The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ Page 11

  All around us, there were aspirational second- and third-generation American Jewish kids looking to make good. Their parents had worked hard to rise into the upper-middle classes. It was the job of the children to keep rising through the traditional Jewish path of higher education. The sons and daughters of wholesalers and small-business owners would become doctors and lawyers. The sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers would become even more important doctors and lawyers—or senators and professors and executives and such.

  But that sort of thinking was not for the likes of us Klavans, no, no. Striving, aspirational third-generation Jews? In need of education, guidance, and nurturing at the hands of teachers? Please! That image of us offended my mother and father both, though in different ways.

  My mother did not want us to rise to a new social level, she wanted us to be at that level already. And what we could not be, she wanted us to seem. She was entranced by the trappings of upper-class WASP elegance. She wanted us to play tennis and wear blue blazers and smoke pipes, though presumably not all at the same time. But if she understood the ethos of hard work, study, risk, and sportsmanship that underlay such appearances, she never managed to communicate it to us—or at least to me—in any meaningful way. To me, it seemed that she wanted us to look and act like the classy guys in the tuxedo movies—instead of like the Great Neck Jews we were—but had no real concept of the substance beneath those flickering images.

  In any case, my mother simply didn’t have the force of personality to override my father’s clamorous show-biz presence and point of view. And for him, education was just one more hurdle between you and success, one more hostile system that had to be gamed. He hadn’t graduated college. And yes, on the one hand, he admitted this made him feel inferior to people who had. But on the other hand, he bristled when anyone suggested that a college education was valuable in and of itself. Sure, you needed that “piece of paper,” to get ahead in life. But if you were proud of having a degree for its own sake, well, you were just a pretentious snob. What could you really learn from teachers, after all? Those failures! They couldn’t even get a job in the real world, and they were jealous of anyone who could. Were you going to allow people like that to fill your head with information and opinions your own father never had? Did they think they were better than he was? Did you?

  My parents were proud that my brothers and I were smart, that we read books and paid attention to culture. If nothing else, it was one more proof that we were superior to our neighbors. I can remember several times when one of my brothers or I referred to some highbrow novel around the dinner table. “Do you think anyone else in this neighborhood is discussing that book over dinner?” my father would ask triumphantly.

  But the idea that our reading was just the first budding sign of intellect—the idea that we might need instruction from adults who had themselves studied and learned—no. My English teacher couldn’t possibly know more about literature than I did. She was just a failed writer envious of my talents, another hostile obstacle to my success. We were all already smarter than she was. And not just smarter. More important: we were funnier. My father was a comedian, after all. When he called his sons funny, that was his highest praise.

  And we were funny, my brothers and I, all four of us. When we weren’t punching one another or holding one another’s feet to the radiator or chasing one another around the room with the dog’s chain or a kitchen knife or a dart from the basement dartboard, we were tearing one another to shreds with witty insults. It was brutal on the ego but, I have to admit, it was ceaselessly hilarious.

  To my mind, looking back on it now, my mother’s faux-elite snobbery and my father’s narcissistic hostility made life too easy on us. If we were already better than everyone around us, we didn’t have to compare ourselves to them or compete with their successes. If the world was hostile and envious of us, we didn’t have to earn its respect. And if we were already smarter than our teachers, then no one could teach us anything. We never had to question our household opinions and points of view. We never had to put ourselves or our ideas to the test.

  I rejected this worldview and I embodied it, both at once. I argued against it and I breathed it in. I read books and thought thoughts that my father found threatening and pretentious and, at the same time, I became antagonistic toward any outer authority. Especially, I became estranged from school to the point of open rebellion. I detested the place.

  From elementary school on, I’d been conning my way through. Neglecting the work, getting by on native intelligence. Burdened every day with the fear of exposure. Hating the classroom because of the fear.

  By the time I reached junior high, I had transformed this dysfunction into a philosophy just as my father had before me. I thought of school as nothing more than a bureaucratic roadblock on the path to life. I thought of teachers as my inferiors with no right to exercise authority over me. I thought of education as a scam, and I felt justified in scamming it right back. I did as little work as possible. I wrote my way around my ignorance of literature and history. I reasoned my way through math problems I didn’t understand. I stumbled through science classes on luck and pluck. I don’t think I ever cheated, but I wasn’t above bluff and fakery and outright lying from time to time.

  Once, after a chemistry class ended, my teacher summoned me to the front of the room. I knew what the problem was. The term was drawing to a close, and I hadn’t yet handed in the final research paper that was going to supply a large percentage of our grade. I hadn’t handed it in because I hadn’t written it. I hadn’t written it because I hadn’t given it even two consecutive seconds of thought. The teacher had her grade book open in front of her on the desk, a pencil in her hand. She was going down the list of names in the book with the pencil point. “I don’t seem to have received your paper yet,” she said. I played startled. I reared back, wide-eyed. I said, “Really? But I handed it in two weeks ago!”

  This was before computers, remember. There would have been only one copy of my paper. It couldn’t have been easily reproduced. The teacher hesitated for a moment, scanning her records. Then she said, “Oh yes, here it is!” She’d actually found my grade! It was right there in her book! Somehow I had received an A-minus on a project I had never handed in. It’s remarkable I still did not believe in God.

  In English class, other lazy students got through by buying CliffsNotes, the little booklets that summarize the plots of classic novels and explain their themes so you can answer test questions without actually reading the novel itself. I didn’t even have the time or energy to use these cheat sheets. Instead, I developed a technique that allowed me to convincingly pretend to have read any book without ever opening it. I discovered that if you delivered yourself of a radical negative opinion on a classic work of literature in a superior and knowing tone, no one ever questioned whether you had actually cracked the binding of the thing or not. If you declared that Moby Dick was a crashing bore; if you said The Scarlet Letter was overwritten and irrelevant; if you proclaimed The Red Badge of Courage was an act of literary fakery, the teacher’s attention shifted from the novel itself to you, your brash eloquence, your haughty sophistication, the shock and cleverness of your position.1 It never once occurred to anyone to put my knowledge to the test or make me support my point of view with specific examples.

  Add to this sort of chicanery, my growing anger against authority—add to my anger the general insurrection of the sixties with all authority everywhere under attack and in retreat—and I was soon a hunkering teenage rebel. I was sullen, hard-drinking, often hungover, openly defiant of the rules. I tromped around in motorcycle boots and wore denim and leather, like some biker bandit in a B movie. I would passionately kiss and grope my girlfriends on the lawn outside and even mash them against the hall walls between classes. Whenever a teacher or administrator scolded me for this, and more than once someone did, I would become enraged and aggressive, snarling in their faces.

  I was thick across and muscular. I
was only just growing out of my fighting phase. I was more intimidating than I realized. The male teachers would make threatening noises at me, but they never followed through. The female teachers learned to stay away. As for those two or three courageous souls, men and women both, who tried to talk to me, to help me—I wouldn’t let them near. I did not trust them. I knew how my competitive father tried to sabotage my projects with his false mentorship. Why would some failure of a teacher be any different?

  And yet all this while, I read and wrote. The beauty of prose mesmerized me. Making words into stories and characters gave me peace, like daydreaming onto the page.

  But because I wouldn’t accept anyone else’s teaching, I could only learn more of what I already knew. My literary taste became cramped and limited. The intellectual values I’d developed in my boyhood hardened into small-minded prejudice. Toughness, cynicism, realism (a literary style that so often has nothing to do with reality), short, masculine Hemingwayan sentences—these were good. Idealism, faith, moral probity, beauty, high-minded Wordsworthian argument, and deep Faulknerian complexity—these were pretentious and bad. I had not read Wordsworth or Faulkner, of course. I didn’t have to. Just dismissing them gave me a kind of power over them. That was the whole method of the con, even when I was conning myself.

  These self-imposed restrictions on my taste not only skewed my education but also skewed my idea of what education was. The bluff, masculine, straightforward “good” writers I admired—Hemingway especially, but also Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jack Kerouac, and the like—played down whatever erudition they had. Only pretentious writers highlighted their educations. I disdained the novels of Faulkner and James Joyce on principle because they were blatantly literary, full of classical learning and erudite references. But the adventurer Hemingway, the private detective Hammett, the beatnik wanderer Kerouac, and World War soldiers like Chandler and Norman Mailer—they wrote about the streets, the battlefields, the road, the violent moment, real life. They had something much better than mere learning. They had Experience!

  Experience! That’s what made a writer great, I thought. Harsh, brutal, savage Experience—I would have done anything to get my hands on some. But where? There were nothing but lawns and homes and normal families around me as far as the eye could see.

  I didn’t want to go to war. Those in the know had declared the Vietnam conflict corrupt and evil. Patriotism was out of fashion. Warrior courage was out of fashion. The draft ended before I came of age and the war ended before I could have fought in it anyway. But, while I’m embarrassed to say it now, the truth is, the idea of joining up simply to serve my country in the armed forces never occurred to me. Where I came from, that was no part of the spirit of the age.

  Instead, I took jobs whenever I could—not jobs that would teach me something or contribute to my future or my career. No, I took jobs that I hoped would get me nearer to the grit of things: Experience. I was a gas jockey, a warehouseman, a truck driver, a construction worker, a delivery boy to some of the dodgier areas of New York City. After seventeen years in grassy peace and comfort, I was hungry for anything that looked like cruel reality.

  What I wanted most, though, was to wander. Not to travel—to drift. I had had wanderlust since I was a little boy. I never looked at rolling hills without yearning—aching—to walk to the top of the nearest one and see what was beyond it. My romantic fantasies often involved a girl in some other town, not this town. A brief affair. A tearful goodbye. Then, babe, I’ve got to travel on down that lonesome, dusty road.

  These longings to roam were natural to me, but pop songs and novels and movies fed them with imagery. There was Ricky Nelson’s ditty “Travelin’ Man.” It was a number-one hit when I was seven. Nelson sang of how he owned the heart of a girl in every port he passed through, from a “pretty Polynesian baby” to a “cute little Eskimo.” I listened to that record until the grooves in the vinyl wore away. There was Shane—Jack Schaefer’s classic western novella about a roving gunman who “rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come.” It was my older brother’s favorite novel for a while and I read it five times before I was twelve. And there was Huckleberry Finn. “I reckon I got to light out for the territory.” He was a hero to me from my earliest days. My mother used to joke sometimes that I was a Jewish version of him: Huckleberry Fein. Then, when I was older, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road stirred me to my heart. And Carole King’s lovely drifter ballad “So Far Away.”

  When I was seventeen, I took a job at a gas station. I had just finished school and I wanted to earn money for my first road trip across the country. In those days before self-service pumps, an attendant used to fill your car, check your oil and tire pressure, and clean off your windshield with a squeegee and a rag. I was that guy. Six days a week, eleven hours a day, I ran to answer the bell that rang whenever a car drove into the station. I worked such long hours that at night, when I went to bed, I would hear the bell in my dreams and leap out from beneath the covers only to find myself standing in my bedroom, dazed. And every day, all day long, the radio in the gas station garage played that song, the season’s big hit, “So Far Away.” The wistful melody made me yearn for the highway with the force of erotic desire. For twenty years afterward, whenever I heard the opening bars, I could still smell gasoline—and I still hungered to be travelin’ on.

  Experience. That was the stuff of life and literature to me. A classical education was the last thing I wanted.

  This was what my father and I fought about, more than anything. I had declared I would not go to college. Ironically, my father was panicked and enraged. All the years of my youth, he had denigrated teachers and intellectuals. Now I wanted no more part of them—and he was absolutely aghast. How would I get a good job without that “piece of paper”? How would I get along in the world—that place he always called “reality”? But he didn’t understand: I didn’t want a good job. I was going to be a writer! I didn’t need an education. I needed Experience.

  In any case, I hated school too much to keep on going. I can’t begin to describe my feverish contempt for the place. I despised classrooms. Sitting and sitting there, smothered by stopped time. I hated the fools and failures in authority. All the meaningless knowledge they wanted to saddle me with. I yearned for the world of Experience beyond the walls.

  To put myself out of my misery, I volunteered for an experimental program. Students were allowed to fulfill the requirements of senior year with a mere eight weeks in summer school. I think the program was designed to clear the high school halls of juvenile delinquents. As I remember it, that’s who showed up for the classes mostly: thugs, bullies, bad girls, and me. Spending the summer in school was excruciating. But then it was over. I was seventeen and I was free.

  So I hit the road. For the next two or three years, off and on, I wandered. Back and forth across the country by car and Greyhound bus. Sometimes with a friend, often alone. Through wild storms and desolate summers. Through every state on the continent with the exception of North Dakota—I figured South Dakota stood in for both. I slept in hobo camps; in campgrounds; in public parks; in cheap, bug-ridden motels; and on a city sidewalk once or twice. I met people from the deep country, north and south, and from all the towns and cities along the way. Occasionally I had the sort of adventures I hungered for. A mudslide in Montana nearly hurled me and my car over a cliff. A blinding blizzard outside of Denver left me stranded and nearly frozen in a vast white wilderness off-road. A few times, I even met a girl here and there who let me live out some version of my pop-song fantasy: a brief, intense, meltingly romantic relationship and then, don’t look twice, I was gone.

  At some point during this first year of traveling, I did send out one college application. I don’t remember why. Maybe I got bored between excursions. In any case, it was a careless, dashed-off thing. A quickly filled-in form. A quickly scribbled essay. I sent it to the University of Californ
ia at Berkeley. It was the only college I thought I might enjoy. For one thing, it was as far away from home as I could get. If there had been a school floating out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I would have applied to that one too. But for another thing, Berkeley was where a lot of the riots took place during the sixties. Not just riots but drug use and wild sex too. That sounded like just the curriculum for me.

  I didn’t expect to get accepted. I didn’t really care whether I got accepted or not. When I didn’t hear anything back from the school, I assumed they had rejected me. But one day, in the midst of my ramblings, I found myself in San Francisco. Out of curiosity, I drove across the bay to the campus. I went into the admissions office and asked about my application. The lady there told me I had been accepted to the school, but they couldn’t mail out my acceptance letter because I had not returned the padlock to my high school locker and would not officially graduate until I paid the high school a four-dollar fine!

  This amused me no end. Not just the locker lock but the whole business, start to finish. Berkeley was considered one of the best universities in the country. Somehow, I had managed to fake my way into a top-flight school.

  I decided, well, I would go.

  CHAPTER 8

  A MENTAL TRAVELER

  I arrived in Berkeley and promptly fell into a pathological depression. Away from the endless arguments with my father, away from the mindless freedom of the open road, all that rage inside me turned in on itself.

  I had talked my parents into paying for a tiny apartment on the city’s north side. I didn’t want to live in a dorm. I wanted privacy so I could go on writing four hours a day. I hated sitting in lecture halls, so I scheduled all my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Even so, I rarely went to any of them. As a result, I was often isolated, cut off from much of college life.