I Was Never a Bully in High School

During a mothers'-day lunch with my mother, after learning that she had broken our agreement (she would offset my donating nothing to the Obama campaign by donating nothing to the Romney campaign–thus saving money for us both), I couldn't control myself and asked her what she thought about the Washington Post piece on Romney's bullying:  


He was incensed that a boy had long blonde hair and led other boys to hold him down while he cut his hair. 


Who would do that? I asked.


Didn't you do things in high school you're not proud of? Mom asked.


Of course I did. But I was never a bully!


And I never was. I can't even imagine that kind of action. What I can imagine is standing up for someone weak against someone stronger. I have done that repeatedly over my career at four different universities. My first impulse is in favor of the disadvantaged. That informs many of my personal and political choices.

Mitt Romney's political impulses are in favor of the advantaged.


When asked about the incident, Romney claimed he couldn't remember it.


This morning I woke to a set of memories (forgotten only briefly during the self-righteous conversation yesterday) that have shaken the certainty with which I countered my mother.


While in high school, sharing a room with twin desks and bunk-beds, I bullied my younger brother John. The memories are of white-hot anger, of fights that only ended when I had my way, fights over trivialities like whether the light in the room should be on or off.


Like the boy Romney bullied, John later came out as gay. 


I don't think (but I'm not sure) that that had anything to do with our fights. Romney too claimed that it never would have entered his mind that the other boy was homosexual.


My memories are clear. They are shameful. They have been with me since I left home to go to college. They inform every sentence I write as I work to overcome whatever parts of that past that can be overcome (it has been two decades since John died and the manuscript "Immortal For Quite Some Time" still has my focused attention).


The knowledge of the feelings and actions of a bully make me a better person, the person who could state flatly that I was no bully.


Now, today, and perhaps since I left home, I am not and have not been a bully. If that is true, it is only true because of the strength of the heart wrenching, indelible memories.


Mitt Romney is either brutally calloused or a calculating liar.

FRATERNAL MEDITATIONS

I've been thinking about the appropriate form for a life, thoughts that are reflected in these first pages of the latest version of my text:

IMMORTAL FOR QUITE SOME TIME


FRATERNAL MEDITATIONS

by


Scott Abbott

For John (Jay)

it can fool me but once
my grandmother used to say
death can fool me only once
then it’ll be my turn to laugh
Alex Caldiero


And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.
John Berger


“. . . nothing returns from what has been destroyed, nothing is reborn, neither dead men, nor burned libraries, nor submerged lighthouses, nor extinct species, despite the museums commemorations statues books speeches good will, of things that have gone only a vague memory remains. . . .”
Mathias Énard


To confess wrong without losing rightness
Ezra Pound


This is not a memoir.
The story is uncertain.
The characters are in flux.
The voices are plural.
The photographs are as troubled as the prose.

This is not a memoir.


Contents
I - Autopsy
II - 5 Degrees Before Top Dead Center 
     Green-and-Tan Notebook #1 
III - The Albanian Smiled
     Yellow Notebook
IV - Variations on Desire
     Green-and-Tan Notebook #2
V - Horror Vacui                                                                                         

     Blue Notebook

VI - A Dry Quill on Rough Paper     

     Blue-and-Tan Notebook


VII - Epilogue

Through a Glass Darkly

In class today we talked about Brian Evenson's "Contagion," about the long page detailing dozens of kinds of barbed wire. It felt, despite its tight focus, like a window onto a whole world. I thought of Bolano's 2666 and of the hundreds of pages that catalogue the deaths of women in Juarez. Again, the accumulation adds up finally, patiently, to a whole world. And then my thoughts turned, as they so often do, to the list of my brother's possessions at his death. For the second time (the repetition doubles the accumulation) I post the list:


31 July 1991, Orem   

            In the afternoon sunshine, John’s death certificate glows bright green on my desk.

            Never married.

            Sex: Male.

            Not a veteran.

            Autopsy, yes.

The sun transforms the books on the north wall into an ordered riot of colors.

The coroner told us John had never tested positive for AIDS. Otherwise his name would have been in a national database.

On the radio this afternoon there was an interview with a Utah AIDS patient. We all, he said, feel immortal for quite some time.

1 August 1991, Orem

I still have John’s things, but what sense does it make to keep them? I make a list under a rubric that feels like a pre-cut dress for a paper doll:

Personal Effects

A large black plastic clock with red hands. The face displays a stylized eagle and the words Miller Genuine Draft Light, Cold Filtered. The second hand lurches in quartz-driven, one-second segments around a brass post.

Greasy running shoes, the soles cracked through.

A pair of stiff, resoled, black-leather lace-up shoes.

One small khaki-colored can: “Emergency Drinking Water.”

A black-painted cardboard African mask.

A life-sized bas-relief plaster bust of a Roman soldier. He wears a gold-plumed helmet and a black breastplate decorated with a lion’s head.

Ash trays: 1) stamped metal, round; 2) white-and-black porcelain shaped like the collar of a formal dress shirt with black tie; 3) heavy glass square with a line drawing of a grotesquely earnest smoker and the text: Smoking is Very Glamorous, Idaho Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health.

Two unwashed pots.

A frying pan.

Two forks.

Three spoons.

Three wooden-handled cooking knives.

A stainless-steel butter knife with a red-brown substance burnt onto both sides of the blade.

A metal box stuffed with yellowed recipe cards.

Kitchen Consultations, Favorite Recipes of the University of California Doctors’ Wives Association.

One set of car keys.

A heavy ten-speed bicycle, both tires flat.

An aluminum bicycle pump.

A dirty green backpack holding several bicycle parts.

A black-and-white TV, encased in white plastic, and a separate rabbit-ears antenna.

A small GE radio, missing its battery cover.

A Dylan Thomas poem, typed out and taped to a cupboard: Do not go gentle into that good night.

A framed quotation from Ayn Rand: If I had one desire in this world, it would be to desire something.

One condom, still sealed in plastic; PRIME, Lubricated with SK-70.

Handwritten IOU’s for the Cactus Bar. $5, $10, and $20 denominations.

1990 Pocket Pal – handwritten addresses and telephone numbers.

Newspaper and magazine clippings in an imitation leather briefcase.

A manila envelope containing legal papers.

PUPPIES, a 1990 Calendar marked with several hand-written notes.

3 ballpoint pens and a blue plastic pencil sharpener.

A black nylon wallet. Inside, a photo of a woman in her sixties, a water-damaged photo of a red-faced infant, a Social Security card (585-46-4127), a Boise Public Library Card, and $203 in bills.

$7.12 in coins.

            A blue sport bag.

Masking tape. Written on the fat roll with a black marker: J. Abbott 1132 S. 4th #3.

Liquid Ivory soap.

A small bottle of Wella Balsam Conditioning Shampoo for Dry Hair.

Suave Shampoo Plus Conditioner for Normal to Dry Hair.

A small bottle of Listerine Antiseptic.

2 bars of Lux, The Pure Beauty Soap.

A large-toothed red plastic comb with handle and a matching red-handled brush with black nylon bristles.

A bottle of aspirin.

MAX FOR MEN hair drier.

A yellow toothbrush.

Curity, wet-pruf adhesive tape.

Four TELFA sterile pads and one band-aid.

Plastic sunglasses.

A one-edged razor blade.

A 100-tablet bottle of Advanced Formula Centrum, High Potency Multivitamin-Multimineral Formula. From A to Zinc. Expiration Date Oct. 93. There are 115 tablets.

26 grey, green, red, or white matchbooks advertising The Interlude Bar & Grill in Boise. A stylized young woman kneels to consider her putt. Her left hand holds her putter, her right hand a martini.

A green matchbook advertises Free Cash Grants: Call 1-900-USA-RICH. Valuable Money Making Information and the ABC’s of Receiving FREE Money from the Government. Now the one dollar per minute two dollar first minute charge is the first step to RICHES.

Nine Kent III Ultra Light Cigarettes.

A burlap-covered corkboard. Glued to the top of the burlap is a black paper cross. A hand points upward toward the cross. A pair of lightning bolts. At the bottom bold letters spell ONE WAY. Four magazine photos have been thumbtacked over the Christian display. Two of them feature similarly posed electric-haired women, one white, one black, both coyly shirtless. The other two photos show the shaved, blindfolded heads of two black women against a chain-link fence.

Two posters from the Monterey Jazz Festival, 1982 and 1983: trumpets standing on chairs.

A poster of a fantasy landscape: castle and dragon and hero and princess.

A 10” x 14” pencil drawing of a hooked trout.

A framed magazine photo of camels dark against fire-lit clouds.

A magazine photo of an eagle perched in front of a brilliant sunset.

A framed painting of a demure little girl with long red hair.

A spool of navy-blue thread.

A needle with a loop of purple thread.

An old pair of Levis; five patches sewn with meticulous stitches.

A worn satin comforter, rust-colored on one side, tan on the other.

A blue quilt tied with red yarn. Splotches of white paint, cigarette burns, and grease spots.

Three pair of black-and-white-checked restaurant uniform pants.

Two heavily starched white chef’s hats.

Two collarless chef’s jackets. Starched, with tightly woven cloth buttons.

Eleven pastel-colored knit shirts advertising the 25th Interlude Open. A young woman kneels with putter and martini.

A pair of grey sweat pants and a grey sweat shirt.

T-shirt: FALLIN’ ANGELLS SPORTING CLUB, Angell’s Bar & Grill, Boise, Idaho.

T & A CAFÉ T-shirt – Where the “ELITE” meet to “EAT.”

A wheeled brown vinyl bag with strap handles.

Three sweaters, colors faded, one unraveling at the left cuff.

A worn leather-and-canvas coat.

Two limp bed sheets.

Cassette Tapes: The Best of Judas Priest; Guns and Roses – Appetite for Destruction; Anthrax – State of Euphoria; Foghat Live.

A plastic ruler with geometric formulas and the admonition: Stay in School, Upon Graduation . . . Join the Aerospace Team, U.S. Air Force.

Twenty-six paperback novels, most of them missing the front cover. Eric v. Lustbader dominates the pile, but there are others as well:

Neon Mirage, by Max Allan Collins: Mob Justice . . . Another shotgun blast ate into the side of Ragen’s once-proud Lincoln.

Vision of the Hunter, by John Tempest: In his hands, his people’s future. In her eyes, the promise of a love stronger than time.

Burt Hirshfeld's Moment of Power: The savage new shocker. . . .

Superconscious Meditation, by Panda Arya, Ph.D.

Self Hypnosis: The Creative Use of Your Mind for Successful Living, by Charles Tebbetts.

Louis L’Amour’s Education of a Wandering Man.

The Magnificent Century, by Thomas B. Costain.

Home as Found, by J. Fenimore Cooper.

Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness: Banned in the U.S. . . . Forward by Havelock Ellis.

Hoyle's Rules of Games, Second Revised Edition.

Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

Readers Digest: Secrets of Better Cooking.

Basic Documents Supplement to International Law: Cases and Materials.

ETCETERA: The Unpublished Poems of E.E. Cummings.

The dust jacket of a Modern Library edition: The Philosophy of Kant. The book itself is missing.

            Five spiral notebooks: two of them green-and-tan; one blue-and-tan; one yellow; one blue. Notes and drawings in John’s hand throughout.

Writing/Living

Woke up this morning from dreams, various dreams, that featured creative, stimulating joint work and play. I think they were responses to a remarkable and generous email from my son Sam, a senior history major at Utah State University, currently studying the history of the French Revolution with a student of Robert Darnton.


Sam wrote:


I wandered into the special collections in the basement of our wonderful library, fumbling with my words and sweating - nervous from the cleanliness and order of the place. The lady at the desk helped me learn how to fill out a request form (I'd assumed it was like the bank where deposit slips are just formalities that the teller always fills out for you - incidentally if you still fill them out prior to a transaction, you are living in 18th century France) and checked my backpack into a locker. You can't take notes with pens, so I put them away and borrowed a pencil. After waiting for two minutes I was handed a fresh copy of the Fall 2011 edition of the journal "Dialogue - A Journal of Mormon Thought." I sat and read for 30 minutes. I enjoyed seeing Scott Abbott written across the top of each page, with the title "Immortal for Quite Some Time" next to it. The narrative jumps right to the point with a series of breathtaking sentences about Uncle John. Letters from his mission follow, with Dad's feelings and emotions and confusion and logic pouring through the pages. The most piercing letter was a long apology John made to Grandma and Grandpa about how he hadn't lived up to the abilities he had, but was lazy and confrontational for no reason. Dad's desire to talk to John, to talk about all the things they never talked about, to love honestly and let all the familial formalities we cling to drop to the ground and just be there for each other made me shake and almost cry. And it just ends, leaving me in the spotless basement next to a king's throne of a chair with a huge beehive carved into the top of it and a display of the skull of Old Ephraim - the biggest bear on record in Utah. It just leaves me alone, so connected to Dad and wanting so much more. . . .


The Dialogue essay is part two of a series, part one published in the Spring 2011 volume, part three to appear next year, part four still to be submitted. [Links to ugly but readable versions of the first two parts HERE.]


Sam read a conversation I had with my brother John, a written conversation based on letters he wrote and my thoughts as I read them. We couldn't have a spoken conversation because John died 20 years ago.


But Sam and I can have conversations; and we're both hungry for them. His response and my surprised and grateful counter-response have me thinking, in my dreams and again this morning, about why I write.


I write to figure things out, to deepen my response to things and to people. I write because I want to enter into conversation with readers. I want, as Sam wrote, to be connected . . . and wanting so much more.


Especially with my children. With my partner Lyn. With friends.


Wanting so much more.

Early Scenes from "Immortal For Quite Some Time"

March 1950, Farmington, New Mexico

In what eventually will become our hometown, for three days running, good citizens report seeing flying saucers. Between eleven and noon each day, hundreds of the alien craft thrill builders and teachers, cooks and civil servants, farmers and trading-post operators.

I was born seven months before the aliens were reported in Farmington. John was born fourteen months after their coming.

I have never seen a flying saucer. Nor, to my knowledge, did John.

September 1954, Paonia, Colorado

            The little engine keeps leaving the tracks to frolic in meadows. Flowers snagged in his wheels betray him. Pedagogical engineers hide in a meadow and jump up with red flags when he turns their way. He gives up frolicking, stays on the tracks, and grows into a good puller-of-trains.

            I put down my Golden Book to watch flatcars stacked with fruit boxes rattle past our log house. My mother leads me across the street to a warehouse. She knocks at a side door. It slides open. She passes her warm bread and a pot of steaming pinto beans through the opening to a dark-eyed woman holding a brown-skinned baby at her breast.

1956, Montpelier, Idaho

            My friend Bernie shows me the litter of birth-wet puppies under his front porch. Their father, he says . . . my dad said their father was a dead daddy horse.

1957, Montpelier, Lincoln Elementary School

            Pots, rings, or chase. We lay out our games of marbles on the playground. I drop my winnings into a blue-and-white-striped bag Mom made from a leg of a pair of overalls. It grows fat and heavy. I knot the drawstring carefully.

            When I’m not playing marbles, I watch a girl with patent-leather shoes swing so high the chains go slack. Her shoes flash in the sun. Her black hair flies in the wind. She knows I watch her.

1958, Montpelier

            Mrs. Sharp has enrolled us in a reading contest. We write titles and authors’ names on lined paper. I speed through dozens of little paperbacks. My list grows and grows. Mrs. Sharp awards me a round steel medal engraved with my name and the number of books I have read: 129.

           

1960, Farmington, New Mexico

            If it weren’t for our fierce soccer games on Ladera del Norte’s dirt field, I would gladly skip lunch to sit in class where our teacher reads another chapter of Little Britches. He’s tough. Determined. Good with horses. Ingenious. Saves his wages.

1964, Aztec, New Mexico

            Regional competition between junior-high bands. I carry my clarinet, she hers. We suck our reeds to keep them moist. We hold hands, speak in low tones, wish there were no end to the day.

1966, Farmington, New Mexico

            Late-afternoon light diffuse in the old Mormon chapel. The sacrament meeting is already an hour gone. The man standing at the pulpit intones the word of God. Sixteen-year-old boys and girls sit thigh to thigh in the back row, pass notes, play games on paper, brush hands.

July 1967, Farmington

            DR. GENE SMITH, ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON. I have swept his parking lot, watered his shrubs, cleaned his office, transcribed his tapes, and once almost fainted while I held a basin of warm water into which he squirted fatty yellow fluid drawn from deep inside a man’s knee through an enormous needle.

            Today, I’m working in the red glow of the darkroom, developing a set of x-rays. I pull the film from the chemical bath and hang the sheets to drip dry. I turn on the fluorescent screen behind them.

Gistening reproductions of Claudia Colter’s spine.

The bones curve ever so slightly from the delicate vertebrae of her neck down to the right and then back to the left before disappearing between the bright wings of her hips.

The bright wings of her hips.

            Again I trace the scoliostic curve, ghostly against the black film, deviating so beautifully from the strictly vertical. I study the dim arcs of ribs that frame her spine, the cunningly articulated vertebrae snaking down between the ribs. I picture Claudia in the next room, naked under the examination gown.

The thoughts arouse me, confuse me. I’m feeling what I’ve learned, in church, to distinguish as the fire of the Holy Ghost. I worship these pale images.

The door opens. It’s Dr. Smith: So what have we got? 

Immortal For Quite Some Time and A Reasonable Dictionary: Avoidance as Anti-Teleology?

A thoughtful email today from college roommate and friend Chuck Hamaker that points out a pattern in a couple of things I've written:

Scott

I just read your piece on your brother John from "Immortal For Quite Some Time," the one posted in BEPRESS as "Our Feet Are the Same"[http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/7/]. I was struck by how similar what you wrote then was to what you wrote when you reported on your and Zarko's trip with Peter Handke [http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2011/01/biography-celebrity-and-identity.html] -- the full account is here under the title "A Reasonable Dictionary": [http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/5/].

In both instances, though it seemed you started with a goal of uncovering something about your subject, you consistently chose not to pursue the person of interest, through declining to meet or even to talk with anyone who actually knew them. You were an accidental tourist in an intentional location.

The places you go give a structure but the content is hardly circumstantial and hardly even tangential to the ostensible subject. I don't know if that's truly what happened or what you invented, it doesn't matter.

I am struck by the similarity of the modus operandi and the extreme "staying away" from the supposed subjects of your attention.

You mention in the Handke piece that you're worried about being a sycophant. I think it's something else, but not that.

In the piece supposedly on John, but not about him in reality, you encounter and interact with people, seem to stumble through, stay out of the way or don't really look, i.e. do not intentionally interact with anyone who really might have had some history of him. Ditto for Handke.

Anyway, for what its worth.

Cheers
Chuck

It's worth a lot Chuck, especially now that you connect the two and give me a chance to think about the similarities and the reasons. Let me add a couple of lines from the opening section of Immortal For Quite Some Time that was published last week in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought:

I look back at “Autopsy,” at my first attempt to tell this story. When I described the visit to the T&A Café I said that “we” went in, that “we” spoke with the owner. But the truth is: I remained in the car while Christy and Mom went inside. I didn’t want to talk with anyone about John. I didn’t want to talk period. Still, I wrote “we” and reported what my mother and sister told me. Caveat lector.


And here are some of the lines I think you were referring to:

11 p.m. Sitting in my motel room, I decide not to call, not to try to talk with Van. It’s a feeling that grew in me while I ate dinner. It became a conscious thought just minutes ago.

Van’s accounts would divert me from the faint traces I’m following. Life moves on. The immutably described, the absolutely defined is fixed like the butterflies I pinned to felt in a cigar box, wrong even when it’s right.

As you suggest, my reason for writing has mostly to do with a wish to understand myself in order to figure out how to live a decent and productive life. While I would like to know my brother in ways his early death made impossible, and while traveling with Peter Handke was memorable in part because of who he is, I have been using those trips, those investigations as a kind of scaffolding for my own discoveries. I'm the kind of detective who will never solve the crime because the facts of the crime remind him of other things.


Which gets me to the anti-teleology of the title of this post. In my experience, it is the people who claim to know the most who know the least. And claiming to know the most often has to do with claiming to know the pattern of history, to know how things will end. As I see it, our understanding is so full of holes that our only hope for understanding is to have a sense for how little we understand. Thus my distaste for straightforward biography.


No new thought that. It's been around since the pre-Socratics in many forms, some of my favorites in the German Romantics' penchant for fragments in lieu of systematic thought, and more recently in the work of Brian Evenson (Evenson’s recent story “Knowledge,” by the way, is a description of “precisely why I have still not written my detective novel”: “attempts to substitute another way of thinking about knowledge always end up derailing the genre").  But it guides me in a lot of ways, at least one of which you've discovered here.


The sketch is one I made of the statue "Victoire de Samothrace" in the Louvre. Looking at the support structures that keep it standing despite its frailty, I was struck by how this perfect and powerful statue is subject to entropy like everything we create. Our thoughts and our works are contingent and ephemeral. And that's to be celebrated, not papered over with lies.


thanks, my friend.

NOX / Immortal For Quite Some Time

I've just finishing reading/seeing Anne Carson's boxbook NOX.

"When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get," she notes on the back cover.

Nox. Night.

A poem by Catullus forms the backbone of the book -- Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus / advento has miseras, frater . . . -- each Latin word awarded, over the course of the book, a Latin/English dictionary entry so the reader can slowly translate the poem the way Carson translates the photos and remembered events and salvaged sentences of and from her brother. Almost every dictionary entry, a patient reader will discover, contains some reference to night:  multa -- multa nox: late in the night, perhaps too late; per -- per noctem in nihilo vehi: to vanish by night into nothing; etc. Do all words come back to nox? Is night the ground of our being? In an elegy, yes.

". . . what a distant mood of parents / handed down as the sad gift for burials -- / accept! soaked with tears of a brother / and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell."

New Directions has reproduced the handmade book beautifully, each page complete with almost real staples and indentations and all the things brought together or made by Anne Carson.

On the two pages pictured here she combines the entry for "belonging to a brother" and slices of her translation of the heartwrenching Catullus poem.

I too have been working on an epitaph for my brother John, an elegy worthy of his life. And I too am reduced to scraps, to things. Reduced? Rather confronted by the fact that that's all we ever have, that pretending to have the whole story is a lie. I'm grateful to have some of John's things, as I noted soon after his death:

1 August 1991, Orem

I still have John’s things, but what sense does it make to keep them? I make a list under the rubric "Personal Effects" that feels like a pre-cut dress for a paper doll until I look up the origin of "effect": ex + facere, to make. The things John accomplished. The things he made. His things, however ephemeral, however cheap, however predictable. 


John's Personal Effects

A large black plastic clock with red hands. The face displays a stylized eagle and the words Miller Genuine Draft Light, Cold Filtered. The second hand lurches in quartz-driven, one-second segments around a brass post.

Greasy running shoes, the soles cracked through.

A pair of stiff, resoled, black-leather lace-up shoes.

One small khaki-colored can: “Emergency Drinking Water.”

A black-painted cardboard African mask.

A life-sized bas-relief plaster bust of a Roman soldier. He wears a gold-plumed helmet and a black breastplate decorated with a lion’s head.

Ash trays: 1) stamped metal, round; 2) white-and-black porcelain shaped like the collar of a formal dress shirt with black tie; 3) heavy glass square with a line drawing of a grotesquely earnest smoker and the text: Smoking is Very Glamorous, Idaho Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health.

Two unwashed pots.

A frying pan.

Two forks.

Three spoons.

Three wooden-handled cooking knives.

A stainless-steel butter knife with a red-brown substance burnt onto both sides of the blade.

A metal box stuffed with yellowed recipe cards.

Kitchen Consultations, Favorite Recipes of the University of California Doctors’ Wives Association.

One set of car keys.

A heavy ten-speed bicycle, both tires flat.

An aluminum bicycle pump.

A dirty green backpack holding several bicycle parts.

A black-and-white TV, encased in white plastic, and a separate rabbit-ears antenna.

A small GE radio, missing its battery cover.

A Dylan Thomas poem, typed out and taped to a cupboard: Do not go gentle into that good night.

A framed quotation from Ayn Rand: If I had one desire in this world, it would be to desire something.

One condom, still sealed in plastic; PRIME, Lubricated with SK-70.

Handwritten IOU’s for the Cactus Bar. $5, $10, and $20 denominations.

1990 Pocket Pal – handwritten addresses and telephone numbers.

Newspaper and magazine clippings in an imitation leather briefcase.

A manila envelope containing legal papers.

PUPPIES, a 1990 Calendar marked with several hand-written notes.

3 ballpoint pens and a blue plastic pencil sharpener.

A black nylon wallet. Inside, a photo of a woman in her sixties, a water-damaged photo of a red-faced infant, a Social Security card (585-46-4127), a Boise Public Library Card, and $203 in bills.

$7.12 in coins.

             A blue sport bag.

Masking tape. Written on the fat roll with a black marker: J. Abbott 1132 S. 4th #3.

Liquid Ivory soap.

A small bottle of Wella Balsam Conditioning Shampoo for Dry Hair.

Suave Shampoo Plus Conditioner for Normal to Dry Hair.

A small bottle of Listerine Antiseptic.

2 bars of Lux, The Pure Beauty Soap.

A large-toothed red plastic comb with handle and a matching red-handled brush with black nylon bristles.

A bottle of aspirin.

MAX FOR MEN hair drier.

A yellow toothbrush.

Curity, wet-pruf adhesive tape.

Four TELFA sterile pads and one band-aid.

Plastic sunglasses.

A one-edged razor blade.

A 100-tablet bottle of Advanced Formula Centrum, High Potency Multivitamin-Multimineral Formula. From A to Zinc. Expiration Date Oct. 93. There are 115 tablets.

26 grey, green, red, or white matchbooks advertising The Interlude Bar & Grill in Boise. A stylized young woman kneels to consider her putt. Her left hand holds her putter, her right hand a martini.

A green matchbook advertises Free Cash Grants: Call 1-900-USA-RICH. Valuable Money Making Information and the ABC’s of Receiving FREE Money from the Government. Now the one dollar per minute two dollar first minute charge is the first step to RICHES.

Nine Kent III Ultra Light Cigarettes.

A burlap-covered corkboard. Glued to the top of the burlap is a black paper cross. A hand points upward toward the cross. A pair of lightning bolts. At the bottom bold letters spell ONE WAY. Four magazine photos have been thumbtacked over the Christian display. Two of them feature similarly posed electric-haired women, one white, one black, both coyly shirtless. The other two photos show the shaved, blindfolded heads of two black women against a chain-link fence.

Two posters from the Monterey Jazz Festival, 1982 and 1983: trumpets standing on chairs.

A poster of a fantasy landscape: castle and dragon and hero and princess.

A 10” x 14” pencil drawing of a hooked trout.

A framed magazine photo of camels dark against fire-lit clouds.

A magazine photo of an eagle perched in front of a brilliant sunset.

A framed painting of a demure little girl with long red hair.

A spool of navy-blue thread.

A needle with a loop of purple thread.

An old pair of Levis; five patches sewn with meticulous stitches.

A worn satin comforter, rust-colored on one side, tan on the other.

A blue quilt tied with red yarn. Splotches of white paint, cigarette burns, and grease spots.

Three pair of black-and-white-checked restaurant uniform pants.

Two heavily starched white chef’s hats.

Two collarless chef’s jackets. Starched, with tightly woven cloth buttons.

Eleven pastel-colored knit shirts advertising the 25th Interlude Open. A young woman kneels with putter and martini.

A pair of grey sweat pants and a grey sweat shirt.

T-shirt: FALLIN’ ANGELLS SPORTING CLUB, Angell’s Bar & Grill, Boise, Idaho.

T & A CAFÉ T-shirt – Where the “ELITE” meet to “EAT.”

A wheeled brown vinyl bag with strap handles.

Three sweaters, colors faded, one unraveling at the left cuff.

A worn leather-and-canvas coat.

Two limp bed sheets.

Cassette Tapes: The Best of Judas Priest; Guns and Roses – Appetite for Destruction; Anthrax – State of Euphoria; Foghat Live.

A plastic ruler with geometric formulas and the admonition: Stay in School, Upon Graduation . . . Join the Aerospace Team, U.S. Air Force.

Twenty-six paperback novels, most of them missing the front cover. Eric v. Lustbader dominates the pile, but there are others as well:

Neon Mirage, by Max Allan Collins: Mob Justice . . . Another shotgun blast ate into the side of Ragen’s once-proud Lincoln.

Vision of the Hunter, by John Tempest: In his hands, his people’s future. In her eyes, the promise of a love stronger than time.

Burt Hirshfeld's Moment of Power: The savage new shocker. . . .

Superconscious Meditation, by Panda Arya, Ph.D.

Self Hypnosis: The Creative Use of Your Mind for Successful Living, by Charles Tebbetts.

Louis L’Amour’s Education of a Wandering Man.

The Magnificent Century, by Thomas B. Costain.

Home as Found, by J. Fenimore Cooper.

Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness: Banned in the U.S. . . . Forward by Havelock Ellis.

Hoyle's Rules of Games, Second Revised Edition.

Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

Readers Digest: Secrets of Better Cooking.

Basic Documents Supplement to International Law: Cases and Materials.

ETCETERA: The Unpublished Poems of E.E. Cummings.

The dust jacket of a Modern Library edition: The Philosophy of Kant. The book itself is missing.

            Five spiral notebooks: two of them green-and-tan; one blue-and-tan; one yellow; one blue. Notes and drawings in John’s hand throughout.