Out of the Nineties: In which my father calls

The summer before my senior year of high school, I was saved. In the born again, radical, Midwest fundamentalist Christian way. I went to summer youth camp to get away from my mother and Greg Proctor’s messy divorce, and there, at an altar call after a full day of Bible quizzes, swimming, and pestering from my cabin counselor, I found the Father I’d always imagined—caring, powerful, and a safe distance away. I came home from camp and changed our answering machine message to say, “Jesus loves you.” My mother was mortified, as she was just starting to get calls from potential suitors.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Kim Dana Kupperman's essay from the Hunger Mountain selected as notable in Best American Essays

Huge news! I linked earlier this year to the James Baldwin Project I edited with Jennifer Bowen Hicks for Hunger Mountain; well, last week I found two things out pertaining to this year's Best American Essay anthology that will be coming out in a couple of weeks:

• Kim Dana Kupperman's essay "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone: A Letter to James Baldwin on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of His Passing" was selected as a notable essay for this year!
  
• My co-editor Jennifer Bowen Hicks also had an essay included as notable in the anthology: "Attention," originally published in the North American Review!
  

Anyone interested can read all the essays selected for the anthologies, and the list of notable essays, here.

Out of the Nineties: Which I enter with a sense of hope and possibility

I entered the Nineties without a father, and with an unbound sense of hope. My mother was divorcing a man I’d been forced to call Dad for eleven years, and I was just getting to know the guy who had left her after getting her pregnant, remarried, and now, fifteen years later, wanted to be my friend. I had no past. There was only possibility.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Against the Eighties is in the books!

Or online at least. Take a look at the complete list/story mosaic here. (And by complete, I mean that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I imagine I'll be changing/adding to it for the rest of my life.)

And without stopping for breath, we plunge headlong into the Nineties starting tomorrow, the first of October!  So many loose ends, so many cliffhangers: Do I ever succeed at anything I try? What exactly happened in popular culture in the Nineties, and was it any better than the tripe served up in the Eighties? A fundamentalist Christian?

All these will be addressed, with a slew of new complications. Feel free to let me fill that Breaking Bad-sized hole in your life. 

Against the Eighties: In which we look to the future

When I came home from meeting Wayne Martin, I told my mom. She told Greg Proctor, who locked me in my room for the rest of the night. By the end of the next year, the advent of the Nineties, they were getting divorced after Greg Proctor had beaten my mother unconscious with a chair. Wayne Martin had expanded his business. And I was a fundamentalist Christian.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties Bonus: Uncles, Uncles, Uncles

I just wrote this during the week, but it seemed to fit. So, an extra little bonus as we wind up the Eighties: 

Absent a trusted father figure, I turned throughout my childhood and adolescence to my uncles for male guidance and role models. My Uncle Mike taught me to fish. I developed my love of reading from my Uncle Monti’s bookshelves of horror novels. My Uncle Butch Proctor taught me sarcasm. My Uncle Butch Martin also taught me sarcasm. My Uncle Dana took me to Tae Known Do lessons when I was continually beat up in grade school. My Uncle Harry taught me by example to bear the blows of life with gentle humor. My Uncle Buster fixed my car and watched basketball games with me in high school. My Uncle Rob introduced me to my birth father. My Uncle Joe Gaines became my Alateen sponsor. My Uncle Brian sent me his two front teeth for Christmas when I was two years old, thirteen years before I ever met him. At least half of these men are not actually my uncles. 

Against the Eighties: In which my young athletic career opens a door

I was perhaps the worst high school football player in the history of the sport. I had to constantly hold up my pants because they didn’t make them small enough to fit my 26-inch waist, and I could never remember plays. To be honest, I didn’t really know what position I played. But it was through the football team that I met my birth father, Wayne Martin. In 1989, my junior year, the starting left guard on the offensive line approached my locker before practice and asked me if I wanted to meet my dad. I didn’t know it until later that night, but his sister was married to Wayne Martin, who had opened up a discount furniture outlet on New Hampshire Street. I played even worse than usual at practice that day and probably spent more than half of it doing wind sprints.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

This is why I love teaching.

Today in class I was talking about the different ways of referring to a text - quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing - when I saw a student with a pear in one hand and a pen in the other. There was writing spiraled all around the pear.

"Excuse me," I said. "Are you taking notes on a pear?"

"No," a student across the room said, "He's pear-aphrasing."

Against the Eighties: In which I receive an indecent proposal

Right before I entered high school, Greg Proctor sat me down and told me I needed to start masturbating, referring to it only as jerking off. He told me methods, and asked me at the dinner table how it was going. I didn’t masturbate until I was 22 years old, after I’d been in two sexual relationships, each with a girl I thought was the love of my life.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

My morning caps lock rant, from Grand Central

WHILE YOU'RE IN LINE FOR YOUR COFFEE IN THE MORNING, CUTTING IN LINE, WAVING YOUR CREDIT CARD ABOVE YOUR HEAD AT THE CASHIER WHILE IN LINE, AND/OR PUSHING YOUR WAY IN FRONT OF PEOPLE AT THE MILK AND SUGAR TABLE IS RUDE. AND SAYING “I’M LATE FOR MY TRAIN” WHEN CALLED ON IT ISN’T AN EXCUSE. THAT’S ACTUALLY EVEN MORE RUDE. WE’RE AT A TRAIN STATION. WE ALL HAVE TRAINS TO CATCH. AND IF YOU’RE LATE FOR A TRAIN, WHY ARE YOU STOPPING TO GET A COFFEE?

Guest blog post in Superstition Review!

As part of the promotion for my podcast of The Revelator, I wrote a guest blog post for Superstition Review about my obsession with listing and my List and the Story project. Fun stuff, check it out!

Against the Eighties: In which an era begins and ends

From 1986-1988, I listened only to hair metal. This era ended for me when I entered high school and fell in love with the daughter of a professor at the university. I followed her everywhere from a distance, until my friend Kevin overheard her talking to her friend on the bleachers of a varsity football game. “John Proctor likes me,” she said. When asked who John Proctor was she replied, “You know, the guy who wears the same Whitesnake shirt every other day.” I threw that shirt away the next day, started listening to the Steve Miller Band, and joined the football team.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

The Revelator podcast is now up on Superstition Review!

The folks at Superstition Review just put up a podcast of my essay "The Revelator" that I recorded for them this summer. You should listen to it! You can do that here, and even read along while listening to Gillian Welch's "Time (The Revelator)," if that's your thing.

Against the Eighties: In which I shamelessly lie about my favorite team

In spring of 1988, I witnessed the University of Kansas basketball team winning the NCAA tournament on a black and white TV in my room. I could hear the town explode outside my bedroom window as the whole town of Lawrence flooded into the streets, but I'd played sick that day so I had to stay in my room. The next day, other boys at my junior high school told of coeds on campus running naked around their sorority houses. To this day, I tell people that night was the first time I saw a naked girl in person.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties: In which I get a lesson in race relations

Perhaps because of the clashing cultures of North and South Lawrence, perhaps because we were acting out what our parents said at home, perhaps because we were junior high boys and needed to throw our out-of-control bodies against each other, a series of race-related fights broke out at South Junior High my ninth-grade year. I wanted in on them. One afternoon in the crowded hallway between classes, Brent Tolbert pushed me from behind to get me moving. I told him to meet me in the morning, in front of the school, trying to sound ominous. He looked at me, puzzled, and just said, “OK.” I told everyone I knew that I was going to fight him the next morning, thinking of our jostle as the undercard of some professional wrestling bill. He showed up the next morning expressionless, and followed me out to the side of the building with most of the school in our wake shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” When we got there, he asked me, “You really wanna do this?” I lunged at him. He picked me up with surprisingly little effort, and held me over his head. Then he put me down to his left. I lunged again, he held me in the air again, and put me down to his right. “We done.” Then he walked away. Later on in high school, when I met my birth father, I found out Brent was my cousin by marriage.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties

Against the Eighties: In which I watch TV

It seems everyone who lived through the Sixties remembers where they were when Martin Luther King and JFK were assassinated. People who lived through the Seventies all seem to remember where they were the day Nixon boarded Air Force One for the last time after resigning. Those of us who lived through the Eighties all remember where we were on January 28, 1986. I was in math class when the principal’s voice came over the intercom. She said she had some very bad news—the Space Shuttle Challenger had broken apart and exploded shortly after taking off, killing all seven passengers, including teacher Christa McAuliffe. When we all gathered in the gymnasium to watch the crash together, I remember being relieved. It was just TV.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties 

Against the Eighties Bonus: Madonna!

All the hubbub about the 30-year anniversary of Madonna's debut album inspired me to write this last night and edit it this morning. Enjoy! 

As an eleven-year-old adolescent living in Kansas, my only connection to the burgeoning, wilting New York City art scene was Madonna’s self-titled debut album. Like so many other children of the Eighties, my own early conceptions of sex were shaped by my mediated interactions with her. It started innocently, with a dream I had sometime after hearing “Borderline” for the first time, when I had a dream that she visited my school with her artsy entourage and picked me out to be her friend. Things got complicated when Playboy printed photos in 1985 from her now-mythic 1978 Lee Friedlander photo shoot, and I spent more than an hour at the 7-11 pretending to play the Journey Escape video game while sidling over to the magazine rack, only to be kicked out by a college student working the front the moment I touched the Playboy. And I was spurned when she married Sean Penn in 1986 and rubbed it in my face by dedicating her next album, True Blue, to him. I was secretly gratified when the marriage publicly failed, and wanted to find Penn and hold him to account when I read that he’d beaten and left her “trussed up like a turkey” when she gave him the divorce papers. I’ve since forgiven Penn, but I still haven’t watched the movie At Close Range, which features my favorite Madonna song, “Live to Tell.”

Against the Eighties: In which I troll merrily

After my first year of junior high I had an additional thing to keep me company in my room at home—the yearbook. I knew everybody’s name and profile, what clubs they were in, what sports they played. I examined everyone’s signature, especially the ones who wrote me personalized notes. “Stay cool, Spidey.” “See ya next year, Monkey.” (My nickname was Spider Monkey.) “Hi eat a lot this summer and please lift weights.” “I’m glad you got out of my math class—the smell was getting to me.” I made friends and enemies with people I didn’t even talk to. Now, with Facebook, I can relive this.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties 

Against the Eighties: In which I plan my escape

The town of Lawrence, where I grew up, is considered by most as either the redheaded stepchild of Kansas or the state’s only merit. An abolitionist stronghold after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 with the streets at the center of town named after the New England states the settlers came from, it was burned to the ground in 1863 by a band of mercenaries and thugs led by William Quantrill. After the war, it then secured the University of Kansas (nearby Leavenworth got the federal prison) and is now called variously a progressive bastion and a refuge for aging hippies. Sometime before I started junior high, the Lawrence City Council decided, in the spirit of economic equalization, to bus the residents of lower-income North Lawrence, where I lived, to upper-middle-class Lawrence South Junior High School. My friend Adrian, with whom I used to compare the size of the cockroaches in our respective houses, was permanently scarred. He recently posted on Facebook that he still hates Swatch watches, as that was how the natives separated themselves from the imports. I looked at it differently. That bus commute was my underground railroad.

Against the Eighties: In which I'm busted

I was caught shoplifting, twice. After the first time, I ran away from home. After the second time, when I was caught on Vermont Street running away from the Ben Franklin with a Transformer under my shirt, I was locked in my room every day when I came home from school during the long, cold winter of 1987. Every book, cassette tape, or other item that could be considered entertaining was removed and placed in my parents’ closet. My mom let me out every weekday from 4:00-5:00, before Greg Proctor came home, and ask me how school was that day. It was my favorite hour of every day. She smuggled into my room the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stephen King novels, and a series of fantasy novels involving a dwarf, a bear, and an otter. I hid them in the AC vents. Almost a decade later I stopped reading King, when he wrote The Shawshank Redemption. It was still a little too close to home.

Just added to The List and the Story: Against the Eighties