Goodnight and Sleep Tight

"A man makes a beast of himself to free himself from the pain of being a man" -- Dr. Samuel Johnson

They say that a true friend deserves much more than a last chance. My true friend deserved as many as he could gather, bull-rushing drunkenly through my life like a tornado as I had doubtlessly torn through the peaceful affairs of others. We had met when we were young--both young beneath our years--immature, partying, trading international addresses as simply as people swapped baseball cards, manifesting all our sundry ills in new climes, with new faces, and the same old outcomes.

We had been chased by a bull in the Galilee, dodged the Federales that time in Mexico, evaded capture at the border for carrying hashish in our shirt pockets, and eluded self-appraisals by living in that expatriate fuzziness of local customs, insisting on proper food and service and taking the piss out of foreigners who doubtlessly granted passage in exchange for precious Yankee dollars.

On the kibbutz, where we met, he was a godsend, a native speaker of my language in a ghetto of foreigners, aeriodite, articulate, with a grin that outlasted long, brutally hot days in the sun and nights of fear trying to sleep in the bomb shelter while rockets fell on the Lebanon border. By days, we swapped stories of home in gallant one-upmanship at a time when American or British nationalism didn't quite cut it abroad, shameless, arguing the differences between cookies and biscuits, trucks and lorries, fries and crisps. We were Banana Buddies, harvesting hundreds of pounds of fruit by day, pints of beer by night.

For fun, we stuffed women's underwear or raw St. Peter's fish in the backpacks of departing fellows, sure to be sniffed out by airport security as they left the country. Or we crept about with buckets filled with bone-chilling ice from the Galilee fish-packing plant, splashing hot co-workers in the blistering 100-degree sun.

And so, after visiting him in England and meeting his mum, I went sadly to Heathrow for my flight, stopping with him in the airport bar for a few goodbye pints and a stop in the bogs--as he called it--for a last toilet stop, whereupon he stepped nimbly behind me at the urinal and pissed up and down my legs, sending me off to my transatlantic flight with the steaming odor of a bar accident. All good fun for him. And so I vowed that was the end of it.

But a year or so later, he petitioned for a visit to Santa Cruz, where he showed up full of high alcoholic octane and vinegar, camping on the floor of our beach house, flirting with Maki and telling her how horribly possessive I was. All pardonable, I suppose, since I eventually drove her off with my overprotective, fearful obsessions; and so I chose to give him yet another chance and we drove to Mexico where we lit a joint on a sand dune a million miles from anywhere, but only a binocular's view away from black-uniformed Federales with automatic rifles.

We could "pay the ticket immediately" a Federale told me in Spanish, or go to the local hoosegow. I opted for the former and brokered a student price while my friend stood chagrined with his gap-toothed leer. All in good fun.

The next time I gave him a last chance was the year after I went into recovery in Washington State. I told him he could stay in my cabin, but there were rules against drink. He agreed to comply. We took the ferryboat to sightseeing in Seattle, where he insisted we enter a local pub for lunch. I said sure, but nothing for me, thanks. He ordered a platter onto which were arranged small glasses of beer representing each of the eight or ten varieties featured at the pub. He ordered a pint for me to "hold in your hand, mate" for the purposes of a reunion photo.

When I declined, he got stroppy, chugging down his own portions and mine as well. Then, fully steamed up for the tour, he insisted we charter a float plane for a ride over the Seattle skyline. The pilot took one look at him and shrugged his shoulders, but I talked him into going. My friend reeked of it and made horrific commentaries en-route to an abbreviated landing splash landing. So when we deplaned safely in Lake Union, I told him it was time for him to go, to find another place to roost.

He went off angrily and, weeks later, left a furious message on my answering machine, citing all my shortcomings and failures as a true friend. I chose to leave it alone.

A few years ago, he noticed my collection of short fiction for sale and sent an email to my publisher: did she know how to get hold of me? He had lost track, our being separated for reasons that eluded him.

I had heard once that drinkers bind together in a whirlwind, holding each other in orbit as links in a dangling mobile. When one link comes off the artifice, the mobile spins wickedly off balance in kinetic disarray. Drinkers will search with undying devotion to bring their wayward sober friend back into the gin.

Not at any price.

I love you dearly, old Banana Buddy. But goodnight, godspeed, and off I go. This is my stop.

At Sundown

After I broke the mirror in my cabin and set out a 50-pound sack of birdseed for the Oregon juncos, I packed some clothes in my car, a copy of Rumi's spiritual poetry, a jar of vitamins, and I drove across the Olympic Peninsula to meet the 11:20 am ferry. Once aboard, I left the car unlocked--what was there to lose anymore?--and I walked down to the passenger deck where I let the cold winds of Puget Sound blow into my face, streaming the tears from my eyes as they came. On the other side of the passage, Mount Rainier ducked under the clouds and the rain-swept skyscrapers of Seattle rose into the dark sky where they seemed decapitated by the squall. I was on my way to treatment, the home for the bewildered, the good old tank, purgatory for those who drank just a little too much and ended up spun out of the path.

In two hours, the little car had labored up over the Cascades, where I had to put on chains in the snow, then caterwauled down the dry side of the mountains to the sprawling valley of apple orchards, fallow by winter, and the deep-etched canyons of the Yakima River. By the early afternoon I found the turnoff, where the canyon dipped down beneath bare hills scrubbed by the winds, past the turnoff to the hilltop bar that gave departing visitors their first drink if they chose to ignore all they had learned about themselves.

The lane to Sundown M Ranch threaded between groves of bare maples and a series of signs, arrayed in Burma-Shave fashion (for those who could remember), one word per narrow slat, the signs arranged so a sentence flowed as you passed: "Today...is...the...first...day...of...the...rest...of...your...life."

Oh, dear god, if there was a god I wondered, how did I slump so low to wash up at a place like this? I felt like I had just joined the Good Sam Club and had to find a recreational vehicle and a blue-haired crochet queen to accompany me on trips to the Ozarks.

They were kind enough at the office, apparently astonished at how little visible baggage I had in-tow, compared with other recent arrivals who brought bags of golf clubs in misguided expectation that they were in for some kind of laid-back tour of the links, followed by a quick sermon on the ills of excess.

It was going swimmingly for me at the arrival hall, a large room furnished with antiques and soft lighting, but then came the strip search. I suppose they were taking no chances with me. And they confiscated my poetry books. I wouldn't have time to read them, said the gentleman who turned my bags inside out and shook them over the mattress. Besides, he added, I'd have more important things to focus on. Apparently satisfied that I had become fully compliant, he escorted me to the lounge, a brightly lit dining hall with scrubbed Formica tables and plastic chairs, and he left me there. Everyone else, he said before going, was in group therapy and would join me shortly.

Did they ever. At the turn of the hour, the hall suddenly churned with residents who thundered in to grab cups of coffee or fruit juice or thick slices of chocolate cake. And they all smoked, some sixty men and women, filling the once-quiet hall with excited yammer and a dense blue-white cloud of tobacco. I took refuge in the non-smoking section, a room separated by a Plexiglas wall, where I sat alone. I may have had a small drinking problem, a loving relationship with marijuana--but I'd be damned if I had checked into this so-called ranch to take up smoking cigarettes!

By the end of the second day, tired of protesting at the high cost of isolating myself in the little room, I joined my fellows in the hall of cancer.

I was put into a men's group led by Jim B., a short, stocky man who had lost a goodly number of teeth to a methamphetamine habit of yore, but insisted on smiling through the gaps. His joy was infuriating. We met at 8 am in his conference room, a dozen of us, fellows concerned about whether they'd be allowed to go home to their wives and girlfriends, preoccupied with fear of losing their jobs--except for those of us who had nothing like that to lose.

The room looked out its huge glass window on the bare, rolling hills and bright green lawns of the ranch. We'd talk about our problems for a few hours, break for lunch, gather for a lecture on habit forming chemicals and the physical damage they caused, took an exercise break in the late afternoons and, following dinner, met again for a film or lecture or a recovery meeting brought in to us from townsfolk.

Sunday mornings, we met in the lecture hall where a priest would talk about uncomfortable subjects like relaxation, peace, serenity, kindness, compassion, and love...all the while showing slides of his trips into the mountains, jolly fields of wildflowers, cascading waterfalls, quiet brooks, the rising walls of glaciers where chunks calved off from the face and plunged into rippling lakes.

One afternoon I made a point of letting Jim know that he had misspelled a word on the chalkboard where he encouraged us to make observations of each other--both "posative" and negative feedback. He took it in, then asked, "We'll, professor, how did a guy as bright as you end up in a place like this?"

After a week long "communication blackout", the men would return to group to dump out the sad revelations of their telephone contacts with women back home. "You'll find your belongings on the porch when you get out," one man reported what his wife had said. Another said his girlfriend had simply hung up on him without uttering a word. I was curious, only, if my juncos had enough food to eat. Jim told me I would have a girlfriend again someday. But he recommended first that I buy a houseplant and see if I could keep it alive. Then, he said, I should try and see if I could keep a pet for a while. Then, finally, I could move on to humans.

I took it all to heart. Perhaps a little too much so, and one morning Jim called me in alone to his office where he showed me photos of his wife and children, posing in their yard with the Cascade peaks behind the back fence. He had been arrested for jacking stereos and televisions to help support his meth habit. Then he had recovered. "All in good time," he told me, "you can end up in a photo just like this one. In god's time," he said.

I told him I was sore at the place for stealing my underwear. I had been there three weeks, and at the beginning of each week, I put my dirty clothes in the hamper outside the laundry room and not once had it been returned to my room. I no longer had any socks. If they were trying to break me, I told Jim, they surely were succeeding.

He howled and sat against his desk a moment before putting his hands on my shoulders and looking me in the eye. "Gabby," he said. "You're supposed to go to the laundry room and pick up your folded laundry off the shelf. We don't bring it to you. Did you think this was the Hilton?"

In addition to the many rules and regulations--to stay inside the confines of the white fence that ran around the ranch perimeter, to stay out of the rooms of women, to sit with the men from my group at dinner, to not smuggle in dope for myself or others--there was a laundry protocol which I had failed to grap in the fog of my own making.

In my last week, I spent an hour detailing my life's experiences to the priest. I had never really spoken with a priest, had more than my share of prejudice against whatever he was selling, and was sure he'd consider me among the tribe that killed his god. But at the end, he simply looked at me and said, "I think you made a decision early on in life to be miserable." We walked together across the grounds in silence and went our separate ways to dinner.

When my 24th day came, I was told I could leave four days early. I had a fix on the problem. The men from my group followed me out to the front lawn where I rang a large iron bell to announce my graduation. I was handed a small commemorative coin--which I could trade in for a cocktail at the bar on the hill overlooking the ranch if I chose--or I could put it in my pocket and keep driving.

I gathered up my poetry books from the front office, said my goodbyes, put my arms around Jim and told him I would let him know when my snapshot was taken. And then I started up the car, drove past the office and along the row of signs that had confirmed that I had the rest of my life ahead of me as I turned left on the river canyon road, out into the highway that finally was headed somewhere, home to my woods, and to dear friends whom I had yet to meet, this family old and renewed that had long expected me.

Freedom

When I leave home most Tuesday nights, the sky is pink and the road across horse country glows with the fading sun. I pass fields where paint ponies and Arabians bend into their evening hay. Hares and skunk dart across the road and families of mule deer scamper into the trees at the sound of tires on the narrow pavement.

I turn right on the county road, pass into thickening subdivisions and mini-malls, and descend past the interstate into the Sacramento Valley where lights from the city on the horizon spark into life in the gathering dusk. By Folsom Lake, the road swings hard left into the town where its high-priced shops and cafes line up along the American River and over the bridge I go, beyond the sprawl of large lots and manor homes to East Natoma Street where it wends left into fields of oak trees and dark rolling hills.

Suddenly the walls come up in the dark like the outer buttresses of a Japanese castle and the sign says to darken your headlights where the road comes up to the guardhouse. I am at Folsom Prison, first opened in 1880 some 20 miles from the California state capital, a million miles away from wherever you are reading this.

To enter the facility, I register at the guard house, then am marched to a second guardhouse inside the old, original tower where I hand over my pass and id to a second officer who buzzes me through the gate. As I walk beneath the towering granite walls, they're watching every step, and gate after gate magically clanks as it's unlocked before me.

More than 4,000 medium and maximum security prisoners are stuffed into overcrowded tiers of cells, two prisoners in each along with bunks, toilet, and sink. This night, I'm inside the cell block, walking the yellow line between the five-story high bank of cells and the outer wall--but the prisoners are not in them. They're sitting on the concrete floor in front of the cells. If one were to stand up, he'd be shot with a rubber bullet. Just before I arrived one of the Hispanic gangs discovered a rapist in their midst and beat him senseless on the yard. A rubber bullet, meant to disperse the attackers struck the rapist in the eye. Now, as I walk down the stairs, descending past the dining hall and out into the chill of the yard, I can see more inmates sitting on the ground waiting for the all-clear.

Just as the guards finish looking me over and giving me the nod, the alert ends and I join the population on the yard as inmates rise and dust themselves off. A few recognize me and nod. A few smile.

This is where I belong on Tuesday nights. Doing alcohol and drug outreach to the precious few inmates who choose to seek it. The United States has the single-highest documented incarceration rate and the largest prison population in the world. More than one in 100 American adults were in prison at the start of 2008. Three out of four inmates in this country have substance abuse problems, but only 10 percent of them receive any kind of treatment before their release back into society. More than 75 percent of California parolees find their way back into prison within a year.

On Tuesday nights, we meet in a schoolroom just off the main yard. California prisons are operating now at more than 200 percent of the planned capacity, and the yard is packed. Out here, the Blacks are lifting weights or shooting basketball, the Hispanics gather at their end, sharing food and blasting music out of a boombox, and whites gather in small groups walking laps around the field. It's chilly winter and they all wear woolen caps pulled down over the ears.

The classroom is warm and I usually stand at the door, shaking hands and greeting the willing ones as they come in from the cold. Michael remembers me and as he reaches the doorway, his face opens up, dropping out of what he calls his "yard mask". Considering the statistics, it's heart-breaking to see only 25 or 30 men at the meeting. But the ones who are here come consistently. Michael says the hour he spends at the meeting is the only time during the week that he feels as if he's no longer in prison. Hearing that is enough to keep me going.

For an hour, we speak openly about the madness of substance abuse. One inmate says he never had a problem but since he committed his crime under the influence, he's been ordered to attend the meeting by his parole officer. He has a life sentence and hopes by complying he may someday walk free. He's already been here 27 years and was arrested just after his 22nd birthday. Another inmate talks about the insane amounts of dope and liquor on his tier. Guards sell some of it. A third inmate talks about his cellmate, how the guy is in his face over staying sober.

I recognize one of the inmate's accents and ask if he's from the South. "Mississippi," he says, grinning. "My mama said if I ever left there I'd end up in jail. She was right."

One of the Hispanic inmates recalls downing his morning bottle of cheap wine and passing out on Market Street in San Francisco where tourists would step over or around him, or miscreants would urinate on him where he slept in the bushes. When you're beyond human aid, it's not a pretty sight. Now he's here, sitting beside whites and Blacks that he'd never acknowledge on the yard or in the cell block.

Christmas is coming and the suicide watch is on. Jeff shows me the tattoo of his eight-year-old daughter he has never held. Martin talks about what it's like to be free from the shackles of alcohol, but that his mind can sometimes still be his judge, jury, and jailer. One of the men reports that Governor Schwarzenegger hopes to kill the funding for our meetings, and it's all I can do to bite my tongue.

At the end of our hour, we stand up, hold hands, and recite the Lord's Prayer. Then, one by one, they file out of the classroom as they pull on their jackets, wool caps, and yard masks. Every man I have come to know through the hour disappears into the crowd of inmates in blue trousers, blue wind breakers, and dark wool hats. The guards peer down from the towers.

I climb from the yard into the warm cell block, past the open showers, beyond the desk where the guards are sharing ribs and french fries, along my yellow line where I walk as the only person who isn't wearing an inmate's clothes or carrying a deputy's weapon, past the tiers of cells that reek of marijuana and tobacco, and down the flight of stairs to the walkway that leads to the main gate. I hand my visitor's badge to the guard and sign myself out. It's Tuesday night, 8:30 pm here on the West Coast, and I'm in my car, back along the bright lights of Folsom's bustling waterfront bars and restaurants, heading home.

Sudden Light

Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me -- Bruce Springsteen, The Rising.

The road out of the darkest woods can begin with a flicker of sun through a tree parted years ago by lightening. I had sought out my cabin in the isolation of the Olympic Forest with gusto. I was certain that the world and its people were the cause of my woes. And when I left the cold and dark heart of interior Alaska, the woods of Washington State promised the wilderness I had come to love without the brittle temperatures and malingering night.

The circular cabin had fourteen windows and skylights, so that you were part of the woods by day, when pileated woodpeckers hammered their beaks into the cedars, and by night, when heavy footed critters broke through the underbrush in the utter darkness. I learned to split my own wood, taking chunks of pine or madrone from the stack and getting my back into it. In the early dawn, I would climb shivering from the sleeping loft and blow fresh life into the glowing coals of the woodstove.

By day the woods were dark, streaked with shadows in the fall air. I could walk to the bright sun along a forest service road, and found my way to a grove of old growth cedar where I'd wrap my arms about the widest tree and sob. I had no idea if I was sad or grateful, or whether it was about another thing entirely.

The nearest town was 14 miles away, and I drove to its feed store and bought rubber boots, a new splitting maul, and a 50 pound sack of wild bird food. I shoveled out huge scoops of feed and spread it across my front porch. By mid-day, thousands of Oregon juncos hopped on the hardwood planks, fighting mightily over the seed. At dusk, mule deer with whited tails walked through the clearing, sipping water from the pond. Herons flew overhead, tossing huge shadows across the salal.

It was a bucolic setting I had dreamt of most of my life, a place where I would have the quiet to write my novel, the peace from battling academics who disapproved of the authors I chose to use in the classroom, and the stream of unhappy students who thought they could barter for better grades with sexual innuendo or simply an endless barrage of excuses.

I had surely gone to the bottom in Alaska, where the combination of never-ending dark, cold, and a fling with pain pills made my life miserable. I had begun hearing voices. Once, when students in the lounge were muttering my name, I burst in on their table and demanded how they dared to talk poorly about me behind my back. One of them shrugged and said they were chatting about what a lively, interesting man I was and a great teacher of writing.

I thought the voices and dark would drop behind me as I drove the miles to the Haines Ferry and took the ship to Seattle. But weeks into my solitude in the woods, they found me again, and I had no one else to blame.

Every morning I got the fire going, made coffee, and sat down to work on my novel. It was a sustained narrative about a mental health counselor who had never resolved his hatred for his father. When his lover leaves him, the counselor goes on a quest across country to find her and, so doing, discovers great truths about himself. But even though the protagonist was piling on the miles, the novel was going nowhere.

In the afternoons, I drove to town to pick up my mail--more rejection slips, bills, supermarket coupons--then drove out to the Sound where I walked the wind-swept beach in the snap of fall cold. I had no friends here, and seemingly had lost the ability to make new ones. I tried the taverns, where my drinking companions were farmers and loggers, and none shared my views of the world. I drove back to the cabin lonelier than ever.

After a while, I couldn't even sit to write anymore. I made my morning fire, had breakfast, paced for hours--it seemed--then left angrily in search of companions. Back to the taverns, back to the seeming indifference of my peers, back home at dusk with a carload of sadness and self pity.

On Thursdays, I'd drive to the feed store and purchase the local newspaper. I suppose one would get a chuckle out of the small-town charm, the trifling struggles of country life that hardly made a scratch in the world's most dire ills, and the classified ads for quilting bees, salmon fishing derbies, dueling appeals by the churches, and community theater productions of Thornton Wilder. It had no such affect on me. Each waking day seemed to dogpile atop a mountain of anger.

One morning I took a razor to my face, cutting off a beard I had worn for 15 years. I hated what I saw and briefly imagined taking the razor to my throat. The man in the mirror was a complete stranger. And I saw only pain and terror in his watery eyes. I drove out to Discovery Bay and sat on a cliff overlooking a beach strewn with rocks and broken deadfall. The ashen stumps and branches poked between jagged stones and ribbons of kelp. I imagined my own body going over the edge, falling with the sudden knowledge of irrevocable decisions, and shattering on the rocks. The pain of striking the rocks seemed greater than the pain I was hoping to quash. Or I was just too afraid, and I drove home with a sense of great failure.

I had begun to sleep in, tucking deep in my sleeping bag, too lazy to get up and light the fire. It was only when I saw that the juncos had run out of seed that I rose, pulled on a coat, and went out to empty a fresh sack on the porch. Oh well, I was up. I made coffee and drove into town for a paper.

As I sat in the tavern that afternoon, I read a classified that caught my eye. There was just a headline and address. It said: "Men's 12-step Writing Group, Thursday 7 pm, St. Paul's Episcopalian Church, 1020 Jefferson St."

Other writers! Companionship. Writerly support. Decent conversation. I could dazzle them with my well-hewn sentences and snappy dialogue. I had no idea what they meant by their title, but I assumed that they had discovered the 12 steps in creating fiction that the masses would buy. I showered and shaved and tucked a notebook under my arm and set off for town.

St. Paul's Church stands on a bluff overlooking Admiralty Inlet and the Puget Sound. The water wraps around the town on its way from the Cascade peaks to the Pacific ocean. Across the bay you can see a string of islands and, beyond them, the snow-capped peaks and the Mount Baker volcano. The path to my meeting led from the sidewalk along a hedge of Rhododendrons, through a well-tended rose garden, and to the door to the basement.

When I entered the room--appropriately late to make my entrance--I saw a dozen middle-aged men seated at a conference table. Several looked up, but they went back to their studies, gazing at a coffee-table-sized book as one of them read aloud. I took an empty seat and listened.

I had no idea what in blazes they were talking about, but the language was baroque, strange, and held no terms I would ever describe as literary. They read a series of questions about a higher power, how they viewed this power, and what they did on a daily basis to connect with it. I was baffled and crestfallen.

During the break, the men introduced themselves--John, Jerry, Pete, another John, Curt--and asked my why I was there. When I said I had expected a writer's group, they laughed and I was more uncomfortable than ever. But, oddly enough, they were friendly, had an uncanny twinkle in their eye, made me welcome, and I decided odd company was better than no company at all.

They had an extra workbook and I bought it at the end of the meeting. Reading it at home, I discovered that I had stumbled into some kind of support group. They were drug addicts, or drunks, or had other kinds of trouble. And yet, I was oddly attracted to their company.

I went the second week, too. John took my phone number and called me to see how I was doing. It was the first personal phone call I had received in my cabin. John said he had a counselor for me. I had done counseling. I doubted I could be helped in any way. No counselor had truly understood what I felt; hell, I had no idea what I felt. In Alabama, after I had broken some furniture and terrified my partner, I went to the community counseling center where the counselor told me I needed to develop outside interests, you know, go fishing some?

But John had a good counselor, he said. And now I added a counseling appointment to my weekly meeing with the bizarre-writing society in St. Paul's basement. At my first session, Judy asked me why I thought I needed counseling. I told her what I knew. I reviewed my well-grooved stories and family histories, after which she pronounced me an alcoholic and that she would not work with me until I had been sober a year. She recommended that I visit the community counseling center to get a professional evaluation.

Once more, a woman had rejected me. I was sure about that as I drove home in rage. But I found myself oddly complaint with advice and drove to the counseling center for my appointment. The counselor handed me a questionnaire, which I answered to the best of my ability. Then we talked for a while. I was certain that I had narrowly evaded an addiction to pain pills in Alaska, that I had a long-time love affair with pot, but that I never drank so much that alcohol was a problem.

The counselor had a different idea. She told me there was a bed at a treatment center in central Washington, that the state would foot the bill if I willing to drive over there tomorrow. "You need to say yes when you're willing," she said, "because this moment may never come again." Surely, this was a dire measure. But my mouth--quite unattached to my mind--said yes and I drove back to my cabin in the woods thinking that some small piece had fallen in place and that I might not have to kill myself.

The next morning I got up without lighting a fire and packed my car. I put two volumes of poetry on the seat and a suitcase of clothes and toiletries, then went back to lock the cabin. I emptied the entire bag of feed on the porch. If the seed ran out before I had completed my 28 days, the juncos would have to go it alone.

After the Galilee

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. ~ James Baldwin

Every morning we would rise in the dark and cold Galilee and walk to the tractor shed for coffee and cookies. We divvied ourselves into work teams, climbed into the kibbutz wagons, and Yossi or Bennie or another leader would hook up the Fordson tractors and drive us up to the banana fields. The sun would toss up a broad announcement of light behind the shadows of the Golan Heights, then burst up suddenly behind a wave of wind that swept across the sea and up the ridges where we bounced along the rutted lanes. Swallows exploded from the trees and sent up volleys of squawks and fluttering wings into the brightening sky. To the south, Mt. Arbel sliced through the morning fog like the ghost-prow of a ship.

At the first crossroads we stopped to wave at Reuven, who stood motionless in his own shadow, his eyes tucked under the wide brim of his blue cotton cap. The first day when we passed, David pointed to Reuven and whispered about the faded cobalt numbers that had been tattooed into his forearm at Auschwitz. His fingertips were stained dark orange from decades of holding cigarettes, his lips drawn into a thin line, a face devoid of palpable emotion. He had lost his wife and children in the camps.

When I inquired if he ever hopped in the wagon to help harvest the bananas for export to Europe, Yossi told me he wanted nothing to do with Europe. And besides, he was too spun out to work anymore. The Hebrew word for it was masugga. It was close to the Yiddish my mother used for the same expression, meshuga. I knew it well.

We merely drove past and let Reuven be, stopping on the way back to drive him to the kibbutz commons for lunch. It was as good as it was likely to ever be for him. And if he was out in the fields contributing to the effort--in his own way--it was honorable of the kibbutz to sustain his life with food, medicine, shelter, and love. But seeing him in that state did little to unravel the decades of hatred I had mustered for the Germans.

Every fall, the Jews of the San Fernando Valley gathered at Devonshire Downs for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Thousands of us would huddle in huge halls and tents at the fairgrounds while the Rabbi read the service and the Cantor blew the sacred ram's horn. I hated it because it typically fell on the same dates of the World Series, it took me out of class during those precious get-to-know-you days of the new fall semester in school and, worst of all, you had to fast from sunset to sunset. Everyone had headaches and was miserable with atonement.

During the service, the Rabbi typically moaned about intermarriage, how it was killing off the precious bloodline of the tribes of Israel and, of course, how the Arabs were bound to push all the Israelis into the Mediterranean Sea. This moment, coupled with years of hearing diatribes from family members against Germany, German cars, blond people, the Wagnerian operas I loved to play on the stereo, etc.--added to years of watching documentaries on the Holocaust, piles of shoes, of bones, of eyeglasses, of living skeleton survivors in rags--well, I was sure the enemies of Judaism had us right where they wanted us, all assembled under one roof in the San Fernando Valley where they could turn on the gas.

So naturally, when I left Israel in the spring, when I took a ship across the Mediterranean and later boarded a bus across Europe, I would have nothing to do with Germany. When my fellow riders got off to tour the German cities along the way between Athens and Amsterdam, I stayed aboard, determined that none of my money would fall into German hands. A cavity search in the icy rain at a German border post (because of the terrorist Bader Meinhoff threat--not because there was a Jew on the bus) further set my heart and soul against them.

* * *

It took me many years to concede that I was not born with hatred, that I learned how to loathe others as a way to remain a victim in my own flesh. It was a way to take poison and forever wait for the other man to die.

In retrospect, I cannot accept my breakthrough as coincidence. The melting of the hardened heart may take a lifetime, but the suddenness of how my perspective was altered continues to astonish and remind me to search out where blindness blocks me from grace.

In early 1991 I was diagnosed with severe depression. That in and of itself was no surprise to me, given the suicides in my immediate family, or that I had spent years attempting to treat my full-body gloom with alcohol or drugs. The doctor sentenced me to cognitive therapy and a medication that felt initially like a lousy batch of LSD that some crazed hippie had concocted in his garage. It was humbling to be meshugga. I couldn't stand the counseling, which was cut-rate and run by an amateur at a county medical clinic. One time she asked me to "walk through the fire" with her support in going cold turkey off my medication, and I ended up in the hospital with toxic shock. She was fired and the facility is lucky I was too depressed to sue their hide.

That winter, I wrote a poem by the wood-burning stove in my cabin in the forest near Chimacum:

On the Promenade of the Seasonally Affected

The last Canadian goose six weeks into fall
rises off the putting green, all
business, and dives behind Mt. Townsend.
The November moon ends
all hope this year we shall not go down into winter.
We trudge through town
hands in our pockets, facing down the wind,
the raw-toothed leaves and sand.

Down in Chimacum the ensilage for cows
weeps methane. Crows pair up in rough-hewn boughs,
school girls rummage through strewn hay
gone to loam in shallow lanes.
Girls are much too new to feel the ache
of natural ruin and fall, arctic air
smokes from their lips, their hair
flared into the draining light of the season.

The rebellion of human chemistry betrays reason.
It’s early dark, dawn’s too late,
& in the collapse of the year We Affected contemplate
fatality, our blood thick beneath the ice
of dim temper, curt hearts out of practice.
A feather on the sidewalk, eiderdown,
and you weep for nothing. (The pulp mill lays down
heavy over the hills a wet black stench of paper.)

The doctor said if medicated you will need to taper
off the elixir and let the Visitor exit as he will.
How lucky to be common for just one season, spill
over into autumn, then skim the black ice of winter, into spring,
the summer light splintering in sheer white threads across the lawn.
Then you drift into fall, falling, nesting like a naturally grown
creature, family around you, friends, Christmas bright,
no sneering thief to filch you off to night.

Early in the new year, I moved to town to be closer to people. I found a lovely little place overlooking the countryside and the Straights of Juan De Fuca. You could see the masts and stacks of large steamers that sailed past town beyond the line of forested hills. Through friends, I discovered a group of depressed people who were looking for company. They sought a safe place to feel temporarily insane in a world with little tolerance for the meshugguna. We began meeting at my house every Thursday night.

There were six of us, and we all came from elsewhere. Claudia spoke with a heavy German accent, wore her hair pulled tightly into a braid, and her eyes flashed on you like a heat ray. I liked her, but felt the old interference rise up like a powerful wedge between us. Each week "We Affected" met to discuss our highs and lows, our walk among the "normal" people. (Normal, my friend Don says, is a setting on a clothes dryer). We'd end each session with prayers and hopes, holding hands, and we'd agree upon a project to complete during the upcoming week. In one case, we settled on creating art that reflected our experience.

The following Thursday night we assembled again in my candle-lit living room. We concealed our projects in a paper bag or box until it was our turn top speak. We went around the room, laughing, applauding each others audacity. It wasn't much for art, but each piece took a chink from the wall. When it was Claudia's turn, she peeled back the brown butcher paper...

It was a bird cage from a pet store. Inside the cage sat a blond-haired doll with blue eyes, alone on the floor, painted tears streaming down her face. The door to the cage was fastened tight with a padlock. "She doesn't know," Claudia said softly, "where is the key."

We sat silently a while in the candlelight, sparing the empty platitudes and false starts at meaning. We held each other.

* * *

A few months later, our group disbanded. The meshugga were all doing well, moving out into the world again in widening orbits. It was spring and the Casablanca lilies rose in the bed beside my front door. Ants marched up and down the long, green stalks and the cherry blossoms broke into fragrant faces in the trees.

Claudia and her husband left town suddenly, quite without fanfare. But before she left, Claudia dropped by to give me a gift wrapped in plain brown paper. Inside the box I found the Native American tapestry she had made, a dream catcher of dazzling threads and beads with feathers streaming from the sides. It hangs on on my wall today, helping me remember precisely how we are freed.

Dreams and wings, dear Claudia. Ich liebe dich.

Matched Luggage

Hello, I must be going,
I cannot stay, I came to say,
I must be going. -- Groucho Marx

Before all of this happened, I had been a youngster without a heavy burden, without dark sirens of judgment that would lure my heart off course. Why is it that so many of us spend the last third of our lives in search of the first third?

I've heard addicts say that when they took their first puff on a crack pipe, the immediate feeling was so euphoric, then ephemeral, and ultimately elusive that they would spend their waking hours in search of that transcendent 30 seconds. I know for a certainty that I felt that way the first time I took a handful of paper-wrapped sugar cubes from an Italian restaurant and secreted them in my coat for the ride home in my parents blue '54 Chevrolet. The discomfort of riding with unhappy people instantly went away, and I spent the entire drive home along the Ventura Freeway, unwrapping nugget after nugget in search of the first bubble of comforting solitude.

Along the way I became a virtuoso escape artist. Be it ever so humble, there's no place like out of here! Although I added preoccupations with food, drink, sex, drugs, or work as a means of avoiding a world with too many sharp edges, I knew how to disappear without the means of any artificial substance. I could drop through an inner hatch into a fuzzy sanctum where all around me buzzed, but I was secure and protected. In short: I erased myself.

I ran away from home at age 9. I was pissed off and tired of being yelled at, and so I started up Longridge Avenue without a lunch or sweater, headed north on Woodman, and got as far as the hospital when it got dark. Ten miles, maybe. Far enough to know I had created sufficient turmoil, but not far enough to continue without a plan and supplies. There would always have to be supplies. So I let the hospital call my mother.

Years later, after so many wake-up calls, I found that the pain I feared was ancient, tribal, cellular--and that I had already survived it. And here in my latter third of life, it became apparent that the evasions postponed reconciliation, were only preemptive strikes against my own happiness.

But as I said, before all of this, I had lived out in the open. I can almost see it from here. Longridge Avenue. I can see Laurie Finley. We were seven years old, living about four or five houses apart. In between lived the dreaded Mr. Feindish, who would scowl and snag softballs we hit onto his lawn before we could retrieve them. Laurie was a tomboy, although I could make no such distinctions at the time. She was my friend. She evolved from the same soul matrix as I. Loved whatever I seemed to love. And she could hit the crap out of a softball.

I remember four or five friends in my lifetime where the brambles of judgment fell away from the start. I spent every waking hour at home excited about the possibility of heading out to the street to meet Laurie Finley. I spent every moment playing alone in the yard waiting for her mother's station wagon to pull around the corner of Longridge so I could run to meet her.

But eventually my sister was born and the little house we had on Longridge was too small for us. The Saturday before we moved, Laurie Finley's mom arranged a party in their yard so I could say farewell to the neighborhood gang, but I never went. I woke up that morning and my eyes had slammed shut--an allergy the doctor said--and I was in agony.

Years later, after I had a driver's license, I drove back to Longridge and passed by the old stationwagon in Laurie Finley's yard. I did it many times over the years, but never got out and knocked on the door.

The next time I felt that way, I met Matt Garbutt. An only child, Matt was showered with affection and was the most inventive, creative boy I ever met. He could ride a unicycle and play an upright tuba at the same time. We were inseparable. We spent hours wide awake in his bedroom, making up comedy routines and satires that we recorded on reel-to-reel tape. His mom would shout for us to shut up and go to sleep. I couldn't wait to meet him in the schoolyard, at the band room, to work on our sketches. Matt was the only gentile friend at my Bar Mitzva.

But when we entered high school, Matt found a different circle of friends and had little to do with me. "It's because you're Jewish," my mother said. But that was an explanation I had heard too many times upon my failures in the social world. Most of those things happened because they happen to everyone. I followed Matt's career, after he left college and became a symphonic tuba player and conductor. We've never made contact.

In high school I found Dianne Chassman. She was lovely, delightful, gorgeous, an exceptional flautist, and we shared a friendship without a sexual trajectory. You would hardly know it to see us. I would sneak out of bed at 1 am to phone her. She had her own phone! (Not many kids our age did in those days.) We'd trade intimate secrets, share dirt on other friends, spin our separate dreams). After a while, finally, we had our own sweethearts and drifted apart. By then, I was embarking on my middle third of life.

I sometimes wonder why I no longer feel that insatiable pull toward another person, that unbridled enthusiasm for intimacy despite the rough edges. The attraction wanes. Have I been irreparably numbed, distracted by narcissism, made wary by pain I have already survived? My deepest friends today are just like me, it seems. We have matched luggage. We're here, but we're always leaving. We're loving by turn, distracted by struggles, often disappointed, and yet we're all still here, in each other's corner, a phone call away. Now the phone goes with you and sits in your pocket. So why do you sometimes seem so far?

Here I am in my last third, wondering how to return to that open place without fear, without judgment. Is it you? Is it me?