The following two accounts are greatly separated, more by time than space. The first barely qualifies for the category of Job Stories, since it took place during my days as a college student, when the eventual fruit of my labors would be a college degree, and the presumed fortune thereafter. But it’s a fitting prelude, because it was much on my mind when the second occurred, and both of them merit preservation while my memory can still supply the details. I suspect the reader will not see a vast difference between the two.
Spring of 1982 was the time of my final semester of work toward a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. My most challenging and rewarding course that semester was Article and Essay Writing, taught by Edward Abbey. Unlike most classes, this one met only once a week, on Monday afternoons from 3:30 till 6:00. It was conducted seminar style, with the ten or so students meeting around a table in a conference room. We would regularly read our writing output aloud, and then take questions and comments, all with the objective of strengthening each others skills as writers.
The standing assignment was 1,000 words of writing per week, choosing in any order from a variety of formats and genres supplied by the instructor (e.g. book review, personal narrative, travel piece). Meeting that seemingly arbitrary quantity of verbiage was a daunting task for me, but it forced practice in that exercise most difficult for a writer: sitting down and putting words to paper. Even now I hesitate to set such a goal for myself, although for a professional writer that amount would be more realistically a daily target, rather than weekly.
One of my classmates in that seminar was a scraggly bearded man, maybe about twenty-five years old, though it was hard to tell; all through my college career I had attended writing classes with fellow students ranging in age from 17 to 75, and my world outlook was all the better for it. I don’t recall this man’s name, so I’ll refer to him as Jim.
If I’d already felt that my life was unremarkable, it especially seemed so in comparison to his. To begin with, Jim lived as a squatter in a national preserve outside of town. He commuted to campus once a week by bicycle, a distance that had to be at least thirty miles each way. He was scrupulous about keeping a clean campsite, leaving little trace of his presence and greatly respecting the desert, if not the laws of its federal custodians. He claimed that rangers looked the other way because of his clean footprint, but regularly moved his base nonetheless.
Jim certainly belonged in a writers’ class, because he was a man with stories to tell. One of his essays described his relations with neighbors in the desert, particularly several families of javelinas. Jim earned the trust, or at least the peaceable disregard of the animals by showing over time that he was neither a predator nor a rival for their food. Javelinas are very clannish, and recognize friend or foe by a distinctive musk odor shared by the group. Jim referred to one such herd as the “coffee group,” because their community scent resembled the smell of roasting coffee.
One of Jim’s essays told of a time when the javelinas threatened his life. He was bicycling back to his camp from town one day, avoiding any contact on the two-lane road with cars, which he despised; he referred to them as “metal monsters, farting toxic fumes.” At one point on the road he encountered a dead javelina, clearly the victim of one of the metal monsters. Jim stopped and pulled the carcass off the pavement; he could do nothing more for it, and coyotes or other scavengers shouldn’t have to risk their own lives for a meal. It was only when he approached his campsite that he realized what he’d done wrong.
A few javelinas from one of the local herds were nearby, and perked up as he approached. Jim realized that he now had the smell on his hands of a foreign clan, and their poor eyesight but keen smell would mark him as an intruder and a threat. They started to charge, and Jim, already tired from his commute, knew that he couldn’t outrun them, and faced broken bones and lacerations at the very least. In a burst of quick thinking he grabbed his canteen and ran toward a rock outcropping, climbing up to a height that he hoped the beasts wouldn’t be able to reach. Once there, he used the canteen water to scrub as best as he could any trace of the dead animal’s scent, hoping that it was only on his skin, not his clothes. It must have worked, because soon the herd down below seemed to lose interest and wander away. He tested by rubbing his cleaned hands over the canteen and then throwing it in the direction of the herd; a couple of them sniffed at it and then moved on, so he decided it was safe. Once back at his camp he quickly got undressed and stowed his clothes safely away until he could get to a laundromat to remove any remaining musk.
That piece by Jim had us all enthralled, as did another one. Jim was not married, nor otherwise attached, but had decided that he wanted to get a vasectomy. His reasoning was that “a kid of mine might turn out to be as good as me, but could also turn out to be as bad as me, and that wouldn’t be a good thing.” Jim’s essay related the events leading up to the actual procedure.
Because he had no health insurance, Jim had to get a new job to pay for the procedure. He took a job as an ambulance attendant, partly because he could get evening or night shifts to accommodate his class schedule. Also, he noted, it was a job that did not require him to own a car.
On his first evening (it might have been the second), he responded with the EMTs to a medical emergency at a house. They were met at the door by a terrified-looking woman who quickly led them to the bedroom, where her husband lay on the bed screaming. He had recently undergone a vasectomy, she told them, and there seemed to be some sort of infection now. As they pulled away a blanket, Jim and the EMTs saw that the man’s scrotum, which his wife had surrounded with ice cubes, was reddish purple. And it was greatly enlarged, because it was clear that his testicles had swollen to the size of tennis balls. Jim followed his companions’ lead in appearing calm and professional for the patient and his wife. They gave the man pain relievers and anti-inflammatories, applied a large ice pack, and carried him to the ambulance and off to a hospital.
Jim’s story ended there. For a long moment there was silence in the room, except for possibly the sound of male knees knocking. Then someone asked if he went ahead with his vasectomy after that incident, and he said, “Oh, yeah. I had it done. No problems.” I don’t remember what came next in that class, but very likely it was an object lesson on story resolution versus anticlimax.
*****
Now we move ahead to December, 1995, when I was teaching English at Tucson High Magnet School, which is literally across the street from the University campus. I was teaching freshmen and seniors that year (my favorite levels), and had arranged to have a substitute for a Friday that I was taking off to have some outpatient surgery.
Yes.
As far as anyone at school knew, I had taken a day off for a doctor’s appointment. But when my seniors came into class that morning, some of them seemed genuinely concerned; “Are you all right, Sir? We were worried about you!” I wasn’t limping, or anything like that. I suppose that it’s natural to assume that someone twice their age would be old and frail. Maybe they simply didn’t like the substitute teacher; kids don’t hold back when that happens, and sometimes they have good reason.
But these kids wouldn’t let go, and as I stood there I thought about two of my tenets of teaching senior English: 1. English comprises nearly everything in American life, so the latitude of subjects I can tie into a lesson is very broad; 2. I might be one of the last teachers they ever have, so if there’s something valuable to teach that they might not otherwise hear about first hand, then why not?
I looked calmly at them, and said that I’d had a vasectomy.
There were a few responses of “A what?”, of course, and a couple of slow knowing nods, but only one or two. I could see that this topic was, well, virgin territory. I then explained, simply and technically, what a vasectomy is, and what it does and doesn’t do. The class listened in rapt silence.
I could see a look of confusion and then horror cross the faces of some of the boys. I quickly emphasized that no, this is not at all the same thing as when you take your dog to the vet to get neutered. After a moment, probably looking for the right way to phrase his question, one boy asked in a tentative voice, “Can you still do stuff?” I said, with what I hoped was a slight smile of reassurance (and not anything approaching a wink or a smirk), that yes, I can do absolutely everything that I could do before, with the single exception of making a woman pregnant. That probably assuaged some fears, I thought.
The look on the faces of most of the girls was fascinating. None of them asked any questions beyond concerns about my being in pain, but I could tell that this was a thing that most of them had not known was even possible: the man gets his tubes tied instead of the woman? O brave new world!
Once the initial shock had worn off, a few questions came to which I gave brief, direct answers: did your wife make you do it? actually, it was my idea; why did you do it? we have two children and we’re stopping there; will you keep riding your bike to school? yes.
Then came a brief pause, but I think the silence was more thoughtful than awkward. And I then nodded my head, thanked them for their attention, and continued with the lesson for the day. I noted to myself that I would not broach this subject with my freshman classes; that three years’ gap of age and maturity makes a world of difference. And I would tell my other senior class only if asked; they didn’t.
I never heard any further mention of that day from students, administrators, or parents. And, as with the majority of any teacher’s lessons, I’d never know whether that teachable moment stayed in the student’s brains long after. But we do as we are called to do, casting our seeds of knowledge upon the soil.
Somewhat anticlimactic postscript:
A few years later, I was chatting with an assistant principal at my school, and told her about the experience of that day. I added with a chuckle that I would not have taken that route had I been observed and evaluated by an administrator that day. She then told me of one day earlier when she was teaching an eighth-grade biology class, and her principal was indeed observing from the back of the room. The lesson was on animal reproduction, but with a jump of thought not unusual for a twelve-year-old, a boy asked, “Miss, when a man jacks off in a woman, can she feel it?” Almost without missing a beat, she responded, “Sometimes,” and then with superhuman sang-froid she continued her lesson. Upon leaving her classroom at the end of the period, her administrator’s only words were, “Well done.”
