The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  He had surgery, twice, at the University of Zero Medical School in Portland. And the damage did not prove at all detrimental to his overall health, or to his outlook on life. (“The Good Lord has dinged me for a reason!” he told the beaming members of the SDA Church of Eugene one fine Sabbath in the spring of ’68.) But it had finished him forever as a track star.

  EVERETT

  Renunciation

  Everyone suspected that whatever America wanted, America got. Why not Nirvana?

  —Gita Mehta, Karma Cola

  When I was thirteen and Peter twelve, Mama and Papa took it into their heads to celebrate a new AAA membership (the car club, not the bush league) by setting forth into the bowels of one of those pre-posthumous purgatories we euphemism-loving Americans call “a family vacation.” Vowing to explore what the free (with membership) AAA Travel Guide called “the Breathtakingly Beautiful Oregon Coast,” they jammed the lot of us into the Dodge Dart wagon, bent over their free (with membership) AAA road maps, and began toodling down mile after merciless mile of serpentine highway, hoping to break down in the middle of nowhere and test out the free (with membership) AAA towing service. Meanwhile we six youths hunched—four in the back seat, two in the way back—watching the wiper blades and defroster slap and huff impotently at opposite sides of the doubly humidified windshield as Irwin joyously pointed out such scenic wonders as the endless skeins of manure-filled barnyards, the quarter-million-acre slashburns and the overloaded log trucks threatening to blast us away to the real Purgatorio while the reputedly “Breathtaking” coastline lurked in omnipresent fog a few hundred feet west of us, invisible as God for the duration of the drive.

  The point of this digression—and the most unforgettable moment of the entire thirteen-day ordeal—occurred in a dismal-looking little sawmill-and-dairy town the sign called “Cloverdale, Oregon’s Best-Kept Secret,” where I happened to glimpse a market upon which were painted the words:

  OUR STEAKS ARE SO TENDER WE DON’T KNOW HOW THE COWS EVER WALKED!

  My reaction, upon spotting this bizarre gloat, was to read it aloud. I thought it funny, and believed the whole claustrophobic family could use a good guffaw. My belief was seven-eighths correct. All but one of us did laugh. What I’d failed to take into account was the depth of imagination and shallowness of stomach of our oddball eighth, Peter, who closed his eyes and commenced—with the eerie competence of some snow-eating yogi—to conjure a Tantric Mind Cow so horrifically overfattened and smooshy-fleshed that it was literally unable to rise from the cesspool of its body and walk. It took him perhaps thirty seconds to smear this mooing snot wad across the canvas of his mind. He then gently tapped my shoulder and said, “MmmmbRoll your mmmmbwindow down! Mmmmb-Fast!” As it was cold and damp outside, as I’ve never responded well to point-blank commands, and as his Mmmmbian dialect was new to me (I thought he was trying to be funny by talking “tender,” like the steaks on the sign), I failed to process his request with anything like the speed the situation required. As a result, Peter’s stomachful of half-digested breakfast shot straight into the closed window, splattered down my neck and chest, and found its final resting place all over my legs and lap.

  Looking past this illustrative lap-load, I find myself unable to ignore a troubling question about the whole spiritual thrust of Peter’s earthly sojourn. To wit: what is the correlation between his burning desire to attain union with God and his utter inability to slog through a little everyday Americana without either fainting or blowing lunch?

  Think about it. If you were the sort of red-blooded, Chicago Bearlovin’, ass-chasin’, shit-kickin’, four-wheel-drivin’ honcho who could, without question or indigestion, daily swash down three or four Styrofoam-swaddled units of Booger King cuisine with a quart or two of the wee-wee that made Milwaukee famous—if you were, in other words, constitutionally and psychologically willing and able to enjoy “Life” just the way Uncle Sam, Aunt Fate and your Sony TV serve it up—chances are you wouldn’t be in any all-fired hurry to renounce the world, shrivel your innards, hone your mind, mortify your pecker, snuff your ego and polish off your cycle of births and deaths in one swell foop. But if, on the other hand, you were the sort of thin-skinned, hyperimaginative orchid-on-legs who fainted splat on the floor every time you got stuck in an elevator full of beefy-breathed businessmen, or who upchucked your daily bread at the mere thought of a mucus-muscled Moo Cow, you may well find this world a vale of queasy tears and be ready to trade it in on the first alternative world you heard of. You might even be willing to attempt trading it in on something downright iffy—like, say, severing the Chain of Causation, attaining Enlightenment, and emanating as a faceless, stomachless, never-again-to-be-nauseous bolt of bodhihood up into the fathomless bosom of the One True Oneness …

  I know that I possess your basic rationalistic, earthbound, Consciousness-1 sort of mind; I know that my lifelong love of baseball renders me wildly biased; I know that my descriptions of the Absolute range from parody to travesty. But taking all this into consideration, I still feel that the distinction just made between two types of Americans raises serious questions about any individual act of renunciation. Is renunciation just plain renunciation? Or does it vary according to the personality and circumstances of the renunciate? Can one person’s painful purification be another person’s piece of cake? I think it can.

  To get specific: if some omnivorous lover of every sort of meat, drink and pleasure known to man—Irwin, for instance—were to renounce the world and commence to live the renunciate’s life, he would really be making stupendous sacrifices. But what about Pete? What worldly riches, what heartfelt loves, what deep pleasures, chronic addictions and hopeless cravings was this vegetarian bookworm truly sacrificing on the day he announced—before leaving for bloody Harvard for godsake!—that he was “renouncing” his past and setting out to attain “Gnosis”?

  I’ll tell you what J think he was sacrificing: fainting and barfing.

  When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was an act exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting.

  Hell, Pete was hardly “in the world” in the first place. That was just the problem. He knew more about thirteenth-century Sufi Orders and the Ptolemaic Universe than the rivers and hills and sewers and mills of southwestern Washington. The guy made me nervous. Take away his voracious reading and Oriental trappings and what was left was damned near a Puritan. And even the great exception to his puritanical predilections—his brilliant ballplaying—was no exception if you sort of squeezed your sphincter into a knot and thought about the game for a minute that way. After all (squeeze hard now), didn’t baseball take place on a playing field so precisely devised that it was known, like the Buddha’s definitive Sutra, as “the diamond”? Didn’t it impose upon its participants (keep squeezing) a monklike uniformity of appearance and a code of conduct backed by a plethora of stringent, dogmatic rules? Didn’t baseball in fact (squeeze really hard now!) bear far greater resemblance to a Monastic-Order-with-Fans than to one of those noisy, colorful, paradoxical, unpredictable, two-sexed, alternately lovely and deadly clanjamfreys we call a “world”?

  Okay. Relax it now. It doesn’t matter anyhow, since in the end Pete even renounced baseball.

  It is said in The Legend of the Buddha Shakyamuni that when the bodhisattva set out to seek enlightenment, his charioteer took him to the edge of the forest, left him alone there, and he proceeded to “emaciate his body for six years, and carry out a number of strict fasts very hard for men to endure.” When Peter set out to seek enlightenment, it was in a jet headed for Boston, then a cab headed for Cambridge, where his first stop was the financial-aid office, his second the college bookstore. It is said in The Legend of the Buddha Shakyamuni that at the moment the young prince sat himself down under the Bo Tree, “no one anywhere was angry, ill, or sad; no one did evil, none was proud; the world became quiet, as though it had
attained perfection … and all living creatures sensed that all would be well.” When Peter sat himself down in his dorm room, Malcom X, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were about to die, a hundred American cities and campuses were about to disintegrate, and a military offensive named for the Buddha’s birthday was about to reduce Vietnam to ashes.

  None of which was Peter’s fault. But when it comes to renunciation, “no pain, no gain” is what I’ve slowly, reluctantly, inexorably come to believe. And when Pete opted for scholarly monkhood, I think he was just trying to outsmart his pain. The Peter who left for Harvard was not looking to integrate or balance his inner and outer selves: he was looking to trick his outer self into nirvana. He’d chosen a diet, not a leap into an abyss. He’d calculated that by considering the physical world “illusory” and burying his nose in metaphysical texts he could go on doing something comfortable while his ignorance and sufferings and hometown and troublesome family just fell away like so much ugly excess poundage.

  Obviously, I question his calculations: to slough off half a self in hopes of finding a whole one is not my idea of good math.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Left Stuff

  1. Hats

  My dear fellow, intelligence isn’t the only thing. I have a kind and happy heart. I also write vaudeville skits of all sorts …

  —the Devil, The Brothers Karamazov

  In 1945, when Edward Conze read of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, he vomited out a train window and declared history meaningless. In 1964, when Peter saw his first atomic blast in a Pentagon documentary, he staggered down an empty hallway, vomited into a closed window, and decided he’d better become a bodhisattva as fast as possible—if not faster. In 1968, when the White House, Pentagon and Congress were debating whether or not to drop nuclear bombs on North Vietnam, Everett didn’t declare or decide or vomit into or out of anything. But he did write a play. It was called Hats.

  During his sojourn as an English major at Washington, Everett fell temporarily but heavily under the influence of Ken “I Took the Pill Without Asking Any Questions” Kesey and several other writers who were trying to work with, or in spite of, psychedelic drugs. Fascinated in particular by the altered-consciousness portions of the novel Sometimes a Great Notion, Everett once used his uncanny ability to make even idiotic impulses sound like indispensable qualifications for humanity’s emergence into a Bold New Age, and talked three of his friends into joining him on a quasi-Keseyian literary experiment of their own. The result of this experiment—or so Everett argued at the time—was his first and (so far) last play, Hats.

  The friends’ names were nothing like Dale, Didi and Phil, but to protect their innocence, should any still exist, that’s what I’ll call them. The experiment (through no fault of Kesey’s, by the way) involved driving up to a reservoir near the foot of Mount Rainier, locating a small unpopulated beach, taking two “hits” of organic mescaline apiece, placing Phil’s Underwood manual typewriter on top of a driftwood log, arguing vehemently about whether it shouldn’t be under the log since it was an Underwood, resolving the argument by placing a small piece of wood on top of the typewriter, removing their clothes because Didi said that William Blake had now and then done the same, then taking turns clacking away at some free-form verbiage which they hoped would later read as strangely as they’d all begun to feel.

  The original plan had been to limit each contestant to an hour at the typewriter, but the mescaline proved so good (or bad, depending on how you look at these things) that in no time, so to speak, none of the writers could tell time. A second problem arose when Dale and Didi elected to type simultaneously, lost interest in the keyboard after its letters became an indistinguishable paisley tapestry, and began trying to force the Underwood to take dictation by bellowing ontological questions at it instead. “Hey, Everett!” they’d roar down into the bewildered machinery. “Who the hell is Phil?” Or “Hey, Phil! Who are Everett?” Or “Hey, Everett and Phil! Who the hell be you guys?” Or “Hey, Dale and Didi! Who we am?”

  When, at Everett’s suggestion, they abandoned the typewriter in order to stick their heads underwater and shout down into the far more responsive lake, Phil, or whoever he was by then, took his shot at the Underwood, and for a long while typed at a furious pace. But when, after an amount of time I fear we can call only “an amount of time,” Everett strolled over to check out Phil’s prodigious output, he found perhaps twenty pages’ worth of the numbers 2 through 8 typed out in a single-spaced column, thus:

  2345678

  2345678

  2345678

  2345678

  2345678

  2345678

  2345678 …

  Everett was not impressed. He picked up a stick, slipped it around the oblivious typist’s back, and shoved down the left shift key, causing the poor fellow’s perfect column of 2345678s to be marred by a sudden @#$%¢&*. “Damn!” Everett said, pointing at it. “Too bad, Phil! You’re disqualified!”

  When Phil began to weep, Everett threw an arm round his shoulder and led him down to help Didi and Dale find out who the hell be the lake. He then rushed back to the log, cracked his knuckles over the keyboard, and let his altered consciousness stream onto the page as planned. The result, as far as even Everett could later tell, was several pages of self-indulgent gobbledygook. But while he was clacking away he happened to overhear Dale, Phil and Didi “playing tricks” on the apparently gullible lake by pretending they were really Einstein, Yogi Bear and Queen Elizabeth. Pathetic as this was, it struck the altered-Everett funny, and he managed (barely) to type out a little of their dialogue. Then a thundershower hit, the drugs began to wear off, and they drove back to Seattle, only to realize, first, that everything they’d written was drivel, and second, that they’d left Phil’s Underwood up at the lake.

  This left Everett with what he felt was a clear choice: one option was to admit to his disgruntled friends that the mescaline experiment was a ridiculous and dangerous outing that had cost a perfectly good Underwood its life; the other was to convince them that the day had in fact been a smashing literary success, that their Einstein/Yogi Bear/Queen Elizabeth skit was brilliant, and that if they only developed it a little it could lead to great things. Obviously the latter option was as harebrained as Congress. But faith is amazing stuff. Even faith in nonsense. And Everett, at the time, really did have faith in what he called “the Keseyian Antitradition of Literary Inspiration via Psychedelics.” The result of that faith—though written primarily under the influence of caffeine—was his first and last play.

  · · · ·

  Hats was an ambitious work in that people of all nationalities, ages and walks of life appeared in it. It was also a provincial work, in that it was riddled with local and national political references, TV puns, sight gags and private jokes thunk up by Everett and his cronies while heavily under the influence of 1968ism. By the time he’d whipped it into final form, though, Everett had incorporated a few clever theatrical devices (for instance, a play within the play) and come up with a cast so incongruous that they would probably have gotten some laughs without even speaking. And after harassing local playhouse producers and directors for weeks as only he could harass, Everett got Hats staged at the Boathouse Theater on Lake Washington. So one fine summer’s Saturday, Irwin and I (after he’d joined Mama for church) drove up in his nifty little Nash Rambler and caught the opening-night performance.

  The obvious eccentricity of Hats turned out to be its chief dramatic purpose as well: everybody in it, no matter their age, race or activity, was at all times wearing some sort of hat or cap, and attached to each one, by dangling springs, were two enormous revolvers. One revolver was painted red, with a yellow hammer and scythe on its handle. The other was star-spangled red, white and blue. Both—even when bobbing dangerously about on the end of their springs—were constantly cocked, and aimed straight at the hat-wearer’s brains.

  The only set was a kind of forest made of trees, bushes, telephone
poles and TV antennas. In honor of the play’s supposed inspiration, Yogi Bear wandered out into this forest first, wearing his usual green necktie and putzy hat—plus the revolvers. “Hey hey hey! Am I starvin’ today!” he said. Then he started looking around for pickanick baskets.

  Hoss Cartwright from Bonanza came out next. And in addition to the revolvers attached to his ten-gallon he had a big horse pistol which he was aiming at Yogi, obviously intending to pot him. As he was about to squeeze the trigger though, Tarzan (wearing a blue baseball cap with a hot-pink T on it, plus the two guns) came swinging out on a telephone wire making his famous jungle cry—which scared Hoss into swinging the big horse pistol around on him instead, Tarzan scowled at him. Hoss scowled back. “You Injun?” he finally asked.

  “Ungawa!” answered Tarzan.

  “Well gosh!” Hoss chuckled. “Sorry, fella! You had me a-goin’ there for a second!”

  “Ungawa!” laughed Tarzan.

  “Say,” Hoss asked. “You haven’t seen Pa anywheres, have ya?”

  Tarzan shook his head, then asked Hoss in grunts and gestures whether he’d seen Jane or Cheetah.

  “Well,” Hoss answered. “Now you mention it, I did see one fine-lookin’ woman, dressed a lot like you are, headin’ off into the shrubs with that rascal Little Joe. I reckoned she was Injun. She any kin to you?”

  “Ungawa!” screamed Tarzan, and off he ran with his head-pistols sproinging.

  Eddie Haskel of Leave It to Beaver was the play’s narrator. He strolled among the various characters like a sneering Beatrice through an Inferno, exchanging gibes or just rolling his eyes at some, giving bad advice or deliberate misdirections to others. For instance, noticing the entwined legs and cowboy boots of what was obviously a pair of writhing lovers sticking out of the bushes, he said, “Hey, Tarzan! Check it out!” And Tarzan ran over, yelled “Ungawa!” and dove right in on top. But while the curses and clothes and leaves came flying up out of the shrubs, Eddie turned with a smirk to the audience and said, “Heh-heh-heh! The Apeman just jumped Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.”