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Authors: Jonathan Carroll

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BOOK: Outside the Dog Museum
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“Did you ever eat a bed?” He broke off a piece of it and put it in his mouth.
“Cool! Can I have some?”
“You can try, but I don’t think you’ll be able to eat it.”
“Oh yeah? Give me some!” I took the piece he offered and put it in my mouth. It tasted like salty plaster. It tasted like a model.
“Yecch!” I spit and spit to get it all out. Bob smiled and continued to chew and then swallow his piece.
“Listen to me, Harry. You can’t eat it because it’s not your house. Sooner or later in everyone’s life a moment comes when their house appears like this. Sometimes it’s when you’re young, sometimes when you’re sick like me. But most peoples’ problem is they can’t see the house, so they die confused. They
say
they want to understand what it’s all about, but given the chance, given the
house,
they either look away or get scared and blind. Because when the house is there and you know it, you don’t have any more excuses, Boss.”
Once again I was baffled by what he was saying, but the tone of
his voice was so intense that it seemed imperative I at least try to understand what he was so passionate about.
“I’m scared at what you’re saying. I don’t get what you mean.”
He nodded, stopped, nodded again. “I’m telling you this now, Harry, so maybe you’ll remember it later on. No one ever told
me.
“Everyone has a house inside them. It defines who they are. A specific style and form, a certain number of rooms. You think about it all your life—what does mine really look like? How many floors are there? What is the view from the different windows? … But only once do you get a chance to actually see it. If you miss that chance, or avoid it ’cause it scares you, then it goes away and you’ll never see it again.”
“
Where
is this house?”
He pointed to his head and mine. “In here. If you recognize it when it comes, then it’ll stay. But accepting it and making it stay is only the first part. Then you’ve got to try understanding it. You’ve got to take it apart and understand every piece. Why it’s there, why it’s made like that … most of all, how each piece fits in the whole.”
I sort of got it. I asked the right question. “What happens when you understand?”
He held up a finger, as if I’d made a good point. “It lets you eat it.”
“Like you just did?”
“Exactly. It lets you take it back inside. Here, look where the roof is gone. It’s the only section of the house I’ve been able to understand so far. The only part I’ve been allowed to eat.” He broke off another piece and popped it into his mouth. “The fuck of the thing is, I don’t have enough time now to do it. You can’t imagine how long it takes. How many hours you sit there and look or try to work it out … but nothing happens. It’s so exciting and frustrating at the same time.”
Whatever he’d said after “fuck” didn’t go anywhere in my head because he’d said
that word!
Even my father didn’t say it and he was a pretty big curser. I’d said it once and gotten the biggest smack of my
life. Whenever I’d heard it since, it was like someone flashing an illegal weapon at me or a pack of dirty playing cards. You were dying to look, but knew it’d get you in a hell of a lot of trouble if you did.
“Fuck.” You don’t hear that much when you’re an eight-year-old. It’s an adult’s word, forbidden and dirty and owning a dangerous gleam of its own. You don’t really know what it means, but use it, and you sure get fast results.
The whole wonder and awe of Layne-Dyer’s model house—what it was, what he
said
it was—fell from the horizon the moment this big orange “FUCK” roared up. The magic of death, the magic of great mysteries, lost to the magic of one dirty word.
A short time later both Karla and my father began calling us from the other room. Bob put his arm around my shoulder and asked again if I understood everything he had said. Lying, I nodded in a way I thought was intelligent and mature, but my mind was on other things.
The photo session ended soon after, which was just as well because I couldn’t wait to get home.
When I was safely in my room and had locked the door, I ran for the bathroom. Locked in there too, I turned on the overhead light and said the word to myself over and over again. Loud, soft, as a plea, an order. I made faces around the word, gestures, I did everything. Hearing it from Layne-Dyer had set something loose in me and I couldn’t let that thing go until I had exhausted its every possibility. Fuck.
 
WHEN I OPENED MY
eyes, I saw Big Top lying on my foot. Venasque was looking at me and eating from a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips.
“That was a dream I had twenty years ago, Venasque. The only thing true about it was I went to Layne-Dyer as a kid to have my picture taken and he fell down once.”
“How old were you when you had the dream?”
“I don’t know, graduate school, as I remember.”
“Why do you think you had it then?”
“Cause I was thinking a lot about houses then. I was studying to be an architect!”
“Harry, don’t be a dope. Before, you were saying things like
Karate Kid
are bad because they water down important issues. That’s true, but here you were having a …
“Listen to me carefully. Sometimes dreams turn into soldiers. They’ll fight your battles and defend your land, but you’ve got to take good care of them. Feed and protect them, give them the attention they deserve. Forget or ignore a dream that size and the soldier dies. That one especially. You’ve got to write that thing down as much as you remember and study it till you realize how important it is. And for God’s sake, keep it protected. You’re going to need it again, believe me.
“Karate Kid
is nonsense, but you were given a gift of real enlightenment, Harry, and you forgot it, till now. Wrote it off like it happened because you were eating hot peppers before you went to bed.”
 
BESIDES THE “TRAVELING” AND
clarinet lessons, Venasque had me do autogenic training to drag my flapping kite of a heartbeat back to earth, as well as create a new quiet room in the house of my life. It would be both easy and false to lie and say our time together was full of miraculous events, profound aphorisms, and enlightenment every step of the way. But being healed and helped by Venasque didn’t work like that. There
was
magic, times when my jaw dropped open and troops of cold-footed lizards ran up my spine. But the norm was quiet talk and laughter, always. I am convinced the great teachers do two things that outweigh everything else—they explain clearly, and they exude an almost palpable feeling of benevolence.
A shaman, teacher … must be fundamentally and at all times
benevolent. None of this half-devil, half-angel stuff, which is a very modern, convenient conceit that misses the point. The point is that while the teaching methods these men sometimes employ are odd and unorthodox and even horrifying, ultimately they know something about us that we ourselves don’t know—they have faculties functioning in their brains that don’t function in ours. And most important, behind all their strange behavior is the benevolent intent to bring us to our spiritual senses.
Since my time with Venasque I have met or read books about other so-called shamans. But these characters aren’t the real thing. They are simply mischievous, intuitive, supersmart little opportunists who pass for spiritual teachers because they have psychic abilities. But psychic powers are a dime a dozen. Someone made the point somewhere that we must learn to distinguish between the occult and the religious, between magic and true spirituality. The two do sometimes come together—saints do have magical powers, sure. But they don’t exploit these powers, and more important, they consider them only by-products of their real concern, which is spiritual development.
Let me tell you one last Venasque story. When I was well again and he was preparing to return to his home in Los Angeles, he still hadn’t mentioned his fee. So I asked. He told me the normal charge was five thousand dollars, but because I was a famous architect, he’d rather I design a new kitchen for his house. The one he had was both old and too full of sad memories of the happy days he’d spent there together with his wife.
“Now it’s your turn to figure me out, Harry. Decide what kind of environment I should have.”
“Is this part of my therapy?”
“No. I need a new kitchen and it’ll be a good way for you to get started again. Something small and tasty!”
I went down to L.A. with him to look at his house, but wasn’t impressed by what I saw. The place itself was postwar, pseudo-Spanish, but the greater cause for concern was the interior: ghetto-chic, shag-rug hell. Too many colors, too many patterns, too many different textures of furniture that didn’t go together at all. It looked like a schizophrenic from Tahiti lived there, or someone wildly enthusiastic for variety, but color-blind down to the difference between blue and yellow.
Worse, with great pride Venasque said his wife had decorated the house and he hadn’t changed a thing since she died.
The kitchen was no different. The touching thing was it looked and felt like the favorite, most lived-in room of his whole house. It was easy to envision the two old people in there, one leaning up against the fridge while the other bustled around, getting their meal ready. I could understand why he wanted me to change its too-familiar face.
“How do you want it, Venasque? Sexy? Mediterranean?”
“What’s a sexy kitchen?”
“White. Silver. Sleek.”
“Sounds like an operating room. I don’t take out tonsils here, Harry. Make me something nice and alive.”
I’d designed buildings that, even on paper, shamed every other structure in the neighborhood both in look and stature. Houses, skyscrapers, factories … the gamut. But coming up with a dumb twelve-foot kitchen for the old man was a real pisser. I wanted to give him my very best in return for all he’d done. When I told him that, he patted my face and said, “Just make sure to leave room for the microwave.”
First I thought Adolf Loos. Venasque would like the Loos style, wouldn’t he? Clean simplicity that went right to the heart of the matter. I showed him pictures but he shook his head. “I’d get cold in a
house like that, Harry. The man forgot to use his heart.” Out went the king of twentieth-century Viennese architecture. Ditto Gaudi was “too crooked,” and Frank Gehry’s work looked like “the fence around the schoolyard.”
And what did the shaman think of Harry Radcliffe’s work?
“Some of the buildings are beautiful, but others look like a lightbulb that’s been left on during the day, or a telephone ringing in an empty apartment.”
Besides being hurt, I had no idea what he was talking about—lightbulb? Empty apartment? Later I discovered the line came from Cocteau’s journals, literally word for word. But that was no help in deciphering what he meant. Only later, when I was in Saru and looking at the proposed site for the dog museum, did it come clear: You can always fill space with form, but it’s like filling an empty room with light, i.e., what good does it do if the light has no real purpose? Or there’s no one to hear the phone’s message? He never said it, but I’m sure Venasque thought I’d clevered my way to prominence while, along the way, forgetting (or consciously neglecting) to use what I was best at, rather than what I was capable of.
Naturally that was an even greater incentive to design a kitchen that would knock his eyes out. I showed him the work of architects as diverse as Bruce Goff, Richard Meier, and even Daniel Liebes-kind. I showed him buildings, furniture, kitchen utensils. Anything to get even the smallest feeling for what he wanted, but he was of little help.
“I don’t know what I want, Harry. I want a kitchen where I can cook a good meal and where the animals and me’ll feel comfortable just sitting around, relaxing.”
So I sat down with my pens and paper and designed a kitchen. Black and white tiles, bird’s-eye maple, German stainless appliances. A few original bits and a few surprises. I liked it. Venasque did not.
“This is nothing, Harry. This is for anyone. I want a kitchen that’s
mine.
Venasque cooks here—not Betty Crocker or Julia Child. This drawing is Harry Radcliffe, Mr. Famous Architect’s kitchen. But this isn’t your place, remember, it’s mine!”
He rarely became angry, but this time he glared at the drawing. I was ashamed although I honestly believed the plans had been done with him foremost in my mind.
“Give me a thousand dollars, Harry. I want you to write me a check right now.”
Without a thought, I wrote the check and handed it over. He looked at it, shook his head, put it in his pocket. “Every time you draw something that’s not mine, I want another thousand dollars. Do you understand? Maybe that’s the only way to get you to learn.”
“Venasque, I’m telling you, I did that design—”
“Shut up! Shut up and go back to work! You’re not crazy anymore. You don’t have any excuses. Just remember, a thousand dollars each time you design for yourself and not for me!”
I worked like a paranoid student preparing for the final examination. I thought kitchens most of the day and did more drawings than I had for the forty-floor Andromeda Center in Birmingham. Only when I was sure I had it
this
time did I dare go to the old man and nervously hand over what I thought was surely
it
this time.
BOOK: Outside the Dog Museum
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