Please Enjoy Your Happiness

by Paul Brinkley-Rogers

  A certain girl has to tell you now, thank you so much for the embrace of a lifetime. That embrace made me beautiful. Maybe my mother says this too because I wear her kimono. Shakespeare would say she was a thing of beauty – not like me, so ugly. Take care of yourself. I wish from you now. I wish. I wish . . . that is my secret. No, no, no. I wish you were here with me on my mountain, forever. I wish I would hear the big noise of your ship coming around the corner into the harbor. I wish I was running down the mountain to meet you. I wish. I wish. I wish.

  How nice for me to wish when I am awake, instead of wishing in my dreams. If you were a teardrop in my eyes, for fear of losing you, I would never cry. Please don’t look too deeply into my eyes next time we meet. Please. Please. Please! I am afraid of emotion that I have not had before. But I am thankful that I can feel the fear, finally, of a young girl falling in love because I was a young girl so long ago.

  Lot of think of you, sailor boy

  Yukiko

  P.S. I’ll go the book store now. Then I will run down the mountain, singing. Can you hear me singing and dancing in the rain?

  P.P.S. I went to the library. I looked for these lyrics: “Si, Mi Chiamano Mimi” [Yes, They Call Me Mimi], from La Boheme. I adore Puccini. That is strange for Japanese because when we are with someone we love, we so politely conceal our feelings. But here I am, confessing to you, and I have not even told you I love you. This aria by Mimi is like a long poem. It is shy and modest. But her emotions shimmer like sunlight on the surface of a lake, don’t you think? These emotions are not under the surface. They are free to dance ON the water, so they can be appreciated. Rodolfo is in love. He wants to know more about her. So she sings.

  Yes, they call me Mimi,

  but my true name is Lucia.

  My story is short.

  A canvas or a silk,

  I do embroidery at home and abroad . . .

  I am happy, happy and at peace

  and my pastime

  is to make lilies and roses.

  I love all things

  that have gentle sweet smells,

  that speak of love, of spring,

  of dreams and fanciful things,

  those things that have poetic names.

  Do you understand me?

  5

  Time of the Typewriter

  To gaze at a river made of time and water and remember Time is another river.

  To know we stray like a river and our faces vanish like water.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES, FROM ‘THE ART OF POETRY’, A PERSONAL ANTHOLOGY

  Hummingbirds are sipping sweet red nectar out of a feeder hanging in front of the window through which I can see my garden. It is the mature garden of a man who is seventy-five. The garden is his creation. I am he. Roses, figs, bamboo, ginger, banana, papaya, white grapes, red grapes, mango, guava, pomelo, red hibiscus, pink hibiscus, white hibiscus, lemons, lemongrass, limes, tangerines, calamansi, pink grapefruit, white grapefruit, jujube, oranges. The cuts on my hand and the calluses are from digging, cutting, and pruning. It is dignified work. If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need, Cicero said, and I think he meant men too old and too lacking in idealism to go to war again. It is also the garden, full of fecundity and delicate perfumes and dazzling colours, of a man without a woman.

  Every year these hummingbirds come and then they go. They are easy to forget, but I never forget them. Every year they are the same: ruby-red throat, shimmering green back, tan underside. They have no fear of me. In fact, they zoom right up and stare me in the face, hovering there like little incandescent gifts from God. Sometimes I even think they are carrying messages from you. They are here in the summer. In the winter, they fly to Central America without so much as a goodbye. They know when to leave. They don’t have to think about it. They just go. But in the spring they always remember to come back.

  I look back on 1959 now, and I try to imagine myself. I am accustomed to old age. I feel comfortable with the impact of time on my mind and my body. I have no idea where I am going – except occasionally I do go to Costa Rica in Central America.

  In San José, Costa Rica’s small capital, I have a circle of male friends all roughly my age: a former Marine with a combat grip who taught economics; a retired physician who suffers from a rare optical disease but still rides mountain bikes on wilderness trails; an itinerant musician who plays keyboards and composes unadulterated lounge music; a tough guy from South Central Los Angeles who mentors even tougher teens; a painter who is perpetually on the run from US tax authorities and exults in every day he is a free man; and a barely literate used-car dealer who had a stroke that slowed him but is still searching for a ‘perfect love’. The fact is, they are all in search of the perfect love, except me. I am still the outsider, just as I was in 1959 when I glimpsed perfection.

  At this point in my life, I am searching for Shangri-La. It does not exist, I know. I am looking, but for the time being my house is a kind of paradise full of boxes packed tight with memories: newspaper clippings; airline tickets from years of travel; a Vietcong booby trap I stepped on but that did not explode; and receipts from old hotels in Phnom Penh, Manila, Buenos Aires, Havana, Hanoi, Mexico City, where deep shadows helped me doze in the afternoons. Books line the walls from floor to ceiling, and an array of antique paintings from Bali, showing maidens in sarongs, is clustered by the front door. There are a lot of photographs in my house too, including some never published that remain hidden because they show shattered bodies in painful detail; these photographs were taken in Cambodia in the final week of the war.

  Soon death will be my visitor. I wait for the knock on the door, made of cedar from Peru, that guards the entrance to my small paradise. I live day by day, aware through the mixed blessing of the internet that friends and relatives of friends are dying or becoming seriously ill every week. Sometimes I wish there would be a clock I could set for the end of my life. If I set it now and it gave me a reading of 2,124 days, 13 hours, 25 minutes, and 14 seconds to go before the end, I would not procrastinate any more. If I was aware that every tick tock of this clock was winding my time down to zero, I might not relish those deep sixty-minute naps I am taking every afternoon, from which I awake completely disoriented. I would be painting my house. Repairing cracked caulk in the bathrooms. Attending social gatherings and musical soirees. I would be driving my Alfa Romeo Spider as fast as I could every day of the week. Would the Yukiko you were in 1959 recognize me now?

  To help me recognize that 1959 version of myself, as I write I have assembled a dozen photos of me when we knew each other. They show a slim young man with a piercing look and neatly arranged dark features, who could be Latino, Arab, Roma, Italian, Persian, or maybe a mix of some of those, with a little Japanese thrown in. Well, of course, there is some Japanese in me, put there for all time by Kaji Yukiko. One of these photos shows me in a white T-shirt and dark blue dungarees, painting a metal ceiling in an office space on the Shangri-La, with a shipmate named R. E. ‘Red’ Downs, a genial African-American guy who was from Mississippi. I have a kind of sneer on my face. There is some stubble around my chin and above my mouth. I am standing on a chair, so I look down on the photographer. Do you remember that you told me this was my ‘imperial’ look?

  ‘You would make a very nice young emperor, Paul,’ you said at the Mozart coffee shop, when I was standing by the table that was your favourite. ‘Such a look you have,’ you said. ‘I did not teach you that. Where did you learn to make a woman feel afraid?’

  I did not understand what you were trying to say. I also remember what I said: ‘There is a lot I do not know. I am trying hard to catch up. Maybe I am looking like this at you because I can’t believe . . .’ I did not finish the sentence. I was not yet a man. I was speaking like a child, and you knew it, and you knew if I had completed the sentence I might have said too much and robbed you of the chance to put your own ending there.

  Other photos show me with an impish grin, packed with energy and i
gnorance and insatiable curiosity. They show me standing alone and confused, or maybe even overwhelmed, in front of the Zen temple in Kamakura, with my hands on my hips, not looking at the camera or at you but at something else. I still stand like that, with a slight lean to the left, all six feet of me. Despite age, you might be relieved to know that I have actually not shrunk one bit. Time changes us and then it doesn’t. Isn’t that strange?

  The really strange thing is I still do not understand where my knowledge about the world came from in 1958 and 1959. It did not come from the one year of American schooling I had at Freeport Senior High in Illinois, Home of the Pretzels – what an uninspiring name!

  Even stranger is the fact that as I was writing this paragraph I noticed Ben, the mailman, arriving by bicycle at my mailbox, into which he inserted a letter postmarked Freeport, from Herb Jacobs, a fellow graduate of the class of 1958, inviting me to the fifty-fifth class reunion: ‘Informal get-together at Ron Prasse’s Barn on Lily Creek Road’, followed by golf at the Park Hills Golf Club and a social hour and ‘2-Meat Hot Buffet’ at the Freeport Eagle’s Club. I phoned my sister Mary in Ohio. ‘What is an Eagle’s Club?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, laughing. ‘There are a lot of strange things about Freeport. Someone told me it is now run by the Mafia.’

  Did I know that in 1958? Certainly not. What I did know about Freeport was that during the year I went to that high school I did the following. It caused an unpleasant buzz. First of all, I accepted an invitation to have coffee with five other students at the home of a quietly intellectual black female classmate who wanted to discuss racial discrimination. I was so incensed by the evidence all around me of racial prejudice that I jumped to my feet and angrily denounced the United States – my adopted country. I was not trying to be a hero. I was upset that the other white kids in the room showed no evidence of outrage and said nothing. Our hostess appeared to be stunned by my outburst. She looked at me oddly as if she thought that explosion of rage was not called for. But I could not help myself.

  One evening a couple of weeks later, I was at a soda fountain reading and thoroughly enjoying a forbidden book, Henry Miller’s Plexus: The Rosy Crucifixion #2, published by the Olympia Press, Paris, and sold to me wrapped tightly sealed in brown paper, like a half-kilo brick of heroin, from under the counter at a dismally lit cigar shop. Four non-black classmates with bad-boy greased hair sauntered in, took one look at me, and shouted ‘Nigger lover!’ several times before sitting down and looking proud of themselves. No one in the soda fountain looked astonished or alarmed, except me.

  But evidently word had circulated about the English boy who abhorred racial prejudice because the week after that several black male classmates stopped me on Douglas Street and invited me to join a high-speed night run in a souped-up Mercury coupe on State Route 20 to the bigger town of Rockford. At a small club down on the river they introduced me as ‘the English boy, and he’s all right!’ That was some night. I did not know how to drink. I did not know how to dance, or even how to move to music. I didn’t do any sweet-talking. But I did have fun – the first completely uninhibited fun I had had in America. We were all squeezed into an overstuffed red velvet booth shaped like a smile, together with some long-legged girls who asked me – close up – if I knew how to kiss. I remember they were playing ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’ by Bobby Freeman, and ‘Whole Lotta Loving’ by Fats Domino. I was not yet eighteen. I was drinking beer. I felt good.

  I got a whole lotta loving for you,

  True, true love for you,

  I got a whole lotta loving for you

  I got a whole lotta for you . . .

  What were the roots of my hot-blooded response to prejudice? You often asked me about that when you could not understand some of the poems I started typing out, poems that were, in effect, howls of rage about America circa 1959. Something primal was stirring in me. There was also something in the air just then, especially at that point in time when we met. This was the year when Fidel Castro, my big hero then, came down out of the mountains to liberate Havana and force Fulgencio Batista to flee to the United States, which greeted the repulsive dictator with flowers. I have the poems I mailed to you on my desk here. They are heavy with political content.

  It was the time of the typewriter, and carbon copies, and the thrill of underlining key passages of verse in red with the flick of a lever if you used a red and black ribbon. Many nights out in the western Pacific I was up late listening to vinyl LPs of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. I told you that I pounded on an office typewriter with a soft lead editing pencil clenched in my teeth, writing poetry with a passion so strong I could not sleep later. I mailed all of these poems to you. I wonder if you have them somewhere. It was the end of the decade and its deadhead politics: Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president. There was still the smell of Joe McCarthyism in the air. John F. Kennedy had let it be known he intended to run for president. Segregation had been struck down by the Supreme Court in 1956, but it was an undeniable fact of life, even in smug little Freeport. The struggle over the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was going on, with segregationist youth spitting, with no shame, at students who were black. All across the South brave people were struggling to make equality a reality in schools, at diners, on buses, at the voting booth. ‘I AM A MAN’ some of their protest signs read. Yes, indeed.

  I remember our conversations about those topics. You were appalled. The Japanese had treated their Chinese neighbours in Manchuria with similar contempt, you said, sadly. I remember how amused I was when some of my shipmates called me a Communist. They even suggested that Security investigate me for the pro-Castro viewpoint that I never tired of expressing, even at the White Rose when Johnny Cash records were spinning. Do you remember how a drunk Marine with a broken beer bottle, who was looking for a fight with anyone, slashed the palm of my right hand and how I marched out into the street with that hand held high to slow the bleeding? Blood was running down my arm and dripping onto my white uniform. What did you exclaim then, when you were waving that big brown bottle of Kirin beer over your head? Was it this: ‘Don’t touch that nice boy or you will be a dead man’? If so, it is a fond remembrance.

  Last night I was reading some of the poetry I wrote aboard ship. I know that you read this too. It was probably an early reaction to the bar scene in Yokosuka, where you worked pouring drinks, slow dancing, and making conversation in baby talk, which was what sailors expected from you. They were not in the White Rose to discuss Dylan Thomas, after all.

  Down the gargoyle alley he set his reeling gaze.

  Through the snarling neon signs and shadowed doorways

  To the ostentatious, incandescent bars

  Frothing like lace frilled leeches

  In this Thieves Alley of monstrous reality.

  Through the jungle conglomeration of babbling

  Assorted humanity to a certain electric white rose

  High flowering on a dimmed corner where

  Impeccably Occidentalized penny-pimps in

  Ivy League mackintoshes cajoled with smiling,

  Laughing eyes the drifting five dollar lonely.

  There was a mistral wind in his hammered ears

  And foreign rain beating his exhausted face as his

  One-by-one footsteps methodically created

  Disintegrating gasoline dreg portraits in the

  Merry gutter pools. Up the rice alley and voooooom!

  Past the chilled octopus clinging hands and

  Women-women clogged doors by.

  Bar Texas (an entity unto itself).

  Bar shit kickin’ Western.

  Bar Playboy (jumpin’ jack rabbit, man!)

  And the extravagant rajah of extravagance, Bar X!

  Yokosuka slice. Japan of Hiroshige cherry blossoms

  And exploding Kabuki Noh plays and the dastardly

  Day of Infamy which brought me to you, Japan,

&nb
sp; Where happy children, like me, can play.

  Were there roots of my discontent in youthful experiences as a teenager earlier, back in England, where, when I was dragged off my bicycle while pedalling through a quiet residential area by a group of thugs, they yelled ‘Paki’ (Pakistani) and other curses I do not recall? One of them hit me in the jaw with a full-bore thrust of his fist, a punch with such impact that it caused my teeth to dig into my lower lip, cutting it severely. The scar is still visible. This happened when I was sixteen.

  Was my discontent connected to the long chats I had with my uncle, John Brinkley, a loyal member of the British Communist Party, who served with the propaganda division of a British Army unit during World War II and whose book-shelves included a cache of red-bound volumes on Marxist topics? Uncle John, who later taught graphic design at the Royal College of Art in London and who wrote Design for Print: A Handbook of Design and Reproduction Processes, was at first refused a visa by the USA to lecture at American colleges because of his Communist affiliations. Later, after some academic protests, he was permitted to lecture at Yale University. He was an extraordinarily good-looking man; dark, lean, like a panther emerging from a jungle of deep shadows.

  Was my discontent, and occasional eccentricity, passed down to me from both sides of my family? Did it come partly from my father, Gilbert, who delighted in driving Rolls-Royces loaned to him by car dealers because he was quite convincing in passing himself off as wealthy? Maybe it came from his glee in embarrassing my sisters with rambunctious behaviour in department stores? Did it come also from my mother, Phyllis, whose side of the family had alleged Romany underpinnings and included an aunt, nurse Nancy, who with her friend, the Irish nurse Katy Plante, drove a doughty little Morris Oxford sedan from Paris to Moscow two years after the end of the war to take a look at what all the fuss had been about?