As Porky and Dawn entered the large room, they argued about where to sit;
“Wait. Where are you going?” Porky asked her as she ventured to the front of the room and into the first row of chairs.
“Let’s sit up here,” she said, “Let’s really get in the face of this.”
“I already picked out a spot for us. Look, they’re aisle seats; we might need to go to the bathroom a lot.”
“I hold it really well. I always sit up front.” Dawn noted Porky’s look of dejection and because she had begun to feel a certain motherly concern for him, she allowed that look to play upon her and tell him, “alright, look, why don’t we pick something in the middle here. Grab those two seats there, you can have the aisle seat,” she said as she pointed to the chairs.
Porky looked around [“They almost looked normal,” he said of the people who were also filling the seats of the seminar room.] He didn’t like the look of the two large microphones on stands that flanked the podium; in fact they scared him.
“What are those microphones for?”
“Oh, through-out the program people go up front to talk about themselves and give testimonials and whatever.”
“Oh,” Porky said, wishing he’d brought something to snack on.
In short order the room filled, the attendants resumed their places by the tables and chairs in back and two tallish men sauntered up to the podium. They were fit and charismatic, dressed in dark suits without ties but there was something a bit off that Porky couldn’t quite put his finger on. The men introduced themselves as Ted and Sören, spelled with one of those funny Scandinavian “ö’s”.
[“I kept looking at them, thinking there’s something not right about these guys and then it hit me; neither one of them had shoulders!” Porky told me. “I don’t know if that has anything to do with the fact that they were both Airline pilots,” he added, “but it kind of makes you wonder.”]
Everything got going quickly, the two shoulder-less men gave an over-view of the Odyssey organization and its many educational programs and then they said something that caught Porky’s attention:
“So, you’re going to get nothing out of this. You’ll get nothing for your money. Can you believe that? Can you believe I would stand here and tell you that for your $450 tuition you leave here with absolutely nothing? Has anyone ever said that to you before?”
These words caused a bit of a buzz among the attendees but for Porky this was no laughing matter. The thing he feared most in this world, or at least in the world of economic transactions, was not getting what he paid for, even if he didn’t pay for it. The thought that he might be taken for a ride or economically abused in any way filled him with humiliation. This was not funny.
“But now let me tell you what this program will give you – nothing! And by nothing I mean this program will create a clearing in your life that will allow you to realize your new possibilities. This is how you’ll start living not based on what happened in your past – because that’s gone, right? – not based in your imagined future but now in the possibilities you create for your self through the Odyssey program.”
“But here’s what I’m going to do for you, as the car salesman says. You’ve been here for an hour now and you’ve gotten a pretty good idea of some of the work we’ll be doing together over the course of the program. Anybody who wants to leave, anybody who thinks this program is not for them, can leave right now and we will refund them all of their money. This will be the last chance to get a refund.”
There was a lot of anxious shifting in seats and craning of necks as everyone contemplated the carrot of getting out now while the getting was good. Porky thought this over for a few moments. He wondered, if he left now, would Dawn give him the refunded $450? No, that’s stupid, he thought, she’d never do that.
“Ok, so let’s see a show of hands. How many are thinking of taking me up on this offer?”
A few hands shot up from the audience. One man began standing to leave and the group leader began speaking to him.
“You look pretty determined to leave. Why don’t you tell everybody your name and why you came here tonight.”
“My name is Ned. I guess I came here because someone told me I should, because I’ve worked in a factory for thirty years and last week they told me that if I wanted to stay, they were going to have to demote me. I never really liked anybody, I mean people in general, but this young woman at the factory, I like her ok, I guess. Well, she told me about Odyssey and how it could help me get more out of my job and my life and that I should go sign up. Told her I didn’t have the money for that and she told me to take a good look around, that I didn’t have much to lose and how I’d reached the end of my rope and she was right. So, I signed up and here I am.”
“You be here, but you be preparing to go, right?” Ned gave the leader a puzzled look. “You were just about to walk out, weren’t you?” the leader asked.
“That’s right, yes, I was.”
“What if I told you that you had the power to move, touch and inspire other people?”
“I’d say, no way.”
“Well, I be telling you that now. With the skills we teach in this program you will have breakthroughs in your work and personal relationships and you’ll open up for yourself a whole new realm of possibility in your life. And I’m going to ask you something, are you enrollable?”
“What do you mean?”
“By that I mean are you able to be touched, moved or inspired by what you might learn here at Odyssey?”
“Well, I don’t know, I can’t say I can even think of a time I’ve been touched, moved and inspired. At least not since I was a kid. But, yeah, I guess I could be.”
“Well, then I be asking you right now to believe in that possibility and that you be with us here this weekend to do that work.”
“I don’t know, nobody ever asks me to stay anywhere. Ok, alright, then I’ll stay I guess. I will be really happy if that does happen.”
“No, not I will be, but I be happy. You be happy now because of your new possibility. Say it for me now, please.”
“I be happy.”
“That’s great. You’re great. You see, we be trying to locate you in the present. Now you be in the moment. Most of you be stuck in the past or be fixin’ to anticipate the future. Past, shmast, it’s over! We done lived that. Instead, we be taking your past and your future out of your present.”
“You see most of you don’t know from nothing.”
At this point the leader tried to shrug and Porky noted that being without shoulders could be an impediment to communication – neither leader was able to shrug effectively.
As the central ideas of Odyssey are gathered together from the gleanings of Western and Eastern philosophy, so the language of Odyssey seemed to come straight from Ellis Island by way of Harlem.
Some hold it up as an object of ridicule, but I find Odyssey’s language endearing. I love it when people get all mouthy and ethnic; Jews with their needling and kvetching, their ample and sometimes tortured ways of finding and circumventing love; Italians with their gestures that make them look like they’re dry-heaving or pulling spaghetti off their bodies.
But best of all are black folks with their sassy Ebonics: The street-corner guys who talk like pirates – “Yo’, ho’, wuhchoo do dat fo’.” Black girls, (well, Black girls on TV anyway,) are such queens, with their glorious, nine-volt battery operated necks – mesmerizing necks only a snake charmer could tame.
It’s hard for white Americans to maintain a grip on African-American Vernacular English – though grasp at it they do, in mockery and envy – because they feel the sting of its ineluctable evasiveness and defiance.
In America, if you want to talk about freedom, if you want to be truly free with your tongue, you have to talk Black talk, the parlance of liberation.
As they navigated the twists and turns of Odyssey talk, everyone in the group was paired up with a partner, wh
om they then went through a series of exercises with. Porky had been temporarily conjoined with a woman who’d been abused in her youth and as part of her healing process, she had mentally put all the men in her life on rafts filled with flowers and sent them adrift into a slow-flowing river that eventually terminated in a treacherous waterfall not that much smaller than Niagara. She was heavily perfumed, as though she still stank of all those flowers, and as Porky listened to her story, he realized he didn’t really like listening to people all that much and he began mentally to make a raft, on which he placed many flowers, onto which he helped his partner. He pushed the raft gently with a long pole and waved goodbye as she journeyed out onto this very same river and he continued waving goodbye, which he decided he liked to do a lot better than listening.
One of the shoulder-less leaders gathered everyone together as a group and told one last tale of wisdom before lunch:
“So, there’s this monkey, see, and he’s walking around the jungle when he comes upon a plastic box with a banana in it. So what does the monkey do? He doesn’t know this is a trap set up by a hunter to catch monkeys. So the monkey, see, he puts his hand through the hole to grab the banana, but he can’t get it through the hole. Well, the monkey’s stuck because he can’t let go of the banana and the hunter grabs him. I’m telling this story because I want you to see that each and every one of you is the monkey and the banana is your past. You can’t let go of your past, you take it everywhere and so get stuck in situations that are detrimental to your well-being.”
Porky wasn’t buying this – (“I mean why couldn’t the monkey bend the banana and squish it through the hole and get away and get the banana? Sure it’d be a mess, but he could have had it all.”) – but it was a good segue into the lunch break.
Greek Gifts
The Helios Greek Diner was located on a dirt and gravel turn-out with the Helios Greek Butcher’s Shop next door. What makes a Greek butcher different from, say, a Polish butcher, besides the fact that the walls are plastered with yellowed photos of the Parthenon rather than the pope, I can’t say.
Porky, striking out on his own, found the diner by some sixth sense that alerts him to the edibility of his surroundings. He just knew it was there; it had to be there, it just had to be, because he needed to be alone with his food and the seminar attendees had already begun to bond in tight little intimate groups that were focused on sharing and if there’s one activity that Porky didn’t want to partake of during the lunch break, it was sharing.
There was an oppressive air hanging over the diner, which seemed to sit in its own little micro-climate on the edge of the forest behind. The sun penetrated the trees with surgical cuts and the wind caused a lowing in the branches. Porky parked the truck and noticed there were only two old cars in the lot. He opened a swing door with wire mesh, above which he saw holes assembled in Braille-like formation where a neon sign had been. He pushed against the dirty hollow-core interior door, which contrasted with the bright chrome finish of the diner’s other surfaces. On the other side of the door he was astonished to find before him heaps of prepared food that filled the counter from one end to the other and not a person in sight!
“Hello?” he asked somewhat meekly, in a hushed tone, as though he were in church but hadn’t been in a long time.
“Hello?” he said once again, this time with more hope.
“Hello?!” There was no one in the diner. Perfect! Porky began looking around, walking up and down the aisle between counter and booths. The seats in the booths were ox-blood red with patches of dull gray duct tape over the slashes underneath. On each table sat the old-fashioned mini-juke boxes with tabs that allowed you to file through the list of pop tunes dated no later than 1983. Porky fished out a quarter and chose a couple of songs, neither of which played. Instead an old ballad kicked up, one that both Porky and I remember from childhood, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray……”.
Porky looked around a bit more, the calendar on the wall next to the kitchen pass-through was current and that day was notated with PHOTO SHOOT in red ink. He poked his head through one of the doors with a porthole; the kitchen; the other led to the bathrooms.
“I be hungry,” he said out loud to himself and then chortled. “I be fixin’ to fix me a sandwich. The possibility I be creating for myself gone be thinly sliced an’ sittin’ on a onion roll.” Porky always finds himself to be highly entertaining.
He tried to be careful about which portions of the displayed food he chose to eat; trying to dissemble his lunch by discreet excavations that might go undetected. It was a structural problem that would be familiar to any homeowner undergoing a renovation project. What can you remove without having the whole thing fall apart?
Porky started with dessert – all manner of honeyed, nutted and flakey-pastried concoctions which made him quickly realize he wasn’t going to make it through dessert without coffee. He went back behind the counter, said “Hello” one more time and then put on a pot of coffee. He looked at the cash register, thought briefly about what a life on the lamb would be like if he should grab it and run. He looked around at the order pads on the worn shelving underneath the counter where several moist towels were stained with drink and constellated with coffee grounds and congratulated himself on his good dumb luck.
More than luck. He was now living a charmed life where one slept with the woman of one’s youthful dreams, met mysterious benefactresses on the freeway – and when hunger struck? – Why, one just walked into de-peopled delis with piled-high food offered up for plunder. He had, he thought, finally freed himself from the daily monotony of a life with comfortably few variations.
The forest, the food; he now lived in a world where magic under-girds everything, a world where an overweight middle-aged Filipino man could play goldilocks for a while. With his appetite, he planned on saving a lot of money by eating here at the diner. After washing down some more baklava, he began at last to eat seriously.
Belly-ache
The allotted time for lunch break was long since over when Porky entered the meeting hall. He could sense that he was about to be humiliated; he could see it on the faces of his fellow seminarians, in their smiles and mischievous eyes, like they were in on a joke that was about to be played out at his expense. He looked around furtively for Dawn, his protector, but he couldn’t find her in the crowd. Before he was able to find a vacant chair, one of the leaders began speaking to him.
“Ok, we’ve been through this before with the other folks but we leave no one behind. What’s your name,” he called out to Porky.
“Porky,” Porky said as some giggles could be heard around the room. “Porky Flores.”
“Ok, Porky, you be late. You be having a breakdown.”
Porky thought about this for a moment; it seemed like a good excuse – he had a small nervous breakdown during lunch, that’s why he’s late, but now he’s better. But he decided he didn’t like using mental illness as an excuse; he didn’t like the social stigma. He decided to be honest:
“No, I’m a little nervous maybe but I’m not having a breakdown.”
“No, you’re having a breakdown in integrity. You made an agreement; your covenant with the group was to be on time, to be in your seat by 12:30. I’m not putting you on the hot seat just to make you feel uncomfortable; this goes to the core of Odyssey education.”
“I had to go find a place to eat where they have the kind of food I need. I have dietary restrictions.”
[I let out a “Hah!” when Porky told me this. “Dietary restrictions? You? What a fricking joke.” Porky laughed, then chortled, “I know, can you imagine me saying that? The effrontery. I’ve got balls.” “Rumor has it your balls are on a short tether these days,” I said. Porky stopped laughing. “Why do you have to go and spoil everything? You’re like my personal dark cloud, with a rusty lining.”]
“What are your restrictions? Are th
ey monitored by a doctor?” the leader asked Porky.
“Well, no, not exactly. I eat mostly Greek food, you know, because of the olive oil and stuff.” There was more laughter from the crowd. Porky started feeling strange; he felt a tightening in the gut.
“Well, I be respectfully suggesting to you that this is in the realm of the story, which we’ll be talking about in the next segment of the program. You see,” the leader was speaking out to the crowd, “we’re all running rackets with stories from our past. We’ve perfected all these ways to avoid being and relating powerfully in the moment.”
Porky began to moan and bend at the knees.
“Now Porky, we’re really not dumping on you so there’s no reason to get upset or feel bad. DON’T FEEL BAD! Instead, live powerfully in the moment. Make the choice to touch, move and inspire.”
At this, Porky began to vomit and shake violently. He then fell to the floor into the puddle of Greek food that lay at his feet. Pandemonium let loose in the room; there was shouting. Porky thought he saw Dawn approaching at the bottom of an inverted bubble that made everything look hazy before he blacked out.
Chapter XVIII: Death Defiance
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