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On My Seven Years Under Dr. Charles Fox

Give me weed, whites, and wine

— Little Feat

I. Arrival, Trust, and First Cracks (2012–2013)

Our former principal Shiozaki sensei retired at the end of the 2011–2012 school year. He left on time, at sixty, having overseen just one International School Festival (ISF), in February 2012, and then stepping away. His departure was orderly, expected, and clean.

Not long after, my colleague Tomoko Wano and I were called into the small room next to the IB office by Mr. Higashitani, who was my direct supervisor at the time. I was still DPC then, not yet formally on the administration, though much of my work already extended beyond that role.

Higashitani told us the next principal would be Charles Fox, a literature professor from Ritsumeikan University. Then, almost casually, he added that Fox would be taking the first two weeks of the April term off to travel to the Ogasawara Islands to help his son with a documentary film.

Higashitani paused. “Is this going to work with this guy?” he asked.

It was not really a question. The decision had already been made. Fox was close to the Chancellor, and with the IB programme growing, it had been decided that it was time for a foreign principal. The appointment carried symbolic weight.

Fox arrived in April 2012.

That first year, I saw him several times a week. I went to his office regularly with issues, proposals, and requests. He came less often to the IB office, but he was visible, present, and accessible. Compared to later years, he felt engaged.

We were still very much in a building phase. Questions were fundamental rather than cosmetic: whether to bring Economics online as an IB subject, how to structure growth, how to manage staffing, how to align IB operations with a larger Japanese institution that had not fully internalized what the IB actually demanded.

Fox was generally supportive. When I raised ideas, he rarely opposed them outright. But he almost always deferred decisions upward. In practice, that meant deferring to Higashitani occasionally, but increasingly to Vice Principal Nishikawa, who was locked in a long, escalating struggle with Higashitani for control of the soul of the school. That battle would define the institution for years.

Two small things I noticed early on.

The first was small but persistent. When Fox felt pressed, uncertain, or cornered, he would drop into a performative Texas drawl: “I’m just a good old boy…I don’t know…I’m new here…” Week one, maybe. Month one, even. But it went on for months. It began to feel less like humility and more like evasion.

The second was subtler. When Fox gave speeches—opening ceremonies, graduations, addresses to the IB community—he often began by explaining that he would speak in both English and Japanese, and why. “Today I will speak in both English and Japanese. There is a reason for that. The reason is that we are a bilingual school.” He would frame bilingualism as a principle rather than simply inhabiting it.

This bothered me in a way I couldn’t quite fully articulate. Later, I would understand it clearly: real bi-cultural schools don’t justify bilingualism. They operationalize it. They have bilingual admissions, bilingual HR support, bilingual communications, bilingual crisis protocols. We had none of those things. Bilingualism existed largely at the level of speech, not structure.

The first real test came with the February 2012 ISF.

Shiozaki had spearheaded the 2011 ISF, and it had been a success. Fox was enthusiastic about repeating it, but he largely stepped back and allowed me and my team to run it. The school green-lit the budget again, and I decided to push hard—to expand, improve, and professionalize the event.

We housed everyone at Ritsumeikan BKC: our students, overseas students, overseas chaperones, Tomoko, Hashizume from our office, and myself—around 150 people in total. Some seniors had smaller rooms, but most students were housed in large shared dorm rooms: one for boys, one for girls.

It was a mistake. An obvious one, in retrospect.

Alcohol made its way in. Boundaries failed. Tomoko and I were housed in another wing entirely, and we had effectively left the students unchaperoned overnight.

The next morning, seniors came to us immediately with a full report. We called Scott, the seniors’ homeroom teacher, at six in the morning. He drove to BKC right away.

We triaged. Scott and Tomoko lectured the seniors while I ran the open mic. We separated students where we had to, called the relevant parents. Tomoko warned me that if the school heard too much too fast, they might shut the entire event down. That felt impossible to me, so we managed carefully. We called Higashitani and Fox at school around nine. Higashitani came immediately. Fox did not. He came only for the opening and closing ceremonies.

The incident was handled. There was a discipline process. Several students were suspended at the very end of term. Fox signed off on the outcome.

But I was underwhelmed. The failure had been predictable, and leadership was thin where it mattered.

By the end of 2012, the IB programme moved from an effectively open budget to a fixed annual one. I was writing policy constantly, with Tomoko translating. Documents were often finalized hours before steering meetings. Higashitani scrambled to understand them and asked for revisions between noon and four every week.

It was exhausting for everyone.

In 2013, mostly to help Higashitani, I was promoted to shukan, the junior most position on the senior administration. That year, I had two dreams—one about a train line I couldn’t quite navigate, another about being pinned inside a roller coaster that led not to thrill but to scrutiny. At the time, I read them as anxiety dreams. Later, I would recognize them as early diagnostics.

II. Competence Without Authority (2014–2015)

2014

By 2014, the rhythms of my work were established.

OD was fully in place as DPC. I traveled extensively for IBEN and with Higashitani and Fox. We were deep in negotiations with KIS over a range of matters that required patience, translation, and careful calibration. Much of the work took place in airports, hotel lobbies, and conference rooms where decisions were floated, withdrawn, and reshaped.

The pace was familiar now. Demanding, but no longer novel.

That year, Fox, Tim Chanecka, and I traveled together to OACAC in Tampa. It was a routine professional trip in the way such things often are: panels, receptions, conversations that blurred together by the second evening. The work itself wasn’t remarkable. What stayed with me happened in transit.

On the flight from Tampa to Washington, D.C., a situation developed that required de-escalation. A man—angry, agitated, and self-certain—was fixated on another passenger he described as a “long-haired liberal.” The grievance was incoherent but intense. It carried the unmistakable energy of someone looking for permission to act.

I intervened.

Not dramatically. Not heroically. I spoke to him, listened long enough to drain the pressure, redirected the conversation, and kept things moving. The moment passed. The flight landed. Nothing happened.

I’ve written about that encounter elsewhere, in Good and Great Talkers, because it captures something I’ve learned over time: that institutions, like planes, often rely on informal actors to maintain order when formal authority is either absent or ill-suited to the moment.

That was 2014.

The work continued. The travel continued. The system functioned. And once again, responsibility lived in the spaces between roles, titles, and official scripts.

2015

From the outside, 2015 looked like continuity.

OD announced in July that he would be leaving, though his departure would stretch on quietly into the following year. In the meantime, the work continued much as before. I remained shukan. Meetings accumulated. Travel continued. IBEN assignments filled gaps in the calendar. We were still deep in negotiations with KIS and other external partners. Nothing felt broken.

At the same time, a new part-time role was added to support a sensitive function. The intent was reasonable. The arrangement informal. Oversight was assumed rather than specified. No one believed this was risky. There was no sense of urgency around it, no raised voices, no formal concern. It entered the system quietly and was treated as such.

That year, David Stubbs was promoted internally to DPC. At the time, it seemed like a good move. I supported it and gave my blessing. Continuity mattered, and internal promotions suggested stability. OD’s long exit thinned leadership gradually rather than dramatically, but again, nothing yet appeared out of order.

The IBEN work continued to provide a counterpoint. Most engagements went as expected. One did not.

It was a pre-authorization engagement with Eton House in China—one of those schools grafted onto an English name without a substantive institutional connection to it. From the beginning, the situation was fragile. The designated DPC, Georgina, was out of her depth. She tried, but early Skype calls revealed fundamental gaps in understanding. The Principal micro-managed aggressively while showing little grasp of IB philosophy or process. A capable Vice Principal carried most of the operational load.

On one scheduled Skype call, I arrived ten minutes late. It was my fault. By the time I logged on, they had already left. A complaint followed. I apologized.

Shortly afterward, Georgina took the unusual step of traveling to Kyoto to seek my guidance in person. We met at a restaurant. She explained that her situation was impossible. Money was tight. Every expenditure required approval from a board chair who was rarely present. I sympathized. I gave her everything I could—practical advice, institutional context, and clarity.

The process continued. I raised concerns about funding and received pushback, but the school agreed to give Georgina limited autonomy over small expenditures. Then a more serious issue surfaced: there was no class schedule. The school had an idea of offerings but no timetable. I told them plainly that this would result in a Matter to Be Addressed—the strongest possible language in a pre-authorization report.

The Principal and Georgina said producing a schedule was impossible. The Vice Principal stopped the conversation and said he could do it overnight. He did.

With a schedule in place, the authorization eventually went through. Georgina left, likely before teaching began. Later, the school complained about me to the IB. I heard about it unofficially and acknowledged that it had been a difficult assignment. The system absorbed the friction. Life moved on.

That summer, my psyche was working as hard as I was.

On August 15, 2015, I had a dream:

I am in college (probably) or at least in a position to have a dorm room. This room is shared and I have a second room which is mine alone and in another building. Whether or not I really should have the second room is not clear, and perhaps because of this I cherish the private room. I have had this kind of set up in dreams before. The private room is well apportioned and clean. I go in and out a few times, and then one time I enter the room next door by accident. My key opens the door and immediately I realize this is not my room. The room is sparse. I leave and enter my room.

There is a new bed in the room and some of my things have been moved around. There are at first two people, an African guy maybe in his early twenties and another guy. The second guy explains that the African has been assigned to this room and that he is a refugee from the genocide in Ghana. There doesn’t seem to be a lot I can say to this so I suggest some changes to the room layout that they had set up and we make the changes. I am not happy about having a roommate however realize that this feeling is selfish in the situation and resolve to make the best of it and welcome the newcomer.

However, when I turn around deeper in the room there are two more people, Americans, a guy and a girl, on the floor eating. They are beginning to generate some garbage which they are throwing on the floor. I bend down to pick up the garbage, smiling an apology that I like to keep things neat. I do not want them to be there and don’t know where they came from.

Back toward the door the African is sitting next to a man from Albania who is shooting heroin. He may be a Roma, which for some reason I know will make stopping him more difficult. Over and over, slowly and competently. This is not good and I start strategizing how to move him out of my room. He is talking and is charismatic, however I am anxious about what will happen if he keeps taking the drug and also anxious that my African roommate will become influenced by him and start using. The whole situation seems to be verging out of my control. I consider the alternative of just ditching the room.

I didn’t analyze the dream at the time. I didn’t need to. I kept working.

Nothing yet appeared out of order.

III. Peak Without Leadership (2016–Mid-2017)

2016

In 2016, the school appeared to be thriving.

The part-time counselor was fully embedded and doing the job as defined. There were no formal complaints, no escalations, no indications that anything was wrong. Looking back, there were clues—but they were faint, contextual, and easily explained away at the time. Nothing rose to the level of alarm.

For me, the year was defined by expansion elsewhere.

My IBEN work intensified significantly. By this point I was working closely with Gill Pressland, who had become the IBEN manager for Asia-Pacific and had effectively taken over my portfolio from Avi Nanda. Avi worked in a different section of the IB organization; Gill was IBEN proper. Around this time, the IB underwent a global restructuring, and IBEN—by extension Gill—emerged with considerably more influence.

Gill was a force. Decisive, demanding, and deeply competent.

Within three years of joining IBEN, I was promoted to Lead Educator for the International Baccalaureate, one of only a handful in the region. I worked frequently with Duan Yorke, and together we handled a large volume of Diploma Programme assignments. Through this work I came to know—directly or indirectly—hundreds of IB educators. My professional network widened rapidly, and my authority in those spaces was clear and functional.

The contrast with home was increasingly stark.

Back at Ritsumeikan Uji, the long-running struggle between Nishikawa and Higashitani finally resolved. Nishikawa won. Power consolidated decisively. From that point on, the school ran flat out, with virtually every decision flowing through him.

Nishikawa was a strong leader. He worked relentlessly. He also had too much to do, and some decisions became personalized by necessity rather than design. The system no longer absorbed pressure; it transmitted it downward.

By then, Fox had become largely ceremonial. Even his speeches were written elsewhere. He attended functions, delivered remarks, and fulfilled representational duties, but operational authority no longer resided with him in any meaningful way. He felt, increasingly, like an afterthought.

We held our final International School Festival in February 2016, closing out the prior academic cycle. After that, there was no budget for me to develop or run future iterations. The festival ended not with conflict, but with quiet disappearance.

Outside the school, my life continued to widen.

I was active in the global Enneagram community and attended at least one conference that year. I was also involved with the International Mental Health Professionals of Japan, and despite not being a trained counselor, I became vice-president of the organization—another example of being entrusted with responsibility in spaces where clarity and judgment mattered more than formal credentialing.

That year, my son entered Ritsumeikan Uji as a seventh grader.

This changed my vantage point. I became more attuned to the junior high school and the International Preparatory Stream. My son did well academically, but his cohort experienced social and behavioral turbulence. I stayed lightly involved, careful to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. I watched more than I intervened.

The year ended smoothly. We graduated one of our largest IB cohorts to date. The programme was booming. Outcomes were strong. On paper, the institution was succeeding.

And yet, by the end of 2016, something essential had shifted.

2017 (Before the Break)

From the outside, 2017 looked like a peak year.

The programme was doing exceptionally well. Both the high school and junior high school streams were booming. Applications outpaced available spaces. We had decisively outperformed our nearest competitor, DISK — not marginally, but structurally — in outcomes, coherence, and momentum. Internally, this was understood. I had written about it. The data supported it.

There was no sense of institutional fragility. If anything, the opposite.

By this point, Fox had receded almost entirely into the background. He continued to fulfill ceremonial duties — speeches, appearances, the visible rhythms of a principal — and he looked the part. But operationally, he was absent. He took long lunches with the other vice principal (not Nishikawa), read the paper, and watched Texas Rangers games at work. From my vantage point, he had checked out.

What struck me was not his disengagement, but its invisibility. No one else seemed to register it. The institution continued to function smoothly enough that absence did not yet register as absence.

In practice, Nishikawa ran the school outright. Every meaningful decision flowed through him. This had been the case for some time, and by 2017 I had fully adapted to it. I took issues to him directly. He decided. The system was centralized, efficient, and under constant load.

I continued to travel extensively for the IB, working closely with Gill Pressland and handling a heavy slate of IBEN assignments. It would not have been inaccurate to say that I was holding two full-time roles simultaneously: one inside the school, one across the region. Both demanded attention. Both relied on judgment rather than formal authority.

And still, nothing appeared wrong.

The counselor role functioned as designed. There were no complaints, no escalations, no formal concerns. In hindsight, there were clues — small irregularities, moments that now read differently — but at the time they did not cohere. They were explainable. They were ignorable. They did not trigger alarms.

The system was succeeding. Leadership was diffuse but intact. Results were strong.

Which is precisely why what came next was so destabilizing.

IV. Rupture, Silence, Exit (Late 2017–2018)

The break arrived as confusion first.

Late one night in October 2017, I received a panicked call that made no sense. The next days revealed something far worse than anything we had imagined. Documentation removed ambiguity. The counselor was dismissed immediately and barred from further contact.

I issued the announcement myself—an error I recognize now.

In December, I learned she was still contacting students. Fox had promised to intervene directly if that happened. He did not. Partial measures followed.

January–April 2018 (V)

By January, our options were limited.

We hired a new university counselor, Nina, who had been working at an IB school in Nagoya. She eased into the role gradually. Tomoko and I did what we could to mentor her. She managed the relational aspects of the job reasonably well, but struggled with formal written communication in both English and Japanese. As a result, I remained deeply involved in university counseling.

The work continued.

When the new school year began in April, the pressure shifted.

A group of parents complained — not about outcomes, but about process. They argued that we had failed to protect the former counselor from what they described as an unreasonable parent, and questioned what was being done about university counseling more broadly.

I told Fox that we had already held a comprehensive meeting in January. All deadlines and procedures had been reviewed. There was no scheduled group meeting for April because nothing new needed to be communicated.

Fox said the parents needed reassurance and asked that we meet them anyway.

We did.

Fox and I drafted a set of twenty talking points together. They reiterated what had already been said in January. They clarified that families were free to work with external counselors, with one explicit exception. They also stated that the former counselor had agreed, as a condition of her departure, not to meet with students.

I read the talking points word for word.

The parents recorded the meeting. The recording was sent to the compliance department of the Ritsumeikan Trust, along with a request that Tomoko and I be dismissed.

At that point, the asymmetry was complete. I was constrained by institutional responsibility and confidentiality. The former counselor was not. Her version of events circulated freely. Mine could not.

I was formally notified of the complaint by Fox.

I was upset — not by the existence of a complaint, which I understood as an occupational risk — but by what it represented. I told him plainly that we had drafted the talking points together, that I had followed them exactly, and that I had repeatedly been placed on the front line at his request while he remained absent.

I told him that it was time for him to speak up for me.

He said there was nothing he could do. That the matter was now in the hands of compliance. That we would have to wait and see what happened.

That was the moment our relationship ended.

Not because of disagreement, but because of abdication.

What remained after that was procedural. Whatever trust had existed between us did not recover.

In late July, I served as lead trainer at a major IBEN engagement in Bali. It went extremely well. Whatever insecurity I had had about the IBEN role dissolved.

In August I went to John Innes’ wedding in the United States and after that I went to the Faculty of Astrological Studies (FAS) Summer School at Exeter College in Oxford. While there I met Isobel and everything just cracked open. Everything I had been carrying surfaced at once.

I returned to Japan and submitted a resignation letter to Fox stating plainly that I could not work under leadership that did not prioritize child safety. He buried it.

I stepped down in practice. I moved my desk. I stopped attending meetings. I began writing. This blog was born.

In October, early decision chaos erupted again. Fox ordered another teacher to verify deadlines already confirmed. I lost my temper—twice. It was the lowest point of my professional life.

After early admissions, I stopped counseling. In November, I stopped teaching. In December, I traveled to the U.S. and breathed again.

In February, I accepted a position at Ritsumeikan Suzaku. It wasn’t a teaching position, and I was not happy there, a story I’ll tell later.

The Fox era, for me, was over.

Coda and Reflection

Here’s the thing. I wanted to respect Dr. Fox. I really did.

He was my senpai—the one who came before. Like me, he arrived in Japan young and built a life here. I don’t know his full context. What was possible? What was unsayable? Those questions remain.

I don’t doubt that he cared or worked hard at times. But by 2016 at the latest, he was a man out of time. His mental map no longer matched the territory, and he did not do the work to update it.

Schools are living systems. Leadership requires vigilance, reflection, and relentless self-critique. Willingness is not readiness.

My hope—my prayer—is that when my own time comes, I do better than my senpai. That I reflect. That I adjust. That I remember the map is not the territory. And if I can’t, that I step aside.

That is the standard I now hold myself to.

Dedication: For all those who came before.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece you may also enjoy my piece on my former Principal, Dr. Fox. It touches on some of the same themes of institutional malpractice. You can read it here.

https://thekyotokibbitzer.wordpress.com/2026/02/25/on-the-sarah-lawrence-kids-my-take/
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On David Bazan’s Crisis of Faith, and Mine

Note: This essay makes several references to my time as a teacher, coordinator, and administrator at Ritsumeikan Uji in Kyoto, Japan. I have written about my time at Ritsumeikan prior in my piece about good and great talkers, and in my piece about hiding in a hotel room for 36 hours after being seriously overworked for months in 2012.

In case parts of the timeline referred to above are not clear, I began working at Rits Uji in 2002, started with the IB program at Rits in 2008, left my job temporarily in 2018, and rejoined after COVID was settling down in 2021. Also, if you like this essay you will like my longform analysis of the great Michael Knott’s album “A Rocket and a Bomb.”

Epigraph:
“There’s real people in them big, big trucks…” 

David Bazan

I’ve always experienced David Bazan (the Christian-adjacent singer songwriter with Pedro the Lion and later solo) not as a songwriter but as a kind of emotional barometer for whatever stage of adulthood I’m in. Every few years I realize he’s already written the song I need, long before I know I need it. He’s not confessional; he’s just brutally, unfussily truthful in a way that feels like being read by somebody who doesn’t care whether you agree with him.


This is a field report on five Bazan songs—what they meant, what they revealed, and how they secretly mapped the last twenty plus years of my interior life.

1. BIG TRUCKS

I first heard “Big Trucks” in my early Ritsumeikan Uji years—2003 or 2004 when I was digging deeply on the site eMusic. The song was first released in 1998 on Pedro the Lion’s It’s Hard to Find a Friend on Made in Mexico records, and is track 3 of 12. There is also a single version which is track 6 on the 1999 EP The Only Reason I Feel Secure. I was into Pedro the Lion back when the air was still clean and my responsibilities hadn’t yet calcified into the adult structures that would come later. I was living in a rental apartment, and still had that sense that life was flexible: the rhythms of teaching, the long days, the long nights, all of it felt new and fresh.

The thing about “Big Trucks” is that it’s so effortlessly literal you almost miss the emotional charge. A child asking his father why he doesn’t respond when another driver flips him off. A parent trying to explain something unexplainable with reference to the humanity of truck drivers. The gap between innocence and knowledge opening in real time.

When I was 28, the resonance was simple: the world is bigger and harder than we think, and adulthood arrives the moment you realize you don’t get to choose the scale of the forces that hit you.

Even then, before IB coordination, before butting heads with my principal, before everything that happened in 2018 which led to me leaving my job, the line felt like a premonition. The big trucks are always coming after all.

2. BANDS WITH MANAGERS
Bands with Managers is the lead off track on Pedro the Lion’s 2004 record Achilles Heel. I was already into the band as mentioned above by this time, and Achilles Heel would prove critical listening in the years that followed. By 2007 the IB tidal wave was approaching, and my days were already starting to feel compressed. I was “going places,” as Bazan mocks himself for saying, which is exactly the problem: I actually was going places. I was acquiring managers, and then heavier managers, and then the structural expectations that come with being the adult in the room.

That’s why I love this song so much—because it’s funny, cutting, self-aware, and self-disparaging all at once:

“Bands with managers are going places.”

He’s laughing at the absurdity of ambition, the ridiculousness of believing your ascent is meaningful, and at the same time he’s wincing, because he knows he’s been swept up in the same machinery.

By 2007, I felt that too. The joke was aimed at me, but gently.

The line I lived was this:

“I’m going places, apparently — and it’s funny, and it’s ridiculous, and I think I’m about to be crushed.”

Ambition and pressure make strange bedfellows. Bazan gets that. He names what most adults won’t: that sometimes “success” feels like being hauled upward by a crane you didn’t ask for.

3. FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS
Foregone Conclusions is track two on Achilles Heel. This is one of his most devastating songs because of its simplicity. The line that gets me every time:

“I don’t wanna believe that all of the above is true.”

This is Bazan calling out doctrinaire Christianity and he’s not subtle about it. It’s almost embarrassingly plain. But middle-aged truth is often embarrassingly plain. For me the line hits in two places: first, in that long stretch where adulthood felt like a narrowing of options; and second, in the recognition of how many “beliefs” I’d inherited and carried long after they’d stopped serving me.


One idea that slowly died in me—over years, not months—was the belief that I could be happy in some uncomplicated, stable way. I don’t mean not depressed. I mean the fantasy that happiness arrives and then stays. By my early forties I knew better.


Happiness is local, flickering. It’s take what you can get. What lasts, perhaps, is meaning, purpose. Bazan already understood that twenty years ago. It took me a little longer.

4. YELLOW BIKE
Yellow Bike is track 2 on Pedro the Lion’s 2019 record Phoenix. If there’s a perfect adult loneliness song, this is it.

“My kingdom for someone to ride with me.”

This line is not necessarily about wanting a partner or romantic longing, although it could be. It’s about pace—finding someone who can move at the same internal speed as you without distorting your life. After 2018, I didn’t trust the world to ride with me in a clean way. Not institutions. Not leadership structures. Not women. The only sane posture was self-containment.


And then came Mela. Mela was first my Periscope friend (Twitter’s discontinued video live-streaming platform), and then my text buddy and then phone buddy in late fall and early winter, 2018. This was not a romance, nothing really other than hours on the phone, day after day. Neither of us were working, and we covered every subject under the sun, including prominently the boys she was with, the boys she was chasing, and the boys that were chasing here.

Mela was the first person after 2018 who matched my internal rhythm without triggering anything. She didn’t need anything from me; she didn’t misread me; she didn’t overstep. She just rode beside me lightly for a window of about six weeks.

That’s what Bazan means by “someone to ride with me.” Not permanence—just pacing. Not dependence—just parallel motion. A few blocks of shared speed. Enough to remember you’re not built for solitude.

5. LITTLE HELP
Little Help is track 3 on Pedro the Lion’s 2024 album Santa Cruz. This is the one that lands hardest in midlife.


“All I needed was a godsend/ All I needed was a little help from a friend.”

For me, that friend was Tommy. During COVID I was on sick leave, drifting, half-collapsed inside myself. Wine in bed, online chess all day, the sense of dissolving in slow motion. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was real. I wasn’t moving toward anything; I was sinking.

And it was Tommy who refused to let me disappear. Not gently. Not metaphorically. Literally. Texting. Calling. Telling me he’d drag me out of my house if he had to. Making me come out with him twice a week in Kyoto, even when I barely had a pulse.


One night we were in a tiny reggae club, drinking Red Stripe, and at around 10:30 p.m., in the restroom of all places, I felt happy for two seconds. Not enlightened. Not healed. Just briefly, unmistakably alive.

That moment didn’t save me. Tommy didn’t “fix” anything. But he interrupted the slide. He held me upright until I could stand on my own again. In the end, that’s what Bazan means. Not salvation. Not heroism. Just stubborn companionship. That moment when someone refuses to let you lose it. And that’s when the line stops being metaphor and becomes plain fact: All I needed was a little help from a friend.

6. CONCLUSION
Overall, I really like Pedro the Lion/ David Bazan. Even more so than Michael Knott, he is a kind of black sheep of the Christian rock movement, and he may even be cancelled by some, I’m not sure, but I think other people, even some of faith, appreciate his relentless questioning, his searing honesty. I don’t know what the state of his faith is today, but it’s been a fascinating and fruitful experience following along the twists and turns of his art and career.

Dedication:
For Tommy — I’ll knock down your door anytime.

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My Time at Northern Arizona University Part II: The Other Graduate Students

Note: This is Part II of my series on my time at Northern Arizona University between 1999-2001. This post takes up the other graduate students in the History Department. Part I, Decision and Arrival, can be found here.

NAU — The Graduate Students

The History Building was located near the northeast of campus, and as I mentioned in Part I it was mere minutes for where I was staying in my first year of the program. There was one graduate office on the second floor — a narrow room with four aging computers, a stubborn printer, and more bodies than desks. Some students shared chairs. Some wrote standing up. You could hear arguments through the walls, even with the door closed. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was the whole ecosystem: every thesis, every grudge, every friendship, every theory, all pressed into what was a pretty small space.

Cindy

The center of the room was Cindy. Early thirties, beautiful, charming, half-brilliant and fully aware of her own gravity. She studied the Southwest like almost everyone else in the cohort, but she made scholarship look like a party you had to be invited to. Men tried. None succeeded. She never dated within the department, but she flirted like a form of cultural exchange — a compliment, a smirk, a dismissal, repeat.

A number of us would go bowling from time to time, and when I bowled a clean 200 one night (still my best score ever) she called me Zen — partly for Japan, partly for the way I moved through things without forcing them.

As mentioned, Cindy flirted lightly with all the single guys in the department, and she and Mandiola had a particular dynamic going on. More on that below.

Lance and Gretchen

Orbiting Cindy were Lance and Gretchen, a long-term unmarried couple renting a big place in the low hills behind campus. Lance was military reserve — rigid posture, some money behind him. Gretchen was smart and generous; they held Thanksgiving at their house and the whole department came. It was clear to me, however, that she lived in Cindy’s shadow a fair bit.

Their relationship read like a stable table with a crack underneath. They had been together for a while at that point, though I don’t believe it ultimately survived.

Dave Diamond, Patrick, and Gary

At the other end of the room sat three men who could fill a bar with argument, and did.

Dave Diamond — mid-fifties, blue-collar history etched into him. Fishing boats, oil platforms, mines. He smoked dope daily like other people drink coffee. His thesis was on one apple orchard. Not agriculture policy in general — one orchard. He traced labor, yield, frost, policy, immigration, machinery, exploitation and renewal through a single patch of earth. That was Diamond: narrow focus, infinite depth. He was grumpy in the best possible tradition, and as I’ll mention later hooked me up with a little green from time to time, and I liked him.

Patrick was about twenty-two, a conservative, and worshipped Ronald Reagan. He believed the free market solved more problems than it created. Diamond thought Reagan had gutted the working class and could give footnotes from memory. They shouted at each other constantly, sometimes in the office, more often over drinks— full volume, full conviction — then they would move on like nothing had happened. They weren’t enemies. They were the ongoing argument.

Gary stood between them philosophically but never took the middle. Libertarian, Western-minded, big on personal risk and responsibility. Motorcycle helmets should be optional, ICU bills be damned. A man should be free to crack his skull if he wants to. You couldn’t move him. His logic was dry and clean. I wrote about Gary and his helmet policy at length here, and here is an excerpt:

Later that year Gary’s brother, also a biker, died in a motorcycle accident on a New Mexico mountain. It was a sad day for the department and for Gary. His brother was a biker and a cop, and I happened to walk past the church where the funeral was being held. There were dudes in Hell’s Angels jackets and cops in dress uniform side by side. Gary came by the graduate student office a day or two later. Yeah, he said, a funeral like that is the only time you’ll see bikers and cops side by side. He talked about his brother and how much he loved his motorcycle. I offered my condolences, but then curiosity got the better of me, as per usual.

“Gary, I have to ask, was your brother wearing a helmet?”

“Of course not. He died like he lived, free.”

“Does the accident make you think any differently about helmet laws?”

“If anything, it makes me more opposed to them. The right to ride without a helmet is what makes a biker a biker. Without that, we have nothing. My brother would feel the same.”

The three of them — Diamond, Patrick, Gary — were a triangle of conflict that never quite resolved. I liked them all in different ways and they all added color to the department.

Scott Fritz

Then there was Scott Fritz — early thirties, soft-spoken, spaced-out, gentle. Loved Las Vegas with an almost devotional sincerity. Not for gambling. For cocktails at 3 a.m. in glass palaces of light. He was in line for a major scholarship until Mandiola took it out from under him. I’m not sure what Scott was studying, but probably the American Southwest as well.

Mandiola

Mandiola and I were the outsiders. Not Southwest scholars. He was studying semiotics. I was studying Asia, oral history, and collective memory.

He was born in Chile, raised in LA, carried two languages without ceremony. His mind was fast — too fast in many ways. He had been married, and at this time was seeing P., an English professor who was at NAU on sabbatical. I met her twice; once over pizza with other members of the department and once more. We didn’t like each other at all, which Mandiola found hysterical. That was him: always drawn to drama — either generating it or laughing at it.

He was the loudest voice in the room. His banter with Cindy dominated the grad office for weeks — compliments tangled with insults. It wasn’t romantic. It was force meeting force, and they both held their ground. I also wrote about becoming friends with Mandiola in my piece I Have a Crush on Katie Park of the Bad Moves; here is a little bit of that:

A good friendship, in my opinion, is one where no matter how long you and your friend have not hung out, if you see them it’s as if not a day has passed. With this sort of friend, I’ve found, there is between yourself and them something fundamental shared. It can be anything really. For example, I first met my good buddy when we were both in graduate school in Arizona, and at first I thought he was a total dick. He was loud, interrupted people constantly, and loved being the center of attention. One night we were drinking as a department and he started razzing me there on the street, just casually insulting me left and right. Suddenly I got where he was coming from. This was, in fact, his way of offering to be friends. Once I understood this, I began to give it right back to him. Called him every name in the book. And he ate it up. By the end of the night we were fast friends and have been ever since, because we share an understanding that our friendship is based, in part, on ripping on each other.

Me

I was twenty-four, newly returned from Japan, married but alone in Flagstaff. I ran most mornings, didn’t drink in my tiny freezing room, and wanted to get straight As. And I got them, with just one A- to keep me honest I guess.

Summary

  • Cindy had presence.
  • Lance and Gretchen had the house on the hill.
  • Fritz had Vegas dreams.
  • Patrick had Reagan.
  • Gary had principles made of stone.
  • Diamond had an orchard.

And Mandiola and I — for all our differences — were the sharpest minds in the room, and it is he that I would spend the most time with and remember the best.

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My Time at Northern Arizona University Part I: Decision and Arrival

Dateline: Kumamoto, Japan. Fall of 1998.

I am living in a small apartment near downtown, tatami under my feet, a low loft overhead, the city moving quietly outside. I’d been teaching English conversation long enough to know I was going nowhere in that job. It wasn’t a crisis; it was a slow stalling-out. Good enough money, students I liked, but no real future. A life you could idle in forever.


Most nights I sat on the floor with a notebook, paging through information on American graduate programs. I wasn’t dreaming about tenure, an academic ladder, or a nameplate on some elite office door. I wasn’t trying to become a history professor at all. What I wanted was simpler and sharper: a way back to the U.S., a life I could actually live inside, and a path that might let the woman I loved come over later, maybe as a nurse, once her father’s condition — only after marriage — was met.

I emailed Tom Wilson, my old Asian History professor from Hamilton, and asked if he would write on my behalf. He agreed, and somewhere out in the system his recommendation went off to people who would never meet him. He also wrote back: don’t go to Northern Arizona; go to Chicago, my school. You can become a professor. It was kind and sincere and completely beside the point. He was thinking career. I was thinking oxygen.

The search itself was slow. I compared cities, programs, costs, climates. When I landed on Northern Arizona University and started looking at Flagstaff, it just felt right: high desert, pine trees, a small city you could walk, not a sprawl you endured. The history program was solid enough, and it wasn’t a teaching-credential track. It looked like a place where I could move forward, not just sideways.

When the offer came back, it was more than just admission. NAU gave me a scholarship and in-state tuition, even though I had never lived in Arizona. That got my attention. Schools don’t hand out cheaper rates to out-of-staters for fun. For whatever mix of reasons — Japan, Hamilton, Tom Wilson’s letter, my file on someone’s desk — they wanted me. That was enough.

I packed up my life in Kumamoto, said goodbye to Washington — my second English conversation school, not the state — and flew back to Spokane. From there I bought a red Toyota pickup for four thousand dollars from a teacher’s husband at St. George’s; he was a cop. It was almost all the money I had. I drove away with a truck, an acceptance, and not much else.


The road south was long and winter-empty. I followed a paper map through states I barely knew, slept in a couple of cheap motels under thin blankets, and kept going at first light. The truck held together. I did too.

Early January, I rolled into Flagstaff. Cold air, bright sky, nothing arranged. I had no housing lined up and almost no cash. I parked on campus, put on black trousers, a black turtleneck, and a black blazer, and walked straight into the History building like that was a normal thing to do.


Karen Powers, the chair, treated it as if it was. I told her I’d just arrived and had nowhere to stay. She didn’t flinch. A friend of hers, she said, had a room to rent a minute from campus, three minutes from the department. We walked over.


It was a small back bedroom, six hundred a month, a parking space in the yard, and a shared bathroom with the guy in the next room. No kitchen, no run of the house. Not ideal. But it was available, and it was there.

I took it on the spot. That same day, I moved in.

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On Why I Told the World to Fuck Off for 36 Hours

Subtitle: And Saved My Life in the Process

So I called you a cab and they called you a hearse,
and I knew what they were talking about.
— The Mendoza Line, “It’s a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly)”

Note: This piece pairs naturally with my recent essay On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl). Both pieces are about the small moments that hold us together when we are breaking apart. You can read that piece here.

By 2012 I finally understood what I had been circling back in 2008 without fully naming: the business hotel wasn’t just a neutral space — it was a controlled dissociation chamber. A place where my mind could flatten without collapsing. A room where the world muted itself into CNN-colored soft focus, where time thinned out, where nothing asked anything of me. I didn’t know it then, but all those mid-range rooms — the bland art, the sealed windows, the gentle hum of an air conditioner tuned to the exact frequency of psychic anesthesia — were teaching me a skill I would need later: how to disappear just long enough to come back intact.

So when the pressure finally broke, when I had been working thirty straight thirteen-hour days and felt myself sliding toward the edge of something unnamed, I took the Shinkansen to Tokyo, checked into a business hotel, turned my phone off, and told the world — or most of it — to fuck off for thirty-six hours. And the shocking thing wasn’t that it worked. The shocking thing was realizing I had been preparing for it years earlier, in those identical rooms where the towels were always clean, the windows always closed, and 9-ball was always on.

So I ducked into the nearest konbini and bought a latte from the machine — the one small ritual that still made sense. The warm cup in my hand steadied me just enough to get through the turnstiles. Kyoto Station felt too bright, too full of intersecting lives and needs, the air full of other people’s urgency. I didn’t have the bandwidth to absorb anyone else’s story; I barely had enough for my own. All I knew was that the next Shinkansen to Tokyo was leaving in eleven minutes, and if I didn’t get on it, something in me would snap in a way I wouldn’t be able to walk back. The latte was cooling fast, my hands were shaking, and every part of my body was saying the same thing: Go. Now. Before you say yes to one more thing you don’t have the energy to carry.

Once the room was arranged — bag on the stand, shoes lined up by the door, Pocari Sweat sweating slightly on the desk next to the bottle of red — my whole system downshifted into something like relief. Not joy. Not peace. Just the quiet recognition that, for the next thirty-six hours, my time belonged to me and no one else. I didn’t have to speak. I didn’t have to answer. I didn’t have to hold anything together. All I needed to do was sit on the bed, take a long drink of Pocari, a short drink of wine, and let my body loosen by degrees. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cinematic. It was just freedom in the smallest, most essential sense: I get to be here, in this room, alone, and the world can wait.

After the first wave of relief, the question always arrived: Do I go out?

Tokyo was right there.

Akasaka-Mitsuke humming five floors beneath me, restaurants lit up like little stages, the crossing full of men in suits walking fast enough to convince you they knew exactly where they were going. I never did. So I’d sit on the bed and pull up the map — not to plan, but to orient. Izakaya here, ramen there, a bar tucked down some side street with red lanterns and a name I couldn’t pronounce. Nothing fancy. Nothing difficult. Just food, warmth, and maybe one drink that wasn’t red wine from a convenience store. I wasn’t looking for a night out. I was looking for simple movement, the kind that doesn’t require performance or decision-making. A walk, a meal, a seat at a counter. A single beer poured by someone who didn’t know my name and didn’t need to.
That was the whole question every time: stay in the bubble, or slip into the Tokyo night just long enough to remember I was a person.

Stepping out into Akasaka-Mitsuke wasn’t lonely — it was liberating. The air felt different the second the sliding doors breathed me out into the crosswalk light. I wasn’t hiding from anyone. I wasn’t avoiding anything. I was simply off the clock in a way that almost never happened in my real life. No one knew where I was, and for the first time in weeks, that fact didn’t carry a threat or a stain of guilt. It felt clean. It felt earned. I wasn’t missing; I was saving my own damn life by giving it a night without responsibility. The freedom wasn’t dramatic. It was simply this: I could walk in any direction, and every direction was allowed.

Out in the Akasaka night, I felt like the version of myself that gets buried under work and obligation — the real me, the one who just wants to wander and see who’s out, what’s open, what energy the city is holding. I wasn’t searching for anything dramatic. I wasn’t looking for revelation or escape. I was just checking things out — the izakaya with the red lantern, the alley with the quiet bar, the group of people laughing too loud on the corner. Dabbling. Moving lightly. Letting Tokyo show me whatever it wanted to show, without needing to make a night out of it. It was the simplest, purest freedom: explore until something feels right, and stop when it doesn’t.

I walked the Akasaka backstreets the way I always do when I’m in this mode — cutting down alleys, taking long cuts and shortcuts that don’t make geographic sense but feel right in my body. Tokyo is a city you navigate by instinct, not logic. You follow energy. You drift. You take the turn that looks interesting, then the one that feels safe, then the one that’s pulsing with life. Sometimes I’d follow the Google map to the place I thought I wanted to eat, only to walk past it and keep going. Other times I’d catch a glimpse of something through a noren curtain — warm light, the sound of laughter, a chef moving with the right kind of ease — and that would be the signal. It was never about the spot itself. It was about finding the right spot, the one that matched the night’s frequency. And over the course of the evening, I usually did both: follow the algorithm, then abandon it; trust the map, then trust myself.

Eventually I found the place — an oyster bar tucked behind one of those half-lit alleys where Akasaka feels a little European and a little dreamlike. Warm light, wood counter, the soft clatter of shells, and a chef who moved with the kind of quiet competence that settles you the moment you sit down. This was exactly my jam: an oyster platter arranged like a small geography, cold and briny and perfect, a bowl of clam chowder steaming in front of me, and a carafe of white wine that I poured slowly, deliberately, one glass at a time. Spendy, sure — but in this mode spendy isn’t excess. Spendy is permission. Spendy is dignity. Spendy is saying to yourself: I get to take my time with this. I get to have a meal that cares for me back. And in that moment, slurping an oyster with the city humming outside, I could feel the night open around me in the cleanest way.

The white wine hit me in that way good pairings do — not as a buzz, but as a reminder of how people take care of themselves when they’re not drowning. White wine and oysters belong together; everyone knows that, and sitting there I felt myself re-enter that understanding. The pairing wasn’t fancy. It was human. It was the kind of small, civilized pleasure most people allow themselves without thinking, and I’d been so buried under work and obligation that I’d forgotten what that felt like. The red I’d had earlier had already warmed me, softened the hard edges, and now the white layered over it, sharpening the night just enough to make everything shimmer. I was slightly buzzed and buzzing — not out of control, not hiding, just finally aligned with myself again.

I left the oyster bar with that warm, gentle buzz humming through me — the kind that makes Tokyo feel lit from within — and walked until I found the sort of place I always look for on these nights. A spendy cocktail bar: dim lights, bottles arranged like small works of art, a bartender in a crisp vest moving with that Japanese mix of precision and grace that makes you feel taken care of without being noticed. I took a high seat at the counter and ordered something I never drink in real life — a proper cocktail, layered, balanced, spendy. Spendy was the point. Spendy meant: I am worth slowing down for. Spendy meant: no one is waiting, no one is watching, no one needs anything from me. I sipped slowly, letting the night stretch out in front of me like a long exhale, feeling myself settle into the version of me that only Tokyo brings out — curious, quiet, open, free.

The bar I ended up in wasn’t some sleek Tokyo cocktail temple — it was better. Two bartenders from Nepal were working the counter, the kind of guys who’ve lived ten different lives before landing in Japan, commuting in from way out because Akasaka rent is a joke. We talked the way travelers talk when no one is trying to impress anyone — about where they were from, how far they lived, what Kathmandu feels like in winter. I wasn’t performing, just listening, rapping with them in that easy drift that happens when you’re slightly buzzed and buzzing in a foreign city. I ordered red wine — not more cocktails — because that was the right shape for the night, and when I finished my glass one of them poured me another, full to the brim, “for the gentleman.” It wasn’t flirtation. It wasn’t special treatment. It was the small grace of the night saying: You came to the right place. You came at the right time. And you’re not carrying anyone else’s weight right now.

When I stepped back out into the night after the second glass of wine, the whole neighborhood felt like it belonged to me. Not in a macho way, not in a performative way — just in that rare, private way where the city’s pace matches your own and you fall into step with its pulse. Akasaka was quiet but lit, humming but not crowded, and for five or six blocks I felt like I owned a slice of it. My slice. The alleys, the crosswalk glow, the last trains whispering underneath the city — all of it moved around me without touching me. I wasn’t hiding. I wasn’t disappearing. I was just walking back to my faded little hotel in a state of clean, earned sovereignty, knowing the world wasn’t tracking me for once. And for those fifteen minutes, Tokyo wasn’t a megacity. It was mine — exactly the size of the person I was in that moment.

Back in the room — my little faded Akasaka hideout five or six blocks from the bar — I didn’t overthink a thing. I drank more red wine, chased it with Pocari, stripped down to my boxers, and let my body fall exactly where it wanted to fall. There was nothing left to hold, nothing left to manage, nothing left to translate. I slept like a baby — a full, unbroken twelve hours, eleven to eleven — the kind of sleep that only arrives when you’ve been carrying too much for too long and finally set it all down in a room no one else can enter. No dreams, no interruptions, no alarms. Just the deep, uncomplicated sleep of someone who gave himself thirty-six hours of mercy and actually took them.

When I woke up around eleven, I felt clear-eyed and ready for more of exactly what the night had been—a continuation of me time. No urgency, no guilt, no one waiting on anything. Just hunger in my stomach and calm in my body. I didn’t rush. I stayed in the room for hours, drifting between the bed and the window, drinking instant coffee, sipping a little more Pocari, scrolling nothing, letting the quiet stretch. I could go out or stay in—either was fine. The whole point was that the day was mine to waste or spend however I wanted. After twelve hours of baby-level sleep, I wasn’t reborn—I was simply functional again. Hungry, steady, grounded, and free.

The next day I was set to return to Kyoto. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go — and the Thin Man cleans up quick. I showered, shaved, packed my bag with the same neat ritual I’d used the night before, and stepped back out into Akasaka like someone who had never been tired in the first place. Before heading to the station I picked up omiyage — the small gesture that makes the return feel seamless — something for the office, something for home. It wasn’t guilt; it was continuity. A way of saying: I left for a day and a half, and now I’m back in the world with all the edges smoothed. By the time I boarded the Shinkansen back to Kyoto, I was already shifting into IB mode — the coordinator, the problem-solver, the guy who keeps the whole thing moving. But now the engine was clean again. The reset had worked. Thirty-six hours alone in a faded Tokyo hotel, oysters, wine, a long sleep, a morning that belonged only to me — and suddenly I could re-enter at full tilt. Not as a martyr. Not as a runaway. Just as myself, restored enough to carry everything again.

Dedication:

For Akasaka — whoever designed that little slice of urban order also re-ordered my mind in the best possible way. Thanks there, baby.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Childhood Abuse

Epigraph I:

Well it’s always been my nature/ to take chances/ my left hand drawn back/ while my left hand advances.

Bob Dylan, Angelina

Epigraph II:

I’m glad I did it all then you know that I didn’t listen/ glad I went and got it all outta my system.

My Morning Jacket, Outta My System

Epigraph III:

It’s never been a fair fight.

Craig Finn. It’s Never Been a Fair Fight

Note: What follows is a direct and somewhat graphic account of my experience of being badly abused as a child. The abuse happened at the hands of my aunt’s (father’s side) first husband when I was six and seven years old in the very early 1980s. As I will recount, the abuse had deep and lasting impacts on me and it took me years, decades, to process and understand what it did to me.

I make absolutely no claim to be an expert on childhood abuse or to speak to anyone else’s experience of this all too common problem. My experience is my own, and that’s all I can really speak to. In addition, although he conducted what I consider to be vicious abuse of my brother, I understand that anyone impacted by abuse may categorize events in different ways. Therefore, I will allude only glancingly to these aspects, and only through the lens of how this impacted me personally. I will, inevitably, make reference to the role of my parents and my aunt in the events, and as I mention below when I began to fully process the abuse I directed a certain degree of anger at these adults. As time has passed, however, I have come to understand that although they were not able, for whatever reason, to stop the abuse, and although it was conducted, at least in my case, in their direct view, the primary responsibility lies with the abuser himself.

In early 2024 I did seek out legal advice from a firm that specializes in childhood sexual abuse, and they gave me a professional and compassionate hearing, however in the end declined to take up my case and directed me instead to the Washington State public system. I will detail those events below. I am not currently pursuing legal avenues, and instead am hoping that by making this public I can finally fully exorcise the lasting damage that was done to me. I take full responsibility for the content of this piece.

I was born in South Bend, Indiana in June of 1974. My father was pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Notre Dame at the time, however when I was around six months old my parents moved back to Santa Clara, California, where my mother’s parents were living. My father did not finish his master’s at Notre Dame because of some issue with the faculty there, however I believe that he did later finish at Santa Cruz University in California. In an interesting side note I also pursued a master’s degree, in History at the University of Northern Arizona in the late 1990s, and did not finish because of a conflict, or disagreement, with my thesis advisor. Life has a funny way of repeating itself.

We lived in Santa Clara until I was, I believe, two years old, and then my parents moved us to Gig Harbor, Washington. My understanding is that my father wanted to move to Washington State to be closer to his sister, Nancy (Nan) Thomas. Nancy is my father’s younger sister and it was she, I believe, that introduced my father to my mother, who was Nancy’s friend when they all attended Santa Clara University.

It just so happened that Nancy was then married to a man who would become my abuser. My first memory of this guy, just some fucking guy as far as I’m concerned, is also my first real memory in life (Note: This has since been revised to happier memories when I was two in California. I will detail these at a later date). It goes like this:

When I was very small, two going on three, (I know I was three in Gig Harbor because my brother Mike was born there in June of 1977), we lived in a small house right next to the Pacific Ocean. What I recall about this time was, we had a dog. My father was working at a nearby lumberyard which I occasionally visited, and, I think, was sort of seeking what would be the next stage of his life. My parents had no money, but I didn’t understand this at the time.

My first vivid memory is of playing a game called “Shovelman” on the beach of the Pacific Ocean right by our house. I don’t remember the rules of Shovelman, but it involved a frisbee. However I do recall, with absolute precision, that one time the frisbee was thrown out into the ocean, which, in western Washington, was very cold. This guy ordered me to swim for the frisbee, and when, predictably, I struggled mightily to reach the frisbee in the freezing water and came out gasping for breath, he laughed and laughed, like a total sadist. Of course I didn’t know what a sadist was at the time, but I recognized his essential nature even then. I knew for sure at that moment that he was a bad guy. Now I don’t fully know if my father and mother liked this guy or considered him a friend. All I know is, he was around some. I later learned that my uncle Kim did not like him. Hated him in fact. Kim has had an interesting and varied life, and is my godfather. I love Kim, and salute him here for his instincts.

While my first memory is a negative one, presaging as we will see later events, I also have positive memories from this time. I recall right around this time the days after my brother was born that some of my mother’s family visited us including her mother Barbara and her youngest sister Leslie. My mother has nine siblings, all, fortunately, still alive and all wonderful people. Leslie was quite young at the time and is only a few years older than myself I believe. Anyway, I looked up to Leslie and thought she was cool, so when we all went to a restaurant I sneaked under the table and pulled on her leg, like little children do. I wanted her attention, but I’m not sure if I got it. As I mentioned above, I also recall visiting my father at the lumberyard and thinking he also was cool and had a cool job. I don’t know if he would remember that line of work the same way or not.

In any case, my family did not stay in Gig Harbor very long, and pretty soon we were back in California, this time in Palo Alto, which is a town adjacent to Santa Clara. These days, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and the nearby San Jose are well known for being sort of the heart of Silicon Valley, but back then they were not really on the map in that way. My mother was working as a swim coach at Stanford University and my father was working at a school in town. This was a wonderful period of my life as I spent time at Stanford hanging around the pool while my mother was coaching which was a total blast. I may recount this time in more detail at a later date. Suffice it to say I was an outgoing, curious, and happy child, eager to see what the world had in store for me. As I will detail below, I believe I was at this time essentially an extravert, and the primary, from my perspective, impact of the later abuse would be to turn me into a somewhat serious introvert. Over and above all other impacts of the abuse, this is the one I resent the most. It is my belief that my natural extraversion, my interest in and ability to trust and like people, was deeply damaged by the actions of my abuser. I will never fully get over this aspect of the situation, and have had to work very, very hard to overcome what I see as a kind of inversion of my essential nature.

In the year 1980 my family moved once again, this time to Spokane, Washington. And again, this was, as I understand it, for my father to be closer to his sister who was by that time working as a young lawyer in the same city. My abuser was also, I believe, a lawyer. It is certainly true that, although younger, Nancy was on the upswing of her career much more quickly than my father. Other than that I don’t know the exact reasons for this following of his sister, however my father found a teaching job at St. George’s school in Spokane WA. I would attend St. George’s from grade 1 through 12, and have written rather extensively about my time there. Interested readers can find these pieces on this blog.

St. George’s was great, and overall, although my parents were still broke, I had a good childhood. However, there was one dark aspect, which was we would regularly visit Nancy and this guy at their home on the South Hill in Spokane. On occasion, but much less regularly, this couple would visit us at our house on the outskirts of the city. I believe that all of the incidents recounted below occurred in 1980 and 1981. I know this for a couple of reasons, first of all because the volcano Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980 and at Nancy’s house in the backyard there was a big craggly rock which had pockets of ash residue from the eruption and this event was a big topic at the time. Secondly, I know that I was enrolled in first grade at St. George’s so I must have been six. My brother Mike then would have been three going on four. I wrote about my wonderful brother Mike before here.

The action at the Thomas household there was not all bad–there was the ash and a nearby park called Cannon Hill Park which was pretty cool. The house on the South Hill was pretty large, certainly larger than our own, and I got to know my cousins, both of whom were even younger than myself. I would say we visited dozens of times over the course of a year or two, and I remember the house and its environs well. In any case, ash and parks aside, the main event at the Thomas house turned out to be regular and vicious abuse from this guy which was conducted in full view of everyone in the living room of the house. After a little dinner or whatever, he would “tickle” myself, my brother, for extended periods of time, 20-30 minutes at a time or so or more. This “tickling” was not in any form playing; it was, instead, a totally vicious fully body attack.

It was absolutely excruciating and horrible, and he would touch every single part of my body and dig his fingers in as deep as possible and screw them around. At first I didn’t know what to make of this or what to do, but overtime I came to hate this so much that I began to fight back. My bother Mike, at three, was obviously in no position to do so, and so he, in my recollection, absolutely got the worst of this. The amazing thing, amazing to me to this day, is that the three other adults, my mother and father and this guy’s wife, would just stand there and watch. There is something deeply sad about adults that cannot, for whatever reason, stand up to a bully.

Later, much later, I would confront my mother about all this, and she has since said that her inability to intervene is one of her deepest regrets.

What I think happened was, when I began to fight back he gave up on abusing me. Also, I suspect, from my understanding of abuser psychology, that I had, essentially, “aged out” of whatever his mindframe was. My sense is that he preferred his victims to be as helpless and defenseless as possible, and I was no longer fitting the bill.

Now I should note that I don’t know what his problem was or what he thought he was getting out of this abuse. And, I don’t wish to research it really, because I would prefer to spend as little time as possible engaging with people of this sort. What I know for certain is that in the early 1980s he was a brutal man. That’s a flat fact.

I will detail what I understand to be the effects on myself and some of the later repercussions of his abuse a little later, but first of all I will recount my attempts to engage with the legal system over this issue, as well as indicate, in a compressed form, how I came to process and understand the abuse. Now I wish to tread carefully here because I do not want to get sucked into a discussion of, or really even take a position on, what is known as repressed memory. I understand that this topic is highly controversial, with strong opinions on all sides. Although I have read a lot, I am not an expert on psychology, much less a topic as fraught as this. What I will say is that I never repressed the memory of the abuse; if you had asked me at any given time in my life if I was brutally attacked by this guy, in full view of other adults, I would have said absolutely yes, that happened. However, what took time was to fully work out how deeply and negatively it impacted me, and in what ways. I think I always intuited it, however it took a some very difficult life experiences to get to the bottom of it.

The first of these was in 2010, when I was already 36 years old. It was at that time that I began spiraling into my memories and trying to uncover some kind of nugget that would unlock a range of issues that I was encountering at the time. In this year, and on a few other occasions after, I would, somewhat obsessively, go over events from my sixth and seventh year, always centering around my aunt Nancy, her house, and what I perceived to be my essential ambidexterity. More on this point later. At some point I intuited, in some way, that Nancy may have had a miscarriage before the birth of her first child. My mother, when I asked her, confirmed that this had taken place, and asked how I knew it. I didn’t, but somehow worked it out, just because I was spending so much time thinking this constellation of issues. It was also during this times that I was also trying to get to the bottom of my sexuality, my introversion, and my inability to learn to play the piano because of seriously weak left hand. I will detail these, and other aspects of the situation, later.

In any case, it was in 2022 that I fully worked out the effects that the abuse had had on me over time, and began, for the first time, to identify as a sexual abuse survivor. This was not something that I wanted to have to incorporate into my personal narrative, however it became inevitable. I looked into the law in Washington State, and as I recall, as I understood it at the time, the statute of limitations was three years which began at the moment that the victim became fully aware of their injury. From my point of view, I became fully aware of my injury in 2022, and therefore, after thinking about it, I contacted a law firm in Washington State in early 2024. This firm specialized in sexual abuse cases, however they were pretty high-powered and I got the impression from their website that they specialized in suing institution, schools, churches, and the like. On this basis I felt that it was somewhat unlikely they would take up my case–there was probably just not enough percentage in it. Nonetheless, their website indicated that they meant business, so I contacted them and a little while later had a call with an associate from the firm. He told me that all the lawyers were all in court, but gave me a full and proper hearing and said that he believed my story. He also asked me an interesting question, which was, did the abuse happen more or less than 20 times? I said my recollection was that yes, it was over 20 times, and he took a note of this. My impression was that for a case like mine, 20 times was some kind of legal threshold.

A few weeks later the associate got back to me via email. As mentioned above, he said that the firm would decline to take my case, and recommended I pursue the public legal system. He also said that he hoped that I got justice. I thanked him in response, and was not overly disappointed because it was clear that their focus was on institutions and I had done my best.

Now I should mention that before I contacted the law firm, I did Google this fucking guy to see what came up. It is true that I didn’t want to, and still don’t really want to, research this guy, however I wanted to see at a minimum what internet footprint he had. It turned out that he had a website where he described himself as some kind of elite international mediator and the site had a picture of him climbing a mountain.

So I guess he leveraged his legal background into some kind of mediation role, which is guess is all related. And I have no idea, he may have had success as a mediator. In actual fact, it is not even my intention to comment at any length on who or what he is today (I do believe he is still alive). Is it possible that he cleaned himself up in some respect? Maybe. But actually I doubt it. It is my opinion that someone as twisted as he was in his early adulthood doesn’t really get over that. I can forgive a lot of things–for example taking a life when drunk driving or something of that nature. Mistakes are made, and mistakes of that sort are basically unintentional. However, this guy, with his Shovelman action and his subsequent brutality, in my estimation, doesn’t really ever get better. Am I being unfair? Perhaps. It’s really hard to say.

In any case, although the firm turned me down, reaching out to them was one of the best decisions I have ever made. By attempting to work through the legal system I had engaged, fairly and properly, with the available channels, and I felt immeasurably better about the whole thing. I did not at that time decide to pursue the public option, because I am not located in Washington State, and I didn’t feel that taking this route any further would be feasible. Instead, I thought about using the only real platform I have, my blog, to discuss my thoughts on the matter. Aside from the legal system, this seemed to me to be the next best thing. And so here we are.

In what follows I wish to enumerate what I understand to be the long-term effects of my abuse. I will, in the interest of my own privacy and that of others, somewhat undersell these, and it is not my intention to burden the reader with my own issues over time. In addition, I would like to make clear that my encounter with the legal system as well as my somewhat long-gestating decision to go public with my story and my conversations with a few trusted friends, has ameliorated, to a significant degree, the effects of my personal abuse. In any case, here is what I feel:

From my earliest memories I wanted to play the piano. When I was in first or second grade I asked my mother to enroll me in piano lessons, and she declined, saying that she had no money. A few years later my brother Mike was allowed to take cello lessons, and he became very good very fast. I would wait in the car while my brother and my mother attended cello lessons there on the South Hill in Spokane. Naturally, I never held this against my brother, who was an awesome musician and I was proud of him, however I did resent, for a very long time, being denied the opportunity to pursue music. It is my understanding that although people can learn music at different times in life, the earlier the better. I have subsequently tried to learn the keyboard by myself, and somehow was able to play “Ocean Rain” by Echo and the Bunnymen and “Someone I Care About” by the Modern Lovers. I didn’t dominate Ocean Rain, but it was least passable. But I still can’t really read or play music. I wish, beyond almost anything, that I would have had the chance to learn music at an early age.

However, my strong feeling, underlined by years of reflection and memory spiraling, is that the abuse from this guy essentially crippled my left hand. I don’t know exactly how I know this, but I have always known it. So I probably wouldn’t have been that great at piano anyway, because the left hand is pretty important. And, the destruction of my left hand is intimately and directly connected to my crippled ambidexterity, the inversion of my extraversion, as well as my somewhat ambiguous sexuality. I will take up these issues in turn.

First, as mentioned above, there was as a result of the abuse, a long-term impact on my left hand. When I was very young, maybe four, I learned to swim in the pool at Stanford, and my strong memory is that I was developing a certain ambidexterity. Ambidexterity is related in some respects to dyslexia, which I also have a very mild case of, however it also has some salubrious aspects, for example in sports and music. I understand this intuitively and experientially, that I could have been a good piano player if I had been able to take lessons and if I had not been, essentially, crippled from the repeated abuse. Thus, the epigraph from Dylan at the top. It’s been forty-five years since I was first abused by this guy, and only now is my left hand, so to speak, advancing.

Second, as mentioned above, I was an extravert until I was six years old when I suddenly turned into a pretty serious introvert. Now, I absolutely don’t wish to imply at all that one orientation is better than another–both have great strengths. However, the issue here is that I was one thing, and then became another. And this corresponded to, and was directly triggered by, the abuse that I suffered. Somehow, the repeated and protracted abuse turned me inward. I no longer trusted people, essentially, and although I still liked, and still do, many people, something went off track. This is the reality.

Third, I know for an absolute fact that my sexuality was deeply damaged by this guy. I can’t speak to any other form of abuse, however my case of male on male abuse, which I experienced (and yes I absolutely categorize my experience as sexual abuse because he violated every part of my body including my genitals) led to a situation where it became for me, once I hit puberty, somewhat difficult to work out what my sexuality was and in what direction it ran. I was, without doubt, attracted to girls, however in the back of my mind there was some kind of lingering, and for me uncomfortable, ambiguity, as well as a distinct inability to approach women. Now, I fully understand that the inability to approach women is a pretty normal aspect of heterosexual teenagers, who are awkward at the best of times, but I always sort of knew that there was something else going on. And what was going on was, my genitalia was first touched, without my consent obviously, for lack of a better term, by an adult male when I was six years old. And that damaged me.

In essence, and again I know instinctively this to be the case, the abuse was so brutal and so protracted that it in essence re-wired my brain. As with repressed memory, I don’t wish to take a strong position on the issue of the left-brain and the right-brain, although I have read and deeply integrated the book The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist, which goes into this matter in far greater detail, and with far greater insight, than I will ever achieve. What I know is the connections within my brain were compromised, indeed fractured, by the abuse. Although it took years for me to fully work this out, I have absolutely no doubt that this is the case. It was, in my belief, something about the pure digging of his fingers that did the damage. Some light tickling would not, I think, have had this effect, however the intensity and depth of his action were, I know, of a completely different level.

Basically, I have been dealing with long-term PTSD from his attacks, dealing with it for 45 years in one way or another, and 15 years more intensely. And you might say “hey there Matty baby, how do you know that your supposed ambidexterity, for example, was so compromised by this guy’s actions?” In answer to that I wish to make an analogy to the trans issue. Now I understand that the trans issue is highly political, and, I guess, pretty complex. However my basic stance is as follows: I do not believe that people who experience feelings of transsexuality or gender dysphoria, basically, are “making it up.” A few may be for various reasons, however I believe that, generally speaking, the set of feelings they experience are real, and also because I have never had them, I cannot speak to them with any authority. Such it is with sexual abuse. The feelings and understandings of sexual abuse victims are, I believe, valid and need to be understood in the context of they know best what the effects of the abuse were. While I cannot perhaps fully explain how I know what I know, I know.

I have a few final thoughts. The first is, as mentioned above and now underlined, my bother also received similar treatment from this guy. I mention this only because I have, ever since, suffered from a great degree of guilt for my inability to protect my brother at that time. Indeed, it was primarily this aspect of the situation, more so than the damage to myself alone, that caused me to direct my anger at my abuse to my mother, and by extension my father and Nancy. I still carry this guilt, and don’t suppose I will ever really get over it. Once again, there is a good deal more to the story, but that’s all I really wish to say at this point.

The second refers to what I described above as the re-wiring of my entire mind and body. Perhaps there is a more clinical term for this, and I think that psychologically alert readers will be able add understanding around this, however this is the best description I can offer. As the second quote at the top of this piece alludes to, the life we have led has been what it has been. I strongly wish I had never suffered the abuse that I did, and have had as a consequence, some of the most painful imaginable situations, however the mere fact that I cannot turn back the clock means that the life I have lived will have to stand, in all of its glory and messiness. This is true, I think, for everyone.

Finally, and I am in no way being facetious, I want to express my deep indebtedness to the great Craig Finn. Craig Finn is the lead singer and songwriter from the bands Lifter Puller and The Hold Steady, and has also had a substantial solo career. One of my very favorite songs of all time is “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” by Finn, which I have written about at some length here, and from which the third epigraph for this piece comes from. I am not exaggerating when I say that Finn saved my life, probably more than once, and has, over time, helped me overcome the damage done by my abuse. Thank you Mr. Finn sir. I love you.

I will choose to close this narrative here. As alluded to above, there is a lot more to the story, however in the interest of the privacy of a range of people, not the least of which myself, I will desist. What I would like to say at the end of the day is, abusing a child is never a fair fight. And so I am deploying the only real tool that I have at my disposal, my pen. Thank you for reading.

Dedication:

For all my friends and family who have taken such good care of me over the years. I wouldn’t be here without you. And for Spencer Krug, the greatest piano player I am aware of.

Note: It you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the other pieces below which take up somewhat similar themes.

On the Sarah Lawrence Kids: My Take
On the Song “Encounter at 3 AM”

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On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”

I. Opening Notes

This is my third piece dealing with the songwriter Craig Finn. I wrote at length about his song “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” and a little more in my piece on Katie Park and The Bad Moves. Although my primary allegiance will always be to Dylan, if I am totally honest Finn is my favorite songwriter. Dylan is a transcendent force, world-historical, and therefore also sort of unapproachable. Finn is down-to-earth—I can imagine having a drink or three with Finn, whereas Dylan would probably have his hoodie up.

So, for the record: my favorite band is Luna, my favorite songwriter is Craig Finn, and the greatest is Dylan. My three favorite Finn songs are “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” and “Killer Parties.” This post takes a close look at “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” with the aim of explicating both the song and Finn’s delivery.

II. Premise and Setup

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is track three on Craig Finn’s 2019 album I Need a New War, released by Partisan Records. For my money, it is not only the standout track on the record, but one of the three greatest songs of my all-time favorite songwriter. The song is ostensibly about an old friend of the narrator (I will refer to him as C.) called Francis, but it’s also about trying to make it in the big city, and about moving on from the past. Making it—or not making it—in the big city is a classic Finn theme.

III. Verse One — The Accident and the Past

The song opens with a report of an accident. The nature of the event is unspecified, but my best guess is an overdose.

The lightning clarity typical of Finn is all over these four lines. We learn that C. and Francis have a relationship shaded by deception, that they still move in overlapping circles, and that both originally came from somewhere else. The final line delivers one of those Finn-isms that cut both ways: city transplants trying to recreate a tiny town, while C. himself is still entangled in the very past he’s trying to escape.

IV. Verse Two — Money, Health, and Elegance

By the second part of the verse it seems Francis has recovered somewhat, and C. has met with him again.

Finn’s concision is astonishing. In eight lines we understand the dynamic completely: C. has money he could give, but knows it’s probably enabling; Francis is perhaps an addict, though neither man states it. We also glimpse Francis in better days—The Parkside, elegant companions, a life C. once aspired toward. And already C. is trying, gently, to pass responsibility to someone else.

This touches something universal: the friend who needs more than we can sustainably give. Or the times we’ve been that friend ourselves.

V. The Chorus — Youth, Longing, and New York

The chorus arrives, one of Finn’s most moving and beautiful. His voice rises on I was drinking, I was dancing, packed with emotion.

This is a flashback to young C. in New York—broke, naive, crashing on Francis’s couch. Finn underlines C.’s passivity three times: waiting, hoping, desperate for New York to ask me out. That phrasing is brilliant. It captures the essential vulnerability of arriving in New York with dreams, no plan, and a subway map.

The memory sends me to my own first visit to New York. Stepping out of the station at 42nd Street into the noise, I felt the shock of sensation—an energy I still feel every time I return. I’ve been to many great cities—Tokyo, London, Singapore, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur—but there is nowhere like New York.

And in a city like that, it can be nearly impossible to get your footing. Everyone is already in motion. Finn evokes that perfectly.

VI. Verse Three — Present-Day Francis

Back to the present:

Francis has been in New York for twenty-three years, and C. nearly as long, since he knows the number by heart. The “bathtub in the kitchen” signals the classic New York starter apartment—a detail so iconic it becomes the song’s title. Francis still goes to the roof for better reception. Phones get disconnected. Life is fraying. C. registers all of this without overt judgment, but with distance. A sense of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

VII. Chorus Reprise — Guilt and Gratitude

The chorus returns with slight changes—“doing things I shouldn’t”—and doubled gratitude: Francis let me crash out on his couch. Repetition becomes confession.

My father read my “Fair Fight” draft and, not knowing anything about Craig Finn, immediately said he sensed a strong midwestern Catholic vibe. He was spot-on. Finn grew up Catholic in Minnesota; guilt, forgiveness, and redemption run through almost everything he writes.

There is also a phenomenal YouTube video of Finn performing this at the Murmrr Theatre, and during the post-chorus especially the performance takes on a spiritual intensity you can’t miss.

VIII. Post-Chorus — The Confession

The lines:

I can’t keep saying thank you, Francis…

These cut two ways. C. is saying:

  1. The couch surfing was long ago, and he has done what he can.
  2. And simultaneously: I’m not the person who can save you.

The confession is directed at Francis—but maybe just as much at himself.

IX. Verse Four — The Old Ropes and the New Distance

The final verse returns briefly to the past: Francis teaching C. how to navigate New York nightlife—befriend bartenders, tip big on the first round. These are the rules of the game. C. remembers them vividly.

Then we snap to the present: Francis’s job rumors, his terrible landlord, the $200 that will “help him breathe a bit easy.” And the repeated question: Francis, do you even have a plan? C. has given him money, but not much, and not with much faith. The trust between them has frayed into obligation.

X. Outro — The Spiritual Release

The outro repeats the confession. Again, it’s worth watching the Murmrr Theatre live version to feel how Finn leans into this. It becomes a kind of secular prayer, a release and a resignation all at once.

XI. Closing Thoughts

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is about youth and aging, about friendship and how it lasts and decays, about guilt and human selfishness in the face of real need. More than anything, it captures what it feels like to try to survive in New York.

I think this song, like “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” is more personal for Finn than some of his strictly narrative pieces. The narrator here has “made it.” Finn himself is an immigrant to New York, from Minnesota, and has sampled deeply from the nightlife he writes about. Few songwriters have chronicled nightlife with more range, consistency, or compassion.

Even if C. can’t keep saying thank you, I can. This song moves me in ways I’ve tried to describe here but still can’t fully encompass.

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Scenes from St. George’s VII: Senior Year II and Coda (with cameos by Bill Gates, Soft-Water, and Twin Peaks)

I used to be free/ I used to be seventeen

Sharon Van Etten

Never said a word, I never had to/ it was my attitude/ that you thought was rude

The Replacements

Long may you run

Neil Young

Note: This is the last in our series about Saint George’s, the school I attended from Grade 1 through Grade 12. You can find the other parts here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI. Thank you to everyone who read this series.

Senior Year II, and After:

It’s time to wrap up the Scenes from St. George’s series, as I’ve said most of what I want to say about that time and place. Before I finish, I want to write a bit about the very end of senior year and the summer after graduation as well as the first winter vacation back from college, and add a short coda.

After a number of us seniors got busted for drinking on our senior trip, things were pretty much winding down. Because we were a smallish class, everyone pretty much got along and there weren’t many cliques, however it is true that the two or three-season athletes, myself included, lived in a slightly different world than those students who mostly didn’t play sports. After baseball season of senior year whatever remaining barriers between classmates crumbled, and sometime around here I finally got a driver’s license. As a result, I spent a bit of time out at Dyche Alsaker’s house. Dyche and I were not all that close, but I liked him for a couple of reasons. One was, although his family certainly had more money than mine, and a bigger house, he never acted like some kind of alpha, which was cool. He just seemed happy to have people over (his parents never seemed to be home) and to go with the flow. I was as well. Dyche’s house was in “the valley” (do all towns have a valley?), which was really just the open space between Eastern Washington and Western Idaho. Most of the real rich folks at St. George’s lived on the South Hill, so maybe there was something about the Valley that was a little more “beta” than the South Hill. At that point in time, as now, I was more than happy to hang with some beta-males, or at least in a circumstance where such ridiculous distinctions no longer obtained.

Dyche loved the band the Replacements and their lead singer Paul Westerberg, and I caught onto his passion for this band. Actually, I may have discovered them on my own first, as their single “Merry Go Round” played a lot on VH1 and at that time I was a regular viewer of their music video program. “Merry Go Round” is the lead off track on the band’s final record All Shook Down, which was released in 1990 and is still by far my favorite “Mats” album. I bought the record and played it over and over in my room as “rock music” was kind of verboten in the main part of the house for reasons passing understanding. I remember one specific day where we drove out to a lake, probably in Idaho, and Dyche boated us around while drinking and listening to Westerberg’s first solo record 14 Songs. 14 Songs is pretty good and has a catchy single “Knocking’ on Mine,” but it’s no All Shook Down. As for drunk boating, while not advisable, it is somewhat preferable to drunk driving because there is simply more space, and Westerberg made the perfect companion for such an outing.

Although I was already into a lot of music at the time, including Dylan, R.E.M., Fine Young Cannibals, and Dire Straits (this list holds up pretty well actually), I was impressed with Dyche’s deeper level of fandom and aspired to know more about my favorite bands. By the time I got to university I had a better idea of what it meant to be a music fan, and this was in no small part because of Dyche. Out at Dyche’s house, there was a predictable amount of drinking and hooking up; the first interested me a little, the second more, although I was still having a bit of a tough time getting anything going in that area. Drinking was easier. One night I drank most of a bottle of whiskey in the hot tub there, and people came to think I had a high tolerance, which wasn’t really true. I also remember commandeering a bed at his house one night when a classmate came in with a girl I did not know. Can we have the bed, they asked–we are stuck on the trampoline. This was not my problem I felt, however they persisted and I gave way. I suppose they needed it more than I did.

As I mentioned, there didn’t seem to be much parental presence at Dyche’s house, which was a positive, but things never got too crazy. People came over, enjoyed the trampoline and the hot tub, and stayed the night instead of driving impaired. It was, all in all, a reasonably healthy developmental zone. This action lasted for a few weeks after graduation, and then kicked off again during the first winter after we went off to college. During that break there was a party at another classmate’s house–similar vibe, no parents, booze, and hooking up. I attended, and the next morning found myself with a girlfriend of sorts. This was a positive. What I recall about that night was, I watched the film The Graduate, walked away with a girlfriend, and smoked a cigar. Decent action, good action, bad action. Two out of three ain’t bad, baby.

Like all scenes of this sort, it didn’t last, nor did my girlfriend. I didn’t really know how to have a girlfriend, so to speak, and although we wrote letters from our respective colleges that spring the relationship had faded by summer. Nonetheless, the whole period, bisected by a few semesters of college, stands out as a crucial, if brief, interlude between high school and “real life.”

Coda:

Disclaimer: This section is pieced together from things I know and things I think probably happened. This is not meant to serve as a strict historical record of events that, for whatever reason, my parents have barely shared with me–and even if they had, this would only be one side of the story. Thus, in historical terms, this is kind of a reconstruction, so take it for what it’s worth.

St. George’s at this point should have been in the rear view mirror, and it mostly was. I came back as an alum, hung around a little, and moved on to the next thing, which turned out to be Japan. However, it was not entirely behind me because my parents still worked there, and my father, after I left, got sucked deeper and deeper into school politics. I wish to tread lightly here because there is so much about this murky period that I still don’t totally understand, however the basic facts as I know them are as follows:

i) After George Swope, who had a cameo in Part VI of this series, St. George’s had a new principal called Jonathan Slater. My father had wanted the job, and didn’t get it.

ii) At first, my father and Slater were fast friends, but I think this was a mutually cynical political relationship in a sense. My father was the head teacher and a power in the school, and Slater would have come in knowing this. They bonded under the auspices that Slater would give way at some point to my father, but this was never going to happen. I knew this, even if my parents did not. At first Slater would invite my family to Thanksgiving and such, and my father praised him to the skies. That changed however, and the two men became bitter enemies. This enmity led eventually to my father leaving the school.

Now St. George’s was an interesting place, and it was pretty much run by the rich folks that sent their kids there. There was some kind of board that pushed the principals around, and this was mostly made up of folks from the South Hill, who tended to be a little on the stuck up side–not terribly in most instances, but somewhat for sure. Also, by the time in question here Dyche’s father was on it, as I understand. I guess Dyche’s dad was the token Vallyer on the basically South Hill board, but then the school got a big donation from the Gates Foundation and I think Bill Gates’ sister came onto the board, or at least into the zone. In essence this was Western Washington doing a little light colonization of Eastern Washington, the red-headed stepchild of that state. Eastern and Western Washington are divided by the Cascades mountains, where Twin Peaks is set. Twin Peaks is in this piece.

Now I don’t know much about Bill Gates, but I suspect he’s not a great guy. In fact, I think he’s pedophile-adjacent. But I know that Bill Gates is not a force for good in the world for a different reason, which has to do with my struggles with my Skype password a few years back. Back before Zoom came along and ate Skype’s lunch six ways to Sunday, I used the service and had a password for it which worked fine. Then Microsoft took it over or something and all the sudden I had to provide a Microsoft password to “get through” to Skype for some reason. This was terrible, because I try to avoid Microsoft at all costs and I didn’t even know if I had a Microsoft password. Certainly I didn’t want one.

But for weeks I could not get anywhere near Skype because of this password issue, and it was driving me nuts. I needed Skype for work and it just wasn’t coming through. In marketing terms, this is a “process” issue. Process is one of the 7 Ps of the marketing mix in business, and basically it refers to how easy, or hard, it is for the customer to access your good or service. Amazon’s one-click check-out is an example of good process. Microsoft’s multi-step, super frustrating, password labyrinth is the opposite. I got so fed up with this whole situation, and by extension Gates, that I even ranted about it and him on the short lived, but awesome, Periscope platform–which Twitter later bought and then killed.

So like I say, Microsoft sucks, Periscope rocks, Skype sucks and deserves its fate, and Bill Gates, in my opinion, also sucks. I don’t know anything about his sister, but her arrival was, I think, the catalyst for my father’s removal.

(By the way, the Skype password issue reminds me of the soft-water issue. When I was a teenager I would frequently see soft-water trucks driving around, and I wondered what in the world soft-water was. I am basically a huge fan of the prefix “soft” and wrote about it here. The only soft-prefixed phrase I don’t like is soft-water. That’s because, trucks and aggressive marketing aside, soft-water is terrible. It’s marketed as some kind of improvement over “hard-water,” which I guess is supposed to be full of minerals or something. However, soft-water is completely terrible. The absence of minerals means that it is totally ineffective at getting soap off your skin, so after a soft-water shower you walk around all day with a patina of soap residue stuck to you. Soft-water is awful and a total scam, just like orthodontists. There is no real connection between Microsoft passwords and soft-water, except both totally suck. I bet you Bill Gates is a big soft-water guy–he does look a little soapy.)

In any case, my father was friendly with the rich folks on the South Hill, and as a result we spent a lot of time at their various big houses. I was less enamored with the South Hill crowd as a whole, as I have made clear, although I did have friends who lived there, however my father was political so he kind of had to suck up a bit. But I don’t think he really loved this sort of hobnobbing–he never seemed really at home in these settings. My overall sense is that at St. George’s my father was mostly on the right side of history, but his shortcomings as a politician were his Achilles Heel.

So, the relationship with Slater was going south for a while, and then the principal’s little predilections started to become basically public knowledge. I don’t know if Slater is still alive–if he is he’d be pretty old, but I think it is a matter of record that if George Edwards liked him some beach babes, Jonathan Slater there was more interested in babes in the cradle, so to speak. Again, just something I’ve heard, but I’ve been hearing it more and more these days. The rumor was that Slater would spend time in, I guess they were, basically sex clubs in downtown Spokane, and his tastes ran as young as possible, staying, perhaps, just this side of legal. Spokane is not that big of a city, and with something of that nature, well word does get around.

So let’s use a little Occam’s Razor on this situation. Just looking at it, here’s what I guess happened. This dude Jonathan Slater was principal for a while and was good at raising money. He was also, like Bill Gates, pedophile-adjacent and Spokane is a small town. While his money raising skills gave him space to engage in some borderline bad action there in downtown Spokane and to cover for a few bad actor friends of his on campus for a while, over time tongues talked and whispers became louder and Slater had to go. My father (who is named Ross) ran point on this effort from within in terms of rallying the teachers to oppose Slater, and at the same time Ross was perhaps positioning himself to get nominated as principal, but I’m not really sure. However, the board didn’t want Ross to be principal because they recognized that he would be a “teacher’s principal” (like a player’s coach in a sense). Board opposition to Ross probably had a few aspects, some more flattering to the board, some less.

One aspect was probably that the board as a whole (I don’t mean any one board member individually, but as a collective over time) had covered for Slater a bit even when his little peccadillos were, or should have been, becoming apparent, and when they came to the conclusion finally that he had to go they wanted to do it quietly. Ross’ involvement was making that difficult. This aspect of the situation is not in the board’s favor. A second aspect is perhaps that the board realized that not only did Slater have to go but the school as a whole, the teaching staff and the administration, needed more accountability and standards, and having a teacher’s principal in place would, in their view, not advance this goal. This is more in the board’s favor.

I am not suggesting that Ross was anti-standards, quite the opposite in many respects, however it is true, in my view, that he was very much driven by personal relationships and by who was on his team. In this sense he approached school administration like he did coaching. And while there are positive aspects to this approach to administration, there are also drawbacks, which the board must have been aware of. Another factor here is that for someone who had serious political aspirations within education for several decades, Ross was in many ways still a limited politician. Although he associated with the wealthy class that ran the school, attended their parties, ate their food, and, at times, flattered them, he was, as I mentioned, at heart not comfortable in these spaces and indexed this in multiple ways. His other weakness, in my opinion, was a tendency to vilification, which as I say started with Slater a while before all the action came to a head. In this case though, I think the vilification was justified. All in all, in the immortal words of The Mendoza Line, mistakes were made.

Somehow the Gates sister got deep in the mix, and the board summarily fired Ross’ best-friend and right hand man. Ostensibly this was, I believe, for not updating his teaching credential, and/or for being habitually late for work (which he was), but in actuality this was a shot at Ross, whom they felt they could not fire. Ross did not take the firing well, and started to raise holy hell, using the Slater business as leverage. There was some kind of teacher revolt that was shut down, and then Ross was pushed out–fired, or left, I’m still not quite sure. Then, Ross sued the school (again, I heard this but my parents never really told me about any of it, but I believe they did eventually get some money), and the Slater business may have made the papers. The Spokane papers don’t have great archives (unlike the South Florida Sun-Sentinel), so I don’t know this for sure, but the basic narrative is along these lines, I believe.

With Slater and Ross both gone, the school moved on and probably the Gates sister installed her own puppet, and that was that for my family’s association with the school. Ross’ relationship with the South Hillers was pretty much shattered, and for some reason he took special issue with the role of Dyche’s dad (who he never had had a relationship with). I didn’t really know Dyche’s dad much, and when I did meet him he seemed pretty chill, so I’m guessing there might have been a bit of projection there. In any case, all those doors closed.

Years later however, one of the rich families who Ross used to be close with must have thought that having Ross back in the fold would be a good idea, and they decided to use me in a roundabout way to try and re-open the door. I was already pretty well along in my IB career here in Asia, and St. George’s was in the process of, or had become, an IB school as well. I got a message asking me if I wanted to come and consult with the school, and although I could totally handle a little consulting, this was a bit odd because I was based in Asia and surely they could get someone more local to give advice. I got the feeling that what was really going on though was the consulting gig was being dangled as a way get to Ross, but maybe it was in good faith, in which case cool. I told my parents about the offer and my mother was horrified that I would even consider it. That’s how bad matters were left with the school. But consider it I did, because if someone wants to fly me somewhere and pay me for my time, I’m probably gonna take it.

The offer fell through though, I’m guessing because the powers-that-were figured out that whatever they were angling for Ross to do wasn’t going to happen and they never really wanted me to consult anyway. I felt a little used, but not really–it was just politics.

Ross moved on to become principal of a Catholic school in Oregon, and was able to implement his team-based approach there and I think he did a great job. He is, I believe, a retired principal in good standing there, and he was widely liked, except by those that he let go. My father is a good man, and a moral one, but he was also a little tough and if he didn’t like the way things were going with a staff member he’d cut the cord. I understand this, and sometimes you gotta do it, but myself take a little longer term view of trying to get people to pull their weight. People are different.

The epigraph for this piece is from the Replacements, of course, from the song “Attitude” off All Shook Down. My two favorite songs on the record are “Someone Take the Wheel” (“I see we’re fighting again/ in some fucking land/ aw throw in another tape man,”) and “Attitude.” All in all I think I’m an alright fellow much of the time, but some people have said I have a little attitude myself. Well, if so I probably picked it up from the Mats.

And Mr. St. George’s, if your IB program is dragging a little or if you are looking for a little consultation in pretty much any area, hit me up. I’ll be there and it won’t even cost you that much. After all, I’ve always been a cheap date.

Dedication: For Dyche. Getting to know you was way more interesting than any subsequent politics. Thanks for the Mats. And for my father. Long may you run.

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Scenes from St. George’s, Part V: Free Range Culture

St. George’s Free Range Culture:

Thus far in this series I have alluded a number of times to what my high school classmate Dyche Alsaker has referred to as the “free range” nature of St. George’s in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Free range is exactly the right phrase here, and a number of factors contributed to the free range, sometimes free-for-all, nature of the times. In no particular order, here are five incidents or examples which I feel exemplify something of this culture. I wonder if readers who didn’t attend SGS will find these strange or more or less normal given the time period.

The Smoking Shack:

When I was first in the lower school around 1981-83, there was a smoking shack for high school seniors just behind the high school building. Seniors, and perhaps juniors, essentially earned the right to smoke on campus by virtue of age, and the smoking shack was deemed official, ordained even, by the school itself. The smoking shack was not just an area, it was a physical structure as indicated by the name, potentially purpose-built for students to smoke in.

Even as a small child, I found this interesting, because by the 1980’s smoking was not as common among adults, at least on a regular basis, as it seems to have been 20 or 30 years earlier, a fact I somehow intuited. The smoking shack was torn down shortly after this time, probably in the mid ’80s, and smoking on campus was no longer allowed (although students would still smoke cigarettes, and other items, in some of the more discrete and far-flung areas of the campus environs). By the time my classmates and myself became high school seniors, we too had a senior lounge, a smallish two-room shack also behind the high school that I believe was once the headmaster’s office. We didn’t smoke there; instead we played mammoth games of Risk and Diplomacy, watched Seinfeld, and played street hockey against Mason Anderson who would do his best Ron Hextall impression. It amazes me to this day that smoking seniors were not only tolerated, but actively encouraged, during my time at SGS.

The Janitor Hangs J.T. and I Up by Our Necks

Way before sugar cubes, pithing needles, or any other of this sort of action, J.T. and I set out to bedevil the middle school janitor. As I mentioned above, both of our fathers coached sports, and therefore we were at school until 6 or 7 PM most days throughout the year. This left ample time for us to get into trouble, which first involved stealing the bucket and mop of the janitor (a tallish bearded dude as I recall) and hiding it, thereby preventing him from doing his job. Naturally we thought this was hysterical. He disagreed, and would curse us, with semi-good humor, as he located and re-secured his equipment. This was when we were in second or third grade I would guess.

One day, after weeks of bucket hide and seek, the janitor had seen enough. He decided to take drastic action. The boys bathroom of the middle school had a set of coat hangers about six feet off the ground, and these must have been pretty sturdy because this dude hung both of us up by the backs of our sweatshirts and left us hanging there as he completed his cleaning rounds. This, as I recall, was pretty unpleasant, and also worrisome–how long did he intend to keep us there? To my recollection this only happened once, and we hung for 15 minutes or so before he let us down. I went home and complained to my parents–the janitor hung us up on the coat hangers! Well, my parents said, did you do something to him? We just hid his bucket like always, I replied. That seems like fair treatment then, said my parents, maybe next time don’t hide his bucket.

Even at the time I actually felt this was a reasonable response on the part of my parents. I mean, we knew we were looking for trouble, we knew we were inconveniencing the dude–getting a reaction was the whole point. So, mission accomplished, although I think we did back off the janitor after this incident. He had made his point, and established himself as a worthy adversary. Respect my dude, respect. It is a little hard to imagine the hanging of children just flying under the radar like this today, but at free range St. George’s in 1983 it was simply par for the course.

The Phone Room:

When my classmates and I were in fifth grade we had a homeroom teacher called C.F. At the time, I thought he was a great teacher. Looking back, I reckon he was probably just super lazy, but also just a little creative in his laziness, a pretty good combination for 11 year olds. Whole lessons would be given over to thought experiments like “imagine you are stranded on a cliff with a sheer drop on either side with one friend. How do you get off the cliff?” Every suggestion was met with dismissal by C.F.–nothing would work. We would go on and on to no conclusion, and then class would end. Or, he would just play the Beatles for the whole class. Stuff like that.

C.F. was pretty even-tempered most of the time, but from time to time he would get mad at a student. This was usually not me, although on a few occasions it was. When he would get mad, he would put the offending student in the “phone room.” The phone room was just what it sounds like–a very small room with a phone that dialed off-campus. This was in the mid ’80s, and cell phones were not yet a thing. The phone room had a single chair, the titular phone, and various phone books. I have no idea if the phone room was ever used by a teacher–certainly I never saw this. Instead, it seemed to exist solely for the purposes of punishment.

C.F. would stick students in the phone room for the length of a class sometimes, but other times he would leave them there all morning or longer. A really bad student might spend 4-5 hours chilling in the phone room. Now today, I believe, this is considered really bad practice. Just locking a student up for hours on end for supposed recalcitrance is not a recommended method for student discipline and rehabilitation. But again, this was the ’80s and things, as I hope I have made clear to my younger readers, were just different back then.

However, the funny thing about the phone room punishment was that off-campus calls from the phone room’s phone were free, and there were phone books. So naturally students with nothing to do and hours at their disposal would make prank call after prank call, calling pizza delivery, other businesses, and, in a precursor to E.P.’s dirty calls to mothers, parents of classmates. I don’t know if C.F. or the other teachers knew about these calls, but all the students did, and some may even have looked forward to a stint in the phone room to operate the phone and raise a little hell.

C.F. ended up having an affair with another teacher and checking all the way out of his job a few years later, before leaving the school and moving to Idaho. Before this, however, we graduated from the lower school to the middle school, and one day I bumped into him and said hello. He said something to the effect of “I won’t talk to you anymore because you and your classmates are bluebirds who have flown away.” What he meant was, I guess, he had done his job and we were someone else’s job/ problem/ business now. Fair enough, perhaps, but still a little odd. All in all, C.F. was a good teacher because he was different and took chances, although his methods would not even begin to stand the scrutiny of a modern school, at least I wouldn’t think. And I never did figure out how to get off that f*** cliff.

Pithing Needles in the Biology Room:

In high school we had two main science teachers. The first was J.T.’s dad E.T. who taught Physics. E.T. was also the assistant baseball and girl’s basketball coach for my father, who was the head coach. E.T. passed away recently, so rest in peace to a mediocre science teacher, an excellent first base coach, and an awesome right hand man.

The second was our Biology teacher, an older woman who had taught, perhaps right there at SGS, as far back as the 1960’s. She would tell us stories of how in the 60’s she would tell the class “any of you who are on acid, just take the class off and go outside,” so she’d seen it all I guess. Nonetheless, we managed, sans hallucinogens, to vex her on a regular basis, and when mad she would cross her arms, stare at the ceiling, and repeat the phrase “bad words, bad words, bad words,” a reasonably inventive way to avoid telling her students what they could do with themselves.

Now, she was probably a perfectly competent Biology teacher, but we were not, as 10th graders, a very receptive group. To be honest, Biology was boring. But one thing the biology room had that held potential were the pithing needles. Pithing needles, for those who don’t know, are thin, very sharp, needles about three inches in length which are attached to a wooden handle. They are, I believe, intended for use in dissections, however J.T., Kelly, and myself found other uses for them. We would sneak back into the Biology room after school and, holding the needles by the handle, fling them up at the ceiling, which was made from soft plaster board or some such material. With the right touch we could stick the needles in the ceiling, and although I only remember doing one dissection (the fabled frog dissection) in biology class, there were copious needles to throw. After a couple hundred attempts, we would manage to stick fifteen or twenty needles in the ceiling, which was quite high up, maybe 20 feet or so. The next day in Biology class the teacher would point out the needles, say her bad words, and threaten us with retribution if we were found to have been involved. What we were really waiting for was if a needle would get loose and fall down during Biology class, which would have been a bonus. (We were not bad kids; Biology was just super boring–what can I say?)

In any case, after weeks of needle flinging the pithing needle supply was pretty much exhausted and the teacher, possibly with some other adult backup, singled the three of us out (she would have known the responsible parties all along of course).

“Alright boys, you are going to climb up and get those down.”

“How are we expected to do that? They are way up there.” No protestations of innocence, just practical objections to the task at hand.

“I don’t care,” she said, “you put them there, you get them down.” One way or another, perhaps with a borrowed ladder, perhaps with a long broom or something, we managed to clear the ceiling of the deadly needles. All in all, sure we stole sugar cubes and ammonia packets, broke and entered into the headmaster’s house, and filled the biology lab’s ceiling with deadly projectiles, but at least we were sober. So, we had that going for us.

We Graduate with Blank Diplomas and Miss Prom:

Like many schools, SGS sent us seniors on a senior trip just weeks before graduation. Senior trips, through normal enough, are invariably a bad idea because students will, nearly without exception, attempt to drink on the trip. And so did we, however our experience was a little different as our drinking was directly facilitated by one of the three adult chaperones on the trip. And yes, we got punished, losing prom and graduating with blank diplomas, which might have been fair in some circumstances but hardly in these specific ones.

I won’t enumerate the exact circumstances of the alcoholic consumption on the trip because I don’t wish to engage in any under the bus throwing, even at this remove, however suffice it to say liquor was provided through a large legal purchase by said chaperone. Another chaperone discovered the drinking after some of my classmates were, let’s say, less effectively clandestine than myself and my own little group (we were trained in spy craft from way back), and the matter was reported to the then headmaster who was called George Swope. George Swope was no George Edwards, despite the shared first name, and was in fact pretty ineffectual in all areas. He called us all into a room with another administrator as backup and lectured us about drinking.

“What I think is fair is we take prom away for all of those who have admitted to drinking, and also you will graduate with blank diplomas. You will have to work off your debt to the school after graduating as well.”

Now really, this was some bullshit. The prom ban was fair enough, but the idea of working off some supposed “debt” after graduation was ridiculous, and I, with my big mouth, said as much in the Swopester’s little meeting.

“We accept (I began with the royal we, because why not) the prom situation, but you can’t take our diplomas away from us. And anyway, the booze was supplied by a teacher, as you well know.”

It didn’t matter. Some of us graduated with blanks, and I looked through the rolled up paper dramatically on receiving it, just to be a dick. Our valedictorian, Matt Carpenter, who always claimed never to study, which I think was also B.S. (although he was super smart so who knows), was under strict orders not to mention the incident in his graduation speech. As I recall, he did a perfect job of alluding to it without saying anything provably related. I was proud of him.

Why would a teacher supply booze to students? Well, because he wanted to be liked. It’s not that complex. Again, if this happened today I imagine the parents of the students in question would raise holy hell, and the teacher would be terminated. None of this happened; his involvement was swept under the rug, and life moved on. J.T. and I did expunge the “debt”, which, karmically, I guess was pretty fair given our earlier transgressions, by clearing a bunch of logs from the river while I played Dylan on a boombox with an extension cord (not the same boombox or extension cord my brother Mike played Richard Marx on). Some of the richer students (I’m just going to call it like it was, and almost everyone there was richer than J.T. and I) dodged log clearing duty to no consequence. That’s the class system–fuck that, by the way.

=====

OK. That’s all I have. There are many, many more examples of free range culture at St. George’s, however my memory and creative vein are tapped out for the time being. If you attended SGS back in these days I hope these reminiscences bring back memories, on the whole happy ones. If you are reading and didn’t attend SGS, does all this sound pretty out of control, or pretty much normal? Leave a comment either way–I’d love to hear from you.

to be continued…

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Scenes from St. George’s Part III: Mr. Dreyer, French Teacher Extraordinaire (with a cameo from Richard Marx)

When I was in middle school I took French from one Monsieur Dreyer. I had already been studying (the verb is used loosely) French for a couple of years, and had some of the basics. In Mr. Dreyer’s class I learned a little more, and could actually kind of hack it in French there for a bit. But any actual language learning that took place in Mr. Dreyer’s class was seriously secondary to the excellent action that took place around his class.

I wasn’t first introduced to Mr. Dreyer in middle school, however. In fact, I first met him when I was in elementary school around the time he began teaching at the school where my father taught, and I attended, in the early 1980s. I remember going to the apartment he shared with his wife, who is Japanese, when they had an exchange student called Atsushi from Japan staying with them. Atsushi was my age, and he showed us how to make onigiri (rice balls). Making rice balls is not all that tough, just rice, water, and salt. Still, I thought onigiri were pretty exotic and Atsushi pretty cool. Some time later Mr. Dreyer and his wife must have come up a bit short of ready cash, because they lived in a tent in my family’s front yard for a while. This seems a little strange looking back, but it wasn’t then. I have no idea what the bathroom or shower situation looked like, but something must have happened.

(My brother Mike also lived out in a tent in the front yard during the summer for a number of years. Maybe it was the same tent. Mike would run an extension cord out to the tent and play his boombox. This was a few years after the Dreyer clan was tenting it, and Mike was deep into the singer Richard Marx. I thought Richard Marx was alright, but he didn’t seem to have a lot of songs. This mattered not at all to Mike who played the same Richard Marx tunes over and over again.

Today Richard Marx is, strangely enough, bigger than ever. But not as a musician. He runs a popular Twitter account where he is a big liberal and also pretty funny. Marx is like Rex Chapman but less problematic. Rex Chapman is super-problematic. I’m not sure exactly how, I just know he is.)

Mr. Dreyer also played a little chess with my father, although my impression is that both of them were pretty bad. Certainly they were not pulling out a lot of “hard-to-find” moves. At that time, I knew Mr. Dreyer was a French teacher, but didn’t know if he was in fact French. Today I believe it to be the case that he is not French, is in fact from California, and just somehow became proficient in the language. Good for him.

Even before I took his class, I was aware that Mr. Dreyer was, let’s say, a different sort of fellow. He liked to tell a story about his brother who lived on a massive contour map of the San Francisco Bay area. The map was located in an enclosed structure that hung under a bridge in Oakland or something. And his brother just chilled there full time, so the story went. So Mr. Dreyer, apparently, was the normal one in his family.

(I remember Mr. Dreyer talking to me about John Lennon one day as well. This was maybe when I was taking his class, but I think it might have been before that. “John Lennon’s assassination was really sad,” he said, “he was just starting to put his life back together.” I had heard of John Lennon but at that time knew nothing of the circumstances of his death. And I certainly didn’t know about his ups and downs in the 1970s. Mr. Dreyer must have been a Lennon fan though, and wanted to tell me about it.)

In any case, when I got to middle school I was assigned Mr. Dreyer, as mentioned. Mr. Dreyer wore a mustache that looked pretty Frenchy to me—maybe that’s why I kind of thought he was a French native. There were also a number of the Tintin books in French on a shelf in the back of the room. I had read most of the Tintin books in English by then, so it was fun to browse the French versions and take in some of the action from a new lens.

In Mr. Dreyer’s class everyone got a “French name,” and I was called “Philippe.” I don’t really care for all these fake names in language class, although I recognize that some people do adopt them as a kind of alter ego. I mean, if a Japanese gal called “Sari” wants to go by “Sally” in English class that’s great. Makes sense. But my actual name sounds nothing like Philippe, so it just seemed kind of random. In any case, little Phillippe was not a bad French student, but he was a restless one. Mr. Dreyer’s classroom opened from the back door onto a kind of grassy area, and for reasons passing understating Philippe would leave class in the middle of the lesson and then try to crawl back in through the back door and up through the room, hoping to escape Mr. Dreyer’s attention. Mr. Dreyer did notice, of course, but he was pretty cool about it.

“What you doing there Philippe? Sneaking back into the room again? Welcome to French class si vous plait.” Something like that. I wasn’t trying to aggravate Mr. Dreyer or anything because I really liked him as a teacher, I was just doing what 12 year old boys do. However, Mr. Dreyer did not view every student as leniently as myself. One of my classmates was a guy we’ll call “E.P.” E.P. was a trouble-maker, and was known to pull the fire alarm in the middle school there on a regular basis. His parents were called, repeatedly, but he didn’t care. He loved pulling that fire alarm. E.P. would also prank call mothers of other students for whom he somehow had phone numbers from the school phone and talk dirty to them in a fake voice. So, yeah.

One week, E.P. and some other students had started throwing wadded up pieces of paper toward a metal garbage can located at the front right corner of Mr. Dreyer’s classroom. Mr. Dreyer let this roll for a few days, however one day before lunch he decided to crack down. “Mr. E.P.,” he said, “I’ll make you a deal.” “You can have one more throw of a paper at that trash can. If you make it, you can go to lunch. If you miss, you have lunch detention.”

Now this struck me as a pretty fair deal, because E.P. didn’t have to accept the challenge. He could have just passed and gone about his day. That, of course, is not what happened. Instead, E.P. wadded up yet another piece of paper and lobbed it at the trash can. He missed. This was the last straw for Mr. Dreyer who, instead of keeping him in detention as promised, took matters a step further. He grabbed the trash can (which was about three and a half feet high) and carried it over to where E.P. was sitting.

“You like garbage!” he shouted. “I’ll show you garbage.” And sure enough Mr. Dreyer, onigiri expert, former tent dweller, and French teacher extraordinaire, emptied the whole thing right on top of E.P.’s dome. Now you might think this was some bad action, and from today’s perspective sure, it probably was. But for us middle schoolers it was hysterical.

“Did you hear what Mr. Dreyer did?” we whispered for the rest of the week. “He dumped a full garbage can on E.P.’s head.” This was the biggest thing to happen all month, and we milked it, obviously. Again, if this happened today, Mr. Dreyer might have faced some kind of sanction, but the 1980’s were not like that. E.P. had been dumped on, and life moved on.

Mr. Dreyer eventually left that school and moved to Kyoto where he taught for a while at Kyoto International School before ultimately moving back to California where his brother lived on a map. Years later I reconnected with Mr. Dreyer on Facebook, where he regularly posts groaningly bad, yet still somehow funny, visual puns. “Cyrano wins by a nose” with a drawing of Cyrano crossing the finish line in a foot race, that sort of thing. Anyway, I wanted to get his perspective on the whole the garbage can situation so I sent him a message. What did he recall of the incident?

He didn’t remember it at first, but then he said “oh yes, that was with a student called “J.”

“No,” I replied, “it was with E.P.”

“No, no, no,” he replied, it was “J. JFK.”

Now I knew that Mr. Dreyer is prone to making some strange jokes, and at first I thought he was making some kind of oblique assassination reference. Was he suggesting that there must have been a second shooter?

“This was not JFK related,” I said. “It was some E.P. action. I‘m sure of it.”

Mr. Dreyer was not sold though, and it occurred to me that there may have been more than one dumping. This may, in fact, have been Dreyer’s go-to-move. After all, his treatment of E.P. was, in truth, pretty unfair—the deal was advertised as sink the shot or detention. Dumping was never mentioned. Was Dreyer moving about the globe and dumping full garbage cans on students left and right? It was a possibility. Maybe I was smart to stay low to the ground after all.

These days, Mr. Dreyer is living in California where he enjoys the warm climate. And he reads this blog. Hey there Mr. Dreyer baby, you’re a cool guy but that garbage can move could maybe use a little reflection. E.P. was a troublemaker, sure, but dumping just wasn’t part of the deal.

to be continued…