by Jaimal Yogis
21
Ananda: “This is half of the holy life, lord: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.”
Buddha: “Don’t say that, Ananda. Don’t say that. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life.”
—Upaddha Sutta
What was also nice about almost getting shot by Officer Scott was that I decided it wasn’t worth stressing too much about writing the article either. I tried as much as possible to let the people I’d interviewed tell the story, to hear their voices coming through, to let the story tell itself.
The story ended up being the longest and most quickly written magazine piece I’ve ever written. It’s also the only article I’ve ever written that won an award of any note. And when it did, I was happy. But I didn’t really feel surprised or even proud. The success didn’t feel like mine. I had been one piece of the story. The scribe. A small piece really. A pawn.
For a while I felt able to work from this more easygoing place. But everything changes. When the sea has been calm and glassy, you can bet a storm is rolling in. I was starting to realize this, I suppose, and subsequent minor life hurricanes would go, more or less, like this. First book would come out, and I’d nearly have a panic attack that it was the wrong book. Siri would leave me, and I’d feel like God was running a lawn mower over my aortas. Second book would come out, and I’d have another panic attack. Pa would get cancer, and we’d spend our days wondering why we waited so long to appreciate our father.
There are cycles. Some patterns repeat. Some are shocking flash floods. But here is the thing about storms. I don’t wish them on you, but they are coming and would you want it differently? What would we talk about? How would we become strong? How would we get off our lazy asses and look into what is actually going on here? What would we celebrate? Storms, after all, have that rare power to bring us—yes, we humans who love to devour each other and put it on TV to watch again—together. Neighbors who have never met are suddenly sharing a lifeboat, giving each other coffee and potatoes.
I have been spoiled in this life by mostly sunny weather. But I’d like the third act of this ending to briefly mention the minor storm—really more of a squall—that reunited me with an old friend.
About a year after writing that journalism story about black San Francisco, I’d finally finished my book Saltwater Buddha. I’d tried as much as possible to learn and let the story write me, but as I was finishing my book, I was also reading Tim Winton, an Australian novelist with a brooding and dark aesthetic, an aesthetic uniquely his and beautiful. Usually, I could separate my love of other writers from my own style. The problem was that Winton wrote about the sea. Worse, he surfed. I was beginning to hate him.
“The poison of the honeybee is the artist’s jealousy,” wrote Blake. I knew this. But this honeybee had hit in the fattiest part of my ass. In other words, I didn’t feel a sting. But jealousy permeated subtly. Deep.
The more I compared my rather sunny book to Winton’s dark, brooding sea, the more I knew I’d done this all wrong. This led me down a rabbit hole of opening dozens of great novels and memoirs and comparing myself to them, which is the death of creativity. You can gain inspiration from other artists, but if you look to them trying to have their voice or popularity, you will only regurgitate them poorly. I thought I knew that. But with this bee-sting venom coursing through my veins, I got amnesia. All I could see was that this Winton perspective, combined with shrewd vocabulary and sentence structure, could lead to literary fame. I muzzled all those insights from the dream-yoga retreat and reporting with Kev—or twisted them—and I chased down Winton.
So, even though Siri was saying that she liked my book as it was, and my publisher had said the same, I proceeded to go in and change everything.
There was some OK writing in the new draft. But I’d later realize—after much suffering—that the new version lacked power because some fabricated new ego had written a formula.
I sent the new draft off to the publisher thinking, Ha! Wait until they see this. This will really knock their socks off if they liked it before.
It did not knock their socks off.
“We don’t want this book,” my editor told me, his jaw sounding tight. “You know, we liked the old book—the book that seemed, well, seemed like you.”
There is little more frustrating than doing months of work and then having your boss tell you that all the work you just did would have been better off not done. You do not get those months back.
So, even though part of me agreed with this editor, I silenced this part of me and became angry and righteous. I told the publisher, “Well, I don’t want to publish that old book. I can’t. I’m going to return the money.”
“That would be a shame,” they said. “But OK.”
“Well, it’s what I’m going to do,” I said, feeling noble.
I went on like this for another couple of months, brooding and thinking I’d been wronged, censored. I was in a manic mood as I started searching for another publisher who would appreciate my work. Some possibilities opened, then closed, then opened, then closed.
So I went back to magazine writing, working overtime to try to make up the money I would have to pay the publisher. Siri and I even did some day-trading, but this was 2008, so you can guess how that went.
Over the couple of months that this ridiculous lifestyle lasted—waking at 6:00 a.m. with Wall Street—my moods were up and down like the stock market. No inner stability. I talked to Siri often about quitting writing altogether and learning to do something practical: bagging groceries, building websites. I didn’t care. I was turning on writing because it was turning on me.
Fortunately Rotten Robbie still lived downstairs.
Rotten Robbie painted houses for money, but the work was sporadic. The fact that he looked as if he just got out of prison didn’t help. Often, when he didn’t have work, he just sat out in front of Carol’s chain-smoking and drinking Rockstar energy drinks and coffee. I’m not kidding that he didn’t drink water. Not a drop. He looked sixty years old—hair and mustache bright white—even though he was only thirty-seven.
Rob had a hard exterior. He constantly bragged about his plethora of guns, his childhood in the ghetto, his jail time. But Siri and I had both developed a soft spot for Rob. When you got to know him, you saw that all Rob really wanted, like most of us, was some friends—some people to protect and love, a family like the one he’d had in his gangster days.
Only now he wasn’t a gangster and was having a little trouble adjusting to the vocabulary and lifestyle of law-abiding citizens. He was, thanks to the Queen, trying hard though. Staying away from the bottle and the drugs. Working any job. Even his occasional racist slur was prison theatrics. It turned out that his best friends were black and Mexican. “Yeah, man,” Rob would say, “the vatos I used to ride with. Those were the fucking days, brother! We had a fucking Impala you wouldn’t believe. Bitches. Money. Everything. But once you’re in the joint, you got nobody but your own.”
You get the picture. Sometimes when Rob was out smoking, I’d sit with him. I didn’t smoke, but for bonding purposes, I’d bum a cigarette and listen to stories from his criminal days.
Usually, Rob just rambled for twenty minutes and then I left him to his tobacco and coffee. But one sunny day, after I’d been pummeled good by big surf, I walked up dripping wet, head hanging, and Rob said, “Well, what are you looking so sullen about, you dick?”
I wasn’t looking sullen because of how badly I’d just been beaten up by Ocean Beach. I was feeling sullen, I told Rob, because I was going to quit writing. I’d recently gotten an offer from a friend to work in advertising and thought I’d give it a go.
“We live in San Francisco,” I said. “What am I trying to prove by being poor, you know?”
Rob knew how much I loved writing because he’d gotten to know me when I was looking at it positively, but I was still expecting him to say, “Yeah, yeah
, go get that money. Get the money and bitches. That’s what life’s about.”
That was sort of his mantra. But instead he gave me an angry look, a look as if I’d offended his soul.
“Are you fucking with me?” he said.
“No, man,” I said. “I just don’t see the point of the struggle. The high school down the street is tearing down its library because the kids just do their work online. What am I doing trying to write books?”
Rob put his cigarette out on the sidewalk slowly, then he turned to me, looked me dead in the eyes, and pushed me hard in the chest. I nearly fell into Carol’s planter boxes. We wrestled briefly as we often did, but Rob was more serious than usual. He pushed me hard again.
“Hey, motherfucker,” he said. “Stop. Look at me.”
Rob lifted up his sleeves, revealing his gang tattoos, scars from knife fights and gunshots.
“You think this shit is easy,” he said. “You think life—this fucking hellhole—is supposed to be easy. This shit ain’t easy. But you don’t fucking quit like a little bitch. You think it’s easy for me not to get plastered right now? I fucking fight it every second. And I don’t know much. I didn’t get a fancy education. But I know this. Don’t be a fucking sellout. Look at you, up there on the top floor. A girlfriend. Writing stories on your fucking laptop all creative and shit. Going fucking surfing. You know what would happen to me if I swam out there? I’d drown. I don’t know how to fucking swim. I’d love to be out there, but I never got that chance. I never had a dad teach me shit. I’d love to write stories, but I never got an education. I’m down here living in the fucking closet, spouting off about stupid shit I used to do like I’m a Vietnam war hero. But you’ve got a chance. It’s not too late for you, you stupid punk-ass bitch. So don’t fucking be a sellout, you fucktard.”
I took a drag, tried not to cough, and looked away. Rob was making good sense to me. I even was a little choked up. But I didn’t want to let Rob know he was getting to me. Also I’d made up my mind. It was time to get real. Get practical.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Hey,” Rob said. “Don’t start. Do not fucking start this ‘maybe’ bullshit, one foot in, one foot out. That shit gets you nowhere. Hey, for me. I’m asking you for me. Look at these eyes. Do not be a little bitch.”
Now, Rob’s speech might sound especially dramatic and offensive. But this was actually how Rob talked all the time. To everyone. Most people ran the other way or called the cops. But Rob, if you could get past the harsh facade, had a kind of wisdom. He really had been to hell and back. He’d seen where poor choices led. This time seemed a little different from his usual ranting.
I looked at Rob in the eyes—his bloodshot, tired, bright blue eyes. They were welling up slightly. Rob seemed to genuinely mean what he was saying. He seemed to care. I took another drag.
“OK,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Ha-ha!” Rob shouted. “Victory! I should be a fucking motivational speaker or some shit. Now put me in one of your stories, dickwad—make me famous!”
I didn’t decide to go back to my book. I was convinced that it was a bad idea. But I decided to keep going with journalism and passed on advertising. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that career, by the way. It’s just not for me.)
Anyway, it was about a month later that I received the call I spoke of at the start of this book, a call from a New York number.
I almost never pick up calls from numbers I don’t recognize. But on this particular day, ferocious northwest winds caking our windows with sand, I was steeped in a stack of Freedom of Information Act requests relating to private funding of public universities. Maybe I just needed an excuse to get out of the contracts. But I picked up the phone and heard familiar laughter.
“Hello?” I said, briefly wondering if this was a prank call.
“Ja-ma,” the voice said.
“Uh, yeah. Hello?”
“Ja-ma!”
“Who is this?”
“Dis Sonam. I here. I here. America!”
“Sonam!” I shouted, leaping out of my seat. I hadn’t heard his voice in more than four years.
“What! How! When! Are you here? Are you in California?”
Sonam laughed for a while, then said, “No, no. I here New York. Dis many many work.”
“That’s great,” I said, still in disbelief. “I mean, I think it’s good. Are you OK? I was worried. I didn’t hear from you.”
“Ya, ya, sorry,” Sonam said. “Dis go South India tree year. Many time no computer. I sorry no write, Ja-ma.”
“But you’re OK?” I said.
“Ya, ya, good. Bery happy,” Sonam said.
He paused.
“But, Ja-ma. You right. Dis America life bery busy.”
He cracked up again. I laughed too.
“Told you so,” I said.
“But I so happy now talk you. You still best friend, Ja-ma. I tink we still one day Tibet going.”
Misty-eyed, I began pacing around the flat. I didn’t know where to begin, so I started firing off questions before Sonam could fully answer them. We talked for an hour—even sang one “Country Roads” chorus.
Apparently, Sonam had come to New York with a delegation of Tibetan monks accompanying a lama. But when they returned to India, Sonam stayed on, finding the job he’d always hoped for in a Tibetan restaurant, one that paid next to nothing but, with a monk’s frugality, was still allowing him to send money home to his family.
“Wait, wait—what!” I said. “You mean you found them, Sonam? You found your family!”
“Ya, ya,” he said casually. “I try go see family now.”
Sonam’s village had gotten a phone. Through a distant cousin in the US, he’d found the number. When he called the first two times, he said, he could only talk to his sister because his mother cried tears of joy for a week when she found out her son was alive. But eventually, he spoke to his mother, “and she many many saying Sonam Sonam. I need see you. We cry a lot. We laugh.”
Sonam’s father had died, but Sonam seemed at peace with this.
“He live long,” he said. “He happy.”
Sonam was not, however, at peace with the news of his older brother, the first of the family to graduate high school. To support his family, the brother had become a police officer with local Chinese officials, Sonam said. But when the brother tried to defend a Tibetan who he thought had been unfairly treated, he was killed, Sonam said, by the police.
“Dis many many angry,” Sonam said. “Every night tinking how help family. Tibet.”
We spoke about human rights groups Sonam could get in touch with, a process he said he was already beginning, then about raising money to get Sonam home. For real this time.
It was so good to speak to him, and I wanted to stay on the phone forever. But Sonam was spending money from his pay-by-minute cell phone. So we said good-bye, agreeing to work together to get him out to the West Coast and back to Tibet.
“I still never see ocean,” Sonam said. “I tink come see Ja-ma bery soon.”
“You can stay with us,” I said, thinking a Tibetan monk would fit right in at the Queen’s palace. (I could only imagine the conversations he and Rob would have.) “As long as you need. You live here, OK?”
“OK, OK,” Sonam said. “I so happy. Bye-bye now.”
I hung up the phone. The joy I had felt when Sonam and I walked those Himalayan trails together, the joy I had felt after those weeks in silence, came flooding back. I also, like the lifting of a veil, understood exactly the jealous bee sting I’d received while writing.
I’d been jealous of Winton the way I’d been jealous in the Himalayas of Jyanth. I was pining after success as I’d pined after an imagined Sati, a Sati whom I’d put on a pedestal to try to fill the emptiness in myself. But just like then, the ordinary stuff that was already here, the ordinary quirks, the ordinary cage, the ordinary me, was good on its own if I didn’t resist. How many times did I have to
learn this? (The answer, by the way, would be many. I am still learning every day.)
I literally ran to my drawer and dusted off my manuscript, the pre-jealous version, and read it cover to cover. I read it this time as if I were a stranger picking up this story. And I realized something. It was not Homer’s Odyssey. But I’d done my best, and this was an honest book. It was a book in which, on my deathbed, I could say, “I said what was true in my experience.” That, I realized, was worth more than saying anything half true for lots of money.
I wrote my publisher the next morning.
“If it’s not too late to change my mind, I’d like to say, you’re right. I’m an idiot. The old book is better.”
The editor called minutes later.
“What’s going on with you?” he asked. “You seemed so sure.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I got a call from an old friend. He helped me see straight.”
“Well, I’m glad,” the editor said. “Congratulations.”
Just like that, a flick of the mind, I did not owe back my book advance. I could stop day-trading. And maybe help Sonam get home.
That call from Sonam was almost eight years ago. As I mentioned in the introduction, I hoped to take these stories up to present day. But somewhere along the line, I realized that this book was Sonam’s book—an homage to my old best friend and teacher.
Still, it’s nice to end current. Today is Saturday. My lovely wife, Amy—who I met just a year after Siri and I broke up, a year that is covered in another book—is nursing Hanafin, our third boy, who has made it out of her belly safely after, as you may recall, a few scares. I’m taking Kaifas and Eben across the street to the beach, and as usual, the little gurus (ages four and two) offer a teaching.
The waves are thunderous today, apartment-building high and stormy. Too big for anyone to surf. Dangerous undertow. So the boys and I play in the glops of foam and search for sand crabs.