Marvin Center Days, Part 5 of 13: The time I let some homeless people sleep in the theater, and I stayed overnight to watch them

(Embodying an overlapping blog-entry theme: Against Mental-Illness Clichés and Canards)

With a brief talk about some ideas of the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard

[Edit 3/19/13.]

This story is an example of what you are capable of doing when you’re young and idealistic. But it was less naïve a “feat” than it may seem to you at first. [Note: See Part 12, March 18 entry, "Prefatory note 1," on the philosophic disposition from which I write on such a "charitable endeavor" as is recounted here.]

Shortly after I first came to GW in September 1980, I was struck by one thing you couldn’t miss on the streets: homeless people, who were also what you would alternatively call vagrants, bums, hobos…. Transient might be another name, but that could refer to a person who was in some kind of fundamental life transition (to put it nicely) and not necessarily a stinky, mentally ill homeless person living in failure mode on the street.

They lived on the street, and passed through the GW campus, which was essentially arrayed on city streets in the Foggy Bottom area. They were filthy, might wear a weird combination of clothes, might talk to themselves…. I still was periodically doing drawings in those days, as I had during high school at times; I drew one or more pictures of homeless people—they were like a wonder, a mystery to fathom.

In some sense, they made you think what often may seem trite: “There but for the grace of God [or chance, or strength of personality] go I.”

Some became familiar faces. You saw them come around every so often…. I remember a fellow student talking about them, and he said one of them was called “Jabber” by some students—not to his face, I would assume—because of, you guessed it, the way he talked. It does not surprise me some students had a more snarky way of talking about them than I did, but that is beside the point here.

How the decision suddenly rolled up

By the end of 1984, I had been ensconced in my staff MC assistant manager role for more than half a year. I had been associated with the facility, so that it was in my bones, since October 1980. I had graduated from college in May 1984. I had a confidence, not a strutting egotism, than came from getting somewhere after years of steady, dogged, hopeful work.

So when the weekend for the second inauguration of President Ronald Reagan came along—I never voted for Reagan, and never would if he was alive and ran today—I was in some sense ready—motivationally, in terms of what I was willing to risk, and regarding what resources I had at hand—for what I did when, that weekend, it was so colossally cold—for Washington, D.C.—that the inauguration was canceled! Reagan received his swearing-in indoors. (I think it got to be 10 degrees or less outside, Saturday night into Sunday morning. This was not impossible to deal with for me, but of course for Washington, D.C., it was an anomalous, bitter cold snap.)

I, of course, was working that weekend at the MC with my usual hours, including Saturday and Sunday nights. Now, I have recounted this situation at least once—I adapted it to a chapter of my first novel The Folder Hunt, which I was laboriously writing at the time. But I think I recounted it later, nonfictionally, too. Here I am just going on memory, and won’t try to recount all the details.

I realized how bitter cold it was going to be, and by January 1985, roughly speaking, I was not as naively agog/sympathetic to the homeless as I was more likely to be as a freshman four-plus years before. But I knew they were as much a part of the scene, generally outside the MC, as ever. (On rare occasions, one would come into the MC, usually to the ground floor, to rest and get warm, use the food vending machines, and so on. That provides a story about another of our managerial duties, dealing with homeless people if/when they came in, and obviously they could theoretically be a bother to the students in some way, but this was not nearly the problem that other non-student presences could be, such as the bathroom gays.)

Realities gamely encountered

When I finally decided to go see if some homeless people would like to spend the coldest night during inauguration weekend inside the MC, it was a rather brave, unusual decision for me to make, but I believe I felt it was justified given the extreme cold weather out, which was the worst I’d ever seen in D.C. Then, the process of going outside on my lunch break to do this was an interesting exercise in step-by-step stuff that was amenable to the fictional “existentialist” treatment—with one-after-the-other phases, depictions of moral wrestling/such, and accounts of somewhat dicey personal interactions—and thus it got in The Folder Hunt. Because it was so cold, and I had limited time, I limited myself to locations where I knew I’d seen some homeless men camp out for the night—one in the entry area of a large office building, another in the “atrium” of a Metro station, and so on—and this meant traipsing over several blocks.

In at least one case, all the homeless person wanted was food. And I took his order, after saying (I guess) where I could get the food (it was Bon Appetit [sp?], a hamburger place right near the MC). He wanted a (I believe, regular) hamburger…. (Later, when I brought him the food, he opened up the burger and said something like, “No catsup?” A lesson in human nature. Bon Appetit’s burgers were great, and I don’t remember why in this case there was no catsup, but maybe you’ll think of the expression “Beggars can’t be choosers.”)

Two men I finally got to come with me had been standing in front of the Metro station I mentioned, which was on K Street. (K Street is sometimes referred to in news reporting, as if it is a big, almost notorious lobbyist location in D.C. To me, it has just been part of the business district of D.C. as I knew it then.) There were actually four or so homeless men there, but two didn’t want to come, or didn’t answer my offer. The two that came fit what you’d imagine they’d look like: one was a longish-haired, bearded sort, and I think he wore something, with all else, that hung on him like a cape. It seemed strange, as far as how I might have looked, to be leading them back to the MC. I had described for them a building where they could spend the night; they probably had no distinct idea what the MC was—as we quietly walked along the street-lighted city streets with, I believe, new snow dusting the sidewalks.

I had them stay in the theater, which was not being used for any purpose that night (it didn’t just house staged plays). The theater seemed a good location because, in part, it kept the homeless men segregated from areas of the MC where students were. I’m sure I showed the men where the bathrooms were.

Staying overnight as “innkeeper”

I elected to stay overnight at the MC to keep an eye on them. There were rooms accessed off an upper floor of the MC that ran along one side of the upper walls of the theater—they were mostly offices of the drama faculty—and they (maybe two did) had little windows that looked out into the theater. I could stay in one of these rooms, where there was an uncomfortable little couch to try to sleep on, and occasionally I could look into the theater to see what was up with my charges.

They sat for the longest time in some of the seats, as if they were waiting for a play to start. I think eventually one or both lay down on the floor to sleep.

One had food with him, and at one point he took it out and ate it.

Andy Moskowitz was the theater manager—he had started in this role as a student job, I think, and later got the job as a staffer, similar to my becoming assistant MC manager for the weekends. On this particular night, I don’t remember if I assumed he’d be out all night, but at one point he did turn up, inconveniently for me. I don’t think I was able to “head him off at the pass”—to catch up with him and explain the homeless-visitor situation—but I remember talking to him at some later point, and he was surprisingly good-natured about it. He made some comment about one of the men having chicken with him (I think Andy was concerned about a mess resulting from the chicken).

I stayed the whole night and I think I was unable to sleep at all. I checked on the men through the window repeatedly, and eventually they got some sleep, as I recall. It wasn’t much but it was something. They got more than I did.

The next morning, around maybe 7-something or 8-something—when, as it happened, students were starting to come into the MC (again, not into the theater) for a normal day—I went down to the homeless men to prepare them to leave.

One thing I’ve always remembered is that, as I led the men out a side door of the theater, the bearded one—who was older than the other man and looked in some surface sense like a Cecil B. DeMille Jehovah—winced at first as he felt the bitter-cold air outside, then turned and gave me a hearty nod/smile of thanks for the accommodations. The other one didn’t say anything, as I recall. In fact, through all of this—my having them in extended over eight or more hours—we never talked at all, or very little (which talk perhaps comprised my telling them where facilities were, like the bathrooms). I think I left it up to them how much they would talk to me. But the bearded one’s gesture of thanks was such that it touches me even today. By which I mean that it doesn’t matter how “down” one is in life, how outside the social pale one is, a person can still show humanity in an intimation of mutual accord/thanks for such a thing as a stay overnight out of the bitter winter cold. I didn’t expect this.

Looking toward a general ethics lesson

At some point, one coworker who was a student manager, whom I told about my plan for this, referred to me with friendly joking as “Saint Greg” or such. I didn’t want such a remark, whether you called it a compliment or whatever. And I don’t think I would have again done a similarly bold thing at the MC, whether or not for humanitarian reasons. That is, having those homeless in, and staying overnight as I had, was risky along several lines, but I thought it was a moral risk worth taking. Sometimes you do this, and may never opt to do it again, because while the risks at one point seem acceptable, as a general practice you realize it doesn’t make a lot of sense. So it becomes a learning experience, and you do it once for the moral value, and then don’t do it again, but it may lead you to find some more “socially well-provided-for way” to do such a thing again.

This could be said to refer to my way of exercising charity in unusual circumstances, which in some sense encompasses (but is not limited to) my work in VISTA in 1986-87, and my involvement in a support group in 2001-03. I think it all falls under the Kierkegaardian notion of the (occasional) “teleological suspension of the ethical,” which is an idea that derives from what some might consider that philosopher’s rather rigid ideas of what characterizes variously moral kinds of behavior: there is the ethical, which means defining what is right to do by certain hard rules, and then there are things we opt to do out of faith, which don’t follow rigid rules but which we still do out of what could be called a higher calling. Through his books, Kierkegaard has various discussions that address all this, which I’m not prepared to lay out; there were his notions of the “knight of infinite resignation,” the “knight of infinite faith,” and the story of Abraham sacrificing his son….

If this sounds like something from a seminary, in a way it is, but Kierkegaard was an existential philosopher (which he only got characterized as after his death), and this all has more relevance and intellectual challenge for young people forming their values and place in life. When you’re an older fool like me—whose life seems, as time goes on and somewhat embarrassingly, to revolve increasingly (more than he has expected) around everyday things like coffee and chocolate and an occasional good laugh—it seems hard to dust off these old philosophic concepts to explain them to someone else. But in sum, my helping those homeless was me, as a young man, engaging in a sort of “teleological suspension of the ethical” on behalf of a couple of poor men who could use a night out of unhealthily bitter cold (I give thanks to professor Peter J. Caws for first teaching me about Kierkegaard; here is his GWU Web site).

(The “teleological suspension of the ethical” seems like a concept that Woody Allen could make comically-adapting hay out of, in a joke involving something done rather off-color by a male with a female. In fact, some philosophic concepts can be bowdlerized this way: Jean-Paul Sartre, who could apparently be a bit of a goat in his sexual life, referred to some of his loves as “contingent” versus what in normal philosophic parlance would, as a logically complementary concept, be the “necessary.” I think this set of premises, obviously tied to slovenly practices, may have caused some form of grief for his paramour Simone de Beauvoir. It’s been a while since I’ve read any of Annie Cohen-Solal’s bio of Sartre. By the way, Professor Caws also wrote a book on Sartre, published in 1979.)

I also recall talking about the homeless-stay stuff in a staff meeting, when I (generally speaking) came to account for what I had done. I don’t think Mr. Cotter was entirely approving, but I don’t think he was simply disapproving either. I think he understood that my doing this was conditioned in good part by recognizably freakish weather. I think a number of us had a decent enough brief set of comments about the matter, and then we moved on. I doubt I wanted to explain a whole lot my reasoning for having those homeless in.

Marvin Center Days, Part 3 of 13: The personality and job-capacity nature of “C.J.,” Carolyn Jefferson

An early lesson in the “sales type” that students typically didn’t warm to

[Edits done 3/17/13. More edits 3/26/13.]

Subsections below:

Simple career-derived sources of my attitude toward C.J., and of other student managers’ attitudes

The nature of the MC, and C.J.’s job as I understood it then

C.J. as a sales-oriented type

The noxiousness of the sales mentality, as I’ve understood it in recent years, outside the MC

The MC’s mission, oriented to service, limited sales nonsense

“C.J.” is an interesting topic. She was probably the most puzzling or criticism-attracting functionary in the MC administration at the time, and a number of us underworkers—whether student managers, a staff lower-level weekend manager like me, or more long-term staffers—made critical comments about her (with or without varying levels or types of humor) as if she was a perpetually erratic character. Today, I think I understand more of what her job was about, but that’s because what she was supposed to do wasn’t something I was apt to fully understand due to how I’ve pursued my career over many years, and more generally it wasn’t something younger (student) workers were apt to understand due to their dedication to some notion of authenticity and to attention to detail.

Simple career-derived sources of my attitude toward C.J., and of other student managers’ attitudes

Fellow student managers’ views of C.J. would intrigue you, but I have to approach this from my angle first.

How did my own career direction affect my view of her? First, what I’m talking about wasn’t a consciously chosen direction: I mean (over the very long term, including well after my MC years) being a supportive “player” in a service or media-related entity whose preferred, and “defined by others,” capacity was largely in attending to behind-the-scenes, craft-oriented details.

When I started my “participation” in the arts in high school, particularly in “Stage Tech” as the department/semi-club was called, I wanted to participate in the putting on of a school play, but I knew I didn’t have the stuff for appearing on stage; partly for very entrenched personal reasons (which I would grow out of, in part), I wasn’t “front and center” material. And I grew quickly to value the role of working behind the scenes—helping construct scenery, moving pieces of scenery around during a play, helping with lighting details. This taught me an invaluable lesson in understanding that it took some noodges in the back, in the shadows, who did a lot of the dog work to make a show happen.

Anyone can appreciate this today when he or she sees 10 minutes of movie credits and realizes it took a lot of unsung craftspeople and behind-the-scenes types to make it possible for Daniel Day-Lewis or Meryl Streep to appear on screen at all. (And all this description of what I learned to value is something I can say in retrospect; by no means did I think, in 1982 or so, that I wanted a career mainly in technical or craft-level support for some form of the arts.)

For a wide array of student workers, working at the MC tapped the same propensities and sense of values. When you worked as a student manager, you provided a lot of technical backup for events that were happening there: meetings of clubs, karate groups practicing, dances, concerts, what-have-you. You had to set up a P.A. system, provide lights, attend to the fact that the arrangement of furniture that was specified in plan-like material you got at the start of your shift. This material was usually written out by Jim Pritchett, whose job description defined that he worked under C.J. Because all the student managers—most of whom were just students working a part-time job there, and most of whom had no intention of pursuing any sort of career at the MC—had to focus on, and came to value, this attention to detail, that shaped the set of values from which they would opt to criticize anyone in upper management who fairly routinely might have not come through entirely with their work in the issue at hand. And this explains how students’ authenticity and details-oriented sides came into play in criticizing C.J.

The nature of the MC, and C.J.’s job as I understood it then

Another factor that determined C.J.’s work was the nature of the MC. As I started to explain in the first installment of this series, the MC wasn’t just a student union, there only for serving students. It also hosted outside groups—regularly convening groups from outside the GWU system, but who may have had participants who were GW students (which I think, though I’m not sure, was the case with the several karate groups that regularly practiced there). It could host groups that had conferences, and even such an entity as a TV network that would host a live TV event there, as happened in 1985 with Ted Koppel’s special “Viewpoint” show that occasionally appeared under the umbrella of his regular Nightline show. So along with being a student union, the MC was a sort of conference center, or “convention hall” of a sort, that sought outside “customers” as well as served the students. This is roughly speaking, based on my experience of the place for years as an underworker. Whether this mixed function was used to help bring in revenue to the school (not just the MC), I’m not fully sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me. [Update on this last sentence: I can only speculate on the revenue-generating side of the MC, but it's possible some of it was for paying off the mortgage that could well have been taken out to pay for the construction of the MC.] 

C.J.’s role, as I was aware of it at the time, was as a sort of liaison of the administrative office to a variety of groups (within GWU or not) who might require certain accommodations—some arrangement of technical support, a use of a particular room or facility, or some measure of publicity or the like—and bring requests for these to C.J. in broad terms. C.J., in turn, would pass on the requirements to Jim Pritchett, who would essentially determine the specifics of what was needed. For night events (and even day ones, which I had much less exposure to), it was up to us student managers and assistant managers to execute the specifics’ being in place. [Update: Another problem was more within the details-oriented side of C.J.'s department: simple errors in scheduling of events. On occasion, two events could be scheduled for the same location at the same time, which was an obvious, embarrassing error. And we night managers were often the ones who had to rectify things here, when two groups might have been waiting to use the same space. This sort of problem was part of the rationale for getting a computer to handle scheduling at the MC. I'll say more about this in Part 13.]

In the abstract, this all seems pretty simple. But it’s amazing how many times this did not come off as it should. The most frequent problem, as I try to summarize a phenomenon from about 30 years ago (my memory slightly rusty), is that C.J. neglected to tell Jim Pritchett something, or didn’t follow through on some “customer” request, or made a “customer” some promise that couldn’t quite be fulfilled as requested (I’m a little unsure about this last one, but it seems to make sense in the context). Sometimes it was Jim P., working as he typically did during the day, who tried to iron out the problem if he became aware of it in time. But at least as frequently, we ground-level nighttime managers, when a “customer” group was there about to start an event and was looking for X that wasn’t there, had to work out the problems that C.J.’s negligence or mistakenness had wrought.

I remember that a number of us low-level types would talk about, “What [in general terms] did C.J. do? What was her job?” In such instances she was regarded as someone who bumbled a lot more often than one would have liked in her position. As a personality, she could be charming and good-humored, and other times she could be angry and cross. I think there was an extent to which you didn’t know at times whether you’d get the friendly C.J. or the angry one. She had certain quirks such as to preface her response (comprising a set of comments) to someone else, whether in a meeting or not, with “Two things:….” She was not an intellectual giant, but when she was on her game, she was capable enough. As I said in the first part, she was a single mother, so this may have played a role in some of her performance (though it wouldn’t have excused major errors).

It’s possible racism on the parts of a very few coworkers played a bit of a role in how (white) underworkers regarded her, but I don’t think this was terribly significant. One of the glorious things about the MC was that there was a wide range of ethnic and racial types there—who were working there, or present as students or others using the facilities—and we were in a cosmopolitan city like Washington, D.C., so there were generally no racist attitudes. In a university setting, it was a place in which to make the most of “It’s a small world, after all,” and realize “Everyone can get along.” And several staffers of the MC administration were Black, as was C.J. But also, some of the criticism of her, as I recall (it was usually “forbearing” or the like), came from her fellow Black administrative coworkers.

C.J. as a sales-oriented type

Today, I would say that what I did not appreciate about C.J., as a function of my level of understanding as a late-teen and early-twenty-something, and as I have learned about from witnessing many times since (at numerous employers long after the MC), is that she was a sales type.

If I were to say that a sales type was the following way—given to broad descriptions of what she can deliver; apt to give warmly delivered promises; presenting dazzle; really all about welcoming customers in (“and we’ll worry about the details later”)—this all would describe not only the sales mentality I’ve seen for years now, but it would describe C.J.

She had, you might say, a sort of impresario aspect to her role, even though she really was supposed to make arrangements for MC “customers” in terms of facilitating arrangement of specific provisions for them (AV support, furnishings, etc.). At times she seemed like a superfluous player in the administrative staff—though she would never have granted that—and yet she could be rather imperious asserting herself in her role, and sometimes showed that she didn’t have a (full) sense of humor about herself while others had one about her (others didn’t show this to her face, generally; and actually, some of the humorous attitudes were not the sort of thing she would have shared anyway). (It’s funny: as I write this, it seems to spell out a certain pattern of psychological deviancy, of a type I’ve encountered a little too often in the media world.)

There are two types of professionals I’ve witnessed in action in many instances, and never wanted to be: lawyers and salespeople. Lawyers comprise an interesting area: I almost went to law school—I was accepted to Boston University Law School and even got a partial scholarship to go (I say today still, the best career move I ever made was not to become a lawyer). And not only have I seen lawyers in action at town meetings many times, but over many years I have had to do my own legal work, in representing my interests in unemployment hearings, traffic court, municipal-government situations, a state Superior Court domestic abuse issue (where I was a witness), and a Superior Court lawsuit, among other things. I have written legal-type documents (such as letters with rigorously referred-to exhibits) to state government entities and federal government entities. I think it’s very important as an American citizen to learn how the legal system works to the extent you need to for your own purposes.

But I’ve also found that lawyers can be aloof, self-serving, self-congratulatory, and in general not “there” as much for someone like me who has encountered the type of problems I have repeatedly in New Jersey. So I both learn how to “be my own lawyer,” and respect the system and its ideals and purpose, and also have long-developed and solidly based contempt for how badly some lawyers can act sometimes—which in my mind happens a little too often in this society.

Lawyers, when they do their jobs right, are something to respect. My view of salespeople is much different. I think you have to know you want to do sales from an early age. It’s like becoming a minister or some kind of arts person where dedication becomes a major anchor for your pursuing the field at all. But, of course, the way sales roles are so often structured, a salesperson gets “immediate gratification” for making a sale: make a sale, and you get a commission, percentage, or whatever. No one does sales on shaky contingency or as a speculative venture.

And to me, a lot of sales types are glorified party animals and prom king-or-queen types, or not-so-secret drunks. I feel, if you are such a person and want to be in sales, go ahead. But I would never become that—and the older I get, the more I realize you can’t go into that field after you’ve been in the financially self-depriving minister-like field that I’ve been in so long.

The noxiousness of the sales mentality, as I’ve understood it in recent years, outside the MC

What is especially disturbing, to me, is not simply a matter of “to each his own” for a career: it is a matter of the tendencies or prerogatives of one style of work’s improperly infringing on those of a very different one. Particularly, what I mean is the sales mentality shaping an area of science—yes, science (such as in health care)—where craftsmanly care and strict attention to detail are paramount.

It has only been in recent years that the sales mentality’s being inimical to the type of values that my own decades-long line of work centers on has become particularly conspicuous. If you abstract the worst tendencies inherent in sales types vis-à-vis the “noodgy” values and prerogatives of a copy editor/proofreader, they would be these: (1) the tendency to make big promises, in very broad-brushed, sunny-skied terms, of what can be delivered to a client; (2) an almost pathological inattention to details, especially when attending to those details is crucial to what you would think the client would expect as implied by the big promises; and (3) a sort of contempt for the craft-level person who has to deliver in relation to all the details—an attitude that implies the craft person is an expendable little trained squirrel who might complain about the ludicrously unrealistic position he or she has been put in by the broader process put into motion by the big-promises sales type, but who “can always be replaced,” or who “fails to see the big picture, and [implicitly] remember the big numbers of money the account represents (which are so important to the company), and the imperatives of staying within budget”—all sorts of things that a details person—who has been in the field probably much longer than the more “newbie” sales types—can readily appreciate.

Where do you see this kind of cavalier, proto-delusional mentality among sales types, which seems to flout the good sense and gripes of the detail-level person? In medical advertising and promotions.

Here’s a metaphor from a whole different area. One time someone told me the semi-tragedy of how race horses are bred (whether she knew this as factual or it was just her interpretation as a layperson, I don’t know, but she seemed to know horses): the horses are bred to have lighter bones, so they can carry their weight at high speeds more easily, but of course they are also meant (bred and trained, I would assume) to have strong muscles. You get into a situation where the strong muscles and light bones are at cross-purposes, and this puts the horse at greater liability to break a leg or such. Hence the sad eventualities of race horses’ breaking legs seemingly more easily than we might expect.

Well, a medical-ad/promo firm is about the same: it is “bred” to have “strong sales muscles,” but it goes “light” on having (for given projects, in the crush of sudden arrangements) a realistic number of details/craft-level people, or in budgeting enough time for them to do their work; the net result is a tension (sometimes on the bitter side) between the sales types and the craft types. Guess whose prerogatives always seem to be defended, and who always (in the nearer term, at least) “wins”? The sales types. After all, these firms are all about sales, not about crafting durable, reliable products.

The MC’s mission, oriented to service, generally limited sales nonsense

The MC was not like this, in the sense that we managers who had to provide for student groups, outside organizations having special events, and so on knew that the details of what we did were essential, not frivolous. For student workers, being able to get the hands-on work done to criteria was about as expected and necessary as being able to bus the table if (in a random restaurant) you were a busboy, or serving the ice cream if your summer job had you do that at the shore. The Marvin Center was a considerably higher-tech, busier type of student job.

C.J., also, wasn’t so cavalier and contemptuous of us lower-level workers as sales types could be (as I would find many years later) in non-university, purely commercial advertising/promotion firms. I think she knew that she was as much “about” being part of the team that provided back-up for events as were those of us who set up the equipment, etc.

But her personality and her job as she saw it (both per her bosses and her own way of defining it) were about broader issues, and about “making a sale with a client/customer” in a sense. And in that regard, I understand her more now; but boy, there were still a lot of problems that emanated from her to us assistant managers, and this sort of problem I’ll return to when I discuss why I left the MC in later 1985 after about five years associated with the place (not counting two summer vacations).

Marvin Center Days, Part 4 of 13: The Gay People’s Alliance and their Halloween party, among other colorful occasional events

[Order of entries is interrupted to bring you this edition. Part 2, with important bracketed editorial notes at its start, is viewable here. This entry is hustled out to orient people to what some of my “possibly touchier social-moré” agenda is here. This entry may be edited in coming days. I ask patience; my logistics are a bit complicated. Some edits done 2/22/13.]

There were many interesting—well beyond the humdrum—events that happened at the MC, whether periodic or one-time. The guitarist Robert Fripp (of King Crimson fame) once held a class-cum-concert in the third floor Ballroom, which was recorded for an album that was released in, I think, 1986 (with the title or artist name featuring “The League of Crafty Guitarists” or such). On another occasion, Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, running mate of Walter Mondale (who himself was running for president in 1984) appeared at an event. Another time, a live TV show was produced in the theater.

But, to a periodic event of a certain interesting sort…. 

I am not a member of the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (GLBT) community, and I don’t consider myself an active exponent of the community, but I am tolerant enough of them. I am not super-well-versed in their history—so when I give some here, it will be merely a sketch as a preliminary to my real area of interest, some colorful anecdotes. I have a cousin who revealed himself as gay to myself and my sister in an interesting situation in 1984, which I won’t recount here. I’ve known other gay people—some were in my grade school class, while I might not have known them to be gay until years later—and of course numerous workers at the MC were gay.

In 1984, the Stonewall uprising in New York City was about 15 years in the past. The 1970s saw increased liberalization—in societal attitudes and in laws—toward gays. Billy Crystal portrayed a gay character on, I think, the Norman Lear show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and the worst that could be said about this was that it reflected Lear’s liberalism. Of course, some people with retrograde attitudes regarding gays could always be found then, as today (remember Jerry Falwell and his political pitch). But by 1984, most students who would attend a private university—especially in a city, Washington, D.C., that had such a gay subcommunity that it was called by some “the San Francisco of the East”—would tend to be outwardly liberal, or tolerant, enough about gays.

There are three areas I have to talk about, which require this introduction: the parties of the Gay People’s Alliance at GW, which really only provide some amusing and sympathetic enough stories; the AIDS epidemic, which relates only tangentially to my other two topics, and which was beginning as an issue in these years; and the most squalid story that I have to tell about the MC, which, as bad as it is, is still a valid part of the “package” of my MC stories, at least to offer an important and somewhat onerous fraction of my work that went on for many months there: the bathroom gays.

In relation to this last issue, which I will discuss in a separate blog entry, I would note that the parts of Bob Spitz’s biography of The Beatles that came out a few years ago that deal with the group’s manager Brian Epstein were especially eye-opening, in terms of the squalid conditions and violence that Epstein was subjected to in the sexual area of his life. It would seem that the environs in which he figured in 1960s Britain were pretty medieval in terms of allowing homosexuality—maybe it was illegal there at the time?—and his getting involved with shady gays for sexual reasons seemed to carry as much risk of hideous violence as anything more positive. This would seem to have gone hand in hand with, much more broadly, the more general phenomenon of how gays in the city, in the U.S. as well as maybe elsewhere in the world, have been relegated to, or consigned themselves to, seeking trysts in YMCAs, bathhouses, and so on, with whatever level of legitimacy in the specific situations there was attached to this.

When it came to gays trysting in the public men’s rooms of the MC, this was a situation that was at once a threat to health (or at least to peace of mind) of anyone in the immediate environs and perhaps to GW students’ more general sense of well-being; legally questionable if not downright illegal; and fogged with a sense of “you didn’t know what mess you’d have to contend with” if there was a need to deal with this on the part of you as a GW manager—both student managers and staffers at the MC dealt with this—or you as a member of the huge Security force at GW. When I talk about it in depth later, I may seem to be “anti-gay,” but I am not. What I am “anti-” in this connection is at the ways a certain subset of gays used those bathrooms in those days.

The Gay People’s Alliance was a wholly different matter. The GPA (they may have changed their name at GW by now) was an upstanding group at GW—run by students and with students as among those the group served, in some good part, at least most of the time. They would hold occasional meetings, or lectures, or the like, some (I seem to recall) at the MC. I don’t recall now just how frequently they held meetings there, or what the lesser ones were like, though some kind of rare educational lecture seems likely. But what long stood out among us MC staff, and were more famous more broadly, were the Halloween dances that they held without fail.

These were usually in the Ballroom, which was on the third floor, and which (per fire-regulation-type designation) could hold about 300 people, if I recall. Very often dances were held there (movies were also shown there, by the Program Board), and we managers brought out the “disco system” for the dances—the big turntable/amplifier system.

The GPA’s Halloween dance was probably the most colorful and high-profile a dance that was held at the MC on a regular basis. But this was mainly because—and I don’t mean anything negative about this—not only did local students attend, dressed in typical Halloween costumes perhaps, but also gays from the broader community attended, dressed in all range of ways. And as far as I know, they never posed any kind of threat as the bathroom gays did. And among the array of people who attended—I always had the feeling these were people from outside the GW student community, but maybe some of them were not—were an assortment of drag queens.

I mean, they were the real McCoy. You saw some high-toned-looking female turn up, dressed to the nines, and then you said, “Wait a minute. That’s not a female!” And there were a number of them.

They were remarkable because they in their appearance—to a straight like me it was just an eye-opener to see, not something to pruriently, uncomprehendingly “ogle” as in “Lookit the queer! On my goodness!”—were more flamboyant and remarkable than the kids who came in more typical Halloween costumes.

There was one year that there was some controversy surrounding the GPA dance—it was probably 1984—and I can’t remember what the brouhaha was about. I think it might have been that some local student group was going to protest the dance, but I don’t remember why. Every other year the GPA had their dance, there wasn’t an issue that anyone outside the group “formally” brought up. This night in 1984, a TV news crew from a D.C. station showed up.

Mr. DeGrasse, who was well versed in what the GPA was about, did not want to go on the third floor at all that night. He said, not ashamed or embarrassed to say so, that he did not want to be accidentally photoed by the TV crew, because if his church congregation saw him on TV, they would not approve, or would pose him some acute embarrassment he didn’t want.

I myself wasn’t eager to get into the range of the TV cameras, but I had to go to the third floor anyway, because with such a big dance, with so many people and the potential for some minor trouble associated with whatever the controversy was and the presence of a TV crew, I had a perfect reason to be there as the “security-related pair of eyes” we managers had to be. This was one very typical aspect of the many aspects of that job. And I recall seeing some TV crew person or two, but I didn’t think I got photoed.

But some day or two later, a friend at the Info Desk told me she’d seen me in a shot from the TV report on the dance (and most likely I would have been seen with my radio on my belt, looking “official,” so it wasn’t as if I’d have been mistaken for a reveler). I was surprised that happened—that I’d been photoed (much less had not ended up being edited out; I was once interviewed by a TV news crew in Clifton, N.J., in 1994, but the interview wasn’t used, but a shot of me walking was).

As I said, the GPA was an upstanding group, and that one 1984 episode with the TV crew came and went, and it wasn’t a big mess to deal with or report on, as I recall. There were much more definite messes in other situations at the MC during my time there.

Marvin Center Days, Part 2 of 13: Becoming a regular staffer, and occasional “reactions” to my regularly filed reports; and a profile of Mr. DeGrasse

This is the last of “tedious job-description” entries; fun anecdotes are coming

[Part 1 is viewable here. Edits done 2/22/13. More 2/27/13. More 3/7/13, especially after reviewing an early-1980s diary.]

[Note 1: I wasn’t sure if Mr. DeGrasse was still alive when I wrote and posted the first Part of this series—darned Internet, I don’t always think to troll it first thing, but it shows you can research even something like if Mr. D’s still alive (I’d done this a few years ago and didn’t find anything definitive then), and very recently it showed he appeared to be still alive. He is about 80 now, apparently—and his wife, who I’d forgotten is older than he, is also still alive. So I will delete a passage below on the off-chance that people he knows, or maybe his congregation if he is still working as a minister, might see these entries. I will explain more why I do the edit when I come to where the passage was. Also, if you find an Internet representation of Mr. D showing the g in his surname as lowercase, that confusion about whether it was uppercase or lowercase existed in some paperwork even in the 1980s when I worked with him, but it is indeed uppercase, as I found from a letter he sent me in 1988.]

[Note 2: Another thing I might make a prefatory note about is why, in the first Part, I identified the number of homosexuals on the administrative staff as I did. Mr. Cotter is deceased, and I don’t imagine he has survivors who would object; Zak Johnson I don’t think would object;  and as for Jim Becker, whom I was least close to of these three, I am not sure as to whether he would object, but the following may provide a basis for him not to object. This identification, done in a very cursory way, helps show the culture of the MC workplace as it was then (which, as far as sexual orientation went, was liberal enough), and which I and close associates there (those of us who were/are straight and talked about it at all) didn’t object to. How it is relevant will become evident when I turn in a late Part in this series to my detailed, emotionally nuanced look at coworker Andy Cohen, regarding whom a preposterous accusation by him of sexual harassment, colored by certain 1980s assumptions, has stark relevance to some issues today. It also fits in to a more complex story of his substance abuse. Andy, by the way, is also deceased. His whole story is a major focus of these MC blog entries, and will come in due time.]

Becoming a regular staffer, and occasional “reactions” to my regularly filed reports

The nice thing about talking about my job at the Marvin Center is that I started at more or less the bottom—the game room—and ascended to the very junior “student manager” level in January 1982—and worked my way up. There was no suddenly landing of a gig in a heedlessly (if not recklessly) finessed way via a placement agency, and no coming to a media job where you find that unusually subjective and benighted perspectives by others often hold court, especially where some coworkers start leaking insinuations/opinions as if you’re not qualified to be there, despite what you know is your long, relevant past experience, which is often decisively more substantial than theirs.

As a “student manager,” I started out as any student manager did, learning the ropes. I did three semesters—one in my sophomore year, and two in my junior year. Then in summer 1983, when I lived in the Washington, D.C., area for a summer for the first time, I worked at the MC then, and also worked a second job, with the Charles E. Smith [property management company, whatever the rest of the name was]. At the latter job I did low-level maintenance-related work at buildings that housed parts of the Patent and Trademark Office in Crystal City, in Arlington, Virginia. That was a busy summer. There were two weeks, I think, where between both jobs I worked about 80 hours each of the weeks, along with weeks of lesser hours (the average that summer might have been 45 or 50 hours).

By my senior year in college, fall 1983 and spring 1984, I had impressed senior staff at the MC enough that I got a raise in pay (I think I asked for this one, as to its amount anyway; previous, small raises might have come automatically); the amount I got in my last two semesters or so was above what student managers usually got. (It was $5 and change an hour, which may seem tiny today, but that was high for that kind of work in those days. By the way, one of my first jobs [in Vernon Township, N.J.], involving bussing tables, paid $2.01 an hour before tips; tips usually brought the hourly pay above minimum wage, which I think in 1979-80 was still less than $3 an hour.)

Through early 1984, I wasn’t rolling in dough; I had college to pay for. I didn’t live high on the hog; for one thing, I was still in the dorm system. For work in summer 1982 in New Jersey, I’d bought what turned out to be a quite-crappy 1975 VW Dasher; I’d brought this to D.C. in fall semester 1982, but this turned out to be a big mistake, given all the mechanical problems it had. By, I think, the end of spring semester 1983, I took it home (in N.J.) and permanently parked it in my driveway at home. Thus, if not in summer 1983, certainly by spring 1984, I didn’t have a car in D.C. I walked and used the Metro—all I needed.

And eventually, starting in later 1984, I would have student loans to pay off that would ultimately take nine years (until 1993) to finish with (of course, I’d moved back to New Jersey in 1986). But as “poor, working student” lives went in 1984, my deal wasn’t too bad. When I hear about student lives today, for those who get student loans—in terms of their financial load after graduating, even accounting for inflation—their deal often sounds distinctly worse than what I faced (though I think each generation’s members who have to work to pay for part of college feel they are earnestly pursuing a tough enough [if not worse] uphill climb that is peculiarly their own).

Incidentally, a note should be made on what being a “student manager” or even a staff “assistant manager” meant. I never saw this as especially “managerial.” It was surprising how even people you worked with rather closely never understood this. I remember one fellow worker at the Info Desk, with whom I chatted a lot, commented late in my many-months dealings with her that my experience as a (student) MC manager set me up for later, more big-time managerial work. I never thought of it that way, nor did I want the job to prepare me that way. The MC work was very much side work you did when attending college, but I am also equally quick to say it wasn’t simple, frivolous student work like serving ice cream or waiting tables (which themselves could be substantial enough). There were many duties that fell under the umbrella of being a student manager, especially if you made an effort to really increase your realm of what you looked out for and did.

As we will see in certain anecdotes, a lot of the job entailed, or devolved from, keeping your eyes open for unusual problems. (If people wonder why I keep so alert to the host of unusual things that can go on even in editorial offices, there are two reasons: my personal proclivities; and the fact that my most significant jobs have more or less required this.) The MC was largely about serving student needs, and being a hospitable environment for them. Yet, because the facility was on city streets, and had a fairly high profile within the campus, it was subject to a wide array of possible problems, some of which involved borderline, or completely, illegal behavior conducted by people who didn’t belong on the premises. We student (or staff assistant) managers were often on the front lines of catching some of this, and often could refer it to GW workers (or to outside help, like the police or fire department) whose jobs were more suited to these issues (e.g., the Security department could be called to tend to the more serious issues).

When I think of how much was expected of me (and fellow student managers) as a student worker in the early-to-mid 1980s to deal with some of the problems there, including but by no means limited to a possible phoned-in bomb threat or 15+ people getting stuck in an elevator, requiring the fire department to come in, or potential violence or threats to health posed by people who didn’t belong in the MC, it boggles the mind how trivializing people can be with me, in much more recent years, at media firms, as if I wasn’t someone who has spent about two-thirds of his life in a work history that has been studded by situations that made demands that, I think, some younger coworkers today would barely be able to field even a fraction of.

            Nightly reports—less humdrum than it may sound

One plumb part of working as a manager—especially if you were the senior person working a given shift—is that you wrote the report on how the night went that was submitted to Mr. Cotter (and was copied to others) for that shift. I was doing that by my senior year (not every night I worked—often a more senior manager did it). It certainly would be a regular duty of mine when I started working as a staffer in May 1984.

The Roland Curry anecdote. One funny episode is, I think, from my senior year. I was working along with, supposedly, a senior student manager named Roland Curry, who was a big Black guy, friendly (and capable enough as a student manager), but a definite frat boy. He could have his irresponsible times.

A little aside: I was never a frat person, but the frats were conspicuous enough on campus, and some were rowdier than others. It’s a testament to how exploratory I could be that I was once at a party at Roland’s frat [no; from my early-1980s diary, I find that the location was some young woman's (rented) house--she was a worker at the MC game room, I believe--and it was on or just before 5/28/83, shortly after the end of my junior year. Several of us there were people who were associated with the MC or, in the case of a Jessica, would be in the future; on Jessica, see my first entry on the MC, toward the end], while I was not the type to really take to that sort of thing [this was generally true from a "preference"/personality standpoint, even though my early-1980s diary shows that I drank a fair amount that night]. I remember being in his frat’s rather seedy rowhouse (or townhouse, however you want to dignify it per what it used to be) [this was true of Sigma Chi's house, but that isn't where I  was on/about 5/28/83], and Roland, who had seemed to have such a reputation as a party animal, was sitting on a couch, quietly drawing some girl and/or others who were there, with others doing the more expected drinking of beer and chatting [true, according to the 5/28/83 diary entry]. I think the frat house in question was that of Sigma Chi (the Greek letters looked sort of like “EX”), which I think was populated mainly by engineering students [true in general, but not where I was ~5/28/83]. Another one of them was a student manager at the MC for a time, and he was a distinctly more noticeable party animal, though he looked rather nerdy. It always seemed paradoxical to me that engineering students, who typically could be such grinds, could have one of the most notorious partying frats on campus.

Anyway, during the MC worknight under discussion, the two managers on duty were supposed to be Roland and me—and he left the premises and was away at a party most of the night, or the whole shift. This was atypical of him. By the shift’s end, I closed things out as normally would be done—there even were some anomalous things that happened during the shift to deal with, and later write about in the report—and I dealt with the anomalies (not a problem) and wrote the entire report for the night (though, as manager with seniority, Roland would have been expected to).

The funny thing was, he came in I think early the next morning, and before the regular daytime staffers showed up, took my (typed) report and hand-wrote it all over as if he was the one who had done it. And he used all the characteristic wordings or attention to detail that I had used—I believe he copied it word for word. He did this because he had been expected to be the senior student manager there that night, but it was remarkable—him copying me word-for-word while his reports were characteristically very sketchy and truncated. None of the senior staffers seemed to pick up on this, even though the report didn’t sound like him. And I wasn’t particularly offended by this ruse myself. I believe when I later told about it to my friend Andy Cohen (more on him in another, late entry, as I said), he was quite amused. Roland Curry, I think, left the job that year, because he was graduating. (I don’t know if he was an engineering major, by the way.)

Another student manager who, like Roland, represented the “older generation” who were slowly leaving (due to graduation or other reasons) was a Marlon Jahnke (I believe that’s the spelling; he was Jewish, and his surname was pronounced YON-kee). He belonged to the same frat that Roland did, I believe, but he was a little more responsible. I mention him because he’ll come up in a more social-observation connection in a later entry.

The “tone of reports” issue. As may not surprise some people who have known me in more recent years, though my personality as a worker was different in the 1980s than now, I approached my reports in a sort of serious-minded way in which I hashed out—didn’t shy from being frank about—issues that often meant that some daytime staffer had left us night workers in the lurch. Another type of problem was where some unforeseen bizarre stuff happened (that wasn’t necessarily the fault of daytime managers) and we night managers had an uphill climb to field it. Mind you, I wasn’t one apt to shy from fielding crises—never have been—but, in the reports, where we had to tell of unusual developments anyway, I always expressed being angered or flustered. Over the longer term, I don’t merely make “complaints that can’t be acted on”: I always try to think of my complaints as about something there should be little or no excuse for not fixing, though what some of the MC reports’ recipients seemed to get a hair across their ass about was the tone I used in discussing the problems.

Further, the key thing here was that I usually retyped my reports, toning them down in the process. (Even with that, I was an editor.) Still, I got occasional feedback from higher-ups (mainly, or maybe only, Mr. Cotter) to the effect that I should “tone down my reports.” This happened both before and after I became a staffer in May 1984. My usual response, even if I didn’t say it to the higher-up opining, was that “My reports already are toned down. (You should have seen the original draft.)”

(One reason that seems apparent today, though I might not have thought much about it at the time, or even might not have recognized it, is that GWU administrators who were, strictly speaking, outside the MC and, pecking-order-wise, above the highest level at the MC [which latter were Mr. Bell, whom I never had issues with, and Mr. Cotter just below him] might have seen the reports as a routine or occasional part of their job, and MC administrators [like Mr. Bell or Mr. Cotter] didn’t want to be embarrassed—as set up by reactions from the higher-level outsiders—by some suggestion that there were the types of objective troubles that I talked about or the “soreheaded mouth” in me that was talking about them. I have long thought that the source of the problem here was the actual problems that I [and others more or less at my level] fielded at the MC, and this was regarding not so much them in their anomaly but the fact that measures that could have been taken to reduce or eliminate them seemed never to be opted for by higher management. We’ll come to this issue again.)

I didn’t think I struck people as a cranky or opinionated pain in the ass, but at a Christmas party we staffers had in December 1984, out at a restaurant a few blocks away (a nice affair, I remember), everyone was given gifts—I don’t know if there was a system for picking what for whom—but what I got was a book that collected some of Andy Rooney’s newspaper-column essays that was published that year. I got the message—I sounded like a bit of an Andy Rooney in my reports. I was a little surprised by this, but not offended.

I don’t know whether to say this reflects that I am the same person capable of mouthing off today as I might have been then, but I can tell you that my sense of my life circumstances in 1984—despite what frustrations and occasional depression I faced (all of which arose in my personal life, and which were so “kept under wraps” that my novel The Folder Hunt was a way of showing how much of a “quiet desperation” type I might have been considered)—was definitely one of being in more of an “up and coming life” than I may be seen to have lately. You could say that I knew I was in a luckier and more hard-work-based place than I’d been some years before, but the whole situation looks more as I describe it here only in long retrospect.

The cranky person you hear from today is the model of me that’s had a lot of mileage put on him, and has every right to give a squawk and some other sign of being a “beater of an old car,” though I try to express humor too. In 1984, I had a sense of having worked hard and long from about 1976 and the start of high school to graduation from college in 1984. If I seemed “going beyond what should have been my bounds” in grumping then, well, I don’t know if I had much less right to do it then than I do similar now. But I definitely was over 25 years younger then.

A profile of Mr. DeGrasse

One of the most memorable people was Mr. Wilfred V. DeGrasse (yes, he capitalized the G). He was a short, stocky Black man born in one of the Caribbean islands—maybe the Virgin Islands. From what I heard, he had been a chief petty officer in the Navy--I couldn't remember (but a 10-year-old manuscript affirms this is correct). His somewhat loud voice was attributed by at least one of my fellow student managers to his having been a sort of military man, but I think that was just his style. (I’ve thought of it more as an instance of a short person being more apt to be loud, which may sound oversimplifying, but it’s interesting how often that sort of association gets brought up to help “explain” someone, and not always by rather simple-minded people.)

I originally said I wouldn’t be surprised if he was deceased. He was about 50 in 1984, and had rather troublingly high blood pressure. Well, as I said in the editorial note up top, he seems to still be alive.

He was the night manager during the week, Monday through Friday. Just about every student manager, if they got a shot at working nights, shared time with him. He had been at the MC for maybe 10 years when I first started working as a student manager in 1982, and he had his routine and preferences, and it was the nimble, energetic students who fielded the could-be-anywhere, fluky, and spontaneous problems out in the building, and Mr. D, as he was called, was more apt to not be out amid the building rabble/activity, or only passed through on occasion. I remember him as being more apt to be camped out at his desk in the administrative office, which we student managers generally accepted readily enough.

Mr. D always wrote the reports when he was on duty. He was methodical and, you could say, rather like a military man with this. Sometimes, in a given night, he voiced concern that he was late getting to his report (and for a lot of it, he took info fed to him from us student managers regarding what we’d dealt with during the night), as if it was a taller order than we students would have seen such a task.

In my intro to this series, I said that Angela White, a student who worked at the Information Desk, called him “Snake in DeGrasse” for certain flirtatious behaviors he did with young women at the MC. I am opting not to say anything more about this. I’d originally drafted a full paragraph here—not meaning to “achieve any justice” or be “mean” or anything. The flirtation thing was enough of an issue to be discussed to an extent by various people at the time, but today, given changes in societal attitudes, specifically all the ways people are seeking to bring former priests, coaches, and so on to account for past sexual indiscretions, I can confidently say I don’t think Mr. D’s rose to this level, and I personally have no beef with him on this.

Anyway, he was married, to his wife of many years, and she couldn’t have children for whatever reason, which fairly deeply disappointed him. Some might find this a little indiscreet to tell, but I think it adds an important aspect to a fair picture of him—and I offer this as a poignant fact without seeking to posit any excuse or explanation for him on some other score. (When I aimed toward becoming a writer more than 30 years ago, I never would have expected the minefield we seem to have today of possible objections from different people in trying to do balanced character studies. We’ve become a society of people who like to lie about themselves and feel entitled to threaten litigation or something other unpleasant “comeuppance” on those we accuse of “revealing what they shouldn’t,” and we writers—especially who blog—seem to have to content ourselves with having to reassess our careers and consider audience tastes more than ever before.)

Mr. D was a minister, as I said in my intro. I recall he sometimes prepared sermons, or such, when at work (just as some of the rest of us occasionally did stuff “outside the realm of normal work” when we were on duty and had free moments).

He was a decent enough man. In spring 1984, I was in need of a means of non-auto transportation to get to and from work, with my new home being a rented house in Arlington, Virginia, which housed four of us tenants (three, not including me, being law students). He sold me a 10-speed bicycle—which I had so long, eventually bringing it back to New Jersey, that I only finally disposed of it in the mid- or later 1990s maybe, after I stopped using it a lot in 1990 or 1991, when I started driving so much, due to my New Jersey (and editorial-work) lifestyle. It eventually just rusted up, unable to be fixed, after being housed unused in my cellar for a long time. I took it apart and put its pieces out for the garbage. I regretted that. Bicycling is good exercise.

After I moved back to New Jersey, there were times in 1986 and 1987 I was desperate for help from former employers in the form of letters of reference. On a specific request in early 1988, I eventually got a letter promising such from Mr. D. He was very genial with the idea—he wrote a letter saying he could serve as a reference. He humorously reminded me of a time I threw (across the office) one of the fancy Motorola walkie-talkies we typically used in our jobs there (while he added that new ones had been bought that worked much better). Those radios were a mainstay of our work, and they required fancy handling of batteries (in recharging them) and dealing with the quirks of individual radios (there were always problems, like certain ones not receiving or sending at certain times, or batteries not working right in one). We also learned on-air protocol (such as using “10-4” for “yes” or “OK”; “Did you copy?” for “Did you get that?”). I had thrown the radio, in the episode he mentioned, because of some problem the thing perpetually had, which never seemed able to be fixed. The funny thing was, those were very solid, analog-era radios—I don’t know why there were so many problems with them (even when they were sent out for repair, more than once).

On the positive side, I think Mr. D referenced something else in his 1988 letter: my picking up slack for him in a way, which happened more than once. The most important thing I remember was not something I felt was in especial need of recognition for. One night he was feeling especially bad with his high blood pressure, and he lay down on the couch in Boris Bell (the director)’s office. I think I said I would keep an eye out, meaning if any people showed up who shouldn’t see him lying down, I would tip him off. What I did do was check in on him midway through his rest to see if he was OK. He had said he felt a sort of shifting (of liquid in his head, so to speak) when he moved—he was having that bad an episode. He must have lain there for a couple or more hours. I handled work matters without trouble. I think for practical purposes I was the only manager functioning in the building that night, and it usually needed at least two (with one typically a staffer, the other a student). He was genuinely thankful for my watching out over things while he rested. I felt it was no problem.

In those days and at that common-sense place, when people had passing health issues, we could look out for each other without much hesitation. In more recent years at publishing and advertising companies, I’ve found that the lack of common sense about such things is remarkable—as if, by some nightmarish transportation, you ended up in North Korea by mistake, and you had run out of excuses or words to use to get across some elemental facts.

Movie break: Lost In Translation (2003), Part 2: It’s a dyadic dance, not a “safety dance”

Particularly: The position of Bob Harris—is he a dirty old man? And the dyadic nature of generation-spanning, brief romantic liaisons: Let’s grow up, critics

[The first part is here. And no, this does not really refer—in some “other-shoe-dropping way”—to some recent workplace-related issues, though the day for that may be soon. Sorry if this entry seems a little diffuse. More economical stuff coming. Edit 2/27/13.]

Subsections below:

The start of my blaming Charlotte

A lesson from the Monica Lewinsky situation of 1998, and the relevant male “exemplar”

Sketches of theories of why young women flirt with men twice their age

The moral positions of Harris and Charlotte showing their sides in the denouement

Weakness of Charlotte’s side of the story doesn’t undercut Harris’s appeal—but the story is also one of a dyadic dance, and the “visitation of value”

Further reading

Seeing this movie for the Xth time since I first saw it in the theater in 2003, I would say that, for its importance to the story, Scarlett Johansson’s performance as Charlotte is the weakest. This may or may not be attributable to how director Sofia Coppola wrote her part and/or directed her.

Johansson has had a fairly illustrious film career for the past decade-plus (some could say maybe she’s been more the beneficiary of luck than landing opportunities based solely on talent), but here, while still pretty young, she seems like a not entirely socially adept, yet earnest enough young woman—who drifts through the Japanese environs, taking in (tourist-style) old temples and a lesson in flower arrangement and such, not unappreciative of beauty and cultural difference.

Meanwhile, she nevertheless has a sort of “emotional affair” with a man twice her age. In terms of the sheer personality the two actors bring to their roles, Harris, played by Bill Murray, seems to bring a lot more than does Charlotte, in terms of colorful expressions, humor, and reflections of life experience. (He also shows what an aging actor can do when blessed with “basset hound eyes”—which, as we know from the example of Rep. John Boehner, don’t always endear us to their owner.)

In a way, this confluence of very different sets of personal liabilities-and-assets is what you would expect from such a “May–December” romance. The young woman brings youthful idealism, wonder, and a “who cares about boundaries” open-mindedness, and the older man brings a sort of moderating, humor-inserting capacity borne of experience (and maybe a somewhat troubled sense that the young woman’s love-related hankerings need to be gently nudged in a far different direction, without blunt offense given).

The start of my blaming Charlotte

If Johansson’s Charlotte—contrary to what the film shows—brought a lot more personality, and a sound sense of pain and of really trying to work her way through the teeth and claws (mixed with fun) of life—even while she seemed to go overboard in pursuing her youthful agenda—I might be willing to excuse her for how she stimulates this fleeting relationship. But I feel that, amid her apparent shallowness, she’s more to blame here than Harris.

Now Harris, of course, can be blamed too; his wife is often enough in touch with him by fax and phone, seeming a nag with her redecorating project, and her voice—to the extent it comes through on the soundtrack—seeming to have the stiff impertinence of a naïve, presuming upscale housewife. Meanwhile, he knows what he has—quarter-century marriage, loving kids at home, and a rare kind of career (with all its gross compromises)—and he still risks it hanging out with the young Charlotte.

But I would primarily blame Charlotte here, because she is just starting out in a marriage—she has a husband with a career, which is remunerative enough (actually, is simply the type) to come with the ability to travel abroad; and she is college-educated. What is her “damage”—to use a term from the film Heathers (1989)—that she starts gravitating toward an unconsummated dalliance with Harris? In a way, you could say she is all the sillier for seeming a star-struck type in terms of linking up with a man who, per the story, is an accomplished star.

But in a way, blaming one individual is beside the point. As the film seems conscious enough of, this sort of fleeting relationship is one of spontaneity and a dyadic quality. Indeed, without wanting to seem I have an agenda regarding some real-life issue here, the trick with these sudden dalliances between people a generation apart in age is a matter of a two-sided phenomenon. This is no “safety dance,” but a dyadic dance. Amid these particular people’s jet-lagged, respectively personally dissatisfied states they are in, a sort of romantic interest suddenly wells up. A semi-Dionysian “imp” starts calling the shots. The two hang out, chat…eventually kiss. It happens from both sides, welling out of the needs of each, but also just “coalescing out of the air between them.”

A lesson from the Monica Lewinsky situation of 1998, and the relevant male “exemplar”

The dyadic, or contextual, aspect of this sort of thing can’t be overstated. It annoyed me years ago (1998) when, in the heat of all the news reporting on the Monica Lewisky affair, some news reporter would suddenly get on her high horse (I believe it was a her) because it had been suggested that more than Bill Clinton was to blame for the affair. Well, in my view, of course he wasn’t the only one! Monica Lewinsky was, too! In fact, if you look at the whole thing in detail, you could not unfairly, at times, blame Lewinsky more.

I mean, we do criticize Clinton, because as occupant of the type of office he was in (aside from the expectations implicit in his marriage), he should have known better than to do the kind of “animal” things he did with Lewinsky (remember the stained dress, etc.). But she was a sine qua non to this situation, too. In fact, even as its negative ramifications started to ensnare her, she could be criticized for still pursuing the relationship as she did—I read parts of her 1999 autobiography, coauthored by Andrew Morton.

In fact, in the book she talks as if the love between her and the president justified so much of her position. She sounds in this like someone blinded by her infatuation. Why didn’t she realize that she was “mucking” with a man in an important office, whose sheer responsibilities and social implications were at stake, and that she was not just pursuing a private affair? Eventually Clinton called her, in a phone conversation, a stalker. In the context, maybe this hit her as cold; one can’t entirely blame her for that reaction. But on a level it was true.

More generally, the way young women can gravitate toward older men should be understood enough nowadays—as to both ambiguous and more innocuous sides. Some examples are just too comical: think of Hugh Hefner (the “loin in winter,” as The New York Times memorably called him in a recent headline), marrying a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. But twenty-something women gravitating toward men twice their age—say, 45 to 50—happens more often than some of us might think. And to those of us conscious of this general phenomenon, or especially encountering it on our daily perambulations, it may be unseemly or an impertinence in the concrete, but in the abstract it shouldn’t seem so unlikely and bizarre.

Sketches of theories of why young women flirt with men twice their age

I’m not “flattering” myself when I say that I’ve seen enough young women (about half my age) get into flirty mode with me (and I am no obviously sexually appealing sort!) that I see it as an odd trend—it is not so terribly isolated. (By the way, don’t go by my LinkedIn photo—that’s from 2003. I look older now, complete with some grey hair.) It typically happens in a public (or semi-public) location—a library, or especially a store (young supermarket cashiers, in my experience over many years, are among those young women most apt to engage in during-work [for them] semi- or more-fully flirtatious behaviors with customers; it usually doesn’t bother me).

In recent times, post-2008-meltdown, I think this phenomenon reflects a little social tension (or “fraying of sense of tradition”) in part. Kids may seem to be unjustifiably in fun/optimism mode, but I think they often have a “substrate” of knowing things societally (financial infrastructure, sense of future) are more in play, or threatened, than usual. Amid this comes some contortions (or defiance) of social morés.

I’ve been developing a theory that twenty-something women flirt with twice-their-age men for one or more of a number of reasons:

1. They don’t know, or don’t realistically guess, his age.
2. They “want to marry their father” (a rather crude way of putting a tendency that is usually less socially awry or objectionable than that may sound; you may or may not want to call it a version of the old Freudian concept of the “electra complex”).
3. They want to passingly assert a little power—even without knowing quite what they’re doing—by being flirty with a man, who for his older age may seem even more exciting a “conquest” than a young man their age.
4. They’re crazy.

With all this stuff when it is manifested to me at particular times, I’m usually not too bothered. In specific instances, when a young woman (about half my age) is being flirty, depending on the nature and apparent meaning of the flirting, I may feel it is just an impertinence or an annoyance that I try not to dignify with full accord or encouragement. Sometimes, on the other hand, I may help set it up with my “roving wolf eye.”

At still other times, a minor, passing flirting between two people—“coming out of wherever”—can just be a way to “sweeten the cup of coffee currently being drunk.” Greasing the rails. Just having passing fun. Sort of like, “You look nice today.” It comes and goes. Who cares?

The moral positions of Harris and Charlotte showing their sides in the denouement

It seems easy enough to theorize that when it comes to Bob Harris and Charlotte, these two people gravitate toward one another, seeing possibility, and a kind of succor and promise, in each other that they can’t get (or currently think they can’t get) in their ongoing mates. They flirt a bit. She, in particular, maybe unexpectedly at the outset, seems to need what “life-coach” counseling he gives on the bed.

As the week goes on, they get emotionally attached enough that she misses him. And just as, in their brewing flirtation before the partying phase of the film, Charlotte shows the awkward way one “decompresses” from a brief romantic flirtation—she seems to show a sudden, surprising indifference in their saying goodbye in the hotel lobby, and she gets on the elevator. Is she showing she feels a bit snubbed? Meanwhile, Harris looks yearning/sad in the wake of her going.

Later, of course, when he is in a limo on his way home, he spies her walking on a concourse, and he hurries out and goes to say a real hearty goodbye, complete with whispered message in the ear (there was a video online some time ago capturing what Murray actually said; it wasn’t “Sofia is a pain in the ass, isn’t she?”) and feelingly given kisses. It’s enough to make her tear up.

This completes the arc of their relationship. An affair? Depends how you define it. Sexual? Of course not. Emotional? Sure. Maybe not that big a deal for being an emotional affair.

But I’m sure when Bob Harris goes home to his kids, they need not worry whether they’ll have a broken home. Bob and his wife may have trivial arguments over a decorating project and what he generally eats for dinner, but the kids will probably have their college money and enough love from Dad.

Charlotte? For her to get into the semi-fling she has with Bob, even after just being married: what to make of this? Is she simply immature? Is she some kind of neurotic, or at least narcissistic, mess?

(Amusingly, a woman Harris actually has a sexual fling with—which seems inserted as humor a little broad for this film—is some unnaturally-redheaded singer who seems just the kind of Yankee who gave up whatever she’d had in the States [maybe her U.S. life obligations were fast vanishing due to some gross “thing that happens when you’re making other plans”] for cover singing in Japan, with loyal instrumentalist in tow. Harris, head bowed at the bar, is looking especially peaked, downcast, and unable to sleep, with big stogie in hand and drink not far away. She pops by after finishing a set and lightly says Hi. Next thing you know, he is waking in his bedroom to the bracing morning light, in a real “What happened last night?” state, and the singer flittering around is entertaining herself with Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis,” a 1974 tune that seems as cheesily fitting as anything for commentary on such a moment. And Charlotte turns up at the door, Harris bolting up apprehensively to answer it….)

Weakness of Charlotte’s side of the story doesn’t undercut Harris’s appeal—but the story is also one of a dyadic dance, and the “visitation of value”

Some of the shallowness of Charlotte’s perspective seems shown in—just before Harris’s and her well-done bed conversation—her suddenly rhapsodic “Let’s never come here again, because it would never be as much fun.” Later, there comes what is to me one of the most trite scenes in the film, when in their last “date,” they are at a table, looking at each other over a short distance, while—can you believe it?—the Atlanta Rhythm Section’s “So Into You” is played by a male cover artist. This looks like a shot for a cheap wine ad. And at one point when Bob says in a spurt of regretful emotion—seeming to have dropped to her age—“I don’t want to leave,” Charlotte responds with a pat, “So don’t. Stay here with me. We’ll start a jazz band.”

What, did they suddenly both become 16 years old?

Looking at the story overall, I feel more for Bob than for Charlotte. But in any event, as short as their relationship is, it is largely a story of a spontaneous “dance” that works for both people in a muddy situation, and it’s over with, and seen through the artful camera, it provides a charmingly atmospheric, sweetly melancholy story for our evening-film pleasure.

Some stories are about transient situations, where the briefness and “vaporousness” of some of their qualities or aspects may seem to belie that there was anything “edifying” to tell about at all. But some experiences in life are all the more valuable for the sheer “visitation” of value, of “expressions of spirit”—even if these include yearning, sadness…—that come, unexpected, in a weird location, with “mental circumstances” askew.

Maybe this story seems like a slight one about randomly thrown-together bourgeois people who have too much time on their hands and money at their disposal, but I think it touches enough of us that it was worth telling. And the film still resonates 10 years after its release.

Further reading

Though this book is rather tangential to what this film and my review cover, it is important in showing how academic psychology has tried to address the complexities of love. In Part 1, I made the comment, “…if you think it’s nerdy to talk drily about this, I agree; I have a hard time delivering this rock ’n’ roll.” There are some occasions where some academic insight into aspects of love relations is useful. However, the following book, while with many useful little insights, has always been difficult for me to square with; it has always been easier for me, when needed, to allude to things in Jerome Kroll’s authoritative The Challenge of the Borderline Patient (Norton, 1988)—which may seem a bit dry in its own right—than to this other book. The following is like sheet music that I know can be the basis for some stirring rock ’n’ roll, but it is hard for me to deliver it: Roy F. Baumeister and Sara R. Wotman, Breaking Hearts: The Two Sides of Unrequited Love (New York: The Guilford Press, 1992). The few times I’ve worked references to this book into writing, it has seemed like trying a dance in which I can’t help but look like a goofus. Maybe in the future with this, I can get us swinging.