That his demise was dramatic and bizarre came as no surprise. But the timing was all wrong. Everyone who’d known Dr. Leland Mars knew he was doing the dance of the doomed. He’d first boogied out to the killing floors way back in the old cattle drivin’ days of the 1960s, back before they started putting stuff in the water, before everyone went all sappy and rolled over for THE SYSTEM. The good doctor stayed out there, dancing away, long after the rest of us had turned in our dance cards, cut our hair, and sold out to the Man. That Mars survived the ’70s was amazing. The fact that he endured the Reagan ’80s without doing something rash was nothing short of Biblical in its miraculousness.
I don’t wish to sound cavalier about another man’s life, but it would’ve been better if he’d gone out in a blaze of glory. As it was, Mars drifted through two miserable decades like the ghost of a Counterculture Past. But few among the cadre of select students who were on the receiving end of his generosity of thought, spirit and sustenance really knew what happened to him after he left the university in 1972. In their happy romantic ignorance, they still see him as he was. In their mind’s eye, Dr. Mars will always remain the robust champion of serious literature and lost causes. A man who could mesmerize an audience with his memories of his nights as a white blues musician, and his days as a political warrior in the good fight. Or the stories he’d read from his books, which drew heavily from his experiential well. In the minds of his former students, Mars will never grow old. And his icon will never fade. Physically, he’s still a ruggedly handsome man with a thick beard and lion’s mane of graying blonde hair. Intellectually, he’s still the most stimulating teacher they ever had. His students keep the faith, at least in their mind’s eye. Why blame them? The man believed that the art of writing could move people to action, but only if it were the product of truth, the kind of truth that can only come from being out there on the perimeter, the kind of truth we all found in his books.
Mars paid a terrible price to learn these worldly truths. But beatings, jail time and death threats only hardened his resolve. He had no quest for martyrdom. We all just figured martyrdom would find him. Mars was a goddamn hero. If he died, he’d go out in a blaze of glory like Butch and Sundance. He died, all right. But that’s not the way his story ends.
Mars had his glory years. After that, he just kept living. Out of sight but never out of mind. The few of us he allowed to get close assumed he'd never change. In the end, our stubborn New Left messiah would die for our sins. That’s what we all assumed. But we were wrong.
Most of us had no clue. But Beck and I had the misfortune of meeting the shell of the man. We found him in a place that only served to emphasize that the dream, as John Lennon had said long ago, was over.
But I must digress from that sad reunion. A more detailed explanation of who Dr. Mars was is in order so the impact of his decline may be properly understood.
Mars was not his given name. He was born Leland Stedwell Montrose IV. The year was 1936. His father was the descendent of the Southern aristocracy that had ruled over vast holdings in the South Carolina low country around Charleston since the 18th century. When Leland Montrose III wed the equally well-heeled Charlotte Stedwell, the scions of the region viewed it as a marriage made in antebellum heaven. The alliance was bound to produce, in the estimation of the region’s bluebloods, a progeny whose birth would be akin to the second coming.
But something went horribly wrong when Leland IV, whose very name summed up what would be expected of him, popped from the womb. Instead of carrying on the fine old Southern traditions, this eldest son of the eldest son became a class traitor and so scandalized the family name they began denying he ever existed.
The trouble started early. As a boy he preferred the company of the black field hands to that of his own kind. “They could tell the goddamndest stories,” he told us later, “Everybody in my own family was so deadly boring I couldn’t handle it so I just started hanging around with the field hands.” Even then, he carried notebooks everywhere, wrote down everything he could. “Thinks didn’t match up. Started to figure I’d been handed a lot of bullshit,” he said, “Started to ask some questions my daddy couldn’t answer.” A succession of military schools failed to break him. If anything, they toughened his resolve to be everything his family hated. When the Kenyon Review published his first short story—an expose of the now defunct military academy—he told his father, “I’m a goddamn genius, and there’s not a whole hell of a lot I can learn around here.” He cashed the check (which wasn’t that much) and left the big white house.
By the age of seventeen, Leland had become a proficient country blues musician. Juke Joint singers had been his teachers. That a wealthy, barely-pubescent whiteboy from a family that had fought so hard to maintain the institutions of segregation could win acceptance in a world so different from his own is testimony to the power of Leland Montrose’s personality and sincerity.
The final break between rebellious son and the unmovable father came in 1956 when Leland took part in his first Civil Rights action. It was a minor skirmish at a lunch counter, but it landed Leland in jail. Leland III left his offspring there until the authorities, who’d grown tired of the lad’s all-too-successful efforts at organizing protests among the prisoners, finally kicked him out. Leland’s name had saved him from physical abuse and he knew it. So, upon release, he went to a courthouse and started the proceedings to have his last name legally changed. After much thought, he settled on the moniker Mars—a nod to the fiery abolitionist from the 1850s, not the angry red planet. After that, Mars proceeded to follow the lead of his chosen namesake and declare war on the powers that be.
Disowned and broke, Mars started traveling the coffeehouse circuit. When he wasn’t on stage, he was out in the field helping to organize black boycotts and voter registration drives. The aforementioned scars from beatings provided an even more vivid record of those years than the diaries he kept. White racists supplied most of the beatings. A few came from black people, who didn’t trust the loudmouth white kid. "Sins of the father," is the way he described it. "If I was them, I'd kick my ass, too."
In 1958 Mars was awarded a scholarship to Columbia. It was the beginning of a meteoric student career that ended when he earned his Ph.D. in literature from Berkley in 1961. By then, Mars had already published two collections of short stories and his first novel, White N****r Blues, a scathing, autobiographical black comedy that created a small but enthusiastic cult following among the politically aware. I’m painfully aware this title seems shocking to the budding new crop of college activists. Hard to explain, kids. Mars was following in the footsteps of Lenny Bruce, another dead icon. He’d probably shock them too.
Mars started teaching shortly after receiving his master’s degree. His radical politics, which were now turned against the war in Vietnam, had gotten him bounced out of two universities already when, in 1967, he took a job at Breckinridge University—a second-tier four-year college in Nowheresville, Illinois. This academic institution boasted a 110-year commitment to academic mediocrity and political ignorance. The school’s clueless administration didn’t know Doctor Mars from Planet Mars. They didn’t follow the Detroit Daily News, the Freep, or the New York Times for that matter. The times were a changing across America, but Breckinridge didn’t. Its administrators felt Mars would fit right in. While they hadn’t read his books, they knew he was a published author. There were few on staff at the time, and it was quite a black eye. So they gave Mars a freshman American Literature survey course. What harm could he do?
I happened to attend Dr. Mars’ course as a college freshman. I didn’t know what I was in for, just figured it was an easy-A. To me, the name “Leland Mars” was nothing more than an entry on a computer-generated course roster. But by the end of the quarter, I’d fallen under the good doctor’s spell and subsequently enrolled in every class he taught, despite of the fact that I was majoring in art rather than literature.
I saw the value in him. Evidently, Mars saw something of value in me. I became one of the handful of students he invited to his house for extracurricular sessions that always lasted late into the night. He’d sit up in his throne-like wicker chair, chain-smoking cigars and sipping Jack Daniels, while listening to the discussions he got rolling through a series of provocative questions. When Mars heard something he didn’t like, he let you know it, loudly. Once he’d reduced your ideas to a mound of guava jelly, he was gracious enough to build you back up and get you on a much more productive line of thinking.
The political climate at the mediocre old school heated up considerably after Dr. Mars arrived. With a little help, he dragged the college kicking and screaming into the 1960s.
Mars and four other professors constituted the first anti-war march the city had ever seen. They got as far as the Honey Dipper Tavern, a notorious hang-out for redneck garbagemen and septic tank haulers on the west side of the square, before being jumped by an outraged garbageman/patriot and several of his cronies. Subsequent actions, most notably the moratorium marches in October and November of 1969, drew more criticism.
When Mars opened his big mouth, that tended to happen. The SDS crowd said he was too damn timid—not truly engagé, man. The radicals changed their tune when the invasion of Cambodia and the deaths at Kent State brought Mars back to the front lines. He came back from the march with a few new scars and the inspiration for his second novel—Bringing the War Back Home, Mamma. It earned him have reviews in The Freep and The Village Voice. But the faculty regents cringed when angry parents started calling about the nasty commie book full of swear words. There were lots of angry words, but Mars shrugged them off. Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you. But bullets can.
On two successive nights, somebody shot at Mars’ house from a passing car. On the third night, Mars shot back. That was the beginning of the end of his tenure at Breckenridge.
I was a third year student at the time. I showed up for his Western Civilization class. Mars had nailed a manifesto to the door of Monty Hall like Martin Luther.
Howdy kids. Sorry to disappoint you, but you will not find the good Doctor Mars inside these hallowed halls. Not today, or ever again. I’m not fired. I quit. But that’s not exactly true. The gutless administrators called me in for a nice long talk. They wouldn’t let me quit or fire me, but they just kept talking, and nearly bored me to death. I finally got sick of all the talk and walked out. Anyway you cut it, I’m gone, kids. I’m not going to work on Maggie’s Farm no more.
Peace and love –
your pal, Dr. Mars.
Dr. Mars dropped off the radar after that. Beck and I graduated, went on to graduate school, and finally entered the real world. In the years that followed, periodic rumors filled our ears. We’d hear that Mars was teaching at some Podunk college. A week or two later, we’d hear they kicked him out. His politics always got him into trouble, so we weren’t surprised. At the dawn of the Reagan administration, Mars was reduced to an itinerant lecturer’s status. That was the rumor, anyway. After that, the rumors stopped. And Beck and I lost track of him.
And now we’ve come to the tragic part of the story. In the fall of 1991, I did an exhibition at Breckenridge’s Fulton Gallery, just down the street from my old alma mater.
Beck showed up, said some not too idiotic things about my paintings. An engineering major, not an art critic. But he’d driven 150 miles from Indiana, and I appreciated it. After the opening, we walked down to our old haunt, a beat-up college bar called Tony’s Joint. It looked shitty in the 1960s. And just as shitty now.
As this dive had the site of many a drinking session with Dr. Mars, Beck and I got all sappy and nostalgic and started reminiscing about our long lost friend. We were deep in remember-when conversation when an old man wearing a worn Army surplus raincoat asked if he could join us. The old man’s face, like the rest of his body, sagged from years of abuse. The redness of his nose indicated that liquor had been the demon that had put him in his current condition. Dr. Mars, in the flesh. But that flesh was ruined. The man was a wreck. We didn’t recognize him.
So there we sat with this walking corpse. Awkward situation, huh? Nobody said a word for a minute or two. I could hear the pinball machine going ding, ding ding in the corner. But something nagged at me. There was something vaguely familiar about the old man.
Then the old man finally broke the silence. He spoke in a noticeable Southern drawl. And he spoke to me.
“Sorry I missed your opening, kid,” he said. “It’s even harder than it used to be to get parts for a Volkswagen bus when you break down on the goddamn Interstate.”
Once those words left the old man's mouth, Beck and I instantly knew who he was.
Dr. Mars.
We’d summoned him, I thought. All our weepy nostalgic talk brought him back—like some kind of damn ghost who’s heard his name.
Mars reached for the bottle of Jack Daniels that Beck and I had been nursing. I half expected his hand to go through it. But he grabbed it. And killed it in seconds.
After the shock of seeing what was left of Dr. Mars wore off, we started grilling him. “Where the hell have you been all these years,” Beck asked. “Wanderin’ through the wasteland, boys, doin’ the dharma bum gig.” was his reply. “What are you living on?” I asked—but Mars wouldn’t answer. We had to prime him with whiskey before he’d say anything more. So we flagged the waitress for another bottle of Jack. The bottle arrived. Mars sucked it down like a human water cooler. Then he really started talking. His tale was so pathetic we were sorry we’d asked.
Mars had indeed spent time as a gypsy professor, but politics wasn’t what ruined his career. Disgust did him in. With himself, the country, the world, you name it. That disgust led to serious drinking and finally madness. Institutions, car wrecks, alleyway beatings. Mars told us the whole sad story for the next half hour or so. Beck and I wanted to run. But once Mars started talking, we couldn’t move. Like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, huh?
I’ll recreate the crux of the conversation to the best of my limited abilities.
Mars absorbed his third bottle of Jack Daniels. Then got all weepy and maudlin. And spilled his guts.
“Truth is, I couldn’t take it anymore my little droogies. I just couldn’t take it. The bastards got to me.”
“What bastards?” I asked, “Administrators, politicians, the cops?”
“Nah,” he says, “I could always handle those bastards. I’m talking about you bastards—you students. You gave up and headed for the hills—or the goddamn suburbs.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled into my beer. “I’m sorry...”
“Got yourselves some nice straight jobs, didntcha?”
“It just kinda happened,” said Beck.
“Yeah. You all got credit cards and televisions and mortgages. 'Just kinda happened,' huh? Jesus Christ, you kids. You were the generation, remember? You were gonna do it...”
“I was going to get around to it,” said Beck. “Life sorta happened.”
Mars thundered—and grabbed a random drink from a waitress’ tray meant for somebody else’s table.
“Life sorta happened? Stop making excuses! That’s pure bullshit and you know it!”
Mars pounded the table. Glasses and bottles jumped. Our fellow patrons gave us dirty looks. But it never stopped him before.
“You wanna know the truth? You bastards —”
Mars paused to down the glass of whatever it is he’d grabbed. Then resumed his train of thought.
“You sold out! That’s the truth! Hell, I don’t blame you. At least you bastards tried … for a year or two. It’s the bastards who followed you that killed me off—those know-nothing sons-a-bitches. At least you punks believed in art and ideas and all that hippy crap. You punks something going there for a while—until you pissed it all away and got replaced by an army of Reaganites. Pod people, that’s what they are—just like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Pod people...and you know how they reproduce?”
Mars pointed to the glowing, flickering TV set mounted above the bar.
“That thing. That goddamn thing. Glass teat. One eyed monsters. Sucks the life out of you, sucks the soul of you. Turns you into a heartless, soulless pod! Look at Reagan. He’s the first pod! A goddamn grin with nothing behind it. First there’s just him, then he starts reproducing—through that thing. People start watching, start turning into little Reaganites. That’s how they breed, see? The pod people gotta have their Gold Card! Gotta have the latest goddamn two-hundred dollar inflatable tennis shoes! Can’t think any more, can’t read a book, wouldn’t occur to any of ’em to do anything. Life’s something you watch. Life’s what happens on the other side of that screen up there. The goddamn Gipper was the first and now that’s all there is—except for me and maybe you.”
A redneck in the corner with his cap on backwards was glaring at us, then finally turned away. Mars gave me a hard, searching look and reached for his glass again. Once he realized it was empty, he reached for Beck’s glass.
“I’m the last man, boys,” he said. “The last man on earth, a living fossil of a dead species ... just a dinosaur now boys, a Coelacanth, a stumbling cliché. Yessir, ol’ Dr. Mars is just a ghost, a graveyard ghost. A ghost in the flesh, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors. Now who’s going to buy me another drink?”
I did, over the waitress’ strenuous objections. Beck bought him the next one. After sucking them down, Mars continued his story.
“I’ve been keeping track of some of you, ya know. You may think you’re still in the fight, but the fact is, no one cares anymore. You’re just going through the motions, that’s all—like some goddamn lives-of-the-artist thing on PBS. You’re just doing a lot of shit somebody already did back in Paris in 1922. Wanna know a secret? The Pod People don’t give a shit. They don’t care about what you paint, they don’t care about what you write, they don’t care about nothin’, man, but getting ahead.”
Mars drained my beer and went on. “Ever wonder what happened to me? ‘Course you did. Well, I’ll tell you.”
Mars’ hand shot out to the table. Felt blindly. The mind behind it realized there was no more booze. So he pulled out a flash from his diseased overcoat. Drank it all. Then continued.
“I was giving a lecture at some bullshit college in upstate New York—one of those yuppie-preppie places for clean white folks. Don’t ask me why they asked me to talk. One of the literature professors remembered my books or something, I dunno. The point is I went, and did my talk to a couple of dozen students— who probably were ordered to be there. One of them raised his hand and asked—asked me mind you—if he could ask me a question. I said sure. And the kid looks at me all serious-like and says, ‘Given the fluctuating trends in television programming, what kind of subject matter would you recommend we specialize in, if any?’ ‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘I’m not following you. You mind repeating that?’ And the kid comes back with ‘Considering the dominance of media-related crossover demographics in the publishing industry—what niche do you really feel is on the upswing?’ ‘Speak English,’ I tell him. ‘Tell me what you’re saying in plain English!’ And snotnose kid looks me straight in the eyes and says ‘I want to write for TV. That’s where the money is. How do you break in to writing for TV?’ And that’s what finally did it.”
Mars shook his gray head sadly. “I snapped, boys. I reached in my pocket and pulled out my snub-nose .38 and told the little bastards to put their wallets on the floor r-right in front of me. Then I started blasting them—got ‘em all right through their Gold Cards, heh. They put me in the bughouse with the spirit of Naomi for that one.”
Beck and I looked at him blankly.
"Ah, Christ. Naomi Jaffe, you morons. Weather Underground, Days of Rage. Chicago cops —"
Mars slumped down on the countertop. I figured it was time to hit the road and reached for my wallet—but he reached out and grabbed my arm with a claw-like hand.
“Put that goddamn thing away,” he said, “This one’s on me. You bastards listened to me. Figure I owe you one.”
Mars reached in his pocket and pulled out a monstrously thick wad of bills.
My eyes got big. He answered my question before I asked it.
“Been writing for TV,” he said, “That’s where the goddamn money is. You wanna sell out, that where you go.”
Beck turned white. It looked like he was trying not to vomit. But I had to ask.
“What do you write?”
“Lotta nostalgic shit about the ’60s, you know? Pays good.”
To prove the point, Mars reeled off a list of cheapjack made-for-TV movies. Free Love for Sale, Rock Angel Blues, Commune Commies. I gave him a blank look.
“Not familiar with my oeuvre, huh?”
I shook my head no.
“Of course not. I write under a pseudonym, dumbass. Jack Ares, get it? Dr. Mars would never write that shit. But Jack Ares … he’s happy to sell out. More than happy. That’s the story, anyway. Don’t want bum my old students out, dig? Little bastards can keep their illusions. Least I can do for the little …”
The good doctor's head thudded down to the counter again. While he slept, I stuffed his money back in his pocket. Beck and I paid the bar tab and managed to drag him into the car. Beck stayed behind in the bar parking lot awaiting the tow truck to haul the wreck of Mars’ VW microbus. I drove my car to the Holiday Inn room the university had rented for me with the wreck of Dr. Mars mumbling incoherently in my back seat.
“Remember what Nietzsche said?”
“Nietzsche said a lot of things.”
“I philosophize with a hammer—that’s good, ain’t it?
Philosophize with a goddamn hammer...”
Somehow, God knows how, I dragged the good doctor’s dead weight into the room and plopped him down on the bed. The bastard snored like a buzz saw and kept me up most of the night. When I woke up the next morning, he was gone.
Long gone.
I found out where on the following night in an identical room in another Holiday Inn outside Kankakee. The Boob Tube the good doctor despised was the bearer of bad news.
I turned on the 5 o’clock news to see a live feed of Dr. Mars bugging out in some monster warehouse discount store on the outskirts of Peoria. Sheer dumb luck I saw him; sheer dumb luck he was on TV. Local crew was filming the grand opening, some talking head was yapping, just another puff piece. I almost changed channels. Then I saw him plain as day. Right behind the blow-dried newsman, there’s old Dr. Mars, hollering his head off like the mad prophet he is. Smelling a story, the TV crew followed him like a pack of bloodhounds as Mars walked straight back to the Home Improvement department to pick up a five-pound sledgehammer, then proceeded to the Home Entertainment department to smash all the shiny new television sets, just methodically working the rows. “Ladies and gentlemen … this is astonishing!” Before long, my wall-mounted TV revealed row on row of gutted boob boxes, like so many blinded Cyclopses. “His anger seems directed at the TV sets, not any of the people in the store ... or us. We don’t fear for our safety—until we do, we’ll continue to bring this amazing story as it unfolds, live on Channel 17.” Sure you will. The destruction of TV is great TV. But that kind of stunt doesn’t play in Peoria. Predictably, things got ugly fast. I saw it all in living color.
Mars interrupted his labors and started bellowing about the “vast wasteland.” Then the store lit up like a disco. Cop lights flashing, sirens blaring. Then the cops stormed into the store and stomped past the camera crew. Mars picked up the sledge again and smashed an RCA XL 100. The cops took exception to his threatening gestures and pumped him full of lead from their new 9mm semi-automatics. The Butch and Sundance ending we’d always expected. But not a blaze of glory. Nothing heroic or romantic about it. Just a sad and ugly scene. Just another nut in America who finally lost it. A loser. A joke. A casualty. One more suicide by cop. Details at 11 on Channel 17.
I watched the paramedics carry Mars away, then clicked off the TV.
It’s 9 o’clock now. Beck just finished calling me to inform me that Mars had hung on for a while at the hospital, but finally checked out.
9:01. 9:02. So it goes.
9:03.
Now I’m just sitting here fingering the good doctor’s snub-nose .38. Mars had left it behind when he ducked out last night. I found it in the pockets of his ratty old overcoat. He’d draped if over the Magic Fingers, where he knew I’d surely find it. An oversight? Or a gift for me? Maybe. His final lesson for his worst student.
A short while ago, I took out my Gold Card, laid it on the plush shag carpet and almost shot a hole through it, but thought better of it. No blaze of glory for me, folks. I’m going to sit back on the bed and finish another bottle of Jack Daniels instead.
Dr. Mars would’ve wanted it that way.
If all of this wasn’t a fiction designed to lament the passing of a time when people still believed in the power of ideas and the art that ideas produced, it would be a real sad story, dontcha think?
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