The Empty Chair

~ ~ ~

The following interview took place in 2010 and was redacted in the fall of 2013.

I’m a gay man who happens to have had a handful of relationships—“serious” ones — with women. The last of these partnerships was unique in that it was the only union to produce a child and a marriage certificate, though not in that order. I’ve never spoken of the events that caused us to separate (we never bothered to divorce) and for whatever reason, this moment in time seems to have presented itself as ripe for the telling. Bruce, I’m not interested in knowing why you stepped into my life. I should say, my tub! You know — the wherefores of the universe conspiring to provoke this “confession.” I only know what I know. And what I don’t know, I have learned to leave alone.

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for what, 30 years? My wife and I met on a six-week silent retreat at Spirit Rock, that’s up in Marin. We were Buddhists then. She might still practice, though I strongly doubt it. Anything’s possible.

I’ve always wanted to teach, but it never panned out because of my allergies — I’m allergic to getting up in the morning and going to work! Never graduated university. I’m self-taught, a bit of a pedant. A few people have called me that, more or less. I’m a perfect example of an autodidact. Isn’t that the most horrid word? If I had matriculated, I suppose my specialty would have been medieval literature but that’s never going to happen. It’s pretentious though I’m prone to use it as an icebreaker — I’m even using it with you! Playing the ol’ medieval literature specialty card. The truth is, I’ve always gravitated toward the spiritual. So what happened was, I renounced my fantasy tenure to become a roving ambassador for my own brand of Zen. If the Buddhists call sitting meditation “zazen,” I call my theosophy “vanzen” because I live in my van. I can’t conceive of a life without the ol’ Greater Vehicle.

My van is my Higher Power, as the alcoholics like to say, and my lower companion too. (Not as big as your SUV but I’ll bet it’s got a tighter turning radius.) I’ve actually converted it to a library because any self-respecting auto-mobile-didact needs his moveable feast. The bookshelves are Brosimum paraense—that’s bloodwood — embellished by ornamental carvings commissioned from local artists along the way. I’d hunker down in whatever community, hand over a plank to the right artisan when he came along, and say: Have at it. I’ve got the handiwork of a monk from Tassajara, a skater from Morro Bay, and a docent at the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa. Cherished volumes are held in place by color-coded bungee cords: red for Bio, blue for Fic, orange for Relig, and so on. Honestly, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a reader. Books have always been there for me in my darkest hours. I’ll admit my collection’s a little biased. I have an estimable selection of San Francisco authors, oh yes I do. And a lot of the Beats. A lot.

You see, everyone knows Jack London was born in San Francisco and went to school in Berkeley but did you know his mother channeled spirits? Oh yes she did. Went nuts too. Shot herself and lived to tell the tale. Dante wrote about the suicides but there’s a hell right here on Earth for those who botch the act. I believe the professionals put them in the “attempters” versus “completers” camp — like rescue versus recovery. She was so bonkers that the authorities gave him a foster mom, who just happened to be a former slave. Make a pretty good movie, wouldn’t it? It’s got the whole deal: genius kid, daydreamer dad, whacko mom, and ex-slave foster. Like one of those movies Leonardo DiCaprio used to star in when he was young. Leonardo’d make a pretty good Jack. Now that’s a film I’d go to see.

Mark Twain was a cub reporter up here, wrote for The Call. Legend has it he dreamed up his stories an hour before deadline. Rather Hunter S. Thompson of him! Did you know Kipling came to America just to find Mr. Clemens? Not to San Francisco — to Elmira, New York. I believe that momentous rendezvous took place sometime between the writing of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn but don’t hold me to it. Lord, but Kipling was a fan! Just in complete awe. Came all the way from India to see him, can you imagine? I’d love to have been a fly on that wall. Now there’s another movie… though this one might be better as a play. If I was a terrible playwright (which I would be if I ever tried my hand), that’d be one hell of a theatrical theme — Kipling and Twain in New York. There’s the title too: “Kipling and Twain in New York.” Readymade. Though maybe “Kipling and Twain in Elmira” would be better. Makes you a little more curious, draws you in.

I got all kinds of ideas today! Aren’t you happy you came back?

He abruptly yet politely excused himself, leaving the trailer for half-an-hour before we resumed.

Did you ever have a love like that? Like Kipling’s for Twain? Starts as an intellectual love, then becomes something else? Crosses over into something else? You read a book and wham—Cupid’s arrow goes right in. And suddenly you’re compelled? To make a pilgrimage. Love is what made Kipling travel all that way.

I had a love affair like that. Once is all you need! I must have been all of thirteen. He was a monk, a Trappist monk named Thomas Merton. You’ve heard of him? I think everyone’s heard of Merton. Though all they usually know is The Seven Storey Mountain. Or maybe about the terrible way he died. But I wasn’t as fortunate as Lord Kipling. By the time I got the idea, my beloved monk was already dead. He was in the Far East, if memory serves — was it Burma? or Thailand — taking a bath when a fan fell in and he was electrocuted. Right then and there he entered the pantheon of famously ignominious literary deaths. You know, Barthes and the bakery truck, Randall Jarrell and W. G. Sebald versus automobile, Tennessee and the frisky bottle cap… though some folks say it wasn’t a bottle cap that did him in at all, but rather what they call “acute Seconal intolerance.” Which is French for overdose.

Did you know that a lot of writers have been knifed? Beckett was stabbed on the street, almost killed him. And Sartre too, by a crazy man who was always asking him for money and tried to break down the door of his apartment. The door was chained but he nearly cut off Sartre’s thumb. Sartre never had any money! That comes as a surprise to most people. It worried him right to the end. A few days, maybe a few hours before he died, he was asking Simone de Beauvoir how they were going to find the money to have him cremated.

Anyway, I was crushed — I mean, about Merton. Death by fan… I guess we should feel lucky they don’t keep fans up there by the Esalen baths! And he was handsome too, like a movie star. At least I thought so. And a monk. And a poet. And a — oh! I was only however-old-I-was but boy that hit me hard. My first serious crush. And say what you will, but the root of crushed is crush. That’s the human comedy for you. I suppose it would have been more romantic if Merton had been knifed like the others. Or shot, like Rimbaud. Anything but death by fan!

Father Thom struggled with celibacy all his life. I really do believe God made us that way, with all our base instincts and perilous urges, and out of His mercy bestowed conscience and shame. I’m afraid I failed Him early on! I was too young to understand God knew I would fail and I was already forgiven. The older I get, the more I subscribe to Tolstoy’s views. You’ve read The Kreutzer Sonata? The later works? By that time in life, Tolstoy was opposed to sexual intercourse, he really thought the high road was to let the whole human race just die out. Life of the party, huh. Though I bet the folks at Esalen would give him a workshop! They’re pretty much open to anything. I’ve got some wonderful books on the topic in my van. Did you know celibacy was optional in the first thousand years of the Church? O yes. “And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison”—Revelation 20:7. Don’t get me started! Thom Merton was a Renaissance man, he had one of those far-reaching, magisterial intellects, good Lord. The man could toss off an essay on Zen just as quick as a raft of poems. He was a marvelous poet.

Here’s a favorite of mine:

I always obey my nurse

I always care

For wound and fracture

Because I am always broken

I obey my nurse…

I have a book in the van, at least I think it’s still in there — unless I’ve loaned it out, which I’m almost certain I didn’t because mostly I lend my books to impoverished kids or homeless folk, and this one wouldn’t be high on that list — it has the somewhat daunting title of History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church. How’s that for pedantry! Now, I’m a Catholic but each faith struggles under the yoke. The OED tells us sacerdotalism is the assertion of the existence in the Christian church of a sacerdotal order of priesthood, having sacrificial functions and invested with supernatural powers. These were the Middle Ages… there is an absolute profusion of intriguing texts from that time by the so-called Christian mystics — Hildegard of Bingen (the monks here are completely gaga over Hildegard. Sinéad O’Connor would have made a great Hildie B), The Scale of Perfection, Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Teresa’s The Way of Perfection (lotta striving toward perfection in those days), and my own personal fave, The Cloud of Unknowing—and O! Better not leave out Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend…

Sorry to digress. I think I have a case of nerves, that’s why I’m chattering away. I’m usually not such a motor-mouth. It’s just that I guess everything’s building up, all that’s been unspoken for so many years. The whole kit and caboodle, as Mama used to say.

A break for lunch. As we settled in, he excused himself. When he returned, he wore a sheepish smile. His face was blotchy, as if from crying.

I had to “make my toilet.” Splash some water on my face…

What was I saying?

The Christian mystics—

Kipling! Kipling also did his time in the City by the Bay, oh yes. Mind you, there was no love lost between the two — not between Kipling and Twain, but Kipling and the city. He was a flinty, finicky man, and most decidedly “on the road.” What do you think the Beats would’ve made of him? Now there’s another play — my third of the day! — the meeting of Kipling and Kerouac. “Kipling/Kerouac,” that’s what you call it. Or maybe just “K2”… K-squared! Yes. I like it. On the Road with Jack and Rudy. Stendhal said something marvelous, that a novel was nothing more than a man holding a mirror as he walks down a road… it reflects the sky above and the mud below, and woe to the man who carries it in his rucksack and captures nothing but the mire! For he will be pilloried.

I was saying. Kipling didn’t care for San Francisco a whit. If he didn’t leave his heart, he certainly left his spleen, or some other mess to clean up. Had a reputation for being a real pisser. Thought everyone was rude, particularly hotel workers. Isn’t that funny? I guess that’s understandable, he was used to India where the English were treated like gods. I have an old Kipling in the van, I know just where, green cover, introduction by Henry James. (Come to think of it, I’ve a very pretty Le Rouge et le Noir.) There’s a chapter in there, if memory serves, called “American Notes,” subtitled “Rudyard Kipling at the Golden Gate.” Apparently, the thing he absolutely could not tolerate about our beautiful city was all the white people! Too many white people. Not enough blacks and fellaheen. (Oh, the Beats were great fans of the fellaheen!) There was just this very long list of complaints. The querulous Lord K had no truck with the custom of the day, which allowed that a fellow who bought a drink would get his food for free. The man even hated cable cars! Moreover, he was of the mind that Americans plagiarized English authors without compensation or acknowledgment, and to make things worse, willfully perverted the pilfered texts. On the topic of copyrights, he was apoplectic. A drooling hound from Hell… but we forgive Genius its prickliness. And he was a prickly pear. Some of my best friends are prickly pears.

Kipling actually wrote about the Cliff House. You know the Cliff House, Bruce? You said you lived in the Bay Area when you were a boy… that took me by surprise. The very Cliff House I — we! — remember from our youth! We lived south of LA, see, in Orange County, and would drive to Point Lobos and Sausalito… our little unhappy family. Those dreadful, benumbing, contentious vacations. Good Lord! We’d go to the Cliff House and my big sis and me climbed the hundreds of steps to that positively Brobdingnagian indoor slide — remember? — made out of slippery, buttery blond wood. I was so struck with fear, my tiny face all scrunched up in tears, like I was heading for the gallows. I never looked down, only straight ahead, at the ass of whoever was in front of me, yet couldn’t help but see from the corner of my eye the sliders whooshing past, the joyful screaming, the chute wide as a highway, like some monstrously tilted bowling lane waiting patiently to strike me out. To avoid the paralysis of vertigo, when I finally reached the top I gave my full attention to the spreading out of my smelly burlap sack, the threadbare magic carpet that would carry me to Hell. You couldn’t take too much time with preparations because a cackling crowd was endlessly summiting behind you, anxious to fling themselves down that bizarre man-made mountain. So you’d plunk yourself on that useless mat and — Geronimo! — off you’d go, hoping to catch up with your stomach at slide’s end. All the while knowing I’d have to immediately begin the climb again, or be called a fag, and be publicly ostracized—

I know, I’m off-track. It’s just the butterflies…

We’re not in a huge hurry, are we?

I just need to work up to it. I’m finding my way. Promise.

All right, and do forgive: the Kipling/Twain rendezvous in New York. As it turns out, the two shared a common passion: copyrights. Ha! According to historical reports, Samuel Clemens had lots to say about this particular issue. Copyrights! Mania of the Titans!

Kipling was an absolutely superb reporter, even referred to himself as a newspaperman. (Jack London had his own view of the papers. Called them “man-killing machines.”) Kipling was known as a human tape recorder, capable of flawlessly transcribing from memory. Capote used to say the same thing, but Capote was more full of shit than a sewer pipe. Lord Rudy quoted Twain, a little speech I spottily committed to memory, as it touches on a topic mentioned earlier and which I am certain we will soon explore, which acted as a balm at the time—

A conscience, like a child, is a nuisance. If you play with it and give it everything it wants — spoil it — it’ll be sure to intrude on all your amusements and most of your griefs. Just treat it as you would anything else. When it’s rebellious, spank it. Be stern! Don’t let it come out to play with you at all hours. That way you’ll end up with a good conscience, one that’s properly trained. But a spoiled one destroys all pleasure in life! I’ve done an excellent job in training my own; at least, I haven’t heard from it for some time. Perhaps I killed it from being too severe. It is wrong to kill a child… though in spite of all I’ve said, a conscience does differ from a child in many ways.

Perhaps it’s better off dead.

Wonderful, isn’t it?

Sometimes satire is the only thing that does the job. All right…

Enough nonsense.

I began by disclosing that while I prefer men to women on the sexual front, I’ve had meaningful relationships with both. I told you I was married but separated, and that I—we—have—had—a child. A son. We had a son.

His name is Ryder.

(I won’t say “was” because it still is.)

My wife’s name is Kelly.

I haven’t seen her for seven or eight years. She lives in Canada with her sister. On her sister’s property anyway. I send money every month. The occasional postcard or email. She writes back now and then. Her sister worries, endlessly. “She’s thin as a bone!” My frontal lobe seems to have taken that information and run with it, because whenever I think of Kelly I picture a haunted scarecrow piercing me with haunted, pleading eyes.

We were living together but hadn’t been physically intimate for a long time when Kelly said she wanted a child. She was 35 or 36—I was 29—she’d had four abortions. Also had PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome, so the doctors said the odds were slim. We were prepared to go another route if we didn’t have any luck but never talked exactly about what that route would be. If I recall, adoption wasn’t entirely ruled out. Kelly was certain motherhood had passed her by (I was certain too) and as a hedge against likely heartbreak she convinced herself that it wasn’t possible, wouldn’t happen. Made her peace. When the kit showed the + sign, it shocked her into bliss. Me too (into bliss). I was a little surprised by that. She said it was a miracle baby and I couldn’t argue.

Back then, we had the understanding our physical needs would be met outside the partnership. I mean, sex was actually fun — for a while — but once she got pregnant, we were forever done. I knew Kelly was involved with various women over the years but had no idea she pursued men as well. I’m not sure if that would have bothered me or not… I mean, another man. I guess it would have, if she didn’t invite me to share! At any rate, we were a “don’t ask, don’t tell” household. If you’re wondering why we stayed together, that’s a little predictable. Better to ask, What forces prevailed to bring us together in the first place? And for what purpose?

I said it before and I’ll say it again: I only know what I know. And what I don’t know, I’ve learned to leave alone.

Until now.

Kelly was an old friend of the Learys’ and liked to tell people our son was named after Tim’s goddaughter, the actress Winona Ryder. Kelly thinks she came up with the name — Ryder — but that’s not how I remember it. And my ego has nothing to do with it. You see, our son didn’t have a name until the very moment he was born. When he popped out, a name popped in: Ryder, from the Djuna Barnes novel. God, I loved that woman! The mad hermit dyke of Greenwich Village. Lived right across the street from e.e. cummings by the way… I know that sounds precious, to name your kid after a Djuna Barnes book — about a monster-dad! — but that’s how it went down, as my biker friends like to say. I didn’t realize it at the time but I think that when I mentioned it as a possibility, Kelly immediately thought it was some sort of ode to Winona—she had a soft spot for glamour and celebrities. She probably loved the idea of being tied into Winona and the Learys. When people asked about it she said she liked the karma of the name, as if our son’s fate (and her own) was to be part of a famous clan. Oh, she basked. I was just happy she went for it. One of the things I love about “Ryder” is that it’s close to writer. And reader too.

My wife — that still sounds weird to me, “my wife,” and it’s funny how it still makes me feel good to say it, that bourgeois part — has always been a serious Buddhist. Me, I’m a dabbler. I told you we met at Spirit Rock but technically that isn’t true. We’d seen each other a handful of times before on skid row, at the mission in Alameda. Part of the do-gooder crew serving meals to the homeless over the holidays. I was surprised to find an attraction there, on my side anyway. I wasn’t sure what she felt but had an inkling. My hetero radar isn’t completely broken, you know. I guess it was karma, as Kelly would say — that I’d feel an attraction toward this woman that was physical, aside from anything else. We didn’t talk much but there was definitely somethin’ going on. We percolated for three years running until we bumped into each other at the retreat. Which brought things to a boil.

Like a lot of people who become interested in Buddhism, I was traumatized by religion, in my case the Catholic Church. My big sis and I were both victims. Cheryl got pregnant at 16 and confessed to one of the fathers. He told her there were special things he could do to make sure the baby would never come out. He said God would help, as long as she kept his intervention a secret. He tried “the cure” a bunch of times but the baby came anyway.

Oh, they did things to me too… that’s why as an adult, I was lost. I drifted toward Buddhism, becoming fairly serious in terms of my meditation practice. But I was never as into it as my wife. Kelly went to all the advanced workshops, you know, the ones they won’t let you in unless you’ve received the transmission of whatever obscure teaching from whatever non-English-speaking roshi. Like a lot of folks, she definitely set out to acquire a black belt in Zen. I just wasn’t that interested — the minute prayer became work, I was out the door. I wasn’t wild about the hierarchy thing either. Hierarchies bug the shit out of me. That smugness, the whole power-tripping, my-silence-is-better-than-your-silence deal. (Anyway, it ain’t Buddhism’s fault. “It’s the people, stupid.”) Oh boy, did we use to skirmish! Kelly called me a living master of “couch potato Zen” and I called her Brigitte Bardo. “Bardo” is Tibetan — have you ever heard? — it means the limbo or “in-between.” There’s a bardo between life and death, a bardo between wakefulness and sleep… a bardo of dreaming. “Brigitte Bardo” used to piss her off, though not completely, because remember, she was into glamour and celebrity. It was all pretty playful. The mood was still light.

Our little family moved from the Haight — from the same block Kenneth Rexroth once lived, he had these famous salons back in the day… everyone used to go, Ferlinghetti, Lamantia, Snyder and Joanne — Kyger — Whalen and McClure and di Prima and Anne Waldman, and of course Ginsberg and Jack — we got out of there and rented a bungalow in Berkeley. I clerked at a bookstore on Telegraph until my lawyer advised it’d be better for my case if I just stayed home and collected disability checks. (More about that in a minute.) I didn’t like that but I do as I’m told. I always obey my nurse. So I became the house mascot, the flâneur who perfected his couch potato Zen. Kelly taught at junior high a district away. She was wrapped too tight — another phrase used by my Hells Angels friends, some of whom are very literate, you know, big readers, and I’m not just talking Stephen King and John Grisham, there was a 400-pound fellow with a swastika tattooed on his forehead who was crazy for Schopenhauer and Spinoza, good Lord! — whenever I hear about one of their weekend gatherings, I’ll try to show up in the bookmobile and they’re tremendously appreciative, though I suppose I took some getting used to — my dear wife was wrapped too tight and all that meditating wasn’t fixing her. A month after we moved to Berkeley, I began to have the vibe that Kelly was staring down the double barrel of a righteous depression.

One of the larger things on her plate was Mom, a semi-invalid living back East. (Her father passed away years before.) The family business, Ballendine’s Second Penny, a high-end antiques shop, had been a fixture in Syracuse for over 40 years; it only took Kelly’s alcoholic brother three months to run it into the ground. Her mother had heart problems complicated by diabetes or maybe it was the other way around. The brother was living at home, doing more harm than good. Like all old people, Mom insisted she didn’t need help even though she could barely make it to the john. The caregivers my wife managed to hire — she interviewed them over the phone from Berkeley, the brother being a useless piece of shit — usually didn’t last the day, and for $4 an hour the best you could hope for was they didn’t steal, at least not in front of you, or beat your loved one to a pulp. Like all daughters (the ones I’ve known), Kelly’s relationship with her mom was deeply fucked up. Whole lotta codependency goin’ on. Clara was a real pro at pushing Kelly’s buttons, especially the one marked GUILT. She started flying back there every other weekend. Once she even took Ryder. He came home with a twitch; I made sure that never happened again. I used to have one when I was a kid and now there was Ryder, widening his mouth every 10 seconds like a fish scooped from its aquarium.

I was surprised when Clara died. I mean, shocked at the speed of it. The flying back and forth and whatnot, the hassling with the brother, all that, had only been going on for maybe three months and I was settling in — we both were — for the long run. The money drain, the emotional drain, the massive inconvenience of it… So when we got the call she was gone, I actually couldn’t believe it! I was like: You’re kidding me. I might even have expressed as much when Kelly gave me the news. Because how many times does a pain-in-the-ass parent die in a timely way, with relatively minimal fuss? Thanks to modern medicine, the death of a parent is usually protracted, more unnatural in cause than natural. And medical heroics aside, the old scumbags seem to willfully hang on! Like they’re invested in not making an easy death — not for themselves, not for their kids, not for the caregivers, not for anyone. I don’t mean to sound devilish but I thought she’d linger until she was 100 and counting. We both did, which has to be most children’s secret fear. So in its own way, my mother-in-law’s death was as surprising as Ryder’s conception. A miracle death! I remember thinking about Clara — just a thought, no malice, hell, I was grateful to her — I remember thinking, “You go, girl! That’s the way to do it—bravo.” There was even some money thrown in (another shocker), not a lot but enough for Kelly to take a sabbatical and go find herself.

Kelly thought it was a good time to get married. Mom always said she wanted to dance at her wedding and I couldn’t figure out if Kelly’s proposal to me was a sentimental capitulation to Clara’s wishes or a posthumous Fuck You. Anyway, it was done. Nothing fancy. A backyard affair with a dozen guests and a Buddhist monk presiding. Ryder walked her up the aisle between rent-a-chairs and was the ring-bearer as well. That was sweet. Kind of a funny fortieth birthday present for me. I think I was a pretty good husband though. Maybe it sounds nuts, but I was good husband material.

I thought that would chill Kelly out — not so much the marriage as her mother’s death. The irony is that when she left her job at school things really began to unravel. Having both parties home at the same time is a game-changer. The house was small. We kept bumping into each other, literally underfoot. You begin paying hostile attention, like cellmates… you get weirdly focused on the annoying habits, shitty sights, sounds, smells and general disgusting lameness of the other party. You start judging them in your head and your heart. Everything gets poisoned, paranoid. Contempt is the order of the day — and night.

You know, I consider myself lucky. I “found” myself a long time ago. And I’m grateful for that. I truly am.

I didn’t say I liked what I found but the finding’s half the journey. Jesus, probably more than half. When you think that most people are out there still looking. What’s the definition of finding yourself, anyway? It really just means being comfortable in your own skin. That’s all enlightenment is, isn’t it? The Buddhists can do their crazy calisthenics, their marathons of Silence and devotion and ritual bullshit but at the end of the day if someone’s happy in their own skin, that’s the Buddha. That’s an enlightened being. People think they need that perfect job or perfect inspiration or perfect spiritual practice but all anyone wants or needs is peace of mind. And you don’t need a Nobel Prize or a million dollars to have it. It helps but it ain’t mandatory. I’ve got my books and my van — it’s a wonderfully nomadic life I wouldn’t trade for the world. [sings, robustly] “Well I’ve got a hammer, and I’ve got a bell, and I’ve got a song to sing, all over this land!” Freedom’s my landlord. The sky above and the mud below. I’ve got a mirror in my knapsack… sometimes I leave it there and sometimes I take it out and point it to the Lord Above!

By most standards I’m a wealthy man. I could buy a house tomorrow if I wanted. A nice house. Which surprises people. Not that I go around saying that because I don’t. When you live the way I do, you can’t be flashy. That’s asking for trouble. You know, Bruce, I don’t own a home or property by choice. Aside from the van and my books, I really don’t have any personal possessions. Nothing to speak of. I’m unencumbered and I think that’s what saved me. The one thing I sometimes yearn for is companionship. A human touch that isn’t lurid. All and all, I’m at peace. I won’t lie, there are days and nights when I feel alone, almost insanely alone — I don’t think that’s too strong a word — times when I feel abandoned by God and man. Not, incidentally, such a wonderful feeling! I’ve had to face certain truths. I can whine about not having a partner to share my itinerant life but the simple truth is I don’t think I’m capable emotionally, maybe even spiritually, of a committed relationship. Not the happiest of insights but that’s what hundreds of hours of therapy’ll get you. (Most of it back in the ’80s.) The last committed relationship I had and will ever have was with my son. Ryder. I’ll never get resolution on that one, never have closure. After he died, a lot of friends told me I should return to therapy. But guess what — I already know the source of my supreme fucked-up-ness. It’s called the Catholic Church. Whoop-dee friggin’ doo.

Whenever I start to feel that alone thing, I look back over the last 24 hours to see what I’ve eaten because sometimes food’ll make you crazy. I know I’m really in a bad place when I personify the Lord our God — play the blame game — because I happen to subscribe to the opinion of those Christian mystics, their elegant assertion being that God or the idea of God is beyond our ability to grasp. To speak of “atheists” and “believers” in relation to God is roughly the same as believing you can convince an ant that it might enjoy a cartoon in The New Yorker. Or getting a rat to read an illuminated text—

“Who has known the mind of the Lord?”

That’s Job…

He splashed water on his face at the kitchen sink, then sat down and rolled a joint.

I come here to get centered. I call it Herman’s Hermitage. It’s lovely, isn’t it? People pass by on the highway completely unaware… bit of a secret treasure. I was going to say no one knows about it but apparently that fellow Pico stays here, though I’ve never had a sighting. (A marvelous writer and dear friend of the Dalai Lama — lives near Kyoto but I believe Mum makes her home in Santa Barbara.) The place has been here since the ’50s — can you imagine what this property is worth now? Oh boy! The woodcarving monk from Tassajara clued me in about it. And cheap too. Well, relatively. The oblates are Camaldolese Benedictine. St. Romuald, an 11th-century ascetic, founded the order. And here they are in Big Sur! Don’t you just love “Camaldolese”? Like some kind of amazing candy or ice cream—“I’ll have a scoop of Camaldolese Benedictine with my violet crumble.” The monks live according to their founder’s “Brief Rule” [he quickly finds a scrap of paper on the bureau, reads aloud]:

Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you — try to forget it. Watch your thoughts, like a fisherman watching fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms. Never leave it. Realize above all else that you are in God’s presence. Stand there as one who stands before an Emperor. Empty yourself. Sit and wait, at peace with the grace of God — like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother gives him.

Tough to adhere to but the world would definitely be a better place. The services are just superb. I was in the rotunda this morning before it began to storm, gathering strength for our time together today. A group of visitors, casually dressed, tourists I think, were in the pews waiting for the hermits to arrive, which of course they always do, on the hour. They wore simple white robes with bunched-up collars, like cats taking naps on their shoulders. Before chanting began, the oblates made time for praying aloud, in counterpoint.

The visitors began, “Lord, hear our prayers!”

The monks said, “Let us pray for those in prison and for those who are hospitalized, and for those who are marginalized by our society.”

“Lord, hear our prayers!”

“Let us pray for the children who are lost, for they abide.”

“Lord, hear our prayers!”

Hildegard of Bingen is a rock star here, I think I mentioned that. I’ve always loved the woman myself. I went through a period of intense searching; it wasn’t by accident that I was drawn toward the female mystics. I’d had enough of the men, thank you very much. I just adored the visions of Hildegard and the “showings” of Julian of Norwich — Julian was a woman — that’s what they call them, “showings,” like a new collection from Chanel! How can you not love divas having visions? How can you not love a reclusive anchoress and medieval feminist? They even referred to God as “our Mother” and I really took to that. Julian had a vision of God putting a sphere in her hand no bigger than a hazelnut. She asked God what it was and He said—She said! — “It is everything that is made. It lasts and always will, because God loves it.” How glorious is that? And “the Three Nothings”… I can’t remember what they are just now, which somehow seems appropriate. But I do recall one of these gals being of the mind that, when in the name of love, the soul becomes nothing — I’m not sure I understand exactly what that means — well, that was the moment it might at last rejoin She who made it. I’m telling you, Bruce, these gals would give any Buddhist a run for his money.

Nothingness…

For a while I was actually a bit obsessed with what they call negative theology. It’s obvious only now what attracted me — I wanted to tear down the scaffolding of the macabre God Organization, I wanted to undecorate the “interior castle,” to raze the diabolical diocese that terrorized me so. I loved the concept of being separated from God by divine darkness, better yet by a cloud of unknowing. I thought “Cloud of Unknowing”—the name of a famous anonymous work — was intensely poetic, even erotic…

Lead us up beyond unknowing and light to where His mysteries lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.

(I know I’m riffing, but hang in. Something’s telling me to ride this out.)

During the time I speak of, my 20s and early 30s, I was more interested in the devil than I was angels, with good reason. After all, the devil was family! See, I really believed in Hildegard’s visions, had to. She had, what, twenty-six of them? Twenty-six “showings”! Julian only had sixteen but who’s counting! I was channeling the whole gang. I guess it was my way of staying loyal to the Church by becoming an avenging anchoress, a superhero in penitential drag. I had showings of my own, enhanced by mushrooms and speed. I too saw the devil as a black and bristly worm, trolling for souls at the farmers’ market of samsara. “Some ran through without buying while others browsed at leisure, stopping to sell and to buy.” That’s Hildegard. “And around its neck a chain is riveted, his hands bound like a thief who deserves to be hanged in Hell”—Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection. (I was born in the wrong time, that’s all, my friend. O, to be middle-aged in the Middle Ages! Though their middle age was 18, 19 and 20, so better to be old—somewhere in your 40s.) Richard Rolle said the devil could put you in a cage whose bars were invisible, and it wasn’t just the avaricious or the lustful that went to Hell, no ma’am. If you were an ascetic in the name of Christ but flaunted it, you know, arranged it so folks would get the tiniest peek at you mortifying your own flesh — off to Hell you go! (The Buddhists say that too.) I was just reading a marvelous book called Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. The rinpoche refers to the Eight Human or “worldly” Concerns. The toughest one of all to shake, even tougher than the desire for comfort or the acquisition of material things, is the craving for fame and reputation. The hermit who secretly yearns to be the most self-deprived, so that he may become legend… Do you know Francisco de Osuna? These aren’t trick questions, I swear. Francisco de Osuna said the devil whispers in our ear while we pray or meditate. The longer the prayer, the greater the danger. He was a Carmelite — doesn’t that sound like a diet candy? (I’ve got sugar on the brain.) Osuna warned that Hell slumbered in a too-avid gaze or too-attentive ear… in other words, anything touched by pride is insidious and if you aren’t careful your heart will fly off like little boys after butterflies. He actually said that, isn’t that so awesome? “Like little boys after butterflies”! Very Suddenly Last Summer. His heart followed his eyes… that’s Job again.

Our Miss Julian said that a person who doubts is like a storm-tossed sea and the only thing that tormented the devil was human tears. Then why can’t the sea itself be made of tears? That’s what I’d like to know.

Kelly was a frustrated artist.

(Join the club.)

I think her idea was she’d somehow come into her artistic self during that six-month recess. Which may have been too ambitous. Kelly was deeply afraid of failure. What if in the end she had nothing to show for her efforts but a painting or two or a shelf of unfired ceramic pots or a notebook of mediocre koan responses and haikus?

Her resentment toward me was palpable. I totally understood. There she was having a dark sabbatical-sabbath of the soul, and there I was, the housebound blob who bore witness. She was naked and vulnerable, hard-bodied and weary from too much desperation-yoga, waiting like a trembling innocent for the cosmos to provide order and direction — who wants to do that in front of the Pillsbury Couchboy? I became the court stenographer (I was already the jester) charged with meticulously keeping the minutes of her myriad creative miscarriages. Ideally, Kelly’s struggle was of the sort best played out on Walden Pond or in a converted Nova Scotian lighthouse. Or maybe one of those forest lookouts on Desolation Peak that Kerouac and Snyder used to favor. I stayed as far out of her way as humanly possible, even pulling a teenage disappearing act whenever she was home — we kept separate bedrooms for years — and she was home a lot. It only made things worse. To her, my conspicuous absence felt like a surveillance camera.

That isn’t to say we weren’t civil. We shared meals together — my wife believed dinner with place mats and cloth napkins was the last bastion of family life — and put up a unified front for Ryder as best we could. But subtle and not so subtle indications of household friction couldn’t be avoided. At table, she was spikey. She gossiped about friends and acquaintances, the anecdotes always featuring what the boyfriends and well-off husbands did for a living. X was a workaholic—“He spent three months researching conjoint therapists!”—and Y traveled to far-flung places yet always managed to bring his significant other. “He goes to Europe every month for business and takes her with him.” I listened, friendly and wide-eyed, with the dumb, vicarious smile of a freeloading younger brother fallen on hard times.

My only value was playing Mr. Mom, a role I happened to relish. Finally, something I didn’t have to apologize for. I just loved being Ryder’s dad. During holidays and school vacations we spent hours playing board games of our own invention, creating miniature worlds whose domains stretched from hardwood floor to backyard grass and beyond. We rented Cukor films and provided scatological commentary. I adored taking him for bacon and eggs at the local greasy spoon and he was thrilled when I allowed him a sip of coffee. Of course, I couldn’t resist dragging him to bookstores. The more rare a book was — the more expensive, the more exquisite — the greater his interest.

I look back now and see that time with him as an extraordinary blessing.

The result being that Kelly was free — to do, go, be whatever. I know that she used that opportunity to flush a few trysts from her system, consummate a few flirtations. But it wasn’t enough to be, Kelly needed to become. She got deeper into her practice. Went on retreats to gain esoteric knowledge from visiting tulkus. She was of dedicated service to the sangha, spearheading a fundraiser to repair the zendo’s leaky roof. She taught incarcerated women how to meditate and got certified in Ashtanga. Began chanting and singing — kirtan. (Everyone said, “That voice. Where did it come from?”) I watched her body continue to grow lithe, long, sculpted. Her yoga for underprivileged women class became so popular it was written up in The Chronicle. Ryder squealed with delight when he saw the above-the-fold photo of his mom.

But still, she languished. She complained that everything was busywork — everything a distraction. She thought she’d had lift-off from the lip of the void but there she was again. Then, in the middle of her leave, something shifted. A friend of hers from the Zen Center visited elementary schools, teaching Buddhist fundamentals to kids from Richmond, Larkspur, Millbrae, Palo Alto, San Rafael. He was a very sweet guy — Kelly had once introduced us at a Metta Hospice lecture — very hyper, very personable. His shtick was to make Buddhism accessible, to spread the dharma and make it fun. The gig he created for himself filled a niche. When Kelly asked if she could tag along, he was delighted.

She was captivated from Day One. She couldn’t believe how these kids were getting it. They were jacked up, dancing around and playing music, shouting “Impermanence Rocks!” and generally strutting their crazy kid-wisdom stuff. Toward the end of each class, her “dharmabud” led them in guided meditation, which they took to like ducks to water. They even got the concept of Nothingness and the death of the ego, sitting like little fortune cookies in perfect lotus position. The guy would play “Nothing Compares 2 U,” remember that? Well, Kelly just bawled like a baby. She said the experience put her in touch again with that feeling she’d almost forgotten, the joyful spirit of beginner’s mind. She got blown back to those early days of study and devotion, when the magnificent, irrefutable logic of the Four Noble Truths cracked open her head. (I always tell people in AA that once you work the Steps, move on to the Truths.) See, Buddhism’s like anything man puts his hand to; one day you wake up and everything’s turned to shit. The magic’s been replaced by cliques of assholes with policies, slogans and gibberish, empty rituals. I think Kelly might have been feeling some of that, the emptiness of it, the is-that-all-there-is-ness of her practice (though not in a good way), and the kids reset her clock. God bless the children. [sings] “God bless the child who’s got his own! Who’s got his own…”

Still, I wondered how this fellow managed to slip Buddhism into the curriculum. Wasn’t that a violation of church and state? As liberal as folks tend to be around this part of the country, you’d have to be naïve not to expect resistance from some of the parents, right? But Kelly said that Dharmabud was very careful not to push Buddhist doctrine, at least not directly. He wasn’t converting anyone. He just wanted to share the concept of compassion, to convey the preciousness of life. He covered his bases: meditation equaled nothing more than the traditionally vaunted “quiet time.” Probably his strongest message was how Mother Earth needed respect and taking care of. (I suppose a Republican might have a problem with that.) He made the Buddha into a generic but dignified cartoon character who carried the message.

The pediatric Magical Mystery Tour — which suited this Namaste-at-home dad just fine! — came along at the perfect time, giving my wife some much-needed juice. As the licensed in-house observer, I sensed the groundwork for something being laid. Suddenly, Kelly got very busy. (Which was great, in that she was no longer crawling up my ass on an hourly basis.) When she wasn’t “managing” the zendo, teaching yoga or doing her jail thing, she tagged along with Dharmabud, auditing his classes. She started missing our mandatory suppers and made up for it by “intensives” with Ryder just before bed. Whenever I stood by the door to listen, it was all bell, book and Buddhism. She even gave pop quizzes. It reminded me of those awful movies she used to watch over and over—Little Buddha and Kundun—starring the once and future Dalai Lama and his tutors.

I don’t want to sound bitchy. The truth is, she was completely devoted to our son. Things were chugging along famously until I learned that Kelly was keeping something from me — my codependent, beleaguered, overachieving wife had been tutoring at the women’s prison for months, and now was poised to continue the work.

At San Quentin.

The next day he was late for our session, and entered hurriedly.

Sorry — ran into the Gossiping Monk. We had an exchange of information… please omit from final transcript! I don’t want people identifying him.

Oh, before I forget, something popped into my head when I was up the hill that is weirdly amazing. You’ve read Gary Snyder, the poet? He’s extraordinary, far better for my money than Jeffers. He’s still alive — Snyder not Jeffers. (Jeffers had a place up here in Carmel, Hawk Tower. Built it himself. A real he-man. And I understand Ferlinghetti still owns the cabin Jack wrote about in Big Sur.) Snyder and Ferlinghetti are pretty much the last of the living Beats, at least the ones I consider to be of any pivotal importance. You know, historically. Ginsberg and Burroughs died just a few months of each other, back in ’97; Huncke went the year before. I would have loved to have met Lucien Carr1, the one who killed the teacher that was stalking him. Carr and Burroughs were friends from St. Louis, I think — the tangled web of all these folks, the genealogy of it blows the mind. You knew that Kerouac helped cover up the murder? There’s supposedly a book about it that Burroughs and Jack wrote back in the forties, but no one’ll publish it.2 Now that would make a wonderful addition to the bookmobile! I would’ve wanted to meet Carr before Neal Cassady… Friggin’ Ferlinghetti’s outlived ’em all, he’s older than these hills, but’ll probably go to Snyder’s memorial. Tough old buzzard. And no estimable talent whatsoever! When I think about the Beats — Lamantia, McClure, Corso, Whalen,

and some of the marginal women… all the Beat women were marginal, all of the women and most of the men! Except Carolyn — Cassady — who’s never going to die, not as long as she’s pawning Jack’s and Neal’s bones for cash money. What a piece of work! There’s Joanne Kyger, Snyder’s ex (I think she still lives up in Bolinas, a lot of them did, Creeley and Whalen lived up there, Lewis Warsh, a whole slew), there’s di Prima and Annie Waldman… anyway, what popped into my head when I was up on the hill was, Snyder’s pseudonym in The Dharma Bums is Ryder—“Japhy Ryder,” remember? And all this time I’ve been thinking Djuna Barnes and her novel when it almost had to be Japhy Ryder who gave my son his name! Well, how do you like that? Which just shows to go you the fallibility of the proverbial eyewitness. Makes you really start to wonder. It’s all a dream, anyway, no? A broken mirror-puzzle. We just reshuffle the pieces. Who was it that said, “Reality is a possibility I cannot afford to ignore”? Leonard Cohen? Or maybe it was Lily Tomlin.

Kerouac and Snyder were close. Jack looked up to him. Snyder was older and became Jack’s mentor in all things Zen. I haven’t thought about any of this in a long time, Bruce, you’re bringing it all to the surface… You know, Kerouac’s a god of mine, that’s why I go on about him. And I know my Kerouac! What’s disgusting is when the fancy literary folk write their essays for the Sunday book reviews, bloviating on how in love they were with Jack when they were kids, how On the Road changed their lives, yadda yadda — or should I say Yaddo Yaddo! You’ll notice how they usually grace us with their perfect opinions on the anniversary of the man’s death or when they have a new book out, and you’re reading about how much they loved him and thinking it’s a tribute when suddenly they turn on him. These tributes to the man who changed their lives suddenly become snarky critical refutations of his work! O they confess to loving and emulating him back in the day when they were feckless undergrads or during their own bullshitty rucksack moment—but then they grew up and put away childish things and destroyed whole forests so as to grace us with their neutered, mannered, irrelevant oeuvres. Their hors d’oeuvres. Five paragraphs in they cut this giant down to size as a mere folly of their youth. See, with me it was the reverse! Exact opposite. Do you remember Capote saying that nasty thing about Jack’s methodology (he said a lot of nasty things), “That’s not writing, that’s typing”? In my own feckless youth, I happened to agree. Being the precocious kid I was, I’d have taken “A Tree of Night” over On the Road all day long. Because On the Road is rather terrible, kind of an awful book in terms of sheer writing, particularly if you measure it against his others, Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, Windblown World, Lonesome Traveler. In a hundred years, Visions of Cody will be the one, that’s his Everest. And the poems! Better than Ikkyu. And the paintings! Blake looks like a child next to Jack… But you see, I was a little snot, a classicist, and it took me the longest time to come around. Then Big Sur—Jack’s beautiful, beautiful novel — sort of kicked the door down and in I ran. And I knew without a doubt this man will cast a shadow larger than Whitman, this man is Whitman. I don’t care too much for the others, sorry to say, not to cast aspersions, even on Mr. Snyder. I was never cool enough for Burroughs or Jewish enough for Ginsberg. None of the rest really matter — except the strange case of Neal Cassady, of course. He’s indispensible. I had a sort of divine vision once that if it were possible to exhume his body, one would find it transformed to vellum, in true Ginsbergian holiness, because at the end he was no longer human, Jack the princess had kissed Neal the frog and restored him to the original, magisterial state of what he was meant to be: a book, a book of life. If I could write, I might try a little Borgesian fairy tale along those lines… O, the Beats, the Beats, the Beats! If you took everyone away and were left with just Kerouac, you’d be just fine. All would be right with the windblown world.

All right. Okay. Good. Sorry.

I want to get back to my wife’s preoccupation with incarcerated living.

I never had a wonderful feeling about it — her teaching there. Not even the women’s jail. I’ve seen enough documentaries on MSNBC to know bad things happen on prison visits. You don’t hear about every incident, that’s all. Teachers raped in the prison library, raped and killed by lifers. Just because there’s a bunch of guards doesn’t mean a thing. These guys are barely making minimum wage. Most of them are crooks too, creeps and sadists. When Kelly was doing her thing at the Women’s Correctional in San Mateo I didn’t have too bad a vibe. But San Quentin took it to a new level.

Kelly hooked up with something called the Prison Dharma Network. The PDN went around the country giving meditation and mindfulness workshops to folks who were locked up. They called their teachings Path of Freedom. The Jewish mafia of the Middle Way sat on the board. You know, all the roshi — Rosh Hashanah machers—Ram Dass, Goldstein, Glassman, Kornfield, Salzburg. The PDN put Kelly through a fairly intense orientation but it was nothing like the one the staff gave her at San Q: what to do if a riot breaks out, what to do if you’re taken hostage, that sort of thing. Part of the allure was ego. It was kind of a trophy gig — frontline bodhisattva service. It was sexy. That as a woman she had the balls to suck it up and walk straight into the belly of the beast… for the enlightenment of others. I think she dug people at the Zen Center knowing too. Gave her a major uptick in the incestuous world of the sangha, where competition for humility was dog-eat-dog.

The tape recorder stopped but new batteries didn’t help. I had to go into town to buy a replacement so we broke for lunch.

I was raised in Santa Ana, California.

An altar boy.

You can see where this is going.

I was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. That’s why I was on disability. I had panic attacks for years, sometimes ten in a day. If you’ve ever had a full-blown panic attack, you know that means ten times a day you are one-hundred percent certain you are going to die. Like, immediately. Don’t have ’em anymore, thank God, and I’m not on meds either. When it comes to victims of child sex abuse, PTSD is pretty much guaranteed. You can set your watch by it. That means night terrors, bedwetting, cutting, bulimia — the whole package. We had wonderful lawyers. From the minute they filed, they made sure we had top-flight care, that we saw the best of the best. I got put on a prescription cocktail that settled my nerves. One of the side effects was weight gain (and excessive cocksucking). Hey, I’ll pick weight gain over night terrors and panic attacks all day long.

That’s what I was waiting for during the couch potato Zen years — the settlement. Took about five years. We had a few suicides along the way, oh yes. Some of the man-boys were just too damaged to hold out. Their hearts flew off like little boys after butterflies. You’d think it’d be easy to sit at the depot and wait for the money train. It wasn’t. The lawyers went for the gold but for all we knew, we’d get the call one morning telling us the gold had turned to brass, tin or dogshit. And there wouldn’t be a thing we could do about it. Settlements were coming in from churches all over the country, seemed like every day it was on the news or in the papers. And some of these payouts came in low, I’m talking very low five-figures, which was not the outcome our guys were shooting for. No one knew the formula, how they arrived at the numbers, it seemed so random. One fellow from Cincinnati used his money to go to Club Med — five times in one year. They found him in the bathtub of his room in Cancún. Overdosed. After he took the pills he slit his wrists and wrapped a plastic bag around his head. What they call overkill.

I was in the choir with a boy named Ramón. His family moved from Santa Ana after only about six months so I didn’t get to know him that well. But I’m sure the heavenly fathers got in their licks. O they were jackals! Ramón’s family settled in Covington, Kentucky, God knows why, must have had relatives there because no one moves to Covington, Kentucky. And that’s where the real damage was done — the diocese in Covington. They fucked, sucked, diced and sliced that poor little Mexican kid to an inch of his life. When he was of age, he was pissed. It’s good to get angry. It’s healthy. He sued the shit out of ’em. But the trouble with Ramón was he jumped the gun. I don’t know how he found his lawyers. Wound up settling in ’93, before all the public hue and cry. At that time, see, people still were saying it couldn’t be true. That it was all hyperbole or plain bullshit. I think he got $25,000. What’s that, 15,000 after the lawyers get theirs? Good representation—stellar representation — is essential. An attorney has to know his way around these lawsuits, it’s become a very specialized area. The attorneys learned from the mistakes of those who preceded them. Poor Ramón! Goes and hires a fellow who’s an expert in marine law! How about that! And they just sue too early. See, back in the day anyone who made an accusation got tarred with being fringy or perverted. The Church had the total upper hand. They were moving priests around like musical chairs, we only found this out later, it all came out — to Mexico, Scotland, Manitoba… hell, they were moving them around in California. To Fresno and Riverside from LA, what have you. The early bird most assuredly did not get the worm, not with these lawsuits. The priests got the worm, boy did they ever! Sucked the come right out of it. So you see it literally didn’t pay to be too far ahead of the curve. Failed suits like Ramón’s paved the way. They were the pioneers. The “visionaries” who went blind to spite their face.

Ramón tried to sue again but got his case thrown out. That was just a few years ago. Waited too long! No, that wasn’t it… there was a double jeopardy issue. A new lawyer promised he’d find a way around it but didn’t. We still keep in touch, sporadically. He sends me these wacky, hypersexual novelty postcards, the type you can buy in a porn shop. He doodles tiny hearts and cocks on them — oy. I never had the heart to tell him I walked away from the courthouse a wealthy man. If he does know, he’s never mentioned it. That kind of discretion is actually typical Ramón. He’s never asked me for money, anyway, though if he did I wouldn’t deny him. It’d make me feel good to help. The last I heard (it’d be comical if it wasn’t so heartbreaking) was that one of the guys who was a part of my settlement who loves to follow this stuff said that Ramón’s been suing the Church, acting as his own counsel. He said they were going to nail him on vexatious litigation, but Ramón doesn’t give a shit. I have to admit, the kid’s got heart. The diocese in Covington eventually forked over $200,000 per plaintiff. It ain’t the lottery but it’s better than whatever Ramón got. But he seems to land on his feet. I won’t start worrying until I get a postcard from Club Med.

Can you hear the rain?

There — hear it now?

A big storm’s coming.

How grateful I am to God for making Big Sur!

Big Sur took me back, you know. Spit me out once, and broke me too. But took me back…

It’s really the strangest place. You can not come here to be healed. That’s the mistake most people make. Big Sur does not feel your pain; it doesn’t even notice your awe. It’s easy to leave here worse than you came. Those who do best are the ones who allow themselves to be erased.

The waves were tall as buildings today, did you see them? Before we met, I parked the van on a turn-out near Bixby Canyon, a half-mile from one of the dizzying, drizzled bridges, towering and hallowed, jaundiced and strange — forgive my poor poetry, but the topic always gets me talking like a fool — their stony span and scope otherworldly, like something from a Piranesi etching. I sat and meditated on the place — Big Sur — and had the revelation that something about it was wrong, which I suppose is the normal human reaction to the unknowable. The sea distorted everything, and set off a chain reaction that charged and changed the very molecules of the air itself, the landscape too, until nothing resembled anything ever seen before… you couldn’t put your finger on it except to say it was wrong. Those waves: at times they rolled north to south, contrary to God’s order, like mischievous ghosts running alongside the shore instead of crashing into it — rats through a witch’s wet hair! And there I was stuck staring, like a child hidden in the shadows watching the forbidden rites of some malevolent cultus supervised by the impetuous, unforgiving, predatory chorus of those waves, the whole scene so majestically wrong, a sacred, supererogatory mess, and me, struck dumb by an unnamable, eons- old sorrow… the permanent impermanence of water engaged — enraged — in ancient, secret activity. The waves took the shape of hunchbacked buffaloes, bristle-foamed brides and grooms in tumbling betrothal, spewing and spuming their vows, exchanged in a cauldron of blackness, each driven in succession by the taskmaster moon to spawn upon the shore then freeze upon reaching it — sudden death upon sand and rock. If that membrane of water could speak it would plash “I go no further no further I go,” slipping back to primordial jellyfish’d infancy, hibernating in Silence before rearing up again, slowly then speedily, all gaudy and cocky, imperious, thundering its bouillabaisse of white noise! Then: all business again — always, again and again and again all business — the business of predatory indifference — in poised, crashing lunge, snatching what it can of my comfort. Endlessly watchable, I watch, we watch, so easily mesmerized by artful anarchy, the mindless, mindful in-and-outness of it, for what else is there but in-and-outness, anarchy, death and indifference? But Jack already said it all, didn’t he? In the “ocean sounds” poem at the end of Big Sur. “One day, I will find the words, and they will be simple.” That’s Jack too, from one of his letters…

I looked up at the Heavens, supreme and resplendent with dark latticed clouds and found nothing truthful in Dr. Williams’ neatly turned phrase “an excrement of some sky.” For the smallest part of this one, the only one we’ll ever know until those other unknowing clouds come, could make nothing but midnight blue Silence—

I know.

The words are just a defense.

I promise I’ll step up the pace.

You’ve been so patient.

I suppose I am finding this more difficult than… anticipated.

I keep saying that.

It’s hard to focus.

Too much sadness.

Know who I was thinking about when I woke up just now? Basho the poet. Do you know Basho? Have you read the haikus? Basho was the absolute god of the Beats — they all wanted to be him. Kerouac came closest but I suppose Snyder’s taken the crown, out of sheer longevity. In sixteen-hundredsomething, Basho’s house burned down. That’s when he went on the road. I have it somewhere in the van, a chapbook, a lovely limited edition of Basho’s The Recordings of a Skeleton Exposed to Weather. Beat that, Beats!

Can I talk about my affair with Carolyn Cassady?

I know I’m skating around. Are you sorry you got yourself into this, Bruce? [laughs] I just can’t seem to approach it headlong. I suppose I could get right to it — the full catastrophe — I just don’t want to be rude and take too much of your time. But I promise I’ll get to it. Soon. First, let me tell you about this thing I had with Neal Cassady’s wife. It’s guaranteed to amuse. Then I’ll talk about… all the rest.

So there I was, falling for Kerouac head over heels — mind you, this wasn’t all that long ago! What can I say? I was a late-bloomer. The book that knocked me out, as I was telling you, was Big Sur. That novel’s actually become more of a draw for me to come back — here — than my Camaldolese hermit friends. When I make my pilgrimages, it’s to Jack’s spirit and the book that I come. To the beginner, I’d recommend Big Sur first… On the Road isn’t even on my shortlist! I know that sounds terrible. Did you know there are Madame Bovary haters? Mais oui. They’re of the opinion — people have beaucoup opinions out there! — that Flaubert loathed his own creations, from the Madame on down, and his contempt bleeds through and ruins the text. Corrupts his achievement. Another group considers Gatsby a novel that fails in its prose but triumphs in evoking a world and a time, a kind of ghost book that lingers like a scent made from flowers pressed between the lines, all fairy- and fingerprint dust. I’m in agreement! Oh, those F’d-up similes that fall so trippingly off the tongue! The glibness gets treacly once you’ve had your fill — which for me was around Page 2. Vomitous! I have a fitzsimile of my own, if you please: at his best, which is most often his worst (at least in Gatsby), Fitzgerald is like a too-congenial whore, wearing too many perfect gossamer gowns. Take that, Mr. Jazz Age! And you heard it here! (I actually believe I’d have made a pretty good critic. I really do think about books all the time and have formed my opinions with great care. Eventually, I may try my hand at an essay or two. Wouldn’t it be marvelous to publish a monograph with the “Vanzen” imprint?) To do what Fitzgerald did is an impossible trick and I’d put On the Road in the same camp. Does it evoke the ineffable? Does it evoke lost youth? Does it evoke the sights and sounds, the promise and magic of a time, an era, a world on the brink, of something mysterious and noble, numinous and new? Without question! Good Lord. Yes. Is it a wonderful novel? A resounding no! It’s an experience, not a novel. It’s a mess. Gatsby and On the Road are like owner manuals for products that can never be delivered. And yet, how beautiful! The spell they cast is diabolical, untouchable. The genius of it, to create a text, an illuminated text of words that somehow alchemize—atomize—into fragrance and music, that kick up the dust of the future and past, and the present too! Good Lord! Perfect mystery-tumbleweeds emitting the warm odor of nostalgia and the cold ardor of timeless, terrifying Silence… skeletons exposed to weather.

But enough about that.

I was telling you about my affair with the ancient widow of Neal Cassady aka Dean Moriarty, that square-jawed beefcake—Beatcake — bigamist fountainhead, automotive contortionist and cuckolded sex addict, that douche bag writer manqué who was Jack’s woman as well, his muse and creator. Jack’s man… who died on the wrong side of railroad earth’s tracks.

When I reached the end of Big Sur—“Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur,” the great heretical coda — when I finished reading that end-poem, awash in the Term Term Klerm Kerm Kurn Cow Kow Cash Cluck and Clock of it, oh what a staggering thing it is! — which, by the way, like wine and wafer, is no representation of Jack, but the very blood, body and brain of him, in those stanzas the man truly dug his own deathless, unintelligible, operatic, watery grave — when I got finis with Sur, I went straight to the Internet and found a website for the estate of Neal Cassady. And there it was… a real-time contact for Carolyn! I have no memory of the emotions that compelled me to send what I believed at the time to be a short, sweet, wryly seductive e-note. It was late, and I was actually here—at the hermitage — of course I was, on a star-tossed mercilessly typical Big Sur night. After firing off my communiqué, I went outside and stripped naked, delirious with joy, got my skin tasered by stellar wind while listening to the rapturous offstage massacre of waves being their usual demure, assassin selves — warriors unlike Arjuna, with never a moment of doubt.

Within an hour, I received a reply.

From her…

I was stunned out of my skin. Gob-smacked, as Carolyn would say, for she’d written back from England, where she made her home. ’Twas mid-morningtide in Blighty.

Now please keep in mind I had just finished that wonder of a book in which Carolyn is portrayed as “Evelyn” and I had a bit of a — no, I had a massive crush on the gal I came to know as the fag hag Iron Lady. So, I write back and she writes me and before you know it we are corresponding. Her emails sounded young, Bruce, young, smart and with it, and suddenly I get paranoid. As if maybe I’m unwittingly participating in some kind of Web thing someone wrote code for, you know, being duped by a promotional goof the publishers use to hawk new editions of The First Third or Off the Road (fag hag Iron Lady’s memoir) — half of me thinks I might be playing the fool for one of these newfangled interactive artificial intelligence ad campaigns getting written up in Wired. Remember too that in the initial throes of it, I was most likely drunk and had probably smoked a little, partaken of the chronic as my younger friends would say… plus, I’d just finished this glorious, glorious book and was so full of the Beats I was practically the fifth Beatle! I was horny for them, and lo and behold there I am having a sudden chat-fest, basically flirting with Neal Cassady’s wife! In my mind she’s not even his widow, all of them are still alive, and it’s all happening now—like something out of Philip K. Dick! But I’m still paranoidly thinking, you know, uhm, okay, if this isn’t some slick viral campaign then maybe someone hacked into the website, it’s a rogue program merely drone-responding to the pathetic battalion of geeks that have Roman candle crushes on “Carolyn Cassady”—who’s long dead. Of course! She’s dead! What was I thinking! I was swooning so hard, I hadn’t even bothered to check if she was still alive… all I had was a “contact” proving otherwise. I’d been “corresponding” with a rudimentary A.I. program that held up its end of the conversation with sad, schmucky groupies before eventually diarrhea-ing the humiliating contents all over the Web. Because how could it be possible that the real Carolyn Cassady, a wizened old woman, got it up for emailing—immediately responding—to strangers?

This went on for a month or so. (The Internet informed that Mrs. Cassady was alive and well.) I didn’t mean to imply there was anything sexual about it, of course there wasn’t, not that I didn’t feel sexual, Lord, I had a hard-on whenever I wrote her! Nope, nothing remotely immodest, in terms of content. I’m sure she sent the same incisive, vivacious emails to other fans but no one could take away from me what I considered to be fact: I was now, by definition — mine! — having a ménage à quatre with Neal, Carolyn and Jack. I’d have been the Ginsberg in the group. See, the miracle of Jack is that, from everything I know, from everything I intuit, he was a mess, and a not too friendly one. Kerouac was drawn to women but was so awkward around them, so deeply uncomfortable, so needy and nasty that he was a faggot by default. He was really kind of an alien, an extraterrestrial. The way he treated his poor daughter Jan! Shitting on her when she came to visit that first time — that only time? — she was just a kid! — disowning her to the end, can you imagine the pain of that young girl? Jesus, it’d have been more merciful if he’d killed her with his own hands. Both those boys — Jack Sundance and the Cassady Kid — had serious mommy issues. Ti Jean’s trouble was that he always felt like he was cheating on his mother. Gabrielle was his enduring love, his true wife. And Neal, well, the minute he got a gal pregnant, the minute she became a mom, he’d have to marry her on the spot, even if he was already married to someone else! Gotta do right by Mom! R-e-s-p-e-c-t. (Find out what it means to me.) Neal liked pimping his women — wives — Moms! — to Jack (to an extent). And the only real way Jack got off was sleeping with women who were “taken.” That was the pathology. You don’t need to be a therapist to figure that one out. Incest ruled the day. I’ve always thought of Carolyn as the Mother Superior of the Beats… Mother Superior — that says it all, don’t it?

After a few months, the emails tapered off. Carolyn was pushing 80. I started to worry that her health might be an issue. So I resolved to do something bold. I decided to travel to England to meet my pen pal. Why not? Money wasn’t a problem; anyway, I’d always wanted to visit the Lake District and see where Wordsworth and Coleridge hung out. Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, imagine being a homophobe and living there! But I was actually thinking in historical terms, literary history mind you, albeit minor literary history, and my idea was to write a piece about the whole experience for a journal or a magazine. The notion of how we met and my flying over to meet her struck me as just the sort of thing that might also be turned into a wonderful little independent film. So I wrote to her and said that it happened I was going to be in the Commonwealth — I never told her that she was the only reason I was coming — and would she be amenable to receiving a visitor? She said she would and that was that.

Have you seen photos of her? I mean, when she was younger? They’re in all the Beat biographies. There aren’t so many, nothing “iconic,” she wasn’t really a looker. I think probably no one really wanted to take her picture, she was kind of a Debbie Downer. A pain-in-the-ass snob with a stick up her ass. There’s nothing worse than a dumb snob, and prudish to boot. It seems like the same few photos are reprinted, over and over. She always looks like she had gas or was being forced to watch dogs copulate — that would be Jack and Neal! Or Neal and Allen. Or Allen and Jack. What stands out the most, in the shots I’ve seen, is her male energy. She looks stern, almost mannish. Which makes total sense, knowing all we know now. Of course the Bell’s palsy didn’t help the overall look.

When I called from London to confirm our appointment, I was beside myself. Welcome to Phil Dick’s Match-dot-com! It was the first time I’d actually heard Carolyn’s voice. She pleasantly offered directions to her place. She said she knew nothing about the “motorways” and the only route she could recommend was the approach from Windsor Castle. Which I thought was apt, because she was royalty — it didn’t matter that everyone but Neal thought she was a pill and a sonofabitch. She was still the Queen and always would be. And boy, did she let you know it!

She came to the door like a movie legend expecting her biographer, a cross between Barbara Stanwyck — there it was, that male, Stanwyck energy — and Doris Day (the latter-day Doris, the one I’ve seen in pictures with her doggies in Carmel Valley). She had a throwaway elegance, an aggressively pretentious modesty, as if her role model was Queen Elizabeth in those “rugged” shots in the Land Rover at Balmoral. After all, Carolyn had decades of experience being the grail, or the next best thing anyway, for thousands of fanboys like myself. She’d outlived her men, and in direct bloodline to the gods, had gained immortality herself—

She asked me in for “a cuppa and nibbles” and it wasn’t long before she turned on the poison spigot. I’m no Kipling, but I’ll do my best to give you a flavor…

[A hilarious impersonation of an American dowager followed, his voice taking on a sporadic, contrived “English” inflection] “By the time Neal was with the Pranksters, he just wanted to die. The trouble was, he no longer believed in suicide. His religion was against it. So he rolled busses, he kept ‘rolling’ busses. I told Kesey it was terrible what was going on but he didn’t want to hear it — Kesey stopped talking to me. They all stopped talking to me, heaven knows why. One day Neal showed up at my house without shoes, looking dreadful. I said, ‘Why are you still with Kesey?’ and Neal said, ‘Honey, people look at me and expect me to perform.’

“Allen was very close to my son. And Allen was lovely — for a time. But around 10 years before he died, he decided he wanted nothing to do with me. We named my son John Allen, after Jack and Allen. When John was a boy, he loved playing with Allen. When Allen was dying, John asked me what he should do because it’d been quite some time since they’d spoken. I said, ‘Call him!’ So John did and the person on the other end said, ‘You know, Allen would have loved to talk to you but he’s in a coma now.’ I’d go see Allen before he decided not to talk to me, he was in London all the time. He’d come for a reading or to do this or that, see one person or the other, and I’d go see him whenever he needed a pair of hands—he loved applause. He even went to Venice on a stretcher because they were giving him some kind of an award. As long as Allen was being honored, he’d show up! I told him years ago, if you can’t learn to accept the plaudits for what they are, it’ll never be enough, you’ll never be able to get enough praise. Right up to the end he thought he was worthless. He thought he was worthless when he was young, and he thought as much right before he died.

“Ferlinghetti decided to dislike me because I said his manager was ripping him off. He didn’t want to hear that. I was owed a lot of money and they finally paid something, like $500—they wrote me a check. I told him the fellow was stealing from him, but he liked the fellow and didn’t want to hear it. He’s got a different manager now. [He pretended I’d asked him a question] What do I think of whom? Joyce Johnson? Oh, her.3 She’s, well—ugh—I won’t get into that. They’re all whores and hangers-on. They slept with Jack once and all of them want to write about it. [Again, he pretended to be engaged by an invisible interlocutor] Who? Oh! That one always liked Burroughs — which probably explained why he stopped talking to me, and why I stayed away.”

They all seemed to stay away from Dame Fag Hag Iron Lady! I’m really channeling that cunt… What else did we talk about? Allen Ginsberg’s visit to Ezra Pound in Italy — Ginsberg and Pound must have been hungry for a pair of hands, no doubt! And Peter Ackroyd. I’m not sure how Mr. Ackroyd came up, but dear Carolyn had an opinion!

“Oh yes, he’s a wonderful biographer. I used to stay in his house in London whenever I was in the city. He’s written some marvelous books — the big one about Dickens — that’s the one he’s known for — I haven’t read the last few — he stopped drinking and now he’s so fat. We don’t talk anymore, I used to know why, but I can’t remember just now. Don’t care, really…

“Joyce Johnson and I do not speak. She’s jealous! My God, how those women lived! Sleeping around — with anyone. I never did that—

“The fact is, I never liked most of their writing much — the Beats—none of them—never did. Jack wrote a few good ones. But you see, I went to Bennington. I was a discerning reader. I was disciplined, I had a classical education. Do you know that’s what Neal was seeking? Classicism and a traditional life. He wanted respectability. That was how he wanted to live and we did that. Neal was able to get along with people of all classes. And I had respectable friends. That was all Neal really wanted. Neal never had a mother. That’s what he was looking for in me.

“I make good money now, they come and pick my house clean as a bone! I call them the ‘Archive People.’ The Archive People come and comb. And wow, do they know what they’re looking for. In one of my memoirs, I wrote about a book Jack liked, by Sri Au — Sri Audi-something — like the car — no, hold on, let me look… I’ve got one of his over here somewhere—Sri Aurobindo. I don’t know what the ‘Sri’ is all about, maybe it’s supposed to be ‘sir’ but someone got dyslexic. He was a sage, from India, one of those holy men who appealed to Jack. I wrote somewhere that Jack made notes in the margins of books — even I forgot, but the Archive People didn’t! They asked me if I still had it and I said I didn’t know so they came over and we looked, and they found it. O there’s quite a market! I sold a sticker, and this was a tiny ‘Can You Pass the Acid Test?’ signed by Neal, I think I got 75,000 after commission. You know, that was the little diploma they used to give… or maybe I got the 75 before commission. Gave it all to my son, told him to use it, because he was destitute. Don’t wait till I’m dead, I told him. See, he’s out there selling cars and no one’s buying.

“My money manager invests everything and my account is getting fat. There’s a Swedish rock star, the Elvis of his country. A friend told me she’d been to one of his concerts. She said that, behind him, right onstage, was an enormous picture of yours truly. Because this Swedish Elvis was influenced by Jack and everybody and even wrote some books, about ten, that became bestsellers over there. My friend saw that picture and said, ‘Carolyn, you should be making money off that.’ So I rang up the singer and said, ‘You need to pay me NOW.’ So we made a deal where he printed up a few hundred of these things and we both signed them and I’d get the money. But he was dragging his feet. I looked at his schedule and said, ‘Well I see you’re going to be in Stockholm. Wouldn’t that be a good place to meet up?’ So we did. And while we’re signing the posters, he asked if I wanted to go to his concert — they’re booked for years in advance — and I said, ‘Sure, can I bring a few friends?’ I wound up bringing a whole crowd! He announced me from the stage. There I was in the VIP section and 25,000 people roared and turned their heads to look at me. I asked my friend if she got a picture of all those people’s heads turning and she said, ‘No, Carolyn, I was taking a picture of you.’ The next day I was told that when it was announced that I was in the stadium, it was like some kind of religious experience for the audience. I said, ‘Well, if it was a religious experience for them, what do you think it was like for me?’ Anyway, we signed the posters but I started to think those things were probably going to take a long time to sell. I mentioned that to the Swedish Elvis and he told me to ring up his man, to settle the accounts. When I got the fellow on the line, he said, ‘Would you like it all in one? Or in two?’ One lump or two. I said, ‘Let me have it all in one.’ They cut me a check right there, for 18,000 pounds. O, the world is having a tough time, but not me!

“I always felt shy and worthless. Didn’t get over it till I was 65—that’s how long it took for me to speak in front of crowds. Because, of course, I was invited all the time. Ginsberg was just needy. At least I knew why I felt worthless. It was because my brothers molested me when I was 10. Took me 55 years to get over…

“Jack wrote Big Sur up in Larry’s cabin. And I’m in the book. A few years ago, some people made a documentary about it. They interviewed me for an hour-and-a-half but I was in the movie about two seconds. When I finally watched it, I almost fell asleep. Had to pinch myself it was so boring. They filmed me walking on the beach but it was the wrong beach. Why, I don’t know. I told them it was wrong but they didn’t seem to care. I guess they were going to fake it. But what’s the point of faking it if you’re making a documentary? That cabin isn’t even up there anymore. In Bixby Canyon. It’s a posh home now. There are a few buildings or whatnot where it used to be — but nothing in that film is authentic. I just don’t understand why people avoid facts! There I was walking down the wrong beach… and everyone they decided to put in the movie was so full of opinions. You see, I don’t have ‘opinions,’ I have knowledge. Jack wrote to me that he had to write that book. He felt good about it. The one thing I liked about that documentary was they flew me out from New York on EOS. I don’t think it exists anymore but it was all First Class — the only way to travel. My son met me there and we had a fabulous day in New York. Then we took the train to California and it was horrid.”

One day at San Quentin — she’d been doing her thing up there, and had managed to extend her sabbatical another six months — they told Kelly that a prisoner from the East Block had requested study time. The East Block is Death Row. Kelly thought that was a good omen. The great Buddhist teachers had always said the dharma was best practiced in the shadow of death-awareness. What better a pupil than one on Death Row?

It took some wrangling between the prison and the ACLU because the powers that be weren’t all that excited about the prospect of “Dead man meditating!” It was a control trip, that’s all. A few months went by… my wife didn’t have a clue what was going on. Then a friendly soul at the ACLU called to say their argument was a constitutional slam-dunk and the warden had capitulated.

Kelly told everyone she didn’t want to know the man’s crime or even his last name. “Half are probably innocent, anyway” was what she said to me. The prisoner was brought to a special room with a glass partition. (In her usual jail class, there were sometimes half a dozen inmates, and a guard but no barriers.) She described the condemned charge as “big and rough, sort of handsome, darty paranoid eyes, bookish glasses, big head of grayish Brillo pad hair, biker moustache.” His name was Ricky. The first thing he wanted to learn about was the Noble Truths. When he pronounced “noble” as in Nobel Prize, Kelly was touched. She said his nervousness was poignant; it’d probably been a while since he’d seen a woman, let alone spoken to one. Kelly was certain this kind of teaching would strengthen her own practice.

They met a handful of times. He was an eager student — meditation is popular on Death Row because it dangles the popular out-of-body-experience carrot of astral projection. Kelly began keeping a journal with an eye to writing something for one of the Buddhist magazines, Tricycle or Shambhala Sun. The subscription dharma rags love that shit; growing the sangha in Sing Sing is a perennial. Then she got more ambitious and set her sights on a book. A memoir (dual memoir, actually), part about her, part about Little Ricky. Well, mostly about her, but still, a kind of we’re-all-on-Death-Row type of thing. I thought the framework was immensely compelling: a condemned convict and a middle-aged Berkeley Buddhist engaged in the ol’ impermanence dialogue. Very cool.

I knew it was only a matter of time before she found out the nature of his crime — his crimes. She was making it too much of a thing not to know, which never works. The No! thing never works. I think she was being somewhat naïve. She was naïve, which happens to be her nature. But if she were really serious about writing a book, she’d eventually need to learn. She’d eventually have to ask. Their evolving intimacy alone, so to speak, would force the issue.

As it happened, her caged songbird was a child killer.

Do you remember Polly Klaas, the girl from Petaluma who was kidnapped? Well, Little Ricky was the monster who snatched her. Richard Allen Davis… remember him? If you’re from around here, you probably do. You’re certainly old enough.

Can I remind you of the case? Polly Klaas was having a slumber party. Twelve-year-olds. Around eleven at night, Little Ricky waltzes in with a knife and ties up the girls. Polly’s parents were home when it happened, how’s that for survivor guilt? If you’re a mom or a dad, you’ve got to be saying Kill me now. Swoops in and swoops out, Polly under his arm. Classic unthinkable bogeyman shit. Mrs. Klaas didn’t know anything was wrong until the morning, when she came in to see who wanted pancakes.

The weird thing is (in terms of the Winona connection) that Winona Ryder went up there after the murder — I want to say it was ’93—she went up to raise money for a reward. Because that’s where she’s from. Winona’s from Petaluma. And she did, she raised a lot. I want to say the final tally was $350,000. I don’t know the numbers, maybe fifty from the community, three hundred from Winona. Winona was awesome. A very kind thing to do, everyone appreciated it, you know, local girl made good, she didn’t come with a movie star vibe. None whatsoever. It hit her hard, hit everybody hard.

Little Ricky was of that genus of killers who begin their careers by torturing animals. Now imagine what the man-version of that boy would do to a lamb like Polly, a lamb who barely has its fur. A little lamb can certainly bring out the worst in a Little Ricky. A fellow just did the same thing down in Florida to a gal who was a few years younger than Polly. Went right into the house and grabbed her. Took her home and raped her, then wrapped her in garbage bags with her stuffed animal and buried her alive. I think about her. I think about Polly. I think about these things… Polly’s with her friends, they’re doing their girl-talk popcorn thing, playing music and dancing — safe. Maybe he punched her head to shut her up as they left the house, she’s under his arm, limbs slow-moving like a drugged crab, his adrenaline’s surging, he’s wasted, invincible, can’t believe he’s pulled this off. Drenched in alcohol, pot and meth, barely feels the lamb-crab moving on his hip, a pirate’s pride and booty — I’ll stop. Not from lack of candor, that’s one thing I’ve never been accused of. It’s more, well, you can’t know how far I go into thinking about these things, of inhabiting that sort of evil, examining it from every angle. Particularly of a child’s. It’s just so unpleasant, Bruce, but that’s how I’m wired. My “lingua franca.” If there’s a terrible place to go, I tend to be there. See, that’s what they did to me. I know it’s dreadful but that’s what I do, I conjure the details because I was killed, right around Polly’s age too. And I’ve had lots of time to think about it, I’m a student of murdered children, I inoculate myself. I know that’s selfish… well, the reasons I study them I suppose are two-fold. One is to honor and grieve for them — and honor and grieve for the child I once was before those monsters… I suppose another reason I go so deep is to celebrate that I made it through. That I survived. Because I believed for so many years beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’d be killed by those men. That God could not—would not save me. Because it was He who put me in harm’s way.

It was God who was intent on destroying me…

And if you’re wondering why Kelly didn’t recognize Richard Allen Davis when they met — I mean, from being in the news — well, her mom got sick right around the time of the abduction, that was when she started flying back east. Massively distracted. Plus, she had to stay out there whole hunks of time to deal with the hospice and the home liquidators, and with her brother. She knew about Polly’s murder — we never spoke much about it — knew from the Learys about the Winona fundraiser. But it all happened during this period of difficulty for her and never really landed on her screen.

He looked as if he was going to continue, but grew quiet. He stared out the window. After what felt like 10 minutes, I quietly left to use the restroom. When I came out, the door was open; was he gone? No — just letting in fresh air.

He smiled at me as he brewed some tea and smoked a roach. I declined his offer.

Pardon my trance.

Needless to say, the crimes and misdemeanors of Little Ricky put a dent in Kelly’s mood. But it was more than a fender bender. It was a full-on karma crash.

Suddenly, she didn’t have the stomach for it — who would? But her pride was tangled up. How could she reconcile the mandate of sharing the Buddha’s teachings, of campaigning for the enlightenment of all beings, with the horror and rage she felt toward the animal that slaughtered Polly Klaas? And what about her project? I know the book was on her mind. She didn’t dare broach it because she didn’t want to sound narcissistic. I know that in her hour of the wolf, my wife still thought the book was essential (which I think it was), not just as an expression of her creativity and development as a Buddhist and a woman but as a tool to work through this terrible dilemma. It seemed to be one of those classic at-a-crossroad crises. You know, what doesn’t kill your practice makes it stronger. But how can I face that monstrous piece of shit? That was her most pressing concern. She couldn’t seem to build a bridge from where she was to where she needed to be, knowing what she knew. So she went back and forth between abandoning the book and resuscitating its high hopes.

Kelly sought counsel from her teacher, who, like most roshis in the Bay Area, was a late-sixtysomething Jew from the East Coast. He said that her work with prisoners was a gift. She wanted him to talk about Richard Allen Davis specifically but he deliberately wouldn’t, invoking all prisoners instead. You know, “the dharma doesn’t come with strings attached.” That was the teaching. I thought it was smug and heartless. To me. No compassion, just bullshit. I’m just saying.

My wife continued her lessons with Davis. She was losing weight, puking before and after she saw him. And Little Ricky knew something was wrong. Kelly said she had a parasite, which made her even more disgusted with herself. That she didn’t have the balls to say something, anything—even Go fuck yourself! — was eating away at her. And Little Ricky was concerned, he was filled with metta, he was genuinely worried about her! He told her to make sure she saw a doctor and maybe she shouldn’t come back until she was better. Finally, she got too sick to handle it. She never returned, not to San Quentin or any of the jails. I remember wishing at the time that she wouldn’t go back to the zendo and that phony roshi either.

I read in People that Polly’s favorite book was Little Women. Winona starred in a film adaptation. It had a dedication to Polly at the end.

To all the murdered Little Women—

The halfway point in her sabbatical had been reached.

Kelly decided that her path was to teach “secular” Buddhism in the schools, like her friend. When she told him she was striking out on her own, Dharmabud said he was thrilled. But I learned through the grapevine that he was stung (don’t get me started on the whole sangha jockeying-for-power thing). My wife was on the rebound from the trauma of San Quentin, a colossal failure in her eyes. Now she had other fish to fry. She knew she was encroaching on Dharmabud’s territory, co-opting his shit, and struck a kind of warrior pose to justify her actions. She walked around the house saying it wasn’t possible for her to step on her friend’s toes, how could teaching the fundamentals of meditation to children be a negative in any way? Her argument kind of boiled down to “this town and the job of enlightening it is big enough for both of us.” Dharmabud did a slow burn. He got mad at her, then mad at himself for being so proprietary—attached—in the first place. His teacher (some other Brooklyn-transplant roshi) told him that an assertion of Self was the cause of his suffering. Hence, Dharmabud redoubled meditation and seva. What a farce! He ended the Impermanence Rocks! tour entirely, so Kelly won by default. She began with farther-away schools, ones that had been overlooked by her mentor because of their geographical inconvenience. Gave her time to gain self-confidence, like Sylvester Stallone in training. Impermanence Rocky!

She ran into an old editor-friend at a party. After a few mysterious meetings in the city, Kelly came home with a bottle of wine and an announcement — she’d been given a $20,000 advance from Chronicle Books for a memoir about being a menopausal, bisexual, Berkeley-bodhisattva. She would write about being adopted. She would write about her cancer (six years in remission). She would write about her affairs. She would write about our son. She wanted to write a lot about our son — what it was like to raise a boy with her gay male partner. She was even screwing up her courage to unravel the nasty Little Ricky experience… but she wanted the overarching theme to be Buddhist thought, practice and doctrine. That was where she lived, it was the landscape surrounding the long road that brought her to where she was now: introducing meditation and metta into elementary schools. Kelly wanted to expose herself, warts and all, the trials and tribulations, and the healing. She’d been asked to write a book! She couldn’t believe her good fortune. It was as if the Universe rung a prayer bell, summoning her to put everything on the table for that sacred, invisible tribe—readers.

You go, girl!

Suddenly, I wasn’t in the way anymore.

She was a thousand pounds lighter and the transformation was lovely to behold. Whatever troubles we had, I always wanted my wife to be happy. (I still do, though it’s impossible now.) That was a constant. It was nice too because before the settlement, I was really marinating in my own shit. Waiting for Godot and the call from my attorneys. So any rays of light were welcome.

One night over dinner, Kelly said she needed to reach out to Dharmabud. She’d decided to call her book Impermanence Rocks and wanted his blessing. That came as a surprise because the working title had been Nirvanarama. (Which I rather liked, particularly because of the felicitous Rama pun. An alternate was Divine Mess, which she rejected as “too Bette Midler.”) Kelly claimed that her friend wouldn’t—couldn’t—object. Plus, she contended that by removing the exclamation point she had rejiggered the phrase’s entire meaning. Without the ejaculatory punctuation, it was no longer juvenile. Impermanence Rocks had a plaintive, stately quality to it, nearly ironic, as if reminding that one can be shipwrecked on the shoals of impermanence as surely as anything else. Though she did decide to reinstate the exclamation point for the chapter on how she brought kiddie dharma to a whole new level.

She already had a dedication in mind: “For Stewart [aka Dharmabud], who gave me the match to light the fire.”

Nope — not Buddhist enough…

“For Stewart, who brought me to puja.”

Naw. People might think Stewart and I are a couple.

“For Mother, who speaks to me each day from Silence.”

No. Not light enough/too New Age cliché-hokey. And a lie.

“For my teacher, Maurice Epstein Roshi.”

Right, that’s it… keep it simple, stupid!

My wife informed the school district that she wouldn’t be returning to her old teaching position. Instead, she asked them to consider appointing her mistress of ceremonies for the oldest established impermanent floating crap game in the Bay Area. The new, improved version now included yoga for the 2nd-grade set.

Get your ya-yas out!

A home-schooled Ryder was the precocious recipient of Mom’s private intensives. He became a kind of proving ground (I guess you could say more of a living laboratory), not just for Impermanence Rocks! but Kelly’s book as well. The whole house was a work-in-progress. We were incredulous at his sophistication in embracing some of Buddhism’s more subtle concepts, and that made my wife think. It was common knowledge that when it came to learning foreign languages, kids left adults in the dust — so why not teach them ethics and empathy? Kelly began to see herself as a promoter of what she believed was a radical new way to educate children in the spiritual realm. Based on whatever Ryder sparked to, she burned CDs of herself narrating Buddhist texts for her toddlers to listen to at the end of class while powering down in savasana. Kelly became the de facto ambassador for the growing “Armies of Awareness,” a phrase she trademarked.

Ryder hung out at the zendo and became a favorite of Kelly’s teacher, who whimsically suggested we might have a tulku on our hands. That’s someone of high rebirth. I never really knew if the teacher was serious but I think Kelly believed he was. Made her prideful. Ryder even “sat” and they just marveled at his focus. He was really coming along, under Kelly’s tutelage. All the women had crushes (and the men too), they absolutely doted over him. He was a gorgeous kid. Handsome. And I have to say pretty amazing because none of it went to his head. For him, it was like swimming or playing the piano, he just took to it. Ryder was what they call a “natural”—I think he could’ve been a big guru when he got older, not the bad kind, but a true teacher, with followers. People would have followed him anywhere, he had an innate charisma. Ryder was one of those rarities, a born leader with a keen mind. And completely book crazy too. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. He went through that period boys do when they read with a flashlight under the covers.

One night I asked what he was reading. It was Songs of the Saints of India, a book Kelly gave him. But on any given night it was a medley of Huckleberry Finn and the Watchmen comic books and even Kelly’s favorite, Chögyam Trungpa — Allen Ginsberg’s and Pema Chödrön’s teacher. He handed it to me. As I flipped through, I saw that he’d made annotations.

“Did you know that to Ram,” he said, “everybody stinks? Ram said they stink like pus from pimples. Or diarrhea from your butt.”

“Nice.”

He laughed.

“But Ram loves us anyway, Daddy! Bodies are smelly, and it doesn’t matter if they’re alive or dead — they stink. Ram said everything was stinky, even honey. Even milk from a sacred cow stinks.”

“Okay. Uhm yeah, right on.”

“Ram said the only thing that made people untouchable was if they couldn’t love.”

As for my wife, she wowed ’em at the schools. Her reputation and minor fame preceded her. Plus, she was now duly certified; she’d acquired some kind of district license that Mr. Unenterprising Woo-Woo Dharmabud never got around to applying for. Which opened more doors because these days you can’t just stroll onto school grounds, not even in Berkeley. Too many issues of liability.

She hatched a scheme to go national. Her plan was to visit school districts all over the country and provide a template of the Armies of Awareness “Compassion Revolution.” At no cost, of course. The economic downturn was in her favor. Cities were so strapped for cash that teachers were paying for crayons and Kleenex out of their own pockets. (That’s still happening.) She’d go into some of those lavatories — they were a disgrace. Hellacious places, toilets clogged with shit, in shards from vandalism. In order for their kids not to go without, teachers bought juice for homeroom with their own money. They bought glue and glitter for art class, lightbulbs and Scotch tape… Jesus. Some of the teachers told Kelly they were doing this back in the ’80s and everything got steadily worse after the lottery was supposedly coming to the rescue. The lottery came and things got worse!

I audited classes at a few of the formerly Dharmabudless start-ups and have to say that Kelly was pretty fucking slick. She soothed the savage Ritalin beasts, made ’em into little bhaktas faster than you could say puff the magic drag queen. The tapped-out, stressed-out educators got a respite in the bargain… a little downtime to reboot, before making the next Safeway run for nutritious snacks and yellow Ticonderoga No. 2s.

Kelly figured the memoir would take a few years so in the meantime self-published a Zen children’s book she’d been working on called How It Can Dance! It was filled with quirky koans—“Does an Awfully Messy Room Have the Buddha Nature?”— loved that one — along with Kelly’s distinctively squiggly, faux-naïf illustrations. (I take full credit for sneaking in a poem from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues and an “upside-down” nonsense rhyme by Kabir, the cantankerous saint of Varanasi.) Mom drew Ryder à la Jules Feiffer — she stole from the best — as the prototypical great-grandchild of the Beats, and her sweet, fanciful narrative allowed him to surf from page to page with beginner’s-mind alacrity and charm. He had a blast… though again I’m compelled to say that Ryder’s exuberance remained sunny and pure. Not a prideful bone in his body. Don’t get me wrong — all kids like to please their moms but he somehow struck a balance between the scholarly and the Oedipal. I’ve tried to do that all my life and failed! Anyway, I kept a close watch on that heart of mine — one of my duties as househusband, don’t you know — and can proudly attest that our son’s head stayed firmly on his shoulders.

Kelly went on a How It Can Dance! book tour that she organized herself, from Seattle to San Diego and every place in-between. She arranged for local library readings and hawked it out of vitamin barns, co-ops and daycare centers. Sold it from her car for God’s sake.

We were on a budget, notwithstanding the advance on the memoir and my disability checks. You know how the money thing goes. I admit I was getting a little wiggy. I must have gained, oh, close to 45 pounds. I put in a lot of time on the porch in a rocking chair that rumor had it once belonged to either Neil Young or Pigpen. (Got it at the flea market.) You know, my wife had an interesting relationship to my lawsuit. On the one hand, she said it was bad karma to be sitting on my ass waiting for reparations over something that happened as a result of karma anyway and that the case had turned all us plaintiffs into virtual eunuchs, which was the ultimate triumph of the abusers. Probably had a point. On the other, I knew she wasn’t above dreaming of the Big Win. With enough Merlot, Kelly’s thoughts wandered to India, a mainstay of her recurring encyclical money-pot grand tour. She loved to tease. She said that when my ship came in — always referred to as the Good Ship Lollipop—she expected no less than a first-class expedition. “And if that isn’t convenient for your schedule, Ryder and I will have a perfectly fine time by ourselves.” She always diva’d out when she drank Merlot. But no bullshit, Kelly considered the fact that she’d never traveled there to be a gaping hole in her CV. She desperately wanted to visit the cave where Siddhartha Gautama meditated; she longed to sit under the Buddha tree in Bodh Gaya. She wanted to go to the Deer Park in Sarnath where he gave his teachings, and to Sravasti, where he taught breath awareness meditation… and make the pilgrimage to Kushinagar, where the Buddha drew his last breath. Her fantasy itinerary for Ryder was catholic indeed, mixing elephant rides (like his beloved if recently outgrown Mowgli) with a visit to Varanasi to watch bodies burning on a ghat — a ritual for which Ryder, courtesy of Mom’s bedtime stories, had already seemed to have acquired a small but persistent curiosity.

After the third glass of wine she’d crinkle her eyes and stare at the moon, archly whispering, “Or maybe I’ll just bring a… ladyfriend.”

She was a hoot.

Oh and look, Bruce, I don’t want to give you the impression I had no life. When Kelly was on the road doing her book or teaching thing, I took breaks from the drudgery of the legal waiting game. I’d arrange for Ryder to have a sleepover at a friend’s then ride into the city to buy crack in the Tenderloin. Find a friendly porn shop with booths in the back for watching movies and get high. Kneel in front of the glory hole and wait for Mr. Right to poke his dick through… Suck-A-Mole not Whac-A-Mole, huh. Not exactly a self-esteem builder but you do what you gostta do. I acquired gonorrhea that way once, in the throat. Nice. Another time I got crabs in my eyebrows. You haven’t lived until you’ve almost blinded yourself with A-200 before finding out that Vaseline asphyxiates the little fuckers. Vaseline!

I was in the yard. What was I doing? I have no memory.

I know it was a Saturday, three weekends before the news of the settlement — O happy day! — though of course at the time, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that everything had fallen apart or the case needed to be refiled on a technicality and would take five more years to resolve.

I went back in the house. Why? No memory.

As I passed Kelly’s meditation room, something caught my eye. A chair, overturned on the floor. I went in to right it. Something stank — my foot skidded — it was shit, right next to the chair—on the chair. How did a dog—what dog—

Then I saw him, hanging from a rope.

No clothes… he wore no clothes.

— what’s this?

(My heart was racing but my mind was calm, observing.)

Rushed to lift — so heavy.

Dead.

Dead—

But what is dead? And what does dead mean—

I could smell him, and all manner of stinky things — that thing Ram said — actually the awesome poet Ravidas said it, or wrote it, anyway — about everything being stinky — emanating from the untouchable touchable body of my son — poo smells, horsey, germy, sandalwoody smells — a complete, fetid jumble. The sky is falling—the phrase came into my head and kept repeating — the sky is falling — so this is what they mean by that — he was a bag, heavy boxer’s punching bag, and I, me, a freak stuck in timespace, slow-dancing with that cold nude weight—How It Can Dance! — and if you’ve ever confronted this sort of thing (there are more out there than you think, I went to a support group for folks who discovered loved ones hanging), there’s an odd moment when you’re lifting—later you wonder why you didn’t just cut them down — as if that might have saved him — you’re supposed to cut them down, but at the moment—dread moment of moments — it seems counterintuitive so you find yourself holding and lifting instead, lifting up—in that odd moment—very odd — you’re just stuck, your instincts say raise him up, take pressure off his neck (the damage already done, windpipes ruined forever), there you are left holding the bag, no way to cut the rope even if you wanted, there’s no knife and you can’t let go, and besides, the angle’s all wrong and your hands are full, so you’re stuck holding the torso of him who was—is—always was your love and your light — like one of those exhausted marathon dance couples from that wonderful movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? If you can’t cut it then you need to undo the knot but it’s too high, you’ll need to stand on a chair — conveniently provided! — so you can lift him with one arm and loosen the noose with the other… you’ll need to bend down to right the chair (now inconveniently laying on its side) but it’s been kicked a few feet away so you need to do more than bend, need to literally let go of him to get to it — the very first of a letting go that will stretch into Infinity — which you do, you have no choice but to let him dangle—have to—and it’s against the will of every cell of your body — body of father holding his son, every cell shrieking no no no he’ll choke… again! — and you cannot, will not bring yourself to be party to a further hanging — oh Bruce! It’s just a horrible, terrible bind — I found myself in — a wretched, killing, scum of the earth moment, alone with myself in the deadly present—and you feel… you’re just completely useless, you’re beyond, like some demon who never should have existed, why were you born? He wouldn’t have been in this ludicrous predicament if you never had been, you’ve murdered him by definition. Your busy, useless arms won’t let you dial for help—where are your clothes, son? — but eventually you do just that, blacking out all thoughts so as not to be party to an unspeakable second hanging — you let go of him as you shuffle over to right that dastardly chair. The seat is broken but you see a short wood plank (what’s that doing there? Well, never mind for now), you lay the plank across the broken drum of the seat so you can stand upon it, a good, pro-active move that suddenly vanquishes or at least diminishes other awful thoughts, our brains are so primitive, they enjoy ordering us to take action-steps, now suddenly face-to-face with Ryder’s dead head, staring at the twisted hard candy features. And again the mind begins its metal machine Muzak:

Ryder?—

— son?—

SON!

You brush his penis with your arm, it’s larger than you thought—

The mind metal-machines: Hmmm, when was the last time I saw it?

My son’s penis—

— probably a few months ago when he was sick.

… right? Holding his head with a cold rag. He puked into the trash.

But he was a shy kid. Always modest about his body, at least more than his parents.

Ry? Why aren’t you wearing clothes?

Ryder?

What is it you’ve done?

What’s happened here—

In the unfathomable midst of it all, your monkey mind noshes on its usual bullshit buffet. But whose thoughts and emotions are these? They don’t feel like yours… you’re a thousand miles away, in the middle of a dream.

A daydream.

You even feel—I felt — silly.

… tongue herniating from mouth — impossible to untie Kelly’s blocks, he used the rope from Kelly’s yoga blocks — why did I think that would be an easy thing? To noodle a finger between rope and skin, like a steel wire under the jaw…

So I had to let him hang again — third hanging! — and run to the kitchen for a knife. Easier to let go the second time. Serial killers say that with each victim, the killing gets easier—

I cut him down.

Carried the birthday suit bag to a phone (no phone in Kelly’s meditation room) — carried! As if to break the vigil of human contact would endanger him — endanger me—and dialed 911. I told them what happened and they said, you know, they were sending someone out, and to stay on the line. Please stay on the line, sir. I’ve heard enough 911 calls on the news to know that’s what they do, that’s protocol, they ask you to stay on the line and be calm. I dropped the receiver on the carpet and just held him, pretending he was asleep. It half-looked like that…

… from a certain angle.

Angle of repose.

What exactly is an angle of repose?

The sky is falling.

I really do have blocks against certain phrases. Words too — like “abide.” “The Dude abides.” I can never remember what it means. And right after I find out, I forget. It’s a biblical word but people use it in songs all the time…

Later I learned that the firemen broke down the door. I didn’t hear them till they wrenched Ryder from my arms. One of them asked, Did you take off his clothes? Uh, no, he was like that when I found him. Metal machine mind said, That probably sounds strange to them. Hell, it sounded strange to me. I knew the police would want to explore further. Protocol. Cop work 101. In death of spouse, rule out spouse. In death of child, rule out parent. In hanging death of naked child, rule out creepy gay dad.

My head told me it was going to be a bit of a hassle but would ultimately resolve. I just hoped it didn’t turn lurid, that the truth would out itself — quickly.

But should I use my church-suit lawyers to defend? (Said monkey mind.)

I rode in the ambulance. They made me sit in front while they worked on him in back. No real memory of it. They tried to start an IV at the house but I don’t think that works when someone’s dead. The veins collapse, no blood’s flowing. Far as I know. But everyone played their part, they were all great. No professional likes to give up on a kid. I think they probably ham it up with kids, it’s instinct, you know, you’re trying to resuscitate a person who hasn’t had a chance to fuck it up, someone who hasn’t had the chance to break any hearts (until now). So they put in that extra effort, apart from the fact that a lot of ’em have kids themselves. If you work on a child who dies, grief counselors and an extended leave with full pay is a slam-dunk. Earth to monkey mind! Now I remember, the chief paramedic, head honcho, was an old pro. Very seasoned. Some of those guys are even D.O.s. You know, osteopaths. There was a woman trainee too, doing her best to not be distraught. Her very first call as an EMT, someone told me later. That had to be rough.

I kept redialing Kelly’s cell, secretly grateful each time she didn’t answer. I finally left a message. Something’s happened to Ryder, call back right away. From the front seat, senses acute, I smelled the pet shop we’d visited the week before, bad, sawdusty, wire terrier puppy smells wafting up—why? His shit was on my pants.

They “pronounced” him at the ER. I now pronounce you boy and Death. Death and wife… They let me in the room, the room with the clickety drapes and someone always moaning on the other side, they let me in to see him, a cop was there, he looked me up and down then hardly looked away, stayed there the whole time, probably protocol again, because of the weirdness of Ryder’s initially undressed body, now covered by two flimsy hospital gowns. God knows what ghoulish things they thought the suspect might have done and was still capable of… They never took the tubes out, not even the one down his throat. Machine mind wondered why. It would have been so easy. Maybe it was someone else’s first shift too, a new hire, an LVN who was supposed to do it but fucked up out of nerves. Everybody too distraught——

Or maybe just a bad RN.

I always obey my nurse.