Shoes for Slippery Slopes
In memory of Spandex. A great dog.*
Here is what happened. My friend, Detective Andy McLean was on his way over, with all his very real human failings, to regale me with stories of crimes he solved and criminals he has brought to justice. All stories I have heard before. Andy has this thing, in the summer months, he only tells you things that he originally told you in the winter. Usually, I am quite happy to tolerate this strange repetition, because it is always interesting to see how he has grown.
He is a dynamic individual. Andy isn’t easy on the eyes, as they say, and he is often preoccupied with things at the precinct. He struggles nobly to control his addiction to alcohol and this often occupies his thoughts too. He is also not a man of great wit, but he is unabashedly great of girth. Many people comment that he lacks any refined sophistication, I agree, he is lacking in the social graces. Somehow, though, this gives him an enviable honesty, and he is a direct and passionate man. There is no one he is more passionate about than Sylvia.
His unswerving devotion to his new wife surprised us all. We all shook our heads, what does she see in him? Sylvia is a woman of great charm, wit, and refinement. She is a lawyer, and as one woman lawyer told me, that means three things. She must look like a woman, act like a man, and work like a dog. But this is a whole other story.
I had just bought a tree pruning pole and stepladder, out of necessity. Well, that may be too strong a word. To be precise, I bought the stepladder out of hedonistic desire.
It’s like this, since canceling our subscription to cable TV a few years ago in a fit of indignation, our antenna has been a fourteen inch piece of thirty gauge copper wire sitting next to a basement window. It did a pretty good job. The length of the wire must be close to a reasonable fraction of a VHF wave. We could pull in nine, albeit, snowy stations.
It is kind of nostalgic. In 1969 watching Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon, I thought, cool, it snows there too. I was eight years old, okay? Now in my thirty-sixth year, it is time to change the seasons and end my television winter. A clear summer view found me at Radio Shack buying an antenna and at two thirds off no less. Things were going to clear up nicely.
The antenna looks like a twenty-four inch radar dome. The task was to mount it on a pole and attach the pole to the chimney. Easy, right. Should be, but first, to prune those branches creeping down onto Hobbit Hall. Should be time left in the day for dinner and a clear visit with Andy.
The pruning went easily. It’s the kind of manual work that does not require a lot of processor time. All you need is a good grasp of the effects of gravity on recently liberated branches and your mind can wonder to other things. My mind wondered into Andy’s.
When he married Sylvia, we all wondered how he had convinced himself that this could be a good move. Then we wondered if this would relieve some of his interminable struggle. Struggle? No, Andy is a tortured man. Would marriage, cut him some freak’in slack, as he might say?
Nobody was giving good odds. He still seemed tortured, even in his sixth year of recovery. Dry drunk, they call it in AA. He may be sober, but just as grouchy and tender as a loaded-up guy on a real bender. Healthier and smarter though, the brain just works a whole lot better after it has dried out.
Part of what makes him this way is a character trait shared by many of the most likeable, trustworthy and responsible people you are ever likely to meet. Andy is an internalizer.
He has many of the virtues I just mentioned, except most people don’t find him likeable. It’s not so much that he is under-socialized, as he is closed. He just doesn’t hang a ‘come and chat with me’ sign around his neck. His conversation tends towards minimalism, it’s as Spartan as a Scandinavian living room, and about as warm. He’s a frequently misunderstood man, Sylvia might say.
Internalizer’s are people who assume they always have something to do with things that happen around them.
Andy calls them ‘twitches’ when he interrogates them. They often get nervous. Andy has met a few extreme cases, guys that come into the stationhouse to confess to a crime just because they were in the bank when it gets robbed. ‘Were you making a withdrawal at the time?’ Andy asked one such character. ‘A deposit’, he responded. ‘Well then, we can’t put you in jail. We can only lock up bystanders who were making withdrawals. This is your lucky day fella, but I better not find you in any more banks that are being robbed. I am afraid, you are free to go.’ Now you understand why I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to explain internalizing to Andy.
I rarely get to see such interesting cases in my general counseling practice. I seem to get much more average folk. I did have one high internalizer that I fixed up pretty quick. In fact, she was a dream case. In my business, the kind of client you pray you videotape, so you can take the tape to show to other counselors on the speaking circuit to promote your new therapy book.
She was a nice lady who had this long-term roommate relationship with a gay man. Their relationship was amicable and convenient. They even took the odd vacation together, but in other respects, maintained separate lives. It was after one of these vacations that it happened. On the way back from the airport, her car went into a skid and crashed into a pick-up truck. When I met her she had the usual signs of accident trauma. Except the next time I saw her she was even worse.
It was a story I hadn’t heard before, but a result I am quite familiar with. Her roommate and dear friend had lived well, a happy, healthy, exuberant existence, she said. She would often forget he was HIV+; her only reminder was his outrageously healthy diet and the odd bottle medication she would see around the apartment.
The accident had left them both apparently uninjured, but soon after, her roommate crashed in another way. His T cells dropped to fifty and his viral load soared. His life of forced hopefulness and cheer was over. The ticking he heard everyday, a constant reminder, had stopped. His face, that all to familiar face, became gaunt and hollow, his eyes empty. A little bit of her died too. Her guilt, the internalized blame that she had killed her companion, was now sinking her into a deep depression. She was inconsolable.
It looked like she was going to require a lot of help. I had never heard of an accident causing this kind of trauma to people who are HIV+, but a friend of mine who does more of this work than I do, said it is possible.
This information would not help me in turning her guilt. It was not looking good for either of them. The only break, if you can call it that, was her friend moved to a hospital. At least, only the silence of her house was her albatross. Living together would have become impossible but only after extracting much more damage.
When she came in the next time, I asked how her friend was. ‘God is still in him,’ she replied. The resounding silence that followed told me all I needed to know. I would be soon mourning with her. God is always the last to leave.
Why do I think of these things again, why in these brief moments? I am now pruning with the saw. Slashing into bark, a snowfall of sawdust coming down in drifts. It’s time to take a breath. This is actually a good story. Yes, pruning can be done with too much vigor.
Well by the end of that session, the mood in the room hadn’t improved much from her opening statement. Then she asked, ‘how will I ever get past this?’ In a bright voice and reflective posture, I said, ‘well, some people do and some people don’t. I can tell you one thing that seems to make a difference, but I don’t know if it will help’. She invited me to tell her anyway. This seemed like a good time to try this out. She was fatiguing of her depression. I knew it, I was fatigued as after a five mile run, just from talking with her in comfortable room for forty minutes.
Well, one thing that seems to make the difference between survivors and people who never get past it is where (or how) someone sees the problem. Some people blame themselves for every occurrence in the world; they assume the responsibility for the problem on a personal level. Other people assign the responsibility to some part of the world. Look, I said, your car accident that has led to this tragedy is really about the loss of friction between rubber and asphalt. It was about the characteristics of water when it crystallizes. A person, who gets past it, can see the world in this way. They somehow seem to know that we are part of a world that has Rules about how it operates. Sometimes these Rules underlie good things and sometimes bad-things and they know that they can neither change the Rules nor be responsible for them. They are not people who make excuses or shirk their responsibilities; they just have this stance towards the world.
People who don’t get past it, seem to disregard the rules of the external world, they do not see themselves as observers of the ways of nature, as well as part of it. They hold that things occur because of them, that the entire world is under their control. So when a good thing occurs, it does so because of them, their attitude, their giftedness or their virtue. I had her attention.
Can a person with faith be the first type of person? She asked. I can see how they would have to be extreme, to deny responsibility for their actions and decisions, but it does seem true that the world works in somewhat predictable ways, at least at certain levels, she added. Yet I would never give up belief that God can influence things.
Well, this is quite a question, I replied. The short answer is that there are people of every faith or belief system that are the first type of person, as I understand it. These people might, for instance, consider the order of the universe, the Rules, to be an expression of God. Some people I know consider the further discovery of the Rules to be a scared duty. Like Einstein, she interjected, Einstein said, ‘God doesn’t play dice’ because he believed that God created the universe with very specific Rules about how all that stuff works. Right, I said, but he isn’t one of the people I know.
There are differences between them, I continued, like some think that God doesn’t really ‘interfere’ as they might say and the Rules are all we have to go on, or mostly. Many of them think that God still pays very close attention to them, though. ‘Knows even the number of hairs on their heads’, she said reflectively. They would agree with that, I think, but they might deny the existence of miracles. Others would say that miracles are the definition, the exception to the Rules proving God’s intervention. Well yes, that would be the definition, she added.
I had never heard her talk so much, and clearly there was a lightening in her tone. It seemed that this conversation was proving something I said as a joke; ‘philosophy is the Viagra of the mind.’ The next time I saw her she was no longer depressed. Her friend was still enduring his titanic battle, the outlook grim but not hopeless.
Just a few more branches to fell and I can move onto my real task of the day, putting the TV antenna up. I hate it when I run out of things to think about before the manual task is done. Usually I wish my brain would work faster. Time to sink into the task, the dignity of manual labor. Why is my arm bleeding?
The ladder I bought is a lightweight, light duty aluminum kind. This means that its maximum rated weight is my exact weight after a few weeks of a good diet. The diet begins just after the antenna goes up. Call me cheap if you want to, but the next ladder up, was really much more expensive. I reasoned that it would do, since I was the only person likely to suffer the results of a miscalculation. Later, Andy will tell me that this is ‘stinkin’ thinkin’. Why should anyone place less value on their own life, just because they were in charge of the decision?
This might be a trait of us internalizer’s too. I will remind Andy of this by bringing up the time he decided to enter a darkened store alone in the middle of a robbery. He will retort that his decision has to do with justice and mine with climbing on a roof. I won’t be able to argue with this, his death would have been much more noble and heroic than mine would have been. I only noticed the similarity in the result.
Well, the only thing I noticed about the ladder was that it shakes and rattles a lot. This is disconcerting, but I don’t think it’s dangerous. We all know that I am just making a bet between my weight and the safety margin the engineers built into it. The number of safety warnings and advice stickers on the ladder strengthens my confidence. Any company that puts that many warnings on a product is surely highly motivated to avoid product liability lawsuits and probably choose a very conservative safety margin. This is my guess anyway.
The roof is not just a house covering. It’s a plane and a slippery slope. I like to think of myself as someone who will venture onto new planes and not be troubled by life’s slippery slopes. My capacities to accept the unfamiliar and exist in the presence of considerable ambiguity, I think, are some of my best qualities. I guess that makes the roof a symbol. A little trepidation is allowed and so is some thoughtful preparation.
The thoughtful preparation amounted to putting on my stickiest shoes. I changed my worn-out cross-trainers for an overpriced pair of high tech boat shoes. If you listened to their marketing you would swear that you could casually walk up the wall and step onto the ceiling. Well, I don’t know about that, but they have glued me to the deck of our sailboat in a wet pitching torrent of rain and breaking waves. These babies are the shoes for the slippery slope.
My guess about the ladder was right. I ascended the roof with no problem at all. The shoes need one of those consumer-warning labels. Something like, ‘Becomes frictionless on aluminum roofs.’ I discovered this just as I stepped off the ladder far enough to put my center of gravity over my newly frictionless foot. Instinctively, I just scrambled up as far as I could hope to put more distance between me and the concrete below. I know this isn’t logical, farther to fall, but this isn’t about logic, it’s about survival. Just do the right thing - don’t think about it.
I get halfway between the peak and the gutter, my limbs outstretched like one of those insects walking on the surface tension of the water. I ponder the problem of my shoes. I decide that the slope requires more insect like scrambling for more slipping distance. My first tentative step starts me down the slope to my ignoble demise. Faster, I think automatically, and I do gain some ground. I make sort of an existential landmark; I am able to hold on to the peak of the roof with my hands. It’s not over and I’m not really better off, just feeling better.
Boat shoes are not meant to come off your feet. It’s really a safety issue; you need good support on a slippery sloping deck. This is more of problem than a feature at the moment. I have to free up one hand to reach behind me to remove my shoes. The net result is a slight loss of handholds, which is enough to put me back into trouble. It’s water and physics all over again.
Sweaty feet do not hold on metal either. This great slide is smooth and constant. If a slide can have a feeling, this one feels like fate. Steadily onward, inertia building, cogent awareness of every passing moment, completely powerless to change it. No philosophical problems here, it’s physics, the Rules once again.
After about four feet, felt like forty, I just stop. Why does everyone, who stops sliding off a roof credit Fate, or thank God, for ‘suspending the Rules’ as a personal favor... Very few people curse the Rules for being so quirky and indiscriminant in the first place. My feet drying out changed my rapidly developing path of life. “Got to love that physics stuff,” Andy might say. I now had ‘gription.’ This isn’t really a word, but it should be, it means the combined Rules of friction, traction and grip.
A rookie detective coined this word in Andy’s squad car, while on another slippery slope. “No gription” he yelled, as the car moved gracefully sideways towards a group of pedestrians about to feel the Rules.
That slide too, was stopped by something, which, who knows, maybe was God. It didn’t make Andy think about physics or the Almighty, it made him think he needed a drink. I know that look, his eyes sink, he frowns, his skin darkens and he can’t speak. It takes everything he has to purge the thought from his mind. From the pain on his face, you would swear he had the accident. Faith, the beauty of the Rules, even relief avoids him. A crisis with a fortunate ending just brings torment.
When it’s over, it’s not really over. He knows he cannot credit himself with the success of overcoming the temptation. He knows that success in overcoming an addiction comes moment by moment. “One day at a time,” they say in AA. Yesterday doesn’t count and tomorrow you can’t count on. Not with the Rules we have. Andy just steels himself to be even more vigilant, reminding himself how close he came to loosing it all again.
My newfound ‘gription’ and me are straddling the peak of the roof. A rest and a pleasant perspective of the neighborhood are a salve for my fears. I’m thinking about the antenna. It weighs about thirty pounds, top heavy, with a coaxial cable tied to the bottom. I need a bag of tools, strapping and clamps as well. Gription is a good friend, but not long enough to trust to that task yet. I decide, ‘Necessity will be the mother of innovation’. There must be more than one way to put an antenna above the roofline. Gription and me go on the slope to prune some over hanging branches. I had thoughtfully placed the pruning pole on the roof before my existential journey began.
I heard the door slam on his medium gray Oldsmobile. It’s not that he had any affection for the car, it has to be large and blend in well, he told me. I took that to mean it was de rigor, like a black leather jacket on a motorcycle. A few minutes latter, he walked in the door.
The dogs bark and run at the sound of the door. Both of them are at his feet sniffing around, getting their stories about where he has been and what he has been doing. Our dogs have a mixed reaction to Andy, and he, a mixed reaction to them. Spandex is our oldest cocker spaniel and she could care less about him, once she has determined that there is no chance he has cookies in his pockets, which he never does. One evening she paid him with her undivided attention, nose sucking up all the air around him and tail wagging like a propeller. Andy said it must have something to do with the evidence bag in his pocket. He looked at me so I would know not to ask about it. I didn’t, I know the look.
One day I will ask him, it drives me nuts. What could it have been, a finger? There are only two things in the world that turn old Spandex on like that; squirrels and liver. Since I can’t fathom how a squirrel could end up as evidence, maybe I will not ever ask. Now that I recall, he did mention that he had cleared up something about his case that evening during the visit. I am not going to tell my wife about this.
Our younger cocker spaniel, Lycra, adores Andy. She will run to him, wag, circle him, run off and come back with her favorite toy, a stuffed cocker puppy, about the size Lycra was when she was born. She will drop the pup at his feet, sit attentively and wag any time he makes eye contact or moves towards the toy. Andy has pretty much the same reaction to her, even though she once took a crack pipe out of his pocket and chewed it to bits one night. Andy was quite gracious about it saying, ‘It was just a small-time case,’ he was chasing down ‘between donuts that afternoon.’ In Andy’s oblique police code, this means he was scaring some kid user, to build a relationship with him.
It’s taken me a longtime to ferret out the meaning in some of the things he says. The hardest part of that one was concluding that he scared people in order to form a relationship with them. It’s not his only way but he has a lot of relationships with mighty frightened people.
Lycra would never fear Andy; she is more likely to hide behind his legs if a discussion gets heated. Andy bends down, picks her up and says, ‘Behind the thin blue line puppy. That’s where to be little girl.’ That is his reaction to her, completely disarmed. His eyes seem to go to browner not just bigger, with Lycra on his lap. Amazingly, Andy’s eyes become cocker spaniel eyes. Avuncular is about the only word to describe it. Despite this soft tender edge to a guy who breathes in and exhales all of humanity’s vices, Andy adamantly states he will never have a dog of his own. ‘What are they really good for,’ he asks, ‘wag here piddle there, not for me, buddy.’
I was pouring his customary ginger ale, my wife was slipping in the lemon wedge, she always does and Andy always complains. “What’s this thing”, he asks, knowing full well. “What’s wrong, Andy, have lemons become a controlled substance,” my wife teases. “No Jan, it’s not that, it’s...um.” “Unmanly,” she completes, “yeah, like that”, he concedes.
I decide to take my turn with him. Teasing, provoking, and arguing with Andy is standard operating procedure early in the evening. In his parlance, you have to work him a bit, soften him up. I find it hilarious to watch Jan do this, it’s so foreign to her. She never teases anyone about anything. So, she isn’t too good at it either.
On the very few occasions where she has tried to tease someone, she usually has to tell him or her after the fact. Their are a few of us, who know her well enough to actually see it when it happens now, only no one will mention how bad she is.
In this circle, we all know it’s the price she pays for her unflagging sincerity. I originally started to tease him, it was the only I could find to engage him. When I saw Jan take her first shot, I almost fell over. It confirmed the necessity of this approach. It ended months of stilted small talk between them, and they started to become friends. Now it’s my turn to take part in the ritual.
“Andy, I never see Lycra more happy than when she is sitting on your lap, leaning her head into your chest. It’s obvious, dogs love you, and you’re a natural, why don’t you get one. Sylvia would love a dog; she’s always saying so. “Look, I told you already, I’m not a dog person, he says placing a perplexed Lycra on the floor. He can’t stop himself though; he pats her head as he lets her go. “But you positively melt when Lycra comes to you Andy,” Jan chimes in. “It’s pretty clear you know dogs and feel for them. You even let Spandex help you that case the last time you were here, when she told you what the evidence was, so you watch dogs petty close and read them well. That’s a ‘dog person.’ There must be another reason. Let’s see any history of trauma from the canine set in your past, Andy?”
“Oh here we go, he retorts, you counselors, always going for it, never let anything go by, jeez.” “Vell, maybe your momma had a puppy zhe loved more dan you, huh? Said Jan in her best Viennese Freud. “Gad, the two of you again, don’t you ever play good-cop-bad-cop, always two on one, all guns blazing, cheesy accents and all. Look, if you really need to know I’ll tell you why I won’t get a dog. Dog’s are a lost cause. How long do they live, ten, twelve years and then what, no dog? What’s the point?”
“So, Andy, Jan asks, you don’t want a dog because the dog would not outlive you?” “No, he replied, I didn’t say that, I wouldn’t want the dog to out live me either.” “What good would that be? They, what do you guys say, bond to you and depend on you for everything in their existence and you die on them. What good is that? Dog’s are a lost cause.” Oh, so really Andy, you don’t want a dog, because you...” Jan is the master of the open-ended question. “What, because I what, says Andy,” not to fall for that gambit. “Well, I was thinking you might say, you don’t want a dog, because you actually love dogs and could bear loosing it or not being there for it,” Jan concludes. “Well, there, fine, if you need me to say that, okay, I said it. Do I get a reduced sentence your honor?”
Jan and I glance at each other, it’s one of those couple’s glances where the data travels faster than a cable modem. The signal is encrypted in our eyes; no one else in the room could have known what we said to each other. The message was: “good, he’s relaxing and warming up. We are doing fine.”
“So, now you think I’m nuts or something, I guess,” Andy asked. “No Andy, I think it’s sweet. You care that deeply and intensely that you don’t want to set yourself up for that type of pain. After all, what pain could be worse than the loss of something that depends on you wholly.” Jan is on a roll now. “It’s the essence of love and protection is a positive manifestation of masculinity.” Andy is almost blushing, he’s just about to shut this one down for good. Jan throws in the towel and she has made her point. “So, anyone ready for dinner? She asks without missing a beat and she is up off her chair before she finishes the sentence.
It’s no great revelation to either of us that Andy won’t have a dog because he would feel too great a loss at loosing it, he is right in a way too, dogs aren’t a good bet as life partners. And it isn’t some neurotic fear that keeps him from loving or getting involved either. Jan is right, it’s an overabundance of a positive trait in men, protection and it’s reciprocal, provision. As for Freud, he just did more damage to how our culture thinks by slapping a prerogative label on every human trait and never identifying a health or strength. Today we might say that such an attitude reflects a very poor self-esteem. If there are Rules for water and asphalt and how they interact, then there are Rules for our things as well. All the Rules in nature seem functional, perhaps arbitrary at some points, but everything has adapted in a perfectly functional and balanced system.
Did Freud think that the fundamental Rules of the human psyche were the only flawed, dissonant Rules in the universe? I don’t know about you, but if I had to pick an early 20th Century guy to hang around with, I would pick Einstein over Freud in a minute. That client was right, Einstein saw beauty and perfection everywhere and his task was to articulate it in mathematics. Freud saw darkness and pestilence in the universe, his task was to articulate toxin.
My stare into my ginger ale was broken by Jan. How’s things in the world of Crime and Punishment, she asked facing Andy. Well, he replied, I caught the Idiot, but we are still-hunting for those two brothers whose name starts with K. “That should be easy, I interjected, it’s a very big book, but it is not easy to interrogate. “ Andy looked at me blankly, as if I had said it in Russian.
Well, the idiot is easy to interrogate, he said. Andy usually called suspects idiots when they are high externalizers. “This guy just figures that the our evidence has no bearing on him. It’s like, he was just along for the ride as the cosmos unfolded his crime for him.”
“What’s he up for, I asked, trying to speak, the best cop that I could. “Trespassing, willful destruction of property, forcible confinement, theft, and arson.” “That’s quite a list,” Jan commented. It’s a strange case and getting weirder by the moment. His lawyer wants to call a philosopher for his defense. He was denied bail and tried to have this philosopher guy listed for visits as his “spiritual adviser.” Who did he want, I asked. “Some kid named Mark Kingwell.”
I know Mark, not in a social way, but I’ve chatted with him, read his books but not his magazine articles, nor do I watch him when he is on television. Some kid I thought to myself, Mark and I are exactly the same age. If Mark is a kid, he’s a whiz kid. He is a Winnipeg kid who did well enough to get into Yale and now teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto. His specialty is justice theory.
If the human brain is a noodle, then Mark is a pasta feast for the pope. Mark, is someone whose path in life I’m going to keep an eye on.
“I’ve heard of him, I said, the guy on the government TV station.” Yeah, that’s him. “Another pampered bright boy, whose mama played Bach to him while he was in her belly. He probably couldn’t change a light bulb if it burned out. Now he just has to sit in his ivory tower for the rest of his life, bring in the taxpayer’s dough and get calluses on his academic butt.”
Andy has always been a little anti-intellectual. It usually gets worse if the reference is directed towards someone younger than he is. So, neither of us expected Andy so say, “Mark is skilled interlocutor, with the ability to forward the deep resonance’s of Western thought, without jargon and with a master’s sense of irony.”
Andy is not bluntly anti-intellectual, he’s not suggesting they all be hanged and burned. He’s not an intelloclast -- to coin a word. What keeps his bile flowing is resentment. His resentment is presently in a slight stage of flux. I know what he said about Mark is strong, but you will have to take my word on it, it is better than it used to be. The flux is the result of Andy’s changing stance towards the world.
Andy’s bile was ground and mixed in a particularly poor performance in high school. He once told me that the problem was semantic in nature, he took the word high too literally. Bored as he could be, he would duck out for drinks between classes. Thoughtfully, he always drank vodka between classes to reduce the possibility of detection. This saved his sophomoric skin one day when his English teacher chided his classmates for the smell of beer in the room. She was also the observant one who described her class as a “herd of grossly illiterate, placid cows.” She must have been correct, since no one mentioned that the word placid was redundant.
Andy continued his academic drinking career over the years. Sometimes he would find the need for a quick drink between classes. To provide for this circumstance he kept two large laboratory jars in his locker. The first labeled Biology sample one contained a clear but putrid smelling liquid. The bottle, Biology sample two, contained forty-percent ethanol in solution. The solution was usually referred to as Prince Igor Vodka. A wanton Prince he was too, contributing to a phenomenon known as state dependent learning. It took Andy three lost credits to finally deduce that if you are learning while you are drunk, that ‘trying to be responsible’ and not drinking on days you had a test is a sure way to lower your marks. Soon, Andy was plastered most of the time. At seventeen, he could impress all the other proto-alcoholics by downing a mickey of whiskey in one long gulp an doing that to start an evening of ‘entertainment.’ This non-curriculum course in applied chemistry would be his biggest and most enduring experience in high school. It would also be the end of his formal education for quite some time.
Andy’ bile turned a sickly shade of green when he discovered no university would accept him. This carved a deep fissure between Andy and his family. Everyone, including Andy expected he would at least pick up some sort of degree. It was clear from early in his life that he had at least that much ability. To his family it was an expectation of adulthood.
They would all be dumb kids but they would all have a piece of vellum saying they knew something about business, science, computers or at worst art history or dance theory. They would have been shocked to discover that not everyone considers the undergraduate degree to be a birthright or our peaceable socialist democracy. They probably argue amongst themselves, that it hardly seems of value, really when anyone who wants one can have one. To be sent-down before he got-up was a critical blow. It was not sufficient for him to acknowledge a drinking problem, but it did create enough of a problem that he had to leave home, a bitter and despondent young man.
In the early years of “real life,” as he calls it, Andy became a master of self-flagellation, both real and metaphorical. He started with his body. Andy began to run many miles per day. He took a job as a house mover and did as much overtime as he could find. A day without muscle pain, severe pain, would not pass. His pain, both physical and metaphorical, he blotted out with nightly drunks.
An alcoholic in superior shape is a rare bird. He didn’t break a sweat on the physical testing for the force. He passed the psychological exam as well. That might seem surprising given the picture you might have of him because of my dwelling on his personal challenges rather than all the things that come easily to him, but these are many.
While it is true what he was recruited during a period where many young men were more interested in dealing dope than being a cop. Andy’s passionate hatred of drugs gave his career a good jump-start. It was this with other strong virtuous traits that edged him in. He believes in corrective justice, in balance to his beliefs about civil polity. He is able to absorb intensive criticism without becoming aggressive. His directed sense of responsibility did not hurt either. The assessing psychologist told him only two things: he passed, and “Try not to take things that happen in his new career too personally.”
At that time, drug testing was intensive, the idea of cops on dope kept the Chief awake all night. These were very expensive tests and it was a political humiliation to even admit that candidates for the constabulary should even be considered for this illegal activity. The sleepless chief made a deal, drop some tests a quietly weed-out the druggies. They dropped the liver enzyme test, making them blind to Andy’s alcoholism. If he had only known, he might not have sent himself through the edgy sweats of withdrawal for each test series.
It was a real low point for him as I remember the time he confessed this to me. It was in the first month of his first sobriety just after he was rejected for the detective’s exam. Andy quite wanted to write the test so he was trying very hard to impress the powers that be. Andy started a rumor that he had been easily admitted to an advanced forensics program at the University of Toronto. It was not a lie, but not a truth either. Andy was indeed taking a forensics course at the Uof T. He would tell his fellow officers all about it and a little more loudly when the brass was around.
The story he chose to tell most often was the one about microwave ovens. These ovens were new at the time and few people knew how they worked. “They cook from the inside out, you know, he would say, and if you put an egg into them or a potato, it heats up and explodes because there is no place for the heated air to get out.
So, what do you think would happen if you put an infant into a microwave?” Even hardened cops scowled at the image of some crack-smoker putting a baby into a microwave and the child exploding. This got everyone’s attention.
“It won’t explode, you guys, you have to keep up-to-date on your science.” The microwave will make a circular burn starting one inch below the skin and it will spread to surrounding tissue the longer the baby is cooked.”
My chicken dinner was looking less appealing right at the moment. Andy’s idea ended up with him having the same queasy feeling in his stomach when one of his rival candidates told everyone that the forensics course was an extension course offered to any ghoul with a hundred bucks. Andy’s triumphant entry into the world of higher learning was a fraud. To his credit, he finished the course. He left with a new appreciation for gore and considerably less anxiety about universities. He drank the bitter cup offered by his fellow officers, but that was all he drank.
“So, Andy, I said, what about this Kingwell guy? What’s this guy’s defense have to do with philosophy?” “I’ll find out more tomorrow, he said, but the gist of it is this Kingwell guy wrote a book about the millennium, about how everyone is already going a bit crazy and how all the computers will crash or something. So this guy claims he was inspired to lock a bunch of people in the basement of a church and keep them there until the year 2000. He was going to camp in the church and guard the door to the basement.”
“He was inspired by the book?” Jan asked. “Nope, he claims he was inspired by philosophy. Jeez, when we picked him up he started yelling, ‘Bring me the hemlock! Bring me the Hemlock! Ignoble minds, you will always kill a true philosopher with vision. This is your destiny and your destruction.” I remember because I wrote it down in my notebook. Even weirder than this is the shrink at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, he said the guy is perfectly sane and can go to jail like anyone else. I thought, for sure, he was a nut job. I will be able to tell you more next time. I can tell it’s going to be a long story, I going to be in court for weeks with this one. So, what have you been up to?”
Janet was serving our usual; skinless chicken breast, broccoli and salad. Don’t you love middle-aged cuisine? Somewhat between the salad and the broccoli, I confessed to them my fear of being on the roof. I even went as far as to suggest that my sore back be probably due to my anxiety during the grand slide. Jan had a confession of her own.
It seems she heard an unusual noise when opening the skylight this morning and now she couldn’t get it closed. Would we give it a shot of grease and a manly shove to the closed position?
Our most manly shoves would do no good, “the sash frame is cracked,” Andy said. The pleasant young woman on the phone said I have two options, repair it my self or she could send me a new one by January for a scant $700. Looks like it is back on the roof for me. It seems as soon as you acknowledge a fear; the universe starts to laugh its ironic laugh. When he left, Andy said he thought we would have more good stories next time.
Kenno.
The great dog, Spandex, was born in Willow Beach Ontario in 1988. She came to live with us in Holland Landing the next year. She had all the possible beauty of an American Cocker Spaniel, but was an inch taller than conformity permits. Her nature was to please and to hunt.
Spandex was the only dog I have met who I can say had a philosophy. Hers went something like this: avoid conflicts and hide from them loudly to make others see the errors of their ways. Belly rubs on soft warm grass are a gift from God. Squirrels are evil incarnate. Sleep each nap as if it is your last. A dog can live on cookies alone, if there is no Italian. Touching is better than talking. Thumbs are not really all that necessary to a happy life. A dog’s subtle humor makes you laugh and think. Laugh and think.
Spandex’s last moments were spent with me in the shade of a pine tree on a warm sunny day. This is how she loved the world the best. She was happy, but it had become difficult to be a dog and stay true to her philosophy. It was the saddest thing I have ever had to do. My last responsibility to her. She rests in our yard at Hobbit Hall.
Andy, in the story, is wrong. Dogs have a lot to tell us about life and living it. We just have to watch them closely enough. They compress all possible joy into a few scant years and leave us to remember. To remember there is joy is simplicity and memory. As painful as her loss is, it does not equal the joy shared with us.
Hobbit Hall, August 1999.
Hobbit Hall 1999.