Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  An interest in genetics is complicated when you wonder how five children could differ so widely from one another in character: John as the eldest son was stuck with being responsible, reliable, a leader, an Eagle Scout, though possessed of a hot temper. Once in high school he was having a fight with a star athlete and I thought I might have to back him up. The other guy, Pinky by name, was using his fists but John slapped him silly with open hands. When John was a senior in high school and I was a sophomore we both started on first-team football though neither of us was very coordinated. We made up for it with what is euphemistically called “rough play” in the Midwest where one Big Ten announcer used to refer to it as “good ole smash-mouth football.” It is this sodden and violent tradition that is falsely thought to build character. Later at Michigan State I saw bar fights between these football behemoths that would have sent Mike Tyson wisely running for cover. Football is war without guns.

  About the time my brother became an Eagle Scout I was drummed out of the Boy Scout tribe for general mayhem. I didn’t want to march or learn how to tie complicated knots or be yelled at by leaders for improperly folding the American flag. The Boy Scout crusade against gays is especially amusing. At one wretched camp three boys were sitting outside a tent waiting their turn for a blow job from a boy with a talent in that direction.

  Judith was irascible, quarrelsome with our mother who insisted on braiding her hair before school, a Swedish tradition. Judy was very boyish and liked working in our huge garden with our father. When she got into her teens she was equally devoted to art, literature, and her somewhat private religion which didn’t exactly put the brakes on her behavior. She wrote me a card from a camp in Wisconsin where she was a counselor announcing that she had won the contest for speed-drinking a six-pack of beer.

  I had moved out before Mary and David entered their teens. Mary was by far the most graceful and gentle member of the family. She had an unobtrusive intelligence and sharpish sense of humor. David, like me, had problems learning how to skip, tie his shoes, or ride a bicycle. He learned to read in his third year and by kindergarten a test said he read on the level of a university graduate student. He was a little round boy of six or so when my parents gave him Ferguson’s scholarly history of the Revolutionary War, which he hugged to his chest and said, “I’ve always wanted this book.” By the time he was five he could beat everyone in the family at Scrabble and it was about this time that we gave him a nickel and he learned his multiplication tables from 1 to 25 in a half hour. Mary and David graduated from Kalamazoo College, and David went on to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for graduate school.

  So much for family, the raising of young who left the nest in reasonably good mental condition except myself. Not quite a truly black sheep but close. When I think of early heroes such as Rimbaud, Richard Wright, Dostoyevsky, Walt Whitman, I am less surprised at my behavior at the time. Books can be so utterly powerful to someone quite vulnerable in their teens, the eyes clouded with hormones, and a wistful heart looking for an artistic Eden far from the shovel and hoe, the locker room slugfests, the urge to find a girl other than your sister who actually reads books. And on a mundane level there was a small farmhouse on a hill between my grandparents’ farmhouse and the village of Barrytown where a woman lived who had published a story in Collier’s magazine, instilling in me so early the banal mystery that a person could write something that appeared before the great world and, according to my parents, get paid enough to afford a modest farmhouse on a hill.

  There are some days when your consciousness isn’t able to “access,” to use a contemporary word, to any viable degree. At times the past lives in a region where “whirl is king” as Aristophanes would have it. And further, if you could write an entire memoir within a single day, say every day for seven days without cheating, each day’s work might be quite different in nature. Visual memory arrives first, then sounds, the smell, the fragility of touch and taste. And the brain is perfectly capable of creating memories that didn’t happen at all, given certain suggestive prodding. In my early twenties as a manual laborer on an experimental horticulture farm I used to alleviate boredom by “mentally” listening to Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, one of my favorite pieces of music at the time, which went well with everything from picking apples to laying out irrigation pipe. I’m sure that there’s a scientific explanation for this though for a poet the science is doomed to be less interesting than the experience. Surprisingly, playing the music in my memory lasted about the same time it did on record.

  The burgeoning of early sexuality can be jarring in memory. Wet bathing suits. Wet wood of dock, body and sun heat against dock. In the warmish water Arlyce who is a head taller than me at age ten wrestles me underwater. She says she’s going to drown me with my neck stuck between her legs. In the swirl underwater I see the crotch of her bathing suit. I could get away but don’t. We wrestle to the point of exhaustion, feet digging into sand and mud, then fall silent, swimming out into deeper water, our faces still burning.

  It is a warm, grainy, nonspecific sexuality that you feel even in your elbows, your nose against the wet hair of her neck, the soles of your feet as if you were walking up warm, oily planks. The mole between her breasts is planetary, and the bathing suit pulled up into her bottom makes the brain lose any of its speech.

  The next time you see her at the county fair she utterly ignores you though you are cutting a fine figure wearing a yellow shirt with a special diagonal zipper. She’s walking with an older kid who already has a few hairs darkening his chin. They lean against his pen with a sow and piglets and she listens raptly to his pig talk. You sidle up until you’re a few feet from her but she glances irritably over the top of your head. She has a mosquito bite on her left calf. Your heart drains away in the midway dust but then you help a red-haired girl brush down her heifer. You get a peek down the front of her blouse. There’s not much there but enough. Outside the cow barn 4-H Club girls in shorts and halters are having a hose fight. Arlyce returns and aims the hose at you and you’re too disturbed to even move. She noticed me!

  That sort of thing. You vaguely know what it’s all about but the general feelings are too strong to even think of closing the deal. At Percy Conrad’s gas station an older boy, maybe thirteen, who rolled his own cigarettes and spit a lot claimed to have done it with a girl named Cheryl. A few of us sat on our bikes and listened to this braggart, Faron by name, who was spindly and no bigger than a ten-year-old was. Faron weighed less than a hundred pounds and Cheryl weighed at least twice that much so it was hard to imagine. A little boy dog tackling a big bitch we thought, the only basis of comparison because a little bull and a big cow was too far-fetched. Every girl in my class knew that when you dropped a pencil you were trying to see up her legs so the pickings were slim indeed. One kid had stolen from his uncle back from the war a nude photo of Barbara Stanwyck though you couldn’t see her face clearly enough to make sure it was Barbara herself. I preferred Jeanne Crain and Diana Durbin, who were in State Fair, or Cyd Charisse dancing with many veils before a powerful, evil Arab sheikh. The final, tormenting sexual straw was Tarzan’s Jane in her leather loincloth, diving in a jungle pond to frolic with Tarzan, played by the great swimmer Johnny Weissmuller.

  It takes a long time, if ever, for this all to get less than confusing. The crudest lessons encouraged versatility. One summer our 4-H Club (Head, Heart, Health, and Hands; what this specifically means has escaped me other than it brought together farm kids separated by distances) arranged a trip on the Milwaukee Clipper, which made the trip across Lake Michigan from Ludington to Milwaukee and back, about six hours each way. When we left Reed City in the middle of the night in a group of cars I was lucky enough to be jammed next to Felicia, a new girl in the area, dark-complected like myself, and whose father was a new and impractical kind of farmer in that he owned a dozen quarter horses. We boarded the huge ship right after daylight and after I made my curious rounds and returned to my group—there were bunche
s of club members from all over northern Michigan—I discovered that Felicia was already involved in another boy who had brought her an early-morning bottle of Coca-Cola. Naturally I was miffed what with my left hand still feeling warm from holding hers. The ground beneath my feet became unstable, partly because we were on a ship in mildly rocking seas.

  What did this mean? The usual lump in my throat arose, which was alleviated hours later at the sight of all the strange creatures in the Milwaukee Zoo with boys jumping up and down screaming and laughing as monkeys jerked off, plainly primates themselves, and girls indignantly slapped at them and huffed off. What’s more, I was being pestered by a geeky kid who was somewhat ostracized because it was said he made love to his heifer standing on a milk stool. I had been following Felicia and her new boyfriend at a distance around the zoo, hoping for reconciliation but wallowing in romantic melancholy, and this bestial loony was disturbing my mood so I slugged him in his Adam’s apple and fled. Sentimentality quickly becomes anger and I sat and stared at an orangutan who had buckteeth like my own, properly thinking that he might be a distant relative.

  On the long trip back to Ludington and as early evening fell on the now placid lake some other disappointed lovers, whether male or female, played “You Can’t Be True, Dear” repeatedly on the lounge jukebox and a couple of sappy lines inscribed themselves in my memory: “You can’t be true, dear, there’s nothing more to say, I trusted you, dear, hoping we’d find a way.” The young quite literally seethe with palpable emotions until the emotions become an indulged habit and not one trace of the comic is allowed entry.

  I was not one to question my own errant affections though I remember feeling apologetic toward Jean Peters when I fell for the more vivid and scary A va Gardner who was then replaced, in a devout Christian period, by Deborah Kerr, who in Quo Vadis was tied to a stake to face an enraged bull (to a rural boy a bull is the ultimate in sexual danger) only to be saved by the gladiator Buddy Baer. My Christian sentiments were seriously addled by Deborah Kerr’s diaphanous gown, which the breeze plastered to her forlorn, lovely body. While she prayed and Buddy struggled there was the question of what this beautiful woman looked like bare naked.

  All of this was taking place in the mind of a boy who was very brown because he couldn’t bear indoors compared to the outside, and had pronounced buckteeth, a foggy left eye focused outward, hair that stood up in the back in the shape of what was called a cowlick. There was also the idea that these beloved actresses were as unlikely to show up in northern Michigan as the German and Japanese bombers. So many preposterous illusions are bred by desire. The homeliest men who couldn’t rationally look at themselves nude in the mirror feel free to comment critically on any woman. A man whose entire body is virtually a stretch mark will proclaim the dislike for stretch marks and a man whose ass wouldn’t fit in a barrel says that big women don’t “turn him on,” all a logical consequence of the desire unconnected to reality that is sold in the culture. Our learning curve is wobbly indeed and our gift for wisdom quite inconsequential.

  I know that our move from Reed City down to Haslett when I was twelve produced the religious upheaval late in my thirteenth year that continued until I was sixteen. When the large going-away party in the Grange Hall took place a few days before we left the north the fatality of the move finally impressed itself upon me. I was saying good-bye to all of my girlfriends, many of whom didn’t know they were in this position. I was being uprooted, not to speak of the rest of the family. I knew it was a promotion for my father and the primary aim was to get us near a university but this didn’t help. If you have five kids and make a small wage it is necessary to move near a college.

  I was going to a place where there weren’t any rivers, no trout, no cabin (which was being sold to my uncles), no loons or blue herons, no bobcats, no endless forests to wander in. There were doubtless lots of people who would regard my eye as the mark of Cain, and who wouldn’t know I was a noble adopted Indian boy from Canada, at the time the large garden-variety figment of my imagination. I couldn’t very well run through the forests when there were no forests, and my ambition to catch a five-pound brown trout had to be put aside forever. No solitary dawn swims to a reed bed in the middle of the lake, shallow enough to sit down, where if you were perfectly still a mother loon and her young might come gliding past.

  It took only a decade or so to realize that all of this caterwauling was misplaced and the faux alternatives that tug each other in the past are quite without meaning. How can you become an Indian tracker when you’re not even an Indian and there’s anyway no demand for your services is a pertinent question the boy never asks. When at age seven my father had given me his Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton he would have had no idea the unrest that this would cause. The book was an instruction manual on how to live wildly in a coming age when the possibilities of such a life were faint. There was also the mild schizophrenia of deeply enjoying listening to the opera on the radio with my mother, and the fantasy of walking into my fifth-grade classroom singing like Richard Tucker, or the popular Mario Lanza.

  Given my curiosity and wandering nature I would have been a poor bet at operating a Standard or Mobil gas station which seemed also like a good idea at the time. The move to Haslett put us in a six-mile range of a good bookstore in East Lansing, a fine library, also the university library which I could visit because my dad’s work in soil conservation and the restoration of depleted watersheds meant an adjunct position at the university. Added to this was a theater that showed foreign films, and the university auditorium where I heard my first symphony orchestra, an experience that was a true skull popper.

  Only much later in life did I come to understand that there was a bridge between my early life in the natural world and the arena of literature, music, and painting. It was the moral and aesthetic equivalent of the “suburbs” in between that goaded my intolerance.

  When I got “saved” at a Baptist revival at fourteen it was an emotional rebellion against the tepidity of my life as a good student and a class literati. I needed ecstasy as it were and the sexual possibilities didn’t exist in the middle-class deck being played. Religious conversion gave me actual emotions that were the equivalent of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which I already loved. The fact that no one else in the Baptist Church appeared to see this correlation is what finally drove me from the church. The glory of a God and Jesus that exclude Mozart seems grim indeed.

  It was a good run for one addicted to emotional excesses. I had a number of visions though this experience became uncomfortable: the hem of Isaiah’s robe stretching miles across a seascape, all the different creatures in the world drinking milk from an immense golden bowl, the perilous caves, and passageways inhabited by evil spirits that changed shapes, the dark path that ostensibly led directly to God though I definitely didn’t get that far.

  There’s an urge to make light of frightening experiences if only to assure yourself that you’re standing on the earth. Even mildly visionary experiences can give you an immediate lust for the ordinary, whether it’s eating, walking, going to the tavern for a drink and immersing yourself in conversations with farmers, mechanics, construction workers, some of whom you’ve known for thirty years. Talking to your dogs can be especially helpful.

  Every year or so in the late evening, usually right after I go to bed, my mind will enter a whirling fugal state where all the stops are pulled with the mind rushing all over the earth and well into space, to the depths of the ocean where the process slows and you can walk along the ocean’s bottom. You’re literally out of control though not at all violently, passing through the homes of friends, huts and kraals in Africa, the bottom of the Amazon’s many rivers, inside the mouth of a lion, the short nap (a split second) in the heart of a whale. One of the most interesting came in the early seventies visiting galaxies that had the beautiful appearance of the later Hubble space photos, pale blue and roseate clouds of stars.

  I’m no longer inclined to get
upset with these experiences though occasionally there is a temporary loss of balance when you have the vivid illusion that you’re actually seeing time herself in a clearing in the forest or, more often, on a riverbank while staring at the passing water. Another more frequent experience, say two or three times a summer, is the strong illusion of seeing holographically. You walk through a landscape and you see all sides of it at once. This is particularly hard to describe in that you’re both within and outside the sensations of your body at the same time, a plainly impossible thing though the mind can arrange it. You also wonder at the mind’s impulse to present you all sides of a tree at once or to move within the body of a bird. As I say, these experiences need not scare you and your sense of the comic enters to keep you on earth.

  The only truly frightening occurrence came when I was already “in extremis.” I was about fifty and still hadn’t learned to behave well, to put it in mild terms. I had done fairly well financially, though it was episodic, and Hollywood like boxing seemed to promote the kind of behavior that quickly used up the purses won. My wife had quite seriously, if irrationally, become sure that if we died our daughters would become destitute. I felt very guilty and vulnerable at the time and quite suddenly quit drugs and drank far less, and began working myself so hard that I daily felt complete exhaustion, which, as many writers and others know, does not stop the work. For instance, when I finished writing Dalva and a couple of screenplays in the same period I went to the doctor and discovered that both of my eardrums were broken from an ignored infection. I had reached the end of my already frayed tether and went north to the cabin to convalesce, which I wanted to be an overnight procedure.

  It was muggy and warm in the north and through the screened windows a loud whine of mosquitoes mixed with rumbling thunder far to the west. I was simply too distraught to open the whiskey bottle on the counter and had eaten less than a quarter of my dinner. I took a long walk in the twilight and was temporarily lost in the horseshoe bend of the river. I had been so cranky that even Sand, my yellow Labrador, was upset though a walk usually made her forgive everything. I went to bed naked covered with sweat unsure that the bed itself was stable. In the middle of the night I awoke and thought I saw car lights. My anger over someone coming to visit was so immediate I thought my skin was on fire. I seemed to burst through the air howling, striking my forehead against a metal chandelier adorned with deer horns, and cutting my head. I raced to the heavy wood door and tore it open without unlocking it, pretty much destroying the door. I ran outside howling but there was no one there. The flash of light was an approaching thunderstorm. I lay down in the damp cool grass feeling my normally hairless chest which seemed to be covered with hair, and my face abnormally large and hairy. I watched lightning directly over my head which helped me to return to “normal.” I started the generator, leaving it on for the rest of the night for reasons of mental safety. I found my dog up under the bed in the loft but she wanted nothing to do with me. I checked the bathroom mirror and rinsed the blood off my face. I got out a hammer and tried to fix the door but without any luck. I wanted to read the Bible but there was none in the bookcase so I settled on a bird book. I poured a glass of whiskey and fried some eggs.