Companion to an Untold Story

Spin the bottle

208 Spin the bottle. A game of luck with large consequences. Joel referred to it in an analysis of his reasons for choosing the teaching profession: I got to thinking about the relationship between me being a teacher and my childhood and arrived at some new insights into my relationship with my father. Memories of how boring it was to be doing things that should have been interesting and instructive had my father only explained the ultimate reason and purpose of my dragging wires under the house; of watching for some light to flash . . . etc. I became aware of a focused resentment that had somehow eluded my consciousness. One thing I don’t like about my having been subjected to psychiatry when I should have been playing spin-the-bottle is that I can’t avoid coming up with psycho-stories like the following: Feeling that his father had failed as a father, giving over much of his fatherly responsibility to teachers, Joel attacks the father image by having a vasectomy before reaching an age when he might reasonably expect to become a father,90 and chooses a life emulating and building upon 90 He had the vasectomy while living with Gale. 209 his teacher (father-surrogate) models; Joel finds teaching especially significant and involving and emotionally swamping (remember the breakdown a year and some ago) because it is something more or quite different from just teaching and finds the idea of himself being a father virtually unthinkable except when he thinks of adopting a child, something he made moves toward doing when he investigated becoming a Big Brother when he finished school at Berkeley.91 Turning into a big brother, not the younger one, was also part of Joel’s game (see The Glory Hole). 91 Letter, February 16, 1983. For the breakdown a year earlier see Time travel. ...