The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

  But I remember once, during an afternoon on which he’d paid me to help him with some light yard work, asking my father why he never seemed to dispense direct advice about life the way my friends’ fathers did. At the time, his failure to give advice seemed to me to be evidence that he was either unusually taciturn and repressed, or else that he just didn’t care enough. In hindsight, I now realize that the reason was not the former and never the second, but rather that my father was, in his own particular way, somewhat wise, at least about certain things. In this instance, he was wise enough to be suspicious of his own desire to seem wise, and to refuse to indulge it—this could make him seem aloof and uncaring, but what he really was was disciplined. He was an adult; he had himself firmly in hand. This remains largely theory, but my best guess as to his never dispensing wisdom like other dads is that my father understood that advice—even wise advice—actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path. I’m not putting this very well. If you begin to get the idea that other people can actually live by the clear, simple principles of good advice, it can make you feel even worse about your own inabilities. It can cause self-pity, which I think my father recognized as the great enemy of life and contributor to nihilism. Although it’s not as though he and I talked about it in any depth—that would have been too much like advice. I can’t remember how he specifically answered that day’s question. I remember asking it, including where we stood and how the rake felt in my hands as I asked it, but then there’s a blank after that. My best guess, derived from my knowledge of our dynamics, would be that he would say trying to advise me about what to do or not do would be like the childhood fable’s rabbit ‘begging’ not to be thrown in the briar patch. Whose name escapes me, though. But obviously meaning he felt it would have the reverse effect. He might have even laughed in a dry way, as though the question was comical in its lack of awareness of our dynamics and the obvious answer. It would probably be the same if I had asked him if he believed I didn’t respect him or his advice. He might act as if he was amused that I was so unaware of myself, that I was incapable of respect but didn’t even know it. It is, as mentioned, possible that he simply didn’t like me very much, and that he used a dry, sophisticated wittiness to sort of try to deal with that fact within himself. It would, I imagine, be hard on someone not to be able to like your own offspring. There would obviously be some guilt involved. I know that even the slumped, boneless way I sat when watching TV or listening to music peeved him—not directly, but it was another thing I used to overhear him speaking about in arguments with my mother. For what it’s worth, I accept the basic idea that parents instinctively do ‘love’ their offspring no matter what—the evolutionary reasoning behind this premise is too obvious to ignore. But actually ‘liking’ them, or enjoying them as people, seems like a totally different thing. It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children’s need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child’s desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn’t a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of. It’s not unlike the religious confidence that one is ‘loved unconditionally’ by God—as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn’t seem to really have anything to do with you, so it’s hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God. The point here is not that every last feeling and emotion must be taken personally as about you, but only that, for basic psychological reasons, it’s difficult not to feel this way when it comes to one’s father—it’s simply human nature.

  Anyhow, all this is part of the question of how I came to be posted here in Examinations—the unexpected coincidences, changes in priorities and direction. Obviously, these sorts of unexpected things can happen in all sorts of different ways, and it’s dangerous to make too much of them. I remember having one roommate—this was at Lindenhurst College—who was a self-professed Christian. I actually had two roommates in the Lindenhurst dorm suite, with a shared communal ‘social room’ in the center and three small single bedrooms leading off of it, which was an excellent rooming setup—but one of these roommates in particular was a Christian, as was his girlfriend. Lindenhurst, which was the first college I attended, was a peculiar place in that it was primarily a school full of Chicagoland-area hippies and wastoids, but also had a fervent Christian minority who were totally separate from the overall life of the school. Christian in this case meaning evangelical, just like Jimmy Carter’s sister, who, if I remember it correctly, was reported as going around performing freelance exorcisms. The fact that members of this evangelical branch of Protestantism refer to themselves as just ‘Christians,’ as though there were only one real kind, is usually enough to characterize them, at least as far as I was concerned. This one had come in via the suite’s third roommate, whom I knew and liked, and who arranged the whole three-way rooming situation without me or the Christian ever meeting one another until it was too late. The Christian was definitely not anyone I would have gone out and recruited to room with on my own, although in fairness, he didn’t much care for my lifestyle or what rooming with me involved, either. The arrangement ended up being highly temporary, anyhow. I remember that he was from upstate Indiana, was fervently involved in a college organization called Campus Crusade, and had numerous pairs of dress chinos and blue blazers and Topsiders, and a smile that looked as though someone had plugged him in. He also had an equally evangelical Christian girlfriend or platonic female friend who would come over a great deal—she practically lived there, from what I could see—and I have a clear, detailed memory of one incident when the three of us were all in the communal area, which in these dormitories’ nomenclature was called the ‘social room,’ but in which I often liked to sit on the third roommate’s soft old vinyl sofa alone instead of in my tiny bedroom, to read, double on Obetrol, or sometimes smoke my little brass one-hitter and watch TV, prompting all sorts of predictable arguments with the Christian, who often liked to treat the social room as a Christian clubhouse and have his girlfriend and all his other high-wattage Christian friends in to drink Fresca and fellowship about Campus Crusade matters or the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy, and so on and so forth, and liked to squeeze my shoes and remind me that it was called ‘the social room’ when I asked them all whether they didn’t have some frightening pamphlets to get out of there and go distribute somewhere or something. In hindsight, it seems obvious that I actually liked despising the Christian because I could pretend that the evangelicals’ smugness and self-righteousness were the only real antithesis or alternative to the cynical, nihilistically wastoid attitude I was starting to cultivate in myself. As if there was nothing in between these two extremes—which, ironically, was exactly what the evangelical Christians also believed. Meaning I was much more like the Christian than either of us would ever be willing to admit. Of course, at barely nineteen, I was totally unaware of all this. At the time, all I knew is that I despised the Christian and enjoyed calling him ‘Pepsodent Boy’ and complaining about him to the third roommate, who was in a rock band besides his classes and was usually not around the suite very much, leaving the Christian and me to mock and bait and judge and use one another to confirm our respective smug prejudices.

  Anyhow, at one juncture, I, the Christian roommate, and his girlfriend—who might technically have been his fiancée—were all sitting around in the suite’s social room, and for some reason—quite possibly unprompted—the girlfriend was seeing fit to tell me the story of how she was ‘saved’ or ‘born again’ and became a Christian. I remember almost nothing about her except for the fact that she wore pointy-toed leather cowbo
y boots decorated with flowers—that is, not cartoons of flowers or isolated floral designs but a rich, detailed, photorealist scene of some kind of meadow or garden in full bloom, so that the boots looked more like a calendar or greeting card. Her testimony, as best as I can now recall, was set on a certain day an unspecified amount of time before, a day when she said she was feeling totally desolate and lost and nearly at the end of her rope, sort of wandering aimlessly in the psychological desert of our younger generation’s decadence and materialism and so on and so forth. Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as—and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be—lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason to even go on living, before they were ‘saved.’ And that she happened, on this one day, to be driving along a county road outside her hometown, just wandering, driving aimlessly around in one of her parents’ AMC Pacer, until, for no particular reason she was aware of inside herself, she turned suddenly into the parking lot of what turned out to be an evangelical Christian church, which by coincidence happened to be right in the middle of holding an evangelical service, and—for what she again claimed was no discernible reason or motive she could have named—she wandered aimlessly in and sat down in the rear of the church in one of the plushly cushioned theater-type seats their churches tend to use instead of wooden pews, and just as she sat down, the preacher or father or whatever they called them there evidently said, ‘There is someone out there with us in the congregation today that is feeling lost and hopeless and at the end of their rope and needs to know that Jesus loves them very, very much,’ and then—in the social room, recounting her story—the girlfriend testified as to how she had been stunned and deeply moved, and said she had instantly felt a huge, dramatic spiritual change deep inside of her in which she said she felt completely reassured and unconditionally known and loved, and as though now suddenly her life had meaning and direction to it after all, and so on and so forth, and that furthermore she had not had a down or empty moment since, not since the pastor or father or whatever picked just that moment to reach out past all the other evangelical Christians sitting there fanning themselves with complimentary fans with slick full-color ads for the church on them and to just kind of verbally nudge them aside out of the way and somehow address himself directly to the girlfriend and her circumstances at just that moment of deep spiritual need. She talked about herself as though she were a car whose pistons had been pulled and valves ground. In hindsight, of course, there turned out to be certain parallels with my own case, but the only real response I had at the time was that I felt annoyed—they both always annoyed the hell out of me, and I can’t remember what I could have been doing that day sitting there in conversation with them, the circumstances—and I can remember making a show of having my tongue pressing against the inside of my cheek in such a way as to produce a visible bulge in my cheek and giving the girlfriend in the boots a dry, sardonic look, and asking her just what exactly had made her think the evangelical pastor was talking to her directly, meaning her in particular, as probably everyone else sitting there in the church audience probably felt the same way she did, as pretty much every red-blooded American in today’s (then) late-Vietnam and Watergate era felt desolate and disillusioned and unmotivated and directionless and lost, and that what if the preacher or father’s saying ‘Someone here’s lost and hopeless’ was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers (like Joyce every morning, over vegetable juice she made herself in a special machine) that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they’re feeling a certain way then surely they’re the only person who is feeling like that. In other words, I was only pretending to ask her a question—I was actually giving the girlfriend a condescending little lecture on people’s narcissism and illusion of uniqueness, like the fat industrialist in Dickens or Ragged Dick who leans back from a giant dinner with his fingers laced over his huge stomach and cannot imagine how anyone in that moment could be hungry anywhere in the whole world. I also remember that the Christian’s girlfriend was a large, copper-haired girl with something slightly wrong with one of the teeth on either side of her front teeth, which overlapped one of the front teeth in a distracting way, because during that day’s conversation she gave me a big smug smile and said that, why, she didn’t think that my cynical comparison was any kind of refutation or nullification of her vital Christ experience that day or its effect on her inner rebirth at all, not one little bit. She may have looked over at the Christian for reassurance or an ‘Amen’ or something at this juncture—I can’t remember what the Christian was doing all through this exchange. I do, though, remember giving her a big, exaggerated smile right back and saying, ‘Whatever,’ and thinking inwardly she wasn’t worth wasting time arguing with, and what was I even doing here talking to them, and that she and Pepsodent Boy deserved one another—and I know sometime soon after that I left them together in the social room and went off while thinking about the whole conversation and feeling somewhat lost and desolate inside, but also consoled that I was at least superior to narcissistic rubes like these two so-called Christians. And then I have a slightly later memory of me standing at a party with a red plastic cup of beer and telling somebody the story of the interchange in such a way that I appeared smart and funny and the girlfriend was a total fool. I know I was nearly always the hero of any story or incident I ever told people about during this period—which, like the thing with the lone sideburn, is a memory that makes me almost wince now.