I Could Have Taught You So Much

Memory’s sparked by significant events. Births, deaths, graduations, unexpected luck, promotions, first successes may serve, as can illnesses, accidents, or other undesirable events. We begin with something memorable and then associations come.

Often when someone has success, they’ll at first share their good fortune. I’ve had friends in rock bands who signed a record contract, then, feeling their position had fundamentally changed, do favors for groups still struggling for recognition. However, with time they see that success may be tenuous, that they’ve become targets for sharks, and soon this generosity ends, replaced by the implacable realities of the music business.

I once met a woman who escaped a suspected serial killer. She was hitchhiking with her sister. A man stopped, picked them up, said he’d be happy to drive them to where they were going, but first had to stop by his house. He invited them in. He seemed friendly and harmless. Once they entered, he became a beast. He punched her in the stomach, and she couldn’t breathe. Then he started hitting her sister with his fists. The woman said that somehow she got up and ran outside, screaming. A car passed by, saw her, two men got out and came to their rescue. She told me this story to me some 40 years after it occurred, coincidentally the same week the man was released from prison. Though she spoke calmly, I could see horror in her face as she relived the event.

Tolstoy, speaking of War and Peace, said a great novel can’t be composed upon the flea; only great events inspire great works. Yet I wonder, perhaps there are other threads which make up the tissue of our lives that, while not providing a heroic or tragic narrative, might furnish an original optic on our lives. The other day, out of nowhere, I was asked what the word leather suggests to me.

I recall my mother taking me to buy leather shoes for school. Each year, we’d go to the Hess Shoe Store off York Rd. in Baltimore. This same store had several barbers who cut children’s hair on the lower floor. I recall the photos of the style choices posted on the wall. I didn’t like them, my idol was John Lennon at the time, yet I had to undergo the humiliation of having a man named Mister Randy clip off all my hair, giving me what I called a “butchy.” I remember the smell of white glue, little dolls called Trolls, pencil sharpeners and erasers in cigar boxes, continuing to high school, an unbroken series of calamities.

My father had a suede leather jacket that he’d purchased around the time he met my mother. It was what could be called a young man’s jacket, stylish and well-cut. He wore it the day he spontaneously leapt over a shopping cart in front of Eddie’s Super Market in Roland Park just after we moved into the neighborhood. With time the jacket became worn and one day I realized that he no longer took it out of the closet. I felt some irrevocable change had taken place. I was right:  it coincided with my parents’ divorce, marking the end of my golden age.

I saw, during a rare family vacation, hippie-like long-haired younger men who did leather work on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. They patterned themselves after the freaks in the R. Crumb comics my older sister bought at Sherman’s bookstore in Baltimore. As a child I was a radical conservative: these types inspired fear in me, they seemed groundless, having no regular existence, no home. I considered them shiftless bums. Maybe this was a sign of my fears about the impending breakup of my parents’ marriage. Associations now come flooding in, Hurricane Agnes, my brother beating a man with a golf club, terrifying roller coasters, my first thoughts on infinity.

I recall hitchhiking through Germany, catching a ride with some men who were on their way to Berlin. One had a book in English, and asked if I wanted to read it. I said sure. It was called The Leatherman’s Handbook. It combined stories about master-slave homosexual relationships along with the practices of that sub-group, the types of handkerchiefs kept in one’s back pocket to indicate sexual role preferences. I read one of the stories, about a punk who breaks into the house of a Marine, gets kidnapped, tortured and raped, but, when given the chance to escape, chooses to stay, having accepted his “master.” Thinking of this makes me recall constantly hearing the names Mary Lou Retton and Michael Jackson pronounced within a sea of otherwise unintelligible German. The guys in the car invited me to a club that night. I declined.

I was wandering around a Greek island when a guy called over to me. Curiously, he was doing leather work on one of the main tourist streets. Looking at me, he began talking and shaking my hand, and wouldn’t let go. I got away from him as fast as possible. He followed me, and asked me to get a drink with him. I kept avoiding him and was successful until the last day when I caught the ferry out to another island. There he was in the café near the port. He took my hand once again and said “You’re leaving. What a pity! I could have taught you so much!”