[frere untel]

Copyright 1994, 2002 by Frere Untel
205 W. Utica Ave
Huntington Beach CA 92648
714/960-8070

Synopsis: High School (from In Search of Aimai Cristen)


Ron is a manic-depressive and, although this is a story about Marianne, it's necessary for me to explain about Ron first. Ron alternated between periods of frenzied activity and acute depression. Today, we'd call him a bipolar personality. When he was high, he'd have a dozen different projects going: Alas, none of them ever got finished; after awhile, reality would catch up with him, he'd slump back inside himself, and nothing was or ever had been right.

Marianne stood about five feet tall, had thin straight legs and everybody called her Mary Poppins. Her hips were a surprise, flaring extravagantly, but the rest of her figure was in keeping with her Mary Poppins image and her pixie haircut. Ron was never mean when he was up; Ron cared too much for people; he just seemed threatening because he moved too fast like a big clumsy dog that bumps into furniture. He really wanted to do good, to help wash your car, or to take your kids to the zoo; he'd make the offer to wash your car even if you were just someone he encountered while you were backing it out of the driveway. He saved a man's life once, dragged him from a decompression chamber when no one else was willing to go in.

When we first met, Ron was in his depressed state, and I, not much better, was hunched over the electric typewriter in Vance's apartment. Words had failed me; I read the newspaper, listened to one of Vance's many classical records, then scurried back to the typewriter when I heard someone coming. Ron crept in the doorway, sat himself down in the meanest chair in the room, something built of looped straw and intended only for decoration, and watched me apprehensively to see if he'd be permitted to stay. I studiously avoided meeting his eye. In response to a few sonar-like grunts on his part, I sent out a series of thought waves reading, "Man at work. Man at work."

He must have picked up on these waves--although he ignored their implication, for he spoke up finally, "Working hard?" he asked. I was furious and did not reply; I typed as fast and as loudly as I could, stressing speed over accuracy. Thankfully, he said nothing further and picked at his nails. Despite or because of his silent presence, nothing I typed in the next five minutes made any sense, "Msdk thy sowthe oosh."

"Get the fuck out of here," I said.

He stood up and headed for the door.

"Wait a minute. Where are you going? Why did you come here? Can't you see I'm working?"

There was a lot of frustration in my voice and he must have sensed that little of the frustration had anything to do with him. "You sound like one of the guards," he said, "Or my father."

Me, his father! Ron must have been at least ten years older than I was and he had gray hair and a lined face to boot. A guard?! I waved my hands in the air. Go away, my hands said.

He told me about the guards and the shock treatments, anyway. What the shrink said. How he'd been committed to the hospital. By his wife. What she'd written while he was in the hospital, and whether she would take him back now that he was discharged. He didn't think she would.

I thought over what he'd said, the way he'd told his story as much as the words he used.

He doesn't want, doesn't feel he deserves to be taken back, I thought. The poor schmuck thinks he's guilty. I told Ron to go back to the asylum until he felt stronger and able to confront his wife. But he couldn't and wouldn't do that; he would rather be depressed and rejected.

The next time we met Ron was in his manic phase or at least on his way up. He didn't recognize me and I didn't recognize him. In fact, we shared an apartment for at least a month before I made the connection.

I'd started to throw parties. First, a party at Christmas for Vance. He'd broken up with a girlfriend of long standing and this party was to be a chance for him to meet someone new. I didn't know what I was doing, and I heated up the mulled wine in an old frying pan. It took almost ten minutes before someone noticed the smell of decaying eggs. Then everyone noticed. Ten minutes later, there was no one left in the apartment.

Several weeks remained before Christmas so we had time to throw another party. I lined up a slightly larger apartment-we'd reached the limits of Vance's place even with our rather meager guest list. The new apartment belonged to a girl with a harelip who lacked confidence. She must have lacked confidence the night of our party because she wasn't home when the guests arrived. There we stood, strung out like some medieval procession along the two blocks that led from Vance's place to hers, unable to get in. Then someone said, "Jack's uncle," and Ron was pushed forward, bowing and smiling, volunteering his place for the party. We took it.

I was living not much of anywhere in particular at the time what with child support payments larger than my monthly salary. Some nights I'd sleep in my car and some I'd spend in my office at the University where I had a sleeping bag and an empty gallon apple juice jug stashed under my desk. At that time, I was working on both a doctoral thesis and a novel. First one, then the other. If the one wouldn't go, flip it away in a drawer, and haul the other out. At four o'clock when my fellow grad students and I adjourned to play touch football, I'd set them aside, unfinished.

There were few dramatic events in my life during this period. Well, I did get to stay overnight in a hotel when I had my army physical. A night in a hotel may not seem like much to you, but it means a lot to a guy who's been sleeping in his office on top of his desk using an empty gallon apple juice jug or tiptoeing through darkened hallways when he has to go to the bathroom.

I failed the I.Q. test-deliberately-that was part of the physical. They made me take it over again the next day, but, by law, the army had to pay for me to stay in a hotel for a second night. The group that took the test with me the next morning did not consist of Berkeley smart-asses all trying to dodge the draft by failing the I.Q. test, but of sincere, if somewhat bewildered poverty-stricken eighteen- and nineteen- year olds who genuinely saw the army as their one chance at a good paying job.

So there these kids were and there was I, candidate for the PhD, together in the exam room the next day, taking the remedial I.Q. test. I went through the test paper carefully, picking out the correct answer for each question and then marking one of the incorrect alternatives on my answer sheet. Occasionally, I put down the right answer so the results wouldn't look too phony.

When I was through with the test-and all this took less time to do than to write about, most of the other candidates were still on page 1 of their test booklet. I glanced over at the young black kid on my left. Oh, oh, his answers to the first two questions were wrong. "Excuse me," I whispered, "But the answers to the first two questions are a) and c)."

"Hey dummy. Don't mess with me," he replied, "I know you. You got the lowest score yesterday."

Sorry. I tried to give similar advice to the Chicano on my right. "You crazy man." he said, "You tell me 'a)' but you put down 'b).'"

"I'm trying to fail," I hissed.

"Shhh," said the proctor.

Marianne wrote to me regularly from her new home in Ann Arbor, "in a white house with picket shutters." She wrote a great deal more and more often than I expected. We hadn't talked much since she got married. But after she was in another city, she opened up to me and out the love poured.

This love wasn't necessarily for me, though it was evident she still cared, but for the things around her, for her house and for her husband. She wasn't able to have children, but it was evident she wanted them desperately. She wrote about a couple she'd met that had six: the parents were weird but their kids were O.K. Her letters said everything was right with her life, but between the lines I read that everything was wrong.

Sometimes, in my letters to her, I'd respond to what she'd written, and sometimes, I'd just tell her about all the crazy parties we were having.

I'd given up my car and my office to move in with Ron. Together, Ron and I got the whole party thing down to a system. First, we'd find a girl who lacked confidence and borrow an apartment. Then, we'd borrow a record player. Invite some girls. In those days, the guys would come automatically and bring booze and mixers if there was a promise of music and girls.

I remember Mavis gave a wingding of a party at her place. The apartment really belonged to both her and her girlfriend Angela, but Angela was a shy schoolteacher who fled to the city at the first sign of our activity. No matter, there were plenty of girls and guys who did come. We danced, broke records. Quick-thinking Mavis made all the gatecrashers sign a guest list so we could invite them the next time. We spilled wine, dented furniture, and one of the numerous Persians stole a purse. When Angela came back early in the a.m. everything was a thick fog. She'd thought, she'd explained apologetically as she helped us clean, that when she got back everything would be all over.

The second crowd led by Ron and Jack came by from the Pic just after closing time. The manager of the apartment building came up to complain. He stayed until the arrival of the police. Angela and I cleaned up a second time together.

The bedroom was separated from the living room by sliding wooden doors. Mavis and Jack, Ron's nephew, were behind the partition. Angela was stretched out beside me on the living room couch, rigid and unresponsive, waiting for Wes to go home.

The next morning, Mavis denied that anything had happened in the bedroom; "We were too drunk," she said. (And all that time together with Angela on the couch there had seemed ample reason-to me, to duplicate what we thought was going on in the next room.)

We'd never held a party in Ron's apartment, not wanting to muddy our own waters. But then, one morning, he got a note from his landlord saying they were going to rip his house down. Hold a party in a house that was about to be torn down?! A tear-down-the-house party? Wow!

Ron really threw himself into the preparations: He invited a series of special guests, including three fashion models from the city, and ordered food (something we never did, ordinarily-we always let other people bring the munchies). He borrowed the record player a week in advance. One morning, I found two fire axes leaning against the front door.

He talked to someone at Canyon Cinema about bringing over a projector and showing experimental films. If I hadn't had my dissertation as an excuse, I would have been dragooned into the most thorough house cleaning ever given a soon-to-be-abandoned house.

Ron wasn't there the morning of the party. Actually, he hadn't been around for several days, I learned on talking with our neighbors. Of course, he had been by at least once that week to invite each of them to the party. I put out a few feelers during the day, down at the Pic where Ron often stopped for coffee and at the Chess Club, but I didn't get any response. By the time eight o'clock rolled around, still without Ron putting in an appearance, I'd resigned myself to going it alone. I did the same thing I always do before a party when I am the host and went to sleep.

When I awoke, there was wine and plenty of booze on the mantle, with cheese, crackers, lunchmeats and sourdough bread on a cloth-covered dining room table; Ron still wasn't to be seen, but two of the upstairs neighbors were in charge. About twenty people in all were present. At first, the group spoke in low tones as one might at the start of any party, although the axes and several claw hammers lay in plain sight. This state of calm lasted only through the second round of drinks.

Just as someone smashed the first window, a car pulled up in the street outside and three elegantly dressed women in fur coats and long shimmering dresses dismounted. The models! They walked up the path slowly-we could see them growing more and more uncertain as they drew closer-until they came near enough to verify the address. Vance opened the door-and the models could see us in the background watching them. In an instant, they'd fled back to their car and driven away. We hooted and jeered and roared and laughed and threw empty bottles after them.

Mark Simmonds (yes, the Mark Simmonds of TV fame but considerably younger then) appeared at the head of a host of undergraduates. After a brief stop for refreshments-we watched them closely to make sure they gave as much as they got-Mark led his friends toward the rear apartments beating a path with a fire axe. Two groups of undergraduates, one at the head and one at the foot of the stairway, soon dismembered it, leaving our neighbors from the second floor isolated from their homes. The police came. We fed them a juvenile or two from Mark's group and they went away.

The crowds that couldn't fit in the house stood on the porch and threw rocks through the windows. I intervened only in response to shrill feminine cries from within. The axes were in constant motion; a wall-smashing contest was organized, held, and prizes awarded. The Canyon Cinema showed their experimental films using first an untouched wall and then the neighboring building as a screen. In the hallway, Flitcraft, a local artist, demonstrated how a three-dimensional mural could be composed from dried cheese dips and various found objects.

At an hour long past anyone's bedtime, two bearded members of Channing Club appeared with a moving van and began to remove the furniture. Though slight of build, they proved remarkably strong for their size, wrestling one large piece of furniture after another from the interior of the house, down the steps, and into their truck. I could hear curses coming from those guests who'd had beds and pillows yanked away from under them. Though otherwise thoughtless, the movers did leave money in case Ron had intended to sell his furniture. There no longer being any place for me to sleep, I went home with someone else and shortly disappeared from public view.

Ron hadn't come to the party because he was in jail. I didn't learn about his incarceration until much later. The first news I had of him actually came though the mail, from Marianne, half a continent away.

"A legendary figure," Marianne wrote, "has once again descended upon Berkeley. He comes to your home late at night, usually just before or just after you have gone to bed, and washes up for you, wiping down the counters and mopping the floors as well as washing the dishes. He asks no remuneration. Once in awhile, he has a glass of milk and a slice of cake he has baked himself in your oven. The Klotz's were woken at about three in the morning. He served them all from the cake he had made and regaled them with stories while he cleaned up and polished the cake pans; then, one by one, they crept back up the stairs and to bed while he began on their floors."

One wonders how these tales reached Marianne in her little cottage with the white picket shutters two thousand miles across the continent long before they reached me in my new position across the Bay at Missiles and Space.

My new job was so near yet so far away from the bohemian life of Berkeley. Occasionally, somebody returning to Berkeley from Los Angeles by the wrong road might put in an appearance at my apartment and spend a night on my floor, but often Marianne was my only contact with the life I'd left behind. She, alas, had her own set of problems in that once calm center of the Midwest.

The war in Viet Nam was now an open secret. Her husband was for it; she was against. She wrote about the new friends she'd met at church: Peg and Dave with their family of seven children, all screaming at one time, Dave shouting, finally a clout, Peg slashing her wrists. Not surprisingly, Marianne began to write about Catholicism's defects: their intransigence on birth control, the impossibility of divorce. Then she wrote about a trip West she was thinking of taking alone and, at the very end of her letter, about a temporary separation from her husband and her intended departure from the house with the white-picket shutters. A few months afterwards, still uncertain about divorce, Marianne headed for California.

Berkeley was changed. There were two coffee shops where one had stood before. A crowd of teenyboppers dressed in old clothing stood outside a pizza parlor all night long playing bongos and tin whistles. On Sundays in the parks, there would be amplifiers and a rock band with guitars and drums. "I know music," Marianne wrote, "And this isn't music." The entrance to the University was a litter of handouts and other prostrate forms. The only sign of permanence I discovered on my return was Ron whom Marianne and I immediately invited to dinner.

With my dissertation in the hands of my committee, and my job in aerospace on hold pending the next Congressional recognition of the Russian menace, I spent most of my days hanging out in the Pic, waiting for approval. Marianne spent a lot of her between-marriage time there also, curled up in her long black trench coat. She seemed to have come out of herself and her Catholic girlhood.

One evening, with the air rampant with isolated Chekhovian conversations, lonesco on a higher plane, someone, I think it was Jack, Ron's nephew asked, "How do you know you're alive?' Marianne gave this question more attention than Jack had intended and told him, finally, "I find skin beneath my fingernails that I've torn from my lover's back."

That same evening, Jack gave me a brief summary of Ron's adventures on and after the day of the party. For almost a week, you'll recall, that party had been dangling like a ripe fruit in front of Ron's eyes. He kept reaching for it long after the date of the party had come and gone, making friends, enlisting and giving aid, and being lovable. "I want everyone I love to come to my party." So he hurled himself into the preparations and missed the actual event.

The morning after, when Jack had labored alone to clean up the debris and move Ron's few remaining possessions to safety, Ron had already been gone three days on his quest. "He won't take his pills," Jack said.

A pill a day was all it took to keep Ron level, but when Ron got excited, he'd conveniently forget and then refuse to take them. When the Berkeley police arrested him finally-he had entered the wrong person's house at three in the morning, Ron demanded a jury trial. A shrewd move as it turned out. While waiting to be examined by a psychiatrist-the police in Berkeley keep space cadets and sociopaths in separate cells, he started taking his pills again. The day of his commitment proceedings-there never was any trial as such-he was sober, and the judge seemed disposed to believe in his reformation. "But he won't," Jack said, "He won't keep taking his pills."

Marianne and I smiled across the table. I think we were both pleased that Ron had escaped once again; Ron being at liberty was proof that inside each of us there was still a part that was childlike and free.

Had I mentioned that Marianne knew Ron primarily by reputation? Oh, we'd had supper together that one evening, but Ron had been very quiet and withdrawn on that particular occasion. Shortly after this conversation with Jack, I heard that Marianne and Ron were going out on dates. They'd been seen at a concert and once just walking through the park. I was spending a lot of time with Ron myself, playing chess. We kept a record of all our moves and after each game he'd tape an analysis of the play. He'd bought the tape recorder because he was thinking of writing a novel about his experiences in and out of the mental hospital. But he never did.

Back on campus, I had four signatures on my dissertation and needed only one more to make it an official Ph.D. The holdout was a woman, the straw boss for all the research assistants in the department. I think she still remembered and was angered that I'd cut out ten minutes early from my duties one afternoon three years earlier. First, she told me I should shorten one of my proofs. O.K., I shortened it. She said she wasn't sure if my commas were always in the right place: had I talked with someone in the English department? I talked. Finally, she wanted to know if I'd read the Russian literature. "Yes," I said, (though I had in mind Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gonchorov, rather than Kolmogorov and Khinchin.)

"All right, I'll sign it."

"!!!!!!!!!!!! Yahooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!! "

"Or wait. Let's talk about this next Tuesday."

Ron wasn't available for chess. At least, I couldn't find him at the cottage he'd been sharing with Jack. His Volkswagen bus was in the driveway; someone had painted it orange and green with yellow flowers and words like 'Love' emblazoned on the door panels. The inside of the cottage was a shambles. A huge cheese-based collage was on the kitchen door. "The world is shit," someone-it looked like Ron's handwriting, had scrawled on the living room wall. Perhaps this home, too, was to be torn down.

A little man with tears in his eyes and a few stray hairs remaining on his nearly bald pate found me pocketing chess books in the rear bedroom. "Are you living here?" he asked me.

I shook my head.

"There must have been a dozen people living here. One man alone couldn't have done all this." True anguish was in his voice and his wringing hands.

I didn't have the heart to tell him-I guess he was Ron's landlord, nor the chutzpah to ask for Ron's forwarding address. At the Pic I learned that Ron was persona non-gratis there too. He'd been in the previous evening with a pair of garden shears, waving them about, preaching, warning other patrons not to be afraid. The manager had come forward to throw him out; there'd been a tussle and they'd both gone through the wall-length plate glass window at the front of the restaurant.

Marianne was in the Pic; she was still smiling, still sitting with her legs curled up on the chair under her black trench coat. "You're a hard man to get hold of," she said to me.

I told her my story about my adviser and the thesis but she wasn't listening. "Ron's not right," she said, "I mean, he's not right."

"He's been acting crazy," 1 said, "And I know he and Jack are going to be evicted from their cottage.

"I like him," she continued, again without acknowledging what I'd told her, "I like him as someone to date, but I don't want to get serious. I've gone out with him a few times and he's beginning to act like... like he owns me. I'm not ungrateful for his attention. I just don't feel like belonging to anyone for a while yet. So soon. I hope he's O.K."

I blinked. The change in topic had been abrupt. The "I hope he's O.K." had come from a different part of her, a part I hadn't heard from since she left Ann Arbor.

"Mark called one night," she said. "He knew that Ron was supposed to see me that night and he called to warn me. 'Ron's got a gun,' he said. When Ron came, he was very polite as usual and when I asked him about the gun, he showed it to me. I was very worried, not for myself, but for Ron. After he left, Mark called back and asked me what I was going to do about the gun.

'"Do about it?'

"'Yes,' Mark said, 'You're his friend.'

"Now, I really didn't think it was any of my responsibility. But Ron is people, so today, I took off on my noon hour and went over to the hospital."

I interrupted her, "And they told you to come back next week, make an appointment, and show your Blue Cross card."

"No. They were very nice. I got in to see the psychiatrist right away. He was very understanding, though I couldn't seem to make him understand that I wanted to talk about Ron. I mean, he kept wanting to know about me and about Arthur and about the divorce. Had I always felt threatened by men? How else should you feel when someone shows you a gun? So I told the psychiatrist to forget the whole thing, I would just go home. He started edging around the desk toward me still asking questions. Goodbye! I ran out of his office. I don't care anymore if Ron is running around the streets with a gun or whatever."

"Or garden shears," I couldn't help adding.

"I heard about those. You might have told me about Ron before you introduced me to him. This morning, I got a bill from the hospital for fifteen dollars. Psychiatric consultation!"

By the time I tracked him down, Ron was depressed again. They'd caught him, of course, took away the shears and the gun and put him in an institution. He spent hours in a padded cell and then in an open ward declaiming the truths he'd uncovered, but no one was listening. They fed him guilt with the morning meal. Guilty: Of unasked for and unwanted labor. He'd fixed people's cars, washed their dishes, minded their children. Guilty: An unlicensed peddler. He'd given away flowers, one for each and every haggard secretary fleeing the University at the end of a too-long workday. He'd held the commuters back at the adjacent intersection, hands up like a traffic cop, and handed each one a bloom.

I saw him one afternoon while he was still in the hospital. We spoke only briefly. He moved slowly, and seemed years older. They were still experimenting with his medication.

Later, I went to the Pic, looking for Marianne-I thought I'd buy her dinner, offset some of the costs of her lesson in psychiatry. While I waited, I talked with someone-I think it was Vance, of the events of the day, the debris of Ron's departure. A guy at the next table overhears our conversation. He's a quiet little guy, button-down suit, mousy-brown hair, lenses like bottle caps, the kind of guy you'd think would never talk to strangers. But he speaks right up, carried away with the headiness of it all;

"I think I met the fellow you were talking about, just a few days ago.

"I was in the cafeteria and though this man had already finished his meal, he stayed behind and talked with me. He was telling me how he was going to teach at some experimental high school on the Peninsula, Summerhill I think it was."

"That's Ron," Vance volunteered. Summerhill High was Ron's latest project, though I think the position for which he'd interviewed was that of a janitor, not a teacher.

"I thought so," the little guy continued, "from the way you described him. He and I talked together for a long while. But you know the more he talked, the less I understood. Like the high school where he was going to teach? He said the kids there just wandered around, took classes when they felt like it. The whole idea sounded crazy. He had this book about the school and he kept reading aloud from it what he said were the answers. But what he read made even less sense. Finally, I asked him point blank, 'you get total freedom, is that the kind of high it is?'

"'Yes,' he says."



Berkeley, 1965.
In Search of Aimai Cristen