A Pilgrim’s Digression

Everywhere I go, I feel like I have come home. Driving up through central Pennsylvania this afternoon, through small towns with Scotch Irish names like Clyde and Armagh, I thought to myself, I could live here.

Green fields of corn and brown fields of soy stretch at the feet of green mountains; highways cut straight through those mountains, so that when you look ahead, you see a straight road running downhill, then up again.

Then, as you come down from these mountains to a town, you may find a lone strip bar or adult video store on the outskirts. As I am from West Virginia, the marketing of sexual vice always makes me feel at home. I like to see towns that cater to certain elemental needs, such as the need to gawk at naked women in the company of other men.

I am also an eager collector of strip bar names, and I found one good one and one bad one today. The good one was almost too good to be true: Streakers was a bar just outside of the town of Butts. The other, the crudely named Climaxes, was near Dubois.

Whoever came up with the name Climaxes gets no points for creativity from me. Not only is it awkward on the tongue, but it makes one think of sticky, icky floors.

Home. Everywhere I go, I think I could live there. Everywhere I go, I meet writers.

I was on the road much of the day today, driving to Ithaca, New York for a conference/workshop (non-literary) at Cornell University. After I checked in at my hotel and attended the mandatory “meet and greet” of the other workshop participants, I went out to walk around Ithaca and find a place to have dinner.

Since my meals are being paid for by the American taxpayer, I wanted to try something new and expensive. I have never eaten Japanese food, so I set off to find a Japanese restaurant. It was only about seven o’clock, but it was closed. So I went looking for a French restaurant. It was out of business. So I went back to the hotel and asked the desk clerk if he could recommend an Asian restaurant, and he suggested one called, simply, Asian Cuisine. It served Korean and Chinese food.

So that’s where I ended up. How do you tell a “real” Chinese restaurant from an American Chinese restuarant? In an American Chinese restaurant, the dinner music is a kind of annoying Asian music, with female singers screeching in high-pitched, foreign voices; but when you sit down, the server gives you a fork to eat with and if you ask for chopsticks, they have none.

In a real Chinese restaurant, the chopsticks are on the table when you sit down, and the music is American pop.

I ate in a real Chinese restaurant tonight. I asked the server to show me how to use the chopsticks, and she obliged; I also asked her to recommend a dish for me. She recommended Korean Sesame Chicken, which at first I thought was a joke; all Americans must order the Sesame chicken. But she insisted, saying that it was her favorite dish, too.

Meanwhile, she brought me an appetizer, four large shrimps with a small dish of heated soy sauce for dipping. Then, the writers came in. Three women writers who are attending a seminar or workshop at Cornell, also. How do I know?

Because they sat right behind me, and whether I wanted to or not, I had to listen. I only heard two distinct voices, so I assume only two of them did the majority of the talking. Let’s call them Joyce and Ann. They were young, perhaps early to mid-twenties and dressed more like Graduate students than Undergrads.

Ann: “I was a little nervous when she said to write a page introducing ourselves to the class. I didn’t expect to start writing right away. It was embarrassing to write about myself.”

Joyce: “But what did you think of Lee’s piece? She was weeping! Could you believe that? Weeping over her own writing?”

Ann: “Oh God, could you believe her? I detest writers who wear their mental illness on their sleeve.”

Joyce: “Her therapist must have told her to cry whenever she felt like it.”

Ann: “I wish Helen had just told her ‘Look, Lee, the whole workshop is not going to be about you, so get a grip.’”

Joyce: “I can just tell, she’s going to be one of these needy people who hog all the teachers’ time. It just makes me sick.”

After awhile, more people came in the restaurant, and it got harder and harder to hear the writers. I was sitting near a window looking out on the street, and so instead of eavesdropping, I people-watched.

Ithaca reminds me a lot of Morgantown, in terms of the ratio of hippies to ordinary folk. Part of the downtown area has been closed to automobile traffic and turned into a sort of outdoor mall. The street has been bricked over and fountained and park benched until it has become a market and commons area, probably deliberately in imitation of the Greek agora or someplace similar.

Scruffy-looking kids and other nefarious-looking people hang out here. I remember from my days in Morgantown, you could never quite tell if these kids were students, or just the kind of shiftless people attracted to college towns because of the availability of drugs and sex.

As I went to dinner, for example, a group of them were sitting on benches on the common area, one of them lying stretched out on a bench, and as I passed, I noticed how dirty his bare feet were. The toenails were black, and while they might have been painted, I suspect they were just filthy. The rest of him was certainly in dire need of a bath, so one can assume his feet were rather unclean as well.

Another pair of bare feet I saw tonight belonged to a young woman pushing a child in a stroller. I saw her as I was sitting in the Chinese restaurant digesting my meal. And yes, she was also pregnant as well as barefoot. A young man, also barefoot, walked beside her with a baby in one those papoose carriers that “really good fathers” wear on their backs. An unlit cigarette dangled between his lips. Another barefoot child, who looked about three, tottled along beside them.

Later still, as I sat there in the restaurant window, a barefoot young woman of about twenty did cartwheels down the sidewalk and across the street. She would walk a few steps, then do a series of cartwheels, then walk a few steps, etc.

Soon after, a group of kids walked by dressed in their native costume of black jeans, black tee-shirts, and backpacks. One of them wore a black Homburg that reminded me of a green Homburg I used to wear in college.

I picked my hat up at an antique shop in Morgantown, so I always felt like mine was a vintage piece of clothing. It had a red feather in the band, which I left in. The young man I saw today had removed any feather from his hat, if it even came with a feather.

I wore my green Homburg everywhere, with casual dress and with a brown sports coat also picked up at the antique shop. With my thick neck and shaved skull, I must have looked like a Bavarian leprechaun in that awful hat. But it was my one affectation, perhaps my only one in the entirety of my undergraduate career.

I paid for my meal with my Government travel card and began the walk back to the hotel. Along the way, I saw:

• A young woman wearing red streetwalker boots, black stockings, and a kind of blue maternity frock that came down just below her buttocks. She did not appear to be pregnant. Her hair was streaked five different colors. She looked like the loose type I would have been hot for when I was an undergraduate.
• A heavy young woman wearing clunky, black witches shoes, black and white striped stockings, a black mini skirt, and a heavy-looking, long-sleeved black velvet shirt. She had bright, dyed red hair in pigtails, and I thought to myself, “That’s what Pippy Longstocking would look like, if Pippy Longstocking had an eating problem and went to a major Eastern University where she fell in with other kids who like to wear heavy, black clothes on especially hot days.”
• A Buddhist monk, or a pretender. One or the other. Probably a pretender, since he was smoking a cigarette.
• A number of frumpy, middle-aged women with excessive makeup who stood around on the sidewalk as if waiting for someone. Never having seen a prostitute before, whenever I see women of a certain age and a certain hard look about them, I always think they must be prostitutes. Prostitutes must be uglier and older than the movies make them out to be.

Returning to a college town nearly ten years after I left college for good, the effect is disorienting. I see myself in shop windows as I pass, and I think, “God, I am so out of place here. I feel so old in my khakis and polo shirts with a good job and money in my pocket.”

If I am critical, it is only because I am conscious how I don’t fit, maybe never did fit. I am also curious how the economy of a college town works, something that never occurred to me in my younger years. Every restaurant I considered for dinner tonight priced meals starting at no less than nine dollars. All the shops had a sort of rarefied, hippy atmosphere, but I doubt any of the strange people I saw milling about the streets actually shop there. They buy their clothes in thirft stores, and their food from co-ops.

In a way, I feel like the whole city is a big, phony show, put on just for me and others like me who come to this town with money to spend and memories of our college years to shed a tear or two over.

There are, of course, professors who spend their whole lives in an environment exactly like this, probably trying to convince themselves they are still as young as the students they teach. They take their students out to bars to show them they know how to drink, just like the young folk. These professors live in a city where inordinate numbers of people ride bycicles and play chess on the commons and smoke clove cigarettes. But I wonder if they, too, ever feel out of place, as if their experience today is not quite as authentic as it was ten or fifteen years ago, when they were the kid dressed all in black and smoking a sullen ciggy in front of the vegetarian co-op market.

Well, I just want my Homburg back. I can afford a new, clean one now. Maybe I’ll stop in one of the fine men’s clothiers in downtown Ithaca tomorrow and pick one up. Or perhaps not. My days of risktaking are probably over.