XZHANG--Summary and Response paper----at least 750 words

1

MIKE ROSE

“I JUST WANNA BE AVERAGE”

Mike Rose is anything but average: he has published poetry, scholarly research, a textbook, and two widely praised

books on education in America. A professor in the School of Education at UCLA, Rose has won awards from the

National Academy of Education, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the John Simon Guggenheim

Memorial Foundation. Below you’ll read the story of how this highly successful teacher and writer started high

school in the “vocational education” track, learning dead-end skills from teachers who were often underprepared

or incompetent. Rose shows that students whom the system has written off can have tremendous unrealized po-

tential, and his critique of the school system specifies several reasons for the ‘failure” of students who go through

high school belligerent, fearful, stoned, frustrated, or just plain bored. This selection comes from Lives on the

Boundary (1989), Rose’s exploration of America’s educationally underprivileged. His most recent book, Possi-

ble Lives (1996), offers a nationwide tour of creative classrooms and innovative educational programs. Rose is

currently researching a new book on the thinking patterns of blue-collar workers.

It took two buses to get to Our Lady of Mercy. The first started deep in South Los Angeles and

caught me at midpoint. The second drifted through neighborhoods with trees, parks, big lawns, and lots

of flowers. The rides were long but were livened up by a group of South L.A. veterans whose parents

also thought that Hope had set up shop in the west end of the county. There was Christy Biggars, who,

at sixteen, was dealing and was, according to rumor, a pimp as well. There were Bill Cobb and Johnny

Gonzales, grease-pencil artists extraordinaire, who left Nembutal-enhanced swirls of “Cobb” and “John-

ny” on the corrugated walls of the bus. And then there was Tyrrell Wilson. Tyrrell was the coolest kid I

knew. He ran the dozens1 like a metric halfback, laid down a rap that outrhymed and outpointed Cobb,

whose rap was good but not great-the curse of a moderately soulful kid trapped in white skin. But it was

Cobb who would sneak a radio onto the bus, and thus underwrote his patter with Little Richard, Fats

Domino, Chuck Berry, the Coasters, and Ernie K. Doe’s mother-in-law, an awful woman who was “sent

1 A verbal game of African origin in which competitors try to top each other’s insults.

2 Mike Rose: “I Just Wanna Be Average”

from down below.” And so it was that Christy and Cobb and Johnny G. and Tyrrell and I and assorted

others picked up along the way passed our days in the back of the bus, a funny mix brought together

by geography and parental desire.

Entrance to school brings with it forms and releases and assessments. Mercy relied on a series of

tests…for placement, and somehow the results of my tests got confused with those of another student

named Rose. The other Rose apparently didn’t do very well, for I was placed in the vocational track,

a euphemism for the bottom level. Neither I nor my parents realized what this meant. We had no

sense that Business Math, Typing, and English-Level D were dead ends. The current spate of reports

on the schools criticizes parents for not involving themselves in the education of their children. But

how would someone like Tommy Rose, with his two years of Italian schooling, know what to ask? And

what sort of pressure could an exhausted waitress apply? The error went undetected, and I remained in

the vocational track for two years. What a place.

My homeroom was supervised by Brother Dill, a troubled and unstable man who also taught

freshman English. When his class drifted away from him, which was often, his voice would rise in par-

anoid accusations, and occasionally he would lose control and shake or smack us. I hadn’t been there

two months when one of his brisk, face-turning slaps had my glasses sliding down the aisle. Physical

education was also pretty harsh. Our teacher was a stubby ex-lineman who had played old-time pro

ball in the Midwest. He routinely had us grabbing our ankles to receive his stinging paddle across our

butts. He did that, he said, to make men of us. “Rose,” he bellowed on our first encounter; me standing

geeky in line in my baggy shorts. “’Rose’ ? What the hell kind of name is that?”

“Italian, sir,” I squeaked.

“Italian! Ho. Rose, do you know the sound a bag of shit makes when it

hits the wall?”

“No, sir.”

“Wop!”

Sophomore English was taught by Mr. Mitropetros. He was a large, bejeweled man who man-

aged the parking lot at the Shrine Auditorium. He would crow and preen and list for us the stars he’d

brushed against. We’d ask questions and glance knowingly and snicker, and all that fueled the poor

guy to brag some more. Parking cars was his night job. He had little training in English, so his lesson

plan for his day work had us reading the district’s required text, Julius Caesar, aloud for the semester.

We’d finished the play way before the twenty weeks was up, so he’d have us switch parts again and

again and start again: Dave Snyder, the fastest guy at Mercy, muscling through Caesar to the breath-

less squeals of Calpurnia, as interpreted by Steve Fusco, a surfer who owned the school’s most envied

paneled wagon. Week ten and Dave and Steve would take on new roles, as would we all, and render

3Mike Rose: “I Just Wanna Be Average”

a water-logged Cassius and a Brutus that are beyond my powers of description.

Spanish I - taken in the second year - fell into the hands of a new recruit. Mr. Montez was a

tiny man, slight, five foot six at the most, soft-spoken and delicate. Spanish was a particularly rowdy

class, and Mr. Montez was as prepared for it as a doily maker at a hammer throw. He would tap his

pencil to a room in which Steve Fusco was propelling spitballs from his heavy lips, in which Mike

Dweetz was taunting Billy Hawk, a half-Indian, half-Spanish, reed-thin, quietly explosive boy. The

vocational track at Our Lady of Mercy mixed kids traveling in from South L.A. with South Bay surfers

and a few Slavs and Chicanos from the harbors of San Pedro. This was a dangerous miscellany: surfers

and hodads and South-Central blacks all ablaze to the metronomic tapping of Hector Montez’s pencil.

One day Billy lost it. Out of the comer of my eye I saw him strike out with his right arm and

catch Dweetz across the neck. Quick as a spasm, Dweetz was out of his seat, scattering desks, cracking

Billy on the side of the head, right behind the eye. Snyder and Fusco and others broke it up, but the

room felt hot and close and naked. Mr. Montez’s tenuous authority was finally ripped to shreds, and I

think everyone felt a little strange about that. The charade was over, and when it came down to it, I

don’t think any of the kids really wanted it to end this way. They had pushed and pushed and bullied

their way into a freedom that both scared and embarrassed them.

Students will float to the mark you set. I and the others in the vocational classes were bobbing

in pretty shallow water. Vocational education has aimed at increasing the economic opportunities of

students who do not do well in our schools. Some serious programs succeed in doing that, and through

exceptional teachers…students learn to develop hypotheses and troubleshoot, reason through a prob-

lem, and communicate effectively - the true job skills. The vocational track, however, is most often

a place for those who are just not making it, a dumping ground for the disaffected. There were a few

teachers who worked hard at education; young Brother Slattery, for example, combined a stern voice

with weekly quizzes to try to pass along to us a skeletal outline of world history. But mostly the teachers

had no idea of how to engage the imaginations of us kids who were scuttling along at the bottom of

the pond.

And the teachers would have needed some inventiveness, for none of us was groomed for the

classroom. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know things - didn’t know how to simplify algebraic fractions,

couldn’t identify different kinds of clauses, bungled Spanish translations - but that I had developed

various faulty and inadequate ways of doing algebra and making sense of Spanish. Worse yet, the years

of defensive tuning out in elementary school had given me a way to escape quickly while seeming

at least half alert. During my time in Voc. Ed., I developed further into a mediocre student and a

somnambulant problem solver, and that affected the subjects I did have the wherewithal to handle:

I detested Shakespeare; I got bored with history. My attention flitted here and there. I fooled around

4 Mike Rose: “I Just Wanna Be Average”

in class and read my books indifferently - the intellectual equivalent of playing with your food. I did

what I had to do to get by, and I did it with half a mind.

But I did learn things about people and eventually came into my own socially. I liked the guys

in Voc. Ed. Growing up where I did, I understood and admired physical prowess, and there was an

abundance of muscle here. There was Dave Snyder, a sprinter and halfback of true quality. Dave’s

ability and his quick wit gave him a natural appeal, and he was welcome in any clique, though he

always kept a little independent. He enjoyed acting the fool and could care less about studies, but

he possessed a certain maturity and never caused the faculty much trouble. It was a testament to his

inde-pendence that he included me among his friends - I eventually went out for track, but I was no

jock. Owing to the Latin alphabet and a dearth of Rs and Ss, Snyder sat behind Rose, and we started

exchanging one-liners and became friends.

There was Ted Richard, a much-touted Little League pitcher. He was chunky and had a baby

face and came to Our Lady of Mercy as a seasoned street fighter. Ted was quick to laugh and he had a

loud, jolly laugh, but when he got angry he’d smile a little smile, the kind that simply raises the comer

of the mouth a quarter of an inch. For those who knew, it was an eerie signal. Those who didn’t found

themselves in big trouble, for Ted was very quick. He loved to carry on what we would come to call

philosophical discussions: What is courage? Does God exist? He also loved words, enjoyed picking up

big ones like salubrious and equivocal and using them in our conversations -laughing at himself as the

word hit a chuckhole rolling off his tongue. Ted didn’t do all that well in school- baseball and parties

and testing the courage he’d speculated about took up his time. His textbooks were Argosy and Field

and Stream, whatever newspapers he’d find on the bus stop - from the Daily Worker to pornography -

conversations with uncles or hobos or businessmen he’d meet in a coffee shop, The Old Man and the

Sea. With hindsight, I can see that Ted was developing into one of those rough-hewn intellectuals

whose sources are a mix of the learned and the apocryphal, whose discussions are both assured and sad.

And then there was Ken Harvey. Ken was good-looking in a puffy way and had a full and oily

ducktail and was a car enthusiast. . . a hodad. One day in religion class, he said the sentence that

turned out to be one of the most memorable of the hundreds of thousands I heard in those Voc. Ed.

years. We were talking about the parable of the talents, about achievement, working hard, doing the

best you can do, blah-blah-blah, when the teacher called on the restive Ken Harvey for an opinion.

Ken thought about it, but just for a second, and said (with studied, minimal affect), “I just wanna be

average.” That woke me up. Average? Who wants to be average? Then the athletes chimed in with the

cliches that make you want to laryngectomize them, and the exchange became a platitudinous melee.

At the time, I thought Ken’s assertion was stupid, and I wrote him off. But his sentence has stayed with

me all these years, and I think I am finally coming to understand it.

5Mike Rose: “I Just Wanna Be Average”

Ken Harvey was gasping for air. School can be a tremendously disorienting place. No matter

how bad the school, you’re going to encounter notions that don’t fit with the assumptions and beliefs

that you grew up with - maybe you’ll hear these dissonant notions from teachers, maybe from the other

students, and maybe you’ll read them. You’ll also be thrown in with all kinds of kids from all kinds of

backgrounds, and that can be unsettling - this is especially true in places of rich ethnic and linguistic

mix, like the L.A. basin. You’ll see a handful of students far excel you in courses that sound exotic and

that are only in the curriculum of the elite: French, physics, trigonometry. And all this is happening

while you’re trying to shape an identity, your body is changing, and your emotions are running wild.

If you’re a working-class kid in the vocational track, the options you’ll have to deal with this will be

constrained in certain ways: you’re defined by your school as “slow”; you’re placed in a curriculum that

isn’t designed to liberate you but to occupy you, or, if you’re lucky, train you, though the training is for

work the society does not esteem; other students are picking up the cues from your school and your

curriculum and interacting with you in particular ways. If you’re a kid like Ted Richard, you turn your

back on all this and let your mind roam where it may. But youngsters like Ted are rare. What Ken and

so many others do is protect themselves from such suffocating madness by taking on with a vengeance

the identity implied in the vocational track. Reject the confusion and frustration by openly defining

yourself as the Common Joe. Champion the average. Rely on your own good sense. Fuck this bullshit.

Bullshit, of course, is everything you - and the others - fear is beyond you: books, essays, tests, academ-

ic scrambling, complexity, scien-tific reasoning, philosophical inquiry.

The tragedy is that you have to twist the knife in your own gray matter to make this defense

work. You’ll have to shut down, have to reject intellectual stimuli or diffuse them with sarcasm, have

to cultivate stupidity, have to convert boredom from a malady into a way of confronting the world.

Keep your vocabulary simple, act stoned when you’re not or act more stoned than you are, flaunt igno-

rance, materialize your dreams. It is a powerful and effective defense - it neutralizes the insult and the

frustration of being a vocational kid and, when perfected, it drives teachers up the wall, a delightful

secondary effect. But like all strong magic, it exacts a price.

My own deliverance from the Voc. Ed. world began with sophomore biology. Every student,

college prep to vocational, had to take biology, and unlike the other courses, the same person taught

all sections. When teaching the vocational group, Brother Clint probably slowed down a bit or omit-

ted a little of the fundamental biochemistry, but he used the same book and more or less the same

syllabus across the board. If one class got tough, he could get tougher. He was young and powerful and

very handsome, and looks and physical strength were high currency. No one gave him any trouble.

I was pretty bad at the dissecting table, but the lectures and the textbook were interesting:

plastic overlays that, with each turned page, peeled away skin, then veins and muscle, then organs,

6 Mike Rose: “I Just Wanna Be Average”

down to the very bones that Brother Clint, pointer in hand, would tap out on our hanging skeleton.

Dave Snyder was in big trouble, for the study of life - versus the living of it-was sticking in his craw.

We worked out a code for our multiple-choice exams. He’d poke me in the back: once for the answer

under A, twice for B, and so on; and when he’d hit the right one, I’d look up to the ceiling as though I

were lost in thought. Poke: cytoplasm. Poke, poke: methane. Poke, poke, poke: William Harvey. Poke,

poke, poke, poke: islets of Langerhans. This didn’t work out perfectly, but Dave passed the course, and

I mastered the dreamy look of a guy on a record jacket. And something else happened. Brother Clint

puzzled over this Voc. Ed. kid who was racking up 98s and 99s on his tests. He checked the school’s

records and discovered the error. He recommended that I begin my junior year in the College Prep

program. According to all I’ve read since, such a shift, as one report put it, is virtually impossible. Kids

at that level rarely cross tracks. The telling thing is how chancy both my placement into and exit from

Voc. Ed. was; neither I nor my parents had anything to do with it. I lived in one world during spring

semester, and when I came back to school in the fall, I was living in another.

Switching to College Prep was a mixed blessing. I was an erratic student. I was undisciplined.

And I hadn’t caught onto the rules of the game: why work hard in a class that didn’t grab my fancy?

I was also hopelessly behind in math. Chemistry was hard; toying with my chemistry set years before

hadn’t prepared me for the chemist’s equations. Fortunately, the priest who taught both chemistry and

second-year algebra was also the school’s athletic director. Membership on the track team covered me;

I knew I wouldn’t get lower than a C. U.S. history was taught pretty well, and I did okay. But civics

was taken over by a football coach who had trouble reading the textbook aloud - and reading aloud

was the centerpiece of his pedagogy. College Prep at Mercy was certainly an improvement over the

vocational program - at least it carried some status - but the social science curriculum was weak, and

the mathematics and physical sciences were simply beyond me. I had a miserable quantitative back-

ground and ended up copying some assignments and finessing the rest as best I could. Let me try to

explain how it feels to see again and again material you should once have learned but didn’t.

You are given a problem. It requires you to simplify algebraic fractions or to multiply expres-

sions containing square roots. You know this is pretty basic material because you’ve seen it for years.

Once a teacher took some time with you, and you learned how to carry out these operations. Simple

versions, anyway. But that was a year or two or more in the past, and these are more complex versions,

and now you’re not sure. And this, you keep telling yourself, is ninth- or even eighth-grade stuff.

Next it’s a word problem. This is also old hat. The basic elements are as familiar as story char-

acters: trains speeding so many miles per hour or shadows of buildings angling so many degrees. Maybe

you know enough, have sat through enough explanations, to be able to begin setting up the problem:

“If one train is going this fast. . .” or “This shadow is really one line of a triangle...” Then: “Let’s see...”

7Mike Rose: “I Just Wanna Be Average”

“How did Jones do this?” “Hmmmm.” “No.” “No, that won’t work.” Your attention wavers. You won-

der about other things: a football game, a dance, that cute new checker at the market. You try to focus

on the problem again. You scribble on paper for a while, but the tension wins out and your attention

flits elsewhere. You crumple the paper and begin daydreaming to ease the frustration.

The particulars will vary, but in essence this is what a number of students go through, especially

those in so-called remedial classes. They open their textbooks and see once again the familiar and

impenetrable formulas and diagrams and terms that have stumped them for years. There is no excite-

ment here. No excitement. Regardless of what the teacher says, this is not a new challenge. There is,

rather, embarrassment and frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again

of long-standing inadequacies. No wonder so many students finally attribute their difficulties to some-

thing inborn, organic: ‘That part of my brain just doesn’t work.” Given the troubling histories many

of these students have, it’s miraculous that any of them can lift the shroud of hopelessness sufficiently

to make de-liverance from these classes possible.

Through this entire period, my father’s health was deteriorating with cruel momentum. His

arteriosclerosis progressed to the point where a simple nick on his shin wouldn’t heal. Eventually it

ulcerated and widened. Lou Minton would come by daily to change the dressing. We tried renting an

oscillating bed - which we placed in the front room - to force blood through the constricted arteries

in my father’s legs. The bed hummed through the night, moving in place to ward off the inevitable.

The ulcer continued to spread, and the doctors finally had to amputate. My grandfather had lost his

leg in a stockyard accident. Now my father too was crippled. His convalescence was slow but steady,

and the doctors placed him in the Santa Monica Rehabilitation Center, a sun-bleached building that

opened out onto the warm spray of the Pacific. The place gave him some strength and some color and

some training in walking with an artificial leg. He did pretty well for a year or so until he slipped and

broke his hip. He was confined to a wheelchair after that, and the confinement contributed to the

diminishing of his body and spirit.

I am holding a picture of him. He is sitting in his wheelchair and smiling at the camera. The

smile appears forced, unsteady, seems to quaver, though it is frozen in silver nitrate. He is in his

mid-sixties and looks eighty. Late in my junior year, he had a stroke and never came out of the result-

ing coma. After that, I would see him only in dreams, and to this day that is how I join him. Some-

times the dreams are sad and grisly and primal: my father lying in a bed soaked with his suppuration,

holding me, rocking me. But sometimes the dreams bring him back to me healthy: him talking to me

on an empty street, or buying some pictures to decorate our old house, or transformed somehow into

someone strong and adept with tools and the physical.

Jack MacFarland couldn’t have come into my life at a better time. My father was dead, and I

8 Mike Rose: “I Just Wanna Be Average”

had logged up too many years of scholastic indifference. Mr. MacFarland had a master’s degree from

Columbia and decided, at twenty-six, to find a little school and teach his heart out. He never took

any credentialing courses, couldn’t bear to, he said, so he had to find employment in a private system.

He ended up at Our Lady of Mercy teaching five sections of senior English. He was a beatnik who was

born too late. His teeth were stained, he tucked his sorry tie in between the third and fourth buttons

of his shirt, and his pants were chronically wrinkled. At first, we couldn’t believe this guy, thought he

slept in his car. But within no time, he had us so startled with work that we didn’t much worry about

where he slept or if he slept at all. We wrote three or four essays a month. We read a book every two to

three weeks, starting with the Iliad and ending up with Hemingway. He gave us a quiz on the reading

every other day. He brought a prep school curriculum to Mercy High.

MacFarland’s lectures were crafted, and as he delivered them he would pace the room jiggling

a piece of chalk in his cupped hand, using it to scribble on the board the names of all the writers and

philosophers and plays and novels he was weaving into his discussion. He asked questions often, raised

everything from Zeno’s paradox to the repeated last line of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy

Evening.” He slowly and carefully built up our knowledge of Western intellectual history-with facts,

with connections, with speculations. We learned about Greek philosophy, about Dante, the Elizabe-

than world view, the Age of Reason, existentialism. He analyzed poems with us, had us reading sec-

tions from John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean?, making a potentially difficult book accessible with

his own explanations. We gave oral reports on poems Ciardi didn’t cover. We imitated the styles of

Conrad, Hemingway, and Time magazine. We wrote and talked, wrote and talked. The man immersed

us in language.

Even MacFarland’s barbs were literary. If Jim Fitzsimmons, hung over and irritable, tried to

smart-ass him, he’d rejoin with a flourish that would spark the indomitable Skip Madison - who’d

lost his front teeth in a hapless tackle - to flick his tongue through the gap and opine, “good chop,”

drawing out the single “0” in stinging indictment. Jack MacFarland, this tobacco-stained intellectual,

brandished linguistic weapons of a kind I hadn’t encountered before. Here was this egghead, for God’s

sake, keeping some pretty difficult people in line. And from what I heard, Mike Dweetz and Steve

Fusco and all the notorious Voc. Ed. crowd settled down as well when MacFarland took the podium.

Though a lot of guys groused in the schoolyard, it just seemed that giving trouble to this particular

teacher was a silly thing to do. Tomfoolery, not to mention assault, had no place in the world he was

trying to create for us, and instinctively everyone knew that. If nothing else, we all recognized Mac-

Farland’s considerable intelligence and respected the hours he put into his work. It came to this: the

troublemaker would look foolish rather than daring. Even Jim Fitzsimmons was reading On the Road

and turning his incipient alcoholism to literary ends.

9Mike Rose: “I Just Wanna Be Average”

There were some lives that were already beyond Jack MacFarland’s ministrations, but mine

was not. I started reading again as I hadn’t since elementary school. I would go into our gloomy little

bedroom or sit at the dinner table while, on the television, Danny McShane was paralyzing Mr. Mota

with the atomic drop, and work slowly back through Heart of Darkness, trying to catch the words in

Conrad’s sentences. I certainly was not MacFarland’s best student; most of the other guys in College

Prep, even my fellow slackers, had better backgrounds than I did. But I worked very hard, for MacFar-

land had hooked me. He tapped myoId interest in reading and creating stories. He gave me a way to

feel special by using my mind. And he provided a role model that wasn’t shaped on physical prowess

alone, and something inside me that I wasn’t quite aware of responded to that. Jack MacFarland estab-

lished a literacy club, to borrow a phrase of Frank Smith’s, and invited me - invited all of us - to join.

There’s been a good deal of research and speculation suggesting that the acknowledgment of

school performance with extrinsic rewards - smiling faces, stars, numbers, grades - diminishes the in-

trinsic satisfaction children experience by engaging in reading or writing or problem solving. While

it’s certainly true that we’ve created an educational system that encourages our best and brightest to

become cynical grade collectors and, in general, have developed an obsession with evaluation and

assessment, I must tell you that venal though it may have been, I loved getting good grades from Mac-

Farland. I now know how subjective grades can be, but then they came tucked in the back of essays

like bits of scientific data, some sort of spectroscopic readout that said, objectively and publicly, that

I had made something of value. I suppose I’d been mediocre for too long and enjoyed a public redefi-

nition. And I suppose the workings of my mind, such as they were, had been private for too long. My

linguistic play moved into the world; . . . these papers with their circled, red B-pluses and A-minuses

linked my mind to something outside it. I carried them around like a club emblem.

One day in the December of my senior year, Mr. MacFarland asked me where I was going to go

to college. I hadn’t thought much about it. Many of the students I teach today spent their last year in

high school with a physics text in one hand and the Stanford catalog in the other, but I wasn’t even

aware of what “entrance requirements” were. My folks would say that they wanted me to go to college

and be a doctor, but I don’t know how seriously I ever took that; it seemed a sweet thing to say, a bit of

supportive family chatter, like telling a gangly daughter she’s graceful. The reality of higher education

wasn’t in my scheme of things: no one in the family had gone to college; only two of my uncles had

completed high school. I figured I’d get a night job and go to the local junior college because I knew

that Snyder and Company were going there to play ball. But I hadn’t even prepared for that. When

I finally said, “I don’t know,” MacFarland looked down at me - I was seated in his office - and said,

“Listen, you can write.”

My grades stank. I had A’s in biology and a handful of B’s in a few English and social science

10 Mike Rose: “I Just Wanna Be Average”

classes. All the rest were C’s - or worse. MacFarland said I would do well in his class and laid down

the law about doing well in the others. Still, the record for my first three years wouldn’t have been

acceptable to any four-year school. To nobody’s surprise, I was turned down flat by USC and UCLA.

But Jack MacFarland was on the case. He had received his bachelor’s degree from Loyola University,

so he made calls to old professors and talked to somebody in admissions and wrote me a strong letter.

Loyola finally accepted me as a probationary student. I would be on trial for the first year, and if I did

okay, I would be granted regular status. MacFarland also intervened to get me a loan, for I could never

have afforded a private college without it. Four more years of religion classes and four more years of

boys at one school, girls at another. But at least I was going to college. Amazing.

In my last semester of high school, I elected a special English course fashioned by Mr. Mac-

Farland, and it was through this elective that there arose at Mercy a fledgling literati. Art Mitz, the

editor of the school newspaper and a very smart guy, was the kingpin. He was joined by me and by

Mark Dever, a quiet boy who wrote beautifully and who would die before he was forty. MacFarland

occasionally invited us to his apartment, and those visits became the high point of our apprenticeship:

we’d clamp on our training wheels and drive to his salon.

He lived in a cramped and cluttered place near the airport, tucked away in the kind of building

that architectural critic Reyner Banham calls a dingbat. Books were allover: stacked, piled, tossed, and

crated, underlined and dog eared, well worn and new. Cigarette ashes crusted with coffee in saucers

or spilling over the sides of motel ashtrays. The little bedroom had, along two of its walls, bricks and

boards loaded with notes, magazines, and oversized books. The kitchen joined the living room, and

there was a stack of German newspapers under the sink. I had never seen anything like it: a great

flophouse of language furnished by City Lights and Cafe Ie Metro. I read every title. I flipped through

paperbacks and scanned jackets and memorized names: Gogol, Finnegans Wake, Djuna Barnes, Jack-

son Pollock, A Coney Island of the Mind, F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, all sorts of Freud,

Troubled Sleep, Man Ray, The Education of Henry Adams, Richard Wright, Film as Art, William Butler

Yeats, Marguerite Duras, Red-burn, A Season in Hell, Kapital. On the cover of Alain-Fournier’s The

Wanderer was an Edward Gorey drawing of a young man on a road winding into dark trees. By the

hotplate sat a strange Kafka novel called Amerika, in which an adolescent hero crosses the Atlantic

to find the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Art and Mark would be talking about a movie or the school

newspaper, and I would be consuming my English teacher’s library. It was heady stuff. I felt like a Pop

Warner athlete on steroids.

Art, Mark, and I would buy stogies and triangulate from MacFarland’s apartment to the Cin-

ema, which now shows X-rated films but was then L.A.’s premier art theater, and then to the musty

Cherokee Bookstore in Hollywood to hobnob with beatnik homosexuals - smoking, drinking bourbon

11Mike Rose: “I Just Wanna Be Average”

and coffee, and trying out awkward phrases we’d gleaned from our mentor’s bookshelves. I was happy

and precocious and a little scared as well, for Hollywood Boulevard was thick with a kind of decadence

that was foreign to the South Side. After the Cherokee, we would head back to the security of Mac-

Farland’s apartment, slaphappy with hipness.

Let me be the first to admit that there was a good deal of adolescent passion in this embrace of

the avant-garde: self-absorption, sexually charged pedantry, an elevation of the odd and abandoned.

Still it was a time during which I absorbed an awful lot of information: long lists of titles, images

from expressionist paintings, new wave shibboleths, snippets of philosophy, and names that read like

Steve Fusco’s misspellings - Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Now this is hardly the stuff of deep un-

derstanding. But it was an introduction, a phrase book, a [travel guide] to a vocabulary of ideas, and

it felt good at the time to know all these words. With hindsight I realize how layered and important

that knowledge was.

It enabled me to do things in the world. I could browse bohemian bookstores in far-off, myste-

rious Hollywood; I could go to the Cinema and see events through the lenses of European directors;

and, most of all, I could share an evening, talk that talk, with Jack MacFarland, the man I most ad-

mired at the time. Knowledge was becoming a bonding agent. Within a year or two, the persona of

the disaffected hipster would prove too cynical, too alienated to last. But for a time it was new and

exciting: it provided a critical perspective on society, and it allowed me to act as though I were living

beyond the limiting boundaries of South Vermont.

Author: Mike Rose; Article Title: I Just Wanna Be Average; Source Title: Lives on the Bound-

ary; Publication Date: 1989; City of Publication: New York, NY; Publisher: Free Press; URL:

http://www.cengage.com/custom/static_content/OLC/s76656_76218lf/rose.pdf.