The Chip Listmiddle age is a good time for brooding over slights and mistakes. it's a better time than old age, because anyone who makes it to old age should waste no time brooding. they can instead enjoy themselves acting however they want to, secure in the knowledge that other humans can't do anything to old people.
the aforesaid is the philosophical principle underlying this sermon. the practical spur is the thought that chip cummings may outlive me. i don't care if he does. but my study makes me aware that history is written not by the victors, but by the survivors. i have known chip since 1973. and my cumulative experience with chip teaches me that it would be a horrifying afterlife to look down upon the earth after my death and watch chip explain me and my life to other people. he will, of course. and therefore i feel impelled to write this even if i suspect it will make some readers uneasy or even sad. after all, it's sad to read about spitting and cussing between old friends or harsh feelings over petty events. but i am determined to have my say, my side. noone will give it except me. and if i am getting back, well, at least i have left off the contact list names of people who at present think well of chip.
maybe after my death some of you, thinking well of me, will forward this to them.
so i've known chip since 1973 and lived with him for six years. that makes the relationship more complex than a lot of marriages. many marriages have left the co-signers with less knowledge of each other than chip and i have of each other. time must play its part.
i must give chip credit for good qualities. he was often my friend whenever it didn't interfere with his plans. he always was and still is a source of insight into the most marvelously varied subjects. for example, years ago, although well within his tenure with citicorp, chip said, 'girls show they like you when they give you their pussy, and companies show they like you when they give you money." i can't find one syllable of that to quibble with. it seems to me like one of the world's great pieces of wisdom. it has that quality of showing inarguably what this life of ours is. it belongs in Bartlett's.
this sermon has its genesis in events of last november. bubba was in new york on business. i had gone to chung-yung's in the middle of the week to do one of those tasks which has bedeviled me all my life - or to put it more globally, i have always been enthralled by my idealistic beliefs - beliefs and a quality of naivite which has let me in for a good deal of buffetting - the wish to believe things about the nature of people and relationships which was not true. the course of my relationship with chip would certainly not have been as it was had i not had those beliefs and naivite. and when it comes to girls, well, the same attributes have led me to believe the man must simply be willing to suffer - it is incumbent upon him to be tolerant and big-spirited. so that explains why i was taking a humungous box of old clothes on the subway from flushing to manhattan. they were my old clothes, which chung-yung had good-naturedly been keeping for me after i left her.
someday i must write a piece about my life in flushing to be titled 'the flushing captivity' - let's hope i get around to it.
you see, chung-yung's former roommate had insisted on washing her clothes in the bathroom and chung-yung was convinced, months after this roommate left, that fumes from the detergents used still lingered throughout the apartment, evoking allergic sympthoms from her. as chung-yung put it, the "toxins" had permea ted her closet and all her clothes. in order to quiet this hypochondria while the roommate remained, i had surreptiously poured out the roommate's detergent and filled the bottle with mild dishwashing liquid, and made damn sure chung-yung watched me do it, too, under the theory that alcoholics can't be disputed with - they can only be humored. when an alcoholic sees little green men, you never make things better by disputing their reality. you have to chase the little green men out. then the alcoholic feels better and you have some peace.
anyhow, the "toxins" had permeated my old clothes, so i was removing them to manhattan, where the prevailing winds would send the "toxins" toward hoboken, or somewhere. i was in one of my snits because it's not always possible to be happy while chasing the little green men. and sweating and trembling from the weight of the humongous box, i sat and scribbled upon a napkin a list of grievances i had against chip, long stored up and brooded upon. it's by no means a complete list, but it's a representative sample of acts which have brought me to the present state. if you out there feel sad or shocked about what has happened to old archer in his dotage, then try assimilating these details.
chip has often said that he brought me to new york. a chippian distortion of course. he brought me to new rochelle. and under false pretenses. chip always hated new york. he said it once in one of our arguments. for years he lied to me about his desire to live in new york city. for years he convinced me to go on living in new rochelle with his insane nasty sister because one of these days, alice, one of these days, we would be moving into new york city. i lived in a child's bedroom for three years paying equally while chip and his nasty insane sister had full bedrooms. now chip uses my room for storage. chip and i mo ved to new rochelle. i moved myself to new york city, and over his vehement emotional objections.
chip finally freed himself of that alcoholic con man james last summer. james and his girlfriend sold chip's boat and robbed chip. chip was due maybe $8000. they gave him $500. well, i hate to say chip's stupid, because in so many ways he is demonstrably not. but he has a great weakness. whenver he wants something, he is blind to any drawbacks. that's why he connected himself to james even when he knew james had been an alky. chip wanted a boat.
repeating errors is one sign of stupidity. well, chip has bought himself a new boat. he called me up last week and said he was bringing it city island this week end. "but it won't be simple," he said. "first i gotta sail it across from long island, and that's dangerous."
"gonna write a book?" i asked.
this silenced him momentarily. then he said, "no, but i was thinking how nice it'd be to have you along for old times sake. there's no doubt that if i was doing this 20 years ago, you'd be on that boat. you know, i opened up a box last weekend, and there was all this stuff from blackstone-"
"i'm goin to bed" i said. "call me in the morning." don't think harshly of me. i didn't say what i was thinking, which was, 'i'll never get on a boat with you again as long you fuckin' live." you see, said boating is a big bore. if there's no wind, you're in effect sitting in your driveway baking except surrounded by water with salt in it. if there's wind, chip, who never progressed beyond the psychological age of eight - or five - and must play with his toys - will turn the boat on its side, making it impossible to read. read? what am i supposed to do? look at the water?& nbsp; i own a working toilet if i want to look at water.but i'll never get on a boat with chip as long as he fuckin' lives again because of a boorish incident on his part. we were his on his boat one afternoon with some girls. hours passed. like five. five hours of chip playing with one of his toys. the girls needed to piss. i overheard them mentioning this among themselves, but they were too shy to tell the captain. so i was a gentleman. i marched up to chip to and told him i had to take a piss really badly. chip said, "AWWWWWWHHHHH why don't you just hang over the side?'that was my good friend telling me to take a piss hanging over the side of the boat because the baby was having too much fun with his toy. after a few hours we made it to shore with much unhappiness on the baby's part, and the girls went ashore, one of them whispering, "peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee."i will never get on a boat with him again as long as he fuckin' lives.scroll back to his weak attempt to manipulate me into getting on his new boat by appealing to feelings no longer felt. chip's manipulative of course, but i have to admit in his mitigation that he's also sentimental. he genuinely believes in the good old days between us. I mean that when i refuse to be screwed as in the past, he may genuinely feel betrayed. after all, exploitation was always a feature of our friendship, and when I don't tolerate it he may, indeed, believe i've forsaken him. when his friend john livingston died last summer chip blubbered into the phone. but it was all self-centered, of course. at one point chip summed up the loss of john by saying, "it just means there will be one less person who knows chip cummings." that statement is so revealing it is almost as though a dramatist wrote it.i hope someday to write an essay titled "stupid never sleeps". the thesis of the essay is that stupid always wins because stupid never stops, sleeps or changes. it is the strongest force in human history. and the moral of the essay is you can't argue with a stupid person. or you shouldn't. now, to bring us back to chip, you can't argue with a dishonest person. it took me the longest time to understand these simple concepts, but i understand them now and can look back upon the unknowing archer of years before as though he was a different person, the sap, the butt, the fool, whatever you want to term the person who doesn't know shit from shinola.it wasn't so long ago. i had begun teaching. it may have been the summer of 1995, and chip and i were driving together to nags head. this was the infamous evening when i mentioned something about failing students and chip snorted derisively, "yeah, i'd like to see you try to fail a student." analyzing chip's retort after all these years, i believe his attitude was anchored in chip's belief that education is like everything in chip's universe - a scam, a con, a put-up job. you see, we always teach the wrong lessons and learn the wrong lessons. and i think growing up with a father who was an ad exec affected chip's psychological development. i think he came to believe that everything was a fraud and that nothing mattered except appearance.
when chung-yung took me to korea, i discovered one day in the park near her home a well-dressed group of bums. i mean they wore suits. i remember that i sighted a well-dressed group of men ahead of me who threw off an aura, a bad smell, of being low-class. if we study this phenomenon, we may note that i was relying upon my vision - of well-dressed men - while my intuition told me that they were low-class - by their movements, by the tone of their voices. and when i saw their flushed-red, seamed faces and exaggerated facial movements, my logical faculties finally joined the incongruous elements in a fit. here were bums in the park wearing nice clothes. i was puzzled.when i inquired to chung-yung about this anomaly, she knew all about it. in korea, she said, value is placed upon appearance above all else. thus winos may dress nicely and con men flourish. "ah!" i said, amusing her greatly. "so chip is korean."so when chip said to me in the car that he dared me to fail a student, what chip meant was that higher education is a fraud, that students buy their grades and that i couldn't fail a student any more than i could sell a customer in a grocery store an empty can of peaches. in fairness to chip, he probably held an accurate view of his own educational experience.but i took it as a dare, and i began to argue. my mistake. for five hours we argued. we argued from new jersey to virginia. we finally ran out of gas because chip wouldn't stop talking. we had to pay a tow truck to bring gasoline. it was so late we paid for a hotel room. and it was all my mistake.because this sermon is about chip and me both. you can't have a con man without a sucker. i learned in this incident that you can't argue with a dishonest person. you see, i was honestly interested in refuting chip's allegation. and chip was dishonestly interested in avoiding admitting he was wrong. i thought i could overcome chip's evasions, circumlocutions, ellisions, and sliding equivalents with facts. because i thought chip was honestly attempting to argue. i really thought that. i am almost embarrassed to think about how naive i was.however, this incident speaks volumes of how highly chip regards my intelligence - to argue for five hours about a miniscule point that even he must have known was false. it speaks volumes.to brood is good, as long as it brings something approaching insight or some form of relief. otherwise, it's a prelude possibly to pulling a timothy mcveigh, who spent a weekend in a hotel room lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling, brooding, before he blew up the murrah building. brooding needs to lead to something, although not necessarily terrorism.i recognize now that chip's behavior was often merely a matter of carelesnness or disrespect. i don't think it was ever malicious. When he split my lip with the baseball, it was simply a matter of carelessness. chip and I were playing catch and he decided, without mentioning it, to throw me a knuckleball pitch. now in the first place, pitching is different from playing catch. that's why baseball has catchers - to signal for the pitch they want so they can prepare to catch it, and sometimes even with this communication, the catchers miss it. but even the pitcher doesn't know where a knuckleball is going to go - and the famous catcher bob uecker joshed that the way to catch a knuckleball was to pick it up after it stopped rolling. in other words, chip threw an unpredictable pitch at me without warning that he was even pitching. i remember holding my glove at chest height and then watching the ball rise in the air to chin level. that's how knuckleballs act.it was $3000 of carelessness after insurance and a permanent bump in my lower lip. but that's chip. he does what he wants to do and the consequences are just astrology. noone can predict how the stars go.i did have the pleasure of asking the doctor if i could have the slices of my lip that he cut away. i remember lying on the table and catching my reflection in the polished metal of the operating lamp, watching the doctor's hand go in and out of my lip with the sewing needle. the doctor asked me what i wanted my lip for. i said i wanted to tell a friend (kokis) "here. i been waiting to give you some of my lip". the doc shook his head no.that trip to nags head in 1995 generated another physical injury i still see every day. we were on the beach. it was 102. i roasted and asked chip if we could leave. we had a friend with us and chip said the friend wasn't ready to leave. chip suggested if i had had enough sun, then i should go sit in the car...on a 102 degree day. well, i was roasted, and i slathered myself up with lotion that night and the next and the next. on the fifth day, my forehead fell off. really. up by my hairline today is a patch of skin that will not tan. it will only turn angry red, as though scalding water had hit it. through the years it has sometimes formed unsightly scabs that people comment upon. this angry red patch, of course, is an obvious site for future melanoma. i mean, a layer of skin has been removed and will not grow back. in a moment of anger i once mentioned this to chip, and he said, "wear a hat".wear a hat...what kind of friend is so careless of consequences and selfish in his own purposes as to physically injure and leave with defacing scars someone he terms a friend - twice? well, obviously, no friend at all.in 1991 chip caused me to miss a christmas with my family. in the weeks preceding christmas he had been calling me and moaning about how he was all alone and why should he care about christmas because he had no family and how he didn't have anyone and boo hoo hoo.god laughs at humans. he gives them all the qualities humans pretend to esteem - generosity, honesty, sincerety and sympathy - and holds his shaking belly while life fucks them for exercising those qualities.i told chip we'd have a new york christmas together. ya know, the old fashioned movie type, jingle bells, salavation army santas, snowflakes, colored lights, bums in the snow etc. etc. chip agreed. so i gave up christmas with my family - for chip, because i felt sorry for him. i called my friend on christmas morning and asked him when he'd be arriving in the city. he said, "ahhhhh, why don't you come up here?" i spent christmas by myself.he never hesitated to pull the old neglected friend routine on me, not even up to today. i remember when i worked at teachers college and was taking courses there and at columbia in 93 and 94. one winter sunday afternoon chip spoke in tones harsh, regretful, forsaken, about what a wrong course my life had taken because i couldn't come sit in his apartment with him. i was in the office working on that sunday. but i could have sat in chip's apartment while he sucked his bong and got glassy eyed and pointed at some cartoon on tv and bellowed stoned laughter. i didn't.chip obviously has feelings, too. he has needs and is easily hurt, as in the example just above. chip's needs have always come before my well-being. for many, many years, whenever chip got stoned and lonely and needed to talk to me at 1 a.m. on weeknights, he picked up that phone, even when i told him not to. when i was once unemployed and had a job interview scheduled for the following morning, a job i needed badly, i told chip at midnight that i was going to sleep. he called 45 minutes later.when i was studying night and day for an important grad school exam and told him i was going to bed, he called me at 1 a.m. i didn't pick up. i called his answering machine back and called him a motherfucker 20 times and didn't talk to him for two months. i'm a shitty friend.then there were the late charges for non-payment of a new york times subscription that amounted to almost $1000. why go into it?then there was the time he said he and i should have an agreement that we would never bring any persons to paris, that it was our secret stash (nobody who knows chip can doubt that i'm using his vocabulary), that we should share it with noone - but then he brought sam hillegass because sam wasn't violating the agreement. why go into it?then there was the time he lied to lala when she wanted to accompany sam, chip and me to amsterdam. lala wanted us to take her, but sam and chip didn't want her to go, so chip said he had to be in amsterdam by a date before she had vacation because he had to present at an important citicorp teleconference. i remember the three of us standing on the sidewalk yelling at each other, sam and chip against me because they didn't want lala to go and i couldn't believe they were treating her thus. why go into it?well, i digress to shine a spotlight on the female mind. i'm sure it would change nothing to let lala know about this incident because she has decided she likes chip, and if a woman has decided she likes a man, then he can do no wrong. no betrayal, infidelity, falsehood or act of ingratitude or inconsideration can affect her decision. she likes the man, she'll rationalize, and put a period there.'how long can this go on?' you're all thinking. i apologize. i'll try to close. i'll relate one act from relatively recent times, October 2006, for the purpose of illustrating the futility of forgiveness for chip. god knows why, but chip had let that alcoholic con man james drive one of chip's cars and a mechanical problem had cropped up. chip could get it fixed cheaply in fort lee, but he needed me to follow him there in his other car and pick him up from the garage.by the way - if i harp upon chip's vanity and premium upon appearance, then answer me this: how many single men do you know who own two cars?i went to new rochelle. chip told me to follow him to fort lee. i didn't have directions or the name of the garage. we pulled onto the expressway. chip jammed his foot on the gas and zoomed out of sight. i saw him no more. i drove to fort lee. i drove around. fort lee is filled with cops. i haven't had a vailid driver's license since 1988. finally, in a state of mind not to be imagined, or possibly you can, i drove chip's car back across the hudson and down to the village. if chip wanted his car back, this time he would come and get it.he'd already left a message of course. i think i took a good leisurely crap before i returned it. i told chip he'd lost me. chip thought differently. chip said that it was like a fighter squadron in wwii. everyone had to follow the leader. in other words, chip was attempting to put the blame on me. i didn't yell, but i didn't mince words. chip became quiet. finally he asked where his car was. i said 12th street. i didn't say anything about how it might be picked up and chip didn't ask. he just said he'd call me when he reached grand central.ya know, we all really have to do some thinking when we have misfortunes. if we think really hard, i believe we'll find that a fair bit stems from our own selves. sure i blame myself. without those qualities in myself, many things would not have happened. that doesn't mean the qualities are bad. they're what i got, and they're not negative. it's analagous to getting struck by lightning while on the telephone. those things happen, and it wouldn't have happened if i hadn't been on the telphone.but chip never blames himself, and so he never learns or changes. even in this last incident, his final verdict was that it was "the curse of james". so he never learns or changes.years after his insane nasty sister screwed him with a credit card fraud and years after james suckered him into the boat scam, chip talked about how he had just started to make decent money at citicorp and then that pair intervened. as chip put it, "my ship came in and it was full of pirates."that's chip at his best: the witty, appropriate bon mot that is mirth-provoking."my ship came in and it was full of pirates."yeah. but chip surrounded himself with louche, shifty people all his life, and almost everyone of them shafted him or turned on him. bob brocia, nancy, james and his girlfriend, david stapleford and his wife, richard caine - they all stole his money. his old friend sam hillegass called him "yankee scum" the last time they talked and hung up on him. bobby ridgewell never shafted him so far as i know, but what kind of college graduate from new rochelle spends afternoons sitting around with professional drug dealers who look like haystack calhoun? what is likely to derive from such activities?about chip's new boat - he went to look at last weekend. "there's a lot of stuff stolen off it," chip said. a flare gun kit, two gallons of gas in a can, a bilge pump, a tool set etc. "I gotta get that boat outa that yard next week," chip said. "next week?" i asked. "by then it'll look like a fish skeleton.""my ship came in and it was full of pirates." it's almost true, so close that it obscures the truth. chip bought a lot of ships in his life, and almost every one of them had the pirates aboard when chip bought them. he was too careless or centered on himself to see it. pace resquiet.