De File

I'm probably the last person who should be writing about the link between memory and our sense of smell. As anyone who knows me well will attest, my allergies and the medications I take for them have rendered me insensitive to a vast array of odors. Someone will walk into a room and declare, "That smells terrible! How can you just sit there?" But despite having been right near the source of the offense, I will be baffled by the query.

Having said that, my sense of smell has improved a good deal in recent years. Ever since I finally consented to steroid treatments for my asthma and allergies -- treatments which, it must be noted, I do take protracted breaks from whenever possible -- I have been experiencing moments of olfactory clarity now and then. Suddenly, the keen perception of an odor will distract me from whatever I'm doing and compel me to a deeper mindfulness. Even when the smell is unpleasant, this heightened awareness is a welcome change from my how I used to experience the world,

I'm starting to wonder, though, whether my past was really as aroma-deprived as I believed. Not only am I noticing smells a lot more than before, I'm finding that memories of my pre-steroid days have a way of flooding into consciousness to accompany those smells. Recently, for example, I had an intense, smell-triggered recollection that inspired me to pursue this topic further. I was cleaning up in the front bathroom of my parents' apartment after helping my mom off the toilet and wheeling her into the dining room when I was suddenly transported back to my teenage years in the Washington D.C. area.

The strange part is that even though the combination of lingering smells in the bathroom was not particularly pleasant, it made me recall one from a place with which I have highly positive associations: the Smithsonian Institution. More specifically, as I soon realized, it reminded me of being inside the Museum of Natural History. Not the National Gallery, the Air and Space Museum or any of the other buildings on the Mall. Those smell differently. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more it become clear that many of them have a unique aroma that I identify with them or, to be more accurate, an aroma which I have used to identify them.

Because I spent my those years living in a suburban Maryland house without air conditioning, where the midnight temperature was regularly in the 90s with a relative humidity that often seemed to be approaching that figure as well, I spent as much of the summer as possible in the District. I'd get up early, despite my night owl proclivities, to accompany my father on his drive to work. I would then sit with him for a while in his office while he read the newspaper as he waited for the workday to begin, reading the articles he would periodically pass my way. Then, when public buildings started to open, I would head out on my peripatetic adventures, all of which were planned to provide extended sojourns in buildings with excellent air conditioning.

Since this was the era of the personal computer's ascendancy, I would frequently stop by the showrooms near my father's building at 16th and M Street NW. For a time, I would spend long hours laboriously entering programs into the Texas Instruments machine with a novel color graphics display at ComputerLand so that I could show off its brilliance and, I hoped, my own. Then, when Apple introduced the Macintosh to great fanfare, I shifted my allegiance to the store that would let me have extended sessions exploring its exciting features. I do remember being troubled by the way the latter were idiot-proofed and inaccessible to the sort of coding I was capable of. But the graphical user interface was too compelling to pass up.

These and other computer emporia were characterized by the same bland neutrality that characterized the consulting firms, non-profits and financial institutions in that part of Washington D.C., the "K Street Corridor" that was attracting so much attention in the Reagan Era, when lobbyists were practically celebrities. And yet for all of their deliberate blandness, these places had a smell that I can now recall quite distinctly, one defined by the conflict between hot electrical technology and air conditioning turned way down, a kind of olfactory storm front that made the air prickle, for an aspiring tech-head like possible, with the air of possibility.

When I was really in need of cool-down, though, I made my way to the Smithsonian. Something about the need to ward off decay and the high ceilings of those museums made them monuments to the potential of artificial temperature control. The Air and Space Museum was the best of all. Sometimes I would walk inside and just sit on a bench to breathe in the absence of heat and humidity. But all the buildings on the Mall were attractive to me for their air conditioning. At the National Gallery's West Wing, the marble reinforced the sense of cool. And at the Natural History Museum, the groups of school-age children and rather dated displays conspired to soften the air, making it feel warm without actually being warm.

In retrospect, I suppose the Natural History Museum, being older than the rest of the main Smithsonian exhibition areas, retained the aroma of preservation methods that left stronger, less pleasant smells than the ones deployed in recent decades. And the older ductwork no doubt contributed to this effect, which was never overpowering. My guess is that what I was smelling in the bathroom was similar enough to those traces that it conjured the memory of going there on hot days. I also suspect that the incongruity of the involuntary association, that conjoining of a present to be endured with a past fondly recalled, made the sensation particularly strong and, yes, memorable.

The last week has been overwhelming, especially on top of the exhaustion that the holidays always induce. I know that many of you have gone through situations like the one that we are presently coping with, in some cases worse. So I don't want to imply that our burden is different from the sort that others bear. What I will say, though, is that living next door to a relative leads to an everyday closeness that makes the perception of loss particularly intense.

Back when I was nine, my paternal grandmother came to live with us at our house in Pennsylvania, because she had health problems that made living with her husband impossible. She needed special care, but also relief from the burden of trying to live up to the standard of the good German housewife. Needless to say, he didn't take her departure well, marking the onset of a difficult period in our family life. Although I didn't fully grasp what was going on, I knew enough to regard her integration into our household with melancholy. I was delighted to have her around, but also recognized what her presence meant: the disintegration of a home where I'd spent a lot of time and had many formative experiences.

Someday I will try to write about that time in my life at greater length. For now, though, I just want to note that, when she left to live her remaining days with my aunt in New York City, in the same house where she'd lived for decades, I missed her a lot more than I would have if she'd not come to live with us. I'm reminded of that feeling now because my father-in-law has been such a big part of my life since we moved to Arizona. His relationship with Skylar is one reason. But it's also due to the fact that he and I, who share a reluctance to engage with the world emotionally, have developed a nuanced form of "male bonding" that centers on his big-screen television and the sporting events he invites me to watch on it.

He emotes more around his daughter and granddaughter. With me, it's more an expression of comfort in what we share together. He repeats the same routines over and over as we talk during the games and I listen, rapt, because I need a sense of ritual in my life. While part of me steps back from time to time to think critically about what he's saying and why he's saying it -- he rarely touches upon potentially painful subjects -- I am still able to immerse myself in his compulsion to repeat and identify with the energy he expends beating back the traumas of his past. Each time he gingerly navigates that minefield, I feel like I'm doing the same with my own history.

That tendency I have to live through others -- a picture of my face would be an excellent illustration to accompany the dictionary definition of "vicariously" -- is a knot that I'm only beginning to want to loosen and therefore also a topic for another day. What matters for the moment is that, in missing his proximity, I'm also missing my primary means of managing emotion. I only just realized the depth of the problem in writing that last sentence. Given the degree to which I've found my thoughts transported back to the years 1977-1980 over the past few days, it seems clear that something has been dislodged in my mind as a result of what's going on right now.

Strangely, I keep picturing the stone rolled away from Jesus's tomb, in what seems like a Gustav Doré etching. It's a dark image, but finely detailed, one I recognize as a metaphor for the mental passage I've been making over the past week. I'm not even sure why I'm still writing this. I sat down to try to explain why my father-in-law's grave illness has affected me so deeply, a point I think I've made sufficiently. But I seem to have moved paratactically into other psychic territory. Originally, I had titled this entry "solace." Perhaps this sort of rambling for all to see is itself a form of solace. The fact that I have absolutely no desire to go back and proofread, which was also the case with my entry of yesterday, certainly indicates that, whatever I'm doing here, it's not what I normally do. I'm willing to regard that as a hopeful sign, even if it's one that can only be dimly discerned through the fog of anxiety and despair.

I'm watching the Louisville-West Virginia game right now. It's pretty good so far, largely living up the hype. It's hard to believe that the much-maligned Big East Conference -- remember the stories last year about how it's automatic BCS slot was in danger -- has two teams ranked in the top five. The surprise for me, though, has been my excitement at the shots of the Louisville skyline. I really do have a crush on the place, however strange that sounds. In a way, though, what I like about it is what I liked about my childhood. The Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area of Pennsylvania has a lot of similarity to the Ohio River Valley, despite its proximity to the Eastern Seaboard. Also, the talk of Saturday's Breeder's Cup at Churchill Downs makes me think of those days when I used to watch coverage of the Derby -- my parents never bet on horse races, but love to watch them -- then go outside and romp in the late afternoon light playing across the beautiful Kentucky Bluegrass that filled the acres of open space on our land. I loved that lawn. It's one of the things I miss most about the place. That first week of May, my birthday week, always seemed the perfect time of year there. The grass was at its finest then. Just last night I was explaining to someone that my favorite birthday was back in 1978, when the Derby, which was on my birthday proper that year, featured the first of three amazing races in which Affirmed barely beat Alydar. I can still smell my birthday dinner of Wiener Schnitzel, Risotto Milanese, and fresh peas from the garden, followed by a homemade cherry pie. The stream of consciousness is serpentine as the course of the Susquehanna.

I've spent the last hour poring through past entries in pursuit of a few specific ones that don't turn up readily on searches. And I started to realize just how mad it is for me to make them so coded. I mean, even I struggle to understand their "real" message, and I'm the one that wrote them. Indeed, were it not for the dates attached to them -- I'm a real stickler for chronological specificity -- I'd frequently be in the dark. My favorite discovery so far is this entry from last year, which is like an allegory abstracted to the fifth power. Thank goodness for the irony imparted by the time stamp, which cuts through the layers like the taste of lemon in a bowl of snow.

I was going through my drawer of all the interviews I've taped this evening, labeling inserts for the cases that lacked them -- I always make sure to affix a label to the tape itself -- and came across a few random tapes. One looked a lot older than others. I had no recollection of it. So I put it on. On one side I heard a Hall & Oates song. Could this be my partner's tape? I don't ever recall taping any of their music, which was never high on my list.

I flipped the tape over and pressed play. Instead of music, I heard talking. I recognized the voice too. The man was talking about civil disobedience in the 1960s. He was clearly teaching. Where did I know him from? And then it hit me. I was listening to my favorite teacher from high school, Al Van Thornout. Although the tape is not high quality, his words were very distinct.

I'll need to listen to the whole tape to be sure, but I'm reasonably certain, after having thought long and hard about it, that the tape probably dates from the latter portion of my ninth grade history class, right after he'd presented us with excerpts from Sophocles's Antigone. Since his lecture focuses -- with extreme lucidity, I should add -- on the question of when, if ever, it is appropriate to break the law, my conjecture makes sense.

Besides, I have fond memories of the intensity of that lecture and the discussion he went on to lead in the Socratic mode he brilliantly deployed. I don't remember taping anything in his class, mind you, so perhaps my recollections are not to be trusted. More likely, though, the tape was made by someone else.

Just now I came to a point in the tape after he has paused to allow a student to speak. The student's voice is extremely faint, far from the microphone. But with the volume turned up all the way and acute concentration, I was able to make out most of the words being spoken. I didn't recognize the student in question, however.

I rewound a little ways to see if my teacher had called on the student by name. He had: "Mr. Bertsch." It was me! I listened again. Initially, I hadn't been able to determine the student's gender. Now I sounded like a boy. Given the tribulations of my time at Queen Anne School, however, my initial confusion was remarkably apt.

I desperately want to extract my fourteen-year-old voice from the tape. I'm not sure whether the technology at my disposal will do the trick or not, but I'm going to do whatever I can. At present, the most striking aspect of my comment -- I'm not asking a question -- is my accent. My pronunciation of the word "law" in particular marks me as the product of a mother raised near Philadelphia and a father from New York City. I still bear traces of my linguistic origins today, but they are fairly muted. Back then, there was no doubting where I came from.

The first time I drank a whole beer was at the party after the senior prom. I didn't go to the prom itself, but was persuaded to attend the party -- a long story, that -- at the very end of the school year. And so I found myself drinking five "pony" Michelobs, observing my classmates and their dates -- including the astonishingly hot Sylvie, my friend John's younger sister -- operating under varying degrees of influence, and staying up all night for the first time when I didn't have a deadline.

As innocent of sin as I was, however, I had long nurtured a fantasy of myself as someone with a taste for exotic intoxication. Shortly after I started at Queen Anne School in the seventh grade, I entered a phase in which The Beatles were my sole musical fixation. I listened to their records over and over and I read as much as I could about their career. I was particularly fascinated with the band's psychedelic era, which began in the wake of Rubber Soul and petered out around the time of the so-called White Album.

At some point during the intense misery of seventh grade, I began to picture myself in a boat on a river, staring up at the marmalade skies. That was 1980-1981, the year of the hostage crisis, when the burnt-out shell of the Sixties was torn down to make way for the urban redevelopment plan of the Eighties. But there were still reminders of a time that both frightened and fascinated me. A number of the seniors in the school still looked like the pot-smoking longhairs that had scared me when I was in elementary school and had to accompany my mother to PTA meetings at Palisades High School. And that's because, as I later found out from my friend Roy, they were pot-smoking longhairs.

The year before I arrived, Roy's older brother Glenn had been part of a contingent that held a bong hit contest as a fundraiser for the class trip and didn't feel it necessary to keep that fact a secret. 1980-1981 wasn't that wild, but the Student Council President was a hard-partying slacker that the school's administration grudgingly tolerated.

All that changed at the start of my eighth grade year. A number of seniors were expelled from the school for smoking pot in the first month of school. Suddenly the dress code was being enforced and short hair was the order of the day. But it was that turning of the tide that served as the inspiration for my fantasy. The grave voices of teachers discussing the expulsions, the stricken look of the remaining seniors, the way the scrutiny of the powers that be was now palpably upon all of us -- they turned me on.

Still miserable beyond belief -- or at least what I can believe myself capable of putting up with today -- I began to daydream of the day when I, too, would be "disappeared" from campus. And so, my Beatles phase still in mind, I gradually hashed out the details of a fantasy in which I would be expelled from school for having a trunk full of LSD.

Mind you, I didn't even know what form LSD came in. I couldn't even visualize a trunk of it. Nevertheless, the fantasy persisted, through the ups and downs of the desert floor I traversed in my passage from seventh grader to twelfth grader. In the end, I was able to replace this impossible-to-realize dream with one I could make real, in which I was able to expel myself from the school through the power of imagination, by writing something for the last issue of our school news magazine -- that's what the long story hinges on -- and doing what I could to absent myself from other school activities.

And then I gave in and tried to experience a "normal" high school graduation after all. Instead of disappearing completely from my classmates' lives as I had planned, I found myself nursing those beers -- I still remember how unpleasant they tasted -- and waiting for the sun to rise. By the time I made it home, my parents and sister were gone. I grabbed a blanket and went to sprawl on the backyard lawn, wondering if I had managed to get a hangover or not. I distinctly remember musing on my expulsion fantasy as I lay there, being annoyed by the heat and humidity, blades of grass poking through the blanket and my clothes to remind me why one doesn't sunbathe in a Maryland summer unless one is at the beach.

This guy is also in Wikipedia. I first learned about him because I took a two-semester Honors composition class with his then-girlfriend, with whom I became close. She made him sound really intense. She also complained that her roommate in the dorm, a hard-partying Asian woman, would watch them have sex during his visits to town and then proposition him later when she was in the bathroom.

I once visited the home he shared with his mother and spent time in his bedroom. I got crepes with him, that same girlfriend, and his girfriend's ex-boyfriend in Rehobeth. And then I did it a few more times. I learned about Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Cabaret Voltaire and a number of other bands from him before meeting cpratt, who took over the responsibility of exposing me to unusual subgenres. Once, when my relationship with Annalee was over, but I was still sharing her apartment at 1890 Arch Street, I went over to his girlfriend's place to hang out. He called from Pittsburgh and told her to send me home, because he was worried she might want to have sex with me. She told me this instead of telling me to go. I went anyway.

Later, when he had moved to the Bay Area and was living with that girlfriend, I borrowed a bicycle from them to take to Mendocino on my first trip there with Kim. I gradually lost touch with his girlfriend and, by extension, him. But I'd see him striding down the path in front of Moffitt Library periodically, his long black hair and blank trenchcoat cutting an impressive figure.

Years later, when I got back in touch with his now former girlfriend, she explained to me that they'd broken up not long after I'd borrowed the bicycle. They stayed in touch, but he was bitter towards her. Since he'd become one of the lead programmers at Netscape, though, that bitterness, which was, to be fair, already deeply rooted when I first met him, was tempered by wealth.

In recent years, his name has popped up a few times in conversations with my ex, who now writes about technology and sex and other matters identified with San Francisco. After getting out of the computer industry, he purchased the DNA Lounge in the "SOMA" portion of the City. Kim read at the DNA Lounge once, on a bill that included other performance poets promoted by Stephen Parr, including his girlfriend Danielle Willis. It was a big deal. She read the poem she recited from memory on the night we met. "Say you're 16 and never seen a gun/I mean a real gun. . ."

I try not to lose touch with people, because I fear that I will not be able to reestablish it. At least, that has been my guiding principle over the years. With the internet, though, that fear makes less and less sense with each passing year. Not only does this guy have plenty of press on the Web, he also has a Live Journal that he updates consistently. I can learn a lot about his current interests that way. I can also marvel at the extreme disparity between the list of "Friends" he selected and the list of people who have made him on of their "Friends." Clearly, he is famous in some of the circles that make heavy use of Live Journal. He even has a series of notable quotes linked to his Wikipedia entry, for goodness sakes.

But I'll always remember him as the astonishingly intense and seemingly angry young man who never seemed to trust me fully -- perhaps because his girlfriend admitted being attracted to me -- but who still did a decent job of showing me respect and, particularly on our Delaware trip, a good time. It doesn't really surprise me that he ended up wealthy and well-known. After all, he was programming LISP in high school. Still, it does disconcert me a bit to know all these things about his past that have nothing to do with his present.

I tend to remember too much of other people's lives. Maybe all my years on the margins of social situations made me a little too attuned to detail. As I type this, I can picture the approach to his Pittsburgh house, the way his mother looked when she opened the door, the barely suppressed rage toward her that he made us feel when we were up in his room. But I don't need to know any of this anymore, do I? I think I'll go stare at his home page for awhile in the hopes of dumping the contents of memory once and for all. . .

I'm attached to this identity, perhaps because I can't detach myself from the familar pain it brings me. You know that passage about the toothache? Well, I'm the sort of person who doesn't mind having something to focus on. I remember it well. I was meeting you in the City for that movie Suture of all things -- by the directors of The Deep End, interestingly -- and, because it was at the Lumiere, decided to take the cable car up California Street. And I was in agony.

It must have been that tooth that ended up breaking into tiny pieces on a Heath bar. The break itself happened right before I gave my first conference paper, the one on noise where I was on the panel with Jonathan Sterne and Josh Kun. I kept probing the emptiness with my tongue as I drove through Illinois, further west than I should have been and wondering how I would manage on no sleep. When the news came on the radio that the speedskater who kept losing had finally won the gold medal in his final race I cried. I almost never cry. But I cried that day.

Sitting here in Houston, the hours I have to wait unfurling like a sleeping bag pulled from its stuff sack, I realize for the first time that the tooth must have had something to do with those tears. You see, I'd already turned it into a metaphor. At the time, I hadn't yet read passage or any of the commentaries on it. Maybe I had understood something of that talk in the Maude Fife room, when I was flush with all that vodka from upstairs at Larry Blake's and crammed into a narrow space by the rear door, right next to the Graduate Chair. I'd been out with Greg, Seth, Kristin and others. Danny and Jen, perhaps. Or Mauri. perhaps even Fred.

It's a blur. I was so happy to be included, finally, without Annalee having to be there to legitimate my belonging. So I drank more than I should have and paid the price of having to stand next to a professor who wanted to exchange ironic facial expressions with me, when I was simply trying not to fall over. And yet, that may have been the perfect way to take in the talk.

I'd been there once before drunk, for Annalee's poetry reading with Tom Clark and Gary Soto. That time Hummer had brought in a bottle of something -- Jack Daniels, I think – and we'd passed it around until I could barely tell what was happening up front at the podium. But it's reasonable to assume that some part of me wanted that sense of oblivion, the distance between myself and that world of graduate school I hadn't yet decided to enter artificially enhanced by our naughtiness.

I know, I know, you're wondering what this has to do with you, with us. I guess I'm just trying to show you that there were decisions even then that left their mark on my body. I don't want to be dramatic about it. But the same burden of choice I feel now was already descending on me like one of those giant balloons from the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, a confusing mass of risk and absurdity. I needed to cut my way out, somehow, yet ended up cutting my way in. Where was I? The tooth. As the cable car headed up Nob Hill the pain was so intense that I could barely see. I had no idea how I would manage to sit through a film.

"Especially a European film," John Waters just added. The thing is, it wasn't a European film, even though it felt like one. Here's what I need to convey. As I walked up Polk to meet you at that café, I was telling myself not to say anything about my tooth. You could tell something was wrong. I made faces sipping my tea. But I didn't confess my situation. And that's why I'm thinking about that day, the strange reversal of black and white in the film, the role that pain plays in confirming one's sense of self as I sit here across from a Starbucks in George Bush International Airport. I didn't really understand the concept of suture back then. Sometimes it confuses me even now.

What I'm starting to realize, though, is that the term provides a way to think about the way I relate to myself through my feelings for you. Or not. I could go on forever without getting any closer to the point. Still, it helps to recount, to check my sums. We saw Suture in 1993. That was a hard time for us. But there were good things too. Your Dennis Cooper interview. My piece on Seattle, which was the one where I found my voice. Our trip to Glacier and Canada. Those day trips to Marin and Sonoma. One great concert after another. The movies.

I think it's easier to remember pain than pleasure. "History is what hurts," as Frederic Jameson writes. In spite of that, we have the dates to remind us that there was good to go with the bad, if we try to see past those points of injury. I still have a hole where my tooth was. Until I started writing this, I hadn't thought about it for years. I just ran my tongue over it.