Though not quite ordinary, snow at Halloween is far from unheard-of in our part of upper New England, and was no surprise at all some five decades back. Mercifully, it had held off on the locally designated trick-or-treat night. I remember how we followed our son, the only child of an eventual five, from door to door in our hamlet. I have a photo of him, three years old, in cowboy costume. His boots are on backwards, and for reasons of his own he insisted we leave them that way. 

 

I was 32, in my fifth year of teaching at Dartmouth College, still agonizingly awkward in the presence of colleague and student alike. All through those five years preceding, some nasty inner goblin kept sneering. You think you belong here, fool? 

 

Over-stimulated, I’d driven to my office absurdly early, having yo-yoed in and out of sleep in the wee hours, high on the fact that Muhammad Ali, against every oddsmaker’s prediction, had knocked out the hulking George Foreman. That match in what was then Zaire is still known by the name Ali gave it: the Rumble in the Jungle. 

 

There were no closed-circuit TV or theatre outlets close to my rural home, and none of our nearby stations, virtually all AM back then, carried the fight. I had to listen on tenterhooks as some voice on my crackling radio – from a station, I think, in Albany– summarized each round after the fact. Though the announcer reported everything, including the eighth-round knockout, quite dispassionately, I recall my own whoop! of exhilaration. 

 

My upbringing and indeed my life in general could scarcely have been less similar to Ali’s, and it’s gotten no more so since. Perhaps because the Rumble in the Jungle’s 50th anniversary transpired so recently, I’ve been wondering all over again just why I was I so attracted to the example of this iconic athlete– and compelled by it. 

 

I witnessed my first heavyweight championship on a friend’s tiny black-and-white television, because in 1952 we had none at our house. In that fight, Rocky Marciano (by later standards practically a bantam at 5’10” and 185 pounds) knocked out the considerably bigger Jersey Joe Walcott in the 13th, after Joe had amassed a sizable lead in points. My friend’s father, an immigrant Ulsterman, celebrated quite loudly, which wasn’t like him at all. At ten years old, I didn’t detect what was likely a racist edge to his glee.

 

After that fight, I followed boxing for a few years in a casual way. I clearly remember, say, a voice intoning “the champ’s legs are rubbery!” in the first of the Patterson-Johansson confrontations. That 1959 memory lingers less for the fight itself, though, than for listening to it with a group of male teenagers sprawled on the floor of a log cabin in Maine. The place belonged to a friend’s parents, and the long weekend was meant to be all about her sixteenth birthday. The adults in their room didn’t know– or did they?– that most of us were a bit high on the beer I’d smuggled in from home. 

 

In the summer of ’64, I occasionally passed Sonny Liston in the flesh, because he trained in north Philadelphia, near to where I was doing some volunteer community work. To pass that scowling colossus on the sidewalk was to pity the flippant young man named Cassius Clay, because, as Cassius would shortly put it in a poem, nobody expected “the total eclipse of the Sonny.” To me, Liston looked like the least vulnerable human alive. The one time I actually met his eyes on the street, his very glare almost KO’d me.

 

Yes, from the first day of his seizing the heavyweight title, I was captivated by this splendid-looking man, now Muhammad Ali. I sided with him in his resistance to the Viet Nam war, raged over the racist lifting of his boxing license in his prime, admired his resolution no matter, and, for all the lionheartedness of Smokin’ Joe, lamented Frazier’s winning their first bout after my hero returned in 1971. 

 

The Frazier-Ali Superfight II and the Thrilla in Manila were monumental, epical, to be sure; but there was something about those eight rounds in Africa that downright riveted many of my generation, black, white, you name it. The Rumble, watched by nearly sixty million people, seemed a sort of crown jewel in a golden age of heavyweight boxing, inspiring books, countless articles, and a fabulous soundtrack to the documentary, When We Were Kings. The fight has also sustained animated conversation ever since among those who recall the event, although few of us have much interest in prizefighting nowadays.

 

For us, the shine soon wore off. For one thing, there came to be too many purported World Championships: WBA, WBC, IBF, WBO, and who knows what else? More importantly, with the exception, perhaps, of the abrasive, hard-to-like Floyd Merriweather, we have no pugilistic stars, let alone ones larger than life. Finally, the popularity of boxing’s horrific competitor, so-called Ultimate Fighting– full of tactics men of my generation were taught to consider dirty– leaves many of us geezers appalled. 

 

Liston, Frazier, Foreman, Norton, Holmes, Shavers, Ellis, Mathis, Terrell, Young: these were boxers who’d have been notable in another era (Frazier still is). If they seemed lesser than Ali, this was not altogether an athletic distinction. I think of something said after Ali’s death by Foreman (may he rest in peace!), whose evolution from menacing gangbanger to good-natured uncle remains extraordinary. “In Africa,” said George, “I realized I wasn’t fighting a man but a force.” * Yes, Ali, whose evolution from enemy of western civilization to international hero seems even more remarkable, was every bit of that.

 

But I’ve gotten a little off-track. I began with an early October morning just after the Rumble, when few lights were yet on in college buildings. In spite of the hour, I saw two young black men standing outside the English department offices. The sight was somehow striking. Half a century back, the men’s presence at any time of day would have been unusual, so few students of color enrolled at Dartmouth in those times. Maybe it was the snow 

dropping on the three of us that somehow leant the scene an even more idiosyncratic dimension,

ghostly aura, Halloween-worthy. Indeed, to this day, the memory feels dreamlike.

 

As I got closer to those two, I heard one ask the other, “Hey, you want to watch the Foreman shuffle?” I can hear that question as clearly as if it were 1974 all over again. The young man affects buckling legs, lolls his head, then, spinning in a ragged circle, collapses face-down, twitching like someone in his final throes. My laughter at that pantomime was as spontaneous and genuine as theirs. I gave them a double thumbs-up– and was immediately stabbed by the old, familiar unease. 

 

After the fallen man snapped to his feet without help from hand or leg, I felt less hip than at any time before or since. I chided myself. Damn! Couldn’t I have come up with something cooler than the thumbs-up bit? The two young men, for whatever reason, perhaps a celebratory one, had on what looked like tailored suits. I glanced down at my own attire– flannel shirt, corduroys, scuffed hiking boots– and concluded that I’d even dressed wrong! I was already going bald, and my ungloved hands looked pasty as cookie dough. The pair of students resumed their vigorous palaver without so much as acknowledging me. 

 

So you think you belong, fool? 

 

That moment marked the onset of what would surely be a daunting day. Preoccupied with my son and his Halloween rituals, and more emphatically with the fight, I’d devoted no time the night before to class preparation, and under such circumstances, I thought of meeting my students as somebody might contemplate the gallows. The notion of straying into improvisation chilled me. I had no lesson plan. I’d be adrift in unpredictability. 

 

My freshman class was the first to meet; we’d be continuing our labored consideration of Milton’s Paradise Lost. (That mammoth poem was required reading in first-year English, which tells you something of the period’s ethos among the Ivies.) Great as the epic may be, Paradise Lost –even without its controversial status in those crucial early years of contemporary feminism– was an ongoing problem. How could I possibly generate interest in it among eighteen-year-olds? I’m sure I hadn’t done so at all up to that point, however diligently I prepared. No, I didn’t belong.

 

Now I take an improbable detour to explain, if possible, why The Rumble in the Jungle, whose worldwide societal impact was seismic, proved so important to me. Mind you, I may be all wet in my evaluations. Memory is often a careless or an overbearing editor, often both. 

 

Whatever the case, I’d spent much of the previous summer in Boulder, Colorado, home of the nascent Naropa Institute, now Naropa University. The enterprise was conceived by a certain Tibetan monk, the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (a scoundrel, as has become even clearer since). Rinpoche imagined Naropa as an alternative to the syllogistic and Eurocentric culture of conventional American colleges. 

 

I didn’t have a trace of credentials to join Naropa’s writing faculty, having published no book yet, only a handful of poems in magazines, most ephemeral, a very few more established, and I had no Buddhist or even flamboyantly countercultural inclinations. No, my appointment was farcically nepotistic. One of Naropa’s administrators was a college friend named John, who vaguely remembered some of my undergraduate efforts in poetry, and who was a serious Buddhist, fluent in Chinese and competent even in Tibetan. I can’t recall how he and Rinpoche met, but the monk had taken him on board as a sort of executive secretary. It was John who recruited me for the team. Needless to say, and even more so than at Dartmouth, I was plagued by my same old fear of committing fraud. I just wasn’t much like the other people at Naropa. What if they saw through me and revealed my bourgeois, westernized character?

 

Make what you will of Rinpoche’s experiment, Naropa did attract many a luminary: Gary Snyder, John Cage, Anne Waldman, Dianne di Prima, William Burroughs, et al. While the term “luminary” hardly applied to me, I did meet on an irregular basis with my own small clutch of students, some truly interesting ones among the hippies, stoners, and spiritual tourists. The earth, however, didn’t move in those sessions. 

It was quite otherwise in another setting. To my genuine astonishment, I found myself a colleague of the world-famous Allen Ginsberg. We met with a far larger and more enthusiastic group. In the seventies, and to this day, Ginsberg was either idol or buffoon, depending on your perspective. He wouldn’t have found many partisans, for instance, among Dartmouth English professors. (Ginsberg’s Liston, you might say, was the academically-ennobled T.S. Eliot.)

 

As for me, I still feel that, although he was not struck by lightning in his every poetic endeavor (who is?), poems like Howl and Kaddish and at least a handful, especially, in his The Fall of Amerika, have lodged themselves in our cultural consciousness– and for very good reason. They gave permission to speech and self-expression that had not existed before. And except when I stood among an uncountable throng to hear Martin Luther King in 1963, I’ve never been in the presence of anyone who could invoke so much of what what the Buddhists at Naropa called virya. Variously translated, virya is the continuous energy by which we may shed samsara, the mundane cycle of life and death. To use George Foreman’s term, Ginsberg represented a force. 

 

When, after my first week out west, I’d found the man very approachable and congenial, I sheepishly asked if he’d look at some of my poems. He obliged, and in a day or so, filled with apprehension, I met with him one-on-one. Would he have unearthed that awful fraud I’d sought to disguise? What in fact ensued marked a crux in my artistic life. Allen said my poems all showed real promise, that it was a shame I so doggedly repressed it. He explained by way of a comment I’ll never forget: “You’re too worried about poetry; it’s just a word; it’ll take care of itself.”

 

Allen Ginsberg, however much he may have mocked his own Ivy League training and the values undergirding it, was what might in his time have been called a classically educated man. So his counsel to me was less that I throw away such perspective as I’d developed as student and teacher at other Ivy League institutions than that I regard it as one among countless others. 

 

In “worrying about poetry,” Allen thought, my writing paid dutiful homage to canons of trained excellence as established by a certain elite, and I ought to insist on autonomy when it came to writing poetry. He quoted a line in which Dr. Williams pointed out that poetry might very well come from the mouths of Polish grandmothers. My commitment to being “literary” suggested too much preoccupation with capital-A Art, and too little with more genuine promptings. The man’s attitude as writing coach carried over into his Naropa classroom, in which Ginsberg allowed the discussion to take whatever direction it would. The talk was organic, not determined. 

 

After that summer, I’d begun to apply Ginsberg’s poetic counsel to my own work, however different it inevitably was and remains from his. I had not, though, imported his approach into my classrooms. It took The Rumble in the Jungle to jar me out of my uptight pedagogical manner. The development, however, was not causative but circumstantial. My obsession with the prizefight hadn’t allowed me to construct a rigid lesson plan. I’d have no alternative to Ginsberg’s improvisatory mode. Though I’d come in that Thursday from the October snowstorm full of trepidation, the following hour proved by far my most animated class since I first arrived in Hanover. Among other crucial things, I recalled Ginsberg simply conceding his ignorance whenever somebody asked a question he couldn’t answer. 

 

Oh, I marveled, you can do that? 

 

Well, I did that myself several times on that autumn morning in 1974, and amazingly enough, nobody seemed shocked when I didn’t have an answer to this or that query; the discussion went on and stayed lively. As it happened, yes, this fool did belong where he was. Everyone in the room, most importantly the teacher, knew as much for the very first time.

 

I chuckle as I look back on the years preceding that vital moment after The Rumble in the Jungle. By pure, happy coincidence, I learned that a professor didn’t have to stay up late reading and translating Milton’s Latin sonnets lest some freshman grill him about their relations to Paradise Lost. (Of course, I exaggerate, but not greatly.)

 

Is there some some connector among the various things I’ve recalled? My firstborn son in cowboy boots, worn backward at his insistence, in an unconventional manner; two young men in the ethereal snow of October, one enacting the Foreman Shuffle, the other laughing in approval; Allen Ginsberg ad-libbing his way from the Greek Classics to Ezra Pound to Bob Dylan and much else; a sputtering, laconic radio broadcast from Albany, New York; above all, the Rumble in the Jungle, the memory that prompts all these others.    

 

Even if it weren’t ludicrous, I’ve already conceded that it would be facile to construe a cause-and-effect relation between a famous prizefight in Zaire and my growth as man, writer, and teacher. Rather, as I reflect on it now, the Rumble in the Jungle, like all of Ali’s fights from my twenty-third year and well into my thirties, emblemized something I’d been yearning for without knowing I sought it: comfort with a certain improvisatory, or, perhaps more accurately, unpredictable element. 

 

I think of Ali’s befuddling his opponent by leading with his right and not the expected left jab; his proceeding from that unanticipated strategy to his “rope-a-dope,” by which, against all counsel he’d surely been given, he allowed Foreman to hit his arms and mid-section again and again until, exhausted, he had no answer for Ali’s flurry of response and went down for the count. 

 

I now think my fascination with Muhammad Ali – in his own poetic idiom, in the ring, in his valorous struggle against a bigoted organization and society– lay in how he epitomized something I hadn’t known I lacked before, an unwillingness to accept models and limits imposed by anyone outside himself but his own God. He was as nimble a man and mind as he was a boxer: you could throw whatever you wanted at him, and he’d always have some unexpected counterpunch. Muhammad Ali did not “worry” about extrinsic standards of any kind, because he knew they’d cramp his style. For me, the night big George Foreman hit the canvas soon coincided with a very early step or two of –what? The Syd Lea Shuffle?

 

Not of course that Ali’s life consisted principally of style, any more, I hope, than my own has, and no, I can’t claim that on its own The Rumble in the Jungle occasioned a change in my outlook on life, love, art, society, politics, what have you. And yet in retrospect this man’s triumph in a career so many strove to undo clarifies something of incalculable importance to me and to millions all over the world: the most significant rule is that there are no rules. Commitment to one’s own integrity should trump the requisites of other individuals, castes, institutions, even nations. 

Big George had it right: Ali was a force.  It’s force of a kind I still feel now and then in my eighties, and, as my recollections imply, it can flow from improbable quarters. When life becomes too routine, too much samsara, I hope my virya, wherever it comes from, can keep showing up as needed right through my own final round

I saw a man with a little boy in a backpack.

As he walked along he sang some nonsense song.

Though half-asleep, the child still seemed to smile. 

The world’s disasters, I know, are here to stay.

Some farmers’ fields lie bleached for lack of rain.  

Deadly tornadoes elsewhere, hurricanes.

Torture, rape, and war– and politicians.

I try to turn my mind to other things. 

I put Ella Fitzgerald on my old-time record player.

Once, I could carry our children the way that man did. 

 

His own small boy will see things that I won’t.

So will his father because he’s still so young.

I hope there’s some validity in prayer.

When grandchildren came I couldn’t be like him.

I couldn’t bear their weight, however slight.

Better than nothing, I told or read them stories.

A pacemaker’s doing its work inside my chest.

Some memories stay sweet in times of torment.

Has there ever been an untormented time?

I regret like anyone else some past behaviors.

 

The cardinal’s back again, so it must be spring.

He cheerfully whistles high on a pine downhill.

That tree’s the first thing here to catch the light.

It’s hardy, it seems, showing no withered limbs. 

I take out both my hearing aids at night.

So the cardinal wakes my wife but no, not me.

The way her smile just beams, the way she haunts my dreams…
There’s a country singer I like named Alan Jackson.

He suffers from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease.

I shouldn’t speak as if I’ve got real grievance.

 

I paddle my kayak, I hike, I ride my bike.

For a man of 82 I’m doing fine.

There’s that brilliant bird and all this reminiscence.

My wife and I just ate a hardy breakfast.

I was a man who carried sons and daughters.

No, no, they can’t take that away from me.

So Ella sings, and for now at least she’s right.

I was a man like one I saw today.

A walk outside may be just what I need.

Out there it’s mud, it’s puddles, it’s pastel sky

Does it make any sense to say I heard dead silence? No matter. I’ll simply declare that I’ve never known such quiet in the sixty years I’ve roamed these woods and hills. I was sitting on a stump beside a frozen bog, an old man who needed rest from his ramble, however stately his pace. It was Christmas Eve, and I’d be well free of that soundless solitude when I returned to a house filled with beloved company, three generations’ worth, from me at 82 down to the youngest of eight grandchildren at six months. Some of the family had put up with holiday-mobbed airports in that hectic season for travel; but now, though I did see two jets’ contrails fading into my patch of gray sky, I didn’t hear any engine’s roar.

Having loved poetry since high school days, well before I started trying my own hand at it, I’d read and would always read poets new and old. So if I was about to say that some lines from Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” came to me quite unaccountably their arrival was really no mystery.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

       Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

Now there was no lake near where I’d stopped, nor was I anyone’s idea of a pallid knight: exertion and the day’s chill had turned me ruddy as any Santa, I suppose; yet I felt the emotional ambience of those lines, not so much because of the songless birds as of whatever their muteness might imply.

As I say, the whole world lay mute. Our three dogs had temporarily ranged out of sight and earshot, and I didn’t even catch the usual rustle of rodents in the fallen oak-leaves. Having no reason to speak, I made no sound myself. If I’d had human companions, they would hardly have suspected the uneasiness skulking beneath my seeming composure.

I first heard “La Belle Dame sans Merci” in my hormone-frenzied junior year of high school. Mr. Adams was our English teacher, slightly foppish– he even wore a beret. Before going on, I should note that we disrespectful punks nicknamed this small fellow The Squirrel. One day in class, seemingly out of the blue, The Squirrel demonstratively recited Keat’s ballad. He obviously had it by heart, and he immediately obliged us to memorize it by week’s end.

In time, I’d spend one year teaching high school too. By virtue of such brief experience alone, I came to regard secondary schoolteachers, especially inspired ones like Mr. Adams, as heroes. Teaching at that level is so demanding that I soon departed for graduate school and then took up a lengthy and relatively easygoing career as a college professor.

Sitting beside that bog on a bleak December morning, of course, I was anything but cursed like Keats’s poor knight; and yet something in the overbearing quiet made me – what would the poet have called it? – bereft? forlorn? My mystification about this anxiety, however, was brief. With a sudden inward wince, I recalled how Mr. Adams got fired well before school let out and how his pupils responded to that dismissal. His substitute for the rest of the year was so unremarkable, compared, that I can’t even remember his name, only his habit of erasing the chalkboard with the sleeve of the drab jacket he wore every day, so that his cuffs turned the color of chalk itself. He may was too bland even to earn a nickname.

It’s been a long, long time since The Squirrel’s abrupt firing, which, even if we teenagers didn’t know it, proved a calamity from an educational perspective. You’d think by now I’d have forgiven myself for laughing along with my acne-blighted clique over the grounds for his termination. School authorities tried to keep the matter hush-hush, but as such things will, the truth emerged before long. These were less enlightened times, or so many of us like to think. What’s more, thoughtlessness and adolescence are almost synonymous. Despite all that, and despite the love that Mr. Adams craved having never been sought from any schoolmate, the man was humiliated, banished.

I falsely claimed to anyone who’d listen that I knew our teacher was gay right along. I pointed to his flamboyant manner of reciting poems, all of which he’d clearly memorized. He’d well up when he delivered any of the Romantics, especially Keats, and he shed actual tears over work by a man named Hart Crane, whose poetry struck us as simply inscrutable. (Though I still don’t know why, a phrase from The Bridge– a poem long enough that Mr. Adams’s command of it still seems uncanny– snared my attention: shrill shirt ballooning.)

By whatever means, we came to hear how The Squirrel was disgraced. The father of some junior highschooler had caught him in the sort of bar that conventional society insisted he shouldn’t patronize. Looking back, I find it more than strange that that parent’s presence in the same place didn’t seem to cause a stir. Be that as it may, Mr. Adams paid the price.

The name of the bar, we somehow discovered, was The Hush Room.

Nowadays my tears seem to come as readily as breath, even more readily, in fact, than they did to our English teacher. There on my primitive seat, my weeping surprised me at first, then didn’t. Poor Mr. Adams, I thought. The tiny catch in my throat was the only thing to break the eerie, unwelcoming quiet.

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

This old stone house feels chilly for July.
Even the moon above the ridge looks cold.
At her age, she can go warm up in bed.

 

Will power, strong as ever, snuffs the thought.
She hears bells sounding from the village church.
But is it some particular hour now?

Lord above, has she forgotten something?
She’ll ask her old friend Jane, who rings the bells.
Night or day’s the same to me, says Milton.

He lives next-door. He’d claim the chill means death.
It’s all the poor man seems to contemplate.
She finds the subject boring more than grim.

When blood stops pumping, that can be the end.
A sudden urge to speak surprises her.
Scraps of a Bible verse come back to mind:

… the words of our lips and meditations...
Her memory just isn’t what it was.
Let them be acceptable… and so on.

Her husband would have known the Psalm no doubt.
He’d likely know the whole damned thing, she thinks.
She’d wait him out as he recited it.

There were more times like that than she can count.
It’s not so bad to have no aims in life.
In fact she likes it, has for quite some while.

One autumn night, I went to a 12-step meeting at the local prison. I hope my presence is of some use at a place like that. I’ve spent no real time in jail, not even a whole night, just some metaphorical spanking for civil rights or anti-war protests. Whatever group of demonstrators I’d joined must have struck the authorities as not worth their trouble. But whenever I visit a correctional facility, I shiver at the clang of a steel door behind me.

 

I rode home from the meeting with my friend Stanley. Stan, a mason, is my age but physically twice as strong, I’m sure; likewise his emotional strength. I’d put his height at about 5’9”, and his weight at 250-plus, not a pound of it hanging. He’s foursquare, solid as a Vermont granite block, the sort he hefted around for decades.

 

Stan escaped some lethal habits a half a century ago, a great thing for him but for others too. His reckoning came after he broke a fellow drunk’s jaw. It all started with a minor insult: noticing my friend’s tendency to cross his eyes when drunk, the guy on the next barstool asked if the tears ran down his shoulders when he cried. Stan told him no, he never cried, period, but he was about to offer something to cry about himself. Stan ended up in jail– but for the last time. “So far,” he’s always adds.

 

When you shake Stan’s hand, you know that, even in his eighties, he could still do a lot of damage with those mitts. But the idea of his getting into a drunken brawl is almost unimaginable. Nowadays, he’s the soul of gentleness and restraint. 

 

An inmate at the jailhouse gathering had spoken of his struggles with a gambling addiction, which prompted the rest of the conversation on our way back in Stan’s truck. The man with the betting habit said he wanted out of his ruinous life–what there was of it. He’d lost wife, children, job, car, home. 

 

I’d heard identical tales before, but not from any gambler, and it puzzled me that something other than a drug or a drink could have consequences like ones faced by people with alcohol or drug habits. It wasn’t like gambling could apply a bodily grip. I asked Stan whether he could identify with the man’s gambling compulsion, and he answered that he didn’t think he’d get hooked on betting but didn’t plan on experimenting, because he’d encountered quite a few people in his longtime sobriety who’d gone through gambler’s hell and landed in a place like the one we’d just left. Or else they died. At least this poor addict was still alive. 

 

Like drinking or drugging, Stan told me, the catastrophic gambler begins in a seemingly harmless way: maybe a few bucks bet with a friend on a local high school game, the prize a slice of pizza, a beer, whatever. 

 

Then, euphoric at winning some small wager, he begins to seek higher stakes, maybe a college game or some regional horse race. He doesn’t yet recognize any trouble, let alone disaster, looming, but the stakes keep getting higher. The regional horse race becomes the Kentucky Derby or the Preakness, the college ballgame becomes the NFL Super Bowl, and so on, each venture requiring a bigger outlay. 

 

“The worst thing,” Stan said, “is a little success, maybe a hundred back on a ten-buck wager.” 

 

Sure enough, the guy at the prison described to the group how he once won a bundle by putting money on some long-odds driver in a big NASCAR event. He couldn’t remember which race, let alone the name of the hero. “My big luck never shows up now, though,” he admitted. “Don’t matter what I’m betting on.” He told us he’s always convinced himself that a change in his fortunes lay right around the corner. That conviction among actively addicted people is common to the point of banal: like the guy with the betting compulsion, the drunk and the junkie get a glimpse of what they’re doing to their lives but they figure something will come along to reverse their predicaments.

 

For the gambler, as for substance abusers, things will go south, maybe slowly, maybe abruptly. There’s perhaps a stretch of tardy bill-paying, and when someone, usually a spouse, asks him for explanation, he comes up with a plausible justification: an unexpected, costly furnace repair, a child’s orthodontic expenses, a set of new snow tires. He may even believe, or at least half-believe, these ruses himself.

 

Or perhaps his partner notices some unusual withdrawals from their joint bank account and from various ATMs, or unfamiliar debts appearing on a shared credit card. Again, the incipient addict dreams up some explanation, but, just so his partner won’t worry, of course, he secretly opens a personal account at a different bank, its monthly statements to be mailed to his work address. And he gets another card that shows his name only. 

 

Such tactics don’t hold up. Sooner or later, someone– out of friendship or, in the case of family, fear of financial chaos– confronts the gambler with his problem. Early on, and in many sad cases for good, the addict’s response tends to be the same: full of self-righteous resentment, he barks, “I don’t have a problem!” and, inevitably, “I can quit whenever I want!”

 

So he does. He quits. Like a drunk going white-knuckle dry for a time, he swears off betting for a week, a month, even a year or more. And then, having “proved” he’s able to resist gambling’s  hold on his soul, he begins again, resolving that this time he’ll behave differently, that he’ll go back to his original just-for-fun, penny-ante stuff. 

 

He proposes some rules for himself: one bet a week, say, and not to exceed ten dollars, and he may stand firm for a spell. But his compulsion is patient. It knows he’ll soon enough bend those rules. Just this once, the gambler will pledge, pushing his limit from ten dollars to fifteen, maybe, or placing a second bet within a single week. Just this once… The downward spiral starts  all over again.

 

“It’s just like you and me said, I’ll only drink after five o’clock,” Stan observed, “or I’ll have one can of beer and that’s that. We both know how that story ends.”

 

Having surrendered, however gradually, to his old ways, the gambler discovers that the addiction’s even more powerful than before. Things get worse, though he doesn’t fully recognize as much even now. He’ll have a thought like, “Okay, I do gamble too much, but…” That but can take all sorts of shapes. Eventually, the gambler concludes, “Okay, I overdo it. But the only person I’m hurting is me.” But often he has a wife and children, so this delusion may be his last before he either addresses his fatal dependency or else he loses his life, either literally or metaphorically, a life now well beyond his own control. The bet is in charge of him now, in the same way that booze or smack rules its slaves.  If funds get short, he may resort to thievery, which is what had stuck this fellow in stir at last.  

 

After Stan dropped me off, I stood a while in the dooryard, pondering our conversation. I’d known people who strained Sterno through a sock and drunk it, a lot more who got wasted on Listerine or some other alcohol-containing mouthwash, even on aftershave. I’d heard one ex-con in recovery from drugs say, “I loved the junk, but I loved the spike too.” He explained in a meeting how he once boiled mayonnaise until a skim of oil came to the top, filled a needle with the goo, and shot it into a vein. “Started floppin’ around like a chicken with its head chopped off,” he admitted. Then he added, “I lived to tell you about it. A lot of ‘em wouldn’t. God done that.  I don’t know what else you’d call it.” 

 

In short, I’d seen or gotten word of some truly mind-boggling instances of addicts’ behavior, but for whatever reason the prisoner we’d heard from that night was the first life-destructive gambler I’d ever heard from. 

 

I never saw the man again, I’m sorry to say, though I went back to the same jail some six months later. Of the handful of prisoners Stan and I met and who were still doing time had any idea where the poor gambler went. Perhaps he moved to another part of the state or the country, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn he’d tried some equivalent to the mayonnaise injection, even if I can’t quite picture what that would look like. He may not have come through with similar luck to the ex-con’s, the one who’d lived through that insane injection.

 

People who are themselves unsusceptible to addiction often sermonize, ascribing any self-devastating behavior to a lack of willpower or morals or both. The less judgmental simply tend to be baffled. One of my dearest friends, for instance, said of his alcoholic brother, “Why won’t he just screw the top back on his fucking vodka? If I were doing something I knew was killing me, I’d stop doing it. I mean, do you know any diabetics who hit the grocery store so they can suck up a pound of sugar?” I couldn’t explain the mysterious, deadly paradox to him; I’ve never found the right words, likely because none exist in the end. People drink because they drink, use because they use, and, evidently, gamble because they gamble. No ethical or psychological explanation I’ve ever heard has proposed more precise motives.

 

The plain fact is that heartbreakingly few addicts ever recover, because too few are blessed– and I use the word advisedly– to find total despair and then, more crucially, to decide for themselves they want a way up and out. No blandishment from others, no legal morass, no humiliation, no physical harm will turn the tide unless the sufferer concludes on his own that he needs to change. He must also recognize that his resolve has met with daily failure and that he needs help. This is the crux of twelve-step programs, after all: you’re just whipped, so you need to ask how a  person gets right from people who’ve been where you are and, with a lot of assistance from their predecessors, have found an escape.

 

That evening, after Stan’s taillights flickered out in the distance, I suddenly noticed the crystalline, star-freckled sky, and I thanked God, or whatever it was, that I could be there to marvel at its splendor. I likewise thanked people like Stan for helping me break my own chains many years back. 

 

The gambler at the jail had been a real mess, chalk-complexioned, gaunt, howling like a newborn. For whatever reason –it made me squirm– he kept pulling on his right earlobe until I thought he’d do himself bodily harm. Now and again, he’d bolt up where he sat to pace around behind our circle of chairs, all the while incoherently muttering vituperation at the fellowship’s terse slogans, which were temporarily taped to a wall. 

 

“Easy does it?” he spat at one point. “Gimme a break!” And later, “One day at a time?” how the hell else does anybody live?” 

 

Stan quietly advised him to keep an open mind: “Remember,” he advised, “your own best thinking got you here.”

 

Picturing the gambler later, I added to my general gratitude the fact that I tended not to react the way that fellow did to things I didn’t like. I was thankful too that at least I hadn’t piled his addictive urges onto my own. I didn’t seem to have it in my character to place a bet, couldn’t even imagine how it felt like to be possessed by betting.

 

Then something occurred to me in a flash, something that had always amused me before, and truthfully still does, no matter my inner laughter’s more qualified since that jail meeting and the conversation with Stan riding home. Just under a quarter-century ago, I taught for a semester at a college in the Ticino, Switzerland’s Italian-speaking canton. Our family lived in a little town near Lugano, and for a good portion of our time there, my wife –on leave from her court mediator’s job– home-schooled our youngest. The Swiss tend to be xenophobic, so we were having a real struggle to get her into a communal grade school. Ultimately, we had to enroll her in a Steiner school as a last resort, which turned out to be a gift: she thrived there, learning basic Italian that she still commands, making friends, developing unpredicted skills.

 

As for me, I quickly found my own gift at the college.  One of my English department colleagues was an Irishman, also a writer, a good one, and it felt we’d known each other for years. I can’t recall how the subject should even have arisen, but one day at lunch I learned from him that in Ireland and in the UK, where he attended the University of Birmingham, the card game we call Blackjack goes by the name of Pontoon. One evening at home, I mentioned this, whereupon that same youngest daughter asked what the game’s rules were. Though I’d rarely played Blackjack, having no interest whatever in cards, I was able to teach her. 

 

At ten years old, that beloved girl would for inscrutable reasons sometimes affect a 1940s gun moll’s manner of speech and gesture. Almost every night, about an hour before bed, she’d arch an eyebrow, look at me out of the corner of an eye, and growl, “Pontoon?” Out came the deck. I’ll shortly reveal why she became so fond of our competition. 

 

A bit of back-story. The refrigerator in our rented house was small for my wife and me, a son and daughter enrolled in the local post-elementary American school, and our little card sharp. On Friday mornings, after home lessons were over and I was off teaching, the youngest would accompany her mom across the Italian border to shop for groceries. Afterwards, they’d stop for a pastry and a cioccolata densa, a hot chocolate drink so thick it looked like a melted candy bar. In the interim, my wife would give our daughter a couple of francs and let her wander around the toy shop just across the street from the market. 

 

On the first few visits, the girl sometimes bought Kinder Joys with trifling toys inside, but at least as often, she’d merely look around and then come find her mother. As time went by, though, my wife noticed she’d begun to fetch home some more elaborate purchases– sets of Legos, dolls, stuffed animals, so on. When asked how she could afford such luxuries, that canny daughter rightly pointed out that things were a good deal cheaper in Italy than in Switzerland, and that, having saved up her unspent francs and the small allowance we gave her each week, these things now lay within her reach.

 

Our daughter deployed this deception simply because my wife had forbidden us both to play Pontoon for money. We could play for swapped chores, for time when she could rollerblade at the little park uphill from our house, for a gelato, but never for cash. Frankly, however, part of the kick my daughter and I got out of our games resided in our mischievous defiance of her mother’s injunction.

 

I’ll cut to the chase. To this day, I can’t explain it. I was almost fifty years older than that little girl. She was in grade school, and I’d earned a Ph.D. in  Comparative Literature. Yet for every hand of Pontoon I won, I’d lose six. Often, I lost every last one. We’d limit ourselves to twelve hands, the winner getting half a Swiss franc, and because we played almost nightly and because I kept getting trounced, our daughter usually owned a fair chunk of change by week’s end. 

 

After a month or so, our subterfuge somehow came to light, I think because our sixteen-year-old son may have ratted us out. Properly reprimanded, we continued to play a while for the sake of competition only, but in short order we lost interest. 

 

Both her parents and that girl, now a grown woman at work on her own advanced degree, still tell this Pontoon story to friends, always evoking chuckles, because the whole business was funny. But getting home late after that prison meeting, as I say, I stood in our dooryard for quite a spell before going inside. November’s Beaver Moon hypnotized me. It was by an inner light, however, that I grasped something for the first time. My loss of interest in those Pontoon games after my wife put the hammer down may well have had something to do, at least in part, with the fact that we weren’t betting anymore. I shivered a bit, and not from the night’s chill alone.

 

In short, I came to see my own behavior in Switzerland from an unanticipated perspective. Why, I now wondered, did I persist in a contest that I lost again and again? The answer came to me unbidden: I’d been dead certain that each game would mark the start of a winning streak as long as our child’s. In short, no matter how funny and negligible my gambling proved, I recognized that something lay inside of me that I don’t ever want to nurture.

 

Here in our part of northern New England, there exist no casinos or OTB parlors, but whenever I watch the Celtics or the Redsox, I see advertisements for online betting sites. There they lurk, one keyboard’s click away. From what he’s told me, and I haven’t the smallest reason to doubt him, Stonemason Stan has never looked into any of these facilities. And I don’t mean to either.