Our Neighborhood Transvestite

     Ryan Deegan.  He was a cool guy, actually.  He used to play catch with us from his front lawn to one of ours so the throws of the softball covered a long distance.  He lived alone in a house that looked pretty much like everyone else's.  We had the most fun on his motorcycle. Loud and powerful.  Not a "motorbike," or any pansy variant like that.  He'd take us on a ride, one thrilled kid at a time.  I think he was retired but I don't know from what. He was hard of hearing and so the tunes he like blared from his high-fi system through his open living room windows in warm weather. 
     Ryan owned one of the first television sets in our neighborhood.  We kids would go over his house to see "Time for Beaney." a puppet show about a young boy who wore a "beanie" cap,  his friend "Cecil the Sea Serpent, " and the adventures they had with other characters such as Dishonest John.  At 7p.m. we'd holler "Time for 'Time for Beaney, ' " and run to Ryan's house. (I was the one who insisted on the repetition of the phrase--the seeds of a snotty little grammarian taking root early.)  We didn't just barge in on him.  Our arrival was by prearranged invitation extended to our parents.  And Ryan had his rules. 
     You could not arrive late to the Deegan house.  You had to have your hair combed.  You could not wear tennis shoes (they took up the nap of the rug).  We considered these strictures odd, but we followed them because we wanted to watch TV.
     What we did not know was that Ryan was "odd" in a more dramatic way than any eccentricities that we observed.  His singularity defeated our parents' desire to tell us the truth about Ryan.  Therefore they said nothing while we were small.  When we all got a little older we started to notice some things in and around his house that puzzled us.
     When our next door neighbors were on vacation I had the job of collecting their newspapers and mail, feeding the cat and watering the lawn and the plants.  Their back yard was separated from the Deegan back yard by a stone wall about five feet high.  On Ryan's side of the wall was his driveway that extended into his garage.  One afternoon, I heard his car pull in and the door open.  I glanced at the top of the wall and glimpsed a lady's blue hat.  The face of the hat wearer was obscured by a wispy veil, and then went out of sight as the person turned and moved from the car to the house. 
     A couple of weeks later I was riding my bike down the sidewalk.  As I passed Ryan's house I looked into his driveway.  I saw a woman watering plants by the side of the house.  I identified the person as a woman because she was garbed in a two piece bathing suit.  I wondered who she was.  So the next day at breakfast I asked my mother, "Is there a woman living in Ryan's house?"
     I thought she was going to choke on her toast.  I told her what I had seen.  She gathered herself and said: "That was not a woman you saw.  That was Ryan dressed like a woman."  The cat was out of the bag.
      My Mom didn't realize I was satisfied with that answer.  I was surprised; I thought it was strange but I did not ask why he did that.  She launched into an explanation nonetheless.    And her explanation was a mess.  She didn't have the words "transvestite" or "cross-dresser" in her active vocabulary.  She told me that there were some people who had "the top of a woman" and "the bottom of a man."  She was standing up as she spoke.  She emitted an "Eww" and then thrust her joined hands into her nether regions in a kind of spastic mimicry of pain or desire.  I wanted to flee the room.
     Over the years I learned more about Ryan.  Mrs. McCormick of the people next door talked with him about his cross-dressing behavior.  He quite calmly explained it was his hobby.  He drew a comparison to Mr. McCormick's enjoyment of fishing.  "Your husband has his hobby.  I have mine."  Later, when I was much older their daughter laughed as she told me this tidbit.  Her bedroom was on the side of their house adjacent to Ryan's living room.  When Ryan's windows were open, she would be regaled with different recordings of his theme song: "I Enjoy Being A Girl!" 
     Nothing that Ryan did or said was illegal, immoral or threatening.  We heard tell of a woman's lingerie shop one town over that catered to his garment preferences.  Good customer.  They kept a small closet available for him as a personal dressing room.  In a sense he was already out of the closet.
    Nice fella.  A dude with an unusual dandy--for the 1950s.  Always treated us well.  Did no harm.  Just a memory from years ago. 
    Now, where did I put my lipstick?
 

   

Picasso and 9/11

     In September 2001 I was teaching gifted students in a public residential school in the Chicagoland area. That morning I wasn't teaching one of my own classes but observing the work of a new teacher. (My overload assignment was to evaluate the pedagogic work of others.)  I sat near the back of the room.  As the class ended, students were leaving and entering.  Fragments of conversation floated to my ear. "An explosion at the Trade Center in NYC, . . . people leaving the tower, . . . everyone frightened."  These kids must be working on a history project paper about the car bomb in '93, I said to myself as I left.  Walking to the English office, I saw a colleague, a veteran English teacher like myself.  He was standing outside the doorway, alone.  As I approached, he said, "A plane flew into one of the towers. in New York."  A couple of other teachers joined us. We drifted into my office.  Word quickly reached us that a second plane had struck the south tower.  So then of course we knew.  This was no freak accident.  This was an attack.

     The principal came on over the P.A. system.  As the morning wore on, he informed us of the unfolding horror.  A plane crashed into the pentagon.  Another seemed to have plowed into the earth in Pennsylvania.  An auditorium that had a big screen and a TV connection was opened up.  Teachers were told to meet with their students and it was our decision to hold class or not.  Because this was a residential school, we did not have to deal with the logistics of transporting students to other places.  We were unencumbered.  But what we did that day was less like teaching and more like ministering.  Students and adults were bewildered, uncomprehending and fearful.  However the adults were called upon to maintain a sense of calm in the storm, to show that as bad as this was, it was not the end of world (not yet.)

     I remember walking to view the TV hookup and encountering students who asked me,  "Mr. Casey, are we a target?  Our school, everyone in our building?"  For an instant, I thought they were trying to make a joke and I stifled a chuckle.  But when I saw the distraught look on their faces, I assured them that terrorists did not have us in their sights.

     The small auditorium was filled with people, many staring at the smoke and fire on the screen, others in motion, arriving, leaving, looking for friends.  The principal and others on his staff were in and out, walkie-talkies in constant use.  By this time the fear that the towers might crumble was being voiced.  The thought proved father to the fact.  The south tower first, the north tower shortly after, both collapsed from the top down.  Gasps and stifled cries throughout the room.

     How do you go into a class, understood to be an oasis of reflection and inquiry, when the world outside has been devastated?  The idea that came to me was French director Henri-Georges Clouzot's film, "The Mystery of Picasso." (sample follows)

 Produced in the 1950s, it depicts the artist in front of a transparent canvas with a camera on the other side.  As Picasso worked, you had a unique view of his composition.  Of course it was no ordinary drawing.  He would draw a fish and then with a few strokes turn it into a chicken, which, after adding swath and detail, would take the shape of a women, and then move into other transformations.  Some representational, some not.  The film affords an unparalleled entree into the creative process.

     Picasso creates 15-20 striking images in about a half an hour.  In order to do that--to move from one image or shape to the next--it was sometimes necessary to "destroy" a good part of what had been made before.  On my syllabus for the class was Graham Greene's story, "The Destructors," about a gang of boys in England who destroy a Christopher Wren house from the inside.  At one point in the narrative, the authorial voice states: "Destruction, after all, is a form of creation." I wanted them to think about these powers. 
     I lead a discussion of the film.  Why did the director and the artist want us to see this?  What did it show us about the making and unmaking of art?  The inner and outer eye of the artist?  We sought to deepen our understand of creativity.
     At the beginning of class we had updated and informed ourselves about the tragedy that had occurred in the world outside.  But we did not spend a lot of time reacting to it.  After a bit I simply said, "I want you to see something and then, we'll talk about it."  In the discussion I made no application to the unfolding events of the day.  Nor did they.  It was a subtext too close at hand.  More than enough concentration was required to plumb the force of artistic creation and how it forms what the eye beholds.  I hoped that they would make their own connections later.  And many told me they did.

  

"Reading" While Road Tripping

    
    

     Recently, I concluded driving 2,215 miles in a road trip, IL to FL and back. I consider this an accomplishment given that Anita and I traveled safely, had no car trouble, no cop trouble. The driving itself was aided and abetted by a rediscovery of the recorded book.

     We both had been users of audio tapes in days when we drove to and from work on a regular basis. It might take a week to hear all of a novel but the cassette functioned ably (and actually surpassed the upstart CD in ease of replaying a bit that you needed to hear again). Now that work has been set aside, we find that long drives offer the continuous time span in which a narrative can unfold and unfurl. You preclude the monotony of driving a long distance by listening to a complex or suspenseful text, and when you are with another person the experience is a dynamic rather than a static sharing.

     Much depends on the audio book you choose. The most successful “listen” we selected was Great House by Nicole Krauss, a lauded work of contemporary literary fiction. It centers on a desk that occupies space and attention in the lives of different people. They are bound to each other—even when they are strangers—by the force and form of the desk and its connection to the past and to loss. The characters and the book itself become integral to the “great house” of memory, evoked by the phrase in the Books of Kings, quoted toward the end of the novel: He burned the house of God, the King’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every great house he burned with fire.

     Listening requires concentration, especially when the text is dense and polyphonic. What the unabridged recording sets before you is not so much a theater of the mind—that is what happens when you read visually. But listening to the spoken voices of five narrators who are guided by a director puts you into the posture of an attentive audience engaged by successive monologues.   And Great House, narrated by five actors under the guidance of a director, prompts you and your partner to pause the recording periodically in your drive to “compare notes” on theme and tone, references and allusions, and the impact of voices and pauses. It’s like being in a book club for two, where you don’t have to be taken away from the text at hand to feign sympathy for others’ personal recital of aches and pains and neglect by grown children.

     “Reading” Krauss’s novel in this way was so enjoyable, I ordered the printed book when we got back home. Now, at another time, I can revisit how we heard it together, and read it again for the first time.