Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  “—that kind, it would be, I don't know, sort of like uncomfortable?”

  Right. It took two to tango, even this theoretical tango, this tango in the portion of the cortex that measures moral imperatives. “Someday,” I said, and he gazed expectantly into my eyes, “someday we'll have to not talk about this.”

  The evening ended with insincere vows all around to meet again soon. I told Melissa that I loved the way she blushed a deep purple, because I could never provide such a dramatic portrayal of embarrassment, due to my darker skin. “We Scottish-Irish-English have all the luck, don't we?” she said. She sighed. Our friendship with the Natters seemed to be suspended.

  Nevertheless, in the metropolitan village of San Francisco, we met and remet. That's the deal, one of the peculiar advantages of living in a metropolis with all its eccentricities and dangers, like a space station on earth, and also in a village with its proximities and interconnections. During an afternoon espresso run at Caffe Trieste, flagship of the Beat flotilla, now beached among tourists, memories, and a few stray boheems, I found Ted also taking an afternoon espresso. Great minds do not always think alike; not all minds are great; but espresso is a valuable common lubricator. We moved our chairs to sit together. Instead of commenting on the niceness of the weather and the steamy warmth of the Trieste, I asked Ted if he thought Marjie had developed in recent years some kind of suspicion of men. “Oh, no,” he declared, defending her consistency. “It's long-standing. Not me, of course, we're super-close.”

  “I know you're an exception. But why the hatred of other men?”

  He struggled for a succinct explanation that would not delay our return to spouses and children. “Well, she's studied history. Hitler was a man.”

  Aristotle was a friend of mine (not him personally, but his writings); the syllogism implied here lay beyond my grasp. I tried to think, Q.E.D. It didn't work. I tried to think, Therefore…Still no luck.

  Ted hastened to assure me that it was nothing personal and remedy was available. Ever since they decided not to be husband and wife but spouse and spouse, equal, level, parallel, and sharing, all discord had evaporated from their partnership. He agreed to clothe their two sons in dresses so that they would appreciate what women face in the patriarchal world. She compromised on one matter. They were allowed to urinate standing up if they insisted.

  “Copacetic with you, Spouse?” she had asked.

  “Cool, Spouse,” he answered.

  They didn't eat grapes (César Chávez). They sewed their own rainbow flag to hang at the door (gay rights). They chose Halloween as their major holiday because witches can be of any gender, no matter what prejudiced people think.

  Later, Spouse and Spouse got divorced anyway.

  The family therapist whom Marjie, now mostly Marjoe, consulted asked her, “Do you want to split?” and Marjoe said yes, so the family therapist said, “Well, that means you're fine, so off you go, sister.” It was a divorce of the new No Fault variety and of the even newer Everybody Wins persuasion. They still shared picketings, marches, and custody of the sons, who objected to their dresses, although their father referred to them as caftans. On the playground during soccer practice, fellow students sneered at linguistic distinctions.

  My wife with her well-exercised love of comedy proposed to me that she invite Marjie's ex-husband on a date. This was an idea in accord with the times; it also commented on the Natters’ particular abstract theories. Melissa telephoned Ted and he was thrilled. “Lunch?” she asked.

  He started to name a time when he would drive over for her. She interrupted. “I'll pick you up,” she said.

  That was the drill. It was 1972, after all. Only sexists of the fifties and earlier would expect the XY chromosome zygotes to come for the XX chromosome zygotes. In the terrible history of oppressive social conditioning, men had usurped sexual vehicle transport privileges.

  Melissa giggled; I chortled, being an XY chromosome zygote non-giggler.

  On the appointed day she arrived at Ted's door with a corsage to pin on his Mao jacket, which was worn over a Mexican shirt, green illicit herb embroidery sprouting behind the live legal gardenias she pinned to him. He stood stiffly at attention. She didn't stab his chest.

  “Relax,” she commanded nervous Ted. Later, at the Good Karma Café, she whispered loudly to the waiter to be sure to give her the check. Ted had trouble relaxing. Sometimes grooviness was asking a lot, even of a cutting-edge thinker. She did not make advances to him because he had difficulty adjusting to Marjie's multicultural, polyamorous principles. He may also have been suspicious of Melissa's sudden embrace of them.

  No damage to our household except for the price of lunch. American civilization did not take an immediate correct turn, the Viet Nam war did not end at once, the borders of expectation between the sexes, now called genders, did not dissolve over the arugula salads. But every little bit counted.

  Melissa came home, still giggling, me chortling, our children that evening reflecting our good humor for the normal mysterious reasons of children.

  Nevertheless, family stress occurs in general, and in the early seventies, with three babies in diapers, a fifteen-month space between our daughter and our twin sons, stress occurred in particular in our family. The times were ones of marital breakdowns between the XX chromosome folks and the XY chromosome people. This was not new, but the intensity of it was special. My wife's history was that of a well-brought-up Ivy League young woman; most of her friends came from similar backgrounds, academically replete, trained winners. Their husbands were the same. But one by one, the marriages were cracking. I would appear at the end of the afternoon, and she would say, “Muffie has left Glenn.” A month or two later, Polly departed her marriage with Devon.

  It felt ominous. When the fourth pal danced off in her Capezios, I was relieved, cosmically, superstitiously, and referred to the group as the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse. Then there was a fifth. There was a sixth, a seventh. In each case, the bereft husband seemed not to be a brute, conspicuously unfaithful, an alcoholic, or a negligent provider. He was a husband; that was the problem.

  The eighth horsewoman of the Apocalypse was Melissa.

  Being a reasonable person, generous and fair-minded, she agreed to see a therapist. She was sad about my sadness. She was considering our children, too. The therapist recommended by one of her friends lived in outer Marin, but she made the drive anyway. One session was all the treatment necessary, since she entered the office and the psychologist asked what was the problem, and she said, “I want to leave my husband.” The therapist looked warmly into her eyes. “Well, then you're okay,” she said.

  My wife returned grinning with the information. We adjourned to the bedroom. She noted that this therapist had been divorced three times and confided that she thought she might be more fond of women than of men. She shrugged. “Those are the breaks, Herb.”

  For a while, Former Spouse Marjoe tried to promote an educational program in “teledildonics.” This was a way to use mind control to move imaginary dildos in desired rhythms from a distance. Marshall McLuhan advocated “probes,” and after all, a probe that didn't work out was just as good as one that did. It was still a probe. But when the course failed to draw paying registrants, she moved on to tending bar in the Diana the Huntress Café on Valencia Street.

  I have changed some details in this history to protect the unisex identities of everyone but my former wife and me. No actual derogation of telekinesis, the science of moving things around by mental power, is intended. In any case, Spouse and Spouse Natter are not into the linear activity of reading words ordered by patriarchal grammar. That was so last century. “Whatever,” as their sons, now adults, like to say. But all who are offended, wherever you are, can lift my fingers from the typewriter keys and slap my hands.

  This was a time, the seventies, of bad sideburns, bad fabrics, bad disco revolving balls, and also bad politics. Most times seem to be times of bad politics; lava lamps were unique. The s
ixties flower world of love, psychedelics, Viet Nam protest, self-discovery, and “I hear you” as the proper response to disagreement had devolved into the irritable hangover of the seventies.

  After friendship with the Natters and also my marriage ended, I happened to enter a Just Desserts café in San Francisco where a group of women sat near the door. One of them had seen me coming and covered her face with her hands, even spreading her fingers to hide her hairline. As I passed, she removed her hands from her face and announced accusingly, startling everyone in the vicinity: “You don't even recognize women, do you, Herb?”

  “I didn't see you, Marjie.”

  Triumphantly she said: “No, of course you wouldn't.”

  Valiant Marjie-Marjoe was like the only woman admitted to the French Foreign Legion, fighting for distant causes, attaining glory and obscure results “by any means necessary,” including hiding her face in Just Desserts. Probably that's not how she saw herself. At times she even ventured to compromise her principles, as when she kept the mole on her nose, only plucking the single dark hair that grew from it.

  I recognize anger, emotion recollected in non-Wordsworthian tranquility, during an effort to recapture a history which seemed to pass under the gypsy's curse: “May you live in interesting times.” I recall both my mother's stern stare at the thought of those who disappointed her and my father's stubborn calm because he knew how to survive and so many others didn't. My adolescent rage against my parents, fleeing as a seventeen-year-old toward wherever my hitchhiking thumb would take me—freedom, someplace else, even if I needed to steal milk and bread from doorsteps—now is transformed into gratitude. I remember my mother and father with love. I learned strictness and stubbornness from them. I also learned anger, malice, and vindictiveness, now freely manifested.

  Someday, probably in fifty or sixty years, I won't nurse my resentments. We must mature, forgive, achieve serenity and true peace.

  Have fifty or sixty years passed yet?

  My sons and daughters will pass on to their children the soul melodies and dissonances of their own mother and father; and their children in turn will continue the enterprise forever. Like all of us, I think of myself as an individual, navigating alone in the universe, but I'm also a moment in history, a point of transmission.

  Now and then, there's a brusque interruption of the gradual slide into the fate of all living creatures. A tooth needs to be pulled as soon as possible. A cataract needs to be peeled off. During these times, the slide seems precipitous. But hey, the tooth is out and the fresh plastic implanted in healthy bone (“Very fortunate at your age,” says the oral surgeon). The cloudy lens in the eye is replaced by the latest advance in ophthalmology (“Good as new, maybe better,” says the expert, “and Medicare covers most of it”). Good again, good as new! Until, maybe, tomorrow.

  The leaves of the calendar drop, the snows melt, the potholes grow deeper. (No snow in San Francisco, however.) I decided to invite Ted for lunch to revisit our shared past. No longer married to Marjie, he is also no longer married to his next wife. His grown sons no longer wear dresses, unless during secret fashion shows before bedroom mirrors in their suburban tract houses. Ted's hair is still ample, but fluffy and white. He has passed through his spasm of Maoism and his longing to share polyamorous sex with the proper same-gender partner.

  I buy the lunch; no corsage. With my purchase, I assume the right to ask questions. Beginning abstractly in order to ease gracefully into my personal concerns, I bring up the People's Republic of China. “Well, it didn't work out,” he says. He shrugs. The broken eggs didn't make a viable omelet or even a tasty egg foo yung. “Also, now they've got a lot of…” He considered how much to grant me. “Pollution?”

  He still ends sentences with an upward-swinging question, in the California manner.

  So then, cautiously, I bring up my marriage, declaring that of course I don't exactly blame him for causing trouble—the trouble went deeper into both character and the times than anything the Natters were responsible for—but I suggest that bad will hurts friendship.

  Distressed, concerned, very much like a person who regretted accepting a free lunch, he said, “Well, Herb, you were a sexist, you know.” He gathered defensive momentum: “You wrote all those books, but Melissa didn't get to write any. Who knows if, instead, you…”

  What?

  “… if the world had been different?”

  He too had regrets. He too had lost a few things. He picked at his non-farmgrown salmon. Writing books is a dream for many; even Ted has written a couple of prescriptive manuals; and Marjie had formed a publishing house with her “womyn” partner to issue their works of feminist antirevisionism.

  “So how are the kids?” he asked.

  He took the words right out of my mouth. “Fine, how are yours?” And once more we vowed to meet again before too long because time passes so quickly and a shared history must be respected and, after all, we used to be friends. No one pronounced the word “misogynist,” and only I pronounced the phrase “Cultural Revolution.”

  Not Letting Go

  And so, although we had insincerely promised that we would meet again, we actually did.

  Nostalgia may, like jealousy, do no good work, but remembrance provides the necessary fuel for taking stock. Once more I invited Ted Natter for coffee, lunch, or dinner, his choice. My telephoned heartiness seemed to make him cautious. “Coffee,” he said.

  As we settled in at the café, I reminded him that the price of coffee had gone up. That's what I remembered; he remembered that they didn't have fair-trade coffee in those days. We fell into a moment of silent communion over dissonant memories, but we both recalled the pretty German hippie who used to serve the coffee and her proud display of American idiom skills—“gut vibez,” “hup tight,” “Miles Davidtz.”

  We were two old friends whose friendship had been a casualty of the times. The bond of dead friendship is still a bond—shared memories and mis-memories. I told him about the Weatherperson who visited me to ask for money, seeming to offer her comely person as a door prize. Also, the Maoist of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Splinter Faction Direct Action Committee—not precisely its real name—a City and County of San Francisco social worker, who came to ask for a contribution for Bob Avakian, Chairman-in-Exile. Subcommander Helen did not offer sex or even hint at it. Perhaps I wasn't her type, or perhaps all her erotic needs were satisfied by the Maximum Leader and Designated Guide-in-Exile, now carrying on from the 13th Arrondissement in Paris. “Bob has read your works,” she had said. “He thinks you're salvageable.”

  I made herbal tea for the visitor. She examined the tag at the end of the teabag string to make certain it didn't come from imperialist highlands. I didn't offer my visitor a joint, because I couldn't guarantee that the marijuana wasn't grown by reactionary forces. Unlike the comely Weatherperson who had made her approach with flirtatious charm, a hint of quid pro quo, this young social worker cleaved doggedly to her teacup and her Bob Avakian mission.

  “When the kulaks and the counterrevolutionaries are crushed like cucarachas under the feet of the working people, you will have a chance to appeal.” Her promise called to mind the Chinese school principal with the landlord mentality. In the future, her offer of an appeal might not be repeated.

  Oh, where are you now, young civil service employee and destroyer of the oligarchy? The workers and peasants of the San Francisco Bay Area cry out for you.

  Subcommander Helen may have a civil service pension and grandchildren by this time. Ted listened attentively to my account, letting me ramble. We had lived a history together.

  “Yeah, that Avakian faction,” he said. “I think I knew that activist. She have a Frida Kahlo decal on her Corvair?”

  “She came by bike.”

  “Was it a ten-speed?”

  Details, details. I didn't remember everything.

  After his stint as a Russian Hill Maoist, Ted had settled into the job of ameliorating the world's ills on a
freelance basis. Frontal opposition seemed counterproductive; it was better to save the whales incrementally, one by one, and then move on to the dolphins, the prairie dogs, the chickens in pens. His metaphor about needing to break eggs in order to make omelets was no longer at the top of the agenda for either Ted or Lenin. In these times, inoperative, like Stalin and Mao. But unlike them, Ted still wanted to help. He wrote mailings for a foundation opposed to child labor and shark fishing, the whales being saved by others. It wasn't a change of direction; it was an evolution. “I'm doing a job,” he said, “and I'm doing it good.”

  This sounded like a slogan he had developed in order to get the attention of honest folks confused by the uses of “well” and “good.” He was still getting down with the masses.

  Now that he was no longer married—“between marriages,” as he said—and his child support days were over, the living was pretty easy. (The sons, now in trousers, were doing okay for themselves: one a chef, the other a middle school teacher.) He rented a bachelor apartment with cotton balls in a glass jar, a stack of The Nation on an end table (no copies of Gourmet), shampoo and conditioner from a worker-owned store on a convenient shelf in the shower. He has earned his comfort. No more cockroaches. A cat. A Spanish-speaking cleaning woman comes every two weeks, checks the cat box, changes the sheets, dusts and vacuums, and what he doesn't know about her legal status hurts neither of them.

  He remembered my advising him that boric acid in kitchen cracks seemed to take care of East Coast cockroaches; it stuck to their legs, they carried it into their nests, it ate away at their siblings. “That was repulsive, Herb,” he said, “so New York. Now we chase them out with ultrasound.”

  No longer a revolutionary, Ted was an evolutionary. The suffering urge for female companionship had also faded, calmed by regular coin insertion into the jukebox at the Puccini Café, which stocks music from Turandot and La Bohème and gives a fellow between marriages his space for sentimental meditation.