Liebau knew the activity to which he was referring.
“Are you crazy?” he said. “That’s not some five-hundred-dollar fine. That is the whole rest of your god damn life in federal prison.”
“I want to do it,” Gradison said sullenly.
“You can’t do it!”
“What’s the fucking difference!” Jack shouted. “Is there somewhere else I need to be?”
A door slammed, and moments later they listened to Kimiko driving off in the car. The two men wound up crying and getting very drunk. Through the wide picture window they saw the sun light up the forest, before they fell asleep.
A year later, Liebau’s tenure was restored. Gradison, according to the minutes of that fall’s English department meeting, had asked for and been granted a psychiatric leave.
* MESSAGE *
Have you met life today?
Rebel. Express yourself. Take your creativity to a whole new level. Express yourself.
Through the Ad and intent of the Advertiser we form our ideas and learn the myths that make us into what we are as a people. To Advertise is to Exist. To Exist is to Advertise. Our ultimate goal is nothing short of a personal and singular Billboard for each citizen. Until that day we will continue to do all in our power to encourage the masses to use any means possible to commandeer the existing media and to alter it to their own design.
In “A Tale of Two Rooms and a Blind Man,” the artist — who spent time in prison in China for making subversive art — invites us to feel, smell, or sense objects in a pitch-black room and then describe them — in a stark white room — to an elegant blind man, who then sculpts them from clay. Through 4/20.
*
FIRST JOHN DROVE up to Durham and stayed in a little bed-and-breakfast he found there, just reading, walking through the dignified campus and past the frat houses with the wading pools and legless couches in the front yard, feeling that particular pang one feels as an outsider in a community of the young. He was happy that way for almost a month, even as the gregarious curiosity of the old couple who ran the B&B turned into a more restrained suspiciousness at his ability to pay every week on time, in cash, without seeming to do anything for a living or to speak of any place he needed to get back to. When the semester ended and the town emptied out he drove — top down, wind roaring in his ears, the Porsche drawing admiring or challenging stares on the highways — to Savannah, where he hadn’t been since he was a boy, just to look around; and from there to New Orleans, where he thought he might stay to see Mardi Gras, just because it seemed like one of those things one ought to be able to say one had seen.
He wasn’t so naive as to expect he would run into Molly anywhere on the road. Ten years earlier he would have been looking around for her reflexively at every red light. Now, though, if anything he tried not to think about her, not out of regret or resentment but because he felt that his unchecked thoughts of her tended of their own accord to grow increasingly unfair. If you were too focused on yourself, then it could seem like it was Molly’s destiny to come into men’s lives, give them something to long for, and then withdraw again, with no residue but the longing. But then you started to turn her into a metaphor, which wasn’t right: which, in fact, couldn’t be done, because to equate her with anything else was to miss the point of her anyway. And meanwhile, she had to go on living her life.
In New Orleans he phoned Shays’s office, took a deep breath, and asked to speak to Mal. Shays got on the phone instead.
“John!” he said, his stagy courtroom drawl growing a little shaky with age. “Mal’s not here!”
John didn’t want to leave the number where he was, a French Quarter rooming house. “When will he be back?”
Shays laughed, entirely inappropriately, John thought. “Don’t know!” he said.
More questioning elicited the mystifying news that Mal had gone to Italy to settle some dispute regarding his house in Umbria. He hadn’t said when he would return, but John assumed that had to be an oversight on somebody’s part — maybe Shays’s, since he was, after all, a little deaf. Mal wouldn’t stay away for long. John still had his cell phone number; but in light of this news, he suddenly felt a bit hesitant about using it. He asked Shays to leave a message for Mal, saying only that he had called to check in, and would call again.
In the end, the town he was most charmed by was Oxford, Mississippi, and when he got tired of driving he went back there and rented a little two-story house near the university. To keep busy, and to meet people, he took a volunteer job as an illustrator for the Sewanee Baptist Church. Nothing too Bible-thumping, just illustrations to accompany Sunday-school texts, newsletter design, pamphlets for the troubled about alcohol abuse, marital difficulties, things like that. John hasn’t found religion himself; never in his life, in fact, has he felt a particular pull in that direction. But the work is pleasant and undemanding; John likes to draw; plus, he can’t help but be aware that there’s a certain integrity to it. He is putting his considerable talents — talents whose expensiveness his kind employers would never in a million years suspect — to good use, in support of certain strong, sincere, uncompromised beliefs, beliefs he respects, even if they aren’t necessarily his.
* MESSAGE *
Where do storytellers get their stories?
In some quintessentially Jeffersonian way, Puppy renders all who see it equal. With its coat of many colors, Puppy straddles a cosmic fault line separating the hilarious and the insidious, the architectural and the organic, the temporary and the timeless. In some Machiavellian way,
There’s No Future In Advertising.
In exchange for the $40,000 for the first academic year, they are expected to wear their First USA clothing whenever they make public appearances on their campus or others for the company. Each has to maintain at least a C average (Mr McCabe was a straight-A student in high school; Mr Barrett got A’s and B’s) and live up to the terms of amoral clause — if they misbehave, the deal is off. But Mr Filak said he fully expected to “re-sign” them for the full four years of college.
*
THE OCEAN SEETHED all day, low waves, too low to attract the surfers even if it had been warm enough for surfing, which it was not. That was the appealing thing about winter in the rambling beach house: the cold weather kept away the trespassers, the partyers, aimless scraggly young people not caring what they befouled on their rambling path to hell. The less appealing thing was that the cold inside the house had to be fought off via heating oil, which meant money, which they didn’t have. Lately they had been setting the thermostat at fifty-six degrees, and Richard had overheard some grumbling about it.
He watched the restless back-and-forth of the ocean — like an animal, he thought, like a tiger miserable in its cage — from behind the uncurtained picture windows. He would have opened the door to the porch, just to hear the surf for a moment, were the cold air not likely to antagonize the others even more. The beach house had been given to them, outright, by a former disciple. Gone now. And while the house itself had been his, all its contents, it turned out, had previously been granted to his ex-wife in their divorce. There was nothing in the five bright rooms now except about twenty sleeping bags, and in the dining room a portable altar from which Richard, every evening after dinner, sermonized.