Images of my life and times and links that, unlike the slowly unraveling neural network in my gray matter, will always instantly take you to some virtual domain.
It was the dawn of the Jet Age. The first commercial 707's hit the skies and the death knell of the locomotive was heard from the Broadway Limited to the Wabash cannonball. The jet engine that powered the new airplanes would soon power the Soviet Sputnik into orbit and jumpstart the race to the Moon. ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) and the policy of M.A.D. (Mutual Assured Destruction) struck a balance of terror in which, the theory went, the prospect of fighting a nuclear war was so terrible that even the "winner" of such a nuclear confrontation would inherit an horrific world where radioactivity slowly fried any survivors. Everyone would lose. Various lunatics insisted that such a war was winnable (the survivors doomed to life underground or in space suits to ward off the deadly unbound atomic waste) and the arms race (which the U.S. indeed won by default in the end) fed off this paranoia and justified itself.
.... Into this maelstrom came I.
A 25-year-old women in New Jersey on a stretcher was on her way up to the portals of Hackensack General. Her third pregnancy had gone well and as she felt the first major contraction come on she did, in one effortless push, bring me into the world as the stretcher passed through the entrance. Since I was so determined to get out and see you folks she made my initials (J.E.T.) spell the name of the engine I simulated in my hurried entrance into the City of Hackensack near Sinatra's Hoboken and a stones throw from
where my father worked in the canyons of steel each day. My favorite times in early childhood were when my Dad would take us in to see a movie at the cavernous Radio City Music Hall (in the future I would find work there babysitting performers) where the high stepping Rockettes used to put on a dance number before the movie show. Then maybe a gander at the huge toy elephants, life sized stuffed giraffes and ultra realistic model railroad displays at F.A O Schwartz Company, another New York landmark all topped of on one memorable occasion by Baked Alaska at the Four Seasons as we watched the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center.
The city was a treasure of fantastic sights, sounds and
smells that inspired delightful dreams and unending fascination. My love for the city endures. Lately (some 42 years later than my debut on the stretcher), when not on the Eastern seaboard, I can be found
Popular culture aside, my early years passed by with a certain paranoia amidst the plenty of post war boom times. At night when a plane passed overhead (there were still a lot of low flying propeller planes then), I all too often imagined that it was a devilish Soviet bomber come to blow all I knew into landfill. Duck and cover by day in school and those lonely planes overhead at night. Cosmonauts were abandoned in space to die (listen to a healthy one on Mir in 1992... here). Ham radio operators heard their anguished screams for help from the bowels of space. My Readers Digest said so. A Government capable of that surely wouldn't think twice about bombing my bourgeois ass.
All of this had an undeterminable but strong effect on me, beyond the imbedded fatalistic attitude one might expect. It was made palatable with the belief that life is very unfortunate to many people yes, but, those very same people could, at the minimum, find a comforting understanding, by nature highly intuitive, but universal. They could find tranquility and illuminating peace as they approached death at the latest, if not long before. For thousands of years sages had called on their communities to recognize and work towards this possibility. Not all are interested or even make these considerations, happy as they are to plod this planet in ignorant bliss or cursed by darkness's that light cannot penetrate. But if one was very lucky and tried to follow ahimsa, (a Hindu concept that Gandhi tied to non-violence) always on the watch out for the cracks in the sidewalk that break your Mother's back, this peace of mind could come years before death, make life blissful as if the Rapture were at hand, and even lessen the suffering of others as a transference of wisdom and understanding was possible from one human to another. And if this person happened to share a romantic and physical love with a soul with similar yearning, there existed the rare possibility of a life spent in exquisite but almost overwhelming happiness forged with a shared response and determination to overcome the horrors and tragedies of which human life is inevitably cluttered (we all have loved ones who die and unforeseen tragedy). Mind you, my skeptical reader, this last miracle of romantic love that endures and grows stronger than the forces aligned to smash it is an increasingly rare thing. The important thing to a man of 19 who is spouting testosterone and with potent emotional needs that are driving him to suppress these feelings by drowning himself in his cups, is that the possibility exists. And if it exists and one has the advantage of knowing the dream has life, than the chances of finding it early and miracle of miracles, sharing it with another, is mightily increased. Or so would say the logical western schooled mind to itself at that age. As it did. That this love could turn sour was incomprehensible then and hard to believe now. Older ponderers of life and love may decide that such serendipitous events have no causal relation with anything else and only occur at random thus this living bliss is realized by just a lucky few. The point is that through the ages their have been many who leave behind their attempts at proof that this wondrous lucky state of harmony and requited love occurs so it must be in the realm of the possible and a noble and worthy goal if the monastery seems a bit reclusive at that tender age. Or so thought I, the eventually hopeless romantic who thought women would believe this possible with him, and take that chance of diving too deep to come out intact let alone enlightened. Wondrous joy "don't come easy" as Ringo might posit. Hollywood fantasy besmirched my reading of "the way things are" and a delusional notion snagged my poor soul early. I knew if I could find someone willing to believe and do the work that keeping focused on the prize entails, all this could be mine. Henry Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy had helped inspire an early taste for a socially permissible sort of drunken debauchery in me, acceptable if borderline behavior in a lovelorn young man whose travels left him too well versed in the horrors of the world. Smashed yes, but always capable of speech and locomotion and always hoping that Cinderella would see through the fumes. I was wrong. To experience the wormwood demons was worthwhile but to continue, even in the face of heartbreak, was insanity. So stopped my unconscious imitation of countless writers and poseurs of the past although I found myself drinking under the table absinthe in Barcelona in eulogy of Toulouse Latrec before I gave up the ghost one summer in Spain. My attempt at maintaining love at a distance was a catastrophe. I had left her behind as a test of my own labored thought. It came to me that life could be awfully short and not a minute was to be wasted out of some warped sense of feminism that allowed that to insist upon marriage was to deny her the only chance for a brief life of adulthood free of parental or chauvinistic society's constraints. So before I tied the knot I thought it only fare to allow her some time free of parental or spousal supervision. Such idiocy! She wanted to get married then but I didn't know it. She thought it meant I didn't really love her. And I sat at the run down Spanish tapas joint and realized that even without these dangers of poisoned thinking things were tough enough. Life was a reckless experiment, like it or not. Fate makes sure a man's passage seems reckless and human frailty and limitations make certain a great deal of exploratory experimentation goes on. And so it did to my eternal loss, the first of many. Romance is always right around the corner when you are looking for help from Rhonda to mend your damaged pump. Wet behind the ears and traveling in a poor country with what could only be deemed a fortune in that third world country (if you managed to buy some gold and a camera to sell on the black market when you got there you became six times as rich as when you arrived), I found myself in silk shirts tailored as I sat cross legged for tea while they were made to order. I looked all about as people called "Sahib, Sahib" in the street, anxious for the sight of a nobleman. Then I realized on my perch on the enormous elephant taxi I shared with two others they were yelling at me. Women stared when they thought themselves unseen and everywhere I felt as though my tall blondish body, made svelte by dysentery was attracting more attention than it had ever known. But no one would come near me. This world was unfathomable, a constant assault on the senses, all of them. My Greta Garbo would never find me here. Let alone BB Bardot who would not be as saintly as Greta and would require some strike zone hitting pitches of woo. Love in the third world where painted women of the night let slip Care package garments to reveal lingerie stained yellow with age. Bizarrely out of place western under things from the 40's in hellish brothels cab drivers would stop at against my wishes. It was enough to make the monastery appealing.
In a moment of epiphany I decided the best thing to do was to keep sight of my seminal work in metaphysics, We Are Animals that Plod This Earth and not let my thoughts devolve from this inspired text. This tragically lost archive has been located and will be available as soon as I translate it from the Farsi that the scribes took down as I, possessed of a certain frenzy, related the work in a language I had no knowledge of late one Afghan night after a strange cookie was served with tea in a chai parlor. The wisdom of the work is easily condensed and you can get the gist of it by losing your money to Pathan highwaymen and then traveling three days in a bus custom made for people a head smaller than yourself and their traveling livestock with the sulfur burps of impending dysentery counted like the intervals between labor contractions as you try to fend off the attack of fluid loss that will offend so as to get you kicked off the bus 20 miles outside of Khandahar in a desert riddled with thieves desperate from hunger. But I do go on......................
Hear what it sounded like in the chai shop in Real Audio format or wait for a .WAV file. If you feel up to it go to the next page [coming soon] for a chapter in progress. {Sorry for delay was doing more field research for the novel in Italy}. August 24th, 1996
