by Mark Salzman
Dad finished bolting the telescope tube to the stand and looked around his feet. “I think the eyepiece box is still in the car,” he said. “You want to go get it?”
It was a familiar strategy of his to find a casual diversion to give him time to think. I went along with the tactic because I was feeling pretty good about my answer, and thought I really had him this time. Let him have all the time he wants, I thought; it’ll just sink in deeper that our whole Western way of thinking is an illusion, an emperor’s-new-clothes thing about believing that you had to have a job and possessions and a degree. When I came back with the eyepieces I was walking the way a cat walks—naturally, without any sense of strain or purpose. I felt free.
He dusted off one of the eyepieces and put it in the telescope. “Listen, Mark. You’re not a cat, you’re a human being. You can’t survive just by catching mice and cleaning yourself with your tongue. You have to cooperate with other people to survive, and cooperating with other human beings is hard. It takes effort. Sometimes you have to worry about what you’re doing, or what other people are doing. Otherwise you could end up doing something without thinking and making a foolish mistake, and you might regret it for the rest of your life. If you stopped learning, Mark, your problems wouldn’t disappear; they’d get much, much worse.”
My sense of freedom started to vanish. “But we’re animals, Dad, just like cats! We’re like, just as natural as they are! There’s no reason we can’t live naturally, the way we were meant to live, instead of creating this artificial world of, like, accomplishments and status and laws and money and morality.”
My father installed one of the eyepieces and checked the focus. “What makes you think that our world of accomplishments and so on is artificial?” he asked.
“Because it exists only in our minds, not in reality!” I answered with all the conviction I could muster. Essentially I was repeating something I had read in a book by Alan Watts called So What?, a book that I found I agreed with perfectly but could never quite explain why to an adult.
“But, Mark, our minds are the product of our brains, and our brains evolved naturally. How can the world we’ve created with our minds not be natural? Does that mean that art isn’t natural? Those Zen masters make art, don’t they? I thought I read once that they claim to make their whole lives into art. Doesn’t that mean that they’re being artificial all day long?”
One thing you could always count on with my dad was that if you sensed you were losing an argument with him and decided to retreat by changing the subject before he could really finish you off, he always let you get away. This meant that he was never able to argue himself into getting a raise or into having his money refunded for faulty merchandise, but it got me out of a lot of tough situations when I was an adolescent. I said I’d get back to him on that and asked if he really thought our telescope had enough light-gathering power to make the faint Horsehead Nebula visible.
“Probably not,” he said wearily, displaying another characteristic of his that you could always count on.
Dad had bought the telescope in 1970, thanks to a serendipitous accident. While paying the bills one morning my mother realized she had made an error calculating the balance in their checkbook. Over time this error had compounded, leading to an inadvertent savings of eight hundred dollars, a huge amount back then for a social worker, his wife and three children. When the initial excitement died down, my father told my mother that if they didn’t apply the money immediately to the principal on their car loan, they could live to regret it terribly one day. My mother, who usually deferred to his judgment when it came to doomsday predictions, firmly disagreed. She insisted that since she had saved the money (inadvertently or not) she could decide how to use it. Half of it could go to the car loan, she decreed, and with the other half my father had to buy himself a telescope.
My father did his best to change her mind, conjuring up an assortment of grim scenarios for our family if we didn’t put all eight hundred dollars toward the loan (“Here we are still paying for it, Martha, when it’s already rusted out and has already nearly a hundred thousand miles on it—what are we going to do when the engine dies?”), but she outwitted him by leaking word of the telescope plan to Erich, Rachel and me. With us pestering him full-time he didn’t stand a chance, and by the end of the weekend he had to admit defeat and agree to treat himself to the one gift he’d wanted all his life.
After weeks and weeks of guilty but careful deliberation—reflector or refractor? high magnification or wide field of view? Newtonian or Cassegrain?—he settled on an F/8 Newtonian reflector with an eight-inch-diameter mirror and an equatorial mount. This means that it was a damn powerful amateur telescope; the tube was nearly six feet long, and with it on a clear day you could read a doctor’s eye chart from half a mile away. He ordered it from Criterion Telescopes, a small company in Hartford chosen partly for its good reputation but also for its proximity to us. He could pick up the telescope himself when it was done and thus be assured that every penny of his four hundred dollars went into optics and not into shipping and handling.
Six months passed. When at last the call came, all of us felt a terrific sense of excitement; for as long as I could remember my parents had had to exercise such frugality that I had never seen them treat themselves even to a decent Christmas present. Dad arranged to pick the telescope up on a Saturday morning, and I asked to go with him. That year I was ten years old.
The Criterion telescope company was almost impossible to find. As I recall, it lay in an alley of warehouse buildings with only a yellowed business card taped to a door to identify the entrance. We rang a buzzer and waited in a drizzling rain before someone wearing safety glasses let us in. We passed through a dark, musty room, then got into an elevator that was operated by ropes. On the second floor we stepped over empty telescope tubes and eyepiece housings, past long benches lined with drill presses and clamps, under a series of bare lightbulbs to a spot near a blurry factory-style window. The place looked scary, but I loved the way it smelled: wood shavings, glue, dope-based paints and the irresistible scent of electric tools glistening with oil. It was a little boy’s olfactory dream come true.
“Here it is,” the technician announced, pointing to two huge boxes, one squat and extremely heavy containing the mount and tracking equipment, and the other over six feet long, which contained the tube with the delicate optics inside. He and another man helped my father get the boxes into the elevator and out to the car. The telescope builders stood in the rain to wave good-bye to us as we drove away; I thought it was because they were sad to see the telescope taken away, but my father said, “Don’t kid yourself, those poor guys just don’t want to have to go back to work.” Once we escaped from downtown Hartford and were at least two highway exits away, we breathed easier, and I, unable to stand the anticipation any longer, climbed back over the front seat, scrambled to the rear of our Volkswagen bus and started clawing at the cardboard boxes to get them open.
When you’re ten years old, you don’t open big cardboard boxes without cutting your fingers on the heavy staples, and this was no exception. By the time I had the long box open I knew my mother would have a fit when she saw my hands (“You might never play the cello again!”), but I didn’t care—I could see the telescope. It was a flawless pearly-white tube with jet-black rims at either end and a blue metal finder scope bolted near the eyepiece hole. It was simply beautiful.
I made my way back to the front seat and babbled for nearly the whole ride home: it’s incredible, it’s bigger than I am, we’ll be the only people in Connecticut with one of these, we’ll probably be able to see the astronauts the next time they walk on the moon with it!
Instead of seeming excited, my father looked even grimmer than usual, and the more I raved about the telescope the worse he looked. I couldn’t understand it; he had finally gotten a present, the present of presents, a toy beyond even my wildest fantasies that he’d had to wait thirty years for, and he didn’t seem part
icularly happy about it. During the months we had waited for the telescope I had taken to imagining what it would be like to see my father giddy with pleasure, wringing his hands with the joy of acquisition and running around the house kicking at wads of packing materials and wrapping paper the way we kids acted on our birthdays and Christmas. But it wasn’t turning out that way. Frustrated, I asked if he wasn’t happy now that at last he had a fancy, expensive telescope. I noticed he winced when I said the word “expensive.”
He didn’t reply at first, and in the silence the windshield wipers and the engine came to sound deafening. “Well, Mark,” he finally said, shaking his head and adjusting his grip on the steering wheel, “I’m afraid I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.”
We looked for the Horsehead Nebula for over an hour but couldn’t find it. I was sure it was the light pollution; Dad was sure it was his telescope. To cheer ourselves up we looked at a few old favorites like the Orion Nebula, which looks like a translucent gray jellyfish, and the planet Jupiter surrounded by five of its moons. Astronomers don’t get tired of seeing the same objects over and over, partly because these images are so deeply strange and beautiful, but also because each time you see the visual images you are reminded of the immense distances, sizes and energies they represent. For this reason astronomers often say the same things over and over when they go out observing, but there is no embarrassment or sense of cliché about it at all. Whenever my father and I went stargazing, at some point in the evening one of us would say, “It makes you feel small, doesn’t it?” And the other would always agree, but this feeling meant something different to him than it did to me. He would back away from the telescope, look upward and say, “We spend most of our lives not even aware that all of that is out there! We all think we’re so important, so special, but then you look up and you realize, Who do we think we’re kidding?” Then he would laugh quietly to himself.
I, on the other hand, liked feeling small because it made my failures insignificant. The gap between who I actually was (a tiny eighth-grader who couldn’t impress girls) and who I wanted to be (a perfect kung fu master living in a mist-concealed valley) seemed much smaller under the night sky than it did in any of my school classrooms or in the Circle of Fighting at the Chinese Boxing Institute.
The Circle of Fighting was an area marked off with masking tape on the floor of our kung fu school. Whereas any part of the floor could be used for stretching, drills, forms (choreographed sequences of moves) or weapons exercises, the Circle of Fighting was special; it was where we either got beaten up by Sensei O’Keefe or tried to beat one another up. Since kung fu was an ancient and respected art form invented by nonviolent Buddhist monks, however, we learned that fighting practice was really all about learning respect for others, so we usually stopped short of injuring each other seriously and kept our temper under control most of the time. Actually the circle itself was a square, but the Circle of Fighting has a nicer ring to it than the Square of Fighting, so that’s what it was called.
I did not fare well in the Circle of Fighting. I had never participated in a contact sport in my life, much less ever been in a fight, so I had no experience to draw on at all. I was small, terrified of being hit, and far from my goal of being impervious to pain. Because I practiced so much at home my punches and kicks came to look pretty good, and after seeing me shadowbox, most people expected me to be a challenging sparring partner. But after hearing me throw up with anxiety before lessons, then watching me step into the Circle and have my anxieties justified in every conceivable way, these same people often wondered aloud what on earth I was doing in a kung fu school. I loathed sparring, not because I had any moral objection to fighting, but because I was so excruciatingly bad at it. Every time I heard Sensei give out the command, “Bow to me—bow to each other—fight!” I felt my will to master kung fu turn to jelly. I just couldn’t be aggressive, and to be any good at all at sparring you must learn to assert yourself. When an opportunity presents itself and your opponent shows an opening or weakness, you have to decide instantly to attack, and you must do so with total commitment. You can’t attack halfheartedly, just to see how it goes, and if things look good then follow through. You get hurt that way, for the same reason that a gymnast can’t do a backflip at half speed just to make sure it’s safe. I never fully grasped this principle, however, so I got hurt a lot and rarely scored any points. But after being punched or kicked, I always managed to recover my balance and strike a good-looking traditional posture.
“He gets the living shit kicked out of him every time, but he sure looks good, don’t he?” Sensei O’Keefe used to say when he was in a good mood, and everybody would laugh, including me. I much preferred ridicule to the other kind of critique he gave me, which he offered when he was in a bad mood or had been drinking or—which was the usual case—both, and it went something like this: “Listen, candy-ass, do you think if you’re jumped by three assholes who don’t give a shit whether you live or die that you’re gonna live if you fight like that? I don’t want to see any more of that pussy bullshit, I want you to do what I’ve been telling you every goddamned lesson, which is: Forget all your fancy book learning and your pretty technique and forget about protecting your pretty little face! All that doesn’t mean shit in the street! You live in real life, not some ivory tower! Real life is about life and death, goddammit! You’re just another momma’s boy smart-ass who thinks he’s too good to have to mess with real life, but it’s gonna stare you in the face someday, candy-ass, and what are you gonna do about it? When you can’t run home to your musical mommy and your needlepointing daddy”—my father had once worked on a needlepoint of an Edward Hopper painting while waiting for me in the parking lot of the Boxing Institute—“in your safe little house in the suburbs, huh? I’ll tell you what’ll happen, candy-ass! You’re gonna get ripped to pieces, and you’re gonna wonder just before getting your head blown off why somebody didn’t prepare you for it. So do yourself a favor and forget about being afraid to get hurt and fight, for Chrissake! There’s no room for pussies in this house.”
Occasionally, when Sensei O’Keefe decided we needed “a little kick in the ass” to move forward in the arts, he led us through special training exercises, which included a kind of sparring where all the students stood in a circle and each one was assigned a number. One person stood in the center. When Sensei O’Keefe yelled out numbers, each person hearing his number called was to attack the person in the center and keep up the assault until he heard his number called out again. This meant that the person in the center could have as many as five people at a time punching and kicking at him, and if you got too tired to defend yourself, you just got punched and kicked more; no one dared let up because Sensei said that since no one lets up on the streets we had to prepare ourselves accordingly. Sometimes, especially if he’d had too much to drink before the lesson, Sensei would forget which numbers he’d called and it would take forever to clear the Circle. At other times he felt the person in the center wasn’t trying hard enough. In that case, Sensei would let out a horrifying scream, jump past the assigned attackers and give the student in the center a beating to remember. When he did that to me one night he hit me so hard on the side of the head that I crashed into a wall and brought a whole shelf of trophies down with me. I sustained a bruise on my temple so deep that it took several days to rise to the surface and form a scab.
Another special exercise was called Cemetery Sparring. We split up into two teams—those with shirts and those without—and left the school separately to hide at opposite ends of a nearby cemetery under cover of night. Practicing our stealth skills, we were to slowly converge on the field of honor and do battle. If we received a decisive blow we had to lie “dead on the field” until the end of the exercise. There was quite a bit of disagreement over what constituted a decisive blow, however, so many of the individual battles went on until one of the parties could in fact do little else but lie on the field. The game ended when one team had been entirely
eliminated; then that team had to do one hundred push-ups and run a mile as punishment for losing. Meanwhile, Sensei O’Keefe was a free agent, and wandered around the cemetery on his own to observe or attack as the spirit moved him. The angriest I think I ever saw him was the night he discovered a student hiding in a tree, hoping to survive the game without having to fight at all. That student did not return for lessons, needless to say.
The most reflective I ever saw Sensei O’Keefe was also during one of these cemetery exercises. He had been smoking pot earlier in the evening, which usually made him more subdued than the drinking did. As usual, I was one of the first to die on the field, so I’d had plenty of time to enjoy the crisp fall air and a lovely view of the night sky accompanied by the shouts, smacks and thuds of glorious combat all around me. By the end of the game Bill, the huge man I liked so much, was the only man standing. Just as he prepared to announce that the game was over and we could all stand up, Sensei O’Keefe came flying out from behind a gravestone and, with a bloodcurdling scream, attacked Bill with such ferocity that I thought Sensei might kill him. Bill was not a candy-ass like me, though; he took it all and gave nearly as much back. But exhausted from all his previous battles he finally fell, bleeding from the nose and mouth and with angry red welts rising all over his ribs and back. He went down fighting, and without uttering a single groan or complaint, which explained why Sensei O’Keefe respected Bill more than any of his other students.