Composting Down: SOLVE FOR X: ESSAYS, by Arthur Saltzman (Part 1 of 5)

Dr. Saltzman was a Chicago Jew, a point that’s only worth leading with because he settled in a place that wasn’t Chicago and that didn’t include many Jews. Joplin was so insensitive toward Jews, in fact, that no one even thought it queer that Don’s Army Surplus boasted Nazi paraphernalia among its tree stands, mace, and gas masks. To my shame, I counted myself among the un-offended. This was high school, mind you, and though I probably should have known better, I didn’t. We’d drive out after school, that curvy two-lane out to Neosho, the ash from our Marlboro Reds speckling the backseat like a Pollack, or, depending on your taste, like bird droppings. We’d slide the coats across the racks in search of an army jacket like the one John Lennon wore on the cover of Live in New York City, pausing respectfully when the ghost of a name appeared over the left breast—a Dishman, a Robinson—then continuing on our hunt, discounting out of hand the camouflage, the slickers, honing in instead on the olive canvas, nothing more than a shirt really, dependent upon layering—of flannels, of thermals—to gather any kind of real warmth. We scavenged in relative ignorance of the trinity of flags looming over us: one American, one Southern, one Nazi. To this day I don’t know if Don arrayed them in this order as a warning or as a threat. Were they a statement, or were they a narrative?

"Heil, Bubba!"

I never saw Dr. Saltzman at Don’s. He was instead relegated to the college that the town didn’t even have the decency to put on a hill. Joplin reserved that honor for Ozark Christian College, which had but a fraction of Southern’s student population but was more closely aligned with the rest of the community, ideologically speaking, and, thus, more deserving of their perch. OCC was out toward Carl Junction, where those three high school students had beaten their retarded friend to death with a bat in some kind of a satanic ritual the summer I moved to Missouri from California. One of the three murderers was an honor student, the class president. When the cops came to his door, he said, “You’re here about Steven.” This was my introduction to my new hometown. Welcome to the Midwest. Duck.

Missouri Southern was kind of out toward Webb City and kind of out toward Carthage, but it was mostly not toward anything at all, which is how the rest of the town liked it.

“You’re moving to a college town, aren’t you?” my girlfriend’s father had asked before I left San Diego. He was trying to put a positive spin on the situation, the look on my face for the months leading up to the move reminiscent of nothing as much as bereavement. In my mind, Missouri equaling death. And not in any abstract kind of way. I mean real, permanent, irrevocable death.

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Yeah, you’re moving to a college town. You’re going to love it.”

I wasn’t fully aware of the implications of the term “college town,” but whatever the promises contained therein I was pretty sure they were not being kept. Joplin was a town and it did indeed include a college, but there the similarities ended. The relationship between the two wasn’t outright hostile—the mayor didn’t set bags full of shit on fire and then leave it on the provost’s porch, and the provost didn’t do donuts on the mayor’s lawn—but a mutual lack of respect festered, nonetheless. The locals thought of the faculty as a bunch of arrogant, godless, spouse-swapping ACLU-lovers who protested against the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers when they weren’t inquiring at the local head shop about a new “Visualize World Peace” bumper sticker, their previous sticker being defaced while they were in the candle shop at the mall. And the faculty thought of the locals as a group of ignorant, racist, gun-toting homophobes whose yards looked like perpetual garage sales and who might actually make something of their lives if they could only get over the infatuation with aluminum foil, Roman candles, and those screeching tops that whirled like dervishes before exploding in the air. “Awesome,” they would say, before taking another swig of their Natty Lite and igniting another.  

Of course, they were both right about the other.

"Welcome to Joplin, just as long as you aren't here for any of that book learning."

In these unofficial culture wars, several professors embodied the college. With his distinguished gray beard and his elbow-patched tweed jackets, Dr. Denniston tackled the role of the Shakespeare professor every bit as well as Olivier played Hamlet. Dr. Lambert’s push-broom mustache, protruding belly, and dry wit qualified him to teach Twain better than any dissertation. And, as the lone tenured, female member of the English Department, Dr. Walters represented her gender well, with a mind as sharp as the “T” in “Bronte” somewhere beneath that pixie-ish haircut.

But none of these figures—really, not even the college itself—looms larger than Dr. Saltzman.

I heard about him years before I ever set foot in his class. His wife at the time was the Enrichment teacher at my junior high school, and though I wasn’t smart enough to actually be in Enrichment, I was smart enough to have a crush on the girls who were, so I heard all about their extracurricular activities—their investigative hikes at George Washington Carver National Park or their community service in the soup line at Soul’s Harbor—which inevitably roped in Dr. Saltzman as a chauffeur.

“He’s just so sarcastic,” the smart girls would say. “He’s the most sarcastic man I have ever met.”

In my mind, “sarcastic” was akin to “cynical,” which wasn’t too far removed from “curmudgeonly.” I pictured Saltzman at the wheel, a gaggle of giggling girls in the backseat, for even smart girls giggle, and his wife in the passenger’s seat, half turned to the girls and half to her husband, occasionally barking directions—“Turn right, Art. Arthur, turn right.”—Saltzman silently obeying, inwardly seething. My impression then was that he was less put upon than it sounds now, though, admittedly, “resigned” hits pretty close to the mark, but resigned in a sense of someone who has reconciled with himself that he will not always be allowed to use his full powers, that there are times when he will instead be required to cart around cars full of teenage girls. Saltzman himself would later introduce me to Saul Bellow. At the time, the best I could do was Walter Mitty.

Two passions: books and basketball.

Yet doughy, impotent Walter Mitty hardly captures his virility. He was a big man, probably 6’4”, who wore his 220 pounds well. He was only in his 40’s, but the wrinkles on his face were deep enough to hold a quarter, particularly those that encircled his mouth like parentheses. His Short Story or Recent Popular Fiction or Creative Writing classes were ostensibly “discussion,” but that really meant that he would tap his foot fitfully for the 15 minutes we were allowed to flounder before he took the reigns and led us to the heart of the discussion.  But even if he regularly failed to tame his more dictatorial tendencies—I find that the best professors rarely do—he eschewed his rightful place at the head of the class. We started each session by forming a circle with our desks, Saltzman walking among us, squeezing himself into the space between the seat and the writing surface in a way that I would relate to a circus elephant balancing on a thimble-like stool if the image weren’t so unflattering. Books looked small in his hands, an unfair fight.

I knew from our discussion of Rabbit, Run—well, his discussion of Rabbit, Run—that he was passionate about basketball, still played even with a group of trusted friends at the Y on Wednesday nights. I pictured him on the court, his back to the basket, wearing down an opponent with his considerable hindquarters, his arm raised, calling for the ball. He wears a knee brace. He says things like “nice take” and “what’s the count?” When a ball heads out of bounds, he and another player lunge for it. Saltzman is falling away, the ball in his possession. He has no clear pass to an open teammate, so at the last second he throws the ball into his opposition’s shin. The ball ricochets against the water fountain. Another player taps him on the head as he walks past. “Nice hustle.” Saltzman nods, breathes heavily, and waits for play to resume.

This is all before I learned that he was dead, that Dr. Saltzman had died, before my dad called me in the middle of the day and said, “Kirb.” My dad never calls. Heart attack, he said, though I later heard aneurysm. Passed in the night. Joy was asleep right next to him. She must have woken up and. He couldn’t have been, what, 55, 56? I’m 62. The campus is in shock. I thought you’d want to know.

I was at work. I clicked my phone shut, prepared for my one o’clock.