That's what I thought, and that's in a way what lead me to going to Japan. I remember the time I went down to the Worthington Public Library to look for books on going abroad. What should you do, what should you expect, what was it like to leave the good old U S of A? I was so analytical about it. I thought of going to the library. What about that. And I remember seeing a book that warned that you shouldn't go abroad thinking that living overseas would solve all your problems. If you have problems now, they won't go away simply because you've gone abroad. Uh oh. I thought.
But then, well what have I got to lose? It was when Jim had told me that I could go over there and get a job teaching English with no problem. That really meant something to me. He described his job teaching English at the YMCA. But I don't know anything about teaching English, I said, and besides, I don't know Japanese. How could I ever do that? Why would they pay me to do that. Oh you can do it, Jim assured me. He was living proof. I was so gullible. I was so skeptical. I was trying to be a man's man, I was. Yes indeed. I wanted to not be beholden to anybody.
But with women, oh that was different. With women, all bets were off. If a woman was nice to me, and I was attracted to her.... Well not really. There was that period where I experimented with being a cad. Callous and uncaring, insisting only on my own needs. A swashbuckler. Love 'em and leave 'em. There was Snooky Miller, the nurse who was eight or nine years older than me. I met her over a lunch one day at the counter of the Bob Evan's restaurant in Worthington. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I struck up a conversation. She chatted amiably. I asked for her phone number, she gave it to me. I was quivering. But I was determined not to be blinded by my emotions. I won't let her run my life, boy howdy. We started spending lots of time together. I was working at Ohio Thermal, being the young laborer, wearing jeans and steel toed boots, living down on campus with my hard nails rock band friends.
It was 1976, and I was a college graduate, English literature, and I considered the degree a scam. Everything seemed a scam in those days, but at the same time I was so goddamn vulnerable, I was so goddamn desperate I was so goddamn in need of some soft touches and a sympathetic ear. I felt all alone, and depended on the people I had known all my life to assure me that I wasn't. Mom, Dad, old friends. But the world seemed to be wearing that idea out, like a favorite shirt that you wear so often you start seeing the weave of the material coming through at the elbows. So Snooky and I played at being in love. She was getting over being divorced a few years before. Her husband had been a physics professor at Ohio State. Imagine that, I thought. When she talked about him, I pictured this fifty year old nerdy professor caricature with thick horn rimmed glasses. Wow, I'm her savior, I thought. I'm what? Passionate, anyway.
She was from the exotic wilds of Connecticut. Her mother was dead, and her father commuted to New York City and worked as a writer, writing copy for Time-Life coffee table books. Imagine that. We even went to visit him one time. Only my second time on a commercial airliner. We landed in New York and got the train for Connecticut. This is the big leagues, I thought. A fancy house in the fancy suburbs. He cooked lobster for us, I remember. Am I really here?
It felt unreal, as though I were observing this dweeb visiting his nerdy girlfriends parents' home. Is this really me? I guess. I clung to the desperate conviction that I could drop her at any point, boy howdy. I wasn't beholden to nobody, not any more. Not after what happened with my younger loves. No way. That's what I thought. I am what I am, that's what I am, boy howdy. Another time we rode up to Chicago on a snowy February day to visit my sister Becky. I drove Snooky's Volkswagen bug. It had been snowing, but it stopped. It was icier than I thought. I think we were about halfway across Indiana, cruising along across the flat plains on a stretch of interstate with a very wide gently sloping median strip when all of the sudden the left wheel dropped over the edge of the pavement and I lost control. Next thing you know we were spinning in slow motion across the gentle grass slope of the median. Once around we spun, and then twice. I wasn't as scared as I had imagined you would be in that situation. I felt like an observer as the VW gracefully traced a wide spinning arc across the expansive snowy grass strip. At the end of the arc, we were facing the opposite direction on the freeway, heading southeast instead of northwest. "That was weird," I said. Snooky blinked and looked back at me, pushing out breath. The VW had stalled, so I started it back up. It seemed to be undamaged. We found the first exit, got off and got back on heading northwest again. We made it to Chicago, and I don't remember much about our visit with my big sister. I sure thought of myself as brash, artistic, my own man, the workingclass hero, all that stuff. God knows how Becky saw me. Snooky worked as a nurse in a Kidney dialysis center. We saw each other pretty frequently. I held my own, but began to feel twinges of unease. Who is this person, this Snooky. God, she's old. What's the next step? Where do we go from here? It wasn't long after that that my leg shattered. Compound fracture, jagged bone sticking through thin lower leg flesh, covered with blood. Leaning against the trunk of a car and looking down I saw the leg swinging back and forth at a right angle to my knee. Oh shit. How did I get myself into this? It was in the parking lot of a Honda motorcycle dealership.
Like my idealized brother, I thought I should without a doubt ride a motorcycle. It would complete the picture I was forming of the misunderstood rebel. Definitely, I needed a motorcycle. So I stopped into the dealership and talked to the man about the Honda, and he handed me a helmet and said, "Take a ride." OK, I thought this will be fun. Five minutes later I was supporting myself by leaning on the hood of brand new Honda car behind the dealership, looking down at my bizarrely swinging leg. The bike had died when I hit the back of the Honda and careened off to the side without me. Broken pieces of plastic amber colored plastic were strewn around. No one saw me wipe out. I was there alone, contemplating my leg as it sung to the left and then to the right, my right foot the ball of a pendulum attached to it. I finally collapsed slowly onto my left side on the asphalt. It took a few minutes for the salesman to figure it out and come around the back of the dealership to find out what had happened. "Are you alright?" "Well, I think I broke my leg."
They took me to the hospital in the ambulance after I broke my leg. I remember they asked me if I wanted to make any phone calls from the gurney, and I knew Mom wouldn't be home, so I called my apartment, where I knew Julie would be there. Julie was Bill's sister, who shared the apartment with us. "Uh...Julie? This is Rob. Uh... I'm in the hospital. I broke my leg. Would you call my parents?" "Sure. Are you ok?" "Yeah, I guess so. But they say it's a compound fracture. There going to put me under and operate." "Oh. OK. I'll call your parents." "OK. Thanks, Julie. Bye." "Bye." And that was that. Don't you think it's weird? I guess so. And as I went under, I floated away on dreams, and I was suddenly about ten years old getting an airplane ride with dad, my forehead pressed against the cold plexiglass side window, the plane's high and constant vibrations gently resonating the thin skin of my skull, the bone beneath, and creating a smooth tingling pinpricking sensation in my brain as I stared down through the plexiglas and the patchy snowy squares of farmland a thousand feet below. I could hear nothing, and my visual perspective was limited to what I could see of the snowy and indistinct winter scene below with my head resting on the plexiglas. Then I saw the flashing mirror of the operating room above me as they lifted me, 1, 2, 3, lift ... from the gurney to the operating table. The anesthesiologist was there, placing the mask on my face, count backward, ok, 100, 99, 98....bye bye. When I awoke, I was in my room with a cast on my right leg from toe to hip. My first visitor was from Roush Honda. It was the salesman. He expressed his condolences, and gave me a Roush Honda key chain. Gee thanks, mister. I felt blank, not even much wondering what would happen next. Snooky and I had had a falling out a few weeks before this little accident. I had declared my independence. She was getting too... I didn't know what, but I was damned if I was going to let myself get all tangled up like I had before in college. I'm my own man, that's for sure. Don't Push The River, It Flows by Itself, said the book my brother had recommended to me in my whimpering malaise. Don't Push the River, don't be pushing yourself to do anything you don't want to do. No shoulds, as his wife said. So I declared my independence, struck out on my own, left poor Snooky wondering what had hit her. Who was this kid, anyway? Was he the shy sweet one, or the nasty workingclass hero. She was sort of prim. She wore glasses and had her hair frosted. It was short, and she had a permanent. She was a young thirties nurse, but she seemed like an older woman to me. I wasn't to let her get the best of me, boy howdy. But naturally she came to visit me in the hospital. Hi Snooky. Hi Rob. We made out on the hospital bed with the curtain around the bed drawn. My leg twinged with pain as we grappled. When she would leave, I'd switch on the tv and fall asleep watching it.
But then, well what have I got to lose? It was when Jim had told me that I could go over there and get a job teaching English with no problem. That really meant something to me. He described his job teaching English at the YMCA. But I don't know anything about teaching English, I said, and besides, I don't know Japanese. How could I ever do that? Why would they pay me to do that. Oh you can do it, Jim assured me. He was living proof. I was so gullible. I was so skeptical. I was trying to be a man's man, I was. Yes indeed. I wanted to not be beholden to anybody.
But with women, oh that was different. With women, all bets were off. If a woman was nice to me, and I was attracted to her.... Well not really. There was that period where I experimented with being a cad. Callous and uncaring, insisting only on my own needs. A swashbuckler. Love 'em and leave 'em. There was Snooky Miller, the nurse who was eight or nine years older than me. I met her over a lunch one day at the counter of the Bob Evan's restaurant in Worthington. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I struck up a conversation. She chatted amiably. I asked for her phone number, she gave it to me. I was quivering. But I was determined not to be blinded by my emotions. I won't let her run my life, boy howdy. We started spending lots of time together. I was working at Ohio Thermal, being the young laborer, wearing jeans and steel toed boots, living down on campus with my hard nails rock band friends.
It was 1976, and I was a college graduate, English literature, and I considered the degree a scam. Everything seemed a scam in those days, but at the same time I was so goddamn vulnerable, I was so goddamn desperate I was so goddamn in need of some soft touches and a sympathetic ear. I felt all alone, and depended on the people I had known all my life to assure me that I wasn't. Mom, Dad, old friends. But the world seemed to be wearing that idea out, like a favorite shirt that you wear so often you start seeing the weave of the material coming through at the elbows. So Snooky and I played at being in love. She was getting over being divorced a few years before. Her husband had been a physics professor at Ohio State. Imagine that, I thought. When she talked about him, I pictured this fifty year old nerdy professor caricature with thick horn rimmed glasses. Wow, I'm her savior, I thought. I'm what? Passionate, anyway.
She was from the exotic wilds of Connecticut. Her mother was dead, and her father commuted to New York City and worked as a writer, writing copy for Time-Life coffee table books. Imagine that. We even went to visit him one time. Only my second time on a commercial airliner. We landed in New York and got the train for Connecticut. This is the big leagues, I thought. A fancy house in the fancy suburbs. He cooked lobster for us, I remember. Am I really here?
It felt unreal, as though I were observing this dweeb visiting his nerdy girlfriends parents' home. Is this really me? I guess. I clung to the desperate conviction that I could drop her at any point, boy howdy. I wasn't beholden to nobody, not any more. Not after what happened with my younger loves. No way. That's what I thought. I am what I am, that's what I am, boy howdy. Another time we rode up to Chicago on a snowy February day to visit my sister Becky. I drove Snooky's Volkswagen bug. It had been snowing, but it stopped. It was icier than I thought. I think we were about halfway across Indiana, cruising along across the flat plains on a stretch of interstate with a very wide gently sloping median strip when all of the sudden the left wheel dropped over the edge of the pavement and I lost control. Next thing you know we were spinning in slow motion across the gentle grass slope of the median. Once around we spun, and then twice. I wasn't as scared as I had imagined you would be in that situation. I felt like an observer as the VW gracefully traced a wide spinning arc across the expansive snowy grass strip. At the end of the arc, we were facing the opposite direction on the freeway, heading southeast instead of northwest. "That was weird," I said. Snooky blinked and looked back at me, pushing out breath. The VW had stalled, so I started it back up. It seemed to be undamaged. We found the first exit, got off and got back on heading northwest again. We made it to Chicago, and I don't remember much about our visit with my big sister. I sure thought of myself as brash, artistic, my own man, the workingclass hero, all that stuff. God knows how Becky saw me. Snooky worked as a nurse in a Kidney dialysis center. We saw each other pretty frequently. I held my own, but began to feel twinges of unease. Who is this person, this Snooky. God, she's old. What's the next step? Where do we go from here? It wasn't long after that that my leg shattered. Compound fracture, jagged bone sticking through thin lower leg flesh, covered with blood. Leaning against the trunk of a car and looking down I saw the leg swinging back and forth at a right angle to my knee. Oh shit. How did I get myself into this? It was in the parking lot of a Honda motorcycle dealership.
Like my idealized brother, I thought I should without a doubt ride a motorcycle. It would complete the picture I was forming of the misunderstood rebel. Definitely, I needed a motorcycle. So I stopped into the dealership and talked to the man about the Honda, and he handed me a helmet and said, "Take a ride." OK, I thought this will be fun. Five minutes later I was supporting myself by leaning on the hood of brand new Honda car behind the dealership, looking down at my bizarrely swinging leg. The bike had died when I hit the back of the Honda and careened off to the side without me. Broken pieces of plastic amber colored plastic were strewn around. No one saw me wipe out. I was there alone, contemplating my leg as it sung to the left and then to the right, my right foot the ball of a pendulum attached to it. I finally collapsed slowly onto my left side on the asphalt. It took a few minutes for the salesman to figure it out and come around the back of the dealership to find out what had happened. "Are you alright?" "Well, I think I broke my leg."
They took me to the hospital in the ambulance after I broke my leg. I remember they asked me if I wanted to make any phone calls from the gurney, and I knew Mom wouldn't be home, so I called my apartment, where I knew Julie would be there. Julie was Bill's sister, who shared the apartment with us. "Uh...Julie? This is Rob. Uh... I'm in the hospital. I broke my leg. Would you call my parents?" "Sure. Are you ok?" "Yeah, I guess so. But they say it's a compound fracture. There going to put me under and operate." "Oh. OK. I'll call your parents." "OK. Thanks, Julie. Bye." "Bye." And that was that. Don't you think it's weird? I guess so. And as I went under, I floated away on dreams, and I was suddenly about ten years old getting an airplane ride with dad, my forehead pressed against the cold plexiglass side window, the plane's high and constant vibrations gently resonating the thin skin of my skull, the bone beneath, and creating a smooth tingling pinpricking sensation in my brain as I stared down through the plexiglas and the patchy snowy squares of farmland a thousand feet below. I could hear nothing, and my visual perspective was limited to what I could see of the snowy and indistinct winter scene below with my head resting on the plexiglas. Then I saw the flashing mirror of the operating room above me as they lifted me, 1, 2, 3, lift ... from the gurney to the operating table. The anesthesiologist was there, placing the mask on my face, count backward, ok, 100, 99, 98....bye bye. When I awoke, I was in my room with a cast on my right leg from toe to hip. My first visitor was from Roush Honda. It was the salesman. He expressed his condolences, and gave me a Roush Honda key chain. Gee thanks, mister. I felt blank, not even much wondering what would happen next. Snooky and I had had a falling out a few weeks before this little accident. I had declared my independence. She was getting too... I didn't know what, but I was damned if I was going to let myself get all tangled up like I had before in college. I'm my own man, that's for sure. Don't Push The River, It Flows by Itself, said the book my brother had recommended to me in my whimpering malaise. Don't Push the River, don't be pushing yourself to do anything you don't want to do. No shoulds, as his wife said. So I declared my independence, struck out on my own, left poor Snooky wondering what had hit her. Who was this kid, anyway? Was he the shy sweet one, or the nasty workingclass hero. She was sort of prim. She wore glasses and had her hair frosted. It was short, and she had a permanent. She was a young thirties nurse, but she seemed like an older woman to me. I wasn't to let her get the best of me, boy howdy. But naturally she came to visit me in the hospital. Hi Snooky. Hi Rob. We made out on the hospital bed with the curtain around the bed drawn. My leg twinged with pain as we grappled. When she would leave, I'd switch on the tv and fall asleep watching it.