The Sweater

First … introductions. My name is Chuck Miller, and I’ve posted on the various Deadspin / Splinter / io9 pages under the name “Chuck the Writer.” It’s nice to meet all of you, and I know it would be better under less stressful circumstances, but hey, a meeting is a meeting.

Over on my personal weblog, I’ve chronicled the rise and fall of my life’s adventures. It’s uplifting and it’s cathartic and it’s everything a weblog is supposed to encompass.

But you’re not reading this specifically for my history. I figured that this post would be a nice “contribution” to what Manny Both-Hanz is trying to create. It may be an online panic room after all the crapola at the old sites … but seeing as we’re all here, let’s share some fun stories.

One story I have shared over the years involves a bit of college life. College life can distract you in an instant – something going on at home, something going on in town, your favorite band is on its way to play a concert nearby, your have two pairs of undies left on Monday and no money for laundry until the end of the week – that kind of stuff.

And sometimes the distractions can appear in – shall we say – the most unlikely or unexpected of sources.

It’s early spring, 1984, and I’m taking Professor Wagner’s literature class – the topic being William Faulkner and his Southern literary contemporaries. And when it came to our midterms, I had studied all semester and was ready to ace the test. Trust me, I read the books.

I should note that it was a chilly March day and my college was in the Northeastern United States, and we were still wearing our coats and boots to get from building to building.  The upstate snow hadn’t melted, and most likely that winter it wouldn’t have melted until at least early July.

Now one of my classmates, as far as you know, was named Renee.  I liked Renee.  She was smart and pretty and she kinda liked me, in a platonic sort of way.  Renee and I did a few lunch dates at the dining hall, saw a couple of movies together on campus, and that was about it.

As Renee arrived for the midterms, she down at the desk to my right, took her big fluffy coat off and draped it over the back of her chair.  I noticed she was wearing a coarse grey sweater with a couple of buttons on the front.  Very stylish.  Renee was always stylish.  She could wear a burlap sack and it would look like a Givenchy original on her body.

Okay.  Time to concentrate on my test.  Professor Wagner wrote the questions on the blackboard. Three essay questions required for the midterm. Right in my wheelhouse.  I should be able to ace this with a kick-ass essay and be done for the day.

I started crafting my arguments of comparison and contrast between the works of the authors Professor Wagner wrote on the board.  I can handle this.  Ballpoint on the paper.  And away I go.

I got through the first essay question, and began crafting my arguments for the second one.  I glanced at some of my classmates.  The last thing I wanted to do was finish the test up and hand my answer in first.  Sometimes it’s just better to pace yourself, even if you’ve got the answers finished – look everything over, erase a word, write it back on the paper so that everyone else thinks you’re correcting a mistake – then hand your test up ONLY after two other people have handed theirs in.

So I glanced to my left.  Guy looks like he’s still struggling to figure out what to write.  Probably taking this class pass/fail anyways.  No probs.

And then I glanced to my right, over at Renee.  As I looked over, I noticed that the stitches on Renee’s grey sweater were wide and expansive, almost as if the sweater had been knitted with thick needles, giving the sweater a meshy, airy appearance.  At the right angle, I could actually see her bare arms through the sweater fabric.  I bet that sweater must keep her cool and warm at the same time, I mused.  Back to the test.  Stop staring at Renee’s sweater.

Second essay question is done.  I’m gonna ace this class, I know I will…

Check to my left.  The guy’s using his pencil eraser to clean out the wax in his ears.  I got this.

Check to my right.  Renee’s still working on her paper… I’m really digging that grey sweater of hers, with the two little buttons in the front –

And then I realized…

THOSE WERE NOT BUTTONS.  Those were her…

Oh my.  Renee was indeed wearing a sweater – but, um, as the cold air in the drafty classroom reached our chairs … well… you use your imagination.

I didn’t have to use any imagination.

Now I was in trouble.  I needed to concentrate on this test.  But oh my Lord… in that sweater, Renee looked absolutely breathtaking…

Come on, Chuck, focus.  Think about the Long Hot Summer.  Think about As I Lay Dying.  Think about whatever might be going on in Yoknapatawpha County.  Stop thinking about…

And you can’t just say, “Hey Renee, could you please put your coat on, that sweater you’re almost wearing is distracting me,” because that would be totally embarrassing.  And you don’t want to be a distraction to everybody else.

Concentrate, Chuck.

As God is my witness, I bore down.  I stared at my notebook until the little blue lines on the paper burned horizontal lines into my eyes.  At that point, I remembered that Faulkner, upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, gave a speech regarding the importance of finding what was the core essence of any writing project.

“The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man.”

And I declined to accept any failure on my part.

I bore down and, pulling everything out of my heart and out of my soul, I crafted one of my best essay responses to Faulkner’s work.  I was fully focused, like a sniper with the enemy in my crosshairs.  I then went back to the second essay question, and erased the final few sentences – which obviously were written while I was under the condition of mammarius distractus – and rewrote and re-clarified my arguments.

Final results – A-minus on the midterm.  I’ll take that.

Renee and I stayed friends that year, but after I graduated from college, we lost track of each other.  Since we weren’t in the same graduating class, we didn’t even meet up when our reunion classes had their anniversaries on the Hill.

But through it all, I hope she’s doing well.  And if she’s still got the sweater… then I hope her boyfriend or husband enjoys watching her wear it.