by Mark Salzman
In fact, for some time I was confused about what he did during the day; the misunderstanding came about one winter morning when, after having gotten up before dawn to put an electric heating blanket over the engine of our Volkswagen (otherwise it wouldn’t start in the winter) before his hour-long commute, he came into the house to savor a final moment of warmth and said to no one in particular, “Back to the salt mines.” I overheard this and went on to announce during show-and-tell that my daddy worked underground; on the back of my report card that year my teacher, who knew that my father was not a miner, wrote, “I worry that sometimes Mark seems to be in his own little world.”
She was right. I was in my own little world, and it consisted mostly of daydreaming to pass the time until Daddy came home from work. For me that was when real life began, because I adored my gloomy father. He was fairly strict, did not care for board games, owned no power tools and had no interest in sports, but he was great company. Aristotle observed that melancholy men are the most witty, to which I would add that they are also the most fun to confide in. For much of my young life I enjoyed nothing better than to help him forget about his awful day at work by telling him about my awful day at school, and this usually led to a good meandering conversation. Sometimes we talked sitting on the living-room floor because that was where he painted, with half of his materials in boxes scattered all around him and the other half ground into the rug. On weekends we talked in the car on the way to the town dump, to the hardware store, to the Volkswagen dealer or to my Youth Symphony rehearsals in Norwalk. If the weather was too awful, he would declare it a Green Blanket Day, pull out an ancient, tattered green blanket, throw it on one of our collapsed sofas, make cinnamon toast and tea for Erich, Rachel and me and spend the day napping there with us and telling stories. Occasionally I joined him for his morning walk around the dairy farm near our house because I could count on his wanting to chat rather than keep his mind on exercise, which he hated. Most of all, though—and most enjoyable of all—we talked under the stars during our astronomy sessions.
Sensing I might be an eager disciple, my dad started me on the hobby as soon as I was old enough to stay awake past eight o’clock. My earliest childhood memory is of his taking me out to a cold field in the middle of the night to see comet Ikeya-Seki. This was in 1965. From its bright starlike head to the end of its frosty tail it measured over thirty million miles, which represents one third of the distance from the earth to the sun. The comet glowed so brightly in the cold night air that the cows standing near us looked like ghostly worshipers, forming icons of their deity with their own breath. As we stamped our feet to keep warm, my father told me that comets were really not much more than snowballs, and that each time they passed by the sun they melted a little. “In a few hundred million years,” he said, “that comet we’re looking at will melt completely, and the dust from the tail will be blown by the solar wind out into the space between the stars.”
One reason, I think, that conversations while stargazing can be so memorable is that you can’t really see your companion’s face. You can only hear his voice while staring up into the darkness, which brings the words into unusually sharp focus. When I asked my dad what would happen to the dust from the tail after it got blown out of the solar system, he said, “Well, gravity might catch it and pull it into a huge cloud of other kinds of dust, and then it would become a new star or planet. Or it might drift out in space forever.”
“How can it drift forever?”
He paused before answering, “Nobody knows, really. But you’ll have a better idea once you get a job.”
Ironically, the one job my dad talked about with enthusiasm required drifting in space; he knew the names of all the astronauts, and considered every one of them a hero. Not surprisingly, when I was seven years old (around the middle of the Gemini program) I decided that I had to become an astronaut. I didn’t mean when I grew up, however; I meant right then, preferably by the end of the month. When I told my father this he said, “You’re too young to be an astronaut right this minute, but if you keep working hard at your schoolwork, you could have a chance at it someday.” This advice discouraged me, but my mother saved the day by suggesting that I write a letter to NASA asking for information about the astronaut program; who knows, she said, maybe there was something I could do right away, even as a seven-year-old.
“Oh, Martha,” my father said, shaking his head. “They don’t have time to answer mail like that.”
“It doesn’t hurt to try,” she countered angrily, so I did write a letter, and three weeks later received a large manila envelope from NASA stuffed with color photographs from space and pamphlets about the space program. “You see?” asked Mom, who never seemed surprised when her long-shot suggestions worked. “You should never be afraid to try something!”
Taking her advice, I began my astronaut training immediately. One of the pamphlets showed an astronaut tucked inside a cramped mock capsule, and the text below explained that the astronauts had to get used to spending many long hours without being able to move. In an early display of what was to become my trademark habit—the obsessive pursuit of unrealistic goals—I decided to set a record for sitting still in a cramped space. I was sure this would get NASA’s attention.
I found a cardboard box that I could barely fit into, drew buttons and gauges all over the inside of it and outfitted it with a blanket, a thermometer, an alarm clock and a periscope made with two of my mother’s compact mirrors. I set up the space photo from NASA against the wall so I could look at them through the periscope and imagine myself on a real mission. My ground crew—Erich and Rachel—prepared Dixie cups filled with sugar water for me and passed them down through the periscope hole when I needed more energy. I began the program by sitting in the box for half an hour, and increased my time every day by adding ten minutes. When I got to over an hour a day it started to get boring, but I knew I had to push on. If I was chosen for the real thing, a trip to the moon, think how long I would have to be prepared to sit!
I knew it was important that I not be comfortable, so I did not allow myself a cushion to sit on, and kept the box closed at all times so that it would get stuffy and overheated. Once a training session began I did not let myself out to go to the bathroom. After a week or so, when I felt my determination waning, I started pointing the box toward the TV so I could watch my favorite program—Lost in Space—through the periscope to counteract the boredom.
I did this for several weeks, building up to over three hours per session before the training came to an abrupt end. I remember the last mission well:
“Mission Commander—this is Mission Control in Houston. Prepare for Trans-Lunar Injection.”
“Mission Commander here. All systems go. Preparing for the burn.”
“Ten seconds until ignition.”
The Trans-Lunar Injection would take me out of the earth’s orbit and send me toward the moon. It would increase my speed from seventeen thousand miles an hour to more than twenty-five thousand miles an hour.
“Ignition!”
There was no sensation of acceleration, no noise and just a slight vibration. Only my computer told me that I was picking up speed at a phenomenal rate. When the burn finished, the vibration stopped.
“Burn complete.”
After that, all was silent. I was in deep space now. The capsule was stuffy and hot inside; a look at the thermometer told me it was 95 degrees. The alarm clock indicated I had been inside it for three hours and five minutes. Suddenly I heard a pop, and felt myself shift in position. Another pop, but this was a little longer in duration, and sounded more like something tearing. Oh no! One of the welded seams of the capsule was opening! If it got any wider, I would lose all air pressure! My body would pop like an overinflated balloon, then freeze instantly in the absolute vacuum of space.
“Mayday, Mayday!” I shouted. “Mission Control, this is Mission Commander. We have a problem.”
“Honey, I’m teaching now.”
> What?
“Where did that voice come from, Mrs. Salzman?”
“Oh, from that box over there near the TV. My son’s in it.”
Mayday! Mayday! I turned the periscope around and saw, instead of the earth or moon or the limitless void, a sight that confused me. It was my mother, giving a piano lesson in our living room, and her student was sitting on the bench, staring in my direction.
“He’s practicing to be an astronaut,” my mother explained in a stage whisper. “He puts those pictures of the stars in front of the box and looks at them through the little periscope. He’s been doing it for weeks now.” She looked toward me. “Oops! Honey, I think your box is starting to fall apart. Your rear end is sticking out.” Her student giggled.
My butt had popped out of the spaceship, right in front of one of Mom’s teenage piano students. I was seven years old again.
I pulled the toy periscope down, climbed out through the top and carefully avoided looking at either my mother or her student. My face was tingling, which I knew meant that it was red as a baboon’s ass. I went upstairs to my room, lay down on the bed and prepared for the arrival of what I called the Black Fog, which descended whenever I came out of an outstanding daydream and realized that I was still a little kid in Connecticut. This time the Black Fog hung over me for weeks. It lifted only when my father brought home a book called Mammals Do the Strangest Things, which inspired my next unrealistic project: turning the swamp in our front yard into a platypus, fruit bat and armadillo sanctuary.
In spite of my failure to become an astronaut, I continued to enjoy astronomy lessons with my father, and our stargazing chats ensured my never losing touch with his dark sense of humor. By the time I reached my teens I had learned the secret of his way of thinking, which was to acknowledge, as Tolstoy had, that the only thing we can really know is that we know nothing. Tolstoy considered this to be the highest flight of human reason, whereas for my dad it was just another grim fact and the only possible explanation for the success of phenomena like the Spanish Inquisition, paintings on black velvet of sad clowns and country-western music. He regarded Woody Allen as a sociologist first and a comedian second; he felt that Edvard Munch would have made a better psychiatrist than Sigmund Freud; and he agreed with Arthur Koestler, who wrote that the human brain was perhaps the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ it does not know how to use.
My only complaint about my father’s pessimism was that he didn’t get more pleasure out of it. This revealed the biggest difference between him and me, the one gap that not even a lifetime of conversation could bridge: my father was a natural pessimist who expected the worst as a matter of course, while I am a synthetic pessimist, someone who tries to protect himself from disappointment by convincing himself that pessimists have the right idea. Natural pessimists suffer when their harsh predictions come true, whereas synthetic pessimists get a kick out of being right for a change. I felt more alive talking with my dad about death than I did listening to other people speculate about immortality, and the satisfaction I felt when he helped me find the right words to articulate a problem buoyed me up higher than any pep talk could have. From my own experiences as a manufactured curmudgeon, then, it seemed to me that my father should have been the liveliest, most buoyant man in the world. The reality was that he was unhappy much of the time, and this left me confused.
I was unhappy a lot of the time, but I could think of good reasons for this. I was a kid and, like all kids, was not really living my own life. School, homework, meals, cello lessons, manners, transportation and hygiene were all factors determined by the law, the establishment or my parents and it was useless to resist. Plus I was physically small, which virtually guarantees misery in boys. I clung to the idea that if I made it to twenty-one alive and without a long criminal record I would be rewarded with independence, a growth spurt, a steady companion of the opposite sex, my own car and a paying job. Then I could be a happy pessimist all day long, not just in the evenings and on weekends when Daddy was home.
My father threatened this vision of paradise. He was married, tall, salaried, drove his own Volkswagen bus and knew there was no point in getting too worked up over what one read about in the papers, yet he was depressed, particularly from Monday morning to Friday afternoon. I felt bad for him, but somewhere around the beginning of adolescence I realized his angst created an opening for me, an opportunity to carve out an identity of my own without hurting or disappointing him: all I had to do was become happy. If I accomplished this he would have to be impressed and might even ask me how I did it, putting me in the position of giving him advice for a change.
Somewhere in that pilot episode of the Kung Fu series I watched, the character who became everyone’s favorite—Master Po, the blind monk who could hear grasshoppers walk—described enlightenment as a sense of oneness with the universe. That was the moment I knew I had to find out more about it; that was when I became convinced that whoever invented kung fu must have had me in mind. Given my background as an astronomer’s apprentice, it was hard for me to imagine a nobler or more intriguing way of becoming happy than by merging with the night sky. If it worked for Buddha, who became enlightened when his eyes fell on Venus, it might work for me. And I couldn’t help noticing that Buddhism offered a blend of pessimism and idealism wonderfully suited to my circumstances: Buddha recognized all life as suffering and ignorance and gave up his stake in the world as we know it, but by doing so, he came to live in a state of perpetual euphoria. So when my dad told me to let him know if becoming like a block of wood worked, there was no turning back. I had to become at one with the universe because to return from such a queer but promising journey empty-handed would have been too humiliating.
2
After several months passed and I had made no apparent progress toward becoming hollow like a cave or opaque like a muddy pool, I decided to pick up the pace. I endeavored to use every moment of the day as a kind of training, not just the hours when I was meditating or practicing kung fu. Still thinking that becoming impervious to pain was the key to enlightenment, I started pinching myself a lot during class, skipping meals, wearing too much or too little clothing for the weather and walking barefoot to school. This last training method sorely tested Erich and Rachel’s loyalty because every time they passed me while riding the bus to school they had to hear the other kids laughing about the idiot with no shoes on.
Being the oldest child, I often wondered what it would have been like to have an older brother. When I pictured him, I usually saw in my mind a cool guy with long hair who sneaked me into bars with his friends, introduced me to girls and taught me to play electric bass so that I could join his rock band. Only now, when I think of what my real-life siblings had to go through, do I realize how lucky I was that I could make my imaginary older brother disappear at will. Besides having to see me wander around the house in a baldhead wig and pajamas or sitting cross-legged out in the backyard in the rain, they had to put up with my requests that they hold duffel bags full of clothes for me to punch and kick, shoot arrows at me with Dad’s bow so that I could practice dodging skills or tug on ropes tied around my ankles to get my legs to stretch further. For Erich, however, the bare feet in winter was just too much—he broke the code of silence and tattled on me. My parents gave me a spirited lecture that night, and the next morning my mother made sure I left the house with shoes on. In addition, she made me promise to keep them on until I came home. I kept my promise, but outsmarted her by cutting the soles out of the shoes, which prompted my ever-observant French teacher to take me aside one day and ask, “Mark, haven’t you ever heard of Shoetown?”
Eager for more advanced training methods, I read an article in a martial arts magazine claiming that back in the old days kung fu masters had trained themselves not to urinate. The magazine explained that those great masters stood crouched in the horse stance (the fundamental posture for most Asian martial arts) for eight or ten hours at a time, sweating out toxins
and using their amazing psychic powers to transform what was left in their bladders into powerful ch’i, translated in the article as “internal life-force breath essence.” I gave retention a try, but only for one afternoon; some of the secrets of old, I concluded, had been lost forever.
A year after seeing that first kung fu program I entered high school, and I was restless. I could imitate all of the movements described in Bruce Tegner’s Book of Kung Fu and Tai Chi, but felt no closer to being a martial arts master. Every day I meditated with my legs crossed for as long as it took a cone of apricot incense to burn down to the coffee table, but instead of concentrating on emptiness I spent most of that time trying not to imagine what my female classmates looked like naked. Most annoying of all, early symptoms of chronic back strain—brought on by my technique of suddenly jumping up into the air and kicking without stretching or warming up to practice being “alert, like men aware of danger”—reminded me all day long that I had not conquered pain. I needed a real teacher. Discouraged and frustrated, I asked my parents why I had to wait five years before I could join a Zen monastery, and they repeated that it was important to have a high school degree. But, they said, if I could find a kung fu school they would drive me to lessons.
