Maybe (Maybe Not) Page 8

  Plainspoken in his conversation, he used one adjective: “sumbitch.” After you got used to it, you didn’t notice when he spoke of his “sumbitch” wife and his “sumbitch” kids and his “sumbitch” friends any more than when he spoke of the “sumbitch” government and the “sumbitch” Russians. He varied the tone a little, but it was all “sumbitch” to him.

  I met him at a poker game. I liked him right away. He came to church the next Sunday saying he’d never heard a sumbitch poker player preach. He stayed on to become an active member of the church. We found him kind and generous behind his facade. His laughter kept us loose in tense moments, and his resources kept us in business when we needed help. Dugan’s way was large, and he didn’t hold back when it came to his part in the life of the church. If we had some trash to haul, he’d drive up in a four-ton dump truck. He sent a road grader to move some gravel around, and to fetch a Christmas tree he sent a diesel truck hitched to a Low Boy trailer—the kind used to transport bulldozers. For Dugan there were very few of life’s problems that could not be addressed with heavy equipment and a go-get-’em attitude.

  Dugan lured me to his construction site one fall with the promise of being allowed to drive a D8 Caterpillar tractor. Sitting in his office trailer drinking coffee, he astonished me by throwing open his briefcase to reveal bundles and bundles of hundred-dollar bills, and a .38-caliber pistol. It was like being in a movie when the bank robbers were about to split the loot. Not to worry. He explained that because his projects were often far from town and he had to hire a lot of temporary labor, he made his payroll in cash. He was bonded to carry as much as half a million dollars. And licensed to carry the gun to protect himself.

  Because he was often away for long stretches of time, Dugan refused an invitation to serve as an officer of the board of trustees. But when he was in town, he came to board meetings anyhow. He thought he ought to contribute to the life of the church beyond just sitting in a pew, and he wanted to know what was going on from the source, not the newsletter.

  As is often the case, “Member of the Board of Trustees” sounds like an important honor, when in fact, the work of a board is more often mundane than not. During the year when Dugan attended meetings, the board’s entire time and energy was devoted to a leaking roof, parking problems, and the difficulty of getting wholesale prices for paper towels and toilet paper. Dugan never said a word. He listened—with chagrin written on his face.

  One January evening the board shifted to an even more fascinating problem. On the entrance side of the church, the driveway had developed potholes. Patching had not helped, so it seemed the driveway would have to be repaved. An expensive proposition. However, on the exit side, nearest the church school, the driveway was smooth, encouraging a level of speed thought dangerous to children. Speed bumps would have to be built there and signs posted. More expense.

  Three hours had drained away while every possible dimension of this driveway problem had been considered. No solution in sight, the meeting fumbled on.

  From his seat outside the board circle, Dugan raised his hand to make a proposal. “Leave the potholes on the entrance side and dig potholes on the exit side. Spray a little tar in them. Call them “speedholes.” He could do it with a shovel and a couple of cans of hot tar in a couple of hours. Free.

  The board gnawed on the problem for another hour—worried about being sued and what the neighbors would think.

  In exasperation Dugan stood up, placed his briefcase on the table, and asked forcefully, “What’s this sumbitch church worth—the whole sumbitch thing, buildings, land, everything—gimme a round figure.”

  They didn’t know about the briefcase.

  The church treasurer replied, “Oh, maybe three hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Great,” cried Dugan, “I’m gonna buy the sumbitch!”

  And he opened his briefcase, laid his pistol aside, and began throwing out bundles of hundred-dollar bills until he reached the established price.

  Silence—stunned silence.

  “Gimme the deed, and it’s done,” said Dugan.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  someone asked.

  “I’m going to get my crew and equipment over here, and we’ll level the sumbitch and haul it to the sumbitch dump before sundown. And I’ll use the land for the cemetery you guys are headed toward in these meetings of the living dead. I’m going to put up a sumbitch monument to the Unknown God.”

  “What’s the gun for, Dugan?” an anxious member asked.

  “I was thinking about putting every last one of you sumbitches out of your misery. Too bad it’s against the law.”

  Then he chewed the board members up one side and down the other for not spending their time on important things and how he came to church for religion and what he got was pissant construction workers he wouldn’t hire for a day, and bygod if they decided they wanted to get serious about all the things a church ought to be doing in this world, to bygod sumbitch let him know.

  Packing up his money and his gun, he stomped off out the door, shouting from down the hall, “The sumbitch offer still stands.”

  What Dugan said and did had a familiar ring to it.

  For all those who have the noble work of the world to do, the question is essentially the same, yes? Fish or cut bait? Dream or do?

  Dugan’s acts are nothing new in religious circles. The prophet Jeremiah didn’t use quite those same words, but his sumbitch message was about the same. Woe unto you, you sumbitches! Shape up or die! Get serious or get out of the way!

  No, we didn’t dig the speedholes. Just too simple a solution.

  But there were more than a few times that the board members thought they’d made a great mistake—they should have sold the sumbitch.

  When I speak before educational groups, I tell my “war stories”—those tales that come out of my life as a schoolteacher. When teachers ask me how I feel about my current vocation, I reply that sometimes I feel sorry for myself—when I’ve been traveling too long and spent too much time in the public fishbowl, and I’m tired and lonely and depressed. The self-pity doesn’t last long—because a little voice in the back of my head always reminds me, “You could be at a faculty meeting.”

  Faculty meetings are black holes that suck intelligence out of nice people’s minds. I hated them so much I always sat on the floor in the back of the room and concentrated on sleeping with my eyes open. Sometimes I survived by imagining what everybody in the room looked like sitting there in their underwear.

  Once I almost died in a faculty meeting. I had taken a paring knife to school to sharpen in the school shop and had put the paring knife in the outside pocket of my book satchel, which was next to me on the floor when I fell over laughing at some absurd thing. I drove the knife through the fleshy part of the back side of my right arm and into my rib cage. It wasn’t as serious a wound as it seems, but I passed out from shock and lay there on the floor. Nobody paid me any attention until blood started seeping out onto the rug.

  An ambulance was called, and I was hauled away to be stitched up.

  The event entered into the mythology of faculty life. “Fulghum hated faculty meetings so much he tried to kill himself during one.”

  It took a while for the chairman of the meeting, the young assistant headmaster, to believe I wasn’t faking when I did my hara-kiri act and fell over. He believed I would do anything to get out of a faculty meeting, and here was proof. His suspicion was well founded. It was true.

  He’d also remembered his previous experience with me and the ape and the naked lady. And that’s a long story and a half—one that begins way out in left field and wanders all over the landscape. I like telling it because it’s such a different story when seen from the viewpoint of each one of the participants. It has philosophical dimensions, as well. The story begins at a wedding.

  A grand garden wedding in early summer. If a wedding inspector had stopped by, she would have found nothing amiss. Though she m
ight have wondered why the bride and the groom and the minister grinned on the edge of laughter all through the ceremony. It was because the groom had threatened to beat his chest and grunt “Ooga-ooga” instead of saying “I do” at the proper moment. It wouldn’t have seemed all that inappropriate if all the guests knew what I knew. For this was the wedding of the ape and the naked lady. I want you to know now there is a happy ending to this story.

  For twenty years, I taught a year-long course called “Graphics” in a private high school. The students called the course “Art for Turkeys”—because it was designed for those who thought they had no artistic talent but wished otherwise. The course was a mix of learning to draw, history of art, philosophy of art, and, as it turned out, sex education.

  In the spring of the year, the Graphics class spent six weeks drawing the human figure. Nude. Naked. Both male and female. The students knew, from the art-history lectures and visits to museums, that artists had considered the human form a worthy subject for thousands of years. And they, in becoming artists, might as well do likewise. To open the door to the mystery and see it literally in the light of day.

  Besides, adolescents already have a very serious interest in the human body. And at the same time, a discomforting fear. You may remember. You own body was developing, and all your friends’ bodies were developing. And you had no control over this—it happened to you. Bodies were connected to sex. Probably the single thing you thought most about for at least ten years of your life.

  We drew the nude human form in the Graphics class as an exercise in growing up—to suspend prejudice and lust and fear. To see what was truly amazing and beautiful about the human body—and to report that with the language of pencil and paint.

  Despite what parents and faculty might think, this was no first unveiling of the secrets of secrets. The students were not ignorant or innocent. Every last one of them had at least seen Playboy and Playgirl magazines, and most of them had viewed R- and X-rated movies and videos. All had taken sex education and biology courses. If statistical surveys were accurate, many already were having sexual relations, and others would if they could.

  These were late-twentieth-century teenagers. It was a mistake to underestimate what they knew. And an equal mistake not to ask them to go one more step and see the human body through the lens of art.

  It wasn’t so easy to convince parents and the school administration. But to make this long story short at this point, it is to the credit of the school that the matter was dealt with fairly and thoughtfully, and the drawing of the nude human figure became an integrated part of the Graphics course and the life of the school.

  After a while, nobody thought much about it anymore. The event came and went without controversy for quite a few years. Samples of student work were placed on view or were taken home, and were received with murmurs of appropriate critical appreciation. No problem.

  (The ape and the naked lady are coming now.)

  It was a Friday. For a week we had been drawing the human figure by working from prints of famous paintings. Now it was time to consider the real thing. Our model was herself an artist and came to us from the nearby university, where she also posed for classes. She was young, attractive, auburn-haired, and shapely. Rubens would have approved.

  An important part of what happened next involves the assistant headmaster of the school. Remember him?—back there at the faculty-meeting knifing. Tall, handsome, serious, ambitious, bright, and eager to succeed at his job. He had come to us in the fall from a very traditional boys’ school in Los Angeles, and had been left alone in charge of the school for the first time, while our headmaster was away at meetings.

  He did not know that three floors directly above his head there was a naked woman. He would not have believed it. It never would have occurred to him. And I neglected to mention the model to him, because the fact of her existence in spring term had blended into the life of the school several years before he came.

  Imagine him sitting at his desk, facing the door to his office, which opens onto the main hallway of the school. It is almost three o’clock and the end of the school day.

  Just one more piece of information before the action really begins: The model had a boyfriend. Both the model and the boyfriend occasionally attended my church. I knew them socially. The boyfriend was coming to pick up the model at the end of the school day, and as long as he was there, he thought he might as well play a joke on me. He would rent an ape costume and kidnap the model.

  There is quiet in the studio.

  Model is posing.

  Students are drawing.

  Mozart is on the stereo.

  All is well.

  I leave the room for a little while to give the students a chance to work without my looking over their shoulders and to get some more supplies from a storeroom. While I am there, I hear cheering from the studio, then quiet again. I return to the studio. The class is gone. And so is the model. A prank, I suppose—they’re just hiding somewhere. I’m cool. They will be back soon, of course.

  What I don’t know is that the boyfriend has charged into the room in his ape suit, beat his chest, hollered “OOGA-OOGA,” picked up the naked lady in his arms, and charged off down the stairs.

  The class thought it was me in the costume.

  Cheering, they jumped up and chased down the stairs behind the ape. Three floors down to the main hall and then all the way down the hall from one end to the other and out the door at the other end, passing, you may remember, the open door of the assistant headmaster, who has bolted up out of his chair and stumbled to his doorway as the ape, naked lady, and students stormed down the hall and out the door. OOGA-OOGA!

  Calmly, I walk down the stairs, looking for my class.

  I know nothing about what’s happened. Nothing. I swear.

  And headed my way is the assistant headmaster, who is nonplussed and inarticulate. He thinks I have set him up. He also thinks it was me in the ape costume. But that can’t be—here I am. He shouts, “What the HELL, Fulghum—what’s with the APE and the NAKED LADY?”

  The ape and the naked lady, in the meantime, have jumped into the ape’s pickup truck and have driven away. The students have returned to the studio by another stairway.

  The assistant headmaster pulls me by the arm out the front door.

  “Out here.”

  But there’s nothing out there but a driveway, some trees, and a lawn.

  Years later. The assistant headmaster still thinks I did a number on him. The students still think it was me in the costume. And the ape married the naked lady, and they have a couple of little apes of their own now. “Ooga-ooga.”

  Is this story true? That’s my version. The ape and the naked lady and the assistant headmaster, of course, have theirs. The varying truth perceived by many witnesses is a fact of life.

  For example, let me add one final view of this ridiculous event, contained in a letter I received this past year from an alumna of the school—a student in that very Graphics class.

  She confessed that she had been afraid to be in the same room with a mixed crowd and a nude model, and even more, she was afraid to be afraid. She didn’t eat all day. She was a doubting Catholic, but she seriously prayed to God that some miracle would happen if she went to class. She arrived late—just as the ape carried the naked lady away. Her prayer had been answered. A miracle. God had provided an almost unbelievable solution.

  She said it kept her going to church for a long time.

  Grand Junction, Colorado. Hot afternoon in mid-July. Local newspaper headline says: POWER SHORTAGE IN GRAND JUNCTION.

  In the men’s room in the local airport passenger terminal, another kind of power problem is in progress. From behind a stall door comes the sharp cry of a small child: “No, no, no, no, no. I won’t. I won’t.”

  Followed by an imploring voice of a man under great pressure. “Please. Do it for Daddy?” and the little voice replies, “No. No, no, no, no, no.”

  The seven men u
sing the facilities turn their faces in unison toward the stall with what-the-hell looks. In the opening at the bottom of the door, two sets of feet can be seen. A small pair, sockless, in black patent-leather sandals. And a much larger pair, in polished brown cowboy boots. The encounter continues:

  “Look, I know you have to go. You go every day. If you don’t go now, you’ll have to go when we’re standing in line or after we’re strapped into our seats or when we’re thirty-five-thousand feet in the air, and you’ll probably mess your pants and we’ll have to clean you up when we’re way up there and you don’t want to have to do that and I don’t want to have to do that so why don’t you just go now like a good girl?”

  “No. This is the boys’ place.”

  “I know, but Daddy can’t go into the girls’ room.”

  “No.”

  “What will Mommy and Grandma say when we get off the plane and you’ve messed your pants and you’re crying and I’m mad? They won’t be glad to see us.”

  “Yes, they will.”

  “We’re going to miss our plane if you don’t go now.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Am I going to have to spank you?”

  “No.”

  “Then please, please, at least try.”

  “No.”

  “If you’ll go, I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll buy you a present—you can pick it.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll give you a dollar.”

  “No.”

  “Please try—just as a favor to Daddy.”

  “No.”

  The big voice gets tough. “Well bygod you’ve just got to do it, that’s all there is to it. You’re going to sit on this pot until something happens.”

  The sounds of struggle as the small feet disappear. “Noooooooooooooo.”