The Professor and Other Writings (24 page)

We had entered a new and somewhat spongiform reality. And thus we dallied, on the way to supper, taking it all in: the brand-new plastic seats and pristine industrial carpeting, the businessmen carrying garment bags, the See's chocolate kiosk. At a certain point, as if yielding to yet another King-of-the-Fairies fancy, Keith took me by the arm and plopped me down in a row of seats in front of a large wall panel composed of randomly pulsing colored lights. The panel was the size of a small billboard and the lights, several hundred of them, flashed on and off like bulbs blinking on an old-fashioned switchboard. The thing appeared to be a high-tech artwork of some kind.
Whatever.
(As one's students are wont to say.) The light patterns were psychedelic and I was soon mesmerized. Keith sat down next to me and, as always, smiling agreeably, began watching, too.

After a while (five minutes? fifteen minutes? an hour?) he leaned over, took hold of both my arms, and placed them carefully and symmetrically on the armrests of my seat. Almost as soon as he touched them, the appendages in question began to feel more like flippers than arms: floppy, uncanny, and still at least a million years away
from evolving anything useful like hands, let alone fingernails or opposable thumbs. Getting a manicure would have been impossible. The lights went on blinking hypnotically. He was now going to do something amazing, Keith said—if I trusted him, that was, and he thought by this point I did. The amazing “something,” it turned out, would involve the all-important alpha waves—mine and his, mysteriously working together. Once he counted down from ten, he said, I would no longer be able to lift my arms up from the armrests or my feet up from the floor. It would be as if
the world's strongest glue were holding them down. I would not be able to
BUDGE. I couldn't wait; it sounded fantastic.

And in turn, hardly had the promised countdown begun than I felt myself yield, as much to the magical aura Keith seemed to diffuse around him as to the hypnotic suggestion (utterly irresistible) in his voice. By the time he reached “one” I was thoroughly petrified: stiff, euphoric, arms stuck to the armrests, my feet grafted to the floor. I resembled an Egyptian tomb effigy, some butch lady-pharoah immobilized on her massive throne. I had that total Hatshepsut thing going on. The only items missing were the square headdress and false beard.

The sensation of paralysis was dizzyingly pleasurable. Millennia seemed to pass. Yet like a cosmic hum the pleasure continued. Periodically, Keith and I gazed down together at my motionless hands and feet and giggled conspiratorially. Every now and then I'd try to wiggle a digit—unsuccessfully—and we'd giggle some more. As the hung-over dharma-diarist would put it the next day:

Take that, boring dodos
. In the end Keith must have released me from my position and helped me up; for my next memory is of the two of us in the restaurant, drinking wine and gobbling down huge forkfuls of orange Coho salmon and baked potato over candlelight. I remember marveling to myself—as if I'd entered the realm of Heideggerian
Dasein—this is the most exquisite baked potato I have ever eaten.
The butter pat, the sour cream, the freeze-dried chives: every luscious explosion on the palate seemed a new ontological token, a guarantor of Absolute Being.

At the same time, as a student of shamanistic encounters, I knew I had been absorbed into Baked Potato–ness—interpolated into the Absolute—for a reason. Shortly after we had finished and our plates had been whisked away, I was hardly surprised when my wizard-companion, now rakishly sucking on his corncob pipe, articulated the Deeper Purpose of Everything with a charming, half-playful grin.
Would I like to go back with him to his hotel room for more wine and pot? He liked me oh so much; he was getting off on imagining how it all was being in my shoes. It would be such a great honor for him; he cared for me—me Terry—so very much.
For a moment I was jubilant. I loved his gentle Brother Sun–Sister Moon face, his curls, and his pinkness—everything in fact about him. I felt I had known him forever, as if he had given birth to me in some primal act of couvade, like one of those tender androgynous male mothers in Ursula K. Le Guin's
Left Hand of Darkness
. A great singing began. He was beautiful—as rich and miraculous and fruit-bearing as a woman. I was tempted.

Yet at the same time, in some odd reflexive fashion, I also knew that I had to decline. I knew he would be kind about it. He was a Loving not a Savage God. He looked rueful for a second then gave me a big smile and didn't press me further. And I, with my usual stunned-ox obliviousness—the certainty that I had to refuse being unrelieved, in the moment, by any real understanding of why I was doing it—was happy enough to shrink politely back into my lovely, lonely, calcareous shell:

A deep enema, I should perhaps have written, for though we parted soon enough—regretfully on both sides—this was hardly the end of the story. With a courtly wave Keith vanished back into the alternative dimension from which he'd come. In a trice Karen had suddenly rematerialized and as if rounding up a lost sheep, began walking me back to the parking garage. I told her what had happened in a sort of glossolaliac loon-burst. (I was still fairly druggy.) I'm sure I must have sounded completely insane, as if I'd been chloroformed and stuffed in a car trunk for two hours and yet claimed to have found the experience more delightful than anything that had ever happened to me. Karen was plainly disturbed—both by my story and my strange gabby-glorified state. She tut-tutted audibly, looked suspiciously around in the back seat before unlocking either of the car doors, and to my dismay, said she found it “terrifying” that someone with Keith's “mystical power” was wandering around incognito in the Sea-Tac airport. It reminded her, she said, of those archdevils, the Jesuits. Was I sure he'd been a wholly benign presence? I remonstrated indignantly until I beat her down and made her change her tune. Okay, she said—well, maybe he
was
a good spirit, after all, a version perhaps of the Alchemical Androgyne, like that character in Cocteau's
Euridice
? Eutebus? Some name like that. It was possible, anyway. Placated for the time being by this hypothesis, I continued to rave about Keith and his marvelous doings almost all the way home, until I finally conked out, there in the passenger seat—mushroom tights askew and head lolling forward, like that of a Hogarthian wastrel after a debauch.

The denouement was swift and crushing, though again I didn't grasp the finer points for some time. Various people wanted to know how the Dog Food Fellowship interview had gone and I was happy to tell them—including one of my fellow students, a poufy-haired, platform-heeled gay guy named Arthur, who, as it happened, was also competing for graduate fellowships. The personal situation, as I should have seen, was potentially flammable: Arthur was a moody disco-queen in the making (though none of us knew it at the time;
Saturday Night Fever
was not to be released until 1977) and I was clearly the more successful young scholar. Yet blind to the possibility that Arthur might be less than pleased by my visionary adventures, I had babbled on excitedly about Keith and the airport and the dope, the Sufi parable, the blinking lights, and the sheer sublimity of it all. The treacherous Arthur—but who on earth could blame him?—at once told one of our professors, a decent, upright, uptight fellow named Fred, who promptly summoned me into his office for interrogation.

At this point the whole affair seemed to morph into one of those sinister varsity “coming of age” dramas in which everyone ends up getting betrayed, committing suicide, or joining a nunnery:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,
or
A Separate Peace,
perhaps, or better yet, Donna Tartt's scabrous
Secret History.
Fred wasted no time: he asked me point blank about the hash-smoking and the hypnosis business. Had Keith
handed me a marijuana cigarette
? I was as stunningly forthright in response as I was about everything in those days. For what had I to be ashamed of? It had been an Utterly Transcendent Experience. Keith was totally cool—Fred wouldn't know about
that,
obviously—and besides what was the fuss about? It was 1975, after all.

Fred was clearly still worried, however, and asked me if I wanted him to follow up in some way with the Dog Food Foundation. The whole thing remained highly irregular. Absolutely not: I was fairly squittering with self-righteousness by this point.
But what if I didn't get a fellowship because of the way Keith had handled things?
Whether I
got a Dog Food Fellowship didn't matter, I replied in a huff; the point had been the encounter itself.
That's fine for you,
Fred persisted,
but what about other candidates, any of whom might have gone in your stead and had a more conventional, possibly fellowship-winning experience?
I didn't care: Fate had not ordained it thus. Outraged by his tired old busybody ways I demanded that Fred definitely
not
pursue the matter officially—a demand to which he reluctantly acceded. I was stern—like a Pope with intellectual leanings, laying down a particularly blood-chilling encyclical.

I didn't get a Dog Food Fellowship. A letter informing me came a few weeks after the talk with Fred. While I sometimes wondered what Keith had said about me in his report—for I found that even though no prize was to be mine I had been “named to the Honorable Mention List of Applicants”—I was not especially upset. I figured that Keith, no-bullshit ace-guy that he was, had probably told the Dog Food Foundation about my lesbianism—maybe even said that I'd announced it during the interview. (
Very courageously
, I now thought.) The fellowship committee—no doubt a bastion of prejudice and hypocrisy—had likely repulsed my application for that reason.
Pfah!
When Fred and my other professors tried, gingerly, to commiserate with me over my lack of success, I was scornful; all I would say was I had revealed a piece of possibly incriminating “personal” information during the interview and that it had obviously been used against me by some hostile and primitive moron.

But it was true I didn't really care. My own weird little projects, like the now-chaste affair with Karen, went on afoot; my graduate school plans seemed unaffected. For no particular reason other than I was curious about a part of the country I had never seen (though in truth I hadn't actually seen
any
part of the country besides the West Coast at that point) I had decided to go to one of the big Midwestern state schools for my Ph.D. I was alone in this somewhat whimsical decision: neither of my divorced parents, British expatriates both, had
gone to college; nor had either of them any knowledge of American universities. I hardly saw them, anyway. I hadn't been back to San Diego for over a year. (I wouldn't go back for another year either.) Through all of this period my mother was largely immersed in her own concerns (depressive-fractious husband, sociopath stepson); my ever-distant father, now married to his third wife, remained conspicuously aloof whenever the question of my educational career came up. To judge by his few, and grudging, comments on the matter, he seemed to resent the fact I had academic ambitions at all. When I'd graduated from high school, he had wanted me to get a secretarial job and take night classes at the local junior college. Though presumably well off—he was a highly skilled aeronautical engineer—he had seen fit not to fund any part of my higher education. It wasn't part of the divorce settlement.

So that was the lay of the land, parent-wise. I was used to it, though, and even more used to winning grants and scholarships—which I proceeded to do in short order. The Dog Food decision was moot in the end: when it came time to decide
which
big Midwestern school—and they all seemed pretty interchangeable to me—I had my choice of fellowships and funding packages. It was simply a matter of pinning the tail on the donkey. I opted for the one that offered me the best stipend. Reinforcing my decision: One of the radical feminist magazines I doted on was published in the city in which the school was located; that too, seemed a promising augury. Between the financial aid I was to receive and the fact I knew I would still be able to get food stamps—I had drawn them all through college (
thank you, Lyndon Baines Johnson!
)—I believed I was indeed pretty well set up. A month or so after my college graduation—a ceremony ungraced, apart from Karen, by friend or family member—I left for the heartland and the unseen institution, selected more or less at random, on my way to what seemed to me a delightfully cushy berth in another universe entirely.

Yet though I'd left the scene, the fellowship imbroglio continued
to sputter on. Someone wrote to me later that fall (Karen? Davy?) to say everybody was talking about it: amid a swirl of rumors, the Dog Food Foundation had abruptly relieved Keith, my quondam interviewer, of his position as its regional representative. He was in official disgrace. I too was in some sort of disgrace-by-association, it seemed; the story now was I hadn't received a fellowship because the people in charge thought I had shown appalling bad judgment. Arthur was apparently exultant. I was horrified: someone higher up than Arthur—some malicious
professor
, I feared—had obviously snitched in turn.