White Out

by Michael W Clune

  GOVERNOR VETOES UNIVERSITY SPENDING BILL

  UNIVERSITY IMPOSES HIRING FREEZE

  I felt like someone had punched me in the throat. I quickly skimmed the story. “State revenue projections plummet…governor vetoes tuition hike…legislature demands universities admit more students.” The perfect storm. “‘We’re at breaking point,’ says University Chancellor.”

  Were they going to take away my new job already? I should have gone to California. I could have bought a gun. Yes, Cash. Two can play that game. I’d be more than a match for him. Especially if he’d been drinking. Catch him slipping and BLAM! See his tiny head coming around the corner and BLAM! Creep up on him while he was sleeping, shove the gun in his mouth, and BLAM! I was freaking out. I called my old friend Dave.

  “Well,” he said slowly. “They can’t fire you. You have a signed contract.”

  “Thank God for that,” I said.

  “But they can squeeze you to death. First they’ll cut your travel money. Then they’ll cut your journal subscriptions. Then they’ll tell you to teach more classes. It’s the same story at state universities around the country.”

  “What is?”

  “Everyone wants to cut higher education. For the Republicans, cutting funding for higher education is like being tough on crime. You know how it is in Congress.” He imitated a southern senator’s voice.

  “The American people need to know the kind of trash that is being taught in our universities today. Here is a textbook that says that Abraham Lincoln was a homosexual. And this book says that Shakespeare was a homosexual. This book says that Norman Rockwell’s art is gay. Norman Rockwell! This is a picture of Santa Claus by Norman Rockwell. Does that look gay to you?”

  Of course it looked gay to me, but maybe that proved Dave’s point. He did have some good news about Cash, though. After some soul searching, Cash had figured out he didn’t have to quit drinking after all. He was just doing weekend binges now, and his liver felt fine. The one undeniable problem, however, was that every time he got drunk, he fell. A lot. He’d wake up with his head bloody and covered with bruises.

  This was a problem, but hardly an insoluble one. Cash had discovered a solution. Now when he felt that itch for a drink, he would put on a helmet. They made good lightweight helmets for motorcyclists. Dave left me with the touching image of Cash sitting alone in his apartment, slowly strapping a helmet to his head, turning on some quiet music, and pouring Aristocrat whiskey into a coffee mug until it started to spill over the edges.

  I hung up and walked around my new neighborhood wringing my hands. Why had I come here? All they care about in this state is cutting taxes. I looked at the self-satisfied Floridians. Middle-aged women with ankle bracelets. They should be very highly taxed to pay for higher education. An Italian guy with oil on his muscles. He should be forced to face the fact that Lincoln was maybe gay. And that he is definitely gay. A smirking septuagenarian getting out of a Mercedes. Where did he get that car? What did he need with it? He should be taxed to death. Through the plate glass I saw a couple jolly Republicans sipping mojitos. I imagined them being slowly taxed to death.

  I stopped at a café. I ate some chicken that was dry in the center and wet at the edges. The sun was setting when I got out. I walked back through the orange light. At my new apartment I sat on the floor amid all the raw matter. Everything was there. What was I supposed to do next? I had no habits here. No routines. Nothing to blunt the world’s sharp edge.

  When you’ve lived in a place for long enough, you hardly see it. That starts to get to you. Michigan got to me like that. I felt like I was getting old among appliances and carpets and lighting fixtures I knew like the back of my hand. The back of your hand isn’t interesting until it’s gone. I wanted to move to a new place where everything is interesting. Where I don’t feel so numb. Where I see everything as if for the first time because it is for the first time. I moved.

  And now, sitting in the middle of a strange floor piled with unpacked boxes, I longed for the thick, comfortable cobwebs of habit. Ten or twenty years of habit. Enough habit to bury all these terrible surfaces. I wanted them invisible. The way living in a place for years almost makes it disappear. You don’t notice it. Everything was too bright in Florida. The new shapes were too sharp. They got stuck in me and I couldn’t relax. What is that coming out of the floor? A door stopper of some kind. It’s weird. I don’t like it.

  A sunbeam hit the alien tiles below the bay window. Sunlight didn’t come through my windows like that in Michigan. The sunbeam came through in a strange way. I followed its track with distaste. It lit up the inch-long black antennae of a monstrous brown-and-yellow insect.

  The thing looked at me. It was maybe a third as big as me. Give or take. The shock of Florida had obliterated my sense of perspective. The insect was an uncertain size. I couldn’t tell whether I should step on it like an ant or kick it in the side like a dog.

  I hit it with a three-pound literary theory book. I had to throw the book out afterward. One chapter of the book says Shakespeare was probably gay. I slept with the lights on. I heard dinosaur bugs moving in the walls.

  When you wake up in a new place, you have to find yourself out there among all the unfamiliar things. In the air-conditioned bedroom, with orange light coming through the beveled glass, it takes a while to distinguish what’s you from what’s not. The hand that feels cold, the leg that feels sore. I pulled myself together. The bugs and the new furniture went to one side of the world and I went to the other. I got out of bed and looked in the mirror. I was covered with skin.

  In the afternoon my new television broke and I decided I should go to an NA meeting. I had been to one in Florida before, when I’d visited in April, but I forgot how to get there. Plus this was a different day of the week. At least I thought it was. My Internet wasn’t working. I found a meeting schedule in my glove compartment. The meeting was at 8:00 p.m. I puzzled out the directions on a map.

  The meeting was near the airport. Everything spreads out near the airport. You can see distance in the sky like birds. The buildings look like they could go too. The air is the color of a wishing well.

  The meeting was in a place called the Church Without Walls. I guess the name means that it’s the kind of church you’re still inside of even when you’re outside. Even when you run outside the church and keep running you’re still in it. That kind of place. It was ninety degrees when I got out of my car in the vast parking lot. The visible form of the Church Without Walls is a six-story office building done in mirrored glass.

  The lobby was deserted. No sign where to go. The floors and even parts of the walls were done in expensive marble. The parts of the walls that weren’t marble were expensive wood. There was a cheap drop ceiling. I opened a door and saw a big empty room filled with folding chairs that had been spray-painted gold. On the wall in big gold letters it read:

  AS HE COMMANDS US

  Perhaps they hadn’t finished doing the rest of the message. Or maybe we were supposed to focus on the way he commands us. How he commands us rather than what he commands us is important. The whole area was like that. There were even signed pictures of famous people on the walls. Mariah Carey. Cedric the Entertainer. You can go there yourself if you want. The doors aren’t locked. There was no sign of the meeting.

  I walked back outside and scanned the parking lot. I saw two figures on bicycles getting bigger. When they got close enough for me to see their hair I knew they were going to the NA meeting.

  “You here for the meeting?” one asked me. I nodded.

  “Then let’s go.” They picked up their bikes and walked in. I followed them. We took an elevator up to the third floor. The elevator was slow.

  “They did a real nice job with this wood,” one guy said, rubbing his hand along the surface.

  “Yeah,” said the other, holding his bike like a video-game gun. “Real nice.”

  When the elevator stopped, we stepped into a corridor of plush carpet and signed
celebrity photographs, mysterious gold stenciled messages (“Let Us Begin”), phantom machine guns, wood-paneled walls, cheap drop ceiling, and a small glass case on a pedestal containing a shining object or objects. At the end of the corridor was a door. The first bicyclist opened it. We stepped through and the Church Without Walls ambience abruptly vanished.

  We were in a small gray room half-full of serious working-class people. The people were milling about talking in low voices. Their faces were familiar from old newsreels of radical union meetings in early twentieth-century America. There were five or six rows of metal folding chairs, a giant metal coffee maker from the nineteen-thirties, a large metal table from the nineteen-thirties, and several other items from the nineteen-thirties, including the thoughts inside everyone’s heads, including my own.

  “It’s good to see you, brother,” a man in a painter’s suit said heartily, slapping one of my companions on the back.

  A woman stepped up and handed me a pamphlet. It had the NA logo on the front.

  Two men, black and white, walked in, each holding copies of The Book.

  “We keep up the struggle together,” an elderly worker with steel eyes was saying to a young man to my left. “No one can do it alone, we need The Group.”

  I had found The Group. I had stepped through a time portal in the wood-paneled, gold-painted, celebrity-eyed Jesus of the twenty-first century into the steel, concrete, and communism of the thirties. These time portals lie in every city, town, and village of America. Nearly all of them are concealed—with diabolical irony—in churches. Lenin would smile. There are NA meetings in hospitals and schools also. We use only our first names.

  “And what’s your name, brother?” the old guy asked me.

  “Mike,” I said. Nothing else about me was real, and I slid effortlessly into one of the two million chambers of the worldwide struggle. It began to turn.

  There were slogans in the air. A middle-aged woman without any nonsense straightened a pile of pamphlets on the table. I moved to help her. Security, solidarity, honesty, open-mindedness, willingness. The five steel principles of NA. The Twelve Steps. The Twelve Traditions. The two books. The two million members.

  NA’s roots are in AA, and AA was forged in the nineteen-thirties. The era of the worker’s struggle. The decade of the five-year plan. Unflinching opposition to the fascists, the bosses, and the opium of the masses, which in my case was opiates, but for Bill W. was alcohol. The earliest AA posters depicted a gigantic concrete man ascending twelve enormous steel-gray steps. I saw a reproduction of it in rehab.

  Seven decades of sports and cheap electricity have pulverized the worker’s movement in the West. In the East, the Soviet dream vanished overnight in one of the sudden, inexplicable, and absolute ruptures in world history that make a mockery of statistics and provide the last best evidence of the existence of a god or gods. Churches without walls soon rose in every city, patrolling a world without slogans, without solidarity, without honesty. Strikes lost their romance. Long lines lost their romance. The endless waiting in government buildings lost its romance. The leader you could lose yourself in disappeared or turned retroactively into a criminal.

  The very idea of the group became loathsome, and class feeling was replaced by an obsessive disgust with the image of the stranger. The man in a raincoat in the back of the theater. The man in front of you in the grocery checkout line with both of his hands stuffed down his pants. The tax-exempt retiree stuffing his face in the McDonald’s drive-through. Even his fingernails have stopped growing, but he keeps eating.

  A little while ago, I read a newspaper item to the following effect: Eight men were arrested yesterday in the adult bookstore the Love Shack on 11203 S. Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa and charged with lewd conduct and resisting arrest. The men had surrounded an employee of the store and were masturbating when the police arrived. The store has a history of similar past incidents, and nearby residents and businesses repeated their demand that the store be shut down.

  My girlfriend, to whom I read this item, responded: “Eight people masturbating together in public? Are they part of a team?”

  This story and her response illustrate more eloquently than any statistic the fate of the group in contemporary America. From the labor union march to the group masturbation team. Today the glue of group solidarity is the corrupt semen of perverts. The Catholic Church, for example. Or the Boy Scouts. Or Three’s Company. I grew up in the Catholic Church, going on Boy Scout campouts on the weekends, watching Three’s Company reruns every day after school. But even this kind of indoctrination couldn’t stop me from falling in love with the idea of The Group.

  It was a private love—the secret afterlife of communism. It started in 1989, the year communism went underground and began hiding inside the children. I was in eighth grade. That year I read The Communist Manifesto with my best friend, Sid. We memorized the slogans. In history class I looked enviously at the long lines of anonymous gray marchers in the grainy documentaries shown to us by our alcoholic Catholic school history teacher. Through the static of the ancient Catholic school television, the marchers were marching. Marching for food. Marching for revolution. Marching for marching. At lunch the other boys in my class lined up to touch the huge early breasts of the sluttiest girl in the school. I stood in line with them, squeezing my eyes shut when it was my turn and imagining red flags.

  During my college years, I came to love Comrade Stalin. It wasn’t easy, working slowly backward from the terrible statistics of his crimes to the fantasy uncle of the nineteen-thirties, but I did it. The pot helped. I thought of him late at night, when Eva had gone to sleep. His crimes left a splinter in my love. It was a rugged, mature love. A love of this world.

  Then as the harder drugs took hold, I would sit alone in my first apartment in Baltimore, high with no music on, and go back over the history of the first and only pure communist state. A history that was also in a way my own ideal past. In a fragile way. The hardest drugs took hold. I lay on my bed in 1999, and up through the dark, squat chimney of the Yeltsin years, I could see the little white clouds of my imaginary communist youth. Through the chipped, cracked lenses of the Clinton regime, I could still make out the brilliant outlines…

  The warm afternoons and tender tears of Khrushchev’s years in power. Then the cerulean blue of the Brezhnev era. The tranced apartment blocks, like a magic syllable repeated to bring good fortune. The bust of Lenin in the state grocery store. Great Lenin’s eyes smiled down benignly: This was socialism.

  We listened, but we didn’t hear! Oh Comrade Stalin, Comrade Lenin! We heard but we didn’t listen! And when I passed into the deeper blues of the heroin nod, there were tears in my eyes.

  So you could say I was receptive to the atmosphere of NA. In a way only slightly more twisting than the usual paths of history, Lenin is responsible for my recovery from addiction. For my recovery, and for the recovery of who knows how many countless others? The revolution moves in strange and fragile ways. But the meeting was starting now, and I took my seat with the others, relishing the bite of the steel folding chair in my lower back. A large poster on the wall read KEEP COMING BACK in big group-effort letters. A large black man stood up in the front of the room.

  “My name is Melvin and I’m an addict.”

  “Hi Melvin!”

  “I remember when I came to NA first I couldn’t be around nobody. Walked into the room and thought y’all was looking at me funny. Them folding chairs made me itch, and I got up and left most as soon as I sit. Like I been bit. But then I started to go to jail every time I got high. Every single time. I’d open up the lil’ baggie and Officer Friendly would come up out of it with the handcuffs.”

  Laughter from the group.

  “I love the group today. It keeps me and I keep coming back. When I first get into recovery my home situation wasn’t so good. The cops had a whole list on me. When they drive up to serve me for child support or for missing a court date or for God knows what else out of the
notorious past my girl would ring this big bell we had on the porch. And I’d sneak out the back door and go lay down in the swamp back there. Then she’d ring it again when they were gone. One time she fell asleep and I was out there all night, one big mosquito bite listening to helicopters that weren’t there crying thinking, Lord, just let me go get high one more time.

  “But when I come back in here to the group y’all told me Meeting Makers Make It and One Day at a Time and Keep Coming Back. And I did. And now it’s been six years, and that bell don’t ring no more, and I’m clean and it’s all due to this group right here. Keep coming back.”

  He sat down to an appreciative rustle. There was a silence thick with the firm breathing of the group. Not like the weak thin breathing of strangers at a bus stop. Or the watery panting of a masturbation team. Or the hopeless breathing of a funeral or a jail cell or a bank lobby. The man in the painter’s suit raised his hand.

  “I don’t have much to share today. I just wanted to say that I’m grateful to be clean and I’m glad to be here with you people tonight.”

  “We’re glad you’re here too,” the group said.

  “I’m Helen, and I’m an addict,” a thin, blonde girl said into the group, and the end of her sentence already sounded richer and faster and stronger and better than the beginning. “I, uh, I guess I never liked being around other people that much. People they…they act like…like, people.” She giggled like it was a private joke, but there are no private jokes in the group and everyone was laughing.

  “I didn’t feel comfortable in every situation. And I kept taking these little pills. At school the teacher’s mouth would move and I would laugh. And they would get angry. Or sometimes they’d laugh. But really, you know, I didn’t understand. Anything they were saying, you know. My relationships were like that. And now, it’s been, God. I don’t know, like ten months. And I can say these things to you and you. You just act like…

  “I don’t know what I mean.”