Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2008
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Raina Hassan
COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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A Prison That Grew to Fit His Face

A note on incivility

By Brian Doyle

I knew a guy once who never spoke with the slightest courtesy or civility, but he was the nicest guy imaginable. Isn't that odd? I mean, whatever you said, be it "Hello," or "How are you?" or "How about those Red Sox?" or "Is that your real nose?" or "Were you really once arrested for stealing a camel from a circus?--which he was--the answers would always be forms of "Piss off," "Leave me alone," "Don't ask stupid questions," "Who invited you?" "Go away," "Are you always such an idiot?" "Why did your people ever leave the sad wet rock on which they were born?" and things like that.

You think I am exaggerating, but I swear that I am not; many other people were startled by the paradoxicity of this man, as he was a pillar of his community, a stalwart and veteran and esteemed employee of the brave nonprofit for which he had worked for thirty years, sober as a judge, married, graced with children, a taxpayer, even once a candidate for selectman in his town, although he garnered only ninety votes, losing to a woman who taught math. Interestingly, she died two weeks after taking office--this was in Vermont--so the town held a special election to fill her seat, and he lost that election also, this time to a man who taught spelling.

Anyway, I spent five years working with this man at a nonprofit that was devoted to elevating and educating children, and they were remarkable years, with many misadventures. One time we were in a meeting when a very important person proposed a very stupid idea in the most arrogant you'll-do-this tone imaginable, and I was sitting behind my incivil friend, with two other people, and we looked at each other with fear and trembling, for we knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he would indeed pop a gasket, blow his top, melt the polar cap, and heap mountainous abuse on his interlocutor, and then we would all be summarily fired and forced back to the toy factories from which we had come, weary of putting the ears on Mr. Potato Head and suchlike all day long, and indeed he did explode, but he did so in memorably calm and incisive fashion, beginning seemingly obliquely by telling the story about how he had indeed stolen a camel, this was in Vermont, and swerving eventually into how what the camel left behind in steaming redolent mounds could, and in fact should, be compared to some ideas from some people, not to name names or anything. I still savor the shimmering silence in that room when he finished speaking; a great silence is a most remarkable sound.

There were many more moments like that, one of the most memorable being the time the mayor of the town this was in Vermont, petulantly refused to release a grant to the educational nonprofit where we worked, even though the grant was from the federal government and was not drawn from the pitiful coffers of the town or the vast campaign slush fund of the mayor, and my incivil friend rose during the annual town meeting and said, in an incisive tone that could be heard in another hemisphere, that the mayor was a horse's ass, a poltroon, a thief, a clown, a mule, a sneer, and a coward, which was so memorable and colorful a parade of insults that another friend of mine wrote it down and happily published it in the town newspaper the next day.

Most of the moments when my incivil friend burst out into thunderstorms of invective were likewise entertaining, at least to people other than the targets, but some of them were not so funny, such as the time a doctor told him that his beloved daughter had a tumor the size of a sparrow in her belly, and my friend excoriated the doctor with such foul and vituperative language that his wife, weeping with shame and fear, hauled him away by the arm though later I found him sprawled and sobbing on the floor of a chapel, and I began to realize then that his fury and testiness were masks of some sort, disguises and personas, skins without which perhaps he could not live, for reasons beyond my ken, and perhaps his; who among us can safely say that they know anything of who they are or how they came to be? And as another friend observed, intelligently, maybe our uncivil friend's snarling mask was a prison that had grown to fit his face; perhaps he had deliberately tried incivility when young, perhaps from rage at or exhaustion from the mincing empty dance of manners, perhaps as a way to be different, and had been caught by it, caught in it, and perhaps he even hammered at the bars and wished to be released, for all we knew. But we did not know.

There are lots more stories, like the memorable torrent of oaths with which he flayed a priest who had lied and lied and lied and lied and lied and lied about raping children, or the startling string of oaths he would emit when he smelled the least bit of pomposity or fatuousness or unpreparedness, or the parade of oaths he used whenever he got fed up with the general cultural absorption in sport, or the marching bands of oaths he reserved for brilliant murderous liars like Stalin, or the imaginative oaths he issued when he caught the slightest scent of condescension or class consciousness, but I'd be weeks telling all those stories, and I should cut to the chase for once, and tell you that eventually he died, and while this grieved me then and saddens me still, because he really was, beneath his brusque and thorny mask, a witty and gentle soul, I savor a story of his passing, told to me by his second son.

A priest had come, at the end, to anoint the dying man and shrive his sins, those being our Catholic habits at the end of the game, and my incivil friend was either consistent to the end of his days, or he ran one last goof on his old friend the priest, for, as the son tells it, the priest slipped in those last hours and made one incautious remark about death not being an end but a beginning, and my incivil friend whispered, with one of the very last breaths of his life, Piss off, Paul, which, as the son told me, made his children and his wife and the priest roar with laughter, and then weep bitter tears.

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. He is the author of nine books of essays and poems, most recently Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices One Day Hill, Melbourne.

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