Chapter 3 The Quarterback and the Coyote

Chapter Three

      The Quarterback and the Coyote

      My dad loved sports, women, music, dancing, and drama.  He grew up in rural Utah during the Depression which introduced him to all of his loves.  He played Romeo in his high school Shakespeare production.  He was a virtuoso on the trumpet and used to tease my brother and I when we drove by the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.  He would point to the top of theEastern spire where the golden statue of Gabriel is blowing his horn, and he would say,“Look up there.  See the guy with the trumpet?  That’s Harry James!”  I knew that the famous bandleader was not an archangel and that my dad was making fun of his Mormon upbringing.  It was confusing because I knew my Grandmother sang in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and was a devote Mormon.  I sang in our Presbyterian Church Choir and my brother (and later his daughter) played the Coronet.  We identified with the Melvilles’ musical talents and expressed them in a weird gender role aspect.  My dad’s official sports were football, basketball, and baseball.  His unofficial sports were gambling and women.  He was a Don Juan type of “lady’s man” who romanced, made love to, and abandoned his sexual partners.   One might think his influence ended with his death, but nothing could be further from the truth.

      Twenty years later, almost to the day of my dad’s funeral, I sat down to eat my sandwich at the community college.  I had been substituting for my colleague and head of the Philosophy Department.  One of his students, who had evidently followed me out of class, came to my table and asked if he could sit down and join me in eating his lunch.  I was happy for the company and welcomed him to my table in the middle of the outside dining area.  He told me that he was getting ready for practice.  He was the Shortstop on the College Baseball Team and had come to college on a Football Scholarship two years earlier.  Having been an excellent student in his high school, he came planning to study History and become a high school teacher and coach.  He loved soccer most of all, but chose to play Quarterback on the Football team because he said, “that’s where you get the money and the girls!”  I was wondering where this was leading and why he had chosen me to share this stuff.  Then, as he looked over his back checking to make sure there was no one within earshot, he said he wanted to share a personal problem and was that ok?  “Sure,” I said, expecting to hear about a conflict on the baseball team.

      The Quarterback looked intently into my eyes and said, “I really feel I can trust you with a secret that has been tormenting me.  Just a few months ago, I was driving home from my girlfriend’s house.  I had a few beers and it was just before the Christmas holidays.  We had a great football season.  It was my second year at the college and I was doing great academically, so it was weird, with all that going for me, how I felt sad and angry at the same time.  I got feeling really suicidal and was driving plenty fast along the river, when I lost control of my car.  I hit a telephone pole and rolled my car into the river.  I would have drowned, cause I hit my head hard in the crash, but some guy who lived there on the river rescued me.  That’s what I was told later, I don’t remember it.  I was in a coma for four days and when I woke up I couldn’t pretend anymore.”  This story was sounding a little too familiar; I asked him, “What happened?”

      The Quarterback continued with tears welling up in his eyes.  “For four days while I was in that coma, I was reliving all of the sexual experiences I had with my junior high school basketball coach.  He wasn’t my first homosexual lover; me and my buddy were thirteen.  We had relations, you know, intimate relations, after practice like oral sex and masturbation, you know how guys are.  Well my parents’ marriage was falling apart and sometimes I really needed to get away, so I would go down to the YMCA gym where this twenty-six year old guy, who was my coach at school, worked evenings.  Sometimes he’d let me in late and we’d shoot hoops.  We had a special handshake and everything.  It was great having a guy like that in my life when I needed him.  My buddies and I had smoked marijuana, so when the coach offered me a hit on a joint he was rolling, I said, “Sure, man, I love that stuff!”  and I did.  I also loved the great blow jobs he gave me after we got stoned and listened to music.  He would have his arm around me and I was really turned on, like my dick would get hard as a rock and stick up.  The first time we had sex, I guess he noticed my erection, cause he put his hand on me like my buddy would and rubbed it.  Then he pulled down my sweats and sucked me off.  That happened all the time when I went over to his apartment.  And he’d give me marijuana to take home to share with my friends, like I became the supplier.  We did LSD and magic mushrooms together and went to the beach all the time to get stoned.  I used to love walking on the beach with him.”  “Wow, that’s quite a story”, I said, rather dumbfounded to have all this intimate history pouring out over the picnic table.   “Then what happened?”

      “When I was fifteen, I decided it was wrong, so I told Bear that I never wanted to do that again.  I wanted to stay friends.  I felt so guilty, like a male hooker I guess, cause I was taking all that dope and turning it into cash.  I covered it all up and started fucking every girl I could.  As the Quarterback on the team, I could get girls easy, man I was a fucking machine!  And the guys really respected me.  One of the linemen and I got scholarships here and we got an apartment together, until the accident anyway.”  The tears were beginning to flow down the young man’s cheeks as he continued his story, “So when I woke up in the hospital, I realized I had to tell my parents.  I had to tell them the secret I was hiding for eight years.  I never told anyone.  I was too afraid that I was gay.  All the sexual relations with women didn’t take the fear and shame away.  And on top of everything, Bear’s little boy was six years old by then.  He got married and they had a kid, but I guess he couldn’t stay with her, cause they separated and got divorced.  Just like my parents did.  I kept wondering if he was going to do that to his little boy, like he did to me.”  Wondering what happened next, I asked, “how did your family react?”  “They were shocked, stunned, and maybe feeling guilty, cause they were so busy arguing and fighting with each other that they didn’t notice what was happening with me.  But they were great support when I told them.  They were kind of surprised that I hadn’t told my drug counselor about it though.  I talked to him about my drug addiction during high school, but I was too ashamed to tell him about me and the Bear.”  So why me?  Why does this perfect stranger decide to drop his sexual bomb on me during lunch?  Do I have an invisible sign hanging on my aura that says, Counseling here, sexual disclosures welcome ?

      The Quarterback continued running with the ball.  “You are the only man I have told about my secret.  I have only told one other person besides my family about this, she was my teacher when I was ten.  We’ve stayed friends.  I guess she knew I was having a tough time at home with my parents fighting all the time.  Today I needed to let go of this stuff and I thought you would understand.  Since the accident, I can’t remember dates and stuff, so I can’t be a History Teacher.  When my high school buddies found out about the molest, they didn’t want to have anything to do with me, like I had a contagious disease or something.  They all transferred to four-year colleges, so I don’t have to relate to them here.  I feel shut out of their lives, like they were my best friends!   Man it hurts!” 

      I had the sense that this kid looked like a twenty-two year old man but was emotionally about twelve or thirteen, like he was reliving the incident as the victim and telling the school counselor all about it.  He pulled on my hurt, heart strings.   I finally responded with, “you really honor me with your trust.  That was hard to tell and I’m glad you shared it with me.  I’m a little shaken by the story, but I know how hard it is to be seen differently after being loved and respected by friends.”   I didn’t tell him how much the story brought up for me.  I was used to being seen as the loving, self-sacrificing father and educator and had experienced that image shattering six years before.  The most recent change was being seen as a predator, a vampire in my wife’s eyes and a coyote in my student’s.

      Later that spring, my son, the Wolf, took pity on me.  He gave me his car.  All I had to do was to go get it.  The bus ride north was another adventure filled with surprises.  As we crossed the border of California, the Greyhound bus was stopped by the local sheriff.  We had switched drivers.  Evidently the first driver, who acted like a German neo-Nazi authoritarian, was suspicious about one of the female passengers.   The new driver, an Afro-American, had never been stopped by the police.  We were boarded by flashlight wielding cops, who had an interest in our eyes and stereotypical attire.  All the Mexicans had to show their ID, as did the young skateboarder from Southern California.  They never asked me for anything nor did they ask anything of the nice white folk, but they did find the woman.  They pulled her off the bus, opened the storage compartment under us, and searched all her belongings on the side of the road at 1am, with red lights flashing all of the time.  My face was against the window watching in disbelief.  Was this the America of my childhood?  As it turned out, she had a prescription for her pain killers, but there was also a warrant out for her arrest.  It took the police a while to sort it all out because the boyfriend who had broken her clavicle had accused her of assault and battery after she headed home.  I guess they believed her story, which she told everyone on the bus who was within earshot.  Although we were delayed, I did make my connection with seconds to spare and received the car as promised.

      Years later I discovered that my son’s motivation for giving me the car was to provide me with transportation out of his mom’s life.  But at that moment in time, I believed my children were trying to help me support myself.  I was teaching at the college and had decided to follow my roots as my estranged wife had directed.  I did use Allan Combs and Mark Holland’s book Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster in the Critical Thinking class.  My deer department head wondered how it was relevant, but was more worried about the return of his cancer.  He decided that, “in the spirit of academic freedom”, he would allow me to select my texts.  The compensation was that I would teach Symbolic Logic, a course the deer did not feel competent to teach.  The small, rural community college had to offer that course bi-annually to keep its articulation agreement with the state university system.  The deer had been the Dean of Instruction when those agreements were established and he had a lot invested in following the rules.  Ironically, I was the one with the most experience teaching philosophy.  I also was the only one with a MA in the subject area.  The deer had a BS and a doctorate in Education, but he was very careful about keeping his seniority a prominent fixture in our relationship.  He acknowledged my superior expertise, but that was irrelevant when his job was threatened.  When his cancer flared up, I wound up teaching all his classes in addition to mine.

      That’s how I met Gabriel, the Mexican-American Coyote.  He used to sit in the back of the deer’s Critical Thinking class and argue with me.  Maybe he just enjoyed provoking me and watching the sparks fly.  It wasn’t hard to get me going considering the text the deer had chosen.  Oh yes, it was NOT the same one I was using.  Mine was written by a woman colleague whom I had met personally.  I understood her reasoning in trying to provide a feminine friendly text and my female students told me that not only did they like her writing style, but the way she presented the material was actually helpful and easy to understand.  She wove her experience of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy into her introduction of fallacies. The deer’s text was written by a man and was in its fifth edition.  Those exercises were often slanted against women.  I found them offensively sexist and said so during class discussion.  This had a strange repercussion.  It affected the members of the class very differently.

      The women, Vietnam Veterans, and older students who sat mostly in the back of the class were more engaged and engaging.  Among that group was the Coyote, who would love to ask questions which would lead me on tangents of interest to him.  This would upset the other younger members of the class.  Not only would I stray from explaining the text, I criticized the deer’s text, their beloved father figure’s choice.  This less mature group was also upset because in the course of a lecture, I said the F word!  They organized a protest group, which went right to the Dean with their complaints.  This led to a re-enactment of the pattern of events which had occurred twenty years before.  Fortunately, having been through a learning experience once, I knew how to negotiate the new inquisition.  I got the support of my colleagues.  The deer was supportive but absent.

      Coyote decided to further complicate matters for me during that stressful time by adding an IRS audit by a troll.  Fortunately the deer’s office provided the space in which to be scrutinized by the troll in relative privacy.  One of the teaching assistants would hang around to talk to me after the troll left.  He liked my energy, my poetry, and my willingness to talk.  Then I discovered he was a Mormon, albeit a strange one, who had gone on a Mission lasting four days.  He quit when he realized the male companion would be with him at all times, even when he was using the toilet in public places.  He had traded his Elder’s badge for a ticket to Hawaii and surfing.  My feeling at the time was “once a Mormon, always a Mormon”.  My father went back to his Mormon religion before he died.  I had seen it happen over and over again.  They may stray from the path, but they always come back.  Although I liked the Eagle Scout, his wounded little boy was a Mormon boy like my dad and that meant trouble.  When the semester ended I gave him the poem about my father’s death that he liked, said good-bye, and closed the office door on him.  And I would have done the same with Gabriel, if Coyote had not intervened.

      My Symbolic Logic course had a computer lab in which all the valid argument patterns could be used to create proofs.  Very few of the students had the discipline to complete the course, actually a few passed, but only one man got an A.  During finals week, I gave extra credit to any of the Critical Thinking students who wanted to try the logic lab.  Gabriel, the Coyote, wanted to trade extra credit for the written paper.  His first language was Spanish and although he spoke English well, he had difficulty writing it.  I liked his confidence and wanted to support it, if indeed he wanted to risk his grade on an unknown.  The deer had given me total responsibility for his students and Gabriel was one of those.  Why not have a little fun with this guy?  He certainly had fun with me.  So I said yes. 

      What happened was another Coyote trick.  As I graded papers and corrected tests, the boredom would get to me.  I would go down to the computer lab to check my email and Gabriel would be working on the logic program.  He would ask me a question.  I would go sit beside him at another computer, answer his question and check my email.  This would happen every time I went to the computer lab.  The guy was glued to the chair and he was completing weeks of work in days! 

      As I spent more time with him, I learned that Gabriel had been in the US Navy, was a lifeguard, had moved to America with his dad, who had fallen in love with his English instructor, divorced the mother of his children and married his teacher.  Gabriel had a brother, almost two years older, who stayed in Mexico, but visited every summer.  The father had a Masters in Agriculture and had managed farms for the Mexican National Bank.  His dad was working as a cook and a part-time Spanish teacher, because his Mexican degree was not considered in hiring.  My assumptions about this good-looking Coyote were beginning to dissolve.  I knew he was a very intelligent man, but a precocious logician wasn’t part of the image he portrayed.  He was suave, flirtatious with the women and flashy, very earthy and sensual, almost a sexual presence.  Hum, all the characteristic aspects of Coyote as I was soon to discover.  He kept telling me that I had to read a book called Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore.  He also invited me to hang out with him at the lake where he was the lifeguard.  Sounded like a nice place to grade final papers, so I took him up on his offer.

      The sun was warm at the lake and there were few swimmers in late May.  It seemed strange that such a beautiful day would have me and Gabe sitting alone on the beach all day.  He told me the story of his life and invited me to join him that evening at a community concert.  If I would save a good spot, he would bring his brother, his cousin, and the beer.   And so it happened that I stepped into the next phase of Coyote’s magical journey.

      When Gabriel arrived, the concert was half over.  He apologized, then introduced his brother and cousin.  We popped open some beers and talked.  It seemed that the cousin was the son of a famous woman psychiatrist in Mexico City and that the family property had been used as the set for the movie Zorro.  Although the boys had been working as farm laborers in the pear orchards that day, they were clearly well educated men.  Gabe’s older brother was in veterinary school and was a Capricorn like me.  He kept looking at me throughout the concert and finally asked me if I had read Carlos Casteneda’s work.  Much to his surprise, I said, “No I haven’t, why do you ask?”  Well he had read a lot of books about the Toltec way of power and he knew some people in Mexico he regarded as sorcerers.  He had always wanted to go to an annual meeting in a town he knew about, but he was afraid to go alone.  He wanted me to go with him if I ever visited Mexico.  “Why me?” I asked.  “Because you make me feel safe.  I would feel safe with you there.” was his response.  “OK”, I said, “I’ll read Coyote Blue and I’ll find some Casteneda to read.  Next time we get together, we will at least have that reading in common.”  Then Andres took a silver ring off his finger.  It was covered with astrological symbols and he pointed out there were two Capricorn symbols.  As he slipped the ring on my finger, he said, “that’s you and me, two Capricorns.  This is to remember me by.”

      When I went to get Coyote Blue the next day, I had another student with me.  He had been very depressed, had left medical school, and was taking Critical Thinking to keep connected to academia.  I was giving all of my students the Kiersey/Bates psychological inventory at that time and the Doctor was exactly the opposite of my type.  You could say that he exemplified my shadow.  He was certainly in a very dark space.  He was living in a trailer on his parents’ property.  I was living in a trailer on my estranged wife’s property.  He was an Aries and bought the Dodge Ram sports car we were looking at for my Aries son. He had introduced himself to me during a break in one of the first classes, because I had shared my out-of-body experience following the auto accident in 1966. 

      The Doctor, who was a gay man raised by a strict Seventh Day Adventist mother and an atheist father, had been wishing God would take him out of his misery while he was driving home from medical school the month before.  He got his wish.  He was side swiped by a RV during the torrential rains.  He spun around 360 degrees into the oncoming traffic, hit the guard rails on the opposite side of the freeway, and bounced all the way back into his lane of traffic before his car stopped.  He totaled his car.  It was a miracle he was alive.  He decided that God didn’t want him to die, so he would have to fight with his depression.  I had suggested he use whatever creative outlet with which he felt comfortable to express himself.  His piano was in storage, but he did like to use acrylics and he would paint perhaps.  I told him that there were practice rooms at the main campus, which he could use to play the piano.  He had taken my advice. 

      The Doctor painted three expressions; the first was himself in the arms of Mother Death, the second was an intricate intertwining of earthy vines in a mandala shape, and the third was him in bright yellow and blue walking and being mirrored by his shadow who was connected to his feet.  He also wanted to play me a piano piece, which he had composed ten years earlier at age fifteen.  The original piece had a depressing minor ending.  He had changed it by taking it up at the end and starting the original melody over.  It had the form of a round musical mandala.  We celebrated the end of the semester with lunch followed by a trip to the bookstore.

      I had forgotten my bi-focal glasses, which were in the car.  My driving glasses were all I had.  So I asked the woman in the bookstore if she had a copy of Coyote Blue.  “Coyote Dream?” she asked looking at the computer screen.  “No, Coyote Blue” I repeated.  “That was Coyote Dream right?” she asked.  “No, it was Coyote Blue, but it’s interesting you keep saying dream.  That’s what I do.  I interpret dreams.”  Then she had to share a dream and talk about her dream mentor before we got to the shelves, where one copy was supposed to be waiting for me.  The elder woman put her left hand on the shelf and scanned using her right hand.  I watched through my driving glasses.  She announced emphatically, “No, it’s not here.  No Christopher Moore here.”  “What about the book you are touching with your left hand?” I wondered.  She pulled the book off the shelf and reported, “Hum, Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore.  Well, I guess we do have a copy.”  I bought the book and began reading it that day.  I also found Casteneda’s Journey to Ixtlan in our home/school library, the only Casteneda book we had in the collection had been left there by a student.

      My sense of humor began to return as I laughed my way through the antics of the Coyote Trickster and his native American student in Moore’s Coyote Blue.  I read Casteneda and laughed through it as well.  I understood the old man, don Juan, and why he did what he did to Carlos.  I understood Carlos’ grumbling frustration also, because I used to be just like Carlos, he reminded me of myself.  This was a very interesting place to be.  I could laugh at myself with compassion.  And then Andres, Gabriel’s brother, came to visit. 

      It was summer and I was still living in the trailer using my family’s kitchen and bathroom on the weekends and evenings.  I had been banned from the home/school during the hours of 8am to 5pm.  I was the janitor, the gardener, and the guard who lived in the trailer.  During the regular school year that meant using the toilets in town or at the college.  Summer was a little more relaxed when there were no students about.  My wife and I were talking to each other at the time.  I had pleaded with her to go to counseling with me, but she insisted there was nothing she needed to discuss.  Once I straightened out my sick soul, felt remorse, and asked for forgiveness, she would consider reconciliation. 

      In 1997, after living with my unconscious (and thus autonomous) Shadow for several years, my wife had found support and clarification in the work of Barbara E. Hort, a Jungian therapist.  Reflecting on her own life and the lives of the clients who were attracted to work with her, Hort (1996) articulated a form of the Shadow archetype which is all pervasive in American culture today: the vampire.  In Unholy Hungers: Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves and Others, Hort illustrates several forms of what she calls the vampire archetype, which drains energy from those it is able to beguile.  Hort discusses the character Dorian Gray, who made a compact with the devil, and thus continued to be attractive and handsome.   While Dorian experimented with, and destroyed the lives of others through alcohol, drugs, and sexuality, his soul grew uglier and uglier.  Vampires cannot see themselves; mirrors do not work.  Dorian Gray’s picture portrait showed his real (evil, ugly) nature.  Dorian, repelled by the inner reality, locked it away.  He compartmentalized it, pretending the socially delightful tempter was just a precocious young man who was misunderstood and in need of love.

      This vampire metaphor held tremendous power for my spouse, who finally had a way to express her sense of powerlessness to change our relationship. Hort asks, “And are we so very different from Dorian?  When we dare to examine our behavior, many of us will find that we are most likely to vampirize our parents and our mates as well as our children” (1996, p. 187). When I read Hort’s work, I recognized the archetype in my behavior and set to work to exorcise it, or as I later discovered, to transform it and, following Jung, integrate the Shadow into my consciousness.

      Psychotherapy can accomplish miracles.  Sometimes it takes a humiliating shock to get the client into the counselor’s office, as it did in my case.  Being told to leave the bed and home we had shared for thirty years was a profound shock.  Since my younger boys, whose judgment I trust, agreed with their mother that my behavior was indeed very negative, subverting, and destroying the family’s trust in me, their father, I found Carol, my female psychotherapist/guide into the realms of the underworld.  I had begun to explore the hidden depths of my unconscious when I discovered Theodore Isaac Rubin’s work (1986) entitled Compassion and Self-hate: An Alternative to Despair, which had hermeneutically attracted my attention.  I found it held the key to the locked room where the vampire’s picture awaited discovery.  Three years of weekly sessions, combined with reading Jung, von Franz, and Native American literature, brought out an emerging recollection of my personal trauma growing up in an alcoholic family.  Slowly the traumatic memories of molestation, which fueled my repetition compulsions to get love and acceptance from males having characteristics like my father, rose to the surface.  I continued with the journaling, expressive art, therapy, and dreamwork, which I had learned twenty years earlier from my Jungian mentors Malcolm Dana and Russ Lockhart and my partner Athena Bizakis Melville.  When I encountered the Medicine of the Native American tradition, my life began to change. 

      Part of that Medicine was Andres.  He was just as handsome as his younger brother, perhaps a little more innocent having lived in Mexico most of his life.  He was working in our town and wanted to have a place to shower and sleep for the night.  He was sincere, modest, and humble.  Since the trailer had an extra bed, I offered Andres a place to rest.  He was very grateful, enjoyed his shower and long talk with me.  In the morning he was gone but his visit had not gone unnoticed.  My estranged wife was furious.  She was projecting the vampire onto me and accused me of having an affair with him right under her nose.  Doing my best not to get defensive, I replied, "I  can imagine  how all this looks to you.  But your perception isn't correct.  I'm not having an affair.  I told you he was visiting me.  His using the shower in the house is like my using the shower.  Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and not a penis.  Your Freudian perspective is wrong." 

Trying to put myself in her shoes, I imagined myself as the betrayed companion who felt righteous indignation.  My estranged lover of thirty some years is hanging out with my competition.  He just doesn't appreciate me and all I have done for us and our marriage. It makes me furious to see him so unconscious.  He never got it . Now he's acting out his passive/aggressive stuff again, hurting me and not owning his anger. 

     Shifting back into myself, "Well, she's got a point.  My therapist would see it differently. It is more my need for my father’s love that I am seeking.  My dad looked like those beautiful young  men when I was four.  It is like being stuck in a time warp with the ghosts of my childhood.  New actors in the same play, trying to change the story line and the ending.  But she is wrong this time."  Trying to explain myself and shift the topic, I offered to discuss my research in Coyote Medicine with her, but not too surprisingly, she was not interested.  She knew what she knew. As far as she was concerned, Mike was in denial; it was plain and simple.  She knew what those beautiful young men were all about.  I couldn’t fool her like I could other people.  I was just Dorian Grey, the seductive vampire, sucking the energy out of everyone I touched. 

     As Mother Bear quoted her dad, who used to say, “there is little comfort in being right,” it doesn’t change the situation to understand it, you still have to deal with what is happening.  And so far as I know, all her certainty about being married to the vampire with the truth hidden in the closet has given her very little comfort.  All of her “rightness” keeps her story in place, well defended against erosion and change, or healing the wounds for that matter.  It is certainly a familiar place we all have been. That way one never has to consider the possibility that she/he could be wrong.  When we are ”wrong” enough to seek counseling, we are getting well enough to heal.