Tunnel (from arc installation), oil on cigar box, ITIN ’04
Sophmore year of college I worked as dishwasher at chez rattez (or Sharpe Refectory) to earn money to get me back to Paris so I could finish my novel Heroes (or To Walk a Circle). It was the story of two kids Phil and Pat (who went by the name Niz). Niz was a punk rocker who I’d seen on the left bank four of five years earlier. He and Hemmingway inspired my sixteen year old brain to try writing a novel when my Parents and I lived at the American Cathedral on Ave. George V for a month (more on this trip later). I started seeing this guy in his red leathers and mohawk all over Paris. He haunted me like a ghost, so I started asking myself: “Who is this guy? What’s he doing in Paris? Is he a drug addict? Heroin?”
Ironically, the main character turned out to be this sullen Dead Head, Phil. Niz sort of spiraled out of control on heroin and hash, where as Phil met the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to France… they had a stalking sort of love affair all over Paris. Phil wanted to be a painter long before I did. You could say his is directly responsible for my becoming a painter (my father was a failed painter… it didn’t seem like a great career choice even at 16). It was Phil and Caroline (more on her later). I blame both of them… and the old man too if we’re throwing stones.
Flash forward and I’m 19. I’ve been on Heroes for Five years… workshopping it in Brown Fiction writing classes (where British types tell me it may not be appropriate to name a novel after a pop song?!). I want closure on it, already. I decide to take a solo trip (the one I ended up doing in ’98), when my rabbi and attorney with the shared name of David… (me middle, him first), but he is a Cohain and I’m …I don’t know what I am, Russian Gypsy by way of Basel, that was what my father liked to think (and you do find Itins only in Switzerland and Russia)…
Anyways, my attorney calls from Yale and tells me He’s coming to Paris too. I figure he’ll play Niz and I’ll play Phil. Flash forward to the Dordogne where Davey baby has hooked us up with lodging at the local castle. His Yalie pal who has been nick named Chateau at school because he lives in one, let’s us crash with his dad (a famous American writer of Russian spy thrillers) and his knock out of a young French Paramour. We drink the local near rosé red wine from a cask in the celler by the oubliette. I start reading Saughter House Five for the first time and editing my Heroes draft.
One day we made a picnic and walked along the unused train tracks that slither snake-like around and through the green hills of Dordogne. Chateau pulled out a ball of black finger hash and we climbed into a fenerated castel-like turret to smoke and drink the wine. The spice like perfume smell mixed with vin rouge and the green alfalfa and the safron sunflowers growing in the fields: a perfect moment – all along the watchtower, princes kept the view.
After lunch we walked along the rails and smoked more and came to a kilometer long tunnel. You couldn’t see the other end and we walked into the darkness where the wine and hash grabbed my brain and I became existentially high… it was almost a flashback (I’d taken LSD earlier that year at a Grateful Dead show and had messianic hullucinations… the world was a lotus flower dream and I had to sheperd all the people I knew because they were essentially characters in my dream… it was a sort of writer’s trip I guess… The ony song I remember from the show is Dylan’s Quinn The Eskimo).
I realized suddenly that I was in a tunnel and that tunnels are a metaphor for death. I realised that I was surrnounded by two Jews and the trinity came harshly to mind.
“I’m in a tunnel surrounded by these two people who are thieves and they will steel my face. They will kill me and I will be a skull… Alas poor Yorick.”
We got deeper into the tunnel and suddenly I realized that the entire history off narrative was a conspiracy leading up to this moment: Metaphors for death, no! All metaphor had been invented so that I could know what a metaphor was so that I could read this murder metaphor at this moment… this moment when I would die!
I walked the train ties in terror, waiting for my friends to draw their long knives and butcher me: initiate me into their world of the dead. The hash was a trick…. A trap. I walked and waited and walked and waited, listening for their footsteps to change in the solid dark, listening for the sound of steel unsheathed and the stick of the bare bodkin… when Low and Behold we were coming again to the light. You could see it in the far distance… a white speck at first, like a star. Was it Paradise? Was it doom? Were we three thieves, or three kings?
And then we were back in light and back in day and I was still alive and staring face to face with a purple wild flower. The Flower glowed in purple and yellow and I swear I could see it breathing and hear it smile at me.
I said to myself, “So this is what the hippies meant by flower power.”
Never have I fealt such relief. The whole Universe changed flavor.
“What’s a metaphor,” I said to myself – quoting Meera Viswanathan, my Indian teacher of Japanese Literature (don’t ask… she was a real beauty who’d stumbled on to Buddhism by way of Keuroac… Sidhartha by way of Hesse…)”What’s a Meddow for? To feed a Cow, of course.”
The Swiss in me loved that bovine joke as much as the Hindu in her did. I laughed and laughed and later we stayed up drinking wine and scotch with the writer and his lover and he talked for a long time about Vonnegut and other writers I should read and he signed a book for me: October Circle…weird.
Mr. Bubble – Plato’s Perfect Hex
When The old man was kicking (and this is the central story of Arc) he saw a dark tunnel in my mother’s closet. I woke her up at four in the morning to move his huge medical bed. She resisted, but I remembered how much looking at that flower had changed my head way back when in the French country side. I’d done his terror trip already. I knew how to calm him down…take him home.
I said to my mother, “Wake up we’re moving the bed. He’s scared of that closet.”
“What closet?”
“Your closet. The one Christian and Damon used to lock me in. It’s a scary place. Trust me. He sees a tunnel. He’s scarred.”
“It won’t help.”
And my father, perhaps hearing his wife’s voice for the first time in hours, let loose a cry of fear and anguish, “There’s a girl under the bed. She’s dying! Save her, Cookie (it was his term of endarment for her). Save her!”
I said, “Mom, I’m the only one in this room whose done enough acid to know that he’s having a bad trip. We’re moving this bed to look out into the rock garden. It will make him calmer… Please believe me! NOW!”
He was screaming about the girl, the tunnel, and the house on fire… He was Willy Lowman and the trees were burning and morphine and she climbed out of a sleepless marital bed and we moved his elaborate contraption bed towards the growing dawn and he instantly calmed…. like oil on the foaming sea.
He looked at the orange birds of paradise that someone had sent as a bouquet. Earlier they had appeared to him as Picasso Guernica hands… Picasso hands on fire, but now as the sun came up like an egg, he said (and these were to be his last words to me and my mother):
“If you look at it differently, It’s really quite beautiful.”
And he fell into a peadeful sleep, like a baby in his mother’s arms … he hadn’t slept in 48 hours… none of us had. The room went all blue and peaceful moving into orange.
My mother has always counted herself a Christian. Her grandfather wrote The Greatest Story Ever Told. She cried like a baby when I told her years earlier that I had tried pot (Roger Waters with Eric Clapton). She cried worse when I told her of my experiments with acid (Dead). It hurt me to hurt her, it is true.
I, however, am eternally grateful to The Dead to have been able to give my father his last good sleep, so he would be well rested for the next morning from which he would never awake. It was a gift… a mitzvah.
Bucky Tries Angles, circa ’64
I had meant to talk about Dungeons and Dragons and how God doesn’t play dice, he plays D and D with octohedrons, etc. I don’t know, maybe I did do that. And When I put the i-tunes on and lit insence and candles Stevie Wonder laughed at me for being “very superstitious”… also a gift from the rabbi cohain… Weird.