No Success Like Failure: UNLIMITED POWER, by Anthony Robbins (Part 3)

“Hard, sharp…smooth, flexible…stiff.”

*****

The natural extension of controlling your own mind is bending the world to your will, for what is the world independent of your perception of it? If I’m sick, but I tell my mind that I am not, and my mind listens, then I am well. Mind 1, Reality 0. At least that would be the score if Robbins believed in reality. Instead, a more accurate tally might simply be Mind 1, or Mind Won.

Despite the ease with which a number of Robbins’ observations can be ridiculed, he does occasionally hit on a point that smacks of truth and, dare I say it, profundity. Take, for example, a line like “Nothing has any meaning except the meaning you give it,” which, if you presented to me divorced from its speaker—say, as a bumper sticker or beneath the signature on an email—I would have a hard time arguing against and might even stop a moment to consider its depth. I do believe that much of life is perception and that success and failure hinges on choices we make when opportunities emerge, opportunities that are, more often than not, of our own making. I draw a line at being able to “pop” into and out of clinical depression, and, indeed, I wonder if 25 years down the road Robbins might want to rethink that one, in the same way that he might want to rethink including the promise by a couple of overly ambitious entrepreneurs that air travel from New York to California will take 12 minutes by 1996. History has proven that goal to be preposterous, and, even with the allowance that hindsight is 20-20 and all that, I have a hard time believing that it was ever really seriously on the table. However, this represents exactly the kind of big-idea thinking that Robbins champions (or at least the kind of thinking that he wants to steal), and, in fairness, I am loathe to mock someone for having a dream, even if it is stupid.

Where Robbins loses me is in his notion that bending the world to his will means that the world exists to serve him. This isn’t making lemonade out of lemons. This is demanding that the lemonade be made for you. Oh, sure, he makes some noise about ensuring the purity of your motives—“It goes without saying you do whatever it takes to succeed without harming another person,” he says in a footnote, though, apparently given Robbins’ audience, it had to be said—and he includes someone else’s recommendation (of course) about what percentage of your earnings should be earmarked for charity, but this emphasis on good deeds appears near the end of the book, long after everyone is done reading, and, in any case, the idea is to give because it will come back to you, which is really just giving to get, which is no kind of giving at all. His argument in favor of vegetarianism fascinates because he focuses exclusively on what it can do for him and fails to mention any environmental concerns or the inhumane treatment of animals, which—I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here—tops the list of why most people who don’t eat meat don’t eat meat.

As I read, I kept wondering, “If everyone in the world adhered to this way of thinking, would the world be a better place?” The answer is that, no, it would not, because the philosophy expressed is, at its core, selfish, and, though Robbins cautions against letting your drive hurt others, I bet he allows for different gradations of “hurt.” What happens when my world bumps up against his? Since everything is created, accidents don’t exist, so any offense has a very specific agent if one requires retribution (or at least if one perceives he requires retribution, which, according to Robbins, is all that really matters).

Failures are to be celebrated, because we should reward the person who ventured to take a chance. Robbins lists Great Men (and, yes, they are all men) failing and failing and failing again, the most famous failure being Abraham Lincoln who faced defeat repeatedly before finally breaking through and ascending to the presidency (and how’d that work out, huh?).

But what if your failures belong to somebody else? What if, say—oh, hypothetically— you and a number of people that you care about deeply all lost your jobs because of the whim of others?

I know how Robbins would accommodate such an event—recast it as an opportunity, focus on what you can achieve with all of that found time, things happen for a reason and all of that fucking shit—but I find it unacceptable to advance a worldview that denies the reality of the situation and that refuses to admit that some things are beyond our control.

“If you don’t believe that you’re creating your world, whether it be your successes or your failures, then you’re at the mercy of circumstances,” Robbins writes. “Things just happen to you. You’re an object, not a subject. Let me tell you, if I had that belief, I’d check out now and look for another culture, another world, another planet. Why be here if you’re just the product of random outside forces?”

“Check out now”? You’ve got to hand it to the guy: Not many motivational speakers recommend suicide. The dead can’t attend refresher classes. The truth is that I know a whole bunch of people who would be on another plant right now, to steal Robbins’ phrase (see, I’m learning), if they actually adhered to this belief. 

Swear to god, I had no idea.

I worked for a company that was part of another company that was owned by a parent company, though the term “parent company” has never sat well with me because any parent who treats his children like most parent companies treat their offspring would expect a visit from the Department of Family Services. Come to think of it, that’s not a half-bad idea: A DFS for negligent parent companies.

Honestly, I was never sure just how far we were removed from the parent company. Mom and Dad seemed to be working through some issues, and we were caught in the middle like a summer house. Every six months or so someone would subject me to a new org chart, but it took longer than I care to admit to realize that “org” mean “organization,” which gives you an idea of what those charts meant to me. Speaking from the kids’ point of view, I rarely felt supported, let alone loved, by our alleged progenitors and instead felt akin to a foster child, a charity case that seemed like a good idea at the time but that had long ago been cropped out of the picture that graced the front of the Christmas card. This image of a modified holiday photo is actually more apropos than you might think, as, near the end that we didn’t yet recognize as the end, our little piece of the company was told to scrap our own holiday party and instead to crash the party that was being hosted by another branch of the company. I say “little,” but we’re talking 160 employees here, which made it all the more humbling when the larger group at the party that night absorbed us all and still I hardly recognized a soul. You think you matter, that you’re part of something, and then one day you realize that you don’t, you’re not. Talk about a charity case.

Not that any of the dysfunction at the top influenced our day to day. Our job was to create educational-resource books, and we did just that with passion, enthusiasm, and care. We were a young group, so details like whether page ranges should be separated with an en dash or a hyphen or whether the “f” in “F/ferris wheel” should be capitalized still mattered. Manuscripts would move from the writers to the editors to the proofreaders, and after each step of the process they would come back lousy with queries, each member of the team doing everything he or she could to make the book as sound as possible. One woman was so proud of her first project that she inscribed it with a note in her native Indian dialect and presented it to her parents.

There was some turmoil. For whatever reason the turnover rate was exceedingly high, which meant that people were forever shifting jobs to fill open roles (I didn’t once begin and end a calendar year in the same position during my five-year tenure), and one ominous December a restructuring cost a number of people their jobs. But even that was communicated as a kind of correction, a necessary cutting of dead weight in order to avoid sinking and to ensure that it would be smooth sailing from there on out. (Sorry, Dead Weight. Their line, not mine.)

The truth is that the only money we had in the first place was because of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Policy, which flooded the states with money to spend on test-prep materials. When the president left office, so did our livelihood. At meeting after meeting, we would ask, What does the new administration mean for us? What are we making now? Who’s going to buy it? With what money? Everyday the news reported more jobs lost, more cities struggling. So? we said. We’re still trying to parse that out, they replied. Well, consider it parsed.

The irony was rich: Not only did we not support the Bush administration, but we were outright hostile toward it. The greatest day any of us had ever had at work was when we circulated a clip from The Daily Show the day after Vice President Cheney shot that guy in the face. We openly howled. Just goes to show what an idiot he is. What idiots they all are. Oh my god. Can you believe it? Actually, I kind of can. Our only regret was that the guy didn’t die. That would have really put Cheney in a bind. Not a single one of us would have walked across the street to shake President Bush’s hand let alone vote for the man, yet the policies of his bumbling administration were inextricably linked to our lives. We never would have admitted it, but he was good for us.

Like him or not--and none of us did--his fate was entwined with ours.

A year after we cut all of that dead weight in a last-ditch effort to stay afloat, the whole outfit sank all the way to the bottom. They called a special meeting on the first Tuesday in January, herded us all into a single room so they only had to bloody one blade, and then some man none of us had ever seen before told us we no longer had jobs. There were few questions. A packet we were supposed to receive later in the week promised all of the answers anyway. As the guy was still talking, I remember thinking, What am I supposed to do tomorrow? And then immediately after, When did I forget how to spend a free day?

A friend was on vacation at the time. His wife saw my Facebook status when they landed nearly a week after her husband had been let go. They had been incommunicado in the interim. “A stiff drink at the end of a bad week,” the status said. “Uh-oh,” she thought. Another friend was due to deliver her first baby at the end of February, right when her company-supplemented insurance would have been discontinued. She ended up having the baby the day before she lost her coverage. My wife and I had been trying to have a second kid at the time. I acted cool when I got home from work that day, let her attend her yoga class in peace while I watched the boy. After she got home, I said, Honey, we should talk. We decided to stop trying until things got more stable.

The strangest part of the whole ordeal was that we were told in January that we were being terminated, but our last day wasn’t until mid-February. The house was shuttered, in effect, though we continued living there. This made for a strange five weeks, in which we put a bow on projects we were looking to sell and attended company-sponsored resume-building seminars that more often than not deteriorated into group-wide bitch sessions, our growing disdain for the leadership—who had abandoned their offices with suspicious haste, by the way: just how long had they known?—was scarcely defused by discussions about how to stick a 30-second interview, just in case you’re asked to interview between floors on an elevator.

For my part, I used these five weeks to explore other options in the company. I know, I know. To return to the sinking-ship metaphor: I decided to move to a spot that was dry for now, which didn’t mean that I wouldn’t eventually be scooping out water by the bucketful again. (To our references to Never Been Kissed, Office Space, Seinfeld, and Friends let’s go ahead and add “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” shall we?) As much as I like to think of myself as an adaptive, freewheeling spirit, I am really a creature of habit, so much so that I find great comfort in taking the same train to the same part of town and buying grapes from the same street vendor each and every business day. Plus, I have this naïve idea that as much as an employer invests in an employee, the employee also invests in the employer. A symbiotic relationship exists between the two: you give me wages, benefits, and the security that enables me to build a life, and I’ll give you my best for a full third of my life as we work together to realize our shared goals. Does that sound so ridiculous? (Don’t answer that.) I won’t go so far as to say that I owed the company anything, but I will say that building on the foundation of four years seemed like a smarter move than starting over from day one.

The rodent in the hat? That was me.

So, much to my muted glee, I landed another job within the company. Five times more responsibility at the same wage. Didn’t matter. I bought a good bottle of whiskey on the way home that night. Let’s celebrate. Vacation days and insurance for everyone! Best of all, we can start thinking again about expanding our family again. I had survived. My belief that pleasant, respectful, hard-working employees would be rewarded in the end had been tested, and it had passed. No matter what happened, I would always have a place.

Back at the office, however, I stayed quiet about my good fortune until the last week when I started slowly disseminating the information like I was a politician sending up test balloons. I was one of the few people company-wide who was staying. None of the people with whom I had worked on a daily basis for half a decade had found anything, either within the company or elsewhere. This was the height of the recession. There wasn’t anything out there. I mean, like, nothing. They had wives and kids too, ideas about how their lives were supposed to proceed. Nonetheless, they greeted my news with enthusiasm. Hey man, that’s great. Congratulations. Right on. Things were so bad that good news for one meant good news for all. At least one of us is going to be OK. Take solace in that, anyway. Despite their kind words, I had a hard time seeing it that way. In my mind, they seethed at me. Motherfucking traitor. Of course he’s staying. Brownnoser like that, what else is he going to do? I hope he’s damned to middle management for all time.

We were supposed to get drinks on the last day, but everyone was too depressed to do anything other than go home and be by themselves. By this point, mine was the only desk that wasn’t cleared off, the one house on the block that hadn’t been leveled by the tornado. People brought me offerings: a pig fashioned out of a corkscrew and pushpins; a handwritten note that said “a shy, stuttering man playing Bingo”; a pencil drawing of an executive meeting in which one of the participants had pulled a gun, another of the men sitting at the table saying, “What the shit, Dave?” I thanked them, shook hands, offered and received hugs. One by one, they would say their goodbyes and then disappear down the hall, a third crying, a third cursing, and a third clicking their heels.

Eventually, just I and the woman who had inscribed the book for her parents remained. We had built something like an actual friendship over the years. Ours was a relationship that was based on antagonizing one another. We teased and mocked and when one of us made the rare error or misjudgment the other would make sure it became part of the permanent record, which is why once a day I would ask her why, six months earlier, she had told a member of my staff to transcribe Genesis word for word. Do you know how many rules you’re violating, I would say. Kirby! She would respond, and she’d tighten her fists and jut out her chin and bug out her eyes in faux hatred. When she played Prospero to my Caliban during some festivities celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday, everyone screamed with laughter. “Abhored slave!” she bellowed. I cowered. “Oh my god,” everyone said. “That’s how you two treat each other in real life.” Deep down, of course, we respected the hell out of each other. We once argued fiercely about the correct capitalization of “double Dutch.” She claimed that only the “d” in “Dutch” should be capitalized, but I told her that the dictionary had “double” up as well. “In all of my books at home, I’ve never seen ‘double’ capitalized,” she raged. “Just how many books do you have on the subject?” I asked. I would attend her wedding later that spring.

In the end, it was jut the two of us on our last day. On her last day, I should say. “Well,” she said, and gave me a hug. I watched the last of my colleagues walk out the door.

Never what you want to see.

My wife says that I have a kind of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder stemming from the events that started on the first Tuesday of the New Year and ended shortly after President’s Day. I don’t want to overstate the situation, but I have a hard time denying something close to survivor’s guilt anyway, if not exactly PTSD. I’m hardly Oskar Schindler saying This watch, this watch, but there was a sense that I should have gone with them, if only out of a solidarity. “Family” is a little strong, but “team” captures it well, and teams win or lose together. I was winning, though it somehow felt like a loss. And, besides, the person who stayed behind was a husk of his former self. I needed a new ID, but I got it into my head that if I asked for one they were going to let me go. I kept quiet in meetings, when I knew I should have spoken up, made promises that were impossible to keep. I thought, If I keep my head down, say yes when asked, they won’t know enough to let me go. It was a classic case of an athlete playing not to lose rather than playing to win. We were moving from our downtown office to an office in Soho. I had started at the company before we moved to the downtown locale. I was one of the few who had been there the entire time. Despite all that had happened, I felt secure there. The impending move worried me.

I was convinced that that they weren’t going to move anyone just to let them go. Surely they wouldn’t make the financial and logistical investment just to cut ties at the new digs. Surely they wouldn’t lead you on like that. I would surreptitiously ask where I was going to sit at the new place. Before a seating chart became available, I was just sure I wasn’t going to be on there. Kirby, we’ve got some bad news. I was going to swipe my badge and be denied. Please see the building manager. My wife was pregnant. She liked her doctor. The doctor had delivered our first baby, which had been a challenging birth. I felt comfortable calling in when the boy was sick. I had accrued 20 days off. Twenty. One morning, the seating chart appeared on the wall. There I was, right with the rest of the team. Proof. Hard evidence that they were counting on me at the new place. I was a member of the team. A new team, yes, but a team, regardless. Everything checked out, but, still, something felt wrong. My grandfather lived all 82 years of his life in West Virginia. After he moved to Missouri, he was dead in two weeks.

I lasted three in Soho.

I know what Robbins would say about all of this. “You created this show you call unemployment.” Really, you can just plug in one perceived weakness for another: You created this show you call depression, unemployment, addiction, stagnation, your life. “If you believe that you’re the ball on the tether, waiting for someone to hit it, that’s how you’ll behave,” he writes. “If you believe that you’re in control, that you can change your patterns, you’ll be able to.”

It’s as simple as that. Only it’s not.

Alone on the 22^nd floor, after my sparring partner had left, I surveyed the ruins. Another branch of the company would move in soon. I would move to another side of the building and never pass that cluster of desks without a wave of nostalgia overtaking me on good days, a wave of sorrow on bad. Weeks before the axe fell, a woman from HR called and said, Hey, how many desks you all have down there? A project we had been developing all year was put on indefinite hold. They took an inventory of every computer in the building. Rumors swirled that our budget hadn’t been approved for the following year. Omar coming, Omar coming. A friend and I requested a meeting with our supervisor. No one said “boss” anymore. It was “supervisor” now. What’s going on, we asked. What do you mean, she said. We told her what we knew, pieced the puzzle together. The imagination you have, she said. You should really write a book.

No Success Like Failure: UNLIMITED POWER, by Anthony Robbins (Part 2)

“You are not your behavior.”

*****

The first term that swept across the 22^nd floor like a bad cold was “efficient.” Granted, “efficient” is a common enough word, especially in a corporate environment, but one day it started cropping up as if it had been planted in everyone’s dreams the night before. It was like that scene in Never Been Kissed in which the cool kid decides that “rufus” is the new hip term and then later a group of students bounce down the steps and one says to the other, “It’s going to be so rufus.” It was exactly like that. “We need to start brainstorming ways that our department can be more efficient,” my manager said one morning, innocently enough. Then, various people in meetings throughout the week: “Does anyone have a more efficient solution?” or “I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’m just trying to take care of the situation as efficiently as possible” or “It’s not a question of resources; it’s a question of efficiency.” I swear that someone on high decided that bonuses would be tied to the number of times management could use the word “efficient” throughout the day. “Efficient”’s crowning achievement occurred when an “efficiency expert” was summoned to analyze all of our processes. This was more Office Space than Never Been Kissed, only without the laughs. Ten months later, a whole bunch of people lost their jobs in what would become known as the First Wave of Layoffs. Efficiency, 1; employees, 0.

The next word that suddenly found itself en vogue was “robust.” This was a significantly more jarring term to encounter in meetings because I had previously only heard it used to refer to wines, and, despite the excellent wine shop only a block away, we rarely discussed bouquets. Instead, our use of “robust” preceded “programs,” “instruction,” or “training.” We had “robust books,” “robust supplements.” We were running a “robust organization.” A friend and I made a game of it. “That’s a pretty robust sandwich you got there.” “I got it across the street, that guy with the robust cart.” The funny thing is that we all used the word correctly—everything from a lesson plan to a ham-n-cheese could be sturdily constructed—so it wasn’t a question of us trying to appear smarter than we actually were. We were as smart as we thought we were, which was pretty smart. The problem was that “robust” just looked so out of place next to the more standard modifiers like “leveled” or “grade-appropriate.” It just felt wrong, even if it was technically right. My job at the time included editing copy that regularly made the case for our robust-ness. I would always leave a note next to “robust” that said, “Are you sure this is the term you want to use?” My queries were never answered.

The final term that the Corporate Gods anointed was “execute against,” as in “If we staff up, we could execute against the first 30 items by the end of the week.” The first time I heard this phrase I thought I had blacked out and woke up in a conversation about death metal. “Live Tonight, One Nite Only: Cannibal Corpse, Septic Flesh, and Execute Against.” I was diligently taking notes, and this combination of words caught me so off guard that I didn’t even know what to write.

“Excuse me,” I said to my manger, this manager three removed from the one who took the efficiency memo to heart. “What did you say?”

“I said if we staff up we could execute against the first 30—.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“‘Execute against.’”

“It means ‘complete.’”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

I appreciate the need for idiosyncrasies of language for given populations. Baseball wouldn’t quite be baseball without the fifty different ways to say “homerun,” each more colorful than the one before. I appreciate too that disciplines require you to demonstrate mastery of their vocabulary before they truly welcome you among their ranks. In such instances, the language functions as a kind of verbal uniform, the words serving in the same way that a tie or a paper hat serves, which is to say as a reminder of who and where you are. I suspect I would have a difficult time keeping up with the lingo if I were to sit in on a meeting of stone masons or air-traffic controllers. And there is an undeniable charm in one who is able to drop “We’re here to drill down to a granular level, but first let me tee it up for you” with the deftness of one plucking a tune on a 12-string guitar.

But too often I find that the language is used in such a way that saps it of its would-be charm. Not that it’s called the “Wharton School of Charm,” I realize, but still. In The Big Short, Michael Lewis notes that Wall Street calls overpriced bonds “rich” rather than “expensive,” and that the bottom floor (or “tranche”) of the riskiest bonds are called “mezzanines” rather than something that doesn’t sound like a desirable section at a sporting event. The idea, obviously, is that “Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders.” Something close to this was going on in the office. Language as a game, only the game felt an awful lot like Keep Away for those of us who resisted playing by rules that we found silly. 

One problem was that the game itself trumped the quality of the player. What matters was not that you were able (or even competent). What matters is that you sounded like you were. The other problem: Did I really want to play in the first place?

“What does that mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“‘Execute against?’”

“It means ‘complete.’”

“Then why don’t you just fucking say so?”

How corporate speak makes us feel.

 

*****

“Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

*****

Robbins’ key to world domination can be summed up in one word: “Steal.” Find someone whose life you admire—popular choices in 1986 included Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Steven Spielberg—and steal everything you possible can about them: their drive, their vision, their posture, the way they think, the way they speak, walk, breathe (yes, breathe: every gazillionaire knows that your breathing ratio should be “inhale one count, hold four counts, exhale two counts,” else he wouldn’t be a gazillionaire). In the creepiest section of the book—and, believe me, to be the creepiest section of a book like this is to be really, really creepy—Robbins mimics the physical attributes of a complete stranger sitting across from him at the park so convincingly that he becomes a kind of mirror image of the man. This is less about being the man and more about getting from the man, as Robbins operates under the principle that people really like themselves, and the closer you are to being them the more likely they are to give you what you want. Robbins prefers the term “model” to “steal,” but don’t let the positive connotation fool you. He’s really advocating for the grandest kind of larceny of all: the hijacking of a life.

What’s more, he’s pretty open about his lack of originality. “Excellence can be duplicated,” he writes. “If other people can do something, all you need to do is model them with precision and you can do exactly the same thing, whether it’s walking on fire, making a million dollars, or developing a perfect relationship.” That last line provides a glimpse of Robbins’ assumed audience, which could cast him as a predator if it weren’t so accurate: salesmen, single women, and, uh, firewalkers.

As Robbins repeatedly points out, the firewalk is the culminating event of his seminars (and, who are we kidding, the book is really just a long advertisement for the seminar). I’ve heard of speakers who submerge their heads under water for seemingly impossible lengths of time, and I’ve actually attended a presentation in which participants were invited to break boards with their bare hands, a la Daniel-san and the ice in The Karate Kid II, but I suspect that Robbins prefers the firewalk on account of its primal implications, to say nothing of the fact that “I walked through fire” serves much better on a metaphorical level and sounds significantly more awesome than “I broke four boards,” though, in fairness, one should never underestimate the cool factor of “with my bare hands.” In any case, they’re all pretty much different versions of the same emotional tenet of motivational speakers: the firewalk, the broken boards, the self-waterboarding—they all illustrate the degree to which you create your own reality. Mind over matter, to resort to a cliché (and why not, since they so often do).

“Remember that we control our brain,” Robbins asserts. “It doesn’t have to control us.” When bald-pated Karl Pilkington suggests the same thing, Ricky Gervais berates him ruthlessly and calls him an idiot, yet somehow when the speaker has a full head of hair he’s heralded as a messiah (raise your hand if you’d like to see Gervais and Robbins go at it Lincoln-Douglas style about a topic of Robbins’ choosing). According to Robbins, everything from a headache to clinical depression can be treated if you follow the Ultimate Success Formula ™ (tell me you’re surprised that it’s trademarked). “If you are depressed, you created and produced that show you call depression,” he writes. “It isn’t a permanent state like losing a leg. It’s a state that people can pop into and out of.” Apparently the chapter on sympathy failed to make the final cut.

Robbins’ approach to controlling your brain relies on a heavily visual component. The headache, for example, he balls up and ushers out the door. But Robbins’ greatest accomplishments are less banishment and more replacement. Robbins knows something that the priest who performs an exorcism doesn’t: The priest focuses only on extracting the devil and doesn’t bother to insert God, which, come to think of it, could be a flaw with most exorcisms. Robbins does not want to leave that empty space. He wants to remove the bad and replace it with the good. Out with Satan and in with God, only in his situation Satan is cheesecake and God is broccoli.

His method for setting someone on the path of a healthier lifestyle involves invoking the mental image of the negative influence, harnessing all of the joy and satisfaction that accompanies that image, and then transferring these feelings to the positive image, which injects the positive with power of the negative and smashes the negative like so many pieces of shattered glass.

He calls the technique for this process the Swish Technique, and an important component is that the person initiating the transfer lets loose with an audible “Whoosh!” when the positive dethrones the negative. So, picture a piece of cheesecake—bright and tempting—at the fore of your mind. Then, in the distance, as if being pulled back by a slingshot, the broccoli—dull and undesirable. Then let the slingshot fly, the broccoli breaking through, assuming all of those positive feelings you had for the cheesecake. When the broccoli scatters the cheesecake, let loose with your accompanying “Whoosh!” Now the cheesecake will be splattered across the floor of your mind and the broccoli will take its place as a shining beacon of desirableness. The swap may not take at first, but after repeating the steps a few times—voila!—you’ll be craving greens for dessert.

You can do this with any part of your life that you want to change. Your relationship, your job, your health, your fears, your frustrations. Robbins again: “See this, ‘Wooosh!’ Do this, see this, ‘Wooosh!’ Do this, see this, ‘Wooosh!’ Do this…until the old picture automatically triggers the new picture, the new states, and thus the new behavior.”

He’s serious. As serious as a flying head of broccoli can be.  

Actually, I think I'd rather break shit with my bare hands.

*****

“[P]lagued by an insistent internal dialogue?”

*****

On Seinfeld, when Jerry refuses to confront a woman’s boyfriend at her behest—a boyfriend who is, at the time, in a coma, I might add—the woman calls Jerry’s masculinity into question. “You are not a man,” she chides. “Then what are all of those ties and sports jackets doing in my closet?” he responds. The implication is that, whatever Jerry lacks, temperamentally speaking, he makes up for with his wardrobe. Apparently the clothes really do make the man, after all.

This line resonates with me because I don’t even have the sports jackets as proof. I have a number of ties, most of which were passed down from my dad when he retired, but, were it up to me, I would never even tuck in my shirt, and one thing I’ve noticed about men—about real men, that is—is that they rarely go untucked.

I keep waiting for it to happen, for me to wake up one day and feel like a man. But I’m in my late-30’s now, and it hasn’t happened yet. I’m beginning to doubt that it ever will. I’m still five foot eight; I could still shave every other day without Leuinda noticing when I kiss her; and I still lack that sexy tuft of hair jutting from the top of my undershirt. And here I always thought that puberty was just a phase. Who knew that it was binding?

They won’t like me outing them, but most of my friends aren’t men either. Not really. Oh, sure. We look like men if you see us from afar at the bar, huddled around a pitcher of light beer like it’s a campfire on a cold night. If you overhear our conversation, we might even sounds like men, as we argue about sports—real but mostly fantasy—or tell off-color jokes or, occasionally, wonder if it was us or them in a recent dust up with our spouses (it’s usually us, though we always say it’s them).

But look more carefully and you will see that we are not as we appear. Not anywhere close, actually. Our clothes don’t really match in any power-suit kind of way—the shirts and slacks go together well enough, but they were cobbled, not coordinated—and not one of us sat across from anyone today in a position of anything other than subservience. We don’t exactly fetch the coffee for the people who have offices—Who had the tall doubleshot mocha with skim?—but neither do we make decisions of any consequence. Remember Chandler’s line from the first season of Friends?  “If I don’t get those numbered entered, it really won’t matter.” That’s us. We go about our day, and in the end if we didn’t someone else would, and it really wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

The truth is, when we get together, we don’t really talk about work, in fact actively avoid the subject, as if it’s a spot on an x-ray that we’d rather not acknowledge. I’m not even sure I really know what any of my friends do for living. I know that sometimes they seem busier than others; sometimes we have to meet at seven rather than at six-thirty, but I never bother to inquire about the delay. Just means the first round is on me. I know locations, generally, commutes, generic names for companies that are more often than not just called “work,” but I have no idea about duties. Not a clue. And they know just as much about me. I’d sit in meetings—back when I used to sit in meetings—and I’d think, If one of my friends walked in here right now, he wouldn’t even recognize me. He would turn his head in embarrassment. "Oh!" It’d be like a mother walking in on her naked grown son, albeit one without any chest hair. “Uh, give me a minute,” I’d stammer, hiding my Blackberry beneath a stack of reports (not that I’ve ever had a Backberry that wasn’t edible, or a stack of reports, for that matter).

I see them sometimes, men—real men—on the elevator while I’m listening to my headphones or hailing a taxi as I descend the stairs of the subway. They get their haircut when they don’t really need it, wear tweed coats that fall all the way to their knees, elbow their way to the front of the crowd. They cheer a little too loudly at the game, take things a tad too seriously, like when they grip your hand as if there’s a prize to be won or turn their nose up while looking in the mirror.

I’ve never spent more than thirty dollars for a watch.

The other day, I was going through security at the airport. I emptied my pockets: a handkerchief, keys, a phone that does little more than place and receive calls (and doesn’t even do that very well), and a little pouch that fits my license, credit cards, and what scarce cash I carry. The only word that can adequately describe this pouch is “purse.” I carry a purse. The guy behind me empties his pockets and plunks down, among other items that prove his y-chromosome, a money clip, thick with its contents, a newly creased fifty on top. I thought to myself, Oh, shit. Now that’s a man.

The most masculine among my friends, the one who is alpha among all of the betas—or at least beta plus—the guy who talks the raunchiest, initiates the occasional fight, bets on the horses, knocks back Jack, and still watches professional wrestling—that guy…he wears ankle-high socks. Ankle-high socks. You can’t be a man in ankle-high socks. In fact, I have it on good authority that Tony Robbins wears full size, with those sock suspenders that affix just below the knee.

Just one piece of proof that I lack.

*****

All of this is to say that I was at the pizzeria with Jonah. We had just completed another in a series of great trips to Fort Tryon Park, where he scooted on his scooter from the entrance all the way to the Cloisters while I ran next time to him like I was his security detail. I’d stay three steps ahead when he’d let me, but mostly I’d just jog alongside knowing that if he did actually fall I wouldn’t be of any real use. We were skinning knees and palms no matter what. Luckily we made it to the museum without incident. I put him on my shoulders for the return trip, his scooter in my right hand, my left holding on tight to his ankles around my neck. It was one o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in March.

He was enjoying his favorite slice—tomato, onion, and broccoli—and we were talking between bites about what time Mommy would be home (she was substitute teaching) and what we were going to do when we got home (“I’m going to take a nap after I play with my cars, Daddy”) when it dawned on me that, of all of the customers there, I was the only man. There were mothers, grandmothers, and nannies—all with stroller-age children—but I was the only father. 

There were other men, yes, but they were all on the other side of the counter. Working. The delineation was impossible to ignore once I realized it:  On a Wednesday afternoon in March, women take the kids to get to pizza.

Men work.

No Success Like Failure: UNLIMITED POWER, by Anthony Robbins

“Today’s the day.”

*****

I slept on the couch on my first night as an unemployed man. Not because my wife banished me because I reeked of beer and whisky, though I did. And not because I was no longer welcome in my own bed on account of failing her. She was four months pregnant. My two-year-old son slept in the other room. She never once said anything that made me feel as if I let our family down. She didn’t have to. I placed that burden on myself, and pretty easily too. I slept on the couch that night because, for the first time in over 15 years of marriage, I didn’t deserve to sleep next to her.

A couple of friends from work had taken me out after. They patiently stood by as six o’clock hit and I continued cleaning out my desk. I wasn’t leaving voluntarily, but neither was I one of those escorted-out-the-door-by-security casualties, those poor souls suffering the added humiliation of a perp walk, though being unemployed hardly qualifies as a crime. It’s just made to feel like one in this country. I had had two weeks, but I had been busy, you know, working. I dumped coffee mugs, calendars, awards into the trash with a sweep of my arm. It was a Friday.

“You want this?” I asked, holding up a Chicago Manual of Style, one of three I had accumulated in my five years on the job.

“Sure.”

“You know, I can bring you anything you can’t carry,” my other friend said.

“I’ll just be another minute.”

“No rush.”

They were both wearing their coats. They had their messenger bags strapped across their chests. I surveyed my desk one last time. Only a few items remained: a pig fashioned out of a corkscrew and pushpins; a handwritten note that said “a shy, stuttering man playing Bingo”; a pencil drawing of an executive meeting in which one of the participants had pulled a gun, another of the men sitting at the table saying, “What the shit, Dave?” These had all been parting gifts to me by co-workers who had also been let go in the past year. Now I was passing them on to the next person who would eventually find himself in our position, though to convince him of that now would be impossible. I didn’t put anything new under the tree.

I gathered my computer and my ID.

“Turning in your gun and badge, huh?”

I walked into my manager’s office. She was rarely there past six o’clock; on a Friday, unthinkable. The day before she had told me that if I had everything I needed to get done done by lunch that I could leave early on my last day. I thought at the time that she was being benevolent, a kindness. I now realized that her day was linked to mine: Someone had told her that she wasn’t going home until I did. It was nearly six thirty. She had a husband and two kids of her own waiting for her in Jersey. She wouldn’t be home until nearly eight o’clock. Her son would be asleep by then. I counted it a small victory.

“Here you go,” I said.

My ID was so faded that it could have belonged to anyone. She put it in her desk drawer, next to the salt, soy sauce, and rubber bands. The computer she locked away in a cabinet, though she didn’t remove the key from the lock.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Thanks.”

We didn’t shake hands.

I walked back to my desk.

“You ready?”

“Let’s go.”

The bar was called “Ear Inn,” the “E” in “Ear” created by shaving off the round parts of the “B” in “Bar” on the neon sign out front. The bar dates back to 1817. The ceilings were low, the floors uneven. We were in Soho, about two blocks from the Hudson. I could see why the bar would have thrived, people coming off the water and stopping at the nearest spot for a drink, especially on a January night like this, the wind chafing my cheeks, not wanting to venture too far into the city. This’ll do.

We had a pint of the house ale, then another and another and another. We ordered food. We talked about work, then the Knicks, then all the crazy shit you could put into a coffee-table book about the Japanese. Arcades. Robots. The things they cram into vending machines alone. When the check came my friends reached for it.

“We got this,” they said.

It was still early, and I wasn’t nearly drunk enough to go home, but they had fiancées to attend to. No shit, both of them getting married in the next year.

“Take care,” one said, as he disappeared down the steps of the subway station.

“Stay in touch,” said the other, as he headed east on Carmine. I tried to commit his personal email address to memory. Jesus. I didn’t even know his email address. Practically every minute I had spent with him was at work.

I stepped into another bar, ordered a three-dollar Bud Lite, with a tip it’s four. I took a piss, checked in at home, called my friend in Queens. He didn’t answer, so I left a message. “You up for a drink?” I asked. “If so, hit me back.” I returned to the bar. Within minutes, my phone buzzed.

“I thought that might be you,” he said.

“You want a drink,” I said. “I mean, if you want, I’m up for a drink.”

“Sure, I’ll have a drink with you.”

“What’s the name of that place right off the train?”

“I can come to you,” he said.

“No, that place right off the train.”

Somehow you can fly from New York to Iceland in five hours, yet it can take an hour and a half to get from Manhattan to Long Island City. I didn’t want to lose my buzz, so I ran through the Village to the train. I looked like a character from a disaster movie. I dared not turn around and see the wreckage that was my life gaining on me. I arrived at the platform just as the train was pulling in. Winded, I grabbed a seat. Everywhere around me people were chattering excitedly. They were dressed to impress, jacked up on the promise of the night ahead. It was almost nine o’clock. Their night was just beginning. The most devoted among them would see the sun rise. My overstuffed bag was heavy on my lap. I folded my arms across the top much like I had seen my wife do on her ever-expanding belly. At least I could unburden myself when it got to be too much. She still had a long way to go, though it suddenly felt much sooner than it had before. What are we going to do?

Scampering through the Village, un-cool though it must have looked, paid off. I beat my friend to the bar. By the time he arrived, I was two more drinks in.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

I pointed halfway down my pint and told him that I would answer that once I got there. That was when the whisky started.

Two hours later I was saying, “We ought to move to LA, you know. At least in LA they pay you to fail.” We made plans. Big plans. Then we sat and drank some more.

When we left the bar, my friend lit a cigarette.

“You want one?” he asked.

“No, thanks.”

Apparently my self-destructiveness had its limits. We walked a block in drunken, frozen silence. We reached where he would turn left and I would continue straight.

“You OK getting home?”

“I’m good.”

“You sure? You could get a car. I’ve got money for a car if you need it.”

“I’m good. Really. Thanks.”

“OK. Well.” We hugged. “Next time I see you, I expect you to have your shuffleboard game down.” I nodded. “That or pinochle.”

“OK. See you.”

“Be safe.”

I ran/walked in whatever direction up Broadway is in Queens—north?—rode the M60 through Harlem, took the uptown A the rest of the way home. It wasn’t that late, but it felt late.

My wife was asleep. At least I had achieved that goal. If only they were all that easy. I could have crawled in next to her. She would have understood, on tonight of all nights. Instead I opted for the couch. My only fear was that she would wake up and think something was wrong. Well.

Three hours later my son woke up crying. It was still dark outside. The partiers from the train were still going strong. I startled awake. My head felt like it was trapped between a mallet and a tree stump.

“I’m here,” I said, as I staggered into his room to console him. I hoped he couldn’t smell the failure on my breath.

The first chapter in our proposed coffee-table book.

 

*****

“How you feel is not the result of what is happening in your life—it is your interpretation of what is happening.”

*****

No satisfactory answer exists for why I have Anthony Robbins’ Unlimited Power: The Way to Peak Personal Achievement on my shelf, so I might as well tell the truth. In this instance, the truth happens to be the same truth that Pete Townsend alleged when authorities discovered child pornography on his computer: I have it for research. I can’t speak for Townsend—the world still awaits Lil’ Tommy—but in my case the truth is indeed true. I was going to write a play that featured a motivational speaker as a central character, which also explains why I own Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Arthur K. Robertson & William Proctor’s Work a 4-Hour Day. The idea was to immerse myself in the way these men think and then create a character whose behavior belied the degree to which their bravado masked their insecurities. The endeavor was doomed from the start, and I never got past a cursory flip of any of these books. Bravado they had to spare, but they revealed no insecurities. That I would have had to provide on my own.

I could have chosen to examine any of these three books for the purposes of this project. I opted for Robbins because, if you came of age in the 1980’s, he is the guru, the don, the alpha and the omega of self-help. Fuck Dr. Phil. Robbins didn’t need a PhD to prove his worth—his formal education extends no further than a high-school diploma—and he damn sure didn’t need Oprah to catapult him to the big time. He did so on his own with a series of infomercials that included the likes of Fran Tarkenton and Quincy Jones sitting at beach-side locales and discussing their successes in tones so earnest that they just had to contain the secrets of eternal happiness. They just had to! In his seminars, Robbins pioneered the mike-strapped-to-the-head look long before Madonna made it fashionable, which freed his hands to slap five with the men, to hoist the women below their asses in ways that weren’t in the least bit lecherous or creepy, and to extend his long arms across the stage so widely that he appeared to be supporting the world entire.  

The Human Chin

 

I remember him mostly because he was gorgeous. He was tall—his bio says six foot, seven—fit and tan, with a face that could fairly be described as “chiseled”: his cheeks just a little indented little like a young Ah-nold and his Tank McNamara-chin that played well when facing the camera but must have been garish in profile. His black hair was soft and lush—the guy had a career as a shampoo model if this brainwashing thing didn’t work out—but I envied nothing so much as his teeth, which were as straight and gleaming as mine were/are crooked and dull.

My friends and I would tune in to mock him in the same obnoxious way that we would ridicule Bob Ross as he painted his “happy trees” on PBS. If Robbins was the OP (Original Phil), the we were the OBB (Original Beavis and Butthead), though we lacked Butthead’s sophistication and never would have survived on basic cable.  

“Hey, check it out. The human chin is on.”

“How much pussy you think that guy gets?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask your mom?”

“Fuck you.”

“I wonder how he avoids ‘pit stains.”

In hindsight, our insistence that Robbins could only be viewed ironically might have been more of a defense than our impressionable young minds would have admitted: The guy was good, damned appealing, dare I say even magnetic. If we didn’t keep a wall of mama jokes between us and him, we might end up picking up what he was putting down.

*****

My copy of Unlimited Power is a paperback from 1986. The sticker on the cover says “10% off pub. retail.” The price on the back says “$12.50 in USA.” Today the book retails for sixteen. The pencil mark on the inside cover says “50 cents.”  I bought it at a library book sale in Lawrence, Kansas, around the turn of the last century. The price on the inside cover is just above a black-and-white photo of Robbins. He looks like a more handsome version of Mitt Romney, though, to be fair, in 1986 Mitt Romney was probably a more handsome version of Mitt Romney too. The picture catches Robbins mid-sentence. His mouth is open. His hands are extended as if to show the size of the fish he recently caught, which, now that you mention it, might not want to be the image he wants to project. The lies that fisherman tell and all.

Beneath his picture, the words: “We can change our lives. We can do, have, and be exactly what we wish.”

Who better to get me off of the couch?

Life is Godzilla. I am a million fleeing Japanese. Can Tony Robbins be the scientist who saves me from myself?

An Elegant So-Leu-tion

Those of you who followed the introduction to this blog--particularly Part 3, "Remainders"--know that the issue of books encroaching on our space has been an ongoing conversation between Leu and me. The short version is that she says Get these books the hell out of here and I say No. To further complicate matters, we're expecting a second baby in June, and he's going to sleep right where the second bookshelf is now. (Hmm, two kids, two bookshelves. Never made that connection before....)

In any case, I think Leu might secretly be using this as an excuse to get rid of what's been a real eyesore for a long, long time now. The image at the top of this blog is a photo of what our shelves look like. I've always been kind of partial to that full-to-bursting look, but I can see where that's a bachelor-type thing, like a cardboard cutout of Princess Leia in that outfit from the beginning of Jedi. Here's an outtake of the current version of shelves that didn't make the final cut:

 Here's another:

 

These are in our son's room, mind you. When he goes to bed at night, the poor kid doesn't know if he should ask us to read Goodnight Moon or the Greeks. He wakes up sweating in the middle of the night.  "What's the matter, buddy?"  "I dreamed I was living in the stacks at the library...."

Well, apparently one advantage to staring at these damn books for the past five years (in this location, anyway) is that Leu started doing what she does, which is putting things together. "We sure do have a lot books with red spines," she says to herself one day, or "What an interesting shade of blue." Then she rents a car, goes to Home Depot, disappears into the bedroom for a while, and voila!

And:

As I told her, it's perfect:  aesthetically pleasing, functional, and inherently bookish. In addition, it got me to thinking about the color palate that publishers use to choose their covers. Those blues and greens are a little too similar to be coincidental. They must come out of focus groups.

But this is not an entry to indulge in over-analysis. This is an entry to share. Enjoy the brevity while it lasts, because I promise to be back soon with overly long musings about my life as a reader.

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

And yet, the line that stings the most from Solve for X is from an essay called “Because I Said So,” which is a meditation on arrogance. In this essay, Saltzman writes, “And how about the one about the writer who creates a fan page for himself on the Web, complete with prospective dust jacket photos (judiciously lit and artfully posed) even before he gets a book contract?”

A blog is hardly a fan page, I realize, but a sudden rush of guilt surged through me when I read this line. It was as if he reached through space and time and smacked me hard across the cheek with one of his meaty palms. Am I cheating? Am I ungrateful? Would I be so critical if he were able to respond? Most of all, would he approve, and why, after all these years, do I yearn for his approval anyway?

I wonder sometimes how much his influence prevented me from more vigorously pursuing a teaching career myself. For the longest time, that was the idea: undergrad, grad, PhD, then teach. Like Saltzman, like my own dad. The company line says that abandoning the PhD had more to do with my own father than it had to do with Dr. Saltzman. I am an American, after all. I’m supposed to surpass my father, not become him. And plenty of evidence exists that I have been trying to do just that ever since I parted with the path that he chose for me. Before he retired, my dad was a theater director. I write plays. It doesn’t take Freud to figure that one out.

But it wasn’t my own father whose voice I couldn’t get out of my head when I was in front of the class, teaching a syllabus that looked suspiciously like Dr. Saltzman’s Contemporary American Fiction course from years ago. My class was called “Recent Popular Fiction,” but that only because the department believed more people would enroll in “Recent Popular” than “Contemporary American.” But don’t let that fool you. It was the same class. I was just the substitute.

I insisted on circling up the desks. I listened impatiently, tapped my foot, took over after the freshmen had floundered long enough. If a discussion wasn’t going in such a way that I could work in one of his decades-old insights, I would steer it so it would. I even dressed like him: khakis and a blue button-down shirt, loafers. On more than one occasion, I’d contort my mouth like he did, point demonstratively to the page with an albeit less-fleshy finger but with my hand nonetheless cocked in the same way that he cocked his: the wrist farther away from the body than the finger with which I/he was pointing.

I’d be in the middle of class, in the middle of a lecture that was at least half not my own—at least—and I’d think, Who am I? Whose voice is this? Am I teaching or acting? And if I’m acting, who am I acting for? For whom are you babysitting?

I never felt like this space was truly mine.

I did not keep my one o’clock. I told my manager I wasn’t feeling well, rescheduled the meeting, and left for the day. “You don’t have a job,” Saltzman was fond of saying. “The job has you.” I’ve used that line several times myself. I’ve claimed it as my own.

I was working in Lower Manhattan at the time, on the 22^nd floor of a building directly across the street from Ground Zero. Vendors were selling glossy photos of 9/11, the planes flaming brilliantly into the buildings that once provided shade where I now stood. I headed south on Church Street, past a deli that had good pastrami. Saltzman had often complained about the lack of a decent deli in Joplin. A deli and jazz. “I mean a real deli,” the kid from Chicago would say. “You know?”

I passed the teenagers, newly dismissed from school, their daily lessons vaporized by the ether of hormones. I continued south. Walked and walked and walked until I could walk no farther. New York Harbor. The southernmost tip of the island. Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island. I wanted to name Jonah “Ellis.” Leu preferred “Jonah.” Staten Island Ferry. Jersey.

The irony is not lost on me. Toiling away on my own lyrical essay. Using him as my raw material. Some might even say disparaging the dead. I don’t think so, but I see the point. I’m the least reliable person to answer that one.

I sat down on a bench. I had a book in my hand. I didn’t remember picking it up. Always carrying a book with me. It’s a habit I developed years and years ago, back when I was an undergraduate at Missouri Southern.

*****

I’ve stayed in touch with a number of my professors from those undergraduate days. My advisor throughout those years has remained a good friend. He visited the city last year with his wife and daughter. We had lunch in our neighborhood. I was in his class when his daughter was born. She started college last year.

Dr. Denniston, the Shakespeare professor who played the role better than Olivier played Hamlet, he recently friended me on Facebook. I don’t know if that’s a win for Facebook or a loss for Shakespeare.

Leu and I stayed in better contact with Joy’s ex-husband than we did with Joy, not out of any sense of taking sides, but that’s just the way life broke. He’s in Pennsylvania now. We almost went to Jeremy’s bar mitzvah but backed out at the last minute. Jonah was due soon, and we were watching our money. Not the best reason, I know. We made vague plans to meet with Jeremy again when he and his dad came to the city for the U.S. Open, but that, too, never developed. Jeremy’s dad is remarried now with a young son of his own named Jonah. We knew but had forgotten. We agreed that it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. Sometimes I think of him and his new life and Joy and hers. I wonder if she thinks it was worth it. I know that’s unfair, but I do.

We last heard from Joy when Leuinda was pregnant with Jonah. She responded in the comments section of a blog we had started. There was an ultrasound photo of Jonah at 12 weeks. “Well, this is beautiful, obviously,” she had written.

I say that was the last we heard from her, but the truth is that Joy and I exchanged several emails over the past month in regards to this essay. I invited her look at any early draft. I figured I owed her that much anyway. She’s been exceedingly supportive, even about the things that I thought might strike a nerve. She’s torn between filling in some of the gaps and letting them stand. For example, she knows the true identities of “EMS” and “WHG.” My guesses were wrong, though when she revealed them to me my first thought was “Of course.” I’ve probably got plenty of other things wrong too, but correct matters less to me than accurate. My favorite of her notes is “if there’s some way for you to include his great 3-pt. shot in there….?” Sure, Joy. I can do that.

"WHG"

I last heard from Dr. Saltzman directly in July 2005. By that time, I had abandoned the PhD for an MFA in Playwriting, a move that, for better or worse, no longer had me wondering whose voice was in my head when I was in front of the class. The writing program was a grueling one, and I read very little for pleasure during those two years. After graduation, I was starved for fiction, ravenous for novels, and even hungrier to share what I had been reading with someone, so I dropped him a line. The email was called “Message from an Old Student and Friend.” It begins, “Hello, Dr. Saltzman. Kirby Fields calling, here. I'm sure this message feels as if it is coming from out of nowhere, and I suppose it is, but you have been on my mind.” From there I catch him up on what I had been reading and where it had taken me. Jonathans begetting Jonathans: Franzen, Lethem, Safran Foer. I then say, “Anyway, the point of this fairly rambling (and name-dropping) e-mail is that your Contemporary American Fiction class set me on this course over 10 years ago. I do believe I bend in this direction anyway, but you were certainly a profound influence. I guess the point, finally, is that the course lasted a semester, but what you inspired has lasted a lifetime.” I again express my admiration for Objects and Empathy before inquiring if anything new is on the horizon and wishing him well.

Twenty-four hours later, he responded:

“Great to hear from you, Kirby, and I'm glad to hear that English 350 continues to percolate up into your consciousness (or is it compost down?). You may be interested to hear that I’m teaching a course entirely devoted to DeLillo this coming fall for our recently established Senior Seminar. As for my own reading list of late, I've read some British fare—The Line of Beauty, Money, and Saturday—and I’m currently in the midst of Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall. Some American things I've enjoyed recently include O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying, Norman’s The Bird Artist, and Wigins’s Evidence of Things Unseen. Always on the lookout for teachable, classworthy texts, which means I get to write every purchase off.

“Best of all, and relevant to your kind interest, my new collection of essays, entitled Nearer, should be out by the end of the summer from Parlor Press, so you and literally tens of others can check for it on line in a month or so. I have two other collections currently being seriously considered (read: looked at skeptically when they get around
to it), so the writing career is going full throttle, or as full throttle as a Honda Civic gets, at any rate.

“Keep in touch, Kirby. Hope all goes well both on and off the page.

“Best always,

“Art”

*****

I don’t know that we have come to terms yet with how to reconcile death and the digital age. Or at least I know that I haven’t, anyway. Sure, I’ve stumbled upon the odd Facebook memorial page—and they can be rather odd—but, thankfully, those whom I’ve lost haven’t had much of a cyberlife. Grandma and Grandpa had a rotary phone. What will happen when the generations that live more and more online pass, yet their status updates, their likes, and their blogs live on? I don’t know about a whole new layer of grief—Kubler-Ross won’t need a rewrite—but I do know that those of us who are left behind might want to prepare ourselves for reminders that appear as unbidden as a pop-up window.

Dr. Saltzman did not have a Facebook page, though one now exists in his memory. He did not post videos on YouTube from his book signings at the local Hasting’s. He never tweeted, though I would love to have seen what he could have done with 140 characters. He did, however, have a personalized page on Amazon.com. There’s a bio, a picture that serves as the author photo from his books, taken by the same man who photographed our wedding, by the way. The text is pretty standard fare: “I am a Professor of English at Missouri Southern State University and the author of ten books of literary nonfiction and contemporary literary criticism….”

What follows, however, is anything but standard and is more revealing about the man than any quote or photograph or link that masquerades as true insight nowadays. What follows is a Wishlist, some 40 items long, of books that Dr. Saltzman added between January 2005 and December 2007. He died in January 2008. Presumably, the list is for people who would like to buy him a gift or, perhaps, he used it as a reading version of a Netflix queue for himself. Whatever the purpose of the list, I counted it a legitimate find, the top of something below the surface that held the promise of so much more. Looking it over, I felt a little invasive, but not so much that I didn’t pore over all 40 titles.

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, is on there. Leuinda has that one. I bought it for her after our most recent trip to Glacier National Park in an effort to help her forget that she is surrounded by concrete. A book by Jonathan Lethem, the title of which I don’t recognize. The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster, available at the time, used, for one penny. And then there’s a slew of stuff I would never have heard of otherwise, which couldn’t have been more appropriate: Like You’d Understand, Anyway: Stories, by Jim Shepard; Curves and Angles: Poems, by Brad Leithauser; Cheap Follies: the Pleasure of Urban Decay, with Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer; Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, by Elizabeth Little; and this, which sounds like I’m making it up but I swear I’m not, I swear: 1001 Books to Read before You Die.

I feel his loss most acutely when I read a new release that I know he would have enjoyed. Part of me feels guilty, because I know he would have gotten more out of it than I do. He would have found ways in, forged connections, discovered the means to make something new.

And that, for me, is the hardest part: all of those books that remain unread.

Currently #2,195,375 on Amazon.com. He's making a move.

Composting Down: SOLVE FOR X: ESSAYS, by Arthur Saltzman (Part 4 of 5)

I would actually add “language” above “books” on my nonbinding list of things that Dr. Saltzman valued, which, in case you’re not keeping score at home, makes “language” number one with a bullet. This love of language, this adoration of individual words, is both what drives his essays and what gets in their way.

When I started reading Solve for X, I kept a list of all of the words I was going to have to look up, but the list didn’t take. There were simply too many of them. “Noumenal,” “cruet,” “bathysphere,” “pasha,” “orrery,” “colophon,” “lagniappe,” to name but a few. Reading with a dictionary in your lap might work for office hours, but it’s hardly convenient on the A train. (Insert note here that the Kindle has a built-in dictionary.) That said, I was ready for the love affair with language, expected it even. After all, this was the man who spent five solid minutes rhapsodizing over the elegance of the word “latitude,” and I still remember him lingering over “fetishistic” for so long that I thought, Sheesh, just get a room already.

So, too, was I ready for the similes and metaphors that are so painstakingly labored that they overwhelm the rest of any given page: “with apologies to the battery of high school math teachers who passed me hurriedly up the line like a leaky bucket” or “One enters [a hotel bed] like an incision, sliding into sleep like a letter into its envelope or an afterthought between parentheses” or, appropriately enough, “Surfing a long sentence can be a heady, splendid ride, but in these cases [i.e., some carefully selected sentences by Henry James] the enterprise is doomed. Either it will dash itself against a period like a boulder or tear its hull against elliptical shoals.” Remember, I minored in the man. I saw this kind of shit coming.

"Orrery."

What I didn’t anticipate was his ever-deepening interest in disciplines that were not his own. When he branched out 20 years ago (give or take) he did so in the areas that I hinted at before: sports, popular culture. He would talk about ordering a record from a television commercial that promised all of the hits by “the original artists” and then tell us that when he eventually received the album the cover band interpreting the songs was called—wait for it—the Original Artists. (Ba-dum-pa!) That kind of thing. In Solve for X, however, his tangential targets are weightier, their language—and this is key—more specialized.

Joy and Jeremy birdwatch—remember her poem from The Paris Review—and Dr. Saltzman took great pleasure, not so much in getting out there with his binoculars and his mud boots, but, rather, in studying his Peterson’s before he even left the house: “Out of love, I am learning the topography of birds,” he writes. “I am practicing the positions of their superciliaries, their scapulars, and their secondaries.” He’s boning up out of love, all right, and I don’t doubt his love for Joy, but so too does he commit himself out of love for such words as “superciliaries,” “scapulars,” and “secondaries.” Later, he references a vocabulary card full of architectural terms, as far as I can tell, just so he drop “ornate astragals,” “volutes,” “abaci,” “fillets,” and “helices.”

It is almost as if he so mastered the vocabulary of his own discipline that he had to investigate others in order to satisfy his desire for words, words, and more words. The vampire who runs out of victims at home has to move a town over. The net effect is 25 essays that are ostensibly about such varied subjects as footnotes, Dante, and the Second Amendment, but that really all end up being about the same damn thing: language.

Did I say that 2,700,000 sounded about right? I’m starting to think it’s a tad high.

A test that Dr. Saltzman eventually would have passed.

Which leaves teaching, which I’m not convinced he was good at—not in any Dead Poet’s Society kind of way, anyway—and which I’m even less convinced he actually enjoyed. I don’t think he liked teaching anymore than an addict likes turning tricks. They both did what they had to do to in order to feed their addiction, only in Dr. Saltzman’s case the addiction wasn’t as illicit as the meth that ravaged so many of his neighbors. The addiction, for him, was writing.

There were rumors, especially around the time of his divorce, that he was trying to get out of Joplin, that he was trying to score a teaching gig elsewhere. I heard that he even landed an interview at a school in one of the Carolinas but that he failed to impress in person as much as he did on the page. A fellow professor confided to me in an off-the-record kind of way that Saltzman was rarely at his best when he was under pressure. All of that sarcasm eventually turned to bitterness after all. The most remarkable part of this story for me was that Saltzman would ever feel pressure. I always wondered if he would have actually taken the job, were it offered, what with his daughter still in the Midwest and all. What about Joy? What about Jeremy?

I know that I certainly would have taken it personally if he had left while I was still there, such were my feelings of proprietorship toward him. He played favorites in the classroom, and I was definitely one of them. There’s no denying that. I know this essay would be far more interesting if I were not, if I just kept to myself in the back row, soaking it all up in silence and never confessing how much he meant to me until it was too late, but that would be a lie. I was a favorite. He liked me, and he knew I liked him. I showed up every day, had done the readings, turned in my assignments on time, typed, with the tracks from the dot-matrix printer stripped away. I regularly demonstrated thought even if I never told him anything he didn’t already know.

Swear to god, I raised my hand and contributed maybe three times in four years. Once we were discussing E.L. Doctorow’s “A Writer in the Family,” and I wondered aloud if Doctorow might be punning on “writer/righter.” Saltzman said, Of course he is, and carried right on.

I thought I was going to have a fucking heart attack.

"Fillet."

In one of his forays into the sciences, Saltzman writes of his interest in books for beginning physicists, books that I was surprised to learn were on his shelf, with titles like Fear of Physics, A Beginner’s Book of Since the Beginnings, and The Universe Shut Up in a Nutshell. Amateur books. Books for rookies. About these books, he writes, “When obsession gets the better of me, I’ll open one to see how long I can sustain some semblance of coherence before I blear. I’m seldom more than ten minutes out of port before the fog sets in.”

I read this passage and thought, You son of a bitch. This is what your students felt. This confusion. This impenetrability. This, well, you said it yourself, this fog. This is what your students felt when you forced them to read John Hawkes, Toni Morrison, or Marilynne Robinson. Yes, “forced.” You made choices. You knew what it was like to be them. You were not unaware.

*****

But one guy—a football player, not to be all stereotypical about it—would sit in the middle of the desks with his head cracked back and his mouth agape and he would openly snore throughout the class. “It’s getting really hard to look at this everyday,” Saltzman once snapped loudly enough that the guy blinked awake for a moment before drifting back to sleep. Another guy, in a poetry writing class, wrote an ode to a truck that he found at the junkyard. The poem included the line, “If she turns over, I’ll be in love.” Saltzman's job was to provide an earnest critique of the poem. He approached it with the same care that he approached a poem by William Carlos Williams or Dianne Ackerman.

His final exam for his writing classes asked each member of the class to bring to the last meeting a passage they liked from a book. Any book, any passage. That was it. Just bring a passage. This was around Christmas, so I brought in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Christ Climbed Down.” Saltzman hated the Beats, sided with Truman Capote’s typing-not-writing criticism, but that wasn’t the point. The point was read. Share.

Inevitably, three people would bring in something from Parade magazine and one wouldn’t bring in anything at all.

The first paragraph of my midterm about John Updike begins: “John Updike is not a writer. This may be a shock to some of you who are familiar with some of his 20+ books, but I am going to have to deny him that title. He uses letters only to transcend words and builds passages and sentences[,] putting them on paper as a painter would but swipe a single stroke from his brush on the canvas.”

It only gets worse from there. Much worse. And I was one of the good ones.

Is it any wonder that he was bitter? Is it any wonder that he couldn’t constrain a desire to be elsewhere, to do better?

People believed him to be so cantankerous, so curmudgeonly that he became known as “Dr. Saltzman, That Teacher at Southern Who Hates Everything.”

It wasn’t a nickname he deserved, but few would argue that it wasn’t earned.

Composting Down: SOLVE FOR X: ESSAYS, by Arthur Saltzman (Part 3 of 5)

I always pegged Dr. Saltzman as a writer first and a scholar second. Actually, check that. I always pegged Dr. Saltzman as a reader first, a writer second, and a scholar third, which by no means diminishes the man’s scholarship. As a scholar, he had this annoying ability at cocktail parties to know more about Chaucer than the Medievalists, more about Shelley than the Romanticists, and more about Joyce than the Modernists, or, well, it must have been annoying for the Medievalists, the Romanticists, and the Modernists, anyway. A conversation about Queenie from Updike’s “A&P” would spiral into a digression about Falstaff that went on for so long that I had to check my syllabus to make sure I was still in my Short Story class. Of course, the putative title of the course had little to do with anything, as Saltzman would liberally pepper throughout any given class references to Bill Cosby from I Spy or to Linus from a long-ago “Peanuts” strip or to Harry Caray from the Cubs broadcast booth the afternoon before.

This was all part of his postmodern bent that I sensed but couldn’t articulate at the time and was thus unable to identify as part of my attraction to him: Whereas other professors snootily guarded their dissertation-ordained portion of the Western Canon (caps theirs), Dr. Saltzman welcomed all comers: Henry IV, or should I say 1HenryIV, The Canterbury Tales, “A&P,” I Spy, “Peanuts,” The Sound and the Fury, To the Lighthouse, and whatever WGN showed after the latest Cubs loss—these were all equal, or at least they were all equal insofar as their ability to provide raw material was the same. And that, for him, is what it all was: Raw material for his own writing.

Dr. Saltzman before eating his dinner while standing up?

He confesses as much in “Why I Don’t Write Best Sellers,” an essay that I knew I knew before I read a single word because he riffed on the theme often enough in class. In class, he would say, “Faulkner tried to write a potboiler, and he ended up writing Sanctuary,” a point that was lost on me because, not having read Sanctuary, I didn’t know if it was good or bad. (For the record, I have since read it, and I still don’t know.) In the essay, Saltzman refreshingly discusses the relatively recent shift in the English classroom away from primary texts and in favor of this ephemeral thing called “theory.” He’s kinder about the matter than John Goodman’s character is in David Simon’s Treme, who laments that all English majors want to do anymore is study themselves, but there is, nonetheless, an undeniable sense of loss in Saltzman’s ruminations. He notes that 25 years ago “not all of us freshly minted Ph.D.’s had as yet been outplaced by theorists, nor had we as yet detected their smoke on the horizon. We persisted in believing that there were still jobs available for honest sentences to do and, a savagely constricted job market to the contrary, that there remained tenurable occupation for their makers….Some of us even dared to imagine that our own language, as though enriched by context, occasionally lived up to the level set by the language that set us analyzing.”

The “us” in that last sentence should not be overlooked.

In some ways, the movement away from the deep read that characterized his previous work was the best thing that could have happened to him, for, as he knew—and as those humbled professors at the cocktail party knew—he could hold his own with the Lukacses and the Bakhtins and the Foucaults if he wanted to. He just didn’t want to. And, as he writes, even if he did want to, “I knew myself to be recidivist at the core. While the ostensibly reformed alcoholic keeps a flask beneath his mattress and gin-filed aspirin bottles tucked back in his sock drawer, I would secretly imbibe from a stash of smoothly intoxicating sentences. I might rinse with Ricouer or gnash Derrida like anise seeds to cover my breath. But by my wistful expression and my wobble, you’d know what contraband I’d been sneaking.”

As of this writing, Solve for X is number 2,746,682 on Amazon’s list of bestselling books.

I still don't know if this is any good. The cover, however, I'm pretty sure about.

After graduation, I helped start a readers group that included former and current students and a few select members of the faculty. Dr. Saltzman was one such member. We would give each other assignments—find a piece of prose that feels especially poetic or a passage from a 19^th century novel of which you are especially fond—and we’d meet in restaurants or at people’s houses or at bookstores and snack and drink and talk about literature with a capital “L,” which I still believed in at the time, but mostly for me anyway it was a way to continue the classroom experience after the diploma was in hand. I don’t know how much I actually liked college and how much I just clung to it because I didn’t know what else to do.

Saltzman was a gracious member of the group. He and Joy were an open secret by that point. She was part of the group too, and I liked seeing the two of them interact as partners rather than as colleagues. They would arrive and leave together, pay for their part of the tab with one bill. At the end of the night, he would help her into her coat. One time, we were leaving Books-a-Million after one of our meetings. Books-a-Million is a discount, warehouse-type bookstore in Joplin that includes a Starbucks rip-off inside and always smacked of For All Bible to me, but maybe that just comes with the territory. In any case, it was Leu, me, Dr. Saltzman, and Joy. We were walking to our cars. I said, “Have a good night, Dr. Saltzman.” He said, “Kirby, you’ve graduated. We’re not in class anymore. You don’t have to call me ‘Doctor.’ ‘Professor’ will do just fine.”

*****

Is it heretical to say that somewhere in the 2,700,000’s is probably where Solve for X belongs? After all, Amazon’s list of bestsellers measures a readership that can hardly be described as discerning. Four of the top 10 bestselling books help their readers either gain money or lose weight, and the top spot is occupied by a story about a boy who travels to heaven and returns to share what he has learned. Yes, he travels to that heaven. As the book’s summary says, “[T]he disarmingly simple message is heaven is a real place, Jesus really loves children, and be ready, there is a coming last battle.”

I imagine Dr. Saltzman’s reaction to someone who tried to pit his work against these chart-toppers would be something along the same lines as what the guitarist for REM said when a reporter compared his band’s waning sales with those of Britney Spears, who, at the time, was looking down at the rest of the pop world from her perch, panties be damned: “Whatever she has, we don’t,” the guitarist quipped.

Come on, I can hear Saltzman pleading, don’t put me in the same ring with that. It’s not even a fair fight. In “Bestsellers,” he aligns himself with Borges, who claimed that he wrote “perhaps for a few personal friends.” Saltzman notes, “I’m with him, grudgingly, in that it ends up being primarily a few friends who read and do not begrudge me my writing.”

Of course, he’s right. To set him opposite Amazon’s hardest hitters rigs the fight. There’s no way he can compete with such accomplished authors as Barbara Streisand and Sammy Hagar, both of whom are currently in the Top 20.

His bigger problem is that I’m not even completely sure that I like Solve for X, and I probably qualify as one of his “few friends who read and do not begrudge [him his] writing.” The truth is that I find it uneven at best. A few choice essays elevate the majority of the work that is otherwise self-indulgent or, most unforgivable of all, boring.

One of the great temptations of evaluating a life so prematurely interrupted is that you want to predict where it would have gone from there—like calculating end-of-year totals based on a player’s performance at the All-Start break—and Dr. Saltzman wasn’t even at the break, not in his new career yet, anyway. He was, let’s call it, a third of the way in, another seven to ten books easily ahead, maybe even more. He had received some recognition, some awards. Another book followed, so clearly he had some reserves. If he had continued at this trajectory, how high would he have gone? I want to project a life in which he sustains himself through his writing. I want him to leave behind the students who weren’t deserving of him anyway. I want to grant him a retirement party in which he is himself the first one to leave. “Smell you later,” he says, as the door clangs shut. He does not look back.

But I can’t. How far would he have gone? The answer, at best: Not very.