An old friend called me recently. I was surprised to learn that he had written a well-received song called mobile home. I was more surprised to learn that he now lives in a manufactured home in upstate New York.
I first met Noah when he was a sixteen-year-old high school student and I was a twenty-three-year-old, fresh-out-of-college-and-scared-of-students,-public speaking,-fire,-women-and-other-dangerous-things teacher. When I came to the school for an interview, I sat next to him in a class that I observed. He was a tall, serious-looking kid with straight black hair who sat in the back row. When I sat down, he saw that I did not have a text book; without my asking, he offered up his own book, to let me look on with him. Six months later, I found myself in front of a room full of him and a bunch of other scary-looking teenagers, pretending to know what I was doing. We spent the year reading two texts, i.e. a novel and a play. The novel was about a guy named Encolpius who offends the god Priapus in a way that parallels the way in which Odysseus offended Poseidon. By way of revenge, Priapus afflicts Encolpius with a case of chronic ED. In a manner parallel to that by which Odysseus was forced to wander the Aegean trying to get home as his nemesis hunted him down, Encolpius is forced to travel the ancient world, looking for people and chemicals to help get his nature back. Only one chapter survives in full. In that chapter, Encolpius and two of his friends attend a dinner party hosted by a newly-rich former slave who is anxious to show how rich he is. The lack of taste rivals anything put on by Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, or Dennis Koslowski. If DeSantis and his thugs could read Latin, they would ban the book.
(Some years ago, a cartoonist in the New Yorker mused what world literature would have been if SSRIs existed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marx would have said, ‘Eh – the market can sort it all out’. Freud would have decided that the Id could lay down with the Superego and everything would be copasetic. Kafka would have studied oral surgery, moved to Dubuque, and had a large family with Felice Bauer. But the real question is – what if Petronius had access to Cialis? Had that happened, we would never have had the Satyricon.)
The play that we read involved two identical twin brothers, separated at birth in a shipwreck. Both have the same name and both believe the other is dead. One sails into the other’s home town, and shenanigans ensue. Menaechmus I’s wife mistakes Menaechmus II for her husband and batters him around the head. The mistress does the same thing, but with a different kind of abuse that the new guy finds to be quite pleasurable. A gift intended for the wife goes to the mistress, and vice versa. The valet gets walloped. In the fifth act, they recognize each other and everyone has a big meal and goes down to the seashore, which is not that hard because the story happens in a town on the coast of what is now Turkey.
A woman’s dress is an important narrative device in the play. This is the gift that was intended for the wife but that goes to the mistress. From the dialogue, it appears that the dress was quite expensive – think fur coat, rather than slinky evening dress. While Memaechmus I and the valet discuss the dress, one makes the comment that it smells good in one place, but not so much infra. I did not understand that sentence when I read it. I knew that ‘infra’ could mean ‘later’ or ‘further along’, but the line did not make much sense when I read it at sight, in front of a bunch of young people who expected me to know my material. As we went over the text, I stumbled. Noah raised his hand and said, quietly, “I think it means, ‘The dress smells good up top, but not so much down below’”. I looked at the Latin, looked at Noah and said ‘Thank you’. He had corrected me in a way that didn’t make me look stupid. In another era, that would be called gentlemanly behavior.
Of course, he was not perfect. He was a teen aged boy, for fuck’s sake. Later in the year, he spent the first half of a class saying ‘shit’ to everything I asked him, except when he made a mistake. When that happened, he would say, ‘I fucked it up’. After the third time this happened, I looked at him and said, ‘I know that you know swear words. I know some of them, too. Could we translate some Latin, please?’ He said, ‘OK’, and stopped.
We lost touch after he graduated. I knew that he had gone to conservatory to study cello, and that he had started making popular music after his formal schooling was done. Two days ago, I googled him. I saw that he had written a song called Mobile Home, and that the song was the title track of an album of the same name. So I pulled up his web site, typed, ‘What the hell do you know about mobile homes?’ into the ‘contact’ page, and went about my business. An hour later, my phone rang (It only farts when people text). After some chit-chat, Noah told me that he and his partner had moved upstate during the pandemic. He spends about a third of his time in the City, dealing with music industry things. He composes at home. And the house where he lives is a manufactured home.
Q: Is your home in a park, or on your own land?
A: We rent the home and the land. It is a large parcel.
Q: Singlewide or doublewide?
A: Single.
Q: How do you like it?
A: I love it!
Q: What year?
A: 2001.
Q: You and this chick have any kids yet? I want grandbabies.
A: Fuck off.
So, that is Noah. Buy his music. Send him your paycheck.
We are in the throes of a housing crisis. Manufactured housing is not the only solution to that crisis, but it is an important component of any feasible solution. One of my star students lives in a manufactured home. If it is good enough for him, it is good enough for any of us. He always knew more than me. Surely he still knows something that the rest of us do not.
Very interesting. No wonder you were a popular teacher. I listened to the song but couldn’t really understand the lyrics. Music okay for it’s sort, I guess.