I still, today, fault myself in the matter of Denoon’s vitromania, which I was just now beginning to endure the fruits of, all unknowing. Nelson adored glass. Blowing it, casting it, it didn’t matter: he loved it. If I had pressed something home on this subject it might have had a clarifying effect. This was an example of something I could have done more with. I don’t know why I didn’t, unless it was because I heard the keystone vitromania stories at a time when I was still grateful just to be receiving this crumb or that from the table of his mind, or because it was a time when he was feeling fragile in some other area and I refrained on vitromania to be considerate. His vitromania was central, somehow.
What is clearly the core incident involving glass goes thusly. Denoon is a boy, and his father has lately fallen, through alcohol abuse, from the high estate of working in an advertising agency to the low estate of being a salesman for a printing ink and industrial resins firm. The family is living south of San Francisco, on the peninsula. I think Nelson is fairly happy in school, and the house they’re renting abuts some nice ex-farmland or an abandoned orchard in the shadow of the Coast Range. I think their place is near Belmont.
Two conditions conjoin. Nelson discovers a bottle dump out in the orchard nearby. Secondly he inherits a binful of corks, since his father has backslid from an attempt to control his drinking through oenophilia and home winemaking. Nelson’s father was a devious drinker, a master drunk Nelson called him, who was at this point managing to spirit his empty fifths out into the woods and into this dump. I forget whether or not this might have been a preexisting dump with a trove of empty bottles already present when Nelson’s father began using it. I think this may have been the case.
Nelson is eleven or twelve and is only in the most elliptical way aware of the extent of his father’s drinking. He is on the verge of discovering how intense the war over his father’s drinking is, but as yet there are only rumors of war, supposedly.
He saw no secret or unconscious impulse working beneath the surface of what he did. He was certain. His project was aesthetic, accidental. Looking back, he could plainly see the part his project played in proving that the agreement between his parents about his father’s habit was a fiction. The agreement in force was that his father would drink set amounts at set times only. Obviously his father must have been drinking volumes of liquor in secret and using the permitted small amounts to mask his excesses. But Nelson’s proof that the ultimate project was innocent was the ad hoc way he had come to undertake it in the first place.
Whatever else there was in it, there was an impulse against waste. The child is father to the man. His project revealed him ab ovo as the demon recycler and reuser he would become in adulthood. It occurs to me that one source of strain in our relationship was his aversion to the use of innocent clichés on my part, as in The child is father to the man. He subtly communicated that he wished people would avoid them and talk more individually and aesthetically, like the Irish or his father. When I said that Irish rural speech was in fact full of clichés, but clichés he was unfamiliar with, it annoyed him. I also argued that there is an aesthetic involved in the self-conscious use of clichés, which was the case in my case. He only nominally agreed with me, and I could tell he continued not to like clichés to figure in my presentation of self. I gather his father was a very elegant speaker, even inter pocula. A consequence of his attitude was that I stuffed my inner discourse with clichés from time to time, because he was making me feel deprived of something innocent, and that I got him a few times to engage in a game where we would talk solely in clichés, with the loser being the one who ran out of clichés not previously employed first. I always won, but he never played the game as committedly as I did. The project began with discarded bottles and unemployed corks. I felt like pointing out the interesting fact that a child will take the most monstrous of parents and pathetically ferret out and seize on the one or two things that might be considered conceivably admirable, like freefloating eloquence. But to the bottles and corks he added another waste commodity, crepe paper.
The family lives near a high school. In the football season when home games are being played, cars and buses arrive wreathed in crepe paper in the visiting school’s colors. The home team is weak and usually loses. The custom is for the winners to drive through downtown Belmont afterward blaring their horns and lavishly strewing their crepe paper decor into the streets to demonstrate victory and contempt. He resents this for Belmont and decides that a response to it would be to go out and strip the parked cars and buses of their crepe paper while the game is still going on. He organizes teams of junior high boys soon to be in Belmont High to do this, including Peter, his brother.
This is risky, but he continues. He becomes the repository for the expropriated crepe paper, collects it in one of the outbuildings at his place, and then incidentally notices that when rained on, crepe paper gives up its color. So he begins soaking crepe paper in jugs to get different colors. In his mind is the pharmacy his mother goes to, with two giant apothecary jars in the window filled with lovely colored water. I noticed that he seemed to have been forever being dragged along by his mother when she went to druggists and doctors, which was frequently. This caught my interest. Why was he always dragooned? The astounding, to me, answer was that his mother was irresistible to doctors. The family lore, which he as a young boy was included in, was that his mother was so attractive that doctors would lose their ethics and propose things to her. Apparently she was quite beautiful, in a meek and delicate way. She felt better if her son was there, even if only in the waiting room. And she would also take him with her into the examining room if the consultation was for something modest like her chronic rhinitis. I said to him Haven’t you ever pursued the notion that with these doctor visits you were getting a specialized indoctrination in the notion that female beauty was powerful and dangerous? He hadn’t. He was always sorry for his mother, was as far as he had pursued it.
Nelson’s construct of his father was of a person using every ounce of his considerable intellect and force to maintain an outwardly middleclass productive exterior while secretly steadily raising the crossbar on the hurdles to accomplishing this by sinking deeper into the grip of alcohol. I granted that his father’s trajectory was not a straight-line descent, but I was hardly able to credit that at twelve Nelson was still so steeped in innocence as he protested. At that age I knew everything that was happening to me in the pathetic matrix I was in. Why did the beginning of wisdom, which Nelson precipitated with his bottle project, come so late?
Nelson idly started a bottle collection, or more precisely a tinted water collection. He took empty bottles from his father’s bottle dump, soaked the labels off, filled them with colored water of different hues created by soaking crepe paper in different permutations, and then corked them. All this industry was carried out in the depths of the property, not secretly, he said, but privately. At first it was desultory, but he began to work more concentratedly when he saw what the next phase of his project was going to be. These were not only liquor bottles, but any bottle with a mouth he could fit a cork into, such as fruit juice or soft drink bottles. It was a calumny that the bottle structure he made was composed entirely of liquor bottles, and one he would resent forever.