THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

The impulse to believe the absurd when presented with the unknowable is called religion. Whether this is wise or unwise is the domain of doctrine. Once you understand someone's doctrine, you understand their rationale for believing the absurd. At that point, it may no longer seem absurd. You can get to both sides of this conondrum from here.

Re: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

Postby admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:37 pm

17. The Scene

JOHN


In the spring of 1989, Abbie Hoffman died; on accident, as my kids used to say. I felt that I had lost a good friend, and so had my generation. He was a surprisingly kind and gentle person who also loved to shout a lot. He provided an enlightened and rousingly important sort of misbehavior.

I remember running around the West Village with him one summer in 1973 trying to unload zip-lock baggies of frozen mushrooms before they melted down and turned into a disgusting mottled swill. But then, after they inevitably did, his perky question became, "Was the value increased?" Of course this kind of question, as well as most all others, got more serpentine the more of the product that we ourselves consumed. Eventually there was nothing left but a wet stain on the floor of my car. As anyone will tell you, including the FBI, as a dealer in drugs, Abbie was a complete washout. As a provocateur of conscience, he was one of the sweetest and best.

I thought about him a lot the night he died. He had been a remarkable and totally energized commentator on the conditions of the day. With him gone, it will be like missing an important trick card in a Tarot deck. I had a hard time getting to sleep, and the next day, as if ambushed, I woke up to the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of another social commentary, my father's book The Grapes of Wrath. More death and coincidence, I suspect.

I don't necessarily want to sing a paean to Abbie Hoffman, but he was a force for an awareness that had not been mine before I was drafted. I don't know what would have happened to me without him or others in the sixties like him. I might have become just another button-down soul and grown prematurely complacent. I know for sure that the times would have been dumber and duller. He was a hard man to satisfy and it is sad that he is gone. For the most part, despondency was not one of Hoffman's public trademarks. It took just plain bad medicine to take him from us.

When asked once by the "Authorities" just what the hell he thought he was doing, Hoffman said, ''I'm just shouting 'theater' in a crowded fire." It was a fire, but for many of us, the fire was also on the inside, and it would smolder for years, camouflaged as rage toward the fixtures of any discerned official oppression.

***

As this book has me casting backward and forward trying to figure out who I am and where I come from, to be honest I need to begin to get into what kind of person I began to make of myself, apart from the torque of my parents and childhood. My natural environment stretches from those formative days to the present, but despite my upbringing, I'm now responsible for the majority of the stretching. It's a bit like the journalistic quandary of when does the story become part of the event?

Definitely, when I was a young teenager, I felt dispossessed and betrayed by forces beyond my control. These feelings come cruising back from time to time. Without a doubt, a lot of this has to do with the crazy episodes that defined my childhood as well as the events that were compounded by the ricochet of my own erratic solutions. With Abbie Hoffman's death, however, I'm forced to remember that though I may have been clever, I wasn't really all that smart. I didn't have a lot of information to go on outside of the reactionary snap of witness abuse. I just knew something was disarranged.

At first I thought perhaps the chief problem was with me. That's how a program of borrowed shame frequently translates and transfers itself anyway. You witness people acting shamelessly and then you take it on as your own stuff. Typically, it starts with witnessing your parents acting out, and pretty soon you're carrying around a load of shame that was transferred from their shoulders onto yours, while they continue to blissfully ignore their abuses.

Then, right on schedule in the early sixties, my youth and opinions really began to mount as I grew into a "know-it-all" adult. It wasn't until later that I experienced the possibility of real conscious blame upon my perpetrators. Along with my peers, I knew something was about to break open. I didn't know what, but I began to feel nameless discontent just before the spark of articulation. And even when it started to happen, there wasn't a breaking open of floodgates, but just the bestirring of complaint; the old generic type of institutional anger that starts by way of a slow under-chorus, like the way babies begin to cry while parked next to each other in their baby carriages. First, they hear the noise of one comrade crying. Then, by way of imitation, one or two more rise to the wonderful sound of pure emotion, and before you know it, twelve babies are screaming bloody murder.

By the time I first returned from Vietnam, a curtain of betrayal hung everywhere. We were way past the gripe stage by then. From our side, it was largely due to what we felt were patriotically enforced lies about America's actions throughout the whole of the past, compounded with other crimes that were born of a decrepit white horror and a facile sense of superiority. We soon realized that even Saint JFK had been jerking off to his ballad of the Green Berets, or screwing Marilyn and reading James Bond every night, for chrissake!

Biologically, a seemingly drastic "punctuated equilibrium" happens all the time, and as the word implies, it's hardly ever a smooth transition, even for a mollusk. In freethinking people, the big lurch forward has the distinct sensation of a real double cross. Perhaps it was inevitable and maybe essential. Then bitterness and anger became ornaments that were pleasing to wear.

Our parents weren't really all that stupid. They suspected correctly that we were about to abandon them to their vanity, their fear, and their dusty domino games. So, by 1966, though we didn't know exactly what was going on, young people definitely felt something, and in my generation, the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Bob Dylan were some of the first babies that screamed foul.

Today, I get a little worried wondering what is going to happen in a world where a lot of younger people think that the Holocaust is a Jewish holiday, and the DMZ was a pre-rap rock group who performed at Vietnam, an unpopular but famous antiwar demonstration somewhere near Woodstock. I have met people who think that the Black Panthers were some sort of an expansion team, and the Dalai Lama is a Peruvian newspaper. I know that before his death, Abbie was somewhat dazed about this sort of thing, too. Without a blink, I saw him say on TV that now he didn't trust anyone under thirty. However, the twinkle in his eye was soothing, as if to say we could educate the young and give them some more time to see what a pickle they might really be in.

Because of the many habits that began to overwhelm me in the seventies, it had been a while since I thought about all of this, but shortly after Hoffman's death, my sixteen-year- old son, Michael, was sitting in the back of the car with his Walkman on, trying to compete with whatever it was that I was blasting over the other system. As I glanced back at him atonally mouthing lyrics, I saw a look of what seemed like rapture and certainty. His jaw was set and his eyes moist. His face was transfixed on a vision floating somewhere just over the horizon of his experience. Curious, I turned off "Hotel California" in time to hear him fervently declare (in that self-centered a capella Walkman way), "The Answer my friend is blowin' in the wind; the Answer is blowin' in the wind." I got a wonderful lump in my throat. At his age, the proclamation of truth is fearless, and the assumption of a basic goodness is basic in itself. It is unconditioned by the questionable kindness or the gauged decencies portioned out from the adult above.

At times, I've seen younger generations look at mine with the hilarity and slightly embarrassed terror of a high school football team from Nebraska watching a serious Japanese porno movie. The sixties and our fine youth recede into caricature as the "No Longer Suited for Prime Time Players." A realm of the senses perhaps, but it was no movie. It was our lives, and it was so tangible; the very Life of Life.

Everyone who was there remembers the burst of energy that brought us the likes of Abbie Hoffman, though they now remember it with varying degrees of fondness. Memories sometimes suffer. For a while it seemed the only way to grasp the era was to pick it up by its shoulder-length hair and dangle it, a sour and silly morsel, over the maw of the eighties. But euphoric recall aside, I can remember the energy and goodness of the time. Our society is still permeated with many of the holistic values and qualities that were distilled in my youth. They linger like the fragrance of perfume in an empty bottle. There were flashes of serenity, and perhaps even an inevitable enlightenment. There was also a notion that happiness or even mere Being, would or could suffice. Maybe, in its quiescence it was superior to action! This was not entirely laziness or hesitation, but a fine caution as the message we were getting was that even excellence seemed apocalyptically suspect. The mastery of science looked like it could be the route of pollution, madness, and nuclear destruction. So ... "Let It Be."

The social and political stops along the way to the present might just seem like a convoluted game of Hippie Trivial Pursuit, however the movements of the day hadn't come out of nowhere. It is true that the little eddies of revulsion and revolution looked like they were coming from youngsters like myself, but a deeper maelstrom had really been a long time swirling and coming, way before Berkeley's free speech movement or Vietnam. Neither did the unmistakable vortex have an epicenter other than the human heart of dissatisfaction. Baby doctor Benjamin Spock and psychologist Abraham Maslow were no kids; and New Lefties like David Dellenger, feminist Betty Friedan, and San Diego's Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse weren't either. They had all spent decades shouldering the Old Left's rugged cross. The Beats, with their Emerson-tinged Eastern religion, had been "on the road" for some time already.

Before I was drafted there were lots of counterculture seniors, though some had an obvious need for musty control. At first, professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, spun round by the double helix, fairly patronized their followers from their Harvard psychology chairs. With mostly good intentions, they imagined a generation locked like pigeons in a Skinner box. They held out a free radical, a key, a chemical/molecular possibility for early liberation, or a least a sugar cube worth of parole. By micrograms we might just forget the box ... dose ... and "break on through to the other side." Such easy fruition was out of sequence, of course, but what a sensate, delicious solution.

Like flies in a fly bottle which had been dashing against the glass, en masse we began to realize that the top was mostly off. The perceived jailers were in the real prison, dumbly guarding the "Outside." We on the inside were free. The fact that there might be bigger bottles ahead that might demand more, even real work at the lid, we didn't exactly foresee. We were very young, and that had its own sweet virtue and leverage.

Though everyone wasn't eighteen years old in 1965, it was the youth(s') movement. It was the kids in their late teens and early twenties who picked up the ball and ran in dizzying circles from goalpost to goalpost, leaving the Keep-the-Faith Old Guard panting and just a little bit worried. For some, it was for the sheer contrary delight of it all. For others, it was far more than just coltishness. A renaissance of organic politics and philosophy were let slip past and through the "dogs of war" at a perfect moment. The millennium by happenstance was colliding in coincidence with the mass adolescent rites of the most populist and reflexively utopian generation in American or world history. If you had survived to this point, it was really great to be alive.

Now "adolescence" is what anthropologists amazingly call a "high-context" culture; a spontaneous medium in which intuitively shared assumptions and formal nuances are so densely packed that every gesture speaks volumes. Overlooking the bloodless sound of it all, this was definitely true. When Bob Dylan sang about people like T. S. Eliot, he wasn't talking about literature; he was reducing progressive demigods to a Saturday night tag-team wrestling match. He could also sing, "The birdies in the trees go tweet-tweet-tweet," and the poetry and the gall were sublime. It was scarcely even the voice of a singer. It was some kind of antivoice, shamanic, invocative, used for sending complex, compelling messages over long distances to anyone with wit to hear. And by the way, if you could read cold lips, Liberalism was dead. The posture of this disregard and indifference that we began to display toward the worn-out righteousness of our immediate elders, also squared the mass family resentments wafting under the surface like a kelp forest.

Without the army to wake up to, my beard grew, I carried a stash, and learned how to tell long meaningful stories about my smallest possessions, like where I got a hole in my clothes. For now, I was becoming a socialized hippie. We hippies felt distinctly abused because of our soft views, and abjured for no good reason whatsoever. For a time, we tried to legitimize ourselves with examples from history. Though I couldn't manage it, there were long-as-you-could-grow-them locks of hair defended as really American, like, you know, Native Americans, the Founding Fathers, the Apostles. No matter the foolishness, what now seems like only style, set off deep, immensely powerful resonances among us.

It was a while before I really "understood" LSD. I had received a liberal education from inspired family sources. I was familiar with the Elizabethans and their King James Bible, as well as the knots and loopholes of Western psychology and philosophy. I loved paradox and Plato, e.e. cummings, and Wallace Stevens. That is to say, I loved the words, but I only understood the meaning in a jazzy, superficial sort of way.

One day, as I was sitting in my bathtub, amicably confused on a certain amount of acid, I began to look at a friend's copy of the Tao Te Ching. This was the jewel in the crown of Chinese thought. My father had exposed me to the works of Chuang Tse and Lao Tse, and I had found the topsy-turvy logic direct and amusing, if bewildering. But as I sat there this day in the clear water, trying to focus on the vibrating point, much less the sense of this Taoist comic book, I was distracted by a bird in the sky, and BAM, I suddenly "got it." Just like it sounds, the scales fell from my eyes, and that was not all. The bathroom exploded into dripping colors, and all the dumb metaphors I had ever heard danced around the room as holy truth. My mind seemed to become absolutely still, and then to fly up, like that bird in the empty sky, happy and free and away from its ancient prison. Oh boy, our species was actually well programmed for transcendence, but there was also the deep mechanism of ego provoking us to grasp and forget.

Looking out the window at the town, all the streets were actually rolling, like a yellow brick road leading to the Emerald City of my primordial being. My God! In my Father's house were many mansions, and they were all suddenly right here in the bathroom. Everything that I had ever read by the Christian mystics, the Taoists, the Sufi poets, the Concordians like Thoreau and Whitman, the Vedas, Vedanta, William Blake, William James, Buddhist Sutras, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and the Book of Common Prayer, all of these things were pointed at the same damn thing that was luminescing all around me. It was something, that thing, that was inexpressible, but whole and real and eternal. In its ineffability, it was the answer to the suffering of the world.

Yup, I had gotten it, but within a few hours of trying to discuss it and own it with words, I lost it. I dearly wanted to share all this with my dad, but my gushing enthusiasm no doubt made it seem like I was "on drugs" or something. A true double bind. Nevertheless, I was stunned, and my life was changed forever, and like the dead Pascal's ''This morning, fire everywhere" note found pinned under his hair shirt, I sit here even today, meditating on the fullness of the present to keep the memory green.

All in all though, I guess I was not unique. Why, every head shop in town was testament to the fact that a lot of my contemporaries had been in a bathtub or two themselves. The lyrics to the music of the day, though not referring directly to the Blue Cliff Record of Zen Buddhist transmission, were distinctly pushing the core ideas of instant enlightenment. You know, Satori ... the FLASH.

Some things were profound, and also very funny. While still stationed at the Pentagon after returning from Vietnam, I'd already started calling in "well." Innate happiness often made it absurd for me to go to work, especially for the Defense Department. It now seemed necessary for me to "Drop at Dawn" at least twice a week, just to stay in tune with a micromacro cosmos. One had to wonder how it ever got along without me knowing it was there before.

I began to comport myself with the air of a full-blown mystic. Mind you, this was not just vanity. What I had seen, I had seen. It was worth contemplating forever. I also liked sex and rock 'n' roll.

With my new hippie friends, I appreciated what was becoming a family that would play with me, and one that I didn't have to fear would be blown away at a moment's notice. In Vietnam, getting close to someone was risky business. For the time being, it was actually American to try and "love one another ... smile on your brother ... come on people now ... etc."

And we were Americans, after all. No matter if the Swiss had invented it. even acid was American. Certainly the electric slam of it was much more like football than, say, curling or grouse hunting. We were for and about revolutionary change, both inside and out, and we had all sorts of other electric toys as well. With these we could implement that change. We had the technology and the drugs to manipulate our psychobiological view. We could communicate with Arthur Koestler's "Ghost in the Machine."

There seemed to be a chance to erase centuries of Western mind-lock with one protracted burst of amplified feedback. Yes! Amplify the feedback! Everything became louder, brighter, more overwhelming. Make art, music, love. Make yourself free. Sometimes we all had the feeling that maybe one mighty thought blast of wild-eyed, god drunk sound would tumble the walls. It was the beginning of music becoming impossibly loud, and speeded up or else stretched out, with languorous drifting musical figures. These were shades of yet more things to come: make politics, make language. Make more love. Make new drugs as battering rams against the old order.

The new culture of the sixties was bursting forth from the main body in a megamitosis. Tired of neglect, our "true" nature would now explode out of our own subconscious. Also true, it looked like it could get a bit freaky on the edges, maybe even a bit messy; the timid might get splattered, but at least the blood would be Day-Glo, like in the Iliad, or like in the Upanishads. Yeah ... like that.

The stars were changing positions, perhaps swirling up enough centrifugal force to throw off everything the Western world seemed to represent to our simple prejudice and complex frustrations. I don't think hardly any of us really knew it, but what seemed like sociology or politics was also a surge of emotion of such proportion that the increasingly loaded dope- receptor sites were perhaps the only fit landing zones for the anguished and minimized concepts of the new order.

Despite the bliss-inducing psychedelia, and the copious painkilling, our anger, though it was almost always obscured in smoke, was alive and palpating our unconscious family dreams. There was real hatred for the mad conquest of nature, the worship of inhuman technology. By 1968, the Chinese Year of the Monkey was upon us with all four thumbs, and rage and grief were to eat our spines from the inside out. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, where children of both sides foddered and salted Vietnam's soil as if the fucking Hittites had joined the fray. The Democrats at their convention in Chicago goose-stepped on the bodies of their natural heirs, and it was also the year that Martin Luther King's and Bobby Kennedy's assassins would make us question any sort of providence and the value of human evolution. It was also the year that I returned to Vietnam as a journalist.
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Re: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

Postby admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:37 pm

18. Saigon Again

JOHN


Using my definition of things, returning to Vietnam in 1968 was probably the first really adult thing I had ever done. It fit all the requirements of my long-ago dream in the elevator shafts of Manhattan. It had danger aplenty, which now, as a civilian, was of course voluntary. It had romance and love in the form of Vietnamese womanhood and the abundant blessing of a matriarchal society, and then of course it was history in the making.

Sometimes memories can or should be obsolete, but though I have tried from time to time, it's impossible to forget Vietnam. In any case I spent such a long time there -- far more than a normal person might -- that to try and get a grasp I have to go back there as surely as a vet sometimes must board a plane to revisit the battlefields of his youth. But for me, the fields of Vietnam had a wide variety of meanings, the symbolism of which colored my life in ways that are probably different than most.

There has been so much misapplied pathos and sloppy thinking (confused as "the Brightest") both before and after "our war." This arrogance derailed us into Southeast Asia in the first place, and we then tried to impose our limited and linear thinking on an ancient world with seasons that could last a decade apiece. So, even today, America is stuck with a Vietnam that won't decode easily and a sensation of quicksand between our toes no matter where we go.

Still, I was struck by a tremendous jolt of inspiration while in Vietnam. Among other things, the Vietnamese saved me from the certainty that technology was supreme. This inspiration included a growing political sophistication. Certainly, the John Wayne war movies that had been the real basic training for my age group had lacked much in preparation for the lethal truth of American sanctimony.

Often when people ask about the war, I glibly say that I grew up in Vietnam. I think many Americans shyly feel the same. Since my first year there more or less kept me bound to the U.S. Army, when I returned to Vietnam I tried to "find" myself by way of doing something different from what one normally does in an army at war. And again, to be truthful, the women of Vietnam and the sweeping gardens of cannabis sativa had as much to do with the pull of returning as a drive toward conspicuous good works or an affectedly bleeding heart.

Saigon was once called the Paris of the Orient. Come to think of it, I believe Phnom Penh was, too, or was that a Pearl? In any case, there are probably more Paris and pearls of the Orient than fleas on a poodle. This was due in part to the old colonial French municipal architecture, which had a wonderful way of accommodating the climate and soul of the people who lived in these towns. There was a sort of built-in decay with a comforting feeling that smoothly supported the ceaseless human pastimes of birth, romance, commerce, old age, and death.

Though at first I didn't really notice it, the Saigon that I returned to held out a different bouquet than the city that I had left in the army. Though I had only been gone for about a year, the city was choked with two million more refugees from the countryside. The Tet Offensive had just finished its roll through America's notion of invincibility and had now left even deeper scars on the people and the architecture.

As a soldier, I had found myself in bars a lot. These were the requisite relaxation spas for military boys, even if you preferred to smoke dope. There one could find the jubilees of male bonding stamped with the fear-driven sexual preening of the condemned. This class of business was quite often cloaked in a self-conscious walkie-talkie-radio-procedure chatter designed to distance its users from all feeling; "Baby-Stumper, Baby-Stumper, Friendly zeroing-in at two-o-clock ... Roger?" The reply would be "Roger that Tango, I'm loaded with 'Nape &. Snake'!" This means something like, "Look at that pretty girl."

Though times had changed in so many ways for me, my impulses set in motion by the scenery returned to their old grooves. Scarcely stopping to feel my way, the very first thing I did when I got back to Saigon and checked in to a hotel near the main bar street called Tu Do, was to lose all my money in a sleight-of-hand exchange on the black market. The amazing thing was that I had watched this sort of back-alley shuffle go down dozens of times and yet I fell for it anyway. I just stood there in the shadows fully aware of what was going on, and watched like a toad blinking on a hot rock as my $400 in greenbacks miraculously turned into about $7 of wonderfully manicured newspaper with just a taste of real piasters on the top and bottom of the stack. After the numbness wore off, the second thing I did was to look for some old friends so I could eat and have a place to sleep the next day.

The first past acquaintance that I ran into was an old, and I mean old, prostitute who went by the name of Monique ... of course. She had been a dance-hall girl who had performed various wondrous routines for the French army. She still thought of herself as something of a chanteuse, and had fascinating gruff stories of those long-lost Foreign Legionnaires. Monique had been a friend of mine since my first days as a green private. In times past I had lent her money as she was rather poor herself, and I had gone shopping at the PX for her. She liked Chanel No. 5, and had considered changing her name to Coco. Now her age, or rather vintage, had given her a certain dignity, but also a look that wasn't all that popular with the free-spending young GIs. I liked to speak French and she had taught me a lot about the romance and ambiance of the previous war in what the Europeans preferred to call Indochina.

Having seen it all, the span of Monique's charity was limited. The blessing of a good- hearted prostitute is perhaps eternal in archetype, though brief in function; I had a day to crash -- tops! Friendship got in the way of business. Short as the benefaction was, I thought that Confucius should have allowed room for a hexagram in the I Ching dedicated to this eternal icon and protectress of foolish boys like myself. Anyway, such was the life of a wandering mendicant, or so my finances forced me to assume.

Looking around my old haunts, I found other friends from the year before who had volunteered for further duty. They had stayed either for the money, or to get out of the army earlier, or because they were in love. The latter was a strong pull. In a couple of years, GIs were staying because of the comforts of another lady, another heroin far more demanding than your basic girl.

For a week or so I hung out with these old army friends, sleeping in their hotel billets, borrowing money, and feeling my way in my new civilian guise. After recovering from a lot of reminiscing, I started getting my freelance press credentials in order. My status as a tourist had a seven-day time limit. However, I had managed to get letters of accreditation from my friends at the Washingtonian, on the strength of the marijuana article that had launched my infamy.

After receiving my press card and my visa, I cashed in my return ticket for money to live on. Back home, my mother was drunk, my father was emotionally unavailable, and my brother was somewhere in the army. The last time I had seen him he had been miserably stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. I, on the other hand, felt happy and alive with all my bridges burned in the existential vacuum of youth, immortality, and careless self- propulsion.

There was a certain lawlessness that I believe had to appeal to anyone beyond the reach of the California Highway Patrol, or the Connecticut State Police. And though we were to lose the war, in the cities that we financed, it appeared that we round-eyed Christians were the privileged boys on the block. In truth, any Vietnamese civilian could have killed you in a heartbeat, but on the face of it, colonial arrogance was met with the genuine politeness of Confucian people. It also helped to form the illusion of personal sway over the population. This was very intoxicating to young men with guns, both in the cities and the countryside. It also sometimes led to tragedy.

The nerve center of all journalistic alliance and dalliance was on the veranda of Saigon's Hotel Continental. From this lovely perch one could watch the main boulevards of the town intersect in front of the National Assembly and drift with the monsoons over gin and tonic, argue the distinctions between the French war and ours, or commiserate over the tides of network benefits or the per diem. Just a couple of blocks away, the daily afternoon briefing known as the Five O'Clock Follies gave out onto this same veranda where interviews and lies could be swapped before dinner.

One day, lonely and a bit shy during that first week, I ordered a beer and sat at the hotel trying to feel the transition in my identity, the new view from the vantage point of personal recognizance. For most Americans, Saigon was a very small town. They traveled by taxi, frequently not knowing the location of where they were going or how to pronounce the names of the streets anyway. Generally, Americans had only three or four destinations in their entire stay: the PX, the airport, their hotel or villa, and the veranda of the Hotel Continental. I actually knew the neighborhood well. I had worked mere yards from this veranda at the first Armed Forces Radio station before it had moved to its vast complex on the other side of town. I had been deeply though unrequitedly in love with a married woman who had lived around the corner, and when my father had been "in country," I had slept in his suite at the Hotel Caravel across the street.

Soon after I ordered my second beer, a very friendly man looking somewhat like a blond bear came up to me and asked if he could sit down. He introduced himself as Dick Swanson, a Life photographer. He had recognized me from photographs that had been taken during my notoriety and arrest in Washington, D.C.

I was something of an anomaly. Though I knew nothing about the legitimate $300-a-day press world, I had been "in country," in fact all over the country as long as most of the reporters who flocked to get their wings singed in Vietnam. And, of course, I knew the military in Vietnam better than most, having just been in it.

I ran into some other young Americans who were not aligned to any particular enterprise other than the curiosity of conscience and a mutual resolve to immerse ourselves further in this bloody passion called Vietnam. We all spoke the language, some extremely well, and we shared a common love for the Vietnamese and their culture.

Trying to understand Vietnam is a task that is beyond the Vietnamese themselves, but just learning some basic things about Vietnam is also an involved project, and one that most Americans were unwilling to take on. This was made evident by the way we Yanks tried to prosecute a war in this already mysterious bamboo forest of contradiction.

As a country, we never made much of an attempt to locate even our position in the cultural terrain, if only for convenience sake. I mean, why were we there? James Kunen, the author of The Strawberry Statement and other documents of the era, once went up to the MP guard in front of the American Embassy and asked him "Why are we in Vietnam?" Jim was referred to the guard's sergeant, forever onward and upward, all the time taking earnest and diligent notes, until he found himself in front of General Abrams who referred him to the president. Needless to say, no one had a very satisfying answer.

For many of us critics, there was a distinctly racist component to the conflict. So it seemed that in trying to defoliate the truth of our real instincts about racial equality and our desire to "help a yellow democracy," we got snagged by a far more rugged relationship with our projection. We tried to con the Vietnamese and ended up conning ourselves in a quicksand war.

This is nothing new. Not under Kipling's sun, or even Joseph Conrad's for that matter. Why, it has taken us fifty years to be able to just focus a little bit beyond our prejudice to see how the Japanese function. In short, even though understanding the East (or now the Mideast) will probably never be the forte of American diplomacy, just trying to learning some basic facts about the people and the countries where we think our interests lay should be obligatory for our leaders.

Our small group began to coalesce and gather itself together around the little soup stands in backstreets and the world of shoeshine boys, shopkeepers, and beggars. Before we knew it, we had become sort of an American counterculture phenomenon right in the heart of a volcano. Again, it was all very street level. This was sympathetic and great for the little city boy in me who had traveled alone as a child through all the backwaters of my own old city.

Vietnam was a magnet. It also had the kind of bohemian, revolutionary cafe-society style that students love to get all worked up about. Indeed, this sort of refreshment was Ho Chi Minh's mother's milk, though he had a different agenda. Our hatred for the war, and our particular disgust in the way it was being reported eventually prompted us to start Dispatch News Service. Because of our simple language skills, this news agency quickly became completely independent of the flow of information dispensed by the Joint United States Press Office or the various embassy spokesmen. It wasn't just a problem for reporters to get past the political bias of these sources, but the texture of the air-conditioned foreign correspondent's life also made it next to impossible to grow beyond the "compound mentality" that governmental Public Information Officers provided and typified.

We at Dispatch were soon joined by defectors from various volunteer services, such as CARE and others who knew the country and had been duped into converting their cultural acumen into military intelligence. With their talents, Dispatch developed into a reliable, if amateur news agency. We were the first to disclose the My Lai massacre and the Con Son tiger cages, as well as other stories now long forgotten. How many people remember the Vietnamese spy who was shot out of a canoe by the CIA like a scene out of The Godfather?

Since I was the only one who knew anything at all about Eastern religions, that became my beat. As I have already hinted, the literary fascination that I had for many years with Buddhism and Taoism had been supercharged with the psychedelic advantages I never had as a child. Thus, with a kind of lysergic warp-speed, I returned to Vietnam as a more or less fully blown acid mystic with a post modern, nonspecific Aquarian view of what was metaphysically on line, so to speak.

To be fair to myself, as much as I may have liked the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, I was not much of an "Oh Wow" recruit when it came to what people use to call transcendentalism. Though I have always managed to associate with them, I was not a very gooey guru junkie either. My conceit spared me much of that. Then, I was mostly a student of the highly literate mystical view of people like Meister Ekhart, the Sufi poet Rumi, or passionate nuts like Sri Ramakrishna, St. John of the Cross, and of course the industrially iconoclastic Sixth Zen Buddhist patriarch, Hui-neng, who founded the notion of instant enlightenment.

As fatuous as it may sound, for a kid who didn't practice much meditation in favor of dope, I knew or at least had read a lot of stuff. And after all, this was more than a hobby. I genuinely felt and still feel that the solution to the entanglements set forth by a discursive and egocentric mind and the emotions that carry its painful though powerful argument could only be set free through spiritual principles. Every culture I had studied knew about this, and each had its own style of bringing about or recognizing the tension necessary for this radical awareness to break free. I was even sometimes smart enough to remember that scholarship alone wouldn't do it, but it helped. In fact, the more you knew, or thought you knew, the greater the release when the conceptual world was turned upside down leaving one dumb in contemplation of the unthinkable. Though this all seemed pretty simple, I already "knew" that pursuing the unknowable with the lantern of knowledge was a wild ride on the Mobius Strip, much like trying to hang on to the dizzy context of this very sentence. It was this kind of tricky business where I felt some professional guidance or example might be helpful.

With all this in the back of my mind, I set off to work. The Buddhist riots in May and June of 1966 allowed the monks of the powerful An Quang Pagoda in Saigon to become a major political force and a tremendous embarrassment to the then South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Cao Ky. The two most imposing figures were a young firebrand named Tich (Venerable) Tri Quang, and an older monk, Tich Tien Minh. I set out to find out whether or not they were politicians or spiritual leaders, or both. It wasn't until years later that I realized that there was no such thing as one without the other, but at the time my confusion came about because of the violence of the riots in the city of Hue, north of Saigon.

Many monks, with mortars and machine guns, had blasted away at the government opposition. A friend of mine, a photographer for Time, had been shredded by a venerable old monk with a grenade launcher. They had their reasons, but from my understanding of the traditional nonviolent Buddhist point of view, this approach seemed odd. Also, self- immolation was not really a Buddhist or even an oriental way of doing things.

I spent a good deal of time studying and interviewing the leaders of the An Quang, and came away feeling that they were in fact more master organizers than master mediators. However, within the precincts of the war itself, and given the political strength of the An Quang Pagoda as a third force, there was no question but that these men were an extremely compelling crew. Yet, despite their achievements at political activism, my notion of Buddha activity, at least in the blissful realm of Absolute Universal Silliness or even "right action" was not appeased.
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Re: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

Postby admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:38 pm

19. The Coconut Monk

JOHN


In the spring of 1968, a few months after interviewing every Buddhist and Catholic leader in sight, a Vietnamese friend of mine told me about a large peace conference on an island in the Mekong that was hosted by a silent yogi called the Coconut Monk. I bussed the seventy kilometers south from Saigon to My Tho City with a party of novice monks. Arriving with a lot of pushing and tickling, we all climbed into sampans at the My Tho quay on the Mekong.

The river here is about four miles wide, segmenting the delta between little My Tho and Kien Hoa City. Phoenix Island was hidden by other small shreds of land that seemed to float like peach slices along with a salad of coconuts and mango, garnished and strewn together with palm fronds in the swift brown water. As we came around one of these spits of land, what I saw made me almost fall out of the boat. There, like a hallucination floating in the middle of the river, was what resembled a Pure Land Buddhist Amusement Park built on pilings. At the prow of the island, a towering pagoda rose from the top of a seventy-foot plaster mountain. The summit was crowned by a Buddhist swastika, a triangle and a cross, which looked down on a huge terrazzo prayer circle, separated by color scheme and the elegant sigmoid line of yin and yang; duality in motion. Sporting neon lights on their heads, the nine dragons of the Mekong sprouted a full forty feet high from the prayer circle. The dragons were ancient and revered figures, symbolic of the nine fingers of the Mekong River's alluvial fan that had in fact created the amazingly rich delta.

While we got closer, the noise of our little outboard motor began to fade and disappeared beneath the din of large wind-bells that hung from the corners of the seven-tiered pagoda. There were hundreds of them. Their size was oddly familiar though and I later learned that they were made out of the brass casings of 175mm howitzer shells. As we came around in front of the island to a landing quay, I saw an extremely large and elaborate relief map of Vietnam, fully seventy feet from end to end, suspended horizontally above the flowing Mekong. The map was complete with little toy towns and cities, mountain ranges and jungles. Sprouting out of the North and the South were pillars that were at least five feet in diameter which rose to the sky to support two ends of a rainbow bridge more than a hundred and fifty feet above the surface, with a little hut on each end.

When we finally edged up to the docking area, I saw about two hundred monks and nuns doing prostrations in the main prayer circle, bowing toward the funny plaster mountain that supported the ascending tiers of the pagoda and looked like something designed for not-so- miniature golf. In a little alcove near the top of the central plaster mountain the Coconut Monk sat grinning. Without a doubt, he was the true embodiment of the classic "Don't Worry -- Be Happy" posture that is eternally endearing and mystifying in a world gone mad.

On this particular day, the little community of about four hundred was choked with tourists and guests for the two-day peace festival. With others I made the pilgrimage up the micromountain to receive a blessing from the master. My friends introduced me as an American Buddhist. His eyebrows rose comically and he began clapping. For a silent man, he was a most communicative person. I somehow understood him perfectly when he questioned in a gesture whether or not I ate meat. I did, and he sort of unclapped, and sent an attendant running down the mountain to the kitchen area. The attendant quickly returned with mangoes and coconuts. The master made me eat. He watched intently until I gobbled the juicy fruit down completely. My genuine enthusiasm was applauded by all as a sign of conversion, or at least sympathy.

I explained to the Coconut Monk (Dao Dua in Vietnamese and pronounced Dow Yua) that I was very interested in Taoism and of course Buddhism. The day before, when I had sat stoned in the Dispatch office staring at a map on the wall, I noticed that if one drew a circle around Vietnam, a simple yin-yang curve appeared. Ton Le Sap Lake (yin) in Cambodia and Hi Nam Island (yang) in the South China Sea, separated by the curved coastline of Vietnam itself, made a perfect, classic yin-yang symbol. The center of the completed visualization lay smack on the infamous DMZ.

When I told him about this discovery, the Coconut Monk's eyebrows jumped up again and he stared at me seriously. After a very long moment, he suddenly sent another monk scurrying down to a little library in the grotto/heart of the pagoda mountain. When the monk returned he had an exquisite map of Vietnam highlighted with the exact same circle around it which Dao Dua had drawn himself the day before. He was going to release this meaningful cosmo-geographical discovery to the guests later as a kind of explanation for the Vietnamese predicament; and here this round-eye had stumbled on the same thing, perhaps picking up the master's vibrations. It was a tremendously awkward moment. The surrounding monks and nuns started clucking their approval, and whispering to each other about my prophetic perceptions. Dao Dua and everyone began complimenting these friends who had invited me. No mere coincidence this, which had brought the American Buddhist to Phoenix Island. Within an hour of being there, I had become a sign, of what I'm not sure. Nonetheless, I was to pay for that little exchange of symbol-awareness with a mixture of pride and embarrassment for the rest of the years I was to be associated with Dao Dua, as the incident eventually spread on the Taoist tom-tom circuit throughout the delta.

I didn't see it happening at first but an increasingly deeper understanding of the life-and- death lessons of Vietnam were to be miraculously furthered by this jungle monk, whose eccentric attitude indicated a compassion and humor that made pathos and simpleminded commiseration unworkable. For me this lesson has never become obsolete.

My year in Vietnam as a soldier had left me with the memory of being a very realistic target. I was always frustrated by my army role and the desire to be near the people without my olive-drab identity. Soon I started going down to Phoenix Island every weekend on my little motorbike. I felt happy in the countryside and that I was no longer such a juicy bull's-eye in the dress of the foreign invader. My shoulders were light as I motorcycled through the flickering sunlight on my little bike under the palms. I felt very secure with the people and as my accent got better, I began to lose the notion of what it was to be non-Vietnamese.

On Phoenix Island, the mutual grief about the war was honest and penetrated all cultural barriers so that I felt like just one of the million carp swimming along in the silt-rich brown water of the Mekong, whose bounty travels all the way from Central Tibet to fan out here in the delta and on into the South China Sea. I was happy here. Perhaps happier than I had ever been in my life. The island became my refuge for the next five years.

Any sort of happy equipoise was Dao Dua's play. He was the father figure I'd longed for and we forged a deep affection for each other. Inversions, centering in chaos, transmutation, and a hilarious annihilation of negativity, were seemingly possible here. An incestuous exhibition of symbols swung around on a pole in the wind. A sign pivoted there, displaying Buddha with his arm around Christ; the flip side, the Holy Virgin, Mother Mary embracing the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Quan Yin. Always, bells out of bullets, inverted aggression.

In response to this extraordinary display of concrete pacifism, and to his Harpo Marx impression of a Buddha, my commitment to the Coconut Monk grew.

One day, the Coconut Monk summoned me. He asked me to stay more permanently with him on the island. He handed me his coconut begging bowel, and I accepted. That night, in the small hours I was woken up, and all the monks took me into the large cave in the plaster mountain and handed me the maroon robes (pajamas really) of the community. Having accepted the robes and the rules of the community such as they were, I moved into a tiny hut which we built on top of an old wooden river barge.

No war and a dragon's roar of nonaggression were the most tangible, and often mysterious part of Dao Dua's influence. It seemed to rule the environment, and I mean this quite literally. It is one thing to emanate kindness or manage to deflate a kitchen quarrel, but there was something deeper going on here. There actually was no war, or the jagged vibrations of war on this island. Above and around it, yes. Many evenings I used to sit eating pineapple under my thatched hut in the moonlight, watching both banks of the river rage at each other with howitzer shells and tracer bullets whistling back and forth over my head, while the colored lights of Dao Dua's prayer circle embraced the sadness and the huge bells of Phoenix Island slammed, exchanging and diffusing the suffering.

From a logical or pedestrian point of view, Dao Dua was quite mad. His presentation was beyond ridiculous, though in fact he danced in a desperate political world surrounded by an electronic battlefield. He made one's mind spin, but his style penetrated the heart. A purely analytical mind could never get purchase on his vision.

Whether or not the person you take teaching from is completely out of hand or represents the truth is often an unavoidable problem. This is more and more the case as we have to spiritually grow up and have to take responsibility for our own truth, rather than hide behind a dead doctrine or any old emperor's new clothes. But in Vietnam, with everyone else in sight trying to slaughter each other, I found it easy to be relaxed about Dao Dua's debatable relevance.

Dao Dua was the epitome of his creation. When I met him he was well under five feet tall. He used to be taller, but he had fallen out of a tree that he was meditating in and broken his back. He asked his disciples not to worry, and get him back up in his tree. His lower back became fused in a sitting posture. His arms seemed to sprout out of his chest instead of his shoulders. His expression mixed a mock-seriousness with a huge approval of everything, except the demonstration of war. The fact of it, however, didn't phase him.

Dao Dua was special. He normally wore his ponytail wound around the top of his head with the tip tucked in at the back. He thought this could symbolize Christ's crown of Thorns. Sometimes he let the ponytail hang own in back, which he said represented Maitreya, the coming Buddha. Then again, he would pull it full around like a beard under his chin and stuff it over the far ear. This one always eluded me. Abe Lincoln perhaps? Symbols are always good advertising, but Dao Dua's knees and the overall shape of his body reflected years of really industrial sitting practice and prostrations.

The Coconut Monk always wore a large crucifix over the saffron robe of a Buddhist monk. It rested on a large round saffron collar, similar to what a clown might wear. I'd never seen anything like it. I studiously asked Dao Dua its origin. He scribbled a note which when translated said, "It's really a bib. I invented it. I only eat vegetables, but I always seem to spill my food."

Having discovered the peaceful eye of the hurricane, I felt a little selfish abut my niche, but Dao Dua's generosity compelled me to invite friends from Saigon to come down and spend a few nights on the island and enjoy his peace. Most of my friends were combat photographers working for the networks and wire services. They, too, found Phoenix Island and its master the only refuge available when the succor of gallows existentialism ran dry. Quickly Dao Dua realized that he had a built-in public relations department through me and these new war-orphans. In some way the Aquarian age had delivered AP, UPI, Time and Newsweek, CBS, the BBC and French television, as well as National Geographic, into his lap.

One full-moon night Dao Dua decided to make a move. I was awakened at about 4:00 A,M. by my friend Dao Phuc, the Coconut Monk's only English-speaking devotee. The wind was blowing small ripples across the Mekong and Phuc threw his cloak over me against the chill as we walked across the wide prayer circle to the plaster mountain. The morning star had risen over the river palms but the moon was still up and Dao Dua was eating his breakfast of coconuts and hot red peppers. He wanted me to go to Saigon and arrange for my journalist friends to come to lunch as his guests in Saigon's Chinese suburb of Cholon. My motorbike was already trapped into a sampan waiting to take me to the mainland. When we hit shore I started out nervously for town. I knew that if Dao Dua were to meet his luncheon date and leave the island, he was risking imprisonment. As for myself, I was risking my visa and general credibility. In a way, it was really like being Soupy Sales's press attache.

I contacted everybody I had ever brought to the island, many of whom had grown to love the Coconut Monk. The lunch was a huge feast prepared and served by some of Dao Dua's Saigon-based devotees who ran a Chinese pharmacy. Dao Dua did not appear at first, but about halfway through lunch he arrived in a 1954 Buick Century with a saffron-painted roof. Though he wouldn't leave the backseat of his car, he handed me an outline of his plans. He wanted my friends in the media to know that on the following day he would arrive at the presidential palace, and then march up the boulevard to the U.S. Embassy to present Lyndon Johnson's emissaries with his updated plans for peace.

After lunch we all went our various ways. Dao Dua had disappeared in his car, leaving us all apprehensive about the mess that we knew would follow any public demonstration on the streets of Saigon. Dao Dua had managed to get off his island by meeting the car at a secluded part of the river, but his presence in the backseat of his car on a Cholon street had started a buzz through the city.

Having seen the head-smashing methods used to break up street demonstrations in Vietnam, I was worried about him. People were passionate and the police often cruel. The solution I thought was to go to the U.S. Embassy right away and warn them that a peaceful monk wanted to drop by and deliver a letter for President Johnson. The political section treated me politely, and after informing them of the next day's activities I left feeling that this little bit of diplomacy would smooth things over. I was very naive.

The following day my friends and I rendezvoused in a side street near the palace. Everything looked fairly normal except perhaps for me -- a Westerner in maroon pajamas. Dao Dua's car came around the corner and when he stepped out, half the people on the street stopped and stared and began to giggle among themselves, or make prostrations of obeisance to the jungle holy man. The other half turned out to be plainclothes policemen, many of whom had apparently been following me since leaving the U.S. Embassy the day before. Police jeeps quickly tore in, blocking the way to the palace, so Dao Dua started strolling towards the embassy. He had brought one coconut with a naturally formed peace sign on the bottom. Actually, all coconuts have this, but he thought that there could be the outside chance that the American president might be moved sufficiently to halt the war though this lovely organic sign of universal harmony.

Our corps of friendly photographers and journalists snapped away, as the small band of ten monks and nuns made its way up the street toward the U.S. compound. The police were actually very delicate with Dao Dua. The central command had made a faux pas by sending a captain to lead the operation whose family was from Kien Hoa where the Dao Dua was most revered as a saint. In fact, the old man knew him as a boy. Anguish and confusion covered the captain's face as he tried to persuade the Dao Dua to please go home to his island and not make any trouble. The Dao Dua just kept walking and grinning and as always, pointing his finger to the sky with huge approval as if complimenting the weather or heaven itself.

As we approached the embassy, a company of marines surrounded the building and locked a huge linked chain around the main gate. As I looked up I saw about forty more soldiers on the roof with quad-barrel 50-caliber machine guns staring down at us. Helicopter gunships began circling overhead to defend U.S. soil from my four foot eight inch teacher. At this show, the Dao Dua sat down on the sidewalk and refused to move. After twenty minutes someone in the embassy began to realize that a little old man was making a ridiculous spectacle out of the police and American military might, all with a single coconut.

Since the old man seemed to have half the press corps cheering him on, the atmosphere began to change into a weird sort of party. The Dao Dua started preparing his lunch on the street. By this time the Vietnamese crowd, past their nervousness, were howling with laughter. Eventually, a tall and typically sweatless diplomat came out and accepted the letter through the bars of the gate. He refused the coconut on the grounds that the president of the United States could not accept gifts from foreign dignitaries. The Dao Dua was satisfied and moved off. Once again with police escort, he was taken back to Phoenix Island with the threat of more severe imprisonment if he ever set foot on the mainland again. To help make the point, a raid had taken place in his absence, and thirty of the Dao Dua's closest monks were arrested.

In his letter the Dao Dua had asked LBJ for the loan of twenty huge transport planes to take him and his followers, plus building materials, to the Demilitarized Zone on the Seventeenth Parallel between North and South Vietnam. There, in the middle of the Ben Hai River, the Dao Dua would build a great prayer tower and deposit himself on the top without food or water. Along with three hundred monks on one side of the river and three hundred on the other, he would pray for seven days and nights. He assured the American president that this project would bring peace to Vietnam.

In the following years the Dao Dua and I played many games together. I was nearly thrown out of the country on several occasions, and it was probably the aura of his wackiness that saved me. Anyway, after this first incident and test of my commitment, 1 don't think I was ever really taken seriously again as a serious journalist. I, too, was transformed into a nuisance and a nutcase. Time magazine ran a picture of me in my robes with the caption:

John Steinbeck IV
A yen for Zen?

In the course of the next few years, with the help of myself and his other new friends, the Coconut Monk escaped his island many times, always to be carted right back by the police, who eventually kept a flotilla of patrol boats circling the island. A police station was established on the edge of the community and soldiers began little patrols on the island. Once in a while, U.S. helicopter jockeys would drop tear gas in the middle of the prayer circle during prostrations, but never once did a bullet penetrate the Dao Dua's domain.

It's all over now. Ho Chi Minh is in his grave, and so is Dao Dua. At first 1 heard that Dao Dua had left his island and moved back to Seven Mountains. This was in 1973. Then later in 1986, in a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris I overheard my name and his mentioned by some Vietnamese exiles. The Communists had tried to turn the island into a tourist attraction after the war. Later I learned that the Coconut Monk had been put under house arrest by the North Vietnamese and eventually killed. When 1 saw him for the last time we didn't say goodbye. He touched his eye, indicating a rare tear. Then grinning, he pointed to the sky where he lived. Memories are obsolete and I can't forget.
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Re: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

Postby admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:38 pm

20. The Turn of the Screw

JOHN


Toward the end of 1968, I found Thom in Saigon standing right in front of me at the PX. I didn't even know he was in Vietnam. One night, flying on Romilar cough syrup (I got everybody drinking it to the point that we bought out all of Saigon), Thom had a vision of Dad dying. Unable to convince him that it was the dope, he went home on emergency leave and naturally, was accused of goldbricking. However, he did spend time with our father who, though supposedly sick in bed, was actually Dad very alert and in bed; clearly not in pain, reading the galleys of my book In Touch.

My father never spoke to me after my dope bust two years prior, which I believe was set up by the U.S. Army to discredit my testimony about the use of drugs in Vietnam. Dad's last words to me, when he heard I'd been found innocent, were, "They should have thrown you in jail." However, that day he told Thom that I was "a damn fine writer."

The next day, Thom went back for a chat about the war and what was going on with him, and was told by Elaine that it's all over. Dad was dead. Apparently he had gone out on a purposelessly suffered overdose of morphine; this before Dad or anybody else considered that it just might be important to say good-bye. Thom and I are to this very day left completely adrift about all of this, without any closure. Elaine had been carrying around a vial of morphine with strict instructions to administer it by needle if Dad asked for it because he was terrified of suffering a painful death. This practice was secretly quite fashionable among their posh Manhattan brownstone set during that period. However, Elaine was not the one who overdosed him. Neither Thom nor I have a clue about Dad's situation and state of mind at the time of his death. I want to examine the underlying dynamics of his family of origin, the seeds of which were carried forward to create, with Elaine, a really unfair and even disgusting display of irresponsibility, and, in her case, greed. Thom is the only witness I have to the darkness that runs through our veins. Readers can find it in my father's stories, but we live with it daily.

Thom returned to Vietnam marginally out of his mind on some THC pills, complete with a highly defensive altered personality, i.e., like Artie Johnson's old man routine from Laugh In. It was days before he came down. In fact, in some sense part of this whole book is because neither of us have; we are bitter that this maneuver took place.

With my father's passing, my brother's eventual rotation stateside and the monsoons coming, I felt it was time to return to America for a brief visit in the spring of 1969. It had been six months since my father's death. I wanted to look into the family affairs of the estate, see my mother, and attend the wedding of my old boarding-school friend Ali Rubottom.

By this time, my mother's unmanageability had just about edged her out of Palm Springs. She was fighting with everyone with the exception of a few aging queens who were ripping her off and exalting her alcoholic tirades as sublime bitchiness. Her ventures in dealing art had all blown up in her face, in part due to her desperate grandiosity and her inability to distinguish between honorable business associates and cirrhotic drinking buddies. These lower companions had robbed and flattered her into virtual bankruptcy. Even her anger had shrunk into little spasms. If by describing her in this way one only gets the picture of an alcoholically churlish woman, I am doing her a disservice. Little Gwyn (my grandmother was Big Gwen) had a lot to be angry about. Her history wasn't a happy one. It wasn't till much later that anyone bothered to figure out that she had been sexually abused by her drunken father. In the light of today's understanding of the pathology of sexually abused women, she had always been right where she ought to be. Haunted, drunk, and pissed off.

She now smoked a little marijuana to be hip, but it didn't sedate her resentments and fears as well as rum and coke. It was more sad than difficult to be around her.

To my way of thinking, the really big event of this return to America was my friend Ali's wedding. Friends of the bride and groom were coming from all over. Though I probably came the farthest, the fabulous Anonymous Artists of America band, America's oldest commune, were going to drive their magic bus from Novato, California, to Newton, Connecticut, for the gig. Their bus had obviously copulated with Ken Kesey's. In fact, they had originally paid for their musical instruments with proceeds from acid sales donated by Richard Alpert, aka Baba Ram Das, and hung with the Merry Pranksters, the Grateful Dead, and other infamous characters of the time. Most of them had been graduate students from the University of Chicago and were among the first to actually "drop-out and tune- in." Indeed the Triple A gave real meaning to those words. Outside of being hippies, for the most part they were actually brilliant.

Ali's brother Sam and I drove across the country in a brand-new "You Deliver-it Drive- Away" Cadillac. This Drive-Away system, where a car owner handed the keys over to a perfect stranger, had been our preferred mode of transportation, though why anyone would have turned over their new car to the likes of us was a testament to auto insurance advertising or desperation.

Arriving in New York, I went to my father's apartment on Seventy-second Street. Because of my arrest in Washington, more than two years had gone by since I had been there. It was so odd seeing his things, knowing he was gone forever. That sounds extremely simpleminded, but even after witnessing so much death in the war, just smelling the odor of his Florida Water cologne made it hard to imagine that I would never again see his lower lip jut out as he polished a knife, or began the process of covering whatever was at hand with leather and glue. Though I tried to be a "grown-up" and hide the fact from myself, I actually missed Dad terribly. But Elaine's apartment was not the place for me to share my sadness even if I could have found it. With the exception of the devastating anguish that overcame me when a pet died, my survival skills and then my homegrown cosmic attitudes had never allowed or prepared me for grief. With my mother's thrashing about and Dad's more saturnine style, there was no model, no proper way to relate to grief. This was not lacking just in my family either. Most Americans are completely lost in space when it come to grief. As usual, all anyone had was the movies! One of the alternatives, for which I did have a model, was anger. Though it didn't yet apply to my father's passing, when it did I liked to think it was on the "warrior" level. Though I may talk later about my walk with grief, during this period my ancestor's genetic proclivity for mood alterations would mask that process before I could get any of it in focus.

At Tower East, over lots of cocktails with Elaine, I was quickly told that my father's will would be in probate practically forever, though I could already see in its content that my stepmother basically inherited everything except a small percentage of some of the domestic copyrights. Thom and I were assured "that your father never wanted you to inherit money." And in truth, the lawyers' fees would far exceed anything that my brother and I would see for decades to come. Blinking in good faith, Thom and I signed all that was put before us. Anyway, as nonmaterialistic hippie types, this was all "cool"; why, this was the first New Age and a revolution taking place, and who knew what role mere money would have in the days to come. Better, I thought, to inherit the wind than fight over more of my father's character-shaping routines from the grave. Anyway, my brother and I could be easily convinced that we hadn't "earned it." And yet, we had a society that all of us were given to shape, and with our own sense of betrayal as legacy enough, try and shape it we would. Later, when we woke up to the fact that we'd been cheated, we hired a lawyer and went after the estate with a vengeance, ending up with a larger share than Elaine had originally intended.

I would soon discover it wasn't just my family that was topsy-turvy. Things back in "the world" had progressed dramatically by the tail end of the Year of the Monkey, 1968. In New York, boys from City College had started hopping Canadian freighters to Cuba to hack sugar cane with the campesinos on the Isle of Youth. North Vietnamese kids who knew the lyrics to "Purple Haze" were there too! If this was a zephyr of collective consciousness, considering the murder, the international foul play, and everything else that was going on, why stop?

And so, around the world the people of my age began the first active deconstruction of our old societies with their gold standards and love and sex standards; in fact any standard was suspect with perhaps the exception of the hashish standard.

In France, a bunch of students chanting "All Power to the Imagination" nearly overthrew the government. Though it had first started as an academic strike, it quickly spread to the workers and after a few days, nine million people stopped going to their jobs.

There was a growing feeling that the whole thing, and I mean the whole thing, was about to topple. In Washington, the Bureau of Standards would probably have to close its doors, and like in the old French Revolution when the calendar and nearly everything else had been changed, all the antediluvian rules would just plain disappear.

Less overtly political than the French, the future cream of American society at Yale spilled stark naked onto State Street, dancing like sylphs through clouds of pepper gas. At Columbia, American Red Guards armed with The Strawberry Statement locked their professors in their dens. As for the boundaries, were there any lines worth drawing at all? Why not breach the divisions between audience and actor, art and action? Why not performance art? Action painting? Wasn't everyone an artist, a genius, a sleeping god? Was there such a thing as criminality? If one were to talk about the politics of experience as the only politics that really mattered, then surely madmen were political prisoners. "Let the men out!" was the slogan of the Black Panther Party newspaper.

And all along, in the foreground was the draft. Because of my family loyalties and background, I had been too old and was already out of the army by 1967 so I didn't quite get the full thrust of this most visceral part of the general revolt, but to everyone else that I knew resistance was obvious. Cards burned. After all, rather than appreciate the new imagination or our higher solutions, the bastards were actually trying to kill us.

Instead of their missions to search and destroy, but still searching, we looked for a unifying principle that would magnetize the disparate fields of politics, the arts, and the spirit into a solid-state approach; one that would ease our outrage and pain.

When all you suddenly want is to stop participating in the hurt created by others for you to live in, you start asking a lot of questions. Why this? Why that? We became like children woozy with agape. Why clothes? Why marriage? Why work? Did you really have to eat meat? Eat at all? And why did the sky have to be blank or blue when it could be purple and populated with avatars and Alpha Centurions. What if C-A-T spelled "dog"? "WOW" became the first guileless retort in a new Esperanto. Language was becoming less than slang, it was becoming epiphanic, almost placental.

Since we were all pretty well stoned, the logic and lineage of things got a little bit fuzzy around the straight edges. If we were to totally follow the dictums of our noble savage hearts, we would soon be running down wild game with our bare teeth in "back to the earth" zeal. Mind you, some logical extensions weren't yet worth the stretch. With the appropriate attention span, you had to backtrack a bit to get it all in focus. After all, it has been said about the sixties that if you remember them, you weren't there.

Some of the first exuberance of the era came pouring from the gates of the academies. Those nutty professors, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, had begun distributing the drug, that drug that could, it was said, turn convicts into saints and make Matisses out of bank clerks; the drug that could disengage the clumsy rational gearbox and send you hurtling to godhead.

Love was a rush, and life was rushing. In a hurry to seed and flower an enduring New Age, it seemed there was just no time. Since everything was essentially questionable, this would be the Omega generation: vision first, reality later. Bands like the Anonymous Artists and the Grateful Dead learned to play their instruments on stage in front of fifty thousand people. There was not time to digest reams of accumulated wisdom. In a synthesis, all the needed answers would surely be laid out with synchronicity like wish-fulfilling gems. Anyway, effort was the probable glue-on to rigidness, and we'd had more than enough of that!

It was to be the passing of poor Homo sapiens, the man heavy with knowing, and the birth of Homo ludens, the man enlightened by play. Enough with television father figures, this emergent creature was going to be the new steward of the garden, with a sharp eye for previous contradiction. We looked over the cultural savannah and saw a society creating an ever more carcinogenic environment even as it spent more than $100 million dollars on cancer research, and an "atoms for peace" program that was spreading atomic war materials across the globe. A senseless game of chicken was being played, for brittle honor, with the Four Horsemen.

Suddenly, the new tribal spokesmen, myself included, were thrust up out of nowhere. With no credentials, no papers other than disenfranchisement, and sincerity, we began to bob like a flotilla of bright little wooden ships on the ever rising tide.

After Ali's wedding, the usual buggy summer came to Connecticut. Sensing a good thing and tired of their California truck-farm style (that is to say, many trucks, but no farm), the hitherto rolling commune of Anonymous Artists now didn't move at all. This was nothing out of the ordinary. "Flopping" was as much in the posture of all-around Aquarian recline as anything else. So were the little dope deals that were needed to pay for brown rice, lentil soup, guitar strings, war paint, and of course more dope.

Though some Newton cops had actually been at the wedding, some of the local police in this almost antique part of the New England Parkway eventually began to worry about the increased hippie traffic up from New York City and the gaily painted buses whose engine parts began to expand like lichens over the once manicured lawns of the leased estate. The overall petri-dish effect of so many people living on so little land was beginning to become noticeable in the agar of the heavy summer air.

An unusually late rain came that year. It went on for weeks and then the property, which had been so verdant during the spring wedding period, began to literally rot and slide into the central pond which had been sensibly abandoned now even by frogs. Instead of the Dionysian reflecting pool that it had been in springtime, it had turned into a sort of La Brea tar pit. A sewer really. I had never seen actual ground rot before. The concept astounded me.

After scabies took over the management of the band and the sylvan arc of the honeymoon's orbit started to decay into the dog days of August, I began to think that maybe at least some of the things they were saying about us hippies might be true. I thought it was as good a time as any to return to Vietnam. In the delta they at least understood the principles of seepage, and anyway, I missed my island and the Coconut Monk a lot. Also, Americans, even if it be this tribe of brothers and sisters, appeared to me to be too big and ungainly when compared to the plums of my acquired Asian taste. But in the process of going all the way back to the war zone to nuzzle with dragons, I also wanted to make a pilgrimage.

In order to fulfill my long-held dream and my childhood identification with Kipling's Kim on the Great Trunk Road of the Raj, I wanted to walk where Buddha and the great yogis had walked. Starting around the world again, I wanted to go to India. I wasn't exactly looking for a guru, and fortunately I didn't find one. Anyway, I wanted to see and play with them all.

Many of my more practical friends longed for the natural high promised by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Transcendental Meditation, or TM were the initials on a lot of people's minds in 1969. It was not really on my mind. I rather liked drugs, and also there was something about the old goat that I didn't entirely trust. But I had to admit that even though the metaphors of his presentation were extraordinarily cloying, his overall sales pitch toward a measurable (in alpha waves) and drugless encounter with God Consciousness in some ways made good business sense. He was after all appealing to what was to become the spiritual entrepreneurs and prototypical Yuppies of the Western world.

The Maharishi had actually made a remarkably successful march through the Ivy League, and with a stream of lisping giggles he had wooed and won the hearts of many students who had been milk fed on marijuana, Hermann Hesse, and Swami Yogananda's all-time classic, Autobiography of a Yogi. Even for this infant New Age where drugs were still relatively harmless and the new intelligentsia had tried and even manufactured most of them, the possibilities for straight-up yoga were tantalizing. The Indian connection and the desire for excursions to the subcontinent was now also fanned by the release of the phenomenally successful book Be Here Now by the old Harvard man himself, Dr. Richard Alpert, now Baba Ram Das. His account of his experiences with his guru were wonderfully received and the miracles waiting in India were vouchedsafe in great measure because Richard had helped to start the mind-drug covenant to begin with. He was "one of us."

Though the Maharishi lacked the golden heart of Swami Yogananda or the deceptively self-effacing Himalayan/Catskill humor of Dr. Ram Das, what the old man did offer was technique. "Enough with the 'trip' stories already ... teach us how to meditate" was the sentiment of functional, pragmatic minds and the searchers who had not yet slumped into marijuana-induced apathy. Those still imbued with the energy and desire for achievement, however sanctimonious, now reached for the subtle bubbles that the "Big M" said were the Perrier of God, expanding exponentially as they reached the surface of consciousness. When the Maharishi then scored the Beatles, for however short a time, it more or less clinched the deal as far as that was concerned.

There is a lot that can be said for Transcendental Meditation as a technique for relaxation and general good health. To be sure, building any sort of formal relationship with one's own mind is the epitome of friendship and patience, not to mention the possible resulting compassion derived from such a slippery endeavor, knowing that other people have the same basic problems with their heads. But the Maharishi claimed more, like levitation and walking hand in hand with him for an interview with Ram or Krishna or other significant nabobs in the Hindu pantheon. That sort of thing remains a matter of interpretation with TM or any other technique. A deeper understanding of what the psychobiological root of what these divine entities really are, or what such a colorful experience might really be comprised of, needs serious discussion. Nevertheless, I felt that the characters along the shore, pilgrims and gurus alike, were often deliriously funny and genuinely touching. As for me personally, suffice it to say that obviously no one on their way back to Vietnam voluntarily could possibly be serious about looking for an offhanded technique for relaxation.

It has been said that pink is the navy blue of India, but additionally it has to be said that grandiosity is also a specialty of that culture. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was no exception. He needed lots of instructors to spread his new and improved mantra system over the surface of the globe. Ali had been practicing TM long enough for him to be eligible for teacher training. Fortunately, during this early period in his career, Maharishi's income taxes were still low enough that he could afford to be in India instead of Switzerland, so for pilgrims who wanted to go farther than the Alps, one had to get to the foothills of the Himalayas to take the training course.

Maharishi's ashram lay above the little settlement called Rishikesh, near the ancient city of Hardwar on the Upper Ganges north of New Delhi. This was where the Beatles had gone. Now too, Ali and I and our women set out for India and the Maharishi's ashram nestled in the jungle woods. I was just along for the ride to the old Fatherland as it were. And so it was, as a Buddhist/Taoist mendicant with my eyes set on Vietnam that we started planning the trip.

Like all good dream trips, I seem to remember that this one was to start out gloriously on twin BMW motorcycles which we would purchase in Bavaria with pro-stock sidecars. Ali and I had been friends since our early teens, and with the help of a little hashish and Southern Comfort, we could dream well together. Also, there was something in my memory of going up and down the road from Saigon to My Tho that made this approach to world travel seem plausible. However, by the time we had all of our plans in place, winter had long since hit the Hindu Kush!

As for me, I had my area of responsibility. Since I was surprisingly "happiest" there, I planned to return to Vietnam in short order. It was, after all, sort of my spiritual home, and it stood as the central metaphor for my generation's dissatisfaction with the massive tactics of aggression which had stirred us to loathe the status quo to begin with.
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Re: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

Postby admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:39 pm

21. Broken Taboos

NANCY


Of all the secrets John had packed in the dry ice of his shame, the one that bone-chilled me most was the act of beating his mother black and blue on his sixteenth birthday. That mutual rape between mother and son broke all taboos, corroding the boundaries between morality, healthy sexuality, and emotional incest. He was also haunted by a story that his mother and grandmother repeatedly threw in his face.

"They said Dad shoved Mother down a staircase when she was three months pregnant with me. He'd decided one baby was enough."

"Mother was the only one who had the intelligence to see through a lot of Dad's posturing," Thom told me. "He couldn't stand that. He needed everyone to take the seat behind him. Mother had too much fire and spunk to do anything but stand up to him. That's why it appeared that his marriage to Elaine was the final success. She knew how to keep him happy by making him feel like the great man. Don't forget, Dad didn't want Mother to continue her singing career after they married. He wanted to cage the bird, and then protested when she turned on him in frustration." The brothers insisted Gwyn was Steinbeck's greatest love. When they met, she was an immensely talented singer and lyricist. Stifled by the marriage, all her unused creativity imploded into depression, alcoholism, and child abuse.

Recently, while combing through Gwyn's archives, I came across an excerpt from an interview that was done shortly before her death, when she had reached a point of equanimity in her sobriety:

"Christmas came, and, like other years, it was party after party. As usual, we followed the same partying pattern through to New Year's eve and everyone around us seemed to be lovers with liquor and feeling no pain.

"John had completely recovered from his trip to Russia where he'd written articles for the New York Herald Tribune. He had begun to become his old restless self again. He became unsettled to the extent that suddenly he decided he did not like New York anymore. 'I want a farm in upstate New York,' he said. So we began a search for a farm. Finally we found one through Burgess Meredith, a great big dairy farm. When we went to look at it, I knew for once in my life I was going to say a firm 'no' to John. I could imagine myself stuck there for the rest of my life. John was always trying to push me away to some corner where there would not be any other soul around. He never realized it, but he was a very jealous man.

"I love the country, but was not prepared to be put away in it. When I climbed back in the real-estate agent's car, I simply said 'I will not move there.' I did not speak to him until we arrived home. It all boiled down to the fact that I'd had it, I was tired of being torn up and dismantled, mentally and physically.

"As we entered 1948, I began to turn away from John. It seemed as if a climax had been building up for years and suddenly I realized it. He was taking aphrodisiacs; he would get drunk and take these pills and then wanted to plunge into his conjugal rights. It is common knowledge that a man who had a little too much to drink will not be exactly at his best when it comes to making love.

"Our relationship as husband and wife continued, but I knew that unless there were some drastic changes in John's attitude toward me, it could not last. He was hardly ever home and when he was he worked in his nest or would say little to me and the children. Always, always there was no reason for his behavior. Only John knew why.

"But I still loved him.

"I got up in the middle of the night at Easter and blew out several eggs and painted them for the children, and for John. He was thrilled to death when I gave them to him the next morning. But moments like that were rare. His attitude, generally, toward me was cold. Like any father he spent moments playing with his children, but rarely Johnny; it was always Thom.

"That summer, his restlessness grew. He was working on the film script for Viva Zapata! and had several things running in his mind. He hardly had time for his sons. He was always preoccupied with something or going somewhere and I never knew where. I did know that he was drinking more than was good for him. I became so unhappy as a woman as I lived what had become a deadly routine with my children. At least I had two sons whom I loved so much. Johnny had chicken pox which John did not care about and as usual, he left it up to me to take care of the matter.

"Sometimes during that summer, we would be out socially and he would erupt into screams and yells against me and I would break down and cry and go home alone. When he returned home, he would say as if nothing had happened, 'Why did you leave the party?'

"Then he decided he could not stand the children's nurse, Miss Diehl, or "Platterfoot," as he called her. Nor could he stand the children or anybody else. He left our house at 175 East Seventy-eighth Street and took a suite at the old Bedford Hotel. He had another 'nest.' He took all his notes on Zapata with him and said to me 'I think I'm going to write a history of my family.' That of course became the forerunner for his East of Eden.

"John's hate for Miss Diehl could only have one ending. She had to go. It was actually a mutual parting of the ways. And when she left, she came to me and placed the key to the house across her hand and said, in soft tones, 'I hope no one ever treats me again in my life as John has.' John refused to write her letters of recommendation, but I did.

"We found a new nurse, Kathy Gunther. She was a very nice, efficient girl. She came at a time when life for me had moved into an unbearable state. As much as I loved John -- and I did, very much -- I knew 1 could not live with him anymore. It was just impossible.

"And then, one night as we danced together, I quietly told him, 'I want a divorce.' He thought I was joking, but found out that I was not. He tried hard to stop me, but it was no use.

"I went to Reno in September 1948 with Kathy Gunther and my two sons, and divorced John on the grounds of incompatibility. John went off to Mexico."

***

After the divorce, the brothers would wake up to various states of horror, bloody shards of revelry gone wrong. They often found their mother passed out in her nightgown exposing body parts that crossed the boundaries of decency. One fight with a boyfriend was so violent that John interceded with a loaded gun. This was the weather system in that posh Manhattan brownstone. It scarred the souls of both boys with a wound that could only calcify, never heal. An oil portrait of a disturbed, four-year-old Master John Steinbeck, looking like a dog that's been shot over too many times, hangs in our living room. By the time the brothers returned home from school, the walls were cleaned, spilled drinks removed, and the slashed Picassos replaced by lesser artists, because the money was running out, but Mother's denial could not mask the stench of depravity. I recoiled in horror as Johnny told me he received frequent midnight visits from his mother's drunken girlfriends, stumbling into his bedroom to fondle him.

"Like all sexually abused males, I thought I had a good thing going. You don't feel you're being manipulated. You think, 'God, this is great: They're doing what you want them to do."

Rinpoche urged Johnny to make peace with his mother before her death. He and Thom invited her to Boulder where she lived with them until she suffered a fatal asthma attack at the age of fifty-six.

"She didn't die drunk," John told me. "Toward the end she only got very drunk once a month. We had a rapprochement. I didn't get in her face about the past, but she was sober enough to know how bad things had been. By that time, I was drinking heavily and I was worried about myself. I'd talk to her about it, alcoholic to alcoholic. We could be frank with each other about alcoholic breakdown.

"When she was into her drunken Marine mouth, she'd call us names and we became a hallucination of him. She'd scream that Thom was just like Dad. But then again, when Dad was drunk, we became a hallucination of her and he'd say we were just like her. It was like being caught in a crossfire. The character assassination was directed at us, rather than the other parent. 'You live with the bitch. Don't you know better than to be just like her? But you are, you're just like her.'"

John's therapist, Mark Bornstein, encouraged him to talk freely about the buried feelings. After John's death, Mark and I listened to the tapes of those sessions.

"Why didn't you go to your father for protection after you beat your mother?"

''I'd already given up thinking he would protect me from her insanity. He was into his Great Writer Bubble, so it wasn't like having a dad around, but instead having the Great Writer present. By the age of thirteen, I realized my father was an asshole and this created a conflict. When you read things like The Red Pony, you think this guy really understands kids, their dream world, their fantasies, and what it's like to be a child. If he knows that much, how can he be such a jerk to Thom and me? So, in a noble, Spartan, stoic way, I formulated this sentence: You can't expect a great writer to be a great father. As the apologist for my family, it worked for me. It made me feel adult, it made me feel reasonable. If someone else challenged or asked a question about his behavior, I could come out with that sentence and I totally bought into it. But now, Michael and Megan expect me to be a certain way, and I have to think about that. From their point of view, I can't just be a great writer and a lousy father. They won't accept that, because Nancy and I have encouraged them to talk about their feelings.

"I had always thought my father was a manic depressive, cranky person. After he died, Thom and I found his stash of speed. Two huge hospital supply bottles with thousands of pills in them. One was three-quarters empty and one was full. He'd been soaring and crashing on amphetamines all along, but this was a missing piece of information when we were growing up. He thought it was artistic to be temperamental, so he indulged his moods. You see this all the time in people who use their moods to verify the fact that they're real, or really important. It taught me to beware of the creative process. Dad would tell Thom and me that we were getting on his nerves. Well, something was -- a huge amphetamine crash. His mouth was always dry, he was peeling his lip, his tongue was raw from rolling it around his teeth all day.

"My father was full of this constant push to make it on our own. He'd put us in situations where he was too chicken to go, like the army. He got Thom reassigned to a fucking helicopter door gunning unit on a whim. He used his influence with his great friend, Lyndon Johnson. He himself drank his way through the Second World War in London during the Italian campaign. Thom was terrified and I'm sure it contributed greatly to his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He was supposed to be working for Armed Forces Radio and TV and suddenly Dad gets him switched to a door gunner's gig, one of the most dangerous posts in the war. Where was his head at? I think in his darkest subconscious world, he would have loved to have pictures of his dead sons who were killed in the war sitting on a grand piano, to fill out his image. Meanwhile, we were lucky to be alive.

"He wanted sons who could be stevedores and at the same time read Latin and Greek. Who understood all great things but could work on the railroad like hobos out of Tortilla Flat. It was a projection of what he himself wanted to be. Very funky, tough, rough-hewn, masculine men who were great lovers, sensitive, multilingual. and courageous. We tried to be what Dad expected us to be, regardless of our basic natures. I'd say we actually turned out to be those people. But we couldn't understand it. We were constantly threatened by his expectations.

"I speak four languages. I'm a very funky motherfucker, a two-fisted drinker. I spent six years in a shooting war. I've been wounded, scarred. Everything that I've put myself through growing up, and what makes up part of being me, was something he pushed for, so that he could claim it for his own. There weren't proper boundaries between his life and ours. He wanted to live heroically through ours.

"Dad had a real dilemma, which I think is interesting not just for him, but for fathers and sons and parents in general. This 'famous father' thing is a smoke screen. The real underlying myth is not whether your father was a speed-freak-abusive-alcoholic-famous- son-of-a-bitch. When all that is resolved, what is most significant is how the generations forgive each other. You get your microscope down onto that and it would be like discovering the structure of DNA.

"I found out my father was famous when I was really young. The doorman said, 'Do you know how famous your father is?' and I asked him what famous meant.

'''Well, everybody knows him.'

"I thought that was quite natural because I knew him and everybody I knew did, too. Those kinds of things, for people who don't have famous fathers on the level of press, radio, and film, are very organic to the people who do. It's like growing your fingernails. When people ask, 'What's it like to be the son of a famous person?' you actually have to do this kind of thing where you answer the question in a way that you think it will be helpful for them to understand. You don't have a contrast. If you're born to a famous father, you don't notice.

"I remember the day I realized my father was an asshole. It was out at the house in Sag Harbor. He'd hired a local sixteen-year-old to mow the lawn; a good old wiseass Long Island punk who didn't give a fuck if this guy wrote books or what. My father barked a couple of orders at him which were very similar in tone and quality to what he'd say to my brother and me. The kid just looked at him and said, 'Fuck you.' He threw the gardening tools in the garage where I was standing, mouth agape, and said, 'You know, your father is a real asshole.'

"I sat there in shock and suddenly everything hooked up and I said, 'Jesus, you're right.' It wasn't me, it was him! I saw his feet of clay. He was no longer Jehovah. I remember the summer afternoon so vividly. I was half in and half out of the garage. Dad was striding out of the house toward his workroom, perhaps to work on the carburetor of his outboard motor. When he heard the kid swear at him, he said, 'Get out of here.' Looking back on it, if you know anything about my father and how he was raised, or as any kid with a summer job yourself, these kinds of dramas happen all the time. My father probably remembered what it was like being a kid with a summer job, saying 'Fuck you', too. This kid had seen a lot of assholes and my father had been around a lot of kids that did yard work. For them, it was everyday stuff, but I was young. It was a new world to me.

"I swear my father picked up on my rite of passage, because our relationship was seriously strained from then on. I became special fodder because I was a threat to his caricature of what he wanted people to see. Just my existence was a threat. I never really listened to my father straight again. I didn't know what was wrong, but I knew something wasn't right. I noticed that he'd surround himself with people who adored him or thought of him as being the word of wisdom on all things. He was involved in a literary circle, but he never quite made the Algonquin. He wouldn't hang out around someone like Dorothy Parker and have her check him out. He was not available for penetrating insight. He was very self-conscious. He knew he was a phoney. He was a total bullshit artist on some levels, and often that makes a great writer. But if you don't walk like you talk, it's not a great character trait.

"After serving in Vietnam, I got busted for marijuana in D.C. and hired my own lawyer, who got me acquitted. I had beaten the military by having the trial postponed till after I was out, so I didn't end up in Leavenworth. I got an honorable discharge and Dad's last words to me were, They should have jailed you: Juxtaposed to the closeness that I felt with him in Vietnam, that experience was a mirror of my whole life with him as a little kid.

"Dad was soundly criticized by his peers for his ridiculous saber-rattling routine. He was touring around and got photographed pulling lanyards and 175 mm artillery toward the enemy, or in helicopters with guns. The Writers Guild said, "Come on, even [Yevgeny] Yevtushenko doesn't do that for the Soviets." But being alcoholic and surrounded by totally admiring army men, he did his usual insecure number which started with The Grapes of Wrath. He had a knack for imbuing people with strengths and nobilities and powers that they didn't know they had. In fact, maybe they didn't have them, but they would be so flattered they wouldn't argue. On Long Island, for instance, there'd be some Mafiosi who bought some land up on South Hampton. Dad would drink coffee with them in the morning and say 'Boy, you can really catch fish. I wish I could catch fish like that.' They'd start talking to him, not sensing the bullshit. It was his own way of calming the waters. He was good at keeping people at a distance by flattering them, and it worked well for him.

"Thom and I are convinced that he never talked to any of those people in Travels with Charley. He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit. He was too shy. He was really frightened of people who saw through him. He couldn't have handled that amount of interaction. So, the book is actually a great novel.

"When he, as 'the Conscience of America,' and his generation realized that the Vietnam War was wrong, his reputation was at stake. He couldn't let go of his belief in the war, and when he finally did, he didn't do it publicly. The M16 he'd been given that had hung over the fireplace ended up in a closet along with the green beret. All those John Wayne symbols melted away and I think being wrong killed him. One thing I've noticed about a certain variety of addicts is that bottom line, they don't like being wrong. It's a threat to their very existence. Dad believed his own press. He was treated like an omniscient philosophical person and he forgot that came from his ability to be humble at one time. It's somewhere in the 'power corrupts' mode. I think that's why he chose the overdose of morphine when he did. He was broken from the Vietnam thing. He didn't want to be alive in a world where he wasn't right.

"He never realized that he'd been an asshole to his family or that he'd messed up as a father. But then, we hadn't messed up enough for him to think he'd messed up. We would in time, but not when he was alive. It was more about him, his reputation, his ego. He was conflicted about us. He didn't delight in our iconoclasm, although he loved the Arthur legend. He knew that the king must die and that he'd be the first motherfucker to get it. We'd topple him first, and that pissed him off."
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Re: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

Postby admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:40 pm

22. Decent

JOHN


By 1971 I was living with my own one-year-old child on Morton Street in the West Village in New York. Blake and her mother, Crystal, and I had moved into an apartment leased to journalist Michael Herr's wife, Valerie. My little nuclear family had returned to the United States from what seemed like a lifetime in Vietnam where Blake had been born.

As a witting soldier, then journalist, most of my stay there had been more or less voluntary. However, with others of my kind, I had tried to elude the spectral fear that floated around in that crucible of agony called "Nam," in the soft, warm glow of the opium lamp. It seemed to help to numb the feelings of remorse and pity for myself and missing friends.

Back home in the States, I had begun to drink heavily, and mostly alone at night. The only people I could relate to were people a bit like myself; people with the odd malaise de corps of the literate walking wounded. Many were journalists like Michael Herr, and a lot of us were "living" in New York. Most of my friends were ex-volunteers from agencies like CARE and the Peace Corps.

One night a group of us met at this little one-room apartment in the Village with the arguably perverse intention to celebrate the Vietnamese lunar New Year at Tet, and call another comrade who had just made it out alive to California. He was back from the land of the dreaming dead after ending his opium habit and perking up in Hong Kong. With one of those little suction-cup things I decided to tape the call for everyone's entertainment.

All things considered, it should have been a loving night of grace and gratitude that we were all reasonably whole and well. The problem was that I wasn't. Not long after everyone's arrival I began to celebrate our special togetherness with a half-gallon of cheap scotch. Soon things began to turn to the inappropriate, and then downright ugly. I remember referring to my dear friend Scott's Chinese girlfriend with some skewered and out of character racist/sexist twist, as if she would be amused and amazed at the cavalier power of my raw expressionism. That was just the beginning.

The technology had changed since my mother's day. The phone call was a disaster of filthy, rambling interjection by me. Afterwards, for some strange reason I put a fresh cassette in the slot. The ensuing two hours of madness went on tape and were waiting for me like a mugger the next morning when I woke up abruptly at dawn from a blackout. I gazed at the infernal machine with what had become an increasingly familiar sense of dis- ease.

Timidly, putting in the earplug, I began to listen to myself and my world go insane. I heard my friends excuse themselves to Crystal and leave under the hostile fire and unprovoked ground assault of my surging abuse. I heard my child begin to cry and go mute when I yelled at her to shut up. I heard myself storm out of the apartment toward a neighborhood bar, only to come right back screaming at the top of my lungs from the street for the keys that I had forgotten. I heard the scuffle on the stairs with the landlord who was protesting about the hour and constant yelling in my apartment. I heard me curse and threaten his life as I nearly pushed him over the banister. I heard my family shift around in their silent fear of my increasing violence. But most of all, I heard my mother, and then, turning off the tape, I heard my own tears.

That cold morning I was dreadfully and irrefutably awakened to the family disease of alcoholism. The experience did nothing to reform me. Indeed, it made further drinking seem the only straightforward escape from the depression of this terrible inheritance. Though I knew that I had not invented the disorder and neither had my parents, and though it took me almost another eighteen years of struggle to come to grips with my "unique" personal expression of this most ancient lifestyle sickness, it was on that morning that I realized I was enmeshed in something far more powerful than just myself.
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Re: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

Postby admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:40 pm

23. Billy Burroughs

JOHN


After leaving Crystal, I traveled back to Asia again, this time motorcyling from southern India to Nepal. I spent two months in a Thai jail, having taken the rap for a woman who transported a small amount of heroine over the Thai-Malaysian border. When I returned to the States, I decided to spend some time with Rinpoche in Boulder.

In 1981, I was drinking with my friend Ken Kesey at the Boulderado. I don't remember what we were talking about. Indeed I don't remember a great deal of that period of my life. But one thing did register. As I slipped deeper and deeper into stupor, Ken brought me up short and said, "What the hell's wrong with you, man? Your dad must have been a real jerk. My children are the sons of a famous father, and they're nothing like you. John, you better start looking squarely at some stuff and get your shit together or you're going to end up dead meat like Burrough's kid."

In truth, I inherited two life-threatening diseases from my parents. Hemochromatosis filled me to overflowing with iron. But it was the other one which was cunning, baffling, and the most powerful, the one that could speak in tongues of reason or comfort, that held my spirit for ransom. It took me multiple relapses as an extremely "low-bottom" addict and a lot of enlightened care from veterans of dependency to get me into a condition where I had the clarity of mind to be able to receive the help of other alcoholics and addicts.

Despite my lifelong dedication to spiritual pursuits, intellect blocked the road to surrender. But fortunately, just like they say, when I truly accepted my powerlessness over my disease, the drama was over, and I could begin to understand the source of some of the behaviors that had taken over my life apart from the fact that I am just a plain old alcoholic-drug addict.

I was once asked to write some words on the occasion of the reissuance of William Burroughs Jr.'s book Speed. It's a bit awkward. I was not an old friend of his, in the sense that I've never been to Palm Beach, Florida. I filled my arms mostly in Asia and first met Billy in Boulder, Colorado, in 1976. By this time we were both beginning the completion of our advanced course in alcoholism, and first-stage cirrhosis. Thom had met him the year before in the same town on a painful car ride one night he had told me about
meeting this obstreperous bastard, who with intense prodding from a googoo-eyed girl, held forth, screaming back the million answers to what it was like to be his father's son. According to the story, my brother, the elder Steinbeck pup, kept his lips scientifically sealed. Apparently the distance of obscure sociology quickly shrank into "there but for the grace of God go I" land, and Thom couldn't wait to get the hell out of the car. When I met Billy a year later in a bar, I found him almost demure, though definitely excited about slow things like glaciers, granite, or sand on beaches -- things like that.

Like some others of the generation, Billy was driven to look at things as clearly as we could judge clarity at all. Probably things were constantly something. This group of people was not particularly select: to wit, hippies. Some of us suited up for the joust by reading a lot of John Rechy, Last Exits of all kinds, not to mention Bill Senior. As heroic kids by nature with some sense of birthright, we also washed down hours of green-whiskey westerns and sagas about existential gangsters and time travelers. For Billy and others, the flavor of that straight drink was not exactly love and light, respectable as that might be. There are always mountain men and pinnacle men. Junkies are always the latter. Beyond a mere haze, many of us knew that the universe was not so pat a phenomenon. Straight shots had to be created or you'd go bonkers. Truly there was no such thing as a free brunch or even a naked one for that matter.

At this point I have a problem in trying to distinguish for the reader the difference between Billy and any other drugged-out kid. His work and his nonegocentric approach to sharing his often hapless derring-do, is one hint. As I reread his books, and as I remember him, everything was an odd-ball dance of coincidence. I don't mean those flaming quizzical connections perceived by speed freaks and acid heads. There things wear off and become silly morsels, as Billy delights in showing us over and over again. For Billy, warm charnel coincidences kept leaping up, and it was to those little deities that he dedicated his nervous system, body, and his life.

Bill Burroughs Jr. would go through trash cans in strange cities looking for and finding the map of his life. Doubtless he was on to something. Not so coincidently, he and I shared a number of similarities born of a common habit, not the least of which was cirrhosis. Billy died after his body rejected a donated second liver; the seat of some young girl's soul, we thought. His coincidences obviously coincided with hers. As a pursuit, the onslaught of so many beads on a thread exhausted him pretty early. He was like a fagged-out tobacco hand, but he had a nervous sort of languor as he translated things into long and short southern humor that always left you with the feeling that you'd missed something important. In the best of times his fears made him chuckle for its wonderful humanity. He seemed to feel that there were a lot of creative possibilities in panic.

I do not know to what extent Billy was cranked by his own measurement to his father. We never really spoke about it and he probably didn't know. In any case, it was tacitly understood that William Senior had his own death-defying dedication to vision. Thus Billy never experienced the curious liberation of seeing his own father as a fraud. And he was never shunned by Dad for finding writing necessary, if not handy. But things haunted him. Possibly it was the morgue picture Allen Ginsberg allowed him to see: a picture of his mother's bullet-hole third eye oozing its black pineal blood. Perhaps this flooded Billy's emotional pain receptor but I don't think so, lurid though it might be. However, speaking of Mom, Billy had a few strikes against him to be sure. He had tried to grow his fetal brain cells in a swirl of Benzedrine-eucalyptus amniotic fluid from her habit during pregnancy of shooting the soakings of nose inhalers. The first liver cell he ever owned was put to indentured servitude even as it tried to mesoderm its way into mere helpfulness. Speed and booze were constant birthday presents when you look at it that way. Still, willing and forgiving as that old liver was, it remembered the world of existence that dares not to exist, and shrank into itself in Bill's twenty-ninth year. Remember, he was in hot pursuit, so he borrowed a sixteen-year-old girl's bile-maker for a few rounds of beer and life. Things got worse.

By now, Billy had a very good nose for when the magic of the world was afoot. At the first whiff, he would search out its cloud-chamber tracks like a bum or a magpie looking for shiny stuff in the street. With his speedy birthright, significance could be found in bent pins when he was on the hunt. With his new liver, most drugs were replaced with powerful anti- rejection steroids and a modicum of postoperative painkillers. He developed a fistula that wouldn't close and with great embarrassment learned the dubious yogic art of shitting out of the middle of his chest. It eventually closed, though only with heroic doses of wacky prednisone. As mortality winked at him, Billy saw and talked to his creator a lot. It could be freaky to be around during one of these tete-a-tetes, but down-to-earth guy that he was, he didn't forget how to whine and make you feel guilty. He certainly made no bones about his love for sympathy.

One last thought for you. The energy that I got from Billy was not an arrangement of tedium or even brilliance particularly. But I say again that there was always this nagging feeling that what he experienced was important for us to be always aware of. For many of us he was too silly, or we were too busy to pay proper attention to the husk that surrounds us all, or to the game that his innocence didn't have enough constitution to describe fully. His compassion was due wholly to what he had seen in his adventure as well as giving a "thanks and tip of the hat" to simple meanness.

I saw him last at a Halloween party. His being looked swollen and sore but his eyes twinkled a "Shucks, who me?"
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Re: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

Postby admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:41 pm

24. Kissing Trains

JOHN


The mountains and gorges around Boulder, Colorado, are exceedingly beautiful. They surge like a frozen tidal wave and then stop abruptly to project their sharp witness over the broad high plains. There the apparition of millions of migrating buffalo would often wander across my mind. Long ago, it is said that it would take weeks for a single herd to drift through the yellow grassland. In winter, the cobalt blue sky almost shatters the eye and the naked aspens on the mountains stand out like oxidized steel on the rare grey days. But even in winter, when the dry chinook winds blow down from the north, even the deepest snowfall is soon puffed away from the streets of the town like baby powder. To some Vietnam vets the word "chinook," which means "snow eater" in Arapaho, had an unwelcome ring to it as the name of an ungainly and sometimes dangerous troop-carrying helicopter.

Boulder and its environs were actually a magnet for Vietnam vets. Though during the war I heard a great number of GIs swear that they would never go camping or even fishing in the woods again, now others felt forced out to the hinterland. Choked with depression and an overwhelming feeling of strangeness, along with their dogs, maybe a rifle, and some booze, they left the townships in search of higher and less wrenching ground. Sometimes in small groups or all alone, they secluded themselves in the mountains near Boulder, or other less fashionable hamlets all across the Rockies, the Tennessee Mountains, the Appalachians, the Ozarks, or any other range that was as inhospitable as the people they felt they had come home to.

In 1979, after attending a Buddhist seminary, I moved back to Boulder from California to be with Nancy and her two children. Midway through that first summer with my new family, I found myself crossing the street with one of my closest surviving friends from Vietnam. He had come out from Pennsylvania to do some trout fishing and to take a look at the Naropa Institute Poetry Department. The Third Annual Red Zinger International Bicycle Classic of Boulder was in top gear. In the middle of the course, which lay in the middle of our course to the Hotel Boulderado bar, my friend stopped and asked me to answer him yes or no -- did I think Vietnam had fucked us up? Since John Balaban was an English teacher, there were a number of other ways that he could have framed this question. For that matter, we were both men of many words and sophisticated shields. If for no other reason than that, I said yes and hurried on before we were run over by the Austrian racing team cornering Spruce Street onto Thirteenth in front of the hotel.

Balaban was so determined to pursue this point that my customary glibness was useless and there wasn't any other available cover in the bar beyond the ordering of stiff drinks. When we went to sit down, John asked his question again. Again, I said yes and surprised, I felt a kind of lightness.

It had been eight years or so since John and I had returned from Vietnam. Portions of our lives had moved forward, but when we met we talked always of the war, about our distant and sometimes dead friends, and about sad and funny memories. John, who is a poet with a bias for life's darkness, had written of these things, describing the leaves of our long calendar in Vietnam as "barbarities, each heaped on the other like stones on a man already stoned to death." Yet the question -- What had this done to us? -- remained unasked. Though we knew better, hoping that a muse might spare our lives, our time in Vietnam had made us squirm into the role of immortal observers.

To new acquaintances we were probably terribly boring: when we got together we must have sounded like two kids coming directly out of an adventure movie saying "remember the part when .... " Now eight years later, somewhat numb even amidst the summer glow of thousands of young and enthusiastic celebrants of herbal tea, bicycle endurance, and beer, the permafrost began to melt and we started at last to acknowledged each other as incomplete and part of the brigades of walking wounded.

With this breath of honesty, we won some comfort from the immediate fact that we had at least stopped redescribing and remembering a bygone Vietnam to ourselves and had begun recounting our lives after to each other. Instead of further layering emotional cysts by encapsulating our experiences in vain and rugged images of the past, we tried to share the chaotic feelings which had begun to surface through our peculiar conduct. John said he found himself crying a lot about nothing in particular. I, on the other hand, had not drawn a clean or sober breath since 1967.

Sometimes when people asked me to tell them about Vietnam, I used one of my fifty stock responses and let them fill in the blanks. Often my audience was not really listening, or just enough to confirm their personal theories about war and life. When I see movies about our war, I find myself mostly avoiding the theme and instead I concentrate on criticizing the special effects; wondering how, after thirty-million-dollar .50 caliber bullets still look like cheap Chinese fireworks, Vietnamese speak like nisei, and Montagnards seem to come from Fiji. Vets spend a lot of time guffawing over such incongruities as the only berth to hide from memory. For Vietnam veterans, a large part of the impact of Platoon was because a skilled technical department robbed us of even that cover.

On the television network I helped build in Vietnam, the favorite programs were Star Trek and Combat; the super fiction of the one and the thick melodrama of the other were actually both so hilariously otherworldly that they were unusually comforting. But even today, a car backfiring or the sound of helicopter rotors in the Los Angeles night are a bitch. And then there are the innumerable rock 'n' roll tunes that snare my limbic brain stem and send me hurtling back in time. My so-called Vietnam brothers mostly agree that the truly horrible things we saw and felt in Vietnam we now remember when we are awake; our nightmares (like running around the living room furniture being chased by VC or something) are just spooky extensions of the fear we learned to look for over our shoulders.

By the time that Balaban and I began to get honest about all of this, people had already begun to speak in terms of the effects in a clinical pigeonhole called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or simply PTSD.

When I was a kid, fatigue and stress were things that happened to metal, especially that of British airliners; now we understand that they also happened to the people in them. These days, what used to be a tough life or even just life is now seen in terms of stress. The odd measure of this is such that either good news or bad could actually kill you.

Despite my initial sneer at the new antiseptic filing for wretchedness, the fact that the Vietnam veteran had now come under the calipers of stress "technology" actually amounted to the first gesture of compassion these forgotten or unwanted men had received up to this point.

When I first heard the psychological term Delayed Stress, I wondered if the "delayed" part referred to our delay in seeing it, or to our unwillingness to throw off the seventies' television stereotype of Vietnam vets as homicidal maniacs. Eventually I discovered that the condition was real and if not dealt with, it was indeed life-threatening as hell. Its effects could range from bleeding gums to cancer to suicide.

Originally, this "stress" business was not really a bandwagon that I wanted to jump on. To be blunt, I found it unmanly. But on encountering my own resistance to acknowledging its existence, my cynicism and hesitation began to fit more and more into the Delayed Stress model. Not all afflicted vets fit under this specific umbrella, while at the same time the list of symptoms is far-ranging enough to splash any number of people who never went to Vietnam; like for instance people who were born in or around New York City, or East L.A., America's answer to Beirut.

Pretending at first to be merely intrigued, I began to look into this affair as a journalist. Just an observer again, you understand. The symptoms that I found on the following list were culled from literature put out by the Disabled American Veterans, though they could apply to victims of natural disasters, prevalent abuse, rape, or any kind of physical or psychological violence. Afflicted vets sometimes like to think that they own this territory as the only ground they ever won, and indeed they won some of it dearly. Certainly I have my favorites:

• sleep disturbances
• tendency to react under stress with survival tactics
• psychic or emotional numbing
• loss of interest in work and activities
• survivor guilt
• avoidance of activities that arouse memories of trauma in the war zone
• suicidal feelings and thoughts
• inability to talk about war experiences
• alienation
• fantasies of retaliation and destruction
• cynicism and distrust of government and authority
• hypersensitivity to perceived injustice
• emotional distancing from children, wife, and others

And my all-time favorite:

• concern with humanistic values overlaid by hedonism

Of course, some of these reactions make for basic good sense and others could be attributable to the pervasive midlife crisis in a world seemingly gone mad. There are, however, some startling statistics that exist exclusively within the world of the Vietnam veteran. Figures indicate that the suicide rate among Vietnam vets is 33 percent higher than among the general population. The figure has now climbed. When I say suicide, I don't mean death by "misadventure" like drunk driving. I mean real gun-to-the-head, blow-yourself-away type stuff. In fact, far more vets have killed themselves than were actually killed in the war. That number also grows daily upward of eighty thousand men. For life insurance or other reasons, many returned vets preferred to "kiss" a moving train or bus, or for that matter, let the cops blow them away reaching for a nonexistent gun during a domestic quarrel.

Of those soldiers who were married before going to Vietnam, 38 percent were divorced within six months after returning home. More than 60 percent of the veterans had persistent problems with emotional adjustment, and the number of Vietnam vets hospitalized for alcoholism or drug addiction has gone off the charts. And then there are the veterans who became inmates of penitentiaries; men who under ordinary circumstances would have never found themselves in such big-time trouble. And one cannot forget the homeless vet population, which, if you'll forgive the pun, is legion.

Though these figures have been ineluctably trickling in over the years since Vietnam-era soldiers first began returning to the States, the statistics were first lumped together under the rubric "delayed stress reaction" in June 1977, when they were brought to national attention in testimony given before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs by the psychologist John P. Wilson. (His report, Identity, Ideology, and Crisis: The Vietnam Veteran in Transition, is but a small part of a two-pound book of his findings gathered during the Forgotten Warrior Project on Vietnam Veterans, a study sponsored by the nonprofit Disabled American Veterans organization.) Assuming that Dr. Wilson, a member of the Department of Psychology at Cleveland State University, used a chronologically and demographically sound cross section of veterans way back then, what comes across as most interesting is not only the identification of a serious problem and its symptoms but a description of the events and circumstances of our times that resulted in a delayed something, for approximately half a million GIs.

From the purely psychological point of view, Dr. Wilson's explanations draw heavily on the work of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. The basic idea runs as follows: Most cultures permit their soon-to-be adults a psychosocial moratorium at about age sixteen. This unofficial grace period, a sort of DMZ between youth and adulthood, ideally allows for the young a space to prepare for and grow into acceptable adult roles. During the years after Korea, in our society this process used to involve motorcycling across the country or hitchhiking through Europe; or it could be a more intense, inner experience involving religion; or it might be getting into food fights and throwing down a lot of beer in college. At any rate, the young adult presumably begins to receive intimations of what he will do with his life. Only when a coherent identity begins to solidify does society apply the screws. Plastics? The Vietnam era, of course, created a different paradigm -- it drafted and sent us to Vietnam.

It is not that the particular passage of becoming a soldier is so unusual. For some this role might even have been an appropriate career choice. Eighteen-year-olds and younger fought in World War II and in all previous wars in American history. In fact, in 1965 most young people were reflexively, unthinkingly "hawks" like myself. But in Vietnam, for a lot of reasons, whole flocks of hawks turned to doves, and after another group ended up singed, they were birds with no feathers left at all.

Thanks to the likes of writer Philip Caputo, director Oliver Stone, and many others, the story is now well known. In Vietnam, we didn't really know who we were fighting most of the time. In Vietnam, death and the horror of war in the jungle amidst friendly incompetence was hardly what you could call grounding unless you were to end up under it. Most significantly, when the GIs came home, they didn't come home in a group, but one at a time. Our friends back home had all been against the war; our parents and wives dearly wanted to avoid the subject. My brother got a very condensed version of this when he came home to find his wife in bed with the "friend." When it came to alienation, this was really one-stop shopping.

Many vets couldn't explain Vietnam to themselves much less to others and eventually we wouldn't even try. When forced into a corner, vets could easily fight amongst each other about the smallest details. So at this point, getting help or gathering any political strength and unity was a parody of anger, mistrust, and more alienation that spilled over onto itself. By 1979 many of us were walking around in "thirty-nothing" bodies, lost in hesitation, furiously trying to remember who we were going to be.

In the days when a delayed stress reaction was a hard fact of life rather than a medical syndrome, help was where you could find it. During most of the seventies, it was nonprofit organizations like the Disabled American Veterans that helped vets carry the weight of post-Vietnam despair and emptiness. They started funding the seminal research projects, doing the street-level work, and making themselves available to those vets who managed to come in out of the cold. On the other hand, the Veterans Administration, the organization traditionally charged with ministering to the American victims of our wars, was one of the last places Vietnam veterans would go. It was weird. Everything was so tangled up that we forgot whether it was General Hershey who ran the VA or Walter Reed who invented the draft. Wasn't it the VA where you went to die in your own piss?

The VA is a tough outfit, and the then director Max Cleland was in his way the toughest of them all. A triple-amputee Vietnam veteran, he was perceived by many vets as a sort of hair-on-your-chest, you-can-make-it-see-I-did poster child. He was unquestionably an inspiration to some, but also the cause of despair to those with less grievous wounds whose lives now seemed to be in shreds. In fairness to the VA, once money came from Congress to start an "outreach" program, the VA proceeded, finding a number of psychologists who were also Vietnam veterans to man the clinics.

When I first started thinking about all of this after the incident with John Balaban, the sound of these programs made me hugely suspicious. The very word "outreach," the generic term used for most programs dealing with PTSD, reminded me of chieu hoi, which means "open arms" in Vietnamese. This term referred to a surrender program for Viet Cong in which cash would be paid for weapons (the bigger the weapon, the greater the money), and then the enemy soldier would supposedly be rehabilitated away from struggling with his oppressor and be taught a trade. This usually worked out in one of three ways: sometimes the soldiers threw down their arms, shouted "chieu hoi!" and were shot dead in their tracks. Sometimes, the returnees survived and got something to fill their bellies for the first time in years; and at least once, in a master stroke of sublime infiltration, an entire battalion which used to live underground in a vast delta tunnel system, "chieu hoi'ed" and finally took complete political control of the province without firing another shot.

The relevance of these programs, and to American society at large, remains an open question after the Persian Gulf, where Israeli experts predict that there will be at least two psychiatric casualties for every one soldier killed in a high-speed desert land war. And then there is also the personality shredding specter of invisible gas to contend with as well. That kind of war will make Vietnam look like a South Sea cruise on the Love Boat. Nonetheless, Vietnam did bring us to a human understanding that was a good deal more refined than the old notions of "shell shock" that had hung around since Verdun.

The main aspect of the "syndrome" approach that I, as a vet, do like is its definitive separation from mental illness. This is an enlightened attitude that in any case seems to work out well for the two main parties: the VA gets off the hook of having to pay Service Incurred Disability Benefits for emotional wounds, and the veteran doesn't have to worry so much that he is losing his mind.

Best of all, with a perception of Delayed Stress, the vet doesn't come under the tyranny of the mental-health game, a self-perpetuating system of isolation in which the doctor is always right and, to certify you are cured, he must be convinced you are willing to exchange your reality for his. Few psychiatrists will take the time and pains to try to understand the Vietnam veteran's reality, or, indeed, ever could understand it. As I said, vets themselves still rehash it constantly, and they were there.

Speaking personally, a great deal of what did happen as a soldier in Vietnam feels like this. I went to war as a hawk. I hated the idea of people who would plant a bomb in a movie theater and force frightened villagers around like slaves. I was very naive; I had grown up watching Victory at Sea. I believed our bullets always hit their rightful target. When I discovered in dreadful instances that this was hardly ever true, my political identity was severely shaken. I turned against the war. I never claimed to be a pacifist, but this thing was loathsome. The jumble of any common moral relationship with nature was downright unhinging. It was a crazy world inhabited by little children running down the street on fire, and great golden carp idling happily in pools which were burnished over with a beautiful thin rainbow-colored film of napalm. Your buddies would be talking one minute and become steaming lumps of flesh and bone fragment the next. The world of existence, suddenly, violently daring not to exist, is really shocking to a nineteen-year-old. The light slips out of your friend's eye and there is no longer any ground on which to put your feet. This corporeal impermanence is perplexing enough for a Buddhist monk, a professional. The best we could come up with at such times to keep from falling of the edge of the world was the expression "Don't mean a thing; don't mean a goddamned thing." The truth was that late adolescence in the jungle allotted only a few trails through existentialism: floating terror laced with bewilderment and an aching boredom that had ridden on the back of foot soldiers since Carthage.

When we came back to "the world," the response of many of us was to first celebrate and then stupefy our memories. We were like people building an expensive beach house on a cliff. To no avail, we tried to reinvest our experience and fill the hole in our heart with the girl back home, or the family left behind in the theater of normalcy. When we felt shaky about how tenuous and flimsy the whole thing was, to appease insecurity we built yet another porch jutting into thin air. Numb-a-holics, when the whole thing collapsed, many Vietnam vets unconsciously built for themselves a counterculture of obscured fury. Not understanding, even twenty years later an awful lot were still wondering why we spent so much time in bed watching reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Love American Style, spilling cigarette ashes and beer all over what was left of our lives.

There was a time when I thought that victory for the Vietnamese people would be a great leap forward for mankind. Sadly, this has not been the case for anyone in Southeast Asia. By the time of the Red Zinger Bicycle Classic, I could almost taste the grief and smell the killing ground, while the Earth Mothers of the antiwar movement obscenely argued with each other over who the Boat People really were. Another conviction melted in my mouth and desperate cynicism tried to keep pace. I realized that I wanted to cry and not have to feel it. Then I wanted to feel it but I didn't know how. Was this my Post Traumatic Delayed Stress reaction? Boy, I hoped so. So great to have a name that I could joke about at least; great to be able to twitch and grimace at children on Halloween while they squeal, "Oh, no -- the Viet vet monster!" Great that it had come out in the open so that people would finally know that it has taken a lot of us a long time to come home. Great that the new psychic amputees of the future will have some basis for being understood.

I spent long years before even really starting the trip, and because I spent so much time with them, my feelings and thoughts have a lot to do with my life with the Vietnamese. They have had about two thousand years of stress and the symptoms have crystallized into folk poetry:

Sad, I blame Mister Sky
When sad, I laugh. Happy, I cry.
Not a man in my next life
I'll become a rustling pine
On a cliff in the sky.
Fly with the pines, cool and lonely.


Not since the First World War has there been so much written by soldiers, but it would be nice if still more GIs wrote poetry. Perhaps someday we will be able to retranslate life that has been turned into "stress" back into life. But for a while to come, many men who began to recognize some of the symptoms of delayed stress in themselves soon became catharsis junkies of a sort.

In 1976, my dealing with Vietnam had really just started. Of course I preferred the total anesthetic approach as did many others. If I thought Vietnam had fucked me up, I had an even greater fear of what facing it with lucidity might hold. Upon just a little exposure to the "syndrome," I found out how hard it could kick once one started to let it in. And then, unbeknownst to me, any foraging through my pain without anesthetics was bound to turn up not just one battle, one war, but my whole fucking life.

For the most part, I surrounded myself with intellectual friends and was deeply involved with searching and sifting through my consciousness in the more polite realms of meditation and the fine points of Buddhist theory concerning things like the nature of sense perception and the objects of perception. The meditation practices were best suited for shrine halls, and retreats, but the theory part traveled well in bars. I was becoming more and more facile with this spiritual approach for dealing with feelings, and this kind of transcendental denial was terrifically absorbing and thus perfect for bull-shit drinking. But as I mentioned, the bars of Boulder, though often crammed with Buddhists, were also sometimes home to the descended angels from the Vietnam war. They would periodically come down from the mountains and junkyards of their loneliness to get drunk and angry at strangers. They could get wonderfully malevolent and resentful in a clean, rich college town like Boulder.

Every once in a while I would literally run into one of these guys. At this point my own increasingly aggressive persona always seemed to attract the dangerous and belligerent type, never the shy, scared sort. I had begun to fight a lot in bars, and it always seemed to end up being another vet tumbling through the tables with me. Magnetized, it was like we were cats. There was the combative frozen staring and subtle yowling at each other until there came a sudden burst of attack, neither side knowing what was the cue that set the contact off. Perhaps it was the mirror on the other's face reflecting some mutual dismemberment of the spirit, the ignoble sight of which was unbearable and only worthy of additional destruction. Sometimes, in a "Don't mean a thing" trance, it felt like a shade of a spent friend passing by and whispering through the booze to join it, passing further, beyond the stink of survival.

Because of these fights and their resulting "night wounds," it wasn't very long after being faced down one too many times by an unhappy vet with a loaded revolver, that I looked at my erstwhile research into the old syndrome business and started going to vet groups. At the very least, I would know more about my adversaries. I also talked to my brother about it. We agreed to try to get some help despite our feelings of uniqueness. He was living in Austin, Texas, at the time, and had to drive all the way to Waco to get onto a group. Though not getting into fights, he was having real problems with dark anger and a private humiliation which had turned more torturously inward. But in Waco there wasn't much for him to identify with. Most of the vets around that neck of nowhere were what he termed Texican cannon fodder; sometimes double and triple amputees with little or no education other than some grade school and what they had managed to pick up in the army. He began to feel like he was the "toy" thinker, encouraged by his regular army counselor so that they could have someone to talk to. Thom started to feel that he was making the long Texas drive for this sad group instead of for himself. It was a point that became moot when the VA counselor himself blew his own brains out. Thom felt that these were possibly not the right people to go to for help.

In Boulder, I was more fortunate. For one thing or another, the police with whom I now enjoyed a first-name relationship had often thrown me into a county-funded overnight detox, and there I met up with an ex-Marine named Don Roth. He was among other things, a board-certified alcohol counselor, but more importantly he was a Marine Vietnam vet, recovering alcoholic, and an all-around regular guy from Pennsylvania who had once gone into the woods himself with a rifle, a lot of hooch, and the grim intent to call it a life and hop on the next train to another world. Don Roth was the genuine article, and best of all, he was alive, sober, and laughing in my face.
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Re: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

Postby admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:42 pm

25. Whip Stall

NANCY


As if it were his last chance, there was a dire urgency in John's attempt to create a sane family with me and the children. He knew it and I knew it and we shared that truth wordlessly, in our lovemaking, in our laughter, in our play. Although our fights over the mood swings caused by his drinking were becoming more frequent, this weather pattern caused little concern. Because my mother, my first husband, and everyone else I knew drank alcoholically, I was accustomed to bizarre behavior. Along with Megan and Michael, who were similarly acclimatized, I thought the roller coaster of constant crisis and drama was normal.

Fortunately, when a bond is strong, when two souls are seamless, the real healing of childhood wounds can take place. John's drunken excess held a mirror to my enabling codependency, and my outrage reflected his craziness back to him. That simple act became our salvation. Although the journey was often ghastly, it served us well. Eventually we arrived at a breathtaking detente simply because we wore each other down to the bone and thereby found a core of truth and authenticity. Later, as popular literature emerged about alcoholic family dynamics, we were proud of the trail we'd blazed without any road maps.

John and I had suffered tortured childhoods; our developmental needs were never met. Two inner angry babies drove our emotional lives, screaming for the attention and nurturing we never received. The task was to transmute the rage into the maturity of two emotionally intelligent adults. At the time, I had no memory of my father's repeated molestations. These did not surface until after years of therapy. So, my family of origin appeared to be more healthy than John's, though later that would prove to have been an insidious illusion.

My father, Ernest Lenn, was a well-known San Francisco journalist, active in the political scene that spawned Diane Feinstein. My mother, Anna Sommer, had also been a talented journalist for the San Francisco News who, like Gwyn, quit working when she got married. Frustrated and depressed, she became an alcoholic as I was growing up. Like John, I was the family scapegoat, though my brother suffered equally. My parents imprisoned us in separate parts of the house, the same divide-and-conquer tactics by which John and Thom were raised. I won approval in that tense Nazi atmosphere through academic and musical achievement. My only emotional outlet was playing Beethoven sonatas. The passion and catharsis they evoked preserved my sanity, but when my piano teacher suggested that I become a concert pianist, I balked because it meant I would have to be tutored at home. I had discovered that boys could provide an escape from the tower in which my parents held me; their attention breathed air into my tomb.

Later, the memory of my father's molestation of me as a baby, which continued until I was old enough to find words to express my anguish, was validated by my brother. He recalled that I had found it safer to blame him than my father for graphic acts that were way beyond the ken of a three-year-old.

John and I began to realize how clearly the scattered shards of our childhoods mirrored each other. Incest; physical, emotional, and sexual abuse from alcoholic parents; toxic tension; and to some extent, I knew about the famous thing. Mine was on a smaller scale, but you could mention my father's name to any San Francisco policeman and a traffic ticket would not be written. All the cops and politicians knew him.

For the first time in all my relationships, I didn't ask, Is this all there is? Previously, I had always felt trapped by the limitations of the men I'd chosen when they abandoned their impetus for personal growth. Johnny and I shared a transcendental chemistry, in the same way a beautiful sunset can bring you back from an afternoon of despondency. Certain people are like that; their presence makes colors more vivid, music more intense. A snack at a fast-food joint with John could be as enchanting as a picnic by the sea. A friend once observed, "There is a stream between you and John, a natural current, that synchronizes your lives." Ours was a love that transcended obsession, one containing such a strong gravitational pull that neither indignity nor abuse could tear it asunder.

When the fights over his drinking started, I understood why John was so fearful in the first stages of our commitment. He worried that I would abandon him when alcohol turned him from a courtly suitor into a monster. We both became wary of each other. Shortly after we moved into our new home, Thom came to stay with us and the primal tug of war between the brothers kept us all on edge. In their competition, they pushed and pulled, forgetting to blame their parents for their professed wounds; ultimately beating on each other for the lack of attention and nurturing they howled over. I never questioned the abnormality of a brother moving in with a couple just beginning a committed relationship. It wasn't like he needed a place to stay. He just acted like it was his right to be there. Because he was rootless, there was nowhere else he was supposed to be. They didn't have parents to rely on, but they had each other, even if their relationship was combative. They often told me that they depended upon each other for reality checks about their abusive childhoods. I gave them plenty of room, but the litany of ancient injustices got old pretty quick.

One night they started in on the usual drunken argument over who had it worse when they were kids. And who had more delayed stress from Vietnam. And who drank more or fought less with their girlfriends. Even, which one Mother loved more. Johnny picked up a chair and slammed it into the wall. That was the start of the holes in the walls of our house. The next morning Thom apologized to me. "You looked so bored when that happened. How much more of this can you take?"

They'd stay up all night. Once I got up to get a glass of water and they were teaching Sluggo, our beloved Abyssinian cat, to jump from the TV toward the birdcage in one flying leap. He learned quickly and never gave up till he'd killed the parakeets a few weeks later. I went back to bed feeling I had four kids in the house, and I hated it. Megan and Michael, who were ten and seven at the time, couldn't figure out if they were living with adults or very large feral children who had never had any adult supervision. While they were charmed by John and Thom's extravagant sense of life, I could tell that the ground underneath them was starting to be as shaky as when Paul was with us. This disturbed me greatly, but I was at a total loss about making any changes. I found myself reuniting with the codependent pattern of shoring up quicksand with my efforts to maintain sanity when the chaos erupted.

Johnny was on edge because of the attention Thom paid to me. It had been de rigueur for their male friends to seduce their girlfriends behind their backs, and then the game was for everyone to pretend nothing had happened. That was ubiquitous Boy's Club behavior back when the Rat Pack met the sexual revolution. When I returned to Boulder from seminary, their friends informed me that Thom had to sleep with John's girls before they could be accepted and vice versa. Horrified, I asked John point-blank if that was the case. I could tell he'd have died if anything had happened with Thom. I took it as a serious indication of the blurred boundaries between them.

John knew I would never betray him in that way. We'd both been relieved to discover each had sown so many wild oats in our respective younger years that we were not tempted by trysts, knowing they only resulted in the exhaustion of being spread too thin. The first time I went alone to a Buddhist seminar, John sat me down and said, "I don't want you to sleep with anyone while you're away and neither will I. I want you to call me every night before you go to sleep. Let's not waste time worrying." Touched by his expression of vulnerability, I adored that the Sex Czar wanted monogamy for both of us.

Thom left at the end of summer and that's when John decided for the first time in his life to stop drinking. He seemed to have reached the end of his infinite rope. We knew nothing about the kind of support new sobriety needs, we just thought he could quit and that was that, a matter of willpower. He stayed sober for two months and they were glorious. He was consistently relaxed and gentle. Friends were impressed and the children were greatly relieved. Like all members of an alcoholic household when Dr. Jekyll is home, we were delighted with the establishment of a comfortable routine. Michael and Megan were forging a strong bond with John. They were very responsive toward his affectionate nature, which tended to dote on them. They loved to cuddle and talk for hours with him about all sorts of things. Their friends also found John to be an entertaining and compassionate relief from their uptight parents.

Things were going so well that we naively decided to take a vacation on the East Coast. We planned a visit to New York, a fall foliage tour through New England, stops at some major Buddhist centers in Vermont, and ending up in Nova Scotia. Thom was to join us for part of the trip. We never thought to ask if John would want to drink and what we'd do if he did, never suspecting Thom's drinking would infect John's efforts at sobriety.

We left the children with Paul and went off blindly, innocently, into the eye of Bedlam. The first week was heaven. Being in New York with John was the epitome of romance to me, ensconced in our hip Grammercy Park suite overlooking the tiny, time-warped square, wrapped in its black iron fence outlining the scarlet leaves. He was a true New Yorker, walking everywhere. We'd rush through the streets in a flurry or else stay in and order veal marsala from room service. John never wanted to go to museums or theaters; to him the sights were on the street, with the people, the homeless, the smells and groaning banquet of urban disintegration.

After a few blissful days, Thom flew in and we set off for Vermont by car. At first, they kept me afloat on gales of laughter, teasing me mercilessly with outrageous volleys, sailing past the crimson trees on those topaz-colored afternoons. We were a joyous trio and it almost felt like a victory. John remained sober for days. I began to think that our life might continue like that, with sanity and grace and extraordinary humor. Eventually, a bitter edge of wariness began to surface. Sharing me, sharing Thom, and beginning to crave alcohol, every night John watched Thom down a fifth of scotch.

Just before we reached the Canadian border, Thom told our waiter offhandedly to "Bring my brother a double." I sat in shocked trepidation and watched the evening decompose. Knowing nothing about alcoholism, I thought John could control his use with willpower, as did he. If he drank that night, it wouldn't necessarily mean he'd drink for the rest of the trip and the following six months, would it?

Wrong. The ensuing days fell into a black hole. John's hangovers left him unbearably grouchy. He and Thom started on their mutual harangue. Then the triangle would turn and I'd be left out in the cold. Mood swings were indulged in like iced tea on a hot afternoon, guzzled and then drained.

Our destination was Halifax, where Rinpoche had moved the center of Vajradhatu, the Buddhist organization. He claimed that the Canadian soil was more fertile for meditation practice, the natives less aggressive than Americans, and the lifestyle more in keeping with the gentleness of Buddha dharma. Secretly, we were privy to the real reason: he wanted to establish an enlightened society. He had come to the alcoholically grandiose conclusion that the best structure for a spiritual utopia was a monarchy. Indeed, the formation of his kingdom was the latest assignment on our spiritual path.

After extensive research by his minions, he decided Nova Scotia was most appropriate for his vision, a small foreign province with little political influence. He established his own army, navy, and even an air force, staffed by weekend warriors, sailors, and aviators. Former hippies were now being told to find lucrative jobs, buy elegant houses, and dress in three- piece suits in order to build a power base. The more financially endowed were buying boats and planes, and sleek new Mercedes became ubiquitous.

He assigned a battery of henchmen called the Guards, and suddenly large men in pinstriped suits appeared at Rinpoche's talks, flanking the auditoriums like Nazi bouncers. We were told they were there to establish a sense of "container" at all the functions, standing at attention on the periphery. Some students were disturbed by these developments, but the dissenters were cajoled back into the herd by the party line that we were serious students of Buddhism, weren't we? No longer hippy trippers browsing a spiritual supermarket, we needed to manifest in a more orderly fashion. Like many Boomers, we were mutating into Yuppies, but our impetus was at the invitation of our guru, which made us superior to the others, whom we scorned because they were doing it out of greed. Advanced practitioners were told that the plan was to infiltrate Nova Scotia and eventually we would take over, thereby creating the Kingdom of Shambala. Rinpoche claimed this would happen, not by force, but by example. The simple people of that impoverished maritime province would be so impressed by our ways that they would want to join our utopian society. Rinpoche, as the universal monarch, would govern the people with his fearless proclamation of sanity.

Having lived in British Columbia for seven years, I was intimately familiar with the Canadian mentality and I was disgusted at his naivete. Most Canadians are fifties-types with distinct family values, and they don't like their boats rocked. I once asked Rinpoche in front of a room full of people if he really thought Nova Scotia would secede from Canada to become the Kingdom of Shambala, and he didn't bat an eyelash. He claimed that it would happen perfectly naturally. A few years later the Canadian government placed the Vajradhatu community on their subversive list.

John and I were uncomfortable about the direction in which Rinpoche was headed, and especially by his spiritual chauvinism, which touted his particular lineage of Tibetan Buddhism as having all the answers. Students adapted a sense of superiority based on the access he provided to teachings that had previously been kept secret within the confines of Tibet's isolation. Again, we were helplessly uneducated. The same lack of awareness about chemical and codependency extended to our ignorance about belonging to a cult. Later, we were astonished at how his tactics fit the mold.

Rinpoche played into Western greed. He took fifteen hundred hip students and encouraged us to shed our counterculture plumage for a formal lifestyle, which he claimed would be a reflection of our discipline and exertion. We were ordered to stop tripping and make enough money to support him in the lavish elegance to which we were all about to become accustomed. He began to insist on a courtly style of life. Indeed, his home was now referred to as "The Court." We were to treat him like a king; his middle-class British wife was to be called "Her Highness, Lady Diana." His head honchos were titled "Lords" and their wives became "Ladies." Students who had come off of communes a few years before, or from the sweat of the antiwar movement were now lapping up the very bourgeois lifestyles we had all protested. Livelihoods changed from subsistence to opulence. We were encouraged to study the Shambala arts of ikebana flower arranging, calligraphy, archery, and dressage. Ragged-assed hippies became monkeys mimicking English nobility. It was hysterically funny and perturbing at the same time. There was a Mouse that Roared quality, and there was also an underlying oxymoronic undertow, of which John was particularly suspicious. What did this have to do with Buddhism?

When Rinpoche insisted that we adapt European manners, John flew into a rage. "He's got a bunch of ignorant, provincial assholes who won't even listen to the evening news, parading around like Louise Quinze fops, crowing because now they know which side of the fork to eat off!" Since that was something we'd both been raised to do, it failed to give us a feeling of superiority. At least our dinner companions no longer commented on our strange handling of utensils.

John had always viewed Rinpoche as the Good Father he never found in Steinbeck. He would write him little notes.

Sir, I want to thank you for steering me in the right direction. There is no way that I can do this without the strong connection and presence of you as you guide my steps. My ego is large. Some people bring it out more than others. I think I know so damned much, but as we both know, the light of my knowledge could not illuminate even a flea's glove compartment in your universe.

Please help me. I am powerless over the need to have others respect what I have seen and learned and this is such a waste of time. It is compulsive and I know where it comes from, but it does me no fine service. Please help me with this in the cause of your skillful means. People treat me with kindness because they see the light of your face on mine. Please let me keep it there for a few more days. I supplicate you in all your forms. Help me be ever mindful of your living presence, as the entire phenomenal world is your dance and delight, without exception.


Hoping Rinpoche could heal his childhood wounds, John thought he had finally found a father figure he could trust.

As Rinpoche's drinking increased, we began to see holes in the fabric of our devotion. During a seminar that summer, Rinpoche was so drunk during his evening talks that several guards had to haul him on and off the stage. One night all he could say was "Be kind to each other. Please, be kind to each other" over and over. It was horrible to see him so inebriated, but it was even more chilling to watch the sycophantic fawning of his henchmen. John and I maintained a healthy sense of discrimination during that period, at the risk of being shunned, as happens in all cults when the student questions. Maybe we had a nose for it, because of all the obsequious behavior that manifests around fame, but we sensed a disturbing quality of delusion both in Rinpoche and his yes-men. Still, we wanted to check out Halifax, where many of our friends had already moved their homes and businesses. We were itching to leave the unreality of Boulder's Disneyesque confines, and hoped Halifax could offer a more cosmopolitan atmosphere.

At first glance, John agreed there was no way on earth those uptight Haligonians with their blue blood, or the peasants who had immigrated from Old Scotia, would ever leave their Church of England or Catholic religions. It was ridiculous to think of them ever becoming Buddhists, as Rinpoche predicted. Thom and John reacted to Halifax as if they'd been thrown in a vat of boiling oil. They were appalled at the slowness of the traffic, dismayed by the last-place-on-earth quality, the utter bleakness. John kicked and bellowed like a bull in a pen.

"There's no damn way I'm going to live here unless I have a guaranteed ticket out at all times. Boulder is provincial enough." We feasted on lobster as our friends showed us around the city. I convinced the captain of a pleasure cruiser to take us around the bay. All he wanted in exchange for the trip was a bottle of scotch. To this day, that poor captain still tells people that he met the Steinbeck brothers and they consumed the entire bottle during the first hour of the voyage. He barely got a drop. John drank vodka that week, which always gave him a bizarre, hallucinogenic high. On our way back to the Maine ferry one night, he suddenly ordered Thom to pull the car over to the side of the road. He leapt out and ran out to the middle of a field, as if he were being chased by bloodhounds. Thom and I sat there, incredulous.

"He has become Mother. The same mood swings and violent emotions," Thom said, shaking his head. Silent minutes passed on the dark, empty road and then Thom called out for him impatiently. John came back subdued, insisting he'd had a religious experience. He'd kicked off his shoes while he was running around the field and was magically led back to the place where they lay. This was an omen, a sign of his liberation. He railed to us about his freedom and what he saw out there in that field. At the hotel, when I couldn't listen any longer, he went next door to Thom's room and raved on. We had no idea what he was even talking about.

From then on, especially when we visited old friends of theirs in upstate New York, Thom would flash me a look that said, "See, now he's where he belongs. You can't touch him here. No girls allowed." Early on, Elaine told me she was stunned by the jealousy Thom exhibited toward me.

"Don't you find it disgusting that a grown man can be so resentful about his brother's girlfriend?" she asked. "Johnny said to me 'Wouldn't you know Thom would be like that?' and I said yes, unfortunately, I knew he had it in him. Does he think he's going to have John cornered for the rest of his life? It's pitiful."

Johnny told me not to take it personally, that Thom was that way with all his women, but it confused and hurt me deeply. I'd see Thom nonverbally putting out the message that I was excluded, and Johnny would be ignoring the whole thing, exuding his own static about Thom's expectations. When all else failed and there was enough booze, things would fold into the sloppy category of We're Steinbecks. I loathed the stale, closed system of Thom's mystique. All I saw were a couple of incredibly wounded bozos posturing like drunken apes, legends in their own minds.

I was starting to lose heart. John's horrible outbursts of anger, which were mostly related to his family, were wearing down my sanity. Not knowing how closely linked they were to his alcoholism, I was utterly confused as to where I fit in. When we were alone, the family baggage would slip off of him like snake skin and he would be at ease, sweet, and loveable.

Years later I saw women making gravel in the streets of Kathmandu, chipping away at a huge stone in the afternoon heat. That's what it felt like. I'd chip and hack and clear away, trying to get to the tender heart I knew was trapped inside John's calcified scar tissue, petrified I wouldn't make it in time. I began to dread that there might be so many obstacles lurking in John's psyche that the task would be impossible. Unfortunately, within the Buddhist community, seeking outside help in the form of therapy was considered taboo. Meditation was touted as the cure-all. When I sought advice within the community, I was given the useless recommendation that I should encourage John to practice meditation, or to sit more myself.

Sometimes his moods manifested as downright sadism. The friends we visited in upstate New York took us to a glider port one afternoon. John put me in the plane and winked to the pilot as he whispered, "Give her a whip stall." I had no idea what that meant, but since Johnny had done a lot of gliding, I figured he wanted to share the experience with me. The plane rose gradually and I was entranced by the graceful airiness of the silent motion. Suddenly, we started going straight up, nose first, tail down and then, without warning, the plane flipped over. As the green fields rushed up to meet us, my stomach felt like it was hurtling through my brain and out the top of my head. Terrified, I said prayers. I thought of the kids, I figured it was the end. And then, as suddenly as the downward lurch had happened, we leveled off easily. The pilot flew on calmly. I broke the silence.

"Did you lose control of the plane?" I cried.

"That was a whip stall, ma'am. Like your husband asked for." I sat stunned, blinking like a toad in hot ashes.

"Have you ever been in a whip stall before?" he asked gently.

"No, I've never even been in a glider before."

"And your husband sent you up without telling you what a whip stall is?"

I nodded.

"Lady, your husband is a sadist. That was a cruel thing to do."

I emerged from the plane, seething. It was the end of our fall foliage tour and the beginning of a giant six-year whip stall in our relationship.
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Re: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

Postby admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:43 pm

26. Close Encounters

NANCY


People still ask me how I managed to stay in the relationship. In those early years, despite John's mood swings and heavy drinking, we clung to the sweetness we saw in each other. Our survival-mode living skills dovetailed beautifully. We had both grown up in a war zone, so we were addicted to a constant crisis and drama. As children, when insanity screamed from the rafters, no one was allowed to speak about it. We learned not to trust or even feel emotions. However, as is typical in recovery, those childhood safeguards eventually stopped working. The strength of our emotions was so powerful that we were forced to deal with feelings directly, instead of using the habitual defense of stuffing them.

As our relationship deepened, we dredged up the unimaginable and unmentionable from each other's psyches. Our psychic Roto-Rooting turned our safe haven into the trench warfare of our childhoods. In his search for recognition at any price, John had become a master manipulator. Abandoned by our parents as they chased after their own narcissistic reflections, we both had self-esteem issues, which resulted in the deleterious practice of people pleasing. Since neither of us knew how to communicate discomfort without anger, our fights became more frequent. And then, strangely, in the midst of our mutual napalm, we could drop the rage enough to give comfort, to search for meaning and hope. We never gave up on each other.

Later, when I became personally familiar with the private lives of my existential heroes, Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs, and Ginsberg, I learned those guys had grappled with the same painful issues. For many years I have corresponded with beat icon Neal Cassady's widow, Carolyn, who was also Kerouac's longtime lover. She is one of the few women I've known who can truly understand my journey with John. Once Carolyn told me:

"People, especially feminists, ask me constantly why I didn't dump Neal. The circumstances he provided me were tailor-made, exactly what I needed to jolt me out of attitudes blocking my growth. Suffering is necessary in order to change. I pity those who aren't strong enough or too blind to have known such men as Neal, John, and Jack."

Psychiatrist R. D. Laing's widow, Marguerite, has also given me enormous solace about that chaotic period. Ronnie was a consummate alcoholic, yet Marguerite stayed with him because every other man paled in comparison, drunk or sober. She knows the magnetism of a man who reveals the full sweep of human emotions, from drooling drunkard to a brilliant, creative cult hero. We've spent hours talking about what it's like to live out the myth of Beauty and the Beast, as Ronald Colman morphs into Quasimodo.

William Burroughs watched his son die of a failed liver transplant in his twenties because he couldn't stop drinking and wore out the new organ. Born to a drug-addicted mother, Billy emerged from the womb craving a fix. Although William wrote with a tough veneer, the death devastated him. Watching a loved one possessed by the demons of addiction is heartbreaking.

Allen Ginsberg struggled to detach from his lifelong lover, Peter Orlovsky, when he drank. "We made a vow to enter Heaven together," Allen said. "It's hard to break that vow."

The radical feminists and recovery police would prefer us to toss guys like Ronnie, Neal, Jack, and John aside. They would chastise Carolyn, Marguerite, and me for our weakness and lack of self-esteem. But it's never that black and white when you love an addict, especially when you stop pointing the finger at their transgressions and look at your own character defects.

Robin Norwood, who wrote the codependency gospel, Women Who Love Too Much, is a pioneer in understanding the nuances of tempestuous relationships. In her subsequent book, Why? she explores the link between childhood wounds and an inclination to attract certain events and people into our lives. To toss John's problems out like yesterday's garbage would only have meant I would have attracted another difficult relationship. In order to clean up the mess in my own psyche, I had to develop stronger boundaries to keep from getting sucked into John's maelstrom. That cannot be done in a vacuum; I need to practice in a relationship.

Norwood goes so far as to question whether the prevention of addiction is even desirable. She claims that although the stakes are high and the price one pays for failure can be immeasurable, addiction can create a pressure which results in personal transformation. I am grateful that there are some veterans of the recovery movement who have emerged with such outrageous insight. I rode astride the razor's edge with John, and although we placed our bets on victory, the odds were on insanity or death, mine or his. As a result, I learned about the true nature of unconditional love. There is a bond so profound that it can surpass the ravages of child abuse, a garbage pail of addictions, and finally, even death. Nine years later, when John embraced sobriety wholeheartedly, he made his amends to me. "My drinking must have taken years off your life. Can you ever forgive me?"

Norwood examines the theory that people with AIDS can be seen as a group of souls dedicated to expressing universal laws of sacrifice. Their suffering may be the catalyst that advances the evolution of humanity toward compassion and acceptance. Similarly, in the early eighties, I believe many addicts worked on a soul level to raise society's awareness about the effects of drugs and alcohol. When the dust settled, I felt that we had bitten off a huge chunk of the collective consciousness by striving to heal those ills on a societal level, as well as in ourselves. When the nights are darkest, our souls labor toward a quantum leap in spiritual evolution. I would have walked through fire in order to free myself from dependency, rage, and fear. My quest began when, as a thirteen-year-old beatnik, these words of Rimbaud's Illuminations were etched on my soul.

Mon am eternal,
Observe ton voe
Malgre la nuit seul
Et le jour en feu.

My eternal soul,
Observe your vow
Despite the night alone
And the day on fire.


In the spring of 1981, John and I flew to Monterey to watch the filming of Cannery Row. Evenings were filled with cocktail parties, late dinners, and midnight swims. Debra Winger swaggered around like a drunken sailor and bellowed "Hey, Schwarzenegger" whenever she saw John, which only she found hysterically funny. Nick Nolte swallowed his wife's wedding ring one night during a row. Every morning, as the crew gathered at the coffee shop for breakfast, he would report that he'd defecated on a newspaper in the hotel room and dug around until he finally found it three days later.

I could not relate to these people. I didn't like the way the little groupies flocked around John. The minute they heard his name, their eyes lidded over like something that had crawled from under a rock and they went into automatic piranha mode, slicing me out of the water. Away from his relative anonymity in Boulder, for the first time I saw a side of John that I detested. When he was recognized for his name, rather than for himself or any accomplishment, his way of smoothing over the omission was to become extremely charming, almost unctuous. As if that would prevent anyone from noticing that he had done nothing remarkable in the past fifteen years.

The exposure of John's insecurities was a double-edged sword. My reaction and his defense solidified our fears of each other, but it also deepened our intimacy. As more of our hidden tendencies surfaced, we were terrified one of us would give up and run away. Fight or flight was becoming a regular stance. But there was also that stand-up guy in John. He had a rock-solid ability to look the truth in the eye and spit at it, which inspired me to stay the course.

I noticed that I was getting stronger, no longer willing to do the walk-on-eggshells when his nerves were on edge in Steinbeck Country. In the blink of an eye, I saw his ambivalence about being recognized as Steinbeck's son swing the gamut from enjoyment to disgust. Because he'd dealt with the whiplash of his reactions for so many years by himself, he found it difficult to let me in. I wanted to share his emotions, but he was too busy pretending they didn't exist. Rather than simply admitting his vulnerability, he feigned a false ease toward the onslaught of attention.

The pressure kept building. While we visited the Cannery Row set in Hollywood, we got into a terrible fight. He ripped his fingernails down my cheek, leaving four long trails from eyelid to chin. The film's producer, Michael Phillips, who also made Close Encounters, invited us to dinner the next night. I wore a ton of makeup and made the excuse that a large puppy had scratched me. I wasn't sure if I fooled anyone, but Michael and his wife were very gracious.

After our experience at seminary, Johnny told his friends that he'd finally met a woman who wouldn't tolerate his bullshit. He sang paeans to my strength and the fact that he'd found his intellectual and emotional match. Now the intimacy was cutting too close to the bone. He had never unburdened himself so openly to any woman about the conflict of being his father's son. Fearful of my scrutiny, he resented the fact that I saw through his "playing Steinbeck." He had lowered his guard; if I had gotten that close, then perhaps I would abandon him. His Hollywood pose didn't help matters. Given enough alcohol, you would have thought he was his father in the flesh. I wanted to tear down the pompous facade. Disgusted, I raged about his bombastic masquerade, which other people blindly saw as charm. "Why do you feel the need to be so pretentious? Why can't you just be yourself? When are you going to develop your own talent, something that is genuinely yours, besides your hollow name?"

Although I was clunky and harsh at times, I felt as if I were fighting for this man's life. I knew that if he didn't resolve these issues, he would waste away. It cut both ways, the demand to discover his true nature and find his own genius was also being made of me. Often during those years, my mind would drift back to that night at seminary when John wept bitterly in my arms. We had to heal the wounds in order to save our souls.

I began to wonder about my penchant for saving conflicted men. While their brilliant complexity challenged my intellect, the high-maintenance regime of pep talks and cheerleading detracted from the task at hand, that of developing a stronger sense of myself. When the abandonment issues caused by my father's molestations were revealed, I would eventually understand why my insecurities were heightened when some bimbette came up to John and played like I didn't exist. Who was I, anyway? I hated the fact that my desire to stay home and raise my kids held no cachet in John's world. I was a full-time mother and housewife, but the act of propping up John to face his demons was enormously time consuming. I desperately wanted a stronger identity, a job, a credential, a title, something that was mine that didn't involve our relationship. In order to create a space of my own, I took a part-time position as administrative assistant in the Vajradhatu Office of International Affairs, which governed the worldwide centers. Also, I devoted two hours a day to my Buddhist spiritual practice, ngondro (pronounced NUN-dro).

In the Tibetan tradition of Tantric Vajrayana Buddhism, the purpose of ngondro is to purify body, speech, and mind. It is the foundation of all other practices, meaning "prelude" in Tibetan. The Buddhist path to enlightenment is divided into three stages, or Yanas. Hinayana meditation techniques uncover the student's hidden neurotic tendencies. I had spent hundreds of hours in sitting meditation, following the breath in and out and labeling thoughts as they arise as "thinking" and gently bringing awareness back to the breath. Grounded spiritually in the Hinayana when we met, John and I had to go through a Hinayana period in our relationship. We had to befriend every nasty, dark, demonic emotion that was buried in our psyches. That awareness would bring enormous humility and acceptance of human nature, our own and each other's, and every other being we encountered.

Rinpoche used to call it "sitting with your shit." Habitual patterns are turned into compost, nurturing your Buddha nature, your basic goodness. Unless you become intimate with the shadow side of your psyche, the characteristics that you are too embarrassed for anyone to see will keep you from knowing yourself and human nature. John and I plowed the ground with fortitude and tenacity until every grotesque rock and twisted root was delivered up to the scrutiny of discriminating awareness. While we managed to conquer all of them, it took our life's blood. Our guts were ripped apart by each other's curious, insistent sword and spilled on the ground for all to see. This was true warriorship, in Rinpoche's sense of the word. He defined a warrior as one who finds authenticity in the search for his true nature. There was an energy between us, a centrifugal force that jet-propelled our quest for self-knowledge.

The second stage in Buddhism is the Mahayana. Now that the earth is plowed and charity has begun at home, the practitioner can afford to be gentle to himself and to expand that generosity to others. Realizing the enemy resides within, not in the other, the task at hand is to tame our own beasts and quit trying to change each other. We must take full responsibility for the chaos and discomfort, examining with microscopic detail the part we play when we fight over slights, whether real and imagined. Later, when experts would observe "Codependents don't make friends, they take hostages," we would understand our mutual acts of terrorism.

Within this context, John and I had taken Bodhisattva vows, promising we would return with each rebirth for as many lifetimes as it would take for every sentient being in the universe to achieve enlightenment, until the last gnat was liberated. Committed to the benefit of all beings, we renounced all self-serving comforts. Rinpoche gave us Bodhisattva names. Mine was Deathless Turquoise Torch. John's was Egoless Thunder, which he joked could be inverted to Thundering Ego. When I got my black belt in codependent studies, I renounced my vows. I no longer want to save the world. It is not healthy for me to put anyone's salvation before my own. It plays into the codependent tendency to comfort the victimizers in hopes that they will be less apt to flip out and kill you. This is not honest behavior; it's a way of controlling and manipulating the environment.

Scholars may accuse me of missing the point, but this is precisely where I began to depart from Buddhism. I had to define a code of ethics that worked in the real world of addictions, not merely in scripture. As John's behavior pushed the parameters of decency, I had to concentrate on my despair and my dis-ease. I was forced to find comfort for myself, rather than in him. My misery could no longer be blamed on his character defects. I could not change him, only myself. This insight was extraordinarily humbling.

At seminary, Rinpoche introduced us to the Vajrayana, the Diamond Vehicle, the most dangerous of all spiritual paths. In this stage, the world becomes free of duality. Things simply are, beyond good and bad, black and white. This is where the magic happens, and I believe it is the basis for unconditional love, the acceptance of both shadow and enlightenment in a partner, the best and the worst. At this point, the student traditionally begins ngondro. Using visualizations and ritual practices, it begins with prostrations, which originally came from the Indian Buddhist tradition, and continues with three other equally grueling practices involving mantras and offerings of repetitive chants, jewels, and perfumed rice. We were to do one hundred thousand full prostrations, from standing to lying flat on the floor, to eliminate the schism between the sacred and the profane. This is an act of surrender and commitment to the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha. It took me three years to complete them, and the psychological and spiritual states they evoked played heavily upon our relationship. Prostrations hone you to become real, honest, and direct. They knock the stuffing out of you and sometimes you want to knock the crap out of everyone else. The practice does not create love and light. Domesticity becomes an irritant. Rinpoche said one has to be a saint to live with a practitioner who is doing prostrations. He called it "airing your dirty laundry." They bring up ancient psychic dreck and deposit it in front of the entire world. There is no place to hide and everyone wants to hide from you, threatened because you see things more clearly. I once told my meditation instructor that just when things were going smoothly, prostrations seemed to create conflict.

"Why do you always want things to go well in your life?" she asked. "Do you even think that's remotely possible?" Rinpoche encouraged learning to live with chaos, and while I believe it served me well as a discipline, peace of mind is my priority now. I don't always get it, but I believe I deserve it.

Since John never meditated formally, we never practiced together. "My other girlfriends used to lord their practice over me," he said. ''I'm grateful you don't use that as leverage to prove you're better than me. And thanks for not nagging like they did." I knew that would never work, and besides, I noticed he did a pretty good job of beating himself up about his laziness. I found a relief and renewal by going to the community shrine room to practice, or closing the door on the one in our house. John was always supportive of my practice time, as if in some way I was doing it for both of us. "I love that you take the time to communicate with the universe on a daily basis."

One winter night in 1982, we rented a cabin in Rocky Mountain National Park, thirty miles from Boulder. Because we had started an instant family with our union, there were times when we needed to get away from the children, in hopes of finding ourselves, and our coupleship. We left Megan and Michael with Paul and brought along Sluggo, our Abyssinian kitten. John drank heavily and started his usual late-night monologue, which had been failing to charm me for months. Something about being stuck out there in the snow with him made me feel bone cold and alone. The next morning he woke up, still drunk, and continued where he left off. As we drove home through the mountain forests, the contrast between the purity of the white snow on the firs, the crackling blue sky, and his smelly, degraded appearance made me nauseous. Gone was my noble, aristocratic lover, as well as his wit and urbane manners. I saw an ape, Quasimodo locked in a belfry of oblivion, and my heart recoiled.

When we stopped to walk in the woods, John carelessly placed Sluggo on a tree limb. As the kitten crawled nearly out of reach, I quickly grabbed him. I was annoyed. Would John have let him climb up the other fifty feet to the top, and then what? Would he have waited three days till Sluggo decided to come down or would he leave when it got dark because it was getting cold and then always miss that cute little guy? Or maybe he would create a drama and call the fire department, miles away. Not only was John no longer so much fun to be with, because no one was home, but he was becoming a colossal bore, a time waster, a nuisance, a fool. 1 wanted to scream, "Get a grip!"

When we returned to Boulder, I started making phone calls to find help. I heard that some community members had formed a group which Rinpoche named Sarpashana (Sanskrit for "peacock" because they supposedly transmute poison) to study substance abuse. I asked John to attend a meeting with me, and I told my story of the ride through the forest that day. I was shocked to see people actually crying in sympathy. These alcoholics had started to face their own drinking problems. They were able to identify with my despair. Several shared that they had heard similar reactions from their loved ones. When they put themselves in my place, driving through the glistening snow, completely alienated from John, they were struck with the depth of suffering they were causing in their own lives. They urged me to seek professional counseling at the county-funded Alcohol Rehabilitation Center (the ARC).

Johnny sat there in his inimitable style, listening to every word in sympathy.

"Yep, I'm an alcoholic!" he announced in his typical stand-up fashion. He didn't notice that everyone looked at him as if to say, Yeah, and what are you going to do about it?

"The game is up," I told John when we got home. "I am going to find out what to do about this craziness. I will do whatever is necessary to get some answers, and if that doesn't work, I will leave you."

The fact that he'd recently been arrested for drunk driving kept John from slipping into defensiveness. The judge presiding over the DUI case ordered John to see a psychologist named Carl Sternberg, who specialized in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Carl suggested in addition to his sessions with John, that we do some couples counseling with him and his wife, Benta. While they did teach us some communication skills, the Sternbergs knew nothing about alcoholism. They mistakenly thought they could help in spite of John's drinking. Now, therapists know not to treat someone until they're clean and sober. To this day, the Sternbergs admit, "We blew it with the Steinbecks." Nevertheless, the fact that John was being watched by the law and by two outsiders caused him to modify his behavior.

The turning point came when I started attending Al-Anon meetings, where I saw women who had been married for forty years to alcoholics actually laughing! They had developed a sense of humor about their lives. I wanted what they had and I was willing to go to any lengths to achieve it. John went to court-ordered AA meetings and claimed he enjoyed the camaraderie. As they always did during his periods of sobriety, things started to lighten up.

In fact, we felt so buoyant, we decided to get married. We had been together for three years. If I were going to continue to put my children and my life in John's hands to such an extent, I wanted a real commitment before going any further. John felt it was necessary to cement the work we were doing. "I admire the fact that you can stick with me through this process," he said. I wanted to know why I'd developed that tenacity. Why did I feel like I've been fighting for my life all my life?
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