That Would Be Me (dot net)

It would probably come as no surprise to anyone who knew me that I’m a college graduate; I’m fairly well spoken, fairly well read, use multi-syllabic words and have a subtle air of pretension that precedes me into any room. It may come as a surprise, however, to know that not once in the thirty years (!) since I graduated has it made any difference that I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree. In fact, no potential employer, potential business partner, potential casting director, potential arresting officer or potential date has ever even asked if I even attended college. It was all, it seems, entirely solipsistic. (Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll try to behave. Solipsism is a theory that the self is the only reality, so a solipsistic experience is one that only matters to the person who experienced it. But you knew that. And it doesn’t matter.)

This is not about that, however. It’s about my experience getting my degree at a small, private, liberal arts Catholic girls’ school. Okay, so it was no longer a girls’ school when I attended, they had started letting boys in a few years before. They also closed down a few years after I graduated. They’d been having financial trouble for years, a circumstance that I assume contributed to both milestones.

Fort Wright College was run by the Sisters of the Holy Names and was housed on what at one time had been the base and barracks of the famous Indian killer, Colonel George Wright, on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington. I first became aware of it the summer out of high school while performing a very small role in a play at a local civic theater in Spokane called Spokane Civic Theatre. The two leads in the play were the couple who ran the drama department at the Fort and I fell instantly enamored of them. They seemed to know things about acting and theater in general that I had never imagined.

I applied, and with government grants, work study and a job at the campus cafeteria in hand, entered academia. The school was very progressive; most classes were “pass/no pass” with evaluative comments that went on your permanent record. You could request actual grades, of course, at the beginning of each term, which most of the math and science students did and few of the art, music or drama students did. The Sisters of the Holy Names were a fairly liberal order, few of them wore habits, those that did either very old or very Korean. In fact my English professor, Sister Jean Concannon, often said she feared sounding too “nunny”. She needn’t have worried, of course. She taught Dylan, both Thomas and Bob, and Joyce, both James and Carol Oates, who have all been accused of everything from sensualism to obscenity. One professor, who taught math, had been kicked out of several African countries for agitating. I liked it there.

There was a subtle tension between the nuns and the lay faculty (I wonder if they’re called that because they’re allowed to get laid. I digress) and all but one teacher in the drama department was lay, so it was natural that there was tension between our department and the rest of the school. (That one non-lay teacher moved to the English department after only a year with us, poor thing.) The year before I got there, they were preparing to mount a production of The Marat/Sade, a play in which, among many other questionable activities, the inmates of an insane asylum attack and rape a bunch of nuns. The college didn’t demand they not do the play, but made their life so miserable they closed down the production and instead did the “happy and likable” James Thurber comedy, The Male Animal. The nuns were quite pleased, saying that it was a grand show and exactly what should be being done. They entirely missed, it seems, the theme of the play, which was a plea for academic freedom and against censorship.

I was one of perhaps three people in the drama department, students and teachers alike, who didn’t smoke. I was one of very few students who didn’t also smoke pot, drop acid and sleep around. (It was, after all, the Seventies.) I was the only one, as far as I can tell, who didn’t drink. I was naive. (Least you think me unnecessarily pure, I assure you I made up for lost time in the Eighties.) Even so, my four years at the Fort were a happy blur. I fell tragically in love with one of my roommates, a big, burly straight man who always smelled slightly of marijuana, spent hours upon hours every day in the ramshackle theater building that always smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke, successfully straddled the divide between “us” and “them”, making lasting friendships in and out of the department, acted in four or five plays a year, started classes most days at ten and finished rehearsal most days at midnight, learned so much about so much and graduated never having had to write a single term paper.

I say I’m a college graduate, but I barely remember our actual graduation. It was in the Commons building, I remember, where the cafeteria was, one of the very few “new” buildings on campus. I also remember one of my classmates, that same burly roommate, getting angry upon hearing someone say “now we enter the real world.” “No,” he insisted. “This is the real world. This is as much the real world as any place you will ever find.” I also remember the party afterwards, at the house of Chris and Heather Welch, a couple who had actually been married, where we all helped to prepare and bake a huge tray of “Nachos Especial”, everyone ate and everyone else drank and we never thought to say good bye to the Fort.

In the thirty (!) years since then I’ve moved to Los Angeles, owned several businesses, had several careers, grown slightly less neurotic, loved and lost, written and published, loved and gained, made up for lost time and, now, on an almost daily basis, get email come-ons to get my degree on-line. I would consider it, of course, but no one would care.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I think the whole “six degrees of separation” theory is based on faulty science, but has become so ingrained in the American Zeitgeist that anyone daring to disbelieve it is at best considered an idiot and at worst labeled a heretic.

That being said, I recently had a series of “small world” experiences.

I decided to join the social netorking site MySpace, in part to promote our book, and in part to see what all the hoo ha was about.  Not knowing quite how to build a circle of friends, which you need to survive on a social networking site, I’m told, I did a search for gay men in Los Angeles that were around my own age. I looked at their profiles one by one and those that seemed interesting I sent friend’s requests to. After the initial contact, I corresponded with very few of them. So much for social networking.

One, Peter, had been in my friend’s list for quite some time when he posted a bulletin regarding a blog in which he had linked a video discussing a conspiracy about possible government involvement in 9/11. In his blog, he was skeptical but intrigued by the notion. I sent him an email with my thoughts on the matter - there was a loud rumor that Roosevelt knew ahead of time that the Japanese were headed for Pearl Harbor but did nothing so he could have an excuse to enter World War Two. If we can believe that, why couldn’t we believe that at least someone in the government may have known about the imminent attack and not only did nothing but prevented others from doing anything in order to start, say, a war over oil - and he wrote back.

We started a delightful correspondence having little to do with politics. We talked about pop culture, travel, our lives thus far. And we made each other giggle. At least he made me giggle.

Shortly before this, my writing partner Steve and I went to a marketing seminar where we met (among other people) a movie director named Marc Rosenbush, who had made an independent movie called Zen Noir. I talked with him, picking his brain about movie making. (I’m picking the brain of anyone I can about movie making these days.) When he put up a MySpace page for his movie, added that to my friends.

One of the Zen Noir page’s friends was a strange fellow called The Alien. He was so weird, surreal and wonderful, I had to have him join me and invited him to be my friend.

Back to Peter. One afternoon, feeling I knew him well enough, now, to ask personal questions (we still hadn’t really met, mind you) I asked him if he had a boyfriend. He said he did, and that his boyfriend was one of my friends, The Alien, whose real name was Jon Harris and who was one of the actors in Zen Noir.

Well. I’m not done, yet.

Peter, Jon and I decided we should actually meet at some point, so I joined them for lunch at a charming little café in West Hollywood. During lunch our conversation was so easy and our sense of conection so strong, we all decided that we must have known each other through several incarnations. We were talking about our travels and lives and Jon told a story about when he lived in Seattle. He directed a play there and in it was this wonderful actress who made him laugh. Her name was Therese Diekhans. Well, I dropped my teeth (which is fairly amazing considering they’re all originals). I went to college with a wonderful actress named Therese Diekhans! We were both founding members of the original Interplayers Ensemble in Spokane, Washington. (Really. I still have letterhead.) Jon went outside for a moment and when he came back, he handed me his cell phone and said, “It’s for you.” It was Therese! We chatted briefly, caught up and have kept in touch since.

I now have two wonderful new friends who came at me from entirely different directions and have been reacquainted with an old friend who I cherish!

Small world.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

Spy Magazine, that wonderful satirical magazine that slowly started losing subscribers as it slowly devolved into a bitch fest, had a great feature called “Logrolling In Our Time” which presented two members of American intelligentsia giving favorable, often glowing critiques of each other on their respective pulpits. It was surprising how many pairs of mutual admirers they could find to keep the feature fed for as many issues as they did. This is a different kind of logrolling, more in line with birling, where a lumberjack perches on a log in the water and spins it with his feet in order to keep his balance. This is an essay inspired by a movie based on a book about a man who wrote a book about a real life event. It is, therefore, at least five times removed from anything that could possibly be considered important to anyone. And so I roll the log.

The movie, of course, is Infamous, which I finally saw last night on cable, about Truman Capote writing his masterpiece (and artistic swan song) In Cold Blood. In this movie Sandra Bullock proves she can really act, disappearing completely into her role. I don’t know if she accurately portrayed Harper Lee, I’ve never met, seen or watched video of the diminutive writer, but Bullock convinced me, at the very least, that she was someone other than Sandra Bullock. It is also a movie in which Daniel James Bond Craig plays one of at least two conflicted gay men he has portrayed on-screen. This essay, you may have guessed, is not about them. The log continues to spin under my feet.

It is, moreover, not about why we are as fascinated by the masterful In Cold Blood as we are by Capote, the silly, pretentious little gossip who wrote it. So fascinated that, within a year, there were two movies made about him creating it. (And there was a movie based on the “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. And there was the Broadway play, called Tru, about Truman’s last years, as he faded into obscurity after bitterly betraying his high society friends by telling all their tales in one of the few books he was able to write after finishing In Cold Blood. And the television special based on the play. It’s not about those, either.) I think the reasons we are fascinated by him and by it, even though he and it seem on opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, are really one thing: Voyeurism. We are a nation of voyeurs. We love getting inside the minds of criminals, watching them plan and execute their crimes. And then we love watching them be caught and punished for the crimes. We also love a gossip. And we surely love watching a gossip crumble and die. We love watching. And I love watching us watch. I’m a voyeur of voyeurs. Even though I’ve never read the book In Cold Blood. But, as you may have surmised, this essay is about none of that. I almost lost my balance for a moment, there.

So what, exactly, is this essay about? It started with a description of how a defunct magazine feature relates to a movie based on a book about a man who wrote a book about a real life event, then moved into a condemnation (or celebration, perhaps) of voyeurism and a confession of talking about something I don’t know anything about. It is about the random connections our spinning minds make, connecting immediate input with data stored so long ago its accuracy might be questioned, and thinking, in the moment the connections occur and coalesce in our conscious minds, that we have discovered or realized something brilliant that others will be moved or intrigued to read or hear. I have just plunged into the icy water and the log is now spinning on its own, quite out of my reach.

It’s not about anything, ultimately. It is logrolling. There is a website that sells a tee shirt that says, “More people have read this shirt than your blog”. I think I’ll buy that shirt. It makes me laugh every time I think about it.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

And what the hell is a continental breakfast? Where did it come from? Which continent? It sounds vaguely European, but somehow I doubt that they only serve Cherios, cornflakes, waffles, orange juice and coffee for breakfast in Brussels.

Yesterday at a rest stop, I climbed a steep hill (a triumph in itself) to look over into the rough cut valley of a Utah canyon. On the way up, I passed a small mound of sand in the rocky path that was swarming with red ants. Almost at the top of the hill there was a hole in the path that was swarming with large black ants. I predict a war in the near future.

Las night I actually sat in the Jacuzzi and swam in the indoor pool at the motel I was staying at. It was run by a handsome young Indian man (from India, not a Native American, who should be called Native Amercanian or something to avoid all the confusion. Or, perhaps, they should just be called “The People.” They were, after all, here first) and the pool area looked neat and clean. Shortly after I got there, a nice Morman family joined me. They may not really have been Morman, but when I asked the father where they were traveling to, he said, “We’re from Salt Lake City. We’re going to Moab,” so I assumed they were. The youngest son was the first into the Jacuzzi. I chatted with him for a moment, then went into the pool. He seemed to want to show off for me, diving and jumping and splashing and always looking sort of slyly my way to make sure I saw. Starved for attention? A budding actor? His older brother was much more reticent. Teenager, you see, and much too cool to care what some long haired stranger thought.

This morning, when I left my room to pack the car, there was a family of small lizards skittering around on the hot sidewalk outside my room. They were tan with a subtle striping and their tails were blue! Some just a dull blue-gray, some quite a bright, almost teal. They ran and jumped ahead of me, staying on the sidewalk, but seeming to want to get away from the large human with the suitcase pursuing them. When they ran by the door to the motel lobby, they jumped up against the door jam as if they knew somehow that it was sometimes open and they were able to get out of the heat that way. They did this to the door to my room, also. In fact twice, when I opened the door, one would get in. It wasn’t hard to get him out again, I simply stood by the corner he ran to (under the air conditioner both times) and he would run the other way and out. It was a different one each time, the first one was a little bigger and darker brown. I didn’t really mind them being in there, but thought if I left them there, they’d either stave to death or the next tenant in the room might be a skittish little girl and I didn’t want to be the indirect cause of any hysterical shrieking. I want my shrieking to be direct, by golly.

So far, besides the two heavy storms during the seminar, it has rained three times on this trip. Once going up the Rockies on the way east, once going up the Rockies on the way west and once in the middle of nowhere in the Utah desert. (Everywhere in the Utah desert, of course, is in the middle of nowhere, but this short, heavy storm was in the middle of that.) When the rain started in earnest in Utah, I took in the smell. For some reason I love the smell when rain first hits hot ground, an earthy smell, like dust. It seems both dry and wet.

Shortly after that last storm, I pulled into a View Area to put the top back down on the car and had a lovely conversation with a nice couple from somewhere back east who traveled around the country converting Thrifty Drug stores into CVS Drug stores. They were headed for a short stay in San Diego, then an extended one in Los Angeles. We chatted a while, I told them about the La Brea Tar Pits, which was near where they were staying, and told them about our book, Weeping Willow, and gave them a card. (I tell almost everyone I meet about our book, Weeping Willow, and give them a card. Have I told you about Weeping Willow? Would you like a card?) The woman seemed impressed and promised to look the site up. The husband seemed kindly aloof and smiled. I suspect he won’t be looking up our site.

This time through, Eastern Utah doesn’t seem quite so foreboding. It still feels alien, mind you, and empty of life, but I can more see how someone might actually like it. Someone weird. An antisocial loner. You’re not from Eastern Utah, are you?

Okay, I’ve been sitting at this rest stop long enough for one black leather clad motorcycle lad to come and go (how the hell can he wear black leather in this heat?) and another two motorcycles both doing double duty carrying quintessential biker dudes and their biker chicks to stop to stretch their legs. I should wrap this up, now, and finish it when I settle in tonight. I could slog through all the way to LA tonight, but I’d probably get in after midnight and what’s the point of that? One more day on the road should be a nice capper. And now I go. The road beckons. The land pulls me. The wild calls.

It’s seven o’clock, or there about. I’m at a Best Western somewhere off the highway near Lake Mead. Not sure how I got here, I pulled off to find a place to go pee and the road kept going and going. The sign had said “Gas, Food, Lodging” but hadn’t mentioned how far off the road said amenities were. The town I went through (once there was a town) was actually kind of nice. Green lawns and quaint houses. Horses. Cows. Trees. Didn’t seem like Nevada at all. I didn’t realize how hot I was until I got into the motel room and turned on the air. My skin instantly became soaked. I must have been perspiring the whole day, but it was so hot and dry, and windy with the top down, I didn’t notice it. I should have; I’ve been drinking a ton of water and barely needed to relieve myself.

I stopped in St. George, Utah, a fair sized town on the far western end of Utah’s stretch of Highway 70. I was sitting in my car writing down the milage in my little notebook, but the door was open. A thin older fellow in worn jeans and a dim white tee shirt looked over my way and said, “What the hell is that?” “A Mini Cooper,” I informed him. He shook his head and said, “I’d rather be shot dead than be seen in something like that.” He was smiling, but I didn’t believe it.

What an extreme reaction, I thought, and considered asking if he wanted a test drive. “It’s a cool car,” I said, completely unruffled, returning his smile. He looked in and studied the dash board. He seemed fascinated and slightly repulsed, like just looking might somehow make his feminine side bubble to the surface. “Does it really go 150 miles an hour?” he asked after seeing the speedometer. I let him know that it did indeed, that they raced them in England where they were made. He shook his head and said, “It’s just wrong, somehow,” and walked away. He had the same crooked smile the whole time, as if to say, “I really don’t like your kind, but this is a bright, public place and I can’t get away with stomping you.”

What a hoot. If I didn’t already love my little car I would now. It makes small minded people uncomfortable. It would really be poetic if I then sang for the next twenty miles. I didn’t, of course, but my heart cockles were warm.

I go, now, to wipe the sweat off my brow. And nose. And neck. And arms. And legs. Sheesh, I’m sweaty.

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Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.