The Forgiven

by Mike Shepherd

  When she arrived we sat at the kitchen table, and she explained the practice of tantric sex to me. I began to feel like I was entering a Masters & Johnson clinical experiment.

  “If the intercourse is prolonged by going slow, without expecting climaxes, then you can just remain in the beginning. Excitement is energy. You can lose it by coming to a peak too soon. Then the energy is lost, and a kind of depression or let down and weakness will follow. If you can temper the excitement of intercourse without leading to a climax, if you can remain in the beginning without becoming too hot, just remaining warm, then you can prolong the act for a very long time. With no ejaculation, with no throwing out energy, it becomes a meditation and through it you continue to be one with your partner. When there is too much heat through intense and uncontrolled excitement, usually more than a man can handle, he boils over and discharges his life force too soon, disempowering himself.

  “Making love is meditation. It is sacred. So while you are making love, go very slowly, there is no hurry, enough time is there. Remain for a while in the meditative state without ejaculation, to prolong the experience for the benefit of yourself and your partner.”

  I got somewhat aroused listening to Lin Lo describe tantric intercourse, so I proposed that we go ahead and try it.

  “Okay, where?” she responded

  “In the courtyard, in the moonlight. It’s very private. No one will see us.”

  We took our clothes off and walked hand-in-hand outside, and sat down on the soft grass. She assumed a full lotus position and directed me to do the same. With our legs intertwined like two contortionists, we extended our arms and placed our hands on each other’s shoulders, while smiling and looking into each other’s eyes. We somehow managed to achieve at least partial penetration, and we held that position, moving ever so slightly. I was fully aroused, but I managed to control my excitement so as not to ejaculate, thereby prolonging the experience which Lin Lo had said was the goal of tantric sex.

  After a while, the antithesis of premature ejaculation occurred: an old high school boy’s bugaboo, called “lover’s nuts.” Stifling ejaculation caused semen to back up into the testicles, causing agonizing pain. In those days the girls would only let you go so far. What else could one expect from a half-assed fuck? No, tantric yoga was not for me.

  I untangled myself from Lin Lo. Disappointed by my lack of cooperation, she went back into the apartment, dressed and left in a huff. At least Mary Jane had departed graciously although with her I had gotten too hot too quickly, and boiled over prematurely.

  With summer coming to an end it was time for me to return to Illinois. I had hitchhiked halfway across the country without incident, except for the prank two mischievous teenagers pulled on me in the middle of Wyoming. However, I didn’t want to push my luck hitchhiking back to Springfield, so I took the train.

  I enjoyed the comfort of train travel instead of being buffeted by the grit-laden wind of semis roaring past me too closely. On the train I could get a cold beer in the club car. I took full advantage of that soon after we pulled out of the station.

  I drank a couple, then went back to my seat and read some Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Li Po and Lindsay from books I bought at City Lights.

  The clickety-clackety sound of the wheels on the tracks provided a background rhythm to their poems, which, along with the train’s swaying, soon put me to sleep.

  When I awoke at sunup, we were zooming alongside a cascading mountain stream. I assumed we were in the Rockies of Colorado.

  I went back to the club car – this time for orange juice, eggs and toast.

  The rest of the trip across the Great Plains was boring because of the bland scenery, and I dozed off while reading. We arrived in Chicago just in time for me to catch a train to “Springpatch” – a somewhat disparaging term some locals used to describe the Capital City’s country bumpkin image Chicago’s Mike Royko often joked about in his newspaper columns about downstate Illinois people. Personally, I was glad to be back among them.

  In the end I had accomplished my mission to meet Ferlinghetti, who taught me that the Beats were hip to Vachel Lindsay. It was something that I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. .

  The uniqueness of my education did little to persuade potential employers to hire me even though I now had a degree in Communications. Despite my being a Vietnam veteran who was a military war correspondent, the liberal media (which was mostly anti-military), wasn’t impressed, so I was stuck tending bar again at DiLello’s after graduating.

  DiLello allowed me to drink on the house an hour or so before closing time at one o’clock, to prime myself for visits to the three o’clock bars with the intent of picking up women, but by then the patrons were either paired up, or drunk on their asses, so I’d just go home alone.

  I was caught up in an endless cycle of serving and consuming drinks. My life was going nowhere. The future looked bleak, and my past had been bleak because of my tumultuous childhood and that fucked up war. From something I read in a men’s health magazine I concluded that I suffered from a newly diagnosed syndrome called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Its symptoms, the article said, could be alleviated with THC, so I bought some pot -- cheap Mexican shit -- and smoked it. In San Francisco I had smoked marijuana sparingly, so I wasn’t cognitive of any long term, positive effects on my mental health. But now, in Springfield, I began to partake regularly, and my mood gradually lightened. I was able to function as a fairly content man who accepted for the time being bar tending was my lot, and my attitude changed from disgruntled to pleasant. But I grew tired of going to bed alone, so I made a concerted effort to remedy that late one night, by inviting a woman who came into the tavern on a regular basis to come home with me for a night cap after I closed. She consented without hesitation, and, to my surprise, when we arrived, she immediately laid out two lines of cocaine on the kitchen table with a razor blade. She handed me a tightly rolled dollar bill to snort one of them with, and I did it. It wasn’t long before I was high. I felt like I was taking off in a jet plane and a tremendous feeling of euphoria washed over me in warm rushing waves. I began to chatter incessantly, and I couldn’t stop clenching my teeth until finally my jaw ached, but that didn’t keep me from talking even more about anything and everything that came to mind on what I thought was a highly intellectual plane. Apparently the woman felt the same way, because she nodded in agreement with everything I said and offered insights of her own. Just as rapidly as the words came out, our clothes came off, and before long we were fucking on the floor like two rabbits in the spring. When we finished, she dressed quickly and flew out the door leaving me strung out with a snoot full of snow. That was not the end of my experimentation with recreational drugs.

  CHAPTER 9

  It took me at least two days to recover from the cocaine, and in the process I discovered that after being high on it I came down hard, like a crashing plane. In contrast, marijuana brought me down nice and easy like a butterfly. That’s why I used it to treat my PTSD. It left me feeling mellow, especially when I mixed it with a drink or two.

  I was concerned that I relied too much on booze and pot to cope with PTSD, so I decided to attend group counseling sessions at the local VA clinic.

  I was surprised to see that the moderator was a woman. Her name was Donna. She had been a MASH nurse in Vietnam, I learned, when we took turns introducing ourselves.

  Judging from the lifted eyebrows when I told them, the others were probably surprised to see an Air Force guy there who had seen action at Khe Sanh. We each had a story to tell that had contributed to our PTSD. Mine was unique because it began with my childhood, which was a contributing factor to the disorder according to the article I had read in the magazine. I didn’t share that concept with the group because I didn’t want to confuse the issue. War-related PTSD was more pertinent to that particular setting.

  In one of the sessions, Donna revealed
that on returning from her tour of duty in Vietnam, she became a protester because of all the gore she had been exposed to as a nurse.

  “I didn’t oppose it for political reasons. I was more concerned about the inhumanity of it all, having seen what men are capable of doing to each other in time of war. The slaughter needed to be stopped.”

  After attending a few more sessions, Donna informed me that she had become a psychologist specializing in dysfunctional family issues when I mentioned to her in passing that I thought that some of my psychological problems were related to my difficult childhood. Those difficulties weren’t limited to me alone. My sisters had gone through what I had, and then some, as the females who remained in the household after our mother left. As I grew up, they were like mothers to me, mothers to themselves, and wives to my father -- taking care of the domestic needs of the household, like cleaning, shopping for food, cooking and doing the laundry. Besides all of this, they managed to get good grades and participate in extracurricular activities. After graduating from high school, Chris eventually married a loving man with whom she had a child; Terry remained single, earned a PH.D and became a professor of English literature, an astonishing achievement considering her childhood. I wasn’t as successful. Like my parents, I succumbed to alcoholism and I alienated my sisters by showing up drunk at holiday gatherings, much as my mother did by phone. Chris and Terry sought counseling to address the lingering effects of their dysfunctional childhoods -- PTSD according to their psychiatrist. Because of my disruptive alcoholic behavior I was excluded from the sessions, and consequently we became estranged. I told Donna about this and she offered me individual counseling to specifically address my childhood. She gave me a card. “If you’d like to discuss it further, give me a call.”

  I had never talked to anyone about what I went through as a child, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to now. I was afraid to open old wounds, and go through all of that pain again. Also I knew that to begin the healing process I needed to air them out, so I called Donna and made an appointment. After I told her about my history she told me that I needed to forgive my parents for their alcoholic behavior, because women like your mother, in the ’40s and’50s, were under a lot of pressure to maintain a household, while your father, a combat veteran who had recently come home from the war and probably suffered from PTSD before it was diagnosed, was under pressure to support the household financially. As a result, they turned to alcohol to help them cope and the family became dysfunctional.”

  I had hoped to get some sympathy for being a victim of my parents behavior, but instead Donna excused it by contending that they were the victims of society, and my grievances were never addressed, so I blew the childhood/PTSD relationship off and concentrated on my war-related PTSD.

  While attending group sessions at the VA clinic, I concluded that it was all about my frustration and heartbreak from seeing the men of my generation blown apart at places like Khe Sanh while risking their lives for the freedom of the Vietnamese, then coming home to see those of my generation protesting against them while exercising their freedom of speech, something that the people of Vietnam wouldn’t be able to enjoy if the Communists prevailed there. As a result of realizing this my healing process began.

  CHAPTER 10

  I continued tending bar at DiLello’s, the most popular sports bar in Springfield, where the local rugby club held its notoriously wild post-game parties – whether they won or lost.

  Goaded by the club’s founder and team captain, Gary David Balmer, six players (three on each side) held a naked teammate aloft on his back and paraded him through the tavern while pouring beer on his genitals, a ritual common among rugby teams worldwide.

  Balmer stood by laughing, apparently pleased that his team had attained such a level of legitimacy in the realm of rugby celebratory practices. It was easy to see why he was the captain of a rough and tumble rugby team. Though not a tall man, he was powerfully built. His leg muscles bulged and his neck and shoulders were like that of bull’s, which served him well in a scrum. I soon discovered that he was more than a typical jock. One night, after last call, when Balmer was in the bar, as I was about to close up, he invited me to come to his place for a beer or two instead of going to a three o’clock bar.

  I followed him in my car to his house. He drove a VW bus, the preferred ride of the hippies of the ’60s and ’70s. I hadn’t thought of him being a hippie since he was into rugby, but the inside of his house looked like some of the hippie pads I’d visited in Carbondale – a hippie haven.

  An antique floor lamp with a yellow shade cast soft light on the back and arms of a stuffed maroon felt chair that matched a maroon rug whose green vine leaves and yellow flower pattern were highlighted by the splash of the lamp’s golden light.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  The couch that matched the chair looked inviting, so that’s where I sat.

  Balmer put a record on – the Doors – and lit a candle that rested in a saucer on an old travel trunk which served as a coffee table. On the trunk I noticed a paperback book by Jack Kerouac entitled the Dharma Bums.

  “Beer?” Balmer asked.

  “Sounds good.” I rarely turned down a beer.

  He went to the kitchen and came back with two green bottles of Beck’s.

  I noticed you have a book there by Kerouac called the Dharma Bums. What the hell is a Dharma bum, anyway?”

  “Dharma is basically a Buddhist term for truth. The book is about the Beat generation trying to find it,” he said.

  “The truth about what, though?”

  “Life, what it means, how to live it. It’s all pretty subjective really. Life has different meanings for different people. Charles Manson sees it one way, Billy Graham another way.”

  “My girlfriend in Vietnam was a Buddhist, but I didn’t learn much about it from her. Only the difference basically between the squat, pot-bellied smiling figure, and the slender more serious one you see in pictures of pagodas and temples. ‘Happy Buddha’ she called the fat one. Represents the care-free attitude of taking life in stride. I think she called the skinnier, contemplative one Siddhartha.”

  “That’s right, Prince Siddhartha,” Balmer concurred. “He was the true Buddha.”

  “So then, Buddha really did exist. I’ve always thought he was just a mythical figure, you know, like a Greek god.”

  “No, man.” Balmer frowned. He seemed perturbed by my ignorance.

  “Siddartha was born in the 6th Century B.C. in northeast India, the heir of the ruling royal family there. He left that life in search of something more spiritual and in pursuit of the secret to the end of suffering. At the age of 35 his pilgrimage took him to the Bodhi tree. Bodhi means enlightenment, which he attained there, and he spent the rest of his life teaching those drawn to the Path of Enlightenment that leads from suffering and dissatisfaction to spiritual fulfillment – in other words Buddhism.”

  “And that’s what you’re in to?”

  “I’m in to the Zen form of it, really, which is Japanese for meditation, although I don’t actually meditate. You know, like lying on your back and closing your eyes and deeply breathing, while tuning everything out, that takes too much of an effort, which defeats the purpose, I believe. I do it passively by being aware of life as it exists in the present moment. This is it, man.”

  “Far out, Balmer, I just got a rush when you said that.”

  “You got a rush from realizing it’s true; the moment of knowing, or the knowing of the moment – a satori. It comes about naturally if you just let go of fretting about the past and the future and focusing on the present.”

  “Yes, but don’t we have to plan for the future?”

  “What we do each moment contributes to that. It’s like when I’m working on one of my stained glass projects. I have a plan, but I don’t worry about when I’ll complete it, it’s a work in progress as I focus on each cut, each sol
der that naturally leads to its completion. The process itself is free of the anxiety associated with fretting about when I’ll finish, which is suffering, and suffering is what Buddhism seeks to relieve us from. That’s the purpose of practicing the religion.”

  “How do you define suffering? I mean if you’ve got a toothache, you don’t need Buddhism, you need a dentist.”

  “I’m talking about mental and emotional suffering, which comes mostly from dissatisfaction about things not being the way we want them to be. You may be dissatisfied with your car, let’s say, for arguments sake, and I don’t blame you,” Balmer joked, and he laughed, “because it’s old and it rattles. You want a newer one, but right now you don’t have the money to buy one, and so you agonize about that instead of being satisfied at the moment with the older one, which despite the squeaks and rattles, provides you with adequate transportation. It got you here.”

  “So what’s wrong with striving for something you want that’s better?”

  “To want is to desire, and desire leads to frustration when we can’t have what we desire, Suffering results from unfulfilled desires and unrealistic expectations, like desiring some beautiful woman who is involved with someone else. Letting go of desire relieves us of the suffering and brings us peace of mind. Let go of the egotistical self which constantly desires to be fulfilled in one way or another. Let go of one’s self, one’s body – in other words one’s life – without mourning for ourselves. Buddha taught that removing such attachments will ultimately lead us to Nirvana – Buddhism’s heaven. Now do I practice all of this like a good Dharma Bum should? Hardly, I have too much of a desire for these.”

  Balmer held up his empty beer bottle and grinned.

  “Yeah, me too,” I said, “And it usually leads to suffering in the morning. I better go.”

  “Hold on, Mick. I’ve got something here that’ll get you higher than the beer and it won’t leave you with a hangover.”