the Chip Swan file

The other morning one of my neighbors texts me to say there is a big white envelope for me downstairs. I put on a mask and pick up a plastic grocery bag with the remains of three turkey legs from last night. I will get the envelope, go out, throw the bag in a dumpster and take the big white envelope upstairs. 

Is it the absentee ballot? I got on the elevator and the elevator goes down and the elevator door opens and I walk out and see the big white envelope and se the address and name of the sender.

Frank Eberling.

My high school writing teacher had messaged me often for over a decade asking for my address because he found my file, the CHIP SWAN file, and wanted to mail it to me. Each time, I sent him my address and kept watch on the mailbox and the shelves in the lobby -- and nada.

Now it is here, all the stories and poems I wrote for his Creative Writing in senior year, Class of 72, Palm Beach Gardens High School. Go Gators.

I grab the envelope and grab the elevator and get back to the sixth floor and on my way to my door realize I am still carrying the bag of dead turkey.

Frank wasn’t long out of college when he started teaching at the new high school. Frank had longish hair that tested the limits of the dress code. I was in ninth grade, and it was 1968. Nixon was running for President. He had a secret peace plan and would bring law and order. Everything seemed to be falling apart. The Democratic Convention was held in the middle of a police riot. In certain ways the time could be described so it sounds like the present, but in significant ways it was different.

The My Lai massacre occurred on my sister’s 25th birthday in March 1968, when I was in junior high, but the public didn’t know about it until November in 1969, when I was in tenth grade at PBGHS. That season rock festival was held at the race track with the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, etc. I couldn’t go, but Frank went.

Anyway, I wasn’t politically aware until near the end of tenth grade. Until then I watched Huntley and Brinkley with Mom and Dad during dinner. I knew enough current events to keep up with Johnny Carson’s monologues. In ninth grade Civics class we were supposed to give a presentation on the candidates and mine was about political cartoons. I drew all the time in class and didn’t pay attention or take notes. I drew cartoons and psychedelic album art inspired doodles that the faculty hated, including my art teachers, but my friends liked. I read many books, but most of them were not assigned reading. So I wasn’t a good student, but I was nerdy and hung up and stunned by the beauty of girls.

I was in tenth grade when Kent State happened, and then I became a radical almost overnight. In eleventh grade I got into an argument about Kent State with my art teacher. I called him a fascist. I got into trouble with my History teacher when I refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I was not a good student, as I said, but Frank Eberling was my English teacher for a semester and I liked him, and I liked what he assigned us to read, but they switched teachers on us and I’m afraid I was a jerk to his replacement. 

I signed up for his Creative Writing class in twelfth grade

By then, Frank’s hairstyle was a variation on that of Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid, and my hair was hanging below my shoulders. I didn’t smoke pot or drink or use drugs and I was friends with Jesus freaks and I also hung out with the hippies who knew me as someone who didn’t use drugs but could be funny. 

One of the stories in the folder is about hitchhiking to the beach with one of those friends. I tried to write about the strange time when some of our friends joined a church-sponsored Jesus movement, were baptized in the ocean, and straightened up. I didn’t know what to say about it and the story was unresolved. I wrote second story that included a memory of a hunting camp I had been in a couple of years earlier. The description of the rowdy camp and the hunters as an army invading nature isn’t bad. The story was about my growing awareness that I didn’t really want to be a hunter.

A book report on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is in the folder. I liked the anti-war message, but I didn’t know what to think about the Sci Fi fantasy/ hallucination episodes. I thought they took away from the message (now I think of the parts about being “unstuck in time” as being about PTSD). 

I already had copies of the short stories, so the real gem in the folder is something I didn’t have, an assignment to write a dialogue based on a newspaper story. I remembered writing a dialogue with two people arguing about the Vietnam War. They were saying the same things I often heard people say about the Domino Theory and that we were fighting the communists there so we won’t have to fight them here. I remembered that the process of writing the dialogue forced me to think the opposing views and that it clarified my thinking about the war. What I’d forgotten was the part the dialogue that was taken from the newspaper. The men are in a helicopter, talking about the war, and they see many dead bodies below, civilians, villagers who they believe were slaughtered by the communists until they see American soldiers shooting children and women and old people. The article was about witnesses to the My Lai massacre who testified at the court martial trial that took place in 1971, in my senior year.

When I decided to drop out of school Frank called me. He already knew why I was leaving. I had explained it all in a monologue I wrote for his class. I thought the country had gone insane and I thought school was a brainwashing factory, processing me to join the insane society. School was getting in the way of my education, I wrote.

Frank wanted to drop out too, and he did a couple of years later by changing careers. He shot video essays for a local TV station and eventually directed independent films. Still a cool guy. He met John D MacDonald for a piece he was shooting and it had an effect on him, and he started writing Travis Magee - influenced novels set in West Palm Beach. You can buy them on Amazon.

The CHIP SWAN folder is full of clues to the strange student I was and who this cool teacher encouraged. Thanks, Frank