by James Kanady
Pissed Again
Editor’s note: This column appeared in two parts in consecutive weeks of the print edition. It is published here in its entirety.
“Perhaps there was never a time that I was not aware of the power of words.” -Joy Harjo
I was reading by age 3.
My mom told me I’d get so bored after reading newspapers, magazines and Reader’s Digests at my maternal grandparents’ house, that I’d use a step stool to reach the kitchen cabinets to read the labels on cans.
My mom said, too, I was a sickly child, plagued by high fevers, earaches, and just plain hurting. (I remember my folks blowing cigarette smoke in my ears as a remedy.)
It reached its apex at age 3. I had a high fever again and, at one point, had a seizure; my eyes rolled back in my head, and Mom said I shook uncontrollably.
At the hospital in the small Kansas town where I grew up, Pratt, they had me on my back with needles in my arms and legs intravenously feeding me fluids and antibiotics. My doctor, Dr. Thorp, determined the cause was my tonsils flooding me with infection, and I was wheeled into surgery. Years later, Dr. Thorp told me my tonsils were so rotten, they fell part in his hands. Recovering, legend has it I read comic books to my nurses.
I cannot ever remember a time in my many years when I was not reading something. It’s as natural as breathing to me. I recently found my report card from first grade. My teacher was Mrs. Huffman, who, as I recall, was very pretty and stirred feelings I did not understand. Here are some of her written comments on my card:
“Jimmy is doing nice first grade work. He does need to learn to be neater with his written work and coloring.” (Oct. 13, 1961)
“Jimmy is doing well in reading. He is showing progress in his writing but needs to work more on his coloring.” (Dec. 1, 1961)
“He displays a lot of interest in reading.” (Jan. 14, 1962)
“He does still need to practice being neat.” (April 3, 1962)
At least I have proven to be consistent. My handwriting still looks as if done by a rhesus monkey, I still don’t color worth a damn (why stay in the lines if I don’t want to?), and reading is life.
Since I was sick for so many of my early years, comic books were part of the cure. DC with Superman and Batman, of course, Classics Illustrated (all of them I still have, and then Marvel kicked the ass of the comics universe. I had so many of the earliest ones: Spiderman, Hulk, Fantastic Four, Nick Fury, the Silver Surfer, and so many more, all kept safe in a bound notebook.
Book-reading early on were the usual: “Tip and Mitton,” “Danny and the Dinosaur,” all of Dr. Seuss, Uncle Remus, “Little Black Sambo,” Jules Verne, “Smoky the Cow Horse,” “Old Yeller,” H.G. Wells, and so many, many more.
I hit the seventh grade and raised the bar on my reading with Ross McDonald’s entire Lew Archer detective series, Alistair MacLean’s adventure novels, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels (in “You Only Live Twice,” a nude Kissy Suzuki tells James, “You’re looking at my cat.” My friend, Harlan Shinkle, and I figured out the meaning of that pretty quickly.), some Zane Grey, Elmore Leonard’s western novels, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series (a friend asked me what the difference was between Lew Archer and McGee was, to which I replied, “Archer is lonely; McGee has sex in every novel.”), and my ultimate addiction: Bantam’s reprints of all the Doc Savage novels from the 1930s. They were released one every month, so I would trek to Ott’s Magazine Store when the calendar flipped for my fix. (I started buying Elmore Leonard’s westerns because James Bama, who did Leonard’s cover art, also did 60 Doc Savage covers).
Ott’s was my Emerald City. Along the south wall, there was an array of magazines. In the center were racks and racks of paperback books. Antiques were everywhere, as was a lunch counter with icy-cold bottles of Coke, straight from a classic red cooler.
Past the magazines were pinball machines and tables where old men would spend afternoons smoking, playing dominos and shooting the bull. I mean, where else could a seventh grader buy a Playboy and pack of Swisher Sweet cigarillos and not be hassled? And not only Playboys; Ott’s fed my addiction to Mad, National Lampoon, and of course, comics!
In junior high and high school, I discovered, and re-read, Ernest Hemingway’s short stories. I liked the pared-down writing. I tried Helen McGuinness’s intrigue novels, but, damn, they kinda went on and on and on. Eric Ambler and John le Carre’s spy novels (I liked the latter better—dark, haunting, and real), “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “True Grit,” the great Ray Bradbury, and as always, Doc Savage.
An English teacher I had (I won’t give her name) cringed when I did an oral book report on Doc Savage No. 45, “The Men Who Smiled No More,” and later she spoke in a whisper to a classmate, Ray Neal (a great guy), after I effusively praised Doc Savage: “These are beneath you.”
That stung.
But the day I opened my paperback copy of Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” in Mr. Fisher’s science class (when I should have been studying science), was a soul-changer.
“He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.”
Boo who? I swallowed hook, line and sinker. Jem, Scout, Atticus, Calpurnia, Heck, Walter Cunningham, Cecil Jacobs, Tom Robinson, and of course, Bob Ewell. God, I hated him, and I recognized him in some mean old men in Pratt, men completely unlike my father. They frightened me for a reason I didn’t understand until I read Harper Lee’s novel.
I wrote down one line from Atticus that has proven true to this day: “There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried.”
“Mockingbird” made me hungry for more, which led me to…Kurt Vonnegut.
I’d heard of him, and I was desperate to read “Slaughterhouse Five,” so after school one afternoon, I strode into the Pratt Public Library, where a glum librarian with teardrop glasses on a necklace watched me like a hawk. She gave off the vibe of a devoted spinster. Or as my great father, Virgil, would say, “Oh, Jimmy, she’s as dried up as a biscuit.”
I walked past her steely gaze without a word. In the card catalog, I thumbed through the Vs and—no Vonnegut! Steeling myself for the encounter, I strode confidently to the circulation desk.
She leaned over. “Yes?”
“I want to read some Kurt Vonnegut books. You don’t have any.”
Her lips pursed so tightly, her entire face drew into the center where her very head looked puckered. “We don’t have any by him.”
“Why?”
“They are not appropriate.”
“Who says?”
“I say.”
“That’s censorship!”
“I don’t do censorship. I do…selective buying.”
“It’s the same thing.”
She crossed her arms. Years later when I thought of this, I figured she crossed her legs in exactly the same way to block potential suitors.
By the time I walked home, I was steaming mad. I threw my books down (no backpacks then) and screamed.
My dad—clad in his white JCPenney briefs and (what we now call) a wife beater t-shirt—lowered the local Pratt Tribune he was reading and asked, “What’s the matter with you?” He’d just gotten home from his run as a Rock Island Railroad engineer.
I told him.
“What?” He got up and went to their bedroom and came out in bib overalls, T-shirt and wingtip shoes. “C’mon,” he waved.
In my basement room, I helped him tape-measure my west wall. He scribbled it all down in a pocket notebook. “Let’s go.”
We got in his Chevy Impala and drove to Green Lumber north of the railroad tracks. “Pud” Green was the owner then, and he and my dad cut and loaded the necessary lumber.
In my room, I helped dad put up bookshelves from ceiling to the floor. He did most of the work, of course, while I was the “git this, git that” boy. Once we were finished, dad examined his work, put hands on his hips, and said, “Fill ’er up.”
And fill it I did.
When I moved to Austin in 1975 to attend the University of Texas, my reading and music passion exploded. I remember sitting at an athletic field across the street from my tiny efficiency apartment complex, reading Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine.” I was so enamored, I wanted to write down quotes to save forever, so I jotted them down in a spiral notebook.
I soon filled that notebook, so I bought another and then another and another. I finally moved these pages into a huge, three-ring spiral notebook that I am still adding to. I can trace my life through these quotes. I often know where I was at the exact moment when a certain passage reached out from the book I was reading and shook me to my soul.
Moving from Pratt to Austin was the greatest thing I could have done. I had to. Something without words told me to go and experience places and people foreign to me. It was a revelation.
My first day for registration on the University of Texas campus was an epiphany. I looked out at 50,000 students and felt like Don Knotts with a moth-eaten straw hat, carrying a battered suitcase with a busted latch closed shut by hay bale twine.
I was soon confident I could handle UT because of the great teachers I had at every level in high school and at Pratt Community College. Those tremendous educators gave me the tools.
I wrote to one of my Juco teachers, Robert Romine, to thank him for what he instilled. Great teachers do this. Sadly, teachers are battered from all sides these days by pressure from ideologues and political expedient puppets so that many great people don’t want to go into the profession.
It is abysmal. A true disservice to children. And toss in social media and disinformation and conspiracy theories? Our children are being groomed to be compliant livestock, easily led. A public service announcement when I was a kid had this tag line: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”
Today, the line would be “A mind is a terrible thing to use.”
And now, at my advanced age, I’m still shoving real paper into my mental wood chipper. My goal isn’t to be a learned person but a learning person. The former is a dead end, the latter a lifelong adventure.
In a June 2023 essay by the great A.O. Scott, he writes that the right and the left “share the assumption that it’s important to protect vulnerable readers from reading the wrong things,” and they, of course, decide what is wrong. He goes on to say “[. . .] the reading crisis isn’t simply another culture-war combat zone. It reflects a deep ambivalence about reading itself, a crack in the foundations of modern consciousness.”
But this modern crisis has historical precepts. Scott brilliantly speaks of the fear of literacy among the laboring classes in Europe and America and mentions theorist Bernard Mandeville, who said reading, writing, and arithmetic were “very pernicious to the poor” because they would breed discontent. “Men who are to remain and end their days in a laborious, tiresome and painful station of life, the sooner they’re put upon it at first, the more patiently they’ll submit to it for ever after.”
He follows this with the anguish Frederick Douglass felt after reading a collection of speeches and essays about liberty: “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing. No matter what, to get rid of thinking!”
That is what I have loved about reading since before I could conceptualize it. The awareness and wonder, the danger and accompanying unsettled feelings, the joy and madness, the arousal of forbidden subjects, and most of all, empowerment and connection to something greater than myself.
I remember the day reading gave me a grand epiphany. I was reading the Ray Bradbury novel, “Dandelion Wine.” It was the chapter where his 12-year-old protagonist, Douglas Spalding, realizes he will someday die. Man, I felt it and trembled closing the book.
That was the moment I became a fledgling adult. With my eventual corporeal end branded into my soul because of Bradbury, I realized that each moment counts. Don’t waste a second. Appreciate life in all of its contradictions.
My life was no longer an unconscious walk though random incidents, with me at the center. My life is connected with every other man, woman and child, united by our temporariness. My life is connected to what Dylan sang: “every grain of sand.” Scary at first, but glorious.
That’s what Ray Bradbury revealed to me. That’s what reading did for me. Reading makes uncomfortable truths tangible. We all need that at every age, especially among so-called adults, who’ve stopped reading and challenging themselves. A genuine life means learning, growing and pushing beyond any and every boundary.
The ideological gatekeepers have no right to keep Truth out of the hands of people and justify it by saying they are protecting them. Keeping them safe? Not safe, but mentally imprisoned. It’s a disingenuous pile of bovine scat. Keeping them safe from what—life?
My great dad. He came up through the Great Depression, fought the Nazis, was the union representative for the railroad and was the greatest father a kid could ever have because he refused to put boundaries on my mind.
He and all those WWII soldiers didn’t fight, die and become maimed so we could cower before fear-mongers. He would be outraged by this era. Remember Plato: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
The remedy?
Do not live your life inside a phone. Get a library card or build your own shelves and follow my dad’s advice: “Fill ’er up!”
Dad, I did, and I still am. I carry your spirit with me.