The Discomfort Zone Read online

  IN CHICAGO, WHERE I was born, our neighbors on one side were Floyd and Dorothy Nutt. On the other side were an older couple who had a grandson named Russie Toates. The first fun I remember ever having involved putting on a new pair of red rubber boots and, incited by Russie, who was a year or two older, stomping and sliding and kicking through an enormous pile of orange-brown dog poop. The fun was memorable because I was immediately severely punished for it.

  I’d just turned five when we moved to Webster Groves. On the morning of my first day of kindergarten, my mother sat me down and explained why it was important not to suck my thumb anymore, and I took her message to heart and never put thumb to mouth again, though I did later smoke cigarettes for twenty years. The first thing my friend Manley heard me say in kindergarten came in response to somebody’s invitation to participate in a game. I said, “I’d rather not play.”

  When I was eight or nine, I committed a transgression that for much of my life seemed to me the most shameful thing I’d ever done. Late one Sunday afternoon, I was let outside after dinner and, finding no one to play with, loitered by our next-door neighbors’ house. Our neighbors were still eating dinner, but I could see their two girls, one a little older than I, the other a little younger, playing in their living room while they waited for dessert to be served. Catching sight of me, they came and stood between parted curtains, looking out through a window and a storm window. We couldn’t hear each other, but I wanted to entertain them, and so I started dancing, and prancing, and twirling, and miming, and making funny faces. The girls ate it up. They excited me to strike ever more extreme and ridiculous poses, and for a while I continued to amuse them, but there came a point where I could feel their attention waning, and I couldn’t think of any new capers to top my old ones, and I also could not bear to lose their attention, and so, on an impulse—I was in a totally giddy place—I pulled my pants down.

  Both girls clapped hands to their mouths in delighted mock horror. I felt instantly that there was no worse thing I could have done. I pulled up my pants and ran down the hill, past our house, to a grassy traffic triangle where I could hide among some oak trees and weather the first, worst wave of shame. In later years and decades, it seemed to me that even then, within minutes of my action, as I sat among the oak trees, I couldn’t remember if I’d taken my underpants down along with my pants. This memory lapse at once tormented me and didn’t matter at all. I’d been granted—and had granted the neighbor girls—a glimpse of the person I knew I was permanently in danger of becoming. He was the worst thing I’d ever seen, and I was determined not to let him out again.

  CURIOUSLY SHAME-FREE, BY contrast, were the hours I spent studying dirty magazines. I mostly did this after school with my friend Weidman, who had located some Playboys in his parents’ bedroom, but one day in junior high, while I was poking around at a construction site, I acquired a magazine of my own. Its name was Rogue, and its previous owners had torn out most of the pictures. The one remaining photo feature depicted a “lesbian eating orgy” consisting of bananas, chocolate cake, great volumes of whipped cream, and four dismal, lank-haired girls striking poses of such patent fakeness that even I, at thirteen, in Webster Groves, understood that “lesbian eating orgy” wasn’t a concept I would ever find useful.

  But pictures, even the good shots in Weidman’s magazines, were a little too much for me anyway. What I loved in my Rogue were the stories. There was an artistic one, with outstanding dialogue, about a liberated girl named Little Charlie who tries to persuade a friend, Chris, to surrender his virginity to her; in one fascinating exchange, Chris declares (sarcastically?) that he is saving himself for his mother, and Little Charlie chides him: “Chris, that’s sick.” Another story, called “Rape—In Reverse,” featured two female hitchhikers, a handgun, a devoted family man, a motel room, and a wealth of unforgettable phrases, including “‘Let’s get him onto the bed,’” “slurping madly,” and “‘Still want to be faithful to wifey?’ she jeered.” My favorite story was a classic about an airline stewardess, Miss Trudy Lazlo, who leans over a first-class passenger named Dwight and affords him “a generous view of her creamy white jugs,” which he correctly takes to be an invitation to meet her in the first-class bathroom and have sex in various positions that I had trouble picturing exactly; in a surprise twist, the story ends with the jet’s pilot pointing to a curtained recess “with a small mattress, at the back of the cockpit,” where Trudy wearily lies down to service him, too. I still wasn’t even hormonally capable of release from the excitement of all this, but the filthiness of Rogue, its absolute incompatibility with my parents, who considered me their clean little boy, made me more intensely happy than any book I ever read.

  WEIDMAN AND I once forged notes from our respective mothers so that we could leave school at noon and watch the first Skylab liftoff. There was nothing either technological or scientific (except, in my case, animals) that Weidman and I didn’t interest ourselves in. We set up competing chemistry labs, dabbled in model railroading, accumulated junked electronic equipment, played with tape recorders, worked as lab assistants, did joint science-fair projects, took classes at the Planetarium, wrote BASIC programs for the modem-driven computer terminal at school, and made fantastically flammable “liquid-fuel rockets” out of test tubes, rubber stoppers, and benzene. On my own, I subscribed to Scientific American, collected rocks and minerals, became an expert on lichens, grew tropical plants from fruit seeds, sliced stuff with a microtome and put it under a microscope, performed homemade physics experiments with springs and pendular weights, and read all of Isaac Asimov’s collections of popular science writings, back to back, in three weeks. My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time. My first stated career goal was “inventor.” And so my parents assumed, not implausibly, that I would become some sort of scientist. They asked Bob, who was studying medicine, what foreign language a budding scientist ought to take in high school, and he answered unequivocally: German.

  WHEN I WAS seven, my parents and I had gone to visit Bob at the University of Kansas. His room was in Ellsworth Hall, a teeming high-rise with harsh lighting and a pervasive locker-room smell. Following my parents into Bob’s room, I saw the centerfold on his wall just as my mother cried out, in anger and disgust, “Bob! Bob! Oh! Ugh! I can’t believe you put that on your wall!” Even apart from my mother’s judgment, which I’d learned to fear greatly, the bloody reds of the pinup girl’s mouth and areolas would have struck me as violent. It was as if the girl had been photographed emerging, skinny and raw and vicious, from a terrible accident that her own derangement had caused. I was scared and offended by what she was inflicting on me and what Bob was inflicting on our parents. “Jon can’t be in this room,” my mother declared, turning me toward the door. Outside, she told me that she didn’t understand Bob at all.

  He became more discreet after that. When we returned for his graduation, three years later, he taped a construction-paper bikini onto his current pinup girl, who in any case looked to me warm and gentle and hippieish—I liked her. Bob went on to bask in my mother’s approval of his decision to come home to St. Louis and go to medical school. If there were girlfriends, I never had the pleasure of meeting them. He did, though, once, bring a med-school acquaintance home for Sunday dinner, and the friend told a story in which he mentioned lying in bed with his girlfriend. I barely even clocked this detail, but as soon as Bob was gone my mother gave me her opinion of it. “I don’t know if he was trying to show off, or shock us, or act sophisticated,” she said, “but if what he said about cohabiting with his girlfriend is true, then I want you to know that I think he’s an immoral person and that I’m very disappointed that Bob is friends with him, because I categorically disapprove of that kind of lifestyle.”

  That kind of lifestyle was my brother Tom’s. After the big fight with my father, he’d gone on to graduate from Rice in film studies and live in Houston slum houses with his artist friends. I was in tenth grade wh
en he brought home one of these friends, a slender, dark-haired woman named Lulu, for Christmas. I couldn’t look at Lulu without feeling as if my breath had been knocked out of me, she was so close to the ideal of casual mid-seventies sexiness. I agonized over what book to buy her for a Christmas present, to make her feel more welcome in the family. My mother, meanwhile, was practically psychotic with hatred. “‘Lulu’? ‘Lulu’? What kind of person has a name like Lulu?” She gave a creaky little laugh. “When I was a girl, a lulu was a crazy person! Did you know that? A lulu was what we called a kooky crazy person!”

  A year later, when both Bob and Tom were living in Chicago and I went to see them for a weekend, my mother forbade me to stay in Tom’s apartment, where Lulu also dwelt. Tom was studying film at the Art Institute, making austere non-narrative shorts with titles like “Chicago River Landscape,” and my mother sensed, accurately, that he had an unhealthy degree of influence over me. When Tom made fun of Cat Stevens, I removed Cat Stevens from my life. When Tom gave me his Grateful Dead LPs, the Dead became my favorite band, and when he cut his hair and moved on to Roxy Music and Talking Heads and DEVO, I cut my hair and followed. Seeing that he bought his clothes at Amvets, I started shopping at thrift stores. Because he lived in a city, I wanted to live in a city; because he made his own yogurt with reconstituted milk, I wanted to make my own yogurt with reconstituted milk; because he took notes in a six-by-nine-inch ring binder, I bought a six-by-nine-inch ring binder and started a journal in it; because he made movies of industrial ruins, I bought a camera and took pictures of industrial ruins; because he lived hand to mouth and did carpentry and rehabbed apartments with scavenged materials, hand to mouth was the way I wanted to live, too. The hopelessly unattainable goddesses of my late adolescence were the art-school girls who orbited Tom in their thrift-store clothes and spiky haircuts.

  THERE WAS NOTHING cool about high-school German. It was the language that none of my friends were taking, and the sun-faded tourist posters in the room of the German teacher, Mrs. Fares, were not a persuasive argument for visiting Germany or falling for its culture. (This much was true of the French and Spanish rooms as well. It was as if the modern languages were so afraid of adolescent scorn that even the classrooms were forced to dress predictably—to wear posters of the bullfight, the Eiffel Tower, the castle Neuschwanstein.) Many of my classmates had German parents or grandparents, whose habits (“He likes his beer warm”) and traditions (“We have Lebkuchen at Christmas”) were of similarly negligible interest to me. The language itself, though, was a snap. It was all about memorizing four-by-four matrixes of adjective endings, and following rules. It was about grammar, which was the thing I was best at. Only the business of German gender, the seeming arbitrariness of the spoon and the fork and the knife,* gave me fits.

  EVEN AS THE bearded Mutton and his male disciples were recapitulating old patriarchies, Fellowship was teaching us to question our assumptions about gender roles. Boys were praised and rewarded for shedding tears, girls for getting mad and swearing. The weekly Fellowship “women’s group” became so popular that it had to be split in two. One female advisor invited girls to her apartment and gave vivid tutorials in how to have sex and not get pregnant. Another advisor challenged the patriarchy so needlingly that once, when she asked Chip Jahn to talk about his feelings, he replied that he felt like dragging her out to the parking lot and beating the shit out of her. For parity, two male advisors tried to start a men’s group, but the only boys who joined it were the already-sensitized ones who wished they could belong to the women’s group.

  Being a woman seemed to me the happening thing, compared to being a man. From the popularity of the weekly support groups, I gathered that women truly had been oppressed and that we men therefore ought to defer to them, and be nurturing and supportive, and cater to their wishes. It was especially important, if you were a man, to look deep into your heart and make sure you weren’t objectifying a woman you loved. If even a tiny part of you was exploiting her for sex, or putting her on a pedestal and worshipping her, this was very bad.

  In my senior-year journal, while I waited for Siebert to return from her first year of college, I constantly policed my feelings about her. I wrote “Don’t CANONIZE her” and “Don’t be in love or anything idiotically destructive like that” and “Jealousy is characteristic of a possessive relationship” and “We are not sacred.” When I caught myself writing her name in block letters, I went back and annotated: “Why the hell capitalize it?” I ridiculed and reviled my mother for her dirty-mindedness in thinking I cared about sex. I did, while Siebert was away, date a racy Catholic girl, O., who taught me to enjoy the raw-cauliflower aftertaste of cigarettes in a girl’s mouth, and I did casually assume that Siebert and I would be losing our virginity before I had to leave for college. But I imagined this loss as a grown-up and serious and friendship-affirming thing, not as intercourse of the kind I’d read about in Rogue. I’d finished with sex like that in junior high.

  One summer evening, soon after Siebert broke her back, just before I turned eighteen, my friends Holyoke and Davis and I were painting a mural, and Holyoke asked Davis and me how often we masturbated. Davis answered that he didn’t do that anymore. He said he’d tried it a few times, but he’d decided it wasn’t really something he enjoyed.

  Holyoke looked at him with grave astonishment. “You didn’t enjoy it.”

  “No, not really,” Davis said. “I wasn’t that into it.”

  Holyoke frowned. “Do you mind if I ask what…technique…and materials…you were using?”

  I listened carefully to the discussion that ensued, because, unlike Davis, I hadn’t even tried it.

  THE FIRST-YEAR GERMAN teacher at Swarthmore College was a flamboyant, elastic-mouthed one-man show, Gene Weber, who pranced and swooped and slapped desktops and addressed his first-year students as “bambini.” He had the manner of an inspired, witty preschool teacher. He found everything in his classroom hilarious, and if the bambini couldn’t generate hilarity themselves, he said hilarious things for them and laughed on their behalf. I didn’t dislike Weber, but I resisted him. The teacher I adored was the drill instructor, Frau Plaxton, a woman of limitless patience and beautifully chiseled Nordic looks. I saw her every Tuesday and Thursday at 8:30 a.m., an hour made tolerable by her affectionate, bemused way of saying “Herr Franzen” when I walked into the room. No matter how badly her students had prepared, Frau Plaxton couldn’t frown sternly without also smiling at her sternness. The German vowels and consonants she overpronounced for heuristic purposes were as juicy as good plums.

  On the other weekdays at 8:30, I had Several-Variable Calculus, a freshman class designed to winnow out students whose devotion to math/science was less than fanatical. By spring break, I was in danger of failing it. If I’d intended to pursue a career in science—as the official fifty-year-old continued to assure his parents that he did—I should have spent my spring break catching up. Instead, my friend Ekström and I took a bus from Philadelphia to Houston so that I could see Siebert, who was out of her back brace and living in a dorm at the University of Houston.

  One night, to get away from her roommate, she and I went outside and sat on a bench in a courtyard surrounded by concrete walls. Siebert told me that one of her teachers, the poet Stephen Spender, had been talking a lot about Sigmund Freud, and that she’d been thinking about her fall from the downspout at Eden Seminary a year earlier. The night before she’d fallen, she and our friend Lunte had been hanging out at my house, and the doorbell had rung, and before I knew what was happening, Siebert was meeting my former sort-of girlfriend, O., for the first time. O. was with Manley and Davis, who had just taken her up to the top of the Eden Seminary bell tower. She was flushed and beaming from the climb, and she didn’t mind admitting that Manley and Davis had tied ropes around her and basically dragged her up the downspout; her physical unfitness was something of a joke.

  Siebert had lost all memory of the day after she met O., but other peo
ple had subsequently told her what she’d done. She’d called up Davis and said she wanted to climb the same tower that O. had climbed. When Davis suggested that Manley come along, or that they at least take a rope, Siebert said no, she didn’t need Manley and she didn’t need ropes. And, indeed, she hadn’t had any trouble climbing up the downspout. It was only at the top, while Davis was reaching down to help her past the gutter, that she’d thrown back her hands. And Freud, she told me, had a theory of the Unconscious. According to Stephen Spender, who had a way of singling her out and fastening his uncanny blue eyes on her whenever he spoke of it, Freud believed that when you made a strange mistake, the conscious part of you believed it was an accident, but in fact it was never an accident: you were doing exactly what the dark, unknowable part of you wanted to do. When your hand slipped and you cut yourself with a knife, it was because the hidden part of you wanted you to cut yourself. When you said “my mother” instead of “my wife,” it was because your id really did mean “my mother.” Siebert’s post-traumatic amnesia was total, and it was hard to imagine anyone less suicidal than her; but what if she’d wanted to fall off the roof? What if the Unconscious in her had wanted to die, because of my dalliance with O.? What if, at the top of the downspout, she’d ceased to be herself and become entirely that dark, other thing?