by Bill Barich
Teaching held together my days, but the nights at St. Andrew’s could be difficult, particularly when the reception on my shortwave radio went bad. If I couldn’t pick up a few innings of baseball on the Armed Forces Network, I got fidgety. The familiar sound of an announcer’s voice suggested a continuity I needed. It proved that America hadn’t vanished just because I was in West Africa. At first I had relied on reading to fill the listless hours, but I’d finished all the paperbacks the Peace Corps had supplied. As for the novel I’d started to write, mildew covered its six pages.
Beyond the literary realm, I tried to entertain myself by sampling the drugs in my Peace Corps medical kit. They failed to yield a decent high, although the powder for crab lice proved beneficial after a trip to Port Harcourt and the Crystal Palace. You sprinkled it on your pubic hair, and the lice scampered out in a panic, as if they were fleeing from a forest fire, but they were too small to swat, unlike the sausage flies I slaughtered in periods of terminal boredom. The flies were about the size of a thumbnail, and when they flew into a room, they reacted poorly to the light. It blinded them temporarily, and they banged into one wall after another, loudly buzzing in protest. I tracked them with a rolled-up paper and kept a tally of the corpses, always hoping to set a new record. My behavior seems to me now a symptom of the underlying malaise that affected us all.
One afternoon Dom asked to confer with me. He looked very serious and confessed he had a problem. It involved his nephew Ethelbert. The boy’s family could no longer provide for him, so Dom wished to take over. Ethelbert wouldn’t be any trouble, he assured me. The boy would live with him, sleep on a raffia mat, and attend our primary school. I told him he’d have to clear it with the college’s principal, and when he got permission, he was delighted. Maybe he thought Ethelbert could cure his loneliness, but I wondered if the boy was really his son. With his secretive nature, Dom could easily have been married. I was curious about the boy, too. Ethelbert would be a tough name to bear, even in a country where girls were routinely called Patience, Prudence, and Charity.
Ethelbert traveled to St. Andrew’s by mammy wagon, all by himself. I happened to be sitting in the shade and grading compositions when he arrived, and I looked up and saw a tiny figure crossing the dry brown weeds of the soccer field and knew in an instant it was him. He had no luggage, just a satchel such as hobos carry, and he dragged his feet and walked with the slightly dazed gait of the uprooted, as if to resist whatever fate had in store for him.
His manner toward Dom was indifferent. If he felt any affection for his uncle, he refused to show it. Instead he wriggled away from a hug. With me, he was sullen and remote. I guessed he must be about seven, but he was nine, a fact I had to pry out of him. He rebuffed our questions and couldn’t be coaxed into a smile. Ethelbert was the saddest child I’d ever met. He must miss his parents terribly, I thought, but the sadness was there the next day, and the day after that.
Ethelbert became a shadowy presence. When he wasn’t at school, he followed Dom around. At odd hours, I’d find him asleep on the floor of my house, curled up in a ball. If he helped with a chore, I gave him a few pennies, but the money failed to cheer him. He was so sulky I figured he might be sick, so I asked Dom to take him to the village clinic. It was a well-run facility, although you had to stand in line for a long time in the hot sun before anybody examined you.
A doctor diagnosed a mild case of anemia and gave Ethelbert some pills, but his mood did not improve. The boy’s embrace of melancholy was absolute. He never played with any other children, never laughed or cried or got angry. His one pleasure was to sit on my back steps, his chin resting on his fists, and stare into the oil palm bush.
Toward the end of May, I collected my mail one morning and found Michael Ofokonsi, ordinarily unshakeable, in an agitated state, cursing under his breath as he filed letters in pigeonholes. He was frantic about the welfare of his brother, a civil servant in the north, whose phone had been disconnected. He’d heard a report on the radio that some Hausa and Fulani rioters, furious with the Aguiyi-Ironsi regime, had launched attacks on Igbos in several cities including Kano, where his brother was based. The mob, armed with clubs and machetes, had gone from house to house through the sabon garis, districts reserved for strangers to the region, and carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Muslim soldiers were rumored to have participated. Nobody knew how many people were dead.
I listened to the reports at home, but they were sketchy and conflicted. Only when the first refugees trickled into Onitsha and later Nnewi did we learn the true extent of the horror. The refugees were sometimes wounded, missing a finger, a hand, or a limb, and they told their stories in quaking voices. The mob had spared no one. Pregnant women were cut open, their fetuses cast into gutters, and children were murdered by the score. The killing went on for days, with houses in flames. Some people were still in hiding, afraid to show themselves, even though the cities were relatively quiet again. All the while Ethelbert sat on my back steps and stared into the oil palm bush. He was possessed by visions, I think now, and what he saw accounted for the enormity of his sadness.
Narrative, 2007
San Francisco: Haight-Ashbury Days
True Believers
As a young man I wanted to be a poet. I couldn’t think of a higher calling, so when I headed for San Francisco to pursue my goal, it was probably inevitable I’d fall in with Buster Farrell, who ran a print shop that doubled as a literary salon. Buster wrote poems himself, and they were good enough to appear in journals other than Wooden Leg, the little magazine he edited and tried to publish quarterly, although he seldom met his deadline. That was no hardship for his subscribers, really, since they were all Buster’s friends and aware of his financial difficulties, but he still felt the pressure and would pick up the pace of his beer drinking, an activity he began before lunch and often continued long into the night.
Buster lived in a flat above the shop with his wife and infant daughter. Zoe Farrell was a gentle soul, blond and plump and forgiving. She tolerated Buster’s money problems and also the impromptu parties that gathered steam down below and wound their way up into her kitchen. Zoe was always throwing together a cheap meal for three or six or ten uninvited guests, while her husband held little Rachel on his lap and discussed subjects of poetic importance. Deeply opinionated, Buster was a native Oregonian built like a lumberjack, with a springy black beard and Trotsky glasses. In debate, he could be intimidating. He’d bang a fist on the table and spill some beer, and I’d notice the inky hands and nails he could never get clean for all the scrubbing he did.
No matter how late the party ended, it never interfered with Buster’s routine. He was a pro, back on duty at eight in the morning. His shop was no more than a glorified basement and cramped with the tools of his trade. It could be as dark as a tunnel down there, but for a fine printer to stay afloat at all was a miracle, as Buster liked to remind us. He conducted tutorials on the job, lecturing on the origins of Bodoni Bold, say, or the visionary element in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Even when his two big presses were operating, you could hear his voice above the clatter. The lectures slowed down his commercial work, though. To pay the rent, he printed fancy editions of literary classics for a book club and did a wonderful job, but his heart wasn’t in it. As soon as he got a check, he invested in a publishing venture of his own that wouldn’t earn a dime. That was Buster’s great glory. He refused to put a price on beauty, but it cost him.
Without question, he was a superb craftsman. He had studied typography with the city’s Old Master, a man renowned for his aesthetic purity and his bad temper, both traits that Buster shared. When he printed a poem on a broadside sheet, he spent hours picking over the proof copies. The process was in no way neat. He’d curse and kick a letter press, then stomp over to the corner bar to brood. Nobody dared to approach when he was in a foul mood, but eventually inspiration would strike, and he’d dash back and make a subtle adjustment to bring all the elements into line.
Ah, happiness! His big face beamed, and another celebration started. The broadsides featured such notables as Gary Snyder and Robert Creeley, so Buster could have sold them for some much-needed cash, but he insisted on giving them away. To be included in the loop was a hippie badge of honor, on par with growing your own pot or having the Jefferson Airplane’s dentist fix your teeth.
I met Buster through a young poet friend, who had an actual chapbook to his credit and stood very tall in my eyes. My own “work,” as I called it, was always elegantly typed on the page, but I knew how awkward it was and never bothered to send it out. The realm of literature was exalted, I believed, and I was desperate to enter it and gain access to its secrets and rewards. I spent most evenings browsing through the poetry books at City Lights, soaking up their essence for free. I sought out authors who were hooked on drugs or alcohol, since the idea of writing in an altered state held an enormous appeal for me. What could be easier or more fun? Whenever I was stoned, though, my “work” got even worse, less honest and more indulgent, and in my bleak hungover periods I doubted I’d ever write a meaningful word.
My friend, the published poet, invited me to lunch one afternoon. I was delighted and pictured a grand banquet with lots of wine and maybe women, but I had never seen the sort of place a published poet sometimes occupies. His apartment was small, messy, and cluttered with books, including a few from the Knothead Press, Buster’s imprint. (All Buster’s references to wood were a mock tribute to the mill town where he grew up.) In the fashion of the era, my host rolled a joint, and soon I was starving. When he went into his pocket-size kitchen, I fell victim to elaborate fantasies about the meal ahead—burgers, steak, could it be a leg of lamb?—but he returned with a loaf of bread, a can of tuna, and a jar of mayonnaise. I was stunned, but I managed to recover. If this was the standard poet’s fare out west, I meant to do it justice and ate with good appetite.
After lunch, we took a stroll through the Haight-Ashbury. The year was 1969, and though the bloom was off the rose, the air still carried a hint of jasmine and patchouli oil—of innocence, you might say. “Let’s drop in on Buster,” my friend suggested. He opened the shop’s door, and a strand of Tibetan bells jingled merrily. Inside, Buster sat cross-legged on the bare concrete floor, a needle and thread in hand, sewing together the signatures for the next issue of Wooden Leg, all sixteen pages. He had an assistant, an even bigger guy with a droopy belly, and the sight of those two giants doing such dainty work made us laugh. Buster gave me a finished copy of the magazine, along with a Ranier Ale, and when I saw it was his last one, I walked to the nearest market and, for the price of a six-pack, bought my way into the exalted realm.
* * *
From that day on, I was a regular at the shop, where Buster welcomed anybody who cared about poetry and literature. His salon was informal, so he didn’t hold forth from an armchair like Gertrude Stein, or post visiting hours like Maxim Gorky. The gatherings simply happened. People arrived at all hours and rarely called ahead. Buster was always very gracious. He’d interrupt his paying work to offer advice, criticism, and tips on book design. He received book collectors, student apprentices, political activists, artists, writers, and those who dreamed of being writers. The dreamers were the largest contingent by far. We came armed with our poems and notebooks, our half-baked fiction and jottings on bar napkins, and Buster, kind to a fault, took us seriously and made editorial comments. He never pulled his punches, though, so you had to be ready for the truth, or his version of it, anyway.
I delayed for weeks before I worked up the nerve to show him some poems I’d written. I waited until the early evening, when Buster was finished for the day and at his most mellow. He gave me a strange look when I handed him a manila folder, as if to ask, “What, you too?” then tilted his head toward a naked lightbulb dangling from a cord. He grunted and ground his teeth as he read, wrestling with the words on the page, and I had an urge to snatch back the folder and burn it on the spot. My fate, even my life, seemed to hang in the balance. Buster was wise enough to understand that, of course, and when he singled out a poem, rattled the paper in front of my nose, and said in his gruff voice, “This isn’t bad,” I felt as if I’d won a prize. He didn’t invite me to contribute to Wooden Leg, the ultimate accolade, but it was enough for the moment to be “not bad.”
If Buster thought somebody had real promise, he’d let the person set a poem or two in type and print them. I never reached those heights, but I watched others go through the drill. They were terribly self-involved and agonized over which typeface to choose, and whether or not it suited their sensibility. In private, I poked fun at them, but I didn’t realize that a sturdy ego is essential if you expect to cope with rejection and win over an indifferent public. I still viewed the literary world as a meritocracy, where good writing always got its due, and I had no idea how easily the will to write can be broken. Those poems from long ago must be treasures to their owners now, a few scraps of a lost youth not blown away in the wind.
But I couldn’t see any of that at the time. None of us could. We were young, and we were true believers. And who could blame us? We had firm evidence that lightning could strike and transform the merely mortal. Famous writers often turned up at the shop, especially Richard Brautigan, an old pal of Buster’s whose whimsical novels had become bestsellers. Brautigan knocked them out in a matter of days at a café in North Beach. He was rich, gifted, and instantly recognizable. His photo graced the jacket of each book, in company with his current girlfriend. Tall and thin, with a Buffalo Bill moustache and a long tangle of blond hair, he’d descend on us from the heavens, toting a half-gallon jug of Red Mountain wine. Despite his fame, he seemed shy and sensitive, but I was too shy myself to talk with him. I listened at a distance and learned.
With such celebrities around, the salon grew in notoriety and attracted more hangers-on, and that further hampered Buster’s ability to function efficiently. He fell behind on everything. He made an unwise decision, too, when he agreed to take in Marco Means, who’d been jailed for punching a cop at a peace march and was paroled into Buster’s custody. Only nineteen, Marco was wiry and intense, with a Medusa-head of dreadlocks, the first I’d ever seen on a white person. He was a librarian’s son from the Midwest, a rabble-rouser, a diabetic, a former junkie who suffered relapses, and a beer drinker to rival and maybe even surpass his benefactor. In his moral outrage, Marco was fierce and fearless, capable of almost anything, outstanding at injuring himself, and as in need of minding as a child.
Buster’s reasons for looking after Marco weren’t entirely altruistic. Though slightly warped, Marco was brilliant. His talent as an illustrator was unexcelled, and his medium was the linoleum block—an ideal complement to fine printing. He carved his intricate images into the blocks with a sharp-bladed Exacto knife, as precisely as a surgeon. Indeed, the spectacle of Marco in the throes of creation became a showpiece at the shop. Just as the arthritic fingers of Pablo Casals loosened in old age and allowed him to bow his cello, so too did Marco rise into himself. He was a picture of calm, regardless of how smashed he might be. His images often depicted a pitched battle between nature and the destructive forces of civilization, with unearthly flowers blooming in trash heaps and vines climbing over the rusted hulls of cars.
With Marco’s illustrations, the broadsides became doubly beautiful, but his blocks demanded special attention, so the work took twice as long. The bills were stacking up, too, and poor Zoe’s patience was wearing thin. Marco was scarcely a considerate lodger. He forgot to eat, failed to flush the toilet, nodded out, had no income, and everybody loved him. Everybody! When he fractured an arm in a fall, twenty well-wishers escorted him to the hospital.
One evening, when another party ascended from the depths, I saw how frustrated Zoe was. Balancing Rachel on a hip, she began flinging vegetables into a pot for soup, at her wit’s end—not that anybody helped her. No, we sat and smoked and jabbered about poetry instead. When Marco used a coffee cup
as an ashtray, Zoe lost it completely. She screamed at Marco, and Buster screamed at her, and Rachel started bawling.
The scene couldn’t be more chaotic, you might think, but chaos knows no boundaries. To his credit, Buster got a grip. Drastic measures were needed if he hoped to survive, so he brought in a partner. This was Frederick Hayes, the linotype operator. His skills would add speed and flexibility, Buster contended, but Frederick was the ultimate harbinger of doom. He had no business sense and actively despised the concept of professional behavior. He was much older than us, nearly forty, and Harvard educated, with a long graying ponytail and an IQ that was off the charts. He regarded his linotype machine as he might a piano, cracking his knuckles before he sat down. Sometimes he wore a soiled ice-cream suit that he’d picked up at the Salvation Army. He resembled a maestro in ruins. Visitors watched in awe when he threw back his head and began humming, lost in a rhapsody only he could hear.
* * *
Frederick’s presence boosted the shop’s level of eccentricity to an all-time high. He had traveled the globe, spoke five languages fluently, and sprinkled his chatter with foreign phrases. I was never exactly certain what he’d said. As a sophisticated free spirit, he was also a sexual adventurer, and that rubbed Buster, with his small-town background, the wrong way. Where Buster had a curious nobility that derived from his mission on poetry’s behalf, Frederick thrived on flamboyance, flirtation, and surreal jokes. Ask him to go right, and he went left. He admired rebels and outlaws, Burroughs and Genet, and willful obscurity thrilled him. If Frederick had a mission, it was to debunk and undermine, upsetting the status quo. That fit perfectly with Marco’s anarchic streak, and soon they were conspirators.
