© NANCE-SASSER/ART SPARKS/PORTLAND 1983 RETURKTO CAVE-SUMNER / ■ ) / FICTION ANDMORE B O B CLINTON ST ^"ARTEPLY
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CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY VOL5, NO. 3 SATISFYINGBUTNOTFILLING FALL1903 STAFF Co-Editors Peggy Lindquist David Milholland Jim Blashfield Lenny Dee Design and Production Jim Blashfield Production Assistants David Milholland Peggy Lindquist Proofreader Stan Sitnick Camerawork Paul Diener Laura Di Trapani m Your Town Press a Ad Production aStacey Fletcher * Peggy Lindquist £ Eric Cain x Ad Sales o Lenny Dee o Martha Ezell t Laurie McClain Typesetting Archetype Printing Tualatin Yamhill Press Contributing Artists John Callahan Claudia Cave-Sumner T. Michael Gardiner Dana Hoyle Contributing Photographers Johnny Dark Paul Diener Ross Hamilton Ann Hirschi David Milholland Rick Rappaport Carl Smool Public Relations Cramer/Hulse Development Consultant Michaele Williams International Attache Pippo Lioni Thanks Eric Edwards Mike Hessley Greg Kroell Al Schwartz Starflower Charlotte Uris John Wanberg F rom the first accounts of the Korean jet incident, much has been confused and illusory. As the days have passed, each baring a revelation contradicting previous “fact,” we’re faced with unadorned salvos from both camps’ propaganda factories, all intent on covering up mistakes and making political hay from the tragedy. For much of our lives, the possibility has always been real that just such an unplanned, unfortunate incident would embroil us in a “hot” (nuclear) war. The day following the first accounts, I was party to a distinguished public servant’s call for a response, even a hot response, for this “utterly uncivilized act” ... an act he compared to the worst Nazi atrocities. Such confusion between disgust for morally unacceptable behavior and a desire for retribution, “at whatever cost,” is both dangerous and deluding. We need, as citizens of this fragile planet, to sort our way out of the nuclear nightmare our mutual paranoia has erected. It will require all our patience, ingenuity and commitment. Though we can be grateful that events have not spiralled out of control, there’s much to learn from the behavior of all parties. The Russians, having studied the Nixon crew’s coverup, have stonewalled, twisted every detail to their advantage, claimed “sacred” authority for their actions, and returned all accusations whole cloth. Like all bureaucracies caught in the act, they’ve taken the low road and will utlimately pay for their inability to admit a mistake. Reagan, while fending off the howling jackals of the far right, who termed this the “first battle of World War III,” chose instead the mantle of the statesman. A more timely incident couldn’t have been found to allay the fears of an electorate convinced the man is looking for a war to fight. Yet even as the campaign to rebaptize the “ugly bear” unfolds, details about the U.S. spy plane flying nearby make such moral outrage less convincing and even raise questions about what new information will come to light. As Dwight D. Eisenhower realized 25 years ago, there can be no winners in a war between superpowers. Yet the major players continue to operate as if the old rules were still in play. No one wants the world to end, but greed and fear continue to push us all to the brink. Today, 13 women and men in sites across the planet are fasting for life, “until a significant step is taken to halt the arms race.” They began their fast on August 6. In the current political climate, they are likely to become martyrs, but they, and we, should realize the full impact of their venture. Write Reagan. Write Andropov. Write anyone you believe needs to hear your feelings. And join with others to raise your voice for peace. The days for “business as usual” have passed. DM hen the sun came up in Portland on August 7th, it illuminated strange white figures painted on the sidewalks. They were outlines of people (a child with a teddy bear, a couple embracing, someone in a wheelchair, an infant, a person crouched) and they appeared on street corners throughout the city. People arising Sunday morning to find these unexpected apparitions were perhaps puzzled. Some were angry. In at least one neighborhood, the faithful were out scrubbing them off the sidewalks in front of their churches before services began. At 10:00 am, August 7th, Hiroshima Day, a group of Portland area artists appeared at a press conference to explain the significance of the shadows: they were intended to be reminiscent of the ghastly shadows left by people whose bodies blocked the incredible light of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima 38 years ago. These painted shadows, however, were taken from live figures. Over 200 people had spent the previous night stenciling, a large number of them artists. They had prepared carefully, gathering to learn how to make the shadows. They were given sheets of a plastic material and were told how to use a light or the sun to cast a shadow that could be traced or to simply lay down and have someone else draw around the body. Then an impermanent mixture of chalk and latex was used to paint around the stencil. They attended a meeting in which the legal implications of their actions were explained to them. In fact, there were fifteen citations for vandalism and one arrest the night of August 6. There was some community outrage in response to the paintings. A number of letters appeared in the press decrying such mischief, the Oregonian denounced it as defacement of public property and the Mayor said that even though he “understood,” he did not approve, because it gives the city “a messy uncared for look.” But many of us were moved by the shadows, reminded each time we stepped over one how close we are to this possibility. Parents have been required to answer insistent questions from their children. Really it was a very gentle way to remind us that the world’s governments are tinkering with inconceivable human destruction. One participant said she felt it was an act of laying down the souls of individual people. Our steady Pacific Northwest rain will soon wash the remaining figures from the streets. There is a lot of work ahead. We want to thank those 200 for their good CONTENTS Cover Nance-Sasser Son ... Sharon Doub iago ..............................4 The Real War in Nicaragua Patty Somlo ....................................9 The Tempest Ronald Netherton-Johnson....... 13 The Rehabilitation of Tim Page Ike Horn .................................... 18 I Call on Claudia Cave-Sumner Jim B lashfie ld.................................. 24 Le Bon Lynn Darroch .............................. 41 Coyote and Wildcat Went Canoeing Rick Rubin ...................................... 46 The Clinton St. Quarterly is published by the Clinton St. Theatre, 2522 SE Clinton, Portland, OR 97202, (503) 222-6039. Unless otherwise noted, all contents copyright © 1983 Clinton St. Quarterly. Eugene Bureau Laurie M cC la in ................. 344-1930 Seattle Bureau Linda Ballantine ............... 322-8711 Advertisers please call (503) 222-6039 Winter Deadlines C o p y ...................................... Oct. 21 Advertising ........................... Nov. 17 Subscriptions are $5 for 4 issues. Send your name and address (include zip) to: CSQ, 2522 SE Clinton, Portland, OR 97202. We’ll send you the paper and 2 tickets to the Clinton St. Theatre. N I TH early 5 years ago, the FREE Clinton St. Quarterly was first published in Portland. It was conceived as a responsible, provocative newspaper with a political bent, which featured the work of underutilized local writers and artists. As the years have rolled by, the personnel have changed, we’ve won dozens of awards, and the paper has evolved. We are now a regional quarterly, printing 35,000 copies in two editions. With this issue, we begin circulation in Eugene, a community that has responded enthusiastically to our first efforts there. And we celebrate the beginning of our 2nd year in Seattle, a birthday that finds us in a unique position to share the best talents our region has fostered. While we continue to take our politics very seriously, we’ll also match our humor, culture, fiction and artwork with anyone in this neck of the woods. The Clinton St. Quarterly continues to be free because that guarantees our advertisers that all our papers get distributed, and picked up, in marked contrast to the substantial returns of many publications. We depend on you, our readers, to let the CSQ's advertisers know you heard about them from us, and that you appreciate their support of this publication. And of course, if you want to make a personal contribution, take out a subscription for yourself or a friend. It guarantees you won’t miss even one exciting issue, and makes a great, modestly-priced gift, especially to an out-of-towner who misses, or wants to learn more about, the Northwest. Quite frankly, we’re not getting rich doing this. Though we wouldn’t mind. We’re just trying to print the best possible paper we can. Join us. Clinton St. Quarterly 3
By Sharon Doubiago Photo by Johnny Dark 4 Clinton St. Quarterly
he sun rising over the Ramona mountains was waking me when I first knew of him. At least when I was first conscious of knowing him. I was sleeping on my back on the sun porch. My mother had said it will feel like faint little scratches from inside, very low, near the pubis, and when you realize it's the baby moving, you'll realize that you've been feeling it for several days. You just didn't know what it was. I call the being I knew then a "he" because I found this out later. At the time, the issue of gender was unimportant, it was the least of considerations, the least of the experience I was having. I certainly didn't have a preference, though I think his father did. It was all too new for me. I felt so passive in that riverine light, in the enormity of the possession, the sense of being totally possessed. Maybe because I was so young, still just a girl in my parent's house. Was it his legs, his arms, his fingers scratching at me from inside, so low? 414 months along. I lay there in the ray of sun feeling the human being inside me, kicking, hitting, grabbing, pleading, holding. The beginning. Daniel. Stereotypes Sept 1. 1982 My friend Tom Jay says “ It’s very Homeric down on the line. Ajax in the Iliad is very much like a lineman." Frosty Bennet says “ Football is one of the things that makes this country interesting.” I think he is right, I feel this too, but it is a mystery to which I have few clues. How can I be interested in football? I leave town sadly. It is hard to go off to Utah, to leave this place, Port Townsend, Washington, where I feel at home, to leave the man I love, for the foreign culture and geography of Utah. Besides my son’s dorm number at the University of Utah where he is on a fifth year athletic scholarship, I have two addresses. One is a very old friend’s, a devout Mormon, and the other is that of a friend of Port Townsend friends, a gay man. Tony says he can get me a job as a bartender at the Sun, the famous Salt Lake City gay bar. Mormons, football players, and gays. Where am I going? What am I doing? All across the thousand miles, In fact through the whole season I will see in my mind’s eye the Port Townsend Leader newsphoto taped to Christina Pacosz’ refrigerator, a photograph of two local highschool football players. These Redskins are very mean-looking young men. Chris has written in an angry hand above the photo, “What is missing from this picture?" And answered beneath it, “ First and foremost, these boys learned to kill what is soft and vulnerable and tender.” “But,” Chris continues in another colored ink, indicating that this is an ongoing breakfast conversation, “She doesn’t die easily.” And in still another ink: “ Football. War. Not much difference.” Most likely this would be my position on football if I didn’t have a football player for a son, if I hadn’t raised the boy who I swear was born an athlete. The similarity between war and football is real and cannot be denied. There is a large difference too — Tom Jay says, "It’s fun to hit other people with real strict rules. Good to know where you’re at.” — and it is in this understanding, mixed with a lot of hunches and intuition, that I, a mother, who is also a feminist and a poet, attempt to hold myself. Long ago I vowed I would not do what parents universally do to their children when they reach young adulthood: get on the other side of them. I trust my son. I miss him terribly in my life. I want to see what he has done to become a man of 21. I want to see him play in his Senior year, the culminating season of his whole school career. After all, I was there at the beginning and all through the middle. I want the pleasure and joy, his story, the intellectual and creative challenge. I want to give him support and to be around when this part of his life ends, and yes, to be an influence, or at least a reminder of what might happen next. I said I would do this when he left home at seventeen. Because of the way I live I can do this: leave, go to another state. I carry three cardboard boxes with me of writing, stories, journals, poems, anecdotes, quotes I’ve collected since his birth when his extremely advanced physical capabilities made him seem like a superboy. Perhaps I’ll write a book about football. Stereotype: I raised my son in the counter-culture. His first experience with war was when he was six, his sister, Shawn was three and we were demonstrating at Century Plaza in Los Angeles against Lyndon Johnson and his ongoing war in Asia. Helicoptors swarmed above us like flies with machine guns pointed at us. The crowd rioted from the armed agitation of the police and I vowed I’d never take my children to a large public demonstration again. I felt it was important to protect their psyches, I wanted them to grow out of love, not out of fear, reaction and panic. I raised him in a world in which the values were of non-competitiveness, nonviolence, non-materialism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-military, anti-war. I raised him on the road, in free schools, without television, without spankings or even discipline as it is normally understood, on food-stamps, on subsistence earnings, on welfare. The neighbors, when we had them, on Topanga Beach, and in Plainfield, Vermont and Mendocino, California, were dopesmoking, longhaired communards and outlaws, political radicals, artists, musicians, poets, farmers, vegetarians, dropouts, nature lovers and revolutionaries — people utterly burned out on this culture’s fascism and greed, epitomized most clearly in its war on Vietnam. The man who helped to raise him, from five to fifteen, his stepfather in all but the legal sense, had served time for refusing induction into the army and for possession of marijuana. Through all this, Danny's longing was to be straight. Like the father who had disappeared when he was so young, like his grandfather with money, his big cars, his beautiful property in Ramona. Two days after Danny graduated from Mendocino High School, probably one of the most counter-culturally influenced high schools in the country, his sister and I drove him to Salt Lake City. They took him immediately into the weight room and did some tests. They told me he was the strongest kid they’d ever taken off the streets, that is, one who had not had weight lifting training. They also said, “ Dan, your biggest problem is going to be in getting your Mean together. You were raised by a hippy mom.” Stereotype: the dumb jock. He has dyslexia. Five years at the University of Utah and he still can't read or write well. Tom Jay: “It is a very intellectual game. It appeals to the mind. Dummies don’t play it. They can’t." That football is intellectual is something else I will learn for myself, from watching the games, attending practices daily. That my son has great intelligence has always been obvious. Even so, because of his great difficulties in school, he has been given countless LQ. tests. He always scores in the superior level. Athletes, I have learned, are often dyslexic. Dyslexics, to put it in very general terms, are non-linear. The perception — some studies say the vision — is “three dimensional.” This is why syllables of words become switched, words are seen backwards, words from the line above are pulled down into the line being read. In fact, studies show that the mind of a dyslexic works at a greater capacity than the constrictive, restrictive linear mind, dyslexia being a greater synthesis of the right and left hemispheres of the brain: the creative, the dream, the unconscious is brought more fully into the world. And the “three dimensional," right-brain access often makes them great athletes. Evidently it is easier to run successful plays on a football field when the mind can hold the many components of a single play, when it can see the whole field in action at one time. For three seasons Danny played tight end. As he put it in an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune in August, “ I did catch two touchdown passes — against Boise State and New Mexico — and both were on busted plays. I was supposed to be blocking each time but I slipped off my man and there I was for the quarterback to spot.” It must have been the New Mexico game that an old lover of mine saw Danny play. He wrote me a postcard from Albuquerque — it was the first time I'd known in years of his whereabouts — raving about what a great tight end Danny is and hinting that he himself may have had some influence on the kid. By his fourth year, Utah had four tight ends and Danny was redshirted. (Kept on D ----------------------------------------------- anny's longing was to be straight. Like the father who had disappeared when he was so young, like his grandfather with money, his big cars, his beautiful property. scholarship but not allowed to play — it preserved his eligibility). The coach, Wayne Howard — Danny chose Utah over all the other schools that recruited him because he loved this man — resigned last spring. A new coach, a new position: offensive tackle. Danny went from 225 to 275 in a couple of months. (He has been six foot five since he was fifteen.) The new coach, Chuck Stobart, a Methodist from Ohio, is of the “old school.” There are disturbing rumors that he is converting to Mormonism. “The missionaries are visiting us regularly,” his wife will put it during the Wyoming game. At any rate, the team is required to pray together before and after each game. Midway through the season I will ask my son what he prays, and how, knowing I never taught him. “Well,” he tells me “ I remember what I learned in my philosophy class in high school. We hold hands in a large circle, the lights are turned out, we bow our heads and have silent prayer. I concentrate very hard, you know, like meditation. I imagine energy hitting me from Mendocino. I see energy coming at me from Florence like a huge ball of lightning. I see it coming at me from my Dad’s in Manhattan Beach. I see it coming from Port Townsend, even though I’ve never been there. I get bombarded with light shooting at me from all the places that love me and it fills me with powerful energy. Then, last of all, I see the light coming at me from the place the team is from. Las Vegas, San Diego, Texas. “Then I'm ready. I’m stoked. Nothing can stop me. I m ready to go out there. And play." Cheerleader Sept, j 1982 I’m at a rest stop near Twin City, Idaho. A high school football team arrives. They climb out of the bus to pee, stretch, a ten minute break from the long drive. This is Clinton St. Quarterly 5
the first week of school, they are on their way to their first game of the season. Malad High. I have just crossed a river named Malad. Another named Malheur. These names seem ominous to me, a serious hint of something dark. Still, there was the smell of alfalfa, the spill of little clouds onto the gold land of my rearview. Then the song as I pulled into the rest stop by the B52s. Living in your own / private Idaho / on the ground / like a wild potato. I could drive forever. But I have to stop myself, to pee, to let Moonlight out, to exercise. The boys are wearing white jerseys with large red numbers on their chests. The same colors as Utah, as Mendocino, as Vermont, as Malibu. My son's teams have always been red and white. The coaches, four of them, are young, with big bellies, dressed in identical red sweat suits. Moonlight has already made their acquaintance, is leaning, mooneyed, against a very fat boy, number 64. I do the exercises I have done since I was twelve and first became alarmed at how large my thighs were becoming. Sweat trickles beneath my bobbing breasts. Behind me I hear loud, forced guffaws. Forced as in peer pressure. Is the team laughing at me? It is possible, in fact likely. I am, no doubt, absurd looking. But I keep the ball in the air, I keep bending to the hot blowing wind, to a purple multi-blossomed bush of the desert so near my face, down and around a mosquito who keeps taking aim at my pink flesh but missing, as I tack and plea, bounce and bob, do my own private cheer to the lone gull from home standing on one foot facing me on the visitor’s gravel: Give me an Ml Give me an A! Give me an L-A-D! whatdaya have, lads?MALAD! And let me tell ya, Mom. That’s BAD! I hear the boys behind me boarding the bus, leaving. The B52s Idaho-Potato punk song wafting back from the Interstate. used to soy to him, "Donny, if the American flag means anything, it means I have the right not to stand for it." Back in the van I study the map for Malad. An old Oldsmobile convertible painted dull silver pulls up behind me. The couple in front looks hot, exhausted. There are three little boys in the back seat. Even the one year old has a butch haircut. The man turns and wacks the oldest upside the head. As the screaming goes on I remember Danny at three, just before I left his father. George had snuck him to the barbershop and had his thick blond curls shaved off. When I went in to check him that night after he’d gone to sleep, the bristly stickers left on his head made me nauseous. It was the first time I didn’t want to kiss him. But, of course, I did. Looking For A Football Team September 4 Mid Saturday afternoon The girl behind the football dorm desk says the whole team went to the Hilton last night, that she thinks there’s a reception there for them this afternoon. So I drive back down into the city, wondering if it's okay if I show up. I wouldn't want to make him nervous before the first game. Running around the Hilton. How funny the place seems to me. So preposterous somehow, so plastic and artificial. “ I’m looking for a football team!” Finally the cute car attendent tells me they were checked in for the night. “ But I think they’re gone now. We were given orders to tell no one, to let no one in. They brought them here to keep them away from all outside influences, girlfriends, wives, media.” This seems much more logical to me than what the girl at Austin Hall said. But what an expense . . . to bring the whole team down ten blocks to the Hilton Hotel just to keep them away from loved ones. And how old fashioned. I decide since I’m here to check out The Room At The Top. In the elevator, I go the twelve flights with a huge fat drunk silver-haired rich-looking sixty year old stereotypic businessman with a Southern drawl, laughing too loud, too excited — that horny-man-laugh so devoid of emotion — and a very young, beautiful Oriental prostitute. G am e t im e — U tah vs. M o n ta n a Ear ly even ing The crowd is shocking. Suddenly, twenty eight thousand people. I’ve been alone on the road for so long. The sense of absurdity as I find my seat, right in the center of everything — Danny has left me a ticket at will call — of having left my whole life, of having driven a thousand miles to get to this football game. The women around me all look like prostitutes, like the woman in the elevator: the false eyelashes, the black eyeliner, the breasts up to the chin, the gaudy colors, the high fashion, the perfumes (oh, the smells!), the high heels, clickety-click- click up and down the cement stadium steps. Then I remember that this is how women in Utah look. They dress up like whores, their men like tricks and pimps, to go to Church. For the first time it occurs^ to me that the woman in the e le va td r 'tha ^ not have been a prostitute, that K is 'S^ her behavior was in fact t y p i c a i ' j ^ a ^ couple behavior, I I feel totally out of place, totally conspicuous. The faded rags I’m wearing. Already something in me wants to sell out, blend in, get my hair cut like their’s, use a little eyeliner, no, a lot of eyeliner. I tell myself I’m just spaced from the long drive, the dislocation, the outrageously beautiful sun setting right in my eyes, the loss of self in the 28,000, who suddenly rise en masse singing The Star Spangled Banner. The Star Spangled Banner! Shit! I forgot all about this. It’s been five years since I last had to refuse to stand for the flag, probably the Sports Award Banquet when the Mendocino American Legion bestowed upon Danny the Athlete Scholar Award. Or was it his graduation? Breaking out in a sweat, I stand my ground, that is, I keep sitting, a dwarfed mouse in the fashionably risen bodies all gloriously belting out the patriotic song. I grow certain that a few people behind me, particularly one man at my right shoulder, is singing louder and louder, directly into my ear, for my unbelievable gall, my insult. I feel sorry, fragile, vulnerable, teary. I remember what I used to say to Danny — the poor kid, years of football and basketball games in our small towns and his mom always refused to stand for the flag — I used to say to him, “ Danny, if the American flag means anything, it means I have the right not to stand for it.” It’s one of the few things he never complained of me about. He was there when I took the vow, in Arlington Cemetery during the Vietnam War when so many boys, my brothers, Vietnamese and Americans, were killing and being killed in its name. And there they are! A hundred red and white football players charging the field! Danny! Bounding out, I spot him instantly, he’s 64, breaking from the mass. I’d recognize him anywhere, just as if I’d fixed him dinner tonight, as if it hasn’t been nine months since Christmas when I saw him last, as if he wasn’t one of a hundred identical costumed and hooded figures way down there and I just one of 28,000. Oh, he’s so beautiful! Such great spirit he has! Swinging those thick arms out in front of him. Running. Warming up. Hugging 65. Kick-off! The announcer bellows: "Monroe catches the ball at the four, cuts to the left side-line, dodges the final Bobcat midfield and races into the endzone. ” Touchdown! The first play of the first game! 96 yards! No one can quite believe it. Then 28,000 people go crazy. The team goes crazy. Laughter flying with the perfume and aftershave. Number 65 jumps into Danny’s arms, his huge feet kicking in the air, like a bride. Danny carrying 65 around the field just like he’s a bride! The crowd out of its mind. I suddenly recall what my fellow poet, and a former high school football player, Tom Jay told me. “There was this other middle guard in the league, a Mexican guy, who was as well known as I was. We were written up a lot in the L. A. Times, the Valley papers. We weighed the same, our statistics were similar, we were middle guards, finally the game came. We were sofineifemalfefie^^ struggle, M t e ^ W d ^ m f e ^ s l t t e e n W p ^ W r e ’d ^ ^ m ' l i B o Je^ach emotionalism, in kind and degree, so poignant and large that I will witness nearly daily for the next five months. There will be times when I will be embarrassed by the display of so much raw emotion. The frequent tears, the frequent open articulation of love and concern from one young man to another, and to others, male and female, not on the team, is hardly the stereotype of the musclebound, out-of-touch-with-the- emotions-He-man football player. Now I’m back into the game, Danny’s all I care about. For watching him, I miss major plays. Everyone yelling. Don’t know what’s going on. He’s on the offensive line. Don’t really know what that means. Can’t tell if he’s doing good. I’ll learn. Ha! I’m going to learn football! The deep orange glow of the desert mountains. The Oquirrh’s. So many people. A stadium full of hookers. So many of them pregnant. I remember the night before Danny was born, I went to my brother’s football game in Ramona. I was too huge to describe. Somebody gasped, “What are you doing here?” I had by that time just given up on his ever coming. I’d accepted that I was going to walk around with a giant football for a belly for the rest of my life. After the game, some friends came home with us. I went into the bedroom, the guys started playing poker, my water broke, George and I swam down that mountain to the hospital, my water flooding the back seat of the car. Ramona High won the game that night. I think my brother Clarke was a quarterback. Or was it a fullback? I have to learn these things. Half time. 10-6. Danny running off the field. Turning around, running back to 73. They run off together, talking. 73: So that’s Gino. His roommate. Gene Knic- krem. Offensive Tackle. I thought Danny said he was a guard. Third quarter. My old problem: I’m too much the visual. I get caught in people’s auras, get stuck, can’t get out, get back to myself. Two rows in front of me is an amazing looking couple, again, in their mode of behavior with each other, the prostitute-pimp construct. She is very beautiful, with long silky white-yellow hair, painted nails, black lashes at half-mast. He’s 60 at least, maybe 70. He’s dressed more silky than she. She’s in the act of seducing him the whole game. He watches the game (like a man), she watches him (like a woman). I watch the game, my son bent to the line, from behind her red gleaming pouty mouth, her flaring nostrils, her black lashed stare at him. She’syoung. He’s rich. He’s pretending to be bored, she’s about to come. I’ve never seen men and women act this way to each other except in the movies. What on earth do they want from each other? Suddenly Montana is leading 12-10! The scoreboard, a marvel of electronic wizardry, declares "The Bobcats could upset the heavily favored Utes if they don’t get it together." Fourth quarter. 16-12, Utes. Fourth down goal for Montana. They don’t make it. A blue and gold player slamming his head into the turf. How I can’t help but hurt for him. Hot beginning, hot ending, final score: 30-12. Utah Utah Utah! Coaches Show Septembers “ C’mon Mom. Every Sunday at three is Coaches Show.” His grin is so large. “Yeah,” one off the guys says. “ Dan’s the star. They usually ask him to be on it.” “Ah, shut up!” Danny says, hitting him. The announcer is saying to coach Stobart, “ I’ve never heard of a situation like this. First play of the season, a touchdown.” I try to concentrate but don’t do well. I just want to look at all of them. Danny and I can’t quit grinning at each other. D-------- anny sits in the-passenger seat Gino on my bed. What a sight! Two of the largest men in the world, they look like a different species. After the show I can tell him all about my trip and what happened yesterday, how I tried to go to the Sun on Friday night when I pulled into town. “You mean the gay bar?” I explain that and about the Hilton. He’s laughing at me. He seems so mature, so high and happy somehow. He seems almost proud of me. Here’s the mother I’ve been trying to tell everyone about and you haven’t believed me. Now you’ll see. For last Christmas I gave him and his sister large photo albums of their lives, from pregnancy to the present. Danny kept saying, “ send me some pictures, Mom, so I can show Sandra my background. Her father flew jets over Vietnam. I tell her I was raised a hippy, how anti-Vietnam you were. She doesn’t believe me. Send pictures!” “That was an awesome photo album you gave Dan for Christmas,” Gino says when we meet, a voice so low you want to stoop down and scoop it up for him. I react to awesome in the way I’d use the word, awesome is in fact exactly what I meant it to be, but )then I remember this is a favorite word of my teenage punk nieces in Oregon. Awesome. It means something a little like groovy. I keep asking questions about what they did at the Hilton. I keep thinking about that prostitute, if in fact she was one. “We saw Patton." "Patton, the movie? “Yeah, Stobart said Patton will make us want to win no matter what.” I begin to go off on one of my rambles. “ Do you remember Nancy Patton? She was Patton’s niece.” Nancy places high on Danny’s list of Mom’s Craziest Friends. “The black guys call you Mendocino Mama. They want to know if you have any mindbenders with you.” Practice September 13 Clapping! All of them! Yelling! 6 Clinton St. Quarterly
Coming together like prayer. So many nales, the deep moan-chant from their hundred throats, spread out in a cross, my son at the center, running hard in place falling, counting, highpitched yells. Screaming like Indian women for their dead, like Ute women keening . . . (“They used to be called the Redskins, but the Indians protested.” ) Counting. Clapping. Running backwards . . . Army, like soldiers for their dead . . . Helmets. Like astronauts. Like astronauts on the moon . . . It’s not that he’s slow. It’s his enormous form taking up so much space. His lope. A sort of long-taking stride, a lazy graceful landing. He never was afraid of falling. “Come on Doubiago!” A voice down there explodes, up, hitting me in the heart, echoes around the cement stadium. “Come on Doubiago!” as they hit. Shatter of shoulder pads. Love It’s raining hard by the time practice is over. “Mom, wait!” As I turn back to him, rain and sweat pouring off him, enormous in the uniform, making me feel dwarfed, a little like a Catholic school girl, “Give me and Gino a ride back to the gym, will you?” I notice four or five guys behind him doing something like crawl-and- facedowns the length of the field. They run ten yards, then fall flat on their faces and bellies, completely prostrate, then jump back up, run the next ten yards, crash to the ground again. A coach is walking alongside of them in the pouring rain. It looks a little unbelievable. Are they really going the whole length of the field? “They had penalties in the game. They’re called U-Reminders." We all climb into my little Psyche. Moonlight, left in the van, is delighted. After greeting them, he scrunches into my sleeping bag in the back behind the boxes of writing, looking ahead eagerly, tongue wagging. Danny sits in the passenger seat, Gino on my bed. What a sight! Two of the largest men in the world, they look like a different species. Beautiful smell of sweat and rain. My incense and wine smells. In my rearview I see Gino pick up one of my three “Son” pillows, the one that has the photograph of Danny at 16 during a Mendocino homecoming game. My sister made that one. The picture appeared on the front page of the Mendocino Beacon. Midgame they changed his position so he had to change his number. So there he is shirtless in his shoulder pads, golden curls all down his neck and eyes, golden belly button, so much slimmer, so boyish, his hair long, I can still hear the girls going out of their minds, catcalling and whistling, and the cypress and sea waving behind him, Mendocino High, surely the most beautiful football field in the world. The pillow looks small in Gino’s hands. He doesn’t say anything. Danny doesn’t seem embarrassed by me now as he was in high school. How much more mature he seems. Self-confident. As I drive up the hill to the Special Events Center, feeling their weight on Psyche’s engine, I reach for the other pillow. “ Remember this?” He takes it in his hands. “Yeah. Jan made it for me." It’s a crocheted pillow, red and white, and it says in the weave AMERICAN PRO #52. Jan was the sister of poet Bill Root, my age. Danny was 15, Jan was 17. She wanted to get married. I hitchhiked to Elk to get him rubbers, so afraid they'd get pregnant. After thinking about it for awhile I gave my permission. What better way at 15 to get educated, I realized, than to get married! A good education. He broke with her a few weeks after I said okay. I always suspected his basketball coach put him up to it. What I love most about the pillow is that it’s stuffed with her used panty hose. The third pililow is a secret, what it’s made of, what it’s stuffed with. As the Indians know, if you give away all your secrets, you lose your power. “ Mom, there’s this guy on the team, he’s the other tackle, he wants you to do his horoscope. I told him you would.” “ Really?” “Yeah, he’s a Libra too, like me. He has the same birthday as Coach McBride. He’s a great guy except for one thing. He’s real prejudiced. He’s German. His mom was born in Germany.” In the back, Gino chuckles, sneeringly. When we pull up at the Special Events Center Danny gestures to one of the wet tired players from out of the swarm. Huge grin, showering rain and sweat, golden curls dripping into his eyes, helmet under his arms. Alex Gerke, 6:05 a.m., October 14, 1961, Pasadena, California. What a smile, what a Venus smile. I remember that I did the 1979 team's chart. Ruled by Venus. I couldn’t figure out what kind of football team would be ruled by Venus. Love, comfort, and beauty? “The defensive linemen of Texas were sucking for air.” Dan Doubiago, Utah offensive lineman The Salt Lake City Tribune, 9/20/82 Texas Sucking for Air When you drive 80 yards you’re really beat. It takes it out of you. We were on their 20 yard line, humidity and heat like a sauna, when we looked into their faces. That’s when I saw they were sucking for air. We were exhausted too, but it was Gerke who started it, squealing and screeching and pointing. We looked around and knew what we were going to do and we were all screaming, jumping up and down, pointing at them, howling. They freaked, their coaches on the sidelines freaked, trying to figure out what was up. Very next play we got the touchdown. NFLDraft April 26,1983 My birthday. I’m dreaming Danny is a small blond man with a butch haircut. He’s not a football player. He’s just a very interesting young man. I wake with the D-------- an was 15, Jan was 17. She wanted to get married. I hitchhiked to Elkto get him rubbers, so afraidthey'dget pregnant. urgency to call and tell him: “ Danny, you don’t have to be a football player.” Have I ever made this clear to him? I’m sleeping in my van outside my sister’s house in Ashland, Oregon. I climb out, climb the stairs and dial his number. The paper had said he'd go in the third or fourth round. When I reach him, he says: “ Mom! That’s a terrible dream. Go back out in the van and dream another one. And don’t say ‘fuck,’ you’re hooked up to the microphones and everyone in this room can hear you.” Then he wished me a happy birthday and apologized for not sending me anything. Later in the day when I called to see how it was going he did something gross. “The newsmen talked me into it. I swallowed a goldfish live." “ Danny! that is gross. What about the poor goldfish?” “Oh, it doesn’t hurt them. They’re digested instantly.” The song the orchestra plays at draft headquarters in the Sheraton Grand Ballroom in New York City. “The Day Belongs To You.” Free Agent April 27,1983 He signed with the Seattle Seahawks! I can't believe how excited I am that he’ll be in Washington, how much he’ll love it there, how much I’ll love it with him there. His agent convinced him, though there were fifteen other teams after him and the second one was the L.A. Raiders — L.A., where he’s wanted to play pro ball all his life — that he should sign with Seattle. They have a new coach, Chuck Knox, they offered him the most money, they’re trying to build their offensive line. In the past 24 hours he flew twice to Seattle! Mothers' Day I got a huge bouquet of flowers today! The card says, “Happy Mother’s Day, Love, The Seattle Seahawks.” Troublesome mom August 9 I wrote Chuck Knox a letter. I thanked him for the beautiful bouquet of flowers and told him he’d made a terrible mistake in cutting my son. I told him all the ways he’s a great football player. I said it was immoral of him to sign so many guys to one position (20 for Danny’s) so they can’t be signed by other teams. When I told Danny I had done this, after three starts, knowing I was going to be taken as a fool, he said “Mom, you can’t do things like that. They’ll blackball me for having a troublesome mom.” Where now? August 23 Danny is in Los Angeles with his agent. His spirits seem high. It seems he’ll get signed somewhere — pertiaps a USFL team. He’s working out, staying in shape — I think of driving down. Has Any Woman Ever Written About Her Son? I raised my son during the ’70s feminist revolution and in the midst of it, in Plain- field, Vermont and in Albion on the Mendocino Coast, both strong feminist centers. Yet for all the wealth of material on the subject of feminism, I could find nothing on raising a boy from a feminist perspective. In fact, in our two towns, it was the policy of separatists to rid themselves of their sons, an issue that to this day makes me, to use a girlhood expression, see red. Beyond the first issue of the personal loss for each boy, the tactic always struck me as creating the enemy in aiding and abetting it with the one sacred, karmically unbargainable force, one’s child. The theory, prominent among some separatists, that human males are inately evil — that is, the aggression that leads to the oppression of all other species derives from the male XY chromosome factor — has always struck me as preposterous. I birthed and then raised both a male and a female and through this was witness (as all parents are if they are open to it) to just how culturally programmed the male/female roles are. Males are no more aggressive than females, we just expect them to be so. We freak to the depths of our own programming if our boy-child is too passive, our girl-child too aggressive. The psychological punishment inflicted upon anyone who transgresses these roles in society is as great as any in our culture. In childhood, in our culture at any rate, the biggest trauma after the initial confrontation with one's mortality, is finding gender identity. The boy, in comparison to the girl, has double trouble. He must differentiate completely from his mother. He must pull back, withdraw, learn to be like the distant, probably absent father. At all costs he must not be like her. He is encouraged to feel distaste for her. Thus we have the “ natural” origins of mother hate, of woman hate, of the male’s embrace of everything opposite the mother: war, mechanism, mastery, control, abstraction, the intellectual propensity toward anti-matter (matter from mater, that is, mother). It is time we mothers began to discuss the raising of boys. The issue is at the heart of our tragedy as a culture. It was the birth of my son that radicalized me, that forever changed me. It is one of the great mysteries to me why this is not universally true. I take the definition of parenting to be the work of protecting and nourishing the immanence with which the child is born, the preserving of the genius, that is the uniqueness of the individual against the onslaught of fascistic culture, to hopefully allow the child to reach adulthood still in touch with some of its true self, and even of the other world. We abandon our children en masse at puberty. At their birth we start programming ourselves to do this. (How often it is said of the infant, Oh god, just wait until the little hellraiser, the honey, is a teenager.) By young adulthood, they, as we were, are orphans. We are always having to begin anew. Waves and waves of us, each North American generation. We have no roots, no guides, no role models, no communities, no traditions of real love. No families. And so we are afraid. We are sick. We are cowards in our collective flights from true energy. We are, still, Puritans. We must learn to find and use the courage we each know from the act of conceiving children. In this we are automatically, instinctively wise, experienced in all the things the culture denies. Son The bullet went through me, lodged beneath my heart, swelled and grew until the birth was a man I rode into the bloodstained hands of the world that laid him on my belly, the prairie, the sea. I seek myself in him. I know myself in him. He is me, in another time, in a male body. I am not being metaphorical or poetic here. It is, very simply, true. He is my child, he came out of my body. More true, he is the love act personified, the union of his father and me . . . the one part of the union that can never be undone, dissolved. In my son’s body I have the sense that my body dominates, as I think I see in our daughter the father’s domination. In my son’s body I see myself gloriously male, all my cells given over to the phenomenon. When I look at him I can feel my cells being fulfilled, that part of me I keep so hidden from being acknowledged, released to the world. His huge hairy legs are my huge hairy legs, allowed to be just that, huge, muscular, with no shame or reluctance or shyness or compromise or other vision that have made mine so pleasingly female. Over the years, I’ve noted that most men I’ve known in the subculture seem to have special relationships with their mothers. I choose men in whom the mother is dominant, the bullshit killer machismo subdued. The most evolved men, it exclaims in my first journal, were raised by single women. This was greatly contrary to everything believed at the time; i.e., divorce will destroy the child, particularly the boy-child who will be without a role model. On the other hand, I now find it as shocking as anything I can think of in our culture that so many men let go of their children, have little or no part in raising them. Men of the counterculture are particularly guilty of this, a syndrome that is in part the twisted effort to maintain personal immanence, to not get sucked into the establishment’s machine. A university football coach, unsuccessfully trying to recruit my son, said to me, in all seriousness: “The only thing I can think of that is greater than the magnitude and profundity of a football game is a woman in labor.” Actually, I can think of something in the male world that matches the magnitude and profundity of a woman in labor, which can perhaps best be summed up in the popular graffiti: Waris Male Menstrual Envy. ” Interestingly, many of my male friends have encouraged me to write this, while I detect in my women friends uneasiness, confusion, even disapproval. There is already so much given to the male phenomenon, they are afraid I will just add more energy to it. They don’t trust me, or anyone, to speak of these things. I don’t trust myself either. Am I just being one of those “ typical” mothers who won’t let her son go? I remember my own mother “ practicing” to let go of us. Women know so much more than they can speak of. Women’s lives are the real subculture. Long ago they grew accustomed to having their deepest convictions, their deepest realities trashed — ignored, denied, ridiculed or beaten out of them. Long ago their love for men, their fathers, brothers, lovers and sons, was shown to be worthless, of no potency in the larger world. But from this vast cultural sub-pool of betrayed energy and of broken hearts, the secrets have become the Sacred. And in this, have become the explosives of the coming Revolution. Of course, the main reason I’ve written this is because I’m an old-fashioned mother. I love my son. I love my daughter. I support them, I celebrate their first adventures out into the big world. I don’t want them to let the culture trash me. It would not be good for them. Nor for me. I still have a lot to teach them. And I want and need, desperately, access to them and their new worlds, for them to teach me. What other hope is there? ■ Sharon Doubiago is a “poet of America” currently residing in Port Townsend. Her epic poem, Hard Country, was published in 1982 by West End Press. Clinton St. Quarterly 7
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