The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

  For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. But the real cause of death, as I saw it, was my mother’s refusal to let me wear jeans to school. Even my old friend Manley, who played drums and could do twenty-three pull-ups and was elected class president in ninth grade, could not afford to see me socially.

  Help finally arrived in tenth grade, when I discovered Levi’s straight-legged corduroys and, through the lucky chance of my Congregational affiliation, found myself at the center of the Fellowship clique at the high school. Almost overnight, I went from dreading lunch hour to happily eating at one of the crowded Fellowship tables, presided over by Peppel, Kortenhof, and Schroer. Even Manley, who was now playing drums in a band called Blue Thyme, had started coming to Fellowship meetings. One Saturday in the fall of our junior year, he called me up and asked if I wanted to go to the mall with him. I’d been planning to hang out with my science buddy Weidman, but I ditched him in a heartbeat and we never hung out again.

  At lunch on Monday, Kortenhof gleefully reported that our padlock was still on the flagpole and that no flag had been raised. (It was 1976, and the high school was lax in its patriotic duties.) The obvious next step, Kortenhof said, was to form a proper group and demand official recognition. So we wrote a note—

  Dear Sir,

  We have kidnapped your flagpole. Further details later.

  —made a quick decision to sign it “U.N.C.L.E.” (after the sixties TV show), and delivered it to the mail slot of the high-school principal, Mr. Knight.

  Mr. Knight was a red-haired, red-bearded, Nordic-looking giant. He had a sideways, shambling way of walking, with frequent pauses to hitch up his pants, and he stood with the stooped posture of a man who spent his days listening to smaller people. We knew his voice from his all-school intercom announcements. His first words—“Teachers, excuse the interruption”—often sounded strained, as if he’d been nervously hesitating at his microphone, but after that his cadences were gentle and offhanded.

  What the six of us wanted, more than anything else, was to be recognized by Mr. Knight as kindred spirits, as players outside the ordinary sphere of student misbehavior and administrative force. And for a week our frustration steadily mounted, because Mr. Knight remained aloof from us, as impervious as the flagpole (which, in our correspondence, we liked to represent as personally his).

  After school on Monday, we cut and pasted words and letters from magazines:

  The phrase “Teachers, excuse the interruption” was Manley’s idea, a poke at Mr. Knight. But Manley was also worried, as was I, that the administration would crack down hard on our little group if we got a reputation for vandalism, and so we returned to school that night with a can of aluminum paint and repaired the damage we’d done to the flagpole in hammering the old lock off. In the morning, we delivered the ransom note, and two-thirty found the six of us, in our respective classrooms, unreasonably hoping that Mr. Knight would make an announcement.

  Our third note was typed on a sheet of notepaper headed with a giant avocado-green HELLO:

  Being as we are a brotherhood of kindly fellows, we are giving you one last chance. And observing that you have not complied with our earlier request, we are hereby reiterating it. To wit: your official recognition of our organization over the public address system at 2:59, Wednesday, March 17. If you comply, your flagpole will be returned by Thursday morning.

  U.N.C.L.E.

  We also made an U.N.C.L.E. flag out of a pillowcase and black electrician’s tape and ran it up the flagpole under cover of night. But Mr. Knight’s office didn’t even notice the flag until Kortenhof casually pointed it out to a teacher—two maintenance workers were then sent outside to cut our lock with a hacksaw and lower the pirate flag—and he ignored the note. He ignored a fourth note, which offered him two dollars in compensation for the broken school padlock. He ignored a fifth note, in which we reiterated our offer and dispelled any notion that our flag had been raised in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.

  By the end of the week, the only interest we’d succeeded in attracting was that of other students. There had been too much huddling and conspiring in hallways, too much blabbing on Kortenhof’s part. We added a seventh member simply to buy his silence. A couple of girls from Fellowship grilled me closely: Flagpole? Uncle? Can we join?

  As the whispering grew louder, and as Kortenhof developed a new plan for a much more ambitious and outstanding prank, we decided to rename ourselves. Manley, who had a half-insolent, half-genuine fondness for really stupid humor, proposed the name DIOTI. He wrote it down and showed it to me.

  “An anagram for ‘idiot’?”

  Manley giggled and shook his head. “It’s also tio, which is ‘uncle’ in Spanish, and ‘di,’ which means ‘two.’ U.N.C.L.E. Two. Get it?”

  “Di-tio.”

  “Except it’s scrambled. DIOTI sounds better.”

  “God, that is stupid.”

  He nodded eagerly, delightedly. “I know! It’s so stupid! Isn’t it great?”

  NINE OF US were piling out of two cars very late on the last Saturday of the school year, wearing dark clothes and dark stocking caps, carrying coils of rope, and zipping up knapsacks that contained hammers, wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, and customized floor plans of the high school, when a police car rounded the corner of Selma Avenue and turned on its searchlight.

  My instinct in police situations, honed by years of shooting off fireworks in a community where they were banned, was to take off running into the dark of the nearest lawn. Half of DIOTI came loping and scattering after me. It was a long time since I’d run through dark lawns uninvited. There was dew on everything, and you could encounter a dog, you could hook your foot in a croquet wicket. I stopped and hid in a group of rhododendrons where Schroer, the Monty Python disciple, was also hiding.

  “Franzen? Is that you? You’re making an incredible amount of noise.”

  In my knapsack, besides tools, I had Easter candy and green plastic Easter hay, five rhymed quatrains that I’d typed on slips of bond paper, and other special equipment. As my own breathing moderated, I could hear the breathing of the squad car’s engine in the distance, the murmur of discussion. Then, more distinctly, a shouted whisper: “Ally-ally-out-’n’-free! Ally-ally-out-’n’-free!” The voice belonged to Holyoke, one of our new recruits, and at first I didn’t understand what he was saying. The equivalent call on my own street was ally-ally-in-come-free.

  “The story,” Holyoke whispered as we followed him toward the patrol car, “is we’re tying a door shut. Gerri Chopin’s front door. We’re going to the Chopins’ house to tie her door shut. We’re using the ropes to tie the door. And the tools are for taking off the hinges.”

  “Michael, that doesn’t make any—”

  “Why take off the hinges if we’re tying—”

  “Hello!”

  “Hello, Officer!”

  The patrolman was standing in his headlight beams, examining knapsacks, checking IDs. “This is all you have? A library card?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looked in Peppel’s bag. “What are you doing with such a big rope?”

  “That’s not a big rope,” Peppel said. “That’s several small ropes tied together.”

  There was a brief silence.

  The officer asked us if we knew that it was after one o’clock.

  “Yes, we do know that,” Manley said, stepping forward and squaring his shoulders. He had a forthright manner whose ironic hollowness no adult, only peers, seemed able to detect. Teachers and mothers found Manley irresistible. Certainly, in spite of his shoulder-length hair, my own mother did.

  “So wha
t are you doing out so late?”

  Manley hung his head and confessed that we’d intended to tie the Chopins’ screen door shut. His tone suggested that he could see now, as he couldn’t five minutes ago, what a childish and negative idea this was. Standing behind him, three or four of us pointed at the Chopins’ house. That’s the Chopins’ house right there, we said.

  The officer looked at the door. We would seem to have been a rather large crew, with a lot of ropes and tools, for the task of tying one screen door shut, and we were less than a hundred yards from the high school in prime pranking season. But it was 1976 and we were white and not drunk. “Go home to bed,” he said.

  The squad car followed Kortenhof’s station wagon back to his house, where, in his bedroom, we decided not to make a second attempt that night. If we waited until Tuesday, we could get a better cover story in place. We could say, I said, that we were observing an unusual stellar occultation by the planet Mars, and that we needed tools to assemble a telescope. I insisted that everyone memorize the bogus name of the bogus star: NGC 6346.

  Luckily, the sky was clear on Tuesday night. Davis escaped his house by jumping out a window. Schroer spent the night at Peppel’s and helped him push the family car out of earshot before starting it. Manley, as usual, simply got into his father’s Opel and drove it to my house, where I’d climbed from my bedroom window and retrieved pieces of my hitherto useless telescope from the bushes where I’d hidden them.

  “We’re going to watch Mars occult NGC 6346,” Manley recited.

  I felt a little guilty about abusing astronomy like this, but there had always been something dubious in my relationship with nature. The official fifty-year-old enjoyed reading about science; the unofficial adolescent mostly cared about theatrics. I longed to get my hands on a bit of pure selenium or rubidium, because who else had pure selenium or rubidium in his home? But if a chemical wasn’t rare, colorful, flammable, or explosively reactive, there was no point in stealing it from school. My father, my rational ally, who by his own testimony had married my mother because “she was a good writer and I thought a good writer could do anything,” and who’d chafed against her romantic nature ever since, encouraged me to be a scientist and discouraged me from fancy writing. One Christmas, as a present, he built me a serious lab bench, and for a while I enjoyed imagining myself keeping a more rigorous notebook. My first and last experiment was to isolate “pure nylon” by melting a scrap of panty hose in a crucible. Turning to astronomy, I again was happy as long as I was reading books, but these books reprinted pages from amateur stargazing logs whose orderly example I couldn’t follow even for one minute. I just wanted to look at pretty things.

  Riding with Manley through the ghostly streets of Webster Groves, I was moved for the same reason that snow had moved me as a child, for its transformative enchantment of ordinary surfaces. The long rows of dark houses, their windows dimly reflecting streetlights, were as still as armored knights asleep under a spell. It was just as Tolkien and C. S. Lewis had promised: there really was another world. The road, devoid of cars and fading into distant haze, really did go ever on and on. Unusual things could happen when nobody was looking.

  On the roof of the high school, Manley and Davis gathered ropes to rappel down exterior walls, while Kortenhof and Schroer set off for the gym, intending to enter through a high window and climb down on one of the folded-up trampolines. The rest of DIOTI went down through a trapdoor, past a crawl space, and out through a biology-department storage room.

  Our floor plans showed the location of the thirty-odd bells that we’d identified while canvassing the school. Most of the bells were the size of half-coconuts and were mounted in hallways. During a lunch hour, we’d given a boost to Kortenhof, who had unscrewed the dish from one of these bells and silenced it by removing the clapper—a pencil-thick cylinder of graphite-blackened metal—from its electromagnetic housing. Two teams of two now headed off to disable the other bells and collect the clappers.

  I had my slips of paper and worked alone. In a second-floor hallway, at knee level between two lockers, was an intriguing little hole with a hinged metal cap. The hole led back into obscure scholastic recesses. Manley and I had often passed idle minutes speaking into it and listening for answers.

  In my laboratory at home, I’d rolled up one of my slips of paper tightly, sealed it inside a segment of glass tubing with a Bunsen flame, and tied and taped a piece of string around the tube. This ampule I now lowered through the little rabbit hole until it dropped out of sight. Then I tied the string to the hinge and shut the metal cap. On the slip of paper was a quatrain of doggerel:

  The base of a venetian blind

  Contains another clue.

  Look in the conference room that’s off

  The library. (What’s new?)

  In the venetian blind was more doggerel that I’d planted during school hours:

  There is a clue behind the plate

  That’s on the western side

  Of those large wooden fire doors

  Near room three sixty-five.

  I went now and unscrewed the push plate from the fire door and taped another slip to the wood underneath:

  And last, another bookish clue

  Before the glorious find.

  The Little Book of Bells’ the one;

  Its code is seven eight nine.

  There were further quatrains hidden on an emergency-lighting fixture, rolled up inside a projection screen, and stuck in a library book called Your School Clubs. Some of the quatrains could have used a rewrite, but nobody thought they were a piece of shit. My idea was to enchant the school for Mr. Knight, to render the building momentarily strange and full of possibility, as a gift to him; and I was in the midst of discovering that writing was a way to do this.

  During the previous two months, students from the five high-school physics classes had written and produced a farce about Isaac Newton, The Fig Connection. I had co-chaired the writing committee with a pretty senior girl, Siebert, toward whom I’d quickly developed strong feelings of stagnation. Siebert was a tomboy who wore bib overalls and knew how to camp, but she was also an artist who drew and wrote effortlessly and had charcoal stains and acrylic smudges on her hands, and she was also a fetching girly-girl who every so often let her hair down and wore high-waisted skirts. I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her. Our play was so warmly received that one of the English teachers suggested that Siebert and I try to publish it. As everything had gone wrong for me in junior high, suddenly everything was going right.

  Toward three o’clock, DIOTI reconvened on the roof with booty: twenty-five clappers and five metal dishes, the latter daringly unbolted from the bigger bells that were mounted on high walls. We tied the clappers together with pink ribbon, filled the largest dish with plastic hay and Easter candy, nestled the clappers and the smaller dishes in the hay, and stashed the whole thing in the crawl space. Returning home then, Peppel and Schroer had the worst of it, pushing Peppel’s car back up a hill and into his driveway. I crept back into my house less cautiously than usual. I hardly cared if I was Caught; for once, I had something they couldn’t take away from me.

  And to go back to school four hours later and see the place so peopled after seeing it so empty: here was a fore-taste of seeing clothed in the daylight the first person you’d spent a night with naked.

  And the silence then, at eight-fifteen, when the bells should have rung but didn’t: this quiet transformation of the ordinary, this sound of one hand clapping, this beautiful absence, was like the poetry I wanted to learn to write.

  At the end of first period, a teacher’s voice came over the classroom speakers to announce that the bells were out of order. Later in the morning, the teacher began to announce not only the time but also, oddly, the temperature. Summer heat poured through the open windows, and without the usual prison-yard clanging the crowds in hallways seemed deregimented, the boundaries of the hours blurred.

  Ma
nley at lunchtime brought happy news: the reason that Mr. Knight wasn’t making the announcements himself was that he was following the clues. Manley had spied him on the second floor, peering down into the rabbit hole. Despite the familiar tone we took with him, few members of DIOTI, certainly not I, had ever exchanged two words with Mr. Knight. He was the ideal, distant, benign, absurd Authority, and until now the notion that he might come out to play with us had been purely hypothetical.

  The only shadow on the day was that a Device of mine again failed to work. Davis called me after school to report that Mr. Knight had lost the glass ampule down the rabbit hole. A canny English teacher, the same one who thought our play should be published, had promised Davis anonymity in exchange for the lost clue. I recited it over the phone, and the next morning the bells were working again. Kortenhof, who had had two hundred DIOTI bumper stickers printed up, went outside with Schroer in broad daylight and applied them to every rear bumper in the faculty parking lot.

  THAT SUMMER MY cousin Gail, my aunt and uncle’s only child, was killed at the wheel of her car in West Virginia. My mother’s mother was dying of liver disease in Minneapolis, and I became morbidly aware that there were fifty thousand nuclear warheads on the planet, several dozen of them targeting St. Louis. My wet dreams felt apocalyptic, like a ripping of vital organs. One night I was awakened by a violent clap of thunder and was convinced that the world was over.

  It was the sweetest summer of my life. “One continuous round of pleasure,” my father kept saying. I fell under the spell of Robert Pirsig and Wallace Stevens and began to write poetry. During the day, Siebert and I shot and edited a Super-8 costume drama with Davis and Lunte, and at night we painted a Rousseauian jungle mural on a wall at the high school. We were still just friends, but every evening that I spent with her was an evening that she didn’t spend with other boys. On her birthday, in July, as she was leaving her house, three of us jumped her from behind, blindfolded her, tied her wrists, and put her in the back of Lunte’s car. We had a surprise party waiting on a riverbank beneath an interstate overpass, and to Siebert’s increasingly plaintive questions—“Jon? Chris? Guys? Is that you?”—we said nothing until Lunte did 43 in a 30 zone. The cop who pulled us over made us unblind her. When he asked her if she knew us, you could see her considering her options before she said yes.