Drifting Together, Drifting Apart

It is odd how things sometimes happen in life. It’s as if you are watching a movie, as if someone else was responsible for your deeds, your Doppelgänger, perhaps, or that your actions were due to some shift in time or dimension. When I look back on some aspects of my life, I’m sure that I must have lived in some parallel universe. If the theories of quantum mechanics have value, it is entirely possible to be in different places at the same time. I have been trying to explain to myself some of the choices I’ve made in my life that were not in my best interest and that ran counter to my better judgment. It wasn’t me; it was my apparition. My first marriage is a case in point.

I met my first wife at an off-campus party in Rosie Hayder’s trailer. Rosie was a fallen Amish girl from southeast Kansas, who was working on her MFA in painting. She was a girl who, as they say in Texas, could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. She was shacked up with my friend Hannes DeBruyn. Hannes was a Dutchman from Rotterdam, whose main ambition in life was to ingest as much booze as possible without having to pay for any of it. He used to stage poetry readings in his digs, which sported a life-size porcelain urinal attached to the front door. He called his place Le Pissoir. To be admitted to his readings you had to bring a bag of doobers or a gallon jug of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, what today you’d call two buck chuck, for the “Intendant,” as he styled himself. Most of the poetry at these do’s was phallic in nature and pretty gross.

Hannes was a slob who looked as if he’d just gotten out of a gypsy caravan. Hygiene was not his strong suit. But he was built like a rugby player with a low center of gravity and he loved to fight. His problem was that he was usually high on something or another. As a result, he mostly lost those dust-ups and his face looked the part. He made up for this shortcoming with his popularity with the girls, who for reasons I couldn’t fathom were all over him. He was on a tight budget, because his father back in Holland had cut him off due to this refusal to graduate. Hannes paid for his tuition and room and board by harvesting the funny weed, which grew wild all over eastern Kansas and selling it to students who didn’t yet know you could just go out into the countryside and pick it along most roads around Lawrence. There were garbage bags full of the stuff under his bed. His place reeked of it.

Hannes was an anarchist at heart. When the campus of the University of Kansas erupted in riots over the Vietnam War in 1965, it was he who led the charge to firebomb the ROTC building. He and his band of agitators occupied the chancellor’s office for four days, before Kansas state troopers rousted them with tear gas. The next year the Student Union building was gutted by fire. Again Hannes was front and center. I don’t know how he did it, but he was never fingered as the instigator. He always tried to get me involved. “We need your military expertise,” he’d urged, “somebody who knows how to shoot straight.” I declined.

Hannes majored in cinematography. He wanted to produce “significant” documentaries. His senior project was called American Apocalypse. It included a scene where two of his pals carried a 6’by 12’canvas backdrop that featured a giant, full-color blow-up of a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. They waited outside the Religious Studies Hall for some of the nuns who taught there to take their daily lunchtime stroll and then walked with the upright backdrop next to the unsuspecting sisters, while Hannes, sitting side-saddle on the backseat of a friend’s motorcycle, filmed the scene while keeping pace with them. “I want to juxtapose the Pope and the nuclear holocaust,” he explained to me later when I viewed his chef-d’oeuvre in the editing room and didn’t quite get the connection.

Another one of his masterpieces contained a scene that was set in the dug-out basement of a house construction site. Three of Hannes’ cronies sat around a fire skinning a road-kill cat and roasting it on a spit, while Hannes hung suspended from the top of the basement wall filming and I held a Klieg light, illuminating the macabre scene. He called it Life after the Apocalypse. I don’t know if he ever finished these projects. He was still working on them four years after I graduated. When it came to his work, he considered himself an artiste, a man of nuance.

Hannes liked my writing. My problem was that I had learned English in the Army, in other words in the gutter. I knew precious little about grammar and syntax and compound sentences or prepositional phrases and gerunds. My vocabulary was basic and lacked the big words being bandied about by the serious English majors. I wrote about my experiences working for Uncle Sam and I shocked my classmates, who thought I was crass.

I read one of my compositions at one of Hannes’ poetry extravaganzas. He’d rigged a stage by placing a sheet of ½ inch plywood on top of his bed. It was a pretty rickety and unstable set-up, particularly after a few slugs of red wine and a couple of fat spliffs. My contribution was a short story I called The Dance of the Greedy Maggots and the gist of it had maggots feasting on the remains of a VC soldier who had been sprayed with Agent Orange. The toxic chemicals caused the white grubs to grow into super-sized marauding man-eaters, which had turned fluorescent orange and sprouted a double set of large green chitinous wings, three pairs of comely legs and massive blue mandibles. It also gave them an urge to dance a la the Rockettes as they marched through the jungle, devouring everything in their path. It was a very bizarre story. Hannes loved it and told me later that it inspired his apocalyptic documentaries.

Anyway, Hannes asked me to come along to this party at Rosie’s trailer. There were three or four others, among them my future wife. Her name was Ann and she was a graduate student working on her MFA in Printmaking and Rosie had dragged her along because she thought this girl needed to get laid.

A little more than a month later, Ann and I decided to get married, even though I knew in my heart of hearts that this was a major mistake. She and I had precious little in common, except loneliness. She didn’t trust men and I can’t say I blamed her. She was divorced. Her first husband had dumped her for his secretary while she was pregnant with their second child. On top of that, he gave her a vaginal infection that led to a miscarriage and rendered her sterile, unable to have any more children. Not surprisingly, she wasn’t very high on men after that, but she wanted a father for her four-year-old son. She was an artist and she cared about little else. She was tall and good looking, extremely intelligent and a talented painter and printmaker. She had an adversarial relationship with English grammar and structured education in general, even though she had been the beneficiary of the best schools money could buy.

We misunderstood each other from the get-go. I was on my best behavior and tried to come across as European, urbane, civilized. She saw someone malleable in me, who would give her what she needed. But I was not some nice American boy fresh off the farm. I had survived the cauldron of war, death and destruction. I had built a wall around my emotions so thick, I didn’t have a clue how to penetrate it. My objective at the time was to finish university as rapidly as possible. I didn’t want to get sidetracked. I didn’t want to lose sight of my immediate goal – graduation and a job. She was absorbed by her art and I by a drive to succeed at university, to get a job, to make a living. I was also lonely and tired of being an outsider and I hated it. So we drifted together.

The clues for eventual failure of this union were everywhere from the start; I just failed to see them. Take our marriage ceremony, for example. We got married by a justice of the peace, whose office was in the atrium of the Douglas County jail. Two jailhouse deputies were our witnesses. The hoots and whistles of the inmates looking down on us from the cell blocks above cheered us on our way. There was no party, no honeymoon. The fact that no one from Ann’s family showed up for the rite should have given me pause, but I wanted to belong, to be accepted, to be part of a family.

Except, this family turned out to be rather dysfunctional. Her parents lived in the past. Both traced their lineage back to the Mayflower and never let you forget that fact. Her father was a direct descendant of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Her maternal grandfather had been a circuit judge in Kansas City. Her mother was a hypochondriac who was always down with some ailment and whose family owned large chunks of downtown Kansas City. Hallmark Cards was built on their land. Her father was the only straight one in this clan, a gentleman. He ran a hardwood lumberyard for his step-brother. His family came from Virginia after the Civil War or, as they called it, the War of Northern Aggression. They had lost everything and were forced to move west.

One of her uncles was a Missouri state representative, courtesy of the old Prendergast Machine in North Kansas City, which had him in their pocket. Her other uncle was a real estate broker, who profited from his political connection in Jefferson City through his brother and his mob friends. One of her aunts was a drunk; another was married to a well-known Hollywood writer, who drank himself to death. Another had been married to a successful surgeon, who shot himself in despair.

Everyone in this family hated each other, but they all pretended to be close, with weekly dinner parties at the grandmother’s fully staffed mansion on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River. They weren’t about to accept an immigrant.

I knew this marriage was not going to work, but I went ahead anyway. It lasted 13 mostly miserable years, before I decided enough was enough and I pulled the plug. We had drifted apart, lived in separate dimensions. As Woody Allen once put it: “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is how far is it from midtown and how late is it open.” Quantum physicists theorize that there is not just one, but many universes, worlds which exist side-by-side along with our own. My quandary is which universe is which and who was that other guy? Was he a phantom or was he real?