by Erik Storlie
Astounded, I call everyone into the room. “God, these flowers. You guys. Come and look! They’re alive. They’re incredibly beautiful. I can’t believe it! Can you see it?”
Everyone troops into the dining room. Joy, Elton, and Celeste seem to be examining me more than the wallpaper. Striker seems subdued, withdrawn. His brown face, which moments ago glowed with deep, vibrant hues, is ashen, lifeless. “Hey, man, Striker, you digging this?
“Yeah,” he says flatly, “sure, it’s something else.”
“Well,” I say, suddenly self-conscious, “let’s go back in the living room and sit down, relax, put on some music, groove with this shit.” I herd everyone back into the living room.
It’s almost six now, and the windows are dark, the room shadowy. Celeste carries a teapot and some cups in from the kitchen. Before it’s offered, with a pushing motion of his hands, Striker blurts out, “No, no man, I don’t want anything at all.” Rumpters, the yellow kitten, begins scratching at his pant leg, trying to climb into his lap, and he impatiently brushes it onto the floor.
“Oh, okay,” says Celeste. “Tell me if you want something else.” Striker says nothing. Uneasy, she chatters with Joy and Elton as she pours their tea. Their eyes keep drifting back to me. Then, abruptly, they get up, Joy saying, “Well, we’ve got to see a man. We’re overdue. Catch you all later.”
“Hey, bullshit,” I say. “Let’s all walk down to the ribs place on Shattuck Avenue. We can have coffee and see the action.” Celeste and Striker look uncomfortable.
“Forget it, man,” Striker says. “You want me to experience ego loss down there?”
Celeste laughs. “Why, the counter man would look at me and say, ‘Little girl, what you doin’ with these hippie boys, one black and one white? Which one belongs to you?’” She smiles at Striker and gently pats his shoulder.
“No, thanks,” says Joy. “We’re cool. We’ll catch you later.” And they’re out the door.
Something’s gone wrong. “Why won’t Joy and Elton hang out with me?” I ask myself. “Where do I fit in? And why did Celeste touch Striker’s shoulder just now?” The walls swim and pulsate. From the center of the rug, waves roll out to break in colored surf on a beach of hardwood floor. Striker is remote, a sharp furrow between his eyebrows. He looks like certain streets in south Minneapolis—black, surly, menacing.
Abruptly, without a word, he stands up and walks toward the front door. I stand up, too, nervous, talking fast. “Hey, man, what’s wrong? Don’t you like this stuff? Be cool. Can’t you dig it? What’s your problem?”
Then suddenly I blurt out, “Maybe you two are hiding something!”
Striker looks at me distantly, lips curling, confusion and frustration written over his face. “Hiding something? I don’t get it. I’m just feeling weird, man, a little restless. Is that okay with you?”
“Bullshit,” I shout. Now it’s all clear. “You two are making it with each other. How could I be so stupid.” My heart pounds. Waves of hurt, anger, and despair wash over me.
“Erik,” says Celeste quietly, astonishment spreading over her face, “that’s crazy. It’s not true. I love you. I’m your woman. And Striker is our friend. It’s just not true. I mean it.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Striker mutters wonderingly. “Where’d this all come from? Now, just let me take my walk and things’ll straighten out in a little while after everyone’s cool.”
Striker slips by me and heads toward the door, but I lunge past him and lean my shoulder against it, hard. “You’re not going anywhere, man,” I grit through my teeth.
“Just let go,” he yells, turning the knob and jerking at it furiously with both hands. I feel the door budge and, bending my knees, grunting and pushing, plant my feet harder.
Suddenly we hear ripping, rending sounds, and the two top hinges tear loose from the jamb. Astonished, we both release the door and stand panting. Striker takes a step toward the now half-opened door. I step into his path, grabbing his shirt at the chest, shouting, “Stay here! Talk to me!”
Explosion! I’m spinning backward, my ears filled with crashing, smashing sounds. Rumpters and Roar scatter like windblown leaves to the edges of the room. Shocked, I find myself sprawled on my back on broken glass in the corner of the darkening living room.
Celeste screams, “Striker!” Striker retires dutifully to his corner, watching me warily, while Celeste moves carefully into the space between us.
Suddenly I feel wetness on the floor. I touch my fingers together. More wet. I feel my face and hair. Everything is wet, sticky. Turning my head, I see the dark blood now pooling on the floor at my side.
“Jesus,” I moan, struggling up to a sitting position, “I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding all over the place. For Christ’s sake, what’s going on? This is my house, you bastard. I thought we were friends. I thought I could trust you. I thought you could handle some real shit, but you’re nowhere, man! Just get the hell out of here.”
Striker sinks down on the couch and looks at me in disbelief. He slowly raises his hands, balls his fists, and presses his knuckles into his cheeks. “Storlie, I’m sorry. You grabbed me. All I did was push you, man.”
“Push me? You hit me! Fuck you. Get the hell out of here! And take your goddamned shit too. You’re evicted.”
Striker sits quietly, eyes staring straight ahead.
Her voice rising, panicky, Celeste says, “Erik, it’s true. He only pushed you. You grabbed him.”
“Okay, fucker,” I shout, “move or I’m calling the cops.” I stand and rush for the phone, dial 0, and ask for the police. Astonished, Celeste and Striker look at each other. “I want a squad car at five-fifty-six Fifty-fifth Street. Right now. There’s been an assault here. Yeah, me. By my roommate. I’m bleeding all over the place. He’s sitting right here. He won’t get the hell out. I want him out of here. I want a squad car here now.”
Striker looks at Celeste wonderingly. “Jesus, there’s grass, acid, meth, and God knows what Rosenfeld’s stashed here. I’m gone.” Pulling open the front door, which hangs crazily on its bottom hinge, Striker melts into the dark street.
Celeste stands for a long moment, hands on hips, staring silently at me. Finally she offers me a slow smile. “Well, my love, my silly little white boy, you can just help clean up now. You haven’t been cheated on. And you’re not bleeding. Striker pushed your ass into my vase of roses and it’s smashed to bits.”
Subdued, shaking, I go for the mop.
After clumsy attempts to help Celeste clean up, I retreat to the bathroom. My stomach is in knots. My bowels cramp painfully. I sit on the pot and stare at the floor. The ceramic tiles groan and writhe with tension, the grout between them oozing up out of the floor—viscous, dark feces.
Nauseated, I look away and up to the hard white edge of the porcelain sink. There’s a peppering of black hairs, each short and curling regularly back on itself to form spirals. Of course. They’re negro hairs. “How strange,” I think. “My girlfriend is a negro. Striker is a negro. Is that why we fought?”
I rest my elbows on my knees, shut my eyes, and drop my head into the upturned palms of my hands. Endless mind stuff rolls out, forming into rivers of negro flesh sprouting black, kinky hairs.
Opening my eyes, I shake the images out of my head and reach with trembling fingers toward the roll of toilet paper. I pull off a loop and clumsily try to fold it into a square pad. It takes me several attempts. I’m five years old, alone, and I just want to cry. I peek out of the bathroom and creep unseen down the hall and quietly curl up in the blankets on the mattress on the floor of Celeste’s and my room.
Two hours later, toward midnight, I’m back sitting in the living room. Celeste’s gone to bed. There’s a furtive knock at the door. It’s Striker, saucer-eyed, pupils hugely dilated in the darkness outside.
“Hey, man, Storlie, is it cool, can I come in? I’m really sorry about it. It just happened. Did you really get hurt?”
“No, no, no, just fucked-up cra
ziness. We’ve got to figure this whole thing out better. Get in here quick. This stuff is a hell of a lot more than a little toke of grass. Thank God the cops never showed up.”
The next day Joy and Elton drop by to see how things went.
“I’ve taken a vow of silence,” I announce sheepishly. “I can’t be trusted to talk. I don’t know what the hell happened yesterday—I can’t believe some of the things that happened. But don’t talk to me. I’m in exile. I’m not speaking. Ask Celeste and Striker what happened. My lips are sealed for the rest of the day.”
Joy suppresses a knowing smirk as I go to the kitchen and make lunch for everyone. “What did happen?” I ask myself. “Lon’s right. We’ve got to do this all differently.”
After lunch, Lon drops by. We all sit down in the living room. Celeste brings in tea, then says with a teasing smile, “Hey, you guys, tell Lon about your trip yesterday.” Embarrassed, Striker and I have to tell him.
Lon’s face falls. “How could you guys do that? I can’t believe it. It really makes me feel terrible.” He sits quietly for a moment, looking first at Striker, then at me.
Embarrassed and ashamed, I stumble out a few words, “Yeah, I know, it was crazy. It’s not like we were really . . .” Suddenly I can’t think of anything more to say.
“You and Striker,” Lon says, “have some very bad karma. ‘Course, it’s not just you. We all do. The whole country. There’s work to do. We’ve got to get conscious. When are you guys going to read Leary’s book? It’s the road map. I’ll take you over to hear Reverend Suzuki, too. He’s awake! He’s a Master! This is a big voyage we’re on. Acid is going to change this whole country.”
“Man, oh, man,” Striker says, “if anything can do it, acid can. It’s heavy shit. I’ll go hear the reverend. That’s cool. But I just think I’ll leave that stuff alone for a while. A little grass keeps me pretty happy.”
It’s October 1, 1964. Lon calls in the afternoon. I’m trying to organize myself so I can pass my orals. On rare days when the house is empty of visitors, I feel a rising panic about this work I absolutely must do.
“Man, get over here to Berkeley,” he says excitedly. “We’ve got to walk up and see the scene on campus.”
“I can’t. I’m outlining the whole history of English literature around the front bedroom wall in different colored markers. I’ve got to start learning all this shit or I’m dead. I’ve got to pass orals before Christmas break. If! flunk, I’m out. Then the draft board can have their way with me—and the way they’re feeling now about old draft-deferred grad students, it’ll be the front lines in Vietnam for sure.”
“Hey, come on, man. This is real history. It’s happening right now. Listen, they tried to throw some activist folks off the tables at Sather Gate. The cops came to make arrests, and now I hear there’s a cop car trapped in the middle of a huge demonstration.”
“Right on campus?”
“Yeah, right in front of the Union.”
I drive to Lon’s place south of campus, and we walk up to see. Going in a back entrance to the Student Union, we get up to the second floor and look out a window. Thousands of students have mobbed the area between the Union and Sproul Hall. The squad car is stranded in a sea of young people. From the top of the car, someone harangues the crowd.
“Lon,” I say, “this is unbelievable. It’s not just the heads, long-hairs, and off-campus radicals. It’s the squares, too. It’s the whole campus. It’s everyone.”
“It’s just the beginning,” Lon says gleefully. “Remember what the Bible says? ‘The fathers have set the sons’ teeth on edge.’ The whole country’s got to change now. There’s political power in Berkeley, and acid’s touching off a wildfire of spiritual power. It’s all coming together right here in front of our eyes. It’s the beginning of the end for the Establishment.”
An itchy stinging on the bottom of my foot pulls me back to the Crag. The sun is high overhead, hot, beating down on my shoulders. It must be close to eleven. Afternoon breezes arriving from the west cool me, licking down my collar, up under my shirttails, and up the cuffs of my jeans.
“It’s funny,” I think, “that despite everything, we were so filled with hope. We never doubted that the new day was dawning, that the corporations, the military, and the politicians would transform, that poverty, racism, and war in Vietnam would be over, that America would blossom.
“We had a taste of freedom. But not a clue about discipline. What naïveté!
“Look at Striker and me. We couldn’t handle it. Just believing in black and white together wasn’t enough. With no discipline, our freedom blew up in our faces.
“And right then the Reverend Suzuki came into our lives. He lived a discipline, simple and unshakable. He radiated the freedom of a being filled with joy.
“We hated the disciplines of America, the churches, colleges, military, business world—all so flawed, so compromised, crippled by materialism, tortured out of shape in Vietnam. Suzuki we came to love. Of course, part of that was romance—the mysterious Orient.”
Another voice intones, “Oh, shut up. Get off your soapbox. You’ve got your hands full just doing zazen.”
I rock slowly back and forth, smile at myself, and chuckle. I rotate my head and neck slowly clockwise, then counterclockwise, luxuriously stretching out hosts of small muscles that have begun to stiffen and ache. I straighten my legs and take off my socks, carefully peeling the left sock off over the scrape. A few curling fibers of wool stick in the hardening blood. I pluck tentatively at one, then restrain my fingers. I leave my socks off now, to help the scab dry out.
I notice hunger pangs. It would be nice to stop and eat. “Speaking of discipline, don’t take a break yet. You’ve hardly begun to sit.”
I rearrange my down vest to get more padding, put my socks on top, and get comfortable. I slowly sit down and cross my legs in the half lotus position. I pull my broad-brimmed hat down tight on my head, tilting the brim against the westerly breezes. And once again I sit, I meditate.
5
Return
IT’S A MONTH LATER, SEVEN O’CLOCK ON A November evening in San Francisco, the beginning of the winter of 1964. This morning Lon and I dropped acid near the top of Mount Tamalpais. By afternoon we were sitting on rocks overlooking the sea. Now we leave the damp fog of Bush Street and enter the Sokoji Temple. As we walk through a large front room, I see an altar on the far wall with a Buddha statue surrounded by an ocean of cut flowers.
We enter a small inner room and join a group of about fifteen men and women sitting on folding chairs in a half circle. They face a single, empty folding chair. We’re mostly young, wearing everything from business suits to torn jeans to psychedelic costumes.
A tiny Japanese man in his late fifties enters and quietly takes the empty chair. His feet don’t even touch the floor. His head is shaved and he wears a simple brown robe. He carries a heavy, worn book. He puts his hands together and bows to us. A few in the audience bow back.
“Good evening,” he says in heavily accented English. “Thank you very much for coming to listen to my talk. I am very surprised that Americans are so interested in zen practice.” He breaks into a smile, his face wrinkling. “My English is not so good. It may be pretty hard for you to understand. But I will try.”
He opens the book, and I see that it’s filled with rows of oriental characters. The Buddha statue, the flowers, the strange little man, this curious book—I feel transported to some distant time and place, far from the city that begins outside the door on the foggy street.
Reverend Suzuki attempts a word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase translation of his text into broken, confusing English. I’m puzzled at first. I can’t follow what he says. But as the talk goes on, images jump alive in my mind. There is firewood that turns to ash and never turns back again. There are fish swimming that never reach the end of the water, and birds flying that never reach the end of the sky. There are tiny drops of dew that reflect and hold the vast sky and the moon.
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Toward the end of the evening, Reverend Suzuki returns again to a passage about enlightenment, struggling to turn it into English.
“So, Dogen says here about an enlightenment that leaves no trace of itself, nothing in the bottom of the cup, no—how do you say it?—no dregs. When we practice, we can forget ourself. We can forget the small self. We don’t feel our dregs. We can maybe begin to feel some big self, something very big. It is really there. We are like the firewood, maybe. Yes, firewood is firewood. But it is already ash, too. Can you understand?
“Some of you worry about this enlightenment. You want to touch it. You want to hold it in your hand. But you are already enlightenment. When this is true, then there is no enlightenment. This enlightenment leaves no traces. But Dogen Zen Master says, this tracelessness goes endlessly, it shines forever through the universe.”
Struggling with the word tracelessness, Reverend Suzuki pauses, looks up smiling, and says, “Ah, that is very, very beautiful, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I think, deeply moved. “Oh, yes, it is.”
Something I can’t name is welling up in me. It’s in the devotion of this small, simple man for an ancient poetry he loves. It’s in images from nature that touch the everyday and the eternal—fish and water, birds and sky—and endless sunlight shedding beauty, sweeping forever through an infinite universe.
It was this I felt at the end of my walk with Celeste up into the Berkeley hills that evening last spring. It was this I saw in the golden sun falling down into the bay, in the gently glowing windows of the houses, in the grasses, shrubs, and flowers beckoning from the yards.
“Yes, I’ll be here,” I say to myself. “I’ll hear him talk again. Lon was right.”
