Laying It All Out There

Chapter One Three Things There are no fat people in Colorado. Or billboards. The Colorado Department of Transportation actually enforces the Ladybird Johnson Highway Beautification Act of 1965. Colorado lawmakers did not give in to the lobbying efforts of the Outdoor Advertising Industry and do not grant the exemptions that eroded the Beautification Act everywhere else. That’s why you see thickets of billboards for lawyers and collision repair looming over roads everywhere else in the country instead of the fruited plains and purple mountains. But the first time you are in Colorado and you’re driving around with Nolan in July of 2016 in his beat-up old Jeep and he asks if you notice anything different, anything missing, you can’t isolate it even though you feel something is different. Then Nolan says there are no billboards, and I am amazed that I didn’t realize it and yet I kinda feel like I did. But I didn’t. Being able to see the mountains in Colorado matters. Beauty by design. Beauty for everyone. CDOT is the department keeping billboards out of Colorado. I don’t know which agency is responsible for keeping fat people out. Or how they achieve their goals. The lack of fat people I do notice on my own, even without the annual evening news segment proclaiming Colorado the healthiest state in the nation, showing footage of lean kids, svelte adults, spry old people, and smiling dogs jogging on scenic trails. Nolan explains that Coloradans are active and like to get out into nature. He goes on about healthy lifestyles, but I stop listening and develop theories of my own: Perhaps Colorado distributes a choice of a bike, a dog with leash, or a snowboard at the border to anyone moving into the state. Or it gives out a set of Colorado active wear: for men, a faded t-shirt and cargo shorts. For women, a t-shirt and leggings, paired with a waist pack to hold keys, a phone and dog treats. These theories settle in since everyone in Colorado seems compelled to bike, walk a dog, slide on snow, or combine those activities in some fashion every day. The way that mountains are the backdrop of Colorado, fat people are just a part of the setting of Texas, where I’m from. Where Nolan used to be from. No billboards at all mean there are no billboards advertising c******s which is what, five months later in the middle of a catastrophic winter storm, I will come back to Colorado for. It is what I will fly to Denver to buy four times in the next three years so I can sneak it back to Texas, where it is not legal. But on my first trip out there, to visit Nolan, I don’t know that yet. On the fourth day of the visit, when I ask why I haven’t seen any m*******a shops, Nolan tells me that we have driven past many. He points one out and I still don’t see it; that is by design too. Colorado has 150 pages of Retail m*******a Advertising Regulations, which prohibit advertising on television, radio, sports events, or pretty much anywhere, other than the store sign itself which can only be a “fixed sign located on the same zone lot as a Retail m*******a Establishment and that exists solely to identify the location of the Retail m*******a Establishment and otherwise complies with any applicable local ordinances.” Also signs cannot use cartoon characters. What that will turn out to mean in practice is that in the first years of the Green Rush, you couldn’t see a c******s dispensary unless you already knew where to look for it, and even then, the odds were off. But that first summer, I didn’t care because I had no idea that I would ever need to go into one. This book is about three disparate things that don’t mesh together. Also, it lacks all subtlety. Like Shakespeare or Star Wars, the subtext is not too ‘sub.’ I’ve taught English and literature at community colleges since the mid-90s and specialize in Freshman Composition One and Two, which is actually an important teaching niche; I pay dues to three professional associations dedicated to just those pigeonholes. My life revolves around getting people in their first year of Higher Ed to be able to read something, figure out what’s being said and what’s not being said, and explain the said and the not-said thing coherently to someone else. Complicating this life mission is that the nineteen-year-olds I teach don’t care, don’t want to be in a writing class, won’t-don’t-or-can’t read, have anxiety, work minimum wage jobs, are mad at their parents, and can’t see why anything matters. There could be worse jobs, like in a gulag in Siberia, working weekends and holidays. Great literature weaves intricate ideas into a fascinating tapestry of humankind’s tentative exploration of itself and the universe. This book ain’t that. So the three disparate things. c******s should be super-legal across the galaxy, like it was for most of human history. Don’t s***k children—or anyone else who isn’t really into it. And one other thing that I forget just now. It’ll come to me. Before I flew out to Colorado four summers ago, I hadn’t seen Nolan in eight years. When we were undergrads at the University of Texas at Austin, his parents lived in Dallas. Then Nolan did his grad school degrees at Caltech, MIT, plus a guest semester at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, before settling down at the University of Colorado Boulder. His parents moved to Corpus Christi because his sister’s husband got a job there, which meant their grandchildren—via Nolan’s sister—would now reside there. Once, during his yearly drive to Texas to visit Ma and Pa de Jaager, Nolan swung through San Antonio. He introduced his Chesapeake Bay Retriever named Fia to my parents who were sitting in their usual spot. One was at each end of the big couch against the wall with the life-sized torso-and-head graduate degree photo of me in cap, gown, and hood, next to the studio photo of my sister Tessa with her two daughters. Fia is shy and vocal; she howled and Nolan translated: Fia was happy to meet us but a bit nervous. Nolan and I went to dinner at Macaroni Grill and talked for hours. My back was to the restaurant and only when it started getting chilly did I look around and realize that all the other customers had gone and the staff was cleaning the room. When we got back, my parents gave a report of Fia’s evening including how long it took her to relax after Nolan left, and how many times she went outside to lay in the yard. I call Nolan every year or so to say hi and keep in touch because I don’t have many friends and I need to maintain some tenuous connection to the few I’ve got, and because this time, I actually needed to talk to him. My best friend in town, Mitch, was too a*s-bustingly busy to meet for lunch and I was agitated. I had yelled at a Comp One class. It was mid-semester; the class was at nine in the morning and full of students with new high school diplomas whose parents had told them to either get a job or go to school. The class was headed for massive attrition, which is professor talk for flunking out. It was a dead class; that’s actually what teachers call it when we have a roomful of unresponsive people. Dead. In high school, students can sometimes get away with not turning in some assignments; in college they can’t, but this group hadn’t figured that out. I’d tried eight weeks of explaining that high school was over, college was different, time to grow up, come on, get your essays in, I’ll give you an extension. Cajoling didn’t do s**t. So Monday morning at 10 a.m. I cussed out the entire class. As a professor, I’d done this many times. By now, I even know when a blowout will be needed during the semester and secretly schedule it in. The I’ve-had-it-with-this-s**t and I’ll-flunk-all-of-your-asses-out spontaneous rant is entirely planned. The sad thing is that it worked, like always. Missed papers materialized and the early morning dullards coffee-ed up enough to keep my Productive Grade Rate from diving off a high-rise. The one man in the class who was over forty watched my performance indifferently. He’d already had a career, having worked up to being a manager in a local warehouse while he raised kids, and now he was pivoting his life around to become a nurse. He saw through the dramatics and sipped bottled water. He had also kept up with his assignments and knew that none of the threats applied to him. Then I cussed out my Composition Two class, it wasn’t planned, I genuinely lost it, and it did not work. Two students dropped the class, and my world went to s**t, so I called Nolan. The Comp Two classroom was a horseshoe set-up: students’ desks were lined up to form three sides of a large square or horseshoe, open at the front of the class. In the middle of the horseshoe, is a rectangle of tables. Students sit around the outside of the horseshoe and also around the rectangle in the center of the horseshoe and I move around the horseshoe or around the inner rectangle or stand up front near the white board, the drop-down screen, and the instructor’s desk. The room was on the side of the building that did not get hit by the morning sun and the class had been erratic all semester, participating some days, and some days acting as if their presence was doing the world a favor, which always strikes me as strange in Higher Education. There’s no law that people have to go to college; you actually have to sign up and fill out forms to come, so why act like an a*s once you get there? That morning they were sleepy and sullen and the one who set me off was Ivy Ruelas. She came in late, sat down at the front of the rectangle, did not take out the literature book and did not take notes, just stared into space, stared at a student across the table who started to squirm, and stared at me. I had disliked Ivy since the third week of the semester. In twenty years, I’ve only had four students that I have truly disliked. One of the four was eventually executed by the State of Texas for k********g, r****g, and murdering at least three women over eight years. During class, two years before they caught him on surveillance camera dumping his last victim’s body in an alley, he told me not to call on him in class again: he didn’t like to be questioned; I better leave him alone. One of the four broke her toddler’s leg, did not get him medical care, and then dropped him off at her sister-in-law’s so she could claim that the sister-in-law had injured him after the in-law rushed the child to the hospital. During a conference with me, that student complained that Child Protective Services should stop taking her kids away. One of the four was a compulsive liar. Ivy was number five on my list of students that gave me the creeps. She had long dark hair and a porcelain doll pallor and made me clammy for two reasons: she had a completely flat aspect, her face always expressionless, but not vacant, and she wanted to be a nurse. She was not interested in medicine or patients and suggested to students around her that patients were kinda gross, she didn’t really want to touch them or help them, but nurses made a lot of money. There was a bonus when you got hired. She had a cousin who was a nurse who had a sporty car, a condo, and partied at all the choice places. You had to go to college to be a nurse, and nurses were rich. I got the same vibe from Ivy that I’d gotten from the serial killer and the child abuser. But Ivy hadn’t done anything; she had never caused a disruption in class other than having her phone out when she wasn’t supposed to. I would ask her to put the phone away, and without a word, she would do so, sliding it into her purse, staring at me. I would turn to the board, and when I turned back, the phone would be out again, while Ivy sat immobile, with a face that was not smug, not challenging in any way, just expressionless. Twenty minutes after she came in that morning, Ivy opened her backpack, spread out a book and spiral, and started working on an algebra spreadsheet, taking up most of her table. I was in the middle of a lecture-discussion-PowerPoint combo. It took a while for the slow burn to rise. Half the students had not read the comments on the papers that I’d spent four days grading; half were watching Ivy work on a spreadsheet unrelated to the class she was sitting in. The third half was struggling with sleep; a guy in the corner of the horseshoe carefully worked a donut out of his shirt pocket. “Get your s**t together on the rewrite!” came out at volume. Heads jerked up, donut-guy paused, mid-bite, and I spun into a ten-minute tirade starting with how there were “people all over the world who are desperate for an education, who risk death just trying to get an education, and here the government will give you money to learn, to improve your life, improve your ability to contribute to society, and all you have to do is to pay attention, pay f*****g attention, write three f*****g coherent papers in four months, which I tell you step-by-step how to write and . . .” Somewhere in the middle of this I caught sight of Ivy filling in a square on her spreadsheet. I took three steps toward her, stood at the head of the rectangle and asked the entire class, “Why the hell would a student in college come to a class and spread their work for some other class out across a table and not pay any attention to the class that they were actually in? How in the hell does it not cross that student’s mind that it’ll piss off their professor?” Without a furrow in her brow or a flush of her pale cheek, Ivy packed the book, spiral, and spreadsheet away. After class, a few students mumbled that they would turn in their rewrites and the guy in the corner apologized for trying to eat a donut. He’d had to work till two in the morning, closing a fast food joint the night before, had overslept, missed breakfast, and grabbed a donut while running to class. He was just so very hungry. The next morning when I got to my office, the light on my phone was blinking. Ten minutes later, my department chair looked uncomfortable as I took a seat in front of his desk. He’s a young guy, early thirties, preternaturally nice and sporting faux tribal tattoos on one arm and a Dallas Cowboys star on the other. Delicately, he asks if there is any chance I may have used some foul language in my Comp Two yesterday. Immediately I say ‘yes,’ too slow to realize that a storm’s a-brewin’. Surprise squats on his face, though whether it’s because I used foul language or because I’m readily admitting it, I can’t tell. “I told them to get their s**t together,” I explain. “A lot have missed assignments, blown the first major paper, or tanked the midterm last week. Those grades have got to come up—” “Two students came to me yesterday and complained,” he sighs. “Two?” Even as I sit there, the idea of blowback has not occurred to me; I’d already reassured the guy with the donut that it was okay to eat in class if he needed to. “For saying ‘s**t’?” I ask. “They said you yelled at the class.” “I did raise my voice.” “Is it possible you used the F-word?” He’s kidding right? “It’s possible,” I postulate, “I may have dropped an F-bomb.” Or eight. He pauses; the conversation has gone foggy for him. “The students said that you made them feel uncomfortable and concerned for their own safety. They dropped the class.” Now it’s my turn to pause. “Who dropped the class?” He gives me their names. The girls—Tina and Daphne—are friends; both sit on the horseshoe directly behind Ivy. “They actually seemed pretty upset, Alene. The tall one,” he says, unable to remember which girl goes with which name, “was on the verge of tears. She struck me as quite religious. I don’t know what religion, but pretty strict, whatever it is. Anyway, she seemed offended, and, uh, verbose. She might pursue the complaint further and go to the dean.” Back in my office I actually do feel contrite, not because the tall religious one might complain to the dean—she never does—but because the girls dropped the class. As a student, I loved learning; I loved being in college, feeling new ideas, the sharp polyhedron shape of them in my mind. As a professor, being able to place concepts, shiny and unexpected in the reach of students who may never have suspected such fresh realms of thought existed was the payoff for trudging through piles of tangled essays and fusty young adult angst. Both girls were both passing—B students—and now I had set them back in their educational journey. And the educational journey thing is what I truly cared about. * So I had cussed out my Comp Two class, and my inner world went to s**t, and I called Nolan. He listened and didn’t say too much, but he never says much anyway. I had already read the first of what would eventually be six anger management books plus The Art of Happiness with the His Holiness, the Dali Llama, looking serene in red and saffron robes on the cover. And I was trying to get back into meditating every day; I had decided I would never flip out in a class again. I talked to Nolan for 70 minutes and started to feel a little steadier, less like an ogre, then thanked him for listening to me unload and asked him again how he’d been over the last year, had he done anything fun, maybe traveled somewhere. “No,” he said, then stopped. Nolan didn’t talk in fits and starts. He spoke in complete sentences, thinking through what he was going to say before he said it, instead of rambling in the dark like the rest of us. “So. I suppose I should tell you or else you will probably be mad at me later if I don’t.” My first thought was he was about to reveal that he’d gotten married and hadn’t invited me to the wedding. And yes, I was going to be mad about that. “I was in the hospital for a month being treated for non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in a sterile isolation ward while they took down and rebuilt my immune system, but I am home now and have been in remission for six months. You need to be in remission for two years before they say you are cured. Well, it is not cured exactly, but two years means the lymphoma is less likely to recur.” I processed a bit. “When did you find out?” “A year ago. About a month after you last called.” “Why didn’t you call and tell me?” “What, just call and say, ‘hi, I have cancer’?” “Yeah.” “Come on now.” We’d already talked longer than usual. Nolan sprinkled in a few more details: he was working from home because his immune system was still weak and he couldn’t be close to too many people yet, and even with health insurance, he had $90,000 in medical bills to deal with. As we were wrapping up, I told Nolan that I was going to come to Colorado for a visit and asked if I could stay at his house. He said yes, which was convenient since I had just invited myself. At the end of the semester, Ivy Ruelas cheated on the final exam. I was not the one who caught her. At the start of each exam, I direct the class to turn off their phones, stow them away and place all bags under the table, inaccessible. During the final, Ivy worked her purse onto the chair next to her, got her phone out, and searched for answers; she cheated quite skillfully and, even though I scanned the class, I didn’t catch her. But the guy sitting next to her did and got pissed off. He was in his late twenties, had already done a stretch in the military, including nine months in Iraq, and still had army hair. He had worked hard all semester for an ‘A’ and planned to be a surgical tech. When he finished the test early, he slipped me a note ratting out Ivy. I nodded, thanking him for his ‘service’ as he left. Ivy still had the phone in her hand, opened to a ‘Free Essays’ web page when I did a walk-around a few minutes later and zeroed out her test. I graded it that afternoon just to see how she had done, but her writing and analysis was a mess; it would have failed anyway. I flunked her on the last day of the semester and thought about the two girls who would have passed if they had stayed in the class instead of taking a principled stand against my berating the lot of them. When I first started teaching in the mid-nineties, community colleges still had room for an esoteric class or two on literary theory. I used to cover the Hero’s Journey: In story traditions around the world, heroes are suddenly thrust into adventures where they have to master self-control in order to gather skills, weapons, companions, and magical gifts to bring home and lead their tribe. Before the journey begins, that person, unnoticed, spends his life preparing, unawares, for the trials he will face the day misfortune tosses him out of his mundane routine. Some small twist triggers the rockslide, like yelling at Ivy or calling Nolan or sitting in front of Mitch in seventh grade. Stupidity is bad, so be less stupid. That’s the third thing the book is about, along with c******s should be growing on everyone’s patio and don’t s***k kids.