by Joe Palmer

TS Admin : Off the beaten track.

From an epithet of Demeter, the earth-goddess [Thesmo-]: casting pigs into chasms, and mixing their decaying flesh with earth to insure fertility

My office mate wore a bow tie with electric bulbs connected to a battery in his pocket so that he could turn them on and off to emphasize the points he was making in his lectures. He also used a stuffed parrot perched on his shoulder. On more solemn occasions he sometimes wore a long, brown tie made of ratty rabbit fur, or he might wear a red silk tie that would coil up under his chin when he touched it, not often, though, for it had to be removed in order to straighten it out. He kept a fistful of tinkling keys to shake at the end of a chain clipped to his belt to get his students’ attention. In those days grownups did not wear running shoes except when they were running, nor did they wear colorful ties with plaid work shirts or baggy, pleated trousers with wide braces in public, unless they were clowns in a circus, but Dick Picker did. A slight, pink, aging Puck, his face needed a moustache so that you would notice it.

Dick Picker had been teaching English in Lebanon at the American University for twenty years when all Hell broke loose there among the Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Druzes, so he took his money and ran home to Vermont where he built a stunning house, a refuge in the mountains. He had a doctorate in English education, so he soon found a professorship in nearby Montreal, teaching teachers to teach English. The courses he taught included Stage Makeup, Clowning, and Using the Tape Recorder.

I too had fled to Montreal, after seeing the world through the eyes of Somalis, Thais, and Egyptians. Dick and I had been students at the same university and we were nearly the same age, so I was sure we would get along together. I was pleased when I learned that he and I would share an office room at the Centre for Teaching English as a Second Language, an unfortunate name of the sort that spawns acronyms: The TESL Centre. An offshoot of the English Department of Sir George Williams University, a city college for working youths whose campus was the YMCA buildings in downtown Montreal, it was created to improve the English skills of French-speaking teachers of English, using money from the federal Liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Trudeau wanted Canada to be like him – rich, sophisticated, and bilingual – so they hired a lot of French and English teachers.

Sir George sent an old English teacher to Michigan to find out about teaching English as a second language, and then she and the deans hired Dick and me to be shamans facilitating the mysterious and magical – language learning.

Nobody knows any more about language acquisition than a farmer knows about agriculture. A farmer puts seeds in the ground, prays for rain, keeps the weeds down, and expects a crop to harvest. And all the while the process remains miraculous and the reasons why mysterious. So it is with language learning. Let it happen or start it early, and it grows by itself. Try to raise a crop by planting in September or sowing in soil where a good crop of another kind is already reaching maturity, and see what happens. All language teaching is interfering with nature. Ideally it does little harm, being mostly a waste of time.

Picker had saved his salary when he lived in Beirut, and he had inherited his parents’ estate in Connecticut, so he hired a congenial, gay architect and built his dream house up in the Green Mountains a few minutes from civilization, a three-storey Gothic fancy with glass walls and a stunning great room, and a loge overlooking the main floor, a “passion pit” strewn with oriental pillows, a male harem reached by a spiral stairway. In the black-tiled bathrooms there were showerheads at crotch level too. He called it Xanadu after the place where Kubla Khan decreed a “stately pleasure dome”, whatever that might have been, in a fragment of poetry titled ‘Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream’, written while the author was using opium, dreaming about Kublai Khan and the Mongol conquest of China, or of Paradise with caves of ice. There was plenty of ice up there in the mountains where Picker built his house.

The first director of the TESL Centre, our colleague, was an intense Scotsman named Ian Magoon, who looked at his situation in the university and promptly resigned. He was used to Edinburgh. He is remembered for turning a profit on the house he had bought in Montreal and on the Volvo automobile he had imported tax free, and the very thin slices of salmon he served as a main course at dinner.

With Magoon gone, Picker took the job and got the dean to hire his personal friend Sedley Marr, a rotund, African Bermudan, a former ballet dancer with no academic credentials, to supervise the numerous English courses offered to the public. Their collaboration mostly concerned whom to invite to spend the weekend and holidays with them at Xanadu, instead of schedules and physical plant and the teachers and curricula. When Sedley ordered several rooms of kindergarten furniture for the classrooms rented by the university for evening adult classes, instead of full-size chairs and tables, Dick had to do a buck-and-wing and a do-si-do down at the deanery to get Sedley off the hook. Dick finally had to pay for having all that furniture trucked back to Toronto to the supplier.

In those days much of Sir George Williams University was in a high-rise building downtown in Montreal, the Hall Building. A fifteen-storey slab of glass and plastic that occupies most of a city block, it looks like the monolith in Kubrick’s film 2001, or one of the buildings of the World Trade Center in New York. The rooms and halls are hung around a central core that holds the utilities and elevators. The floors contain the air-conditioning and heating ducts, the electrical wires and plumbing. Many of the rooms have no natural light, an inhuman fault now forbidden in Sweden and other civilized places. The windows of the Hall Building do not open. Usually the building requires no heat because the living, breathing occupants provide an excess of excited molecules.

In that fetid warren I shared an office room with Dick Picker, two walls away from light and the notion of air, inside the outer ring of rooms. No strangers to squalor, we had both lived in the Middle East, so at first we had fun with our greetings and small talk in Arabic, to the amazement of everyone. “Ya, Habibi, Insh’allah, El-hamdu-l’illah!”

Dick would flash the bulbs on his bow tie. Or do a soft shoe in his Hush Puppies, oblivious to the crowded rooms so much like a Middle-Eastern native quarter.

When we had meetings with individual students, one of us would have to leave the room because the air got so heavy and polluted we could hardly breathe. Of course, in those days everyone smoked cigarettes, cigars, and pipes, even during meetings. The dean of the faculty of arts, God rest his soul, used to smoke his pipe during interminable committee meetings, smoking cigarettes while it cooled off between loads of tobacco. Then he would fire up the old smoke stack again, using the pipe stem as a pointer in the smoky air between puffs.

So it is that when you live in a miasma, in a coal town or near industrial factories or paper mills, you get used to the stink. You accommodate to the vile stuff that fills your lungs such that you notice variation in the airborne poisons that surround you, like a fish in water. You stop noticing the stink of the industrial waste, the stale perspiration, the colognes, the halitosis, the toe jam around you. They become part of the ground of your being against which a new stink stands out.

I’m not obsessed with personal hygiene, or fussy about the way others smell, as long as they keep their distance. Of course, I change my socks and my mind regularly. However, I began to think that my office mate must have some unusual habits that had caused a different mix of the office fog we lived in. Onto the base odor of civet, musk, and ambergris a new note floated occasionally, a ping, a slight, fading sound that tickled the nose, an ester, a vinegar or ether, not an essential oil or flowery compound. Dick had on occasion used patchouli, but the new odor was not the heavy, minty din of the East that patchouli calls up. No, it was more animal, more basic and subtle, unlike the fanfare of baking bread.

Live and let live, I thought. The notion of “lifestyle” was new and fashionable then. So what did I know about how those people lived? Those people? They were not in my experience. I had been married most of my life and had a bunch of kids. Walk in a man’s shoes for a mile, and you can steal his shoes and he can’t catch you because he’s barefoot. Or something. I was confused by the annoyance of the noisy odor that seemed to get worse every day and by the social distance between Dick and me. I didn’t know him well enough to complain.

I was reluctant and embarrassed to mention how cloying and uncomfortable our shared cubicle had become, that windowless box, like a locker full of old sneaker shoes in a gymnasium.

Our office room, like all the others, was ventilated with forced air that flowed through ducts from a cleaning and cooling plant situated on the roof of the building. On any given day our cell had been no more fetid than any other, but for weeks a malodorous whoosh had increasingly accompanied the whisper of air from the vent in the ceiling.

I found myself avoiding the room. I would go into it early, get my papers and books, and hide in one of the teachers’ lounges to make preparations and write. One morning I was at a table reading Beowulf when Dick walked in the room carrying his briefcase. He greeted me and offered to fetch me a cup of coffee. He wanted to talk to me, he said.

“So, what’s up?” I asked.

“It’s a matter of personal hygiene,” he said.

“Yours or mine?”

We smelled each other. He smelled like Canoe, an expensive aftershave lotion. I smelled like Lilac Vegetal from a barbershop.

What was missing were the foul-smelling, incompletely oxidized products of the typically anaerobic splitting of proteins by bacteria and fungi that we had grown to loathe in our Hades, our Hell, our cell in the offices of the TESL Centre.

But neither of us was the Lord of the Flies.

It was the body of an engineering student from Ontario, a nerd. His body was stuck in the duct that aerated our wing of the Fourth Floor, having fallen from an access door on the fourteenth floor. Murder or suicide we never found out. Nobody had missed him. It was weeks before the body was identified.

All that while everyone had thought their colleagues stank.

–X–X–