It was a bright autumn day, November 6, 1964. Lindy and I walked to the main building, grabbed a Times at the service desk, and headed down the aisle of a crowded dining room. Grossinger’s regulars waved at me as though nothing were unusual. I was with a girl. I had been with a girl before. That was how it must have looked. But Lindy was a girl found elsewhere and she represented everything about me that had nothing to do with the Hotel.
After breakfast we walked the grounds in chill morning, across the golf course to the Lake, back past the skating rink and greenhouses along the ballfields, leaves ochre and burgundy on the trees of eternal return. Afterwards I led her on a tour of the kitchen, past steaming grills and lines of waiters and waitresses; in the process we collected fruit and cookies for the road. We came back to the car and filled it at the Hotel pump.
“The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” I joked. “The next stop, Annandale-on-Hudson.”
She zoomed out the gate and turned left on 52; it was a sixty-mile trip, picking up Route 209 at Ellenville, crossing the Hudson at Kingston. As she opened a window and lit a cigarette, I got out “Weeks” and began reading aloud:
Raven in Chiapas….
wings tensed back
it has swallowed its tongue
in hunger to eat
hunger to cry out loud into the sky I am here
who made us feed on shit
feed me because I cry louder….
because I can crack the cheap bowl of your cry with my shriek….
“He is amazing,” she said. “It’s hard to believe we’re really going to see him.”
Robert Kelly lived on the Bard campus. When we inquired for his whereabouts, we were directed to a small parking lot, its driveway ending in a cluster of barracks-like apartments. As instructed, we knocked on the last door. A woman answered. Stocky, garbed in shawl and robes, she could have been a large dwarf out of Norse mythology. She stared back and forth at each of us intently enough to be rude. After taking stock of the ingénue college students, she proclaimed, “You must be Richard Grossinger and friend. Come in. Robert has been waiting for you.”
Already I could hear his voice bellowing from the back rooms: “Joby, is it Richard Grossinger?”
We stepped into another reality, a den packed floor to ceiling with every imaginable size, shape, and age of book and manuscript, some lying open, others with feathers and paperweights marking places. Encyclopedia-like tomes and black binders rested on tables along with unfinished cups of coffee and overflowing ashtrays. Books and papers were scattered all over the faded Turkish carpet. Occult icons, alchemical posters, tarot cards, tankgas, and horoscopes were attached to the walls. It was how I would have pictured Merlin’s lair: a Mediaeval flat that had been inhabited by the same two immortals for centuries.
There was no heat; the apartment was stone-cold. An ancient furnace-like unit with a pipe through the ceiling was either inoperable or, more likely, set at fifty. Across the archway leading to the entrance from which Robert Kelly was about to loom, judging by the sound, was a hand-made sign with the words: TOMORROW POSSIBLE BECAUSE IT IS.
Though we had been forewarned about his appearance, nothing could have prepared us for a giant or his manner of entering. Well over three hundred pounds and six feet, an unkempt red mane, he transformed scale itself, inhabiting the room by gasping between breaths. He continued to alter space as he walked, like a boulder coming through water.
“Yes, yes, Richard Grossinger—wonderful speech you gave—and—” He turned to Lindy, whom I quickly introduced. Then he scurried us to chairs like a man feeding pigeons. “Is there anything happening these days at Amherst and Smith? I had thought not. And then Harvey Bialy returns with a story of an unlikely ceremony and carrying this magnificent piece of sacred oratory.” He grabbed my carbon from one of the tabletops and shook the daylights out of it.
Collaborating on our response, Lindy and I explained how there was little going on at Amherst and Smith. As we enumerated the courses we were taking and what we were reading, he listened patiently, then indicated he would soon supply the remedy.
He began his discourse in the middle of nowhere, an impromptu sermon on a form of Sufi music he had recently discovered, its relation to cosmic vibrations, citing texts he presumed (quite wrongly) we knew. In fact, for the whole of the visit he seemed to gloss over the gulf between our spheres of learning as if it didn’t exist or, in any case, needn’t deter him from fulsome testimony. His grandiloquence recalled the high language of gospel but, like Olson, a vernacular version with shifts into hip pidgin. As he spoke, Joby interrupted constantly with emendations I didn’t follow, as if everything required her exactitude and footnotes. I had to pay close attention not to lose track or slight either of them.
It was also as though we had entered a Berlitz class in which a foreign tongue was acquired simply by listening and repeating in kind. But it wasn’t quite that—it was as though we were being trained for a different mode of perception and discourse, the rules of which would become evident only by our being in its midst and observing and practicing its conventions. Later I realized that Kelly was teaching in a different way from my Amherst or Horace Mann masters; he was telling us stuff all right, important facts and ideas, but he was also changing our consciousness, attuning it to a higher, more serious octave by mantra and melody as much as by information.
At one point he retreated to the back room and re-manifested with a pile of colorful mimeographed sheets he stapled together by virtually crushing a tiny machine as he walked. These made up a magazine he called matter. We each got our own copy. I turned through my pages, which were filled with poetry, notes, diagrams, and epigraphs. Right off I saw an essay on film-making by Stan Brakhage, and I told them about the screening at Amherst.
“Brakhage taught you an important lesson,” he pronounced. “You see, when you are young, you think you can live on anything, like junk food, and you can, and seem to do all right—you two are testament to that. But in order to grow into men and women you need real things, real imagination, not just symbols, or the ideas of some professor who hasn’t been out of the university in two hundred years.”
Then Kelly asked Joby if she was hungry and, when she responded with a growl, he proposed to take us to town for lunch. In the driveway we were chaperoned to an old sedan. “Named Bloisius,” Joby informed us with a maternal smile as she herded us in. She and Kelly occupied thrones in the front seat, which was decorated uncarlike with postcards and amulets on the walls. We obeyed her instructions to pile up books strewn across the back and made enough room to settle in. The smell of decay indigenous to the vehicle was a blend of oranges and bookstore parchment, not unpleasant.
Kelly hugged and rolled the wheel like an octopus with a crystal ball in his circumference as he headed for and then crossed the Rhinecliff Bridge over the Hudson into Kingston. I had driven or been driven past this town a hundred times or more en route to and from Grossinger’s, including ninety minutes ago, but had never seen its interior. In my mind it was a Thruway exit, so I was eager for more of a peek.
We drifted down a lively main street and, without braking, Kelly turned into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant, almost hitting a parked truck without the slightest acknowledgment. Inside, as we continued to talk, I had the sense of leaving the “silk route” to the Catskills and entering a parallel reality that had been operating beside it all along.
In the course of egg rolls and spare ribs, produced quickly without our ordering, by a waitress who must have known the routine, Kelly made headway through an unpredictable list of topics, quizzing us on them one by one. He began with conventional items—where we came from, what we read and wrote, what our relationship to each other was, in general who we thought we were. He certified each answer with a smile that was sometimes approving, sometimes quixotic, but never condescending, as he and Joby traded obscure asides like an examining committee. Then he made leaps of metaphor and view, dissolving beliefs we had held our whole lives. It was both exhilarating and exhausting, though we were hardly prepared for the deluge.
“What planets do you think are inhabited?” he asked at one point, picking up on my expressed interest in science fiction.
I gave a considered response, favoring Mars and Venus.
“That’s the astronomer’s answer; I think they are all inhabited, inhabited on other planes and by creatures indigenous to those planes. We conceive life only in three dimensions, but beings might live on worlds in other dimensions, for instance in the astral plane, while at the same time the surfaces of those worlds appear barren.”
“Even Pluto?” I baited, trying to see how far he was willing to go.
“Don’t be fooled by its size. It’s a planet, the same as any other, and we know nothing about it, except as we have seemed to discover and name it.” He drained a demitasse of green tea like a giant slurping a thimble. “You ask about Pluto. I say Pluto gives birth to the present epoch. I say that the Sun itself is inhabited. I think its core is teeming with creatures, all in an exalted state. Not necessarily higher, though. Souls exist on the Sun in their own occasion as we do here.” He stopped to consider where to take us next.
“Souls come to worlds for specific reasons based on karma. Ours is the green planet, the realm of growth; here, uniquely, creatures transform themselves by their work. It is a precious opportunity, but it exacts a price; that is, if we squander it. Such is our desperate situation, the reason we cannot dawdle. Your professors don’t see it, so they fulfill their etymology. They profess—about nothing in particular, nothing that finally matters. They go on and on as if we had time unto eternity.”
He paused to order main dishes, selecting for us too, and then picked up where he had left off.
“We have very little time, almost no time at all, and the Moon is waiting to gobble us up, to trap us in habitual motion. In truth, we live our lives in an instant, effect a transmutation or not, vanish into darkness if we fail. That is the next task for you two—to live—now that you have declared yourself apart from the monster.”
Then he asked us about dreams and I answered with interpretations from Jung as well as Freud. “Good basic training,” he attested, “but this is still the Western dream you are talking about, the dream that stands for something. I am talking about a pure act of dreaming that does not have to be subservient to any system of symbols. Dreaming is no different from ‘lifing’—that’s an American Indian testament, though they didn’t name it as such, they experienced it directly. Dream is its own mystery, its own logos, not the product of some professional establishment. Your dream tonight might be Freudian, or Jungian, but only if you interpret it as such. It could also be an utterly unknown message from an unknowable intelligence, perhaps your own, or a landscape infused from a higher dimension. Remember Blake: make your own system or be enslaved by another’s.” Joby started to object, but he finished the conceit himself. “Unfortunately Blake was enslaved by his own system.”
“Don’t dreams carry the meanings of past events?” Lindy asked. “Do you think Freud had it all wrong?”
“What about the archetypes?” I threw in. “Don’t they also shape dreams at a primal level?”
“We don’t even know if there is such a thing as an archetype. Jung is seductive, hence dangerous. He offers pompano so delicate they are hard to resist, but he too was enslaved by his own system. Meanings and symbols are only accouterments of a greater dreaming. But they are not the fact of dreaming. Dreaming is its own fact, just like lifing. What is this life a symbol for? It’s not a symbol; it’s a life. Now eat. Let the gods nourish you.”
The arrival of dishes had interrupted our talk, as mu shu pork, broccoli beef, spare ribs, cashew prawns, and black mushrooms were tossed on the table without fanfare. Kelly praised each in turn with playfully flamboyant oblations, as he dished out generous helpings for all. We ate in relative silence.
“It is charming to be children when you are children,” he opined while counting out his cash and assuring us we were his guests. “But in America they want to keep you children forever.” He downed one last helping of tea. “Your professors are children—I mean, in terms of the true mages and avatars of the universe. Your parents likewise.” He slowly peered around the room as if to include its diners in his indictment; then he pointed to an unlikely gray-haired gent seated by the window and said under his breath, “I know that man.” After a pause during which I wondered what manner of new riddle this was, he added, “I’ve seen him in every Howard Johnson’s in the country.”
As we walked to the car, he continued the thread, “You have an opportunity to be more than parrots or pedants. Already Richard’s Halloween vision speaks to that, to a deeper truth. I see it in both of you. Stop writing fiction. Stop making up things and satisfying yourself with allusions. It’s not charming and inventive; it’s devious and evasive. Do you want to live lives of gossip, be raconteurs for your time on Earth? Do you want to dream and breathe this fraud of a civilization? Grow up! Become citizens of the cosmos.”
On the way back to Annandale he cited poetic and Gnostic masters, as he urged us to supplement our meager and modernistic educations with real texts, the titles of which he continued to compile on the back of an envelope, using the steering wheel as a writing surface while in vehicular motion.
At his apartment he offered to read to us from his work. In a hurry to get started north, we tried politely to resist, but he chided us for being Amherst and Smith drones and shooed us back into our seats. “What would your good professors think if you refused a reading from William Butler Yeats?”
I balked at being a captive audience, but he read like a jinni—Yeats was an understatement. He closed with a long poem called “The Alchemist” with lines as good as any I had ever heard:
& if we do not get up and destroy all the congressmen
turn them into naked men and let the sun shine on them
set them down in a desert & let them find their way out,
north, by whatever sexual power is left in them, if we do not
seize the president and take him out in daytime and show him
the fire & energy of one at least immediate star, white star….
we will walk forever down the hallways into mirrors and
stagger and look to our left hand for support & the sun
will have set inside us & the world will be filled with Law….
We sat in stunned humility. Each in our way, we knew that we were in a sacred space, being blessed by a priest.
In truth, it was a mystery event. If we had come in disguise, the Kellys were in disguise too, and so was the altar, camouflaged as a dingy tenement. In any ordinary sense the Kellys’ hut was dwarfed by Grossinger’s, but that tiny, rumpled apartment on the nether shore of the Hudson was a hologram of the entire cosmos. The Five of Pentacles had been drawn upside-down, the mendicants were in the temple.
Then Kelly told us to stick together and protect each other, as he assigned us the task of waking up Amherst and Smith. He handed Lindy the torn-off reading-list and bid us “God’s speed” with a mudra of his left hand, “Until the next time…. I’m sure there will be many.”
We left him copies of our work, and he promised to read them and discuss them on our return “which I hope,” he added, “will be soon.”
We drove into a different world from the one out of which we had trundled hours earlier, repairing like pilgrims from Plato’s cave who had seen how large the universe actually was. We found the way to the Taconic and followed its gentle wooded hills up through New York to meet the Thruway just before the Mass line.
“Give me a few days to get my life together,” Lindy requested at the door to Laura Scales. “It has been a radical and exhausting grail.” I nodded and drove back to Phi Psi.
Several times a week over the next two months I picked her up at Smith and we set out looking for new places to dine: a tavern in Hadley, the Aqua Vitae outside Northampton, a diner in Florence, a steak house in Springfield, the local Howard Johnson’s. There we ratified our emotional and artistic world. We protected the identity of our emerging twosome while enacting our apostasy within the Amherst-Smith demesne. Driven by an idealism and esoteric terminology few seemed to understand, we made appearances in our classes like double agents in collusion with a foreign polity, Kelly’s Bard. Most of Amherst and Smith spoke the party line, as if there were no muses or sacred paths, offering a familiar mince of cliché pieties, half-baked assertions, existential homilies—hedged bets all.
Kelly had conferred a guidance and rectitude we had long sought. For me it was not just his exemplar; it was the tarot, the Halloween ceremony, Jung, Crowley, Nelson’s angelic birds. I suddenly had numerous guides, present and transcendent. For Lindy, in her own words, “It was a breath of jarring, almost gagging cold air on the tepid waters of Smith’s academic grind, which was a constant struggle for good enough grades, nothing else. It was unbidden knowledge, an alternate artistic universe of food nourishing and necessary. I didn’t realize how starved I had been.”
Then there was her and my relationship. We had bonded incongruously and unexpectedly, as writers and seekers, but now we had reached another, more serious phase, beyond neophyte boy and girl in a gambol or expendable tryst. Kelly wanted us to succeed as a couple too, to dodge gossipy dissuasions and normative templates. He had put down a dare, given us a high bar to shoot for, but we submitted willingly, for we wanted follow his lead and gain our personal and artistic freedom.
For Lindy it was a break with the social world of her past, its dating rituals, and the sorts of men considered admirable in that sphere. I was not the guy she had been looking for or imagining, not even close—more like his antithesis. I was not only the epitome of Jewish New York but a renegade and outcast there.
And while I may have been looking for some combination of Alice in Wonderland, Cathy Carr singing “First Anniversary,” and Emily Dickinson, I had been snagged by a combo of Simone de Beauvoir, Yvonne Rainer, and Annie Oakley.
I had no doubt found “her” too soon, but it was too late to do anything about it. We were in a trap—in my blue room with the yellow serape, not able to escape our pasts and divergent styles. We had been raised and trained differently, not only how to behave in the world but how to dress, how to witness yourself, how to be a man or a woman and how a man and a woman charm each other and expect to be charmed. Such customs ranged from the humdrum uses of social drinking and smoking to what to expect from life and love—in general how to occupy time and space and one’s own desires, plus all the vestigial habits people dredge up when they try to stay close, be best friends and a romantic couple too.
Personal traits are deep-seated and loyal and do not submit to ideology or hermetic edict. My girlfriend was scrupulous about her looks, though in a playful manner, creatively attuned to the impact of clothes, makeup, and style. She was brash and a bit wild, free and easy in her gyroscope through time and space, the nuances of flirting and touch. My ways of being and moving were unconscious, or derived cluelessly from baseball and lapsed Viola Wolfe dance lessons. I was mostly unaware of my appearance, lost in thoughts, forgetful that I was even being seen.
She embodied a milieu more culturally sophisticated than Betsy’s Miami Beach but similar in its self-assurance and sangfroid. She came from a strictly cordial family and had a fair amount of “Flower Girl” debutante glamour and Denver vogue to her. Trained in ballet from eight to sixteen and later modern dance, she was dazzling when she did the dance of her name. I was still trying to remember its sequence of steps.
I had an unexamined romantic penchant, a tendency toward literal, sentimental responses. By contrast, Lindy was cosmopolitan, experienced sexually and socially. She understood that relationship was complex, cantankerous, paradoxical, and that you usually got somewhere by going against the grain, confronting impediments and challenges rather than evading or pretending they could be finessed or overlooked. She was bored by pap and ritualized gestures and by people’s knee-jerk valorizations of them, so she didn’t offer any lenient routes or passes.
I had no use for ritualized gambols any more than she did. I had tarried too long with civilians: casual wayfarers, geishas and mere narcissicists. I was ready to play for keeps with a complicated partner in a game that counted. So I tried to observe and respond conscientiously.
I wasn’t daunted by Lindy’s fast company. I had handled my mother’s onslaughts, so I didn’t flinch or back off her sometimes brutal assessments—and they were doozies, as accurate and deadly as verbal arrows got. I was stoked and challenged, for I was not only Fabian’s patient, I was his apprentice, a long-time psychological inquisitor, of late a literary and metaphysical reader too. I had trained a sensitivity to moods and projections, an attunement to paradoxes of intent. I didn’t get bogged down. I knew how to mirror and transform. I had done it for years with sundry folks from Abbey West to Betsy Sley to Jeff Tripp.
Our inconsonant rhythms and contrary histories precluded any ease of sexuality. That part of the relationship was a struggle from the get-go. She proceeded slowly, respecting old-fashioned adolescent boundaries. She did not want us taking on more than we could handle, her own social maturity notwithstanding. Liberated sex had not made her particularly happy, and she wanted off the fast track and the sorts of yardsticks and fellow travellers it provided. “I wouldn’t have blown in your ear,” she told me later, “if I thought you would have misunderstood or taken advantage like most boys. I knew I could trust you.” In that regard we were peers trying to change speeds and get in sync—her slowing down and me speeding up.
Life neophytes coming from opposite directions, we were training each other, trying to balance each other’s excesses, reforming each other’s rigidities and atavisms. That made our romance tough and diagnostic more than sexy and sweet.
We argued nightly, one more cigarette for her in the car before Smith’s curfew, trying to patch it together with a conciliatory more than romantic kiss.
Lindy was clear and acerbic and embraced the confident good-humored person when I became him, but she hectored and dismissed the perverse child. When I kneeled on the mattress looking wounded and distraught, she would say, “Enough,” and go for a walk in the Glen, or sit in the living room talking with other people, waiting for me to give it up. I despised that child too, but there was no place to hide him.
“That’s okay,” Lindy said. “So, we hate each other. It will all come out in the wash.”
Like Schuyler I was trying to scale the abyss of my failed adolescence in a single leap. Lindy was as helpful as another person, with her own destiny at stake, could be. She didn’t abandon me or get scared off when I panicked, but she also didn’t let my dramas take over or stampede her into compliance with desperate claims. She required that I make an ongoing, sincere attempt at normalization, to stop indulging and inflating my knee-jerk apostasies and paranoias. If I hadn’t, she would have been gone in a flash.
Yet she counted on my originality and prowess for dead-reckoning, my willingness to improvise and make unconventional choices, as I pushed her to break her obedience to spurious authority and decorum and to be her quirkiest, most free-associative self.
I had to learn how to my discriminate contradictory passions on the fly: the generosity of creative imagination (good) versus tantrums of mere contrariness (bad). My pranks, fears, and epiphanies ran in overlapping synapses, so it was a challenge to sort them out and retain my dignity as well as any ease or flair. I didn’t always stay on the beam of that one because I hadn’t experienced, at a baseline level, that the tracks, though parallel, weren’t the same. To my family it was all perverse and insane, every insight and audacity. As far as they were concerned, I had no visionary or aesthetic gifts. At best I was meant to become a lawyer or hotel executive. The trouble was, I had allowed myself to be minimalized and depreciated in my own mind too.
By what presumption was I purporting to court this woman? At times I would wake with a start like a man on a tightrope who had never been trained in the art; it seemed sheer overreach and bluff. I hadn’t even dated yet. It was a wonder that Lindy even liked me, let alone perhaps loved me, that she saw a diamond in the rough.
When she was feeling good about our relationship, she might at random moments, even in public, let her entire weight suddenly collapse against mine like a modern dancer in an informally choreographed pas de deux. As I shifted with varying degrees of success to absorb her impact without losing balance, often stumbling a bit, she would pronounce with self-deprecating satire: “A man you can lean on!”
She was invoking a current fashion ad that ran regularly in the New York Times Magazine and New Yorker. A woman in a worksuit of blended polyester inclined like the Tower of Pisa against nothing but the words “A man you can lean on—that’s Klopman!” The issue of whether I was solid enough to hold up her weight too (if necessary) was crucial because Klopman had been her long-time standard. Before me, there were Steve and Jim and others like them—super-confident males. When she was dubious or incensed by my failings—the absurdity of even considering me boyfriend material—she treated the clothing ad as gospel and made comments like, “I need a different kind of man, and you need someone you can lean on too. If we keep forcing the issue, we are both going to end up on the floor.”
I tended to judge how we were doing by how seriously she took Klopman.
She decided to go to a friend’s house outside Boston for Thanksgiving (“Remember, familiarity breeds contempt,” she warned, amused that I had thought the word was “content.”). I went to the Hotel and used it as a base to revisit Bard. It turned out that Kelly had guests on that day, so Harvey led me to the home of Jonathan Greene, a married student and poet. Beside the fireplace after dinner I participated in an evening of scuttlebutt during which I fielded questions about myself. Harvey sat there smoking his pipe, nodding and smirking, tossing an occasional jibe like “Don’t forget, he’s not only got Amherst but Grossinger’s to live down.”
I visited Kelly the next afternoon. He expressed concern about my “travelling without Lindy.” I acknowledged his warning and promised to return together, but he was already on to the next topic.
“Why did you tell Harvey and Jonathan your story and yet never a word to me, even about Grossinger’s?” I was dumbfounded that he already knew, then abashed as I pictured myself chattering away while the disciples prepared their report for the master. But was he saying that I should have told him my life tales too, or that I made an ass out of myself by telling them at all?
“It didn’t seem appropriate.”
“You’re right. It wasn’t. I caught the attention of the part of you that is awake, and you didn’t think to waste my time on such nonsense. Having Lindy with you helped; you were in too serious a situation to dawdle. With those others it was just nervous energy, nothing that counts in play. That’s okay. You defined them too. Nothing lost.”
He had a very definite opinion about my relationship to Grossinger’s. “You must have accumulated good karma in a previous lifetime. Grossinger’s is the universe’s way of rewarding you. Don’t reject it. That would be ungracious. Try to put it to good use. Since it is a blessing to you, try to be a blessing to it. Not in a culturally ritualistic way, as everyone will insist at the waste of both your time and theirs, but in the true sense of magi bearing gifts. Respect the karma of your family members too. Don’t deprive them of your knowledge or compassion out of second-rate political claptrap.”
Then he handed my manuscript back to me.
“The speech you gave at Halloween was, in a sense, your first piece of writing. What comes before it is more gossip, social chatter of the sort you did last night.” His eyes were solemn and piercing. “Confession is a trick we play on ourselves. We pretend it is personal, but it is actually the least personal act of all.” I nodded, as he went on. “We were all mistreated in childhood; do we want to make that the talisman of our lives? We all have the same fantasies and daydreams; they’re not of essence. It’s the energy they generate that matters. Remember Crowley, turn it into the nourishment you need, make a different energy, do not let the Moon swallow you. Anyone can dance like a marionette. It is far more difficult to face our uniqueness, to speak of what is truly in our hearts.”
I had waited a lifetime for Fabian and Friend—even Leo Marx—to speak with such clarity and precision.
“Your Halloween speech was personal because no one could have spoken it but you; it expressed your destiny. These Betsies and Peggies are everyone’s fantasies, which means no one’s.” He corroborated the point by reading from a poem by Olson:
This, is no bare incoming
of novel abstract form, this
is no welter or the forms
of those events, this,
Greeks, is the stopping
of the battle.
On the afternoon of Christmas vacation I drove Lindy to the airport by Hartford. I already had my own ticket out of New York and would meet her in Denver in a four days’ time. I passed through Grossinger’s like a mirage. Aunt Bunny was back in the hospital by then, getting a new round of shock treatment. “How can you allow such a thing?” I demanded of my father.
“Richard, I haven’t paid for your medical school yet. Leave this to the doctors.”
I visited my New York family the day before my flight. I was an outsider there too, no longer privy to battles and tensions that had once been second nature. They were conducting them now without me, my mother and brother at each other’s throats, my sister catatonic.
Head against an airplane window, I looked down at snowy checkerboard farms and sang on and off in my mind a silly New Christy Minstrels song that began “I was drivin’ a rig out o’ Texas, / all loaded an’ bound for Cheyenne…. ” Then, on the other side of sky, mid-afternoon, she was standing there in a crowd in her blue puffy winter jacket with an open face that melted my heart.
“Hello, kiddo.”
As I said the password back, the song’s patter concluded in my brain: “ … got me a woman in Denver, Lord,/ That’s where I’m settlin’ down…. ”
She drove us to her house in Capitol Hill near center city, though to a New Yorker it looked like countryside. Christmas lights in the windows, snow on the front lawn; this was my daydream past, my undisclosed future. Her parents, her married sisters, and their husbands were on hand. I was introduced in a flurry and offered this and that to eat and drink.
While treating me gingerly, everyone expressed enthusiasm about my visit and curiosity about my people back east. Her mother and father were older than mine, silver-haired denizens of the Old West. Since I had been briefed in advance on her father Hank’s eclectic interests I sought him out for an exchange about UFOs and then Pueblo Indians.
Her oldest sister Susie was friendly if cool. Her husband was a business executive. He spoke that night with authority about profit margins.
Her next oldest sister, Polly, had Lindy’s eyes and wise look, but was more slapdash and quippy, outwardly super-friendly. Her clarion of a voice dominated the clatter. After a few minutes she led me aside and whispered, “Boy, am I glad you’re here. I’ve been hearing about some of Lindy’s flings, married men and all. I always knew my good-looking kid sis was going to attract the wrong types.” Then she patted me on the arm and gave me a hug. Her husband was a smooth, stocky psychiatrist who had been a flight surgeon on aircraft carriers in the South China Sea.
If the Houghs were self-conscious about my being Jewish at Christmas time, they needn’t have been. We were all Americans, and I was far more committed to the teachings of Thomas Merton than to anything I had learned at Hebrew School. Angels and alchemists were Christian; the tarot was Gnostic and Qabalistic both. Christ was a rabbi who took an old prophecy to another level.
On Christmas morning I read to them from Merton’s sermon on Prometheus. Its gist is that we are foolish in to try to steal things God is only too willing to give us for free. In making ourselves into heroes or thieves we deny his pure bounty and generosity. We barter away spirit for matter and goods.
The anti-materialism came across, so it was not their favorite message, but they thanked me for sharing it with them. In the days that followed, though we didn’t acknowledge it, they were becoming my family too.
Denver felt a bit like my runaway in Winnipeg, only this time for real. I gradually lost myself in the adventure, touring my girlfriend’s city with her—coffee shops, former schools and neighborhoods, meals and beers in Larimer Square. One afternoon I went around the house photographing vignettes of her life, collections of objects on her desk, clothes thrown over the chair.
I was in flight over the abyss, and there was no turning back. My only hope was to land on the other side.
When I called Stan Brakhage in Rollinsville I omitted mention of Phi Psi because I did not want to be implicated in Tripp’s hyperboles. Happy to have unexpected visitors courtesy of Kelly, he gave us directions on finding his cabin, a couple of unmarked dirt roads in the mix. Lindy and I set out in her father’s Chevvy the next afternoon: a pilgrimage into the foothills of the Rockies recalling our recent sally from the Catskills to the Hudson.
The highway to Boulder was the easy part. On subsequent mountain roads we got lost multiple times and had to turn around in perilous spots and wind back. Finally we found a hopeful lane, enough like the one Brakhage described to risk plunging into wilderness.
I stood in the snow, staring at a relic, clearing my head: a log cabin amidst drifts, piles of wood and splitting blocks, a very old car, an axe in one log…. the stageset of Dog Star Man.
When we came in the door I had the same giddy sensation as upon entering Kelly’s—I was crossing an unmarked cosmological perimeter. “Greetings,” said Brakhage, extending his hand. If the Kellys’ home was a chamber of the Druid occult, this was the Orphic West out of Denver.
We followed Stan in and immediately met the real-life Jane. She was dressed in jeans and boots and had been blending batter for bread. The hearth of the cabin was spacious and sunny, filled with books, canisters, reels, and other paraphernalia of Stan’s art. Small kids scampered in and out, mostly without pants.
Stan began talking, just as at Amherst, partly from the generous impulse of his thoughts and partly in resentment for the way he had been treated at the kinds of Eastern colleges we came from. As he railed about being poor and unappreciated and not having enough money even to buy film stock, our Amherst and Smith affiliations escalated, without any participation from us, into red flags of moneyed elitism.
Sitting there cluelessly representing them, we became targets for longstanding peeves and resentments we barely understood. There were moments I thought we were about to get tossed out, as when Stan thundered once he figured out my connection to Tripp, infuriated that I tried to keep it from him. Luckily he settled into a scathing commentary on my former housemate: Jeff was deluded, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, indulged for too long by negligent parents and professors, a fatuous bombast as well. He concluded finally that he should sell his beloved Porsche, “that is, if he cares about art. And if he doesn’t need the money, which he clearly doesn’t, there’s a film-maker in Colorado who can always use it to buy another year’s groceries.”
Then he asked if we were hungry. Jane disappeared for a spell and returned with a platter of a bark tea, tan goat’s milk cheese, and some fresh-baked bread.
We ate as Stan took us on tour with a cast of rowdy characters: Sartre, Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound. When he realized that Lindy hadn’t seen his films he brought out a projector and showed a section of Dog Star Man. Then he told us about the death of its dog, Sirius: “Other dogs found his corpse in the snow and rubbed themselves in it. The origin of perfumes is the body’s decay—you know, John Donne: the nearness of death and sex.”
Day became night. Exhausted, I felt myself sliding into a quicksand of déjà vu as well as an apathy at my core. Wind blew snow against the cabin. The meaning of everything, myself included, was evaporating. The Six of Cups had been drawn from the Greater Deck. I felt far from anyplace and wanted to go home, if only I knew where that was.
They fed us from an iron pot of soup they were making for dinner. Afterwards, Stan posed a riddle: One night he and a friend, happy and peaceful, sitting under the moon with beers, asked each other, “Why can’t it be like this all the time?”
It was a wonderful question, but we couldn’t guess the answer: “Why can’t it be like this all the time?”
“It is like this all the time,” Stan said. “It’s just that we don’t know it.”
They walked us back to the car and we chugged into the wintry black. As Lindy worked her way down the mountain I got dizzier and dizzier. It wasn’t just carsickness; it was the whole day, the life. Though I was thrilled by our ongoing adventure, my body rejected its baptisms. I felt chilled, nauseated by unfamiliar aliments: goat’s milk and Gertrude Stein and elf tea, Stan and Jane’s marriage and children, now the twisting road, the intimacy of Lindy herself. I was afraid I didn’t have the strength or guts to pull this off. I wanted to rest. Enough bravado. Enough radical art and transformation. Finally I was too sick to continue and had to get out.
It was the biggest display of stars I had ever seen, the Dipper and Orion outblazed. Breathing Rocky Mountain air, I shivered and improved, the bitter cold restoring a counterweight of reality. I came back into the car and put my head in her lap as she drove, her icy paw now and then on my forehead as she steered the curves. I hadn’t the strength even to focus—let alone identify—constellations I saw upside-down.
I refunded my return plane fare so we could take the train east together. We tried to arrange it so that we would go to New York, reclaim the Mustang, and drive it back to school, but Lindy’s mother caught on at the last minute and changed her ticket at the station.
“It’s totally inappropriate to travel together,” she grumbled. “Let Rich go fetch his own car.”
At dawn we lay against each other half-asleep on a bench in the Chicago station … bookends, spoons. We fit, auras and energy patterns as much as bodies. My train came first. I kissed her and boarded. I shot through the Midwest, across New York State, down Harlem, into the tunnel at Park Avenue and 96th. I took the subway up to Central Park West. It was a weekday—everyone in my family was at work or school. There in the basement garage I found my car where I had left it, all shiny yellow—Bob had had the caked mud and brine of winter washed off. In the grace of that gesture of his I drove the turnpikes back to Amherst.
Second semester I signed up for Watercolor and the History of Art. I also took History of Film, Cognitive Psychology, Hindu Philosophy, and Seventeenth-Century Literature. It was a busy schedule, for I was still gathering credits to make up courses flunked freshman year. I was also beginning to view my studies with perspective. I had arrived at Amherst dazed and confused, unprepared to use resources that made it a fabled academic destination. While most of my classmates jumped at the chance to have complex experiences and start adult life, I was deep in my own maelstrom—at war with myself and embattled with the world.
Now I felt remorse for what I had lost—more than half my college tenure. It was too late to retrieve those opportunities, so I approached the ones that remained with childlike enthusiasm. Lindy had exposed my lack of a cultural background too. Her world was infused with Monet, Klee, Satie, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Merce Cunningham. Mine had nothing at all. Both my clans had ignored the fine arts so thoroughly that I viewed them as immaterial, on the level of tightrope walking or falconry. Except for photography, my seventh-grade fling with Danse Macabre, and a few other token dispensations, the worlds of painting, sculpture, dance, and symphonic music were demoted subconsciously to either decorations or affectations. Since I barely even sampled them, I overlooked their unique enchantments, their range of aesthetics and knowledge—the clues they held to the nature of reality.
I continued to ignore them in college, as I marched straight into the avant-garde, admitting a few abstract expressionist painters like Klee and Miró and the atonal, cosmic-ray-like sounds of Elliott Carter and Arnold Schoenberg—but little else.
Lindy startled me into recognition of both my hubris and deficiency. Apprised by her in a way I hadn’t been by high-school and college cohorts, I was anxious to address the deficit and make myself whole. In fact, I signed up for History of Music too but failed a tone test in the first class—I didn’t know the difference between one note and another—so I switched those units to a psych class that met in the same period: optical illusions and pattern formation.
Meanwhile I got a few Phi Psi classical-music buffs to tutor me on Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, et al. They took the initiation seriously, with listening sessions and “Name That Composer” quizzes. Holst’s Planets and César Frank’s Symphony in D Minor became as consummate and hermetic as the best of Bobby Darin and the Brothers Four. And the organ mystery of Franck’s Prélude, Fugue and Variation touched something ineffable and profound that had been in me all the way back to Bridey’s church. Whenever I heard those ambiguous chords repeating, overlaying, building and combining mutations at different pitches, I may not have tracked their harmonic progression, but I remembered why I was alive.
In my life after college I would try to reclaim other things I cared about but had given short shrift or missed entirely: physics, competitive ice hockey, hardball, astronomy, biology, swaths of world literature, another language, a social identity, guileless male bonds. Attempting a young man’s rites of passage as a middle-aged and older civilian wasn’t the same as doing them at the proper age in a sequestered setting, but it had to pass. For much of my Amherst career I had been that kid from Bill-Dave toting his baseball glove in the snow. As long as I needed to convert primal totems, I had scant time for liberal arts.
I was still on a vision quest, swapping courses and extracurricular activities for rudiments of magic, alchemy, and divination. I needed to commute demons and their corrosive imagery to breathe at all or have space inside me, one day perhaps to shoot a puck again and study the universe with equanimity.
In Watercolor we were given large sheets of cold-pressed paper and taught to moisten it and then dab or drip pigment. That was how I copied the forsythia bushes of New England spring. I had never imagined myself painting before, but my initial attempt brought back the April hill on which we read our work for Mr. Ervin, a lemon brush tinting moist white fibers with a guileless time.
I was inhabiting the oracle issued on a corollary spring day a year prior, deriving its fathomless chimera. So far had I come in a solar circuit that the cumulus-strewn azure and glacial tarn were already ancient and occult. That swimming hole held a sphinx, and its remote beckoning had become the metronome of my existence.
I felt nostalgia for things that had never happened, a bottomless depth in myself that vibrated with the mystery and poignancy of the world. And it was yellow this time, not blue: lemon and gold yellow, the basis of every deck, secular and sacred, that had been sealed or encrypted, whose bittersweet intimation girded my life.
It was there in Central Park when I sleigh-rode on Daddy’s back, there as I caught the taut cowhides he lobbed.
The irrepressible joy, the desire to know, to be what I knew.
It was there as Uncle Paul led a child into the tabernacle of Yankee Stadium and summoned Gil McDougald across the field, and years later looking down from the subway el into unknown territories. The latency, the clue in the cinders.
A premonition of not just cosmic but soul expanse.
It was there at Chipinaw amidst whining wasps and in the tang of mown fields, and Viola Wolfe’s studio where austerities of fox trot and waltz were imposed in lieu of the sacred boy-girl dance, and at the shimmering Grossinger’s pool when a teenager, awash in qualms and anticipation, sought entry to a longing he couldn’t catechize.
The reverie, the unaccountable premonition of sacredness and loss.
It reverberated down corridors of Horace Mann, as a novice wandered between lifetimes, past and future casting each other’s cryptic veil. And esoteric forsythia sprang into fire across field and vale.
That curious twining of dread and desire that makes everything possible and indispensable.
Drawn anew, the Six of Cups proffered a turn of fate, beyond innocence and childhood rambles. The unknowable forces of Creation, mine and the universe’s, were converging on a small spiral in the Milky Way where two of us had commenced some twenty years prior and almost seven hundred leagues apart: Denver gal, New York boy; now fledgling woman, fledgling man sharing a ceremony in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.
I was painting my own saffron trump.
I began dressing in the way Lindy wanted. I bought dungarees and turtlenecks, learned to drink coffee, tried to smoke her cigarettes and finally compromised on a pipe. It was an unfamiliar ritual, stuffing in the tobacco and igniting it. It created a rich, fiery aroma I associated with Dr. Friend, but it lasted only a month.
Unfamiliar rituals were what I needed. The past offered only a sense of smallness and self-loathing. Soon enough my mother would meet my girlfriend and thank her—with nothing short of amazement—for going out with me. That’s how they thought of me: a weirdo, a misfit—troubled little Richie. But to myself I was a maker of ceremonies, a radical artist, an individuating hero. No wonder I wanted to rebuild my associations from scratch—Joan Miró: Women, Birds, Stars, “Courage in a dragonfly”; Charles Ives: polytonality, symphony in D minor; Mahler: the muffled drum; Melville: “the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things”; dark coffee; Brakhage: Dog Star Man; Gertrude Stein: “one must dare to be happy”; John Keats: “negative capability,” “To what green altar, O mysterious priest.” Every day new. Kelly: Tomorrow possible because it is….
Helene wrote a letter pleading for me not to drop her. Helene? For a moment I couldn’t remember who she was.
I was midway in my leap.
I stopped writing novels. I stuck my reams of confessional prose into cartons and forgot about them.
My guides were Winnebago shamans and Celtic shape-changers, not Bellow’s shamanic caricatures. I intended to blast through Grossinger’s to “The Twilight Zone” or Jack Finney’s enchanted “third level” beneath New York’s subway lines. For Miss Carver this had been a nonstarter—she wanted Henderson’s mock sorcerers, voodoo frogs, and allegorical lions with their social-parody agenda. She preferred the merely ironical profundity of a literary device. But I was appalled by Bellow’s spiritual shallowness and self-entitled cultural theft.
It didn’t matter that I was a novice poet. I wanted to remake myself through Kelly, Brakhage, Olson, and projective verse: art as the highest activity of the mind, your relation to God and the Universe. I wanted to run as fast as I could from Catherine Carver, and I did:
miró
using brightest colors on
loops of the infinite, stars
were made blue, gods were made
yellow, and where
one color crossed
another, a
message was born.
lindy hey
lindy hey come
to the window babe
smile babe
grey sunless
air
driven by
isobars
into
sky wind.
today when i was not thinking of you,
a lean bike figure
drove softly by, i
was 2fingering an acorn,
so I sidearmed it happily in your direction, you
arrived
blue, your reindeer skijacket powder
blue, your thinking notebook marble
blue, your bike scratchy with Donald Duck
blue, its silent eye a filament of ozone
blue, i
following
to catch you soon,
soon, kiddo.
Then I wrote my Bob Kuzava poem, throwback to a kid listening to the seventh game of the 1952 World Series, his first.
On weekends Lindy and I ranged farther. We visited an art museum in Worcester for an Australian Aborigine show. Then Boston. We collected Polachek at his apartment and went to hear Harvey Bialy read with Allen Ginsberg and some young Harvard poets. Afterwards everyone was invited to Ginsberg’s apartment. A party was in progress; a dog gave birth in the corner. We stood to the side, interested but not part of it, then returned to the relative innocence of Western Mass.
The following weekend we drove to New York and stayed a night with my family. For all the angst I put into that meeting, the time was uneventful. My mother and Lindy had their tête-à-tête.
At a raunchy theater in the East Village we attended a late-night Kenneth Anger retrospective. The crowd was testy, police cars patrolling up and down the block, officers staring down those entering. The films were a blend of homosexual fantasies, motorcycle orgies, and Crowleyite rituals, but Brakhage had assigned Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Scorpio Rising and we were under his aegis.
During spring vacation we drove to the Hotel. My father’s house was empty except for us. While puffy clouds floated above the golf course, we studied in a rowboat. The air was barely warm, a few turtles visible on rocks along the shore. Lindy was taking a course on Sixteenth Century Poetry, so read to me from Thomas Carew: “The warm sun thaws the benumbed earth, / And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth / To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree / The drowsy cuckoo and the humble-bee.”
It was a lush idyll—beers at the bar, dinners of matzoh ball soup, steak, and fries, capped with different flavors of sherbet and chocolate or lemon sponge cake.
We continued to Bard. Kelly had tendered an invitation to visit him while school was out, and he provided us a bare room in the empty infirmary. That night she stared down at me like a rider on a horse and said with a cheery laugh, “There, Rich, no longer a virgin.” I felt oddly clinical, a post-sensual coldness and wish to get myself back. I had wanted this for so long, but it was another thing entirely, not the tantalizing forest of vines, more a combination of mythical sex and actual intimacy, a dance of man and woman bones I hadn’t yet learned.
The next morning, driving across New York to Connecticut to see Brakhage show his films at Yale, the experience opened inside me. A calm, almost pleasurable nausea blossomed from my belly like a lotus, so that I had to be neither powerful nor well, just cozy as she zipped through sun-shade patches of trees and houses. I felt less as though I had become a man, more that I was a kid again, safe and whole, the heater blowing warmth, the sky an unreal robin’s egg blue. I turned on the Mets opening game … an extra-inning single winning it for them.
Why can’t it be like this all the time, Stan?
In the weeks that followed, I discovered unhappily that it can’t. We lived out the prophecy that making love would become a deterrent, not a touchstone. We were stuck back in the blue room, and I didn’t have the gumption or pizzazz to keep starting over, to woo her with confidence and grace. I wanted to have that closeness always, not because it was earned or even pleasurable but because it sealed the promise. I was running perhaps five years ahead of myself, hoping to skip the shoals that lay in between. I didn’t want to become grim and militaristic like Schuyler, but I would have done well to heed his cautionary tale.
I made her a map of the house in which we would live: the bedrooms of our children, the darkroom, the attic with its telescope, the garden. She began talking about how we were getting too cozy—that I was assuming the relationship rather than letting it develop. As she stomped out of the blue room one night, I lay there, drowning in my ashes. She returned, furious at my self-pity: “I hate men who drool!” It certainly would … in the wash.
The shadow of childhood crept over me like a pall, not then, once upon a time—because that was all dead and gone—but now, in the present, in the form of strictures and agonies it gave rise to. I knew deep down I couldn’t just keep climbing; soon enough I would tumble back. I knew this and yet couldn’t help myself.
She wanted to be free again—it happened so fast I didn’t know where it came from.
She said, Whoa! Let’s stop seeing each other for a while. I need to breathe. You’re holding on too tight.
Familiarity had indeed bred something akin to contempt.
Earlier that spring, provoked by political satire from Phi Psi, Amherst’s Fraternity Council had issued a series of punitive directives, requiring our House to make more conventional uses of its tuition-sourced budget, including a regular homecoming band and a publication. At our next meeting the House jug band was deeded official status, and $100 was turned over to me to put out a literary magazine. At first I balked, but the idea of launching a four-college journal was already in the air locally.
Even before the fraternity council’s directive, Kelly had urged Lindy and me to start our own magazine as a way to get ourselves affiliated in the larger ’hood—he felt that young writers should make their debut in the company of made warriors and mages. Each visit to Annandale, he gave us the newest editions of matter. Those goldenrod and blue-green pages were priceless, hot off the mimeo press with the recent work of avatars.
When I told Kelly about the Phi Psi edict, he suggested that the fraternity-council magistrates were the unwitting tool of my spirit guides—Crowley magick-talk of the sort we did all the time. He proposed that we subvert their intentions and use my speech as Io’s opening salvo: “It’s channeled from your own higher self anyway, so it can herald your first serious public undertaking.”
Lindy offered to handle Smith if we did it. We found co-editors at Mount Holyoke and UMass. Then, since Phi Psi’s tiny allotment was hardly adequate, I enlisted house members to traipse from shop to shop in Amherst (and when the ploy proved successful, Northampton and Belchertown), begging ads from bookstores, clothiers, art galleries, optometrists, gas stations, and of course the Lord Jeff Inn and Wiggins Tavern. All of these establishments had budgets for community involvement.
After weeks of soliciting manuscripts, we laid out thirty pages of writing and artwork, including poems from Chuck Stein, Harvey Bialy, Lindy, and Dona to which we added a bonhomie sent on request by science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, some notes on psi phenomena from a classmate, and the text of a pamphlet handed me by a stranger in Greenwich Village and blaming all mankind’s woes on a comet.
But the magazine’s name eluded us. Then while re-reading my poem of the previous spring, I found the moon Io circling Jupiter. The idea of such a short title—a line and a circle—delighted both Nelson and me, him as a minimalist and me as a crossword-puzzle/“moons of the solar system” buff. Using discarded window screening from the attic, he made a surface of mesh, sprinkled it with mothwings from the bowl of a lamp, added washers and nuts, smeared the whole thing with India ink, and pressed it on a piece of paper. He thought that the resulting image was perfect, but on my insistence he took a fountain pen and etched a pictograph of Jupiter in the still-wet ink. “Ever the literalist, Grossinger, making me deface my impeccable screen art with a dopey cartoon of a planet!”
With unrestrained glee I thanked him, for I couldn’t myself draw a turtle. Now I wish I had let his transdimensional field stand as what it was: a gateway beyond literality.
In order to have the magazine published inexpensively Lindy and I took the work to a cut-rate typesetter in New York City and then brought her pages to the Grossinger’s print shop. The keyboarder was so cut-rate that, after we gave her a list of her typos, she lit another cigarette, typed a sheet of amendments, and handed it to me. It was left to us to cut them out and paste them over her errors: “You want corrections in place,” she griped, “find a fancier joint.” Ninety miles away we enlisted my old friend Stanley in the Grossinger’s print shop and, with a knife, pot of glue, and steady hand during a break from laying out the next day’s lunch menu, he got us clean paste-ups. Then he promised to print the booklet when he had an opening in his schedule.
Lindy and I had planned to go together to fetch the cartons and drop the first copies at Bard, but by the time it was ready she was off at Williams, going out with an old friend from Denver. So, that Friday after classes, I drove the four hours to the Hotel alone.
In stacks beside rooster-clad breakfast menus sat Io, Nelson’s image on its front. It was like an occult Chipinaw Chirp, artwork seamlessly tattooed among words, moth-wing-and-mesh covers vaguely suggesting Minoan tablets. I kept sniffing the fresh ink as I lugged three cartons to the car. Then I drove to Bard and presented Io to Kelly.
After extolling the magazine and promising to submit work to the next issue, he heard out my woes and suggested that he and I go to the Chinese restaurant for a private session. As we clanked across the bridge, his body draped over the column of Bloisius, he gave the oracle’s answer: “This is life and death to you, isn’t it? At least you recognize that. You were well taught by your childhood hardships. Most people in this country think it’s all fun and games.” His words were as startling and on target as ever. “America has teeth, you know. If you rise up and become what you are, it will try to strike you down, destroy you. All the while it will smile and pretend to be innocuous. Ah yes, that great American sense of humor that someday will surely kill us all.”
I said that Lindy wanted to date other people and I wondered if maybe she was right. “Perhaps I should see other girls too.”
“Those are just notions. You don’t know where the gods are leading you. Simply follow. Forget the past. Be what you are now. Lindy—and you likewise—are involved in an old image of ecstasy, but ‘ex’ is always outside. We need to invent a new word—call it ‘enstasy,’ the pleasure of staying within a growing form no matter how painful. The form itself will sustain you and tell you when it is time to break off. You have only the vulnerability of your being with which to face the world. Expose yourself and be redeemed.”
On a walk in the Glen the following Monday, Nelson cautioned me not to forget the angels either: “You can’t write their script for them. They write for you. They write so much better than you could imagine. When you get too involved in making things happen you get in their way. Simple prayers are everywhere—like those bird sounds. Listen.”
“Kywassik!kywassik!kywassik!” shot from distant trees. The primal obscurity of that code cut through me like a knife.
Then one evening in May, Lindy called and asked me to bring her more copies of Io. We went for a drive in the country and parked by a tobacco field. I looked at her face, no more anger in it, only a mirror of what my love for the world had become, my hope too, because I had cast it all into her. I kissed her teary cheeks as she said, “Okay, Rich, so we try again.”
Years later she contended that our courtship was bumpy because she was coming of age too, going through her own process of individuation, my melodramas and mythologies notwithstanding. Human beings are complex enough creatures and the universe itself is all the more complex, so two divergent stories can occupy the same space-time and both be true. After all, we are operating on many different levels, psychological and psychic, simultaneously.
Now the summer faced us—and how to be together. Lindy had her own quandary with her family. There was little good feeling left at home: her sisters were elsewhere, her mother and father were not getting along—a mid-life crisis. More radical and zany than the other girls, she had grown up nonetheless a cheerful, compliant daughter in a Colorado Episcopalian setting, Mayflower Society on her father’s side, Denver society on her mother’s, trappings of wealth but not enough money to back appearances. In their own heedless way these parents had sabotaged her, keeping her powerless and eligible. She was supposed to marry a social prototype, a businessman or lawyer. They never considered who she really was herself or that she might contain dances and dreams not in the other two girls.
At adolescence she had been transformed from a family jester into a rebellious teenager, hanging around the circle of a friend’s mom who threw weekend parties where booze, Librium, and marijuana flowed freely. On Lindy’s sixteenth birthday she tossed her clothes down from the second storey and planned to slip out the window for late fireworks, but her father surprised her in the act. It was horribly dangerous—descending safely down the house would not have worked.
Her last weeks of high school were open warfare. By the time she left for college, the rifts had healed, her behavior blamed on the boys she was dating. Her family didn’t shout so much as impose guilt trips on one another—obligatory confessions, apologies under duress. When Lindy talked on the phone about the shortcomings of Smith, her mother said simply, “Then you can transfer to CU.” She had gone to Smith herself and didn’t want it criticized.
After our visits to Kelly and the escapades of the spring, Lindy could no more return to being a compliant citizen at home—her mother dominant, her father not saying a word—than I could abide another term at Grossinger’s. We planned to spend the summer together.
We toyed with the notion of working in New York—Milty Stackel had a new shop in Queens and offered to hire us—but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Her requirement was that she come back to Colorado. If that’s where Lindy had to be, well then so did I. We hatched a different plan, around Aspen. “It’s the most happening Colorado town,” she effused. We would each go home; then she would head to the Western Slope and get a job. I would drive out, a big journey, New York all the way to the Rockies, and meet her there.
I took her to the Hartford-Springfield airport, aware of the hurdles before us. At least we were of one mind and heart and our difficulties were tactical. We kissed goodbye, and I headed to Grossinger’s. My mindset was sacred warrior, “Moon River,” “Gotta Travel On,” Another Country. My book was Lord of the Rings, recommended months earlier by Schuy, now critical reading material. I was setting out from the Shire with the ring, under the shadow of Mordor.
When I told my father that I would get my own job again he froze. “Absolutely not,” he barked, “This summer you’re working for me.” I nodded disarmingly, keeping my plan to myself.
The next morning I visited our old boarder Jerry thirteen miles away in Grahamsville. It seemed sad that he and I couldn’t have another summer of playing ball, sitting in the backyard with Bunny, but that pastoral was over. I told him what I was about to do. He understood my wish to be free if not the irreconcilability of my situation.
I had been under the influence of the gods for so many months now that nothing was innocent—they were hurrying me on my way. I was lucky to survive even that simple encounter with a friend. A blue car speeding past me twice (going into town and then back out at perhaps ninety) had performed a hit-and-run, seriously injuring a child. A witness said it was the one that “came back through town,” which was also me because I had overshot Jerry’s road. As we sat on the porch, he got a disquieting phone call. He calculated my degree of jeopardy—enough not to risk a constable’s fishing expedition (though my car was yellow)—and he sent me home immediately on a back road.
I felt the malevolence of the thing on my tail. Dark forces of undisclosed vintage opposed me. Some stranger, on a whim, could take away my license. I could end up in jail or a mental ward like Bunny. I could lose Lindy. And my own father was laconic, barely conscious. I had no time to spare.