baptismal tchotchke, pewter plate with Basel Munster, circa ’71
This thing seems to have eleven sides…it goes up to eleven…
There were three years where if I had died, I would have gone straight to nowhere… purgatory. All you Dante fans know what I’m talking about… I was not Baptized till I was three… so I actually remember that scarry kraut putting a water mark on my third eye and Peter the Basel Butcher (biblical rock and head of the Midevil Butcher’s Guild and frequent Fasnacht piper) carried me up the aisle. I was terrified, like Sophia Coppola in God Father II. Only Peter was my God Father and still is, but he’s probably killed a lot more things than any mafia Don could dream of. He kills for living and has a collection of many sharp knives… ancient steel… Swiss steel.
This goes back to my question about the body and language. Peter’s wife (not my Godmother, who is Trudi and lives on a sheep farm in Whales) had the same cancer as my old man, only the Swiss kept cutting it out with their sharp steel and she’s still alive… it is a struggle and they butcher her again and again, bus she’s alive. The old man they refused to cut at Sloan Catering. So the ghouls filled him full of strange drugs and took away his clothes and things and like that vega table lady in the news: fed him by tubes and killed him with indescriminite Chemo and never even gave him a bong hit to ease the pain… but I digress.
It all some how reminds me of my first nervous breakdown I had during a final examn for Martha Nussbaum. She kept talking about the fragility of goodness and Greek Tragedy. Little did I know I was walking into one. I had been dating this rich Hawaiian Japanese girl and her mother decided to fly me out to Hawaii as a Christmas gift… that would have been stressful enough, but this creepy South African Jew (son of an arms or diamond dealer no doubt and a real pig and apparently rich as pig shit) was threatening to join us and make it a cozy threesum (the girl liked to think this guy was just a friend, but who are we kidding?…and sho’ ’nuff, he eventually he got in her pants… I knew he was trying, the mother knew he was trying, the sister, the brother, even the estranged father knew… she really couldn’t have been that dumb… for chrissakes she’s a E.R. doctor in the Bronx now!) So that was a freak out, but what was worse is that I’d done up my dorm room as the Sistine Shrapnel… a sort of grafitti/expressionist five sided installation. The ceiling was done up as a Hans Aarp meets Keith Haring and I had Kline and Japanese Calligraphy and German ghouls and it was pretty fucking cool. Parents fresh in from Debuque dropping off Freshmen would poke their heads in and laugh: “Psychedelic”…. Really it wasn’t all that trippy, but it was intense and colorful. Kids would knock on my door (okay they may have been under the influence, but I didn’t ask or tell) just to sit in the room and look for a while. One kid told me: “Man this is the exact reason I came to this school.”
The fucking administration should have charged tickets, but instead threatened me with ten thousand dollar lawsuit. I had this and Hawaii on my head when I went to my Greek Tragedy final. It was a question on Plato and Aristotle that set me off. Something about five paragraphs summing up their differences on what the good human life is or something.
I was all: “Five paragraphs for that? What am I, a japanese Poet here?”
I kept trying, but hating what I’d written so I’d tear out the pages and start again. I went through about three or four of those little blue exam books and was quite literally in a pile of torm paper on the edge of tears and just spinning in infinity. I didn’t finish the exam…at least not to my own satisfaction, but went back to the Sistine Shrapnel to start grinding the paint off with a sander I’d borrowed from a local RI student(who’d fallen madly in love with her Chinese T.A. whose father was apparently in the pharmeceutical industry in China and imported opium and was insanely rich in Hong Kong…weird… you’d ask him what his dad did…cause it was obvious from his car that he was loaded, and he’d say: “Oh he’s an Opium dealer” and wait for your jaw to drop, mine never did, so he liked me… I mean who doesn’t realize that traditional Chinese medicine might involve opium at some point… even Woody Allen knows that).
I had only a few hours before catching the train to New York and the plane to Hawaii. I was a wreck, but busy. In the dust of ruined frescoes I got a call from Martha Nussbaum who’d been alerted by an hysterical T.A. that I was about to go out the window or something (honestly the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind YET…I was too busy). She and the T.A. had taken the pile of half finished torn essays and glued and taped them back together and she was calling to see if I was still alive and tell me that I’d passed the test….I’d probably written more than needed and in an insane hyperlinked bit and pieces way… Very William S. Burroughs….she claimed I’d hit all the salient points with my shotgun technique. Thank God for the Pass/Fail good old Brown (before they fucked that up too).
I remember her saying: “They were good essays, why did you stop?”
“Were they as good as Plato? Aristotle? Euripides?…” I shrieked.
Clearly I was putting myself under preassure that tears a building down and puts people on streets.
Had this been a comedy and not a tragedy Martha would have quoted me the old joke: euripides, eumenedies and we would have had a good laugh about the torn pages and who ripped what and mended when….ha ha ha.
It didn’t work out like that, but it was really nice of her to call and I started crying like a baby and no one was more surprised than me. It is possible to be clinically depressed and have nø idea. She stayed on the phone with me like Yossarian in Catch 22 saying over and over: “There There.. There there.” Which begs the question: is Catch 22 a comedy or a tragedy?
Any way Martha was real Mensch (can women be a mensch?… saint? and naturally Brown lost her to Chicago)… a real life saver and in the only compliment she’d really like: a good human being. She taught me this one lesson: Goodness is not always fragile even if people always are and will be.
It occured to me the other day, that the book drawings (which involve tearing up the books) are directly related to that breakdown which went down and down and down in blue Hawaii, so far away from blue Hawaii, but that is another story.
