He that breatheth forth truth uttereth righteousness;
But a false witness deceit.
—Proverbs 12:17
I’d climbed Rain Mountain on Western Samoa and been photographed lying adjacent to Robert Louis Stevenson’s tomb, only my head jutting from the cement. I’d kissed Paul Gauguin’s grave in the Marquesas, drinking a $300 bottle of red Bordeaux alone that night, listening to the long breaking surf rolling onto the reefless island, all the way from the nearest continent five thousand miles distant. I’d had my testicles held in an assessing way by wild mountain warriors in New Guinea who still behaved according to the original meaning of “testament.” (As you spoke, they held your balls feeling the resonance or lack thereof to judge your honesty.)
And in the Cook Islands, a break in the outlying reef in the middle of a storm meant just clearing the razorlike coral on a small wooden boat, getting stuck there after our fifty-four-foot cutter had been sunk by an accidental blow from a passing sub. I remember sitting for weeks on that little atoll, pondering William Marsten’s grave. Marsten was an English mariner who settled on Palmerston Island, had four wives, and fathered twenty-three children, whose descendants now took care of me. Sweet inbreds, these, violating the predictions of geneticists and royal watchers.
Yeah. I’d seen some adventure without thieving or killing. I’m an anomaly of the last years of the millennium, I know, but real.
I’d left New York for Honolulu in 1968 and now missed my relatives, living and dead, who were more real to me than a serrated black-and-white photo but unreachable in their time and conditions. Each, ossified by life, thought of me, if ever, as a friendly black sheep who had jumped the family fence, never to return.
Always good for a chuckle was old Bob, who was always available, anytime day or night, for a mooch, a free beer or plate of food, but mainly to shoot the breeze. It was usually me talking rapid-fire New Yorkese and he responding in his slow East Bay, self-taught way.
“‘Well, a man who’d go to sea for fun’d go to hell for a pastime,’ said the quartermaster, drinking his gin,” said Bob (quoting Lowry) after I told him of my plan to ship out as lecturer to some ports, any ports, for a few weeks.
“Bob,” I said. “Bob, I can’t take it anymore. I have impulses I’m afraid of, to hurt myself and others, my mind’s abuzz with scores of vengeful thoughts, towards everyone I know and ever knew.”
Again, he threw a quote at me: “Who knows what delicate wonders have disappeared from the world for want of the will to survive.”
“Cut the crap, Bob! You’ve been reading too many cheap novels in that room of yours.”
A man’s pride shall bring him low;
But he that is of a lowly spirit shall attain to honour.
—Proverbs 29:23
“No, not a novel. From Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee,” Bob replied.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I thought you never watched TV in your life.”
“I heard it from Peter, the cook over at Tong Kiang,” Bob answered.
“A great mind, that Peter,” I replied, sarcasm straightening my twisted mouth.
I looked up to salute the human vision and courage it had taken to throw this span across the bay as I sped under the North Tower. The familiar dull orange girders were brushed by light fog, giving me a clear shot at the tower lights.
Images rolled through my mind, of past cruises to the southern hemisphere. I could see the blue Nordic eyes of the German captain as he paced the deck, his unshaven face in a grimace of doubt, looking mad. He surprised me in only an undershirt and unshaven that dawn as I awoke in a particularly hard roll, my far-forward cabin taking a pounding that sounded like sledgehammers against the steel plate that separated me and my sleeping family from the Tonga Trench, six thousand miles down.
The captain stared at me on the deck, with half-mad eyes, bellowing and pleading, “Lecturer, all the time, Tahiti to Fiji, Fiji to Tahiti, Tahiti to Fiji, Fiji to Tahiti,” his Saxon English a perfect cadence for the boredom of this cruise. A fixed back-and-forth cruise for a man longing to be free to sail the high seas, for the asylum bound, I’m sure. But poor Captain Aye (I swear it!) didn’t quite take that desperate route.
After that storm subsided, he must have accepted his tame lot because I saw him that night, at dinner, all cleaned up and immaculate, personifying the German sea captain.
Hitting the brakes, I almost swerved into the guardrail to avoid careening across the roadway! Another Bay airhead cutting me off from the right-hand lane and now pretending she didn’t do a thing by staring dead straight ahead. I’ll speed up now, there. Good, “F——you, you rotten jerk! You like to cut people off? Here, how’d you like to swim to San Francisco!”
Okay. Calming down in the slow-moving traffic now, my thoughts returned to the sea. Once, when our ship docked in Recife, I took a small group of the more adventurous passengers into the jungle to show them medicinal plants firsthand. “This one cures headaches, that one ulcers. Memory is enhanced with this,” and so on.
One particularly grating skeptic kept lecturing me. “Even if these plants do work, how do you know it’s not all psychological?” With a putz like him, no amount of scientific references would be convincing.
“Here, let me show you something.” I began to climb a huge hardwood tree while continuing to talk to the shrinking group below. “You see this vine,” I shouted. “If you take the sap and put it in an arrow and shoot a monkey high on a tree (gasps of liberal horror), the monkey will fall from the tree into the hands of the hungry hunter below.” I continued to climb to find a particularly beautiful flowering sample of the curare vine.
“So,” shouted the putz, “what’s the point?”
“This vine contains the drug curare. It’s a muscle relaxant. It makes any animal lose its grip. Monkey, man, New Yorker, Hoosier, priest, dancer, cardiac patient… get it?” I bellowed. “No matter who you are, the curare will have the same effect on your muscles. It’s not at all in your head. It’s biological, physiological. Wait, I’ll be down in a minute to show you.”
Pulling myself up a few more feet, I was through the dense canopy of the tree. In a blink, as in a fantasy, I was on solid ground!
A pack of dogs came running at me. I froze. There was a glacial-like pool of clear blue water, and from beyond it a female shouted, “Don’t worry, they’re harmless.”
The bridge cables whipped past, his eyes now in their ever-ascending arc. Halfway across, he wondered, just what impelled him on?
In those reveries just past, he realized that in those previous trips to the islands he had very much been running toward, toward goals. Now he would be, in fact was, running from. From all that California or at least the Bay Area had become. From all that the world according to the synods had become. ABC + CBS + NBC + CNN = HATEFUL! From all that the rotting sick deviates had made in their own image. A city built on Judeo-Christian values, on Italian and Irish Catholic virtues, on Jewish business acumen, Chinese labor and investments—all this beauty had been stalled by a whore. Where once there was genuine pride, the pride of genuine accomplishments, there now was hawked in its place all the false pride of the progressives and then some.
The false pride of being a pervert.
And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind;
—First Kings 19:11
The false pride of “civil rights” lawsuits.
The false pride of first birthing and then laying the blame for some epidemics on innocent bystanders.
The false pride of superior culture.
The false pride of calumny—in the arts—literature—academia (wherever the perverts reigned).
The false pride of sexual freedom marked by the clanking of chains.
Yes, it had become a time of falseness. A time to cry, a time to weep, a time to leap, a time to run.
“Time is the great sort
er of experience.” That’s what Lin Yutang, his fortune teller, had last sent him.
From nowhere came that anagram. Would time give him the perspective needed to sort these emotions? To separate his own condition in time from that of the city in which he lived? Had the forces of present-tense communication made him a direct emblem of his city, of his country, of his time? Without a moment anymore to dwell on the past, neither his own nor the historical realities of anything, it seemed—just the newspapers, thirty-six television channels, mindless news updates on the car radio—he had become a point in time. The recipient of bad forebodings. Of riots and crashes and fires and streams of racial beatings not seen nor heard since Hitler’s Germany. Oh, how this poor, running rabbi needed the sanctity of an honest brothel! He had to run or else risk falling into madness. The madness of a John Wilkes Booth, whose self-realized cowardice became blamed on just one man, the one who had taken credit for “freeing the slaves” whom Booth had marked for death.
Should he stay, he might focus on the loudest of them now strutting about city chambers. And only God knew where that might lead.
“He was hurt by God, so he will become a priest” was a saying he’d grew up on. His younger brother, born a cripple, was supposed to become a holy man but had died at age seven. So he, his older brother, had somehow felt obligated to fulfill his poor brother’s calling. But how?
With the impulses of a not-so-ordinary man and the personality of a born tyrant, our bridge traveler to nowhere had no intention of spending his life dressed in black.
But could he not climb a tree so high and see so far as to bring back to Earth for all to see God’s vision for a perfect South? Could he not somehow fulfill his brother’s lost lot in other than a formal priestly way? By rescuing healing plants, for example? Oh, how impossible this quest of the alternate priest became, to prove to God, if not to man, that you worshipped Him, but in your own way! To do so without edifice or pageant. To sing his praises in silence. To bow down to Him without moving. To follow his commandments without following them. (Had our running priest become a Buddhist?)
“The Messiah is here!” proclaimed the flyers. And now it seemed his religious Jewish friends of the Lubavitcher sect had all gone mad! Souls that had once, years before, sheltered him, saved him from madness, from suicide or homicide. But now they too, it seemed, needed saving! “Collective insanity,” he had thought when first he saw their announcements. To not only cry out for the Coming (in Jewish eyes) but to publish a date and then, when the day had passed, drop all reference to the Chosen One!
Gender, God, and reality. Heavy stuff to balance on a bridge.
A horn warned the fog. A ship slipped the gate. Images of Bob and his generation looking forward to the shore crossed his mind. “I’m on a bus going to Fort Cronkite. It comes to the end of the line. The driver says, ‘Everybody off the bus.’ I sit still. ‘Okay, off the bus.’”
“I ain’t getting off,” I tell him. “It’s too windy on the beach.” (Too windy even for an old salt.) For June in San Francisco, we’re having August weather, but worse. The product of Saddam’s oil fires last year? Vectors of wind out of control. The Moslem winds again? For in just a hundred years, remember, our cunning Arab cousins took an unknown local cult of the Book and swept two-thirds of the world.
He gets out of his driver’s seat. He comes to the back of the bus where I’m sitting next to two old ladies. “Look,” he says, “you’ve got to get off the bus.”
“I ain’t going.”
He’s got a half-shaved head, an earring, three rings on each finger, and he’s a bus driver!
One word leads to another. “Listen, I’m gonna smoke and you’ve got to get off the bus!”
“Well,” I told him, “it’s illegal. Get off the bus and smoke with the rest of the numbskulls. I’m not getting off in this wind.”
Wind. Hasim. Screws everybody’s mind. Ions? Blows pollen, mites, viroids into people’s minds? Sweeps protective cullens from the skin? Upraises particles unseen stripping people?
Wind. Wind is death. According to the Japanese.
Wind. The Russians think it brings illness. As do the Chinese. Not a race on Earth welcomes it, yet wind is the great pollinator without which all screws itself.
Wind. The world itself upsets.
So Bob stays on the bus with the two old ladies, one asking the other, “What did he say?” not comprehending the bus driver or seeing his earrings or shaved head or attitude. The hostile driver smokes a cigarette.
But the fog was wafting strong now, in the middle of the bridge.
Bob sat firm in his triumph over one little vandal. It was his most recent battle against evil, one that had begun on the mean streets of East Oakland and led through Guadalcanal. I fought my own battles against evil, becoming myself, one who, as I often jested, had had to learn to “lie, cheat, and steal” (or was it “beg, borrow, and steal”?) to survive. Despite all my advanced degrees, my many published and unpublished books, and my obvious verbal talents, society hid its rewards from me. The vandals had broken through the gates of academia, journalism, publishing, medicine, law, and government. And in their thirty-year reign, they had created an “old vandals” network not seen in America since the bureaucratic tyrannies of the early part of this century, more like the current social order in Sicily, where neither talent nor education counted, or the recent experience in eastern Europe.
Could the warnings and exhortations of Job compare with Disney? Could Jeremiah compete with the evening news?
Look what the Times had become. One power-mad psychopath after another paraded throughout, with all the details of his/her personal wealth displayed so as to render the moderately successful reader impotent and hopeless by the time the sports page was reached. Could this epic of the Sulzbergers be compared with Ecclesiastes?
No, of course not.
Which is why the original book of the Jews was now read only by illiterate fools, who by circumstance or genetic dysfunction believed the words had been dictated from Heaven and inscribed in stone. Probably a collection of constipated poets, failed jewel hustlers, bankrupt sandal makers, whoremongers past their prime, child molesters, animal torturers, and other biblical-age riffraff, thought the bridge driver as he now approached the South Tower, nearing the toll booths into the city.
He glanced at the tiny fortune-cookie fortune Scotch-taped to the dashboard of his old two-door Bronco: “You are an angel—beware of those who collect feathers.”
By now it’s a private comedy. I’m no angel, but I’ve lost most of my feathers, mostly trying to fly, he mused. Every time I’ve been given a chance I could soar like an eagle—it’s been the trying to fly where the real losers live. Those failed writers who became agents now all menopausal and ready to give to the UJA after years supporting the PLO. Those tight-lipped WASP academics whose guilt made them hire the Jews after the Holocaust, the academic Jews who chose to exile any hint of rebellion in their Jewish male descendants, welcoming instead the women and other minorities they thought they could bamboozle. And bamboozle they did, running every racket known to the mafia within the halls of academe, encouraging all the while the debate over “affirmative action” so they could continue their plunder—plundering unnecessary research funds, conducting excessive animal experimentation, molesting their young students, holding grandiose conferences modeled on the tools of those governmental bureaucrats they did business with, the “Look what the universities have become,” he thought; plunderer of graduate students’ discoveries and labor, plunderer of all lost ideals everywhere and in all time since Abraham tried to slay Isaac but was saved by a counterhallucination. A generation of incompetents not seen in the history of the republic, incompetents who had created their own fields of study to justify their lack of productive scholarship in the real fields of learning. Those fertile fields which blossomed with a flora so vibrant and diverse, now reduced in size and offering to “women’s studies,” “black studies,” “Chicano studies,�
� “lesbian studies,” “gay studies,” “trans studies,” all nonsciences created by jingoists with tenure desperate for attention and respect.
Leo Tolstoy wrote somewhere that those who believe their religion is greater than God will believe that their sect is greater than their religion and end up by believing that they are greater than their sect.
On and on it went as he drove over the Golden Gate Bridge.
For if a man live many years,
Let him rejoice in them all,
And remember the days of darkness,
For they shall be many.
All that cometh is vanity.
—Ecclesiastes 11:8
The Room with a View to Eternity
Yearning for the occasional conversation and the soft sweet winter light as it bathes the pastel-colored wooden buildings, the wonderful food of China and Italy as it has been adapted to America’s West Coast over a period of about a hundred years—that is a century of mixing local vegetables and soils into the ancient recipes of the Hakka people, the Genovese, and at least one Sicilian—I rented a room in North Beach.
Walking up the stairs to my room on the top floor of the old five-story hotel on Sansome Street at Broadway, I ran into my old friend. “Hey, if it isn’t my old friend Bob,” I said, greeting him at the top of the first set of stairs of the redbrick walk-up. The linoleum was as clean as your grandmother’s, and it always reminded me of my grandmother’s big house with the potted palm by the door. A grandmother dead now for more than forty years, whose house emitted a clean, sweet aroma that I swear I recognize each time I enter this random hotel occupied mainly by men on the run or hiding from their past.
Bob and I hadn’t spoken on the phone for about three months, since I had moved into my house. He had used to call a couple times a week, but being a notoriously cheap bastard, he had stopped calling because the rate was no longer local.
God, Faith, and Reason Page 14