by Herbert Gold
Craig suggested humbly that it might be a good idea to be more like him, evolved—he had in mind greater issues than thighs. He credited his spouse, recently renamed for Diana the Huntress, with evolving him. Like Ted Natter, he couldn't have done it alone. Both Craig and Ted hesitated to criticize my spouse, whom I still called my “wife,” but made it clear that the patriarchal hunter-gatherer paradigm was so over in a world that hungered for faithful caregiving.
My wife (spouse) grinned when I passed on the news. “Next time I see them, I'll wear my headband.” She wrapped it around her forehead, suggesting Native American credentials, although she wasn't a Native American. It was a look we both liked, but without a feather, not warlike. We were consistent lovers of peace. She was one of the few young women in our local peacemaking crowd who opposed wearing cartridge belts as a fashion statement during picketing missions at the Federal Building in San Francisco. Cartridge belts plus chants of “U.S. Out of Viet Nam!” sent a mixed message, whereas a lovely ribbon wrapped around the forehead sent the message: I'm together, I'm a together person, we can all keep our brains together, it's still possible, guys.
This was a time of great innovation in Lifestyle and disease discovery. Craig's wife, Diana, with a devoted husband and two sunny daughters, wondered if she had the right to contentment when so many east Asians were dying in east Asia and so many sisters were being pressured to have sex with men who didn't necessarily deserve them. Out of solidarity with the suffering masses and victims of marital disrespect, she decided to take leave of her husband and children for a six-month retreat at an all-womyn commune in Santa Cruz. At the family conference where she announced her move, she explained that she was not a lesbian, but an explorer of alternative lifestyles. That was the plan. While she explained, her younger daughter explored the cleansing, irrigating sensation of tears and Craig smilingly developed a frontal lobe headache.
“Stop your crying,” said Mom to Liz. “I'll keep in touch.”
She kept in touch with Monday postcards, plus get-well cards when the girls caught the flu. Unfortunately, to telephone would interrupt the flow of alternative lifestyle, but she sent spiritual love vibes shooting down California Route One, the scenic road from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. She was learning from her mates in the commune that often a man would say he respected a woman before they had sex, but would just turn his hairy back on her afterward, snoring away without a care in the world, neglecting to nurture the recently discovered G-spot. On one of her postcards, she wrote to Liz that soon she might be told by a boy that he respected her, but she should watch out. Diana was learning to become a really together herman being. The patriarchy had conspired to hide the news of the G-spot for thousands of years. Women were not going to take it anymore.
Meanwhile, Craig was exploring the headache and depression lifestyle. He feared he hadn't even paid enough attention to the A- through F-spots. Through one of his colleagues at San Francisco State, he found a doctor to diagnose his condition. “Sub-acute epilepsy,” Craig explained to me. “Check it out for yourself.”
I hadn't heard of this disease.
“Epilepsy without any symptoms of epilepsy.”
“Pardon?”
“Well, do you have headaches sometimes? bad dreams? Are you depressed sometimes?”
I checked through my history. “At times, all of the above.”
Craig threw up his hands. “You see? It's a done deal. A clear case of…” He lowered his voice. He was proud to share. “Epilepsy in the sub-acute form.”
The treatment consisted of vitamins, deep breathing, and regular office visits to the sub-acute epilepsy specialist. Since I already was a frequent breather and vitamin buyer, my problems were only intermittent. But with regular office visits, I could eliminate the need for long walks and coffee, my usual remedies.
“Forget the blues and gather the roses,” Craig advised, his voice no longer lowered, startling the folks at the next table.
“So how's your wife doing?”
He made a little wince. “She wants me to refer to her as spouse, not wife. My spouse is coming home in another forty-three days.”
“You're counting,” I said. Life gave him many occasions for sub-acute fits, such as friends like me. There were even complications for him in his daughters’ (and his) dance classes. He launched a student rebellion, joined by no one, not even his daughters, against a choreographed series of leaps and bounds accompanying the recording of a non-Afro-Cuban song:
Mama, get the hammer,
There's a fly on baby's head
“This is no time for joking about child abuse,” he told the instructor, Gwana Akumba, and stamped his bare foot. “I won't participate.” He warmed his hurt heel in his hand; he forgot he hadn't been wearing shoes when he stamped. He glared from a folding chair while the other dancers, sellouts to the military-industrial-folkdancing complex, enacted life on a front porch without insect screens. Craig was a pioneer in suffering new diseases and principle-related conditions, such as sub-acute epilepsy and a foot hurt in the line of duty.
He explored the frontiers of manly feminism. This was a time of incest survival groups to rescue survivors, sometimes victims whose fathers, uncles, or brothers never actually did anything untoward, but may well have thought of it. In Mill Valley, a weekly Affluence Visualization Seminar gathered future millionaires who were not yet rich because they hadn't correctly visualized wealth (also hadn't accumulated a lot of money). A person couldn't venture out in the Bay Area without finding a remedy for a nefarious condition never before diagnosed. Cures struggled to keep pace with syndromes.
During one military crisis, my college classmate Allen Ginsberg—sometimes my friend, sometimes not, sometimes my friend again—asked the Hell's Angels to rescind their offer to serve as “gorillas” in Viet Nam. He didn't criticize Oakland chapter president Sonny Barger's spelling of “guerrillas” in his telegram to United States president Richard Nixon because Allen was a compassionate, nonjudg-mental peace advocate. Instead, as a fallback position, Allen recruited what he called “a trained corps of disciplined fairies” to unbutton the jeans of the Hell's Angels and fellate them into love and understanding. History does not record President S. Barger's response to Allen's Zen-inspired project, but we do know that the war in Viet Nam eventually ended.
Satanic rituals were only a few years off—fourteen-year-olds impregnated so that the fetuses could be torn out and used in unspeakable ceremonies, generally in secluded woods. The FBI uncovered no evidence of this because the FBI was complicit. A twelve-hundred-page book connected the Mafia, the Kennedys, the Illuminati, and certain Elders with a plot to conceal the fact that Moses was actually an Egyptian. I only read a two-hundred-page summary of The Gemstone Papers, but the friend who offered it to me was the Jewish founder of a chain of no-preservative muffin shops, and as a Jewish person himself, assured me that no anti-Semitism was involved.
Waking up to the sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, or a cover of that anthem about sitting by the dock of the bay was always an adventure. You could esteem both Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan; only fools liked Donovan. The woman teaching the lessons of The Gemstone Papers on FM radio in San Jose linked California politics, Alexander Hamilton, the Mafia, Pope John XXIII, Zionism, Quaker Oats, and the Kellogg's cereal monolith in a way that was difficult to follow unless you paid attention. But people were distracted by their own lives; another cunning trick of the Illuminati.
After Diana MacKenzie-Nebisher's brief investigatory foray into the herperson's commune in Santa Cruz, she returned to find that Craig had taken advantage of her absence to learn to bake cakes and what he called a “decadent” chocolate and cherry pie. Spouse turned up her adorable nose at the pie. Craig explained that “decadent” was how all the great chefs described rich chocolate desserts. Gourmet cheficizing was only one of the things he had studied during Spouse's marriage sabbatical. Yon Cassius had a sulky and larded look; he thought too much and renewed an old hobby, o
vereating. He had misplaced the tape measure with which he measured his thighs. Such men are dangerous, mostly to themselves.
“Well, bye-bye to that,” snapped Spouse, meaning cherry and chocolate pie. She had learned different things in Santa Cruz, including how to spill pig's blood on the Miss America parade. Back with her family, she wrote long letters, not just Monday postcards, to her fellow communards. Solidarity Forever was the reason. She propped up her broadened horizons in order to preserve both vertical and horizontal dimension.
“Pig's blood?” her younger daughter asked. “On a car?”
“Was it a convertible?” her other daughter asked.
“With the top down,” said the warrior, home from her wars. “On her stupid pink gown.”
“Yucch, so gross, Mom,” said one of the daughters.
“You can call me Diana,” the mother said.
As the years sped by and the snows melted in those regions that include snow among the weather choices, and then the spring came, and the summer, and events followed in their appointed sequence, Craig and Diana continued to endure their happy marriage. She bought him a powerful gel to remove the hair on his heavily forested back, but she wouldn't apply it herself, he couldn't reach, and they let the matter slide. The daughters survived, thrived, learned from a few divorces. Craig still writes love notes to Diana and hides them, like Easter eggs, in places she doesn't expect. “You are my song and my prayer, you are a completion and a fulfillment, you are my angel huntress forever and ever…”
Spouse, surprised anew, even moved, sometimes replies in her own way: “Ditto.”
That phrase “forever and ever” is a lyrical exaggeration, for in this world, nothing made of flesh is forever. Not even the giant centuries-old tortoises of Galápagos, sluggish though they may be. Not even the coral reefs and many minerals, which are not made of flesh. As to spirit, the question is still widely debated.
11
Still Alive: But All in Good Time, Might Not Be
For nine months I swam like a tiny fish in my mother, then was born and did my best to take over the lives of my parents. Firstborn son, I ruled. Later, I watched them fading, dying. In turn, I co-created my own little fish, five of them, and now they accompany me through the process of late living, future dying. I still feel like a fish swimming—not in my mother but free in the ocean. My eldest daughter tells me she doesn't like my living alone. I'm not alone! But much of my company is now invisible because only remembered.
One friend, call him Buddy, still survives from my childhood in Lakewood, Ohio. Inheriting from his parents, he lives in the same house where we ate buttered white Wonder Bread toast after school and pretended we weren't classroom rivals in addition to friends. At my family's house a few blocks away, we ate my mother's “sugarless” oatmeal raisin cookies. Because she said they were sugarless, they wouldn't harm our teeth. In those days, saying would make it so.
“Sugarless” did not mean there was no sugar in the cookies. “You wouldn't have wanted hardened bread, would you?” she explained sixty-five years later, clearing her conscience before she died. In our family we say “died” because we don't believe people go anyplace after death. Buddy's parents “passed on” years ago. We're both orphans now.
Buddy says he doesn't travel because he likes to be always within a few steps of his bathroom with all the requisite implements. He was remodeling another room in his house, the Library, which had been installed by his upward-mobile parents. Exhibited on the shelves had been a blue glass Shirley Temple cream pitcher (a valuable “collectible” earned in a Kellogg's or Post Toasties promotion), a teakwood Buddha from the opening of a Chinese restaurant with its rival, a grinning plastic Confucius, stationed nearby (Buddy's family liked dining out on chop suey, chow mein, egg foo yung), trophies from travels and marksmanship competitions, and also a collection of books, including a Tarzan series from Buddy's childhood, the World Book encyclopedia set, and two of my novels.
Soon, when the contractor had finished removing the dark panels and shelves, the Library would be a den.
“A den?”
“A den, a den, a den,” he said rapidly. “My Entertainment Center, plasma screen, the Japanese've come up with some real advances.”
“Couldn't you just keep it as a library—?”
“You think I have time to reread those old books with all the good shows out there, plus cable, plus my DVDs?”
“You used to… Remember in the summer we'd read a book a day and keep score?”
“I'm not so fond of reading lately. Maybe it's the macular whatchacallit. I've got this macular generation, plus working my way from cataract to cardiac. And I could tell you about my prostrate—oh boy. But otherwise I'm mostly fine. My den remodel'll give me a leash on life.”
I imagined him as an old dog on a new leash. I said, “We used to give ourselves names from Thomas Wolfe, James Branch Cabell, Kenneth Roberts —”
“Hey, I remember those days. The world was our oyster, right. But lately Bonnie did the reading, specially in our sunset years.”
He fell silent. I said nothing, thinking this was the way to respect his silence, but after a while, I said, “You miss her?”
“Sometimes, yeah.” He sighed and cast his eyes toward the contractor's unfinished work, the dark wood stacked in a corner. “Her birthday maybe. Other holidays. I'm gonna keep the ashes on that one shelf up there above my Entertainment Center. With the DVDs.”
Buddy's teeth were regular and white, but not thanks to my mother's sugarless cookies. They were removable. He smiled as he used to. He didn't want me to think he was complaining. He said I was welcome anytime when I wanted to see how the Lakewood of our childhood had grown up and joined the real world of Cleveland.
Facetiousness is a poor but serviceable substitute for humor. When invited out, I often accept with gratitude, adding the ritual bit of graciousness that I have no social life and mostly can be found eating the Early Bird Special at Zim's, a chain restaurant, reading a newspaper, and using nail scissors to clip items that might come in handy someday, such as Health Advances or Grooming Tips for Seniors.
An uncomfortable ha-ha is the usual response. The generous host or hostess does not rescind the invitation.
In the traveling carnivals of my runaway adolescence, this was known as kidding on the square, but in fact, I do spend most evenings alone. It's true in the same sense that occasional bursts of talkativeness are only a way to camouflage my crippling stammer, stutter, and secret inarticulateness. A willingness to pick up conversations with fellow passengers on the bus is a means to hide shyness. As Walt Whitman would say if he were a contemporary adolescent, I contain multitudes of whatever.
So perhaps I'm only hiding encroaching senility by remembering the past and anticipating the future with relish as a screen for the inner drooling, limping, shrunken, bent, squeaking Herb.
Every year or so, I telephone my first college girlfriend and give thanks that her voice is still strong and clear, although she gives me news of the debilitation of her husband. We share unease at our changed worlds. Occasionally I also hear from a playmate of very early childhood, writing from her retirement home in South Carolina and begging me to accept Jesus before it's too late. Out of old friendship, remembering graham crackers and milk together on her parents’ front porch, she wants to die knowing that I will not burn in hell. I don't have the heart to remind her that at age four we also used to play Hospital together, a game made in heaven for us because I had no sisters and she had no brothers and therefore we were both intensely curious about the anatomy of the opposite and, frequently, opposing sex. On a need-to-know basis, she doesn't need this reminder after her long life of evangelical piety.
I began to read the obituary pages because of what I told myself was an interest in stories, each obituary representing a condensed life, although too many of them seemed to be the story of an insurance company vice president's career. Then I began to notice that some of them, more of them, man
y of the defunct were my age (“So young,” I would mouth aloud). Now I still think, So Young, although most of the perishing renowned who earn lead obituaries in The New York Times are younger than I am, veterans of later wars than mine.
I pay close attention to the mini-stories that indicate a second or third spouse, sometimes taken at an advanced age. Good for you, I decide over a favorite vegetable and bean curd dish at my neighborhood Chinese restaurant (adequate light for reading, nice Yolanda my regular waitress).
I regret the loss of enemies, too. Like friends, beloveds, and the famous, the hated fill a place in our hearts. On the one ghoulish hand, I grieve for their consequent inability to repent. On the other, dripping with gore and black with spite, I lose with the death of an enemy the ability to take revenge. What's the use of hatred now? The philosopher Irwin Corey taught me that without hatred, there can be no joy in revenge.
What is happening with these losses is a gradual depopulation of my world. I don't want to become the goofy old guy heading out for coffee with the morning newspaper under his arm and his head filled with nothing but nostalgia, which, like jealousy, does no good work and produces diminishing returns. History should be a continuing activity, leading into the future.
When I hike, sometimes there's a sudden shooting pain in my right foot that comes and goes without warning. If it's too intense, I stop, but usually I just keep on walking and it mysteriously disappears. My doctor can't find a cause. I used to jump off towers in the Army to prepare for parachuting into the perhaps welcoming arms of our gallant Soviet allies. It was wartime and doctors had the convenient notion of treating severe sprains by injecting morphine into the foot and ankle, binding them, and then sending the soldier (me) back to duty. I wonder if this present pain is a shadow memory of an injury from more than sixty years ago. Just as I did in the Army, I'll live with it; walk, run, and jump through it.
