Pierson's Autobiography

James Pierson

English 575

March 2, 2011

A Literary Autobiography

     When I had Mrs. Perry for my sixth grade teacher I decided that I wanted to be a teacher like her.  After the parade of bad to mediocre teachers I had endured to that point I got the idea, after watching the way she ran her class, that I had seen the way school should be conducted and that it would be good career for me to be a teacher with Mrs. Perry’s model in mind.  Her happy attitude, the way she treated her students, and her assumption that sixth graders could benefit from being exposed to ideas and literature that most people would assume were over our heads, made her someone I hoped to be like.  

     I entered her class a few months into the first semester of sixth grade.  I had been extracted from St. James Catholic School on P.C.H. in Redondo Beach and placed in Flavian Elementary on Hallison St. in West Torrance because the pastor of St. James Church, Father O’Gorman, came into our living room and called my mother a sinner (in a heavy Irish accent) for using birth control.  He inferred the proscribed practice because my mother had produced only two Catholics.  St. James School was like Crunchem Hall in Matilda.  Third grade was misery.  We had to sit silently most of the day doing math and grammar exercises in a basement classroom with no windows.  Our literature was The Baltimore Catechism.  We had to memorize the answers to questions like, “From whom do we learn to know, love, and serve God?”  Answer: The Catholic Church, of course (the one holy and apostolic church).  Because I refused to shut up and co-operate I was sometimes confined alone to a small, bare room off the principal’s office.  I cried for my dog.  The other school years at St. James were not as bad as third grade but some hardships continued.  We were urged to skip breakfast before the daily communion at seven a.m. in the church across P.C.H. We were taught by the nuns and priests about a possible religious vocation for some of the better of us to join them in their professions. There was always instruction about eternal damnation for our sins.  I sometimes lay in bed fearing that omnipresent and omniscient God knew that I doubted his existence and didn’t like him if he did exist.  The “eternal” part of “eternal damnation” is what worried me most.  Leaving Catholic school and going to Flavian Elementary was like being released from prison after a long stretch.

     Mrs. Perry’s curriculum and demeanor were very different from the nuns’ and lay teachers’ styles at the Catholic school.  Instead of sitting silently working in grammar and math books as I had done for the previous years, at the new school we sang every day and we sounded great.  We had a twenty-five song repertoire.  I learned what a balalaika is by singing about it.  We sang, “The Streets of Laredo”.   I pictured the young, bloody cowboy dying on the dusty street. In Mrs. Perry’s class every day was a celebration of language.

     At some point during the school year Mrs. Perry started reading The Pickwick Papers aloud to the class.  This was the highlight of my day every school day.  I knew that something profound was going to happen sometime during school hours; that I was going to enter the world of the Pickwick Club for twenty minutes or half an hour.  I had read very much before that time but didn’t imagine that language and stories like that existed.  After she finished Pickwick she read Herman Wouk’s great The City Boy.    

     I have been thirsty for literature since I was a toddler.  As a pre-schooler in East Hartford, Connecticut, I begged my Aunt Madeline to read to me.  She read only after the radio soap operas were over.  In early elementary school I bought and consumed hundreds of twelve cent comic books.  It was a five miles round trip bike ride to Sav-on on 190^th St. to buy the books.  I read Dot, Richie Rich, Archie and Friends, Little Lotta and a bit of Superman. I liked the twenty-five cent triple editions of the comic books best.  Around the same time I read stories about kids as sports heroes.  I imagined myself as the hero, scoring the winning touchdown.   I was so obsessed with reading that I wouldn’t stop even after being told to turn off the lights at bedtime.  My father once burst into my room because he saw a red light coming from under the closed door of my bedroom.  The light I used to read under the covers was shining through my red blanket.  My father thought there was an inferno in my room.

     When I was about eight years old my mother bought me a very thick collected works of H.G. Wells.  I told her it was too difficult.  She told me I would grow into it.  At about twelve years old I hit the jackpot while snooping around in my mother’s room.  I found her collection of novels.  The best of the treasure was Harold Robbin’s The Carpetbaggers.  The stories are awesome and the sex scenes are epic. I found time to read The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and the rest of Wells’ fiction between the novels I pilfered from my mother’s hiding place.

     When I was eleven and twelve years old I read about 100 Hardy Boys books, some of them at my parental grandparents’ house.   One of the cool things about staying at my grandparents’ house in Torrance was that they didn’t make me turn off the light at some set bedtime.  I could finish another dollar thirty-five cent Hardy Boys in one sitting, killing the light at two or three in the morning.

     After my year with Mrs. Perry in sixth grade my parents divorced.  My mother, sister and I went from the middle class to poverty when my deadbeat father took off to Central New York State with his new wife and family.  We moved from a single family house on a nice street in Torrance to a series of dirty, roach infested apartments in south Hawthorne.  My grades at Leuzinger High School in Lawndale were horrible.  I never did my homework.  I showed up for school almost every day but didn’t want to do any extra studying.  I just managed to graduate at the bottom of my class.  But I read every day.  In high school I read Catch 22 and Johnny Got His Gun.  These anti-war books have characters that have been mutilated by combat.  They were interesting to me because I was sure that I was destined to be fighting against the N.V.A. and Viet Cong very soon.  During my sophomore year at Leuzinger I went to my step-brother’s funeral.  Two or three months after being inducted into the Marine Corps tall and handsome Larry Robillard returned from Viet Nam in a coffin.  His family was warned not to open the box.  He had been killed by a mine in I Corp near the D.M.Z.  I feared I would be next.

    The draft ended in February, 1972.  I was relieved by the reprieve. After a halting start and a stint on academic probation, I graduated from El Camino College in 1975.  Some of the teachers were excellent, especially English teacher Mrs. Ripley and American History teacher Don Haydu.  Some were wacky.  In Philosophy 100 we studied Plato’s Republic for twenty weeks.  The pipe smoking, Z Z Top looking professor came into class and stared at us until we said something.  He refused to lecture and when asked for his opinion replied, “What do you think?”  My psychology teacher had us sit on the carpet in a circle the entire semester.  The early 1970’s was a time to find a new way of thinking and doing things. 

     The perceived need for spiritual enlightenment was a strong impulse for some of us during this era.  Two of my friends, chubby David Coe and skinny Gary Payne, became ardent born-again Christians after seeing God during one of our Ouija board séances in Steve Barragan’s bedroom in Hawthorne.  Two others at the party were drawn into Scientology.  Some of our little clique went to est and did transcendental meditation.  We rolled marijuana stems and seeds into Zig-Zag papers in hopes of gaining an epiphanic moment or two.  I read Be Here Now about Timothy Leary’s friend and former Harvard colleague Richard Albert’s L.S.D. fueled trips to India for enlightenment at the feet of his guru, Neem Karoli Baba.  I read all of Herman Hesse’s books.  In Siddhartha the hero is an ascetic monk who tells the plum-lipped girl that his talents are that he can wait and fast.  Fasting in the extreme is part of another book I read at that time: Knut Hamsun’s Hunger.  The protagonist eats wood to ease the pain of starvation that he suffers because he refuses to compromise his ideals by getting a job.  After graduating from U.C.L.A. (where I wrote one “A” paper about Michelangelo painting on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel) with a B.A. in English I didn’t want to work at a real job.  I wanted to play tennis everyday. I moved to Europe for four years and at times survived on only peanuts, bananas and water.  I lived in a room with no bathroom and only one electrical outlet.  I had the choice of either the lamp, the electrical space heater or the radio.  On freezing nights in the room above a narrow street in Waregem, Belgium, I wore an overcoat into bed.  While working in Belgium as a very low paid laborer I bought the fattest novel I could buy with my limited money.  Among others I read Anthony Trollop’s Barsetshire novels.  These thick novels, like my triple edition comic books, gave a lot of bang for the buck.  The intricate plots were a good escape from the cold and poverty.  No matter where I was I continued to grind away at the English canon, called by some “books by dead white guys.”

     No matter what happened I kept in mind my goal to be as good a teacher as Mrs. Perry.  I’m still trying to figure out how to guide my students’ learning beyond the lowest level on Bloom’s taxonomy: knowledge or just remembering.  I’d like to guide them to synthesis where they can produce a plan and then a “unique communication”.  So my literacy autobiography ends with me sitting in the Dominguez Hills library filling in bubbles on graphic organizers during the precious last week of vacation before I have to return to work for the spring semester of my twenty-sixth year of teaching.  While in the library I also read G.K. Chesterton’s books about Dickens to find out what one of the expert critics wrote about The Pickwick Papers.  He compares the book to the light that the God of Genesis created on the first day.  “Pickwick is in Dickens’ career the mere mass of light before the creation of sun or moon.  It is the splendid, shapeless substance of which all his stars were ultimately made.”  The bright, shapeless mass that I was when I entered Mrs. Perry’s sixth grade class was partially formed by the adventures of Mr. Pickwick who according to G.K. is, “…the Ulysses of Comedy…sustained by that hint of divinity which tells him in the darkest hour that he is doomed to live happily ever afterwards.  He has set out walking to the end of the world, but he knows he will find an inn there.”