Wild Ducks Flying Backward (14 page)

Mama Lo is singing to Newton. All the while, she is swinging before his glazed eyes a corkscrew on the end of a string. Back and forth, pendulum-like. Newton’s gaze moves along the spiral of the corkscrew, following it down, down, down…

With Newton still bound to it, the giant chicken leg hops up the slope of the first volcano. It hops over the edge and down into the crater. Inside the volcano, the music is very loud. Upon a ledge, the Goddess is standing. She is resplendent, beautiful, both funky and ethereal. In her hands are a pair of dice. The Goddess shakes the dice and throws them. The dice are normal size when they leave her hand, but when they hit the volcano floor, they are huge. One large die lands at the foot of the chicken leg. Newton looks down upon it, sees it is a 2. The second die rolls to a stop beside it. This one is a 3.

As Newton stares, the two spots on the first die are replaced with the faces of his twin boys. He turns to the second die, whose three spots are just changing into the faces of three racially mixed baby girls. Each has a different-colored ribbon in her hair. The three primary colors.

Suddenly, the chicken leg hops into an underground passage. As it moves along the lava corridor (the primordial soup is bubbling, spattering Newton; it is red and looks suspiciously like barbecue sauce), we cut to an aerial view of the twin volcanoes. There is a roar, and a puff of smoke and steam erupts from the second volcano. Out of it pops Newton aboard the chicken leg, only now it is a cooked drumstick, dripping barbecue sauce. Newton gets a spectacular view of the island and its twin volcanic peaks.

In front of the shrine, Newton’s head snaps. He “comes to.” With a bewildered expression, he looks at Mama Lo. His attention is directed to the shrine. Where the snowflake picture was is now the face of the Goddess. The Goddess smiles and speaks, directly to Newton. “The dice are always rolling,” is what she says.

As Newton turns to Mama Lo, as if to speak, the shack door is smashed, and in bursts Hinkley Jr. and his posse. “You’re saved!” Hinkley Jr. yells to Newton. To Mama Lo he shouts, “No false moves! In the name of the
Weekly World Enquirer
and free men everywhere, you’re under arrest!”

A violent tropical thunderstorm has moved in over the clearing. Taking refuge from the downpour, Zumba, Brutha, Leroyette, and Freddie (unchained) are under Zumba’s shack, relaxing and smoking spliffs. Freighter, however, has climbed to the top of his antenna tower, where he is wiring Freddie’s expensive and adored guitar to the tip. When Freddie sees this, he runs out into the storm, jumping up and down and screaming. A distraught Cookie stands in the rain, yelling at Freighter to come down. “I got to beat him,” growls Freighter. “Honey, we
is
going to beat him,” says Cookie, rubbing her belly.

A bolt of lightning strikes Zumba’s tower. It sparks across the clearing, joining, momentarily, the twin towers with an electric arc. Freighter receives a jolt that knocks him off of his lofty perch.

In Minneapolis, Heidi is watching TV. The newscaster says that Freddie fans are gathering in Miami, keeping a vigil. Heidi says to the twins, “I wish we’d gone to Miami with your weird old daddy.”

When Hinkley Jr.’s party, including Newton, arrives at the clearing, the rain has just stopped. Unconscious, Freighter lies on the wet ground. Zumba and Freddie are working over him. Newton offers to drive to the civilized part of the island and fetch a doctor. He speeds away in the dune buggy. At one point, he can make out in the distance the waterfall and Mama Lo’s shack. He slows down and almost stops, but drives on.

A few days later, a Lear jet lands in Miami and Freddie Manhattan deplanes. The media is there in full force, as well as several hundred cheering fans. Some fans are carrying a huge banner, reading: WELCOME HOME FREDDIE! Among the fans is Heidi. She lays the twins on a baggage cart and moves in to touch Freddie. There is instantly something between them. Freddie looks her over and we can virtually hear the chemical crackle.

Newton, who has deplaned after Freddie (and after Hinkley Jr., now monopolizing the media), picks up the twins and walks slowly away with them. Heidi glances over, sees this, hesitates, then moves back into Freddie’s arms.

Nearly a year passes. It is early winter in Minneapolis. Newton drives through the snow to a day care center, where he deposits the twins. He then drives on to work. At the museum, a letter awaits him. It bears a St. Ignatz postmark. On the way to his station, he tears it open. He removes two photos. Walking, he looks at the first. It’s a picture of Zumba and Leroyette. They have a baby boy.

As Newton lectures, we see the second photo, which he has just taped to his projector. Cookie and Freighter (Freighter has a wooden leg now, and is making a “V” for Victory sign) are holding triplets: three little racially mixed girls, each with a different colored bow in her hair.

“Of all the trillions and trillions of snowflakes that have fallen upon the Earth, scientists
claim
no two…”

Newton breaks off. He stares at the photo of his triplets. As he projects fresh snowflakes onto a screen, he takes up again. “…scientists
claim
no two have ever been alike. However, folks, as we know, the dice are always rolling.” Expectantly, he turns to examine the screen.

Ergo!
magazine, 1990

MUSINGS
&
CRITIQUES

In Defiance of Gravity

Writing, Wisdom, & The Fabulous Club Gemini

I

I
t had been a long time since I’d contemplated suicide. In fact, I don’t believe I’d ever before considered the corporal
DELETE
key an option. Yet there I was, teetering on a bridge high above some oyster-lit backwater from Puget Sound, thinking about closing my earthly accounts with a leap and a splash.

Why? My romantic life couldn’t have been sweeter, my health was close to rosy, the writing was going well, finances were adequate, and while the horror show that that cupidinous cult of corporate vampires was making of our federal government might be enough to drive me to drink (a trip I’m seldom reluctant to take), the political knavery does not exist that could drive me
into
the drink. No, the truth is, I was being prodded to execute a Kevorkian header into the Stygian slough by a short story I’d just read in a back issue of
The New Yorker
.

Entitled (ironically enough)
Fun With Problems,
the piece was composed by Robert Stone, and you can bet it wasn’t Stone’s prose style that had weakened my will to live: the man’s a crack technician whose choices of verb and adjective can sometimes floor me with admiration. He’s a smithery of a storyteller who’s hammered out a stalwart oeuvre—but holy Chernobyl, is he bleak! Stone apparently believes the human condition one pathetically unstable, appallingly corrupt piece of business, and, frankly, at this stage of our evolutionary development there’s a shortage of evidence to contradict him. Nevertheless, I’d always counted myself among those free spirits who refuse to allow mankind’s ignoble deportment and dumb-cluck diatheses to cloud their grand perspective or sleet on their parade. On that day, however, Stone’s narrative prowess had been such as to infect me (unconscionably, I now contend) with his Weltschmerz.

In fairness, Stone alone was not to blame. For too many years my edacious reading habits had been leading me into one unappealing corner after another, dank cul-de-sacs littered with tearstained diaries, empty pill bottles, bulging briefcases, broken vows, humdrum phrases, sociological swab samples, and the (lovely?) bones of dismembered children: the detritus of a literary scene that, with several notable exceptions, has been about as entertaining as a Taliban theme park and as elevating as the prayer breakfast at the Bates Motel.
Fun With Problems
was simply the final straw, the charred cherry atop a mad-cow sundae.

So, who knows how things might have turned out that glum afternoon had not I suddenly heard, as I flirted with extinction, a particular sound in my mind’s ear; the sound, believe it or not, of a distant kitty cat; a sound that instantly transported me away from the lure of fatal waters, away from the toxic contagions of sordid fiction, and into a place—a real place, though I’ve only visited it in my imagination—a place called the Fabulous Club Gemini.

II

The Fabulous Club Gemini. Where is it, anyhow? Memphis, probably. Or Houston. No, actually I think it might be one of the ideologically unencumbered features of Washington, D.C. In any case, some years back, a music writer for the
Village Voice
made a pilgrimage to the smoke-polluted, windowless, cinderblock venue, wherever its exact location, and while being introduced to some of the ancient musicians who’d been playing the Fabulous Club Gemini practically since the vagitus of time, the pilgrim became so excited he momentarily lost his downtown cool.

“I can’t believe,” he quoted himself as having gushed, “that I’m talking to the man who barked on Big Mama Thornton’s recording of ‘Hound Dog’!”

“Yeah,” the grizzled sideman drawled. “I was gonna
meow
—but it was too hip for ’em.”

Okay, perhaps I’m overly fanciful, but I have reason to suspect it might have been precisely an echo from that crusty confession that, as incongruous as it may seem, enticed me down from the kamikaze viaduct. I do know that I’m often reminded of it when I glance at the annual lists of Pulitzers, Booker Prizes, or National Book Awards; when an interviewer’s question forces me to re-examine my personal literary aesthetic; or when speaking with eager students in those university creative writing programs where prescribed, if rarified, barking is actively promoted and any feline departure summarily euthanized.

There’s some validity, I suppose, in the academic approach, for as Big Mama’s accompanist would attest, our culture simply has a far greater demand for the predictable bow-wow than for the unexpected caterwaul: orthodox woofing pays the rent. In a dogma-eat-dogma world, a few teachers, editors, and critics may be hip enough to tolerate a subversive mew, a quirky purr now and again, but they’re well aware of the fate that awaits those who produce— or sanction—mysterious off-the-wall meowing when familiar yaps and snarls are clearly called for.

Let me explain that when I refer to “meowing” here, what I’m really talking about is the human impulse to be playful; an impulse all too frequently demeaned and suppressed in the adult population, especially when it manifests itself in an unconventional manner or inappropriate context. To bark at the end of a song entitled “Hound Dog” is just playful enough to elicit a soupçon of mainstream amusement, but Fred (I believe that was the sessionman’s name), in wanting instead to meow, was pushing the envelope and raising the stakes, raising them to a “hipper” level perhaps, a more irreverent level undoubtedly. There’s a sense in which ol’ Fred was showing a tiny spark of what the Tibetans call “crazy wisdom,” a sense in which he was assuming for a bare instant the archetypal role of the holy fool.

Now, the fact that Fred would have denied any such arcane ambition, the fact that he may only have been stoned out of his gourd at the time, all that is irrelevant.

It’s also unimportant that Fred’s recording studio tomfoolery lacked real profundity, that while it may have been eccentrically playful it was not very
seriously
playful. What does matter is that we come to recognize that playfulness, as a philosophical stance, can be very serious, indeed; and, moreover, that it possesses an unfailing capacity to arouse ridicule and hostility in those among us who crave certainty, reverence, and restraint.

The fact that playfulness—a kind of
divine
playfulness intended to lighten man’s existential burden and promote what Joseph Campbell called “the rapture of being alive”—lies near the core of Zen, Taoist, Sufi, and Tantric teachings is lost on most westerners: working stiffs and intellectuals alike. Even scholars who acknowledge the playful undertone in those disciplines treat it with condescension and disrespect, never mind that it’s a worldview arrived at after millennia of exhaustive study, deep meditation, unflinching observation, and intense debate.

Tell an editor at
The New York Review of Books
that Abbott Chögyam Trungpa would squirt his disciples with water pistols when they became overly earnest in their meditative practice, or that the house of Japan’s most venerated ninja is filled with Mickey Mouse memorabilia, and you’ll witness an eye-roll of silent-movie proportions. Like that fusty old patriarch in the Bible, when they become a man (or woman), they “put away childish things,” which is to say they seal off with the hard gray wax of fear and pomposity that aspect of their being that once was attuned to wonder.

As a result of their having abandoned that part of human nature that is potentially most transcendent, it’s no surprise that modern intellectuals dismiss playfulness—especially when it dares to present itself in literature, philosophy, or art—as frivolous or whimsical. Men who wear bow ties to work every day (let’s make an exception for waiters and Pee-wee Herman), men whose dreams have been usurped either by the shallow aspirations of the marketplace or the drab clichés of Marxist realpolitik, such men are not adroit at distinguishing that which is lighthearted from that which is merely lightweight. God knows what confused thunders might rumble in their sinuses were they to encounter a concept such as “crazy wisdom.”

Crazy wisdom is, of course, the opposite of conventional wisdom. It is wisdom that deliberately swims against the current in order to avoid being swept along in the numbing wake of bourgeois compromise, wisdom that flouts taboos in order to undermine their power; wisdom that evolves when one, while refusing to avert one’s gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, insists on joy in spite of everything; wisdom that embraces risk and eschews security, wisdom that turns the tables on neurosis by lampooning it, the wisdom of those who neither seek authority nor willingly submit to it.

Oddly enough, one of the most striking illustrations of crazy wisdom in all of western literature occurs in a pedestrian piece of police pulp by Joseph Wambaugh.
The Black Marble
is so stylistically lifeless it could have been printed in embalming fluid, but the rigor mortis of its prose is temporarily enlivened by a scattering of scenes that I shall attempt to summarize (although it’s been decades since I read the book).

As I remember it, a relatively inexperienced member of the Los Angeles Police Department is transferred to the vice squad. No sooner does the new cop report for duty than he’s introduced to a strange lottery. There is, it seems, an undesirable beat, a section of the city that no vice cop ever wants to patrol. It’s a sleazy, filthy, volatile, extremely dangerous area, full of shooting galleries and dark alleys and not a donut shop in sight. So great has been the objection to being assigned to that sinister beat that the precinct captain has devised a raffle to cope with it. At the beginning of each night shift, he produces a bag of marbles, every marble white save one. One by one, the cops reach in the bag and pull out their fate. The unfortunate who draws the single black marble must screw up his spine and descend that evening into the urban hell.

Around the drawing of the marbles there’s a considerable amount of tension, and the new man quickly succumbs to it. Just showing up for work is twice as stressful as it ought to be. In the station house, negativity is prevalent, jovial camaraderie rare.

The new cop draws the black marble a couple of times and finds the dreaded zone to be as violent and unsavory as advertised. However, he not only survives there, he learns he can tolerate the beat reasonably well by changing his attitude toward it, by regarding it less as a tribulation than as some special opportunity to escape routine and regularity, by appreciating it as an unusual experience available to very few people on the planet. Slowly, his anxiety begins to evaporate.

One night he shocks his comrades by emptying the bag and
deliberately
selecting the black marble. The next night, he does it again. From then on, he simply strolls into the station and nonchalantly requests the black marble. He no longer has to fret over the possibility of losing the draw. For better or worse, he controls his destiny.

Ordeal now has been transformed into adventure, stress into excitement. The transformer is himself transformed, his uptightness replaced first by a kind of giddy rush, then by a buddhistic calm. Moreover, his daring, his abandon, his serenity, is contagious. Vice squad headquarters gradually relaxes. Liberated, the whole damn place opens up to life.

And that, brothers and sisters, though Wambaugh probably didn’t intend it, is crazy wisdom in action.

Admittedly, when the cop made the short straw his own, when he seized the nasty end of the stick and rode it to transcendence, he put himself in extra peril. That’s par for the course. Only an airhead would mistake the left-handed path for a safe path.

While serious playfulness may be an effective means of domesticating fear and pain, it’s not about meowing past the graveyard. No, the seriously playful individual meows right through the graveyard gate, meows into his or her very grave. When Oscar Wilde allegedly gestured at the garish wallpaper in his cheap Parisian hotel room and announced with his dying breath, “Either it goes or I go,” he was exhibiting something beyond an irrepressibly brilliant wit. Freud, you see, wasn’t whistling “Edelweiss” when he wrote that gallows humor is indicative of “a greatness of soul.”

The quips of the condemned prisoner or dying patient tower dramatically above, say, sallies on TV sitcoms by reason of their gloriously inappropriate refusal, even at life’s most acute moment, to surrender to despair. The man who jokes in the executioner’s face can be destroyed but never defeated.

When a venerable Zen master, upon hearing a sudden burst of squirrel chatter outside his window, sat up in his deathbed and proclaimed, “
That’s
what it was all about!”, his last words surpassed Wilde’s in playful significance, constituting as they did a koan of sorts, an enigmatic invitation to rethink the meaning of existence. Anecdotes such as this one remind the nimble-minded that there’s often a thin line between the comic and the cosmic, and that on that frontier can be found the doorway to psychic rebirth.

Ancient Egyptians believed that when a person died, the gods immediately placed his or her heart in one pan of a set of scales. In the other pan was a feather. If there was imbalance, if the heart of the deceased weighed more than the feather, he or she was denied admittance to the afterworld. Only the lighthearted were deemed advanced enough to merit immortality.

Now, in a culture such as ours, where the tyranny of the dull mind holds sway, we can expect our intelligentsia to write off Egyptian heart-weighing as quaint superstition, to dismiss squirrel-chatter illumination as flaky Asian guru woo woo. Fine. But what about the Euro-American Trickster tradition, what about Coyote and Raven and Loki and Hermes and the community-sanctioned blasphemies of the clown princes of Saturnalia? For that matter, what about Dada, Duchamp, and the ’pataphysics of Alfred Jarry? What about
Gargantua
and
Finnegans Wake,
John Cage and Erik Satie, Gurdjieff and Robert Anton Wilson, Frank Zappa and Antoni Gaudí? What about Carlos Castaneda, Picasso, and the alchemists of Prague? Allen Ginsberg and R. D. Laing, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Lewis Carroll, Alexander Calder and Italo Calvino, Henry Miller, Pippi Longstocking, Andrei Codrescu, Ishmael Reed, Alan Rudolph, Mark Twain, and the electric Kool-Aid acid pranksters? What about the sly tongue-in-cheek subversions of Nietzsche (yes, Nietzsche!), and what about Shakespeare, for God’s sake, the mega-bard in whose plays, tragedies included, three thousand puns, some of them real groaners, have been verifiably cataloged?