In some of my previous hosts, I have discussed my relationship with Professor K. I’m not completely done with that. In writing about the “limbo” year, I must also write about the people I met.
Dramatis Personae
I met a variety of people in Joe’s classes during the limbo year. Some became my friends, others casual acquaintances, and some were potentially on the enemy list. Few of the people I met during that period I now count among my very good friends.
One of the first people I met was Tomas, my predecessor as the journal’s assistant editor, at Joe’s journal party. He was heavy set, middle-aged, and a bit gruff, but genuinely kind at the same time. Tomas spent many years driving buses and getting involved with various Latino art and poetry scenes. His marriage to a very elegant Columbian woman, a high school Spanish teacher, may have been his primary motivation for getting an MFA. Getting a BA had been an on and off thing for him, but he worked very steadily towards getting a masters, most likely to become more stable career-wise for his wife and children. He had reliably served as Joe’s right hand man for the past few years before I met Joe, but his time was coming to an end. Tomas needed to work on his thesis and became busy with family obligations. However, he did find time to take Joe’s classes.
Keenan and Elizabeth were friends of Tatiyana’s and became a part of my MFA career while they were in the program. Keenan was short and stocky, with hair that stood up rather than go down. Elizabeth had long, unstyled blond hair that hung down her back. Together, they were perceived as an artsy couple, but they were more than that. They were brilliant, and unlike many artsy people, they had discipline. I have never met people who so devoted to writing like them. Elizabeth was a partner with Tatiyana in a journal they founded together in the Pacific Northwest. For a while, they edited through correspondence, but now they were back together in San Diego for a while, they were able to work together. Keenan was the more scholarly of the two, but they both were incredibly well read. First, Joe threw us together in collaborative projects for Form and Theory, and then I got to know them during Henry O’Donough’s bar hours. Keenan and Elizabeth would become some of the most important readers of my work during my MFA career.
Julian Rosenthal was a seventy-something retired physician who audited Joe’s classes. Joe was fond of addressing him as Dr. Jules, and the moniker stuck. Everyone else in the class soon took to calling him that. Dr. Jules was critical of everything that Joe presented in the Form and Theory course, because Joe’s selections were extremely heterodox. The novels and short stories went against convention and reading them was never an easy ride at all. They were provocative, nonetheless, but they had little entertainment value for Dr. Jules. He often objected to the sexuality and the presence of cuss words in the works. He found them to be morally and artistically reprehensible and would not hesitate to say so at times. He could not get past the apparent sloppiness of the outsider artists, and it was funny when he referred to a work as disciplined (because of the technical skill). His criticism was not limited to the works we studied. When I housesat for Joe, I saw his journal among the stack collected at the end of the semester and looked through it. He was critical of Joe and his classmates, yours truly included. It was unnerving to see how he characterized me, but at least I came across as a person, whether I liked it or not. He simply characterized Stevie, a good friend of mine, as a homosexual. Dr. Jules was literal minded and was seen by all of us as a conservative voice in the class.
I had met Stevie two years before in an upper division Toni Morrison seminar. He was thin, blond, sweet, and unavoidably gay. We would only hang out during cigarette breaks, but not much beyond that. The following summer, I saw him at Gay Pride and chatted briefly. It was not until Joe’s Form and Theory class that I would get to know him. I got to know about his obsession with his namesake, Stevie Nicks. Sometimes, she was all he could talk about. It’s a common discussion threat up to this day. I would later learn about the others in his “diva pantheon” – Wonder Woman, Emma Peel, a Classics professor he knew at his undergrad alma mater, and one of the resident poets of the University’s program. An early conversation opportunity was when I was riding a bus to the University. Stevie dropped his car off to get repaired, and coincidentally he came aboard the same bus. We chatted, became better acquainted, and he later dropped me off at the grocery store where I worked. While I did not hang out with him much outside of class during the course of the semester, I would keep in touch with him after the class was over. We’re still very good friends today.
Lilia was a born-again Christian, but definitely not the garden variety Christian. While she was vocal about her faith and had theologically orthodox views, she was never glib. She often looked at Joe’s selections with her Christianity, but she was also open-minded enough to learn from them. Lilia had an earnest desire to create good and interesting art that expressed her beliefs. Apart from her religion, what informed her work were two things – she was Filipina-American and she was intimately acquainted with physical suffering. She often had a disorder that would redden her skin and then leave her pigment uneven. She was allergic to all kinds of food and found it safe to be on a vegan diet. I would later learn about some of her other issues through her writing. She was dating Erik, an alumnus of the MFA program, and they would soon get married. I became good friends with Erik through a professional relationship developed outside of the University.
“Dramatis Personae” to be continued…
