The Weekly Screed (#783)

Superego
by David Benjamin

“Hooray, excelsior and pow!
The ship of state is sunk and dead,
And we, the fools, are at the bow,
From which the wise and good have fled.”
                            — Benjie, The Id, 1966

PARIS — Bob Schuster was my first publisher. The imprint was SRTB Ketchachokee Publications. The four letters designated the main characters in a “literary” venture that was more of a high-school comedy than a commercial enterprise. The “S” was Scott Rothney, sometimes known as Brother Chiboinkin, whom Schuster gave top billing because he was our most (well, only) intimidating colleague. The “R” was Schuster (Robert), the “T” was shy, romantic Tom Sundal. I was the “B,” last because I’d arrived in Madison only recently, after a provincial childhood in remotest Tomah (Up North).

As for the “Ketchachokee” appendage, that was Schuster’s idea, which he explained once. But it made no sense and we all forgot it.

Our editorial product was called The Id, mainly because Schuster had read A Primer of Freudian Psychology. Scott had, too. Sundal, who was too psychologically brittle to delve too deeply into himself, had prudently eschewed Freud. I resolved to get around to Freud but never did. My ignorance of the great Sigmund probably hampered my literary “career” because this was, after all, an era when Freudian gobbledegook captivated a lot of otherwise splendid storytellers.

(Without realizing it, by the way, I discovered that the perfect literary antidote to Freud was William Goldman (The Princess Bride).)

Schuster, who tended to labor mightily on short poems about death, rapidly recognized that I was The Id’s most prolific contributor. For me, writing — in Freudian terms — was a compulsion. However, being a product of St. Mary’s School, I preferred to see my logorrheic output as a sort of priestly vocation visited upon me by and angry God.

Either way, Schuster not only made me his “star” author, he committed more of himself to my oeuvre than to his own sporadic snatches of adolescent noir. He embraced his thankless role as The Id’s superego and risked his spotless Goody Two-Shoes reputation to get my drivel — and the odd poem — into print.

For example, he stole for me. To produce The Id, we needed a printing machine. These were pre-Xerox days, when the cheapest way to do a “print run” was with a device we called a “mimeograph.” This contraption was actually a spirit duplicator, or “ditto” machine. Ditto fuel was a clear, pungent fluid. Fresh on a newly printed page, it gave off a pleasantly alcoholic fragrance that suggested a cocktail blend of gin and Prestone antifreeze. If you pressed your face into your Biology test sheet and inhaled, you began the exam with a nice, fleeting isopropanol-methanol high. Generations of school kids were hooked on ditto perfume.

Every teachers lounge in America had a spirit duplicator. But SRTB Ketchacokee Publications had none, nor did we have access to the teachers’ room. Nor did we possess the capital to buy a machine So, Schuster stole a spirit duplicator.

From his church.

And then he lied, to his sainted mom, who asked where he got it.

“Oh, we just borrowed it.”

Maybe Schuster meant that. But he never took it back.

Besides, we needed the thing — and its laborious printing process — more than Schuster’s pastor ever would. We needed to write, and be read (we sold The Id for a quarter — cheap). Because of Bob’s stealing, lying and churning out pages on our hijacked ditto machine, I evolved into “the writer” among my peers at LaFollette High.

Bob’s labors produced readers, many of whom ended up friends. In those days, we had a rare subculture of teenage smartasses at LaFollette High. We came from three or four different classes (both chronological and social) and a half-dozen feeder schools. We took part — or refused to take part — in different high-school activities. We never formed a single group or held meetings, but we all knew who we were. We treated conversation as a contact sport. Our sarcasm left bruises. We mocked pretense, we defied authority, we scorned small talk and quoted poetry (Yeats, cummings, Ezra Pound), we sneered at the masses and we suffered no fools but ourselves. And we saw, in one another, the evanescent seeds of greatness.

In common, we all had The Id.

Among us, Schuster was an island of calm, smarter than the smartest but uniquely disinclined toward one-upmanship. He laughed softly at himself and taught us how that works. He abetted us and grew among us without competing. He published us.

On Sunday, while visiting Schuster at the hospital, I learned that he’s dying. The doctors are sending him home. There’s nothing more they can do. Schuster greeted his fate with a crooked smile and an ironic note on the brevity of it all.

They say that one of the measures of one’s own life is whether, in all your years, you’ve changed anyone else’s life.

Schuster changed mine. More than that, he defined it.

In those two-odd years of pumping a rickety ditto machine, inhaling methanol fumes and printing out the purple pages of The Id ’til they were too faint to read, Schuster provided me my first audience — which is every author’s deepest need. He lent me access to praise and favor. He gave me a sense of the hard work — including stealing and lying — that would be my destiny as an unknown writer, pouring my blood into a typewriter, compromising my future and ravaging my relationships to keep on writing so that, in the end, I will probably die as obscurely as I began.

It was Schuster, more than any friend or teacher, mentor, parent, spouse or child, who made clear to me my own fate, my bondage to words and the odds against me. Schuster was the guidepost to my destiny.