Another Suicide Note

Another Suicide Note

            R. Freeman-Toole

I. Prelude

I took the pills, and then lay down on the bed with my laptop on my chest, to write this thing, hoping that during its composition I would fade away; that my fingers would slowly cease to trickle across the keys and I would be no more.

I wrote: 

"Dear friends-- and yet it is false to say "Dear Friends", because, if I had any friends, I would not be doing this thing--the word "FRIENDS" is my whole problem, my insane, territorial excrescence--no, let it say, "Dear Acquaintances"--no, no, "To Whom it may concern." For all my friends have betrayed me, one by one, this one then that one after the other, they have fled from me; they all have decided I am not worth the hassle (small wonder), and have excluded me from their tiny universes, thus: "please delete me from your e-mail list", or "return to sender", or "no longer at this address", etc. I miss them all, lament them all, my vacant mirrors--especially the one, the one special friend, my boyhood brother, my one and only, my one-and-equal, true friend. 

'My mind drifts back and back to that one time we were truly, absolutely together. What an evening that was! How we raced, hand-in-hand, down the sepia-lamp-lit, grass-cracked, summer sidewalk! How we laughed huzzahs of joy in the face of our high school graduation's mask of night. Oh, how I remember the yellow glow of the street, as our racing shadows pierced the sultry air with footfalls and giggles; the illumination must have come from some inner light, our illumined minds together radiating outward from an inmost, central sun. Yes, it must have been with haloes that we ran through the palpable shadows, as we tossed off our beams and laughed--the golden glow tracing an impetuous line through the dark, past the street-lights, past the 60's cracker-box screened porches, past the finally-farewelled vestiges of youth. With haloes we vowed our friendship like priests, like lovers. We were together then, in that ecstasy of spirit which joined us, consolidated us: we two would be the great composers of the future--equal in love, equal in hope and vision, dedicated to each other, dedicated to our belief in each other--above all, sure of each other as we peered into the trembling future in which all was tenuous but us. 

'All. We. Ha! Talk about eggs in one basket! Yes, it was too much, too much even for our passion which was blue-bright as seventeen can be, confident as only ignorant folk may kid themselves. Indeed, over the years, success and distance took us farther from each other. Illumination paled and whitened to a thin ghostlike memorial, and he, at last, said the words to my face, "I look on you with towering condescension." And, thus in a moment, we two were no longer, were no longer brothers, no longer equal in love, equal in hope and vision, not even in respect, that pitiful excuse, in the professional world, for identity. I ceased to exist in him while he became himself, and I he ceased to exist in me while I became nothing.

'Thus was it always: one by one they turning away, their lives all richer without me, I becoming less, and less, and less than nothing, standing upon a subtle horizon, watching the last red and dying evening turn from night to nothing; down I sink into it, the red and black of it, and I take my leave. And, thus, this letter is not to my friends, the many I high-toned away, insulted away, pissed away. 

'Nor is it to my family (to my sons, who either disparage me, or dismiss me, or misunderstand me; nor is it to my wife who is no longer my wife, who is no longer even a woman--a woman to my manhood). To these do I NOT say goodbye, nor they, not even these, but rather it is to myself I say goodbye--"To Whom it may concern"-- to my failures, to my disappointments, to my follies, to my misapprehensions, to my visions of a glittering niche in the temple of fame, to my inflated egotistical fantasy of contributing a link to the great chain of human knowledge. To all these I say goodbye and goodbye and good-bye . . . "

And even now the drugs begin to take effect, because my fingers are typing slower, and I can barely keep up with my final thoughts, which with down thoughts, with down like cloudy clots, cloudy, cloudy, cloudy, cloudy, cloudy thoughts-- thoughts. 

II. Getting Out

And now I am on a rocky place: I am standing in the center of a sacred circle, a sanctuary of stone and vaulting pines, in, say, the High Sierras; I teeter on a precipice with mountains thousands of feet below me, and mountains thousands of feet above me. I look up, up, and there's my old high school; but the front foyer, the square windowed box of light, is a citadel, it is a castle, minaret flags flying in medieval green gaiety over the battlements; it is a place on the high road up there in the rocks. The rocks are gray; the rocks, like remembered gray, granite sheets of the Sierras, are a musty, dusty, crusty, gray--a gray that gets in your fingernails, and grits and scrapes. The rocks are gray and cartoon-like, and the citadel, (I'm looking at the citadel), towers straight up, straight up, like I'm looking up a flagpole. I climb the sheer rock face, the boulders, the plates of gray; I climb, fingers grasping between the places where the plates of rock join in musty, dusty, crusty seams. They give me a perch, and I climb, and my bare toes grab onto the perches; my hands grasp, and my feet push, and suddenly, like a swimmer catapulting up from the bottom of the pool, I find myself levitated to a doorway. 

It is a square, squarish door. It is like an elevator door. The door slides open. Inside, it is like a car hung on wire that floats over Disneyland, and I am through the door, facing the glare of a bright light. The light from outside the window is filtered in through blinds, plastic venetian blinds, half-drawn, and the strips of plastic are partially interrupting the glare, casting striped shadows onto the floor; the windows throw shafts of bright glaring light, and cross-beams of shadow over the weaving, wavering floor. In there, smoking a hookah, is the Cheshire cat--only the Cheshire cat's face is my face; I am seeing my white, high school face--the face in the picture taken of me at my father's wedding, where I'm drunk, leaning forward, speaking passionately, some useful truth to my old girlfriend. I'm pale in my black suit, barely any mustache at all, and I'm pointing a finger straight at the truth. My father married a girl just little older than I was, and I brought the truth-packing finger to his wedding. At my father's wedding my face is lean, and white, and full of passion, and full of intensity, leaning forward. 

And there, floating above a Persian pillow, in the small, small elevator room, is my face, my hookah-smoking, exhaling face--the glare stretching wispy ghosts through the air; clouds of ghosts, elongated like gum, like cotton candy pulled apart like in those state fair machines--stretching, thinning, dispersing through the timorous air. And to one side, to the right, above and to the right, there is another light. There is sitar music. My hookah-smoking face is lit up, and I say to myself, 

"Where am I?"

And I say to myself, "You are where you always were, grasshopper." 

And I say to myself, "You mean I'm in a 60's TV show? A re-run? It was a place of death, where I wished myself to be." 

And I say to myself, "Ha, ha! These are only words you speak, these are only the false thoughts you have, because the debt that you seek to pay is a false debt, a false task. It is one more denial, one more failure. There is no end to the ways you kid yourself! Look where I see, turn your eyes to where I point!"

I follow his finger through the blinds and see an ancient, dusty road. It is the painting of the road to Emmaus, the very road trodden by Jesus, every day of my mother's life, hanging just above her collection of plastic horses. Suddenly, I am IN the painting that has hung on my mother's wall for forty years. Jesus is walking away from Jerusalem, reaching, with his disciples, for some modicum of truth, perhaps the one antic truth absconded from my father's wedding. We know the name of that road because it is a painting of Jesus speaking with Cleopas and some other dude on that road; and though the road is surrounded by trees, and Jerusalem is a smoggy smudge in the distance, suggested only by leaf and cloud, I realize that I am walking on this road, side by side, with my high school friend, my betrayer, the other dude; he is smiling, smirking, standing beside me, saying, 

"It was not condescension that I sent you, but the size of my dick, which  always aspired to be longer than yours, and which proved never quite to be, even in my profoundest, sincerest fantasies." 

We talk of other things, his premier with the Seattle Symphony, what it was like with Yo-Yo Ma, his thirteenth mistress, the Korean cabbie. It's all just silly, with Jesus standing by, and finally he says, "I'm sorry, and I'm sorry, but--" He wipes the smirk off his face, and fades to Jerusalem. There is something in his eyes, but I can't see--self-effacement? Shame? Fat chance. He Cheshire cats me, finger-of-truths me, out of the painting.

And then the road is a corridor. I'm in a hotel corridor. Looking forward, I cannot see to the end end of the corridor, the line of doors on either side has no end, the painter of this scene never studied perspective, because nothing vanishes, it just gets smaller and smaller, but never disappears. I start to move, I start to process toward the vanishing point which does not vanish. As I pass each door I cast furtive, peeping tom glances from right to left. Each of the rooms has one of those semicircular, green light shades above the door. There is an endless parade of these green light shades, all lit in pale forty wattitude, and I think of Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling, only that would be in black and white, while this is definitely green. The green semi-circles above the doors are bisected longitudinally by a gold (brass, I guess) band, and the bulbs are just visible, peeking over the rims. The carpet is deep crimson, newly, profoundly groomed. My feet, still bare, still sore a little (from the climb, you see), caress the polyester, and bury themselves in blood-red profundity.  

I walk. I eavesdrop. From left to right my head twists back and forth, left, right left, right, passing room after room, one glimpse after another. In each room there is an old friend, an old enemy, an old memory. The girl, the first girl (I never told her I loved her), the Guy who taught me how to smoke, the asshole of an English teacher who threw my play in the garbage, the old barn, the fallow cornfield where I first touched female breast, the minister who sent me to Hell, my Sunday school teacher who sent me to Hell, my own Grandmother who sent me to Hell.

I stop. I see the guitar player from my high school who serenaded his women in turn, one by one, in a pornographic parade almost as long as the corridor; in January he would say, "This is blank-blank, we're going to be married in the spring." That next spring there would be another blank-blank, and they were going to be married in the fall. And there, to another blank-blank, his guitar would sing the most profound melodies, Jerry Garcia melodies, melodies of Mozart, melodies of the Steppenwolf, speaking in dark corridors, and smoky corridors of the Viet Nam War years. I step into the room, unseen, unsensed, enjoying my private, secret surveillance. I see the guitar, and the face of the guitarist leaning into the guitar, and, there, singing with the guitar, in harmony with the guitar is my own unaccompanied violin piece, my aria, my song without words--the note of his guitar and the note of the violin locked in Keatsian embrace--and the guitarist disappears, the two notes heavier than the memory can support,

and now I am in the corridor again, and there's another door. And I see my first wife, my singer, my beautiful singer, my Mozart singer, my Cherubino, my Queen of the Night, my insane Salome singing in denial-- and there she is again with blood-red spots on her thin dress; her breasts are visible through the thinness, and the red spots decorate the nipples peeking through the thin white material. My heart breaks, again, for so much melody; she pivots on her stretched legs like an Indian dancer and I hear the tabla, weeping pulses of hosanna,

and I'm in another room, and another room, and another room, and each one of the rooms is a cascade of failed aspirations, lost friends, dashed hopes. Lear is with me, and we scream the blues together:

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! 

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout 

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!"

My mother is in one of the rooms. I glimpse her out of the corner of my eye, and take evasive action; tip-toeing past the door, I almost make good my escape, my quick-slinking sidestep, but she catches me. Our eyes meet, momentarily, and she gleams--ah! one more time, she points, ah! one more time, the way to Hell. The message of my childhood, straight from THANKYOUJESUS, if she only knew, HA! I leave that room. I don't want to be in that room. I hear her compleynt trailing after me, yapping after me like a farmer's dog, "Rickie Jesus WANTS you to take out the garbage--you don't want to go to Hell, DO YOU?" If she only knew! 

But the corridor leads on, and now I can see a light at the end--the chain of green light shades is not infinite after all. The corridor ceases to be a corridor, but lengthens, stretches and thins (the Twilight Zone aspect ratio effect), into a hillside trail. On the convex horizon of the twisting trail I stumble and halt. The light is still ahead, but, instead of rooms on either side, I see, in the ditches and gutters, as it were, the disembodied heads of more high school memories: the jock who threw a basketball at my head, the girl who wrote the story about a talking horse, the English teacher who made me memorize Chaucer, the amazed one who hooted "Whoooo are youuuuu to criticize Aldous Huxley?" 

This Brave New Memory is important to me, because it was the first time I ever said to anybody, "I'm me, that's who I am! It is I who criticize Aldous Huxley! (You cow.)" Me and good ol' Aldous Huxley--Aldous Huxley the painter of pneumatic breasts in a world of perfect women, (that's what I got out of that book!), and I am among the women in Brave New World, and they 

crowd around me, 

and flatter me, 

and press against me, 

and I am relieved of all responsibility. 

The light in this dream seems to carry me higher until I drift once again into the elevated conveyance of my other self; I stand before the floating pillow of my hookah-smoking other self. And I say to him,

"Where am I really?"

And he says, "This isn't Candid Camera. It's no joke. Just look." 

I am three years old. And there, back by the trail, is the tree, the black tree, the tree, a hundred yards up the hill from the house-trailer. Below the tree, the trailer is lit up with the same yellow light as were my friend and I, that night of high school graduation. Below, they're making strawberry ice cream. I am three years old. I love strawberry ice cream. They're cranking the ice cream maker, the green-bucket, silver-crank ice cream maker; and there are children there, and there is a yellow light, and there's a concrete floor, and people are are celebrating the ice cream on this concrete floor outside, and the trailer is lit up as long, and green, and safe as it can be; and it is my house. Father knows best. There I am safe--in green and yellow I am safe. 

But, behind me, the tree is beckoning. It draws my eyes away. I look to my left and there, a hundred yards up, across a dark, tilting field, is the black tree, beckoning. I walk toward the tree, and the tree grows fingers in the dark--black fingers wriggling in black relief, against the red-gray twilit sky, on the ends of arms that reach--fingers that aspire in painful distention, not for me, but, for that streak of cloud wherein vaguely resides some true thing, (although, at this time, I am three years old, I do not even remotely suspect it). I walk closer to the tree, and the tree is black, and the fingers are black, and I follow with my glazed eyes the trace of these fingers into the sky; I wonder, 

"Where do the fingers leave what the flip-fingers clutch?" 

And I look back, and there is the trailer, the long green trailer in the yellow light with the strawberry ice cream. I look at the tree. I look at the trailer. I look at the tree, and I look at the trailer. I have no idea where I am, and I have no idea who I am, but I know that the tree is speaking to me: speaking prophecies, and warnings to me. I look back at the strawberry ice cream and my heart goes out to it, and I start toward it, but there is a man in my way.

III. The Suburbs

"You din't really think you were gonna to get off that easy, did ya?" says the Guy. 

The Guy is wearing one of those Fedora hats, broad, slanting brim shading his eyes--very 40's, very Dick Tracy, very Bullets Over Broadway. He is smoking a filterless cigarette, and insolently flicks ash in my direction. His square jaw and sharp chin close in on me for a better look. His black eyes, mere inches away, focus on mine for just long enough to get my attention; then he turns and roughly brushes past me. He lopes downward, down the hill, not shyly--with authority--the weight of heavy things depressing him, his eyes sagging toward his footsteps, both hands dug deep into the pockets of his sharp-shouldered black suit, pockets bulging, tie askew. The smoke from the cigarette, now wedged into the corner of his mouth, leaves a white trail, a stretched-out, wispy ghost in the air. I don't immediately respond to his lead, so he turns around and says, "Waddya waitin' for? Do I look to you like a Guy with nothin' ta do?" He comes back and gets right up in my face again; his face, in the shadow of the fedora, is illuminated by the orange glow of the cigarette. "DO I?" For an instant, there is a withering fixity in his expression before he turns again, leading down the hill. Lamblike, and choking on the smoke, I follow. 

I follow as he plows ahead, someplace away from the trailer. From hilltop height, I am looking down on a little town. We are walking a curvy path, paved down the side of this green hill. (How green! I can't believe the green! I've never seen such GREEN before!) He ambles down the hill into the town; no, it is more of a mosey than an amble. I, myself, keep tripping on lumps in the asphalt. . .

Here we are in this little town. All these people are walking around in this little town: there is a post office with a flag flying in front, a pharmacy, a quick-stop, a coffee shop. There are tiny thirty-by-fifty-foot fenced yards, and sidewalks, and driveways, with people sitting in the yards, walking on the sidewalks, and shooting baskets in the driveways.  

Walking three feet ahead of me, The Guy gestures broadly with his hand and says, "This is the suburbs." 

And I say, "The suburbs! The suburbs of what?"

He stops and turns to face such absurd ignorance. He Guy says, "Jus' where the hell (just an expression) d' ya think you are?"

"Fuck if I know," I say. "As far as I'm concerned, I'm lying in bed in Centerville, "A Great Place to Raise Your Kids", waiting to die."

"I told ya, you ain't gettin' off that easy. You are not dreaming, and you are not dying. But you have left Centerville behind for the time being. You have left your body suspended, hanging in middle American lassitude, and you are being guided, BY ME, onto a lower level of the astral plane, just outside the City."

"The City?" I repeat, predictably. 

"Yeah, the City," he says. "You don't know shit, do ya?"

"Just a tourist, I guess," I say.

"My dear and exceptionally dense buddy, you will find, in higher planes of consciousness, that the reward for one-liners like that is ever so slight."

"Sorry," I say. I think I mean it. "So--astral plane?"

"Yeah, yeah, ok. Ya see, the astral plane is this big sprawling expanse of false space and false time--a dimension once removed from your familiar physical dimension--higher, but not that much higher; not so high that ya can't get here from Centerville. By the way, I lied, before--you ARE dreaming--sort of. You have left your physical body behind in Centerville and are traveling a little lighter now. Even though ya can't remember it, you have already been to this place many, many times before, dreaming the while in your current life; also you have been here, not-dreaming, between many other lives." 

"Oh thou transcendental swami you are giving me goosebumps."

"Bear with me--it gets better. The connection between your body back in Kidville and here is, for the moment, more attenuated than during normal dreaming because, (I lied twice), you ARE dying--but once again, maybe not. We shall see what we shall see. You ARE pretty fuckin' sick right now, and that's why you can be having this experience; but the question of dying is still undecided. Get used to it and forget about it--you're here now, and here you will be for awhile, or maybe longer." It was charming how his gruff exterior gentled to patient teacher for these brief moments. "Anyway, here we are in this state of mind, walking along the outskirts o' this higher plane, and right at the center of the plane, is the City swelling up like a vast volcano. Ev'ry frickin' soul in the universe sifts through the City sometime or other: some go on up the ladder, some go back to Centerville, but many hang out here in the burbs for eons upon eons. They put on quite a show, lemme tell ya."

My jaw is sagging in unbelief, and he loses a bit of his cool: "Look, you lame brain, you're on a different frickin' plane of existence now. You," huffing on the word like Rocky Balboa, "you are in your spirit body, and we're in the suburbs o' the great Astral City." He thumbs it over his shoulder, like to a dame he wants to overhear. "We have to get into the plane through one of these lower levels, so right now we're seeing only the scumbags and white trash that hang out down here. We'll be through this in a coupla minutes, and then you'll start seeing some of the glitter. You'll start seeing the Wizard of Oz, horse of a different color and everything."

IV. Guru

So here we are on the outskirts of the Emerald City, (ha, ha), walking and talking about spirit bodies and past lives, and I'm not buying any of it. Unblessed am I who sees, but does not believe; I keep waiting, impatiently, for the trap door to slam shut, for all this Disneyland glitter to be absorbed into the blackness of eternal non-being. The pain that drove me to the pill bottle is not so easily assuaged, nor distracted; it is still grating in my astral gut, and, although the Fantasia World of Not-Dreaming is supreme entertainment, the truth of it has not pierced my heart. I know that sentence implies I'm thinking that the truth of it WILL eventually pierce my heart, indeed, but, I swear to you, no such thought has yet entered my mind. I am here, taking it all in, like a kid and his Saturday morning cartoons, but I am really waiting for that long commercial break.

So here we are, on the outskirts of the Emerald City, (ha, ha, ha), making our way through neighborhoods of astral white trash, (Chicago, north side, by the el tracks), when suddenly I notice that standing in one of the fenced yards is my old teacher from college, my old guru. 

In every young person's life there is one man who stands out as the most important influence of his formative years. For most boys it is his father, but I never really had a father, as we will see, below; I, subsequently, spent  many, many years searching for a surrogate father--somebody to respect, to emulate, to love--someone whose stamp could be indelibly and positively impressed on my psyche. This was the guy--my guru, may Allah be praised. Or is it Krishna?

This is the teacher who used to have a dozen private students coming to him in ghetto coffee shops, all day long, in lines; he possessed unparalleled, encyclopedic knowledge in any of a dozen different disciplines: physics, chemistry, math, biology, geology, geography, history, literature, even music. To each student he was able to give some special insight, some eccentric, original twist on his subject that opened up unexpected vistas of understanding. They came, picked his brain, and left, to be periodically replaced by a new crop. 

But I was not like the others--I came and I did not leave. To me, he was the hero of my life, my surrogate father. He was the man whose TOTAL knowledge of so many things awed me, and humbled me. He was so many great things: 

he was the brave pioneer who drove a white truck down through the Yucatán, drawing the first map of that region; 

he was the newspaperman who wrote the joke article on the psychedelic properties of banana peel, inspiring Yellow Submarine as one more great, surreptitious guffaw; 

he was the musical connoisseur par excellence, 

the international level Haydn-ologist, 

the man who could whistle the first and second themes of every movement of every Mozart symphony from #25 through #41, 

the man who knew where the end of the Schubert Unfinished Symphony went; 

he was the music teacher who taught me the Fibonacci series, changing my compositional technique forever; 

he was the man whom I loved more than any other man in my life, who inspired me, directed me, claimed me--and then just DISAPPEARED, dropped out of my life, like a leaf blown from a tree. 

I can't tell if I'm getting across what this man meant to me--before and after: He was more than the father I never had, he was the one shred of sure self-affirmation I could cling to, in this world that was, even then, crowded with rejection and disappointment. He was THE ONE TRULY HEAVY DUDE WHO BELIEVED IN ME. He was my cure for suicide and insanity--he was the single proof that I wasn't a crazy, worthless piece of shit. He was my oasis in the desert. Seeing him for a few hours once or twice a year was enough to give me the confidence to carry on, to keep believing. Without his support, I was like a disjunct sentence, no subject, no predicate, and no object.

I didn't just search all over Los Angeles for him, I drove ALL OVER CALIFORNIA looking for him. He was gone. He visited me one last time, after I had my first son, and then he never came again--quit his college teaching job, and just DISAPPEARED. I missed him like an amputated limb--my heart never recovered the piece of it he took with him.

Now I see him, standing before a hooded, smoking grill, a great bearded bear of a man, making barbecue in his yard; he sports an outrageously billowy white chef's hat and greasy cooking gloves that reach up his arms; he lofts a huge fork in one mitt, a globe in the other. The classic Renaissance pose (imagine pillars, and the Tiber River, banked by the Appennines in the background) is Van Eyck meets Charles Schulz. I laugh at this old sweet song, and I am filled with ecstatic feelings of love reborn; but I am also pissed as hell. I am pissed that I have to DIE to see him again. I press up against the waist-high, chain-link fence and I ask him, practically scream at him, "Why did you desert me?" 

He, also, does not waste time with small talk, hey, long time no see, how ya doin', good to see you. He knows what I mean. He says, "It was time for me to go; I was getting too attached to you; and I had learned that attachment leads to misery." 

And I said, "Well, I was plenty miserable being abandoned by you. You were my only friend." 

He says, "I knew that about you. I admired that about you, and I was gratified. But I never accepted your friendship; and, you know, neither did Wescutt, and neither did Grady, and neither did that O'Reilly, and, finally, neither did Drew, the OTHER great composer of the 20th century. They all rejected your proposition of a what you thought a proper friendship should be; they all thought it was too much; they all thought it was too intense; or, just, simply, maybe, they didn't love you. I loved you--I guess that was my problem." 

"You abandoned me because you loved me?"

"Yeah, pretty much, yeah."

"Bullshit."

Like a robin bursting with melody, aee"You always hurt the one you love, the one you shouldn't hurt at all."tgbh

A shaft of pain gores through me to hear him sing again.

He says, "The way you loved me was the way Satan loved God--too much. You were lost in me--and I enjoyed it too much. I had to leave you so you could find yourself. I knew that sooner or later your love would lead to a fall from grace--I had to cut it off before that happened."

"Bullshit," I say.

"That's the way I saw it," he says.

"Then I guess there's nothing more to say," I say.

And he says, "Sure there is--there's always more to say--all that bullshit you're lugging around with you--that stuff lingers--"

"I guess you would know," I say.

"You'll know soon enough," he says.

"By the way," I say, "My Guy, here, says this is the slums, the suburbs of the astral plane. What are you doing here? I would have thought your elevated mind would cherish more elevated surroundings." 

And he says to me, "Well, you know I always liked to hang out in poor neighborhoods." I think back to the Bonanza Restaurant, and also that crummy little Mexican fast food place where he used to sit and drink coffee by the hour; giving court, as you might say, to the crew of young men who visited him at unscheduled hours, and learned from him.

My Guy gives a tug on my arm and I topple on down the street. "Gotta go," I say.

"Hey, come on back sometime; we'll count commas in Bach counterpoints! Have some of my barbecue--it's heavenly."

And I pass out of sight, as another group of boys gather around him,  magnetized by his eclectic rap.

V. The City

Meanwhile my Guy is practically dragging me over the cracked concrete. I feel like a puppy on a leash. He keeps taking these broad, large steps, so I have to scurry to keep up. We're now on a sidewalk in New York, and I think how I was in New York once, and how I sat on a flat gray rock in Central Park and looked at the skyline and said, "This is possible for me, I could do this."

And then I flash back to Los Angeles, the overpass on the San Diego Freeway that arcs over and around that vast sweep of George Gershwin sky; the broad swathes of red sky and blue ocean carry me further into a dream. I said the same thing to that smog-choked, flaming sky, "I CAN DO THIS!" But I didn't do it, I didn't! I didn't!" And the Guy brings me out of it, saying, "Cut out that shit; you din't think you were gonna to get off that easy did ya?"

In my preoccupation, I barely notice the little square middle-class yards beginning to lengthen and deepen. The cracked sidewalks morph into elegant, tree-lined boulevards, and, soon enough, I notice, placed farther and farther from the street, elaborate Beverly Hills mansions, emerald-studded castles, reaching up above long, lush, tilting carpets of green grass; I see paved roads, bordered by gracefully lilting elms and willows, winding up hills and disappearing into secret gardens. The street itself, heretofore seldom traveled, becomes trafficked by magical mercedes, and silver, unicorn-drawn carriages. All the passersby give the appearance of kings and queens, in their high seats, and every vehicle's progress feels like a parade.

Eventually, the neighborhood atmosphere gives way to what appears to be more of a business district. I begin seeing taller and taller buildings. In fact, before long, our path is lightly shadowed by skyscrapers. Vaulting pinnacles pierce high clouds and beyond. Indeed, the horse of a different color of Oz is the least of this neighborhood's curiosities: there are rainbow-glowing street signs, undulating awnings extended out over great winking windows, and, wafting above our heads, caressing the restless breeze, float singing, silver threads of confetti, shimmering shards of melody, humming sopranino hosannas. There are elevated trains which glide silently, blissfully, seemingly on air--they seem to float above us, although they clearly rest on gleaming metallic over-structures, tracks which soar more than two stories above the sidewalk. I am reminded, again, of the overpass on the San Diego freeway, but my Guy, ever-sensitive to my thoughts, gives me a dirty look when that image crosses my mind; so I edit it out, so as to observe, more closely, the new sights and sounds.

The streets do not feel crowded, and yet the suggestion of millions upon millions relentlessly impresses itself upon my mind, as face, after face, after transparent, after transfixed, after illuminated face rushes by.

We wend by verdurous parks decorated with glittering fountains, grandiose monuments, and bold statues. At some points, history seems to breathe its reflected images, in teeming thunderheads, from the ground up; we walk through shades of fame with each step; the ages stretch like forests ahead and behind, and 'now" is a question of degree. Best of all, there is a trace of music in the air (not the tinsel confetti, which intermittently brushes against the ear like scraps of pleasant wallpaper); it is a deep, deeper choral plangency, which gets louder if you listen to it, and disappears if you don't want to hear it. 

In one park, I am attracted to an abstract, bronze sculpture--a kinetic sculpture, part statue part poem--whose interlaced webwork of sharp points and angles spouts forth a fountain of metal tangents, stiffly vibrating and criss-crossing in complicated patterns; it all seems to suggest a rising pipeline of undulating, copper ocean waves. Trekking high above the base, of this three-dimensional trellis, is a culminating golden ball; the ball appears to be suspended slightly above the latticework, revolving and gyrating, and yet remaining motionless. At a certain point, the ball descends down through a channel in the latticework, bulging through the waves, and mother ocean grows great with child; there is a boiling, seething conflagration of forms, and then the ball is exhaled up, up, through the waves to spin, motionless again, at the apex. This movement is repeated at random time intervals. There is a copper plaque at the lower left-hand corner of the base; it reads: "Little Bang".

We approach a bearded prophet, a mahesh yogi guru, who stands before what looks like a New York street hot dog cart. He brandishes steaming hot dogs in each hand, and calls out, to sell his wares, in a broad Gandhiesque accent, "Come to me, and I'll make you one with everything!" I have to laugh, because I know that gag from my earthly existence, but the Guy sees me giggling and says, "Yeah, I know, it's corny, but it's true--those hot dogs are incredible; you should check them out sometime."

We enter a vast plaza, a red-brick-floored patio leading, under white Greek arches, into a temple or auditorium, I can't see which, if there is a difference. The high arches above the great doors are supported by tall, tall Greek columns. Polished marble, white and gleaming. Dorian,I think--or Aeolian.

I see the ghost of Elliott Carter. He is just pacing, nervously, from column to column, from arch to arch, smoking a cigarette and biting his nails. 

I say, "You just died, I hear."

"Yes," he said, "I made it last a good long while, but I don't really know what to say, I mean that is that--that--that is a problem for the administration, I don't handle that, so why don't you try--take this stairway here, and go down to the second floor, Room 497," and he disappears.

The Guy is flapping the door in my face again, saying, "Let's get the fuck out of here!" 

VI. The Rotunda

And suddenly the sidewalk becomes one of those airport escalators--flat escalators--moving sidewalks--and we're gliding along, through the high arches, like a cool breeze. I'm surprised to note that this place seems exactly like the inside of an airport: we are now definitely INSIDE, enclosed under a many-stories-high translucent canopy, like a great rotunda, and we are zipping by section after section of reclining theater chairs, round umbrella-topped tables, more street vendors, and tiny glass-fronted shops selling all sorts of astral-type knick-knacks: like haloes, past-life folders, lightning rods, and invisibility cloaks. The Emerald City, (city within city within city), shimmers in its green glowing going; but my Guy says we are not quite arrived yet, we have two more stops to make on the lower levels. 

The Guy hops us off the escalator and points out a figure sitting in a small classroom, only it's not a classroom--it's like the INSIDE of a classroom with one whole side of the room all missing, like a movie set, where the camera only shoots INSIDE the illusion. It is Mr. Hughes. 8th grade, Mr. Hughes, the grammar question guy: "'I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Wiener,' not, 'I wish I was an Oscar Meyer Wiener.' Subjunctive case, conditional, not plural. You remember, Mr. Hughes. You remember, I gave you that tape with my music and a whole bunch of other private stuff on it. You never listened to it. I found it in your locker two months after I gave it to you, and you never listened to it. So, I took it back. I took back my broken needy heart, out of your locker and back into my teen-age solitude."

And he blushes, if such can be said of a ghost, and says, "Yes, I remember, Rick." 

And I say, "You never listened to the fucking talking tape!" 

And he says, "Yes, I know Rick." 

And I say, "You were the first friend who ever betrayed me." 

"Yes, I know Rick, you're right." Then a bit of nostalgia: "Fearing, wherein, that I might err, I hesitate therefore to give immediate response to your somewhat surreptitious inquiry." He liked to say that; it means, I don't know. "Within the constraints of your definition of friendship, you will forever be betrayed." 

It seems like this conversation might go on, but my Guy says, "That's enough. How many times do you have to hear this? How many surrogate father figures do you have to go through?" 

"Gee, Dr. Freud, fearing, wherein, that I might err, I hesitate therefore to give immediate response to your somewhat surreptitious inquiry." HeeHee. "How many?"

"Dumbshit," he explains.

We get back on the escalator.

The escalator is gently inclining UP, and the scenes become even more elaborate: there are plethoras of crystal chandeliers, all tinkling Christmas bell tunes in the high air. There are encampments of scholars gathered around the central suns of Socrates, Shakespeare, Einstein, and, yes, Gandhi. There are great silk couches that call out to the weary, there are pools of ruby-red fish swimming and leaping in rings, and there are neon-lit doors inviting us into exotic dens.

That deep background music is still in my ear, underneath the Christmas bells, and I notice an interlude from my opera dragging its feet under my feet. There is a rush, and a flurry of song wends its way up from my past. I am arrested and illumined for an instant, and I lose my place. I remember vaguely where I am, and wonder if I am finally dying.

The Guy says, "Don't worry--"

"I'm not getting' off that easy," I finish for him. I am back now. I ask, "Where are we going anyway?" 

And he looks back and he says, "I'm taking it to see the boss, whadja think we were doin'?" 

I said, "I don't know, I've never been dead before." 

He says, "I never been bored before, but your bullshit could get me there pretty damn quick, sonny."

"What bullshit?" I call out, amazed. 

He pauses and leans back into me--"Two counts," he says. "One, you been dead LOTS of times, and B, the only reason you can't remember, is you ain't really dead, right now."

I must have blanched--an astral body must imitate the physical body in some of its expressions, mustn't it?

"Look, relax, we're almost there--the boss will explain everything. But, he toll me to give you a look around first. So, I thought we meet some people, hang out a bit, get up to his place about five. That okay with you?" 

I said, "Sure, I've never been not-really-dead before, so I don't know the timetable that people usually keep in the Great Astral City." I say it real sarcastic, so I know he knows I still don't believe any of this, I'm just waiting for the drugs to do their work, so I can blank out of existence. 

The Guy says, "Smart asses don't go far in this plane."

I look behind me and see Mr. Hughes fading into the distance, and then I look forward. The Guy says, "Stop here," and we step off the sideways escalator. It is another open TV set, only this time it is a living room in Tennessee, with a deer's head vacantly staring over the mantelpiece of a roaring fire. There's this kid sitting there, in an overstuffed chair, who looks just like me in the fucking wedding picture! The antlers make shadows, and my shy eyes follow the tracing progress of plush Victorian carpet. I look again. I think, "Who the hell is this? Evil genius Number two?" 

The Guy says, "This is the twin that wasn't born. This is your brother who decided it would be better to try another time." And we two look at each other, and we remember the womb that was only big enough for me, and we remember the separation, the loss--the loss and the victory, victorious because he chose the easier path. He was sitting on Easy Street, waiting for heartstring to come along with me. He rises to meet me, and we spontaneously fall into each other's arms, with bursts of wailing, of weeping. We gaze into each others' mirrors, and that is that. I sigh. I bid him farewell. I get back on the god damn escalator.

VII. The Boss

My Guy gave no other hints about THE BOSS, but led straight on to a glowing door at the end of the escalator's line. The door was not conspicuously grander, or more ornately decorated than any of the dozens of other doors we had whizzed by, on our moving-sidewalk tour, (although, at this point, the peak of the rotunda's canopy was distantly out of sight, obscured by inner-floating clouds); and yet, once we were there, something in that particular door held the attention, something beckoned, enticed the eyes, drawing them to it like a magnet draws iron unto itself.

The high, gothic-arched door swung open of its own volition, and we entered. There, on a raised throne sat a blonde man. I recognized Him from the painting of the Road to Emmaus. I know, I know, Jews are not supposed to be blonde, but--perhaps it was the halo. The seat was somewhat distant from the door, and yet it was almost touchable; I say He sat both near and far because size and proportion, in that room, were as ambiguous as an e.e. cummings poem, as fickle as woman's love. I mean, it seemed like a little room, not a large room at all, and yet, His presence crowded the walls such that no infinity could equal the vastness of its reach, the magnitude of its pressure. And as to peace, oh, how my soul longs to know, once again, that uncrowded presence, once again to rest upon that rolling bosom of Mother Peace, that ocean, that sky!

And how can I describe THE BOSS? It was like seeing an idea in a white robe. A shiny idea--a thought for the ages, a jest for the moment. It would be easy, in that room, to lose track not only of space but of time as well; in fact, the moment of our meeting, the moment when our eyes met and I lost myself in Him--I don't know, I can't remember whether it was for seconds or for eons that we knew each other's unspoken thoughts, that we saw each other in a transcendent relationship to each other, a relationship in which I saw myself below Him, and all around Him, and yet INSIDE Him. I think of the 19th century epistemologist thinkers, and laugh at the puny apogee of their puerile knowing. This was knowledge, a personal ideal raised beyond the heights of Mount Olympus, beyond all capacity of knowing into a rarefied atmosphere of BEING KNOWN. I saw Him at some center, at some focus of existence, in an environment in which ambiguity or doubt were not only impossible, they were unthinkable. Affirmation was at the essence of my knowledge of Him, of I in Him, and He in me. 

And, my GOD, did He know all my tricks. He knew me top to bottom, and it was totally no bullshit with him. There was no possibility of a lie in His mind--no articles of self-deception ever made it past the portals of His knowing; black thoughts were seized by the jaws of Cerberus and shredded on the hearth. ABANDON ALL BULLSHIT YE WHO ENTER HERE. And yet, it was easy, too. He made me feel comfortable, without trying to make me feel comfortable. And He was the center, and everything surrounding Him, even I, was an ocean of peace.

I know, that phraseology reeks of sitar music and third eyes, but I just can't think of any other way to say it. And there was no bullshit about the procedure, either. He did not formalize our meeting, He did not greet me, He did not suggest any sort of context: it was straight to work. I had been brought to Him for a reason, and that reason was action. He to speak, I to act. The interview was so brief I can't even remember the words. He didn't bother with why I'm here, or what is going to happen pretty soon, or who did what, or how this works, what's the point to any of it; but went straight to the tasks. He set me three tasks. There was no why. The tasks were these:

1. Travel to the marches of the lower astral jungle;

2. Find a melody stranded there among the thorns;

3. Use it to open a door, a door you must find yourself, the key to which is this melody only.

"It's an ethnomusicology expedition!" I cried. "Gorillas in the Mist" meets "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho".

He dismissed me as instantly as He had taken me into Himself, and I was on the escalator again before I knew what hit me.

VIII. On the Road 

My guy escorted me out to the City limits, on the opposite side of the City from the one by which we had entered. The trip was short--we took an express sidewalk, so to speak. We found ourselves standing just outside a high wall, the outer limits of OZ, as it were, looking down a dirt-black country road. There were no suburbs here, only road, and field, and sky. My Guy gave me a compass, a burlap bag, and a chromatic harmonica. He pointed me down the road and said, "Stay always to the south."  

I said, "How the hell do I know which way is south, in the astral plane?" 

"Look at the god damn compass, dumb shit." And then he was gone.

I tucked the harmonica under my belt, threw the bag over my shoulder; holding the compass before me in my right hand, I lined up my face with the "S" and began to walk. At first, the road was like many another road in the countryside of Indiana. There were rolling hills resplendent with carpets of gorgeous green grass, there were horizons attired in radiant gowns of lightly crimsoned cloud, there were little brooks off to the side, hidden by coverts of elm and willow, and there were little birds twittering in the tops of spreading chestnut trees. 

Indeed, the road was like many another road in Indiana, with a ditch on one side and a ditch on the other side, and even an occasional farmhouse to the left with its obligatory colloquy of barking dogs. But like many things in the astral plane, the scenery changed, sometimes gradually, sometimes erratically. Sometimes I was looking at a barn on my left with a great Red Man chewing tobacco sign painted on the roof, and suddenly on my right I was passing what looked like an ashram out of the movie Gandhi. Sometimes the landscape flowed by like a great green river, and sometimes I saw deserts of rock, blazing with rust and petroglyphs. 

The notion of time was compromised as well--it seemed as though I were walking forever in eternal day, and then suddenly the sun would wane into insignificance, and something like a moon would dart impetuously across the darkened sky, more like a shooting star than a ghostly galleon. This so-called "night" might last an hour, or a minute, or a year, and then it was day again, and I must travel on again. I know not how many revolutions of this cycle I experienced, because the night brought with it an incomprehensible forgetfulness, that defied the index of measurement. All I know is that I traveled a long time.

I kept the compass before me, and kept the arrow pointing at "S", a procedure which sometimes led me off the road and through a harvested cornfield, stiff with truncated stalks, sometimes over running streams, sometimes up steep, stony hillsides. But I knew I was looking for a "jungle of the lower astral plane", and, finally, just over the top of one such stony hill, my sight was  gratified (or not so gratified) with a vision below me of a forbidding forest of deep green leaves, twisted roots, and black shadows. This must be it.

The forest was hugely intimidating, and had the same stygian quality as the terrifying stairs that used to lead down into the my family's haunted  basement; as I stepped across the threshold into the darkling wood, I felt the same chilling panic that had always invaded me, back when I had to go down under the house to grope, in the dark, for screws, or pliers, or twine, or some other lost or seldom-used hardware. The suffocating murk vibrated with tenebrous repulsions of the grave--and yet there was an attraction there that held me suspended in its grip for uncounted moments. When I finally broke free of the hypnotic thralldom of the pulsing shade, I resolved in myself to walk farther into the tangled jungle.

As I forced myself to enter into the shadows, my eyes chanced upon a small furry animal. You might have called it a woodchuck, even a squirrel, except that it had a bald white head, almost like an eagle, and two pursed, yellow lips, almost like a duck's bill. The bushy tail seemed to be the giveaway--but just about the time I had settled on the idea of "squirrel", the bill started chattering in a language which was most unsquirrel-like. In fact, it chattered like a pissed-off Chinaman in an opium den. 

But, regardless of the language, there was no doubt that its intention was to direct me, to lead me. It made itself clear, through gesture and ejaculation, that I must follow it--it brooked no disagreement on this subject. It scampered into the wood, climbing high, and darted here and there among the crowded branches; from limb to hanging limb, it jumped, pranced, twirled, and sashayed, sometimes executing complex twists, turns, and arabesques. Indeed, the comparison with Fred Astaire was inescapable, especially with the high white forehead. At times I was tempted to ignore my guide, and keep following the little "S" on my compass, but whenever I did this, my ears were assailed by such a conflagration of Chinese profanity that I had to follow, even when we veered to the right or left of the "S". Fortunately, my little squirrel friend always came back to the true "S", and finally led me out into a clearing, gouged silently out of the density, by a rolling river. The river bank was impacted on either side by teeming patches of rough reeds. Having made it this far, my little Chinese friend chattered his farewells, disappeared, and I never saw him again.

IX. On the River 

I sat down as close to the riverbank as I could get, and considered making my way to the shallows and having a drink. This was when I made my first discovery: as I pushed through the reeds, they responded to my touch with loud, random ejaculations; being thus disturbed made the plants shriek with discontent. It was as if each reed had embedded in it a short, 3-second recording of--of God-knows-what, and touching it triggered the recording, like touching an open anemone makes it close up. Some utterances were the cries of children being beaten by Samurai warlords, some sounded like the groans of old crones beating the dust out of blankets hanging on clotheslines in Tennessee, some of the reeds moaned like virgins making love for the first time, and some sounded like Baroque castrato opera singers. It was the castrato component that interested me, because my task was to find a melody. I had to sort through the screaming reeds and find the neighborhood of musical reeds. As I waded deeper into the cluster. I heard more and more music--musical fragments of one or two lines--lines from operas, concerti, trio sonatas, jazz standards, rap songs, whatever; most of them I knew, some I didn't. 

When I started out on my quest, I had had no idea how I would "find a melody". This was obviously how. Somewhere in this tangle of tunes there must be a reed that would play a melody which would contain, within its defining features, some familiar reference that would lead me to the door. The door could be anything, I supposed, but, given the heady nature of this "astral experience",  (ha, ha), I could only assume that the door was, symbolically, something that was closed inside myself, (ha,ha); therefore, I could only conclude that when I found the right reed, I would find the right melody; the melody would speak to me in some significant way that I would recognize, intuitively, as soon as I heard it. I searched for hours, groping clusters of two and three reeds at a time. I heard an almost complete performance of  The Marriage of Figaro, not to mention the collected works of Buddy Holly, and the middle 17th-century composer Piccini. 

Dark eventually overcame me, as the so-called astral night asserted itself once again. Never mind that the journey I had just taken had started out with a vision of "horizons attired in radiant gowns of lightly crimsoned cloud" implying sunset, and that I had recently gone a progress of what amounted to several days, over road, through jungle, and into river without losing a calorie of daylight. But the dark, with its forgetful veil, softened the blow when the sought-after melody suddenly struck me in the face. I suppose, in terms of the irrational logic of poetry, that it had to be in the dark, in the shallows by slanting gray rock, that I must find the reed that spoke to me.

X. "If I Had a Nickel"--Retrospective Interlude 1:

My musical talent came primarily from my mother's side of the family; there were half a dozen accomplished musicians in her line, although none of them, but I, went the respectable, that is to say, lah-dee-dah, University route. For instance, I had a cousin who was a virtuoso accordion player; he used his talent to become a missionary-evangelist to Germany, of all places, and he played Abide With Me on the chordavox for the German heathens. His sister was a fairly accomplished pianist. A great uncle, Elmo, played banjo in Nashville, and Aunt Delilah played the Jew's harp and the saw. My brother crooned Praise Songs while playing the electric bass, just like Paul McCartney.

My mother was a gifted singer, whose voice made a deep impression on me from my earliest years, and served as the standard model for beautiful singing all the way till I went to college and heard real opera singers. My mother had a natural gift for vibrato, rubato, portamento, croonato, and schmaltzato. She could harmonize, or sing lead, and could have made it as a back-up singer in any gospel group of the 60s south. 

My father was not without talent, though in a highly qualified sense. In truth, he had a nice voice, a nice vibrato, and a nice feeling for style; in fact, it was my father who actually gave me my first lessons in harmony, because standing next to him in church three times a week, hearing him improvising bass parts to the old hymns, gave me an understanding of root movements that was just as about as thorough as I could have got in any 1st year theory course. Granted, it is not a difficult feat, by any means, to improvise bass parts to music that generally has only three or four chords to it, at most; but it does, nevertheless, require an ear and an intuitive sense of form. He was not a dunderhead.

No, the problem with my father's singing was that he had no pitch memory, such that his a cappella performances displayed a very ambiguous, to say the least, sense of tonality. He was one of those singers who would start off a song in one key, and then modulate, by quarter-tones, to a half-dozen other keys before he got to the end. He was pretty musical, as I said, but since he never had any training or any real choir experience (besides singing the hymns along with my mother in our fundamentalist Baptist Church), he never really got anywhere beyond a vaguely successful imitation of Bing Crosby on his most crooniest numbers.

Nevertheless, the one of the few positive memories I have of my father is of him singing. One song, in particular, was his favorite: it was Eddy Arnold's 

"If I had a nickel, I know what I'd do-- 

I'd spend it all for candy and give it all you. 

That's how much I love you, baby." 

I think that's about all he knew of the song, but he used to sing those three lines repeatedly around the house, and in the car, and on the way to visit his many extramarital concubines.

I almost missed it among the reeds because, as I said, the out-of-tuneness of it sometimes made it almost unintelligible, therefore, easy to miss in a mob of melodies. But as I was shuffling through the reeds on the farthermost bank, listening to half a dozen reeds, at once, shouting the blues, blind like Ray Charles, I heard the word "nickel". I came back and researched through the jumble of underbrush and found the reed that sang, "If I had a nickel, I know what I'd do," when I touched it. 

This was clearly the melody that was meant for me; this was clearly the tune that was going to open doors. I saw it all: I was supposed to capture a vestige of my past--my fucking father--in a burlap bag, and open a door in myself with it. How cute! I thought it was ironic, and then I began to see the point, even though I desperately did not want to see the point. The thickly-woven, archetypal web of this fantasy trip through the astral plane was being dispersed into the self-conscious quirkiness of 60s TV psychology; Yoda was calling me into the jungle, and Darth Vader was my father--yuck. It was more than a little bit of a piss-off to discover that the reedy river was really some couch in a Beverly Hills psychiatrist's office. Still, it was what it was--it is what it is. If this rite of passage were to mean anything, it would have to deal with some intimately fatal blemish in my character--I would have to deal with it from the inside out. The scars that lead a man to suicide must be buried pretty deep, and I could think of no scars as deep as the ones my father gave me. I wondered how deep "If I Had a Nickel" could go.

XI. "If I Had a Nickel"--Retrospective Interlude 2:

Let's get right down to it, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: it was my father who fucked me. It was my father who had made be timid, afraid of my own shadow. It was my father who had debased me, abused me, belittled me, and nearly destroyed me. Listen:

When I first started talking, I put sentences together fluently, almost poetically, but always with a slightly skewed sense of syntax and definition; also, I often could not separate what was on my mind, at that inner moment, from what I was asked to respond to in the outer reality. This abnormal penchant was pounced on by my too-conventional father, and was ridiculed and berated as unacceptable. My father soon came to attribute my eccentric mode of expression to a deeply rooted and sinful character flaw. What kind of an asshole won't even answer a simple question? For instance, four-year-old Rickie might be sitting on the living room floor looking out the front window, when his father would come up and pronounce:

"Good morning, Rick."

"Daddy says."

"How are you this morning?"

Silence. How am I?

"I said, how are you this morning, Rick?"

"The curtains wiggle."

"What?"

"The window. The curtains wiggle."

"What kind of stupid thing is that to say!"

"How am I. The window curtains are wiggling."

"Lord help us. The curtains are wiggling."

This conversation might protract itself into a five-minute meditation on wind and windows, as my father tried to get to the bottom of my off-the-wall remark, but, short or long, it would invariably descend into a cascade of insults deploring my inability to answer a goddamn simple question. It never occurred to anybody that there was no such thing a s simple question to me. The family prayers at table and bedside never lacked heaps of heartfelt entreaties to Jesus to heal Rickie's willful and stubborn dedication to the devil's work.

At a very early age, this abusive insensitivity drove, deep down inside me, my will to respond to ANYBODY in words. To me, reaching out into the world of men was not a natural process, but a calculated act of logic and will; and I was bitch-slapped down by my own father so many times, in my formative years, that I lost the power to rise to the occasion; and, without the PRACTICE it would have taken to perform this difficult task, I not only lost the will, I lost the capacity for normal response. For years, the words would percolate in my mind, striving for verbal expression, but eventually I even gave up trying to formulate what I thought MIGHT be the proper countersigns to passwords such as, "How are you?" "What'll it be?" "Hello." "Name?" 

It was not that my father was a particularly bad man; although he was pretty much of a bad man, there were many worse fathers than he, in the annals of screwed up musicians. Beethoven's father for example, who heaped abuse, upon alcohol-inspired abuse, on young Ludwig's head before he was twelve, made him practice all night in bare feet, so he could compete with the famous Wolfie. Bach's older brother ripped out of his hands a manuscript  the young Sebastian had stayed up all night, for weeks, copying out. Tchaikovsky's father wouldn't hear of his son becoming a musician, and sent him to law school. My father did abuse me--he beat me, sometimes savagely, but only until I was around six or seven; after that, the legal question of the distinction between "spanking" and "beating" reared its ugly head, and he was forced to start wailing on the furniture instead of me, when his frustration reached a flash point. He did not understand my skewed personality, and after awhile he just stopped trying. He came to the same conclusion that most people come to when they deal with people like me--that they're doing it on purpose, that they have some personality flaw, that they are substandard individuals, that they could fix it if they just weren't such assholes. 

Truth to be told, my father had a pretty skewed personality himself: he was very gifted in some things and very stupid at some other things. He had tremendous drive, and could really push people around to get things done in his job of discount retail store manager; but he had major blind spots, and major obsessive behaviors, primarily having to do with sex.

I remember, in my early years, admiring my father, vastly. I thought it was so cool that he was the manager of a store. He told people what to do, he kept complicated accounting books, he managed inventory, and he seemed to make lots of money. Mostly, I admired him because he encouraged a certain amount of independent thinking, a certain level of rebellious nature. My unfunny father fed the flame of my misfit-infection, by example—endorsing it as a primary virtue. He took pride in what he considered to be his own rugged individualism, and he encouraged (at first) his son to do the same. The irony is that my father's brand of non-conformity was very tame indeed, compared to the heights of eccentricity I was soon to scale. To my father’s small-town mind, extreme non-conformity consisted of something like wearing mismatched socks, or jay walking, or coloring outside the lines. The moral code of that clan of born-again Christian-farmer-republicans, in whose dynasty he had been raised, was so strictly defined, that even subtle variations in accepted behavior appeared to them to be outrageous departures. Thus, very small infractions indeed, seemed to him the absolute height of throw-caution-to-the-wind daring. He would sometimes spit, when nobody was looking—and nobody ever was.

It is important to mention my tendency toward black and white thinking. My father, for better or worse, was my role model all through my early formative years, and anything he said, I believed--not with a grain of salt, but blindly, wholeheartedly, and steadfastly. Thus, every principle he proclaimed from the Sunday dinner table became law to me, and the formation of my own moral code was precisely based on the words bandied about in his speeches, like ribbons fluttering on a scarecrow. Like Santa Claus, I believed my father because what impressionable child can imagine his father lying to him? Soon enough I was to discover the depth of his deception—his deception of me and of himself, but, until I reached the age of responsibility, my father’s catechism was the template for mine.

Also, remember that the meaning and significance of words loomed much larger in my mind than they did for normal people, such that concepts taught me by my father were more rigidly and actively applied than he ever would have himself. To him, the rhetoric of moral training was more like the poetry you entertain yourself with in some ideal world, in front of some ideal fireplace, before you re-enter the world of compromise and practicality. To my literal mind, there was no distinction between the ideal world and the real world. And when the legion of my father's cruel hypocrisies were finally revealed to me, my whole world shook to its foundations, and I could make no sense of anything I saw or felt.

It is not that my father was stupid—no, he had a very quick mind and a talent for making subtle distinctions; but my father had grown up in a very small world whose parochial boundaries created a kind of implosion of consciousness, directing all its inhabitants' attention inward, encouraging them to focus, with microscopic attention, on the strictest details of their inherited social conventions. Even as the resistless river of time flowed by, they insisted on back-peddling upstream in the shallows, clinging with quiet desperation to the shores of a nostalgic past where things were clear and simple, right was right, wrong was wrong, men were men, and God was Good, etc. In this world, much ado was constantly made about practically nothing, because there was practically nothing else to do. They attempted to freeze-frame their eternal moment, and it was a good moment; but meanwhile the specific gravity of the mainstream current was sucking out all the life, leaving behind nothing but an old, beautifully-bound book, words smearing across the rotting pages, shrinking eddies. They sang, "Sing unto the Lord a new song," every Sunday to the same hundred-fifty-year-old tune. 

Not to mention the fact that this obsession with the virtues of stability and order created a judgmental climate in which everybody was everybody else's brother's keeper. And they didn't miss a trick either. My father was trained to meet the slightest, most superficial deviations from the accepted norm with a reaction in extreme disproportion to the actual magnitude of the deviation (by anything like reasonable contemporary standards); it was like living in a Japanese Noh play in which the slightest stylized arch of an eyebrow was equivalent, in real life, to a major violent hissy fit. It was, therefore, very easy to be a non-conformist in my father’s world, since almost every natural unguarded expression of personality could be viewed as a social aberration on some subtle level or other. Thus, the substance of my father's non-conformity consisted of a few lite, jovial nose-snubbings at selected conventions of this extreme fundamentalist-Christian-blue-collar realm. 

The piss-off was that he was a hypocrite, and I have my doubts that he even knew it. Even as he was congratulating himself for violating some selected minor protocol of his native, inbred subculture, he was, in the same moment, actually crusading for the most normal, the most conventional values of society at large. He was, in fact, merely trading the Old-Time-Religion-Phantasmagoria for some of the few things that magazines and billboards were telling him were real (him and 95% of the rest of the country). But, in order for him to conceal his hypocrisy from himself, it was necessary for him to assume the mantle of “non-conformist;” in order to shield himself from the guilt that teemed in his heart of hearts, from his mother’s voice, from his pastor’s brimstone, he must assume an idealistic virtue: he had to make a hero of himself, whose magnitude might overshadow the shame—he must make himself forget that his parents were weak, mindless assholes, by making himself feel brave for being a weak, mindful asshole. 

Let’s face it, the rules he broke were not the real rules, although he felt they were at the time; the dogmatic canon, of the church he was raised in, included old-fashioned restrictions of behavior and activity that the mainstream WASP majority had abandoned years ago. For instance, in his family, there was a religious injunction against going to movies, Satan's mouthpiece—so he went to the movies once in awhile (he would show them, ha!), which, after all, was a pretty normal thing for most people to do; but, to his bull-headed mother, it was an indulgence that would land him in Hell. Thus, in his alienated state, every merely conventional action took on the quality of a dare. Other sinful activities were these: he went to public dances, he SMOKED, he drank a little, and, we learned years later, he indulged in a plethora of profligate sexual promiscuities, the number of which, after the divorce, I lost track of. 

When my father was young, all these violations, of the Old White Trash Reformed Religiousocial Code, would have been considered capital crimes; but by the time he was twenty, in the light of the grand scheme of the big city, that had gradually been invading the edges of small-town consciousness, they had all become mere paltry misdemeanors, breaches of table-etiquette, no more. Once again, my father was a hypocrite—he prided himself on breaking laws that, ex post facto, had already ceased to be laws. His crimes served only to bolster his ego and bloat his blarney.

He considered himself a pioneer for parading his transgressions, like proud plaster horses, past the village elders; in truth, however, he was a crow cawing at a straw man in a field of stubble; the straw man was basically un-offended—we know this because, as I would learn soon enough, the straw man's revenge on true offenders was ruthless and swift. No, what my father didn't understand was that his level of surreptitious defiance was tolerated by the very system he sought to defy, and that the truly unacceptable levels of deviant behavior were simply unimaginable to him. So it was, that he promoted his reputation as a devil-may-care rake and free spirit, while unconsciously maintaining a secret, though absolute, essential allegiance to the parochial values of his native culture. Listen:

It was about 1965. We were selling our house on Division Street. There was an ad in the paper. A humble black man came knocking on our door when nobody was home but I. He looked at me through the screen, hat in hand, studying the doorjamb, and asked, “Do you sell to colored?” I didn’t understand the question. “Do you sell to colored?” “I-I guess so,” I said. The man’s face brightened. He took a quick tour of the house, and just a few minutes later came back with his elderly mother. I’ll never forget that Jemima-plump black woman gazing in wonder at our cheap white-trash living room, like it was the Taj Mahal. The living room was framed off from the dining room by these two pretend Greek columns made of carved oak—a little simulated Southern aristocracy somewhat inappropriately thrown into a room barely 20x15. The woman smoothed her hand over the wood with the gentlest of touches, the brown of her fingers melding with the stain of the wood. “This is ni-i-i-ce,” she purred.

My father freaked when he heard there was a black man in our house; the neighbors were making vicious threats almost before he got out of his car. He lied to that poor black man, and broke Jemima’s heart. I broke her heart because I was too stupid to adhere to the social conventions of a racist society, but my father certainly scored one for “Heroic-Nonconformist Guys R Us” that day. “This is ni-i-i-ce,” she purred, and still purrs in my memory. I hope she got herself a real nice nigger house.

My father repeatedly told me that it was good to be a certain thing—but in describing that certain thing, the words he used were so abstract that they eventually became invested with completely other meanings for me. My father said a certain thing, and I heard a totally different thing. It was because I could not recognize subtle shadings of semantics aligned with body language, which soften or deflect the impact of any string of statements. When my father spoke in absolute terms, I believed him absolutely. Fair was fair. I did not know the deep-seated corruption of compromise that sat on my father's heart and fed his language with outright lies. 

Pointing the thorny road to Heaven, 

He treads the primrose path of dalliance. 

Thus, it was simply miscommunication on a grand scale that first led me astray into a world of TV values that did not really exist; values that I was incapable of recognizing did not exist. And I never realized this until it was way too late. What I never understood, in my black and white thinking mode, was that nobody in their right mind would ever actually believe all the black and white principles that were my family’s stock-in-trade. I was told certain things and believed them passionately until, around age twelve, I suddenly couldn’t believe them anymore; and then my only recourse was to reject the whole conceptual edifice including the fools who were trying to sell me all this bullshit. I became estranged from the PEOPLE in my family on philosophical grounds. It never occurred to me that they didn’t REALLY believe this stuff either, that is to say, their beliefs never informed their actions, actions that belied, fundamentally, other beliefs entirely. It was my inability to interpret body language that made it hard for me to understand somebody talking out of the corner of his mouth. My father’s mouth had at least three corners.

However fundamentally mistaken he was, my father saw himself as a rebel: and it wasn't as though he had nothing to rebel against—he did, having been brought up in a repressed, Bible-carrying-born-again-Christian family. My own indoctrination in fundamentalist religious dogma turned out badly in the end, but it was not entirely wasted, for, in the expansive glow of after-Sunday-dinner corpulence, he preached many a fine sermon. In fact, it was his natural flair for displays of verbal virtuosity that he had used, at age eighteen, to win the hand of my mother—listen:

Mabel Braun was of German country farmer stock and a staunch, nay, fanatical Baptist like her mother before her. She had a great body, and radiated sexual energy, but she was in love with her religion and only agreed to marry my father because he was considering becoming a minister. A minister. The fulfillment of a young girl's little small-town dream—just think, to live as a happy minister's wife, free of sin, free of guilt, abask in the radiance of pristine properness. She lived a ritual existence which leant it charm and character, tribal resonance in fact, but which also tended (unfortunately) to smear the faces in the scenario into a blur of anonymity, an anonymity too-easily antagonized by sharp distinctions, such as a neatly twisted personality like I turned out to be. The theory was (the tale, the legend) that my father laid that line on Mabel, about becoming a preacher, only because she just totally refused to put out until they were married, so what the hell else was he going to do to get into this girl's pants?  Marry you? Become a MAN OF GOD? Hell, yes, Angel-tits, HELL, YES!

Now, this is not to say that he had no sincere youthful enthusiasm for the profession of minister, (he did attend four years of college and graduated with a B.A. in History, with a minor in Religion), but somewhere along the way he had a crisis of faith, and he eventually lost most of it. (He said later that the coup de grace was dealt by Mabel's mother; he had come to the mother troubled and soul-searching, only to find her insensitive and unyielding—her bottom line was, "If you're not sure, don't do it." He wasn't sure, that's why he was asking, damn it! So he didn't. Thus were many diverse fates sealed with a sigh.)

So here he was, four years later, stuck with a woman whose primary values in life he had secretly come to reject, but who was the mother of his most beloved son; and here she was married to a man who had basically backed out on their firm though unwritten prenuptial agreement. Imagine the disappointment: a pair of betrayed lovers standing on the threshold of their lives holding nothing but ashes in their scalded hands. In any sane world these two would have split up immediately, except for me, except for me, (their colicky kid who had come in their third year of marriage, the junior year). And so they toiled on, struggling to keep up the pretense, the central hub of their hot romance, fucking on Sunday afternoons, the day of rest, and living apart most of the rest of the time. As an afterthought, they both set about indoctrinating me into the code of God (sic), she believing more passionately than ever, and he, by default, barely believing at all.  

But that was my father's magic—he was quite fluently verbal, and could create an illusion of sincerity by expressing himself with weighty authority on simple subjects, (the fringes of the philosophic were his sovereign domain); and he made an attractive case for his theology, even though he had secretly abandoned it. It was the music in his voice that had seduced me, I thought later, it was the old Irish genes shining through with the blarney and the bale, and me just eating it up like any kid raised on television (pure style) would have. Only moreso.

I totally bought into my father's hype about being yourself at all costs, and damn the torpedoes (I was always a sucker for rhetoric that way (more on this later)). I took the images of all those banner-waving, high-flown ideals of individuality that my father bandied about, that he patted himself on the back with, and transformed them into a pattern of antic behavior—I turned them into my father's worst nightmare; for I really came to believe that the only way I could achieve any sense of freedom, was by being myself no matter how that self failed to harmonize with the proper current social convention. I applied my father’s principle of the noble rebel, and, in doing so, outraged him and everybody else in the sane, hypocritical world. And, although I was getting shafted, left and right, by the establishment, and the only strategy I could think of, to deal with the rejection, was the same strategy my father before me had adopted—it was all THEIR fault. “Fuck ‘em.” Fuck ‘em fucked me for the next 35 years.

XII. "If I Had a Nickel"--Retrospective Interlude 3:

One of the most shattering disappointments, to my father, was that I could not shake hands. He prided himself on his personality, which he thought was engaging and charming (actually it was brazenly loud and coarse, but, to be sure, in a low-class-charming way—I’m sure its sex appeal was not wasted on his many mistresses). The cornerstone of his social suavity was the confident, manly handshake, which he endeavored on MANY occasions to teach me. Unfortunately, people like me typically have a horror of being casually touched, and, although I could sometimes get the movement right, I could never get the music—I would grimace, or wince, or just extend a finger, or, most often, refuse to put my hand out at all. What this meant to my father was that, whenever he introduced me to one of his bosses, he came off looking like a schmuck with a loser kid. Shit!

Now, go figure how a problem like that is going to go over in a household where the harmony of existence depends on a smooth, featureless, faceless surface. The meaning, in this corner of the culture, comes through the repetition of rituals; it validates itself by affirming the timelessness of tradition, meanwhile subjecting the behavior of every single member of the community to the most scrupulous scrutiny for any slightest sign of aberration. If you stuck out in any of a score of wrong ways, you were just plain screwed, branded, shunned, banished. I reasoned, later, that I had learned to become so focused in my art, because I was reacting against that constant pressure at home to stay unfocussed, blurry, approximate. I didn’t know that extreme concentration was an autistic stereotype.

"I love America!" I said. "Where else but in America can somebody like me even make it out of the chute?  I admit it, I'm lucky the world didn't drown me as a pup, I'm surely lucky to be alive, but alive I am, I am, and I demand of this life the space to be me, that weird, weird mix of culture and counterculture me, the guy who refuses to join any club (so matter how often they invite me), and who refuses to put on any airs except my own. I refuse to align myself with the doctrines of any institutionalized attitude and I will not put on a false face for the public or the bureaucracy." (Little did I know that at the precise moment of this pronouncement, that sound in the background that I thought was a passing truck was in fact the clang of doom.)

The mistake, the tragedy, lay in this: I had been corrupted almost from the start by an imbroglio of irreconcilably mixed messages. I was taught virtue, honor, tolerance in every corner of my conceptual field, by my father, his church, his school; hell, even the damn TV—Lassie, The Lone Ranger, and Mickey Mouse—they were all telling me how, if I stuck to my true nature, success, of the only worthwhile kind, was mine. I was taught that love conquers all, and that truth and integrity are the only comfortable companions on the dusty by-roads of life. I came to passionately uphold these ideals, taught by the mindless positivism of Middle America; but like a true artist, I made more of them than I should have. Then, when the moment came when all this training, all this truth, was supposed to amount to something, I turned around and got rejected by practically every institution I came in contact with, for the open-hearted innocent possession of precisely those very virtues extolled by all those institutions' propaganda machines; I detected lie after lie webbing a spider's block across every feasible passageway.  The hypocrisy of these institutions was just like the hypocrisy of my father—a little individuality will be fine young man, as long as you're not more individual than we are—too much and we'll fuck you without a kiss or a smile.

I remember the day we were putting up the storm windows. In Illinois, you have one season for screen windows in the summer, and then, when it turns to fall (about October), you put the storm windows up. You exchange screen windows for glass windows, which are supposed to help the insulation and keep the house warmer. My father had been a manual laborer for most of his life, since he was thirteen, and he totally understood how to do work; but he had no clue, really, about how to get other people to work with him. I, with my Mr. Spock mentality, needed step-by-step instructions to do anything. I couldn't follow the logic of work, the trajectory of work, and was, therefore, always accused of being lazy, or uncooperative in these projects. He would struggle with the storm windows, expecting me to help, but he never told me what I was supposed to do to help; so I stood around watching him struggle in frustration, and then felt depressed and worthless when he would scream at me for not helping.

The picture is vivid in my mind: the storm windows had green trim, they were about four to five feet tall, and 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 feet wide, and they fitted into the window frame, held in place by these little wingnut doodads. There were two little hooks at the top of the window frame, so you had to get up high to get the window fixtures to drop onto those hooks; with no ladder, (of course), you had lift the window way up over your head, (his head), and jockey the storm window into place without dropping it and breaking it. I remember watching that green trim trying to fit into that white square of the window, as it refused to go, and refused to go, and refused to go, my father struggling with the awkward-sized window waving and tottering in his hands, frustration and anger mounting in his blushing face. 

The window faced out on an alley. The alleys in central Illinois were dirt and gravel affairs which ran through the center of every block, with the backyards of all the houses spilling out onto them. Many houses had backyard garages, many led to backyard barbecues; there were very few fences, very few obstructions of any kind (which made it easy for young people to cut through yards and make elaborate shortcuts back and forth to school). I remember the contrast between the black-soot, black-gravel, black-alley and the green grass growing up along the concrete foundation of the house. Then there was that bright green trim of the storm window. These three images are merged, in memory, into a gyrating kaleidoscope of impressions: the alley, the grass, the green trim, and (of course) my father screaming at me. I don't know why this particular engram-event stands out in my mind, because there were many others--the time he smashed his hand into the wall leaving a great dent there instead of striking me, the time he berated me, (right in front of a girl I was attracted to), for not being able to work competently in his store sorting socks, or Levis, or boxes of pajamas; and the time he told me that in twenty years of marriage he had had at least that many women.

But this one time, this one time of all-- I think it might have been the turning point in his devolving opinion of me. I think our minds met and agreed that I was destined to be a loser, that I had no future in the real world. He thought I was lazy, and obtuse, so I thought that, too. Later, when I showed prodigy-like talent for music, it was too late. He could simply not imagine anybody making a living with music. He appreciated my abilities, and appreciated my my literateness, as I showed myself to be gifted in writing as well, in addition to having a fairly precocious appreciation of English literature. But to him, all these things were hobbies, playtime, not in the least bit useful in the cold cruel world of work and money; a career in the arts was impossibly distant from any kind of life he could ever possibly imagine for himself, and so was therefore impossibly distant from anything he could ever imagine for me. Thus, in his mind, I was destined to be a talented loser, and, along with everything else in my family, especially my mother, he lost interest.

Thus it was that my father planted in me the seeds of failure, from which I never recovered, and for which I never forgave him.

"If I had a nickel, I know what I'd do-- 

I'd spend it all for candy and give it all you. 

That's how much I love you, baby." 

Are you getting this?

XIII. On the Road Again

So there I was, standing by the river Styx, looking at a yellow reed that sang, "I wish I had a nickel," every time I touched it. As I mentioned, I found the reed in the dark, but a moment later the sun peeked over the tops of trees, and, sending its tentative rays across the flowing stream, declared that it was morning again. Ok then.

The first problem was, "How do I transport this thing?" I worried that it might be getting its animate life from the soil, and, if I plucked it out of the ground, it would stop singing; but when I looked closer, I realized that the structure of the reed was very much like an organ pipe: it was a hollow tube with its tip shaved off, at an acute angle, creating an ellipsoidal opening at the top. The singing was caused by an influx of air rushing through the tubelike center of the reed; (the slightest touch was enough to excite this influx of air); each reed's unique enunciation was created by certain complications of fine hair-like tendrils running down its center, such that all you had to do to make it sing, "I wish I had a nickel," was to send an ever-so-slight puff of air across that opening, like a transverse flute, or, say, a beer bottle. So, carefully plucking up the reed by the roots, hearing it sing one last phrase of Eddy Arnold's song, before it lapsed into silence, I gently enfolded the reed in burlap. It turned out that I did not have to be that gentle after all, as the reed was of a fairly sturdy stiffness, more like bamboo than swamp grass. 

I climbed up out of the shallows and began making my way back toward where I thought the road had been, following the "N" of the compass. It seemed logical to follow the "N", since to get there I had followed the "S". But, as I mentioned before, the astral landscapes have an eccentric tendency toward ambiguity and transformation, and the road I encountered facing "N" was not the reverse of the road facing "S", but was a completely new complex of geographical configurations. For one thing there was not a trace of Indiana. Indiana had flown the coop. I saw instead only misty obfuscations of canyons.

I was walking through a narrow way, (that is to say, when I could see the way), canyon walls towering above me on either side. As I indicated, the fog was so dense that I could barely see 50 feet in front of me, or 50 feet above me. Everywhere I looked there were stony walls complicated with scree and scrub, and all forging upward beyond my field of vision. Every once in a while, the cry of birds would reach my ears, and I would occasionally be able to discern, above me, an ever-so-faint flutter of wings;  but I never saw any distinct forms, and I never distinguished any intelligible sounds.

At length, the mist began to thin, and I could see sandstone and cactus stretching before me. The black of the road still conforming to an inflexible and elongated horizon dotted with dark clouds of smoke. I appeared to be approaching a land of volcanoes. Indeed, the birds, now quite visible to me, conforming to the portentous, threatening suggestion of "volcanoes" sailed in circles above me like vultures; as I approached the black clouds, the birds sometimes dived within a few feet of my head, squawking warnings and accusations. I began to endure uncomfortable physical sensations, the like of which I couldn't remember experiencing during my entire foray into this higher dimension, and I began to wonder what consequence of these sensations lay in store for me.

The sun, which had seemed, before, never to want to set, had, after its brief sojourn into twilight, begun to reassert itself with fiercer and fiercer aggressiveness; indeed, its formerly cheerful yellow glow had become a torrent of light. As the heat from the sun began to intensify, I first began to sweat, and then, actually to burn. The cruel rays seemed suddenly to affect me in a way that was, so far, unprecedented in this distant dimension. However, no sooner had I realized that my skin was reacting adversely to the light, than, just over to one side of the many rolling hills, I came upon an oasis of shade, a roadside park, a rest stop: a single broad-leaf spreading oak, with a great round knob protruding from its lower roots, made a welcome and comfortable seat for me, and the shade cooled, in a miraculously comfortable way, my burning skin. 

There I sat, and there I wondered. After some moments, something light and fragrant grazed my head. I brushed it out of my hair, as one would brush away a falling leaf in the fall, and then realized that a light rain of ever-so-brown leaves was falling on me. I looked up and saw the face of a leprechaun grinning down at me--not a green leprechaun, a Brown leprechaun; and his grin was brown, and his eyes twinkled a light, bright brown. He was hanging upside down, face toward me, grinning down at me.

"Come from the river?" he said. 

"Yes," I said. 

"Looking for tunes?" he said, indicating the burlap bag. "Gone on that quest before, myself. How did you like the Mozart?" 

"It was very fun, but I would've rather heard the tunes strung together instead of piecemeal." 

"Aha! A perfectionist I see." 

"I confess, yes," I said. "But please tell me in what country I find myself, and whence come you, oh tree dweller." 

My friend, still hanging face down, thought this to be a most hilarious remark, and took several minutes to settle down. His giggles fell on me like a rain of glittering hailstones; little, bright hailstones falling from the tree, floating by, supported by little umbrellas, little parachutes, falling down, falling down.

"Well, as to where you are, here you are."

Very funny, I thought, but did not say. 

"As to my name: it might be Rumpelstiltskin, it might be Alexander the great-- it might even be Salieri (you know from all the Mozart). But rather call me Buck, or, if you must O'Buck." 

"O'Buck," I said, "is it your custom to reside always in the trees or do you ever come down?" 

At this deployment, to the earth he slid down his feet, righting himself in a flamboyant somersault; he extended his hand in a jovial distention. You will remember that shaking hands has always been a problem for me, and so it was no less on the astral plane than anywhere else. I faked my way through the ceremony by shifting the burlap bag slightly on my shoulders, changing hands and, thus, making it inconvenient for me to extend mine. O'Buck took the hint and settled himself next to me on the broad knob.

"Well, you said I am where I am," I said. "But I'm not sure what that means in even the most philosophical sense," I said. "I thought I was dead. I thought I wanted to be dead. But recent events have so confounded me, that what I wanted, has been replaced by enigmatic directives from the Boss."

"Ah, the Boss," said O'Buck. His reach extends far, I know. Good man."

"Well, I can see you carry your treasure with you," he says, indicating the burlap bag. "So you must be returning to the city." 

"Yes," I said, "but I am unsure of the way." 

"Well!" says O'Buck, "never mind. All ways lead to the city, eventually; you just have to be ready. You seem unready." 

"Oh," I said, "and why is that?" 

"Because you're still on the road. Why don't you just go?" 

And then I realized: that that's how these things work here. I could have been back in the city already, I could have just thought myself there, I could have just imagined the door I was supposed to open, and there it would be. But it was fear that kept me from such a thing, and it was still, in a way, disbelief. I looked into O'Buck's eyes, and suddenly found myself in a deep, dark well.

XIV. The Deep Dark Well

So here I am, standing at the bottom of this deep dark well. I know it is dark because I can't see shit. I know I'm in a well because I reach out to my right, and I reach out to my left, I reach out behind me, and I reach out in front of me, and I can feel stone walls in a circle around me. Also, I am standing in an inch of water, soaking my socks, threatening to drown my socks. I know it is deep because I look up, way, way up, and, at first, I see O'Buck's face, a tiny, grinning pinprick of light at the top; and then I see the astral night with the shooting moon tracing its thin line across the tiny, tiny opening.

The reality of my situation does not dawn on me at first, since, everything that has happened to me since I took the pills is so outlandish, so unreal: but eventually I begin to feel the nauseating suffocation of being down a fucking well. Searching for a reasonable interpretation, I think, "Aha! Fear is the prison to which, I Wish I had a Nickel is the key!" I could hear that reasoning plop like a lead balloon in the inch of water at my feet. "No, I Wish I Had a Nickel  represents the bottom rung of a ladder which I can use to climb out of here." Double-plop. "No, I Wish I Had a Nickel is supposed to be a key to something--the only key to something. I'm supposed to use the reed as a key--Oh Shit!" And then I realize with a shock, that the burlap bag, with the reed in it, is up at the top leaning against the knob. O'Buck is probably decorating his treehouse with it, at this very moment. "Shit!" I say.

"Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!" I beat the walls with my hands. First blood reveals what a dumb idea THAT is. The idea of climbing out of the well occurs to me, and it is not an impossible thought, except that the round circumference of the well is just large enough so that I can't reach two sides at once, either by reaching out my hands to my sides, or by reaching out my hands one way and my feet another. That climbing possibility is out. Using the mortared slits between the bricks for finger and toe-holds is the next possibility, but the well is very neatly made, with very slight ridges between the bricks, which my fingers cannot grab onto. I think of the gray rocks that I climbed up, toward the citadel at my old high school, and I try to relive that experience; I make it up about three feet, and then slip hopelessly to the bottom with a splash. It is actually a well, an empty well to be sure, but there must be a channel from the river somewhere that fills the thing up from time to time. I am lucky (or unlucky) enough find myself at the bottom during the dry season. I wonder when it will begin to fill. It begins to fill. To add to the pressure, let's add a time factor.

So I sit down in the water (3 inches, now) to celebrate my self-pity, when I hear a scraping along the side of the bricks. It is the sound of the chromatic harmonica that has been tucked in my belt this whole time. I probably should've told you what a chromatic harmonica is, when I first mentioned it, because it's probably not common knowledge; so I'll tell you now: a chromatic harmonica is a harmonica with more reeds than the normal diatonic harmonica; a normal harmonica just has the major scale tones, half of which sound when you blow out, and half of which sound when you suck in. Thus, a normal harmonica can play major scales and two chords. With a chromatic harmonica there are reeds for each of the twelve chromatic half-steps. On a good one there are usually 2 1/2 octaves; there is a little valve on the side, that you push with your index finger, that opens and closes a little door that selects one chorus of reeds or another; this mechanism allows you to play chromatic scales--that is, half-step scales--which are not available on a diatonic harmonica. It will not be surprising to you to hear that the melody to If I Had a Nickel requires half-steps. Thus, the plan that had been set in motion by THE BOSS reveals itself to me in crystalline clarity: I realize that I am going to have to perform If I Had a Nickel on the chromatic harmonica, and this is going to be the key to something--most likely the way out of a deep well.

So I play it: E D# E D# E C.. D# E C C C….. D# E D# E F G C.. D# E C C C C….. "That's how much I love you, baby." D D D D B G..G G….. "That's how much I love you." G G G G A C….. I can't believe I'm doing this: this is the culmination of all those nights in the 60s watching the Jimmy Dean Show, watching the Muppets, and Yakkity Sax man, and Floyd Cramer, and Roger Miller, and Minnie Pearl--all those memories come flooding back, and then E D# E D# E C.. D# E C C C…...

Jimmy Dean and Big John move aside, and I hear my father singing: 

"If I had a nickel, I know what I'd do-- 

I'd spend it all for candy and give it all you. 

That's how much I love you, baby." 

And the bricks on one side of the wall of the well begin to jiggle; some of the mortar crumbles, and more bricks, and more bricks begin to jiggle aside. The door, that was supposed to be opened by the nickel, crumbles open before me and I see, vaguely, a passageway. I climb into the passageway on my hands and knees, not waiting for the hole to get bigger. As it continues to do that, I push the loose bricks aside. I crawl through and I look ahead. 

At the far end of the shallow passage, radiating out from the side of the broken well wall, is a TV screen, and I see my father standing on a ridge in Tennessee. Rosy-fingered dawn finds him looking at the term paper he has just written for his history class, his college history class. He had to spend all night typing that paper, because my mother, a professional typist, was "Too tired." 

[For this "Too tired," insert the most whiny, most self-pitying, most wimpy, self-obsessed, wheedling tone of voice you can imagine.] 

"I'm too tired." 

Go back to midnight. While she sleeps, he, who has been up since six that morning, driving a milk truck for five hours, going to class, then selling pots and pans door-to-door, sits down at a typewriter to type, one letter at a time, The Role of the Magna Carta in the Changing Politics of Medieval England. At 6:00, he holds the paper in his hands, and watches the rising Tennessee November sun, a great red circle interrupted by the black outline, the reaching, leafless fingers of a tree on the edge of the trailer court lot. 

There he stands; my father, once so madly in love (lust) with a woman, he decided to give up his whole life for her dream. HER DREAM. And now he discovers that the dream is dross, the woman is a selfish bitch, and this worthless bachelor's degree brings him no closer to any kind of happiness he had imagined for himself when he was 18 and finally got into her pants. The tree, the spindly fingers of the tree, are wrapped around his heart, and everything he ever wanted is crushed in that cruel embrace. I see my father standing there. I see him walking toward the Pontiac convertible (he loves convertibles); he gets into the car, he puts the key in the ignition and begins to run away. In his mind he is already down the road, in his heart, he is in the next county, in his loins he is in California, Arizona, Montana, anywhere away, away from that bitch. 

And then, in his mind, he sees me, little one-year-old Rickie lying asleep. Little one-year-old Rickie (whom he beat the shit out of two days ago, till he was black and blue, for having colic, 

"He wouldn't stop crying, he wouldn't stop crying, he wouldn't, he wouldn't!"),

and who now lies innocent and helpless in the crib. He can't leave his son. He can't leave me. It was the one truly selfless thing he ever did. Who knows if it wouldn't have been better otherwise? Who knows?

"If I had a nickel, I know what I'd do-- 

I'd spend it all for candy and give it all you. 

That's how much I love you, baby." 

My father takes the key out of the ignition. He goes back into the trailer. He can sleep maybe 2 1/2 hours before the day begins again. He throws the pages loosely onto the kitchen counter, and lies down on the couch, snoring deeply in seconds.

XV. Denouement

Form and tradition require a denouement to this story, but there is nothing much else to tell. I woke up. My laptop was still sitting on my chest, getting quite hot, by the way. I wasn't dead, but every muscle in my body felt like it had just been to the dentist--I stumbled out of bed because I could not feel my feet; there were cobwebs in my eyes and in my mouth, my fingers were like heavy clubs. 

Yeah, so all the blame shit I had pinned on my father seemed less his fault and more mine. You would think that would make me feel worse, but it didn't--it was like a good loose shit after long constipation. Seeing what he gave up for me, made it a lot easier to to deal with what I gave up for him. Maybe all those betrayals were less significant than I thought. Maybe one great act of sacrifice moots all the other little acts of--whatever. I don't know. Blame is like a poison, but it is also like blinders; taking off the blinders, even a little, even in a Hollywood ending, helps quite a bit.

I had some micro-wave french fries and burritos, and I finished a can of ginger ale left in the fridge. I made a list of people I had to call: Drew, my wife, and my father. Who do you think I called first?

"Dad?" I said.