Off to the Side

by Jim Harrison

  In a desperate July recently I stared at thirty-seven galleys and manuscripts on my cabin desk, plus a pile of half-written poems and two partially written books, and precisely fifty-three unanswered letters. It was very hot and both male and female bugs—mostly blackflies and deerflies—were finding me attractive. My solace was rowing a little brown-and-blue boat counterclockwise around a big lake, which required four hours, lovely but somewhat autistic behavior. On a steamy morning I recalled that the great Zen master Yuan-Wu said, “Abandoning things is superior” and I planned a road trip, settling on the most exciting state in the union, Nebraska. I have several dear friends in Nebraska and the Niobrara River Valley in the Sandhills is my favorite beautiful spot on earth. The capitol building in Lincoln is clearly the niftiest state capitol building in the United States, but perhaps more important, Lincoln is the site of my beloved strip club the Night Before. My mom and dad always advised soul searching before making a big decision so I meditated a full second. My mom and dad preferred the straight and narrow where I, for nongenetic reasons, have favored the wide and crooked.

  As I drove west I began to wonder if my own taste might be far from or near to the norm. Men, above all, are excitable boys, but that doesn’t mean that my own aesthetic principles are readily expunged by any thigh on the block. For instance, I once spent an evening at the Crazy Horse in Paris, including at least two hours backstage with the owner and friends drinking vintage wines. Let’s just say this experience brought me very close to the heart of the matter. I felt a reverence that maybe Steven Spielberg owns after he creates one of those dawn-of-creation scenes. I tried to affect a mood of Parisian blasé about the girls who brushed my left elbow on their way to the locker room. It means a great deal more to be a writer in Paris than in New York and the girls wanted a group picture with me. Sophie Bernardin, the present owner, told me that her father who began the club would audition a thousand girls for every one he selected. It’s a hundred bucks to enter the front door. Standing there with my arms around the moist bevy I simply trembled. I’ve addressed several thousand people in a theater with far less agitation. This was a clear case of too much, the moral equivalent of drinking a magnum of ‘49 Lafite Rothschild in thirty minutes. I felt the aftershocks, the tremors, for days, the experience similar to when a friend called during an L.A. earthquake and said, “The fucking tectonics are grinding the shit out of each other.” In a perfect world the girls would have followed the lumbering Pied Piper out of the club to a remote manor in Burgundy where a gross of Viagra would have been depleted. Two years later I can still scent the lilac in the air, hear the laughing, dulcet French syllables, feel the weight of my thumping heart.

  * * *

  On this Nebraska trip I had only three evenings at the Night Before. People talk about discretionary time on their cellulars when they should throw them under a garbage truck and do what they want. Three nights was probably enough for a man who needed to get back to the Cornhusker Hotel and read Wittgenstein and a pile of civics textbooks. I was accompanied by an eminent folklorist and a well-known mental-health authority. Both wish to remain anonymous, having recently seen on CNN a man arrested for sticking out his tongue at women in a traffic jam. These are perilous times when the Supreme Court would turn the great Henry Miller into chum were he still alive. Don’t stick out your tongue even if there’s a dung beetle biting it. Nowadays, you’ll be safe only when you’re dead.

  I’d say that out of at least thirty evenings my current three-day cycle was high medium. When the local University of Nebraska is in session a portion of the girls are from modern dance classes which adds a certain bourgeois zeal. On my last night a fetching lass picked up the slack by wearing a sorority-type pleated skirt. I had also seen this tactic in a Tucson club but in Lincoln the girl had the advantage of looking like a young Deborah Norville. Years ago just before the cameras rolled on the Today show I had made Deborah blush by dropping a pencil and pretending to look up her dress. This archaic midwestern sorority look has greater appeal onstage than it does in a motel where you learn they haven’t even read Søren Kierkegaard.

  I spoke with Ken Semler, who has owned the Night Before for nineteen years, about certain political pressures from the Lincoln city council. The direction of the criticism was concentrated on two other Lincoln clubs that had a somewhat more permissive policy but were too loud for me to bear what with my ears having been undimmed by rock music. Not oddly Semler reminded me of the manager of a first-rate restaurant. The man is obviously shrewd with a sharp eye for clean quarters, good air, and manageable behavior in his patrons. I mentioned my own notion that authorities are often threatened by a reality that doesn’t exist. The arena of sexual confusion is wide indeed and the media insists on a state of lust we can feel only in isolated moments. Men and a fair number of women come into this club, have a few drinks, chat, and watch nearly naked women dance an often-comic parody of lust. As a freeborn American I am obstinate in thinking a nude woman does not jeopardize civic health and that if anything she encourages it.

  Ironies abound. A hyperenergized greed has been the core of our society for the past decade and it is evident in strip clubs. In the Night Before the closest allowed contact with the stripper is putting money in your mouth and having it taken by clenched buttocks or breasts. This is an improbable metaphor of fascism at play that we cooperate with because it is far, far better than nothing. By all evidence the majority of interested men confine this activity to magazines and computers. I’ve noted for a long time that I am flesh and I want to be there in the flesh. The nakedness of women by all standards is the glory of God. Men, too, for some. Why settle for virtual reality when you can be there?

  On my last evening, between the dinner slab of Nebraska prime beef and our arrival at the Night Before, we stopped to look at a university agricultural display of Native grasses and wildflowers. I was swept away by this beauty in the middle of the city. In the late twilight the cicadas were deafening, as you would be if you had been buried for seventeen years and had just emerged for sex. Even Shakespeare said, “We are nature, too.”

  Meanwhile, it’s hard to figure out in public entertainment what is thriving and what is waning, though I suspect strip clubs are in the latter category for reasons greater than sniveling politicians. The world of Aldous Huxley, or of George Orwell in 1984, is much closer than we think, in fact their peculiar tendrils are wrapped thoroughly around our lives. Both Orwell and Huxley would be amused at the “safe sex” represented in computer porn sites, not to speak of the dominance of politically correct behavior. And gradually the idea of a job, which once was not much more than a livelihood, has come to be equated to a life. Discretionary time to “booze and cruise” is rapidly fading into the past.

  Once men in large numbers traveled to the tenderloins of cities to “let off steam,” as the euphemism goes, and this still happens in convention cities where high-end strip clubs are popular. Historically, the waxing and waning can be seen most clearly in the Northwest, where Seattle strip clubs were once a vast draw for loggers, commercial fishermen, cowboys, and farmers from the outlying areas. With the business gentrification of everything the torch has passed to Vancouver, British Columbia, a city closer to the true outback, and where in a dozen fine clubs no rules are noticeable.

  I suspect, then, that it is the twilight of stripping rather than the high noon, but then twilight has always been my favorite time of day. When you’re far from home and having a fine dinner with cronies and you are all tired of talking about how the lower fifty percent in our society are becoming social mutants (luckily I don’t have friends who talk much about the stock market), you certainly aren’t going to go to a movie where you can’t have a drink, or to a simple bar where you will continue talking about politics until your collective pores bleed. Instead, you go to a strip club, abandon politics, have a few drinks, and dwell on what you’ve always thought was the most beautiful thing on earth, the body of a woman.

  HUNTING, FI
SHING (AND DOGS)

  Recently in a poem I thought, “I was born a baby. What has been added?” What are these hundreds of layers of living clothes I’ve mostly unwittingly layered onto myself like the laminae of an interminable onion? What are the peculiar landscapes of mind that fueled the decisions behind how I lived my life, and what were the largely unconscious impulses? When you map your life in retrospect there’s a bit of a blind cartographer at work. It’s not pleasurable but you have to see the structure of the way you spend your hours as a palimpsest of time overlaying the whole brutish structure, a four-dimensional topographical map with the fourth dimension being time. Simply enough, what did I do with my time?

  “Huh,” the soul howls. I mean life outside the dominating force of your work, your livelihood, the jobs that offered only in the oldest terms “room and board.” An omniscient time and study analysis would figure in the immensity of loitering, brooding, dawdling, reading, sleeping, meals, the banality of hygiene, the grooming we share with chimps and house cats.

  The big items within discretionary time are our sports and amusements. In an infantile view of the afterlife the white-bearded gatekeeper will quiz us about what we did on earth under the assumption that when we enter the afterlife we are “off” earth, normally an expensive procedure when you look at NASA. “I spent an immense amount of time fishing and hunting,” you answer, adding hopefully, “You know, enjoying God’s handiwork.”

  This all presumes that you had spare time in the first place. One of the most frequent comments I hear everywhere, right up there with “What’s for dinner” and “I want to be somebody” is “I don’t have time to read,” which is essentially telling you, a lifelong writer, that your profession is below that of communal spritzers and flossing, and frequent social ass scratching. Everyone has to learn over and over that at best time is seized and then you flee. If you’re locked in one place people will always try to get you to do something they don’t want to do themselves, or as a post-Calvinist nitwit, you actually believe you can clear your desk, answer all calls, all faxes and e-mails, have a few drinks, make a going-away dinner for twelve, and at dawn you will drive or fly in a state of total serenity to a fishing or hunting destination. Myself, I’ve found it easier to live next door to where I can fish and hunt, though I feel lucky in my profession as I know this contiguity is rarely possible for most.

  After six decades I’ve only recently understood the degree to which I’m my father’s son. You can rather easily go back further through several thousand generations, and according to the most recent DNA archaeological studies, we all began on a savannah in Africa hunting. It’s seventy thousand years ago and the Neanderthals are disappearing. There’s just us and we’re rather black. When we move to the north for twenty thousand years or so we’ll lighten up. We’ll paint lovely pictures of our hunting and fishing expeditions on cave walls. Further on in time but well before Christ we’ll even get more careful about our hunting. According to Herodotus the ancient Egyptians declared a death penalty for anyone who killed a hawk or ibis.

  Back down to Dad and me, the keeper of the name Jim, a free item, who became a bit overeducated by dint of a radical curiosity. A casual interest in the news reveals, despite being in the gifted territory north of the equator, certain tribalistic difficulties in Ireland and Israel, specific Arab groups and us, not to dismiss what was formerly known as Yugoslavia, over which we have layered the thin lid of civilization on a Ball jar full of pissed-off hornets. The tentatively governable world is enough to drive you to the woods, let alone live deep within an empire with all of the preposterous greed and malfeasance of the Roman.

  But maybe we should be aware that heading away from what we think of as civilization to fish and hunt is always more than that. It’s amazing how many things are sold in terms of “escape.” The other day while gassing my car on the way to fishing a yokel asked me if they were going to start draining the Great Lakes to water Texas and for no reason I said, “Absolutely,” then noting his stricken appearance I added, “Only if we let them,” and then he said, “We’ll shoot the fuckers when they show up.” That attitude was better for his own life, the one he had to live. He passed on a “secret” fishing place that I already knew about but the intention was good. Now I wasn’t escaping the draining of the Great Lakes or any of another thousand raw sources of enervation but was simply going fishing, but then you have to carry your brain along with you so you can’t escape anything, you can only make the world tolerable by offering yourself compensatory pleasure. In the arena of outdoor writing it is never admitted that sometimes the pleasure doesn’t work. I recall when I was about ten years old, a few years after World War II, I was fishing a big bend in a river in northern Michigan with my father who was well upstream. I could see through the trees across the river, and across a broad green field there was a single railroad car on a siding. Unfortunately for the fishing expedition my mother had saved all Life magazines from the war years and I remembered a photo of an open railroad car near a death camp that was full of shoes, including a great number of children’s and baby shoes. Even as a ten-year-old I had a fair sense of geography and knew the railroad car across the field couldn’t be the same one but the woods behind me were dark and deep and a ship might very well have brought the railroad car to America from Germany and dark forces were hiding it in northern Michigan. I wasn’t smart enough about history to draw any conclusions about death camps, except that particular history that evening resembled a ghost story and despite catching several fine brown trout the world was right; there with me.

  My long-dead father was a modest man and would not wish to be referred to in noble terms. He had an improbable work ethic which was handy indeed for a man who was the sole support of a family of five children. In addition to his work as a county agricultural agent, and later as a soil scientist and designer of watershed recoveries, it was his habit to have a huge vegetable garden for the after-work hours. Any other spare time before we had to move to southern Michigan when I was twelve was spent fishing. I was barely in school before I became similarly addicted, and when my left eye became blinded at age seven and my retreat from civilization increased in speed and volume, fishing filled the vacuum. I was too young to hunt but I think I was about ten when I was allowed to tag along to deer camp. I never did develop a passion for deer hunting that approached fishing but early on envied a boy down the lake who had a .410 with which he hunted grouse. Watching him and following along to try to help flush birds I could see that this sport would enter my life in a large way.

  In the past few years when life seems to have become more of a single piece I have noticed that I tend to feel quite contemporary when driving to a fishing or hunting destination, but when I arrive a number of centuries drift away. There’s no conscious sense of the atavistic, only that everything you’ve learned in school, university, your business life is of no use to you now. This is especially true if you’re hunting and you watch your dog’s hyperalert attentiveness when you let her out of the car. Her nose wrinkles and she sucks air in through her wattles as she looks at the territory, trying to pick up scent and see if she’s familiar with the hunting ground. When you put on her beeper or bell collar you feel her trembling and you aim her in the direction you wish to start. When you move away from the car you quickly and consciously become a dog yourself as much as is possible. You are following her nose, certainly not your unsophisticated own. You might hope she heads for the right habitat, the particular mixture of flora that tends to harbor grouse and woodcock, but at the same time you know that her years of experience have taught her this. As my dogs have aged and slowed down I’ve been amazed at how much they’ve conserved their energy by moving directly from covert to covert without the aimless bursts of speed that typified their younger behavior. Hopefully your concentration on what you are doing is close to that of the dog and after a couple of hours, when you both are quite tired, you find that you have been so immersed in this creaturely behavior that yo
u haven’t had a worrisome or contemporary thought since you got out of the car. You have plenty of time for those when you reach home though the act of cooking dinner can further delay their arrival. If you hunt or fish a couple of weeks in a row without reading newspapers or watching television news a certain not altogether deserved grace can reenter your life. Newsworthy events and people, as always, have gotten along in the usual ways without your mental company.

  “Inside” is for making a living, “outside” is for pleasure. That’s how you first begin to structure the world when you grow up in the country. The pain of learning that the world is round and everything bleeds into everything else is gradual. One day under the guidance of my dog Rose I shot four grouse in an hour and was soon back at the cabin eating lunch and reading ancient Chinese poetry, the latter a specific nostrum against the inanity of the world. In T’ang Dynasty poetry you are taught over and over that nearly all public life and effort is basically inane, that you should spend as much time as conceivable in the natural world. I then took a nap and awoke rather startled with the fact that I was broke. I heated coffee and drank it hurriedly because it was nearly four P.M., the time I must, during hunting season, open a good bottle of French wine if I’m not doing an afternoon hunt. Four birds in a day are enough at the beginning of a long season. Two or three is actually better. In the past being a piggy about hunting has given me bad dreams.