The Discomfort Zone

CENTRALLY LOCATED

KORTENHOF HAD HEARD of a high school where pranksters had put an automobile tire over the top of a thirty-foot flagpole, like a ring on a finger, and this seemed to him an impressive and elegant and beautiful feat that we at our high school ought to try to duplicate. Kortenhof was the son of a lawyer, and he had a lawyerly directness and a perpetual crocodile smile that made him fun company, if a little scary. Every day at lunch hour he led us outside to gaze at the flagpole and to hear his latest thoughts about accessorizing it with steel-belted radial tires. (Steel-belted radials, he said, would be harder for administrators to remove.) Eventually we all agreed that this was an exciting technical challenge worthy of a heavy investment of our time and energy.

The flagpole, which was forty feet tall, stood on an apron of concrete near the high school’s main entrance, on Selma Avenue. It was too thick at the base to be shinnied up easily, and a fall from the top could be fatal. None of us had access to an extension ladder longer than twenty feet. We talked about building some sort of catapult, how spectacular a catapult would be, but airborne car tires were sure to do serious damage if they missed their mark, and cops patrolled Selma too frequently for us to risk getting caught with heavy equipment, assuming we could even build it.

The school itself could be a ladder, though. The roof was only six feet lower than the ball at the flagpole’s crown, and we knew how to get to the roof. My friend Davis and I volunteered to build a Device, consisting of ropes and a pulley and a long board, that would convey a tire from the roof to the pole and drop it over. If the Device didn’t work, we could try lassoing the pole with a rope, standing on a stepladder for added elevation, and sliding a tire down the rope. If this failed as well, it still might be possible, with a lot of luck, to gang-Frisbee a tire up and out and over.

Six of us — Kortenhof, Davis, Manley, Schroer, Peppel, and me — met up near the high school on a Friday night in March. Davis came with a stepladder on top of his parents’ Pinto station wagon. There had been some trouble at home when his father saw the ladder, but Davis, who was smarter and less kindhearted than his parent, had explained that the ladder belonged to Manley.

“Yes, but what are you doing with it?”

“Dad, it’s Ben’s ladder.”

“I know, but what are you doing with it?”

“I just said! It’s Ben’s ladder!”

“Christopher, I heard you the first time. I want to know what you’re doing with it.”

“God! Dad! It’s Ben’s ladder. How many times do I have to tell you? It’s Ben’s ladder.”

To get to the main roof, you climbed a long, sturdy downspout near the music rooms, crossed a plain of tar and caramel-brown Missouri gravel, and climbed a metal staircase and a sheer eight-foot wall. Unless you were me, you also had to stop and drag me up the eight-foot wall. The growth spurt I’d had the year before had made me taller and heavier and clumsier, while leaving unaltered my pitiful arm and shoulder strength.

I was probably nobody’s idea of an ideal fellow gang member, but I came with Manley and Davis, my old friends, who were good athletes and avid climbers of public buildings. In junior high, Manley had broken the school record for pull-ups, doing twenty-three of them. As for Davis, he’d been a football halfback and a starting basketball forward and was unbelievably tough. Once, on a January campout in a deserted Missouri state park, on a morning so cold we split our frozen grapefruits with a hatchet and fried them on an open fire (we were in a phase of cook-it-yourself fruitarian-ism), we found an old car hood with a towrope attached to it, irresistible, irresistible. We tied the rope to our friend Lunte’s Travelall, and Lunte drove at ill-considered speeds along the unplowed park roads, towing Davis while I kept watch from the back seat. We were doing about 40 when the road plunged unexpectedly down a hill. Lunte had to brake hard and steer into a skid to avoid rolling the Travelall, which cracked the towrope like a whip and flung Davis at a sick-making velocity toward a line of heavy-duty picnic tables stacked up in falling-domino formation. It was the kind of collision that killed people. There was a sunlit explosion of sparkling powder and shattered lumber, and through the rear window, as the snow settled and Lunte slowed the vehicle, I saw Davis come trotting after us, limping a little and clutching a jagged shard of picnic table. He was shouting, he said later, “I’m alive! I’m alive!” He’d demolished one of the frozen tables — knocked it into a hundred pieces — with his ankle.

Also dragged to the roof, along with me, were the stepladder, lots of rope, two bald steel-belted radials, and the Device that Davis and I had built. Leaning out over the balustrade, we could sort of almost touch the flagpole. The object of our fixation wasn’t more than twelve feet away from us, but its skin of aluminum paint matched the cloudy bright suburban sky behind it, and it was curiously hard to see. It seemed at once close and far away and disembodied and very accessible. The six of us stood there wishing we could touch it, groaning and exclaiming with desire to touch it.

Although Davis was a better mechanic, I was more facile than he at arguing for doing things my way. As a result, little we built ever worked. Certainly our Device, as soon became apparent, had no chance. At the end of the board was a crude wooden bracket that could never have gripped the flagpole, especially under the added weight of a tire; there was also the more fundamental difficulty of leaning out over a balustrade and pulling hard on a heavy board to control it while also trying to push it against a flagpole that, when bumped, clanged and swung distressingly. We were lucky not to send the Device through one of the windows on the floors below us. The group verdict was swift and harsh: piece of shit.

I laughed and said it, too: piece of shit. But I went off to one side, my throat thick with disappointment, and stood alone while everybody else tried the lasso. Peppel was swinging his hips like a rodeo man.

“Yee haw!”

“John-Boy, gimme that lasso.”

“Yee haw!”

Over the balustrade I could see the dark trees of Webster Groves and the more distant TV-tower lights that marked the boundaries of my childhood. A night wind coming across the football practice field carried the smell of thawed winter earth, the great sorrowful world-smell of being alive beneath a sky. In my imagination, as in the pencil drawings I’d made, I’d seen the Device work brilliantly. The contrast between the brightness of my dreams and the utter botch of my executions, the despair into which this contrast plunged me, was a recipe for self-consciousness. I felt identified with the disgraced Device. I was tired and cold and I wanted to go home.

I’d grown up amid tools, with a father who could build anything, and I thought I could do anything myself. How difficult could it be to drill a straight hole through a piece of wood? I would bear down with the utmost concentration, and the drill bit would emerge in a totally wrong place on the underside of the wood, and I would be shocked. Always. Shocked. In tenth grade I set out to build from scratch a refracting telescope with an equatorial mount and tripod, and my father, seeing the kind of work I was doing, took pity on me and built the entire thing himself. He cut threads in iron pipe for the mounting, poured concrete in a coffee can for the counterweight, hacksawed an old carbon-steel bedframe for the base of the tripod, and made a cunning lens mount out of galvanized sheet metal, machine screws, and pieces of a plastic ice-cream carton. The only part of the telescope I built on my own was the eyepiece holder, which was the only part that didn’t work right, which rendered the rest of it practically useless. And so I hated being young.

It was after one o’clock when Peppel finally threw the lasso high and far enough to capture the flagpole. I stopped sulking and joined in the general cheering. But new difficulties emerged right away. Kortenhof climbed the stepladder and tugged the lasso up to within a foot of the ball, but here it snagged on the pulley and flag cables. The only way to propel a tire over the top would be to snap the rope vigorously up and down:

When we strung the tire out on the rope, however, it sagged out of reach of the top:

To raise the tire, Kortenhof had to pull hard on the rope, which, if you were standing on a ladder, was a good way to launch yourself over the balustrade. Four of us grabbed the ladder and applied counterforce. But this then wildly stressed the flagpole itself:

The flagpole made worrisome creaking and popping sounds as it leaned toward us. It also threatened, in the manner of a strained fishing rod, to recoil and cast Kortenhof out over Selma Avenue like a piece of bait. We were thwarted yet again. Our delight in seeing a tire rubbing up against the desired ball, nudging to within inches of the wished-for penetration, only heightened our anguish.

Two months earlier, around the time of her fifteenth birthday, my first-ever girlfriend, Merrell, had dumped me hard. She was a brainy Fellowship girl with coltish corduroy legs and straight brown hair that reached to the wallet in her back pocket. (Purses, she believed, were girly and antifeminist.) We’d come together on a church-membership retreat in a country house where I’d unrolled my sleeping bag in a carpeted closet into which Merrell and her own sleeping bag had then migrated by deliriously slow degrees. In the months that followed, Merrell had corrected my most egregious mannerisms and my most annoying misconceptions about girls, and sometimes she’d let me kiss her. We held hands through the entirety of my first R-rated movie, Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away, which two feminist advisors from Fellowship took a group of us to see for somewhat opaque political reasons. (“Sex but not explicit,” I noted in my journal.) Then, in January, possibly in reaction to my obsessive tendencies, Merrell got busy with other friends and started avoiding me. She applied for transfer to a local private academy for the gifted and the well-to-do. Mystified, and badly hurt, I renounced what Fellowship had taught me to call the “stagnation” of romantic attachments.

Although the flagpole situation was hopeless, Kortenhof and Schroer were yanking the rope more violently, causing the pole to lurch and shudder while the worriers among us — Manley and I — told them to stop. Finally, inevitably, somebody lost hold of the rope, and we all went home with a new problem: if the rope was still in place on Monday morning, the administration would guess what we’d been up to.

Returning the next night, Saturday, we smashed the padlock at the base of the pole, released the flag cables, and tried to jostle the rope free by tugging on the cables, with no success. The once stiff rope dangled flaccidly alongside the unconquered administrative mast, its frayed end twisting in the wind, twenty feet off the ground. We came back on Sunday night with a new padlock and took turns trying to shinny up the too-thick pole, again with no success. Most of us gave up then — we may have had homework, and Schroer was heavily into Monty Python, which aired at eleven — but Manley and Davis returned to the school yet again and managed to release the rope by boosting each other and yanking on the cables. They put our padlock on the flagpole; and now it was our hostage.

MANLEY’S PARENTS WERE permissive, and Kortenhof’s house was big enough to exit and enter inconspicuously, but most of us had trouble getting away from our parents after midnight. One Sunday morning, after two hours of sleep, I came down to breakfast and found my parents ominously untalkative. My father was at the stove frying our weekly pre-church eggs. My mother was frowning with what I now realize was probably more fear than disapproval. There was fear in her voice as well. “Dad says he heard you coming in the front door this morning after it was light,” she said. “It must have been six o’clock. Were you out?”

Caught! I’d been Caught!

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I was over at the park with Ben and Chris.”

“You said you were going to bed early. Your light was off.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the floor. “But I couldn’t sleep, and they’d said they’d be over at the park, you know, if I couldn’t sleep.”

“What on earth were you doing out there so long?”

“Irene,” my father warned, from the stove. “Don’t ask the question if you can’t stand to hear the answer.”

“Just talking,” I said.

The sensation of being Caught: it was like the buzz I once got from some cans of Reddi-wip whose gas propellent I shared with Manley and Davis — a ballooning, dizzying sensation of being all surface, my inner self suddenly so flagrant and gigantic that it seemed to force the air from my lungs and the blood from my head.

I associate this sensation with the rushing heave of a car engine, the low whoosh of my mother’s Buick as it surged with alarming, incredible speed up our driveway and into our garage. It was in the nature of this whoosh that I always heard it earlier than I wanted or expected to. I was Caught privately enjoying myself, usually in the living room, listening to music, and I had to scramble.

Our stereo was housed in a mahogany-stained console of the kind sold nowadays in thrift stores. Its brand name was Aeolian, and its speakers were hidden behind doors that my mother insisted on keeping closed when she played the local all-Muzak station, KCFM, for her dinner guests; orchestral arrangements of “Penny Lane” and “Cherish” fought through cabinetry in a muffled whisper, the ornate pendent door handles buzzing with voices during KCFM’s half-hourly commercial announcements. When I was alone in the house, I opened the doors and played my own records, mostly hand-me-downs from my brothers. My two favorite bands in those pre-punk years were the Grateful Dead and the Moody Blues. (My enthusiasm for the latter survived until I read, in a Rolling Stone review, that their music was suited to “the kind of person who whispers ‘I love you’ to a one-night stand.”) One afternoon, I was kneeling at the Aeolian altar and playing an especially syrupy Moodies effort at such soul-stirring volume that I failed to hear my mother’s automotive whoosh. She burst into the house crying, “Turn that off! That awful rock music! I can’t stand it! Turn it off!” Her complaint was unjust; the song, which had no rock beat whatsoever, offered KCFMish sentiments like Isn’t life strange / A turn of the page /…it makes me want to cry. But I nevertheless felt hugely Caught.

The car I preferred hearing was my father’s car, the Cougar he commuted to work in, because it never showed up unexpectedly. My father understood privacy, and he was eager to accept the straight-A self that I presented to him. He was my rational and enlightened ally, the powerful engineer who helped me man the dikes against the ever-invading sea of my mother. And yet, by temperament, he was no less hostile to my adolescence than she was.

My father was plagued by the suspicion that adolescents were getting away with something: that their pleasures were insufficiently trammeled by conscience and responsibility. My brothers had borne the brunt of his resentment, but even with me it would sometimes boil over in pronouncements on my character. He said, “You have demonstrated a taste for expensive things, but not for the work it takes to earn them.” He said, “Friends are fine, but all evening every evening is too much.” He had a double-edged phrase that he couldn’t stop repeating whenever he came home from work and found me reading a novel or playing with my friends: “One continuous round of pleasure!”

When I was fifteen, my Fellowship friend Hoener and I struck up a poetic correspondence. Hoener lived in a different school district, and one Sunday in the summer she came home with us after church and spent the afternoon with me. We walked over to my old elementary school and played in the dirt: made little dirt roads, bark bridges, and twig cottages on the ground beneath a tree. Hoener’s friends at her school were doing the ordinary cool things — drinking, experimenting with sex and drugs — that I wasn’t. I was scared of Hoener’s beauty and her savoir faire and was relieved to discover that she and I shared romantic views of childhood. We were old enough not to be ashamed of playing like little kids, young enough to still become engrossed in it. By the end of our afternoon, I was close to whispering “I love you.” I thought it was maybe four o’clock, but when we got back to my house we found Hoener’s father waiting in his car. It was six-fifteen and he’d been waiting for an hour. “Oops,” Hoener said.

Inside the house, my dinner was cold on the table. My parents (this was unprecedented) had eaten without me. My mother flickered into sight and said, “Your father has something to say to you before you sit down.”

I went to the den, where he had his briefcase open on his lap. Without looking up, he announced, “You are not to see Fawn again.”

“What?”

“You and she were gone for five hours. Her father wanted to know where you were. I had to tell him I had no idea.”

“We were just over at Clark School.”

“You will not see Fawn again.”

“Why not?”

“Calpurnia is above suspicion,” he said. “You are not.”

Calpurnia? Suspicion?

Later that evening, after my father had cooled off, he came to my room and told me that I could see Hoener again if I wanted to. But I’d already taken his disapproval to heart. I started sending Hoener asinine and hurtful letters, and I started lying to my father as well as to my mother. Their troubles with my brother in 1970 were the kind of conflict I was bent on avoiding, and Tom’s big mistake, it seemed to me, had been his failure to keep up appearances.

More and more, I maintained two separate versions of myself, the official fifty-year-old boy and the unofficial adolescent. There came a time when my mother asked me why all my undershirts were developing holes at navel level. The official version of me had no answer; the unofficial adolescent did. In 1974, crewneck white undershirts were fashion suicide, but my mother came from a world in which colored T-shirts were evidently on a moral par with water beds and roach clips, and she refused to let me wear them. Every morning, therefore, after I left the house, I pulled down my undershirt until it didn’t show at the collar, and I safety-pinned it to my underpants. (Sometimes the pins opened and stuck me in the belly, but the alternative — wearing no T-shirt at all — would have made me feel too naked.) When I could get away with it, I also went to the boys’ bathroom and changed out of certain grievously bad shirts. My mother, in her thrift, favored inexpensive tab-collared knits, usually of polyester, which advertised me equally as an obedient little boy and a middle-aged golfer, and which chafed my neck as if to keep me ever mindful of the shame of wearing them.

For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. But the real cause of death, as I saw it, was my mother’s refusal to let me wear jeans to school. Even my old friend Manley, who played drums and could do twenty-three pull-ups and was elected class president in ninth grade, could not afford to see me socially.

Help finally arrived in tenth grade, when I discovered Levi’s straight-legged corduroys and, through the lucky chance of my Congregational affiliation, found myself at the center of the Fellowship clique at the high school. Almost overnight, I went from dreading lunch hour to happily eating at one of the crowded Fellowship tables, presided over by Peppel, Kortenhof, and Schroer. Even Manley, who was now playing drums in a band called Blue Thyme, had started coming to Fellowship meetings. One Saturday in the fall of our junior year, he called me up and asked if I wanted to go to the mall with him. I’d been planning to hang out with my science buddy Weidman, but I ditched him in a heartbeat and we never hung out again.

At lunch on Monday, Kortenhof gleefully reported that our padlock was still on the flagpole and that no flag had been raised. (It was 1976, and the high school was lax in its patriotic duties.) The obvious next step, Kortenhof said, was to form a proper group and demand official recognition. So we wrote a note—

Dear Sir,

We have kidnapped your flagpole. Further details later.

— made a quick decision to sign it “U.N.C.L.E.” (after the sixties TV show), and delivered it to the mail slot of the high-school principal, Mr. Knight.

Mr. Knight was a red-haired, red-bearded, Nordic-looking giant. He had a sideways, shambling way of walking, with frequent pauses to hitch up his pants, and he stood with the stooped posture of a man who spent his days listening to smaller people. We knew his voice from his all-school intercom announcements. His first words—“Teachers, excuse the interruption”—often sounded strained, as if he’d been nervously hesitating at his microphone, but after that his cadences were gentle and offhanded.

What the six of us wanted, more than anything else, was to be recognized by Mr. Knight as kindred spirits, as players outside the ordinary sphere of student misbehavior and administrative force. And for a week our frustration steadily mounted, because Mr. Knight remained aloof from us, as impervious as the flagpole (which, in our correspondence, we liked to represent as personally his).

After school on Monday, we cut and pasted words and letters from magazines:

The phrase “Teachers, excuse the interruption” was Manley’s idea, a poke at Mr. Knight. But Manley was also worried, as was I, that the administration would crack down hard on our little group if we got a reputation for vandalism, and so we returned to school that night with a can of aluminum paint and repaired the damage we’d done to the flagpole in hammering the old lock off. In the morning, we delivered the ransom note, and two-thirty found the six of us, in our respective classrooms, unreasonably hoping that Mr. Knight would make an announcement.

Our third note was typed on a sheet of notepaper headed with a giant avocado-green HELLO:

Being as we are a brotherhood of kindly fellows, we are giving you one last chance. And observing that you have not complied with our earlier request, we are hereby reiterating it. To wit: your official recognition of our organization over the public address system at 2:59, Wednesday, March 17. If you comply, your flagpole will be returned by Thursday morning.

U.N.C.L.E.

We also made an U.N.C.L.E. flag out of a pillowcase and black electrician’s tape and ran it up the flagpole under cover of night. But Mr. Knight’s office didn’t even notice the flag until Kortenhof casually pointed it out to a teacher — two maintenance workers were then sent outside to cut our lock with a hacksaw and lower the pirate flag — and he ignored the note. He ignored a fourth note, which offered him two dollars in compensation for the broken school padlock. He ignored a fifth note, in which we reiterated our offer and dispelled any notion that our flag had been raised in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.

By the end of the week, the only interest we’d succeeded in attracting was that of other students. There had been too much huddling and conspiring in hallways, too much blabbing on Kortenhof’s part. We added a seventh member simply to buy his silence. A couple of girls from Fellowship grilled me closely: Flagpole? Uncle? Can we join?

As the whispering grew louder, and as Kortenhof developed a new plan for a much more ambitious and outstanding prank, we decided to rename ourselves. Manley, who had a half-insolent, half-genuine fondness for really stupid humor, proposed the name DIOTI. He wrote it down and showed it to me.

“An anagram for ‘idiot’?”

Manley giggled and shook his head. “It’s also tio, which is ‘uncle’ in Spanish, and ‘di,’ which means ‘two.’ U.N.C.L.E. Two. Get it?”

“Di-tio.”

“Except it’s scrambled. DIOTI sounds better.”

“God, that is stupid.”

He nodded eagerly, delightedly. “I know! It’s so stupid! Isn’t it great?”

NINE OF US were piling out of two cars very late on the last Saturday of the school year, wearing dark clothes and dark stocking caps, carrying coils of rope, and zipping up knapsacks that contained hammers, wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, and customized floor plans of the high school, when a police car rounded the corner of Selma Avenue and turned on its searchlight.

My instinct in police situations, honed by years of shooting off fireworks in a community where they were banned, was to take off running into the dark of the nearest lawn. Half of DIOTI came loping and scattering after me. It was a long time since I’d run through dark lawns uninvited. There was dew on everything, and you could encounter a dog, you could hook your foot in a croquet wicket. I stopped and hid in a group of rhododendrons where Schroer, the Monty Python disciple, was also hiding.

“Franzen? Is that you? You’re making an incredible amount of noise.”

In my knapsack, besides tools, I had Easter candy and green plastic Easter hay, five rhymed quatrains that I’d typed on slips of bond paper, and other special equipment. As my own breathing moderated, I could hear the breathing of the squad car’s engine in the distance, the murmur of discussion. Then, more distinctly, a shouted whisper: “Ally-ally-out-’n’-free! Ally-ally-out-’n’-free!” The voice belonged to Holyoke, one of our new recruits, and at first I didn’t understand what he was saying. The equivalent call on my own street was ally-ally-in-come-free.

“The story,” Holyoke whispered as we followed him toward the patrol car, “is we’re tying a door shut. Gerri Chopin’s front door. We’re going to the Chopins’ house to tie her door shut. We’re using the ropes to tie the door. And the tools are for taking off the hinges.”

“Michael, that doesn’t make any—”

“Why take off the hinges if we’re tying—”

“Hello!”

“Hello, Officer!”

The patrolman was standing in his headlight beams, examining knapsacks, checking IDs. “This is all you have? A library card?”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked in Peppel’s bag. “What are you doing with such a big rope?”

“That’s not a big rope,” Peppel said. “That’s several small ropes tied together.”

There was a brief silence.

The officer asked us if we knew that it was after one o’clock.

“Yes, we do know that,” Manley said, stepping forward and squaring his shoulders. He had a forthright manner whose ironic hollowness no adult, only peers, seemed able to detect. Teachers and mothers found Manley irresistible. Certainly, in spite of his shoulder-length hair, my own mother did.

“So what are you doing out so late?”

Manley hung his head and confessed that we’d intended to tie the Chopins’ screen door shut. His tone suggested that he could see now, as he couldn’t five minutes ago, what a childish and negative idea this was. Standing behind him, three or four of us pointed at the Chopins’ house. That’s the Chopins’ house right there, we said.

The officer looked at the door. We would seem to have been a rather large crew, with a lot of ropes and tools, for the task of tying one screen door shut, and we were less than a hundred yards from the high school in prime pranking season. But it was 1976 and we were white and not drunk. “Go home to bed,” he said.

The squad car followed Kortenhof’s station wagon back to his house, where, in his bedroom, we decided not to make a second attempt that night. If we waited until Tuesday, we could get a better cover story in place. We could say, I said, that we were observing an unusual stellar occultation by the planet Mars, and that we needed tools to assemble a telescope. I insisted that everyone memorize the bogus name of the bogus star: NGC 6346.

Luckily, the sky was clear on Tuesday night. Davis escaped his house by jumping out a window. Schroer spent the night at Peppel’s and helped him push the family car out of earshot before starting it. Manley, as usual, simply got into his father’s Opel and drove it to my house, where I’d climbed from my bedroom window and retrieved pieces of my hitherto useless telescope from the bushes where I’d hidden them.

“We’re going to watch Mars occult NGC 6346,” Manley recited.

I felt a little guilty about abusing astronomy like this, but there had always been something dubious in my relationship with nature. The official fifty-year-old enjoyed reading about science; the unofficial adolescent mostly cared about theatrics. I longed to get my hands on a bit of pure selenium or rubidium, because who else had pure selenium or rubidium in his home? But if a chemical wasn’t rare, colorful, flammable, or explosively reactive, there was no point in stealing it from school. My father, my rational ally, who by his own testimony had married my mother because “she was a good writer and I thought a good writer could do anything,” and who’d chafed against her romantic nature ever since, encouraged me to be a scientist and discouraged me from fancy writing. One Christmas, as a present, he built me a serious lab bench, and for a while I enjoyed imagining myself keeping a more rigorous notebook. My first and last experiment was to isolate “pure nylon” by melting a scrap of panty hose in a crucible. Turning to astronomy, I again was happy as long as I was reading books, but these books reprinted pages from amateur stargazing logs whose orderly example I couldn’t follow even for one minute. I just wanted to look at pretty things.

Riding with Manley through the ghostly streets of Webster Groves, I was moved for the same reason that snow had moved me as a child, for its transformative enchantment of ordinary surfaces. The long rows of dark houses, their windows dimly reflecting streetlights, were as still as armored knights asleep under a spell. It was just as Tolkien and C. S. Lewis had promised: there really was another world. The road, devoid of cars and fading into distant haze, really did go ever on and on. Unusual things could happen when nobody was looking.

On the roof of the high school, Manley and Davis gathered ropes to rappel down exterior walls, while Kortenhof and Schroer set off for the gym, intending to enter through a high window and climb down on one of the folded-up trampolines. The rest of DIOTI went down through a trapdoor, past a crawl space, and out through a biology-department storage room.

Our floor plans showed the location of the thirty-odd bells that we’d identified while canvassing the school. Most of the bells were the size of half-coconuts and were mounted in hallways. During a lunch hour, we’d given a boost to Kortenhof, who had unscrewed the dish from one of these bells and silenced it by removing the clapper — a pencil-thick cylinder of graphite-blackened metal — from its electromagnetic housing. Two teams of two now headed off to disable the other bells and collect the clappers.

I had my slips of paper and worked alone. In a second-floor hallway, at knee level between two lockers, was an intriguing little hole with a hinged metal cap. The hole led back into obscure scholastic recesses. Manley and I had often passed idle minutes speaking into it and listening for answers.

In my laboratory at home, I’d rolled up one of my slips of paper tightly, sealed it inside a segment of glass tubing with a Bunsen flame, and tied and taped a piece of string around the tube. This ampule I now lowered through the little rabbit hole until it dropped out of sight. Then I tied the string to the hinge and shut the metal cap. On the slip of paper was a quatrain of doggerel:

The base of a venetian blind

Contains another clue.

Look in the conference room that’s off

The library. (What’s new?)

In the venetian blind was more doggerel that I’d planted during school hours:

There is a clue behind the plate

That’s on the western side

Of those large wooden fire doors

Near room three sixty-five.

I went now and unscrewed the push plate from the fire door and taped another slip to the wood underneath:

And last, another bookish clue

Before the glorious find.

The Little Book of Bells’ the one;

Its code is seven eight nine.

There were further quatrains hidden on an emergency-lighting fixture, rolled up inside a projection screen, and stuck in a library book called Your School Clubs. Some of the quatrains could have used a rewrite, but nobody thought they were a piece of shit. My idea was to enchant the school for Mr. Knight, to render the building momentarily strange and full of possibility, as a gift to him; and I was in the midst of discovering that writing was a way to do this.

During the previous two months, students from the five high-school physics classes had written and produced a farce about Isaac Newton, The Fig Connection. I had co-chaired the writing committee with a pretty senior girl, Siebert, toward whom I’d quickly developed strong feelings of stagnation. Siebert was a tomboy who wore bib overalls and knew how to camp, but she was also an artist who drew and wrote effortlessly and had charcoal stains and acrylic smudges on her hands, and she was also a fetching girly-girl who every so often let her hair down and wore high-waisted skirts. I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her. Our play was so warmly received that one of the English teachers suggested that Siebert and I try to publish it. As everything had gone wrong for me in junior high, suddenly everything was going right.

Toward three o’clock, DIOTI reconvened on the roof with booty: twenty-five clappers and five metal dishes, the latter daringly unbolted from the bigger bells that were mounted on high walls. We tied the clappers together with pink ribbon, filled the largest dish with plastic hay and Easter candy, nestled the clappers and the smaller dishes in the hay, and stashed the whole thing in the crawl space. Returning home then, Peppel and Schroer had the worst of it, pushing Peppel’s car back up a hill and into his driveway. I crept back into my house less cautiously than usual. I hardly cared if I was Caught; for once, I had something they couldn’t take away from me.

And to go back to school four hours later and see the place so peopled after seeing it so empty: here was a fore-taste of seeing clothed in the daylight the first person you’d spent a night with naked.

And the silence then, at eight-fifteen, when the bells should have rung but didn’t: this quiet transformation of the ordinary, this sound of one hand clapping, this beautiful absence, was like the poetry I wanted to learn to write.

At the end of first period, a teacher’s voice came over the classroom speakers to announce that the bells were out of order. Later in the morning, the teacher began to announce not only the time but also, oddly, the temperature. Summer heat poured through the open windows, and without the usual prison-yard clanging the crowds in hallways seemed deregimented, the boundaries of the hours blurred.

Manley at lunchtime brought happy news: the reason that Mr. Knight wasn’t making the announcements himself was that he was following the clues. Manley had spied him on the second floor, peering down into the rabbit hole. Despite the familiar tone we took with him, few members of DIOTI, certainly not I, had ever exchanged two words with Mr. Knight. He was the ideal, distant, benign, absurd Authority, and until now the notion that he might come out to play with us had been purely hypothetical.

The only shadow on the day was that a Device of mine again failed to work. Davis called me after school to report that Mr. Knight had lost the glass ampule down the rabbit hole. A canny English teacher, the same one who thought our play should be published, had promised Davis anonymity in exchange for the lost clue. I recited it over the phone, and the next morning the bells were working again. Kortenhof, who had had two hundred DIOTI bumper stickers printed up, went outside with Schroer in broad daylight and applied them to every rear bumper in the faculty parking lot.

THAT SUMMER MY cousin Gail, my aunt and uncle’s only child, was killed at the wheel of her car in West Virginia. My mother’s mother was dying of liver disease in Minneapolis, and I became morbidly aware that there were fifty thousand nuclear warheads on the planet, several dozen of them targeting St. Louis. My wet dreams felt apocalyptic, like a ripping of vital organs. One night I was awakened by a violent clap of thunder and was convinced that the world was over.

It was the sweetest summer of my life. “One continuous round of pleasure,” my father kept saying. I fell under the spell of Robert Pirsig and Wallace Stevens and began to write poetry. During the day, Siebert and I shot and edited a Super-8 costume drama with Davis and Lunte, and at night we painted a Rousseauian jungle mural on a wall at the high school. We were still just friends, but every evening that I spent with her was an evening that she didn’t spend with other boys. On her birthday, in July, as she was leaving her house, three of us jumped her from behind, blindfolded her, tied her wrists, and put her in the back of Lunte’s car. We had a surprise party waiting on a riverbank beneath an interstate overpass, and to Siebert’s increasingly plaintive questions—“Jon? Chris? Guys? Is that you?”—we said nothing until Lunte did 43 in a 30 zone. The cop who pulled us over made us unblind her. When he asked her if she knew us, you could see her considering her options before she said yes.

In August, Siebert went away to college, which allowed me to idealize her from a distance, communicate mainly in writing, put energy into new theatrical projects, and casually date someone else. Late in the fall, a publisher bought The Fig Connection for one hundred dollars, and I told my parents I was going to be a writer. They weren’t happy to hear it.

I had started keeping a journal, and I was discovering that I didn’t need school in order to experience the misery of appearances. I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment in the privacy of my bedroom, simply by reading what I’d written in the journal the day before. Its pages faithfully mirrored my fraudulence and pomposity and immaturity. Reading it made me desperate to change myself, to sound less idiotic. As George Benson had stressed in Then Joy Breaks Through, the experiences of growth and self-realization, even of ecstatic joy, were natural processes available to believers and nonbelievers alike. And so I declared private war on stagnation and committed myself privately to personal growth. The Authentic Relationship I wanted now was with the written page.

One Sunday night at Fellowship, the group did an exercise in which it arranged itself as a continuum across the church meeting hall. One corner of the hall was designated Heart, the opposite corner Brain. As anyone could have predicted, most of the group went rushing to the Heart corner, crowding together in a warm and huggy mass. A much smaller number of people, Symes among them, scattered themselves along the center of the continuum. Way over in the Brain corner, close to nobody else, Manley and I stood shoulder to shoulder and stared back at the Heart people defiantly. It was odd to be calling myself all Brain when my heart was so full of love for Manley. More than odd: it was hostile.

DIOTI’s first prank of the new year was to batik a queen-size bedsheet and unfurl it over the school’s main entrance on the morning that an accrediting committee from the North Central Association arrived to inspect the school. I built a Device involving two sheet-metal levers, a pulley, and a rope that ran across the roof and dangled by a third-floor courtyard window. When we pulled the rope on Monday morning, nothing happened. Davis had to go outside, climb to the roof in plain view, and unfurl the banner by hand. It said DIOTI WELCOMES YOU, NCA.

Through the winter, subgroups of DIOTI staged smaller side pranks. I had a taste for scenes involving costumes and toy guns. Davis and Manley kept climbing buildings, proceeding on a typical Saturday night from the gargoyled bell tower of Eden Seminary to the roofs of Washington University, and finally to the kitchen of the Presbyterian church, where freshly baked Sunday cookies were available to intruders.

For the main spring prank, we chose as a victim one of my favorite teachers, Ms. Wojak, because her room was in the middle of the second floor and had a very high ceiling, and because she was rumored to have disparaged DIOTI. It took nine of us four hours on a Wednesday night to empty thirty rooms of their desks, herd the desks downstairs and through hallways, and pack them, floor to ceiling, into Ms. Wojak’s room. Some of the rooms had transoms that Manley or Davis could climb through. To get into the others, we removed the hinges from the door of the main office and made use of the keys that teachers habitually left in their mail slots. Since I was fifty as well as seventeen, I’d insisted that we take along masking tape and markers and label the desks with their room numbers before moving them, to simplify the job of putting them back. Even so, I was sorry when I saw what a violent snarl we’d made of Ms. Wojak’s room. I thought she might feel singled out for persecution, and so I wrote the words CENTRALLY LOCATED on her blackboard. It was the only writing I did for DIOTI that spring. I didn’t care about Mr. Knight anymore; the work was all that mattered.

During our graduation ceremonies, at the football field, the superintendent of schools told the story of the desks and cited their masking-tape labels as evidence of a “new spirit of responsibility” among young people today. DIOTI had secreted a farewell banner, batiked in school colors, in the base of the football scoreboard, but the Device I’d built to release it hadn’t worked well in trials the night before, and vigilant school officials had snipped the release line before Holyoke, disguised in a fisherman’s outfit and dark glasses, arrived to pull it. After the ceremony, I wanted to tell my parents that it was official: I was the author of a new spirit of responsibility among young people today. But of course I couldn’t, and didn’t.

I EXPECTED TO start drinking and having sex that summer. Siebert had returned from college by herself (her family had moved to Texas), and we had already done some heavy stagnating on her grandmother’s living-room sofa. Now Lunte and his family were about to embark on a two-month camping trip, leaving Siebert to house-sit for them. She would be in the house by herself, every night, for two months.

She and I both took jobs downtown, and on our first Friday she failed to show up for a lunch date with me. I spent the afternoon wondering whether, as with Merrell, I might be coming on too strong. But that evening, while I was eating dinner with my parents, Davis came to our house and delivered the news: Siebert was in St. Joseph’s Hospital with a broken back. She’d asked Davis to take her to the top of the Eden Seminary bell tower the night before, and she’d fallen from a thirty-foot downspout.

I felt like throwing up. And yet, even as I tried to wrap my mind around the news, my most pressing concern was that my parents were getting it directly, before I could tailor it for them. I felt as if I and all my friends had been Caught in a new, large, irrevocable way. My mother, as she listened to Davis, was wearing her darkest scowl. She’d always preferred the well-spoken Manley to the lumpy Davis, and she’d never had much use for Siebert, either. Her disapproval now was radiant and total. My father, who liked Siebert, was upset nearly to the point of tears. “I don’t understand what you were doing on the roof,” he said.

“Yeah, well, so anyway,” Davis said miserably, “so she wasn’t on the roof yet. I was on the roof trying to reach down and, you know, help her.”

“But, Chris, my God,” my father cried. “Why were the two of you climbing on the roof at Eden Seminary?”

Davis looked a little pissed off. He’d done the right thing by giving me the news in person, and now, as a reward, my parents were beating up on him. “Yeah, well, so anyway,” he said, “she like called me last night and she wanted me to take her up to the top of the tower. I wanted to use rope, but she’s a really good climber. She didn’t want the rope.”

“There’s a nice view from the tower,” I offered. “You can see all around.”

My mother turned to me severely. “Have you been up there?”

“No,” I said, which was accidentally the truth.

“I don’t understand this at all,” my father said.

In Davis’s Pinto, as the two of us drove to Eden, he said that he’d gone up the downspout ahead of Siebert. The downspout was solid and well anchored to the wall, and Siebert had followed him easily until she reached the gutter. If she’d just extended her hand, Davis said, he could have reached down from the roof and pulled her up. But she seemed to panic, and before he could help her the focus went out of her eyes, her hands flew back behind her head, and she went straight down, twenty-five feet, landing flat on her back on the seminary lawn. The thud, Davis said, was horrible. Without thinking, without even lowering himself off the gutter, he jumped down thirty feet and broke his fall with the roll he’d practiced after lesser jumps. Siebert was moaning. He ran and banged on the nearest lighted windows and shouted for an ambulance.

The grass at the base of the downspout was not as trampled as I’d expected. Davis pointed to the spot where the EMTs had put Siebert on a rigid pallet. I forced myself to look up at the gutter. The evening air at Eden, incoherently, was mild and delicious. There was twilight birdsong in the freshly foliated oak trees, Protestant lights coming on in Gothic windows.

“You jumped down from there?” I said.

“Yeah, it was really dumb.”

Siebert, it turned out, had been fortunate in landing flat. Two of her vertebrae were shattered, but her nerves were intact. She was in the hospital for six weeks, and I went to see her every evening, sometimes with Davis, more often alone. A guitarist friend and I wrote inspirational songs and sang them for her during thunderstorms. It was dark all summer. I lay on the Luntes’ pool table with rum, Löwenbräu, Seagram’s, and blackberry wine in my stomach and watched the ceiling spin. I didn’t hate myself, but I hated adolescence, hated the very word. In August, after Siebert’s parents had taken her back to Texas with a cumbersome body brace and a lot of painkillers, I went out with the girl I’d been dating in the spring. According to my journal, we had an excellent time making out.

ADOLESCENCE IS BEST enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart’s getting crushed or exalted, even when you’re absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there come these moments when you’re aware that what’s happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You’re miserable and ashamed if you don’t believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you’re stupid if you do. This was the double bind from which our playing with Mr. Knight, our taking something so very useless so very seriously, had given us a miraculous fifteen-month reprieve.

But when does the real story start? At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I’ve become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who’s still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments, I run around town in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage, I define as uncool any group to which I can’t belong, I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I’m never going to die.

The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die. Along the way, however, Mr. Knight keeps reappearing: Mr. Knight as God, Mr. Knight as history, Mr. Knight as government or fate or nature. And the game of art, which begins as a bid for Mr. Knight’s attention, eventually invites you to pursue it for its own sake, with a seriousness that redeems and is redeemed by its fundamental uselessness.

FOR AN INEXPERIENCED Midwesterner in the fast-living East, college turned out to be a reprise of junior high. I managed to befriend a few fellow lonelyhearts, but the only pranks I was involved in were openly sadistic — pelting a popular girl with cubes of Jell-O, hauling an eight-foot length of rail into the dorm room of two better-adjusted classmates. Manley and Davis sounded no happier at their respective schools; they were smoking a lot of pot. Lunte had moved to Moscow, Idaho. Holyoke, still with DIOTI, organized a final prank involving a classroom waist-deep in crumpled newspaper.

Siebert came back to St. Louis the next summer, walking without pain, wearing clothes in the style of Annie Hall, and worked with me on a farce about a police inspector in colonial India. My feelings toward her were an adolescent stew of love-and-reconsider, of commit-and-keep-your-options-open. Manley and Davis were the ones who took me to breakfast for my birthday, on the last morning of the summer. They picked me up in Davis’s car, where they also had a white cane, Davis’s dimwitted spaniel, Goldie, and a pair of swimming goggles that they’d dipped in black paint. They invited me to put on the goggles, and then they gave me the cane and Goldie’s leash and led me into a pancake house, where I amused them by eating a stack of pancakes like a blind man.

After breakfast, we deposited Goldie at Davis’s house and went driving on arterials in the baking August heat. I guessed that our destination was the Arch, on the riverfront, and it was. I gamely went tap-tapping through the Arch’s underground lobby, my sense of hearing growing sharper by the minute. Davis bought tickets to the top of the Arch while Manley incited me to touch a Remington bronze, a rearing horse. Behind us a man spoke sharply: “Please don’t touch the — Oh. Oh. I’m sorry.”

I took my hands away.

“No, no, please, go ahead. It’s an original Remington, but please touch it.”

I put my hands back on the bronze. Manley, the little jerk, went off to giggle someplace with Davis. The park ranger’s hands led mine. “Feel the muscles in the horse’s chest,” he urged.

I was wearing mutilated swimming goggles. My cane was a quarter-inch dowel rod with one coat of white paint. I turned to leave.

“Wait,” the ranger said. “There are some really neat things I want to show you.”

“Um.”

He took my arm and led me deeper into the Museum of Westward Expansion. His voice grew even gentler. “How long have you been — without your sight?”

“Not long,” I said.

“Feel this tepee.” He directed my hand. “These are buffalo skins with the hair scraped off. Here, I’ll take your cane.”

We went inside the tepee, and for a daylong five minutes I dutifully stroked furs, fingered utensils, smelled woven baskets. The crime of deceiving the ranger felt more grievous with each passing minute. When I escaped from the tepee and thanked him, I was covered with sweat.

At the top of the Arch, I was finally unblinded and saw: haze, glare, coal barges, Busch Stadium, a diarrhetic river. Manley shrugged and looked at the metal floor. “We were hoping you’d be able to see more up here,” he said.

It often happened on my birthday that the first fall cold front of summer came blowing through. The next afternoon, when my parents and I drove east to a wedding in Fort Wayne, the sky was scrubbed clean. Giant Illinois cornfields, nearly ripe, rippled in the golden light from behind us. You could taste, in air fresh from crossing Canada, almost everything there was to know about life around here. And how devoid of interiors the farmhouses looked in light so perfect! How impatient to be harvested the cornfields seemed in their wind-driven tossing! And how platonically green the official signs for Effingham! (Its unofficial name, I surmised, was Fuckingham.) The season had changed overnight, and I was reading better books and trying to write every day, starting over from scratch now, by myself.

My father was exceeding the speed limit by an unvarying four miles per hour. My mother spoke from the back seat. “What did you and Chris and Ben do yesterday?”

“Nothing,” I said. “We had breakfast.”