Staple                                                                                                                                                     April 13, 1999

Champaign, IL

 

Jason:

 

In your field, I would expect, you probably don’t have many professors or students who use the phrase “cunt-fucking” in class-twice.  I have to get out of the humanities.

 

You know as well as anyone that I love to see a bunch of good-looking young people having a good-and maybe even dangerous-time.  So, I saw Go and 10 Things I Hate About You (though I couldn’t shed the dignity to see The Mod Squad or Never Been Kissed.)

 

I said that I’m considering leaving the humanities, and I’m afraid that Hollywood has unduly influenced me.  If I left, I’d like to teach at a Catholic school-the only decision is between whether to teach young girls in pleated or plaid skirts.  But in 10 the English teacher is a cool, hip, young, handsome black man and in Never the English teacher is a cool, hip, young, handsome white man.  I sometimes delude myself into thinking that I could happily step into that role; but, quite soon afterwards, I picture myself as an assistant baseball coach to Ed Wajda, trotting out to coach first base with an afternoon hang-over (made worse by the sun) and in a uniform that is entirely too small and/or tight on me; then, quite soon after that (and not an unattractive prospect), I picture myself with my hands on my knees warning our runner to be careful because the pitcher’s got a real good move over to first.  I’d like that.

 

I’m having a few poems published in a soon-to-be forgotten review.  In this respect, you have the advantages of being in the Sciences.

 

I got into a heated debate with myself about what I should do this summer:  one, find a job in a liquor store; two, find a job teaching composition at the community college; three, wear shorts, a grey polo shirt, blue canvas nautical shoes, and lay around reading newspapers from across the country-L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post, while getting drunk and waiting for Fall Semester to start; four, go home to Cortland and write an essay on the poet Hart Crane-he and his parents lived briefly in Warren (on High Street) and his Aunt, well into the 1930’s, was editor of the Tribune Chronicle.  There are no monuments or plagues in Warren, I suspect, because Crane was a fag and a drunk and he killed himself before he turned thirty-three; five, fly to Paris and try to get Emilie pregnant so she’ll have to marry me (this plan works better, you’re right, on Catholics and not the relatively secular Swedish people, but there is no harm in trying); six, (and I’ve been saving this for the last since I know you’d like it best)-Atlantic City, baby!  You, me, and a dog-eared copy of How the Pimps Beat the Whores and the House.

 

Three moments in your last letter strike me as worth comment:  first, I doubt the veracity of your claim that Orgy will play Athens in the fall as part of the MTV college invasion, if only because I cannot imagine that all that hadn’t already taken place during our time at the alma mater.  Two, though your placement of us at Ping Center (in what I would heretofore like to think of as our red-shirtted senior year) is intriguing, I can’t help but think that I would have spent my red-shirtted senior year tracking down that attractive Film T.A. who once asked me if I knew where her box-i.e. mailbox-was.  After several years of rehearsing the line, “No, but I have a pretty good idea,” I would like to take the opportunity to make a half-hearted effort at a terminable romance.  Knowing, if she were anything like me, how depraved and lonely graduate students in the humanities can be, I think I may have been able to start a Sid & Nancy-S & N, not S & M-romance.  Finally, as to your admittingly novel-and I may be naïve in my praise-seemingly fool-proof pick-up line, “I’m thinking about moving.”  My own technique (drawing on Hart Crane from above) would be, once you had lured your date into an intimate setting (i.e. you and she alone together in a non-public place), to ask her, of the three-alcoholic, homosexual, or suicidal-which she would most regret you being.  Whatever her answer, sigh, and then lightly cup her breast with your hand.