Stu (not his real name) had begun to percolate with joy and promise when his presence in the shadows of a Chatham Hall dormitory was acknowledged by a resident of said dorm. The girl waved to him from a lighted third-story window. Stu waved back. Then the unthinkable happened, the stuff of dreams. As Stu stood there gaping, the girl pulled her sweater over her head. Next, she unhooked her bra and tossed it aside. She allowed Stu a good long look at her little moons before beckoning him to come orbit them. He shrugged, threw up his hands, became almost frantic with frustration, there being under the circumstances no way to reach her except by rocket, a moon landing logistically impossible.
Ah, but what was this? The bare-breasted schoolgirl was pointing to a narrow fire escape that ran down the side of the dorm. Stu was a tall lad, yet he could not reach even the bottom rung of that ladder. Not to worry. The siren had disappeared and with her Stu’s hopes, but just then the fire escape began to lower. The girl was operating some kind of lever mechanism. When the rungs were low enough, he climbed aboard, shaking with excitement. He was going to heaven on a creaky steel ladder! However, just out of reach of the third floor, the ascent abruptly aborted. In midair now, and at a forty-five-degree angle, the ladder remained -- and remained -- immobile. The lights went off in the siren’s room. Stu was stranded. He thought he heard giggles. A chorus of them.
In the desperate jump that followed, Stu shattered his ankle and cracked his femur. He was on crutches when his folks arrived to fetch him home in disgrace one month before he was to graduate.
I never met Stu Seaworth, he’d come and gone the previous year, and for all I know his story could have been embellished or even wholly apocryphal. Still, firmly embedded in Hargrave mythology, it was not without value. It suggested, in an oblique, potentially painful way, a way fraught with consequences, that girlie Chatham Hall -- its mystique, its challenge, its looming presence, its moth-to-candle-flame allure -- might contribute as much as the military school itself when it came to making boys into men.
Upon arrival at Hargrave, I was assigned the oddest, most isolated room in the academy. What was up with that? Had they heard something? Did they fear I might incite rebellion -- or worse, subject innocent cadets to the spectacle of the talking stick?
Tucked away in a remote corner of the third and top floor, the room was exceptionally large: long and narrow with a slanted ceiling and single small window, giving every appearance of having once been an attic. This room was so far removed from administration offices, from dayroom, classrooms, dining hall, gym, and quadrangle that its occupants had to set a clock to alarm at least five minutes before reveille (the actual bugle call that awoke the rest of the cadet corps) in order to fall out on time for morning formation.
I had two roommates. From Virginia peanut country, there was a mild-mannered boy, bespectacled, still freighting half a load of baby fat, and bearing the almost Faulknerian name of Ollie Hux. In the other bunk, from the Dominican Republic, was a handsome, worldly, self-assured Hargrave veteran named Pelayo Brugál. There were quite a few Hispanic cadets enrolled at the academy, largely from the Caribbean and South America, places where the military in particular and machismo in general were the cat’s meow and not a caterwaul less.
Brugál (accent on the last syllable) had seniority among the Hispanics and was their natural leader. He helped them academically, taught new arrivals the ropes. As a result, our big “attic” room was a Hispanic gathering place. Afternoons, it was crowded with boys from Venezuela and Cuba, jabbering away in Spanish, the world’s fastest language, seeming to all talk at once. It was like living in a cage full of parrots whose crackers had been laced with crystal meth. I found it agreeably colorful.
For whatever reason, Brugál had not been home in two years, spending his summers at Hargrave. That year (my year), however, he flew down to join his family for the Christmas holidays. With him, he carried two suitcases, one packed with clothing, the other empty.
It so happened that Pelayo’s father and uncle owned the largest rum distillery in the Dominican Republic. When Brugál returned to school during the first week of January, the previously empty suitcase was now filled. With bottles of rum. Fine Dominican rum. Rum, the higher life-form that crawled out of the primal ooze of molasses.
Every night after taps, when the academy was quiet and dark, Pelayo would steal to our closet and remove a bottle from the locked bag. He, Ollie Hux, and I would each swallow a nice big slug. It was warming. It was uplifting. It was fraternal. It made for sound sleep and pleasant dreams. Happy, well rested, and maybe a trifle smug, we were willfully oblivious to the certainty that we were flirting with fire. Then, on February 19, the school burned down.
When the fire alarm sounded that night during study hour, I, along with other cadets from that end of the third floor, scampered down the nearest fire escape. Even though we caught a faint whiff of smoke, none of us expected the fire, which started in a teacher’s quarters on the floor below, to amount to very much. Believing that we’d rather quickly be back in our rooms, we cheerfully welcomed this unscheduled break from the books. Then we looked up and saw flames. And they appeared to be spreading.
Rescuing the rum was out of the question, but my Warsaw basketball letter jacket was in our room, along with photos of (mostly imaginary) girlfriends, a sweater, and some warm socks: it was fifteen degrees that night and I’d fled in khaki pants, a T-shirt, and bedroom slippers. So, sensing now that the situation might actually turn into something serious, I headed back up the fire escape, and intent on grabbing those items that passed pitifully for my valuables, climbed again through the open window.
On the ground, what had initially been a semifestive atmosphere was digressing into shock and pandemonium. Cadets, faculty, and staff milled about in helpless confusion, awaiting the arrival of Chatham’s one fire engine. Nobody saw me return to the burning building, there were no shouts of warning, no hysterical mother wailed, “Fireman, Fireman, save my child!”
Once inside the third-floor hallway, I crashed headlong into a wall of heated smoke. I’d taken only a couple of steps before smoke filled my eyes, my nose, my throat. It felt as if a troop of Girl Scouts were toasting marshmallows in my lungs. (Sure, it could just as well have been Boy Scouts, but even near death I preferred the company of females.) On the verge of losing consciousness, I managed to execute a clumsy about-face and practically somersaulted back through the window. If anyone noticed my descent, coughing and choking, they gave no indication. In minutes, I was just another figure in the crowd, watching with a mixture of fascination, excitement, disbelief, and dismay, the metastasizing flames. Nobody thought to have me treated for smoke inhalation.
Yeah, impulsive Tommy Rotten had been lucky to get out alive, but I was fortunate in another way as well. Inevitably, sooner or later, that secret stash of rum would have been discovered -- it was stupid to think otherwise -- and Pelayo Brugál, Ollie Hux, and I would have been given the ol’ spit-shined boot, our names to be chiseled below that of Stu Seaworth in the Hargrave hall of shame. And who can say what trajectory my life might have taken thereafter? No longer admissible to the college of my choice, and at seventeen too young to seek refuge in the army, I . . . well, I like to think I might have followed Brugál down to Santo Domingo, where I would have written a version of The Rum Diary years before Hunter S. Thompson. It’s debatable whether or not that could be considered a happy ending.
Hargrave rose from the ashes. Like the Phoenix? No, more like the Tucson -- at least for the remainder of that school year. Following a month’s suspension, the academy amazingly reopened in March, but with major adjustments. Surrounded by parade grounds, an athletic field, a quadrangle, and an outdoor swimming pool, Hargrave had occupied a single extremely long three-story building, only one end of which had survived the fire. That end contained the gymnasium, now converted to a dining hall, and living quarters for approximately one-third of the cadets. The rest of us were distributed around Chatham in various temporary loc
ations, I being lucky enough to be included in a group of about twenty that was housed in a downtown hotel.
Because our uniforms had gone up in smoke, we now wore civilian clothes. This spelled a blessed end to daily inspections and gave us a newfound sense of freedom, but failed to adequately conceal our identities as cadets. At the insistence of their parents, if not wholly a matter of personal preference, town girls continued by and large to shun us, and Chatham Hall girls remained as distant as ever, although from our hotel rooms we could spy on them during their weekly visits to the business district to pick up girlie items at the drugstore, etc. They came on foot, always in parties of ten or more, and were as heavily chaperoned as a shipment of weapons-grade plutonium.
We still were subject to curfews and to morning formations (now a rather motley agglomeration), but drilling was suspended for the duration, which oddly enough displeased me. I rather liked to drill and was fairly good at it, having been trained in the Boy Scouts. You see, the adult males who organized and presided over my Scout patrol in Warsaw had seemed less interested in making outdoorsmen of us boys than in teaching us to drill, box, and to properly care for the American flag. I can see now that they were out to mold us into little fascists, and recalling their incessant racist and anti-Semitic remarks, I have a suspicion that at least a couple were members of the Ku Klux Klan. There was more Klan activity in 1940s Virginia than people today realize. In any case, my entire Scout patrol was suspended after some of us were caught drinking cheap wine (ninety-five cents a bottle cheap, paid for with our Scouting dues), and peeking in the windows of comely housewives (in lieu, perhaps, of earning a merit badge for bird-watching).
Hargrave was now half military academy, half civilian prep school, and its postfire year passed unsteadily for everyone involved. It did pass, of course, and at graduation exercises on the final day, I found myself summoned by name three times to the front of the assembly: once to receive a diploma; once to accept a Quill and Scroll award, given to cadets who had made exceptional contributions to the school newspaper; and lastly to be presented the coveted Senior Essay Medal, which I’d won not for an essay but a short story entitled “Voodoo Moon,” about some weird goings-on in the Louisiana swamps. The name of no other graduate was called more than twice that day, most only once, and my triple honors served me particularly well since the previous evening I’d smashed in the right front fender on my father’s brand-new Chevrolet sedan, having skidded into a tombstone while joyriding through a local cemetery. Daddy’s anger, his disappointment, was naturally, fortunately, tempered somewhat by pride in my achievements. So it was that neither for the first time nor the last my verbal mojo, my knack for the written word, served to save my reckless ass.
13
now showing: satori
Yesterday (18 November 2011), police in Los Angeles announced that after thirty years they were reopening their investigation into the demise of Natalie Wood. She had died in the waters off Santa Catalina Island during or after a party aboard a yacht, and at the time cause of death had been given as drowning while drunk. Now the circumstances were being reexamined and the news prompted my paramour to ask if my long-ago Natalie-inspired spiritual awakening, described earlier in these pages, had been an example of satori. I replied, “Close but no sitar.”
It might have been a passable pun except for one cross-cultural flaw: a sitar is an East Indian musical instrument while the term “satori” is Japanese. Usually defined as “sudden enlightenment,” satori is how Zen adepts refer to a spontaneous lightning strike of total, all-encompassing understanding. It most often follows many years of study and meditation, although the bolt of unlimited awareness has been known to wallop novices as well. Excluding that Natalie Wood episode, which was emotional and heart-centered, bypassing the intellect, I’ve experienced satori twice in my life, both times ignited by the most unlikely of sources and neither producing, except in capricious, barely perceptible ways, lasting results.
In 1966, I was renting a spacious apartment -- seven rooms and bath -- for fifty bucks a month. Why so cheap? Situated in an industrial area of Seattle, the apartment occupied the second story above a machine shop. Apparently, few renters considered that a desirable location. I, on the other hand, found it as appealing as a Manhattan penthouse.
The shop manufactured gears. Gears have to be ground. So, rather than a cacophony of clanking and banging, the noise from below my quarters was a low, slow, steady, grinding hum, not unlike the turning of the screw on a ship. It was soothing, comforting, and even kind of romantic; a perfect sound track for both lovemaking and a good peaceful sleep. On those occasions when the gear works had a rush order that compelled it to grind around the clock, I experienced difficulty in getting out of bed in the morning. I could have blissfully slept all night and all day. And sometimes when I did force myself to arise, I’d walk to the window, half expecting to see expanses of ocean and, in the distance, a silhouette of, say, Tahiti -- or maybe Santa Catalina, whose waters would eventually swallow Natalie Wood.
Nobody wants influenza, but when I was hijacked by a virus in January of ’66, I took consolation in the fact that I’d get to recline in my warm bed for several days and be lullabied by the sweet humming of friendly machinery. Moreover, I had a good book to read. I Lost It at the Movies was a collection of reviews by legendary film critic Pauline Kael. Ms. Kael was one of those rare critics whose passion for her subject was contagious. Just as Henry Miller’s writing on Matisse was evocative and enrapturing to the point where it could make the reader willing to walk ten miles naked through a shit storm if there was a chance at the end to view a painting by Matisse, so reading Pauline Kael gave one a raging appetite for movies. It’s a credit to the virus that I managed to resist for four days before abandoning my sickbed to head to a theater.
In those premall, premultiplex, pre-Netflix days (I didn’t own a television), first-run movie theaters tended to be clustered in city centers. Thus, I slid behind the wheel of my decrepit Plymouth Valiant (it was nearly as infirm as I) and set out for downtown Seattle. It was winter, as I said, and I hadn’t driven far along Elliott Way before running head-on into a full-fledged blizzard. Snowfall of this magnitude is rare in Seattle, whose winters are typically mild and rainy, but this baby might have sent Admiral Byrd retreating into early retirement. Snow was blowing directly into my windshield, reducing visibility, though it was early afternoon, to practically zero. Except for roiling snowflakes, I could see nothing beyond the hood of my car.
There used to be a driving range and putting green on Elliott Way, advertised by an elevated sign depicting a large white golfball. The painted golfball was outlined in three-dimensional white neon. As I crept along, squinting into an animated curtain of swirling, spinning snowflakes, there unexpectedly appeared in this dynamic white vortex a glowing white circle. A seed, a cell, a head, a halo, a tondo, a corona, a bodily orifice, a zodiac wheel, the sun, the earth, the moon, the eye, and the egg; the unbroken cycle of life, the continuity of consciousness, the mysterious silver flower of the soul: that neon golfball was all of those things and none of them; and as I glimpsed it suspended and radiating within an energized field of sparkling flakes, white on white, I suddenly understood everything.
Everything! I saw how the universe worked, how it was put together -- on every level, macrocosmic and microcosmic. For as long as it lasted, and it was over I’m guessing in a dozen seconds (in that state time was elastic/geologic), I was witness to an indissolvable totality of reality, a gestalt which normally our monkey minds split into convenient fragments. The rigid fetters that bind us to simplistic dispositions, absurd rationalizations, self-destructive ideologies, and divisive worldviews were severed and I was a free spirit in the oneness of the whole enchilada, seeing the world -- material and immaterial -- for the all-inclusive miracle it is: not a continuous undifferentiated glob of stuff, mind you, but more like a great spiraling web whose interconnected threads are beaded with pulsing blips that as much as anyt
hing else resemble notes of music. I’m all too aware of how woo-woo this sounds, but it was as real as a stubbed toe and as lucid as a page in Hemingway.
Had I been Asian and of a certain temperament, I suppose I would have repaired to a Zendo, an ashram, or a wilderness cave to meditate upon my neon golfball satori for the rest of my life, striving to integrate it somehow into my daily existence. Instead, although shaken, galvanized, and fairly splish-splashing in a fading aura of awe, I just motored on through the subsiding snow squall and went to a Hollywood movie.
The film, incidentally, was The Group. It chronicled on-screen the lives and loves of a bevy of Vassar girls. Pauline Kael would later dismiss it as “carelessly busy.”
Although there are legions of us stray cats for whom libraries, bookshops, and movie theaters have served as temples, cathedrals, or sacred groves, it’s still embarrassing to have to admit that, excluding certain LSD epiphanies, the primary, most affecting “metaphysical” (for want of a less suspect term) experiences in my life have each one been connected in some way to movies. First there was the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan who supplanted Jesus in my pantheon of heroes; next came the floodtide of love and empathy raised by the young Natalie Wood; then there was the powerful creative breakthrough precipitated by Shoot the Piano Player, followed by the snowy golfball satori that occurred as I drove and was driven to see a film. And finally -- the butter on the box of transcendental popcorn -- my second and only other satori actually transpired inside a movie house.
The year was 1991, the venue was the Neptune Theater in Seattle’s University District. The film was The Fisher King, starring Robin Williams. Based loosely on the Percival story from the Arthurian legends, Williams plays Parry, a man broken financially, physically, and mentally. Homeless, Parry has been given shelter in the basement of a New York tenement building; and in that dusty, low-ceilinged space, zigzagged with furnace ducts, electrical wiring, and water pipes, he has set up an altar, a small shrine.