0.2 The funeral of bobo  (Page 12/12)

Nevertheless, I had let that slip to Allister, and now I admitted to Senechal that the improbable claim was true.

It turned out that Senechal was asking not out of curiosity but because Brodsky was coming to the University of Washington for a reading, and the Weekly wanted someone to cover the event. “Is that something you could do?” she asked.

I couldn’t tell whether she was asking if I’d be willing or if I had the writing ability. In any event, I immediately said yes.

In due course, Brodsky came to Seattle, read to a packed house at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall, and spent a day walking around Seattle with me and talking. At one point we wandered into Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, a cluttered waterfront emporium packed with classically tacky souvenirs and famed for its signature attraction—a mummified corpse with a bullet hole in its chest. Brodsky was enthralled. He bought two little boxes made from seashells for himself, and a coonskin hat for Erin.

For all of the time we had spent together in Ann Arbor, I had never asked to hear the story of Brodsky’s expulsion from Russia. He always seemed to hate playing the romantic figure of the Russian Exile, which was something of a stock character in 70s and 80s America, and he preferred suffering his homesickness in silence. But now he seemed in the mood to reminisce, and he told the whole sordid story, his voice lapsing into stunned gloom only once, when he was recalling how the secret police were insisting that he fill out a form consenting to be exiled. “How shall I describe myself here?” Brodsky had asked, pointing to a blank line on the document. “Just sign, ‘Joseph the Jew,’” his interrogator answered.

Like every Russian I knew, Brodsky had taken to the U.S. with enthusiasm for everything but the location. He had happily become a citizen and settled into the life of an increasingly prominent Russian-American poet. He was studying English frenziedly and beginning to write poetry in English as well as Russian. He loved being free of government scrutiny and able to vote in elections that mattered. He was passionately conservative, as were virtually all exiled Russians I knew—I remember him saying, when Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976, that he’d “have to find a new country to live in”—and he still was saddled with an amazing, made-in-Russia addiction to cigarettes. His Edgewater Hotel room was filled with bottles of heart medication—he had had two bypass operations by then—and packs of cigarettes.

He also had not shaken his conviction, universally and passionately held among Russians, that ethnic divisions were Everything. We walked over a good deal of downtown Seattle and the Seattle waterfront that day, with Brodsky expostulating constantly about Seattle’s charms. “It is so beautiful here, Fred! So peaceful! I might move here, actually…it’s a perfect place. And you know what I like best about it, Fred? It’s that there are no swarthy people here!”

I was less dismayed by the sentiment itself—I had long since grown used to hearing such pronouncements from even the most enlightened Russians, including Russian Jews—than I was by what it indicated to me about Seattle. My years east had been eye-opening in good part because racial and ethnic divisions were so open and so deep back there. In Albany and Ann Arbor in the 1970s, I routinely heard whites and blacks alike refer to blacks as “colored,” and I had developed the widely held self-image among Seattleites of our city as an exceptionally enlightened, bias-free utopia. But Brodsky, however inadvertently, was gracelessly pointing out that Seattle was less enlightened than overwhelmingly white, Seattle tolerance being more a function of uniformity than diversity. It’s easy to tolerate people, after all, that you never have anything to do with. Could it be that Seattleites were no less racist than the rest of the world, the only thing setting us apart being the lack of opportunity to express racist sentiment?

With its population 83 percent Caucasian, Seattle was the second whitest in the nation among large cities, trailing Indianapolis by less than one percent. I wondered if we weren’t too inclined to take credit for things beyond our control when it came to our pretensions to tolerance. In matters of race, we were tolerating the absent. It was a little like our self-satisfaction over how nice everyone in Seattle was—how hard is it to be nice when you live in such a stress-free city, free even from immoderate weather? Brodksy made our self-satisfaction feel unwarranted, and I was reminded in that connection of yet another line from Murray Morgan: “‘To hear you people talk,’ an easterner told a Seattle friend, ‘you’d think you built Mt. Rainier.’”

It turned out that the Weekly liked my Brodsky piece enough to ask what else I wanted to write about, and within a matter of months I was freelancing regularly there, supplementing my typesetting-business income and setting off on a steep learning curve about Seattle and its possibilities.

The ascendance of the Weekly in Seattle can be seen now as a sign that Seattle was on the threshold of massive change—moving from a big provincial town to something like a major American city. Even in 1976, when the Weekly was founded, it wasn’t clear that Seattle was ready for a publication offering an alternative to the complacent coverage sold by the city’s dailies—nor that there was enough cultural life in Seattle to sustain a culture-centric weekly. But by 1983, when I began working half-time for the Weekly , it was the city’s leading cultural voice, and the paper’s offices were filled with the kind of high energy that ascendant organizations always have. We were on a roll at the Weekly and we knew it—and we sensed that Seattle was, too.

The more time I spent at Microsoft, meanwhile, the clearer it was to me that the company was going to be a solid success. Every time I went out there the place was packed with more people. Microsoft kept offering me more and more work from more and more editors and hiring people at an ever-more-blistering pace. My friend Jan Allister was growing increasingly miserable at butterworth, so I told her about Microsoft and introduced her to the head of its editorial department. The woman hired Allister almost immediately after giving her an editing test. I might not have had the stomach to work at such a juggernaut myself, but at least now I was assured of getting all the typesetting work I needed.

This was vitally important. Writing was proving to be immensely pleasurable, and my wife, with career ambitions no greater than mine and with an even greater desire to stay at home playing with our daughters, began doing adoption counseling part-time, generating the same risible income I was earning with my writing. So it was typesetting that was paying our bills. And as long as I could keep cash-spewing Microsoft as a customer, I could avoid the distasteful ritual of getting into my business costume—an old, ill-fitting jacket-and-slacks outfit I had bought years ago for some adult social occasion—working myself into an optimistic lather, and making sales calls on potential customers. Nothing was more depressing. I had only had to try that a few times, and every depressing attempt left me feeling like Willy Loman without the charm.