Cascade area of Grand Rapids. No more stairs! With all that moving out and moving in, taking care of baby Oliver, Jodi maintaining her demanding health care job, Brendan starting a new job... even with all that stress, their complexions remained unblemished. Nary a pimple! Brendan's many tubas have adjusted to the new atmosphere and their dogs now bark at reimagined varmints. New beginnings are born.

Every night before bed, Sue applies a degreasing compound to remove her makeup before rubbing in a new grease to juice up her pores. When in the morning she springs from bed, her skin positively glows! I've put sunglasses on my side table to reduce the blinding sheen. Sue's life-long high school friends and later her life-long college friends (very bad influences, all) held their annual reunions this summer. And to top it off, the women from both groups engineered a surprise 70th birthday party for her. Such unmitigated adoration. Sue returns home from these events so very grateful, her face emitting a rosy hue, but also concealing renewed criminal intent.

In 2019, I caught rainbow trout with a fly rod in the Colorado mountains, caught a pompano in the surf near St. Augustine, and, best of all, suffered an in-grown toenail. I came to believe that in-grown toenails are the hors d'oeuvres en route to Satan's promenade into Hell. I pondered this while my toe's sac of pus finally started to deflate. I came to Jesus and vowed to repent, to improve my ways: go on fewer ice cream binges, keep the D-con fresh and the mousetraps emptied, read more literature with less smut, and give friendly waves to the neighbors, whose names escape me. So far, so good.  I've had no recurrences of purple toe and my mouth is free of cold sores. My conscience and complexion are clear.

And what Christmas letter would be complete without an homage to… The Impeachment of Donald  J. Trump? The hearings, as Democrats and Republicans took their turns, threw me into a fit of ping-ponging between bug-eyed incredulity and gross inflations of intestinal gas. And it’s so strange:  those hot Republican faces took on the blush of a familiar orange hue. It’s either a case of neckties noosed too tight or a somatic reaction to blind allegiance.

Keep your skins moisturized this holiday season. And it’s important to prevent crusty nostrils. For Christmas, you really want that effervescent, pinkish hue.

Peachtree Street

From 1956 to 1960, my family lived in Atlanta. I was in third grade in 1959 and took a school bus to Jim Cherry Elementary School a few miles away. There was a poor African American neighborhood across the street from the school, but, of course, no kids from there attended.

I didn't know any black people other than Ero and Mary. Ero was our old, gentle Negro maid who I remember hummed soft hymns while ironing laundry. I remember playing with cars on the floor nearby, listening to Ero hum in her low quiet voice as she ironed there, her stockings rolled down to her ankles in the heat. One evening, my father drove her home and he let me come along. We dropped her off at a tin-roofed, ramshackle house at the end of a dirt street. A dozen people relaxed on the raised, covered porch while lazy dogs panted beneath. It must have been an odd sight for them to see white people driving into their neighborhood, let alone providing escort to one of their own. They sat silent and without expression as we dropped her off.

Mary replaced Ero after Ero got sick. I remember her as a sweet and smiling young woman. She had a baby after working for us for a few months. My father again let me come along when we visited her to take her some money. We drove up through a long stand of woods to a tiny cinder block house with a flat roof and no windows. We knocked on the door and a faint voice beckoned us in. There was Mary on a bed alone in the house with her infant. She had had the baby at home. We stayed less than a minute.

My father in 1959 taped a sentence onto the dashboard of his car. He worked as an outreach professor for the Georgia Department of Education, a job which sent him to Georgia prisons to advocate for educational programs for inmates. He might pass chain gangs along Georgia's country roads, the black prisoners in striped jumpsuits slashing away at brush or picking up trash, their master nearby on horseback. I guess that's how I envisioned black men back then: mean and menacing, but safe at a distance. Years later, I remember Dad telling me how he felt when challenging a system hell-bent on preserving ignorance and cruelty. He tried to bring a message of hope to penitentiary officials afflicted with ears that would not hear and eyes that would not see.

But in his boxy Rambler, off he would gallop on those Atlanta mornings to his appointments, over the hills to the north or over the flatlands and cotton fields to the south, east, or west. He had a wife and four kids to support and a job with meager pay to promote the impossible. He may have felt undaunted much of the time, like a Don Quixote charging forth against all odds. But often he despaired. It was at those desperate times, so he later told me, that he would glance over at the dashboard to gain an ounce of courage, glance over to the meditation he wrote to himself: "Ride 'em cowboy!"

One day we were driving down Atlanta's main thoroughfare, Peachtree Steet. While stopped at a light, a black woman in a colorful sweater walked by on a crowded sidewalk, wearing the exact sweater as my mother. Mom was so mortified that she slunk down in the passenger's seat to prevent any detection by the white people around. My father chuckled at her for feeling humiliated but she frantically stripped herself of the sweater and threw it on the floorboard. She never wore it again.

My actual contacts with African Americans were sparse. I remember going bowling for the first time at my brother's birthday party. Raggedy black boys worked as pin setters. They sat at the end of the lanes on stools and after a ball was bowled, they tossed the toppled pins back into a bin and rolled the ball back to the bowler on the return chute. The boys would then return to their stools and comic books until the next ball. They weren't much older than me, about eight years-old, but how alien they seemed.

We kids knew "nigger" was a bad word and not to say it at home or at school. It was always NEE-gro, you've got to say NEE-gro. But one morning a loudmouthed boy in my classroom let fly the n-word when degrading his family's maid. "You mustn't say that word," the teacher said. "You must say "niggra." How odd that "Negro" wasn't her correction. White people mainly described African Americans as "colored," though my parents never did. They always said NEE-gro, as the educated, northern-born were wont to do. If  the "Negro" moniker was intended to give black people some equivalence, no equivalence seeped into me, at least not in that place and time.

No, I absorbed Jim Crow into my bones. One summer afternoon, my friend, Phillip, and I were walking near our neighborhood church when we observed a young black man hustling down the nearby road. A black pedestrian was an unusual sight in our white neighborhood. "Let's yell at him," I said.

We took positions up a rise and behind a low wall on the church property, a safe distance away with an escape route if he should chase us. On the count of three we would let him have it. "One, two, three," we whispered together and rose from behind the wall to scream, "HEY NIGGER!"

The man froze and turned to see us gazing down at him. "What you want, snowballs!" he yelled, seeming mad as hell. He held his stare. Philip giggled. My heart pounded, ready to run. But then the man turned and quickly went on his way down the road.

I never felt proud, nor right, nor thought the racist taunt was funny. But I wasn't ashamed either, like the way I felt after I shot a turtle dove through the neck with my bb gun. I never shot at birds again after that. But I am ashamed today. Did that man slough ours off as just one more of a thousand insults? Did we fan an inner rage? Did we cause him to lash out at others? Did he cry? Would he forget?

My family moved to Lafayette, Indiana, when I was nine and entering fourth grade. On the first day of school, my teacher asked if I as the new student would stand and announce my name to the class. As I rose and in my distinctive southern drawl, I responded, "Yes, ma'am." The class howled. I stood red-faced. I learned then and there to eliminate that southern "ma'am" from all encounters. And my drawl soon morphed into something twangy without my realizing it.

It's easy to hatchet out certain words and give new parlance to accepted ways of expression. But you can't simply extricate bone-deep feelings born in childhood. Even though your father may have been Atticus Finch, we all lived near Peachtree Street. Long ago I let go of the big, vicious lies I learned as truth in Georgia. I like to think that today I'm more like my father. But there's no denying that those feelings, not completely defeated, still lurk darkly within me.

Oh, Madonna

Those were heady days back in 1971 and 72. George and I shared room 226 in Snyder Hall at Michigan State University, I a sophomore, he a socially awkward freshman. Before the leaves started to turn, we became best buddies. The Stones blared and we guzzled quarts of Colt 45. Dozens of boys from the down the hall would wander in and out our open door to appraise our latest rendition of chaos. Neither of us had started to shave.

Some might have said that as copacetic roomies go, we were an unlikely pair. George had a ponytail and abhorred smoke of any kind. I also had a ponytail but adored smoke of several kinds. I fancied myself a revolutionary and joined SDS. George mocked my left windedness and all hell could break when our clashing ideologies were fueled by malt liquor. 

One spring evening an angry mob of student protesters marched past our second-floor window. Hundreds filled the space between Snyder and Abbott halls. The American military that day had bombed Cambodia. I would soon join that anti-war mob, grab a bull horn, and help lead a takeover of the Administration Building. But on that night, half drunk on Colt 45, George thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle. He cranked open the window and screamed, "Go Purdue! Go Purdue!"

George grew up on a pig farm in western Michigan, but his father also worked as a chemist. He was an intellectual, a descendent of blue bloods back in Boston. Visiting George at the farm made for a collision of senses. Inside, family members sat by lamps reading novels.  Outside, pig stink wafted through cottonwoods while chickens in their coops clucked and pigs grunted from within the hog barn.There was a milk cow named Bossie and an old, fur-matted collie snoozing on the porch by a row of high rubber boots ready for chores. Fly paper hung in the kitchen. Meanwhile, George's mother sat in the parlor doing the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. He and his family had shed any social graces out on that farmland of Allegan County

George had no aspirations to acquire his father's pig farm. He hated the place. But he shared his dad's keen aptitude for chemistry and toddled off to MSU in 1971 to major in the subject. The plan was short-lived. By his second semester, he switched from chemistry to English, my major. He would later say that I had had a major impact on his decision. I did argue that his passion for Robert Burns the poet far outweighed any curiosity he might have had about carbon interacting with hydrogen. I did argue that his love for Kurt Vonnegut was unmatched by any love for the laboratory. I did argue that he was a fine writer with a fine wit. But I suspect it was just easier to be an English major when your academic demands were tempered by dormitory mayhem. 

So, George and I, both students now of the humanities, took a course entitled, "The History of Famous Art in Europe from April 12, 1165 to July 29, 1354, Mainly Paintings but Some Really Old Architecture Too." The class fit nicely around important stretches of sleep and priority beer activities. One hundred students, about ninety eight of them girls, attended. We sat up in the back of a darkened, stadium-style lecture hall where the professor presented slide after slide of really, really old paintings.

For ninety minutes one day, the prof presented an endless stream of Madonnas. Evidently, pre-Renaissance Italians just loved their Madonnas and couldn't get enough. With all the proportion of a second grader's crayon drawing, those old painters unleashed a buttload of madonna classics. Slide! Here we have Madonna with Child, and notice how the artist... blah, blah, blah. Slide! You got your Madonna with Saint Agnes, and notice how the saint holds an olive branch... blah, blah, blah. Slide! You got your Madonna with Child and the Saints! Slide! You got your Madonna with Child in the Manger. Slide! Madonna with Saint Ignatius. Slide! Slide! Slide!  Droning and droning, noticing and noticing, the professor persisted in monotone. And each medieval madonna wore the face of an unpleasant woman with uncomfortable gas. Madonna with This. Madonna with That. You could hear a smattering of snores.

At about the seventy minute mark, George gave me a poke and handed me a note. This was odd. In the dim light, carefully, I opened it. It read,

"Madonna with Beard!"  

I was unprepared. I lost it. I laughed loud and I laughed long. The professor stopped mid-sentence and froze. And all those eyes, those two hundred eyes, they searched the room and fused their gazes upon me. But I was a goner. I was in mid explosion. There! There seared into my brain, I beheld the most precious madonna of all, Madonna with full cheeks of hair.

Before Giotto, DaVinci, Michelangelo, and all the other Renaissance Boys came around, you wouldn't have seen any painters down at the Florence Comedy Club. Those old masters, back in their musty studios, they could have used a guy like George. For hundreds of years, saints just stood around adoring. Baby Jesuses just laid around being adored. And hundreds of madonnas, they just stood or sat there with unpleasant faces. It would have been nice, if one of those Madonnas, just one, would have been depicted sneaking two fingers behind the head of an unsuspecting pope. Rabbit ears!

If you happen to visit Florence, join the throng at the Uffizi Gallery, and visit the madonnas of the Pre-Renaissance. If you get bored and don't mind some playful sacrilege, you can let George be your guide: Madonna with Personal Flotation Device. Madonna with Mohawk. Madonna with Burrito. Your appreciation for art will skyrocket.

I remember him sitting in our dorm room with a book in his lap, laughing at a Robert Burns' verse or at a passage in a Vonnegut novel. His love for a turn of phrase rubbed off on me.
We took a class on Chaucer together and learned to read Middle English. He tutored me. Responding to George's final paper, the professor at first accused him of plagiarism. He hadn't, but his thoughts coincidentally had mirrored a scholar's thoughts. After George stormed the professor's office, the professor became persuaded. George got an A. Besides, cheating was beneath him.

I sometimes wonder what draws people to become friends. Kindred interests, of course, and kindred spirits. I lost it when I read the note that read, "Madonna with Beard." But of the hundred students in that class, how many would have had a similar response if passed the same note at the same time? A minority, I would bet.

One afternoon on an East Lansing street, a group of us were clambering into my parked Pinto when from out of nowhere a large friendly puppy bounced up and jumped headlong into the back seat joining George and another friend. They suddenly became ensconced in a tornado of frenzied dog like three characters spinning full tilt in a clothes dryer. No one could grab the beast as it bounced from floor to roof to front seat and back, its tail slapping faces and its tongue splattering froth as it gyrated.

Springing from some demented recess in my brain, I thought in that moment to shout, "Out damn Spot!" 

And off Spot ran. Look! See Spot run. George howled at the joke but my other two friends comprehended nothing funny. That was a big thing that made good buddies of George and me, to twist from the events of a day some absurd irony.

Two young strangers assigned to Room 226. Kindred spirits, kindred thirsts, kindred points of view. I admired the kid who celebrated a crazy connection between an anti-war mob and a football rally, who was inspired to pass a note in art history class. I admired the kid who grew up on a pig farm and would sit down with a 19th century Scottish poet. He celebrated my hair-brained connection between MacBeth and the puppy in the Pinto.

We got each other.