Jodhpurs and Cuss-words
February 25th, 2007
He stood before the class like a feverdream of veddy-veddy-British horsemanship stained with a febrile madness: a tall, heavily-built man with a florid, good-natured face and long steely hair swept back in oily ringlets, dressed in a classical English riding outfit of bow tie, bright yellow jacket, and black jodhpurs tucked into kneehigh black boots. His voice when he spoke, detailing the materials we’d be reading and discussing in his Great Books class, was a basso-profundo boom of such angelic clarity and pulpit-searing power that it made even the lowliest phrase–”We’ll be meeting in Room 203 of the Education Center next Wednesday”–sound like a pronouncement from the very God of the Old Testament himself. Between his surreal attire and his beautiful, beautiful voice, Professor Gene Halboth could’ve made a lecture about the rate of salt deposition in the Dead Sea hypnotic. You couldn’t take your eyes off of the man; you couldn’t stopper your eyes. He was like a man-shaped hole in the Universe through which shone the light of some strange and outré reality where antebellum South’ron gentlemen hunted radioactive foxes through mushroom forests and spoke with the tongues of seal-breaking, trumpet-blowing, end-calling apocalyptic angels….
It was my first semester at California University of Pennsylvania–Fall of 1993–and Gene Halboth’s Great Books class was the first class of my first day. Even though I was a transfer student (from Penn State Fayette) with a number of credits under my belt and no real need for a general humanities class like Great Books, I’d nonetheless scheduled the course as an elective because…hell, I was an English major! I loved nothing better than reading, and none of the other electives available to me that semester seemed interesting or apropos to my field of study–so there I was, half-asleep at my desk, surrounded by hordes of oblivious freshmen still reeking of the booze they’d guzzled at last night’s semester-kickoff parties. And before me, this…this vision of the unearthly, this bizarre rider, spoke at length of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (which wasn’t even on our reading list) and paused every now and again to utter completely random statements such as: “Karl Marx…how I despise the writings of that man!”
That first day of class, Halboth did not once mention any of the books that were listed in the syllabus. He did not discuss grading, or any assignments. He did not even call roll or address any of us students with questions, comments, or any form of acknowledgement–he simply entered the room like an Old Testament prophet decked out for a fox hunt in the King’s Woods, proceeded to the blackboard, and began to lecture about…well, whatever happened to be in his mind at that moment. It was a stream-of-consciousness rant that covered everything from baseball scores to the Evil of Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy to the Evil of Karl Marx, the Evil of Karl Marx to proper watering of your houseplants.
This guy’s a certifiable loony, I thought then.
Ohhhh, little did I know….
I dropped the class a day later–but not because of Herr Halboth’s obvious insanity. Rather, I dropped it despite that. I would’ve loved to remain in his class, sitting back and losing myself in the incomprehensible spirals of his fractal eccentricity–because watching crazy people do they thang is one of the greatest of amusements!–but the class was allllllll the way on the other end of campus from the rest of my courses, and my busted-up knees simply couldn’t hack that quartermile march. I had to get Gene Halboth to sign the drop slip, which I did before the next meeting.
I caught him in the hall. “Dr. Halboth,” said I, “I have to drop your class. My knees are all messed up,” and so on and so forth. I handed him the slip and he signed it with a strange, almost lonely sigh.
“Take care of yourself, young man,” he said with a heartbreaking, lonely gravitas–as though he were my father, and I’d just told him I was moving West to pursue my prodigal dreams in Hollywood. “I wish only the best for you.”
And those were the last words that I recall Gene Halboth ever saying to me. But that was not the end of my experiences with him.
I was entering Cal U as a junior, having taken enough credits in my two years at Penn State Fayette Campus to transfer in well beyond the need for lowerlevel classes like “Great Books” or any of the freshman or sophomore courses that Professor Halboth taught. He was then nearing retirement, after however-many long years teaching at Cal U, and taught only a handful of classes per semester–usually “Great Books” and a section or two of freshman comp. I never had any need to take Halboth for anything…but as an English major who quickly became somewhat of a fixture around the English Department (so much so that, by the time I was a senior, I was occasionally mistaken for a junior or adjunct member of the faculty!), I got to see him every now and again, passing silently, mysteriously down the corridor in old Dixon Hall, ducking in and out of his verboten office that I don’t think anyone but he had entered in nearly twenty years, and greeting his colleagues and sometimes students with a vacant sort of terse aplomb.
Every English Department at every college, university, trade school, Magick Ackademy, and hall-o’-learnin’ on earth is–by its very nature–a hotbed of rumors and whispered tales. Who’s sleeping with whom, who’s the biggest backstabber, who’s got his/her nose farthest up President Armenti’s goldplated ass…et cetera. God knows, Cal U’s English Department was a howling tempest of academic drama summoned up by a veritable legion of Prosperos–but even amongst such a tumultuous crowd of egos, ideals, and twisted, Calibanic pettiness, Gene Halboth shone in the whirling murk with an aetheric glow unique to him.
In a department that one friend and colleague once likened to ”an ambulatory asylum where the inmates have all gotten tenure,” Gene Halboth was our Chief Broom. He was our Dr. Channard.
His background, I soon learned, was rather tragic–as those of many bonafide weirdos are…for, contrary to common belief, true weirdos are made, not born. The orbits of comets are not eccentric by default: circumstances, and the innate brutality of the universe, bends their paths with blows, strikes, damage. And so it was with Gene Halboth. He’d been a perfectly normal fella (or, well, as normal a fella as any English teacher can be) until his wife died sometime in the 1980s, I believe. Her death derailed the poor man, and he was just never right after that….He filled the void of her absence with his horses, and eventually he began to show up for work only in his riding outfit. Thus was a legend born.
Gene Halboth was a genial guy, for the most part, and so most of the stories concerning him were comical in nature–almost all of them revolving around something strange or silly overheard in one of his classes, or in the English Department hallway.
But some of the stories were of a much darker nature….It seems Professor Halboth had a temper. It took a great deal to incite it, but if you did…god help you. Supposedly, Halboth once spent three consecutive class periods savagely berating a student who interrupted one of his scattershot “lectures” with juvenile note-passing. I can only imagine how terrifying it must’ve been to be in the focus of that thunderous voice’s crop-withering ire. But Halboth’s rare-but-explosive outbursts were not merely vocal. Once, it was said, he was pissed at a fellow professor over some sort of policy issue (as a tenured faculty member, Halboth was required to serve on various committees now and again); he cornered this colleague in the hallway outside his office, and when the other said something that finally lit Halboth’s powder, he erupted and slammed the poor bastard against the wall–holding him off the ground with one hand around his throat! Remember: Gene Halboth may have been old and, later, in rather poor health…but he was a big guy, with the strength of a friggin’ bear.
It’s hard–damnear impossible–to credit many of these tales, of course. Halboth was a secretive man. He guarded his office with the vigilance of a genie guarding a hoard of Mohammedan gold: I never saw the interior of it, nor have I ever met anyone who did. And, as is the case with all eccentrics, it was hard to believe whether or not any of the tales told about him were true or not. It was certainly possible that they were…but it was just as likely that they were complete fabrications.
There is, however, one particular Halboth Tale that I can personally verify. One story that, one day, I discovered to be 100% True As Can Be.
The Tale of the Cussing Chamber.
One of the most common legends of Gene Halboth was that he had a special secret room somewhere in the library where he’d repair at uncertain times to just sit and…well, cuss. Swear. Talk shit. This was probably the least outré tale told of Professor Halboth, yet still suspect: Halboth was a very dedicated Christian, who always spoke very formally; I simply couldn’t envision Herr Halboth sullying that amazing voice with so vulgar a word as “shit.” At the same time, though, every religious person I’ve ever known has had some kind of dark, shadowy quirk or id-monster hidden in the basement of their minds…so, hey–it wasn’t that much of a stretch to imagine that Halboth might find pleasure and release in clandestine cursing. Hell, maybe he rode his horses around his property motherfucking away loudly like some Victorian lord shooting invective at the world. What made the Tale of the Cussing Chamber unique, though, was that it existed on campus–in Manderino Library…perhaps on the third floor, perhaps the fourth. Many people swore (pun intended) that they’d seen Halboth go into the Cussing Chamber, but they all said the room was in different places.
Little did I know that one day I would discover the room for myself. It happened thusly:
In my last semester of undergraduate study, Spring of 1995, I found myself spending a great deal of time in Manderino Library studying for various tests, reading assigned texts…but, mostly, just goofing off or sleeping between widely-spaced classes. The fourth floor of the library was the best place to do these things, for it was the Quiet Floor: no talking, no cellphones, no noise of any kind allowed. The fourth floor was painted a lovely, peaceful aqueous blue–the blue of swimming pools and hospitals–and among the stacks of dusty books were many comfortable blue chairs and uncomfortable study carrels where one could flop and pursue a good nap or a marathon cram session. Along one side of the fourth floor, though, were a number of small, closetlike study rooms, only big enough for a single person and a study carrel, where students could sequester themselves if they wanted absolute peace and quiet, or anonymity. Needless to say, these study chambers were mostly used for making out and furtive fucks; the one and only time I ever saw fit to use one–for putting together an extensive project for a linguistics class–I ended up leaving the door open so that some fresh air from the fourth floor proper could circulate in and dispel the cloying funk of young love.
But I digress. My favorite place to flop on the fourth floor was in a bank of chairs close to the study rooms, where I could prop my feet up on an endtable and do my work (that is, doze off) in the warm sunlight spilling through the great panes of glass that overlooked the campus before me. And that’s where I was one day, reading an assignment for my Modern British Novel course, when Gene Halboth came creaking by. In the hollow silence of the fourth floor, the squeaking of his leather boots was greatly magnified. I looked over my shoulder to see him passing behind me, his ever-present riding crop in one hand and a leather satchel full of papers–Comp I papers, I supposed–in the other. He proceeded over to one of the study rooms and unlocked it with a set of keys, then vanished within.
This was the first time I’d ever seen Professor Halboth in the library, and as I saw him enter the study room I immediately thought: Could this be it? Is this the Cussing Chamber? It was not unusual to see various teachers go into and out of the study rooms, of course: many of them used the little boxes as convenient places away from the office in which to grade papers or organize extensive research projects. And Halboth had gone by with a bulging sack of papers. No doubt he’d just repaired to the study room to grade that mound of student babble in peace and quiet….I returned to my reading and, though I was still troubled by thoughts of the Cussing Chamber, I turned my attention elsewhere.
Until I heard the mumbling.
A few minutes after Halboth had entered the room, I grew aware of a low muttering just audible over the blue-painted silence and the rasp of turning pages. I thought it was merely some students whispering in the nearby stacks. I put it out of mind…but minutes later it intruded again–it had not, in fact, gone anywhere: the murmur was slow and steady and constant as the rumble of distant machinery. I looked around but was completely alone. On a Tuesday afternoon, after most classes were finished, the fourth floor of the library was a ghost town. I was alone in this part of the library…except for Professor Halboth. In the nearby study room.
Could it…? Was there some truth in…?
I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to know.
So I crept over to the door of the study room. The steady drone of hushed conversation was definitely coming from within–I could recognize the profundo cadences of Halboth’s voice leaking from the room like a rich, dark mist. At first I thought he was speaking to someone, perhaps talking on a cellphone, but the rhythm of his speech was not the broken back-and-forth of a conversation, but a metrical march of a recitation. Was he reading something aloud to himself? Beowulf, perhaps? It certainly sounded epic.
I leaned closer to the door’s lock, where I could hear better–all the while tingling with a fizzy mixture of emotions: fear of being caught, curiosity, anticipation, the thrill of the strange–and I heard:
“Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Buttfucker. The fucker of butts. The sucker of cocks. I fuck your mother. Shit, bullshit, and horse-shit….”
All in that wondrous, stentorian voice that I’d long identified as the voice of the heavens.
It was true. All of it. The Cussing Chamber was real–I was crouched outside of it, trembling with amazement, as within Professor Gene Halboth delivered a seemingly endless litany of filth that would make a gangsta rapper blush. It was like listening to a god damning a horrific offense.
Thought Halboth’s voice sounded calm and expertly controlled, there was a Satanic vehemence behind that words that made them sizzle with danger. This was the man who’d picked up a fellow faculty member by the throat and pinned him to the wall. Dear god, what would he do if he discovered me squatting outside his adytum of virulence?! I was honestly frightened–yet also struggling and struggling not to burst out laughing–so I scampered away and resumed my seat.
I tried to study. I tried to read my novel. But I couldn’t. The neverending rumble of distant cursewords and slander just wouldn’t leave me alone. I wanted to call somebody, anybody on my cellphone and tell them, “I’VE FOUND THE CUSSING CHAMBER! IT’S REAL!” I wanted to jump up and down and run around in circles laughing.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and packed up my stuff to leave. Just then, the study room door opened and Professor Halboth stepped out, locking it again behind him. His usually-florid face was a terrible, bruised red/purple–like a blackberry about to burst. His brow was sweaty. Yet he came out with a noticeable lightness to his heavy body, as though he’d just taken a twelve-pound shit, or shed a mental weight that had been bending his back for weeks.
He noticed me standing there and gave me a kind nod. “Hello, son,” he said, and walked on, swinging his riding crop and satchel of papers with an easy jauntiness.
I’m sure I needn’t comment on the obvious mental health benefits of a good motherfucking session. Have we not all had times when the pressures of our jobs and lives have just built up such a head of steam that the only way to release the tension is to open our mouths and blast forth with a scalding stream of curses? I sure as hell have! Since I began teaching in 2000, I’ve certainly had my share of days when the only remedy for the sheer awfulness of the student writing I have to read is a powerful, primal shout of “SON OF A FUCKING BITCH!” No matter how calm we are, no matter how cool or how religious, nothing helps a person unwind better than a good ol’ barbaric yawp. My discovery of the Cussing Chamber did not confirm anything about Halboth’s insanity–rather, it confirmed that beneath the English riding outfit and the weird stream-of-consciousness lectures, Halboth was a human person just like all of us. He was just a man–wounded by loss, weirder than a 3.5-dollar bill, yes…but he could be overwhelmed with work pressures no different than you or I. So he had a special, secret room where he went to vent in privacy. What of it? I tend to do all of my decompressing motherfucking in my car, driving to and from work. He had a study room. Big deal.
Professor Gene Halboth died sometime in the late 1990s. I have no idea what finally brought him low, or where he’s buried–but I hope he was buried in his jodhpurs, and I hope that, in the ultimate redoubt of his coffin, he is cocksucking, motherfucking, buttraping and bullshitting away, assuring us all of his simple humanity, releasing all the awful tensions of being alive until one day, weightless and freed of everything but that angelic voice, he can ascend to the spheres and join his wife in the choirs of the Allmighty.
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Those of us who knew him saw little to criticize and much less to taint his reputation.
Those of us who knew him cannot doubt his integrity.
We can, however, doubt your intent.
Respect the living and the dead, sir, and, perhaps, your writing will become respectable.
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