Sun House, page 14
Dr. Kool’s expression remained immovably fierce, Risa’s immovably tender. Silent seconds ticked by. When finally he stood, the good doctor appeared suddenly old and frail. But when Risa put her arms around him, his own arms went, by increments, from weakly holding her, to nearly crushing her, to quietly gasping as he crushed.
The instant he released her she spun on her heels. Not quite sobbing but not daring to look back, she strode out of his office and away.
QUITTING DR. KOOL was the worst. Her next few moves were enjoyable in a way.
First, to protect herself against any further “sacred sexism,” she gathered up every last one of her Skrit-related class notebooks, texts, lexicons, mythology, and scriptures, boxed them up, taped the boxes tightly shut, drove them to her father’s house, stored them in the rafters of his two-car garage, and swore never to open them again.
Next move: in hopes of venting and so purging the worst of her anger, Risa opened her latest secret scribbled dumbsaint notebook and penned a torrid if unmailable letter to the Sons Only Verse author:
Dear Pseudo Rishi,
I won’t lie. The grenade you somehow slipped into the Upanishads broke my heart. But some of us lapsed Catholic girls know how to deal with this kind of shit. When Aristotle, Aquinas & the Church fathers teach that a woman is a malformed man known as a manqué, or when some big-shot early Xian like Tertullian teaches that the wombs of women are “filth” & the children in our wombs “loathsome curdled lumps feeding on muck,” we turn as tough as this cruel foolishness forces us to be. When it comes to defining our minds, hearts & bodies, YOU, Sons Only Fool, are a manqué rishi, Aristotle, Tertullian & Aquinas are manqué theologians, & I thank the Unseen Guileless Perfection for the womb She gave me to distinguish me from the penis-fetishizing likes of you! My Skrit-fired heart burns for Truth in the body the Unseen bequeathed it, & if you think I’ll let that fire die to passively await an incarnation as some niggle-scriptured Brahmin’s pampered baby boy you’ve got another hundred thinks coming. There is a path, extremely fine & extending far! It has touched me, I have discovered it! That beneath which the year revolves, the breathing behind breathing, sight behind sight, hearing behind hearing, thinking behind thinking, the first, the ancient. With the heart alone I have beheld it, & that heart is beating inside a knowledge-body (sambodhakaya) & truth-body (dharmakaya) like yours, but a begotten-body (nirmanakaya) that, thanks to a Cathoholic Irish American, a philandering Montana Scot & my beloved Unseen Mother/Father, is double-breasted, girl-hipped & gratefully vaginaed & the time for you vaginaphobes to start freaking is NOW. This girl aims to show the Highest Mysteries a love so true it will break even your mother-hating heart, causing the spurned word WOMAN to fall inside you, saving you, at long last, from YOU!
Risa’s third move was her strangest: she launched perhaps the most poorly armed anti-sexist counterinsurgency of all time, consisting of a one-woman Sanskrit Oral Tradition of her own devising. In her downtime, off-time, waiting-in-grocery-lines or jammed-in-traffic time she began to recite, in an audible murmur, every Skrit word, verse, prayer fragment, or myth scrap she could recall. Since it was a written verse that had betrayed her, she refused to write down the scores of passages and couple thousand words she initially knew by heart. The only source for her recitations, she decided, would be her female memory. Her recitations, as a result, grew more unreliable by the day. But, over time, there turned out to be something soothing about the music her recitations made. Living in a computer-obsessed, car-clogged, espresso-wired Seattle that considered the previous decade a Nostalgia Product and previous civilizations off the radar entirely, the sound of ancient words like prakŗiti, dharmakāya, and sahaj samādhi stirred a place deep within that her Americanness might have anesthetized if not for her recitation habit. Her chief pleasure in reciting was auditory. The sound of her dwindling collection of Skrit scraps reminded her of the way the low thud-thud-thudding of an old Norton, Indian, or Harley moves many an otherwise unadventurous middle-aged man to rise up in gypsy daring, suck in his gut, don leather, tie on a racy headscarf, and take off on multistate pilgrimages to nowhere, sans seat belts, antilock brakes, and helmet.
Years rolled by and life served up the usual roller coaster. She kept up her meditative efforts to convert sadnesses into interior night sky. She kept scribbling crazy-dumbsaint interpretations of her passing art passions, gratefully failed romances, epiphanies, metaphysical enthusiasms. She received the news, sent out of the blue by a U Dub classmate, that Dr. Chagan Kuldunchari had retired and returned to India to recite the Vedas with those who still can, only to take ill within a year and die, in a Pune hospital, of the jarringly non-Vedic term “dengue fever.” She experienced daily angst, daily gridlock, daily blizzards of media-born info-pellets that buried everyone she knew beneath deep drifts of spiritual polystyrene. And—in the manner of a stubborn child dragging an ever more bedraggled old baby blanket off to kindergarten—she kept chanting scraps of Sanskrit during every lull in her day.
Why exactly? No reasonable reason. Her scraps had something mythic, sonic, and unreasoning to do with a time when animals could talk and the mind had mysterious powers. Something to do with fifty centuries of Indian women banned by the men to whom they’d given birth, sex, sons, breast milk, lives, from the wisdom that sustained those same fathers and sons. Something to do, too, with a recurring Earth-intuition she couldn’t shake. In yet another dumbsaint notebook entry, she wrote:
A language is not some orderly repository of words stockpiled by an academy or priesthood in a temperature-controlled warehouse. A language is a living, breathing creature made of millions of sounds wandering loose over the land, possessing, haunting & taunting its human hosts be they women, men, children, or any combination thereof. And of course, in a world like this one, the path to Truth is cluttered with tollbooths occupied by Laws of Manu cronies, corporate pretas, Brahmin banking twerps & Vatican mind police. Of course this Kali Age exudes a darkness so dense that, by definition, reason can’t see a glimmer of light. But some Irish poet I once read, Patrick Kavanagh maybe, had “a feeling / that through a hole in reason’s ceiling / we can fly to knowledge / without ever going to college” & Skrit songs of unreason keep shooting me through that hole. I don’t know why Skrit scraps are crucial. I only know that if I sit down in the smog of this mean, sweet incarnation, breathe slow as every lover of Big True since Prajapati, & chant, “A thousand heads hath Purusha, a thousand feet, a thousand eyes,” hidden eyes sometimes actually open. I only know that, during a gyno exam last month, when Doc Jolene did a pap smear move that hurt like hell, without a thought I cried out, “Avatara Tumha Dharaya Karana, Uddhraya jana jada jiva!” Which is Hindi not Skrit & I don’t even remember what it means! But no sooner was it out of my mouth than something wildly more mysterious than my legs opened & I felt the pangs of what I want to call the Mother Matrix straining to give birth to the desperately needed infant world destined to replace this shattered one. Out of some enormous dark joy I then began to sob, causing Jolene to gasp, “What is it, Risa?! What’s wrong!” But how could I explain to my gyno that a Skrit scrap had just shot through reason’s ceiling to soothe the Great Mother as She strains to deliver the infant world we’ll soon be forced to leap aboard?
XIII. Tits vs. Gandhi
(Portland, winter 1991)
That guy you used to be, he’s still in the car. He’ll always be in the car. Just don’t let him drive. He might be shouting out directions. But whatever you do, don’t let him get behind the wheel.
—Eddie Vedder
My Mahatmaship is worthless.
—Mahatma Gandhi
AS JAMEY VAN Zandt became a largish fish in the small pond of Portland’s theatre scene, a gigantic fly continued to frolic in his champagne glass: every January on his and his mother’s shared birthday-deathday he went as mad as King Lear. I’ve described the partial recovery inspired by the post-bike-crash realization that his near-victims kept selflessly saving his life. I wish I could say that this insight healed him permanently. But in his twenties, when drugs, alcohol, and women with gravitationally collapsed interior objects of their own entered the birthday-deathday equation, Jamey’s January 30ths became a kind of Mardi Gras/New Year’s Eve/Halloween/April Fools’/Day of the Dead rolled into one.
Among his darker misadventures was an LSD-fueled grocery-shopping excursion. Entering a busy Portland Safeway, Jamey perceived via acid logic that the existing global financial system is entirely bogus—which to LSD’s credit did foretell the financial meltdown of 2008–2009 years in advance. To LSD’s discredit, it also gave Jamey what he felt was an unerring ability to identify the Richly Deserving Poor among his fellow shoppers. Since all cash was now counterfeit, it made perfect sense to start dumping armloads of unpaid-for groceries into the carts of these souls. And because Jamey was egalitarian by nature, he also identified two police officers called to the scene as the Deserving Underpaid, and attempted to hand them each an armload of steaks. How odd it seemed, until the acid wore off hours later, that their response to his visionary generosity was throwing him facedown on the floor, cuffing him, hauling him to jail, and sending a terrified Romeo to Animal Control to await rescue by Jamey’s long-suffering dad, Jon. Another misadventure involved a grain-alcohol-fueled encounter with a prostitute, leading to an unsuccessful proposal of marriage to said prostitute, but the successful contraction of a sexually transmitted disease.
More sad examples aren’t needed. I, the Holy Goat, have already stated that Jamey was, for many years, entrapped in a split personality with a tragically strong preference for the friendlier of his two selves. Jamey’s Princeling persona spent 364 days a year driving all thought of his mother down into darkness and comporting himself as if she’d never existed. On the 365th day an enraged Darkling then flew up out of blackness and “made it up to Debbie” by surrendering to almost any self-punishing act that presented itself. Sure, handing “free” Safeway T-bones to cops bodes ill for your legal record, but it sure frees up an alter ego boiling with repressed fury after 364 days locked up in a Princeling’s mother-denying subconscious. Sure, prostitutes are almost never as good-hearted as Hollywood encourages us to believe, but when the sallow come-on smile of a streetwalker perfectly matches the yellow of your dying mother’s leukemic face, the unhealed five-year-old within experiences a new brand of attraction altogether.
Because the sexually transmitted disease was a treatable case of gonorrhea and a Safeway manager chose not to press charges, Jamey remained physically and legally unscathed. But after every such fiasco the Princeling never wondered what had come over him. The sole strategy he used to stave off his next birthday-deathday disaster was to throw the Darkling back in prison, maintain the interior wall between his two selves, and weather fines, doctors’ appointments, lawyers’ fees, and physical recoveries with no attempt to grasp that grieving might be both a dire need and a kind of art form.
But one weird brand of energy remained capable of piercing the interior wall between his two selves. Its cause? The unrelated words “Mahatma” and “Debbie.” Magic words are the most difficult to get hold of, but they’re also the most powerful. And is any mother’s name less than magic to those who evolve from gamete to fetus to infant inside the body bearing her name? Every time the weak word “Debbie” or strong word “Mahatma” entered Jamey’s ears, the interior wall vanished, the Princeling and Darkling clearly saw and detested each other, and neither persona grasped that the death of his opposite would entail the death of himself. No kinder term than Grief Imbecile describes a man who refuses to try to resolve such an intolerable psychic split.
ON JANUARY 30TH, 1991, the instant Jamey’s eyes opened and his breathing grew wakeful, Romeo leapt from the Nautilus to the bed and stuck his cold nose in Jamey’s face.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jamey announced.
The dog smiled, doting on his funky morning breath and watching him eagerly.
“I’m thirty-three today, Roams, and my mom’s negative twenty-eight. So her corpse, had it remained, say, in this room with us, would be a pile of desiccated bones, splintered yellow teeth, cobwebs, and dust. Pondering that fact, I’ve decided upon this, my thirty-third born-date, to bid Mumsy farewell, sweep up the bones, cobwebs, and sad mess of her early death, toss it all out, and be done with this Fate-baiting birthday-deathday heaviness for the rest of my life. Sound like a plan?”
Despite the stupidity of Jamey’s summary and the impossibility of his plan, his one true worshipper smiled and amiably nosed him. Is it any wonder humans have made an industry out of self-involved, book-length, nearly autoerotic odes to their dogs? Only our own sex organs are as cheerfully willing to share in our self-deluding impulses!
Taking Romeo’s smile and tail wagging to be the “Yes” they weren’t, Jamey began his Debbie Eradication Project by picking up the Kodachrome portrait on his nightstand, looking at his mother’s blue eyes, happy smile, and comely face for the ten-thousandth time, and thought, Mom, I figure the Buddhists have it right. Reincarnation’s prob’ly the deal. So you, at this point, could be some winsome nineteen-year-old lass of Glasgow or deep-chested young potato farmer of Peru. But that lass or farmer can’t hear a word I’m saying, doesn’t care what I’m saying, and hasn’t the faintest memory of Dad or Jude or me. Which is as it must be, whether we like it or not. So. Sorry as I am that you had to leave life so early, and pretty as you are in this old photo, yours is no longer a face I should be straining to recall. Trying to conjure you every birthday-deathday has messed with my life and other lives in inexcusable ways. You wouldn’t want that. And Roams and I don’t want it. Right, Roams? Jamey turned the photo toward Romeo, who smiled and thumped his tail.
See how everyone visible agrees it’s time we go our separate ways? You were my mom, I was your little boy, we loved each other. But time and space have stretched that love so thin it’s time the link was allowed to snap. So to any part of you who might still be listening, hear me: go away. I don’t say this to be mean. Only to make our farewell final so we can continue our separate journeys. Mother. Mom. Debbie. As of this moment, we’re done. Fare well.
With that, Jamey carried the photo brusquely down the hall to his kitchen and bent to the lowest drawer to the left of the sink. “The junk drawer,” he called it. Opening it and moving Romeo’s investigative nose aside, he shoved around broken sunglasses, wood screws, a stale cigar in a cracked plastic tube, rubber bands, not-quite-empty Ronsonol lighter fluid and WD-40 cans, outmoded floppy disks, and reached the drawer’s wood bottom. Placing Kodachrome Debbie on the bare wood, he unceremoniously scrambled the junk over it until the photo was buried. He then stood, shoved the drawer closed with his foot, but, as he was doing so, caught a last glimpse of one blue Mother eye peeking up at him through the junk.
A jolt of sick panic shot through his body. With effort, he repressed it. “That’s that, Roams,” he said, causing Romeo to smile on cue, and they turned to a birthday unhampered by such nuisances as gravitationally collapsed interior mom objects—
while on the opposite side of the interior wall the Darkling seethed, awaiting his moment.
THE PRINCELING’S PLANS for his 33rd-Birthday-and-First-Ever-No-Deathday Celebration had been laid for some time: a Northwest Portland movie house, Cinema 21, was hosting a traveling New York–based film festival called “Meetings with the Makers.” The fest featured eight “art films” that arrived in town, one per week. Traveling with each film was a key actor, director, or cinematographer who, after the screening, would field questions from the audience. The 1981 Louis Malle cult hit My Dinner with André was part of the fest. Jamey hadn’t seen the film in years and André Gregory was one of his theatrical heroes. But for purposes of his birthday celebration, the film’s curious little co-star, Wallace Shawn, was Jamey’s ace in the hole. Shawn was the “Maker” who’d be meeting the audience and answering questions. Shawn also happened to stand five foot two and was round faced and bald, while Jamey was six foot two, slender faced, and sported a thick brown ponytail, yet he could reproduce Shawn’s voice, accent, lisp, and vexed rationalism to hilarious perfection.
He had major plans for this impersonation. His date for the evening was a stunning young woman by the name of Holly Brrhfygythsfyfth,1 with whom he’d flirted off and on ever since college. Ms. Brrhfygythsfyfth had responded to his flirtations with cool indifference till his recent rise to Northwest theatre stardom, but after breaking up with a fiancé, she’d leaked news of renewed interest through a mutual friend. Jamey phoned her the same day, and Holly sounded nothing but thrilled to accept his invitation to “Meetings with the Makers.” To unwind afterward, he’d reserved his favorite table at Café Cru, the late-night restaurant and jazz club, where his game plan was to await the perfect moment to launch an over-the-top seduction made sidesplitting by his Wallace Shawn lisp.
Moved by a suspicion that he might get lucky, Jamey spent the morning cleaning and romanticizing his apartment. He left his latest play, Photographing Your Inner Child, artfully strewn across one end of his dinner table. He built a winter “non-flower arrangement” of twigs and cattails for the same table and used a canning jar for a vase as if to say, “How casual!” He left a dashing red and gold robe he’d worn as King Lear visible in a not-quite-closed hall closet, not because he’d played Lear any time recently but because he had visions of a naked Ms. Brrhfygythsfyfth enwrapped and enraptured in the sumptuous robe.
In the belief that it was never too soon for a renowned actor—aka professional multiple-personality-disordered exhibitionist—to demonstrate that he is humble and kitchen literate, Jamey baked a batch of his irresistible homemade oatmeal raisin cookies, told Romeo, “We’re prepped!” and off they went on a marathon walk. Jamey then showered, dressed for the film fest in his casual finest, and drove Romeo over to Jon’s for the night, Jon being the one person with whom Romeo would cheerfully stay on the rare occasions when Jamey couldn’t include a loaded Land Nautilus in his plans.
