Thomas Sullivan

Rites of passage almost always take away innocence, but it’s what you replace the innocence with that reckons the true cost…or net gain. This is the third, and I think final, column I’m posting about the urban settings that shaped me as a writer. It started when Dave Niall Wilson blogged this response to one of my many “nature” raves:

“You can’t write about life if you live out in the woods…unless you’re Sully or Thoreau…but it would be interesting (just for perspective) to see a similar piece sometime about someone lost on the inner streets of somewhere, gray walls, too much traffic, alleys and backwaters of civilization.”

He was quite right to cite the meaninglessness of one setting without the perspective of the other. And neither Thoreau nor I (thank you very much for that august company) can derive meaning in a vacuum. Thoreau’s writings tell us what drove him to nature, and I guess mine testify to the fact that nature is a simplification and an equity line of truth for me against the mortgages of civilization. So I tried to give Davey what he asked for, and the memories just compounded until I had to make it three columns. And still other memories are bubbling up in blood and ether and ambrosia. It all fits the general format I’ve styled as my “Cannibal Essays,” so maybe I’ll revisit the theme down the road, but for now let me acknowledge the humbling outpouring of email received here and some equally generous blog threads, and let me also tie up loose ends that many people have asked about.

“Khaki Man” just disappeared [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/12/16/thomas-sullivan-khaki-man-the-peanut-butter-players/]. I’ve never confirmed what happened to him. Never tried after a few forays into the Cass Corridor. The fire at the halfway house may be the merciless end to his story, but the dance he performed with that soul-wounded woman is untouchable in eternity. The “bully” at the Lawndale Hotel also vanished after the incident with the mirror [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/01/16/thomas-sullivan-empty-boxes-i-have-worn/]. The nameless do that. I never saw him again. The slamming of his door was the final sound I heard from him as well, and that perhaps is the most significant thing. That silence from his sealed room was almost more awful than the abuse until I finally left the Lawndale. I regret that I probably drove him deeper into shame and pain. The hard truth of all our lives is that we can’t make everything right, and that we just have to keep faith with the realities within ourselves and not miss the next chance to deliver. There are a few things unredeemed or unfulfilled I’ve continued to look for in life, and I will not let them pass if they cross my radar again. If. You don’t get many moments of truth, or people who represent it. And when they come, they will likely challenge everything you think you knew and be inconvenient as hell.

But that’s what a writer (or any person with a whole soul) is supposed to do, isn’t it? Find the moments of truth or the people who represent it. They cover the spectrum of human attributes, and if you are an idealist you may see a Grail once, or never, but you’d better remember it, if you do, because it may become the measure of everything in your world. By that Grail you may know the value of what you spent your time chasing. I’m not writing about the minor logistics of wins and losses in your life, imperfections of corruptible things, flaws and compromises of daily living. I mean the things on the white altar of your soul: the passions that make you optimum, and without which you only exist. They may come as tests of your strength. Or they may require you to keep faith with who you are. Those moments of truth. A writer polishes mirrors until they reflect what he/she has found. What have you found? What are you looking for?

If you’re like me, it’s all pretty accidental, and maybe you wake up when the moments of truth happen by and maybe you don’t. A couple of times I did wake up. Khaki Man showed me where beauty is, the bully of the Lawndale taught me compassion. God only knows what I’ve missed. I remember learning about pride, though. Phony and real. The phony was at a top-of-the-game moment during my long slide from a quest to hold the world record in the 200-meter long course breastroke. I didn’t know it then, but I had already failed at that, because I would never get closer than I had been. I also didn’t know that the record didn’t matter. It was the pursuit that mattered.

Wow. Do you know, I’ve never admitted that before?

Anyway, it was an awards banquet for a small college swim team. We were second at the nationals that year, and I was team captain, and there were bucketfuls of lobster Newberg at the banquet. I even got to introduce the President of the United States…on tape for our little ceremonies. Young studs congratulating ourselves. The only things that kept us from beating our chests were the stickpins in our silk ties. But you know, it’s okay once in a while to recognize success, and this was that time.

The setting was a hallowed club in an old gray building downtown. We went outside just before it started and stood on the red carpet under the arrival canopy, talking like the macho jocks we were. Into that he came, a street guy, gaunt, shabby, a little wobbly. He moved quickly enough to suggest he was also sober, and the feverish hope in his bloodshot eyes seemed to say that he didn’t want to be. So there we were, dressed to the nines and nowhere to go, and he was bearing down on us like we were an oasis. His voice squeaked with dryness, but he spoke with surprising elegance. We were all fine young gentlemen, he said, very fine in our fine new clothes. And after a few aching moments, he mumbled as humbly as you have ever heard: “Could any of you fine young gentlemen spare a little change?”

Everyone was suddenly very busy with body language, studying patent leather stiletto shoes, rotating ever so slightly on a heel, as if to lean out of the way of the question. No one wanted to be made a fool of. But he wasn’t leaving, and when he made eye contact with me, all I could think
of was that my buddies were watching to see what I would do. I know I turned him down with dispassion, though I don’t remember whether it was barbed or just polite. Nothing I hadn’t done before or since.

Except that the banquet room was slightly below street level, and you could look up through the tall lancet windows and see the hunched figures in the cold looking down like condemning angels. Okay, I’ve tried to be honest about who I am in these essays. I am not driven by charitable reflexes. In fact, misplaced compassion is more often crippling than kind, to my way of thinking. I believe in the strength of every individual, in human potential, and I am cynical toward leaders who empower themselves through dependencies or misguided guilt or who lock masses of people into their own weaknesses for the benefit of a few who are truly needy. The victim mentality is the most destructive mindset you can inflict on a person or a society. It should be reserved as a weapon of war to undermine one’s enemies. I don’t know how anyone can achieve anything, including self-respect, without empowering themselves as individuals to pursue the best life with whatever means they have. Just wanted you to know.

It was warm in the banquet room and I was glutted with lobster Newberg when I looked up and saw him staring down at me again. His eyes were dull, and I could make up something rather more profound than what I saw, but the truth is he just didn’t get it. My time, his time – different moments of truth, and maybe he had my moment once, and maybe I’ll have his. He just looked empty. You shouldn’t ever be that empty. You should know where you are in life. You should understand. Why didn’t he understand?

And that was the moment I understood. It didn’t matter whether it made sense to give another hungry alcoholic a buck or two. This was about me, and whether I was going to go through life missing the individuals, and I haven’t a clue how many times I failed that test before, but suddenly I wasn’t going to fail it again.

He was gone, of course, before I could get outside, and going to the corner didn’t bring him back, and driving in that neighborhood purely circumstantially a couple of times over the next few weeks didn’t rematerialize him either. I think if I had found him, I wouldn’t be remembering this. But I didn’t find him. Like Khaki Man, he is another phantom of the streets who taught me something I needed to know in order to call myself a writer, a student of the human condition.

So that was phony pride. And the whole thing got replayed again a few years later when I thought I had the street scene down to clichés. But you just can’t come at people – individuals – like you know anything just because you’ve seen others like them. When you stop being the student, you stop learning. I was about to learn real pride.

It was Washington D.C., and I was just entering a government building – I dunno, maybe the National Gallery. And there was one of those still lifes, a ragged black man perched on the top step while the crowds flowed up and down. Rail thin, burning eyes in a body that was ashes. He didn’t have his hand out, nor did I read a con in those eyes. He just looked like he was taking a break from life, from caring, from trying. Maybe that’s why I stuck out a bill as I reached the top step. No big show, I just wanted him to take it. But he didn’t. I paused. And when we had definite eye contact, I got the challenge. What the hell, I didn’t want to humiliate him. Looking back, I can see how stupid the thing I did next was, but I knew damn well he was desperately hungry, and there was a wire trash basket next to him with McDonald’s bags and plastic cups to the brim. It occurred to me that he might have been picking through it, or waiting for someone to lob a half-eaten quarter-pounder onto the pile. So I tucked the bill into the mouth of a bag sitting on top. That was all. He saw me do it, but I didn’t look directly at him again.

I was inside and distracted long enough to forget the whole thing until I came out maybe half an hour later. When my glance caught the empty step, I remembered. And there was the wire basket, and I don’t know why I had to look – whether it was to prove I had understood his pride and knew it limits, or perhaps a disquieting suspicion that I had not. Well, you already know what I’m going to tell you. Because the bill was right where I had left it.

I’ve never doubted the desire for dignity and independence in another human being since, however oppressed, beaten down, corrupted, or enslaved by false notions that desire may be.

Moments of truth. To be a writer is to learn as much as you can about human nature. I hope you find your moments when they find you.

If you’d like to get my free monthly newsletter, drop me your email address at mn333mn@earthlink.net. And if you like my writing, and would like to read a sample chapter of my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF, check it out at the my web site link below. Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

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