Email Theo		A Memoir of a Damaged Year (Note: The following is an expansion of the memoir I wrote under the same title. I have added sections IV, V, & VI, as well as a few other items.) 'Once during the winter of 1966 in Columbia, South Carolina, it snowed for three minutes or so. Panicked, coeds at the University put up their parasols to protect themselves from the alien substance. It is to be regretted that they didn't take that sort of care in matters of the heart.' -- a cultural observer I. I spent my first year of graduate work in Mathematics at the University of South Carolina. This was not my first choice, but they offered me a three-year all-expenses-paid National Science Foundation grant which flattered me so much I couldn't refuse it. I did not do well there. For one thing, the teaching in the Math Department was, all in all, atrocious. (One three-hour seminar, for example, was 'taught' by a German with a thick accent and wild gesticulations who used a textbook available only in French!) (This reduced some of us to a juvenile level: one fellow passed a note during class which read, 'If you've fucked dogs, smile.') Then too, the stipend relieved me of any teaching - the very thing I wanted to do. I hated the hot flatness, the banality, the southernness of Columbia. And my real love was Music (my best friend, doing graduate work in Math at a northern university, had just 'defected' to become a piano major.) But, fearful of such radical change for myself, I persevered in the field that seemed to have chosen me. I did attend one or two football games there in the fall. The cheerleaders, all males, would scream: 'Let's go, Gamecocks, go - give 'em HEH-YELL!!' (Once, someone up in the stands threw an ice cube down into the megaphone of one of those howlers - a perfectly reasonable response to such a chant, in my view.) The male graduate student housing, the oldest in the University, was on the main quadrangle. These venerable row houses had bullet marks from Sherman's troops on the brick without, and hard-shell cockroaches in the walls within. Cohabiting with those creatures were students of three main types: There were, as expected, students from the South. One, a Math student from Georgia named Tom Millner, lived upstairs. He would come down with his Gibson guitar and regale me with songs by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash. One song Tom particularly enjoyed playing and singing for me was Bob Dylan's 'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.' Tom relished the words of arbitrary abandonment: 'It's not that you treated me unkind; Coulda done better, but I don't mind. You just sorta wasted my precious time. So don't think twice, it's alright.' (I wound up buying that guitar, along with its case, from Tom sometime after he married and moved to an apartment second semester. As we were closing the deal, his new bride Ludelle came home, peered in at what we were doing, and asked plaintively, 'You ain't sellin' that nice case I give ya for Christmas, are ya Tom?' It was interesting to see Tom wriggle and squirm: 'Well, Ludelle, ya see, I was ...' I later discovered the neck of the guitar was warped.) There were also, somewhat surprisingly, quite a few students from the North - in particular, New York City. (I qualified if you consider New Jersey to be the Sixth Borough.) One, named Harold Stecker, lived downstairs. He was a bearded slob whose major was Psychology. Stecker was the sort who would emerge from the bathroom and declare, 'You know, a good shit is worth a half a fuck!' (I was wont to tell him, 'Good - go have two good shits and leave the women alone!') His chosen field did not seem to help him give up chain smoking, or resolve fractured relations with the opposite sex. (He told me frankly of a date he'd recently had with a woman where they were bored and at a loss as to what to do. 'Do you wanna screw?' he asked her without enthusiasm. The lady declined.) II. And then there was John Kenneth Price. Ken (as he was known to all his acquaintances) lived neither upstairs nor downstairs but rather across the hall from me. Thus I saw him often, especially as his door was frequently open. He was an anomaly at South Carolina, not least because he seemed to be the only student there from Colorado. He was a loner who could be seen striding briskly across campus (he was thin and lanky) with a golf umbrella in his hand. In those situations he had something of the dandy about him, the umbrella taking the part of the walking stick. Gatsby, we are told, had a platonic conception of himself. Ken Price seemed to have an exaggerated, even outlandish, conception of himself. He was a poseur for a number of faux roles: intellectual, lecturer, and lover were three. He was a blowhard and a braggart, by far the biggest I have ever known. Using his grinning roommate Ed as a straight man, he would make such outlandish statements as the 'fact' that he had a sex organ the size of a 16-oz Pepsi bottle. (Of course, no proof by demonstration was ever offered.) He had once vomited so much into the sink in their room, that what finally began appearing was yellow bile. And so forth. Ken seemed to know everything that was going on at U.S.C. I had a roommate who was seldom there because he lived in Charleston (which he called 'The City of God') with his new wife. When I mentioned this to Ken, he scoffed and said, 'Ha! He married the biggest whore in the whole University!' Another time Ken told me about a visit the singer Johnny Mathis had made to the school the previous year. A (male) student had been assigned to help him. After the concert, the student was showing him back to his lodgings. Suddenly the singer put a hand on his leg. When the student recoiled in horror, the singer said, 'But you'd be the envy of the campus!' Ken laughed bitterly: 'Yeah, you'd be the envy of the campus if you just let Johnny Mathis…!' He would work particularly hard to catch someone in (what at least to him appeared to be) a foolish or embarrassing act or admission, at which point he would gleefully exclaim 'Gobble!' - no doubt implying thereby that said individual at that moment resembled a turkey. (Another favorite was 'Suck wind!') Ken used to declaim bits of (mostly hoary old) poetry to me in an unnatural high-pitched singsong voice. One, by a Mrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans (I had to look this one up), was already a chestnut in my father's schooldays: 'The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck Shone round him o'er the dead.' (etc.) Another, by e e cummings, had a line that particularly appealed to him, for he declaimed it at several different times: '...his rectum wickedly to tease by means of skillfully applied bayonets roasted hot with heat— Olaf (upon what were once knees) does almost ceaselessly repeat "there is some shit I will not eat" ...' (emphasis mine) Then he would sometimes begin to tease (or was it taunt?) me, asking 'Is there some shit you wouldn't eat, Ted?', and when I did not know how to respond (for in truth I wondered whether he intuited something about me I didn't know myself) he would taunt me further with 'Gobble, Ted!' (Ken Price never seemed to be a person forced into a position of having to decide whether to eat shit or not. But, I gradually found out, he was not averse to putting other people in that sort of position.) Then, too, at times he would quote what appeared to be an ancient proverb: 'The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.' And then, for emphasis, he would tack on: 'Exceeding fine, motherfucker, exceeding fine!' I wondered whether Ken knew how grotesque his pompous singsong declamations were. Did he actually believe he was giving a stirring performance? Or was he deliberately parodying what he conceived to be a Grand Tradition of Elocution? I could never be sure. Someday, he assured us, he would run for president. "And my motto will be: 'PRICE IS RIGHT FOR PRESIDENT!'" - this delivered in his best stentorian singsong. III. I soon found out that Ken was dating an undergraduate girl named Caroline. She was a redhead and a nursing student. Almost as soon, I realized that Ken did not respect or love Caroline. He made it widely known that he was having carnal relations with her (mostly, I gathered, on the grassy slope behind her dorm.) Strutting about his room, he would ask embarrassing rhetorical questions such as 'Ed, do you know what color pubic hair a redhead has?' Then he would give a knowing little chortle. When I first met Caroline she was wearing her starched white nurses' uniform (usually she was seen in a flower print dress.) But what stood out the most was her natural flaming red hair (which was cut short.) There were a few freckles but not many. She had a trim little figure. I recall that she would stand quaintly with her feet at right angles. And her face? Forty years later I am surprised and delighted to remember her as having something of the look of Marilyn Monroe about her. Not the voluptuousness; rather, the sweetly laughing beauty in the eyes, along with their essential shyness and modesty. Like Monroe's, too, was her voice. There was a quiet breathiness (not exaggerated like Marilyn's) which was a part of her southern speech. The tones of that speech were dulcet, soft - sweet. There was, in fact, a sweetness about her whole being; it was an essential quality of her. I quickly concluded that Ken was lucky to have Caroline. When I told him this, he laughed and replied that there was a 'problem': there was another girl in the picture. She lived in West Virginia and her name was Marty. It seems that Ken had committed himself to marry Marty, as follows: Her mother had gotten pregnant (with Marty) by a man who promptly left her. So she had made Marty promise that she would not sleep with a man until they were married. But Ken persuaded Marty to have sex with him (while swearing to marry her 'soon') by bemoaning, 'I won't feel like a Real Man unless you make love with me!' So Marty gave in. The thing was, Ken only related to Marty on the phone long distance. He would call her from the pay phone out in the hall between our rooms, so I could not help but overhear him. I must say it was the most grotesque sort of relating I'd ever seen or heard. Ken had a fixed manic smile on his face, and he talked in a high falsetto. His speaking was often punctuated by the word-sound HON-N-E-EE! which rose to a screech as he spoke it. I could not understand how Marty could stand being courted by a raving banshee, but she seemed to tolerate it very well, since the relationship (if that was the word for it) continued. Apparently the chief and only reason Ken preferred Marty to Caroline was because the former had, in Ken's immortal phrase, 'Good Clean Legs.' I spent much of the year trying to figure out what exactly this meant. I saw Caroline fairly often when she was with Ken, and I began to use those occasions to surreptitiously examine her legs with my eyes from the standpoint of hygiene. Of course I could only see her calves, but those appeared to be clean, in the literal meaning of the term (no mud or dirt, etc.)(In fact, Caroline was always fresh and well-scrubbed.) So then I began to look for medical disorders of the skin: rashes, blemishes, eczema, fungi, parasites, scaling, warts, scabies, acne, boils, pustules, running sores, and so forth. But there were no signs of any of these - her skin was smooth and unblemished. But then I realized that Ken's judgment was probably an aesthetic one having to do with the shape, relative slimness, or even muscle tone of the legs. But there again, Caroline's legs seemed to be shapely enough. I saw Marty only once during the course of the regular school year, but I made sure to discretely examine her legs as well. The results of my 'investigation' were as follows: both girls had decent-looking calves; Caroline's were larger, more pronounced, but not unattractive. I decided that the problems for Ken resided in the other half of the leg, or thigh. But my researches by necessity ended at the hems of these girls' dresses. As for Marty herself, I found her to be rather devoid of personality, a bit mousy. Certainly she had none of Caroline's sweetness of looks and manner. But her legs were slim and smooth, and that was what mattered. IV. I had two girlfriends of sorts that year I was at South Carolina. The first relationship was problematical in a couple of ways. One was that the girl was a thousand or so miles away. Her name was Kathy and she was a senior at Wells College in upstate New York. I had met her the year before when I was a senior at Lehigh and the Lehigh Glee Club had sung with Wells. We had hit it off well when we first met. She was an amateur cellist - very amateur, as she was wont to warn me (she joked that her teacher had told her that her inferiority complex about the instrument was due to her inferiority on it.) But she was vivacious and bright (she was a religion major, which I found esoteric); she was slim; and she wore glasses, which I found attractive in a woman. So in the spring of my last semester at Lehigh, I invited her to houseparty. We danced to Count Basie on Saturday evening. After we had changed, we went back to my (single) room. We were lying on my bed together when, by some sort of quick-change wizardry which I still admire after more than forty years, I managed to remove all of her clothing and then all of mine in two deft operations. I found myself lying atop her with nothing more in mind than to be close to her (at the time I was totally inexperienced in matters female.) 'No, Ted,' she said in quiet protest, 'I could never face my mother if I got pregnant by a man I didn't love!' That seemed to mark a turning point. From then on I would desperately try to get Kathy to love me. The trouble was, I was her intellectual and emotional inferior at the time (she sent me a copy of Martin Buber's 'I/Thou' but I didn't know what to make of it.) I was excessively naïve (once I had started at South Carolina I affixed a Confederate flag decal to my car in the misguided belief that it simply stood for the South and had no other meaning.) The field I was superior in, music, was little consolation: we seldom talked about it; and she was not good enough on the cello for us to play together. Needless to say, mathematics was not even on the radar screen. Now, the next year, separation caused us to correspond a bit. (For some reason – perhaps Ken's bizarre example – I never phoned her.) I always enjoyed writing letters because they provided a particularly good forum for self indulgence, namely: I could say whatever I pleased and the addressed couldn't respond for at least three days. I also decided about then that the main purpose of a letter is to entertain the recipient. But Kathy wasn't entertained by my letters. In a jagged hand which seemed to match her prickly personality she wrote back a set of admonishments for what I had written. Even in my most successful medium I couldn't please her. V. That fall I had heard that the Lehigh Glee Club was singing with Wells in early November. So I decided to travel up there to hear them and see Kathy in the bargain. Wells College was in Aurora, a village on the eastern shore of Lake Cayuga well above Ithaca. I would travel to it from Columbia in a series of steps that became increasingly shorter in distance but longer in time and more primitive. First, I flew to Syracuse. Then I took a bus to Auburn on the northern tip of the lake. And finally I hitchhiked from there down to Aurora. The fall was in its last stages in upstate New York. The trees were barren of all their leaves, which lay brown and wilted on the ground. There were pumpkins on the front porches of farmhouses. The air was crisp and cold. All this filled me with a deep longing for the North of my upbringing (for, indeed, there was little climate change in South Carolina.) I felt instinctively that I was in the right place for me. I would soon find out that this chilled barrenness was emblematic of my relationship with Kathy. It was good to see Professor Cutler and the rest of the Glee Club. Kathy, however, seemed less than pleased to see me. I can only recall one thing that happened on that visit, but it was devastating to me. We had gone to the home of one of her professors, whose wife had had a baby recently. I watched Kathy as she held the baby. After we left, I made a vague remark about 'the Future' or some such. She replied bluntly, 'If you think something will come of this, maybe we'd just better forget the whole thing right now!' I felt like wading into Lake Cayuga and drowning myself. (When I told her that later, she replied dismissively, 'Oh that's silliness!' But I could see a look of fear in her eyes.) IV. VI. I drove Stecker home during Christmas break. He had promised to pack us each lunch. When I picked him up I noticed he had only one brown paper bag. Lunchtime came and he opened the bag: inside was nothing but a huge knockwurst, out of which he proceeded to take a humunguous chomp before he handed it to me. I didn't eat lunch that day! I came back after New Years for a couple of more weeks of classes and then exams. When I left to make the long drive home again, I already knew I hadn't done well the first semester. I must have been a glutton for punishment, for I decided to drive up to Aurora to see Kathy again. The trip began with two ill omens. First, I had an accident on a cold drizzly afternoon before I was even out of South Carolina, which necessitated a stay over for repairs to my face and car. Then, when I arrived home, I found out that my grandfather had died. So I had to stay home until the funeral was over. That trip to Aurora ('Dawn') was replete with ironies. The only thing I remember was a session together in my car. An unwritten rule had cropped up: that I could pleasure her, but she wouldn't pleasure me. Once, in a fit of passion she moaned: 'I need you physically!' Not mentally or emotionally or psychologically or even monetarily, but merely physically. I felt like a woman who was being used by a man. Why did I continue going to see Kathy when she made it so crystal clear that she did not particularly care for me? I suppose because I liked and admired her. Of course I was attracted to her. And, in truth, there were no others. This time, though, I finally seem to have gotten the hint: I did not try to see Kathy again. We continued a fitful correspondence, but even that gradually petered out. VII. I returned to South Carolina for the second term, albeit with the proverbial sinking feeling (and doubly so.) Shortly after the semester began, I was called into the office of the Math Chairman (whom Millner claimed looked like Deputy Dawg.) He had summoned me to chastise me for my low first-term grades. I was issued not-so-veiled threats about the possible loss of my fellowship 'if present trends continue.' From that moment I began to plot my escape from South Carolina. A couple of Math doctoral students who were as disaffected with the teaching at U.S.C. as I was (they were plain angry) had gotten their Masters degrees from West Virginia University. They praised the teaching there, the temperate climate, the hills and river - and the important fact that it was above the Mason-Dixon Line. I immediately applied there to do graduate study. Meanwhile Tom Millner had married between semesters and had moved out of the dorm into an apartment with his new bride Ludelle. In high school, he had had the accoutrements of the normal southern boy of that era, viz: two girlfriends at the same time. One was strictly for purposes of sex and therefore not a candidate for marriage; the other kept her virginity and therefore qualified as such a candidate. I call this the Code of Southern Dichotomy. Tom never told me how Loudelle was in bed after their marriage and I didn't ask. But I could easily imagine that he might have found himself to be yet another victim of the Code, wherein the woman he married was a bit frigid and far less daring and interesting than the woman he had scorned and rejected because she had defied the Code. That winter it was too cold to fornicate on the grassy slope. So Ken borrowed my car (a Corvair with New Jersey plates) a few times to take Caroline to a motel. Ken didn't spend every Saturday night with Caroline. At times he and I would walk downtown (he carrying his telltale umbrella) to a seedy bar called Gant's. In the basement there was a bumper pool table. Ken would drink Dr Pepper and we would play this strange form of pool wherein you most often had to carom the ball off a bumper in order to get it into the hole. There was no room for force, only finesse in this delicate game, and I came to be good enough to enjoy calculating angles of rebound. Any bumper pool game at Gant's was complicated by the fact that the table surface was warped. You would hit a ball in a supposedly straight line and in certain spots it would veer off eerily to the side. The owner Gant would challenge Ken and me to games for money: he knew where all the warps were, and how to compensate for them. On those little outings with me, Ken seemed the most like a 'normal' person. Gone was the swagger and the bravado, the jeering and the taunting. At those times I actually found Ken pleasant to be with. VIII. And then one day I heard that Caroline was pregnant. Did someone whisper this bit of juicy gossip to me in a hushed aside? Hardly! Rather, Ken was yelling, bellowing, trumpeting it throughout the dorm. He was in a paroxysm of rage at this turn of bad luck for him, and he wanted everyone to know it. His two cronies tried to cheer him up with extreme solutions and poetic parodies. One drawled, 'Do you want me to run over your head with a truck, Ken?' while another intoned (in a valiant effort to get in all the major themes): "The boy stood on the burning deck With cheeks of golden brown; The captain roared, 'No bumper pool! Suck wind! Get outta town!'" But all Ken did was prowl around, growling as he sucked in his breath: 'Kill it God!' And then God killed it. Or at least Caroline had a miscarriage. Ken was out of the proverbial woods. He and his cronies celebrated loudly; I did not join them because I did not find this whole display in the best of taste. Life returned to normal for a few weeks - 'normal' meaning Ken began declaiming poetry and taunting me once more. I had been accepted (with my low grades!) by that University up North - and with a teaching assistantship to boot! To celebrate, Millner and I went to an all-you-can-eat fish fry at the local Howard Johnson's (Ludelle had to work that night.) Tom was a strapping country boy with a voracious appetite. But after his third call to the waitress with the request 'Ma'am, could ah please have some more fiyish?', she became so angry with him that she stopped waiting on him! Shortly after that evening we heard that Caroline was pregnant again. Again we saw the tearing out of hair, and heard the gnashing of teeth and the lamentations. And again Ken petitioned the god in which he didn't believe with sucked-in breath: 'Kill it God! Kill it!' And God killed it a second time. Incredibly, miraculously, Caroline had another miscarriage (I wondered whether she was putting some of her nursing skills to use here.) Again there was wild celebration by Ken and his cronies. And then, as soon as the spring semester was over, Ken married Marty. IX. I had remained in South Carolina for the summer. Instinctively I gravitated toward Caroline's apartment across town. Ken's departure seemed to have left her in a daze, stunned. Sometimes we would go out for ice cream. But many evenings were spent either in silence or listening to romantic ballads she probably had shared with Ken, such as Richard Chamberlain singing Cole Porter's 'True Love'. After such evenings I would kiss her good night, but that would be it. One evening after I'd seen Caroline I ran into Ken on campus and we chatted for a few minutes. He was talking about his thesis in a matter of fact way when he suddenly asked mischievously, 'Why Ted, is that lipstick on your face?' I blushed with embarrassment. As I began wiping it off, he added in a tone of half mockery and half regret: 'Now you're getting all those nice things I used to enjoy!' I didn't tell him the truth - not because of any impulse toward chivalry on my part, but rather because I didn't think he deserved to hear it. In midsummer I was planning to drive down to Birmingham for the wedding of one of my math colleagues. When I told Caroline about my plans, she surprised me by asking whether she could come with me. Of course I was delighted to have such a traveling companion. And she was delightful! We chatted gaily both going and returning about all possible subjects, save of course the one that was most on our minds. We were hunting for a motel to stay in for the night when Caroline leaned over and said in her sweetest tones the words every young man would love to hear: 'We can get one room together if you like, Ted.' I liked the idea so much I almost ran the car off the road! We found a motel and got our room. We went out for a leisurely dinner (I wolfed mine), thence to return to the room. Caroline got ready first and got into bed. I put on my pajamas and then climbed in beside her. She was facing away from me. I placed my hand on her shoulder, but there was no response. Was she asleep already? I couldn't be sure from her breathing. I called her name softly but there was no response. And then I realized: this person, once so sexually alive, had become frozen, frigid because of what Ken had done to her; and I was left picking up the pieces of the wreckage he had left. An anger welled up in me against him; indeed, I was angry at myself and that whole wasted year which seemed to be symbolized perfectly by the situation there in bed. The anger only subsided when I remembered Caroline. I uttered a Good Night and turned away from her. Her voice came back softly and plaintively: 'Good Night Ted.' That was the first bit of knowledge I gained on that trip. The second happened the next morning, when I found out that Caroline had essentially no eyebrows, that she had to paint them on each morning. X. Later in the summer I did something pretty stupid: I arranged for a meeting, a tete-a-tete, between Ken and Caroline. The meeting took place in a diner. I brought Caroline, and Ken came a bit later. They only sat together for about five minutes, but it was the most excruciating five minutes I have ever witnessed. She spoke softly and slowly, as if she were handling something very delicate and fragile. He spoke slowly and softly too (a revelation to me!), although his face wore the grin of a terrified mannequin. They said hello and asked each other how they were and that was about it. Each reported that they were 'fine'. Did either believe it to be true for the other? I think that men want to believe that women they have left miss them. As for Caroline, afterwards she said to me, 'The only thing I couldn't stand would be to find out that Ken wasn't happy.' XI. During my last week in South Carolina, I was invited to Ken and Marty's for dinner. I remember little of the meal save that it was a surprisingly low-key evening. That is, Ken was not his usual manic, raucous self. LIfe with Marty seemed to have calmed him, domesticated him - tamed him. I wondered whether the price for him to live with Marty was that he was forced to converse in banalities whenever she was around. After we did up the dishes, Ken and I wandered into the yard out back. It was a gorgeous late summer evening. Marty had cooked a good meal and seemed like a nice young woman, and I told Ken so. I asked him how their married life was going. Subito, he became his old self as his voice dropped to take on an ominous tone: "On our wedding night I was lying beside Marty in bed. She was asleep, but I was wide awake staring at the ceiling. And what kept repeating itself over and over in my head was [here he bore down on each individual word]: 'Why didn't I marry Caroline?!'" I was too shocked to speak. His eyes rolled around and then fixed on mine. He gave me his little manic grin and intoned in that singsong voice: 'The mills of the gods grind slowly, But they grind exceeding fine!' And then, so sotto-voce and so sucked in that I could just barely hear it: 'Gobble, Ken - Gobble!'