The knock came at 2 a.m. Opening the door of my sophomore dorm room, I saw him standing there, with a sleeping bag and a sack of belongings.
“Can I crash with you?” he asked.
I was both surprised and not surprised. Mark had an uncanny knack for finding me wherever I happened to be, even when we hadn’t been in touch, and a habit of appearing unannounced.
He stayed only about three days this time. I had a roommate who thought crashing had something to do with drug trips, and who in any case didn’t appreciate having a stranger sleeping on our floor.
Mark spent most of this visit trying to persuade me to leave college and join him on the road. He also developed a crush on my friend Danna, whom for some reason he kept calling Donna.
One time the three of us were going somewhere by foot when we came to a small ditch, which we easily jumped. “You know, Donna,” Mark said, “out West, they’d call this Big Shit River.”
Mark sat in on a philosophy class I was taking. Afterward, he handed me a short-short story he had written, about a college student who was sweating to turn in a paper to make his professor happy. The story ended with the student struggling to decide whether to stay in school or drop out and experience real life. Mark had named the student in the story Steve, of course.
Mark returned to the road while I remained in college, writing papers and taking tests and securing a degree. I would be lying if I said his way of doing life didn’t tug at my thoughts, though.
We met in our high school’s creative writing class, which was really just the standard 11th-grade English lit course with a few writing assignments sprinkled in: study Elizabethan sonnets for a week, then write a sonnet; that sort of thing.
Mark and I each wrote a short story that we read aloud to the class. Mine was a somewhat sappy tale about a caveman who stopped war, invented music and found true love (a classmate told me I was a sentimentalist, which I don’t think she meant as a compliment).
Mark’s was a first-person story about a man who comes upon a woman bathing in a river beneath a bridge. At the sentence, “She stretched her naked body luxuriantly,” all the girls giggled and our teacher turned beet red. Afterward, Mark informed me that she told him never to write anything like that again, not in her class anyway.
Parenthetically, English teachers sure were prudish back then. This was a woman who could recite Chaucer from memory in the original Middle English. I guess she skipped past the bawdy parts.
My own brush with high school censorship happened in journalism class. I turned in an editorial for the school newspaper lambasting the mayor of Mobile for a variety of crimes he had recently committed against—ironically—free speech. Our advisor, Miss Hinz, tore it up in front of me. “You can’t criticize the mayor!” she calmly explained (I jest; she was shouting and her hands were trembling as she shredded my neatly typed pages).
The suppression of words and ideas always got my ire up, but I think it just bemused Mark. “None of this matters,” he would say, sweeping his hand to indicate the school, its teachers, the other students, Mobile itself, and all the people who took things way too seriously. It was the pronouncement of an existentialist, an identity he embraced.
We were two nonconformists in a sea of conformity, or so we imagined. My rebellion was one of the mind, mostly, but Mark’s was more physical, an urge to take on nature rather than fight The Man. I identified with Winston Smith in 1984 (a doomed character, it must be remembered), but Mark saw himself as a Hemingway-esque figure who could disregard society’s traps and roadblocks as he forged his own path.
We had many serious discussions at Mobile’s only hip (i.e., San Francisco-style) coffee house at that time. We talked about books, especially the science fiction we both loved, but also others. I wanted to talk about Marshall McLuhan; he insisted I read Jack Kerouac as being more relevant to life than an intellectual’s theorizing.
Mark had a blunt way of speaking, whatever the subject.
When I speculated, fatalistically, that I would probably end up living in the suburbs, having kids and driving a station wagon, he said, “If you do I’ll find you and beat the shit out of you.”
“Your mother’s a bitch,” he told me after I drove him home and she came along for the ride, carping on my driving the whole way. My mother was a challenging person, to put it nicely, so his words did not anger me. Others in my friend group probably thought it, too, but Mark had no qualms in saying it out loud. Or in reproaching me: “Why do you let her get to you?” he demanded.
Once I showed him a poem I’d written to impress a girl. After reading it, his only comment was, “And you want this girl to like you?”
Not that he was doing much better in the female department. After finagling a date with a girl he had a crush on, he presented her with a bracelet—which she rejected, laughing at him.
One time he asked, would I have sex with the homeliest girl in our class, if I could? When I said no, he said, “Why? She has the same parts as other girls.” He had a habit of asking such things out of the blue. I don’t know if it was to make me think in ways I hadn’t before or to voice his own grapplings with the perplexities of life, sex high among them.
I think of Mark when I read lines such as this, from Kerouac’s Dharma Bums: “Pain or love or danger makes you real again....”
Love sounded good and desirable to me, but I was averse to pain and danger. Not Mark.
One night we launched a canoe into the Gulf of Mexico—his idea, of course. It wasn’t a particularly surfworthy vessel, but we kept it steady long enough to paddle to the deserted western end of Dauphin Island. One of us even caught a fish. After beaching the canoe, we built a fire and Mark cleaned and cooked it, and we ate it with our fingers off “plates” consisting of pages torn from a notebook he kept with him. Mosquitoes were horrendous that night, though, and our sleeping bags gave no protection. We finally gave up, and, bone tired, made a midnight paddle back to our launch site and his car.
My other memory of that night is the ride home when Mark suddenly whipped around a slow-moving vehicle, passing it on a blind hill. “Jesus, Mark!” I screamed.
Once safely back in our own lane, he reminded me that it was nighttime, and we would have seen the glow from an oncoming car’s headlights well before we topped the hill. (That logic seemed weak to me, and in any case did not consider the drivers who forget to turn their lights on.)
Coming from a family that was at least nominally Catholic, Mark, to my knowledge, had no particular spiritual bent. I call him a dharma bum because, a la Kerouac, his bumming around seemed, for him, tantamount to a spiritual practice.
After high school Mark went off to the University of Alabama and I to LSU. He dropped out of college after one semester. When we next saw each other he had been hitchhiking around the country for at least half a year.
His father—an art professor, and, by Mark’s telling, a peripatetic free spirit himself in his younger days—didn’t like it and wanted him to stay in school. “My life is out there, not in a classroom,” Mark said. “Besides, I couldn’t get laid at Alabama.”
The road was a different world. It had its hardships; he described sleeping under a trailer as snow fell around it after he showed up at some friends’ home in Colorado and they weren’t there. But there were adventures, too, including sexual ones, some of which sounded improbable. Perhaps a part of me simply didn’t want them to be true, as I tried to wrestle down my envy.
He showed me a typewritten and mimeographed book of sorts, a manifesto, that he had picked up in California. I had never known Mark to be political, but he was enthusiastic about this document and the ideas in it. “Steve, this explains everything about the fascism in this country.” He had met members of the leftist group that produced it, and they had a plan for revolution that included setting up sniper nests along the freeways. I couldn’t tell if he was on board with that or not.
The last I heard of Mark was from my friend Danna. He showed up in her hometown, New Orleans, and tried to court her. According to her he convinced the owner of a garage that he had mechanic skills, and was fired after one day on the job.
For a long time afterward I expected that one day I’d hear his knock again, but it never came.
Fast-forward several decades. One day while Googling people from my past, I found Mark in a coastal town in Oregon. He was a fishing guide and a cook at a restaurant, and my sleuthing also revealed that he had a wife and children.
A community newsletter from the early 2000s advertised a showing of his art at the restaurant where he worked. My biggest find, though, was a 700-word newspaper article from 2009 about his “labor of love”—building a 57-foot replica of a 19th-century clipper ship. A photograph showed him standing beside the work in progress, what looked to be a fully ribbed hull to which he had started attaching planks.
According to the article he “got the idea after returning home from work one day. He had downed a shot and was sipping on a beer when his wife asked if he had any ambitions for the rest of his life.
“‘I said, ‘I want to be captain of my own vessel ….’”
Mark told the reporter that his plans included marketing the ship as a floating restaurant and that he envisioned providing cruises along the West Coast or even around the world.
He initially thought he'd be able to finish the work in less than a year “and have the vessel bobbing along the coast by the Fourth of July, 2005.” But that time frame was “a little bit of wishful thinking,” as the reporter noted. Aside from the problem of finding help—he wanted people who would work for the excitement of it, not money—he admitted to letting hours go by just contemplating the whole thing.
The story concluded: “‘I just hope to have it done before I die,’ said the 57-year-old.”
Earlier this year we traveled to Oregon to visit my daughter, who lives in Portland. The idea hit me that I should look up Mark, even though getting from Portland to his town would have entailed a 10-hour drive, round trip.
It would only be fitting, I thought, to pop in on him unannounced, as he was wont to do to others. Given all I had told her about him, my wife agreed.
I figured he’d be easy to find, either at the restaurant, if he was still working, or at his home—the newspaper story had dropped several strong clues to its location. Probably, he was known as the town eccentric, and all I’d have to do was ask around.
I rehearsed my first words to him, and couldn’t come up with anything better than, “Hey, you old bastard. You remember me?” He would love it.
While in Portland I decided to Google Mark one more time, for anything about him I might have missed.
At that moment life dumped a bucketful of cold water on me, in the form of an obituary for Mark’s mother. After the list of survivors it was noted that she was predeceased by two sons, Mark being one of them.
His mom’s obit was dated 2017. With the other scraps of information I had, that meant Mark had been dead between six and 14 years, thus robbing me of the pleasure of turning the tables on him after all those decades by showing up at his door. The old bastard.
I’ll remember Mark as one of the “the mad ones,” to quote Kerouac’s On The Road, “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn ….”
And I’ll forever wonder if I should have taken one of the roads less traveled, as he did.
And I wonder: Did he finish that ship?
Additional thoughts (I always have some after writing one of these essays):
I was startled to learn, from Mark’s mother’s obituary (I’ve never found one for him), that he had eight siblings. I only remember a sister; perhaps the others were older and already out on their own when I knew Mark.
The coffee house where Mark and I sat discussing life, the universe and everything was apparently short-lived. I’ve yet to find anyone else who remembers it, even on the Facebook page devoted to Mobile nostalgia. Situated in a repurposed old house that I recall as being near the intersection of Old Shell Road and McGregor Avenue, it was called the Anchor Club. Someone told me it was run by the Jesuits from Spring Hill College. I suppose the name was Christian symbolism: Jesus as our anchor. There was a woman who oversaw the place, but the coffee, from a large industrial urn (none of this fancy, expensive coffee-drink stuff we have now), was on the honor system; you poured yourself a cup and dropped a dime or quarter in a bowl. Butcher paper covered the walls for us habitués to write our deep thoughts and cleverly hip quips on. It was always open-mic there, and anyone who wanted to could get up and strum a guitar or recite a poem. I wish I could find someone to confirm that I didn’t imagine this place. And no, I didn’t see it in a drug-induced hallucination, as someone on the nostalgia page insinuated. The Internet lacks any records of or references to it. Perhaps I’ll send the link to this essay to the college’s archivists for help.
Evelyn Hinz, the journalism advisor who ripped up my editorial, was a strange person, to put it mildly. Someone said her nervous mannerisms and occasional bizarre behavior stemmed from her Jeep hitting a mine when she was a battlefield correspondent in World War II. Her fiancé, who was driving, was killed, and she had to have a steel plate put in her head. That was the story, anyway.
It’s always jolting to find out that someone I knew in the past has died. Coming from a line of long-lived individuals, I can’t fully grasp that friends and acquaintances of roughly my age are gone. Learning about a death via the Internet is particularly weird; checking the date of an online obituary I frequently discover that the person has actually been gone for years. In my mind he (or she) is still the age I last saw him, and very much alive.
One of the last times I saw Mark before I went off to college was at a party he threw while his parents were out of town. The girls he invited didn’t show, which seemed to be the story of our lives up to then, and Mark made himself sick on vodka. I associate the song “One” by Three Dog Night with that party, as it was being played a lot on the radio. And that’s my excuse for sticking music here. Only this is a cover by Aimee Mann from the 1999 movie, Magnolia, one of my favorites.
Permission is given to republish this article, with these provisions: 1. You must credit me, R. Stephen Smith, as the author. 2. You must include a link back to this page or to my home page.