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No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home - Softcover

Offutt, Chris

 
9780684865522: No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0684865521 ISBN 13: 9780684865522
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

In his fortieth year, Chris Offutt returns to his alma mater, Morehead State University, the only four-year school in the Kentucky hills. He envisions leading the modest life of a teacher and father. Yet present-day reality collides painfully with memory, leaving Offutt in the midst of an adventure he never imagined: the search for a home that no longer exists.
Interwoven with this bittersweet homecoming tale are the wartime stories of Offutt's parents-in-law, Arthur and Irene. An unlikely friendship develops between the eighty-year-old Polish Jew and the forty-year-old Kentucky hillbilly as Arthur and Offutt share comfort in exile, reliving the past at a distance. With masterful prose, Offutt combines these disparate accounts to create No Heroes, a profound meditation on family, home, the Holocaust, and history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Offutt is an award-winning author and screenwriter. He worked on the HBO drama True Blood and the Showtime series Weeds. His books include Kentucky Straight, The Same River Twice, The Good Brother, Out of the Woods, and No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and many other anthologies. He lives near Oxford, Mississippi.

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Chapter One: Job Interview

Kentuckians have a long tradition of going west for a new life and winding up homesick instead. Some went nuts, some got depressed, and some made do. I did a little of all three, then got lucky. I finagled an interview for a teaching position at the only four-year university in the hills. It was more of a high school with ashtrays than a genuine college. I should know. Twenty years ago I graduated from there.

Morehead State University began as a Normal School to produce teachers for the Appalachian region, then progressed to college status. During the 1960s it became a full-fledged university, but natives still referred to it as "the college." Very few local people attended MSU. I had gone to grade school, high school, and college within a ten-mile radius. It wasn't until much later that I understood how unusual this was, particularly in such a rural environment.

As a theater and art student I supported myself by working part-time for the MSU Maintenance Department. Few of my fellow workers had finished high school and none had gone to college. According to hill culture, you were a sinner or an outlaw, a nice girl or a slut, lived with your folks or got married, worked at maintenance or went to college. This either/or mentality is a product of geography. Land here is either slanted or not, and you lived on a ridge or in a hollow. That I was simultaneously engaged in both attending college and working at maintenance astonished my coworkers and faculty alike.

I worked on the painting crew specializing in the outdoor jobs no one else wanted. Many times I painted a curb yellow in the morning, then stepped over it on my way to class that afternoon. Teachers ignored me when I wore my work clothes. My maintenance buddies felt uncomfortable if they saw me going to class, and I developed the habit of eating alone to conceal the book in my lunch bucket. Now I was back to interview for a job as an English teacher.

Before the interview I borrowed a tie from Clyde James, a man who'd been my neighbor and baby-sitter when I was four years old. He now ran the MSU student center. Clyde was something of a clothes horse, and rumor had it that his closets were carefully organized so that he didn't wear the same outfit twice per year. My lack of a tie was no surprise to Clyde, who was delighted to assist me. After narrowing his choices to three, he picked a tie that vaguely matched my slick clothes -- dark pants, light shirt, tan jacket. I'd bought a brown belt for the occasion, my single concession to formal dress. Clyde thought brown shoes would have been better than black, but I could pass. He deftly tied a half-Windsor knot, looped it beneath my collar, and adjusted it to a snug fit. The material was blue and gray silk, with a touch of red -- perfectly conservative. He smoothed my collar and sent me out, calling me "Prof Offutt."

As I left the building, two maintenance men emerged from a basement door of the student center. Flecks of dry paint spattered their clothes. They leaned against the wall and lit cigarettes just as I had done twenty years before. The basement door was partially concealed by a wall that rose five feet to street level. It was the ideal hidey-hole, a bunker from which you could spy a boss in plenty of time to return to work.

"Hey boys," I said. "Working hard?"

"Hidy, Chris," the younger man said. "Ain't seen you in a while."

"Is that Awful Offutt?" the other said. "By God he's growed, ain't he. Want a cigarette?"

I shook my head. Men of the hills don't have the custom of shaking hands or hugging or cheek-kissing. We either beat on each other or look away and mumble. I had known the younger man all my life. Otis was from Haldeman, my home hill of two hundred people.

"How's your mom and dad?" he said.

"They're all right. And yours?"

"Same. I see your mom in town, but your daddy don't hardly leave the house, does he."

"Not much," I said.

"What's he do?"

"You'll have to ask him."

The older man was named Billy. We worked together twenty years before, and he had mistakenly believed that I sought the salaried maintenance position he coveted. Billy was my age but looked fifteen years older. His palms were the most heavily callused I'd ever seen.

"Kenny still boss?" I said.

"He died," Billy said.

"Big Bob?"

"Retired."

"How about that Johnson?"

"Which one?"

"From up Christy Creek," I said. "Used to drink a half-pint before lunch."

"Oh, him. He's in the state pen."

"Well, ain't there nobody still yet there?"

"Me."

"You must be the boss man now."

"Naw," Billy said. His voice took on the angry tone I remembered. "They gave it to somebody else. What are you doing back? Going to court?"

"No, why?"

He lifted his chin in a gesture toward my tie.

"You're dressed for it."

"These are my job-hunting clothes."

Otis grinned at me. Within the contours of his face I saw the child I recalled from our shared time playing in the woods. We knew the secrets of each other's scars.

"You coming back?" he said.

"Trying to. I got an interview today."

"Where at?"

"The college."

"They're hiring," Otis said. "I don't know if you can get on with the painters, but they need movers. You go in there and talk to Amos Riddle. You know any Riddles? They live up on Redbird."

"It's not for maintenance, Otis."

"It's not."

"No," I said. "It's for teaching. You know, to be a teacher."

Otis and Billy erupted with laughter, bellowing as if their lives lacked mirth and they were grateful for the joke. When the sound trailed away, they looked at me and I knew they were waiting for the truth.

"I swear, boys," I said. "I took it up out west."

"Awful Offutt ain't changed a bit, has he," Billy said as he laughed again.

"You should have heard him when he was little," Otis said. "He told us there was a whale under the grade school."

"I didn't know any better."

"What I want to know," Billy said, "is who told you they were hiring maintenance men to teach college?"

They began to laugh again, their breath coming hard before shifting to smokers' rasping. They calmed themselves, glanced at each other, and began to giggle.

"Hey," Otis said. "Maybe you can put in a word for me. I'd like to be the boss of a girls' dorm. One of them live-ins."

"All right," I said. "How about you, Billy?"

"I'll take president. Then I can fire you for lying."

"I ain't lying, boys."

"The truth has got to be in him," Otis said. "Because it ain't never come out yet."

"What time is it," I said. "I got that interview at nine o'clock."

"Now I know you're lying," he said. "It's five after."

He showed me his watch, and I hurried away, their laughter hanging in the air like pollen. I understood Billy and Otis's consternation at my being a teacher. As a student in the seventies, I was usually stoned on marijuana. My work strategy had been to complete my task at a furious speed, then rest until quitting time. Neither Otis nor Billy had any reason to believe I had changed. That any maintenance worker, particularly one with my habits, could become a teacher confirmed all their fears and suspicions about the university. B.A. stood for "Big Asshole," B.S. stood for "Bull Shit," and Ph.D. stood for "Piled High and Deep." At MSU the wisest people worked for maintenance and the stupidest had the most letters after their name.

College teachers were rich, snobby, and dumber in the head than a hog is in the ass. The good one was rare, yet untrustworthy, like a dog that licked your hand but had a history of biting. The administrators were worse -- bigwigs and muckety-mucks who possessed more money than God and were...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0684865521
ISBN 13 
9780684865522
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
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Niederlande