The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  I can remember the ‘Uncola,’ and the way Noxzema commercials always played a big bump-and-grind theme. I seem to remember a lot of wood-pattern designs on things that were not wood, and station wagons with side panels engineered to look like wood. I remember Jimmy Carter addressing the nation in a cardigan, and something about Carter’s brother turning out to be a wastoid and public boob embarrassing the president just by being related to him.

  I don’t think I voted. The truth is that I don’t remember if I voted or not. I probably planned to and said I was going to and then got distracted somehow and didn’t get around to it. That would be about par for the period.

  Obviously, it probably goes without saying that I partied heavily during this whole period. I don’t know how much I should say about this. But I didn’t party any more or less than everyone else I knew did—in fact, very precisely neither more nor less. Everyone I knew and hung out with was a wastoid, and we knew it. It was hip to be ashamed of it, in a strange way. A weird kind of narcissistic despair. Or just to feel directionless and lost—we romanticized it. I did like Ritalin and certain types of speed like Cylert, which was a little unusual, but everyone had their idiosyncratic favorites when it came to partying. I didn’t do incredible amounts of speed, as the kinds I liked were hard to get—you more had to stumble across it. The roommate with the blue Firebird was obsessed with hashish, which he always described as mellow.

  Looking back, I doubt if it ever occurred to me that the way I felt towards this roommate was probably the way my father felt about me—that I was just as much a conformist as he was, plus a hypocrite, a ‘rebel’ who really just sponged off of society in the form of his parents. I wish I could say I was aware enough for this contradiction to sink in at the time, although I probably would have just turned it into some kind of hip, nihilistic joke. At the same time, sometimes I know I worried about my directionlessness and lack of initiative, how abstract and open to different interpretations everything seemed at the time, even about how fuzzy and pointless my memories were starting to seem. My father, on the other hand, I know, remembered everything—in particular, physical details, the precise day and time of appointments, and past statements which were now inconsistent with present statements. But then, I would learn that this sort of close attention and total recall was part of his job.

  What I really was was naive. For instance, I knew I lied, but I hardly ever assumed that anybody else around me might be lying. I realize now how conceited that is, and how unfocused that lets actual reality be. I was a child, really. The truth is that most of what I really know about myself I learned in the Service. That may sound too much like sucking up, but it’s the truth. I’ve been here five years, and I’ve learned an incredible amount.

  Anyhow, I can also recall smoking pot with my mother and her partner, Joyce. They grew their own, and it wasn’t exactly potent, but that wasn’t really the point, because with them it was more of a sort of liberated political statement than a matter of getting high, and my mother almost seemed to make it a point to smoke pot whenever I was over there visiting them, and while it made me a little uncomfortable, I don’t ever remember refusing to ‘fire up’ with them, even though it embarrassed me somewhat when they used college terms like this. At that time, my mother and Joyce co-owned a small feminist bookstore, which I knew my father resented having helped finance through the divorce settlement. And I can remember once sitting around on their Wrigleyville apartment’s beanbag chairs, passing around one of their large, amateurishly rolled doobersteins—which was the hip, wastoid term for a joint at that time, at least around the Chicagoland area—and listening to my mother and Joyce recount very vivid, detailed memories from their early childhoods, and both of them laughing and crying and stroking one another’s hair in emotional support, which didn’t really bother me—their touching or even kissing one another in front of me—or at least by then I’d had plenty of time to get used to it, but I can remember becoming more and more paranoid and nervous at the time, because, when I tried hard to think of some of my own childhood memories, the only really vivid memory I could remember involved me pounding Glovolium into my Rawlings catcher’s mitt, which my father had gotten me, and that day of getting the Johnny Bench Autograph mitt I remembered very well, although Mom and Joyce’s was not the place to wax all sentimental about my father getting me something, obviously. The worst part was then starting to hear my mother recount all these memories and anecdotes of my own childhood, and realizing that she actually remembered much more of my early childhood than I did, as though somehow she’d seized or confiscated memories and experiences that were technically mine. Obviously, I didn’t think of the term seize at the time. That’s more a Service term. But smoking pot with my mother and Joyce was usually just not a pleasant experience at all, and often totally weirded me out, now that I think about it—and yet I did it with them almost every time. I doubt my mother enjoyed it much, either. The whole thing had an air of pretense of fun and liberation about it. In retrospect, I get the feeling that my mom was trying to get me to see her as changing and growing up right there with me, both on my side of the generation gap, as though we were still as close as we were when I was a child. As both being nonconformists and giving my father the finger, symbolically. Anyhow, smoking pot with her and Joyce always felt a bit hypocritical. My parents split up in February 1972, in the same week that Edmund Muskie cried in public on the campaign trail, and the TV had clips of him crying over and over. I can’t remember what he was crying about, but it definitely sunk his chances in the campaign. It was the sixth week of theater class in high school where I first learned the term nihilist. I know I didn’t feel any real hostility towards Joyce, by the way, although I do remember always feeling sort of edgy when it was just her and me, and being relieved when my mother got home and I could sort of relate to both of them as a couple instead of trying to make conversation with Joyce, which was always complicated because there always felt like a great deal more subjects and things to remember not to bring up than there were to actually talk about, so that trying to make chitchat with her was like trying to slalom at Devil’s Head if the slalom’s gates were only inches apart.

  In hindsight, I realized later that my father was actually kind of witty and sophisticated. At the time, I think I thought of him as barely alive, as like a robot or slave to conformity. It’s true that he was uptight, anal, and quick with the put-downs. He was a hundred percent conventional establishment, and totally on the other side of the generation gap—he was forty-nine when he died, which was in December 1977, which obviously means he grew up during the Depression. But I don’t think I ever appreciated his sense of humor about all of it—there was a way he sort of wove his pro-establishment views into a dry, witty style that I don’t remember ever getting or understanding his jokes in at the time. I didn’t have much of a sense of humor then, it seems, or else I did the standard child’s thing of taking everything he said as a personal comment or judgment. There was stuff I knew about him, which I’d picked up through the years of childhood, mostly from my mother. Like that he’d been really, really shy when they’d first met. How he had wanted to go to more than just technical college but he had bills to pay—he was in logistics and supply in Korea but had already gotten married to my mother before he was posted overseas, and so upon discharge he immediately had to find a job. This is what people her age did then, she explained—if you met the right person and were at least out of high school, you got married, without even ever really thinking about it or questioning yourself. The point is that he was very smart and somewhat unfulfilled, like many of his generation. He worked hard because he had to, and his own dreams were put on the back burner. This is all indirectly, from my mother, but it fit with certain bits and pieces that even I couldn’t help being aware of. For instance, my father read all the time. He was constantly reading. It was his whole recreation, especially after the divorce—he was always coming home from the library with a stack of books with that c
lear library plastic wrap on the covers. I never paid any attention to what the books were or why he read so much—he never talked about what he was reading. I don’t even know what his favorite kinds were, as in history, mysteries, or what. Looking back now, I think he was lonely, especially after the divorce, as the only people you could call his friends were colleagues from his job, and I think he essentially found his job boring—I don’t think he felt much personal investment in the City of Chicago’s budget and expenditure protocols, especially as it wasn’t his idea to move here—and I think books and intellectual issues were one of his escapes from boredom. He was actually a very smart person. I wish I could remember more examples of the sort of things he’d say—at the time, I think they seemed more hostile or judgmental than like he was making fun of both of us at the same time. I do remember he sometimes referred to the so-called younger generation (meaning mine) as ‘This thing America hath wrought.’ That’s not a very good example. It’s almost like he thought the blame went both ways, that there was something wrong with the whole country’s adults if they could produce kids like this in the 1970s. I remember once in October or November 1976, at twenty-one, during another period of time off, after being enrolled at DePaul—which actually didn’t go well at all, the first time I was at DePaul. It was basically a disaster. They kind of invited me to leave, actually, which was the only time that had happened. The other times, at Lindenhurst College and then later at UIC, I’d withdrawn on my own. Anyhow, during this time off, I was working the second shift at a Cheese Nabs factory in Buffalo Grove and living there at my father’s house in Libertyville. There was no way I was crashing at my mother and Joyce’s apartment in the Wrigleyville section of Chicago, where the rooms all had bead curtains instead of doors. But I didn’t have to punch in at this mindless job until six, so I’d mostly just hang around the house all afternoon until it was time to leave. And sometimes during this period my father would be away for a couple of days—like the Service, the City of Chicago’s financial departments were always sending their more technical people to conferences and in-services, which I would come to learn later here in the Service are not like the big drunken conventions of private industry but are usually highly intensive and work-centered. My father said the city in-services were mostly just tedious, which was a word he used a fair amount, tedious. And on these trips it was just me living in the house, and you can imagine what used to happen when I’d be there on my own, especially on weekends, even though I was supposed to be in charge of looking after the house while he was gone. But the memory is of him coming home early one afternoon in ’76 from one of these work trips, like a day or two before I’d thought he told me he was going to be home, and coming in the front door and finding me and two of my old so-called friends from Libertyville South high school in the living room—which, due to the slightly raised design of the front porch and front door, was in effect a sunken living room that more or less started right inside the front door, with one small set of stairs leading down into the living room and another set leading up to the house’s second floor. Architecturally, the house’s style is known as a raised ranch, like most of the other older homes on the street, and it had another set of stairs leading from the second-floor hallway down into the garage, which actually supports part of the second story—that is, the garage is, structurally, a necessary part of the house, which is what’s distinctive about a raised ranch. At the moment he entered, two of us were slumped on the davenport with our dirty feet up on his special coffee table, and the carpeting was all littered with beer cans and Taco Bell wrappers—the cans were my father’s beer, which he bought in bulk twice a year and stored in the utility room closet and normally drank maybe a total of two per week of—with us sitting there totally wasted and watching The Searchers on WGN, and one of the guys listening to Deep Purple on my father’s special stereo headphones for listening to classical music on, and the coffee table’s special oak or maple top with big rings of condensation from the beer cans all over it because we’d turned the house’s heat way up past where he normally allowed it to be, in terms of energy conservation and expense, and the other guy next to me on the davenport leaning over in the middle of taking a huge bong hit—this guy was famous for being able to take massive hits. Plus, the whole living room reeked. When then, suddenly, in the memory, I heard the distinctive sound of his footsteps on the broad wooden porch and the sound of his key in the front door, and only a second later my father suddenly comes in on a wave of very cold, clear air through the doorway with his hat and overnight bag—I was in the paralyzed shock of the totally busted kid, and I sat there paralyzed, unable to do anything and yet seeing each frame of him coming in with horrible focus and clarity—and him standing there at the edge of the few stairs down to the living room, taking his hat off with the trademark gesture that involved both his head and his hand as he stood there taking in the scene and the three of us—he’d made no secret of not much liking these old high school friends, who were the same guys I’d been out partying with when my mom’s gas cap was stolen and the tank siphoned out, and none of us had any money left by the time we found the car, and I had to call my father and he had to take the train down after work to pay for gas so I could get the Le Car back to my mom and Joyce, who co-owned it and used it for bookstore business—with the three of us now slumped there all totally wasted and paralyzed, one of the guys wearing a ratty old tee shirt that actually said FUCK YOU across the chest, the other coughing out his mammoth hit in shock, so that a plume of pot smoke went rolling out across the living room towards my father—in short, my memory is of the scene being the worst confirmation of the worst kind of generation-gap stereotype and parental disgust for their decadent, wastoid kids, and of my father slowly putting down his bag and case and just standing there, with no expression and not saying anything for what felt like such a long time, and then he slowly made a gesture of putting one arm up in the air a little and looking up and said, ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!,’ and then picked up his overnight bag again and without a word walked up the upstairs stairs and went into their old bedroom and closed the door. He didn’t slam it, but you could hear the door close quite firmly. The memory, strangely, which is horribly sharp and detailed up to there, then totally stops, like a tape that’s just run out, and I don’t know what happened after that, like getting the guys out of there and hurriedly trying to clean everything up and turn the thermostat back down to sixty-eight, though I do remember feeling like complete shit, not so much like I’d been ‘busted’ or was in trouble as just childish, like a spoiled little selfish child, and imagining what I must have looked like to him, sitting there in litter in his house, wasted, with my dirty feet on the marked-up coffee table he and my mother had saved up for and gotten at an antique store in Rockford when they were still young and didn’t have much money, and which he prized, and rubbed lemon oil in all the time, and said all he asked was that I should please keep my feet off of it and use a coaster—like, for a second or two seeing what I actually must have looked like to him as he stood there looking at us treating his living room like that. It wasn’t a pretty picture, and it felt even worse as he hadn’t yelled or squeezed my shoes about it—he just looked weary, and sort of embarrassed for both of us—and I remember for a second or two I could actually feel what he must have been feeling, and for an instant saw myself through his eyes, which made the whole thing much, much worse than if he’d been furious, or yelled, which he never did, not even the next time he and I were alone in the same room—which I don’t remember when this was, like whether I skulked out of the house after cleaning everything up or whether I stayed there to face him. I don’t know which one I did. I didn’t even understand what he said, although obviously I understood he was being sarcastic, and in some way blaming himself or making fun of himself for having produced the ‘work’ that had just thrown the Taco Bell wrappers and bags on the floor instead of bothering to get up and take like eight steps to throw them away. Altho
ugh later on, I just stumbled on the poem it turned out he was quoting from, in some kind of weird context at the Indianapolis TAC, and my eyes just about bulged out of my head, because I hadn’t even known it was a poem—and a famous one, by the same British poet who evidently wrote the original Frankenstein. And I didn’t even know my father read British poetry, much less that he could quote from it when he was upset. In short, there was probably much more to him than I was aware of, and I don’t remember even realizing how little I knew about him, really, until after he was gone and it was too late. I expect that this sort of regret is typical, as well.

  Anyhow, this one terrible memory of looking up from the davenport and seeing myself through his eyes, and of his sad, sophisticated way of expressing how sad and disgusted he was—this kind of sums up the whole period for me now, when I think of it. I also remember both of those former friends’ names, too, from that fucked-up day, but obviously that’s not relevant.

  Things began to get much more vivid, focused, and concrete in 1978, and in retrospect I suppose I agree with Mom and Joyce that this was the year I ‘found myself’ or ‘put away childish things’ and began the process of developing some initiative and direction in my life, which obviously led to my joining the Service.