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?

A Man's World

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days and cry over what is happening. Have you noticed: The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer! -- Robert Bly

"The world needs a man's heart" -- Joseph Jastrab

Men do not yearn for talk about men, for we have heard abundantly on this subject most of our lives from women, and we're quick to wince, quick to blame. While mothers, daughters and wives have a determinate angle on us, they do not know the beast from the inside. We work hard, die much too young, or continue to die slowly inside, unappreciated, banishing ourselves to the sofa or, worse, we suddenly find ourselves out in the yard sharpening our blades for war.

(This is the point in the writing where real dudes or the homophobic log off the website, shred the book, set fire to bad news. But read this entire sentence before you roll your dulled, dry eyes: The reason you won't or can't participate in this discussion is because, up till now, you've never been asked by another man to have a true heart-to-heart, man-to-man. This is a different thing than slamming down your shot glass, turning to the other guy, and blaming "the bitch" for your self-inflicted misery.)

You were raised by a loving mother who supported your earliest campaigns and a father who destroyed his body to lay bread on the sideboard. Perhaps even back then, as it certainly is now, your mother worked, too. Mine built periscopes during World War II. In the fifties and sixties it all looked fine from where you sat quietly at your end of the dinner table. Dad went to the shop or office, your mother attended to the care and feeding of your body and soul and -- under best circumstances -- she tried to listen to your exploits, adventures, triumphs and early sorrows. She knew all about empathy, about love... but she did not know YOU. Dad might have known, but he wasn't saying. What you heard growing up was from women and all about your shortcomings: we're not intuitive, we're violent, we smell funny, we're strange, we're slobs, we live to screw, we're snakes and snails and puppy dog's tails.

Even among those boys who were loved and recognized in youth, there isn't a man I know today who doesn't occasionally act like an asshole. It's our nature. It's theirs, too, by the way. But women have felt our savagery historically and paid dearly, so don't ask them to concede the darker part of themselves--or suffer ours gladly. But when men won't talk to each other about our sudden melancholy, our shadowy fears, our loss of financial, spiritual or emotional security, about how it is to live for the two week golf trip, the ownership of the remote control, the ability to find a quiet place where we don't have to respond on cue to feelings we have yet to identify, we let women do our defining for us--and we end up torching the house.

Today there are thousands of decent, angry men in my life, co-heads of households who have lost the generational means of sustaining themselves and their loved ones. They sold cars or fished deep waters. They invested in training for life in a cubicle that folded up on them as when a circus leaves town forever. When I worked as a Fortune 500 web consultant, my firm hired a man to fire half the staff. A professional butcher. He was a scary fellow of innuendo, deflections, and the ability to smile to your face while he locked you out and took your badge.

There are fathers and sons, too, throughout the country, who have lost their land and found themselves numbed as a conduit in a fast-food assembly line; and there are fatherless, inner-city youths who have never understood a thing about their rage except that it flows in torrents of a steady dance beat, boys and men who have watched the upper class accelerate away from them without notice, let alone justice or compassion, or men who have listened patiently for decades now to female rage and felt themselves grow fearful, ashamed, distant and unheard. A ruthless energy runs through the thoroughfares of our cities and towns. It even appears among the fortunate men for whom life is good, where security and friendships seemingly abound, but where talk is sterile and ideas have withered.

So, let us say here and now that YOU are decidedly invited to the discussion. In fact, it's your turn. I have found men who have opened their hearts, expressed their rage, their shame, their frustrations, speaking of and listening to our relative truth without giving into fear or the need to blunt it with drugs, or gambling, or hookers, or endless food buffets and a routine coma in front of talk shows each night. When we give voice to our secrets, we discover that most of us are alike at the most profound levels. We may be violent by nature, but are loving by opportunity, by good fortune, by magic.

We need not take all too seriously the women criticizing our love of sports, or yukking up our friendships, calling them "male bonding", or "doing the guy thing." They never question communion among themselves, and perhaps some are afraid of their men changing, despite their claims otherwise. For when that happens, women will receive the equality they more than deserve; they'll lose their identity as the sole care-takers of inner life. We've abdicated our half of the responsibility, walled ourselves off of our families, our children, our peers, and our wellspring of hope. Most women I know are sick and tired, anyway, of playing mom to grown men, and men, freed by our new connections to each other, can learn to define ourselves precisely as we are: bright, organized, creative, intuitive, fathering, funny, imperfect, growing, wounded or betrayed, grieving, angry, lonely, unfulfilled, or rudderless in a cold culture we helped create and sustain by our silence.

One place to start talking is with our friends and at home, fathers speaking their truths to sons, to their fathers. Another is in the workplace, and through our music, painting, acting, hiking, being men among men. In the 1990s I attended one of those heralded Days for Men conducted by Robert Bly. I entered a hall and passed down a welcome line of every man who had entered the room before me. The 600th man into the auditorium was greeted by 599 men. There were grandpas and sons, fathers and infant boys, gays, disabled veterans, twins, cousins, great-granddads in military uniforms, drumming young men in warpaint, whooping, thundering, applauding, loving men who met to see what it looks like from the inside.

And when a solitary janitor, a woman, entered the foyer for a split second with her broom and bucket, 600 voices died.

Undaunted, I spent the next few years at Men's Wisdom Councils in Seattle, where we drummed, formed talking circles, met in small groups to talk about relationships, right livelihood, being fathers or sons, how to take care of our minds and bodies, how to find our own native spirituality. I sat in sweat lodges with men of the S'Clallam tribe, pouring water and praying over rocks for the right relationship between men and the earth, our forebears, and with our families. I built a sweat lodge in my yard and invited men to invite their friends. I taught my father to hug me--or at least helped him to remember how its done--and I kiss him every time we meet.

There once had been powerful fraternal organizations for men, where they volunteered in service to others, raised money for men's scholarships, or built sanctuaries where they could be equals without relation to their jobs, backgrounds, or income. My dad's group of choice was the Knights of Pythias, an organization founded after the Civil War. Such an odd ring to its name! And when I visited their website recently I was astounded to my core to know that my own father had been a member. The order was founded on theories of Pythagoras. "It was a maxim of Pythagoras that the two most excellent things for man were "to speak the truth and to render benefits to each other." Here is more of what they say about themselves:

"The Fraternal Order of Knights of Pythias and its members are dedicated to the cause of universal peace. Pythians are pledged to the promotion of understanding among men of good will as the surest means of attaining Universal Peace. We believe that men, meeting in a spirit of goodwill, in an honest effort of understanding, can live together on this earth in peace and harmony. We seek those who agree with this belief, and have a belief in a personal Supreme Being, to join our ranks in an effort to reach 'Peace Through Understanding'. "

Many fraternal organizations are dying out today, unable to bring aboard newcomers or reach young males. I volunteered at a Shriners' Hospital for severely burned children and learned that the number of men who join up is shrinking, meaning less funding in the future for such noble endeavors. All along I had been laughing at their silly fez caps to take the time to learn what they were about.

When I had been eight or nine, my father took me to a Russian sweat bath (he called it a schvitz) in the Jewish section of Los Angeles. But I spent the better part of the evening in the company of men, young and old, who sweat in thick clouds of steam, whacked each other's backs with eucalyptus leaves, shared conversations about synagogue, school, work, and wives. I had no idea there was such a place, and I'm sure it's long gone now.

Greening up from our own spiritual ice age won't be easy and the opportunity--the absolute necessity of it--comes at a time when men are surely needed. The ice caps are melting. There's a plan for Iraq. Brothers or butchers, which shall we be?

Our work together is not some new self-help program, for "self" is isolated and isolating, and it needs no help. "Self" rather needs our restraint. Simply, we need men in our lives, to give to ourselves freely without strings. We simply must, because it's up to us.

Eye for an Eye

The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
What? Mr Deasy asked.
A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
-- James Joyce, Ulysses

The clatter of feet, the hissing radiators, the bang of the teacher's bag on the desk...I remember this much of Brooklyn's PS 99. I remember the red door and short, black picket fence, the cloakroom, where we put our wet slickers on hangars and stood our rubber boots in neat rows, and the shelf where those of us lucky enough to have a lunch put up our colorful pails for the noon hour.

I don't remember much about second grade, but I remember that my best friend was also named Gary and that we came as a matched set of 1950s boys, with our wool shirts and bluejeans with the legs turned up in three or four inch cuffs that were called "buckets". We wore matching crew-cuts with the front of our hair held up in a ridge with pink "butch wax" and the backs scalped so closely that you could spot all the imperfections of the skull where the plates came together like continents of a living globe.

Not only did we look alike, my namesake and I prided ourselves in forging an alliance against "the others", the non-Garys. But that December in our second grade -- if only for a few days -- our friendship was cleaved by fate. We were in Prospect Park, a sprawling 585-acre playland with a skating rink, zoo, and forest designed by the same landscape architect who masterminded New York's Central Park across the river.

I can't recall the other rider, perhaps she was Gary's sister, or another friend. We were lined up on a toboggan atop one of the parks rolling hills, with a wide expanse below. Gary sat in front, the girl tucked in behind him, and I sat in the rear. With a rush we were off, the landscape spinning by on each side beyond the roostertails of spraying snow.

I didn't see the park bench, even at the moment the girl ducked out of the way. Gary must have ducked first, because I was the only one to take the full stopping force of the concrete in my face.

The next day at PS 99 the shiner under my right eye was the talk of the class. I had gotten it in a fight. I had been hit by a mugger. I wish I could have come up with a number of less humiliating explanations. My teacher and classmates referred to me as Gary with the Eye. The other Gary laughed at me along with the others. As far I as was concerned, we were no longer a matched set. He was one of them.

A day or two passed that way. I guess, finally, it bugged him. Gary came to see me after class.

Our family lived near the corner of 13th Street and Avenue M.-- a few short blocks from PS 99. We rented the top half of a duplex. The kitchen had black and white checkerboard tiles on the floor and a red Formica table with matching chairs. Visitors had to ring an outside bell to get into the foyer, then climb a long flight of stairs with a hardwood banister to reach the landing.

On judgment day, my friend Gary rang the bell, raced in from the December chill, and smacked headlong into the banister. His shiner, quite naturally, welled up under the right eye. And when we returned to PS 99 the following morning, we were twins again.

The Claw of the White Ant

I was raised on the horror films of the 1950s where creatures exposed to radiation from atomic testing invaded secret government labs only to eat the scientists who had worked so diligently to protect us from the Red Menace. The beasts were metaphors for the creeping Stalinist thugs who hid under the bed, waiting to steal your mind and pervert your allegiance from, say, apple pie to borscht.

My brother--five years my junior--and I would camp out in front of the black and white television on Saturday nights, tuned in to Channel 9, the local Los Angeles station that aired spooky flicks. Creature Features. The opening shot drew in on a castle set in a craggy hilltop in the fog, its a single lantern aglow against the endless dark and creeping fog. Then a voice cried out: "Helooooo there!"

The idea, on nights that mom and dad went out, was to watch the show for a while, then chase Ted around the house and beat the crap out of him. Kind of a rehearsal for fratricide.

There is probably a tangled psychological explanation for displacing my pent up family frustrations onto him, possibly some genetic coding to re-enact Cain and Abel. Perhaps it's a learned behavior. My sister claims that Ted practiced his own (though more subtle) forms of sibling terrorism on her. In the animal kingdom, brothers scuffle to prepare to survive in a world where the Red Menace is real enough. Many of us believe that we have evolved from that point, but I can't be sure when I watch the evening news.

I loved to torment Ted with a game played on hot summer days. We'd gather in the vacant lot at the corner of Collett and Kingsbury. It was a huge lot, now choked end-to-end with apartment houses. But in the day, it had rolling terrain and weeds, and a great assortment of rubbish (cardboard, wood, old appliances) that you could round up for a fort. We held dirt-clod fights with other neighborhood kids. You tossed only caked hunks of mud, but grabbed a small rock when you were angry enough at the enemy.

What I told Ted was this: beneath the tumbleweeds, the piles of castaway lumber, and bits of broken glass in the field were armies of White Ants. They were down there, awaiting their chance. There are, of course, no such things, although exterminators often use the term to designate termites. But MY white ants were brutal carnivores with serrated teeth that could rip Ted into a bubbling pulp of flesh in a matter of seconds.

"Look out," I'd shout, "it's the white ants." And Ted would get a pained look, rise on his tiptoes, and scurry for the sidewalk, his flip-flops beating out time to the cadence of horror. I had assured him that the ants could not reach him through solid concrete, and they never did.

Over the years I turned out to be the creep that would sit beside you in a darkened theater as we'd watch a thriller and the moment the soundtrack hinted of looming terror, I'd clap my hands, or shout, or jab you in the ribs.

I don't remember ever having anyone do these things to me. But what I do recall is my father taking me out of a New York theater in the middle of Fantasia, where I had exploded in tears at the sight of the Devil in Night on Bald Mountain who scooped up lost souls in his green talons. I can see its face before me this very moment when I close my eyes. And later in childhood, after the first time I had watched Godzilla rampage through Tokyo, I had years of nightmares where the beast would find me where I hid beneath a stairwell. His mouth drew back in a snarl as he bent over and breathed fire...

It's amazing that we ever outgrow the boogieman. Ted has. Today, he's a great success, a partner in a leading architectural firm, designing structures impervious to White Ants, earthquakes, and stomping fire lizards. In my evening prayers, which have grown elaborate over the years, I ask to never cause him a moment's discomfort again.