Up in the Old Hotel

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Mount Si

A cold blue hangs on the deck and drips off the flowers falling from the verandas. The sun is far from rising above the Cascades and the raccoons are far, miles miles miles, from the mess they made with the trash by the steep street earlier that night. The mug in his hand holds fresh dust and bitter coffee and a proud porcelain crack on the side opposite his mouth. His boots are muddy and dry and in the back seat of the car out front. His sandwich is made. The dried mangos get sealed in sandwich bags and he convinces himself that today will be a good day. Busy, but a good day. The term papers are stacked and tied together with used rubber bands and fresh blue ink. No one hears him whistle and he hardly knows the tune coming from his perked lips and or even that he’s making a noise. The wind kicking at the thin windows and the creak of the wood floors makes the rhythm and he follows it as easy as he can. In his head, he can see the mountain snow turning to ice and he fears it’ll turn to rain and slush and mud. But, my friend, he’s found a rhythm and he aims to follow it as easy as he can.

No one along the asphalt river of Interstate 5, from sunny San Diego to mundane Medford, up towards to Portland and the soaked logs surrounding the saw mill in Kelso, and all through Seattle and on any lake or reservoir and mountain village, not one resident of any highway town and city of this West Coast can be worried, shy, happy, relaxed, stressed, like my friend Luke. Luke’s idiosyncrasies can be easy to impersonate, but I’ve met no one like him. When I do My Luke, I simply slouch my shoulders slightly, rub my hands against the front of my pants and say quietly, “well, well, well, that just isn’t right, don’t cha think,” while I shimmy my bare upper lip, where the real Luke’s perfectly white mustache would be. Luke is a professor of English, speaks fluent Old English (which, surprisingly, sounds nothing like Modern English, or Early Modern English, yet a little like German) loves American literature but has little respect for anything John Steinbeck ever wrote, collects Japanese caper books in paperback, is in bed by 9 every night, reads for one half hour, turns out the light, wishes his wife a good night, and wakes up–every morning, without fail or falter–at five AM to go over papers, eat oatmeal (Quaker Oats, milk, raisins and brown sugar) drink coffee (straight black) and comb his hair with his callused fingers.

Every Thursday, during the school year, which runs from late September to June, Luke drives his Honda to the US Bank on Third and Nickerson and waits till 6:05 for students to join him. Then, he will leave the parking lot and drive east to Mt Si. Luke makes sure that no class is ever scheduled for those Thursday mornings. Luke has not taught a Thursday morning class in over twenty years. “I have to go up. I don’t care if its the same hike. I need to. It keeps me sane.” Every student who decides to join Luke on his regular hike is told the same thing, with shaky, good-humored but honest words. “I leave the parking lot of the bank at 6:05, because the clock in my car is wrong. So, I leave at six. Bring ten dollars. Five for breakfast. Five for lunch. See you in the morning.” Luke loves having students along for his weekly hikes. Students love coming along with Luke. Luke doesn’t wait past 6:05.

Quiet news drifts from the radio and competes with the heat humming from the vents of Luke’s new car. Luke says he bought the new car because he was in a rut, but he doesn’t say what kind of rut this was. He drives east on Interstate 90 towards the town of North Bend, at the base of Mt. Si. The waistress at Tweet’s Cafe in downtown North Bend knows Luke and winks as he orders the same thing he orders every Thursday. This lady knows the order, but Luke says it anyway, the same he has for years. “Good morning,” he says. “Oatmeal. Thank you.” Luke pays in cash and sits by the Pac-Man arcade game near the door. He ruffles his white hair and warms his blood by breathing quick, hot breathes under his mustache.

Camp Robber

Luke moves in a steady stroll up the four miles of Mt. Si. He weighs down his ruck sack with old detergent bottles filled with tap water. He does this for the exercise and to keep in shape for the summer when he’ll walk a section of the Pacific Crest Trail. I’ve tried for numerous summers to plan a week of hiking on the PCT with Luke, but it has never come to be. Even worse, for each attempt, Luke will painstakingly map out each and every mile we’d walk together, months before either of us has bought a single freeze-dried dinner or water purifier. “I want you to look at something here,” Luke would say whenever I’d visit his office, an office he painted an off-white, because the standard white the school insisted upon gave him a headache. “I was looking at the section of trail we’ll be moving through. We’ll take it easy a few days and make enough time to climb the Sisters. Now, what do you think about carrying boots? I don’t want to, but, but we just might have to if we’re going to climb anything.” Then, Luke’ll unfold a large map, reference an off-beat PCT guide, search through Google Earth and print out a small copy of the map, jot notes on that map and fold it up for me to take home. It broke my heart when I called from Montana to let him know that this summer, my friend, just ain’t going to work.

Once to the summit of Mt. Si, Luke feeds the Camp Robbers that wait through the year for hikers on the top. The birds stay till the snows push them off the mountain or beneath the deep cracks in the rocks. Camp Robbers are given their name because of their complete lack of fear for humans, and their near infatuation for humans with food. “Once, I had a sandwich in my hand and here one come,” Luke once said of the birds. “I was about to take a bite and then it was gone. The bird nearly crashed trying to carry it away.”

The mountain steadily conquered, Luke sits against an icy rock and shares his sandwich and dried mango with blue and silver birds that rest on his shoulders and stare up at him from his resting hand. Other birds hang on the skeleton trees and watch as Luke drinks his coffee from a black and gray thermos. Clouds cover the sun and the view down the highway and Luke knows the time just by the familiar breeze and the crick in his knees. Luke stands, unloads the water from his pack, reties his shoes and whistles down the mountain like Chaucer or Whitman or Joseph Mitchell on his way to visit Joe Gould.

James Murray, creator of the OED, and Professor Luke look-alike.

Luke has two book collections. One covers the west wall of his school office. These are mostly reference books and paperback novels. This collection is haphazardly arranged by class and subject. Devoted to one self is a complete Oxford English Dictionary: over 30 volumes, each weighing close to ten pounds of pressed ink and linguistic knowledge. “The library announced they were getting a new Oxford Dictionary,” says Luke. “So, at the meeting, among all the English staff, before the librarian could even finish asking, ‘would anyone like these…’ I shot my hand up. I carted them out with a hand-truck to my office that night.” For Luke, this was like an early Christmas and a double birthday, plus an Olympic medal multiplied by a smooch from Marylin Monroe, the star of his yearly calendar and a few magazine clippings on his office wall . It was the best meeting he ever had.

Luke’s other book collection is at his Shoreline home. This collection is in perfect order by Last Name, First and moves on five or six cabinets throughout his one story house. One evening, before dinner with his wife, my girlfriend and I, Luke tells me he has something I need to see.

“I saved up for this one,” says Luke with wide eyes. He wipes his hands on his jeans before taking a short hardback book on the shelf. The cover depicts a wild-haired man smiling and five words in bubbling yellow type: Joe Gould’s Secrect Joseph Mitchell. “This is the book I was telling you about. First edition. Mitchell is the New Yorker writer who wrote these incredible profiles about people in the bad parts of town. I think you need to read him.” Joe Gould, Luke tells me, was what some call an excentric and author of the grandest History ever written. “Mitchell hung around this guy, and he wrote on everything. Said he was writing the greatest History of America,” Luke says to me. Joe Gould listened to people and wrote down what they said. His History was extensive but never about politicians. Joe Gould, and perhaps Mitchell as well, meant to tell history in the back of bars and the window side of coffee shops and cafes. “You need to read this,” Luke says. Then, he placed the book back on the shelf.

I went and read everything by Joseph Mitchell, but never found “Joe Gould’s Secret.” The school library didn’t own it, and it was no where to be found at my favorite book stores. Luke had the first edition in his home. Luke had showed it to me. He even let me hold it. But, I knew he wouldn’t let me borrow it, so I didn’t ask. Every moment I had it my hands at his home, Luke looked on and smiled and frowned, full of pride and worry.

Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell

When Luke grades papers, he does so with his feet up on his desk, leaning back in his wooden chair. He holds an inkwell pen in his right hand and jots notes in capital letters on countless double-spaced essays. In his office, a stack of stapled and annotated paper sits like a crumbling mountain to his right on the floor next to a few dead flies and more than a few blue rubber bands. Luke’s sharp shoulders almost touch his hairy ears, and his mouth moves slightly as he follows arguments and decides on their most appropriate conclusion. His notes are extensive. For almost each and every essay he will touch this day and the next and the day after that, Luke smothers black ink and coffee rings on each page. Then, he types a one-page letter and signs it “Best Wishes, Luke.” In fact, Luke writes extensively on just about everything. He keeps schedules in black ink on his left hand, red notes in a leather booklet, diagrams of his happiness and stress on coffeehouse receipts, names of good books on anything he can find.

When I found him in his office, he appeared relaxed when I knocked on his door, his feet up, his pen frantic.

“Howdy, Luke,” I said.

“Well hello there, Michael,” he said with his eyes wide.

“I just wanted to stop by and say hi.”

“Thank you very much. Now is not so much the time, Michael. I got quite the stack of papers to grade. I’d love to get together soon. Maybe when the quarter ends…” and breathes heavy through his mouth. Then shakes his hair and taps the pen on his knee.

“Cool. No worries. I’ll talk to you soon.”

By his office door, on a tack-board featuring a photo of a bald man in bathtub, Luke displays his weekly schedule. The spaces not taken up by class, meetings, and Thursday’s Hiking Day, are full of loopy letters making up student’s names. Some need a meeting to go over papers. Some need to talk about home, roommates, God, a girl. Others just want to go have coffee to hear what he has to say and to really be listened to. I look for space to put my name. But there is none. I start to leave.

“Michael. See any movies lately?” Luke asks.

“Yeah. I saw the one we were talking about a while ago. The sci-fi one. I saw it at the Crest.”

“My son and I saw that one too. Very good. Very very good–”

“Best action movie I saw all yea–”

“Michael,” Luke says, remembering the papers and the deadlines. “Okay, sorry, back to work. Take care, now”

“Will do, Luke.”

I didn’t see Luke for a long time after that. Then, I got an email, early in the morning.

Michael, guess what?  I bought you a little present – don’t get too excited, because it’s from Goodwill.  It’s sitting on the dictionary stand up against the window in my office (it has your name on it).  Best wishes, Luke.

In the empty office the next afternoon I found a large paperback book exactly where Luke had said. On the front was a note with my name on it. All capital letters. Black ink. Two dots on the I. The book was Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel. It was a book of all of his profiles and essays, collected and ordered in small type and tight margins. I stood in Luke’s office and flipped through the stories of non-celebrities I had been reading and had enjoyed for their clear words and obvious respect for those who never asked for much, those who never thought they should have gotten much of any from anyone them, but who deserve all of their content and tired bodies could hold. The stories that were nothing but hard and eloquent lines on scratch paper, those stories and people made to last forever from double-dotted I’s and best regards and full pages. And in the final section, “Joe Gould’s Secret.” As I walked down the hall from Luke office and turned down the stairs and over the flat grass outside, rubber shoes kicked on the sidewalk and I hummed a song I didn’t know.

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