by Bruce Wagner
Gone Fishin’!
As I said, the shrink sedated her. She slept for 36 hours and seemed much better. A postmortem honeymoon period ensued. For a week or so, we couldn’t stop talking, but in a good way. Real chatterboxes. A freaky, hypomanic phase, like being back in college taking speed to cram for exams. O, we had mourning sickness (with a “u”) for sure! We vomited, metaphorically and not, and when that was done, like after peyote—ever eat peyote?—that’s when the magic began. Being in our bodies, being in the world, was some kind of insane kick. It was almost like we were discovering them for the first time, no, maybe more like interlopers, those old Hollywood movies where angels come to Earth and are amazed to have bodies again. Or with psilocybin, when you get that insight that the mushroom has taken you so it can see the world through human eyes . . . It was funny. Even taking shits had us in stitches! It was a way of being with Ryder too, as if the three of us were already in the bodiless regions and Kelly and I just came down temporarily, to revisit what a hoot and a comedy—what a divine travesty it was to have a body, we were on spring break but would return to our boy after a long carnal weekend. Good times! I think we had entered this weird labile stage of loss where everything was so surreal it felt antic: we had crossword puzzle showdowns, we painted little masterpieces, we polished silver crap we didn’t even know we had, cooked dinner at 4 a.m. in formal dress . . . told forgotten, complicated jokes and recited the first and last names of ancient homeroom geeks. We tried on distractions, competitive channel-surfed with dueling remotes, indulged in klieg-lit nighttime gardening, built ingenious Rube Goldberg devices. It felt zany and erotic—overheated teenagers in a seizure of shoplifting. In fact, it got erotic. We fucked again, just once. And that was . . . sad. For a while anyway and then it got funny again. Really funny. We were in a frenzy that we had no desire to name or explain. Couldn’t explain. Just we happy two. And we had these—we experienced these moments of supreme, supernatural, grief-free giddiness! It was so awesome. In those fucked-up days, without knowing, my wife and I probably got pretty close to getting it—the formless form/gateless gate scam, the whole bullshitless bullshit, “non-returning” Pure Abode–dwelling anagami rap—’cause something way outside of ourselves was forcing our hand. Talk about your unsolicited crash course in enlightenment! (And boy, did we crash. But that wasn’t till a week later.) We got out there, like those airplanes that almost make it to space. Where the pilot sees the stars and the blackness just beyond the atmosphere?
The Theory of Relativity proved you would come back younger from a voyage to the stars, right? I think even when you come back from New York on JetBlue, you’re technically younger. Infinitesimally so—but hell, I’ll take it. Have to. It’s like that old line about pregnancy—you can’t be a little bit pregnant. You either come back younger or you don’t. So we went through this phase, got our degrees in the jitterbug-ology of Death. We blew through verbiage, waving words like the man who waved his whisk before God, as the Sufi wiseguy once said. Danced our jive asses off to Motown . . . how it can dance! Had Ryder dancing with us too, we each held one of his little absent hands though that was tough because, see, the three of us actually used to do that, had our sweaty, popcorn’d Soul Train–American Bandstand Saturday nights. But Kelly and me danced through it, pretended Ryder was there, full-on boogie’d with and acknowledged him. I was the coach, Ryder the quarterback, and Kelly the head cheerleader for Team Zombie. O yes—the walking and dancing dead.
Dead man meditating . . .
Then one day it was over. Guess you had to have been there. You know, I learned a lot from Kelly. She was magnificent. I don’t think that’s been adequately conveyed in the few hours we’ve spent. Kelly was simply magnificent.
About a week after Ryder died, I spoke to a friend who lost his kid two decades back. He said the hard part came after the wake, when friends stopped bringing food and folks stopped calling, to give you your space. Or because they didn’t know what to say or whatever. “These are the good times,” he said. “Savor it.”
The irony is that the death of our son was his teachable moment to her. But I think she’s going to have to wait a long time to learn its lesson. Hopefully, she’ll get it, at the TM of her own death: the lesson of Impermanence.
There’s a marvelous little story that Sir Richard Burton recounts in his Anatomy of Melancholy. That book didn’t leave my side for three years after we lost our son.
A young man, disconsolate over his debts, saw no way out. He went into an abandoned shack to hang himself. He’d already tied the rope on a rafter when something caught his eye. He went over to a caved-in closet to investigate and found a trove of gold coins. It was meant to be hidden but a rotting beam had broken under its weight. He couldn’t believe his reversal of fortune. He crept away with the treasure chest under his arm. A while later, another young man entered the shack. When he saw that the treasure that he’d hidden was gone, he used the rope left behind to hang himself. Isn’t that lovely? Like something from Boccaccio.
I hope you don’t think it too strange, my telling that. I’ll tell you why I did. Have you ever had a bad breakup? Or unrequited love? And when it’s over, you keep thinking you see their car? You see it everywhere: on the freeway, in parking lots, in front of you, behind. You see it in your dreams . . . I did that for years once. I even knew it wasn’t his car anymore, someone told me he’d bought a new one but there I was, trapped in time, still on the lookout for a yellow Corolla with a dent on the passenger door. Couldn’t help myself. It’s like that for me and hangings now. Whenever I read about one in the paper . . . I’ve got a book of clippings. Maybe that’s carrying it too far. I don’t do the tarot anymore. For some reason, I shy away from the Hanged Man, though I’m a real fan of upside-down crucifixions. St. Peter and all. Go figure.
What can I say? There’s perverse comfort in it. I don’t know the psychology. There’s a hidden fraternity, you’d be surprised, of people whose loved ones hanged themselves. And folks like me, who found them. Thank God for the Internet.
He laughed, smiled to himself, then placed his hands together in his lap and closed his eyes like a guru who was done for the day. I took the liberty of boiling water for tea but in a few minutes he broke free of his thoughts and leapt beside me. “No no, don’t fuss with that. You’ve listened so patiently that a parting cup of tea is the least I could do.” We drank in relative silence, with Charley resuming the lotus position. A pleasant smile of what I took for catharsis suffused his features. He asked me a few questions about where I was going next, when I thought the anthology would be published, and so forth.
I was in my car and halfway down the winding hill when he appeared, out of breath. He looked not so much anguished as startled. I asked what was wrong. He said he’d left something out—“a rather crucial last piece of business. I’d kick myself if I never told you, whether you decide to include it or not.” I told him I would turn around but he said the afternoon’s talk had exhausted him. He apologized again for any inconvenience, offering two choices: tomorrow—here at lunchtime—or later on at 2 a.m. when the baths at Esalen open. It appealed to me to end our encounter at the place it had begun.
The superb night was cold and crystalline, and made me think about his comment of the pilots who get so close to the stars and the blackness—and about Big Sur being a place where one cannot expect to be healed. Only one other person was in the tub; she got out and nodded to us in leavetaking, a cue to begin. Then she was gone.
I told you I wouldn’t hold back and I meant it. What I’m about to tell you may sound egregious or vulgar—TMI alert!
Here goes.
I think pretty much everyone knows that a hanged man gets a hard-on. Most of us have heard it before, somewhere or other. Wikipedia calls it “angel lust” but you never really know what’s a bullshit Wiki entry and what isn’t. Someone could have heard “angel lust” on Grey’s Anatomy, which means it may or may not have b
een made up by smartass Hollywood writers. So pretty soon you’ve got fake entries in there that look real and maybe even become real if they catch on. Somebody could have put “angel lust” in there and it’s bogus but the wikitectives haven’t caught it yet or maybe never will until it’s actually entered the vernacular. In which case, it’d stay on Wiki anyway. At any rate, it was true with my son. He got a hard-on. Or had one when I found him. The death erection, what they call a “terminal” erection. I’ve studied up on this a little—I mean, since. When a man is hanged, he gets hard and sometimes climaxes. Of course as his dad I saw his penis in every way, shape and form—you change the diapers and see an adorable stiffie, a confection, you want to take a bite! A terminal confection. Kelly and I would joke about it, I think that’s probably something most parents do, you could see the purple vein, he’d pee straight up, oh do all kinds of things. It seems to me that in the delirium of the moment, my son hanging from the rope and me lifting him, hefting the weight of him, that infernal dance of ours frozen in time, tadpole thickened to anemone-sized tentacle by the hanging trauma, its familiar now very unfamiliar purple vein not a rebuke but a wild reminder of God, that now Ryder wildly belonged to God—I wasn’t aroused, Lord no, never, more like a frightened boy myself, making up for my shyness by clutching a tall girl at a cotillion dance, holding on too tight—what a simple heartbreak scene drawn in my head forevermore! His little balls made a horizontal 8, the Infinity sign, I saw myself as a boy just his age, see myself now as we talk, skittish child-victim of the clergy cotillion—there’s my son, dead, hard—helplessly, incognizantly aroused by his yanked, roughshod transition to boodafield . . .
I’ve never told anyone that.
He wrapped himself in a towel and retrieved a cassette recorder from the backpack on a nearby bench. Back in the tub, taking care to hold it out of harm’s way, he played a tape of his wife reading a Ravidas poem to their son. Her voice was lovely, carefree.
It’s just a clay puppet, but how it can dance!
It looks here, looks there, listens and talks,
races off this way and that;
It comes on something and it swells with pride,
but if fortune fades it starts to cry.
It gets tangled in its lusts, in tastes
of mind, word, and deed,
and then it meets its end and takes some other form.
Brother, says Ravidas, the world’s a game, a magic show,
and I’m in love with the gamester,
the magician who makes it go.
He swathed the tape recorder in a towel and without getting up from the tub, set it on the ground. Then he resumed, with an enigmatic smile.
I was at a flea market in Sebastopol and came across an unusual item, the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. There’s a lot of volumes and the three I laid my hands on now make their home in the van. There was a story in there of a young student the police detained. I can’t remember why he was arrested, but I doubt if the punishment—injection of chemicals into his feet—fit the crime. After a few days, he was stripped naked and fitted with a hood so he couldn’t see. Imagine his fear as they began pouring liquid onto his body! It was only milk and the policemen tried not to laugh . . . they brought in a calf that sucked the milk on his penis. One of the priests used to do that to me with honey, sans blindfolds. And I’d do it to him. On camping trips, he’d smear honey on himself and ask me to lick it off. (For some reason, he was in the habit of asking politely. Being polite probably turned him on.) Do you know what the sonofabitch used to say? That I should imagine his bunghole as Christ’s wedding ring and the deeper I got my finger and tongue, the stronger was my marriage to the Savior. O, he was a great wit. He used to say, most impolitely, “It is easier for a little faggot to pass through the hole of a man of God than it is for a girl to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” When he went down on me, that hot mouth felt like the guts of some dying animal. Felt great. Awful to admit, but true. You could smell his dirty breath when he talked, right through his nostrils . . . hygiene was never a strong suit with the prelates. I have come to believe—no pun intended!—that the more flagrant the sacrilege, the greater the orgasm all around. I never let him know I was horny, always acted like he was hurting me. He knew I was putting on an act. He knew that I knew that he knew, which became our covenant. And that it felt good, his mouth, my mouth, our whatever, became a covenant between me and God, for how could there not be godliness in such a feeling? I remember so clearly the sound of the birds singing their indifferent song while he worked on me, I heard the scratchings of the leafless branches of courtyard trees as if the Lord Himself was at the door, impatiently waiting to be let in.
Now, my lust is wanderlust—I visit rocky coast and chaparral, hermitage and open road, to reacquaint myself with all things beautiful that they tried to destroy.
You know the story of Saturn, don’t you? Saturn castrated his father, oh yes, then married his sister. Talk about your dysfunctional family. It was foretold he’d be dethroned by one of his sons. So what did he do? What any self-respecting God would: ate ’em all up at birth, like bonbons. Eventually, Rhea—his sister-wife—got a little tired of the drama. When it came time to feed him Baby Boy No. 6—that would be Jupiter—she swaddled a rock in blankets and he swallowed that instead. I guess gods know pretty much everything but still have trouble when it comes to spotting the difference between newborns and wrapped-up rocks. So the sister hid Jupiter away. You know, those oracles never made bum predictions. The gods were really dumb that way too. They never seemed to catch on that the oracles were always right.
There’s a painting by Goya, part of what they call the “black paintings.” They were done directly on the walls of his house, kind of in secret. None were commissioned or even meant to be seen. The most famous is Saturn Devouring His Son. Goya didn’t name it that, someone else did. All the black paintings were untitled because they weren’t meant for the public, they were for his eyes only. Well, it’s an absolutely fiendish painting. He’s just laying into this—Saturn’s delightedly laying into this little man—taking big bites out of this—this torso with legs—the eyes are bulging in Daddy Dearest’s head, I am telling you, Bruce, it will make you shiver! Go online when you have a chance and take a look. By the time he did the black paintings, Goya was old and deaf. See, in the privacy of his own home he could just let it rip, God bless him. But here’s why I brought it up, this is what most people don’t know. You see, there were photographs taken before those paintings were transferred to canvas. Now remember, these murals were painted on plaster, on the plaster walls of his house and the experts took pictures before they moved them to the Prado. No one knows where the photographs are now, of course, but it’s fairly common knowledge the government destroyed them. The thing is, there’s still a few people living who wrote about what they saw—in the photos—and they say Saturn had an erection—Goya painted Saturn fully aroused as he ate his kid! Which makes perfect sense, at least to me. Which was totally suppressed, you know, for the “greater” good. Whitewashed. Literally. God knows how many hands those photos passed through. How many busybody committees, how many bourgeois arbiters of taste who ruled that such a thing would be too scandalous. Mustn’t threaten tourism with a scandale!
By the time it got to the museum, the hard-on was painted over.
Ryder died in December, on a Saturday. That’s a double Saturn. He was born in December too. Not favorable. Gloomy—bitter— cold—saturnine. None of which of course describes my son. Sometimes Ouroboros, the serpent that devours its tail, is a symbol used for Saturn. Ouroboros: the “O” sign. Remember that? The snakehead—or tail—even makes a little bulge in the “O,” changing it to a “Q”—tongue lolling from mouth. Funny, huh? So Saturn devours his son, deflowers his son; Saturn eats his own tail . . . eats the thing he made, the thing-at-its-beginning, the thing-he-once-was. Everything comes full circle. Or so
we like to think.
But wouldn’t it be funny if everything didn’t?
In the months after he died, I dreamt of waves, tall as buildings. Big Sur waves. I was drowning in them, with sick priests floating all around like goblins, or stuck to me like leeches, gobble-gobbling me up, licking my flat tits—
[recites]
And God did not make death
He did not make pain
But the little blind fire
that leaps from one wound into another
knitting the broken bones
and fixing the broken bones
and fixing sins so they cannot be forgotten.
I will obey my nurse who keeps this fire
deep in her wounded breast
for God did not make death—
As I said, Kelly’s living on the edge of her sister’s land, in Calgary.
A cabin; she lives in a cabin.
Her sister worries about her incessantly.
There is a field there, and I’m told she sometimes wanders in it.
But my wife never strays too far from the cabin.
SECOND
GURU
The next story was told to me in the desert of New Mexico, over five days.
Our sessions took place at night, under an ecclesiastical cope of stars. Queenie spent her days submerged in a profusion of journals and diaries (whose keeping was a lifelong habit; she revisited them in order to refresh her memory “so as to maximize our time”). Many of those writings were almost thirty years old. She made use of other source material as well and in the course of the story reveals how she came upon it. I make note of this to help explain what might otherwise be taken for superhuman powers of reflection. That said, she freely admitted she had no qualms extemporizing, if it helped her cause, i.e., advancing the story or to more accurately convey a mood or a message.
