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Copyright (C) 2008-2009 David B. Axelrod |
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HELPFUL LINKS |
ARTS
AND SCIENCES by David B. Axelrod Who would have thought that one rocket could launch the whole world into another universe. Well, if not the whole world, my world! My first “career” assignment when I was thirteen, lead me to interviewing the owner of a local drugstore: “My Future as a Pharmacist.” Chemistry sets, when I was a kid, included bomb making chemicals. It was probably the only kind of cooking an American boy could get away with and not be a sissy. Powdered charcoal, silky yellow sulfur, crystalline, white potassium nitrate and poof—black gun powder. We could mix up picric acid crystals that could blow the heel of an unsuspecting shoe. Just combine some potassium permanganate and chilled glycerin and place it in the sun to produce the most marvelous spontaneous combustion—a brilliant purple flame. Better living through chemistry!
Then, of all things, the enemy, those rotten Russians, launched Sputnik
and we were all supposed to be rocket scientists. It was even more shocking
where I came from—Beverly, Massachusetts, home of the Cabots and the Lodge and
of course a conservative, Republican town. I’ve vivid memories of “I
Like Ike” rallies in the town square. Later, when Nixon ran for president,
there was a rally right on our main street— Of course our school board joined the rush to beat the evil communists who had so rattled our safe, small town. We had a Nike missile base perched up on Reservoir Hill but what good were our little missiles in defense of freedom if the enemy was already traveling into space? The radio broadcast their satellite’s piercing “beep, beep, beep.” We could even look up and see what we thought was the satellite passing! It was all so shocking that of course I and every one of my friends was immediately willing to sign up for a new “experimental” science program. Our beloved science teacher, Mr. Kishon, would guide us, not through the old lessons and formulas of conventional physics, but through exercises to encourage creativity, to expand our scientific minds. Mr. Preston, our chemistry teacher, might hold the secrets of fire in a beaker but we were to invent new ways to new worlds in our physics classes. And all at the same time Mr. Cooper—a right-wing, John Birch Society devote and our Sophomore English teacher--was coaching us on “Paradise Lost,” reminding us of “The Inferno” and drawing parallels to the hell our world would become if conquered by those godless communists.
My own life was already hell, though I knew no other world than the one I
inhabited so I certainly could not have admitted that I was damned. What a
complex if familiar set of plot lines I followed from day to day: tortured
younger brother; asthmatic, sick kid; my mother’s much more than my father’s
son; town Jew; a young teen intellectual. The complexity was enough to make me
sit by the window on cold When I revealed to my junior-year English teacher that I was writing poems, she told me that “all adolescents write poetry.” “I’d like show you some but I’m afraid you won’t like them,” I all but whispered. “Why?” she asked, “do they have dirty words in them?” I was surprised by her question. I suppose they may as well have, but I was embarrassed because they felt so personal. I hadn’t read “Howl” though I knew about the Beatniks. What my poems had was a side of me no red-blooded American boy was supposed to show—sensitivity. I decided not to share the poems with her. The only ones I did show were the funny ones. I even had my first poem published in the Aegis, our high school magazine. SPUTNIK Things up here in Heaven Aren’t so good right now Because those nasty, noisy Sputniks Are causing quite a row. They break up chorus practice. They wake us from our sleep. If we could only find a way To stop their beep beep beep. I was glad to see my work in print though it didn’t do anything to change my imagine with my cousin Lorna. She was a year older than I and ran with the in-crowd. As far as she was concerned, the poetry thing just further added to her assessment of me as a Momma’s Boy and a fink. For those who don’t know, “fink” was the prevailing name for what would now be a “nerd.” That identity—four eyes, briefcase toting, chess-playing, honors-class-science-club-wheezing-finky kid—was not altogether rejected by me. I had given up on being an athlete when I got left off the basketball team bus for the first real game back in Junior High. Granted there was one Jewish football player in our high school, but the sports were always identified as “goyisha naches” (what non-Jews thought of as fun) in my household. My own brother, who beat me from infancy until he left home when I was about thirteen, had claimed the prize of being a physical brute with a trigger temper. In our family and among my many cousins, I was content with being a wimpy if secretly a pretty smart kid. What I hadn’t
contemplated was a life beyond science and math. I’m pretty sure that every
boy in the honors classes applied to engineering college. I was so psyched I
applied at the beginning of September. The For my senior prom I got fixed up with the daughter of a family friend. Linda was not gorgeous, even a tad pudgy, but acceptable enough for me to imagine I really had a girlfriend. I rehearsed a suitable compliment to greet her as I drove our new if very modest, black, Studebaker, the five or six miles to her neighboring town. I got to her front door holding the orchard corsage in the clear plastic box I’d kept in the refrigerator for the day before. “You look ravishing!” I would tell her when she opened the door. I rang her bell, listened for her footsteps. Her door swung open to reveal her, adorned with a cream-colored bow in her long black hair to match her flouncy cream-colored prom dress. I declared, “You look ravenous!” A rush of embarrassment reddened my cheeks. I was never sure if she had heard me correctly or my malapropism had gone right by her. My love life was non-existent in high school so why would I expect to leap into suave with my senior prom? I spent what had become my habitual, fourth summer at my Uncle’s plastics factory where I toiled in the sweltering hell of extrusion machines with my father always nearby fixing the machinery and laughing. The factory job
was his great joy, with pride in his bother’s wealth if not his own, and the
chance to invent new machines to make all those wonderful new plastic products.
He was always happy at the factory even as I labored grudgingly near him. I was,
of course, always over-tired as I tried fit into a When I got to
UMass, I was ready for something new. Yes, it was only a few years removed from
it’s old name, I strapped on my slide rule, carried my book bag of hefty Calculus, Physics, and Chemistry books from class to class in the bright autumn sun, and lunched at the engineering table. After classes I slipped away to meet my girlfriend Judy to work on things literary. But what did writing and poetry have to do with me, an engineering major? Increasingly, there was a schism. Of course, having
a girlfriend made poetry seem increasingly relevant to, particularly when she
showed me how it was done in the back seat of her car. She was from a
nouveau-rich, More and more, I realized love and poetry weren’t compatible with science and math. It was increasingly difficult to calculate formulas quickly when I was up all night first making a publication deadline and then making love. Add to that equation my growing identification with the Beatnik counter-culture that inhabited the fringes of our college campus, and I was on a crash course with my own cumulative average. It became very clear as I flunked my physics quizes that all the experimental science in high school could not save me from the simple fact that my interests had changed. My country might need rocket scientists to safe-guard democracy but I was less and less likely to be one of them. I had a different rocket in my pocket. I was writing my brains out in between loving my pants off. This was going to be difficult to explain the my old teachers who had sent me off full of pride at my dedication toreduplicatable results and scientific inquiry. It would be even harder to convince my very pragmatic father who was never visibly distressed at my older brother’s rejecting college and going into the Army. If he was paying for my college, it had to be for something he could understand. It was on a
chilly afternoon, most certainly in March, when I left the My trusty Keuffel
& Esser slide rule jiggling in its leather case against my tan chino pants.
I rushed as much as I could, aware that path was duly muddy. We engineers, ever
practical, had worn an actual groove in the grass to avoid the long circuitous
sidewalk that lead to the When I entered, I immediately spotted my Freshman English teacher, Dr. Tucker, seated at a small table sipping coffee. A set of compositions were strewn in front of him but he gestured for me to sit. I watched him scoop them up and stuff them into a very old, very full black leather briefcase. “I read yours. It was very good,” he told me. “Really? I worked all night on it,” I confessed, feeling a pride that almost made up for the edge of worry I had when I left the physics test. “You have a good style and a good sense of humor.” “I like to write. I wish that was what I could do.” “So why not do that?” he asked, as if it were possible. “No one can make a living writing,” I protested. “I do,” he said. I was startled by this revelation. I studied his face. He was smiling more broadly than my father’s when Dad figured out how to fix something. The cafeteria was lit more by the glass wall of windows than the rather factory-like high-ceilinged fluorescent lights and a ray of sun emerged to play across Dr. Tucker’s cheeks. I could see over his shoulder to a further corner where the real bohemians—a gang of guys and girls I was just starting to meet. By evening they would hang out at The Kings Rook coffee house. Right now they sat in a tight circle, played guitar and sang folks songs for each other. They were rumored to be using marijuana. I saw Jack there who gave me a little wave and went back to strumming his guitar. Jack, who not long after he would be busted for selling one joint to an undercover narc and serve a four and a half years in prison.
There were the Greek tables further toward the interior entrance to the
cafeteria where Paul, the son of my family’s close friends, sat with his
brothers. He was also in engineering, doing well at it, but we didn’t speak
much as he had fit into that totally different lifestyle so neatly. The Greek
idea of a good time was to tie a string to a Pledges penis, run it up his
undershirt, down the long sleeve of his white shirt and at the other end, have
him ask the sorority sisters to pull on a rather short cord tied to a pencil to
sign his pledge book. Dr. Tucker was wearing what seemed like the one gray, three-piece wool suit he always wore. If he owned another it was the exact duplicate of that one. He was probably forty, and he had already gone completely gray. He was rumored to have suffered shell shock in the WWII, so that would explain his rather halting speech pattern. It wasn’t quite a stutter and it didn’t prevent him from lecturing on the fine points of style in Freshman English. But when he spoke, if he paused and appeared to struggle to articulate a word, his very thick, long eyebrows would dance to reveal his interior struggle. He was smiling broadly at me as he asserted that there was life beyond engineering and science: “I make a living as a teacher but I’m a writer,” he declared, “a writer who teaches.” “Could I do that?” I asked, like a kid who has just watched a friend hitting a roll of caps with his dad’s very big, polished-steel hammer. Bang! Just like that. “Of course,” he beamed. “They are even going to need a lot of college English teachers. Schools are expanding now.” “If only,” I protested, but the shift had already begun: from science to art. Almost as monumental as the great debate in Aristotle: to inform or to entertain? It would manifest itself over a series of turbulent semesters, as I dropped out of engineering and signed up as a psychology major. That way, I figured, I could still be in science, albeit “social science” I still feared my own “humanities.” That spring, on the first real warm evening, there were a series of panty raids. Male students would sweep down from the boys’ dorms toward the girls’ dorms chanting “Panties! Panties!” The campus cops—unarmed and untrained—seemed helpless in the face of the seething mass. A window or two were broken. Mostly, the girls threw their panties willingly from all the floors. One showed a breast from the corner of a window. One pushed her bare ass out a window for us to see. She and a window breaker were expelled. Girls’ curfews were clamped even tighter and boys were cautioned that others might be expelled. I covered the riots—as they came to be called by the town newspaper—from the police side of the lines, writing a story for our own campus newspaper. I wrote poems about eternal spring. I was in love, oblivious to any statistics that would have predicted that my first romance would break up within another year. I channeled my distain for the establishment into the humor magazine, YAHOO, which was consciously trying to find a place somewhere between The New Yorker and Playboy. Caesura, the literary magazine, began to regularly include my poetry. It took me a year more of running rats in the behavioral science lab to realize that I didn’t want to major in psychology. UMass’s orientation at the time was somewhere between B.F. Skinner and covert operations funded by government grants that sought to test the effects of certain psychoactive drugs on rats. Oh Timothy Leary, if you only knew what we did to them.
The exact day I declared myself an English major is lost in my memory.
The turning point was clear. Even Dr. Tucker’s surprising divorce,
precipitated by his wife’s running off with a local minister, was not enough
to deter me. The fact that I ruined my cumulative average, first with failed
engineering classes and later with extra curricular activities, didn’t stop
me. The pain in the ass I made of myself with certain college administrators,
almost stopped me. I had campaigned to prevent the firing of a beloved young
English professor who was too radical for a conservative campus’ tastes. They
fired him, ostensibly for not publishing enough—code words for his being too
popular among the students. Or, perhaps it was because he was one of the first
professors I can remember who spoke against I’ve been making my living as a writer ever since. You might even say I’ve made a science out of how to do it.
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