All Our Waves Are Water

by Jaimal Yogis

  Then, on the fifth night, it worked. I was in old Hong Kong. Bandits were chasing me through alleys and ancient streets. I was terrified, running frantically through restaurants and strangers’ homes. But just as I was tearing through someone’s laundry drying between brick apartments, I saw an old African American woman knitting in the middle of the street. She was humming a beautiful tune, and there was something a little off about this picture, something that made me realize, Oh, yeah, I’m dreaming. I turned around, faced the bandits, then proceeded to break down walls and windows with some kung fu worthy of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (something I cannot pretend to do in waking life). Most of the bandits fled. The ones who didn’t I beat up while the old woman cheered me on.

  I woke up excited to have had some success. But in some ways, the success backfired. The next day, I wasn’t present. I felt hungry for more lucid dreams. That night I dreamt I was looking for lucid dreams at a grocery store like boxes of cereal. I told Steven about this and he laughed. “We have to remember that there’s nothing inherently special about lucid dreaming,” he said. “Just like there’s nothing inherently special about meditation. These are just tools. Don’t make the tool what you’re chasing.”

  So I tried to let go of my panicky search. It was enough to be up here on the island, I told myself. That night, I ended up at a picnic; old oak trees and patterned cloths were spread over an open meadow. People were nibbling on cheese and chocolate and fresh-baked breads. Children were playing. It was lovely. But something didn’t feel quite right. The body I inhabited was unfamiliar, like a shell. After clumsily stumbling around the meadow, I realized I was actually inside some cardboard boxes strung together with string. More disconcertingly, these boxes were my body.

  Shaken, I felt my face and became terrified. Where were my lips, my eyes, my ears? Where was I?

  I felt out of sorts until, all of a sudden, I realized what the problem was: I’d always been in this boxy shell. I’d just never become aware enough to notice how limiting the boxes were. I’d never noticed that I was looking through a slit cut in a box.

  With that thought, consciousness, like water pouring from bottle to stream, rushed out through the eye slit, becoming the entirety of the picnic and the trees and the sky. Oneness doesn’t capture the experience because it conjures a disappearing act, which this was emphatically not. On the contrary, I had a body but it was loose and fluid and could see in all directions. I was finally, I thought, appearing in full form: the grass, the trees, the food, the people sipping wine and eating cheese. They were all themselves. But they were also all me. It seemed the most obvious and most exquisite thing, a freedom unlike any other I’d ever known because it wasn’t limited by the boundaries of the idea of myself I always carried like an unconscious ID card.

  In the morning, I couldn’t remember any dreams and felt slightly disappointed. But later that day, after morning meditation, I went jogging on a trail above the sound and saw a grassy meadow that was reminiscent of the picnic. Suddenly, the dream came back. Just like when consciousness rushed through the eye slits of the box, again it seemed as if my body enlarged. This time the feeling was less supernatural. But it was every bit as ecstatic. I looked around me, and the bent cypress trees, the black water, the brambly blackberry bushes were all extensions of my senses.

  There was nobody around, which was good because I might have run up and started hugging them and crying. But out of some nearby bushes, a puppy that looked only a few weeks old stumbled onto the road. Black and puffy like a mini grizzly bear, he nuzzled into me and yipped, trying to lick my face. I stopped to play with the pup, and as he tumbled under my hands, his innocent joy seemed to be everywhere—in the dirt and the leaves and the crisp air. I sat there with him and wept. Then I jogged back and leapt into the icy sound.

  20

  The Canadian puppy was a nice moment. But spiritual fulfillment is as fleeting as any sort. Home from dream life, normal life went on: happy, then sad, then dull again, then sharp.

  Lucid dreams came often for a while, and that was pleasant. But soon I got tired again and those vanished too.

  That said, there was a moment postretreat that I often think back on and try to use as something of a compass for my work now. So here it is, the second act of the end.

  My editor had assigned a story to me about why all the black people were leaving San Francisco. This was a good story, and one I was interested in. But having found such relaxation up on the island, I felt myself resisting the grit and exhaustion of reporting. I started to complain. But as I drove through traffic one Monday to do interviews, I caught myself moaning and thought, Come on. There must be a way to change this tired approach. Where was that universal puppy love in Monday morning traffic?

  So I pulled over my van and thought about what I could do. I thought how usually I operated as if my job was to go out and affect the world, get the job done. It was me, me, me struggling through the workday and through the corrupt world. I was either the superhero or the victim, depending on my mood.

  So, I thought, what if I just reversed both patterns—full 180? What if, instead of this noble journalist going out to get the story or the writer wilting under a corrupt system of top-down corporate media, what if I saw my editors and the big media conglomerate that owned our magazine and the fashion section doing puff pieces and the people I’d soon interview and my parents who’d taught me to love books and the paper mill that made our glossy pages and the printer and the trees and the semiconductor factory that allowed my computer to be and the marketing folks who sold the whiskey ads that ultimately paid my rent—what if I saw them all as writing this article? What if I let go of everything I thought I knew and let the everything report and write? What if I listened so well, and shut up long enough, the story told itself to me?

  This could obviously get weird. I’m here to interview you, but I’m going to let everything ask the questions, is that OK? I didn’t do that. It’s important not to act nuts as a spiritual practitioner. That doesn’t help anyone. But from that day forward and for the next few weeks, I tried, as much as possible, to allow the everythingness of puppy love lead. I tried to surrender. Though I won’t pretend I found reporting bliss, a few interesting things happened. For one, I nearly got shot.

  I was reporting the story in Bayview Hunters Point, a part of San Francisco that, back then, was not even included on tourist maps. It was a corner of the city full of gang-ridden projects, two Superfund sites, lots of liquor stores and pawn shops, a high murder rate, and not a single grocery store. It was also the only remaining mostly black neighborhood.

  The standard way to report the piece would have been to go and talk to all the demographic experts about why, from 1990 to 2000, while San Francisco’s overall population increased more than 7 percent, the number of people who listed their race as African American fell from 76,343 to 58,791, a decline of 23 percent, more than any major city in the country has experienced. I’d pick an expert slant and go fill in the statistics with anecdotes from local citizens.

  But as I started that process, I realized that this was the story I would have written. It was a formula and had little power because formulas just go through the motions and don’t really care about people and beauty. I needed to see everyone in this story as alive as that puppy on Pender: an extension of the Everything.

  So I drove into Hunters Point and told myself it was time for shoe-leather reporting. But I wasn’t going to get all noble and muckraking about it. Instead, I’d just have a relaxing day in the neighborhood.

  This felt strange and lazy the first day. I also felt shy. Mostly I just wrote down little details about the dilapidated projects or the blighted schools. But I came back the next day and the next, just walking around Hunters Point, and became a bit more bold each day. I started striking up spontaneous conversations at BBQ joints and liquor stores, with school teachers, gangsters, politicians, business owners, and homeless folks. Again, I won’t pretend I was a Jedi being gu
ided with each step. This was still work. But I began noticing a subtle shift. I was starting to see these interviews as meeting distant family members. The drunk on the corner who’d worked the naval shipyard and now had cancer, the fourteen-year-old hiding a sawed-off shotgun in his black 49ers puff coat, the high school basketball star who became a preacher, the cop who’d grown up in the hood before going to war in Iraq, the teacher, the rapper, the developer, the politician. They were each someone’s son or daughter. Each of their stories had its own wisdom of experience—a tale worthy of Shakespeare or Byron or Joyce if you stayed long enough. I soon met Kev.

  According to a survey by the San Francisco Educational Services, young people in Bayview Hunters Point tended to “maintain unrealistic expectations of stardom in sports or entertainment as the only alternative to low-end jobs.” But Kev Kelley told me he was one of the lucky ones. He was going to do the impossible.

  And why not? Kev had good looks and talent. Shock-G from Digital Underground was producing some of Kev’s songs, and Kevin Epps, a documentary filmmaker from Bayview, was making Kev one of three stars in a documentary called Rap Dreams. Kev said he was friends with all the biggies. “Mistah F.A.B., Dead Prez, Shock-G. I fuck with all them,” Kev told me when we met in Oakland after his grandfather, who ran a local trucking company, told me I had to meet his rap star grandson.

  Kev grew up in Hunters Point, but I was meeting him at his Oakland apartment because he had recently been priced out of San Francisco when he couldn’t find placement in the projects. He still represented San Francisco in all his music though. He also said he was the only one who could show me the real Hunters Point.

  “This is the shit they don’t talk about in the papers.” He smiled. “Ride in with me.”

  As we drove back into the city, Kev—in a brown San Francisco Giants hat that hovered over his cornrows and the tops of his ears—went back and forth between telling gangster tales and spontaneously breaking into his raps. “Step into my soul / See what I’ve seen / I felt pain / I was born to get the money and the fame,” he shouted out the window.

  I liked Kev. He was proud, boastful. But his pride seemed rooted in wanting to give back to the community. “I’m gonna save this neighborhood with music,” Kev said. “Because, see, even in Africa, black culture was always about shining. I think, being in a culture that has been so deprived, our ancestors, the youth, the coming generations, they thrive off being able to say, ‘Look, this is me. Like, I came straight from Newcomb, and this is me.’”

  While driving down Newcomb, an infamously violent street, Kev moaned about the gun violence that had taken so many of his friends. But when we arrived at our first destination, Rudy’s Bar-b-que Pit on Third Street, as soon as we hit the sidewalk, Kev looked like a lost child who’d found home again. He began whirling around, shaking hands, giving hugs, introducing me to everyone in sight. “Tell this reporter how I’m doing this rap thing,” he said to some young guys standing on the corner. They nodded and smiled. “Yeah, you doin’ that.”

  While we chatted with this crew, a black Suburban with shiny silver rims soon pulled up on the corner in front of the BBQ shop. The driver was a middle-aged man named Muhammad, the son of the owner of a nearby gym. Kev wanted me to interview him. I still had no idea what my story was about. So I leaned into the Suburban asking Muhammad questions. Kev meanwhile went to grab some BBQ and, deep in questions, I didn’t see the two silver Crown Victorias pull up behind. I did, however, hear a voice through a megaphone: “Green sweatshirt, get your hands out of your pockets!”

  The megaphone startled me, but I’d been hearing sirens and cops throughout the week. I ignored them until the sounds got closer: “Get your hands out of your pockets! In the green, get your hands out of your pockets now!”

  At that moment, Muhammad’s eyes widened. His hands drifted to the top of his head.

  “Green sweatshirt! Remove yourself from the vehicle,” came the voice, which was now directly behind me, “or we will remove you from the vehicle!”

  I looked at my sweatshirt. It was indeed green. But somehow—white privilege? urban naïveté?—the words didn’t register as personal until Muhammad nodded at me like, “Dude, turn the hell around!”

  I turned. A short muscular African American man was standing just a couple feet from me. The veins in his arms bulged, and as I followed those bulging arms, I saw that a large silver pistol was trained on my face.

  “Hands out of your pockets now!” he shouted.

  I don’t remember thinking at all as I looked down the barrel of that pistol. I simply found my hands rising from my pockets. I continued, however, gripping my voice recorder, a bright, shiny metal object that is about the size of one of those little guns you see in old British spy movies.

  “Drop the weapon now!” the man said.

  Weapon? The word ping-ponged about my brain without meaning.

  Fortunately, Kev had just popped out of the BBQ joint with his ribs and had seen this too many times. “The fucking recorder, Jaimal! Drop that shit! Drop that motherfucking recorder!”

  Kev’s voice broke my brain freeze. I dropped the recorder and realized seven plainclothes cops had surrounded us. Before I knew it, I was being pressed against the cop car and searched.

  I tried to act calm while the cops patted us down. Everyone else was acting calm. Everyone but Kev. “He’s a reporter,” Kev kept shouting with the same exuberance he rapped with. The cop who had pulled the gun, Officer Scott, didn’t look as though he was buying it. This pissed Kev off. “This is why I brought him here,” Kev said, “just so he can experience firsthand what we go through every day. Cause it shows what it means to be in the neighborhood, that’s all. With this face!”

  Scott, who was black too, shot Kev a “don’t pull that with me” look. “I don’t discriminate,” he said, and told Kev he was going to give him a ticket for loitering. We debated whether Kev and I were loitering or not, and Officer Scott told us that he had a room full of guns confiscated from this exact corner. “This is not just any corner to be standing on Kev,” he said. “You know this.”

  Kev rolled his eyes, but eventually, after calling in to see if Kev had any warrants—he didn’t—the cops let us go.

  The Crown Victorias sped off. Safely inside Rudy’s Bar-b-que Pit, Kev hollered to the whole place that I just had my first gun pulled on me. He thought this was hysterical.

  “I told you,” Kev shouted, “the police out here are totally racist. They are hating on anyone from the community with any success. They will ride by you twenty times in two hours. It just makes no sense. I mean, go investigate a murder. Do something with your time instead of harassing.”

  As we ate, I tried to laugh with Kev, to act part of the scene. I didn’t feel rattled. I didn’t even blame Officer Scott or the gangsters who might have had those guns for Scott to confiscate any other day. You could smell the blood in the air in Hunters Point and the cops and the robbers were both channeling the stress. I was just glad Scott didn’t shoot.

  Kev and I went on to have a normal day in the neighborhood before going to have shrimp and grits with his grandfather, who only laughed when I told him the story. “Welcome to the neighborhood, son,” he said.

  By this point I did feel part of the neighborhood. I felt that I could be any of the cops or teachers or shipyard workers or Kev. But later that night, as Siri and I cooked spring pasta in our little beach loft, our ever-gentrifying white coast, I found myself getting choked up. Maybe it was Siri’s reaction to the story—“You could’ve been killed!” Maybe it was sadness for the kids who had to grow up with guns as ordinary as baseballs in the self-proclaimed “most liberal” city on earth. But as I conjured the image of Officer Scott holding that pistol to my face, the experience was a bit like becoming lucid in a dream.

  It was an ordinary Tuesday night dinner, and the world turned vivid like the picnic dream. Our wooden thrift-store dining room table, Siri’s abstract paintings, even the sound of our voices
over the traffic. They all hit me at once. It was clear that this was what was important.

  What was important exactly? I wasn’t sure I could say, but I suppose it was all these little things that were our fingers and toes and hair and eyes and how beautiful they could be. The way the zucchini and squash sat with the fusilli, looking inviting on the blue plate with chipped edges. The way Siri’s bangs lay against her forehead and her green-gray eyes had been placed right there in her skull. The way the wooden floorboards creaked when you stepped on them.

  We all know that we could go any day: a car accident, a brain aneurysm, a heart attack, a bullet. Rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, nothing protects us. We know this, and yet we don’t know it. We move through life as if we have forever, as if we can take the stroll around the block, the cappuccino made unusually well, the Tuesday fusilli, for granted. We live as if there will always be a million more like this. So we filter out the details. We go on stressing about accumulating achievements, the big impressive things. But the big impressive things we hold up as the meaning of it all—success, the house on the hill, the shiny car, the World Series title—the things we decide are worth filtering out the little things for—are they so great? Is winning so unique and pleasant? Is success so supreme? Are shiny cars that lovely? They’re OK, sure.

  But that night I saw Officer Scott had given me a gift. He’d made me recall briefly that nothing beats spring pasta on Tuesday with your girlfriend, the sensation of breath in your lungs, a walk on the dunes after dinner, the full moon sinking behind the city.