WORKING WITH THE ENEMY

Sometimes you overhear conversations that make you laugh, as in my last post, and sometimes you overhear conversations that make you want to cry, as in the one I overheard just now at work.

I don't work at a liberal or highbrow think tank by any means, but I usually assume a certain level of enlightenment and decency among my co-workers. I usually assume it is a safe and tolerable place to be gay.

Then someone casually lobs a staggeringly homophobic remark into the open, and — even more staggering — it is received with warm approbation.

I didn't hear the whole conversation because it took place on another floor among people I mostly know only by name. I could just hear voices coming over the balcony, some of which I could put faces to and some of which I couldn't. The gist of the conversation was that these guys were trying to figure out where to have dinner. One of them was naming restaurants, and when he got to a certain restaurant, another guy said "No! No way!" And the other guy said, "Why? Did you get some bad food?" And the guy just answered, "Never again!" Then a third guy, someone I actually know, said, "He got hit on there." Long pause, in which I could imagine the other guys thinking, "Awesome! He got hit on! What's the problem?" Then the guy I know continued: "By a guy."

Then followed a display of repulsion. Well, yeah, of course we won't go there now. We'd probably be anally raped as soon as we walked in the door. Whew! Dodged a bullet.

You would have thought the guy had said he was served a burrito filled with vomit, instead of that someone found him attractive and expressed interest in him that he was perfectly free to accept or decline.

I understand that some people are really uncomfortable with homosexuality and that they might not feel exactly flattered when someone who really turns them off makes a pass at them, but I don't understand feeling so outraged and appalled that you would "never again" patronize a good restaurant because of the fear that the same (highly improbable, when you think about it) homosexual might be there to prey on you again.

Or maybe you don't fear that exactly. Maybe you were just so traumatized by the gayness of it that you can't bear being in those four walls again. You can't bear any reminder of the faggotry that befell you. Your appetite for the restaurant's delicious food has been permanently lost.

And I don't understand why not a single one of the four or five guys involved in this conversation didn't speak up and say, "We can never eat at this restaurant because you're afraid that some gay guy will hit on you? Really? Isn't that kind of silly?" Instead they all just seemed to accept it as a perfectly rational, understandable response.

What if some female customer whom he found highly unattractive had hit on him? Would he let the fear of a repeat episode keep him from the restaurant? I doubt it. He'd probably politely tell her he wasn't interested and not give it another thought. He wouldn't flee the premises with a (flamboyant, don't you think?) cry of "Never again!"

Why does the unwanted attention from another man strike such a nerve?

I know that if you asked any of these guys if they were homophobic that they'd say no, that they'd insist they had "nothing against gays." But that's kind of the scary part, because they're just normal, average guys behaving like, well, normal, average guys who have nothing against anybody (as long as everything remains sort of "separate but equal"). They probably don't say "fag" in front of their kids — they're decent people, after all, not mean-spirited — but you don't really need to say "fag" when you otherwise manage to convey that a man being interested in another man is about the most appalling thing you can think of.

SWEET LITTLE LIES

I was at Half Price Books just now looking for Alice McDermott's "At Weddings and Wakes" (They had it. Yay!), and I overheard this conversation between a guy and his daughter, who appeared to be about 4.

Girl: Dad.

(silence)

Girl: (louder) Dad.

Guy: What is it?

Girl: Mom just got mad at me.

Guy: She did? (with a soothing tone of complete indifference)

Girl: Yeah. Really mad.

Guy: Why did Mom get mad?

Girl: I dunno.

Guy: What did you do?

Girl: I dunno.

Guy: She just got mad for no reason?

Girl: It looks that way.

(At what age does lying go from being cute and precocious to vile and manipulative?)

STORIES

Sometimes you read a book and wonder how the author survived the telling.

How did this person stare this thing in the face and grapple with it and pin it down? How did she take an amorphous mass of dark, swirling emotion and turn it into the hard, gemlike flame of a book?

It's a miracle to me: that there are people among us who devote their lives to telling stories, to observing facts big and small — how sunlight plays on a brick wall, how grief plays on memory — collecting and polishing the raw data of humanity and giving it back to us in a portable form.

Why do they do it?

The easier thing, by far, would be to not grapple, to not write, to let the butterflies — or predatory birds — of experience flutter by unexamined. Why this need to capture, categorize, contain?

I was thinking of this today while reading a beautiful book I can't imagine writing. Reading it was harrowing enough.

I told a friend it depressed the hell out of me, and she said, "This is two in a row for you! Let me pick out your next book, dear."

Her observation, referring to my last post, made me smile. I hadn't thought of it that way. I hadn't thought that it was something about the books, some gloomy common denominator. I had assumed it was something about the way I received them, something about my own state of mind.

I previously have had two notable experiences of being horribly depressed by books: one was Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" and the other was a book of Diane Arbus photographs. In both cases I didn't even want the books in my house, I found their content so bleak and sour. But I couldn't banish them from my soul, and, in both cases, I was able to re-examine them and where I remembered despair and the desire to avert my gaze I now found a surprising beauty and gentleness, even a delight in life. I can't explain the transformation. I would like to think I became braver.

Writing is about so much more than a gift of expression. It's about an extreme sort of courage. It's about a willingness to handle the mess, to give it shape, to endure the terrible loneliness of the task so someone else can pick up the book and feel a sense of recognition, even if horrible at times, and, in the process, feel less alone.

So here's to Alice McDermott, the author who made me feel terrible today. A great writer. If she has the courage to write it, I have the courage to read it.

SHOP OF HORROR

Wow. Here's a tiny, unassuming book that will chill your very soul: "The Bookshop" by Penelope Fitzgerald.

I was expecting a quaint story about a British widow who opens a book store in a seaside village in the 1950s. What else would you expect from a British author who didn't start writing until her late 50s? And that's certainly what I got — along with a disarming meditation on, well, pure evil.

Not the kind of evil where people get tortured and killed and whatnot. No. The kind of evil, rather, where people quietly have their souls crushed by their bland and boring neighbors.

It's a book about how we all are capable of screwing up one another's lives through laziness, indifference and a continuum of callousness ranging from self-centered insensitivity to cold-hearted calculation.

It's about how small things that could make a huge difference go unsaid. It's about the pitfalls of the path of least resistance that tempts us all. It's about plodding on even when defeat is a foregone conclusion. It's the maddening, but necessary, unhappy ending.

And it's a masterpiece of understatement, which makes it hurt and amaze all the more when you get knocked on your ass in the final scenes.

JOAN BAEZ

I saw Joan Baez this week with my friends Erin and Ben. I have seen her twice before, but this time was really special, not only because I got to share the experience with loved ones, but because we got to sit in the front row, where you can actually see every detail in the performer's face and body language and hear the band members interact with one another as they tune their instruments between songs. This was a new experience for me, at least with a performer of this caliber.

The thing that strikes me most about Baez is how she has this heart-breaking voice but is so damn humble about it. On so many songs she could really justify projecting her voice in a show-offy way and displaying her legendary range — and often you wish she would! — but mostly she avoids verbal acrobatics, or, when they're really called for, she performs them so effortlessly that it's like she's utterly unconscious that she's doing anything remarkable.

I also love her because she's always on the right side of history — and is always there before anyone else: with civil rights, war, the environment, poverty. She's famous for singing "We Shall Overcome" at Martin Luther King's 1963 march on Washington, but less well-known for fervently and very publicly supporting gay rights in 1970s San Francisco. What other celebrities were lending their voices to that cause? Even now.

True, it fits her role as the “Madonna of the disaffected,” but I’m nonetheless impressed when someone with advantages and talents who could easily have chosen a path of vast personal wealth and comfort — and a very different kind of career — opts for an alternative life. It's like in her adolescence it occurred to her that she had an exceptional voice and thought, not "Hey, I could be famous!" but "Hey, I could help some people!" (I read that when she was a kid she refused to take part in a Cold War air raid drill on the grounds that it was government propaganda. Thank God she never grew up.)

The other extremely cool thing about her is that after the show this week she wrapped herself in a flannel shirt and happily mingled on the sidewalk with fans, which is how we got the rockin’ photo above.

THAT KID

On the first day of class a student challenged me. It was odd because students are usually subdued on the first day. They mainly sit quietly, mentally calculating how much effort the course will require, how much class they can safely miss and how easy a grader I'll be based on whatever hints of personality I manage to reveal during that first presentation. Pushover, hardass or something in between?

This semester the first presentation was a little spiel about agreement — an area of grammar that can confuse even the most conscientious. Is it "The group of plumbers are" or "The group of plumbers is"? Is it "The couple have" or "The couple has"?

I was talking about how when you have a "neither/nor" construction the verb must agree with the noun closest to it. So, for example, it's "Neither the actors nor the director likes the theater." It sounds kind of wrong, but it's right.

A woman in the dead middle of the room barked, "That's stupid."

All 60 heads turned toward her, then toward me. Apparently I was supposed to passionately take up the "It's not stupid" side of the argument. I am familiar with the collective, expectant look in these situations. Usually it arises when someone throws down the heretofore unquestioned wisdom of his high school English teacher like a gauntlet. "I was always told never to split infinitives," he'll declare. Or "never to use contractions." Or "never to end a sentence with a preposition." Or "never to start a sentence with a conjunction."

The students don't usually tell me that what I'm saying is stupid per se, just that it's profoundly unorthodox and clashes violently with everything they've ever been told. I like how these challenges generally come in the passive voice. I was told. It makes it easier to pick up the gauntlet. Well, now you're being told something else. If "being told" is all the authority you require to cling to a belief, then "being untold" has a certain persuasiveness, too, provided the person doing the untelling has a mental stature in the ballpark of the original teller.

The "That's stupid" challenge is harder to answer, because in many cases I agree with the assessment. Part of me wanted to tell the woman, "You're right. That is stupid. Let's do it your way. Take home the grammar book and highlight everything that you believe to be stupid. Pencil in how you would handle the situation instead, and we'll adopt that as our text. OK?"

Instead, I said something to her along the lines of, "Well, it sounds stupid to our ears because we're so used to hearing it said incorrectly that when we hear it said correctly it just seems wrong and nonsensical. If you find it terribly grating, you can just switch the order and say "Neither the director nor the actors like the theater."

This seemed to mollify her — until I said the next "stupid" thing.

In class after class, she'd belt out her opinion, never bothering to raise her hand. "That's stupid." "That's lame." "Oh, that makes sense," meaning, of course, that it makes zero sense.

I honestly feared she would become a problem, a distraction, even as I started to become privately fond of her sauciness. On quizzes she would write things like "My girl Sebs! Woo-hoo!" (referring to Gov. Sebelius) or "The Hill!" (referring, affectionately, to Hillary Clinton). I have a big soft spot for a certain kind of zany, even if ill-informed, pertness, maybe because it's a quality I lack — or, if not lack exactly, then am unable to show. When the students had to write a haiku for a silly headline exercise, hers was about Ernest Hemingway's cats in Key West. And I knew she knew about them not from reading about Hemingway, but from partying in Florida. And that somehow made the poem even more endearing — to know that it came from life, not books.

Today in lab she started peppering me with challenging questions about the exercise. I was keeping pace with her demands, but my face, on the fourth or fifth question, must have betrayed the tiniest feeling of weariness, because all of a sudden, while I was in mid-answer, she relented. She just stopped. And she said, "I'm sorry. I'm being that kid." I said, "That's OK, what I was ..." And she interrupted me, a weird blankness on her face. "Nevermind. I don't want to be that kid."

So I didn't answer. I just sat there feeling kind of blue while they finished their exercises. Why didn't she want to be that kid anymore? I was getting so used to that kid. It made sense for her to be that kid.

I felt seriously down. Then as she was leaving class she turned in her exercise and asked me, "Are you going somewhere fabulous for spring break?"

"No," I said, sadly picturing myself in swimwear and hoping she and her classmates weren't doing the same. "I have to ..." but before I could get out the word "work," she barked, "You're not?! That's stupid!"

JANE OVERHEAD

My friend Erin made this cross stitch for me: a silhouette of Jane Austen. I hung it over my bed — the perfect talisman against banality, pettiness, boorishness and everything in life that militates against loveliness and grace and freedom.