The word "mentor" these days usually means an institutional relationship between someone "senior" and someone "junior" who needs the mentor's guidance in acquiring a certain set of values, whether of the corporate jungle, the classroom, or in the social world at large (as with organizations like Big Brother or Big Sister). In other words, an apprenticeship, where the senior partner passes down accumulated wisdom to the junior in hopes that the junior partner, the "mentee," will properly "fit in" after the mentoring period is over.
The institutional flavor the term has acquired carries with it only the barest hint of the desperation and urgency that originally charged the word. "Mentor" comes from the name of the man Odysseus, that dilatory hero of The Odyssey, left as the caretaker of his property, which included his wife Penelopeia and his son Telemachos. Mentor, the caretaker, becomes a "mentor" only when Athena, with Zeus' approval, takes on the man's shape and voice in order to help Telemachos find his father and bring him home. She does this because life has become quite desparate for Telemachos and his mother: their house is besieged by suitors who want Penelopeia's hand, and Telemachos, because of his father's absence, is shaken by doubts about his own manhood and destiny.
In becoming both Mentor and a mentor, Athena performs two services for Telemachos. First, she acts as "a guide, a wise and faithful counselor," the qualities we normally associate with a mentor, and Telemachos often thanks Mentor for giving him insights he could not have found on his own. But more importantly, Athena drove Telemachos to search outside himself for the answers that would "father" his own growth and shatter the misguided assessments imposed on him by the swinish suitors, his own mother, and most especially his own loss of faith in himself. Athena, as a mentor, did not become Telemachos' father, that is, turn into a pale counterfeit of the real thing; instead, she conjoined her wisdom with Telemachos' character so that he, in the end, found the father he needed, not only in the fleshly shape of Odysseus but, more importantly, in the once-confused but now clearly forged depths of his own character. As she tells him, "You will lack neither courage nor sense in the future, and since the mind of Odysseus has not wholly failed in you, there is hope for the future, and I tell you that you will succeed." When people seek out mentors, rather than have them assigned by some institutional process, they seek the kind of guidance Athena provided Telemachos because they are pushed to look outside themselves for someone who will help them complete themselves, help them bring themselves to some more potent level of self-knowledge and find the buoyant love and nutritious wisdom for which we all hunger all our lives.
In my 17th year of life I thought I had found my mentor, though I wouldn't have used the word at the time because I didn't know it existed. I only knew that I (like about half the high school) found John Pearson cool, and that I felt drawn to him like thread follows a needle. John taught English and also filled in as the school's drama coach (the terminology of his position shows the essential jockish quality of the high school). Actually, teaching drama was his first love; he swam in his glorious element when directing the two or three productions the school put on each year, not only because he simply loved the theatre but because it gave him a chance to unplug himself from role of "teacher" (i.e., paid government servant) and get to know his students without the formalisms of the classroom. He knew that the same students who struggled with and against Hamlet in his classroom would immediately get what afflicted the melancholy Dane if he could get them on the stage, under lights, working the words out through their bodies.
As a magnet and a beacon, he seemed singularly unprepossessing. Slightly built, perhaps no taller than 5½ feet, he had wispy sandy-brown hair which barely covered an incipient bald spot. He wore his hair shaggy but not long, just enough to hang over the tops of his ears and shirt collar. He also had a goatee, again wispy, only slightly denser than the ones found on pictures of grinning Chinese sages. His clothing, while kempt, exhibited no special taste; he leaned towards vests, which he wore for the extra pockets they gave him. His voice, instrumentally, did its job well enough but without any particular resonance or gravity. From the outside he looked like a mildly bohemian, thin-boned, getting-on-to-thirty-one young man, the kind of look adequate for being an English teacher and drama director but not, perhaps, for any of the real business of the world.
I met him on the slant, to so speak, because of my girlfriend, Pamela. She had auditioned for, and gotten the part of, Maria in the school's winter drama production West Side Story. Because I rarely saw her, I started going to rehearsals to catch up with her, and when I did I saw things I hadn't expected to see. I saw guys on the stage I knew, a few of them my fellow football players. That made me take notice -- they hadn't told me they were going to go out for the play.
Even more flabbergasting than seeing the guys under the lights, though, was watching what they did when they were up there. These guys, guys with whom I had lifted weights and banged heads, started to sing and dance, doing some song about being a "Jet." A woman whom I didn't know helped them learn the steps while John stood quietly off to one side and watched her work. She showed them some steps; they tried to follow her. She showed them again, slowly, taking them through the movements one at a time while the music teacher drummed out the song on the piano. Finally (and this astounded me even more) they actually began to make it all come together -- and it didn't look half bad.
At one rehearsal, Pamela gathered me up and brought me on stage to meet John. I remember his greeting me cordially, saying something to Pamela like, "So this is Michael," indicating that I had been talked about and not kept away like a secret. I told him, because I didn't know what else to say, that I liked the little that I'd seen, and then he asked me something that I would later tag as one of those moments where life takes an important if neck-wrenching 90-degree turn into something new that forever changes the nature of being alive. "I need a few more people to be in the Jets," he said. "Would you like to be in the show?" I don't think I thought much about it when I said yes -- I only knew that by saying yes I would be able to see more of Pamela, which was the priority at the moment.
Thus began a transformative time for me as I became a singing, whirling, fighting Jet. It wasn't just the joy of performing that grabbed me, though I admit that doing all that effervesced me in a way nothing else in my life ever had. But two things mattered even more than the unbuckled enjoyment of being under light. On stage, with all of us pulling together, all of the disparate, rambunctious parts blending slowly into something much finer than the sum of these parts, I felt arrived, that I had stumbled upon an oasis of fortune in a desert called adolescence. No, that isn't quite right: not stumbled upon but guided to by someone who knew (in a way I couldn't know because my youth made me blind and noisy-brained) that everyone needed the miner's helmet of someone else's experience to help them cut through the deep darkness of their confusions -- and who also knew that most people never got the guide they needed, which is why he made the effort.
The production, from what I remember, came out pretty well. To this day I don't know if we had any talent up there, but I do know that for John to have a high school troupe do West Side Story, and even be able to pull off a show, much less a good one, given the music's difficulty and the intricate melding of dance, song, and story, constituted a coup in itself. But the choice to do this show, his patience all through the process, exactly demonstrated John's character: he wanted to do things that stretched people, that made them reach into themselves to go beyond themselves, because he knew that we all had talents that the world, in its drive for entropy and profit, usually never tapped and didn't care much about.
I know I blossomed under the attention, feeling vindicated about emotions and skills that no one had ever valued or cared to bring to the surface. I started to spend more time with him, dropping into his classroom after school or visiting his house during the summer (a bunch of us would often go over after work, and he would fire up the barbecue and play the records we brought over). The nice thing about being in John's presence was that he never talked down to us and valued what we had to say not only for what it meant but also for the fact that we had taken the trouble to formulate the words and say it. He never shot down our fairly stupid political discussions or embarrassed us for liking or disliking something that he had a different opinion about. He kept telling us to voice our ideas, give shape to our thoughts, but also to do this with integrity and intelligence: don't argue without some facts, don't mistake our parents' ideas for our own ideas, don't forget that sometimes very little difference existed between believing something strongly and being narrow-minded and a bigot. He told us what he thought, but he never required us to think those same thoughts. He enjoyed the clash of ideas, the sparks that would fly over revelation and rebuttal.
With John's friendship, we rose like yeast under a mild heat. We could all feel our brains begin to take shape, feel more congruency between head and heart, gut and syllogism. We sensed that we were maturing, ripening, our ambiguities slipping into sureties. I remember going over to his house just by myself, when sometimes I needed a place to go to sort things out or balance myself in someone else's company. There were times we never even talked. I had a book, he would be writing, on the record player he would have his favorite Debussy -- and the house would hum with the combined silent energies. And I know he extended these courtesies to other people as well -- he had invited people into his life, and they came like deer to a salt lick.
I think that openness was why people valued John so highly. We all had adults who never slacked off on telling us what we needed to do and pointing out our deficiencies. I realize now, of course, that most of them acted out of love and concern but didn't know how else to show it except through the forms with which they'd been inoculated by their parents and teachers, which included moralizing, sermonizing, autocracy, selective deafness, and so on. John, however, had no truck with any of that, and consequently treated us as human-beings-in-progress, with all the respect due a work of art finding its ballast and beacon. Of course, he didn't have the full responsibility of raising us and therefore never had to suffer the unclean rooms and dismissive flippancy that our parents endured -- he could afford to be sage and patient. But at our age that didn't matter -- all we knew was that here stood an adult who did not look at us children as delinquent creatures needing severe restraints.
Thus, if John was a mentor to us, he was one who worked at the level of suggestion rather than lecture, who mulched us and kept the air temperate and then stood back to watch what he knew would be the inevitable unfolding, like watching an actor onstage in the darkness gradually appear as the lights rise to full heat and power. I know now that he worked that way because he knew how easily he could have created disciples, to tangle our lifelines with his to an unhealthy and disrespectful degree, and that was something for which he had no taste or desire. As a teacher, a director, a human being, he worked best by indirection, the way a collection of photons from starlight, almost weightless in themselves, can, enmassed, slowly shape the universe.
We, of course, also wondered about the mundane details of his life: did he have sex, did he drink, what did he do when he wasn't with us, what were his parents like, were they alive, what kind of childhood did he have, where was he born, when was his birthday, what did he do during college, had he ever smoked dope, where did he get his hair cut. We actually knew very little about his life other than the small portion he let us see. He'd sometimes give us glimpses when he illustrated points he wanted to make with tales of his own life, but these were dollops, just enough to tease our taste for curiosity. It's not as if we didn't directly ask him some of these things, and indirectly ask him others, but I think he kept us at arm's length about much of his life so that he could draw certain boundaries that would keep the relationships from turning into dependencies. He may very well have wanted to move closer to some or all of us: after all, we were a handsome and vibrant group of young adults, and I'm sure he wasn't immune to certain attractions concerning these young people who made themselves vulnerable and available to him by their trust and respect. That he didn't act on these desires may or may not deserve admiration, but that he made himself maintain scrupulous lines of permission allowed us intimacy without fear and, more important, innocence without embarrassment.
Later, when I became a teacher myself, I understood perfectly why he did what he did: the power that good teachers have to shape and infuse can easily become, because of simple human weakness or confusion, an equally strong power to damage, and that not using these great tyrannical powers for personal satisfactions is an absolute moral principle that teachers must follow without exception, regardless of temptation.
I did have a chance to become closer to John -- as close as he would permit -- when, for the spring production, he decided to do The Fantasticks. I wanted the role of El Gallo so badly because I had convinced myself that living inside me was the twin of this smart-alecky, sexy, mostly wise, itinerant, dashing jongleur, and that I only needed a chance like this to introduce him to the world and take over his identity. (El Gallo was heady stuff for an eighteen-year old with the usual entourage of confusions and ambiguities.) But he gave the part to my good friend Lenny, who indisputably had a better voice, and I got the role of Bellamy, the father of Louisa, the moony young girl.
We started rehearsals, and right off the bat it became clear that Lenny felt very uncomfortable being out front. Lenny did an excellent sit-on-a-stool-and-play-acoustic-guitar act around town, but he had never performed on stage before and knew even less than I did about acting (which would have put us both into negative numbers). John worked with him, but Lenny couldn't fight his own insecurities and ended up dropping out. At that point, I stepped forward, shuffling and pulling my forelock, and announced my availability. He thought about it and decided to give me the nod. I didn't know why he did it, given that I hadn't stood out as his first choice in the first place, but I didn't care: back door or front door, I had the role.
For the next two months I slowly metamorphosed into El Gallo. Even today I impress myself with how carefully I constructed his character, how I shaped pieces of myself into the kind of cheeky romantic I could never be in real life but could pretend to be on the stage. I realized the truth later, as I saw the show again and again whenever I had the chance: while, on the outside, I may have been doing the "actor thing" of sculpting the clay of self into El Gallo, in reality I was shaping myself into John Pearson, or at least into the John Pearson I (incompletely) knew. He was the El Gallo I wanted to become, and, unconsciously, I borrowed as much from my conception of him as I did from my own self-knowledge to craft this handsome, knowing, yet finally compassionate character who would lead two young children into wisdom and pain and love.
Regardless of how many decades have slipped by, I can feel the whole process now as pure present-tense. In my room, playing the cast album over and over, I caught the inflections of the singer, the way he slid into or out of notes, punching some, softly mouthing others. I tried for the brisk non-sentimentality of Try To Remember that John wanted, avoiding the temptation to milk notes or phrases, or, as John called it, "to turn into Johnny Mathis." I practiced, again and again, the brio of The Rape Song (which now, unfortunately, is dropped from the show because of changed sensitivities), the vocal gymnastics of Round and Round, the baritone masculinity of I Can See It. John had enlisted the help of the vocal instructor in school (an interesting man, an ex-Marine who had sung in the service), and twice a week he gave me voice lessons; before long, my strengthening voice worked its way up to the higher notes without either breaking down or shutting off.
In fact, the voice lessons symbolized how I felt: everything inside seemed to be getting stronger, reaching higher, taking aim. What had started out as inner now began to shape the outer: the way I carried myself, the set of my expressions, the way my eyes filtered light -- I started wearing El Gallo as easily as I wore my clothes. Even then I knew what was happening to me, knew that I was reconstructing myself by an act of pure imagination against the grain of my genetics and training. Talk about heady -- for perhaps the first time in my life I felt powerful, prescient, not subject to the whims of my confusions. Like El Gallo, like John Pearson, I could arrange the proceedings to serve my purposes, become the artist with a vision.
The show had a surprising success at school -- it actually provoked discussions and people lined up to get tickets. Of course, I enjoyed the applause -- what actor doesn't? -- but I enjoyed even more this new-found power to shape and re-shape the contours of my self. And I couldn't thank John enough for offering me this chance to learn about learning, this chance to risk reaching a higher level and know that higher levels are, indeed, there to reach. For an eighteen-year old ready to step off the platform onto the train of the world, it was a ticket that had "Anywhere" stamped all over it.
About the same time the show happened, I received my acceptance letter to attend Harvard College. The whole story about how that happened would require another essay, but the universe had been thoughtful enough to have an alumnus recruiter read my records at the high school and arrange an interview with the college. With his support, my grades, thoughtful recommendations (a warm one from John), a strong application, and the requisite luck for these kinds of ventures, I got in.
John held a cook-out at his house to celebrate college acceptances, a good year for drama, the dedication of the yearbook to him, just the general effervescence of spring and early summer coming in to the air. About thirty of us arrived, food in hand, and several other teachers also showed up, and before long we were able to drop our assigned masks as teacher and student and talk as level human beings, older adults to younger adults, knowing to learning-to-know, a-little-tired to more-than-ready. Towards sunset we all stood in John's backyard, which faced west and crested the top of a small rise so that we had an untroubled view of the horizon. An ordinary sunset for the most part, full of its ordinary richness, streaked with flaring cirrus clouds, the descending red globe of fusion fire full, then half, then quarter, then gone, the first stars revealed. John said, to no one in particular, that when he died he wanted to go to heaven and do the technical direction for sunsets. I thought that most likely he would.
June arrived -- the end of the school year, the end of our educational careers (in both senses of that word), graduation, the prom: all the tribal rituals attached to high school in America. They blurred by, each of us trying to crystallize some moment from the rush that we could carry with us, enshrined, for the rest of our days to return us to the exact feel of the transition, the change, the risk, the letting go -- as if these things would never again happen to us. John was there through all of this, helping us try to make sense of a moment that really couldn't be understood until many moments later.
John had also agreed to be my "pen pal" while I was at school. I couldn't wait to get to Harvard to tell him about everything that I would be learning. I would build an intellectual companionship with him just like the kinds of "correspondences" that artists and writers and lovers had generated. Our letters would be literate, dense, charming, incisive, ageless, and through them he could still guide me as he had over the past year. This promise of continued friendship made going off to college a little less frightening and much more charged with purpose and promise.
By the end of June most of us stood hip-deep in summer jobs, earning money for college. I spoke with John occasionally but found that my daily round of work, seeing Pamela and friends, reading, and just hanging out ravened up the days extraordinarily fast.
Then one morning, July 4, a Sunday, a day I did not have to work, my mother came into my bedroom with the newspaper. Its headline, in typical large sans serif type, brought me bolt upright: John had been killed the night before, stabbed 21 times and bludgeoned with a hammer by a hitchhiker he'd picked up on his way back from visiting his parents in Portsmouth, VA.
What can be said about our reactions that hasn't been said about countless tragedies vigiled by countless disbelieving and confused friends and family throughout history? Shock, grief, anger -- all feelings expected and all brutal in their inevitablity. We exchanged useless condolences, shared unsoothing empathies, trying to make sense of what could not be forced into sense. (And what would sense have meant anyways? No "sense" would have taken away the pain, as if logic could be an anodyne. Even if the killing had made "sense," the loss would have been just as deep and razored.) To add to the pain, his family decided to hold the funeral in Virginia and shipped the body back there, leaving us to put together a pale memorial service at the school, where many spoke highly of him and the chorus sang his favorite song, "If We Only Have Love," from Jacques Brel...
I stumbled through the rest of the summer, the surface of me going to work and filling out the day, the underside of me still raw. I made my preparations for college, felt the requisite brew of excitement and apprehension -- but John's absence lurked, the loss of his guidance frightening me more than I could admit to myself. I had so counted on his voice in my ears, his words for my eyes -- and now all I had was ashes, less than ashes: grief without the promise of the phoenix.
Of course, the first few months of the "Harvard experience" more than overwhelmed me, substituting for the self-pities I brought with me its own brand of angst and turmoil: learning to live with roommates, keeping my own schedule, wanting to give in to the multitude of new temptations, a brain suddenly required to sift an enormous pile of data for which I had no context. I felt constantly behind, outdated, outgunned. I met people my age who, thanks to their prep school education, had read books I had never even heard of: I was the hick in the drawing room of the Atheneum, the rube among the sharpers. My first week there, while everyone else attended the numerous activities student services had concocted to ease the freshmen into the semester, I started reading not only what my course syllabus instructed me to read but also the suggested material, scared of falling behind. From the outset I felt entirely inadequate to the chance that the universe had granted me, a feeling I did not lose (if I ever lost it) until my second semester senior year, when I could actually be comfortable enough in my own skin to enjoy the world around me.
Through all of this I didn't have anyone on whom I could try things out for size and sense. John had promised to be that sounding board, so, out of a kind of desperation, I made him take up his role. I began talking to John, trying through the discourse to arrange the idiosyncratic flow of my life into something like self-knowledge, and responding to myself as I thought he might with insight or clues. I performed in another production of The Fantasticks, this time as the father for which he had originally cast me. I started looking into doing more theatre, especially song and dance, and (this was in my sophomore year) auditioned for and got into West Side Story when Leonard Bernstein came back to Harvard for the Eliot Norton lectures. None of this could, or did, work; the inequalities loomed too large. I was talking to a ghost when what I needed was a large fleshy embrace. By the middle of my sophomore year I had to give him up and let him die completely -- I remember the moment distinctly, sitting in the dark, crying (John probably would have dismissed the scene as too melodramatic, in need of a good dose of underplay) -- so that I could put El Gallo to rest and take up the much more difficult task of living with myself.
At the end of The Odyssey, as Odysseus, along with Telemachos, has wreaked his vengeance upon the interlopers in his home, Athena, again in the voice and shape of Mentor, tells him that the time for righting past wrongs has passed by: "'Hold your hand, make an end of war and conflict...' Odysseus obeyed gladly with all his heart" (271). In other words, the last act of Mentor, as a guise for Athena, was to call everyone to live out their better natures. When John lived, that is what he prompted me to do: stop the war within my soul and pursue life "with all my heart." The extent to which I have or have not done that is my own summa; John played his role perfectly well, coaching me with the dialogue, setting out the context of the scenes, and then trusting me to infuse the lines and action with the beauty of my own spirit, a beauty he believed everyone possessed (even, quite possibly, the man who killed him) but often hid under the bushel of shame or fear or a misinformed belief that making a living equals living a life.
To this day I feel his absence, though it is not the same loss I felt then. Then I had lost a mentor, a teacher, a guide -- in short, I had been an empty glass waiting for the full pitcher to pour. Now I miss a companion, an equal, a mate, a commiserative and salutary fellow traveler. I would have reveled in our concerted upbringing of each other. So on the next July 3 I will pause, as I always do, to remember; attending the next performance of The Fantasticks, I will recite, sotto voce, El Gallo's speeches; when I rent West Side Story again, I will recall how he strung a ragtag group of boys into a pearl necklace of a gang; and wish once again that life could have been very, very different. Then move on to other celebrations.
(February 1996)