I think I was in the third grade when I finally understood myself to be fat. They’d been calling me “fatso” for a while at that point, which was just confusing to me. But then one day, at school, I caught sight of the reflection of a fat boy in a window, and it was me. The mystery was solved. I took on the fat identity then and there.
From third until eighth grades, I was fat. A combination of dieting and a growth spurt made me skinny by the ninth grade, and I remained thus. Ninth grade was, in that time and place, the first year of high school. There was a special two-year school in the California Central Valley, consisting of seventh and eighth grades, called Junior High School. We had no Middle School in the Valley back then. I don’t know if that’s changed. Anyway, as a fat kid, the hardest part wasn’t the many taunts, or even the adjustments I made to my own expectations when I realized that everyone hated me. The hardest part wasn’t the fact that teams had to be picked every afternoon for the sports we were supposed to love. And not only was I always the last one picked, but the team captains, the ones doing the picking, daily and loudly fought over who would have to take me. And the teachers turned a blind eye to this. Like I was only getting what I deserved as far as they were concerned, or that this was preparing me in some way for the life I should expect. In any case, everyone hated me, and I had lots of evidence to prove it. And it of course left a big imprint. Those who don’t believe it can simply remind themselves (everyone who was ever a kid themselves) how cruel and savage kids are, and how the slightest remark can become an inescapable identity. I did think everyone hated me. I had pretty good evidence to prove it. I never recovered.
My mother was probably what would now be called, by the psychologists who still believe it, a Borderline Personality. She came from an old Central Valley, California, family. I had many uncles, and most of them lived nearby. My grandfather built the first house on River Road in Ceres. If you’re from around there, you know that’s something. Mom was always angry or hurt. It never got better. I went to my hometown, Modesto, California, a lot during her last years, and I was amazed that so many people (even her relatives) thought she was very weird, even as a girl. Peggy, my sister, and I were not bad children for living far away from her. It was a survival tactic. They supported it. Mom was married quite young, as was common in the Valley back then. She only wanted to be a working-class wife, as she was taught, but that didn’t work out well for her. Her mother (who got divorced in 1949, when it was still a major scandal) died at only 49 in the early sixties. Her father died in 1969 when he was only 64. And in 1968, her husband died at 37. The sixties were not good for her. She maintained a base of hatred at all times. This would regularly morph into what Peggy and I came to call “meltdowns.” These would be mean crying jags (although she claimed to be unable to cry) with lots of talk about bad she was and such. The main take-homes of these meltdowns was that she could never be consoled (and if we tried it would be insulting) and it was usually the fault of Peggy or me. That much never changed. She was always the center of attention, even while our dad was still alive. We bought into it. One thing she always did—and this is funny in retrospect—was to accuse us of being wrong before we actually said anything. She knew we were always wrong. That much was a given. We just had to say something before she knew how we were wrong, that’s all. I used to imagine myself strapped to a chair before her. Any move I made, in any direction, was wrong. So was not moving at all. There was nothing one could do. I brought up this strapped-to-a-chair analogy to my sister and she said it seemed familiar to her. When Mom visited us, there was a model for the visit. She always begin with her presentation of all the things that had made a impression on her. This could be anything from a large packet of institutional chicken gravy to a cute bird that concealed an egg-shaped bank within, and this bank seemed to come out the bird’s ass when you squeezed. Then she would most likely get very angry, because we were not reacting as we should have to her recent discoveries, or, as was more likely, we reacted, but not in the way we were supposed to. There was no way to win. After that, since she knew she was subject to meltdowns anyway she just let’m rip. For the rest of her visit we had to navigate between meltdowns and just ordinary anger. When the visit was over, Peggy and I would call each other to compare notes and to laugh at the various meltdowns and what triggered them. I remember a few things: I recall the moment I realized that avoiding meltdowns was a lousy way to live, and I wasn’t going to do it anymore (I was in my thirties. I was on the big street that goes down the middle of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts). And this one: in her last days there were many of us sitting around her bed in the hospital. I think it was me, Eric, her brother Wobbie and his wife, Marily, and Pat and Martin Schmidt, old friends of my dad. A bubbly nurse came in, stroked Mom’s cheek, and said, “She’s a sweet lady.” The look that went around all of us was priceless and hilarious. She was not a sweet lady, and the look confirmed that all of us knew it. She occupied an eternal present moment (behavior that is now said to engender happiness—a point I dispute), but that present moment was always hell for her. Simple things messed up her whole life. Blaming was the most important thing. My sister and I were usually blamed, as we were always the first in her sight. She hated everyone indiscriminately. She was always the center of our family. All of our lives were focused on her and to avoiding her meltdowns.
My father was, by contrast, a pretty simple guy. He was born in Springfield, Missouri, and grew up in the Missouri Ozarks. As he used to tell it, he went one day to the little one-room schoolhouse in Highlandville, Missouri, as usual. His family arrived with a loaded truck during his lunch break and yelled, “We’re going to California, hop on!” He hopped on. This was in the early thirties when so many people from that depressed region emigrated to California. He married my mother in 1949. I assume they had a relationship before that, but I know nothing about it. He died young. I was about 12. So he never saw the skinny, gay, self-taught guy I later became. Not that he would have liked that guy better. It seems like he was already worried that I wasn’t interested in the standard boy things. That I was turning into a sissy, as it as was then called.
It was then that books saved my life. After my father died and my mother’s mental illness bloomed, I began to haunt the library, first the Broughton Branch (named, I later learned, for a large, progressive family of Modesto. The younger boy was once married to the film critic Pauline Kael. He himself was a figure in the early gay rights movement and an experimental filmmaker). Then I graduated to the big Modesto-Stanislaus Library (a long walk, but worth it) and before that I had also been to the creepy old Stanislaus County Library (which I understand is now a museum). My main interests were architecture and religion and philosophy, areas that took me beyond the region I was from, and that were not taught in our school. I remember our drafting teacher (who would only let girls study architecture because it was kinda girly) being surprised that I was so well-read in architecture. He didn’t even know that I liked it! I knew just where to go to find those books back in the stacks of the library, and I had my own special table there. I can still remember how it looked and felt and where it was. I think it was during that period (again due to the great gift of considering myself the side dish rather than the main course) that I began the practice of reading things far over my head. I remember reading Richard Neutra’s SURVIVAL THROUGH DESIGN and understanding very little of it. It was a pure act of devotion. And I was aware that I was probably the only person in Modesto who had read it. Thomas Merton (with whom I fell in love) was always throwing in French or Latin phrases without translation, as all educated humans were expected to know them. I figured I’d learn them later, and then I would reread. Once again, it was because I was naturally not the center of attention that directed my steps a certain way. None of the subjects I was interested in were taught in my school. None were thus valued at all, including by me. My library life was secret. And that was OK.
Based on what I’ve written above, it should come as no surprise that I came to consider myself a side dish rather than a main course, and that’s remained a pretty strong tendency for all my life.
I joined the Coast Guard when I was barely 18. This was mainly to get out of the Valley, but partially also to take advantage of the old GI Bill. Without that wonderful social program, I’d not have been able to go to college or grad school. I went, eventually, to Humboldt State University, and I got my MA at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary (long story. . .), and I recognized from the outset that there were certain young people who HAD to go to college, and that I was not one of them. I also saw that being male was a big advantage, as was the fact that we of the Central Valley did not speak with a Southern accent. College was properly the playground of the rich. I remember seeing the rich kids who had to go, and the stupid girls (sorry) who were mainly there to find husbands of the right class. I felt remarkably free even then, when I understood that. That higher education was merit-based for a few decades is a wonderful thing. I think it will now go back to being a playground for rich kids, like it was always supposed to be. My side-dish nature got me through it. And that nature is what gave me a thirty- or forty-year career in the gentlemen’s profession of book publishing, when I had no gentlemanly credentials. I snuck in, as I did with most things. And I worked my way up to be something of a legend. No one suspected a thing.
And now I am with the most wonderful guy in the world. We were both 39 when we met. We’re now 70. So we’ve known each other for more than thirty years at this point. He understands me. Knows what I mean. I didn’t know I was lonely until he came along—as the cure to an illness I didn’t know I had before I got the remedy. He came to Colorado when I had the stroke, and stayed with me until I could be airlifted out. I love him very much. I hope to be with him the rest of my life. Those who wring their hands over us, and who say it’s too early to talk of our relationship can fuck off. He comes from a middle class family (everyone was supposed to move up a class after WW2, and his family tried). I come from a working class region. His family created their own culture, which includes the roles of every family member. And which puts him at the center of all relationships. Again, I am a side dish compared to the main course, which is him. It feels a bit like the culture I grew up in. That’s OK.
One of the things that has gotten me by (and I now see this jives with the Buddhadharma that was a natural fit for me from the time I was a teenager) was that I was an observer of the whole thing. The observer observed that I was a side dish. But it wouldn’t have been different if I were a self-confident, straight, dummie, or if I didn’t believe in autodidacticism. It’s all just observation. The consciousness that sees it is there no matter what’s being observed. I always think of the words of one of the smartest people I know. He said that the biggest problem he had with his Zen students was that they took enlightenment as a kind of goal. The real trick is not to be attached to it. It comes. It goes. So does confusion. The trick is not preferring enlightenment to confusion. The trick is not just enlightenment. its in learning not to be attached to it! Reminds me of the observer. Observing everything that comes and goes. In other words, everything. Here’s the main secret: observation is more important than being a side-dish or main course. Simple, yeah, but it changes everything too.
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