Humility as a secular value: "The Stamp Collector" by Dave King

In my evangelical teen youth group I attended faithfully while in high school, there was a chorus we often sang:

Make me a servant, humble and meek
Lord, let me lift up those who are weak
And my the prayer of my heart always be:
Make me a servant, make me a servant, make me a servant, today

There may be no Christian value that more directly clashes with modern, secular values than humility. It's so alien to our culture, in fact, that I'm often tempted to write it off as one of those values that simply does not translate from an old-world, God-makes-the-rules mindset to a possible secular set of values. It seems close to honoring the Sabbath or resolving to have no other gods before Jehovah: there just is no analogue, no modern updating of this value that makes sense without a religious framework for it.

But the fact is that humility can be good for us. More than that--it can actually be good to be humbled, or even the related but distinct word humiliated. Our natures seem set up to refuse this idea. People will spend their entire lives fighting the notion that they've been wrong or that they need to change, even if this admission might do them immediate and tangible good.

Joe Meecher

The protagonist of Dave King's "The Stamp Collector" is in need of just such a moment of abject humiliation. He's an alcoholic, and has been fighting a mostly losing battle with it for two decades. In a way, those decades have been nothing but the search for that elusive experience addicts talk about as their turning point: rock bottom.

Not that rock bottom

"Rock bottom" is an interesting notion. There may be nothing in the real world that is as much an application of literary thinking as this. It's close to a real belief in the notion that people need to reach a catharsis in order to change. In "The Stamp Collector," Joe has already had his share of what might be "rock bottom" experiences. He blew a windfall in his twenties when he won $237,000 in a lottery and then ran through it in a little over a year. After that, he broke up with Louis, his boyfriend who was the only long-term relationship he'd ever had. (At age forty, Louis still seems to have been the only long-term relationship Joe has had.)

Joe managed to do one thing right with his money. After using it on a European vacation for Louis and himself, Joe gave Louis, with whom he had only been in a relationship for a short time, $55,000 to open up a hair salon. Since then, Louis has continued to give Joe dividends from the salon, even though they broke up less than two years into their relationship. Because of their business partnership, Louis has continued on in the margins of Joe's life. They meet for dinner a few times a year, and Louis even helped get Joe into treatment at least once. It's not much, but it's the closest thing to a long-term, stable relationship Joe's got.

The whammo

Unlike the last story in the O.Henry anthology, this one gets to the moment when the status quo is upset very quickly. The moment Joe's life is upset is one of the best passages in the story:

When the phone rang, I was wondering what small tidy gesture might make the place clean. I'd been struggling to stay dry, but I'd had my slips, and it was weeks since I'd closed up the fold-out couch. On the night table, perched like a tea bag on the handle of a coffee mug, lay the wrapper from a condom I barely remembered using, and when things reach this point I start to get worried...
The man on the phone said, "Mr. Meegan, Officer Lee McCabe of the Rhode Island State Police. Regarding a Louis Prevala, of Boston, Mass?"
I said, "Yes, sir."
There's a notion that such moments bring you to your senses, but the effect on me was to turn up the static. Louis had once called me a sports car with a headlight misaligned, and as the trooper explained the nature of his call, that crooked, unpredictable beam was hard to resist. I went around the kitchen and poked around for Excedrin, and as I knocked back the tablets I noticed my hand was shaking. I opened a Dr. Pepper and wondered if I'd fed Mr. Navy, and through it all, the cop described the collision. He said Louis's mother had turned in the wrong lane, and I pictured East Duffield as it was when I visited: the shingled storefronts, the chunky green window boxes. How inconspicuous I'd felt there! The officer said Mrs. Prevala had not survived--but she never thought I was right for her boy.

It's typical to slow the action down during a key moment in a story, similar to slow-motion or an extreme close-up in film. This passage does this, but by interrupting the phone call to fill in background and letting the scene move forward in jumps and starts, it also avoids being too predictable. There are a lot of stories with "the call from the police" in them, but this one is like no other, owing to the skill with which the scene is rendered.

It turns out that Louis had, for whatever reason, left Joe's name and number in his wallet as his emergency contact. So Joe drives from Boston to Rhode Island, where he finds Louis unconscious, but--he is told--probably about to wake up sometime soon.

The Stamp Collector

What's all this got to do with a stamp collector? Although the stamp collector is referred to in the first sentence of the story, the meaning of this person, like so many of the story's secrets, is wonderfully kept off stage until needed. Louis is a kind person. He gives his time to his mother, who is also an alcoholic. He is talkative with the "developmentally disabled" (as Joe calls him) man down the street. This man, whose name is Stevie, is the stamp collector. Louis sends him stamps during his European vacation with Joe and carries on a long relationship with Stevie. The mother is annoyed by Stevie, but it's in Louis's nature to be kind and to at least chat pleasantly with others. Joe assumes it's part of being a hair stylist, but it's really because Louis is just kind. When Louis and Joe broke up, Louis told Joe he had nothing left to give, and while Joe replied that he had felt the same ever since he ran out of money, this is just Joe not realizing what really matters. Louis is a giving person, and this has more to do with why he sends stamps to the neighborhood "developmentally disabled" person who is cared for by his father than with Louis's habits of small talk.

This stamp collector becomes important, as the title would suggest. But first, Joe has to go through a few more false epiphanies. When he comes to Rhode Island, he spends the day in the hospital with Louis, then rents a room at a cheap hotel. As he is leaving Louis at the end of the day, he maybe sees some kind of redemption in helping his old lover out: "In the silence of the ward it was easy to imagine what a fine nurse I'd make; to dwell on my chance for regaining what I'd lost." He goes to a bar, but immediately leaves. The next day, he feels "like (he'd) conquered something."

But when he goes back to the hospital in the morning, April from the salon, who Joe know thinks of him as a "nuisance," is there. Someone from the funeral home shows up, wanting them to help make decisions about the funeral for Louis's mother, Carole. Two things about Carole, though: she always hated Joe, and she was a drunk. In fact, since "no one knows drunkenness as well as a drunk," Joe is certain she caused the accident by driving under the influence. He flies off the handle, "caught in the beam of (his) wayward headlight," forcing April to get him in line. It doesn't matter what Joe thinks, she says, Louis would want a good funeral for his mother.

Joe ends up spiraling downward after this. He goes back to Boston, gets his cat, and then returns to Rhode Island. He ends up, on a whim, going to the house where Louis had lived with his mother. Naturally, the mother has alcohol around, and Joe can't resist this time. He ends up plastered and laying underneath Louis's Miata:

The ground was a bit soft, and I inched myself under the trunk, putting my arms at my sides and getting in tight behind the rear wheels, until I was pinned there and could no longer move. I pressed my face to the ground and rubbed my nose back and forth until it seemed I'd abraded the skin, then I picked my head up and slammed it against the undercarriage, and though I wasn't quite sobbing yet, I started to heave. I knocked my head around until stars fluttered before me and all I could manage was a few whimpery squeaks, then I opened my mouth and bit the soil, scooping up all I could with my tongue. I've done this before, this wallowing in abasement, and it always feels good. There's a theory that a drunk won't clean up until he hits rock bottom, so each new incident might perhaps be the one.

There it is: the quest for rock-bottom, for the life-changing humbling. Joe has tried many times to manufacture this moment, but it's not a moment you can really make yourself. It requires--Secular Jesus help me for saying it--some kind of grace.

Why Joe receives this grace and Louis's mother doesn't

Joe is a drunk. So is Louis's mother. But they handle their alcoholism differently, and that affects how others treat them.  When Louis's doctor sees that Louis responds to pain stimulus, Joe jokes that, "So he's miles ahead of me." The doctor grins. He grins because this is a self-effacing, humble way to respond. Louis's mother, Carole, meanwhile, demonstrates nothing but pride, or "hauteur," as Joe sees it. During one awkward evening at Louis's house, when the mother was drinking and Joe was not, he noted that "even three sheets to the wind, Mrs. Prevala acted as if she was only high-strung, and Louis never acknowledged his mother's alcoholism the way he did mine." Joe notes that she softly closes the door to her room at a time when he would have been waving the bottle in Louis's face, because "once (he's) drinking (he) can't pretend that (he's) not."

This all has a lot to do with why Carole Prevala dies of her own hand in a drunk driving accident and Joe survives to have the humbling he needs. Joe is a drunk, but an honest drunk. Carole hides her drunkenness. To use New Testament terminology, Joe is "poor in spirit." Carole refuses to admit her spiritual bankruptcy, and so no grace is available to her.

How does grace arrive to Joe? He spends the night under Louis's Miata. The neighbors--Stevie and Stevie's father--come up in the morning to see who is at Carole's house. Stevie's father instinctively treats Joe like he treats his own son--that is to say, like someone who needs help. This is the moment where Joe realizes that in the "years (he'd) spent looking after (himself)," he "didn't do a good job." It's only when Stevie's father encourages Joe to get cleaned up, to think of what Louis would want, to go to Carole's funeral so he could tell Louis when he wakes up what it was like, that Joe makes what change he is capable of. This is his rock bottom. This seems somewhat insulting to whatever community of disability it is Stevie suffers from, that Joe's ultimate humiliation is that he is sort of taken for a "developmentally disabled" person, but it turns out that's what Joe needs. The humiliation isn't that he is "treated like he's retarded," to use the phrasing Joe would probably have used, but Joe's realization that he is as in need of help as others whose need is more obvious. Stevie's father encourages Joe to get cleaned up in the same patient voice he uses with Stevie, and Joe complies, both humbled and, maybe, on the road to whatever recovery he is capable of.

Joe's "cleaning up" scene is a literal baptism.

"The old man said, "You ought to have some clothes on (Joe ended up without a shirt while spending the night underneath the Miata)," and reached for the screen door, and I pushed past him and rushed to the kitchen and put my mouth under the tap, and the water that came out wasn't nearly wet enough. It poured into my mouth and burbled down my face, and I swallowed as much as I could, then turned and let it wash over my head and ears, finding sensitive zones all over my scalp. At last I let go, and my face hit the bed of the sink...Then the tap was turned off, and someone was patting my head with a cloth.
"Good idea," the man said. He moved the cloth to my back and went on patting, gently patting, and said nothing about my heaving and sniveling or the way I rocked back and forth and dug my chest with my nails." 

Once he has reached his humiliation, there is no need to humiliate him more. We can look past his lack of a shirt and the mud all over him and the fact he obviously had a bender the night before.

The denouement

Usually, a denouement looks forward to how the catharsis is going to change the way things were. After Joe Meecher meekly endures the guidance of Stevie's father, though, the final scene isn't Joe going to the funeral or going back to the hospital. It's him looking back to the vacation in Europe right after he won the lottery money.

I really was puzzled by this. It's not looking to the future, but the past. Joe maybe gives us a bit of a key to this puzzle. As he thinks back to how absolutely perfect the vacation was, and the moments he shared with Louis, he admits that "I'm not good at imagining the future, and all I wanted was for everything to go on forever: the vacation, the money, the amazingly relaxed camaraderie that was just beginning to become love."

Joe isn't capable of fully rounding the bend. There is no rock bottom. There is no moment after which everything turns around and goes only in one direction. His denouement is not to look forward, but to the past, to the last time he can remember when everything in his life wasn't shit. Maybe this is the best he can do. Maybe life for Joe isn't one rock bottom, it's finding the bottom every day, it's being baptized every day, it's making small movements toward better every day.

This story was just a knockout. I loved everything about it. It's not an easy story for Westerners to take, accustomed as we are to avoiding humbling and humility at all costs. There are some obvious religious overtones to it that you'd think I would not like, given that my agnosticism is a big part of who I am. But Christianity was so successful for so long (and continues to be successful) because parts of it really answer problems that people need help with. I have no problem with trying to find a way to adopt these parts of Christianity into a secular life. Humility is one of the trickiest virtues to adopt, because it's inimical to our radically democratic notions. But some people need it badly, and almost everyone needs it at some point in their lives. I love the way this story gets at how irreplaceable humility is.