Grudges are heavy burdens to carry over a long period of time. I know. I have carried one for more than forty years. I am not particularly proud of my grudge; it is not especially noble. But it is mine, and I have taken pains to cultivate it on a regular basis. In turn, it has always been there when I’ve needed it.
My grudge dates back to 1966-67, my first year at Duke. Shortly after arriving on campus, my fellow freshmen and I were given a series of placement exams. One was for foreign language. As it turned out, three years of goofing around in Señor Marvin Woodard’s high school Spanish classes did little to prepare me for the expectations of the Duke foreign language department. Consequently, I scored too low on the Spanish exam to place into the second year, and I had too many years of high school Spanish to qualify for the beginning course. My only option was to take another language. My choice was French. I forget why.
Our course schedules arrived toward the end of Freshman Week, and I noticed with some amusement that my French teacher’s name was O’Keefe. Everybody on the hall got a kick out of that. I thought it was a good omen. And so, with a light heart and a heady feeling of beginning anew I arrived at Monsieur O’Keefe’s classroom in Carr Building, East Campus, on a bright, crisp September morning. It took Monsieur O’Keefe about ten seconds to dispossess me of whatever good feelings I had about taking French.
As I was settling in my back row seat, Monsieur O’Keefe pulled out his gold Zippo, snapped open the top with a flick of his thumb, and lit a Marlboro. After exhaling a long blue plume of smoke, Monsieur O’Keefe introduced himself en français. Then, fixing us with an unnerving stare, he stated his credo in plain English: “I believe,” he said, “that the greatest educational motivator is fear.” Stunned silence, followed by a few nervous coughs. Monsieur O’Keefe went on to explain the particulars of his belief, enumerating the ways in which they would be made manifest in his classroom. All of this took three Marlboros.
As he sat there smoking and scaring the shit out of everybody, Monsieur O’Keefe began to radiate a persona that was somewhat at odds with his physical appearance. At first glance he was a short, blond-headed, unremarkable man in his mid-to late twenties. Black horn-rimmed glasses gave him the look of the young Michael Kane in The Ipcress File, and a perching slouch suggested something of the vulture. He wore desert boots, the sine qua non of the sixties grad student, and the ever-present Marlboro completed the image.
In the first couple of weeks of class, Monsieur O’Keefe’s credo took hold in a variety of tedious and time-consuming requirements. First, we were forced to go to the language lab for a certain number of hours a week. There, we would find a booth, thread our reel-to-reel tape into one of the machines, and be driven berserk for an hour by the scratchy, muffled voice coming out of the headphones. It was torture. In addition, each week Monsieur O’Keefe required us to memorize the entire dialogue from the French textbook and recite a part, when called upon in class, without reference to the book. The dialogues were those inane vignettes that always had Emile meeting Jacqueline at either the Tour Eiffel or the Bois de Boulogne. We were the only section of French 1 that was required to memorize them. I checked around.
To make things worse, Monsieur O’Keefe gave daily quizzes on vocabulary and sentence structure. He graded them on the binary scale – you made either an A or an F. I remember getting back quizzes that had one or two red marks on them – an accent mark correction, or a spelling mistake – everything else was just fine. Grade: F. Same with the dialogues. Miss one word of the recitation: F. You were either right or wrong. No in-between with Monsieur O’Keefe. The man was relentless, smoking one cigarette after another and handing out F’s like they were party favors. Once, while walking on campus with a date, I happened to cross paths with Monsieur O’Keefe and greeted him with a cheery, “Bon jour”. He stopped and corrected my pronunciation. I feel certain that later in the day he recorded another F by my name in his grade book. Still, I struggled on.
At mid-semester, the French instructors gave a common exam to all first-year French students. To my surprise and delight, I made an A. The next week Monsieur O’Keefe gave his own mid-term. I made an F. That’s when I decided to request a conference with him. We met in his office, and I remember that he was not exactly welcoming. Still, I made a great effort to be courteous. First I confessed that foreign languages were not my forte (he agreed). Then I attempted to make my case. First, I told him that I felt I knew more French than my grades were indicating. Monsieur O’Keefe just stared at me. Then I told him that I was spending a lot of time studying, but was frustrated by getting F’s for minor mistakes on his quizzes. Monsieur O’Keefe continued to stare. At that point, sweat beading up on my forehead, I fired the heavy artillery. I asked if it seemed right to him that I could get an A on the department exam but fail his. Monsieur O’Keefe pulled himself up from his slouch and spoke. He said that the problem was one of two things: either I was not working hard enough, or the Admissions Department had made a mistake. That was it. No encouragement, no kind words of any description. And that’s when the grudge took hold.
Somehow I got through it. Despite taking the first semester exam with a broken right hand, mononucleosis, and a terminal case of tonsillitis, I struggled and fought my way to a D. I repeated the performance, without the handicaps, in the second semester. By the skin of my teeth I slipped out of the clutches of Monsieur O’Keefe and into second year French. And in a divine case of topsy-turvy, I drew the easiest teacher in the department, a very nice Jamaican whose name, I’m embarrassed to say, I don’t remember. In any case, the first test I got back from him had red marks all over it. Grade: A. After that, it was all downhill. I had, it seemed, learned a lot from Monsieur O’Keefe, I just didn’t get credit for it.
In a way, I never got out of Monsieur O’Keefe’s class. For years I have been plagued by recurring nightmares in which French demons run amok, handing out F’s. I know they’re French because they wear desert boots, they are rude, and they chain smoke Marlboros. When academic horror stories are exchanged, I have always been confident that my struggles with The Monsieur would compete with anything on the table. In fact, taking my measure of revenge, I talked about him to anyone who would listen, and I painted the most unflattering portrait of him that my vocabulary would allow. There have even been times when I have fantasized about bumping into Monsieur O’Keefe on the street somewhere and giving him a good thrashing – or at least an insulting slap across the face with a limp glove. Then, at some point I began to regard him in the way old boxers regard opponents who had beaten their brains out in the ring. Monsieur O’Keefe had come to be more than just my nemesis. He had caused me a lot of pain and anguish over the course of one year, but he has been a muse for more than forty. I’m not sure I would want to do without him.
AFTERWORD
Just the other day, I dusted off my grudge and was carrying on about it to some friends at a downtown greasy spoon. I got laughs in all the right places, and I received sympathy when it was called for. My companions agreed that Monsieur O’Keefe was a terrible excuse for a human being, and then we began to speculate about whatever became of him. I decided he had probably become the card man for a French-themed whore house in Las Vegas. More laughs.
When I got home, the question of Monsieur O’Keefe’s whereabouts persisted, so I got busy and conjured up Google on my computer. I typed in O’Keefe, professor of French, and hit the send button. Seconds later a list appeared, and there right at the top was a website for Dr. Charles O’Keefe, Professor of French, Denison College, PhD Duke University, 1968. My man!
I should have stopped right there. Instead, I clicked on his website and read that “Charlie” O’Keefe was a much beloved professor who had won awards for his teaching and was, according to one of his colleagues, “alive to the wry ironies of life.” Wry ironies of life? I brought up his picture, and there he was: a bald, cuddly figure with a twinkle in his eye and a warm grin spread across his face. My wife took one look at him and said, “It’s Mr. Rogers.” She was right. The monster had turned into a sweet little old man, revered by his students and loved by his colleagues. I was devastated. The target of my forty-year grudge no longer existed. Talk about “wry ironies of life.” Indeed.
On reflection, though, I decided that Monsieur O’Keefe must have grown and learned from his experiences in the classroom at Duke. After all, he was just six years older than I was when he taught me. He probably figured out that a teacher can be demanding without being niggling and distant, and perhaps he looks back on his early forays as a graduate instructor with some embarrassment and misgivings. Or maybe not. Whatever the case, I am thinking about letting bygones be bygones. I can no longer tell my stories about the monster monsieur without Mr. Rogers’s image floating up and dousing the fire. On the other hand, maybe the new ending makes for a better tale – the capacity for change, redemption, and all that. The better part of me says that’s the way to go. But I have to admit, it’s hard to give up the grudge. It’s been such a guilty pleasure all these years that I hate to let it go.
Bob Williams ‘70
October, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
MONSIEUR O'KEEFE
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
The Potential for a Total Disaster
On Friday's marketplace, Felix Salmon let drop a number that not many people want you to hear. He said that there are three to four trillion dollars in losses that the financial sector has suffered that have, as of yet, not really been felt:
"At the moment the politics is no where near nationalization. They are quite keen to do anything but nationalization, which I think is a little bit shortsighted. And nationalization makes a lot of sense in this situation. What's quite clear is that right now they only have $350 billion to play with -- the second trench of the TARP money. And they haven't decided what they want to do with that until they really come up with a big strategic solution for the entire banking sector in the United States. And I have a feeling that when that bill comes out, then I think you might start beginning to see the second wave of capitulation, as it were, when people, really it start to sink in that there's three or four trillion dollars worth of losses just sitting in the financial sector, which someone is going to have to take."
CONTINUE "THE POTENTIAL FOR A TOTAL DISASTER"
Excerpt from a Novel
We are hoping to feature new fiction on Super Collide from time to time. Today we are excited and proud to bring you the work of one of our own, Guy Benjamin Brookshire. An excerpt from his new novel follows. Please contact supercollide@gmail.com for inquiries on the novel or Guy's work.
I was pushed forward by someone trying to get to the front of the crowd. The bell of the horn turned towards me. People around me hunched their shoulders, almost cowering. It seemed too late for me. I saw the eyes of the soldiers.“Do you want to ask something?” the man on the bullhorn challenged, uninvitingly. People looked at me. I saw them looking at me and felt a wave of nausea. I answered, in a loud, clear voice:
“It seems like a lot of people are missing. Where'd they go?” JLI pulled on my arm.
I don't know how many people heard me, but at that moment, I thought everybody did.
“I'm not sure I understand what your question means. Are you suggesting we are responsible for the recent depopulation?”
“We just want information. We want to know who means to govern us, you know. We used to govern ourselves.” JLI pulled on my arm harder and hissed. There was some talk amongst the soldiers, more of them were drifting over, the better to hear the idiot talk. They were jeering at me. I went on: “Are you from the provisional government? Are you here to help us?”
“We're here to control this roadway. That means keeping the peace. That means ensuring that traffic laws are obeyed. It also means ensuring that way-stations such as this provide essential services and remain free of any subversive activity that could compromise our control over this roadway. We are not providing aid. We are providing security.”
Though he was not reading from a piece of paper, the statement seemed prepared. A tittering swept through crowd. People who hadn't heard were asking people who had what he said. There was an unintelligible shout that sounded angry. The bullhorn scanned the crowd, looking for the culprit.
“Will the provisional government be helping people relocate?” I asked.
“We aren't relocating you, we are pacifying you.”
“What have we done that we need pacifying?” the exasperation in my voice was not hidden.
“What have you done that you need relocating?” the bullhorn asked, with killing wit. The other team leader, who had been squatting over the body of the flier distributor they had shot and going through his pockets, stood up and snatched the bullhorn from him. He said loudly,
“This area is now under security control. Please disperse. Return to your travel as soon as your business has been completed. Please disperse. This area is now under security control. Please Disperse. Return to your travel as soon as your business here has been completed . . .”
The low words bubbling through the crowd became louder. The words “killed” and “murder” were heard repeatedly. The crowd hushed and in the silence, the bullhorn sounded that much louder and the closing of car doors was like an echo of a book being dropped in a library. Perhaps because I had spoken, many people were looking at me.
“Ask him who the president is.”“Ask him where we can find a hospital.”
“Ask him if there are any new maps being circulated.”
“Where—can we find—a representative—of the provisional—authorities—who can answer—our questions?” I asked very loudly. I couldn't shout down the bullhorn, but I was heard by some. People at least heard that I was shouting. JLI whispered something plaintive I didn't hear.
“Disperse. This area is under security control. Disperse. This area is under security control . . .”
I thought about walking up and trying to ask my questions face to face, but the body of the man in the Santa Claus get-up lay at their feet in a pool of his own blood, his head like a broken eggshell. It gave me pause. A round man with large red eyes behind his glasses, who had clearly been disturbed by the shooting, climbed up on a car to shout:
“What the fuck is going on? What the fuck is going on?”
A gray woman who could have been his mother, scrambled to pull at his pant leg, so that he kept slipping as he attempted to get up the windshield and stand on the roof.
“Must've knew him,” I heard a voice near me say.
“This guy isn't getting us anywhere,” I heard a woman say, gesturing at me as she turned away. The soldiers holding the perimeter near us began to crane their necks, taking interest in the man shouting as his mother pulled at him. One made a gesture like turning an invisible doorknob over his shoulder. The leader on the bullhorn hardly broke the monotony of his repetition with a simple:
“Yeah, bring him in.”
The three closest troops closed up their intervals and moved forward. Their bayonets flashed. The crowd melted away at their approach. They swept their guns back and forth as they moved, rehearsing a massacre. People were pushing and shoving to get away from them. Isolated horn-blasts increased in frequency. When the soldiers got to where the man was scrabbling up his windshield, struggling against his mother like a child throwing a tantrum, a ring of people were standing, watching.
“Come with us, buddy,” said a soldier.
“What the fuck is going on?” The man had finally kicked away his mother and was flapping his arms up and down to punctuate his yowling like a deranged cheerleader.
“Come down, sir—you're frightening people,” said another and gestured with his finger to the ground. He wasn't even looking at the man, but was watching the crowd, which was watching his every move. He didn't like it.
“Who the fuck are you? What is going on?”
The soldier who hadn't spoken was holding his hand to the side of his helmet as if trying to listen to a transmission. He nodded, looked around, stood on tip-toes, found the officer with the bullhorn, gave him a thumbs-up and received one in return, then pointed his rifle at the man and said:
“You are disturbing the peace and must come with us. Get down now.” He turned his rifle up a few degrees and fired. Women screamed. The warning shot had a remarkable effect on the man. Despite the cold, he began to undress. His coat came off fast, but he got frustrated with the buttons on his shirt and just tore it open. Tears were streaming down his face as he began struggling with his belt. His mother was reaching up to him as if he were a cat stuck in a tree.
“Who the fuck—Ahhh!—what's going on? What's going on?”
When he whipped his belt out, he swung it around his head in a vaguely menacing gesture and they shot him at least thirty times before he even fell over. A mist of blood hung in the air for an instant. The ring of their casings hitting the ground and bouncing was musical. The man's mother sat on the pavement. The crowd had all hit the ground or crouched behind cars and only slowly began to raise their heads again. As they did, the clipped clucking of cowed disapproval filled the air. The soldiers began to back away. As they did so, they passed me. I was standing in something like awe of their ability to turn the world to hell.
They saw me looking at them and approached me as I wondered whether it was safer to stand or retreat.
“Hey, what the hell was this guy talking about?” the one who had fired the warning shot said, pointing at me with the barrel of his rifle.“I don't know, but it sounded kind of, uh, subversiony,” said another, over his shoulder, walking backwards, “like, uh, he said something about government: isn't that subverting?”
“I don't think it works like that,” I said.
“Well, how does it work, buddy?” he snarled.
“Not very well, apparently.”
“Should we take care of this?” The other was speaking, I realized, into his helmet-mounted intercom. “I'm sorry I didn't get that. Sorry, could you repeat that? One more time?”
“No, we asked him if he had a question,” said the man with the bullhorn. “Over.”
The mood of the mob had changed and now pressure from the crowd was pressing everyone forward, and it was difficult to fight back against the press of bodies without being violent. The soldiers began to back away towards the man with the bullhorn. The two teams united in a huddle and the man with the bullhorn pointed back towards the exit and the tank. They moved out across the parking lot towards it. The crowd, simultaneously pushing towards the soldiers from behind and back from the soldiers' advance where it occurred, was in a state of maximum compression, as in the scrums of rioting. The soldiers could not pass.
There was an explosion and a car flipped in the air. It landed nose first on another car and demolished it. The explosion ruined every car within its radius of contact. Burning debris was everywhere and many people expressed fear that there would be another explosion. As they were calling out over the noise of the after-blast, another car did explode and the whole thing happened all over again. When the two blasts had died in reverberations that continued only in the mind, it was clear that many people had died. My side of the crowd was unharmed. But on the other side of the parking lot, the dead closest to the cars were just heads and limbs and chunks of torso. The blood of those closest to the explosions had instantly broiled into a sizzling goo that was difficult to distinguish from the burning oil. Further out where glass and pieces of metal had flown the blood flowed audibly from dying and grievously wounded bodies. The soldiers charged forward into the stunned, prone masses and proceeded through them, at a jog, to the exit. Bits of flaming rubber were falling, smoking, through the air like brimstone.
A man who seemed to think that I was to blame, rushed me even as debris was still falling.
“You're getting people killed for bullshit. That was bullshit. What are you saying? You're not making any sense. You're not making any sense. You're gonna get us all killed. What do you mean 'we mean to govern ourselves'? Who is 'we'? Who are you? People are dead because of you!”
He tried to strangle me, but others in the crowd restrained him. I could see veins in his eyeballs and stood as if hypnotized. There was a moment when I realized the people who were restraining him were waiting for me to say what to do with him. He was an older man. I did not hesitate in thinking that he might be right. Perhaps the tank shelled us because the soldiers had radioed in that a madman was trying to confuse people into attacking them, the people were blocking retreat and closing in: do something. So they shelled us and the troops slipped away in the chaos. My fault? Why not?
JLI led me away by the hand. There were men tearing their shirts for bandages. Under JLI's silent instruction, I began to tend the wounded which meant pressing handfuls of clothing into a woman's gaping wound and dragging her away behind the restaurant, out of the tank's line of sight. Some people's blood smoked in the cold. The sounds of men shouting just barely drowned out the sounds of women screaming. There were doctors in the crowd. Three to be precise. They made a makeshift surgery in the garage. Napkins, knives and pots of boiling water were brought from the restaurant. Several casualties who had been blinded were placed together in the game room and they sat as if potted, listening, waiting for something, while lights from the video games flashed on their bandages. A man, about my age, had a shirt wrapped around his head. He looked as if someone had poured a bucket of blood over him. He was calling out. I think it was a name. No one answered him.
There was the sound of gunfire from somewhere in the distance as if many balloons were being popped. One of the doctors came to me with bloody hands. He began to wipe them on a dishcloth. A little boy with a bowl of black hair came up and stood next to him, hooking his index finger through the doctor's belt loop. I was ready to swear this was the boy I had glimpsed underground.
“Where are you going now?”
I looked at his face. Under a shock of iron gray hair, nobly weather-beaten features were arranged with a regularity that suggested intelligence. I knew that face, he was the man I had seen in the survivor's tent. He must've known all about the relief efforts. I wanted to ask him what he thought I should do, where he was going—essentially, to lead me. But I saw that for whatever reason, he was asking the same of me. To my surprise, I told him my destination, though I had not known it myself.
“I guess Arkansas. It seems like that's where I should go. If I have family left, that's where I should look for them.”
“I'm heading that way.”
Thank you to Broken Silence, USA Today, and The Daily Mail Online for the images of European Peace Keepers in Africa, A car bombing in Iraq, and French Rioters on Sarkozy's election night.
Goodbye to Bush: an attempt at an assessment
President George W. Bush has repeatedly suggested that only History can judge him. The idea that history is univocal, unchanging, and belongs to a far future that won't give any credence to his critics is difficult to support, but so are many of the ideas that guided and sustained this administration -- an administration which will soon belong to the past. The president who will give his name to this era has certainly left a mark on our time, but how do we read that mark?Though conservatives felt incredible relief at his election after a long and cold eight years in the Clinton wilderness, George Bush began his presidency under a strange sort of cloud. The excitable amongst us could imagine a constitutional crisis as the Florida recount dragged on and on. Though he had not won the popular vote, and the electoral college vote hung by chads in Florida, the Supreme Court, conservative by a slim majority, installed the Governor of Texas in a decision that the nation, aided in its acceptance by a remarkably magnanimous Vice President Gore, did not significantly oppose. As the burst technology bubble rained recessional fall-out on the land and tales of voting irregularities and rumors of the Cardinal Richelieu-like influence of Vice President Dick Cheney began to spread, the omens were not good. But even from those earliest moments, the salient feature of Bush's presidency had been established: a blithe certitude in his own rightness, which often seemed oblivious of any opposition whatsoever. When George W. Bush wants to win someone over to his side, he simply speaks and behaves as though no one could possibly disagree with him. William Kristol may find this style of leadership refreshing, but the majority of the American people seem to have drawn a different conclusion.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
FLUNKING LUNCH
There were many things about college life that puzzled me: micro-economics; the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins; calculating water potential in plants; identifying meat in the cafeteria – to name just a few. But of all the institutional curiosities, none was more bewildering to me than physical education. I mean, what was the point? At the time, I thought the only reason for requiring it was to justify all the coaches that were necessary for one sport or another. But now, looking back, I wonder if p.e. was in the curriculum for another purpose altogether. Perhaps it was there as a Machiavellian ploy to intensify the intellectual experience by contrast, if you will. Perhaps not. Whatever the case, the Physical Education Department at Duke in the 1960s offered ample opportunities for us to forget, at least for a while, that we were in a place of higher learning.
When I entered Duke in 1966, students were required to pass four semesters of p.e for graduation. The only exceptions to that rule were the jocks. All other freshmen were given a physical aptitude test and, according to the results, were placed in either the regular p.e. class or Individual Development. The regular class comprised a sampler of activities, including swimming, rebound tumbling, volleyball, and wrestling. The Individual Development course was designed for those who were physically challenged by injury, birth defect, or an inability to walk and chew gum at the same time. Its main objective was to keep students from hurting themselves or each other.
I passed the physical aptitude test without any trouble and was placed in regular p.e. My first instructor was Roy Skinner, the university’s lacrosse coach. Skinner was a shorter version of Fred Gwynne, the actor who played Herman Munster on television. He had a wry sense of humor, and he took neither himself nor his course very seriously.
Coach Skinner lectured to us occasionally about eating and drinking too much, or about how to tell an endomorph from an ectomorph, and then he turned us loose to play a variety of games, some of which he must have invented himself. Flickerball, a weird combination of football and basketball, was one of them. The object of the game was for a team to pass a football around until someone was in position to throw it through a hole in a backboard. Points were awarded for hitting the board as well as for scoring a bull’s eye. Apparently flickerball still exists. Wikipedia describes it in part as “a game played in a group of 6 to 40 players divided more or less equally on opposite sides of an area such as a gymnasium, parking lot, or field… with no specific regulations regarding the length of the game or timeouts.” Makes you wonder why it never really caught on.
Whatever the game, Coach Skinner was not one to waste a lot of time talking about it. Instead, he was a proponent of the “throw-out-the-ball-and-let-them-play” method of p.e. instruction. His intro to volleyball consisted of the following explanation: “The ball comes over the net. The setter sets the ball. The monster man moves up. Spike! Point! That’s the name of the game.” To his credit, Coach Skinner let us know that his class was not going to cause us much trouble. “Flunking p.e. is like flunking lunch,” he told us. “If you show up, you get a B. If you show up and show interest, you get an A.”
After Skinner, our group was sent to Jack Persons, Duke’s swimming coach since the 1930s. Unlike Coach Skinner, Coach Persons was temperamental and sarcastic. He yelled a lot, and in the confines of the indoor pool his voice exploded and echoed like a sonic boom. The pool was Persons’ fiefdom, and since knowing how to swim was one of the requirements for a Duke degree, he wielded a lot of power. To get out of his class, you had to show proficiency in three of four strokes: backstroke, sidestroke, breaststroke, and freestyle. Coach Persons’ routine was to take his clipboard, station himself at one end of the pool, and yell out a stroke. Those of us who were trying to qualify would line up and dive in at his whistle. To pass, all we had to do was swim two lengths of the pool. Persons checked your name off as you climbed out.
On the first day of qualifying I passed the freestyle and the backstroke. So, I arrived on the second day needing only to pass one more stroke to fulfill the requirement. Or so I thought. When we gathered at the pool, Coach Persons read off the names of those who had failed to qualify. My name was on the list for the freestyle and the backstroke. I immediately went over to Persons to correct the situation. His face turned beet red and he told me through clenched teeth that his list was not subject to change. “Get in line, Williamson,” he screamed. I tried to tell him I was not Williamson, but he was already yelling at somebody else.
For the next two days the routine was exactly the same. I’d show up for class and hear my name called out as not having passed a single stroke. I’d protest, and Coach Person would send me to the pool to do it all over again. I ended up passing every stroke three different times before I was able to convince him that I was Williams, the swimmer, not Williamson, the sinker. Even then he blamed me for not speaking clearly enough. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he yelled. I never found out if Williamson passed the swimming requirement. He was not among us when we moved on to wrestling. Lucky Williamson.
Wrestling turned out to be the ultimate p.e. horror story. Our instructor was the university’s wrestling coach, Bill Harvey. Harvey was the drill sergeant type. He was built like a fireplug and looked a lot like Popeye. For pleasure and amusement he played on the Duke Rugby Club. Today, when I see the bumper sticker RUGBY PLAYERS EAT THEIR YOUNG, I think of Bill Harvey – although, to be fair, the phrase is a bit of an understatement in his case.
For the first several weeks, Coach Harvey ran us ragged with grueling sets of calisthenics and tumbling exercises. Then, having broken us down, he narrowed his focus to teaching us the basic wrestling holds and escapes. The culmination of our stint with him was to be two three-minute wrestling matches, each of us being paired with someone of approximately the same weight. As a kid, I thought that dancing with Mrs. Winfield Crew in junior high cotillion class was as long as three minutes could get. Turns out I was wrong.
In the first of these matches, roommates “Bad” Simmons and “Go” Tuite, friends of mine, were pitted against each other. Harvey blew his whistle and the two of them grappled away, straining and grunting, the coach screaming in their ears. It was gross and it was horrifying. When the match was finally over, “Bad” crawled to the edge of the mat and threw up. Nobody laughed.
It was then that I made a deal with the guy I was matched with. “You can win,” I told him, “just let me look good enough to get by.” He agreed. Our turn came, and we got in position on the mat. Harvey blew his whistle and began screaming at us. Evidently that was the deal-breaker for my guy. He lit into me as if his life depended on the outcome, grunting and grabbing and twisting for all he was worth. Stunned by the sudden reversal, all I could do was roll over on my stomach to keep from getting pinned. For what seemed like about an hour, my guy grappled and I rolled over on my stomach in a grotesque frenzy of flailing arms and legs, all of which was accompanied by the blood-curdling screams of Coach Harvey. “Two minutes!,” he yelled. “Two minutes!” This meant we’d only been at each other for one minute. I thought I was going to die.
Sometime just after the two-minute warning, I was overcome by a rage that welled up from deep within me. I think what did it was a combination of my guy reneging on me, and Harvey screaming like a banshee right in my ear. At any rate, my adrenal glands kicked in and with a scream of my own that would have made Hulk Hogan proud, I put a schoolyard headlock on the guy, lifted him from the mat, and leg-locked him back down. Harvey went nuts, slamming the mat and stopping the bout just before I threw up. My technique was terrible, Harvey told us, but he liked the rage.
I had reached my limit of endurance. We were allowed three cuts per semester in p.e. I took all of mine during the last three classes with Coach Harvey. I was already looking forward to second semester, when I would be able to choose a more reasonable p.e. course – one that I could get through without risk of drowning or being laid up with a strangulated hernia.
Then, just before first semester exams, I managed to break my right hand playing basketball with some of the guys on the football team. Because of my injury I was placed in Individual Development for second semester. My class met in the weight room, which in those days was located in the basement of Duke (now Cameron) Indoor Stadium. The instructor was Otho Davis. A few years later, Davis would join the Philadelphia Eagles organization and become the prototype for the professional athletic trainer. Back then, he was the head trainer for the Duke teams.
The first day I spent in Individual Development with Otho Davis is hardwired into my memory. There, on the basement floor, amidst the free weights and the early versions of exercise machines, was gathered the most pitiful group of male physical specimens I’d ever seen in one place. They were wandering around, dressed in these droopy gray p.e. uniforms, gazing at the equipment as if seeing those things for the first time.
It was into this scene that Otho made his appearance, stepping through a door from the Indoor Stadium and onto the landing of a metal stairway that led down to the weight room. He approached the railing, and, as if speaking to us from the bridge of a ship, he called for our attention. Then, looking out over the group below, Otho shook his head, exhaled an audible sigh, and said, “Okay, guys. Listen up. I want two groups. Spastics over to the left; sub-spastics to the right.” And, as God is my witness, those guys divided themselves into two groups. Everybody was laughing, especially the sub-spastics. I think I went with them.
I checked in with Otho and was told to write up a plan for rehabilitating my hand. He suggested some weight training and stretching, and I came up with a schedule of exercises and repetitions that would take me through the semester. I stuck with it only for a couple of weeks. As soon as the cast came off I began sneaking out of the weight room and getting into pick-up basketball games in the Indoor Stadium. My ritual was to wait for Otho to leave class, as he invariably did five or ten minutes after roll call, and then go up and play ball for the remainder of the hour. This went on for weeks. Then, one day I looked up and there was Otho, staring at me and motioning for me to come over to him. I dropped the ball and ran to the side of the court, a sick feeling welling up in the pit of my stomach. Sure enough, Otho wanted to know what I was doing. I gathered what wits I had and answered, without much conviction, that dribbling and shooting a basketball was really loosening up my hand much better than all those exercises. Otho looked at me long and hard, then he said, “Sounds good to me. Keep it up.” And that was about the last I saw of Otho Davis.
Sophomore year I looked over all the choices for p.e. and was struck by the fact that bowling met only one day a week. I wasn’t particularly interested in bowling, but it seemed like the easiest way to go. Show up once a week and forget about it. I mean, what was there to bowling? I signed right up.
The class met at one of the lanes in Durham and it was taught by a woman, a Mrs. Jean Gibson, who was part owner of the place. It didn’t take long for us to figure out that Mrs. Gibson took her job very seriously. Although she seemed to have little formal education, it was clear that she thought of herself as a Duke professor – a professor of bowling. All of us were taking the course for much the same reason, and none of us was the least bit serious about it – except for the guy who had his own ball, shoes, and bowling glove. He caught a lot of grief.
As the course progressed, Professor Gibson grew more and more haughty and officious. Nothing was funny to her, not even the unfortunate refugee from Individual Development who couldn’t get his ball down the lane. This guy released the ball so slowly that you could read, “Brunswick… Brunswick… Brunswick” as it crept toward the gutter, or the “channel”, as she insisted we call it. Poor fellow. One time, the momentum of his ball was so feeble that it stopped dead in the middle of the alley.
Looking back, I suspect Mrs. Gibson was insecure about teaching us and, in her defense, I’m sure we weren’t the most cooperative group she ever had. But she compounded her problem by trying to make bowling an academic exercise. Her lessons were repetitive, pedantic, and almost always involved a certain number of things to remember about each facet of the game. For example, she would explain in painstaking detail the two things about your stance, or the three things to remember about your grip. We would be tested on these things, she told us.
One day Mrs. Gibson was holding forth on the three things you had to have to be a good bowler: (1) a good grip; (2) a good backswing; and (3) a good release. She spoke about these fundamentals as if she were trying to get across some arcane law of nuclear physics. As she was going over it for the second or third time, she noticed a guy who had obviously drifted off into deep sleep. She called his name and asked him to tell her the three things he needed to be a good bowler. He opened one eye and said, “What?” Seething, she asked the question once again. “I said,” she spat out, “what are the three things you need to be a good bowler?” This time the guy opened both eyes, stared at her for a couple of seconds, and said, “An arm, a leg, and 55 cents.” What followed was the loudest, longest laugh I ever heard in a classroom at Duke.
From that day on Professor Gibson became, in her own mind at least, a woman scorned. And she set about doing everything she could to make us take her and her class seriously. She began giving daily quizzes that demanded the most trivial, meaningless information, and she delighted when the college guys did poorly on them.
I bumped along in the class, staying out of her way and doing well enough to get a B. I managed to keep out of trouble right up to the day of the final exam – six or eight mimeographed pages of bowling trivia. I was on page 3 when I felt a tap on the shoulder and heard a familiar voice. I turned around and there was my hometown buddy, Joey Page. He had borrowed a car at UNC and driven over to my dorm to see me. The guys on my hall had told him I was off campus at bowling class. Now, anybody else would have thanked the guys and gone back to Chapel Hill. Not Joey Page. He got directions to the bowling alley and drove right over.
As Joey was telling me all this, suddenly Mrs. Gibson appeared out of nowhere and snatched the exam off my desk. “You’re cheating,” she said. I remember thinking that she had reasonably misunderstood the situation, and I set about explaining that my friend, whom I hadn’t seen for some time, had just come by to say hello. To my amazement she continued to accuse me of cheating because, she said, we had been told there would be no talking during the test. At this point Joey, who true to his nature was enjoying the confusion, told Mrs. Gibson that I couldn’t be getting any help from him because he didn’t know the first thing about bowling. And he added, “If you don’t believe me, give me the test and I’ll prove it to you.”
By now the ruckus had spilled over into the class. All the guys had stopped taking the exam and were staring in disbelief at the scene being played out in front of them. A furious Mrs. Gibson had gotten herself in the middle of some kind of weird power struggle, and she was not backing down. I was acting out the role of aggrieved party, holding on for dear life. And my friend Joey Page, a stranger to everyone else in the class, was dancing around the two of us like Jerry Lewis. In the midst of all this insanity it began to dawn on me that things could get really serious, since cheating was grounds for expulsion from the university. Somehow I gathered my thoughts and told Mrs. Gibson I wanted to talk to her supervisor. “That’s fine, she said,” and she stalked over to the phone.
A few minutes later she came back to tell me that Mr. Corrie was coming right over. “We’ll see what he has to say about all this,” she declared. To this day I picture Bill Corrie, Chairman of the Duke Physical Education Department, bent over his desk, working feverishly to meet some important deadline, when the phone rings. On the other end is his bowling instructress telling him that she has a situation at the lanes. Things are getting out of hand, she says. He needs to get out there right away.
Bill Corrie was not wearing his happy face when he walked through the door of the East Durham Lanes. He conferred with Professor Gibson, and then I was summoned to join them. Corrie asked Gibson to tell her story. When she was finished, he asked me to tell mine. When I was through, Corrie looked off into the middle distance, shook his head, and said that he would have to think this one out and get back to us. Then he asked if anyone had anything else to say. I said, yes. One more thing: “If I were going to cheat on anything at this university,” I told Mr. Corrie, “it wouldn’t be on a bowling test.” Gibson turned red; Corrie almost smiled.
I never heard anything from Bruce Corrie or anyone else. When my report card came, I had a B in p.e. That was the last I thought about it until twenty years later. My wife and I were at my mother’s, going through some boxes, when we found my college transcript. Sheila was enjoying reading out my less than stellar record when suddenly she stopped and said, “You’ve been holding out on me.” I gave her a quizzical look. “You took square dancing at Duke,” she said. “And you made a B.” I looked at the transcript, and sure enough, there it was: P.E. 133: Square Dancing – Grade, B. I was completely flummoxed. How did that happen? Must have been a clerical error because I didn’t even know they taught square dancing at Duke.
It was sometime later that the truth hit me. I went back to my transcript and, as I suspected, bowling was nowhere to be found. What must have happened is that Jean Gibson, refusing to back down, had failed me. Bruce Corrie, sympathetic to my case and tired of trying to deal with her, had transferred me on paper to square dancing and given me a B. That’s the only scenario that makes sense – Corrie had stepped up and saved me from flunking lunch. What a guy! I have half a mind to look him up, give him a call, and thank him for the bailout. I wonder if he’d remember me.
Bob Williams
With thanks to my friends and classmates Dave Williams and Jon Alper for a memory boost.
December, 2008
