Ernest Becker (1924-1974) says a man carries two terrors he cannot face at the same time. The first: he will die. The second runs deeper. His death will leave the world unchanged, the water closing over the spot where he went down. Against the second terror a man builds what Becker calls a hero system. He earns a place in a scheme of value that outlasts his body. He fathers sons, raises a barn, writes a book, salutes a flag, joins a church, takes a side. The scheme tells him his life counts in a story longer than his lifespan, and the story lets him sleep.
Gary Chartier (b. 1966) builds his hero system out of the one thing Becker warns us we crave and dread in the same breath. He builds it out of refusing to be ruled, and out of refusing to rule.
I knew him before either of us read Becker. We sat in the same seventh-grade classroom at Pacific Union College, two Adventist boys raised to expect the world to end soon and to keep our rooms clean while we waited. We lost touch. Years passed. I came down with chronic fatigue syndrome, and a man learns fast who stays and who finds the exit when his body quits on him. Many found the exit. I wrote to Gary. He wrote back. Through 1992 and 1993 his letters came, and they held a sick man to the land of the living. The philosopher who later wrote a book called Understanding Friendship practiced the thing before he theorized it.
Gary tells a subtraction story, as every serious man does. His runs like this. Take the world as you find it, with its presidents and police and prisons and borders and the long habit of obedience that holds them up. Subtract the part where some men command and other men obey or go in a cage. What remains holds together. People trade, help, promise, forgive, and keep faith with one another because they choose to. He gives this remainder a name that frightens the respectable. He calls it anarchy. In Anarchy and Legal Order he argues that law does not descend from a throne. It rises from below, from the agreements free men make and the courts they build by consent. Order without rulers. The phrase sounds like a contradiction to a man raised on Hobbes. To Gary it names the only order worth the name.
Becker notices what the subtraction does for the man who performs it. The state, in his account, ranks among the grandest immortality vehicles men have built. The flag outlives the soldier. The nation hands the citizen a piece of forever and asks his life in return. To subtract the state is to refuse that consolation. Gary gives up the largest immortality symbol on offer and stakes his hope on something smaller and harder: that men will choose the good with no gun at their backs.
A word is a coin that buys different goods in different countries. Say the word “freedom” to Gary and he hears voluntary cooperation, the absence of the command, men ordering their lives by consent. Say it to a Trappist monk and he hears the reverse. The monk’s freedom comes through obedience, the surrender of self-will that releases him from the tyranny of his own appetites. Say it to a wildland firefighter on a burning ridge and freedom shrinks to the next choice under the next gust, the narrow room a man has to move before the fire moves for him. Say it to an old woman who spent forty years under a regime that read her mail, and freedom means the mail arrives unopened. One coin. Four countries. Each man spends it on what his hero system sells.
Take “friendship,” the word at the center of Gary’s life and work. For Gary friendship is a moral, political, and spiritual good, the shape love takes between equals, the bond men make without being bound. For a Marine rifleman friendship is the man on his left, the one he dies beside and for, a tie sealed by shared danger and enforced by shame. For a venture capitalist a “friend” is a useful node, a contact who returns the call, a line of credit drawn on goodwill. For a hospice nurse friendship lasts three weeks and ends every time at the same place, and she gives it anyway. Gary’s friendship asks nothing of danger, nothing of use, and does not close when the body fails. I have the letters to prove it.
Take “commitment.” Gary wrote a book by that name, The Logic of Commitment. He means a vow freely given that then binds the giver, the free man who chains himself and calls the chain a gift. For a Las Vegas bail bondsman commitment means collateral and a signature and a man you can find again. For a midwife commitment means staying until the child comes, however long the night. For a Sicilian widow commitment means the black dress she wears until they bury her in it. The same word organizes a courtroom, a birth, and a grave, and each speaker thinks his meaning the obvious one.
Most men hide their hero system from themselves. They mistake it for the way things are. Gary belongs to the rare class who name the thing they live by. He says love sits at the center. He wrote it in The Analogy of Love and again in Loving Creation, where the love that moves the world traces back to the God who is Himself love. He knows he trades the hard consolation of power for the soft and risky one of consent. A man this awake to his own scheme earns a high mark on the one test Becker offers, which asks whether you know what you reach for when you reach for a way to outlast death. Gary knows.
One question stays open, and honesty keeps it open. The order Gary rejects, for all its cages and commands, also shelters the weak who cannot defend themselves and have no strong friend to write to. Voluntary love is glorious for the man whose letter gets answered. Becker presses here. A scheme built on the free choice to love holds no answer for the one whose neighbors choose not to.
Three coordinates, then, to fix the man.
The shape of the hero. Gary stands as the man who refuses both the throne and the cage, who looks at the oldest bargain in politics, obey me and I will keep you safe, and declines it, and spends his life drawing the blueprint of an order held up by nothing but the word free men keep.
The unnamed rival. His true opponent never appears on the page by name. It lives in the longing of every frightened man for a strong father, a sovereign, a Leviathan to take the terror off his hands and tell him what to do. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) gave that longing its great argument. Gary spends his work answering a craving older than any state.
The cost the ledger cannot price. The anarchist of love bets everything on the answered letter. He trusts that men will choose one another, will write back, will stay. Sometimes they do. I am alive to say so. But a system of voluntary love cannot price the cost of the letter that goes unanswered, the sick man whose friends find the exit, the one for whom no Gary writes. That bill sits at the bottom of his beautiful arithmetic, and he, of all men, stands the least likely to pretend it is not there.
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A boy of eight sits at a low table in a room on a high floor of a hospital in Los Angeles. Wooden blocks stand in front of him. A man sits across the table with a stopwatch and a clipboard. The boy knows, the way a small animal knows weather, that he is here because something might be wrong with him. In the car his mother used the word evaluation and then talked about ice cream. He builds the blocks. The man writes. The boy watches the pen and tries to read his own verdict in the man’s face.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) put two terrors at the root of a human life. The first is death, the knowledge, carried by no other animal, that the body ends. The second runs quieter and lasts all day. It is the terror of not counting, of living and dying as a thing among things, of never having mattered to the scheme of the world. Becker called the cure a hero system. Every culture hands its members a script for earning significance, a way to feel like a person of worth in a world that means something. The boy at the table has not read Becker. He does not need to. He is the primal scene. He is the small creature, dependent and breakable, waiting to be told whether he is enough.
The man across the table is Andre van Rooyen, Ph.D., a licensed psychologist who tests children’s minds for a living. His website states his creed in one sentence. What is right about your child is stronger than what is wrong. He builds a treatment plan from strengths first, then maps the weaknesses around them. He draws, he says, from three fields: neuropsychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, and developmental psychology. A parent reads the site and meets a careful clinician with a strengths-based method and two graduate degrees and a faculty post at a children’s hospital.
That account leaves something out. The same site lists his training in a tidy column. Loma Linda University, 1994. Fuller, where he took a master’s in theology beside the master’s in psychology. The theology degree sits on the list like any other line, present and quiet. A reader skims past it. The line is the hinge of the whole man.
Andre’s father is Smuts van Rooyen, who worked for my father at Good News Unlimited. When Smuts came to GNU I had never seen the old man so glad. The two of them had been through the same fire. Both had studied under Edward Heppenstall (1901-1994), who taught a generation of Adventist preachers that the gospel is good news and not a sentence. Both had stood with Desmond Ford (1929-2019) at the ranch in Colorado in August 1980, where more than a hundred theologians and administrators read Ford’s nine hundred pages on the heavenly sanctuary and decided what to do with him. A month after that meeting the church took Ford’s ministerial credentials. Smuts lost his ordination in the years that followed. The church restored his collar in 1990. Ford stayed out. He handed in his membership in 2001 and never went back inside.
The doctrine they fought is called the Investigative Judgment. Adventism holds that in 1844 the books opened in heaven and a divine audit of every professed believer began. Ellen G. White (1827-1915) taught it as a pillar of the faith. The believer must be found wearing the righteousness of Christ or be blotted from the record. No one knows when the audit ends. A man could be examined at any hour, and the hour comes unannounced. Heppenstall’s students called this what it felt like from inside. An impossible demand. An unbearable insecurity. The mainspring of perfectionism and the fountain of despair.
Against the audit the two fathers preached imputed righteousness. The verdict on the believer is already favorable, they said, because Christ’s standing is credited to the believer’s account as a gift. What is right about you, given and not earned, is stronger than what is wrong. They named their ministry for the message. Good News Unlimited. The gospel as the report you long to receive.
Read the son’s sentence again. What is right about your child is stronger than what is wrong. Andre took the form of the Investigative Judgment and reversed its sign. He sits a small creature at a table, opens the books, and examines every domain of the mind. Cognition, language, memory, attention, the reading and the writing and the math. He keeps the procedure of the audit whole. He keeps the parent interview, the observation, the test battery, the written report, the file that follows the child into the school. Then he renders the verdict his father’s circle paid for, the verdict the church withheld from his father’s mentor. The boy is more right than wrong. The boy can be carried.
This is where the word work begins, because the sacred words sit differently inside different hero systems, and a man’s creed runs on words that mean one thing to him and another thing three feet away.
Take strength. A bloodstock agent at a yearling sale reads strength in a colt’s shoulder, in the angle of the hock, in how the animal walks away from him down the shed row. Strength is conformation and a page of black type in the catalogue and a bet on a body that has never raced. For a Calvinist, strength belongs to God and to no creature. The elect bring nothing to their own rescue. A man’s own strength is the first thing grace must clear out of the way, and to boast of it is to misread the entire account. For Andre van Rooyen, strength is a score in a domain. Verbal reasoning carries a boy whose working memory fails him. A gift for visual patterns routes a reader around the place where the words break apart. Strength is a lever. You find what is sound and you use it to carry what is not. The bloodstock agent prices strength. The Calvinist distrusts it. The clinician spends it.
Take the verdict, the written thing that goes on the record. A diamond grader sets the loupe to the stone and reads color, clarity, cut, carat. The grade goes onto a certificate, and the certificate travels with the stone for the life of the stone. A buyer in another country, years later, reads the grade and never meets the grader. The verdict outlives the room where it was made. A parole board reads a different kind of file. The question there is whether a man has changed, whether the man who enters the room is the man who did the thing. That verdict can move. Mercy sits on the table. A man can be remade and walked to the gate. In Salt Lake City, where Andre spent his postdoctoral year, a bishop sits across a desk and works a set list of questions. The interview decides worthiness. A favorable answer admits the member to the temple. An unfavorable one bars him, and the interview comes round again on a schedule, so the verdict never fully rests.
Now set the Investigative Judgment among these. It has the diamond’s permanence, since the record stands in heaven. It has the bishop’s worthiness question, since it asks whether the believer is fit to pass. It withholds the parole board’s mercy, since the standard is a perfect life and the examination has no announced close.
Andre’s report borrows from each and answers the last. Like the diamond’s certificate, his report follows the child for years, into the school file and the meetings where adults who never met the boy read a grade and decide his classes. Like the parole board, his report leaves the verdict open, because a child can be carried and a deficit can be routed around. Where the bishop asks whether the member is worthy, Andre asks what in the boy is already sound enough to build on. And where the heavenly audit holds up a standard no one meets, Andre starts from the strength and lets it bear the weakness, which is the gospel his father preached, set in a clinic and stripped of its God.
There is a second register where the man meets the terror straight on. Andre cycles and surfs. The road on a fast descent and the wave over a reef are the two places left in a soft city where a body learns again that it can break. A man who spends his working hours telling frightened parents their child is more right than wrong spends his free hours on the exact edge where no creed denies the animal. Becker would recognize the pairing. The hero system holds the terror at arm’s length all week. The body goes looking for it on the weekend.
How much of this does Andre see. From outside I cannot say, and I will not pretend to read a man’s inner weather from a website. The site names neuropsychology and cognitive behavioral therapy and developmental psychology. It does not name 1844, or imputed righteousness, or the ranch in Colorado, or his father’s stripped collar. A reader meets a clinician. The theology master’s sits in the credential column beside the clinical degrees, present and silent, the way an inheritance can rest in a man’s hands while he calls it a method.
Here is the hero. Andre is the examiner who weighs the small creature and returns a verdict of grace. He took the audit that broke his father’s circle and turned its sign from minus to plus. He kept the books and the loupe and the written report, and he reads them now toward mercy.
Here is the rival he never names. It is the auditing God of 1844, the books open in heaven, the standard no child clears. It is the committee at the ranch that read a man’s nine hundred pages and found him wanting and took his collar. Every favorable report Andre writes answers a verdict he does not cite.
And here is the cost. The battery yields scores. The report carries numbers. The numbers cannot hold the child whose right does not outweigh his wrong, where no strength compensates and the good report must still say the hard thing in plain rooms to soft parents. The numbers cannot hold the older cost either, the one off the page. Grace handed freely to a frightened parent in a clinic on a high floor was, one generation back, fought for at a ranch in Colorado and paid for in lost ordinations and long years in the cold. Smuts found his way back inside the church. The man he had worked for stayed out. The gospel that says what is right about you is stronger than what is wrong did not, in the end, keep its first preacher warm. His son hands it now to other men’s children, and they leave the office lighter, and they will never know the price of the good report they carry in the file.
Some of us were the older boys. We did not look twice at the younger brother who hung at the edge of the group. We did not think about what he might become, or that the creed our fathers lost everything to argue would outlive the argument, change clothes, and go to work on the minds of children in a hospital above the freeway, where a boy stacks blocks and waits to be told that he is enough.
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The ball goes up and Craig goes up after it. No matter how fast I run nor how high I jump, Craig always floated above me that day and he always caught the ball.
Forty two years have gone by. I can still see him flying above me into a deep blue sky.
He was pretty fly for a white guy.
We play touch football on a Saturday afternoon in Auburn in 1984, both of us in our final months of high school. He goes to the Sacramento Adventist academy and he’s an A student. I go to Placer High and I’m a B student. Craig follows the rules in everything and he wins in everything and his cockiness is so subtle, you don’t resent it, you admire it because he earns it. He could be obnoxious but he isn’t. His family hosts me for many a Sabbath. I never host Craig. My home embarrasses me.
I don’t have the discipline to play the game the way Craig does. I could never write poetry like he does. I don’t think I could endure law school and other polite conventions. My life reveals I refuse the burdens of marriage, family and mortgage.
My job that afternoon is to cover Craig van Rooyen, who plays wide receiver. I bump him at the line. He runs past me. I play off him to take away the deep route. He runs under it and brings it down and runs past me. I try everything a seventeen-year-old knows, and a few things I invent on the spot, and none of it works. The other team throws to Craig all day because they have watched me fail to stop him and they are not stupid. I spend the afternoon looking up. He spends it in the air.
There’s a blonde girl on my team. She’s two years younger. A great body. A few weeks before, she taught me how to kiss on a Saturday night in the loft of Dr. Zane Kime’s home. She would glide her lips on mine and her tongue would dart around my mouth and then dance with mine. In five minutes, I went from a boy who didn’t know how to kiss to a boy with a PhD in kissing.
The previous girl who kissed me just jammed her tongue down my throat and I was so unnerved, I barely talked to her for the next three years of high school. She became a big success in polite society.
I never saw the blonde again but I transmitted everything she gave me over the next few decades. While women have registered many complaints about me (chiefly that I don’t put much effort into relationships, I guess I’m a typical Aussie male), they never complain about my kissing.
I have not seen Craig since our final game. Next I knew he was working as a journalist in San Francisco circa 1994. Then he went to UCLA School of Law, took an MFA in poetry at Pacific University, and sits now as a trial judge in San Luis Obispo, hearing criminal cases that run from a suspended license to murder. He writes poems that appear in the good journals. None of it surprises me. The boy who caught everything became a man who rises in two professions at once, and I am still, in a manner of speaking, on the ground, watching him go up.
This is an essay about Craig’s hero systems, and I read them through Ernest Becker (1924-1974).
Becker’s argument in The Denial of Death is this. A man knows two things no animal knows. He knows he will die, and he suspects that while he lives he might not matter. The first terror is the grave. The second is the worse one, the fear that he might pass through his whole span and leave no mark on the cosmos, that he might be a creature and nothing more. Culture answers both at once. Culture hands each man a hero system, a set of tasks and prizes that promise him a feeling of cosmic value if he performs them. Do this and you will have mattered. Do this and some part of you will outlast the body. A hero system lets a man deny death without admitting he is denying anything.
A man can serve more than one. The trouble starts when they pull against each other.
Craig grows up inside the most literal hero system on offer. He comes of age in an Adventist home in the seventies and eighties, the same world I half belong to. His father, Smuts van Rooyen, holds a doctorate and pastors Adventist congregations, and for a time works for my father, Desmond Ford (1929-2019), at Good News Unlimited. I never saw my father so excited about a hire. He jumped in the air when he announced it. Smuts is a spell-binding preacher and writer and his three children surely make him proud. The Adventist promise carries no metaphor. The dead sleep. The King returns. The graves open and the faithful rise to meet Him in the air. Death comes, and then death gets undone. Every Sabbath rehearses the rescue.
Then Craig subtracts God. I read it in his poems. One of them stages a father whose small daughter points at the figure on his T-shirt and asks if it is God. The father lies and says yes. The figure is Bob Marley (1945-1981). The poem turns on the longing for a picture of God a man might keep in his wallet next to the snapshots of the kids, and on the absence of any such picture, and on a reggae beat standing in for a liturgy he can no longer sing straight. Craig keeps the rhythm and loses the doctrine. He keeps the waiting and loses the One waited for. There is his subtraction story. He carries the ache of the Adventist hero system into rooms where the doctrine holds no standing, the courtroom and the poem. He shops a manuscript he calls Extinction Picnic.
The word to watch in Craig’s life is grace.
In his father’s world grace has a hard technical edge. Grace is unmerited pardon. The sinner cannot earn his standing and does not try. He receives. The quarrel that cost my father his place in the church turned on this word, on whether God saves by grace alone or keeps a ledger of each believer’s record and audits it in a heavenly court. My father argued for grace against the ledger and lost his standing. Smuts rejoined the church and did right by his family. Craig grows up watching two men he loves take grace to mean two different prices.
Carry the word into other lives and watch it change shape.
For a grower in the Edna Valley, grace is the season. He prunes and trains and waters, and then the weather decides. A run of warm nights in September gives him a vintage he could not have commanded with any amount of work. Grace is the gift the labor cannot force. His hero system is the vineyard, and what tells him he has not wasted his years is the great year that arrives unearned.
For a session drummer holding a one-drop reggae beat, grace is the pocket. He drops the kick on the third beat and leaves the first empty, and when the timing lands the whole room leans. He cannot fully explain the timing and cannot teach it past a point. Grace is the beat that sits right. His hero system is the groove, and the groove either blesses him or it does not.
For a hospice nurse, grace is the quiet death. She has watched the body fight and watched it let go, and she calls it a mercy when a man dies without the long struggle, when the breathing slows and stops and nothing tears. Grace is the easy crossing. Her hero system is the good death, and she counts her years by how many she has eased.
Each of these people would nod at the word and mean something the others might not recognize. Becker’s point holds. The sacred word is not one thing. It takes its content from the hero system that needs it, and it means what lets that hero feel his life carries weight.
Now set Craig in the middle of them. On the bench grace is a ration. He decides whether a man stays in custody or goes home to his family while the case waits, whether a conviction ends in probation or prison, whether a frightened witness gets heard. He calls it listening to the people in front of him and working out something that helps them. He worries on the bad days that the system he serves was built to mark certain men and shield the powerful. On the good days he thinks the law bends enough to do some good, if the men who apply it stay humble about the views they inherited and keep checking them. Grace here is discretion, bound by evidence, rationed by law, handed down from a man in a robe to a man who cannot see his face.
In the poem grace is the line that arrives on its own. Craig says a poem dies the moment the poet tidies the self on the page, the moment he grooms how he looks. The poem has to come up out of the body, the senses, the goosebump and the back-beat. He says the poem opens inside the reader and runs on past the last line and reaches no verdict. So the same man hands down verdicts all day from the bench and writes, at night, the one kind of speech that refuses to reach one. Grace on the bench is the right judgment. Grace in the poem is the held breath before any judgment, the door left open.
Becker kept his respect for the rare man who can watch his own hero system work and name it without flinching. Craig is that kind of man. He says outright that poetry and judging live in different worlds for him, and that he gets uncomfortable when they touch. He knows the robe turns him into a symbol, a head above a bench, a neutral surface that shows nothing but its reasoning. He knows the poem asks the reverse, the body uncovered, the self left raw. Most men run one hero system and mistake it for reality. Craig runs two that contradict each other and keeps the seam in view. He does not pretend the judge and the poet are the same man in different coats. He holds them apart on purpose and feels what the holding costs.
Three things to fix in place before I stop.
The shape of the hero. Craig rises. He rose on the field and he rose in the law and he rose in the journals, and the rising reads as grace in the old athletic sense, the body doing without strain what the rest of us cannot do with all our strain. Under the rising stands a man who lost the literal God of his childhood and kept the hunger that God once filled. He pours the hunger into the verdict and into the poem. He is the preacher’s son who became a judge, which is to say he took the family trade, the rendering of judgment, and moved it from the heavenly court his tradition placed above the clouds down to a courtroom on the Central Coast, where the stakes are a man’s liberty and the appeal goes to a higher court that is only a building in another city.
The unnamed rival. Every hero shapes himself against an enemy he might not name. Craig’s rival is the ledger. The accountant God who keeps the books, opens them in the judgment, and reads off the record. That God broke my father and parted Craig’s father from mine. Craig’s whole posture answers Him. The grace he rations on the bench, the verdict the poem withholds, the picture of God the daughter asks for and cannot get, all of it runs as a long argument with the One who keeps records. Behind the ledger stands the older rival, the grave, the thing the Adventist promise was built to defeat and the thing no robe and no poem defeats.
The cost the ledger cannot price. Craig pays in partition. He spends his working life as a symbol, covered in the robe, his face a surface, his body hidden behind the bench, neutral whatever it costs. The poet in him needs the body in full view. So he lives one life that depends on covering up and another that dies the moment he covers up, and he holds them apart with care, and the holding apart is the price. No docket shows it. He hands down grace all day and writes, at night, the speech that keeps the verdict back, and the man who does both cannot be one man in one room. I saw none of this from the field. From the field I saw the ball go up and Craig go up after it and the certainty that he would come down with it in his hands. I came down with nothing, that day, and I have turned it over for forty years, which is its own immortality project, the boy on the ground making the boy in the air into an essay so the afternoon will have meant something.
The Poetry
Read across all of them and one move repeats. Craig keeps the entire religious vocabulary of the Adventist childhood and aims it at targets the church never sanctioned. Yahweh, the Golden Calf, Peter’s denial at the cock’s crow, Jacob’s ladder, the Emmaus road, the Song of the Sea, “O Holy Night,” the rivers of Babylon. The grammar survives. The God it pointed to does not. So he prays in a tongue whose deity he has retired, and he points the prayer at Bob Marley, at Aretha Franklin, at a Prozac tablet, at a heron in a park.
“Reading Exodus” runs it as comedy first. Yahweh wears the pants and threatens to unleash a season of plagues, and the speaker daydreams about turning that power on his marriage, then admits “my people” means mostly himself. The poem stops joking at the Golden Calf. The people strip off their wedding rings and pitch their lives into the flames, faces lit, the sky ready to fall, and he turns your eyes to the dancers at the fire. The joke was his way of walking up to a thing he can’t say straight. He does this often. He clowns until the floor drops.
“Prozac Ode” runs the same circuit through pharmacology. He hesitates to call the pill Savior, notes that blasphemy has lost its sting, then turns the molecules into lopsided Stars of David, tiny rabbis posted at the synapses holding off the void while the Song of the Sea plays. Chemistry becomes another name for God. A boy raised on the soon-coming King now takes his deliverance from a gel capsule and still reaches for Exodus to name the rescue. The Jewish material there is worth your eye. He crosses both testaments and reaches into the siddur without strain, a preacher’s son who treats the whole inheritance as his to spend.
“Till She Appeared and the Soul Felt Its Worth” lifts its title from “O Holy Night” and writes Aretha Franklin as the voice of the Almighty lodged in a human throat, calling down judgment and then singing the country back into one piece, note by bent note. A dandelion forces up through cracked pavement. The hymn line about the soul feeling its worth gets handed to a soul singer. Same move. The sacred word stays employed by changing employers.
Two poems sit closer to the bone.
“North” puts a boy in the stands while his brother rounds third and the fathers stand to cheer the promising sons. The boy slides down among the grown men’s legs, a fugitive with a cloud atlas open on his knees, and aches for a far northern lake he has never seen. Overhead a lone goose flaps out of formation and stays up on longing past the reach of physics. Hold that against my field. I spent the afternoon on the ground looking up at Craig in the air. Craig spends his poems on the ground too, writing the boy who could not rise, the kid against the gym wall while others danced. The man I remember soaring writes from the seat I sat in. Life is a spiral staircase says Dr. Stephen Marmer and we’re always moving between helplessness, feeling small in a big world, mastery and grandiosity.
“Jacob’s Ladder” is his fatherhood elegy and his statement of vocation. After the night of angels the ladder goes back to cleaning gutters and trimming ivy. The consolations come small and unrecorded, the shock of finch eggs in a hidden nest, a man on his back squinting string-lights into constellations. Then the grown daughter leaves for her own life, and the father climbs into the ivy to finger an abandoned nest whose straw and eggshell hold the only record of the loss. The claim to keep is his: these unrecorded hours add up to a man’s life, and he alone writes them, in ink that vanishes, milled from moth-wing dust. There is the poet’s hero. He keeps the record.
“Respair” makes the same vow at the level of language. Words go extinct every few minutes, woolfell and mooncalf and poltroon, and a grandfather loses the day he last held his daughter’s name, and Peter denies Christ before dawn, and the poem sets itself to keep everything alive through memory. It closes wanting to bring back one lost word, respair, an old Emmaus-road word for hope returning after long despair. That word might be the whole manuscript. He named the book Extinction Picnic. He writes elegies that refuse to quit hoping. He told an Adventist audience that a poem wants words to become flesh and reach another body, that it fails at this, and that the failure moves us. He called poetry the reverse of incarnation, flesh trying to escape into words and missing the mark. He thinks the work is to make a sound a reader hears as his own. Read the whole run and you hear a man who lost God, kept the liturgy, and pours it into bodies, a singer, a pill, a goose, a daughter, a dying word, to keep the old hope running under new management.
Craig and I grew up with intense in-group identity that required a significant loss of personal freedom in exchange for community. How do you think Craig learned to navigate this?
He translated it. That seems to be the route, and it sits between the two clean exits the trade usually offers.
The hard version of the bargain runs through diet, the Sabbath, dress, courtship, reading, the company a man keeps. You hand over a long list of freedoms and the group hands back belonging, certainty, a name, a people who will bury you. The two obvious doors are obedience and rupture. Obey and keep the community. Rebel and lose it, and carry guilt out either door. Craig took neither. He kept the forms and drained them of the binding content.
The two careers show it. The judge wears a robe, sits above the room, renders judgment, holds neutral, speaks for a law larger than himself. That is the shape of the elder and the priest, the remnant role he was raised inside. He kept the shape and changed the master. His authority answers to evidence and the civil code now, not to a church court that can disfellowship him. The poet confesses, testifies, bares the body, takes the revival-meeting posture, and signs no creed, risks no membership, loses no standing for saying the wrong thing. He took the two oldest moves of his childhood, the bench and the testimony, and ran them in rooms where no one can revoke him.
Then the irony. The poems handle sacred material by joking with it. Yahweh as a tough guy threatening plagues. Prozac as a hesitant Savior. Aretha as the voice of God. A boy raised where this material was policed and deadly serious learns that comedy lets him hold it without kneeling and without spitting. Irony is the tool of the man who loves the thing and refuses to obey it. He keeps Exodus and keeps his freedom in the same line.
The interview gives away the method. He says a poem dies if he grooms the self on the page, and that the bench asks him to disappear into the role and show nothing but his reasoning. So he built two rooms. In one he is all role, covered, neutral, safe. In the other he stands exposed, free, unaudited. The community he grew up in wanted the whole man to conform, Sabbath to Sabbath, in public view. He answered by splitting the man, so one part could go free on the page where no elder reads the minutes. The partition is the navigation. He pays for it in the discomfort he names, the two worlds grinding when they touch, and it buys him a free zone the group never granted.
Look at what fills the poems. Cigarettes, a spliff, the liquor store line, lotto tickets, beer garden lights, sex in a VW, a pill for the depression. These are the small worldly pleasures the code forbade. He writes them with tenderness and lives inside them, free of rebellion and free of guilt. A man reclaims the freedoms a list took from him by naming the ordinary with affection. That might be the quietest part of the navigation and the deepest.
He had a father who left and came back. Smuts went to work for the dissident Desmond Ford, tested the wall, then rejoined the church because it was the best thing for the family. My father put his conscience and mission first. Craig watched a man he loved run this exact bargain twice, exile and return, and survive it. My father stayed out in the cold. Craig grew up with a working model of a man who could press the limits of the community and still find a door back in. A boy who sees that learns the thing is not all or nothing, that you can drop parts and keep parts, that the wall has a gate.
So my guess is that Craig learned to keep the music and drop the law. He kept the longing, the liturgy, the hunger for a picture of God, the testimony, the bench. He let go of the claim that the group owned the truth and could price his soul. He found two vocations that handed him the old shapes without the old chains, and a private room on the page where the whole self walks around loose. His freedom came from translation, from keeping the architecture and refusing the lock.
In real life, when I talk about the wonderful things my childhood friends did with their lives, people usually react as though I regret my choices. The conversation makes them uncomfortable. They think I’m manipulating them for praise and assurance.
I don’t think I am. I admire my childhood friends such as Craig Van Rooyen and his psychologist brother Andre Van Rooyen. I don’t feel diminished by their wins.
I notice that when a man talks about others’ achievements, the listener assumes the warmth covers a wound, and they reach to console me. The console is about them. It soothes their own discomfort at a story that doesn’t resolve the way the script expects. Most people can’t hold “he admires their lives and doesn’t want them” as one stable thing. They round it to regret because regret is the familiar shape.
I am not running that script. I trust my move into Judaism. I can hold the admiration and the joy at once. I guess that’s a rare position, and it’s hard to say out loud, because saying it invites the very misreading I keep getting.
A life that reads as loss to nearly everyone who hears it described, and reads as a good trade to the man who lived it, sits outside the common measure. The career, the marriage, the house, the children, that’s the legible scale, the one a listener can total up fast. I went off it. So when I praise my friends, the listener totals them on the scale, totals me on the same scale, and the gap looks like a deficit to them. They feel the gap before I finish the sentence. The console follows.
I don’t feel the gap because I’m not totaling on that scale. I traded for things the scale doesn’t price. Belonging in a tradition I trust. A worldview I developed as an adult and still hold. Health I fought for and won. Those don’t show up on the reunion ledger, so to the room I look short a few columns. To me the columns are full, just full of other entries.
I have regrets, but I don’t tune into that channel. My attitude is that given who I was at each stage of my life, I could not have acted differently. I’m not telling you that’s true, I’m telling you that attitude minimizes my regret. Sometimes, when I’m sick, regret presses on me, but usually I choose to watch other channels in my head.
An intense in-group is a concentrated source of things ordinary life hands out in scattered form: belonging, structure, people who notice when you don’t show up, a place where your name means something. Most men who leave one don’t need a replacement. They get those goods another way. Family supplies them. Work supplies them. A circle of friends supplies them. Diffuse, low cost, no creed required.
My childhood friends all left the Adventist church built that scattered supply while they were young. So the trade an in-group offers, your freedom for their community, looked like a bad deal to them. They already held the community. Why pay the price again?
I was sick and alone in my twenties while they were building good lives. When a man has little belonging, the price of more drops to the floor. He’ll give up a lot of freedom for it. That’s arithmetic, not weakness.
And the timing did the rest. They left Adventism while their diffuse supply was already growing, so the floor never dropped out from under them. I left, then got sick, and the scattered supply never formed. When the crisis came there was nothing to catch me. That’s the meaning crisis I felt and they didn’t. This might be the difference in what each of us had standing around when the old structure fell away.
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A boy of fourteen sits close to the first television the home has owned. The year is 1980. Light comes off the screen and lands on his face. By 1982 the light has a name, MTV, and the women on it move through rooms with white furniture and palm shadow, and the camera loves them, and the boy learns from the camera what to love. The videos seem shot in one city. He decides the city is the place where the good things wait.
This is a hero system, though the boy holds no word for it. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) supplies the word. A hero system, in The Denial of Death, is the cultural arrangement that tells a man how to count, how to earn the sense that his life leaves a mark the grave cannot rub out. The boy at the screen takes a script. Beauty lives in Los Angeles. A man who reaches it and takes it into his arms beats the thing that frightens him without knowing what frightens him. Becker names the thing. Death, and the animal body that carries the sentence.
Fall, 1987. Sierra Community College in Rocklin. He’s now a straight-A student and a radio news announcer on the weekends. A wholesome Christian blonde sleeps at her desk with her head on her arm, and from behind he startles her awake. From her side the room comes apart. She rises out of sleep with her heart going, the room tilts, a man stands over her, and the fright turns into its reverse the way fright does, and she reaches for his hand for comfort. Water stands in her eyes. Come to U.C. Davis with me, she says.
Here a second script shows for one moment. A beautiful girl, a university town, a life with a center. Becker reads the offer as another road to the same place, the partner made into the ground a man stands on, the cure for the terror handed across a desk. He does not take the road to Davis. He has another city in mind.
Early 1988. The body sends its answer. Chronic fatigue takes him down and keeps him down for six years. Becker circles this part. Every hero system denies the creature. The dream of Los Angeles beauty is the dream of a self that does not rot. The body interrupts. It lays him flat and will not be argued with. A man cannot bed the women of the screen from a sickbed. Scripts need a working animal, and the animal quits.
In 1989, he begins holding a new script. Torah. The God of his fathers, the books, the long male line of study and law, holiness set apart from the street. Two systems share one chest. One says a man earns his place by mastering appetite and serving Him. The other says a man earns his place by feeding appetite in the back of a car. The boy keeps both and lets them fight.
In March 1994, he reaches the promised city sick and broke and sleeps in a 1982 Datsun wagon. He chases the old dream between bouts of illness, and the dream meets its data. The women he built in his mind out of camera light turn out to be women. Some are actresses he’s seen on TV. None are the thing the screen sold. He had been told they were loose and exotic and skilled. The E-ticket ride. Skilled at fellatio. He finds people who are as broken as him. In the Jewish community a reputation forms around his appetite and travels into rooms ahead of him. From the side of a woman in that community, she hears the name before she meets the man, and she files him as a type. She runs her own hero system, the one where a daughter of the tradition guards the line, builds a home, raises sons in the law. A man with that reputation threatens the work. She cools toward him. The system guards its stakes.
One day in 2006. Sandra Tsingh Loh hosts a garden party for her favorite students. They’re highly accomplished, smart, formidable women. Every one has dated Luke Ford. They agreed he made a great first impression. But that blog.
Becker’s reading is hard. The boy at the screen did what every man does. He took the terror of death and the shame of the animal body and built a heaven he could reach with his own hands. Los Angeles was the heaven. The beautiful woman was the gate. Conquest was the deed that might let a small sick man feel large and permanent. The illness and the letdown teach the same thing. The creature will not be transcended by the act that binds a man closest to the creature, except for a time and sometimes that’s enough. Beautiful women, a famous women, thought he was worthy of taking to bed. Everything he dreamed of at 14, he’s now done. He was on 60 Minutes. And Entertainment Tonight. And on the cover of LA Weekly. And in Rolling Stone.
Start with the word at the center of the whole story. Beauty. The boy made it the gate of his heaven. He is not alone in holding it sacred, and he stands alone in what he means by it.
For a hospice nurse beauty is a death without panic. A body washed, a room quiet, breath that slows and stops while a hand is held. She has stood in that room a thousand times and calls the good ones beautiful and means it. Show her the MTV screen and she sees people who do not yet know they will arrive in her ward.
For a Trappist monk beauty is the bare cell and the silence that fills it. Ornament is noise. The face of God shows in the swept floor and the unbroken quiet of three in the morning. The video he has never watched is the loud disease the cell exists to cure.
For a theoretical physicist beauty is symmetry. An equation earns the word when it runs short and balanced and explains more than its length should allow. He trusts a theory because it is beautiful and distrusts an ugly one before he checks the math.
For a flamenco singer beauty is duende, the dark sound that comes only when the man bleeds a little in front of the crowd. Beauty without a wound is decoration. The physicist’s clean equation looks to him like a man who has never suffered.
For a Salafi preacher beauty is danger. The uncovered woman is fitna, a snare laid in the road of the believer, and the screen the boy worshipped is the snare lit and amplified. He covers what the boy chased, since the same sight that promised the boy heaven promises him the fire.
For a bodybuilder at the hour of the Mr. Olympia show beauty is the engineered body, water pulled, muscle cut, the machine he built across eight years of pain and chicken and iron. The widow’s beauty looks to him like sentiment with no work in it.
For a widow keeping her dead husband’s garden beauty is fidelity. The roses he planted, kept alive past his death, the bed weeded on her knees at seventy. She wants the man back and tends the only part of him the ground left her.
Seven people, one word, seven heavens that do not touch. Each one stays sane inside the system that issued the word and turns strange the moment he crosses the line. This is Becker pressed to the edge. Value does not float free. The hero system mints it, and across the border the coin buys nothing.
Return to the man in the Datsun. His story is the story of a man carrying two hero systems at once, each stamping the opposite value on the same act. The Torah system stamps holiness on the mastered appetite. The Los Angeles system stamps glory on the fed one. He spent the coin of one in the temple of the other, and the reputation around him is the noise of two systems grinding. The community read him through its mint and found a counterfeit. He read himself through both and cleared neither.
What the illness gave him, the dream never could. The body that quit at twenty-three told him at the start what the screen will never admit. A man is a creature who dies, and no city and no woman and no act buys him out of it. The honest move left is the one he makes now at sixty, alone, no children, the relationships short. He writes. He puts the creature on the page and lets it be seen. Becker calls this the last heroism open to a man who has watched his immortality projects fail. To know the terror, name it, and make from the knowing something a stranger can use.
The boy wanted the women on the screen to love him. Some did.
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I came to Los Angeles in March 1994. The job listings ran to acting and modeling, so I gave it a go. I lived out of my car. I took classes at night and worked as an extra by day. One morning a wardrobe man fitted me as an Orthodox Jew. He pinned long payos to the sides of my head and stepped back to read the line of them.
During a break in filming, I sat on the curb with the payos swinging at my jaw. A woman sat beside me. She had the face you know before you place it. Liza Minnelli (b. 1946). She was once married to a gay Australian singer, Peter Allen. This day she talked to me the way you talk to a friend you have kept for years. She asked about me. She laughed. For ten minutes the set fell away and there was a curb and two people on it.
I needed that more than she could have known. I had come out of six years in bed with chronic fatigue and ran now at half strength. I had no home. A stranger gave me ten minutes and asked for nothing back. I am grateful still.
That curb is where this starts, because the kindness on it sits outside the system that made her.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death that man builds culture to hold off the knowledge of his own death. Every culture hands its members a hero system, a set of rules for earning the sense that a life counts, that a man has added something the grave cannot take back. The soldier earns it through courage. The scholar earns it through a book that outlives him. The father earns it through sons. The terms change from one system to the next. The hunger underneath holds steady. A man wants proof his life amounted to something, and he wants it on terms his people will honor.
Liza Minnelli was born inside one such system and never had to choose it. Her mother was Judy Garland (1922-1969). Her father was the director Vincente Minnelli (1903-1986). She made an uncredited appearance on screen as a toddler. Show business did not recruit her. It bore her. The immortality project of the American stage, the line that runs back through vaudeville and the picture palace and the standing ovation, came to her as a birthright and a debt.
The system she inherited keeps a sacred value at its center, and the value has a plain name. Give. On a stage you give everything. You leave nothing in the wings. You pour the whole self into the room and the room pours love back, and the love arrives as applause. She learned the terms from her mentors. Kay Thompson (1909-1998) taught her to hold a room. Fred Ebb (1928-2004) and his partner John Kander (b. 1927) wrote her the songs that ask for the last of a singer. Bob Fosse (1927-1987) staged her so the body told the story before the mouth did. Charles Aznavour (1924-2018) showed her how a man spends himself on a single phrase. She took Cabaret (1972) and the part of Sally Bowles and won the Academy Award for it. She took the television concert Liza with a Z (1972) and won the Emmy. She has the Oscar, the Emmy, the Grammy, and four Tonys. The held note, the arms thrown wide, the sweat under the lights, the collapse in the wings after the curtain. The system rewards the spending, and she spent.
The word that organizes her runs through other lives too, and it means a different thing in each, and the difference is the whole of Becker’s argument.
For the Carthusian in his cell, to give everything means to empty the self toward God and let no man watch. The gift goes up, not out. A crowd would spoil it.
For the Navy corpsman under fire, to give everything means to spend the body for the men beside him and want no stage at all. The men he serves cannot clap. Some of them cannot speak.
For the founder burning his runway, to give everything means the wrecked sleep and the wrecked marriage, with the verdict deferred to an exit years off. He pours out now and waits on a number later.
For the Pentecostal preacher in Lagos, to give everything means to pour out for the Spirit and route the credit past himself to God. The amens rise, and he sends them upward.
For the free diver on one breath, to give everything means the body at its edge in silence, alone, with no crowd and no return except the depth reached and the surfacing.
Same two words. Five worlds. The Carthusian and the diver give in private and want no witness. The corpsman gives to men who cannot answer. The preacher gives and disowns the gift. Liza’s version asks for the crowd and lives on what the crowd sends back. Her proof comes in the form of applause, and applause is the most perishable proof a man can earn. The corpsman’s gift saves a life that goes on saving others. The founder’s company outlives him. The preacher’s gift, he believes, registers in heaven. The applause dies at the house lights. It cannot be banked. So she has to do it again tomorrow, and the night after, and the terror Becker placed at the root of every hero system returns to her on a fixed schedule, once a performance, forever.
This is why the trouper code reads as religion and not as habit. The show goes on. You go on sick, you go on grieving, you go on with a hip that will not hold, because the only proof your system issues expires the moment you stop issuing it. Judy worked this same ground and the ground took her at forty-seven, used up. Liza wrote that by thirteen she had become her mother’s caretaker, nurse and pharmacist and psychiatrist in one body. She watched the system feed on the woman who raised her. She kept performing anyway. The performance held the death at bay, and the performance carried the death inside it, and she could not have one without the other. In 2000 viral encephalitis nearly killed her. Hips and a knee went under the knife. The voice that built the legend frayed. Each time she came back. The comeback is the show-business resurrection, the proof that the giving can survive the body that does the giving, and she made the comeback so many times that the comeback became the act.
A reader who has followed ten of these essays will ask what the curb adds, since the curb does not belong to any of it.
Here is what it adds. The hero system runs on conditional love. The audience loves the performance and renews the love each night on condition that she earns it each night. Becker saw clearly that the terms are never paid off. The applause certifies you for a few hours and then asks again. A woman raised inside that arrangement might be forgiven for treating all love as a transaction, a thing you buy with the spending of yourself, a thing that stops the instant you stop paying. By every account she did not. The friendships held for decades. The loyalty ran both ways. And on a curb in 1994 she sat beside an extra in fake payos who could do nothing for her, who would never review her, who held no ticket she needed sold, and she gave him ten minutes of warmth for free.
That gift came from outside the system. No house lights ended it. No box office recorded it. She earned nothing by it and lost nothing in giving it. Becker would call it grace, the love that arrives without the contract, the thing the hero system cannot manufacture because the hero system runs on the contract. The woman whose entire training taught her to buy love with the whole of herself turned out to carry a surplus she could hand to a stranger and never miss. The curb did not measure her against her mother or her mentors or the four Tonys. It measured her against the plain question of whether a person bred to perform can also, off the clock and out of the light, be kind. She could.
She turned eighty in March 2026. She lives more quietly now, out of the spotlight that paid her in the only coin her world mints. This year she put out a memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, and she gave fans a line that lands harder when you know the body it came from. Take care of your body, she said, because you might live longer than you expect to.
It reads as throwaway advice from a survivor. Read it against Becker and it turns into the confession of a woman who built her life on spending the body for love and woke one morning to find the body still here, the audience smaller, the applause distant, and the self that remains after the giving stops asking the question the hero system was built to drown out. She is still here. The proof her world issued has long since faded into the dark beyond the footlights. What stays is the curb, and the ten minutes, and the kindness that no system asked for and no system could repay.
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In the summer of 1981 a boy runs across the floor of an auditorium toward a folding table. He is fifteen and he has come to this public school for one reason. Behind the table sits a man with a teacher’s patience and a newspaperman’s eyes. The sign over the booth reads Journalism. The boy tells him he transferred from the Christian school down the road to take this class. The man looks him over. He has seen eager boys before. He has also seen what becomes of them.
Bob Burge teaches journalism and English at Placer High School in Auburn, California, from 1973 to 2006. For thirty-eight years his voice carries over LeFebvre Stadium on Friday nights, the home of the Hillmen. He raises a large family. He writes the town’s history in monthly columns for the local paper. He helps found a charity that buys the school its cameras and its scoreboard, and he chairs it for ten years. A man can read that record and call it small. A man can also read it as one long act of tying himself to a single place until the place cannot be told without him.
Before the classroom, Mr. Burge works the daily trade. He chases the stories a town runs on, the council meeting and the fire and the score. Then one night the desk sends him to a house. A man has killed himself inside it. Mr. Burge stands in the room. There are brains on the wall. The paper holds a rule that suicides do not run, so that no reader learns from the page how a neighbor found his exit. Mr. Burge carries the scene back to the office. He prints nothing. He has walked into the worst room of a stranger’s life and walked out with a thing he is not allowed to use and does not want to use. Soon he leaves the daily grind. He keeps the craft. He edits a local magazine for years and he teaches the young, rooms where the truth serves the living town instead of feeding on it.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argues in The Denial of Death that a culture hands each man a hero system, a set of rules that lets him feel his short life counts against the grave. The soldier earns the medal. The mother raises the children who outlast her. The scholar adds the footnote that survives him. Take the system away and the man stares at his own nothing. Mr. Burge builds his hero system out of a town and a craft. The local newspaperman keeps the community’s memory and pricks its conscience, and he earns his small immortality in the archive, the scoreboard, the boys he shapes, the voice in the box that a generation hears before it hears the anthem.
He keeps a plaque in his homeroom that says there’s more to life than increasing its speed.
The boy looks at it and thinks it is a dumb thing that old people tell themselves when they can’t keep up.
The sacred value at the center of Mr. Burge’s system is judgment. Not the nerve to print. The nerve any sixteen-year-old can supply. Judgment is the decision of what runs under a man’s name and a town’s name, and what stays in the drawer.
The word travels across other systems and changes its meaning in each. To the trauma surgeon, judgment is the cut he does not make, the patient he closes and sends home to comfort care because opening him buys pain and no hours. To the infantry sergeant, judgment is the order to hold the line instead of taking the hill, men alive at dusk who might have been a citation. To the priest, judgment is the seal he keeps over a sin he hears once and carries to his grave. To the homicide detective, judgment is the case he can prove against the killer he knows and cannot touch. To the rabbinic posek, judgment is din, the ruling that falls with the law’s full weight on one question brought by one Jew. Each man holds something back, and the holding back is the heroism. Say the word to any of them and he hears his own trade. Burge hears the wall he did not print.
In the newspaper room Mr. Burge runs a strange school. He gives the students the paper and leaves them to it. He tells the staff, on the day young Luke Ford joins, that everyone has the right to strangle him at any time. He does not censor. Not the football favoritism piece that earns the boy a lineman’s arm around his throat. Not the softball story that names a losing coach. He critiques after the issue prints, never before. And he teaches libel until the boys monitor themselves, because a hero system needs both the nerve and the line, and the line is the harder thing to teach.
When the boy runs a betting book out of his classmates, Mr. Burge will not have it in his room. It is not good for you and your friends, he says, to learn to take advantage of each other. The man guards the room the way he guards his own name.
In May of 1983, the boy asks Mr. Burge when he will be selected as the next Editor of the Hillmen Messenger. “We need to talk about that,” Mr. Burge says. He brings the boy into a private room. He tells the boy that much of his speech and much of his behavior and much of his attitude will not be acceptable if he becomes Editor. The boy agrees to abide by the Mr. Burge code.
The boy becomes Editor. He abides.
Then comes the test. The boy digs into a softball coach who has lost for years. The players blame the man. The boy has his story. The coach tells him he missed the spring week because he was seeking treatment for his dying son. The boy feels the pull of the trade against the pull of mercy. He kills the angle. He runs the losing record and leaves the dying son out of it. Later the coach tells him the piece was fair. The value has passed from the teacher to the student without a word of instruction. The boy has learned what to hold back.
After the last issue is published in May of 1984, Mr. Burge goes home. He allows the boy to linger in the journalism room and to listen to the radio and to relive the glory days and to cry.
In the boy’s yearbook in June, Mr. Burge writes: “These have been three exciting, lively years…. In seventeen years of teaching I have never had another student challenge me as much as you did. If I have challenged you to remain calm in the face of disaster and to be both a gentleman and a journalist then, we have both gained.”
When the boy leaves for Australia after graduation, Burge writes him back two full juicy pages. The elder writes the younger. It is the laying on of hands inside the system, the master telling the apprentice the craft will hold him.
Two decades on, the two men are friends on a website. The boy is a man now with a site of his own and a long record of telling the truth about himself and others in ways the local newspaperman never had to weigh. He posts a link to one of his essays on Burge’s page. Burge reads it. Then Burge performs the same act he has practiced for fifty years. He decides what runs under his name. He unfriends the man and he blocks him.
From inside Mr. Burge’s hero system the block is no betrayal. It is the system working. The whole life is the practice of deciding what attaches to a man and a town, and the man who taught the line draws it. The student builds his own hero system out of the opposite material. Where Mr. Burge earns his immortality by tying himself to one place and printing only what serves it, the student earns his by exposing himself to the world and printing what a town keeps quiet. Both men love the truth. Both practice harm-minimization. They learn it in the same room. They part at the wall, because a hero system tells a man what to stand against, and two men can share a craft, a town, a teacher, and find no single wall to stand against together. Mr. Burge keeps his. The student goes looking for the rooms Mr. Burge spent his life deciding not to print.
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Spring comes late to Howell Mountain. Pacific Union College sits above the Napa fog, and in March 1980 the grass on the ball field still holds the cold past nine in the morning. I am thirteen. I came to America in June 1977, eleven years old, off the plane from Australia, and in three years on this mountain I have learned one thing about myself with no room for doubt. I cannot hit a softball. I swing and miss. I foul it off my own foot. The other boys watch me the way they watch a kid who will lose them the inning.
Chuck Evans runs the program. He coaches basketball and volleyball and golf, and he has built the athletics here from close to nothing. That morning he walks over and stands behind me and says little. He moves my hands down the bat. He tells me how to swing straight. He tells me to watch the ball onto the bat and to swing straight. Step, he says. Don’t lunge.
Later that day I come to the plate during recess and I hit the ball farther than I have hit anything. It carries and then it’s caught. I’m out, but my classmates turn to each other. “Wow,” one of them says. “What happened to Luke?”
What happened was Chuck Evans. To see what he did, you have to see what he holds sacred, and a sacred thing has no meaning outside the world that made it sacred.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death that men build hero systems to outrun the knowledge that they die. A hero system hands a man a script. Honor these things, do these things, and your small life joins something the grave cannot reach. Becker thought every culture sells this same product under a different label, the feeling that a man counts in a scheme larger than his own flesh. Religion sells it. The nation sells it. So does the gym, and so does the ball field.
Chuck’s hero system has a name. He teaches exercise science at a Seventh-day Adventist college, and in that world the body carries a weight that most American gyms never set on it. Paul tells the Corinthians their bodies house the Holy Spirit. Ellen White (1827-1915) built a health message into the center of the faith, and out of it came Loma Linda and the vegetarian table and the long Adventist habit of treating diet and rest and exercise as duties owed to God rather than as private taste. The school down the hill teaches the whole man, mind and body and spirit, because the faith promises that God raises the body and does not discard it. A clumsy boy at the plate, then, holds something on loan from his Maker. The flesh has a design. Training honors the design. To stand behind a kid and fix his swing is to tend a temple, and the work counts because the One who issued the body will ask for an accounting of it.
This puts Chuck at a strange line, and the line tells you who he is. Adventism grew up wary of worldly ambition. The reward sits in the next life, not in a trophy case, and a faith that keeps the Sabbath against the whole calendar of American sport has reason to distrust the Saturday game and the roar of the crowd and the man who lives for the win. American athletics runs on the opposite engine. It crowns the victor. It keeps the record. It teaches a boy that he counts when he beats another boy. Chuck spends his career at the joint where these two systems grind against each other, and he has made a living smoothing the friction. He gives seminars on ethics in athletics. He sits on the Angwin Community Council. The man who reconciles two hero systems for a living must believe in both, and must believe that the body can serve God and still keep score, that competition can build a man rather than corrode him, that the coach answers to a higher official than the umpire.
Hold that word, fitness, and watch it change shape as it passes from his world into others, because the same word names a different god in each.
A Marine drill instructor uses the word and means a body hardened into a tool of the state. Fitness for him is the load carried, the mile run under fire, the readiness to kill and to keep his men alive. The body belongs to the Corps before it belongs to the man, and a soft body betrays the unit. His immortality runs through the flag and the brotherhood, and the recruit who breaks down on the third mile threatens both.
A competitive bodybuilder uses the same word and means symmetry under stage light. Fitness for him is the photographed peak, the line of the deltoid, the proof of will written on the surface where the judges can read it. He starves and dehydrates himself for one afternoon of display, and he calls the wreck of that afternoon health because the system he serves rewards the image and not the man inside it. His grab at immortality runs through the photo, the trophy, the body frozen at its best the day before it begins again to fade.
A Carthusian monk in his cell hears the word and flinches. The body for him is the lower self, the appetite that drags the soul down, the thing to be subdued by fast and silence and the cold floor at the hour of vigil. Fitness barely registers, and where it registers it tempts. He starves the flesh to feed the spirit, the reverse of the man on Howell Mountain who feeds the flesh to glorify its Maker. Both men kneel. They kneel at opposite altars.
A Silicon Valley biohacker says fitness and means a dashboard. Resting heart rate, sleep stages, glucose curves, the long bet against death itself. He does not want the resurrection of the body. He wants to never need one. He tracks his markers and swallows his compounds and chases the year when a man might stop dying, and his hero system makes the most literal grab at immortality of them all, a refusal to hand the body back at the end.
An aging ballerina uses the word and means line. Fitness for her is the held arabesque, the turnout, the body bent past its natural limit into grace, and the cruelty of her system shows in the calendar. Her temple decays on a schedule the monk and the coach can ignore. The thing she worships leaves her first.
The boy at the plate carries his own freight, and none of these men can read it. I had crossed an ocean and lost a country and learned that I was no good at the games American boys play, which on a small mountain campus is most of what a boy has. The diamond was a court where I kept losing. Chuck did not see a hopeless case, because his world holds no hopeless bodies. Every body answers to patient training, since every body comes from the same hand and goes back to it. He did not give me a pep talk. He moved my hands and told me to watch the ball, and the small mercy of that morning was theological before it was athletic. He treated a clumsy immigrant kid as a thing worth fixing, because in his system nothing made by God is past fixing.
Becker would point out the rest. A man wants to leave something the grave cannot take. Chuck holds no great record of his own that the world remembers. He has something better suited to his system. He has the bodies he trained and the men they grew into, and he has a swing he corrected on a cold morning forty-five years ago that the man who owns it still tells stories about. That is the coach’s immortality, and it runs through other people’s flesh. He fixed a thousand of these. Most of them he has forgotten. The work outlives the memory of the work.
I love talking sports with Chuck. I love it now the way I loved it then, and the love has the same root. For one morning a man who believed my body was worth his trouble took the trouble, and the ball carried, and the boys turned around. He thinks he taught me to hit. He taught me that someone was watching who did not think I was a lost cause. In his hero system, no one is.
Posted inPUC|Comments Off on Chuck Evans and the Sacred Body
The door of the Badzik home stays open to Luke Ford on the weekends from 1980-1984. He comes for a Friday and stays through Sunday, fed and housed and tolerated, a guest the family takes in without ceremony. Luke never returns the favor. His own home stays shut. He is ashamed of it, ashamed enough that he accepts years of hospitality and offers none, and the reason hangs over the friendship without ever reaching speech.
Doug Badzik (b. c. 1966) sits in the same ninth-grade classroom at Forest Lake Christian School. Both boys come out of Seventh-day Adventism. Doug is chubby. He is not a social star. He does the homework, keeps the rules, treats the strange intense boy beside him with patience, and moves through the year doing, as far as anyone can see, all the right things. Luke does the opposite of the right things.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argues in The Denial of Death (1973) that a man assembles his life to feel he counts, that he stands as an object of value against a universe that will erase him, and that what he builds might outlast his body. Becker calls the scheme that grants the feeling a hero system. To be a hero inside one is to earn the sense that a life carries weight death cannot cancel. A boy chooses, or backs into, the system that will grade him, and the grade becomes his sense of his own worth.
Two boys leave the same fold and pick opposite systems.
Luke builds his hero on words. He argues. He performs. He holds the floor with verve and conviction and the certainty that he is right, and the certainty does not wait on whether he is right. Doug builds his hero on reliability. He shows up. He prepares. He does the work and keeps his word and earns the slow trust that collects around a man others can count on. The talker and the steward. One courts attention. The other courts the quieter reward of the man people lean on when the load comes due.
In the summer of 1992 Luke, sick with chronic fatigue syndrome, tracks Doug down. Doug dreads the letter. He’s heard Luke is tracking everyone down and pleading for attention. Doug feels a responsibility to reply. He feels he should tell the truth. He gives the honest verdict. Luke Ford, he says, was an arrogant little turd who was always right regardless of whether he was right. Whatever his arguments lacked in substance he made up for in verve and raw rhetorical ability. Luke frequently seemed illogical.
Read the verdict from inside Doug’s hero system and it holds. There, substance ranks above performance, logic above heat, accuracy above force, and a boy who is always right regardless of whether he is right has committed the cardinal sin of the system, which is to take winning the argument for getting it correct. Read the same boy from inside his own hero system and the indictment turns to a résumé. Verve, raw rhetorical ability, the power to hold a room and bend it. The same traits draw a failing grade in one cosmos and high marks in the other. The boy does not change. The system that scores him does.
The word doing the work in Doug’s verdict is right, and the word splits the moment you carry it across a fence line. For the epidemiologist, right is the model the data confirm, the curve that holds, the call the later numbers vindicate. For the carpenter, right is true and square and plumb, the joint that closes with no gap and needs no shim. For the appellate lawyer, right is the claim a man asserts against the state, the entitlement the text protects. For the ship’s navigator, right is the heading that brings the hull to the harbor and not the rocks. For the Adventist who raised both boys, right is righteous, set straight with God, justified before the judgment. Each man says the word and means a different universe. Luke, always right, means none of these. He means the boy won.
Adventism trains a posture, and the posture survives the loss of the faith. The Adventist watches. He reads the signs, sees the catastrophe coming, holds himself ready for an end the careless world refuses to see. He treats the body as a charge to keep, the diet and the health a discipline rather than a pleasure, the flesh a thing to guard against the day. Doug walks out of the church and carries the posture into the world.
He becomes a physician. Then a physician of populations. By his own account he has led public health and biosurveillance organizations charged with protecting millions, run budgets in the tens of millions, directed teams of physicians and scientists, governed some of the largest stores of health data and biological material on earth, and stood as a senior advisor to Cabinet-level leaders through pandemic and crisis. He watches for the plague the careless world refuses to see. He holds the system ready for the end. The watchman left the church and kept the watch. The end of the world turned into a curve to flatten, the day no man knows into a continuity-of-operations plan, the coming judgment into enterprise risk. Becker might note the neatness of it. The immortality project moved from heaven to the institution, and the boy who did the right things found his transcendence in organizations built to outlast him and in people kept alive who will never learn his name.
The language of the mature hero is the language of the executive class. He speaks of mission alignment and accountability, of durable organizations that perform under pressure, of translating complex insight into clear guidance that lets a board decide, of driving long-term value. The diction stays dry by design. It is the prose of a man whose heroism hides inside systems that work, whose triumphs read as the absence of disaster, whose best days leave no headline because the thing he guarded against did not happen. The watchman’s reward is a quiet morning.
Luke came back in 1992 with his body failing, and the body is the coin Doug’s world holds sacred. The hero of words arrived broken in the one currency the hero of health and function and performance under pressure could read at a glance. Doug gave him the truth as his system saw it, and the truth was not kind. It was also not wrong. Doug did the right things and rose to guard millions. Luke did things and got the verdict.
Two boys leave one cocoon. One builds a hero out of words and conviction and the spotlight and carries the gift and the wound of it into a hard life. The other follows the rules, does the work, keeps the watch, and becomes a man others lean on under load. Luke is grateful he knew him. Becker holds that every man needs to feel he counts, and that he will spend his life proving it against the dark. Doug proved it by becoming a man the dark has to get past first.
Posted inAdventist|Comments Off on The Boy Who Did the Right Things
In the winter of 1980 the bus to Forest Lake Christian School leaves before sunrise and comes back after dark. The ride runs two hours each way. Luke Ford rides it in the cold, fourteen years old, pulled that summer out of the only world he has known. His father has lost the Seventh-day Adventist pulpit and moved the family to Auburn, forty-five minutes north of Sacramento, to run an evangelical foundation of his own. The boy fails Spanish and Algebra his first semester. He finishes the term with a 1.2. He thinks he hates the school. He hates the year.
Then a boy a grade ahead of him, and a stratosphere above him in standing, starts giving him rides.
Lane Van Howd (c. 1964-1981) lives a mile from the Ford family’s new home. He moves through a room without effort, always teasing, always laughing, lifting the mood of whoever stands near him, the first dark hair coming in above his lip. He skis. Girls find him worth looking at. He carries the certainty of a boy who has decided he knows better than the adults, and his world rewards the certainty rather than punishing it. He buys Luke cold drinks in the afternoons while they wait for his mother and study the new ski equipment in the Auburn shops. He is kind to a miserable stranger. Some good people come into a life and adopt the stray. Lane is one of them.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argues in The Denial of Death (1973) that a man builds his life to feel he counts, that he stands as an object of value in a universe of meaning, and that his contribution will outlast his body. Becker calls the scheme that grants this feeling a hero system. Every society codes one. To be a hero inside it is to earn the sense that a life carries weight death cannot cancel. Self-esteem, in Becker’s account, is the felt sense of heroism. A child who loses his footing in one such system, torn from the warm and familiar and dropped among strangers, loses the ground of his own worth. That is Luke on the bus.
Lane hands some of it back.
The Van Howd home runs on a different code than the one Luke carries north from the Adventist church. On Super Bowl Sunday, January 25, 1981, the boys watch the Oakland Raiders take apart the Philadelphia Eagles. Nancy Van Howd sets the terms of the house out loud. “God comes first in this home,” she says. “And sports comes second.” In Luke’s home sport sits nowhere near second. Sport is idolatry, and he has learned to hide how much he loves it. In the Van Howd home a boy talks about the girls he likes. In Luke’s home there is no dating, no banter about crushes, no salvation offered by the opposite sex until the wedding. The Van Howds are Pentecostal, perhaps Assembly of God. Luke’s people are hyper-intellectual Adventists who hold God at the distance of doctrine.
Two hero systems share a Bible and almost nothing else.
Set the values of Lane’s world beside the values of Luke’s and watch them refuse to translate. Vitality stands at the center of the Van Howd code. A boy should be in motion, loud, athletic, sure of himself, spending his life rather than guarding it. The same vigor reads in the Adventist home as appetite unmastered. There the body is a temple under discipline, the diet policed, the energy banked against the Second Coming. What Lane’s mother files just under God, Luke’s family files near sin. Confidence in Auburn is leadership and manhood, the Reagan-era American certainty that the man who knows his own mind should act on it. Confidence in the Adventist home shades toward pride, the first sin, the one that cost Lucifer heaven. Warmth in the Van Howd home is a currency. The boy who lifts the mood of a room performs something close to a sacred act. Warmth in Luke’s home ranks below seriousness, and a boy earns his standing by the rigor of his mind, not the heat of his company.
Hospitality runs through the Van Howd code as well. The family takes in the strange Adventist boy with no fuss, gives him rides and cold drinks and a seat at the Super Bowl, and asks nothing back. To shelter the stranger is to do a thing the system counts as honor.
The deepest article of the Van Howd faith is a God who acts now. Luke is raised on an academic approach to Him, a God who reasons through Scripture and intervenes at the end of history, on schedule, at the resurrection promised for the last day. The Van Howds expect Him in the room. They ask Him to heal, to move, to break into the afternoon. This is the article that will be tested in July.
The word at the center of Lane’s world is life, and the word will not hold still when you carry it across a property line. For the hospice nurse who sits through the long afternoons with the dying, life is a finite thing to ease toward a good close, and the gentle death is the achievement. For the Theravada monk, life is the wheel, the round of birth and suffering and birth again, and the prize is release from it, so another turn counts as the failure. For the cattle rancher above Auburn, life is stock and season, born and fattened and shipped on the calendar, and tenderness toward it is a cost the ledger will not carry. For the combat medic, life is the thing he buys back by the minute under fire, some men worked and some men set aside, the triage tag standing in for the judgment of God. For the Calvinist a few miles down the road from the Van Howds, life is a script written before the foundation of the world, and a boy’s death belongs to that script, no emergency in it, no scandal, the settled decree of Him who does all things well. Each man says the word and points at a different universe.
Lane’s universe holds that life is vital force, charged, given to be spent, and that the God who gives it can give it back across the line of death if His people ask with enough belief. In July that belief meets its hardest hour.
Ninth grade ends in June 1981. The Ford family moves a few miles off. Luke stops seeing Lane. In mid-July the word reaches him that Lane has died, a passenger in a car wreck, no one else hurt.
The same news reaches Auburn by a stranger road. Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) has made Douglas Van Howd, Lane’s father, the White House artist, and the sculptor is at work on a gift for the Netherlands, an American Indian and an eagle set on a piece of petrified Arizona wood. Reagan’s counsel, Herbert Ellingwood, carries the news to him in Washington. The father’s mind will not take it. Why does the top man in the White House tell me this, he thinks. No, no, no, that is not my kid. But it is. He cannot finish the sculpture until 1984. The gift never reaches the Dutch. It stands instead in the Roosevelt Room, a monument to a week the maker could not work.
The service runs in a church Luke has never sat in, an open casket at the front, Lane in his Sunday best, looking well. Luke has buried people before, but no one his own age, and never under a roof that expects God to act in the hour. The pastor preaches a nearer God than Luke knows. At the peak of the message he puts the question to the room. If you believe God can raise Lane from the dead right now, he says, raise your hand.
Almost every hand goes up. Luke’s goes up with them. For that moment the Adventist boy, raised to keep God at the length of an argument, believes that God can return his friend to the room. He shuts his eyes and prays for the miracle. He opens them and holds his breath and stares at the coffin and waits for a rising that never comes.
Becker writes that every hero system, under all its forms, works to deny that death is final. Here the denial drops its disguise and stands in the open. A room full of believers refuses the casket and asks God to reverse it on the spot. The hand goes up because the alternative, the box as the last word and the universe as indifferent to a sixteen-year-old boy, cannot be borne. When the miracle holds off, the system does not break. It folds the loss into a longer promise. He is with the Lord. We will see him again. Becker might note the resourcefulness of a hero system that can take its own apparent refutation and feed it back into the faith. The Van Howd code stakes everything on the present-tense God, and when the present tense fails it borrows the future tense the Adventists keep, the resurrection deferred to the last day. The two systems, so far apart at the Super Bowl, reach for the same consolation at the grave.
Lane never built a hero system. He inherited one and wore it with ease, a borrowed code that happened to fit him. Most accounts of a man’s hero system trace the project he spent decades constructing. Lane had no project yet. He had charm and a body and sixteen years and a family that loved God and football in that order. Death came before he could complicate any of it, which leaves him a clean specimen of the thing the rest of us muddy by living long enough to revise. What he gave Luke was not doctrine. It was the door out of the cocoon, the first friend outside the Adventist fold, the sign that another code existed and that a boy could be happy inside it. From tenth grade on Luke went to public school, where no one spoke of resurrection at all, a third system, with its own gods and its own silence.
Luke was not much comfort to the family that morning. His words were few and his face gave little. Nancy Van Howd called his mother once, a few years on, to touch base. He could not face the pain in that home, so he let the line go quiet. The good family that sheltered the stray passed out of his life.
Becker holds that a man needs to feel he counts, and that he will build, borrow, or stumble into a scheme that lets him feel it against the fact of death. For one winter and spring a boy in motion lent that feeling to a miserable stranger on a long bus route, and asked nothing back, and then went into the ground at sixteen while a church held up its hands and a father in Washington set down his tools. The word for what Lane had is life. He spent it the way his people taught him to, all at once, and early.
Posted inAuburn|Comments Off on God Comes First, and Sports Comes Second
Scott Hamelin and I go to Placer High School together 1982-1984. We are friendly. The friend I make is his father. Joe Hamelin is the Sports Editor of the Sacramento Bee (he used to be a beat writer assigned to the San Diego Clippers). He’s remarried and he has six sons. He covers the pros. He writes about the best players alive, and his peers honor him for it. None of that is why I call him. I call him because he picks up, and once he picks up he stays on the line.
The calls run long. A weekday afternoon, the receiver warm against my ear, Joe on the other end with the patience of a man who has nowhere he wants to be more. We talk about journalism. We talk about the career I want before I have done a thing to deserve wanting it. He gives me his afternoons. Over the months the hours pass a hundred. He tells me that Coach Hubie Brown called his players cocksuckers. He tells me that there is no white basketball and black basketball, that no race is faster than any other, that the Sacramento Union won’t be a real competitor until they put in more resources.
Then he gives me more than talk. For two years (1983-1984) we sit together in a community access cable booth and call Placer High men’s basketball. Wood benches. A gym that smells of floor wax and sweat. A camera my classmate Eric aims at the court. Joe has sat courtside for the finest players in the game, and now he calls a high school contest beside a teenager as if more than 10 people watched it (“Nobody ever comments to me about these broadcasts,” he tells me).
Then he gives me the thing that turns a boy into a professional. He hands me an assignment. Cover a high school basketball tournament (Kendall Arnett) for the Bee. They pay me. My reports run in the paper that lands on driveways across the valley. A man who could have spent that assignment on anyone spends it on me.
A classmate mocks me for my hero worship of Joe Hamelin. I don’t mind too much. I have this thing inside of me that needs to worship some people, and it is embarrassing, but Joe is kind to me and he doesn’t make any demands. I’m not fodder for a cause. I’m a smart kid who knows more about sports than any kid he’s known because I learned it from reading books and all the back issues of Time, Newsweek, Life and Sports Illustrated magazines (read the summer of 1977 at Pacific Union College). My home didn’t get a TV until 1980.
I intern at the Auburn Journal Sports Department for six months (late 1983 and early 1984) but my editor Rob Knies doesn’t want a Joe Hamelin profile. “We compete with the Bee. We’re not going to help the Bee.” Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote The Denial of Death in 1973. He says a man cannot live with the knowledge that he will die and rot and be forgotten, so every culture hands him a hero system, a set of roles and rules that let him feel he counts, that some part of him outlasts the body. The hero system tells a man what a good life looks like, what earns honor, what a worthy man does with his days. Inside it he can be a hero on a small scale. Outside it the same acts read as nothing.
Joe lived inside the hero system of the American daily newspaper. Its temple is the sports desk. Its scripture is the box score. Its sacrament is the deadline, the nightly small death after which the day’s work sets and cannot be revised. Its sacred value, the one that orders the rest, is credit.
Joe wrote a column three days a week. It was good.
Credit, in the newsroom, means honor assigned by the record. The score does not lie. You name the man who scored and you name the man who missed, and you do not root in the press box. The byline is the reward and the receipt at once, a man’s name fixed in type, a small immortality on cheap paper that yellows but sits in a library for good. To give a man a byline enters him in the book of those who were here and did the work.
The word changes at the border. Carry credit into other hero systems and it grows a new meaning.
A Benedictine copyist in a cold scriptorium spends his life on a single manuscript and signs none of it. Credit, for him, is sin. The work rises to God, and a name in the margin steals from Him what is His. The monk earns his place by erasing himself from the page.
A Plains warrior counting coup cannot be given credit and spits on the offer. Credit is the blow struck on a living enemy before witnesses, seized on a horse, never assigned by an editor at a desk. What Joe hands across a table the warrior takes in the open or never holds at all.
A loan shark keeps a different book. Credit is what he extends so a man will owe him, leverage dressed as kindness, a line in a ledger that ends in a broken hand. He gives credit to own you. Joe gives credit to free you.
A cadre at a struggle session learns that claiming credit is the deviation that gets a man denounced. The achievement belongs to the collective, the Party, the Chairman, and the man who signs his own name has confessed a crime. The byline Joe prizes serves, in that room, as evidence against you.
A Reformed preacher tells his flock that credit is grace, unearned and unearnable, imputed by God to men who merit nothing. Salvation comes as a gift because no work can buy it. Joe’s faith runs the other way. In his church you earn the line of type. The kid covers the tournament, files clean copy, and the name is his because he did the thing.
Joe’s hero system holds that credit is earned. The score adjudicates. The byline belongs to the man who reported the game. Yet what Joe does for me is advance credit to a boy who has earned nothing, the way a banker advances a loan to a borrower with no history, on faith, against future work. The honor economy of the newsroom and the gift economy of the mentor live inside the same man and the same word. He believes credit must be earned, and he lends it to me before I can earn it, because that loan is how the hero system reproduces. An old man recruits a young one by advancing him significance he has not yet paid for. The hundred hours, the cable booth, the tournament byline: an initiation. Joe does what his religion asks of its elders, which is to make more of themselves before they die.
The hard part comes after. The hero system Joe served thins out. Sports desks empty. Papers fold or shrink to a website and a skeleton staff. The permanent printed record, the byline that was to outlast the man, proves as mortal as the man. Joe advanced me credit in a currency that lost most of its value. The driveways stopped getting the paper. The libraries cleared the bound volumes. A young man who built his life on the byline found that byline worth less each year.
The gift held anyway. The thing that transferred in that booth was never the byline. It was the standard. You name who scored. You do not root in the press box. You file clean and on time and you let the reader have his own reaction. A man carries that into work the newspaper never imagined, onto platforms Joe never saw, long after the desk he loved goes dark. The currency failed. The faith it taught did not.
In 1990, Joe wrote To Fly and Fight: Memoirs of a Triple Ace about Clarence E. Anderson, an Auburn resident who was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery on March 30, 2026.
Around 1990, Joe quit his job to write books full-time. I don’t think he published another book, and eventually he went back to writing for newspapers, retiring around 2005.
In 1988, I came down with what some doctors called chronic fatigue syndrome. Tossing and turning on my bed circa 1991, I get up and call Joe and he visits me. All of my friends my own age keep their distance, but everyone over 40 treats me with compassion.
In 1994, I return to two-thirds of a normal life, and once I get regular internet connection starting in 1997, I hunt Joe down to exchange emails.
There lies the strange grace of a hero system. It hands a man a project that death defeats, and in the handing it makes him more than he becomes alone. Joe knew, on some floor of himself, that the paper would not save him. He sat in the gym anyway and called the game as if the wire were waiting, and he gave a job that paid, and he made a writer. Forty years on I am still spending the credit he advanced. He never asked for it back.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
