Kingdom of the Young

by Edie Meidav

  If you could, hypothetically, wash yourself clean of culture, would you then live the life of the body more purely? Our California had all the romantic-savage idealism of Truffaut’s The Wild Child, in which the wolf-boy loses the inner truth of his body once he is civilized, yet our California also had the gourmet jadedness of your average American international food court: sample the best of everywhere else, become a multiplied citizen, and why ever leave? Motion could become stasis in the perfect microcosm of Berkeley.

  We came to the Zion of California, and specifically Berkeley, after my family had already tried out Saint Louis, Haifa, Toronto, Westbury. We came the year the sixties truly ended, that is, in 1974, when the whole city was entering what I would later realize was one prolonged hangover, the buzzkill that included Reagan, the Charles Manson years, the various propositions announcing that people did not want to pay taxes to support anyone other than themselves. Vietnam veterans smoked their only pleasant artifacts of the war, their tiny pinched hoardables, sitting on the curbs along Telegraph Avenue, the main drag toward the university, steeping the whole area in sickly sweet fumes. Open-air sellers sold hippie jewelry—and what did ever happen to macramé, which seemed such an important art to my young self, as important as basket weaving or the making of incense holders?—underneath a mural depicting the people’s struggle to save People’s Park from the pigs, the police. There was a sense of revolution mutely dimmed. Now the bourgeoisie got to eat their massive alfalfa-sprout salads while kids growing up during that time in that place got to see what happened if you went the way of drugs, a massive cautionary display on every corner.

  So in the end the body became the path of improvement.

  California’s adolescent desire to make a better world, once nipped, became the realpolitik of someone entering their late twenties and early thirties, the more mature evaluation made by someone who realizes their own risks and mortality and who then makes adjustments.

  In the buzzkill years, seeded by a genealogy beginning with the Jack LaLannes and continued by the Jane Fondas, what the state’s citizens were left with was the body. In the state I grew up in, the body was everything. You could retreat into the body and its nurturance and rejuvenation, its vitamin protocol or cryogenic suspension. Retreat into a fanfold of body therapies because the body would not betray, or if it did, it was your fault. You could control your health, as well as your fate, and any illness was a sign of poor internal combustion. Every adult I knew was dedicated toward some form of self-development, and these forms usually radiated from and toward the body.

  From northern California all these body therapies—what we could see from another vantage as focused outcomes of the gold rush—were introduced, refined, reified, consolidated. Trager points, polarity, dance continuum, Rolfing, tai chi. Because, finally, when you had renounced your birthright, when politics had betrayed you, when you could not believe in your dreams, in community or connection or culture, you would always have the body, its urges, and the sophrosyne of the state writ upon it. You could endlessly self-improve, climb fire trails, eat more phytonutrients, meditate for hours a day and thus insure your own longevity or at least your survival when the great cataclysms would come, and bet your earthquake insurance come they would.

  On the east coast and perhaps everywhere else, when people find a body therapy they like, they cling to it as if it is a splintered board after a shipwreck, singular and intense in their devotion to it, truly zealous acolytes in crowded corridors in Manhattan or in meetings in little hard-to-find restaurants. But on the west coast, people slip in and out of the ever-present therapies—because to survive in a place that doesn’t squeeze your contours with a social contract as, say, with New England’s lawns and flags, you need to have some kind of pressure around your corporeal self—with an ease and blending akin to all the state’s experiments with pineapple and pimiento: California Pizza Kitchen indeed.

  My parents were not wholly immune to these new-fangled body therapies but also, interestingly, managed to remain in a prior century. My mother used olive oil on her face; on his hair my father used a tube of 1950s grease, part of a storm-cloud gathering of intention prior to any important business meeting. Of course he had other icons, all bespeaking the dream of ultimate mobility: the cologne of departure, the briefcase, the traveler’s Dopp kit with its tweezers, Band-Aids, scissors, shoe polish, an open briefcase. Most of my father’s life was spent in movement. When I was young, he would travel for months at a time for the United Nations to develop sustainable energy projects in Ethiopia, Honduras, Kenya, the Philippines, and who knows where else.

  My favorite memory of him from my kindergarten years is of a card he sent to me in his careful, floral immigrant cursive, a bird’s African feathers tufted on the front. In his absence, like our last phone call, the token became everything.

  After his brief stint for the UN, where he couldn’t stand being a government man, out in California, the land of possibility and future attainment, he started two companies. Over his career, he traveled the world but only after his death, as I took the plane westward that chilly middle of the night, did I realize that on planes, trains, boats, in any movement, I had always been closest to him.

  A few months after his death, I went on an already-planned research trip to Nicaragua and realized, as the plane began its touchdown in Managua, the local women around me busily applying eye makeup against the backdrop of volcanoes, how so many moments of his life were spent in true California sybaritic fashion, enjoying and appreciating the artistry of the people around him, a man unpretentious in wishing to connect with all he met, parking attendant or fellow passenger, always filled with stories of savoring the lives of strangers: an older woman whose charity in Nicaragua he wished to help, some Oakland evangelist whose family needed succor, as well as the occasional dignitary or billionaire. He may have reserved his greatest fondness, however, for the chef at the Hotel Cesar in Managua.

  Ten years before he died, five before his mind started its continental drift, he invited me to come translate on a business trip: we’d use the Hotel Cesar as our base. As with any Californian doing tai chi in the sun, he justified pleasure if it fell in the service of utopian work. Blithe about risk, the kind of person who had fallen down elevator shafts, into hot springs, and down stairs around the world, he wanted to share the pleasures of the Cesar. Never mind that on that first Nicaragua trip, I ended up having a life-or-death experience in the jungle when he sent me packing on laden burros up the volcano Momotombo with a team of brothers. Using machetes to cut the jungle ahead, the brothers and I were to find spots to place antiquated iron boxes containing seismic monitors: if it formed part of the strategy that the brothers lost the youngest brother who didn’t know the volcano, that the dark tugged in around the youngest and me, my father could not have known. Nor could he have guessed that, upon realizing our fate, this boy turned upon me with his own burning question: Why is it American girls don’t like Nicaraguan boys? Tramping through unknown wilderness, sharing my last water, we ended up clinging to one tree, our burros tied up below, skittish. While the nighttime cobras hissed below us, the young brother persisted in wanting to lose his virginity, the longest night of my life, and only by some instinct I cannot find or locate now, I led us the next morning toward what became eventually a path and a road and we were finally found.

  Only that I was perplexed anew by my father, who, upon my return back to him and his Hotel Cesar, sighed, relieved, his accent thicker than ever: I’m so glad I did not know you were lost, that I had no clue it was happening! And why not? I would have tried to send helicopters to try to rescue you! Hopeful ignorance thus triumphed over friction, a possibly Israeli trait which also suited him to California, the state of mind in which people pursue the specificities of lifestyle, each person facing the ocean, rather than be too aware of the particularities of those who rub shoulders nearby.

  During that first visit to Nicaragua, he and I stayed a few more days at the Hotel Ce
sar where with the chef and others he chatted, a bit like Hemingway in Cuba if without the drink, happy to sit poolside, speaking an intelligible if slow Spanish to one person after another in business meetings filled in equal parts with charm and futility. His Nicaraguan ventures, motivated by a typically idealistic desire to provide what he thought was a sustainable clean energy source to people in need, never thrived. Part of this failure, as one associate later told me, had to do with his refusal to adhere to important local customs, bribery paramount among them. And clinging to some self-spun philosophy, his imagined fortunes rose and sank in a second like those of a dreamy 1849 gold miner.

  Prospecting for something more incorporeal, when I came for the second time to Nicaragua, soon after his death, I was glad to stay anywhere but in the ache of his memory, staying not in the Cesar but in a tatty little inn. Like him, I had to rely hugely on the kindness of strangers and so felt especially close to him, a father who made random new acquaintances his mobile family, much like our California and much like his profession, which converted the chance of steam into an impermanent, aspirational project. What he bequeathed me: to be in exile, making only of the body and one’s immediate acquaintances a home.

  His most religious custom was to check into a hotel in some foreign city and then call my mother at home to say he had reached his latest geographical coordinates: the tenacity had arrived at its goal, and in this, my parents accorded each other great latitude. In movement—the dream shared by Zion and California—one could find meaning, purpose, belonging.

  Say your goodbyes then, said Bob the unflappable nurse.

  In other words, make a cord to a man of so many moveable parts.

  In that one last second I had to talk to him—fittingly exiled—the trumpet-blast of a lifetime together came out of me:

  Dad, I said, never having had the right name to call him, you are responsible for so much of anything that is good in me and your children and grandchildren love you and we’ll do what we can to honor your memory and legacy and all the good you’ve sown and you’ve been holding on so long and now it might be your time to let go and do you remember that song you loved about all the world being a narrow bridge, the important thing being not to fear and—

  I got to hang up now, said Bob the knowledgeable, sixty seconds into my swan song.

  Thirty seconds later, according to later reportage, my father, who allegedly smiled and nodded lightly as I spoke, was dead.

  No one gives you a user manual for such moments. Somewhere inside I had signed a contract that I would be by my father’s side when he died, a kind of fellow traveler, as if my childhood in Berkeley—that made-up Californian confection, a pastiche of a bardo, made up of everyone else’s in-between spaces, a kind of tunnel—meant I had to be with him in this final threshold zone.

  That we had that last moment could have relieved me, just as my father was relieved not to have sent helicopters to rescue me from near death in that Nicaraguan jungle. To be close but not to have to feel the pain of potential separation.

  I could have said: Jeez, at least I got to talk to my dad in his last second. He heard me, he smiled.

  Instead, when a minute later the doctor called us in New York to tell us what we already knew, I felt I had betrayed my father’s legacy by not being by his side, that I had taken his California Zion lesson too deeply and become a person too much in movement, too much a traveler, too far away, following dreams of my own.

  And still that doctor’s call released me from a deep freeze. I ran through our house as if on amphetamines, middle of the night on tiptoes, unable not to rush, as if it would change anything if I were speedy in booking a ticket from Albany, the nearest airport, so I could fly toward California. We the living scurry while our dead have all the time in the world. History sleeps; we hurry toward our ends. Plus I did not want to wake my kids to say I was going. Their relative innocence, lips fluttering over dream-words, seemed crucial, almost more important than whatever had just happened. This was how my psyche compartmentalized loss. If you don’t orphan details, you won’t have to see your own orphaning.

  In a cold car in a parking lot in the middle of the night at that Albany airport, I pretended to sleep before my flight, enjoying the physical discomfort. No bed of nails could have been spiky enough. Already in movement I was closer to him but still I needed a physical correlate to the metaphysical dislodging death performs, some way to show my father I understood what his body might have known, despite its hypersedation, in all its recent injustices.

  When I got to California, it felt oddly fitting that the religious mandates around his burial kept me from seeing his body on that first day, a decent veil. My siblings and I sat outside the back door of the locked, squat suburban building within which a guard sat praying over his body. We looked past native wildflowers into a valley half river-rift and half tectonic shift, with a large silver aqueduct lacking, given the drought, the life-force of water roaring down into the canyon: exactly the kind of landscape my father would have appreciated, one where the grandeur of nature dwarfed a small token of human intervention, your archetypal Californian scene.

  The next day, I sat in a room in that squat building alone with his body, so oddly still and yet alive, his huge bony head looking peaceful, the love that he radiated out to so many chillingly present in the room.

  My youngest daughter, the fire truck lover, the three-year-old who has something of my father’s brow, had told me that morning she had glimpsed Saba walking in the house again and that, scared, she had hidden from him. The night of his death, before we knew he was dying, before we put her to sleep in that upstate house with its tilt toward entropic custom, she had been trying to tell me, with strange insistence, that sometimes people go to hospitals and never leave. With adult casualness, I had considered her talk merely the metabolism of some discussion she’d overheard a month earlier.

  Though in retrospect, signs collected: earlier that September day, in the first of two classes I taught, I’d repressed the urge to share an anecdote on radical shifts in perception, not telling students the story of the hallucinatory airport moment in which I’d learned a beloved great-uncle had died, when around me flight-goers no longer were sleepwalkers but keenly aware each act made a necessary but ludicrous feint against the overwhelming heaviness of mortality. The next class I taught, I similarly had to avoid laughing uncontrollably, much as I’d done at the exact moment a best friend of mine was killed miles away from where I sat in a classroom as a high school student in a troubled Jerusalem.

  Perhaps these facts—my daughter’s insistence on the suddenness of death, the odd telegraphs I wanted to convey to my students but did not—were circumstantial or are as strong as the telephone cord. What ties the living to the dead, after a while, has mostly to do with the cord of belief, while the soul of writing will always be elegy: one uses words to create a trail back to some missing source, the platonic home you hope for but can never quite reach. Like the hundreds of unfinished highways you find in California, founded on big dreams and crashing in reality, all the roads that begin, continue, and never reach their ends, this bit of writing is, perhaps necessarily, unilateral, incapable of neat conclusion.

  I write this from the lobby of a Cuban hotel in the spring of 2011 under a statue of the one omnipresent heroic American you find here, Lincoln, the emaciated liberator, almost as ubiquitous as Che or Fidel, Bolivar, Allende, Maceo, Martí. My family, daughters and all, have been living in this country in an apartment owned by a slumlord on a street spilling over occasionally with rivers of sewage. For days at a time, we will have no water; on other days, the gas or electricity goes. To live here you live inside a national body, the scent of cologne, urinals and sugar everywhere, sugar being a useful substance for keeping a population somewhat peppy. It seems that only on certain government-decreed days the chickens lay and you find hundreds of people gleeful as they carry gray open trays of eggs home for safekeeping. At scheduled hours, bread appears in the baker
ies and every passerby hoists a triumphant loaf of fifty grams, no more and no less. Every restaurant’s menu lists tantalizing items that will never be obtained by anyone.

  As legend would have it, the people, however, are mostly a constant party.

  In this travel, its deprivations and pleasures, I seem still to be performing some kind of wake for my father, a man who always managed, in his way, to find gold in dirt.

  This hotel from where I write is a sybarite’s enclave in an uneasy socialist utopia. As if I have just crawled out of some gasless, waterless outback, I deeply appreciate its café con leche. The months here have made it easy to recognize travelers from Berkeley, flocked here in disproportionate number: they talk out of the corners of their mouths as if their next restless thought tugs for flight. If they are older, they are fit and wear practical many-pocketed vests and floppy hats, their gestures loose and expressive. If younger, they are tattooed, hefty in calf muscle and committed to years of travel, either as foreign guides in Latin America or still fighting the good fight for Che’s idea of the new man motivated by moral profit and not financial gain.

  On this early Sunday morning, over the loudspeaker comes, on endlessly hopeful loop, a Muzak version, replete with Andean pipes and a rumba swing, of the one American song ubiquitous in Cuba, the Eagles’ “Hotel California”:

  There she stood in the doorway

  I heard the mission bell

  I was thinking to myself

  This could be heaven or this could be hell

  In a purgatory of exile, movement, and endless hope, having carried no more than the government-mandated forty-five pounds of luggage into this country, light-handed and skimming the earth, I recognize: right now I am probably as close as I could possibly be to my father’s California, that rosy future and its impossible state, the one I’m pointed toward, the one that can never be.